Boyd said, “We’ll be running along now.”
Burnet added, “Maybe we’ll see you again, maybe we won’t.”
Ray apologized, “If we don’t get a lift early, we’ll never get one. So long.”
Then they were gone, they and their suitcases and golf bags.
Katheren found the world to be suddenly very quiet, motionless and empty. She wasn’t traveling. She wouldn’t be for a long time to come, considering the Ford’s condition. And for the first time in days, she was practically alone with her husband.
Relations between them had been strained further than she thought. She was distinctly averse to making conversation with him, so she walked Caligula and looked for a drugstore and something to relieve her whacking headache.
It was only a little after nine in the morning. If the Beardsleys had put up for the night in Gallup, why not the others?
Two blocks from the garage, Katheren wasn’t surprised to see the Tozers and their Nash. Ray Kemp and the Winter twins were just settling themselves in it. They had wangled themselves a lift. Henry came out of a small café tucking money into his bill-fold. Having paid the family breakfast bill, he was taking the wheel, setting out for California. Everybody waved behind the dusty windows to Katheren, left behind.
She waved back. The complacent, over-crowded sedan waddling westward somehow annoyed her. She was in a mood to be annoyed by anything.
And wasn’t she glad to be left behind? She wasn’t chasing anybody—her husband was doing that. In fact, he had miraculously caught up with his precious Shanley case, but only by dint of running the daylights out of their sole means of transportation, so that he was promptly losing it again. Now he would have to give it up for good. And it served him right.
She drank a glass of fizzy stuff at a drugstore soda fountain. It had been glibly guaranteed to wipe out the worst headache in man or beast in less than three minutes.
It did nothing of the sort.
She led Caligula back to the garage, hoping to sit in the Ford and rest. However, the car’s front end had been hoisted up on a derrick and a repairman lay underneath, methodically taking the motor to pieces.
George wasn’t anywhere about.
The repairman said he hadn’t seen him since the car was sold.
“This car? Sold?”
“Boss gave him fifteen dollars for it. Don’t ask me why.”
“I won’t,” Katheren assured him.
She found a wooden bench to sit on, along with her vague dismay.
What was the man up to now?
It was clear in Katheren’s mind that she was about to have a tremendous row with him—if he hadn’t abandoned her for good.
By the time George appeared from round the corner, she was ready for him. She was also aware of what he was up to. He had Milton Smalnick in tow, and Milton left him to cross the highway to another garage—where as sure as fate the Lagonda was parked. George had hunted up Smalnick, induced him to give them a lift.
“Off in a cloud of dust, I suppose,” she said as he sat beside her. “The chase is still on. View halloo.”
“Well, yes,” he admitted. He tried to take her hand. She wouldn’t let him. She refused to be conciliated, tricked or blandished any more.
“Heading straight for Los Angeles, aren’t you?”
“Why, yes, that does seem the general direction—”
“After what Gaillard warned you, you’re going to Los Angeles. You’re going to follow this murder case to the end. The devil with your honeymoon, you’re a detective first, last and always. I see.”
“Dearest Katheren!” he implored her.
“Dearest Katheren my eye!”
“You might listen, you know. I’m trying to tell you I can’t help myself. I must go on. There’ll be more blood spilled if I don’t. You understand that much, I hope? In any case”—and he seized her hand in spite of her struggles, held it tightly till it hurt—“nothing is going to stop me. Not even you, my beloved wife! However, I thought it over at length last night, and decided to give up investigation. Give it up forever. Have a go at selling insurance, perhaps. Anything you like. I give you my most solemn promise, to take effect immediately this case is washed up.”
“I always liked the pretty tinkle of your promises when they broke.”
“Oh, Katheren! Don’t you see?”
“No. You’re going on?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Good-by. I’m not.”
“I rather expected that. As a matter of fact, you’re better off waiting here, out of it. A day’s rest, and you’ll be your old self again. Good girl! Expect me in forty-eight hours, possibly less. Take care of yourself!”
He kissed the hand, thrust a wad of crumpled bills and silver into it, and ran.
The Lagonda had been backed into the street. George slipped behind the wheel, took off superbly, swooped round a heavy truck and vanished.
Caligula tugged on his lead. He couldn’t make Katheren understand, so he sat down mournfully to think about his master, and resignedly wait.
And that was that, exactly as Katheren had dreaded it would happen some day.
Gone.
4
Whether or not she would have waited for him is debatable. Probably not.
She felt indescribably hurt, indescribably angry, in about equal parts. She was also afraid something horrible might happen to her husband, which suggests she was finding out she loved him in spite of all.
At any rate, she went back inside the garage for the battered tube of tooth-paste she had brought along from La Junta. She found it squashed down alongside the seat. She also found a long, oily fragment of black cloth laid out on a newspaper for her to see:
“Want to know why your bearings burned out?” the mechanic asked. “Take a look at that.”
“What is it?”
“Necktie. Regular five-and-ten-cent store, your crankcase was. No wonder the oil feed line got clogged.”
“What else did you find?”
“Bits and pieces. This here looks like a hunk of a cheap ring.”
The necktie, the ring.
“Did you tell my husband about these?”
“Didn’t tell nobody but you. Just came on ‘em.”
He may have thought Katheren a little odd, the way she carefully wrapped the oily stuff in the newspaper.
Why had they been put in the crankcase? To dispose of them. Even so, what a strange method of disposal.
...And Katheren, without half trying, made a series of dazzling deductions.
Between the Winter twins and Ray Kemp on the one hand, and the Tozer family on the other, some kind of guilty secret was shared. Guilt connected with the murders of Rex Shanley and Cicely. Well, then:
Wasn’t it probable that the damning evidence had been put in the crankcase by Ray or the twins, first to hide the stuff, second to sabotage the motor and bring about precisely what had happened—the stranding of the Woars in a Gallup garage?
Suspicious was the fact that the Winters particularly had done all they could along the way to slow up the Woars. Suspicious was their tinkering with the motor last night and this morning. Suspicious also, the convenience with which the Tozers had been waiting for the boys to take them on.
The murderer had been doing his utmost to stop the Woars. The Woars had been stopped by the Winters and Ray Kemp. Didn’t it follow that the Winters and Ray Kemp were the murderers?
Unless it could be that Tozer was guilty, and the boys merely helping him get away.
Anyhow, Katheren felt very sure she had the solution of the Shanley case wrapped up in a thickness of newspaper.
5
“Let’s see how long it takes you,” she told the used car salesman, “to sell me the fastest car in Gallup.”
He made her get in and sit behind the wheel of a blue Packard coupé, last year’s model. He lifted the hood and the cover of the luggage compartment for her, as if there were jewels inside.
“Very
well,” said Katheren. “I have to make you out a check on a New York bank for it. Can you cope with that?”
“Call New York by long distance to get an O.K. That’ll cost you a few dollars extra.”
At four minutes to eleven that morning, Katheren drove out of Gallup, the owner of a very pretty and responsive car. If nothing like as fast as the Lagonda, it could be pushed along till the Lagonda stopped somewhere, and overtake it then.
Headache had been forgotten, weariness put off with hot coffee, and a new purpose in life acquired. Wouldn’t George be surprised to see her!
At twenty past, she was crossing the line into the State of Arizona.
She persuaded the speedometer needle up to seventy. Caligula made himself comfortable on the shelf behind the seat.
Katheren took comfort of another kind, having figured mileages and geography. Needles was the city on the California-Arizona border. She ought to reach there before dark. If not at Needles, she expected to overtake George somewhere on the road in Arizona. With her new evidence from the Ford crankcase, he ought to be able to complete his case without risking the rest of the journey to Los Angeles.
Then by following Route Fifty from Barstow, they could drive through Bakersfield and Fresno to San Francisco.
It had stopped occurring to her by now that, some two hours ago, she had parted from her husband forever. She even blamed herself for being a bad sport. She was quite willing to be convinced that he had only left her behind in Gallup because he expected violence before he brought his murderer to account. He hadn’t wanted her damaged in the fracas. Really, an awfully nice man once you understood him...
She breezed through Holbrook.
Slightly surprising to Katheren, but increasingly evident; there was nothing at all the matter with the used Packard she had bought.
Nothing, that is, except a tendency on the part of one rear tire to run soft. After two stops for air and the discovery of a tenpenny nail in the shoe, she decided to take no more chances with it. She took time out in Winslow to change to the spare. She also took on gas, oil and a hamburger.
On a paper napkin she computed her average speed for the morning; it came out at a little better than fifty miles an hour. She went over the figures for mistakes. It still came out a little better than fifty. She must have looked disappointed.
“Don’t forget,” said the hamburger provider, studying her figures in a kindly, interested way, “you slowed up for towns.”
“Statistics are always discouraging to me. Did you see a Lagonda pass here this morning?”
“A what?”
When enlightened, the man reluctantly admitted he had not.
“It may have been going too fast for you to notice. It’s trying to catch up with a Mercury with a man in it alone. Did you see that, by any chance?”
“No, don’t seem like I did.”
“Or a new Chrysler with two women and a man in it?”
“I’m not up on the new cars, lady. I got an old Jordan, and when it comes to getting around—”
“I know how you feel. How about an overcrowded Nash?”
“Couple bales o’ hay on the front bumper?”
“It isn’t very likely, I’m afraid. Thanks just the same.”
She paid for the hamburger and coke: fifteen cents.
She paid for the gas, ten gallons of it. According to the salesman in Gallup, the Packard would give her twenty miles to the gallon. As she had sensibly foreseen, twelve was more like it. Twelve into the nine hundred eighty miles from Gallup to San Francisco...Anyhow, to get to the end of their journey would cost about three more dollars than she possessed.
Which was one of those jarring little facts that insisted upon being faced.
Why hadn’t she made her check large enough to give herself a few extra hundreds in cash? The used-car salesman in Gallup wouldn’t have minded in the least.
Another jarring little fact was the uniform lack of information about George along the way. The day grew hot and long, the desert hotter and dustier, and the chase more and more futile.
Flagstaff, Ash Fork, Kingman; she stopped at each to ask questions, but the Lagonda hadn’t been seen. Ash Fork remembered the Tozer Nash. It had stopped for gas. Kingman was doubtful about the Nash, definite about the Beardsley Chrysler, and tentative in identifying a Mercury that could have been Nick’s. All of them were well ahead of Katheren. All of them had had opportunity to connect with one another along the way.
However, Katheren was interested mainly in the Lagonda.
It never occurred to her that George might have changed to one of the other cars. She had no way of knowing that he had arranged a meeting of the travelers. She knew nothing about Palmyra Hot Springs, that isolated rendezvous in the desert, or of his plans to end the Shanley affair in privacy.
She doggedly pushed on.
Flagstaff, Ash Fork, Kingman; towns in many respects promising, but not promising to Katheren that her husband was on the road ahead. The Lagonda simply hadn’t been seen.
And the sun began to set, and burn straight into her eyes over the top of a ridge of desolate, fantastic mountains. The heat, rushing through the open windows, broiled her as if she were so much unfeeling bacon in the hands of a conscientious cook. The barren land, the empty road, the loneliness, grew savage.
She crossed the Colorado River into California.
The Needle Rocks cast long, jagged eastward shadows, not comforting to her. The prospect of darkness, the threat of night in this enormous emptiness, roused a small feeling of panic. What if she ran out of gas, found herself stranded?
The smoke of a train; a water tank and a cluster of cottonwoods appeared over the stony horizon; the town of Needles. A small town, and excruciatingly hot, it nevertheless ran to super-service station complete with the grinning young man in a spotless white uniform. He cleaned grime and insects from her windshield even as he inquired, “What’ll it be this evening?”
“Did a foreign car, a Lagonda, go through here recently?” and Katheren prepared herself for the blank look and the slow shake of the head.
“Uh-huh. Stopped for gas. Going west.”
“Two men in it?”
“One. Little after five o’clock, it was.”
“One man? Five o’clock? Almost two hours ago—”
“Beg your pardon, one hour ago. Less than that, I’d say. Lady, you forgot to turn your watch back to Pacific Standard Time at Seligman.”
“In other words, it’s only ten minutes of six?”
“Righty. Folks do make that mistake. Anything else I can do for you?”
He couldn’t describe the solitary man in the Lagonda; he might have been Woar or Smalnick. Rather than puzzle over it, she told him to put in gas and oil.
One hundred fifty miles of hard driving to Barstow. Unearthly heat and a hard climb. But, the boy said, an excellent highway.
“Kind of lonely, if you don’t mind that. I guess you can take care of yourself, though.”
She was warned. However, she thought only of catching up with the Lagonda before it reached Barstow.
All but two dollars and thirty-five cents went into the Packard’s bowels there in Needles. Two dollars and thirty-five cents against the seven hundred miles up to San Francisco. She had to catch up with it now.
She sped on. Needles dwindled and disappeared in the rear view mirror of the Packard. She began the climb over the mountains. The motor began to boil.
She was in the desert again, a desert that had opened out to horizons so vast, cruel and awesome that she saw herself as a minute particle of life crawling painfully up some infernal sloping platter, towards a rim that constantly retreated. She saw no house, no car, no living thing anywhere. As evidence of other life on the planet, there was only the road, always straight, steep and endless. It was not quite enough.
Then the savage landscape turned purple. It would soon be dark. And suddenly it was dark, as suddenly as if an unseen hand had switched out the light.
&n
bsp; At the same time, the infernal platter tilted the other way, and the road descended swiftly into a black, gigantic, bottomless valley.
Twenty
Palmyra Hot Springs lies half a mile from the paved highway, at the end of a neglected and almost invisible side road. Originally it had been a half-hearted attempt at a desert health resort, of the sort frequently found in southern California. Why anyone made the attempt there, at the bottom of a hellish sink in the Mojave Desert, has yet to be explained.
A bleached phantom of a sign points travelers to the place. CABINS, the sign offers; RADIO-ACTIVE MINERAL BATHS, SULPHUR SPRING WATER, MEALS. Under the faded and peeling paint, a dozen changes of management might be traced, if anyone wished to bother.
Katheren probably noticed neither the sign nor the side road. The Hot Springs showed no lights.
She pulled up under the paintless porch of a ramshackle filling station, marked PALMYRA. The heat, when she stopped, wrapped her round like a woolly blanket.
A horde of winged and crawling things came at her. Somewhere in the unnatural stillness, radio music jigged and crackled feverishly with desert static.
She blew her horn, and a boy showed himself. He was brown and naked, save for sneakers and a pair of faded swimming trunks. He gazed at her from the door of the filling station shack with impenetrable stupidity.
Caligula woke out of a doze, and made uneasy sounds. Before she could quiet him, and make known to the naked boy that she wanted water in her radiator, a stocky figure pushed past the boy and came to the side of the car. He was Milton Smalnick.
Before he could recognize Katheren’s face in the shadow, he had asked her, 4’Got room for me going west?”
Whether he was more surprised, or Katheren, would be impossible to say. He gaped.
“Where’s your car?” she asked.
“In back,” and he waved out into the solid darkness.
“Where’s George?”
“Why, he caught up with Beardsley in Arizona. He went on. He must be way ahead.”
“Good Lord!”
“I’m stranded here in this bake-oven. I got some water in my gas tank. Car won’t run on water. If you hadn’t come along, I’d probably have to walk two hundred miles into Hollywood to get somebody to come out and tow it home. Damn it, these bugs are driving me screwy—!”
If A Body Page 21