“Not yet, eh? Better keep your fingers crossed,” Woar advised. He sat up, stared hard at the two: “Who is Shanley, where from, why wanted dead? What’s the game?”
Alden and Mae jumped, or the equivalent from a squatting posture.
“Don’t jump for my benefit. I’m not impressed. It’s a bloody game, it’$ murder, which entails electrocution, hanging and other discouraging penalties. Do you understand?”
Mae started to protest.
“No, it’s not a nice conversation, Mrs. Beardsley. I’m not a nice man, either. I’m wondering if our little motor smash this evening was a coincidence—or did you know that at such an hour, a pedestrian would be shoved out under the wheels of a passing west-bound car; yours if you went ahead of me, mine if you stayed behind? Delicate point. Oh, he was shoved, no doubt about it. I’ll undertake to convince any jury that I caught a glimpse of the man who did it in the margin of my lights. Better, let’s hope Shanley lives. Let’s hope he’s shoved under no more cars tonight. Convey the hope to Migler, and Tozer, and the twins, and save us all much trouble with the police—will you?”
George arose and opened the door for them. The storm pounced in and ruffled the room.
Bewildered, indignant, offended, outraged, the Beardsleys stalked to the opening.
Mae called weakly to Katheren in the kitchen, but definitely not to George,4’My dear, thanks ever so much for the drink. It was very nice.”
Alden warned nobody in particular, “I wouldn’t go imagining a lot of wild things if I were you!”
They both cast constrained little lemon-drop smiles over their shoulders and ducked out into the rain.
Woar shut the door.
“Did you have to do it that way?” Katheren wanted earnestly to know.
“Dearest Katheren, I got rid of them,” he said wistfully. “I give you my word, I wasn’t detecting. I gave fair warning, just in case. The very least I could do for Shanley. In all fairness, wasn’t it?”
“You’re still a detective. You can’t see the woodpile for the niggers in it.”
He looked bewildered and repentant, and dug his pipe into his tobacco pouch.
“Ordinarily, George, I wouldn’t mind in the least. It’s the way you’re made, I suppose—but this time I’m sure you’re wrong, and besides, you’ve given yourself away to those people in the worst possible manner under the circumstances,” and she told him the circumstances.
He didn’t light his pipe.
He pocketed it, kissed her and said, “It’s rotten, Katheren, but don’t let it get you down. I shan’t be caught in this hole. There’s time enough, if we don’t waste it...”
3
He had to mount the spare wheel first; a job of about twenty minutes, with luck. Having backed the Buick under the shed, George was grunting at it while Katheren started water boiling for a quick cup of tea.
Only a bride, cooking in a strange kitchen for a husband almost equally new and strange—and who, by the way, when changing to dry shoes left the wet ones out to be stumbled over—Katheren nevertheless knew all about watched pots not boiling. She put the shoes under the bed and watched out the front window.
Uneasy serpents of light wriggled across the rain puddles. Everybody Sleeps Here!
Very much awake, the Winter twins had a light in the car shed of Number Four. They had finally got down to installing the repaired ignition system in their old Ford. Through the window of Number Four, Katheren could see another young man publicly changing his clothes.
Within Number Six a reddish head moved busily about—Mrs. Shanley, probably. She was singing at her work—singing in a low, husky, agreeable voice just loud enough to be heard above the wind and rain. “I’m Nobody’s Baby...” She sang well, that Mrs. Shanley! Nick Leeds, striding through the mud, stopped to listen. Then, remembering the rain, ducked into his cabin, Number Three. His door banged shut.
Almost at once Mr. Tozer appeared with a slim girl who hopped beside him, clearing the wettest spots in graceful bounds. She had on slacks and a red waterproof with a hood that covered her hair. For no particular reason, Katheren supposed the girl was Tozer’s daughter.
Out for a stroll in the rain?
No, they paused in front of Number Four and talked a moment with their heads close together.
The red waterproof nodded to something Tozer said, then ran on alone to Number Six and knocked. Mrs. Shanley opened the door, the waterproof went inside. After that Mrs. Shanley appeared at the window—to draw down the blind.
As if that were a signal, Tozer went into Number Four without knocking. Katheren craned a little. She could see the semi-nude young man present his face for close inspection, then his fists and forearms. Tozer was examining him like a doctor his patient. Both gesticulated oddly, almost violently. Then Tozer turned to the window and that blind also was drawn.
Katheren wondered at herself. She felt tense, expectant, restless with anxiety to be off, to be away from Migler’s, and the missing handbill and the drunken Shanley failed to account for the feeling entirely.
Caligula sympathized. He growled and snuffled at an inaudible sound beyond the crack under the door. He followed her to the kitchen, guarding her, when she went to pour the boiling water into a cracked and ugly teapot.
That pot, so ugly that it was funny, and the scent of tea and the worn shelves, the hissing gas ring, the cheap, chipped cups and plates she had to do with, brought back Katheren’s sense of humor and perspective.
“You’re a grand dog,” she told Caligula, who always responded to flattery, “but you worry too much. This is just an ordinary auto camp. You’ll get used to them before this trip is over. Now go lie down.”
Half convinced, Caligula sprawled on the floor. He kept his ears cocked, though, and his muzzle pointed warily toward the door.
Katheren melted butter in a frying pan with a cooked egg or two in view. Scrambled, poached, fried or how? Better ask George.
Before she could reach the door, the lights went out. They went out everywhere.
In the darkness Katheren bumped her elbow on the foot rail of the ungainly bed. Her funnybone, too. She saw stars and felt sickish.
Caligula set up a scrabbling and woofing at the door. What on earth was the matter with him?
She conquered her queasiness, groped her way round the end of the bed and found the door knob. It seemed to take an outrageously long time. The cabin had taken advantage of the total dark to expand and rearrange itself.
She scolded Caligula into behaving himself. She leaned out into the wind and called—but what she said when George responded had nothing to do with eggs. She knew at once why the dog had woofed.
“Look over there, George, quick!”
“Where, my dear?”
“At the Shanleys’ car! I think—isn’t that fire?”
“Don’t come out. It is,” said Woar, and ran.
4
There was more running and shouting, and then the lights came on. The butter was sizzling. Katheren attended to it and the eggs. When she finished, Woar stood dripping at her elbow, smiling beautifully.
“Don’t grin. What was wrong?”
“Fortunately for Mr. Shanley, who was sound asleep in his car,” he told her, and unblushingly began stripping off his thoroughly soaked clothes, “you noticed the fire in time. Otherwise he’d have been a fragrant kipper by now.”
“How did it happen? And the eggs are ready, by the way.”
Woar rubbed himself with a towel and sniffed hungrily.
“The little darlings are scrambled, too. Ah! The fire? Oh, wads of oily rag and paper under the cowl. What they were there for, I can’t imagine. Another whisky flask—old Spinning Wheel Straight Rye, empty. And Shanley drunk as the Prince Regent. Or a hoot-owl, if you prefer. And toast! And teal It’s magnificent.”
He twisted the towel around his bare middle and made ready to sit down to table. Someone knocked at the door. He looked appalled.
“I’ll go,” said Kathere
n.
She opened the door only far enough to put her head out, and saw the reddish hair of Mrs. Shanley, wet and glistening with rain. Turned up to the light, her face was haggard, desperate, but unforgettably beautiful. The woman stared at Katheren a moment with wide eyes. They were very large eyes, soft and guileless, and now they were piteous, like the eyes of a lost spaniel.
“Can I speak to your husband?” she implored in a low, husky voice.
“I’m afraid he hasn’t any clothes on. Could you wait—”
“No, it—it doesn’t matter. Don’t bother him. I’ll go next door.”
She whisked herself away before Katheren could reply.
She knocked on the door of Number Three, Nick Leeds’s cabin. No answer. She hurried on toward One, and that was the last Katheren could see of her.
“Mrs. Shanley. She probably just wanted to thank you,” Katheren told George, though the explanation wasn’t quite adequate, considering the look in those eyes. However, “What did you do?”
“Beardsley came over, and the Winter twins and Tozer and a stocky little brute from Number Two. We put the fire out. A pip-squeak fire at best. Shanley seemed to resent our attentions, so we put him in charge of that enormous chap in Three—Leeds, his name is.”
“I know him.”
“Do you? Anyhow, there was no disaster, and I pity Mrs. Shanley from the bottom of my heart. That’s that. Did I tell you the spare is also flat?”
“No!”
“It is, my dear. I was about to try the hand pump when the lights went off. Blown fuse, I was given to understand. Well, darling—happy days!”
He raised his tea-cup.
“Sugar?”
“In tea? No, thanks.”
“Never?”
“Never in tea. Always in coffee. Altogether marvelous, Kay.”
“What?”
“These eggs.”
She put down knife and fork, and swallowed the piece of toast that encumbered her mouth.
“George, please stop being cheerful and beating around the bush. I know what you’re thinking. It was another try at murder, wasn’t it?”
He stared at the leaves in the bottom of his empty tea-cup and nodded.
“What are you going to do?”
He shrugged. “What can I do?”
She got up and went round to his side of the table, primarily to pour him another cup of tea. Instead she put her hands on his shoulders and gripped them tightly.
“It’s horrible.”
“Its frightfully clumsy.”
“George, you must get that tire pumped up right away. You’re not in Scotland Yard any more, you’re not a policeman or a detective really. You’re just a—a man, with a wife, on a motor trip. You don’t have to see any more than other men see. You don’t have to know any more. You don’t have to think and analyze. Do you?”
“Do I? I don’t know.”
“You talked about settling down in some business or other. Remember, yesterday, when we left New York? All right, you stopped being a detective yesterday, and you’re an ordinary businessman now. What business exactly, I don’t know, but we’ll think of one.”
He put his hand over one of hers and said, “Katheren, you’re amazing.”
“I mean it, George. Drink another cup of tea now, and fix that tire.”
He drank his tea. He thrust his legs into dry flannels, pulled on an old tennis sweater and dug out his third pair of dry shoes for the day.
He was bending over, tying the laces when they heard the sound of a car starting up across the court.
Katheren went to the window. She pulled the edge of the blind enough to look out.
“An old Pontiac,” she told him.
“Shanley’s car.”
“Is it? I can’t believe he’s sober enough to—well, anyhow, it’s gone now.”
“Where?”
“Along the highway somewhere. Let’s forget it.”
Unwilling to be forgot, the sound of the motor echoed weirdly through the trees. It seemed to stall, start up again, roar along in one of the lower gears, and so dwindle away toward the west.
Woar bundled himself up in his well-worn mackintosh. Katheren thought he looked unhappy, defeated. She was sorry but unrepentant.
“Don’t bother with your wet things,” she told him. “I’ll wrap them in a newspaper.”
He wasn’t listening to her.
He had paused in the open doorway, his head cocked, his lips sucked in, waiting mournfully for the crack of doom.
It came, and it rattled the dishes. First a heavy, distant, rolling thunder, next a long-drawn-out scream of tires, finally an intense crash, reverberating again and again, hushing the storm. At last, silence.
A stunned silence, out of which Migler’s came slowly to life. Someone shouted a question. A door slammed. More doors, more voices, and running feet and questions back and forth...
Katheren and George stood looking at each other awkwardly, trying to get on from there, finding it momentarily impossible.
Woar gradually relaxed his shoulders and murmured, “I think that would be it.”
5
Nick Leeds took over, did most of what had to be done.
He summoned police, ambulance and the wrecking car. He set red warning flares to stop traffic along the blocked road. He forced the reluctant Migler to fill and light his stock of lanterns from the store. They were already in use at the scene of the wreck when the Woars showed up.
A giant White Spot six-wheeler had come to grief. The tractor unit stood on its nose in a culvert mouth. The trailer, ripped and spewing its freight, lay overturned across the highway. Small and incongruous by contrast, the remains of Shanley’s old Pontiac looked like a child’s toy tossed away after long use. It squatted on its axles in a bramble patch.
Shanley had been taken out of the wreckage and stretched on the grass. Migler’s shaky hand was holding one of the lanterns over him. Mae hovered near with an umbrella shielding the victim from the rain.
“Can’t we do something for him?” she appealed to George. “Can’t we help him?”
“Get him in where it’s warm,” said Migler, unasked.
“Hardly worthwhile,” George told them. “He’s dead.”
More concerned for the living, Woar waded through brambles to the side of the other casualty, the swamper. Faces haggard in the lantern light bent low over the unconscious body.
“He never knew what hit him,” the truck driver grieved for his assistant. “He was gettin’ some sleep.”
The truck driver spat from a bloody mouth. His eyes were full of wonder. Nick growled at him, “Your swamper’s all right. Bang on the head. Concussion. He won’t die. Forget it.”
Tozer solemnly agreed, and added that he “knew a little about medicine, enough to tell that much.”
Perhaps the truck driver saw a glint of accusation in Traffic Inspector Leeds’s sharp eye. At any rate, he wiped his bleeding lips and began to protest, “I swear on my mother’s grave I was usin’ my gears, I was slowin’ up ready to take on gas at Migler’s, I was crawlin’ along—and this has to happen to me!”
“How fast?” asked Nick.
“Forty, maybe thirty-five, I swear it!”
“Make it thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five, sure. You’d kill yourself goin’ any faster on these bends east of Hendrysburg. I’m tellin’ you, I sees this jalopy, no lights, no nothin’, comin’ at me on my side o’ the road. I swings over. I think I’m clearin’ it, only I skids and my trailer connects. Bing, and I’m in a ditch, spittin’ good teeth!”
“The other guy?”
“The jalopy? Pretty fast, on the wrong side. Drunk, I swear it!”
“Anybody else on the road?”
“Not a soul in sight, and it’s a straight road to Migler’s, and I could see the gas pumps all lit up. I know what I’m tellin’ you, Nick!”
“Sure, but I got to know what you’re tellin’ the cops.”
Nick made o
ff with one of the lanterns then, to draw a plan of the scene in triplicate for the accident insurance report. Catastrophe was all in the day’s work.
The ambulance slithered up beyond the overturned trailer, then the wrecking car. The truck driver and his unconscious swamper were whisked into the former, and out of the latter came two men in yellow slickers who dragged clanking lengths of heavy chain about and snarled at people who got in their way.
People, what with the storm and being snarled at, began to straggle back towards the lights of Migler’s, a hundred yards down the road.
The show was over.
George found Katheren in the lee of the overturned trailer, where She was emptying pebbles out of her shoes.
“Remarkable,” he observed, “how well they manage these things.”
“This is no time to be British, George.”
“No offense meant.”
“None taken. I’m wet and cross. Can we be on our way?”
He was considerate. He lit a cigarette for her before he told her, “Not a chance, my dear. The police would probably have us stopped in the next town, if only to find out why we ran away.”
“And if we don’t—?”
“We’ll be questioned along with the rest. If we look innocent enough, we might even get away with it.”
“You know how I feel about that.”
“Abundantly.”
“I loathe Migler’s and I expect us to be sold down the river any moment now for a measly twenty-five dollars reward.”
“I loathe Migler’s too, Katheren; but with faint, growing surprise I discover we aren’t sold down the river yet, and I’m beginning to think we may not be. Whoever made off with that handbill could be clever enough to realize it’s worth more than twenty-five. Fifty perhaps. Not to the police but to us.”
“Blackmail.”
“Good old blackmail,” said George, and took her arm to lead her back towards Migler’s.
6
A few benighted tourists held up by the wreck in the road passed through. The police car tore by the Woars and sprayed them with the mist boiling up from its wheels. It slewed in at the entrance to Migler’s.
Watching it, Katheren suffered a fresh pang of dismay. In spite of her husbands calm assurance, she felt dismally trapped.
If A Body Page 3