Enchanted Isle (14 page)

We all three went down soon as we finished breakfast, said hello to Steve in the coffee shop, walked around to Mr. Clawson’s, and then taxied to City Hall, where Mr. Haynes’s office was. When we got there the same girl was there, the one who had worked the stenotype, as well as the tape recorder. Mr. Haynes brought us all in his private office and she handed him some papers, not yet stapled together, that seemed to be my confession. He read it, though pretty fast, as though he’d seen it before, and then gave it to me, saying, “Yes, Mandy, I think it’s in order now. Will you sign it, here at the end, on the line she’s marked with an X. Then initial each page.”

But, like I told Mrs. Minot, curiosity killed the cat, and I wanted to read what I’d said. It was not what I’d said at all! It was all different and left out about the gun and how scared Rick and I were. It had in about the mink coat, but nothing about Rick backing out, or trying to, before being made at gunpoint. It was loused from beginning to end, and I yelped, “It’s not what I said. It’s been doctored!”

“Yes, Mandy? In what way doctored?”

Mr. Haynes was very cold, but I told him. More than I’ve put in here. By that time Mr. Clawson had had a look, and he chimed in too: “What’s the big idea, Jack? Having Mandy’s statement rewritten?”

“Well, we generally do. You have to pull it together so it makes some kind of sense.”

“It made plenty of sense as she said it.”

“Not to a jury it wouldn’t.”

“Since when is a jury so dumb?”

That was Mother, sounding like ground glass in a blender. By that time she’d had a look too, and she went on, “I’ve had to sit in court while cases were being tried, and my observation was not that juries were dumb, but that they weren’t—that that was the trouble with them, from the lawyer’s point of view. Could it be that you rewrote Mandy’s statement as a way of convicting that boy?”

“I’ve said why I had it rewritten.”

“You have indeed.”

“You doubt my word?”

He was pretty ugly about it, but she said, “Come here.”

He didn’t move, and she went over to him. She leaned close, patted his cheek, and said, “You don’t look like no lion tamer.”

“Just like a lying son of a bitch?”

He laughed and she laughed, telling him, “You go wash your mouth out with soap! Why, the very idea, saying something like that in mixed company! And good-looking as you are, and truthful-looking! You stop cutting your eye at me, or I’ll be falling for you! Where’s the typescript? Of the tape? From the recording machine? She’ll sign that, and that’s all she’ll sign, or we’re starting all over again.”

“Mr. Wilmer, you have a persuasive wife.”

“Oh, she generally gets her way.”

“And a damned beautiful wife.”

“She’ll pass in a crowd, no doubt.”

“Pass in it? She’ll light it up like a star shell.”

By that time he had motioned to the girl, who got another paper out of her dispatch case, a thick one, all stapled up in a blue cover. Mother took it, glanced through it, flipping the pages over, and said, “OK, this is it. Mandy? Do you have a pen?”

So I signed, the girl stamped her notary seal on and signed, after having me raise my right hand and asking did I solemnly swear that the statement I had given here was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That seemed to be it. Mr. Haynes looked at Mother and said, “Mrs. Wilmer, since you are so very good-looking, and since your eyes do turn me to putty, I’ll kick in with some very good news. It made the A.P. wire.”

“What did? And what’s the A.P. wire?”

“The story was sent out by the Associated Press. It hit them funny, the rude awakening you got on your wedding night.”

“OK, but what’s good about it?”

“It means that papers have it all over the country, so that boy will see it and, if he has any sense, surrender.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess that would help.”

“It’ll be the end of this thing!”

“Or maybe not, Mr. Haynes.”

“What makes you say that, Mandy?”

“He doesn’t have any sense.”

So then we all had lunch—Mr. Clawson, Mr. Haynes, Mr. Wilmer, Mother, and I—at Marconi’s again, but I kept thinking of Steve, and when I mentioned him, Mr. Wilmer called the hotel, had him paged, and invited him. And he came. And Marconi’s is a wonderful place, which did it big for Mr. Wilmer, and I loved the dishes they served but don’t remember their names. So once again Mr. Wilmer begged me to stay and said we’d paint the town red, he, Mother, and I, “for a real Saturday night” and “when I say red I mean red. If there’s one thing Baltimore has, it’s bucketfuls of red paint.” But Steve’s face spoke to me, and I said I’d go back with him. Then, from the look on Mother’s face, I knew she still had hopes that I would fall for him in more than a daughterly way. But Mr. Wilmer was frowning, not seeming to like it so much.

Anyhow, Steve and I drove home and hardly were in the house before things commenced to happen. First, of course, was the phone, and that was my first experience with the obscene call from some guy. You’ve no idea what they said, and you know you ought to hang up, and yet what you do is hang on from not believing what they’ll say next. Then the doorbell, with people there you hadn’t seen in a year, or thought of in all that time—beginning with Mrs. Minot, still nosing around for some dirt, asking if Mother got married and why I’m not held in jail. I told her, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” and Steve told her, “You’ll have to excuse us, please, we’re awfully tired.”

So I’d ask them in and talk a few minutes and Steve would shoo them out, saying, “We have to put in some calls” or “We have some friends coming in” or “We have to darn some socks” or whatever popped in his head. It went on all afternoon, and then at night we went out to the Bladensburg place for dinner. We got home around nine o’clock, and when the phone rang Steve took it. Then he handed me the receiver, saying, “Some guy calling you long-distance.”

But he looked at me kind of queer, and when I answered I knew why. A boy’s voice said, “Mandy Vernick, please.”

“This is Mandy Vernick.”

“Mandy, this is Rick.”

“Oh! Well, hello and how are you, Rick?”

I tried to make it sound friendly, but he snarled when he said, “What’s it to you how I am?”

“Rick, that’s not very nice.”

“Who says it’s supposed to be nice?”

“OK. What do you want?”

“To tell you what you’ve got coming.”

“What do you mean coming?”

“What do you think I mean? For what you’ve done to me, that’s what I mean.”

“Done to you? I did you a favor, that’s what I did, putting them on your trail so you can be taken in before you do something else as silly as the last thing you did. Rick, are you listening to me? If you give yourself up, right away, wherever you are, and turn that money in, they may not do much to you. I did everything I could to make it that you were forced at gunpoint against your will, and that’s on my statement, sworn. But if you keep on being a jerk, that won’t hold water at all, what I put in my statement. It’ll be that you do want that money, that maybe once you were forced, but now you’re hanging on all of your own free will. Rick, are you listening?”

“Bitch, are you?”

“Rick, that’s no way to talk.”

“OK. I’ll knock off the talk and say what I mean to do. What I mean to do to you.”

“And what’s that?”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Listen, I don’t go for riddles.”

“Then, I’ll make it plain. I’m killing you, Mandy. That’s what I mean to do. You’re going to wake up dead.”

“And how can you kill me?”

“By shooting you through your lying, double-crossing, rotten little heart.”

“Rick, will you listen to me?”

“No, Mandy, I don’t have time.”

Then came the dial tone and I knew he had hung up. Steve had been leaning close and said, “I heard it. That means we must call the cops.”

S
O THE NEXT THREE
hours were nice. I’ll say they were, the kind of a nightmare you dream about all the rest of your life. After talking it over with me, holding my hand and telling me not to be scared, regardless of what Rick had said, Steve decided to call the Baltimore cops, not the Prince George’s County cops or the Town of Hyattsville cops, though, of course, they were just down the street. So he did, first getting the number from information. He had to argue about it, first with one guy, then with another, till he finally got one who was actually in charge of the case. He was told to hold everything, to “keep the girl there in the house,” and an officer would be over. Sure enough, the officer came, after a couple of hours, and heard us both tell our tale. But Steve’s, it turned out, was just as important as mine. Because he was the one who heard it, what the girl had said, what the operator told Rick, before the connection was made: “Deposit a dollar and a half, please.” That told it, not much but a little, where the call had come from—at lease in a general way, Florida, California, Nevada, Arizona, or New Mexico. It wasn’t much, but as the officer said, more than nothing. The main thing was Rick couldn’t get there that night.

But that was just the beginning. Next off, the officer had to call Baltimore, “the Chief,” as he called him, for orders on what to do next. So the Chief said take me in, to jail seemed to be the idea, “protective custody” so I wouldn’t get shot. That’s when Steve hit the roof, refusing to let me go for the reason I already was in custody, custody of my mother, and he was acting for her. Then he called Mr. Clawson, whose number he already had, and had him talk to the officer. The officer said orders were orders but that he would wait while Mr. Clawson called the Chief and the Chief called him back. So then we sat around and Steve put out some beer, when the officer kind of relaxed and wasn’t so bullheaded to us. Then the Chief called and they talked, first the officer and then Steve. And Steve said, “Chief, who am I to tell you your business and how to run it? Just the same, it makes no sense, taking this girl in. In the first place it’s wrong, and in the second place it’s dumb. Because, look, suppose he calls again? Suppose he’s stolen a car and is on his way to her? Or suppose he’s traveling by bus? Or plane? Or however he’s fixing to get here? And he puts in another call? Tonight? Tomorrow? Or tomorrow night? If she’s here she can string it out, hold him on the line while the call is traced, which takes a few minutes, remember. If she’s not here that does it, and nothing more can be done. If she is here we got a chance. And so far as him killing her goes, it won’t happen, that I promise you. I have a gun, right here in this house, in the downstairs table drawer. I keep it under a permit. Have to; I drive a truck. So no one’s going to shoot her.”

The officer was leaning close, out there in the hall, to hear what was being said, and I could tell by how he was acting that Steve had put it across. It was a half hour before he left, as calls had to be made, to the Baltimore cops, the Hyattsville cops, and the Baltimore cops again, to set the stakeout up so we could catch Rick if he called, or at lease find out where he was. But at last he did leave, and then we could go to bed. So once more I wanted Steve there to tell me good night, and once more he came. He knelt by the bed, and I kissed him and at last told him about the island. He said, “But Mandy, you want an island, we’ll have one, lessen they cost more than I think. Next month my rig will be paid for, and the house already is. We’ll have money to buy one. And even now we can have clams. There’s a place in Washington sells them, Little Necks, on the half shell!”

“Steve, now you’re the goof.”

“OK, but I love you.”

“And thanks for tonight. What you did, I mean, saving me from going to jail.”

“That was an idea, wasn’t it?”

Next day was Sunday, and the papers didn’t have it, but Steve said they’re printed early and don’t have the late stuff until Monday. Around ten Mother called, scared to death that I was in jail, and it turned out Mr. Clawson had called her the night before, but she wasn’t in the hotel and got in too late to give him the callback he asked for. Of course, count on Mother: Saturday night, town-painting on Saturday night as long as the red held out was what she loved most of all. So when she was calmed down, I made breakfast for Steve and me, eating it in my kimono, which I shouldn’t have done, as he could see plenty and once I caught him peeping. Then I dressed and the razzmatazz started—the same old thing, with people coming and Steve running them out, and the obscene bunch on the phone. So we started to go out for lunch, but a cop in a car stopped us and said we must stay in “to take any calls,” as he put it, meaning calls from Rick. So we did, and some canned shrimp were there, which I fixed on toast, with some vegetable soup to start and ice cream to wind up, as Mother had always had some for me. For dinner I put out steaks to thaw and cooked them in the broiler, with a baked potato apiece, peas and onion, ice cream again for dessert, and salad to start. Steve was awful nice, paying me compliments on how good I cooked. At eight Rick called again, and Steve ducked out the front door to yell at the cop in his car that he should start the tracer going, calling in on his radio phone, so the phone company would get busy on it, as they had said they would. So I commenced doing my stuff, bawling and carrying on so Rick would enjoy himself, the scare he was giving me, and hang on to hear some more. And he did, for quite some time, but then all of a sudden hung up, before the tracer was run out all the way. But they did take it as far as St. Louis, which proved he was somewhere out West, as I had thought all along. Because it didn’t look like, in Savannah, he would keep on with the trip that he and I had started. That more or less left the West. And this time Steve heard the girl say, “Deposit one dollar, please,” which seemed to mean he was closer, in El Paso or Denver or Omaha.

So we went to bed again, and I was happy and felt safe with Steve. Monday the papers had it, Rick saying he meant to kill me, but not a big story at all, or pictures or anything. Which seemed funny, but that’s how it was. Then something had to be done to get some food in the house, as we were running low. So when Mrs. Minot came again to put her nose in it once more, right after Steve rang his replacement to take the truck to New York for still another trip, Steve got her into the act to go out and buy us some stuff. I made out a list for her and Steve gave her twenty dollars, so at last she said she would and went off in her car. Pretty soon she was back, with a shopping bag full of stuff and $6.42 in change, which Steve told her to keep “to help pay for your gas.” So that relieved on the famine and also relieved on her. Because once she’d taken his money, she more or less had to shut up, the stuff she was talking around, as people had called in to tell me. It was kind of a gain all around.