Talk of The Town (5 page)

“That’s
my
number,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“They were the plates off my car.”

We’ll show you tomorrow,
he’d said.
But just a hint! you understand.
The job was for my benefit. He’d done five hundred to a thousand dollars’ worth of damage to one of her rooms to get his message across to me.

I stepped over by her. “Can you describe him?” I asked.

Her head was bowed again, and her hands trembled as they pleated and unpleated a fold of her skirt. She was slipping back into the wooden insularity of shock. I knelt beside the chair. I hated to hound her this way, but when the doctor arrived he’d given her a sedative, and it might be twenty-four hours before I could talk to her again.

“Can you give me any kind of description of him?” I asked gently.

She raised her head a little and focused her eyes on me, then drew a hand across her face in a bewildered gesture. She took a shaky breath. “I—I—”

Josie shot me an angry and troubled glance. “Hadn’t you ought to leave her alone? The pore child can’t takes no more.”

“I know,” I said.

Mrs. Langston made a last effort. “I’m all right.” She paused, and then went on in a voice that was almost inaudible and was without any expression at all. “I think he was about thirty-five. Tall. Perhaps six foot. But very thin. He had sandy hair, and pale blue eyes, and he’d been out in the sun a lot. You know—wrinkles in the corners of the eyes—bleached eyebrows. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“You’re doing fine,” I told her. “Can you think of anything else?”

She took a deep breath. “I think he wore glasses. . . Yes. . . . They had steel rims. . . . He had on a white shirt. . . . But no tie.”

“Any distinguishing marks? Scars, things like that?”

She shook her head.

A car came to a stop on the gravel outside. I stood up. “What’s the doctor's name?” I asked Josie.

“Dr. Graham,” she said.

I went out. A youngish man with a pleasant, alert face and a blond crew-cut was slamming the door of a green two-seater. He had a small black bag in his hand.

“Dr. Graham? My name’s Chatham,” I said. We shook hands and I told him quickly what had happened. “On top of all the rest of it, I suppose it overloaded her. Hysteria, shock—I don’t know exactly what you’d call it. But I think she’s on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown.”

“Yes, I see. We’d better have a look at her,” he said politely, but with the quick impatience of all physicians for all lay diagnosis.

I followed him inside.

He spoke to her, and then frowned at the woodenness of her response. “We’d better get her into the bedroom,” he said. “If you’ll help—”

“Just bring your bag,” I said.

She tried to protest and stand, but I picked her up and followed Josie in through the curtained doorway behind the desk. It was a combined living- and dining-room. There were two doors opposite. The one on the right led into the bedroom. It was cool and quiet, with the curtains closed against the sun, and furnished with quiet good taste. The rug was pearl-gray, and there was a double bed covered with a dark blue corduroy spread. I placed her on it.

“I’m all right now,” she said, trying to sit up. I pushed her gently back onto the pillow. Framed in the aureole of dark and tousled hair, her face was like white wax.

Dr. Graham placed his bag on a chair and was taking out the stethoscope. He nodded for me to leave. “You stay,” he said to Josie.

I went back through the outer room. It had a fireplace at one end, and there were a number of mounted fish on the walls and some enlarged photographs of boats. I thought absently that the fish were dolphin, but I paid little attention to them. I was in a hurry. I grabbed up the phone in the office and called the Sheriff.

“He’s not here,” a man’s voice said. “This is Redfield. What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling from the Magnolia Lodge-” I began.

“Yes?” he interrupted. “What’s wrong out there now. The voice wasn’t harsh so much as abrupt and impatient and somehow annoyed.

“Vandalism,” I said. “An acid job. Somebody’s wrecked one of the rooms.”

“Acid? When did it happen?”

“Sometime between two a.m. and daylight.”

“He rented the room? Is that it?” In spite of the undertone of annoyance or whatever it was, this one obviously was more on the ball than that comedian I’d talked to yesterday. There was a tough professional competence in the way he snapped the questions.

“That’s right,” I said. “How about shooting a man here?”

“You got a license number? Description of the car?”

“The car's a green Ford sedan,” I replied, and quickly repeated her description of the man. “The number was phony. The plates were stolen.”

“Hold it a minute!” he cut in brusquely. “What do you mean, they’re stolen? How would you know?”

“Because they were mine. My car's in the garage, being worked on. The big garage with a showroom—”

“Not so fast. Just who are you, anyway?”

I told him. Or started to. He interrupted me again. “Look, I don’t get you in this picture at all. Put Langston on.”

“She’s collapsed,” I said. “The doctor’s with her. How about getting a man out here to look at that mess?”

“We’ll send somebody,” he said. “And you stick around. We want to talk to you.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

He hung up.

I stood for a moment, thinking swiftly. The chances were it was sulphuric. That was cheap, and common, easy to get. And if I could neutralize it soon enough I might save a little something from the wreckage. The woodwork and furniture could be refinished if the stuff didn’t eat in too far. But I had to be sure, first. Turning, I hurried back into the room behind the curtained doorway, and took the door on the left this time. It was the kitchen. I began yanking open the cupboards above the sink. In a moment I found what I was looking for, a small tin of bicarbonate of soda.

Grabbing it, I went out and up to Room 5 at the double. I stood in the doorway and rubbed my handkerchief into the sodden ruin of the carpet until it was damp with the acid. Then I spread it on the concrete slab of the porch, sprinkled a heavy coating of soda over one half of it and waited. In a few minutes the untreated part tore at a touch, like wet paper, but that under the soda was merely discolored. I kicked it off onto the gravel and went back. My hand itched where it had been in contact with the acid. I found a tap in front of the office and washed it.

I could take her car if I could find the keys. But I wanted to talk to the doctor before he left, and I had to be here when the men from the Sheriff’s office showed up. I went inside and called a taxi. When I hung up I could hear the professional murmur of the doctor's voice in the bedroom. With nothing to occupy my mind for the moment, I was conscious of the rage again. The yearning to get my hands on him was almost like sexual desire. Cool off, I thought; you’d better watch that. In another minute or two a car stopped outside. I went out.

It was Jake, with his keyboard of grave and improbable teeth. “Howdy,” he said.

“Good morning, Jake.” I handed him a twenty. “Run over to the nearest grocery store or market, will you, and bring me a case of baking soda.”

He stared. “A case? You sure must have a king-size indigestion.”

“Yeah,” I said. When I offered no explanation, he took off, still looking at me as if I’d gone mad.

There’d probably be very little chance of tracing the acid, I thought. We were dealing with a sharper mind than that: he’d know better than to buy it, and if he could break into that garage to lift my number plates he could certainly do the same to some battery shop to steal it.

I glanced at my watch with sudden impatience. What the hell was keeping them? It had been ten minutes since I’d called. I went back inside. Josie had come out and was standing by the desk in doleful and anxious suspension as if she couldn’t figure out which way to turn to pick up the broken thread of her day. The doctor came out through the curtains and set his bag on the desk. He was carrying a prescription pad.

“What do you think?” I asked.

He glanced at me, frowning. “You’re not a relative by any chance?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded. “I didn’t think she had any here—”

“Listen, Doctor,” I said, “somebody’s got to take charge here. I don’t know what friends she has in town, or where you could run down her next of kin, so you might as well tell me. I’m a friend of hers.”

“Very well.” He put down the prescription pad, undipped his pen, and started writing. “Get these made up right away and start giving them as soon as she wakes up. I gave her a sedative, so it’ll be late this afternoon or tonight. But what she needs more than anything is rest--”

He stopped then and glanced up at me. “And what I mean by rest is exactly that. Absolute rest, in bed. Quiet. With as few worries as possible and no more emotional upheavals if you can help it.”

“You name it,” I said. “She gets it.”

“Try to get some food into her. I’d say off-hand she was twenty pounds underweight. I can’t tell until we can run lab tests, of course, but I don’t think it’s anemia or anything organic at all. It looks like overwork, lack of sleep, and emotional strain.”

“What about nervous breakdown?”

He shook his head. “That’s always unpredictable; it varies too much with individual temperament and nervous reserve. We’ll just have to wait and see what she’s like in the next few days. Off-hand, I’d say she’s dangerously close to it. I don’t know how long she’s been over-drawing her account, and I’m no psychiatrist, anyway, but I do think she’s been under too much pressure too long—”

His voice trailed off. Then he shrugged, and said crisply, “Well, to get back to more familiar ground. This is a tranquillizer. And this one’s vitamins. And here’s Phenobarbital.” He glanced up at me as he shoved the prescriptions across the desk. “Keep the phenobarbs yourself and give it to her by individual dose, as directed.”

“That bad?” I asked.

“No. Probably not. But why take chances?”

“Had I better round up a nurse?”

He glanced at Josie. “Do you stay here nights?”

“No, suh,” she replied. “I ain’t been, but I could.”

“Fine. There should be somebody around. For the next few nights, anyway.”

“You do that,” I told her. “Let the rest of the place go and just take care of her. I’m going to close it for the time being, anyway.”

Dr. Graham gathered up his bag. “Call me when she wakes up. I won’t come out unless it’s necessary, but you can tell when you talk to her.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

He drove off. Just as he was going out onto the highway, Jake turned in. I set the case of bicarbonate on the porch, took the change, paid him, and gave him a large tip. He departed towards town, shaking his head.

I found a long garden hose that would reach up to No. 5, and coupled it to the tap outside the office. But I couldn’t touch a thing until they’d been over it. I glanced up the highway; there was no Sheriff’s car in sight. I looked at my watch, threw the hose savagely onto the gravel, strode into the office, and picked up the phone.

The same Deputy answered. “Sheriff’s office. Redfield.”

“This is Chatham, at the Magnolia Lodge motel—”

“Yes, yes,” he cut me off brusquely. “What do you want now?”

“I want to know when you’re going to send somebody out here.”

“Don’t heave your weight around. We’re sending a man.”

“When?” I asked. “Try to make it this week, will you? I want to neutralize that acid and wash the place out before it eats it down to the foundations.”

“Well, wash it out. You’ve got our permission.”

“Look, don’t you want pictures for evidence? And how about checking the hardware for prints?”

“Get off my back, will you? For Christ’s sake, if he was working with acid, he had on rubber gloves. Prints!”

There was a lot of logic in that, of course. But it wasn’t infallible, by any means, and as an assumption it was slipshod police work. And I had an odd feeling he knew it. He was being a little too hard, a little too vehement

“And another thing,” he went on, “about this pipe dream that he was using your plates. I don’t like gags like that not even a little. I just called the garage, and both plates are right there on your car.”

I frowned. Had she seen them or merely taken he word for it? Then I remembered. She’d said they were California tags, but all he’d put down on the card had been the number. She’d seen them herself.

“So he put them back,” I said. “Don’t ask me why.”

“I won’t. I’d be goofy enough if I even believed he’d taken them.”

“Did they report the garage had been entered?”

“No. Of course not.”

“All right, listen. It’s very easy to settle. But why not get off your fat and go do it yourself instead of telephoning? If you’ll check that garage, you’ll find it’s been broken into somewhere. And you’ll also find those plates have been taken off, and then put back. There’s no strain. California didn’t issue a new plate in ‘fifty-seven, just a sticker tab. So they’ve been bolted on there for eighteen months. If the bolts are still frozen, the drinks are on me. But how about dusting them for prints first? Not that I think you’ll find any: the joker is too smart for that.”

“Do you think I’m nuts? Why the hell would anybody go to all that trouble to get a license plate?”

“If you ever get out here,” I said, “I’ll tell you about it.”

“Stick around. There’s going to be somebody. You’re beginning to interest me.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

I put down the instrument, and was just going out the door when it rang. I went back. “Hello. Magnolia Lodge motel.”

There was no answer, only the faint hiss of background noise and what might have been somebody breathing. “Hello,” I said again.

The receiver clicked in my ear as he hung up.

The creep, I thought. Or was it my friend this time, checking to see if I was still around? Then a sudden thought arrested me, and I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me before. It could be the same man. Maybe he wasn’t a psycho at all. Maybe it was a systematic and cold-blooded campaign to wreck her health and sanity and ruin her financially. And he’d wanted to get rid of me in case I was trying to help her.