“Where are my children?”
“Well, Sheila, how should I know—?”
Sheila grabbed her and jerked her out into the hall. “Where are my children, I said.”
“They’re all right. He just wanted to see them a minute before he—”
She stopped when one of the cops walked up behind her, stepped through the open door with his gun ready, and went inside. The other cop stayed in the hall, right beside Sheila and Church, his gun in his hand, listening. After a minute or two the cop that went in came to the door and motioned us inside. Sheila and Church went in, then I went in, then the other cop stepped inside, but stood where he could cover the hall. It was a one-room furnished apartment, with a dining alcove to one side, and a bathroom. All doors were open; even the closet door, where the cop had opened them, ready to shoot if he had to. In the middle of the floor were a couple of suitcases strapped up tight. The cop that went in first walked over to Church.
“All right, Fats, spit it out.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Where are those kids?”
“How should I know—?”
“You want that puss mashed in?”
“… He’s bringing them here.”
“When?”
“Now. He ought to be here by now.”
“What for?”
“To take with us. We were going to blow.”
“He using a car?”
“He’s using his car.”
“O.K.—open them suitcases.”
“I have no key. He—”
“I said open them.”
She stooped down and began to unstrap the suitcases. The cop poked her behind with the gun.
“Come on, step on it, step on it!”
When she had them unstrapped, she took keys from her handbag and unlocked them. The cop kicked them open. Then he whistled. From the larger of the two suitcases money began tumbling on the floor, some of it in bundles, with rubber bands around it, some of it with paper wrappers still on, showing the amounts. That was the new money we had had in the vault, stuff that had never even been touched. Church began to curse at Sheila.
“It’s all there, and now you’ve got what you want, haven’t you? You think I didn’t know what you were doing? You think I didn’t see you fixing those cards up so you could send him up when they found that shortage? All right, he beat you to it, and he took your old man for a ride too—that sanctimonious old fool! But you haven’t got him yet, and you haven’t got those brats! I’ll—”
She made a dive for the door, but the cop was standing there and threw her back. Then he spoke to the other one, the one that was stooped down, fingering the money. “Jake!”
“Yeah?”
“He’ll be here for that dough. You better put in a call. No use taking chances. We need more men.”
“God, I never seen that much dough.”
He stepped over to the phone and lifted the receiver to dial. Just then, from outside, I heard a car horn give a kind of a rattle, like they give when they’re tapped three or four times quick. Church heard it too, and opened her mouth to scream. That scream never came out. Sheila leaped at her, caught her throat with one hand, and covered her mouth with the other. She turned her head around to the cops.
“Go on, hurry up, he’s out there.”
The cops dived out and piled down the stairs, and I was right after them. They no sooner reached the door than there was a shot, from a car parked out front, right behind my car. One cop ducked behind a big urn beside the door, the other ran behind a tree. The car was moving now, and I meant to get that guy if it was the last thing I did on earth. I ran off to the right, across the apartment house lawn and the lawn next to it and the lawn next to that, as hard as I could. There was no way he could turn. If he was going to get away, he had to pass me. I got to a car that was parked about fifty feet up the street, and crouched down in front of it, right on the front bumper, so that the car was between him and me. He was in second now, and giving her the gun, but I jumped and caught the door handle.
What happened in the next ten seconds I’m not sure I know myself. The speed of the car threw me back, so I lost my grip on the door handle, and I hit my head on the fender. I was still wearing a bandage, from the other cut, so that wasn’t so good. But I caught the rear door handle, and hung on. All that happened quicker than I can tell it, but being thrown back that way, I guess that’s what saved me. He must have thought I was still up front, because inside the car he began to shoot, and I saw holes appear in the front door, one by one. I had some crazy idea I had to count them, so I’d know when he’d shot his shells out. I saw three holes, one right after the other. But then I woke up that there were more shots than holes, that some of those shots were coming from behind. That meant the cops had got in it again. I was right in the line of fire, and I wanted to drop off and lay in the street, but I held on. Then these screams began coming from the back seat, and I remembered the kids. I yelled at the cops that the children were back there, but just then the car slacked and gave a yaw to the left, and we went crashing into the curb and stopped.
I got up, opened the front door, and jumped aside, quick. There was no need to jump. He was lying curled up on the front seat, with his head hanging down, and all over the upholstery was blood. But what I saw, when one of the cops ran up and opened the rear door, was just pitiful. The oldest of the kids, Anna, was down on the floor moaning, and her sister, the little three-year-old, Charlotte, was up on the seat, screaming at her father to look at Anna, that Anna was hurt.
Her father wasn’t saying anything.
It seemed funny that the cop, the one that had treated Church so rough, could be so swell when it came to a couple of children. He kept calling them Sissy, and got the little one calmed down in just about a minute, and the other one too, the one that was shot. The other cop ran back to the apartment house, to phone for help, and to collar Church before she could run off with that dough, and he caught her just as she was beating it out the door. This one stayed right with the car, and he no sooner got the children quiet than he had Sheila on his hands, and about five hundred people that began collecting from every place there was.
Sheila was like a wild woman, but she didn’t have a chance with that cop. He wouldn’t let her touch Anna, and he wouldn’t let Anna be moved till the doctors moved her. There on the floor of the car was where she was going to stay, he said, and nothing that Sheila said could change him. I figured he was right, and put my arms around her, and tried to get her quiet, and in a minute or two I felt her stiffen and knew she was going to do everything she could to keep herself under control.
The ambulances got there at last, and they put Brent in one, and the little girl in the other, and Sheila rode in with her. I took little Charlotte in my car. As she left me, Sheila touched my arm.
“More hospitals.”
“You’ve had a dose.”
“But this—Dave!”
It was one in the morning before they got through in the operating room, and long before that the nurses put little Charlotte to bed. From what she said to me on the way in, and what the cops and I were able to piece together, it wasn’t one of the cop’s shots that had hit Anna at all.
What happened was that the kids were asleep on the back seat, both of them, when Brent pulled up in front of the apartment house, and didn’t know a thing till he started to shoot through the door at me. Then the oldest one jumped up and spoke to her father. When he didn’t answer she stood up and tried to talk to him on his left side, back of where he was trying to shoot and drive at the same time. That must have been when he turned and let the cops have it over his shoulder. Except that instead of getting the cops, he got his own child.
When it was all over I took Sheila home. I didn’t take her to Glendale. I took her to her father’s house in Westwood.
She had phoned him what had happened, and they were waiting for her. She looked like a ghost of herself, and leaned against the window with her eyes closed. “Did they tell you about Brent?”
She opened her eyes.
“… No. How is he?”
“He won’t be executed for murder.”
“You mean—?”
“He died. On the table.”
She closed her eyes again, and didn’t speak for a while, and when she did it was in a dull, lifeless way.
“Charles was all right, a fine man—until he met Church. I don’t know what effect she had on him. He went completely insane about her, and then he began to go bad. What he did, I mean at the bank that morning, wasn’t his think-up, it was hers.”
“But why, will you tell me that?”
“To get back at me. At my father. At the world. At everything. You noticed what she said to me? With her that meant an obsession that I was set to ruin Charles, and if I was, then they would strike first, that’s all. Charles was completely under her, and she’s bad. Really, I’m not sure she’s quite sane.”
“What a thing to call a sweetie.”
“I think that was part of the hold she had on him. He wasn’t a very masculine man. With me, I think he felt on the defensive, though certainly I never gave him any reason to. But with her, with that colorless, dietician nature that she had—I think he felt like a man. I mean, she excited him. Because she is such a frump, she gave him something I could never give him.”
“I begin to get it now.”
“Isn’t that funny? He was my husband, and I don’t care whether he’s alive or dead—I simply don’t care. All I can think of is that little thing down there—”
“What do the doctors say?”
“They don’t know. It’s entirely her constitution and how it develops. It was through her abdomen, and there were eleven perforations, and there’ll be peritonitis, and maybe other complications—and they can’t even know what’s going to happen for two or three days yet. And the loss of blood was frightful.”
“They’ll give her transfusions.”
“She had one, while they were operating. That was what they were waiting for. They didn’t dare start till the donor arrived.”
“If blood’s what it takes, I’ve got plenty.”
She started to cry, and caught my arm. “Even blood, Dave? Is there anything you haven’t given me?”
“Forget it.”
“Dave?”
“Yes?”
“If I’d played the cards that God dealt me, it wouldn’t have happened. That’s the awful part. If I’m to be punished—all right, it’s what I deserve. But if only the punishment—doesn’t fall on her!”
XIII
The newspapers gave Sheila a break, I’ll say that for them, once the cops exonerated her. They played the story up big, but they made her the heroine of it, and I can’t complain of what they said about me, except I’d rather they hadn’t said anything. Church took a plea and got sent over to Tehachapi for a while. She even admitted she was the one that brought in the spider. All the money was there, so Dr. Rollinson got his stake back, and the bonding company had nothing to pay, which kind of eased off what had been keeping me awake nights.
But that wasn’t what Sheila and I had to worry about. It was that poor kid down there in the hospital, and that was just awful. The doctors knew what was coming, all right. For two or three days she went along and you’d have thought she was doing fine, except that her temperature kept rising a little bit at a time, and her eyes kept getting brighter and her cheeks redder. Then the peritonitis broke, and broke plenty. For two weeks her temperature stayed up around 104, and then when it seemed she had that licked, pneumonia set in. She was in oxygen for three days, and when she came out of it she was so weak you couldn’t believe she could live at all. Then, at last, she began to get better.
All that time I took Sheila in there twice a day, and we’d sit and watch the chart, and in between we’d talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I had no idea. The mess over the bond was all cleared up, but I hadn’t been told to come back to work, and I didn’t expect to be. And after the way my name had been plastered on the front pages all over the country, I didn’t know where I could get a job, or whether I could get a job. I knew a little about banking, but in banking the first thing you’ve got to have is a good name.
Then one night we were sitting there, Sheila and myself, with the two kids on the bed, looking at a picture book, when the door opened, and the Old Man walked in. It was the first time we had seen him since the night he danced with Sheila, just before he sailed for Honolulu. He had a box of flowers, and handed them to Sheila with a bow. “Just dropped in to see how the little girl is getting along.”
Sheila took the flowers and turned away quickly to hide how she felt, then rang for the nurse and sent them out to be put in water. Then she introduced him to the children, and he sat on the bed and kidded along with them, and they let him look at the pictures in the picture book. The flowers came back, and Sheila caught her breath, and they were jumbo chrysanthemums all right. She thanked him for them, and he said they came from his own garden in Beverly. The nurse went and the kids kind of quieted down again, and Sheila went over to him, and sat down beside him on the bed, and took his hand. “You think this is a surprise, don’t you?”
“Well, I can do better.”
He dug in his pocket and fished up a couple of little dolls. The kids went nuts over them, and that was the end of talk for about five minutes. But Sheila was still hanging on to the Old Man’s hand, and went on: “It’s no surprise at all. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Oh, you have.”
“I saw you were back.”
“I got back yesterday.”
“I knew you’d come.”
The Old Man looked at me and grinned. “I must have done pretty well in that dance. I must have uncorked a pretty good rhumba.”
“I’d say you did all right.”
Sheik laughed, and kissed his hand, and got up and moved into a chair. He moved into a chair too, and looked at his chrysanthemums and said, “Well, when you like somebody you have to bring her flowers.”
“And when you like somebody, you know they’ll do it.”
He sat there a minute, and then he said, “I think you two are about the silliest pair of fools I ever knew. Just about the silliest.”
“We think so too.”
“But not a pair of crooks. … I read a little about it, in Honolulu, and when I got back I went into it from beginning to end, thoroughly. If I’d been here, I’d have let you have it right in the neck, just exactly where Lou Frazier let you have it, and I haven’t one word of criticism to offer for what he did. But I wasn’t here. I was away, I’m glad to say. Now that I’m back I can’t find it in me to hold it against you. It was against all rules, all prudence, but it wasn’t morally wrong. And—it was silly. But all of us, I suppose, are silly now and then. Even I feel the impulse—especially when dancing the rhumba.”
He stopped and let his fingertips touch in front of his eyes, and stared through them for a minute or so. Then he went on:
“But—the official family is the official family, and while Frazier isn’t quite as sore as he was, he’s not exactly friendly, even yet. I don’t think there’s anything for you in the home office for some little time yet, Bennett—at any rate, until this blows over a little. However, I’ve about decided to open a branch in Honolulu. How would you like to take charge of that?”
Brother, does a cat like liver?
So Honolulu’s where we are now, all five of us: Sheila, and myself, and Anna, and Charlotte, and Arthur, a little number you haven’t heard about yet, that arrived about a year after we got here, and that was named after the Old Man. They’re out there on the beach now, and I can see them from where I’m writing on the
veranda, and my wife looks kind of pretty in a bathing suit, if anybody happens to ask you. The Old Man was in a few weeks ago, and told us that Frazier’s been moved East, and any time I want to go back, it’s all clear, and he’ll find a spot for me. But I don’t know. I like it here, and Sheila likes it here, and the kids like it here, and the branch is doing fine. And another thing: I’m not so sure I want to make it too handy for Sheila and the Old Man to dance the rhumba.
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These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, 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 © 2015 by James M. Cain
“The Robbery,” Copyright 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, by Press Pub. Co. “Pastorale.” Copyright 1928 by The American Mercury, Inc. Copyright renewed 1955 by James M. Cain. “The Taking of Montfaucon.” Copyright 1929 by The American Mercury, Inc. “The Baby in the Icebox.” Copyright 1932 by The American Mercury, Inc. Copyright renewed 1959 by James M. Cain. “Dead Man.” Copyright 1936 by James M. Cain. Copyright renewed 1963 by James M. Cain. “Brush Fire.” Copyright 1936 by Macfadden Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1963 by James M. Cain. “The Birthday Party.” Copyright 1936 by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1963 by James M. Cain. “Coal Black.” Copyright 1937 by Macfadden Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed 1964 by James M. Cain. “The Girl in the Storm.” Copyright 1939 by James M. Cain. “Money and the Woman (The Embezzler).” Copyright 1940 by James M. Cain. Copyright renewed 1968 by James M. Cain. “Joy Ride to Glory.” Copyright © 1981 by Alice M. Piper. “Mommy’s A Barfly” Copyright © 2012 by Eric Piper. “Death on the Beach” Copyright © 1858 by Jack London’s Adventure Magazine. “Two O’clock Blonde” Copyright © 1953 by Manhunt. “Pay-Off Girl” Copyright © 1952 by Esquire, Inc. “Cigarette Girl” Copyright © 1953 by Manhunt, “Career in C Major” Copyright © 1946 Knopf. Reprinted with permission.