Carny kill

8

One of those cute little highschool things in the red-and-white guide outfit came up to me with a nice clean smile. This one wore a very short skirt and she had pretty legs. I wondered if she was seventeen.

"Pardon me, sir, but aren't you Mr. Thaxton?"

I admitted I was as I ran my eye from the tip of her toes to the top of her hose. Which I couldn't actually see because it disappeared under her skimpy skirt. Which was just about as high as the law would allow in public. Any higher and the vice squad would slap a morals charge on the Cochrane Enterprises.

Nix, nix, I told myself. She looks seventeen, she'll claim eighteen, and tomorrow morning her battle-ax mama will rush in yelling she's only sixteen. But I was only kidding myself. I didn't really care. Not too much.

"Mr. Franks has been looking everywhere for you, sir;, she said with the nice clean smile that was starting to get on my nerves. What ever happened to all the whory looking, hard-eyed tarts who used to haunt carny lots?

"For me? Why?"

"I'm sure I don't know, sir. He simply said-"

I'd been through this same dialogue with one of her nice clean boyfriends. "Okay, okay. Where does he want to see me?"

She didn't quite point because anybody knows that's bad manners, but made a sort of indicative gesture toward the south.

"His office is upstairs over the storerooms, sir."

Upstairs, naturally. With Private on the door. I smiled at the bright little thing and looped my arm in hers.

"Show me, huh?"

You'd have thought I had pinched her where I shouldn't.

"Please, Mr. Thaxton! That sort of familiarity isn't necessary."

I decided she was a little college thing. They usually don't know a term like familiarity in highschool. That was my top-of-the-head thought. My sub-level thought was more basic, more home-truthish. It was this:

You're dated, boy. You're age-lagging. Once past thirty you enter the anachronism stage. The young tasties are starting to think of you as Uncle Thax.

You want the truth? It hurt when she backed off from me. That's a funny and goddam tragic thing about a man. No matter how old or how wise he becomes he still needs to feel that every good-looking female between fifteen and fifty is instantly attracted by his magnetic personality. When they aren't-he dies.

"Forgive me," I said with a bitter smile (bitterness usually rouses the mate sympathy in a female). "Now and then I encounter an honest to God virgin and I forget how to act."

This was the cynical, world-weary bit which had always found great success in my past. Today it fell flat on its face. The nice clean little thing with the pretty legs looked at me as if to say 'You really shouldn't drink so much, Mr. Thaxton.'

"You'll find Mr. Franks' office just around the corner, sir," she said in a voice you could starch a stuffed shirt in.

I gave up. I nodded and turned away. Then I looked back and said, "Hey. How old are you?"

"Eighteen." Still starchy about it.

"That's what I thought."

I went around the corner and entered the building with the word Private on the door.

Billie was coming down the stairs and she stopped and smiled and said, "Thax."

And suddenly I was seventeen again and standing fifteen years back in an Ohio stream up to my ankles and a very pretty young girl was standing on a log above me and looking down at me in a way that can only happen the first time, and nothing in this entire goddam atomic bombhaunted world was relevant. Only that girl and myself and our picnic by a lonely Ohio stream.

I went up the steps and took Billie's hand.

"Billie-you just reminded me of the first time I fell in love. I was seventeen and she was sixteen, and it was the year I ran off to join a circus."

Billie's smile deepened. She was looking into my eyes.

"Thax, you're an incurable romantic daydreamer."

"Well-"

"No," she said. "Don't say it doesn't matter. It does matter, darling. It does."

Then she kissed me.

I just stood there. There's no other way to describe it. I just stood there. Billie squeezed my hand.

"Wait for me behind the nautch show tonight." She went around me and started down the steps. Then I woke up.

"Hey. What's with you and Franks?"

She looked up at me and her face, for all its inherent sensualness plus beauty-parlor perfection, seemed bright and innocent. Nice and clean-to coin my own phrase.

"I just gave Franks my two weeks notice," she said. "I'm quitting. Tell you tonight."

Her spikeheels clit-clattered down the rest of the steps. The door marked Private swung closed in her faint perfumed wake. I stared at it.

Quitting? No more Billie? Just two weeks? I was no longer the boy standing in the Ohio stream. I felt like an old overworked anachronism again. I went upstairs and knocked on the landing door. Franks' voice told me to come in.

The business manager's office was done in the same motif as May's suite. Swedish modern. It wasn't bloated with a lot of satin cushions though.

The bluff-faced Mr. Franks was just closing his safe and he stood up in his two-hundred dollar suit and came around his driftwood-Rez desk to offer me his hand. We shook and he asked me how Neverland was treating me, and I said, "Fine," and asked how it was treating him, and he chuckled and said, "Fine, just fine," and I reminded him that he wanted to see me.

He said, "Yes," in a somewhat distracted manner and went back to his desk and picked up the phone and asked the exchange for Mrs. Cochrane's suite in the Queen Anne Cottage. He smiled at me while he waited for a connection and said:

"Sit down, Thax, sit down."

I sat down in a chair that felt like it had been growing on one of our hardwood ridges when Columbus missed America.

"May?" Franks said into the phone. "Thaxton's here now. Can you come over?"

He winked at me while he listened to her reply, to show me that it was really nothing serious-just the usual female nonsense.

I didn't believe his wink any more than I believed his Swedish modern office. He was a natural-born yes-man who tried to cover it up with a hearty show of efficiency.

"Well," he said as he parked the phone back in its cradle.

That didn't mean much to me, so I said so.

"Well what?"

He raised his eyes inquiringly. "Pardon me?"

"You said well," I told him. "That usually means well something or other. I'm waiting for the something. The other you can keep."

His bluff fuse broke into a Babbitt smile and he sat down. We looked at each other across his massive driftwood-Rez desk.

"I simply thought it was time we had a little talk, Thaxton."

"We? Why invite my ex-wife into our little talk then?"

He fussed with his pens and pencils on his uninked desk blotter, arranging them just so.

"Well-" he said, "I thought it would be better if she were here. Because it more or less concerns her, you see?"

I said, "If you mean the murder of her husband-I suppose it does more or less concern her."

He frowned and made a geometrical pattern with his pens and pencils.

"You're a part of this show, Thaxton," he said gravely. "And you were once Mrs. Cochrane's husband. I should think you would be willing to see us through this trying time."

"Um. As long as this trying time doesn't pin a rose on me."

He looked at me quizzically.

"Ferris is now toying around with two ideas," I told him. "One-I helped May knock over Cochrane, for money. Two-I did the deed on my own, for revenge."

Franks broke up the geometric pattern with his desk set by placing a pen perpendicular to a pencil.

"Is that a fact," he said solemnly. "I didn't know that."

I grinned at him. "Don't let it give you ideas. I ain't about to become the patsy for this smear."

He gave me an owlish look. "I can assure you, Thaxton-"

The inner door opened without a preliminary knock. May stood framed in the doorway for a moment, very dramatic looking in a silver skintight outfit. Like a redheaded shark, if you can imagine such a predatory creature.

"All right, May," I said. "Close the door and finish your entrance. You're on stage now."

She didn't get mad, which was out of character for her. She closed the door and approached me with a little girlish look of appeal.

"Darling," she said. "I need your help."

It was time to duck. I could hear the beautiful diamondback shaking its rattles. I took another try at making her mad.

"What is it? Another corpse you want moved?"

"Darling," May said, "that's really very funny. That's the one thing I always liked about you-your wonderful sense of humor."

"Sit down, will you, May?" I said. "You make me feel like a rabbit in a cornfield with a hawk hovering overhead."

She was too nervous to sit down. She started to pace Franks' office. We both watched her. It was a beautiful thing to see. She had the body for it and the body had the rhythm. But I had seen it all before. I let Franks watch by himself. I took out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. Franks remembered his social manners and struck his desk lighter for me.

"Darling," May said, "you've heard what they're trying to do to me around here." Her inflection said it wasn't a question.

"You mean murderwise?"

She came to roost by the arm of my chair and said "Um" She took the cigarette out of my hand the same way she always used to do and started to take a drag. Then she hesitated and glanced at it and at me, as if wondering if I had something I should see a doctor about. I took my smoke back.

"Everybody thinks I murdered Rob," she said. "It's all over the lot. Every last mother's bastard out there-" she made a broad arm gesture encompassing Neverland- "who takes my money is saying it!"

"Now, May," Franks said soothingly. "Not everyone."

"Be quiet, Lloyd," May snapped. She looked at me. "Well, you can't deny it, can you, Thax?"

"Uh-uh. But you can't blame 'em either, May. You're a natural for it. Look at the motive. Money money money."

She started pacing again, saying, "But dammit, I didn't do it! Why should I? Rob gave me everything."

"Uh-huh, but maybe you wanted everything except a sixty-year-old Irish husband. Maybe you wanted to marry some husky young buck who didn't have a dime and Cochrane said no divorce. Hell, I don't know."

May came back to my chair with little red glints in her eyes.

"So that's what they're saying about me now, hm? The dirty-"

"May," Franks said. "Now, May."

She whirled on him. "Will you for godsake shut up, Lloyd! Will you just do that kind little thing for me, sweetie? I'm trying to talk to Thax."

Franks' flaming expression seemed to say it wasn't fair of May to talk to him that way in front of an outsider. After all he was her business manager, wasn't he? He was just trying to be helpful and now May went and threw that kind of crap in his face.

"All I'm trying to say, May, is that it won't help us progress by losing our temper. We must remain rational and-"

"Rational!" May cried. "My God, look what they're doing to me! Can't you understand? I'm being framed for murder! My knife, my earring, my husband. My God, I'm as good as convicted!"

I stood up and mashed out my cigarette on a desk tray.

"Well," I said, "this has been pleasant, but I'm supposed to be out on the lot earning the salary you good people pay me."

May dropped her anger and switched back to feminine appeal.

"Darling-I really do need your help."

"Mine?"

"Um. If I ever meant anything at all to you, sweetness, I only want you to do one little thing for me."

I could have told her what she had meant to me but I decided I'd better not. I looked at her askance.

"What is the one little thing?"

"I want you to help me by not telling the law all about our private life. I mean back when we were married. I'm in deep enough, darling, without having all the gory details of the past thrown at me too."

"Ferris already knows we were once married, May."

She shook her head impatiently. "I don't mean that. I mean, for example, that little incident in Decatur."

That little incident in Decatur had damn near cost me my life. That was the night I caught Bill Duff and May making like Ferris' crossed fingers in Duff's trailer. The night Duff lost his eye-tooth. May and I had pitched a beauty when we got back to our own trailer, and then May had pitched a knife at me and thank God I had decided to sit down on the bed just as she did or I would have had a new hole where I didn't need one.

It was pretty plain that a story like that wouldn't do her present situation much good. I grinned at her.

"You mean you want me to withhold evidence?"

"No, no," Franks said hurriedly. "What you mistakenly call evidence isn't germane to Mr. Cochrane's death. It isn't relevant in any sense, except perhaps-"

"Except that it will give the DA a dandy chance to establish May's behavior pattern of throwing knives at her husbands," I said.

Franks looked slightly annoyed. "All Mrs. Cochrane is asking of you, Thaxton, is not to volunteer an old story like that if you don't have to. You see?"

"Uh-huh. Just a slight omission on my part."

"Exactly. And-" he took time out to clear his throat- "Mrs. Cochrane would of course be very appreciative. I-uh, understand you arrived here somewhat strapped for money?"

I cocked my head at him.

"You're offering me a shot at blackmail, Mr. Franks?"

"No," he said. "No no no. Please do not use that term, Thaxton. I had in mind a bonus. After all, you do work for Mrs. Cochrane, and-"

"Oh for godsake, Lloyd." May looked disgusted. "Thax wasn't born yesterday. He called it by its right name the first time." She looked at me. "Will you take it and keep your mouth shut?"

I was almost at the point of asking how much It was, exactly. But I backed off like an honorable little man.

"This may come as a jolt to you, sweetie," I said to her. "But the only money I'm going to take from you is what I earn on the lot. But don't sweat it. I won't tell Ferris you once tried to use me as a bull's-eye." I winked at Franks. "See you two very nice people later."

May followed me to the door. When I got it open she leaned her lithe body against the edge and placed a silvertipped hand over one of mine. She looked up at me with her best, practiced, feline, look.

"Like Lloyd said, darling, I am very appreciative." Her voice was pure cat's purr.

I glanced at her claws and drew my hand out and gave her a pat on the behind.

"Better save it for the jury sweetness," I said. "You just might need it."

I went down the stairs with May's parting comment in my ear.

"Bastard."