And the Girl Screamed (Prologue Crime)

by Gil Brewer

  Inez Harrington was remarkable.

  Walking back out to the car, what had happened seemed suddenly impossible. I opened my shirt pocket and took out the sheet of paper with the list of names and addresses she had given me. It was real; it felt exactly like paper, and the writing was legible.

  I stood beside the car, feeling the whisky buzz a little in my head, and tried to find air to breathe. There wasn’t any. The night was as flat and hot as trapped air in a furnace pipe.

  I knew I would go through life reacting sharply to the color red.

  As I climbed under the wheel, a police car whistled past out on the road. It took the red light at the intersection, headed toward the Harrington house on Melbourne. Now they would knew what I was driving.

  • • •

  The first name Inez had given me on the list was Sam Roberson, over on Lowell Court. The street wasn’t too far from the business section, up above Sixteenth. It was subdued and the homes nicely kept, the lawns trimmed and mowed. The Roberson place was set well back, between two large banyan trees. Cicadas droned and fizzed in unseen bushes. They had one of these big crystal balls on a cement pedestal in the front yard. Beside the large cement stucco porch three stalwart plastic flamingoes stood on long spidery legs and craned their necks at endless nothing.

  I wondered if all kids were like Inez. They couldn’t be. I wondered if Jinny had been; somehow, I didn’t think so. They had been close friends, but Inez Harrington had a way with her—many ways, and that was stating it mildly.

  I parked the car down the street, in the shadows again, thinking of how the police could come along at the same time I did. So far, I’d been lucky in keeping ahead of the law. How long would it last? I wanted very much to know how Eve was making out, and just thinking of her hurt plenty.

  Thayer would be riding me right now, every possible way. He wouldn’t leave any pebbles unturned, trying to make me really look bad.

  I got out and walked along the grass toward the house. I had to keep shoving Eve out of my mind. That she was in danger was a thought I couldn’t live with.

  It was a square, stucco house. I went up on the porch and found a brass knocker and knocked. It was brightly lighted inside. Nobody answered the door. I started to knock again, then saw a bell button. Under the button was a little card with careful printing. Please Ring! I rang. Immediately footsteps came from close by the door.

  “This where Sam Roberson lives?”

  “I’m Sam Roberson.”

  “Must be Sam Junior I’m looking for.”

  “My son?”

  I waited. The man at the door was holding two shirts on metal hangers. A woman came into the hallway.

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “Somebody wants Sam,” he said.

  “He’s upstairs, studying.”

  “I’m from the police,” I said. “If I could talk with your son, I’d—”

  “What—what?” the woman said. The two of them crowded in the doorway. There was no screen door on the house and the doorway was filled with their suddenly worried faces. The woman crumpled against the shirts, and the man became conscious of that and tried to yank them free without looking at them. One of the shirts came off the hanger and fell to the floor. The woman stepped on it heavily.

  “It’s about a—” I paused. “A friend of your son’s has been—” I stopped again. “A girl your son knows was killed tonight,” I said. “I’ve been sent out to ask a few questions.”

  “Killed?” the man said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who?” the woman said. “A car accident? Yes, I’ve waited for the day when—it was an accident, wasn’t it? Who was it? Who was this girl my son knows? Tell me, officer—I’m entitled to know, you know that. I want to know right now who you’re talking about. Any girl who’s involved in an accident having to do with my son has no right—”

  The man turned on her with something like savagery, and she shut up abruptly.

  “Come inside,” the man said.

  “It was a car accident?” the woman said. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  She blocked the door. The man looked at her. She moved aside and I went on in and we stood in the hallway. The woman briskly took the shirts from the man and hurried away with them, muttering under her breath. Suddenly she realized there was only one shirt, where there should have been two. She looked around, holding one hand to her mouth.

  I shrugged. She saw the shirt on the floor by the door. She hurried to it, picked it up, brushed it off and held it to her breast like a pet cat. Then she walked swiftly down the hall again. In a moment she returned and stood at the foot of the stairs, wringing her hands.

  I thought how easy it was for anybody posing as a cop to gain entrance into private homes.

  Mr. Roberson was a short, thin individual, wearing steel-rimmed glasses. He didn’t know what to say. His wife was the opposite; large and ham-armed, with a mouth like a clamp.

  “Maybe you’d better call Sam,” Mrs. Roberson said.

  “All right, I’ll just call him down,” her husband said.

  “I’d like to talk with him alone. Would it be all right if I went on up?”

  They looked at each other. It was all right.

  “Second floor, on the left,” Roberson said. Then he said, “I’ll just run up with you—I won’t stay.”

  “Can’t you just speak to us?” she said.

  I looked at her, not knowing what to say.

  “It’s very important that I talk with your son,” I told her.

  “Well, can’t we be present?”

  “I’d appreciate it if it could be alone.”

  She began to wring her hands again. She looked up and down the hall. Wattles of flesh on her upper arms jiggled from side to side. She shook her head slowly.

  Mr. Roberson touched me between the shoulder blades and nodded. We started upstairs.

  • • •

  “Yes, sir. Sure. I know Jinny real well.”

  I leaned against the closed bedroom door. There had been something halfway decent about Mr. Roberson. When he opened the door, he’d only said, “Here’s someone to see you, Sam,” and then left. He could have made it rough if he’d wanted to. I had told young Sam who I was, and asked him if he knew Jinny.

  He was seated across the room at a desk. He watched me quietly. The room was that of an active young man, with an interest in sports and fly fishing. A small workbench against the opposite wall of the room was arranged with a vise for tying flies. At the back of the bench, built up on the wall, was a neat series of tiny drawers, maybe fifty or seventy-five of them. They looked handmade, but very well done. I glanced at Sam, and he was still quietly watching me. I looked back at the workbench.

  “Quite a deal,” I said “Sure have the equipment. You like to fish?”

  “Yes.”

  A row of inverted wire loops across the bench held spools of colored thread. There were other little gadgets. Four sleek, handmade fly rods hung by their tips from black hooks in the ceiling. On the wall at the end of the workbench was a huge, flat, glass-enclosed case with hundreds of flies of various sizes and brilliant, beautiful colors mounted on fine white batting.

  There were two crossed tennis rackets on the wall A baseball bat—hardball—leaned in a corner with a pitcher’s mitt dangling from an oily strap over the top of it. There was a thick layer of dust on the mitt. There were pictures of mountains and lakes and a series of colored photos of airplanes.

  Then I saw the shelf with the footballs. It was a shelf perhaps five feet long, with footballs running from regulation size down to one the size of a pea. Above the shelf was a series of photographs of Sam Roberson in different poses on the football field. Passing, catching, running, blocking. There was a large one showing him kicking a field goal, just after the point of connection. Still another showed him racing down the field with the ball held far out and secure, with five me
n clawing at him, two down at his heels. It was obviously an action shot taken during a game.

  “Football’s the real interest, eh?” I said.

  “Yes sir.”

  I glanced toward him and he was watching me. The pride was there in his eyes. Young Sam had stayed in the chair at the desk since his father had introduced us. Now he suddenly rose and came across the room. He was tall, heavy in the shoulders, built solid, and he moved lithely. He wore blue slacks and T-shirt. His blond hair was cut in a neatly square crew-cut, his blue eyes were very clear. He was clean shaven, freshly washed, and tanned. I had a sudden hope that he would be able to help me.

  “You’re from the police?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe you’d better tell me what this is all about.”

  “Sure. What position do you play, Sam?”

  “I’m a back.” Again the flash of pride in his eyes.

  “Going to college?”

  He nodded. “University of Florida,” he said with that same display of pride and sudden eagerness. “Football scholarship.”

  “Means a lot.”

  “It means everything,” he said. “I’ve dreamed of going to U. of F. ever since I was old enough to run with a ball.” He paused, started to say something else about that, then he frowned and said, “You’d better tell me what you’re here for.”

  “When did you last see Jinny Foster, Sam?”

  “Jinny?” He frowned. “Jinny Foster?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, I saw her tonight. Early tonight.” He kept on frowning slightly. “Why?”

  “You know Inez Harrington?”

  He hesitated, then said a little hurriedly, “Sure. Say, what’s this all about? I mean, sure—I know Inez and Jinny, and I saw Jinny tonight.”

  I walked across the room to his desk. He started to move after me, then stopped.

  “What’s this all about?” he said.

  A chemistry book was open beneath a goose-necked lamp on the desk. There were some papers arranged beside the book with writing and symbols on them: problems. This boy was going to college, no matter what. Otherwise, the desk was neatly clean. Night frowned through the open windows over the desk, yawning drowsily among the blue lace curtains.

  “Jinny’s dead,” I said, turning to him.

  “Dead?”

  He stood there looking at me. It didn’t register, and the frown came back. He moved over to the bed and sat down on the foot and stared up at me. “Jinny, dead? How do you mean, dead?”

  “There’s only one way, Sam.”

  “Yes, but—”

  I told him. He watched me all the while, rising from the bed and stepping closer as I talked. “Now,” I said, “would you tell me all you remember about seeing her tonight?”

  “Good night!” he said. “Jinny.”

  He stared at the floor and swallowed. He swallowed again, returned to the foot of the bed and sat down. He put his hands on his knees. “Good night,” he said. “I was just with her a little while ago.”

  “How long a little while, Sam?”

  He shook his head. “Well, early, really. Just after supper. Around dusk, that is. I had to run downtown with the car.” He paused. “We’re—the family, that is—we’re going up to our fishing camp on Lake Oklawatchi tomorrow. The folks are packing stuff now. Mom and Dad, that is. I had to run down to pick up a gasoline lantern we were having fixed. Something jammed up on it. I saw Jinny walking along Sixteenth. I picked her up. Said she had to go to the library.”

  “Oh?”

  He looked up at me. His face was very sober, and the way his eyes looked, he was remembering Jinny Foster.

  “She had a book due at the library.”

  “What kind of a book?”

  He shrugged. “Some medical book. Something. She’s—was—deeply interested in medicine lately.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I told her I’d run her down to the library. She sure was glad, too. She had a date, or something.”

  “Who with?”

  “She didn’t say. I took her down there and dropped her off. She went into the library with her book and I went over and picked up the lantern and came home.”

  “That’s all?”

  He stared at me. “That’s all? I told her that maybe I could have her up to camp for a couple days. The folks wouldn’t mind—fact is, I mentioned it to them and they said it would be fine. She’s been up before. But she was busy, or something.”

  I waited a moment. The more I moved along with this, the closer I was coming to something. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel it. It was kids—kids—kids, all over the place. I had never run into anything quite like this when I worked on the force. There was an odor to this. Already, Sam Roberson had helped me a lot more than he knew. I thought about the school walls getting smeared up with paint, and how lockers had been ripped open, desks torn out of the floor, files in the principal’s office destroyed. I thought of the gang fights that had been taking place down around Williams Park, the city bus that had been raided, the women who had been raped. I thought of all the things that kids had been doing lately in this town, and I didn’t like any of it.

  “How did Jinny seem, Sam?”

  “When I saw her tonight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean was she nervous? No. She acted fine. Even told me a joke. Pretty good one, too—but she was in a hurry, all right. Wanted to get to the library. I guess she was meeting somebody there.”

  “Was Jinny your girl?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Didn’t it bother you, her meeting somebody else?”

  He shrugged again and stared at the floor.

  “You remember the name of the book she had?”

  “Sure. The Medical Advisor, something like that.”

  “This Inez Harrington. What kind of a girl is she, Sam?”

  He looked up at me and started to say something, then cut it off. Then he thought about it and said it anyway.

  “Well,” he said. “She’s a good scout.”

  I hummed a little and turned the chair by the desk around and sat down, straddling it. I leaned my arms across the top of the chair and looked at him.

  “How good a scout?” I said.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “Well, when you say she was a good scout, do you mean she made fire by friction? Or is it something else?”

  His face grew brick-red.

  “Relax,” I said. “I’ve met Inez.”

  “Oh—did you?”

  “Yes. How about her—what’s she like?” I cleared my throat. “From your point of view, that is.”

  “I think she’s unhappy, sir. Her folks really treat her like dirt. I mean—you asked me, so I’m trying to tell you the truth. She acts as if she doesn’t care about not really having a home. But you should see her when she’s in somebody else’s house. What I mean is—she just kind of stares.” He paused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. She’s nice, though.”

  “Uh-huh. Now, about Jinny. Was she a good scout, too, Sam?”

  “Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir!” He nearly broke into a grin this time.

  “Which?”

  He held his hands out and looked at them.

  “I mean—no, sir.”

  I stood up. “Then the last time you saw Jinny Foster, you saw her walk into the library?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s right. Listen, about this good scout business—”

  I lifted one hand. “Who’s Talbot Swanson, Sam?”

  “Well, he’s a guy—just—”

  “And Roy Patterson,” I said, thinking of the other name on Inez’s list. “About him. Did he go with Jinny at all?”

  “Sometimes he did. Yes. Sometimes.”

  He was staring at the floor again. I began to get the feeling I should move on. Inez had doubtless told the police what kind of car I was driving. And Eve kept appearing in my mind’s eye.

 
; I knew a lot of time was going by, and I didn’t like it. I had the feeling I wasn’t getting any place, now. There was a let-down. Suppose the killer were kind of crackpot, and suppose he did see Eve looking at him? But all I could do was keep plugging and try to stay away from the police. Sam Roberson was a little help; but who was it Jinny had planned to meet?

  “There anything you can think of—you might be able to tell me about Jinny, anything at all, Sam?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’ve read about this teen-age gang stuff in the papers?”

  He looked up at me and nodded.

  “Could Jinny have been mixed up in anything like that? I mean, could she have been a member of any gang—you know anything about that?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s a lot of guff. They get to beating drums over something some kids cooked up, is all. There aren’t any gangs. That’s a lot of guff.”

  “You don’t belong to anything like that.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “That’s all straight and pure guff,” he said. “Believe me. I don’t know what gets into people, sir. Didn’t anything like that ever happen when you went to school?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Well, was it gangs? I mean, like they say?”

  “No. But things could—”

  “No,” he said. “There isn’t time for that stuff. Figure it out, just take and figure on time alone. When would you have time for all that? There’s too much to do.”

  “Interesting subject though, isn’t it?”

  His face reddened again. “Yes,” he admitted. “I guess it’s interesting.”

  “Jinny and Inez moved around a lot together, eh?”

  “Inez tell you that?”

  “No.”