Hot Spot (11 page)

“Yeah,” I said, trying to make my voice sound natural. “I’m Madox. What is it?”

“We’re from the Sheriff’s office. You better come along with us.”

I
T WAS TOUGH, WITH THAT
light in my face. I couldn’t let anything show. Just hang on, I thought desperately. Play it dumb. Play it a line at a time till you find out.

“I don’t get it,” I said, as naturally as I could. “You want to see me? You must have the wrong party.”

“We don’t think so.” They came out of the light then, one on each side of me. I recognized them. They were the two deputies who had been talking to Gulick Saturday afternoon. “Let’s take a ride.”

“Well, sure,” I said. “But how’s for telling me what this is all about?”

“Bank robbery—and arson,” the short one said.

“Bank robbery?” I said. “Aren’t you guys reaching for it a little? Look, I’m a car salesman. I work for George Harshaw—”

“We know all about that,” he said, cutting me off. “But we want to have a little talk with you. I’d advise you to come along without any argument; you’re just making it tough on yourself.”

“Sure. If I can help you any way, I’ll be glad to.” I shrugged.

“He came over behind me and felt me under the arms and down the sides. “He’s clean, Buck,” he said to the other one, and then to me, “All right, Madox. Get in the car.”

“O.K.,” I said. “But wait’ll I lock mine.”

“We’ll do it. You got your keys?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me have ’em.”

I gave him the keys, which were still in my hand. He tossed them to the tall deputy, the one called Buck, who went around in back of the car and opened the trunk. He switched on a long-barrelled flashlight and looked over every inch of it. Then he went inside the car and began lifting up the seats and pawing through the junk in the glove compartment.

“Where you been?” the short one asked me while Buck was shaking down the car. “Two-thirty’s a little late for this town.”

“Just riding around,” I said. “It’s too hot to sleep.”

“Things on your mind, maybe?” He managed to get a lot of suggestion into it. “Just where you been riding around?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said, suddenly realizing I had no idea where I’d been. “Just around. Up the highway and back.”

“Maybe you’d better try to remember. You don’t look too good, right now.”

Just then Buck slammed the door and came over to us. “What you doing with a pair of girl’s shoes in your car?” he asked.

I stared at him. Shoes? Then I remembered; I hadn’t given them to her. “Oh,” I said. “They belong to a friend of mine.”

“She always leave her shoes in the car?” Buck asked, “I’ve heard of ’em leaving their pants around here and there—”

“Take it easy, Mac,” I said. I told them about losing the dog and going back to find him. They motioned me towards the police car while I was talking and we got in, all three of us in the back seat. There was another man in front, at the wheel.

“And what girl was this?” the short one asked.

“Her name’s Gloria Harper.”

“She live here in town?”

“It’s all right,” the man in front said. I knew who he was then. He was the deputy who’d been at the fire, the one who lived here. “I know her. She’s a nice kid. If this guy’s mixed up in something I doubt if she is.”

We went on through town and north on the highway. It was about twenty miles to the county seat. I was still flying blind, but I was beginning to have a hunch they were too. Maybe they didn’t have a thing to go on except the fact that I was a stranger in town.

I began to breathe a little easier. So far I hadn’t made a false move or spilled anything, in spite of the suddenness of it, and now that I was on guard all I had to do was play it as it turned up and stick to my story. I even had my alibi there in the front seat, the deputy who’d seen me at the fire. The only thing I had to remember was not to spring it too soon in the game. Let it come out naturally—that was the thing.

When we got into town we drove right to the jail. The Sheriff was there waiting for us in a hot, bleak office full of harsh light and steel filing cabinets. It was the first time I’d seen him up close, and I didn’t much like what I saw. There wasn’t any of the pot-bellied court-house stooge here; he was a policeman doing police work. The hair must have been prematurely white because the face was that of a man in his forties, a face with all the flabby indecision of the front side of an axe.

“What took you so long?” he asked Buck.

“He was out ridin’ around,” Buck said.

“Where?”

It was the short deputy who answered. “He says he don’t know.” He grinned.

I turned and looked at him. He wasn’t over five feet five, with a deformed left hand and a nasty pair of eyes, and you could see he liked going around with the badge and gun as much as he didn’t like men bigger than he was. The other two—Buck and the one who’d been at the fire—looked harmless enough, just lanky, serious-minded country boys drawing a county paycheque.

“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You and Buck can go home.” They went out and he jerked his head towards a folding chair over against the wall. “Sit down, Madox,” he said, taking a cigar out of a box.

I sat down. The big unshaded bulb hanging in the middle of the room made it even hotter than it was inside. I fished out a cigarette and lighted it, throwing the match into a dirty spittoon. Sweat ran down my chest inside the shirt. How much did they know?

“What’s this all about, Sheriff?” I asked.

He bit the end off the cigar and looked over at the deputy, ignoring me. “What about the car, Tate?”

“It was clean. Wasn’t nothing in it but a pair of girl’s shoes and the junk in the glove locker. The usual stuff.”

“And his room?”

Tate shook his head. “Nothing there but his clothes.” He sat astride the chair with his arms propped on the back, watching me while he smoked a cigarette.

The Sheriff jerked his head around suddenly, and the cold, incisive eyes bored into me. “All right, Madox; where’d you hide it?”

“Hide what?” I asked.

“That money.”

“Look, Sheriff,” I said. “I could ask you what money, and waste some more of your time and mine, but I understand that I’m supposed to have robbed a bank. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, let’s get down to cases. I didn’t rob a bank. I happen to be a car salesman, and I haven’t got any sidelines. But if you think there’s any way I can help you, let’s get on with it and quit horsing around so I can get back and get some sleep. I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

“O.K.,” he said. He leaned backwards across the desk and flipped open one of the drawers. His hand came out holding a cardboard box. He lifted the lid off, then walked over and handed it to me. I looked at it and had to fight to keep my face still. It was the alarm clock.

“Where’d you buy it, Madox?”

“I didn’t.”

“You know what it is, don’t you?” He didn’t raise his voice or threaten. He didn’t have to. He just looked at you.

“Sure,” I said. “It looks like what’s left of a clock.” It was black, and the glass was melted.

“That’s right. It’s an alarm clock. Take a good look at it. See anything funny about it?”

“Nothing except that it’s been on fire. But what’s it got to do with me? I thought you said I robbed a bank. You mean when I got rich I burned my alarm clock?”

“Not exactly. Notice something else funny about it? It hasn’t got a bell.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll bite. So it
hasn’t
got a bell.”

“Not much use as an alarm clock, is it?”

“I shouldn’t think so. But I still don’t get it. Why tell me?”

“Why? Just in case you ever wanted to hold up a bank sometime, and needed a diversion. It’s an old Indian-fighter’s trick. You’d use a clock like this to start a fire somewhere at exactly the time you wanted it started. That’d take the pressure off, because everybody in town’d go to the fire. You notice those little drops of metal on top of the clapper? They’re solder. The insurance investigator who dug it out of the ashes told me about them. There was a match-holder of some kind fastened on there and it melted off with the heat, but it didn’t quite
all
melt off. But it’s still a damned smart trick.” Suddenly he stopped his pacing back and forth and snapped at me like a popping whip.
“Madox, where’d you buy that clock?”

“I told you,” I said. “I never saw it before.”

He went back and sat down on the edge of the desk. “A man smart enough to pull off a job like that’d be too smart to buy the stuff he needed for it there in town. He’d go somewhere else and get it.” He leaned forward a little with the cigar in his mouth. “Now, let’s have the truth for once. Where’d you go the Friday before the fire?”

I stared at him a little blankly. “Go? I don’t remember going anywhere— No, wait a minute. I did, too. I don’t remember whether it was Friday or not, but about a week before the fire I went down to Houston.”

“That’s more like it. And what’d you go down there for? Not to buy a clock, by any chance?”

“No. I went down there to try to collect some money a man owed me.”

“What man?”

“His name’s Kelvey. Tom Kelvey.” I was in the clear on that. Kelvey’d owed me two hundred dollars for over a year.

“What’s his address?”

I told him.

“And you saw him? And got the money?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t see him.”

“Well, that’s too bad. You drove all the way down there to put the bite on him and then you didn’t even see him. I’ll bet he was out of town, wasn’t he? Funny how those things happen.”

I could see that one coming. They’d probably check Kelvey, so I had to do better than that. “No,” I said. “I don’t know whether he was home or not. I didn’t even look him up.”

“I see. You suddenly decided you didn’t want the money after all.”

“No. I got side-tracked.”

“By what?”

“I ran into an old girl friend.”

“And that was more important?”

“Well,” I said, “you know how it is. It’s always more important than anything, at the time.”

“All right. Who was the girl?”

“End of the line,” I said. “She’s an old girl friend, like I said. But she’s also married.”

“Then you
did
go down there to buy a clock.”

“Think anything you want. I’ve told you how it happened.”

“But you won’t say who the girl was?”

“Of course not. You think I want her to get in trouble?”

“Well, you’ve got yourself in trouble.”

“I don’t think so. You say you
think
I robbed a bank. That’s not trouble, unless I’d actually done it. What’d you do, pick my name out of a hat?”

“No. This is Monday morning, and six of us have been working on this since Friday evening. It doesn’t take that long to pull a name out of a hat. Madox, you might as well face it. You stick out in this thing like a cootch dancer at a funeral.”

“Why?” I asked. I wiped the sweat off my face. “For God’s sake, why? Because I was there in town?”

“I’m coming to that. Why were you?”

“I told you. I work there. I sell cars.”

“I know. And in less than three weeks after you show up, the bank is robbed. Where’d you work last?”

“In Houston.”

“So you leave a city the size of Houston and just happen to wind up in a one-horse burg of less than three thousand. To sell cars, you say. Why?”

“Cars are sold everywhere.”

“Did somebody recommend the place? Did Harshaw advertise for a salesman in the Houston papers?”

“No,” I said. “I—”

“I see. Just a coincidence.”

“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you. After I quit my job in Houston, I decided I’d go to Oklahoma City. I stopped in Lander to get some lunch, and while I was eating Harshaw came in for coffee. We got to talking about something that was in the paper there on the counter, and struck up kind of a general conversation. When he found out I was a salesman, he offered me a job. You can ask him about it if you don’t believe me.”

“So you took a job? Just like that?”

“Why not? A job was what I was looking for.”

“And then in less than three weeks somebody sticks up a bank that hasn’t been robbed in the forty-three years it’s been there. A week before it happens you go off somewhere for a whole day and night and you can’t explain. And the same day it happens, a little after dark, you sneak out of town again for two or three hours. Where’d you go that time?”

I began to be afraid of him then. He was like a bulldog; every time he shifted his grip he got a little more of your throat.

“Well?” The relentless eyes wouldn’t leave my face. “Another married woman you can’t tell us about?”

“No,” I said. “I remember what you’re talking about. I went swimming.”

“Everybody else in town is in an uproar about a fire and bank robbery, but you go swimming. All right, where’d you go?”

I told him.

“Did you ever go swimming out there at night before?”

“Yes. Several times.”

He grunted. “Good. That’s what I wanted to know. Now tell me something I’m curious about.” He paused a moment, watching me and letting me wait. “On these other times,
did you always make it a point to stop in at the restaurant on your way back with your hair plastered down like a wet rat, and kid the waitress about it?”

I was groggy for a minute. How could I have known I’d run into a mind like this? I’d done it deliberately, for an alibi, but he could smell it. It was overdone for him. It was phony; it stuck out. I rolled with it, trying to keep my face from showing I was being hurt.

“Look,” I said, “how the hell do I know where I went every time I came back from swimming? I don’t keep a diary. God, you just go swimming. And then you go home. Or you want a cup of coffee. Or a Coke. Or you go to the movies. Or to the can. Who’s going to keep track of all that?”

“I was just curious about it. We’ll call it another coincidence. Let’s go back to the first time you were ever in that bank. You opened an account, remember? And here’s the funniest coincidence of all. There was a fire that day too, wasn’t there?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think there was, now that I recall it.”