River Girl (19 page)

When the first gray light began to filter through the drawn Venetian blinds I got up and dressed. She was sleeping all right now, quite peacefully, with a hand beneath her cheek and the dark hair swirled across the pillow. It was cooler now inside the room, and I gently pulled up the sheet without disturbing her. It was only a bad dream, I thought; she’ll get over it.

In the early dawn the empty canyon of the street was almost cool; yesterday’s heat was dead, and today’s was waiting to be born. A street-cleaning truck went by, swishing water, and I could smell the dust being overrun and drowned the way it is in the first large drops of rain. This is the only time of day, I thought, when a city is ever beautiful.

The final editions of the morning papers were on the stands. I bought them and hurried into a coffee shop full of white tile and chrome and sat down at the counter. The story sprang out at me from the front pages, apparently getting bigger by the hour.

“SWAMP SEARCHED FOR BODY,” I read.

“MURDER CLUE IN DISAPPEARANCE.”

“VIOLENCE FEARED.”

They had found the boats. Wild with eagerness, I tore into the stories:

I sipped the coffee, hardly noticing it in my excitement. It was even better than I had hoped. And Buford was terrific. He should have gone on the stage, I thought.

The story went on with a lot more of Buford. He reconstructed the whole thing as indicated by the evidence, giving his opinion that I had arrested Shevlin and started out with him. Somewhere along the line I had grown momentarily careless, Shevlin had seized the opportunity to slug me with the oar, unlock the cuffs—they had found the key where I had dropped it—and had dropped me over the side with the anchor tied to my body. Then he had gone back for his wife—for by this time it was known that he was married, though no one could remember having seen her in almost a year—and on the way out of the swamp in his boat he had hidden the rental boat and then escaped. It was as nearly what I had planned as if I’d left him a script to read.

Full of elation, I paused to light a cigarette, and then read on, looking for some hint about the grand jury.

I put the paper down. That last paragraph might be the answer. It carried a hint of something I had hoped for but had not dared count on too heavily. Now that I was presumably dead and nothing could be gained by investigation except to raise a smell, there was a good chance they had let it die out of respect for the Judge’s memory. Probably they had started, got far enough into it to see where it was going to lead, and now that I was dead they’d let it drop. I hoped so, anyway.

I paid for the coffee and went back to the hotel, walking as if a hundred-pound weight had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders and knowing that at last there was no danger. I almost ran the last few steps down the corridor to get into the room to tell her.

She was just coming out of the bathroom in her robe. I caught her excitedly and kissed her while she looked at me in wonder, and then I handed her the papers.

“Read it,” I said. “We’re in the clear. They went for every bit of it. No, wait.” I interrupted myself. “Before you start, call room service and order your breakfast. I’ve already had some coffee and I’m too excited to eat any thing.”

“All right, Jack.” She made an effort to smile, but it was a strained and pitiful attempt, and I knew that the terror of last night was still alive there somewhere below the surface. After she had made the call she started reading the news stories and I watched her face as the hope and relief grew in her eyes. When the waiter knocked on the door I went into the bathroom and hid while the set up the breakfast things. When he had gone I came out and drank a little of her coffee and watched her while she finished the papers and tried to eat. She didn’t get much of it down.

“Look,” I ran on, too full of plans now to be quiet, “the other things you bought will be delivered to the hotel by noon today and I’ll have the suit and a change of clothes. We have luggage and can travel looking just like anybody else. So we’ll check out, separately, sometime this afternoon, and catch the first bus. No, by God, we’ll take the plane. We can afford it now. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? We’ll take the plane to San Francisco, stay there a few days, and then go on up to Seattle by bus to see the country.”

She had begun to catch my excitement now. “I think that’s wonderful, Jack,” she said. She called the airline and found there would be a plane at six-fifteen p.m., and made her reservation.

“You’ll have to go down and pick up the ticket sometime this morning,” I said. “I’ll follow you and get a ticket for myself. Maybe we’d better make it pretty soon, so they won’t be sold out.”

She called room service and I went back into the bathroom while the waiter took away the dishes. I prowled the room restlessly while she was in the bath changing into street clothes, and when she came out I spoiled her lipstick kissing her.

“You’re just like a big bear,” she said, smiling. She started to pin her hair up into that roll on the back of her neck and I took her by the arms and turned her around.

“Couldn’t you leave it down now?” I asked. “After all, there hasn’t been any description of you broadcast, as far as we know. As a matter of fact, nobody’s seen you for-a year and they don’t even know what you look like. But, no, I guess not. It would attract attention, chopped up like that. I don’t like it, though. Put up that way, I mean. Because it’s so damned lovely when it’s down across the side of your face.”

“But after all, Jack,” she smiled, “when we’re alone together I always have it down. And you don’t care what it looks like to other people, do you?”

“Yes that’s right. But remember that when we’re out in public, the other people aren’t the only ones looking at you. I am too.”

“You say awfully nice things for this early in the morning.

“There is no early morning in the way I feel about you,” I said, grinning. “It’s always just at dusk with the moon rising.”

“Sweet! Maybe, though, I could get a beauty-shop appointment this morning and have it cut to even it up. It would be all right then.”

“Try it,” I said eagerly. “That’d be fine.”

She looked up some in the telephone book and started calling. On about the third one she hit a cancellation and they said they could take her at eleven-thirty.

We went down the street to the airline office, going in separately, and she picked up her ticket while I bought one. There isn’t much need for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff any more, I thought, and as soon as we’re on the plane we’ll call it off. It’s all right now.

We went back to the hotel to wait until she had to go to the beauty shop. The rest of her packages had been delivered. I went up to my room and found that the suit and the other clothes I had bought had come, as well as the new bag. I packed, and just as I was starting out the door to meet her down in front of the hotel I remembered I hadn’t shaved this morning. I’d forgotten all about it. Well, there isn’t time now, I thought; I’ll come back and do it while she’s in the shop.

The beauty shop was only two blocks away, and we walked, going slowly along through the dense crowds and the heat. The boys were beginning to call the afternoon papers and I was just going to buy one when a sharp cry from Doris interrupted me.

“Jack! I left my watch!” She had stopped. “I took it off to bathe this morning and put it on the dresser. And when I got ready to meet you I went right over there and looked at it to see what time it was and didn’t put it on. Oh, how stupid!”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s safe in the room. “But I’m worried about it. It’s such a beautiful thing, and you gave it to me. And, besides, the maid will be in to clean the room.”

“I know what,” I said. “Give me your key and I’ll run back and pick it up while I’m waiting for you.”

I watched her go across the street and into the shop, and when she was inside I walked back to the hotel. The watch was still on the dresser and I picked it up and put it in my pocket. I’ll run upstairs and shave, I thought, and go back to meet her. She said it’d take only about half an hour. Then I remembered the paper I hadn’t bought, and was suddenly curious as to whether anything new had turned up. I went back out and bought one from the boy on the corner. He handed it to me folded and I stuck it under my arm, going up the street toward the bar I had been in yesterday. It was air-conditioned and would be more comfortable than the hotel.

The place was almost deserted, very cool and dim after the crowds and hot sunlight in the street. The barman in his white jacket was bent over a newspaper spread out on the bar, and as I went past I noted absently that it was the same one I carried under my arm, the afternoon paper with the salmon-colored outer sheet. I sat down at the end of the bar and he came over.

“Bottle of beer,” I said.

He opened it and got a glass. “Quite a deal about that sheriff, wasn’t it?” he asked.

I’m a celebrity now, I thought. But, anyway, a dead one. “Yeah,” I said casually. “Probably never find his body, either.”

He shook his head. “Not a chance, in that place. I been up there fishing a couple of times. But, say, that babe was a looker, wasn’t she?”

What was he talking about? “Babe?” I asked.

“Yeah, that guy’s wife. A real pipperoo.”

“Wife?” I asked stupidly. What the hell, was Louise mixed up in it now?

“The sheriff?”

“No,” he said. “The other one. The man that killed…his wife’s picture is there on the front page.”

I could feel my skin congeal inside the sweaty clothes. Somehow I got the paper out from under my arm and unfolded it, trying to keep my face still while the bar swam around me in a slow and horrible eddying of black mirrors and mahogany and white-jacketed barmen.

I knew what it was even before I looked. For some crazy reason, the thing she had said about the watch came back to me. “I went right over there and looked at it to see what time it was and didn’t put it on.” I had stood right there in the cabin day before yesterday, taking a last look around, and had looked right at the picture sitting there on the mantel beside the clock—the clock I had even noticed was stopped—and I had never even seen it.

“A honey, huh?” It was the barman.

Somehow I managed it. “Yeah,” I said. “A honey.” I had to get out of there. But I couldn’t run like that. I might get him suspicious. Somehow I managed to dig a dollar out of my pocket and put it on the bar, to give him something to do besides just standing there looking at me. They had given it a full two columns. “sought,” the caption said. “Mrs. Roger Shevlin, beautiful young wife of man sought in swamp killing.” Good God Almight, I raged, they didn’t have a picture of him—only twenty thousand of them scattered in every law-enforcement office in the South—so they had to run hers!

I gulped at the beer, almost drowning myself to get it down so I could get out of there. Fortunately I had swallowed it before my eyes had started wildly down the front-page story alongside the picture, for then I got the second jolt—

as law enforcement officers of the adjacent county swung into the search for the body and the escaped killers. According to Sheriff Carl C. Raines of Blakeman County, Marshall may have been overpowered and killed in the cabin itself or nearby, and Shevlin and his wife may quite possibly have disposed of the body in the other direction, above the cabin, before they fled.

I tried to put the glass down without rattling it against the wood. So now Raines was mixed up in it, and thought she had helped to kill me, and he was looking for them both! Buford had called the warning, and I hadn’t paid any attention. He had told me that the upper end of the lake was in Blakeman County. I had even known it myself, but hadn’t thought it was important. But now—

Buford covering my tracks behind me was one thing, but having Raines sniffing at the trail was something entirely different. He wasn’t just going through the motions.

Somehow I got out of the bar. Heat rolled up and hit me as I went through the door, and I had to remember where I was to get my directions straight. The beauty shop was up the street toward the left. But what was I going to do? I thought of her sitting there, with that ragged hair already causing the girls to notice her, and with everybody looking at the picture on the front page. I’ve got to do something, I thought agonizingly. But what? I had to wait for her to come out; if I went in there to get her, that would attract attention. And if I got her back to the hotel, then what? Dye her hair? How did you disguise a woman?