Talk of The Town (12 page)

Dawn was breaking when I swung off the highway at the two mailboxes and followed the dirt road through the pines. No one was up at either of the two farmhouses. As I passed the cattle-loading pen, a covey of young quail crossed the road ahead of me and then flushed, exploding fanwise like feathered projectiles to sail out over the palmettos. In a few minutes I pulled in and stopped under the tree in front of the fire-blackened chimney.

I had wakened before daybreak and almost at once I’d been struck by the thought I was almost positive there had been no other car tracks in this road yesterday, at least none this side of the farmhouses. How had he got in here? There must be a road of some sort in that timber beyond the fields and he’d come in the back way. If I could find it, I might locate the place he’d left his car.

It was humid and warm and the air was utterly still as if the day were poised and holding its breath, waiting to explode. There was no sound, except now and then the
bub-bob-white
of a quail somewhere out in the field. It still wasn’t full light, but I could see well enough to make out another set of tire tracks besides the ones I had made yesterday. The redheaded Deputy, I thought. When he’d been unable to provoke me into a charge of assaulting an officer, he’d become bored enough to come on out here and make a stab at doing his job. For a moment I felt almost sorry for Redfield. It was a sadly undermanned police force, with one cop and two clowns.

There was no point in even going inside the barn now; it would be too dark to see anything. I went on past it, hearing my shoes slash through the dead weeds and feeling a chill between my shoulderblades as I thought again of that shotgun going off behind my head. Some two hundred yards beyond, at the lower end of the smaller field, I crawled between sagging strands of barbed wire and pushed into the timber. It was mostly oak and scrubby pine. So far I had seen no footprints, but I had no illusions as to my being a scout or tracker. I’d lived all my life on pavement. And what I was looking for was a road; I’d be able to see that.

I crossed a sandy ravine in which ran a small trickle of water, and then beyond it the way led upwards at a slight grade. I kept going. It was easy traveling, fairly open with not much underbrush and only occasional bunches of dead grass and nettles. It was broad daylight now. In another few minutes I hit the road. It was only a pair of dusty ruts winding through the trees, but there were tire tracks in it, and they looked fairly fresh. At least they had been put there since the last rain. The road ran roughly north and south, parallel to the one I’d come in on. I marked the spot by dropping a stick in one of the ruts, and turned right, following it south towards the highway. After a half-mile I’d still seen no indication the car had ever stopped or pulled out of the ruts. I turned and went back, and a few hundred yards north of the marker I’d left I found what I was looking for. An even fainter pair of ruts led off to the left, towards the fields in back of the barn, and there were fresh tread marks in the dust. They were a standard diamond pattern, which meant nothing, since there were thousands just like them anywhere. The sun was coming up now.

I followed them, walking between the ruts. In places the ground was covered with a carpet of pine needles so the treads didn’t show at all, but in others there was open sand and I examined them carefully, looking for flaws or cut places that might identify one of the tires. There were none that I could see. In about two hundred yards I came to the place he’d stopped and turned around. A fairly large pine had fallen across the trace of a road, and there was no way he could get around it. I studied the tracks. He’d pulled out to left, reversed as far as he could go, and then had pulled back into the road, facing the way he’d come. Several drops of oil had seeped into the sand in one place midway between the ruts, which meant whoever it was hadn’t merely turned here and gone back. His car had sat here for a while. I nodded and lit a cigarette. The place should be less than half a mile directly behind the field and the barn; this was my boy, all right.

But there was nothing to indicate who he might have been or whether there had been more than one. I could see traces of footprints in one or two spots, but they were indistinct and incomplete, of no value. Then I noticed something. In turning, he’d been cramped for space because of the trees all around, and at the very end of his reverse he had backed into a pine sapling. I stood looking at it. The small gouge in the bark was unmistakable, but it was too high, at least eighteen inches above where it should have been. Then I knew what had done it. Not the bumper of a car; the tail of a pick-up truck.

Talley drove one. The picture of it flashed into my mind, standing in front of the Silver King with chicken droppings all over its sides. I shrugged it off, wondering why I kept thinking of that mush-mouthed clown. Circling the fallen tree, I went on west, towards the field. There were occasional traces of footprints between the old ruts, and in about a hundred yards I came across a half-smoked cigarette that had been ground out beneath a shoe. It had a white filter tip, and when I straightened out the torn and crumpled paper I could read the brand name. It was a Kent.

When I came back to the barn the sun was well up and it was light enough to see inside. I went through it and found nothing at all except the savagely mutilated plank at the head of the ladder where the shot charge had slashed through it. The empty shells were gone. I stood looking up at the torn plank, feeling a chill uneasiness. How would they try next? And where? They’d know I would be more difficult to decoy now, so they couldn’t get me out here in the country. Would they dare try it in town, from a car? Possibly at night, I thought; I’d have to watch all the time. It gave you the creeps.

I drove back to town, had some breakfast at the Steak House, and called the Sheriff’s office. Magruder answered. He said Redfield was taking the day off.

“What do you want?” he asked truculently.

“A cop,” I said, and hung up.

I looked up Redfield’s home number in the book, and dialed it. There was no answer.

The stores were beginning to open now. I went up the street to a hardware shop and bought a hundred-foot tape, and picked up some cheap drawing instruments at a dime store. Before I went back to the car I tried Redfield’s number again. There was still no answer. I looked at the address; there was a chance he might be working in the yard on his day off and not hear the phone. It was 1060 Clayton. That would be the third street north of Springer and way out in the east end. I drove out. It was in the last block where the street dead-ended against a fenced peach orchard. On the left was a playground and baseball diamond fenced with high wire netting. The house was on the right, the only one in the block. It was a low ranch-style with a new coat of white paint. The rural mailbox out in front bore the neatly lettered name: K. R. Redfield. I stopped and got out.

Either he or his wife was a gardener. It was a big lot, probably half an acre, and the lawn in front showed plenty of care. At the left there was a concrete drive and a six-foot trellised fence with pyracantha espaliered beautifully against it. The same type of fence, covered with climbing roses, was on the right, with another strip of lawn and walk paved with bricks laid in sand. I stepped up on the porch and rang the bell. There was no answer. I crossed the lawn to the driveway and looked towards the back.

The garage was at least a hundred feet back, past this wing of the L- or J-shaped house. The door was closed. Bougainvillea was splashed like flame against the side of it. I stepped on back and around the corner, hoping he might be working in the backyard. There was a big oak tree over on the right, with more brick paving under it, and two peach trees and another strip of velvety lawn. He had been working back here, apparently laying a low brick wall for a raised flower-bed along the back of the lawn, but there was no one in sight now. Tools were still lying near the job, and there was a pile of sand and a bag of cement at one end of the brick paving.

I had come slightly past the inner corner of the end of the wing, and as I turned to leave I glanced idly behind me at the alcove formed by the two wings of the house. Then I froze in confusion. Almost under my feet, a girl with dark, wine-red hair was lying on her back on a large beach towel with her feet towards me and her hands under the back of her head. She was completely nude except for a pair of dark glasses that were aimed at my face in a blank, inscrutable stare. I whirled, and was back around the corner on the drive again by the time I had grasped the obvious, but comforting, fact that she was asleep. My face was still hot, however, as I hurried down the drive and got into the station wagon.

I could still see her. She was Redfield’s wife and I didn’t want to, and tried guiltily to scrape the picture of her off my mind, but it stuck, the way the bright flame of an electric welding arc does after you’ve closed your eyes too late. I could see the dark red hair spread across the towel and the plastic squeeze bottle of suntan lotion beside her hip, and the concave belly—I cursed, and whirled the car around.

At the end of the block I turned left and came out on the main road near the Spanish Main. Redfield’s place was almost behind the Magnolia Lodge. Not more than a quarter of a mile, I thought.

Georgia Langston was still asleep. I drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen with Josie, changed into faded denim trousers, and went to work. I tore up the rest of the ruined carpet in Room 5, swept it out onto the gravel with the piled remains of the mattresses, bedclothes, and curtains, and phoned for a truck to haul it to the city dump. When it was gone I washed out the whole room with the hose once more and pushed the water out of the door with a broom. The last of the acid should be out now, and in four or five days when the room was thoroughly dry I could paint it and have a new carpet laid.

The anger at all this senseless ruin began to wear off a little, and I felt fine. It was wonderful to be doing something again. The sun beat down and sweat rolled off my shoulders as I took the hundred-foot tape and a big rough pad and pencil and went out front. I stood by the sign where I could see the entire front of the place and as I began excitedly visualizing it as it would be, I wanted to grab the tools now and begin the assault on it, violently, in the hot sun. I made a crude sketch of the lot and the buildings, reeled out the tape, and began writing in the dimensions. I took all the data into my room, switched on the air-conditioner, and drew it to scale on a large sheet of drawing paper, putting the fifteen by thirty foot pool in the center, almost in front of the office, with the concrete edge around it and the whole thing bordered with grass. The drive in from the road would be blacktop paving, as would the parking area in front of the rooms. Border the drive with two raised flower-beds and at the outer ends of the front lawns set solid masses of bamboo. That should grow here, and grow fast. Light the bamboo from below with colored spotlights—chi-chi and a little on the overdone side, perhaps, but it would be spectacular, and that was what we wanted. Children’s playground here, at this end of the lawn.

I was breaking it down into square yards of lawn, square yards of blacktop and concrete deck, lineal feet of underground conduit and water pipe and numbers of sprinkler heads, when there was a knock on the door. I looked at my watch and was startled to see it was after eleven. I’d really been wrapped up in it.

“Come in,” I called.

It was Georgia Langston. She was wearing a crisp white skirt and a short-sleeved blouse the color of cinnamon, and looked refreshed and very easy on the eyes. She smiled. “I’m not interrupting, am I?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Come on in. I want you to see this.” I stood up. She came over and stood by my shoulder as I explained the drawing to her.

“What do you think?” I asked.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful,” she said quietly. “But are you sure you want to do it?”

“Yes. The more I look at it, the more it appeals to me. Then it’s a deal?”

She nodded. Then all at once she smiled warmly and held out her hand.

“I’ll start the transfer of the money to an account here in the local bank,” I said. “It’ll take several days. In the meantime you can get your lawyer to draw up the partnership agreement.”

“All right,” she said. Then she shook her head wearily. “But, Bill, how can we even reopen the place? We don’t know what they’ll do next.”

I took hold of her arms. “I’m still working on it. There are a couple of small leads and I’m trying to get hold of Redfield now.”

“Do you think he’ll ever do anything?”

“He has to,” I said. “We’ve just got to keep trying.”

When she went back to the office I stripped off the sweaty clothes, showered, and changed the dressing on my arm. I put on a fresh sports shirt and some new trousers and made up a bundle of laundry to drop off in town. It was a quarter to twelve when I got out to Redfield’s again, and this time I had better luck. Just as I was stopping I caught a glimpse of him along the right side of the house. He was working in the backyard. I started rather hesitantly along the brick walk, but when he saw me coming and made no move to head me off I gathered it was all right. She had gone inside.

He was shirtless, kneeling as he worked at the low brick wall. Beside him, in the shade of the large oak, was the steel wheelbarrow containing a small heap of mortar. He glanced up.

“Hello,” I said.

He nodded curtly, but made no reply. I wondered if he thought I’d come to start trouble. He’d roughed me up in the office when he lost his temper, I outweighed him by at least thirty pounds, and he was a long way from his gun. But if the thought had even occurred to him it obviously wasn’t worrying him.

I lit a cigarette and squatted then on my heels, watching him. He was a good cop, but he’d never give Churchill any competition as an amateur bricklayer. “Something I wanted to tell you,” I said. “I went back out there this morning. And I found the place he parked his car.”

He didn’t even look up. I don’t bring the job home with me.”

He was awkward with the trowel, and kept poking and patting more mortar between the bricks with his fingers. “You’re not going to have any fingertips left,” I said. “That stuff’s abrasive.”

“I know,” he replied. “After half an hour of it they feel like they’d been sandpapered.”

“You mind if I show you something?” I asked.

“You a bricklayer?”

“Not union. But I used to do a lot of this patio stuff. Walks, borders, things like that.”

He said nothing, and for a moment I thought he was going to refuse. Then he handed me the trowel and moved back a little. I showed him how to slap down the mortar, spread it with the tip of the trowel to push it towards the edge of the bricks, and how to butter the end of the new one with mortar with a wiping motion of the trowel. I put it in place, sliced off the excess with the trowel, and went on to the next one. I put down three more.

He gave me a fleeting, hard grin. “You sure as hell make it look easy.”

“It just takes practice,” I said. “But you ought to wet your bricks down more. They’re too dry.”

“What does that do?” he asked.

“They’re porous, so they absorb all the moisture from your mortar too fast. Makes it crumbly, and it won’t bind. You got a tub or something to soak them in?”

“Sure.” He went across to the garage and came back with a small garbage can. “How’s this?”

“Fine,” I said. We filled it with bricks and turned the hose on it. “Let them soak a few minutes and then take them out.”

He nodded, and wiped the perspiration from his face. “How about a beer?”

“Sounds great,” I said.

He went through the screened back porch and into the kitchen, and emerged in a minute with two punched cans of beer. We squatted on our heels in the shade. I glanced around the rest of the patio. The other wing of the house stretched across behind us to the drive and I could see the front wheels and hood of an old car beyond the corner of it. There was a picture window in the central part, with flower-beds under it, and brick paving across the inner part of the L. That was where she had been. I tried not to think about her at all and hoped she didn’t come out.

I nodded towards the mass of bougainvillea on the garage. “Don’t you have frost here? How do you protect that?”

He took a sip of his beer. “We only have two or three a year that’re sharp enough to hurt it. I put a smudge pot back in the corner and that saves it.”

We discussed the local lawn grasses. He was full of the subject, and some of the hardness went out of his eyes as he warmed to it. He looked at me with interest. “You sound like a gardener yourself. How’d you happen to know so much about all this?”

I had an uncle who was a landscape architect,” I said. “I used to work for him.” I told him about the deal with Georgia Langston, and what I wanted to do with the grounds.

He nodded. “So that’s the deal?” He turned the beer can in his hands, staring at the lettering on it. Then he said, curtly and ill-at-ease, “I’m sorry about that business in the office.”

“Forget it,” I said.

He reached into the pocket of his trousers and brought out a packet of cigarettes and held them out. “Smoke?”

They were Kents. “Thanks,” I said. I took one and we both lit up.

We finished the beer and he rose. “Got to unload the rest of those bricks,” he said. “I’ll back in.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” I told him. I felt good about having been right about him all the time. He went on round the corner of the opposite wing of the house and I heard the car door slam. It pulled ahead in the drive, and as it came all the way into view I stared. It was a pick-up truck. He cut the wheels and backed in across the brick paving and stopped. I shot a quick glance at the rear wheels. The treads were that same diamond pattern I’d seen out there in the dust.

I kept my face expressionless. It didn’t mean anything, I thought. Plenty of people smoked that brand of cigarettes, there were hundreds of pick-up trucks around, and that was one of the most common of all truck tires. But he was out of the office when I’d got there.

We unloaded the bricks and stacked them. He leaned against the tailgate and looked at me thoughtfully. “You say you went out there this morning? And found the place he parked?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know what he was driving?”

I wasn’t too sure what he was after, but there was no use ducking it. “Yes,” I said. “A pick-up truck.”

He nodded approvingly. I was wondering if you spotted that gouged place on the sapling.”

It was a relief, somehow. The other man, the unknown, was dangerous enough, but Redfield would have been worse. “So you went out, too?” I asked.

“After Mitchell came back and told me it probably happened about the way you said. I had a hunch how he’d got in there, so I took the back road and then walked down to where he’d turned around at that fallen tree.”

“Did you go on down to the barn?” I asked.

“Sure.” He gave me that hard-bitten grin. “If you mean the cigarette butt,
I
left that. You don’t think he’d be stupid enough to do it?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not, come to think of it.”

At that moment a car came down the drive and stopped in front of the garage, and I realized I had stayed too long. It was a station wagon, and the girl who got out could have been any attractive young suburban housewife meeting the six-fifteen. except that I had to fight myself to keep from seeing her the way I had the first time. I kept my face blankly polite—I hoped.

She wore the dark red hair in a shoulder-length pony tail, and had on sandals and a crisp cotton dress with a very conservative heart-shaped face. She was prettier than most. And probably more extensively tanned—I cursed myself.

Redfield introduced us rather stiffly. She held out her hand, and smiled. “How do you do, Mr. Chatham.”

“How do you do,” I said.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked pleasantly.

I shook my head. “San Francisco.”

She regarded me thoughtfully. “It’s odd, though. I have the strangest impression I’ve seen you somewhere before.

I caught my party expression before it could slide off onto my shirt, and propped it up again. “Well—that is, I have been around here for a day or two.”

“Maybe that’s it.” Then she smiled charmingly. “You’ve had that feeling, haven’t you, Mr. Chatham. I mean, that you’ve seen someone before?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. I suppose everybody does at times.”

I was furious, and uneasy at the same time because I couldn’t see what she was up to. So she hadn’t been asleep. Then she knew it was purely accidental and that I’d fled the moment I saw her.

“How do you like our garden?” she asked. “Don’t you think Kelly’s done a wonderful job?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very good.”

Maybe she was crazy. It was another minute or two before I could get away with any grace at all. Redfield said nothing, except to thank me curtly for helping him with the bricks.

“You
must
come back, Mr. Chatham,” she said graciously.

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”

I went out to the station wagon, wondering if I was leaving blood tracks on the driveway. What was the matter with her, and what had she been trying to do? Why the knife? Or had it been that at all? Maybe she was just bouncing her nude body against me for kicks. Or as an invitation.

In the presence of her husband?
Redfield?
If she liked to live that dangerously, why not take up Russian roulette with
all
the chambers loaded?

When I got back to the motel, Georgia Langston was behind the desk in the lobby, making entries in two big ledgers. Josie was muttering indignantly. “I jest can’t do nothin’ with her, Mr. Chatham.”

“I can,” I said. I closed the ledgers, took her by the arm, and walked her into the bedroom. Stacking the two pillows, I told her firmly, “In you go.”

She sighed with exaggerated martyrdom, but lay back. I removed her sandals, dropped them by the bed, and sat down in the armchair. She turned her head then, and smiled. “You’re a bully. But nice.”

“I happen to think you’re pretty nice too,” I said. “And I don’t like picking up the pieces of people I’m fond of, so you stay there. I want to talk to you, anyway.”

She made a face. “Well, do you think I could smoke, Doctor?”

I lit a cigarette for her and one for myself. “How well did you and your husband know the Redfields?” I asked.

“Not really well,” she replied. “We rarely entertained at all. You just can’t, and operate a motel. I think we played bridge together two or three times. But he and my husband went fishing together quite often.”

“That’s something else I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “Weren’t you worried about his going fishing alone? I mean, with a history of two heart attacks?”

She nodded. “Of course. But he practically never did, because of the way I felt about it. The only reason he went alone that day was that Redfield had to go out of town at the last minute and he couldn’t get anybody else—”

“Hold it,” I said quickly. “Back up a minute. You mean he and Redfield had planned to go together, but Redfield had to cancel? Tell me exactly how it happened.”

She stared at me questioningly. “The day it all happened was Thursday, you know. They’d had the trip planned since the previous Monday, or something like that. But around noon on Wednesday Redfield called here. He was leaving town right then, going up into Alabama somewhere, I think, to extradite a prisoner, or some other police job. He said he was sorry he hadn’t called sooner.”