She said: “Don’t be crazy, Donny. He doesn’t know a thing, not a thing. He can’t do anything to either of us.”
“I don’t care what happens, to me or anybody else,” the anguished voice said behind me. “You’re running out on me, breaking your promise to me. I always knew it was too good to be true. Now I just don’t care any more.”
“I care,” she said. “I care what happens to me.” Her hazel eyes shifted to me, above the unwavering gun. “I won’t stay here. I’ll shoot you if I have to.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary. Put it down, Fern. It’s Bartolomeo’s gun, isn’t it? I found the shells to fit it in his glove compartment.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I talked to Angel.”
“Is he here?” Panic whined in her voice.
“No. I came alone.”
“You better leave the same way then, while you can go under your own power.”
“I’m staying. You need protection, whether you know it or not. And I need information. Donny, go in the kitchen and bring me that note.”
“Don’t do it, Donny. I’m warning you.”
His sneakered feet made soft indecisive sounds. I advanced on the girl, talking quietly and steadily: “You conspired to kill a man, but you don’t have to be afraid. He had it coming. Tell the whole story to the cops, and my guess is they won’t even book you. Hell, you can even become famous. The government wants you as a witness in a tax case.”
“What kind of a case?”
“A tax case against Angel. It’s probably the only kind of rap they can pin on him. You can send him up for the rest of his life like Capone. You’ll be a heroine, Fern.”
“Don’t call me Fern. I hate that name.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “I hate everything connected with that name. I hate myself.”
“You’ll hate yourself more if you don’t put down that gun. Shoot me and it all starts over again. The cops will be on your trail, Angel’s troopers will be gunning for you.”
Now only the cot was between us, the cot and the unsteady gun facing me above it.
“This is the turning-point,” I said. “You’ve made a lot of bum decisions and almost ruined yourself, playing footsie with the evillest men there are. You can go on the way you have been, getting in deeper until you end up in a refrigerated drawer, or you can come back out of it now, into a decent life.”
“A decent life? Here? With my father married to Mabel?”
“I don’t think Mabel will last much longer. Anyway, I’m not Mabel. I’m on your side.”
Ella made a decision. I could tell a mile away what she was going to do. She dropped the gun on the blanket. I scooped it up and turned to Donny:
“Let me see that note.”
He disappeared through the kitchen door, head and shoulders drooping on the long stalk of his body.
“What could I do?” the girl said. “I was caught. It was Bart or me. All the way up from Acapulco I planned how I could get away. He held a gun in my side when we crossed the border, the same way when we stopped for gas or to eat at the drive-ins. I realized he had to be killed. My father’s motel looked like my only chance. So I talked Bart into staying there with me overnight. He had no idea who the place belonged to. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I only knew it had to be something drastic. Once I was back with Angel in the desert, that was the end of me. Even if he didn’t kill me, it meant I’d have to go on living with him. Anything was better than that. So I wrote a note to Donny in the bathroom, and dropped it out the window. He was always crazy about me.”
Her mouth had grown softer. She looked remarkably young and virginal. The faint blue hollows under her eyes were dewy. “Donny shot Bart with Bart’s own gun. He had more nerve than I had. I lost my nerve when I went back into the room this morning. I didn’t know about the blood in the bathroom. It was the last straw.”
She was wrong. Something crashed in the kitchen. A cool draft swept the living room. A gun spoke twice, out of sight. Donny fell backwards through the doorway, a piece of brownish paper clutched in his hand. Blood gleamed on his shoulder like a red badge.
I stepped behind the cot and pulled the girl down to the floor with me. Gino came through the door, his two-colored sports shoe stepping on Donny’s laboring chest. I shot the gun out of his hand. He floundered back against the wall, clutching at his wrist.
I sighted carefully for my second shot, until the black bar of his eyebrows was steady in the sights of the .38. The hole it made was invisible. Gino fell loosely forward, prone on the floor beside the man he had killed.
Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap. Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sighing voice:
“You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.”
“Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy man. Crazy fool.”
“You like me better than you used to? Now?”
“I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.”
She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-colored at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.
His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:
“Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.”
I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.
Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.
Sex Murder in Cameron
by Michael Fessier
The romance was a strange one, and the marriage was even stranger. Doc Marston wasn’t surprised when the result was a sex murder in Cameron.
Old Doc Marston is a stubborn cuss. When they found the body of Cass Buford with his head sliced in the middle by an axe and started looking for Linda, old Doc Marston said that what had happened to Cass didn’t surprise him one bit. When they caught Linda hiding in Jim Carver’s cabin trying to wash the blood out of her dress, Doc Marston seemed almost disappointed that she hadn’t got away. When they remembered that Jim had been hanging around the Buford farm long after his work as handyman was done and that Cass had complained about it, Doc Marston made a lot of enemies by saying that folks were taking too much for granted.
What made the people really disgusted with Doc, though, was Doc’s attitude when Linda calmly confessed that she’d killed Cass.
“Maybe she did,” Doc said, “but there’s more back of it than anybody knows about. There’s something mighty strange about this whole business.”
“You bet there is,” the sheriff told him. “There’s something damned strange about a woman who kills a man who gave her such a good home as Cass gave Linda.”
“How do you know she had a good home?” Doc asked. “You haven’t ever lived with Cass.”
“And neither have you,” the sheriff said.
That stumped Doc. He didn’t have anything to say for a while. Which was a good thing for Doc, because most folks thought he’d said too much already.
Everyone admitted, of course, that there was something strange about Cass’ marrying Linda. Cass was one of the most important men in Cameron County. He was the last of the Bufords and he owned everything that was left of the family fortune. It wasn’t as much as it used to be, but still there was a well-paying farm and a half interest in the Cameron First National Bank and some first and second mortgages that paid good interest.