Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin (17 page)

“I told you not to take all of it!”

“I wanted it all.”

I stared at her. Well, what the hell did it matter now? She looked at me that way and said, “Was she nice in bed, Jack?”

“Who?”

“That girl? Was she hot? A good lay? Did she really love it up?”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m merely asking. I’m serious. She looked as if she could really bounce a bed.”

“Shirley, cut it out!”

“Don’t shout, darling. People will hear you. It’s embarrassing. It may not be to you, but it is to me.”

She turned and looked at the windshield.

I packed the money lovingly back into the shiny white leather bag, and snapped the lid shut.

All three hundred thousand dollars of it.

The key was in my hand. Make a gesture, I thought. Go ahead. I looked at the key. It was a hard thing to do.

“Here,” I said. “You keep this.”

She took the key daintily, without a word, and put it in her purse, and faced front. I reached out and touched her arm. It was like touching a stovepipe.

“Shirley,” I said. “Honey. Please. Don’t—”

She watched the windshield.

I started the car and drove away, then remembered.

“Where are your bags?”

“At the Greyhound bus terminal. I checked them. I couldn’t possibly carry everything.”

“We’ll pick them up.”

I drove over there. She gave me the check. I felt frightened to leave her in the car alone with the money. What else could I do? Carry it with me? I went on in and got her bags, four of them, and put them in the back seat of the Ford. She hadn’t moved a muscle. We drove away.

“I didn’t think you went for blondes,” she said. “I thought brunettes were your dish.”

“Cut it out, Shirley.”

“Did she like to do it with her clothes on or off?”

“Stop it.”

Her tone was flat. “You treated her awfully, Jack, really, you did. She was crying. She must have felt very bad. Is that any way to treat a girl?”

I clamped my lips tight.

“Jack.”

I gripped the steering wheel, thinking about those cops back at the apartment.

“Was she as good as I am?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “I really want to know, Jack. Honestly. Tell me, just between us—was she better?”

I gnawed the inside of my cheek.

“I suppose we all have our points,” she said, “You called her Grace. Grace is such a nice name. It has a certain fillip to it, don’t you think? I mean, it’s—well, bold, you might say, but not too bold. There’s a certain feeling of mystery—”

“Please, Shirley. You’ve ragged me enough.”

“It’s just that I’m interested. It’s a wonder you never mentioned her to me. She has a beautiful body. She didn’t wear falsies, either. Of course, neither do I. But hers were a little bigger, I think. But, then.”

I waited. She didn’t speak for a moment. I drove toward the outskirts of town. I had wanted everything to run smoothly between us. It wasn’t going to be that way. I didn’t know how to tell her we were really running now because we had to run.

Only I had the money.

I’d thought “I”—not
we.

She said something. Then she said, “Oh, darling.” Then she said, “Please...” It came out as a kind of sob. She moved across the seat and I slowed the car, wondering, What now?

She shoved the white bag on the floor and put her arms around me.

“I believe you,” she said. “I believe you.”

She kissed the side of my face, with her arms around my neck, purring to herself the way she did, and half-kneeling on the seat. “Don’t you see how it was?” she said. “I just couldn’t stand it. That’s all. I love you, Jack—I love you.” She kissed me on the mouth, and hugged me some more. “I couldn’t stand it. I love you so much—so much.”

I got a look at her eyes and they were mad for a second. I mean
mad,
not angry. Then that went away.

“I believed you right away,” she said. “But the thought of sharing you with something like that—with
anyone
—it would be too much.”

“You never shared me.”

“I know, Jack. I’m sorry. Can’t you see?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t try to make me feel worse, now.”

“I’m not.”

“I wanted to hurt you—to make you feel as bad as I felt.” She leaned in tightly against me, kissing me, and purring. I nearly drove the car off the street. “All right, now?” she said. There was something husky in her tone.

“Yeah. I couldn’t do anything with her, Shirley.”

“I understand.”

“We can talk sensibly now?”

“Yes.” She knelt there on the seat with her arms around me, her eyes shining. Her hair was tumbled down around one side of her face. “You’re my man,” she said. “And I love you.”

I patted her thigh.

“I got the money without any trouble at all,” she said. “Isn’t it really better getting it all, instead of leaving some behind? We’ll never come back for it. Don’t you see?”

“It was the chance itself,” I said. “I wasn’t sure you could bring it off. It doesn’t matter now.”

She sank back on the seat, watching me, smiling with a kind of secretiveness. She looked a million. Ten million. I felt really good all of a sudden.

“Shirley?”

“Yes?”

I told her about Miraglia and the police at my apartment, and how we had to run for sure, now. How there was no other way out.

She said a lot of things, and carried on some, but I finally got her calmed down. She was scared. But so was I.

What scared me was the thought of losing that money.

Boiled down, nothing else mattered. That much money was worth being scared about, and it was worth taking chances for. I could have spent my whole life in the store and never managed to gouge even a small part of what we had out of sales.

“You knew this all the time, and you let me act like I did,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

She really meant it.

“Listen,” I said. “We’re not going to have time to talk now. First off, it’ll take them a little time to find out about this car....”

“That girl saw it.”

“I know, I know. Don’t you think I realize that? It can’t be helped. I was planning to trade it off for still another. We can’t do it, now. If we steal one, that won’t help.”

“What will we do? Where will we go?”

“Easy, now. Keep hold of yourself. There’s only us, you know? We can’t take a bus, a train, or a plane. They’ll be watching them. They’ll sure as hell set up road blocks before long. They’ve probably already contacted the bank. They’re at your place. They’re looking for us right now. The one chance we have got is this car, until they find out about it.”

“Yes, Jack.”

I headed across town toward the junkyard district.

“They’ll have the license number before the day’s out. But there are a lot of cars exactly like this one on the highways, everywhere. I’m going to swipe a plate off a wrecked car in a junkyard, then we’ll scram.”

“Where?”

“Not far. We’ll take back roads, head north maybe fifty or seventy miles, and rent a place. Anything. A cabin someplace. Then when everything cools down, we’ll take off. The big mistake would be to try and make it now. We’d never make it, Shirley.”

She just looked at me.

I made it to a junkyard I knew of, where it was self-service. I parked down the street, told her to lie on the seat, out of sight. Then I went over to the yard, and told the man I was looking for an old Stromberg carburetor to fix up a hot rod I was building for my kid. He said to have a look around.

“I’ll need pliers and a screw driver.”

He grumbled, and loaned me the tools.

I found a plate for this year, got that off the car it was on, and slid it under my shirt and belt, at my back. Then I located a carb, and tore it off fast.

“You’ll need a kit,” he said. “This is all shot to hell.”

“I know it.”

“I sell kits.”

“Well, I figured...”

“It’s no good without you fix it, pal.”

“Okay. I’ll take the kit, then.”

I paid for the stuff, and went back to the car. She was lying on the seat, looking like a scared rabbit.

I was beginning to feel fine. We had a good chance.

We drove out of town, taking the back routes, and stopped the first chance so I could change the plates. Shirley sat in the car, tuning the radio. She’d been quiet ever since we left town, and that bothered me a little. I buried the plate that was on the car. Then I heard her call.

“Jack. Hurry!”

Well, I went over there, and it was on the radio. She picked up the tail end of a news flash, but even at that, it was pretty explicit.

They were holding Henry Lamphier in a jail cell for his own protection. He had sworn to kill us both. The police were having a bad time with him. We were suspected of murdering both Victor Spondell and Mayda Lamphier, and they had it all straight down the line, even though they claimed they weren’t positive. They theorized Mayda Lamphier had somehow surprised us in the act of letting Victor die, and we’d had to do away with her. They uncovered everything. The pad with the list of stuff at my place, Miraglia’s name, everybody’s name, all the gimmicks. It added up. I don’t know, maybe there was something inevitable about it, because they’d even dug up the bloody blanket.

A young cop got credit for that. He had put himself in what he figured was my place, since the Medical Examiner had claimed there would have been a lot of blood, and we had probably wrapped Mayda in something.

He walked away from the spot by the canal, down the road, and turned off where he thought we might have buried whatever it was, and dug up the bloody blanket.

They had checked with the bank at three minutes to ten. So they’d missed Shirley by maybe seconds.

There was nothing on the car as yet.

We were “love killers.” We had held “wild orgies” under the very eyes of the pitiful dying man. We were “sex-crazed thieves and lustful murderers.” We were “passion-bold.” I could see all the fact crime writers streaming toward the house that they called the “love nest death house,” and stuff like that.

Behind it all was Anthony Miraglia. He told the police something had made him suspicious. He berated himself for not acting sooner. He had discovered the original condenser I’d taken out of the intercom unit under Victor Spondell’s eyes, claiming it was bad. I remembered leaving it on the windowsill. I’d had to take it out with Victor watching.

He had taken the condenser home to his boy, who was interested in building radio kits. Then he looked at it, checked it, and found it flawless. From there on out, one thing had led to another, Doctor Miraglia told them. “Victor Spondell was a strong man, and I admired his courage in view of the fact that he knew he would die. He was my friend.”

They said we would never get away.

Something began to go out of me. I had to keep looking at that white bag with the money in it, to reassure myself. It helped.

“It looks bad, Jack.”

“Looks and is are two different things,” I said. “Keep your chin up, Shirley.”

We stopped off in Tampa, got some sandwiches and cokes, and took off.

By late afternoon we had rented a cabin on a river, in the woods. We were “newlyweds.” The nearest store and gas station stood at a country intersection about a mile away, called Wilke’s Corners.

The cabin was an old place, but pretty well kept up. There were three rooms. A small kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. The furniture was beat.

The cabin was on a small hill. You could look out the front windows and see the dirt road winding down through pine trees, away from the river. On the other side, you could see the river, and you could hear it, pulsing darkly against the shore. There were cypresses and vines along the river, and the water was black.

We’d had to ask about a place. I asked in a bar attached to the grocery store at Wilke’s Corners. A farmer said he had a place, and we rented it sight unseen.

Shirley had waited in the car. But she was still talking about how the man’s face looked when I paid him the rent for the first two weeks.

“Well,” she said, standing in the living room. “We’re here.”

“Yeah. It’s not bad.”

She moved toward me. “It’s wonderful, Jack. We’re married. We’re newlyweds. I like it that way.”

“Sure. So do I.”

“Kiss me.”

I kissed her. I had wanted to bring in the stuff from the car. I didn’t get to it right then. I was worried about all they’d said over the radio. I was worried about the guy we’d had to rent the cabin from. I was worried and scared about everything, but nothing seemed to bother Shirley from the moment she entered that cabin door.

She said, “There’s nobody here, but us.”

“Yeah.”

“Nobody to see us, or watch us.”

“That’s right.”

“Just us. All alone. The way it should be.”

I held her tightly. It was good this way. You could hear the river and the wind in the pines and it was getting on toward the first part of twilight. Some of the worry fell away from me. The place was warm with our coming. We stood there in the middle of the living room, holding each other, amid the old smells of wood and old fires, and the air was close, but maybe that helped. It was different. There was a kind of freedom in it, and this freedom slowly worked on you, and all the bad fell away.

“We don’t have to hurry, or anything,” she said. “We can take our time, and do anything we want.” She said it in a close whisper, and there was strong excitement behind the words.

I rubbed my hands up and down her body, feeling the shape of her, and pulling her against me. I kissed her lips and her face, and we stood there holding it like that.

She pressed her hands against my chest, and tipped her head up to me, her lips parted, her eyes shining big and round. “Jack.” she said. “Do you really know how much I love you?”

I kissed her on the mouth and she moaned softly.

“Jack?” Her eyes had the devil in them now. “Let’s just take off all our clothes and be naked together. Not a stitch.”

“Hadn’t we better get the stuff in from the car?”

I kept thinking of that money out there in the car.