“I’m very good, you know,” she says.
“Are you?”
“I’m very, very good.”
“How much?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“I’m a lot of woman, honey.”
“I’ll give you twenty-five.”
“Compromise time,” she says. “Thirty-five.”
“Twenty-five or nothing.”
“Thirty-five or nothing.”
The music continues, but the scream ends abruptly and is replaced by a faint, faraway sound, the sound of a pebble tumbling down a mountainside. But then that sound, too, dies, and there is silence, and in his mind the limping man sees Yellow lying dead and broken and bloodied at the bottom of the cliff. Alice’s hand brands his thigh and she breathes into his ear, “I know a lot of things, old Smith honey, I know a lot of ways to make a man happy. Thirty-five dollars is a bargain price.”
“All right!” the limping man says urgently, standing. “All right, let’s go!”
Alice smiles. “You won’t be sorry.”
“Let’s go!” he says again, and pulls her to her feet. They make their way quickly toward the curtained entranceway.
Behind the bar, the light-skinned Negro watches them with his implacable stare, and smiles very faintly, and on the stage the nude girl dancer sinks to her knees with her head hanging down and her long red hair shielding her body like a gossamer cloak as the music terminates and the pink spotlight winks out.
Chicago lay cold and bright and aloof under a darkly overcast sky when Larry Drexel’s flight from San Francisco arrived at O’Hare Airport a few minutes past ten Tuesday night.
Immediately after claiming his single suitcase, Drexel entered a cab in front of the main terminal and instructed the driver to take him to one of the larger downtown hotels, where he had made telephone reservations that afternoon. He settled back against the rear seat as the cab began to make its way out of the airport, removed a cheroot from his suit pocket, and lit it carefully.
He thought: Who would have figured Kilduff to turn out the way he did? Crap-yellow, and running scared. He came undone at the seams this morning at Sebastopol; I shouldn’t have said anything to him at all about killing Helgerman, but how could you predict a reaction like that?
It turned his stomach remembering how he had had to patronize Kilduff: “It’s nothing as relatively unimportant as exposure, or even a prison sentence, facing us now, Steve. It’s life and death, kill or be killed—the law of the jungle. No judgments, no great moral decisions, Steve; kill or be killed, pure and simple.” But he’d finally gotten him calmed down on the drive back to San Francisco, telling him that they would talk it all out again when he got back from Chicago; but there was no figuring how long it would be before Kilduff got to thinking on the thing and made some damned-fool move that would blow the whole scene—like going to the police, spilling his guts . . .
He couldn’t let that happen. He had too many things going for him—El Peyote and Cantina del Flores, which he now owned one hundred percent as of Monday morning at 10:43—too many avenues opening up, each of them leading to golden rainbows, to allow one son of a bitch who didn’t have the balls for justifiable homicide to queer it all. He had thought it all out very carefully on the plane, and the way he saw it, he had just one way to go. The idea of tracing Helgerman back to San Francisco really wasn’t feasible, and he’d just be kidding himself if he actually thought he could determine his whereabouts that way; but if he could learn where Helgerman lived, where he called home now, then there was a good chance he could reverse the entire situation. Helgerman would have to come home eventually, wouldn’t he? And when he did, then he would become the hunted and Larry Drexel would become the hunter.
As for Kilduff . . . well, he had made his goddamned bed, hadn’t he? He was approaching the deep end, no mistake, and it was a certainty that he was going over the edge before too long. There was the distinct possibility that. Helgerman would get him before then, because he had gotten Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp and Conradin; but there wasn’t any assurance of that. And suppose Helgerman made a try and failed? Kilduff—straight to the fuzz for sure.
So he couldn’t afford to take the risk—he couldn’t afford to wait. The thing to do was fly back to San Francisco tomorrow sometime, whether or not he located Helgerman’s address, because he could always return to Chicago and Granite City again. Get Kilduff alone somewhere, like he should have done before he left. Just the two of them.
And then hit him on the head.
Eliminate the threat once and for all.
Drexel moistened his lips, staring out at the flickering lights of the Windy City. He didn’t much care for the idea of that, not really; they had been friends once and there was the chance Kilduff would straighten up, you never knew. But the odds were all wrong, and friendships meant nothing when it came to your own ass. He would do it, all right; there was no other choice in the matter. You had to protect yourself, didn’t you?
Well, didn’t you?
9
Trina Conradin lay with her eyes open wide in the canopied antique bed she had shared with her husband, in the big white house on Bodega Flat, and listened to the wind and the rain and the sounds of night, and asked God again and again, silently, rhetorically, why her husband had died. She lay without moving, the cool white sheets pulled up tightly to her throat, waiting for the momentary respite of sleep, waiting in vain for sleep that never came. All that came were ghosts, ethereal wraiths fluttering, whispering, playing tag along the high ceilings and within the old dark walls. And she couldn’t cry any more; she couldn’t cry.
At the first pale, filtered light of morning—what day? Wednesday?—the storm abated; the wind grew tranquil and the thunder ebbed into nothingness and the sound of the rain was very gentle on the glass panes of the window. Trina lay in the warm, empty bed and tried to imagine her future. What would she do? Where would she go? There were too many memories, too many ghosts, in this big old house—and in Bodega Bay. Sell the house, then, and sell Jim’s boat and go away somewhere. To live alone somewhere, alone . . .
She pushed the thoughts away; not now, she told herself, this isn’t the time. She slid out of bed, and dressed in a pair of old black capris and a gray pullover sweater, and went downstairs to the kitchen.
Shortly past eleven, Mr. Spencer, from the mortuary, arrived solicitous and apologetic to present Trina with a thin black leather-bound book which had Inscribed Memories printed in gold leaf on the cover. He took her hand and held it for a brief moment, as if it were a fragile sparrow’s egg, and offered once more his whispered condolences. When he had gone, Trina sat in one of the dated wing chairs in the dark sitting room and opened the book and looked at the facing page. In raised black script: That the memory Of the beloved departed May always be preserved, We have compiled This book of Inscribed Memories.
We present this record to you In appreciation of your confidence and As a tribute to your loved one, Who will Linger in fond remembrance throughout The years to come.
On the page following, in the same printing, and handwritten carefully with a nibbed pen: In Memory Of And on the page following:
Entered into Rest
Sitting there, Trina still was unable to cry. She turned the parchment-like pages of the book in her lap slowly until she came to one divided into two columns, one headed: Friends; the other: Relatives . So few, she thought, so very, very few. Her eyes moved slowly down each column and then paused on the last signature under Friends: Steven Kilduff, San Francisco. She tried to place the name, to remember if she herself knew it from some past place or time, or if Jim had mentioned it, but it was totally strange and evoked no response in her mind. Steven Kilduff. Had that been the man who had spoken to her in the mortuary yesterday? Or was it the name of the other man, the dark Latin one? Why had only one of the two men signed the guest book in the vestibule? Why—?