A Bullet for Cinderella (22 page)

I stood up. “Where is she?”

The doctor stared at me. “I can’t let you see her. There’s no point in seeing her.”

I moved closer to him. “I want to see her.”

He stared at me and then took my wrist, put his finger tips on my pulse. He took a pencil flashlight out of his pocket and shone it directly into my eye from a few inches away.

He turned to the captain. “This man should be in bed.”

Marion sighed. “Have you got a bed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll have to put a guard on the door. This man is under arrest. But look. Just let him look in the door at Ruth. Maybe he earned that much. I don’t know.”

They let me look. She was in a private room. Her father sat near the bed. He didn’t look toward the doorway. He watched her face. She was no one I would have ever recognized. She was puffy, discolored. She breathed heavily through her open mouth. There was an odor of sickness in the room. I looked at her and I thought of the movie heroines. They go through terror and capture and violence, yet four minutes after rescue they melt, with glossy hair and limpid eyes and gown by Dior, into the
arms of Lancaster, or Gable, or Brando. This was reality. The pain and ugliness and sickness of reality.

They took me away.

The formalities were complicated. I had to appear and be questioned at the joint inquest. I told all I knew of the deaths of Antoinette Christina Rasi and Earl David Fitzmartin. I signed six copies of my detailed statement. The final verdict was justifiable homicide. I had killed in defense of my life.

Both the money found in Fitzmartin’s car and the money in the cave became a part of George Warden’s estate. A second cousin and his wife flew in from Houston to protect their claim to the money and whatever else there was. They arrived on Sunday.

George and Eloise Warden were buried in the Warden family plot. Fulton, identified through his dental work, was sent to Chicago for his third burial. No relative of Fitzmartin could be found. The county buried him. Grassman’s body was found. His brother flew down from Chicago and took the body back on the train.

I had told them about Antoinette’s clothes and jewelry and the money, the precise amount, that Fitzmartin had taken. The court appointed an executor for Antoinette Rasi’s estate, and directed that the clothing and furs and jewels be sold, and made an informal suggestion to the executor that the funds be used for the Doyle children.

When something is dropped and broken, the pieces have to be picked up. The mess has to be cleaned up.

They were through with me on Tuesday. Captain Marion walked down the steps of the courthouse with me. We stood on the sidewalk in the sunshine.

“You’re through here, Howard. We’re through with you. There are some charges we could have made stick. But we didn’t. You can be damn glad. We don’t want you here. We don’t want to see you back here.”

“I’m not leaving.”

He stared at me. His eyes were cold. “I don’t think that’s very bright.”

“I’m going to stay.”

“I think I know what’s on your mind. But it won’t work. You’ve spent all the time you could with her. It hasn’t worked, has it? It won’t work for you. Not with her.”

“I want to stay and try. I’ve made my peace with her father. He understands. I can’t say he approves. But he understands enough so he isn’t trying to drive me off.”

“You’re beating your head against a wall.”

“Maybe.”

“Prine wants to run you out of town.”

“Do you? Actually?”

His face flushed. “Stay then, dammit. Stay! It will do you no good.”

I went back to the hospital. Because of her private room, visiting hours were less restricted. I waited while the nurse went to her. The nurse came back. Each time I was afraid the nurse would say I couldn’t see her.

“She’ll see you in five minutes, Mr. Howard.”

“Thank you.”

I waited. They told me when it was time. I went to her room as before and pulled the chair up to the bed. Her face was not as swollen, but it was still badly discolored. As before, she turned her face toward the wall. She had looked at me for a moment without expression before turning away. She had not yet spoken to me. But I had spoken to her. I had talked to her for hours. I had told her everything. I had told her what she meant to me, and had received no response at all. It was like talking to a wall. The only encouragement was her letting me see her at all. The doctor had told me she would recover more quickly if she could recover from her listlessness, her depression.

As on other days, I talked. I could not tell if she was listening. I had told her all there was to tell about the things that had happened. There was no point in repeating it, no point in begging for understanding or forgiveness.

So I talked of other things, and other days. Places I had been. I told her about Tokyo, about Pusan, about the hospital. I told her about the work I used to do. I conjectured
out loud about what I could find to do in Hillston. I still had seven hundred dollars left. I was careful not to ask questions. I did not want it to seem to her as though I were angling for a response.

She lay with her face turned toward the wall. For all I knew she could be asleep. And then suddenly, surprisingly, her hand came timidly from the cover of the hospital blanket. It reached blindly toward me and I took her hand in both of mine. She squeezed my hand hard once and then let her hand lie in mine.

That was the sign. That was enough. The rest of it would come. Now it was just a matter of time. There would be a day when there would be laughter, when she would walk again in that proud way of hers. All this would fade and it would be right for her and for me. We both had a lot of forgetting to do, and we could do it better together. This was the woman I wanted. I could never be driven away.

This was treasure.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.