Girl Out Back

Three

There was no doubt of it; I had seen his picture in the papers several times, and it was even displayed in the post-office on a “wanted” notice right now unless it had been taken down in the last week.

I leaned back in the chair and shook my head after I had looked at all the mug shots. “I’ve never seen any of them around here,” I said. “But doesn’t it strike you as odd that hot money would show up in a sporting goods shop. Doesn’t fit, somehow.”

The brown eyes and the lean, alert face were thoughtful. “You never know,” he said. “And, of course, the chances are it was through several hands before it got here.”

“In other words, the person passing it wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with it?”

“That’s right. You didn’t, did you?”

“I suppose you’re not allowed to say what it’s all about?” I said.

He shook his head with a faint smile. “I’m afraid not. Not at the moment, anyway.”

He asked if he could check the register for any more of it. There was none, of course. We shook hands and he drove off. I watched him go up the street, feeling the other one burning a hole in my wallet. I didn’t do anything, though, until Otis came out. That was inevitable.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s plenty hot.”

“You can say that again. You couldn’t have raised more stink if you’d tried to deposit a live bomb.”

“Could be a kidnap pay-off,” I said. “Or bank robbery. Something like that.”

He turned to go back to the shop. “Well, we sure got a high class of trade around here. You think I ought to start wearing a carnation to work?”

As soon as he was inside the shop and at work I crossed to the office. I sat down and took the one out of my wallet, reaching for the pad I’d written the number on. They checked! They were not only close; they were consecutive. One ended in—23, the other in—24.

I turned it, studying the stain along the bottom and feeling intense excitement. As nearly as I could tell, it was exactly the same as that on the other, same place, same shape. Those bills had been stacked, probably in their original binder, when this substance—whatever it was—got on them.

I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain. A minute amount of the reddish-brown came off.

Dried blood? That was dramatic, but improbable. Blood would be darker, and it would scrape off. This was a stain. No, my first guess was as good as any. How had he put it? The mark wasn’t significant, but another one might have it.

It could be rust, plain iron oxide picked up by contact with rusting metal. If it weren’t significant, that probably meant it hadn’t been there when it had left legitimate hands. So perhaps —just perhaps—it had been stored for some time in a metal container in a place that was slightly damp.

I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair. None of it made any sense at all. The thought of its having anything to do with Haig was laughable—but there was the fact his picture had been among those mug shots. It was a fascinating puzzle any way you looked at it. And it was made even more fascinating by the fact that Haig, at the time he had disappeared off the face of the earth, was carrying with him a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars.

I needed an excuse, and ten minutes before closing time it came along as if I’d written the script myself. Two fishermen stopped in on their way back to Sanport. They had seven bass, the smallest of which weighed three pounds.

“Where?” I asked, hanging over their icebox.

“Sumner Lake,” they replied.

“With live bait? Or hand grenades?”

“Fly-rod bugs. Cork poppers. . . .”

“Cut it out,” I said. “In August?”

“It’s the truth,” they said. “We found an underground spring. The water was this cool. . . .”

Otis had come out too. He glanced resignedly from the fish to me and sighed. “How long’ll you be gone?

“Where?” I asked.

“Hah,” he said mournfully.

Sumner Lake was perfect. It was ninety miles in the opposite direction. “Well, if you insist. But I wouldn’t knock off go fishing for anybody but you.”

“You want Pete to come in?”

Pete was his boy, the fourteen-year-old who looked like a Sherman tank. During summer vacations he sometimes filled down here when I went fishing.

“Sure,” I said. I went back in the shop and picked up the 3-h.p. motor I used on rental skiffs. I put it in the back of the station wagon, along with a can of fuel. We locked up.

“I’ll be back Wednesday night or Thursday,” I said. “And, look. If another of those twenties comes in, call the F.B.I, in Sanport. They want us to watch for them; here’s the serial number of the other one.”

I drove home. When I pulled into the drive under the oaks I saw her Chrysler was in the garage. So she was home, and probably loaded to her silken ears with my inhumanity to dear Mr. Selby. Here we go again, I thought.

She was in the kitchen writing a check for Reba for the day’s housecleaning, wearing a lightweight knit thing that looked as if she’d been built into it by an oriental sybarite with a do-it-yourself kit. It was strange; her clothes were never tight on her but you didn’t have any trouble sensing that their occupant wasn’t a collegiate pole-vaulter. Well, maybe there a Turk somewhere back in my ancestry and I was just sensitive to the voluptuous wave-form of her particular radiation. She’d been to the beauty shop, and her hair-do gleamed like embossed and highly polished chrome. The full-mouthed and broad-planed face was as outrageously blonde as the rest of her, faintly sensuous and at the same time stamped with that strong suggestion of purely female cussedness that was no lie at all.

She turned the blue eyes on me now and smiled with sweet deadliness. “Oh. Home so early, dear? I didn’t think you’d be able to get away.”

This was for Reba’s benefit, and you could see it was fooling her. She took her check and started retreating toward the back door before she got blood on her.

I opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “Oh,” I said. “Something important came up, sweet. I’m going fishing.”

“Isn’t that nice. Reba, Mr. Godwin is going fishing. Does your husband fish much?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. “He fish ever’ now an’ then.”

“Well, I think it’s so wonderful for men to have a hobby, don’t you?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. She left. She was forty-something and had learned what this world does to non-combatants.

The blue eyes flashed. The first pitch was high and inside and smoking. “Well! Just leave me sitting there like a fool! You couldn’t get away from your precious toys for five minutes to show a little consideration for your wife, but you can drop everything to go fishing. And what do you suppose Mr. Selby thought?”

She couldn’t make me lose my temper now. I was too excited about this other thing, and I wasn’t even thinking about her. “Oh, he didn’t mind,” I said. “Think how he enjoyed looking at your legs.”

I took a drink of the beer and did a brief impersonation of the oleaginous Mr. Selby stalking a crossed thigh. He was the devious type, the long-range planner; he maneuvered into position and then caught the target obliquely on a passing shot.

“Mr. Selby is a gentleman—!”

“Which is more than you can say for some people you know,” I said. “Did you bring home that paper you wanted me to sign?”

“I told you it had to be notarized,” she snapped.

“So you did. Well, by God, that’ll teach me a lesson; the next time you whistle I’ll dash right over.”

“You enjoy humiliating me, is that it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s actually just confusion. I get busy down there and forget which way I’m supposed to jump when you press the button.”

“Oh, you make me tired.”

“Take a rest, then. I’m going to Sumner Lake and I’ll be gone till Thursday.”

She stared coldly, facing me across the kitchen. “The Wheelers are coming tonight to play bridge. But that wouldn’t matter, would it?”

“Tell ‘em to stay home and start their own war,” I said. “Haven’t they got any initiative at all?”

She whirled and went out. She looked regal as hell. I finished the beer and went down the stairs to the basement. The instant I was alone everything else faded from my mind and the thousand fascinating aspects of the puzzle came swarming back at once. Did Mrs. Nunn know that money was hot? She couldn’t have. Then how had she got it? Why two of those bills? I irritably brushed all the questions aside. There were no answers to any of them, and I was merely wasting time. I began gathering up my camping and fishing paraphernalia—duffel bag with my fishing clothes and shaving gear in it, tackle box, fly-rod, mosquito dope, and bedding. I wouldn’t need cooking equipment or food; my information was the Nunn’s ran a lunch-room of sorts along with the three old cabins and the boat and motor rental business.

I carried it all out to the station wagon. It took two trips. As I was going through the living-room the second time she came down the stairs from the second floor. I paused, with both hands full, and said, “Well, see you Thursday. . . .” She stared, stony-eyed, and said nothing. I went on out to the car, threw the rest of the stuff in, and slammed out of the drive.

I turned left on Main, going north toward Sumner Lake. Javier lay to the south and east and this would be a roundabout way to get there, but when you start lying you have to be consistent. I stopped at a service station on the highway at the edge of town and had the gasoline tank filled and the oil checked. The man who ran it, Wendell Graham, was a fisherman himself and a frequent customer at the store.

“Lucky devil,” he said. “Sumner Lake, huh? I hear it’s been pretty good.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

Eight miles north of town I turned off the highway on to a secondary road going east. It was a little after six. I met few-cars. Twenty miles ahead the road connected with another north-south highway, State 41, after skirting the edge of the wild and heavily timbered country at the upper end of the lake. State 41 passed along the east side of Javier at a distance of two to three miles. There was an access road in from that side, but it ran through swampy bottom country and was passable only in dry weather.

There were a few more cars after I turned on to 41, though traffic wasn’t heavy. It was not one of the principal routes to the coast. Once as I topped a slight rise I could see the unbroken wildness of the bottom country to the west, though I could not see the lake itself. It was broken into channels and inlets this far up and they were out of sight in the timber. It was superb duck hunting country in winter, but the only way in then, aside from walking, was to leave your car at the camp on the south end and go up by boat. At the foot of the grade was the poorly banked S-curve that had killed five people in the past three years. I slowed automatically, even though the road was dry, idly noting the white crosses the Highway Department had put up on the shoulder where cars had gone off the road due to excessive speed or drunken driving. I frowned thoughtfully, trying to remember something that nibbled at the edge of my mind. Then I was past. It wasn’t important.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later I turned right again, leaving Highway 41 and taking to the country road that wound through the area to the south of the lake. The sun was gone now and warm summer dusk was thickening out through the timber. When my headlights sprayed against the three rural mailboxes and the old sign on my right I slowed and turned in through a cattle guard to a pair of dusty ruts going north across an old field long since abandoned to weeds and nettles. It hadn’t rained for a long time and the growth beside the road was powdered with dust. In a few minutes the road began to lead downward through increasingly heavy timber where fireflies winked in the darkness.

I passed some cleared land on my left and an old farmhouse sitting back off the road. A dog barked with bristling outrage and came hurtling out of the darkness to chase the car. A boy’s voice yelled, “Come back heah, you crazy Trix!” The faint light of a kerosene lamp glowed at a window. The R.E.A. hadn’t penetrated here; it was too thinly settled to warrant the lines. There was one more farmhouse beyond it about a half mile and then the road was lost in the immensity of timber. I crossed the stream that was the outlet of the lake on a rattling wooden bridge. Low places in the road had been filled with gravel to make it passable in wet weather. My headlights swung in huge arcs, splashing against the trunks of trees, as I followed its windings. The vastness and solitude of it made me feel good; I had always liked wild places. A little less than a mile beyond the bridge the road forked, one pair of ruts leading off to the left. The sign had fallen down, but I remembered it had pointed to the right. In a few minutes I came into the clearing. When I stopped and cut the motor I could hear the frog chorus along the shore of the lake.

There were four buildings, three small ones huddled darkly together at the edge of the inlet on my left and a larger one just ahead and to my right. Hot light streamed from an open doorway. I saw only one car, the station wagon Mrs. Nunn had driven this morning. I cut the headlights and got out.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice called. It came from outside the doorway. He was standing to one side of it, away from the light.

“Godwin,” I said. “From Wardlow.”

“Oh,” he said. He stepped before the door then and opened the screen. “Come on in.”

I followed him. The illumination inside the crudely finished room came from a hissing gasoline lantern suspended from a rafter with a length of wire. Insects whirled about it in a frenzied dance, butting their heads against the shield. On the left was a short counter with three stools before it and beyond the end of the counter was a glass-topped showcase containing items of fishing tackle. There was a small screened window at the other end of the room and an open doorway at the left behind the pass-through between the ends of the counter and showcase. This presumably led to their living quarters in the rear of the building. Behind the counter was a small icebox and a bottled gas stove which had two burners and a hamburger grill. On the shelves above the stove and icebox were some cartons of cigarettes, cans of soup, condensed milk, small cereal boxes, and some doughnuts in cellophane bags. Some shelves along the right-hand wall held a small stock of staple groceries, a few cheap magazines, and a large stack of comic books. I glanced at the latter, faintly puzzled. Well, maybe he read them himself. I didn’t particularly like him.

He’d been at various times a town constable and deputy sheriff until some political shake-up had pushed him away from the trough for good, and it was said he was crooked. It wasn’t this latter, however, that had rubbed me the wrong way the two times we’d met; moral indignation was a little out of my line. It was just that he seemed too impressed with his own toughness, as if he could still feel that holstered gun banging against his thigh.

He went behind the counter, hung a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match on his thumbnail. Maybe he picked it up from reading private eyes; it was stock gesture 93-B, Hard Case Lighting a Cigarette. He was about my height, but rail-thin, with a bleak and angular face that seemed to have been stretched too tightly over the bone structure behind it. There was no warmth in the sherry-colored eyes. He dropped the match on the floor, still watching me through the smoke with no expression at all. They must nave an interesting home life, I thought—the two of them staring at each other and dribbling a fall-out of dead matches around the place.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’d like one of your cabins,” I said. “And a boat, for a couple days’ fishing. How’s it been?”

“So-so.” He shrugged indifferently. “You never been out here before, have you?”

“Once or twice,” I said. “Duck hunting. It was before you bought the place.”

“So you decided to try the fishing, huh?”

“That’s right,” I said. He didn’t appear to be the gushing type that fell all over a new customer, but I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I was trying to figure out where they kept their cash and made change. There was no register in sight.

“Anything else you want?” he asked.

I turned back to him. The harsh angularity of his face was broken into planes of highlights and shadow by the overhead light. From the waist up he wore nothing but a sweaty undershirt, and his arms and shoulders looked like a muscle chart from an anatomy textbook. There wasn’t enough subcutaneous fat to smooth the contours; he was as functional and uncluttered as an axe blade. The stare said nothing at all.

”How’s that?” I asked.

“Motor? Bait? Guide? You need anything besides a boat?”

“No,” I said. Maybe if I didn’t ask for too much he’d let me stay.

“Take the cabin on this end,” he said. “It’s not locked.”

I still had to get a look inside their cash-box, wherever it was. I hadn’t driven this far just to sleep. “How about a sandwich and a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“It’s pretty late.”

“I know it is,” I said. “But I haven’t had any dinner. I drove out here right after work.”

“You must have been in a hurry. Really like to fish, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. I was beginning to like him even less.

Without turning his head toward the door behind him, he called out, “Jewel!”

There was no answer. The room was silent except for the hiss of the lantern and the faint spatting sounds of the insects bumping against it. He started to turn, as if to call out again. She came through the doorway, dressed in a man’s blue shirt and a pair of dungarees. She gave an almost imperceptible start when she saw me, but then the surprise or whatever it had been was gone and her face closed up like a drawn Venetian blind.

“Fix Mister Godwin a hamburger,” he said curtly, without turning his head.

“At this time of night?”

“Never mind what time it is; I got a watch. He come off without his supper.”

She stared silently at the back of his head for an instant, and then walked over in front of the icebox. I sat down on one of the stools. She lighted the burner under the grill and slapped down the meat patty she had taken from the icebox. He watched her flatly for a moment and then turned away. A bug banged into the lantern overhead and fell to the counter where he lay on his back, buzzing his wings. The meat began to sizzle after a minute or two and she turned it with the spatula, leaning forward slightly with the tawny mane of hair swinging downward across her cheek. A cockroach came up from somewhere and walked along the edge of the counter. It looked shiny in the white, hot light. She stared at it, and then pushed the hair back from her face with her hand.

“Grease,” she said, almost in a whisper.

His eyes turned, but he made no other movement. “What?”

“I said grease. G-r-e-a-s-e.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing. I love the smell of it in my hair.”

“You sure as hell have a hard time,” he said.

“What gave you that idea?” she asked. “Not many women can go around smelling like they slept with their head on a rancid hamburger.”

Something made her look up then, and she caught his eyes on her. She stopped abruptly. The room was caught up in that taut silence again. Then it was broken by the sound of the telephone—two long and two short rings.

He came around the end of the counter and lifted the receiver off the hook of the instrument mounted on the wall near the door. It was an old type, with a hand crank.

“Hello,” he said. “Yeah, this is Nunn . . . Sure . . . Sure . . . Okay . . . Around daylight . . . Okay, I’ll be ready. Good-bye.”

Then, before he replaced the receiver, he spoke into the mouthpiece again. “Jest in case some of you old busybodies missed part of it, that was a man in Woodside. He wants to go fishin’ tomorrow, and he wants me to guide him. Any questions?”

He dropped the receiver on the hook. “Party line,” he said.

The country was filling up with people he didn’t like. He’d have to put on another shift, at tins rate, to be satisfactorily nasty to all of them.

She finished the hamburger and put it in front of me. “No coffee. You want a coke?”

“All right,” I said.

She opened one and put it on the counter, and then turned and went back through the doorway without a word. He leaned on the other side of the counter while I ate. He didn’t say anything. It was all right with me. I was caught up on his conversation.

When I had finished I stood up and took the wallet from my pocket. “How much?”

He shook his head. “Just settle up for the whole thing when you leave.”

“Might as well keep it straight as we go,” I protested. I had to get a look at that cash drawer tonight.

He shrugged. “Okay. That’ll be—let’s see—forty-five cents.”

I took out a five. He lifted a cigar box from a shelf under the counter, set it on top, and lifted the lid. There were four or five bills in it, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. He glanced at the five in my hand and shook his head.

“You got anything smaller?”

“I’ll see,” I said. I brought out a single. “Better give me a packet of cigarettes while you’re at it.”

He turned to get them off the back shelf. I shot a hand into the cigar box and spread the bills out. There were two fives and several singles, plus some silver.

There was no twenty, new or otherwise.

He gave me my change. I went out, drove the car up alongside the end cabin, and carried my gear in. It took me only a few minutes to unroll my bedding on the lumpy old mattress. I switched off the battery-operated camp lantern and lay down. Mosquitoes whined thinly around my ears in the dark as I lay there smoking a cigarette. Frogs kept up their chorus along the shore and I heard a feeding bass splash somewhere out in the lake.

Money? Out here? I must be crazy.

But where had those two twenties come from? Right here, hadn’t they? I’d seen them myself; there was no doubt of it whatever. Then I cursed softly and crushed out the cigarette. The whole thing was utterly absurd. Was I seriously expecting to find some connection between this mean and primitive little backwoods camp and the mystery of the slightly fantastic Bill Haig?