“Brother, you said it,” I told him.
“Not matter,” the voice said. “Go away now, go home. Five hundred dollars. Nothing being said five hundred dollars arriving one week from today.”
“Fine,” I said. “You having my address?”
“Very funny,” the voice cooed. “Ha, ha.”
Something hit the back of my right knee, and the leg folded suddenly the way it will when hit at that point. My head began to ache from where it was going to get a crack from the gun, but he fooled me. It was the old rabbit punch, and it was a honey of its type. Done with the heel of a very hard little hand. My head came off and went halfway across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.
There was an interval of midnight in a small room with the windows shut and no air. My chest labored against the ground. They put a ton of coal on my back. One of the hard lumps pressed into the middle of my back. I made some noises but they must have been unimportant. Nobody bothered about them. I heard the sound of a boat motor get louder, and a soft thud of feet walking on the pine needles, making a dry, slithering sound. Then a couple of heavy grunts and steps going away. Then steps coming back and a hurry voice, with a sort of accent.
“What did you get there, Charlie?”
“Oh nothing,” Charlie said cooingly. “Smoking pipe, not doing anything. Summer visitor, ha, ha.”
“Did he see the stiff?”
“Not seeing,” Charlie said. I wondered why.
“Okay, let’s go.”
“Ah, too bad,” Charlie said. “Too bad.” The weight got off my back and the lumps of hard coal went away from my spine. “Too bad,” Charlie said again. “But must do.”
He didn’t fool this time. He hit me with the gun. Come around and I’ll let you feel the lump under my scalp. I’ve got several of them.
Time passed and I was up on my knees, whining. I put a foot on the ground and hoisted myself on it and wiped my face off with the back of my hand and put the other foot on the ground and climbed out of the hole it felt like I was in.
The shine of water, dark now from the sun but silvered by the moon, was directly in front of me. To the right was the big fallen tree. That brought it back. I moved cautiously towards it, rubbing my head with careful fingertips. It was swollen and soft, but not bleeding. I stopped and looked back for my hat, and then remembered I had left it in the car.
I went around the tree. The moon was bright as it can only be in the mountains or on the desert. You could almost see that there was no body on the ground now and no gun lying against the tree with ants crawling on it. The ground had a sort of smoothed-out, raked look.
I stood there and listened, and all I heard was the blood pounding in my head, and all I felt was my head aching. Then my hand jumped for the gun and the gun was there. And the hand jumped again for my wallet and the wallet was there. I hauled it out and looked at my money. That seemed to be there, too.
I turned around and plowed back to the car. I wanted to go back to the hotel and get a couple of drinks and lie down. I wanted to meet Charlie after a while, but not right away. First I wanted to lie down for a while. I was a growing boy and I needed rest.
I got into the car and started it and tooled it around on the soft ground and back on to the dirt road and back along that to the highway. I didn’t meet any cars. The music was still going well in the dancing pavilion off to the side, and the throaty-voiced singer was giving out “I’ll Never Smile Again.”
When I reached the highway I put the lights on and drove back to the village. The local law hung out in a one-room pineboard shack halfway up the block from the boat landing, across the street from the firehouse. There was a naked light burning inside, behind a glass-paneled door.
I stopped the car on the other side of the street and sat there for a minute looking into the shack. There was a man inside, sitting bareheaded in a swivel chair at an old rolltop desk. I opened the car door and moved to get out, then stopped and shut the door again and started the motor and drove on.
I had a hundred dollars to earn, after all.
3
I drove two miles past the village and came to the bakery and turned on a newly oiled road towards the lake. I passed a couple of camps and then saw the brownish tents of the boys’ camp with lights strung between them and a clatter coming from a big tent where they were washing dishes. A little beyond that the road curved around an inlet and a dirt road branched off. It was deeply rutted and full of stones half embedded in the dirt, and the trees barely gave it room to pass. I went by a couple of lighted cabins, old ones built of pine with the bark left on. Then the road climbed and the place got emptier, and after a while a big cabin hung over the edge of the bluff looking down on the lake at its feet. The cabin had two chimneys and a rustic fence, and a double garage outside the fence. There was a long porch on the lake side, and steps going down to the water. Light came from the windows. My headlights tilted up enough to catch the name Baldwin painted on a wooden board nailed to a tree. This was the cabin, all right.
The garage was open and a sedan was parked in it. I stopped a little beyond and went far enough into the garage to feel the exhaust pipe of the car. It was cold. I went through a rustic gate up a path outlined in stones to the porch. The door opened as I got there. A tall woman stood there, framed against the light. A little silky dog rushed out past her, tumbled down the steps and hit me in the stomach with two front paws, then dropped to the ground and ran in circles making noises of approval.
“Down, Shiny!” the woman called. “Down! Isn’t she a funny little dog? Funny itty doggie. She’s half coyote.”
The dog ran back into the house. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey? I’m Evans. I called you up about an hour ago.”
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Lacey,” she said. “My husband hasn’t come in yet. I—well, come in, won’t you?” Her voice had a remote sound, like a voice in the mist.
She closed the door behind me after I went in and stood there looking at me, then shrugged a little and sat down in a wicker chair. I sat down in another just like it. The dog appeared from nowhere, jumped in my lap, wiped a neat tongue across the end of my nose and jumped down again. It was a small grayish dog with a sharp nose and a long, feathery tail.
It was a long room with a lot of windows and not very fresh curtains at them. There was a big fireplace, Indian rugs, two davenports with faded cretonne slips over them, more wicker furniture, not too comfortable. There were some antlers on the wall, one pair with six points.
“Fred isn’t home yet,” Mrs. Lacey said again. “I don’t know what’s keeping him.”
I nodded. She had a pale face, rather taut, dark hair that was a little wild. She was wearing a double-breasted scarlet coat with brass buttons, gray flannel slacks, pigskin clog sandals, and no stockings. There was a necklace of cloudy amber around her throat and a bandeau of old-rose material in her hair. She was in her middle thirties, so it was too late for her to learn how to dress herself.
“You wanted to see my husband on business?”
“Yes. He wrote me to come up and stay at the Indian Head and phone him.”
“Oh—at the Indian Head,” she said, as if that meant something. She crossed her legs, didn’t like them that way, and uncrossed them again. She leaned forward and cupped a long chin in her hand. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Evans?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“It’s…it’s about the money?” she asked quickly.
I nodded. That seemed safe. It was usually about money. It was about a hundred dollars that I had in my pocket, anyhow.
“Of course,” she said. “Naturally. Would you care for a drink?”
“Very much.”
She went over to a little wooden bar and came back with two glasses. We drank. We looked at each other over the rims of our glasses.
“The Indian Head,” she said. “We staye
d there two nights when we came up. While the cabin was being cleaned up. It had been empty for two years before we bought it. They get so dirty.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“You say my husband wrote to you?” She was looking down into her glass now. “I suppose he told you the story.”
I offered her a cigarette. She started to reach, then shook her head and put her hand on her kneecap and twisted it. She gave me the careful up-from-under look.
“He was a little vague,” I said. “In spots.”
She looked at me steadily and I looked at her steadily. I breathed gently into my glass until it misted.
“Well, I don’t think we need be mysterious about it,” she said. “Although as a matter of fact I know more about it than Fred thinks I do. He doesn’t know, for example, that I saw that letter.”
“The letter he sent me?”
“No. The letter he got from Los Angeles with the report on the ten-dollar bill.”
“How did you get to see it?” I asked.
She laughed without much amusement. “Fred’s too secretive. It’s a mistake to be too secretive with a woman. I sneaked a look at it while he was in the bathroom. I got it out of his pocket.”
I nodded and drank some more of my drink. I said: “Uh-huh.” That didn’t commit me very far, which was a good idea as long as I didn’t know what we were talking about. “But how did you know it was in his pocket?” I asked.
“He’d just got it at the post office. I was with him.” She laughed, with a little more amusement this time. “I saw that there was a bill in it and that it came from Los Angeles. I knew he had sent one of the bills to a friend there who is an expert on such things. So of course I knew this letter was a report. It was.”
“Seems like Fred doesn’t cover up very well,” I said. “What did the letter say?”
She flushed slightly. “I don’t know that I should tell you. I don’t really know that you are a detective or that your name is Evans.”
“Well, that’s something that can be settled without violence,” I said. I got up and showed her enough to prove it. When I sat down again the little dog came over and sniffed at the cuffs on my trousers. I bent down to pat her head and got a handful of spit.
“It said that the bill was beautiful work. The paper, in particular, was just about perfect. But under a comparison microscope there were very small differences of registration. What does that mean?”
“It means that the bill he sent hadn’t been made from a government plate. Anything else wrong?”
“Yes. Under black light—whatever that is—there appeared to be slight differences in the composition of the inks. But the letter added that to the naked eye the counterfeit was practically perfect. It would fool any bank teller.”
I nodded. This was something I hadn’t expected. “Who wrote the letter, Mrs. Lacey?”
“He signed himself Bill. It was on a plain sheet of paper. I don’t know who wrote it. Oh, there was something else. Bill said that Fred ought to turn it in to the Federal people right away, because the money was good enough to make a lot of trouble if much of it got into circulation. But, of course, Fred wouldn’t want to do that if he could help it. That would be why he sent for you.”
“Well, no, of course not,” I said. This was a shot in the dark, but it wasn’t likely to hit anything. Not with the amount of dark I had to shoot into.
She nodded, as if I had said something.
“What is Fred doing now, mostly?” I asked.
“Bridge and poker, like he’s done for years. He plays bridge almost every afternoon at the athletic club and poker at night a good deal. You can see that he couldn’t afford to be connected with counterfeit money, even in the most innocent way. There would always be someone who wouldn’t believe it was innocent. He plays the races, too, but that’s just fun. That’s how he got the five hundred dollars he put in my shoe for a present for me. At the Indian Head.”
I wanted to go out in the yard and do a little yelling and breast beating, just to let off steam. But all I could do was sit there and look wise and guzzle my drink. I guzzled it empty and made a lonely noise with the ice cubes and she went and got me another one. I took a slug of that and breathed deeply and said: “If the bill was so good, how did he know it was bad, if you get what I mean?”
Her eyes widened a little. “Oh—I see. He didn’t, of course. Not that one. But there were fifty of them, all ten-dollar bills, all new. And the money hadn’t been that way when he put it in the shoe.”
I wondered if tearing my hair would do me any good. I didn’t think—my head was too sore. Charlie. Good old Charlie! Okay, Charlie, after a while I’ll be around with my gang.
“Look,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Lacey. He didn’t tell me about the shoe. Does he always keep his money in a shoe, or was this something special on account of he won it at the races and horses wear shoes?”
“I told you it was a surprise present for me. When I put the shoe on I would find it, of course.”
“Oh.” I gnawed about half an inch off my upper lip. “But you didn’t find it?”
“How could I when I sent the maid to take the shoes to the shoemaker in the village to have lifts put on them? I didn’t look inside. I didn’t know Fred had put anything in the shoe.”
A little light was coming. It was very far off and coming very slowly. It was a very little light, about half a firefly’s worth.
I said: “And Fred didn’t know that. And this maid took the shoes to the shoemaker. What then?”
“Well, Gertrude—that’s the maid’s name—said she hadn’t noticed the money, either. So when Fred found out about it and had asked her, he went over to the shoemaker’s place, and he hadn’t worked on the shoes and the roll of money was still stuffed down into the toe of the shoe. So Fred laughed and took the money out and put it in his pocket and gave the shoemaker five dollars because he was lucky.”
I finished my second drink and leaned back. “I get it now. Then Fred took the roll out and looked it over and he saw it wasn’t the same money. It was all new ten-dollar bills, and before it had probably been various sizes of bills and not new or not all new.”
She looked surprised that I had to reason it out. I wondered how long a letter she thought Fred had written me. I said: “Then Fred would have to assume that there was some reason for changing the money. He thought of one and sent a bill to a friend of his to be tested. And the report came back that it was very good counterfeit, but still counterfeit. Who did he ask about it at the hotel?”
“Nobody except Gertrude, I guess. He didn’t want to start anything. I guess he just sent for you.”
I snubbed my cigarette out and looked out of the open front windows at the moonlit lake. A speedboat with a hard white headlight slid muttering along in the water, far off over the water, and disappeared behind a wooded point.
I looked back at Mrs. Lacey. She was still sitting with her chin propped in a thin hand. Her eyes seemed far away.
“I wish Fred would come home,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He went out with a man named Frank Luders, who is staying at the Woodland Club, down at the far end of the lake. Fred said he owned an interest in it. But I called Mr. Luders up a while ago and he said Fred had just ridden uptown with him and got off at the post office. I’ve been expecting Fred to phone and ask me to pick him up somewhere. He left hours ago.”
“They probably have some card games down at the Woodland Club. Maybe he went there.”
She nodded. “He usually calls me, though.”
I stared at the floor for a while and tried not to feel like a heel. Then I stood up. “I guess I’ll go on back to the hotel. I’ll be there if you want to phone me. I think I’ve met Mr. Lacey somewhere. Isn’t he a thickset man about forty-five, going a little bald, with a small mustache?”
She went to the door with me. “Yes,” she said. “That’s Fred, all right.”
She had shut the
dog in the house and was standing outside herself as I turned the car and drove away. God, she looked lonely.
4
I was lying on my back on the bed, wobbling a cigarette around and trying to make up my mind just why I had to play cute with this affair, when the knock came at the door. I called out. A girl in a working uniform came in with some towels. She had dark, reddish hair and a pert, nicely made-up face and long legs. She excused herself and hung some towels on the rack and started back to the door and gave me a sidelong look with a good deal of fluttering eyelash in it.
I said, “Hello, Gertrude,” just for the hell of it.
She stopped, and the dark-red head came around and the mouth was ready to smile.
“How’d you know my name?”
“I didn’t. But one of the maids is Gertrude. I wanted to talk to her.”
She leaned against the door frame, towels over her arm. Her eyes were lazy. “Yeah?”
“Live up here, or just up here for the summer?” I asked.
Her lip curled. “I should say I don’t live up here. With these mountain screwballs? I should say not.”
“You doing all right?”
She nodded. “And I don’t need any company, mister.” She sounded as if she could be talked out of that.
I looked at her for a minute and said: “Tell about that money somebody hid in a shoe.”
“Who are you?” she asked coolly.
“The name is Evans. I’m a Los Angeles detective.” I grinned at her, very wise.
Her face stiffened a little. The hand holding the towels clutched and her nails made a scratching sound on the cloth. She moved back from the door and sat down in a straight chair against the wall. Trouble dwelt in her eyes.
“A dick,” she breathed. “What goes on?”
“Don’t you know?”
“All I heard was Mrs. Lacey left some money in a shoe she wanted a lift put on the heel, and I took it over to the shoemaker and he didn’t steal the money. And I didn’t, either. She got the money back, didn’t she?”
“Don’t like cops, do you? Seems to me I know your face,” I said.