Girl Out Back

Ten

I turned off 41 into the short access road, hoping anxiously there wouldn’t be any fishermen down there today. The chances of it were slight, however, since it was Monday. When I came around the last turn in the twisting pair of ruts and saw the camp-ground and snatches of the sheet-metal glare of the water through the trees I breathed softly in relief. It was as deserted and silent as the upper reaches of the Orinoco.

I got out and surveyed a route through the timber and then backed the station wagon over it until I was a good hundred yards from the road. Taking the wrench and the two-gallon can, I crawled under the back and removed the drain-plug at the bottom of the gasoline tank. I filled the can and then let the rest run out and soak into the ground. When the tank was completely dry, I replaced the drain-plug and poured about a quart back into it from the can. If the car would start at all, the fuel pump should be able to pick up enough to run it for possibly a mile, and perhaps almost to the highway.

Capping the can tightly, I carried it a short distance away and hid it in some underbrush, noting the location carefully so I could find it again, in the dark if I had to. I got back in the seat and pressed the starter. The engine took hold promptly. I drove back to the road and parked just off it, facing toward the highway and far enough back from the camp-ground to be out of sight of anyone going past in a boat.

Lifting out the suitcase, I stripped down to my shorts and changed clothes. I carefully knotted the blue tie, using the rear-view mirror to check the result. I put on the hat, slid into the jacket of the suit, and ripped open the envelope containing my credentials and the warrant. After stowing these in the pockets of the jacket, I put my old slacks and sports shirt in the suitcase and stowed it away again, under the blankets. Removing the registration holder from the steering wheel shaft, I hid it nearby in some bushes. It probably wasn’t necessary, but there was no use taking chances. There was nothing in the car that would identify me. I checked to be sure I still had the spare ignition key I always carried in my wallet, locked the station wagon, and dropped the leather key case in my pocket. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. Lean, unrelenting, deadly, Special Agent G. U. Ward was on the job with the look of far distances in his eyes. No, the look of eagles, I thought. Far distances you had in Westerns. I wondered if this interlude of goofiness meant I was nervous. No. I was all right. There was nothing to it; the whole thing was ridiculously easy.

I cut out across the bottom, taking my time. There wasn’t much chance he’d be out on the lake this early, and I had to get inside the cabin as the first move. When I reached a point in the edge of the timber where I could see the cove, I saw his boat was there. He was nowhere in sight. Probably taking a nap, I thought.

I waited, remaining well back from the clearing. Three-quarters of an hour went by. Shortly after four-fifteen he came out the door and went down to the boat. He had on his straw sombrero and gun-belt and holster, and was carrying a spinning rod. He cranked the motor and went straight across to the edge of the bed of pads on the other side of the waterway. I circled the edge of the clearing and came up directly behind the cabin. When I looked around the corner I could see him through an opening in the trees at the edge of the water, but he was almost two hundred yards away and intent on his casting. There was little chance he would see me. I slipped around the corner and entered.

The reading glasses were on top of the chest of drawers. As I picked them up I noticed they’d had a minor repair job since I’d seen them last. A narrow strip of white tape was stuck to the outer edge of the right lens, apparently to hold it in the frame. A disquieting thought struck me; maybe he had discovered the spare set was missing. Presumably he had jarred these somehow and loosened that lens; wouldn’t that cause him to dig out the other pair?

I whirled and lifted the magazines off the trunk and opened it. There were no glasses in it. I closed it and hurriedly rifled the drawers in the chest, and then started making a quick but thorough search of the entire cabin. Half-way through this, I was struck with the absurdity of it. What difference did it make if he had discovered they were gone;

He couldn’t possibly have replaced them in this length of time. And he was here, wasn’t he? This was the reason I’d sabotaged the spares rather than the set he was using—to head off any possibility he might be in town replacing them when I came back. Everything was right according to plan. I replaced my divots and returned to the pair on the chest of drawers.

Picking them up, I held them against the palm of my left hand while I hit each of the lenses a smart rap with the back of my knife. They cracked all the way through, but did not shatter. I replaced them carefully, turning them a little so they would be in profile to anyone on the other side of the room or near the door.

Now to set the stage. I stepped to the door and looked out. He was only partly visible through the screen of foliage. I went back to the shed, squatted under the bench, and lifted down the cereal carton. The two packages of tens were still in it. Hurrying back to his garbage dump, I gathered up the bits of hardware from the burned suitcase. I took everything into the cabin. Clearing the kitchen table of its accumulation of syrup-smeared dirty dishes, I moved it slightly toward the center of the room and put a chair beside it.

I set the pieces of blackened hardware on the table, spread out a little as if I had been examining them, and lifted the money from the carton. One package of the tens I left in its paper binder, but the other, which had the stain along the edge, I opened, preserving the band intact, and scattered loosely on the surface. I stood back and surveyed it. It made quite an impressive picture. There was nothing to do now but wait. I located a dirty plate to use for an ash-tray, lit a cigarette and sat down. I hoped he didn’t fish too long. Now that everything was ready, I wanted to get on with it; inactivity was going to make me nervous.

In about twenty minutes I heard the motor start. But he was only moving to a new location further along the weed bed. I cursed impatiently. Another fifteen minutes dragged by. The motor started again, and this time when I looked out I saw him headed in toward the cove. All right, I thought; here we go. Make it good, pal.

I stepped out the door and went around to the side of the cabin. I heard him cut the motor to glide into the cove, and then in a minute his footsteps as he came up the path toward the cabin. I let him draw nearer. There seemed only a remote chance he’d be silly enough to try to shoot me with that gun, but I wanted to be near enough to stop him in the event of that being an unwarranted assumption on my part. He was very near the door now. I stepped around the corner right in front of him.

“Mr. Cliffords?” I asked. “Mr. Walter E. Cliffords?”

He stopped short, holding the spinning rod in one hand and a very large bass on a stringer in the other. The guileless blue eyes went round with amazement. He looked like a startled baby.

“What’s that?” he asked blankly.

“Are you Mr. Cliffords?” I repeated.

“Sure,” he said, recovering a little. He frowned at me as if I were a trifle dense. Who else would he be? “I’m the only one that lives here,” he explained. “What you want?”

I took one more step forward and brought the black identification folder out of the pocket of my jacket.

“My name’s Ward,” I said, flipping it open briefly before bis face and then closing it again. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. You’re under arrest, Mr. Cliffords.”

”Arrest?” The baby eyes went even rounder.

His mouth fell open and he dropped the rod and the fish to the ground. I tensed up, but he was only shoving his hands into the air. He held them stiffly at arms’ length above his head.

This seemed a trifle on the dramatic side, but it was all right with me. Then, so suddenly he took me by surprise, he moved. He took a step backward, turned to face the wall of the cabin, and tilted himself forward and off balance until he was supported by bis outstretched hands against the planks.

“What . . . ?” I said.

Then I got it. You always did that with dangerous criminals. It immobilized them while you lifted their arsenals. I unbuckled bis gunbelt, caught it as it dropped, transferred the .38 to my pocket, and tossed the belt itself inside the door. They didn’t do it any better on Dragnet. He still made no move to straighten up, and I was about to order him to when I caught myself just in time.

It was his arrest, by God, and he wanted it to be carried out in the approved manner. I still hadn’t frisked him for a hidden gun. I stooped and ran my hands up both sides of his legs, one at a time, and then up his body and under his arms.

“All right,” I said curtly.

He straightened and turned to face me. The round pixie face was filled with the wonder of a child beholding old faithful for the first time “A G-man,” he said in awe. “The F.B.I. What you know about that?”

I took the folded mortgage form from my breast pocket and held it out to him. “This is the Federal warrant for your arrest.”

He accepted it gingerly, as if it might explode.

Then he unfolded it and stared blankly. “I can’t read nothing without my specs,” he said. “They’re inside.”

I nodded toward the door. “All right. Let’s go in.”

I was right behind him. At the first step he took to the left, toward the chest, I snapped crisply, “Never mind! Stay away from those drawers. Stand right there in the center of the room.”

“Yessir,” he said.

“Where are they?” I asked. “I’ll get them.”

“On top of that dresser.”

“All right,” I said. “Don’t move from there.” I stepped over to the chest, turning my head to look back at him as I picked up the glasses. They slipped from my fingers. I made a desperate stab at them with the other hand to catch them before they could hit the floor, and batted them against the wall. The lenses shattered.

“Damn it!” I said. I turned and faced him apologetically, “I’m sorry as the devil, Mr. Cliffords. We’ll get you another pair.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.

I waited for him to mention the other pair in the trunk. When we didn’t find them, of course, I’d jump right down his throat for stalling, and divert his attention from a fact that could look quite fishy if he had the intelligence to grasp it. However, he said nothing about them. I glanced at him. He had taken the bait. He’d turned his head and was staring at the evidence on the kitchen table.

He shook his head resignedly. “I should have knowed,” he said. “I should have knowed I’d never get away with it.”

I was in. It was as easy as that.

I stepped over and gently lifted the warrant from his nerveless fingers, returning it to my pocket. “You’d better sit down,” I said, not unkindly.

He collapsed into the chair beside the table. When he took his eyes off the money and looked up at me, however, I was puzzled by the expression on his face. Instead of the blank despair I had expected, there was something odd in it. Dumb admiration was as near as I could come to it.

“How did you ever find it out?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll get to that in a minute. Right now it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say can be used against you. You’ve got yourself in a bad jam, Mr. Cliffords.”

“Will there be reporters”” he asked. “You reckon they’ll take my picture and print it in the papers?”

He reminded me of a child hoping to be taken on a picnic.

“I don’t think you realize the mess you’re in,” I said, frowning.

“Oh?” he said. “What you reckon they’ll charge me with?”

I fired up a cigarette, closed the lighter, and returned it to my pocket, letting him wait. I had to scare him now, and scare him badly.

“Not nothing real serious?” he suggested. “After all, all I done was find it. . . .”

I exhaled smoke and stared at him for a long minute. “I’m afraid you’re not very familiar with the law, Mr. Cliffords. A man was killed in that hold-up, as you know. That, of course, is the equivalent of first-degree murder.”

“But, look, Mr. Ward . . . I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

“Unfortunately,” I went on sternly, “that’s not quite the case. The minute you took that money for yourself and failed to report it to us, you made yourself an accessory. Under the law, you’re guilty right along with Haig. However, even if the Federal charge was reduced to obstructing justice or compounding a felony, there’s still the matter of prior jurisdiction. . . .”

I wasn’t sure as to the accuracy of all this legal gobbledegook, but it didn’t matter. He would know even less about it. And it was working. He leaned forward, staring at me.

“The State may want to hold you on a charge of murder,” I went on. “That would take precedence, of course.”

“Murder?”

I nodded. “We can’t be sure, of course, until we exhume the body, but the local District Attorney is interested. He feels there is a good chance Haig was still alive when you found him, and that you killed him for the money. . . .”

Cliffords broke in. “But he wasn’t, Mr .Ward. He was dead, I tell you. He’d been dead for days. That’s how come I happened to find him; it was all them birds.”

I had a hunch he was telling the truth, but the thing now was to keep him guessing and scared.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “When the body is exhumed, they may be able to tell. Just what you’ll be tried for is none of my business, anyway. I’m here merely to bring you in. And, of course, to recover the money.”

“Oh, I’ll show you where it is,” he said eagerly. “Will that help? I mean . . .”

“I can make no deals,” I said, being stern about it. “Of course, obviously it won’t hurt your case any, especially if you haven’t spent too much of it.”

“Oh, I hardly spent any at all.” Then his face fell. “But I did burn all them bonds and things, when I burned the satchel.”

He’d merely saved me the trouble of doing it myself, but I shook my head gravely. “That’s not so good,” I said. “Don’t you see that establishes willful intent?”

A couple more hours of this, I thought, and I should be able to pass the bar exam.

He sighed. “I’m sure sorry, Mr. Ward.”

I shook my head sympathetically. “I am, too, in a way, in spite of all the trouble you caused us. I mean, you weren’t a criminal—at least, up until now. And at your age—well, even ten years. . . .”

“Ten years?” he repeated slowly. I had him going now.

“Forget I said that,” I told him quickly. “I shouldn’t have. I mean, I’m not a judge. I’m an arresting officer. But tell me, what in the name of Heaven did you do it for? You didn’t spend much of it, you say. What did you want with it?”

He looked down at his hands. “Well, sir, it’s kind of a silly thing, I reckon. It got hold of me when I seen how much there was and when I got to thinking about it afterward. If I pretended like it was mine long enough, and nobody come along to take it away from me, I could mebbe take and do this thing I been thinking about all my life. One of them sort of things you know you ain’t ever going to do, but you just keep thinking about anyway.”

“What’s that?” I asked. We were wasting time, but it interested me.

“I wanted to buy a coconut farm,” he said simply.

“Coconut. . .?” I stared at him, and then I saw the dream. It was all over the round, lost, wistful face—the face of the world’s eternal patsy. He was like a child thinking about Christmas morning.

“On one of them islands,” he went on softly, not even looking at me. “Down south, you know. Just a one-island farm, but I would own the whole island and every single, blessed thing on it. I’d live on it, in a big house on top of a hill, and there’d be all these niggers. I’d wear boots, and one of them explorer’s hats, and I’d be good to ‘em. You know, things like doctoring them when they was sick, and holding trials when one of ‘em stole something from another one.

“There wouldn’t be any other white people except this store-keeper that I didn’t like and that I’d make him jump like Billy-be-damned when I said something to him, and then of course the straw-boss and his wife. The straw-boss, you understand, is the one that handles the niggers and that I give the orders to, and his wife would look just like Laura LaPlante. . . .”

He broke off, his face a picture of dreamy rapture. “You remember Laura LaPlante?

He had sixteen years on me. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you mean. nothing changes but the name.”

“Anyway,” he went on, not even hearing me, “this straw-boss’s wife would look exactly like her, and when he was off at the other end of the island seeing to the coconut trees and telling the niggers what to do she’d come in and sleep with me because she thought about me all the time, day and night. He’d know about it, of course, but there wasn’t anything he could do because I paid him so much he didn’t want to lose the job. . . .”

He sighed and shook his head. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him he could have shortened the dream considerably and got into the sack with her a lot faster by marrying the LaPlante type himself and by-passing the overseer. But maybe that wouldn’t work.

“Well, cheer up,” I said. “You might have got tired of her, and think of what a hell of a place that would have been to try to dodge a woman. Now, let’s go get it.”

“Sure,” he replied. “But first, would you tell me how you fellers found out I had it.”

“It wasn’t easy,” I said. “It took us a year and a half. And there’s a chance we never would have if you hadn’t spent some of the money we recognized. . .

“Them twenty-dollar bills,” he said. “I knowed it. I knowed it.”

You just knowed it too late, Bwana Sahib. “Why did you spend them, then?”

“I didn’t stop to think till I’d already passed three of ‘em. Then I noticed the numbers all run in order. So you traced em?

I shook my head. “No. We never did find out who spent them originally, but we did know they came from this area. So we went back to the other angle we were working on. Haig got away from that wreck, all right, and away from Sanport—we knew that. Nobody in Sanport would have hidden him; he was too hot. So the chances were that before the police arrived, he forced his way into a car that was passing and put a gun on the driver. That happens quite often. But the thing we never could understand was why the driver didn’t report it afterward. Even if Haig had killed him and stolen the car, the whole thing would have come out eventually. The car would have been found, or some friend or relative of the driver would have reported him missing. That was the thing that threw us, you see. Simply that the driver would have reported it if he were alive, or somebody would have reported the driver’s absence if he’d just disappeared.

“It took us a long time to see the answer, but we finally did, just about the time your twenty dollar-bill showed up. Suppose the driver died before he could tell us, all right, but in a perfectly routine manner that wasn’t suspicious at all? Routine, at least, in police work.

“We checked the Highway Patrol reports for that day, and we found it. Six hours and twenty minutes after Haig disappeared out his getaway car when it hit that truck, an elderly couple in a 1950 Plymouth sedan went off the road two miles from here just after dark in a downpour of rain and were instantly killed. They were on the wrong road, and they were driving faster than they normally did, even in good visibility on dry pavement. Haig, you see? He was in the car. He’d forced them to hide out somewhere until after dark.

“He was probably hurt, and maybe punchy with shock, so he didn’t know where he was going. The only thing he was sure of was that he had to stay off the highway. He could have left a trail of blood, but it washed right away. It was raining, you see. And when they picked up the old people, there was nothing in the car to indicate he’d ever been with them.

“It was easy from there. We just came out here, among other places, and searched your camp. We found what was left of his suitcase, and the rest of those twenties, plus those tens.”

When I finished, Cliffords didn’t say anything for a moment. He merely sighed and looked at me with that awe in his face. Then, finally, he said, “And I thought I could get away with it.”

“All right,” I said. I was tired of wasting time. “You ready to show me where it is?”

He stood up. “Sure,” he said. “There’s three more thousand of it under the house, on a sill. Unless you found that, too.”

That was wonderful, I thought swiftly. Add that to nearly a thousand there on the table. It was going to work out beautifully.

“And the rest of it?” I asked.

“Buried in three syrup buckets, under a down tree. About a mile up the lake.”

“How much?” I asked. “Do you know?”

He nodded. “I added up the little bands. It took me a long time. There’s a hundred and thirteen thousand of it.”

And it was so ridiculously easy. All I’d had to do was ask for it.

“Umh-umh,” I said thoughtfully. “That checks out pretty well with the bank’s figures. Well, let’s get on with it.”