“Suppose I drop around tomorrow morning?” I said. “I’ll bring some stuff along. We can decide what you want. How’s that?”
“All right. That’s fine.”
“If we started anything tonight, we’d never get finished.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
We walked across the room. I stepped out onto the front porch. I looked back at her through the screen.
“Good night, Miss Angela.”
“Good night, Mr. Ruxton.”
I had that feeling you get. Just a little tight in the chest. Not quite enough air. But so far it was one of those things. I thought again how sometimes I looked too hard at people, trying to figure what made them itch the way they did.
I drove past the store. Somebody had locked up, and only the night lights were on, with the two TV sets in the show window grinding away; one a Western, the other the fights. I always figured, you get them looking in from outside, maybe one or two will drift inside, and you’re that much closer to their pocketbooks. I left the sets on all night, because maybe somebody would come back in the morning. Then, sometimes I’d stick around till midnight.
I turned up the alley and drove slowly past the shop. Louis Sneed was at the front bench, working on his hi-fi speaker system, the one he claimed would revolutionize the audio world and cancel out all previous speaker system designs.
I parked the truck in the parking area, lining it up carefully with the other beside me. One truck was out on call, apparently. Twenty-four hour service, that’s what. All this so you could stay comfortably in debt at the end of every week, with money in your pocket that wasn’t yours, because you had to float it big to make it pay off big someday.
I looked across at the back of the building, at the shop. Big my foot. It was penny ante.
Someday, sweetheart.
I went over to my car, walking quietly. It would be just like Grace to hide on the floor by the back seat. It was okay, she wasn’t there. I got in and drove home.
There was no sign of Grace anywhere. I drove once around the block before pulling into the apartment garage, but the streets were quiet. She wasn’t hanging around the front of the building, either.
I went on up and took a shower, then mixed a drink. I kept thinking about this Shirley Angela, and how she looked, and how she’d run off at the mouth.
Young and tender.
I went to bed.
In the middle of the night, the phone kept ringing. I got up. It was after three. It was Grace. She’d been drinking and she was crying. She wanted to make sure I knew she was crying.
“I’ve got to see you, Jack.”
“No.”
“This isn’t fair. It’s awful, what you’re doing. Don’t treat me this way. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”
“Go sleep it off, Grace.”
“Please, Jack. Let me come up?”
I hung up and went back to bed. I was half nuts for morning to come so I could get out to Shirley Angela’s place again.
Next morning I hung around the store till ten, getting ready. Pete Stallsworth finally helped me load a couple TV sets on the truck; an RCA console, and a Philco table model for hanging over the bed. I worked up some ideas for brackets, and told Pete I was doing something for a good friend and would handle the whole deal myself. I took along a lot of junk—pamphlets, consumers’ reports, pictures, room layouts, good come-on stuff. Why the hell it is, I don’t know, but customers always insist on having a mob of phony literature, all glossed up in technicolor. The set itself doesn’t matter, it’s the folders and pamphlets and crap that really count. Then they hardly look at them.
On the way, I stopped off at Timothy’s Radio Supply and signed for four different kinds of intercom units, and told the guy he’d probably have a nice sale on his hands. I drove past the front of the house slowly. It looked different in daylight. Just a house, with palm trees out front, and St. Augustine grass, and the sloping ramp leading to the front porch.
Well, I could be wrong.
I turned in the drive and parked under a tree. The Australian pine hedge between the drive and the neighboring house ran from out back clear to the street. Everything was quiet. I felt low. I had planned to do this whole job myself. It meant carrying TV sets, putting up an antenna, wiring, the works. It wouldn’t be easy.
“Hello, there.”
“Hi.”
She was on the porch, waving.
It didn’t make me feel any better, seeing her. I couldn’t get it out of my head; something like that, doing what she was doing, prisoned for Christ only knew how long with an old bastard who wouldn’t die.
“Morning,” I said. “How’s everything?”
“Fine.”
She was really a knockout this morning. She had on a pair of black toreador pants, skin tight, with little slits at the calf. On top she had somehow managed to squeeze into a thin white sleeveless sweater, so nobody could possibly miss what she had up there. She had plenty. She wore sandals, and a bright smile. Her hair was auburn, all right, and brushed to a sheen.
She came off the porch and around front and along the drive.
“I was expecting you earlier. I phoned, but they told me you’d left.”
“I wish now I’d come earlier.”
That didn’t get me anywhere.
“I’m very anxious to get started,” she said. “It’s like Christmas—buying all these things.”
I got out of the truck and came around to where she stood. I opened the door and hauled the loose-leaf notebooks and the carton of pamphlets off the seat.
She said, “I suppose I could have come down to the store. Doctor Miraglia comes twice a week. That’s when I go out to shop, and everything.”
“I see.” I didn’t ask her what “everything” was.
“But I like it this way,” she said. “If it’s not too much trouble for you.”
“Well?”
“Well.”
I grinned and nodded toward the house, and she nodded, and started walking that way. I followed her inside. “We can check through this stuff first,” I said as we entered the living room. “You can kind of make up your mind. Then we’ll get down to brass tacks.”
“Swell.”
The bedroom door was closed. But I could see him in there, in my mind’s eye, staring bleakly into the past....
“Good morning, Ruxton.”
Something stopped ticking inside me for a second, then started again. It was Spondell. He stood in the dinette, staring at me with those eagle’s eyes. He had on a blue corduroy bathrobe and slippers, and his hair was combed. He held a cup of coffee.
“Well,” I said. “Glad you’re feeling better.”
He started to say something, but she jumped in fast with the lifeline. “Victor, you’d better toddle back to bed, now. You’ve been up over a half hour. You know what Doctor Miraglia said.”
“The hell with him.”
“Now, Victor.”
“All right, baby.” He grinned. “Glad to see you, Ruxton—you old son of a bitch.”
“Victor!”
