“Your neighbors probably already have. If you don’t, it’ll look bad.”
He smirked. “Doesn’t it look bad enough?”
“I don’t think so. Take it from somebody who’s done his share of divorce work, this marriage isn’t working out…and in the settlement, Myrtle coming after you with a .32 is going to speak better for you than her.”
He was mulling that over, looking at his out-cold, incredibly beautiful, crazy-as-a-bedbug wife, when I got the hell out, before it occurred to him to ask me what I was doing there.
6
Stained ivory in the moonlight, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains provided a majestic backdrop for the humble skyline of the pink adobe cabins of Lowman’s Motor Court. Exotic as this vista may have been, I had begun to long for the simple pleasures of Chicago, Illinois. In the red blush of the motel’s nearby hovering neon sign, I pulled the Terraplane into the stall at Cabin 2, put the buggy’s top up in case the forecast of rain was correct, and trudged inside, where I began to pack.
I had decided to quit. The women on this job were either sleeping with each other or waving guns around, and that was enough to send this Midwestern lad back to where girls were girls and boys were boys and guns were carried chiefly by cops and crooks, if you’ll pardon the redundancy. Furthermore, I wanted work that did not involve a client who very likely sent his wife death threats before hiring me to protect her, and/or work which also did not require me to fly with a pilot who considered crashing her plane an interesting variation on landing.
True, this job paid well, but I had been on it long enough to rack myself up a pretty little pile of money, which I was now prepared to gather up and take home with me. On the train. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the small square room, I used the nightstand phone to make a reservation; I could get a Union Pacific sleeper at two-forty-five tomorrow afternoon.
With the exception of my clothes for tomorrow, toothbrush and powder, hairbrush and oil, and the white boxers I had on for sleeping, my bag was packed. It lay open like a clamshell on the luggage stand at the foot of the bed, the Speed Graphic nestled among the clothing like a pearl; my nine-millimeter was similarly buried.
Bare-chested like Gable in It Happened One Night (and Mantz in what happened tonight), I lay atop the nubby pink bedspread, reading Film Fun magazine, which was mostly jokes and pictures of pretty girls; I never claimed to go in for Proust. The cabin was sparsely furnished in ranch style, its pink plaster walls broken up occasionally by a framed print of a cactus or burro; but one amenity, at least, was a table model radio by the bed. I had it going fairly loud, in hopes of drowning out my thoughts, the Dorsey Brothers playing their theme song, “Lost in a Fog,” live from the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, when the knock came at the door.
I didn’t put my robe on, because I didn’t have one. And I didn’t bother putting my pants on, either, because I figured this was probably the manager asking me to turn my radio down. The windows were open, after all, wind whispering in, fluffing the green-and-yellow cotton curtains with their geometric Indian-blanket design. Clicking the radio off as I climbed from the bed, I figured my problem was already solved.
As Proust would say, little did I know.
“What?” I asked my closed door.
“It’s me.”
Amy’s voice.
I cracked the door and looked into her lovely, weathered, somewhat puffy face, expressionless as a bisque baby’s, though the blue-gray eyes were filigreed red. Her mop of dark blonde curls looked even more tousled than usual.
I asked her, “What are you doing here?”
“Let me in,” she said.
“I’m not dressed.”
“Neither am I.”
I opened the door a little wider and saw that she wasn’t, at least not properly: she still wore Mantz’s maroon-striped pajama top and a pair of dungarees that were parachute-baggy but short, her ankles showing.
And her feet were in moccasin-type slippers.
Bewildered, I let her in, shut the door, asked, “How’d you get here?”
“Toni loaned me her car. What happened at Paul’s? Is he all right?”
I climbed into my pants as I told her.
“I hope he called the cops, like I advised him,” I concluded. “If so, I’m sure he’ll leave you out of it.”
“I can’t believe she actually shot at him.” Amy was sitting on the room’s only chair, in the corner between the windows and the dresser, shaking her head; her hands were folded in her lap and she had the aspect of a repentant naughty child.
I sat on the edge of the bed and said, “I don’t know that she shot at him…. The gun just kind of went off, when I grabbed her.”
Amy gave me a sharp look. “Did she see you?”
“No. Myrtle probably thinks you grabbed her…but she didn’t see either one of us in the house…or your friend Miss Lake, either.”
She sighed deeply. “I suppose I’m lucky you were there…”
“If you came here to thank me, it’s not necessary.”
“Thank you?” She stood; her arms were straight at her sides, her hands were fists—she looked a little comical in the pajama top and short baggy jeans (on loan from Toni Lake, I’d wager) but I didn’t feel like smiling. “Thank you?”
She walked to my open suitcase and plucked the Speed Graphic from amidst my underthings. Then she strode over to where I sat on the edge of the bed, planting herself before me, holding the camera in my face as if I were on the witness stand, she were the prosecuting attorney and the camera Exhibit A.
“What’s this?” she asked, the second word hissing through the space between her teeth. “A party favor?”
“You know what it is.”
Her lip curled in a tiny sneer. “I knew what it was when I noticed it on the kitchen table, at Paul’s, too.”
She had good night vision; but then she was a pilot.
“You were spying on me, Nathan, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t take any pictures, Amy.”
She flung the camera. It smacked into the far wall, carving a notch in the plaster, springing open like a jack-in-the-box, exposing the unshot film, which unspooled, pieces of the camera flying off, broken to shit. Now I really was expecting a call from the manager.
“I thought we were friends,” she said, voice quavering with anger.
“I was hoping we might be more than that,” I said. “But I guess I’m not your type.”
She slapped me.
It rocked my head and my cheek stung like a burn, tears springing to my eyes, and I tried like hell to keep them there. The wounded like to cling to their dignity, shredded though it may be.
“And here I thought you were for equal rights,” I said.
She spit the words at me: “What are you talking about?”
And I stood and got almost nose to nose with her and, my cheek on fire, spit words back: “God help the man that raises a hand to you, but you can hit a man…. That’s always a woman’s prerogative, isn’t it?”
She sucked in air and raised a fist, as if to hammer me with it, only it froze there, her eyes going to that fist, as if her hand had had a life of its own and was surprising her with its actions.
Then her hand wasn’t a fist anymore, it was an open palm that covered her mouth and then both hands were enveloping her face as she seemed to crumple, and I caught her in my arms, folded her close to me, and surprisingly, she let me. Maybe she was just too upset to stop me.
“That was cruel of me,” I whispered in her ear.
“No…no…I should never have struck you….”
She pushed away a bit and, still in my arms, looked at me; the eyes, bloodshot though they were, were lovely and clear, more blue than gray, the color of a clear winter sky, and she fixed them on me, her tear-streaked expression regretful as she touched my cheek, gently.