Girl Out Back (3 page)

“I notice you never seem to have any trouble getting away for those stupid fishing trips you go on. . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Next time I’ll clear through channels.”

“Do you
have
to do this?”

I could feel that tight band across my chest again. Selby was probably listening to her, Ramsey to me. “No,” I said. “And, anyway, why don’t we wait till we can buy radio time and get on the air with it?”

She hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle with a hand that shook. I was raging inside. She could stuff Selby and her lousy real estate—I stopped. What was happening to me, anyway? I was beginning to act like a sucker. What had ever become of Godwin the smooth operator?

I suddenly remembered Ramsey back in the office. I rubbed a hand harshly across my face, trying to wring the emotion out of myself so I could think. So what about Ramsey? The thing that stuck out was that he was after something, and that it was big. You could feel it. Look at the way it had happened. It was only seven hours ago I’d deposited that money in the bank, and now. . . It was like throwing a match in spilled gasoline.

The questions began coming from every direction. What was it? Why was it so hot? Where did Mrs. Nunn fit in? And how had she happened to have two of them? In that backwoods fishing camp? It was impossible, but there it was. And why the F.B.I.? I stopped suddenly.

Haig. Wild Bill Haig.
I brushed it irritably aside. Why Haig? The F.B.I, must have a few other men it wanted; it didn’t exist for the sole purpose of trying to run down a man who had simply evaporated eighteen months ago.

I turned and went back to the office. Ramsey had got up and was looking out the window. We both sat down again and I picked up the cigarette I had left in the tray.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Now, where were we?”

“Do you remember when you took it in?” he asked.

I drew on the cigarette and frowned. “Let’s see—that deposit was Saturday’s receipts. No, wait. Friday’s and Saturday’s. I didn’t go to the bank Saturday at all.”

He nodded. “Well, that pins it down to two days. Try to think back. There should be a pretty good chance you can isolate the sale.”

I was thinking, but not about that. I was regarding the haphazard operations of Chance. I
could
have deposited both those bills. I
should
have bought the stamps with the other. It
could
still be out there in the register, where he was certain to look before he left. Instead, it was in my pocket. One could have been a fluke, lost in the shuffle; but not two. If he’d traced two of them to this place he’d know damn well I should remember the circumstances. It would mean either one sale that necessarily had to be more than twenty dollars, or a repeater who came in twice and paid for something with identical, new, fresh twenty-dollar bills.

“Is it counterfeit?” I asked. I didn’t think the F.B.I, had anything to do with that, but I wasn’t sure.

He shook his head. “No. It’s perfectly good.”

“It’s just hot, then?”

He smiled faintly. “You might call it that.”

Kidnap pay-off? I thought. Transportation of stolen property across a state line? What else? Bank robbery? I was back to Wild Bill Haig again.

“Can you place it?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head, frowning. “No-o. It beats me.” I was conscious this was the first deliberate lie. The others had all been evasions.

“But it has to be within those two days? Friday or Saturday?”

That’s right I made a deposit Friday morning.”

“There’s no chance it could have been left over in the register or in the safe from previous receipts? I mean, as change, or an oversight, or something like that?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We leave change, sure; but nothing larger than tens.”

“How about this morning? Before the bank opened?”

I shook my head. “No-o.”

Otis
. Otis had come in while I was taking Mrs. Nunn’s payment out of the register. He would know those motors had been picked up. And also that the charges had been over twenty dollars. Careful, pal. Careful.

“Well, we’ve got something to start with, anyway,” Ramsey said. “We’ve isolated it to two days’ receipts. Now—what is your approximate volume of business?”

“About forty thousand last year.”

“That breaks down to around—hmmmmm—,” he said, frowning. “Say between a hundred and hundred-and-fifty a day.”

I didn’t say anything; I merely nodded. That was an over-simplification, and it was badly booby-trapped. But if he didn’t see it I wasn’t going to tell him.

He went on. “But along with tackle you sell boats and motors. Items of two hundred to a thousand and more. So a lot of your business must be in large individual sales, paid by check.”

It was no wonder criminals didn’t like to tangle with them, I thought. Still, there was a certain pleasure in watching an incisive and well-honed mind at work, even if you were watching it from the other side of the fence.

“That’s right,” I said. “But on the other hand, in the course of a day we sell a hell of a lot of small items. Flies, leaders, plugs, lines, spinning lures, and so on. We make change for a lot of twenties.”

He nodded. “Most of your business is local? That is, with people you know, at least by sight?”

“A good part of it, yes. Say within a fifty-mile radius. But fishermen can come from anywhere. We even get a lot of trade from Sanport.”

I was still thinking about Otis. I had to find out, before I went too far with this.

“It’s just possible the shop man may know something about it,” I said. He covers the front when I’m out.”

“I was just coming to that,” Ramsey said. “Is he here now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just a moment.”

I went out in the showroom and called him. He came in a moment later, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he shoved in the pocket of his overalls.

I performed the introductions, and let Ramsey take it from there. Otis looked at the note, frowning, and then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I don’t place it.”

I sat down and lit another cigarette.

“It came from here,” I said. “There’s not much doubt of that; it was in that bank deposit this morning. You were here when I was making it up—remember, you came in while I was putting the change in the register. Do you recall seeing it while I was doing all that?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But, hell, you could look right at it and not see it. It’s just another twenty-dollar bill. I could have taken it in myself.”

He hadn’t noticed. I was shuffling money and he was making sardonic wisecracks about it, but that was as far as it went. He didn’t know I’d taken two twenties
out
of the register while putting the change in.

He went back to the shop.

I sighed and spread my hands. “Otis just about named it,” I said. “You look at money, but you never see it. Nothing but the figures in the corners.”

He nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep trying, though. There are a number of angles in a thing of this sort. If the man comes back, for instance, you may remember waiting on him Friday or Saturday. When you sell a particular piece of merchandise, try to remember the last time you sold the same thing and how it was paid for.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, what about if another one shows up? You want me to call the bank? Or you?”

“Call our office in Sanport. We would appreciate it.”

“Any new twenty?” I asked. “Or does it have to have that mark?”

“The mark is not significant,” he said thoughtfully. “Though it may have it. The things to watch for are the year, and then the number.”

“Is it all right if I write this one down?”

“Yes.”

I pulled over a pad and drew the bill toward me. While I was copying the number I studied the stain intently. I was beginning to have an idea about that, and I was pretty sure he did too. I tried to memorize the exact form of it.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“If another one comes in with very close to the same number, call us immediately. If you know the person passing it, give us his name and address. If he’s a stranger, try to get the license number of his car and a good description of him. Unobtrusively, of course.”

“Any others beside the twenties to watch for?”

“No. That’s all,” he said. “Except . . .” He opened the briefcase again and came out with about a dozen photographs which he handed across to me. “Have you ever seen any of these men?”

There were no names on them, but I didn’t need a tag to recognize the seventh one I turned up. It was Bill Haig.

There was no doubt of it; I had seen his picture in the papers several times, and it was even displayed in the post-office on a “wanted” notice right now unless it had been taken down in the last week.

I leaned back in the chair and shook my head after I had looked at all the mug shots. “I’ve never seen any of them around here,” I said. “But doesn’t it strike you as odd that hot money would show up in a sporting goods shop. Doesn’t fit, somehow.”

The brown eyes and the lean, alert face were thoughtful. “You never know,” he said. “And, of course, the chances are it was through several hands before it got here.”

“In other words, the person passing it wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with it?”

“That’s right. You didn’t, did you?”

“I suppose you’re not allowed to say what it’s all about?” I said.

He shook his head with a faint smile. “I’m afraid not. Not at the moment, anyway.”

He asked if he could check the register for any more of it. There was none, of course. We shook hands and he drove off. I watched him go up the street, feeling the other one burning a hole in my wallet. I didn’t do anything, though, until Otis came out. That was inevitable.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s plenty hot.”

“You can say that again. You couldn’t have raised more stink if you’d tried to deposit a live bomb.”

“Could be a kidnap pay-off,” I said. “Or bank robbery. Something like that.”

He turned to go back to the shop. “Well, we sure got a high class of trade around here. You think I ought to start wearing a carnation to work?”

As soon as he was inside the shop and at work I crossed to the office. I sat down and took the one out of my wallet, reaching for the pad I’d written the number on. They checked! They were not only close; they were consecutive. One ended in—23, the other in—24.

I turned it, studying the stain along the bottom and feeling intense excitement. As nearly as I could tell, it was exactly the same as that on the other, same place, same shape. Those bills had been stacked, probably in their original binder, when this substance—whatever it was—got on them.

I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain. A minute amount of the reddish-brown came off.

Dried blood? That was dramatic, but improbable. Blood would be darker, and it would scrape off. This was a stain. No, my first guess was as good as any. How had he put it? The mark wasn’t significant, but another one
might have it.

It could be rust, plain iron oxide picked up by contact with rusting metal. If it weren’t significant, that probably meant it hadn’t been there when it had left legitimate hands. So perhaps —just perhaps—it had been stored for some time in a metal container in a place that was slightly damp.

I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair. None of it made any sense at all. The thought of its having anything to do with Haig was laughable—but there was the fact his picture had been among those mug shots. It was a fascinating puzzle any way you looked at it. And it was made even more fascinating by the fact that Haig, at the time he had disappeared off the face of the earth, was carrying with him a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars.

I needed an excuse, and ten minutes before closing time it came along as if I’d written the script myself. Two fishermen stopped in on their way back to Sanport. They had seven bass, the smallest of which weighed three pounds.

“Where?” I asked, hanging over their icebox.

“Sumner Lake,” they replied.

“With live bait? Or hand grenades?”

“Fly-rod bugs. Cork poppers. . . .”

“Cut it out,” I said. “In August?”

“It’s the truth,” they said. “We found an underground spring. The water was this cool. . . .”

Otis had come out too. He glanced resignedly from the fish to me and sighed. “How long’ll you be gone?

“Where?” I asked.

“Hah,” he said mournfully.

Sumner Lake was perfect. It was ninety miles in the opposite direction. “Well, if you insist. But I wouldn’t knock off go fishing for anybody but you.”

“You want Pete to come in?”

Pete was his boy, the fourteen-year-old who looked like a Sherman tank. During summer vacations he sometimes filled down here when I went fishing.

“Sure,” I said. I went back in the shop and picked up the 3-h.p. motor I used on rental skiffs. I put it in the back of the station wagon, along with a can of fuel. We locked up.

“I’ll be back Wednesday night or Thursday,” I said. “And, look. If another of those twenties comes in, call the F.B.I, in Sanport. They want us to watch for them; here’s the serial number of the other one.”

I drove home. When I pulled into the drive under the oaks I saw her Chrysler was in the garage. So she was home, and probably loaded to her silken ears with my inhumanity to dear Mr. Selby. Here we go again, I thought.

She was in the kitchen writing a check for Reba for the day’s housecleaning, wearing a lightweight knit thing that looked as if she’d been built into it by an oriental sybarite with a do-it-yourself kit. It was strange; her clothes were never tight on her but you didn’t have any trouble sensing that their occupant wasn’t a collegiate pole-vaulter. Well, maybe there a Turk somewhere back in my ancestry and I was just sensitive to the voluptuous wave-form of her particular radiation. She’d been to the beauty shop, and her hair-do gleamed like embossed and highly polished chrome. The full-mouthed and broad-planed face was as outrageously blonde as the rest of her, faintly sensuous and at the same time stamped with that strong suggestion of purely female cussedness that was no lie at all.

She turned the blue eyes on me now and smiled with sweet deadliness. “Oh. Home so early, dear? I didn’t think you’d be able to get away.”

This was for Reba’s benefit, and you could see it was fooling her. She took her check and started retreating toward the back door before she got blood on her.

I opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “Oh,” I said. “Something important came up, sweet. I’m going fishing.”

“Isn’t that nice. Reba, Mr. Godwin is going fishing. Does your husband fish much?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. “He fish ever’ now an’ then.”

“Well, I think it’s so wonderful for men to have a hobby, don’t you?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. She left. She was forty-something and had learned what this world does to non-combatants.

The blue eyes flashed. The first pitch was high and inside and smoking.
“Well!
Just leave me sitting there like a fool! You couldn’t get away from your precious toys for five minutes to show a little consideration for your wife, but you can drop everything to go fishing. And what do you suppose Mr. Selby thought?”

She couldn’t make me lose my temper now. I was too excited about this other thing, and I wasn’t even thinking about her. “Oh, he didn’t mind,” I said. “Think how he enjoyed looking at your legs.”

I took a drink of the beer and did a brief impersonation of the oleaginous Mr. Selby stalking a crossed thigh. He was the devious type, the long-range planner; he maneuvered into position and then caught the target obliquely on a passing shot.

“Mr. Selby is a gentleman—!”

“Which is more than you can say for some people you know,” I said. “Did you bring home that paper you wanted me to sign?”

“I told you it had to be notarized,” she snapped.

“So you did. Well, by God, that’ll teach me a lesson; the next time you whistle I’ll dash right over.”

“You enjoy humiliating me, is that it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s actually just confusion. I get busy down there and forget which way I’m supposed to jump when you press the button.”

“Oh, you make me tired.”

“Take a rest, then. I’m going to Sumner Lake and I’ll be gone till Thursday.”

She stared coldly, facing me across the kitchen. “The Wheelers are coming tonight to play bridge. But that wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“Tell ‘em to stay home and start their own war,” I said. “Haven’t they got any initiative at all?”

She whirled and went out. She looked regal as hell. I finished the beer and went down the stairs to the basement. The instant I was alone everything else faded from my mind and the thousand fascinating aspects of the puzzle came swarming back at once. Did Mrs. Nunn know that money was hot? She couldn’t have. Then how had she got it? Why
two
of those bills? I irritably brushed all the questions aside. There were no answers to any of them, and I was merely wasting time. I began gathering up my camping and fishing paraphernalia—duffel bag with my fishing clothes and shaving gear in it, tackle box, fly-rod, mosquito dope, and bedding. I wouldn’t need cooking equipment or food; my information was the Nunn’s ran a lunch-room of sorts along with the three old cabins and the boat and motor rental business.

I carried it all out to the station wagon. It took two trips. As I was going through the living-room the second time she came down the stairs from the second floor. I paused, with both hands full, and said, “Well, see you Thursday. . . .” She stared, stony-eyed, and said nothing. I went on out to the car, threw the rest of the stuff in, and slammed out of the drive.

I turned left on Main, going north toward Sumner Lake. Javier lay to the south and east and this would be a roundabout way to get there, but when you start lying you have to be consistent. I stopped at a service station on the highway at the edge of town and had the gasoline tank filled and the oil checked. The man who ran it, Wendell Graham, was a fisherman himself and a frequent customer at the store.

“Lucky devil,” he said. “Sumner Lake, huh? I hear it’s been pretty good.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Eight miles north of town I turned off the highway on to a secondary road going east. It was a little after six. I met few-cars. Twenty miles ahead the road connected with another north-south highway, State 41, after skirting the edge of the wild and heavily timbered country at the upper end of the lake. State 41 passed along the east side of Javier at a distance of two to three miles. There was an access road in from that side, but it ran through swampy bottom country and was passable only in dry weather.

There were a few more cars after I turned on to 41, though traffic wasn’t heavy. It was not one of the principal routes to the coast. Once as I topped a slight rise I could see the unbroken wildness of the bottom country to the west, though I could not see the lake itself. It was broken into channels and inlets this far up and they were out of sight in the timber. It was superb duck hunting country in winter, but the only way in then, aside from walking, was to leave your car at the camp on the south end and go up by boat. At the foot of the grade was the poorly banked S-curve that had killed five people in the past three years. I slowed automatically, even though the road was dry, idly noting the white crosses the Highway Department had put up on the shoulder where cars had gone off the road due to excessive speed or drunken driving. I frowned thoughtfully, trying to remember something that nibbled at the edge of my mind. Then I was past. It wasn’t important.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later I turned right again, leaving Highway 41 and taking to the country road that wound through the area to the south of the lake. The sun was gone now and warm summer dusk was thickening out through the timber. When my headlights sprayed against the three rural mailboxes and the old sign on my right I slowed and turned in through a cattle guard to a pair of dusty ruts going north across an old field long since abandoned to weeds and nettles. It hadn’t rained for a long time and the growth beside the road was powdered with dust. In a few minutes the road began to lead downward through increasingly heavy timber where fireflies winked in the darkness.

I passed some cleared land on my left and an old farmhouse sitting back off the road. A dog barked with bristling outrage and came hurtling out of the darkness to chase the car. A boy’s voice yelled, “Come back heah, you crazy Trix!” The faint light of a kerosene lamp glowed at a window. The R.E.A. hadn’t penetrated here; it was too thinly settled to warrant the lines. There was one more farmhouse beyond it about a half mile and then the road was lost in the immensity of timber. I crossed the stream that was the outlet of the lake on a rattling wooden bridge. Low places in the road had been filled with gravel to make it passable in wet weather. My headlights swung in huge arcs, splashing against the trunks of trees, as I followed its windings. The vastness and solitude of it made me feel good; I had always liked wild places. A little less than a mile beyond the bridge the road forked, one pair of ruts leading off to the left. The sign had fallen down, but I remembered it had pointed to the right. In a few minutes I came into the clearing. When I stopped and cut the motor I could hear the frog chorus along the shore of the lake.

There were four buildings, three small ones huddled darkly together at the edge of the inlet on my left and a larger one just ahead and to my right. Hot light streamed from an open doorway. I saw only one car, the station wagon Mrs. Nunn had driven this morning. I cut the headlights and got out.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice called. It came from outside the doorway. He was standing to one side of it, away from the light.

“Godwin,” I said. “From Wardlow.”

“Oh,” he said. He stepped before the door then and opened the screen. “Come on in.”

I followed him. The illumination inside the crudely finished room came from a hissing gasoline lantern suspended from a rafter with a length of wire. Insects whirled about it in a frenzied dance, butting their heads against the shield. On the left was a short counter with three stools before it and beyond the end of the counter was a glass-topped showcase containing items of fishing tackle. There was a small screened window at the other end of the room and an open doorway at the left behind the pass-through between the ends of the counter and showcase. This presumably led to their living quarters in the rear of the building. Behind the counter was a small icebox and a bottled gas stove which had two burners and a hamburger grill. On the shelves above the stove and icebox were some cartons of cigarettes, cans of soup, condensed milk, small cereal boxes, and some doughnuts in cellophane bags. Some shelves along the right-hand wall held a small stock of staple groceries, a few cheap magazines, and a large stack of comic books. I glanced at the latter, faintly puzzled. Well, maybe he read them himself. I didn’t particularly like him.