Girl Out Back (4 page)

He’d been at various times a town constable and deputy sheriff until some political shake-up had pushed him away from the trough for good, and it was said he was crooked. It wasn’t this latter, however, that had rubbed me the wrong way the two times we’d met; moral indignation was a little out of my line. It was just that he seemed too impressed with his own toughness, as if he could still feel that holstered gun banging against his thigh.

He went behind the counter, hung a cigarette in his mouth, and struck a match on his thumbnail. Maybe he picked it up from reading private eyes; it was stock gesture 93-B, Hard Case Lighting a Cigarette. He was about my height, but rail-thin, with a bleak and angular face that seemed to have been stretched too tightly over the bone structure behind it. There was no warmth in the sherry-colored eyes. He dropped the match on the floor, still watching me through the smoke with no expression at all. They must nave an interesting home life, I thought—the two of them staring at each other and dribbling a fall-out of dead matches around the place.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’d like one of your cabins,” I said. “And a boat, for a couple days’ fishing. How’s it been?”

“So-so.” He shrugged indifferently. “You never been out here before, have you?”

“Once or twice,” I said. “Duck hunting. It was before you bought the place.”

“So you decided to try the fishing, huh?”

“That’s right,” I said. He didn’t appear to be the gushing type that fell all over a new customer, but I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I was trying to figure out where they kept their cash and made change. There was no register in sight.

“Anything else you want?” he asked.

I turned back to him. The harsh angularity of his face was broken into planes of highlights and shadow by the overhead light. From the waist up he wore nothing but a sweaty undershirt, and his arms and shoulders looked like a muscle chart from an anatomy textbook. There wasn’t enough subcutaneous fat to smooth the contours; he was as functional and uncluttered as an axe blade. The stare said nothing at all.

”How’s that?” I asked.

“Motor? Bait? Guide? You need anything besides a boat?”

“No,” I said. Maybe if I didn’t ask for too much he’d let me stay.

“Take the cabin on this end,” he said. “It’s not locked.”

I still had to get a look inside their cash-box, wherever it was. I hadn’t driven this far just to sleep. “How about a sandwich and a cup of coffee?” I asked.

“It’s pretty late.”

“I know it is,” I said. “But I haven’t had any dinner. I drove out here right after work.”

“You must have been in a hurry. Really like to fish, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. I was beginning to like him even less.

Without turning his head toward the door behind him, he called out, “Jewel!”

There was no answer. The room was silent except for the hiss of the lantern and the faint spatting sounds of the insects bumping against it. He started to turn, as if to call out again. She came through the doorway, dressed in a man’s blue shirt and a pair of dungarees. She gave an almost imperceptible start when she saw me, but then the surprise or whatever it had been was gone and her face closed up like a drawn Venetian blind.

“Fix Mister Godwin a hamburger,” he said curtly, without turning his head.

“At this time of night?”

“Never mind what time it is; I got a watch. He come off without his supper.”

She stared silently at the back of his head for an instant, and then walked over in front of the icebox. I sat down on one of the stools. She lighted the burner under the grill and slapped down the meat patty she had taken from the icebox. He watched her flatly for a moment and then turned away. A bug banged into the lantern overhead and fell to the counter where he lay on his back, buzzing his wings. The meat began to sizzle after a minute or two and she turned it with the spatula, leaning forward slightly with the tawny mane of hair swinging downward across her cheek. A cockroach came up from somewhere and walked along the edge of the counter. It looked shiny in the white, hot light. She stared at it, and then pushed the hair back from her face with her hand.

“Grease,” she said, almost in a whisper.

His eyes turned, but he made no other movement. “What?”

“I said grease. G-r-e-a-s-e.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing. I love the smell of it in my hair.”

“You sure as hell have a hard time,” he said.

“What gave you that idea?” she asked. “Not many women can go around smelling like they slept with their head on a rancid hamburger.”

Something made her look up then, and she caught his eyes on her. She stopped abruptly. The room was caught up in that taut silence again. Then it was broken by the sound of the telephone—two long and two short rings.

He came around the end of the counter and lifted the receiver off the hook of the instrument mounted on the wall near the door. It was an old type, with a hand crank.

“Hello,” he said. “Yeah, this is Nunn . . . Sure . . . Sure . . . Okay . . . Around daylight . . . Okay, I’ll be ready. Good-bye.”

Then, before he replaced the receiver, he spoke into the mouthpiece again. “Jest in case some of you old busybodies missed part of it, that was a man in Woodside. He wants to go fishin’ tomorrow, and he wants me to guide him. Any questions?”

He dropped the receiver on the hook. “Party line,” he said.

The country was filling up with people he didn’t like. He’d have to put on another shift, at tins rate, to be satisfactorily nasty to all of them.

She finished the hamburger and put it in front of me. “No coffee. You want a coke?”

“All right,” I said.

She opened one and put it on the counter, and then turned and went back through the doorway without a word. He leaned on the other side of the counter while I ate. He didn’t say anything. It was all right with me. I was caught up on his conversation.

When I had finished I stood up and took the wallet from my pocket. “How much?”

He shook his head. “Just settle up for the whole thing when you leave.”

“Might as well keep it straight as we go,” I protested. I had to get a look at that cash drawer tonight.

He shrugged. “Okay. That’ll be—let’s see—forty-five cents.”

I took out a five. He lifted a cigar box from a shelf under the counter, set it on top, and lifted the lid. There were four or five bills in it, but I couldn’t see them all clearly. He glanced at the five in my hand and shook his head.

“You got anything smaller?”

“I’ll see,” I said. I brought out a single. “Better give me a packet of cigarettes while you’re at it.”

He turned to get them off the back shelf. I shot a hand into the cigar box and spread the bills out. There were two fives and several singles, plus some silver.

There was no twenty, new or otherwise.

He gave me my change. I went out, drove the car up alongside the end cabin, and carried my gear in. It took me only a few minutes to unroll my bedding on the lumpy old mattress. I switched off the battery-operated camp lantern and lay down. Mosquitoes whined thinly around my ears in the dark as I lay there smoking a cigarette. Frogs kept up their chorus along the shore and I heard a feeding bass splash somewhere out in the lake.

Money? Out here? I must be crazy.

But where had those two twenties come from? Right here, hadn’t they? I’d seen them myself; there was no doubt of it whatever. Then I cursed softly and crushed out the cigarette. The whole thing was utterly absurd. Was I seriously expecting to find some connection between this mean and primitive little backwoods camp and the mystery of the slightly fantastic Bill Haig?

They’d have called him Mad-dog Haig except that his first name was William. Wild Bill was inevitable then, but inaccurate, at least by connotation. The suggestive flamboyance of it as applied to race drivers and stunt men was no more descriptive of Haig than it would have been of the cold and vicious deadliness of a cobra. He was an atavism. He belonged back with the Machine-gun Kellys, the Pretty Boy Floyds, and the Dillingers of the thirties. He was the embodiment of violence. The odd part of it, though, was that until the time he flamed across the front pages two years ago at the age of twenty-six his only criminal record was that of a petty hoodlum arrested and convicted once for stealing cars. Apparently he had simply gone berserk, but berserk with a paradoxically calculated violence that was aimed at one thing: knocking off banks, and big ones.

In that brief period of six months beginning in August 1953 he and his gang had robbed three big-city banks by direct and brutal assault. Firepower and blind luck had got him out of all three of them, but it had been gory and not even very profitable until the last one he hit. He seemed to know nothing about banks and their protective devices, and to care even less. Planning apparently had no place in his
modus operandi;
he simply went in and then shot his way out. The first one, in St. Louis, had resulted in the death of a teller and a bank guard, and had netted him less than nine thousand dollars. The second one was in suburban Detroit. It gained him eighty thousand dollars for a few short minutes until the gang member carrying the majority of the loot was shot down in the street outside the bank in a gun battle with police. Haig and the other two escaped with something like fifteen thousand dollars, leaving behind them a dead patrolman and another with a bullet-shattered hip. The outcry in the newspapers crescendoed.

It was in Sanport in February that the realities of life in the 1950s with their police networks, F.B.I, co-operation, protective alarm systems, and traffic clogged streets and highways caught up with him at last. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say they caught up with his gang. He hit the Gulf First National with three other men. They killed another guard, wounded a bank official, and looted it of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The whole thing caved in on him then, as anybody would know it inevitably had to, and the getaway became a shambles. They left the first member, Red Jolley, on the steps of the bank with a police bullet in his abdomen. The driver of the getaway car was shot through the head in the first block. The other man in the front seat shoved him out of the door and took the wheel. Haig was in the back seat with the bag containing the loot. Twenty minutes later, on the outskirts of the city but still inside the crystallizing ring of roadblocks being set up by the police, the getaway car slammed into the rear of a slow-moving truck at better than sixty miles an hour. Both vehicles careened across the dividing line into oncoming traffic, involving two other cars in the smash-up before coming to rest. Police were swarming all over the scene in slightly more than ninety seconds. The driver of the getaway car was still behind the wheel, dead of a broken neck. Haig; Haig was nowhere.

It was as if he had calmly stepped from the wreckage and boarded a flying saucer for Mars, carrying the bag of loot with him. Nobody saw him. The money was gone. Nobody had ever seen him again, to this day. That was a year and a half ago.

It was not so much that it was impossible he could have escaped in that ninety seconds of wild confusion as it was just unthinkable he could have got completely away and continued to elude the vast and continuing search for him that was still going on eighteen months later. There was simply no place he could hide. He was too hot for the underworld to touch with a barge-pole. He was a cop-killer, and he was on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted” list. He couldn’t have bought protection or concealment from anybody with any kind of money, with ten times the amount he was carrying.

And they knew everything about him that there was to know.

Red Jolley had lived long enough to talk. He told them who Haig was and where he’d come from. The F.B.I, had gone on from there and when they were through they could have written a six-volume biography of him. They had photographs, descriptions, fingerprints, and a dossier on his personal habits all the way from his preferences in girls down to the way he liked his eggs for breakfast. His picture had been on the front page of every newspaper and displayed on the walls of every post-office in the country. And it had all come to exactly nothing. Haig had, to all outward appearances, evaporated. Along with the entire haul from one of the biggest bank robberies in history.

I lit another cigarette and lay looking up at the dark, aware again of the fantastic impossibility that this could have anything to do with him. But, damn it, the facts were there, and they were incontestable. I lined them up in my mind.

One. That money had never been found.

Two. The fact that they were still looking for it proved that. It also proved that at least part of it was identifiable.

Three. Those two twenty-dollar bills were too obviously identifiable, on the evidence. The F.B.I, was trying to learn where they had come from. And they had shown me Haig’s photograph, among others.

Four. Those two bills had come from here.

But where was the connection? Haig was from San Francisco. He was a city boy. He wouldn’t be able to survive all day in this wilderness swamp, even if he’d been able to get here, and even an idiot would have better sense than to try to hide out in an environment as foreign as this. He’d stick out like Anita Ekberg at a Hottentot fish fry.

What did you come up with? There were several good strong probabilities, and the first of these was that Haig was dead. If he were still alive the F.B.I, would have found him before this. But that only made the mystery worse. Why hadn’t his remains turned up? Even his dead body would be so hot it was practically radioactive. And that still left the utterly baffling question of how that money had wound up here—that is, those two twenty-dollar bills. Suppose somebody had come into possession of it through some set of circumstances as yet unknown; wouldn’t even a sub-human intelligence grasp the fact that there might be just a touch of the unusual about a suitcase full of money lying around that way and that he’d better be careful where he tried to spend it? So why two brand new and consecutively numbered bills of that denomination in a place where a twenty of any kind would attract attention?

But, wait. She’d said she had spent the night in town. Maybe she had got the money there. No. That didn’t fit. He’d told her to pick up the motors, so he must have given her the money with which to pay for them. That brought it right back here again. And there were only two possibilities.

Either the Nunns had that loot themselves, or somebody who did have it had spent part of it here. You almost had to eliminate Nunn; he’d been a peace officer and if he were trying to pass off hot money he’d do it where it wouldn’t leave such a clearly marked trail. He’d realize the dangers inherent in the whole thing.

I grinned in the darkness as it suddenly occurred to me that in all these suppositions and theories I had taken it for granted that anyone stumbling into the orbit of that missing bag of loot through no matter what set of unusual circumstances would automatically be another crook who’d try to cash in on it, instead of an honest man who’d merely call the nearest cop and turn it in. This calm assumption was clearly based on Godwin’s Law of Character Erosion, which states that the attrition of honesty varies inversely with the square of the distance and directly with the mass of the temptation.

I tried to think of some way of pumping her as to who had spent those two twenties. But no matter how obliquely I went at it I’d arouse suspicion. The circumstance of my showing up here for the first time within hours of her visit to the store might look a little odd in itself, without doing anything else to attract attention. It was a long time before I went to sleep.

The sound of a car driving into the clearing waked me just at dawn. I looked around the interior of the crude little cabin. It was roofed with corrugated sheet metal and its flooring was of splintery, unfinished pine planks. Aside from the bed the only furnishings were a sheet metal stove for heat during the duck season and a wooden packing box on which stood a pail of water and a wash-basin. I hurriedly washed my face, dressed in khaki fishing clothes, and went outside with a dixie cup of water to brush my teeth. It was one of those rare combinations of time and place that always made you a little sad at the thought of dying and never seeing its like again. There was an almost poised stillness about it, as if the day were waiting to explode. The surface of the narrow inlet, walled in by high-crowned and shadowy timber, was unbroken and dark, and little feathers of mist curled off it to hang suspended against the backdrop of the trees. Before me and a little to the right eight or ten skiffs were moored to a float that ran out from the shore like something lying on a mirror. Everything was wet with dew.

The man who had driven up in the car had apparently gone into the main building. I went over and entered. The lantern was burning again, its white light issuing from the doorway to blend with the gray tones of dawn. Jewel Nunn, in shorts and a man’s shirt, was frying eggs on the grill. She glanced up sullenly as she heard the screen door open, and I saw that her eyes were puffy and faintly red as if from sleeplessness or crying. Nunn himself was taking some spinning lures from the showcase. He nodded curtly. The other man, presumably the one who had called last night, was sitting at the counter. He turned his head to look around at me. I didn’t know him. He was a slender, graying man in his fifties, neatly dressed in pressed khakis that obviously were not his standard garb. A doctor, you would have said, or perhaps an attorney, or bank official.

He nodded pleasantly. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said. I sat down on the stool at the left end of the counter and ordered some coffee and two eggs. We ate silently.

The other man finished and paid for his breakfast with a dollar bill. Nunn came out of the doorway leading to the rear. He was carrying a small outboard motor.

“You about ready, Godwin?” he asked.

“No hurry,” I said. “Just tell me which boat.”

“What kind of motor you got?”

I nodded to the one he was carrying. “Same thing.”

“Take number six then.”

He and the other man went out. I heard them collecting gear from the car as I finished the eggs. I stood up and took a five from my wallet, moving along the counter until I was standing over the cigar box as she made change. There was only the same money in it there’d been last night. Well what had I expected? The whole thing looked silly.

I went out. It was fully light now. I went back to the cabin and draped my bedding over a wire outside between two trees so it would sun during the day. I unlocked the station wagon and carried the motor down to the float. Nunn and his passenger were loaded and apparently ready to go, but he was fiddling with the motor. He looked up and nodded to a skiff that had a crudely painted numeral 6 on the bow. I clamped the motor on the transom and lit a cigarette before going back for my tackle.

When I came back and began putting the stuff in the skiff they were still sitting there. The gray-haired man was looking impatient, but he said nothing. Nunn appeared in no hurry to start; he was still puttering around the motor and bailing out the skiff. When I had my gear loaded he made a couple of half-hearted pulls with the starter rope.

“I thought you overhauled these motors,” he said with a sour glance in my direction.

“We did,” I said. “Try opening the shut-off valve.”

He grunted and turned it. On the next pull the motor took hold. “Follow us if you want to,” he said, throttling it down so he could be heard. “Best fishing is up where we’re going.”

“Thanks,” I said, wondering at this burst of generosity. His passenger was paying for his guide services; it was a little strange he’d offer them to me for nothing.

They started up the inlet between the walls, of trees. I cranked the motor and followed, with no intention of sticking with them all the way up. I liked to fish alone, aside from the fact it was discourteous from a sporting standpoint to freeload where somebody else was picking up the tab for the guide.

Javier was not a single large lake in the accepted sense of the word; it was rather a lake system. The only open body of water of any size was at the lower end, an expanse of fairly shallow water perhaps a little less than a mile wide and only slightly longer. Beyond that it was a vast network of sloughs, channels, and swampy areas in heavy timber, all connected by waterways passable to outboard craft. Some of the sloughs and channels were quite extensive, running up to a quarter mile in width. I wasn’t afraid of becoming lost: years of hunting and fishing had made me at home in this kind of terrain, and in my tackle box I carried a large-scale county map that showed it all in detail. We came out of the inlet into open water, keeping close to the weed beds and old snags of trees along the eastern side. The sun was not up yet, and the air was cool and fresh. Once I saw a flash of white in the edge of the timber as we startled a deer drinking in the shallows. The swirls of feeding bass could be seen now and then among the pads.

Nunn veered off to the left and entered a channel in the upper end. I continued straight ahead. In a few minutes I cut the motor and let the boat drift as I began setting up the fly-rod. I was near the north end of the open water myself, but to the eastward of the channel in which Nunn and his passenger had disappeared. Directly ahead another winding and timber-walled channel came in, bearing off to the north and east. The boat came to rest and I shipped the oars, kicking it ahead now and then between casts into pockets among the pads off to my left. After five minutes nothing had struck the silvery streamer fly I was using, so I removed it from the leader and fastened on a green, cork-bodied popping bug. I dropped it in a small opening thirty feet away, twitched the line to make it gurgle, and a bass smashed it, erupting from the water with a head-shaking leap as I set the hook. I worked him away from the pads, wore him down, and slipped the net under him to work the hook out of his mouth. I lost the next two, and then landed another which I also released. For a half hour I gave myself up wholly to the sheer joy of fishing, and the baffling riddle of those twenty dollar bills was gone from my mind. The sun came up and it began to be hot. There was no breeze at all and the surface of the lake was like glass.