Girl Out Back (9 page)

“Did you want to?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything. She turned the station wagon around and drove off without looking back.

When the sound of her car had died away, I took the twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. It was exactly like the other two, brand new, with that line of stain along the edge. And it had been right there on the counter, almost under his hand. I shuddered.

Flicking the lighter, I touched flame to one corner and watched it burn. I ground the ash to powder in the rut and pushed sand over it.

There may be more of you, boys, I thought; but don’t count Godwin out altogether. He has a number of assorted talents, and you can see he doesn’t care how he uses them.

When I got back to the store, Ramsey was in the office. He was as quiet and as courteous as ever, and the call was merely a routine follow-up, but in a little while I began to be afraid of him.

It did no good to remind myself that I’d committed no crime except that of withholding information, and that that wasn’t remotely susceptible to proof because nobody else knew I even had the information. He scared me, anyway. It was the questions.

Why? I wondered. What exactly is there about a trained investigator that frightens you when somebody else asking the same questions would merely be a nuisance or a bore? It took me several minutes to isolate it, and when I did it was absurd—at first glance. It’s simply that he’s listening to the answers.

It’s no more than that. In this antic bedlam of two billion people yakking all at the same time sixteen hours a day, a man who listens to the answers to his own questions can scare you. The tip-off is the complete, utter, absolute lack of any response at all to anything you say. He doesn’t have time to respond; he’s too busy listening. You say something. It doesn’t merely rattle on his eardrums and cause him to say
Har, har, that’s a good one,
or
Say, that’s too bad, or Well, I’ll be damned.
He absorbs it. There’s no other word for it. He closes himself around it with the terrible silence and the impersonality of quicksand engulfing an unwary animal, and when he does, it’s irrevocable. There’s no use trying to tell him something else six months later, because he knows what you said the first time. And in the end, of course, if you’re guilty of something, he kills you with simple mathematics. It’s easy to make two answers jibe. Try ten thousand.

Then, I reflected, a tape-recorder should have the same effect. No. Not necessarily, but the reason for that was obvious. It was a matter of conditioning. In the twentieth century we accepted the miraculous as commonplace in the Machine, but we still expected Man to talk more than he listened. When he didn’t, it was unnerving.

Well, I thought, shaking off the apprehension, I can still beat them. Simply because there is no longer any link at all between the inner track, where I’m operating, and the outer track where they are.

But a few minutes later when he stood up, gravely shook hands, and said, “We appreciate your co-operation very much, Mr. Godwin,” I wondered.

One of us was a sucker. Which one?

I sweated it out all day Saturday, fighting my impatience, and didn’t go back to the lake until Sunday. I had to be very careful now; any unusual behavior could be dangerous. Jessica watched me load the tackle in the car late Saturday night, and we spoke to each other for the first time in forty-eight hours.

“Do you really want to go fishing again?” she asked tentatively.

“Oh, I don’t really fish,” I said. “I wreathe garlands in my hair and chase nymphs through the woodland aisles. Great for the waistline.”

She turned away.

“And if you catch one,” I added, “it beats a cold shower all to hell.” The next time she married she might have better luck in finding somebody she could tease and get away with it.

I spent another night on my monastic rack in the den and left before dawn, picking up some breakfast, a thermos of coffee, and a sandwich at an all-night café on the way out of town. It was still short of sunrise when I turned off State 41 on to that access road into the upper lake and wound my way through the dim and lofty hush of the timber. It was slow going, because the road was almost non-existent, and in those two short miles the utter futility of it came home to me with a finality no longer to be denied. This was farcical. If I lived to be two hundred, I’d never succeed in locating it like this. You simply couldn’t grasp the immensity of the place until you were out here trying to visualize finding something the approximate size of a suitcase not merely lost in it but deliberately hidden. It was hopeless this way. He had to show me where it was.

Sure, I thought. That would be the day. He might not go back to it for six months, and there was less than one chance in a million he’d do it when I happened to be around.

What, then? Just give up? Before I’d even tried? No, there had to be a way to do it; eventually I’d come up with it. I drove out of the ruts and hid the station wagon before I arrived at the end of the road. On Sunday some fishermen might come in here, and there could always be one who might recognize it.

However, there were no cars at the camping area yet. I cut off through the timber, paralleling the lake shore, and before I reached the point I heard an outboard motor sputter and start. It should be his, I thought. When I came out to the water’s edge where I could see the long reach in front of his cabin, a skiff with a solitary figure in it was going around the bend at the upper end. I went on up and sneaked a glance at the cove. His boat was gone, all right. I watched the clearing for a moment, just to be sure, but I had it all to myself.

I went around to the shed first. The two packages of tens were still there in the cereal carton; he apparently hadn’t even discovered the twenties were gone. I replaced them and went into the cabin, looking aimlessly around and goaded by the futility of it. It wasn’t here; I knew that, so what did I expect to find? An idea, I thought. I had to have some kind of plan. Nothing occurred to me. The place was just as it had been the other time, with the same general untidiness and sloppy housekeeping. There were more dirty dishes, most of the plates showing a residue of syrup in them. I remembered the three one-gallon cans of it I’d looked in before, and decided he must eat syrup on everything.

I went out, and around in back, stooping to peer under the cabin. It was more than two feet off the ground, and I could see all the way through. There was no indication the ground had ever been dug up. I was wasting time; why did I persist in looking around here when it could be anywhere in fifty square miles? Maybe that was the reason; the rest of it was so hopeless I didn’t want to start.

I caught sight of something about fifty yards to the rear of the cabin in the edge of the timber, and walked back to it. It was his garbage dump, a small pile of empty tins and broken jars, old magazines, and ashes from the stove. I located a stick and began moving the litter enough to see the ground beneath; if you were going to bury something in the earth this would be a good way to camouflage it afterward. But there was no evidence the ground had ever been disturbed. I probed all around with the stick and found it solid everywhere. I sighed wearily and began pushing the cans and bottles back the way I had found them. Then I stopped suddenly, staring at something on the ground.

I bent and picked it up. It was a piece of fire-blackened metal, small and vaguely cup-shaped. I recognized it instantly. It was the corner reinforcement off a cheap leather or fiber suitcase. I poked around with the stick some more. Within a few minutes I had scraped up parts of both the clasps, the lock, and one of the rings through which the end of the handle had fitted. Here was the final bit of proof, I thought—if I had needed any more. This was probably what was left of Haig’s famous suitcase.

Then I shrugged and tossed the blackened bits of metal back on the rubbish. This wasn’t accomplishing anything. Sure, he’d burned the suitcase; but what he done with the money? I went on back into the timber and began making long sweeps through it with my eyes on the ground.

Around ten o”clock I heard his motor again as he returned from fishing. Hardly knowing why, I came back toward the clearing. Perhaps it was curiosity. Here was the man who was the key to the whole thing, and I knew next to nothing about him; I’d seen him twice from a distance, and had spent one long and terrible minute staring at the seat of his overalls. I cautiously circled the open space until I could see the door in front of the cabin. Well screened by underbrush, I lay down to watch. Smoke issued from the stove-pipe, and in a short while he came out and sat down in the doorway with a cup of coffee. I still couldn’t see his face clearly because he was almost as far away as he had been those two times he’d passed me in his boat, but I had an impression of a pudgy and ineffectual little man made ridiculous by that gun-belt strapped about his waist. He put down the coffee cup after a while and walked out into the yard, moving with what he apparently considered the deadly crouch of the Western gunman. His hand shot down to the holster and came up with the .38, the cold-eyed and implacable frontier marshal facing his man in the street at sundown and beating him to the draw. Take that, you varmint! He repeated this several times, practicing the blazing wizardry with the Colt that had made him the scourge of the bad ones. The poor barmy little bastard, I thought.

He went back in the cabin, and when he emerged again he was carrying a magazine. He sat down in the doorway with his feet on the step, and began to read. It was probably cooler there than inside. He held the magazine very close to his face, not more than twelve inches away at most, and I noticed he had on a pair of the glasses I had seen while ransacking the place. Apparently his eyesight was considerably below the minimum standard for eagle-eyed lawmen; judging from where he was holding the magazine he wouldn’t be able to read it at all without those cheaters.

Oh?
I frowned reflectively; an idea was beginning to nudge me.

Wait. Don’t go off half-cocked, I warned myself. Try to remember. He hadn’t had them on either of the times I’d seen him in his boat, nor just now while practicing his draw. I was certain of the latter, and reasonably sure of the former. Then he could and did get around without them, when he wanted to. Probably they were solely for reading.
Could
he read without them? I went on studying him, watching the way he labored at it with his face right up against the page and remembering the thickness of those lenses. There wasn’t a chance. I felt a tingle of excitement as all the parts of it began to fall into place. He’d take me right to it, and then never tell anybody else that he had.

When he finally tired of reading and went inside, I slipped backward and faded into the trees. Returning to the station wagon, I ate the sandwich and drank some coffee, and then sat smoking and thinking about it. The first thing I had to do was get back in the cabin. Today, if possible, for it would save a trip, and I was afire with impatience. Maybe my luck would hold and he’d go out fishing again in the afternoon. I returned to the point and waited. Hours went by. Finally, a little after five in the afternoon, I heard his motor start and he came out of the cove. He went on up toward the bend at the far end of the reach; maybe he’d found good fishing there this morning. I slipped through the timber, and when I reached the clearing I could still hear his motor fading away in the distance.

I entered the cabin, beginning to feel at home in the place now. The glasses he’d had on were atop the chest of drawers, where they had been before. I stepped quickly over to the trunk, lifted off the piles of magazines, and opened it. The others were still in the tray, inside their case. I slipped them out, and compared them. As far as I could tell, they were exactly alike; the ones in the trunk were merely a spare set in case he broke the others. They each had the same thick lenses that gave terrific magnification. Without them, he’d see ordinary print as a grayish and chaotic blur. So far, so good. I returned the spare set to their case, shoved them in my pocket, and closed the trunk. Leaving the other pair on the chest of drawers, I went out. On the way back to the car, I threw the ones I’d taken into the lake, case and all. They sank out of sight. I drove on back to town.

When I got home Jessica was out somewhere. Probably at a movie, I thought. I didn’t care; we were finished, and the hell with it. Once I got my hands on the late Mr. Haig’s enticing legacy . . . No, I cautioned myself, not so fast. Not until some of the heat had cooled down and they’d written this area off as a fluke. I might have to stick around as long as six months, just to be sure.

I showered, shaved, and changed clothes, and then began searching through a trunk full of personal gear for what I’d need. I found an old passport photograph that would do, and a slim black wallet I’d had for use with evening clothes. What else? Oh, yes; a piece of clear plastic. I couldn’t find any that would serve; that on my driver’s license was too small. Well, there should be something around the shop.

I drove over. It was dark now. I let myself in, re-locked the door, and went into the office, switching on the light over the desk. I drew the blind over the single window. Now, what about the plastic? The answer occurred to me almost instantly; I went out into the showroom and got a fly box out of the showcase, one of the small ones without compartments in it. Taking out my knife, I cut the bottom out of it. After rounding the corners slightly, I had a flat and transparent sheet nearly three inches by four. I studied it. Maybe it was
too
clear. Taking it back to the shop, I rubbed one side of it with steel wool to scratch it up a little. It was just right.

Back in the office, I went to work on the wallet with the knife, cutting a window in the inner flap just slightly smaller than the plastic. Then I slipped the latter under it, and stuck it in place with cement. I put the whole thing under the desk dictionary to set up while I prepared the card.

What, exactly, had it looked like? I couldn’t remember, and then realized that that in itself was the answer. It made no difference at all as long as it had a picture and a signature of sorts. I located an inventory card, rolled it into the typewriter, and pecked out a little form attesting that the following

Mr. _________ was a paid-up member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and was permitted to solicit on the streets after examination by a competent physician. Then I typed in George U. Ward as the name of the individual in question, signed his name in the lower left corner, and scrawled something flourishing and indecipherable in the lower right. I stuck the photograph to it with some more of the cement. Very impressive, I thought, studying it critically. I didn’t have anything I could use for a seal, but it didn’t matter. I trimmed it to the right size, tucked it in behind the plastic window in the wallet, and cemented it in place, wondering what the penalty was for impersonating a Federal officer, even with something like this. It didn’t matter, however; who would ever know?

The warrant was easier. I took one of the finance company’s standard mortgage forms from the desk, filled in Cliffords’ name, and signed it William Butler Yeats in another burst of calligraphic frenzy. Gathering up the scraps of leather and plastic left over from the operation, I disposed of them in the garbage can at the rear of the building. I sealed the warrant and the do-it-yourself credentials in an envelope, shoved it in my pocket, and went back to the house. Jessica still hadn’t returned. So much the better; I didn’t want her watching and wondering.

When I went upstairs, got a suitcase out of the hall closet, and carried it into the bedroom, I found why she was still gone. A note was pinned to the pillow on what had been my side of the bed until I’d move to the den. Nice touch, I thought; Clausewitz couldn’t have improved on it. If I never did see it, it wasn’t her fault.

“Just in case you might possibly be interested,”
it said,
“I have gone to Sanport for a week at the beach. Don’t forget to put out the cat. Or cats.”

Well, that was fine. Except for Otis at the store, there was nobody who would be likely to notice or be curious about my movements now until the whole thing was finished. And I could take care of Otis all right. I put the open leather bag on the bed and turned to the closet. Selecting a conservative, tropical-weight suit, I folded it, hanger and all, into the bag.

Well, maybe she had friends down there. Some girl, maybe, who’d gone to school with her and later married a man named Kleinfelter who was in the cotton brokerage business. Sit on the beach and cut up old touches—that sort of thing. Who cared?

Let’s see. White shirt, cuff-links, blue tie. There was room to put in the soft straw hat without crushing it.

Kleinfelter himself would be five-seven and bald, and never talk about anything but the tax structure. And, anyway, it was
Mrs.
Kleinfelter she’d gone to school with. Remember those silly pajama parties? Remember that creepy Rowbottom boy, the one whose ears stuck straight out from the side of his head . . . “

For Christ’s sake, I thought; what do I care what she went to Sanport for, or who she knows down there? We’re washed up, we’re not even sleeping together any more, and what she does is her own business.