The Way Some People Die

Chapter 34

For two hours I drove down the white rushing tunnel carved by my headlights in the solid night. At the end of the run the unbuilt town lay dark around me, its corners desolate under the sparse streetlights. When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.

There was light behind the Venetian blinds of the house that Dalling built, the kind of warm and homey light a lonely man might envy as he passed the house. The same light that murderers worked in when they killed their wives or husbands or lovers or best friends. The house was as quiet as a burial vault.

The light was in the living-room. I mounted the low veranda and looked in between the slats of the blind. Galley lay prone on the tan rug, one arm supporting her head, the other outstretched. The visible side of her face was smeared darkly with something that looked like blood. Her visible eye was closed. There was a heavy automatic gun in her outstretched hand. The too-late feeling that had driven me across the desert went to my knees and loosened them.

The front door was standing open and I went in, letting the screen door close itself behind me. From the hall I heard her breathing and sighing in slow alternation. She sounded like a runner who has run a fast race and fallen and broken his heart.

I was halfway across the room toward the prostrate girl when she became aware of me. She rose on her knees and elbows, her breasts sharp-pointed at the floor, the blunt gun in her right hand pointed at me. Behind the tangled black hair that hung down over her face, her eyes gleamed like an animal’s. I froze.

She straightened gradually, rocking back on her heels and rising to her feet; stood swaying a little with her legs apart, both hands holding the gun up. She tossed her hair back. Her eyes were wide and fixed.

“What happened to you?”

She answered me in a small tired voice: “I don’t know. I must have passed out for a while.”

“Give me the gun.” I took a step toward her. Another step would put me within kicking distance, but my feet stuck to the floor.

“Stand back. Back to where you were.” Her voice had changed. It cracked like an animal trainer’s whip. And her hands were steady as stone.

The soles of my feet came unstuck and slid away from her. Her eyes were blank and ominous, like the gun’s round eye.

“Where’s Mario?”

She shrugged impatiently. “How should I know?”

“You left the cafe together.”

Her mouth twisted. “God, I despise you, Archer! You’re a dirty little sees-all hears-all tells-all monkey, aren’t you? What difference does it make to you what people do?”

“I like to pretend I’m God. But I don’t really fool myself. It takes a murderer to believe it about himself. Personally, I’m just another fruit fly. If I don’t care what happens to fruit flies, what is there to care about? And if I don’t care, who will? It makes no difference to the stars.” My talk was postponing the gun’s roaring period, but I couldn’t talk it out of her hands and out the window.

“You’re talking nonsense, chattering like a monkey.” Her foot felt for the armchair behind her, and she sat down carefully, cradling the gun on her knee. “If you must talk, we’ll talk seriously. You sit down, too.”

I squatted uncomfortably on a leatherette hassock by the fireplace. Yellow light fell like an ugly truth from the bulbs in the ceiling fixture. Galley was bleeding from a wide cut on one cheekbone.

I said: “There’s blood on your face.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Blood on your hands, too.”

“Not yours. Not yet.” She smiled her bitter smile. “I want to explain to you why I killed Keith Dalling. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

“You have the gun.”

“I know. I’m going to keep it. I didn’t have the gun when I shot Keith. I had to fight him for it.”

“I see. Self-defense. Neat. Only, can you get away with it?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” she said.

“It’s the first time if you are.”

“Yes, the first time.” She spoke rapidly and low. “When I drove Joe to the Point Tuesday morning, I saw Keith’s car at the docks. He knew Joe would turn up there: I told him myself. I didn’t realize what Keith was planning. I went back to Los Angeles, to Keith’s apartment, and waited for him there. When he came home I asked him what he had done, and he confessed to me. He’d fought with Joe on the boat and pushed him into the ocean. He thought the way was clear now for us to marry. I couldn’t conceal what I thought of him, I didn’t try. He was a murderer, and I told him so. Then he pulled a gun on me, the gun he’d taken from Joe, your gun, as you guessed he did. I pretended to be convinced – I had to save my life – and I made up to him and got the gun away from him. I shot him. I had to. Then I panicked and ran out and threw your gun in the drain, and when the police questioned me I lied about everything. I was afraid. I knew that Joe was dead, and it made no difference to him if I blamed Keith’s death on him. I know now I made a mistake. I should have called the police when it happened, and told them the truth.”

Her breast rose and fell irregularly. Like any pretty woman with mussed hair, blood on her face, she had a waiflike appeal, which the steady gun destroyed. I thought of Speed, and saw how easy it was to wilt in a gun’s shadow. Though I had faced them before, single and multiple, each time was a fresh new experience. And a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.

“What truth?” I said. “You’ve changed your story so often I doubt if you know what really happened.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Her face seemed to narrow and lengthen. I had never seen her look ugly before. An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

“I believe you partly. No doubt you shot Dalling. The circumstances sound a bit artificial.”

The blood from her cut cheek wriggled like a black worm at the corner of her mouth. “The police will believe me, if you’re not there to deny it. I can turn Gary round my little finger.” It was a forlorn boast.

“You’re losing your looks,” I said.

“Murders take it out of a woman. You pay so much for them that they’re never the bargain they seem to be.” I heard a noise from the back of the house, and was talking to cover it. It sounded like a drunk man floundering in the dark.

She glanced at the gun in her hands and back to my face, imagining the flight of the bullet. I saw her knuckles tense around the butt.

And I leaned forward a little without rising, shifting my weight to the balls of my feet, still talking: “If you shoot me, I’ll get to you before I die, I promise. You’ll have no looks left, even if you survive. Even if you survive, the police will finish the job. You’re vulnerable as hell.” The back door creaked. “Vulnerable as hell,” I repeated loudly. “Two murders, or three, already, and more coming up. You can’t kill everybody. We’re too many for one crazy girl with a gun.”

The floundering footsteps moved on the kitchen floor. She heard them. Her eyes shifted from me to the door on her right, came back to me before I could stir. She stepped sideways out of the chair, retreating with her back to the window, so that her gun commanded my side of the room and the kitchen doorway.

Mario came into the doorway and leaned there for an instant with one raised hand gripping the frame. His chin had been smashed by something heavier than a fist. Blood coursed down his neck into the black hair that curled over his open shirt-collar. There was death in his face. I wasn’t sure he could see until he advanced on Galley. His smashed mouth blew a bubble in which the room hung upside down, tiny and blood-colored.

She yelped once like a dog and fired point-blank. The slug spun Mario on his heels and flung him bodily against the wall. He pushed himself away from the wall with his hands and turned to face her. She fired again, the black gun jumping like a toad. Still her white hands held it firm, and her white devoted face was watching us both.

Mario doubled forward and sank to his knees. The indestructible man crawled toward the woman, leaking blood like black oil on her rug. Her third shot drilled the bandaged top of his head, and finished Mario. Still she was not content. Standing over him, she pumped three bullets into his back as fast as she could fire.

I counted them, and when the gun was empty I took it away from her. She didn’t resist.