Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

They were nice modern cabins, clean and airy and walled with knotty pine. The baths were large instead of the usual tiny affairs you find at most tourist courts, and contained combination bathtubs and showers.

“We’ll take two,” I told the proprietor. “We’ll be here a week, so I’ll pay the full week now. How much?”

He said the normal rate was nine dollars a day, but as a weekly rate we could have them for fifty-six dollars each. “With another fifty cent a day knocked off if you do your own cleaning instead of having maid service,” he added.

Helena surprised me by saying she preferred to do the cleaning herself, which caused the proprietor’s wife to give her a pleased smile. Apparently the wife constituted the maid service.

Helena stayed outside when I went back to the office to resister.

I signed as Howard Bliss and sister, Benton, Illinois, and listed the Illinois license number registered to the Dodge. Then I paid him a hundred and five dollars.

Our cabins were numbers six and seven. When I got outside again, I discovered Helena had backed the Buick into the car port between them while I was registering.

“You could have left it in front of the cabins,” I said to her. “We aren’t going to be here long.”

“We’ll be here at least a half hour. I told you I’m going to take a bath.”

“Several tunes,” I said wearily. “Which cabin do you want?”

She looked at both speculatively. The one on the right went with the car port we were using, because a door near the rear wall of the port led into the cabin.

Helena said, “I’ll take the right one.”

Getting her bag from the car, I carried it into the right-hand cabin via the car port door and set it on her bed. Then I got my own bag from the car and went into my own cabin.

Inasmuch as I was going to have to kill a half hour anyway, I decided to take a cold shower myself. I took my time under the water, letting its coldness knock the tiredness out of my muscles and wash some of the sleepiness from my eyes. Twenty-five minutes later, refreshed and in clean clothes, I knocked at the next cabin door.

“Just a minute,” Helena called. “I’m still dressing.”

It was closer to ten minutes before she appeared, and meantime I stood out in the sun letting the heat wilt my collar and undo all the good a cold shower had done me. When she finally appeared she was dressed in a white sun dress, low-heeled sandals which exposed bare, red-tipped toes, and no hat. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail.

Carefully she locked her cabin door-behind her and dropped the key in a straw purse.

This time I drove the Buick.

When we pulled up alongside the parked Dodge, I handed her the keys to it.

“Instead of following you, suppose we arrange to meet somewhere?” Helena suggested. “I’d like to do a little shopping.”

“You know Chicago?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Then we’ll make it somewhere simple.” I looked at my watch, noting it was nearly ten a.m. “The Statler Cocktail Lounge at two p.m.?”

“All right.”

“Be careful you don’t get picked up for anything,” I cautioned. “Even a parking ticket would put us in the soup with that Missouri plate on the Dodge.”

“I’ll be careful.”

I drove off while she was unlocking the coupe door.

I didn’t have any trouble arranging for the car to be fixed. I stopped at the first Buick service garage I saw.

The chief repairman, a cheerful middle-aged man, carefully looked over the damage. “What’s the other guy look like?” he asked.

“There wasn’t any other guy,” I told him. “My wife mistook a tree next to our drive for the garage.”

He told me he could do the whole job, including a check of wheel alignment, in three days for approximately a hundred dollars.

“That’s a rough estimate, you understand,” he said. “May vary a few bucks one way or the other.”

I gave him the name George Seward and a South Chicago address a couple of miles from the repair garage. When he asked for my phone number, I said I didn’t have a phone and just to hold the car when it was finished until I picked it up.

My business was all completed by noon and suddenly I was exhausted from lack of sleep and the strain of driving three hundred miles at night. I began to wish I had arranged to meet Helena at twelve-thirty instead of at two.

There was nothing to do but kill two hours, however. I took a taxi to the Statler, had lunch and then slowly sipped four highballs in the cocktail lounge while I waited for her. She showed up at ten after two.

“Want a drink?” I asked. “Or shall we go back to the court and collapse? I’m ready to fall on my face.”

She looked me over consideringly. “You do look tired,” she said. “We’ll pick up a couple of bottles of bourbon and some soda on the way and I’ll have my drink at the court. Maybe we can get some ice from the proprietor.”

My four drinks had relaxed me just enough so that I had difficulty keeping my eyes open. I let Helena drive.

I was just beginning to drift off to sleep sitting up when the car braked to a stop, then backed into a parking place at the curb. I opened my eyes to see we were in front of a liquor store.

Reluctantly I climbed out of the car. “You say bourbon?” I asked Helena.

When she merely nodded, I went on into the store. I bought two quarts of bourbon and a six-bottle carry-pack of soda.

When I raised the Dodge’s trunk lid to stow away my purchases. I was surprised to find the floor of the trunk was soaking wet. There hadn’t been any water on it when I had searched the trunk for tools to change license plates.

But I was too sleepy to wonder about it much. Slamming the lid shut, I climbed back in the car and let myself sink into a semi-coma again. Helena had to shake me awake when we got back to the tourist court.

I slept straight through until eight o’clock that night. Presumably Helena did the same, for when I finally looked outside to peer next door, her cabin was dark and the Dodge was still in its car port. She must have awakened about the same time I did, though, because she knocked at my door just as I finished dressing.

She was carrying the two bottles of bourbon and the carry-pack of soda.

“I thought we’d have a drink before we went out for dinner,” she said.

I found two glasses in the bathroom, but the prospect of warm bourbon and soda didn’t appeal to me.

“I’ll see it I can get some ice at the office,” I said.

But the proprietor told me he was sorry, they had only enough ice for their personal needs. When I returned to the cabin, I suggested we have our before-dinner drink at the same place we picked to eat.

“Maybe I can get some ice from him,” Helena said.

A drink didn’t mean that much to me, but since she seemed so set on one, I didn’t argue. From my open door I watched as she moved toward the office. The movement walking gave to her body would have made a corpse sit up in his casket. It occurred to me the motel proprietor would have to be made of ice himself to refuse her.

In a few moments she reappeared carrying a china water pitcher.

She stopped at her own cabin door, said to me, “I’ll be with you in a minute, Barney,” unlocked the door and went inside.

What she was going into her cabin for, I couldn’t decide, because when she reappeared a few moments later, she still carried nothing but the pitcher. Carefully she locked the door behind her and came over to my door. When she handed me the pitcher I saw it was full of cracked ice instead of cubes.

“What’s he have, an old-fashioned icebox?” I asked in surprise.

“I didn’t inquire,” Helena said. “I just asked for ice.”