River Girl (11 page)

She saw me looking at it. “Miss Abbie thought one of us ought to be a redhead, so I told her I’d try it,” she explained bashfully. “It didn’t come out very good, did it?”

I was conscious of wondering somewhat crazily if I didn’t have anything better to do than sit here and talk about this girl’s hair problems, but got hold of myself enough to make some sensible and halfway civil reply. Maybe it would get her to relax enough to tell me what she knew about that mess downstairs.

“I think it looks all right,” I said. “But why red?”

“Well, you see, there was already a blonde here and two brunettes, and Miss Abbie thought maybe a redhead would be nice.”

Christ, I thought, what the merchandise in one of these places goes through. But I wanted to get back to what I’d come here for.

“I guess you’re leaving,” I said, looking at the suitcase.

“Yes.” She nodded. “Now that Miss Abbie’s hurt…” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “There won’t be nobody to run the place now. And I was afraid they’d arrest me for a witness. You’re not going to, are you?” The big eyes regarded me apprehensively. “You promised.”

“No,” I said. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions. Did you see what happened down there? The first part of it, I mean.”

“No,” she replied. Her eyes avoided me and kept looking down in her lap. I knew she was still afraid and was lying.

“Well,” I said, “that’s too bad. But you go ahead packing and I’ll give you a lift up to the bus station with your suitcase. Have you got enough money to get away on?”

“No-o, not very much,” she said hesitantly. “I don’t know for sure just how much a bus ticket to Bayou City is, but I might have enough. You wouldn’t like to—to—” We had started to be friends now, and she had a little trouble getting back suddenly to the strictly commercial plane.

“No.” I shook my head. “But I’d be glad to lend you twenty or twenty-five if it’d help any. It’s kind of tough for a girl—”

“You would?” She said at me with surprise.

“Sure,” I said. I took out the wallet and removed a couple of tens from it and handed them to her. I can get it back from Buford, I thought. “Now, you go ahead with your packing.”

I smoked a cigarette and watched her get her meager clothing together, making no more reference to the fight. She knows something, I thought, and she’s just about convinced I’m not going to get rough with her or take her in.

In a minute she paused, looking down at the suitcase. “Thank you for the money. It was right nice of you. Not many people…”

“It’s all right,” I said.

She went on, still not looking at me. “I didn’t see much of that down there. It scared me. You know how us girls have to live. The least little thing, the police—”

“Yes. I know. It’s a tough racket,” I said, waiting and trying not to seem impatient.

“It wasn’t Miss Abbie’s fault.” She turned away from the suitcase and looked at me now, the big eyes very earnest and full of loyalty to Miss Abbie. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. “She kept telling him she didn’t know where the girl was.”

“He was looking for some girl?” I prompted casually, trying not to be too insistent.

She nodded. “Yes. He was looking for his daughter That young kid that was here, the one that talked so mean.”

She didn’t have to draw me a picture. I knew what girl the man was looking for, and I knew just how quiet this whole thing was going to be the minute he decided to open his mouth.

There was a lot of it that didn’t make sense. How had he known the girl had been here? And why had he shut up like that the minute he was arrested? I lighted another cigarette and ground the old one out on the floor. “Look, Bernice,” I said, trying to be as offhand as possible, “why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it? You’ve got plenty of time before your bus leaves.”

“All right.” She sat down on the bed and I stepped over and took the chair.

“Try to remember what this man said,” I went on. “You were there when he came in, weren’t you?”

She nodded. “Miss Abbie and me was both downstairs. This man come in the front door and looked at me first and then at her and said, ‘Are you Miz Bell?’ He wasn’t a very big man, kind of scrawny, with his face all brown and wrinkled up with the sun grins, like he was a farmer or something, but he was dressed up in his town clothes, a kind of shiny old black suit and tan shoes, but he didn’t have no tie in his shirt collar. It was buttoned, but didn’t have a tie. But that don’t matter, I reckon. I do remember, though, that he had a kind of wild look in his eyes. Anyway, when Miss Abbie said she was Miss Abbie, they went in that other room, the one in back of the lobby, a kind of parlor. At first I didn’t hear ‘em, because they wasn’t talking loud, and then his voice kept getting stronger. ‘Ain’t no use you lying,’ he kept saying over and over. ‘I know she was here.’ Then he was cussing and yelling something awful and I began to be afraid he’d have the police after us. ‘I’ll show you how I know she was here,’ he says. “This is how I know. Jest look at that and then tell me you ain’t seen her.’ Miss Abbie was beginning to yell by this time, and I could hear her telling him she didn’t have no idea where the girl was.”

“Hold it a minute, Bernice,” I interrupted. “You couldn’t see them from where you were, could you?”

She shook her head. “No. They was in that other room. The door wasn’t more than half closed, but I couldn’t see ‘em.”

“Did you go back in the room after the police had been here and gone? I mean, after they took Abbie away?”

“No. Kate and me run down the street. First, Kate called the shurf’s office, and then later, when the shurf got here, we run.”

I nodded. It must have been a letter the man was showing Abbie. But where was it? If he’d had it on him when Kurd brought him in, they’d have found it when they searched him, when they took his money and belt and things. And Abbie couldn’t have been carrying it when she left, for she wasn’t in any condition to be carrying anything. Could it have been on the floor down there? If so, why hadn’t Hurd seen it?

I stood up hurriedly. “You finish up your packing, Bernice,” I said, “and I’ll drop you off in town. I’m going down to that room and have a look.”

I went down the stairs in the dark and along the lower hall until I found the door. When I was inside I struck a match to locate the light switch, closed the door, and snapped on the light. There wasn’t much evidence of a fight, but when I thought about it I realized there couldn’t have been any great struggle, as small as Abbie was. He’d just chopped her with that knife and she’d fallen over onto the sofa, and now she might be dying. There were blood spots on the rug, but they weren’t what I was looking for. There was no sign of a letter.

I went across and looked at the sofa. There was blood on one end of it, on the arm. It sat in the corner, with the arm only about a foot from the other wall. Leaning over, I looked down. There it was. I squatted on the floor and reached an arm in after it and pulled it out. It was typewritten, on good stationery, and when I glanced down at the signature I could feel a draft blowing up my back.

I read it over again and folded it up slowly and stuck it in my pocket. Buford was going to be interested in seeing this. Well, I thought, he had an idea there was more here than showed on the surface.

It wasn’t too hard to piece it all together. Elkins must be that big crazy kid, the one who’d gone berserk when he found the girl down here. So as soon as he got out of jail he went back home, wherever it was, and told the girl’s mother about it, or she had got it out of him some way. And the mother, knowing what a violent hothead like her husband would do when he heard it, had made the kid promise not to tell him, or maybe the kid hadn’t because he was still sore at the old man. The mother had written Soames, knowing he was in the same town, and asked him to find the girl and talk to her, try to send her home. And then the old man had got hold of Soames’s reply and headed for here with blood in his eye. It all added up, all right. The only trouble with it was that no matter how many times you added it, you couldn’t get any total you liked.

Soames knew, then, that the girl had been here. He knew, and Waites knew, and the whole country was going to know as soon as this thing had time to explode, that a brothel operating with police connivance had been harboring a fifteen-year-old girl, that a woman was dead, or might be, and that the girl’s father was likely to be tried for murder as a result of it. The smell of bribery and police corruption was going to be so powerful the grand jury wasn’t going to be able to ignore it any longer.

Just then I heard Bernice coming down the stairs. She had the suitcase in her hand and was ready to go. I flipped the light off and we went out.

“The car’s up in the next block,” I said. “Just stand here out of the street lights while I go get it.”

I brought it down and stopped and she climbed in. No one had seen us, or paid any attention, apparently. Dropping over one block to miss the square, I headed back to town, stopping on a quiet street a block from the station. I ought to get a job driving a station wagon at a girls’ boarding school, I thought. How many times have I done this?

“So long, Bernice,” I said, and held out my hand. “Just forget everything you told me and don’t ever tell anybody else and you’ll be safe enough.”

“‘I won’t,” she said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in nothing.” She thanked me again for the money and got out. I saw her walk up the street toward the station. What a life, I thought. Cat house behind, cat house ahead. Then I snapped out of it. I was in a hell of a spot to be feeling sorry for her.

I drove around and parked in front of the courthouse and sat there for a minute, trying to think. Cars lazily circled the square, boys out riding with their girl friends; and something about it, maybe the summer night or the hissing sound of tires or the quick, musical laughter of a girl, suddenly made me think of how it had been before I went off to the Army all those years ago in 1942, how it had been to be home from college in the summer, out riding in the Judge’s automobile, a Chevrolet somehow forever five years old. God, I thought, that was a long time back.

I shook my head, trying to clear it, like a fighter taking a beating. Get up there, I thought. Get up to the office and see what you can find on Shevlin; Buford can wait a little while. But what about this other mess? It was going to blow wide open, tomorrow or the next day. If I tried to disappear now, wouldn’t everybody know it was a phony? And, knowing it was a fake, they would do a lot of looking into the place where I had disappeared, a place I didn’t ever want anybody nosing around because that was where Shevlin was. I’d be better off to stay here and take the rap on the probable bribery charge than to direct any attention toward Shevlin. But, then, there was no use trying to kid myself that Shevlin’s disappearance was going to continue unnoticed forever. Somebody would miss him and start looking into it. I shook my head again, and ran a hand across my face. It was like being at the bottom of a well.

I started around again, taking up all the obvious facts and examining them, and when I almost completed the circuit I suddenly found the one I sought, the one that had escaped me until now. Waites hadn’t talked; he’d never said a word about why he was down there at Abbie’s and why he had attacked her. Why? I wondered. Probably at first it was a natural enough disinclination to go shouting to the world that he was looking for his daughter in a whore house—that was understandable. But when he had a little while to think it over and see what a mess he was in, that he might wind up charged with murder… Had anybody been in to see him? A lawyer?

I climbed quickly out of the car and started across the street to the drugstore to call Buford and ask him, and then suddenly remembered I didn’t know the telephone number of Dianne’s, or Dinah’s, apartment, and that I didn’t even know her full name. I stopped. It adds up that way, I thought. I know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day, but Soames and the grand jury and everybody else connected with it has every reason to believe I don’t know a thing. But it was only a guess. Maybe they hadn’t sent a lawyer to the jail to see him and tell him to keep his mouth shut until they got ready to close in on us. There wasn’t any way to know for sure until I saw Buford.

But first, I thought, I’m going in that office and do the thing I’ve been trying to get to for the past nine hours. I’m going to find out about Shevlin. None of the rest of it means anything if I’m wrong about him. I wheeled and went up the front steps and banged on the door until the janitor came down and let me in. “Got to get in the office for a little while,” I said, and went on past him up the stairs. I had a key to the office itself. When it closed at five-thirty all the telephone calls were switched to the office at the jail, but the files I wanted were up here.

I went in and switched on the lights. Getting out a cigarette, I turned to the bank of firing cases along the wall. It was going to be a long, tedious job, for I had no idea at all of how to begin, since there was obviously no point in trying to look him up by name. Shevlin was probably just the last of a series of them. I started in, riffling through the circulars and bulletins and notices, looking only at the ones with pictures. Ten or fifteen minutes dragged by. It was oppressively hot in the room with the big lights on and the windows closed, and I began to sweat. There was no sound in the building except occasionally the ring of a bucket somewhere down below as the janitor went about his mopping.

I slammed a drawer shut and paused, lighting another cigarette and thinking. I wasn’t getting anywhere this way. It would take a week to go through all this stuff. The thing to do was to sit down and try to analyze it logically. What was I looking for, anyway? Well, obviously, a “wanted” notice out on Shevlin, with the picture on it. But there were two facts about it that didn’t jibe. It would be a very old one, but still one that I had seen fairly recently. It would be an old one because Doris had been living with him for over five years and he hadn’t committed any crime in that time; and it would be one that I must have seen fairly recently because there was still the fact that I had noticed something familiar about his face that day when I had run into him up the lake. I knew I had never seen him before, so I must have seen his picture somewhere, and the most logical place to have seen it was here. Therefore, it really must have been some old notice that I had looked at not too long ago. But why? In which cabinet, and what had I been looking for at the time?

I smoked the cigarette out to the end in sharp, vicious puffs, sitting there at the desk with my chin on my hand, trying to remember, to concentrate. Impatient, and conscious of the passage of time, with all the other events of the night gnawing away at the edge of thought, I struggled for the key to it. It must have been here that I saw the picture. I was more sure of it than ever. Some memory, some faint recollection of a thing that had happened here in the office lingered teasingly just beyond my grasp. I had looked at it not too long ago, and something outside the regular routine of office had made me do it. But what? I reached out for it desperately, almost knowing it, and it ran, laughing, off the edge of memory. It had something to do with Lorraine and the filing cabinets, some remark she had made. That was it! It was a joking and rather stupid observation she had made about the picture. And then I knew what it was.