“Here’s your friend,” I said, pitching my voice down so I wouldn’t wake them up. I scooped him out of the back of the car and dropped him over the fence. When I turned back she was standing beside me and quite near, and my eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness so I could see her face. Her eyes were very big and they looked black in the starlight, and her hair was a rumpled mop of blondeness.
“It was wonderful of you,” she whispered.
“Not at all.”
“I was worried; you were gone so long.”
“We were whispering like a boy and girl in a doorway. “He wasn’t there. I had to keep calling him. But he’s all right; he was just lost.”
“I was afraid you were lost.”
“You were?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Thank you for everything. It was a lovely day, wasn’t it?”
“Is it midnight yet?”
“Not quite.”
“Well, happy birthday, Junior.” I took her face in my hands and kissed her. And then they dynamited the dam.
She wasn’t Junior any more and nobody was kidding and the light touch was gone somewhere downriver in the night. Her arms were around my neck and I was holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe. It was crazy and very wonderful. We didn’t say anything. After a long time I let go of her and took her face in my hands again and tilted it up a little, and she put her hands up over mine. I could see the starshine in her eyes as if they were wet.
“It was a wonderful day, wasn’t it?” she asked softly.
“And getting better,” I said.
“I’ve got to go in, Harry.”
“I can’t let you go.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.” Suddenly she pulled my head down and kissed me and slipped away inside the gate. “Good night, Harry,” she said. I watched until she was up on the front porch and then when I heard the screen door open and close I got in the car and drove off.
I don’t know how long I drove around, or where I went. Everything was mixed up and I couldn’t sort it out. Once I remembered standing beside the car somewhere on a dark country road smoking and grinding a cigarette butt under my foot and thinking: I’m thirty years old and she’s just a kid—just a big-eyed, beautiful kid who never says much. That’s all she is. And kissing her is like driving into a nitro truck.
It must have been after two when I got back to the rooming house. I was still in the dream, and only half noticed the strange car parked at the curb on the other side of the street. I cut my lights and got out, and then the spot hit me right in the eyes.
“Madox?” The voice came from the wall of darkness somewhere on my right.
“It’s him.” That one was on the left.
I couldn’t see anything but the light, and cold was running up my back like a stream of ice water. But somehow I got my mind back in time from the rosy cloud it was in, and I had sense enough not to try to run. I froze up tight and waited.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to make my voice sound natural. “I’m Madox. What is it?”
“We’re from the Sheriff’s office. You better come along with us.”
10
It was tough, with that light in my face. I couldn’t let anything show. Just hang on, I thought desperately. Play it dumb. Play it a line at a time till you find out.
“I don’t get it,” I said, as naturally as I could. “You want to see me? You must have the wrong party.”
“We don’t think so.” They came out of the light then, one on each side of me. I recognized them. They were the two deputies who had been talking to Gulick Saturday afternoon. “Let’s take a ride.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “But how’s for telling me what this is all about?”
“Bank robbery—and arson,” the short one said.
“Bank robbery?” I said. “Aren’t you guys reaching for it a little? Look, I’m a car salesman. I work for George Harshaw—“
“We know all about that,” he said, cutting me off. “But we want to have a little talk with you. I’d advise you to come along without any argument; you’re just making it tough on yourself.”
“Sure. If I can help you any way, I’ll be glad to.” I shrugged.
He came over behind me and felt me under the arms and down the sides. “He’s clean, Buck,” he said to the other one, and then to me, “All right, Madox. Get in the car.”
“O.K.,” I said. “But wait’ll I lock mine.”
“We’ll do it. You got your keys?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me have ‘em.”
I gave him the keys, which were still in my hand. He tossed them to the tall deputy, the one called Buck, who went around in back of the car and opened the trunk. He switched on a long-barrelled flashlight and looked over every inch of it. Then he went inside the car and began lifting up the seats and pawing through the junk in the glove compartment.
“Where you been?” the short one asked me while Buck was shaking down the car. “Two-thirty’s a little late for this town.”
“Just riding around,” I said. “It’s too hot to sleep.”
“Things on your mind, maybe?” He managed to get a lot of suggestion into it. “Just where you been riding around?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said, suddenly realizing I had no idea where I’d been. “Just around. Up the highway and back.”
“Maybe you’d better try to remember. You don’t look too good, right now.”
Just then Buck slammed the door and came over to us. “What you doing with a pair of girl’s shoes in your car?” he asked.
I stared at him. Shoes? Then I remembered; I hadn’t given them to her. “Oh,” I said. “They belong to a friend of mine.”
“She always leave her shoes in the car?” Buck asked, “I’ve heard of ‘em leaving their pants around here and there—“
“Take it easy, Mac,” I said. I told them about losing the dog and going back to find him. They motioned me towards the police car while I was talking and we got in, all three of us in the back seat. There was another man in front, at the wheel.
“And what girl was this?” the short one asked.
“Her name’s Gloria Harper.”
“She live here in town?”
“It’s all right,” the man in front said. I knew who he was then. He was the deputy who’d been at the fire, the one who lived here. “I know her. She’s a nice kid. If this guy’s mixed up in something I doubt if she is.”
We went on through town and north on the highway. It was about twenty miles to the county seat. I was still flying blind, but I was beginning to have a hunch they were too. Maybe they didn’t have a thing to go on except the fact that I was a stranger in town.
I began to breathe a little easier. So far I hadn’t made a false move or spilled anything, in spite of the suddenness of it, and now that I was on guard all I had to do was play it as it turned up and stick to my story. I even had my alibi there in the front seat, the deputy who’d seen me at the fire. The only thing I had to remember was not to spring it too soon in the game. Let it come out naturally—that was the thing.
When we got into town we drove right to the jail. The Sheriff was there waiting for us in a hot, bleak office full of harsh light and steel filing cabinets. It was the first time I’d seen him up close, and I didn’t much like what I saw. There wasn’t any of the pot-bellied court-house stooge here; he was a policeman doing police work. The hair must have been prematurely white because the face was that of a man in his forties, a face with all the flabby indecision of the front side of an ax.