The Threateners Page 4

  “They’re very systematic,” I said. “Six-hour shifts; this gal still has a few minutes to go. At noon sharp she’ll be relieved by a skinny young fellow with ragged jeans and a lot of dark beard, driving a white Chevy van. He was the first one I spotted, so I call him Spooky One; the lady is Spooky Three. At six in the evening, One will be replaced by Four, a sharp-looking Latin gent in a suit—with or without a tie depending on the mood of the moment—who’ll take up the watch in a sporty little red Pontiac of some kind. At midnight, a tall blond character in boots, jeans, and a cowboy hat, driving a husky blue Ford pickup with four-wheel drive, one of those jacked-up monsters with a row of lights over the cab, will take over. Spooky Two. At least that describes the costumes and rolling stock as of yesterday; they switch things around occasionally to confuse. . . . Now what’s happening?”

  She’d suddenly become very intent on the knothole. “The station wagon is driving away, but there isn’t any—oh, yes, here comes the van. He’s parking a little closer. Like you said, a real Castro beard." She drew a long breath and turned to face me. “What are you trying to tell me, Matt?”

  “Join the club, baby. We’re all wearing extra shadows these days, it’s the latest fashion.”

  She said sharply, “You mean, you want me to believe you’re being watched, too? What makes you think I’ll fell for a crazy story like that? The way you know their schedule to the minute, they’re probably your bodyguards, assigned to protect you from people you’ve driven crazy, like me. . . . Oh, damn!”

  Intent on our conversation, she’d snagged a stocking, cutting too close to the comer of the flower bed.

  I said, “Why don’t you drop the act, Madeleine?”

  She looked at me for a moment; then she bent over and touched a dampened forefinger to her damaged hose. I’ve never figured out why they do that; do they expect saliva to heal the broken nylon threads magically? She straightened up slowly to face me.

  When she didn’t speak at once, I went on: “It’s the standard toughie-lawyer routine, isn’t it? Intimidate the witness by treating him as guilty and coming at him hard and watching his reactions, hoping he’ll give himself away, one way or the other. But this is Matt, sweetheart. You don’t have to run a bluff on me or put on an act for me. I’m on your side.

  Her voice was harsh: "I had some people on my side once, long ago at the time of my trial; a lot of nice, friendly, helpful people. I have them to thank for my conviction. It made me, let’s say, a bit mistrustful of folks claiming to be on my side.” She drew a long breath. “That girl said she was there—they were all there—on account of you.”

  It was an odd way of putting it, but this wasn’t the time to analyze it. I grinned. “That just means you didn’t hit her hard enough, or often enough, sweetheart. It would be interesting to know what other stories she’d have come up with.” I regarded her for a moment, rather grimly. "No matter what anybody said, you don’t really believe I’d send a bunch of creeps to harass you without a word of warning, do you, Madeleine?”

  There was a little silence as we faced each other. I’d forgotten—I’d made myself forget—what a lovely thing she was, if you like your lovely things brave and brainy. At last her glance dropped away from mine. She licked her lips before speaking.

  “I had to be sure. ” Her voice was soft. “The man I knew five years ago was on my side, but you could have changed.”

  “I’m hurt. Whatever happened to faith and trust? Come on, let’s get back inside. . . . No, not you, you big mutt; you stay out here and pretend you’re a savage watchdog.”

  I closed the French doors behind us. Madeleine was busily brushing herself off as if she’d covered several miles of trackless wilderness instead of about twenty yards of fenced yard. She looked down at herself ruefully.

  “Damn, it doesn’t matter how nicely you’re dressed, just one little run in your nylons makes you look as if youd been sleeping in your clothes."

  That was an exaggeration, but the slight damage was a breach in the businesswoman armor, an intriguing hint that severe and untouchable as she looked, she wasn’t completely invulnerable.

  She went on without looking up: ‘ ‘You never came, Matt."

  She licked her lips. "I thought maybe, when you heard about the divorce . . ."

  I cleared my throat. “You picked the other guy, remember? Am I supposed to spend my life chasing after dames who don’t know their own minds? If you wanted me, all you had to do was grab a phone. You knew that.”

  “Yes, I knew. I guess I was . . . just too proud to admit I’d made a terrible mistake.” She looked up at last. ‘‘He was a mouse, darling! A sweet mouse, but still a mouse.”

  “Hell, you knew that when you married him.”

  “I thought you’d come. I told myself, when you learned of the divorce you’d surely come. And then . . . and then I realized at last that I was kidding myself and I’d have to be the one, but I kept waiting. . . . I guess I was waiting for a good excuse. Well, I got it. These Spookies, as you call them. So I came down here and put on my silly act because I’m a proud bitch who has a hell of a time admitting she was wrong. Matt, I—” Then she stopped, and drew a long breath, and asked with sudden anger, “Are you just going to stand there? Well, if you’re too stiff-necked to come six feet to me, after I’ve driven four hundred miles to you, I suppose I can manage to make it the rest of the way!”

  She did.

  Chapter 4

  At the last moment before the reaction went critical I closed the drapes and blinds at her request. No neighbors can look into my little rear patio or the bedroom window at the side of the house without doing some tough fence climbing, but I guess she was feeling shy in that respect, although in no other. Later, after a long time had passed—after our breathing had returned almost to normal—she stirred in my arms as we lay on the big bed in the vague, soft daylight that sneaked into the room in spite of the obstacles I’d put in its way. I heard her laugh softly.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “I’m so tired of being respectable, darling! I’m so tired of being the smart and well-groomed professional woman!” She laughed again. “Well, we’ve pretty well taken care of that, haven’t we? See the high-class lady lawyer lying on the untidy bed all naked and tanglehaired and sweaty with her high-class lady-lawyer costume scattered over the floor getting all wrinkled and dusty. God, it’s like getting out of a goddamn straitjacket!” After a little pause she went on: “Walter would have hung it all up neatly for me, you know, before he allowed himself to join me. He was a very neat boy.”

  I said, “That’s why you married him, wasn’t it, for his nearness and respectability?”

  She nodded. “But it wasn’t one of my very best ideas. After spending years being pushed around in prison and then coming home to receive the ex-con treatment—you remember—I wasn’t thinking very straight, I guess. I just wanted to show all those smug, self-righteous bastards. . . . But I shouldn’t talk mean about Walter. I gave him such a hell of a time toward the end, poor guy, and he never did figure out why. He thought it was because I was in love with you.”

  “Gosh, aren’t you?”

  Her face was suddenly unsmiling in the dusk. “Don’t be silly, Matt. I have to hate you, don’t you know that?”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  She licked her lips. “Why shouldn’t I hate you? You practically brought me back from the dead, and I don’t just mean the way you stopped a bullet to protect me. I owe you a ridiculous debt of gratitude, and the fact that at the end I managed to save your life a little doesn’t go very far toward canceling the awful obligation. . . . Don’t all debtors detest their creditors? And you, you bastard, you saw me the way I was when I got out of prison, a flabby, broken-down, self-pitying . . . How can I help hating a man who remembers me like that? How can I help hating the man who practically rebuilt me from scratch? I bet that monster he created hated Dr. Frankenstein’s guts for doing such a clumsy job. Well, I’m your very ow
n do-it-yourself female monster, darling; and you’d better figure out what to do with me, now that you’ve got me all constructed, because you seem to have built me so I don’t function too well by myself.”

  I looked at her for a moment without speaking; then I sat up and reached over the side of the bed for a couple of garments, passing her a creamy slip with lace top and bottom and satin in between, and hauling on my own well-worn white cotton-and-polyester shorts, JC Penney’s best.

  She looked at the lingerie in her hands and smiled faintly. “You got something against nude women, buster?”

  “That’s asking for a dirty crack, but I’ll restrain myself. Put it on, if you want to have zee great Herr Doktor Matthias Helmstein his mind on your problems keep. Another drink?"

  “If you’re planning to feed me some lunch pretty soon to soak it up.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  When I returned with two glasses, she’d smoothed out the bedspread we’d rumpled and piled up the pillows we’d tossed aside. She looked like a little girl sitting there demurely against them, bare-legged and bare-shouldered in her pretty slip. I noted, however, that the little girl had been adult enough to run a quick comb through her tousled hair and make hasty repairs to her damaged lipstick. I noted also that she hadn’t bothered to pick up her suit or blouse or stockings, leaving them on the floor with her high-heel shoes like the fragmented, discarded shell of a past stage of her development. I wasn’t about to disturb any significant symbols of liberation she wanted to leave lying around, so I stepped over the crumpled clothes and, after giving her both glasses to hold, settled myself beside her and retrieved one.

  “Ve vill now zee analysis commence,” I said, after taking a healthy sip. "What’s bugging you besides a bunch of snoops in your hair, babe?”

  She said, “I’m not making it, Matt.”

  I regarded her for a moment. Fear stirred within me as I remembered another woman I’d met in times of desperate trouble who, unable to find her way back to a satisfactory way of living afterward, had wound up killing herself.

  I said, “You indicated you were doing pretty well with that law firm up in Denver. ”

  “Yes, and I was doing pretty well as Mrs. Walter Maxon, too, for the first year or so; at least Mr. Maxon seemed to think so. For God’s sake, darling, I’m not bad-looking and I’m not dumb. I know the moves and I can fake them pretty well even when I don’t, well, feel them. I can put on a swell loving-wife performance for a husband and I can manage a very convincing bright-but-modest-associate routine for the partners. All it takes is a little hypocrisy and a little acting ability. And all the time I’m bored out of my skull. My God, two years with that sweet little boy in that sweet little house-well, it wasn’t so damn little—with the biggest excitement of my day being whether or not I got his eggs soft-boiled just right in the morning. Even then there was no danger of his beating me if I goofed, dammit, or even complaining; he’d just look a little sad. Well, I made a showplace of his lousy shack in return for his giving me his veddy, veddy respect-able name, and I entertained Ms business contacts beautifully, if I do say so myself, and I was very sneaky and clever about helping him with his work without ever letting him know that as a lawyer, he made me want to scream. Not that he didn’t know his law, he was a walking law library, but he had about as much gumption as a three-toed sloth, no enterprise, no inspiration, just meticulous hard work, which is okay in its place, but occasionally you’ve got to come up with something a little more dramatic, and there was no drama in him. Not in the courtroom and not . . . not in bed.”

  After just making love to the lady, I didn’t feel right about discussing the sexual prowess of her former husband or listening to her discuss it.

  I said, “Well, come to that, I’ve never considered myself a particularly dramatic lover.”

  She said judiciously, “Maybe you’re not quite Casanova reincarnated, but at least you act as if there was another human being in the bed with you, willing and reasonably durable, not a porcelain doll too precious and fragile to . . . No, damn it, that’s dirty. I mustn’t talk about him like that. He was just as sweet as he could be and he loved me; loved me enough that, when I had to leave, he let me go without making me feel too awful about it. Just as you did when I decided to marry him. I’ve always respected you for that.”

  In spite of my modest disclaimer, I wasn’t quite sure I liked not being Casanova reincarnated. I said, “Golly gee, ma’am, it makes me feel warm all over, being respected like that.”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You know what I mean. You’re not—and neither is Walter—the kind of selfish and possessive lover who grabs a gun when he finds the gal with another man and blows away the two of them. That kind of hysterical freak doesn’t really love anybody but himself. He’s just telling the world how badly his poor little feelings have been hurt. If you love somebody, you want them happy, preferably with you but if not with somebody else, don’t you? If you really love them, you certainly don’t want them dead!”

  I said, “It’s very pleasant to lounge on a bed alongside a pretty girl in her underwear, drinking whiskey and talking about love, but I’m afraid it isn’t getting us very far. . . .”

  I stopped, hearing a sound outside. Happy was barking in an odd way. Labradors don’t bark much as a rule and he’s pretty quiet even for a Lab, although like most dogs he will serenade the postman and the UPS man—I sometimes wonder what those guys do to attract so much loud canine attention. But this was a sharper and more excited bark than the deep routine woofing designed to warn me that the defensive perimeter was again under attack by dangerous delivery personnel. . . . Then there was the crack of a shot, and silence. I felt a sudden panic.

  “Oh, Jesus, if some trigger-happy bastard has shot my dog . . . !”

  I rolled off the bed, kicked my feet into my shoes, and ran into the living room. It took me a moment to unlock the rack and get down one of the shotguns. There are two theories about the home storage of firearms. One says you never load a gun in the house, the other says an unloaded gun is a useless piece of iron and you’re supposed to treat every gun as if it were loaded, anyway, so it might as well be. With no kids around, I go for Theory Two to the extent that while the chamber was empty, the weapon in my hands, an old Remington 1100 auto, had four buckshot shells in the magazine. Heading for the door, I yanked back the charging handle and let the bolt slam forward, readying the gun for firing.

  Normally, I might have taken a few precautions like, say, going out the bedroom door as before so I wouldn’t be stepping right into the line of fire; but the ugly silence, after the odd-sounding barking and the single shot, did things to my judgment. I had an ex-wife and some offspring in the east somewhere, but the big yellow retriever in the yard was my only immediate family, and maybe you wouldn’t die for your dog but I’m not so sure about me. I’d certainly kill for him. As far as I’m concerned, any two-legged creature that would harm a dog isn’t really human, so where’s the problem?

  I yanked the door open and made a dive for the bushes on the far side of the path, wishing the old lady from whom I’d bought the house had gone in for anything but roses. Nobody shot at me. I came up scratched, with the gun shouldered ready to fire, safety off. Then I drew a long breath of relief. Happy was standing over something by the front gate, his thick yellow tail slashing from side to side. Wherever the single bullet had gone, at least he was still alive and on his feet.

  I extricated myself from the thorny cover into which I’d plunged and moved forward cautiously. My initial impression was that my gentle hunting dog had brought down the intruder and was now busily tearing him limb from limb; which was strange behavior for a soft-mouthed retriever who never left a tooth mark on a bird. Then I saw that the invader was a woman; and that Happy was merely licking her face in his friendly fashion. She didn’t seem to appreciate his attentions. Hearing me approach, she pushed herself up, her face white, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Take him
away!” she gasped. “Oh, please take him away!”

  I saw her pistol come up, a small automatic. I didn’t know if she was even aware, in her panic, that she was still holding it; but it was swinging my way, and a gun is a gun, and dying accidentally isn’t a great improvement over dying intentionally. I kicked at the weapon and swung the butt of my shotgun hard, keeping the muzzle high so that if there was a discharge, it wouldn’t blow my head off. The shotgun didn’t fire, but the wooden stock made a solid thunking sound as it hit the woman’s skull just above the ear.

  Chapter 5

  I picked up the pistol where I’d kicked it. Checking it, I saw that its seven-shot magazine lacked two cartridges: the one that had been fired and the one that was in the chamber ready to fire. It was a small. 380 Spanish automatic called Llama—well, semiautomatic, if you want to get technical. I was reminded of somebody’s long-ago jingle to the effect that a one-1 lama is a priest, but a two-1 llama is a beast. Edgar Guest? Ogden Nash? This little beast seemed like a reasonably well made gun. I replaced the magazine, set the safety catch, and having attended to all stray firearms, always the well-trained agent’s first concern after a crisis, laid it aside with my shotgun on the rough wooden box built against the front fence that concealed my garbage cans.

  I turned anxiously to examine Happy. He’d been hovering nearby, looking hopeful. He was clearly of the opinion that with two firearms in sight and one shot fired there should be something for a good retriever to retrieve, damn it, just tell him where. I called him to me and inspected him carefully for blood, poked him for indications of pain, and drew a long breath of relief when I found neither; apparently the bullet had gone elsewhere.

  “Will you stop playing with your damn dog; this woman is badly hurt.”

  I gave Happy a pat and released him, looking around. Madeleine was kneeling beside the unconscious figure by the gate. She was wearing an old plaid robe of mine and her high heels.