“But you took care of that for me, didn’t you?”
“Slipped my mind too.” Now his smile disappeared. “Let’s level. What’s this all about? I’ll find out sooner or later. Why play coy with me?”
“There’s nothing to be coy about. I don’t know any more than you do.”
He glared at me. “There’s a body in the house and in the barn there’s a cut-up car. The police will get to wondering why the night clerk was going through all that trouble and they’ll trace the car. That will bring Sam into the picture. The police will keep pulling on the string and that means that Irene, and you, and eventually me, will all get into the act. I don’t know how clean you are, Regan, but I don’t want too many people to know too much about me. I’d like to run, but my brain tells me to stay around if I want to protect myself. What the hell happened to Sam? Did he just skip out or is there something else I should know?”
“I haven’t got a thing to offer you, Cable. I’m walking in a cloud myself.” I got into my car and pulled away from the curb.
And now I wondered about Pete Cable. Was his mind as blank about this as he said? Or was it possible that he had actually caught up with Rogers and gotten rougher than he had planned? But then how did Bert Dryer fit in on this? I didn’t think that Cable would go to a stranger and say, “Look, I’ve got a body and a car to get rid of. How about lending me a hand? I found thirty-five thousand and we can split that for your trouble.” And yet Bert Dryer was in on this up to his dead neck.
I glanced at the rear-view mirror. A two-tone Buick was following me and I had been expecting that.
I pulled up at a small department store and went inside. The Buick parked fifty feet behind my car. Now Cable had the choice of waiting for me to come out of the front of the store or the rear. He couldn’t be in both places at once. He probably swore, but he decided to stick with my car. If I shook him, at least he’d make me walk.
I used the rear exit and followed the alley toward the Liston House.
I wondered about Irene Rogers. She’d been with Rogers for three years and it looked like Sam hadn’t been spending much money on her. And he didn’t seem to be the kind who ever would. Had she decided that this was the best time to get hold of the thirty-five thousand — when Sam had it with him, not in a personal bank account?
Did she need Bert’s help to get rid of the body and the car? Or was he blackmailing her and she had then decided to get rid of him?
But if she had the money, why had she brought me into this at all? She didn’t need me and she wouldn’t want me to do any digging. She could simply have put the money away and reported to the police that her husband was missing — if she wanted to bother about that at all.
Then who was Bert Dryer’s partner? If it wasn’t Cable or Irene, who else was left? It could be anybody, but I thought I had one good bet left.
The day clerk at the Liston House looked up when I entered. “Find Bert?”
“I knocked, but I guess he wasn’t home.”
The day clerk was a small man. Just like Bert. Would it take two men that size to move a body?
A card table had been set in the lobby and a pinochle game was in progress. The players all seemed to be in their late sixties or the seventies. I lit a cigarette and turned back to the day clerk. “You work here all day, every day?”
He smiled faintly. “Have to. I own the place. Frank Liston’s the name.” He watched the card players for a moment. “Long hours, but it’s really not too hard. Mostly sitting and waiting for something to happen and there hasn’t been too much of that in the last ten years. Sunday’s my only day off. Hire one of the college boys to take over. Only twenty-one, but dependable.”
I wasn’t interested in the college boy. I didn’t think Bert would turn to him if he needed help to cover up a murder.
“Do you sleep here?” I asked.
“No. My wife and I got a little cottage on Chestnut.”
“Bert Dryer been with you long?”
“Twelve years.” His eyes went past me to the front door and I turned. A burly gray-haired State Trooper was turning the old-fashioned brass knob.
“That’s Sergeant Stark,” Liston said. “Looks serious about something”
Stark approached the desk. “Frank, I’ve got some bad news. Bert Dryer’s dead.”
Liston’s mouth dropped. “Dead? Did he have an accident?”
Stark shook his head. “It was no accident, Frank. He was shot. Jim Hagen delivered a load of fuel oil to Bert’s place a little while ago and when he was filling the barrels he happened to look into the kitchen window. He saw Bert lying on the floor.”
Frank Liston looked at me and I thought I’d better do the talking about myself before he did. “I was out there just an hour ago, Sergeant. I knocked, but there was no answer and so I came back here.”
Stark regarded me with interest. “Why did you want to see Bert?”
I showed him my credentials. “I was hired by a Mrs. Rogers to find her husband. He disappeared about a week ago. I traced him to this hotel. He registered, went to his room, and, according to Bert Dryer, left early the next morning. I tried to pick up from there, but I hit a dead end. So I thought I’d go to Bert again, figuring that he might remember something else that might help me.”
“What does this Rogers look like?”
I gave him the photograph.
He studied it. “Never saw him around here.” He handed back the snapshot. “A missing man and a murder? Do we have a coincidence here, or do they touch each other?”
“I have no idea, Sergeant.”
“You say that you traced Rogers to this hotel? How?”
I told him about the punchboard routine Rogers and Cable had worked up for themselves. He would find out about that later anyway and it would look much better for me if I told him myself. “Cable is in town now. If you want to talk to him before he leaves, you might look down Main Street. I saw him parked there not long ago.” I described Cable and his car.
The sergeant looked dubious. He seemed to be thinking that the disappearance of Rogers and the punchboard racket needed looking into, but did they actually have anything to do with the murder he was working on now? Evidently he decided that he couldn’t afford to overlook speaking to Cable. He moved toward the door. “Don’t leave town for a while, Regan. We might have more to talk about.”
When he was gone I slipped into the phone booth and called Irene Rogers. “The body of the night clerk has been found. The police have talked to me.”
“What have you told them so far?”
“Just that I was looking for your husband. The punchboards came into the conversation too, but I didn’t mention that your husband was carrying thirty-five thousand dollars with him.”
“They’ll find out about that too.”
“Maybe. But if I don’t tell them and you don’t, who will? The man who killed Bert Dryer? I think we’ve still got a chance to get to the money before the police do. They’ll be wanting to talk to you too when they find the connection between Dryer and your husband. You can be expecting to hear from them.”
“All right. I’ll keep quiet about the money.”
I didn’t see Stark again until five that afternoon.
He eased himself into one of the lobby chairs. “We found your man, Sam Rogers.”
I looked pleased. “Where was he hiding?”
“In the ground.” Stark found a cigarette and lit it. “We had men going over Bert Dryer’s grounds. First they found a little hole about a foot deep behind one of Bert’s sheds. From the outline we could make out at the bottom, it looked to us like somebody had dug up a cashbox. One of those little metal ones that most folks have in their homes for personal papers.”