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“Five hundred smackers,” breathed Annalou. “What Don and I couldn’t do, if we had that!”
“Puh-lease,” Bill murmured. “Spare me the details!”
“I mean we just have to put ’em together.” She colored rosily. “The features they’ve jumbled up here, I mean. I ought to be pretty good at this. I’m terrible on names, but I hardly ever forget a face.”
Bill considered. “That might be Lou Costello’s chin. The comedian, you know.”
“Sure,” she agreed. “And those are Charles Boyer’s eyes, I’ll bet.” She paused, “But whose nose?”
“Ain’t Durante’s. Not big enough.”
“Humphrey Bogart? No.” She shook her head.
Bill clucked sympathetically. “I wouldn’t know. To me, one nose is as good as another, long’s it stays out of my business.”
She glanced up at the sound of crunching gravel. “Excuse me for mentioning it, then. But you got a customer.”
A maroon sedan rolled smoothly onto the drive-in. It had a doctor’s white cross beside the license plate. Bill hurried over to the ethyl pump.
A tall man in fawn gabardine with snap-brim to match, got out of the sedan, pointed to the windshield, asked Bill a question, strolled languidly toward the attendant’s shack. A tall, slim, leggy girl climbed out, too. She looked up at the sign:
Fill Your Insides At The Outside Inn
“What you want, Eddie?” she called.
“Coffee,” he answered, over his shoulder. “Black.”
Annalou put away the puzzle sheet, slid two cups onto saucers.
The tall girl was willowy and graceful. Like those models at the big stores in town, Annalou thought. The dress she was wearing helped the illusion along. It was something soft and fuzzy in a pink-and-gray mixture, cut way down to there in front. It had that New Look everybody was talking about. On her, Annalou decided, it wasn’t bad.
“Howya, honey-chile.” The newcomer’s voice was throaty velvet. “Hot java on tap?”
“Best in town.” Annalou gazed admiringly at the dress. Must be an exclusive. Pipe that rose-rhinestone embroidery. “Something with it?”
“Uh-uh. Make it two, though.” The girl sat sidewise on her stool, crossed her nylons. “Things kinda slow?”
Annalou set out cream and sugar. “Always quiet this time of—”
A flat report came then. It sounded like a backfire. Annalou glanced quickly at the sedan’s exhaust. The motor wasn’t running. Bill had filled the tank, gone back to the shack.
The tall girl spilled off the stool, scurried toward the car. The driver of the sedan walked swiftly out of the shack. He got about ten paces from the door when Bill stumbled out, all doubled up, holding both hands pressed tight over his abdomen.
“You — skunk!” He coughed. He leaned against the door frame, fell down, got to his hands and knees, crawled a few feet, sagged to the gravel on his face, and lay still.
The tall girl snatched at her companion’s arm. “Eddie!” she screamed. “You promised you wouldn’t!”
He didn’t break his stride, didn’t answer.
“Eddie!” She tugged at his arm. “You’ve killed him!”
He jerked open the car door, slid in. “Coming?” He kicked the starter, the motor roared.
She scrambled in beside him. The sedan leaped forward before she got the door closed.
Frozen with fear, Annalou reached for a pencil on the cash-register ledge. She scribbled a number on the edge of the puzzle.
Then she grabbed a nickel out of the cash drawer, stumbled with pounding heart across the gravel toward Bill...
Lieutenant Les Wiley waited until the flash-bulb boys were through and the starchy internes had lifted Bill’s body onto a stretcher.
“You say this girl called him Eddie, Miss Kenyon?”
Annalou shivered, moved closer to Don Rixey’s protecting shoulder. “That’s right. Twice, she called him Eddie.”
“You’d recognize him, if you saw him?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. 1 didn’t see him close, Lieutenant. He had his hat pulled down over his eyes.”
The phone in the attendant’s shack rang. One of the plainclothesmen answered. “Hello,” he said, and “Yes,” and “Just a sec.” He came to the door.
“For you, Miss Kenyon. Your mother, 1 guess.”
They must have put it on the radio already then, she guessed. Otherwise, how would they have heard, at home? She hadn’t called anybody but Don.
“This is Annalou.” Her hand shook as she picked up the receiver. There was a spatter of dark red on the floor beside the phone shelf. This was where it had happened!
“One minute, honey-chile.” That throaty, velvety voice!
Annalou could only gasp.
“Listen, kid!” It was the man’s voice, now. Those brittle tones were unmistakable, though she’d only heard him speak one word. The murderer! “I’m givin’ you some friendly advice, babe. You talk all you want to, to those Little Boy Blues. But you’ll sleep better if you kind of forget to remember what 1 look like. You didn’t see me very good. Catch wise?”
“Yes,” Annalou breathed, almost paralyzed. “Yes, I catch.”
“That’s a smart kid,” the man at the other end of the line went on, smoothly. “That’s being sensible. I’d hate to have to do — what I had to do there in the office where you are now — again. Understand?”
Annalou nearly fainted. “Yes,” she managed to say. “Oh, yes, I understand.”
“So just be kind of vague, undecided. That’s right. And you won’t hear from me any more. If you play it that way.”
She didn’t hear him hang up. She didn’t hear anything. The plainclothesman picked her up off the floor. Don slopped a wet handkerchief on her forehead. The lieutenant found a flask in his pocket.
When she recovered enough to talk, she told them.
Lieutenant Wiley studied her narrowly: “So now you’re going to find it hard to remember, huh?”
Don snapped: “Why shouldn’t she! What would you do, if your life had been threatened!”
The lieutenant regarded him morosely. “Let the little lady do the talking and me the thinking. We’ll get along. How about it, Miss Kenyon?”
Annalou looked at Don, but she thought about Bill. Good old amiable Bill, crawling across the gravel there, with a hole as big as your fist in his stomach.
“I don’t know if I can describe the man.” She brushed her taffy-bright hair back off her forehead, wearily. “But I might be able to pick his picture out if you have a photo of him in the Rogues’ Gallery.” She bit her lip. “I hardly ever forget a face.”
A few hours later the lieutenant came into the file room with a typed report and an air of resignation.
“A lot of quick thinkin’ — for nothing. That license number you spotted, Miss Kenyon—”
Don exclaimed eagerly: “They picked up the sedan, huh?”
Wiley raised his eyebrows sardonically. “You in again? How’d it be if you pretended you’re just an innocent bystander, hah? Leave me and the little lady go into this kind of private like, hah?”
Don retorted defensively: “I just thought if they got the car—”
“They did. Half an hour ago. Parked. Right here on State Street. It was a stolen heap. We knew that, anyway. The doctor who owns it had reported its loss earlier tonight.” Wiley laid the report on his battered flat-top desk. “There weren’t any prints on the steering wheel or door handles. All wiped off, of course. So we’re back where we started.”