She should have run then, but her dismay and outrage were so great that she had no room for fear. She knew who had done it, but surely Johnny was gone. The man she had married had little taste for physical confrontation. Oh, there had been plenty of harsh words and that one slap, but nothing else.
Besides, her underwear was all over the floor.
It made a rough trail from the living room down the short hall to her bedroom. All of it—full slips, half-slips, bras, panties, the girdle she didn’t need but sometimes wore—had been slashed. At the end of the hall, the door to the bathroom stood open. The towel rack had been ripped down. Printed on the tile where it had been, also in her lipstick, was another message: FILTHY FUCKER.
The door of her bedroom was also open. She went to it and stoodin it with no sense at all that Johnny Clayton was standing behind it with a knife in one hand and a Smith & Wesson Victory .38 in the other. The revolver he carried that day was the same make and model as the one Lee Oswald would use to take the life of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit.
Her little vanity bag lay open on her bed, the contents, mostly makeup, scattered across the coverlet. The accordion doors of her closet were folded open. Some of her clothes still drooped sadly from their hangers; most were on the floor. All of them had been slashed.
“Johnny, you bastard!” She wanted to scream those words, but the shock was too great. She could only whisper.
She started for the closet but didn’t get far. An arm curled around her neck and a small circle of steel pressed hard against her temple. “Don’t move, don’t fight. If you do, I’ll kill you.”
She tried to pull away and he lashed her upside the head with the revolver’s short barrel. At the same time the arm around her neck tightened. She saw the knife in the fist at the end of the arm that was choking her and stopped struggling. It was Johnny—she recognized the voice—but it reallywasn’tJohnny. He had changed.
I should have listened to him,she thought—meaning me.Why didn’t I listen?
He marched her into the living room, arm still around her throat, then spun her and shoved her down on the couch, where she flopped, legs splayed.
“Pull down your dress. I can see your garters, you whore.”
He was wearing bib overalls (that alone was enough to make her feel like she was dreaming) and had dyed his hair a weird orange-blond. She almost laughed.
He sat down on the hassock in front of her. The gun was aimed at her midsection. “We’re going to call your cockboy.”
“I don’t know what—”
“Amberson. The one you play hide the salami with in that hot-sheets place over Killeen. I know all about it. I’ve been watching you a long time.”
“Johnny, if you leave now I won’t call the police. I promise. Even though you spoiled my clothes.”
“Whore clothes,” he said dismissively.
“I don’t… I don’t know his number.”
Her address book, the one she usually kept in her little office next to the typewriter, was lying open next to the phone. “I do. It’s on the first page. I looked underCfor Cockboy first, but it wasn’t there. I’ll place the call, so you don’t get any ideas about saying something to the operator. Then you talk to him.”
“I won’t, Johnny, not if you mean to hurt him.”
He leaned forward. His weird orange-blond hair flopped into his eyes and he brushed it away with the hand holding the gun. Then he used the knife-hand to pluck the phone out of its cradle. The gun remained pointed steadily at her midsection. “Here’s the thing, Sadie,” he said, and now he sounded almost rational. “I’m going to kill one of you. The other can live. You decide which one it’s going to be.”
He meant every word. She could see it on his face. “What… what if he isn’t home?”
He chuckled at her stupidity. “Then you die, Sadie.”
She must have thought:I can buy some time. It’s at least three hours from Dallas to Jodie, more if the traffic’s heavy. Time enough for Johnny to come to his senses. Maybe. Or for his attention to lapse just long enough for me to throw something at him and run out the door.
He dialed 0 without looking at the address book (his memory for numbers had always been just short of perfect), and asked for Westbrook 7-5430. Listened. Said, “Thank you, Operator.”
Then, silence. Somewhere, over a hundred miles north, a telephone was ringing. She must have wondered how many rings Johnny would allow before hanging up and shooting her in the stomach.
Then his listening expression changed. He brightened, even smiled a little. His teeth were as white as ever, she observed, and why not? He had always brushed them at least half a dozen times a day. “Hello, Mr. Amberson. Someone here has something to say to you.”
He got off the hassock and handed Sadie the phone. As she put it to her ear, he slashed out with the knife, quick as a striking snake, and sliced open the side of her face.
4
“What did you do to her?”I shouted.“What did you do, you bastard?”
