Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

And I kept thinking of Kathy Keats and how her back had felt under my hands, as if I could snap it like a stick. I looked in the phone book. They weren’t listed. I found the apartment house. The card under the right button had Pinelli written on it. I didn’t have the guts to push the button. She came out at four o’clock the next day, and she was trying to look through me and beyond me, trying to spot a cab.

“Hello!” I said.

She focused on me, and frowned. “Oh, it’s the schoolboy. What’s your name again, dear?”

“Kirby Stassen.”

“Get me a cab, dear.”

I hailed one and got into it with her. She looked slightly startled. “What in the world are you doing?”

“Nothing at the moment. I wanted to know how... your husband is doing.”

“That’s sweet of you, Stassen,” she said, “but I’m going to have my hair done.” She gave the driver the address.

“I’ll go along and buy you a drink afterward,” I said.

“I won’t be out until six anyway.”

“I can wait.”

“Suit yourself, dear.”

We both got out at the hairdresser’s. She pointed out a hotel diagonally across the street and told me to wait there, in the lobby or the bar. I waited in the bar and then in the lobby. I wanted courage but not too much. When she came in, she spotted me and gave me that smile when she was forty feet away. She came, walking tall, giving me that smile, and I knew as she did it that it wasn’t for me. It was for the people watching her come to me.

The bar didn’t get much trade. We had a banquette table, very alone.

“Why do you give a goddam about John?” she asked me.

“I don’t really know. But I do.”

“Are you working for Gabe now?”

“He left for Portugal. I’m living in his apartment. I’m looking for work. I had a job for a while. It wasn’t something I’d want to do forever, but I shouldn’t have gotten fired. Is John working?”

“No. I’ve been doing some commercials, for some nasty goo that takes hair off your legs. My legs are still good, thank God.”

“All of you is good, Kathy.”

“You’re a brave child, Stassen, aren’t you?”

“I’m dauntless. Do you have any plans?”

“Oh, we always have plans.”

“Your eyes are just the color of violets.”

“A deathless line, indeed! We’re going to Mexico, Stassen. To another borrowed place to live. A beach place at Acapulco. John has some old friends who are setting up a company to make movies down there. He thinks he can get into the act.”

“I’d like to go to Mexico.”

“Why do you keep reminding me of a cocker spaniel?”

“When are you going?”

“It will have to be soon. The Burmans are coming back from Italy this month. They’ll want the apartment. And I think it’s time to get John out of this town. All the goddam doors are closed. All the secretaries have the word to give him the brush job. Show biz, darling. Kick the wounded. Direct forty pictures that pay off, and you can crush people under your wheels. Add two turkeys and you’re dead.”

“It’s time for me to get out of this town too.”

She started to say something, stopped, and looked intently at me. I had the odd feeling that it was the first time she had looked directly at me and seen me. “Of course you can drive a car, Stassen.”

“Yes.”

“John is a horrible driver. I despise driving. We were going to fly. But this way... I could take everything. Would you drive us down? It would be a business deal, Stassen. We’ll pay all your expenses plus... oh, a hundred dollars at the end of the trip.”

“I’ll do it for nothing.”

“Thank you, no. We don’t need a pal, Stassen. We need a driver. Then everybody will know where everybody stands.”

I agreed to do it. Their car was in dead storage. It was a lot of car, a two-year-old Chrysler Imperial, black, loaded with every power gadget there is, plus air conditioning. It had six thousand miles on it. The California tags had run out. I found out that a friend had driven it east for them.

I had it checked over for the trip, and I arranged for new tags. I took my Chev over to Jersey and peddled it for thirteen hundred. It was a horrible whipping, but the best I could do. So I was able to start off with about sixteen hundred bucks, all but two hundred in traveler’s checks.

They had a lot of stuff. Most of it was hers. I took it over to the apartment and loaded it the day before we left, a snowy day in mid-March. I packed the big rear trunk right to the eaves, and packed the rear seat to the roof, leaving space for one person back there. She had a lot of ideas about what should go where, and she kept changing her mind.

Finally I said, “Kathy, maybe I should get a chauffeur hat and uniform. To go with all the orders.”

She straightened and gave me as cold and flat a look as I have ever received from anybody. “Just do your job, Stassen, without bickering about it, and we’ll all get along a lot better.”

We stood beside the car with the snow coming down, big wet flakes that caught in her hair. I was close to walking away. I didn’t have to take abuse from a little broken-down actress. It was a showdown. She was establishing the relationship right there. A flake caught in her eyelashes. It didn’t melt. I wanted to take her by her childish shoulders and kiss that eye and feel the ice of the snowflake against my lips, and the warm round violet eye.

“Yes, sir , Mrs. Pinelli, sir,” I said.

There was a slight lift of the corners of her mouth. “Take that big blue one off the bottom and put this leather one there, please. I’ll have to get into the blue one when we get into warmer weather.”

So I unloaded and reloaded again. “What time should I bring it around in the morning, Kathy?”

“Let’s get an early start. Ten o’clock.”

So I drove the brute away. It was crouched on its haunches because of the weight. I garaged it and locked it myself, and spent my last night in Gabe’s apartment, laying out the route. I figured it for a seven-day trip. I didn’t know how naïve my guess was. I thought of sending them a card at home to let them know what I was doing, but I decided it would be more interesting to send the card from Acapulco. It would do more wondrous things for the old man’s blood pressure.

By quarter of eleven the next morning, we were through the tunnel and heading down the Jersey Pike. It was a clear, metallic morning, with a dry road and light traffic. I kept the needle locked on seventy. Kathy was beside me, John Pinelli in back. They both acted morose about the whole thing. There wasn’t any excitement or anticipation in them. But I felt like singing.

I felt I should report on the route. “I decided the best thing to do is go right down 301, then cut west on 80 until we...”

“That will be fine,” Pinelli said.

“I don’t know how many miles you want to make a day.”

“Every day at four o’clock, Stassen,” she said, “start looking for a nice place. We’ll stop between four and five. I won’t ride beyond five o’clock. Lunch between one and two, please. Try to find nice places for lunch.”

And that’s the way it went. When you’re lucky to get on the road before eleven, and you have to get off the highway a little after four, even in a brute like that Chrysler, it’s a good trick to do two hundred and fifty miles a day. At each motel stop she would hand me the money, and I would go in and register, a single for me, and a twin-bed double for them. Then I would drive to their unit and carry their baggage in. I was privileged to eat with them at lunch, but not at dinner. They had a fitted liquor case, and each night he would get smashed, and they would eat as late as the nearest restaurant would serve them. They never changed seats. She stayed up front beside me. About once an hour she would turn the radio on and hunt the whole length of the dial and turn it off. I could never figure out what sort of program she was looking for. Every day she spent at least an hour working on her nails. When she had a chance, she would buy a half dozen magazines. She would leaf through them very quickly, like an illiterate looking at the pictures, and drop them out the window one at a time as she finished them. Sometimes she would sleep, but for not more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. John Pinelli slept oftener, longer and heavier — slumped against the luggage, snoring resonantly.