She nodded. “To the sheriff. Jimmy Tait. He’s an old friend.”
“Good. Now then, by the time he gets around to questioning you, I’ll be well on my way to Chicago with the kids. You don’t know where Susan phoned you from. Suddenly you will remember running into Mrs. Farley a month ago. Think of a logical place. She was tight. She seemed very upset. She talked strangely. It didn’t make any sense to you. Something about the Outfit, and something about her husband thinking she was going to fink out, and something about pushers.”
Solemn as a library child she said, “Outfit. Fink out. Pushers.”
“And then she said something about old farms having their own graveyards and laughed in a crazy way.”
“But why do you want me to say all that?”
“Mrs. Shottlehauster. Mildred. If you were trained in this work you could go ahead without question. But I am going to take the chance of telling you what we think. Believe me, it will cause me serious trouble if you tell anyone this. Your husband, anyone at all. We believe Farley is a known criminal. We have no LD. yet. Last Sunday Farley made advances to Susan.”
“His own daughter!” Scandal made her eyes sparkle.
“Only the smallest one is his.”
“Tommy?”
“Yes. When she resisted him, he beat her badly. She didn’t let the other kids see her condition. She took a bus to Chicago Monday evening. She came to us and told us she believed Farley had killed her stepmother three weeks ago and buried her somewhere on the farm. She said Farley was hiding out there, and she had no idea why. I was sent to look things over. You know the rest.”
“It’s so terrible. Those nice kids!”
I looked at her with a firm official frown. “When you know things other people don’t, Mildred, it’s a terrible temptation to tell so that you can feel important. I trust you to resist that impulse. Your only reward will be the knowledge you lived up to your obligation as a good citizen. That will be in our files, but we can’t thank you in any public way.”
“Pusher means about drugs, doesn’t it?”
“Please don’t ask me any more questions because I’ve already told you more than I’m authorized to tell.”
She glowed with her new responsibility. Her little jaw firmed up with resolve. She would hug her secret closely, cherishing the knowledge she was in our files. In my flush of success with her, I had the eerie temptation to tell her I was the man from A.U.N.T. Association Uncovering the Narcotics Traffic. But there is a limit to what you can make them buy.
She jumped to her feet. “I’ll phone the school and then I’ll pack their things, sir.”
“Forgive me for lying to you the last time I was here?”
“Oh yes! You’ve got a job to do.”
TWELVE
FIVE DAYS later, on Monday morning a little after ten, I sat in John Andrus’ office at the bank. A quiet paneled room. We were alone. The door was closed. He had told his girl to hold his calls. He was troubled. He frowned, sighed, shook his head.
“It’s a very awkward situation,” he said for the third time.
“It doesn’t have to be. Just keep it clear in your mind what we keep on the record and what we keep off the record.”
“As a trust officer I have certain…”
“I know, John. Fiduciary responsibilities. I gave you every last dollar I chipped out of that damned car.
“One hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars. How am I supposed to account for it? How did I get it? Where’s the other four hundred and twenty thousand?”
“You worry too much. Let’s take it one at a time. I told you Janice Stanyard will lie beautifully if she has to. Geis gave her a package to hold for him. She forgot about it. She found it the other day on her closet shelf, opened it, found all the money, contacted Heidi at once, and Heidi said to bring it to you.”
‘Fine,“ he said wearily. ”Wonderful.“
“And when the estate is appraised next October, if the tax boys get sticky about it, you call that number I gave you, and you will get three characters who’ll swear that for over a year the Doctor was going over to Gary once or twice a month and playing high-stakes poker in a fast game and losing very very heavily. That is, if we don’t turn up the rest of the money somehow in the meantime. Which doesn’t look likely. Those three will give you an expert performance, and nobody will break them down.”
Staring at me he shook his head in mild wonder. “Where did you develop contacts like that, damn it? How can you so blandly and so confidently come up with people perfectly willing to perjure themselves about something that doesn’t concern them at all?”
“I did a favor for a local operator once. He’s the type who stays grateful. Maybe local is the wrong word. This is home base. He operates in a lot of areas. John, if nobody comes up with any more of Fort’s money, how does the estate thing stand?”
He hesitated and then said, “Rough estimate. Seventy-five for Gloria and half that for each kid, Heidi and Roger.”
“Nice if I could have picked up the whole thing out there. Or if they had found anything when they took the place apart, inch by inch. Of course it would have been a rough go proving it was Fort’s money if they’d found the rest of it, but you could have swung it.”
“Vote of confidence. Hahl”
“John, there’s just too many possibilities. He took a lot of little trips. So he was stashing it elsewhere. Or whoever came after him, maybe because he talked just a little bit too much about making a nice score, found everything except what I found. I think it’s over. They identified him as Saul Gorba. They know he had an aneurysm that blew under the high blood. pressure pain gives you. They assume that whoever worked on him left with what they’d come for. It is obvious Gorba was hiding out. And it is a safe assumption he strangled Gretchen and buried her five feet under, suitcase and all. And they know the kids don’t know anything about anything. Murder first, felony murder, by person or persons unknown. We got a little back. We pick up the pieces, the world goes on.”
“Wonder why he killed Gretchen?”
“Maybe because she kept wondering where the money was coming from, and even though she wasn’t too bright, she had been given enough twos to add to twos over a long time, and when the answer began to show, she didn’t like it. She was an amiable earthy slob, but she wasn’t crooked. And putting leverage on a dying man is pretty ugly. Or maybe he just decided the daughter looked a lot better. We’ll never know”
“One comment, Trav. It really surprised me to have Heidi pick up the tab for that double funeral.” And one of the eeriest ones I had attended. Saturday afternoon. Two boxes. One floral piece on each one. Select little group. The five towheads. Gretch must have had muscular genes. The kids all looked alike. Fair, blue-eyed, round-faced, sturdy. Seeing them together it was an astonishment that Susan had been able to sustain her personal myth of a different parentage. In dark glasses, dark hat and veil, Susan’s damages were obscured. So it was the kids and Janice and Heidi and John Andrus and Anna Ottlo and me, and a sonorous voice reading a standard service, and a tired woman diddling with the keys on a small electric organ. Anna whuffawed and snuffled and grunted her anguish. Some tears were shed for Saul Gorba, the tears of Tommy, his natural child. Most of his were for Gretchen, but he had some for Saul. There had been a relationship between them not shared by the others.