Джеймс Чейз - You Never Know With Women

We looked at each other. The lapis-lazuli eyes were as unruffled and as impersonal as the lily pond.

“Do you usually work as fast as that?” she asked and touched her mouth gently with slim fingers.

There was a weight on my chest that made me breathless. When I spoke I had a croak in my voice a frog would have envied.

“It seemed the thing to do,” I said. “We might do it again sometime.”

She swung her legs over the wall and stood up. The top of her sleek dark head was a little above my shoulder. She stood very still and straight.

“We might,” she said and walked away. I watched her go. Her slim body was upright and graceful and she didn’t look back. I watched her until she had disappeared into the house, then I sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. My hands were as steady as an aspen leaf.

For the rest of the afternoon I stayed right there by the lily pond. Nothing happened. No one came near me. No one peeped at me from the windows. I had all the time in the world to think out what I was going to do that night, how I was going to evade the guards and the dog, how I was going to climb that wall without being seen, and how I was going to open the safe. But I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I thought about Veda Rux. I was still thinking about her when the sun dropped behind the tall pine trees and the shadows lengthened on the lawn. I was still thinking about her when Parker came out of the house and down to the pond.

I looked at him blankly because he had gone right out of my mind. It was as if he had never existed. That was the effect she had on me.

“You’d better come in now,” he said abruptly. “We’ll run through the final arrangements before we have supper. We want to get off about nine o’clock when the moon’s right.”

We went back into the house. There was no sign of her in the hall or the lounge where Gorman was waiting. I kept listening for sounds of her, but the house was as still and as quiet as a morgue.

“Dominic will carry the dagger,” Gorman said. “When you’re up on the wall he’ll hand it to you. Be careful with it. I don’t want the case scratched.”

Parker gave me a key which he said unlocked the back door. We went over the architect’s plan once more.

“I have another two hundred bucks coming to me before I go in there,” I reminded Gorman. “You can give it to me now if that’s okay with you.”

“Dominic will give it to you at the same time as he gives you the dagger,” Gorman said. “You’ve had too much of my money without working for it, Mr. Jackson. I want some action from you before I part with any more.”

I grinned.

“Right; only I don’t go over the wall without it.”

I expected to see her at supper, but she wasn’t there. Halfway through the meal found I just had to know where she was. I said casually I’d seen a girl in the garden and was that Miss Rux and wasn’t she coming in for a bite of food?

Parker turned a greenish white. His fists clenched until the knuckles seemed to be bursting out of his skin. He started to say something in a voice that was drowned in rage, but Gorman put in quickly, “Don’t excite yourself, Dominic.”

I didn’t like the look of Parker, and I pushed back my chair. He looked mad enough to take a sock at me. I don’t like a guy to sock me when I’m sitting down: Even a pixey like Parker.

“You’re hired to do a job, Jackson,” Parker said, leaning across the table and glaring at me. “Keep your damned nose out of what doesn’t concern you! Miss Rux doesn’t want anything to do with a cheap crook like you, and I’ll see her wishes are carried out. Don’t bring her name into this conversation!”

Because of what had happened out there by the pond I didn’t play it the way I should.

“Don’t tell me that number I saw in the fancy pants could fall for a pixey like you,” I said and laughed at him. I had my heel against the rung of the chair and I was about to kick it away and land him a poke in his snout when I found myself looking down the barrel of a.38 police special that had jumped into his hand. Max had said he carried a gun as if he could use it. That draw was the quickest thing outside the movies I’d ever seen.

“Dominic!” Gorman said quietly.

I didn’t move. There was a blank, sightless look in Parker’s washed-out blue eyes that told me he was going to shoot. It was a nasty moment. The gun barrel looked as big as the Brooklyn Battery tunnel and twice as steady. I could see the thin finger taking in the slack on the trigger.

“Dominic!” Gorman shouted and brought his great fist crashing down on the table.

The gun barrel dropped and Parker blinked at me as if he couldn’t understand what had happened. His vacant, bewildered look sent a chill up my spine. This guy was slaphappy. I’d seen that dazed, vacant expression duplicated on a row of faces in the psychopathic ward in the County jail. You couldn’t mistake it once you’d seen it: the face of a paranoiac killer.

“Don’t get excited, Dominic,” Gorman said in his thin, scratchy voice. He hadn’t turned a hair, and I began to understand why he kept telling Parker to take it easy. It was his way of controlling this pixey when he was getting out of hand.

Parker got slowly to his feet, stared at the gun as if he couldn’t understand what it was doing in his hand and walked quietly out of the room.

I took out my handkerchief and touched my forehead with it. I was sweating: not much, but I was sweating.

“You want to watch that guy,” I said evenly. “One of these days they’ll take him away, strapped to a stretcher.”

“You have only yourself to blame, Mr. Jackson,” Gorman said, his eyes cold. “He’s all right if you handle him right. You happen to be the quarrelsome type. Have some more coffee?”

I grinned.

“I’m going to have a drink. He was going to shoot. Don’t kid me. You want to take that gun away from him before there’s an accident.”

Gorman watched me pour the drink. There was an empty expression on his fat face.

“You mustn’t take him too seriously, Mr. Jackson. He’s become attached to Miss Rux. I shouldn’t mention her again in your conversation.”

“That guy? And what does she think of him?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with you.”

I took a drink and came back to the table.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

At nine o’clock Parker brought the car around to the front door. He was distant and calm and seemed to have got over his little spell.

Gorman came down the steps to see us off.

“Good luck, Mr. Jackson. Parker will give you last-minute instructions. I’ll have your money for you when you return.”

I was looking up at the dark windows hoping to see her and I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. She wasn’t there.

“We should be back in a couple of hours,” Parker said to Gorman. I could tell his nerves were jangling by the shake in his voice. “If we’re not, you know what to do.”

“You’ll be back,” Gorman returned. His nerves were in better shape. “Mr. Jackson won’t make a mistake.”

I hoped I wouldn’t. As we drove away into the darkness I leaned out of the window and looked back at the house. I still couldn’t see her.

We sat in the car close to the twelve-foot wall that skirted the back of Brett’s house. It was cold and quiet up there on the mountain, and dark. We couldn’t see the wall or the car or each other. It was as if we were suspended in black space.

“All right,” Parker said softly. “You know what to do. Take your time. Give me a whistle when you’re coming back. I’ll flash a light so you’ll find the rope again.”