River Girl (13 page)

“Say, you’re right!”

“Of course he’s right,” Dinah said excitedly. “Mr. Marshall, that’s good.”

Buford thought about it for a minute. “But how about this Farrell or Shevlin, or whatever his name is? If he gets caught—”

“There’s practically no chance of it,” I said, wondering just how much he was guessing now. “The man’s no fool, or he couldn’t have dodged everybody all these years. And if I get careless and let him give me the slip as I’m bringing him in, do you think he’s going to hang around for me to make a second run at him? He’ll be clear out of the country in less than a day. And then, when he reads in the papers that he’s being hunted for killing me, he will make himself scarce.”

Buford nodded his head approvingly. “You’re right about that, too. That would take care of you, all right, but how about me? So I tell them that this deputy of mine who just got himself killed was a crook, that I’m sure he was because he’s not here to defend himself, so everybody has a good laugh.”

“Yes I know,” I said. ‘There has to be more to it than your unsupported word. That can be taken care of.”

“And there’s Louise. Do you think she’s going to hold still for it? Obviously, in a setup like this, you can’t take her with you, unless you expect the grand jury to believe that she was both clairvoyant and a practical believer in suttee. So she’ll be here, yelling her head off to get on the stand and deny that you ever took anything.”

“Yes. I’m coming to that.” I leaned forward in the chair and looked at both of them, and particularly at Dinah. I didn’t know how she was going to take this. “But suppose Louise suddenly lost interest in defending my good name, if she has any anyway. Remember, she doesn’t know I turned any money over to you. All she knows is that I didn’t give it to her. Suppose it turned out that all this time I had been paying the apartment rent and buying Lincoln convertibles for a girl friend named Dinah.”

Buford put down his drink. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

But I was more interested in Dinah’s reaction. Her eyes met mine very gravely except for a flutter of humor far back in the depths, and she inclined her head. “Mr. Marshall was such a nice gentleman and I appreciate everything he did for me, and I’m sure I never had the faintest idea he was married.”

Buford went to the kitchen to mix another drink. After he had gone out the door I looked across at Dinah and said, “I hope you didn’t mind my suggesting that. I mean, there’s no reason you have to get dragged into it.”

The gray eyes crinkled up in a smile. “I don’t mind at all. I’d love it.”

She puzzled me a little. I hadn’t paid much attention to her, under the circumstances, with that thing this afternoon eating away at the back of my mind and the rest of it in a whirl from trying to cope with all this other mess, but still I was conscious of something a little disturbing about her each time she got mixed up in my thoughts. The different sides of her you saw didn’t add up to anything you would normally expect, and it made you wonder where she had come from and what made her operate. Small, chic, and smooth, completely feminine and disturbingly good-looking with the clear skin and slender face and the hair like polished copper rings, she looked like the classic example of what you would collect if you had the true collector’s spirit and plenty of money, but when you looked at her again you were aware of the vitality and the restlessness and the audacious spirit in the eyes. You got the idea in a little while that she took excitement the way some people took drugs, and you wondered how she liked this bird-in-a-gilded-gun-collection existence she was living now.

Buford came back in a minute with the drinks. As he handed me mine he asked, “Where did you say this Shevlin lives, Jack? How far up the lake?”

“It must be about twenty miles up from the store,” I said. “There’s not much of anything except swamp above where he is.”

He looked thoughtful for a minute. “That’s over the county line, I think. Most of that swamp is in Blakeman County.

I shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. I don’t think that anyone will ever take the trouble to look into whether I went a little beyond the line without knowing it.”

“No. I guess not. Well, here’s luck.” We drank, and then got back to the question of money. I asked for five thousand again. He insisted he couldn’t get hold of it on short notice, especially without attracting attention, but that he could put his hands on three thousand in a safe-deposit box at the bank the first thing tomorrow morning.

“O.K.,” I said. That would do. After all, I had originally planned on having to do it on the two hundred odd I got for my fishing equipment.

I stood up. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’ll be better if you bring up this Shevlin job in front of the others. But then, you know how to handle it.”

He nodded. “Leave it to me.” He got up from the sofa and held out his hand. “I won’t be able to tell you good-by tomorrow, so here it is. Good luck.” He paused, and then went on quietly, with his eyes directly on mine. “And remember, I’m buying a one-way trip. Don’t come back, or we’ll both be in trouble.” It wasn’t until later that I knew just how he meant that.

I didn’t go directly home. I was too restless to go back to the house. And in a way, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I knew that I was a little afraid. Ever since eleven o’clock this morning I had been going at a full run and my mind had been furiously intent on this problem, to the exclusion of everything else, but what was it going to be like when I lay down in the darkness with the problem solved and the movement stilled, with Shevlin putting his hand up to his chest in that terrible gesture and turning to look at me as his knees gave way under him and he started to fall? Was that what I would see when I tried to close my eyes? Or would there be nothing?

I turned and drove out north of town, past the lake where we used to swim in summers a long time ago when I was a boy. The bathhouse was gone now and the lake was filled with weeds, but as I sat there in the car in the summer night I could see the dazzling sunlight and hear the splash and the laughter as the sixteen-year-old Jack Marshall did a belly-buster trying to jackknife off the high board to impress a girl, coming out of the water stinging and crimson from the impact. Circling through streets that were quiet now and almost deserted, I went past the high school and the football field, remembering October afternoons and the sweat and the dry taste in the mouth like copper pennies and the way the ground jarred, tilting crazily against your face. The old grammar school had burned, and there was a box factory there now, but I could see the corner where she had waited while I chased the dog, trying to get the paper from his mouth, and I could hear the school bell ringing, telling us we were late. I’ll never see any of this again, I but it’s all gone now anyway.

It was midnight when I put the car in the garage and walked through the hot, dead air in the kitchen, hearing my footsteps echo through the house. I had changed into pajamas and was sitting on the side of the bed smoking a cigarette and wondering whether there would be any use in trying to sleep when it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I padded barefoot out into the kitchen and started looking through the refrigerator, finding nothing except a bottle of milk that had been there for two weeks and was sour. In a cupboard I came across a can of salmon. I opened it and had started to dig it out onto a plate when the telephone rang. I started a little, surprised at the unexpected sound. Buford, I thought. My God, has something else happened? I went down the hall to the stand.

“Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Marshall?” It was a girl’s voice.

“Yes. Who is it?”

“Dinah Weatherford. I tried to get you a while ago, but I guess you were out. You haven’t gone to bed have you?”

“No,” I said. “Not quite. Has something happened?”

“Not exactly. But could I come over for a minute? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Why yes,” I said, wondering. “Do you know how to find the place?”

“I think so. You’re sure it’s all right?”

“Sure. I was just opening a can of salmon. I’ll find you a clean fork.”

She laughed. “I’ll have you know I’m not a cat. Or am I?”

She hung up and I went back to the bedroom and put on a dressing gown and some slippers. It was hot, and I turned on the electric fan in the kitchen, sitting under it with my elbows on the table. What did Dinah have on her mind? I wondered if Buford had asked her to tell me something.

Glancing up at the clock, I saw it was nearly half past twelve and knew Doris would be at the hotel now. I thought of her alone and scared and tried to imagine what she would be doing at this moment. Was she trying to sleep, with a light on in the bathroom to drive away the dark? Was she standing at the window staring out into the streets at busses and neon signs and the hot bright lights of restaurant fronts and the people going home from shows, feeling the strangeness of it after a year of living burial in that swamp? Was she counting the hours, as I was? Tomorrow, and tomorrow night, I thought, and part of another day…

I heard the car pull up and stop in front of the garage. When I went outside she had cut the lights, but I heard the car door slam shut and she came toward me out of the darkness in the yard. I followed her into the kitchen. She had changed into a white linen skirt and a Russian-looking sort of blouse with long, full sleeves quite tight at the wrists, and when she turned under the light and smiled at me her eyes were alight with that excitement I had seen in them before.

“Let’s go into the living room,” I said. She shook her head. “This is all right. I just wanted to tell you something.”

I pulled out a chair and she sat down at the table. I sat down across from her, watching the play of light against the burnished copper hair and the audacious tilt of the head. “What’s up?” I asked.

“I think I can help you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “How?”

“I got to thinking about it after you left and after Buford went home. This thing you’re doing, I mean. It interested me.” She stopped, her elbows propped on the table and her chin resting on her hands, looking at me. “You interest me.”

“Why?” I asked. I didn’t see what she was getting at.

“Imagination. You shouldn’t have any, but you do. Imagination, plus the gambler’s instinct. Don’t you see?”

“No,” I said. “All I see is a chump who got in over his head and is trying to wiggle out.”

“Maybe you’re not looking from where I am.” She smiled, and then went on, “But let me tell you what I had in mind. Tonight when you told Buford what you were going to do, you didn’t make any mention of what was going to happen after you abandoned the boat there in the swamp. Have you thought about that? You don’t mind my asking, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Good. You realize, of course, don’t you, that you’re going to be afoot and that when you get out to the highway you won’t be able to flag a ride because whoever gives you a lift will remember you. And, naturally, you can’t take your car. Also, even if you walked to the next town, you wouldn’t dare get on a bus there. They might remember you.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. It’s not very good, that part of it, but it can’t be helped.”

Actually, I had an idea about it, but I didn’t see any point in telling her. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, but there just wasn’t any reason she had to know. There was a railroad across on the far side of the swamp, and at one place a water tank and siding where freights went in the-hole for passenger trains. I planned to hang around there tomorrow night and get on a southbound freight.

She leaned a little across the table. “Well, there’s where I can help you. You’ll be afoot, so I can pick you up on the highway after dark.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, I appreciate it a lot, but it would be risky for you, and there’s no reason you have to get mixed up in it.”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Don’t you see I want to do it? Listen, Jack! I can call you Jack, can’t I? It would be so easy. You just tell me where you’ll be, say at nine o’clock, and I’ll come by very slowly. I’ll flip my headlights up and then down a couple of times so you’ll know who it is, and then stop. If there are too many cars in sight, I’ll go on and turn around and come back for you.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“I’ll give you a lift to Bayou City. You can get a bus there without attracting attention. That’ll be far enough away. I’ll tell Buford I just went down there shopping. I do it quite often.”

“He doesn’t know about this, then?”

“No,” she said quietly. “He doesn’t know about it.”

I was thinking. This was a lot better way of getting out of the swamp than the other. I’d get to Bayou City the same night, and I wouldn’t have to go to the hotel looking like a tramp from having ridden all night on a freight, providing I even got on one. It was just what I needed, but I still hesitated a little. Nobody does anything for nothing. What did she want to get mixed up in it for?

“What do you think?” she asked, watching me intently.

“It sounds good.”

“Then it’s a deal?”

“I’m still wondering what you get out of it.”

“Excitement,” she said simply.

“Is that all?”

“I think so. I’m not sure. But isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not that fond of excitement.”

She studied my face. “You just think you’re not. You don’t realize yet what you’re capable of.”

“Look, Dinah,” I said. “I’m not looking for thrills. All I want to do is get the hell out of here before I get thrown in jail. And I don’t care if I never see any more excitement the rest of my life than a good, fast checker game.”

“All right,” she said. “But where do I meet you?” What the hell, I thought. She just wants to help me for the laughs she gets out of it. Why not? It’d be a way out of that swamp.

“O.K.,” I said. I was trying to get the layout of the roads and the lake straight in my mind to give her a picture of it. “Excuse me a minute. I want to get a pencil.”

I found a pencil and an old envelope in the dining room and came back. She slid her chair around alongside mine, pressing gently against my shoulder and watching me as I drew the map.

“Here’s town,” I said. “The highway runs east along here, and then turns south, toward the end of the lake. You know where that store is down there, don’t you? The highway goes across the south end of the lake on the big earth dam, and just beyond the east end of the dam there’s a store and a boat place and a honky-tonk beer joint.” She nodded.

“Well, about two miles beyond that bunch of buildings a secondary road takes off to the left, going north. This runs up the other side of the lake. It isn’t much of a road, but there’s not much travel on it, which is good for our purpose.” I paused, trying to remember landmarks. It had been a long time since I’d been over there. The railroad was over there, running parallel and probably a quarter mile beyond the secondary road. I’d want to leave the boat at some place that would indicate Shevlin had headed for the water tank to catch a freight. There’s a small creek, I thought, along there somewhere. And then I remembered.

“Look, Dinah. It would be about fifteen miles after you make the turn off the highway onto that country road. You hit a stand of big pines very close to the road on both sides, a half mile or more of them before they taper off into second-growth stuff again. Then there’s a gravel pit with an old loading platform, off to the right, where I’ve marked it. Then, just about a half mile beyond the gravel pit, you’ll cross a small concrete bridge. It won’t be the first one, for there are some more below it, but I can’t remember whether it’s the third or fourth. Anyway, that’s the reason I’ve put these other landmarks on here, so you’ll know you have the right one. I’ll be waiting just beyond the bridge. Blink your lights as you go over it. Think you’ve got it?”

“Yes. It’s easy. Now, what time?”

“How about eight o’clock? It’ll be dark by then.” She put her—hand on my arm and smiled. “Wonderful. Can I bring anything for you, any clothes from here that I could put in the car now? Naturally, you won’t be able to take anything extra in the morning.”

I shook my head. “No. I won’t take a thing. Just the clothes I’ll have on. It wouldn’t look right otherwise.”

“Yes. That’s right.” She got up from the table. “Well, I’ve got to go and let you get some sleep.”