“Six days.”
“...Six days?”
“Gramie, the longest days of my life—they didn’t have inny end, because none of these doctors knew if you were going to live. Once you did die—your heart stopped, right there on the bed, and hadn’t been for that doctor, the one who took your tube, you’d have been carried out feet first. I saw your jaw drop and called him, and he massaged your chest. I thought he’d rub all the skin off, but at last your face twitched, and you breathed. That was after they operated—you’ve been trepanned and I don’t know what-all, they took five ounces of blood off your brain. It was an awful thing that Burl did to you, banging you with the gun.”
“Oh yeah. What happened to him?”
“Got cremated, was all.”
“You mean he’s dead?”
“I mean I killed him.”
“You had the ice pick under that napkin?”
“I did, and I stuck him with it, but only got it half in. I was beating on it, to hammer it the rest of the way, and he was battling me, trying to pull it out. I won, though. The autopsy showed it entered his heart. And your mother, she ordered the cremation job, ashes to be scattered, ‘so no trace of him remains on the face of this earth,’ as she said.”
“He’s no loss.”
“You can say that again.”
We spent the morning checking things back, so I got kind of caught up—beginning with the wire, that came to where she was staying, at the Truckee Motel in Reno, that Burl got the address of by pretending to be the Post Office, calling her mother to ask. “Like I said,” she explained, “left me all jittered and shook, but instantly, when I saw him dead on the floor, I knew we’d made our fresh start, so don’t worry about that inny more.”
I said I wouldn’t, and she told how she called the police, “knowing the number, thanks to you.” She said I was still tied when they got there, “as I couldn’t loosen the knots in the towels he’d tied you up with, on account of how he had wet them.” It seemed she’d been held, a few minutes, till they checked her story out, but then they hustled her off to the hospital, in the same ambulance they called for me.
But in the middle of her telling about it, the door opened and there were the Langs, both on their lunch hour. And Mr. Lang you would hardly have known. From the meek, hangdog guy of the last few weeks, he was completely different, with his shoulders thrown back, his head up, and a smiling look in his eye.
“Well, well, well!” he burst out, after shaking hands with me. “I guess we found out, didn’t we? Whose number was up? Who was on that hook? I’m so proud of her I could dance the Sailor’s Hornpipe.”
“Look,” she cut in. “I can do without stuff that’s going to make me seasick. I’m not proud at all, in inny way, shape, or form. If it had to be done it had to be, but let’s us not talk about it.”
“Okay, but I’m proud. See?”
“Louis, that’ll do,” said Mrs. Lang.
But it cleared the air, and the rest of their visit was mostly pleasant, but he kept talking about “that stuff in the papers,” and how people felt about it. “It was in there about the rape,” he said, “but nobody seems to mind. Now that she killed him, that makes it okay.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” said Sonya.
They left, finally, and then I asked her about the papers, which until then I hadn’t thought about. “I saved them for you,” she said, kind of grim.
She disappeared, then came back with a whole stack, the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the Prince Georges Post, the Prince Georges Sentinel, and maybe one or two others. And there it was, smeared all over the Washington Post:
Burwell Stuart
Stabbed to Death;
Sister-in-Law Held
There were columns about it, and also about Dale Morgan, the peculiar way she had died, and the insurance money Burl collected—even a lot about Jane, and the will she had drawn in his favor and then revoked. All kinds of stuff was there, true as far as it went, but leaving out most of what mattered, at least as I thought, reading it.
It turned out she thought so too. She said: “Gramie, if you’re stuck with it, if you have to stay here for those tests, couldn’t you put the time to some use? I mean, let Helen Musick bring the recorder, the tape recorder you have, and then dictate how it was, the true account of what happened, so it goes together to make some sense, ’stead of this mixed-up account in the papers. Then she could transcribe it for you, and who knows? Some paper might print it, just so the truth gets told.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’ll give it a whirl.”
So that’s what I’m doing now—of course one or two names have been changed, as they used to say on Dragnet, “to protect the innocent”—but not many, and none of the main ones.
The tests went on, all favorable, and then one day, while Mother was there with Sonya, the door opened, and who should come in but Jane. She was in black too, but barely glanced at me. She went straight to Sonya, sat down beside her, and took her hand. “I just wanted to say,” she whispered, “I know now you were telling the truth.” Then she came over, picked up my hand and patted it, and took a chair that Sonya brought for her, from the hall.
“Jane,” said Mother, “something occurs to me. If you’d stop trying to be the femme fatale of the Senior Citizen set, if you’d be your age, and deed that land to Gramie, so he can start his development now, taking you in as a partner, you’d be living, when he remodels it, in the prettiest house in the county, in the middle of the swankiest suburb, and have more money to spend than you ever had in your life. All it needs is that you stop being a goof.”
“Yes, Edith, I already have.”
“You already have—what?”
“Had the papers drawn—I couldn’t sign them, however, until... until. ...”
She stopped and Mother seemed annoyed. “Until...?” she snapped. “What are you talking about?”
“Till she knew he wouldn’t die,” said Sonya.
“Yes, Edith—I couldn’t be sure.”
She came over, put her hand on my head, which was big from the bandages on it, said: “My little boy”—and kissed me.
That night, when Mother had gone and Jane had gone and Helen Musick had gone and the Langs had gone, Sonya leaned down to me. “I haven’t told you yet,” she whispered, “about me and the room they gave me—it’s really a little office, but they put a cot in I can sleep on. And now you’ve passed your tests, now you’ve proved you can walk, you’ve also proved something else—you can play hookey if you try. My place is two doors down the hall, and I can have a nice cloud moved in, all scrubbed up and pink. And soon as the night nurse leaves, if you’d slip out in the hall and slip into my little room, there’d be someone waiting for you, and you could lie on the cloud with her, admiring the beautiful view, of moonlight and shells and cotton, in balls like little rabbits—”
The night nurse just left.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1984 by Alice M. Piper
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-9155-9
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James M. Cain, Cloud Nine
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