“What took you so long?” he asked Buck.
“He was out ridin’ around,” Buck said.
“Where?”
It was the short deputy who answered. “He says he don’t know.” He grinned.
I turned and looked at him. He wasn’t over five feet five, with a deformed left hand and a nasty pair of eyes, and you could see he liked going around with the badge and gun as much as he didn’t like men bigger than he was. The other two—Buck and the one who’d been at the fire—looked harmless enough, just lanky, serious-minded country boys drawing a county paycheck.
“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You and Buck can go home.” They went out and he jerked his head towards a folding chair over against the wall. “Sit down, Madox,” he said, taking a cigar out of a box.
I sat down. The big unshaded bulb hanging in the middle of the room made it even hotter than it was inside. I fished out a cigarette and lighted it, throwing the match into a dirty spittoon. Sweat ran down my chest inside the shirt. How much did they know?
“What’s this all about, Sheriff?” I asked.
He bit the end off the cigar and looked over at the deputy, ignoring me. “What about the car, Tate?”
“It was clean. Wasn’t nothing in it but a pair of girl’s shoes and the junk in the glove locker. The usual stuff.”
“And his room?”
Tate shook his head. “Nothing there but his clothes.” He sat astride the chair with his arms propped on the back, watching me while he smoked a cigarette.
The Sheriff jerked his head around suddenly, and the cold, incisive eyes bored into me. “All right, Madox; where’d you hide it?”
“Hide what?” I asked.
“That money.”
“Look, Sheriff,” I said. “I could ask you what money, and waste some more of your time and mine, but I understand that I’m supposed to have robbed a bank. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, let’s get down to cases. I didn’t rob a bank. I happen to be a car salesman, and I haven’t got any sidelines. But if you think there’s any way I can help you, let’s get on with it and quit horsing around so I can get back and get some sleep. I’ve got to work tomorrow.”
“O.K.,” he said. He leaned backwards across the desk and flipped open one of the drawers. His hand came out holding a cardboard box. He lifted the lid off, then walked over and handed it to me. I looked at it and had to fight to keep my face still. It was the alarm clock.
“Where’d you buy it, Madox?”
“I didn’t.”
“You know what it is, don’t you?” He didn’t raise his voice or threaten. He didn’t have to. He just looked at you.
“Sure,” I said. “It looks like what’s left of a clock.” It was black, and the glass was melted.
“That’s right. It’s an alarm clock. Take a good look at it. See anything funny about it?”
“Nothing except that it’s been on fire. But what’s it got to do with me? I thought you said I robbed a bank. You mean when I got rich I burned my alarm clock?”
“Not exactly. Notice something else funny about it? It hasn’t got a bell.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll bite. So it hasn’t got a bell.”
“Not much use as an alarm clock, is it?”
“I shouldn’t think so. But I still don’t get it. Why tell me?”
“Why? Just in case you ever wanted to hold up a bank sometime, and needed a diversion. It’s an old Indian-fighter’s trick. You’d use a clock like this to start a fire somewhere at exactly the time you wanted it started. That’d take the pressure off, because everybody in town’d go to the fire. You notice those little drops of metal on top of the clapper? They’re solder. The insurance investigator who dug it out of the ashes told me about them. There was a match-holder of some kind fastened on there and it melted off with the heat, but it didn’t quite all melt off. But it’s still a damned smart trick.” Suddenly he stopped his pacing back and forth and snapped at me like a popping whip. “Madox, where’d you buy that clock?”
“I told you,” I said. “I never saw it before.”
He went back and sat down on the edge of the desk. “A man smart enough to pull off a job like that’d be too smart to buy the stuff he needed for it there in town. He’d go somewhere else and get it.” He leaned forward a little with the cigar in his mouth. “Now, let’s have the truth for once. Where’d you go the Friday before the fire?”
I stared at him a little blankly. “Go? I don’t remember going anywhere—No, wait a minute. I did, too. I don’t remember whether it was Friday or not, but about a week before the fire I went down to Houston.”
“That’s more like it. And what’d you go down there for? Not to buy a clock, by any chance?”
“No. I went down there to try to collect some money a man owed me.”
“What man?”
“His name’s Kelvey. Tom Kelvey.” I was in the clear on that. Kelvey’d owed me two hundred dollars for over a year.
“What’s his address?”
I told him.
“And you saw him? And got the money?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t see him.”
“Well, that’s too bad. You drove all the way down there to put the bite on him and then you didn’t even see him. I’ll bet he was out of town, wasn’t he? Funny how those things happen.”
I could see that one coming. They’d probably check Kelvey, so I had to do better than that. “No,” I said. “I don’t know whether he was home or not. I didn’t even look him up.”
“I see. You suddenly decided you didn’t want the money after all.”
“No. I got side-tracked.”
“By what?”
“I ran into an old girl friend.”
“And that was more important?”
“Well,” I said, “you know how it is. It’s always more important than anything, at the time.”
“All right. Who was the girl?”
“End of the line,” I said. “She’s an old girl friend, like I said. But she’s also married.”
“Then you did go down there to buy a clock.”
“Think anything you want. I’ve told you how it happened.”
“But you won’t say who the girl was?”
“Of course not. You think I want her to get in trouble?”
“Well, you’ve got yourself in trouble.”
“I don’t think so. You say you think I robbed a bank. That’s not trouble, unless I’d actually done it. What’d you do, pick my name out of a hat?”
“No. This is Monday morning, and six of us have been working on this since Friday evening. It doesn’t take that long to pull a name out of a hat. Madox, you might as well face it. You stick out in this thing like a cootch dancer at a funeral.”
“Why?” I asked. I wiped the sweat off my face. “For God’s sake, why? Because I was there in town?”
“I’m coming to that. Why were you?”
“I told you. I work there. I sell cars.”
“I know. And in less than three weeks after you show up, the bank is robbed. Where’d you work last?”
“In Houston.”
“So you leave a city the size of Houston and just happen to wind up in a one-horse burg of less than three thousand. To sell cars, you say. Why?”
“Cars are sold everywhere.”
“Did somebody recommend the place? Did Harshaw advertise for a salesman in the Houston papers?”
“No,” I said. “I—“
“I see. Just a coincidence.”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you. After I quit my job in Houston, I decided I’d go to Oklahoma City. I stopped in Lander to get some lunch, and while I was eating Harshaw came in for coffee. We got to talking about something that was in the paper there on the counter, and struck up kind of a general conversation. When he found out I was a salesman, he offered me a job. You can ask him about it if you don’t believe me.”