Girl Out Back (2 page)

“Sure,” I said. “What were they? Repairs?”

She nodded slightly. “Nunn. George Nunn.”

“Oh. Then you’re Mrs. Nunn?”

“That’s right,” she said with the same indifference. If it turned out
I
was Mrs. Nunn she wasn’t going to raise a stink about it.

“I think they’re ready to go,” I said. “Come on in.”

I pushed the door back and stood aside. She stepped up on the concrete walk and went past me. She was quite tall. I’m six feet two, so in the scuffed spectator pumps she was wearing she must have been close to five eight. Her legs were bare. The predominantly blue cotton dress she had on was just another number off the rack, well worn and often laundered, and while it was somewhat tight across the chest for a couple of somewhat obvious reasons I noted it only in passing. Now that bust-line architecture has become a basic industry, like steel and heavy construction, all the old pleasant conjectures are a waste of time and you never believe anything until the returns are in from the precincts. The cascade of tawny hair fell to her shoulders, bobbing a little as she walked and framing a dead-white face on which there was no expression at all, unless utter stillness is an expression. The eyes were a smoky gray, fringed with dark lashes that were almost startling against the milk-white skin, and the mouth had been good to begin with but she’d overpainted it into a sullen smear with too much of the wrong shade of lipstick. Well, it was her mouth, wasn’t it?

I indicated an aluminum frame chair in the front of the showroom near the showcases. “Sit down. I’ll get the motors.”

It was dim inside the shop. I clicked on a switch and a bank of fluorescent tubes over the lone work-bench came on and an electric fan began whirring. There were a half-dozen dismantled motors scattered around on the bench in various stages of repair, but I walked on over to the end of the room where the completed jobs were clamped to individual dollies. They were both there, 3-h.p. motors with tags that read “Nunn” on one side and “Tested OK” on the other.

George Nunn ran a fishing camp on Javier Lake, about thirty miles away in another county. It was an enormous, marshy body of water in a wild area, accessible by road most of the year only at his place on the lower end. I’d been over there a few times duck hunting, but it was before he’d taken over the camp. He’d been in the store two or three times, and still owed me around fifty dollars on a motor he’d bought from me. I lifted the repaired ones on to the bench and started wiping them down with a piece of waste. In a moment I heard a clicking of high heels on the concrete floor of the showroom. She came in and stood watching me after an indifferent glance around at the bench and the shelves of tools and spare parts.

“How’s the fishing on Javier?” I asked.

She shrugged. “All right, I suppose.”

She set her purse on the bench and took out a cigarette and a folder of matches. The breeze from the oscillating fan riffled the mane of tawny hair and blew out the match before she could get the cigarette going. She threw it on the floor, in spite of the fact there was an ash-tray right in front of her. She struck another that went out. It went to the floor also. I held a lighter for her.

“Have you got a telephone out there?” I asked.

She blew out smoke and looked up at me with eyes as expressionless as nailheads. “Why?”

Business,” I said. “Advertising. If your husband will call me when he has some good catches over there I may be able to get them in the Sanport papers. You know, the outdoors columns in the
Call
and the
Herald
. Blake and Carstairs both check here twice a week by long distance.”

“We’ve got a phone,” she said. “Party line. Sometimes it even works.”

“You’d be surprised how good it is for business,” I went on, “to get the name of your place in those columns now and then. I pick up a lot of free advertising that way.”

“That s nice,” she said.

I started to give her a wheeze about how to phone in the information, to be sure to get the fishermen’s names right, and the type of gear used, and so on, but when I glanced around I saw she wasn’t even plugged in. She was still watching me, but she hadn’t heard anything I said. I finished wiping down the motors, nodded for her to precede me, and carried them out front.

“How much?” she asked.

”Just a minute,” I said. I went into the office and lifted Otis’s work order off the spike, added up the labor and material charges, and then found the amount of the old balance.

“Seventy-four thirty-five,” I said when I came back. “That includes the old balance of forty-eight dollars, plus twenty-six thirty-five for repairs.”

She came around opposite the cash register and put down her purse. Taking out a billfold, she counted out three twenties, a ten, and a five. I was inwardly congratulating myself on getting the whole amount, and it was only half-consciously I noticed two of the twenties were crisp, brand-new ones. I counted out her change, put the bills into their respective compartments in the register drawer, and closed it. I tossed a “Thank you” into the bottomless void of her disinterest, and carried the motors out to the station wagon. She got in, and I closed the door for her. It struck me then, for the first time, that it was odd she was here so early. It was a long drive, part of it over back-country roads.

“You must have left very early,” I said.

She switched on the ignition and I thought for an instant she wasn’t going to answer. Then she turned her head just briefly and trained that flat stare on my face. “I spent the night in town,” she said. “I’m a trusty.”

She backed the station wagon around and took off with a scattering of loose gravel under the tires. I stood looking after her for a moment, and then shrugged and went back inside. Whatever was eating her was none of my business; I was in outboard motors. Go home, Moddom. Go back to the little home and the faithful husband.

In the office I resumed the search for the stamp box and finally ran it to earth in one of the bottom desk drawers. There were only a half-dozen threes in it. I probably hadn’t remembered to buy any since Barbara left. I stamped the letters and made out a petty cash slip for twenty dollars. Might as well get a supply while I was at it. And make the bank deposit while I was out, I thought; this was Monday morning, and we still had Friday’s and Saturday’s receipts in the safe.

I opened the safe, stamped and initialed the checks, and counted the currency and silver. After adding it all up on the machine, I remembered the money Mrs. Nunn had paid me. I should break up at least a couple of those twenties for change to start the day with. Counting out forty dollars in fives, singles, and coin, I carried it out to the register and rang up NO SALE to open the drawer. As I was sliding the twenties from under the roller in the right-hand compartment I was again idly aware of the crisp freshness of the two on top. I didn’t really know why, because in any kind of business where you handle much currency you run across new bills all the time. Perhaps it was because there were two of them back-to-back and because they had curled a little under the roller with their ends sticking up. One of them had what appeared to be a brown stain of some kind along the edge for about half the width of the bill.

I set them aside, put the petty cash receipt in the drawer, and distributed the change into the proper compartments. I slid one of the twenties into my wallet for the stamps and was just closing the drawer when I heard the rasp of a shoe on the pavement outside. I glanced up. It was Otis. He unlocked the door and came on in as I was putting the wallet in my pocket and gathering up the other two twenties for the bank deposit. He lighted a cigarette and looked sadly at the register.

“Tapping the till again, boss?”

His full name is Otis Olin Shaw. He’s around forty-five, and looks a little like the pictures of Lincoln at that age except the black hair is thinning and is gone altogether from a small round spot on his crown. His unvarying facial expression is that of an undertaker who’s just learned his best friend has been cremated by a rival establishment while owing him three hundred dollars. This bleak sadness, however, covers a gall-and-wormwood sense of humor, a lot of intelligence, and something verging on genius when it comes to internal combustion engines.

“Good morning, Herr Schopenhauer,” I said. “What’s the cheery word?”

He shook his head and followed me into the office like an aging Great Dane, sitting down at the desk and watching mournfully as I stuffed the currency and checks into the white bag I used for the deposit. “I was just telling the old lady this morning,” he said, “that there was a chance you might raise me to fourteen a week now that heroin is getting cheaper. . . .”

I added the twenties to the currency and clipped the adding machine tally to the deposit slip. “Don’t count on it,” I said. “That cheap stuff is cut, and I need more of it.”

He raised a hand. “Oh, I don’t begrudge you a nickel of it myself. It’s just—well, the old lady’s always after me. Going around town, she keeps seeing all these women wearing shoes. You know how it is, stooped over that way picking up cigarette butts. . . .”

”Belt her one,” I said, “and keep her at home. What kind of a man are you, anyway?”

“I just haven’t got the heart, boss. She’s usually carrying around one of the kids that’s too weak to walk. . . .”

He had one child, a boy of around fourteen who already looked like something out of the back-field of the Los Angeles Rams. They owned their own home and Otis cleared around a hundred a week with salary, commissions, and overtime, now that he’d got a raise when Barbara was purged and we both had to double part time as clerks.

He went back to the shop. I wrote out checks for a bunch of bills that were due on the tenth, and then opened the big sliding doors at the sides of the building. It was growing hot now at eight thirty of a still and cloudless morning in August. I swept down the showroom around the boats and trailers. We had over a dozen models on the floor, running all the way from a car-top duck boat to a sixteen-foot inboard runabout that sold for close to two thousand.

As soon as the bank opened I called out to Otis to watch the front, took the deposit from the safe, picked up the outgoing mail, and walked over to Main. Brassy sunlight beat on my bare head and I could feel beads of perspiration under the thin sports shirt. I crossed with the light and entered.

It was a small place, a branch of the Mid-South Bank & Trust of Sanport, with only a couple of tellers’ windows and Warren Bennett’s desk behind a railing at the right. I got in line at Arthur Pressler’s window, feeling almost chill in the sudden transition from the outside heat to air-conditioning. At the far end, behind a counter, I saw Barbara Renfrew seated at an automatic book-keeping machine, her smooth dark head bent over her work. She looked up in a moment, saw me, and smiled in that shy, quiet way she did. It occurred to me that now she was no longer working for me making a pass at her would be permissible under the revised ground rules without a loss of face on both sides, and that I really should, since I’d been accused of it so many times. It was an attractive thought, but I shrugged it off, hardly knowing why. Maybe it was because I didn’t share Jessica’s staunch faith in her accessibility. Clod, I thought. Godwin, you lack scope and vision. . . .

“Good morning, Barney.”

The line ahead of me had disappeared and I was facing Arthur Pressler through the bars of his window. “Good morning,” I said, passing over the cloth bag. He pulled it open and began adding checks on the machine with the precise and economical movements of some super-robot out of the twenty-second century. He was a rather cold-faced man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a no-nonsense set to his mouth. As far as I knew he had no existence outside this cubicle of his, as if he’d been bought from I.B.M. and bolted to the floor, but he could handle money faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He did it almost in a blur, and he was infallible.

I lit a cigarette and watched him now. He finished the checks and tossed them aside, and then tore into the bundle of currency, dropping it into neat and separate bunches of singles, fives, tens, and twenties. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He was counting the twenties. The fifth or sixth was one of those new ones Mrs. Nunn had paid me. It dropped, and the next one started to come down on it, and then he broke his rhythm. He paused. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head he picked them all up and started over. He’d lost count. It was odd, I thought; maybe they hadn’t been oiling him properly. He passed me the duplicate of the deposit slip and I went out and down the street to the post-office.

Business was brisk for Monday. Besides incidental items of tackle we sold one complete rig: fourteen-foot plywood boat, 7-h.p. motor, trailer, and all the incidentals such as a spare gasoline can, kapok seat cushions, and icebox. After the customer had taken delivery and driven off I sent Otis out for a couple of cans of beer to celebrate the deal. I took out my wallet to hand him a dollar, and as I did I noticed I still had that new twenty dollar bill. That was odd. Hadn’t I bought those stamps with it? apparently I’d paid for them with my own money, which I usually tried to keep separate on the other side of the divider. It didn’t matter, though; there was no change involved to foul up the register and the books.

Otis went out. I was transferring the twenty to the other compartment of the wallet when I saw it was the one that had the odd brownish stain at one end, along the edge. I looked at it, and then turned it over. It was on both sides for about half the width of the bill, and extended up along the paper for perhaps an eighth of an inch or less. I wondered idly what it was. It seemed odd there’d be a stain on a bill this fresh from the Federal Reserve vaults, unless they were using taxpayers’ blood for ink now in the printing office.

At four thirty in the afternoon I was up front alone looking for the boat manufacturer’s ad in this month’s
Field & Stream
when a car pulled in and stopped in front of the window. I saw with a glance at its front license plate it was from Sanport, but when the driver got out he didn’t look much like a potential customer. At least he wasn’t on a fishing trip at the moment. He was dressed in a blue summer-weight suit, white shirt, pale blue tie, and a Panama with a gray band. Salesman, I thought.

He lifted a briefcase out of the seat and came in, a man somewhere around fifty with dark hair that was graying at the temples, composed brown eyes, and a quiet, efficient look about him.

“Good afternoon,” I said, “what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Godwin?” he asked pleasantly.

“That’s right,” I said.

He put the briefcase on the counter and held his wallet in front of me, opened to an identification card. “Ramsey,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

I suppose everybody has that same sinking feeling in the first fraction of a second, wondering what crime he’s committed to get the F.B.I, after him. Then it’s gone, of course, as soon as you realize it’s just a routine security check. Your old friend Julius Bananas has applied for a job balancing a teacup for the State Department and they want to know if he was ever a Communist and how he stood on some of the fundamental issues like girls.

I grinned at him. “Don’t tell me I’ve made the list.”

He smiled, but he didn’t get carried away with it. He’d probably heard all those feeble gags a thousand times. “Are you busy?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if I could.”

“Sure,” I said. “Fire away. Or, wait; let’s go in the office. There’s a fan.” The whole day had been still, and now in the late afternoon the dead, humid air was stifling.

We walked back to the office and I switched on the fan. He sat down in the straight chair in front of the desk with the briefcase in his lap. I pushed the typewriter stand out of the way and sat down in the swivel chair. Taking out cigarettes, I offered him one, which he refused with a smile and a shake of his head. I lit mine and leaned back.

“What’s it about, Mr. Ramsey?” I asked.

He unstrapped the briefcase and took out an oblong Manila envelope. It seemed to me to be rather small to contain much of a file on the aspiring Mr. Bananas, but then maybe they’d just started and hadn’t come up with much yet in the matter of his political aberrations and mating habits.

“I wanted to ask you about this,” Ramsey said. He slid something out of the envelope and dropped it on the desk between us. I stared at it.

It was a crisp, new twenty-dollar bill. It was, in fact, the same twenty-dollar bill I had in my wallet.

I wondered if I’d gone crazy. It had to be the same one; there was that narrow brown stain in exactly the same place, Then I got it. It was obvious, of course. This was the one I’d deposited in the bank. They’d
both
had that stain, but I just hadn’t noticed it. When I looked at them in the cash drawer, they’d probably been turned end for end.

“It’s familiar?” he asked quietly.

So that explained Pressler’s hesitation when he came to it as he was counting. He’d spotted something phony about it, or it had rung a bell of some kind in his mind, just enough to throw him off stride.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I deposited it in the bank this morning.”

This morning; It must be hot, whatever it is. That was only seven hours ago, and it took three to drive here from Sanport. “You’re sure?” he asked.

“Reasonably so,” I said. “It’s new. And there’s that hairline discoloration at the bottom. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing it.”

He leaned forward a little. “When?” he asked. “I mean, do you remember where you got it?”

“Then it is the same one?” I asked. “It came from the bank?”

He nodded. “I picked it up over there just a few minutes ago. Presumably somebody spent it here at your store. Do you remember who it was?”

I was just about to reply when the phone rang. It was up front on the showcase next to the cash register.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I went out and picked up the receiver. “Boat Supply. Godwin speaking.”

“My, you sound businesslike.” It was Jessica’s voice, teasing and faintly provocative.
“Mrs.
Godwin speaking,” she went on, imitating me. “Look, honey, would you be a real cute lamb and run over here for a minute?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Mr. Selby’s office. We need your signature on a thing.”

We.
We need
your
signature. Oh, what the hell, I thought; cut it out. You’re developing rabbit ears.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m busy right now, but I should be able to make it in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

”But, Barney, he wants to go home. It’ll only take a minute.”

I regarded the enormity of it. I was keeping Mr. Selby from the bosom of his happy little family. I was not only an annoying by-product of the community property laws, I was a churl who would inconvenience Mr. Selby.

“Jessie, I’m tied up at the moment. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Or why don’t you drop by here with it?”

“It has to be notarized,” she explained, with just a touch of exasperation. It wasn’t necessary, of course, to explain what the paper was. “Look, Barney, for Heaven’s sake, there isn’t anything so important about selling bass plugs that you can’t get away for five minutes.”

“I told you I’d be there as soon as I could.”

“You’re just keeping us waiting for no reason at all. Mr. Selby . . .”

“And how is dear Mr. Selby? Don’t forget to keep your skirt pulled down.”

“Barney. are you coming over here?”

“I told you. When I could get away. Did it ever occur to you I might be busy?”