When Swenson saw her, he shouted, “Hey, honey!”
And then she turned toward us and squinted into the sun. And then her pretty face ignited into a smile and she returned the wave. And then went on walking in the opposite direction.
“That’s the little woman,” Swenson said. “My wife.”
“Pretty,” I said.
“She sure is,” he said proudly. “I hope you get a chance to meet her.”
But I had met her. Many times I’d met her. And that was why, in fact, I was here. Because I’d met her and she’d betrayed me and now I was going to kill her.
The fishing turned out to be all I’d heard. I spent two days collecting sunrays and catfish, and two nights drinking bathtub gin and squiring about a young woman who wore just a wee bit too many pieces of Kleenex in her bra. But her earnestness endeared her to me, and so we spent several sweet moonlit hours in a hushed cove next to where the water ran moonsilver at midnight.
Not until Tuesday did I start following the lawman’s wife. When I’d known her her name had been Ann Sage and she’d lived in Chicago. Here her name was Karen Caine. She’d put on ten pounds and dipped her hair a little too often in the peroxide bottle. She had a nice life. During the day, she went to the beauty shop and the picture show and the bakery.
Nights, her appointed rounds became even more interesting. I found a hill on the right side of the isolated Caine house on the edge of town. Through my field glasses, I saw that hubby, apparently tired, usually went to bed around 8:30, leaving Karen downstairs to read movie magazines, smoke Chesterfields and listen to the radio.
He came from the woods in back of the house, her lover. He was a big man with a handsome but fierce face and a lot of girly-curly dark hair. He went straight into the darkened garage. She came out promptly at ten. It was all pretty sensible, when you thought about it. You go anywhere with somebody, folks are bound to see you eventually. But if all you do is go out to your garage — and she carried a small sack of garbage as a pretext — who could see anything? If lover boy kept his mouth shut, who would ever know?
And hubby was upstairs asleep.
On my fourth day in town, I rolled out of bed an hour later than usual. That bathtub gin can do bad things to your system, especially your head.
He knocked and then came right in without my invitation. He had on a crisp new khaki uniform that would be sweated out and dusted out by day’s end and he had this strange smile on his face. One of those smug smiles that said he knew something I didn’t.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I said, still in my boxers, still sitting on the side of my single bed. I fired up a Lucky.
He had a glass in his hand. A plain 6-ounce drinking glass.
“Recognize this?” he said.
Something was sure up. He was so excited he kept licking his lips and breathing very hard.
“Looks like a glass to me.”
“Yeah, but what kinda glass?”
“Drinking glass.” The hangover had left me irritable. “Look, I always like to have some breakfast before I play parlor games.”
The grin came — full force now. “This ain’t no parlor game I’m playing, Mr. Dillinger.”
So then I knew. “The glass I drank lemonade from?”
“One and the same.”
“You’re a bright lad.”
“Bright enough to match the fingerprints with the WANTED poster J. Edgar sent out when they thought you were still alive. I didn’t know who you were so I had to look through a lot of posters. You got a real funny whorl on your right thumb.”
“I cut it on a scythe when I was a kid.”
“Too bad. It’s real easy to spot you.”
“You tell them where they can find me?”
His wife Anne Sage had told the federales where they could find me on the night of July 22. She’d be wearing red when we left the theater and she’d be standing next to me. She’d pitch to the left and they’d open fire. What they hadn’t counted on was me figuring that something was going on. She’d been acting jittery all night. Just as we were leaving the theater, I grabbed her and used her as a shield. J. Edgar wouldn’t want his boys to gun down an innocent girl. It’d look bad in the press. So they didn’t have any choice but to let me get in my car — her along for the ride — and get away. That was three years ago. Since then that West Coast doc had worked on my face, turning me into a new man. And I’d been looking for Ann Sage.
Or had been.
I’d outrun J. Edgar once. I doubted I’d do it again.
“They’ve probably got this hotel surrounded,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot wearier than my thirty-seven years.
He shook his head. “Nah. I haven’t called them yet.”
I took a deep drag of the Lucky. The stream of smoke I exhaled was a perfect ice blue. Beautiful in its way. “You want all the glory for yourself, huh? ‘I Captured John Dillinger.’ Make you a regular folk hero.”
He looked kind of dopey then. And I realized just how young and unsophisticated he was. Despite all the tough talk, I mean.
Standing right there, a badge on his chest, a gun on his hip, for all the world a cold and serious lawman, he got tears in his eyes and said, “I can’t take it anymore, Mr. Dillinger.”
“Can’t take what?” I said.
So he told me.
I slept in again the next morning. This time it wasn’t the fault of bathtub gin. I was just tired. It’d been a long and industrious night.
The desk clerk, as I handed him the two dollars I owed him for my last night, said, “You must’ve slept through all the excitement.”
“Oh?”
“You met Deputy Caine.”
“Sure. Nice young man.”
The clerk, who had a mole, slick hair and breath that could peel onions, leaned forward on the desk and said, “His old lady was bangin’ this here young buck of a farmer, see? The way folks surmise it is the farmer wanted her to leave Caine and marry him. They musta had an argument, see, and the farmer killed her and then hisself.”
I shook my head. “Boy, what a sad old world.”
“I hear ya, brother.” Then: “Caine didn’t hear about it till this morning. He took a prisoner over to Dunkertown and stayed there all night right on a cot in the police station.”
Hard to find a better alibi than that.
I was just tossing my bag in my roadster when I saw Deputy Caine coming out of his office and walking into the dusty street. Several people stopped him. The way they kind of whispered and gently touched him, you could tell they were trying to console him.
I whipped the roadster around so that I’d drive past the sheriff’s office as I left town. When I got even with the small stone building, I stepped on the brake. Caine came over and put his foot on the running board.
“I guess we both got what we wanted,” he said.
I guess we did. She’d betrayed me with the feds and she’d betrayed him in bed. We’d both gotten what we wanted.
“So everything go all right?”
“Just fine.” The farmer had been big, all right, but dumb. Faking his suicide hadn’t been difficult at all.
“She say anything, you know, before she died?”
I knew what he wanted to hear. What any man would want to hear. That she was sorry she betrayed him. That she still loved him.
“I could lie to you, kid, but I’m not sure I’d be doing you any favors.”
“Yeah, I suppose not.” He squinted up at the sun. “That funeral parlor’s gonna be hot as a bitch tonight, with the wake and all.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Hot as a bitch.
“Good luck with everything — Mr. Thompson,” he said. And grinned.
That had been my part of the bargain. I kill his wife for him — something he couldn’t bring himself to do — and he let me go without informing the feds. Seemed reasonable to me.