how near I had been to winning, every step of the way, and how I’d just missed it every time because of her. I could have stopped Sutton without killing him if she hadn’t told him about the bank, because Sutton was afraid of me until he had that. And if she hadn’t been there in the shack that night, if I’d sense enough to know it had to be her— I thought of Gloria walking home alone in the dark believing that I had sold her out for this sexy tubful of guts and her money, believing it and forever, because I could never tell her.
The room was filling with that same red mist there’d been that night I’d killed Sutton. What did it matter now if they sent me to the chair? I’d lost it all. I’d lost everything because of her. I walked slowly over and stood looking down at the sensuous and slightly mocking face and the white column of her throat.
“You’ll have to beg now,” she said. “You had your chance, but you threw it away because you wanted that little owl. I’m going to enjoy hearing you beg me to marry you. You see, you have to look after me, Harry. Something might happen to me—”
“Yes,” I said. “Something might.”
Maybe she heard the murder in my voice, because she quit smiling and her eyes went wide. I reached down and caught the front of the black dress. It ripped loose at her belly and everything from there on up came off in my hand, but she came up out of the chair with the force of it and stood there swaying, the scream beginning and then chopping suddenly off as I put my right hand on her throat and threw her across the coffee table on to the sofa. I went across it after her just as she wiggled off the sofa on to the floor, still trying to get her breath to scream, and then I was on her. I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ‘em burn me. All they could do was kill me—
It’s like committing suicide by holding your breath.
I relaxed my hands and turned her loose.
“You see, Harry,” she said. She looked down at the wreckage of her clothing and the big, spread-out breasts, and then at me, and smiled. She’d been right the first time, and she knew it.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. We were lying against the edge of the sofa and her hair was mussed and she was half naked and I could smell the perfume she always wore.
The smile broadened and she put her arms up around my neck. “Yes, what?”
I knew the answer now.
“Yes, dear,” I said.
That was almost a year ago. We’re married now, and I go to work every morning at nine, and sell cars, and lend money, and make more than I know what to do with. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce, and the service clubs, and even the Volunteer Fire Department. I like to think that some day I might be a director of the bank, because that would be the final, supreme laugh of them all when I’m lying awake at night. It’s something to look forward to—not much, but something—and maybe some day I’ll make it and become the only bank director in the world who started at the bottom by robbing the bank and worked his way up by becoming indispensable to a bitch, and the only one anywhere who has twelve thousand three hundred dollars of his bank’s assets buried under six inches of slowly rotting manure in a collapsing barn on a sandhill and who intends to let it stay there until the barn rots and the money rots and he rots himself, because if he ever dug it up and looked at it he’d go crazy and kill himself. It’s an ambition, and everybody should have one, even if it’s only a good laugh in the middle of the night when he has a little trouble getting to sleep because he’s worrying about his wife. She might be tiring of him, or catching cold.
I’ve given up trying to find out where the original of that statement is, and