“Grease,” she said, almost in a whisper.
His eyes turned, but he made no other movement. “What?”
“I said grease. G-r-e-a-s-e.”
“What about it?”
“Nothing. I love the smell of it in my hair.”
“You sure as hell have a hard time,” he said.
“What gave you that idea?” she asked. “Not many women can go around smelling like they slept with their head on a rancid hamburger.”
Something made her look up then, and she caught his eyes on her. She stopped abruptly. The room was caught up in that taut silence again. Then it was broken by the sound of the telephone—two long and two short rings.
He came around the end of the counter and lifted the receiver off the hook of the instrument mounted on the wall near the door. It was an old type, with a hand crank.
“Hello,” he said. “Yeah, this is Nunn . . . Sure . . . Sure . . . Okay . . . Around daylight . . . Okay, I’ll be ready. Good-bye.”
Then, before he replaced the receiver, he spoke into the mouthpiece again. “Jest in case some of you old busybodies missed part of it, that was a man in Woodside. He wants to go fishin’ tomorrow, and he wants me to guide him. Any questions?”
He dropped the receiver on the hook. “Party line,” he said.
The country was filling up with people he didn’t like. He’d have to put on another shift, at tins rate, to be satisfactorily nasty to all of them.
She finished the hamburger and put it in front of me. “No coffee. You want a coke?”
“All right,” I said.
She opened one and put it on the counter, and then turned and went back through the doorway without a word. He leaned on the other side of the counter while I ate. He didn’t say anything. It was all right with me. I was caught up on his conversation.
When I had finished I stood up and took the wallet from my pocket. “How much?”
He shook his head. “Just settle up for the whole thing when you leave.”
“Might as well keep it straight as we go,” I protested. I had to get a look at that cash drawer tonight.
He shrugged. “Okay. That’ll be—let’s see—forty-five cents.”
I took out a five. He lifted a cigar box from a shelf under the counter, set it on top, and lifted the lid. There were four or five bills in it, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. He glanced at the five in my hand and shook his head.
“You got anything smaller?”
“I’ll see,” I said. I brought out a single. “Better give me a packet of cigarettes while you’re at it.”
He turned to get them off the back shelf. I shot a hand into the cigar box and spread the bills out. There were two fives and several singles, plus some silver.
There was no twenty, new or otherwise.
He gave me my change. I went out, drove the car up alongside the end cabin, and carried my gear in. It took me only a few minutes to unroll my bedding on the lumpy old mattress. I switched off the battery-operated camp lantern and lay down. Mosquitoes whined thinly around my ears in the dark as I lay there smoking a cigarette. Frogs kept up their chorus along the shore and I heard a feeding bass splash somewhere out in the lake.
Money? Out here? I must be crazy.
But where had those two twenties come from? Right here, hadn’t they? I’d seen them myself; there was no doubt of it whatever. Then I cursed softly and crushed out the cigarette. The whole thing was utterly absurd. Was I seriously expecting to find some connection between this mean and primitive little backwoods camp and the mystery of the slightly fantastic Bill Haig?
Four
They’d have called him Mad-dog Haig except that his first name was William. Wild Bill was inevitable then, but inaccurate, at least by connotation. The suggestive flamboyance of it as applied to race drivers and stunt men was no more descriptive of Haig than it would have been of the cold and vicious deadliness of a cobra. He was an atavism. He belonged back with the Machine-gun Kellys, the Pretty Boy Floyds, and the Dillingers of the thirties. He was the embodiment of violence. The odd part of it, though, was that until the time he flamed across the front pages two years ago at the age of twenty-six his only criminal record was that of a petty hoodlum arrested and convicted once for stealing cars. Apparently he had simply gone berserk, but berserk with a paradoxically calculated violence that was aimed at one thing: knocking off banks, and big ones.
In that brief period of six months beginning in August 1953 he and his gang had robbed three big-city banks by direct and brutal assault. Firepower and blind luck had got him out of all three of them, but it had been gory and not even very profitable until the last one he hit. He seemed to know nothing about banks and their protective devices, and to care even less. Planning apparently had no place in his modus operandi; he simply went in and then shot his way out. The first one, in St. Louis, had resulted in the death of a teller and a bank guard, and had netted him less than nine thousand dollars. The second one was in suburban Detroit. It gained him eighty thousand dollars for a few short minutes until the gang member carrying the majority of the loot was shot down in the street outside the bank in a gun battle with police. Haig and the other two escaped with something like fifteen thousand dollars, leaving behind them a dead patrolman and another with a bullet-shattered hip. The outcry in the newspapers crescendoed.
It was in Sanport in February that the realities of life in the 1950s with their police networks, F.B.I, co-operation, protective alarm systems, and traffic clogged streets and highways caught up with him at last. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they caught up with his gang. He hit the Gulf First National with three other men. They killed another guard, wounded a bank official, and looted it of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The whole thing caved in on him then, as anybody would know it inevitably had to, and the getaway became a shambles. They left the first member, Red Jolley, on the steps of the bank with a police bullet in his abdomen. The driver of the getaway car was shot through the head in the first block. The other man in the front seat shoved him out of the door and took the wheel. Haig was in the back seat with the bag containing the loot. Twenty minutes later, on the outskirts of the city but still inside the crystallizing ring of roadblocks being set up by the police, the getaway car slammed into the rear of a slow-moving truck at better than sixty miles an hour. Both vehicles careened across the dividing line into oncoming traffic, involving two other cars in the smash-up before coming to rest. Police were swarming all over the scene in slightly more than ninety seconds. The driver of the getaway car was still behind the wheel, dead of a broken neck. Haig; Haig was nowhere.
It was as if he had calmly stepped from the wreckage and boarded a flying saucer for Mars, carrying the bag of loot with him. Nobody saw him. The money was gone. Nobody had ever seen him again, to this day. That was a year and a half ago.
It was not so much that it was impossible he could have escaped in that ninety seconds of wild confusion as it was just unthinkable he could have got completely away and continued to elude the vast and continuing search for him that was still going on eighteen months later. There was simply no place he could hide. He was too hot for the underworld to touch with a barge-pole. He was a cop-killer, and he was on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” list. He couldn’t have bought protection or concealment from anybody with any kind of money, with ten times the amount he was carrying.
And they knew everything about him that there was to know.
Red Jolley had lived long enough to talk. He told them who Haig was and where he’d come from. The F.B.I, had gone on from there and when they were through they could have written a six-volume biography of him. They had photographs, descriptions, fingerprints, and a dossier on his personal habits all the way from his preferences in girls down to the way he liked his eggs for breakfast. His picture had been on the front page of every newspaper and displayed on the walls of every post-office in the country. And it had all come to exactly nothing. Haig had, to all outward appearances, evaporated. Along with the entire haul from one of the biggest bank robberies in history.