“And you don’t trust me near it,” I said. “You still don’t trust me at all.”
She brushed away hair which was blowing across her face. “We’ll get along better if we don’t expect too much from each other.”
“Suits me,” I grunted. I would have enjoyed slapping her.
In Badmont we found two blocks of bustling stores and filling stations. Like all towns in an area of widely scattered population, it served the people who lived far beyond the town limits. Molly pulled up in front of a white stucco post office.
“Well, there’s Tilly Atchison,” a little old woman behind the window grill told us in answer to our question. “Only his real name in Tilford Atchison, though everybody calls him Tilly. Is that who you’re looking for?”
“What does he do for a living?” I
She pursed bloodless lips. “Lives on his daughter Louise, that’s what Tilly Atchison does for a living. I’ve known him forty years if I’ve known him a day, but he never as much as lifted a finger to. . .”
Molly said: “Is there anybody named Matilda?” She had taken out a plastic compact the size of a coffee saucer and was dabbing powder on her face.
The woman stuck her face against the grill to get a full view of Molly. Obviously she didn’t approve of attractive young women renewing their faces in her post office. “This gentleman wants a Tilly,” she told Molly severely.
“Tilly is short for Matilda,” Molly explained.
“You don’t say?” the postmistress mulled over the information. “There’s Matilda Ames, but she lives over in York State.”
“Yes?”
“York State,” the postmistress said firmly, putting a foreigner in his place. “It’s just past the ridge. Folks who live on the other side of the state line come to Badmont for their mail because we’re the nearest post office. Matilda Ames doesn’t come herself. I reckon she’s too fat to move much. She sends her man Milton — I don’t know his other name — never gets mail sent to him. He comes twice a week to pick up mail for Matilda Ames and to buy food for the lunchroom and sometimes . . .”
“She runs a lunchroom?” I asked.
“Owns it. Owns a used car place too.”
“How do we get there?”
Keep on this road. Right inside York State. You can’t miss the place.”
When we were outside, Molly said: “It could be that old man, Tilford Atchison, who hasn't any visible means of support, but let's try Matilda Ames first. Especially as she runs a lunchroom and I'm hungry.”
“It was clever of you to think of Tilly as Matilda.”
She pulled open the car door and slid behind the wheel without acknowledging the compliment. I noticed that she again placed her handbag on her left side, out of my reach.
We climbed “another mountain and saw a road marker which announced that we were passing from New Jersey into New York. A couple of hundred feet beyond there was a long two-story house covered with gray asbestos' shingles. Two small signs hung over the double door. One said, “EATS,” and the other said, “TOURISTS.” At the side of the house two birch logs were set on either side of a cinder driveway entrance. The posts were connected by an arched wooden sign which said: “BEST USED CAR BARGAINS IN THE EAST.”
Molly pulled up to the narrow parking area in front of the house. She remained behind the wheel to retie her broad blue hair ribbon. I got out and walked to the corner of the house and had a look at the used car lot. The cars stood in rows of twenty or so, and then there was a broad empty space, and then a big red barn at the foot of a hill. Some of the cars were obviously jalopies, but from what I could see at that distance most of them were A-1 buys.
“Looking for something?” a man asked.
He had come out of a side door. He was a wizened man in blue denim overalls several sizes too large for his gnarled frame. A corncob pipe was clamped in a mouth so thin that he appeared to have no lips. His chin fell away to almost nothing.
“Just stretching my legs,” I told him, and turned back to the car.
Molly was removing a medium-sized airplane bag from the car trunk. As I went up to her, she shut and locked the trunk.
“What's in that bag?” I asked.
“You can't expect a girl to go anywhere overnight without taking a bag along.”
“I didn't see you pack it.”
“I packed it while you .were asleep and brought it down to my car when I went for rolls.” She lifted the bag. “And if you don't mind, don't speak to me as if you were my husband.”
I said: “You had it all arranged while I was still asleep. Sometimes you let me make up my own mind, but only when it agrees with your plans.”
Abruptly she turned on her smile and patted my cheek. I couldn't decide whether to knock her hand away or purr. “You're sore about the, gun, Adam.”
“That's only part of it,” I said. “You're just supposed to be tagging along, but I have a feeling that it's the other way around.”
She gave my cheek another appeasing pat and tucked a hand through my arm. I remembered my manners and took the bag from her.
The lunchroom must once have been the living room of a private home. There was hardly enough space for a short counter, a wirelegged table and four wire chairs. Behind the counter there was a single coffee urn streaked with rust, a fly-specked mirror no bigger than a bathroom mirror, a four-burner gas range, a short workbench which needed scraping, a refrigerator that couldn't have served more than a moderately sized family. And a fat woman.
Her eyes swept over us and stopped at the bag I carried. “If you're tourists, I'm all filled up.”
“So early?” I said.
“What’s the difference how early it is if I’ve no room?”
“Well, we can at least have lunch here.” Molly moved to the counter.
I put down the bag and we sat on two of the five high stools. The only sign of food was two anemic pies in a glass ' case. It was still lunch hour, but the place was empty except for us, I could understand that. Ordinarily I would have made a wide circuit to avoid eating here.
“You can have apple pie and coffee,” the fat woman said.
“Is that all you have?” Molly asked.
“Take it or leave it.” She had a positive hatred of doing business.
“We’ll take it,” Molly said.
The fat woman removed one of the pies from the case. She was built low to the ground. Her face looked like a lump of dough thrown on a table. Underneath her three or four chins she had a bosom which would crowd a small room. You expected a woman like that to be slovenly, but she wasn’t. Her gray-streaked hair was neatly gathered back. She wore no apron. Her dress didn’t belong behind a lunchroom counter; it was black crepe with long white beads around the collar, and it looked prosperous.
Molly lit a cigarette and pushed the pack over to me. “Are you Tilly?” she asked conversationally.
The fat woman turned from the urn with two steaming cups in her pudgy hands. “So what?”
“This place was recommended to us in Badmont.”
The pale eyes buried in fleshy sockets narrowed. “For eating?”
Molly chuckled. “For sleeping. Somebody in Badmont told us that Tilly had tourist accommodations.”
“Well, I’m all filled up.”
The fat woman set the cups before us and served up two slabs of pie. The best that could be said for the coffee was that it was hot; the pie was mush between cardboard. I had no appetite, anyway. Here was a woman named Tilly, but she wasn’t even in the same state as Badmont. In fact, I was no longer sure that Larry had said Badmont. I had a depressing feeling that I was getting nowhere slowly.
“We’d be willing to pay a little extra to be put up for the night,” Molly was saying.
The fat woman placed both hands on the counter and looked us over carefully. “Why?” she said.
“Because we have to sleep somewhere.”
The fat woman shook her head. “It’s too early. Before it gets dark you can
do plenty of traveling to wherever you’re going”
“For the same reason it’s too early in the day for a tourist house to be filled,” Molly said. “That’s why I’m hoping you can find room for us if we pay you well.”
“I’m all filled up.”
I had let Molly carry the ball since we had entered, and she hadn’t moved an inch. Now it was my turn. I said: “Raymond Teacher told me to come here.”
On my left I heard somebody stir. I looked over my shoulder. The wizened man in blue denims stood sucking his corncob pipe in a doorway leading into a hall.
He removed his pipe from his lipless mouth.
“Ray’s dead.”
Knots tightened in my stomach. I was here.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tilly fingered one of the long white beads on her collar. “Ray Teacher is too dead to send anybody anywhere.”
“Ray is dead only since Monday.” I abandoned trying to get the coffee down. “Of all the crummy luck, to get knocked off by a car while crossing a street. He was a swell guy.”
The wizened man in the hall doorway snickered. “I heard Ray Teacher called lots of things, but nobody never called him a swell guy.”
First mistake, the penalty of saying more than enough. I picked up the pieces in a hurry. “I mean he was swell to me. I was flat broke. He lent me some dough and told me he thought there was a job for me and that next time he came up here he’d bring me along.”
“What’s your name?” Tilly asked.
I was prepared for that one. “Thomas Rover.”
“Never heard of you.”
“Lots of people haven’t.”
“Who’s the girl?”
I waited for Molly to take it. She continued to eat the pie as if it had taste. I said: “My wife. Her name is Madge.” Molly’s head lifted an inch and dipped an inch. She didn’t look at me.
Tilly ran a thick forefinger across her mouth. On the finger there was a vast floral-shaped monstrosity of white diamonds and rubies and sapphires in a platinum setting. It was hardly what you would expect a hash-slinger to wear behind the counter.
“So you saw Ray?” she said reflectively. “When?”
“A few days ago.”
“What day?”
The trap yawned. Raymond Teacher might have been here on a day I mentioned, and then she would know that all the rest was a lie too.
“Monday, wasn't it?” I said to Molly, giving myself a chance to contradict her if it became necessary.
“Monday morning,” she told Tilly blandly. “It was Monday evening that we heard he'd been run over. We dropped up to Ray's apartment in the Bronx. We'd known him out west, but he wasn't ready to lend us dough. Then Ray got an idea and asked Tom if he wanted to work for George Moon and Tom said sure. That's when he let us have a hundred bucks. He told us he'd get in touch with us in, few days. Then a few hours later he was killed.”
Too many details, I thought, and waited tensely. Details were necessary, but dangerous when you had to take long guesses. We knew that Teacher had lived, in the Bronx only because the newspaper story which had told about the accident had said so. But maybe that was wrong, or he hadn't a regular apartment there, or Tilly knew that he hadn't been in the Bronx at all Monday morning.
Tilly slid her ,pale eyes from Molly to me. “Did Ray leave with a bag?”
“I wouldn't know,” I said. “We left before he did. What kind of bag.''
“Didn't he tell you about it?”
“He didn't do much talking. He didn't even tell me what kind of job. When we heard he was dead, we decided it was all off. Then last night Madge remembered that Ray had said that the job would likely be at Tilly's place in Badmont. We'd never heard of Tilly or Badmont, but we had nothing to lose by looking.”
“What do you do?”
I tried not to hesitate, but I did. “I'm pretty handy with a gat.”
The wizened man uttered a derisive sound. “Trigger-men are a dime a dozen. We don't need 'em. Jasp Vital's dead and we'll handle Larry Goodby if he shows his face. The boss is taking care of the guy in Brooklyn who's got the bag. A guy named Breen. If the guy don't hand over the bag, George will snatch his . . . “
“Shut up, Milton,” Tilly said.
“Huh? Yeah.” Milton stuck his pipe back into his chinless face.
“Are you handy, with anything beside a gun?” Tilly asked me.
“Sure.” I wondered what I ought to be handy with and remembered the used car lot behind the house. “I'm a cracker-jack car mechanic.”
Surprisingly, that brought a satisfied nod from Tilly. And Milton said: “Yeah, we're short-handed. Rufus can use a good one when he starts going again.”
“Well, I'm a good one,” I said. “But I'm not working for a mechanic's pay.”
“No?” Tilly stepped back from the counter and leaned her broad hips against the gas range.
“What are you working for?”
“You tell me.”
She didn't. She jabbed' a fat thumb at Molly. “Why were you trying to spend the night here without telling me what you'd come for?”
“We weren't too sure that this was the place Ray Teacher meant,” Molly muttered. Her profile looked suddenly tired. Harsh lines had appeared at the corner of her mouth.
Tilly returned her attention to me. “You say you come from out west. Where? Who do you know there? What did you do?”
There were too many questions, and any one of them was dynamite. I assumed anger. “Why should I tell you anything? All I know is that you’re selling cardboard pie in a moth-eaten lunchroom. Ray said I’d work for George Moon. I’ll do my talking to him.”
“He ain’t here,” Milton informed me. “He’s in Brooklyn working on that guy Breen who has the bag.”
“Shut up, Milton.” Tilly waddled to the tap, poured herself a glass of water, drained it at a gulp, wiped her mouth with the fiat of her hand. Then she said almost amiably: “Tough guy, huh?”
I saw myself in the fly-speckled mirror behind the counter. The bruise on my cheek gave me a sinister aspect. I experimented with a leer, and it looked passable and I turned it on Tilly. “I’m tough enough to want to tie up with George Moon, but not unless there’s enough in it for me.”
“There’ll be enough. I don’t know when George will be back.”
“We’re willing to hang around if you have a place for us to sleep,” I said.
She reached under the counter and brought up a hotel register. “We’re licensed as a hotel. Everything has to be legal. If you have a record, use a phony name.”
“This name will do.” I took the pen from her.
Molly leaned against my shoulder and watched me write in the register: “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Rover, New York.”
When I put down the pen, she slid off the stool. Listlessly, she pulled down her sweater and tucked her handbag under her arm. Somehow she seemed not as tall and straight as a few minutes ago.
“Milton, show them up to the double room,” Tilly said.
He faded into the hall. I picked up Molly’s bag. The: hall ran the remaining length of the house to a side entrance at the far end. Halfway up the hall there was a staircase. We started to climb it.
“Tom,” Tilly called.
I ascended two more steps before I remembered. I turned and saw Tilly at the foot of the stairs. “I’m letting you stay till George, comes because I think we can use you,” she said. “But you keep your nose clean till George says you’re okay. Don’t snoop. Get it?”
“Sure.” I went on.
Molly was following Milton into one of the rooms strung out on either side of the hall. It wasn’t a bad room. You could turn around in it without hitting anything and the paper with the red roses on the walls wasn’t more than a dozen years old. There were; two windows and a double bed which looked softer than the floor and a dresser with tarnished gilt drawer-handles and two chairs, one with a cracked leather seat.
Milton said: “Bring you towels later. The bathroom is down
at the end of the hall.” He emitted an old man’s dry snicker “Hope you can stand the food Tilly dishes out.”
“Does she make real meals?” I asked.
“For the boys. If you can call ’em meals.” He pulled on his corncob and contemplated Molly’s legs. She was standing at one of the windows with her back to us.
I said: “What’s that bag you were telling us about downstairs?”
“Well, Ray was carrying it when he got clipped by the car. This guy Breen’s wife took Ray to the hospital and held onto the bag.”
“Was there anything valuable in it?”
Milton rolled the pipestem inside his mouth. He started to take the stem out to speak.
“Mil-ton!” Tilly called from downstairs.
“That dame runs me to a rag,” he explained cheerfully and left.
I watched the door close behind him and silently cursed Tilly. But the chance wasn’t lost beyond recall. He liked to talk. I’d get him aside as soon as I could.
“Tom Rover!” Molly said. She had turned from the window and was wearily stripping off her jacket. “The Rover Boys at Tilly’s, or Murder for Kiddies.”
“It’s a name.”
“And so is Madge a name. Madge Rover. God!” She tossed the jacket on the bed and curled her lips. “And a double bed. Remember you’re a Rover boy, so don’t go getting ideas about that bed.”
I could hand it back when I had to. “I didn’t ask you to come along. There wasn’t any way I could explain you to Tilly except as my wife. Don’t flatter yourself that there was any other reason. I’ll sleep on a chair or on the floor or standing up.”
“You re damn right you will!”
She was too much for me. In the few hours I had known her she had been aggressive and remote, gay and sullen, garrulous and wordless. Now still another mood was on her, and I wasn’t yet sure what it was.
“Hell,” I said. There wasn’t anything else a man could say when a woman acted up like that.
Her voice turned quieter, crisper. “Do you mind if I change my clothes?”
I went out into the hall. I started to slam the door and caught it on the swing and shut it softly. I went down the stairs and turned toward the lunchroom and stopped with my heart doing a complete flip.
Bruno Fischer Page 10