River Girl

by Charles Williams

  It wasn’t too hard to piece it all together. Elkins must be that big crazy kid, the one who’d gone berserk when he found the girl down here. So as soon as he got out of jail he went back home, wherever it was, and told the girl’s mother about it, or she had got it out of him some way. And the mother, knowing what a violent hothead like her husband would do when he heard it, had made the kid promise not to tell him, or maybe the kid hadn’t because he was still sore at the old man. The mother had written Soames, knowing he was in the same town, and asked him to find the girl and talk to her, try to send her home. And then the old man had got hold of Soames’s reply and headed for here with blood in his eye. It all added up, all right. The only trouble with it was that no matter how many times you added it, you couldn’t get any total you liked.

  Soames knew, then, that the girl had been here. He knew, and Waites knew, and the whole country was going to know as soon as this thing had time to explode, that a brothel operating with police connivance had been harboring a fifteen-year-old girl, that a woman was dead, or might be, and that the girl’s father was likely to be tried for murder as a result of it. The smell of bribery and police corruption was going to be so powerful the grand jury wasn’t going to be able to ignore it any longer.

  Just then I heard Bernice coming down the stairs. She had the suitcase in her hand and was ready to go. I flipped the light off and we went out.

  “The car’s up in the next block,” I said. “Just stand here out of the street lights while I go get it.”

  I brought it down and stopped and she climbed in. No one had seen us, or paid any attention, apparently. Dropping over one block to miss the square, I headed back to town, stopping on a quiet street a block from the station. I ought to get a job driving a station wagon at a girls’ boarding school, I thought. How many times have I done this?

  “So long, Bernice,” I said, and held out my hand. “Just forget everything you told me and don’t ever tell anybody else and you’ll be safe enough.”

  “‘I won’t,” she said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in nothing.” She thanked me again for the money and got out. I saw her walk up the street toward the station. What a life, I thought. Cat house behind, cat house ahead. Then I snapped out of it. I was in a hell of a spot to be feeling sorry for her.

  I drove around and parked in front of the courthouse and sat there for a minute, trying to think. Cars lazily circled the square, boys out riding with their girl friends; and something about it, maybe the summer night or the hissing sound of tires or the quick, musical laughter of a girl, suddenly made me think of how it had been before I went off to the Army all those years ago in 1942, how it had been to be home from college in the summer, out riding in the Judge’s automobile, a Chevrolet somehow forever five years old. God, I thought, that was a long time back.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, like a fighter taking a beating. Get up there, I thought. Get up to the office and see what you can find on Shevlin; Buford can wait a little while. But what about this other mess? It was going to blow wide open, tomorrow or the next day. If I tried to disappear now, wouldn’t everybody know it was a phony? And, knowing it was a fake, they would do a lot of looking into the place where I had disappeared, a place I didn’t ever want anybody nosing around because that was where Shevlin was. I’d be better off to stay here and take the rap on the probable bribery charge than to direct any attention toward Shevlin. But, then, there was no use trying to kid myself that Shevlin’s disappearance was going to continue unnoticed forever. Somebody would miss him and start looking into it. I shook my head again, and ran a hand across my face. It was like being at the bottom of a well.

  I started around again, taking up all the obvious facts and examining them, and when I almost completed the circuit I suddenly found the one I sought, the one that had escaped me until now. Waites hadn’t talked; he’d never said a word about why he was down there at Abbie’s and why he had attacked her. Why? I wondered. Probably at first it was a natural enough disinclination to go shouting to the world that he was looking for his daughter in a whore house—that was understandable. But when he had a little while to think it over and see what a mess he was in, that he might wind up charged with murder… Had anybody been in to see him? A lawyer?

  I climbed quickly out of the car and started across the street to the drugstore to call Buford and ask him, and then suddenly remembered I didn’t know the telephone number of Dianne’s, or Dinah’s, apartment, and that I didn’t even know her full name. I stopped. It adds up that way, I thought. I know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day, but Soames and the grand jury and everybody else connected with it has every reason to believe I don’t know a thing. But it was only a guess. Maybe they hadn’t sent a lawyer to the jail to see him and tell him to keep his mouth shut until they got ready to close in on us. There wasn’t any way to know for sure until I saw Buford.

  But first, I thought, I’m going in that office and do the thing I’ve been trying to get to for the past nine hours. I’m going to find out about Shevlin. None of the rest of it means anything if I’m wrong about him. I wheeled and went up the front steps and banged on the door until the janitor came down and let me in. “Got to get in the office for a little while,” I said, and went on past him up the stairs. I had a key to the office itself. When it closed at five-thirty all the telephone calls were switched to the office at the jail, but the files I wanted were up here.

  I went in and switched on the lights. Getting out a cigarette, I turned to the bank of firing cases along the wall. It was going to be a long, tedious job, for I had no idea at all of how to begin, since there was obviously no point in trying to look him up by name. Shevlin was probably just the last of a series of them. I started in, riffling through the circulars and bulletins and notices, looking only at the ones with pictures. Ten or fifteen minutes dragged by. It was oppressively hot in the room with the big lights on and the windows closed, and I began to sweat. There was no sound in the building except occasionally the ring of a bucket somewhere down below as the janitor went about his mopping.

  I slammed a drawer shut and paused, lighting another cigarette and thinking. I wasn’t getting anywhere this way. It would take a week to go through all this stuff. The thing to do was to sit down and try to analyze it logically. What was I looking for, anyway? Well, obviously, a “wanted” notice out on Shevlin, with the picture on it. But there were two facts about it that didn’t jibe. It would be a very old one, but still one that I had seen fairly recently. It would be an old one because Doris had been living with him for over five years and he hadn’t committed any crime in that time; and it would be one that I must have seen fairly recently because there was still the fact that I had noticed something familiar about his face that day when I had run into him up the lake. I knew I had never seen him before, so I must have seen his picture somewhere, and the most logical place to have seen it was here. Therefore, it really must have been some old notice that I had looked at not too long ago. But why? In which cabinet, and what had I been looking for at the time?

  I smoked the cigarette out to the end in sharp, vicious puffs, sitting there at the desk with my chin on my hand, trying to remember, to concentrate. Impatient, and conscious of the passage of time, with all the other events of the night gnawing away at the edge of thought, I struggled for the key to it. It must have been here that I saw the picture. I was more sure of it than ever. Some memory, some faint recollection of a thing that had happened here in the office lingered teasingly just beyond my grasp. I had looked at it not too long ago, and something outside the regular routine of office had made me do it. But what? I reached out for it desperately, almost knowing it, and it ran, laughing, off the edge of memory. It had something to do with Lorraine and the filing cabinets, some remark she had made. That was it! It was a joking and rather stupid observation she had made about the picture. And then I knew what it was.

  It had happened three or four months ago. Lorraine had been firing
papers in the cabinets and forgotten that one of the drawers had a broken stop. When she pulled it open it flew out on the floor, spilling papers all over the office. I was there at the time and had helped her gather them up. And it was while we were bent over the disordered jumble that she had picked up a picture that had caught her attention and held it out admiringly.

  “Boy, but he’s good-looking! If I ever get murdered, I hope it’s by somebody as handsome as that!”

  I jumped up from the desk. Well, I thought, I know what drawer he’s in. And I know what he’s wanted for.

  Fifteen

  It took only a couple of minutes to find it now. With a grunt of satisfaction, I jerked it from the file and put it on the desk, and stood looking down at the picture of Lewis Farrell, alias Roger Shevlin, wanted for murder and escape.

  The picture had been made a long time ago, apparently in 1940, and Lorraine had been right in saying he was a handsome man, but the identity was unmistakable. Looking at it now, I could see why I had still noticed the resemblance when I saw him that day on the lake. It was the deep-set, rather brooding eyes and the well-formed bone structure of the face, which the lines of the years and that grayish stubble hadn’t been able to hide.

  I read it hurriedly. He had been tried and convicted of killing his wife in 1939. There was no information about the crime itself, or the trial, but apparently it hadn’t been first-degree murder, for he had drawn a life sentence instead of death. He began serving time in the state penitentiary in 1940, was transferred to a farm as a model prisoner in 1943, and had escaped the same year. So far, so good, I thought, and very good.

  The picture stared up at me. Year after year of running, I thought, and terror, and nights of looking up at the ceiling in the dark while he wondered who had seen him during the day. He’d had years of this and then wound up lying face down in his own blood in a backwoods cabin, and I had been the one who had killed him, so now I had bought my own ticket on the merry-go-round. I straightened up and ran a hand across my face. There was no use getting morbid about it now. I stuck the notice back in the file.

  I closed the office and went back out into the square. It all depended now on what I found out from Buford. If he said that a lawyer or someone else had visited Waites after his arrest, we could be pretty sure they believed we didn’t know what had really happened down there, or what was behind it, and that they were taking pains to keep us in the dark. Bernice was gone, and they wouldn’t know we had the letter, and...I stopped. The letter! My God, why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? If Waites hadn’t already told them that he’d lost it down there, he would sooner or later, and they’d go look for it.

  I crossed to the car as fast as I could walk, backed out of the parking place, and shot down the street toward the hotel. Parking in the same place I had before, I took a look up and down the street. The hotel itself was still dark and no one was in sight.

  I went up the steps. Slipping softly into the lobby, I walked down the hall by feel until I came to the door of the room. Once inside, with the door closed, I struck a match and looked around. It appeared to be just as I had left it. Walking over to the sofa. I took the letter out of my pocket and dropped it carefully down against the wall where I had found it. Then I went back out and got into the car, breathing easily again. It would have wrecked everything if they had found out, after I was gone, that I had read that letter.

  I was beginning to feel like a man being chased through some horrible dream. How many hours ago, I thought, did I stand there in that cabin and turn her around facing me so I could see how she looked in decent clothes and with her hair combed, stand there feeling proud of the loveliness of her? Was it months ago now? I looked at my watch as I went past a street light. It was a little after nine. It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.

  Suddenly, I was conscious of a consuming desire to get back to the girl’s apartment and find out the only other thing there was left to learn. Somehow, that seemed now to be the goal toward which I had been running since eleven o’clock this morning, the final knowledge that at last I had my hands on all the loose ends of this thing I so I could know definitely, once and for all, what I was going to do. It seemed that for a length of time beyond all measuring I had been running across the surface of a lake on treacherous cakes of ice that sank under me as fast as I stepped on them. When I got one thing straightened out in my mind, something else would explode in my face and change it.

  I parked and hurried up the walk to the entrance. The door clicked as soon as I pushed the buzzer. They’re anxious too, I thought. I must have been gone a long time.

  Buford looked up as I came in. “I just called the hospital. They think the Bell woman will pull through all right. They won’t let anybody in to see her yet, though.”

  I was glad to hear it, in spite of the fact that I knew the grand jury would probably subpoena her. She was a bandit, but a cheerful one, and I liked her.

  Buford went over and turned off the radio and came back to sit down on the sofa beside Dinah. She looked at me with interest.

  “What did you find out?” Buford asked. He might have been asking me who won the Tulane-Alabama game, but I knew what was going on in his mind.

  I sat down. I reached for a cigarette, and found the pack was empty. Dinah pushed a silver cigarette case across the table toward me, smiling. “Before I start,” I said, “I want to ask a question. Did Waites have any visitor after he was arrested?”

  “Waites?”

  “That’s the man you’ve got in jail. Maybe he gave some other name when you booked him, but that’s his right one.”

  “Then you found out about him?”

  “Quite a bit. And it’s all bad. But first, did anybody go in to see him?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Holloway.”

  I knew then I’d been right. Holloway was a lawyer, and a good one. He was also a member of Soames’s congregation and active in church work.

  “All right, let’s have it,” Buford said quietly.

  “Well, hold onto your hat,” I said. “That fifteen-year-old girl Abbie Bell had down there is Waites’s daughter.”

  Buford put down the cigar and whistled softly. As rapidly as possible I gave him the whole thing, what I had found out from Bernice, what the letter had said, and what I had been able to figure out from it. He got the whole picture as fast as I gave it to him. There was nothing slow about Buford.

  “So now we’ve got Waites in jail, where he’ll be very handy for the grand jury any time they want to listen to him,” he said. “And that Bell woman’s in the hospital, where they can get her story as soon as she’s able to talk.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you can’t do a damned thing about either of them. You can’t move Abbie Bell; and you can’t run Waites out of town because he’s under a serious charge, or will be, and you’d never in God’s world explain it if he turned up missing. It’s just about as near perfect as anything can be.”

  Buford picked up his drink and looked at it. “Sweet Jesus,” he said.

  “They know they’ve got us,” I went on. “Mrs. Waites probably got in touch with Soames again when her husband took off for here with his hot head and his knife, asking him to try to head the old man off before he got in trouble. It was too late for Soames to do anything about it, but of course he knew who it was as soon as he heard there’d been trouble down at Abbie’s place. So he had Holloway take the case to defend the old man, and in return they asked him to keep his mouth shut for another day or two until they could get their facts ready for the grand jury. I don’t doubt that Holloway even told Waites he’d be in danger of having something happen to him if we found out who he was and what his testimony would do to us.”

  Buford got up from the sofa and walked slowly over to the wall where the guns were and stood there for a moment looking at them with his back to us. I sat looking at him, waiting to see what he would have to say, and then the rest of it began to fall into place for me. It was a part of th
e idea that had never occurred to me until this minute, and as I turned it over in my mind I was conscious of a warm feeling of elation and the knowledge that I had all the loose ends taken care of at last. This last piece fitted into it as perfectly as the final section of a jigsaw puzzle.

  I turned back and noticed abruptly that Dinah had been watching my face with that speculative interest I had seen in her eyes before. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that every time I had looked around her eyes had been on me, not with anything flirtatious in them, but only with that intense and fascinated interest, as a child might watch grownups getting ready for a hunting trip.

  The gray eyes smiled at me over the top of the highball glass. “You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s a good one.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” Buford turned back from the gun collection. He had lifted down one of the shotguns, an English double barrel, and as he turned he brought it up and swung it in an arc, mounting the gun and swinging it through all in one fluid motion the way a good wing shot gets onto a covey of rising birds. Then he took it down, looked at it once, and replaced it on the rack. “I like expensive guns,” he said.

  And expensive women, I thought, wondering how many other custodians of the gun collection there had been before Dinah. But I couldn’t quite follow him at the moment. I knew he was down there at the bottom of the well, where I had been, looking up at the smooth, unscalable walls, and he wanted to talk about guns. But maybe guns just happened to be a good opening subject. I’d never underestimated him, and didn’t intend to.

  He reached down and picked up his drink off the coffee table. “You have any expensive habits, Jack?”

  I began to have a strange and unaccountable hunch then, a feeling that we were both working our way around to the same idea. I lit another of Dinah’s cigarettes. “No,” I said. “None except staying out of jail. That may be a little expensive at the moment.”