Gorba had the brains and I had the luck. I worked as hard and fast as I could, dug out eleven packets, couldn’t find another place on the body that went tunk instead of pang. I’d had the luck to watch the process one day while roaming around a repair garage, and then to tell the manager what a cheap-ass system it was. He had the kindliness and patience to tell me some of the facts of life. Costs were going up so fast anything more than a gentle nudge would total a car. So be glad there was a new system that would keep the insurance cost from going out of sight a little while longer. If I wanted to complain about something, he said, I should complain about the shyster operators who’d buy one for dimes that had been in a head-on, then scour around for the same year and model that had been crunched hard enough in the rear end to be a total, saw both in half, weld the two good halves together, repaint and sell it a long way from home plate. The plastic just didn’t fit the personality of a painstaking man very good with his hands.
I whacked the crumbs of hardened goo off the packets, stowed them in my pockets, ran to the car, carved the mud off my shoes with a sodden piece of wood, and made as good time as I dared driving over to Peru, a small city of about 9000. I put the car in a big gas station in town, told the man to fill it and see if he could hose the worst of the mud off. I bought myself a pair of shoes and, in the dime store, some wrapping paper, twine, tape, and mailing labels. I parked on a quiet street, put on the new shoes, dropped the muddy ones onto the floor in back, packed the money and the gun into the shoe box, wrapped it neatly and solidly, filled out the label, drove to the post office, and mailed it to myself at the Drake. Parcel post. Fifty dollars’ insurance. Special handling.
I was hurrying through the things I knew I ought to do because I couldn’t find any good handle on the main problem.
The main problem was all too vivid. Country areas have their own kind of radar, and it is as old as man, old as the first villages after he got tired of being a roaming hunter and sleeping in a different tree every night. Once Gorba’s mistreated corpse was found, Mildred Shottlehauster would leap into the act, grabbing her little moment of importance, and she would call the sheriff, maybe calling him Ted or Al or Freddy or Hank darling, and tell him about this great tall suntanned pale-eyed fellow driving a such and such, calling himself McGee and talking about a credit investigation and finding out there was nobody at the farm, but maybe he went up there and somebody was there, huh? And when this got around, Brawn-Baby, the gauntleted girl bus driver with the shoulders, would connect and come up with something else, and the ripples in that little pond would finally lap at the doorstep of my Georgian motel where Hank darling would get the license number off the registration.
There was some merit in stopping it dead right at the source, right in Milly’s kitchen before she started to make waves. I could hustle back there and make it before lunch, and play it cool, and tell her she’d been so helpful I thought I’d tell her I’d had to turn down the Farley family, and even though she had very probably been slowly turned off by the passage of time, with just a little firmness and insistence she would come back with a rush, and I could finish what Bread Boy had left undone, and later save her face with some sincere and solemn hoke about a sudden attraction so strong we really couldn’t help ourselves. And then when she all of a sudden had an overwhelming urge to call Sheriff Darling Dear, doubtless a political buddy of her husband,, she would yank her little competent hands back from that phone as if verily it were a snake. They could bring McGee back and he could answer the right question in the wrong way, and the earth would open and the Shottlehausters’ farm and hopes would slide slowly in.
Could do. Even had she known Bread Boy for years, the very basic rationalization was the same, the first hurdle overcome.
Listen, guys, let me tell you about the time I was up in Illinois and there was this little farm wife, six kids, and I’m telling you, I set her onto a counter top and she was as hot as a…
Not today, fellows. Not to save the McGee skin. Had I taken the opening being so tentatively and warily offered when I had been with her before, it would have left a tired taste in the mouth and bad air in the lungs and a sorry little picture in the back of the mind. But this was too cold-blooded to be even thinkable.
So, okay, stop off and see Mildred and tell her that I’d gone to the farm and Farley was dead in a very ugly way, and I didn’t want to be brought into it, and if I was I’d have to account for all my, time in the area, and I’d spent some of that time looking in her kitchen window and reading the legends and persuasions on the Darling truck. Sure. Rub her nose in it. Grind her right into the dirt: She who play kitchen game pay big price sooner or later, hey?
Think a little, you big stupid beach bum!
I finally got the rusty gears working upstairs, popped thumb and finger, and hightailed it for the Shottlehauster farm, rehearsing my end of the dialogue en route.
She was surprised to see me. I exuded total con fidence. Something had come up. I needed her help. I’d lied about the credit investigation. Sorry.
Have to do that kind of thing sometimes. Line of duty. I sidestepped her questions, borrowed her phone, and made a collect call to Heidi and, with Mildred at my elbow, I asked Heidi to put Susan on.
“Susan? McGee here. The kids have been staying with the Shottlehauster family since Monday evening. They’re okay, and they’re in school right now. But I think I’d better bring them back to Chicago. I just stopped at the farm. He’s there all right. And somebody has killed him. Very unpleasantly.”
At my elbow I heard Mildred give a gassy squeak. “Susan?” I said. “Are you all right?”
“I… I’m trying to be sorry about him. But I can’t.”
“Now would you do me a favor? Please talk to Mrs. Shottlehauster and ask her to help me get the kids out of the school here. This can be a very ugly thing and they ought to be well out of range. Don’t tell her anything about me except she can trust me. Okay?”
I handed Mildred the phone. She stammered and said, “It’s a t-terrible thing, dear. I’m so sorry.” She listened for a little while and then she said, “Of course, Susan dear. You can depend on me. I’ll pack their things and Mr. McGee can bring them along.”
After she hung up I ordered her to sit down in her own living room. She was big-eyed and solemn. She said she knew who to call in the school system. She said she was a past president of the PTA.
“Here is what I want you to do. I know you have no training in this sort of thing, but you seem very understanding and intelligent. Here is your story. Susan called you from Chicago. She said a friend would stop by about noon to pick up the things her brothers and sister brought over here, and then go to the school and get them, and would you please arrange it, tell the school it is an emergency. Then she began to cry. You thought Mrs. Farley might be very ill. Mr. Farley had told you both of them were in Chicago. So you asked about Mrs. Farley. Susan then told you that her mother has been missing for three weeks and she thinks something terrible happened to her. So you did as the girl asked. A man came by and picked up the children’s things. Just a man. He didn’t give a name. But you knew he was all right because of having talked to Susan. Now, do you have a car here that you can use to get up that muddy road at the farm?”
“Harry’s old Land Rover will go through anything.”
“Do you mind seeing something pretty horrible?”
“I’m not a sissy, Mr. McGee.”
“Back to your story. You will go to the farm because you thought Farley acted peculiarly Monday night. You wonder if he is there or Mrs. Farley is there. And you are a little uneasy about having made the arrangements on the word of a seventeen-yearold girl without consulting the parents. You’ll find him in the first shed beyond the foundations where the barn was. I think he’s been dead since sometime yesterday, but that’s just a guess. You will notice that the whole place is ransacked. So you will go to a phone and report it.”