Helene shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re doing dirty, just that they are.”
“Your husband never told you where the money came from?”
Helene shook her head.
“Wally, I don’t want them to do anything to my mother and father.”
“They won’t. The dumbest thing they could do is try to do something to you. Or them. The whole Police Department would come down on them.”
“Huh!” she snorted. “They don’t want to go to jail; there’s no telling what they’ll do.”
“They’re just trying to scare you, is all. Christ, I wish you had told me about this. I could have got to Washington and nobody would ever have known.”
“I told you, I didn’t want to involve you.”
“And I told you, I’m involved in whatever you do,” Milham said. He reached out for her hand again, and this time she did not move it away.
When he looked at her face, tears were running down her cheeks.
“Honey, don’t do that. I can’t stand to see you cry.”
“Wally, what am I going to do?”
“The question is what are we going to do. You understand?”
“OK. We,” Helene said, and tried to smile.
“OK. So you’re not going back to your mother’s. That’s one thing.”
“What is she going to say? What do I say to her?”
“What did you say when you left the house?”
“I told her I had to go somewhere, and that I would call. She didn’t like it at all.”
“OK. So you call her again, and tell her you have to go away for a couple of days, and that you’ll call her.”
“She won’t like it.”
“Honey, for Christ’s sake! They called you there because they knew you were there.”
She nodded a grudging acceptance of that.
“So where do I go?”
“My place,” he suggested without much conviction in his voice.
“I can’t do that, and you know it,” Helene said.
“OK. We’ll talk about that later. Tonight we’ll go to a motel.”
“Not we, Wally. I’m not up to anything like that.”
“OK. We get you in a motel. You go to bed. Get your rest. I’ll think of something.”
“Something what?”
“I don’t know. Something,” Milham said. “One thing at a time.”