Candy

and all-too-obviously natural. I was the ultimate Mark, the Magnificent Sucker, the Patsy-to-end-all-Patsies. I felt duped and swindled and taken, but more than anything else I felt appallingly stupid, which hurt more than the rest of it. There are few things quite so disheartening as the discovery that your love and trust have been used to nail you to the wall.

In the taxi back to the hotel and on the elevator to the room I thought valiantly that it couldn’t have been her, that she couldn’t have done a thing like that, that even if she had she would never have been able to fool me the way she did. My mind invented an Unknown Person who slipped into the apartment after I left and before Candy appeared, a blank-faced, medium-built nonentity who had done the evil deed and vanished like smoke in a whirlwind.

That explained everything. Mr. Nobody had done it, Candy thought I had done it, and off we were to Mexico. Mr. Nobody, the little man who wasn’t there.

Only he wasn’t there. That was the sore point and it sort of fouled things up.

I started to knock on the door, then changed my mind and used my key instead. The door opened and I walked inside and closed it behind me. She was on the bed and she was awake and she was naked. She looked at me and her eyes were wide with a combination of Gee-I’m-glad-to-see-you and Something’s-bothering-you-what-is- it? shining softly in them.

I didn’t know what to say or where to start. I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the nudity of her. Somehow it made me feel out of place with my clothes on but there was nothing to do about that but take my clothes off and that wasn’t what I had in mind. I was, for once in my life, not in the mood for love.

“Hi,” she said. “I missed you this morning. I wanted you when I woke up and you weren’t here. The bed was empty and it was terrible.”

I looked away from her. I saw her shoes at the edge of the bed with their high heels and pointed toes. I saw our clothes on one chair where we had hurled them the night before. I saw a wisp of lingerie in a tangle on the floor at the foot of the bed.

I turned back and saw her. Her face was a little drawn now, not so much that anybody would have noticed it, but enough so that I knew she knew that something was wrong. I knew her well enough to read her face.

Or did I? Perhaps I never knew her at all. Perhaps I was just beginning to discover her.

“Jeff,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Did I do something?”

That was sort of a leading question.

“Jeff—” She paused, a significant pause that was pregnant with meaning, and waited for me to unburden my alleged mind.

I said: “How come you killed her with the knife?”

The silence was strikingly loud.

Her face never cracked but there was just the merest twitch of her right eye and the slightest trembling of one shoulder. That was enough. Then she was calm and relaxed and said things that didn’t mean anything to me because I did not hear them. I sat there mute and deaf with rage and self-pity and hate and every emotion in the catalogue except happiness, and finally I asked her to start over at the beginning because I hadn’t heard one goddamn word that came out of her mouth.

“The knife was right there,” she said. “You cut her throat with it. What are you talking about?”

“I never saw any knife.”

“But it was there! Jeff, are you sure? Because … because if you didn’t then somebody else must have done it and you’re in the clear. Of course we’ll still have to go to Mexico because there’s no way to prove it and you did rape her, but—”

“Candy.” I had just remembered something, something that made Mr. Nobody nobody at all. I had thought that Mr. Nobody had already died within my mind, but evidently he hadn’t because this present realization was sufficiently crushing to keep me speechless for a second or two. It was all I could do to get her name out in a flat two syllables devoid of any intonation whatsoever. That was enough—the tone of my voice must have combined with the expression on her face to silence her because her mouth snapped shut and she didn’t say another word.

“She died in your arms,” I said. “She talked to you and told you all about it and died in your arms.”

She looked at me, puzzled.

“That’s how you knew I had been there,” I went on. I was talking very easily now—it seemed almost as though someone else was talking with my mouth and some other brain moving my lips, it was that simple.

“You went to her and she told you I had been there. And then she died in your arms. Right?”

She nodded.

“Quite a lot of talking,” I said. “Quite a speech from a woman with her throat cut from ear to ear.”

The color drained out of her. It was the first time I had seen her genuinely shaken and the sight did something to me. It was as though I was getting my first real indication that Candy Cain was a human being like the rest of us, a person who was not wholly invulnerable.

But she recovered quickly. She didn’t say anything at first but the color seeped back into her flesh as suddenly as it had left it and she lay there keen-eyed, waiting for me to say something else.

“This is unnecessary,” I said. “You already know what you did but I’m going to tell you, anyway. You walked in on Caroline, saw I was an obvious patsy for a play like this and killed her. I don’t have the slightest idea why you did it but I don’t suppose that makes much difference.”

There was a touch of humour in those eyes of hers now and I hated her for it.

I pushed on. “Then you cleaned out the apartment, beat it to the Astor and phoned me. You managed to convince me that I had killed her—how could I figure it for anything else? You were always careful never to say a word about how she got it. You never mentioned any knife. As soon as you did it would have been all over. Because I did a lot of things in that apartment without knowing just what I was doing, but I know damned well I never had my hands on a knife.”

I fumbled for a cigarette and got one going. I didn’t offer her one and she didn’t ask for one. I smoked and took a few breaths.

“Never played the radio,” I said. “I should have noticed how nervous you were when that one newscast was on, but I was so nervous myself that it sailed right past me. Now it makes sense. But how in God’s name did you expect to get away with it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Good God! I couldn’t go the rest of my life without stumbling across a newspaper story. What kind of world do you think this is? Even in Mexico there would have been some mention somewhere and someday I would have hit it and the jig would have been up. How did you figure to get clean?”

She smiled. I didn’t particularly care for that smile.

“Jeff,” she said, softly and clearly, “I did get away with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“You got away with it this far. But now you’re not getting away with it any further. I know damn well I didn’t kill the Christie bitch and that you did.”

“So what?”

I just looked at her.

“Can you prove it, Jeff?”

I stammered something quite meaningless.

“You can’t prove a thing, Jeff. You know and I know that I killed Caroline. After you left she decided that I wasn’t worth the agony you had just put her through. She wanted me to leave, Jeff. She was going to throw me into the street.”

“That’s where you belong.”

“She was going to throw me out on the street,” she repeated, and she didn’t act as though she had heard a word I said. “I had to kill her. She had all that money lying around the apartment, money and jewels and all, and all I had to do was kill her and it would be mine and we could run away together. You and me.”

“Why?”