Murder with a Past

8

She was waiting for him in the doorway of her room. He supposed she had instructed the seedy clerk at the desk in the dusty lobby to warn her of his arrival.

Stretched over her gelatinous figure were skintight slimjims with a pattern of huge pink roses and a knit blouse that sculptured her outsized chest. There was a cigarette in her fat fingers and a tobacco crumb on her lips.

“Anybody with you?” She stepped into the hall and glanced down the dingy stairwell.

“You said to come alone.”

She motioned him into her room and followed him in.

She shut and latched the door and leaned back against it, watching him critically — even, Tully thought, anxiously. He glanced around the room; he had never set foot in Flynn’s Inn before. Like the hall it was dingy and cramped and dirty, and she had brought with her from the motel room the same odor of stale smoke and cheap perfume. He wondered if he was the intended victim of a badger game — the bed was unmade, the bedclothes tumbled about.

“Have a drink, Mr. Tully?”

“What? Oh — no, thanks. Miss Blake—”

“I never been much on this ‘Miss Blake’ stuff.” The woman went to the dusty bureau and poured herself a shot from a two-thirds empty fifth of rye. “You call me Maudie.”

“Look,” Tully said. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but if this is some kind of shakedown racket—”

“Why, Mr. Tully, you got no right to talk to me like that!” She actually sounded injured. “I just had a story to tell you.”

“Then tell it, please, and I’ll get out of here.”

“A real sad story, I mean.” She slung the contents of the shot glass down her throat. “About a girl who needs a loan.”

“I’m not a banker or a money-lender,” Tully said shortly. “I’m in the market for information and I’ll buy it. How much do you want?” He brought out his wallet and waited. Her quick animal eyes pounced on it and sprang away. She went back to the bureau and refilled the glass.

“What’s your hurry, Mr. Tully? Why don’t you sit down and relax?” Tully looked around, spotted one uncluttered chair, and sat down on it. “That’s better,” she smiled. “You see, Mr. Tully, I leveled with the cops. My neck ain’t stuck out. If I happen to remember an extra detail later, that’s natural, ain’t it?”

“What detail?”

Her glance was fixed on his right hand, and he looked down. He had forgotten that he was still holding the wallet. “First about that loan I mentioned...”

He made an impatient gesture. “How much?”

Maudie Blake said swiftly, “A hundred. Cash. They don’t like checks here.”

Tully opened his wallet and leafed through its contents. There were three twenties and a few small bills. “All I have on me is seventy-eight dollars.”

She walked over to him and deliberately looked into his wallet. “Okay,” she said. “Gimme.”

He handed her the bills and put his empty wallet away. She made a tight roll of the money and thrust it into the cleft under her blouse.

“Well?” Tully demanded. He felt himself sweating.

She carried her drink to a lumpy chair and sat down, draping her left leg over the arm. She looked at him uneasily and gulped the whisky. She had apparently been drinking for some time; her eyes were beginning to blear and she sounded a little tight.

“You’re not going to like this, Mr. Tully,” the woman began slowly. “Remember, I never promised you would. Right?”

“If it’s about Crandall Cox,” Tully said, “I’m listening.”

“And your wife.” She blinked and tongued her lips. “She wasn’t the only one,” she said. “A long time ago... well, Cranny used to tell me he didn’t give a damn about any of them but me. I didn’t believe him even then. But — you know how dames are, Mr. Tully. Or maybe you don’t.”

Or maybe I don’t...

Maudie Blake’s face drooped all over. “I was the one who was always there — he always had me, and he knew it. Cranny Cox was the kind needed a woman to fall back on when he was scared or broke — something like a dog he could count on no matter what he did. A dog that didn’t ask for nothing but a pat on the head once in a while, or even a boot in the rear.”

She got up and shuffled back to the bureau and the whisky bottle.

“It must have been rough on you,” Tully said. Who cares? he thought. Get on with it!

“Rough? Yes, you could say that, mister... yess’r, you could sure say that.”

He thought she was going to cry. Instead, her mouth tightened and she seized the bottle and drank directly from it and then took it back to the lumpy chair with her.

“When he got real sick this last time,” she said, “I figured I had Cranny for good. Though what I wanted with him I can’t tell you. All I knew was... I’d sooner have a kick from Cranny Cox than a kiss from any other man I ever knew. And he knew it. Goddam that ugly creep, he knew it!”

“Miss Blake,” Tully said. “Maudie—”

But she mumbled, “And I was wrong again. I didn’t have him, any more than the other times. He still had his great big plans to live it up. He just let me take care of him till he could get back on his feet. Then he robbed me and took off again.”

In spite of the sick dread in the pit of his stomach Tully found himself becoming aware of Maudie Blake as a woman, a hopeless addict of what she herself would hardly dare call love — love for a man who permitted her to shelter and nurse and feed him and give him money, and who then deserted her again.

“Did you know his plans? That he was coming here?”

“He didn’t tell me nothing. One day I come home and he was gone, and he didn’t come back. No note, no nothing. But I found a bus timetable... he’d marked it... name of a town, and I remembered he’d once said it was his home town.”

“So you followed him?”

“Took the next bus.” She hiccupped and giggled, “’Scuse me.”

“Why?”

“Huh?” She peered at him owlishly.

“Why did you follow him?”

She seemed surprised. “He needed me.”

“If he left you without a word,” Tully said, “how did you know he was at the Hobby?” Suddenly he was suspicious.

“I didn’t. But I figured him for a cheap motel — I’d only left a few bucks in my flat that he’d lifted. Third motel I tried, there he was, walking across the parking lot.”

“I suppose he wasn’t very glad to see you?”

“He cussed me out good.” She laughed, tilted the bottle again. But it was empty, and she flung it from her. “Later he says okay, you’re here you can stay, only keep out of my hair.” She laughed again, then scowled and began to struggle out of the chair. “I got to get me another bottle—”

But Tully was towering over her, and she plopped back in alarm. “Cox told you why he’d come here, didn’t he?”

“No—”

“You’re lying. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”

Through her fright he saw a glint of cunning. “That ain’t what you’re buying for seventy-eight bucks, Mr. Tully.”

“Would you rather Lieutenant Smith asked you the question?”

“You yell copper and a fat lot of good it’ll do you,” she muttered. “I’d just have to tell him like I’m telling you: I don’t know why Cranny came here, I just followed him, that’s all. Is there a law against that?”

Something in Tully’s face above her sobered her.

“Now don’t you try muscle on me, mister!”

“Cox told you his plan, didn’t he?”

“He never—”

“And I was beginning to feel sorry for you! Either you were both in on this from the start, or he cut you in on the action when you showed up at the Hobby!”

She shrank deep into the chair. “No. I swear—”

“Making you share the crime of whatever he was up to would be a kind of insurance for Cox. That’s it, isn’t it? He didn’t trust you, so he assigned part of the job to you. What were you supposed to do, Maudie?” Tully was shaking her now, his fingers deep in her fat shoulders. “What part of the mucky plan did he assign to you? Talk, you bitch!”

It was the sight of her eyes that brought him to his senses. They were bugging out, terrified, from her purpling face; and to Tully’s horror he saw that his hands were around her neck. He released her and backed off. She felt her throat unbelievingly.

“You were gonna choke me,” she whispered. “I ought to have you arrested for f’lonious assault, that’s what I ought to do!.. But I got a better idea, Mr. Tully.”

She was all bitch now, a mountain of triumphant flesh. Tully half turned away, half closed his smarting eyes. The Blake woman got out of the chair and waddled over to him, still feeling her neck.

“I was trying to ease you into it because I thought you were real class and a nice guy and I didn’t want to hurt you no more than I had to. But now, Mr. Tully, I’m gonna give it to you good! You know what your seventy-eight bucks bought? You listen!”

He tried to avoid her sour breath, but he could not.

“You drive on up to the Lodge at Wilton Lake — the Lodge, hear? Talk to the people who run it — the maids and the bellhops — take a good long look at the register—”

“What are you talking about?” Tully stammered. “The register for when — what?”

“Two summers ago — first week in June, Mr. Tuny,” the woman jeered. “Him and her — yeah! Cranny Cox and your wife.”

Tully became aware of his surroundings. He was seated behind the wheel of his car in the parking lot of Flynn’s Inn. A man came staggering out of the bar and a blare of drunken noise came out with him. Then the door closed and everything was silent again.

He had no recollection of leaving Maudie Blake’s room or of getting into the Imperial. He remembered only the ghost of a cackle behind him, as if some witch had laughed in a nightmare...

He lit a cigarette mechanically.

The Blake woman was a vicious liar, of course. It couldn’t possibly be true. To shack up at a resort hotel with a rotten punk like Crandall Cox... Impossible. Not Ruth. Not a woman as fastidious as Ruth.

Then why had she gone running to the Hobby Motel at Cox’s call... with a gun... two years later?

There’s a reason, Tully thought desperately. There’s got to be a reason — a reason that takes me off this hook — a reason a man could live with...

One thing is sure, he told himself. I know my wife. I’m not going to give that sodden bag of lard the satisfaction of having made me drive up to Wilton Lake on a sneak check...

Two summers ago... that was before their marriage, before they had even met. Maybe Ruth had been there at the Lodge at the same time as Cox, so what? It could have been the frankest coincidence, something the jealous mind of this Blake virago had seized and built on to house her jealousy. Or else Cox, having met Ruth casually, had done the building to torment Maudie Blake, in the sadistic way of kept men contemptuously sure of their keepers. That was it! Cox had made up the whole story and spilled it to Maudie Blake for laughs, knowing she would fall for it and agonize over it.

So it wouldn’t really be doubting Ruth if he did drive up to the Lake and sort of got the feel of the place again. Tully began to think about it even pleasurably. He hadn’t been up to the Lake in years...

And, of course! He sat up in the car, tingling.

If Ruth had spent some time at Wilton Lake two summers ago she could hardly have failed, in her instinctive appreciation of nature, to fall under its spell. It was a beautiful, serene, secluded place, not over-patronized, and at this particular season... Why, she might be up there right now! Frightened, maybe, not knowing what to do, not daring to phone, hoping against hope that somehow he would fathom her hide-out and come secretly to her rescue...

What am I waiting for? Tully asked himself exultantly.

As he started his car he shut down his mind, refusing to think past the point at which he had stopped.