A Bullet for Cinderella Page 17

  I heard his soft grunt of satisfaction. I readied myself. He put both arms in, and wormed his way in head first. I knew he would not be able to see immediately. The gun was in his hand. As soon as his head appeared in the opening, inside the vines, I smashed the glass jar full into his face.

  The jar smashed, cutting my hand. I tried to snatch at the gun, but I was too slow. He was gone. I heard the thud as he fell. I knew that I could not afford to give him time to recover. I scraped myself badly as I slid through the entrance. I grasped the vines and stood up, teetering on the ledge. I saw him below me. He was on his hands and knees, gun still in his hand, shaking his head in a slow, heavy way. It was a twelve foot drop, perhaps a little more. I dropped onto him. I landed on the small of his back, heels together, legs stiff.

  My weight smashed him to the ground. The fall jolted me. I rolled to my feet with agonizing slowness and turned to face the expected shot. He lay quite still. His finger tips touched the gun. I picked it up and moved back away from him and watched him. By watching closely I could see the movement of his back as he breathed. I aimed at his head. But I could not make myself fire. Then I saw that the breathing had stopped. I wondered if it was a trick. I picked up a stone and threw it at him. It hit his back and bounded away.

  Finally I approached him and rolled him over. And I knew that he was dead. He died in a curious way. He had fallen back off the narrow ledge, fallen with the broken pieces of the heavy glass jar. Stunned, he had gotten to his hands and knees. He was trying to clear his head. When I had smashed him back to the ground, a large piece of the broken jar had been under his throat. As I had watched him his blood had soaked into the sandy soil. His blood had soaked a thick wad of the money that had been in the jar. A wind blew through the hollow. There were some loose bills. The wind swirled them around. One blew toward me. I picked it up and looked at it stupidly. It was a ten-dollar bill.

  I went up to the cave again. I think I had the idea of carrying her down. I knew I could not make it. I looked at her. Paris was out. It was done. I looked at her and wondered if this, after all, had been what she was looking for. It could have been. It could have been the nameless thing she sought. But I guessed that had she been given her choice, she would have wanted it in a different form. Not so ugly. Not with ruined face and cheap clothes.

  I climbed back down. I was exhausted. A few feet from the bottom I slipped and fell again. I gathered up all the money. I put it in the cave with her. They could come and find it there when I told them where it was. I went back to where we had left the boat. The river seemed a little quieter. I took the line and walked the boat down to the south end of the island. The current tugged at it. Below the island the river was quieter. I got into the boat. Just as I started to row toward the shore, it began to rain again, rain that fell out of a yellow sky. The rain whispered on the gray river. It diluted the blood on my hands. The rain was on my face like tears.

  The banks were high. I found a place to beach the boat about a thousand yards below the Rasi place. I walked through wet grass to the road. I walked to the Rasi place.

  Anita came out. I asked if she had a phone I could use.

  “We’ve got no phone. Where’s the boat? What did you do with the boat? Where’s Antoinette? What’s all the blood on your clothes? What’s happened?”

  She was still screaming questions at me when I fitted the key into the ignition, started the car, and drove away.

  Heavy clouds had darkened the afternoon. I had never seen it rain as hard. Traffic crept through the charcoal streets of Hillston, their lights yellow and feeble in the rain.

  I turned through the arch and parked beside the police cars in the courtyard of the station. A man yelled at me from a doorway, telling me I couldn’t park there. I paid no attention to him. I found Prine. Captain Marion wasn’t in. He’d gone home to sleep.

  Prine stared at me in a funny way. He took my arm when he led me to a chair. “Are you drunk?”

  “No. I’m not drunk.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I know where to look for the girl, for Ruth. North of town. Near the river. If she’s alive. If she’s dead I don’t know where to look. She wouldn’t be far from where he got the boat.”

  “What boat?”

  “Will you have people look for her? Right now?”

  “What boat, damn it?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole thing after you look. I want to come, too. I want to come with you.”

  They sent cars out. They called Captain Marion and the Chief of Police. They sent people out to look in the rain. Scores of people searched. I rode with Prine. In the end it was a contingent of Boy Scouts who found her. They found the black coupé. The trunk compartment was open a half inch. We sped through the rain when word came over the radio. But the ambulance got there first. They were loading her onto the ambulance when we arrived. They closed the doors and drove away before I could get to the ambulance.

  The car was parked behind a roadside sign. It had been covered with roofing paper. Some of the paper had shifted in the wind. One of the Scouts had seen the gleam of metal.

  Two policemen in black rain-wet rubber capes were there.

  “What shape was she in?” Prine demanded.

  One of the men spat. “I don’t think she’ll make it. I think she was about gone. She looked about gone to me. You know, the way they all look. Just about breathing. Color of putty. Pretty banged up.”

  Prine whirled toward me. “All right. We’ve got her now. How about Fitzmartin? Start talking.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “I killed him. I’ll tell you the rest later. I want to go to the hospital.”

  • FOURTEEN •

  I sat on a bench in a waiting-room in the hospital. Water from my sodden clothing dripped onto the floor. Captain Marion sat beside me. Prine leaned against the wall. A man I didn’t know sat on the other side of me. I looked at the pattern of the tiles in the floor as I talked. From time to time they would ask questions in a quiet voice.

  I told the complete truth. I lied about one thing only. I told them that Fitzmartin had told me that he had hidden Grassman’s body in a barn eight or ten miles south of the city, on a side road. In a ruined barn near a burned house. Marion nodded to Prine. He went out to send men out to hunt for the barn. He had gone out once before, to send men to the island. I had told how to find the cave, and told them what they would find in the cave. I told them they would find the gun in my car. I lied about Grassman, and I left out what I knew about Antoinette. It would do them no good to know about her. They would learn enough from the Redding police. They did not have to know more than that.

  I told them all the rest. Why I had come to Hillston. Everything I had seen and guessed. Everything Fitzmartin had said. Timmy’s dying statements. All of it. The whole stinking mess. It felt good to tell about it.

  “Let me get this straight, Howard,” Marion said. “You made a deal with Fitzmartin. You were going to have the girl find the money. Then you were going to turn it over to Fitzmartin in return for Ruth’s safety. You made that deal yourself. You thought you could handle it better than we could. Is that it?”

  “I thought that was the only way it could be handled. But he crossed me up. He followed us.”

  “We could have grabbed him when he got to the river. We’d have gotten to Ruth earlier. If she dies, you’re going to be responsible.”

  I looked at him for the first time in over an hour. “I don’t see it that way.”

  “Did he say how he killed Grassman? You told us why he did it.”

  “He hit him on the head with a piece of pipe.”

  “What do you think the Rasi girl was going to do when you turned the money over to Fitzmartin? Assuming that it went the way you thought it would go.”

  “I guess she wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “Why didn’t she come and get the money herself, once she knew where it pro
bably was?”

  “I haven’t any idea. I think she felt she needed help. I think she decided I could help her. I think she planned to get away with all of it somehow after we were both well away from here. When I was sleeping. Something like that. I think she thought she could handle me pretty easily.”

  “How many shots did he fire into the cave?”

  “I wasn’t counting. Maybe twenty.”

  A doctor came into the room. Marion stood up. “What’s the score, Dan?”

  The doctor looked at us disapprovingly. It was as though we were responsible for what had happened to Ruth.

  “I think I can say that physically she’ll be all right. She’s young and she has a good body. She might mend quite rapidly. It’s hard to say. It will depend on her mental condition. I can’t answer for that. I’ve seldom seen anyone handled more brutally. I can give you a list. Dislocated thumb. Broken shoulder. Two cracked ribs. A cracked pelvis. She was criminally attacked. Two broken toes. We nearly missed those. She was beaten about the face. That wouldn’t have killed her. It was the shock and exposure that nearly did it, came awfully close to doing it. She’s been treated for shock. She’s out of her head. She doesn’t know where she is. We just put her to sleep. I say, I can’t estimate mental damage.”

  I stood up. “Where is she?”

  The doctor stared at me. “I can’t let you see her. There’s no point in seeing her.”

  I moved closer to him. “I want to see her.”

  He stared at me and then took my wrist, put his finger tips on my pulse. He took a pencil flashlight out of his pocket and shone it directly into my eye from a few inches away.

  He turned to the captain. “This man should be in bed.”

  Marion sighed. “Have you got a bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to put a guard on the door. This man is under arrest. But look. Just let him look in the door at Ruth. Maybe he earned that much. I don’t know.”

  They let me look. She was in a private room. Her father sat near the bed. He didn’t look toward the doorway. He watched her face. She was no one I would have ever recognized. She was puffy, discolored. She breathed heavily through her open mouth. There was an odor of sickness in the room. I looked at her and I thought of the movie heroines. They go through terror and capture and violence, yet four minutes after rescue they melt, with glossy hair and limpid eyes and gown by Dior, into the arms of Lancaster, or Gable, or Brando. This was reality. The pain and ugliness and sickness of reality.

  They took me away.

  The formalities were complicated. I had to appear and be questioned at the joint inquest. I told all I knew of the deaths of Antoinette Christina Rasi and Earl David Fitzmartin. I signed six copies of my detailed statement. The final verdict was justifiable homicide. I had killed in defense of my life.

  Both the money found in Fitzmartin’s car and the money in the cave became a part of George Warden’s estate. A second cousin and his wife flew in from Houston to protect their claim to the money and whatever else there was. They arrived on Sunday.

  George and Eloise Warden were buried in the Warden family plot. Fulton, identified through his dental work, was sent to Chicago for his third burial. No relative of Fitzmartin could be found. The county buried him. Grassman’s body was found. His brother flew down from Chicago and took the body back on the train.

  I had told them about Antoinette’s clothes and jewelry and the money, the precise amount, that Fitzmartin had taken. The court appointed an executor for Antoinette Rasi’s estate, and directed that the clothing and furs and jewels be sold, and made an informal suggestion to the executor that the funds be used for the Doyle children.

  When something is dropped and broken, the pieces have to be picked up. The mess has to be cleaned up.

  They were through with me on Tuesday. Captain Marion walked down the steps of the courthouse with me. We stood on the sidewalk in the sunshine.

  “You’re through here, Howard. We’re through with you. There are some charges we could have made stick. But we didn’t. You can be damn glad. We don’t want you here. We don’t want to see you back here.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  He stared at me. His eyes were cold. “I don’t think that’s very bright.”

  “I’m going to stay.”

  “I think I know what’s on your mind. But it won’t work. You’ve spent all the time you could with her. It hasn’t worked, has it? It won’t work for you. Not with her.”

  “I want to stay and try. I’ve made my peace with her father. He understands. I can’t say he approves. But he understands enough so he isn’t trying to drive me off.”

  “You’re beating your head against a wall.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Prine wants to run you out of town.”

  “Do you? Actually?”

  His face flushed. “Stay then, dammit. Stay! It will do you no good.”

  I went back to the hospital. Because of her private room, visiting hours were less restricted. I waited while the nurse went to her. The nurse came back. Each time I was afraid the nurse would say I couldn’t see her.

  “She’ll see you in five minutes, Mr. Howard.”

  “Thank you.”

  I waited. They told me when it was time. I went to her room as before and pulled the chair up to the bed. Her face was not as swollen, but it was still badly discolored. As before, she turned her face toward the wall. She had looked at me for a moment without expression before turning away. She had not yet spoken to me. But I had spoken to her. I had talked to her for hours. I had told her everything. I had told her what she meant to me, and had received no response at all. It was like talking to a wall. The only encouragement was her letting me see her at all. The doctor had told me she would recover more quickly if she could recover from her listlessness, her depression.

  As on other days, I talked. I could not tell if she was listening. I had told her all there was to tell about the things that had happened. There was no point in repeating it, no point in begging for understanding or forgiveness.

  So I talked of other things, and other days. Places I had been. I told her about Tokyo, about Pusan, about the hospital. I told her about the work I used to do. I conjectured out loud about what I could find to do in Hillston. I still had seven hundred dollars left. I was careful not to ask questions. I did not want it to seem to her as though I were angling for a response.

  She lay with her face turned toward the wall. For all I knew she could be asleep. And then suddenly, surprisingly, her hand came timidly from the cover of the hospital blanket. It reached blindly toward me and I took her hand in both of mine. She squeezed my hand hard once and then let her hand lie in mine.

  That was the sign. That was enough. The rest of it would come. Now it was just a matter of time. There would be a day when there would be laughter, when she would walk again in that proud way of hers. All this would fade and it would be right for her and for me. We both had a lot of forgetting to do, and we could do it better together. This was the woman I wanted. I could never be driven away.

  This was treasure.

  About the Author

  John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.

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