College-Cut Kill

Chapter Seven Setting Up the Kill

Tilly had stayed up until three, she said, finishing a story for our mutual Friday class. She wanted me to read it. She had brought her carbon with her, in her purse.

“Right here?”

“No. The atmosphere has to be better than this, Joe. Wine, soft music.”

“At my place I can provide the wine and the soft music. Would you okay the background?”

“Look, I’m blushing about the story. I thought it was something I’d never try to put on paper. Maybe I don’t want you to read it.”

It was Friday afternoon. We went out to my place. I put on dark glasses and took the carbon out on the beach.

Tilly said, “One thing I’m not going to do is sit and watch you read it, Joe.” She walked down the beach away from me. I watched her walk away from me. No other girl had such a perfect line of back, concavity of slim waist, with the straightest of lines dropping from the armpits down to the in-curve of waist, then flaring, descending in a slanted curve to the pinched-in place of the knee, then sleekly curving again down the calf to the delicacy of ankle bone and the princess-narrow foot.

She turned and looked back and read my mind. “Hey, read the story,” she said.

I read it. She’d showed me other work and I’d been ruthless about too many adjectives, about stiltedness. This one was simple. A boy and a girl. The awkward poetry of a first love. The boy dies. Something in the girl dies. Forever, she thinks. She wants it to be forever. She never wants to feel again. But as she comes slowly back to life, she fights against it. In vain.

And one day she has flowered again into another love and she cannot fight any more — and then she knows that the bruised heart is the one that can feel the most pain and also the most joy. There was a sting at the corners of my eyes as I finished it.

“Come here,” I called. My voice was hoarse.

She came running. I held her by her sun-warm shoulders and kissed her. We both wept and it was a silly and precious thing.

“I do the writing in this family.” I said. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know. Now I don’t think so.”

“In this family? That is a phrase I leap upon, darling. That is a bone I take in my teeth and run with.”

“Trapped,” I said.

“I release you. I open the trap.”

“Hell no! I insist on being trapped. I want to be trapped. I am a guy who believed in a multiplicity of women. I still do. You’re all of them. You’ll keep well. You’ll last. How will you look at sixty?”

“At you.”

“I’ll be six years older. I’ll sit in the corner and crack my knuckles.”

“With me on your lap it’ll be tough.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Is it good enough to hand in, my story?”

“Too good. We won’t hand it in. We’ll whip up something else for the class. This one we keep. Maybe someday we’ll sell it.” Something stirred at the back of my mind. She saw then the change in my expression.

“What is it, Joe? What are you thinking about?”

“Let me get organized.” I got up and paced around. She watched me. I came back and sat beside her. “Look. I can’t power Arthur into trying anything. It won’t work. I can’t become dangerous. But there’s another way.”

“How?”

I tapped her story with one finger. “This way.”

“How do you mean?”

“I write it up. Other names, other places, but the same method of death in each case. I’ll twist it a little. I’ll make it a small business concern. The similarity will be like a slap in the face.”

“You’ll have to write an ending to it. How does it end, Joe?”

“I won’t end it. I’ll take it right up to a certain spot.”

“Then what are you going to do with it?”

“Easy, my love. I’m going to leave it in Arthur’s room and wait and see what happens. I am going to have it look like an accident. I am going to do it in such a way that he’s going to have to give some thought to eliminating one Joe Arlin.”

“No, Joe. Please, no!”

“I’ve got to finish it off. One way or another.”

She looked at me for a long time. “I suppose you do,” she said quietly.

“Be a good girl. Play in the sand. Build castles. I want to bang this out while it’s hot.”

Dust clouded the page in the type-writer and I put the desk lamp on. Tilly sat across the room reading a magazine. I could feel her eyes on the back of my head from time to time.

I had brought my bad guy up to the Sherman death.

“...stood for a moment and took the risk of looking to see that nothing had been forgotten. The gun had slid under the desk. The body was utterly still. He sew the full clip on the desk beside the bottle of gun oil and...”

“Hey!” I said.

“What, darling?”

“I’ve got a slow leak in my head. So has Lieutenant Cord. So had the murderer.”

She came up behind me and put her hand lightly on my shoulder. “How do you mean?” I pointed at the sentence I had partially finished. “I don’t see anything.”

“Angel,” I said, “Lieutenant Cord spoke of a full clip. I do not think he meant seven or six. I think he meant eight. A clip will not hold nine. There was one shell in the chamber. So how did it get there? To load a .45 with nine you put in a full clip, jack one into the chamber, remove clip, add one more to the clip and slap it back into the grip. A guy loading with nine is not likely to forget he has done so. Let us go calling...”

Lieutenant Cord was about to leave. He frowned at me, looked appreciatively at Tilly. I put the question to him.

“Yes, the clip was full, but what does that prove? Maybe that one had been in the chamber for months. It even makes the case stronger my way. The guy takes out the clip, counts eight through the holes, and forgets the nine load.”

“Or somebody else palms another shell out of the box he had and puts it in the chamber.”

“What kind of tea do you drink, Arlin?”

“Be frank with me, Lieutenant. Doesn’t this make the whole thing just a little more dubious to you?”

“No,” he said flatly.

“You,” I said, “look at life through a peashooter. You can focus on one incident at a time. Don’t you ever try to relate each incident to a whole series?”

“Not this time.”

“Miss Owen and I know who did it, Lieutenant.”

“She drinks tea too, eh?”

“You don’t want to know?”

“Not interested. Go play games. Go play cop. Maybe it’s a part of your education.”

We left. “For a time there he seemed brighter than that,” I said.

We got into the car. “Joe,” she said. “Joe, why don’t you go back to New York? Why don’t you tell Mr. Flynn that in your opinion Arthur Marris did it? Why don’t you let him take over? He could build a fire under the lieutenant. Why don’t you go to New York and take me with you?”

“Shameless!”

“Determined. You’re not getting out of my sight again, Joe.”

“I propose and what do I get? A bloodhound yet.”

“Take us home, Joe.”

“Home! Haven’t you ever heard the old adage about street cars?”

“Yes, but you have a season ticket. Home, Joe.”

What can you do?...

I finished the unfinished yarn, folded one copy carelessly and shoved it into my pocket. I finished it Saturday. Tilly, who’d driven down early, was singing in the small kitchen, banging the dishes around.

“I go to leave the epic,” I said.

“Hurry back. And, Joe, bring two of the biggest steaks you can find. The biggest. I’ve never been so hungry.”

I felt like a commuter going to work. Kissed in the living room. Kissed at the door. Waved to. Told to be careful, dear.

Although the brethren with Saturday morning classes were at them, the others were in bed, most of them, with a few others looking squinty-eyed at black coffee in the dining room. I had some coffee with Step Krindall. This morning his baby blue eyes were bleary.

He moaned at forty-second intervals, wiping his pink head. He said, “That wrist watch of yours, Rod. Could you wrap it in your handkerchief and put it in your pocket? The tick is killing me.”

“A large evening?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t counted my money yet. I missed the curfew and the bed check and the last bus out here.”

“Seen Arthur around this morning?”

“He was coming out of the communal shower as I went in. A ghastly memory. He smiled at me. He slammed the door.”

I finished my coffee.

“You slurp a little, don’t you?” he said weakly.

I gave him a hearty slap on the back and went back to the row of senior rooms. I tapped on Arthur’s door.

“Come in!” He looked up from the desk. He was studying. He frowned and then forced a smile.

“I came in to tell you I was a little off the beam the other day, Arthur. I’m sorry. Must be the heat.”

“You don’t know how glad I am to hear that, Rod. Frankly, you had me puzzled. I was going to suggest a checkup at the infirmary. Sometimes the boys get working too hard. A lot of times you can catch them before they crack.”

I looked at him blandly. “Too bad you didn’t catch Ted Flynn in time.”

He nodded. “I’ve felt bad about that ever since. Of course, it was Harv Lorr’s responsibility then. But all upperclassmen should look out for all the other brothers, don’t you think?”

“I certainly think so.” I pushed myself up out of the chair, said good-by and left quickly before he could call my attention to the folded second-sheets I’d left tucked visibly between the cushion and the arm. I had written it up without my name so that anyone would naturally read it to find out whose it was. And I was depending on the narrative hook I’d inserted in the first sentence to keep the reader on the line until it broke off on page nine.

I went and bought two steaks as thick as my fist, frozen shrimp, cocktail sauce, an orchid with funny gray petals edged with green, a bandanna with a pattern of dice all adding up to seven or eleven, gin and vermouth, both imported, and a vast silly shoulder bag of woven green straw. I wanted to buy her the main street, two miles of waterfront beach and the Hope diamond, plus a brace of gray convertibles that would match her level eyes. But I had to save something to buy later.

When I got back, she was gone. I stowed the perishables in the freezing compartment and jittered around, cracking my knuckles, humming, pacing and mumbling until she came back at quarter to one.

“Just where do you think you’ve been?” I demanded.

“Hey, be domineering some more. I love it.”

“Where did you go?”

“I took a bus to school and found Molly and talked her out of this.” She took it out of her purse and handed it to me. It was ridiculously small. On the palm of her hand, it looked as vicious and unprincipled as a coral snake.

“Her father gave it to her,” Tilly said.

I took it and broke it and looked at the six full chambers. I put out one load and snapped the cylinder shut and made certain the hammer was on the empty chamber.

“I thought we ought to have one,” she said in a small voice.

“You’re cute,” I said. “You’re lovable. Come here.” I opened the bottom bureau drawer and took out the .357 Magnum. If the one she brought was a coral snake, this is a hooded cobra. “Now we’ve got an arsenal.”

“How was I to know, Joe?”

“Look at me! Am I a bare-handed type hero? Am I a comic-book buccaneer? Uh uh, honey. At moments of danger you will find Arlin huddled behind the artillery. You should have seen me in the war. Safety-first Arlin, they called me. The only man in the navy who could crawl all the way into a battle helmet.”

Suddenly she was in my arms and shivering. I laid the weapons on the corner of the bureau and paid attention. “I’m scared, scared, scared,” she said.

“Hold on for twelve hours,” I said. “To yourself — not to me. Junior will move fast. He has to. The chips are on the table. The mask has slipped. The hour is on the wing and the bird in the bush has become a rolling stone.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“What do you expect? Get out from under my chin. Stand over there. Okay. This is the order of battle. Arthur will show. He has to. He will show in one of two ways, but first night must fall. He will either come in here playing house president looking for an opening, or he will sneak.

“We will have the daylight hours in which to be gay. Then, come night, we must be boy scouts. We must guard against the sneak play. The surf makes considerable racket. A sneak will come from the beach.

“Thus, the answer is to be invisible from the beach and to be brightly lighted. The south corner of the living room answers that purpose very neatly. We will move the couch there and sit pleasantly side by side with weapons available and wait. In that way we shall be facing the door at which he will knock, should he decide to come openly. Should he knock — you, in great silence, will dart into the living room closet.

“Either way, we shall have two witnesses, you and me. Should he come openly, you must rely on my reflexes and my glib tongue, darling.”

“I love your reflexes.”

“On the ice you will find two mastodon steaks, shrimp that need no cleaning and one wild flower. The wild flower is for you.

“If the steaks turn out poorly, due to the cooking thereof, I shall take away the flower.”

Oh, we were glib and gay throughout that long afternoon. We swam, drank, ate, told jokes, sang, held hands. Nothing did very much good. Our laughter was too brittle and high, and our jokes were leaden.

There were ghosts lurking behind our eyes.

Violence belongs in damp city alleys and shabby tenements and sordid little bars. It doesn’t fit into an environment of white sand and the blue-green gulf water, and the absurd and frantic running of the sand pipers, and the coquinas digging into the wash of wet sand. Murder doesn’t go with the tilt of white gull-wings against the incredibly blue sky, or the honeyed shoulders of the girl you love.

From time to time during that afternoon I would almost forget, and then it would come back — the evil that hid behind the sun and under the sand, and under the water and around the corner of the house.