Girl Out Back

Two

She backed the station wagon around and took off with a scattering of loose gravel under the tires. I stood looking after her for a moment, and then shrugged and went back inside. Whatever was eating her was none of my business; I was in outboard motors. Go home, Moddom. Go back to the little home and the faithful husband.

In the office I resumed the search for the stamp box and finally ran it to earth in one of the bottom desk drawers. There were only a half-dozen threes in it. I probably hadn’t remembered to buy any since Barbara left. I stamped the letters and made out a petty cash slip for twenty dollars. Might as well get a supply while I was at it. And make the bank deposit while I was out, I thought; this was Monday morning, and we still had Friday’s and Saturday’s receipts in the safe.

I opened the safe, stamped and initialed the checks, and counted the currency and silver. After adding it all up on the machine, I remembered the money Mrs. Nunn had paid me. I should break up at least a couple of those twenties for change to start the day with. Counting out forty dollars in fives, singles, and coin, I carried it out to the register and rang up NO SALE to open the drawer. As I was sliding the twenties from under the roller in the right-hand compartment I was again idly aware of the crisp freshness of the two on top. I didn’t really know why, because in any kind of business where you handle much currency you run across new bills all the time. Perhaps it was because there were two of them back-to-back and because they had curled a little under the roller with their ends sticking up. One of them had what appeared to be a brown stain of some kind along the edge for about half the width of the bill.

I set them aside, put the petty cash receipt in the drawer, and distributed the change into the proper compartments. I slid one of the twenties into my wallet for the stamps and was just closing the drawer when I heard the rasp of a shoe on the pavement outside. I glanced up. It was Otis. He unlocked the door and came on in as I was putting the wallet in my pocket and gathering up the other two twenties for the bank deposit. He lighted a cigarette and looked sadly at the register.

“Tapping the till again, boss?”

His full name is Otis Olin Shaw. He’s around forty-five, and looks a little like the pictures of Lincoln at that age except the black hair is thinning and is gone altogether from a small round spot on his crown. His unvarying facial expression is that of an undertaker who’s just learned his best friend has been cremated by a rival establishment while owing him three hundred dollars. This bleak sadness, however, covers a gall-and-wormwood sense of humor, a lot of intelligence, and something verging on genius when it comes to internal combustion engines.

“Good morning, Herr Schopenhauer,” I said. “What’s the cheery word?”

He shook his head and followed me into the office like an aging Great Dane, sitting down at the desk and watching mournfully as I stuffed the currency and checks into the white bag I used for the deposit. “I was just telling the old lady this morning,” he said, “that there was a chance you might raise me to fourteen a week now that heroin is getting cheaper. . . .”

I added the twenties to the currency and clipped the adding machine tally to the deposit slip. “Don’t count on it,” I said. “That cheap stuff is cut, and I need more of it.”

He raised a hand. “Oh, I don’t begrudge you a nickel of it myself. It’s just—well, the old lady’s always after me. Going around town, she keeps seeing all these women wearing shoes. You know how it is, stooped over that way picking up cigarette butts. . . .”

”Belt her one,” I said, “and keep her at home. What kind of a man are you, anyway?”

“I just haven’t got the heart, boss. She’s usually carrying around one of the kids that’s too weak to walk. . . .”

He had one child, a boy of around fourteen who already looked like something out of the back-field of the Los Angeles Rams. They owned their own home and Otis cleared around a hundred a week with salary, commissions, and overtime, now that he’d got a raise when Barbara was purged and we both had to double part time as clerks.

He went back to the shop. I wrote out checks for a bunch of bills that were due on the tenth, and then opened the big sliding doors at the sides of the building. It was growing hot now at eight thirty of a still and cloudless morning in August. I swept down the showroom around the boats and trailers. We had over a dozen models on the floor, running all the way from a car-top duck boat to a sixteen-foot inboard runabout that sold for close to two thousand.

As soon as the bank opened I called out to Otis to watch the front, took the deposit from the safe, picked up the outgoing mail, and walked over to Main. Brassy sunlight beat on my bare head and I could feel beads of perspiration under the thin sports shirt. I crossed with the light and entered.

It was a small place, a branch of the Mid-South Bank & Trust of Sanport, with only a couple of tellers’ windows and Warren Bennett’s desk behind a railing at the right. I got in line at Arthur Pressler’s window, feeling almost chill in the sudden transition from the outside heat to air-conditioning. At the far end, behind a counter, I saw Barbara Renfrew seated at an automatic book-keeping machine, her smooth dark head bent over her work. She looked up in a moment, saw me, and smiled in that shy, quiet way she did. It occurred to me that now she was no longer working for me making a pass at her would be permissible under the revised ground rules without a loss of face on both sides, and that I really should, since I’d been accused of it so many times. It was an attractive thought, but I shrugged it off, hardly knowing why. Maybe it was because I didn’t share Jessica’s staunch faith in her accessibility. Clod, I thought. Godwin, you lack scope and vision. . . .

“Good morning, Barney.”

The line ahead of me had disappeared and I was facing Arthur Pressler through the bars of his window. “Good morning,” I said, passing over the cloth bag. He pulled it open and began adding checks on the machine with the precise and economical movements of some super-robot out of the twenty-second century. He was a rather cold-faced man in his early thirties, with sandy hair, rimless glasses, and a no-nonsense set to his mouth. As far as I knew he had no existence outside this cubicle of his, as if he’d been bought from I.B.M. and bolted to the floor, but he could handle money faster than anyone I’d ever seen. He did it almost in a blur, and he was infallible.

I lit a cigarette and watched him now. He finished the checks and tossed them aside, and then tore into the bundle of currency, dropping it into neat and separate bunches of singles, fives, tens, and twenties. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He was counting the twenties. The fifth or sixth was one of those new ones Mrs. Nunn had paid me. It dropped, and the next one started to come down on it, and then he broke his rhythm. He paused. With an almost imperceptible shake of his head he picked them all up and started over. He’d lost count. It was odd, I thought; maybe they hadn’t been oiling him properly. He passed me the duplicate of the deposit slip and I went out and down the street to the post-office.

Business was brisk for Monday. Besides incidental items of tackle we sold one complete rig: fourteen-foot plywood boat, 7-h.p. motor, trailer, and all the incidentals such as a spare gasoline can, kapok seat cushions, and icebox. After the customer had taken delivery and driven off I sent Otis out for a couple of cans of beer to celebrate the deal. I took out my wallet to hand him a dollar, and as I did I noticed I still had that new twenty dollar bill. That was odd. Hadn’t I bought those stamps with it? apparently I’d paid for them with my own money, which I usually tried to keep separate on the other side of the divider. It didn’t matter, though; there was no change involved to foul up the register and the books.

Otis went out. I was transferring the twenty to the other compartment of the wallet when I saw it was the one that had the odd brownish stain at one end, along the edge. I looked at it, and then turned it over. It was on both sides for about half the width of the bill, and extended up along the paper for perhaps an eighth of an inch or less. I wondered idly what it was. It seemed odd there’d be a stain on a bill this fresh from the Federal Reserve vaults, unless they were using taxpayers’ blood for ink now in the printing office.

At four thirty in the afternoon I was up front alone looking for the boat manufacturer’s ad in this month’s Field & Stream when a car pulled in and stopped in front of the window. I saw with a glance at its front license plate it was from Sanport, but when the driver got out he didn’t look much like a potential customer. At least he wasn’t on a fishing trip at the moment. He was dressed in a blue summer-weight suit, white shirt, pale blue tie, and a Panama with a gray band. Salesman, I thought.

He lifted a briefcase out of the seat and came in, a man somewhere around fifty with dark hair that was graying at the temples, composed brown eyes, and a quiet, efficient look about him.

“Good afternoon,” I said, “what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Godwin?” he asked pleasantly.

“That’s right,” I said.

He put the briefcase on the counter and held his wallet in front of me, opened to an identification card. “Ramsey,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

I suppose everybody has that same sinking feeling in the first fraction of a second, wondering what crime he’s committed to get the F.B.I, after him. Then it’s gone, of course, as soon as you realize it’s just a routine security check. Your old friend Julius Bananas has applied for a job balancing a teacup for the State Department and they want to know if he was ever a Communist and how he stood on some of the fundamental issues like girls.

I grinned at him. “Don’t tell me I’ve made the list.”

He smiled, but he didn’t get carried away with it. He’d probably heard all those feeble gags a thousand times. “Are you busy?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if I could.”

“Sure,” I said. “Fire away. Or, wait; let’s go in the office. There’s a fan.” The whole day had been still, and now in the late afternoon the dead, humid air was stifling.

We walked back to the office and I switched on the fan. He sat down in the straight chair in front of the desk with the briefcase in his lap. I pushed the typewriter stand out of the way and sat down in the swivel chair. Taking out cigarettes, I offered him one, which he refused with a smile and a shake of his head. I lit mine and leaned back.

“What’s it about, Mr. Ramsey?” I asked.

He unstrapped the briefcase and took out an oblong Manila envelope. It seemed to me to be rather small to contain much of a file on the aspiring Mr. Bananas, but then maybe they’d just started and hadn’t come up with much yet in the matter of his political aberrations and mating habits.

“I wanted to ask you about this,” Ramsey said. He slid something out of the envelope and dropped it on the desk between us. I stared at it.

It was a crisp, new twenty-dollar bill. It was, in fact, the same twenty-dollar bill I had in my wallet.

I wondered if I’d gone crazy. It had to be the same one; there was that narrow brown stain in exactly the same place, Then I got it. It was obvious, of course. This was the one I’d deposited in the bank. They’d both had that stain, but I just hadn’t noticed it. When I looked at them in the cash drawer, they’d probably been turned end for end.

“It’s familiar?” he asked quietly.

So that explained Pressler’s hesitation when he came to it as he was counting. He’d spotted something phony about it, or it had rung a bell of some kind in his mind, just enough to throw him off stride.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I deposited it in the bank this morning.”

This morning; It must be hot, whatever it is. That was only seven hours ago, and it took three to drive here from Sanport. “You’re sure?” he asked.

“Reasonably so,” I said. “It’s new. And there’s that hairline discoloration at the bottom. I’m pretty sure I remember seeing it.”

He leaned forward a little. “When?” he asked. “I mean, do you remember where you got it?”

“Then it is the same one?” I asked. “It came from the bank?”

He nodded. “I picked it up over there just a few minutes ago. Presumably somebody spent it here at your store. Do you remember who it was?”

I was just about to reply when the phone rang. It was up front on the showcase next to the cash register.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I went out and picked up the receiver. “Boat Supply. Godwin speaking.”

“My, you sound businesslike.” It was Jessica’s voice, teasing and faintly provocative. “Mrs. Godwin speaking,” she went on, imitating me. “Look, honey, would you be a real cute lamb and run over here for a minute?”

“Where?” I asked.

“Mr. Selby’s office. We need your signature on a thing.”

We. We need your signature. Oh, what the hell, I thought; cut it out. You’re developing rabbit ears.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m busy right now, but I should be able to make it in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

”But, Barney, he wants to go home. It’ll only take a minute.”

I regarded the enormity of it. I was keeping Mr. Selby from the bosom of his happy little family. I was not only an annoying by-product of the community property laws, I was a churl who would inconvenience Mr. Selby.

“Jessie, I’m tied up at the moment. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Or why don’t you drop by here with it?”

“It has to be notarized,” she explained, with just a touch of exasperation. It wasn’t necessary, of course, to explain what the paper was. “Look, Barney, for Heaven’s sake, there isn’t anything so important about selling bass plugs that you can’t get away for five minutes.”

“I told you I’d be there as soon as I could.”

“You’re just keeping us waiting for no reason at all. Mr. Selby . . .”

“And how is dear Mr. Selby? Don’t forget to keep your skirt pulled down.”

“Barney. are you coming over here?”

“I told you. When I could get away. Did it ever occur to you I might be busy?”

“I notice you never seem to have any trouble getting away for those stupid fishing trips you go on. . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Next time I’ll clear through channels.”

“Do you have to do this?”

I could feel that tight band across my chest again. Selby was probably listening to her, Ramsey to me. “No,” I said. “And, anyway, why don’t we wait till we can buy radio time and get on the air with it?”

She hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle with a hand that shook. I was raging inside. She could stuff Selby and her lousy real estate—I stopped. What was happening to me, anyway? I was beginning to act like a sucker. What had ever become of Godwin the smooth operator?

I suddenly remembered Ramsey back in the office. I rubbed a hand harshly across my face, trying to wring the emotion out of myself so I could think. So what about Ramsey? The thing that stuck out was that he was after something, and that it was big. You could feel it. Look at the way it had happened. It was only seven hours ago I’d deposited that money in the bank, and now. . . It was like throwing a match in spilled gasoline.

The questions began coming from every direction. What was it? Why was it so hot? Where did Mrs. Nunn fit in? And how had she happened to have two of them? In that backwoods fishing camp? It was impossible, but there it was. And why the F.B.I.? I stopped suddenly.

Haig. Wild Bill Haig. I brushed it irritably aside. Why Haig? The F.B.I, must have a few other men it wanted; it didn’t exist for the sole purpose of trying to run down a man who had simply evaporated eighteen months ago.

I turned and went back to the office. Ramsey had got up and was looking out the window. We both sat down again and I picked up the cigarette I had left in the tray.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Now, where were we?”

“Do you remember when you took it in?” he asked.

I drew on the cigarette and frowned. “Let’s see—that deposit was Saturday’s receipts. No, wait. Friday’s and Saturday’s. I didn’t go to the bank Saturday at all.”

He nodded. “Well, that pins it down to two days. Try to think back. There should be a pretty good chance you can isolate the sale.”

I was thinking, but not about that. I was regarding the haphazard operations of Chance. I could have deposited both those bills. I should have bought the stamps with the other. It could still be out there in the register, where he was certain to look before he left. Instead, it was in my pocket. One could have been a fluke, lost in the shuffle; but not two. If he’d traced two of them to this place he’d know damn well I should remember the circumstances. It would mean either one sale that necessarily had to be more than twenty dollars, or a repeater who came in twice and paid for something with identical, new, fresh twenty-dollar bills.

“Is it counterfeit?” I asked. I didn’t think the F.B.I, had anything to do with that, but I wasn’t sure.

He shook his head. “No. It’s perfectly good.”

“It’s just hot, then?”

He smiled faintly. “You might call it that.”

Kidnap pay-off? I thought. Transportation of stolen property across a state line? What else? Bank robbery? I was back to Wild Bill Haig again.

“Can you place it?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head, frowning. “No-o. It beats me.” I was conscious this was the first deliberate lie. The others had all been evasions.

“But it has to be within those two days? Friday or Saturday?”

That’s right I made a deposit Friday morning.”

“There’s no chance it could have been left over in the register or in the safe from previous receipts? I mean, as change, or an oversight, or something like that?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We leave change, sure; but nothing larger than tens.”

“How about this morning? Before the bank opened?”

I shook my head. “No-o.”

Otis. Otis had come in while I was taking Mrs. Nunn’s payment out of the register. He would know those motors had been picked up. And also that the charges had been over twenty dollars. Careful, pal. Careful.

“Well, we’ve got something to start with, anyway,” Ramsey said. “We’ve isolated it to two days’ receipts. Now—what is your approximate volume of business?”

“About forty thousand last year.”

“That breaks down to around—hmmmmm—,” he said, frowning. “Say between a hundred and hundred-and-fifty a day.”

I didn’t say anything; I merely nodded. That was an over-simplification, and it was badly booby-trapped. But if he didn’t see it I wasn’t going to tell him.

He went on. “But along with tackle you sell boats and motors. Items of two hundred to a thousand and more. So a lot of your business must be in large individual sales, paid by check.”

It was no wonder criminals didn’t like to tangle with them, I thought. Still, there was a certain pleasure in watching an incisive and well-honed mind at work, even if you were watching it from the other side of the fence.

“That’s right,” I said. “But on the other hand, in the course of a day we sell a hell of a lot of small items. Flies, leaders, plugs, lines, spinning lures, and so on. We make change for a lot of twenties.”

He nodded. “Most of your business is local? That is, with people you know, at least by sight?”

“A good part of it, yes. Say within a fifty-mile radius. But fishermen can come from anywhere. We even get a lot of trade from Sanport.”

I was still thinking about Otis. I had to find out, before I went too far with this.

“It’s just possible the shop man may know something about it,” I said. He covers the front when I’m out.”

“I was just coming to that,” Ramsey said. “Is he here now?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just a moment.”

I went out in the showroom and called him. He came in a moment later, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he shoved in the pocket of his overalls.

I performed the introductions, and let Ramsey take it from there. Otis looked at the note, frowning, and then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I don’t place it.”

I sat down and lit another cigarette.

“It came from here,” I said. “There’s not much doubt of that; it was in that bank deposit this morning. You were here when I was making it up—remember, you came in while I was putting the change in the register. Do you recall seeing it while I was doing all that?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “But, hell, you could look right at it and not see it. It’s just another twenty-dollar bill. I could have taken it in myself.”

He hadn’t noticed. I was shuffling money and he was making sardonic wisecracks about it, but that was as far as it went. He didn’t know I’d taken two twenties out of the register while putting the change in.

He went back to the shop.

I sighed and spread my hands. “Otis just about named it,” I said. “You look at money, but you never see it. Nothing but the figures in the corners.”

He nodded. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep trying, though. There are a number of angles in a thing of this sort. If the man comes back, for instance, you may remember waiting on him Friday or Saturday. When you sell a particular piece of merchandise, try to remember the last time you sold the same thing and how it was paid for.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now, what about if another one shows up? You want me to call the bank? Or you?”

“Call our office in Sanport. We would appreciate it.”

“Any new twenty?” I asked. “Or does it have to have that mark?”

“The mark is not significant,” he said thoughtfully. “Though it may have it. The things to watch for are the year, and then the number.”

“Is it all right if I write this one down?”

“Yes.”

I pulled over a pad and drew the bill toward me. While I was copying the number I studied the stain intently. I was beginning to have an idea about that, and I was pretty sure he did too. I tried to memorize the exact form of it.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“If another one comes in with very close to the same number, call us immediately. If you know the person passing it, give us his name and address. If he’s a stranger, try to get the license number of his car and a good description of him. Unobtrusively, of course.”

“Any others beside the twenties to watch for?”

“No. That’s all,” he said. “Except . . .” He opened the briefcase again and came out with about a dozen photographs which he handed across to me. “Have you ever seen any of these men?”

There were no names on them, but I didn’t need a tag to recognize the seventh one I turned up. It was Bill Haig.