“You have to know the technique. Shall I try?”
“Why not?”
The technique was simple. She turned and gestured, and a squat bartender came down on the other side of the bar. His round, oily face was bland. His tiny, pinched mouth, tucked under a swollen nose, twitched back over shrunken gums. Peter specified bourbon and water, and the woman said, assuming his acceptance of the weary routine, that she’d have hers in ginger ale. When the drinks were in their hands, she said, “There’s a booth empty,” and he said, “That’s convenient,” and they went over and sat down on the same side of the table.
She sipped her pale, professional drink. “My name’s Roxy,” she said.
“It’s a nice name. Mine’s Peter.” A waiter materialized periodically with full glasses. Peter drank what he had to and spilled what he could. Roxy, pressing against him, played her weary part with automatic fidelity. The whole place was hot and panting, and after so much time and bad whisky, there was a churning rebellion in his stomach, a growing turbulent sickness.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.
“Why?”
“It’s too crowded.”
“Don’t let it bother you. No one pays any attention.”
“It’s my Puritan background, baby. I like privacy, and I’m willing to pay for it.”
She arched her thin eyebrows and formed a red circle with her lips. “I work here. You know that. I’m not supposed to run out with the customers.”
“Who’d notice?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “All right. You go out alone. I’ll meet you at the alley entrance in a few minutes.”
He got out of the booth and went out through the hall past the fat man in the chair to the street. The air was astringent in his throat and lungs. His head cleared a little, and the revolution in his stomach subsided to a turgid unrest. Walking swiftly, he went down to the corner and back on the side street to the alley entrance. Three or four steps down the alley, he stopped and stood quietly, pressed against the damp brick of an old building.
Down the alley, a door opened and closed, projecting and extinguishing a weak swath of light. For a second, his ears caught faintly a wave of crazy reefer rhythms. High heels rapped briskly on brick, coming abreast, and pushing away from the wall, he hooked an arm. She spun around with a startled curse, the curse cutting off abruptly when she recognized him.
“You scared hell out of me, honey,” she said.
“Sorry. The car’s right down the street.”
They went down to the Olds and got in. Lowering the window beside her, she sat strangely upright in the seat, lifting her face with a kind of pathetic greediness into the rush of cold air, and as he drove, he thought he could see from the corners of his eyes a faint flush of color in her sallow cheeks. The Olds moved cautiously through narrow streets of predominate darkness, emerging finally into a brighter section where incandescents and neons repelled the shadows, passing after a short while into the avenues and broad boulevards tilted upward toward the high ground above the river.
On the suburban road at the crest of the rise, where the earth descended again to the lip of the bluff, he stopped the Olds. Twin shafts from the headlights sliced down through the darkness past the rail fence into emptiness. Then he leaned forward and extinguished the lights suddenly, and in the instant after extinction, before his eyes could adjust, the night was complete and impenetrable, a soft and tangible pressure that filled him with a momentary terror, as if it were he who was about to die.
She twisted toward him on the seat. “Why are we stopping here? I’m getting cold.”
There was no fear in her voice, no rising awareness of danger, but only a slight nasality, the hint of a petulant whine.
“Have you ever been up here before?” he said.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“I thought maybe you’d like the view. Look behind you.”
She twisted away in the opposite direction, looking back through the rear window. Behind and below them, the lights of the city were spread in wide display. She sat that way a long time, twisted in the seat to look back at the lights, and then she said, “It’s pretty. It’s been a long time since anyone bothered to show me anything pretty.”
“I thought you might like it,” he said.
And then, because it had to be then, because he could never bring himself to the point again, he reached out and took her by the throat from behind. She tried to twist around to face him, clawing at his hands and threshing her legs in a desperate diffusion of energy, but she was not strong, even in a struggle for life, and it was only a little while until she was dead.
Afterward, he proceeded quickly, according to plan. He removed a can of gasoline from the rear and soaked the interior of the car. He started the engine and pressed the accelerator down, wedging it with a piece of wood. With the high singing of many horses in his ears, he pulled the body over under the wheel, switched on the headlights, and dropped a lighted match on the upholstery. Finally, he pulled the automatic transmission lever into drive position and simultaneously released the hand brake, and the big car leaped away, careening. He stood and watched it crash through the fence at the edge of the bluff and catapult blazing into space. After a moment that seemed forever, he heard from below the crashing of steel and a detonation that was like a giant expulsion of air.
Slipping off the side of the road, he ran. Carrying the empty gasoline can, he ran at a tangent and downward through the dark toward the street below where his own car waited.
CHAPTER 7.
The colored flags of the terrace were littered with dead leaves that had blown in on the wind. A pile of
