Lawrence Block - Masters of Noir - Volume 1

On the sun porch, Cindy stood with her back to me, staring out across the cleared area of the yard to the standing timber. She was wearing a slim black sheath of a dress without shoulders. Beautiful in anything or nothing, in black she was most beautiful of all. She was smoking a cigarette, and when she lifted it to her lips, the smoke rose in a thin, transparent cloud to mingle with the golden haze the light made in her hair.

“It’s been a long time,” she said. “Almost an hour.”

“What’s been almost an hour?”

“Since the last explosion. They’ve been coming at half-hour intervals.”

“Maybe they’ve raised him.”

“Maybe.”

She moved a little, lifting the cigarette to her lips again, and the sunlight slipped up her arm and over her shoulder. I went up behind her and trailed my hands down the black sheath to where it flared tautly over firm hips and then back up to her shoulders. I pulled her back against me hard, breathing her hair.

“Nervous, Cindy?”

“No. You?”

“A little. It’s the waiting, I guess.”

She turned to face me, her arms coming up fiercely around my neck.

“Sorry, Tony? Will you ever be sorry?”

I looked down into the hot, gold-flecked eyes, and I said, “No, I’ll never be sorry,” and her cigarette dropped with a small sound to the asphalt tile behind me. Out on the front veranda, there was a loud knocking at the door.

I went in through the living room and on out through the hall to the front door, and there on the veranda stood Aaron Owens, the sheriff of the county. He was a short, fat little man with round cheeks and a bowed mouth, and it crossed my mind that maybe he’d been elected sheriff because the voters thought he was cute. Looking in at me through the screen, he mopped his face with a bright bandana and blew out a wet sigh.

“Hello, Mr. Wren. It’s a hot walk up from the lake.”

I opened the screen door and told him to come in. “My cousin’s on the sun porch. She’ll mix you a drink.”

We went back to the sun porch, and Cindy put bourbon and soda and ice in a glass and handed it to him. He took the drink eagerly.

“We’ve been listening to the blasting,” Cindy said. “We haven’t heard any now for an hour.”

He looked at her over the rim of his glass, his face and voice taking on a studied solemnity.

“We’ve brought him up. Poor old guy. I came to tell you.”

Cindy turned quickly away, looking again out across the yard to the timber, and the little sheriff’s eyes made a lingering, appreciative tour of the black sheath.

“He’ll be taken right into town,” he said. “Twenty-four hours in the water, you know. Didn’t do him any good. We thought you’d prefer it that way.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

He lifted his glass again, draining the bourbon and soda off the cubes. He let one of the cubes slip down the glass into his mouth, then spit it back into the glass.

“The coroner’ll look him over. Just routine. An old man like that shouldn’t swim alone in deep water. Maybe a cramp. Maybe a heart attack. Never can tell with an old man.”

“Grandfather was always active,” I said.

He looked wistfully at his empty glass for a minute and then set it down on the glass-topped table.

“Sure. Some old men never want to give up. Ought to know better. Well, time to be running along. Lucky to get him up so soon. Can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

I took him back to the front door and watched him cross the veranda and go down across the cleared area into the timber. Turning away, I went back to Cindy.

She was facing me when I came in, black and gold against the bright glass. Her lips were parted, and her breasts rose and fell with a slow, measured cadence.

“Everything’s all right, Tony. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“Sure. They can’t touch us, honey.”

“He was an old man. We didn’t take much of his life away.”

“Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it at all.”

“I won’t, Tony. I’ll just think about the time when we can go away. I’ll think of you and me and more money than we can spend in a dozen lifetimes. You and me and the long, hot days under a sky that’s bluer than any blue you’ve ever seen. Oh, Tony.”

I went over and held her tightly until she whimpered with pain and her eyes were blind with the pleasure of suffering.

“It won’t be long, honey. Not long. After the will’s probated. After everything’s settled.”

She snarled her fingers in my hair and pulled my face down to her hungry lips, and it must have been a century later when I became aware of the shrill intrusion of the telephone in the hall behind me.

I went out to answer it, and when I spoke into the transmitter my mind was still swimming in a kind of steaming mist. The voice that answered mine was clear and incisive but very soft. I had to strain to understand.

“Mr. Wren? My name is Evan Lane. I have a lodge across the lake. I see the sheriff’s men have quit blasting. Does that mean they’ve found the old man?”

“Yes,” I said. “They found him.”

“Permit me to extend my sympathy.” The country line hummed for a long moment in my ear, and it seemed to me that I could hear, far off at the other end, the soft ghost of a laugh. “Also my congratulations,” the voice said.

A cold wind seemed to come through the wire with the voice. The warm mist inside my skull condensed and fell, leaving my mind chill and gray and very still. Inside my ribs, there was a terrible pain, as if someone had thrust a knife between them.

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

The laugh was unmistakable this time, rising on a light, high note. “I offered my congratulations, Mr. Wren. For getting away with it, I mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think you do. You see, Mr. Wren, you made one small mistake. You made the mistake of acting too soon after your lovely friend had been sun bathing on the beach. A girl like that is an open invitation to a man like me to use his telescope. I have a clear shot from my veranda. Now do you understand, Mr. Wren?”

“What do you want?”

“I think you’ll find me a reasonable man. Perhaps we’d better meet and discuss terms.”

“Where?”

“Say the barroom of the Lakeshore Inn.”

“When?”

“Tonight? At nine?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I cradled the phone and went back through the living room to the sun porch. Cindy was standing at a liquor cabinet in the corner, moving a swizzle stick in the second of two drinks she’d mixed. She stopped stirring and looked across at me, becoming suddenly very quiet.

“Who was it, Tony?”

“He said his name’s Evan Lane. He has a lodge across the lake.”

“What did he want?”

“He wants to meet me at the Lakeshore Inn. Tonight.”

“Why?”

“He has a habit of watching you on the beach through a telescope. He was watching yesterday. He saw me and the old man in the lake.”

She took two stiff steps toward me, her slim body rigid in its black sheath. Bright spots were burning in her cheeks.

“Blackmail?”

“It looks like it.”

“What shall we do, Tony? What shall we do?”

“Find out what he’s after, first of all. After that, we’ll see.”

“He’ll bleed us, Tony. He’ll bleed us white.”

“No,” I said. “It won’t be like that. It won’t be like that at all.”

Then she came the rest of the way to me, but her body was cold and rigid in my arms, and it was a long time before it got back the way it was before the telephone rang.

The Lakeshore Inn was on an arm of the lake that was almost at a right angle to the main body. In the barroom, they’d tried to make an effect with rafters. After they’d finished, the effect was just rafters, but you felt friendly because they’d tried.