Quint hesitated. Finally he said, “When do you plan going?”
Hastings moved his grip from the chair, “The first flight I can get tomorrow morning.”
“Very well,” Quint said.
17. Carol McCloud
Carol McCloud had two telephones, both in the living room of the suite. One was her listed number; the bell was disconnected, she never knew if it was ringing. An answering service took her calls on that line.
The unlisted telephone rang. She was lounging on the divan with a book; in her occupation, with most of the day to herself, she had a good deal of time for reading.
“Hello?”
“Carol?”
A man’s voice, calling her by her first name. She had the brief wild thought that there was only such a tiny handful of people in the whole world who would think of her when they spoke the name “Carol.”
She said, “Hello, Mason,” absenting all feeling from her tone.
“Have you got a date tonight?”
“How delicately you put it,” she said. “It’s Friday. What do you think?”
“Break it.”
“My clients don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Break it,” he said again. “Find somebody else to take your place.”
“If I could be replaced that easily at the last minute,” she said, “I wouldn’t be in my tax bracket.”
He laughed. Over the phone it was a hard, metallic sound. He said, “That’s my own line you’re using against me. Do you think that’s fair?”
“Since when have you ever worried about whether anything was fair?”
“Break your date,” he said. “I’ll be there at seven.”
Click.
She put the receiver down slowly and glanced at the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel-ten past five.
She had to make nine phone calls before she was able to find a suitable girl to cover for her. Afterward she went around the apartment doing meaningless busy things-adjusting ashtrays, moving a chair six inches, fiddling with air-conditioners. She was too angry to go back to her book.
In the bathroom mirror she inspected the fresh bruise on her right cheek and applied a new coat of makeup to cover it; the bruise had come on top of an old one that hadn’t quite healed, and her cheek stung with throbbing agony.
An East Side hotel manager had called yesterday-he had four tycoons from the Coast looking to have a party. She had rounded up three girls and shepherded them to the appointed suite. The four tycoons were in real estate, and there was an hour’s bragging about the millions they had made from Southern California land, after which they began to complain that the hotel manager had made them shell out the price of a small aircraft carrier and you girls God damn better be worth it.
The girls gave the johns a full-scale stag act. Three of the tycoons were high enough to loosen up and enjoy it. The fourth was beyond that stage into drunken surliness. He babbled something about his wife, something about Good Christian Women, something about Sin and Communists, and he belted her across the face. She laid his face open with her fingernails and kneed him in the groin and left him to his three companions, who shut him up.
It didn’t happen often; it had been a long time since she had accepted a john without references. She didn’t like being mauled; she feared exposure, the unknown allegiances of strangers. There were only two things she feared more. One was time, which would age her; the other was that voice on the telephone just now.
She went into the bedroom and put on her leotards and rolled out the mat on top of the carpet. She had done her exercises once today, but now she did them again, needing that mindless concentration on ritual physical movement. She spent an hour at it, exhausted herself, and knew she would be stiff in the morning; she took a hot shower, and a cold shower, and creamed and powdered her body, and after that she dressed herself in floor-length satin hostess pajamas. She took a great deal of care and time with her hair and her eye makeup, but just the same it was only six-forty when she was done. She went into the living room and sat down facing the door, folded her hands in her lap, and waited with no expression at all on her face.
He always made her vividly aware of the past she didn’t want to remember. She remembered the sagging clapboard Victorian farmhouse with its paint long gone, weathered to a splintery gray. Kentucky, childhood, endless cuddlings by numerous “uncles.” Her father had been an unidentified sailor who had spent one night in Lexington on his way to New London. About the only home she remembered was the old farmhouse, with a rusty De Soto up on blocks in the yard, a sagging washday line hung between house and tree, chickens and dogs, two rusty truck fenders, and a dented galvanized milk can. They were on the relief rolls, recipients of charity packages of clothes and food at Christmastime. Her mother had been a sleazy middle-aged bag of Southern discomforts, too distracted by sex and alcohol to mind living in lackluster filth.
She remembered herself, a child of nine, curiously watching through an open window, seeing her mother step out of her clothes and leave them on the floor while a man, whose two-and-a-half-ton truck sat warm-hooded in the drive, came into sight putting a can of beer to his lips, wiping his mouth, brutally crushing the empty can in one hand. She remembered the torn undershirt, a wedge out of the cloth open and flapping at the side, revealing the man’s hirsute pelt. The man tossed the mangled can away and reached impatiently for her mother’s sagging naked body. The clatter of the can on the linoleum floor, the resigned flatness of her mother’s withdrawn face, the man’s blasphemous laughing remarks, and then the crash and squeak of the bed.
One day her mother had gone down to the crossroads to get a bottle of whiskey. She hadn’t come back. Somebody said she took up with a salesman driving through. Carol had been twelve then; she remembered teen-age boys sneaking looks at her legs, a teacher who’d fondled her developing breasts, the groping hands of the men folk of the hill families who’d passed her from hand to hand after her mother ran off. She had done chores, now and then gone briefly to school. One seventeen-year-old had taken her to a boondock party, and he had put something in her drink that had made her feel good all over. Whatever it was, it ran her up the walls. She had stayed with him in the woods for four days. Afterward someone said something, and the boy’s father horse-whipped her off the farm.
At fifteen she was slinging hash in a crossroads tavern. The cook’s young brother came home from the Army, he was a smiling dandy with worldly charm, and they were married in the spring by a circuit preacher. Their sensuous delirium had lasted almost a week, after which Floyd had turned sulky and cross and dragged her off with him, to Concord and then to Pensacola, and then to Houston, on the trail of elusive wealth: “You want to eat beans the rest of yo’ life?” He had borrowed money to open a Japanese car franchise, but it had failed; he had wildcatted an oil field and hit a dry hole; he met some gamblers, and they went to Miami.
He had become rough and cursory in bed, mounting her and pumping his spurt into her and leaving her hung up dry. She learned to make her body a nerveless thing, without shame or sensation, a bitter insensitive receptacle for his absentminded pleasures. He was making enemies then, with his surly ways, and they were not the kind of enemies a man could afford. He had already become a compulsive loser; now he ran his gambling debts up so high there was nothing to do but run for it. By then she had a spiderweb of scars on her buttocks from his tantrums. He refused to leave her behind; they left in the middle of the night, traveling in a car he had stolen, driving across the South by night, holing up by day. She was sixteen then, pregnant, and terrified. They fled into the Southwest and ditched the stolen car in Amarillo, hitchhiked to Albuquerque, and stopped there. He found work pumping gas in a filling station and began to lay plans to rob the till.
Whenever she argued with him, he beat her. He told her to meet him at the gas station at two in the morning, and she was too frightened to refuse; and when she arrived at the appointed hour, she found him bending over the owner’s body, searching the pockets for the cash-register keys-he had smashed the owner’s larynx with a tire iron. He emptied out the register, and they drove north in a car someone had left overnight in the gas station for a lube job. They left it parked on a side street in Trinidad, took a bus to Colorado Springs, stole a pickup truck out of a shopping-center parking lot, and drove through the night across the Rockies to Grand Junction, where a man spotted them having coffee in a diner and followed them outside. The man was from Miami.