Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter IV

He was heavy. She had not dreamed that he was so heavy. Tugging, straining, staining herself with his blood, she got him onto a leather sofa and stripped him naked to the waist. She saw with a black wave of despair that the wound was bad, that he was barely alive. His chest heaved. Pink bubbles formed and broke on his lips.

Working like an automaton, not stopping to wonder what had gone so wrong, she did what she could with hot water and towels and an inferior antiseptic she found in the bedroom. It wasn’t much. His heaving chest quieted, his breath becoming dangerously shallow. The pink bubbles formed more slowly, growing gradually in dimension to the bursting point, inflated gently by his diminished breath.

It was only after she had done all she could for him that she thought of the money. She took it from the inside pocket of his sodden coat and stood holding the thick packet in her hands. It was smeared with blood. Connie’s blood. She stood here for a long time, looking down at the fifty grand, the stained stuff of the big plan, balancing in the mental columns of her own perverted accounts the green against the red. With a sudden, violent backhand motion of her arm, she threw the packet away from her. It struck the opposite wall and flew apart, the green leaves fluttering to the floor. Her voice came up on a dry, rasping sob.

“Connie,” she said again. “Connie.”

Kneeling beside the leather couch, she laid her face against his naked body below the wound, and it was several minutes before she realized that he was dead. Then, in spite of a grief that was real, she began to think, with the predatory coldness that had always been independent of her emotions, of her own survival. She understood that money would be essential, and she got up and began gathering the scattered notes. She was engaged in this when the door swung open, and a tall man stood in the opening. In a kind of strange immunity to shock that was the effect of too much already, she was not frightened, nor even startled, and she saw that this man, too, had been shot. His right arm hung stiffly at his side. In his left hand was a gun. His eyes moved from her to Connie’s body on the sofa and back again.

“He’s dead?”

“Yes.” And then, quickly, “I didn’t kill him.”

“I know you didn’t. I did.”

At his words, hate flared within her, a hot blue flame, like the flame of an acetylene torch. So this was the man. This was the man who had done it. The intensity of her emotion made her feel scorched and withered inside, but with craft born of danger she gave no sign. This was a man. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man. And men were to use. They were to be used for chosen ends in whatever methods were necessary at the moment.

“I don’t understand.”

“I shot him at Hogan, and how he ever lived this long to drive a car this far is God’s own miracle.” The lips moved again, giving the angular, face no warmth. “I thought he was a kidnapper. I see now that he wasn’t. I see now that he was only the partner in a conspiracy. In a way, I can’t blame him. A woman like you. The old man told me you were beautiful, but the word isn’t good enough.”

Casually, she drifted a little left, her body lithe in its sheer gown, between him and the kerosene lamp.

“Who are you?” she asked him very quietly.

He moved, coming farther into the room.

“My name’s Pitt. Jefferson Pitt. I’m a private detective, like him.” His eyes slanted off again to the body on the sofa. “The old man hired me to keep an eye on the fifty grand. Your grandfather, I mean. Tonight, in Hogan, the thing broke wide open. Constance shot me. I shot Constance. He stole a car and got away. I bullied a cab stand down the street into letting me take a cab to follow him. But he was away. He must have driven like a maniac. I drove all the way to the city without catching sight of him.

“Then I gambled. If he’d taken another way, or if he’d gone on into the city, I’d lost him. But I figured he might have taken the by-pass around the city. If he had, I might be able to cut straight across and pick him up at the junction on the other side. It was a good gamble. I’d only been at the junction a few minutes when he came roaring off the by-pass. I couldn’t catch him, but I managed to keep his taillight in sight most of the time. I was lucky to see it when he turned off into these hills. Finally I found the stolen car smashed up in a stand of oaks down below. I saw the light up here, and here I am.”

She was caught, and she knew it. Connie was dead, and she was caught, and to make an issue of it now would only be to concede her most potent weapons. Not to antagonize him, that was the idea. He’d come this far in his own way, and the thing from this point was to make him continue in her way. The way she had planned for Connie. It was quite a trick, but it could be done. By a beautiful woman in a sheer gown in an isolated cabin in the hills, it could be done. And there was another factor on her side. A factor that could be decisive. Fifty grand in crisp green, slightly bloodstained.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“Not much.”

“I can’t do much. Hot water and antiseptic. I’ll rip up a slip for the bandage.”

He looked at her, admiration stirring in his eyes, softening for a second the haggard harshness of his face. He moved across the room, past the body of Cleo Constance that was now, in death, only a little colder, a little more remote, than it had been alive. Laying his gun on a table with an awkward southpaw motion, he removed his coat carefully. She went over and unbuttoned his shirt, her pale, astringent hair a soft and heady cloud just below his bold nose. When she was finished, she went off into the tiny kitchen to heat more water on the kerosene stove. In a chair, fighting dull pain and fatigue, he saw that she had laid the money on the table beside the gun. They lay there in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp with ugly, primitive life of their own, symbols of the present issue.

She returned with the water and worked at his wound. Her fingers were swift, gentle, sure. The smell of her was good and clean and pungent, sharp in his nostrils. He let his head fall back against the chair, his eyes closed. His face, she saw, was a different face in repose, marked by the signs of a strange, half-reluctant gentleness. He displayed no concern about the gun. Because he was too tired to care? Or because he understood that it was hot her purpose to use it? Her early, hot hate was gone. This man had killed Connie, but now, after a lapse of minutes, she didn’t care. Things go and things come. You say goodbye and you say hello.

She finished dressing the wound and put her mouth down upon his.

“Jeff,” she whispered, a second later. “Jefferson Pitt.”

His eyes opened, staring up into hers. Then, because she possessed always a hard capacity for realism, she began to understand that this was one engagement she couldn’t win. Not that the eyes rejected her coldly.

They rejected her gently, with reluctance and sorrow.

“A woman like you,” he said, as he had before. “What more could a man ask?”

She said hotly and quickly, “And fifty grand, Jeff. A woman like me, and fifty grand.”

He put his unhurt arm around her and stood up, holding her tight against him with her feet off the floor. Holding her like that, he kissed her. Then he released her and moved away, not looking at her as he spoke, answering his own question.

“What more? Nothing, you’d think. Nothing that any rational man would dream of. But some men aren’t rational. Men like me. They adhere all their lives to a kind of personal law that leaves them always behind in a shambles of lost chances. It buys them nothing on earth and nothing after. Even after they no longer believe in the old myths of reward and justice, they still hang onto the old law, because it’s something they have to have to go on living.”

He turned to look back at her, and said, “You’d better get dressed.”

She went into the next room and dressed swiftly, thinking swiftly. Conceding defeat in respect to him, she still thought of the money. He had been, at most, as Connie had really been before him, only incidental. Dressed, wearing a fur coat, she took a gun out of her purse and went back into the other room with the gun in her hand.

He was standing with his back to her. The money and his gun were still lying together on the table, and she thought that he must be a bigger fool than any other man alive. Walking over to the table, she swept the notes into her purse as he turned to watch her.

“You don’t need the gun,” he said.

“It comes in handy for persuasion when other methods fail.”

“You don’t need it. You can walk out of here anytime you want to. Take the car I came in. The taxi. You can leave it wherever you catch the train or plane or bus.”

She looked at him as if he were mad. “You’re crazy. You’re a crazy guy.”

“Why? The old man would never let you stand trial. Why bother to take you back?”

“What about the fifty grand? He’ll give you hell for letting it get away.”

“Let him.”

“But why? Why let me take it?”

He shrugged, and he was again haggard and tired. “Maybe because, like you say, I’m crazy. Maybe because I think he owes it to you. There’s never been anything in the world he didn’t think he could buy for cash. Whatever relief he needs from the guilt he shares in making a woman like you out of the woman you could have been, he can buy with the fifty grand. But it doesn’t matter. Just take the money and leave.”

At the door, she turned. “What about you?”

“I’ll walk to the highway and catch a ride.”

“With that shoulder?”

“I’ll manage.”

“You could ride in with me.” And then with an aching urgency that she couldn’t understand, “Please come.”

He returned her look, sensing the urgency. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for the offer.”

“I’ll let you know,” she said, and started toward the waiting taxi.

He sent for the body and went to the doctor, slept and went back to the old man. He stood there in the big room, and told the story. The invalid watched him with venomous eyes.

“So they were both in it. The pair of them together. And he’s dead, you say?”

“Yes. I killed him.”

“Good. Where’s Brenda?”

“I don’t know. I hope I never know.”

“You let her get away?”

“More than that. I helped her.”

“With my money?”

“Yes.”

“What was your cut?”

Anger stirred faintly, quickly subsiding. “Nothing.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t give a damn whether you do.”

“I could have you jailed.”

“Go ahead and do it.”

The old man sat there twisted and still, and slowly the venom drained from his eyes. “All right, boy. What’s fifty thousand? Just tell me why you did it.”

He wished he knew. He wished he could state it clearly, even to himself. “I’m not sure. Last night I met some people I’ve been meeting all my life. One of them I killed, and I’m sorry now I did it. You get sick of it. You get sick of pushing people around because they’re lost in the crazy maze that someone says we’ve got to find out way through like white rats in a laboratory. Things just happen to people, that’s all, and one of the things that happened to Brenda is you. Whatever she is, you’re part of it. You can buy your peace with the fifty grand.”

The old eyes were closed in the semblance of slumber. The voice came up muffled from his chest. “All right. Get out. Send me your bill.”

“There’s no bill,” Jeff said.

He went out of the room and down the stairs past the Van Gogh and outside to his jalopy in the drive. He sat quietly under the wheel, thinking of a slim woman with pale hair somewhere in the hot countries.

She’d “let him know,” she’d said... Well, maybe, just possibly, she might. And if and when she did, he might — again just possibly — be able to raise the fare.

Savagely, Jeff cursed. “Good God, will I ever grow up?” he said aloud. There was an embarrassed grin on his homely face as he drove away.