Charles Williams - Girl Out Back

“If it was me, Barney,” Manners said, “I’d just put in a rebuilt motor. What you think?”

“That sounds all right,” I said.

“I got a lot of work piled up, so it’ll be five or six days.”

“There’s no hurry,” I said. “No hurry at all.”

“Phone you an estimate tomorrow. See you, Barney.” He got in beside his helper and the twin units of Jewel Nunn’s catafalque began to move slowly down the street in the immemorial stance of mating quadrupeds. If only one person could cry, I thought, it wouldn’t be so terrible. But at least nobody laughed at her, and maybe that’s as close as you ever come to winning.

I went over on the sidewalk. Traffic was beginning to move normally now. Grady Collins waved at me and called out, “Come on, Barney. I’ll run you home.”

“Thanks,” I said. I crossed the street with the light, and just as I was climbing in the patrol car I saw Ramsey. He was standing on the corner in front of the bank staring thoughtfully at nothing.

Granite? I thought. Basalt? Shale? Gneiss? What the devil was it?

We went up Minden. The long gout of the spilled oil was there on the road, running from Main all the way back to Underhill.

“There’s where the drain-plug dropped out,” Grady said. “Right there. Funny thing to happen, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Just wasn’t tightened, and the motor vibration finally screwed it out.”

I nodded. He’d probably left it screwed in about a sixteenth of a turn. He couldn’t find anything to drain it into, and he knew if he let it pour out on the floor of the garage I’d see it when I backed off it.

Grady pulled into the drive so he could turn around. I got out. “Thanks a lot,” I said. He lifted a hand and backed out into the street. I let myself in. The note I’d left for Jessica was on the coffee table. I screwed it up and took it out into the kitchen to drop in the refuse can. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was a little after five. She should be home in half an hour or less.

I wondered when they’d be here. It could be before she was, or it might be an hour, or two, or even tomorrow. As far as I could see, it didn’t make much difference. Even thinking of flight was ridiculous.

Well, I could at least take one final look at it. Turning, I went down the stairs to the den. Then I stopped in the doorway and stared. The lid of the trunk was thrown back and all the old clothing was piled on the floor in front of it. But I’d locked it! I must have. No. I’d looked at my watch, saw I had only ten minutes to get to the bank, and had slammed it shut but I’d forgotten to take out the key.

It was stupid and careless, but that wasn’t it. The trunk’s being locked or unlocked didn’t make a bit of difference. He had to know it was there, and he simply couldn’t have known. He didn’t even know it existed. He hadn’t had a single contact with the thing from beginning to end.

I stepped over by the trunk then, and happened to glance down on the floor beyond the end of it. The answer was there, in the little heap of sleazy pink underthings and stockings and the wrinkled print dress. I restrained a crazy impulse to laugh. It was in her overnight bag, in the back of the station wagon where I’d put it.

I put everything in the trunk, closed it, and sat down on top of it to light a cigarette. I was Godwin, the operator. Twice in the same day I had been out-maneuvered and completely made a fool of, separately, by two primitives operating a backwoods fishing camp.

I wondered when she had begun to catch on. It was probably when I switched that twenty-dollar bill in her bag. She must have discovered it wasn’t the same one she’d had and started then to put it all together, and of course it was no mystery at all to her where the twenty had originally come from. Cliffords had spent it at the camp.

So when she was up there that afternoon, she’d probably got Cliffords to describe the F.B.I, man who’d arrested him, and knew I’d found what I was after at last. Her maneuvering afterward was clever, too; you had to admit that.

She probably hadn’t intended to try to grab it here at all. That would have been too improbable and too much to hope for. She’d merely planned to go along with me until she had a good chance somewhere farther along the line, and then grab it and clear out. My carrying the bag down here in the den and leaving it beside the trunk was practically the equivalent of putting up a sign telling her where it was, and my stupidity in forgetting to take the key out again was another telling her to help herself. That was the reason the bag had been out in the living-room. She was on her way from the den to the front door and the Sanport bus when he came in through the rear and caught her.

I shrugged it off. The whole thing was over now. No, I thought; not quite. There’s one more slight matter, and that’s to re-sell Mr. Nunn his little bill of goods. I thought about him very coldly. I’d pick up my own, but I was damned if I was going to buy his. His mistake was that he didn’t know anything about this other business. I could tell the whole truth from beginning to end, including Cliffords, and the chances were they’d believe me. There was just a chance, too, that I might be able to help him trip himself up. Grady Collins was a bright young man who could use his head.

I went upstairs and called his office, and was lucky enough to catch him in.

“Barney Godwin,” I said. “Has my friend Nunn been bothering you again?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, he has,” Grady said. “He called up again about ten minutes ago. Still insists you’ve got his wife. You holding her for ransom, or what?”

”But he hasn’t come in the office?”

“No.”

“Well, I think he will. And probably before too long.”

“What makes you think so, Barney?”

“I’ve always been interested in psychic phenomena. And unless I’m badly mistaken, Nunn is clairvoyant.”

“Come again?”

“Don’t ask questions. Just listen. Make sure you’ve got a witness there all the time, and when Nunn comes in make sure he does all his talking before the witness. How’re you reading me?”

“Fine. Keep on.”

“Play it dumb. Keep brushing him off. If you do it long enough, and keep listening closely enough, he’ll tell you where his wife is.”

“All right,” he said. “Do you know where she is?”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I don’t even know where my own wife is.”

I was down in the den lying on the couch with a cigarette thirty minutes later when I heard her car pull into the garage. In a moment there was the clicking of high heels on the basement stairs. She appeared in the doorway. She had a new hair-do, new shoes, and a new dress that was loaded with the same old magic in the same old places.

I grinned at her. “You look wonderful.”

“You look pretty wonderful yourself,” she said.

She walked over by the sofa and stood looking down at me with eyes that were faintly misted. I made no move to get up.

“How was Sanport?” I asked.

“It was fine, I guess.”

Nobody said anything for a minute.

“Did you miss me?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said.

She slid to her knees beside the sofa, and then sat down on the floor. Her face was on her arms very near to mine and her eyes were brimming with tears.

”Barney,” she said, “you’re not helping me very much.”

“What are you trying to do, baby? I’ll help you if I can.”

“I’m trying to tell you that I love you more than anything in the world. It’s all I thought about all the time I was in Sanport and all the way home. . . .”

She went on talking, and I listened to her, reflecting that I was probably in love with her, which was an asinine situation when you thought of it. You couldn’t operate that way; you began to flub your lines and get awkward and emotional, like a teen-ager. It had ruined everything. Well, it was ruined anyway, so what difference did it make?