Dixie was standing in the middle of the room with a glass in his hand. He was wearing a spotless white dinner jacket, and his benign face had a scrubbed, rosy look. His small mouth curled affectionately.
“Hello. Ray. You’re a good boy to come so soon.”
Behind him, sitting in a chair with motionless rigidity that was the antithesis of her usual seductive grace, was Myra. Her face was stiff, drained of blood, and her eyes in the startling pallor were like burned-out cinders, her mouth like a crimson wound.
The wrong feeling intensified. Twisting at the hips, Ray could see Rhino by the door at his rear. He stood there indolently, shoulders braced against the wall, his right hand resting in the pocket of his coat.
The maid had advanced on Ray’s other side. Her stance, for a woman, was oddly erect, almost military, and it prompted in him a strange kind of disgust. It seemed, for some reason, a physical perversion.
“I always come soon,” he said carefully.
Dixie lifted his glass and sipped, looking at Ray over the rim. “Thanks. But I had better explain why I called you out tonight. Also why I’ve invited Rhino and Mitzie to attend this little conference. I’ve made use of them, you see and I believe in permitting the people I’ve used in an affair to see its finish. And then, too, it is good for personnel to be made aware of certain consequences.” He smiled gently. “You know what I am, Ray? I’m a foolish, fat little man with a beautiful wife, and that’s the trouble. Perhaps there is nothing quite so unfortunate as a man like me with a wife like Myra. Because he has no confidence, you see. He has no faith. It corrupts his personality. It makes him suspicious, and it degrades him. If he were like you, it would be different. If he were a tall and handsome guy, he wouldn’t be forced to measures a man should scorn.”
It was all clear then, of course.
Even before Dixie walked to a table and flipped a switch. Even before the sultry, vibrant voice whispered his damnation through the room: Ray, Ray…
Dixie flipped the switch again, cutting off Ray’s line, and he was suddenly a sick old man. The smooth skin seemed to darken and wither on his bones. “The machine was in a cabinet in the hall,” he said. “This was only one of the rooms it could have picked up. Mitzie’s very clever about operating it. For a dame, Mitzie’s clever about a lot of things.”
He lifted his glass and drained it greedily. “What would you do, Ray, if you were Dixie Cannon? What would you do to the guy who made your wife? As you said in the office today, it’s a matter of discipline. Some things you can’t let pass.”
It seemed to Ray at that moment, in retrospect, that the whole day had been pointed toward this bad end and he wondered dully how he had been so blind as to miss the signs of destiny—his own words to Myra about needing Dixie’s protection, the malignant threat of Prince Caleb Kirk, all the dark signs pointing. He tried to speak, but he found that he couldn’t. Bones and muscles functioned, permitting his mouth to open, but no sound would come from his throat.
“At first I thought I’d ruin your handsome face.” Dixie said. “I thought I’d let Rhino cut it up for me. But then l remembered something you said to Myra. Something on the tape there. ‘Who keeps me alive?’ you said. So now I’ve decided it will be best it we simply part company. From this moment, we are at liberty from each other. I will take steps to make it known that you are no longer my man and therefore no longer my concern. For example. I’ve already notified the men I’m presently dealing with—the Schultz twins. Prince Caleb Kirk. They were quite interested.”
Then there was an unexpected sharp sound of splintering glass and blood dripped brightly from Dixie’s soft fingers. His voice rose to a shrill, womanlike scream.
“Get out, you double-dealing son of a bitch! Get the hell out before I have Rhino cut you to shreds!”
Ray turned away with a bleak sense of loneliness that was more terrible than fear. For a moment his eyes sought the face of Myra, but there was nothing in it now but defeat and the shadow of terror, so he gave up and went past Rhino into the hall and out of the house. All the way hanging in disembodied suspension before him there was a second face. It was long and yellow, with a sour mouth, and hate-filled eyes, the symbol of his enemies.
Fair game. Open season on Ray Butler. He felt a frantic, irrational compulsion to start running, but all growth and structure on the surface of the earth around him seemed, of a sudden, to disintegrate and disappear leaving no place, no place at all, for a man to hide.
MAY I COME IN?
Originally published in Manhunt, January 1955.
I saw Marilla today, and it all came back with the sight of him, all the details I’ve tried to remember and couldn’t—all the little, important details that meant so much, all about the night and what happened in the night and all things before and afterward…
* * * *
The night was hot and humid.
I lay in my room on a sheet sodden with the seepage from my pores, and suspended above me in the dark like a design in ectoplasm was the face of the man named Marilla, and the hate within
