I played my flashlight beam over him.
He was dead, all right.
“Looks like we can save our money,” I said. “It’s all over now.”
“I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So do I.”
We got the hell out of there.
7
A month later, just as you could smell autumn on the summer winds, Jan and I celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary. We drove up to Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, and stayed at a very nice hotel and rented a Chris-Craft for a couple of days. This was the first time I’d been able to relax since the thing with the burglar had started.
One night when Jan was asleep, I went up on the deck of the boat and just watched the stars. I used to read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a boy. I always remembered how John Carter felt — that the stars had a very special destiny for him and would someday summon him to that destiny. My destiny, I decided that night there on the deck, was to be a good family man, a good stockbroker, and a good neighbor. The bad things were all behind me now. I imagined Neil was feeling pretty much the same way. Hot bitter July seemed a long way behind us now. Fall was coming, bringing with it football and Thanksgiving and Christmas. July would recede even more with snow on the ground.
The funny thing was, I didn’t see Neil much anymore. It was as if the sight of each other brought back a lot of bad memories. It was a mutual feeling, too. I didn’t want to see him any more than he wanted to see me. Our wives thought this was pretty strange. They’d meet at the supermarket or shopping center and wonder why “the boys” didn’t get together anymore. Neil’s wife, Sarah, kept inviting us over to “sit around the pool and watch Neil pretend he knows how to swim.” September was summer hot. The pool was still the centerpiece of their life.
Not that I made any new friends. The notion of a midweek poker game had lost all its appeal. There was work and my family and little else.
Then, one sunny Indian-summer afternoon, Neil called and said, “Maybe we should get together again.”
“Maybe.”
“Its over, Aaron. It really is.”
“I know.”
“Will you at least think about it?”
I felt embarrassed. “Oh, hell, Neil. Is that swimming pool of yours open Saturday afternoon?”
“As a matter of fact, it is. And as a matter of fact, Sarah and the girls are going to be gone to a fashion show at the club.”
“Perfect. We’ll have a couple of beers.”
“You know how to swim?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “And from what Sarah says, you don’t either.”
I got there about three, pulled into the drive, walked to the back where the gate in the wooden fence led to the swimming pool. It was eighty degrees, and even from here I could smell the chlorine.
I opened the gate and went inside and saw him right away. The funny thing was, I didn’t have much of a reaction at all. I just watched him. He was floating. Face-down. He looked pale in his red trunks. This, like the others, would be judged an accidental death. Of that I had no doubt at all.
I used the cellular phone in my car to call 911.
I didn’t want Sarah and the girls coming back to see an ambulance and police cars in the drive and them not knowing what was going on.
I called the club and had her paged.
I told her what I’d found. I let her cry. I didn’t know what to say. I never do.
In the distance, I could hear the ambulance working its way toward the Neil Solomon residence.
I was just about to get out of the car when my cellular phone rang. I picked up. “Hello?”
“There were three of us that night at your house, Mr. Bellini. You killed two of us. I recovered from when your friend stabbed me, remember? Now I’m ready for action. I really am, Mr. Bellini.”
Then the emergency people were there, and neighbors, too, and then wan, trembling Sarah. I just let her cry some more. Gave her whiskey and let her cry.
8
He knows how to do it, whoever he is.
He lets a long time go between late-night calls. He lets me start to think that maybe he changed his mind and left town. And then he calls. Oh, yes, he knows just how to play this little game. He never says anything. He doesn’t need to. He just listens. And then hangs up.
I’ve considered going to the police, of course, but it’s way too late for that. Way too late.
Or I could ask Jan and the kids to move away to a different city with me. But he knows who I am, and he’d find me again.
So all I can do is wait and hope that I get lucky, the way Neil and I got lucky the night we killed the second of them.
Tonight I can’t sleep.
It’s after midnight.
Jan and I wrapped presents until well after eleven. She asked me again if anything was wrong. We don’t make love as much as we used to, she said; and then there are the nightmares. “Please tell me if something’s wrong, Aaron. Please.”
I stand at the window watching the snow come down. Soft and beautiful snow. In the morning, a Saturday, the kids will make a snowman and then go sledding and then have themselves a good old-fashioned snowball fight, which invariably means that one of them will come rushing in at some point and accuse the other of some terrible misdeed.
I see all this from the attic window.
Then I turn back and look around the poker table. Four empty chairs. Three of them belong to dead men.
I look at the empty chairs and think back to summer.
I look at the empty chairs and wait for the phone to ring.
I wait for the phone to ring.
1996
JAMES CRUMLEY
HOT SPRINGS
James (Arthur) Crumley (1939-2008) was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and grew up in south Texas. After serving in the Army in the Philippines, he received his BA in history (1964) from the Texas College of Arts and Industries, to which he had received a football scholarship, then got his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing (1966) from the University of Iowa, where he began his first novel, One to Count Cadence, as his masters thesis; it was published in 1969.
After that Vietnam War novel, he turned to mystery fiction with The Wrong Case (1975), introducing the first of his two private eye characters, Milo Milo-dragovich, who also appeared in Dancing Bear (1983) and The Final Country (2001). His tougher PI, C. W. Sughrue, made his debut in The Last Good Kiss (1978), which many contemporary mystery writers, such as George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane, regard as among the most influential crime novels of the second half of the twentieth century. This memorable novel opens with one of the most famous and perfect first lines in crime fiction: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” Sughrue also appeared in The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), The Right Madness (2005), and Bordersnakes (1996), in which Milo also features. Inexplicably, and to its everlasting shame, the Mystery Writers of America never gave Crumley any award, or even nominated him for one — a seemingly impossible scenario when one considers the power and importance of his work, as well as the nearly overwhelming beauty of his prose.
“Hot Springs” was first published in the anthology Murder for Love (New York: Delacorte, 1996).
At night, even in the chill mountain air, Mona Sue insisted on cranking the air conditioner all the way up. Her usual temperature always ran a couple of degrees higher than normal, and she claimed that the baby she carried made her constant fever even worse. She kept the cabin cold enough to hang meat. During the long, sleepless nights, Ben-bow spooned to her naked, burning skin, trying to stay warm.