Donald Hamilton - Death of a Citizen

He said, "Very well. We'll do our best." His voice was stiff and reluctant, but pouter than it had been. He hesitated and said, "Mr. Helm?"

"Yes?"

"If you don't mind my asking," he said, "just what is your line?"

I glanced towards Loris, who was still breathing a little. You had to hand it to the guy, he was tough as a buffalo. But I didn't think he'd last much longer.

"Why," I said gently, "killing's my line, Mr. Calhoun." I turned and left the two of them there.

It seemed very odd to be coming home, like any businessman returning from a trip. I parked in the drive. The door burst open, and Beth came running towards me and stumbled into my arms. I held her kind of gingerly. If you feel a certain way about a woman, and your work involves, say, a garbage truck or a butcher shop, you like to clean up a bit before you put your hands on her. I couldn't help feeling I must stink of blood and gun powder, not to mention another woman.

"Any messages?" I asked after a little.

"Yes," she breathed, as if in answer to my thought. "A woman called. And… and there was something else…"

"What?"

"Something… something horrible…"

I drew a long breath. "Show me," I said.

She led me onto the porch. "She… told me over the phone to look out here. I don't know how long it had been here when she called, I didn't hear anybody… She said it was to… to change your mind, in case you were trying to be… clever…

It was a shoe box, tucked back in a corner behind one of our porch chairs, I suppose so the older kids wouldn't find and investigate it on their way to school. I pushed it out into the open with my foot, and looked at the box, and at my wife. Her face was white. I bent down and untied the string and opened the box. Our gray tomcat was inside, quite dead and rather messily disemboweled.

The funny thing was, it made me mad. It could have been so much worse; yet instead of feeling relieved, I was grieved and angry, remembering the fun the kids had had with the poor stupid beast, and all the mornings it had been at the kitchen door to greet me, meowing for its milk… I remembered also that this cat had once scared hell out of Tina by stowing away in the truck with her. She wasn't one to forget small injuries, if she could pay them back conveniently. Well, neither was I.

"Cover it up, please!" Beth said in a choked voice. "Poor Tiger! Matt, what kind of person would.

would do something like that?"

I put the lid back on the box and 'straightened up. I wanted to tell her: a person very much like me. It was a message from Tina to me. She was saying that the fun was over and from now on everything was strictly business and I could expect no concessions from her on the grounds of sentiment. Well, I had a message for her, too. And while I'm moderately fond of animals, and capable of feeling grief for a family pet, I can take an awful lot of dead cats if I have to.

"What are my instructions?" I asked.

Beth said, "Take… it out back. I'll get a shovel. It's Mrs. Garcia's day to clean the house. I'll tell you out there."

I nodded and picked up the box, carried it into the back yard, and set it down near the softest looking spot in the flowerbed at the side of the studio. It occurred to me that I was practically making a career of disposing of bodies, human and animal. Beth joined me. I took the shovel and started to dig.

She said, "At ten o'clock, or as soon afterwards as you get here, you're supposed to drive out Cerrillos Road. There's a motel just outside the city limits on the right-hand side, a kind of truck stop with a gas station and restaurant-you remember the one, with shabby little cabins in back, red and white. Tony's Place. You're to go to the cabin farthest from the road. But don't park there. First leave your car where everybody else does, by the restaurant. And if anybody follows you, or anything happens, Betsy-"

"All right, no need to spell it out," I said as she hesitated. I stuck the box into the hole' I'd made and covered it up. I looked at my watch. "Check my time," I said. "A quarter of ten."

"I have ten of ten," she said, "but I'm just a little fast. Mart-"

"What?"

"She called you Eric once, by mistake. Why? She sounded as if… as if she knew you quite well. At the Darrels' party you said you'd never seen her before."

"That's right," I said. "I did say that, but it wasn't the truth. Beth…"

I patted the dirt into place over Tiger's grave, and straightened up-leaning on the long-handled shoveland looked at her. Her light-brown hair was a little rumpled, as if she hadn't spent much time on it this morning, but it looked soft and bright in the sunshine. She was wearing a loose green sweater and a green plaid skirt, and she looked very young, like the college girl I'd married when I'd had no business marrying anyone-young, and tired, and scared, and pretty, and innocent.

It was time for me to remember the standing orders. Look her in the eye and lie, Mac had said that day in Washington, lie and keep on lying… Never mind exactly what I told her. It was the kind of stuff I put on paper and sell for money. It seemed that, like many other Americans overseas, I'd become involved with a black-market ring while I was stationed in London. Now some of the members had suddenly reappeared in my life with a crooked proposition which I'd nobly refused even to consider, only apparently they needed my help badly, enough to resort to extreme measures..

Beth was silent for a while after I'd finished. I could tell she was deeply shocked by this glimpse into my fictitious, criminal past. She hadn't thought I was that kind of a guy.

"Of course," she said slowly, "I always knew there was something… You were never quite frank about

I thought it was just that you'd seen some terrible things over there and didn't want to talk about them."

She might look like an innocent college girl, but there were times when she was practically clairvoyant. It was very hard to keep up the act in the face of her steady regard. I forced myself to make a clumsy, embarrassed gesture, like a man who's got everything off his chest.

"Well," I said, "that's the story, Beth."

"And this woman," she said, "this woman who called you Eric…

I said, "We had code names for each other. But that's not what you're asking. The answer is yes."

After a moment, she asked, "What are you… What will you do?"

"Get Betsy back," I said. "Don't ask me how. You wouldn't want to know."

IT was a dreary-looking place, mostly a great dusty parking lot with big trucks standing around- tankers, vans, and refrigerator jobs with compressors going, setting up a constant racket, like outboard motors. There was a big sign saying: TRUCKERS DISCOUNTS. The restaurant-cafe, we usually call it in this part of the world-wasn't as bad as it might have been, and there were some surprisingly shiny and expensivelooking cars with out-of-state license plates parked alongside. Somebody once told somebody that the place where the truckers stop is the place to eat, and tourists have been acting on that advice ever since. There may even be something to it.

In back, like poor relations, stood a bunch of little red-and-white clapboard shacks, relics of the days when a tourist cabin was a cabin, not a disembodied hotel room with TV, air-conditioning, and wall-to-wall carpeting. I stuck the Plymouth between an Arizona Chrysler and a California Volkswagen with a little sign on the back: DON'T SQUASH ME-I EAT HARMFUL INSECTS. It reminded me, for some reason, of the little blue Morris I'd encountered in Texas, also with a sign on the back; and I wondered what Mac had Shorty doing these days. I hoped it was something easy, after the rough time I'd given her in San Antonio.

But it was no time to be thinking of the women I'd known except one, and I took the paper-wrapped parcel from the seat beside me, got out of the car, walked along the line of cabins and, reaching the last one, knocked on the door.