Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“But you wouldn’t call them until then?”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Not that I’m going to tell you what to do or not to do, but I wouldn’t do it myself. Not if it were my little girl.”

We talked about some things. He poured another drink and I finally got around to sipping at the one he’d poured me when I first walked in. We’d been in that same room three years ago, drinking the same brand of whiskey. He’d managed to hold himself together through Paula’s funeral, and after everybody else cleared out and Bethie was asleep he and I settled in with a couple of bottles. Tonight I would take it easy on the booze, but that night three years ago I’d matched him drink for drink.

Out of the blue he said, “She could have been, you know.” I missed the connection. “Could have been your little girl,” he explained. “Bethie could have. If you’d have married Paula.”

“If your grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea cart.”

“ ‘But she’d still be your grandmother.’ Isn’t that what we used to say? You could have married Paula.”

“She had too much sense for that.” Though the cards might have played that way, if Anson Pollard hadn’t come along. Now Paula was three years dead, dead of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, if you can believe it. And the woman I’d married, and a far cry from Paula she was, had left me and gone to California. I heard someone say that the Lord took the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. Well, she was and she did, and now Anse and I were a couple of solitary birds going long in the tooth. Take away thirty pounds and a few million dollars and a nine-year-old girl with freckles and you’d be hard-pressed to tell us apart.

Take away a nine-year-old girl with freckles. Somebody’d done just that.

“You’ll see me through this,” he said. “Won’t you, Lou?”

“If it’s what you want.”

“I wish to hell you were still sheriff. The voters of this county never had any sense.”

“Maybe it’s better that I’m not. This way I’m just a private citizen, nobody for the kidnappers to get excited about.”

“I want you to work for me after this is over.”

“Well, now.”

“We can work out the details later. By God, I should have hired you the minute the election results came in. I figured we knew each other too well, we’d been through too much together. But you can do better working for me than you’re doing now, and I can use you, I know I can. We’ll talk about it later.”

“We’ll see.”

“Lou, we’ll get her back, won’t we?”

“Sure we will, Anse. Of course we will.”

Well, you haveto go through the motions. There was no phone call that night. If the victim’s alive they generally make a call and let you hear their voice. On tape, maybe, but reading that day’s newspaper so you can place the recording in time. Any proof they can give you that the person’s alive makes it that much more certain you’ll pay the ransom.

Of course nothing’s hard and fast. Kidnapping’s an amateur crime and every fool who tries it has to make up his own rules. So it didn’t necessarily prove anything that there was no call.

I hung around, waiting it out with him. He hit the bourbon pretty hard but he was always a man who could take on a heavy load without showing it much. Somewhere along the way I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.

A little past midnight I said, “I don’t guess there’s going to be a call tonight, Anse. I’m gonna head for home.”

He wanted me to stay over. He had reasons — in case there was a call in the middle of the night, in case something called for action. I told him he had my number and he could call me at any hour. What we both knew is his real reason was he didn’t want to be alone there, and I thought about staying with him and decided I didn’t want to. The hours were just taking too long to go by, and I didn’t figure I’d get a good night’s sleep under his roof.

I drove right on home. I kept it under the speed limit because I didn’t want one of Wally Hines’s eager beavers coming up behind me with the siren wailing. They’ll do that now. We hardly ever gave out tickets to local people when I was running the show, just a warning and a soft one at that. We saved the tickets for the leadfoot tourists. Well, another man’s apt to have his own way of doing things.

In my own house I popped a beer and ate my leftover hamburger. It was cold with the grease congealed on it but I was hungry enough to get it down. I could have had something out of Anse’s refrigerator but I hadn’t been hungry while I was there.

I sat in a chair and put on Johnny Carson but didn’t even try to pay attention. I thought how little Bethie was dead and buried somewhere that nobody would likely ever find her. Because that was the way it read, even if it wasn’t what Anse and I dared to say to each other. I sat there and thought how Paula was dead of a bee sting and my wife was on the other side of the continent and now Bethie. Thoughts swirled around in my head like water going down a bathtub drain.

I was up a long while. The television was still on when they were playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and I might as well have been watching programs in Japanese for all the sense they made to me.

Somewhere down the line I went to bed.

I was eatinga sweet roll and drinking a cup of coffee when he called. There’d been a phone call just moments earlier from the kidnapper, he told me, his voice hoarse with the strain of it all.

“He whispered. I was half asleep, I could barely make out what he was saying. I was afraid to ask him to repeat anything. I was just afraid, Lou.”

“You get everything?”

“I think so. I have to buy a special suitcase, I have to pack it a certain way and chuck it into a culvert at a certain time.” He mentioned some of the specifics. I was only half listening. Then he said, “I asked them to let me talk to Bethie.”

“And?”

“It was as if he didn’t even hear me. He just went on telling me things, and I asked him again and he hung up.”

She was dead and in the ground, I thought.

I said, “He probably made the call from a pay phone. Most likely they’re keeping her at a farmhouse somewhere and he wouldn’t want to chance a trace on the call. He wouldn’t have her along to let her talk, he wouldn’t want to take the chance. And he’d speed up the conversation to keep it from being traced at all.”

“I thought of that, Lou. I just wished I could have heard her voice.”

He’d never hear her voice again, I thought. My mind filled with an image of a child’s broken body on a patch of ground, and a big man a few yards from her, holding a shovel, digging. I blinked my eyes, trying to chase the image, but it just went and hovered there on the edge of thought.

“You’ll hear it soon enough,” I said. “You’ll have her back soon.”

“Can you come over, Lou?”

“Hell, I’m on my way.”

I poured what was left of my coffee down the sink. I took the sweet roll with me, ate it on the way to the car. The sun was up but there was no warmth in it yet.

In the picture I’d had, with the child’s corpse and the man digging, a light rain had been falling. But there’d been no rain yesterday and it didn’t look likely today. A man’s mind’ll do tricky things, fill in details on its own. A scene like that, gloomy and all, it seems like there ought to be rain. So the mind just sketches it in.

On the wayto the bank he said, “Lou, I want to hire you.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we can talk about it after Bethie’s back and all this is over, but I’m not even sure I want to stay around town, Anse. I’ve been talking with some people down in Florida and there might be something for me down there.”