“Howard’s crippled,” she said. “An automobile accident. He’ll never get out of his wheelchair.” She looked up at me as if she’d just explained something.
“How long ago?” I asked.
“Two years. It was his own fault. Drunk at ninety miles an hour. He can’t complain.”
“I’ve been drunk at ninety miles an hour myself.”
“Oh, so have I.” The shrug and tilted smile. “We all take our chances.”
I wondered how much her husband knew about her. How much I knew about her. From time to time I’d marvelled at how skillfully she could cover up the bruises on her face and neck with makeup. She was all that mattered to me now, and it made me ache with a strange compassion for her husband, thinking how it would be watching her, from a wheelchair.
“Let’s get going,” she said, standing and slipping into her suede high heeled shoes. “The fire’s getting low.”
I yanked her back by the elbow. Then I walked over and put another log on the fire.
Where I lived, at a motel in North Beach, was quite a comedown from the beach house love nest. During the long days of dwindling heat and afternoon showers I’d lie on my bed, sipping bourbon over ice and thinking about Lani and myself. I’m no kind of fool, and I knew what was happening didn’t exactly tally. With her money and looks Lani could have had her choice of big husky young ones, her kind. I never kidded myself; I was over thirty-five, blond hair getting a little thin and once-athletic body now sporting a slight drinker’s paunch. Not a bad looking guy, but not the pick of the litter. And my not-solucrative occupation of water skiing instructor during the vacation season would hardly have attracted Lani. I already owed her over five hundred dollars she never expected to get back.
Maybe any guy in my situation would have wondered how he’d got so lucky. I didn’t know or really care. I only knew I had what I wanted most. And even during the day I could close my eyes and lean back in my bed five miles from sea and hear the tortured surf of the rolling night ocean.
“He has more money than he could burn,” Lani said to me one night at the beach house.
“Howard?”
She nodded and ran her fingernails through the hair on my chest.
“You’re his wife,” I told her “Half of all he owns is yours and vice versa.”
“You’re something I own that isn’t half his, Dennis. We own each, other. I feel more married to you than to Howard.”
“Divorce him,” I said. “You’d get your half.”
She pulled her head away from me for a moment and looked incredulous.
“Are you kidding? The court wouldn’t look too kindly on a woman leaving a cripple. And Howard’s really ruthless. His lawyers might bring out something from my past.”
“Or present.”
She tried to bite my arm and I pulled her back by the hair. I knew what she’d been talking toward and I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything but her. She was twisting her head all around, laughing, as I slapped her and shoved her away. She was still laughing when she said it.
“Dennis, there’s only one—”
I interrupted her. “I’ll kill, him for you,” I said.
We were both serious then. She sat up and we stared at each other. The twin reflections of the fire were tiny star-points of red light in her dark eyes. I reached for her.
The beach house was where we discussed the thing in detail, weighing one plan after another. We always met there and nowhere else. I’d conceal my old sedan in the shadows behind a jagged stand of rock and walk down through the grass and cool sand to the door off the wooden sun deck. She’d be waiting for me.
“Listen,” she said to me one night when the sea wind was howling in gusts around the sturdy house, “why don’t we use this on him?” She opened her purse and drew out a small, snub-nosed .32 caliber revolver.
I took it from her and turned it over in my hand. A compact, ugly weapon with an unusual eight shot cylinder, the purity of its flawless white pearl grips made the rest of it seem all the uglier.
“Whose?” I asked.
Lani closed her purse and tossed it onto the sofa from where she sat on an oversized cushion. “Howard gave it to me just after we were married, for protection.”
“Then it can be traced to you.”
She shook her head impatiently. “He bought it for me in Europe, when he was on a business trip in a communist block country. Brought it back illegally, really. I looked into this thing, Dennis. I know the police can identify the type and make weapon used from the bullet, only this make gun won’t even be known to them. All they’ll be able to say for sure is it was a .32 caliber.”
I looked at her admiringly and slipped the revolver into my pants pocket. “You do your homework like a good girl. How many people know you own this thing?”
“Quite a few people were there when Howard gave it to me three years ago, but only a few people have seen it since. I doubt if anybody even, knows what caliber it is. I know I can pretend I don’t.”
She was watching me closely as I thoughtfully rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth. “What happens if the police ask you to produce the gun? Nothing to prevent them from matching it with the murder bullet then.”
Lani laughed. “In three years I lost it! Let them search for it if they want. It’ll be at the bottom of the ocean where you threw it.” She was grinning secretively, her dark hair hanging loose over one ear and the makeup under one eye smudged.
“Why not let me in on your entire plan?” I said. “The whole thing would come off better.”
“I didn’t mean to take over or anything. I just want it to be safe for you, baby, for both of us. So we can enjoy afterward together.”
I wondered then if afterward would be like before.
“I know this gun is safe,” Lani went on. “No matter where you got another one the police might eventually trace it. But with this one they can’t.”
“Is it registered or anything?”
“No, Howard just gave it to me.”
“But the people who saw him give it to you, couldn’t they identify it?”
“Not if they never saw it again.” She took a sip of the expensive blended whiskey she was drinking from the bottle and looked up smiling at me with her head tilted back and kind of resting on one shoulder. “I think I’ve got an idea you’ll like,” she said. Her lips were parted wide, still glistening wet from the whiskey.
That’s how three nights later I found myself dressed only in swimming trunks and deck shoes, seated uncomfortably in the hard, barnacle-clad wooden structure of the underside of the long pier that jutted out into the sea from Howard Sundale’s private beach. To the right, beyond the rise of sand, I could see the lights of his sprawling hacienda style house as I kept shifting my weight and feeling the spray from the surf lick at my ankles. I’d always considered myself small time, maybe, not the toughest but smart, and here I was killing for a woman. There’d been plenty of passed up opportunities to kill for money. I knew it wasn’t Lani’s, money at all; I’d have wanted her rich or poor.
I unconsciously glanced at my wrist for the engraved watch I’d been careful not to wear, and I pursed softly as the white foaming breakers surged out their rolling lives beneath me. It had to be ten o’clock!
Lani had guaranteed me that Belson, her husband’s chauffeur and handyman, would bring Howard for his nightly stroll out onto the long pier at ten o’clock.
“Belson always wheels him there,” she’d said. “It’s habit with them. Only this time I’ll call Belson back to the house for a moment and he’ll leave Howard there alone — for you.”
The idea then was simple and effective. I was to climb up from my hiding place, shoot. Howard, strip him of ring, watch and wallet, then swim back along the shoreline to near where my car was hidden and drive for North Beach Bridge, where I’d throw the murder gun into deep water.