Джон Макдональд - More Good Old Stuff

When the truck roar faded, she put on what was obviously a social smile and said, “I’m Mrs. Clarey and I live right down there.” She pointed, laughed thinly and added, “I guess I must be your nearest neighbor, Mr.—”

“I guess you are,” he said, still wearing the cool smile, ignoring her request for his name.

Obviously that was all she had planned, the conversation up to that point. Her smile began to have a strained quality, a smile painted on a thin face.

“George and I, we saw the baby carriage on the front porch and we thought that being neighbors and all... your wife...” She lost the sentence and flushed.

“She isn’t well,” Stan said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is there anything that I—”

“No, thanks.”

She scraped some of the mud off her shoe onto the edge of the top step, then decided that she shouldn’t have done it, as she bent over and shoved the clod loose with her thumb. She straightened up, rubbing her thumb on the palm of her other hand, her smile gone.

“I guess I’d better go and come back when Mrs. — when your wife is feeling better.”

“You do that.”

She went awkwardly down the steps, picking her way across the mud toward the strip of pasture that separated the two houses. The back of her neck under the tightly curled hair looked flushed. She turned and glanced back quickly and went on, moving as though she wanted to run from him.

Stan Ryan waited until she had crossed the rise in the middle of the pasture and disappeared on the far side. He could see the green roof of the Clarey house. He spat out into the mud, turned and slowly moved back into the house.

Sticky dishes were piled high on the kitchen drainboard and a neat row of empty bottles was lined up under the sink.

Stan Ryan was drenched in sweat, as though he had run a long way or lifted a great weight.

Art Marka stood in the dining-room doorway, his hands in his pockets, a stubble of black beard on his face, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. His pale blue shirt was stained dark in wide patches at the armpits.

“How are your nerves, kid?” Art asked.

“As good as yours.”

“You know, kid, we really got an asset in that honest puss of yours. Even freckles you’ve got. Everybody trusts a man with freckles. She take it okay?”

Stan shrugged. “Guess so. She won’t be back. She’ll probably tell her punk husband tonight that we’re pretty unfriendly. No more than that. I told her my wife was sick.”

Art sighed and stretched. “Kid, I wish you had a wife and I wish she was here and I wish she wasn’t sick. This place gets on my nerves. I need a break.”

From the dining room, where the shades were drawn, Steve Jadisko said, “Stop dreaming, moon boy. Come on back. I’m about to knock on you.”

“Rummy, rummy, rummy,” Art muttered. “Go take my hand, kid. I’ll stake you. I’m going to take a nap.”

Stan went in and sat across from Steve at the cheap new maple table. The top had long dark scorch marks from cigarettes, pale rings from careless glasses.

Steve Jadisko was short and squat, with a face like a gray paving stone, an underlip that hung pendulously away from yellowed teeth. He looked like a moron, but Stan knew that Steve was probably smarter than Art Marka, who had planned the kidnapping.

Stan picked up Art’s hand and began to plan mechanically. The word “kidnapping” had an alien and foreign sound to it. An unreal sound. It was a word that brought on night sweats. Even though it had happened over three months before.

Steve knocked with eight, added up Stan’s hand, marked the score.

Marka had picked the family right. They had paid the four hundred thousand without a whimper, and the small bills weren’t marked. Art had insisted that the kid be kept healthy because then, if things went wrong, there was a better chance of a jury recommendation for mercy.

Steve had been the one who was in the second car when the exchange was to be made. He had the kid on the floor in back in the basket. Art had picked up the bundle and run back to the first car, and as soon as Art had checked the bundle by ripping open a corner, Stan had given the two beeps on the horn that was the signal to Steve to unload the basket.

But when Steve had shown up at the crossroads, the kid was still with him. Still in the basket. The kid had started to bawl, probably for food, and Steve, getting nervous, had pulled the blankets up over its head to stop the yammer. The kid had stopped.

Before Steve had unloaded, he had taken a look and found the kid’s face blue because it had smothered.

So at the crossroads, Art had made Stan take it back into the brush and scoop a hole in the leaf mold. The cold sweats came at night when Stan dreamed of how the body had felt in his hands, how still it was, how incredibly heavy.

So, of course, the family had blatted their troubles to the FBI, and it hit the papers the day after the Boy Scouts had found the grave, and now it was Murder One for sure. Stan Ryan thought a lot about death. Often he found himself clamping his solid thigh between strong fingers and feeling the aliveness of himself, picturing the blood rushing through the veins and arteries. It was a hell of a thing that they wanted to take him, Stan Ryan, and make him dead.

There had been no point in getting rough with Steve Jadisko because it was done and nothing could change it. Sometimes in the night Stan woke up and thought he had heard the kid crying the way it had cried in the cellar room where they had kept it for those five days before the payoff, five days while the family got the cash together.

Art had planned the hideout. A month before they had taken the kid, Art had bought the house two hundred miles away, eight miles from a big city. A cheap and lonesome house, a get-rich-quick venture by a small, sloppy building contractor.

Stan had lived in the house for two weeks before the kidnapping, following the routine that Art had set up for him.

After the kid was buried, they had split and gone to the house. The only car they kept was legitimate, a gray ’68 Plymouth. Registered. Stan Ryan did the buying. Art and Steve hadn’t left the house in three months, hadn’t been seen by a soul.

It had died off the newspapers, except for an editorial now and then. “Why haven’t the brutal murderers been apprehended?”

Stan sorted his new hand, sighed and said, “How soon do we leave, Steve?”

“Hell, kid! You know as well as I do. Another month and a half. Then we divide and split up.”

“Where are you going, Steve?”

“Kid, if I should tell you and if they should grab you, they got ways to make you tell them. If you don’t know you can’t tell them a thing.”

Stan knew where he was going. To Mexico and from there to Guatemala. He had heard they couldn’t extradite you from there. And it was cheap. If he was careful, his hundred thousand might last the rest of his life. One seventy-five to Art and one twenty-five to Steve.

For a long time Stan had been nervous about them killing him and leaving him in the house. But Art had explained that nobody should try anything funny because it might give the cops a quick lead and it would be easier to follow a trail from a known place, and if anybody got wise, they might well be signing their own death warrant.

Steve glanced at his watch. “Time for your housework, Mother,” he said.

Stan walked to the front door, took a cautious look around, then stepped out, grabbed the baby carriage and wheeled it into the front hall. Dust from the traffic had collected on the pale blue blanket. He took it out and shook it.

Testing the front door to make certain it was locked, he went out onto the back porch, across the muddy yard, and untied the end of the clothesline that was fastened to the corner of the garage. It was a lot easier to take in the line, clothes and all, than to take the clothes off each day and then hang them back on the line. He held them high to keep them out of the mud, untied the end fastened to the house and took the whole wad inside, dropped them in a corner of the kitchen. The line held aprons, women’s underthings, T-shirts, shorts, a couple of sheets. All the things necessary to show that the house was occupied by a man and wife.