“I know, I know. Don’t you think I realize that? It can’t be helped. I was planning to trade it off for still another. We can’t do it, now. If we steal one, that won’t help.”
“What will we do? Where will we go?”
“Easy, now. Keep hold of yourself. There’s only us, you know? We can’t take a bus, a train, or a plane. They’ll be watching them. They’ll sure as hell set up road blocks before long. They’ve probably already contacted the bank. They’re at your place. They’re looking for us right now. The one chance we have got is this car, until they find out about it.”
“Yes, Jack.”
I headed across town toward the junkyard district.
“They’ll have the license number before the day’s out. But there are a lot of cars exactly like this one on the highways, everywhere. I’m going to swipe a plate off a wrecked car in a junkyard, then we’ll scram.”
“Where?”
“Not far. We’ll take back roads, head north maybe fifty or seventy miles, and rent a place. Anything. A cabin someplace. Then when everything cools down, we’ll take off. The big mistake would be to try and make it now. We’d never make it, Shirley.”
She just looked at me.
I made it to a junkyard I knew of, where it was self-service. I parked down the street, told her to lie on the seat, out of sight. Then I went over to the yard, and told the man I was looking for an old Stromberg carburetor to fix up a hot rod I was building for my kid. He said to have a look around.
“I’ll need pliers and a screw driver.”
He grumbled, and loaned me the tools.
I found a plate for this year, got that off the car it was on, and slid it under my shirt and belt, at my back. Then I located a carb, and tore it off fast.
“You’ll need a kit,” he said. “This is all shot to hell.”
“I know it.”
“I sell kits.”
“Well, I figured...”
“It’s no good without you fix it, pal.”
“Okay. I’ll take the kit, then.”
I paid for the stuff, and went back to the car. She was lying on the seat, looking like a scared rabbit.
I was beginning to feel fine. We had a good chance.
We drove out of town, taking the back routes, and stopped the first chance so I could change the plates. Shirley sat in the car, tuning the radio. She’d been quiet ever since we left town, and that bothered me a little. I buried the plate that was on the car. Then I heard her call.
“Jack. Hurry!”
Well, I went over there, and it was on the radio. She picked up the tail end of a news flash, but even at that, it was pretty explicit.
They were holding Henry Lamphier in a jail cell for his own protection. He had sworn to kill us both. The police were having a bad time with him. We were suspected of murdering both Victor Spondell and Mayda Lamphier, and they had it all straight down the line, even though they claimed they weren’t positive. They theorized Mayda Lamphier had somehow surprised us in the act of letting Victor die, and we’d had to do away with her. They uncovered everything. The pad with the list of stuff at my place, Miraglia’s name, everybody’s name, all the gimmicks. It added up. I don’t know, maybe there was something inevitable about it, because they’d even dug up the bloody blanket.
A young cop got credit for that. He had put himself in what he figured was my place, since the Medical Examiner had claimed there would have been a lot of blood, and we had probably wrapped Mayda in something.
He walked away from the spot by the canal, down the road, and turned off where he thought we might have buried whatever it was, and dug up the bloody blanket.
They had checked with the bank at three minutes to ten. So they’d missed Shirley by maybe seconds.
There was nothing on the car as yet.
We were “love killers.” We had held “wild orgies” under the very eyes of the pitiful dying man. We were “sex-crazed thieves and lustful murderers.” We were “passion-bold.” I could see all the fact crime writers streaming toward the house that they called the “love nest death house,” and stuff like that.
Behind it all was Anthony Miraglia. He told the police something had made him suspicious. He berated himself for not acting sooner. He had discovered the original condenser I’d taken out of the intercom unit under Victor Spondell’s eyes, claiming it was bad. I remembered leaving it on the windowsill. I’d had to take it out with Victor watching.
He had taken the condenser home to his boy, who was interested in building radio kits. Then he looked at it, checked it, and found it flawless. From there on out, one thing had led to another, Doctor Miraglia told them. “Victor Spondell was a strong man, and I admired his courage in view of the fact that he knew he would die. He was my friend.”
They said we would never get away.
Something began to go out of me. I had to keep looking at that white bag with the money in it, to reassure myself. It helped.
“It looks bad, Jack.”
“Looks and is are two different things,” I said. “Keep your chin up, Shirley.”
We stopped off in Tampa, got some sandwiches and cokes, and took off.
By late afternoon we had rented a cabin on a river, in the woods. We were “newlyweds.” The nearest store and gas station stood at a country intersection about a mile away, called Wilke’s Corners.
The cabin was an old place, but pretty well kept up. There were three rooms. A small kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. The furniture was beat.
The cabin was on a small hill. You could look out the front windows and see the dirt road winding down through pine trees, away from the river. On the other side, you could see the river, and you could hear it, pulsing darkly against the shore. There were cypresses and vines along the river, and the water was black.
We’d had to ask about a place. I asked in a bar attached to the grocery store at Wilke’s Corners. A farmer said he had a place, and we rented it sight unseen.
Shirley had waited in the car. But she was still talking about how the man’s face looked when I paid him the rent for the first two weeks.
“Well,” she said, standing in the living room. “We’re here.”
“Yeah. It’s not bad.”
She moved toward me. “It’s wonderful, Jack. We’re married. We’re newlyweds. I like it that way.”
“Sure. So do I.”
“Kiss me.”
I kissed her. I had wanted to bring in the stuff from the car. I didn’t get to it right then. I was worried about all they’d said over the radio. I was worried about the guy we’d had to rent the cabin from. I was worried and scared about everything, but nothing seemed to bother Shirley from the moment she entered that cabin door.
She said, “There’s nobody here, but us.”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody to see us, or watch us.”
“That’s right.”
“Just us. All alone. The way it should be.”
I held her tightly. It was good this way. You could hear the river and the wind in the pines and it was getting on toward the first part of twilight. Some of the worry fell away from me. The place was warm with our coming. We stood there in the middle of the living room, holding each other, amid the old smells of wood and old fires, and the air was close, but maybe that helped. It was different. There was a kind of freedom in it, and this freedom slowly worked on you, and all the bad fell away.
“We don’t have to hurry, or anything,” she said. “We can take our time, and do anything we want.” She said it in a close whisper, and there was strong excitement behind the words.
I rubbed my hands up and down her body, feeling the shape of her, and pulling her against me. I kissed her lips and her face, and we stood there holding it like that.
She pressed her hands against my chest, and tipped her head up to me, her lips parted, her eyes shining big and round. “Jack.” she said. “Do you really know how much I love you?”