Tears Are for Angels Read online

  Again I slowly crossed the room. I picked up the gun and took out my handkerchief and spent a good five minutes patiently wiping prints from its surface. Then I trudged the long distance back to the dressing table, carrying the gun in my handkerchief.

  I took the limp right hand in mine and closed it about the butt. The hand was small and the index finger barely spanned the distance to the trigger.

  I raised the hand, still clutched on the pistol, until the barrel pointed exactly into the wound a few inches away.

  Then I let the hand fall and the gun clattered on the floor.

  You're good, I thought. Boy, you're good. For an amateur you're doing all right. You ought to be a pro.

  So that was that and I only had to touch it once more. I got another handkerchief from the dresser and, wearily now, I walked out of the bedroom and into the hall and on down it toward the dark living room. I went over to the desk from which I had taken the gun.

  Her portable was there, the battered old Underwood she had brought with her and used for the voluminous correspondence she had carried on with old friends. With a handkerchief in each hand, I picked it up, careful not lo touch it, and carried it back to the bedroom.

  I returned again to the living room and opened a drawer and, again with a handkerchief, picked up a sheet of typing paper. I went back to the bedroom and rolled the paper into the machine.

  Still using the two handkerchiefs, I picked the typewriter up again and carried it over and put it down in the lap. I squatted at the left side and steadied the machine on the sprawled legs with my left hand. I reached across it with my right and took the right arm and pulled it into its lap. Then I took the right index finger in my hand.

  The slow, solemn tap-tap-tap was ominous in the stillness of the room. I felt profuse sweat on my brow and my head was aching badly now. But I kept on punching the lifeless finger at the keyboard until I had spelled out, all in capital letters:

  HARRY IS UNFAITHFUL. I JUST CAN'T TAKE IT.

  I let the right hand fall back to its side and I took the two handkerchiefs again and picked up the portable and put it on her dressing table. That was all right because she used it in here often, as well as at the living-room desk.

  I put one of the handkerchiefs in my pocket and carried the other one to the bathroom and dropped it in the clothes hamper. And then it was done.

  But there was still time. I had to be sure. One mistake was all it would take. One mistake could fry me in that evil little armchair up at State Prison. One mistake and Dick Stewart would go free forever.

  I sat down on the bed and put my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. I studied the whole thing out, the way it was, and the way it would look to them. I turned it in my mind and I started right from the beginning and went through it to the end and tried to see the loose ends dangling. My aching head didn't make it any easier. But I forced myself to think it through.

  It's a good thing I did. Because I had made two mistakes. Two glaring boners. Maybe more, too, but I couldn't find them, and just the two were bad enough.

  The first would be easy to fix. I had wiped the gun absolutely clean of fingerprints and had put hers on it. It didn't stand to reason that my prints wouldn't also be on my own pistol, a souvenir I had lugged back with me from Italy. So that had to be done all over.

  I sat there, staring at the second mistake. It was on the white rug, a little brown stain of blood I hadn't even seen until now, ten feet away from where I had placed the body. I could drag the body back over there to the blood, but it wouldn't look as good, as real as I had made it.

  I thought about it until the way came to me. It came to me how I could fix it up about the blood and at the same time seal the case up tight, remove any doubt there might be in their minds when they came.

  I got up and got the handkerchief out of the hamper and went back over to the dressing table and picked up the typewriter and put it in the lap again, and held it the same as before. And then I took the finger and punched out another line, beneath the first one:

  NOW WE'LL BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

  I put the typewriter back on the dressing table. I stood up, walked around the chair, and picked up the gun. I went back to the bathroom and dropped the handkerchief back in the hamper. I came back into the bedroom and, with the other handkerchief, wiped the gun.

  I handled it, carelessly, all over, clicking the safety on and off, touching the barrel, just the way you might handle any gun if it was yours and you were used to it.

  Then I went over and stood by the blood spot on the rug and held the gun in my right hand, at arm's length, and pointed it back toward my left arm. I took a full minute getting the aim just as it had to be.

  Gently, I squeezed the trigger.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I caught one in the war, too, so the shock of it slamming into the muscle of my arm didn't surprise me, or the force with which I spun half around.

  But no matter how often you've been hit, the pain is just as bad. It was just as bad then, maybe worse, and I reeled and funny lights came on in my head. The gun fell out of my hand and I dropped on my knees to the rug.

  There was plenty of blood and I slowly stretched out and let it run and cover up the little brown spot on the rug. I began to feel better lying there. I was warm and the pain began to go away and I wanted to lie there forever and just let it all go, and never get up.

  But I watched the blood, pumping regularly from the upper part of my arm, and knew I had to get up. Using my good arm, I pushed myself to my knees and staggered up. I stood there swaying and the pain was back. I reached over and pulled the edges of cloth away from the wound and bit my lip sharply. I steadied myself.

  I tore the sleeve off, at the shoulder seam, with one hard jerk. I wrapped it around my arm, tightly, and the blood flow began to slow up. I stood there and tried to think. There was something else, something final that had to be done.

  Then I remembered the gun and that was it. Slowly, I went down on one knee and picked it up. I had to stay down there and breathe a minute before I could get back up.

  But finally I made it and then I lurched across that wide room and knelt once more by the body. The blood dripped behind me, but I didn't care.

  Let it drip, I thought. Let it run all over the floor.

  This time I didn't have the strength to raise the arm. But I got the gun in the hand, somehow, and pressed the stiffening fingers around it and let it fall.

  Now, goddamnit, I thought. It's done. It's finished.

  I went back across the room and out into the hall again and staggered on back to the kitchen. I smeared blood all over the clean white cabinets, but at last I got the bottle down from an upper shelf and pulled the cork out with my teeth and took a long, long drink. It exploded in my stomach, and when I went back into the hall, I was stronger, if not steadier.

  I picked up the phone from the little desk just beyond the bedroom door. I got the county operator and when I said, "Sheriff's office," she plugged the call right in for me.

  It rang twice before a sleepy voice answered.

  "Walt?"

  "He ain't here. Deputy James talkin'."

  "Bill. Bill James."

  "Yeah. Who's this?"

  "Bill, you get Walt. I don't care where he is. Get him and get out to my place."

  "Who is this?"

  "Harry London."

  "Oh, yeah. What's the trouble, Harry?"

  "Never mind. Just get Walt and get out here."

  "I don't know, Harry, he said-"

  "Get him," I said. "My wife just killed herself."

  ***

  When they came up on the porch, the rain had stopped completely. I was sitting on the floor in the bedroom, against the opposite wall from the dressing table. The bottle was beside me on the floor and it was almost empty now.

  I called out to them and they came on back to the lighted bedroom door and stopped there and looked around at the blood-splattered room.

  Walt's dee
p-set eyes lighted on the bottle.

  "Good," he said. "Ease off the shock."

  "Go to hell," I said.

  "Take it easy, Harry."

  He went over to the dressing table and touched it once and then he leaned over and read the note. He looked quickly at me and this time saw the arm and the tourniquet. He came quickly across the room and knelt by me and looked at the wound.

  "You, Bill," he said. "Go git that first-aid stuff in the car and then drive Harry to the hospital."

  Bill faded out of the door.

  Walt rocked back on his lean haunches.

  "All this blood your'n?"

  "It's ketchup. Don't you know ketchup from blood?"

  He looked at the bottle again and moved it from my reach.

  "You got the shock eased off enough," he said. "Tell me about it."

  I closed my eyes and let my head go back against the wall.

  "I came back from that fishing trip I planned. Stormed on me and I came back. She wasn't expecting me and I came in quiet. Going to surprise her."

  I heard Bill come back up on the porch.

  "She was sitting there where she is now. She had the gun. First thing I saw when I opened the door. 'What the hell,' I said. She didn't say anything. She just got up and came over and stood right in front of me, holding the gun. 'Put that thing down,' I told her."

  Bill put the first-aid kit in Walt's hand. Walt opened it and began to fumble around inside of it.

  "Then she said, 'You're back,' just like that, in a funny kind of voice. 'Yeah,' I said, and I started to reach out and get the gun and then she said, 'that makes it better.' And then she lifted up the gun and pointed it at me and I hollered and she shot me before I could move."

  "Take it easy," Walt said again. He shook a powder out over the wound and began to fish in the kit for gauze.

  "I went down. I couldn't even move. I guess she thought I was dead. I tried to holler or something but I couldn't make a sound. It was like I was paralyzed. And then I heard that typewriter going and I knew I was crazy. It must be a dream, I thought. And about that time the typing stopped and in a minute the gun went off again."

  He was bandaging the wound now, but his eyes were on mine. I managed to keep staring at him and I thought the whisky was good protection. If I acted funny they could blame it on that.

  "I had to just lay there but pretty soon I got- to where I could move and then I got up and crawled over there and saw what it was. After a while I got this tourniquet and went back and got the bottle and called you."

  You can't prove it a goddamn bit different, I thought, not if you wanted to. A hick sheriff like you, spending half your time with those roosters you're always fighting. Just get it over with, that's all.

  For God's sake, just get it over with.

  The bandage was finished and he nodded at Bill. Bill helped me up and I grabbed the bottle again and killed it in one swallow and threw it on the bed. That's where you belong, I thought. In the bed with the other dead soldiers.

  "Bill will take you to the hospital," Walt was saying. "I'll handle ev'rything here. Then you get some sleep an' we'll talk tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow's a big word," I said.

  "It'll get here."

  So I let Bill take my arm and help me and we were almost out of that room when Walt spoke again.

  "That note, Harry. What it says right?"

  I looked at him a long time. So what? I thought. What difference does it make now?

  "Hell," I said, "you never knew a guy to turn it down when it came along, did you?"

  He pursed his lips.

  "Some," he said. "One or two."

  "Go to hell," I said, and we went on out into the hall.

  And, like death, the thing I had forgotten came at me out of the dark.

  My hands.

  I hadn't washed them. Not since firing the shot into my arm.

  Did Walt know about paraffin tests? The only thing he knew about police work was how to handle a gun. But he could have learned about that test like I had, reading Dick Tracy. And if he got suspicious… I swore to myself as we came out on the porch. The rain had stopped, but the night smelled of it and the air was cool. The moon was out now and it glinted on a puddle in front of the steps.

  We started down the steps and I let a foot drag and pitched forward. My good arm slipped through Bill's fingers and I went lace down in the puddle, both arms in front of me.

  The pain was, for a moment, more than I could bear, and I could almost feel the tremendous surge of the blood again. But my hands were deep in the puddle and I ground them into the mud and covered them over the wrists with the rain water and let them stay there.

  Bill quickly helped me up then and we looked at the blood, pumping regularly again.

  "I better get Walt to fix that," he said.

  "The hell with Walt." I started toward the car.

  He hesitated, then came after me.

  It was a long ride to town, but no longer than my thoughts, and the shooting, slashing pains in my arm and shoulder hurt no more than the nails someone slowly drove into my sides.

  Lucy, I thought.

  Lucy.

  Why did you do it?

  ***

  They held a coroner's inquest, but that's as far as it went.

  Ours is a pretty backwoods county. It looked like suicide and I had said it was suicide, so as far as they were concerned it was suicide.

  It wasn't as if any of them had really known Lucy well, grown up and gone to school with her. It wasn't even as if the ones of them who had known her at all even liked her very much. Lucy had had New York City written all over her, and in Coshocken County, where the county scat town of St. Johns has a population of less than a thousand, that went over like a polecat at a picnic.

  The clothes she ordered from New York stores, the way she walked and wore her hair and talked and laughed… the county never got used to any of those things. So when everything pointed to her having killed herself, trying to include me in the deal, the coroner's jury and everyone else chalked it up to the fact that she was a Yankee and a mighty queer piece to boot.

  After it all happened, I began to feel that somehow in this fact lay the key to what Lucy had done. I had known she was lonely on the farm, far away from friends and familiar places, but there had been no outward indications of boredom or strain.

  We'd been married in New York, just before I went overseas as an engineer captain. When I came back, nearly two years later, I was a major and the war was over and Coshocken County looked, from New York's gay spots, like the hind end of hell. So I kept the oak leaves on for a while, and Lucy and I had a spell of Army life on the West Coast.

  We had a high old time, what with my pay and the big postwar profits from the farm my father had left me, and which Brax Jordan, my lawyer, was operating for me. But it palled on me gradually, and one day when I suggested I resign and we try Coshocken for a while, she said all right, without eagerness but seemingly without regret.

  We had been there a little less than a year the night I came home to find her in bed with Dick Stewart. Somewhere in that year, the boredom and the quiet and the loneliness must have become too much for the city-bred girl. Only she hadn't told me about it, and maybe that was because I had settled back into the old life as if I had never been away, as if I would stay there forever. Which I would have. Only not if I had known. Not then. I was a trained engineer. We could have gone anywhere, and no farm, no way of life in the world, would have been worth losing her.

  So there had been, I figured, the loneliness and the boredom and then there had been Dick Stewart. He has a big store in St. Johns, only it isn't his. It belongs to his wife, a polio victim who won't ever walk again, and he married her to get it. But a store and plenty of tobacco money isn't enough for him.

  He has to have women. Sometimes he'll get you aside and tell you about his trips to the state capital and the girls he has there and what he does with them and you can see it in his eyes, th
e way he has to have them. Only the trips have to be infrequent and there have to be women in between and there are.

  And there isn't a soul in the county who would be surprised to hear that Dick Stewart had been shot in someone else's bedroom or barn loft, and there are plenty of them who'll tell you there's more than one youngster around named Brigman or Meakins or Buxton or Bailey, with the same blue eyes and curly hair and dark skin Dick Stewart has.

  So there must have been the loneliness and the boredom for her, then Stewart. Finally there was the bedroom and the fear, the blood on the white rug and the inert sprawl of the legs and the sightless glass of the eyes.

  But it had all come out the way I had planned, and nobody, as far as I knew, even had an idea it wasn't suicide. Except Dick Stewart, And he, I was sure, was keeping his mouth shut, because of that rich, paralytic wife who held his purse strings. Because he couldn't afford not to keep quiet; he had nothing to gain and everything to lose if he didn't keep his mouth shut.

  And now I could deal with him in my own way, at my own leisure. There was plenty of time, and I intended to use it. I would make him pay out for Lucy and for me. I would make him pay out, all right. But when I did, it would be foolproof. When I did, it would be like it had been with Lucy. It would look the way I wanted it to look.

  There was plenty of time to figure it out, to figure how to do it, and, sweetest of all, every day I delayed was one more day through which he would have to live, waiting for it, knowing it was coming, knowing it had to come, but not when, not how, not where.

  That was the sweetest of all, to know it was going to he like that for him until the day I decided to end it, to know the terror and the despair and the incomparable aloneness of him waiting for me to do it, somewhere, sometime, somehow.