James Chase: Eve

As I sat on the terrace, a bottle of Scotch at my elbow, and the moon like a dead man’s face, shedding its silver light on the hills, I tried to reconstruct Eve’s character now that I knew so much more about her.

So well had she created her make-believe background that even now I wondered whether the red headed girl had been telling me the truth. Eve had been so emphatic that Jack Hurst did not know of the existence of the house in Laurel Canyon Drive and that he did not know how she had earned her living. I remembered her saying, “He’d kill me if he knew. But I suppose he will find out one day. I always say my sins will find me out and they will too. Then I’ll have to run to you for protection.”

Was she lying when she had said that? It would be easy to trap her now. I had only to telephone the house in Laurel Canyon Drive to find out if she were still there.

I poured myself out another whisky, drank it and then looked at my wrist watch. It was twelve fifteen.

I stood up. My legs were a little unsteady, but my brain was clear. I went along the terrace to my study and opening the french windows I entered and turned on the light. I had forgotten the red head in the sitting room so absorbed had I become in stripping aside the curtain of secrecy that Eve had erected. I sat at the desk and dialled her number. The bell rang for a long time and as I was about to hang up, thinking that after all I had guessed wrong and that the house was empty, there was a sudden click and Eve said, “Hello?”

So it was true. I need not have spoken but I could not resist letting her know that I had found her out.

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“Oh, Clive, can’t you leave me alone for five minutes?” Her voice was thick and blurred.

“You’re tight,” I said.

She giggled. “Beautifully tight. I’ve drunk everything in the world tonight.”

“I like the look of your husband.”

“Everyone likes him. But go away, Clive. I can’t talk now.”

“Is he with you?”

“Hm-hm . . . he’s here all right.”

“I thought he didn’t know you had that place,” I said.

There was a pause and I could not help smiling to myself. I would have liked to have seen her face. She must have realized that she had talked too much.”

“I was tight . . . I brought him here without thinking,” she said, at last, almost as if she were trying to convince herself. “He’s furious . . . I guess it’s all over with us now.”

I nearly laughed. “You can’t mean that, Eve,” I said, trying to assume an anxious note in my voice. “Whatever will you do?”

“I don’t know.” She tried to sound worried, but she did not succeed. “Please hang up, Clive. I’ve got an awful head and things are all going wrong.”

“Is he staying long?”

“No . . . no . . . not after this. He’ll go tomorrow.”

“So he knows everything now?” I asked, determined to give her no respite.

“I can’t talk now.” Her voice had sharpened and I could imagine those two furrows above her nose knitted in a frown. “I must go . . . he is calling,” and she hung up.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” the red head said from the door.

I got to my feet. “I’ll drive you back,” I said, determined to get rid of her at once. “Come on, let’s go.”

She stared. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “I’m going to bed. To hell with going all that way back. I’m tired. You told me you wanted me to stay the night and I’m damn well going to stay.”

Now that she had told me what I wanted to know about Eve I could not wait to see the last of her. To have brought such a woman into my home had been the craziest thing I had yet done.

“Oh no, you’re not,” I said sharply. “I shouldn’t have brought you here in the first place. I’ll get you home in an hour. Let’s go—”

She sat down heavily in an armchair and kicked off her shoes. “I’m not going,” she said obstinately.

I stood over her, cold with anger and alarm. “Don’t be a slut,” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

She smiled. “You should have thought of that before,” she said and yawned. She had a lot of gold work in her mouth. “And don’t look like that. I can take care of myself and I’m not scared of you.”

I suddenly wanted to get my hands round her soft fat throat, but I turned away.

“What’s the matter with you?” she went on, watching me suspiciously. “Don’t you want a good time? Why have you got sore all of a sudden?”

I faced her. “I’ve changed my mind,” I said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “I’ll give you one more chance. Are you going quietly or do you want me to use force?”

We eyed each other for a long moment and then she shrugged.

“All right,” she said and called me a bad name. “Give me a drink and I’ll go.”

I went onto the terrace for a bottle of Scotch.

John Coulson was sitting on the wooden seat at the bottom of the garden. As I watched him, he turned and the moonlight lit his face. He was laughing at me.

I filled a glass with whisky and drank it standing.

“You haven’t anything to laugh at,” I said. “You may think you have, but you haven’t. The laugh’s on you, but you’re such a poor dumb cluck you don’t even know it.”

I went back to the study, but the red head wasn’t there.

I stood staring round the empty room for several minutes. Whisky fumes clouded my brain and I began to wonder whether I had imagined that the red head had been in this room. I began to wonder, after I had taken another drink, whether she had ever been in this cabin and after a few moments I had an obstinate idea at the back of my mind that I had never met her at all.

As I crossed the room to the settee I lurched against a table and sent it over with a crash. A cutglass ash tray and a big vase of carnations smashed on the carpet.

“Where are you?” I shouted. “I know you are hiding somewhere.”

I stumbled into the lobby and called again. “Come out, wherever you are. Come-on-out!”

I waited, but the cabin was silent. Then I knew where she was. It was only because I was drunk that I hadn’t thought of it before. She was in Carol’s and my bedroom. I felt a great surge of hot blood rise to my head and I walked down the passage to my bedroom and turned the door knob. The door was locked.

“Come out,” I shouted, hammering on the panels. “Do you hear? Come out!”

“Go away,” she called. “I want to go to sleep.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t come out,” I said, a vicious, desperate note in my voice.

“I’m going to sleep,” the red head shouted back. “I’m not coming out for you or any other tight fisted punk.”

I went on hammering on the door for several minutes until my hands throbbed and burned.

Then I had an idea. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you’ll go home,” I said, with my head against the panel of the door.

“Honest?” I heard her scramble out of bed.

“Honest.”

“Push it under the door and I’ll believe you.”

“Here you are,” I said and I began to force the notes under the narrow space between the carpet and the door.

She could not wait to get it that way and she jerked open the door.

I stepped back, staring at her in horror. She had wedged her big soft body into a pair of Carol’s pyjamas and over her heavy shoulders was Carol’s short ermine coat.

I let the rest of the money slip out of my fingers and I stood there unable to move or unable to say anything. She bent down and began to gather up the money. As she did so her knees burst through the thin silk of the pyjamas.

She giggled. “Your wife must be a skinny bitch,” she said, not pausing as she grabbed at the money.