Carny kill

19

May was pacing up and down through a grayish garland of cigarette smoke when I opened the cabin door. She came to a full, abrupt stop and looked at me and it was a look I had never seen on her face before. Pure shock.

"Thax." She barely said it.

"Why don't you sit down, May?" I said.

I don't think she consciously heard me. She didn't sit down. She didn't make a move. She stared at me and her obsidian eyes seemed to grow in her porcelain-perfect face.

I said, "He's dead, May. He fell on your knife."

She kept staring at me and her black pupils glowed with a dull red light.

"You filthy bastard," she whispered.

"I wouldn't lie to you now, May. If I'd killed him I'd admit it. But I didn't. It was an accident."

Then she sat down, all at once, and it was a good thing the table bench was right behind her or I think she would have gone out on the deck. She seemed to have forgotten the cigarette that was smoking itself between her pale, tapered fingers. She looked blankly at the floor.

"I loved him."

I think she was telling herself, and I think she meant it. At least I think she thought she meant it, which made it just about the same thing. I went over and picked up Gabby's automatic and shoved it under my belt.

"What are you going to do?" She didn't look at me.

"Tell Ferris. I want out of this thing with a clean slate."

She looked at me. "He won't believe you."

"I think he will. He isn't stupid, you know, May. I think he just needed a little more time to get it sorted out. A good cop doesn't like to jump until he has all the facts down pat."

Her cigarette must have started to burn her fingers. She looked at it as if wondering what it was doing there. Then she dropped it on the floor and tapped at it with one red pump.

"Should I run, Thax?" It was not May's voice at all. It was quiet, grave, almost detached. I shook my head.

"It's too late to run, May. You couldn't get far enough fast enough. Besides, it doesn't really matter now, does it?"

"No," she said in the same nothing voice, "I guess it doesn't."

I left her sitting in the cabin. I closed the door very quietly and then I gathered up the rowboat they had used to reach the island and the one I had used and I tied the bow of the one to the stern of the other and rowed back to the Admiral Benbow dock.

The moon was just starting to come out from behind the black scud for another look around. It was nearly three AM.

They burnt the trash every night in a big furnace room behind the bunkhouse and I made a trip over there because it seemed like a good place to dry out my soggy clothes.

Nobody was in the baked room but an old man asleep on a blanket pallet. He had been making love to a gin bottle and he had neglected to put the cap back on it and there was that ginny perfume scent in the hot air that I could do without.

I capped his bottle for him. If it had been anything except gin I would have had a snort. I have no scruples when it comes to booze.

It didn't take long for my duds to dry out in that heat, and when I was dressed again I went over to the bunkhouse to use the phone.

Four or five of the rummies were sleeping it off in there but they were too far gone to be bothered by the electric light I snapped on.

A typical POed desk-sergeant voice told me no, Ferris wasn't at headquarters and what did I expect at that time of night, or maybe I didn't know what time of night it was?

I told him yes, I knew and that I also knew that another man had just been killed at Neverland and I thought maybe Ferris might want to be cut in on it.

The desk sergeant's 'voice got excited and he wanted to know who I was and who was killed and who had done it and everything except the color of my socks, and I kept asking for Ferris until finally he gave in grudgingly and switched the call to Ferris' home.

Mrs. Ferris answered and she was sleepy and mad and she said yes, her husband was there but didn't I know what time of night it was? Then Ferris came on by growling yeah?

I told him about it, most of it. How I had figured the plot and how I had gone over to Treasure Island and presented it to May and Mike and how they had tried to kill me.

Ferris didn't get very excited about the news. He said huh. Then he said, "You were just about one giant step ahead of me."

"You mean you had already figured them for it? Mike Ransome in with May Cochrane?"

"Well, I was just rounding that bend," Ferris said. "We got a healthy line on them last night. Seems for the past two-three months they've been renting a room here in town under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Millard Rankin. From all indications they'd shack up there whenever old man Cochrane's back was turned. That sort of put the whole deal in a new light."

There was a pause on his end, and then he said, "I take it things went sour for you tonight, huh?"

"How's that?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Thaxton. I get the impression you went out there with some idea of blackmail in mind. What happened? You couldn't come to terms? That why you're calling cop on them now?"

I let out my breath and shook my head.

"Look," I said, "you're forgetting that I'm supposed to be a rapist, not an extortionist. But believe it or not, none of us had blackmail in mind. They were on to me and they set up a trap to eliminate my troublesome personality. I went out there with the idea I could outfox them, but it misfired on me."

"Yeah," Ferris said and I could tell from his tone just how much he believed me. "So then Ransome accidentally falls on his own knife. Uh-huh. And how did your ex-wife accidentally kill herself?"

"She didn't. She's still out there."

"How's that?"

"I left her on the island."

"Jesus! You just walked off and left her there?"

"It's all right," I said. "I took both rowboats and she doesn't know how to swim. She'll keep."

He said it again, "Jesus. Did it ever enter your goddam head that she might commit suicide?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes, it entered my head. I don't think she will but it's a possibility. But it doesn't really matter, does it? It would save everyone a lot of grief, wouldn't it?"

It was his turn to blow his breath. I heard him do it.

"Thaxton-I'll be out there just as quick as I can find my pants and a squad car. You stay right where you are. Hear me? You and I are going to have a long, hard father and son talk today."

"I've still got a couple of things to take care of," I told him.

His voice leaped along the wire.

"Goddammit, Thaxton, I said _stay where you are!_"

"Take it easy, Ferris. You know where to find me when you want me." I hung up.

One of the rummies woke up and yelled at me to turn off the goddam light. I told him to go himself. He didn't but he roiled over and went back to sleep. I looked up Billie's number in the directory.

There was no answer. I figured she was dead asleep and I let it ring a dozen times but there was still no answer. I repeated the old Anglo-Saxon word I'd just said to the rummy and hung up and walked out of the bunkhouse.

It was getting on to four by the time I reached the basement in Dracula's Castle. I asked the lookout on the door if Gabby was still in the game and when he said yes, I said tell him I wanted to see him out in the hall a minute.

Gabby was wearing insomnialike smudges under his eyes when he stepped outside and closed the door after him. He looked at me with a tired, incurious expression and I handed him his automatic.

"Thanks for the loan," I said. "But you better replace the firing-pin. It works better when all the parts are intact."

Gabby looked at the gun in his hand and wet his lips. He didn't say anything, didn't look at me.

He wasn't my big by a damn sight, but I didn't mind taking him apart because I knew he was a handy little bastard and even if he didn't have a switchblade on him at least he had that Roscoe to use as a sap and that would help equalize our size.

But he just stood there, staring at that gun that wasn't a gun, waiting for it like a convicted war criminal waiting for the inevitable noose. Then he said something that was so incongruous to his nature it caught me offbase.

"Forgive me, Thax."

And then I knew I couldn't do it and that made me feel so goddam mad and frustrated I started yelling at him.

"_Why the hell did you do it?_ We were friends, weren't we?"

He let out his breath like a weary man lowering a heavy burden.

"Are they dead?" he asked. "Did you kill 'em?"

"Who? Mike and May? Mike is, and the johns are coming for May."

"Well," Gabby said, and for a long moment I didn't think he was going to say anything else. Then he started to talk.

"They had me in a bind, Thax, and I didn't have enough guts to get up off the ground and make like a man. About four years back me and May worked for the same outfit up north. There was a beef one night on the lot and a mark got killed. I sapped too hard. A few of the carnys knew who did it but they figured the rube had it coming so they clammed up. May was one of 'em."

He grunted with disgust.

"I should have known better. Should have known May better. I came here a couple of years back and got a job with Cochrane. I didn't know that May was his wife or that she was even on the lot. Then one day she walks by my gallery and looks at me. That's all, just looks. No sign, no word. But I knew then she was going to make me pay somehow, sometime. Every day for two years I've waited for the ax to fall. And it finally did-a couple a three days back.

"Mike Ransome came to see me. He gave me this toy. He knew that you and me had become buddy-buddy and he had an idea that before very long you'd be looking around for a gun. He figured you'd come to me and said I was to give you this Roscoe. Said it was all a part of a joke he was going to pull on you and that I'd better help with my end of it unless I wanted the law to take another healthy look at that four year old murder. So…"

He raised his head and for the first time since I had known him a look of urgent appeal came into his sallow face.

"But at least I tried to head you off, didn't I, Thax? I told you not to take the damn thing-to cut and run instead."

"That's right, Gabby," I said. "You tried."

I felt empty, disillusioned. I had thought of Gabby as one of those self-contained characters who would always stand up and spit in the world's mean face. Now I saw he had never been anything but a frightened little man.

"Let's forget it," I said. "It doesn't matter now."

But I knew that neither of us could forget it and that nothing would ever be the same again. Gabby knew it too. He didn't say a word when I turned and went up the steps.

I knew I'd be in for a long hard day once Ferris got his hooks in me and started scrubbing me over the washboard, and I didn't want to go into all that without a little sleep under my belt. It was after four by then and I was out on my feet. But I couldn't go back to the tree house because Ferris would send his storm troopers there first thing.

Then I remembered the unused room up in Dracula's Castle. I went up there and closed the door and threw myself on the bed. The last thing I heard was the wailing police sirens coming from a long long way off.