Джон Макдональд - More Good Old Stuff

“No,” he said softly.

She straightened her shoulders and there was contempt in her face. “You couldn’t kill me,” she said proudly. “You know why? Because you still love me.”

He stared at the pale oval of her face, shocked by what she had said. “Love you?” he exclaimed. “You!”

It came then. It started as a small spot of delirium deep inside him, spiraling up through his chest, exploding into laughter at his lips. Loud, raucous, pealing laughter.

Somehow he found the doorknob, let himself out into the dark hall. The hoarse wonderful sound of his great laughter boomed along the corridor, blasted the silent air of the stairwell. He clutched his middle with one hand and caught at the railings with the other.

Slowly he managed the stairs, whooping and gasping in an odd glee that was almost too much to bear. The door slammed behind him and he was out in the night heat of the city, weak and panting.

James Forbes walked off through the night streets, a pain in his side, his lips still twisting, and in his heart he knew that he was at last free.

He could hate the two of them no longer.

Hate was a prison with walls that touch the gray sky.

He was finally free.

He was sitting in a place called Stukey’s on Primrose Street, and he had been there most of the afternoon, alone at a table for two, a table with wire legs and the black scar tissue of cigarette burns. At the far end of the bar, a little clot of beer drinkers were making a two-dollar investment cover a whole afternoon of TV. Max dimly realized that they were so hard up for conversation they even watched the puppets on the late-afternoon kid shows.

He wasn’t drinking hard and heavy. But he was working on it. Somehow it had become important to achieve a state of remoteness. Whenever he felt himself sliding back into the uncomfortable reality of the present, he raised one finger and Stukey came out from behind the bar with another shot.

Three days before, the managing editor had climbed up onto a desk in the newsroom and addressed the whole working staff. His words had been as depressing as if he’d played a fire hose on the crowd. The sense of it was that the bankroll had faded, the promised backers had eeled out and thank you all so much for your loyal service and I hope you all find wonderful jobs within the next eleven minutes.

Max Raffidy sat and drank with a careful effort to maintain a detached state that was neither drunk nor sober. Because when he veered toward soberness he began to think that there were no jobs left in this town, in his town, and he’d have to hit the sticks. And when the shots came along a shade too fast he wanted to go out and punch noses. Being a large citizen with heavy bones and having a background of alley fights in this same city when he was a kid, he knew that if he went out nose hunting, he would land in a cage.

He could have taken his sorrows to one of the bars frequented by his fellow sufferers, but he did not wish to weep on shoulders, nor did he want tears on the lapels of his own tweeds, so he bundled up his misery and disgust and had taken it to Stukey’s — not to drown it, but just to make it swim a little.

He sat alone, and with his big blunt fingers, he peeled paper matches down so that they looked like little people. These he gave names to, the names of the people whose job it should have been to keep the Chronicle running. He laid them, one at a time, with a certain dedication, in the green glass ashtray with the chip out of the rim, and lit their little green heads with the butt of his cigarette, watching them flare up and writhe in unutterable torment.

He was vaguely considering taking his troubles to another bar when the raggedy screen door flapped and banged and the girl came in. She stood a few feet inside the door. The corners of her mouth were pulled down in such an odd way that Max told himself that here was a person with even more trouble than he had.

She saw him then, and her face lit up like a kid’s pumpkin. She ran the three steps to the table for two, collapsed into the chair opposite him. He had his arm outstretched on the table. She grabbed his forearm with both hands, her fingers digging strongly into him. She laid her forehead down against his arm, the breath shuddering out of her.

Two large and solid men in dark suits came in and stood a few feet behind her, looking down at her, looking inquisitively at Max.

“Oh, Jerry! Jerry, darling,” the girl said, her voice somehow thick and twisted.

Max had been around a sufficiently long time so that he was about to say, “Take her along, boys.” He recognized one of them as Billy Shaw, a district man.

But there was a sudden hotness on his thick wrist and he knew that a tear had fallen there. Somehow this made it all quite different. Tears were oddly in the mood of this day of unemployment, this sultry spring day.

He left his arm right where it was, with the warm pressure of her against it. He said mildly, “Something we can do for you boys?”

Shaw looked at him and said, “Seems she called you Jerry. Wouldn’t you be Max Raffidy that used to drop into precinct, reporting police?”

“It’s her special name for me,” Max said.

“Don’t go wise with us, Raff. What’s her name?”

“If you want her name, let’s do it right, Shaw. Let’s all go right down and book her.”

Shaw gave him a look of baffled disgust. “You people know too much. There’s no charge, Raffidy. She was reported acting funny on the street. Crying and carrying on.”

“She’s fine now. All my women cry and carry on when they can’t be with me.”

Stukey came over drying his hands on his apron. “I’d just as soon not have no trouble here, gentlemen.”

“Keep her off the street,” Shaw snapped. He nudged his running mate and together they walked heavily out.

“Bring the lady a brandy, Stuke,” Max said. Stukey shrugged and went back behind the bar.

Now I have a tramp on my hands, Max thought. Sir Lancelot Raffidy roars in on his white horse. She seemed content to make a permanent pillow of his arm. In fact, the arm threatened to go to sleep. The kitteny whine of the woman pretending to be a puppet had covered up the little conversation with Shaw. It still made a certain amount of privacy possible.

“Hey,” Max said softly. He burrowed with his other hand, got a crooked finger under her chin, gently eased her up.

Her hands slid down so that she held his big hand with both of hers, gave him the warmest smile he had seen in many a moon.

Stukey brought the brandy and plodded away. Max gave the girl the Raffidy evaluation. Silly spring hat, worn a bit awry. Hair worn too long for fashion, long and blond and curled under at the ends. Not harsh parched blond. Soft and natural. Short straight nose, unplucked brows, gray eyes, damp with tears, gray-purple smudges of weariness under the eyes. A young mouth, warm and somehow crumpled. As though from recent hurt. Pale, with a smudge on her cheek and the side of her nose.

The tiny bugles blew inside Max. This was no tramp. This might have a very legitimate news interest. Then he smiled wearily as he realized that even if there was a news interest, there was no place to phone it in.

Obviously the kid — she wasn’t over twenty-two — had been having a rough time. The side of her hand was scraped raw and her hair was tangled.

The gray eyes bothered him. She smiled right at him, but when he looked into her eyes there was an emptiness there: as though she were smiling, not at Max, but at somebody sitting right behind Max. A faintly creepy dish, this one.