Mrs. Mosby was drawing him a cup of coffee. “Sure, that’s all right. You’ve done fine. Got a lot more digging done than I thought you would.” She glanced at him anxiously as she put the coffee down in front of him on the counter, perhaps sensing his mood of disgust and boredom. “Tell you what, I’ll close up about seven, you and your wife can have the place to yourselves. There’s a cot stowed in the rafters, up above those shelves in the storeroom. It ain’t much, just a double cot and a pad. I’ll get you some bedding. What I thought, it’ll save you the price of a room.”
Karen was stacking dishes under the counter. “That’s nice of you, Ellie.” She hadn’t looked up. She’d been acting funny, in Eddie’s opinion, ever since the middle of the afternoon. Scared, more than ever. Dry-mouthed with fright, eyes big, hands quivering.
He noted a paper down the counter, pulled it toward him. It was an L.A. paper, and as soon as he saw the headlines he knew what was eating Karen.
RICH WIDOW SLAIN IN PASADENA
TEEN-AGER, WOMAN’S WARD, MISSING
Eddie glanced at Mrs. Mosby, saw she had turned away and wasn’t paying any attention, and began reading the news article avidly. The information was scant but bewildering. The last Eddie had seen of old Mrs. Havermann she’d been in the door of the closet, stiffening, cooling, showing signs of strangulation but otherwise not marked up. Here in the paper it stated she had been found in a blood-smeared room, evidence of a savage gunfight all around her, and the cause of death was undecided.
Eddie felt as if his head whirled. What was this?
He licked his lips and read on. Stolz had told the police he had arrived at the Havermann house at around eleven-thirty, answering a phone call from Mrs. Havermann to Las Vegas. Mrs. Havermann’s message, delivered to him at the hotel, had said that she was nervous over the possible presence of burglars. According to the paper, the police were quite curious as to why the elderly woman had appealed for protection to an ex-son-in-law as far away as Las Vegas, but Stolz stuck to his tale that Mrs. Havermann had lived almost alone and had grown eccentric. He had also informed the police of the disappearance of the young girl whom Mrs. Havermann had raised from the age of nine or ten. There then followed a good description of Karen.
There were photographs on an inner page: the Havermann house from outside, Stolz—coming out the front door with his hat up as if accidentally shielding his face—and a picture of Karen with braids at about the age of twelve. It still looked a lot like her, Eddie noted uneasily.
In a framed box was a detailed description of the girl, with an appeal from the police for anyone seeing her to get in touch with them.
The general belief seemed to be that Karen had been kidnaped by the robbers who had invaded the house, had had a gunfight, and had decamped.
Stolz said that nothing seemed to be missing.
Not a word about the money, Eddie thought. He put the paper down, tried to figure out what had happened. Stolz had his money safe, that was sure. He was keeping quiet about it, too. Then another hunch struck Eddie with dreadful impact.
Skip had been shot in that room. Stolz had killed him and hidden his body, dumped it somewhere. Or else Skip was wounded and was hiding somewhere and perhaps dying slowly.
A terrific sense of treasonous guilt shot through Eddie. His course was plain to him. He would have to go back to L.A. and find Skip.
Chapter Eighteen
MRS. MOSBY locked the front door of the café and clicked off all the lights in the dining area. She showed Eddie where the cot was, stuck up high in the rafters, the pad tied in a roll beside it; and while he was getting the cot down, setting it up and unrolling the pad, she went to her house and brought back two pillows in fresh cases, a couple of sheets and a blanket.
When she had gone again, when the bed was made, Eddie flopped on it and stretched himself with a sigh. “I’m beat. Chrissakes, I’m beat to the socks,” he said. Then he looked around for Karen. She had disappeared into the kitchen. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“I’ve got to scrub and wash my hair,” Karen called back.
Eddie lay and listened to the wet splashy noises from the sink, and then he drowsed. He hadn’t worked so hard since the last time he’d been in honor camp, repairing the roads in a county park. He woke when Karen sat down beside him. She’d found an old broken comb, was using it to straighten her hair. She smelled fresh and clean. He lifted himself and pulled her close, loving the clean smell and the softness. Then he had to talk about what he’d read in the paper.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out. Stolz must have caught Skip and shot him, but Skip somehow got away. He’ll need help; my God, he might be bleeding to death somewhere this minute.”
A bleak frightened look settled in her eyes. “Don’t talk about him. Don’t think about him. Forget him.”
“I can’t do it.” Eddie spoke in resignation, bitterly.
“We have each other,” she said desperately. “We don’t need him.”
“I shouldn’t have run away, ditched him like that. It wasn’t any kind of a thing to do.”
“No, it was the right thing to do.” She lay down close to Eddie and tucked her head against his chin, and he saw the fluff of her hair against the dying twilight.
He pulled up her face, kissed her, forgot the tiredness and began to stroke the soft line of her back beneath the slip she’d kept on as a nightdress. Then the discomfort of his own guilt intruded. “I’ve got to go back and see what’s happened to him.”
She pulled away, rose on an elbow. “What? What did you say?”
“I’ve got to go back.” Eddie’s brown eyes, so brown they seemed black, were thoughtful in his dark, square face. “It’s this way. Skip and I—well, we were always a team. Always together! We never let each other down.”
“I’ll bet he’s let you down plenty of times,” Karen said in sudden anger. “I’ll bet he’s tricked you and left you out on a limb over and over again.”
Eddie sat up; he felt irritated and insulted. Still, he couldn’t blame Karen for being upset; she was young and inexperienced. He controlled the rush of angry words. “This is what I planned, why I planned it. Now look. We were going to sleep here tonight, weren’t we?” Karen nodded; he went on: “So if I slip out and drive back to L.A. during the night, get back here by daylight, who’s going to know about it, and what difference will it make?”
Karen had moved away to sit crouched at the foot of the bed. Inside the rayon slip she looked slim as a child, frail, defeated. Her skin glowed with a white shine under the dim light from the window high in the storeroom wall. “Please don’t go. Oh, please, Eddie! Stay here with me. Or if you want, tomorrow we can go on somewhere else.”
The tone was so desperate, so pleading, that Eddie almost relented.
As if sensing that he was on the verge of giving in, Karen rushed on: “If you go anywhere near that house, the police will grab you. I’ll bet they’d grab you if you drove by a block away and even looked over at it.”
“I wouldn’t go out to your place,” Eddie said. “What I’d better do, the first thing to do, is check with Eddie’s uncle.”
“You can do that over the telephone!”
“I don’t know the number.”
“Well, you know Skip’s name!” Her voice grew higher, shriller, with every word she spoke.
“It’s not in Skip’s name, or his uncle’s name. His uncle works for a man—I’ve heard Skip mention the man’s name but I can’t remember it. I wouldn’t want to put in a long-distance call anyway, asking about Skip. You know, if the cops are wise, the phone could be bugged, or the uncle even taken in on suspicion—oh, hell, anything could have happened!”
She flung herself at him, clutched him, squeezed so tight that Eddie was astonished at her frantic strength. “Don’t go! Don’t go!”
Eddie loosened her grip patiently. “Now of course Skip’s uncle doesn’t know anything about the Havermann job,” he went on, thinking aloud. “So he won’t know,
unless Skip got to him, that Skip needs help. That’s what I’ve got to do, get to him and explain that Skip’s in trouble, must be shot up and ought to be found and taken to a doctor.”
She threw back her head, brushed at her hair, looked directly into his eyes. “I know it isn’t Skip who’s hurt. He’s too smart, too clever and quick. If anyone is shot, it’s somebody else.”
“It has to be Skip,” Eddie explained. “Stolz is okay. The paper said so.”
At the last Karen offered Eddie the one gift she thought would keep him, and he accepted it instantly and delightedly, loving her passionately for the offering of it; but when it was done he got up from the bed and put on his clothes and went out, instructing her to lock the door after him.
Thinking to cut some distance from the trip, he took the Ventura Boulevard route for San Fernando Valley, planning to enter L.A. through North Hollywood and Cahuenga Pass; and in an isolated part of the west valley, surrounded by walnut groves and areas of rocky hills, everything but what the headlights showed blanketed in moonless dark, the old car burned out a bearing, the engine exploded with a grinding breakage, and he was stranded. He was nowhere near L.A., had no idea what the next town might be or where it was. Karen and Mrs. Mosby’s café might as well have been a thousand miles from him. All he could do was to wait in the car until daylight.
When Mrs. Mosby came over from her own place at about seven, Karen was already up and dressed, had the cot folded and stacked in a corner, the pad rolled and tied, the borrowed bedding placed neatly on top. She was in the dining room, stacking dishes. Coffee water was boiling.
Mrs. Mosby exclaimed with pleasure and surprise. There wasn’t a lazy bone in the girl’s body. She was young and pretty, the truckers would be attracted. Mrs. Mosby made plans to keep them here—and then noticed the absence of Eddie. “Now where’d he take himself off to?” She peered out through the front windows. “Car gone, too, huh?”
“He went over to see a friend,” Karen said stumblingly. “Last night. He . . . didn’t come back.”
Mrs. Mosby studied Karen, saw that tears were just under the surface and that the girl was terribly frightened and upset. Had a fight, she concluded from her own experience, remembering the long ago years when she had been a bride, easily hurt and dismayed. “Well, we’ll just go ahead and have breakfast, and he’ll show up. You scold him good when he comes. Make him eat crow. Ain’t every young fellow has as pretty a wife as you.”
They ate. The food was hearty and filling. Mrs. Mosby emptied her change bag into the cash register, unlocked the front door, and the place was open for business.
Karen worked as if afraid to stop. She scrubbed up all the out-of-the-way spots, stacked canned goods in the storeroom, tidied the soaps and brushes beneath the sink. She seemed determined to keep her hands occupied, to keep thought, introspection, and self-concern at bay.
At about eleven-thirty Mrs. Mosby went back home to attend to her husband’s wants. During this time Karen was alone in the café. A trucker came in with an L.A. morning paper. He left it when he finished eating. Karen read it in panic. Her description was boxed on the front page now, in large black type. Mrs. Havermann’s death had been attributed to heart failure brought on by asphyxiation. Murder. A man identified as the intruder in her home had been found dead of gunshot wounds in a car some distance from the Havermann house. Reading this, Karen had an almost unbearable surge of relief, thinking Skip was dead and Eddie would know it and come back—but the paper’s account continued, to say that the dead man had been identified as a middle-aged ex-convict named Thomas Ranigan, commonly known among his criminal associates as Big Tom.
His fingerprints matched the bloody ones found in the dead woman’s room and on her person. The police were now trying to trace Ranigan’s movements on the night of the murder and to account for the accomplices who must have quarreled with him and shot him.
Karen felt almost dizzied by this crazy story which seemed to have no connection with the facts as she knew them. Eddie had made a frightening mistake in going back. Probably he was in the hands of the police right now. As the paper dropped from her fingers, the black-boxed description of herself seemed to boom almost audibly from the page: seventeen years old, five feet three to four, slender build, dark brown hair, blue eyes, attractive appearance. It never occurred to Karen that the items listed in the box could apply to thousands of other young girls. She felt picked out, spotlighted. She felt as if a million eyes, a million pointing fingers, searched out her shrinking body. She was convinced that the next customer to walk into Mrs. Mosby’s café would recognize her instantly.
The place was empty temporarily. It was chance, perhaps her only one. She ran to the cash register, punched a key, removed a handful of bills, half dollars, quarters. She rushed around the counter and out the front door. Beyond the parking lot the highway hummed with traffic.
She walked, turning whenever she heard a car coming, trying not to look guilty and scared, trying to look like an ordinary girl out for a walk, needing a ride. She was in the outskirts of Oxnard now, among orange-packing plants, lots selling farming equipment, truck lots.
The big tanker began slowing some distance behind her. By the time Karen looked around, she could see that it was going to stop. The big tires spun gravel off into the roadside ditch, the brakes whooshed with a sound like a giant sigh. Then from the cab the driver was leaning across to look down at her. He had a heavy face, black eyebrows, signs of a beard beneath his skin. “Hey, kiddo. You going someplace? Want a ride?”
She nodded swiftly. “Yes, I want a ride. Please.”
“Where you headed?” He smiled now, the lips drew back from his teeth, his heavy chin widened.
“Where are you going?”
“Don’t care, huh?” He put an elbow on the rim of the cab window. “I’m headed for Salinas; from Salinas I’m taking a load north. Eureka. Know where that is?” He smiled, waited; but Karen was struck dumb, and he added, watching her curiously, “Three hundred miles north of San Francisco.”
She said from a dry mouth, “That’s fine.”
She took a step toward the cab door and he put his hand down inside as if about to touch the door latch there. Then he sized her up a little more closely. Perhaps something young and inexperienced about her warned him off. His look clouded and he said, “Well, now, wait a minute.” After a pause he added, “That’s a hell of a long trip. Sure you want to go so far?”
He was stalling, she saw. She looked up at him. The heavy, sweating face was like a mask hung in the sky above her, denying her, shutting her away from escape.
She tried to think of some way to convince him he should take her, to force some hint of invitation and knowingness into her eyes so that he might be attracted to her, but she was too inexpert and too unsophisticated to bring it off. She could not summon any coaxing remarks. She looked up at him mutely.
“You really got to go?” he asked softly.
She nodded.
His hand dropped to the door latch, and the wide door swung out and for a moment she saw the wide padded leather seat and his thick legs and his booted foot on the brake pedal. “Get in,” he said.
She took a single step on the gravelly shoulder of the road, and then wordlessly she turned and, running, almost falling, she went headlong back the way she had come.
Skip awoke and looked around the hotel room. He felt good, in spite of the long hours at the crap tables the night before, plus the drinking he had done after midnight in order to stay awake. He rolled over, took the phone off the cradle, asked the desk for the time. It was a quarter past ten. Skip asked to be transferred to room service, requested a shot of Scotch, coffee, and tomato juice sent up at once.
He crawled out of bed, inspected the roll in his pants pocket. He had over seven hundred in tens, twenties, and fifties. The remainder of the money he’d found in the Havermann house was still intact. After some thought he took an envelope and paper from the writing desk across the room, wrappe
d the Havermann money into the writing sheet and sealed it in the envelope, wrote his name across the envelope; and when the boy came with the whiskey, coffee, and juice, Skip tipped him two dollars and asked that he turn the envelope over to the desk with instructions to lock it in the safe.
Skip then lay in bed and enjoyed his breakfast.
He made plans for the day. Blackjack first. He used to be pretty good at it. An old con in the road camp had showed him a trick or two. But while Skip was dressing he became displeased with his clothes. Hell, they were rags. He postponed the gambling until he had bought a new suit, shirt, shoes, and tie. Then he hit the blackjack tables, three clubs one after the other, and by ten minutes to two he was broke. He went back to the hotel and requested his envelope from the safe.
He thought that the clerk handed it over with a glance of cynical amusement, knowing what was inside, thinking of the sucker being peeled of his money, and inwardly Skip cursed and raged.
He went back to Virginia Street and by chance, recognizing the façade, re-entered the club at which he had begun gambling the evening before. He gave the girl a hundred-dollar bill and she seemed to delay changing it, fussing with money in the cash drawer below the counter; and then, distinctly, perhaps because some sixth sense was tuned for an alarm, Skip heard a buzzer sound somewhere in the rear of the club, near the entrance to the café.
He put his face close to the grill. “Something wrong with my dough, sister?”
She met his gaze calmly. “No, sir. I’ve had to call for some small bills. The manager will be here in a minute.”
Skip looked around. A tall man dressed in a tux, white shirt, black tie was coming toward him through the ranks of slots. He had his eyes fixed on Skip in a way which Skip recognized. He was memorizing Skip’s face. Skip reached at once inside the cage, snatched his bill back, and turned for the door. “Just a minute,” called the manager in a voice of authority.
Skip walked rapidly, bumping into people, shoving others flat against the machines as he passed. One old woman screeched at him, “You better watch it, buddy!”
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