“Is that all I’m to be told?”
It was Nick who said, “Don’t worry about him, Mrs. Brendan. We’re after a woman, and she hasn’t got a gun.”
“A woman?”
Woar explained precisely, “Not a man, but a woman. She also robbed the hotel cash box of a sum of money—fifty or a hundred dollars, according to report. She fled in a light truck, property of the Kansas Highway Department, and when last seen was on the road to Newton. That’s all we know at present.”
“Who was the woman?”
“Cicely.”
The two men were ready. Nick paused in the doorway to beseech Katheren, “See that nothing happens to her, will you, Mrs. Brendan?”
“I’ll do my best, Nick. Will you be long?”
“Don’t know. We’re working for the constable now—we’re the posse. Wish us luck!”
Something cruel and vindictive about the way he said it caused Katheren to shudder. The door closed. They went down the stairs.
Cicely had tried to kill Ruth Shanley! Cicely had robbed a cash box and run away!
The fact was so utterly appalling and unexpected that Katheren had trouble believing it. She spread the dusty quilt over Ruth’s legs and fixed her a drink. Nothing unbelievable about those bruises on Ruth’s throat!
“If the room was dark, how did you know it was Cicely?”
Ruth’s voice, hoarse and low, told her, “Those long fingernails? And the fox fur? Couldn’t be anybody else.”
“But why? Why should she want to—to hurt you?”
“I guess I stood in her way. I guess she couldn’t wait...”
“Wait for what?”
But Ruth only shook her head and closed her eyes. Katheren went to the window.
On the patch of pavement outside the front door of the hotel huddled a group of men, foreshortened below her. An oldish man, in a black rubber coat, the constable probably, was talking to them. She could see his jaw move, the ruin of what had been a strong, jutting jaw before some enthusiastic dentist had got in his work on it. He was giving them orders.
Smalnick was there, the Winter twins, Ray Kemp, several other men she had never seen before, and Henry Tozer. At George’s elbow stood Nick Leeds, and the light from the lanterns slashed across his taut features.
What he would do to Cicely if he found her first, Katheren preferred not to imagine.
4
The light truck had been found about two hundred yards from the hotel, abandoned in a roadside mire. Cicely’s driving had not been up to the exigencies of Kansas.
The problem had simplified itself to one of beating the surrounding flats for a desperate, drunken creature in high-heeled shoes. The constable thought she’d be found cowering out of the rain in some abandoned shack, or behind a billboard or under a cottonwood tree.
The posse spread out. Those who knew it best had been assigned the village of Elm Point itself. The others took the fields.
Hazlitt Woar found himself alone with a sizzling lantern in a world of rain. Mud sucked at his shoes when he strayed from the Newton highway. He stayed on the highway.
Other lanterns bobbled along to the right and left of him. They vanished, appeared and vanished again with increasing irregularity as the hunt spread out. After twenty minutes of walking, Woar saw no more lanterns, only surrounding night.
No use hurrying. He had ideas of his own.
She would stay on the road, for the same reason he did. Cicely would run for a bit, then sober up, realize what she had done and what she was in for, and slog along in growing weariness towards Newton. The road was closed to traffic, but she probably didn’t know that. She might even have forlorn hopes of being picked up by a passing motorist and taken comfortably to Newton.
The strain of her masquerade, he told himself, had at last been too much for her. The carefully applied glaze of refinement had cracked, exposed her essential crudeness. In a way, it was what he had hoped for...
He passed through a wood and between two little hills, as well as he could make out. Then the rain stopped.
In the silence, the grumble of a heavy torrent off to his left came clearly to him. The river.
A short way farther, he heard a scream. A woman’s voice, distinctly. Some distance off, and confused with the river sound. It came again, and he placed it to the left and ahead.
He called a “hello there!” and ran. Once he thought he saw the quick gleam of a light in that direction, but accepted it with reservations. His own lantern might have been reflected from a wet fence post.
He ran and called. He came to the end of the fence, and struck out to the left, across muddy, rising ground, too uneven for haste.
Better stop, he decided, and make sure. His calling had gone unanswered for perhaps five minutes.
“Hello there!”
This time an answer came from the nearby roar of water, a man’s voice, a shout of, “Over here!”
Just beyond the rising ground, where the yellow swirls of the flood lay thinly on the meadow near the river bank, he came upon Smalnick and his lantern. The man was far out in the water, dangerously far, reaching frantically for a dark human shape caught among some drifting branches.
The strength of the water threatened to sweep away branches, dark shape and Smalnick downstream. He was up to his arm-pits, floundering, precariously holding the lantern high. He slipped. The lantern disappeared.
Woar shouted, “Let go, you fool!”
Smalnick let go. The human thing whirled away and vanished.
When Woar could get to him, the man was half swimming, half treading the mud beneath him, fighting hard to keep from being pulled under. Woar caught a hand, hauled him to safety.
“The ground—drops away,” panted Smalnick, almost apologetically.
“Cicely?”
“In those branches. That’s why I—that was her.”
“Alive?”
Smalnick, a stocky drowned rat weighted with his streaming clothes, stopped in his tracks. He looked at Woar with intense surprise.
“Alive? She must have been. You don’t see me rescuing dead people, do you?”
Woar grunted.
“She’s dead by now, at any rate,” he said quietly, and led Smalnick towards the road.
5
Having wrung out their clothes as well as they could, they trudged back to Elm Point together, in no haste. Cicely would get there before them. The river and its passenger were beyond human powers to interfere.
Smalnick had heard the cry, he said, just as George had. He had been nearer, though. She was in the water when he reached her, and floating with the branches. He thought she was trying to get away from him.
“Did she speak to you?”
“No, she didn’t. Maybe she was drowning.”
“Did she try to swim?”
“Well, she was laying there in the bushes, a black spot, and I couldn’t make out—”
“You did all you could,” George assured him. “You came within a deuce of losing your own life. Did you see anyone else?”
“No.”
“Considering the circumstances, it will probably go on the records as a suicide. Anybody who’d take to that river rather than be caught would be definitely choosing death.”
Smalnick humbly thought so too.
Humility and Milton Smalnick seemed to get on well together for strangers; but during that walk back to Elm Point, Smalnick, except as a legendary being to whom incense was burned in Hollywood, ceased to exist as Smalnick.
The impersonation no longer worked, and he knew it.
“The hell of it is, Mr. Brendan, I’ll lose my job. Sure, my name’s Lefty. Sure, I work for Milton Smalnick. I’m his secretary, see, and I know Kim like a brother from way back. Sometimes I call myself Milton Smalnick, it’s a kick, people drop everything and run when they hear the name. Milton knows I do it, he even gets a laugh out of it. He sometimes even puts me up to it himself when he don’t want to be bothered with people, and I take ‘em
out on parties and so on...
“He sends me East to bring this swell car of his back to Beverly Hills for him. For God’s sake, who’s gonna mind a joke? I say I’m Smalnick, women fall for it, and I have a lot of free comedy. Look, how do I know that old fool Shanley is gonna get killed? How do I know Cicely ain’t really Milton’s cousin? I play straight—and now where am I! Milton’s name gets in the papers, and he gets sore, and I’m crucified for a lousy joke. Believe me, Mr. Brendan, I been sweatin’ blood all by myself ever since I identify that jerk back in Ohio to call off the cops.”
“You didn’t know Shanley, then?”
“So help me, I did, and just the way I told you, too.”
“You picked up Cicely in New York?”
“Just like I told you.”
“Not in Uniontown, Pennsylvania?”
“The hell with Uniontown. I picked her up in New York.”
“You also forged Smalnick’s name to the check you gave Beardsley, remember.”
Lefty remembered. With touching docility, he only asked that everybody be easy on him.
“I have the check,” George told him, just as the stark buildings of Elm Point came into view against a graying dawn. “I’m going to keep it, and your story, for my own peculiar uses.”
“You want money outa me?”
“Not at all. I want the truth, and for reasons I doubt if I could make clear to you in the short time at our disposal. Only one thing you need be afraid of.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m wanted by the police. My name is Hazlitt Woar, not George Brendan. If I’m caught, your check, your story, everything, becomes public property. Better for you, undoubtedly, if I’m not caught. Do you understand?”
Lefty said he did.
He went off to look up the constable, then, and George made himself as comfortable as possible in the office of the Hotel Excelsior, ill-advised monument to some forgotten civic enterprise, while he waited for the rest of the hunters to come in.
He had time for a quick nap.
Even under those conditions, sleep hit him like a soft bludgeon, and when he woke, he was refreshed.
Thirteen
KATHEREN woke out of a bad dream. George was dead.
The dream had a particularly convincing quality, even after she was awake, because she could hear the ringing of shovels on the coffin. But it was morning, in Hotel Excelsior, and the sun was up, shining on the water pitcher nestling in its basin. Ruth slept peacefully beside her, and the muddy hulk of Nick Leeds snored with Caligula in his lap in the room’s only chair. Comfortable, rather than surprising, this having a crowd up to sleep in one’s bedroom...
The shovel noise came not from George’s grave, but from a muddy truck in the street below, where a shift of road repairmen were starting out for work. It was very early, not quite ten to six.
Still, it would be nice to make sure about George.
Having slept in her clothes that night, she got ready, herself, the luggage and Caligula, in the proverbial number of shakes.
She met her husband on the stair. Two things were immediately evident: he was not dead, and he was more unhappy than she had ever seen him before.
Only his head and shoulders showed above the level of the top step. A dirty glare fell on him from the glass skylight in the ceiling. His face looked horribly drawn and white.
“Is the coffee that bad?”
He shook his head to her. He said, “Hurry, Katheren.”
“What’s the matter, George?”
“Hurry,” he said, and the way he said it was still more alarming.
“Did you find Cicely?”
“Yes.”
The proprietress met them at the bottom of the stairs. She made a beckoning gesture towards an enormous oblong table in the center of the court. On a gray tablecloth stood a wan potted palm surrounded by oranges.
“Hot cakes or fried mush thirty-five cents,” she told them. “Bacon and eggs or small steak fifty cents.”
“No breakfast,” said Woar firmly. “The bill, please.”
“Just you two?”
“Yes.”
“Two-fifty each, makes five dollars. Say now, that woman who stole my money—were you folks acquainted in any way?”
Woar’s hand rested a moment on Katheren’s arm, a warning. He said, “We don’t know anything about her, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t know about her?”
“No.”
The widow held Woar’s ten-dollar bill in her hand doubtfully. She led them into the office, put on glasses and consulted the register.
“What’s her name, Bonner, Bonnel, Bonnet?”
“We don’t know her name,” said Woar firmly. “We don’t know anything about her.”
“Well, I guess you don’t look like the kind of folks would lie about a thing like that,” said the woman, and sneered as if the opinion ran contrary to her better judgment. She painstakingly made change.
Woar stuffed the money in his pocket, took up the luggage and led Katheren out into the street.
A score of stark brick buildings, another score of scattered shacks protected by huge cottonwood trees, constituted Elm Point.
Even at a little after six, men and women were picking their way about in the mud of the lanes, or over the great clods of mud that had been tracked up on the highway. A group of them stood about the end of an open truck that had stopped across the road from the Excelsior. They gaped at something lying within.
Woar had driven the Buick from the garage. Its nose looked no less battered and discouraging by daylight.
“She’ll run, though,” said Woar. “Still sound at heart. Only her beauty has suffered.”
“Cicely, I take it, is in jail?”
“Not this morning, my dear.”
“May I be told why?”
“You may not.”
He started up the motor. Katheren wiped Caligula’s muddy paws with tissue and let him sit between them. As the car moved away, and she turned to throw the tissue into the gutter, she again noticed the cluster of people about the end of the truck.
“What are they looking at, George?”
“Who?”
“Those people. What’s in the bottom of that Highway Department truck? What’s happened to Cicely, George?”
He shifted into high gear with grim concentration. He intended not to answer.
“Cicely’s in the bottom of the truck, isn’t she?”
From the way his lips tightened, she knew it was so.
2
“How far to the state line?” he asked.
“More than three hundred miles. Three hundred and thirty.”
The sun shone at their backs. On the level white road, banked above the wet plains and the winding river, Woar let the Buick out to seventy-five. No other cars were traveling yet.
The taut look on her husband’s face and the rattling whine of the wind through the shattered radiator guard combined to increase Katheren’s apprehension.
“Coffee in a thermos,” said Woar, “and an egg sandwich. Best I could do, Katheren. I put them in the glove box.”
Katheren got out the thermos, sipped some of the very strong and very hot coffee from it, and said, “I’m quite able to stand the ghastly details, George.”
“Ghastly is the word.”
“Go on, please.”
“Her body was fished out of the river at daybreak by the crew of men working on the bridge. It had been washed down to them from above.”
“Drowned, or—”
“Apparently drowned. An accident. Suicide. Murder by any other name. You see, the corpse bears marks of violence about the head, shows little water in the lungs. Purse recovered, contents missing—but for one handbill offering reward for information leading to arrest of Hazlitt G. B. Woar—”
“Cicely took it!”
“Possibly. Attempt to suppress that piece of evidence under the nose of the constable didn’t come off. Also, Milton Smalnick heroically tryin
g to save the woman from a watery grave met me on the scene of the crime. Means, motive, opportunity. Add them up as the slow but astute mind of the constable of Elm Point eventually must, and you’ll appreciate my reason for hurrying the hell out of the State of Kansas.”
“You can’t be serious, George!”
“I bloody well am! I’m practically wanted for murder!”
3
The morning was still too young for traffic. The battered Buick must have stood out like a thicket of sore thumbs.
The flooded section of highway between Elm Point and Newton had been diked off and opened during the early hours. They got safely through, and through Newton, circumspectly, via the suburbs where they hoped they wouldn’t be noticed.
Leaving the city limits behind on their way to Hutchinson, George relaxed a little and gulped some coffee out of the thermos.
“So far, so good,” said Katheren.
“So far, not far enough. Poor devils!”
“Who? Us?”
“No. All those on land or sea wanted by the police.”
On both sides of the road lay farms, open plains, little woods, none without freshly deposited puddles and ponds. Through the wet land ran wet side roads, oozy, open wounds in the earth’s skin. Woar waved a hand at them:
“We’re trapped by the law on the highway, we’re trapped by that if we leave it. Off the slab! Now I know what it means!”
He stepped up the speed to eighty.
Whether it was Cicely’s absence, or that they were running away from the Shanley case in deep earnest now, or that sharing a hazard caused it, the Woars were on better terms than they had been for days.
That morning Katheren found herself actually admiring George, profession and all. Twenty-four hours earlier, the subject of murder had inspired her with loathing; now she was strongly tempted to ask questions. Her curiosity and her pride had it out in her mind. Pride won the decision, on points.
Behind them in Elm Point, a stocky young man who was no longer Milton J. Smalnick climbed into his boss’s Lagonda. Chastened and humble, he hoped the Shanley case would never hear of him again. He certainly counted on making himself scarce, for he left his luggage unpacked and his hotel bill unpaid rather than face his fellow-guests that morning.
Not long after him, Nick Leeds and Ruth took off. By sheer insistence, Nick had persuaded her. He was heroically happy, in spite of a tinge of uneasiness about her consent. They were to be married in New Mexico—if possible, in Santa Fe.
If A Body Page 15