Weep for Me by John D. MacDonald Page B

own cash position overnight for the sake of a gamble in real estate or the market.
    I couldn’t decide what I was actually doing. If this was only a little mental exercise, then I was dragging it out as long as possible before doing anything criminal. I was making the planning stage last a long time while I had her as often as possible, in the hope that the having of her would loosen her hold on me.
    Against that was the knowledge that each time with her had been more climactic than the last time.
    I checked the list quickly and went up. I tapped on her door and listened. I could hear the sound of her shower. I tried the knob and it was unlocked. I went in and the shower noise was louder. I locked the door behind me. I sat to wait for her and I thought of how she would look, lean marble in the small stall, and desire was like a wave that smashed over me and rolled me under.
    I went in blindly and shoved the curtain aside and caught her gleaming wetness in my arms and pulled her out. I broke her lips with my mouth and pulled her down and made her cry out, there in the cramped space between the stall and the washbowl, cold floor tileagainst her back, rumpled bath mat under her hips, while, from an enormous distance, came the faint sound of the shower, like the sea heard from far away.
    When she came out in her robe much later, I handed her the list. She looked at it. I had totaled what I thought we could safely take. Two hundred and sixty thousand, out of thirty-eight accounts. An average of two thousand a check meant a hundred and thirty checks. A great many to handle. Almost too many.
    She had brought back five canceled checks.
    I took the shade off a floor lamp, put it on its side on the floor, and shoved the bulb end under the plate glass of the coffee table. First I practiced tracing a signature from one of the checks on scrap paper until I was reasonably fluid. Then I placed a new blank check over the canceled one. R. V. McKnight. Check for cash. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Dated July 2. Next Tuesday. She watched, with nothing moving in her face, watched with her bruised lips motionless.
    I handed it to her. “Good!” she whispered. “Better than I had hoped.”
    “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It will never be projected on a courtroom screen.”
    “It’s good.” She felt it as though it were silk.
    I made out twelve checks in all. She watched patiently. I put them in my wallet.
    “Monday we’ll start, Kyle?” she said.
    “Monday.”
    “You’re so smart, Kyle.”
    “Not very. I hope I’m going to be smart enough.”
    She sat beside me on the couch. She pushed me back, made me put my legs up, lie flat. She moved up so that her hip touched my waist. She put her hands on either side of my head and looked down into my eyes, her hair falling toward my face, touching my cheek lightly.
    “Tell me about it again, Kyle. As though you’ve never told me before. Explain the whole thing, Kyle.”
    I knew what she wanted then. She wanted the same sort of excitement she had felt the first time.
    I began to tell her, my voice flat and monotonous. Isaw it working on her. She bent over me and flicked her tongue against my moving lips. When I stopped she told me to keep talking. When I raised my arms, she pushed them back down.
    She was over me with tantalizing, fisted languor, with hot blind eyes, with raw mouth and furnace breath. And her body gleamed white when the robe parted, and her thigh was long, reaching ivory as she knelt over me, and my voice went on and on, talking flatly of money and checking accounts and altered statements until it was too late, and then we talked with other voices, and the velvet whip cracked, and deep in my mind something cried out that the list, the forgeries, the theft were real, would happen. Nothing could stop it. The same way nothing could stop paroxysm until she fell on my chest like a dark bird torn suddenly out of a storm sky and hurled against the cliff and rocks, wounded unto