“All right,” she said lifelessly.
She came back in about fifteen minutes and shook her head at his questioning glance. “There’s some other people living in the apartment now.”
Then she hasn’t been home at all, he thought. If she’d gone back she could probably have kept the apartment, by laying the landlord or selling her pictures. There ought to be a big demand for her pictures, he thought coldly.
“What are you going to do now?” Dorothy asked him the morning of the third day.
“Try to get out of the state, if I can make it. That is, if I can’t locate her.”
“When?”
“In another day or so. Why? You in a hurry for me to leave?” he asked suspiciously.
“No,” she said. “You can stay as long as you want.”
“I’ll pay you back for what you’ve spent,” he said angrily, “if the money’s bothering you.”
“I don’t care anything about the money.”
“You don’t care about anything, do you? I never thought I’d see the time I could be here three days and never even get to touch you.”
“I didn’t either,” she said, looking at the floor.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Nothing seems to make any difference.”
It was hot in the apartment during the day, almost unbearably hot with the door and the windows closed. Restlessness had begun to ride him with its raking spurs almost from the time he had the handcuff off, and he would pace the floor of the small room in stocking feet, going on for hours. The thought of Joy began to be an obsession. When Dorothy brought in the morning paper on her way home from work he would snatch it away and read the news stories of the man hunt, looking for some mention of her. Then he would make her go out at noon and bring in the afternoon papers as soon as they were on the street. I can’t hang around here forever, he thought. I’ll go nuts. I’ve got to try to get out of the state, maybe to Florida or somewhere, and if I don’t find out pretty soon where she is I’ll have to go anyway.
The fifth day was torment. He could no longer sit still at all and there were moments when he felt that within a matter of hours he would go berserk and run out into the street to shoot it out with the first policeman he saw. Then he would get hold of himself and force himself to calm clown, knowing that when he did leave the apartment it was going to take all the cunning and cold self-control he possessed to get clear. He rarely spoke to Dorothy now. When she left at three-thirty to go to work he merely stopped his pacing for a moment to growl.
As Dorothy went out the doorway at the foot of the stairs she glanced at the mailboxes through habit, then stopped. There was a letter in hers. She opened the box and took it out, glancing at it curiously. She very seldom received any mail, and thought it might be only an advertising circular until she saw the handwriting.
She opened it. It was from Joy.Dear Dorothy:I hope you will forgive me for not writing to you for so long, but there has been so much trouble, as you have probably read about. I am staying with Sewell’s family on their farm up here and they have been so nice to me during this trying time. Mr. Neely is a charming old gentleman, you would love him, and Sewell’s brother Mitchell is the handsomest thing, you wouldn’t believe it, really. There is a young sister, too, who is the most adorable thing.I would like to stay here longer, but I really ought to go back to work. So, Dorothy, I wonder, if you could spare it, would you lend me twenty dollars ($20.00) for bus fare and expenses so I could come down there and look for a job. The Neelys would just insist on giving it to me if I told them I was short of money, but they have done so much for me already I hate to ask them.I wouldn’t ask anybody but you, for you have always been my best friend. Dorothy, I will pay you back out of my first pay check, of course. Hoping to hear from you soon,Your loving friend,Joy
Dorothy slid it back inside the envelope and started to go back up the stairs. I might as well show it to him, she thought wearily. He’s so anxious to find her. Let him go on back to her once more.
Then she stopped, halfway up. If he goes there to see her, she thought, they’ll kill him. They’re bound to be watching all that country for him. I’ll wait till I come home from work tonight and that’ll give me time to think about it.
When she came home at twelve-thirty the apartment was empty. There was no farewell or note of any kind, but Sewell was gone.
She stood silently for a moment in the middle of the room, feeling the unbearable loneliness coming back. Then she changed into her kimono and sat down on the bed, just staring at her hands in her lap. He would never be back again, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter at all any more. She didn’t even want to cry. After a while she turned on the radio and set the volume low. Moving up to the head of the bed, she put her face up close to the loud-speaker and listened to the dance band coming from the Edgewater Beach in Chicago.
Fourteen
When he had cleared the outskirts of the city, headed east, he looked at the gasoline gauge. It was low, below a quarter full, and he began looking for a station. It was after midnight now but there would still be plenty of them open along the highway. If I was going to steal a car, he thought, why couldn’t I have stolen one with a full tank? It was a good car, though, a late-model Lincoln with lots of power.
He passed two or three Stations, large, brilliantly lighted, watching for a smaller one. In them big stations, he thought, even when you stay in the car you got light coming at you from all directions. One Lincoln looks like any other Lincoln, at least till they get it on the pickup list, but my face has been in too many papers.
He hit the open country, and then there was a small town, asleep now except for the flashing caution light across the highway, an all-night café and a constable making his rounds, and on the far end of the darkly huddled cluster of buildings he saw what he wanted. It was a small station, set back slightly from the street, with only one light over the driveway.
The door of the station was open and a youth in grease-stained white sat at a desk looking at the pictures in Life. Sewell stopped under the light in the driveway and the young man came out, smiling.
“Yessir,” he said eagerly. “Fill her up?” He had friendly gray eyes and big shoulders, and the arms below the rolled-up white sleeves were tanned and heavy, rope-muscled. Football player, Sewell thought.
“Think it’ll take about twelve or fifteen,” he said, bending his head down and pretending to be looking for something in the glove compartment.
“Regular or ethyl?”
“Ethyl,” he said over his shoulder.
The young man went around to the back of the car and took the hose off the hook. Then, suddenly, he was back at the window.
“The keys to the gas tank?” he asked pleasantly.
It’s little things, Sewell thought. Always little things. You can’t think of ‘em all. Lots of people forget to give ‘em the key, sure, but it just takes a little thing like that to start one of ‘em thinking. What kind of dope is it that don’t even know his own car’s got a lock on the gas tank?
“Oh, yeah,” he said casually, still looking down at the road map he had taken out of the glove compartment. He slipped the ignition key out of the lock and passed the leather key container out the window. But suppose it’s not in there? he thought. When the attendant went back around to the rear he shot a hand into the glove compartment again. There it was, a key tied to a small plastic tag.