Tears Are for Angels (7 page)

    I picked up the phone from the little desk just beyond the bedroom door. I got the county operator and when I said, "Sheriff's office," she plugged the call right in for me.

    It rang twice before a sleepy voice answered.

    "Walt?"

    "He ain't here. Deputy James talkin'."

    "Bill. Bill James."

    "Yeah. Who's this?"

    "Bill, you get Walt. I don't care where he is. Get him and get out to my place."

    "Who is this?"

    "Harry London."

    "Oh, yeah. What's the trouble, Harry?"

    "Never mind. Just get Walt and get out here."

    "I don't know, Harry, he said-"

    "Get him," I said. "My wife just killed herself."

    

    

    When they came up on the porch, the rain had stopped completely. I was sitting on the floor in the bedroom, against the opposite wall from the dressing table. The bottle was beside me on the floor and it was almost empty now.

    I called out to them and they came on back to the lighted bedroom door and stopped there and looked around at the blood-splattered room.

    Walt's deep-set eyes lighted on the bottle.

    "Good," he said. "Ease off the shock."

    "Go to hell," I said.

    "Take it easy, Harry."

    He went over to the dressing table and touched it once and then he leaned over and read the note. He looked quickly at me and this time saw the arm and the tourniquet. He came quickly across the room and knelt by me and looked at the wound.

    "You, Bill," he said. "Go git that first-aid stuff in the car and then drive Harry to the hospital."

    Bill faded out of the door.

    Walt rocked back on his lean haunches.

    "All this blood your'n?"

    "It's ketchup. Don't you know ketchup from blood?"

    He looked at the bottle again and moved it from my reach.

    "You got the shock eased off enough," he said. "Tell me about it."

    I closed my eyes and let my head go back against the wall.

    "I came back from that fishing trip I planned. Stormed on me and I came back. She wasn't expecting me and I came in quiet. Going to surprise her."

    I heard Bill come back up on the porch.

    "She was sitting there where she is now. She had the gun. First thing I saw when I opened the door. 'What the hell,' I said. She didn't say anything. She just got up and came over and stood right in front of me, holding the gun. 'Put that thing down,' I told her."

    Bill put the first-aid kit in Walt's hand. Walt opened it and began to fumble around inside of it.

    "Then she said, 'You're back,' just like that, in a funny kind of voice. 'Yeah,' I said, and I started to reach out and get the gun and then she said, 'that makes it better.' And then she lifted up the gun and pointed it at me and I hollered and she shot me before I could move."

    "Take it easy," Walt said again. He shook a powder out over the wound and began to fish in the kit for gauze.

    "I went down. I couldn't even move. I guess she thought I was dead. I tried to holler or something but I couldn't make a sound. It was like I was paralyzed. And then I heard that typewriter going and I knew I was crazy. It must be a dream, I thought. And about that time the typing stopped and in a minute the gun went off again."

    He was bandaging the wound now, but his eyes were on mine. I managed to keep staring at him and I thought the whisky was good protection. If I acted funny they could blame it on that.

    "I had to just lay there but pretty soon I got- to where I could move and then I got up and crawled over there and saw what it was. After a while I got this tourniquet and went back and got the bottle and called you."

    You can't prove it a goddamn bit different, I thought, not if you wanted to. A hick sheriff like you, spending half your time with those roosters you're always fighting. Just get it over with, that's all.

    For God's sake, just get it over with.

    The bandage was finished and he nodded at Bill. Bill helped me up and I grabbed the bottle again and killed it in one swallow and threw it on the bed. That's where you belong, I thought. In the bed with the other dead soldiers.

    "Bill will take you to the hospital," Walt was saying. "I'll handle ev'rything here. Then you get some sleep an' we'll talk tomorrow."

    "Tomorrow's a big word," I said.

    "It'll get here."

    So I let Bill take my arm and help me and we were almost out of that room when Walt spoke again.

    "That note, Harry. What it says right?"

    I looked at him a long time. So what? I thought. What difference does it make now?

    "Hell," I said, "you never knew a guy to turn it down when it came along, did you?"

    He pursed his lips.

    "Some," he said. "One or two."

    "Go to hell," I said, and we went on out into the hall.

    And, like death, the thing I had forgotten came at me out of the dark.

    My hands.

    I hadn't washed them. Not since firing the shot into my arm.

    Did Walt know about paraffin tests? The only thing he knew about police work was how to handle a gun. But he could have learned about that test like I had, reading Dick Tracy. And if he got suspicious… I swore to myself as we came out on the porch. The rain had stopped, but the night smelled of it and the air was cool. The moon was out now and it glinted on a puddle in front of the steps.

    We started down the steps and I let a foot drag and pitched forward. My good arm slipped through Bill's fingers and I went lace down in the puddle, both arms in front of me.

    The pain was, for a moment, more than I could bear, and I could almost feel the tremendous surge of the blood again. But my hands were deep in the puddle and I ground them into the mud and covered them over the wrists with the rain water and let them stay there.

    Bill quickly helped me up then and we looked at the blood, pumping regularly again.

    "I better get Walt to fix that," he said.

    "The hell with Walt." I started toward the car.

    He hesitated, then came after me.

    It was a long ride to town, but no longer than my thoughts, and the shooting, slashing pains in my arm and shoulder hurt no more than the nails someone slowly drove into my sides.

    Lucy, I thought.

    Lucy.

    Why did you do it?

    

    

    They held a coroner's inquest, but that's as far as it went.

    Ours is a pretty backwoods county. It looked like suicide and I had said it was suicide, so as far as they were concerned it was suicide.

    It wasn't as if any of them had really known Lucy well, grown up and gone to school with her. It wasn't even as if the ones of them who had known her at all even liked her very much. Lucy had had New York City written all over her, and in Coshocken County, where the county scat town of St. Johns has a population of less than a thousand, that went over like a polecat at a picnic.

    The clothes she ordered from New York stores, the way she walked and wore her hair and talked and laughed… the county never got used to any of those things. So when everything pointed to her having killed herself, trying to include me in the deal, the coroner's jury and everyone else chalked it up to the fact that she was a Yankee and a mighty queer piece to boot.

    After it all happened, I began to feel that somehow in this fact lay the key to what Lucy had done. I had known she was lonely on the farm, far away from friends and familiar places, but there had been no outward indications of boredom or strain.

    We'd been married in New York, just before I went overseas as an engineer captain. When I came back, nearly two years later, I was a major and the war was over and Coshocken County looked, from New York's gay spots, like the hind end of hell. So I kept the oak leaves on for a while, and Lucy and I had a spell of Army life on the West Coast.

    We had a high old time, what with my pay and the big postwar profits from the farm my father had left me, and which Brax Jordan, my lawyer, was operating for me. But it palled on me gradually, and one day when I suggested I resign and we try Coshocken for a while, she said all right, without eagerness but seemingly without regret.

    We had been there a little less than a year the night I came home to find her in bed with Dick Stewart. Somewhere in that year, the boredom and the quiet and the loneliness must have become too much for the city-bred girl. Only she hadn't told me about it, and maybe that was because I had settled back into the old life as if I had never been away, as if I would stay there forever. Which I would have. Only not if I had known. Not then. I was a trained engineer. We could have gone anywhere, and no farm, no way of life in the world, would have been worth losing her.

    So there had been, I figured, the loneliness and the boredom and then there had been Dick Stewart. He has a big store in St. Johns, only it isn't his. It belongs to his wife, a polio victim who won't ever walk again, and he married her to get it. But a store and plenty of tobacco money isn't enough for him.

    He has to have women. Sometimes he'll get you aside and tell you about his trips to the state capital and the girls he has there and what he does with them and you can see it in his eyes, the way he has to have them. Only the trips have to be infrequent and there have to be women in between and there are.

    And there isn't a soul in the county who would be surprised to hear that Dick Stewart had been shot in someone else's bedroom or barn loft, and there are plenty of them who'll tell you there's more than one youngster around named Brigman or Meakins or Buxton or Bailey, with the same blue eyes and curly hair and dark skin Dick Stewart has.

    So there must have been the loneliness and the boredom for her, then Stewart. Finally there was the bedroom and the fear, the blood on the white rug and the inert sprawl of the legs and the sightless glass of the eyes.

    But it had all come out the way I had planned, and nobody, as far as I knew, even had an idea it wasn't suicide. Except Dick Stewart, And he, I was sure, was keeping his mouth shut, because of that rich, paralytic wife who held his purse strings. Because he couldn't afford not to keep quiet; he had nothing to gain and everything to lose if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

    And now I could deal with him in my own way, at my own leisure. There was plenty of time, and I intended to use it. I would make him pay out for Lucy and for me. I would make him pay out, all right. But when I did, it would be foolproof. When I did, it would be like it had been with Lucy. It would look the way I wanted it to look.

    There was plenty of time to figure it out, to figure how to do it, and, sweetest of all, every day I delayed was one more day through which he would have to live, waiting for it, knowing it was coming, knowing it had to come, but not when, not how, not where.

    That was the sweetest of all, to know it was going to he like that for him until the day I decided to end it, to know the terror and the despair and the incomparable aloneness of him waiting for me to do it, somewhere, sometime, somehow.

    I began to plan murders. I planned them cold-bloodedly and deliberately, without a qualm of conscience in me, only black merciless hate, because he had it coming to him. I had the power and the right to do it. Without guilt, I planned murder upon murder, and then discarded each plan because there was a flaw, a catch, a weak link that couldn't be trusted. And then I planned again.

    I had plenty of time, you see. One thing had gone wrong. Three days after Lucy's death, the surgeon had amputated my left arm just below the shoulder, had left this ugly, reminding stump, this dangling, freakish monument to all I owed to Dick Stewart.

    

    

    It was amazing how simply a whole life could be ended.

    I don't mean just the mortality that had been Lucy's, but the whole of a life together that had been built between us. For her part, she had had no family, except a distant aunt and uncle who kept discreetly silent about the whole thing, after I had Brax Jordan notify them.

    As simply as that, with only the additional complication of a funeral I could not attend, and which few others cared to attend, and the meaningless purchase of a tombstone, she went to dust and memory.

    As for the rest of it, as soon as I was on the road to recovery from my arm operation I called in Jordan again. His quick lawyer's eyes narrowed when I told him what I wanted.

    "Don't be a fool, Harry!"

    "And then," I said, "you take what you get for it and settle up my debts and buy me the old Caldwell place."

    He shook his head.

    "They must have you doped up."

    "Look, Brax. You just do what I say. Let the bright remarks go."

    He chewed furiously at his cigar. It was nearly as big as he was. Brax Jordan was a little fellow, not much over five-four. His head, set solidly on amazingly wide shoulders, seemed far too big for his body.

    Maybe that head was just bulging with brain. A lot of people thought so, anyway. He had smashed all records at law school, and when he finished he could have had his pick of jobs with any number of big-city law firms. Yet he had come back to St. Johns to open his own practice.

    Oddly enough, it had made him rich, because he combined his law work with some of the shrewdest farm real-estate deals the county had ever seen. His holdings were far bigger than mine, although he owned no single piece of land as big as the London place.