River Girl (12 page)

It had happened three or four months ago. Lorraine had been firing papers in the cabinets and forgotten that one of the drawers had a broken stop. When she pulled it open it flew out on the floor, spilling papers all over the office. I was there at the time and had helped her gather them up. And it was while we were bent over the disordered jumble that she had picked up a picture that had caught her attention and held it out admiringly.

“Boy, but he’s good-looking! If I ever get murdered, I hope it’s by somebody as handsome as that!”

I jumped up from the desk. Well, I thought, I know what drawer he’s in. And I know what he’s wanted for.

It took only a couple of minutes to find it now. With a grunt of satisfaction, I jerked it from the file and put it on the desk, and stood looking down at the picture of Lewis Farrell, alias Roger Shevlin, wanted for murder and escape.

The picture had been made a long time ago, apparently in 1940, and Lorraine had been right in saying he was a handsome man, but the identity was unmistakable. Looking at it now, I could see why I had still noticed the resemblance when I saw him that day on the lake. It was the deep-set, rather brooding eyes and the well-formed bone structure of the face, which the lines of the years and that grayish stubble hadn’t been able to hide.

I read it hurriedly. He had been tried and convicted of killing his wife in 1939. There was no information about the crime itself, or the trial, but apparently it hadn’t been first-degree murder, for he had drawn a life sentence instead of death. He began serving time in the state penitentiary in 1940, was transferred to a farm as a model prisoner in 1943, and had escaped the same year. So far, so good, I thought, and very good.

The picture stared up at me. Year after year of running, I thought, and terror, and nights of looking up at the ceiling in the dark while he wondered who had seen him during the day. He’d had years of this and then wound up lying face down in his own blood in a backwoods cabin, and I had been the one who had killed him, so now I had bought my own ticket on the merry-go-round. I straightened up and ran a hand across my face. There was no use getting morbid about it now. I stuck the notice back in the file.

I closed the office and went back out into the square. It all depended now on what I found out from Buford. If he said that a lawyer or someone else had visited Waites after his arrest, we could be pretty sure they believed we didn’t know what had really happened down there, or what was behind it, and that they were taking pains to keep us in the dark. Bernice was gone, and they wouldn’t know we had the letter, and...I stopped. The letter! My God, why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? If Waites hadn’t already told them that he’d lost it down there, he would sooner or later, and they’d go look for it.

I crossed to the car as fast as I could walk, backed out of the parking place, and shot down the street toward the hotel. Parking in the same place I had before, I took a look up and down the street. The hotel itself was still dark and no one was in sight.

I went up the steps. Slipping softly into the lobby, I walked down the hall by feel until I came to the door of the room. Once inside, with the door closed, I struck a match and looked around. It appeared to be just as I had left it. Walking over to the sofa. I took the letter out of my pocket and dropped it carefully down against the wall where I had found it. Then I went back out and got into the car, breathing easily again. It would have wrecked everything if they had found out, after I was gone, that I had read that letter.

I was beginning to feel like a man being chased through some horrible dream. How many hours ago, I thought, did I stand there in that cabin and turn her around facing me so I could see how she looked in decent clothes and with her hair combed, stand there feeling proud of the loveliness of her? Was it months ago now? I looked at my watch as I went past a street light. It was a little after nine. It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.

Suddenly, I was conscious of a consuming desire to get back to the girl’s apartment and find out the only other thing there was left to learn. Somehow, that seemed now to be the goal toward which I had been running since eleven o’clock this morning, the final knowledge that at last I had my hands on all the loose ends of this thing I so I could know definitely, once and for all, what I was going to do. It seemed that for a length of time beyond all measuring I had been running across the surface of a lake on treacherous cakes of ice that sank under me as fast as I stepped on them. When I got one thing straightened out in my mind, something else would explode in my face and change it.

I parked and hurried up the walk to the entrance. The door clicked as soon as I pushed the buzzer. They’re anxious too, I thought. I must have been gone a long time.

Buford looked up as I came in. “I just called the hospital. They think the Bell woman will pull through all right. They won’t let anybody in to see her yet, though.”

I was glad to hear it, in spite of the fact that I knew the grand jury would probably subpoena her. She was a bandit, but a cheerful one, and I liked her.

Buford went over and turned off the radio and came back to sit down on the sofa beside Dinah. She looked at me with interest.

“What did you find out?” Buford asked. He might have been asking me who won the Tulane-Alabama game, but I knew what was going on in his mind.

I sat down. I reached for a cigarette, and found the pack was empty. Dinah pushed a silver cigarette case across the table toward me, smiling. “Before I start,” I said, “I want to ask a question. Did Waites have any visitor after he was arrested?”

“Waites?”

“That’s the man you’ve got in jail. Maybe he gave some other name when you booked him, but that’s his right one.”

“Then you found out about him?”

“Quite a bit. And it’s all bad. But first, did anybody go in to see him?”

He nodded. “Yes. Holloway.”

I knew then I’d been right. Holloway was a lawyer, and a good one. He was also a member of Soames’s congregation and active in church work.

“All right, let’s have it,” Buford said quietly.

“Well, hold onto your hat,” I said. “That fifteen-year-old girl Abbie Bell had down there is Waites’s daughter.”

Buford put down the cigar and whistled softly. As rapidly as possible I gave him the whole thing, what I had found out from Bernice, what the letter had said, and what I had been able to figure out from it. He got the whole picture as fast as I gave it to him. There was nothing slow about Buford.

“So now we’ve got Waites in jail, where he’ll be very handy for the grand jury any time they want to listen to him,” he said. “And that Bell woman’s in the hospital, where they can get her story as soon as she’s able to talk.”

“Yes,” I said. “And you can’t do a damned thing about either of them. You can’t move Abbie Bell; and you can’t run Waites out of town because he’s under a serious charge, or will be, and you’d never in God’s world explain it if he turned up missing. It’s just about as near perfect as anything can be.”

Buford picked up his drink and looked at it. “Sweet Jesus,” he said.

“They know they’ve got us,” I went on. “Mrs. Waites probably got in touch with Soames again when her husband took off for here with his hot head and his knife, asking him to try to head the old man off before he got in trouble. It was too late for Soames to do anything about it, but of course he knew who it was as soon as he heard there’d been trouble down at Abbie’s place. So he had Holloway take the case to defend the old man, and in return they asked him to keep his mouth shut for another day or two until they could get their facts ready for the grand jury. I don’t doubt that Holloway even told Waites he’d be in danger of having something happen to him if we found out who he was and what his testimony would do to us.”

Buford got up from the sofa and walked slowly over to the wall where the guns were and stood there for a moment looking at them with his back to us. I sat looking at him, waiting to see what he would have to say, and then the rest of it began to fall into place for me. It was a part of the idea that had never occurred to me until this minute, and as I turned it over in my mind I was conscious of a warm feeling of elation and the knowledge that I had all the loose ends taken care of at last. This last piece fitted into it as perfectly as the final section of a jigsaw puzzle.

I turned back and noticed abruptly that Dinah had been watching my face with that speculative interest I had seen in her eyes before. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that every time I had looked around her eyes had been on me, not with anything flirtatious in them, but only with that intense and fascinated interest, as a child might watch grownups getting ready for a hunting trip.

The gray eyes smiled at me over the top of the highball glass. “You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s a good one.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” Buford turned back from the gun collection. He had lifted down one of the shotguns, an English double barrel, and as he turned he brought it up and swung it in an arc, mounting the gun and swinging it through all in one fluid motion the way a good wing shot gets onto a covey of rising birds. Then he took it down, looked at it once, and replaced it on the rack. “I like expensive guns,” he said.

And expensive women, I thought, wondering how many other custodians of the gun collection there had been before Dinah. But I couldn’t quite follow him at the moment. I knew he was down there at the bottom of the well, where I had been, looking up at the smooth, unscalable walls, and he wanted to talk about guns. But maybe guns just happened to be a good opening subject. I’d never underestimated him, and didn’t intend to.

He reached down and picked up his drink off the coffee table. “You have any expensive habits, Jack?”

I began to have a strange and unaccountable hunch then, a feeling that we were both working our way around to the same idea. I lit another of Dinah’s cigarettes. “No,” I said. “None except staying out of jail. That may be a little expensive at the moment.”

“It might be, at that.” He sat down across from me on the sofa and looked at me. “You have any ideas? Don’t worry about Dianne. Where information is concerned, she’s a one-way street.”

“Good,” I said. “I wasn’t worried about her.” Actually, I didn’t like this talking in front of her. Not that I didn’t trust her, or had any reason to believe she talked too much, for after all he trusted her and he was no fool, but in something like this you increase your risk a thousand times for every additional person who knows what you’re up to. However, there wasn’t much I could do about it. If I insisted on talking to him alone, he’d probably tell her all about it later anyway, and it would be the same except that that way she might be angry about it and more likely to talk.

“All right,” I said. “We’re in the middle. We might as well admit it. Sometime tomorrow or the next day they’re going to start issuing subpoenas by the dozen to find out what’s been going on here. And you know as well as I do that that thing about the Waites girl is going to stir up a hell of a stink. It isn’t anything that can be hushed up, especially now that her father will probably go to the pen over it. And Abbie Bell won’t have any choice in the matter but to tell the truth when they get to her. She’ll be under oath, and she’s been around long enough to have heard of the perjury laws. ‘Why, I’ve just been paying the sheriff’s office for protection,’ she’ll say. ‘Doesn’t everybody?’”

Buford nodded. “But we know that. Let’s hear something new.”

“That’s right. But I just wanted to be sure we were both starting from the same place. Now, here’s where we split. As top man, you’re going to be the one they turn to for the answers. But balanced against that is the fact that I’ve been doing the collecting, at least for a long time now; that is, they’ve never actually given you anything direct. They gave it to me. And that’ll be what they testify. However, the people investigating the thing will know who got the money unless you’re able to show them otherwise. What you need is a goat.”

He nodded again. “I’m still with you.”

“However, you can’t make a goat out of me without my consent. It’s too easy to tell the truth on a witness stand, as we both know. But, on the other hand, if you had a goat who wasn’t here to take the stand, you might get by with it.”

“In other words, if you ran.”

“That’s right. And running is expensive.”

He took the case out of his pocket, selected a cigar with extreme concentration, bit the end off it reflectively, and flipped the lighter. “How expensive, Jack?”

“Five thousand,” I said. I looked across at him and then at Dinah. She had her elbows on her knees and was staring at my face almost enraptured.

“I haven’t got that much,” he said. “But disregarding the figure for the moment, let’s look at this running angle. Just how long do you think you could keep from being caught? You ever look at yourself in a full-length mirror? Put you in any group of a hundred people and you’d stick out like a platinum blonde with two black eyes and a French poodle. You’re six feet two, or thereabouts, you weigh over two hundred, your face is as flat as an Indian’s and two shades darker, and you’ve got coal-black hair with a curl in it you couldn’t take out with a Negro’s anti-kink solution. You wouldn’t be away a week.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But if they thought I was dead, they wouldn’t look very hard. Not in that way.”

It startled him. He had the drink in his hand, and now he put it down and looked at me. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

“There’s a man up there in the head of the lake where I was fishing the other day who’s wanted for murder and escape. I ran into him, thought his face was familiar, and tonight I looked him up in the files. You can verify this by looking yourself. His name is actually Lewis Farrell, but he’s going under the name of Shevlin now. He’s been on the run since 1943. Now, if I took one of the county cars tomorrow morning, drove down to the foot of the lake, rented a boat and motor, and went up the lake to arrest him and never did come out, what would be the natural conclusion after your searching parties found the abandoned boat floating around in some God-forsaken part of that swamp? Remember, this man is dangerous, and he’s wanted for murder, not petit larceny or crap-shooting.”

I could see the idea take hold of him. “By God, that sounds all right, Jack.” And then doubt began to show itself in his eyes, and he shook his head. “It’s good, all right, but it’s going to look like too much of a coincidence. Two weeks ago, or even last week, it would have worked all right. But now—”

“No,” I said. “You haven’t looked at all of it yet. I couldn’t be running from anything that’s going to happen here, because I don’t have the faintest idea anything is going to happen. Bernice is gone. Waites has never said a word because they told him not to, the letter is down there where he dropped it, and I’ve never seen it.”