Everywhere you looked, on the table and on the trunk, under the bed, and piled on the floor around the sides of the room, were stacks of old comic books and cheap true crime magazines whose covers ran largely to toothsome and improbable girls who had died violently in attitudes calculated to display the optimum expanse of thigh. The floor hadn’t been swept for some time. I looked around at the dirty dishes and the rumpled bed. Well, I hadn’t come out here to inspect him for a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
I started with the chest. On top of it there was nothing except a folded towel and a pair of thick-lensed spectacles. I slid out the top drawer. There were some handkerchiefs in it and his shaving gear and a small mirror, and two boxes of .38 caliber ammunition. Two envelopes bore the printed return address of an office of the Southern Pacific Railroad. They had been opened, but through the glassine windows I could see there was something still inside. Maybe the checks came with a voucher attached; I’d be able to find out just how large the pension was. I was reaching for one of them when I spied the corner of his wallet sticking out from under the handkerchiefs. I hurriedly slipped it out and flipped it open. It held seven ten-dollar bills, a five, and four singles. But not one of them had a stain along the edge. There was simply no trace of it at all.
I felt suddenly let down and cheated. Taking the tens over to the window, I turned them carefully in the light, examining them all over. It was no use. They were just like any of millions of others. I shrugged, and returned all the money to the wallet. There was no identification in it except an old New Mexico driver’s liscense that had expired in 1953. It was made out to Walter E. Cliffords, and gave an address in Lordsburg. He was five feet six inches tall and weighed 152. Hair, br. Eyes, bl. He was born in 1910.
I dropped the wallet back in the drawer and reached for one of the envelopes. When I slid the voucher out, I gave a little start of surprise. The check was still attached to it. It was the same story in the other one. I rooted among the handkerchiefs and came up with one more. The checks were all in the amount of $58.50, payable to Walter E. Cliffords, and he hadn’t cashed one since May. He must be popular with the accounting department, I thought. And suffering from no shortage of money, in spite of the fact she’d said he spent nearly half that amount on comic books and magazines each month. Well, he might get something from Social Security . . . no, you had to be sixty-five, didn’t you? One thing was clear, however; his finances didn’t ring true at all.
The other two drawers held nothing but clothing. I closed them and turned to the trunk. It wasn’t locked. Lifting off the stacks of magazines, I raised the lid, conscious of a strong odor of moth crystals. The compartmented tray on top held a hodge-podge of miscellaneous stuff, shotgun shells, plastic boxes of bass flies and spinning lures, gun-cleaning equipment, some bottles of old patent medicine, and another pair of spectacles in a case. I lifted it out and set it aside. The bottom was full of winter clothing. I snatched it all out, feeling in the pockets of the jackets and the raincoat. There was nothing else in it except some magazines lying on the bottom.
Well, what now? I shook my head, still crouched on my knees beside the trunk and staring musingly into its emptiness. There should have been something. Something besides you, honey, I thought.
The uppermost magazine was another of those true detective things. On its cover a creamy-textured and extremely loth maiden in a Place Pigalle outfit was trying to stay at least one jump ahead of a hearty type with a cleaver. Ah, youth. What mad pursuit? . . . What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Wait a minute . . . . I frowned thoughtfully. Why in the trunk? He must have a half-ton of these things stacked around the room; what was special about this one? I grabbed it up. There were two more under it, another crime magazine of a different brand and one of those pocket-sized digests that can reduce Gibbon to four hundred words. I felt the stirrings of an illogical excitement; here I was going back into left field again. The digest magazine displayed its table of contents on the cover. I ran my eye down it rapidly. Half-way down I stopped.
Wild Bill Haig, Enigma.
So?
I dropped it and began leafing frantically through one of the crime books for its table of contents. There it was. I gulped it at one devouring glance, and drew a blank. Was I wrong again? I started back, more slowly. Girls in Purgatory . . . Clue of the Bloodstained Something . . . Ice-Cold Blonde . . . Nude Something Or Other . . . Is This Man Among the Living? . . .
Hold it. Try page forty-three.
I found it, and then breathed softly. It was Haig, all right. The next one was easy; it was the lead story. Will They Ever Solve the Mystery of Bill Haig?
I don’t know, pal, but give me a little time; I’m working on it. I closed the magazine and dropped it softly back into the trunk.
I put everything back in the trunk the way it had been, closed it, replaced the magazines on top, and went to work. I tore the rumpled bed apart and turned and probed the mattress and pillows. I pulled the drawers out of the chest and looked under and in back of them. I looked in the stove, and pulled the pots away from the wall to see behind them. I tore the piles of magazines down and shuffled them. Every few minutes I stepped to the door to check the cove again, and then returned to the methodical ransacking. I was careful to put everything back the way it was, but I missed nothing. I even went through the groceries and pried the lids off three one-gallon pails of syrup. It was a complete blank. The only money in this cabin was that in his wallet.
Of course it was too big to hide in a place like this. That was obvious, but he should have some of it here where it was convenient. If I could just find one of those twenty-dollar bills—then I’d know. After all, the magazine articles could be a coincidence. Maybe he idolized criminals, or collected Haigiana the way some people collected data on Sherlock Holmes. Hell, there could be half a dozen good explanations for it. I had to find something more concrete.
I went around back and entered the shed. There wasn’t too much light, even with the door open, but my eyes gradually became accustomed to the dimness. One side of it was stacked with stove-wood. There was a bench on the right that held the remains of an outboard motor, a five-gallon can of fuel, and a dozen or so beat-up old duck decoys. A pair of oars leaned against the rear wall. The floor of hard-packed earth, under close scrutiny, showed no indication of having ever been dug up. An old hunting coat hung from the wall above the bench. I took it down and went through all the pockets. I was working against time now, beginning to feel jittery as I listened for his motor. What about the wood? There wasn’t time to tear all that down and get it piled back. I’d just have to return tomorrow. Was there anywhere else? I looked swiftly around. nothing remained except the underside of the bench. Sitting, I slid back under it and looked up. The light was too poor here to see much more than its general outline. I fished the lighter from my pocket and flipped it, holding it above the level of my eyes, and then the sudden intake of my breath made a little gasping sound in the stillness.
The framing of the bench was of two-by-sixes, a long one across the front and shorter ones running from front to back between it and the wall. To the bottom of a pair of these, at the front of the bench, a short section of plank had been nailed, forming a pocket that was accessible only from down here. And sitting in the pocket was a small cereal carton. I snatched it down and slid from under the bench.