Girl Out Back (13 page)

I paddled until I was headed outward, and then cranked the motor. Idling down to slow speed, I pointed the bow straight across toward the weed beds along the other shore. When I was nearly half-way across I stood up and dived over the side. I came up, and the boat was drawing away, a diminishing shadow on the dark surface of the water as the motor kept up its thrumming sound in the night. It was swinging to the right, I thought. It didn’t matter much where it hit something and came to rest, but I hoped it wouldn’t double back and run me down.

I got my bearings and started swimming back to the cove. When I waded out of the water and sat on the log to put my shoes on I tried to judge where it was now. It sounded as if it were on the other side, and it didn’t appear to be moving. Probably it had already plowed into the pails. That was fine.

I stepped ashore, picked up the valise, and returned to the cabin, hurrying now because I wanted to get away from here. Lighting the lamp again, I put the clothes back in one of the drawers of the chest, and shoved the valise under the bed where he’d got it. I located a paper bag and picked up the shattered glass of the syrup pitcher. I soused his dish towel in the water pail, wrung it out, and mopped up the syrup, dropping the towel in the bag when I had finished. What else. Oh, yes—the plate I had used for an ash-tray. I scraped the butts into the bag, wiped the plate with a handful of paper from the wood-box to remove the rest of the ashes, and put the paper in the fire-box of the stove. Better burn all that, I thought. I stuck a match to it, and then shoved in the carton the money had been in, and the waxed paper that had been used to wrap that hidden under the house. When it had all burned down and gone out, I pulverized the ashes with the poker and replaced the lid. I put the blackened pieces of hardware from Haig’s suitcase in the paper bag, shoved the table back where it had been, and looked around. What else? There was nothing to indicate I had ever been here.

Of course, I had left footprints out there in a few places in the hard earth of the yard and in the trail, but it didn’t matter, even though my shoes were larger than his. Nobody would be looking for footprints. What had happened to him would be perfectly obvious. He’d stumbled over the tackle box, fallen overboard wearing that gun-belt and gun, and had drowned when the boat plowed on and left him. An autopsy would bear it out.

I picked up the paper bag, blew out the lamp, and went out. When my eyes were accustomed to the darkness again, I walked down to the lake about fifty yards above the cove, and threw the bag out into the water. The hardware and broken glass were heavy enough to make it sink. Picking my way through the dark trees, I went back down to the cove.

I rolled my shirt, trousers, and socks into a bundle and knotted the tie around it. Putting on the jacket and the hat, I picked up the crutch, the three pails and the bundle of wet clothing, and started down the lake through the timber. It was slow going and it was farther this way because I had to follow the shore-line to keep from being lost. Brush scratched my legs, and it required intense and constant alertness to keep from running into tree trunks. The sound of the outboard motor grew fainter behind me. I stopped once to tear the padding from the crutch and dispose of it under a log. A few hundred yards farther along I threw the forked sapling itself into the water. I was conscious that I was tiring, but had no conception of the passage of time. It could have been twenty minutes or it might have been hours that I’d been wrapped in this furious concentration, impervious to everything except this Problem I was working on. Nothing else existed, or could exist until I was through with it.

I stumbled into an open space and realized I had reached the camp-ground. I swung left, located the road, and in another minute was standing beside the station wagon. The moves remaining in the Problem were dwindling rapidly now, being checked off one by one. I fished the keys from the pocket of my jacket and unlocked the door. Grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment, I hurried out to where I had hidden the can of gasoline and refueled the car. I replaced the registration certificate. Lifting out the suitcase, stripped off the jacket and wet shorts, and dressed in the slacks and sports shirt I’d had on before.

Like an operating team making a sponge count, I spread out the wet clothes and checked to be sure I hadn’t lost anything. It was all there—shirt, tie, socks, trousers, cuff-links, lighter, pocket-knife, wallet, bogus credentials, the sodden remains of the warrant, the brown paper bag containing the ten dollar bills, and even the drowned and mushy package of cigarettes in my shirt. I tossed the paper bag in the suitcase, and put the wallet, knife, and lighter in the pockets of my slacks. Rolling everything else back up in the shirt, I stowed the bundle in the rear of the car.

I took out the knife and pried the lids off the three pails. So oblivious was I to everything but the closing moves of the Problem I scarcely even recognized the paper bundles as money as I hurriedly transferred them to the suitcase. When the pails were empty I put the jacket in the bag on top of the bundles, closed the bag, and stowed it in the car alongside the wet clothes, pulling the blankets and the kapok life-belts over it. Picking up the flashlight and the three pails, I walked back to the edge of the water. I sailed the lids out into it. Then I filled the three pails with water so they would sink, and threw them as far as I could out into the lake. I turned the light on my watch. It was waterproof, and still running after its two immersions in the lake.

It was eight seventeen. The Problem was solved, and all I had to do was go home. I switched off the light and stood there for a moment as the tenseness uncoiled along my nerves. It had been a rough assignment with tremendous pressure and no margin for error, but I hadn’t missed a move. I knew that. It was perfect.

Then, suddenly, I became conscious that something had changed. I turned my head with a puzzled frown, wondering what it was. I hadn’t heard anything; all about me was the vast silence of the swamp.

Wait. That was it! It was the silence itself. All this time I had been listening to the thin, faraway drone of the outboard motor without consciously hearing it, and now it had stopped. The motor had run out of fuel at last.

I fought it, but the concentration was all gone now and it was too terrible and too graphic to be denied. It was as if he hadn’t died an hour ago, but right now—at this exact instant as the motor made its final revolution and became quiet at last and all movement and life and sound were gone forever from that dark and brooding channel before his cabin.

“Are you all right, Mr. Ward?”

It all came up then. I whirled and fell to my knees with my hands in the edge of the water and made a horrible retching sound as I heaved and suffocated with the sting of vomit in my nostrils. When I was wrung out and weak I moved a little and washed my face, and then lay back on the ground, still shaking.

Don’t be so damned dramatic, I told myself coldly. You knew beforehand it wasn’t going to be any picnic, didn’t you? You’re not that stupid.

But there wasn’t any way I could have known he was going to say that. He just didn’t know whether I could swim or not, and he wanted to help me.

After a while, when some of my strength returned, I went back to the station wagon and drove out of the bottom.

I had only two gallons of gasoline. Trying to get all the way home on that would be too risky, and there probably wouldn’t be anything open at Hampstead, so I drove back to Exeter and filled up. It was a few minutes past ten when I got home, fervently glad I had the place all to myself.

People were still up in several nearby houses. I drove on into the garage and closed the overhead door. There was a smaller side door that faced the kitchen porch. I went around to the front of the house and let myself in. I turned on a light in the kitchen, drew the curtains, and brought the suitcase and bundle of clothes in through the back.

Turning on the oven in the kitchen range, I spread the wet trousers and the the on the back of a chair before it. The shirt was hopelessly stained with the mushy cigarettes. It would never do to put it in the laundry; according to the best traditions of the mystery story, employees of laundries spent ninety per cent of their time searching for evidence of crimes. Well, I knew several ways to circumvent these sterling but over zealous citizens. I dumped the cigarettes into the sink, rinsed out as much of the stain as possible, and tore off the buttons, which I threw in the refuse can, the one in the house. Then I tore the shirt into handy-sized polishing cloths, saturated them with some of Reba’s floor wax, and threw them in the garbage can behind the house.

I went upstairs to the bathroom. With a pair of kitchen shears I cut the black identification folder into scraps and flushed it down the john. The soggy warrant followed it, and then the drowned cigarettes. I took off my shoes and put them on shoe trees to dry naturally in the closet. I put the hat away. Donning a pair of slippers and combing my hair, I went back downstairs and turned the trousers and tie before the oven. When they began to feel merely damp, I broke out Reba’s ironing board and electric iron and pressed them carefully. I slid the trousers neatly on to a hanger, added the jacket, and went back to the bedroom. I put the suit away where it had been and hung the tie back on the rack. I was the only living person who knew Special Agent Ward had ever existed, and now the last trace of him was gone.

I’d saved the best part until last. Taking the suitcase, I went downstairs to the den, drew the curtains over the small windows, and switched on the reading lamp beside the big chair. I dragged over my trunk and emptied it of the accumulation of books and papers and old clothes I’d never quite got around to throwing away. Then I hunted up a pad and pencil and opened the suitcase.

I piled it on the floor first, separated into individual stacks of hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, and fives, writing down the amounts printed on the bands and hoping Cliffords had been correct in his count. He hadn’t, but it was even better. The total when I added it came to $103,500. I added the $2,800 still in the paper bag.

That made a grand total of $107,300. I stared at it and whistled softly. It was all mine,
and nobody on earth knew I had it.
I wondered if anybody else in all history had ever pulled off a coup this size entirely alone and without even the suspicion of one other human being. When you stopped to examine it, the thing must be without parallel. It wasn’t solely that there was no reason anyone should suspect I had it; there wasn’t even anybody to
miss
it. That was what made it fantastic. There was absolutely no link between Haig and Cliffords, and none between Cliffords and me, and both Haig and Cliffords were dead. . . .

If only he had run.
I wanted him to! That’s the way I meant it.

I fought down the sick spasm. It passed in a moment. There would be others, plenty of them, but they would pass too. Time didn’t wound all heels; it was still the other way around. The only saving grace of cliches was that they were true. It would never go away, of course, but you could live with it if you were being paid enough according to your individual sense of values. Mine, perhaps, would raise more than one eyebrow among the Good Housekeeping crowd, but then I wasn’t asking them to live by them; I was merely doing so myself.

I got up to find cigarettes and came back to stare at the pile of money again, excitedly making plans. I’d hold on here for another six months. By that time they would have given up in this area and stopped watching it. Let’s see, that would be in February. I’d take it to Florida and put it in several safe deposit boxes. Cash—that is, currency—was always unusual in any kind of business transaction and likely to attract attention, so I would open several scattered checking accounts, add to them gradually, and eventually consolidate them. I’d lie low until mid-summer, at the very bottom of the season, studying the west coast and the Keys for a good location to buy into a marina in a small way or start one of my own. And once I had a business established it would be easy to convert increasing amounts of currency into investments or use it to enlarge the operation. It was just a matter of going slowly.

I put it into the bottom of the trunk and covered it with the old clothing I’d taken out—ski things I hadn’t used for years, a dinner jacket, a uniform, and a couple of double-breasted suits. It would be safe here. They never went into my things, and I had the only key, anyway. I replaced the books and papers, locked the trunk and moved it back against the wall. The key I put into my wallet.

I went back up to the kitchen, made a sandwich, and opened a can of beer. Carrying them into the living-room, I loaded the gramophone with arias from
Eugene Onegin
and
Boris Godunov.
The house was too quiet. After a while I switched it off and went upstairs. I took a shower and lay down naked on the bed. Her note was still pinned to the pillow. I crumpled it and threw it on the dresser, wishing she would come back. A fight would be better than this intense silence. I switched off the light. The moon had come up now and its soft light was slanting in under the honeysuckle about the window.

It hit me without warning. I rolled my face down into the pillow and locked my arms around it, shaking and sick and trying not to make any sound. The picture was a long time going away. There was something stark and forever lost and terrible about it, the boat lying motionless there in the moonlight between the dark walls of the trees as if it were waiting for him to come back and get it.

I sat up and lit a cigarette. It was all right. Conscience was no avenging lion; it was a jackal. It circled you like any other carrion-eating vermin, knowing it had no chance when you were on guard and waiting for the precise moment you were waking up or going to sleep. A couple of bad moments a day were no exorbitant price to pay tor a hundred thousand dollars. Fade, brother. We’ve done this routine before, and I always outlasted you. Remember?

I awoke once during the night, drenched with sweat and tangled in the sheet as if I had been threshing wildly about. In the morning, when my eyes first opened to the gray coolness of dawn, it was a minute or two before it came back, and when it did it was with a rush of freezing and overwhelming terror. They would catch me; I’d go to the electric chair. Then reason took hold again and it disappeared.

Catch me? There wasn’t a chance in the world. How could they? It was absolutely impregnable from every angle. In the first place, Cliffords had merely drowned. An autopsy would prove that, and an examination of his boat would tell them how it happened. And, secondly, I didn’t even know him, and had never been to his place.

I shaved and dressed and drove downtown for some breakfast. While I was sitting at the counter in Joey’s eating half a melon, Ramsey came in and sat down two stools away.

He nodded and smiled. “How are you tins morning, Mr. Godwin?”

”Fine, thanks,” I said. “are you having any luck?” It was a waste of rime, I knew, even if I weren’t already aware he wasn’t having any luck. None of them would tell you what day it was.

Hmmmm, not much,” he replied. He gave his order to the waitress. Then he looked around at me again. “How is the fishing in this area? I understand you’re quite an authority.”

“I know it pretty well,” I said. “It’s part of the job, and then I fish a lot myself. You thinking of trying it?”

“I thought I might, when my vacation comes up. What do you think of Sumner Lake?”

I took a sip of my coffee. “Well, it’s usually a good bet.”

“Have you been up there recently?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just a few days ago, in fact. For once, though, it let me down. August is a bad month.”

“Oh? Well, I was thinking of early October. Thanks a lot. If I do make it, I’ll stop by and talk to you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Any time. Be glad to help.”

The canteloup tasted like asbestos pipe-insulation, but I went ahead and forced it down. I paid the bill and drove over to the store. What was he after, anyway? Was he checking on me? For some reason I couldn’t determine, I suddenly thought of that Russian policeman—what was his name?— who haunted Raskolnikov at every turn.

Nuts, it was merely a coincidence. He just happened to want to go fishing; that’s all.

Otis had already opened up and was sweeping down the showroom. He came over and leaned the broom against the showcase to light a cigarette.

“Little trick I picked up in the army,” he said. “You watch till you see some brass coming and then grab a broom and sweep like hell.”

“Anything happen yesterday?” I asked. “Anybody force his way in and buy something before you could stop him?”

“Oh, sure. Matter of fact, I kept the place open till you were clear out of sight. Sold a five-horse motor. For cash. It’s in the safe.”

“Good,” I said. My heart wasn’t in it this morning.

Otis was silent for a moment. He started to turn away, but then appeared to change his mind about it. He balanced the broom on his foot, watching it moodily.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I almost forgot. That guy Nunn called up a couple of hours after you’d left.”

“Oh?”

He nodded, still looking at the broom. “Wanted to talk to you, but I told him you’d gone for the rest of the day. So then he wanted to know where.”

“What was on his mind?” I asked. I didn’t like this much.

“He was crying about the job we did on his motors, as near as I could tell. I tried to get him to let me in on what he thought was the matter with ’em, but he just said he jumped you about ’em when you stayed out there last week.”

I looked at him quickly. He was still staring down at the broom. Well, there was Sunday. I could tell him that was when I’d been out there. Then I realized it was no use. Otis knew I’d lied about Sumner Lake. But why was he trying to tell me?

I made no reply. There appeared to be a shortage at the moment.

“Uh, boss,” he went on hesitantly, “about that twelve dollars a week you pay me. How much of that would you say was for personal advice?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You break it down.”

“Well, look. I won a prize once for minding my own business. A whole new bedroom slipper—I think it was the left one. You say the word and I’ll keep right on after the other one.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Spill it.”

“This Nunn is bad news. Believe me, boss. He’s hairy as hell. This is a little out of my line, but I just figured you might not know about him. He killed four men while he was in the Sheriff’s office over there

“Oh,” I said. I saw it now. Otis thought I was making a play for her. I sighed softly in relief. Well, it would look that way. We’d been here alone when she came for the motors, and then I’d taken off right after her. And she’d been calling here for me.

“I guess that’s about all,” he said. “No offense intended.”

“Of course not,” I replied. “Thanks.”

“Maybe I just got used to you. If something happens to you, I got to go looking around for some other slave-driving skinflint to exploit me.”

“I’d never forgive myself,” I agreed. I felt a lot better. “Suppose you fell into some evil dive where they expected you to work?”

“Sure,” he replied. You could see he was relieved, and glad to be through with it. “Like I was telling the old lady just this morning. Where else they got a pension plan that you can retire and live free in the dog pound as soon as you’re a hundred and five? I get this lump in my throat every time I think about it.. . .”

We had it all settled without getting weepy about it. I was to stay out of the sack with Mrs. Nunn. He went back to sweeping. I checked yesterday’s receipts, made up the deposit, and locked it in the safe. He’d given me a scare there for a moment, but everything was fine. I knew, though, that I was never going to feel entirely at ease until I could clear out of here. Utterly harmless things would be forever making me jumpy when I read the wrong meaning into them. It’d happened twice so far this morning, and it wasn’t nine o”clock. You had to be on guard all the time to keep from giving yourself away. More than one badly wanted man had been picked up by a cop who’d meant to do nothing more than give him a parking ticket.

Fortunately, business was good, so I didn’t have too much time on my hands. At ten I went over and made the bank deposit and had a cup of coffee. When I returned a local car salesman came in to talk about boats and try to sell me a new station wagon.

I was up front alone just after eleven when the telephone rang. Otis looked out the door of the shop, but went back when he saw I was going to answer.

As soon as I picked up the receiver I was glad he had. It was Jewel Nunn.

“Oh, how are you?” I asked, wishing she’d stop this. Being killed by George Nunn would be carrying an alibi too far.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“Well, fairly so.” If she thought I was going to drive down to Hampstead she was crazy. “You running errands again this morning?”

“No . . . I mean, nothing important. I just thought I’d give you a ring while I was here at the drug store. There was something I wanted to tell you. . . .”

“Sure,” I said. “Fire away.”

“I don’t think I ought to over the phone.”

“Hey,” I protested, “that’s not fair, getting my curiosity all aroused. I wish I could get away, but I just don’t see. . . .”

“Well, it’s not real important, anyway,” she said. “It’s just about Mr. Cliffords. You remember . . .”