River Girl (10 page)

I shoved off and started the motor, and as I went down the slough I swung around once and looked back. She had turned and was walking along the ruts of the old logging road, very straight and lovely and alone, and suddenly I knew, more than I ever had before, how much I loved her, and that if anything ever happened to her, everything would end for me.

I’d driven the Olds down this morning instead of the old Ford, and after I returned the boat I blasted it back up the highway to where the logging road turned off. It was slow work there, however, because of high centers, and I’d gone barely a quarter mile before I met her. After she’d climbed in and I turned around I passed her the cigarettes and asked her to light me one. As she handed it over, she said, “You haven’t told me yet what we’re going to do, Jack.”

“I’m not sure about all of it yet myself,” I said, swinging out of the ruts to get past a high spot in the road. “A lot of it depends on what I find out in town. But right now I’m going to take you down to Colston, where you can get on a bus without being seen by anybody around here and where we won’t be seen together.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to meet you in Bayou City. Day after tomorrow, or that night.”

On the way down to Colston I stopped at a small town and bought a cheap suitcase and three or four Sunday papers to stuff in it so it wouldn’t feel empty. “You’ll need that to check into a hotel,” I said. “They probably wouldn’t give you a room without it.”

As I started to get back in the car I suddenly noticed her hair. I mean, I noticed it in the way that someone else would, the way I had when I had first seen it. I had grown accustomed to the way it was chopped up, and to me it was beautiful and I always wanted to get my hands into it and it made my breath catch in my throat to look at her, but everybody else who saw it was going to notice it and remember the girl who’d had her hair cut with a dull butcher knife.

She saw me looking at it and for an instant the tension went out of her face and her eyes were tender. “You’re still fascinated with my hair-do, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I wasn’t thinking of my reaction to it. The idea, for the next thousand miles or so, is to blend into the herd, or at least as much as a girl with your looks can do it, and you might as well be leading a couple of pandas on a leash.”

She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. “Can you run back in the drugstore and get me a package of bobby pins?”

She worked on it while I drove. It was long enough to roll into a knot on the back of her neck, and when she got through none of the ragged ends showed. “How do you like it now?” she asked, turning to lean toward me.

“Fine,” I said. “Now you’re just another beautiful girl. Women will look at your clothes and men’ll look at your legs. You’re safe enough.”

“Do you like it better this way? I could wear it like this.”

“No,” I said. “I liked it better the other way. Somehow, it was easier to imagine being lost in it and never finding my way out.”

She looked over at me with her eyes soft and reached out to pat my hand on the steering wheel.

“Warn me when you’re going to do that while I’m driving,” I said. “You’ll get us both killed.”

When we got to Colston I pulled off into a quiet side street under the big trees and stopped. Taking out the wallet, I handed her a hundred and fifty of the money.

“I’m going to tell you good-by here,” I said, “because I’m going to drop you off a block or so from the bus station and run. There will be a bus for Bayou City sometime this evening, around seven, I think. You’ll arrive there a little before midnight. Go to the State Hotel. It’s a small one, quiet, and not too expensive, but still not crumby enough for the cops to have their eyes on it. Register as Mrs. Crawford and just wait until I show up. Try to buy yourself a few clothes, but make the money go as far as possible, because we’re going to have to travel by bus. I won’t be able to bring the car the way things are going to work out. And be sure to remember this: When I get there, don’t recognize me. It may be safer for us to travel separately until we get clear out of the state. You can slip me the number of your room on the quiet, but don’t let anybody see that you even know me.”

I took her face in both my hands. “I won’t see you for forty-eight hours, and after that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. So this is two days’ worth of good-by, and then there’ll never be another one.” She held onto me, and when she finally stirred and pushed back on my chest her eyes were wet.

“Jack,” she whispered, “I’m afraid.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said. “Just hang on.”

“But you’re up to something.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not anything dangerous. Not as dangerous as running now would be.”

“But what is it? Don’t you see I have to know?”

“All right,” I said. “But it may not pan out. That’s the only reason I didn’t want to tell you. It all depends on what I find out in town. I’m going to try to make it look as if he killed me.”

It was nearly seven when I got back to town. The sun was down, but the air was still and heat lay stagnant and suffocating in the streets. I started to go on up to the courthouse, but remembered it would be closed now, and since I’d have to get the custodian to let me in the building there was no use in hurrying. He probably wouldn’t be there to start cleaning up until nearly eight. Impatient and savage at the delay but still trying to tell myself there was no hurry, that I had all night to find out what I wanted to know, I turned in at the house. At least I could get out of the sweaty fishing clothes and take a shower.

As I was turning the key in the back door I heard the telephone ringing inside. The key stuck for a minute, and while I worked with it I could hear the ringing going on with that shrill, waspish insistence a telephone always has in an empty house. Just as I got the door open and started through the kitchen it quit. Well, the hell with it, I thought.

There was a postcard from Louise, the usual picture of a yellow beach covered with parasols and a Prussian-blue ocean in the background. “We’re having a fine time,” she said. I threw it in on the bed and started to undress for the shower. At least, I thought, she didn’t ask for money this time. The shower felt wonderful. I turned it on hot, then cold, then hot again, feeling my nerves begin to unwind and a little of the tightness go out of me. And then, in the middle of it, the telephone started in again. Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought, and let it ring. It went on, seeming to grow shriller and more angry as the seconds passed, and finally I turned off the water and reached for a towel. Just as I came out of the shower stall it stopped.

I dried myself, wrapped the towel around my waist, and went out in the kitchen. Getting a couple of ice cubes out of the refrigerator, I poured a glass half full of bourbon and ran a little water in it. By the time the first two swallows had gone down I could feel myself settling like a punctured balloon. I hadn’t realized how taut I’d been now for hours. It’ll be all right in a few days, I thought. It’ll wear off, and I won’t think about it. I know I won’t. The telephone started again.

This time I got to it, still carrying the drink. “Hello,” I said impatiently. “Marshall speaking.”

“Where have you been?” It was Buford, and I could hear the cold anger in his voice. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours.” I could feel the tightness coming back. Something had happened.

“I had a little private business to attend to,” I said. I knew I had a bawling out coming to me for going off without telling him, so if he wanted to give it to me now, this was as good a time as any.

“Well, next time how about letting me know about it? I might have to get in touch with you.”

“Right,” I said. “I see what you mean.”

“No. You don’t. You don’t know how much I mean. I want to see you right away.”

“All right. What’s up?”

“All hell’s broken loose. But I can’t talk about it over the phone. Get over here as fast as you can.”

“Where are you?”

“A friend’s place. That four-story apartment house on Georgia street. Apartment Three.”

“I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” I hung up. I had an idea about the “friend’s place,” but I’d never been there or even known where it was. Buford was a bachelor and lived with his mother in a big ugly gingerbread house built by his grandfather back in the eighties, but I’d always been pretty sure he had another place somewhere, for he could disappear right here in town at times and nobody could find him. It wasn’t any of my business, however, and I’d never thought about it much except to wonder once or twice why he didn’t marry the girl, whoever she was. Maybe he didn’t believe in marriage.

I finished the drink and went into the bedroom to throw on some clothes. The car was still in the driveway, and I backed out and headed across town. Apartment 3 had a private entrance. I pressed the buzzer and the door clicked. There was a short hall at the top of the stairs, and the door to the living-room was on the left. It was a big room on the corner of the building, looking out into both streets, but the curtains were drawn now and the Lights were on, for it was dusk outside.

It was beautifully furnished, with a beige rug and blond furniture, a big console phonograph, and shelves full of record albums and books, but the two things that would hit you in the eye as you walked into it would be first the girl, and then the guns. She was on the sofa with her legs curled under her, and as I came in she uncoiled and stood up with the connected flow of movement of a cat turning on a rug, a small girl with a vital, somehow reckless face and short-cropped hair in tight rings close to her head like curling chips of copper. She was wearing a blue dressing gown that just touched the floor under her feet and was pulled chastely together at the base of a creamy throat with a large silver pin in the shape of an Oriental sword. I had seen her around town a number of times, driving a Lincoln convertible, but never had known who she was except that someone had said she was married to an Army engineer working on something in Alaska. The story had probably been started by Buford.

“Mr. Marshall?” she asked, smiling. “I’m Dinah.”

“How do you do?” I said.

She saw me looking around inquiringly. “Mr. Buford is out in the kitchen mixing a drink. He won’t let me do it; he says no woman should ever be trusted with a loaded gun or a cocktail shaker.”

I nodded, and looked around at the wall. She must have seen the wonder on my face, for she laughed.

“How do you like my gun collection?” I looked back at her and saw the amusement in the gray eyes. Somehow you got the idea that the very incongruity of it tickled her probably as much as it did Buford, this idea of a girl’s apartment—traditional in every other respect, secluded, anonymous, tastefully furnished—with one whole wall covered with guns. There were expensive shotguns, which he used during the bird season, rifles all the way from .22’s to large-caliber things I’d never seen before, and a beautiful collection of antique firearms probably going back to Revolutionary days.

“They’re nice,” I said. Any other time I would have gone over and looked at them more closely and probably would have paid more attention to her, this amazing flame-haired figurine who found amusement in sharing a love nest with an arsenal, but right now I had too many other things on my mind. Impatience was making me jumpy and I wished Buford would come on and tell me what he thought was so damned important and get it over with so I could go on with what I wanted to do, get over to the courthouse and find out what I could about Shevlin.

He came in then with three highballs on a tray. “Hello, Jack,” he said, quite calmly, and I knew that if he intended bawling me out any more about running off that way he wasn’t going to do it in front of the girl. He was always an odd one; he was dangerous enough to kill you if the necessity for it ever arose, but there wouldn’t be any breach of good manners.

We sat down and he got right to it. Lighting a cigar, he looked at me across the coffee table. “Don’t worry about Dianne,” he said, which meant we could talk freely in front of her.

It seemed to me she had said her name was Dinah, but I let it go. “What happened?” I asked.

“It’s your friend Abbie Bell. She’s in the hospital. In bad shape.”

“What!” I put down the glass. “What happened to her?”

“Some man jumped her with a knife and chopped her up pretty badly. She’s in serious condition; they think she has a chance to pull through, but nobody can see her yet.”

“Who did it? Did you get the—” I caught myself, thinking of the girl.

“That’s the funny part of it, and the part that’s got me worried. We’ve got him in jail, but we don’t know who he is or why he did it. No identification of any land on him, and as far as we can find, he hasn’t got a record.”

“Was he drunk?”

“No. Cold sober. And he shut up like an oyster when we arrested him. Not a word out of him.”

“And now?” I asked.

“It’s dangerous. If Abbie dies, there’ll be an awful stink, naturally, for allowing a place like that to operate. And the man’ll have to stand trial, of course. And it isn’t just what’s on the surface here that worries me. Something tells me there’s a lot more underneath.”

“Who picked him up?” I asked.

“Hurd.” Bud Hurd was the other deputy here in town. “It was about three this afternoon. The phone rang, and it was some Negro girl who works down there at Abbie’s. The maid, I guess. She was screaming her head off, not saying anything but, ‘Miss Abbie! Miss Abbie!’ over and over, so I shot Hurd down there to find out what the hell was going on. He said the place was a madhouse. The Negro girl and a white one were screaming out in the hall, and when he went in the room where the rest of the racket was, Abbie was folded up across the end of a sofa with her clothes half torn off and a cut down one arm and another bad one in the back. The man was still waving the knife and swearing, and when Bud came in he made a break for the door but Bud collared him and hit him once with the sap to get the knife away from him. He called the ambulance and they took Abbie to the hospital. We can’t get in to see her, and he won’t talk, so we don’t have any idea what it was all about.”

“How about the girls?” I asked. Somebody should know what started it.

“They had disappeared. I guess there was only the one white girl left there, besides the Negro maid, and they both lit out while Bud was getting the man calmed down. They didn’t seem to have taken anything with them.”

“And they didn’t come back?”

“No. Bud went back later and couldn’t find them.” I stood up. He looked at me questioningly. “You got any ideas?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think the girls will come back, if their clothes are still there.”

Dianne, or Dinah, looked at me across the rim of her glass, the reckless gray eyes alight with interest. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “They’ll probably come back now that it’s dark. Can I go too? I’d like to see the inside of one of those places.”

“No,” Buford said shortly.

She said nothing, but the eyes shifted, studying him thoughtfully, and then she shrugged. You got the impression she’d never spent a great deal of time in her life asking permission of anyone, or paying much attention to refusals.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, glad she wasn’t going, and anxious to get started.

So far it was just a confused mess in my mind. I hadn’t had a chance to sort any of it out, and as I got in the car and started down there my mind was busy with it. I was sorry about Abbie, of course, and hoped she would pull through, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And, of course, the main thing was trying to figure out what bearing it was going to have on what I was trying to do. On the surface of it, it would have none, for if I had any luck and found out what I hoped I’d find about Shevlin, I’d be gone tomorrow and they could have this load of grief all to themselves from now on. But when you looked at it again, it wasn’t quite that simple. With this thing flaring up and a grand-jury investigation a very real possibility, my disappearing the very next day was going to make the long arm of coincidence look as if it had been pulled out at the socket. I didn’t like it. And I wasn’t just running from a bribery charge now. If they got to sniffing around too much over the place where I’d disappeared, it would be Shevlin they’d find.

The square was full of people joy-riding to escape the heat and heading for the movies. I shot down the side street and stopped the car a block away from Abbie’s. The beer joint was an island of light and juke-box noise, and beyond it the hotel was completely dark. A drunk came out of the saloon and lurched past me, headed across the street for the chili place, but there was no one else around. I went softly up the steps and opened the door, standing very quietly for a moment in the front room. Maybe the girl and the maid had already been there and gone. I could tell by turning on the lights and looking in the rooms upstairs to see if any clothes were left, but that would mean that if they started to come back now they’d see the light and run again. I was trying to make up my mind about it when suddenly I heard a footstep and the click of a switch in the hall on the second floor and I could see the reflection of light above the stairs.

I went up them, trying not to make any noise, and had reached the top before I heard a sharp cry of fright, and the door to the room slammed shut. This left me in total darkness, for the light had been inside the room, but I could see the thin crack of it under the door and walked toward it. The door was bolted.

“Who is it?” the girl inside cried out in fright. “Marshall,” I said. “Open up. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Who?”

“Jack Marshall. From the sheriffs office.”

“I didn’t see anything! Honest, I didn’t.” I knew why she had run. She was afraid of being called as a witness in the trial in case Abbie died, and she didn’t like the idea. In her profession, she probably figured the less she had to do with the courts and police, the better off she was.

I know,” I said. “I’m not trying to take you in as a witness. I just want to talk to you.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t. But you can’t get out as long as I’m standing here, so you might as well open up and see.”

“All right,” she said hesitantly. I heard the bolt slide back, and pushed the door open.

There was an open suitcase on the bed and she had just started to put her clothes in it. She stood near the dresser, still holding a pair of stockings in her hand, her face pale and the large brown eyes watching me uneasily. I suddenly remembered this was the room that boy’s clothes had been in.

“You’re Bernice, aren’t you?” I asked, trying to calm her a little.

“Yes. But I didn’t see anything down there. You don’t want me for anything, do you?”

“No,” I said. I came on into the room. “Would you like a cigarette?”

She took it and I lighted it for her. This seemed to ease her mind a little, and she sat down in the chair near the head of the bed, sitting up straight on the front edge of it as if she might fly away any minute. Her hands turned nervously in her lap and I wondered if she’d burn herself with the cigarette. She must have been around twenty-eight, not a very pretty girl, but with a rather docile, not too bright face, which must have been pleasant and good-natured when she wasn’t scared like this, and her eyes had something of the timidity and shy friendliness of an old dog’s. Her hair had been very dark at one time and was now hopelessly fouled up in some shade between maroon and black as a result, apparently, of some attempt to dye it red.