The Neon Jungle (13 page)

“Now wait, I…”

“But that would leave your friend Sussen in possession of as much inconvenient information as you have. We could make your death look accidental. But two fatal accidents compound risk. I assure you, we are not being melodramatic. This is a matter of business. We realize now that your rather dramatic distribution system was a mistake. We should have kept our… normal methods. Now this will be an intelligence test, Lockter. What do you think we would like you to do?”

“My God, I don’t—”

“Think, Vern. Think hard.”

Vern lit a cigarette, noting that his hands shook. The back of his neck felt cool. He did not like the way the Judge had made him feel young, stupid, unimportant. He thought back over the bewildering conversation. He said, thinking aloud, “You think you need more of a handle on me. And you think Stussen isn’t of any use any more on account of… I guess you’ve decided to give up the delivery system.”

“Correct. You’re doing splendidly.”

“Then I guess maybe you want me to kill Rick Stussen.”

“There’s a certain promise to you, son. Under stress you can think quite constructively. You do that and then we’ll be happy to trust you to take a fall for supplying the girl and not attempt a trade. I would say that in view of your previous record, three years would be a reasonable sentence. Three years and a guarantee of employment when you are released. If you bungle the killing, no information you can give them will keep you from at least a life sentence. We, of course, would like to have evidence of premeditation.”

“What do you mean?”

The Judge turned on the dash lights, took a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket “I’ll dictate and you write, Vern. I think if you lean close to the dash lights, you can see well enough.”

“Look, I don’t—

“Come now, Vern. This is just good procedure. Date it, please, at the top. Go ahead. That’s fine. The salutation should be—let me see now… ‘Darling baby.’ That’s certainly anonymous enough. Here’s the message. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I meant what I said last night about that Rick Stussen. He’s too damn dumb to live. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to figure some way to kill him so they’ll never catch me. Burn this note, baby. I trust you. It would look like hell in court, wouldn’t it? Ha-ha! Same place, same time tomorrow night, baby. All my love.’ Now sign it ‘Vern.’ Thank you, son.” The pad was taken out of his hand. The Judge examined it. “Glad you didn’t try to disguise your handwriting. You gave us a sample this morning, you know.”

Vern felt a coldness inside him. One thing was perfectly obvious: With that note in existence, he would not dare kill Stussen. They couldn’t trap him that way. So pretend agreement, and make plans, and run like hell. Run to where they’d never find him. With that decision made, confidence began to seep back into him.

“Now, Vern,” said the Judge, “let us just review your possible courses of action. One, you kill Stussen skillfully. Then you are picked up for supplying heroin to the Varaki girl and this note in our files guarantees your loyalty to us, because if you talk, the note will be sent to the authorities and the Stussen affair will be reopened. Two, you bungle the Stussen killing and you are picked up for it. You will still keep silent because this note, showing premeditation, will guarantee your electrocution. Three, you try to run for it. One of our people will kill Stussen and we will send the note in and let the authorities help us run you down. No matter who finds you first, our people or the law, you will quite certainly die. I think we can safely say, Vern, in the vernacular, that this note wraps you up.”

“If I don’t bungle it, and do my time without talking, do I get the note back?”

“I’m sorry, my boy. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. The note will be kept in a safe place. It could be considered a form of contract for your future services. A business asset.”

Vern thought of all the implications for three long seconds and then, moving very quickly, stabbed his hand out at the pocket where the Judge had placed the notebook. His fingertips barely touched the fabric when he was slugged from behind, rapped sharply over the left ear. It was done skillfully He spiraled down through grayness to the very edge of unconsciousness and then come slowly back up to the real world of the car and the dim dash lights and the darkness. He bent forward, his hand cupping the throbbing place over his ear.

“We’ll let you out here, Vern,” the Judge said. “Today is Monday. Make this week’s deliveries. You’ll have to take care of Stussen before next Monday. Monday morning leave the collection in the usual place. But there’ll be no more deliveries, of course. That means you’ll have between now and next Saturday night to plan how you’ll arrange the matter of Stussen. It should occur Saturday night or Sunday.”

“Want to tell me exactly when, where, and how?” Vern asked bitterly.

“I’ve never cared a great deal for sarcasm,” the Judge said.

Vern got out of the car. It rolled smoothly away and, forty yards up the street, the Judge turned the lights on. Vern walked for a little way, and then he was sick. He supported himself with one hand against a tree. He wiped his lips with his handkerchief and threw it over a hedge into a small yard. His heels made empty sounds in the street. It was always the same. One slip, one impulse, and they came in on you. Impulse to fix the kid up. Impulse to take over and suggest a course of action. One slip and they had you. No more the soft-stepping, the slick cat-foot silences, the secret ways. No more. The money there, tamped in dirt. No good. Paper. Use it and all the Rowells moved in. Where did you get it? How did you get it? No more escape.

Unless…

He stopped. The city night was like soft movement around him. Unless. And that was the one thing that would make the note valueless. He wondered why he had forgotten. Someone had to kill Stussen violently and in anger and with an utter carelessness of consequence, and with a perfect willingness to confess the crime. The old man had the shoulder meat from hoisting ten thousand crates of food, ten thousand sides of beef. The old man had anger. Anger now at what had happened to Teena. Anger at what could happen to Jana. Jana, unused wife, feeling the shifting subtle torment of the body’s demands, while the old man dreamed of a lost son and now would dream of a daughter equally lost. Jana, moving in ancient instinctual patterns, most vulnerable because of that lingering Old World tradition of submission. And he sensed how it could be done.

JANA HEARD a faint creak on the staircase. Gus, beside her, filled the warm still air of the room with harsh metronomic snores. She heard a sound of water running. She turned her head and looked at the luminous dial of the bedside clock. A little after twelve. That would be Vern, the last one in. All in, now. Except for Teena. Teena away in some strange place. In a white bed in a white place with white lights in the halls, and a smell of sterilizing.

The nights were long. Unbearably long. It seemed impossible to exhaust the stubborn body. She thought longingly of the harvest times. The roar of the binder and the prickling of dust and chaff on sweaty faces. And working as hard as a man through the long hot days until your back was full of bitter wires, and the hard bed became as deep and soft as clouds, and morning came the instant you closed your eyes.

She remembered the barn dances, the sturdy stompings, the hard twang and scrape of the music, the nasal chant, the prance and bounce and the hard locked arms, and the quick, frank, stirring touches during the fast music beat. It had all happened in a faraway world where everything looked golden. The barn lights, the fields, the folded glow of the sun. She remembered the shy boy from down the road. Peter. The October day on the fresh spread hay in the unused box stall they had lost all shyness. After that they were together whenever they could manage it. All in a lost golden world. They had never seemed to think of talk about anything beyond the times they could be together. And then it had all ended that terrible day in August. That picnic day.

Peter had driven the two of them out there in his family’s pickup truck. Vast sandwiches, dandelion wine, and nearly half of a not quite stale chocolate cake. They’d walked from the pickup carrying the picnic lunch down to their place—a steep cut in the bank with a soft flat bed of moss and grass. The cut angled back so that when they were at the very end of it they could not see the lake at all, nor could they be seen by anyone unless that person looked directly down at them, a project that would be considerable hampered by thorn bushes.

With the sun directly overhead so that it shone down on the soft green bed and on them, warmly, they had made love for quite a long time and then, vastly hungry, had eaten every scrap of the food. The sun no longer came into the cut and they drank the wine and then made love in the green shadows. Then he had pulled on his swimming trunks and gone out of the cut and she had lain back, feeling the wine in her, feeling the prickle of the grass against her, feeling the contentment and the drifting sweet exhaustion. She had thought she heard him call and she remembered that she had smiled. At last, yawning, she had put on her own suit and gone out. He was not there. He was always playing jokes. She called him, guessing that he had come out of the water and hidden himself. He wouldn’t come out. She called him and then she sulked and she called that she was going to drive the truck home and leave him. She grew angry and while she was angry the sun moved behind a cloud in the west. The blue lake slowly turned gray and the wind made it choppy. The wind was cool and she hugged herself, shivering. The day was suddenly lonely, cold and empty, and she was no longer angry, but frightened as she looked at the grayness of water.

They found him when dawn was beginning to make the harsh floodlights look pale. She had refused to leave. She sat on the hill wrapped in the blanket with her father’s hand tight on her shoulder, watching the slow movements of the boat lights. She saw how it would be for him down there, with his drowned hair, and his thin tanned face, and the lean strong body that had loved hers. They hooked his flesh at dawn and brought him up, and some of the boats came in and the others headed down the lake, back to their home docks.

She went down the hill with her father’s arm around her, and looked at him before they carried him up the hill to the county ambulance. She thought he would look frightened, or as if he had died in pain. But his face was swollen, darkened, and absolutely expressionless.

She knew that they would inevitably have married. Both families had expected it. The funeral time was not hard. It was like something happening in a movie. She wished only that they could have created a new life within her that last time there in the cleft in the hillside, so that in some way there would be preserved that thin tanned face and the look of him so that he would not be so completely dead. It had been clear to her that she would have to get away from that place where he always stood, waiting for her, just out of sight around every corner. The wish to go to school in Johnston seemed a good enough answer. It was also clear that there would never be anyone else. Never.

She was related to Gus’s dead wife. He missed his wife badly. Something about her seemed to remind Gus of the way his wife had been when they had both been young. In an odd way it seemed to help him to have her around. One night, a year and a half ago, they had been alone in the house. The others were out. She had decided to go to bed early. She came out of the bathroom to go to her room and found Gus standing in the hall. He looked at her very oddly. She had to go by him to get to her room. He caught her and put his strong arms around her and breathed quickly against her hair. She stood very still and cold for a time, and then sensed his loneliness and his need. And she sensed also a physical stirring within herself that seemed aside and apart from what she had felt in her mind for Peter. She gave herself to him in her room. In the act she found a release she had not expected. Afterward he cried and spoke to her in her parents’ tongue, which she could understand but not speak well, calling himself an evil man. In the darkness she told him of Peter, and made him understand, She said they had both lost the most important one. She said she would marry him, if he would be willing to do that.

They were married two weeks later, to the consternation of the family, to the heavy sour amusement of Anna. And the marriage, for Jana, turned out to be something entirely unanticipated. Gus forgot his grief in the joys of the young body of his bride. He grew visibly younger. He was a good virile strength to be with in the night, a good one to laugh with in the daytime. He made her small gifts of tenderness, and her heart grew warm toward him.

With the news of Henry’s death, he changed utterly. Within days he lost all the youth she had brought to him. He was no longer a lover. He was a sag-shouldered old man who slept beside her. She had touched him timidly a few times, with the courage of her need, only to have him mutter something incomprehensible and turn heavily away from her. She tried dozens of little ways to reawaken his desire for her, not only because she had learned to need him, but also because she thought that it would help him, that it would give him some little moments of forgetfulness. In the end she began to realize that to him she was now daughter rather than wife. And she resigned herself to tension and to nervousness, hoping that they would soon fade, hoping that the body would slowly readjust itself.

Tonight he had told her of Teena, and he had held her close in the big bed, his slow tears dropping hot against her shoulder. Being held close had finally begun to stir her, in spite of her wish merely to hold him and comfort him. She had restrained herself for as long as she could and then expressed her need in a way that was unmistakable to him, only to have him fling himself away from her and roll over, huddled in a grief he no longer wished to share. After a long time he had fallen asleep, and she lay in the darkness and tried to think of dull and trivial things.

At seven o’clock Tuesday evening, during the long June twilight, the store was closing. Walter locked the door as the last customer, a small boy with a loaf of bread, left and went behind the counter to help Bonny cash up. Rick was rearranging the meat case, taking some of the items into the cooler. Dover, the new boy, was filling the trash cans in the back behind the storeroom and lugging them around one by one to the curb out front for early-morning collection. Gus was working on the vegetables in the display case, snipping off wilted leaves with his thumbnail, picking out the spoiled tomatoes and tossing them into a small broken hamper that Dover would place out front. Jana had swept out and she stood in the left side of the display window taping to the inside of the windows the signs Walter had lettered indicating specials for tomorrow. The truck had driven in from the last delivery and Vern Lockter was tossing a few empty cartons into the storeroom. Everyone worked doggedly and silently. In past years the time of closing had been a good part of the day. Jokes and a few cans of beer opened and talk about the day’s business. But on this Tuesday night there was no talk. Just the low murmur of Walter and Bonny, checking the tape and machine totals, the wet splash of spoiled tomatoes, the click-chunk of the cooler door, the faint acid buzzing of the neon.