“Wait a minute, Van,” he said. Some of the color was coming back to his face. He loosened his collar. His eyes narrowed a little. “You’re forgetting a few things. Vera and I were very... uh... circumspect. Nobody knows about our relationship. Not anybody at all. There’s nothing to tie her in with me. I went back to her place, last night, and got rid of all her stuff, left a note written on her typewriter, explaining to the landlord that she’d gotten a better job in L. A. That angle’s well covered. Van, the way it’s set up, you’d be the one the police would jump on. Everybody in the office knew you were going with her, then had a fight when she got in trouble. It will just look like she let it go for a month, then really went after you. You got panicky — and took that way out. That’s the way the police would figure it. So, you see, you’ve got no real hold on me.”
I stared at him, unbelievingly. That turned my guts over for a moment. But not for long. I laughed. “Nice try,” I told him. “But police work is super-scientific these days. When they go over your car, they’ll find proof that Vera was in it, last night. They’ll go over that car with vacuum cleaners, with a fine tooth comb. There’ll be plenty of evidence that you’re the killer and you’ll never in a million years get rid of it. The shoes you wore, the shovel.” I grinned at him. “A nice attempt to pass the buck, Harry, but it won’t work. Let’s talk about that raise some more.”
I got to be Supervisor of the mailing department that day. With a big raise. And from then on I began living it up. I got a better apartment, a lot of clothes. My boss was a real good guy. Whenever I ran short I could always borrow a hundred from him. He wasn’t in any sweat about me paying it back, either. Especially since I didn’t overdo it. Poor Harry Owen wasn’t enjoying life so much, though. He began to drink a lot. Even in the office, during the day, you could smell it on him. It started some talk but not much. So maybe business was bad or something and he was worried.
Once, I got curious, and asked him: “Why did you do it the hard way? Why didn’t you marry the kid? She wasn’t so bad.”
He told me, then, that he was already married, although separated, and that his wife was against divorce. I borrowed an extra fifty from him, on that.
During that next month, I began to take it easy on the job, too. When I felt like taking an afternoon off or something, I did it. If I felt like sitting around, reading for awhile, I did it. Who was going to say anything? Harry Owen? It griped a lot of people in the office. They got jealous. I didn’t care. The hell with them! One wise guy even said:
“Who does this guy Van think he is, a privileged character or something? I never saw a guy get away with so much. He must know where the body’s buried or something.”
The funny part was, he wasn’t kidding. He just didn’t realize it, that’s all.
This went on for a month. Then one morning, in front of the whole office, when I came in an hour late, Harry Owen told me: “Van, you come in late one more morning, take another afternoon off, or sluff on the job any more, and you’re through. You’re fired.”
I looked at him as though he’d said something in Arabic. “What?” I said. “Are you kidding?”
He’d aged badly in the last month but right now his jaw was set firmly. His eyes looked sunken way into his head and bloodshot from drinking so much, but they held mine steadily enough. “Try it and find out,” he said.
There was only one thing to figure. The guy’d gone crazy. He couldn’t do that to me. For this, for humiliating me like that, I was really going to rub his nose in some dirt. Now he was really going to pay. I’d get ten grand out of him, or else. From now on I’d bleed him dry. But it was late afternoon before I got into his office to see him. By then he was pretty drunk. A kind of controlled drunk, so that he could still talk all right, and sit fairly straight in his chair. But he was loaded, no question, in spite of that.
He didn’t even give me a chance. “Whatever you’re going to say, skip it,” he told me right off. “The honeymoon is over, Van. You have no more hold on me.”
I got so mad I felt as though I was swelling, like a puff adder. My collar got too tight. “I haven’t, huh?” I said.
“No, Van.” He showed his teeth in a ghastly grin. “I moved it. It isn’t where you saw me put it, any more. I put it where nobody’ll ever find it. Never. So now what can you prove?”
It took me a moment to get it through my head. I said: “I can still go to the cops.”
“Sure,” he said. “And they’ll go up there and find nothing, and slap you around for bothering them.”
“Wait a minute. You couldn’t have moved her. She’s been there a month. She’d have been a mess.”
He looked for a moment as though he was going to throw up. Then he got control, and said: “She was. Don’t let’s talk about it any more, Van. It’s all over.”
“You’re bluffing!” I shouted it at him. “What do you think I am, a chump? There wouldn’t be enough left of her to move.”
“Okay,” he said. “Have it your way. Now get out, before I call someone to throw you out.”
I went back to the mail room but I kept thinking about it and the more I thought the more I knew he wasn’t bluffing. Yet he couldn’t have done what he said. I had to find out. I borrowed Joe’s car again that night and drove up there. Along that same dark, dirt road, to the same spot. It gave me the creeps a little. I hadn’t brought a flashlight and in the dark it took me a little time to find the clearing. But I found it. The only thing was, he was right; he hadn’t been bluffing. The shallow grave was still there but it was all dug up. It was empty. She was gone.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, out loud.
“Yeah,” someone said, and I whirled around to stare into the blinding beam of three flashlights. Three flashlights held by cops.
They took me back into the city and I told the cops the whole story. I had to. They thought I’d killed Vera, buried her out there, just as Harry Owen had first said that they would. They’d gotten an anonymous phone tip about the corpse and where it was buried, earlier in the day. They’d gone out and dug it up. The same tip told them to watch me.
I told them, of course, that their phone tip had been Harry Owen. They said they questioned him, after that, investigated him. He denied knowing anything about any of it. Apparently, as he had said, they weren’t able to dig up any connection between him and Vera. They couldn’t find anybody who’d ever seen them together, or knew they were seeing each other. They’d been circumspect, all right. He was clean. I wasn’t, as far as the cops were concerned.
I knew what had happened. I’d pushed him too far. He’d finally decided to take a chance on winding the whole thing up, getting rid of me, by putting the cops on me. It hadn’t been much of a chance. He’d realized that the police couldn’t see anybody but me. It was cut and dried. They wouldn’t investigate him, too much, Harry Owen figured. And he was right.
I couldn’t talk the cops out of it and my lawyer couldn’t convince the jury, either. After the trial he told me that he’d heard Harry Owen was drinking himself to death, had wound up in the Alky ward a couple of times, already. A lot of good that did me.
The stupid part about the whole thing, the Police lab worked on the remains. And like I’d heard it happens sometimes, Vera may have had all the symptoms, but according to those lab boys, it must have been something else, because they said she wasn’t that way at all.