Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin (5 page)

“Let’s say you’re right.”

“I am right, darling—so very right. Tell you something, now. I did want the TV sets, and the speakers, the intercom units, for the house. But I’m not going to lie. I wanted the other, too.” She leaned slightly toward me and there was a shade of bitterness in her tone. “I’ve been through hell with that man, taking care of him—I won’t go into that now. It’s too damned sordid. Suffice to say the past few years have been a prison for me. I’ve had very few acquaintances, none of the kind I’ve wanted, let alone anyone I could call a friend. I’ve been lonely. I don’t have time for anything but taking care of him.” Her voice tensed. “Alone all the time, like that, you get to doing things, thinking things, and sometimes you actually believe you’ll go crazy.”

“I can understand that.”

“Yes. Can you understand this? I like to lie on my back with a man on top of me.”

“I sort of guessed that the other day.”

She showed me her teeth, gleaming and white and maybe even predatory, between the red lips. Sometimes the things she said seemed to come from movies she might have seen, or novels she might have read. But it didn’t matter. She said, “That’s one of the things I like about you. We’re a pair, Jack. It’s hot and it will stay hot.” She hesitated, then said, “So I wanted the TV sets, but I counted on the other, too. I planned for it. I thought of a lot of ways, and it seemed the best. Lots of things could always go wrong with the TV sets, or other things I’d buy. I didn’t give a damn who it was. A man, that’s all, see?” Her face wasn’t pretty when she said that. You didn’t want it pretty, either. She breathed shallowly, her eyes clear and young and bright. “If it didn’t look as if it would work out right, then I’d try another place, until I found what I wanted. I didn’t imagine it would be too difficult, if I made things obvious. Only you were different. I would have waited a long time.”

“Oh, sure.”

Her voice was low and tight. “You looked me over and liked what you saw, and you thought about it. You listened to every word I said, and thought about that. You considered every angle till I thought I’d go crazy. Like how old I was, and everything.” She gave me that sly look along her eyes. “I told you all about Victor, so you’d know how it was with me. His having an attack when he did was timed just right. You think I needed your help, taking care of him? I could do that in my sleep. But I knew you’d be sure then that I did have it tough, and maybe I’d like to play around.”

“You’re really nuts, you know that?” She awed me. “You and Victor both should be in the hospital. You belong there.”

“You laugh at me,” she said, “and I’ll dig your eyes out. I’m telling you, so you’ll know.”

“Okay.”

Her voice softened. “I knew what you were thinking. There’s only one thing, Jack. Now I don’t want anybody else—ever. I just want you.”

“Sure.”

“I’m in love with you, Jack.”

We sat there like that, watching each other.

Something coarse came into her tone. “I mean all I said. And don’t try to kid me—you’re as bad as I am.”

“How do you mean, bad?”

She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips until they gleamed, and the excitement was in her eyes. “The other part of it,” she said. “Victor. You were right. I thought all the things you said.” She gave a quick sigh, straightened in the seat, and began looking at the windshield again. “But I could never do anything like that. I think about it—but it’s just dreaming.”

“The snow’s getting pretty heavy now, Shirley. You’ll have us drifted in if you don’t watch it.”

She slowly turned and frowned at me. “Just what do you mean?”

“I mean you’re going to do it, Shirley. Someday you’d have to do it, you couldn’t help yourself. So it’s going to be now.”

She stared at me, still frowning. She didn’t speak.

“We’re going to do it together,” I said. “You know that.”

Her lips moved very slightly, and there was no expression on her face at all.

“You mean you would help me?” she said.

“Yes.”

The word hung there between us.

She slid across the seat and knelt on one knee, and put her arms around my neck, and pressed her mouth against mine. She shivered in my arms. I held her that way, then let go, and she slid back on the seat. Dim fright lurked in her eyes.

“I didn’t know what you would say,” she said. “I couldn’t be absolutely sure.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Good—crazy good.”

She was wearing a fawn-colored dress of some slippery material that clung to her shape. Her eyes were very bright now, almost like glass. Her hair was thick and soft and full of light. The hem of the dress had worked far up on her thighs, past the rims of sheer, gartered stockings, twisted into the plump milk-white flesh.

I reached for her. She gave a little gasp and arched her back against the pressure of my hands, her breasts filling with the way she breathed as I pulled her up to me.

“You were here early,” she said.

“So were you.”

And then were locked together, and the car was shuddering in a storm of lust.

Much later we sat far apart and talked. Or Shirley talked.

“Mother was only married to Victor a year and a half before she died. Sometimes, when he’s very ill, he gets the two of us mixed up. He thinks I’m his wife. But, anyway, everything comes to me when he dies. One thing that’s worried me is the way he gives money away.”

“How?”

“Don’t get in a stew. There’s plenty left.” She reached over and patted my lips with her fingers, smiling. Then she got serious again. “Maybe there’s more left now than he figures on giving me, even. He sold out for a frightful sum. But he makes these damned donations, it’s like a disease. He gives to charities. It really scares me.”

“For three years you’ve lived with this?”

She nodded. “Plus the year and a half before mother died. When she died, he just seemed to fall apart. Mother was his secretary for a while.”

“He likes you a lot.”

“He had nobody. I had nobody. It was one of those things.” She smiled from the corners of her eyes. “I always sort of worked on him a little. It looked good to me.”

“I can imagine. How much you figure he has right now? I mean cash in the bank?”

“Three—maybe four hundred thousand. I don’t know exactly. About that.”

“About—” I started to say something else, then stopped. I just sat there. It was my turn to stare at the windshield. It came to me how much money that was. I actually got a chill. In the back of my head, I’d had something like fifty, seventy-five thousand, and a split was there, too—twenty-five, maybe thirty for me. I hadn’t brought it out clearly; it was just in the back of my head. But four hundred thousand dollars. She had said it as if it were three or four dollars.

I looked at her. She was watching me. The front or her dress was still undone. One full breast was bared, shaped like a honeydew melon, and her hair was snarled, the lipstick smeared. Her dress was rucked up in her lap, and her black nylon pants were hanging on the wind-wing handle. She looked hot enough to catch fire, but too lazy to do anything but just lie there and smoke.

The look of her, the smooth white flesh, stirred it all up in me again. I reached for her and kissed the nipple of her breast and then her mouth, and her fingers bit into my shoulders, the nails digging. She thrust herself away. “Not here—not again—somebody might—”

I couldn’t let go of her.

Then she said, “I don’t give a damn,” and locked her arms around my neck. The instant she spoke, I did give a damn. If we were seen together from now on, out like this, the whole thing would have to be called off.

I let go of her, reached over and took her pants off the wind-wing handle and dropped them in her lap.

“Put ’em on,” I said. “We’re as nutty as they come. We’ve got to separate and get out of here.” I told her why.

She lay back, pouting, and looking about sixteen. “I guess you’re right,” she said.

I offered her a cigarette, but she didn’t want one. I lit up, waiting, trying to calm down. She got dressed, covered up, took a comb out of a small purse and began running it through her hair.

“Could he possibly be suspicious of you in any way?” I said. “Any way at all?”

“No.” Her voice was flat now. “He even talks of how he’ll live another twenty years. How I’ll always be at his side. Like that.”

“Shirley,” I said. “We can’t wait on this. We’ve got to pull it off as soon as possible.”

“When?”

“Soon. I’ll think about it.” It was as if we were discussing a get-together between friends. I said, “Listen, didn’t he ever want you to go to school?”

“I went to private schools,” she said. “But when mother died, he wanted me to stay with him.” She paused. “Jack,” she said, turning in the seat, looking at me as she combed the snarls out of her hair. “You can’t begin to imagine what this has done to me. Being with him every hour of the day, the way he is. Seeing him live on and on. Watching months and years go down the drain. Knowing they’ll try to get him into a hospital eventually, maybe any day.” She quit combing and her eyes got that glazed, absent look. “Knowing that even if I manage to keep him out of a hospital, it’ll be bedpans and dirty sheets and giving him baths and all the rest of that stinking that goes with it.” She stared at the windshield and put her hand over her mouth, then took it away. “You can’t imagine. Nobody can.”

“I can. Rugged.”

“He won’t die. He just won’t die. He’s not really supposed to get out of bed, except when he has to—and God believe me, I would make him crawl on his hands and knees.”

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t. You’d fetch the bedpan, and do your job, because all he’d have to do is complain just once to this Miraglia—even joking—and that would be that. He’d have a registered nurse in there so fast you’d hardly know it happened.”

“Don’t frighten me. But you’re right. Doctor Miraglia says he can stay up a little. Victor wants to be up a lot. I let him. It’s our secret. I try to even urge him, carefully, of course, thinking something might happen.”

“You ever think maybe it makes him stronger?”

“I’m trapped,” she said. “I’ll go out of my mind.”

“Not now. Remember?”

She said, “This doesn’t seem wrong at all, Jack.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve come to hate him—hate everything about him. He’s stealing my life. He’s taken my fun, and I can’t escape because of that damned money he holds over my head. He doesn’t talk about it. It’s just there, in his eyes, in the way he grins at me. I don’t even think of him as a person any more.”

“Easy, now. I understand.”

“You can’t really understand, Jack. Not really. Nobody could.” It was there in her eyes. “He’s like a corpse, only he can’t be decently buried.”

“I get you.”

“And you don’t even know him. He’s nothing to you, so it shouldn’t really matter to you, either.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Her eyes got dreamy. “To be free. God, to be free again. Free to come and go. Free—to have you, Jack—free to breathe again, without hate.”

“You’re getting poetic.”

She laughed softly. Her eyes were misty. “I guess—I guess I just can’t help it.”

“You weren’t thinking of anything like dropping that TV set on his face, were you?”

“I read it in a magazine. Somebody had a TV set on his ceiling, so he could watch it, lying in bed. I kept thinking about it. I couldn’t forget it.”

“You’d have lasted about ten minutes after the cops got there. They’d have torn you apart. Listen, Shirley—I am going to put that TV set up there on the ceiling. But it’ll be up so damned solid you won’t get it down without pulling the roof with it.”

“What, then?”

“It’s obvious. No air.”

The corners of her mouth tipped up. “You think that hasn’t occurred to me about a thousand times?” Her eyes lidded faintly. “Every time I hold that mask over his face I have to fight myself to turn on the oxygen.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You turn it on—only you just don’t put the mask over his face.”

“I don’t agree with you.”

“That’s how it’s got to be.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Only it won’t be quite that simple,” I said. “There’ll be more to it.” I reached across her and opened the door. “I’ve got half an idea. I want to work on it. You run along. I’ll meet you at your place, with the truck, and take up where I left off. I won’t come till the doc’s gone.”

She put her hand to her mouth. “I forgot. I’d better hurry.” She got out. “I told Victor you were busy with something unavoidable that came up. I told him you’d be back.”

“Pretty sure of yourself.”

“I prayed you would.”

She went to her car. Well, so far Victor was just an old half-dead bastard who was going to finish dying. I had to keep it that way. The minute conscience stepped in, you were in trouble.

She drove off, and I sat there, and she was no more than out of hearing when I began to worry. One slip-up was all we needed. I’d forgotten to tell her to prepare a sound alibi for where she’d been.

I gunned the car out of there and went tearing down the boulevard. It was too late. She was gone.

I pulled over to the curb and stopped the car, and sat there gripping the steering wheel, knowing I would go through with this thing. All my life I’d been waiting for a chance like this. Keep your eyes and ears open and stay tuned in, and one day there it is. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to touch it. And it’s not half frightening, or anything like that. Shirley and I generated something together that drowned out conscience. This was just something we were going to do together. And, of course, the money. I wanted it. I would get it. All I had to do was make him die in a way that looked natural, and make the whole thing look legitimate. And there would be Shirley, too.

Thinking that made it better still. Shirley Angela was under my skin like the itch and it was going to take a lot of scratching.

He was ready to die. He was old enough. He sure as hell was rich enough.

Then I thought, “But you never killed.”

So there had to be a first time. It wouldn’t be hard. It would just barely be killing, if you looked at it right. And there would be no more Grace; something that had gone on too long already with no way to top her.