Robert Alter - Carny kill

I gave up. I nodded and turned away. Then I looked back and said, "Hey. How old are you?"

"Eighteen." Still starchy about it.

"That's what I thought."

I went around the corner and entered the building with the word Private on the door.

Billie was coming down the stairs and she stopped and smiled and said, "Thax."

And suddenly I was seventeen again and standing fifteen years back in an Ohio stream up to my ankles and a very pretty young girl was standing on a log above me and looking down at me in a way that can only happen the first time, and nothing in this entire goddam atomic bombhaunted world was relevant. Only that girl and myself and our picnic by a lonely Ohio stream.

I went up the steps and took Billie's hand.

"Billie-you just reminded me of the first time I fell in love. I was seventeen and she was sixteen, and it was the year I ran off to join a circus."

Billie's smile deepened. She was looking into my eyes.

"Thax, you're an incurable romantic daydreamer."

"Well-"

"No," she said. "Don't say it doesn't matter. It does matter, darling. It does."

Then she kissed me.

I just stood there. There's no other way to describe it. I just stood there. Billie squeezed my hand.

"Wait for me behind the nautch show tonight." She went around me and started down the steps. Then I woke up.

"Hey. What's with you and Franks?"

She looked up at me and her face, for all its inherent sensualness plus beauty-parlor perfection, seemed bright and innocent. Nice and clean-to coin my own phrase.

"I just gave Franks my two weeks notice," she said. "I'm quitting. Tell you tonight."

Her spikeheels clit-clattered down the rest of the steps. The door marked Private swung closed in her faint perfumed wake. I stared at it.

Quitting? No more Billie? Just two weeks? I was no longer the boy standing in the Ohio stream. I felt like an old overworked anachronism again. I went upstairs and knocked on the landing door. Franks' voice told me to come in.

The business manager's office was done in the same motif as May's suite. Swedish modern. It wasn't bloated with a lot of satin cushions though.

The bluff-faced Mr. Franks was just closing his safe and he stood up in his two-hundred dollar suit and came around his driftwood-Rez desk to offer me his hand. We shook and he asked me how Neverland was treating me, and I said, "Fine," and asked how it was treating him, and he chuckled and said, "Fine, just fine," and I reminded him that he wanted to see me.

He said, "Yes," in a somewhat distracted manner and went back to his desk and picked up the phone and asked the exchange for Mrs. Cochrane's suite in the Queen Anne Cottage. He smiled at me while he waited for a connection and said:

"Sit down, Thax, sit down."

I sat down in a chair that felt like it had been growing on one of our hardwood ridges when Columbus missed America.

"May?" Franks said into the phone. "Thaxton's here now. Can you come over?"

He winked at me while he listened to her reply, to show me that it was really nothing serious-just the usual female nonsense.

I didn't believe his wink any more than I believed his Swedish modern office. He was a natural-born yes-man who tried to cover it up with a hearty show of efficiency.

"Well," he said as he parked the phone back in its cradle.

That didn't mean much to me, so I said so.

"Well what?"

He raised his eyes inquiringly. "Pardon me?"

"You said well," I told him. "That usually means well something or other. I'm waiting for the something. The other you can keep."

His bluff fuse broke into a Babbitt smile and he sat down. We looked at each other across his massive driftwood-Rez desk.

"I simply thought it was time we had a little talk, Thaxton."

"We? Why invite my ex-wife into our little talk then?"

He fussed with his pens and pencils on his uninked desk blotter, arranging them just so.

"Well-" he said, "I thought it would be better if she were here. Because it more or less concerns her, you see?"

I said, "If you mean the murder of her husband-I suppose it does more or less concern her."

He frowned and made a geometrical pattern with his pens and pencils.

"You're a part of this show, Thaxton," he said gravely. "And you were once Mrs. Cochrane's husband. I should think you would be willing to see us through this trying time."

"Um. As long as this trying time doesn't pin a rose on me."

He looked at me quizzically.

"Ferris is now toying around with two ideas," I told him. "One-I helped May knock over Cochrane, for money. Two-I did the deed on my own, for revenge."

Franks broke up the geometric pattern with his desk set by placing a pen perpendicular to a pencil.

"Is that a fact," he said solemnly. "I didn't know that."

I grinned at him. "Don't let it give you ideas. I ain't about to become the patsy for this smear."

He gave me an owlish look. "I can assure you, Thaxton-"

The inner door opened without a preliminary knock. May stood framed in the doorway for a moment, very dramatic looking in a silver skintight outfit. Like a redheaded shark, if you can imagine such a predatory creature.

"All right, May," I said. "Close the door and finish your entrance. You're on stage now."

She didn't get mad, which was out of character for her. She closed the door and approached me with a little girlish look of appeal.

"Darling," she said. "I need your help."

It was time to duck. I could hear the beautiful diamondback shaking its rattles. I took another try at making her mad.

"What is it? Another corpse you want moved?"

"Darling," May said, "that's really very funny. That's the one thing I always liked about you-your wonderful sense of humor."

"Sit down, will you, May?" I said. "You make me feel like a rabbit in a cornfield with a hawk hovering overhead."

She was too nervous to sit down. She started to pace Franks' office. We both watched her. It was a beautiful thing to see. She had the body for it and the body had the rhythm. But I had seen it all before. I let Franks watch by himself. I took out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. Franks remembered his social manners and struck his desk lighter for me.

"Darling," May said, "you've heard what they're trying to do to me around here." Her inflection said it wasn't a question.

"You mean murderwise?"

She came to roost by the arm of my chair and said "Um" She took the cigarette out of my hand the same way she always used to do and started to take a drag. Then she hesitated and glanced at it and at me, as if wondering if I had something I should see a doctor about. I took my smoke back.

"Everybody thinks I murdered Rob," she said. "It's all over the lot. Every last mother's bastard out there-" she made a broad arm gesture encompassing Neverland- "who takes my money is saying it!"

"Now, May," Franks said soothingly. "Not everyone."

"Be quiet, Lloyd," May snapped. She looked at me. "Well, you can't deny it, can you, Thax?"

"Uh-uh. But you can't blame 'em either, May. You're a natural for it. Look at the motive. Money money money."

She started pacing again, saying, "But dammit, I didn't do it! Why should I? Rob gave me everything."

"Uh-huh, but maybe you wanted everything except a sixty-year-old Irish husband. Maybe you wanted to marry some husky young buck who didn't have a dime and Cochrane said no divorce. Hell, I don't know."

May came back to my chair with little red glints in her eyes.

"So that's what they're saying about me now, hm? The dirty-"

"May," Franks said. "Now, May."

She whirled on him. "Will you for godsake shut up, Lloyd! Will you just do that kind little thing for me, sweetie? I'm trying to talk to Thax."

Franks' flaming expression seemed to say it wasn't fair of May to talk to him that way in front of an outsider. After all he was her business manager, wasn't he? He was just trying to be helpful and now May went and threw that kind of crap in his face.