Candy Page 12

  We drove days and stayed nights at motels. We ate pretty lousy food but we made pretty good love and the latter made up for the former. I thought about running for the rest of my life and this more or less bothered me; then I thought about sleeping with Candy for the rest of my life and this more or less compensated for the running.

  The Buick burned a lot of gas. But it was a pleasure to drive and there was always a nice ribbon of road stretched out in front of us. It was a good thing. If we had stayed cooped up in one place hiding out I would have cracked. This way I had something to do and the monotonous routine of driving and driving and driving helped preserve whatever vestige of sanity I had left. It wasn’t much but it was a hell of a lot better than schizophrenia.

  It was a hot and beautiful morning when we crossed the Texas-Oklahoma border and gunned off in the general direction of Galveston. Texas looked big even though I couldn’t see too much of it from the road. It stretched out every which way and I felt lost. When we pulled up at a Gulf station for a tankful I noticed that Texans look just the way they’re supposed to look. So help me, in this case the stereotype fits. Every last one of the bastards is six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders and bronzed skin. I don’t doubt that there are five-foot Texans with running noses somewhere in the vastness of the state, but I personally have never set eyes on one.

  Driving in Texas is, because of the length and breadth of the state, an ungodly bore. We were in Galveston before too long but it seemed as though we’d been driving through Texas and more Texas for the greater part of our lives. I wondered if there was no end to Texas. I wondered if there was a single solitary hill in the whole damned state. I even wondered if it ever rained there and I decided that it didn’t dare to rain. It would be afraid to—awed by the awful and awesome sureness of Texas. Because Texas was incredibly sure of itself.

  You know what they say.

  There’s nothing as sure as death and Texas.

  The passport forger, happily, was from out of state. He was short and dumpy and his skin looked as though it had been kept in a storage shed for the past five years. His eyes blinked and watered and his nose ran and he wore a look of perpetual fear.

  He had the steadiest hand I had ever seen in my life.

  He wasn’t a crook. He was an artist, a full-fledged artist who could do magnificent tricks with a pen and a printing-press. We told him what we wanted and Candy told him the name of somebody who had put her on his tail and he got right to work on our doctored documents. He never asked us who we were or what we were running from—he knew better than to ask. He was an artist and a professional in his trade and he did it up brown. We gave him carte blanche and he more than lived up to his reputation.

  In bygone times the runt would have made a fine living forging Rembrandts. Now he was doing our driver’s licenses and birth certificates and all the rest. Even an expert would have had the devil’s own time telling his products from the real thing.

  Candy, who had known enough to bargain with the used-car dealer, also knew enough not to bargain with the runt. He asked a lot—twelve hundred bucks for the works—and it was easily worth it. When we walked out of there we were Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor and no one in the world could have said otherwise.

  Or proved otherwise. Neither of us had our prints on file any place. We were Mr. and Mrs. David Trevor. Period. End of report.

  We took a hotel room, which was nice after the run of motels. We baptised the bed properly with a hot love-match and we sacked out. The bed was comfortable and the pillows were soft and we slept thoroughly.

  She was still sleeping when I woke up and I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I got dressed, shaved, and headed downstairs for breakfast. I was hungrier than I’d been in a long while and the hotel’s coffee shop had good wheat cakes. I had a stack of them drenched in real maple syrup, the kind you can’t hardly get no more.

  Over coffee and a cigarette I browsed through the Galveston morning blat. The world news was a run-of-the-mill roundup of H-bomb tests and South American revolutions, neither of which met with my approval, and the local news was glutted with reports of local corruption, which if nothing else proved that New York and Galveston weren’t as different as you might suspect at first.

  It was awhile before it occurred to me that I was reading a newspaper, the first newspaper since the murder, and that it might not be a bad idea to hunt through the paper for a story on the killing. It was a pretty exciting killing, all things considered, and Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie was a big enough name in the Social Register so that she rated nationwide coverage of her untimely demise.

  I found what I was looking for on page eleven. It was halfway down the page, a little one-column thing with a staid eighteen-point head, and it went like so:

  HUNT THINS FOR

  CHRISTIE SLAYER

  NEW YORK (AP)—Police were baffled today as clues failed to turn up concerning the whereabouts of Jeffrey Flanders, prime suspect in the murder of Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie.

  Sgt. Charles Schwerner, spokesman for Manhattan West, admitted that Flanders seemed to have “vanished into thin air.”

  “We’ve followed up every lead around,” Schwerner stated. “We’re pretty sure he’s travelling with the woman but we haven’t gotten a lead on them yet. It’s like the earth opened up and swallowed them.”

  The woman Schwerner referred to is Miss Candace Cain, acquaintance of Mrs. Christie’s, at whose swank East Side apartment Mrs. Christie was found.

  Police conjecture that Flanders and Miss Cain fled the city after Flanders criminally assaulted Mrs. Christie and stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife.

  I finished the story, nodded sadly and guiltily, and took a quick drag of my cigarette. Then when the story hit me, I dropped the cigarette and it rolled from the counter to the floor.

  I didn’t bother to pick it up.

  I re-read the last paragraph of the story, then read it a third time. I thought long and hard about the kitchen knife with which I had stabbed Caroline Lipton Christie to death.

  What kitchen knife?

  Chapter Eleven

  THERE COULD, OF COURSE, be any number of rational explanations. The wires of Associated Press had more than a few goofs on their respectable shoulders and this was quite possibly one of them. Or, if the Galveston Record went to press without benefit of teletype apparatus, a local linotype operator might have substituted a non-existent kitchen knife for my bloody hands.

  And then again …

  I tried to forget about the then-and-again part of it. I got out of the coffee shop and found a cab to take me to the Record building, a three-story brick mess that looked as though it was taking a siesta until it was time to get down to the monotony of putting out a newspaper once again. The friendly old coot with horn-rimmed spectacles and alcoholic breath who was minding the store gave me copies of the past week’s issues and didn’t even charge me a nickel apiece for them. I remember thinking hazily that a person could save a nickel a day in Galveston if he was willing to get his news a day late.

  If the kitchen knife gambit had been an error, then it had been a persistent wire service goof that showed up an amazing total of four times in the first story and at least once in every other version. It seemed that Mrs. Caroline Lipton Christie had suffered the overwhelming indignity of having her ivory throat slit from ear to ear.

  The possibility of suicide had been ruled out, I learned. Police had conjectured that Caroline might have been raped and then have killed herself, but the absence of any fingerprints whatsoever ruled that out. It was a clear-cut case of rape and murder (although the puritanical press persisted in calling it “Criminal Assault”) and the rapist and murderer, according to all sorts of testimony, turned out to be none other than yours truly.

  Two people in the world knew better. Three people if you could count Caroline, but since she was no longer in the world but in a gay heaven all her own, that left just the two of us.

  Me.

&
nbsp; And my own true love.

  I thought it over and decided that I didn’t believe it. Then I thought it over some more and decided that there was nothing else to believe no matter how bitter the inevitable realization tasted in my throat.

  So I tossed the newspapers in the nearest trashbasket in an effort to oblige in the drive to KEEP GALVESTON CLEAN and found my way back to the Hotel Westlake. My brain burned and my fingers played neurotic games with themselves. The beautiful morning was a neutral gray now and the hot sun was a pale cardboard cut-out on a sky of vomit purple.

  It all made sense, sick sense, horrible sense, unnatural sense that was now frighteningly and staggeringly and all-too-obviously natural. I was the ultimate Mark, the Magnificent Sucker, the Patsy-to-end-all-Patsies. I felt duped and swindled and taken, but more than anything else I felt appallingly stupid, which hurt more than the rest of it. There are few things quite so disheartening as the discovery that your love and trust have been used to nail you to the wall.

  In the taxi back to the hotel and on the elevator to the room I thought valiantly that it couldn’t have been her, that she couldn’t have done a thing like that, that even if she had she would never have been able to fool me the way she did. My mind invented an Unknown Person who slipped into the apartment after I left and before Candy appeared, a blank-faced, medium-built nonentity who had done the evil deed and vanished like smoke in a whirlwind.

  That explained everything. Mr. Nobody had done it, Candy thought I had done it, and off we were to Mexico. Mr. Nobody, the little man who wasn’t there.

  Only he wasn’t there. That was the sore point and it sort of fouled things up.

  I started to knock on the door, then changed my mind and used my key instead. The door opened and I walked inside and closed it behind me. She was on the bed and she was awake and she was naked. She looked at me and her eyes were wide with a combination of Gee-I’m-glad-to-see-you and Something’s-bothering-you-what-is-it? shining softly in them.

  I didn’t know what to say or where to start. I walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the nudity of her. Somehow it made me feel out of place with my clothes on but there was nothing to do about that but take my clothes off and that wasn’t what I had in mind. I was, for once in my life, not in the mood for love.

  “Hi,” she said. “I missed you this morning. I wanted you when I woke up and you weren’t here. The bed was empty and it was terrible.”

  I looked away from her. I saw her shoes at the edge of the bed with their high heels and pointed toes. I saw our clothes on one chair where we had hurled them the night before. I saw a wisp of lingerie in a tangle on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  I turned back and saw her. Her face was a little drawn now, not so much that anybody would have noticed it, but enough so that I knew she knew that something was wrong. I knew her well enough to read her face.

  Or did I? Perhaps I never knew her at all. Perhaps I was just beginning to discover her.

  “Jeff,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did I do something?”

  That was sort of a leading question.

  “Jeff—” She paused, a significant pause that was pregnant with meaning, and waited for me to unburden my alleged mind.

  I said: “How come you killed her with the knife?”

  The silence was strikingly loud.

  Her face never cracked but there was just the merest twitch of her right eye and the slightest trembling of one shoulder. That was enough. Then she was calm and relaxed and said things that didn’t mean anything to me because I did not hear them. I sat there mute and deaf with rage and self-pity and hate and every emotion in the catalogue except happiness, and finally I asked her to start over at the beginning because I hadn’t heard one goddamn word that came out of her mouth.

  “The knife was right there,” she said. “You cut her throat with it. What are you talking about?”

  “I never saw any knife.”

  “But it was there! Jeff, are you sure? Because … because if you didn’t then somebody else must have done it and you’re in the clear. Of course we’ll still have to go to Mexico because there’s no way to prove it and you did rape her, but—”

  “Candy.” I had just remembered something, something that made Mr. Nobody nobody at all. I had thought that Mr. Nobody had already died within my mind, but evidently he hadn’t because this present realization was sufficiently crushing to keep me speechless for a second or two. It was all I could do to get her name out in a flat two syllables devoid of any intonation whatsoever. That was enough—the tone of my voice must have combined with the expression on her face to silence her because her mouth snapped shut and she didn’t say another word.

  “She died in your arms,” I said. “She talked to you and told you all about it and died in your arms.”

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  “That’s how you knew I had been there,” I went on. I was talking very easily now—it seemed almost as though someone else was talking with my mouth and some other brain moving my lips, it was that simple.

  “You went to her and she told you I had been there. And then she died in your arms. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “Quite a lot of talking,” I said. “Quite a speech from a woman with her throat cut from ear to ear.”

  The color drained out of her. It was the first time I had seen her genuinely shaken and the sight did something to me. It was as though I was getting my first real indication that Candy Cain was a human being like the rest of us, a person who was not wholly invulnerable.

  But she recovered quickly. She didn’t say anything at first but the color seeped back into her flesh as suddenly as it had left it and she lay there keen-eyed, waiting for me to say something else.

  “This is unnecessary,” I said. “You already know what you did but I’m going to tell you, anyway. You walked in on Caroline, saw I was an obvious patsy for a play like this and killed her. I don’t have the slightest idea why you did it but I don’t suppose that makes much difference.”

  There was a touch of humour in those eyes of hers now and I hated her for it.

  I pushed on. “Then you cleaned out the apartment, beat it to the Astor and phoned me. You managed to convince me that I had killed her—how could I figure it for anything else? You were always careful never to say a word about how she got it. You never mentioned any knife. As soon as you did it would have been all over. Because I did a lot of things in that apartment without knowing just what I was doing, but I know damned well I never had my hands on a knife.”

  I fumbled for a cigarette and got one going. I didn’t offer her one and she didn’t ask for one. I smoked and took a few breaths.

  “Never played the radio,” I said. “I should have noticed how nervous you were when that one newscast was on, but I was so nervous myself that it sailed right past me. Now it makes sense. But how in God’s name did you expect to get away with it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Good God! I couldn’t go the rest of my life without stumbling across a newspaper story. What kind of world do you think this is? Even in Mexico there would have been some mention somewhere and someday I would have hit it and the jig would have been up. How did you figure to get clean?”

  She smiled. I didn’t particularly care for that smile.

  “Jeff,” she said, softly and clearly, “I did get away with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “You got away with it this far. But now you’re not getting away with it any further. I know damn well I didn’t kill the Christie bitch and that you did.”

  “So what?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Can you prove it, Jeff?”

  I stammered something quite meaningless.

  “You can’t prove a thing, Jeff. You know and I know that I killed Caroline. After you left she decided that I
wasn’t worth the agony you had just put her through. She wanted me to leave, Jeff. She was going to throw me into the street.”

  “That’s where you belong.”

  “She was going to throw me out on the street,” she repeated, and she didn’t act as though she had heard a word I said. “I had to kill her. She had all that money lying around the apartment, money and jewels and all, and all I had to do was kill her and it would be mine and we could run away together. You and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I like you, Jeff, and because—”

  “Cut the crap.”

  “That’s part of it,” she said, her eyes level. “I’d rather live with you than anybody else, I guess. But running away with you made it safe for me.”

  I was baffled and it must have shown on my face because my expression got a tiny laugh out of her.

  “If you didn’t come away with me,” she said, “they might not have proved you killed her. You could have taken one of those lie detector tests or something and wormed your way out. But you’re not safe now, Jeff. You ran off and nobody outside of you and me is ever going to believe you didn’t kill Caroline. Nobody in the world.”

  “But you ran off with me—”

  “I know. That makes me an accessory after the fact. And I stole all the money and jewels and that makes me a thief. But it doesn’t make me a murderer, Jeff, and that’s what it makes you. They may send me to prison for a while, but they’ll send you to the electric chair.”

  I couldn’t say a word.

  “Now do you see what I mean? You found out about me killing Caroline, but that doesn’t change a damn thing. You still have to get out of the country and I’m still going with you. We can live good in Mexico, Jeff. We can have each other just the same, and we couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t killed Caroline. We can have each other and we can be happy and—”

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked at her there, all naked and all unashamed, confessing a murder and trying to make it appear both rational and blameless, confessing a frame-up and propositioning the guy she’d just framed in the same breath.