And Ramsey was here pumping him. I lit a cigarette for myself.
“. . . I didn’t think of it till after the F.B.I, man had left, but you might mention it when he comes back. I think they’re still around here, a couple of ‘em. They’re making every place in town.”
Is this the last trip, Otis? You’re sure you don’t want to feed me through the rollers again? I frowned thoughtfully at my own cigarette, since that seemed to be what they were doing now, and said, “No. Wait. I think she came after those motors. His wife, I mean. Early Monday morning, before you got here. Seems to me she gave me a check.”
Was that too risky? It would be if it got as far as Ramsey, but not if I stopped Otis here and now. “Yeah,” I went on. “I’m pretty sure of it. Signed her own name to it. Her first name, I mean. Janice? Jeanette? No. Jewel. That was it.”
“Oh.” He shrugged. “Well, it was just a thought. Guess it’s about time to check in at the salt mine. You got your whip and the leg-irons?”
You’re not really going to get off my back and go to work, you cadaverous ray of sunshine? “Strength, comrade,” I said. “Soon comes the day.”
The morning passed in a blur. I waited on people automatically, going through the motions like a machine while my thoughts raced along an endless treadmill. The F.B.I, must be swarming in on this place like an air attack; it was just a miracle I’d got those twenties shut off in time. But maybe I hadn’t; there was still one more floating around somewhere. One could do it.
How was I going to find it, something no larger than a two-suiter bag in over fifty square miles of wilderness? It was impossible. No. For over a hundred and sixty thousand dollars, nothing was impossible. But it wouldn’t be that much, I cautioned myself. Some of it would be in securities I’d have to destroy; more would be like those twenties—too risky to pass. But there still could be over a hundred thousand of it. But where? Think of it—fifty square miles. Thirty-two thousand acres of timber and underbrush and swamp.
Otis went out to lunch. When he returned, I started out. The phone rang before I could get in the car. I went back. Otis had answered it and was holding out the receiver as I came in the door. “For you, boss.”
“Thanks,” I said. He went back toward the shop.
“Mr. Godwin?” It was a woman’s voice. It was Jewel Nunn.
I wondered if she had told Otis who she was.
Eight
“Oh, hello,”” I said. “How are you?”
“I hated to bother you,” she said hesitantly. “But yesterday when you left you forgot to pack one of your shirts.”
“Well, thanks a million for calling,” I said. “Just throw it in a corner somewhere, and the next time I come out I’ll pick it up.”
“Oh, I’ve got it with me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Hampstead, at the drug store. I had to come in to buy some things, and I thought that since I’d be this near to Wardlow I’d just bring the shirt along. I could leave it here—or if you’ve got a few minutes to spare you could meet me here and I’d give it to you.” She sounded faintly embarrassed, as if she’d got involved in that rigamarole of explanation and couldn’t find any way to turn it off.
Hampstead was fifteen miles south of town, where you left the highway to go to Javier Lake. It was silly to drive down there and back just for an old khaki shirt, but there didn’t seem to be any graceful way out of it. Then it occurred to me I might learn a little more about Cliffords if I talked to her. I was going to need all the information I could get.
“Sure, I’ll be right there,” I said. “It’s awfully nice of you to go to all this trouble.”
I called to Otis to take over, and hit the highway out of town. Less than twenty minutes later I was in Hampstead. It was a village with a population of less than a thousand, in a tomato-growing community. The highway by-passed it at a distance of about half a mile. There was a big packing shed near the railroad tracks and beyond that a cluster of buildings about a block long that comprised the business district. It was quiet and half asleep in the white sunlight of noon. I saw her old station wagon parked on the left in front of the grocery, directly across the street from the drugstore. I pulled into a space beyond the drugstore and was just getting out when I saw him.
There were a few people on the sidewalks, mostly farmers in khaki and overalls and a teen-age girl or two in jeans, but this one was no tomato-grower. He’d just come out of the hardware place at the corner on the other side of the street and was lighting a cigarette while he studied the other store fronts along that side. He was wearing a snap-brim Panama and a gray suit and had a thin briefcase under his arm. He could be a salesman, of course, but even at a distance of half a block you could see that young, alert, well-pressed neatness of the F.B.I, agent written all over him. They must be taking this end of the country apart. I hoped that bundle I’d put on the bus would start hitting the Kansas City or Chicago banks in a few days; they were making me nervous.
I pushed open the screen door of the drugstore and went in. A couple of old-fashioned overhead fans moved sluggishly, faintly stirring the air. At the left two teen-age boys with gooey concoctions before them slouched on stools and sprawled against the soda fountain like melting wax figures. There was a counter and a prescription department at the rear, and three booths on the right, behind the magazine stands. Most of the floor space in the center was taken up with racks holding cosmetics and candy and other assorted merchandise. She was in one of the booths, watching the door. Her eyes lit up and she gave me a faintly embarrassed smile.
I walked over. “You look very nice,” I said, smiling down at her. She had on a crisp summery dress with very short sleeves and a lacy spray of white at the throat, and this time she’d done a better job with the lipstick. A narrow blue ribbon passed under the cascade of tawny hair and was tied with a little bow at the top of her head. It made her appear younger, not more than twenty at most. “The shirt is in that paper bag,” she said awkwardly. It was on the table before her, with a couple of other small parcels and a half-finished lemonade.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” I asked. “After all, I do want to thank you.”
“Oh, of course,” she said. “I mean—please sit down. But I’ll have to run in just a minute.”
She was as transparent as glass, a basically nice kid sticking her toe in the water and then drawing back in alarm. It wasn’t me, particularly. It was the bleakness of her life in general. Probably anybody who bathed as often as once a week and didn’t scratch himself in public could score with any one of the standard approaches if he’d merely take the trouble to restore her faith in her own desirability. She’d called me, and now by God it was up to me; she wasn’t sure, either, just how much she wanted to happen, but it would be nice just to be able to use some of the old defense patterns again, if nothing else.
It was interesting, but I had other things on my mind. And at any rate if I were looking around for somebody else’s patio to play in, it probably wouldn’t be Nunn’s. The silly bastard might blow your head off.
We engaged in the usual inane small talk for a few minutes, and when she started gathering up her packages and said she had to go I merely thanked her again for bringing the shirt.
“I’ll go out to the car with you,” I said, helping her with the parcels.
“Thank you,” she said. “But there’s one more thing I want to get, if you don’t mind.”
I followed her as she prowled among the stands of merchandise. In a moment she found what she was looking for, a bottle of scented bath oil. Just as we turned to take it back toward the clerk at the cash register in the rear, I saw the man in the gray suit come in the door.