Clouds covered the sky. A thin rain fell. In the farmlands west of Vandalia, a lingering dusk overtook them.
Feeding Caligula from a can, Katheren said, “Why don’t we give up the struggle, George? We’ll never reach St. Louis tonight.”
But George, nursing the car up to fair speed, was disinclined to stop:
“What if Tozer reported you to the police?”
“For attempted murder, I suppose? Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not. I long for Missouri, that’s all.”
With or without disinclination, they stopped, and permanently, in the gloom of a dank little wood.
Katheren walked the dog, George and his flashlight delved under the hood. A car sped past, pulled up, then backed to a position parallel with the Buick.
“Trouble?” cried the hearty voice of Alden Beardsley. He was inclined to be helpful, but not to get out of his comfortable car in the growing rain.
“Sugar in the gas,” said George. He put the beam of his flashlight into the Chrysler. “Where’s Ruth?”
“Traveling with the Smalnicks since lunch. Sugar? What an awful trick for anybody to play,” Mae lamented. “Need a lift into town?”
“No, thanks. Send a tow car.”
“We’ll stop at the next garage, George, don’t worry!”
The Chrysler swept on up the road, and its tail lamps dwindled in the twilight, leaving the Woars in a dripping solitude. Katheren got in out of the wet. Woar tinkered. Night fell.
For half an hour, cars swished rapidly past the stranded Buick. None even hesitated. Katheren passed the time resenting them and conjuring up misfortunes for them to run into.
She was surprised when some Samaritan behind a feeble pair of headlamps chose to pull up beside them. It proved to be the Model “A,” though, and not too well-intended.
Ray in a yellow slicker remained at the wheel, as non-committal as monument. Boyd and Burnet elbowed in beside Woar for a look at the dark cavity where the motor lurked.
“Carburetor?” said Boyd.
“Dry,” said Burnet.
“Not getting gas,” said Boyd. “American cars, Mr. Brendan, have a little gadget around in back where you have to put the stuff in.”
“Trouble happens to be in the fuel line,” said Woar. “Have you a tire pump?”
“Never use the stuff,” said Burnet. “What I’d do is, I’d put it all together again and give the thing a deft blow with something heavy. That’s how we keep our motor in such swell condition.”
“The quixotic Winters,” said Boyd, “wish you Godspeed, maybe tomorrow or the next day. We hate to see any man stuck, but that doesn’t go for detectives. Have a nice time!”
When they had gone on, Woar put down the hood and joined Katheren.
“No use. The battery’s too feeble to start her, even if she would run. Katheren, my darling, we’ll sit here and grow old together, you and I.”
“On milk chocolate or canned dog food? That’s all there is to eat.”
He munched chocolate, smoked his pipe and brooded. In that lonely wood, rain came down in gusty spatters from the trees overhead. For a long time no cars went by.
“We’re well out of it now,” he said at last.
“Out of what in particular?”
“The running. We who were going to leave the others far behind are left far behind ourselves. And the moral of that is—?”
“I don’t know. I meant well, George, but we had bad luck.”
“Sugar in your gas isn’t bad luck,” and he sounded unusually bitter about it. “My dear, it’s been out of our hands from the beginning. This tour is being conducted by some ingenious devil who works out his schedules far in advance. Can’t you see the plan working? Beardsley, Tozer, Smalnick, the Winters, all on time, through passengers, itinerary arranged by the guide. Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt Woar aren’t included in the party, therefore motor trouble. Dash it all, I’m giving the tow car thirty minutes more, then I’ll start out on foot...”
That was his first open admission that his mind was on the case, and the last hypothesis he confided to her. She would have liked to ask questions, but she remembered, and suppressed them. Consequently, they sat in strained silence.
About twenty of the thirty minutes had gone by when a car entered the wood from the west.
It passed them hesitantly, turned about, and pulled close alongside. Katheren supposed it was the tow car at last.
A flashlight beam glared at them through George’s window. A voice muttered, “Looks like them, all right.”
Before George could open his door, the light was at his elbow, glinting on brass buttons of a uniform and the tip of an automatic.
“Hazlitt Woar,” said the voice, “you’re under arrest. Come on, get out.”
“And my wife?”
“Bring her along,” called another voice from the car.
“That, my dear,” said George amiably, “is that.”
And so they were taken to jail.
Seven
WHERE the rest of the Shanley case spent that night remains unknown. The detective spent it on a clean but very hard cot in a cold, damp, concrete cell in the basement of the City Hall in St. Petersville, Illinois.
Katheren held herself responsible. She had been rather pig-headed about the Buick. It should have been properly overhauled back in Plainfield.
In this contrite frame of mind, she started a conversation with the considerate and ruddy-faced young policeman who was working over a stamp collection at his desk.
“I thought I’d go out and buy sandwiches or something for my husband, if you’ll let me.”
“Lady, we’re not holding you at all. Only him. Wimples’ across the street makes darn good sandwiches.”
“Thanks. Will my husband be here long enough to need tooth-brush and razor?”
“We just sent a wire to this guy Hellenberger in Jersey. It’s up to him to get in touch with the immigration people or the F.B.I. How long before we get an answer, I wouldn’t know.”
“I see.”
St. Petersville had nothing to distinguish it from any other small American town. It had sidewalks, sleeping inhabitants and a depressing emptiness in the rain.
Katheren walked the sidewalks and wondered what George would have thought of to do. He was taking it with such tragic cheerfulness. She couldn’t let him down.
At the end of three-quarters of an hour and an exhaustive tour of the town, she returned in better spirits with food and a dozen magazines. She passed them through the bars to George.
“I took care of everything I could imagine,” she told him. “We’ll see how it comes out. Beardsley did leave word for the tow car, and Hilda’s in a garage. She can’t be fixed tonight. I told them to tow her into St. Louis right away and start a night man working.”
“You’re a lamb.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?”
His eyes pointed out that the young policeman was listening. He said, “No. Take a room in a hotel and get some sleep.”
“I’m not a bit sleepy, really,” she objected, and tried to kiss him through the bars. They were cold. The salute was too symbolic.
The policeman’s interest in stamps had worn limp. Katheren offered a cigarette, begged a light. He put his album in a drawer and turned the desk lamp away from her eyes:
“It’s a pleasure, pulling in folks like you.”
“We’ve been expecting it for days,” she confessed, establishing a mood of pleasant intimacy. “Who gave us away?”
“Phone call. No name given.”
“Somebody passing through town, I imagine?”
“Guess so. Call came in at—let’s see—eleven minutes after eight.”
“Man’s voice, or a woman’s?”
“Man.”
Katheren said, “If I knew who it was, I’d go to an awful lot of trouble to see him boiled in oil.”
“Sure, that’s natural,” said the policeman.
“Instinctive,” Woar agreed from th
e depths of his cell. When the policeman dug out a pack of cards, however, and suggested a three-handed game of Hearts, Woar begged off.
“I’d rather read,” he told them. “Escapist literature.”
So Katheren taught the young man to play Russian Bank. Midnight passed, then one, then two....It grew difficult to be amusing. Her eyes were heavy, her heart afraid.
At twenty after two, the phone rang. It startled Katheren out of a profound yawn.
She listened to gruff yesses, noes and say-that-agains in a state of exquisite suspense, till at last the young man hung up. Without a word, he showed her the message he had written down:
Countermand reward. Hazlitt Woar not wanted here. Will verify by letter.
H. S. Hellenberger,
Public Prosecutor
“Ain’t that somethin’?”
Katheren agreed. But would it get George out of jail, and quickly? Hiding her anxiety, she listened while he called the Chief of Police, then the railway station for a copy of the telegram to be sent round. Formalities dragged on for half an hour.
At last Woar emerged from his cell and pocketed money and personal impedimenta taken from him when he had been booked.
“Guess we got to let you go, Mr. Woar,” said the policeman with touching reluctance.
As they stepped into the street, he said, “Don’t forget—boil that guy in oil when you find him!”
They earnestly shook hands on that.
The rain had stopped. Woar filled his lungs from the fresh, wet wind, and admitted a longing to stretch his legs.
“If we don’t get out of this town,” said Katheren, “this will probably be the last walk we’ll ever take together.”
2
Getting out of St. Petersville took little time, but a lot of money. They settled a thumping sum on the garage proprietor who had arranged for Hilda to be towed ahead, and then, rather than wait for train or bus, they had to close a ruinous deal with a taxi driver to take them to St. Louis too. With her lap full of Caligula and her head on her husband’s shoulder, Katheren snatched sleep, till dawn lighted the sky and glazed the Mississippi River. They were crossing the municipal toll bridge into St. Louis and a fresh country—where the police might not yet have been informed about them—the State of Missouri.
They stopped first at the Twelfth Street Garage. The Buick lay disemboweled there, her tank removed, battery on the charging line, head off and valves in a rack. Several hours more, the mechanic thought, and Hilda would be fit for the struggle again.
Next the telegraph office.
Here three messages awaited Zlitt; two from Washington:
MARY UP AND AROUND. NO FURTHER CAUSE FOR WORRY. ENJOY YOUR TRIP.
GAILLARD
Then, dated twelve hours later:
NO RESPONSE TO URGENT QUERY SENT KANSAS CITY. INFORMATION VITAL TO MARY. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?
GAILLARD
And the last, from New York, had just been received:
AFTER YOUR CALL TOOK EDMUND TO TRENTON WHERE HE SENT WIRE TO POLICE AS REQUESTED AND DO HOPE IT WORKED. CONGRATULATE ME. LANDED EDMUND COMING HOME. ANNOUNCING ENGAGEMENT NOW BUYING RING TOMORROW. HOORAY.
BEA
“I don’t know who Edmund is any more than you do,” Katheren explained, “but Bea Cramshaw was the only person in the world I could think of with a phone beside her bed, so I called her long distance while I was waiting for Wimples’ to make your sandwiches. I happened to remember Hellenberger’s habits. His office is never open at night. He won’t be reading that telegram from St. Petersville for another two hours, probably. So I said to myself, why not take a chance? A forged reply from Trenton would do us a lot more good than a real one. I think Edmund did a very nice job of it, everything considered. Anyhow, it worked, didn’t it?”
“I love you,” said George simply, and kissed her.
“What about poor Mary?”
“We’ll have to push on to Kansas City and find out—after a few hours’ sleep, a bath and a shave. That is, if you’re not afraid of running into the Smalnicks or the Beardsleys in every hotel in St. Louis.”
“I’d like to run into one of them,” she said. “The one who’s got it in for us.”
“Oh, so?” and he turned a quizzical eye on her. “Does that mean you’re changing your mind about a detective in the family?”
She was not having any of that. She told him, “George, you’d do well on the stage. You’d make a perfectly gorgeous ham.”
3
Hilda hummed, Katheren drove, and George looked up the route out of St. Louis. The top had been put down, and the sun at noon shone warm upon them.
“U.S. Forty all the way. Next town, St. Charles,” he told her.
Katheren remembers a wide avenue, lined by trees and, on the left, a high iron fence with park grounds beyond. At this time of day, the lifted thumbs and pious faces of the hitch-hikers drooped in the heat. St. Louis paused for an angel to pass over.
There was nothing living in sight for a moment but the little group at the side of the road. There seemed to be an altercation. At the approach of the Buick they dropped it to lean anxiously out like reeds in the wind, and offer thumbs in the universal gesture of appeal.
One of them was a boy with a bundle; the second a barrel-chested man wearing two sweaters; and the third a vision of unhappy elegance in very high heels, a silk gown, fox fur jacket and a plumed hat. Cicely Smalnick!
Woar saw it too. He said, “My sainted aunt!”
“Stop?”
“By all means!”
Katheren brought the Buick to rest about forty or fifty feet beyond the three. In spite of her high heels, Cicely could sprint. She was fighting to displace the barrel-chested man, who had put himself in the lead. She was swinging her patent-leather suitcase against him to good advantage.
Oddly enough, she hadn’t recognized the Woars at once.
When she did, she instantly abandoned the race and retreated behind a tree. Katheren backed the Buick to her, however, and Woar opened the door.
“Only room enough for the lady,” said Woar to the panting faces of the men.
Cicely shrugged and surrendered. She minced from tree to Buick, bestowing her suitcase on George with an air of “Here, my good man.”
Settling herself in the front seat, she gave Katheren a nod that acknowledged previous acquaintance. A faint smile of gratitude pierced the clouds of resentment against the world in general.
As the Buick picked up again, she said, “Can you fahncy the nerve? They think they own the town. ‘Don’t stand on our corner, go get a corner of your own!’ Wouldn’t that hand you a lahf?”
It occurred to Katheren that the woman was hopelessly nearsighted. That would account for her not recognizing the Buick at first glance. It also occurred to Katheren that the Woars must have been the last people in the world Cicely had expected or desired to see.
Nevertheless, she was treating her benefactors to the faintly bored, faintly amused smile proper to the haughty and elegant Mrs. Milton Smalnick, quite as if nothing had happened.
“My deah, you drive very well, don’t you?” she told Katheren. “I simply detest driving myself. You’re wondering about me, aren’t you? Dear friend in the show business in St. Louis, Sam Sinsabaugh, he and his wife begged me to go in their car to Kansas City. Milton had that Ruth Shanley for company, so I said yes. Fahncy this, if you can! Sam had to have his appendix out at nine o’clock this morning—and Milton already on his way, with me practically penniless! Milton nevah lets me take the train even without a maid and a private compahtment—and I hitch-hike! Isn’t that an experience?”
Katheren was grateful for a husband to wink at. He winked back, very artfully, and he must have been thinking as she thought, for he said, “I imagine the hotel, or Sam’s wife, or almost anyone in St. Louis would have helped you out with train fare.”
“Yes. Well. That never entered my mind,” said Cicely, compounding the improbability of her tale with the preposterous. She was
either too lazy or too contemptuous to bother inventing a first-rate lie.
“This is the road to Kansas, isn’t it?”
Woar assured her it was.
“The only road?”
“There’s another by way of Alton that by-passes St. Louis entirely. It meets this road again at St. Charles.”
“Damn,” muttered Cicely, under her breath, as if spitting out grape seeds.
“Too bad,” said Woar mildly. “He probably took the by-pass.”
“Who?”
“The man you were waiting for. The Winters and Ray Kemp? No, they’re children comparatively, aren’t they? Nick Leeds then. Why were you waiting for Nick Leeds?”
Cicely laughed a merry, derisive laugh, a hoot of sheer scorn. But Katheren believes she heard that laugh scrape bottom in a sea of horror for one brief instant. Cicely, though, was a slick piece of parlor magic. Now you see her, now you don’t.
“I put my money on Nick Leeds,” pursued Woar as if he were gently prying open a beautiful but stubborn box, “because the work put in on your careful hair-do, the alluring eye shadow, artistic bit of lip painting and those marvelous fingernails would he wasted on all but the solitary male.”
“How observant, Mr. Brendan!”
“Why Nick Leeds? You forgot to answer my question.”
“And who gave you permission to ahsk questions?”
“My job. I’m a private detective. Thought you knew.”
“Stop,” she said, and hooted, and somehow managed to rest a caressing hand on George’s knee. “My deah Mr. Brendan, you’re killing me!”
Woar laughed too: “I may be, at that! Electrocution for murder in Ohio, as I remember. Not that I can make an arrest myself, of course. You’ve the right to deal with the police, if you’d rather not talk to me.”
“Nick Leeds,” replied Cicely, coming down to earth but not without condescension, “is a person I barely know. I have nothing in common with him. That answers your question.”
“What time did you go through St. Petersville last night?”
“We stopped there for tea. I couldn’t possibly remember the time.”
“Where did you stop on the road before Migler’s?”
“That far back? My deah fellow, I can’t think. Is there a Uniontown in Pennsylvania? We had a vile lunch, wherever it was.”
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