“Sure.”
“You won’t leave?”
He said, “Where’s my pants?”
“Over there on the chair.”
“Turn the pockets inside out, take all the dough out, then I won’t leave.”
I said, “You gave me the change — what was left of it.”
He heaved a sigh. “Okay then, that’s fine. Go ahead.” He punched the pillows back into shape behind his head, said, “Gimme a cigarette, buddy, and I’ll be all right as soon as that water quits sloshin’ around in my stomach.”
I gave him a cigarette, and walked out to the highway. I hadn’t gone over half a mile when a car stopped and gave me a ride to town.
A newsstand featured papers from all the principal cities. I found a Las Vegas paper. The police made much over the disappearance of Helen Framley. They had finally traced her to an apartment where she had been in hiding since the night of the murder. She had disappeared, and police, checking up on the activities of one Donald Lam, a private investigator who had been employed on another angle of the case, were convinced that she, an ex-prize fighter by the name of Hazen, and Lam had all left town together. The police were inclined to believe that Helen Framley had either been implicated in the murder or had highly significant information, and that the private detective, seeking to steal a march on police, was offering her a chance to escape in return for such information as she could give. There was a strong intimation that the officials would consider this a serious matter, and that Lam might well find himself prosecuted for compounding a felony. Hazen, it seemed, was also implicated. He’d positively identified the body as that of a former pugilist named Sidney Jannix.
Evidently, the police hadn’t as yet linked me with the purchase of the secondhand automobile.
I rang up a few more places, handed them my regular line, cut out the article from the Las Vegas paper, left the rest of the newspaper in a telephone booth, and started back for the cabin.
I had to walk nearly a mile before I caught a ride.
Helen returned about an hour after I got back. Louie got the dinner, washed and wiped the dishes. The three of us went to a movie, and then went to bed.
Louie Hazen was pulling me out of bed before I hardly realized I’d been asleep. The air was filled with cold dawn.
“Come on,” he said. “Get this road work in while it’s cool. I don’t want you to sweat.”
I sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbed my eyes. “It’s not cool, it’s cold,” I protested.
“You’ll be all right when you get out.”
He slipped a hand under my arm, lifted me to my feet. My legs all but buckled, the muscles were so sore.
“Gosh, Louie, I can’t take it this morning. I’ll have to rest.”
“Come on,” he said, and started pushing me around.
“Oh, forget it, Louie. I’m not training for any fight or anything. After all, we can—”
He opened the window, pulled off the screen, dropped it to the ground, tossed out my running-shoes, pants, and light sweater, and then, before I realized what he was intending to do, picked me up as though I had weighed precisely nothing, and tossed me out after them. Then he closed and locked the window.
The door was locked. It was cold out there on the ground. I picked up my clothes and moved around to the side of the house away from the highway, dressed in shivering silence, took a deep breath, and started jog trotting after Louie along the road. Every step was agony.
Louie kept watching me over his shoulder, looking at the expression on my face, the way I was moving my legs. He seemed to know exactly when the soreness began to leave me, and then again knew exactly when the breathlessness became acute.
We walked all the way back, taking deep breaths. I suddenly picked up Louie’s trick of breathing with my diaphragm, sucking air way down, squeezing out every last bit of it before taking another deep breath.
Louie, watching me, nodded approvingly.
We went back to the house and put on the stiff set of fighting-gloves. Louie said, “I’m going to train you to throw a hard punch this morning. Now swing one right at this glove. Put everything you’ve got right behind it. No, no, no. Don’t draw back.”
It seemed interminable hours that we worked out there in the sunlight, and then Louie had me under the shower, was kneading and pounding my muscles again, and by the time I was up and dressed, Helen Framley had the kitchen full of the fragrance of steaming coffee.
Later that morning I got a lead.
A retail-credit association member had delivered groceries to a Mrs. Sidney Jannix in an apartment on California Street.
I went out to the place, parked the jalopy, climbed stairs, and pressed a buzzer.
The woman who opened the door was Corla Burke.
“May I come in?” I asked.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Helen Framley.”
She frowned at me. For a moment, there was quick alarm in her eyes. “How did you find me?”
“That,” I said, “is something of a story. Do I tell it out here, or inside?”
“Inside,” she said, and held the door open so I could come in.
I sat down by the window. Corla Burke, seated across from me where the light etched expression on her face, played into my hands by opening the conversation. “I, simply couldn’t have taken advantage of Miss Framley’s offer,” she said. “I wrote and told her so.”
I adopted an attitude of being somewhat aggrieved.
“I don’t see why.”
“It wouldn’t have been fair.”
“I think it would have been a lot better than what you did do.”
I could see that shot struck home. She said, “I didn’t know, of course, what— Well, I couldn’t, look into the future myself,” and she laughed nervously.
“Miss Framley felt she tried to do the square thing by you and that you hadn’t been — well, suppose we say appreciative.”
“I’m sorry. How did you happen to come here?”
“Why, this was the logical place to look for you.”
“Why did you want to find me?”
“I thought perhaps something could be done to straighten things out.”
“No, not now.”
“I still think so.”
“I’m afraid you’re overly optimistic. Please thank Miss Framley for me and tell her that I certainly don’t want her to think I was ungrateful, and I guess — well, I guess that’s about all there is to tell her.”
I glanced around, saw that a suitcase was open, that folded garments were placed on a table and on two of the chairs. On a small table in the corner by the window was a woman’s hat, gloves, and purse. A stamped envelope lay on the corner of this table.
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Certainly not. I’ll have one—”
I gave her a cigarette, held a match, managed to move so that I was at the edge of the table as I reached for an ash tray, and then grabbed for the letter.
She saw what was happening and flung herself at the table. I got my hands on the letter first. She clawed at it. I said, “If it isn’t postmarked Las Vegas I’m not interested. If it is, I’m going to read it.”
She redoubled her efforts, grabbed at my arm. I pushed her away. I managed to avoid her, pulled the sheet of paper out from the envelope.
It was a hasty scrawl and read:
Donald Lam a private detective is on the job. -He’s contacted Helen Framley. Helen’s boy friend, man by the name of Beegan, was murdered last night. You aren’t safe in Reno. Hunt a deep hole somewhere else.
The letter was signed simply with the initials “A. W.”
I said, “Let’s be frank with each other and save time. I’m Lam. Arthur Whitewell hired me to find you — and saw that Philip knew all about it, of course. Now suppose you tell me your story.”