Chapter 4
Gus Blake brought the car to a lurching stop and reached over across Janey to open the door. Maybe he should have left her at the Maynards' and let Orvie Rogers bring her home later, but their house was on the way to Doc Wernitz's at Newton's Corner, and home in bed was obviously where she belonged. He tried to make her face out in the light coming through the dusty windshield from the overhead traffic signal on the corner. All he could see was a greenish seasick blob above the black velvet collar of her evening wrap.
"You sure you'll be okay, Janey? I've got to get out there before they start pushing things around. There's something screwy about this. You can smell it a mile."
"I'm okay, Gus."
"You don't sound it."
As the light changed, turning the greenish cast of her face into a rosy red, she looked a little better, anyway. She pulled herself forward in the seat.
"I'm all right, Gus. You go ahead. I told you I'm all right now."
"Sure, you told me, I still don't get it. I don't see anything about getting a thirty-two-fifty jackpot that's enough to make you blow your top the way you did. But there's no use our yakking about it anymore. You're a wreck." He opened the door. "You go on in and go to bed. Get your mother to stay all night. I'll make up the couch if I get home in time to need it. Okay?"
"Okay." Janey pulled her skirt around her legs and got out, holding on to the door to steady her wooden knees. She took a step and turned back.
"What is it, Janey?"
He didn't mean to sound abrupt or impatient, but he was in a hurry. When he'd said there was something screwy about Wernitz's murder he meant it. Smithville was not in any of the big-time gambling circuits. As such things went, Doc Wernitz had operated quietly and reasonably within the law. But slot machines and murder had teamed up before. If Doc Wernitz had been killed earlier, it might easily have been written off as an occupational hazard. Coming now, just as the news that he was shutting up shop and leaving Smithville had barely begun to trickle out into the open, it was something else again.
And what had the great Blake done when the counterman at the Margot Lunch had told him, that evening at six o'clock, that he'd heard Doc Wernitz was leaving? Blake, the Narcissus, had looked at himself in the black pool of the Margot's lousy coffee and wondered whether he ought to go back and pull his trenchant and thought-provoking editorial reply to Aunt Mamie on the slot machines, and decided against it. There'd always be another Wernitz to operate the machines, and always suckers to play them. That, plus a commendable caution on his part; he didn't want anybody in Smithville saying he'd written the editorial and then hotfooted it out to Wernitz for his approval-which is what they'd say if he'd been seen within a mile of Newton's Corner that or any other day.
And now it was too late. At that moment or a little earlier, or a little later, Doc Wernitz had been murdered. He gave himself a vicious kick in the seat of his mental pants, setting up a chain reaction that made his voice sound sharper and more impatient as he repeated his question. "What is it now? I'm in one hell of a hurry."
"I'm sorry." She drew back quietly. The light on the corner behind them switched to red, but the convertible coming along the street speeded up and shot through, live rubber screaming on the pavement as it slid to a sharp stop behind Gus Blakes' dingy coupe. Janey stiffened. It was too late for her to get the door shut. Lois Maynard was already there.
"I'm going with you, Gus. Come on, let me drive you."
She was at the car door, holding it open, bending forward as she talked to him. Janey moved back. They hadn't pushed her away, not physically, but the effect was the same. Her long black velvet skirt brushed the dry leaves in front of the hedge, her high heels tottered on the uneven bricks. Lois had low-heeled shoes on and a tweed coat lined with fur.
"You go back home, Lois."
Janey heard him, but she heard Lois, too.
"I'm going with you," she said coolly. She laughed. "A reporter's place is at her editor's side. I've never been in on a murder, Gus, and it's good experience, and I'm going, whether you like it or not. "I've got a press card, too. You'd better let me drive you. I can make better time than you can and not have a flat halfway there."
She pulled the door back with a determined hand. "Come on, Gus. Don't be a stubborn ape. We've got to hurry."
Janey put her key into the lock and held on to the doorknob for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to swallow down the hollow sick waves of despair coming up from inside her stomach. Gus was gone, in Lois's car. It was her own fault. He'd much rather drive himself than have even Lois drive him, but what she'd said about a flat was true. He had to drive at a snail's pace on the graveled corduroy roads out in the country. They could have had new tires-they could have had a new car-if it hadn't heen for her.
She let her burning forehead rest on the cold white surface of the door. How much was it? A thousand dollars? That couldn't be. There wasn't that much money in the whole world. It couldn't be a thousand dollars. That was crazy. She couldn't possibly have written that many checks, for ten dollars, or twenty dollars. There had to be something wrong somewhere. She raised her head, shook it violently to shake off the sick, horrible web of fear weaving itself around her mind, and turned the key in the lock. It was true, of course. There was no use denying it, no use lying to herself, pretending what was true couldn't be true.
It came again, the horrible sickening moment of torture as the truth flashed nakedly and clearly into her mind, before the intensity of it numbed and paralyzed her so that she could go on living with it inside her until it came again, suddenly like this, or earlier when the jackpot fell there at the Maynards'. She clenched her fists and pressed her head harder against the wood of the door. "Oh, no, no," she whispered. "It can't be." It couldn't be a thousand dollars. It couldn't possibly have added up to that much in the ten-and fifteen-and once in a while twenty-dollar checks she'd written and cashed at the Sailing Club and the Country Club. There had to be something wrong somewhere. The bank balance would have showed it over the last five months. The scribbled check stubs she'd torn out and stuck in her pocket, put away then and only got out and added up the week before, must be wrong. She must have made duplicates of some of them. That had to be it, or they'd have been turned in to the bank and showed on her balance. She'd kept telling herself that, half believing it at first, sharply repressing the whispering doubt telling her it was more likely to be the other way, that these weren't all, there were others she'd written and forgotten about and hadn't put down. More than a thousand dollars-it couldn't be. She kept telling herself that, with only a few icy prickles in her heart to tell her the truth, multiplying every time she added the check stubs again, until they'd turned suddenly into a freezing, sickening deluge there was no possibility of denying-and with it had come the paralyzing horrible fear weaving its web around her. It was true, and there was nothing she could do about it. The money was gone, there was no way to bring it back.
She knew it was true, and she'd even known it would be true, since she'd first started playing the slot machines in June, the month after Lois Maynard came back home and started working with Gus on the paper. She'd known it but she hadn't cared, at first. There was something about yanking down the iron handle of the machine that seemed to take the sickening loneliness out of her life. Every time she yanked at it she was yanking at Lois Maynard; every time she put in a quarter, or a half dollar, and yanked the iron handle she was transferring unhappiness, and resentment, and fear, from Gus and the woman who was the cause of it to the blatant inanimacy of the machine. It didn't matter if she won or lost. At least she wasn't at home, alone, while Gus and Lois covered the waterfront-the sailing races, the stock show, the tobacco auction, the city, council, and county commissioners' meetings-Gus conducting a private school of journalism with the owner's daughter as sole pupil.
"Why don't you leave the kid with your mother, Janey, and go down to the Club with Orvie? Lois and I'll join you for dinner when we get back. You'd be bored stiff, Janey. It's just a demonstration of contour plowing." If it wasn't contour plowing it was something else she wouldn't be interested in. "Why don't you go with Orvie on his boat, Janey? All they do at the finish line is sit around and have another drink, and you don't drink, Janey." And in August, they'd decided they'd put out a centennial edition of the Smithville Gazette. "Where's Orvie, Janey? He'll take you to the dance. We've got to work tonight."
"And I'm not married to Orvie-I'm married to Gus!"
It was a hurt, passionate protest that pulled her sharply up, bringing her back face to face with another reality that the jingle, clank, and whirr of the slot machines helped her momentarily to forget.
"Oh, I wish I were-" She didn't say the rest of it. Some kind of primitive fear that the spoken wish had a magic power of its own stopped her. You had to be sure before you said what you wished, sure it was what you really wanted. But it was what she wanted. Not because of the slot machines and the thousand dollars. If it hadn't been for all the rest of it there'd never have been any slot machines. She'd never played them, or wanted to play them, until everything else went out of her life when Lois Maynard came back into Gus's.
He should never have married me. I should have known I wasn't good enough for him. A thousand dollars-her mind flashed back to it. Real and tangible as it was, it was more than just a thousand dollars; it was a symbol into which she had translated all her loneliness and despair. Oh, I wish I were dead She had said it. You say things, and it's one step further. She clutched the small black velvet bag tighter in her hand, her lips suddenly dry as ashes. Inside it, there was another step. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. Then she raised her chin, opened her eyes, and took a long breath of the cold November air. Her mother was staying with little Jane. She couldn't let her mother see, and she had a way of seeing when things were wrong.
She opened the door. "Hello, Mother. It's me."
She called up the stairs, expecting her mother would be there in the living room, dozing in front of the fire over her knitting. It was a small house in the center of the town, old brick, two rooms deep, three stories high, set back from the street behind a high privet hedge, with a long narrow backyard; the kitchen and dining room on the first floor, the living room and Gus's study on the second and their bedroom in front, little Jane's in back on the third, with a bathroom in between at the head of the narrow, crooked staircase up the side of the house. It was a good house if a crazy one, built by a man who wanted to have a small grocery store on the ground floor and rooms to live in above, that Gus had found, and that had become to Janey the core of a vivid rainbow dream-a dream that had started changing five months ago, slowly at first, and gathering speed until at last it had broken into a nightmare of despair and disillusion.
"Mother!" she called again. The double doors from the hall into the dining room were open, and the other door leading into the pantry. The light in the kitchen was on. Her mother came bustling happily out, wiping her hands on a yellow-and-white-checked dish towel.
"I thought I'd just make you children a coffee cake after little Jane went to sleep," she said briskly. "I didn't expect you home this early." She stopped wiping her hands, the smile on her face fading. "Why, Janey, what's the matter?" She put the dish towel down on the pantry table and came through the dining room. "What is it, Janey?"
For an instant the tenderness and anxiety in her mother's face almost betrayed her. She turned quickly and took off her evening wrap. As she dropped it on the chair she saw her mother's old gray coat on it, neatly folded across the back. Her black cotton gloves and worn black handbag were on the table. A thousand dollars-it was almost half of what her father made in a year at the Rogers plant-and with that and what her mother had made sewing and renting the spare room to a foreman in the shipping department they had brought Janey up and owned their own house, and even had a secondhand car now that Janey was married. They'd even saved something for their own kind of social security. "It's nothing, Mother."
Her mother was still standing there looking "Where's Gus, Janey?"
Janey put her hand on the chair to steady her knees.
"He had to go out in the country." She moistened her lips so she could speak. "Some man was killed. A man named Doc Wernitz-"
"I know," her mother said. "I heard it on the radio." Her voice was brisk and matter-of-fact again. "He was a gambler. He ran all these machines-supposed to give you something for nothing and never do. The Smithville Recreation Company. If that's what they call recreation. Janey!"
Janey was staring at her, her eyes drained of color. The Smithville Recreation Company. The words were an inaudible whisper scarcely moving her lips. That was what was stamped in red on the back of many of the ten-and twenty-dollar checks she'd written to the Sailing Club that the bank had returned with her statements the first of the month. Pay to the Smithville Recreation Company. It was stamped in red letters on the back-of a few hundred dollars' worth of all the checks she'd written.
"Janey, what is the matter with you?" her mother demanded. "Everybody knew Mr. Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company."
Everybody but Janey. It went slowly through her mind. I didn't know.
"And now they've murdered him." It was a statement of simple fact, the event neither surprising nor regrettable, the way her mother said it. Then, as if she had not meant it to sound as callous as it did, she said, "But it's a pity all the same. I'm sorry for the poor man. He wasn't a bad sort, just by himself. Dad'll miss him dropping by the plant on hot nights, to visit out on the pier."
Janey swayed dizzily. Her mother's voice seemed a long way off, reaching her through a swarm of angry bees buzzing in red stamped letters around her. It seemed as if her mother was saying her father knew Doc Wernitz, and Doc Wernitz used to visit with him. But it couldn't be. She was too dazed to hear.
"In fact, he was a lonely sort of man, your father always said." Her mother went over to the chair and took her coat. "His people came from the same place in the old country Dad's came from. I guess Dad'll miss him, if nobody else does. I guess your father was the only friend he had. Real friend, I mean."
She put on her coat. Janey stood motionless. The swarming bees had gone away. Everything seemed curiously quiet and very clear. Doc Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company. He was the one who cashed checks for the Country Club and the Sailing Club when the banks were closed and they'd run out of silver. He was a friend of her father's. He hadn't banked all of her checks he'd taken. That explained why so few of them showed on her monthly statement from the bank. The cold fear caught again at her heart. What did it mean? Had he just kept them, because her father was his friend?
She went uncertainly through the doors into the cool shadows of the dining room and let herself down into a chair, holding tightly to the edge of the table to keep from missing the chair and falling to the floor. Had he told her father? What if some of her checks, the ones he had not taken to the bank, were out at his house? What if Gus found them? What if Lois Maynard, out there now with Gus, found them? As she closed her eyes she could feel herself thinking, If only I didn't have to open them again, and ever look at anyone again "Janey." Her mother had started to the front door, but she came back into the dining room. Her shadow in front of the lamp on the hall table threw a merciful darkness across the table where Janey sat.
"Yes, Mother." How could she sit there in the crumbled ruins of her small universe and say, "Yes, Mother," as if nothing had happened and nothing mattered?
"I don't know what's the matter, Janey, but I know you don't act like yourself anymore, so it must mean you and Gus are having trouble. It's what Dad and I were afraid was going to happen when you were so bent and determined on marrying him. There was nothing anybody could say to you, you were so crazy in love with him. Dad wanted you to marry Orvie Rogers, because Orvie is a good boy, even if he didn't want you at first to run around with Orvie's crowd instead of boys of your own kind and condition. And Dad never thought Gus would marry you, Janey. The way you were, blind and deaf and dumb to everything else, Dad and I were worried sick all the time. You were so crazy mad after him. And if Lois Maynard hadn't gone off and left him the way she did, there's no telling what would have happened. She was the one he was in love with. Everybody in town knew that. He was never any part as crazy about you as you were about him."
"I know it." She tried to speak it, but no sound came. She knew it very well. It was that other reality she faced and tried desperately to forget each time she yanked down the handle of the slot machine. It was the thing she knew each time Gus said, "Why don't you get Orvie to take you?" It was the answer, every time she cried out to herself in protest that it was not Orvie but Gus she was married to.
She moistened her lips again. "I know it, Mother. You don't have to remind me."
"Somebody's got to remind you. I'm not doing it just to hurt you. You've got little Jane to think of, Janey. I'm glad to come and sit here when you and Gus want to go out and Dad's at work. I like to do it. But not if it makes you forget Gus has his work and you have yours. And that's most likely the matter with you right now, with that Maynard girl working on the paper and all. I guess you're worried, worried sick, Janey. But Gus is your husband. I don't think he's apt to forget as easy as you think. Gus never looked to Dad and me like a man that lets anybody pull him around by the nose."
She patted Janey's shoulder. "What if I worried all my life because there were a lot of pretty girls working the same place Dad worked? Good night, Janey. You better go and see that little Jane hasn't kicked the covers off. It's cold tonight."
The front door closed behind her. Janey listened to her step on the frosty pavement until it was gone and the house was silent except for the hum of the oil burner in the basement and the icebox motor coming on and going off.
"You've never thrown away a thousand dollars," she whispered. "You've never wished you could go to bed and go to sleep and never have to wake again-"
She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The black evening bag was on the table in the hall. Her feet were like blocks of frozen wood as she went over to it and picked it up. She held it for a moment and opened it. There were the thirty-two dollars in bills on top, that Lois Maynard had stuffed in there, with her handkerchief, and some quarters that dropped on the table as she took the bills out. One of them was the gilded quarter that Jim Ferguson had put in her bag. Somebody's lucky piece. Her lucky piece, Jim had said. She turned it over in her hand, dropped it back in the bag, and put the other quarters with the bills on the table.
The other thing was in the bag, too. She shivered as she took it out. It was a piece of yellow cleansing tissue, the corners twisted together to make a small pouch. Her fingers trembled as she untwisted it and held it open in the palm of her hand under the lamp on the table. A dozen small oblong capsules glittered up at her, a dozen small evil orange-colored eyes. Go to sleep and never have to wake up again-she stared blindly down at them. Then she raised her head, listening up the stairs, and drew a sudden breath of sharp and passionate decision. She jerked her hand back and flung them violently away from her, knocking her bag after them onto the rug. The evil orange eyes rolled off the rug onto the waxed pine floor and lay winking up at her. The gilded lucky piece flew out of the bag, rolled off in a crazy half-circle and back near her feet. It winked up, too. She bent down breathlessly and picked it up. Maybe it really was her lucky piece. She pressed it in her closed palm an instant before she picked up her bag and dropped it in. Then very slowly she gathered up the orange-colored capsules and put them back in the square of tissue. She got to her feet and counted them. There were only eleven. She got down again to look for the twelfth. It must have rolled into the dining room. She turned on the light and looked there, but it was nowhere in sight and she was suddenly too tired to look anymore.
In the morning. She folded the eleven up in the tissue and picked up her bag, too tired to find the last one now, too tired even to go out and turn off the kitchen light. She put her foot on the first step, and on the second. A thousand dollars-she might as well have flushed it down the bathroom drain, the way she was going to do with the orange-colored capsules. She clutched them a little tighter in her hand. A thousand dollars-it couldn't be. It couldn't possibly be.
Add to it the now-obvious plan of Lois, Janey thought. The little bitch has always had her eyes on Gus. Now she's made up her mind to go for it.
But Janey felt that Gus had too much class for a game like that. He was all man-and all hers, Janey thought. Gus was an honest, gruff sort of man, and the guilt he would suffer over an affair with Lois would be tremendous.
Janey wasn't that way. She had never understood Gus's guilt feelings about sex-but in a way she was glad that he had them. She felt it was a form of insurance that she did everything in her power to keep in force.
But her mind couldn't stay away from the thousand dollars. Suddenly Janey grinned. She could always become a hooker, she thought. What had she read about that? Something-probably in one of Gus's men's magazines. Suburban hookers, it was called. It was about housewives augmenting their incomes with afternoon prostitution.
When she read it, it had sounded bizarre and unreal. But now, faced with a shortfall of a thousand dollars, it didn't seem so farfetched at all.
Janey allowed her mind to drift. It was a pleasure to think about a way out, an escape route that no one had thought of. Of course, sleeping with strange men, having them actually make love to you for a few dollars ... she wasn't sure if she could go through with it.
Janey imagined herself waiting at home for the phone to ring-for she would be sent out on "assignment" rather than walk the streets.
The phone would ring and she would answer it. "Go to the Hotel Claridge," a voice would say, "Room 105."
A half-hour later she would arrive, wearing her white dress. She would knock on the door of room 105 and it would be answered by a barrel-chested man smoking a cigar. With a glance he would take in her lovely body and beautiful face. He would grin. "Come on in," he'd say.
After two drinks Janey knew that she would feel much better about it. Liquor was all she needed and she knew it. In fact, if she had three drinks, she'd probably be looking forward to it. After all, no one was ever going to know. It would be a secret, and she would leave the room a hundred dollars ahead.
He undressed as she finished her third drink. Janey saw it all in her mind's eye, clear as a bell. She saw herself lick her lips with nervous energy. And then the man dropped his trousers and Janey sucked in her breath in astonishment.
Janey had never seen such a huge penis. It seemed to be nine inches long and as thick as a baby's forearm. She swallowed nervously, aware that she was going to have to earn her money this time.
He dragged her to the bed and told her to take it off. She pulled her dress over her head and felt his thick fingers on her body immediately. He fingered her breasts roughly, and then jammed a thick hand between her legs, rubbing it back and forth roughly.
Janey wanted nothing more than to get it over with-the entire affair was beginning to sicken her. But then he pushed her backward onto the bed and stood over her, stroking himself, grinning lewdly at her.
"Play with yourself," he commanded. The thought of allowing this vile creature to witness so personal a matter disgusted Janey, but she realized that she was there for a hundred dollars, not for the pleasure of it.
She spread her long legs and massaged herself gently with the palm of her hand, surprised at her immediate and erotic response to it. She had figured that she was so turned off that nothing would happen, but her body betrayed her.
He was laughing now, calling her a whore because she would do anything that he said. He knelt on the bed, straddling her with his knees, and introduced his giant penis into her mouth. She almost gagged, but she found herself sucking eagerly after a few seconds, her hand still busily massaging her center.
And then she felt the gush of her orgasm-it came as a surprise to her-and she pulled away from his penis, but his hard hands fastened to the sides of her face and he told her to continue or he wouldn't pay a dime.
Janey felt his penis thickening even more-it didn't seem that anything could get that big! And then he began grunting and his thighs were jiggling with pleasure and his hot seed poured into her mouth, choking her, disgusting her, and at the same time adding to the pleasure that she was giving herself.
And then Janey snapped out of it, shaken and oddly excited by her fantasy.