Girl Out Back (15 page)

I thought swiftly. She probably wouldn’t leave without the usual flotsam and sentimental rubbish women always clung to with such mulish perversity. At least, not without an argument that would take longer than going after them.

“You’re sure he’s up the lake?” I asked. “There’s no use having a nasty scene or maybe a fight.”

She nodded. “He’s fishing with some man. It’ll only take me a few minutes to pack what I want to take. Do you want me to meet you here?”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“From now on,” I said, “you go nowhere without me, you tawny-haired angel.” At least, not till we got out of this country. “And, besides, we could leave your car there.”

“All right,” she said.

She drove fast. I stayed close behind her. We met no one at all on the road, but after we made the turn-off and were down in the bottom almost to the camp we had to pull over for a car that was coming out. There was a man in it alone, and he wore a long-visored fishing cap. I frowned, not caring much for it. But she should know whether or not that was the man he was guiding, and she continued on. I followed.

We came around the last bend and into the clearing. It was quiet and deserted except for a late model Ford parked near the cabins. She stopped, and I turned around so I’d be headed out toward the highway.

When we got out I nodded toward the Ford. “Is that his car? The man he’s fishing with?”

She looked doubtful. “I’m not sure. There were two different men, and one of them went out alone. I don’t remember which was which.”

“Well, we’re here. Let’s get started.”

We walked over to the lunch-room. It was open, except for the screen door.

“I locked up when I left,” she said.

Well, it couldn’t be helped. If we ran into him, it was going to be a lot more awkward on account of my being with her, but that was the way it bounced. I had to be sure she hadn’t talked to anybody. I opened the screen and we went in. The room was empty. He could be in back, I thought, but presumably he would have heard us by this time and come out. She hesitated, and I knew she didn’t like the idea of going in to see, but I couldn’t help her there. It was bad enough this way, but if he came in and found the two of us in their bedroom the whole thing was apt to turn hairy in large quantities.

He didn’t strike me at all as the well-we-might-as-well-be-civilized type.

“It’s so quiet,” she said.

I’d noticed that, and usually liked more noise myself. I was about to say something when the screen door opened quietly behind us and he came in. God alone knew where he’d been. Under the best of circumstances his face wasn’t anything you’d need in your dreams unless you wanted to grate a coconut, but now there was a frozen savagery about it I didn’t like at all.

He didn’t say anything. He leaned against the door jamb and looked dangerous. He was good at it.

She was behind me. “I’m leaving, George,” she said.

Nothing moved except his lips. “You figure you’ll be better off with glamor-boy here?

“I’m going away,” she said. “That’s the only thing that matters, isn’t it?”

“Get a place with a back door,” he said. “So you can both keep in practice.”

“Look, Nunn,” I broke in. “There hasn’t been . . .”

“Shut up,” he said. I’ll get to you in a minute.”

“Go pack your bag,” I told her. “You’ve told him you’re leaving. That’s all that’s necessary.”

She turned and went through the doorway behind the counter. He started to come toward me. I was blocking his way at the opening between the counter and showcase.

“She’s afraid of you,” I said. “Stay out of there and leave her alone.”

I could see he didn’t have a gun. He wore nothing except a pair of dungarees and a sweaty T-shirt. He looked like something carved out of knotty wood.

“You forget whose place this is?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But why don’t you stop acting like an idiot. All she’s doing is leaving. It happens every day.”

“Yeah. It does with you around, sport.”

He made no move to swing at me, or go past. Instead he stepped down the counter and leaned over it. When he straightened he had a hunting knife in his hand. It had a thin and wicked blade about eight inches long.

He started back toward me. “You want to see what a man looks like standing in his own guts?”

He meant it. He wasn’t the bluffing kind. I backed up a step. There was nothing under the counter or in the showcase I could hold him off with. I didn’t like it at all any more. About one more step backward and I’d be in that hallway on the other side of the door, and in the close quarters there I was going to have knife in me somewhere no matter what I did.

Then something slid past my side, just under my right arm. It was a .45 automatic. I grabbed it from her hand and leveled it at him. Instead of stopping, he lunged at me, and I knew the chamber wasn’t armed. It was his gun, of course, and if she had armed it we’d have heard her. There wasn’t time. I swung it at the side of his head and was lucky enough to connect. He fell into me like a bum tackle, rolled off, and fell to the floor. She cried out behind me.

“Get back,” I snapped at her.

Instead, she came on past me, stepped over his legs, and went around the counter. She sat down on one of the stools and put her face down in her arms. She was just weak and sick.

I bent over him and felt his head where the trickle of blood showed on his scalp above the left ear. There was no fracture. He groaned and stirred his legs. I picked up the knife and tossed it back on the shelf under the counter. Straightening up, I pulled the slide of the gun back to arm it. A cartridge flew out. I looked down at him and shook my head. He was a rough type. It took guts to charge a gun you knew was ready to shoot.

“He have any more guns around here?” I asked.

She sat up. Her face was pale and very still. I supposed as a way to break up house-keeping in the old urbane manner this could stand a little polishing. I’d had enough of it myself; I’d never cared much for these muscle routines.

“Two,” she said. “A rifle and a shotgun.”

“Maybe you’d better bring ’em out.”

They were a 30.30 and a Model 12 shotgun. I went down and threw them in the lake off the end of the float. It was a shame to treat good guns like that, but this thing was sour now for fair. They’d probably have been able to kiss it off with nothing but a double order of frozen silence all around if she’d been alone; but after that humiliation he’d kill either or both of us if he could.

I went back. She was coming out the screen door with her overnight bag. When I looked inside he was moving. He had his head and shoulders against the wall and was trying to inch his way up. A bright thread of blood ran down the corded neck and into his T-shirt. He looked at me, but said nothing. I turned and went out. She was putting her bag in the car. I looked back at him before I let the screen door slam, and he was on his feet, weakly clutching the end of the counter and vomiting.

I was getting behind the wheel when I heard the door slam again. He walked unsteadily toward us as I reached for the starter, and stopped about ten feet away, staring at both of us.

It didn’t seem to be a situation that called for a great deal in the way of conversation. I pressed the starter and we drove on out of the bottom.

I stopped once and threw the .45 out into the timber at the side of the road.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to be that messy.”

“It’s all right,” she said. She was looking a little better now, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Neither did I.

I thought swiftly as I gunned the car back toward Hampstead and the highway. It has to be done just right now, and in as natural a way as possible. If we were running away together, we wouldn’t flaunt the fact all over town. We’d meet somewhere and simply go, knowing it would be a matter of public knowledge within hours, anyway. And I could not let her talk to anybody, anybody at all under any circumstances, until we were away from here. The only thing to do was take her home and leave her there while I cashed the check and made the last trip to the shop.

She didn’t have to be seen going in. The three houses along that street were old ones that went in for privacy. They were on big lots, heavily planted, with a fenced alley at the rear. I could take her in that way. No, I thought. Why be silly about it? Overdoing the cloak-and-dagger would be carrying it too far in the other direction. We’d merely drive right into the garage and go out through the side door and into the kitchen. It was only four or five steps, and could be seen only from the house directly across the street. If Mrs. Macklin happened to be looking out the window at just that moment, who cared? We were merely being clandestine, not furtive. It’d give her a chance to sound “Boots and Saddles” after we were gone, and harry on the pack.

I made the turn on to the highway. Jewel put a hand on mine on the steering wheel and moved a little closer. She glanced up and smiled faintly. “It won’t take long, will it, Barney? I mean, before we can start?”

”No,” I said. “An hour or two, at the most. You won’t mind waiting for me at the house, will you?”

She shook her head. “That will be all right.”

I swung off the main drag in the outskirts of town and circled to get on Minden at the outer end. The house was the second from the corner on Underhill, a short side street that intersected it. I made the turn into Underhill, and then swung into the driveway. The garage door was open. I went on in.

Patting her on the hand, I said, “Sit tight for just a minute.”

I pulled down the garage door and let myself in at the front of the house. Going on through, I unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out to the garage again. She had already got out and was standing there with her bag. I took it and followed her in.

The curtains were drawn in the kitchen and the Venetian blinds closed in the dining- and living-rooms. We went on through to the living-room and I put down her bag.

She dropped her purse on the coffee table and turned. I caught her to me and kissed the upraised lips and closed eyes and then whispered rapturously against her ear, “Darling, darling; it won t be long,” at the same time reminding myself she probably wouldn’t want to get very sweaty about it here, under the circumstances, and that there was a lot to be done.

She surrendered to it for an instant, and then began pushing me away, breathless and confused but radiantly happy. “No, Barney. No. Let’s hurry and get started.”

“All right, sweet,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

She sat down on the sofa near the phonograph and took a cigarette from her bag. I lit it for her. She smiled and said, “It’s so wonderful it’s like a dream.”

I turned toward the stairs, and then stopped, struck by an odd thought.

“Look,” I asked, “how did you know she was gone?”

She smilingly shook her head at me. “It was in the paper, silly. Don’t you ever look at it?”

“Oh,” I said. I went on up the stairs. Well, there was that to be said for having a rich wife; you could always read the paper and find out what she was doing. I grabbed two of my suitcases from the hall closet, took them into the bedroom, and began throwing clothes into them. It required less than a minute to see I was never going to get more than a quarter of my personal gear into them. And I needed the other bag for the money; it was the only one to which I hadn’t lost the key.

Well, why not ship the trunk? I could put the money in that other bag, throw away most of the useless rubbish that was stored in it now, and pack it with things I wanted to take. I could leave it on the kitchen porch and phone to have it picked up and forwarded collect care Railway Express in Miami. Right. That was it.

I picked up the other bag from the closet and hurried down the stairs. She was still on the sofa. I made the circle sign with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and said, “I’m gaining on it,” as I hurried on toward the kitchen. She looked up and smiled, but remained where she was.

Down in the den, I pulled the trunk away from the wall and unlocked it. Just as I was about to throw the first of the stuff out, I looked at my watch. I whistled. It was two twenty. The bank closed in ten minutes. And I had to cash that check. Sure, I had over a hundred thousand dollars right here under my hand; but how would it look to the F.B.I., in case they investigated, if I ran off like this without bothering to withdraw any of the over fifteen hundred I had in my personal current account? I couldn’t speak for them, but I knew it would look damned suspicious to me.

I slammed the trunk shut and hurried back up the stairs. “Have to get to the bank before it closes,” I called out to her from the door of the dining-room. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, sweet.”

She smiled and waved. “Please hurry, darling.”

I went out the kitchen door and backed the car out of the garage. Luck was with me and I found a parking place right across the street from the bank.

I made a quick calculation of my balance and wrote out a check for $1,540. Arthur Pressler gave it to me in fifties and twenties, looked up once as if to ask me why I was withdrawing my account, and then decided it wasn’t efficient to indulge in such human foibles as curiosity. I glanced at my watch and stopped in Joey’s for a quick cup of coffee. He waited on me himself.

He was a fat and humorous man with six or seven long hairs combed diagonally across a head as slick and shiny on top as a steel roller bearing, and he was the best wing shot I have ever seen. I’d hunted quail with him a lot.

“Hey, Barney,” he asked genially, “what’s with you and these F.B.I, jokers?”

I just saved spilling the coffee. “Why?”

“A quiet type named Ramsey. He’s been in here twice pumping me about you. Where you came from, how long you been here, all that routine. You applied for a Federal job?”

“Oh,” I said. “Something like that. It’s indefinite yet.”

“Well, you’re in, boy. With the send-off I gave you, you can have Hoover’s job. You think that boy’s not honest, I said, there’s been a paved street in front of his house for two years now, and the last time I looked it was still there. . . .”

“You’re a real pal,” I said. I put a dime on the counter and went out, feeling uneasy for no reason I could pin down. Ramsey didn’t have anything to work on. That’s the reason he was poking around here asking silly questions. He was outside in the cold; the moat was filled and the drawbridge was up. But still I didn’t like it; he made me nervous with that knack he had of seeming to be there at my elbow every time I turned around, as if ubiquity were an end in itself. What was the name of that Russian detective in
Crime and Punishment?
Rock. Something like rock.

I shrugged it off; that was some private eye. Private eyes always had virile names like Rock and Mike. That way you could tell how tough they were.

I drove over to the store. It was twenty to three. When I went in, Otis was out in the showroom where he could keep an eye on the front door, rubbing down the wax on a runabout hull. He saw me and went on back to the shop. I looked around, wondering why I had come back; there wasn’t anything I had to do here. Otis had a key; he’d open it in the morning, and when I didn’t show up he’d call his boy to come in. They’d keep it going until she came back from wherever she was and whatever she was doing; in fact, he could probably take over and run it for her. He knew the business, and he was so honest Diogenes could have put out his lantern and found him in the dark. Maybe he didn’t know how to get out and keep a fire burning under those prospects, or how to work the publicity angles so they’d talk about you and know where you were, but he’d do a good solid job of running a business for her. . . . I stopped. What the hell did I care what she did with the place? She could grind it up for cat food.

I heard tires on the gravel outside, and looked around. Ramsey was getting out of his car with his briefcase in his hand. Maybe there are really several of him, I thought; there might be a Ramsey-duplicating machine somewhere that somebody’d forgotten to turn off. Well, in about another hour he could start looking around for somebody else to haunt.

He came in. “Good afternoon, Mr. Godwin,” he said in that courteous and unhurried way he had.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Ramsey.” We should have mint juleps and goatees.

“I was hoping I’d catch you in.”

Now what had he meant by that! Was he implying I did an inordinate amount of running around, or that he thought I was trying to dodge him?

“I’d like to take a few more minutes of your time, if you’re not too busy.”

“Certainly,” I said. We went back to the office and I sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. He took the one in front of it and opened the briefcase.

“I hate to keep interfering with your work all the rime,” he said. “But I still have hope we may eventually stumble on to a lead as to who spent that twenty-dollar bill here. The mystifying thing is that just one should show up. There should have been more, somewhere in this area.”

I frowned. “The only thing I can see is that he must have been a transient.” I wondered what the devil had become of those I’d put on the bus. There should have been some action up there by this time, you’d think.

He nodded. “Yes, that’s a possibility, of course. Among others.”

I read you, Mr. Ramsey. This is the needle. Otherwise you wouldn’t have told me there were no others; the F.B.I, doesn’t go around throwing out information like some neighborhood gossip. You mean there should have been others if the person passing it hadn’t been warned the F.B.I, was after him.

“Well,” I said hopefully, “can you think of any new approach? I’ve racked my brains. . . .”

No. Except that I wanted to pass along to you the request we’re making of all the merchants in the area, and that is to be on the lookout for any currency, new or old, that appears to be stained in an unusual manner. . . .”

“Stained?”

He nodded. “A reddish-brown discoloration. Similar to rust stains. If you come across any, I’d appreciate your calling us immediately and making a note of who gave it to you.”

“Sure. Of course,” I said. “Anything else?”

He smiled. “Just some more pictures, if you can spare the time.”

He must have had fifty or more. They were just props, I was pretty sure, but I went through them carefully in spite of the fact I was impatient to get away. Haig was there again.

“I have a vague impression I’ve seen that one somewhere,” I said. “But I don’t know where, or when.”

He nodded. “I see. Lately, do you think?”

“No. I’m not even sure I have seen him, but if I did it must have been a long time ago.”

He put them back in the briefcase and stood up, holding out his hand. “I want to thank you again for your co-operation, Mr. Godwin. We appreciate it.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I wish I could be of more help.” We shook hands and I followed him out to the front door.

He stopped and turned just before he went out. “I’m still hoping to get away for that fishing trip in October,” he said. “What do you think of Javier Lake?”

I managed to keep my face expressionless. “Well, I haven’t fished it a great deal myself,” I said. “But they say it’s usually pretty good, especially after the water starts to turn cool.”

He nodded. “Well, thanks a lot.”

He drove off. I remained rooted there by the showcase, thinking swiftly. Maybe I was playing right into their hands. Suppose they suspected me, for some reason, but knew they were going to have a hard time digging up any proof? Wouldn’t they try to scare me into making a break, knowing I’d have the stuff with me and that they’d merely have to search the car? I had to leave it here. Hide it somewhere; even bury it again. I could come back for it six months or a year from now, when the heat was gone. It wouldn’t take that long, actually; as soon as they were convinced she was the only thing I’d been after. . .

I stopped. If they searched the car,
she’d
be in it.
You mean you’re looking for Mr. Haig’s money? Why, I thought you got that when you arrested Mr. Cliffords.
Oh, sweet Jesus.

All right, I had her. Now what was I going to do with her? Put her on a bus, at least until Sanport? I looked at my watch. There was one through in about twenty minutes. But she might talk to somebody, some local. Which was the less risky? Wait. . . . If she weren’t with me, what were they supposed to think I was running for? No. She had to go in the car with me. That was the only way. Actually, the chances were that if they did stop me they wouldn’t even say what they were after. They’d just look.

But at any rate, I had to get that money disposed of before we left. I could find something waterproof at the house to put it in, and take it out in the country somewhere. I’d tell her I had to do one more errand. She could wait at the house. But I had to get started. Was I going to stand here all day?

I called out to Otis. He stuck his head out the door at the rear. “I’m going home,” I said. “Probably won’t be back.” “Right,” he said.

I wished there was some way I could say good-bye to him, but there didn’t appear to be any under the circumstances. I went out. Just as I was getting in the car around at the side of the building I thought I heard the telephone ringing. I went on. He came running out the front door waving his arm as I drove off, but I looked straight ahead, pretending not to see. I didn’t have time to answer the phone. When I came to the street and was about to drive into it, I had to wait for a car coming from my left. It was a police car, one of those belonging to the Sheriff’s Department. It didn’t go past, however; it turned in, and stopped right alongside me.