“Shirley?”
Nothing.
“Did it go all right, Shirley?”
She just sat there.
I slowed down and tried to drive very carefully. “Shirley?” I said. “It’s like this.” So I told her all about Grace; everything about her. It was something I should have done at the beginning, and let that be a lesson to me. I laid it on the line and dropped it in her lap. “She’s screwy. There was nothing I could do. What would you have me do?”
She had nothing to say. I stopped the car and turned to look at her.
“Shirley.” My voice was tight. “Did you or did you not get the money?”
“What if I didn’t?”
“Did you get it!”
She didn’t look at me. I grabbed the bag and started opening it. The clamps were stuck. I tore at them.
“There’s a key,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“I have it.”
“Well, give it to me!”
“Here.” She fished around in a small blue purse, and handed me a flat metal key. My hands were soaking wet and shaking. I couldn’t get it in the lock, then I did, and the bag popped open and money tumbled all over the seat between us. It was stacked neatly and it was all in paper-banded packets.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You made it,” I said, staring at the money.
“Yes. That’s obvious, isn’t it.”
“How much?”
“All of it. Three hundred and forty...”
“I told you not to take all of it!”
“I wanted it all.”
I stared at her. Well, what the hell did it matter now? She looked at me that way and said, “Was she nice in bed, Jack?”
“Who?”
“That girl? Was she hot? A good lay? Did she really love it up?”
“Cut it out.”
“I’m merely asking. I’m serious. She looked as if she could really bounce a bed.”
“Shirley, cut it out!”
“Don’t shout, darling. People will hear you. It’s embarrassing. It may not be to you, but it is to me.”
She turned and looked at the windshield.
I packed the money lovingly back into the shiny white leather bag, and snapped the lid shut.
All three hundred thousand dollars of it.
The key was in my hand. Make a gesture, I thought. Go ahead. I looked at the key. It was a hard thing to do.
“Here,” I said. “You keep this.”
She took the key daintily, without a word, and put it in her purse, and faced front. I reached out and touched her arm. It was like touching a stovepipe.
“Shirley,” I said. “Honey. Please. Don’t—”
She watched the windshield.
I started the car and drove away, then remembered.
“Where are your bags?”
“At the Greyhound bus terminal. I checked them. I couldn’t possibly carry everything.”
“We’ll pick them up.”
I drove over there. She gave me the check. I felt frightened to leave her in the car alone with the money. What else could I do? Carry it with me? I went on in and got her bags, four of them, and put them in the back seat of the Ford. She hadn’t moved a muscle. We drove away.
“I didn’t think you went for blondes,” she said. “I thought brunettes were your dish.”
“Cut it out, Shirley.”
“Did she like to do it with her clothes on or off?”
“Stop it.”
Her tone was flat. “You treated her awfully, Jack, really, you did. She was crying. She must have felt very bad. Is that any way to treat a girl?”
I clamped my lips tight.
“Jack.”
I gripped the steering wheel, thinking about those cops back at the apartment.
“Was she as good as I am?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I really want to know, Jack. Honestly. Tell me, just between us—was she better?”
I gnawed the inside of my cheek.
“I suppose we all have our points,” she said, “You called her Grace. Grace is such a nice name. It has a certain fillip to it, don’t you think? I mean, it’s—well, bold, you might say, but not too bold. There’s a certain feeling of mystery—”
“Please, Shirley. You’ve ragged me enough.”
“It’s just that I’m interested. It’s a wonder you never mentioned her to me. She has a beautiful body. She didn’t wear falsies, either. Of course, neither do I. But hers were a little bigger, I think. But, then.”
I waited. She didn’t speak for a moment. I drove toward the outskirts of town. I had wanted everything to run smoothly between us. It wasn’t going to be that way. I didn’t know how to tell her we were really running now because we had to run.
Only I had the money.
I’d thought “I”—not we.
She said something. Then she said, “Oh, darling.” Then she said, “Please...” It came out as a kind of sob. She moved across the seat and I slowed the car, wondering, What now?
She shoved the white bag on the floor and put her arms around me.
“I believe you,” she said. “I believe you.”
She kissed the side of my face, with her arms around my neck, purring to herself the way she did, and half-kneeling on the seat. “Don’t you see how it was?” she said. “I just couldn’t stand it. That’s all. I love you, Jack—I love you.” She kissed me on the mouth, and hugged me some more. “I couldn’t stand it. I love you so much—so much.”
I got a look at her eyes and they were mad for a second. I mean mad, not angry. Then that went away.
“I believed you right away,” she said. “But the thought of sharing you with something like that—with anyone—it would be too much.”
“You never shared me.”
“I know, Jack. I’m sorry. Can’t you see?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t try to make me feel worse, now.”
“I’m not.”
“I wanted to hurt you—to make you feel as bad as I felt.” She leaned in tightly against me, kissing me, and purring. I nearly drove the car off the street. “All right, now?” she said. There was something husky in her tone.
“Yeah. I couldn’t do anything with her, Shirley.”
“I understand.”
“We can talk sensibly now?”
“Yes.” She knelt there on the seat with her arms around me, her eyes shining. Her hair was tumbled down around one side of her face. “You’re my man,” she said. “And I love you.”
I patted her thigh.
“I got the money without any trouble at all,” she said. “Isn’t it really better getting it all, instead of leaving some behind? We’ll never come back for it. Don’t you see?”
“It was the chance itself,” I said. “I wasn’t sure you could bring it off. It doesn’t matter now.”
She sank back on the seat, watching me, smiling with a kind of secretiveness. She looked a million. Ten million. I felt really good all of a sudden.
“Shirley?”
“Yes?”
I told her about Miraglia and the police at my apartment, and how we had to run for sure, now. How there was no other way out.
Fourteen
She said a lot of things, and carried on some, but I finally got her calmed down. She was scared. But so was I.
What scared me was the thought of losing that money.
Boiled down, nothing else mattered. That much money was worth being scared about, and it was worth taking chances for. I could have spent my whole life in the store and never managed to gouge even a small part of what we had out of sales.
“You knew this all the time, and you let me act like I did,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
She really meant it.
“Listen,” I said. “We’re not going to have time to talk now. First off, it’ll take them a little time to find out about this car....”
“That girl saw it.”