brought it out clearly; it was just in the back of my head. But four hundred thousand dollars. She had said it as if it were three or four dollars.
I looked at her. She was watching me. The front or her dress was still undone. One full breast was bared, shaped like a honeydew melon, and her hair was snarled, the lipstick smeared. Her dress was rucked up in her lap, and her black nylon pants were hanging on the wind-wing handle. She looked hot enough to catch fire, but too lazy to do anything but just lie there and smoke.
The look of her, the smooth white flesh, stirred it all up in me again. I reached for her and kissed the nipple of her breast and then her mouth, and her fingers bit into my shoulders, the nails digging. She thrust herself away. “Not here—not again—somebody might—”
I couldn’t let go of her.
Then she said, “I don’t give a damn,” and locked her arms around my neck. The instant she spoke, I did give a damn. If we were seen together from now on, out like this, the whole thing would have to be called off.
I let go of her, reached over and took her pants off the wind-wing handle and dropped them in her lap.
“Put ’em on,” I said. “We’re as nutty as they come. We’ve got to separate and get out of here.” I told her why.
She lay back, pouting, and looking about sixteen. “I guess you’re right,” she said.
I offered her a cigarette, but she didn’t want one. I lit up, waiting, trying to calm down. She got dressed, covered up, took a comb out of a small purse and began running it through her hair.
“Could he possibly be suspicious of you in any way?” I said. “Any way at all?”
“No.” Her voice was flat now. “He even talks of how he’ll live another twenty years. How I’ll always be at his side. Like that.”
“Shirley,” I said. “We can’t wait on this. We’ve got to pull it off as soon as possible.”
“When?”
“Soon. I’ll think about it.” It was as if we were discussing a get-together between friends. I said, “Listen, didn’t he ever want you to go to school?”
“I went to private schools,” she said. “But when mother died, he wanted me to stay with him.” She paused. “Jack,” she said, turning in the seat, looking at me as she combed the snarls out of her hair. “You can’t begin to imagine what this has done to me. Being with him every hour of the day, the way he is. Seeing him live on and on. Watching months and years go down the drain. Knowing they’ll try to get him into a hospital eventually, maybe any day.” She quit combing and her eyes got that glazed, absent look. “Knowing that even if I manage to keep him out of a hospital, it’ll be bedpans and dirty sheets and giving him baths and all the rest of that stinking that goes with it.” She stared at the windshield and put her hand over her mouth, then took it away. “You can’t imagine. Nobody can.”
“I can. Rugged.”
“He won’t die. He just won’t die. He’s not really supposed to get out of bed, except when he has to—and God believe me, I would make him crawl on his hands and knees.”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t. You’d fetch the bedpan, and do your job, because all he’d have to do is complain just once to this Miraglia—even joking—and that would be that. He’d have a registered nurse in there so fast you’d hardly know it happened.”
“Don’t frighten me. But you’re right. Doctor Miraglia says he can stay up a little. Victor wants to be up a lot. I let him. It’s our secret. I try to even urge him, carefully, of course, thinking something might happen.”
“You ever think maybe it makes him stronger?”
“I’m trapped,” she said. “I’ll go out of my mind.”
“Not now. Remember?”
She said, “This doesn’t seem wrong at all, Jack.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve come to hate him—hate everything about him. He’s stealing my life. He’s taken my fun, and I can’t escape because of that damned money he holds over my head. He doesn’t talk about it. It’s just there, in his eyes, in the way he grins at me. I don’t even think of him as a person any more.”
“Easy, now. I understand.”
“You can’t really understand, Jack. Not really. Nobody could.” It was there in her eyes. “He’s like a corpse, only he can’t be decently buried.”
“I get you.”
“And you don’t even know him. He’s nothing to you, so it shouldn’t really matter to you, either.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Her eyes got dreamy. “To be free. God, to be free again. Free to come and go. Free—to have you, Jack—free to breathe again, without hate.”
“You’re getting poetic.”
She laughed softly. Her eyes were misty. “I guess—I guess I just can’t help it.”
“You weren’t thinking of anything like dropping that TV set on his face, were you?”
“I read it in a magazine. Somebody had a TV set on his ceiling, so he could watch it, lying in bed. I kept thinking about it. I couldn’t forget it.”
“You’d have lasted about ten minutes after the cops got there. They’d have torn you apart. Listen, Shirley—I am going to put that TV set up there on the ceiling. But it’ll be up so damned solid you won’t get it down without pulling the roof with it.”
“What, then?”
“It’s obvious. No air.”
The corners of her mouth tipped up. “You think that hasn’t occurred to me about a thousand times?” Her eyes lidded faintly. “Every time I hold that mask over his face I have to fight myself to turn on the oxygen.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You turn it on—only you just don’t put the mask over his face.”
“I don’t agree with you.”
“That’s how it’s got to be.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Only it won’t be quite that simple,” I said. “There’ll be more to it.” I reached across her and opened the door. “I’ve got half an idea. I want to work on it. You run along. I’ll meet you at your place, with the truck, and take up where I left off. I won’t come till the doc’s gone.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “I forgot. I’d better hurry.” She got out. “I told Victor you were busy with something unavoidable that came up. I told him you’d be back.”
“Pretty sure of yourself.”
“I prayed you would.”
She went to her car. Well, so far Victor was just an old half-dead bastard who was going to finish dying. I had to keep it that way. The minute conscience stepped in, you were in trouble.
She drove off, and I sat there, and she was no more than out of hearing when I began to worry. One slip-up was all we needed. I’d forgotten to tell her to prepare a sound alibi for where she’d been.
I gunned the car out of there and went tearing down the boulevard. It was too late. She was gone.
I pulled over to the curb and stopped the car, and sat there gripping the steering wheel, knowing I would go through with this thing. All my life I’d been waiting for a chance like this. Keep your eyes and ears open and stay tuned in, and one day there it is. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to touch it. And it’s not half frightening, or anything like that. Shirley and I generated something together that drowned out conscience. This was just something we were going to do together. And, of course, the money. I wanted it. I would get it. All I had to do was make him die in a way that looked natural, and make the whole thing look legitimate. And there would be Shirley, too.
Thinking that made it better still. Shirley Angela was under my skin like the itch and it was going to take a lot of scratching.
He was ready to die. He was old enough. He sure as hell was rich enough.
Then I thought, “But you never killed.”
So there had to be a first time. It wouldn’t be hard. It would just barely be killing, if you looked at it right. And there would be no more Grace; something that had gone on too long already with no way to top her.
We were going to kill Victor Spondell for his money, and that’s how it was going to be.
I went downstairs and had Veronica Lewis, a babe I knew, run a quick check on Victor Spondell’s bankroll. It
