American Boy - Larry Watson [77]
“I’ll say it different.”
“You can say it anyway you like. But, Matt”—if I didn’t know better, I would have thought her puckered forehead indicated genuine concern—“why the hell would anyone believe you?”
I reached inside my coat pocket and touched the item that I’d gone upstairs to take the night I drove the Valiant back from Bellamy. Since then it had either been on my person or, while I slept, under my pillow.
Quickly, before I lost what little courage I had left, I pulled out the stenographic pad, held it aloft, and said, “Because of this.”
Louisa didn’t bother pretending. She knew what I held, what it was, and what it meant.
“That doesn’t belong to you, Matt.”
I was so uncertain and unsteady in this enterprise that I hid behind what I’d already said. “This is why you’re leaving. Because if you don’t, I’ll tell the doctor and his wife what you’ve been scheming. This is proof, and we both know it.”
Her smile returned, but its fragility was plain. “Show him. He won’t care....”
“If you believe that, then you don’t know the man.”
“That’s not yours, Matt. It’s not yours—” She lurched a little, as if she considered leaping up and trying to take the pad from me.
“It was yours, but I took it. Now it’s mine. Sound familiar?”
“You really are a prick. You know that? A real prick.” Color rose to her cheeks.
“Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard that. Now you need to go upstairs and pack your things.”
Louisa took a moment to survey the room. She lingered over the big gas range, the refrigerator with its double doors. The breakfast dishes that had been washed and rinsed, then left to dry in the rack beside the sink. The money on the table. The half-eaten sandwich. The cigarettes. There was nothing there that could help her, unless it was a butcher knife in a drawer. I almost felt sorry for her.
But when she looked back at me it was with a smile and a plan better than the sharpest blade in the house.
“Why don’t you come upstairs with me, Matt? We’ve got the house to ourselves.” She glanced at the clock over the stove. “And time.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do it.”
“You won’t have to do anything. Just hang on tight. I’ll do all the work.”
“You don’t have time. You have to pack.”
“Do you get it? Do you fucking get it? Do you know what I’m offering you?”
“I believe you’re proposing a business arrangement. Some sort of exchange—”
“—Don’t be a fucking smart-ass, Matt.”
It was my turn to look at the clock. “You have to get going.”
“Matt ...” The head-lowered, heavy-lidded look she gave me was supposed to be seductive, and I had no doubt she could usually convey that message very well. But something had slipped away from her, and the expression she wore now had too much desperation to be enticing. “We had some good times together,” she continued. “I knew what you wanted. I always knew. And now you can have it. It can be like before, only with you and me—”
I just shook my head.
Louisa apparently sensed a greater intransigence in me than I felt. “Oh, fuck it,” she said, and swept up the 305 dollars in one quick motion. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll beg.”
She was on her way out of the room when she wheeled about to face me once again. “You don’t need to wait around. I’ll find my own ride.” Two steps up the maid’s staircase she turned a final time. “And Matt? You can stick that steno pad up your ass for all I care.”
Until that moment I had never seen Louisa Lindahl’s eyes glisten with tears. That she was capable of tears didn’t mean she could be trusted, however. When I left the house, I got in the car and drove away, but then I circled around and parked on a hillside. From there I had a view—through the light, fine-grained snow, through a winter-bare stand of trees—of the front of the Dunbar house.
Within half an hour a car pulled up in front of the house. I recognized the driver as Hank Hettig, a fellow who might well have shared a booth with Louisa and Lester at PeeWee’s Bar. He didn’t get out of the car, but he didn’t have to. Almost immediately Louisa came out the front door, chipboard suitcase in hand.