Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 10 (11 page)

Myrtle’s voice was musical as she said, “Look what I’ve got, Paul….”

I figured that gun wasn’t behind her back, now.

“Put that down, Red. You don’t…”

That was when I came in and grabbed her from behind, bear-hugging her, pinning her arms, flattening her fine breasts with my forearms, but she managed to fire the gun anyway, shattering the bedstand lamp even as Mantz dove out of bed, just under the bullet’s trajectory. The room was dark now, though some light filtered in from the hallway.

“Let me go!” she squealed, not knowing who had hold of her.

And Mantz came scrambling forward, his face tight with rage, and he belted her in the jaw with a fist, and she went limp, the gun clattering to the hardwood floor, where we were lucky it didn’t go off again.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I spat at him, easing the unconscious woman over to the bed, laying her out gently, there. I hadn’t been holding her like that so he could fucking slug her! Blood trailed from the corner of her mouth; even in this state, she was a lovely thing. Too bad when she got jealous she went around with a gun.

“She tried to shoot me!” Mantz said, understandably worked up, hopping around like a mustached monkey in his bare chest. “She’s lucky I didn’t knock her block off!…Where’s Amelia?”

“I got her and her pal out the back door,” I said, switching on the overhead light. “Your wife never saw them, or me. So we were never here, remember? In about two seconds, I’m slipping out, myself.”

“What should I do?”

“Call the cops.”

He frowned, calming down a little. “Do I have to?”

“Your neighbors probably already have. If you don’t, it’ll look bad.”

He smirked. “Doesn’t it look bad enough?”

“I don’t think so. Take it from somebody who’s done his share of divorce work, this marriage isn’t working out…and in the settlement, Myrtle coming after you with a .32 is going to speak better for you than her.”

He was mulling that over, looking at his out-cold, incredibly beautiful, crazy-as-a-bedbug wife, when I got the hell out, before it occurred to him to ask me what I was doing there.

Stained ivory in the moonlight, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains provided a majestic backdrop for the humble skyline of the pink adobe cabins of Lowman’s Motor Court. Exotic as this vista may have been, I had begun to long for the simple pleasures of Chicago, Illinois. In the red blush of the motel’s nearby hovering neon sign, I pulled the Terraplane into the stall at Cabin 2, put the buggy’s top up in case the forecast of rain was correct, and trudged inside, where I began to pack.

I had decided to quit. The women on this job were either sleeping with each other or waving guns around, and that was enough to send this Midwestern lad back to where girls were girls and boys were boys and guns were carried chiefly by cops and crooks, if you’ll pardon the redundancy. Furthermore, I wanted work that did not involve a client who very likely sent his wife death threats before hiring me to protect her, and/or work which also did not require me to fly with a pilot who considered crashing her plane an interesting variation on landing.

True, this job paid well, but I had been on it long enough to rack myself up a pretty little pile of money, which I was now prepared to gather up and take home with me. On the train. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the small square room, I used the nightstand phone to make a reservation; I could get a Union Pacific sleeper at two-forty-five tomorrow afternoon.

With the exception of my clothes for tomorrow, toothbrush and powder, hairbrush and oil, and the white boxers I had on for sleeping, my bag was packed. It lay open like a clamshell on the luggage stand at the foot of the bed, the Speed Graphic nestled among the clothing like a pearl; my nine-millimeter was similarly buried.

Bare-chested like Gable in
It Happened One Night
(and Mantz in what happened tonight), I lay atop the nubby pink bedspread, reading
Film Fun
magazine, which was mostly jokes and pictures of pretty girls; I never claimed to go in for Proust. The cabin was sparsely furnished in ranch style, its pink plaster walls broken up occasionally by a framed print of a cactus or burro; but one amenity, at least, was a table model radio by the bed. I had it going fairly loud, in hopes of drowning out my thoughts, the Dorsey Brothers playing their theme song, “Lost in a Fog,” live from the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, when the knock came at the door.

I didn’t put my robe on, because I didn’t have one. And I didn’t bother putting my pants on, either, because I figured this was probably the manager asking me to turn my radio down. The windows were open, after all, wind whispering in, fluffing the green-and-yellow cotton curtains with their geometric Indian-blanket design. Clicking the radio off as I climbed from the bed, I figured my problem was already solved.

As Proust would say, little did I know.

“What?” I asked my closed door.

“It’s me.”

Amy’s voice.

I cracked the door and looked into her lovely, weathered, somewhat puffy face, expressionless as a bisque baby’s, though the blue-gray eyes were filigreed red. Her mop of dark blonde curls looked even more tousled than usual.

I asked her, “What are you doing here?”

“Let me in,” she said.

“I’m not dressed.”

“Neither am I.”

I opened the door a little wider and saw that she wasn’t, at least not properly: she still wore Mantz’s maroon-striped pajama top and a pair of dungarees that were parachute-baggy but short, her ankles showing.

And her feet were in moccasin-type slippers.

Bewildered, I let her in, shut the door, asked, “How’d you get here?”

“Toni loaned me her car. What happened at Paul’s? Is he all right?”

I climbed into my pants as I told her.

“I hope he called the cops, like I advised him,” I concluded. “If so, I’m sure he’ll leave you out of it.”

“I can’t believe she actually shot at him.” Amy was sitting on the room’s only chair, in the corner between the windows and the dresser, shaking her head; her hands were folded in her lap and she had the aspect of a repentant naughty child.

I sat on the edge of the bed and said, “I don’t know that she shot
at
him…. The gun just kind of went off, when I grabbed her.”

Amy gave me a sharp look. “Did she see you?”

“No. Myrtle probably thinks
you
grabbed her…but she didn’t see either one of us in the house…or your friend Miss Lake, either.”

She sighed deeply. “I suppose I’m lucky you were there…”

“If you came here to thank me, it’s not necessary.”

“Thank you?” She stood; her arms were straight at her sides, her hands were fists—she looked a little comical in the pajama top and short baggy jeans (on loan from Toni Lake, I’d wager) but I didn’t feel like smiling. “
Thank
you?”

She walked to my open suitcase and plucked the Speed Graphic from amidst my underthings. Then she strode over to where I sat on the edge of the bed, planting herself before me, holding the camera in my face as if I were on the witness stand, she were the prosecuting attorney and the camera Exhibit A.

“What’s this?” she asked, the second word hissing through the space between her teeth. “A party favor?”

“You know what it is.”

Her lip curled in a tiny sneer. “I knew what it was when I noticed it on the kitchen table, at Paul’s, too.”

She had good night vision; but then she was a pilot.

“You were spying on me, Nathan, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t take any pictures, Amy.”

She flung the camera. It smacked into the far wall, carving a notch in the plaster, springing open like a jack-in-the-box, exposing the unshot film, which unspooled, pieces of the camera flying off, broken to shit. Now I really was expecting a call from the manager.

“I thought we were friends,” she said, voice quavering with anger.

“I was hoping we might be more than that,” I said. “But I guess I’m not your type.”

She slapped me.

It rocked my head and my cheek stung like a burn, tears springing to my eyes, and I tried like hell to keep them there. The wounded like to cling to their dignity, shredded though it may be.

“And here I thought you were for equal rights,” I said.

She spit the words at me: “What are you talking about?”

And I stood and got almost nose to nose with her and, my cheek on fire, spit words back: “God help the man that raises a hand to
you,
but you can hit a man…. That’s always a woman’s prerogative, isn’t it?”

She sucked in air and raised a fist, as if to hammer me with it, only it froze there, her eyes going to that fist, as if her hand had had a life of its own and was surprising her with its actions.

Then her hand wasn’t a fist anymore, it was an open palm that covered her mouth and then both hands were enveloping her face as she seemed to crumple, and I caught her in my arms, folded her close to me, and surprisingly, she let me. Maybe she was just too upset to stop me.

“That was cruel of me,” I whispered in her ear.

“No…no…I should never have struck you….”

She pushed away a bit and, still in my arms, looked at me; the eyes, bloodshot though they were, were lovely and clear, more blue than gray, the color of a clear winter sky, and she fixed them on me, her tear-streaked expression regretful as she touched my cheek, gently.

“I’m sorry, Nathan…sorry. Forgive me….”

“I deserved the slap. I’m a lousy goddamn bastard and I don’t deserve your apologies….”

She was shaking her head side to side, the tears welling again. “I don’t believe in hitting people. I hate being struck, and yet I struck you….”

I placed my hands on her shoulders and looked right at her. “I hit you in another way. I betrayed our friendship, and Christ, I couldn’t feel like a bigger heel. Amy, I’m sorry.”

She hugged me, her hands warm on my bare back.

“It’s not you,” she whispered. “It’s G. P. He’s a corrupting influence…. No one knows that better than I.”

“Amy, I wasn’t lying,” I said into her ear, in a rush of embarrassed words. “I didn’t take any pictures. I would’ve quit this dirty job days ago if I hadn’t got jealous of Mantz….”

She pulled away a few inches, her expression quizzical and almost amused. “Jealous?”

“Guess that’s kind of silly now….”

“I never knew you felt that way about me, Nathan. I thought we were just…pals.”

“We are pals, Amy. And I won’t say a word to that son of a bitch you’re married to.”

She touched my cheek again, just with her fingertips. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

“Stop it,” I said gently.

She kissed my cheek. A tender little kiss.

I smiled at her. “Still friends, then?”

She smiled back. “I don’t think so….”

And she kissed me again, only not on the stinging cheek, but full on my mouth, not at all tenderly, but urgently, eagerly.

Those warm, full lips were everything I’d hoped they’d be, salty with her tears, and this was no friendly kiss, it was passionate, a hungry confession of feelings that she’d harbored, too, and her hands clutched at my back, desperately, and if I’d held her any closer, I’d have crushed the life from her. We kissed again, and again, and I was crying too, and it wasn’t from the slap, it was the emotional fucking roller coaster I’d been on this evening, tears of joy because a woman I desperately wanted and had abandoned hope of ever having had her tongue in my mouth.

Then we were fumbling at each other’s paltry clothing, my hands unbuttoning the man’s pajama top, exposing the creamy skin beneath, and she was unbuckling my belt, then tugging my pants down over the white boxers, both of us flailing in comical, out-of-control desire.

And then she was nude to the waist, justifiably unashamed of a shapely form that might have belonged to a teenage girl, not a woman approaching forty—small, beautifully formed tip-tilting breasts, prominent rib cage, and a waist I could put my hands around. Confronted by the tentpole at the front of my white boxers, she had a sudden burst of modesty and reached over and switched off the bedside lamp.

Then she stepped out of her baggy dungarees and the white cotton step-ins beneath, and I got out of the boxers, and we rolled as one onto the bed, embracing, kissing, caressing, saying nothing except each other’s name occasionally, and when it was time, under a framed cactus print, she rolled the lambskin onto me and mounted me.

The cabin’s darkness wore the red patina of the motel sign filtering through the cotton curtains, and with her atop me, flushed with passion and suffused neon, eyes half-lidded, lips parted as she panted, she remained in control, ever the pilot. She was like no woman before or since in my experience, tall, lean, muscular yet pliable, her skin satin-smooth except for her sweet freckled weather-punished face, her legs endless though sumptuously fleshed, her breasts perfect girlish handfuls, tipped with bullets. For being of such a modest, even prudish upbringing, she knew things; she had a contortionist’s limber frame, and an athlete’s stamina, and she took me new places.

But her co-pilot had flown before too, and when she finally arrived at our destination, back on top again after a world tour, she came with a shuddering intense glee and a final shower of tears before she collapsed into my arms.

Out of gas.

We were both still breathing hard, and she was snuggled against me and I was on my back, looking at the ceiling, which wore the reddish blush of motel neon.

“Can I ask you something personal?” I ventured. I was using a tissue from the nightstand to remove the lambskin.

“My goodness,” she said, “I think at this point you can risk it.”

“Do you like boys or girls?”

“Yes,” she said.

And I was trying to think of something to say in response to that when I realized she was asleep, gently snoring.

Perhaps an hour later, I heard something, woke and she wasn’t next to me. The red-tinged darkness was cut by a shaft of light from the bathroom where the water was running. Then she was in the bathroom doorway, in just Mantz’s pajama top, silhouetted there.

Sitting up, I said, “Hey, you.”

“Don’t look at me,” she said, though only her legs were showing, and hadn’t she been a stark-naked cowgirl riding me not so long before? She clicked off the bathroom light, ran to the bed, threw back the covers and scurried under them; we’d been sleeping atop the bedspread, so I got around under there with her and leaned on my elbow and looked at her. She was on her side, facing me, face half-hidden by the pillow.

“What brought on that sudden attack of ladylike reserve?” I asked.

“I hate my body.”

“Well, I love your body, and anyway all I could see was your legs.”

“I hate my legs.”

“I have fond memories of your legs.”

“I have fat thighs. I hate my thighs.”

“Well, let’s have a look, then….” I flipped the covers back.

She squealed and pulled the covers up and said, “I’ll hit you again.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I like where that led last time….”

Then we were in each other’s arms, giggling, kissing, and then the giggling ceased and the kissing continued and this time around was not at all frantic, but the sort of luxurious, lingering lovemaking characteristic of a couple who know each other well.

Later, I was half-sitting up, two pillows behind me, and she was snuggled against me again, my arm gathering her near, her head resting against my chest.

“There will be no more scurrilous remarks about your thighs,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. She was leaning on her elbow, now, chin propped on her palm. Gazing right at me. “Nathan, there’s something you should know about those threatening notes—”

I cut her off: “Mantz told me about your husband’s history in that regard. Do you think G. P. sent them?”

“Not really,” she said, but not confidently. “Why would he?”

“Publicity, for one thing. To remind the world how important you are.”

“He hasn’t released anything about it to the press.”

“Yet…. Or maybe it’s to provide a cover for what he
really
hired me to do.”