Джеймс Чейз - You Never Know With Women

I leaned forward and pulled out the knife. More blood welled out of the wound.

I crept into the inner room and got my clothes. She slept peaceably now, a smile on her lips. I took my clothes into the other room and gently closed the door. Scared to light the lamp, I dressed hurriedly by the light of the flashlight, then I poured myself a drink. Not once while I was dressing did I look at Max. The thought of touching him gave me the horrors.

The drink helped me and I went over to the stack of tools that stood in a corner. As I picked up a spade, the whole damned stack came crashing to the floor.

I heard Veda call out. “Who is it?” Then the door jerked open and she stood there, her face white and her eyes startled, staring at me. I felt sweat running down my face and there was a tightness inside my head that bothered me.

“It’s all right. Stay where you are.”

“Floyd! What is it? What are you doing?”

“Keep out of this!” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. “Go back to bed and stay there. Keep out of this!”

“Why, Floyd...” She was looking at the spade I held in my hand and her eyes widened. Then she turned swiftly to look at Max, but it was too dark to see him.

“What are you doing?”

“Keep out of this, Veda! Leave me alone.”

“What have you done?”

“All right.” I threw down the spade. “What else could I have done? Keep out of it. That’s all I ask you. Keep out of it and leave it to me.”

She walked to the lamp and lit it. Her hands were steady, but her face was as white as a fresh fall of snow. In the hard glare of the acetylene lamp the blood on Max’s shirt glistened like red paint.

I heard her stifle a scream. She stared at him for a long moment of time, then she said quietly: “We said no. Why did you do it?”

“Could you figure out any other way?”

“If they ever find him...”

“I know. You don’t have to tell me. Go back to bed. You must keep out of this.”

“No. I’m helping you.”

My nerves recoiled at the determination in her voice.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted at her. “It’s bad enough to handle him without you being here. Leave me alone!”

She ran into the bedroom and shut the door. I was shaking like a muscle dancer. Even another shot of Scotch didn’t help much. Without looking at Max, I went out into the darkness, clutching the spade.

It was beginning to rain. We hadn’t had any rain for weeks, and it had to pick this night. I looked around in the darkness. No lights showed, no sound came to me, but the rising wind. It was lonely and wild: the right spot for murder.

I went to the shed, put the spade in the back seat of the Buick, drove around to the shack door. It wouldn’t do to bury him anywhere near the shack. His last trip had to be a long one.

I went into the shack. She was dressed and bending over Max as I entered.

“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s all right, Floyd. Don’t be angry.”

I went closer.

She had wrapped him in a blanket and had tied the ends together. He looked harmless now: a bundle of clothing going to the cleaners. She had done what I had been dreading to do.

“Veda!”

“Oh, stop it!” she said fiercely and stood away from me.

“I can manage now. You mustn’t have anything to do with this. I want you to keep clear of it.”

“I’m not staying here alone. And what does it matter? Do you think they’d believe I had nothing to do with it?”

We looked at each other. The frozen look in her eyes worried me.

“All right.”

I took his shoulders and she took his feet. As we carried him out of the shack I thought of his pale, thin, shabbily dressed sister. Max is so wild. He might get into trouble . Well, he wouldn’t get into any more trouble after this.

We drove across the foothills, through the rain and into the darkness. We had put him in the boot on the rubber mat, and I kept thinking of him and the way he looked when I had found him. Veda waited in the car while I dug. I worked in the light of one of the head-lamps and I felt her eyes on me all the time. We buried him deep. When he went into the hole the blanket slipped and in the light of the headlights we both looked into his dead face. I let go of him and stepped back. He thumped down in the wet soil, and was gone, but that dead face was with me then as it is with me now.

We spent a lot of time in the pouring rain, replacing the turf and stamping it down. If the rain kept up all night it would wash away the traces of the digging by the morning. I didn’t think they would find him.

We were wet and cold and very tired when we drove back. Neither of us could think of anything to say, so the drive back was in silence: There was blood on the floor to clear up and we both worked at it. We scrubbed the rubber mat in the boot, we looked carefully around for anything that belonged to him, and I found his limp wallet that had fallen under the table. There were some papers in it, but I didn’t feel like going through them just then and I put the wallet in my hip pocket. Finally we were through. Looking around the room, there was no trace of Max any more, yet the room was full of him. I could see him standing in the doorway, sitting at the table, smirking at us, lying back in the chair with his face bruised and bleeding, lying on the floor with the serene look in his eyes and the knife in his chest.

“I wish you hadn’t done it.” The words came out of her as if she could no longer keep them in. “I won’t say any more about it, but I’d give everything I’ve ever had if you hadn’t done it.”

I could have told her then. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I had made such a damned mess of my life, one thing worse didn’t matter; anyway, that’s the way I saw it then. With her it was different. She was going up; a thing like this could ruin her.

“We won’t talk about it. Let’s have some coffee; and you’d better change.”

While she was putting the kettle on, she said. “Will they come out here to look for him?”

“I don’t think so. No one knows he’s out here. They’ll look for him along the coast if they look at all. They won’t take much notice of his mother. He’s not Lindsay Brett.”

“Should we stay on here?”

“We have to.”

She gave a little shiver.

“I wish we could go. I keep feeling he’s still here.”

“I know. So do I. But we have to stay. There’s nowhere else to go. We’ve been safe here up to now.”

The dawn was coming up over the hills as we finished the coffee. I thought of the long day before us. Both with our secret thoughts. It came to me suddenly that it wouldn’t be the same again. She thought I had killed him; I knew she had. No, it wasn’t going to be the same again. Women are funny animals. You never know with them. Love between a man and a woman is a brittle thing. If ever she fell out of love with me, my life would be in her hands. Looking at her now I wasn’t sure if she had already fallen out of love with me. It worried me. It was another step down. Another low spot. It was down now all the time.

During the next three days everything we had built up between us crumpled away. It started with small things. We suddenly found we hadn’t much to say to each other; talking was an effort, but we made the effort, and living the way we did there was nothing to talk about at the best of times, except the things two people talk about when they are in love. Well, we didn’t talk about those things: we talked about the rain, and whether we had enough food, and would I get some more logs and would she fix a hole in my sock. She didn’t come into my bunk any more; and I didn’t want her to. She’d be undressed and in her bunk by the time I had made up the fire in the outer room. I didn’t have to torment myself by watching her take of her clothes, knowing the way she felt; there was no point in that. Once or twice I touched her and she suppressed a shiver, so I quit touching her. Max was with us twenty-four hours of the day. Neither of us could get him out of our minds. During those three days a tension began to grow that only needed a spark to touch it off. But there was no spark. We were both very careful about that.