She took it. Her sobbing had worn down to a sniffle now. She put the jacket on and buttoned it up in front. She clasped it closed at the neck with one hand.
Her teeth were clenched. “I wish you had killed them,” she said. She bowed her head, crying angrily. “Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you kill them?”
“I didn’t want to get them mad,” I said.
The light changed. We rolled on, up out of the Village. Up past the downtown parks, the weird buildings that surrounded them. Skyscrapers with crowns and golden pinnacles, vaunting arches, white Greek columns lit by cold blue light: they hung over us at every window.
I relaxed a little. I fed a cigarette into my battered mouth. I offered one to her. She shook her head. I smoked. The smoke tasted good.
And then it all came out of her. “I want to get them, I want to get them,” she said between her teeth. “I want to get them any way, any way we can. I want you to print that story like you said. I want everyone to know what they did. I want them to go to jail. I want them to die there. I want them to rot and die.”
I glanced over at her. She was staring at me wildly, fiercely. The venom in her eyes startled me. She’d earned it, but it startled me all the same when I thought about the corn-fed country girl I’d seen only a few hours before.
“I want them to rot and die,” she said again. She seemed to roll the idea around on her tongue. “I want them all to rot and die.”
I nodded. I drove. I smoked. We came into Gramercy Park. “You want me to nail them in the Star,” I said.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“They might weather it. It’s only ink.”
“Oh no, oh no.” She shook her head sharply. “Not in this town. In this town, ink is everything. Everything. You could destroy them. I know it. I know you could.”
I was cruising past the row of brownstones where her building was. I saw an opening between two parked cars. I let the Dodge glide into it.
I threw the gearshift into park and shifted to look at Georgia. I was leaning on the wheel.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, maybe I can.” Her eyes gleamed with hope and hatred as she looked at me. I said: “But I have to know about the pictures.”
The gleam in her eyes went out like a snuffed candle. She blinked. She turned her face away from me. The light of a street lamp poured down on her through the windshield. I studied the glow of it on her hair.
“You’ve got to tell me the truth, Georgia,” I said. “You’ve got to tell me so I can put it in the paper. So I can show why Dellacroce would want to have you slapped around tonight. You’ve got to tell me and when you’re through telling me, you’ve got to tell the cops. Then maybe—maybe—we can really nail them for good and all.”
When she raised her face to me, the hatred was gone. There was only fear in her eyes. The fear and violated innocence of a country girl in a bad part of the big city. She tried to speak. She couldn’t. Her face began to crumple. She threw herself into my arms.
“Hey,” I said.
She cried against my chest. I felt the tears making my shirt wet. I looked down at her hair while she cried. I felt like an idiot.
I had to reach around her to get my cigarette to the ashtray. I tossed it in there and let it smoke. That freed my hands so I could pat Georgia on the back. I patted her on the back.
“Hey,” I said, more softly. I stroked her hair.
“All I wanted was to be an actress,” she said.
“I know,” I said. I even sounded like an idiot.
“That’s not so awful, darn it. It’s not.”
“No, it’s not awful.”
She sniffled. She wiped her nose on my shirt. I’d kind of liked this shirt, too.
She raised her head. Her eyes were close to mine. They were nice eyes, soft and deep. Even now, they were nice, filled with tears. I studied her eyes and her bruises and her lips, puffy with crying. She looked hurt and sad like a little girl.
“I was so scared tonight,” she whispered.
“I know,” I said. “But it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”
“So scared.”
“I understand.”
“I do want to tell you the truth.”
“All right.”
“I want to, I just …”
“You’ve got to, Georgia.”
“The police will think I murdered that man, that Kendrick man. They’ll think …”
“Don’t worry. I know the cop on the case. He’s a good one. He’ll watch out for you. If he doesn’t, I will.”
She gazed up at me. I figured she was about nineteen. She was even younger than Lansing.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you inside. We can talk there.”
She leaned on my chest again. “Oh God, not tonight. I can’t take anymore tonight.”
I considered it. I kept my arm around her while I considered it. I looked down at her hair. It was past my deadline anyway.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just take you inside.”
So I took her inside. I took her up the stairs with my arm around her shoulder. I opened the door while she leaned against the jamb. I went into the apartment first and checked it out. There was no one lurking around.
I went to the door. She followed me. She looked small and childish with my jacket billowing around her. She threw her arms around me.
“I don’t even know you,” she said. “I don’t even know who you really are.”
I patted her hair. I gently peeled her off of me. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I told her. “We’ll have to talk before my deadline.”
She gazed at me some more. “You know,” she said, “you really do have my father’s eyes.”
Now I felt like an idiot and an old man at the same time.
I listened to her lock the door, then headed back to my car.
17
It was past midnight. I was beat.
I went back to the office. I battered out some notes on what had happened tonight. I didn’t have the energy to write the full story, but I got it down close enough. When I was done, I typed out some instructions on what to do with the notes in the event of my untimely transformation into ground beef. I pointed out that the two guns I’d taken were locked in the bottom drawer of my desk. Finally, I put the envelope on top of the keyboard to McKay’s computer terminal.
I waved to the few night folks wandering around the maze of cubicles. I went home.
When I got there, I turned on the air conditioner. Poured myself a drink. Switched on the tube in the bedroom and lit myself a cigarette. I stationed an ashtray on the bedside table just so.
Then I lay down with my scotch glass balanced on my belly. I sipped my drink and smoked my cigarette and watched TV. I thought fondly of the days when they used to play movies on the tube at night. There was nothing on now but cop shows and talk shows. I chose a talk show.
Some starlet was talking about her latest movie. She was very pretty. Lots of yellow hair, perfect features. I wondered if she felt as soft as she looked. I wondered what it would be like to hold her pressed against me. To have her cry, helpless, on my shoulder. To have her say thank you with big, wide eyes.
But then she probably never did those things. So I wondered if she gave good back rubs, instead. I hurt all over.
After a while, my attention drifted. I tried to remember when the day had begun. I recalled my boss telling me I was going to be fired. But that was not the beginning of it. I had opened my front door to Wally Shakespeare and a sock in the nose. But it went back even farther than that. There was that first moment when my radio alarm went off with the news that I had been scooped on my own story. It really had been a long day. A long day and a lousy one.
My eyes began to close now. I jacked them open, thinking of the cigarette. I snuffed it out. Cot undressed. I killed the TV and the light. I climbed into bed.
As I let my eyes close again, I remembered that I was going to talk to Georgia tomorrow. That made me feel a little better. I wondered, v
aguely, why it made me feel better. Because, I answered, she would give me my story, the scoop I needed to keep my job, to rescue my reputation. That’s why I’d gone looking for her in the first place, wasn’t it? Wasn’t that why I’d taken advantage of her rage and fear to convince her to talk to me?
God, God, I thought, I hate this story. It was low and it was dirty and it was making me low and dirty, too. I took a deep breath, let it out, tried to relax. You do what you have to do, that’s the thing of it. No one’s perfect, no one’s clean all the time. You do your work as honestly as you can, and you do what you have to do. I’d turned this story down when it was just a sex scandal, but it was a murder now. It was a story now, and Georgia was part of it. It was my job to get that story, to get it first. It’s an honest job. I get paid honest money to do it. I do it well. I do what I have to do.
I was too tired to go on thinking like that. Bullshit takes too much out of me. The chain of my thought began to break apart, the links drifting off in all different directions. Vaguely, I thought of Mayforth Kendrick lying sprawled on his floor with that bullet in him. No one has the right, I thought. I thought of the thug with the harelip. I thought of his gun in my back and that stairwell door getting closer and closer. My arm drifted down over the edge of the bed. That stairwell door. Closer. Closer …
As the last of my consciousness faded away, my arm hung loose, the hand dangled.
And I felt somebody breathing on it.
My eyes opened quickly, wide. I kept my hand where it was. There was no question about it. There was a puff of warm air, then another and another. It came in a steady rhythm that matched the rhythm of my own breath.
Someone was under the bed.
I pulled my hand back up. I rolled onto my side with a lot of thrashing and moaning, as if I were going to sleep. I let my breathing steady. I added a slight gurgle to it to make it sound like snoring. I lay still, snoring, with my eyes open, watching the side of the bed.
After about a minute, he made his move. He shifted, grunting. He slithered into the open. I saw the shadow of his head emerge. I saw it come up over the edge of the bed. I waited to get a look at the rest of him.
He stood up. He stood up and up. When he was finished standing, it seemed his head had vanished among the shadows of the ceiling. I thought at first it was Frankenstein, come to avenge the bullet in the thigh. It was not a pleasant thought. In fact, it made my stomach turn to jelly. I lay there, waiting for him to lean down and crush my head with his bare hands.
He didn’t. The giant began moving away. He moved past the window. The light from the street outside came through the pane. For a moment, I saw the titan’s face bathed in its garish glow.
I reached out. I turned on the light on my bedside table.
He spun halfway toward me, then froze in the sudden brightness. He looked down at me from his incredible height as I struggled to sit up.
“What the hell?” I said.
Wally Shakespeare just stood there stupidly. His jaw loosened. His hand moved a little at his side. I guess this was supposed to be some primitive form of communication.
I tried a primitive form of my own. “You asshole,” I said. “What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?”
“Uh,” the big idiot said.
“Christ! Do you know how fucking tired I am? How am I supposed to sleep with you under my bed?”
“Uh … gee,” he said.
“Why don’t you come back in the morning so I can have you arrested like a civilized person?” I reached for my cigarette pack. I shot a new butt into my mouth. I lit it angrily, puffing great clouds of smoke everywhere. “Christ!” I said.
Wally still stood there, still stupidly. His face, with its big round cheeks, was so empty of expression it almost seemed out of focus. It just sort of floated up there around the ceiling above his gargantuan shoulders, never really taking shape. His broad chest heaved as he breathed in fear.
Then, slowly, while I continued to curse him, he began to get angry. I could almost see it well up from his belly and rise into his shock-dulled brain.
He lifted an arm. It was the size of a log. He pointed a finger at me. It was the size of a little log.
“You …” he said.
I stopped cursing at him. If anyone else hit me today, I’d wind up in a Home for the Terminally Punched. I sighed smoke and waited for Wally to gather his thoughts.
“You …!” he said again. “You’ve found Georgia, haven’t you?”
I gestured with the cigarette. “Yeah. That’s right. That’s why I wanted the picture of her.”
“But you—you tricked me. You’re doing a story on her. You’re going to put it in the newspaper that she sinned with that man, that she was in pictures with that politician, sinning.” He stepped forward. His hand curled into a fist. “Aren’t you?” he said.
I drew my knees up under the covers. I rested my arms on them. I smoked. I eyed the creature. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, probably. Probably that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
He took another step forward. His legs touched the foot of the bed. “You said … you said you’d call me if you found out anything, if you could tell me where she was.… You made that promise right here in the sight of Cod.”
“Okay, son, okay. Look: sit down.”
“You tell me where she is. Her soul is in danger of eternal damnation every second she’s in this city.”
“Yeah, well, that’s true enough. True of all of us. But you still better sit down.”
Now both his hands were clenched. “Why?”
“Because I’m not going to tell you where she is, and if you’re standing up you might be tempted to hit me again.”
For some reason, this made sense to him. He thought it over a second, nodded, and backed away from the bed. There was an easy chair in the corner. He propped himself on the edge of its seat. He clasped his hands in front of him, rubbing them together. He glared at me. He waited.
My situation, it seemed to me, hadn’t changed very much since this morning. Here I was entertaining the Amazing Giant Fundamentalist again. It was John Wells’ prescription for an exciting time: begin and end each day in fear of your life.
“She doesn’t want to see you,” I said.
This annoyed him. “Oh …” he began.
“It’s true, man. She’s hiding out from you. Specifically from you.”
“Oh, Mr. Wells, that’s just the devil. Don’t you know that? I mean, it’s obvious.”
“What?”
“The devil. Satan. That’s him telling her what to do. That’s not the real Georgia. Why, my daddy could have that demon purged from her soul with a single laying-on of hands.”
“That’s just it, Oral. She doesn’t want the demon purged from her soul.”
His face went blank again. “Huh?”
“She wants to be an actress, man. Now, maybe where you’re from that’s considered the work of the devil, but around here it’s a noble enough calling. It even pays well if you hit it big.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t believe I was this dense. He tried patiently to explain it to me one more time. “Mr. Wells, Georgia is my fiancée. She’s going to come back to Ohio with me. She’s going to have my children. She’s going to stand by me in the trials of my preaching. I mean, that’s a woman’s role as prescribed by Cod.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Yes,” he said with a vigorous nod. “That’s right.”
“So that’s it. I was wondering what it was.”
He laughed. He felt I was beginning to catch on. “So, you see, Satan has put these thoughts into her head to tempt her away from the work of the Lord.”
I reached out and snuffed the cigarette in the ashtray by the bed. “Well, it’s all clear to me now.”
“Finally!”
“You’re a fucking lunatic.”
“Huh?”
“Listen, Falwell, let me ask you a question: How, as you went about your godly duties, did
you happen to wind up hiding under my bed?”
Well, he was a little embarrassed about that. A little bit of red rose to his cheeks. He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t come here to hide under a bed,” he said. “I came here to talk to you directly.”
“Yeah, I remember the last time you did that. I’m really sorry I wasn’t home to receive you.”
“When I saw you weren’t home, I decided there was no time to waste, with Georgia threatened by perdition every moment and all. So I … I. broke in to see if there was any … anything lying around that might tell me if you’d found her, and where she was, only …”
“Only I came home.”
He hung his head. “Yeah.”
“And just how did you find out I’d gotten to Georgia in the first place?”
“My new friends told me.”
“The folks on Theater Row.”
“That’s right.”
“Who specifically?”
His head came up. His expression had hardened. “Look, that’s not the point here.…”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it is. I mean, you’re sitting here and you’re talking like the fruitcake you are about Georgia and Satan and how she’s sinning and all that. But you’re the one who broke in here, Swaggart. You’re the guy trying to look at things that aren’t yours, hiding under beds.…”
He shot up out of the chair. He towered over my bed. He pointed that big finger at me again. “You listen here, you listen to me!” he thundered. “I may be crazy and I may be a sinner and maybe I can’t say things the way you-all can all sharp and smart and—and deceitful, and maybe I sound funny to you talking about God and all …” He caught his breath. “But at least … at least … I care about her. I love her. I mean, you, with all your talk, all your twisting and perverting things, why, you’re just trying to deceive me so I’ll leave her to you—”
“Wally.”
“You’re trying to deceive her so you can write your filthy stories. You’re trying—”
“Walter.”
“—to use her, to bury her under your lust for sex and scandal in this fiend-haunted city. You’re trying—”