What's Better Than Money (8 page)

“I’m not interested in women.”

“You’re in as much a mess as I am only you don’t seem to know it.”

“Oh, go to hell!” I said, furious with her. I knew she was right. I had been in a mess ever since I had come out of hospital, and what was more, I had grown to like being in a mess.

“I’ll tell you something now,” she said softly. “I hate you. I know you are good for me: I know you could save me, but all the same I hate you. I’ll never forget how you treated me when you blackmailed me about the police. Watch out, Jeff. I’ll get my own back for that even if we go into business together.”

“You try anything funny with me,” I said, glaring in her direction in the darkness, “and I’ll give you a hiding. That’s what you want: a damn good hiding.”

She suddenly giggled.

“Maybe I do. Wilbur used to beat me.”

I moved away from her. She was so corrupt and horrible it made me sick to be close to her.

“What’s the time?” she asked.

I looked at the luminous hands of my watch.

“Half past ten.”

“Let’s go.”

That set my heart thumping.

“Do they have guards here?”

“Guards? What for?”

She was already crawling away from me, and I went after her. A few seconds later we were standing together in the darkness, near the exit of the Studio. We paused to listen.

There wasn’t a sound.

“I’ll lead the way,” she said. “Keep close to me.”

We moved out of the Studio into the hot, dark night. There were stars, but the moon hadn’t come up yet. I could just see her as she paused to look into the darkness, the way I was looking.

“Are you scared?” she asked, moving close to me. I hated the feel of her slight, hot body, but my back was against the wall of the studio and I couldn’t get away from her. “I’m not. This sort of job never scares me, but I think you’re scared.”

“Okay, so I’m scared,” I said, shoving her away. “Does that satisfy you?”

“You don’t have to be. They can’t do anything to you worse than you have already done to yourself. That’s something I’m always telling myself.”

“You’re nuts! What kind of talk is that supposed to be?”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the money. It’ll be easy.”

She moved away into the darkness and I followed her.

All day, she had been carrying a sling bag over her shoulder. When she paused outside the casting director’s bungalow, I heard her zip the bag open.

I stood close to her, listening, aware of the thudding of my heart beats, feeling my blood pounding through my veins and I was scared silly.

I heard her fiddling with the lock. She must have been very expert. In a few seconds, I heard the lock snap back.

Together we entered the dark office. We paused, waiting for our eyes to become used to the faint light from the stars we could see through the uncurtained window. After a few seconds we could see the outline of the desk across the room.

We went over to it and Rima knelt beside it.

“You keep watch,” she said. “This shouldn’t take long.”

I was shaking with fright by now.

“I don’t want to go ahead with this,” I said. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Don’t be a quitter!” she said sharply. “I’m not giving up now.”

There was a sudden gleam of light as she turned the beam of a flashlight on the lock of the drawer. Then she sat on the floor and began to hum softly under her breath.

I waited, my heart thumping, listening to the tiny scratching noise she was making as she worked on the lock.

“It’s tricky,” she said, “but I’ll fix it in a moment.”

But she didn’t. The minutes dragged by: the scratching noise began to get on my nerves. Now she had stopped humming and I could hear her swearing under her breath.

“What’s going on?” I asked, moving away from the window to stare over the desk at her.

“It’s a toughie, but I’ll beat it.” She sounded quite calm. “Leave me alone. Let me concentrate.”

“Let’s get out of here!”

“Oh, quiet down!”

I turned back to the window, then my heart gave a sudden bound, leaving me breathless.

Outlined against the starlit darkness I could see the head and shoulders of a man who was looking through the window.

I didn’t know if he could see me. It was dark in the office, but he seemed to be staring directly at me.

His shoulders looked immense, and on his head was a flat peaked cap that turned me cold.

“There’s someone out there,” I said, but the words didn’t get beyond my dry lips.

Rima said, “I’ve fixed it!”

“There’s someone out there!”

“I’ve got it open!”

“Didn’t you hear me? Someone’s outside!”

“Get under cover!”

I looked wildly around the dark room. Sweat, as cold as ice, was running down my face. I started across the room as the door was flung open. The light clicked on.

The impact of the hard, bright light on me was like a blow on the head.

“Make a move and I’ll blast you!”

A cop voice: tough, hard and full of confidence. I looked towards the door.

He stood in the open doorway, a .45 in his brown muscular hand, pointing at me. He was all-cop: big, broad and terrifying.

“What are you doing in here?”

Slowly, I put up my shaking hands. I had a horrible feeling he was going to shoot me.

“I – I – I. . .”

“Keep your hands like that!”

He didn’t know Rima was crouching behind the desk. My one thought now was to cover her: to get out of the office before he found her.

Somehow I managed to get some control over my shaking nerves.

“I lost my way,” I said. “I was going to sleep here.”

“Yeah? You’ll sleep somewhere a lot safer than here. Come on. Move slowly and keep your hands up.”

I moved towards him.

“Hold it!” He was staring at the desk. “Have you been trying to bust into that?”

“No. . . I tell you. . .”

“Back up against the wall! Move!”

I backed up against the wall.

“Turn around!”

I faced the wall.

There was a long moment of complete silence.

The only sound in my ears was the thud-thud-thud of my heart beats: then there came a violent, shattering crash of gunfire.

The sound, enormous in the room made me cringe. I looked over my shoulder, thinking the guard had walked right into Rima and had killed her.

He was standing by the desk, bent double. His smart cap had fallen off, showing a bald spot at the back of his head. His gauntlet gloves were pressed to his stomach, his gun lay on the floor.

From between the fingers of his gloves, blood began to leak, then there was a second bang of gunfire. I saw the flash of the gun coming from behind the desk.

The guard gave a strangled grunt: the sound a fighter makes when his opponent has sunk in one that really cripples. Then, slowly, he tipped over and spread out on the floor.

I stood there, staring, my hands still in the air, sick enough to throw up.

Rima straightened up from behind the desk. In her hand was a smoking .38. She looked indifferently at the guard. She hadn’t even lost colour.

“There’s no money,” she said savagely. “The drawer’s empty.”

I scarcely heard what she was saying.

I stared at the guard, watching the trickle of blood move out of him in a thin thread across the polished parquet floor.

“Let’s get out of here!”

The urgent rasp in her voice brought me to my senses.

“You’ve killed him!”

“He would have killed me, wouldn’t he?” She stared coldly at me. “Come on, you fool! Someone will have heard the shooting!”

She started across the room, but I grabbed her arm, jerking her around.

“Where did you get that gun?”

She wrenched free.

“Oh, come on! They’ll be here in a moment!”

Her indifferent, glittering eyes horrified me.

Then somewhere in the outer darkness I heard a siren start up. Its moaning note chilled me.

“Come on! Come on!”

She ran out into the darkness and I went after her.

Lights were coming on all over the Studios. Men’s voices shouted.

I felt her hand on my arm as she shoved me down a dark alley. We ran blindly as the siren continued to moan into the night.

“Here!”

She pulled me into a dark doorway. For a brief moment her flashlight made a puddle of light, then turned off. She pulled me down behind a big wooden crate.

We heard racing, heavy footsteps go by. We heard men shouting to each other. Someone began to blow a shrill whistle that set my nerves jangling.

“Come on!”

If it hadn’t been for her, I would never have got out of the place. She was terribly cool and controlled. She steered me through the dark alleys. She seemed to know when we were about to run into danger and when it was clear to go ahead.

As we ran past the endless buildings and the vast Studio sheds, the whistles and the voices grew fainter, and at last, panting, we stopped in the shadow of a building to listen.

There was silence now except the still moaning siren.

“We’ve got to get out of here before the cops arrive,” Rima said.

“You killed him!”

“Oh, shut up! We can get over the wall at the end of this alley.”

I went with her until we came to a ten-foot wall. We paused beside it and looked up at it.

“Help me up.”

I took her foot in both my hands and heaved her up. She swung one leg over the wall, bending low and stared down into the darkness.

“It’s okay. Can you get up?”

I walked back, ran at the wall, jumped and grabbed at the top. I got a grip, hung for a moment, then heaved myself up. We both rolled over the wall and dropped onto the dirt road that ran alongside the Studio.

We walked quickly to the main road. Along this road was parked a line of cars belonging to people in a night club across the way.

“There should be a bus in five minutes or so,” Rima said.

I heard the approaching sound of police sirens.

Rima grabbed my arm and shoved me to a Skyliner Ford.

“Get in – quick!”

I slid in and she followed.

She had just time to close the door when two police cars went storming past, heading for the main entrance to the Studio.

“We’ll wait here,” Rima said. “There’ll be more coming. They mustn’t see us on the street.”

This made sense although I was aching to get away.

“Larry!” Rima said, disgust in her voice. “I should have known he would get it all wrong. They must bank the money or put it in a safe when they close down.”

“Do you realise you’ve killed a man?” I said. “They can send us to the gas chamber. You mad bitch! I wish I had never had anything to do with you!”

“It was in self-defence,” she said hotly. “I had to do it!”

“It wasn’t! You shot him down in cold blood. You shot him twice!”

“I would have been a fool to let him shoot me, wouldn’t I? He had a gun in his hand. It was self-defence!”

“It was murder!”

“Oh, shut up!”

“I’m through with you. I never want to see you again so long as I live!”

“You’re yellow! You wanted the money as much as I did! You wanted to make money out of me! Now, when things turn sour. . .”

“You call killing a man turning sour?”

“Oh, quiet down!”

I sat still, my hands gripping the steering wheel. I was panic stricken. I told myself I must have been out of my mind to have got mixed up with her. If I got away I would go home and I would start my studies again. I would never do a bad thing again so long as I lived.

We heard more sirens. Another police car packed with plain clothes men went past, and a few seconds later, an ambulance.

“That’s the end of the procession,” Rima said. “Let’s go.”

She got out of the car and I followed her.

We walked fast to the bus stop. After two or three minutes the bus arrived.

We sat at the back. No one paid us any attention. Rima smoked, staring out of the window. As we came down the main road to the waterfront, she began to sneeze.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

Soon after seven o’clock the next morning, I woke out of a restless sleep, and staring up at the ceiling, I thought back on the previous night. I felt pretty bad.

I had had only three or four hours’ sleep. Most of the night I had thought of the guard and how Rima had shot him.

She had gone to her room when we had got back, and I had heard her snivelling and sneezing for an hour until I thought the sound would drive me crazy. Then I heard her go out and I guessed she was going to hunt for some sucker to buy her a shot.

I was asleep when she came in. I was aware of her door shutting but I was so tired, I turned over and went off to sleep again.

Now, lying in bed, with the sun coming around the edges of the blind, I wondered what I had best do. I had to leave town. I didn’t dare stay here any longer. I would see Rusty, borrow the fare from him, and I’d leave this morning.

There was a train out around eleven o’clock.

My bedroom door opened abruptly and Rima came in. She was dressed, wearing her red shirt and her skin tight jeans. She looked pale and her eyes were glittering unnaturally. She had had her shot all right.

She stood at the foot of the bed, looking at me.

“What do you want?” I said. “Get out of here!”

“I’m going to the Studios. Aren’t you coming?”

“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t go back there for all the money in the world.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, her eyes contemptuous.

“I’m not going to pass up that job. If I do, it’ll be the last I’ll get. What are you going to do then?”

“I’m leaving town. Have you forgotten you killed a man last night or is it just one of those things you can brush off?”

She smiled.

“They think you did it.”

That brought me bolt upright in bed.

“Me? What do you mean?”

“Relax. No one killed anyone. He’s not dead.”

I threw off the sheet and swung my feet to the floor.

“How do you know?”

“It’s in the paper.”

“Where is it?”

“It was outside one of the rooms.”