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  “Did they buy it?”

  “I don’t know. This McGinty, he’s hard to read. He looks at me like I haven’t got any clothes on.”

  “I can assure you a lot of men look at you that way.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “I didn’t say that. That’s how men are. It’s hormones. We aren’t worth the powder it would take to blow our asses up. All we want to do is fuck and spend money, and right now, I’m not doing either.”

  “I like it when you’re crude.”

  “I don’t like myself much when I am. What did the cop do?”

  “Kept staring at me and asked me the same thing over and over. I kept my story straight. Didn’t change it. He said there would be an inquiry.”

  “All right,” I said. “Just play it close to the house. Go to the drive-in, spend more time there than usual. Act normal.”

  “I don’t feel normal.”

  “Neither do I, honey, and there’s a reason for that. This isn’t normal, but we got to win the fucking Oscar from here on out.”

  “I really wanted that money, Ed. It was a plan I thought would work.”

  “It was a good plan. Frank just wouldn’t cooperate. He disagreed with the main feature of our plan. He didn’t want to die.”

  (41)

  It wasn’t but two nights later when she came over to the apartment. I had told her where I lived a while back, but it was about ten o’clock and I was about to go to bed, and there’s a gentle knock at the door.

  I answered it, and there she was.

  At first, seeing her, I was mad, but then I was glad. I pulled her inside, and we jerked each other’s clothes off and ended up in the bedroom. It was a long night and there wasn’t much sleeping. The bedsprings squeaked so furiously, I feared the people in the apartment below might complain.

  We slept in most of the next day.

  When we woke up, even though it was after noon, I went into the kitchen and fixed us some coffee and breakfast while she did her bathroom duties. I had given her a spare toothbrush and a fresh towel.

  Breakfast was ready when she came into the kitchen with the towel, using it to dry her hair. She wasn’t wearing anything.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  She wrapped the towel around her and sat down, and I put breakfast and a cup of coffee in front of her.

  “I know what you’re going to say, Ed. That I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I can’t say that. Not after last night.”

  She smiled, and it really tugged at me. I liked that smile. “It was good, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Where did you park?”

  “Down the block.”

  “That should be all right. People park all up and down the street here.”

  “Rose isn’t going to authorize the money.”

  “Can he do that?”

  She sipped her coffee. “He can and will. They aren’t saying I did anything or had anything done, but it’s suspicious enough, he told me, that he couldn’t in good conscience pay out the money until there was a full investigation.”

  “How long can that take?”

  “He said it might take a year.”

  “A year?”

  “That’s what he said. He knows I had something to do with it, Ed. He’s putting off paying me until he thinks the cops can prove I did it. He’s a tight-ass company man who does it all by the book. He’s a real son of a bitch.”

  “He’s smart is what he is.”

  “Too smart.”

  “I don’t mean to sound crass, baby, but I was counting on that money.”

  “You and me both.”

  I told her about how I had lost my job.

  “That’s tough. I’m so sorry.”

  I agreed and poured us more coffee.

  “You know what?” she said.

  “What?”

  “There might be a way to get us together and for it to look all right. You see, they don’t know I know you, and you need a job. Right? So I can put you on at the drive-in. I can make you manager. If it should come up, I can say you’re doing what Frank used to do, though in truth, Frank didn’t do anything but go on the road to sell encyclopedias and drink beer, come home and drink beer, and wipe his dick off on my inner thigh.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “For a murderer, you’re awfully sensitive,” she said.

  “I guess I am.”

  “Way we could do is you could go to work for me, and there’s a little room there at the drive-in, and the concession has some cooking stuff, so it would be your kitchen. There’s a bathroom in that little section, and we can put a bed in there. We can say you needed a job, and since you worked at the car lot, you know how to keep records—”

  “That’s true. I do.”

  “We can say you live there and run the place, and I don’t like to do that kind of thing anyway. We’ll say it’s men’s business. They love that.”

  “And all the while, you’re giving them the business.”

  “We both are. What do you think?”

  “Not a bad idea. Not at all. That way I’m not just hanging around, and you don’t have to sneak over here to see me. And I can quit burning up rent money.”

  “Housing will be part of your salary, if anyone asks.”

  I had rent coming up, and I had the thousand dollars in the bank with what I had saved up, and what I’d had before the thousand was good enough when I had a job, but without an income, I would soon be back on a car lot, which I was sick of by that point.

  If we weren’t going to get that insurance money, maybe the next best thing would be me managing the drive-in with Nancy.

  No reason for the cops to suspect any kind of previous connection between us. For all the cops knew, I was just some guy who’d been looking for a job and I got one there.

  (42)

  I went to work at the High-Tone Drive-In, and frankly, there wasn’t much work to it. I looked at the books and determined the theater had a lot of customers, but tickets were cheap, so that didn’t bring in a lot of cash. The real money came from the concession, all the teenagers coming in and eating like piranhas with a blooded cow in the water, but even that didn’t make as much money as I’d thought. The real money wasn’t all that real. I got my cut, it wasn’t as good as the car lot.

  As for the cemetery, activity was slow. Most folks just got a shovel, buried Fido in the backyard.

  I thought about how more money could be made. During the week, Nancy mostly worked the pimple-faced girl, but now and again she had extra help on the weekends, which was when you had all the teenagers. The help was paid cheap and they worked like it.

  I thought maybe if we paid the workers more and had more of them, they might be happier and give customers better service, and that might help improve business. Nancy wasn’t biting.

  I thought we could let Walter go. I could take tickets, or Nancy could. That would save some dough. But she wouldn’t hear of it. He did all the repairs at the place, and she said we could get him to learn how to actually taxidermy the dogs and cats when needed, and we could bump up prices on everything from burying critters to popcorn, and we could work more instead of hiring more teenagers at a higher price.

  I was beginning to think the businesses weren’t doing well due not only to Frank, but to Nancy herself.

  Worst part was me and Walter didn’t like each other. It had been hate at first sight, and in time it became worse. I hardly spoke to him. I didn’t want to hear his voice. I hated turning my back on him. It made me nervous.

  Now and again I saw him going up to the house to get something or other. I’d be at the drive-in doing this and that, and I couldn’t get my mind off him going up there, and I’d end up going up there myself.

  I found him sitting at the kitchen table a few times, having a cup of coffee with Nancy. I didn’t like that at all. Nancy said a man could have a cup of coffee without it being romantic, but I still didn’t like it.

  I t
hought about how me and her had gotten together, and that hadn’t taken much, and Walter, he was a big, handsome fellow, and, well, I didn’t like it. In a nutshell, I was jealous.

  The jealousy worked two ways. I found that out one night due to the daughter of the insurance man, Esau Rose. The girl came regularly to the drive-in with her boyfriend, and they would come up to the concession stand together. She was about seventeen, I figured, long-legged and tan with tumbling blond hair. Where Nancy looked like sweaty sheets and the clinging aroma of musk, this girl, she looked like sweetness and clouds and long romance. She always wore simple but well-fitting clothes and gold earrings dangling against her tanned skin.

  The boy she came with was a football type, handsome and broad-shouldered, and the way he moved, conducted himself, you couldn’t help but get the feeling he was as dense as the Amazon rain forest.

  I had seen them both before at the drive-in, so it wasn’t the first time I had noticed her. But this night I’m talking about, I was working the concession with the pimple-faced girl and Nancy, as the other help had decided they were done with the job. I marked that up to Nancy being a tightwad.

  When the girl came in, it was like a warm light came in with her. Now, I know how that sounds, sexual and all, but it wasn’t like that. It was like finding a puppy beside the road. If you had any kind of heart, you wanted to bring it home and feed it and take care of it.

  Well, I know how that sounds too, but I assure you, it wasn’t like that.

  The boy swaggered up with his wallet in his hand, his mouth hanging open, his eyes not quite making contact with mine. He looked at the candy under the glass, pursed his lips, and studied the popcorn popping in the machine like there might be a variety of choices there. “Give me a hot dog and a Coke, one of the big ones, and we want the big bag of popcorn. Two boxes of those chocolate-covered almonds too.”

  The girl, all smiles, said, “Reggie, I’ll have a hot dog as well.”

  “Sure,” Reggie said.

  Something about Reggie made me want to push his face in.

  The girl looked at me. Her eyes were so innocent, I hated that she had to live in this world, hated that one day she would find the world a lot less innocent than she felt it was now.

  “You’re new,” she said, turning her head in a way that made me think even more of a puppy.

  “Just went to work here recently.”

  Nancy looked over at me, then at the girl on the other side of the concession, and Nancy’s black eyes looked like crude oil boiling.

  The pimple-faced girl was helping another couple, so me and Nancy put together the girl and her boyfriend’s order.

  “You got only one drink,” I said. “Do you want another?”

  The girl looked at me like I was the only person in the universe. “Make it a small Dr Pepper.”

  Nancy, who was now close beside me, said, “I’ll get that.”

  “You have such lovely skin,” the girl said to Nancy.

  “Thanks,” Nancy said. It was like she had to say it around teeth that were biting the head off a kitten.

  They gathered up their food, and the boy said, “Come on, Julie. Let’s get back. I think the killing is about to happen.”

  When they went out, I wondered how Julie had ended up with that idiot, and then I thought I might be Nancy’s idiot.

  * * *

  When Walter finally went home at night—he had a habit of hanging around for long stretches—Nancy would have me come up to the house, or she’d come to my place in the concession building to visit with me. That was damn nice, but I sure wasn’t getting any richer.

  Something about that girl, Julie Rose, the insurance man’s daughter, was kind of like a soothing salve on my soul, and I started looking forward to seeing her Friday nights, or sometimes it was Saturday. She and her boyfriend nearly always came. We spoke more as time went by, me and her. Nothing serious, just the usual across-the-counter small talk you made with someone you didn’t really know. I liked seeing her, though, and I really started pushing to be behind the concession on Friday nights.

  In time I didn’t want to go up to the house and see Nancy, preferred she came to see me, because I went up there, came to the back door where I finished Frank off, it got so I expected to see him out there with that stick, his face all knotted, his eyes almost shut, smiling at me, showing me his missing teeth, his bloody mouth.

  (43)

  One night after the drive-in had closed down and Walter had left to go wherever he stayed, some burrow, I figured, Nancy came to the drive-in, and we went into my little room and did the nasty for an hour or two.

  She had brought a bottle of the good stuff, and she got up without putting anything on, turned on the light, got the bottle and a couple of fruit jars out of my little nest of assorted dishes, and poured a generous amount of that liquid heat in the jars. She took her time bringing them over to the bed because she wanted to have me see what it was I’d been having and could have again.

  She stood tall and her breasts were poked out, and pretty soon the sheet over me was poked out too. She sat down on the bed with her back against the wall and gave me my drink.

  I had been lying down, but now I sat up and put my back against the wall the same as her. We were so close, I could feel heat coming off her. It was like sitting next to a forest fire. I sipped from the jar. It made me tingle all over.

  “I been thinking. I know a way we can get that money, Ed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I figure any day now, I’ll get word they aren’t paying out, because they released Frank’s body to his mother, not me.”

  “They did?”

  “Just said it. Yeah.”

  “Hell, Nancy. I thought you had already given up on that money. I know I have.”

  “From the insurance company, yeah. But we can get as much from Esau Rose as we would have from the insurance.”

  Some scenarios tried to form in my mind about how we might get that much money without the insurance paying it, but I came up with nothing. I didn’t say anything. I sipped my drink. I knew Nancy liked to be a little dramatic, so I waited.

  “That girl. Julie.”

  “The daughter of the insurance guy, Esau Rose.”

  “Yeah. The pretty one you like talking to so much at the concession.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s a customer.”

  “She’s a cute little trick of a customer with a tight sweater and a fat ass.”

  I should have let that go, but I didn’t. “I wouldn’t say it was fat.”

  “See? I was right. You are looking at her.”

  “Hey, I’m not dead. But she’s just a kid.”

  “A ripe kid. But listen here, Ed. Get your mind off her ass and think about what I’m saying. This is where I see some irony coming in, this plan I got. What we do is we take her, and we demand money for her father to get her back. The money owed on the insurance. Not the exact amount, that might be too much, and it might get figured out if it’s the same. They might look to me, since they’re already suspicious about Frank’s death. But we ask for an amount in that ballpark. Old man Rose has money. He’s got it from cheating everyone on their insurance. Not wanting to pay out claims.”

  “Insurance money doesn’t come out of his pocket, darling. And I’m not liking this idea much at all.”

  “Will you at least hear me out?”

  I decided I would, and then I’d tell her we wouldn’t do that because it was stupid.

  “What we do is, we watch her a bit. Know she comes here on Fridays or Saturdays. Nearly every Friday, and when she leaves, if you’re set, you could follow her and maybe catch her when the boy lets her off. You’d have to deal with him.”

  “Deal with him?”

  “I’m not saying you hurt him bad, but you could discourage him from giving you any trouble. You go prepared. Knock him down or out. Grab the girl, and we can put her up somewhere. We need to find a place, figure that out, but we stash her and set
the ransom. Rose pays us off, we return the girl.”

  I thought about that for a moment. It was something I was all set to dismiss, but then I got to thinking we could ask for fifty thousand dollars, which was more than the insurance payout. We could ask for that, and that much money, we got that, we were set. We could get married, and that way I would have access to the property Nancy had. She had at least inherited that after Frank’s death. We could sell the drive-in and the cemetery off, those not being the moneymaking businesses I’d thought, and we could use that money to buy a car lot. I understood that business. I would be a lot better at it than Dave, and he was good. I played it right, I could own a string of them, have other people doing the job I used to do, and I could manage things. I’d be sitting pretty. And so would Nancy, of course.

  I began to think about being a big shot all over again. “We would have to really plan ahead,” I said.

  She smiled at me. She knew her fish. She had dangled the bait of quick money, and I bit.

  (44)

  When Julie and her boyfriend came to the drive-in, I would study their pattern. They always came for the first feature, but usually after that, they left.

  That made it about nine p.m. Mostly Friday nights, sometimes Saturdays.

  One night about eight thirty, I went over to the barn, garage, whatever you want to call it, pulled Nancy’s car around out back of the house, and waited. I sat on the back porch and drank coffee and watched the drive-in to see when Julie and Alley Oop left. There was plenty of light from that big sign, so when they came out the exit, I would be able to see them go.

  I sat and looked at that big bright sign, those lights that seemed like a big golden finger pointing skyward. Place hadn’t lived up to my expectations, and though I’m not a superstitious man, and not religious, I liked to believe, same as the first time I saw those lights, that the golden finger was pointing up toward my success. It was just a little game I played, and it occurred to me if we got that money, maybe we wouldn’t sell the place. We could get someone to run it, hopefully not Walter. Because if I talked Nancy into keeping the place, that’s what she’d want, her cousin to run it. I didn’t like that, but then I decided I could live with that if I had to.