The Accused, Harold R. Daniels [read out loud books txt] 📗

advanced until his body vas almost touching hers. His eyes were hot, his face twisted in the anger he could not express by raising his voice. “Listen to me, you whore, you. You left your husband, the poor bastard, and you think you can come back here to slut around and live off the old man and me. That’s what you think. Now you listen to me. You don’t stay even tonight. You get out. Get out and I’ll tell the old man that you had to go back home. If I ever see you again in this house I get you away somewhere and beat you until you are nearly dead. And if I see you after that, I beat you until you_ are_ dead. Get out now, right now, before he comes in here.”

“I haven’t got any place to go, Dom,” she pleaded, backing away from him.

“Go back to your husband.”

“I can’t,” she wailed.

“Then go to hell.” He pushed her toward the door. At his touch, she whirled and tried to run toward the kitchen. Dom’s hand closed on her neck with such violence that his fingers nearly met at her throat. She could not scream, she could not breathe. He opened the door and pushed her so violently that she nearly fell down the steps. On the sidewalk she turned to scream at him but when he came toward her, she turned and hurried up the street.

Within a few minutes the initial shock of Dominick’s violent expulsion wore off. She still had most of Morlock’s paycheck, nearly seventy dollars. She would get a room, buy the few cosmetics she needed. She would think about it later. Meanwhile, she wanted a drink.

The bars and clubs were the same as they had always been. Only the people seemed different. She stopped in several, intending each time to stay only briefly and then to see about getting a room. And then she was given a warm welcome in one of the smaller bars. She had walked in to see a fat little man waving a handful of bills. She smiled and said, “Hello, Porky. You buying?” She remembered him from the old days.

He was half drunk, she saw. He turned and said, “Hey, Louise! Where have you been keeping yourself?”

“Here and there.”

He rushed over to put his arm across her shoulders. “Give Louise a drink,” he demanded, waving the bills. “Hey, Louise, what about a game of gin? Let me win back some of the dough you won off me.”

The bartender—she remembered him too—said, “Watch out for him, Louise. He won forty bucks this afternoon. He can’t lose.”

“Come on, Louise,” Porky insisted. “For a buck.” She could make money from this little drunk, Louise thought. A mark. See that he kept drinking—and she would be careful about how much she drank herself. “You’ll never get even with me playing for a buck,” she said. “How about five?”

She began to play conservatively, getting down as soon as possible on each hand in order to avoid a schneider which would cost double. Porky was a nervous, noisy player: laughing happily when he went down for a good score and cursing when he lost points. Not a good player but tonight a lucky one. He won two games in which she barely got on the board and she became angry with herself. She would win, she was confident that she would win; but each game that he won meant just that much more ground that she would have to make up before she began making money from him.

Porky’s luck, good to begin with, became fantastic. Twice he ginned before she even made a run in her and. He schneidered her on the third game and crowed happily.

“Hey—what I tell you! You want to get even, we play ten.”

She finished her drink and said angrily, “All right. Ten.”

She won the ten-dollar game and felt better. Now if she could schneider Porky she would begin to get into his money. As winner she bought drinks.

She did not win another game; she lost six consecutive times. Porky was quite drunk by now and she would have been able to cheat him—she did manage to cheat a little on the point count—but the game had attracted attention by this time and there were too many people standing near the table. One man, a wise guy, she thought, several times corrected her when she counted in her own favor.

She was in a bad jam. She had less than two dollars left. Until now they had put the money on the side of the table before each game. It was her deal as loser of the last game. Without putting her money up, hoping that Porky would not notice, she began to deal the cards.

The wise guy said, “What about getting the dough up, Louise?”

He was staring at her coldly.

“Why don’t you mind your own damn business? Come on, Porky. Discard.”

Wise guy said, “You’ve got your money up, Porky. Where’s hers.”

Porky looked troubled. “You’re supposed to put it up, Louise. You know that.”

“I was going to,” she said, “until this nosy bastard butted in. I got the money right here in my purse.” She appealed to Porky’s drunken sense of gallantry. “You want me to show you?”

Wise guy butted in again. “She hasn’t got more than a couple of bucks in her purse, Porky. She’s been trying to cheat you all night. Make her get the dough up or don’t play with her.”

Porky was unhappy. He had been playing and winning and having a fine time and now these people wanted to fight. “I know you got the money, Louise. Why don’t you put it on the table and we’ll play. You’re due to win one.”

“There was nothing she could do now; nothing she could say. Wise guy had spoiled it. She did not consider what the consequences might have been if she had played and lost and been unable to pay. She had taken such chances before and relied on her sex and looks to get her out of it.

She got up defiantly. “If that’s the way you feel, the hell with you,” she said, and walked from the room with the laughter following her.

She no longer had enough money for a room. She entered a cafe and tried to call Rosie, the friend of that first date with Morlock. She was not home. Louise sat at the bar and ordered beer, trying to make herself think what she should do. It was much easier to drink beer and not think. She began a round of bars, insinuating herself between groups of men so that she was offered drinks often enough but received no more substantial bids.

Louise, who had allowed herself to be picked up on hundred occasions in the old days, had never solicited.

Her contempt for the slatterns who did was the more powerful because of her fear that she might some day sink to the same level—though she never really admitted this fear to herself. At one-thirty in the morning, lurching a little, her stockings awry and her lipstick smeared; at one-thirty, half drunk and loose mouthed, Louise Morlock approached a tall man on a street corner. “Say, Jack,” she began.

The man said, “Oh, oh. You’d better come with me, dear.” He waved a hand and a car appeared. She got in the back seat and sank into the cushions only half aware that the car was a police car.

She was allowed to make a telephone call Monday morning. Sick and ashamed, she asked the operator to get Ludlow College in Warfield for her.

Morlock had spent most of Sunday at Abram’s Rock. The great monolith was now a touchstone for him. He could sit on its ancient gray head and be transported out of his troubled world and back to the golden days when he had played here with Marianna Cruz. He went to his classes on Monday refreshed, as though he had taken strength from the rock. He was preparing a lecture in the teachers’ lounge when Louise’s call came. There were several other teachers in the room; because of their presence he kept the shock from his voice.

“Al,” she said. “I’m in trouble. They’ve got me at the police station. Al, come and get me, will you?”

He asked in a low voice, “Where?”

“In Providence. Al—will you?”

“I’ve got classes this morning,” he said. “I can’t get out of them on such short notice. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Driving to Providence in the afternoon in Dodson’s car he tried to think of a solution; when he walked into the police station he had not found one, other than to take her back with him. They would have to reach some sort of an understanding. In the meantime he would have to make it clear to her that he was a teacher; his job depended on his reputation and that of his wife. The fear came on him then that it might already be in the papers; might have gotten back to Warfield. When the detective who had arrested Louise took him aside, he blurted out, “Did it get in the papers?”

The detective seemed a little irritated at the interruption.

“No,” he said. “Where married women are involved we keep it quiet as much as we can.”