“Turn around,” said Toddy softly. “She called the turn on you, Milt. I trusted you. On top of that, you had a lot of luck. If I hadn’t chased off after Donald, I’d have found out that Elaine was pulling a fake.”
“There was no element of luck,” Milt said. “I telephoned Elaine when you left the shop. There was ample time to locate the watch and prepare for your arrival.”
“But if I’d examined Elaine…”
“If you had—well, it would be a prank; and later we should have tried again. But we—I—knew you would not do that. So many predicaments has your stupidity placed you in, and always you react in the same manner. You place no faith in the wisdom or mercy of constituted authority. You make no study of the factors behind your contretemps. Tricks you have, not brains; tricks and legs. So, where tricks are futile, you run.”
Toddy grunted. “You’re a funny guy, Milt. Very funny.”
“Oh, there is no doubt about it. Everyone has always said so. There is only one person who did not.”
“Me,” cooed Elaine, snuggling against him. “I knew better right from the beginning.”
“So you did,” Milt nodded benignly. “So now, I think, you should have another drink. A very small one.”
Ahead and to the right, blurred lights pushed up through the shrouds of rain. Santa Monica. It wouldn’t be long now.
A car came towards them, fog-lights burning, moving rapidly. Toddy’s hand tightened on the wheel…Side-swipe it?…Huh-uh. Milt had nothing to lose. An accident, any sign of trouble, would only make him kill more quickly.
Toddy forced a short ugly laugh. Elaine lowered the bottle, squinted suspiciously in the darkness.
“Something funny, prince?”
Toddy shrugged.
“Goddammit, I asked you if—”
“Quiet, my treasure.” Milt drew her back against his shoulder. “And, yes, I think I will take charge of the liquor. He is trying to disturb you. Drink makes the task easy.”
“But—all right, honey.”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” said Toddy. “Why was the room straightened up before Elaine skipped out?”
“On the night of her supposed death? Merely a precautionary measure. The police might have been notified if the condition of the room happened to be observed. I felt sure you would hold Alvarado responsible. I wished to make sure you had no interference.”
“That part of your plan didn’t work out very well, did it?”
“It worked out well enough,” said Milt, “as your present situation proves.…But you were laughing a moment ago?”
“I was just thinking.” Toddy laughed again. “Wondering about you and Elaine; how long it’ll be before she turns on you…when you least expect it.”
“Because she turned, as you put it, on you? But there is no similarity between the two cases. You could give her nothing. I can. She never needed you. She needs me. You tried to hold her against her will. I would never do that. If parting becomes necessary, it will be arranged amicably. We will share and share alike, and each will go his own way.”
“That’s sound logic,” said Toddy, “but you’re not dealing with a logical person. Elaine gets her fun out of not getting along. It’s the only entertainment, aside from drinking, that she’s capable of. She’s a degenerate, Milt. She’s liable to go in for killing as hard as she does drinking. I wouldn’t believe the doctors when—”
Something hit him a painful blow on the head, the car swerved. He swung it straight again at a sharp command from Milt. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the jeweler turn, hand raised, toward Elaine.
“Dummkopf!” he snapped. “I have a notion to…” Then he smiled, and his voice went suddenly gentle. “It seems we both have the temper. It is not a time to give way to it.”
“I’m sorry, honey. He just made me so damned sore…”
“But now you see through his tricks, eh? You see where they might lead to?”
“Uh-huh.” Elaine sighed. “You’re so smart, darling. You see right through people.”
“He doesn’t see through you,” said Toddy. “If he did he’d take that gun away from you. He’d know what you’re thinking—that all of that dough would be better than half.”
Elaine made a mocking sound with her lips. Milt chuckled fatly.
“It is useless, Toddy. In the regrettable absence of attraction, there would still be the factor of need. It was I who planned this, and there will be yet more planning, thinking, to be done. Even an Elaine as elemental as the one you portray would not destroy something necessary to survival.”
“Anyway,” said Elaine, “I don’t want the old gun; I wouldn’t know how to use it. You take it, honey.”
Milt pushed it back at her. “But you must know! It is imperative. Look, I will show you again…The safety, here. Then, only a firm, short pull on the trigger. Very short unless you wish to empty it. It is automatic, as I told you previously…”
His own gun was in his lap for the moment, and Toddy knew another surge of hope. He couldn’t, of course, do anything himself. But Elaine…
But Elaine didn’t. Milt picked up his gun again.
Toddy turned the car off Olympic and onto Ocean Avenue. They reached Pico Street, and he turned again. Less than a mile ahead was the ocean.
“No more questions, Toddy? Nothing else you would like to inquire about?”
“Nothing.”
“After all, the opportunity will not arise again.”
“No, it won’t,” said Toddy. “Look, Milt…”
“Yes?”
“Let Miss Chavez go. She won’t—”
“I will not go,” said Dolores, calmly.
“You will not,” agreed Milt. “I am sorry. It is a terrible penalty to pay for allying oneself with an imbecile.”
He rolled down the window of the car and peered out, and the rain sounds mingled with the roar of the ocean, the breakers rolling in and out from shore. Toddy made the last turn.
“You made one mistake, Milt. There’s one thing you didn’t count on.”
“Interesting,” murmured Milt, “but not, I am afraid, true.…This is the place you had in mind, I believe? Yes. You will stop, then, and turn off your lights.”
Toddy stopped. The lights went off.
There was a moment of silence, the near-absolute silence which precedes action. Before Milt could break it, Toddy spoke.
This was his last chance, his and Dolores’. And he knew it was wasted, no chance at all, even before he started to speak. What he had to say was incredible. His strained, hollow voice made it preposterous.
“Really, Toddy.” Milt sounded almost embarrassed. “You do not expect us to believe that?”
“No,” said Toddy. “I don’t expect you to believe me. But it is true.”
“Only stupidity I charged you with,” Milt pointed out. “Not insanity. You did not know Elaine was alive. You were sure you would be accused of her murder. Willing though you might be to pass up a fortune, and I sincerely suspect such a willingness, you would not dare abide by your bargain. In this case, you had no choice but to run.”
“I was tired of running.” (Elaine giggled.) “I knew I hadn’t killed her. I was going to fight the case.”
“Without money? With all the evidence against you? With a long record of criminality? And if, by some fluke of justice, you cleared yourself, what then? You have no trade but to prey upon others. You—”
“I could get one.” The words, the tone seemed ridiculously childish.
“We waste time,” said Milt. “You would have me believe you pursued one futility to achieve another. You, risking your liberty—perhaps your life—by keeping a bargain? You, placing your faith, at last, in the courts? You, Toddy Kent, doing these things for a so-called good name, a job, perhaps Miss Chavez—”
“It would not have been perhaps,” said Dolores.
“Even so,” Milt shrugged. “I know him too well, and he knows himself too well. He does not fit the part.?
??Now, I think…”
“Let Elaine think,” Toddy persisted doggedly. “You can’t pull out. You want to get her in as deep as you are. Don’t let him do it, Elaine! There’s a tape recorder in the car. I—”
“Elaine,” Milt interrupted, “is not required to think. And, of course, there is a recorder. How else could you obtain the evidence you were supposed to get? I do not deny the existence of a bargain. Only that you had no intention of keeping it.”
“I did intend to keep it! I know it looks like I didn’t, but I had to make it look that way! I was supposed to meet them here—I called them just before I went to your shop. Elaine—”
“Tonight?” said Milt. “You were to meet them there tonight, or tomorrow night? Or perhaps even the next? You are transparent, Toddy. Your government men would have given you two days without surveillance as quickly as they would give you two hours. Never would they have agreed to such an arrangement.”
“They didn’t agree to it, but they had to take it. I’d already ducked out on ’em. It was either play it my way or—”
“Nonsense. You insult my intelligence.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said Elaine, worriedly. “Let me—”
“It is not necessary,” said Milt. “I have already thought. Of everything…You were to meet them here, eh? Bah! Where are they, then?”
Toddy licked dry lips, helplessly. It was no use. The evidence was all against him. He couldn’t make them believe something that was incredible to himself.
“I don’t know,” he said, almost indifferently. “It’s a big beach. Maybe they don’t recognize the car. I don’t know where they are, but—”
Milt’s curt, bored laugh cut him off. “They would not recognize the car, certainly. You would see to that. And we both know where they are—anywhere but here. Now, enough!”
“But Milt, honey…” Elaine began.
“Enough!” snapped Milt. “Must I explain everything twice? Why do you think I played with him there in the shop, found out exactly where he wished to go? Because it would be safe. It would be the last place his whilom friends would expect to find him.”
“All right, honey. I was just—”
“We will proceed! And—please!—the bottle will remain here!”
Dolores was shoved over in the seat, squeezed against Toddy. Elaine pushed past her, and got out. She stood back in the sand a few feet, covering the door as Toddy and the girl emerged.
Milt came out last, grunting from the exertion, blinking his eyes against the rain.
“Now,” he panted, “we will just…” He gestured with the gun. Elaine spoke apologetically.
“Milt, baby, are you sure, really sure that…?”
“I have said so! It is all finished. Now we have only to—”
He saw, then, heard the childishly delighted laugh—mischievous, filled with the viciousness it could not recognize, signaling triumph in a game without rules. It seemed to paralyze him. The gun hung loose in his fingers.
“Liebling!” he gasped. “Darling! There is so much. Why—?”
There was a brief, stuttering blast. “W-why?” Milt said, and crumpled to the sand. And he said no more and heard no more.
Elaine snatched up his gun, and leveled it quickly.
“Huh-uh, prince. You gave me an idea, but I get ideas, too. L’il Elaine’s dead. L’il Elaine’s in the clear. This is your gun and you shot him, and he shot you and her. And—”
“Elaine!” Toddy’s voice shook. “For your own sake, don’t! The government men are bound to be near here. They probably missed us in the rain, but those shots are sure to—”
“D—don’t make me laugh, prince. D-don’t m-make me laugh…”
She began to rock with laughter; it pealed out, shrill, delighted, infectious. And suddenly Toddy was laughing with her. Laughing and ridding himself of something, the last, fragile, frazzled tie. “L-like”—she was shrieking—“like Milt said, prince, you d-don’t fit the part!”
That was the way he would always remember her—the monkey face twisted with merriment, the scrawny, rain-drenched figure rocking in the abrupt pitiless glow of floodlights, laughing as the guns of the T-men began to chatter.
So he would always remember her, but it was like remembering another person. Someone he had never known.
The gizmo, the golden, deceptive, brass-filled gizmo, was gone at last.
About the Author
James Meyers Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1906. In all, Jim Thompson wrote twenty-nine novels and two screenplays (for the Stanley Kubrick films The Killing and Paths of Glory). Films based on his novels include The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.
…and The Transgressors
In July 2012, Mulholland Books will publish Jim Thompson’s The Transgressors. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.
The Transgressors
Under the far-west Texas sky, a pale, wind-swept blue in the late August afternoon, the big convertible swayed and swung lazily, jouncing its two occupants—a prostitute and a deputy sheriff—into brief contact; it seemed to crawl toward the horizon like a large black bug, caught inside an up-ended, transparent bowl.
The wind was almost constant, something that one was aware of only when it ceased. The sparse stalks of burned-dry Johnson grass lay almost prone from its pressure, and the giant cacti, the tree-tall Spanish bayonet, leaned warily away from it. It seemed bent on driving everything before it, unwilling to rest until the desolation was absolute.
For the past two-odd hours, ever since they had left the town of Big Sands, the woman had turned in her seat occasionally to look at the man; hopefully at first, then with a kind of frustrated bafflement, and finally with snapping-eyed, tight-lipped fury. Now, at last, she swung abruptly around to stare at him, hiking her skirt high on her thighs, her breasts swelling angrily against her blouse.
The man appeared not to notice. He was, in fact, squinting off to his left, trying to locate the spirelike speck amidst a cluster of lesser specks which, ten miles nearer, would prove to be the derrick and accouterments of a wildcat drilling well.
“Tom…” the woman said. “Tom.”
The man saw what he was looking for at last. The woman didn’t. She was a relative newcomer to the area, still a stranger after almost three years. And strangers here had died of thirst and hunger, of heat or cold, because they accepted the apparent emptiness as real; because, unable to survive themselves, they could not see how others might. They had done it four hundred years ago. They would be doing it four thousand years hence. For the land was unchanging—did not have the necessary elements for change. Men changed it briefly, and then it went back to what it had been.
“Tom! Tom Lord!”
“Yeah, Joyce?”
Deputy Sheriff Tom Lord turned away from the landscape; smiled pleasurably as he noted the hiked-up skirt and the area beneath it. “Oh, gonna take my picture, huh? Want me to say cheese?”
“Stop it! You know what I want!”
“Mmm, let’s see,” Lord mused—then brightened exaggeratedly. “Why, sure. Ought to’ve known right away. Well, you just hop in the back seat and get yourself fixed, an’—”
He broke off abruptly as Joyce Lakewood swung at him. She swung again, began to pound, claw, and slap at him. His hat, a sixty-dollar ranch-style Stetson fell into the rear of the car. His neat, black bow tie was knocked askew. He ducked and dodged as he drove, sheltering himself with one arm, laughing uproariously and so contagiously that the woman at last joined in. But unwillingly, and not without a trace of bitterness.
“Ah, Tom,” she said. “What can I do with you, anyway?”
“Why, now, you’ve been doing right fine so far,” Lord said. “I ain’t got a complaint in the world, and that’s a fact.”
“But what about me? Why did you bring me out here today?”
“You’ve been saying we needed to have a good long talk,” the deputy pointed out. “Ca
n’t remember how many times you’ve said it. Thought we ought to get off some place where we wouldn’t be disturbed.”
“We wouldn’t have been disturbed at my place.”
“We-el, maybe not,” Lord said. “But I don’t reckon we’d have done much talkin’. Seems like we always think of somethin’ more interesting to do.”
He reached down behind the seat, winking at her slyly as he recovered his hat. Joyce reddened, feeling a mixture of anger and shame.
She was used to vulgarity, to lewdness, to downright filthiness. She had become quite used to it by the time she was fourteen, and she was thirty now. Yet quite often with this man—more and more often, of late—she had found herself blushing at his smallest indelicacy; had been offended and angered and hurt by language which, coming from another man—from any of the hundreds of men before him—would have seemed almost prim.
And she didn’t know how to object to it, how to explain why, being what she was, she did object to it. Her only recourse, as now, was to pass over the issue and strike back at a tangent. It would give her no satisfaction, only rebound with more hurt, but still she did it.
“Why do you use that cornball talk?” she snapped. “You’re no rube! You’re probably the best educated man in the county, practically a medical-school graduate, but you sound like some character in a third-rate movie!”
Lord’s delicately arched eyebrows went up. “You mean,” he said, “you don’t think it’s fittin’?”
“Of course it’s not! A man who’s had your advantages…”
“Well, now, looky,” Lord cut in, drawling. “Turn it around t’other way, and the same boot fits your foot.”
“What—how do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m a heap and I talk like nothin’. You’re nothing, and you talk like a heap. Why, y’know,” he smiled at her, smiled with his lips and his even white teeth, dark eyes cold and humorless, “as long as you keep a rein on yourself, you could fool almost anyone. Even me, now, I have to keep remindin’ myself that you ain’t a real honest-to-Gawd lady.”