“No.”
“Will you give my best wishes to Mrs. Collinson, and tell her I’m so sorry I couldn’t see her?”
“Yeah.”
She said, “Goodbye,” and got into the car; I took off my hat and she rode away.
XXII. Confessional
Mickey Linehan opened the front door for me. He looked at my scratched face and laughed:
“You do have one hell of a time with your women. Why don’t you ask them instead of trying to take it away from them? It’d save you a lot of skin.” He poked a thumb at the ceiling. “Better go up and negotiate with that one. She’s been raising hell.”
I went up to Gabrielle’s room. She was sitting in the middle of the wallowed-up bed. Her hands were in her hair, tugging at it. Her soggy face was thirty-five years old. She was making hurt-animal noises in her throat.
“It’s a fight, huh?” I said from the door.
She took her hands out of her hair.
“I won’t die?” The question was a whimper between edge-to-edge teeth.
“Not a chance.”
She sobbed and lay down. I straightened the covers over her. She complained that there was a lump in her throat, that her jaws and the hollows behind her knees ached.
“Regular symptoms,” I assured her. “They won’t bother you much, and you’ll miss the cramps.”
Fingernails scratched the door. Gabrielle jumped up in bed, crying:
“Don’t go away again.”
“No farther than the door,” I promised, and went to it.
MacMan was there.
“That Mexican Mary,” he whispered, “was hiding in the bushes watching you and the woman. I spotted her when she came out, and tailed her across to the road below. She stopped the limousine and talked with the woman–five-ten minutes. I couldn’t get near enough to hear any of it.”
“Where is she now?”
“In the kitchen. She came back. The woman in the heap went on. Mickey says the Mex is packing a knife and is going to make grief for us. Reckon he’s right?”
“He generally is,” I said. “She’s strong for Mrs. Collinson, and doesn’t think we mean her any good. Why in hell can’t she mind her own business? It adds up that she peeped and saw Mrs. Haldorn wasn’t for us, figured she was for Mrs. Collinson, and braced her. I hope Mrs. Haldorn had sense enough to tell her to behave. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do but watch her. No use giving her the gate: we’ve got to have a cook.”
When MacMan had gone Gabrielle remembered we had had a visitor, and asked me about it, and about the shot she had heard and my scratched face.
“It was Aaronia Haldorn,” I told her; “and she lost her head. No harm done. She’s gone now.”
“She came here to kill me,” the girl said, not excitedly, but as if she knew certainly.
“Maybe. She wouldn’t admit anything. Why should she kill you?”
I didn’t get an answer to that.
It was a long bad night. I spent most of it in the girl’s room, in a leather rocker dragged in from the front room. She got perhaps an hour and a half of sleep, in three instalments. Nightmares brought her screaming out of all three. I dozed when she let me. Off and on through the night I heard stealthy sounds in the hall–Mary Nunez watching over her mistress, I supposed.
Wednesday was a longer and worse day. By noon my jaws were as sore as Gabrielle’s, from going around holding my back teeth together. She was getting the works now. Light was positive, active pain to her eyes, sound to her ears, odors of any sort to her nostrils. The weight of her silk nightgown, the touch of sheets over and under her, tortured her skin. Every nerve she had yanked every muscle she had, continually. Promises that she wasn’t going to die were no good now: life wasn’t nice enough.
“Stop fighting it, if you want,” I said. “Let yourself go. I’ll take care of you.”
She took me at my word, and I had a maniac on my hands. Once her shrieks brought Mary Nunez to the door, snarling and spitting at me in Mex-Spanish. I was holding Gabrielle down in bed by the shoulders, sweating as much as she was.