Nothing in Her Way — 181
Pain was still pounding at my skull, but my mind was
clearing a little so I could think. We had to keep our
heads. If we let the sounds on the other side of the door
push us over the edge and started going wild, we’d all
be dead. She would break after a while and tell them
where the money was, but maybe Brock wasn’t
interested primarily in the money alone. You could see
he got his fun in other ways.
I moved shakily to the window and looked out. It was
totally dark now, and fog pressed in on the building like
saturated gauze. Nine floors down the street lamp was
faintly visible, while below and to the left the neon sign
over the cocktail lounge was a diffused and watery
splash of orange. I reached for the light switch and cut
it and looked again. Beyond me to the left one of the
big casement windows in the living room was partly
open. The drapes were drawn but a little light escaped
to seep futilely into the fog and lose itself. I strained my
eyes downward and could just faintly see what I was
looking for, a narrow ledge perhaps five inches wide
running across the front of the building just below the
windows.
Could I make it? The windows were a good six feet
apart and each opened from the center, so I’d have to
go around the one on the other end to get inside it, but
by spread-eagling myself along the ledge I should be
able to span the distance from one to the other. Bolton
was beside me in the darkness, peering out.
I flicked the light back on. He shook his head. We
moved away from the window so they wouldn’t hear us
and he said, “Not with the two of them in there and the
light on. They’d get you coming through the drapes.”
I knew that, but there was still one chance. There was
a reading lamp on the night table beside the bed. I
grabbed it up and pulled the plug out of the wall outlet.
There was the stinging, sharp impact of flesh on flesh
from beyond the wall and again that strangled intake of
breath like a gasp, and we looked away from each
other. My flesh crawled, and I couldn’t control the
trembling of my hands.
Nothing in Her Way — 182
I took the lamp in one hand and the cord in the other
and jerked. The wires tore out of the base, one already
bare on the end. I put the other between my teeth and
bit down, yanking on it with my hands. It cut my lip, but
a little of the insulation was gone. I twisted the two
bare ends together.
Bolton looked at me and shook his head. “If the lights
in there are on a different circuit, you’re dead.”
We could hear Brock. “This won’t get it, Monk. I tell
you. You want to hear her sing? Just yank off her blouse
and that brassiere and hand me your cigarette.”
I stood up. “Wait till I get on the ledge and around
the end of that other window. When I start to climb in,
plug it back in the socket.”
“You’re still groggy. Let me go.”
“No,” I said.
Then I was outside and had my feet on the ledge. I
had to lean outward over nine floors of empty fog to get
around the edge of the open window. Now I was past it
and could stand up against the wall, my face touching
the bricks and my left hand holding onto the steel
window frame. It was dark and everything was wet with
the fog. I edged outward toward the right, inching my
feet along with my heels extending out over space.
My left arm was straight out now, the fingers just
gripping the window. The bricks were cold against my
face. I put out my right arm and felt the fingertips just
brush the edge of the other window. I couldn’t make it.
I couldn’t get hold of both windows at once. My arms
weren’t long enough.
I teetered precariously, trying to stretch out another
inch, letting go a little with the fingers of the left hand
until they were just braced against the window frame,
balancing there with my face shoved against the wall. I
still couldn’t hook the fingers of my right hand over the
edge of the other one. I strained, trying not to think of
the hundred feet of space between me and the fogshrouded
sidewalk below.
Then from inside the room I heard the sound of cloth
being ripped and the little cry of terror torn from her as
Nothing in Her Way — 183
she began to break. I let go completely with the left
hand, pushing, and swung across the wet, dark surface
of the wall like an inverted pendulum. The bricks
pushed at my chest, forcing me outward over
nothingness, while I clawed wildly with my right. My
fingers closed over the upper edge of the steel frame
just as I started to drop and then I was hanging from it
and pawing for the ledge with my feet. One of them hit
and I pushed up with it as I pulled myself up and I was
standing again, leaning outward to get around the
edge. In a second I was around, with the angle of the
steel frame behind me. Every muscle in my body was
trembling.
I looked back and I could see Bolton in the light from
the open window. He was watching me, and when I
nodded, his head disappeared. I tried to pray. If the
lights of the two rooms were on different circuits I
didn’t have a chance. The bedroom fuse would blow
when he plugged in the shorted wires, but I’d have to
go through the drapes into the living room in full view
of the two of them with guns.
I could hear the faint but terrible rustlings of
impotent struggle and I could hear her beginning to
cry. And then the lights chopped off. I clawed my way
inside, fighting through the drapes.
The darkness was impenetrable, as black as the
bottom of a mine. I heard Brock curse, “What the hell,”
and I moved toward the sound of his voice with my
hands out in front of me. I collided with somebody and
we went down in a threshing tangle. All hell exploded
at once. I heard a crash that sounded like glass
breaking somewhere, in the darkness and then the
scraping as Bolton fought at the bedroom door, shoving
back the sofa. I knew it was Brock I had when a big fist
crashed against my head. I swung wildly and hit the
rug. I located his face with one clawing hand and
swung at it with the other. He managed to land on me
again, and then we were locked in a writhing mass of
arms and legs. I got him by the throat and hung on,
raging, not even feeling the blows battering on my face
and chest.
Nothing in Her Way — 184
Suddenly there was a light. I managed to swing my
head a little and saw it was Cathy holding a cigarette
lighter. “Put that out!” I screamed. “Donnelly! The
gun!”
“He won’t shoot anybody,” she said, and just then
Bolton came running past her. He appeared to take
something out of her hand and then he was kneeling
beside me. His arm swung, there was a meaty crunch,
and Brock went limp. I looked at it. It was Donnelly’s
gun.
I got unsteadily to my feet and held onto a chair. I’d
taken a beating and I was weak. In the faint light I
could see Donnelly lying on the rug with a broken table
lamp beside him and Cathy herself holding up the
cigarette lighter. Her hair was wildly tousled, her
blouse was torn, and I could see the stinging red on her
face where she’d been slapped, but she was unmarked.
She swayed a little and tried to smile.
“I socked him,” she gurgled ecstatically. “I hit him
with the lamp.”
I caught her just as she started to fall. The darkness
closed in around us and I heard Bolton saying
something about the fuse box. I sat down on the floor
and just held her in my arms. I knew it was the last
time I ever would.
* * *
It was a half hour before things quieted down. We got
the lights on again, and when Donnelly and Brock
started to come around Bolton pointed toward the door
with the gun.
“In just three minutes, I’m going to call the police,”
he said. Donnelly was crying, and Brock was looking at
him with contempt as they left.
Cathy had changed clothes. We sat in the living room
with drinks in our hands. She rattled the ice in her
glass and glanced across at me and smiled.
“Mike, darling,” she said happily, “do you realize
we’ve done it? At last. After all those years.”
Nothing in Her Way — 185
“Yes,” I said. I got up and walked over to the window
and looked out at the fog.
“You don’t have to worry about it, Mike. He was so
scared when he left here he’ll never see through it. It
was beautiful, wasn’t it?”
“I know,” I said. “He’s already gone.”
I didn’t feel anything about him at all. I don’t know
what I had expected, but there just wasn’t anything.
What he had done couldn’t be wiped out by what we
had done. I didn’t feel any remorse for having swindled
him. Not him. And I didn’t feel any pride in it, or
satisfaction. I tried to think of some reaction, but the
only thing I could come up with was that I was just
tired of him. I was sick of the sound of his name, and I
didn’t even want to think about him any more.
“It was beautiful, Judd,” she was saying to Bolton.
“When we have time, I want to tell you just how we did
it.”
It had been coming ever since I’d picked up that
letter on Lachlan’s desk. I didn’t want it to. But there
wasn’t anything I could do about it. The confusion and
excitement and the worry about her had kept putting it
off, but it was here now. I turned around and faced her.
“What do you think we ought to do now?” I asked.
“Why don’t we go to Acapulco for a few weeks?”
I shook my head. “I mean after that. Remember, we
haven’t got Lachlan to look forward to any more.”
“Oh,” she said cheerfully, “I’ve got loads of ideas.
Some even better than this one. But this was beautiful,
wasn’t it? It was just so perfect, Judd. I mean, for
Lachlan. You see, Lachlan is essentially a wise-guy
type, a pseudo sophisticate, and the thing we had to do
—”
I walked slowly over and stood in front of her. Bolton
stopped listening to her and watched me. “Cathy,” I
said, “where did you hide that money?”
She smiled. “In one of your suitcases.”
“How about bringing it out here?”
Nothing in Her Way — 186
She looked at me questioningly, but got up and went
into the bedroom. She came out in a minute with the
envelope in her hand. Bolton was staring now.
“What are you going to do, Mike?” she asked
curiously.
Without answering, I sat down at the coffee table, slid
the bills out, and began counting. It took quite a while.
All seventy of them were there. The room was very
quiet when I had finished. I put them in two piles, sixtyfive
in one and five in the other. Then I passed the five
to her.
She was staring at me. “Mike, what on earth—”
I put the sixty-five one-thousand-dollar bills into the
envelope and shoved it in my pocket. “You spent a week
in Wyecross, investigating, didn’t you?” I asked her.
“And you told me Howard C. Goodwin was the one
who’d worked for Lachlan.”
“Yes.” She was hardly breathing as she watched me.
“Well, I spent a lot longer than a week there, and I
went ahead and helped swindle him. So I guess neither
of us has very much to be proud of. Do we?”
“What do you mean?”
“It makes you a liar, and it makes me stupid for
believing you.”
“No,” she said defiantly. “I tell you—”
“It’s no use, Cathy,” I said. I told her about the letter
in Lachlan’s apartment.
“All right,” she said hotly. “I did know it. But, Mike, I
went out there in the first place because his name was
Goodwin, and because Elaine said he had been in
Mexico.”
“And you found out he wasn’t the one. But when I
asked you, that night in New Orleans—”
“But don’t you see, Mike?” she said frantically. “I had
to tell you that. We had to have you. Could I give up the
chance at Lachlan we’d waited for all our lives?”
That was it, I thought. I felt rotten as hell. It was
always Lachlan, and still it wasn’t Lachlan at all—or it
hadn’t been for a long time. He was an excuse, or
Nothing in Her Way — 187
maybe he had started it in the beginning, but he really
didn’t have anything to do with it any more. She had
needed him, maybe, to rationalize it up until now, but
that was all over.
It was a game. It was the most fascinating game in
the world, and it was the money. I thought of the way
she had been ever since we had started to work on
Lachlan, the preoccupation, the tense excitement
showing in her eyes, and the way she would sometimes
forget I was there. It had been there all the time for me
to see, and now that I couldn’t evade it any longer I
knew I had been seeing it in spite of trying so hard to
look the other way. She had smiled with that hard,
bright look in her eyes when I’d warned her Lachlan
was no sucker and that it wouldn’t be easy. She didn’t
want it to be easy. The more difficult it was, the better.
It was a challenge. That was what made it fun.
She’d not only been willing to swindle a man who’d
never done anything to her, knowing he wasn’t the
Goodwin we were after, but she had made up that story
about Elaine Holman for the sheer pleasure there was
in knowing she had swindled Charlie too. She didn’t
stand to get any more money out of it that way; it was
just the secret satisfaction there was in outfoxing the
fox, of getting him to do the work, and of being able to
laugh at both him and Bolton afterward, because no
matter what happened, the police would never be able
to touch her, because she hadn’t taken any part in it.
It was strange, as I thought about it now—about the
way she had lied to me about Goodwin—that there
wasn’t any anger. When I’d left her in El Paso I’d been
in a rage, on the ragged edge of hurting her, but now
there wasn’t anything except a sort of sadness. She
couldn’t help it. Maybe she’d been made that way by
what Lachlan had done when we were children. But
there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
I tried to straighten out the way I felt about it, but it
was all mixed up, and the only thing I was sure of was
that I didn’t want any more of it. I was just sick of
confidence games. I was sick of double crosses and
double double crosses and of wondering who somebody
really was and what he really meant when he said
Nothing in Her Way — 188
something. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in a very
good position to be pointing the finger at her from a
moral standpoint; I hadn’t had any qualms about
helping to swindle Lachlan, and I didn’t have any now.
All I needed was to have the other fellow do it first.
Maybe that was the exact point at which we divided. I
had to have that justification, or that excuse, and now
she didn’t any more.
I sighed. I knew there wasn’t any use, but I had to
try. The twenty-three years were talking.
“You know what I’m going to do with the rest of it,
don’t you?” I asked.
“No,” she said. She did know. I could see it in her
face.
“I’m going to send it back to Goodwin. Do you want
me to, or don’t you?”
“Send it back to Goodwin? Mike, are you crazy?”
I stood up. “I just wanted to know how you felt about
it,” I said. “And I think you know you can’t stop me, so
let’s don’t make this any rougher than we have to.”
I went into the bedroom and pulled my two old
suitcases out of the closet and started packing them. I
didn’t get half my stuff, and I didn’t pay any attention
to what I did pack because I was in a hurry. I was
started now, and if I kept going, fast, without thinking
too much about it, I could do it. She could go with
Bolton; they understood each other. That was the way it
had to be. But there wasn’t any fun in thinking about it
or in knowing that someday she was going to wind up
in prison. When I came back out into the living room
she had quit raging at me and there were tears in her
eyes. She turned to Bolton.
“Can’t you stop him from doing a crazy thing like
this?”
Bolton shook his head, and looked at me and smiled.
We both knew what he meant, and maybe she did too.
If I wanted to cut my throat, why should he try to stop
me?
He lit a cigarette and said with urbane amusement,
“Belen appears to have done a little soul-searching and
Nothing in Her Way — 189
come up with the decaying remains of some sort of
peasant morality. I think you’d do better to leave him
with it before he starts trying to share it with you.”
She turned abruptly away from him before he had
finished. “Mike,” she said, “please—”
“Maybe you’d both better come with me,” I said, “so
there won’t be any doubt as to what I did with the
money. It won’t take long.”
I carried the bags and we went down front and got a
cab. She sat between us as we rode down the hill. We
were all very silent. We stopped at the airline terminal
while I took the bags in and checked them and bought a
ticket to Las Vegas; then we went on down to Market.
We got out in front of the branch bank that stays
open at night. They came in with me and watched,
saying nothing, while I bought a cashier’s check for
$65,000, made out to Howard C. Goodwin. Bolton
didn’t want to stop me and she couldn’t, because a
scene would only bring the cops. We walked over to a
drugstore and I bought an envelope and a stamp. I
addressed it at the counter, put the check in, and
sealed it. In the upper left-hand corner I wrote one
word: Reichert. We went out on the sidewalk.
It was foggy down on Market now. We walked slowly
along the sidewalk, with Cathy in the middle, and none
of us said anything. There was a mailbox on the next
corner. I handed her the envelope. When she looked up
at me I saw she was crying. She shook her head and
handed it back to me.
“No,” she said. “I’d rather you did it. Maybe it means
something to you. I’d only feel like an idiot.”
I dropped it in the slot and let the metal lid clang.
“You’re a fool, Belen,” Bolton said.
“Shut up,” she said tonelessly. And then, “Get a cab.
And wait in it. I’ll be there.”
He flagged one and got in. She stared at me silently
for a moment. And then she said, “I guess you know
now, Mike, why I kept putting you off when you asked
me to marry you again. I knew this was going to happen
sometime, and it’s simpler this way, isn’t it?”
Nothing in Her Way — 190
“Do we have to do it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You know that.”
“Why?”
“Because it just wouldn’t work any more. We both
know it, don’t we?”
“Yes. I guess we do.”
“But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Remember?”
“I’d rather not.” I wanted to get going while I could.
She tried to smile. “Let’s don’t kiss each other goodby.
I’ll just go now. But, Mike, we did get even with
Lachlan, didn’t we?”
I thought about Lachlan. He had ruined more than
Dunbar & Belen when he pulled off that scheme sixteen
years ago.
“No,” I said. “But if I were you I wouldn’t worry about
it any more.”
She had started toward the cab, but now she turned
and looked back.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we never will,” I said.
THE END
Nothing in Her Way — 191
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