Hot Spot (12 page)

“And when you went in, there wasn’t anybody in the place, as far as you could see?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“But of course you didn’t think anything about it? I mean, it happens every day—a bank with money lying around everywhere and nobody in sight looking after it. You didn’t think about it again, did you?”

“Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, I thought they were goofier than bedbugs.”

“But you went right ahead and put your money in it, didn’t you?”

“I had to, if I was going to put it anywhere. It was the only bank in town.”

He shifted his attack then. That was the trouble with him; you could never tell where he was going to hit you next. “You’re a pretty big man, Madox. How much do you weigh?”

“Around two-fifteen. Why?”

“And just from looking at you I’d say not much of it’s fat. There’s a lot of power there. What I’m getting at is a long talk I had with Julian Ward. I spent about two hours with him, trying to find something to start with. He didn’t see the man who tied him up; all he saw was a blanket. But there was one thing he
was
certain about—and that was whoever did the job was a big man and a powerful one. He said he’d never felt such absolute helplessness in his life.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I know Ward. He’s the man who opened the account for me. He’s sixty if he’s a day, and he wouldn’t weigh 140 in a wet overcoat. A high-school kid could manhandle him.”

“Sure. But the thing that stuck in his mind wasn’t that it was done, but the
way
it was done. No effort. So much reserve power the man didn’t even hurt him, just picked him up and set him down the way you would a baby.”

“All right,” I said. “So it was a big man. Am I the only one in the state?”

“You’re the only one so far that fits exactly in the whole picture.”

“Well, look,” I said angrily. “Let’s get down to some facts. You say the bank was robbed while that building was burned down, that whoever cleaned it out set the building afire so he wouldn’t be bothered by kibitzers looking over his shoulder. Well, I was at the fire. So how in hell could I have been in two places at once?”

He stopped and sat down on the edge of the desk again, with what looked like a little smile around the corners of his mouth. “I wondered when you’d get around to that,” he said. “Can you prove you were at the fire?”

I had sense enough to lead into it gradually. This white-haired bloodhound could smell a pat alibi a mile. “Well, damn,” I said, “somebody must have seen me. After all, there were more than a thousand people milling around—”

“But anybody in particular?” he asked.

“Well, I didn’t go around shaking hands and taking down the names and addresses of witnesses, if that’s what you mean. But let me think. There’s bound to be somebody who remembers me. I talked to some of them—”

“Why not go ahead and say it?” he asked softy. “One of the men you talked to is sitting right there looking at you. He remembers you. He remembers how you made a big splash handling hose and helping shove the crowd back—twenty-five minutes after the fire started, and after the bank was already robbed.”

T
HAT STARTED IT, AND IT
went on and on until time meant nothing any more. They had Gulick’s statement that I’d left the car lot when the fire engine went by, and they said nobody had seen me again until a full twenty-five minutes had gone by. I said I’d been at the fire the whole time. They said I hadn’t. I began to feel dazed, and hypnotized, too tired to lift my hands or light a cigarette or think. The world became nothing but heat and white light and an endless rain of questions beating against me. They took turns. Tate went out for coffee and when he came back the Sheriff went out. It made no difference. The questions and the accusations were the same and after a while I couldn’t tell the voices apart.

“Where did you go that Friday?”

“I went to Houston.”

“Where did you go that night?”

“Swimming. I told you.
I went swimming.”

“You went somewhere to get rid of that money. Where’d you hide it?”

“I went swimming.”

“Did you bury it?”

“I went swimming.”

“Where did you bury it?”

“I didn’t bury anything.”

“How did you mark the place?”

“I went swimming.”

“Was it near the river?”

“It was in the river.”

“You buried the money in the river?”

“I didn’t bury any money. I didn’t have any money. I don’t know anything about any money.”

“Did you bury it along the road somewhere? Did you bury it in a money bag? What kind of bag? What’d you carry it away from the bank in? Did you count it? Don’t you know the bank has a record of the serial numbers? You can’t spend it.
Where did you hide it?”

“I didn’t bury anything.”

“Where did you buy that clock?”

“I never saw the clock before.”

“Did you go to Houston?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the name of the girl?”

“Kelvey.”

“I thought Kelvey was the man who owed you money.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“You just said the girl’s name was Kelvey. Who owed you money?”

“Kelvey.”

“There wasn’t any girl, was there? You went down there to buy a clock to make a fire-bomb.
Where’d you buy that clock?”

“I didn’t.”

“You stood behind the door in the can and threw a blanket over him when he came in. Why didn’t you sap him?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“You knew he was an old man and you were afraid you’d kill him and you didn’t want a murder rap on your hands. Wasn’t that it?”

“I’ve told you a thousand times. I was at the fire.”

“I’m talking about before you got to the fire.”

“I got there within two or three minutes after the fire-truck.”

“What time was that?”

“How the hell do I know? Was there
anybody
at the fire who could tell you exactly what time it was?”

“Why didn’t somebody see you?”

“They did. Tate saw me.”

“Why didn’t he see you before the bank was robbed?”

“How do I know? Maybe he did.”

“He says he didn’t.”

“All right. Ask him to name all the other people he saw there, and the exact times he saw them.”

“You made a big show when you got there, didn’t you? Everybody could see you. But it was too late. That was
after
the bank was robbed.”

It went on. I was groggy. After a while I could see yellow light along the wall and thought my mind was becoming unstuck. It was sunlight, coming in through the bars on the window.

They fingerprinted me, took my belt and wallet, and led me upstairs to a cell. I sat down on the side of a bunk with my head in my hands while the whole place revolved slowly around me. I could still hear the questions. The voices wouldn’t stop.

Two trusties or turnkeys came down the corridor with breakfast. It consisted of a pile of grey oatmeal on a tin plate and a cup of greenish-black coffee with oil on it. I set the oatmeal on the floor and drank the coffee. It was awful. I had only two cigarettes left, so I tore one in two and smoked half of it.

There was another man in the cell, but I hadn’t paid much attention to him until now he came over holding out a cigarette. “If’n you don’t want the oatmeal, I’ll eat it,” he said. “I’ll trade you a cigarette for it.” He was a thin middle-aged man with sandy hair and a red, sunburned neck like a farmer.

I took it. “Thanks,” I said.

I lay down in the bunk and put an arm up over my face to shut out the light and tried to sleep. It wasn’t any good. Where did we go from here? I couldn’t prove I was at the fire all the time, and they couldn’t prove I wasn’t. The only thing they had to go on was the fact that that Sheriff knew I was the one who’d done it, knew it absolutely and without doubt—and without any proof at all that they could take into court. Nobody had seen me. They had my fingerprints, but I didn’t have a record, and I hadn’t left any prints in the bank because I’d used a handkerchief around my hand opening drawers and doors. What did they have on their side? Nothing—except that they could keep on asking questions until I went crazy.

They had to have a confession. And they had to make me show them where the money was so I couldn’t repudiate it in court. Could they do it? I didn’t know. There wasn’t any way to tell what you’d do after two or three days of that.

Sometime in the afternoon they came and got me again. The Sheriff was in the office, along with Buck and Tate, and another man I didn’t know. He could have been the prosecuting attorney or one of the detectives from Houston.

“We’re going to give you one more chance to come clean,” the Sheriff said.

“How much longer does this go on?” I asked.

“Till you tell us what you did with that money.”

“I don’t know anything about any money.”

It was the last session all over again, only worse. Sometimes three of them would be hammering at me at the same time, one in front and one on each side so I’d have to keep turning my head to answer. One would fire a question at me and before I could get my mouth open there’d be two more.

“Where’d you go the night before the fire?”

“How do I know? To the movies, I think.”

“Your landlady said she heard you come in around two a.m.”

“Where’d you go last night before they picked you up?”

“I told you—”

“Do a lot of running around at night, don’t you?”

“In a hell of a hurry to get to that fire, weren’t you? Gulick says you took off from there like a ruptured duck. But just why was it
you never did even go near the first one?”

And then, after about an hour, there was an abrupt change in the attack. Buck left the room, and when he came back he had two more men with him. They were prisoners, because I remembered seeing them upstairs in the cells. He lined the three of us up about four feet apart in a row and then got in the line himself. Tate and the man I didn’t know sat in chairs along the other wall, not saying anything and just watching intently. I kept my eye on the Sheriff. He was up to something, and I’d seen enough of him by this time to know it would be dangerous.

“All right, not a word out of any of you,” he said, and went over and opened the door. I could feel the tension building up.

“We’re ready,” he said to somebody in the hall. He stepped outside. I watched the door, conscious of the sweat breaking out on my face. Then he came back, leading someone by the arm. It was the old blind Negro, Uncle Mort.

You could feel the whole room tighten up. The two prisoners were watching the Negro, not knowing what it was all about but scared. I watched him and the Sheriff, feeling all the eyes on me and trying to guess what was coming. The Sheriff led him down the line, stopping him in front of each man about three feet away and facing him.

It was the stillness that made it bad. Nobody said a word. They stood for maybe a minute in front of the first man, and then moved to the next one. It was completely fantastic. It was a police line-up for a blind man.

I was third in line, after the two prisoners. I watched the expressionless black face and the sightless eyes behind the glasses. What was he doing? Listening? Smelling? Or could he actually see? I remembered the way he had tracked me there in the bank. And then I began to get it. It was the silence which tipped me off. He was listening to the breathing of each man when the Sheriff stopped him.

He stopped in front of me. We were facing each other in exactly the same way we had in the bank, and from the same arm’s-length distance. It was insane. It would make you scream if you didn’t have good nerves. They were trying to prove I had held up the bank, and I was standing right there in the midst of them facing the very man who’d watched me do it—except that he couldn’t see. But was there something characteristic about my breathing that would identify me? My nose was broken; was that it? I waited, sweating. He moved on to Buck.

Then they were coming back to me again, and I could see it. They weren’t trying to identify my—they were trying to make me break. It was just psychology. A thing like that wouldn’t hold up in court, but if they could crack my nerve and make me confess,
that
would. There’d be any one of a hundred signals he could give the Negro to tip him when he was in front of the right man.

They stopped in front of me. The Negro’s face was blank as death. “Hit sound like him,” he said then.

“You sure, Uncle Mort?” the Sheriff asked.

“Suah sound like him. Got a kind of bleep, like a teakettle.”

“You’ve heard it before?”

“Heered it twice befoah. One day about three weeks back, befoah the bank got held up, an’ then the next time whilst I’m a-standin’ there an’ the man holdin’ up the bank right in front of me.”

“And that first time, there was a fire that day too, wasn’t there? And nobody in the bank except this man?”

“Yessuh. That right. I went in to ask Mist’ Julian wheahabouts the fiah, only he ain’t in theah. Jes’ this man. Suah sound like him.”

“All right, Uncle Mort. That’s all.” The Sheriff led him to the door and turned him over to someone in the hall. Buck went out with the two prisoners.

“Sit down, Madox.” The Sheriff nodded curtly towards the chair. When I was seated, he said, “All right. You ready to make a statement now? What did you do with the money?”

“So we’re back to that again?”

“Why don’t you get wise to yourself, Madox? You can see we’ve got the goods on you. You just trying to make it tougher on yourself?”

“No.”

“You heard that Negro. He picked you out of four men. And he can do it in court.”

“Not without you there to squeeze his arm.”

“I didn’t squeeze his arm. He recognized your breathing.”

“Bad sweat. What the hell is this, Alice in Wonderland?”

“Have a little trouble getting your breath, don’t you, with that broken nose? Ever have a doctor look at it?”

“No.”

“Probably don’t even notice it yourself, do you? That little whistle, I mean.”

“Cut it out, will you? So the man who robbed the bank was breathing.”

He stopped directly in front of me and pointed the cigar in my face. “Look, Madox. I’m not trying to find out who robbed that bank. I already know that.
And you know that I know it.
Don’t you? So I want to tell you something. You’re not going to get away with it. So help me God, I’m going to prove it if it’s the last thing I ever do in this world. We’ll start at the beginning again. Now tell me where you went when the fire broke out.”