A Bullet for Cinderella (21 page)

“He looked all right before. It was on the inside. Now it’s showing.”

“Frankly, he scares the hell out of me. I tell you they ought to shoot him on sight, like a crazy dog.”

“He’s getting worse.”

“You can’t get any worse than that. What was he looking over here for?”

“I think he’s eliminating places where we could be, one by one. He’s got a lot of daylight. I hope he eliminated this place.”

“You can’t see much from over there. Just a sort of shadow. And the hole looks too little, even if it didn’t have the stuff in front of it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“He gives me the creeps.”

I kept a careful watch. The next time I saw him, he was climbing down the wall on the far side. Antoinette saw him, too. Her hand tightened on my shoulder. Her breath was warm against my ear.

“What’s he doing down there?” she whispered.

“I think he’s trying to track us. I don’t know how good he is at it. If he’s good, he’ll find that our tracks end somewhere in the hollow.”

“The ground was soft,” she whispered. “Dear God, I hope he doesn’t know how.”

He was out of sight. We heard one rock clatter against another, audible above the soft roar of the river. We moved as far back in the little cave as we could get. Nothing happened for a long time. We gradually relaxed again, moved up to where we could watch.

It must have been a full half hour later when I saw him on the far side, clambering up. He sat on the rim at the top. He aimed carefully, somewhere off to our right, and pulled the trigger. The sound was flat, torn away by the wind. He aimed and fired again, this time closer.

I realized too late what he was doing. I tried to scramble back. He fired again. Antoinette gave a great raw scream of agony. Blood burst from her face. The slug had furrowed down her face, smashed her teeth and her jaw, striking at an angle just under her cheekbone. She
screamed again, the ruined mouth hanging open. I saw the next shot take her just above the left collarbone, angling down through her body. She dug her fingers down into the sand, arched her body, then settled into death as the next bullet slapped damply into her flesh. I was pressed hard against the rocks at the side. He shot twice more into her body and then there was silence. I tried to compress myself into the smallest possible target.

When he fired again, it was from a different angle. The slug hammered off rock, ricocheting inside the small cave, hitting two walls so quickly the sound was almost simultaneous before it buried itself in the sand. The next one ricocheted and from the sharp pain in my face I thought it had hit me. But it had filled my right cheek with sharp rock fragments. I could move no farther to the side. If he found the proper angle he would hit me directly. If he did not, a ricochet could kill me. I grasped her body and pulled it over me. He fired several more shots. One broke one of the jars. Another hit her body. My hands were sticky with her blood. I shielded my head against her heavy breast, my legs pulled up. I tried to adjust the body so it would give me maximum cover. A ricocheting slug rapped the heel of my shoe with such force that it numbed my foot.

I gave a harsh, loud cry of pain. The shooting stopped. After a few minutes he spoke in an almost conversational tone. He was close under the cave.

“Howard! Howard! Come on out of there.”

I did not answer. He had thought of caves, had fired into the shadowy places, had hit the right one. I hoped he would believe us both dead. It was my only chance, that he should believe us both dead. I wormed my way out from under her body. There was no loose stone in the cave. There were only the jars of money.

I took one jar and crouched off to the left of the entrance. I heard the rattle of the rocks and knew he was climbing. I saw the vines tremble. I was poised and ready to hurl the jar at his face. But his face did not appear. His strong hand appeared, moving slowly into the cave, inviting me to try to grasp it. It was a clever move. I
knew that he was probably braced there, gun in the other hand, waiting for such a try. More of his arm came into the cave. I could see his shoulder, blocking off the light. But I could not see his head.

His brown hand crept across the sand. It touched Antoinette’s dark hair, paused for a moment, felt its way to her face, touched lightly her dead eyes. She lay curled where I had pushed the body in crawling out from under it. The hand moved across the sand again. It came to her flexed knee, touched the knee, felt the material of the jeans. In that moment I realized that he thought it was my knee. He had only seen her from the waist up when he had approached the island in the boat. She was curled in such a way he did not relate the knee to the face he had touched. His powerful fingers bit through the blue jean material, caught the flesh underneath and twisted it cruelly.

I heard his soft grunt of satisfaction. I readied myself. He put both arms in, and wormed his way in head first. I knew he would not be able to see immediately. The gun was in his hand. As soon as his head appeared in the opening, inside the vines, I smashed the glass jar full into his face.

The jar smashed, cutting my hand. I tried to snatch at the gun, but I was too slow. He was gone. I heard the thud as he fell. I knew that I could not afford to give him time to recover. I scraped myself badly as I slid through the entrance. I grasped the vines and stood up, teetering on the ledge. I saw him below me. He was on his hands and knees, gun still in his hand, shaking his head in a slow, heavy way. It was a twelve foot drop, perhaps a little more. I dropped onto him. I landed on the small of his back, heels together, legs stiff.

My weight smashed him to the ground. The fall jolted me. I rolled to my feet with agonizing slowness and turned to face the expected shot. He lay quite still. His finger tips touched the gun. I picked it up and moved back away from him and watched him. By watching closely I could see the movement of his back as he breathed. I aimed at his head. But I could not make
myself fire. Then I saw that the breathing had stopped. I wondered if it was a trick. I picked up a stone and threw it at him. It hit his back and bounded away.

Finally I approached him and rolled him over. And I knew that he was dead. He died in a curious way. He had fallen back off the narrow ledge, fallen with the broken pieces of the heavy glass jar. Stunned, he had gotten to his hands and knees. He was trying to clear his head. When I had smashed him back to the ground, a large piece of the broken jar had been under his throat. As I had watched him his blood had soaked into the sandy soil. His blood had soaked a thick wad of the money that had been in the jar. A wind blew through the hollow. There were some loose bills. The wind swirled them around. One blew toward me. I picked it up and looked at it stupidly. It was a ten-dollar bill.

I went up to the cave again. I think I had the idea of carrying her down. I knew I could not make it. I looked at her. Paris was out. It was done. I looked at her and wondered if this, after all, had been what she was looking for. It could have been. It could have been the nameless thing she sought. But I guessed that had she been given her choice, she would have wanted it in a different form. Not so ugly. Not with ruined face and cheap clothes.

I climbed back down. I was exhausted. A few feet from the bottom I slipped and fell again. I gathered up all the money. I put it in the cave with her. They could come and find it there when I told them where it was. I went back to where we had left the boat. The river seemed a little quieter. I took the line and walked the boat down to the south end of the island. The current tugged at it. Below the island the river was quieter. I got into the boat. Just as I started to row toward the shore, it began to rain again, rain that fell out of a yellow sky. The rain whispered on the gray river. It diluted the blood on my hands. The rain was on my face like tears.

The banks were high. I found a place to beach the boat about a thousand yards below the Rasi place. I walked through wet grass to the road. I walked to the Rasi place.

Anita came out. I asked if she had a phone I could use.

“We’ve got no phone. Where’s the boat? What did you do with the boat? Where’s Antoinette? What’s all the blood on your clothes? What’s happened?”

She was still screaming questions at me when I fitted the key into the ignition, started the car, and drove away.

Heavy clouds had darkened the afternoon. I had never seen it rain as hard. Traffic crept through the charcoal streets of Hillston, their lights yellow and feeble in the rain.

I turned through the arch and parked beside the police cars in the courtyard of the station. A man yelled at me from a doorway, telling me I couldn’t park there. I paid no attention to him. I found Prine. Captain Marion wasn’t in. He’d gone home to sleep.

Prine stared at me in a funny way. He took my arm when he led me to a chair. “Are you drunk?”

“No. I’m not drunk.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I know where to look for the girl, for Ruth. North of town. Near the river. If she’s alive. If she’s dead I don’t know where to look. She wouldn’t be far from where he got the boat.”

“What boat?”

“Will you have people look for her? Right now?”

“What boat, damn it?”

“I’ll tell you the whole thing after you look. I want to come, too. I want to come with you.”

They sent cars out. They called Captain Marion and the Chief of Police. They sent people out to look in the rain. Scores of people searched. I rode with Prine. In the end it was a contingent of Boy Scouts who found her. They found the black coupé. The trunk compartment was open a half inch. We sped through the rain when word came over the radio. But the ambulance got there first. They were loading her onto the ambulance when we arrived. They closed the doors and drove away before I could get to the ambulance.

The car was parked behind a roadside sign. It had
been covered with roofing paper. Some of the paper had shifted in the wind. One of the Scouts had seen the gleam of metal.

Two policemen in black rain-wet rubber capes were there.

“What shape was she in?” Prine demanded.

One of the men spat. “I don’t think she’ll make it. I think she was about gone. She looked about gone to me. You know, the way they all look. Just about breathing. Color of putty. Pretty banged up.”

Prine whirled toward me. “All right. We’ve got her now. How about Fitzmartin? Start talking.”

“He’s dead.”

“How do you know he’s dead?”

“I killed him. I’ll tell you the rest later. I want to go to the hospital.”

I
sat on a bench in a waiting-room in the hospital. Water from my sodden clothing dripped onto the floor. Captain Marion sat beside me. Prine leaned against the wall. A man I didn’t know sat on the other side of me. I looked at the pattern of the tiles in the floor as I talked. From time to time they would ask questions in a quiet voice.

I told the complete truth. I lied about one thing only. I told them that Fitzmartin had told me that he had hidden Grassman’s body in a barn eight or ten miles south of the city, on a side road. In a ruined barn near a burned house. Marion nodded to Prine. He went out to send men out to hunt for the barn. He had gone out once before, to send men to the island. I had told how to find the cave, and told them what they would find in the cave. I told them they would find the gun in my car. I lied about Grassman, and I left out what I knew about Antoinette.
It would do them no good to know about her. They would learn enough from the Redding police. They did not have to know more than that.

I told them all the rest. Why I had come to Hillston. Everything I had seen and guessed. Everything Fitzmartin had said. Timmy’s dying statements. All of it. The whole stinking mess. It felt good to tell about it.

“Let me get this straight, Howard,” Marion said. “You made a deal with Fitzmartin. You were going to have the girl find the money. Then you were going to turn it over to Fitzmartin in return for Ruth’s safety. You made that deal yourself. You thought you could handle it better than we could. Is that it?”

“I thought that was the only way it could be handled. But he crossed me up. He followed us.”

“We could have grabbed him when he got to the river. We’d have gotten to Ruth earlier. If she dies, you’re going to be responsible.”

I looked at him for the first time in over an hour. “I don’t see it that way.”

“Did he say how he killed Grassman? You told us why he did it.”

“He hit him on the head with a piece of pipe.”

“What do you think the Rasi girl was going to do when you turned the money over to Fitzmartin? Assuming that it went the way you thought it would go.”

“I guess she wouldn’t have liked it.”

“Why didn’t she come and get the money herself, once she knew where it probably was?”

“I haven’t any idea. I think she felt she needed help. I think she decided I could help her. I think she planned to get away with all of it somehow after we were both well away from here. When I was sleeping. Something like that. I think she thought she could handle me pretty easily.”

“How many shots did he fire into the cave?”

“I wasn’t counting. Maybe twenty.”

A doctor came into the room. Marion stood up. “What’s the score, Dan?”

The doctor looked at us disapprovingly. It was as
though we were responsible for what had happened to Ruth.

“I think I can say that physically she’ll be all right. She’s young and she has a good body. She might mend quite rapidly. It’s hard to say. It will depend on her mental condition. I can’t answer for that. I’ve seldom seen anyone handled more brutally. I can give you a list. Dislocated thumb. Broken shoulder. Two cracked ribs. A cracked pelvis. She was criminally attacked. Two broken toes. We nearly missed those. She was beaten about the face. That wouldn’t have killed her. It was the shock and exposure that nearly did it, came awfully close to doing it. She’s been treated for shock. She’s out of her head. She doesn’t know where she is. We just put her to sleep. I say, I can’t estimate mental damage.”