The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 10

  He played the dummy. He drove her and Mrs. Lister to Pueblo, the seat of the neighboring county, knowing they were about to commit a felony. But he was smart enough to know that if it kept Ginny away from Maria a felony was but a minor risk to take. And would a dummy be able to big-deal a hundred-dollar price for the job?

  “Didn’t you ever hear of marriage by proxy,” said Ginny Wynn, “where they get a substitute to stand in and get married for somebody else?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Beef, watching the road ahead of him as he drove.

  “Well, this is annulment by proxy. I guess when you come right down to it,” she continued, “they’d probably prefer you to do it the proper way, but, hell, Bomba, you never did anything the least bit improper?”

  “I gotta admit I have, but nine times outa ten I wound up with a world of hurt from it.”

  Mrs. Lister sat quietly in the back seat looking off to the Rockies and her memories.

  “Bomba, the little improper things in life are what keeps it spinning around. The first man who threw chili in the beans was doing something improper. And he wasn’t even getting any one hundred bucks.”

  “Got some good eats, though, didn’t he?” said Beef, laughing and shaking his head.

  She rumpled his hair.

  He felt the familiar sense of comradeship and anxiety that always foreran any illegitimate enterprise. “Why do we have to go to another county?” he asked. “That’s what I’d like to know. What’s wrong with the Springs?”

  “Oh, Bomba,” said Ginny, exasperated.

  “Yes, oh, Bomba,” said Mrs. Lister, aping her.

  “We’ve got to protect Gordie’s reputation, don’t we? Now, all you got to do is look like a young fellow who was tricked into marrying an old bag like me and now sure is sorry about it.”

  “Hey, hold on there, Ginny Mom, let’s back up a little there. You ain’t no old bag. You got a couple polkas left in you yet.”

  She put a maternal hand on his knee. “You’re sweet. Look sorry anyway. Don’t say a thing unless you’re asked a question and then answer yes or no as seems sensible for the situation. Same goes for you, Auntie, don’t you volunteer a thing.”

  Mrs. Lister began to get excited about her role in the venture.

  “Just remember, Bomba, your name is Gordon Wynn, W-Y-N-N. And I’m your wife Maria.”

  “Who am I again?” asked Mrs. Lister.

  “Why, you’re my aunt, dear.”

  In the Pueblo County Courthouse, amid the trappings of justice, Beef felt the usual pain at the base of his stomach, knowing it was too late for out, but encouraged at least by the greater role he was playing in Maria’s safety.

  Mrs. Lister was as nervous as he, but Ginny was perfectly at ease and chatted brightly with the lawyer.

  Finally the judge called, “Wynn versus Wynn.”

  The lawyer stood and said, “That is ready, your honor.”

  Beef was called to the witness stand, and he trudged there like the accused, expecting a long contract from a judge who was sick to death of his type. He had never seen a civil matter.

  The clerk swore him in and asked, “Your name is Gordon Wynn?”

  “Yes,” he said, and in that breath he had committed perjury for the woman he loved and $100 to spend on her, if she would let him.

  The lawyer said, “This matter, if I may say to the court, comes on pursuant to a stipulation and waiver, which is on file herein.” Then he turned to Beef and said, “Mr. Wynn, you are the plaintiff in this action for an annulment of your marriage to Maria Wynn, is that true?”

  “The what, sir?” asked Beef.

  “The plaintiff. You are seeking the annulment, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “You and Maria did go through a formal marriage ceremony at Colorado Springs, Colorado, is that true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You and she never lived together as man and wife, is that true?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As I understand it, when you questioned her in regard to that she said she just wanted to be married but she never intended to go through with the marriage? Is that true and correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Beef.

  “Had you known that she intended to never live with you as man and wife, Mr. Wynn, would you have ever married Mrs. Wynn?”

  Beef asked for a repeat of the question and then answered, “No, sir.”

  The lawyer turned to the judge and said, “Well, I think that is all, your honor.”

  “The decree is granted,” said the judge, without lifting his eyes from his bench.

  In the car, though she had been somber as could be during the court proceedings, Ginny bounced up and down on the seat and clapped her hands like a little girl. “We did it!” she cried. “We did it! At last!” She threw her arms around Beef and kissed him. “You were just fine, Bomba. What a load off my mind. At last, that stupid marriage is over.”

  “You’re sure that’s legal?” asked Beef, knowing full well it was not and knowing there was now another county he must stay out of. Worth it.

  “Legal, smegal, in a couple of days I’ll have a piece of paper in my hand that will say to anyone who sees it that my Gordie is not married to that bitch.”

  Beef wished that he could believe in the false piece of paper as much as Ginny would. He wanted Maria free of that cop, her husband.

  “I’m sure glad this here worked out,” he said, “and everybody’s happy as hell now. I believe you got something to give me, Ginny Mom.”

  She took a bill out of her purse, folded it, and slipped it into his shirt pocket, patting the spot after she had placed the bill.

  He pulled out the bill with two fingers and looked at it. “This is a twenty. We said a hundred.”

  “Lordy, boy, you don’t think I carry that kind of cash around, do you? A little old lady like me? Somebody’d hit me over the head for it. Don’t you worry, Ginny will make good on the balance.”

  Beef put the twenty back into his breast pocket. Twenty cents on the dollar. People have been buying him all his life for twenty cents on the dollar.

  TWELVE

  The dissolution of her son’s marriage existed only in Ginny’s mind and, fraudulently, in the Pueblo County Hall of Records. In a new apartment unknown to his mother, Gordon continued to divide his domestic life, against daily conciliatory promises. Ginny felt the need to tell someone about the annulment, to reaffirm the truth of what she had done.

  In Gordie’s dresser drawer she discovered, for the second time, a form for a change of beneficiary for his insurance policy, naming Maria in place of her. She had destroyed the first one. Furious, she destroyed this one as well, but not before she discovered that it contained Maria’s new address. She would go over there and prove a thing or two.

  “What’s the point, Ginny Mom?” asked Beef, who, of course, had to come, along with Mrs. Lister. By this time Mrs. Lister had begun to take her impersonation seriously and thought of Ginny as her dead sister’s eldest girl.

  “You should let Gordie and Maria come to some kind of agreement. Water seeks its own level,” he counseled, relying once again on a phenomenon he adored, taught him by his father, who while in his cups imagined himself a plumber and a poet.

  “I’d like to stick her head under water,” said Ginny; even i harmless aphorisms suggested weapons.

  They walked arm in arm, Beef in the middle. Mrs. Lister slowed them down. At one point they had to stop entirely so that she could catch her breath.

  “Do you want I should carry you piggyback?” asked Beef.

  “That would look silly,” said Ginny.

  He bent over and Mrs. Lister crawled upon his broad back. Mrs. Lister ignored all stares and jeers except for when she shouted after a earful of roaring teen-agers, “Wait till you get old! See how funny it is then!”

  The landlady was a landlady. All three had had lifetimes of commerce with the type: suspicious, snoopy, self-right
eous. Their eyes always narrowed when you mentioned a dog, a cat, a parakeet. They were experts on cleanliness, physical and moral. Noise was an invention and pastime of those on welfare. They were wells of tea and sympathy until the rent came due and then they were as hard and dry as desert rocks. Ginny and Mrs. Lister knew them so well, and had dreamt so many times of becoming landladies themselves.

  Ginny identified herself as Gordon Wynn’s mother, surprising him with a visit. She wanted to be let into the apartment to wait for him. The landlady was skeptical, even after Ginny presented identification. She called the owner of the apartment house and asked for permission to go into the apartment.

  “You’re a very cautious landlady,” said Ginny.

  “In this business, you got to be.”

  “Funny, as cautious as you seem to be you don’t know that they are not married. They are living in sin.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Don’t care to.”

  When Ginny and Beef followed the landlady up the stairs in the courtyard to the balcony facing the apartment, Mrs. Lister stayed behind. She avoided stairs whenever possible.

  She unlocked the door and said, in the custom of landladies everywhere, “It’s quite a nice apartment for the price.”

  “Yeah?” said Beef. “What’s it rent for?” He had a longing to move in and assume the rent.

  Ginny brushed them aside and raced into the living room. She saw the hated TV set, comfort to the enemy, and wanted nothing more than to put her foot through it.

  The landlady watched her apprehensively, with growing awareness of the mistake it was to allow this woman and this man into one of her units.

  “Easy now, Ginny Mom,” said Beef. “Relax now.”

  She ran into the bedroom and threw open the closet doors. “Look here,” she said. “One, two, three shirts. One pair of pants. Does that sound like a permanent resident to you? You are mistaken, my dear landlady, you have no Mr. and Mrs. Wynn here.”

  Beef looked at the bed. Her pillow, he thought. This is where she lies down to sleep.

  Ginny had in her hands one of Maria’s dresses. She held it at the neck, as though preparing to tear it to shreds.

  “What’s going on?” said the landlady. “I thought you wanted to surprise your son.”

  “I wanted to surprise you, dear landlady. You don’t have any Mr. and Mrs. living here. You’ve got a beaner shacking up.”

  Unnoticed in the tension, Beef filched a barrette from the top of the dressing table and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

  “Look, put the dress back and come downstairs and I’ll make you some tea,” said the landlady, with the calmness one musters when faced with a couple of lunatics. “I’m afraid you’re going to tear the dress, and that wouldn’t be nice. I’m responsible for this apartment, and I think we should go downstairs for some tea.”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me,” said Beef. He wanted to make good his escape with the treasure in his pocket.

  “Tear the dress? I’ll tear out her heart and feed it to the dogs!”

  “Ginny Mom,” said Beef, “shit on that talk.” He took the dress away from her and hung it in the closet, furtively running his hand over it as he shut the door.

  “I’d like to use the bathroom, please,” said Ginny softly.

  The landlady seemed swept by a wave of revulsion. “Come downstairs and you can use mine,” she said.

  “But I need a bathroom now.”

  “Well, I think you can hold it in for the minute it takes to go downstairs,” said the landlady. “I’ll make you some tea.”

  Ginny did not use the bathroom; the landlady did not make any tea.

  When they got back to the landlady’s apartment they saw Mrs. Lister sitting in a corner talking to herself, her lips moving slightly.

  Ginny turned to the landlady and said, “They are not married.”

  “All I know is they came here as Mr. and Mrs. and he paid the rent and as far as I’m concerned they’re just another couple in one of the units.”

  “Then you don’t know very much. Did you know she takes dope?”

  “Seems like a sweet girl to me,” said the landlady.

  Ah, the sweetest of all, thought Beef, and beautiful too.

  “She goes down to Fort Carson and sleeps with GIs,” said Ginny.

  “I think you better go now,” said the landlady.

  “I think so too,” said Beef.

  “I’ve half a mind to buy this place and fire you and give my aunt here your job. You’re not a very good manager.”

  “Well, fine, you do that,” said the landlady. “Good-bye.”

  “Maybe you’d like to go down to Pueblo and look at the courthouse records and see for yourself that their marriage was annulled. She married him just to brag to her friends that she hooked a white man, so he dumped her.”

  Beef was stunned and frightened to hear her talk freely of their crime, a bona fide felony that could put them all behind bars.

  “Well, I don’t believe that either,” said the landlady.

  “Why don’t you just see for yourself?” insisted Ginny.

  “Look, if you don’t go, I’m calling the police,” she said, at the end of her patience.

  “Oh, I’ll get her,” said Ginny. “And I’ll get you.” Then a very grand gesture involving extended hands and a body stretched to its limit, a presidential gesture, an evangelistic gesture. “I’ll get everyone!”

  “The hell with it, Ginny Mom,” said Beef.

  “I will kill her if it’s the last thing I do!” she yelled.

  “Talkin’ like that’ll just get you all curdled up in the stomach.”

  “She means it,” said Mrs. Lister.

  But she fails to reckon with me, thought Beef.

  There are things sadder than a man who lurks outside the apartment of the woman he loves, knowing she is inside with her husband, whom she loves instead of him, unaccountably. There are no doubt numerous things sadder than this, and Beef tried to think what they might be as he withdrew into the shadows, that night of the day he had gone into her apartment with Ginny.

  Inside, Gordon and Maria stood on opposite sides of the kitchen counter. Gordon was in uniform and Maria wore a robe. She was trying to tell him something, but apparently was having difficulty finding the words. She clasped her hands in front of her, struggled for her breath, then came out with it. Beef recognized the pained expression on Gordon’s face. He asked her a question, she answered it. He asked another. She replied. He had heard enough, lowering his head into his hands more in embarrassment than despair, but she had more to say...more to say...until she cried out. She was leaning over the sink, crying into a paper towel. The man would not comfort her. He would not get off his stool. He would not take his head out of his hands, nor his unhappy wife into his arms.

  Beef, who had never hurt anyone deliberately, said to himself, “If he don’t stop making her cry, I’m gonna kill the son-of-a-bitch.”

  BOOK 2

  ONE

  Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, the district attorney of Pueblo County, Ralph Ferguson, received a visit from attorney Roger Glover, who said that he had a hypothetical case to try out on him.

  The district attorney, “Fergie” to his friends and occasionally to the press, leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Hypothetical” cases to a lawyer informally consulting the DA were like “this friend of mine” to a neurotic consulting a psychiatrist at a cocktail party. He hooked one thumb over his old-fashioned suspenders, crossed a leg over a knee, and scratched his ankle.

  “Go ahead,” he said to Glover.

  “Well, supposing a man and a woman, along with a much older woman, an aunt, come into an attorney’s office and want an annulment of their marriage. The lawyer prepares the papers, they go to court, and the decree is granted, because they admit to never living together as man and wife and she admits she had no intention of doing so.”

  “Go on,” said the district attorney.


  “The lawyer then learns that the two people who got the annulment were not even married, were not who they claimed to be. They were getting the annulment for another couple, against their desires, that is, against the desires of the couple that actually are married.”

  “That’s called a fraudulent annulment,” said the DA, who relished words like home cooking and wasted not.

  “What would you do, as DA, if this annulment took place in Pueblo County?”

  “I’d prosecute,” said Ferguson.

  “What if one of the people involved was a young police officer?”

  “I’d still prosecute. I’ve never believed in protecting cops, or anyone else. That’s what keeps butchers in hospital operating rooms.”

  “The officer is one of the innocent parties.”

  “Then he has nothing to worry about.”

  “The thing is, Ralph, it was his mother who got it.”

  Ferguson rocked forward and leaned his arms on his desk. The situation was no longer just a fraudulent annulment. It was a symptom, a warning. “I think you better tell me what you know,” he said.

  Roger Glover folded his hands over his stomach. So much for hypothetical cases.

  “It seems this young policeman from the Springs got married to a girl his mother disapproved of. Old story, right? Happens hundreds of times every day, right? Only in this case Mother is so steamed she gets somebody to impersonate her son, she impersonates her own daughter-in-law, an old crony impersonates her aunt, and they come down here to Pueblo and annul the marriage. I think it’s her way of making the strongest complaint possible against her son’s choice of wives.”

  There is a stronger complaint possible, thought Ferguson, but he said, “Who granted the decree?”

  “Barry Winston. I’ve just come from his office. He thinks it’s possible to call her on contempt of court and save the son from what could be a bad blow to his reputation and career. It’s a felony, you know.”