Talk of the town Page 12

  She was tiring. It occurred to me I was doing a very poor job of carrying out the doctor’s orders. I crushed out the cigarette and stood up. “Back to bed for you. I’ll get your medicine.” I brought over one of the sleeping pills from my room.

  She smiled. “You and Dr. Graham are a heavy-handed pair of conspirators. Didn’t it ever occur to either of you if I’d wanted to take that way out of it I’d have done it long ago?”

  “To be frank,” I said, “neither of us was too sure how you’d come out of that business this morning. You’re a stronger girl than we gave you credit for.”

  She stood up and held out her hand. “Well, run along before I make a liar out of you. You’ll never know how nice you’ve been.”

  “Good night,” I said. “We’ll talk over that deal in the morning.” I locked the back door and left. I sat on the side of the concrete slab in front of my room smoking and watching the place until Josie returned. There was no telling what they would do next. Georgia Langston was sleeping peacefully when Josie came back around ten-thirty and set up her cot in the living-room. I told her to keep the front door bolted, and went across to bed.

  I checked to be sure the window at the rear of the room was locked and the curtains tightly drawn. There was something very chilling in the thought of that shotgun. I could still see the empty eyes at the ends of its dual barrels searching for me down there in the gloom like some nightmarish radar. Only a fool wouldn’t be scared. He was smart, and he was deadly, and I didn’t have the faintest idea who he was. And if I didn’t flush him out before he had a second chance, I wasn’t going to be very pretty when they found me.

  I lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the quiet hum of the air-conditioner and trying to make some glimmer of sense of it. Langston had left here alive at ten minutes to four at the earliest, and he’d arrived there at four-twenty-five with his head bashed in, rolled up in a tarpaulin in the back of his own station wagon. It was a twenty-minute drive. So in fifteen minutes at the outside he’d gone somewhere and managed to get himself killed. He couldn’t have gone very far. But that didn’t mean anything. It was a small town, and at that time of morning, with no traffic, you could get from one end of it to the other in less than five minutes.

  But how did a woman get into the picture? Even if he were a chaser, which everybody said he wasn’t, nobody went prowling at four in the morning in a country town. Not with bass tackle and an outboard motor and a flask of coffee. It was ridiculous.

  The woman was in the picture, obviously, because she was Strader’s girl friend, the one he’d been coming up here to see. But what possible connection could there be between Strader’s girl friend and Langston? The easy answer to that, of course, brought you right back to the police point of view. Langston was married to her. So try again. The woman was here in town. She lived here. Somewhere before she must have known Strader. He’d driven up here three times in two months to see her, and it was a thousand miles’ round trip. Strader, on the evidence, was no love-starved adolescent, so she must be quite a girl. Of course, you never knew what some other man would go for, but how many had I seen around here so far that could pull me the length of the State of Florida?

  One. I was back to the police point of view again.

  I sighed in the darkness and lit a cigarette. She was here somewhere and I had to find her.

  I had one very slim lead. When she’d called me on the phone, she had made no attempt to disguise her voice, even if it were possible, or cover it with the slurred speech of the half-drunken as she had when she’d called Mrs. Langston that morning. It simply wasn’t necessary, because in half an hour I was going to be dead anyway. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  But how did you explain that insane thing about the fan?

  Then I set straight up in bed, cursing myself for an idiot. Why hadn’t I seen it before? There was no mystery about the fan at all. That first call, when she’d hung up abruptly, wasn’t a teaser or come-on, as I’d thought it was, or a way of lending authenticity to her story. Or not solely any of those. It was also a test. They were checking me.

  Somewhere he’d seen me going in and out of those phone booths, and suspected what I was up to, but he wanted to be absolutely sure. So what could be simpler than setting up a phony for me, duplicating the noise with a fan near some other telephone, and watching while she called me? If I ran across the street to try to catch her when she hung up, he’d know. And I had. And he knew. So she made the second one, and sent me out to meet the shotgun. Very smooth teamwork; you had to admit it, even if it scared you.

  So far, so good. Did it mean, then, that it had to be one of the four who’d been at the place that first time— Rupe, Dunleavy, Ollie, or Pearl Talley? Not necessarily, I thought; they seemed to have ways of knowing everything I did in this town, and even if he’d spotted me somewhere farther up the line and followed me for a while to make sure what I was doing, he could have found out from any number of people that I’d finally come out and checked the booth at the Silver King. But it definitely made more sense if it were one of those four. He’d know I had more reason to suspect him, because he was still there.

  Assume it was one of the four. Which one? Dunleavy worked in a filling station just up the road. He would have been able to see me when I ran over there. Ollie was already there, naturally. Pearl Talley had come in just after me. That left only Rupe unaccounted for. Did that make him more or less likely than the others? He could have been watching from anywhere around, and remained out of sight.

  Wouldn’t that be the natural thing to do, rather than walking in openly, as Talley had done? Sure, I thought, except for one thing. As far as my reasoning it out afterwards was concerned, the way they saw it, there was no sweat at all. Afterwards I was going to be dead.

  So it could have been Talley just as well as any of the others. No, I thought. Not with that mush-mouthed, Georgia-boy accent of his. Whoever the man was, I’d heard him twice on the telephone, and while he’d been whispering once and speaking very softly the other time, some of that houn’-dawg dialect would have come through if it’d been Talley. That left three of them.

  So now I had two very tenuous threads to follow, both due to the fact they’d underestimated my life expectancy. They’d know I had them, and they wouldn’t make the same mistake again. It was a long time before I got to sleep.

  * * *

  Dawn was breaking when I swung off the highway at the two mailboxes and followed the dirt road through the pines. No one was up at either of the two farmhouses. As I passed the cattle-loading pen, a covey of young quail crossed the road ahead of me and then flushed, exploding fanwise like feathered projectiles to sail out over the palmettos. In a few minutes I pulled in and stopped under the tree in front of the fire-blackened chimney.

  I had wakened before daybreak and almost at once I’d been struck by the thought I was almost positive there had been no other car tracks in this road yesterday, at least none this side of the farmhouses. How had he got in here? There must be a road of some sort in that timber beyond the fields and he’d come in the back way. If I could find it, I might locate the place he’d left his car.

  It was humid and warm and the air was utterly still as if the day were poised and holding its breath, waiting to explode. There was no sound, except now and then the bub-bob-white of a quail somewhere out in the field. It still wasn’t full light, but I could see well enough to make out another set of tire tracks besides the ones I had made yesterday. The redheaded Deputy, I thought. When he’d been unable to provoke me into a charge of assaulting an officer, he’d become bored enough to come on out here and make a stab at doing his job. For a moment I felt almost sorry for Redfield. It was a sadly undermanned police force, with one cop and two clowns.

  There was no point in even going inside the barn now; it would be too dark to see anything. I went on past it, hearing my shoes slash through the dead weeds and feeling a chill between my shoulderblades as I thought again of that shotg
un going off behind my head. Some two hundred yards beyond, at the lower end of the smaller field, I crawled between sagging strands of barbed wire and pushed into the timber. It was mostly oak and scrubby pine. So far I had seen no footprints, but I had no illusions as to my being a scout or tracker. I’d lived all my life on pavement. And what I was looking for was a road; I’d be able to see that.

  I crossed a sandy ravine in which ran a small trickle of water, and then beyond it the way led upwards at a slight grade. I kept going. It was easy traveling, fairly open with not much underbrush and only occasional bunches of dead grass and nettles. It was broad daylight now. In another few minutes I hit the road. It was only a pair of dusty ruts winding through the trees, but there were tire tracks in it, and they looked fairly fresh. At least they had been put there since the last rain. The road ran roughly north and south, parallel to the one I’d come in on. I marked the spot by dropping a stick in one of the ruts, and turned right, following it south towards the highway. After a half-mile I’d still seen no indication the car had ever stopped or pulled out of the ruts. I turned and went back, and a few hundred yards north of the marker I’d left I found what I was looking for. An even fainter pair of ruts led off to the left, towards the fields in back of the barn, and there were fresh tread marks in the dust. They were a standard diamond pattern, which meant nothing, since there were thousands just like them anywhere. The sun was coming up now.

  I followed them, walking between the ruts. In places the ground was covered with a carpet of pine needles so the treads didn’t show at all, but in others there was open sand and I examined them carefully, looking for flaws or cut places that might identify one of the tires. There were none that I could see. In about two hundred yards I came to the place he’d stopped and turned around. A fairly large pine had fallen across the trace of a road, and there was no way he could get around it. I studied the tracks. He’d pulled out to left, reversed as far as he could go, and then had pulled back into the road, facing the way he’d come. Several drops of oil had seeped into the sand in one place midway between the ruts, which meant whoever it was hadn’t merely turned here and gone back. His car had sat here for a while. I nodded and lit a cigarette. The place should be less than half a mile directly behind the field and the barn; this was my boy, all right.

  But there was nothing to indicate who he might have been or whether there had been more than one. I could see traces of footprints in one or two spots, but they were indistinct and incomplete, of no value. Then I noticed something. In turning, he’d been cramped for space because of the trees all around, and at the very end of his reverse he had backed into a pine sapling. I stood looking at it. The small gouge in the bark was unmistakable, but it was too high, at least eighteen inches above where it should have been. Then I knew what had done it. Not the bumper of a car; the tail of a pick-up truck.

  Talley drove one. The picture of it flashed into my mind, standing in front of the Silver King with chicken droppings all over its sides. I shrugged it off, wondering why I kept thinking of that mush-mouthed clown. Circling the fallen tree, I went on west, towards the field. There were occasional traces of footprints between the old ruts, and in about a hundred yards I came across a half-smoked cigarette that had been ground out beneath a shoe. It had a white filter tip, and when I straightened out the torn and crumpled paper I could read the brand name. It was a Kent.

  When I came back to the barn the sun was well up and it was light enough to see inside. I went through it and found nothing at all except the savagely mutilated plank at the head of the ladder where the shot charge had slashed through it. The empty shells were gone. I stood looking up at the torn plank, feeling a chill uneasiness. How would they try next? And where? They’d know I would be more difficult to decoy now, so they couldn’t get me out here in the country. Would they dare try it in town, from a car? Possibly at night, I thought; I’d have to watch all the time. It gave you the creeps.

  I drove back to town, had some breakfast at the Steak House, and called the Sheriff’s office. Magruder answered. He said Redfield was taking the day off.

  “What do you want?” he asked truculently.

  “A cop,” I said, and hung up.

  I looked up Redfield’s home number in the book, and dialed it. There was no answer.

  The stores were beginning to open now. I went up the street to a hardware shop and bought a hundred-foot tape, and picked up some cheap drawing instruments at a dime store. Before I went back to the car I tried Redfield’s number again. There was still no answer. I looked at the address; there was a chance he might be working in the yard on his day off and not hear the phone. It was 1060 Clayton. That would be the third street north of Springer and way out in the east end. I drove out. It was in the last block where the street dead-ended against a fenced peach orchard. On the left was a playground and baseball diamond fenced with high wire netting. The house was on the right, the only one in the block. It was a low ranch-style with a new coat of white paint. The rural mailbox out in front bore the neatly lettered name: K. R. Redfield. I stopped and got out.

  Either he or his wife was a gardener. It was a big lot, probably half an acre, and the lawn in front showed plenty of care. At the left there was a concrete drive and a six-foot trellised fence with pyracantha espaliered beautifully against it. The same type of fence, covered with climbing roses, was on the right, with another strip of lawn and walk paved with bricks laid in sand. I stepped up on the porch and rang the bell. There was no answer. I crossed the lawn to the driveway and looked towards the back.

  The garage was at least a hundred feet back, past this wing of the L- or J-shaped house. The door was closed. Bougainvillea was splashed like flame against the side of it. I stepped on back and around the corner, hoping he might be working in the backyard. There was a big oak tree over on the right, with more brick paving under it, and two peach trees and another strip of velvety lawn. He had been working back here, apparently laying a low brick wall for a raised flower-bed along the back of the lawn, but there was no one in sight now. Tools were still lying near the job, and there was a pile of sand and a bag of cement at one end of the brick paving.

  I had come slightly past the inner corner of the end of the wing, and as I turned to leave I glanced idly behind me at the alcove formed by the two wings of the house. Then I froze in confusion. Almost under my feet, a girl with dark, wine-red hair was lying on her back on a large beach towel with her feet towards me and her hands under the back of her head. She was completely nude except for a pair of dark glasses that were aimed at my face in a blank, inscrutable stare. I whirled, and was back around the corner on the drive again by the time I had grasped the obvious, but comforting, fact that she was asleep. My face was still hot, however, as I hurried down the drive and got into the station wagon.

  I could still see her. She was Redfield’s wife and I didn’t want to, and tried guiltily to scrape the picture of her off my mind, but it stuck, the way the bright flame of an electric welding arc does after you’ve closed your eyes too late. I could see the dark red hair spread across the towel and the plastic squeeze bottle of suntan lotion beside her hip, and the concave belly—I cursed, and whirled the car around.

  At the end of the block I turned left and came out on the main road near the Spanish Main. Redfield’s place was almost behind the Magnolia Lodge. Not more than a quarter of a mile, I thought.

  10

  Georgia Langston was still asleep. I drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen with Josie, changed into faded denim trousers, and went to work. I tore up the rest of the ruined carpet in Room 5, swept it out onto the gravel with the piled remains of the mattresses, bedclothes, and curtains, and phoned for a truck to haul it to the city dump. When it was gone I washed out the whole room with the hose once more and pushed the water out of the door with a broom. The last of the acid should be out now, and in four or five days when the room was thoroughly dry I could paint it and have a new carpet laid.

  The anger a
t all this senseless ruin began to wear off a little, and I felt fine. It was wonderful to be doing something again. The sun beat down and sweat rolled off my shoulders as I took the hundred-foot tape and a big rough pad and pencil and went out front. I stood by the sign where I could see the entire front of the place and as I began excitedly visualizing it as it would be, I wanted to grab the tools now and begin the assault on it, violently, in the hot sun. I made a crude sketch of the lot and the buildings, reeled out the tape, and began writing in the dimensions. I took all the data into my room, switched on the air-conditioner, and drew it to scale on a large sheet of drawing paper, putting the fifteen by thirty foot pool in the center, almost in front of the office, with the concrete edge around it and the whole thing bordered with grass. The drive in from the road would be blacktop paving, as would the parking area in front of the rooms. Border the drive with two raised flower-beds and at the outer ends of the front lawns set solid masses of bamboo. That should grow here, and grow fast. Light the bamboo from below with colored spotlights—chi-chi and a little on the overdone side, perhaps, but it would be spectacular, and that was what we wanted. Children’s playground here, at this end of the lawn.

  I was breaking it down into square yards of lawn, square yards of blacktop and concrete deck, lineal feet of underground conduit and water pipe and numbers of sprinkler heads, when there was a knock on the door. I looked at my watch and was startled to see it was after eleven. I’d really been wrapped up in it.

  “Come in,” I called.

  It was Georgia Langston. She was wearing a crisp white skirt and a short-sleeved blouse the color of cinnamon, and looked refreshed and very easy on the eyes. She smiled. “I’m not interrupting, am I?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Come on in. I want you to see this.” I stood up. She came over and stood by my shoulder as I explained the drawing to her.