High Priest of California & Wild Wives: Two Novels, page 15
“Go to your room!” He told her fiercely.
“Fuck yourself,” she remarked quietly and wandered over to the fireplace.
“I wanted to take a look at you, Blake,” he said, ignoring Florence’s suggestion. “I made arrangements to see you this afternoon, but you squirmed out of it some way—”
“I was in my office,” I said. “If you wanted to see me, why didn’t you call for an appointment instead of sending two thugs after me?”
“You’re an unscrupulous man, Blake. I’ve checked on you, and I know how to handle your kind.”
“Money won’t do everything, Weintraub. Your daughter’s twenty-six years old. If you think you can keep her under lock and key forever, you’re—” I broke off in mid-sentence. Florence was laughing with whooping peals of choking laughter, and clutching the mantel for support. Weintraub looked blankly at me for a moment, and then held up his hand. It had stopped trembling.
“Daughter?” he asked vaguely. “Did she say she was my daughter?”
Florence stopped her laughter abruptly and stared at us sullenly.
“Well,” I said. “Isn’t she?”
“No. It so happens that Florence is my wife!” He glared suspiciously at me, still undecided as to whether I knew or didn’t know she was his better half.
“Oh,” I said. There was one more Desert Wind remaining in the glass pitcher. I poured it into my glass and drank it down.
Chapter Eight
I REMAINED AS COOL AS I COULD, under the circumstances. Weintraub was watching me closely, looking for a reaction on my part that would prove me to be a liar. I set my empty glass on the table.
“Look, Mr. Weintraub,” I said feebly, “I didn’t know she was your wife—”
Weintraub grimly set his lips and looked at Florence. She was standing in front of the fireplace; her arms were crossed beneath her considerable breasts, and her face bore a detached expression, as though she was thinking of something else.
“I believe you, Blake,” Weintraub said with a trace of sadness in his voice. “A lot of her lovers didn’t know she was married at first. But by the time they found out, she had them so completely—well, it’s too late then. They don’t want to give her up and I have to convince them that they’d better! It’s all so—”
“Lies, lies. Lies, lies. Lies, lies. Lies, lies,” Florence sing-songed.
“No, Blake, you’re not the first of Florence’s lovers by any means. And I really don’t give a damn anymore what she does. If she had any discrimination, it wouldn’t be so hard to take. But my wife doesn’t draw the line,” Weintraub said bitterly. “As far as she’s concerned, there is no line! I’ve been forced to have her watched all the time. But that hasn’t been, what you might call, practical. . .”
“If I’m so bad,” Florence commented, “why don’t you give me a divorce?”
Weintraub shook his massive head. “No, I’ll never divorce you—and you don’t want a divorce, anyway! You and I made an agreement, and that agreement was marriage. I got what I wanted and you got what you wanted. Money for you, and for me,” he smiled sardonically, “the best sex in San Francisco!” He turned to me. “And as far as I’m concerned, it’s worth every cent it’s cost me!”
Weintraub’s face was an angry red; his cheeks puffed, and his eyes brightened as though a switch was clicked on inside his head.
“I intend to protect my investment, Blake.” He faced Florence. “Marriage is no different from any other type of contract. I’ll fight to the last moment of my life for anything and everything I own. And if you tried to get a divorce, I have enough evidence on you to have you laughed out of court. Any court. You wouldn’t get a penny, not even in a California court!”
He crossed the room briskly and jabbed a finger into my chest.
“Do you want to marry her, Blake? Do you think you could support her?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I’ve never given it any thought.”
He sneered. His face was quite red in the places it wasn’t blue-black. “You couldn’t pay her doctor bills! Her sani—”
Florence screamed and cut him off. It was a startling, awesome outcry. Starting low in her chest, like a police siren heard in the distance, it gathered force and momentum and reached a terrifying crescendo. It stopped momentarily while she took another breath and then it started all over again. She exerted every muscle in her body to produce such a scream. Her eyes were closed and she stood with her feet apart and her fists clenched tightly; her elbows tight against her sides. It hurt my ears to listen to it. Taking Florence by the shoulders, I shook her back and forth as hard as I could. The hard shaking didn’t even slow her down. I slapped her face three or four times.
“Stop it, Florence!” I had to yell at her to be heard.
I was knocked sideways across the room, hit from behind by Weintraub. I stumbled onto the stone table, banged my shin and with luck, managed to remain on my feet. Weintraub had hit me just above my right kidney with a metal smoking stand. He swung the heavy stand again, but I evaded his clumsy swing by jumping backwards. The momentum of his charging swing whirled him around and I leaped forward with a looping right hand blow that caught him below the ear. He dropped the smoking stand and pitched forward to the floor. He didn’t move.
“What’s the matter with you, you crazy bastard!” I yelled. Florence had stopped screaming on Weintraub’s fall, and my voice reverberated in the silent room. There was a sweet smile on Florence’s face, and she wet her lips with the tip of her pink tongue.
“Do you think he’s dead?” she asked excitedly.
“Of course not. What got into you, anyway?”
“I always scream when he starts to nag. It infuriates him and he usually goes away and leaves me alone.” She rubbed her face ruefully. There was a large, red hand-mark on her face where I had slapped her. “You hurt me when you slapped me, but I don’t mind.”
“I thought you were hysterical, kid. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.”
“What difference does it make?” Florence shrugged comically. “As long as it’s exciting.” She sat down on the sofa, took a Marlboro out of the box on the table, and lit it with a table-lighter shaped like a miniature piece of Henry Moore’s sculpture. “What about him, Jake?” she asked quietly, kicking her unconscious husband in the ribs with the point of her toe. “Is it worth the effort to bring him around?”
“I’ll get some water. Where’s the kitchen?”
“Through there.” She pointed to the hallway and settled herself comfortably on the couch, puffing languidly on her cigarette.
I left the living room and wandered down the hall, holding my hand tightly against my sore side to ease the pain. Weintraub had hit me with only a glancing blow of the smoking stand. A square, solid blow and I’d have been the one unconscious on the floor instead of him. Marriage or no marriage, he was nuts to hang onto a woman like Florence. But that was his business, not mine. Under the circumstances, I was through. No more playing around with Florence for me. A man like Weintraub had a lot of influence in San Francisco, and if he wanted to push things, I’d be relieved of my private investigator’s license in a hurry. I’d bring him out of it, try my best to explain things quietly, and then I’d push off. This was the second time in one day that I had been sucked into a triangle through no fault of my own. And I didn’t like it. The fifth door I tried led into the kitchen.
I got an empty saucepan out of the cabinet beneath the sink and filled it with cold water from the tap. I plucked a dish towel from the rack above the range and draped it over my arm. A cat meowed. There was a large charcoal-colored cat, with white feet, sitting on its haunches by the outside door. It meowed plaintively.
“Do you want out, Kitty?” I asked the cat. It meowed again. I put the pan of water down on the sideboard, crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the backyard. The stupid cat sat where it was without moving. I shut the door and picked up the pan of water again. The cat meowed again. I set the pan down again, opened the door so it could get out, but the cat didn’t make a move. I kicked out with my right foot and caught the cat just right. It sailed out of the door, missed the steps completely and landed running. It quickly disappeared into the darkness of the backyard. I slammed the door and left the kitchen with the pan of cold water. I don’t like cats, anyway. Too independent. And even when you try to do them a favor they don’t appreciate it.
Florence was idly leafing through a movie magazine when I returned to the living room. She tossed the magazine on the table and looked curiously at the pan of water when I set it down.
“What are you going to do, Jake?”
Weintraub was still inert upon the floor. He was stretched out, face down, with his arms spread. I turned him over on his back. It wasn’t easy. He was heavier than he looked.
“I’m going to bring him to.”
“Oh.” Florence picked up her magazine again.
I wet the dishcloth and rubbed Weintraub’s face with it. I slopped the cloth in water and wrung it out over his face. I slapped him lightly a couple of times. I dumped the entire panful of water over his face. There was a great deal of water in the pan and it made a pool beneath his head. He didn’t stir a muscle. I searched among the many folds of skin on his neck for quite a while before I found his jugular vein. I couldn’t feel a heartbeat, so I wasn’t sure whether I had the vein or not. Lifting his right eyelid with my left hand I jabbed my right forefinger into his eye. No reflex. Florence’s purse was at the other end of the table where I couldn’t reach it.
“Hand me your little mirror,” I told her, pointing to her handbag.
“Why?”
“I said to give me your mirror!” I was a little excited by that time and I had raised my voice. Florence opened her purse and handed me her compact. For a moment I couldn’t open it, and when I found the latch, I was holding the compact upside down and rose-colored face powder was scattered over Weintraub’s set expression. I held the mirror part of the compact as close as I could to Weintraub’s lips, and then I examined it. There was no moisture or fogginess on the mirror. Not a trace. I snapped the compact shut and tossed it into Florence’s lap.
“Is something wrong, Jake?”
“Yeah,” I said, getting off my knees. I poured a double shot of gin into an empty glass and poured it down my throat. I choked slightly and the raw gin brought tears to my eyes. I wiped them away. Florence had lost interest in the movie magazine and was sitting on the edge of the sofa with her eyes widened. Her mouth was partly open, her lips wet.
“Is he dead, Jake?
“He couldn’t be any deader.”
Chapter Nine
“DO YOU WANT A DRINK, FLORENCE?”
“A little one.” She indicated the size by holding up a thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
I poured a jigger of gin into a glass and handed it to her. I sat down across from her in a soft leather chair. But I leaped up immediately. Now was no time to sit down and relax. I had to figure an angle, and the best way for me to think is on my feet. I paced up and down the room, turning the facts over in my mind and getting nowhere.
“What do we do now, Jake?” Florence asked, after she gulped her drink and put the glass on the table. I didn’t know.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
I took a cigarette out of the box on the table and lit it with the table-lighter. My hands trembled, and the cigarette tasted as dry as fifty-year-old sherry. After two drags I crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray.
“I suppose the smart thing to do is call the police, kid. But when I do my name is Fall Guy. There’s a lieutenant who’s been after me for a long time, and if I don’t end up in the gas chamber, I’ll end up at Folsom crushing stones. Somehow, the prospect of prison doesn’t encourage me to do my right and proper duty as a citizen . . .”
“You and I both know it was an accident, Jake. But if I told the truth, nobody would believe me. Milton and I have had some nasty arguments in our time, and his lawyer has some papers in his office that would—well, all I can say, is that this is very unfortunate.”
“That’s a good word for it. Unfortunate.”
“I know what we can do, Jake. We can leave.”
“Leave? Where would we go?”
“There are lots of places.”
“Not anymore, there aren’t. Twenty years ago a person could disappear, but not now. We might get away for awhile, but we’d be caught, and then it would be just that much tougher.”
“What about me? I don’t want to die . . .” Florence started to cry. I sat down beside her and tried to give her some comfort by putting my arms around her.
“Come on, Florence, crying isn’t going to do you any good. The best thing to do is call the police. When they get here, we clam up, say absolutely nothing. Let them jump to a lot of wrong conclusions. Then, after we get a lawyer, we tell the exact truth and hope for the best—”
“No!” Florence pulled away from me and got to her feet. She glared down at me, and stood with her legs apart, arms akimbo. “Do you think I’m going to rot in prison over a son-of-a-bitch like him?” She kicked Weintraub’s body viciously with her toe. “Take a good look at him! Go ahead! How’d you like to have something like that crawl into bed with you every night?” She turned away from me. “He was always sweating. Not a hot, decent sweat, the way a working man sweats—oh, no, not him! It was a cold, clammy sweat, and his skin is just like a frog’s. I put up with it, just the way he said I did; for the money, and I’ve got that money too. He thought he was so smart!” she said derisively. “He never gave me any cash, you see, but he gave me charge accounts in every store and restaurant in town. So I figured out a system . . .”
She paused for breath, laughed wildly.
“It’s a simple system, really. I’d buy a dress, or furs, something expensive—say a hundred dollars or so, and then I’d sell it back to the salesgirl for half price without taking it out of the store. The girl could sell it and make twice the profit for herself. See? I’d charge the hundred dollars and get fifty in cash from the salesgirl. Milton never complained about bills, and there was so much stuff I sent home anyway, besides the stuff I sold for cash, he never got wise to what I was doing. At least I don’t think he did.”
“How much money have you got?”
“Plenty.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars in the vault at the Desert Sands in Vegas. Another ten thousand in Mexico City, and five thousand in a safe deposit box in New York.”
“That much?”
“That much, and maybe more.”
It was enough money for me to think things over a little more carefully. In fact, twenty thousand dollars was a fabulous sum to a man like me. The most money I’d ever had in a lump sum was eight hundred dollars. That was my discharge pay when I got out of the army, and I hadn’t hung onto it long enough to really get a good look at it. Maybe Florence and I could work things out, at that. If we picked up the five thousand in Vegas, it would be easy to get to Mexico City. Once in Mexico, we could live for a long time on fifteen thousand dollars. At least long enough for the hunt to die down. Then we could quietly move to New York and lose ourselves in the masses. To stand trial and avoid conviction was a thirty-to-one shot. A jury might take a dim view of a so-called accident if it found out I was sleeping with the wife. And as far as claiming self-defense, a jury might figure Weintraub was entirely within his rights to bounce a smoking stand off my ribs. After all, a husband is justified in slugging a man who is fondling his wife when he isn’t supposed to be at home. One lousy, indignant husband, or one church-going wife on the jury could put me behind the bars on a second degree rap, if nothing else. Ten years. Ten years in jail would raise my age to forty-three instead of thirty-three. And I had already wasted ten years of my life in the army. Florence was right. It was best to leave quietly and hope for the best while we were out of jail instead of in . . .
“Please, Jake,” Florence said, putting her arms around my waist and burying her face against my chest. “I’ll make it up to you. You’ll see.”
“I know you will, Florence. And I’ll make it up to you for putting the last punch in your meal ticket.”
Florence blew her nose on a piece of Kleenex she took out of her purse. She took a tiny brush and her lipstick and made a new, coral mouth. I poured another shot of gin in my glass, but I didn’t drink it. If we were going to be on the run for awhile, I thought it best to dispense with drinking.
“How long do you think we have, Florence?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean servants! I know damned well you don’t do the housework in this place.”
“We should have until Monday morning, at least. There’s a housekeeper, Mrs. Watkins, and a maid, but I let them go for the weekend as soon as Milton left for the airport. The damned liar! I wanted us to have the place to ourselves.”
I walked across the room to the large picture window, pulled the drapes aside slightly and looked outside. The circular driveway was empty except for Florence’s Buick. There was a streetlight near the entrance to the grounds, but I didn’t see anyone lurking about on the street or near the gate.
“What about those two clowns? Do you think he actually fired them? It’s hard to tell.”
“I think he did, Jake. As he said, what good were they?”
“I wish I knew for sure. They told me he wanted to talk to me when they tried to pick me up at the hotel. And he sort of admitted that he sent them for me. Of course, he could have fired them afterward.”
“No. They were fired when I told you, all right. He must have asked them later to go on that one more errand.”
“But they know all about us, baby. And if they tell the police the situation, we’d never prove to a jury that I hit Weintraub in self-defense.”
