Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin (7 page)

“Isn’t that taking an awful chance?”

“Sure. But you think of a better way, and tell me about it. Don’t you see? I’ll be sick about it, I’ll feel like hell. But what can I do? Resurrect him?”

“Jack—it’s really good.”

“Sure.” I motioned with my head. “We’d better get inside. It’s getting dark, and I’d better take off. It’ll look better if I come around in the morning, work in the daytime. We can iron out any snarls then. You try to think of flaws, all night, and I’ll do the same. Try to think of anything that could go wrong.”

“All right.”

We moved around the side of the house. “I wish you could stay,” she said.

“I can’t. We’ve got to take it real easy.”

We walked up the ramp onto the front porch. The front screen door opened, and a woman stepped out on the porch. She was very thin, with long blonde hair, and she was wearing a pair of dungarees and a loose white blouse. She looked the nervous type, and loud.

“Shirley,” she said. Her voice was raspy, like the edge of a tin can against slate, “Where’ve you been, honey? I’ve looked all over hell for you.”

This was great.

“Mayda,” Shirley said. “What is it?”

The woman looked at me and made with the sideward glance, waggling penciled eyebrows.

“I’d like to borrow handsome, here. For just a few minutes,” she said. She was maybe thirty-two or three. “I thought you were inside, so I just crashed the gate. You know me.”

Shirley gave me a quick helpless look and tried to tell me something with her eyes that I couldn’t get.

“Mr. Ruxton,” Shirley said. “This is my next door neighbor, Mayda Lamphier.”

“Free, white and twenty-one,” the woman said. She waggled her eyebrows again. “What I mean is, my husband’s in Alaska. He won’t be back for six months. You can imagine how that is, can’t you?”

“What’s up?” Shirley said.

“He’s a TV fixer-upper, isn’t he?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Well, daddy,” she said to me. “My set’s acting up. I saw your truck over here.” She regarded Shirley with a smile. “I figured maybe I could borrow him for a few minutes. It’s probably nothing more than some adjustment.” She gave with the eyebrows again. “The set, of course, honey.”

“I’m just leaving,” I said. “Be glad to take a look.” I turned to Shirley. “See you in the morning, Miss Angela. I’ll try to get everything installed as quickly as possible.”

“Thanks, Mr. Ruxton.”

This was something Shirley hadn’t warned me about. It troubled her. I felt bad about it.

We went across to Mayda’s house and tinkered with the set.

“You were right,” I said to Mayda Lamphier. “It was just the horizontal hold out of kilter. You could’ve fixed it yourself.”

“But it’s so much nicer having you do it. What do I owe you?”

“Nothing. Glad to help.”

“How’s for one for the road?”

“One what?”

“Oh, come, darling. Give me time to get my breath.” She gushed some laughter, eyeing me, and meaning damned well everything she said. “A drink is what I meant.”

“Thanks just the same. I’ve got to get back.”

“I’m all alone in this house,” she said. “I’ve been married for ten years. This is the first time my husband’s ever been away. Think of that.”

I thought of that.

“Know what I mean?” she said.

“You sure must miss him.”

“I don’t miss him worth a hang.” she said. “You know what I mean.”

I looked over at her TV set, in the dimly lighted room. “If you’ll just leave that the way it is, it’ll probably stay okay for a long while.”

“You won’t hang around?”

“I’m sorry. The business keeps me hopping.”

“How you like Shirl?”

“Miss Angela, you mean?”

“You know who I mean, honey.”

“She seems like a nice kid,” I said. I turned and started over toward the door.

“She’s sure tied down with that old monkey,” Mayda Lamphier said. “Know what I mean?”

I opened the front door, turned and looked at her.

She waggled her eyebrows, smiling. “You’re real cute,” she said. “Maybe Shirl won’t have to go running off so much, with you around.”

I hung onto the door. “I don’t get you,” I said quizzically.

“Come, now, darling. She’s always running downtown, running off. Stuck with that old geezer, and as young as she is. I don’t blame her. She’s missing out on all the fun, and she knows it. At her age, she should be having boyfriends—but she doesn’t have a one. I mean, not that you can see. I don’t blame her, whatever she does. Not really.”

Not much, she didn’t. This one was a knife with a sharp blade. Just the same, it was good, having met her. I figured I had acted right with her.

“Well,” I said. “That’s how it goes.”

“You’ll be around—over at Shirl’s?”

“Some work I have to do. It might take a couple of days.”

“I might need you again.”

“Okay. So long.”

I walked out into the street and around the hedge, and back to where I had left the truck parked in the driveway. Shirley was in the shadow of the porch, standing in the driveway.

“Make it look right,” I said, as I came up to the truck. “She’s got a nose forty feet long, and eyes like telescopes. She’s got to be stopped from going in your house. I don’t care how you do it. But do it. Tell her the doctor said nobody’s to come in, because of Victor. Got that?”

“All right, Mr. Ruxton,” she said, just loud enough so it would carry across the hedge. Then she got a little closer to me and spoke softly. “I was going to tell you about her. She’s perfectly harmless. She just thinks she’s full of hell.”

“Thinks or is,” I said. “Stop her. Coral snakes are harmless, too—if you stay away from them. It’s okay for now, because she really believes everything’s on the up and up. We’ve got to keep it that way. Get back inside, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Oh, God, Jack—if you could only stay.” I started the truck up and backed out into the street. Mayda Lamphier was walking back and forth in her living room. I saw her through the windows.

I didn’t sleep worth a damn that night. I smoked cigarettes and lay there staring up at the ceiling, thinking about everything. I went over every detail, and I didn’t see how it could miss.

I got so excited my heart acted as if it had started freewheeling. It wouldn’t slow down. My breathing was all cockeyed, and I couldn’t lie still in the bed. I tried lying every way possible. Nothing worked. I held my breath, trying to slow down my heart and it would slow down, but the second I started breathing again it began hammering. Through it all I kept trying not to think of her, because she stirred me up so bad, just thinking of her, I knew I’d never sleep. I’d be lying there talking to her in my mind, laughing a little to myself, and once I caught myself motioning with my hands, explaining to her how everything would run smooth, and how we’d have the money, and then I’d be kissing her, with my hands snarled in her hair, and we’d be wild. So I’d get up.

I tried fixing a stiff drink. It only made things worse. So I quit trying to sleep. I took a scratch pad, and pencil, and got in bed, and lay there figuring loopholes. I made lists of everything I could think of. I put her down in black and white.
Shirley Angela.
I tried to coldly analyze all the movements she would make from the time
Victor
had
The Attack
until after the will was probated, and we had the money, and then the waiting after that. I’d find myself lying back staring into a misty pastel
Rio de Janeiro,
with her laughing and pushing against me with her hip, or maybe the two of us lying in a ritzy hotel bedroom on one of those oversized beds. And she would be naked, with that auburn hair fanned out around her head on the pillow.

So then I began all over again, with the intercom units. I would solder the coupling condenser to the grid terminal, and do a sloppy job.

I thought about how I would act, how sorry I would be when they told me it was my fault he died. So I got off that tack, right away, and began thinking about the big beds with her again, and somewhere along in there I konked off and Shirley Angela turned into Mayda Lamphier. I kept chasing Mayda Lamphier through an endless living room full of TV sets. She would stand on a TV set, and take off pieces of clothing, until she was leaping from one TV set to the other with nothing on but a raggedy blouse, flapping out behind her. I caught her. Just as I got my hands on her, she gave a yell, and this Doctor Miraglia popped up from behind all the TV sets. I came awake in a sweat.

I got up and burned all the paper I’d been figuring on, and flushed it down the john. It was daylight outside.

The buzzer sounded. It was Grace at the door.

“I just stopped over to say goodbye,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Goodbye.” I started to close the door.

“Goddamn you, Jack!”

She lunged against the door and came into the apartment. She stood there looking at me. I wasn’t sure whether she would cry or scream or what.

“I told you not to come here,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, it’s practically still dark outside.”

She began pacing up and down, rubbing her hands together. I watched her. I didn’t like any part of it. All I wanted to do was get her the hell out of here. She was slim and blonde, with a tightly packed, well-shaped body. She had on a fresh pink dress, and she wasn’t carrying anything, not even a purse. She always walked kind of heavy on her heels, and I watched her breasts jiggle as she moved around the room. She was trying to look determined, and having a hard time of it.

“What do you want?” I said. “Look, Grace. Start using your head, will you?”

She turned and stared at me for maybe three seconds, her eyes real cool. “All right, Jack. I wanted this to go right. I see it hasn’t. It never will. I’m going away, leaving town. I’ll quit bothering you. I wanted to say I’m sorry.” She started pounding toward the door, and stopped in front of me, and her lips twisted with it. “But I’m not sorry.”

“Okay. So long, Grace. Take care of yourself, for old times’ sake.”

She was a finagling woman. Sometimes she more than just scared me. I stood there waiting for her to go, afraid to say anything else for fear she’d take it wrong. No matter what you said, Grace would take it as an insult, or some kind of probe among her defenses.

“You won’t see me again,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

I still didn’t say anything. I wondered if she was going to start the suicide bit again. She didn’t. She kept looking at me for a minute, with her mouth kind of twisted up that way, then she went over to the door, and out into the hall. She slammed the door. I listened to her walking away down the hall, the heels smacking.

The next day was rough. I worked hard and got the intercom units wired into the house. I left the business about the television set on the ceiling in his bedroom until last, because I figured to get the intercoms in so he could fiddle with them and get tired of them as soon as possible.

We had a few minutes in the kitchen when I first started working; we went over everything together again. She had come up with one or two minor snags, like Doctor Miraglia showing right at the moment when Victor was dying, or Victor maybe somehow getting out of bed and running into the street because she wasn’t helping him. I told her those were chances we had to take. I convinced her they wouldn’t happen.

“I spoke to Mayda,” she said. “I told her Victor had to have absolute quiet from now on, and he mustn’t get excited, so she shouldn’t come into the house. I told her I was very sorry. She understood, all right.”

“She’s a big mouth,” I said. “She might mention it to Miraglia, later on, and he’d say he never gave any such orders.”

“I’ll tell him about her, when I see him. I’ll tell him I used him as an excuse to get rid of her because she’s such a bore.”

“Good. That’s perfect.”

“She mentioned you.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s all right, though. I fixed that. I told her you were an awful dope, stuff like that. How you couldn’t wait to finish the job. I didn’t make any big thing of it, of course.”

“Shirley,” I said. “I just thought of something. You’ll have to impress this on your mind until it’s an automatic action. The speakers I’m going to put up out back in the yard will have a volume control. You’ll have to see that they’re turned off. And as soon as he’s—gone, you’ll have to turn them on—and you can’t be seen doing it. It would cook us. If he started yelling over the intercom before the unit grounds out, somebody would sure as hell hear him.”

“Could they hear him from inside the house?”

“His voice is too weak to carry that far. Like as not, the unit will short right out. Now, don’t worry about that. I can do it perfect. But you’ve got to be sure you turn those speakers on, because that’s where you’ll say you were when it happened. In the dark, by the Gulf, sitting. You can say you like to sit out there at night.”

“I’ll remember. You’ll have to show me the volume controls.”

“Yeah.”

“Jack, you don’t think they’ll suspect us.”

“How can they? Don’t you worry. It’ll be my fault, like I said, and that won’t mean a thing. I’m just a television repairman, see? There’s nothing between you and me. We’ve only just met. That’s the first thing. Any number of people can attest to that. They’ll never suspect you. All they’ll think is that you got a break.” I hesitated, and pulled her to me, and kissed her, then let her go, because I didn’t want anything starting up right then. “Know what the word will be?” I said. “They’ll say, Poor old Spondell, he’s better off dead. He was suffering. It’s a shame to say it, but you’re better off, and he’s better off. All these years you’ve nursed him, waited on him hand and foot. If they think anything bad, it’ll be counteracted by their own thoughts that he’s better off dead.”

“Don’t say it anymore, Jack.”

“I know. It kind of gets you, sometimes. But, listen, Shirley. We can’t be seen together, and you can’t call me. I’ll contact you somehow, if need be. We can use the alibi of my coming out here to adjust something—once, maybe twice. No more. I’ll be out once to solder the condenser. We should leave it at that.”