The floor! Rusty sent the beam downward. It was concrete, of course. And underneath…?
“Damn it!” he said. “They must have been here.”
They had — because the once-solid concrete floor was rubble. The pick-axes of the sheriff’s men had done a thorough job. “I told you,” Helen Krauss sighed. “They looked everywhere.”
Rusty swept the room with light. There was no boat, nothing stored in corners. The beam bounced oft bare walls.
He raised it to the flat roof of the ceiling and caught only the reflection of mica from tar-paper insulation.
“It’s no use,” Helen told him. “It couldn’t be this easy.”
“There’s still the house,” Rusty said. “Come on.”
He turned and walked out of the place, glad to get away from the rank, fetid animal odor. He turned the flashlight toward the roof.
Then he stopped. “Notice anything?” he said.
“What?”
“The roof. It’s higher than the ceiling.”
“So what?”
“There could be space up there,” Rusty said.
“Yes, but…”
“Listen.”
She was silent — both of them were silent. In the silence, they could hear the emerging sound. It sounded at first like the patter of rain on the roof, but it wasn’t raining, and it wasn’t coming from the roof. It was coming from directly underneath — the sound of tiny, scurrying feet between roof and ceiling. The rats were there. The rats and what else?
“Come on,” he muttered.
“Where are you going?”
“Up to the house — to find a ladder.”
He didn’t have to break in, and that was fine. There was a ladder in the shed, and he carried it back. Helen discovered a crowbar. She held the flashlight while he propped the ladder against the wall and climbed up. The crowbar pried off the tar-paper in strips. It came away easily, ripping out from the few nails. Apparently the stuff had been applied in a hurry. A man with only a few hours to work in has to do a fast job.
Underneath the tar-paper, Rusty found timbers. Now the crowbar really came in handy. The boards groaned in anguish, and there were other squeaking sounds as the rats fled down into the cracks along the side walls. Rusty was glad they fled, otherwise he’d never have had the guts to crawl up there through the opening in the boards and look around. Helen handed him the flashlight, and he used it.
He didn’t have to look very far.
The black metal box was sitting there right in front of him. Beyond it lay the thing.
Rusty knew it was Pete Taylor, because it had to be, but there was no way of identification. There wasn’t a shred of clothing left, or a shred of flesh, either. The rats had picked him clean, picked him down to the bones. All that was left was a skeleton — a skeleton and a black metal box.
Rusty clawed the box closer, opened it. He saw the bills, bulging in stacks. He smelled the money, smelled it even above the sickening fetor. It smelled good, it smelled of perfume and tenderloin steak and the leathery seat-cover aroma of a shiny new car.
“Find anything?” Helen called. Her voice was trembling.
“Yes,” he answered, and his voice was trembling just a little too. “I’ve got it. Hold the ladder, I’m coming down now.”
He was coming down now, and that meant it was time — time to act. He handed her the crowbar and the flashlight, but kept his fingers on the side of the black metal box. He wanted to carry that himself. Then, when he put it down on the floor, and she bent over to look at it, he could pick up a piece of concrete rubble and let her have it.
It was going to be easy. He had everything figured out in advance — everything except the part about handing her the crowbar.
That’s what she used to hit him with when he got to the bottom of the ladder…
He must have been out for ten minutes, at least. Anyway, it was long enough for her to find the rope somewhere. Maybe she had kept it in the car. Wherever she got it, she knew how to use it. His wrists and ankles hurt almost as much as the back of his head, where the blood was starting to congeal.
He opened his mouth and discovered that it did no good. She had gagged him tightly with a handkerchief. All he could do was lie there in the rubble on the boathouse floor and watch her pick up the black metal box.
She opened it and laughed.
The flashlight was lying on the floor. In its beam, he could see her face quite plainly. She had taken off her glasses, and he discovered the lenses lying shattered on the floor.
Helen Krauss saw what he was staring at and laughed again.
“I don’t need those things any more,” she told him. “I never did. It was all part of the act, like letting my hair go black and putting on all this weight. For two years now, I’ve put on this dumb slob routine, just so nobody’d notice me. When I leave town, nobody’s going to pay any attention either. Sometimes it’s smart to play dumb, you know?”
Rusty made noises underneath the gag. She thought that was funny, too.
“I suppose you’re finally beginning to figure it out,” she said. “Mike never meant to pull off any payroll job. Pete Taylor and I had been cheating on him for six months, and he had just begun to suspect. I don’t know who told him, or what they said.
“He never said anything to me about it beforehand — just went downtown with his gun to find Pete and kill him. Maybe he meant to kill me too. He never even thought about the money at the time. All he knew was that it would be easy to pick Pete up on payroll day.
“I guess he knocked Pete out and drove him down here, and Pete came to before he died and kept saying he was innocent. At least, Mike told me that much when he came back.
“I never got a chance to ask where he’d taken Pete or what he’d done with the money. The first thing I did, when Mike came home and said what he’d done, was to cover up for myself. I swore it was all a pack of lies, that Pete and I hadn’t done anything wrong. I told him we’d take the money and go away together. I was still selling him on that when the cops came.
“I guess he believed me — because he never cracked during the trial. But I didn’t get a chance again to ask where he hid the dough. He couldn’t write me from prison, because they censor all the mail. So my only out was to wait — wait until he came back, or someone else came. And that’s how it worked out.”
Rusty tried to say something, but the gag was too tight.
“Why did I conk you one? For the same reason you were going to conk me. Don’t try to deny it — that’s what you intended to do, wasn’t it? I know the way creeps like you think.” Her voice was soft.
She smiled down at him. “I know how you get to thinking when you’re a prisoner — because I’ve been a prisoner myself, for two years — a prisoner in this big body of mine. I’ve sweated it out for that money, and now I’m leaving. I’m leaving here, leaving the dumb waitress prison I made for myself. I’m going to shed forty pounds and bleach my hair again and go back to being the old Helen Krauss — with fifty-six grand to live it up with.”
Rusty tried just once more. All that came out was a gurgle. “Don’t worry,” she said, “they won’t find me. And they won’t find you for a long, long time. I’m putting that lock back on the door when I go. Besides, there’s nothing to tie the two of us together. It’s clean as a whistle.”
She turned, and then Rusty stopped gurgling. He hunched forward and kicked out with his bound feet. They caught her right across the back of the knees, and she went down. Rusty rolled across the rubble and raised his feet from the ground, like a flail. They came down on her stomach, and she let out a gasp.