Chapter 9

"Do you want a drink, Florence?"

"A little one." She indicated the size by holding up a thumb and forefinger an inch apart. I poured a jigger of gin into a glass and handed it to her. I sat down across from her in a soft leather chair. But I leaped up immediately. Now was no time to sit down and relax. I had to figure an angle, and the best way for me to think is on my feet. I paced up and down the room, turning the facts over in my mind and getting nowhere.

"What do we do now, Jake?" Florence asked, after she gulped her drink and put the glass on the table. I didn't know.

"I don't know. I don't know what to do."

I took a cigarette out of the box on the table and lit it with the table-lighter. My hands trembled, and the cigarette tasted as dry as fifty-year-old sherry. After two drags I crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray.

"I suppose the smart thing to do is call the police, kid. But when I do my name is Fall Guy. There's a lieutenant who's been after me for a long time, and if I don't end up in the gas chamber, I'll end up at Folsom crushing stones. Somehow, the prospect of prison doesn't encourage me to do my right and proper duty as a citizen . . . "

"You and I both know it was an accident, Jake. But if I told the truth, nobody would believe me. Milton and I have had some nasty arguments in our time, and his lawyer has some papers in his office that would - well, all I can say, is that this is very unfortunate."

"That's a good word for it. Unfortunate."

"I know what we can do, Jake. We can leave."

"Leave? Where would we go?"

"There are lots of places."

"Not anymore, there aren't. Twenty years ago a person could disappear, but not now. We might get away for awhile, but we'd be caught, and then it would be just that much tougher."

"What about me? I don't want to die…" Florence started to cry. I sat down beside her and tried to give her some comfort by putting my arms around her.

"Come on, Florence, crying isn't going to do you any good. The best thing to do is call the police. When they get here, we clam up, say absolutely nothing. Let them jump to a lot of wrong conclusions. Then, after we get a lawyer, we tell the exact truth and hope for the best-"

"No!" Florence pulled away from me and got to her feet. She glared down at me, and stood with her legs apart, arms akimbo. "Do you think I'm going to rot in prison over a son-of-a-bitch like him?" She kicked Weintraub's body viciously with her toe. "Take a good look at him! Go ahead! How'd you like to have something like that crawl into bed with you every night?" She turned away from me. "He was always sweating. Not a hot, decent sweat, the way a working man sweats - oh, no, not him! It was a cold, clammy sweat, and his skin is just like a frog's. I put up with it, just the way he said I did; for the money, and I've got that money too. He thought he was so smart!" she said derisively. "He never gave me any cash, you see, but he gave me charge accounts in every store and restaurant in town. So I figured out a system..."

She paused for breath, laughed wildly.

"It's a simple system, really. I'd buy a dress, or furs, something expensive - say a hundred dollars or so, and then I'd sell it back to the salesgirl for half price without taking it out of the store. The girl could sell it and make twice the profit for herself. See? I'd charge the hundred dollars and get fifty in cash from the salesgirl. Milton never complained about bills, and there was so much stuff I sent home anyway, besides the stuff I sold for cash, he never got wise to what I was doing. At least I don't think he did."

"How much money have you got?"

"Plenty."

"How much?"

"I don't know exactly."

"How much?"

"Five thousand dollars in the vault at the Desert Sands in Vegas. Another ten thousand in Mexico City, and five thousand in a safe deposit box in New York."

"That much?"

"That much, and maybe more."

It was enough money for me to think things over a little more carefully. In fact, twenty thousand dollars was a fabulous sum to a man like me. The most money I'd ever had in a lump sum was eight hundred dollars. That was my discharge pay when I got out of the army, and I hadn't hung onto it long enough to really get a good look at it. Maybe Florence and I could work things out, at that. If we picked up the five thousand in Vegas, it would be easy to get to Mexico City. Once in Mexico, we could live for a long time on fifteen thousand dollars. At least long enough for the hunt to die down. Then we could quietly move to New York and lose ourselves in the masses. To stand trial and avoid conviction was a thirty-to-one shot. A jury might take a dim view of a so-called accident if it found out I was sleeping with the wife. And as far as claiming self-defense, a jury might figure Weintraub was entirely within his rights to bounce a smoking stand off my ribs. After all, a husband is justified in slugging a man who is fondling his wife when he isn't supposed to be at home. One lousy, indignant husband, or one church-going wife on the jury could put me behind the bars on a second degree rap, if nothing else. Ten years. Ten years in jail would raise my age to forty-three instead of thirty-three. And I had already wasted ten years of my life in the army. Florence was right. It was best to leave quietly and hope for the best while we were out of jail instead of in…

"Please, Jake, " Florence said, putting her arms around my waist and burying her face against my chest. "I'll make it up to you. You’ll see."

"I know you will, Florence. And I’ll make it up to you for putting the last punch in your meal ticket."

Florence blew her nose on a piece of Kleenex she took out of her purse. She took a tiny brush and her lipstick and made a new, coral mouth. I poured another shot of gin in my glass, but I didn't drink it. If we were going to be on the run for awhile, I thought it best to dispense with drinking.

"How long do you think we have, Florence?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean servants! I know damned well you don't do the housework in this place."

"We should have until Monday morning, at least. There's a housekeeper, Mrs. Watkins, and a maid, but I let them go for the weekend as soon as Milton left for the airport. The damned liar! I wanted us to have the place to ourselves."

I walked across the room to the large picture window, pulled the drapes aside slightly and looked outside. The circular driveway was empty except for Florence's Buick. There was a streetlight near the entrance to the grounds, but I didn't see anyone lurking about on the street or near the gate.

"What about those two clowns? Do you think he actually fired them? It's hard to tell."

"I think he did, Jake. As he said, what good were they?"

"I wish I knew for sure. They told me he wanted to talk to me when they tried to pick me up at the hotel. And he sort of admitted that he sent them for me. Of course, he could have fired them afterward."

"No. They were fired when I told you, all right. He must have asked them later to go on that one more errand."

"But they know all about us, baby. And if they tell the police the situation, we'd never prove to a jury that I hit Weintraub in self-defense."

"You don't have to convince me, Jake. I know I'm in this as deep as you are. I'm ready to go."

"I am too. I was thinking out loud. And I certainly don't want to be tailed on our way to Vegas."

"Let's skip Vegas and drive straight through to Mexico City."

"What about the dough in Vegas? I don't have enough money to get to Mexico. If we pick up the money in Vegas, we can charter a plane to drop us below the border."

"Whatever you say, Jake. You're the man, and it's up to you to decide."

"Then let's get going. Pack a bag with a few things, and the sooner we leave the better."

Florence kissed me quickly on the mouth and ran up the stairs. To make certain, I checked Weintraub again. He was dead all right. No mistake. He hadn't hit his head, so it must have been my right to the head that killed him. His face looked strange with the rose face powder sprinkled over it. It was like seeing again the first dead man I'd seen in Europe. He had been in the same position as Weintraub, only lying beside the road. The dust from the moving column had powdered his face almost the same shade of rose. Eyeballs and all. I shoved Weintraub's body under the table so that the head was out of sight. I didn't want to look at it.

It would be unwise to stop at a restaurant on the drive to Vegas, so I returned to the kitchen for a look inside the refrigerator. There was part of a ham, six tomatoes and an almost full jar of mayonnaise. I found a loaf of bread in the breadbox and a table knife in a drawer beside the sink. I put this stuff in a paper sack and returned to the living room. We could make sandwiches on the road.

Florence came down the stairs with a small over-nighter in her hand. She was wearing a full-length mink coat over her suit. I took the small suitcase and she got her purse from the table. After I switched out the lights, we left the house and got into the Buick. I threw the over-nighter on the back seat and Florence drove through the gates. I kept my eyes open, but there was nobody on the street, and there were no cars parked near the house.

"Never mind stopping at my hotel, Florence. Head straight for the 101 bypass. "

"I knew something like this would happen someday," Florence giggled. "Wasn't I smart to put some money away, here and there, just in case?"

"Yeah," I said. "Roll up your window. It's cold, and I'm not wearing a mink coat."

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