Girl Out Back (16 page)

It was Grady Collins, the deputy who was stationed here in Wardlow. He was a stocky and pleasant-faced younger type of about twenty-five, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean war.

He pushed the white hat back on his head and grinned. “Hi, Barney. I was just headed for your place.”

“What’s on your mind, Grady?” I asked. Why didn’t some lab come up with a liquid cop-repellant you could rub on yourself?

“You don’t know a guy named Nunn, do you? George Nunn?”

What now? “Well, I’ve seen him once or twice. Why?”

Before he could answer, I heard somebody running across the gravel behind me, and looked back. It was Otis.

“Long distance call for you,” he said. “From Felton.”

As far as I knew, I didn’t know anybody in Felton. Nor want to.

“Tell the operator to transfer it home,” I said. “In five minutes or so. Thanks, Otis.” He turned and went back.

“What about this Nunn?” I asked Collins. If I ever got out of this place maybe I ought to take a vacation.

“I don’t know. He sounds Asiatic. Called up a little while ago with some goofy line of crap his wife’s with you and he wants her picked up so he can talk to her. Get her to come back.”

What was his angle in that? Oh. Trying to delay us until he could get hold of another gun and start looking for us.

“With me?” I said. “Where’d he call from? Some opium den?”

Collins grinned and shook his head. “You got me, pal. From that camp of his, I guess. Anyway, you haven’t seen her, have you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s what I told the meat-head. Also that I couldn’t pick her up, anyway, unless he came in and swore out a complaint. If he calls back, I”ll tell him to go sleep it off. Brother, this job.”

“Well, I’ll see you,” I said.

He lifted a hand and grinned. “See you, Barney.”

I hit the light green crossing Main and was home in two minutes or less. I put the car in the garage, pulled down the overhead door, and started in the front of the house. Just as I was going up the steps I remembered I hadn’t called the express company. Well, I’d do that now. God, would I ever get away from here? And what was I going to pack that money in? It had to be something waterproof. And I’d have to come up with something to tell her, some new errand.

I stepped into the living-room, and looked around in surprise. She wasn’t there. “Jewel,” I called.

There was no answer. Maybe she’d gone upstairs to the bathroom. I called again, a little louder, and received only silence in reply. There were four cigarettes, smeared with lipstick, in the ash-tray she had been using. I turned toward the dining-room. There was her overnight bag, lying on its side under the edge of the table. I stepped quickly over and looked in.

She wasn’t there, but two of the chain were overturned. And near them lay one of her shoes.

I began to run then. I took the stairs three at a time and made the turn into the bedroom so fast I almost lost my balance and crashed into the wall. She was on the bed, lying face up with most of her clothes torn off and the cord of my electric razor around her throat. I took one look at her and headed for the bathroom. I fell to my knees in front of the John and tried not to be sick.

The telephone began ringing downstairs. It went on and on.

My arms shook as if with a bad chill as I braced myself against the wall. I had to get out of there, to some place where I could think. Away from her. I kept seeing her, even behind me and with my eyes closed.

The police, I thought. I had to call the police so they could catch the unspeakable son of a bitch and hang him before he could get out of the country. The phone went on ringing. Well, maybe it would stop some day. I got up unsteadily, went through the bedroom without looking at her, and started down the stairs.

It struck me then. Wasn’t I overdoing the righteous indignation just a little, and being a trifle dramatic? It hadn’t been three hours since I’d been trying to think of some way. . . . I closed my eyes and shuddered. Good God, no. Not like that. Nor any way. I hadn’t, had I?

Hang
him? Him?
I stopped dead.

They’d hang me. She was strangled in my bedroom with the cord of my electric razor while my wife was away. That torn clothing— And I had just five minutes ago told the police I hadn’t seen her. Right after drawing fifteen hundred dollars from the bank so I could skip the country. Oh, they’d hang Nunn, all right. I’d be lucky if they didn’t hand him a gun and tell him to shoot me.

I was at the foot of the stairs. The telephone went on ringing. Maybe if I answered it, it would stop, but I wasn’t sure. I picked it up.

“Mr. Godwin?” a bright female voice asked. “We have a long-distance call from Felton.”

“I don’t know anybody in Fel . . .”

“Barney, darling!” It was Jessica. “Oh, it’s good to hear your voice again.

I leaned against the wall. “Where . . .?” I began, and then stopped as it occurred to me in a great burst of deductive reasoning that if she were calling from Felton that must be where she was.

“How are you?” I asked stupidly.

“Just fine, dear. And dying to see you. I’m on my way home now, and I’ll be there in about two hours. I stopped here for a cup of coffee, and I just thought I’d call and let you know.”

“You’ll be here in about two hours?” I could absorb practically anything if it were repeated two or three times. “Good. That’s fine.”

“You lamb. You great, big, beautiful, woolly lamb you. I’ll run now, honey, and be on my way. See you soon.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

I hung up. A very white gesture, I thought. After two years of accusing me of chasing everything in this end of the State that didn’t shave twice a day, she wanted to give me enough advance notice to clear the place of women if I had any here, so there wouldn’t be a fight when she got home. That was really decent. Well, for once she was right. There was one here.

It was all piling up too fast for me. I stood still for a minute with my face in my hands and tried to think. Did I have any chance at all of convincing them? I didn’t have a scratch on me. But, then, neither would Nunn. He’d hit her first and knocked her out, down here in the dining-room, and then after he’d strangled her he faked the assault. It would just be my word against his. I could show them the guns in the lake, and that lump on his head. But what would that really prove? Nothing, except that we’d had a fight. It wouldn’t count for much against the fact he had called the police and tried to get them to pick her up so he could talk to her and try to get her to come home. And that I had told the police, after she was already dead in my bedroom, that I hadn’t seen her.

I considered that. It was neat, when you thought of it. I’d under-estimated him all along, dismissing him as a muscle-brained tough boy, and he’d got me. He knew I’d deny knowing where she was, so I could hang myself. He’d probably called them from right here.

Well, he hadn’t quite got me yet. I could get her out of here; it could be done but it wasn’t going to be easy, not being able to wait until dark. I had less than two hours. I snapped out of it and ran toward the stairs. It took an effort to go back in that room. The nausea was working on me again, but I had to get the razor cord off her throat. It had been wrapped around twice and then tied in back. I had to look at her face once. Well, she was unconscious, I thought. Maybe that helped; I didn’t know.

I worked the cord free and put it back in the bathroom. Going out in the hall, I took a blanket from the linen closet. I spread it on the floor beside the bed and lifted her down on to it. There was no rigidity at all yet, and she was hard to handle. I pulled the torn dress down to cover her with the little dignity there was left to her, and cast about for her underclothes. She still had on the bra, and I found the panties shoved into the rumpled folds of the bedspread. I remembered she hadn’t worn stockings, so there would be no suspender belt. There should be one shoe up here, however. I found it under the bed.

Going downstairs, I picked up the shoe that was in the dining-room and got a roll of heavy cord from a drawer in the kitchen. I was recovering now, and thinking quite clearly. On the way back I stopped in the living-room and picked up the four cigarette butts from the ash-tray, the ones that were smeared with lipstick. I flushed them down the toilet. Putting both shoes and her panties down beside her on the blanket, I folded it over her both ways and then folded the ends in. I knew that I was probably as guilty of the actual fact of her being dead as Nunn was, and while the sadism and brutality were all his, I still felt better after I didn’t have to look at her any more. I made several ties around her body with the cord, to hold the blanket in place.

Then I turned my attention to the bed. There’d been surprisingly little blood for a bad beating, but then he’d merely been trying to bruise and puff the face rather than cut it. There was one sizeable spot and two smaller ones on the bedspread, and in one place it had gone through both sheets. I took them all off, washed out the spots in the bathroom, and put them in Reba’s laundry bag. Getting new sheets and another spread from the linen closet. I remade the bed, trying to copy the way it had been tucked before.

I took out the two bags I’d packed and put them in the hall closet. The one down in my den didn’t matter. Jessica would be here long before I got back, but she wouldn’t go down there. I took a last look around. Everything was in order up here. Picking her up with considerable difficulty, I carried her down the stairs and out to the kitchen. I placed her near the door, went out, and closed it behind me.

I studied the distance. It was two steps across the kitchen porch, down two steps to the ground, and then three long strides into the side door of the garage. Situated as it was, with only trees to the rear and the house and garage covering the respective sides, it was exposed to view only from the street and Mrs. Macklin’s house directly across it. As I came back from the garage to the kitchen porch I shot a casual glance across at her windows. The drapes were open in the living-room windows and in two of upstairs bedrooms. She was probably home. The garage door was closed. There were no other cars parked in front, so there probably wasn’t any bridge game or catfight in progress. It was hard to tell just what Mrs. 20/20 Snellen would be doing this time of day.

Well, I could give her something to do. As I recalled the layout of her web, her telephone had two extensions, one in the central hallway and the other in the kitchen. Either would do. I went back inside the kitchen, but left the door unlatched.

I was going to have to take a chance on the street, but very few cars went by as a rule. It ended in a cul-de-sac at the end of the next block. I went into the living-room, looked up her number, and dialed it. It rang four or five times. The receiver clicked on the other end and when I heard her say, “Hello,” I put this one down and ran. Hoisting up Jewel Nunn’s body, I kicked open the door and went out and into the garage. No car went by. I was in the clear.

The end of the station wagon was already open. I put her in, doubled into as small a space as possible, and pulled the blankets and life-belts over her. I went back in the house, replaced the telephone handset, and brought out her overnight case. There was a short-handled gardening spade in the garage. I put it and her purse in under the blankets. Everything was set, except that I’d better leave a note. After she’d called me, it would look a little odd if I didn’t. I went back inside once more, scribbled out a few lines to the effect that a man who owed me eighty dollars on an old deal had called from Exeter that I could collect if I’d come after it, and left it on the coffee table. Of course, there would be a fight, anyway. That was news? But she wouldn’t have cause to suspect anything. Except that I was still the same miserable bastard she’d been married to for two years.

I locked the front and back doors, and swung up the door of the garage. Taking one last look into the back of the station wagon, I was satisfied with it. It was always full of some kind of camping gear and those old rumpled blankets and life-belts. I glanced at my watch. It was four twenty-five.

I got in and backed out of the garage. Somewhere off that road going into the northern end of Javier Lake, I thought. It would do as well as any. I tried not to think about her. Twenty-four was a lousy time to die. Oh, drop it. It never did any good. This world was a rough place to live in, unless you lived in it one day at a time and never thought of what was gone or what could have happened. You used up Today, threw it back over your shoulder, put your hand around a blind corner, and a little man put another one in it. Some fine morning you’d shove your hand around the corner and there’d be no little man. Just a seagull with a sense of humor. You couldn’t buck a system like that; you joined it.

I might make this stick, and I might not. The best thing would be to continue denying she was ever with me. Nobody could prove it, and Nunn’s word didn’t carry much weight. If I carried it off successfully I’d hang around another six months or a year before I tried to get away. She’d never tell anybody about Cliffords now.

I swung into Minden. It was only three blocks to the traffic light at Main. I saw I was going to hit it on the green, and speeded up a little, and then the career of Barney Godwin began to come apart like a cheap toy left out in the rain. I smelled the motor just a second before all the bearings began to go, but by that time I was already into the intersection and starting to turn. The clatter of connecting rods and burned-out mains rose to a crescendo, and then the end of a rod came out through the crankcase wall and I was through. The motor locked. tires skidded and made a short screeching sound as I came to a standstill in the middle of the intersection of Main and Minden with traffic piling up around me and horns beginning to blow.

There was a sort of horrible fascination about it, like watching a levee crumble and go out, or seeing an explosion in slow motion in a newsreel. You knew what the end result was going to be, and yet you sat and appraised the individual stages in the sequence of destruction. Pedestrians turned and stared, most of them people I knew. The light changed. More horns took up the outcry. I saw Grady Collins step off the curb and come toward me. He was grinning wryly and shaking his head.

“Barney, he said, “did you ever try putting oil in this heap?”

Then, before I could reply, he called to someone on the sidewalk before the café. “Hey, Gus. Run inside Joey’s there and call Manners. Tell him to bring his wrecker and get this clunk of Barney’s off the street.”

I got out. If there was anything unusual about my manner or expression he apparently didn’t notice it, so perhaps nothing showed. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, so I merely stood there. He grinned at me again, shook his head ruefully at the car, and began directing traffic around it.

The wrecker came and maneuvered into position. While his helper was hooking on and hoisting the front of the station wagon, Manners glanced briefly under the hood, whistled, and shook his head. Then he got down on hands and knees and peered at the bottom of the motor.

“Crankcase drain-plug is gone, Barney,” he said. “Somebody didn’t tighten it.”

Perhaps, I thought, it
was
news to him. He hadn’t had the benefit of my experience. I turned and studied the faces along the sidewalk, searching for Nunn. He probably wasn’t expecting it this soon, I thought; there was no way he could have known Jessica was coming home and that I d have to do it in daylight. No. Wait. There he was, near the middle of the block, peering owlishly at the spectacle while he weaved with a slightly exaggerated drunkenness. No doubt, I thought, it exceeded his fondest hopes.

“If it was me, Barney,” Manners said, “I’d just put in a rebuilt motor. What you think?”

“That sounds all right,” I said.

“I got a lot of work piled up, so it’ll be five or six days.”

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “No hurry at all.”

“Phone you an estimate tomorrow. See you, Barney.” He got in beside his helper and the twin units of Jewel Nunn’s catafalque began to move slowly down the street in the immemorial stance of mating quadrupeds. If only one person could cry, I thought, it wouldn’t be so terrible. But at least nobody laughed at her, and maybe that’s as close as you ever come to winning.

I went over on the sidewalk. Traffic was beginning to move normally now. Grady Collins waved at me and called out, “Come on, Barney. I’ll run you home.”

“Thanks,” I said. I crossed the street with the light, and just as I was climbing in the patrol car I saw Ramsey. He was standing on the corner in front of the bank staring thoughtfully at nothing.

Granite? I thought. Basalt? Shale? Gneiss? What the devil was it?

We went up Minden. The long gout of the spilled oil was there on the road, running from Main all the way back to Underhill.

“There’s where the drain-plug dropped out,” Grady said. “Right there. Funny thing to happen, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Just wasn’t tightened, and the motor vibration finally screwed it out.”

I nodded. He’d probably left it screwed in about a sixteenth of a turn. He couldn’t find anything to drain it into, and he knew if he let it pour out on the floor of the garage I’d see it when I backed off it.

Grady pulled into the drive so he could turn around. I got out. “Thanks a lot,” I said. He lifted a hand and backed out into the street. I let myself in. The note I’d left for Jessica was on the coffee table. I screwed it up and took it out into the kitchen to drop in the refuse can. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was a little after five. She should be home in half an hour or less.

I wondered when they’d be here. It could be before she was, or it might be an hour, or two, or even tomorrow. As far as I could see, it didn’t make much difference. Even thinking of flight was ridiculous.

Well, I could at least take one final look at it. Turning, I went down the stairs to the den. Then I stopped in the doorway and stared. The lid of the trunk was thrown back and all the old clothing was piled on the floor in front of it. But I’d locked it! I must have. No. I’d looked at my watch, saw I had only ten minutes to get to the bank, and had slammed it shut but I’d forgotten to take out the key.

It was stupid and careless, but that wasn’t it. The trunk’s being locked or unlocked didn’t make a bit of difference. He had to know it was there, and he simply couldn’t have known. He didn’t even know it existed. He hadn’t had a single contact with the thing from beginning to end.

I stepped over by the trunk then, and happened to glance down on the floor beyond the end of it. The answer was there, in the little heap of sleazy pink underthings and stockings and the wrinkled print dress. I restrained a crazy impulse to laugh. It was in her overnight bag, in the back of the station wagon where I’d put it.

I put everything in the trunk, closed it, and sat down on top of it to light a cigarette. I was Godwin, the operator. Twice in the same day I had been out-maneuvered and completely made a fool of, separately, by two primitives operating a backwoods fishing camp.

I wondered when she had begun to catch on. It was probably when I switched that twenty-dollar bill in her bag. She must have discovered it wasn’t the same one she’d had and started then to put it all together, and of course it was no mystery at all to her where the twenty had originally come from. Cliffords had spent it at the camp.

So when she was up there that afternoon, she’d probably got Cliffords to describe the F.B.I, man who’d arrested him, and knew I’d found what I was after at last. Her maneuvering afterward was clever, too; you had to admit that.

She probably hadn’t intended to try to grab it here at all. That would have been too improbable and too much to hope for. She’d merely planned to go along with me until she had a good chance somewhere farther along the line, and then grab it and clear out. My carrying the bag down here in the den and leaving it beside the trunk was practically the equivalent of putting up a sign telling her where it was, and my stupidity in forgetting to take the key out again was another telling her to help herself. That was the reason the bag had been out in the living-room. She was on her way from the den to the front door and the Sanport bus when he came in through the rear and caught her.