Charles Williams - Girl Out Back

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 glasses. 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.

“Damn 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 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 pass 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 nobody 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 niggers. 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-damned 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 niggers 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.”