Nothing In Her Way Read online

  Lachlan was the junior member of the firm, both in years and in seniority. He had been in residence on that job in Central America, in charge, with a second in command by the name of Goodwin. Of course, Dunbar and my father had been there a dozen times or more, but you can’t see everything, especially when you trust the man who’s doing the job. And when the dam folded up like water-soaked cardboard, they flew in in a chartered plane. Police were waiting for them at the airport.

  Lachlan hadn’t sold any of the reinforcing steel. That would have been too easy to spot. But with Goodwin in charge of the concrete work, government inspectors for sale, and native labor who didn’t know a mix specification from the second chorus of “The Peanut Vendor,” it was just stealing candy to divert around a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the cement into his own channels. Most of the proceeds had gone into the campaign fund of another eager beaver on the make—an army colonel who had his eye on the presidency. The two of them pulled it off. About a week before the dam folded, the colonel had taken over the government in a palace revolution. How could Lachlan lose? He didn’t. Dunbar and Belen went to jail, while Lachlan and the colonel took over what was left of the firm and only God knows how much of the damages collected by the government. You’ll never go broke taking it out of one pocket and putting it in another.

  That was in 1936. I said I’d kill Lachlan when I grew up. Cathy said I’d have to get there first, because she was going to kill him. She was ten years old.

  We grew up that way, the two of us with that shared obsession for revenge. After a while, of course, we gave up the childish and impractical idea of killing him, since that wouldn’t prove anything at all and would probably land us in the electric chair besides. What we were going to do was more poetic. We were going to take him the way he had taken our fathers. It was a large project for a couple of kids.

  I ground out the cigarette and lay looking up at the dark. We knew where he was at last. But could we do it? How could we do it? Lachlan would be nearly fifty now; he’d been everywhere and done everything; and he was a swindler himself and knew all the angles. It was still a large project, and I didn’t know.

  And then it occurred to me that I didn’t even know yet what this plan was they had cooked up for Goodwin.

  I found out in the morning. Charlie told me. And it was sweet.

  * * *

  He was staying at the Roosevelt. When I go over to his room around eleven a.m. Cathy and Bolton were already there. Charlie was still in a silk dressing gown, the plump, angelic face pink from fresh barbering, and was just finishing a breakfast consisting of a Persian melon and a large pot of cafe Creole in the living room of his suite. He lighted one of his precious Havana cigars with slow, loving care and leaned back to smile benignly at me.

  “Ah, come in, Mike,” he said. “I see that Miss Holman’s powers of persuasion are somewhat better than my feeble efforts.”

  Did he really think she was Elaine Holman? I wondered. But we had to keep up the act. I looked across at her. She was very lovely and chic in a brown suit with a fur piece dangling in casual elegance from her shoulder.

  “If that puzzles you, Charlie,” I said, “take a look at yourself and then at Miss Holman.”

  She smiled at me and said, “Thank you, Mr. Belen.”

  I still wondered about it. Nobody had kidded Charlie about anything since he was five. But, actually, what difference did it make whether he thought she was Elaine Holman or Florence Nightingale? He could still run out with all the money either way.

  Bolton and I nodded curtly to each other to get it over with for the day. I thought about last night, and wondered if she still had the harpoon in him. She seemed to despise him—but why was she mixed up with him?

  Maybe it was an act for my benefit, I thought suddenly. Maybe there was more to their “business” relationship than met the eye. I stopped, silently cursing myself. What was I getting jealous for? We weren’t married any more, were we? What did she mean to me? Nothing at all, I told myself. Nothing.

  “Well, I’m here, Charlie,” I said. “I take it I’d only be wasting time trying to get you to raise your offer of fifteen per cent.”

  “A very sound hypothesis, Mike,” he agreed, “if a little weak in the statistical department. The figure was ten per cent.”

  I shrugged resignedly. I’d known it was ten, of course, but to make it look good I had to haggle a little.

  “All right,” I said. “Just when and how do we sandbag Miss Holman’s uncle?”

  He winced. “Mike!”

  “O.K. But how? Remember, I know nothing at all about it. What do I do?

  He removed the cigar and looked at it thoughtfully. “Ah, I intended to ask you last night, Mike. Did you ever study chemistry?”

  “In high school,” I said, puzzled. “By the time I got to college I knew better. Why?”

  “It isn’t important. You’re a chemical engineer in this little venture we have in mind, and a slight knowledge of chemistry would, of course, be no great liability.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I used to know that salt was sodium something. Remind me to look it up sometime.”

  He smiled soothingly. “As I say, it doesn’t matter. The secret of a thing of this kind, Mike, is never to talk shop with people who do know. And, since you are to conceal the fact that you’re a chemical engineer, you should encounter no difficulty.”

  “Then there’s nothing to it,” I said. “It’s easy. I’m not a chemical engineer, but I’m pretending to be one, so I can pretend I’m not one. Is the rest of the scheme that simple?”

  Bolton was boredly reading a copy of Fortune. Cathy was listening and watching us, but without much interest. They both knew the whole thing by heart, of course.

  Charlie delicately tapped the long ash from his cigar. “A quite—ah—understandable bewilderment, Mike. At first glance it might seem a little involved, but there is a very good reason behind it. Now, to begin with, you go to Wyecross alone. The entire first act—aside from what has already been done—is yours, and I need not add, of course, that the success of the whole venture depends upon you. Miss Holman is driving to San Antonio tomorrow to visit friends, and no doubt she would be glad to have your company for that part of the journey. Beyond San Antonio, I suggest you travel by bus. Mr. Bolton and I shall be in Houston until later developments necessitate our appearing on the scene. You will, of course, have our address.

  “Now, to get to the core of the matter. Mr. Goodwin, who is a man of about forty, is cashier of the Stockmen’s Bank, the only bank in Wyecross. From his father he inherited a large block of the bank’s stock, in addition to some fifteen thousand acres of land lying just east of Wyecross. Practically all this land is utterly unfit for anything, being nothing but a sort of Sahara in miniature, an endless waste of sand dunes. I have observed it from the club car of the train, Mike, and a more utterly desolate landscape I never hope to see. My only hope is that, since you will be there some time, you don’t go stark mad.”

  “Never mind the description,” I broke in. “What’s all this got to do with it?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Everything, my boy. Now, upon your arrival in Wyecross, you will go to Frankie and Johnnie’s Kottage Kamp.” He closed his eyes and shuddered slightly, and then went on. “You will go to this revolting caravansary and engage a room, or a court, as I believe it is called.”

  He went on talking, and he told it well. After a while I began to see the basic pattern of it, and had an idea of what he was aiming for, and it was a sweet piece of work. There was one hitch to it, however, and that was I couldn’t make out where the money came in. The way it was set up, it didn’t make sense. I broke in and asked him, and when he told me, I saw the poisonous beauty of it all at once like a light coming on. It was really rigged.

  It wasn’t just a simple matter of having it explained to me once. I had to be coached in it. We went over it for hours. We adjourned for lunch, and then came back and went a
t it again. I went out in the afternoon and visited the bank, and bought the few props I’d need, and returned to my hotel to pack.

  Bolton disappeared somewhere. Charlie and I took Cathy out to dinner, and I stayed with her until she was back in her hotel. I was still thinking of Donnelly. We didn’t see anything of him.

  We left early in the morning. She was driving a ‘51 Cadillac, and she rode it hard. We talked very little. She was concentrating on the driving, and I was trying to stay off the “do-you-remembers.”

  Once she said, “You’re not sorry, are you, Mike?”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “That you came in with us?”

  “No. Of course not. I want Lachlan as badly as you do. And Goodwin too, for that matter.”

  “That’s the only reason, then?”

  I turned and looked at her. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “We had a lot of fun, didn’t we, Mike?”

  “And a lot of fights.”

  “Do you know why I’m going to San Antonio?” she asked.

  “Why?”

  “We might get to see each other once in a while. It’s not too far to Wyecross. And, of course, I couldn’t stay in Wyecross with you, because Charlie thinks I’m Goodwin’s niece.”

  “You hope.”

  We got into San Antonio around eight p.m. She went to a hotel, while I took my bags around to the bus station and checked them. The next bus going west was at ten-forty-five. I met her in the lobby and we went out for dinner, both of us a little quiet.

  Afterward we climbed down the steps at the end of one of the bridges and walked along beside the river. It ran through the middle of the city in a series of little pools and falls, with stone walks and benches along the banks. The night was brilliantly clear and a little frosty, and straight up beyond the glow of the city you could see the cold shine of desert stars.

  She was wearing a gray fur coat with the collar turned up against her cheek, and a crazy little hat was perched on one side of the tousled red hair with a sort of schoolgirl carelessness. She was very lovely.

  We stopped and watched the shine of lights on the water.

  “Mike, do you remember—” she began.

  “No,” I said. “I have a poor memory.”

  “Why?

  “It broke down. Overload, I think.”

  “It’s too bad.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  According to the best scientific theories, a girl has no glamour, enchantment, mystery, or attraction for the man who has known her since she was three years old and who has fought with her and played cowboys with her and swum off sand bars with her under the blazing sun on tropical rivers the color of coffee and who has been married to her and has fought with her again and who has been divorced from her and has forgotten her entirely in two years. It’s very scientific. I made myself watch the lights.

  “What time does your bus leave, Mike?”

  “In about an hour.”

  “Do you have to go tonight?”

  There wasn’t anybody else around. I turned away from the lights on the water and they were shining in her eyes until she closed them, and the lashes were very long like shadows on her face when I raised my head after a while and looked at her.

  “No,” I said.

  Four

  When I began to see the sand I knew I was almost there. Beyond the rusty strands of barbed wire it stretched away toward the horizon on both sides of the highway in desolate and wind-ruffled dunes, with only a tumbleweed or gaunt mesquite here and there to break the monotony of it. Then I could see the water tank up ahead.

  Wyecross was a bleak little town lost in the desert like a handful of children’s toys dropped and scattered along the highway. It was afternoon now under a sky like a blue glass bowl, and the three blocks of the business district were half asleep in the glare of the sun. I climbed down at the bus station and stood on the high sidewalk while the driver dug the two bags out of the luggage rack. A gust of wind slammed up the street like a balled fist, pushing at me, and I could taste the grit.

  I took the bags and went into the restaurant that was also the bus station. The coffee was bitter with alkali. There was a jukebox at the other end of the counter and it was crying the same dirge the other one had, in that bar in New Orleans. I thought of Donnelly. He couldn’t find her in San Antonio. Couldn’t he? He’d found her in New Orleans, hadn’t he? The coffee didn’t warm the cold ball of uneasiness in my stomach.

  I turned and looked out the big flyspecked window in front, past the shoddy Christmas decorations that had never been taken down, and the cardboard signs propped against the glass. They were blank on this side, but you knew they advertised Coca-Cola and some brand of cigarettes and maybe what was playing Sun., Mon., Tues. at the only movie in town.

  I saw it then. It was diagonally across the street, on the corner. It was like a thousand others between Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound, with two marble or imitation marble columns in front and the name and assets written on the window in gold leaf. Stockmen’s Bank, it said. The door was closed now, because it was a little after three, and a small blind was pulled down in back of the glass. They’d still be at work, though, and I thought of him inside there, not knowing that after sixteen years I was right across the street from him.

  Lachlan had always been the one, because he was the top boy, the brain, the one who’d engineered it. I hadn’t thought of Goodwin for a long time, and in fact had even forgotten his first name was Howard. But now that I was so near and had actually caught up with him, I began to feel that same old hatred for him that I’d felt so long for Lachlan. He was just as guilty. I wanted to cross the street and see him, just look at him, but I didn’t. That wasn’t the way to do it. I’d meet him when the time came, but it had to be done according to plan.

  I picked up the bags and walked back along the sidewalk the way we had come in. It was only two blocks to the edge of town. The sidewalk ended abruptly, as if it had got scared and quit when it saw the desert. There was a gas station on the left, and just beyond it, on the right, was the motel. It was about a dozen frame cabins painted a scabrous brown and grouped in a hollow square with the open end facing the highway. The sign on the arch over the driveway said, “Frankie & Johnnie’s Kottage Kamp—Vacancy.” The first cabin on the left was the office. I walked across the gravel and rang the bell.

  Frankie or Johnnie was a fat man somewhere around forty who hadn’t shaved for two or three days. He had on cowboy boots, and his paunch hung out over the top of a pair of skin-tight Levis apparently held up by the friction on his legs and backside. The eyes were muddy brown and questioning. “Yessir?” he said.

  “Vacancy?” I asked.

  “Sure thing.” The eyes went beyond me, sweeping the driveway, and then looked down at the suitcases. “You got a car?”

  “I came on the bus,” I said.

  “Oh.” He considered this. Apparently nobody had ever stopped here before without a car. “Sure. We can fix you up. Just for tonight, huh?”

  I shook my head. “I’ll probably be here for some time. I’d like to have it by the week, or month, if I could get a rate.”

  We arrived at a deal after a few minutes’ haggling, and I paid him a month in advance and signed the register as Julius Reichert of New Orleans. I could see the curiosity working on him. He got a key and we walked up the gravel drive.

  It was a small cubbyhole as bleak as a Grosz drawing. The front of it was furnished with an iron bedstead and a shaky night table and an old rocker, while at the rear there was a sink and a two-burner gas stove on a table. He bent down and stuck a match to the open gas heater, which had flakes of asbestos up the back behind the flame. The asbestos turned red in the heat.

  “Don’t go to sleep with it burning and all the doors and windows closed,” he said. “It’ll suffocate you.”

  “All right,” I said. I put the bags down.

  He paused on his way out, with his hand on the door. “Salesman, I
guess, huh?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t sell anything.”

  “Oh.” He went out.

  I sat down on the bed and lit a cigarette. The gas heater burned with a slight hiss, and outside I could hear the wind searching restlessly around the cabins. I tried to think about it. It had gone all right. In less than a week the whole town would be as curious as he was right now. Why would a man—and an obvious Easterner, at that—come to a whistle stop like this in the middle of nowhere, take a cabin by the month, and just stay here, doing nothing at all? And if they thought that was odd, they would have their hands full when they began to get the rest of the act.

  Then I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about her. I could see her. I could almost feel her there in the cabin. The hell, I thought; it wasn’t this bad before, when we split up. I’d missed her, but not like this. It was just the bleak loneliness of this God-forsaken outpost at the end of nowhere. That had to be it. Before, there had been the gambling, and big cities, and other girls, and always the horses running. Sure, that was all it was, just the loneliness.

  I could see I didn’t want much of this—this sitting around here thinking how it had been in San Antonio and listening to the wind. I wondered how long it would take. A month? But we couldn’t rush it. That would be fatal. He had to come to me. All I could do was set out the bait and wait for him. But she was going to drive up Saturday night, a week from tomorrow. It was only eight days.

  I went into the cold bathroom and shaved. I looked strange with the crew haircut and the steel-rimmed glasses. Dr. Julius Reichert, I thought, the dedicated chemist who doesn’t know a compound from a mixture. We were taking long chances. Would Goodwin go for it?

  After I changed clothes I walked back to town and sat around the drugstore, reading magazines. Around six I picked out the most likely-looking of the town’s three restaurants and ate dinner—pork chops and applesauce—thinking of the bisque d’ecrevisses at Antoine’s. Since it was Friday night, the movie was a Western. I walked back to Frankie and Johnnie’s in the windy dark and thought of Sunday and shuddered.