The Good Old Stuff

A Trap for the Careless (aka The Judas Chick)

This James Garver drove out to Sharan Point with his problem on the afternoon of the fifth day of badminton, all set to lay it in Shay Pritchard’s lap. The court was set up in the lower garden about fifty feet from the pool. I saw Krimbow coming slowly down the steps, favoring his rheumatism, his mouth set in the perpetual lemon-taste, the sun gleaming on his bristling white Prussian haircut.

It was my serve and I was at the point where the bat weighed forty-nine pounds, my mouth was full of cotton, and the pain in my side felt as though it had always been there.

I held onto the bird and Shay glared at me. “Come on, Robby!”

There are a few Shay Pritchards in every generation. They are seldom happy. The fates give them a triple portion of energy, a restless mind, an enormous capacity for boredom, a measure of personal charm, and a hint of savagery. Three years ago I went to Sharan Point to write Shay up for a national magazine. By now the editors have written me off. I’ve wanted to leave a dozen times. But somehow...

Physically he is a big slope-shouldered character with a round, guileless face, baby-blue eyes, curly blond hair, and a shade more weight below the belt than above it. Dressed in his best he looks like an overgrown kid being sent off to a church social. Stripped down, his thighs are like beer kegs, and restless slabs of muscle crawl on his shoulders and arms with every movement. Through some alchemy of personality he can look one moment like a bashful farm boy on his first date, and seconds later like a demon avenger, a conscienceless tool of doom.

I have seen him kill. And I have seen women look at him.

Either I hate him or he is a combination best friend and employer. Someday I will have to make up my mind.

Shay Pritchard: fullback, Rhodes scholar, infantryman, sculptor. Man of colossal hungers, of gargantuan appetites — with the instincts of a crook, and of a cop.

A sweet son of a bitch.

Krimbow spat with precision into a circular flower bed and said, “He’s one of those people keeps cracking his knuckles.”

Shay sighed. “Who, Krimbow?”

“Drives an eight-year-old sedan and wears a ten-year-old suit and says he’s got to see you. Says that a Lieutenant Ryan sent him out here.”

“Ryan knows I don’t work for love.”

“I told this fella the usual fee for just talking to you, Shay, and unless he’s got the inside of that roll packed with ones, it ought to be enough for two — three new cars. Calls himself James P. Garver.”

At the mention of the roll the annoyed expression slid off Shay’s round face. He beamed. “Help all those who can pay,” he said. “Where’d you put him?”

“I was going to leave him in the hall, until I saw he was loaded, and then I moved him into the small study.”

“Go tell him to wait fifteen minutes,” Shay said.

Krimbow went back up toward the house. “Ryan is missing persons,” I said.

When we went into the small study, James P. Garver jumped up, smiled nervously. He was a weedy little man close to fifty with a farmer’s cross-hatched neck and hands thickened and permanently curved into the shape for grasping tool handles. He had a dried, unmemorable face, colorless gray eyes, rusty hair, and an air of tension. His teeth were cheap, glassy and too even.

He looked at me, licked his lips, and said, “Mr. Pritchard, I—”

“Sit down, please,” Shay said in irritation. “I’m Pritchard. This is Mr. Moran, my assistant.”

Garver bobbed his head in acknowledgment, sat down on the edge of one of the deep leather chairs, and rested his hard hands on his thighs.

Shay strolled over to the cabinet. “Drink?” he asked.

“I don’t much, but right now...”

With the glasses distributed, Shay perched one massive hip on the corner of the desk, towering over Garver, and said, “My man told you that for three hundred dollars I’ll listen to you. If I want to take on the problem I’ll state a fee commensurate with the difficulties involved. That fee will not include expenses, and I cannot, of course, guarantee results. Then it will be your decision to tell me whether or not to go ahead.”

“Lieutenant Ryan seemed to think—”

“Forgive me, Garver, but I can’t think of anything I’m less interested in than the opinions of Lieutenant Ryan. State your problem.”

“Well, it’s about Allie, Mr. Pritchard. It’s only Thursday, but it seems like she’s been gone for longer than just since Tuesday afternoon. She’s my wife. I’ve been just about crazy. I went to a cattle auction in Randolph on Tuesday and when I came back she just wasn’t there. I’ve got a picture of her here...”

It was an eight-by-ten glossy print, and he had folded it once lengthwise and shoved it into the inside breast pocket of his suit. He handed it over to Shay almost reverently.

Shay had a look on his face of pronounced disinterest. The farmer’s wife had grown weary of the farm. He looked at the picture. His eyes narrowed and he sucked at his lower lip. He handed it to me.

It was a professional job by a man who knew how. She was reclining on some sort of chaise longue, and the picture was of head, throat, and shoulders, stopping just at the verge of becoming too intimate. Eyes too deep and too wise for her age, and a soft, wide mouth that was not wise at all — only willing. The blond hair was spread out around her head. We both stared at Garver.

Suddenly there was something indescribably goaty about him, and his cackling laugh was that of the eternal Pan. “Guess you fellas didn’t expect my wife to be a pin-up girl. The rest of her is just as nice as that face, too. Surprised everybody, I did, coming back with her that day. She’s only twenty.” Then anxiety overcame the sudden wet-lipped look and he said dully, “Can’t imagine what happened to her.”

“Where did you meet her?”

Surprisingly, Garver flushed. “I haven’t told anybody else this, but I guess you ought to know. About six months ago I got a crazy notion to go away by myself. Working too hard, I guess. I went down to Endor City, about a two-hundred-mile drive, and got myself a hotel room. Went to a lot of movies, and then I got tired of the movies and I had a few drinks. Asked the cab driver to take me somewhere where I could have some fun. Drove me way outside Endor City and I didn’t like that place, so he brought me back to a place right in town. You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look. They call it Roger’s Place. There’s friendly girls there that’ll talk to you right at the bar. I met Allie there. She was unhappy. She said she was tired of young kids that weren’t serious and she said she liked older men. We went to a few other places, I disremember where, and then we went to her place and — well, I guess we kind of forgot ourselves. Anyway, she was a-crying, and a-carrying on and saying she wasn’t that kind of girl at all and I could see she wasn’t and we got married two days later.”

“What was her address there?” Shay interrupted.

“It was a sort of rooming house. Wait a minute. I got it here in my wallet. Oh, here it is. Ten-eighteen Columbine Street. We checked her right out of there. The poor kid didn’t have much more than enough to fill one suitcase. I brought her back here. I live over on the River Road and the house isn’t much, so I contracted for a new house. We just moved into it ten days ago. No, eleven. We’ve been pretty happy. Best six months of my life.” Again his eyes held the hard glint of Pan.

“What is her full name?”

“Allana Montrose Garver.”

“Where from?”

“I don’t rightly know. Back East somewhere.”

“Relatives?”

“The poor kid is alone in the world. Leastways, she was.”

“You have relatives?”

“Neither kith nor kin. There was some second and third cousins, but I don’t know where they are. Haven’t for twenty years.”

Shay poured fresh drinks. Garver covered his glass with the top of his hand and shook his head.

“Now tell me about yourself,” Shay asked gently.

Garver sighed and looked into the past, his eyes clouding. “Got married when I was twenty. Mary died a year later when the kid came. The kid died two days after she did. I went back with my pa. When he died I took over the farm. When I began to do better with feed business and the cattle trading, I sold off a lot of the acreage. My partner is Sam Jarone. We’ve been doing well for the past eight — nine years. He handles the feed business, mostly, and I work out the cattle deals.”

“What are you worth?” Shay asked bluntly.

Garver looked startled. “I don’t know as I—”

“I must know everything, Garver.”

He didn’t like it. “Let me see. Real liquid stuff’ll go maybe four hundred thousand. About another hundred and fifty thousand tied up so tight it’d take a long time to get it loose.”

“A half million, eh?” Shay said dryly.

“I don’t think about it that way.”

“I hope you don’t mind if I do, Mr. Garver.”

“Well, I’m pretty careful about not throwing money around.”

“Now I must ask you some questions that you might not like. First — did Mrs. Garver know your financial position?”

Garver beamed. “No, she didn’t. That’s how I knew she fell in love with me for sure. I never did tell her until after we’d been married a month. That was when I changed my will and the insurance over.”

“She seemed pleased?”

“Why, she certainly did! Huggin’ me and kissin’ me for fair.”

“How was your money going to go before you changed it over?”

“The estate was going half to the Baptist Church and half to the State College and the Department of Farm Economics, and the insurance to Sam Jarone.”

“Much insurance?”

“Eighty-five thousand paid up. It was sort of partnership insurance, but bigger than it had to be. So when I transferred it, I took out forty thousand renewable term, with Sam as beneficiary. That’s what he has, with me named to get it in case something happens to him.”

“Did Jarone seem annoyed that you got married?”

Garver flushed. “Yes, damn him. He has been giving me a terrible time with all those nasty remarks of his. Way he tells it, I could be a hundred and ten years old marrying a kid of fourteen. Matter of fact, I’m forty-eight. Not too much difference there. Hell, when I’m seventy, Allie’ll be forty-two.”

“Are you expecting an increase in the family?”

“No, we’re not. I’ve been hoping, but it just hasn’t turned out that way yet. Can you find her, Mr. Pritchard?”

“Have you considered the fact that she might not want to be found?” Shay said softly.

“That’s a lie! Allie’s been happy with me. I’m thinking it’s this here amnesia and she wandered off, or else somebody took her off and I haven’t gotten a kidnap note yet.”

“Ryan is working on it?”

“He put her on the tape today. I tried to pay him to go at it with special handling and he said he couldn’t and sent me to you. Will you take it on?”

“The fee will be five thousand dollars. Plus expenses. And another five thousand if it goes over two weeks.”

Garver swallowed hard. He stared at Shay. “Say, you didn’t even blink when you said five thousand.”

“Should I have?”

“It’s a lot of money.”

“Allana’s a lot of girl, Mr. Garver. I’ll accept your check.”

“I’d have to think about spending that much money so fast.”

Shay looked at his watch. “Think about it for two minutes, Mr. Garver. And then you can leave if you decide it’s too much money.”

Garver muttered, “Five thousand, eh.” He brightened. “Say, I’ll give you a check for five hundred and three thousand cash. That way you don’t have to report it for taxes and the net to you’ll be about the same.”

Shay stood up slowly. “Mr. Garver, diddling the federal government in that manner smacks of shooting fish in a wash-tub. It isn’t sporting. And your two minutes are up.”

Garver scribbled the check, waved it back and forth to dry it. He handed it over. “Now what are you going to do first, Mr. Pritchard?”

“Tell you to go back to your affairs and keep your mouth shut and report anything unusual to me immediately. We may call on you later. You said you are out on the River Road?”

“A quarter of a mile north of Bliss Corners. On the left. My name’s on the mailbox.”

“Good day, Mr. Garver.”

We watched him go down the walk to the side drive, a man following a hypothetical horse across a nonexistent plowed field, his shoulders bowed by plow handles that weren’t there. Shay whirled an ice cube in his glass, frowning down at it.

“That was pretty heavy, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“For that he-goat? I was charging him for his marital bliss. Spread over six months it doesn’t come to much.”

“A pretty obvious situation,” I said. “She found out he was loaded so she grabbed him. But money doesn’t make some things easier. And so she left.”

“If you’re right, and I hope you are, it’s an easy five thousand. But I have a funny hunch about this.”

“Jarone?”

He shrugged. “Five after four. We need a woman’s opinion. Bets likes martinis and the pool. Tell Krimbow and phone her up, will you, Robby?”

“I know your curious charm, Shay, but Bets won’t come within a mile and a half of this place again and you know it.”

“A month has passed, Señor Moran. A full and lonely month. I suggest that you play up the forgive-and-forget angle.”

After he left the room, I perched my heels on the desk and dialed. After four rings, Bets answered.

“This is Robby, honey. Don’t hang up.”

Bets is a combination oil and air force widow, a dark angular cutie of twenty-nine who lives five miles up the road with maid, gardener, five-year-old daughter, and a portable typewriter on which she sublimates herself by turning out lurid confessions for money that she does not need. For a time it looked as if she and Shay could make it, but on those two the rough edges just don’t rub off.

“Am I supposed to be mad enough to hang up? It just isn’t that important.”

“At five we’re using the old-fashioned glasses for martinis. The water in the pool was changed this morning, and we’re both bored and we have nothing lovely to look upon.”

“Tell that big clown to go look in a mirror for an hour or so. That ought to make him feel pleased.”

“Bets, you hurt me. We live too close, Shay says, for the war to keep going on. Let’s all be pals again.”

“He’s a bastard.”

“We both know that, but he’s cute sometimes. Like a tame bear. Come wallow in our pool, honey. Shay says to wear the bikini, the yellow one.”

“That one’s for looking, not swimming.” Her voice sounded friendlier.

“We’ll share the risk with you. Five-ish?”

She sighed. “I might as well. I’ve confessed myself into a hell of a corner, and I can’t seem to write my way out of it.”

We had been out of the pool long enough for it to turn back into a sheet of green glass. Bets lay on the rubberized mattress on the apron of the pool, her almost boyish body a startling tan in the sunset light contrasted with the brave yellow of the skimpy suit. Her cheekbones are high and sharp enough to give her a gaunt look. Her eyes are hawk-hooded and her mouth is a wide, harsh slash. If she could get down three notes lower, she could sing baritone. She has never failed to give me a quickened pulse.

She and Shay had been distinctly cool until he had at last broken the tension by immersing her firmly and deeply. She had come up sputtering behind and had made a fair attempt to sit on his head. Then they were old friends again.

Our martini pitcher is as tall as a hydrant and seems to contain as much fluid. Shay serves too much liquor and drinks too much himself, but he is never out of control and any guest who gets that way is having his last visit at Sharan Point.

Shay had padded off to the house. I was stretched out on the concrete at right angles to the mattress, stealing a bit of it as a rest for the back of my head. Bets’s fingers moved moonlight across my forehead, expressing nothing except in their rhythm, and that was more than enough.

“Belay it, woman,” I said. “Or I’ll have to go leap in the pool.”

Shay came back. I sat up. He handed her the picture of Allie.

“Please classify,” he said.

Bets held it so that the fading light caught it.

“Hmmm. I’d really have to hear her talk to do a good job. Let me see. Car hop, movie extra, commercial playmate. Hard to tell. But the little gal has been here and there and back again.”

“Farmer’s wife,” Shay said, laughter in his voice.

She sat up with a long, easy motion and stared at him. “Don’t tell me! That must be quite a farmer. What well did you drop him into?”

“I didn’t. He’s a remarkably unattractive little man pushing fifty. His fingernails are dirty and his breath is bad. Nor is his linen spotless.”

“Oil under his farm?”

“He has it, but the little girl didn’t know it until after she said yes.”

“Are you positive of that?”

“Even if he had told her he had money, he was in a situation where she would be likely to think he was lying. So I want a woman’s opinion. List the reasons that would cause that little item to marry the farmer, omitting money.”

Bets lay back and stared up at the dusk sky. She still held the picture between lean brown fingers.

“That’s not so easy, Shay. A girl gets lonely. But not that lonely. Here’s one. Masochism. Somebody lets her down hard. She takes her revenge by marrying into an impossible situation. But the gal doesn’t look like either the sentimental or the masochistic type. If you want melodrama, sometimes people have to hide. And sometimes you have a person with legal problems. They can inherit only if married. The last item, of course, is a girl who is — shall we be delicate and say infanticipating? — who grabs the first security that comes along. That covers it, Shay. Like any of them?”

“It clarifies my thinking.”

“Why do you want to know all this?”

“She left, either alone or aided. The farmer is upset.”

“Maybe somebody raided the cookie jar and she’ll be home, contrite, tomorrow.”

“Could be. Tonight my subconscious will work on it. It does better than I do.”

She shivered. “Would somebody please mention getting dressed,” she said.

Krimbow had seared the steaks in his own incredible fashion. Bets ate like a female wolf. She phoned and checked on Prim, her little girl, and later I watched her play chess with Shay on the glassed-in terrace.

She played a slashing, vicious game, bringing all her power to bear at every point, ignoring defense to strike out. Shay parried and covered himself well, then moved onto the offensive when her attacks lost momentum.

I was watching their hands on the board. I saw her reach out and pick up a bishop. She held it in midair. It was not a proper piece to move at that point. Her knuckles were white. I looked at her and saw that she was looking into Shay’s eyes. Her face was expressionless.

In a flat voice she said, “You never did finish that last figure, did you?”

“The pose wasn’t right. That pose wasn’t for you. It wasn’t worth casting.”

“You said you would try another one.”

“You said you would never pose again.”

I gave my stage yawn and muttered good night as I left the room. No one answered me.

After I was in bed, I knew that they were up in the studio, the harsh lights bright above them, his big, thick-fingered hands molding the clay with surprising delicacy, Bets standing on the raised platform, on the turntable that moved around at the rate of one inch a minute.

It had all started again between them. Over chess.

The roar of her station wagon, the sputter of gravel against the fenders, woke me later. Moonlight was white in the room. I heard a sound and went to the window. Shay Pritchard was swimming up and down the length of the pool, low in the water, his arms lifting slowly. I counted six laps and went back to bed and to sleep.

It was a small ranch-type house, sparkling new. Garver met us at the door, incongruous in those House Beautiful surroundings. His eyes were puffed as though he had slept badly. His face lighted up as he recognized us.

“Did you find out something already?”

“No. We want to look around,” Shay said.

He showed us the house. In the living room Shay went immediately to the magazine rack. Mixed in with the farm periodicals and cattle journals was an ample collection of glossy-paper true-crime magazines.

“Yours?” Shay asked.

“No, Allie liked those. She’d curl up like a kitten in that big chair over there, of an evening, and sometimes read that stuff until way past midnight. Her eyes’d shine funny-like over some of ’em. When we stayed up late I’d go out and scramble us a few eggs and put on a pot of coffee.”

“She didn’t like to cook.”

“I wouldn’t say she doesn’t like to. She just can’t do it so good. Me, I’m pretty handy around a kitchen from living alone all these years, so I do most of it.”

“I’d like a look at her clothes.”

Garver led the way back to the two bedrooms. He pointed to a big record player. “Bought her that for a wedding present. She wanted one bad.”

Shay looked over the albums. A lot of Cuban rhythms. The rest was rock with a heavy beat.

“She picked all them out,” Garver said. “She’d — well, she’d dance to ’em when we were alone. She knew I liked it.”

Shay moved over to the dressing table. He stared at the massive array of bottles, jars, jugs, vials. He picked up a small bottle. “Expensive.”

“Fifty bucks an ounce,” Garver said proudly. “Smells good.”

The big closet covered one whole wall. It had sliding mirror-paneled doors. Once they were open I could catch the woman-scent of her. Shay leafed through the racked clothes like a man reading an out-of-date magazine in a dentist’s office.

“Can you tell which of this stuff she had before you met her, Garver?” he asked.

“She threw most of that out. The blue dress there, the long shiny one, she had.”

Shay took it off the hanger. He glanced at the label and said, “I’m taking this along.”

Garver shrugged. There was a section of built-in drawers. Shay yanked them open, one at a time. Nothing but an array of filmy black panties, yellow ones, pink, powder blue — bras to match. The dressing-table drawers were full of small items. Junk jewelry, a lot of it heavy and barbaric.

“Did she have any good jewels?”

“No. I was going to get her something. She wanted an emerald. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“Where did she keep her private papers?”

“She didn’t have any. I helped her pack when she left her place. Just clothes and shoes.”

“What did she take with her?”

“I don’t know. When I left the house in the morning she wasn’t up yet. I made her breakfast and took it to her. I can’t see as there’s anything missing, but I don’t rightly remember all the clothes she had. Or even the suitcases she bought. Lieutenant Ryan asked me all that too.”

“Toothbrush?”

“That’s still hanging right in the bathroom, and her hairbrush and stuff is still in the cabinet. That’s why I don’t think she took anything except the clothes on her back.”

“What did she do all day while you were working?”

“Read and played the radio and her records, or went shopping.”

“Did you two have friends?”

“Well, my friends are pretty old, and she was a stranger here, and she said it would be nice if we were selfish for the first year or so and stayed by ourselves. That suited me okay.”

We thanked him and left. Shay had the blue dress over his arm. It was a hard, electric blue in heavy satin. I slid behind the wheel and we went down the road.

Shay saw the old woman sitting, rocking, on the farmhouse porch, shelling peas. “Pull up,” he said.

As we walked up to the porch I saw him carefully adjust his clean-cut boyish manner.

“Lovely day, ma’am,” he said shyly.

“Seems to be.” She had the eyes of a chipmunk. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m Shay Pritchard and this is Robert Moran. We don’t want to bother you, Mrs. Carriff.”

“Read the name off the mailbox, eh? What’s on your mind?”

“I know that a good woman like you wouldn’t discuss her neighbors with strangers.”

“Depends on which neighbors, Mr. Pritchard.”

He grinned boyishly. “Let’s say Mrs. James Garver.”

Mrs. Carriff braced her feet and stopped rocking. She looked at Shay and then at me. She started rocking again. “She won’t be back.”

“Why are you so sure of that?”

“Girl like her? Jim Garver was softheaded to marry the likes of that. Her reeking of cheap perfume and wearing no proper undergarments and more coats of paint that Murphy’s barn! Young enough to be his granddaughter. She was after his money, but she found out she’d have to wait too long. Jim’s sturdy. Lucky for him, she wasn’t the kind to help him on his way. It’s happened before. No, she just got right sick of living out here where it’s quiet and went on back to the city.”

“You saw her leaving?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t have to. I know her kind.”

“Did she ever have any callers — that is, while Jim was at work.”

“Men callers? They could have parked up Garrison’s lane and come across lots. Easy enough to stay out of sight that way. She probably had ’em, all right. But the only one I ever saw was that silly Garrison boy. Big, gawky thing. His mother told me he went off his feed after Jim brought that woman home. He must be nineteen now. Used to hang around out on the road and just stare at the house, hoping to see her through a window. But don’t let on I talked about him if you go see him. His mother’d be mad as hops I told you anything.”

Ted Garrison was working on a yellow tractor. He had the fuel pump dismantled and spread out on newspaper. There was a wide smudge of grease from his cheekbone to his jaw across his wind-burned face. He was tall and wide, and when he moved I saw nothing gawky about him.

“Want something?”

“How well did you know Allie Garver?” Shay asked. His tone was harsh and blunt.

The fuel pump diaphragm slipped out of the boy’s fingers and rolled across the newspaper into the dooryard dust. His face paled under the ruddiness.

“Is — is she dead?”

“Why would you think she was dead?”

“You said how well did I know her. Like she was dead.”

“She’s gone. She could be dead. We don’t know.”

The color seeped slowly back. The boy’s brown eyes hardened. “How well I know her is none of your damn business.”

He had shoulders like a horse, and they were tensed under the blue work shirt. I moved out to one side a bit to flank him, just in case.

Shay sneered. “She’s the kind to use a punk like you for laughs while Jim was working. Where’d you meet her? In the woods?”

The boy rushed with ponderous rage, swinging a right fist like a stone in the end of a sling. Shay moved to one side, evading the blow, and made what seemed to be a pawing, awkward gesture toward the boy’s middle. Ted Garrison whoofed as the wind went out of him. He staggered and went to his knees, fighting for air. He lunged up and went down again, this time onto hands and knees. He shook his head, almost sadly.

“Now, be nice,” Shay said.

Ted pushed himself back onto his haunches. His face was twisted. “She isn’t that kind. She isn’t! She wouldn’t even look at me. She was too good for that old buzzard Jim Garver. I don’t know how he talked her into marrying him. I wanted to ask her to leave him.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“Once.”

“What about?”

“A letter for her got stuck to one of ours and got into our box. I took it down to her. I said, ‘They left this letter in our box by accident. I’m Ted Garrison.’ She said, ‘Thank you, Ted.’ And then she closed the door.”

“When was that?”

“Last Monday.”

“Did you take a look at the letter?”

“It was from Endor City, and there wasn’t any return address on it. It was typed, and the envelope was the kind you buy in the post office — the long kind with the stamp already on it. It wasn’t addressed to her very good. It just said, ‘Mrs. Garver, Bliss Corners.’ At the post office they’d penciled in ‘Route Two.’ I held it up to the sun, but—” He stopped suddenly.

“But you couldn’t read through the envelope, eh?” Shay said. He laughed.

Ted stood up. “She’s the — the most wonderful person I ever saw. It makes me mad the way the old hens around here talk about her.” He looked hard at Shay. “And if you make another crack about her, I’ll come at you again.”

I wandered around the house while Shay worked in the studio. The problem of Mrs. Garver seemed to have slipped from his mind.

I was too restless to shut myself in the library and make progress on my book. I swam a bit, even though it was raining. At five he came downstairs, tenderly carrying an object wrapped in burlap sacking.

I followed him into the study and watched him place it on the desk. It was about two and a half feet high. I knew that last night’s clay image of Bets had been coated with a trick rubber solution and that, after the solution had hardened, he had cut it through to pull the clay figure out. The rubber, when hardened, served as a mold for the white plaster. The last part of the afternoon had been spent buffing the rough edges from the white plaster. Then, as usual, he would wait a month or so. If, at the end of a month, he still liked it, the plaster would be a pattern for the mold to cast it in metal.

“Unveiling of Bets,” he said acidly, unwinding the burlap.

She was taking a half step, and her head was lowered and turned so sharply to one side that the left cheek pressed against the left shoulder. Her arms were rigid at her sides, fingers splayed and pressed hard against her thighs. Viewed from the front the figure expressed shyness and a sense of guilt. I had seen those qualities in Bets, but I hardly considered them dominant.

I frowned. “It doesn’t—”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked mildly. He turned it around gently, so that the back was toward me. I saw the reason for the odd angle of the head. She was looking back over her shoulder. There was slyness and lust on her face, invitation in the cant of her hip and the arch of her back.

“I’m calling it Hypocrisy,” he said. “The two-sided image of shame and desire.”

“It’s — it’s cruel,” I said.

“And very like a woman. She’ll like it.”

“She’ll smash it!”

“Robby,” he said sadly, “I thought you knew Bets better than that. The last pose failed because I got tangled up with conjectures about her soul. Now we are pretty well agreed that Bets’s soul has a twenty-three-inch waist, thirty-two-inch bust, and thirty-one-inch hips.” He looked at his watch. “If you can be ready in fifteen minutes, we ought to be in Endor City by nine o’clock for a late dinner.”

We arrived at Roger’s Place at eleven. A cobblestone alley in the old portion of Endor City, an alley too narrow for a car. Three steps down to a door made of cypress boards, grooved and ancient. At the third step we broke the beam of a photo-electric cell, and the door swung silently open. Nothing could have been more incongruous in that setting.

The ceilings were low and the massive beams were painted Chinese red. The walls were an odd pale aqua, dimly and indirectly lighted. The cypress bar was on the left, a tiny band in the back right corner: marimba, muted trumpet, and bass. The three musicians looked, at first glance, like college boys taking time off. But the crew cuts were dyed, the jackets were sodden in the armpits, and their eyes had been imported from some quiet corner of hell.

Shay took three steps beyond the check girl and planted his feet. He has the knack of imposing himself on the people in a room, of hitting them across the mouth with amused insolence, of showing them, like a black ace flashed quickly, the constant threat of violence.

The thin man who sauntered over wore a Shetland tweed jacket, iron-gray masculine hair. His eyes had the bulging impermanence of droplets of blue spring water spattered on a slick white surface, as though, by shaking his head violently, they would rain to the floor. The eyes flicked across my face, leaving an indescribable sensation of wetness.

“You gentlemen would like to stand at the bar.” He murmured it, and it was a statement rather than a question.

I had moved over to where I could see Shay’s face. It had a heaviness, a glazed, animal look. “Place was recommended to me. You’re Roger.”

Without seeming to, he led us over to the bar. “I’m Rogah.”

“I’m Smith,” Shay said. “John Q. Smith. And my pal — Joseph Q. Brown. Can’t have any fun in the old home town. Too close to the flagpole, as they say. You sell any fun here, Rogah?”

“Life is so full of a number of things, Mr. Smith. Fun is spelled many different ways.”

“We’ll let you write the prescription, Doc Rogah.”

He floated away. My eyes were used to the dimness. Smoke drifted on the sour-sweet air, and some of it had the tang of pot. Several couples moved to the slow beat of the music, glazed and somnambulistic. A girl at a table laughed. A man with a full, silky brown beard made quick Gallic gestures and talked in a low tone to a sleepy boy.

Maybe Rogah, maybe the bartender, pushed a concealed button. They came through a curtain in the back left corner, two of them. Graded, no doubt, to the cut of our clothes. Tall and long-legged, with that look of breeding that has gone too far, that has decayed, like collies too long in the muzzle, like continental automobiles, like French perfume bottles, like rapiers so frail that they become toys, not weapons.

Rogah joined them and he walked as they did. “Mr. Smith, may I present Miss Smith? And Miss Brown? Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown.” He floated back into the gloom, drifting like something that had become untied under the sea.

Miss Brown’s pupils were so vast that they shrunk the iris to a thin frame of blue. Her honey hair was intricately coiffed. The dress was an off-orange that should have been the wrong color for her but wasn’t. She moved close to the bar between Shay and me, and the other one was on the other side of Shay, his big shoulders turned so that all I could see of her was the crown of her head, the mist-brown hair, ringleted.

“It’s so difficult to meet interesting people,” Miss Brown said. The diction was flat, clipped, precise.

“It seemed easy this time. Boston?”

“Dedham. And please call me Lee.”

“I’m Robby. And your drink is either Scotch or brandy.”

“How perspicacious, Robby. I like men who guess. Earlier in this dull evening it was Scotch, but now it’s five star.”

I ordered. She tilted her head on one side, and I saw that some of the precision of her speech and the carefulness of her movements was due to a case of being taken drunk. Her shoulder, where she leaned lightly against me, was warm.

She said, “Do you work for Mr. Smith?”

“Don’t tell me it’s beginning to show, Lee.”

“Don’t be hurt, Robby. I just felt that relationship in the atmosphere. And I prefer people without that... certain ruthlessness that employers have. You’re a small boy trying to be as tough as the big boys, aren’t you? There — I can see I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“You’re odd, aren’t you?”

“That,” she said briskly, “is a gambit I grow weary of. Dear Lee, you’re so intelligent, so charming, so lovely, so obviously well educated. Then the next step is to ask me why I’m doing this. I’ll tell you in advance, Robby, before you work your way up to the question. It’s because the world is a very, very dull place.”

“Since he left?”

The tiny brandy glass lifted slowly, was emptied, and moved just as slowly back down onto the bar. “Darling,” she said, “if you get nasty and make me cry, I’ll spoil your evening, but good.”

A new customer moved in at the bar beyond Shay. He looked around almost shyly, like a small boy who has just finished writing a dirty word on a fence. He took off his glasses and wiped them on a crisp white handkerchief. I ordered another round. When I looked at him again there was a girl with him. He had adopted an uncle’s attitude. I heard his jovial laughter. The girl was young and she was neatly and plainly dressed. The man had a comfortable round tummy and a pin-striped business suit, a lodge pin in his lapel.

Shay pulled his girl around so that we stood in a group of four. He said, glancing at his watch, “Robby, the party ought to be in full swing by now, and now that we’ve got dates, let’s go.”

His girl pouted. “Don’t want to go to any dull parties, Shay.”

“Let’s not,” Lee said.

“Come on, we’ll have fun,” Shay said.

“Let’s stay here,” Lee said firmly. “Then later on we’ll go over to my apartment and have a more select party. No strangers. Just the four of us.”

“No, I insist we go,” Shay said.

I caught the look that Lee gave the other girl. The other girl said, “You two looked like fun, but I guess we were wrong. Have a good time at your party, boys.”

There must have been another signal I missed. Rogah appeared, as if he had sprouted up out of the floorboards. “All you sweet people shouldn’t quarrel,” he murmured.

Shay smiled. “I have a strange aversion to going to any place a girl suggests. It so often turns out to be remarkably expensive.”

“What are you implying?” Rogah said. He smiled.

“Nothing at all. My friend and I are in a strange town. Our guard is up. Is there a law against that?”

Rogah sighed. “I make my share of mistakes. Considering the hour, I think that the girls can go with you to the party you mentioned, but I do think you should pay me the profit I would have made from your drinks and theirs.”

“Anything to make both ends meet, eh?” Shay said, smiling with his lips.

“A hundred should cover it.”

“That’s a fair bit of drinking.”

“The glasses have false bottoms, Mr. Smith.”

Shay looked at the girls. He shook his head. “Thanks just the same, Rogah. The refreshment is overvalued.”

“Why, you cheap—”

“Lee!” Rogah said. It was almost a whisper, but it whistled and snapped like a whip end. She stopped and she was pale around the mouth. Rogah made a small gesture with his hand and they walked off, balancing false dignity like schoolgirls carrying books on their heads for the sake of posture.

“Don’t hurry back, gentlemen,” Rogah said. He smiled. His teeth were small and quite pointed.

Outside, in the alley, Shay said, “Now we check another piece of the puzzle.”

“If you’re collecting pieces of a puzzle, friend, you’re one up on me.”

The cabstand was right around the corner. The flag was up and the driver lounged behind the wheel, the radio turned low.

“We want a cab,” Shay said, reaching for the door handle.

“Sorry, Mac. Waiting for a customer.”

“Your flag’s up.”

“So my flag’s up. Don’t give me an argument, chubby. Go on down the street. There’s other cabs.”

Shay, to my surprise, walked meekly off. Our sedan was around the corner.

He slid behind the wheel and made no move to start the motor. “The shell in the middle has the pea under it, mister,” he said.

“You lose,” I said.

“It smelleth to highest heaven, Robby. It stinketh, in fact. Wait here. I want to stir James P. Garver out of his downy nest.” He slid out and went off into the darkness. I lit a cigarette. When it was half gone, he was back.

“The address,” he said, “is the Henderson Hotel. Neat, clean, efficient. Horse your bag out of the back and check in there. Let the desk clerk know you’re on vacation and you want to say whoopee in loud, harsh tones. Give your right name and a fake address.”

It was twelve thirty when I registered. The Henderson had an aseptic look. The lobby was the severe inside of a concrete shoebox. I was too tired to give my lines much life when I leaned over the desk and asked the clerk if this was “a pretty good town.”

He slid his fingers inside his shirt and scratched himself. “Depends.”

“I’m not afraid to spend money.”

“That case, you might have yourself a time. Take a look at your room and then come on down to the bar. I’ll page you later, Mr. Moran. When I get things set up.”

I tipped the bellhop two dollars, to stay in character. After he left I yanked one black hair from my head and wound it around the catch on my suitcase. Then I went downstairs. They gave me time for one drink before the call came. The horse-faced clerk moved in so close he was nearly nibbling on my ear.

“You just go along where the cabbie out the side entrance takes you. Good man. You can trust him.” I slipped the clerk a five and went on out.

Three steps from the cab I began to make two and one add up to four. It was the same cab which had been at the end of the alley.

“Hear you want some fun, mister,” the cabbie said jovially. I held my breath. He glanced at me but I could see that he didn’t recognize me.

“I could do with some.”

“There’s a place outside of town runs wide open. You ought to like it.”

“It’s your town. Let’s go.”

The music thump shook the silent fields for a hundred yards around. Cars nuzzled up against the clapboard walls like fierce, patient dogs awaiting their masters.

“I’ll stick around,” he said as I paid him. “No charge. I might pick up a fare going back, and if you don’t like it I’ll be right here.”

The first face I saw when I walked in was the face of Rogah. I stiffened. But the clothes, though of the same order, weren’t quite right. And the dimensions were off in a subtle manner. I got it then: Rogah’s twin brother. He was busy laughing politely at someone’s jokes. I went over to the bar and angled to where I could keep him in the mirror. In a moment a kid in a white jacket, one of the waiters, came in from outside and spoke into the twin’s ear. He glanced over at me, then strolled along the booths lining the far wall. A husky citizen with crinkled ears heaved himself out of a booth a bit later and moved in my direction. As smooth as cream.

His voice was slurred and drunken, but his eyes weren’t. “I’d say you’re a stranger in town, friend.”

“That’s right.”

He lurched against me. I felt the quick cat-light flick of his hands as he made a close and clever check. “Ooops. Sorry, pardner.” He belched, lowered his voice. “Lookin’ for fun, mister?” I nodded. “You won’t find it out here tonight. The joint is dead. Better go back to town. Try Roger’s Place.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Don’t mention it, friend.” He wavered off, but his steps steadied as he neared the booth. The twin was looking into the booth. I saw him get the sign and nod toward the door. The waiter went outside again. I had been looked over, searched, and apparently okayed. I finished my drink, left a quarter tip on the bar, and went back outside. The cab pulled over and the driver opened the door.

“Pretty dead in there tonight, I guess. My mistake. I won’t charge you for the haul to the next place. I’m taking you to a sweet little spot called Roger’s Place.”

He spun out onto the main highway and gunned it toward town. It was beginning to shape up. But I was worried. Roger’s Place would be a bit unhealthy to go back to. A little thinking was in order.

“Roger’s Place?” I said slowly. “I’ve heard that before. Now I remember. A fellow told me about that place.”

“Yeah?” he said, caution in his tone.

“I’d forgotten it until now. He told me that if I ever got to this town to go there and ask for a girl called Allana Montrose. He said she hung around there.”

“Oh.” I detected the relief. “Little blonde?”

“That’s what he said.”

“She isn’t around any more. The word is that she got married.” He laughed huskily. “They make good wives, the fella says, those little blondes.”

“I’m getting pretty tired. Maybe we’d better wait until tomorrow night.”

He slowed down, turned in the seat, and stared back at me. “What’s the matter with you? Figure this is a clip operation?”

“Not at all. I said I was tired.”

“I know you wise guys. Somebody tried to do you a favor, you figure there’s angles on it.” He slowed almost to a stop. “I got a notion to bust you one in the chops, Moran.”

“You got the name from the desk clerk. I wonder why he told you.”

The cab stopped completely. He yanked on the emergency brake. His tone was wheedling. “Look, Mr. Moran, I wouldn’t steer you wrong. Be a nice guy and let me take you there for free. If I take you back to the hotel I got to charge you for the trip in. Ten bucks.”

“It was only three to go out there.”

“It’s later now. So you see it would cost you a ten just not to take a look at Roger’s Place.” His rearview mirror was tilted down. I glanced in it and saw, in the glow of the dashlight, his square hand, the fingers cramped around a lug wrench. I smacked the door handle down with the heel of my hand and dived out. The wrench thudded against the upholstery behind me. I landed on my hands and knees and rolled into the shallow ditch, rolled up onto my feet, and moved back quietly another forty feet before lowering myself into the dry grass.

He stood beside the cab for a long time, staring out into the darkness. Then he jumped behind the wheel and roared toward Endor City. I estimated that we’d gone a half mile. I went back to the first place he’d taken me to — the Club Three — in a fast walk.

Rogah’s twin stared hard at me as I strolled in. He moved in beside me at the bar. “Back so soon?” he said softly. His voice was pitched lower than Rogah’s.

I nodded. “I was going into town, but I had trouble with the cab driver. He got wise, and I wanted him to take me back to the hotel. He wanted to charge me ten bucks and collect with a lug wrench. So I left him fast.”

“Indeed? I can’t have my patrons treated that way. Do you have his number?”

“Yes.”

“Let me phone the police for you.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

He stared at me hard. “They’ll have a prowl car here in minutes.”

“Look,” I said. “I would prefer not to talk to any cops. Is that all right with you, or do you want me to type out an outline?”

His eyes hardened a bit. “Oh, I see.”

“And if you don’t mind, I’ll stay right here.”

“How hot are you?”

“Like a cucumber. This is the wrong state.”

“Then you can stay.”

“Thank you so very much.”

After a fanfare by the brassy band, the floor show started. It was a dull affair of blue jokes, a raspy emcee, a chorus line with meaty thighs, and a comic juggler — as funny as a case of typhoid. I was glad when it went away. I didn’t want to go back to the hotel. And I didn’t want to stay in the Club Three. The only other choice was to go for a walk. And that seemed like too much trouble. I stayed.

Beyond the booths was a stairway going up. The entertainers came in from a doorway beyond the bandstand. I wondered what was upstairs.

At five minutes past two, when I had one over the limit, Allana Montrose Garver, in pale yellow slacks and a halter, came down those stairs and slid into the first empty booth, sitting so she could watch the band. Rogah’s twin brother, in a crow-flight line, came across the floor and leaned over the booth, his face angry. She leaned forward, and I could see by the shape of her mouth that she was using four-letter words. He tugged on her arm to pull her toward the doorway, and she snatched it free. The crinkly-eared guy moved in and joined the party. He leaned over the booth and she leaned back out of sight. His arm moved quickly and he straightened up. They both stared at her. Once again the twin took her arm. This time she came along without a struggle. There was a red blotch on her jawline, and she staggered as she stood up. They got her onto the stairway and watched her go up.

I went outside as fast as I dared. The upper windows were dark. A light clicked on behind a screen on the third window from the left. Her silhouette crossed between the light and the screen. Her head was bent in dejection, her arms craned back in that odd distortion necessary to untie a halter or unhook a bra. I turned and went back inside.

Shay came in twenty minutes later. He didn’t look at me. He had one drink and left. I slid into the car beside him.

“You did good,” he said wryly. “A cop is watching for you at the hotel. A little question of deadheading a taxi bill.”

“Either that or go to see Rogah or get slugged with a wrench. I liked my way best. How’d you find this place?”

“The taxi man talks fast when you get his arm in the right position. This lovely little city gets warmer and warmer.”

“Now,” I said, “here’s something you didn’t expect. Allana Montrose Garver is up there behind the third window from the left. Her light’s out now. She came downstairs to watch the fun and games. They urged her to go back up.”

He exhaled slowly. “You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then we’d better get her out of there, Robby.”

“And then go down and heist some gold from Fort Knox.”

“Don’t be a defeatist. Anyway, you know the score now.”

“Sure. The badger game on a mass-production basis. The well-to-do strangers are screened first at the hotel, then out here. If they pass both inspections, they are funneled to Roger’s

Place. There the trained gals take over. With a good screening job they can make a killing on every sucker. The rooms and apartments may be wired for sound. James P. Garver was going to be a routine sucker. They had time to check on him after he registered in and found they had a widower of close to fifty with a half a million bucks. So they put their best talent on him — one Allana Montrose.”

“And,” he said softly, “it was a change of assignment for her. The blue dress I took comes off in four different ways. She was part of the show here. They had a way to put the pressure on her.”

“But what are they planning to do?”

“I have a faint, disturbing idea,” he said gently. “And so we go collect Mrs. Garver. If I can park under that window, do you think you could reach the sill?”

“I might. But how do we turn invisible? There’s floodlights around here.”

“Invisibility is a question of degree.”

With the motor barely turning over, he slid the big car ahead. The gravel popped under the tires. He put the car under the window and left the motor running. The lights of the car went out.

“Get out of the car,” he said, “and count ten after I go through the door. Then scramble up as fast as you can go. Bust the window if you have to. And get that girl. I have a hunch she’ll want to come along. Lower her onto the car top and drop down yourself. Get her in the back on the floor and get behind the wheel and open the other door. Have that motor already turning over and give it one blast on the horn as soon as you’ve moved it up opposite the door.”

He took a last drag on his cigarette, flipped it away, tugged on his belt, and walked to the door. He went inside.

I counted to ten. On the count of nine there was a sound from inside as if a tubful of steel washers and bolts had been thrown through a plate-glass window. The music faltered, lost the beat, and faded off. The window sill came even with my eyes. I broke the window with my elbow and yelled, “Allie Garver! The window! Let’s go!”

I found the catch and slid the window up. The shade was in my way. I tore it off, wiggled through, my stomach across the sill. Her mouth was wide open, and she held the blanket up against the front of her.

“Move!” I said. “We’ve got about ten seconds!” There was a blue robe on the chair. I threw it at her.

She shrugged into it as I heard the steps pounding up the stairs.

“Unlock the door, Allie!” yelled the voice of Rogah’s brother. I unlocked it. It swung inward. He took one step into the room. I jumped full into his chest with both feet. He shot backwards across the narrow hall and down the mouth of the stairway. She was at the window. I swung her up, slid her out feet first, and lowered her by the wrists until her feet touched the car top. She was on the ground by the time I dropped. I felt the metal dent under my heel.

Voices were roaring in anger. She fell full length on the floor as I shoved her into the back. I gunned the motor, yanked the car forward twenty feet until it was opposite the door, reached over, and opened the far door at the same moment as I blew on the horn.

I could see inside. The crinkle-eared gentleman lay on his back on the floor. His mouth looked like a tomato that had fallen on the sidewalk. Shay, his face alight with a vast, animal glee, yanked a man toward him, lifted him by throat and crotch, and hurled him at the others. He staggered as a bottle hit him over the eye, plunged toward the door. They caught him from behind. He ducked forward and threw one of them over his head, turned sideways to avoid a vicious kick in the middle, spun, and punched twice with precision. The last man between him and the door lost heart and stepped aside at the last moment. I had the car thirty feet away before Shay could pull the door shut. He glanced down into the back.

“Nice work, Robby. Nice!”

“Have fun?”

He was breathing heavily. He gingerly touched his forehead. One arm was gone completely from his jacket and his shirt was buttonless. His knuckles were gashed.

“Nothing to clear the head like a good brawl. She was glad to come along, wasn’t she?”

“Hurry,” Allie said, plaintively. “Please hurry!”

He turned so he could smile at her.

“Why, kitten?”

“They’re killing him tonight!”

Shay made the phone calls while I waited in the car with Allie. There was, as I had expected, an unidentified lipstick in the glove compartment. She used the dome light and the rear-vision mirror. She had fallen from the car roof. The right hip of her blue robe was gritty and torn, and her elbow was skinned. She winced as I used the antiseptic in the first-aid kit on it.

Shay came out of the all-night drugstore at a half trot. “Make time, Robby,” he said.

As I held the speedometer at ninety and the big car swayed and roared through the night, Allie spoke over the sound of the rush of the wind.

“I’ve always been a sucker for a pair of dice or a wheel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have sold my act to Jeff Maydo at Club Three if I’d known it was a bust-out house on the side. I don’t know how it happened. They let me keep playing and they took my notes, and all at once I was eleven thousand in hock. That’s when things got rough. Jeff’s brother, Roger, runs Roger’s Place in town, but they work close together. The two of them had what they called a heart-to-heart talk with me. They wanted to put me on the list down at Roger’s Place and let me work my way out of the hole with the extra income. I think they knew I’d blow up at that. I’m no prude, but I’m no hooker either. I said no and then Roger, the creepier one, he said that he’d have to have a friend of his operate on my face, just as a lesson to the other deadbeats. I knew he meant it. He said I’d have a hard time getting my new face into any kind of an act except the circus.”

“Lovely people,” Shay said.

“Oh, the best. We compromised. They said that they’d save me until a prize sucker came along and then, if I did my part, they’d cancel out the debt and give me a five-thousand-dollar bonus. I–I said okay.”

“And the sucker turned out to be Jim Garver.”

“That’s right. Believe me, when I saw him, it wasn’t an act when I did my crying at the bar at Roger’s Place. Then I took on so many drinks that I don’t remember much. Anyway, the next day I got my instructions, and the idea was that I had to marry him. They put the pressure on until I had to say I would. I didn’t understand what they wanted to do. They had me in the bag. I married him. You’d never know he had any dough at all. They must have really checked on him, because a month after we were married, I found out about the half million. I used to call Jeff. He’d keep telling me to sit tight, sit tight. So I did. It wasn’t bad. I got to like old Jim. He’s kind of a sweet guy, and he’s a wonderful cook. And I liked it nice and quiet in the country. Then the letter came for me to come in here. I had to leave without anything, and keep anybody from seeing me leave. I guess I managed it all right. I went to the Club Three. It was... like a nightmare. I didn’t know they were going to kill him until then.”

“When did you find out?”

“Yesterday. I guess I haven’t got much... courage. They made me sign the papers.”

“A confession?”

“Sort of. It gives all the details. I can buy it back from them for four hundred thousand dollars, and if I don’t they can give it to the cops. They won’t be implicated in any way. I haven’t any proof against them. I came downstairs tonight hoping I could sneak out and stop it. But they made me go back up again.”

“Faster, Robby,” Shay said.

We left her with Krimbow and went over to Garver’s house. I cut the lights before we came over the last rise. The night was bright enough so that I could see the turnoff to Garver’s place. The willows made the shadows heavy. I cut the motor.

A voice at the window said, “Nice and easy, now. Press the palms of your hands against the car roof.”

The pencil beam shot through the window. The faint rebound of it picked up the trooper’s brass and the gun-muzzle glint.

“Oh, Mr. Pritchard!” the trooper said, recognizing Shay.

“Where’s Burns?”

“Right here, Shay,” the big trooper captain said softly. “Nothing yet. We’ve got a net all around the place. The old man’s been in bed for hours.”

Shay got out on his side. He latched the car door softly. “The tip is good, Ed. The only danger is that when it went wrong on the Endor City end, they might have had a chance to call their man off.”

“Jim Garver pays his taxes. He gets protection.”

“Have you planted a man in the house?”

“Haven’t wanted to take that chance.”

Shay was silent. He said, “I’ve been in there. I know the floor plan. Mind if I work my way close?”

“Better leave it to us, Shay.”

An awakened bird made small throaty sounds and subsided. Off in the swamps the peepers shrilled endlessly. Over on the main highway truck motors thrummed. The gray in the east began to be touched with rose. The car, invisible moments before, emerged from the blackness.

I glanced at Shay. He had an odd expression on his face. He had a listening look.

“I’m going to the house,” Shay said.

“You gave us the tip, Shay,” Burns said with a hint of anger, “but this is my show. When I call it off, which will be soon, you can go take a look.”

“Garver has lived alone,” Shay said. “He has farmer’s habits. The way the house sets, we can see the kitchen windows from here. There’s no light on yet. Why?”

“Maybe he was tired.”

“And maybe,” Shay said, “he’s dead tired.”

“A mouse couldn’t have crept in there since we started covering the place,” Burns said impatiently.

“And suppose the mouse was already holed up in there before you circled the place? Or had killed him and gone?”

“I had a trooper phone him and hang up when he answered. The light went on, so he was okay then.”

“He should be up by now,” Shay insisted.

“Okay, okay,” Burns said wearily. “We’ll both go take a look.”

Nobody stopped me, so I followed along.

The house was as tight as a drum. We circled it. When Burns shined his light into the bedroom window through the screen and began to curse softly and slowly, I looked in.

His bare, gnarled feet hung motionless, six inches from the floor. He wore faded blue-and-white flannel pajamas. The over-turned chair was off to his left. The cord was tied to the metal handle of the trap door set into the bedroom ceiling. His thick-knuckled hands hung at his sides, curled as though to grasp a tool. The cheap teeth were clamped into the swollen blue tongue and, all around the dead irises, the muddy whites showed.

Burns kicked a hole in the screen and yanked it out. He started to climb over the sill when Shay yanked him back.

“What the hell are you—”

“If a mouse couldn’t sneak in, a mouse couldn’t sneak out, either.”

Burns stood very still for a moment. “Worth a try,” he said.

Twenty minutes later it was broad daylight. When the man broke from cover near the garage, running like a rabbit, Burns drew the .38 special without haste. He held the muzzle high and slowly lowered it, intersecting the line of flight. The sound of the shot was flat in the still morning air. The running man did a complete somersault and rolled to a stop.

“Knee?” Shay asked.

“Hip. It’s a safer shot.”

He had a sullen, stolid face. He bore the pain without any change of expression.

The doctor worked on him back in the trooper station. Shay, Burns, a few others, and myself stared at him.

“He hasn’t got a name,” Burns said gently, “and he doesn’t know what he was doing on Garver’s land.”

“The Maydo twins are going to be very unhappy,” Shay said. The man’s eyes betrayed a sudden surprise, then went blank again. The doctor applied the final strip of tape and stepped back quickly as if he had been touching something dirty.

“We can convince him he ought to talk,” Burns said.

“Oh, he’ll talk right now,” Shay said. “He’ll tell us who told him to kill Garver.”

“Are you nuts?” the man said hoarsely.

Shay was smoking a cigarette. He nibbled a half moon of thumbnail from his left hand and laid it across the horizontal cigarette, just above the glowing tip. He held it close to the man’s face. When the flame touched the nail, it curled and stank.

“Smell that? That’s the way a man smells after they kick the switch, friend. He jumps up against the straps three, sometimes four times. A husky kid like you might go for five. It sure makes a terrible stink.”

The man on the table swallowed hard.

“Sure,” Shay said, almost fondly, “you can keep your mouth shut. You can be a hero. You make your little jumps against the straps and then, before the worms even have a chance to go to work, they’ll forget who the hell you were. At least, even when you get life, which you might not get, you get to see sunshine once in a while, a chance to walk around the yard.”

The man licked his lips. “You got somebody to write this down?”

Shay and I came out of the restaurant. He climbed into the car as though he had suddenly grown old. The lump on his forehead was an angry purple. He sat woodenly beside me.

“Big callous character,” I said.

“Shut up, Robby.”

“No, you don’t feel these things a bit, do you? A dead old guy and five thousand salted. The five is what counts.”

“I told you to shut up!”

“I can’t shut up. It’s such a shock to me to find out that you become emotionally involved in these shoddy little affairs.”

“Why the hell do I keep you around?”

“You mean why do I stay, don’t you? Maybe I stay because once every six months I get a look at the vulnerable part of you, Shay, the part that can grieve for strangers. It’s the only thing that makes you human. You’ve got the dough. If you don’t want to be hurt, why don’t you just sit on your fanny at Sharan Point and add to your collection of statues of the female form. Maybe underneath you’re some sort of white knight looking for grails.”

He boiled out of the car and raced around the hood. I was out of my side before he could reach the door. The restaurant was a truck stop. They came out fast and stood back to give us room. The right that I blocked numbed my left arm from elbow to fingertips. I put a lot of pent-up irritation into the counter and the shock went all the way down to my heels. It stopped him. His arms sagged, and he shook his head like a great blond bear. In his second rush he got me back against the car. I hurt my knuckles on his head, then opened his mouth with an overhand left while he worked on my middle. He was tearing me apart in the middle. I had to fake out of it, so I sagged. He stepped back. I came up out of the crouch, all my wind gone, and drove ahead behind a straight right. But there wasn’t enough left for me to keep my feet. I went down onto my hands and knees at the same moment he dropped onto the gravel. We glared at each other for three seconds, and then he began to grin. In a moment we were laughing at nothing at all.

“Aren’t you guys even mad?” a trucker asked in an awed voice.

We were still laughing, idiotically, when I drove between the big stone gateposts of the house at Sharan Point.

The three of us were at the edge of the pool: Shay, Allana, and myself. Shay was face down on the mattress and Allana sat beside me on the edge of the pool, her feet dangling in the water. The wind ruffled the edges of the newspaper, the Endor City Journal.

Allana frowned. “I feel guilty about it all. It doesn’t seem right that I not only get off without being charged for anything, but I get all Jim’s money.”

“You’ll have a job getting the insurance,” Shay said. “They don’t pay off on big policies where there’s something strange about it. My guess is that you’ll have to bring suit and prove that you were held against your will.”

“Maybe I won’t even try to collect,” Allie said.

Shay propped himself up on one elbow. “Don’t be a damn fool! Money won’t buy happiness, but it’ll make unhappiness a hell of a lot easier to endure. And don’t feel guilty. You gave the tip-off that helped in the roundup of the whole dirty crew. God knows how many poor innocents had the pressure put on them and paid and paid and paid. Old Jim just walked into a trap. And it would have been perfect. Young wife leaves. Farmer hangs himself in fit of depression. Young wife returns, full of remorse but loaded with dough. And their hired assassin did such a neat job it would have been next to impossible to prove murder unless he talked.”

“I–I’ve got to live with myself,” Allie said. “And right now I don’t think much of myself. I’m going away, I guess.”

“Worst thing you could do,” Shay said firmly. “Stay right in that little house. Face it out. You said you liked the country. Get a woman in to stay with you. The neighbors will never know what really happened, unless you tell them. In a year you’ll be a part of the community. Be smart about it. Learn to cook and bake. Take cakes and things around when your neighbors are sick. Cut down on the makeup and don’t dress ahead of the fashions, dress just a little bit behind them.”

She swirled her feet in the water. “Gee, maybe I could.”

“Sure you could,” I said.

She giggled. “Allana Montrose! The real name is Alice Mertz. Allie Mertz. Now it’s Allie Garver. I’m almost back where I started as far as names go. But not in the money department. There were seven kids. The old man had a candy store in Camden. He made book in the back, and when the horses were rough on the suckers, he’d close up and disappear. He’d come back in a week or two with a bad case of the shakes. Then one time he didn’t come back. I was next to the oldest. I quit high school and clerked at the K-Mart. Do you think I can act like a lady, Robby?”

“We’ll see that you do.”

“A lady,” Shay said, “usually has a speaking acquaintance with the arts. We can start right now. Those big windows up there are the windows to my studio. I do figures in clay and cast them myself. If you’d like, we could go up there and I can show you the sort of work I do. Maybe a little later you’d like to pose.”

I glared at their backs as they walked toward the house, Allie small and trim beside Shay’s hulking build.

I swam two angry lengths and got dressed. They were still in the studio.

It was only three o’clock and only five miles to Bets’s house. I walked it.