Girl Out Back (11 page)

A couple more hours of this, I thought, and I should be able to pass the bar exam.

He sighed. “I’m sure sorry, Mr. Ward.”

I shook my head sympathetically. “I am, too, in a way, in spite of all the trouble you caused us. I mean, you weren’t a criminal—at least, up until now. And at your age—well, even ten years. . . .”

“Ten years?” he repeated slowly. I had him going now.

“Forget I said that,” I told him quickly. “I shouldn’t have. I mean, I’m not a judge. I’m an arresting officer. But tell me, what in the name of Heaven did you do it for? You didn’t spend much of it, you say. What did you want with it?”

He looked down at his hands. “Well, sir, it’s kind of a silly thing, I reckon. It got hold of me when I seen how much there was and when I got to thinking about it afterward. If I pretended like it was mine long enough, and nobody come along to take it away from me, I could mebbe take and do this thing I been thinking about all my life. One of them sort of things you know you ain’t ever going to do, but you just keep thinking about anyway.”

“What’s that?” I asked. We were wasting time, but it interested me.

“I wanted to buy a coconut farm,” he said simply.

“Coconut. . .?” I stared at him, and then I saw the dream. It was all over the round, lost, wistful face—the face of the world’s eternal patsy. He was like a child thinking about Christmas morning.

“On one of them islands,” he went on softly, not even looking at me. “Down south, you know. Just a one-island farm, but I would own the whole island and every single, blessed thing on it. I’d live on it, in a big house on top of a hill, and there’d be all these niggers. I’d wear boots, and one of them explorer’s hats, and I’d be good to ‘em. You know, things like doctoring them when they was sick, and holding trials when one of ‘em stole something from another one.

“There wouldn’t be any other white people except this store-keeper that I didn’t like and that I’d make him jump like Billy-be-damned when I said something to him, and then of course the straw-boss and his wife. The straw-boss, you understand, is the one that handles the niggers and that I give the orders to, and his wife would look just like Laura LaPlante. . . .”

He broke off, his face a picture of dreamy rapture. “You remember Laura LaPlante?

He had sixteen years on me. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you mean. nothing changes but the name.”

“Anyway,” he went on, not even hearing me, “this straw-boss’s wife would look exactly like her, and when he was off at the other end of the island seeing to the coconut trees and telling the niggers what to do she’d come in and sleep with me because she thought about me all the time, day and night. He’d know about it, of course, but there wasn’t anything he could do because I paid him so much he didn’t want to lose the job. . . .”

He sighed and shook his head. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him he could have shortened the dream considerably and got into the sack with her a lot faster by marrying the LaPlante type himself and by-passing the overseer. But maybe that wouldn’t work.

“Well, cheer up,” I said. “You might have got tired of her, and think of what a hell of a place that would have been to try to dodge a woman. Now, let’s go get it.”

“Sure,” he replied. “But first, would you tell me how you fellers found out I had it.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “It took us a year and a half. And there’s a chance we never would have if you hadn’t spent some of the money we recognized. . .

“Them twenty-dollar bills,” he said. “I knowed it. I knowed it.”

You just knowed it too late, Bwana Sahib. “Why did you spend them, then?”

“I didn’t stop to think till I’d already passed three of ‘em. Then I noticed the numbers all run in order. So you traced em?

I shook my head. “No. We never did find out who spent them originally, but we did know they came from this area. So we went back to the other angle we were working on. Haig got away from that wreck, all right, and away from Sanport—we knew that. Nobody in Sanport would have hidden him; he was too hot. So the chances were that before the police arrived, he forced his way into a car that was passing and put a gun on the driver. That happens quite often. But the thing we never could understand was why the driver didn’t report it afterward. Even if Haig had killed him and stolen the car, the whole thing would have come out eventually. The car would have been found, or some friend or relative of the driver would have reported him missing. That was the thing that threw us, you see. Simply that the driver would have reported it if he were alive, or somebody would have reported the driver’s absence if he’d just disappeared.

“It took us a long time to see the answer, but we finally did, just about the time your twenty dollar-bill showed up. Suppose the driver died before he could tell us, all right, but in a perfectly routine manner that wasn’t suspicious at all? Routine, at least, in police work.

“We checked the Highway Patrol reports for that day, and we found it. Six hours and twenty minutes after Haig disappeared out his getaway car when it hit that truck, an elderly couple in a 1950 Plymouth sedan went off the road two miles from here just after dark in a downpour of rain and were instantly killed. They were on the wrong road, and they were driving faster than they normally did, even in good visibility on dry pavement. Haig, you see? He was in the car. He’d forced them to hide out somewhere until after dark.

“He was probably hurt, and maybe punchy with shock, so he didn’t know where he was going. The only thing he was sure of was that he had to stay off the highway. He could have left a trail of blood, but it washed right away. It was raining, you see. And when they picked up the old people, there was nothing in the car to indicate he’d ever been with them.

“It was easy from there. We just came out here, among other places, and searched your camp. We found what was left of his suitcase, and the rest of those twenties, plus those tens.”

When I finished, Cliffords didn’t say anything for a moment. He merely sighed and looked at me with that awe in his face. Then, finally, he said, “And I thought I could get away with it.”

“All right,” I said. I was tired of wasting time. “You ready to show me where it is?”

He stood up. “Sure,” he said. “There’s three more thousand of it under the house, on a sill. Unless you found that, too.”

That was wonderful, I thought swiftly. Add that to nearly a thousand there on the table. It was going to work out beautifully.

“And the rest of it?” I asked.

“Buried in three syrup buckets, under a down tree. About a mile up the lake.”

“How much?” I asked. “Do you know?”

He nodded. “I added up the little bands. It took me a long time. There’s a hundred and thirteen thousand of it.”

And it was so ridiculously easy. All I’d had to do was ask for it.

“Umh-umh,” I said thoughtfully. “That checks out pretty well with the bank’s figures. Well, let’s get on with it.”

We picked up that under the house. It had been almost directly over my head when I’d peered under that other time, but I’d been looking for something much larger. It was all in tens, five hundred dollars to the bundle, wrapped in waxed paper and lying flat on top of the sill. We brought it inside and he watched while I gathered up and counted what was on the kitchen table.

“Altogether, three thousand eight hundred and forty,” I announced.

He found a paper bag for it. I put it all inside, folded it over carefully, and sealed it with some cellophane tape he had. I wrote the sum on it, and then the notation, “Recovered in vicinity of cabin.” He watched intently, very much impressed with all this police routine.

“We’ll have to come back by here so you can pack the clothes you want to take to jail with you,” I said. “So there’s no use carrying this around. We’ll pick it up on the way back. Let’s see. . . .”

I pulled a stack of magazines and comic books away from the wall and shoved the money behind it.

“Should be safe there,” I said.

He nodded. “Sure. Nobody ever comes here.”

“You say it’s about a mile?” I asked.

“Pretty near, I reckon.”

“I don’t see any sense wearing this hot jacket up there.” I said. I slipped it off. Removing his .38 from the pocket, I shoved it in the waistband of my trousers. Then I removed the fake warrant from the inside breast pocket, and when I slid it into the right hip pocket of my trousers I eased out the leather key case that was already there, holding it concealed in my hand for an instant while I was folding the jacket. I let it drop just as I tossed the jacket across the bed and turned toward the door.

He called my attention to it. “Say, Mr. Ward, your keys fell out.”

“Oh.” I picked them up. “Thanks. Wouldn’t do to lose them. We d be stranded.”

“Your car’s down at the camp-ground, I reckon?”

“That’s right,” I said. I picked up the jacket again, dropped the keys in one of the pockets, and tossed it back on the bed. We went out. He picked up a short-handled shovel.

It was late afternoon now, and shadows were long across the clearing. We started out through the timber with Cliffords leading the way, going generally north but angling gradually way from the lake.

“Is Haig up this way, too?” I asked.

“No, sir.” He pointed off to the right. “Up there. Not too far from that road, and about a mile this side of the highway.”

“Well, we won’t bother with him today,” I said. “We’ll bring you out tomorrow or the next day and you can show us where. The local District Attorney wants to be represented, anyway, and there’s the coroner.”

“What could they tell now?” he asked, plodding purposefully ahead and not looking around. “I mean, it’s been a year and a half.”

“Probably not much,” I replied. “Of course, if you had shot him and the bullet struck a bone. . . . That would show up, naturally.”

“But I
didn’t
shoot him, Mr. Ward! I’m telling you the truth about the whole thing. I was out huntin’ squirrels and I seen all them birds circlin’ around. . . .”

“We’d assume it was that way,” I said. “Had they bothered him?”

“No. They was just beginning to light in the trees— “Then you could form a pretty good idea as to what did kill him?”

“Sure. He’d been in a bad wreck, and he’d bled to death. Anybody could see that. I wondered how he’d ever made it that far from the highway. He was pretty well banged up all over, but the worst was the cut on his right arm.”

“And the suitcase was near him?”

“His head and shoulders was lying on it, and he still had his hand through the handle. Like he was trying to get up with it.”

I had a momentary flash of what it was probably like, bleeding to death at night in the rain, and wondered as to the nature of Haig’s particular coconut farm, but gave it up. There was never much profit in that type of speculation, and the ivory tower boys could handle it without help.

“Well, it’s too bad,” I said. “And it’s hard to understand why you did it. As far as we’ve been able to determine, you’ve never been in trouble before.”

“No, sir. I worked all my life. Section hand for the S.P.”

“You’ve never been in prison at all, have you?”

“No, sir.”

Plodding on ahead of me through the timber in that big hat, he reminded me of some rotund and ineffably earnest gnome who’d just been handed an important assignment by the Fairy Princess.

“Don’t let it get you down,” I said. “You’ll make out all right.”

“Is it very bad?” he asked.

“We-ell,” I said thoughtfully, keeping one pace behind him, “naturally, it’s not any fun. It’s not supposed to be. But plenty of people come through it in fine shape.”

He said nothing.

“There’s been too much written and said about it by people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” I went on. “They distort the picture. They over-emphasize things that really aren’t too bad, and play down others that are worse. It’s not so much the bad food and the monotony and the overcrowding they talk about all the time, as it is other things they minimize and try to hush up. The homosexuals, for instance. They make it bad for everybody.”

”They . . . they do?”

“Yes. In this way. You have to watch out for them continually. They’re after you all the time, and the only effective way to discourage them is to fight. But fighting is against the rules, so you lose your privileges. The warden’s staff is too badly overworked and short-handed to hold a two-day hearing to determine who was at fault in a brawl. They merely penalize both parties and let it go. And if you get a reputation for being a trouble-maker you get the guards down on you, too. But don’t let it throw you. You’ll come through it all right.”

He made no reply. We changed direction a little to circle the end of a slough that still had water in it.

“How do you find your way around down here?” I asked. “I’d be lost in five minutes.”

“Oh, there ain’t nothin’ to it,” he replied. “You just remember which way you’re goin’ all the time.”

“It sounds easy,” I said. “But I’d probably be two days trying to find my way back to the cabin.”

“We’re nearly there,” he said. “You see the roots of that down tree, up ahead?”

I saw it. It was less than a hundred yards ahead in a heavy stand of oaks. One of them had fallen, apparently several years ago, carrying down a smaller one with it and creating a tangle of broken limbs and brush at the top. We hurried up. It would be sunset in about an hour, I thought, appraising the flat angle of the shafts of sunlight slanting down through the foliage overhead.

“It’s under this big one,” Cliffords said. He walked up alongside the bole of it to the first limb. I watched him, trying not to show my excitement. The trunk was about six inches off the ground here, supported by the welter of broken limbs beyond, and the ground was covered with a heavy carpet of old leaves.

He raked the leaves back, under the overhang of the round trunk, and I could see the depression where the earth had settled. He dropped to his knees and began scraping the dirt away with the edge of the shovel. I heard it strike metal. I leaned over his shoulder, staring down intently.

“I dug it up about five months ago and put it in new buckets,” he said. “They rust out pretty fast.”

He threw the shovel aside and started scooping the earth out with his hands. I could see them now, all three of them. They were buried in a row, vertically, with the bottoms up. He tugged at the first one, rocking it back and forth to free it from the ground. I dropped to my knees and did the same with the one on the other end. His came free, and then mine. He lifted out the middle one, which was free now that the others were removed. They lay side by side on the old leaves in a shaft of sunlight. They had brownish splotches of rust on them and were encrusted with the damp black sod in which they had lain, but to me they were more beautiful than three Grecian urns. I lit a cigarette, suddenly conscious that my shirt was stuck to me with perspiration, and knelt there just staring at them and savoring the tremendous exultation of the moment.

They were the standard one-gallon pails used in that part of the country for storing syrup, the same as the ones I’d seen in his cabin. Each had a wire handle and a tight, press-fit lid of the same diameter as the pad. I saw that after he had pressed on the lids he had dipped the tops in melted paraffin. Not bad, I thought; if he’d known about silica-gel dehydrators he could have eliminated rust altogether on the inside.

“You want to open ’em?” he asked.

I nodded. “Just one.”

I set one of them upright between us. He took out his knife, scraped away some of the paraffin, and used the back of the blade to pry up the lid. It came free at last and fell to the ground. I looked inside, and for an instant I was almost afraid he’d hear the pounding of my heart. There was only one way to describe it, I thought; it was a gallon of money.

It was full. It was jammed with packages of fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. They were laid in flat, they were bent to fit the curve of the pail, they were doubled, they were put in every way imaginable to take advantage of every bit of space. Tens were jammed against fifties, and when I lifted a package of fives, there was a sheaf of hundreds under it. I tossed it back in. I didn’t want him to see the trembling of my hands.

“She sure is a pile of money, ain’t she?” he said.

It was time to get rid of him. I ground out the cigarette and nodded. “All right. You can put the lid back on. We’d better get going.”

The steep-sided hole they had come from was just behind me and slightly to the right. He was bent over the pail, pressing down the lid. I shot a quick glance behind me and stood up. I stepped backward and when I felt the edge of the hole under my foot I let it slide on in.

“Damn ... !” I cursed explosively, waved my arms, and fell. My shoulder hit the log and I rolled off it to the ground.

He sprang over and knelt beside me. “Hey, Mr. Ward. Are you okay?”

I pushed myself to my hands and knees. “I’m all right,” I said. “I just forgot about that damned hole.”

“Here. Let me help you up.” He took hold of my arm.

I tried to stand. The moment I put my right foot on the ground I sucked my breath in sharply and collapsed. Drawing a sleeve across my face to wipe off the sweat and dirt, I said shakily, “It’s my ankle. Wait a minute.”

He watched as I unlaced my shoe. I grimaced realistically as I pulled it off and felt the ankle and foot. “It’s hot,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s broken. Probably just a bad sprain.”

“You think you can walk on it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Wait till I get my breath and I’ll try again.”

I did, and gave an even better performance. “No use,” I said.

“Mebbe I could cut you something for a crutch.”

“Not with that knife? it’d have to be something pretty heavy. It’ll have to be bandaged, too.” I moved the foot slightly and said,
“Whew!”

“Well...” he said hesitantly, “I’ve got a roll of bandage stuff at the cabin. And some tape.”

I considered it, looking doubtful “I don’t know. . . .”

“Mebbe we could tear up our shirts and make a bandage.”

“It’ll take a longer strip,” I told him. “Regular roll bandage, or a torn-up sheet. And I’ll still have to have a crutch.”

“I don’t see no other way,” he said. “I’ll just have to go to the cabin. I got an axe there, and I could cut a sapling with a fork, and pad it at the top. I’ll bring a sheet, and some liniment.”

I frowned. “You re under arrest, on a serious charge. I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight.”

“I can t think of nothing else,” he said.

“You wouldn’t try to escape?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, all right,” I said doubtfully. “I guess you couldn’t get far, anyway, with no car.”

That was pretty crude, but in dealing with a low grade mentality subtlety could be dangerous. He might miss it.

“Well, you’d better hurry along,” I went on, before he could say anything. “It’ll be dark in another hour or two.”

“Sure,” he said. He went off through the timber in the direction we had come, walking quite fast now.

As soon as he was out of sight I grinned and got up. I sat on the log and lit a cigarette. The thing to do was give him plenty of time; it didn’t matter when I got out of here. He’d have to take to his feet after the car quit on him somewhere this side of the highway, and it would be most embarrassing for both of us if I refueled it and got out on the road before he’d managed to thumb a ride. He might even take time to pack a lot of his gear, in fact, since he’d know I couldn’t crawl back to the camp-ground before sometime tomorrow even if I knew the way. And even then I wouldn’t get out of the bottom until they sent a search party after me.

I smoked the cigarette all the way out to the end before I made any move to open the other two pails, extracting in full measure the joys of anticipation. There were too few moments like this in life, and when you’d used them up they were gone forever. I thought of what was inside the pails, and then appraised the craftsmanship of the operation itself. Not bad, I thought. Of course, I’d had a lot of luck at the beginning, but the solution of the problem itself, after it was posed, was a creditable bit of work. It was a minor masterpiece, if I did say so.

Come on, hammy, I thought; quit milking the curtain calls and get to work. Grinding out the cigarette, I knelt and took out my knife. In a moment I had all three of them open. It was like dreaming you owned Fort Knox and then waking up to find the deed and the keys in your hand. The other two were exactly like the first, crammed full of currency in every denomination from five to a hundred. I hurriedly slipped off my shirt, spread it on the ground, and began piling the money on it, not trying to count it but searching for that I was going to have to destroy. When I came to a package that had that crisp, new look about it I’d toss it to one side. In a few minutes I had it all sorted out. Of course, I’d have to go over it more carefully later on, but I should have most of it. There were four more sheafs of those new twenties, six tens, and two in the fifty-dollar denomination.