Someone Is Bleeding Read Online Free PDF

don’t believe what I’ve told you,” he said crushing some more, “I want you to check. Don’t take my word for it.’
    Then the door slammed and Steig pulled the black car around the pear-shaped drive and onto the road that led precipitously down to the highway.
    I sat in the car staring at the floor. And listening to the wind whistle by the car as it roared along the ocean at eighty miles an hour. Under a cold moon.
    * * *
    I wrote sporadically. I went to the beach, way up the beach, far from the spot where we’d met. I went to the movies. I read. And, from all activities, absorbed nothing. I was still half anesthetized. I hadn’t known her long, a few weeks. But she’d gotten to me.
    I thought about her after the first few days of deliberately avoiding any thoughts at all about her.
    I remembered taking her to the little bar downstairs in one of the hotels along Ocean Drive. I forget the name of it. I remember the soft lighting, the heavy wood paneling, circling the dance floor with Peggy in my arms, listening to the music of the three-piece combination. Sitting at the tables and having a couple of drinks together, Her eyes over the glass, looking at me. A soft look. Adoring and unquestioning.
    I remembered the first time I’d told her how I felt about her. I remembered other things. It had been such a short time really Yet so long, it seemed. Years of walking through the silent streets of Santa Monica looking at the pretty houses, making unspoken plans. Walking together through Will Rogers State Park in the Santa Monica Hills. Finding fresh mountain lion tracks and running back to the parking place, breathlessly excited and laughing. And walking all the way back to Santa Monica. Walking everywhere, hand in hand, never needing to speak. Murder?
    I went to the library and looked through old papers. I didn’t find anything. And when I thought some more, I remembered Linda and that look Jim had given me on graduation day.
    I went back to my love. Days after. In sorrow and repentance. And found her on the back lawn, trying to read. But just staring at the same page.
    And she was cold at first because she’d been hurt. I didn’t let it stop me. I was apologetic. I smiled at her and said again and again and again:
    “I’m sorry, Peggy. I’m sorry.”
    * * *
    “Murdered!” she said to me. “Is that what he told you?” I nodded, grimly.
    She shook her head. “How could he?” she said. And I felt some slight relish in seeing indications of the chinks in Jim Vaughan’s self-forged armor.
    “Why, though?” she said. “I didn’t murder him.”
    “Where is your husband?” I asked.
    “He’s dead,” she told me. “He died in San Francisco. A year ago.”
    We sat in the back yard, talking. And she kept shaking her head and saying she couldn’t understand how Jim could say such a thing about her.
    “It is strange,” I said. “I never saw Jim involve himself in such an obvious lie before.”
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    She looked away. “I didn’t murder him,” she said, softly.
    “I know,” I said.
    “You didn’t know it before,” she said. “You believed what he said.”
    “It came as such a shock,” I said. “Think of how you’d feel if, out or a clear blue sky, someone told you I’d murdered my mother or my wife.”
    “I’d check before I believed.”
    ”What would you think if I told you I was divorced, made you think my wife was still alive?”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Let’s forget about it,” I said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “I have missed you,” I said.
    “But you stayed away.”
    I couldn’t answer. I just felt rage. At Jim for lying so blatantly to me. At myself for believing him. Mostly the latter. For a guy who considers himself superior, I thought, I’d been awfully easy to delude.
    It was around that time that I noticed Albert.
    He was looking out of his window at Peggy. I forgot to mention it, but Peggy only had on shorts and a tight halter.
    I called