Джеймс Чейз - You Never Know With Women

“Yeah, I remember now. It caused a hell of a sensation. That must be two years ago.”

“It was. The Feds cracked down on Verne and they hunted him night and day. They finally traced him to a house in Dallas, surrounded the place and fought it out with him. When they got into the house they found he had twenty slugs in his body, and still he wasn’t dead. He died on the way to hospital. Alma got away.”

“What happened to her?”

“She had been out shopping when they trapped Verne. They found the hundred grand in suitcases in the house, so they knew she hadn’t much money. They went after her, but she slipped through their net somehow. A year later they got a tip she’d been seen in Elk City, but she had gone by the time they got there. A couple of days after, the Sheriff of Gallup spotted her and gave the alarm. She’d been hiding in Albuquerque and was once more on the move, so they thought. They found her body a few miles from Gallup in a smashed car. She had hit a tree. The car had caught fire, and she was pretty well smashed and burned. But it was Alma all right. That happened about twelve months ago.”

I did a little thinking, then shook my head. “It doesn’t get me anywhere.” After pacing the floor for a while and thinking some more, I asked: “There was no doubt the girl was Alma?”

“It might not have been,” Lu said with a grin, “but the Feds said it was, and they don’t make mistakes. It was her car. One of her bags had been thrown clear. It was full of her stuff. They couldn’t identify the body. They had no record of her fingerprints, and the body was badly burned. If it wasn’t her, who else could it have been?”

“No one missing at the time?”

“They didn’t say so.”

“No, I guess I’m trying to make too much of this. Do we know anything about Sheila Kendrick?”

“I don’t.”

“We’d better check up on her. Get after her, Lu. I want to know where she came from, what she’s been doing for the past few years. She comes from San Francisco. You’ll have to go out there and dig. It’s important.”

Lu looked inquiringly at Mick.

“Do I do it?”

“Sure you do it.”

“All right, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Maybe you’re right, but it’s the only lead I have. I’m going to do a little digging myself. I have to start from the beginning. Maybe I’ll turn up something if I go back far enough. I’m going to work on the Baillies.”

“I can’t see how they figure in this,” Mick said, shaking his head, “but you work it the way you think.”

“Wait a second, Lu,” I said, as he moved to the door. “Did you ever see Alma?”

“Once, but not to talk to. She was waiting in a car for Verne.”

“Remember her?”

“Not really. She was fair, but that’s all I can remember. I didn’t get a good look at her.”

“Okay, Lu.” When he had gone I said to Mick: “Well, I’ll move off first thing tomorrow morning. Take care of that twenty-five grand for me. If I come unstuck, you keep it.”

Early the next morning I drove out of Santa Medina and headed for Albuquerque. On the way I stopped at Gallup and called in on the Sheriff’s office. He was an elderly, well-nourished party with a lot of spare time on his hands. He welcomed me when I explained I was a writer and wanted information about the Baillies.

“Not much I can tell you,” he said, hoisting his feet on to the desk. “Sit down and make yourself at home. I ain’t got any liquor to offer you, but maybe you can get along without it.”

I said I thought I could, and started in to see what I could get out of him. He remembered the car smash all right. It had been the talk of Gallup for weeks.

“It happened like this,” he told me, sucking at his pipe. “I was standing in the doorway, sunning myself, when she drove in. The description the Feds had put out wasn’t much. I knew they were looking for a fair girl in a dark-brown leather coat and driving a green coupe Chrysler. Well, the car this girl was driving was a green coupe Chrysler, but the licence plates didn’t tally with the ones in the Fed’s handbill, and she wasn’t wearing a leather coat. I was interested, mind you, and I watched her, but I didn’t think it was the girl. She bought groceries, and I kept wondering if she was Alma.” He grinned boyishly at me. “If she was Alma, then she was dangerous and I’m too old to fool around with guns. I let her go. But I called up the local office and reported having seen her. Well, they found her a mile or so out of town, smashed up against a tree. That’s all there’s to it.”

“A nice efficient sheriff,” I thought. The Feds must have loved him.

“They were sure the girl in the car was Alma Baillie?”

His mouth fell open.

“Why, sure. There was a reward out for her, see? By rights I should have got it, but the Federal officer claimed it. He was pretty decent about it and gave me a share. He didn’t make a mistake. He had all the proof he wanted. The leather coat was found. It was burned, but it was easy to identify. And there was plenty of stuff in her bag to convince me it was Alma,”

“How about finger-prints?”

“What are you getting at, young man? They didn’t have her prints recorded. You want to take it easy. If you go through life being suspicious of people you’ll be an old man before you know it.”

I thanked him, gave him a cigar and went out into the sunshine again, far from satisfied. From Gallup I drove to Albuquerque and called in on the News Editor of the local newspaper. I spun him the same yarn, and asked if he had any information regarding Alma Baillie that might be helpful.

The News Editor was a smart little guy, with keen grey eyes that looked at me through a pair of heavy shell spectacles.

“Just what did you want to know, Mr. Dexter?”

“I’d like to see the house she stayed at, and I’d like to know if you believe she met her end in the car, or whether it was some other girl.”

He blinked at that

“Funny you should say that. At the time I had my doubts, but nothing came of it. The Federal officer identified her. It was a lucky break for him; he earned the two-thousand-dollar reward.”

“What happened to him?”

“He retired. He’s chicken-farming now.”

“What made you have doubts it wasn’t Alma?”

He grinned at me.

“Well, you know how it is. We’re suspicious people, Mr. Dexter. Someone in Gallup said there were two girls in the car, but the sheriff said he was a liar and maybe he was.”

“Who was he?”

“I forget his name. He’s left the district now.”

“Know where he’s gone?”

“Amarillo, but he’s an unreliable witness. Half the time he’s drunk and the other half he’s trying to scrape up enough money to buy liquor. We decided he was talking out of the back of his neck.”

“I’d take it as a favour if you could hunt up his name and address.”

It took a little time, but he got it for me in the end.

“Jack Nesby,” he told me after a clerk had dug through the records, and he gave me the address.

I went around to the house where Alma Baillie had lived, but the landlady wasn’t helpful or couldn’t tell me anything. I wasn’t sure which, but I didn’t get any information from her. From Albuquerque I went to Amarillo where I found Nesby propping up the bar in a beer saloon. He was old, and dimwitted and a little drunk, but he brightened up when I bought him a large whisky.

Yes, he remembered seeing Alma come into Gallup. He poked a grimy finger at me and wagged his head as he peered at me with dim eyes.

“It was a frame-up,” he told me hoarsely. “That Fed was after the reward. There were two girls in the car. I saw ‘em as plain as I see you. There was the smart one and the shabby one. The sheriff saw ‘em too, but he kept his mouth shut because the Fed paid him off. When I spoke up they threatened to run me in for vagrancy.”