Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  So far? But aren’t we home, she thought. Where we understand and will be understood.

  Some miles farther, he suddenly turned the wheel, with his right leg convulsing oddly, and the station wagon bumped into a dusty parking lot at the side of a small diner. Toby managed to set the brake, then he tumbled out on his side, putting his right foot to the ground and massaging the calf. Ann got out and ran around to him.

  “Cramp. Oo-ow. And a doosy, too. Tension, I guess.”

  “I can drive.”

  He glanced upward. “No, no. Look, why don’t we get some coffee?” He was looking rather fiercely reckless. “We’ve got some figuring to do, anyhow.”

  What figuring? she wondered. But he began to limp toward the diner and she followed.

  When they were inside, the pain took hold of him and a woman, evidently the proprietress, rolled nervous eyes. “Just a cramp,” Toby reassured her. “Can we get some breakfast?”

  “Why, sure thing.” She led them to a booth in the rear which was dim and smelled of yesterday’s potatoes.

  But the coffee was marvelous.

  “What now?” said Toby after a while, when the pain creases had gone from his face.

  “I thought—” Ann didn’t finish. She realized that she hadn’t been thinking. When Toby had said home, she had imagined he meant their home town.

  He read her mind. “Uh uh. Not two hundred more miles—not the way we’re loaded.” (No, of course not.) “I think San Diego,” he went on. “And someone in authority, you know?”

  He meant the police. Ann nodded.

  “But what about his wife? Ann, what would you want?”

  Ann tried to turn a sympathetic imagination toward an answer. She could dimly remember how Ethel Reynolds looked—middle-aged spread, pink jowls, twists of pale hair. Poor woman—Ann did not really know her, knew nothing about her temperament. “I think,” she finally answered, “that she will be glad we have done what

  we’ve done.”

  “Should we call her? Right away?”

  Ann said, “I guess we should.”

  Toby leaned out of the booth, massaging his leg where it was stretched out into the aisle. “Not much privacy here. Phone’s on the wall.”

  “Not here, then. One of those outdoor booths?”

  “Okay. See, I can’t quite figure what to do with the—the package.”

  “But won’t the—the authorities . . .?”

  “Yes, but do we drive up with it? To a police station? Or to some hospital?”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Or would she want—a regular place?”

  The conversation was awkward, when they could not speak aloud about a dead body or a funeral parlor.

  “We should ask her that,” Ann said.

  Toby sighed, “One more cup.”

  Ann studied the plane of his cheek, the touch of gauntness. She was beginning to think that she was a girl, and a stupid one, at that. She not only didn’t know the answers, she didn’t know the questions.

  Except one. “What will happen to us?” she asked softly.

  “I don’t know.” Their eyes met. “Wish I could keep you out of it,” Toby said. “It wasn’t your decision.”

  “It was my necessity, Toby.” Ann was woman enough and bright enough to know that much. “Did we break a law?”

  “We don’t know,” Toby said, “but ignorance is no excuse. Well, we’d better get going.”

  At the cash register the proprietress inquired about his leg and Toby said it seemed to be functioning properly now. He left the money and the Hartmans went outside.

  The station wagon was not where they had left it.

  It was not in the parking lot at all.

  It was gone.

  Toby’s hand was painful on Ann’s shoulder. They whirled and went back inside. “Did you see anybody drive off with my gray station wagon?” he demanded.

  “What? What’s that?” When the meaning of the question finally got through to the woman’s understanding, she became agitated. So did one of the customers of the place, a barrel-chested man in working clothes, with a disreputable felt hat pulled to a pixie peak on his head.

  “Hey, I saw a gray station wagon, backing out. Didn’t know it was yours, Mister. I wasn’t here when you parked it. Hey, you better call the cops right away. They’re pretty sharp, you know. They’ll get right on it.”

  Now the proprietress was pointing to the phone on the wall. “That’s right. You do that, Mister.”

  The Hartmans realized that they could not not do that.

  Toby gave Ann a look, then went to the phone, with the proprietress beside him, holding a dime ready, helpful, insistent, full of faith in the power of the police to protect the innocent. They were just within the city limits. So Toby called the San Diego police.

  Ann stood there, paralysed. What would Toby say? What could he say?

  Very quietly, steadily, he reported a stolen car. He gave the location of the diner, prompted by the proprietress. He described the station wagon, gave the license number, said that it was loaded with camping equipment. He gave their names and their home address in Santa Barbara. Finally, he said, “We’ll try to get into town and find a hotel. I’ll call you back from there.” He thanked somebody and hung up.

  He had not mentioned a dead body—but he looked ghastly.

  The customer was dancing up and down on his pointed shoes. “Hey, listen, folks, I’m going into town. You can ride along with me. You’re perfectly welcome. Okay?”

  “That’s mighty nice of you,” Toby said tiredly.

  So they went outside, and Toby and Ann got into the back seat of an old Ford. The man coaxed it into motion and told them his name was Donahue, that he was a plasterer. It was a crime there was so much crime these days. It was these punk kids. Now that he came to think about it, he was pretty sure that a couple of kids had taken the wagon. Now, he didn’t know exactly why he thought so. Skinny legs in tight jeans—he remembered that much. Memory was a funny thing, wasn’t it? And so on and so on.

  Ann could not speak and Toby spoke as little as possible. He gave Donahue the name of a hotel. On arrival, Toby thanked him and said, yes they had his name and address, as a witness.

  Mr. Donahue, rolling his eyes at the great canopy over the sidewalk, began to backtrack. “Say, folks, listen, I don’t think I could identify nobody. Not really. I just got this impression, you know what I mean? It’s not going to be too much help, you know what I mean? Look, I’ll do my duty and all, but I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

  “We understand,” Ann said to him. Mr. Donahue gave her a look of sadness and drove away.

  So Toby, in his old flannel shirt and dirty suntans, and Ann, in her rumpled suit of slacks and soiled shirt, walked past the doorman into the dim and elegant old lobby. But Toby had stayed here many times before, and when the manager came out, Toby gave him a quiet explanation that went no further than “fishing trip, stolen car and luggage.” The manager allowed the stern look on his face to dissolve toward service and personally led them to their room.

  As soon as he was gone, Ann threw herself down on the lush mattress. Toby said quickly, warningly, “We probably are in no more trouble than we already were, Annie. Go wash up, why don’t you? I’m going to call Ethel Reynolds. Then we’ll trot around to the police station.”

  “Yes,” said Ann calmly. She went into the luxurious bathroom and put her hands into hot water. She washed her face and neck and she combed her hair. She tugged at her shapeless garments and held her body so that the slacks and shirt fell into smarter lines. She was feeling stunned by everything that was happening, including the fact that her husband had obviously expected her to lie down on the bed and have a girlish cry.

  When she came back into the room, Toby said, “I’ve decided to call her from the station. She’ll probably want to talk to them too.”

  “It would be bad enough to have to tell her if we knew her,” Ann said.

  “Or wor
se,” he said.

  They took a cab. Toby had not been able to shave, since everything was in the suitcases in the station wagon; but he had washed and neatened his hair.

  They entered the Headquarters building and asked where to report the theft of a body. They endured, with what calm they could muster, a series of hard-eyed stares, and at last found themselves in an office with a man in a gray suit who told them his name was Larson.

  Toby told the story, sparing nothing. At the end, before the man could comment, Toby added quickly, “Now, I ought to call his wife. I really ought. I’ve chickened out on that long enough.”

  Larson nodded and pushed a phone toward Toby.

  Ann sat in a chair and clasped her hands, thinking, I can’t seem to help at all. I can’t do any of these awful things. Toby has to do them. If it wasn’t for me, he’d have got in touch with the Mexican police. And who knows? It might have turned out all right. Who knows?

  She listened to Toby struggling to tell a woman gently that her husband was suddenly and mysteriously dead, that his body had been smuggled across the border, and then stolen. The poor woman must have said that she didn’t understand, because Toby, with almost superhuman patience, began to go all through it again.

  After that, Toby looked at Larson with such despair that the detective extended his hand for the phone. He went through it the third time, in a somewhat less hesitant manner.

  When, at last, the connection was broken, the understanding was that Ethel Reynolds would come to San Diego at once. The Hartmans were to reserve a hotel room for her and wait for her.

  Now Toby sat, exhausted, while Larson used the phone again. After a brief mention of a dead man he went through a series of “I see,” “Okay,” and “Right.” Then he put down the phone and faced them.

  “Your car has been found,” he told them watchfully.

  “Oh.” Ann rose. At least, this was a little better.

  “There is no dead body on the roof of your station wagon,” Larson said quietly.

  Toby and Ann simply stared at him.

  “We had better go,” the police officer said. “Come with me.”

  So they rode, with Larson, in a dark sedan, out of the city and back along the road by which they had entered San Diego. They soon stopped asking questions to which there were no answers.

  The station wagon was parked about a mile past the diner. It was cluttered and dusty, with the canvas of one of the half tents hanging down over the side. The fishing rods were still there, and one of the sleeping bags was on the roof.

  But there was no body.

  Not in the station wagon or on top of it.

  A police car was there, and uniformed men greeted Larson with deference. They had spotted the station wagon by its description and the license number. There it had stood—but no prints, no clues. Nothing for the police to work on.

  Ann and Toby were standing on the sidewalk, hand in hand. Larson beckoned. “See what else is missing,” he suggested.

  Toby said, “One of the canvases from the roof, and two sleeping bags. And—you know—”

  “Anything else, is what I’m asking,” snapped Larson.

  So Toby put his head in over the lowered tailgate. “Hard to say . . . Nothing, as far as I can tell.”

  Ann slipped under his arm to look in. Her green silk suit gleamed dimly inside its plastic bag. “Could we please take our clothes?” she asked Larson. “We haven’t got a stitch to change into.”

  “Lift those suitcases out.”

  Toby lifted them out, his tan leather and her blue nylon. He did not touch Reynolds’ black bag.

  “Open them,” said Larson.

  Toby opened them on the tailboard. Ann’s pink slip, her high heels, the old skirt and sweater she had jammed in, were exposed. Larson stirred the contents of both cases with a hand he used as if it were a stick. “All right,” he said, “take them, but nothing else. In view of your story about this dead man, we’ll have to impound the car.”

  He left them and seemed to be giving instructions.

  Ann, standing on the sidewalk, began to cry. Very silently, not to disturb anybody, she let the tears roll down. It seemed so sad that a man should have died and been treated with such indignity as to have been lost, like an old shoe, the one old shoe that lies beside the road,

  so mysteriously, with the shape of a living foot still in it.

  Larson came back, gave her tears a hard look that dried them instantly, herded the Hartmans into his sedan, and drove them back to the hotel. He went up to the room with them. In the incongruous elegance they all sat down.

  Larson said, “Maybe they had a notion to go camping. They wired across your ignition and took off. They start to look over the loot, and find the dead man. They realize they’ve got a hot car. Abandon it. But there are people who are superstitiously unwilling to handle a dead body. So the body will turn up somewhere else—in some out-of-the-way spot.”

  Larson shrugged. “They couldn’t have gone too far before they started to unload, that’s for sure. So we’ll look around and we’ll find it. That is if—”

  He became bland. “Now, this Byron Reynolds was a business associate of yours, you say, Mr. Hartman?”

  “I said we worked in the same office.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Not too well. Nice fellow, but older than I am. Went to lunch a few times. Very casually. Never entertained him and his wife socially. Ann—I mean, Mrs. Hartman—barely knew them.”

  “How much did you know Mr. Reynolds, Mrs. Hartman?” The detective’s eyes were cold.

  “I’d met him and his wife at the Company parties, only once or twice,” she said.

  “He was—did you say, in his early forties? Did you ever meet him anywhere alone? Mrs. Hartman?”

  “What?” said Ann, not understanding until Toby drew air in, sharply.

  “I ask the questions,” Larson said, “that I have to ask. Any trouble between you and Reynolds in a business way, Hartman? Rivalry? Grudges? Office politics?”

  “No,” said Toby shortly. “He liked to fish. He wanted to go in the worst way, so I felt sorry for him. And that’s all there was to it. What are you thinking? There’ll be an autopsy, won’t there?”

  “Not without a body,” Larson reminded them.

  “You’ll find it.”

  “We’ll do our best—and that’s pretty good, don’t forget it.” Larson seemed to be giving them warning. “If we don’t, I may have to do a little more wondering. Now, you say you came over the border with a body on the roof of your car. Suppose you didn’t? Suppose the man died down there in Mexico and his death could be, shall we say, embarrassing to you? So you bury him in the sand. Or somewhere. Then you panic. Run. Now, you are home free. Why? Because we can look for the body on this side as long as we like, but we can’t find what isn’t there. Can we?”

  Toby said sharply, “We stole our own car? Ask the woman in the diner. Ask Mr. Donahue.”

  “I don’t say you stole your own car,” said Larson calmly. “I just wonder if, given the fact that it just happened to get stolen, you didn’t very cleverly improvise a little?”

  “That’s pretty wild,” said Toby stiffly.

  “It would be a coincidence?” Larson grinned at them. “It already is. And so is everything else you’ve told me. No, it looks as if you bury him and run and get away with it. But where is he? People are going to want to know. Pretty smart if we look for him here instead of where he really is.”

  “You flatter us,” said Toby with bitter anger.

  “I kind of hope we’ll find that body pretty soon,” Larson said. “Time doesn’t help any of us, very much. Meanwhile, we’ll be checking.” And he left abruptly.

  Toby turned around, looking wild. “Now what? Now he is going to be checking on us, up home. Now come all the nasty questions. All over the office. All over the neighborhood. Among our friends. Questions about me. Questions about you.”

  “I know,” Ann sa
id. She thought that no matter what the answers are, the questions alone are going to be a mark on us, forever. “Well,” she said brightly, “maybe the sky is falling, but this chicken-little is going to have a bath, and you had better take one, too. Then we’ll go down and have a super-civilized luncheon with all the fixings.”

  “While we can, eh?” Toby was trying as hard as she to grin and be gay.

  So they tried. But they were not as young as they had been yesterday, and any playfulness was much too close to hysteria. Ann, in the old sweater and skirt, felt like the proverbial condemned criminal.

  They were paged. Santa Barbara calling. Mrs. Reynolds was prostrated and under a doctor’s care. Her lawyer, a Mr. Bixler, was on his way and would the Hartmans please put the hotel room in his name? The Hartmans did.

  Toby bought a large scale map of the city. They went up to the room where he pored over it and Ann stared at the wall.

  “Listen, Annie, I’ve been figuring the times involved. Do you realize that this thief or thieves had the car for only about one hour, maybe less? The body has to be near that diner.”

  “That’s what Mr. Larson was saying, isn’t it? But you can drive an awful long way in one hour.”

  “Not and get back to a mile from where you started.”

  “You can drive pretty far in even half an hour.”

  “I don’t think he did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, look at it this way. Suppose he drove half an hour as far as he could go? Why the devil would he turn around and come back at all? Why not leave the car half an hour out?”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Look where it was found. About a mile the other side of the diner.”

  “So?”

  “So I say he first took it the other way—this side of the diner. Donahue didn’t see which way he drove off. Now, figure that the thief panics. He has to get rid of the car. He doesn’t leave it where it is. Now, don’t tell me he drove it about a mile, stopped on a busy thoroughfare, and removed a body there.”

  “No.”

  “Then he wanted to get it away from the place where he first took it. So he turns around and just after he passes the diner—about a mile after—he loses his nerve.”