Girl Out Back Part 9

"All right," I said curtly.

He straightened and turned to face me. The round pixie face was filled with the wonder of a child beholding old faithful for the first time "A G-man," he said in awe. "The F.B.I. What you know about that?"

I took the folded mortgage form from my breast pocket and held it out to him. "This is the Federal warrant for your arrest."

He accepted it gingerly, as if it might explode.

Then he unfolded it and stared blankly. "I can't read nothing without my specs," he said. "They're inside."

I nodded toward the door. "All right. Let's go in."

I was right behind him. At the first step he took to the left, toward the chest, I snapped crisply, "Never mind! Stay away from those drawers. Stand right there in the center of the room."

"Yessir," he said.

"Where are they?" I asked. "I'll get them."

"On top of that dresser."

"All right," I said. "Don't move from there." I stepped over to the chest, turning my head to look back at him as I picked up the gla.s.ses. They slipped from my fingers. I made a desperate stab at them with the other hand to catch them before they could hit the floor, and batted them against the wall. The lenses shattered.

"d.a.m.n it!" I said. I turned and faced him apologetically, "I'm sorry as the devil, Mr. Cliffords. We'll get you another pair."

"Oh, that's all right," he said.

I waited for him to mention the other pair in the trunk. When we didn't find them, of course, I'd jump right down his throat for stalling, and divert his attention from a fact that could look quite fishy if he had the intelligence to grasp it. However, he said nothing about them. I glanced at him. He had taken the bait. He'd turned his head and was staring at the evidence on the kitchen table.

He shook his head resignedly. "I should have knowed," he said. "I should have knowed I'd never get away with it."

I was in. It was as easy as that.

I stepped over and gently lifted the warrant from his nerveless fingers, returning it to my pocket. "You'd better sit down," I said, not unkindly.

He collapsed into the chair beside the table. When he took his eyes off the money and looked up at me, however, I was puzzled by the expression on his face. Instead of the blank despair I had expected, there was something odd in it. Dumb admiration was as near as I could come to it.

"How did you ever find it out?" he asked.

"Never mind," I said. "We'll get to that in a minute. Right now it's my duty to warn you that anything you say can be used against you. You've got yourself in a bad jam, Mr. Cliffords."

"Will there be reporters"" he asked. "You reckon they'll take my picture and print it in the papers?"

He reminded me of a child hoping to be taken on a picnic.

"I don't think you realize the mess you're in," I said, frowning.

"Oh?" he said. "What you reckon they'll charge me with?"

I fired up a cigarette, closed the lighter, and returned it to my pocket, letting him wait. I had to scare him now, and scare him badly.

"Not nothing real serious?" he suggested. "After all, all I done was find it. . . ."

I exhaled smoke and stared at him for a long minute. "I'm afraid you're not very familiar with the law, Mr. Cliffords. A man was killed in that hold-up, as you know. That, of course, is the equivalent of first-degree murder."

"But, look, Mr. Ward . . . I didn't have nothing to do with that."

"Unfortunately," I went on sternly, "that's not quite the case. The minute you took that money for yourself and failed to report it to us, you made yourself an accessory. Under the law, you're guilty right along with Haig. However, even if the Federal charge was reduced to obstructing justice or compounding a felony, there's still the matter of prior jurisdiction. . . ."

I wasn't sure as to the accuracy of all this legal gobbledegook, but it didn't matter. He would know even less about it. And it was working. He leaned forward, staring at me.

"The State may want to hold you on a charge of murder," I went on. "That would take precedence, of course."

"Murder?"

I nodded. "We can't be sure, of course, until we exhume the body, but the local District Attorney is interested. He feels there is a good chance Haig was still alive when you found him, and that you killed him for the money. . . ."

Cliffords broke in. "But he wasn't, Mr .Ward. He was dead, I tell you. He'd been dead for days. That's how come I happened to find him; it was all them birds."

I had a hunch he was telling the truth, but the thing now was to keep him guessing and scared.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "When the body is exhumed, they may be able to tell. Just what you'll be tried for is none of my business, anyway. I'm here merely to bring you in. And, of course, to recover the money."

"Oh, I'll show you where it is," he said eagerly. "Will that help? I mean . . ."

"I can make no deals," I said, being stern about it. "Of course, obviously it won't hurt your case any, especially if you haven't spent too much of it."

"Oh, I hardly spent any at all." Then his face fell. "But I did did burn all them bonds and things, when I burned the satchel." burn all them bonds and things, when I burned the satchel."

He'd merely saved me the trouble of doing it myself, but I shook my head gravely. "That's not so good," I said. "Don't you see that establishes willful intent?"

A couple more hours of this, I thought, and I should be able to pa.s.s the bar exam.

He sighed. "I'm sure sorry, Mr. Ward."

I shook my head sympathetically. "I am, too, in a way, in spite of all the trouble you caused us. I mean, you weren't a criminal-at least, up until now. And at your age-well, even ten years. . . ."

"Ten years?" he repeated slowly. I had him going now.

"Forget I said that," I told him quickly. "I shouldn't have. I mean, I'm not a judge. I'm an arresting officer. But tell me, what in the name of Heaven did you do it for? You didn't spend much of it, you say. What did you want with it?"

He looked down at his hands. "Well, sir, it's kind of a silly thing, I reckon. It got hold of me when I seen how much there was and when I got to thinking about it afterward. If I pretended like it was mine long enough, and n.o.body come along to take it away from me, I could mebbe take and do this thing I been thinking about all my life. One of them sort of things you know you ain't ever going to do, but you just keep thinking about anyway."

"What's that?" I asked. We were wasting time, but it interested me.

"I wanted to buy a coconut farm," he said simply.

"Coconut. . .?" I stared at him, and then I saw the dream. It was all over the round, lost, wistful face-the face of the world's eternal patsy. He was like a child thinking about Christmas morning.

"On one of them islands," he went on softly, not even looking at me. "Down south, you know. Just a one-island farm, but I would own the whole island and every single, blessed thing on it. I'd live on it, in a big house on top of a hill, and there'd be all these n.i.g.g.e.rs. I'd wear boots, and one of them explorer's hats, and I'd be good to 'em. You know, things like doctoring them when they was sick, and holding trials when one of 'em stole something from another one.

"There wouldn't be any other white people except this store-keeper that I didn't like and that I'd make him jump like Billy-be-d.a.m.ned when I said something to him, and then of course the straw-boss and his wife. The straw-boss, you understand, is the one that handles the n.i.g.g.e.rs and that I give the orders to, and his wife would look just like Laura LaPlante. . . ."

He broke off, his face a picture of dreamy rapture. "You remember Laura LaPlante?

He had sixteen years on me. I shook my head. "No. But I know who you mean. nothing changes but the name."

"Anyway," he went on, not even hearing me, "this straw-boss's wife would look exactly like her, and when he was off at the other end of the island seeing to the coconut trees and telling the n.i.g.g.e.rs what to do she'd come in and sleep with me because she thought about me all the time, day and night. He'd know about it, of course, but there wasn't anything he could do because I paid him so much he didn't want to lose the job. . . ."

He sighed and shook his head. I wondered if it had ever occurred to him he could have shortened the dream considerably and got into the sack with her a lot faster by marrying the LaPlante type himself and by-pa.s.sing the overseer. But maybe that wouldn't work.

"Well, cheer up," I said. "You might have got tired of her, and think of what a h.e.l.l of a place that would have been to try to dodge a woman. Now, let's go get it."

"Sure," he replied. "But first, would you tell me how you fellers found out I had it."

"It wasn't easy," I said. "It took us a year and a half. And there's a chance we never would have if you hadn't spent some of the money we recognized. . .

"Them twenty-dollar bills," he said. "I knowed it. I knowed it."

You just knowed it too late, Bwana Sahib. "Why did you spend them, then?"

"I didn't stop to think till I'd already pa.s.sed three of 'em. Then I noticed the numbers all run in order. So you traced em?

I shook my head. "No. We never did find out who spent them originally, but we did know they came from this area. So we went back to the other angle we were working on. Haig got away from that wreck, all right, and away from Sanport-we knew that. n.o.body in Sanport would have hidden him; he was too hot. So the chances were that before the police arrived, he forced his way into a car that was pa.s.sing and put a gun on the driver. That happens quite often. But the thing we never could understand was why the driver didn't report it afterward. Even if Haig had killed him and stolen the car, the whole thing would have come out eventually. The car would have been found, or some friend or relative of the driver would have reported him missing. That was the thing that threw us, you see. Simply that the driver would have reported it if he were alive, or somebody would have reported the driver's absence if he'd just disappeared.

"It took us a long time to see the answer, but we finally did, just about the time your twenty dollar-bill showed up. Suppose the driver died before he could tell us, all right, but in a perfectly routine manner that wasn't suspicious at all? Routine, at least, in police work.

"We checked the Highway Patrol reports for that day, and we found it. Six hours and twenty minutes after Haig disappeared out his getaway car when it hit that truck, an elderly couple in a 1950 Plymouth sedan went off the road two miles from here just after dark in a downpour of rain and were instantly killed. They were on the wrong road, and they were driving faster than they normally did, even in good visibility on dry pavement. Haig, you see? He was in the car. He'd forced them to hide out somewhere until after dark.

"He was probably hurt, and maybe punchy with shock, so he didn't know where he was going. The only thing he was sure of was that he had to stay off the highway. He could have left a trail of blood, but it washed right away. It was raining, you see. And when they picked up the old people, there was nothing in the car to indicate he'd ever been with them.

"It was easy from there. We just came out here, among other places, and searched your camp. We found what was left of his suitcase, and the rest of those twenties, plus those tens."

When I finished, Cliffords didn't say anything for a moment. He merely sighed and looked at me with that awe in his face. Then, finally, he said, "And I thought I could get away with it."

"All right," I said. I was tired of wasting time. "You ready to show me where it is?"

He stood up. "Sure," he said. "There's three more thousand of it under the house, on a sill. Unless you found that, too."

That was wonderful, I thought swiftly. Add that to nearly a thousand there on the table. It was going to work out beautifully.

"And the rest of it?" I asked.

"Buried in three syrup buckets, under a down tree. About a mile up the lake."

"How much?" I asked. "Do you know?"

He nodded. "I added up the little bands. It took me a long time. There's a hundred and thirteen thousand of it."

And it was so ridiculously easy. All I'd had to do was ask for it.

"Umh-umh," I said thoughtfully. "That checks out pretty well with the bank's figures. Well, let's get on with it."

Eleven

We picked up that under the house. It had been almost directly over my head when I'd peered under that other time, but I'd been looking for something much larger. It was all in tens, five hundred dollars to the bundle, wrapped in waxed paper and lying flat on top of the sill. We brought it inside and he watched while I gathered up and counted what was on the kitchen table.

"Altogether, three thousand eight hundred and forty," I announced.

He found a paper bag for it. I put it all inside, folded it over carefully, and sealed it with some cellophane tape he had. I wrote the sum on it, and then the notation, "Recovered in vicinity of cabin." He watched intently, very much impressed with all this police routine.

"We'll have to come back by here so you can pack the clothes you want to take to jail with you," I said. "So there's no use carrying this around. We'll pick it up on the way back. Let's see. . . ."

I pulled a stack of magazines and comic books away from the wall and shoved the money behind it.

"Should be safe there," I said.

He nodded. "Sure. n.o.body ever comes here."

"You say it's about a mile?" I asked.

"Pretty near, I reckon."

"I don't see any sense wearing this hot jacket up there." I said. I slipped it off. Removing his .38 from the pocket, I shoved it in the waistband of my trousers. Then I removed the fake warrant from the inside breast pocket, and when I slid it into the right hip pocket of my trousers I eased out the leather key case that was already there, holding it concealed in my hand for an instant while I was folding the jacket. I let it drop just as I tossed the jacket across the bed and turned toward the door.

He called my attention to it. "Say, Mr. Ward, your keys fell out."

"Oh." I picked them up. "Thanks. Wouldn't do to lose them. We d be stranded."

"Your car's down at the camp-ground, I reckon?"

"That's right," I said. I picked up the jacket again, dropped the keys in one of the pockets, and tossed it back on the bed. We went out. He picked up a short-handled shovel.

It was late afternoon now, and shadows were long across the clearing. We started out through the timber with Cliffords leading the way, going generally north but angling gradually way from the lake.

"Is Haig up this way, too?" I asked.

"No, sir." He pointed off to the right. "Up there. Not too far from that road, and about a mile this side of the highway."

"Well, we won't bother with him today," I said. "We'll bring you out tomorrow or the next day and you can show us where. The local District Attorney wants to be represented, anyway, and there's the coroner."

"What could they tell now?" he asked, plodding purposefully ahead and not looking around. "I mean, it's been a year and a half."