Nothing In Her Way by Charles Williams(5)

“It wasn’t too hard to guess what they were up to,”
she said. “When I came back from Houston I had an
idea they were speeding things up a little. I called the
hotel at Ludley Friday morning, and then called
Houston. And when Charlie wasn’t at either place I
knew our laughing boys had their shoes in their hands
and were headed for the door. I tried to call you, but
you were out. It was too late by then to pick you up, of
course, but with luck I might get them before they
could get away from El Paso. Of course, I could have
just gone to them and demanded our share, but since
Nothing in Her Way — 83
they wanted to play winner-take-all—” She smiled
coldly. “Well, they asked for it,” I said.
She turned to face me. “It’s history now, Mike. We’ve
got other things to think about.”
She was always one jump ahead of me. “Such as?” I
asked.
“Lachlan. The big one.”
“Oh,” I said. “But not right now.”
“Why?”
“Right at the moment I’m too happy to hate even
Lachlan. Wait here a minute.” I got out of the car. In
the bar that’s never more than two doors from

anywhere in Reno I bought a bottle of champagne and
talked the barman out of two glasses. Somehow it
seemed quite logical, just the thing you always did at
six o’clock in the morning.
I slid in behind the wheel and drove, while she leaned
against me with her head on my shoulder. We went out
the Carson highway and turned off on the road to
Mount Rose. It hadn’t been plowed yet, but there were
chains on the car and we made it as far as I wanted to
go. It was a lookout point where you could pull off the
road and look down across the valley. I got out and
shoved the champagne and the two glasses into the
waist-high barricade of snow left by the plows after an
earlier snowfall.
When the champagne was cold it was growing light. I
lifted her out of the car, because she couldn’t walk in
the snow in shoes that were only high heels and straps,
and put her on the hood where she could see. It made
her catch her breath. The valley was spread out below
us, luminous and ghostly in the dawn, with nothing
moving anywhere in all the white. I opened the
champagne, the pop as the cork came out sounding
strange and out of place in the frozen hush of early
morning. We drank it all and then very gravely threw
the glasses into the snowy pines below the road.
“Mike,” she said suddenly, staring at me with a
startled expression, “what makes your clothes so
lumpy?”
Nothing in Her Way — 84
“Oh.” I’d forgotten all about the crap game. “Money.”
She started laughing and slid down off the hood. I
caught her and held her up. She was shrieking, and in a
minute it struck me as funny and I began, too. We
leaned on each other and howled.
Donnelly was very far away then—Donnelly and
Bolton and Charlie. And even Lachlan. But it didn’t last
long.
She said a strange thing as we got into the elevator to
go up to the room I’d got at the hotel. I only half
noticed it at the time, but I remembered it later. We
were standing in the rear of the car, and I wasn’t
paying any attention to anyone except her.
“Darling,” she asked quietly, “will there be another
one at Hialeah?”
I turned and stared at her. “Another what?”
She looked confused and changed suddenly to
Spanish. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “I’m so sorry. I
just forget.”
We were on our way up to our room, and I didn’t
think any more about it then.
Who would?
Nothing in Her Way — 85
Ten
We had fought a lot when we were married, and the
thing we had fought about more than anything else was
Lachlan. I could forget him once in a while, but she
never could. She’d flare up and accuse me of being
easy-going, lazy, and aimless. I wasn’t dedicated.
I took the attitude that since we hadn’t found him yet,
there was no use staying in a perpetual uproar about
him. He might even be dead, as far as we knew, and I
didn’t see any future in devoting our lives to anything
as frustrating as trying to get even with a dead man.
She couldn’t see it that way, though. Weren’t we still
looking for him? We had to be ready to move in on him
if we ever picked up his trail.
We watched the airline and steamship passenger lists
in the New York, Miami, and New Orleans papers for
all travel to and from Latin America. For a long time we
had a detective agency working on it. We wrote endless
letters to consuls in Central and South American cities.
We picked up his trail in half a dozen cities, but it was
always an old trail and he was gone. He’d disposed of
his interest in the old firm of Dunbar & Belen long ago,
and had moved out of the country when a new regime
came into power. He’d been mixed up in oil in
Venezuela, an airline in Colombia, and a landdevelopment
swindle of some kind in Panama. He made
Nothing in Her Way — 86
a lot of money, one way or another. But so far as we
could learn, he still hadn’t come back to the States.
All this effort had been to find Lachlan himself. We’d
never bothered much with Goodwin; that is, until Cathy
had heard of him from her friend Elaine Holman. She
said she’d learned from a few things the Holman girl
had let drop that her uncle, whose name was Goodwin,
had spent some time in Central America during his
younger days. This and the name had started her
wondering, so she had made a trip to Wyecross to find
out. This had still been a more or less side-line issue,
however; Lachlan was always the one we were after.
But it hadn’t been the search that caused all the
fights. The thing I could never go along with was her
preoccupation with confidence games. She collected
them. She studied them the way some people study
chess, or Lee’s campaigns in the Civil War. She read
everything she could find about them, and devised
endless ones of her own, and always she’d lose patience
with me because I couldn’t keep up any steady interest
in them. It wasn’t surprising that she knew people like
Charlie and Bolton, because bunco artists had always
fascinated her. It was part of getting ready to cut
Lachlan down, because we were going to find him
someday, weren’t we?
And now we had. But I didn’t know the half of it yet.
It was early afternoon. I lay on the bed and watched
her. She was sitting at the writing desk, dressed in a
blue robe and mules, and the red hair was all in a
jumble from running her hand through it. She was
chewing a pencil and writing something.
“This would be a fine day to be married,” I said. “If
you’d comb your hair.”
She frowned at the paper. “You can make an honest
woman of me sometime when we’re not busy.”
“Are we busy?”
“Well, I am,” she said pointedly.
I lit a cigarette. “Well, let me know when you can
work me into your schedule.”
Nothing in Her Way — 87
“You’re already in it, amigo. Do you know how much
money you won?”
“No,” I said.
“Guess.”
“Four pocketsful. Or is pocketfuls?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mike, you’re hopeless. You
won nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars.”
“Well, it’s better than a kick in the backside with a
frozen boot. What are you driving at? Besides going
through my pockets while I’m asleep?”
“I’m adding up how much money we have altogether.
With the sixty-five thousand—”
“You realize, of course,” I said, “that you’re going to
get a bill from Charlie and Bolton for half of that,
sooner or later.” I was still kidding on the outside, but I
was serious.
She smiled, a little coldly. “I have no objection to
their trying, I’m sure. If they didn’t learn last time—”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll try. Incidentally, do you
suppose they’re wise to it yet?”
“Oh, certainly. They weren’t fooled for any longer
than it took them to discover that wasn’t a police car. It
was a U-Drive-It.”
I don’t know what made me think of it just then, but I
suddenly remembered the strange thing she’d said in
the elevator. I tried to remember it.
“Say, what was that crazy remark you made in the
elevator?” I asked.
“When?”
“This morning. Something about Hialeah.”
“Oh.” She frowned and pushed her paper work aside
and put a cigarette in her mouth. “That was it, darling.
The opening gun of what we’ve waited sixteen years
for.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Do you remember the man who was standing on
your left? Big man with a deep tan?”
“Vaguely. Why?”
Nothing in Her Way — 88
She struck a match and stared at me through
cigarette smoke. “That,” she said, “was Martin
Lachlan.”
“What!” I rolled over and sat up. I stared back at her.
“Mr. Martin Lachlan, swindler, oil man, playboy, biggame
fisherman, lecher, and soon-to-be-sucker.”
“Wait a minute. You knew he was in Reno?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“So that explains it. I see it now. I’ve been wondering
how you knew I was here. You didn’t, did you? It was
Lachlan that brought you.”
“Mike, stop yelling. I didn’t come here to see Lachlan.
We’re going to see him in San Francisco. I came here
because I had to find you. And the way I knew you were
here is really quite simple. I couldn’t find you in Las
Vegas. I knew you’d be in one or the other.”
I calmed down a little. “All right. But how did you find
out he was here?”
“The detective agency. The one I’ve had working on it
for the past year. I got a report from them just before I
left San Antonio. Lachlan’s here because he’s trying to
reach a property settlement with his third wife. She’s
staying at a dude ranch here, to divorce him.”
“But how’d you recognize him? You don’t remember
what he looked like any more than I do.”
Without a word she opened her purse, which was
lying on the desk. She took out something and sailed it
across to me on the bed. I picked it up. It was a
snapshot. “From the detective agency,” she said.
He was a powerfully built man who’d probably be in
his late forties. It was a bold, self-assured face, and
there was something about the way he held himself that
gave you the idea he was one of those overbearing
blowhards who’s always telling and showing you he’s
just as good a man as he was twenty years ago. There
wasn’t anything of the simpleton about him, though.
The eyes told you better than that. They looked sharp
and tough.
“A hard nut to crack,” I said, and sailed it back.
Nothing in Her Way — 89
She smiled. “Not too hard.”
“He’s no fool. His record tells you that.”
“I know,” she said. “But that just makes it
interesting.” Her eyes were shining. She was in love
with the idea.
“All right,” I said. “But you still haven’t explained that
screwball remark in the elevator.”
She smiled again. “It’s really quite simple, Mike. It
was a plant.”
“A what?”
“Something that will stick in his mind. He heard it,
because I saw him look around. It’ll puzzle him for a
while, and then he’ll forget it. But the next time he sees
us he’ll remember it. And he’ll be curious.”
“He won’t be half as curious as I am,” I said.
She got up and began pacing the floor. She ran her
fingers through her hair. “It’s just what I’ve been
telling you all these years, Mike, you Latin bird brain.
We’ve found Lachlan, and you’ve got no plan of
operation.”
“No,” I said. “But that’s what we’re going to do now.
We’re going to figure one out.”
“It won’t be necessary, I assure you. I took care of
that long ago. It’s all set. With just a little help from us,
Mr. Lachlan is going to dig his own pit, walk into it,
skin himself, and pass us the pelt. Now, do you want to
know how it’s done?”
“How? What kind of flimflam is it?”
“The fixed race.”
“Cut it out, Cathy,” I said impatiently. “This is no time
for joking.”
“I’m not joking. That’s the way we do it.”
“Don’t be a sap,” I said. “Didn’t you look at that
picture? Don’t you remember his record? He’s no idiot.
He’ll never go for anything as corny as that.”
She blew a smoke ring and looked at it. “You think
not?” she asked smugly.
Nothing in Her Way — 90
“Of course not. You tell any six-year-old kid you’re
going to let him in on a fixed race and he’ll laugh in
your face.”
“Yes. I know. That’s the reason I’m going to use it. I
want to make it as humiliating as possible. I want to
rub his face in it.”
“But it won’t work, I tell you,” I said angrily.
“Mike, you’re being a little naive. In the first place,
you have no conception at all of the depths of human
credulity. And in the second place, you don’t tell him
you can fix a race. You convince him you can by telling
him you can’t.”
“Now, that makes sense,” I said sarcastically.
“It makes a lot of sense when you understand what I
mean.”
“If I ever do,” I said. “Suppose you go back to that
crazy thing in the elevator and start filling me in from
there.”
“All right,” she said. She sat down on the side of the
bed. “To begin with, one of the angles of the thing is
the fact that we both speak Spanish.”
“So does Lachlan.”
She smiled. “Exactly. If he didn’t, it would be utterly
pointless. But he does, and he doesn’t have any idea at
all that we know it. And when we meet again, if he’s
curious about us, he’ll never let us know he does
understand it, and that’s very important.
“Now, remember what I said. I mean, the way it
would sound to somebody who understands both
languages. I asked if there was going to be another
‘one’ at Hialeah. Hialeah, of course, is obviously a race
track to anybody. And then, as I knew you would, you
asked, ‘One what?’ Now, that could mean, of course,
that you didn’t have any idea what I was talking about,
but since there were other people present it could also
mean, ‘Shut up, you damn fool.’ So I apologized, very
contritely, in another language, which I obviously
hoped nobody listening would understand. You see how
simple it is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You sound like Charlie.”
Nothing in Her Way — 91
“Oh,” she said, “all that’s elementary. The really dirty
work is yet to come.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “But, Cathy, it looks to me
as if we’re both off the track in one thing, right at the
beginning. And that is, we’ve never thought of any
reason why Lachlan should go for any kind of flimflam.
They all work on the sucker’s desire to make a few fast
bucks. And if Lachlan is already loaded, how can we
interest him?”
“Because,” she explained patiently, “nobody has
plenty of it, and nobody ever will. And on top of that
he’s paying big chunks of alimony to two wives already,
and number three is getting ready to push up to the
trough. And don’t forget the little matter of income tax.
Who couldn’t use a few hundred thousand that didn’t
have to show up on March fifteenth?”
“O.K.,” I shrugged. “But I still say this race thing is
crazy. So we go to him and whisper in his ear that
we’ve got a sure thing in the second at Belmont Park.
So then he calls the cops.”
“Dear old Mike,” she said exasperatedly. “We don’t
whisper anything in his ear, now or ever. We try our
best to avoid him. We don’t know anything about races,
fixed or otherwise. And when he comes around
pestering you about it, you assure him, quite honestly,
that to the best of your knowledge there is no such
thing as a fixed race.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You will,” she said.
Nothing in Her Way — 92
Eleven
If the world had lost a great actor when Charlie became
a crook, it lost a brilliant general when Cathy was born
a girl. The next week was one of the busiest I’d ever put
in in my life. When you looked at the thing at close
range and out of context, it didn’t make, much sense;
all we seemed to be doing was spending money in one
mad shopping spree. But when you saw it in
perspective and as part of the whole plan, it was all as
carefully thought out as the Normandy invasion. We
drove to San Francisco and registered at the St.
Francis as Dr. and Mrs. Michael Rogers.
I went to a tailor and ordered five new suits and
assorted tweed sports coats and slacks and went to a
shirtmaker for a couple of dozen new shirts. She began
looting the San Francisco shops. She’d always had
wonderful taste in clothes, and for once in her life she
didn’t seem to care in the slightest what anything cost,
so before long she began to stand out as a clothes
horse, even in San Francisco. I’d meet her to take her
to lunch and when I’d see her coming along the street
in the spring sunshine she looked like an angel with
charge accounts.
“Could I buy you this flower stand?” I asked.
“Silly, why?”
“We could throw flowers in front of the cable cars.”
Nothing in Her Way — 93
“You’re nice, Mike, but impractical.”
“What do we have to do now?”
“The Rotunda of the City of Paris. We’re still looking
for pictures for the apartment. Remember?”
“We haven’t got an apartment. Remember?”
“We will have.”
And we did. We got just the one we wanted in the
Montlake, the big apartment hotel where Lachlan lived.
It was six rooms besides the servants’ quarters, with a
view of the bay all the way from the Golden Gate to
Alcatraz and a doorman who looked a little like Admiral
Drake except that he dressed better. When I learned
the rent I managed to keep from wincing.
“We’ll be ready to move in in a day or two, Mike,” she
said excitedly that night in the room at the St. Francis.
We had gone up to get cleaned up for dinner. A boy had
brought up a bottle of Scotch and some ice, and I fixed
us a drink. She had on a new robe about the color of
moonlit fog and probably less than half as dense. She
was something to see.
“You’re something to see,” I said.
“So I noticed, you Latin goat. Just hold some ice
cubes on your wrist for a moment, or think of me as
your ex-wife. We have to talk business.”
“What now?”
“How would you like a Jaguar?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I used to be married to one.”
“Idiot! I mean the car.”
“Why?” I asked. “Are you turning in the Cadillac?”
“No. The Jaguar is for you.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s just what we need. Two
cars, I mean. Nobody’s found space enough to park one
around here since the Coolidge administration, so now
we’re going to circle the block with two.”
She lit a cigarette and sat down in a big chair. “We
need it,” she informed me. “It’s more window
dressing.”
Nothing in Her Way — 94
“That brings up a point,” I said. “Aren’t we overdoing
it a little?”
“No,” she said definitely. “Not for Lachlan. He’s the
type of nouveau riche who thinks money’s for show.
You have to club people with it if you have it. I know all
this is a little thick, but subtlety’d be lost on him.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. But if Lachlan
doesn’t go for it, it’ll be an expensive horse laugh.”
“Don’t worry,” she said calmly. “He’ll bite.”
It was one of the primary booby traps in her
campaign. She’d explained it to me that day in Reno, in
pointing out why we’d had to have so much money to
tackle it. I didn’t understand at first.
“It doesn’t match up,” I said. “Michael Rogers is a
veterinarian. Well—I mean, they probably do all right,
and maybe they even eat steak twice a week, but I
never heard of one who had a private pipeline into Fort
Knox.”
“Well?” She smiled.
“Oh!” I said.
“You see? There it is. What would be your idea if you
were a bank president and noticed one of your seventya-
week bookkeepers or tellers was coming to work in a
Mercedes-Benz and buying his wife a new mink every
year?”
“I’d call the auditors. Or grab my piggie bank and
scram before he got that too.”
“In other words, you might have a faint suspicion that
he had some other source of income?”
“All right,” I said. “You don’t have to draw me a
picture.”
* * *
It was fine that week—most of the time. I noticed,
though, that the moments when she could relax and
laugh or even pay much attention to my telling her how
lovely she was were becoming more and more rare. She
was completely absorbed in this Lachlan thing. It was
becoming an obsession with her. We had to rehearse it
Nothing in Her Way — 95
by the hour. When we weren’t talking about it, she was
thinking about it, going through each of the moves in
her mind.
And I began to catch myself thinking about Goodwin
more than I had. I’d quit worrying so much about the
police as time went by and we still seemed safe enough
half a continent away, but I had a habit of suddenly—
and for no reason at all—-remembering Goodwin
himself or his wife and their house in Wyecross. I
wondered how he had raised the $65,000, whether it
had taken everything he had. And then I’d curse myself.
What did I care how he raised it? How much did I
suppose he’d worried when he’d helped Lachlan ruin
the rest of us?
And there was one other thing. I awoke one night to
find her pounding on my chest and crying out that I was
breaking her in pieces.
“Mike! What on earth are you trying to do?” she
panted.
I was sweating. My pajama top was wet and my
hands were shaking. I had to switch on the light and
look at her to reassure myself. “It was just a dream,” I
said. “A bad dream.”
“For heaven’s sake, what did you dream about?
Dinosaurs?”
“Donnelly.”
“Oh, will you ever forget Donnelly?”
“No,” I said. “And I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“I shipped him out here. Remember?”
We moved into the Montlake the next day, and it
must have looked like an Indian prince taking off for his
summer palace. There were sixteen pieces of luggage, I
think, besides all the packages and hatboxes and a fur
coat or two.
The apartment was on the ninth floor. I stood by the
big windows in the living room and looked out over the
bay. It was sparkling and clear in the morning
sunshine, and I could see a boat going out to Alcatraz.
They’ve got a view over there too, I thought, but they
Nothing in Her Way — 96
don’t like it. A whole rock covered with tough guys and
wisenheimers who knew more than the cops. And just
beyond, out of sight up the bay, was San Quentin,
where the state of California kept its smart characters
who could never be caught. I remembered that awful
minute in the hotel room in El Paso when I’d opened
the door and seen her standing there with the two men
in white Texas-sheriff hats. How many warnings did I
need?
I shrugged it off, a little angrily. I was getting as
nervous as an old woman. Either we wanted Lachlan or
we didn’t. And if we did, I couldn’t spend all my time
standing around shaking like a chicken. He’d taken his
chances, and if we wanted a rematch we had to be as
tough as he was.
We bought the Jaguar that morning and drove it over
on Fillmore to try it out on a hill. After that we rolled it
down Bayshore to San Mateo, went over to Skyline, and
came back to the beach and to the Cliff House for
lunch. For a while we were like a couple of high-school
kids with a new hot rod. We had a bottle of wine with
the abalone and we laughed a lot and were very happy,
watching the seals out in the kelp beds and the big
ground swells heaving up to batter at the rocks. When
we came back to the apartment there was a Chrysler
station wagon with a lot of dust on it pulled into the
loading zone ahead of us and the doorman and two
bellboys were unloading luggage and an armful of
heavy boat rods and salt-water reels like drums. The
big bareheaded man in the suede jacket was wearing
sunglasses, but I saw him turn and do a double take at
her as we went past, and I knew we were closing in on
him at last. It was Lachlan.
* * *
I got up early the next morning and made a trip down
to the Skid Row south of Market. To put on this act of
ours we had to have the help of one other person—just
a brief appearance in the early stages—and he had to
speak Spanish. She even had that all figured out. It had
to be somebody with enough intelligence to swing his
Nothing in Her Way — 97
part and still not a wise guy who’d ask too many
questions or want to muscle in himself.
And we had to be sure he’d disappear when his job
was done. There was an answer to that, which I thought
of almost as soon as she did: a wetback.
I took the cable car down to the foot of Powell and
walked on over to Howard. It was another beautiful
morning, even here among the flophouses and cheap
taverns and hole-in-the-wall cafes smelling of grease
and chile. A wino slept with his head against a fire
hydrant with an empty bottle in the gutter beside him,
and somebody had stolen his shoes. There were half a
dozen employment agencies along here with big
blackboards on the walls and men standing around
listlessly as if they had even forgotten what they were
waiting for. I tried the first one and didn’t see anyone
who looked promising. In the next one my luck was
better. He was a young Mexican in clean khakis and a
leather coat.
I went over to him. “Good morning. Looking for a
job?”
He nodded, a little warily. The jobs came off the
board he was watching, not from strangers wandering
in off the street.
“You speak English?” I asked.
He nodded again. “I was born in San Antonio. I speak
much English.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I was in San Antonio myself,
during the war. Stationed at Fort Lewis. You know
where that is?”
“Oh, sure. I live near to it. I worked there.”
He looked pretty good and as if he might do. He was
a good liar, and a wetback, and that’s what we wanted.
“It’s all right,” I said in Spanish, and grinned at him. “I
don’t care what part of Mexico you’re from. I’m not an
Immigration man.” He was fast on the uptake, all right,
for it took him only a second to see he’d gone into the
bucket on that Fort Lewis thing. Lewis is in
Washington.
“How are you called?” I asked.
Nothing in Her Way — 98
“Juan Benavides.”
He probably wasn’t, but it didn’t make any difference.
“I’m glad to know you, Juan,” I said. “My name’s
Rogers. Let’s go get a cup of coffee. Perhaps I have a
job for you.”
We went over to Mission and found a restaurant a
little cleaner than most. He was broke, so I ordered him
some ham and eggs while I got coffee. While he was
eating, I gave him the proposition.
“I’ll give you an outfit of clothes, two hundred dollars
American money, and a bus ticket to anywhere you
want to go. The job won’t take more than a half hour,
with maybe two or three hours’ coaching, but you may
have to wait around a week or ten days till I get ready
for you. Naturally, I’ll pay for your room and meals
while you’re waiting. How about it?”
He stopped his assault on the ham and eggs for a
moment to study me with grave Latin suspicion. “What
class of job is this?”
“It’s just a little joke I want to play on a friend of
mine. I need somebody who speaks Spanish. Very good
Spanish, too, not like just any peon.”
“A serious joke?”
“No,” I said. “Not serious.”
“Maybe there will be trouble with the police?” He
was a little suspicious of that “joke on a friend” angle,
as I knew he would be if he was smart enough to be of
any use to us. However, I had a pretty good idea as to
what form his reluctance would take.
“No,” I said. “This is not a joke that would interest
the police.”
“Nevertheless,” he said, “I could not do a job of this
class for less than three hundred dollars. As you can
see, it would take great skill.”
He’ll do, I thought. He doesn’t even know what the
job is, and already it takes great skill and three
hundred dollars. Maybe we should take him in as a
partner.
“Two-fifty,” I said.
Nothing in Her Way — 99
“Two hundred and seventy-five, and a gold watch
chain with the suit.”
“Two hundred and sixty and a gold watch chain,” I
said. There really wasn’t any sense to it, but you can
never afford to lose face in one of those transactions by
giving in on the first round. It isn’t actually the money
so much as a matter of personal honor.
“I accept your job,” he said.
I took him over to a men’s furnishing store on Market
and let him pick out the whole outfit from the shoes up.
He settled for a sort of semizoot affair in something
that looked electric blue in the store and would
probably be worse in daylight, and got a high-crowned
snap-brim hat to go with it. It was about what I’d had in
mind, and it all fitted the picture very well. He had to
look sharp. I paid for it and gave him the alteration slip
for the suit and the Montlake address and apartment
number.
“The clerk says it’ll be ready day after tomorrow,” I
said. “As soon as you get it, come on up to this address
and see me. Here’s twenty dollars. Get yourself a room,
and when you come up, be sure to bring me the hotel
telephone number, or at least the name, so I can look it
up. You understand all that?”
“I understand. Do you remember the gold watch
chain?”
“It will be there.”
We went out and shook hands on the sidewalk. “Until
later,” I said. “Until later.”
I watched him take off across the street. Of course he
could always pick up his new clothes and lam, with all
of it clear profit, but I didn’t think he would. He’d
probably show up.
I walked back to Powell. The usual crowd of tourists
blocked traffic around the cable-car turntable, but I
managed to climb, onto the step as the car started
clanging up the hill with people hanging on
everywhere, like a subway car turned wrong side out.
We only have two cars now, I thought; I have to do this.
Nothing in Her Way — 100
The trouble was I was just as big a sucker for the cable
cars as the other tourists.
When we made the stop at Sutter some more people
piled on till we looked like a bunch of grapes being
dragged up a hill. Some tall guy made a landing on the
step beside me and I tried to crowd over enough to give
him something to hang onto. His arm was across in
front of my face and our feet were so mixed up I didn’t
know whether I was standing on mine or his.
“A little crowded, eh, Belen?” a voice said in my ear. I
turned, and Judd Bolton and I were rubbing noses like
two Eskimos. Our arms were across each other’s necks
as we held onto the stanchions.
We stared at each other for a full ten seconds. There
didn’t seem to be anything to say.
“Do you rumba?” I asked.
Nothing in Her Way — 101
Twelve
“Yes,” he said. “But I sing better. Or maybe you’d
rather have a little talk first.”
The car stopped in the middle of California Street and
he stepped down and nodded at me. I got down and we
both walked over to the sidewalk. I still hadn’t thought
of anything. I’d know all the time this was going to
happen, but maybe I just hadn’t expected it so soon.
“How about the Top of the Mark?” he asked.
“All right.”
It wasn’t crowded, and we got seats by a window with
empty booths on both sides of us. We ordered Scotch,
and while we were waiting for the drinks I studied his
face. The cuts were healed now. You couldn’t see
anything in the eyes; they were as noncommittal and
hard and gray as ever. He was smooth and tough as
they come, but somehow in a civilized sort of way—
which made it worse, because there was no way on
earth to guess what he was capable of.
Suddenly I was conscious of an odd sort of flashback
to that night in the bar in New Orleans and the way he
had cringed before Donnelly. It still puzzled me. The
evidence didn’t add up right.
The drinks came. “Salud,” I said. And then, as soon as
the waiter was gone, I went on quickly, trying to beat
Nothing in Her Way — 102
him to the punch. “Well, don’t keep me guessing all
day. I want to hear about it. How’d you get away? And
what about Charlie? Did he—”
“Cut it out, Belen,” he interrupted impatiently. “Let’s
dispense with the fairy tales and get down to business.
Where’s Cathy?”