One, and the one I liked the best, I almost missed, because it wasn’t reported until nearly midnight. The people had gone to a movie eight blocks from where we had Torran bottled up. Their car, a black Pontiac sedan, 1947 model, had been left in the parking lot near the theater. They’d gone into the theater at twenty after eight. That made sense. Torran was smart enough to pick a car that had just been parked, and he’d have had time to get there and watch the lot entrance. He wouldn’t want a flashy car.
There was a blue check after the entry. I looked it up in the recovery register. Recovered in Beloit, Wisconsin, on Friday – reported to the Chicago police at one in the afternoon. They had informed the owner and he had said he’d go up and get it Saturday.
None of the others looked as promising.
Friday noon I was in Beloit. When I made inquiries about the car, the local cops gave me a bored look and said that it had already been checked by the Bureau.
After I smiled enough, they let me know the facts. It was on the main drag in a meter zone. It had been tagged for all night parking, then tagged again for overtime in a meter Friday morning. Then they checked against stolen car numbers and towed it in and told Chicago. The answer to my big question was disappointing. Were there any cars stolen from here Thursday night – any time between ten and two? Sorry, no. No missing persons – with car and all? Nope.
A sour lead, and I couldn’t tell if I was right. I went back to Chicago and checked out of my room. I waited until night before leaving. Then I left from the parking lot street at eight-thirty. I was Torran, wearing women’s clothes. My feet hurt. I was in a stolen car. I wanted to shed the clothes.
I took Route 20 out through Elgin. I stayed well within the speed limits, as no doubt Torran had done. I pretended it was raining. I looked for a chance to change my clothes. I’d need some sort of shelter from the rain, or else have to do it in the car. The longer I kept my own clothes wrapped around me, the more wrinkled and conspicuous they’d get. The ideal spot would be one where I could change and also ditch the women’s clothes.
That’s a tough assignment on a rainy night in a heavily populated section. I didn’t have much hope of it working out. He could have pulled off in any number of places after leaving Starks. At Rockford I turned right on Route 51. I crossed from South Beloit over into Beloit and parked as near as I could to where the car had been found. It was twenty-five after ten. Allow Torran ten minutes to change and he would have gotten in just before quarter to eleven at the latest.
I lit a cigarette and sat in the car for a few minutes trying to think. I went for a walk. Three blocks away was a bus station. Every night a southbound bus left for Rockford, La Salle, Bloomington, Decatur and Vandalia at eleven-fifteen. I liked that one. The hunted animal doubles back on its tracks.
I found the driver having coffee. I asked him if he’d taken the bus on that run the previous Thursday week. He took a tattered mimeographed schedule out of his inside pocket, studied it and said that he had. I asked him if he remembered any specific people on that trip and he gave me a look of complete disgust. “I drive one hell of a lot of buses,” he said. I showed him the picture of Torran. It rang no bell.
He warmed up a bit for a five-dollar tip. I sat beside him with my coffee. “Now think back. Did anything happen that was unusual that night? It was raining. Remember? Anything at all that might have puzzled you?”
He started to shake his head slowly and then stopped shaking it. He looked into space for a moment. “Now wait a minute. I don’t know if this is anything or not. I make my Bloomington stop. Below there, some place just outside Heyworth, a car goes by me doing maybe ninety. Up ahead it slows down to a creep and I got to pass it. Zoom, it goes by me again. Looks like a girl driving. She slows up again and I got to pass her. Then she scoots by again and I don’t ever catch up to her again. The third time she goes by she leans on the horn like she was saying hello to somebody. You know – shave and a haircut, two bits.”
“Could she have been looking for somebody on the bus?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Anybody get off at Decatur?”
“Three or four, I think.”
“Nothing funny about them, about any one of them?”
“Now, you know, I just remembered. One of them had a ticket to Vandalia, but she got off at Decatur.”
“She?”
“Yeah. Big heavy woman with no baggage.”
“And a big hat?”
“Damn if that isn’t right! One hell of a big hat!”
I added another five to what he already had. I thanked him and went to the ticket office and got a timetable of that late run. It’s roughly a hundred and forty miles from Beloit due south to Bloomington. Even with two stops the bus made it in under three hours, getting to Bloomington at ten after two in the morning.
I was in Bloomington at ten minutes of two. A bored man with gray pouches under his eyes lounged behind the ticket grille.
“Were you on a week ago Thursday at this time?”
He yawned. “I’m on every night, friend. In the daytime I try to sleep. The neighborhood is full of kids. I’m learning to hate children.”
“Would you remember if someone, it might have been a girl, just missed the southbound bus from Beloit to Vandalia?”
“If you’d come around a year from now, friend, I’d still remember the lady. You don’t see much of that material in bus stations. She came plunging in here five minutes after number seventy had pulled out.”
“Nice?”
“About five eight. She stood right where you’re standing. Hair like harvest wheat – with rain beads caught in it. Moon-pool eyes, pal, and a funny, tough, scratchy little voice, like a tired phonograph needle. She asked me if the bus had left and I said yes and away she went. It was like she pulled me along on a string. I went right to the door. She got into a big gray sedan and went away from here so fast that the tires yelped.”
“What make?”
“Oh, the car? Who knows? Big and new. Cad, Buick, Packard. Take any car. Say, that’s pretty good! Take any car.”
“A dark-eyed blonde. Hair cut short?”
“Nope. Nice and long. The kind to run barefoot through.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-two, three, four.”
“Clothes?”
“Brother, I was too busy taking them off to take a look at them. Something green, I think. But it could have been blue.”
At Decatur I found that I was too close to falling asleep at the wheel, so I checked in at a hotel. In the morning I bought a road atlas and took it into the sandwich shop with me to read while having breakfast. I looked at the map with the idea of trying to outguess them – rather than guess the way they would.
Obviously Torran had phoned from some place along his escape route and told the girl his plan. I had them spotted at Decatur in the rain in her car with Torran still in his disguise and with dawn not too many hours away. Either they were going to make a long run for it together, or she was going to take him to some hideout. If he had called from Beloit – which seemed the most probable, then I could draw a circle two hundred miles in radius around Bloomington and safely assume that she had roared over to Bloomington from some place within that circle.
It didn’t look as though she could have made it from St Louis. If she had to get ready for a trip, Springfield might be a logical starting point. Yet, if it were Springfield, why not let Torran ride all the way to Decatur? If it were Peoria, she should have been in Bloomington in plenty of time. Galesburg seemed just about right. If she’d been in Chicago, then why hadn’t he gone to see her before he began to suspect that he was being covered?