“So you lived happily ever after, and that’s why you’re not here.”
“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Leo started to have the fantods, worse than ever. It got so bad I sent some money to Sam, for an insurance policy. I thought if it got too bad I could come out here and retire on Sam. They didn’t know about Sam.”
“They?”
“Leo and his sister. She handled the money for Leo after his memory faded. Leo blew his top the end of last year. He tried to gun an orchestra leader for no good reason at all. We took him to a doctor and the doctor said he’d been sick for twenty years and was in the final stage of paresis. We couldn’t keep him in Michigan after that. He had enemies in the organization. The money boys and the underdogs with the irons were both turning against him. Leo never laid anything on the line for his share of those banks. All he ever put up was his hard-nose reputation and his connections. If they knew he lost his mind they’d cut him out, or cut him down. So it was California here we came. I sold Una on Arroyo Beach.
“Ever since Boston, when Charlie Singleton kicked me out of his life, I had this certain idea busting my brain. He thought I was from hunger, and I thought if I went back to Arroyo Beach with money on my back I’d make him squirm. Pass him on the street and pretend I didn’t know him. Anyway, that was my idea. When I did see him again, I did a quick reverse and there I was back at the old stand, Saturday nights in his studio. I didn’t care about anything he did to me in the past. He was the only man I liked to be with. It went along like old times until a couple of weeks ago the lid blew off. When Leo found out about Charlie and me.” She paused, her eyes like fogged blue steel.
“Did he find out from Lucy?”
“Not a chance. Lucy was my one real friend in that house. Besides, she was a nurse. She had psychic – psychiatric training. She wouldn’t pull a raw deal like that on one of her patients. She was the one who warned us Leo was on the warpath. She came up the mountain in a cab one jump ahead of him.”
“Who sent Leo on the warpath?”
“Una did, at least that’s what we figured afterwards. Lucy drove me over to the hotel to keep my date with Charlie. When Lucy got back to the house, Una cross-questioned her about where I was and who I was with. Lucy wouldn’t talk, and Una fired her. I guess Una knew all about it already. She turned Leo loose and sicked him on us.
“Maybe the fantods ran in the family. Anyway, she must have been far gone with whatever it was she had, to give Leo a loaded gun and a green light. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was in the studio with Lucy when it happened. I looked out the window and saw Leo in the station-wagon with Una, and Charlie walking out to him, not realizing the danger. Charlie went right up to the station-wagon, and Leo shot him. Charlie fell down and got up again. Una took Leo’s gun away from him. We all stepped in and got him under control. Then Una put on an act about how Leo forced her to bring him there. I believed her, then. I was scared not to believe her. I’ve always been scared of Una.
“She said the shooting had to be hushed up, or else. It had to be as if nothing happened. No hospital for Charlie, and him doubled up in his car. I was afraid to argue with Una. I took what clothes I had in the studio and drove Charlie and Lucy over the pass to Bella City.
“I’d been to see Sam Benning a couple of times in the spring and summer, in case I ever needed him. He thought I was working in L.A., modeling clothes. We were on pretty good terms, but I couldn’t tell Sam the truth: that one boy-friend shot the other and Sam was to make it all come right in the end. I played it as strong as I could with Sam. I told him Charlie had made a rough pass and I shot him myself. Lucy backed me up. Charlie was past talking by then.
“Sam believed me. He made me promise if he fixed Charlie up I had to stick with him in Bella City from then on and be a wife to him. I promised. He had me over a barrel.
“Maybe the wound was worse than it looked at first, or Sam isn’t much of a surgeon. He blamed Lucy for what happened, said she fouled up the operation trying to assist him. Sam was always a man to shift blame onto other people’s shoulders. Anyway Charlie died that night, right on the table in the examination room, before he came out of the ether.”
“Who gave him the anesthetic?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t stand to see him bleeding.”
“You’re a strange woman, Bess.”
“I don’t think so. How could I watch Sam cutting into him? Charlie was my boy. I loved him.”
“I’ll tell you what’s really strange,” she added after an intervaclass="underline" “The people you love are never the ones that love you. The people that love you, the way Sam loved me, they’re the ones you can’t love. Sam was a good man when I first knew him. But he was too crazy about me. I couldn’t love him, ever, and he was too smart to fool. It ruined him.
“He did a wild thing that Sunday morning. There was Charlie dead in his house, and Sam thinking I had shot him. I couldn’t change my story at that late date. Sam was afraid he was going to lose me again, and it pushed him over the edge. He butchered Charlie, cut him up into pieces like a butcher. He locked the cellar door on me, wouldn’t let me down there. I could tell from the noises what he was doing. There was a laundry tub and an old gas stove down there that his mother left behind her when she died. When he was through, there was nothing but bones left. He spent the next three nights working on them, putting them together with wire. Sam always was good with his hands. When it was all wired together and varnished and dried, he riveted on a tag from a medical-supply house and hung the thing in a closet. He said that was the skeleton in my closet and if I ever left him–” She drew a fingernail across her throat.
There was a muffled cry from the inner room.
“And that’s your proof?” I said loudly.
“You’ll find it in the closet off his examination room. Unless you already did?”
“What did he do with Charlie’s car?”
“Hid it in the barn, under some old boards and tarpaulins. I helped him.”
“Did you help him burn Max Heiss, when Max found the car?”
Bess didn’t hear me. An intermittent sobbing and gasping rose and fell in the inner room. Bess was listening to it, the flesh haggard on the bones of her face like wet clay drooping on an armature.
“You crossed me, you,” she said.
Something fell softly and heavily against the inside of the glass-paneled door. I went to it. The door was hard to open because Sylvia had fainted against it. I reached around its edge and turned her onto her back. The metal earphones pincered her closed white face. Her eyes came open: “I’m sorry. I’m such a fool.”
I started for the water cooler. Bess was at the outer door, fumbling with the Yale lock. The packages of bills were gone from the table.
“Sit down,” I said to her straining yellow back. “I haven’t finished with you.”
She didn’t answer. All her remaining energy was focused on escape. The lock snapped back. The door opened inwards with Una pushing behind it from the hallway.
Una’s mouth was wet. Her eyes were blind with the same darkness I had seen on her brother’s face. The gun in her hand was real.
“I thought you’d be here with him. This is the payoff, Wionowski, to squealers and false friends.”
“Don’t do it.” Bess was leaning off balance against the opening door, still bent on escape.
I moved sideways to the wall, bringing my gun out fast, not fast enough. Bess staggered backwards under the blow of the first shot from Una’s gun and went down under the second. The twin explosions smashed like bones in my head.