A bottle-blonde sitting in a boudoir chair nervously reading a paper. A face that wasn’t hard as it was when I first saw her.
A voice that exclaimed breathlessly, “Johnny!”
“Hello, Wendy.”
She threw the paper down and ran to me. Her arms went around my neck and she buried her face against my shoulder. Her hair smelled nice. She seemed to see my face for the first time and almost got sick looking at me. Her fingers came up and touched my mouth, my eyes, then my ears. Was it terror or horror in her eyes?
She said, “Johnny... what was it?”
I wasn’t easy on her. I put my hands on her chest and shoved her halfway across the room. Her back slammed into the dresser and she stood there with her hands pressed to her ears not able to believe what was happening.
“They’re dead, Wendy. Servo, Packman, Gardiner, Harlan, Troy. Hell, everybody’s dead. It’s all over.”
I think then she realized what I had come for. Her whole body trembled violently but not having the power to move.
“I should have said, ‘Hello, Vera’ when I came in. That’s the name, isn’t it? Vera West.”
Her lips got dry and she licked them. It didn’t help any.
“Smart guy, Nick. He knew the score right along. He knew damn well I wasn’t Johnny McBride and steered me straight to you so you could get back at Servo through me. Revenge, wasn’t it? Like me.”
I took off my coat and threw it over the chair. The gun in the pocket clunked on the floor. I stripped off my belt and dangled it from my hand. “Take off your clothes, Vera.”
It was horror I had seen in her eyes. It got bigger and brighter as she watched me swing that belt in a slow arc. “Take off your clothes,” I repeated. “I know I’m right but I want to make sure. See, you’re getting every break.”
I saw it happen and didn’t know why. The horror faded into defiance and a sob choked her up. Her fingers went to the top button of her blouse and flipped it open. Then the next, and the next until it was wide open. It slipped off one arm, then the other and fell to the carpet too softly to hear.
“There were a couple of things that never did make sense to me, Vera. They looked good, but really didn’t make sense and I never gave them much thought. One was that quick way I got around to meeting you. Not many people would want a suspected killer to have the run of their house. You didn’t put up much objection at all.”
The zipper at the side of her skirt hissed metallically. She let go of the hem. It fell at her feet in a circle and stayed there. Automatically her fingers worked the slip up, then her arms crossed and she lifted it over her head. The defiance came out again when she flicked it across the room and stood there in the sheerest black underwear that could be made. Tall, tanned. Calendar legs. Smooth. The curve of her thighs sweeping into her stomach and on up around the proud beauty of her breasts. The flesh rippled with her breathing across the flat of her waist and her hands came up again to the bra, very slowly.
“You live here on the edge of a wide-open town where a girl like you could rake in a pile yet never once did you go near that town. You work out on the highway under a lot of make-up and a phony name and whenever I wanted you to see the bright lights you turned me down. That’s something I should have thought about. You were afraid to go near town. Afraid somebody might recognize you. You stuck to a nice safe spot waiting for something to happen that would put you in a spot to make Lenny pay off to you and when I came along you grabbed the big chance.”
The bra had another zipper. It was right down the middle and she opened it with two fingers. Her breasts were alive and vibrant, a lighter tan than the rest of her, standing firm and proud in the excitement that coursed through her body. Her shoulders were wide and square, a sleek taper down to her waist.
My mouth felt drawn and it wasn’t as easy to speak any longer. “You dug up a lot of information on friend Tucker in a hurry. I bet you and Nick put in many a week collecting all the stuff you had in that package. Instead of looking around like I wanted you to you sat in the beauty parlor and had your hair done to waste time.”
She was almost ready to do it. My whole body started to crawl. The belt was limp in my hand.
“You had a lot of handy information about Everybody. You knew about Harlan and made sure I knew it with that ad in the paper and that phone call. You knew right where to steer me for more information. You had a long time to figure out the angles and knew just what was what. All you needed was a strong arm to make the play for you. All I want to know is why, Vera. You won’t die like the rest, but you’ll hurt like hell for a long time and always show the marks. I’d just like to know why. Johnny was such a nice guy.”
She didn’t answer me. Her forefingers ran under the elastic of the panties, then they unfolded down around her hips. She stepped out of them, held them up, then tossed them casually after the other things. She stood there like a statue, naked except for her shoes, her hands leaning on the dresser behind her.
I looked at her hungrily, knowing it would be the last time I’d see her so nakedly beautiful. My head nodded and the belt swung in my hand again. “It was a good gimmick, Vera. A lovely disguise. A natural blonde making herself an unnatural blonde right down to phony dark roots. The hairdresser must have had a hell of a time, but it was a nice trick in case somebody looked too close and thought you were familiar. It would fool anybody.
“No wonder you didn’t want me to see you in the light without any clothes on.” My mouth felt dry. There was a nasty taste behind my teeth. “It’s been a long wait, Vera. You’ve changed a lot since that picture Logan gave me of you was taken, but you’re still beautiful. Johnny must have suffered every time he thought of you. It’s been one hell of a long wait but you’re finally going to suffer a little bit like Johnny did.”
I raised the strap.
The dresser drawer opened and shut fast and she was pointing a gun at me. It was a little gun, but big enough. I had talked myself right into another trap again.
Her face was a curious mixture of emotion. She pointed the gun at the dressing table beside me. “Look in the top drawer.”
I was so damned mad I could hardly move. I was nearly ready to let her shoot then knock her teeth out with the barrel and if the same curious emotion that was in her face hadn’t been in her voice too I would have.
I opened the top drawer. I was looking at myself again. A lot of George Wilsons. “Nick had them too.”
“Look at the date.”
At the bottom of each one was a stamped date of delivery with notice to post. The ones on the bottom of the pile went back seven years.
She watched me until I shut the drawer. “I’ve known about George Wilson ever since Johnny McBride left town. Nick has always had them. It scared me until we learned that George Wilson was wanted long before anything ever happened to Johnny. Now look in the next drawer.”
My mind was numb. I felt cold all over. A lot of crazy things were going on in my head and I couldn’t understand it. I opened that drawer and emptied an envelope out on the dresser. There was a deed there to the house on Pontiel Road made out to John McBride. There was an army discharge certificate and a letter from the War Department.
“Read it,” she said.
The letter was a full account of the war activities of John McBride. It told in detail that he had been trained for special work and operated behind the enemy lines on secret missions that included one of the successful coups of the war when he entered a German Command Headquarters building and relieved a safe of a document that listed German agents working in Allied zones.
My mind was a mad frenzy of thoughts shuttling back and forth too fast to make sense. They shrieked and hammered to be recognized and beat against my skull in despair when I couldn’t sort them out.