preserve whatever vestige of sanity I had left. It wasn’t much but it was a hell of a lot better than schizophrenia.
It was a hot and beautiful morning when we crossed the Texas-Oklahoma border and gunned off in the general direction of Galveston. Texas looked big even though I couldn’t see too much of it from the road. It stretched out every which way and I felt lost. When we pulled up at a Gulf station for a tankful I noticed that Texans look just the way they’re supposed to look. So help me, in this case the stereotype fits. Every last one of the bastards is six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders and bronzed skin. I don’t doubt that there are five-foot Texans with running noses somewhere in the vastness of the state, but I personally have never set eyes on one.
Driving in Texas is, because of the length and breadth of the state, an ungodly bore. We were in Galveston before too long but it seemed as though we’d been driving through Texas and more Texas for the greater part of our lives. I wondered if there was no end to Texas. I wondered if there was a single solitary hill in the whole damned state. I even wondered if it ever rained there and I decided that it didn’t dare to rain. It would be afraid to—awed by the awful and awesome sureness of Texas. Because Texas was incredibly sure of itself.
You know what they say.
There’s nothing as sure as death and Texas.
The passport forger, happily, was from out of state. He was short and dumpy and his skin looked as though it had been kept in a storage shed for the past five years. His eyes blinked and watered and his nose ran and he wore a look of perpetual fear.
He had the steadiest hand I had ever seen in my life.
He wasn’t a crook. He was an artist, a full-fledged artist who could do magnificent tricks with a pen and a printing-press. We told him what we wanted and Candy told him the name of somebody who had put her on his tail and he got right to work on our doctored documents. He never asked us who we were or what we were running from—he knew better than to ask. He was an artist and a professional in his trade and he did it up brown. We gave him
In bygone times the runt would have made a fine living forging Rembrandts. Now he was doing our driver’s licenses and birth certificates and all the rest. Even an expert would have had the devil’s own time telling his products from the real thing.
Candy, who had known enough to bargain with the used-car dealer, also knew enough not to bargain with the runt. He asked a lot—twelve hundred bucks for the works—and it was easily worth it. When we walked out of there we were Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor and no one in the world could have said otherwise.
Or proved otherwise. Neither of us had our prints on file any place. We
We took a hotel room, which was nice after the run of motels. We baptised the bed properly with a hot love-match and we sacked out. The bed was comfortable and the pillows were soft and we slept thoroughly.
She was still sleeping when I woke up and I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I got dressed, shaved, and headed downstairs for breakfast. I was hungrier than I’d been in a long while and the hotel’s coffee shop had good wheat cakes. I had a stack of them drenched in real maple syrup, the kind you can’t hardly get no more.
Over coffee and a cigarette I browsed through the Galveston morning blat. The world news was a run-of- the-mill roundup of H-bomb tests and South American revolutions, neither of which met with my approval, and the local news was glutted with reports of local corruption, which if nothing else proved that New York and Galveston weren’t as different as you might suspect at first.
It was awhile before it occurred to me that I was reading a newspaper, the first newspaper since the murder, and that it might not be a bad idea to hunt through the paper for a story on the killing. It was a pretty exciting killing, all things considered, and Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie was a big enough name in the Social Register so that she rated nationwide coverage of her untimely demise.
I found what I was looking for on page eleven. It was halfway down the page, a little one-column thing with a staid eighteen-point head, and it went like so:
HUNT THINS FOR
CHRISTIE SLAYER
NEW YORK (AP)—Police were baffled today as clues failed to turn up concerning the whereabouts of Jeffrey Flanders, prime suspect in the murder of Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie.
Sgt. Charles Schwerner, spokesman for Manhattan West, admitted that Flanders seemed to have “vanished into thin air.”
“We’ve followed up every lead around,” Schwerner stated. “We’re pretty sure he’s travelling with the woman but we haven’t gotten a lead on them yet. It’s like the earth opened up and swallowed them.”
The woman Schwerner referred to is Miss Candace Cain, acquaintance of Mrs. Christie’s, at whose swank East Side apartment Mrs. Christie was found.
Police conjecture that Flanders and Miss Cain fled the city after Flanders criminally assaulted Mrs. Christie and stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife.
I finished the story, nodded sadly and guiltily, and took a quick drag of my cigarette. Then when the story hit me, I dropped the cigarette and it rolled from the counter to the floor.
I didn’t bother to pick it up.
I re-read the last paragraph of the story, then read it a third time. I thought long and hard about the kitchen knife with which I had stabbed Caroline Lipton Christie to death.
Chapter Eleven
THERE COULD, OF COURSE, be any number of rational explanations. The wires of Associated Press had more than a few goofs on their respectable shoulders and this was quite possibly one of them. Or, if the
And then again …
I tried to forget about the then-and-again part of it. I got out of the coffee shop and found a cab to take me to the Record building, a three-story brick mess that looked as though it was taking a siesta until it was time to get down to the monotony of putting out a newspaper once again. The friendly old coot with horn-rimmed spectacles and alcoholic breath who was minding the store gave me copies of the past week’s issues and didn’t even charge me a nickel apiece for them. I remember thinking hazily that a person could save a nickel a day in Galveston if he was willing to get his news a day late.
If the kitchen knife gambit had been an error, then it had been a persistent wire service goof that showed up an amazing total of four times in the first story and at least once in every other version. It seemed that Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie had suffered the overwhelming indignity of having her ivory throat slit from ear to ear.
The possibility of suicide had been ruled out, I learned. Police had conjectured that Caroline might have been raped and then have killed herself, but the absence of any fingerprints whatsoever ruled that out. It was a clear-cut case of rape and murder (although the puritanical press persisted in calling it “Criminal Assault”) and the rapist and murderer, according to all sorts of testimony, turned out to be none other than yours truly.
Two people in the world knew better. Three people if you could count Caroline, but since she was no longer in the world but in a gay heaven all her own, that left just the two of us.
Me.
And my own true love.
I thought it over and decided that I didn’t believe it. Then I thought it over some more and decided that there was nothing else to believe no matter how bitter the inevitable realization tasted in my throat.
So I tossed the newspapers in the nearest trashbasket in an effort to oblige in the drive to KEEP GALVESTON CLEAN and found my way back to the Hotel Westlake. My brain burned and my fingers played neurotic games with themselves. The beautiful morning was a neutral gray now and the hot sun was a pale cardboard cut-out on a sky of vomit purple.
It all made sense, sick sense, horrible sense, unnatural sense that was now frighteningly and staggeringly
