Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde Read online

  The stairs still weren’t anything that would interest Busby Berkeley. At the top of them, I heard voices. They got louder as I neared Number 6. It sounded like I wasn’t the only one having a bad morning. I paused in front of the door, listening. Down the hall, the manager’s door was shut. Inside I heard Shade and Rebecca going at it pretty strong. I was coming at a bad time. Okay by me. The worse, the better. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I opened it.

  Rebecca wore a pair of beige slacks and a brassiere. Her hair was uncombed and her feet were bare. Shade was dressed just as he’d been the previous Friday, except I couldn’t see his hat anywhere. His face was dark and ugly, and his enormous neck seemed to be swelling as I watched. When I came in, he slowly pivoted his entire body to look at me. It was like watching a gun turret turning. “Why, it’s Misser Carson,” he said.

  “Ray,” Rebecca said, not looking at me. “Get out of here.”

  I said, “Hello, Shade. Rebecca.”

  “Why it’s Mister Carson. H’lo, Misser Carson. Nother one a Beggy’s frien’s. Nice t’know Beggy’s so many frien’s.”

  “That’s enough now, Lorrie,” Rebecca said.

  “Real good frien’s. Y’wamme t’run along now like a li’l bitty angel and run long now so you c’n talk a Mister Carson?”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Shut up, Ray. Lorrie, I want you to calm down now.”

  “Beggy’s poplar gal. Yessir. Nother frien’. Nother frien’. Wamme run long? Be n’angel? No? No? Maybe’ll stay then. Stay’n wash. Learn some’n. Yessir, Beggy knows a few th—”

  Shade wasn’t the only one who could move fast. I saw a white streak, and suddenly Shade’s face had snapped to the side and there were three red welts down his cheek.

  “Shut up,” she whispered. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

  He looked at her in horror — I was probably looking at her the same way — and his eyes slowly filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Becky. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Get out of here. Go away.”

  “I didn’t mean it, Becky,” he said, beginning to sob. “I didn’t mean nothing, Becky.”

  “You miserable fat-faced lump of hillbilly cowboy feeble-minded — you’ll never mean anything. You’ll never mean anything. Go away.”

  She began to swear at him then, one hard spurt after another of vile language. She didn’t use any words I didn’t know, and I guess I wasn’t surprised she knew them herself, but it was shocking to hear them in those clear, familiar, almost prissy tones — her diction hadn’t coarsened at all — and pouring out through a red distorted face I wouldn’t have recognized.

  “Don’t, Becky,” Shade kept saying. “Becky, don’t.”

  He pronounced it dawn.

  Swearing furiously, she wrangled him through the door and slammed it.

  “I’ll go crazy,” she said to no one special. “I’ll go right straight out of my goddamned mind. This is hell. This is hell.” She looked at me with hatred. “What do you want here with your big fat face?”

  Then she went still. Her eyes, which she’d twisted small, grew huge, terrifyingly large, and she spun and yanked the door open again.

  Shade was still standing there, weeping. “Becky,” he said.

  The noise that came from her now wasn’t speech at all, just a sound like heavy chain being dragged over rock. She lunged forward at Shade and began driving him down the hall with her fists. I heard them shuffling slowly along the carpet, and her voice echoing. She was expressing herself, all right. He was getting it with the bark still on.

  The moment they were out of sight, I went to the little desk. Nothing there or in the closet. The top drawer of the bureau was socks and undies. In the second drawer I found the powder-blue appointment book. I flipped through it. Mostly blank. The first three months were gone. In the back there was a string of phone numbers next to single initials, and I tried to commit the first two to memory. I looked in the pocket in the back cover, from which she’d taken the snapshot of Halliday. Inside was a letter on plain white stationery, with no envelope. It had been folded and refolded so often it was fragile along the creases. I read:

  Dear Becky,

  Well Kid it looks like the Movie Star idea is a bust as we thought it might be but I’m not down hearted and I don’t want you to be either. I got a number of other things working just at the moment and I think I’m doing O.K. or anyhow I could be if a few things would work out like I’m planning but my spirits are good and this is not as bad a Town as I was thinking. But I wish I had my girl with me. Because then I know everything would really go then. Honey there are more girls here then you could think of a million girls but there aren’t any of them like you, like a queen, and I think you should come out here because when they see you here they’ll know they really got something. I’m serious when I say that you could go big around here. Baby they think they’ve seen something but they haven’t seen athing till they’ve seen you. I’d like to see you up there getting treated like you deserve and I wouldn’t be a bit suprised to find you got that little something they seem to think I lack, and also I never think so clearly as when your here with me. If we were working this town together nothing could stop us. And even if they did I wouldn’t care anyway if you were here. I’m taking a little liberty and enclosing as you can see a ticket on the Western Zephiyr. I wish I was sending you an airplane ticket instead but that’ll come in time. Baby just come for a visit to lift my spirits and if you don’t like it I’ll get you home again someway but I know the way I really know things that this is your kind of Town.

  All my love allways,

  “Lance”

  I heard a door slam down the hall, and footsteps approaching. She walked back into the room saying, “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him.”

  When she saw me holding the letter, she stopped.

  She walked over to the straight chair by the closet. She sat herself down cautiously, as if she wasn’t sure the chair would hold.

  We looked at each other.

  “You met him a few months ago when he hired you to do a stag movie,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I said, “So you did a couple movies and then stole his money, because he wasn’t much of anything to you anyway, and now he wants to douse you with lye.”

  “May I have that, please,” she whispered.

  “Sure,” I said, and handed her the letter.

  “May I have my book, please.”

  I gave that to her, too, and she folded the letter carefully and tucked it away where it had been and zipped up the book.

  She gripped the book in both hands.

  “I know,” she said. “I know I’ve lied to you. But I haven’t lied about anything important, Ray. Not important to you. Only to me.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “If you’re going to hit me,” she said, “then go on and hit me, but please don’t just keep standing over me like this.”

  I sat down on the bed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Take it from ‘important,’ž” I said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Becky,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I didn’t lie, really,” she said. “Everything important was true. From your end. I do need to get away from him. He did say he’d burn my face. The only thing different is that I didn’t just meet him because he wanted girls for his movies. The only thing is that I’ve known him, that we grew up together, in the same little town. And I loved him very much. And there was only him, and he loved me too. If you read the letter — back then he loved me too. He wrote such wonderful letters, and he was going to send for me, and he did send for me. And when I got here I couldn’t understand anything, because back home everyone liked us, and wished us well, because we were such nice kids. We were. We were athletes and we were nice kids. And for a while, when I was here, I thought everything he was doing must be all right, because it was him doing it. And the
n I thought, if the other things, if he wasn’t right according to those things, then I’d have to get rid of everything else that said he was wrong. Because I loved him. And I made movies for him. And I did other things. And I began turning, I’ve turned into something horrible. I had to get away. I have to get away. Because I don’t even have his love anymore. But he can’t stand to lose anything, even if he has all the others, and he said he’d ruin me if I went, and then I took some money to make a new start with, and that made it worse. Ray?” she said, tears trickling down her face. “Didn’t you ever have something so precious, what a stupid word. Something that seemed to justify the whole world, and it went ugly, so ugly. And afterward, you wanted to pretend it had never been. That you’d never been that wrong, or hurt that badly.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

  “I did,” she said. “And I thought I was so lucky. And I still don’t know how it happened. And I don’t even believe it’s him anymore. You’re so surprised I want him hurt, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s already dead. He must be, dead for years, and now it’s somebody else, someone horrible. Because in high school he was so lovely and there was only each other.”

  “And what high school was this?”

  “Do you really need to know that, too?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I roared, and lurched to my feet.

  She shrank back against the wall.

  “Too many goddamned stories,” I said, almost choking. “Too many goddamned people telling me too many goddamned things. Something so precious — you don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. Here.” I was digging money from my pocket. There was almost nothing left. I threw it all on the bed. “Here. Here’s what’s left. It’s what I’ve got left. For fifteen bucks a day I’m anybody’s chump, but not yours anymore. Not yours. Get yourself another. I’m out. I’m out.” I turned and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” she wailed.

  “I’m out,” I said, and wrenched open the door.

  “You can’t go,” she said, and was across the room and her arms were around me. She clutched at my shoulder and somehow got me facing her again, and got herself plastered against me like a windblown scarf, and got the door closed. We stumbled back against it. “Don’t go,” she said. “You can’t go.” Her voice was flat with terror. I couldn’t see her face. She was rubbing it, open-mouthed, against my neck, and hauling my shirttails out of my pants and scraping at the small of my back with her fingers. “You can’t go,” she hissed. “You can’t. You can’t. Don’t go.” She was rubbing the whole front of herself against me from chin to knees, back and forth, as if my name were written in chalk on a wall and she needed to rub it out, and I smelled again the scent of harsh white soap, the kind you wash the laundry with, not your own body.

  Over her shoulder, I was counting the money on the bed. “It doesn’t figure,” I said thickly. “If a buck gets me one of them, and twenty-one bucks gets me two, are you telling me twenty-six dollars and forty cents buys the whole package?”

  “Don’t go,” she said.

  I shut up.

  21

  Difference

  I never told Mattie what it was like. I wouldn’t have known how, anyway. Rebecca knew an awful lot, and she did an awful lot, and for a while I thought I must be a hell of a fellow. Then I saw that the noises she made and the things she said and did were just that, things she said and did. And then I saw they weren’t even meant to fool me. She was just trying to show me a good time. I stopped.

  “What,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see her face in the shadows.

  “I warned you,” she said softly.

  “No. What you said was you weren’t very good.”

  “I meant that I don’t want anything. I never want anything. It’s okay,” she said, touching my face. “Don’t stop. It’s okay.”

  “Was it—”

  “It’s never been any different with anybody. But I was happy when it was him. It’s okay. Don’t stop. Come here. It’s okay.”

  What got to me most, I think, was that I couldn’t do anything to get her nipples up. They were just pale disks, sometimes a little nubbly. Of course, some women are like that, even if they’re having a fine time. Anyway, it was stupid to take it personally.

  Shade tapped on the door once near midnight, softly calling Becky’s name, and once a few hours later. The first time Rebecca screamed at him to go away, and the second time she just made the noises she was already making, but a little louder. I heard him weeping and stumbling heavily away down the hall.

  His hat was on the floor near the window, behind the bed. That’s why I hadn’t seen it earlier.

  When I woke at dawn, Rebecca was on the other side of the bed and facing away from me, curled up in a C, all shoulder blades and lion-colored hair. Every now and again she let out a delicate little snore. They were lovely sounds. She didn’t smell like soap now. She smelled like bed. I had forty-eight hours left now until Scarpa sent his men, but it’s funny how lying with a woman makes you feel safe for a little while anyway. Still, forty-eight hours isn’t much, no matter how good Rebecca smelled, and I got up carefully, knelt down on the floor, and started going through her clothes. There was some pale light coming in under the blinds, and I held up each label and read it. They were just labels. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes. I didn’t think I could do her closet or dresser without waking her, so I got her purse off the night table, gripped the clasp in my fist to muffle the click, and slowly twisted it open. Her purse was nice and tidy. She had a clean lace handkerchief in there, a change purse with about a dollar in change, six singles held together with a paper clip, two shades of lipstick, and a compact I didn’t open. There was no driver’s license. There was a little chrome .32 automatic with a fake pearl grip. I could have hidden the whole thing in my hand. I broke it and sniffed, looked down the barrel, then popped out the magazine and counted six bullets. Full, and hadn’t been fired in a long while. I slid the magazine back in. It went home with a faint click, and I heard Rebecca stop mid-snore. She was watching me from her nest of fair hair. “Don’t you ever stop,” she said, without love.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Morning. If you wanted to see what was in my purse, why didn’t you ask?”

  “I’m shy.”

  “I’ve given you this,” she said, patting the sheet over her middle. “I’ve given you all this. You think I wouldn’t’ve given you what’s in my purse? Go on. Take it.”

  “I’d look pretty silly with a gun like this,” I said. “I’ve never understood why anybody would put chrome on a gun.” I pulled out a corner of the sheet and began wiping it down.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Someday, when you do something stupid with this, I don’t want them to find any of my prints on it.”

  “I thought I’d better get one,” she said. “You’re probably going to tell me I got the wrong kind.”

  I examined the gun on both sides in the light from under the blinds, holding it by the sheet, then dropped it back into her purse and set her purse back on the night table. I flopped down beside her. She lay on her back with the blanket drawn up to her chin, the edge of it bunched loosely in her fists, but when I took hold of it myself she let go at once, and I slowly drew it down to the foot of the bed. I propped myself on one elbow and just looked. There wasn’t an inch of her that was unfamiliar now. In one way I felt as if we’d been lying around naked all our lives, but in another way I felt I’d just stolen my first peek at her through some bathroom window, as if I was some lucky dirty lad alone in an alley. She lay there gazing at the ceiling, arms at her sides.

  “You could say something nice,” she said bleakly. “You could tell me I’m beautiful.”

  “You look ridiculous,” I said. “You look like two balloons on a string.”

  “Thank you. I know. And you,” she went on savagely, “look awful. You did look s
tupid with my gun. You looked like some big horrible stupid hairy animal. And so pleased with yourself. You don’t look a bit like a bear. Bears look nice.”

  “Nice? We had some bears where I’m from. Browns and a few grizzlies. They say people are the only animals that kill for fun. It’s not true. A grizzly will do it just to pass the time.”

  “I know about bears but they still look nice. They have little eyes, and they always look like they’re looking around, trying to figure things out.”

  “Well, that’s me in a nutshell. How did we got onto bears?”

  “I don’t know. It was something I thought of.”

  We lay there a while in silence. Her breasts and thighs were beginning to goose-pimple, but she didn’t try to pull up the blanket. There was a hard flat spot in the center of her chest, and I touched it with a forefinger, then traced my finger down her narrow belly. I picked up one of her legs by the calf, gave it a little shake, let it drop. Her legs didn’t touch except at the knee, the way some skinny women’s don’t, but also, her shoulders were wide enough that her arms didn’t touch her sides. There was a clean pale hollow under her arm, and I stroked it with my thumb. She wasn’t ticklish. Her muscles were long, flat, and delicate, and braided together like the muscles in a doe’s flank. Most pretty women look better with their clothes on, but you had to see all of that goofy body for it to make sense.