She was right, I realized on reflection. We should have signed in somewhere before I changed the plates, as I didn’t want the Missouri plates which were now on the Dodge listed even on a tourist court’s records. Disconsolately I considered the prospect of having to change the plates back again, then decided it wasn’t necessary. There wasn’t much danger in letting some tourist court proprietor see the damaged Buick so long as it didn’t have its own plates on it.
“You win,” I said. “Follow me again.”
Helena shook her head again. “You follow me this time. I saw just the court I want when we came in on 66. Maybe you’re smart on some things, but I prefer to trust my own judgment on a place to sleep.”
Shrugging, I climbed back in the Dodge and waited for her to start the procession.
Helena drove nearly ten miles out of town on 66, passing a half dozen motels which looked adequate to me before pulling off to the side of the road suddenly and parking. I parked behind her.
“Lock it up,” she called back to me.
Winding the windows shut, I got out and locked the Dodge. When I slid into the Buick next to her, she pointed through the windshield toward a large tourist court about a hundred yards ahead on the opposite side of the road.
“That’s the one. Isn’t it nice?”
It didn’t look any different to me than the half dozen others we’d passed, except that this one had open front stalls for automobiles.
“It’s lovely,” I growled. “Let’s get it over with.”
9
The place was called the Starview Motor Court and advertised hot baths and steam heat. Since the temperature hovered around eighty, neither seemed like much of an inducement to me.
Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution, I had Helena swing the car so that the left side was toward the office. With dozens of different automobiles driving in and out of the court daily, it wasn’t likely the proprietor would notice our green Buick convertible had changed to a green Dodge coupe a few hours after we checked in, but there wasn’t any point in deliberately calling attention to our smashed fender. Just possibly it would catch his notice enough to make it register on him.
The proprietor was a sad-faced man in his fifties who had an equally sad-faced wife. They occupied quarters behind the small office. For some reason both of them went along to show us cabins.
They were nice modern cabins, clean and airy and walled with knotty pine. The baths were large instead of the usual tiny affairs you find at most tourist courts, and contained combination bathtubs and showers.
“We’ll take two,” I told the proprietor. “We’ll be here a week, so I’ll pay the full week now. How much?”
He said the normal rate was nine dollars a day, but as a weekly rate we could have them for fifty-six dollars each. “With another fifty cent a day knocked off if you do your own cleaning instead of having maid service,” he added.
Helena surprised me by saying she preferred to do the cleaning herself, which caused the proprietor’s wife to give her a pleased smile. Apparently the wife constituted the maid service.
Helena stayed outside when I went back to the office to register. I signed as Howard Bliss and sister, Benton, Illinois, and listed the Illinois license number registered to the Dodge. Then I paid him a hundred and five dollars.
Our cabins were numbers six and seven. When I got outside again, I discovered Helena had backed the Buick into the car port between them while I was registering.
“You could have left it in front of the cabins,” I said to her. “We aren’t going to be here long.”
“We’ll be here at least a half hour. I told you I’m going to take a bath.”
“Several times,” I said wearily. “Which cabin do you want?”
She looked at both speculatively. The one on the right went with the car port we were using, because a door near the rear wall of the port led into the cabin.
Helena said, “I’ll take the right one.”
Getting her bag from the car, I carried it into the right-hand cabin via the car port door and set it on her bed. Then I got my own bag from the car and went into my own cabin.
Inasmuch as I was going to have to kill a half hour anyway, I decided to take a cold shower myself. I took my time under the water, letting its coldness knock the tiredness out of my muscles and wash some of the sleepiness from my eyes. Twenty-five minutes later, refreshed and in clean clothes, I knocked at the next cabin door.
“Just a minute,” Helena called. “I’m still dressing.”
It was closer to ten minutes before she appeared, and meantime I stood out in the sun letting the heat wilt my collar and undo all the good a cold shower had done me. When she finally appeared she was dressed in a white sun dress, low-heeled sandals which exposed bare, red-tipped toes, and no hat. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail.
Carefully she locked her cabin door behind her and dropped the key in a straw purse.
This time I drove the Buick. When we pulled up alongside the parked Dodge, I handed her the keys to it.
“Instead of following you, suppose we arrange to meet somewhere?” Helena suggested. “I’d like to do a little shopping.”
“You know Chicago?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Then we’ll make it somewhere simple.” I looked at my watch, noting it was nearly ten A.M. “The Statler Cocktail Lounge at two P.M.?”
“All right.”
“Be careful you don’t get picked up for anything,” I cautioned. “Even a parking ticket would put us in the soup with that Missouri plate on the Dodge.”
“I’ll be careful.”
I drove off while she was unlocking the coupe door.
I didn’t have any trouble arranging for the car to be fixed. I stopped at the first Buick service garage I saw.
The chief repairman, a cheerful middle-aged man, carefully looked over the damage. “What’s the other guy look like?” he asked.
“There wasn’t any other guy,” I told him. “My wife mistook a tree next to our drive for the garage.”
He told me he could do the whole job, including a check of wheel alignment, in three days for approximately a hundred dollars.
“That’s a rough estimate, you understand,” he said. “May vary a few bucks one way or the other.”
I gave him the name George Seward and a South Chicago address a couple of miles from the repair garage. When he asked for my phone number, I said I didn’t have a phone and just to hold the car when it was finished until I picked it up.
My business was all completed by noon and suddenly I was exhausted from lack of sleep and the strain of driving three hundred miles at night. I began to wish I had arranged to meet Helena at twelve-thirty instead of at two.
There was nothing to do but kill two hours, however. I took a taxi to the Statler, had lunch and then slowly sipped four highballs in the cocktail lounge while I waited for her. She showed up at ten after two.
“Want a drink?” I asked. “Or shall we go back to the court and collapse? I’m ready to fall on my face.”
She looked me over consideringly. “You do look tired,” she said. “We’ll pick up a couple of bottles of bourbon and some soda on the way and I’ll have my drink at the court. Maybe we can get some ice from the proprietor.”
My four drinks had relaxed me just enough so that I had difficulty keeping my eyes open. I let Helena drive.
I was just beginning to drift off to sleep sitting up when the car braked to a stop, then backed into a parking place at the curb. I opened my eyes to see we were in front of a liquor store.
Reluctantly I climbed out of the car. “You say bourbon?” I asked Helena.
When she merely nodded, I went on into the store. I bought two quarts of bourbon and a six-bottle carry-pack of soda.