James Cain - The Magician's Wife

During all this, Clay changed to T shirt and shorts, put out soap, brush, and towel, and started the water running. At last she fluttered past him, down the hall to the bedroom, and then prettily reappeared, dressed as September Morn, a clean dish towel pinned around her head. She felt the bath with her toe, then climbed in. He soaped her, slowly, carefully, tenderly, and she scrubbed herself with the brush. Then, as the tub filled she stretched out. Occasionally she washed water over her breasts, but mostly she just lay there, her eyes closed, saying nothing. He said nothing, either, being content to drink her in with his eyes as he sat beside the tub on the little bath stool. Presently, though, her face twisted, as though in pain, and she covered it with her hands. “ Now! ” he admonished her, kindly but peremptorily. “No more of that! It’s over, that’s the main thing! It’s all that matters.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s over.”

She opened her eyes, let them wander vacantly. Then, closing them, she recited, in a ritualistic way: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over — I keep telling myself that. It’s over .”

Then, in a different voice, opening her eyes again and staring at her hands: “If it is... If it is!”

“If it is? Of course it is!”

“... Clay, I haven’t told you all.”

“You mean you’re going to be held?”

“Well, I hope not — but I could have been. Clay, do you know why they took me? To that beachhouse? At two A.M.? It was to check out a tip from Alec.”

“You mean he informed? Against you?”

“Nice, wasn’t it?”

“But he wasn’t there! How could he know anything?”

“By psychology, Clay — or something. At the hospital he smelled ether on the corpse and knew the answer at once. I did take the ether—”

“For mosquitoes, the paper said.”

“That’s right — but as he figured it out, I swabbed the gum off with it from four-inch bandage I used to smother his father to death. So he brought the cops to the house to look for bandage and ether. Oh, yes, that’s what he did — I could hear him talking to them, a long time, out in the drive. So then, when neither one was found, we had to go down to the beachhouse, to talk with MacReady, they said, that nurse the old man had, but actually to keep up the search. So the ether they found at once, right on the living-room table, where Mr. El had put it — he had to use it, too, and of course smeared on plenty, greedy as he was. All that was proved by his fingerprints right on the bottle. They never found any bandage — though I’ll say for them, they looked. All day long their scuba divers were out combing the bay, trying to find it there. Well, who knows where it is? Alec had four-inch bandage that he used on wicker baskets, patching them up inside where the sword would cut the strands — so he wouldn’t have to buy new ones every week and a half. But that was back in the spring, and who knows what happened to it? The cleaning woman comes, and she could have thrown it out. Or I could have and not remembered about it. Or Elly, God bless him, could have put it somewhere. It wasn’t there, that’s all we know — but did he have to talk with the cops? Before he talked with me?”

“I wouldn’t call it friendly.”

“Friendly? Friendly? ”

She slapped the side of the tub, to indicate how she regarded it, and then after some moments said: “So, that’s why this is good-by, Clay.”

“... Good-by?” he whispered, stunned.

“That’s it, much as I hate it.”

“But why?”

“Well, Clay, you made yourself clear, and I accept what you said: I come with you now, or don’t come. So I can’t come with you now, so — good-by.”

“But why can’t you come with me now?”

“There’s something I have to do.”

“Yes, but what?”

“Nothing that — concerns you.”

“If it concerns you it has to concern me.”

After popping herself back and forth, first by pressing a toe to the spigot, then by bumping with her head, she said: “I shouldn’t be like this — but it’s how I am, and I can’t help myself. Clay, when someone does something to me, I can’t let it pass, that’s all. I have to do something back. And I’m going to. But it may take some little time, and so — I can’t come with you now.”

She said it with brisk decision, suddenly standing up, tweaking the drain, and starting to towel off. Then, stepping out on the mat and slipping the cloth from her head, she led the way to the living room, still without a stitch on, and curled up in the chair by the window. He followed, tramping around uneasily, trying to readjust to this new development — or old development, now almost in the open. Presently, in a somewhat different tone, she went on: “And there’s something I mustn’t forget. Clay, in justice to those cops, hands and slobber and all, they didn’t really believe him — they did their stuff, of course, but when they didn’t find anything, they tried to get through his head I was not the girl he thought. And of course, he had to shut up. But he thought what he thought, and he’s not going to unthink it, regardless of what they said, and regardless of time passing by. Twenty years can go by and he’ll still think that’s what I did — and where do I go from there? Suppose I did come with you. My life would never be safe. And yours wouldn’t, darling! I can’t forget you for one minute. He could be crazy enough to move against you too — as being in on it, maybe, and helping to raise his boy. He might even move against Elly. I tell you, in some ways he’s not all there in the head.”

“Who mentioned something like that?”

“You did, Clay. You warned me.”

She whispered it reverently, and he went over and kissed her. She pressed his hand and then in a moment went on: “And there’s still another angle. Clay, I know you hate it whenever I talk about money, and I glory in you for it. But money figures in this and can’t be disregarded. He’s a millionaire now — the picture has changed overnight. And from where he sits, to get rid of me he’ll have to pay me, plenty. Well? Wouldn’t burying me be cheaper? Especially when all it takes is magic.”

“Magic? Hey, there are limits to everything!”

“Clay, what do you know about magic?”

“Not much. Just the same—?”

“It’s based on illusion, isn’t it?”

“I — suppose so. And? ”

“If he can make hundreds of people think they saw me floating through the air when it’s really just a dummy, he can make a dozen think they saw me around the house, after he drove off to work, and before my body was found, curled up in my car, a rubber hose running in from the exhaust. By magic is how it can be done!”

“If you mean what I think you mean, they burn you for it in Maryland — and I don’t like it one bit.”

“Nobody’s asking you to.”

He had hoped, perhaps, that she didn’t mean what he thought, and her answer unsettled him badly, so he didn’t speak for some minutes. At last he asked: “ Do you mean to do it by magic? ”

“I’m not a magician, Clay.”

“But you must have something in mind.”

“Yes — you sit on the porch of a beachhouse, watching divers at work, looking for stuff to bum you, you think of all kinds of things.”

“Then you do have something in mind?”

“It’s my lookout; it doesn’t concern you.”

“If I love you, it has to.”

“That touches me, but if this is good-by, why do we louse it with stuff that has no meaning? Why can’t we have our evening, kiss, and part? I’ve already told you too much.”

“But why must this be good-by?”