The sergeant’s smile was uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t say so.”
“Then please do what I suggest.”
“But that kind of thing ought to be done by the C.I.D.”
She looked appealingly at Vernon Gyce. “Isn’t this pretty stupid, really? How can they do it if you won’t call them in?”
Gyce examined his big knuckles. “Barney, maybe we could take a shot at it unofficially, sort of. So there’s no report if it doesn’t work out.”
“On your own time, Vern.”
“It would be okay?”
“I’m giving you an hour off right now. But who pays for the phone calls?”
“I will,” Jane Ann said quickly.
“Can I use the back office?” Gyce asked.
“Go ahead. But remember, it’s unofficial.”
Jane Ann and Gyce walked into a small office in the rear of the small building. Gyce left her there alone and came back in a few moments with the master list of all the doctors in the area.
“Start with the ones nearest here?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. I think the best place to start would be with the ones in any direction outside of Hartsville except this direction. And far enough so that the doctor wouldn’t be likely to know the patient.”
He thought it over and nodded. He took a pencil and made tiny, neat little check marks beside three names. “Barleydale, Hallmeister and Quenton City, then.”
She tried to relax as he made the first call. She was conscious of the racing of her heart. “Doctor? This is Trooper Gyce, Dowellburg Barracks, sir. We want to know if on the twenty-sixth of last month you had a patient come in for treatment with injuries that could have occurred in a traffic accident. A male patient not personally known to you... Sir?... Yes, of course. Sorry to have bothered you.”
On the second call he could not get hold of the doctor. The office nurse had him wait while she checked the records. No such patient had been in.
Gyce hung up and shrugged. “Sometimes they walk away without a scratch, Mrs. Foley.”
“You saw the car. Was that likely?”
“I guess not. We’ll keep trying, anyhow.”
No luck on the third call. Next he tried Palmerton, thirty miles southeast of Hartsville. He asked his standard question. He waited. She saw his face quicken with interest. He pulled a scratch pad closer. “I’d like the details on that, sir.” She watched him write on the pad. Nine thirty A.M. 26th. Wrist, hand, ribs, laceration on jaw. Acc in woods. WMA, approx 30, tall, sandy. John Hart. Cash. “Thank you very much. Doctor. This may be what we’re looking for.”
Gyce hung up and gave Jane Ann a wide grin of delight. “Son of a gun!” he said. “It could be the jackpot. Mrs. Foley. It just might be. His office is in his home. The man arrived before office hours. There were two of them, but the doctor didn’t get a look at the other one. The man was pretty banged up. Broken wrist, badly sprained hand, cracked ribs and a facial laceration. Said he’d stumbled in the woods and hurt himself in falling. By that time his wrist was so badly swollen the doctor had a hard time setting it. Checked the hand with a fluoroscope, but no bones broken there. Taped his ribs, stitched the laceration, set the wrist and put a cast on it and put it in a sling. He said the man looked and acted as if he’d walked out of the woods and had been in considerable pain for quite a few hours, so he didn’t think twice about it. But he did ask the man to come back in a week and he never showed up. Let’s go tell Barney.”
“And then the Criminal Investigation people?”
He nodded. “Now there’s enough to go on.”
“But can they find him?”
Vernon Gyce savored a cold little smile. “They can find him.”
The C.I.D. specialists found Charles “Chick” Marlow within thirty-six hours. They found him a hundred miles from Hartsville, using a false name. He tried to go out through the window of the restaurant where they found him. They brought him back. He refused to say a word. He was questioned for twelve consecutive hours, was identified by the doctor who had treated him, and was shown a faked fingerprint record supposedly taken from the death car and a faked blood-test report supposedly made from bloodstains found at the scene of the accident.
At last he gave a great shuddering sigh and his face went slack, and at these familiar symptoms they called in the official stenographer.
“Such lousy luck,” he said softly. “All my life, nothing but this same lousy luck.”
He told all of it. He needed no further prompting. He and his brother and the Mannix woman had seen T. J. Arlington and John Foley arrive in separate cars. The three of them had been bored. The brothers had told Shirley she couldn’t pick up the stranger. There had been no plan in the beginning. It all grew out of boredom. She had stopped Foley and asked for a ride home, telling him there was a man waiting to rough her up, that she lived fairly close but didn’t have a car.
John Foley had been too wary of her to go for that. It had annoyed her, made her mad at him. Then Chick Marlow suggested to her that if she could get Foley out in the back parking lot, maybe they could convince him he should lend them his car. Lew Marlow had wanted no part of that game.
Right after T. J. Arlington left, the Marlow brothers left. Chick waited in the shadows out in back and Lew drove out in the truck and went home. It took forty minutes for Shirley Mannix to talk John Foley into giving her a lift home. As soon as they were out in the lot, Shirley, by prearrangement, grabbed John Foley and kissed him.
“I come up behind him and clunked him with a rock. I put him in his car, in the back, and got the keys and drove it out of there. We felt crazy, laughing and all. We said how we’d leave him off someplace and take his car papers and credit cards and see if we could make it all the way to California. I don’t know if we were kidding or if we were really going to do it. She got up and leaned over the seat and felt him and said he was breathing okay. We didn’t see how he could make much trouble, on account of, after all, she had picked him up. She’d left the place with him. A lot of people saw that. And then all of a sudden I saw I maybe wasn’t going to make that big curve this side of Dowellburg.”
The accident had injured him painfully, but it did not knock him out. He found Foley first, and was frightened at the way the man looked. It took him longer to find Shirley Mannix. He lighted a match with his good hand and saw that she was dead. When he heard the truck stopping, he ran into the brush. When the driver was gone, he started back toward Hartsville, walking on the shoulder of the road, ducking for cover whenever he heard a car coming. He got to the cabin he shared with his brother at eight in the morning, circling wide to come up behind it so he would not be seen. His brother drove him to the doctor in Palmerton and then took him out of the area, where pertinent questions might be asked about his injuries.
The charges were assault, grand theft, kidnaping and felony murder.
The newspapers corrected themselves with all the space and attention that any story with a warm and human angle merits, housewife solves kidnap mystery... BAR-GIRL PROVES ACCOMPLICE.
They all were interviewed and photographed — Jane Ann, Irene, the children, Johnny. Theirs was a three-day fame, and Jane Ann was glad when it was over.
One afternoon soon afterward, she pushed Johnny’s wheel chair down the long corridor to the sun room and then sat with him. She smiled at him, muffling a yawn.