An Eye for an Eye Page 4

  He closed the fingers in a gesture of crushing.

  She shook her head. Her knees went out from under her and he caught her and put her on a rickety chair. He took the knife out of his pocket again.

  “I’ll let you loose because I guess I got to,” he said, “but I’m warning you. Those window shades are down and they stay down, see? Minute I catch you near one I’ll belt you. Minute you open your mouth to yell I’ll belt you. You never been belted much, I guess, huh? One of these spoiled dames that thinks everything is made just for her. Well, I’ll teach you. The doors are locked and the keys are in my pocket and you ain’t going to get out. You understand that? Okay.”

  He cut the tape from her wrists. Then he took hold of one corner of the wide strip on her face and pulled.

  She nearly fainted again. She felt him open her mouth and pour some liquor into it. She jerked away, coughing, and he shrugged and tilted the bottle to his own mouth. When she could talk again she looked up at him with utter hatred and said:

  “Why have you done this to me? What right have you got—”

  “Right!” he said. “I’ll damn well tell you what right I’ve got.” He slammed the bottle down and leaned over her. He radiated a kind of ferocity that was like nothing she had ever seen before, mixed with and part of a devout indignation.

  “Your husband,” he said to her, “took my wife away from me. So now I’ve taken his away from him. That’s fair enough, ain’t it? I don’t see how anything could be fairer.”

  six

  She sat perfectly still for a minute, staring at him. Then she said slowly, one word at a time:

  “My husband took your wife away?”

  She began to laugh.

  His face become redder and uglier. “Think that’s funny, huh?”

  “Not my husband. Not Ben. Somebody else. You’ve made a mistake.”

  “The hell it was somebody else. You’re Mrs. Ben Forbes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes I am. And he never touched your wife.” She was not laughing now, she was screaming harshly in a totally strange voice. “He’s not that kind. He’s never looked at another woman. He’s—” She searched for a word and found it and flung it at him as a summation of everything he was not. “He’s decent.”

  He shook his head. “Not that way. If it had been it would have been easy. I’d have killed him, and her too. Like that. But no, not that son of a bitch. He did it legal.”

  Carolyn said stupidly, “I don’t understand.”

  “What are you, dumb or something? You’re a lawyer’s wife and you don’t know about divorce?”

  “Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “Just wait.” She was shivering now. She was already cold, but cold was only a small part of it. She folded her arms across her and put her hands under her elbows and pressed her knees hard together. But the chair creaked with her shivering even so.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Your wife divorced you. My husband was her lawyer. Is that right?”

  “You bet it is. I’m Al Guthrie, didn’t you ever hear that name? And hers is Lorene. And your husband, he swanked around that stinking courtroom and got Lorene to tell the judge a lot of stuff about me and the old fool gave her a divorce. Said she didn’t have to live with me any more.”

  “And you blame Ben? You blame the lawyer because your wife wanted a divorce?”

  Her voice broke on a note of unbelief, and he gave her a hot blind look and said:

  “You’re goddamn right I blame him.”

  Carolyn said, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

  “You think so,” Al said. “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think. Lorene fought with me before. She left me before, a couple or three times. But she always came back. She was mine, see? Just give her a little while to cool down and she knew who she belonged to. She’d come running back. Every time, see? It was just between us. But this last time your husband got hold of her and filled her up on a lot of crap about her rights and what she could do and what she didn’t have to stand for. Mr. Forbes says, Mr. Forbes says!”

  He made a vicious slashing motion with his hand. He was moving around now in the filthy cluttered room, unable to contain his rage any longer standing still.

  “I figured she’d get over it. I figured, Let her get her stinking little divorce, what the hell—she’ll come back. She can come back any time before it’s final and spend the night with me and there won’t be any divorce. So I let her sit for a while. Let her get good and lonesome, see? While I had me a time and she couldn’t complain about it. Then I went around to see if she was ready yet. You know what she did?”

  Carolyn said, “No.”

  “She threw me out.” He spoke slowly now, his eyes narrowed remembering. “She told me if I bothered her she’d call the cops. Real snotty. That’s what your husband taught her, how to be snotty and threaten me with the cops.”

  He looked at Carolyn, shivering on the chair.

  “A man’s wife belongs to him. Nobody’s got a right to come in between them. I told her that. I told her I was tired fooling around and if she didn’t come back to me I’d make her. And she told me—”

  Carolyn stared at his mouth, fascinated. She had never seen such a mouth. She watched the lips move, watched the muscles stir in the cheeks and along the jaw, watched the broad white edges of his teeth. It was almost splendid in its brutality, like the heavy jowls of a lion.

  He said, “She got a goddamned injunction against me. Forbes put her up to that, too. Hadn’t been for him I could have handled her. I’d have her back with me right now.”

  Carolyn drew a long breath, trying to make her voice sound calm and reasonable.

  “Ben is a lawyer. He does what the law says he should do. There’s nothing personal—”

  “Law,” said Al contemptuously. “Any cheap shyster can do tricks with it. I got the right on my side. That’s more important.”

  “You haven’t anything on your side,” Carolyn said shrilly. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve kidnaped me. Don’t you know that’s a capital offense just the same as murder?”

  She enlarged on that, with sudden hope.

  “If you let me go now I’ll promise not to tell who you are or anything about you. But if you don’t the FBI will be after you tomorrow and you won’t have a chance.”

  He laughed at her.

  “FBI, hell. Just because I never went to a fancy law college don’t mean I’m dumb, you know. I didn’t leave a bunch of printed signs around. How’s the FBI going to look for me when they don’t even know what happened to you?”

  “They’ll know.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, but they will. They will!” She jumped up, her voice rising again to that harsh strange scream. “Anyway, what do you want with me? What do you think I can do about it?”

  “It’s real plain and simple,” Al said. “I’d think even a dame could figure it out. Your husband talked my wife into leaving me. I want her back. So I just hold onto you until your husband gets her to change her mind.”

  The enormity of the idea, the insane logic of it were stunning. She hardly knew how to argue it.

  “Don’t you see how impossible it is? No matter what you do to us Ben can’t make your wife come back to you if she doesn’t want to. Nobody can.”

  “Well then,” Al said slowly, “that’s going to be tough on all of us.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Carolyn, looking at his face and thinking, This is a crazy man, God help me, there’s no reasoning intelligence there, nothing to call to. Crazy, and something more, something even worse. He’s a fool.

  “Because,” said Al, “if I don’t get Lorene back he ain’t going to get you back either.”

  “No,” Carolyn whispered. “Oh no. You couldn’t do that. It’s so—pointless.” She had to sit down again, and the room became unsteady around her. From a great distance she heard his voice, rough with an old fury, a rage long nursed and brooded over.


  “—for an eye, ain’t that what it says? His wife for mine. He didn’t give a damn for me, none of ’em did, when they sat around on their fat cans in that courtroom taking Lorene away from me. They didn’t care how I lived without her. Okay. Okay.”

  He was drinking again. The liquor glistened on his lips, turning them moist and pink as a girl’s. He wiped them with his hand and said:

  “I’ll kill Lorene, too. She was a virgin when I got her and I broke her myself, and I ain’t going to leave her for any other man to take. After that, I don’t know. Maybe Forbes, too. I’ll see how I feel then.”

  Carolyn shook her head. It was quite difficult to speak. “You can’t do it,” she said. “The police—”

  “Maybe they’ll get me. Maybe not. So what? I got nothing much to live for. You take away everything a man has and he just don’t care, see?”

  He brooded, smiling a little. He’s enjoying himself, Carolyn thought. He’s wallowing in the sense of power, thinking how he can hurt and frighten people, loving every minute of it.

  Is this how a killer looks?

  She turned her eyes away.

  There was something, some detail in his plan that did not fit. Something left out. It had a vague connotation of hope in her mind. She pursued it desperately through the mists of fear.

  “Ben,” she said. “You’ll have to tell him.”

  “Oh, sure. Sure. I’ll make it real plain to him.”

  That was where the hope was. He had to tell Ben what had happened to her so that he could make Ben talk to Lorene, and the minute Ben knew he would tell the police and the FBI and they would come and take her away.

  She kept her eyes averted so he would not see the look in them. “When are you going to tell him?”

  “When I get ready.”

  “But the sooner you—”

  “Let him sweat,” Al said. “He let me sweat plenty. All these months with Lorene away from me, getting me arrested if I even tried to talk to her, not knowing what she’s doing or who she’s with, he didn’t care. He had you. He wasn’t eating his meals around in joints or looking for a friendly bed to get into. He wasn’t losing his job or getting kicked out of his own home. The hell with him. Let him sweat.”

  He smiled again and added, “Then when I do call him I figure he’ll be kind of softened up, not quite so damned sure of himself. I figure he’ll be ready to hump.”

  “But—” said Carolyn, and stopped, and tried again. “But it may take time, a lot of time. You’d better tell him right away so he can start talking to your wife.”

  “I got time. It’s a couple weeks yet before the divorce is final.” He looked down at her. “I know what’s on your mind, but I told you I ain’t dumb. Forbes won’t call in any help. I’ll make that plain to him too. This is between him and me, and he better keep it that way—unless he’s real anxious to get rid of you.”

  He drank again and lighted a cigarette and tossed the match in the sink. There was a silence. Carolyn sat with her eyes shut and her arms hugged tight around her body. After a while in a curiously flat voice she said:

  “Please, let me go to the bathroom.”

  He seemed to enjoy that, as though it were an admission of her helplessness. He became almost jovial.

  “Why, sure,” he said. “Right this way.”

  He opened a door in a corner of the kitchen, turned on a light, and pointed down.

  Carolyn got up and walked stiffly across the room.

  “In the cellar?”

  “Sure, in the cellar. That’s good enough for the working stiffs.”

  She went down the narrow steps, hanging to the pipe rail. Rough stone walls had been whitewashed once and were still pale under a coating of grime. The windows were boarded up. There was a rust-stained sink, and toward the front of the cellar an old gravity-feed furnace. Beyond that was the coalbin, with a little heap of coal left in it and a shovel against the wall. Beside the coalbin was a little booth built out of tongue-and-groove stuff and painted a dark gray. Al, who had come down the steps behind her, pointed to it.

  “It ain’t fancy but it works. Help yourself.”

  She walked the length of the cellar. Warmth came from the furnace as she passed it. She went into the booth and closed the door.

  She leaned her forehead against the cold wood and thought, What shall I do? Oh, God, what shall I do? She wanted to cry, but there did not seem to be any tears in her. She felt strange, not real at all in anything she said or did.

  Her hands were quite steady. She marveled at them.

  After a few minutes she came out of the booth and walked to the furnace and stood close to it.

  “Come on,” Al said. “Let’s not spend the night down here.”

  “I’m cold. I want to get warm.”

  “Look. I told you, come on.”

  She did not move.

  He came toward her, striding down the length of the cellar.

  She reached out and picked up the stubby broad-bladed coal shovel and held it in both hands as high as the ceiling would let her, and she rushed at Al Guthrie, making a sound like a thin whining between her clenched jaws.

  She saw his face in the naked light. It swelled out and up, becoming huge, red-flushed, reamed with two bright holes of angry blue. She saw the wavy hair, prinked and primped and beautiful, and she felt the weight of the shovel in her hands, and there was a desire in her, a lust that would have horrified her if she had been sane. But she was not.

  She was a strong young woman. She swung the shovel down.

  He dodged it easily and took it away from her and threw it clanging into a corner with one hand while he held her with the other. And she screamed, but not for very long. He beat her. That was all he did to her but he did it savagely, and to a woman who had never in her life been subjected to physical violence it was enough.

  That was Tuesday night.

  She spent most of Wednesday lying on a frowsy bed in the smaller of the two upstairs rooms. It had only one window and that was closed and had a heavy quilt hung over it to deaden any sound she might make. It was quite dark in the room and there was a cold unlived-in-smell. Her wrists and ankles were tied with long cords to the four corners of the old iron bedstead. She could not move around much, but she had no desire to move. She had no desire to do anything, not even to live.

  In the afternoon Al Guthrie came in and turned on the ceiling light. He leaned over and looked at her.

  “Want me to bring you the shovel?” he asked. “Want to try that again?”

  She did not answer, and he laughed. He gagged her and made sure the cords were tight. Then he turned off the light and went out. She could hear him go down the stairs and through the house and out the door. After that it was still. She heard the chuffing of a light engine, unexpected and startlingly close. It roused her for a moment, but then the sound receded and she lapsed back into the gray daze of negation. When she was awake she felt and remembered. It was better this way.

  Some time later Al came into the room again. He turned on the light and untied her. He smelled of beer and he was pleased about something. He threw a newspaper on the bed.

  “There,” he said. “Look at that.”

  She lay limp and unmoving.

  “Oh for Chrissake,” he said impatiently, “you’re not dead. Sit up.”

  He pulled her up and shoved the paper in front of her. She stared at it, not seeing it. Then a picture caught her eye. It was familiar. It was herself. They’re looking for me, she thought. They’re going to find me. With sudden avidity she seized the paper and read.

  “What did I tell you?” Al said. “They got no idea at all.” He repeated, “No idea,” several times, full of pride in his accomplishment.

  Carolyn let the paper fall. She began to cry, a slow dribbling of tears without any sound.

  Al laughed. “Haven’t you got any faith in your husband? He’s a real smart man, remember? He’ll find a way. Or don’t you figure he wants you back bad enough to bother
trying?”

  Carolyn did not ask for the words. They just came to her. “You pig,” she said. “You dirty rotten pig.”

  She sat miserably on the bed, her slacks and sweater smudged with dirt from the cellar floor, her face swollen and stained with bruises, her hair hanging in her eyes. She shrank from herself, from her own dirtiness and her beaten and degraded flesh. She felt that she could never be clean again, or proud. She crumpled over sideways, her mind running swiftly back to its refuge in not-being.

  But this time Al would not let her. He was in a high, triumphant mood. “Pig, huh?” he said. “Well, now, pigs like to eat, don’t they? And this pig hasn’t eat a good home-cooked dinner since he didn’t have a woman around the house. But he’s got one now.”

  He cuffed her, not hard.

  “Come on, you’ve laid on your can long enough.”

  For a minute she could not believe that she had understood him. “You want me to—to cook for you?”

  “That’s a woman’s job, ain’t it? You’re a woman, ain’t you? You don’t expect me to cook for you, do you?”

  He towered over her, laughing at her, daring her.

  “No,” she said with feeble rage. “I won’t do it.”

  He dragged her off the bed and held her, digging his strong fingers into her arms.

  “Maybe,” he suggested, “You need some more like last night.”

  She flinched, shaking her head. “Let me go. I’ll do it.”

  She went out and down the stairs and he followed her, chuckling. “You train real good,” he said. “Faster than Lorene. But that’s maybe on account of her red hair.”

  He sat on a chair in the kitchen and watched her work, drinking beer and talking about Lorene.

  On Friday in the late afternoon he tied her and gagged her on the bed upstairs and locked up the house. He walked four short blocks to Trumbull Avenue, where there were shops and markets and several bars. He went into one of the bars and sat for a long time drinking beer and brooding, not morosely at all but thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed up and his head nodding occasionally in approval of something passing through his mind.