around, you know, at the Taft. She knows Nelson. Been telling him she wants to meet you.”
“She has, huh?” Bo Stokes says. He grins at the woman’s silhouette, “You told Nels you wanna meet me, huh?”
The woman nods and giggles. “Wanda, meet Bo,” the driver says. “Bo, meet Wanda.” She slides over closer to the driver and pats the seat beside her.
“Well now darlin,” Bo Stokes says. He opens the car door and crowds his bulk onto the seat and slides an arm around the woman’s shoulders and his hand closes on her thigh and the woman puts her hand to the back of his neck and he glances at the driver and even in the dim light sees now that he does not know him and he starts to draw back but the woman locks both arms hard around his neck and pulls him against her and the driver grabs him by the coat lapel and holds him fast and presses a pistol up under his chin and before Bo Stokes can gain the leverage to break free, before he can even believe this is happening to him—he who fought Jack Dempsey almost even for two rounds and scored several good shots before the Mauler caught him with a right hook that brought the stellar sky down on his head—he sees an explosion of stars to surpass all imagination and where the bullet goes through the car roof it leaves a dark viscid smear.
Laura Upthegrove pulls the door shut as Clarence Middleton wheels the car into the street and if anybody along the boulevard heard the pistol report there is no sign of it.
“This dress is just ruint,” Laura says as Clarence makes a right turn at the corner and heads around the block. She holds the heavy press of the dead man to her like a lover so that any who sees them might take them for such. She feels the blood seeping warmly over her breasts and down her belly, smells it ripe through the scent of cordite. “Good thing I never did like it worth a damn.”
Clarence drives back onto the boulevard and heads north. In another hour he will be dropping Bo Stokes’ mortal remains in a canal miles off the main highway and fourteen feet deep and swarming with gators.
Near midnight of yet the same evening…
Nelson Bellamy is lying supine and fondling the heavy breasts of the naked woman mounted on him and rolling her hips with expert technique. The bedside lamp is lit but the woman has draped Bellamy’s undershirt over it to effect a more subdued cast of light. So engrossed are the lovers in what they are doing—and so loud is the music booming through the open window from the dance pavilion next door—that neither hears the small clack of the doorlock Joe Ashley has opened with a ring of keys appropriated from a downstairs maid. He is masked with a bandanna and holds a shotgun with cut-down barrels and the stock reduced to a pistolgrip.
They had pulled up their masks and entered the Taft Hotel—he and Albert Miller—through the kitchen. Albert Miller put a pistol to a cook’s head and asked which room was Nelson Bellamy’s and the man said 302 without hesitation and they could see he was too frightened to be lying. Just then a maid came in from the adjoining linen room and at the sight of the key ring on her waist Old Joe smiled and said the Good Lord was making it all too easy. Albert Miller remained downstairs to hold the cooks in place as well as any other who might come to the kitchen in the interim. On the third floor landing Old Joe came on a pair of guards playing rummy, men so long without challenge they’d grown lax and dull and they sat with their cards in their hands and one asked in raised voice to be heard over the music who he was. Joe Ashley brought the cutoff up from behind his leg and cocked both hammers and the guards went still and mute. He disarmed each of them in his turn and ordered one to lie on the floor and the other to use cords off the window curtains to bind his partner’s hands tightly behind him and tie his feet together. Joe then clubbed the untied man in the back of the head with the muzzle of the sawed-off and the man fell to his knees and clutched his head and swore vehemently and said, “What the fuck you do that for?” He started to get up and turn around and Joe hit him again, harder, squarely atop his crown. The man fell on his side and gripped the top of his head with both hands and rocked on the floor and wept with the pain and swore heatedly. Old Joe gaped and said, “Son of a bitch.” And once more hit the man in the head with the shotgun—this time behind the ear—and this time the man fell still. Blood ran in a thin rivulet from his hair and stained the carpet under his head. “Shit man, you killed him,” the tied man said. Old Joe told him to shut up. He knelt beside the bleeding man and checked his pulse at his throat and felt that he was still alive. He took the cords off another window curtain and tied the unconscious man tightly hand and foot. Then checked the first man’s bonds and found that they been left just loose enough that the men might with effort work himself free, and so he tightened them. He dragged the unconscious man around and using their belts tied the two men together back to back, each man’s hands belted to the other’s feet. He pulled off their shoes and socks and balled the socks and stuffed a pair into each man’s mouth. He studied his handiwork and picked up his shotgun and saw the conscious one watching him:
“You try callin out or you make a fuss any other way before I come back though, I promise you’ll die.”
Now he gently pushes the door open and the hallway light falls across the bed within. The girl ceases her pelvic gyration to look over her shoulder and she sees a masked man with a wild tangle of white hair coming toward her with darkcircled eyes glowing like coalfires in a nightwind. He motions her away and she scrabbles off the bed and against the wall where she huddles with her arms crossed over her breasts. Bellamy rises on his elbows, his cock yet upright and gleaming, and sees a shotgun muzzle two inches from his face and at the far end of the shortened barrel and the extended left arm holding it the maniacally grinning face of Joe Ashley, his bandanna mask pulled down around his neck so the man might see clearly the agent of his death. Bellamy’s erection folds.
“I dont never care to come to this snakepit town,” Old Joe says, “but this trip’s damn well worth it.”
“Hold on,” Bellamy says in halting voice. “Let’s talk this out.”
Joe Ashley shoves the gun muzzle against Bellamy’s cheek and forces his head back into the pillow. Bellamy shuts his eyes and says tightly, “Listen, listen to me, we can work this out. We’re businessmen, you and me. We can work it out.”
Holding the gun to Bellamy’s underchin Joe Ashley withdraws an ice pick from his belt and all in one fast action shoves it to the hilt in Bellamy’s heart and slips it out and steps back as Bellamy convulses but once and then lies still with eyes wide but done with seeing in this world. Joe Ashley pulls his mask up again and heads for the door. The girl whimpers into her fist at her mouth and her eyes are shut tight as if she would subvert the memory of this horror by not paying visual witness.
He exits the way he came—past the belt-bound and sock-gagged guards who have not make effort to free themselves and down to the kitchen where the cocks are seated now and drinking coffee and Albert Miller is flirting with the maid. Albert pulls his bandanna down just long enough to give her a quick kiss on the lips and then follows Old Joe into the night.
Every couple of weeks or so Laura presented herself at the kitchen door of Miss Lillian’s to be admitted by Wisteria, the daytime head-maid who adored Miss Loretta and delighted in the special charge of conveying Miss Laura to and from her room. A few weeks earlier Wisteria had told Loretta May of seeing a scruffy one-eyed marmalade kitten wandering about in the alley behind the house and being reminded of Mister John by it. Loretta had insisted that she go find the kitten and bring it to her and the maid had done so. Loretta named the cat Johnny and it had lived in her room ever since.
Laura always arrived shortly after sunrise, at which hour Miss Lillian and the girls were just retired until the midafternoon and no one was about in the house but the Negro help. If any of the domestics were curious about her visits they kept their curiosity to themselves. She would usually stay but an hour or two, sometimes longer. Sometimes they fell asleep in each other’s arms and in those instances the good Wisteria would do as Miss Loretta had instructed and tap on her door at one o’clock to rouse so she could be one her way before the rest of the house came awake.
They never questioned their actions together, these two. They held each other close and kissed and caressed and their mutual affections now and then were of such intimacy to render them both breathless. Sometimes they spoke of John hardly at all but he was ever on their minds. As they held each other close Loretta May would tell Laura in low voice what she had seen of him in recent dreams, what she had heard him say. She told of his lonely isolation and the things he called to mind to keep a steadfast spirit. Laura smiled at her renditions of his visions of their swampland world and of the sea—thought she was fearful of the ocean even more than he was and would not venture on it. When Loretta spoke of the near-madness of his desire for them and the physical torment it caused him they both wept and Laura said she wished they could fuck him for real in his dreams and then cried the harder
