These were things that anybody could see—even Brad.
But nobody else could see inside. Nobody else could see her eyes when she cried because she never cried when anybody else was around. Most of her beauty was inside, and nobody else could see inside her. Their eyes stopped at the clear skin and the corn-colored hair and the gently curved body, and that is why I was the only person who ever knew Margie.
The others never knew how she felt in your arms when she was very happy or very sad. I don’t give a damn how many arms she’s been in; she’s only happy or sad with me. With the others she crawled into a shell as thin and tight as skin, and the others think that shell is Margie.
But it isn’t.
I felt sorry for the others, if you want to know the truth. I felt sorry for them because they never stayed all night with Margie and woke up with her tears matting the hair on their chests and her body warm and quiet.
When I asked her to marry me she cried more than ever and told me I was crazy and I didn’t mean it. Then she said yes, and cried some more and we made love so beautifully that even thinking about it weeks later made me shake a little.
I finished cleaning the gun and set it up on the rack on the wall. I skinned the rabbits and dressed them and salted them down, and then I washed up and changed my shirt and headed towards Margie’s place. She lived by herself in a little cabin on the outskirts of the town.
Days she clerked in the five-and-dime in town, but that was going to change. She’d be coming to my place and she’d be my woman, and then she wouldn’t have to work anymore. She didn’t have to do a thing she didn’t want to. She could just lie around the house all day loving me.
That would be enough.
The moon was up by the time I got to her cabin. The moon was round and bright and golden and it floated like a California orange. When I opened Margie’s door, the wind nearly tore it clear off its hinges.
The wind blew all night long, but I didn’t hear it.
I think the wind set a record for our part of Kansas. It kept up day after day, each day a little worse than the last, and you could tell there was more than a storm brewing. You could smell it the way the wheat was bowed over so much it looked like it grew that way.
The wind was all over. There was a rush of accidents—a two-car head-on collision at the intersection of Mill Run and 68, a blowout just a mile from our house, a freak accident with a telephone pole dropping on a parked car.
Nobody walked away from those accidents. Five people died in the two-car deal and a salesman got sandwiched in the blowout when his car turned over. And there were two kids from the high school in the backseat of that parked car. You couldn’t tell which was which, the way the telephone pole pressed their bodies together.
It sounded silly, but everybody knew it was the wind. And the wind kept blowing without a storm.
And the wind was in Brad, the way he kept up with his needling and prodding. He was getting through to me more often and my hand was sore from making a fist and relaxing it. He made up stories about Margie and who she went with and what they did and how many times and other crazy things. I just couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m telling you this for your own good,” he would say. “Hell—get what you can. I don’t blame you for that. But I have to keep you from marrying her. I’ve gotta look out for my older brother. You farmers don’t know all the angles.”
That got Pa mad. He started off how there was nothing wrong with being a farmer and how it wasn’t as bad as the Navy where all you did was ride a tin boat or maybe kill some folk if there was a war on.
Every day was just that much worse than the last.
But when it happened I wasn’t ready for it. I walked to her place in a harder and colder wind than ever, and when I got there she was all alone. She was sitting hunched up on her bed with her head almost touching her knees and her hair falling down over her face. I couldn’t see her face. I pulled the door shut and walked over to her.
When I went to give her a kiss she turned her face to the wall and wouldn’t look at me. I knew something was wrong, and I guess I knew just what it was, but I was hoping so hard that I wouldn’t let myself believe it.
I sat down on the bed next to her and pulled her over to me. She didn’t pull away. I let her head rest in my lap and ran my fingers through that long silky hair. I thought I could get her to cry it out but she wouldn’t cry, not a single tear. Her whole body was shaking with something but she wouldn’t open up and let it out. I just sat there stroking her hair and not saying a thing.
Then she looked at me and she started to cry. She cried for a long time, crying all the sickness and sadness out of her; when it was done she was better and I knew she would be all right.
It wouldn’t leave a scar.
It was done.
The walk home was a long one even with the wind behind me. He was waiting for me, and when I came in he looked at me and he knew that I knew.
He said, “She was nice, Brother John. But I’ve had better.”
I just looked at him. I didn’t bother to tell him that he never had her, that I was the only man to have her, ever.
He wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.
“You ought to get around more,” he said. “Oughta see what the rest of the world’s like. You know?”
The vein in my temple started throbbing just the way Margie’s did before.
“There’s other women. Bet you’ll find some that’s even better in the sack than she is, Brother John.”
When you’re up close a shotgun makes a big messy hole, big as a man’s fist, but when I squeezed that trigger the shell went through him like a sword through a piece of silk, like the wind blowing outside. He let out a moan and put both hands over the hole in his stomach and sat down slowly. His eyes were staring like he couldn’t believe it happened.
His eyes got glassy, but they stayed open that way, staring at me.
Outside the wind broke and it started to rain.
Fifteen months and I’ll be out. The law’s the law, but the people around here know me and they knew Brad, and the law can bend a little when it has to.
Margie will be waiting for me. I know she will.
I DON’T FOOL AROUND
FISCHER PULLED UP AT A CURB and we got out of the car in a hurry, heading for the black Chevy with the people standing around it. The precinct cop made room for us and we went on through. As far as I was concerned, this was just a formality. I knew who was dead and I knew who had killed him. Taking a good long look at the corpse wasn’t going to change that.
The punk slumped over the wheel with holes in his head had lived longer than we had expected. He was a hood named Johnny Blue, a strongarm-weakbrain who crossed some of the wrong people. He’d been due for a hit for weeks, according to the rumbles that filtered through to Manhattan West. Now he’d been hit, and hard.
One slug in the side of the face. Another in the neck. Three more in the back of the head.
“Who is he?” Fischer asked. I told him.
“A messy way to do it,” the kid went on. “Any of those shots would have killed him. Why shoot him up like that?”
My college cop. My new partner, my cross to bear ever since some genius switched Danny Taggert to Vice. My Little Boy Lost, who wanted murder to be a nice clean affair, with one bullet lodged in the heart and, if you please, as little blood as possible.
I said, “The killer didn’t want to take chances.”
“Chances? But—”
I was very tired. “This wasn’t a tavern brawl,” I told him. “This wasn’t one guy hitting another guy over the head with a bar stool. This was a pro killing.”
“It doesn’t look so professional to me. A mess.”
“That’s because you don’t know what to look for.” I turned away, sick of the corpse and the killer, sick of Fischer, sick of West 46th Street at three in the morning. Sick of murder.
“It’s a pro killing,” I said again. “In a car, on a quiet street, in the middle of the night. Five bullets, any one of which would have caused death. That’s a trademark.”
“Why?”
“Because hired killers don’t fool around,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
The coffee was bitter but it was black and it was hot. I sipped it as I read through the file again. I knew everything in the file by heart. I read it automatically, then shoved it over to Fischer.
“Name,” I said, “Frank Calder. First arrest at age 14, 1948, grand theft auto. Suspended. Arrested three months later, GTA again, six months in Elmira. Three years later he was picked up for assault with a deadly weapon. A knife. The victim refused to press charges and we dropped them.”
I sipped some more of the coffee. “That was eight years ago. Since then he’s been picked up fifteen times. Same charge each time. Suspicion of homicide.”
“Innocent?”
“Guilty, of course. Fifteen times that we know about. Probably a dozen more that we don’t know about. Fourteen times we let him go. Once we thought we had a case.”
“What happened?”
“Grand jury disagreed with us. Indictment quashed.”
Fischer nodded. “And you think he may have killed Blue?”
“No.”
“Then why are we—”
“I don’t think he might have killed Blue,” I said. “I know damn well he killed Blue. Calder does most of his work in the Kitchen. A Hell’s Kitchen boy from the start, grew up on 39th Street west of Ninth. Gun used was a .38. Calder always uses a .38. Likes to shoot people in cars.”
“Still, you can’t be sure that—”
“I can be sure,” I cut in. I wished that Vice would send Danny back to me. Fischer was impossible. “Calder works for Nino Popo a lot of the time. Popo had a thing against Blue. Quit sounding like a public defender, will you? This was one of Calder’s. Period.”
“We pick him up now?”
“No.”
“But you just said—”
“I know what I said. I know damn well what I said and I don’t need a parrot to toss it back at me.”
“But—”
“Shut up.” I finished the coffee. “I told you Calder was a pro. You know what that means? You understand what that record says? He’s a hired killer. You pay him and he shoots people. That’s how he makes his living. A good living. He dresses in three-hundred-dollar suits. He wears gold cuff links. He lives in a penthouse overlooking Central Park. The west side of the park—he’s not a millionaire. But he does well in his job.”
I paused for breath. I just wanted to get home and go to bed. I was tired. “I told you about pros,” I said. “They don’t fool around. They don’t leave loopholes. It’s their business and they know it. They don’t crack under pressure. If we pick up Calder he’ll be out in no time at all. No witnesses. A cast-iron alibi. No holes at all.”
“So what do we do?”
“We go home,” I said. “We go home and take hot showers and go to bed. Tomorrow we pick him up.”