“A lawyer? Not exactly, my boy, though I do know a smattering of law. Why?”
“I’m Boyd Winter,” said the twin, “and this is my brother Burnet. We’d like to know if we can sue this drunk, or make a complaint or something.”
“On any particular grounds?”
“Well, fairly particular,” said Burnet bitterly. “He almost killed me, if that means anything to you. I’ve got a whole flock of witnesses.”
Tozer contributed, “The boys are right; it came as close to downright manslaughter as anything I ever saw. Burnet here was looking under the hood of his car, when Shanley came along and knocked him flat in the mud. Pretty near ran over him. Too blind tight to steer past a red barn, not to mention a young man who wasn’t wearing a tail light.”
“When was this?” asked a voice. It was George’s voice.
“Just about the time we were all pulling in for the night. Six o’clock, wouldn’t you say, Migler?”
Migler released his chin wattle and nodded solemnly. It had gone far enough, Katheren decided. She had seen the minute flaring of George’s nostrils, noticed the dreamy, far-away look that came into his eyes, heard him put the first tentative question to these suspects who were busily confessing motives for an attempted murder; so she nudged his elbow. Lest he mistake the nudge, she also took a firm grip on Caligula’s leash and moved towards the door.
Boyd was saying darkly, “He’s a menace. He’s a potential killer of little dogs and children and innocent people, and something’s got to be done about it. Believe me, we’re sore!”
And Burnet was saying wearily, “Only this guy isn’t interested and he’s not a lawyer anyhow, so let’s get that coke.”
Grocery store, post office, motor accessories shop, short order restaurant and soda fountain abounded for the twins to choose among, and they chose to hoist their corduroys on stools at the fountain and turn the backs of their sweat-shirts to the room while Mrs. Migler prepared their cokes.
George was having difficulty getting away from Beardsley.
Migler came from the back of the shop with a quart bottle of household ammonia, which he gave to Tozer. Migler vouchsafed, “Go way out west to go to college, them two boys!” and pointed an awed finger at the Winter backs.
Tozer uncorked the ammonia, seized Shanley’s head by its scant mousy hair and thrust his face into the fumes. Shanley winced and sneezed.
“That’ll fix him,” Tozer told them.
“Fissem,” echoed Shanley, and tried to roll off the counter. With much help, he got unsteadily to his feet and blinked his bloodshot eyes. He brushed away the help, took a few tentative steps like a bold fledgling leaving the nest—and sneezed. Successfully recovering his balance, he tottered round Katheren and Caligula, found the door by a miracle of blind faith, threw it open, and dove out into the night.
Tozer shook his head: “Now it begins again!”
Migler mused, “Drunks and little chillern, the good book says! You got to feel sorry sometimes for their wives, don’t you now? Locked him out, Mrs. Shanley did, and who’s gonna blame her? He’ll sleep just as good in that Pontiac o’ his as he will in a bed in Number Six, and never know the difference! Now, folks, I still got Number One and Number Five empty. No tellin’ how long, this weather. Comes to ten dollars even, in advance.”
“We’ll be going on,” said George. “We only want a tire changed.”
“Not tonight. Change it first thing come morning, though.”
“I’ll change it myself, thanks just the same,” and George made his adieux to Alden Beardsley.
“Takes a good man,” said Migler to a tower of tinned peaches, “to jack up a wheel in this mud. Long ways to the next town, too. Maybe the hotel’s got a bed there, maybe not. Storm’s comin’ on worse all the time. That’s how people catch colds, drivin’ at night in wet clothes...”
The admonitions droned on, Tozer went over to inspect a shelf of fish bait in tins, the Winter twins fed more nickels into the juke-box and George exchanged insurance company references with Beardsley, quite as if the Shanley adventure were decently over and done with.
Katheren stood impatiently at the door, almost pressing her nose against the wet glass.
It flew open in her face.
A spectacular blonde creature confronted her, and after staring haughtily for an instant, said with great elegance, “I beg youah pahdon, I’m suah!” The accent was pseudo-British, and not washable.
Katheren retreated in awe against the post office partition.
The spectacle swished past her, stove-pipe hat, jacket of silver fox, black satin frock, lacy silk stockings and a pair of precarious, spindly high-heeled shoes. She left a whiff of heavy perfume in her wake. Wherever she came from, wherever she was bound, she did not belong in Migler’s.
A half-smile, a quick lowering of the eyelids for George Brendan and Alden Beardsley, who were well dressed; seductive, that was meant to be.
Then the blonde waved crimson fingernails at the shelves of canned soup, imperiously demanding Cream of Shrimp, which Migler had never heard of.
George and Alden got their minds on insurance again.
Katheren, whistling soundlessly, began to read the post office announcement board, complete with the usual exhortations to Join the Army Now, air mail rates, and lesser handbills advertising weird-looking criminals. Katheren’s glance passed casually over them, traveled a little way beyond, then reverted in horrified disbelief.
She recognized the lean, slightly amused face of her husband. A fair likeness, though the eyes and mustache had been touched up. Bold, black, unmistakable letters over it proclaimed:
WANTED FOR DEPORTATION
Katheren checked the instant impulse to snatch it down. Mrs. Migler was watching her, wondering whether to come over and sell her a stamp or not. Katheren assumed an appearance of innocent loitering, or tried to, and read through to the bitter end:
HAZLITT G. B. WOAR
May use an Alias. Poses as Scotland Yard Representative, Private Detective or Confidential Investigator. Nationality: British. Description: Age, 37; Height, 5 feet, 11-1/2 inches, medium slender build, dark hair and mustache, brown eyes, dresses quietly but well, speaks with English accent.
$25.00 REWARD
will be paid to person giving information leading to arrest & apprehension of this man.
Notify:
Harry S. Hellenberger
Public Prosecutor,
Melton County, N. J.
“The post office,” said Mrs. Migler’s voice through the wicket, “ain’t open at night, but if you just want a stamp—”
Katheren bought some stamps. Mrs. Migler had very sharp eyes, and undoubtedly a suspicious turn of mind. Katheren avoided even looking at the handbill again. George was waiting for her, ready to leave.
“We’d better stay here, I think,” she told him. “He’s right about your driving in wet clothes. Mr. Beardsley’s sensible, he’s staying. How much did Mr. Migler say it was?”
Two dollars per person, including use of stove, running water, and shower bath right there any time you want it. And a dollar apiece deposit on each of the cabins, against the possibility of flying by night with the cabin furnishings. Ten dollars all told for two couples in two cabins.
George behaved beautifully. He raised his eyebrows no more than an eighth of an inch, and drew five dollars from his pocket. Beardsley produced his five. Migler clutched at the money, and his wife offered them a selection of keys from a cigar box.
“Which is which?” asked Beardsley.
“Don’t make no never mind,” Mrs. Migler dismissed the matter. “Them’s pass keys. All keys here is pass keys. Ain’t had regular keys for pretty near on three years now....”
She departed through a threadbare curtain that apparently led into the Migler living quarters. Migler went to Tozer in the tinned-bait department. The spectacular blonde hugged her soup to her breast, apparently done with her shopping. The Winter twins were concentrating on the
ir ignition problem.
Except for Alden Beardsley, then, the coast about the announcement board was clearing nicely. Alden stood at the door, beckoning out into the storm.
Beckoning to his wife, it proved.
She came in, cheerfully stamping the muddy slop from her neat shoes. Alden put an arm about her shoulders, led her to the Woars and said, “Brendans, this is Mae. Now Mae and I were talking about you two on the way along—no harm if I get a little personal, is there?—and she said—”
Mae, small, round, trim and genial, shushed her husband. He over-rode the shushing.
“Anyhow, we got a bet on you folks. Want to settle it for us? Now don’t blush, Katheren! Don’t haul off and hit me, George! I had an idea you two just got married recently and you were on your honeymoon. Am I right?”
When two people, eminently sensible and prosperous, and both somewhere beyond fifty, twinkle at you after a question like that, there’s little you can do other than what Katheren did:
“How on earth did you find us out?”
“Why, my girl, when you’re our age, you’ll spot a newlywed a mile off...”
Alden took his hat off (displaying a crop of curly, iron-gray hair that would do justice to the best bank in the land); he made a little bow, and shook hands with her.
Mae said, “When you get to know us better, you won’t mind us so much, either of you! Just a couple of old busybodies, interested in nice young people, getting all the fun we can out of life! If Alden was wrong, he was going to ask you to our cabin and buy you a little drink, but since he isn’t wrong—”
“Ah! We’re the mugs,” said George. “Will you do us the honor, and I’ll see what can be dug out of our suitcase?”
Everybody joined arms.
George and Alden contended for the right to open the door.
The wind came in, fluttering the handbills on the announcement board.
“Go ahead, all of you,” said Katheren. “I’ll be right along. I have to buy something. Some eggs. We need eggs, George.”
“Do we? Of course, right! Cabin Number Five, Katheren.”
“I won’t forget—Number Five.”
The three of them vanished in a swirl of rain.
“Pahdon me, if you please!”
It was the spectacular blonde again, awkwardly embracing two cans as if to make it clear that such shopping was quite an experience for her, sidling sinuously past Katheren, mincing off into the darkness and mud on her high heels.
The time was ripe for what Katheren had to do; but the handbill was not.
It had disappeared.
Two
KATHEREN, being a sensible businesswoman (Meynard & Cramshaw, Literary Agents, Madison Avenue, New York City), told herself that it couldn’t have got very far in the three minutes or less in which her eyes had been off the announcement board.
Woar might have been identified by someone in need of twenty-five dollars. That was the worst snag.
But the Winter twins still sat at the soda fountain, engrossed in their ignition problem. They hadn’t budged. Mr. Tozer had moved to the center of the store, where he and Migler fiddled with fishing reels. Tozer threw Katheren a whimsical little smile that might have meant almost anything. And Mrs. Migler hadn’t returned at all.
Also the elegant creature in the fox fur asked to be considered. Katheren, in spite of the fox fur, was cynical about the lengths people would go for money these days.
However, she couldn’t do anything about that now, and she could search the floor, where the handbill might have been blown by the wind.
“Six eggs,” she told Migler, “a loaf of bread, a quarter pound of your best butter and a package of tea...coffee...”
With Migler occupied, she hunted beneath counters and in corners. She hunted very carefully. In vain. Somebody in Mountain View Rest Camp knew the worst about the Woars. No use deluding herself, that somebody might have telephoned the nearest town already for the police.
While she stood dismally anticipating her husband’s capture and waiting for Migler to dig up change for the bill she had given him, the door opened and a man came in. She had never seen him before. She expected never to see him again. Therefore she barely noticed him till he stood over her and bowed:
“Hello. Lot of swell music going to waste. What do you say, want to dance?”
It was so surprising and irrelevant, Katheren couldn’t help herself. She laughed. A silly laugh, and a little wild, she supposed, but there it was, forcing its way out of her.
The man had a very definite and handsome kind of face, which promptly looked offended.
“I wash myself, I’m clean,” he said, and spread two huge, hard hands in front of her for inspection. “If you don’t want to dance with me, just say so. What’s the matter, anyhow?”
“I don’t even know who you are!”
“That we can clear up quick,” he assured her, and reached into a hip pocket for a battered bill-fold, letting her see that it was fat with money and at the same time taking a business card from it:
White Spot Interstate Trucking Corp.
Chicago.
NICK LEEDS, Traffic Inspector
Residence, 40201 No. Alexandria
Los Angeles, Calif.
“Really, I’m grateful, Nick, but as it happens—”
“Still worried? Ask Migler. I stop here all the time. I’m through this way every week.”
In spite of his gnarled ears and an awesome muscular frame that bulged the seams of his leather windbreaker jacket when he moved, Nick Leeds was young and impressionable and, Katheren gathered, easily hurt. And he was not the kind of man Katheren could wish to hurt. So she confessed:
“I have to cook my husband’s dinner,” and reached for the change Migler was counting out for her.
“You didn’t look like you were married.”
“Don’t mention it. Very kind of you to say that.”
“A guy makes those mistakes, you know.”
He turned on his heel, thrust his hands deep in his trouser pockets and shouldered across the store to the soda fountain, where he canted a hip on a stool.
Katheren had to pick up the unwanted groceries and run; but not in abject dread. If she’s just been tacitly told her eyes are attractive, her skin and figure younger than they have a right to be, and her clothes as nice as she thought they were when she bought them—a woman tan face anything.
2
Cabins One, Three and Five, little wooden shacks, confronted Cabins Two, Four and Six across a rectangular and feebly lighted quagmire. Lean-to shelters attached to each cabin protected the occupants’ cars.
At the far end, a long white shed marked “Ladies-Gents—Showers” closed the rear of the court. At the end nearest the road, on drier ground, stood Migler’s store and a huge object like a loaf of aluminum bread on wheels. The Tozer trailer at its moorings in the trailer park, as it turned out.
Sinister, Woar had called it.
For the first time, Katheren caught the full force of the word, stripped of irony. Sinister and malignant that dismal auto court looked now, in the shifting shadows thrown by a few bare light bulbs swaying in the gale on the ends of their wire stems.
A human silhouette wavered between the bath and Number Six—Shanley on his unconsolable drunken prowl. He vanished into the blackness under Six’s car shed. Shanley’s cabin and Shanley’s car—and none of her business anyway.
She shivered at a trickle of rain that ran down her neck and hurried all the faster to the door of Number Five, and light and warmth and her husband.
The inside belonged to a gigantic and unyielding iron bed, to the exclusion of almost everything else—even Katheren, till she managed to squirm between the foot of it and the plasterboard wall and so get to the kitchen.
Woar and the Beardsleys squatted on the counterpane, oriental fashion. The former, with his shoulders propped against a bed-post, drank whisky and water out of a teacup as if a comfortable eternity lay before him.
> She called, “George,” though, and he stirred himself and came.
“Did you feed Caligula?”
“Forgot!”
“Never mind. I’ll do it,” and she added in a whisper close into his ear, “Get rid of them, quick. Don’t ask why.”
He didn’t.
Alden was the kind of man who could look dignified squatting on a bed. In his rich, deep, confidence-inspiring voice, raised so the Brendan-Woars could hear him in the kitchen, he was bumbling on, “What I was afraid of was a damage suit—estate tied up by some damn shyster lawyer! Man in my position can’t be too careful! And that reminds me—you youngsters being just married, maybe you’re thinking of investing for that well-known nest egg in the near future. Glad to give you any advice I can.”
He flourished a card at George as he emerged from the kitchen. It said, “Alden Beardsley, New York, Chicago, Santa Barbara,” and by way of a glittering generality, “Investments.”
George flung himself on the bed, dropping his head on a pillow and cocking wet shoes up on the coverlet. Katheren, opening a can of dog food, could see the wicked, fitful glint in his half-closed eyes. She heard him drawl, “Thanks, Beardsley—”
Mae lifted her cup overhead:
“Just a minute. Before anybody talks business, here’s to the bride and groom and long happiness together. Drink up, Alden. And say—if they’re driving out to California, why don’t they come and see us in Santa Barbara? Give them our address, dear. Katheren, you’ll love it! We got the habit, and we winter there every year. I don’t know anybody we’d rather have come to see us—”
Those amiable Beardsleys! The new-born friendship was instantly exposed on a mountainside to die.
“Have much trouble with the police?” asked Woar, again in a drawl, supremely indolent, markedly different from his usual clipped accent.
At that sudden shot across their bows, the Beardsleys gaped. They were taken aback. Who was Katheren to blame them?
For half a minute, rain pounded and the tip of George’s shoe traced intricate patterns in the air. Then Alden recovered enough to pass the question off as a tasteless joke. He smiled a lofty, righteous smile and shook his head.
If A Body Page 2