James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

When I heard Zita’s name, I saw red. I made up my mind I’d get to the bottom of this if I had to take the place apart piece by piece. The big problem was how. I sat down on the edge of the bed, and the more I thought about it the madder I got. I glared down at Maria’s uniform lying there on the bed beside me, and called her a few choice names under my breath. And then, still glaring at the uniform, I suddenly knew I had it. That uniform was going to be good for something besides showing off Maria’s legs.

I grabbed the uniform off the bed, went to the window and threw it out. Then I went back to the sitting room. Maria was still on her knees at the table.

“Lady,” I said, “if you want a uniform, you tell Mademoiselle Zita to bring it up here. Call her, and make it quick. Somebody else won’t do. I want to talk to her .”

“Oh,” I said. “That.”

“Give it to me!” she said. “You took it. You—”

“Well, no, Maria, I didn’t,” I said. “Not that I wouldn’t have taken it. Not that you misjudge my character. I’m just that greedy. And just that mean. I didn’t remember it, that’s all.”

“Ah!” she said. “Ah!” She was standing with her feet spread apart and her hands on her hips. I’d never seen a nude woman so completely unconscious of her body as this one was.

Bill came over from the window and slapper her — to make her pipe down with the racket, I suppose — and suddenly I realized I’d pulled a damn good stunt. It was now a question of who was trapped. All three of us were, of course, except that I didn’t care any more if the cops barged in or not. I didn’t care, but they did.

“Get on that phone,” I told Maria, “because you don’t get out till Zita comes — unless you go with the cops.”

“Call,” Bill told her. “You got to.”

He went to the phone in the foyer, put in the call, and gave Maria the receiver. She talked a long time in Hungarian, and then she hung up and came back into the living room. “She’ll be here,” she said. “She’ll bring me something to wear. And now, Mr. Hull, give me that money you threw out with my—”

I clipped her on the jaw, and I didn’t pull the punch. Bill caught her as she fell, which was his big mistake. I dived over her head and got both hands on his throat, and we all went down together.

I didn’t hit him, or take time to pull the girl away, or anything of the kind. I just lay there, squeezing my fingers into his windpipe, while he clawed at my hands and threshed. I let him thresh for one minute, clocking it by my wristwatch, which was as long as I figured him to last.

When he’d quit threshing, and lay there as limp as Maria was, I let go and dragged him away from her. I reached in his pocked and got my eighty dollars, and then I massaged his throat to give him a chance to breathe.

His fact was almost black, but he began to fight for air, sounding like a windsucker horse.

I went over a Maria and aimed a kick at her bottom.

It gave me some satisfaction, sinking my toe in like a kick from the forty-yard stripe, and listening to her groan. I did it again, and when she sad up I said, “Once more, baby — what did Zita come here for? You ready to talk about it?”

She opened her mouth to answer me, but then she saw Bill lying there and she gave a yelp and scrambled on all fours to him to help him.

I had to slap her around a little more to get it through her head that I was the most important guy in this room. And I had to ask her a question.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s have it. What was it she came about?”

“To — warn you.” Maria said. “I knew she was becoming suspicious of Bill and me, and...”

She moistened her lips and turned to look at where Bill was still sleeping with his noisy gasps.

“The rest of it!” I said. “And hurry!”

She shrugged. “I phoned Bill right after I talked to you, so that he’d know where to come. I spoke softly — but even so, perhaps Mademoiselle Zita overheard enough to put two and two together.”

“You said she came here to warn me,” I told her. “Why didn’t she go ahead and do it?”

She shrugged again. “You ask her.”

She moved over and took Bill in her arms, and I didn’t try to stop her. I watcher her stroking his face, and I was so surprised to see that a ferret like her could love that I was a second slow on the buzzer when it sounded abruptly.

I was a little groggy from all my exertion by then, but I staggered into the foyer, closed the living room door, and opened the one to the hall.

Sure enough, Zita was there again. She was holding a dress folded across her arms.

I jerked the dressed away from her. “Come in, Zita,” I said. “Come in and join our fouled-up little party. We’re having one hell of a time here, Zita — thanks to the warning you didn’t give me.”

I took a breath, and was all ready to start in on her again, when she took a step toward me and fired a slap that stung clear down to my heels. Her eyes sparkled with anger.

“What did you expect?” she said. “You dated my maid! My maid!”

I stepped out of range and thought over what she’d just said. It could explain a lot, the warning she had expected to give some poor boob in this suite, and the warning she didn’t give when she saw that the boob was me.

The way she’d reacted when she knew it was I who had made the date with Maria was just feminine enough to be compatible with linking me pretty well.

All at once, bill started that wind-sucking sound in the living room again, a truly frightening sound. Zita grabbed the dress away from me, brushed past me, and went in there.

It wasn’t more than a minute before Bill went staggering out, and after him Maria, zipping up the dress in back and crying.

Zita came out of the living room and walked up to me slowly. She apologized then for having slapped me, and I apologized for having spoken so roughly to her, and she nodded at me and I nodded at her.

Pretty soon we were both smiling, and there didn’t seem to be much point in doing any more apologizing.

And so that was that. Starting from that moment, things moved along very smoothly, and Zita’s Hungarian accent never gave me a minute’s trouble.

It didn’t, that is, until a few afternoons later when we were faced with the novel situation of the bridegroom having to ask the bride what he should fill in under: WOMAN’S FULL NAME — PLEASE PRINT.

His name was Diego, and he was bound for Playa Washington, a beach in Northern Mexico, partly for a Sunday’s outing, partly to drum up business for the “taxi” he was driving. He was a good-looking Mexican in his late twenties, a bit taller than average, and of the café con leche color, lightly flushed with cinnamon, that bespeaks the mestizo , or mixture of Spanish and Indian. He wore khaki shorts, sport shirt, two-toned shoes, and brown cloth hat with eyelets. He whistled Cielito Lindo and glanced occasionally at the tremendous afternoon sky, but his attention was on his gauges, especially the speedometer, for the road, through improved, was rough, and tended, at too fast a clip, to heat tires and explode them. His car was a sedan, and though he operated it for hire around Matamoras, a little city on the Rio Grande, there was nothing about it that was different from any family bus.

After 22 miles from Matamoras the road ended, and he pulled off to a field, parking with other cars and leaving the road clear for the special buses that are a feature of fiestas in Mexico, and often run on rough-and-ready principles. To the boys who swarmed over him, he amiably passed out coppers, Mexican coins the size of half dollars, and to a character in snuffy cottons, who professed to be in charge, twenty-five cents American. Then, after locking up, he headed for the dunes which give this coast its special character. They are 8-10-12 feet high, of sand so bright it blazes under the sun and sends up shimmering refractions of light. The result is, the land is screened from the sea, the sea from the land, so Diego didn’t see the beach until he popped through a break in the dunes, and was in the middle of it. It was well worth the smile it brought to his face. It was a riot of color, from rugs, robes, rubber animals, and gaudy beach umbrellas; and thousands of people lolled, joked, flirted, and snoozed on it. Also, many swam, especially girls in infra-Bikini suits, with the eager zest for water that is the immemorial heritage of these people. When they went out too far, so far the porpoises offshore took an interest, the nearest Gendarme blew his whistle, calling them in. they came, but not meekly. Volubly they expressed their opinion, and volubly he answered them back. Lately, proper lifeguards have been provided for Playa Washington, with pulmotors and fancy equipment, but at this time the Gendarmes were the only supervision it had, and if they overworked their whistles, the danger, as we shall see, was real.