The Passion Murders

THE PASSION MURDERS

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THE PASSION MURDERS DAY KEENE

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DAY KEENE

THE PASSION MURDERS DAY KEENE PUBLISHED 1951 BLACKMASK.COM EDITION 2004 ISBN: 1-59654-106-7 BLACKMASK ONLINE IS A DIVISION OF DISRUPTIVE PUBLISHING, INC.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE 3 CHAPTER TWO 8 CHAPTER THREE 15 CHAPTER FOUR 21 CHAPTER FIVE 28 CHAPTER SIX 33 CHAPTER SEVEN 37 CHAPTER EIGHT 42 CHAPTER NINE 48 CHAPTER TEN 53 CHAPTER ELEVEN 59 CHAPTER TWELVE 65 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 71 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 77 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 81 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 86 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 93 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 98 CHAPTER NINETEEN 105

CHAPTER ONE I WAS PUTTING the finishing touches on the case of the State of California versus Joe Connors, et al, when Miss Able opened the door of my office. “Mr. Blair to see you, Counselor.” “The name,” I told her, “is Shannon. Hi Shannon to my friends. What does Blair want?” Miss Abie’s ample breasts heaved. Her face was flushed. She’d seen a movie about a lawyer once and working in a law office was still very exciting to her. “He didn’t say, Counselor. But he did say it’s very important.”

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I lit a Turkish cigarette, wishing it was Bull Durham, or better still, a big mouthful of fine cut. You can put shoes on a Georgia boy’s feet. You can comb the cotton hulls out of his hair. You can sheathe his six-feet-two, two hundred pounds in a custom-tailored, three hundred dollar suit of clothes. You can marry him to the prettiest and most promising starlet in Hollywood. You can appoint him a special prosecutor because he is the only lawyer in Los Angeles County fool enough, or with guts enough, to buck Joe Connors and his crowd. But a man is what he was born. I didn’t like Sonny Blair. I wouldn’t have liked him if he had been a United States Supreme Court decision in my favor. Some people still called him “the Dreamboat.” A few moronic teenagers still felt ants in their pants and swooned when he crooned into a mike. It was reputed that he still had something very special that made him attractive to older women, too, especially frustrated young wives whose husbands were too busy or too enfeebled to give them the emotional exercise they needed. At one time, Blair had been in the big money, but since TV, when he could be seen as well as heard, his popularity had steadily decreased. I had defended him three times. Once for drunken driving. Once in an alienation of affections suit. Once on a statutory charge involving a fifteen-year-old girl. All three cases brought sizable fees. But I still thought he stunk. In my book, he was a slimy little punk who would sell his mother for three fan letters and a bottle of gin. “Tell Mr. Blair I’m not in,” I told her. She bit her lower lip in disappointment. “Yes, sir. Whatever you say, Counselor.” Blair pushed her aside and walked into the office. “Don’t give me that, Shannon,” he said. “The hell you’re not in.” He gave Miss Able a dirty look. “I told your girl to tell you this is important.” “But I did,” Miss Able protested. “I told Mr. Shannon you said it was very important.” Blair shut the door in her face and began to wear paths in my eighteendollar-a-yard broadloom. Eight paces to the window and eight paces back. Nine paces to the book-lined wall, then back to his starting point. I looked at him through cigarette smoke. I didn’t like him any better than I had the last time I’d seen him. He was about five-feet-eight, with a face that women called elfin. His ears protruded from each side of his head like the landing flaps on a P38. His cheeks were sunken. There were purple bands under his eyes. He looked like something a Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard cat had dragged in, and he’d spent the night with the cat.

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Blair stopped pacing and looked hurt. “What’s the idea of telling your girl to tell me you’re not in?” I apologized. “I’m sorry. A mere figure of speech. What I really meant was, I’m not in to you. Now get out. Before I give you your choice of being thrown out a door or a window.” Blair resumed his pacing. “That’s a hell of a way for you to talk. After the fees I’ve paid you.” “Did you get what you paid for?” I asked him. “Yes,” he admitted. “I did.” I picked up the brief on which I had been working. “Then blow. I’m not taking any cases for a month or two. Not until I finish up this Connors’ business. And even if I were I wouldn’t fix a parking ticket for you if you paid me ten thousand dollars.” I was being a small boy. I knew it. But what would you have done if you’d caught a guy kissing your wife, by force, and her in nothing but a scrap of cloth that wouldn’t make a breech clout for a parakeet? Even if you did have a gun and slammed him hard with it across the face and sent him packing with a word to the wise to keep his hands to himself in the future? That had been at Manny Norman’s place two months before. Out in the San Fernando Valley, in the hills above Encino. It had been a typical Hollywood brawl, with all the great and sear-great invited to help Manny celebrate the five-year extension of his contract at enough money a year to pay the President and the cabinet and have enough left over to buy a ranch full of pastel minks. I hadn’t wanted to go. Sally had. We’d gone. Once there, I’d had a good time until, wondering why Sally was taking so long to dress after the en masse plunge in the pool, I’d gone in search of her and found her in one of the pool-side dressing cabanas, fighting off Senny Blair, with only a wisp of panties between her and his intentions. I could still shut my eyes and see his greedy hands on her. Maybe that goes in Hollywood, but not with me. Down in the you-all country, once a couple joins hands they can wear out all the mattresses they have a mind to, but it’s strictly a family affair. I’d hit Blair so hard that he’d gone through a beaverboard panel. The crash attracted a crowd. The crowd and Manny Norman kept me from killing him. Now the bastard had the nerve to walk into my office and expect me, for a fee, to pry him out of some jam. The mere I thought about it the madder I got. Sally and I had been feuding for some time, over her desire to remain in pictures even now that my legal practice had reached a point where I was financially able to give her

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everything that pictures could. With the exception of fan mail. The Sonny Blair affair hadn’t improved our relations. “Why didn’t you scream?” I had asked her. “I didn’t have time,” she told me. “I was changing from my bathing suit and there he was. Then I was afraid to scream for fear there’d be a scandal that might hurt my career.” I’d gone all cracker then, thin-lipped and mean-eyed. “Your career. In other words, if I hadn’t shown on the scene you’d have let him, rather than ruin your chances in pictures.” That was when Sally exploded. “You dumb, evil-minded Georgia cracker!” she’d called me, and pounded on me with a little fist that couldn’t have cracked a paper-shell pecan. “I thought I could handle him. You hear me? There’s never been any man but you. There’s never going to be. Now take me home. And don’t even dare look at me for a week. Don’t touch me. Don’t even talk to me.” Women. There was a framed picture of Sally on my desk. I picked it up and looked at it. Most of the girls they write stories about are leggy blondes, or sultry redheads with green eyes. They have lush breasts tipped with coral or rubies. Sally isn’t like that. Her hair is brown. She wears it in bangs in front and a cute little bun in back. Her eyes are a deep brown. She is barely five feet tall. She doesn’t weigh over one hundred and ten pounds, and she never will. Her breasts are shaped like breasts and tipped with the substance breasts should be tipped with, neither large or small, but ample for any purpose whatsoever. She doesn’t look sultry or sexy. She doesn’t have to. She is. Her cute little white hide is stuffed with more damn delightful dynamite than a man could expect of ten leggy blondes with a half-dozen sultry redheads thrown in. I set the picture back on my desk and looked at Blair. He was still wearing paths in the broadloom. “I thought I told you to blow.” Beads of sweat formed on his face. It was warm but not that warm. “I can’t blow, Shannon. I’m in a jam, a bad one. One that may wash me up completely.” I gave him the old ho-ho. “Go on. You’re breaking my heart.” He sat on one of the office chairs and held his head in his hands. “I mean it. What’s the penalty for running down and killing someone when you’re drunk?” I said, “In this state, being drunk automatically makes it manslaughter. How many years you do is up to the jury that hears the case. I haven’t looked at the statutes lately, but as I recall, offhand, the minimum is two

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and the maximum is ten years.” Blair mopped at the sweat on his face. “Oh, God. Oh, God.” He wasn’t praying. He was feeling sorry for himself. “You were alone?” “No.” “You had a girl in the car with you?” “Yeah.” Blair mopped at his face again. “A married woman?” “Yeah.” “In pictures?” “Yeah.” “She was drunk, too?” Blair pulled at one end of his bow tie. It opened. I could see a fresh hickey on his neck. “She was stinking,” he told me. “What happens to the one who wasn’t driving?” I shook my head at him. “There you pose a moot question. I wouldn’t feel qualified to answer that. At least, not without a substantial retainer.” Blair cursed me in fine old one-syllable English. “Ten years,” he whispered. “Ten years.” I stacked the papers on my desk. “It’s on the book?” Blair opened the top button of his shirt and rubbed at the hickey. “No. Not yet,” he panted. “It happened just this side of Palmdale, see? We’re on our way back from Tahoe on US 6 when this kid runs out in the road. We’re doing ninety, see. Both of us blind drunk. And Jesus. We splatter the kid all over a culvert and damn near wreck my new car to boot.” It was no skin off my nose but it made me sick to hear him tell it. He sounded more concerned about his car than he did about the child he’d killed. “You stopped?” He nodded. “Yeah. We had to. The impact smashed in the whole front of the car and did something to the steering wheel. That’s how the kid’s parents come to find out who we are. They go to the pictures a lot, see? And as soon as they come screaming out on the road, they make us.” I put the dope I’d gathered on Joe Connors in my briefcase “How sad.” “They’re poor, see?” Blair continued. “Migrant workers. And them kinda people can always use a little dough. That’s why I come to you, Shannon. I thought maybe between us we could fix it.” I locked my briefcase and put the key in my pocket. “I’ll be glad to, Sonny,” I told him. “Seeing as I have switched from the foxes to the hounds, at least temporarily, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll speak to the Attorney General. And maybe when I finish sending Joe Connors to the

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lethal chamber, the Attorney General will let me prosecute you.” I walked around my desk, caught him by the front of his coat and lifted him off the chair. “And if I do have that opportunity, you bastard, the least that you’ll get is life.” I dropped him back in the chair. Blair sat looking up at me. There was an odd look on his face. “You don’t get the whole story, yet, do you, Shannon?” “What’s there to get?” I asked him. “You spent the weekend at Lake Tahoe with some hot little bitch who told her husband—” I enumerated the stock Hollywood excuses: “’I’m going to visit my mother.’ ‘I have to be on location Friday night to be ready to shoot Monday morning.’ ‘I think a few days apart will do us good.’ ” I stared at him. “You had a hell of a weekend with the bottle and the sack. You both were still stinking drunk when you started back this morning. You smacked into a kid. And now you’re crying.” Blair shook his head. “No. I wasn’t driving, see? The girl was driving. It’s the girl who’s facing ten years.” “So—?” Blair wet his lips. “So where did Sally tell you she was going to spend the weekend?” I told him. “She flew up to Grass Valley to visit her folks. She said she thought a few days would ...” I ran down like an unwound clock. My knees sagged under me. I could feel my stomach turn over. I lifted Blair out of his chair again and slapped him with my open hand. “Don’t give me that. Sally is good.” Blood showing from the corners of his mouth, Blair smirked, “You’re telling me. I just spent the weekend with her. And, like you say, between the bottle and the sack we had a hell of a time. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s why I thought you might help. You see, it wasn’t me, it was Sally who was driving when we hit the kid.”

CHAPTER TWO I RELEASED HIS coat and walked back to my own chair. I felt numb. Like when you’re told someone you love is dead. I picked up the phone and asked Miss Able to get me Long Distance. When the operator answered, I said, “I’d like to speak to Mrs. John Frazer, Grass Valley, California. I don’t know the number. But it’s a farm, about five miles out of town. On State Highway 20.” She took my number and said she would call me back. While I waited, I asked Blair, “Where’s Sally now?”

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He said, “On location. Somewhere in the Mojave. That’s why she was driving so fast. You knew they were going to start shooting this morning.” Sally told me you knew.” “Yes. I knew,” I admitted. He straightened his shirt and tie. The wings of the tie covered the hickey. “She killed the kid early this morning, see? Just after daybreak. And I gave the parents all the dough I had on me to keep them quiet until I could talk to you. About four hundred dollars. The old man was fairly decent after that. He even drove us back to Palmdale in his truck and Sally picked up a cab there.” He straightened his coat. “Where are they shooting?” Blair said, “I think over near Victorville. At least, that’s where Sally told me she was supposed to report.” I nodded. “Yeah. That’s what she told me.” The phone rang. I picked it up and Sally’s mother came on the wire, talking loud like some folks do, especially fanners, because the local operator had told her that Los Angeles was calling. “Hello,” she said into the phone. “Hello.” “This is Hi, Mrs. Frazer,” I told her. “Who?” she shouted. “Hi,” I repeated. “Hi Shannon.” “Oh,” she said. “Hi. Sally isn’t here, Hi. She only stayed a few hours. Then she had to go to Lake Tahoe. It was something about the lead in a new picture.” “When was this?” I asked her. Mrs. Frazer said, “Late Friday night. She’d hardly unpacked her grip when she got the phone call. She was going to go right from there to location. We ought to be very proud of our little girl, Hi.” “Yes. We ought to,” I agreed and hung up. I realized my palms were wet with sweat. I wiped them on my coat. Then I opened the bottom drawer in my desk and took out a bottle. I drank from the neck, looking at Blair. He squirmed in his chair. “Don’t look at me like that, Shannon. It takes two to have an affair. I didn’t force Sally into anything; She came to Lake Tahoe of her own free will.” “Yes. So her mother said,” I told him. I took another drink, thinking, It’s different when it happens to you. I thought about two of the men I had defended for murder. One had killed his wife under very similar circumstances. The other had killed his wife’s lawyer. I’d lost the toss on one and won the other. At the time I’d

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thought what a fool a man was to put his neck in a sling because of any woman. Now I knew how Olson and Wayne had felt. It was a matter of shocked pride as well as betrayed love. To think that any woman could do such a thing to you. I said, “You’ve got it coming, you bastard.” I got up from my chair. I crossed the room to give it to him. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength. It was like I was empty inside, like someone had pulled a plug and my guts had gone down the drain along with my dreams and Sally. All that was left was a shell. All I wanted to do was die. Blair had been holding his breath. He exhaled slowly. “Well?” “Well, what?” I asked him. He licked at the lips that had spent a weekend kissing Sally. Blair had to have something special to make him stand out in a crowd, something to make my Sally prefer spending a weekend with him rather than with the man I thought I was. “Well, what?” He said, “What are you going to do about the kid’s parents? You going to help me buy them off? Or are you going to let Sally do ten years?” The thought was intriguing. It would be fit punishment for Sally. She could be the star of Tehachapi prison, the lead in the mop and bucket brigade, her small white body gowned in smart blue denim. A number instead of a name. My stomach turned over again. I said, “Excuse me,” to Blair and barely made it to my private washroom. I lost the two drinks I’d taken, along with my breakfast and lunch. I couldn’t let that happen to Sally no matter what she’d done to me. I loved her. When I came out Blair was still standing with his palms against the wall. He said, “I’m sorry, Shannon.” I cuffed him with the back of my hand. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even open your mouth or I may change my mind and kill you. I drank from the bottle again. This time the rye had a solid feel. It would stay down this time, I hoped. To make certain it would I weighted it with more rye, wishing it was corn whiskey fresh from some back country still. It all went to prove something, possibly what happened to a man when he tried to climb out of his class. I wiped my lips with my hand, wishing I was back in Elfers. Life was simpler there. It very seldom happened, but down in the red clay country when a man caught his wife in flagrante delicto, he used a knife or a pistol or a shotgun, whatever came ready to his hand, to kill the man who’d

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climbed into his saddle. Then he drove into town and told old Sheriff White: “I just caught Clem Bledsoe with Maybelle and kilt him deader than hell.” Sheriff White would stroke the mustache that matched his name. “That so?” he would say. “I been fearing something like this might happen since I seen ‘em a-hugging and a-kissing back of the schoolhouse at the last box supper. Caught ‘em right in the act, huh?” “On the cot in the blow-way. They thought I was down on the lower forty dusting for weevils.” “You hurt Maybelle any?” “I hit her a lick or two. In fact, I beat hell outen her.” “Well, you’d best stay around,” Sheriff White would say. “Me and Orin will go out an’ get Clem’s body afore it stinks up the countryside. But I wouldn’t worry none if I were you. You been a good provider. Maybelle had no call to treat you that-a-way. Asides, in the forty years I been sheriff I’ve yet to see a coroner’s jury who approved of infidelity.” Nor would they. A panel of thin-lipped fanners in dust-stained overalls would sit on the body and call it justifiable homicide; for fear the same thing might happen to them, that some sweet-” talking booger might use the cot on their blow-way, if sin was encouraged. But this wasn’t Elfers County, Georgia. This was Glamour City. The only unwritten law in L. A. was: It’s better not to do it, but if you must, take it out of town for a weekend and sign the register as Jones. I finished the whiskey in the bottle and dropped the bottle in the wastebasket. I put on my hat and topcoat. I picked up my briefcase from my desk and tucked it under my arm. “The child’s parents expect you back this afternoon?” Blair nodded, mutely. His eyes were still bugged. He thought I meant what I said about killing him. I did. I still hadn’t made up my mind just what I was going to do. Life wasn’t going to mean much without Sally. Miss Able got to her feet as we walked into the outer office. Funny. I mean the things that a man notices. I realized for the first time that her right breast was a trifle larger than her left. It gave her a rather off-balanced look. Like a small boat tacking against the wind. She fluttered her eyelashes at me. “Will you be back this afternoon, Counselor?” I told her the truth. “I don’t know.” My car was in a parking lot on Spring Street, a “52 model custom-built Cadillac. I watched the boy back it out of its space. I’d come a long way

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from Elfers, Georgia. For what? To fall in love with a dream. And have the dream go to bed with a crooner. “Well, get in,” I told Blair. Traffic, as usual, was heavy. I angled through town over to the Arroyo Seco and headed up toward Palmdale through Pasadena. I wished the whiskey would bite. I wished I knew what to do. Nothing would ever be the same between Sally and me again. When I’d said ‘I do’ I’d meant it. It had been for keeps. Now even the thought of touching her, after she’d dirtied our marriage with a slimy little rat like Blair was more than I could stomach. “Why didn’t you scream?” I’d asked her. And she’d told me. I gripped the wheel until my knuckles turned white. Her goddamn career, being a picture star, meant more to her than anything else in the world. That was the only answer to the past weekend. Sally had not been neglected. It couldn’t have been for that reason. But in the hope of furthering her career she’d been willing to lend her body to Blair’s special talents, combining business with pleasure. Although what she thought a washed-up has-been like Sonny Blair could do for her was more than I could understand. “What did you promise Sally?” I asked Blair. He said, “The lead in Manny Norman’s new picture.” “How could you promise her that?” He smirked, “I still have a few connections. I also know where there are a lot of bodies buried.” That much was true. A lot of feminine picture stars get where they are on talent. Nine-tenths of them, in fact. But in the picture business, as in any field of endeavor, a straight line, preferably horizontal, is the shortest distance between two points. In certain Hollywood circles it’s not how much talent a girl has that counts, it’s whom she knows and how far she is willing to go that determines the extent of her success. True, when she gets in front of the camera she has to have what it takes to please the general public. But the chances are that in her climb up the ladder she’s left a good many satisfied rungs behind her. Blair spoke what was in his mind. “It won’t do any good to kill me, Shannon.” “No,” I agreed. “It won’t.” I drove on, mulling a possible out in my mind. The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked what I was thinking. I’d been fed up with Glamour City for some time. It was too hot in summer. It was too cold in winter. It was too dry. It was too wet. The plain girls were too plain. The

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pretty girls were too pretty. There were too many swimming pools. There were too many soul-saving religious fanatics. There were too many heels to match them. There was too much of everything for a big old Georgia boy. The only reason I’d stuck out my neck in agreeing to prosecute Joe Connors had been to make Sally proud of me. Now that incentive was gone. Why should I take a chance on Connors nailing my hide on the fence along with those of half-a-dozen other bright lawyers and law enforcement officials who had tried to get him? I realized, slightly shocked, that I didn’t give a damn what Joe Connors did. Men had gambled, gone down the line, taken drugs, a thousand years before Joe Connors had been born. A thousand years from now, unless human nature changed, some other Joe Connors would cater to men who wanted to bet on a horse, stay with a girl, or wreck their health and lives with drugs. Who was I to say what was right and what was wrong? Who was I to play God? All I wanted was out. Some of the numbness left my mind. If I could, I’d pry Sally out of this jam. For memory’s sake. Then I was going back to Georgia. The flim-flam and the tinsel boys, the Jesus shouters and the Chamber of Commerce, the Sonny Blairs, the Manny Normans, the Joe Connors could have Southern California. I’d climbed as high as I could. I didn’t like where I was. Once I’d squared Sally, I was going home. I was going back to the five hundred and eighty eroded acres of red clay on which I’d been born. I was going to take off my shoes. I was going to put a big chew in my mouth. Then I was going to sit under a chinaberry tree and spit on the rest of the world. Blair was still worried. “You couldn’t plead the unwritten law. Juries don’t go for that anymore. The chances are you’d go to the lethal chamber.” I kept him worried. “That’s an idea. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about my income tax.” He squirmed on the seat from time to time. I had an idea he was sitting in water. Past Pasadena, we began to climb. I cut through the Soledad Pass at around three thousand feet, then dropped down into the Mojave on US 6. “Just around the next bend,” Blair panted. “The unpainted shack on the right.” The shack in which the dead girl’s parents lived was about what I’d expected. The ridge pole sagged like a sway-backed mare. There were no screens on the door or windows. Blair’s wrecked Jaguar was standing in the refuse-littered yard between a shiny new Ford coupe and a beaten-up

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panel truck with the name Joe Carroll hand-lettered on the right hand panel. When they heard the car, a half-dozen ragged, big-eyed kids spilled out of the doorway. The oldest wasn’t more than seven. All the girls wore dresses, that’s all. All the boys had on were pants. A thumb-sucking baby was naked. I got out and looked at the grille work of the Jaguar. Sally must have been going ninety, possibly even more, for the impact to damage the grille as badly as it was damaged. There was a liberal smear of blood on the grille. A few long black hairs, stuck in the clotted blood, rippled in the hot wind off the Mojave. Standing beside me, Blair shuddered and mopped at his face with his coat sleeve. “Geez. I’ll never forget the sound when Sally smacked into the kid. It was like listening to a ripe musk-melon up against a concrete wall.” I said it was a miracle all three of them hadn’t been killed. A dark, heavyset man, wearing his best blue suit and a grease-stained black hat, followed the ragged kids out the door. A thin, rather pretty woman stood in the doorway of the shack twisting her dirty apron into a rope. Blair introduced me to the man. “This is Mr. Shannon, Sally Shannon’s husband, Mr. Carroll. Counselor, this is Mr. Carroll.” Carroll didn’t offer to shake hands. He was strictly grapes of wrath. And while he had been waiting for us to show, he’d squeezed a few of the grapes. His small eyes were bloodshot. He brushed the big-eyed kids aside and held out his hand palm up, rubbing his thumb and index finger together, as he breathed heavily in my face. “How much?” he demanded. I turned and told Blair, “Ask him how much he wants for an unconditional release. Although, legally speaking, I doubt if it’s worth a damn. In not reporting the child’s death, we’re all making ourselves guilty of compounding a felony.” A slim, well-dressed man brushed the pretty woman aside and smiled at me, white-toothed, from the doorway of the shack. “How true, Counselor,” he said. “In that case, let’s not be picayune about this. Let’s make it worth our while. But won’t you step in out of the sun?” “You know him?” Blair whispered. I nodded. As I recalled, his name was Roberts. He was a police court shyster who picked a living of sorts out of the L. A. drunk tanks, when he wasn’t representing some slightly soiled lily who’d realized she was sitting on a fortune. Well, anyway, a living. I walked to the door of the shack. “You representing the family?” Roberts played with his watch chain. “I am.”

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I came right to the point. “How much do you have in mind?” He said, “Fifty thousand dollars.” I said, “You’re out of your head.” He shrugged. “Could be. But then, on the other hand, Counselor...” “What?” He told me. “Ten years is a long time.”

CHAPTER THREE ROBERTS STEPPED ASIDE. I walked into the shack. It didn’t look any better on the inside. There was a kitchen and a living room, both of them filthy. I could see the yard through cracks in the wall. I could also see a cheap coffin in the front room. It was mounted on saw-horses. A branched candelabra with lighted candles stood at each end of the coffin. Roberts was the perfect host. “Perhaps before we continue our discussion, you would like to see Angelica.” My collar was choking me. “That’s the name of the kid Sally killed?” “A sweet child. A great comfort to her loving parents. She would have been eight years old tomorrow.” Roberts shot his cuffs. “And knowing that you will do everything in your power to protect Mrs. Shannon’s reputation, and save her from being imprisoned on a manslaughter charge, I have taken the liberty of advancing the bereaved parents a few hundred dollars, so that they might have religious consolation in their grief. In fact, the priest just left. Mr. and Mrs. Carroll told him that Angelica had been struck by a hit and run driver.” Roberts shrugged. “But of course, if insufficient financial relief is forthcoming, their memories can always improve. As you see, the death car is still standing in the yard.” Blair whimpered, “Oh, God.” There were several straight-backed chairs around the plain deal table. I sat on one of them, noticing for the first time that, from force of habit acquired in weeks of investigating, I’d brought in with me my briefcase containing the evidence I’d gathered against Joe Connors. I stood the case against one of the legs of the table. “Okay. Let’s talk business, Roberts. How much?” Roberts sat across from me and showed me his white teeth. “I thought I had mentioned a figure.” I shook my head. “That’s way too high. I’ve been making big money these last few years, but you know how it is in Hollywood. I’ve spent it as fast as I’ve made it.” Mentally I toted up my checkbook. “I can go for fifteen grand, no more.” Roberts looked at Blair. “How about you, sir? You were a passenger in

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the car. It was your car. By your own admission, you were both intoxicated. You were returning from an apparently delightful but illicit weekend with the lady in question. Surely, it’s worth something to you to save her reputation and to save her from being imprisoned.” Blair ran true to form. “I don’t give a damn what happens to Sally. But I can’t be involved in this. The stink would wash me up.” He looked at me. “I can go for ten thousand, Shannon. I can raise that much by selling the last of my bonds.” Roberts beamed. “Now we have twenty-five thousand. All we have to do is raise twenty-five thousand more.” I shook my head. “It’s out of the question. The fifteen Gs will strap me. Ask Carroll if he will take twenty-five.” Roberts spoke to the bereaved father. Carroll took a big drink of wine while he debated the question. He and the pretty woman retired to a corner of the shack and whispered rapidly. Then Carroll returned to the table. Tears streamed down his face. He slapped his chest. He pointed to the coffin in the living room. He pointed to his remaining children. He pointed to his wife, meanwhile spraying us with excited conversation. Then, having made his point, he picked up the wine bottle again. “He says ‘no,’“ Roberts told me. I picked my briefcase from the table leg and stood up. “Well, I guess you’ll have to sue us. Twenty-five grand is as high as we go.” “No,” Blair protested. “Don’t make it so final, Shannon. The moment we walk out of here, they’re going to call the cops.” He began to blubber. “And even if I wasn’t driving, they’ll probably hold me equally responsible with Sally. Because it was my car.” I asked him if he could raise twenty-five thousand. Blair pressed the heels of his palms to his head. “Where? Maybe another five grand. Maybe Manny will let me have that much. But, after all, Sally is your wife.” “You had her last,” I reminded him. I closed my eyes and wished I hadn’t said it. I could see Blair’s thin fingers crawling over Sally. Like ten white amorous worms. I realized I was breathing hard. I swung on him as hard as I could. “Why, you son-of-a-bitch.” The blow caught him flush on one cheek and knocked him into a corner of the shack. The big-eyed kids who had crowded in after us began to cry. So did the pretty woman. Carroll cursed. Roberts interposed his bulk between me and Blair. “Gently, gently, Counselor,” he said, quietly. “I know how you must feel. It is never pleasant for a man to learn that his wife has betrayed him. But

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violence will get us nowhere. The fact remains a child has been killed. As you yourself remarked earlier, in concealing this knowledge from the police we are all guilty of compounding a felony. Once this is reported to the police we’ll all be in hot water. But the guilt remains with Mrs. Shannon. She faces a term in prison. Whether it is for one year or ten, a conviction—and she will most certainly be convicted—will finish her picture career. You must love her. If you didn’t love her you wouldn’t have married her. Why don’t you think this over?” Roberts looked at his watch. “Why don’t we postpone your final decision for, say, twenty-four hours?” The lad was good. He wouldn’t stay in the police courts long. His voice had the hypnotic quality of a snake’s eyes. I hesitated, “Well—” Blair picked himself up from the floor. My blow had done his left eye no good. It was puffed and was going to color. “Take him up, please, Shannon,” he begged. “I can’t have this come out. I’m through in pictures now. And if this comes out, I’ll be through on radio and TV. Maybe I can raise another twenty-five grand. At least, I can try.” Roberts nodded. “That sounds sensible to me.” I shrugged. “Okay. Twenty-four hours. We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon at the same time. But I don’t see what good the delay is going to do. I know my financial condition. And fifteen thousand is as high as I can go.” I walked back to my car, trailed by Roberts and Carroll and the bevy of kids. The pretty woman remained in the doorway, twisting her apron. “Unfortunate. This is very unfortunate for everyone concerned,” Roberts said. “Very well, Counselor.” He looked at his watch again. “We shall expect you and Mr. Blair promptly at four-thirty tomorrow afternoon. If you do not return by then, I haven’t the least doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Carroll’s memories will have improved considerably.” I backed out of the yard and headed back for L.A. There was a bloodsmeared culvert I hadn’t noticed a few yards from the house. Blair sounded sick. “The impact threw the kid into the culvert. Head first. Geez. You should have heard Sally scream.” I said, “I can imagine.” I debated turning around, driving back to Palmdale, cutting across the desert to Victorville and having it out with Sally. But I didn’t want to see Sally, I didn’t ever want to see her again. What was done was done. Not all the tears in the world would change the status quo. Going to bed with someone was one thing that couldn’t be undone. I lit a cigarette, thinking the old Persian tentmaker would have made quite a lawyer. He had the gift of summing up things succinctly in a few words. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit shall lure it

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back to cancel half a line, nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” Now what could be simpler than that? It was dark by the time we reached Pasadena. I asked Blair where he wanted me to drop him off. He said, “Anywhere I can pick up a cab. I’m going out and talk to Manny the first thing I do He’s awful anxious to have Sally do the lead in his next. The thought was sour in my mouth. I said, “Don’t tell me she’s slept with him, too?” Blair didn’t say anything. The small veins in my temples began to pound. I seemed to have been sharing Sally with quite a few celebrities. Small wonder she hadn’t screamed at Manny Norman’s party. The thought struck me that if her fair white body held out, she’d probably wind up owning RKO. There was a cab on the next corner. I stopped the Caddy beside it. Blair got out and stood holding the door he’d closed. “Where are you going now?” he asked. I hadn’t the least idea. I said, “What’s it to you?” He said, “I want to know where I can contact you. Name some place where I can meet you about four or five hours from now and tell you how I made out.” I said, “Make it Tony’s at. midnight.” There was a fine film of sweat on his forehead. He asked, “You sure you can’t raise more than fifteen grand?” I said, “I’m positive.” Blair mopped at his forehead. “Then it would seem to be up to me.” I drove on into Los Angeles and back to the same parking lot. A Ford coupe loafed behind me all the way in from Pasadena. Roberts? One of Joe Connors’ boys? So what difference did it make? Connors no longer had any reason to fear me. As soon as the Carroll business was finished one way or another, I was tendering my resignation as special prosecutor. I was going home to Elfers. Some other eager beaver could present the contents of my briefcase to the grand jury. It was, in a way, a shame. I’d done a good job on Connors. I had enough dynamite in my briefcase to blow him and his satellites all the way back to Brooklyn. With a twenty-year stop at San Quentin. The parking lot attendant touched his cap. “You’re going to work late tonight, eh, Mr. Shannon?” I was hot. I was tired. I was sick, inside. There was still a big hollow where my guts should be. What I should have done, I thought, was strangle Blair, then drive on down to Victorville and beat hell outen Sally. The mental “outen” threw me. It was definite proof you could take the boy out of the country but you couldn’t take the country out of the boy. Still, it was what my father and grandfather would have done. No one

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would ever have used the cot on their blow-way and lived to boast about it. “Why, yes. For a few hours,” I told the boy. I walked up the street to Angelino’s. The usual “one quick one” crowd were overflowing the booths and bellied to the bar, sipping their favorite tipple before bucking the rat race on Sunset, Ventura, Sepulveda, Laurel Canyon. Going home to their wives, who hadn’t been in bed with anyone since they had last seen them. “I think I’ll try rum,” I told Nick. “Make it a double. Ron-rico.” The barman grinned. “That’s a sailor’s drink. You must be trying a maritime case, Mr. Shannon.” I said, “Could be,” and sipped at the rum. It tasted good. I drank it and ordered another. Two or three lawyers with offices in the building stopped by my stool to ask how I was making out on the Connors case. “Fine,” I told them. “Just fine.” The rum began to blur the sharp edges of things. But the damn briefcase was paralyzing my thighs. There was a metal self-service baggage locker in the back of the bar for the convenience of Angelino’s patrons. I walked back to the washroom, dropped a dime in the slot, put the briefcase in a locker and put the key in my pocket. Then I went back to my stool and ordered another double. Nick looked a little worried. He leaned across the bar. “Look. Not that you’re drunk or anything like that, Mr. Shannon. But why don’t you move over to a booth and drink the next one while you’re eating a little something?” It wasn’t a bad idea. I carried my drink to a booth and a pert waitress tried to hand me a menu. I waved it aside. “I’ll have a mess of collards cooked with white pork,” I told her. “Grits and grease gravy- And a side order of black-eyed peas.” The waitress grinned at me. “Another frustrated you-all, eh? I’d never have believed it on you, Mr. Shannon. Me, I’m an Okie, myself. That is, my parents were.” She wrote something on her pad. I said, “Don’t tell me you have what I ordered?” She shook her pretty head. “I’m afraid not. Don’t look now, Mr. Shannon, but you’re eating corned beef and cabbage.” Something about the swish of her skirt reminded me of Sally. I carried my drink to the phone booth, dialed long distance and told the operator I wanted to speak to Sally Shannon. She quipped, “A lot of men do.” I said, with drunken dignity, “It so happens my name is Hi Shannon and

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I’m her husband. Mrs. Shannon is on location in or near Victorville. She is probably stopping in one of the hotels in Victorville. Would you please see if you can contact her?” The operator said, crisply, “I’m sorry, Mr. Shannon. Please hold the wire.” I finished my drink while I waited. It didn’t take the operator long. She said, “Go ahead, Mr. Shannon.” I tried to speak and couldn’t. The lump in my throat filled my mouth. Sally’s voice sounded small. “Is that you, Hi?” I swallowed the lump. “That’s right. I—hear you didn’t spend the weekend with your parents, after all.” Her voice was breathless and a million miles away. “No. I—I went to Lake Tahoe,” she admitted. “And I’m so glad you called. I’ve phoned the apartment ten times. I’ve phoned every place I thought you might be. Even the Attorney General’s office. I have to talk to you, Hi. About something that happened.” I said, “I already know it,” and hung up. My hand was so slippery with sweat I almost dropped the receiver. The phone rang back almost immediately. Still crisp, the operator said, “That will be one dollar and eighty cents.” I fumbled eight quarters from my change and dropped them in the slot. One after the other. Each making a small metallic “pling.” Like the high heel of a pretty girl’s shoe kicking at the heart of the chump in love with her. Sally wonted to tell me something. I walked back to the bar. “Let’s see that rum bottle a minute Nick.” Nick thought it was a beef. He set the bottle on the bar. “Four years old. Every drop of it, Mr. Shannon. It’s good stuff.” “You’re telling me?” I asked him. I picked the bottle from the wood and carried it back to the booth where my corned beef and cabbage were waiting. I was no longer alone. Looking very fresh and sweet in a pastel yellow sports dress cut low enough to show the round of her mismated breasts, Miss Able was sitting on the other side of the booth. She smiled as I sat down. “I came in to eat,” she said, “and I saw you sitting here, Counselor. So I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind if I ate with you.” I took a drink from the neck of the bottle. “Not at all. Remind me to raise your wages so you can eat here all the time.” The longer I looked at her, the better Miss Able looked to me. Her hair was the same brown as Sally’s. She was convex in the proper places, concave where she should be. She weighed about the same. I liked the perfume she used.

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She laughed, embarrassed, “Oh, Counselor.” “Mr. Shannon,” I reminded her. “Hi Shannon to my friends.” She wet her lips with her tongue. Under the table her leg brushed mine. In the mental and emotional condition I was in, the contact was electric. Miss Abie’s tongue returned to her mouth. “Hi, then.” I patted the hand on the table. “What’s your first name, honey?” She leaned forward so I could see the hollow between her breasts. “Mary Lou.” Under the table her leg pressed even harder against mine. It made me feel very male. At least, one woman still liked me. Unless I was very much mistaken, Mary Lou was not only Able but willing. I returned the pressure of her leg. She sucked in her breath. “Thank Heaven.” “Thank Heaven about what?” I asked her. She told me. “You. I thought you’d never notice me.”

CHAPTER FOUR TWO FLOORS BELOW, on Santa Monica Boulevard, the night traffic was a pleasant blur. I lay on my back on the bed, smoking a Turkish cigarette, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling. It was a nice apartment for a girl making forty-five dollars a week. I asked Mary Lou how she managed. She was frank. “Oh, I do this and that on the side.” I opened a fresh rum bottle. “And very good at it, too.” She stopped combing her hair and wrinkled her nose at me. “Caveman.” I took a drink and wiped my lips on the back of my hand. “I didn’t hear you complaining a few minutes ago.” She laid the comb on her dressing table and turned to face me. “I’m not complaining now. I’m just stating a fact. Believe me, Hi. It’s a pleasure to meet a man after the—” she paused, stuck for a descriptive phrase, “well, I don’t know what you call them, that I’ve met.” “On the corner of Hollywood and Vine?” “And on the Strip.” So her breasts didn’t quite match. They were pretty. They reminded me of the gag about the old maid who got married. By the time they take off their toupees and remove their padded shoulders and their dentures — It wasn’t that funny, but drunk as I was, I slapped the bed and howled. So I was drunk. I meant to get more drunk. So I was untrue to Sally. Four could play at the same game that two did. I patted the bed. “Come back here.” She eyed me dubiously. “I’d better not. At least, until I get my breath.

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Are they all like you down in Georgia?” I howled at that one, too. “How come you took a job in my office?” I asked. Mary Lou confirmed what I’d thought. “Well, I thought it would be exciting. And it has been.” She enumerated my recent cases on her fingers. “In the four months I’ve been with you, you’ve defended one killer, two embezzlers, a charge of statutory rape, and that Loag Beach assault affair.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “And now you’ve been appointed special prosecutor to send Joe Connors to jail.” I get a grip on the rum. “Let’s not talk about that. What time is it, anyway?”’ She looked at the small gold wrist watch that was the only thing she was wearing. “Ten o’clock.” “How long have we been here?” Mary Lou laughed. “Boy. You must have been boiled when we left Angelino’s. We’ve been here for two hours.” “And my car?” She came over and sat on the bed beside me. “Among my other talents it happens that I can drive a Cadillac. Relax. Both your car and your briefcase are safe. All that you lost is your virtue.” I lay on the bed, relieved. The world that I had known had ended with my abortive phone conversation with Sally. Until then, in the back of my mind I’d hoped the whole thing had been a nightmare. But it hadn’t. Sally admitted she’d been at Lake Tahoe. She’d told me she’d phoned everywhere because she had to talk to me about something that had “happened.” Happened. I could feel cold sweat start on my body. She’d spent the weekend with Sonny Blair. She’d run down and killed a child. Still she’d gone on location to hang on to her goddamn job. Or perhaps because Manny Norman was the star of “Desert Rat” and she had to initial a few more clauses in the contract she’d signed to play the lead in his next picture. I drank from the neck of the bottle. I hadn’t the least recollection of leaving Angelino’s. I hoped I’d eaten my corned beef and cabbage. I meant to get a lot drunker than I was. But if I wanted to stay with the party, and I did, I’d need a good solid base for the rum I intended to consume before the night was over. “Did I eat my supper?” I asked. Mary Lou beat and kissed me. “Every speck on your plate, pretending it was collards and something you called pig-pork.” She took the bottle out of my hand. “But you also drank a full fifth of rum. How’s for laying off

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of this for a while, Hi?” “Counselor,” I corrected her. “Hi to his friends,” Mary Lou corrected me. “You great big old six-foot Georgia boy from down in the red clay country where men are men and women are glad they are.” Her hair tickled my face. It was a pleasant sensation. I said, “That’s a hell of a way for a secretary to talk to her employer.” Mary Lou ran her mouth along my lips. “Not if the secretary likes her employment. And I’m beginning to. Very much.” “So you say,” I told her. “What have you done to prove it, lately?” I reached for the bottle. She held it away from me. “No. Please, Hi. Can’t you think of anything to do but drink?” “What else is there?” I asked her. Mary Lou leaned across me, her skin burning into my chest as she set the bottle on the floor. Then her body was plastered to mine. “I’ll show you,” she murmured. “I’ll show you, you big old Georgia boy.” She did. The traffic was thinner now. There was a fog. There must be. I could hear a foghorn moaning out beyond the Santa Monica breakwater. Mary Lou lifted her head from my chest. “I’m hungry.” I said, “That’s a common complaint with women.” She was frank again. “Sex always makes me hungry.” I spatted her. “Don’t be vulgar. Do you think you’ve earned the right to eat?” The third bottle of rum was half empty. She’d had as much of it as I had. Mary Lou debated the question. “Yes,” she decided. “I think so.” I sat up and lifted her to her feet. “Then get some clothes on and well go get a steak.” She sat on her dressing table bench, facing me, and put on her stockings. “You don’t think I’m too bad, do you, Hi? Because I,” she blushed, “well, you know what I mean.” I found my socks and shorts. “I think you’re sweet. I think you’re a damn swell kid. At least you’re honest about it. You don’t pretend to be something you aren’t. And if you were really in love with a man, I don’t believe you’d cheat on him.” She tossed her hair out of her eyes. Her small chin jutted. “I’d die first.” I put on my shoes and pants and picked up her phone. She wanted to know whom I was calling. I told her, “My wife. And believe me, it’s mere curiosity. I just want to see if a certain something that happened is important enough to her to make her drive up from Victorville.”

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“Oh,” Mary Lou said. Sally answered our phone the second ring. Her voice still sounded small and frightened. There was also a small husk in it as if she had been crying. “The Hi Shannon residence,” she said. “Mrs. Shannon speaking.” I broke the connection softly. I nodded. Mary Lou was fastening her bra. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?” I said, “Yeah.” I wiped my wet palms on my trousers. I wished Sally didn’t affect me the way she did. Even knowing what she was, I still loved her. I supposed I always would. All the Mary Lous in the world would only be substitutes for Sally. And now she was facing the first big crisis in her life alone. I could feel the effects of the rum evaporate. Then I thought of Sonny Blair. With anyone but him. How could Sally have so shamed me? I took a big drink and felt better. I’d lay out the ten grand I had in cash. I’d even throw in the Caddy if I had to and the small equity I had in the Benedict Canyon place. That would up the total I could raise to, say, twenty-four thousand. If Blair could raise the rest, we still might be able to satisfy the Carrolls. I’d do all I could for Sally. But I wanted no more of her. I never even wanted to see her again. Mary Lou looked at the dresses in her closet. “May I ask you a question?” “You may.” “Where are you going to take me to eat?” I asked her what time it was. She said it was eleven forty-five. I’d promised to meet Blair at midnight. But if I was late, he would wait. I asked her, “How would you like to eat at Tony’s?” Mary Lou said, “I’d love to.” She took off her bra. “Then in that case I won’t want this.” She dropped the bra on the floor and put on a green evening gown whose only supports seemed to be the ones that grew on her. She turned her back for me to fasten the snap at her waist. “I’ve always wanted to eat at Tony’s. But none of the pikers I’ve met would ever take me there.” She brushed my lips with hers. “You sober enough to drive?” I said I thought I was. I was. After my brief blackout at Angelino’s, the more I drank, the more sober I became. At least the surface. I was in one of those moods. There wasn’t enough n in Puerto Rico to drown the butterflies in my stomach, let alone pass me out. Maybe you’ve been to Tony’s. You probably have if you’re in the upper brackets. It’s up in the hills back of Malibu. They say the house once belonged to an opera star. In good weather you eat on the terrace overlooking the blue Pacific, with the next port along the thirty-fourth parallel

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Kinomoto, Japan. The cuisine is French and very good. They don’t bother to print prices on the menu. You just order what looks good to you, then keep your fingers crossed and hope you have enough in the bank to cover the check when it comes. Mary Lou was impressed. The joint was old hat to me. Sally and I had eaten there often, for Sally to see and be seen. So often I could almost read bill-of-fare French. The thing I liked best about the place was the tacit understanding of the barmen that nothing under three ounces liquid measure constituted a drink. We ate on the terrace, behind a glass windbreak, with the stars hanging so low it almost seemed a man could reach up and pick one. Most of the couples were in evening dress, California style. The girls wore strapless, backless evening gowns. Most of the men wore business suits or sports jackets. Only a tie was de rigeur. I asked Mary Lou if she liked it. She wrinkled her nose at me. “I love it. You’ve a lot of change coming, mister. Just wait until I get you back to the apartment.” I ordered the specialty of the house for both of us, filet mignon smothered in fresh mushrooms, with a bottle of Chablis for Mary Lou and a bottle of Ronrico rum for me. Both wine and rum to be put in a cooler. If the waiter was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Oui, Monsieur Shannon.” Mary Lou was even more pleased. “They know you. You’re really a big shot, aren’t you, Hi?” “Not so big.” I told her. Sonny Blair proved it by staggering out on the terrace and flopping down in one of the chairs at our table. He was still half frightened to death. It showed in the lines of his face and the liver-bags under his eyes. “How’d you make out?” I asked him. He shook his head. “Not so good.” He was almost as drunk as I was but not carrying it as well. He looked over his bow tie at Mary Lou. “Who’s she?” I introduced them. “Miss Able, Mr. Blair. Mr. Blair, Miss Able.” Mary Lou said, “I’m pleased to meet you.” “I make you now,” Blair said gallantly. “You’re the girl with the big bazooms. The one who works in Shannon’s office.” He looked like he was about to cry. “So help me God, Shannon,” he said. “I can’t raise a dime. Manny turned me down cold.” I pushed back my chair and stood up. “Let’s spare Miss Able the details of our business deal. She hears enough of them during business hours. Come on. Ill buy you a drink at the bar.”

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Mary Lou smiled, “Don’t be long. Please, Hi.” I said I wouldn’t be long. I had to help support Blair to keep him from falling. “You’re a fine one to talk about Sally,” he hiccuped. He tried to imitate Mary Lou’s voice. “’Don’t be long. Please, Hi.’ It makes it very convenient to keep a supply right in the office, eh?” “Very convenient,” I agreed and made myself one promise. As soon as I had squared the matter with the Carfolls, if I could, and before I left California I was going to change the contours of Blair’s face. The bar was almost deserted. I picked two stools at the far end and boosted Blair up on one of them. The barman looked at him dubiously. “Nothing for Mr. Blair,” I forestalled his refusal. “And I’ll have a small glass of Vichy.” The barman’s face relaxed. “Yes, sir, Mr. Shannon.” Blair sucked at the wet end of a cigarette. “Not a goddamn dime,” he muttered. “And after all the favors I’ve done Manny.” He hiccuped. “And not only Manny, either. I been all over town.” I waited until my Vichy water came, then I laid it on the line. “Look. You say you can raise ten thousand. You can raise that much?” He nodded. “By selling the rest of my bonds.” I continued, “I have fifteen thousand in cash. That makes twenty-five thousand.” He protested, “But they won’t go for that. They told us that this afternoon.” I told him to shut up. “The Caddy is a special job. It will bring four more, possibly even five. Then there is my twelve grand equity in the Benedict Canyon house. I totaled the various sums. That makes forty-two thousand dollars, only eight thousand short of what they asked. The chances are they’ll go for it.” Blair brightened, but not much. “Could be. We can offer to settle for forty-two. But the hell of it is, and Roberts is smart enough to know it, they can get a hundred grand by taking the story to the studio. Sally is a valuable piece of property. They’re grooming her for stardom. And you know what will happen when the studio lawyers get hold of it. She won’t even have been in the car, I’m the guy who’ll take the rap. I’m the guy who’ll get ten years.” I sipped the Vichy, wishing it was rum. “Now there you have an idea. It’s a wonder I didn’t think of that.” Blair was on the verge of hysteria. “Oh no, you don’t. You don’t sell me out, understand? Before I do time, I’ll dirty Sally’s name from coast to

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coast. Ill fix it so no self-respecting studio will dare let her do a walk-on. I’ll —.” He was looking over my shoulder. He stopped and ran a shaky hand over his mouth. I swiveled around on my stool. Joe Connors was standing behind me, with Sam Cassida and Johnny Hass behind him. All three were in black ties. A slim, good-looking, prematurely gray-haired man in his early thirties, Connors could pass as a banker. In a manner of speaking, he was. His bankroll was behind three-fourths of the rackets in Southern California. He controlled the gambling and the call girl business from south of the Tehachapis all the way down to Diego. He was also reputed to be the kingpin of the narcotic trade, although I doubted that very much. Gambling, yes. Prostitution, of course. Goon squads and protection, that was right down his alley. But in my two-month investigation I hadn’t turned up a thing that would link him to narcotics. He was too smart a hood to tangle with the old man with the whiskers. I said, “Hello, Connors.” He acknowledged the salutation with the suspicion of a bow. “Mr. Shannon. Or should I say, Counselor.” I said, “Hi, to my friends. But that doesn’t include you, Connors.” Blair gaped openmouthed. Connors laughed. “That’s one thing I like about you, Shannon. You’re so shy.” He inclined his head at a door marked “Private.” “What do you say we retire to the privacy of Tony’s office and discuss this little domestic difficulty which you and Sonny seem to be in?” I looked at Blair. His hands still continued to shake. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t care who knows, as long as I get out of this.” His voice was hysterical. “I won’t be washed up.” He screamed, “I won’t.” I said, “So you tried to borrow money from Connors?” Blair bobbed his head. “Yeah.” I looked past Connors at Hass and Cassida. If Connors looked like a banker, they could be vice-presidents in his bank; in charge of the vaults where they kept the bodies of wise guys who defaulted on notes, tried to muscle in, or otherwise offered to put the bank put of business. “Hi, Hi,” Hass said, pleasantly. Cassida bowed from the waist. “Good evening, Counselor.” I slid off the bar stool, looking at Connors. “Sure, why not?” I asked him. “There’s only one minor matter.” “And that is?” “I’m entertaining a guest.”

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Connors stepped aside to let me pass. “We won’t detain you long, Mr. Shannon.” He amended his statement. “That is, if we can come to terms.” Cassida opened the door marked Private. “After you, Counselor.” I lighted a cigarette, wishing it was a chew of tobacco and I was already sitting under my chinaberry tree in Elfers County, Georgia. I didn’t like Connors’ last crack. “That is, if we can come to terms.” The last two eager beavers who had attempted to goose Joe Connors into San Quentin via the grand jury route had mysteriously disappeared. Through doors like this one? I blew smoke in Sam Cassida’s face. “Might I ask one question, Mr. Connors?” “Of course,” Connors said, politely. “Who owns Tony’s?” Connors was modest about it. “Why, it just so happens that I do,” he told me.

CHAPTER FIVE THE OFFICE WAS large and expensively furnished in green leather. Even the walls were paneled with it. Joe Connors had done well on the wrong side of the law. Nor had he ever done any time. I knew. I had checked. The only fall he’d ever taken had been a sixty-day suspended sentence in Brooklyn. And that had been years ago, before he had developed connections. Blair flopped on a leather couch near the door. Connors sat back of a glass-topped desk and indicated a chair. “Sit down, Counselor. You are, as you say, entertaining a guest. And as I remarked in the bar, this shouldn’t take very long.” I sat in the chair he indicated. “Just what do you have in mind?” He told me. “Combing you out of my hair.” He could mean that in any of several ways. It was his proposition. I waited. Connors looked sharply at Hass. “But we’re forgetting our manners, Johnny. A drink for Counselor Shannon. Ronrico straight, I believe. I’ll have the same.” “Yes, Mr. Connors,” Hass said. He opened a portable bar and took out a bottle and two glasses. He put the glasses on the desk and filled them both from the same bottle. Connors lifted his glass. “To your continued health, Mr. Shannon.” I sipped my drink. Rum still tasted good. “So now to business,” Connors said. “Twenty-four hours ago I wouldn’t

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have made you this proposition, Shannon. I know you for an attorney of integrity. I know that in all Southern California you are the only lawyer of standing who dared to stick out his neck in the usual election year attempt to get me.” His smile was wry. “Needless to say, I have no desire to be gotten.” I finished my drink. Hass refilled my glass. Connors continued. “From the reports I’ve had your investigation of me and the evidence you have gathered is the most complete of any that has been compiled so far. Do you think you have enough to go before the grand jury and have me indicted?” I said, “I think I have.” Connors considered the statement. “If I am indicted and brought to trial, with you prosecuting the case, I will undoubtedly be convicted. A man’s luck can’t hold forever.” I said that was correct. Connors lighted a cigarette and looked through a veil of smoke at Blair, with distaste. “I understand you’re having a bit of family trouble, Shannon.” I repeated that was correct, feeling like a goddamn parrot. “It comes to all of us,” Connors said. “I’ve had two or three broads two-time me.” His smile grew even more twisted. “But I doubt very much if my manner of meeting such a situation would appeal to you. We represent two schools of thought. You’re a gentleman. I’m not. Me, I’d slap in the broad’s teeth, buy her a set of dentures, and ship her down to Rio. That way, I’d make a small profit on the deal. But you, being a gentleman, despite the fact that your wife spent a drunken weekend with a slimy little crooner, a weekend that ended in tragedy and the death of an innocent child, are willing to sacrifice everything you have to save your wife’s career and spare her a prison term.” I asked him how he knew how far I was willing to go. He nodded at Sam Cassida. Cassida tripped a lever and my own voice came back to me on a tape recorder: “...The Caddy is a special job. It will bring four more, possibly even five. Then there is my twelve grand equity in the Benedict Canyon house...” Connors nodded at Cassida. He shut off the tape recorder. I said, “You don’t miss any angles, do you?” Connors smiled. “In my business you can’t afford to.” I knew what was coming. “So?” Connors told me. “It’s worth fifty thousand dollars to me to get you out of my hair.” He opened one of the drawers of his desk and stacked sheaves of bills fresh from the bank on the glass, like it was so much paper. Blair got up from the couch. “For God’s sake, take it,” he begged, tears

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in his eyes. Hass pushed him back en the couch. “Shut up. This is Shannon’s decision, net yours. If I was him I’d beat your goddamn face in.” I sat looking at the money. The Attorney General had warned me. He’d told me that Connors would attempt to buy me off, and failing that, to kill me. I’d already made up my mind to turn what evidence I had over to the Attorney General and go back to Elfers. If I took Connors’ money I could square Sally and still have a little left to buy grits, while I sat under my china-berry tree spitting on the world, I could even take Mary Lou back to Elfers with me. On the other hand, every self-respecting lawyer in the country would know what had happened and puke at the mention of my name. I asked, “And the alternative?” Connors told me. “I’ll have to get rid of you, Shannon. I don’t like the feel of your breath oh my neck. I don’t like the smell of it. It smells like San Quentin. For me. And I’d much rather gamble on being tried for murder than do time.” I continued to look at the money. Connors was a good psychologist. Twenty-four hours before, while I’d still wanted Sally to be proud of me, I’d have punched his face and walked out of the office. If I could get out. Now, what difference did it make? What difference did anything make? I made my decision. “Okay. You’ve bought a boy.” Blair was so relieved, he began to bawl. His sobs brought en an attack of hiccups. Hass and Cassida relaxed. I reached for the money. Connors blocked my hand. “That’s fine, Counselor. I’m glad you’re being sensible about this. I like you. Believe me. But before we conclude the deal, there are one or two points I’d like to have clarified.” I asked him what they were. “Do you intend to remain in Los Angeles?” “No.” “When are you leaving?” “Tonight. This morning, rather. Whenever I can get my clothes out of the Benedict Canyon house without bumping into Sally.” “You don’t intend to see your wife, then?” “I’d rather not.” “Now, about this lawyer representing the family of the child that your wife killed. What’s his name?” I said, “Roberts. I don’t know his first name.” Connors looked at Hass. “Have we ever used him?” Hass shook his head. “Naw. He’s just a police court punk.” Connors thought a moment. “In that case, I think we’d better accompany you to the final settlement, Mr. Shannon. Just in case this Roberts might not be sufficiently impressed by the fact that he is helping

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you to compound a felony. We wouldn’t want him to try to come back at you or Mrs. Shannon for more money, would we?” I said, “You don’t miss anything, do you?” “You live longer that way,” Connors said. “Get this Roberts on the phone, Johnny. Tell him to meet us at the Carroll place.” Connors looked at a platinum wrist watch. “Say, in three hours from now. The sooner we settle this business, the better for all concerned.” He looked back at me. “Now where is your briefcase, Counselor?” I said I thought it was in the car. Cassida patted his face with a silk handkerchief. “He thinks. He spends two months gathering enough dope to tuck us all away. And he thinks it’s in the car.” I said, “I blacked out earlier in the evening. But Miss Able assured me my briefcase was safe. So I imagine it’s either in my car or at her apartment.” Connors got up from his desk. “Let’s ask her.” He started for the door, turned back. “Another minor point. When we’ve settled with the Carrolls, what then, Shannon?” “What do you mean, what then?” “Where are you going from there?” I told him, “Elfers, Georgia.” “You have sufficient cash?” “No,” I admitted. “I haven’t. I’ll have to cash a check.” Connors sat back of his desk again. “I’ll be glad to cash one for you,” he said. I took my check book from my pocket. “How high can I go?” “As high as you like.” “My entire balance?” “If you so desire.” I wrote out a check for fifteen thousand dollars. Connors took more money from the drawer and counted fifteen thousand dollars in front of me. In one thousand, five hundred and one hundred dollar bills. I put the money in my pocket. Connors got up from his chair. “Now, let’s go talk to Miss Able.” He gestured at the money still piled on his desk. “Put that in something, will you, Sam? Then you and Johnny meet us in the parking lot.” Cassida nodded. Hass hung up the phone he’d been using. “Roberts will meet us,” he said. Connors and I walked out on the terrace. Mary Lou had finished her filet mignon and was three-fourths—through mine. “You didn’t come,” she explained, “and I hated to see all that good food go to waste.” She licked her fingers, daintily. “Especially as hungry as I was.”

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I said I was glad she’d enjoyed it and introduced Connors. “Miss Able, Mr. Connors, Mr. Connors, Miss Able.” Connors could be charming. He was. “I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Able.” He looked at me. I pulled a chair from under the table and sat down. “Where’s my briefcase, Mary Lou?” She said, “In the back of the car. You know, in the turtle back. You’re so careless with it, Hi. You’d have left it leaning against the bar at Angelino’s, if I hadn’t picked it up.” She smiled brightly at Connors. “But I knew it was important so I locked it in the car.” She looked pleased with herself. “Good,” Connors smiled. “We’ll meet you in the lot, Shannon. As soon as Miss Able finishes her steak.” He walked away from the table. I took the rum bottle from the cooler and poured a water glass half full. Mary Lou stopped smiling. Her nails bit into the back of my hand. “You’ve sold out, Hi,” she accused. “You’ve sold out to Connors.” “That’s right,” I admitted. “For how much?” I told her, “Plenty. How would you like to take a little trip, Mary Lou?” “With you?” “Yeah.” “Where to?” “Elfers, Georgia. With maybe a stop at Las Vegas and New Orleans on the way.” Her nails bit even deeper. “I’d like that,” she admitted. “I’d like that very much.” She put the last bite of steak in her mouth and talked around it. “I knew it,” she enthused. “I knew it.” “You knew what?” She swallowed the bite of steak and wiped her lips with her tongue. “That working for you was going to be exciting.” The rum was biting good now. So I was being a heel. Being a heel had its compensations. So I’d lost Sally, I’d gained Mary Lou. I had fifteen grand in my pocket. For the first time in years I hadn’t a care or a responsibility. Once we were back in Elfers, I could divide my time between sitting under a china-berry tree and making love to Mary Lou, who liked to earn her right to eat. I thought of her as I had seen her, white and lovely in my arms back in her apartment. The thought excited me. To keep from making a fool of myself and kissing and fondling her on the terrace, I looked out at the purple Pacific, then up at the low-hanging stars. It was a mistake. They were the same stars Sally and I had wished on.

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Many times. Before we could afford to eat at Tony’s. When she’d been a big-eyed extra and I’d been a police court punk whose only office had been the bullpen at the Temple of Justice. My glow faded. The rum turned sour in my stomach. Hi Shannon had sold out. Hi Shannon had dirtied his name. Because he was in love with a woman no other woman could ever replace. I wanted to put my face in my hands and cry. Goodbye, Sally, I thought. Even so, I still love you. Mary Lou saw the change in my face. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? Are you sick?” “Yeah. A little,” I lied. What could I tell her? The truth? That I wished that I was dead?

CHAPTER SIX THE MAID WAS sleepy and cross. “No, sir, Mr. Shannon,” she said. “Mrs. Shannon waited for you for three hours. She phoned every place she thought you might be. Then she had to drive back to Victorville. She said the shooting schedule called for some dawn shots.” She pulled her faded robe about her. Dawn wasn’t too far away. I found a couple of traveling bags and stuffed them with suits and shirts and underwear and walked back to the car. “Was she home?” Mary Lou asked. I shook my head. “No. She had to go back on location.” “Hmm,” Mary Lou sniffed. “That’s a new name for it.” “Perhaps it’s just as well,” Connors said from the back seat. “Perhaps,” I agreed with him. Johnny Hass driving Connors’ car beeped his horn and our two-car cavalcade moved on. The canyon road was filled with the hush of approaching dawn. Now and then my bright lights picked out a woven wire fence, covered with climbing roses. I tried to think of something to say. I couldn’t. All I could think of was Sally. At least it had been nice while it lasted. Mary Lou’s fingers kneaded my thigh. “When we get to Las Vegas can I gamble a little, Hi?” “If you want to,” I told her. Connors said, “Stay away from the slot machines. Most of them are fixed so they pay out twenty cents for every dollar played. You get a much better percentage break at the dice tables.” “You should know,” I said. Now the rum bit. Now it didn’t. One minute I was drunk as hell. The next I’d never been so sober. It was an odd sensation. I felt like I was driving in a nightmare in intimate contact with people to whom I wouldn’t even

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speak during my waking hours. Connors asked, “What about Blair?” It was an effort to answer him. I asked, “What do you mean, what about Blair?” Connors said, “Just that. You’re doing me a big favor, Shannon. True, I’m paying you fifty grand for it. Nevertheless, it is a big favor. I’ve been afraid of you from the start. Fm glad you’re out of my hair. So if you’d like me to have some of my boys take care of Blair, well, I don’t imagine anyone but a few of his mares will miss him.” Just like that. “No. Don’t bother,” I said. “He’s only half to blame. As he pointed out, it takes two to have an affair.” “True,” Connors admitted. “True. Oh well. The world is filled with women.” His world might be. Mine wasn’t. Mary Lou’s fingers continued to knead my thigh. “Don’t you go putting ideas in my big Georgia boy’s head. I’m all the woman he needs.” Connors laughed. “I can imagine. You’re a cute kid, Mary Lou.” I felt dirty. I wanted to take a bath. I put Mary Lou’s hand back on the seat. “Don’t do that.” “Why?” “I don’t like it.” She pouted, “We aren’t even to Palmdale and you’re already tired of me.” I said, “I’m not tired of you.” I sounded like I was shouting at her. I was. “Steady, Shannon,” Connors counseled from the back seat. “Time and Mary Lou will take care of everything.” I said, “I hope so.” After that none of us spoke until Johnny Hass swung the lead Caddy into the Carroll yard, just as dawn broke over the desert. Neither the yard nor the shack had improved in the twelve hours since I’d last seen them. Blair’s imported Jaguar was still nosed against a Joshua tree. The panel truck was just as battered, Roberts’ Ford just as bright. Roberts came out of the shack to greet us. He was properly impressed by being in Connors’ presence. I almost thought he was going to take off his hat. “This is a pleasure, Mr. Connors,” he said. “I mean meeting you.” He was just another shyster to Connors. “You have the releases ready to be signed?” Roberts shrugged, then looked at me. “But certainly. Although I believe that Counselor Shannon will back me when I say that all this is very much outside the law. That we are all guilty of compounding a felony in conceal-

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ing the true circumstances regarding the child’s death.” I said that was correct. “As far as I can see, the only value of a signed release will be to implicate the Carrolls to an extent where we’ll ail go to jail if they try to extort money from any of us.” Blair leaned against the crumpled fender of his car. “Geez. Am I glad to be out of this one.” Carroll came out of the shack He was still wearing the black suit and hat. They looked like he’d been sleeping in them. The smell of wine was stronger. He stood a moment, looking bleary-eyed at the circle of men in his yard. Roberts led the way toward the door of the shack. “To business, gentlemen.” Mary Lou wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Ill think I’ll stay in the car.” “You do that,” Connors said. There was a naked bulb hanging from a green cord over the kitchen table. The ragged kids I’d seen the afternoon before were sleeping on pallets on the floor. The pretty but faded woman was kneeling in front of the coffin in the living room. I doubted she’d get much of the fifty thousand dollars. Roberts spread the releases, typed in triplicate, on the table and handed Carroll his fountain pen. Carroll sat in one of the straight-backed chairs and laboriously signed his name in the three places Roberts had marked with a cross. “Have the woman sign, too,” Connors said. Roberts called to the kneeling woman. She got to her feet and came into the kitchen. I stood looking around the shack. The irony. It was small wonder they’d recognized Sally. There was a half-dozen publicity stills tacked to the studding. There was also a fan picture of Blair when he’d been at the height of his fame. I looked back at the table. The woman couldn’t write. Roberts wrote “Mrs. Joseph Carroll” and the faded woman legalized it with a cross. Roberts put his fountain pen back in his pocket. “Now, if you please, the money.” Sam Cassida opened the director’s cage he was carrying and stacked the sheaves of bills on the table. They were still banded as they had come from the bank. Roberts counted them by sheaves. Satisfied with the count, he swept them into a sack that had originally held chicken feed and handed one signed release to me, one to Sonny Blair and one to Joe Connors. He smiled, “Just so Mr. Connors can be assured there will be no demands upon his friends for money.” The woman went back and knelt in front of the coffin, but the sight of

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the money had lessened Carroll’s grief considerably. He picked a gallon jug of wine from the floor and offered it to all of us in turn. Everyone, with the exception of Blair, refused it. He tilted the jug to his lips. “How.” The smell of the shack was making me sick. I asked Roberts, “That does it?” He said, “That does it, Mr. Shannon.” I walked back to my car and Mary Lou, with Connors walking beside me. He smiled, “Now, that wasn’t so painful, was it?” “No,” I admitted. “It wasn’t.” Mary Lou was in a hurry. “Come en. Let’s get going, Hi. I’ve always wanted to see Las Vegas.” I started to walk around to the wheel side of the car. Connors stopped me. “The briefcase, Shannon. Remember?” I reached in to get the keys in the ignition. “It’s in your car,” Mary Lou told Connors. “I gave it to Mr. Hass.” Connors looked at Hass. Hags nodded. Connors said, “Well, that seems to be it, then.” He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Good luck, Shannon. I wish you all the luck in the world in Elfers. But don’t ever come back to L.A.” I slid behind the wheel. “I don’t intend to.” There had been something I was going to do but I couldn’t think what it was. Then I remembered. I had been going to break Sonny Blair’s nose. Suddenly, it was unimportant. I drove out of the refuse-littered yard into the rising sun. I was numb with fatigue and rum. The whole thing had a feeling of unreality about it. As if it were a movie set and all of the participants were actors. I had a feeling that at any moment the director was going to shout, “Cameras! Sound!” The heat waves shimmering on the road made it difficult to drive. And somewhere, over there, across the desert, was Sally. Looking beautiful for a camera as a bored cameraman took dawn shots on his shooting schedule. They could title the picture “Hi Shannon Goes Home.” But it wasn’t the way I had planned it. I’d planned to go home with Sally, the local newspaper filled with my name, and the old men loafing in the courthouse square asking each other: “Who?” “Why, old Judge Shannon’s boy.” “Oh. The one who went out to the West Coast after he come home from the wars and married that purty little picture girl. Hell, yes. I know Hi.” “Sure you know Hi. He’s the boy from here that did what that Kefauver fellow from over in Tennessee couldn’t do. The one who sent that Connors

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fellow and all his crowd to jail. Now, Egaddy, there’s a boy that Elfers kin be proud of.” So I’d sold out for a mess, not even a mess of pottage, to get my love out of a nasty scrape, my love who didn’t love me anymore, my love who was in love with her own image on a screen. “Why didn’t you scream?” I’d asked her. Sally had told me. Now I was going home in disgrace, with an over-anxious secretary who admitted she did this and that on the side and had a very professional touch to what she did. I was hot. I was tired. My head ached. The day grew hotter with the rising sun. Mary Lou grew more amorous. She sat closer on the wide front seat. Her fingers began to knead my thigh again. Her breathing was uneven. Her pretty but slightly mis-mated breasts threatened, momentarily, to pop out of what bodice there was to her low-cut evening dress. As we passed an attractive-looking tourist court, she breathed, “We could stop there if you want to, Hi. At least, for a few hours. Or can you wait until we get to Las Vegas?” “I think I can wait.”

CHAPTER SEVEN I LOOKED AT THE barman again. He was ten feet six inches tall and growing another inch every time I looked up from my glass. I was very pleased with Hi Shannon. I’d known that I could do it. Anyone could get drunk. All you had to do was drink enough rum. I rapped my glass on the bar. The barman grew another inch as he told me, “Not in here, chum. Believe me, you have plenty.” I started to argue with him and changed my mind. So I was drunk. That was the way I wanted to be. It had taken me two days to get that way. What was there to argue about? I pushed back off the stool and scooped up the handful of silver dollars he’d given me in change for a twenty-dollar bill. Mary Lou would be worried about me. She worried every time I got ten feet away from the cabin. “You’re going to run out on me,” she’d sniff. “You don’t love me anymore.” Love. That was strictly for the birds. There wasn’t any such thing. There was only male and female. And after a time you got a bellyful of that, even a big boy from Georgia. The wall of the tourist court bar was lined with half dollar and dollar slot machines. I fumbled a dollar into a slot and yanked the handle. Three bars came up, one right after the other, snicking into position, win, place, show

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and jackpot. There was a musical tinkle and thud of silver as the machine spit silver dollars sole deep all over the floor. I couldn’t lose for winning. It struck me funny as hell. I threw back my head and laughed and laughed and laughed. A big lad, as big as I was, wearing a black sombrero, a fancy cowboy shirt and a pair of faded levis, materialized out of the smoke haze and said, “Okay. Pick ‘em up, fellow, and blow.” He was dressed like a cowboy. He talked like a Brooklyn bouncer. Out of one side of his mouth. His eyes intrigued me. They looked like bilious oysters. I said I’d pick up my money when I got goddamn good and ready. “Sure, pal. Sure,” he soothed me. “Here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He led me back to the bar and leaned me against the wood. “You stand there and have another drink. This one on the house. And I’ll pick up your money for you.” It sounded like a good idea to me. The ten-foot-six inch barman had grown another foot. He poured me a stiff shot of rum. “Savor it, pal,” he told me. I savored it, watching the lad in the black sombrero pick up the silver from the floor. When he’d finished he had a double handful of silver dollars. He put half of them in my right coat pocket, half of them in my left. Then, speaking over my shoulder to someone I couldn’t see, he said, “Will you please open the door, Tom?” I turned to see what Tom looked like and my pants were suddenly too tight, my collar was choking me and I was being propelled along the bar, everyone laughing like hell. Everyone but me. I lit in the dust with my face. When I could, I sat up and looked back at the bar. The lad in the black sombrero was standing in the lighted doorway, dusting his palms together. “And don’t come back,” he told me. “We’ve enjoyed your business. But we’ve had plenty of it.” He stepped back and the bat wings closed. I sat in the dust a long time, listening to the thud of the handles of the slot machines. Then somewhere down the street a five piece combo began their own arrangement of “Cry.” It didn’t sound too bad. I got to my feet and brushed the worst of the alkali dust from my clothes, looking across the landscaped court at Cottage No. 7. If I went back to the cottage there would be another scene. I was a brute, a monster. I’d induced her to leave L. A. I’d promised her a good time. Now all I did was drink and brood. Well, not quite all. But one thing was certain, I didn’t love her. That was for sure. I loved Sally. I staggered along the bar to a dark spot in the shrubbery and lost most of

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the rum I’d drunk. The silver was heavy in my pockets. It made my coat bind and cut into my neck muscles. I dumped two handfuls of dollars on the grass and went in search of a cup of coffee. In the morning, Mary Lou and I would move on. Maybe things would be better in Elfers. There was a clock in a store window. I focused my eyes on it. It was eleven o’clock. It had been nine when I’d left to get a quick one. By now, Mary Lou would be furious. It was a wonder she hadn’t come in search of me. In her opinion she’d latched on to a good thing. She meant to keep it. I passed the entrance to the big hotel where Sally and I always stayed, whenever we flew down to Vegas for a few drinks and a laugh. How many years ago? At least a hundred. I walked on, trying not to stagger. I wasn’t a big shot any more. I wasn’t even a small one. If I got picked up for being stewed, no courteous officer would escort me to my hotel suite. I wouldn’t even be held for safekeeping. I’d be booked and thrown in the drunk tank. A newsboy on the next corner was selling Los Angeles papers. I gave him a dollar for one. He grinned, “Kinda pitchin’ one, eh, compadre?” “Kinda,” I agreed with him. There was a coffee shop in the block. I sat at the counter and ordered black coffee. It tasted good. I drank it, looking in the narrow slot of mirror behind the coffee um. There was still plenty of dust on my suit. My face was puffed. There was more red than white in my eyes. “Lover boy,” Sally had called me. The coffee did me more good than the rum had. It steadied my nerves to a point where I could unfold the paper without rustling the pages. I ordered a second cup. I raised it to my lips and set it down as my picture looked up at me from the front page of the Times. The headline read — SPECIAL PROSECUTOR RESIGNS The caption under my picture read — Hi Shannon, local attorney, recently appointed Special Prosecutor by Attorney General Gilmore. Mr. Shannon has decided he wants no part of Joe Connors, et al. I read the story, sipping my second cup of coffee. It was a masterpiece of weaseling. Nowhere in it did it say that Connors had paid me off, but the intimation was there. I tried to remember resigning and vaguely recalled writing and mailing my resignation special delivery airmail, the first night Mary Lou and I had reached Las Vegas. The story also mentioned, in passing, that the Times had been unable to contact my secretary, Mary Lou Able, at such and such an address on Santa Monica Boulevard, but the paper was too cagey to intimate that we had left town together without more definite proof than it had. I read down to “Please turn to Page 2—

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Attorney.” I turned the page but failed to finish the story. There was a twocolumn cut of Sally on the left-hand side of page 2. It wasn’t a studio picture and the studio wasn’t going to like it. Sally’s bangs were mussed. She looked like she’d been crying when the man had snapped her. The caption read — Sally Shannon, Amalgamated starlet, denies any marital rift with missing husband. “I don’t know why Hi should resign,” Mrs. Shannon says. “Hi considered it an honor to be selected to prosecute Joe Connors.” I folded the paper and put it in my pocket, then laid a silver dollar beside my still three-fourths-filled cup and stood up. The counterman was concerned. “Something wrong with the coffee, chum?” “No. Not with the coffee,” I told him and walked out. Most of the day’s heat had dissipated. The night was cool and clear. From where I stood, it looked as if a low-flying airplane would have to dodge the stars. I walked back toward the motor court where Mary Lou and I were stopping. I’d had all the rum I’d wanted. I’d had all I wanted of Mary Lou. I realized I’d never wanted her. Our abortive affair had been a desire on my part to strike back at Sally, hurt her as she’d hurt me. But Sally didn’t know that Mary Lou was alive. She probably wouldn’t care if she did. Still, judging from my last night with Sally, the night before she’d left me to go to Lake Tahoe to spend the weekend with a has-been crooner, Sally was the type who wanted her cake and liked to eat it, too. She’d certainly fooled me. In the seven years we’d been married, I’d have sworn that if any other man had laid a hand on Sally, she would have killed him. That is, until the night of Manny Norman’s party. I put Sally out of my mind and considered my immediate problem. Mary Lou didn’t love me. I was just another man in her life. She liked what I could give her. Lights, clothes, sex, excitement. But I had been a disappointment to her. She would, without doubt, be glad to call it quits for what was left of the fifteen thousand. I’d save out a few hundred for my immediate expenses and she could have the rest. She could go back to L.A. and get another job and do this and that on the side. The motel bar wag still going full blast. The bouncer in the black sombrero was standing in the bat wings. As I passed him, I gave him a half salute. “Thanks, pal.” He looked at me like I was nuts and closed the bat wings. I walked down the path to Cottage No. 7. The porch light was on, but Mary Lou had given up waiting for me and gone to bed. As I closed the door behind me, I saw the lower half of her body outlined by the moonlight. “I’m sorry, kid,” I said. “But I got drunk again. The hell of it is, I can’t

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stay that way.” She didn’t say anything. I took off my coat and shirt and shoes and fumbled in the small closet, through the sports dresses and Western outfit I’d bought her on our first day in town, for a pair of pajamas that should be hanging on a hook. I couldn’t find the pajamas. Rather than light the light,’ I thought to hell with them. Blankets were made before pajamas. I peeled and got into bed and drew the blanket up over her. “You shouldn’t lie there like that,” I reproved her. “What do you want to do? Catch cold?” Mary Lou continued to sulk. I fumbled on the chair beside the bed for a cigarette and a match. I lit the cigarette. Then I got what I was thinking off my chest before I lost my nerve. “Look, honey,” I told Mary Lou. “I knew this hasn’t turned out the way you hoped it would. I know I’m not very good company. And what you say about me Hot loving you is so. Ill never love anyone but Sally. So she twotimed me with Blair. I’ll never forgive her for that. But I’ll never stop loving her, either.” I waited for Mary Lou to cry and lie about how much she loved me. She didn’t. She just lay still and silent beside me. I continued. “So I tell you what I think we ought to do. Let’s break this up. Feeling as I do about Sally, I’m no good to you. So look. Even after the money we’ve spent on clothes and gambling at night clubs, considering what I’ve won, I have almost as much as I had when we hit here. Say fourteen thousand five hundred. So you take the fourteen thousand and head back for L. A. and I’ll drive on home to Elfers as I originally planned. How does that sound to you?” Mary Lou continued to remain silent. I got a little impatient. I said, “For God’s sake, Mary Lou. I’m not the first man you stayed with. Act your age. Let’s be adult about this.” I turned on my side under the blanket and reached out a hand to shake some sense into her. Her firm skin acted like a magnet, a cold one. I sucked in my breath and held it, waiting for her heart to beat. It didn’t. Fear drenched my body with sweat. Small wonder Mary Lou hadn’t answered me. Small wonder she hadn’t cried. She couldn’t. I threw back the blanket and eased out of bed and stood up. There was a lamp on her side of the bed. I walked around the foot of the bed and lighted the lamp. The upper part of her body was lying in a pool of clotted blood, her life drained out of a small puckered hole just under her left breast.

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I felt her flesh again. All body heat had gone. She had been dead at least two hours, since shortly after I’d left the cottage. A hoarse voice that sounded vaguely like my own said, “I’m sorry, kid.” Then I was sick all aver the wall.

CHAPTER EIGHT WHO? WHY? I CLUNG to the foot of the bed, looking around the oneroom cottage. It had been systematically searched. Drawers had been opened and spilled. The new clothes I’d bought Mary Lou were scattered all over the floor. My travelling cases had been opened and pawed through. The pajamas I’d tried to find were wadded on top of the dresser. The sight of them made me realize I was nude. I found a clean undershirt and shorts in the litter on the floor and took them into the bathroom with me. I took a hot shower, then a cold one, standing under the cold water until my flesh was covered with goose pimples and my teeth were chattering. It gave me a headache but evaporated the last trace of the rum. I combed my hair. I shaved. I put on the undershirt and shorts. A gray flannel suit was disarranged on a hanger in the closet but still freshly cleaned and pressed. I found a clean white silk shirt and a tie. Dressed, I transferred my wallet and change and keys from the dust-stained suit that I’d dropped across the chair. The pockets of the coat were still weighted with silver dollars. I left them where they were. The tie was one that Sally had given me. For an anniversary present. I tied it and looked in the mirror. I didn’t look too bad. My face was puffed. My eyes were still bloodshot. I looked like I had been drunk, but in a threehundred-dollar suit of clothes and a forty-dollar hand-painted tie. It was surprising what a difference it made. I almost looked like Hi Shannon, the successful husband of Sally Shannon, the most promising starlet in Hollywood. There was only one thing I could do — notify the local police. I knew. I had defended too many innocent men who’d lost their nerve and run to make the same mistake myself. I hadn’t killed Mary Lou. I couldn’t prove it, true. But neither could the Las Vegas police prove that I had killed her. Nine-tenths of all police forces are honest. The Las Vegas boys were no exception. They have a tough row to hoe. They do it well. I even knew one or two of the commissioned men. That would help, as would the fourteen thousand dollars in my pocket. If success begets success, it’s only human nature to defer to a well-dressed, prosperous man and push a stumblebum around. I found a gray Borsalino on the floor of the

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closet and straightened it out the best I could. Then I walked back to the bed and looked at Mary Lou again. Any differences we’d had were resolved. She’d given me what she had to give and gotten damn little in exchange. The only thing of which she had been guilty was wanting to live. “I’m sorry, kid,” I told her again. “Believe me, I’m sorry.” I pulled the blanket over her. I turned out the light. I locked the door. I put the key in my pocket. When things broke badly for a Shannon, they broke all the way. The next few minutes, the next few hours, the next few weeks and months, possibly some years to come, were going to be damned unpleasant. Juries did surprising things. I knew. I was a lawyer. Still, I had to report the body. If I didn’t, it was mine. For keeps. Each cottage had its own car-port. I backed the Caddy out into the drive and pointed its nose toward the highway. As I rolled out of the court, a car in front of the bar switched on its lights and a vaguely familiar voice yelled, “You!” I braked automatically and glanced at the bar I’d been thrown out of an hour before. The lad in the black sombrero was at it again, shaking his fist at someone in the car parked in front of the bat wings. I stepped on the gas as automatically as I’d braked. I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to go on record, so the police could go to work before the trail was completely cold. The car in front of the bar followed me down the street but drove on when I swung in, in front of the police station. A uniformed policeman standing in front of the station looked up from some notation he was making in his notebook, as I skidded into the curb. “Going pretty fast, weren’t you, mister?” he asked. “Yes,” I admitted. “I was.” “And you know, don’t you, that you’re in a no parking zone.” I got out of the car and slammed the door. My nerves were beginning to give me hell again. My head ached so I could hardly see. “I want to report a homicide,” I said. “Does Lieutenant Keely happen to be on duty?” The patrolman put his notebook in his pocket. “That he is, sir. If you’ll just follow me.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Who is it that’s dead?” I told him. “A girl with whom I checked into a local motor court three nights ago. A girl by the name of Miss Mary Lou Able.” “How, dead?” he asked. I said, “Shot through the heart. At least, there’s a bullet hole under her left breast.” He whistled. “You kill her?”

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“No.” “Who did?” “I don’t know.” He reached for the knob of a door marked “Homicide,” then did a double take. “Mary Lou Able,” he said. “Then you must be Hi Shannon, the guy Joe Connors paid off.” He amended his statement. “According to the L.A. Times.” I took off my hat and ran my handkerchief around the leather sweat band. “That’s right.” The officer opened the door. “Mr. Hi Shannon to see you,” he told Lieutenant Keely. “He says he wants to report a homicide...” All Homicide men are the same, perhaps even in Timbuctoo. Cold, methodical, efficient, born doubting Thomases, learning their first few months on the job to trust not even their own mothers pertaining to murder. I’d met Lieutenant Keely twice before, both times in LA. in connection with cases on which we had worked on opposite sides of the fence. He called in a Captain Roe, a bright-eyed little man with hair so black it looked like it was dyed. Captain Roe asked most of the questions. “You say you’ve been at this court how many days, Mr. Shannon?” he asked. I said, “This makes the fourth night.” “Ever since you left L.A., let’s say, in a hurry?” “That is correct.” “And the name of the court?” “I believe it’s called the Desert Rose.” I found the key to the cottage in my pocket and looked at the name on the attached tab. “Yes, that’s the name.” “You and Miss Able have been living at the court as man and wife?” “That is correct.” “She must be very pretty,” Lieutenant Keely said, “to compete with Sally Shannon.” I didn’t say anything. “What did you quarrel about?” The question was asked quietly, casually. But I’d been expecting it. I had sat in on two dozen such talks before. But never as the logical suspect. “We didn’t quarrel,” I told Roe. I lied a little. “We were on the best of terms when I left the cottage shortly after nine o’clock this evening.” “You didn’t kill her?” “No.” “Where did you go?” “To the bar that is run in connection with the court. At least, I presume it is.”

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“You got drunk?” “Stinking. So drunk they threw me out.” Captain Roe seemed pleased with my frankness. “I thought as much. That’s not holy water you’re sweating. How long were you in the bar?” “Several hours.” “Just drinking?” “And playing the slot machines.” “Where did you go when they threw you out?” “Up the street to get a cup of coffee.” “Then you went back to the court?” “Yes, sir.” “Where you found your mistress dead?” “Yes, sir.” “Then you came directly here?” “No, sir. You see I didn’t realize she was dead at first. I thought she was just sulking when she didn’t answer me.” “I thought you said you hadn’t quarreled.” I began to sweat even harder. “We hadn’t. But I’d been out for a couple of hours, away from her. I’d been drinking. And, well, you know how women are.” “Yeah,” Captain Roe admitted. “I know. I’ve been married for twentyeight years. Don’t tell me you got in bed with her?” “Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Keely said, “Jeez. With a dead woman.” I patted at the sweat on my forehead. “I didn’t know she was dead. As soon as I learned she was, I dressed and came directly here.” “What condition was the cottage in?” Roe asked. I said, “Very disordered. Everything had been pawed through.” “Anything missing?” “I wouldn’t know that. I didn’t make a thorough check. But there was nothing valuable in the cottage.” “How about her?” Roe asked. “Is she a pretty girl, Shannon?” “Very pretty.” “And you say she was lying on the bed nude when you returned to the cottage?” “Yes, sir.” “Had she been assaulted?” I felt my face get red. “I don’t know. I didn’t think of that angle. And not being a medical man I wouldn’t have been able to—ascertain that fact if I had thought of it.”

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“Why not?” My face got even redder. “It so happens we had relations shortly before I left the cottage.” “And how long would you say she’s been dead?” I told the truth. “Since about nine o’clock, approximately the time I left the cottage.” Captain Roe looked at Keely. A big man, given to fat, Lieutenant Keely heaved his bulk out of his chair. “Well, let’s go look at her. It’s a cinch she’s not going to get any warmer.” He opened the office door, “After you, Mr. Shannon.” It was midnight and a little better, but the tempo—of Glitter Gulch increased. Well-dressed men and women, some in Western outfits, crowded the cafes, nightclubs and casinos. Uniformed officers and plainclothesmen mixed with the crowd of spenders. Las Vegas wants its guests to have a good time. That’s its stock in trade. But it won’t stand for any rough stuff. You sleep with the woman you brought and a foul-mouthed drunk is just as much of a pain in the neck in a gambling casino as he is in the First Baptist Church. Keely rode in my Caddy with me. Captain Roe followed in a squad car, accompanied by two homicide men. I knew Keely had read the morning Times. It had been lying face up on his desk. But he made no comment at the time. I drove directly to Cottage No. 7 and parked in the drive. The police car stopped a few feet behind my car and the three men in it got out. I felt through my pockets for the key. As I did, Captain Roe spoke the veiled suspicion I’d felt behind his questions at the station. “You’re sure this is on the up and up, now, Shannon? You’re sure you’re not still drunk or having a nightmare or something?” I said, “I’m positive.” Then I opened the door to the cottage, switched on the ceiling light and I wasn’t quite so sure. The cottage had been a mess when I left it. Not so, now. Someone had picked the clothes from the floor and put them back in the drawers or hung them neatly on hangers in the closet. My traveling bags, packed and strapped, were standing on the baggage rack where I had put them when I arrived. There was no sign of a body on the bed. The bed was neatly made, with the elaborate spread tucked neatly under and covering the pillows. The two homicide plainclothesmen looked at Captain Roe. Captain Roe looked at Lieutenant Keely. Lieutenant Keely looked at me. I felt like a goddamn fool.

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I strode to the bed and ripped back the spread and blankets. The bottom sheet was crisp and fresh, unstained. I said, “She was here. And she was dead.” The two plainclothesmen looked in the bathroom. They looked in the tiny closet. They looked out the window behind the bed. They got down on their hands and knees and looked under the bed. Then they and Captain Roe and Lieutenant Keely walked out en the porch and held a whispered consultation. I stood looking at the bed, wondering if my four-day drunk could have so disordered my mind that I’d only thought I’d seen Mary Lou lying nude and lovely on the bed, dead, with a small, brown, puckered bullet hole under the left breast that didn’t quite match the right. The four men on the porch talked for a long time. One of the plainclothesmen came back in the cottage, picked my traveling bags from the rack and walked out again. Lieutenant Keely appeared in the doorway. “Let’s go for a little ride, Mr. Shannon,” he said. He motioned to me. I joined him on the porch. “In your car or mine?” “In your car,” Lieutenant Keely said. Back of the wheel again, I said, “She was there and she was dead. I saw her.” Keely might have been humoring a slightly stupid child. “Sure,” he assured me. “Of course.” I eased the big car around the circular drive. “Where to now? Back to the station?” “N-no,” Lieutenant Keely said. “I tell you what. Drive out to the edge of town, Mr. Shannon. You’re doing fine. Just keep headed north on U.S. 91.” I glanced in the rear vision mirror. The squad car with Captain Roe and the two plainclothesmen in it was loafing along behind us. I passed a bank of service clubs and hotel and casino signs and pulled over on the shoulder of the road opposite the Las Vegas city limit sign. “Now what?” I asked Lieutenant Keely. He glanced back to make certain the squad car had parked behind us. Then he got out and walked around the Caddy and put his big hands en the rim of the door next to me. “Well, I’ll tell you, Shannon,” he said. “Us guys here in Las Vegas are just an average bunch of cops with a little harder job than most police forces. Very few of us are geniuses. Very few of us are dumb. At least, dumb enough to pull crooked hotshots’ chestnuts out of the fire.” He was beginning to shout. His florid face got even redder. “I don’t know what was back of that cock and bull story you tried to hand us. Frankly, I don’t give a goddamn. Maybe your broad run out on you and you want us to try and find her.

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Maybe that little deal you pulled in L.A., the one that’s headlined all over the morning Times, backfired on you some way and you’d like a little police protection. You’d like to have us throw you in a cell and run you through the psycho mill. That would tuck you away in a cell, nice and safe, for four or five days.” Lieutenant Keely shook his head. “But whatever you’re trying to sell, we aren’t buying it, see?” I protested, “But, Keely—.” He said, “Shut up, Shannon. I’m doing the talking. You may be a big shot in L.A. but you’re just another guy down here. We have to live with gamblers, see? Good guys, most of them. But we learned long ago to keep our noses clean about their internal affairs. They police their own ranks, but good.” He waved me on. “So take it on out of town, Shannon. Keep right on U.S. 91. Or drive off into the desert or into Lake Mead. It don’t mean a damn to us. But don’t come back to Las Vegas. Ever. That’s final.” Keely pushed himself away from the car. I glanced in my rear-vision mirror. The two city plainclothesmen had gotten out of the police car and were standing with their right hands in their pockets to make certain that the Lieutenant didn’t have any trouble with me. “Okay. Let’s go,” Keely said sharply. I depressed the gas pedal and shot forward into the night. It didn’t make sense. But then nothing had since the Monday afternoon Sonny Blair had walked into my office to tell me about the weekend that he and Sally had spent in Lake Tahoe. Together. “Good? You’re telling me. Between the bottle and the sack, we had a lot of fun.” It could be I’d imagined the whole thing. It could be Mary Lou wasn’t dead. It could be I was crazy.

CHAPTER NINE SOMEWHERE IN THE deepening dusk in the old house a faucet dripped with maddening persistency. My eyes burned. My head ached. I was lying in a pool of sweat. So I was home. So? I lay listening to the drip of the faucet. I considered getting up and trying to locate it and the sober half of my mind said, To hell with it. In the mess that my life had become, a dripping faucet was merely another minor annoyance. I lay thinking of Sally. Goodbye, honey, I thought. It was nice to have known you. It was nice to have held you in my arms. It was nice of you to let a big old country boy dream on. Until the smashed grille of a Jaguar

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returning from Lake Tahoe killed two birds with one impact. A big-eyed little girl and a big old Georgia boy who was still old-fashioned enough to believe a wife should sleep only with her husband. I wriggled my bare toes on the sheet and got no comfort out of it. I had worn shoes too long. It was the same with chewing tobacco. I’d lost my taste for it. What I wanted was a Turkish cigarette and a filet mignon at Tony’s. No. At Giro’s, Dave’s Blue Room, Angelino’s. Anywhere but Tony’s. Outside the rusted screens, the drone of insects increased with the coming of night. I lay looking out the window. A pale moon climbed the gnarled branches of a slash pine. Like a starlet climbing to fame, caressing each branch for a moment before moving on to the next one higher: The sky began to fill with stars. From the topmost branch of a chinaberry tree a mating cardinal flooded the night with song. I lay listening to the bird, trying not to think, and thinking. Now it was all behind me, I knew how big a heel a man could be. Hi Shannon, Attorney at Law. Law had taken me out of the sticks. It had combed the cotton hulls out of my hair and brushed the peanut shucks out of my pockets. It had put money in the bank for me. It had given me fancy clothes, a fancy car, a fancy wife. And I had done it wrong. When my first big chance had come along to repay the legal profession for what it had done for me, I had kicked it in the teeth. I’d had Joe Connors dead to rights. And I’d sold out to save the career of a little tramp who didn’t deserve any consideration. Now Mary Lou was dead. She had to be. I hadn’t imagined that. That part of the nightmare was real. For some reason best known to himself, someone had removed the body and tidied up the cottage while I had been in the Las Vegas station reporting a homicide. Who? And who had been the man who had yelled “You” at me when I’d passed the motel bar on my way to the station? I tried to remember the voice but it was too many miles behind me, too many bottles age. I covered my eyes with my arm to shut out the moon. I was glad my mother and the Judge were dead. They’d both been proud of me. Mother, because I was her son. The Judge, because I was following him in his profession. There had always been judges and attorneys in the Shannon family. Up until now. I sat up and felt on the floor beside the bed for the gallon jug of white moon I’d bought in town. I tipped it up over my arm, uncorked it and let the raw corn whiskey trickle down my throat. It didn’t taste as good as rum. It tasted hot and bitter. I felt on the dark floor for my shoes, considering driving back into Elfers and buying a case of rum. Possibly two cases.

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I was still debating the matter when a car drove into the yard and parked under the chinaberry tree. A moment later, a heavy fist banged on the front door. I stopped debating the rum and debated going downstairs to see who it was, and thought, To hell with them. I didn’t care who it was. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t know of anyone, at least anyone in Elfers, who would want to see me. The boys in the square had made that plain when I’d driven into town. The Connors story had preceded me. The local paper had given it a big write-up. I wasn’t the local hero any more. I was the local stinker, a big fat Georgia boy who didn’t have the guts to take it when the going had gotten a little tough. They thought I’d been afraid of Joe Connors. What could I tell them? That I’d sold out to buy Sally out of a jam? The boys made it clear just where I stood. Go on, heel. Keep walking. How much did Connors pay you to resign? I’d just as soon not serve you, Mr. Shannon. Your trade isn’t welcome here. The one thing I can’t abide is a coward. Only Paul and the barman at the Crescent Cocktail Lounge would even talk to me. And the barman was paid to talk. Paul alone had been his usual friendly self. I’d told Paul the whole story. Then I’d quarreled even with Paul, because he’d called Sally what she was, because he’d said she wasn’t worth what I had given up for her. We had, I believed, exchanged blows. At least, I’d taken a swing at Paul for calling Sally a pretty little tramp. And Paul had threatened to beat some brains into my head with the gold-Headed ebony cane that had been his father’s. I must remember to drive into town in the morning and apologize to Paul. I must drive out to his house and see May. Paul had wanted me to stay with them instead of trying to batch it here in the old home place. But I’d had enough trouble with women. And I was still a little afraid of May. She’d wanted me plenty bad once, and Paul had been second choice. The pounding on the lower door continued. I thought, Go away. Go die. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The pounding stopped. There was a sound of splintering wood. I got to my feet and stood weaving as heavy feet clomped up the stairs and down the long upper hall. The door to the bedroom opened. A grotesque white-hooded, whitesheeted figure walked into the room. A second, a third, a fourth, a fifth robed figure crowded in behind the first one and rimmed me in a semi-circle. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. They looked as funny as hell, like children

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in playclothes. “Put your shoes on, Shannon,” one of the robed figures said. “We’re going for a ride.” I tried to place the voice. I couldn’t. I’d been away too long. But it was a local man. I could tell by his red clay drawl. “Now, just a minute, punk,” I said. Another of the robed men said, “Oh, we’re punks, eh? But at least we’re not crooks and we’re not cowards.” A fist lashed out in the moonlight to make contact with my jaw. The jug flew from my hand and smashed against the wall, filling the room with the stench of corn whiskey. I staggered back from the blow. The bed caught the edge of my knees. As I fell, all five robed figures jumped me. Everywhere I turned, there were fists. I felt as if I were being smothered in sweaty unwashed sheets. Fighting back as best I could, I thought, I’m dreaming this. This is all part of the nightmare. It has to be. Things like this didn’t happen to people. Not even in Elfers County. Things like this were just something you read about in the morning paper. Something that happened to some stranger by the name of Jorwosky or Dubinsky or Kelly. Through a—blur of pain and thudding fists I heard the robed figure straddling me order, “We’ll tie his hands and feet and carry him down to the car.” By arching my back sharply I threw the figure into the wall behind the bed and fought back to my feet, only to have a blackjack explode against the side of my head. “That will fix the bastard,” one of them said. “But just to be sure—.” I heard the impact before I felt pain. The floor of the big old house reeled crazily. The moon left the top of the pine in which it had been nesting and rushed in through the open window to flood the room with light. For a moment, it blotted out everything with its brilliance. Then the searing light faded to a cold black silence. There were only two sounds in the world. The full throated mating song of the cardinal and the drip, drip, drip of the faucet. Then even they faded out. There was a rush of warm air on my face when consciousness returned. Every muscle in my body ached; my mouth was filled with blood. I opened my eyes to see that I was on the back scat of a car. My own? I was sitting between two robed and hooded figures. There were two more in the front seat. The fifth man had disappeared. I rode, trying to orient myself in the dark as familiar objects loomed

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large in the moonlight. That was the Cronkite farm. That was the O’Hara slough in which Paul and I had gigged frogs as boys. Now we were passing old man Levy’s Four Corners. After my chores were done, I’d always been able to find a pick-up game in the flat meadow in back of the old man’s store. Paul and I had played ball there night after night until it was so dark that we’d had to paint the ball with the same kind of luminous paint they used on the plain-looking ties that read “Kiss Me, Kid” in the dark. Old man Levy was a good Joe. He’d sent away to Atlanta and bought a whole pint for us. None of the men in the car spoke. I decided it wasn’t my car. It didn’t ride smoothly enough. From the direction in which we were headed, I imagined they were taking me down to the secluded cane brakes on the near side of the river. More white-robed figures were probably waiting there. And I’d wanted to come home. To this. For some reason, the thought amused me. “Punks,” I said again. “That’s what you are, punks. Just slimy punks, afraid to show your faces. Do your wives know you’re using their bed-sheets? Look. I’ll tell you what. You untie my feet and hands and I’ll fight you one at a time or all together.” The hooded man on my right side said, “A big talker, ain’t he? All the Shannons had wide mouths.” .The man on my other side drawled, “We’ll whittle him down. Just as soon as we get to the brakes.” The white-hooded driver said, “He’s not such a big shot, now.” Again I tried to place the voices. The driver sounded a little like Ginty the garage man, but I’d been away from Elfers too long to identify any of the voices with any certainty. The car turned left into the brakes just beyond the Brannon landing and jolted down a little used road. Not far from the river it stopped in a small clearing. The two men in front got out and helped the two men sitting guard on me to lift me to the ground, like I was a sack of peanuts. I’d been wrong about one thing. There were no other hooded men in the clearing. The five men who’d broken into the farmhouse seemed to be the entire local chapter of the bedsheet crowd. As I lay on the ground watching, straining at the ropes around my wrists and ankles, a second pair of headlights jolted down the road to the clearing. It was my Caddy being driven by the fifth man. I got to my bound feet with an effort. “All right, now suppose one of you tells me what this is all about?” One of the robed men slapped me hard. “The idea is, you’re leaving town.” He sounded like a back country preacher with a pint of shine under his belt and his eyes on the collection plate. “This is a God-fearing,

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respectable community. And we don’t want the likes of you despoiling it with your crooked cowardly deals and painted women.” He repeated, “The idea is, you’re leaving town.” A robed man punched me in the groin. “Catch on?” The blow knocked me to my knees, writhing in pain. Because of my bound feet, I lost balance and fell on my side. As I did, all of them kicked me. I fought back to my knees, the seams of my silk shirt popping as long unused muscles tried to snap the rope around my wrists. For some reason, I wasn’t afraid. All I felt was contempt. The man with the blackjack tapped it lightly against his palm. “Shannon. I always had a mind you were a big bag of wind and this little caper you pulled out there on the Coast proves I was right. You’re a yellow-bellied skunk, that’s what you are. And we ain’t fooling with you. What you got so far, and what you’re going to get, is just a sample of what will happen to you if you don’t do what you’re told to do.” “And that b?” He said, “Get out of Elfers County. Get out tonight. Don’t let tomorrow morning’s sun shine on your head. Be a long way gone by then. And just to speed you on your way—” He swung the blackjack again. I ducked and the rope around my wrists snapped. I swung back blindly. A man sobbed in pain. “Goddamn. He’s got his hands loose.” “I’ll fix that,” the figure with the blackjack said. And he did. The wet muck of the lowland felt cool and soft to my battered face. From a long distance away, a man said, “Out. Out of town. Get out tonight. And don’t ever come back. Or, so help me God, well kill you.” The use of God’s name, I thought, is strictly irrelevant to the matter at hand. I opened my mouth to object and soft mud filled it. I tried to push my face out of the mud. I couldn’t. I seemed to be sinking, sinking, sinking.

CHAPTER TEN THE NIGHT WIND was cool. I lay a long time, just hurting. Then I sat up and spit mud from my mouth. I was alone in the clearing. I remembered the rope on my wrists snapping. I flexed the muscles in my forearms. Everything about me hurt. My ankles were still wound with rope. I sat waiting for my head to clear. Then I worked on the knots of the ropes that held my ankles together. After a long time, they gave. I got to my feet and stood weaving. When I could, I walked to Mr. Fleetwood’s creation. One of the bedsheet bastards had scraped a knife or a cotton bale hook the length of the Caddy,

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from the front bumper to the red light rising out of the fish tail. They were the type who would do such a thing. Never having any beauty in their lives, they didn’t want anyone else to have any. I brushed a fleck of paint from the scratch and looked inside the car. My bags, presumably packed, were in the back seat. When they said, “Go,” they meant, “Leave. Depart. Don’t sully our fair county any more.” I faced a tree and did what I had to do, wishing it was on them. Finished, I crawled in the car and sat back of the wheel for five minutes, listening to the night things rustling through the cane brake, hearing the gurgle of the river. Then I opened the smaller of my bags and found some clean shorts, some clean socks and an undershirt. I laid them on the seat of the car while I stripped off the bloody, muddy, torn things I was wearing. I wadded the clothes I took off into a ball and threw them into a bush. Then, picking up the clean things, I waded across the spongy flat to the river. In the moonlight it stretched to hell and gone, liquid black and silver. I laid my clean things on a cypress knee and waded into the water. It was cold but soothing to my screaming nerves and battered muscles. It patted with little black fingers at the cuts on my face. I washed the blood and mud from my mouth with it. Then I swam out into the night halfway to the opposite shore and lay there on my back, floating, letting the current have its way with me, thinking how easy it would be to allow the black water to close over me. Thinking about Sally wouldn’t hurt me any more. I wouldn’t have to puzzle over who had killed Mary Lou and why. All I would have to do was think up a plausible story to tell Saint Peter. “I went swimming in the river. I got a cramp. The current was too much for me.” But you didn’t lie to the Big Judge or any of his bailiffs. Saint Peter would bang his gavel on a star. He’d say: “Heifer dust, Counselor. Don’t give the court that. Life just got too much for you and you quit. Could be the boys in Elfers are right. Could be you’re yellow.” I turned back on my stomach and tried to locate the tall dead cypress by which I’d marked the clearing in the cane brake. It was a long way up river. I fought the current back toward the clearing, feeling the strength return to my muscles, breathing easily. You didn’t kid the Big Judge. If with all His other chores He could mark the fall of a sparrow into some dingy morals court and send her forth to gin no more, well, you didn’t lie to Him. You did the best you could. And if you came into His court with clean hands, the chances were His decision would be in your favor.

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I wallowed up into the shallows, feeling better than I had for days. I dried myself with the shirt I had thrown into the bush, put on the shorts and my shoes and walked back to the Caddy. I chose a brown silk crepe shirt this time, with a yellow tie and the pure Irish linen white suit that Sally had insisted I buy on one of our weekend jaunts to Palm Springs. “You’re no Clark Gable, honey,” she’d told me. “Your ears aren’t big enough. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re Dan Dailey, Errol Flynn and Montgomery Clift all rolled in one. And a very nice job of it, too. I love every freckle on that battered cracker mug of yours and I want you to stand out like a lighthouse, so every other hussy can see what I have and be jealous.” Words. Women, it seemed, were good at them. Even better than lawyers. Sally could talk like that. She could lie soft and warm in my arms, all her passion spent, and go right from my arms to those of Sonny Blair. A wave of anger swept me. Perhaps Paul had been right after all. I shouldn’t have been a gentleman. I should have been all cracker with Sally. Instead of throwing away my own career to buy her out of a nasty jam of her own making, I should have hit her “a lick or two.” I should have blacked both her eyes and paddled her until she couldn’t sit down for a month. Then she’d still be on the cot in my blow-way, penitent and eager to please me. And I would still be Special Prosecutor Hi Shannon instead of, “Oh, yes, that heel, Shannon.” I tied my tie extra carefully and slid in back of the wheel and started the motor of the car. I wasn’t leaving town. Too many towns were barred to me, now. Connors had ordered me to stay out of L.A. and Lieutenant Kelly had made it clear I wasn’t welcome in Las Vegas. I had to have someplace to light. Elfers was as good as any. But right now I wanted to talk to Paul. I wanted to ask him if he knew the names of any of the local Bedsheet Beavers. I also wanted to buy a gun. And the next time the dirty sheet crowd came back their wives would have more than sweat and spilled whiskey to wash out when they put the ritual robes in the Bendix. Maybe you’ve been in Elfers. Maybe not. You may have passed through it on your way to St. Petersburg or Miami. There is nothing about Elfers to distinguish it from any other of a hundred small Southern towns of ten thousand population. There are two cotton gins, a cotton, a peanut and a tobacco warehouse, several small factories and a big consolidated high school. Being the county seat, it also has a red-brick courthouse. It sets in two

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city blocks a block from the highway, built mainly around a green square shaded by century-old trees. The more important and prosperous stores face on the courthouse square. Smaller stores and less important business blocks crowd the four side streets originating in the square and pinching out in the railway yards, the through highway, Pepper Town and the white residential section. It being prayer meeting night, most of the stores fronting on the square were closed. There were cars in the lined-off parking spaces and a few pedestrians on the street. In the distance, I could hear the commingled bells of the First Methodist Church, the First Baptist, and the Church of the Open Door, calling the faithful to midweek prayer service meetings. The gas pumps in front of Ginty’s garage were lighted. I pulled in under the marquee and beeped my horn. “Fill it up,” I told Ginty. A stocky, red-faced man with a roll of fat around his middle, Ginty almost swallowed his chew of tobacco. There was no doubt about it. The sullen look on his face stamped him. There was no way I could prove it, but he’d been one of the bastards in a bedsheet. He jammed the hose in the gas tank and pumped in fifteen gallons of ethyl. I had him check the oil, the water in the battery and the radiator and the pressure in my tires. He thought I was going away. “Leaving us so soon?” he asked. “Well, right here, anyway,” I told him. “I’m driving half a block down to Crescent Lounge.” I poked a twenty-dollar bill through the window. “You can keep the change for your trouble, boy. And, by the way, you don’t happen to know where I can buy a gun, do you? Preferably a .43?” Ginty stuffed the bill in his coverall pocket and turned away without answering. I drove on down the street and parked in front of the Crescent Lounge. It was new since my days in town. The loquacious barman was still on duty, but except for him and myself the cocktail lounge was deserted. I ordered a double rum with water on the side and sipped it slowly. I was over that phase of my trouble. It was no longer compulsion drinking. The rum tasted good. “Where’s everyone?” I asked the barman. “Don’t tell me the rum pots of Elfers have given up drinking on Wednesday nights? Or is it only during prayer meeting?” The barman was a big-city boy from Atlanta. He’d looked sin in the face and found he liked it. To him that made us kin. “No. It’s not that, Mr. Shannon,” he assured me. “The joint was jumping

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less than fifteen minutes ago. Even Sheriff White and Doc Handley were in here having a drink. Then Orin Bream, you may remember him, he’s Sheriff White’s chief deputy, came in and said something in the sheriff’s ear. I was having a little trouble with the beer tap just then and I didn’t hear what he said. But both White and Handley hotfooted it out, followed by every guy in the place.” He sighed. “Could be there’s a smash-up out on the highway.” “Could be,” I agreed with him. The bar didn’t handle Murads. I bought a deck of Camels and laid a ten on the wood to cover the drink, the cigarettes and the bottle I ordered to take with me. The lounge was dimly lighted. Handing me the sacked bottle, the barman really saw my face for the first time. He almost dropped the bottle of rum. “Holy smoke. What happened to you, Mr. Shannon? You smash up your car or something after you left here this afternoon?” I looked at my face in the bar mirror. It was clean. That was all I could say for it. My left eye was swollen almost shut. There was a deep knuckle cut under the other. My mouth was puffed. One cheek was a ghastly, looking green. The other cheek was purple. “No. I ran into a bedsheet,” I told him. The barman’s eyes widened in comprehension. “I hear there’s a few around.” “I know it,” I assured him. “You don’t know where I can buy a gun, do you?” Our kinship didn’t extend that far. He had to make his living in Elfers. He found a spot on the bar that required mopping. “I’ll inquire around, Mr. Shannon.” I said, “You do that,” and walked the bottle of rum back to my car and drove on. Halfway up the block a small group of teen-agers were clustered around the popcorn machine on the sidewalk in front of the Park Theatre. Still farther on, light spilled out of the big plate glass window of the sheriff’s office. I slowed my car as I passed. Neither White nor Bream were in the office, but a sallow-faced deputy whose name, if I recalled correctly, was Jack Carter was busy passing out rifles from the usually locked gun rack to a half dozen men. I wondered if there had been another prison break. I hoped not. Still, that would explain White’s hasty departure from the Crescent. It would also explain the guns. Or it could be there was trouble at one of the road camps. I rounded the courthouse square, headed for Paul Mason’s second-floor

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law office. I hoped Paul was still in his office. I wanted to apologize for having been a damn fool. Besides, Paul would give me a gun. Paul would give me a dozen guns. But I didn’t want to go out to his house unless I had to. May always made me feel sticky. She still hadn’t forgiven me for marrying Sally instead of her. Her marriage to Paul had been strictly second choice and, while Paul had never said anything about it, I didn’t imagine he and May were any too happy together. May, in her own sweet way, was a bitch. The last time she and Paul had visited us in L.A., May had done her best to get me to crawl in bed with her. “For old times’ sake.” More, May was the type of girl who would despise Paul for being a cripple. Not even Paul’s money and the social prestige that marriage to him had brought her would compensate a girl like May for Paul’s clubfoot. Paul’s big Packard was parked in front of his office, beside Sheriff White’s clay-stained Pontiac. And that was fine with me. I wanted to talk to Sheriff White, too. Things had reached a pretty pass in Elfers when a group of hooded men could undertake to set themselves up as guardians of the general public’s morals. I climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the second floor and pushed open the lighted door of Paul’s reception room. There was no one in the reception room but I could hear voices in the inner office. I lit a Camel and waited for Paul to finish his business with the sheriff. I started to sit down and froze halfway to the chair as a girl began to cry. It hurt my back to stand erect again. The cuts on my face tingled as blood rushed to it. So now I knew. I was crazy. The beating the hooded punks had given me had addled my alcohol-soaked brain. I could swear it was Sally crying. I cracked the door to Paul’s inner office and looked in. A big good-looking man in his middle forties with premature white hair and a black hairline mustache, Doctor Handley was squatted on his haunches working on’ something or someone back of Paul’s desk. The girl, incredibly, was Sally. She stood with the fingers of one small hand pressed to her mouth as if to keep herself from screaming. Sheriff White was standing beside Sally. When he saw me, he pushed his battered planter’s panama on the back of his head. He seemed surprised to see me, also a little embarrassed. “Oh, it’s you, Shannon,” he said. “I thought you’d be in the next county by now.” I ignored him to ask Sally, “How did you get here?” She took her fingers away from her mouth. “I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta and took a bus here.” That, I thought, was a laugh. Sally riding a bus. I tried to think of some-

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thing to say. The best I could come up with was, “I thought you were on location.” Sally’s voice was small. “We finished the day before yesterday.” She stood with tears filming her eyes, her lips half parted, as if she expected me to take her in my arms and kiss her. I was goddamned if I would. Not after Sonny Blair.

CHAPTER ELEVEN I STARTED TO TURN and walk out. Anywhere away from Sally. Then I realized what Sheriff White had said. “And why should I be in the next county by now?” Doctor Handley stood up and spoke before White could get his thoughts reorganized. “About an hour ago, I’d say,” he said. “Death was practically instantaneous.” Handley stooped back of the desk and came up with Paul’s gold-headed cane. The wood was cracked and smeared with clotted blood. “Paul’s cane, of course, was the weapon. And while death was practically instantaneous, as I said,” Handley looked at me for the first time, “I would say from the condition of Paul’s hands and knuckles that he put up a terrific fight for his life.” Looking at me, Sheriff White stroked one of his white moustaches. I shook my head at him. “Uh uh.” Both men and Sally watching me, I rounded the desk and looked at the crumpled figure on the floor. Paul was dead. And whoever had killed Paul must have hated him. His thin face was battered almost beyond recognition. His heavy black shoe, made especially for him, lay at a grotesque angle. The white index finger of his outstretched arm was pointed at the open safe built into the wall. I was still shaking my head. “Oh, no,” I told White. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t kill Paul. Paul was my friend.” Handley asked me if I could explain the-bruises and contusions on my face. “Yes,” I told him. “I can. Five members of the local Klan broke into the old home place, took me down in the cane brakes and beat hell out of me.” Neither Doctor Handley or Sheriff White said anything. What I’d just said had a hollow, unreal ring even to my own ears. It was the sort of thing a smart lawyer would think up. Sally gave up waiting for me to kiss her and buried her face in her hands and cried. White picked up the phone on Paul’s desk and asked the operator on

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duty to get him his office. The connection made, he said “White speaking, Jack. You can stop passing out guns. And locate Orin and tell him to call off the road blocks. That’s right. Hi just walked into Paul’s office. No. Let the men I deputized keep their rifles and bring them over here. When the word gets around, we may need them. Paul was well-liked.” I could feel my face getting redder with every word, with every tick of the clock on the wall over the safe. I said, “Now, just a minute, fellows.” Before I could continue, high heels clicked across the reception room and, accompanied by Doc Curtis, the dentist who had the suite of offices next to Paul’s, May Mason burst into the room. May hadn’t changed. Her hair was still too blonde. She still wore too much makeup. Her clothes had cost too much money. There was too much of her. She was still a very beautiful woman, but even her tummy bulged slightly. In another year or two, May was going to be fat. “Where is he?” May demanded. “Where is Paul?” Doctor Handley tried to keep her from rounding the desk and couldn’t. May slapped his hands away. “Keep your hands off me.” The ringed fingers of her left hand pressed against the desk, she stood a moment looking down at Paul. Then, dry sobs shaking her body, she swayed and would have fallen if Handley hadn’t caught her. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “There, Mrs. Mason. There.” May brushed his hand off her shoulder and turned to look at me. There was hate in her eyes. “Paul told me you were in town. He phoned and said he wouldn’t be home for supper, because you’d had a misunderstanding this afternoon and he was expecting you back. Why did you do it, Hi? Paul couldn’t love you more if you had been his own brother.” I felt like I was choking. On Paul’s blood. I felt like a red-faced schoolboy accused of chalking dirty words on a fence. I repeated, “Now, wait a minute. All of you. I didn’t kill Paul. And I can explain these bruises on my face.” “So you-say,” Doctor Handley said. Sheriff White looked at the dentist who had come into the office with May. “You may you heard Hi and Paul quarreling this afternoon, Doc?” Doctor Curtis said, “I couldn’t help hearing them. They shouted at each other for almost half an hour. Paul said Hi was a fool to throw his life and career away for a little Hollywood—well I wouldn’t care to repeat in front of Mrs. Mason the word Paul used. Hi objected strenuously. I heard a sound that could have been a slap. Then, furious, Paul said he ought to use his cane to beat some sense into Hi.”

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May sobbed, “Instead, Hi used it on Paul.” She wiped her eyes on a wisp of lace and looked from Sally to Sheriff White. “Where does she Come into this?” White said, “She doesn’t. Mrs. Shannon came in on the Atlanta bus less than half an hour ago. She went directly to my office to ask questions and directions to the Shannon place. Orin brought her over here, thinking Paul might want to run her out there. And together they discovered Paul’s body.” Sally closed the few steps between us and looked up at me. Her voice was still small. Her wet eyes searching mine, she said, “You didn’t do it, did you, Hi? You didn’t kill your friend?” I could smell the perfume of her hair. My arms ached for the feel of her. To keep from taking her in my arms, I put my hands in my pockets, the fists clenched. “No. I didn’t kill Paul. What are you doing here, Sally?” She began to cry silently, her eyes still searching my face. I’d never seen anyone look so lonely, so forlorn. “Well, you acted so strange when I talked to you from Victorville. You didn’t even come up when I drove all the way home that night. Then there was all that stuff in the paper about you resigning as Special Prosecutor. So I flew down here, knowing you’d probably come here, thinking you might want me with you.” She moved her head slowly from side to side. “But you don’t want me with you, do you, Hi?” “No,” I said. Sally winced as if I had slapped her. I turned back to Sheriff White. “What Doctor Curtis says is so. I did quarrel with Paul this afternoon. That’s why I came back tonight. To apologize. But I didn’t kill Paul.” “So you say,” May said bitterly. Doctor Handley asked, “You had been drinking, Hi?” I told him the truth. “I was stinking. With reason. No one in Elfers but Paul would even talk to me.” Behind me a harsh voice said, “So no one would speak to you. Is that an excuse for killing Paul?” I turned to see Jack Carter in the doorway. Behind him, Paul’s reception room had filled with men. All of them were armed. All of them were grimfaced. Sheriff White had been truthful in saying Paul had been well liked. There wasn’t a man in the crowd to whom Paul hadn’t lent money or given free advice. I protested, “Don’t be like that, Jack. Paul was my friend. Why should I kill him?” “There was the money,” May said. She looked at Sheriff White. “You found it?”

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White shook his head. “Not yet.” Then out in the reception room some man I couldn’t see said, “That friendship stuff doesn’t wash. A guy yellow enough to walk out, or let himself be bought out of a position of trust like the papers say Shannon did out there in Los Angeles, is yellow enough to kill a cripple for the gold in the head of his cane.” Some other man in the crowd in the office asked, “Well, what are we waiting for? For Shannon to die of old age or something?” White added a pinch of tobacco to the chew in his cheek and drew his bone-handled pistol, almost casually. “That will be all of that kind of talk. I’ll jug the next man who even hints at such a thing. I armed you fellows to keep the law, not break it.” “That’s right,” Doctor Handley backed him. “After all, all this is just supposition. We don’t know that Hi killed Paul. And all a lynching would do would be to give Elfers a bad name in the Northern papers.” The sweat on my spine turned cold. Sally tried to come into my arms. I pushed her away. May said, “Paul had eight thousand dollars in his safe. It was cotton money, I believe. Has Hi been searched?” “No,” Sheriff White admitted. “But I kin search him right now.” I waited for him to find my wallet with the fourteen thousand dollars in it. He didn’t. I tried to remember if I had transferred it from my blood- and mud-stained coat and couldn’t. I’d been too mentally upset to remember details. For all I knew the money was still in the coat I’d tossed into the bushes. So I found it again. How could I explain the money? Would they believe Joe Connors had cashed my personal check for fifteen thousand dollars? The answer was no. One of the men in the outer office said, “Hell. All them Shannons from the old man down have been biggety scapers, but they’re smart. Hi wouldn’t keep the money on him. But he sure could use it.” The unseen speaker wolf-whistled. “It must come higher in Hollywood ‘n it does in Elfers. Jist look at the clothes that little ol’ gal he’s married to is wearing. Look at her diamond rings and her earrings.” Sally turned her face to the wall and stood, her slim shoulders shaking, as if her heart was broken. She was thinking of me? A bad press? What? I wished I knew. I wished I knew the real reason why she’d come to Elfers. I realized I was panting, as if I’d run a long way, with a lynch mob at my heels. “Now, wait. Look, fellows,” I gasped. “Listen to me. Before this gets out of hand.” I appealed to Doctor Handley. “You say Paul was killed about an

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hour ago?” “Yes,” Doctor Handley said. “Approximately. Give or take a half hour either way.” I said, “Then I couldn’t have killed him. Like I told you before, an hour ago I was down in the cane brakes, having the hell beaten out of me by five men in white robes and hoods. They pulled me out of bed a half hour before that. They beat me in my room out at the farm. Then they adjourned to the river and did it all over again.” I paused, waiting for someone to speak. No one did. I continued: “Just before they knocked me unconscious, the leader of the mob warned me to get out of Elfers before morning. He told me not to let the Elfers sun shine on my head. He said they would kill me if I did. That’s why I came up here. Along with wanting to apologize for our rhubarb this afternoon, I wanted to ask Paul if he knew any of the local men who belonged to the Klan.” They didn’t believe me. Even Sally turned from the wall. Her eyes were wide and worried. Doctor Handley broke the silence. “They beat you in those clothes?” I shook my head. “No. The clothes I was wearing were all covered with mud and blood. I threw them into the bushes. Then I went for a swim in the river and changed into this suit.” May crossed—the office and stood in front of me. So close, her big, firm breasts almost touched my chest. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “You’re lying, Hi. You may have changed your clothes. But you changed them after you fought with Paul. And the only reason you came back was because Paul’s body was found sooner than you expected it to be, and you couldn’t get through the road blocks.” The man who had remarked about Sally said, “By God, I’ll buy that. Come on, fellows. Let’s string the bastard up to the railroad trestle.” The men in the outer office tried to push Jack Carter aside. He turned and beat at them with the butt of his pistol. Her face white, her eyes big and round, Sally interposed her small body between me and the doorway. Sheriff White drew his bone-handled pistol again. “Step aside, Jack,” he said, quietly. He laid down the law without raising his voice. “Now, as for the rest of you men. There has never been a lynching in Elfers County. There’s never going to be one as long as I’m sheriff. Come ahead and get Shannon, if you think you can take him away from me. But I’ll shoot the first son-of-a-bitch that steps over that doorsill.” The men in the reception room pushed back from the doorway. They knew White meant it. He did. He was Law as it was once represented, as it

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still is in some places. Doctor Handley broke the silence that followed. “Look, fellows. Let’s be sensible about this. We all loved Paul. That’s understood. But Hi is also a local boy. I, for one, have never known Hi Shannon to tell a lie. And if he is telling the truth, there should be some sign of a struggle down in the cane brakes. We should be able to find the clothes he says he was wearing when the hooded men beat him.” White stroked his moustaches with his free hand. “Now, that makes sense. Won’t do a mite of harm to look.” He waved the men aside. “All right, make a path there, men.” He motioned me on ahead of him. “And you ride in my car, Hi. You’ll find it right out in front.” I rode looking straight ahead, trying to forget that Sally was sitting beside me. Sally being here with me was merely another turn in the nightmare that had begun the afternoon Blair had walked into my office. Don’t give me that, Shannon,” he’d said. “The hell you’re not in. I told your girl to tell you this was important!” Somehow in the confusion Sally had fought her way into Sheriff White’s car with me. She tried to snuggle her hand into mine. I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but there were tears in her voice. “Don’t be so cold and distant with me, Hi. Stop being a tight-lipped mean old cracker and tell me that you love me, that you want me here with you.” I pushed her hand away. What kind of chap did Sally think I was? Winchell, or maybe it was Lyons, had best summed up Sally’s type: “If a smart little hustler fools a big dumb country boy once, shame on her. If she fools him twice, shame on him.” Even I had to admit the search was thorough. The clearing in the brakes was criss-crossed with headlights. If my discarded underthings and shirt and suit had still been there, Sheriff White and his deputies would have found them. But they weren’t. Nor had the spongy ground held the imprints of the struggle. All they had been able to find were my footprints in the mud on the river bank. I sat in the sheriff’s car, trying not to hear Sally sobbing beside me, fighting panic. White had to believe me. I had been beaten by five sheeted hoodlums. I hadn’t killed Paul. I stirred restlessly on the seat and Orin Bream turned his pale eyes La my direction. “Just take it easy, Hi. It shouldn’t be too long, now.” His heavy gun sagging his belt, Sheriff White cut across the battery of headlights to the car. He pushed his hat back on his head, leaned on the door and looked in at me. “You wouldn’t care to change your story, would you, Hi?”

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“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t. Why?” “This is the clearing in which you were beaten?” “It is.” “The clearing in which five men dressed in Klan regalia beat you with a blackjack and warned you to leave Elfers under penalty of death?” “That’s right.” The tobacco-stained corners of the old man’s mouth turned down. He spat a stream of tobacco juice out into the glare of the headlights, then turned back to the car. “Uh uh,” he said. “You’re lying and you know it, Hi.” His voice was flat, without expression. “Because you are a local boy, because you made us proud of you for a while, I’ve given you every break I could. But the five sheeted men exist only in your own drunken imagination. In the first place, the Klan never got a foothold in Elfers County. I don’t hold with men covering their faces to do what they’re ashamed to do with their faces bare. So me and Orin and Jack run their organizers out of the County by the seat of their pants and you are the first and only one to report an incident of night riding.” I tried to speak. I couldn’t. The lump in my throat was too big. The old man tugged a heavy manila envelope from his hip pocket. In the glare of the headlights, I could see it was imprinted with Paul Mason’s return address. If not delivered within five days return to Paul Mason, Atty.-at-law, Courthouse Square, Elfers, Georgia. Sheriff White continued. “In the second place, I did just what I should have done in the first place. I searched your car. And what do you think? Tucked away in the well under your spare tire, I found the eight thousand dollars that was known to be in Paul’s safe.” He opened the envelope. I stared at the money in it, incredulous. Sally’s hand felt for mine again. I gripped it this time. “Take a good look,” White told me. His voice was still flat, expressionless. “It’s going to burn you, boy.”

CHAPTER TWELVE AS CELLS GO, IT was large, on the third floor of the courthouse. The floor hadn’t been originally intended as a jail. The windows were fullsized, if barred. I had two windows in my cell, one on each comer of the building. Through them I could see two sides of the square. Being right up under the eaves, the cell was hot. I’d spent the night stripped to my shorts, trying not to think. Twice during the early morning hours Sheriff White had looked in

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through the bars and asked if I was ready to dictate and sign a confession. Both times I told him the truth, that I hadn’t killed Paul. Now, with late morning pushing noon, I stood wearing my linen pants and undershirt, holding onto the bars in first one window, then the other, watching the movement in the square. It wouldn’t be too long before the reporters and photographers sent by the big-city dailies would arrive. Both Sally and I were news with a capital N. The affair would be spread over the front page of every newspaper in the country. Inevitably some reporter would smell out my old romance with May. Some smart boy might even dig up Mary Lou. The Las Vegas incident would be publicized. Keely and Roe would have to make a thorough investigation. And all hell would break loose. Mary Lou’s body had to be somewhere. Hate welled up out of the square. I could feel it. The men and women who stopped on the tree-shaded walk to look up at the third floor hated me. The merchants standing in their doorways hated me. I was a big old longlegged hometown boy who had had a chance to bring glory to Elfers. And I’d let them down. I’d turned yellowbelly. I’d murdered my best friend for eight thousand dollars. Across the square, the manager of the Park Theatre came out of the lobby with a tall ladder and began to change the letters in the marquee. A few minutes later, Ed Johnson, who owned the Ace Sign Shop, delivered two lobby signs. He leaned them against the front of the building and both men surveyed them with evident satisfaction. From somewhere, probably Atlanta or the Jacksonville exchange, the manager had obtained a copy of “Swamp Fever,” a picture in which Sally played a secondary role. The lobby sign read: Tonight—In Person Sally Shannon Paul had been right about Sally. She was nothing but a greedy little tramp out for all she could get. I turned away, sickened, and walked to the other window. What I saw out of it wasn’t much better. May, wearing unrelieved black, was walking across the grass toward the courthouse door. Black became her. May was a pretty woman. With Paul dead, she was also a very wealthy one. The last time I’d talked to Paul, sober, in Los Angeles, Paul had told me he’d cleaned up in cotton futures, that he didn’t have to work another day if he lived to be a hundred. May passed out of sight, into the building. I sat on the cot and lighted a cigarette. May and Sally, it would seem, were alike in a good many respects. Both of them knew what they wanted and how to get it.

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There was a scuff of heavy shoes, then a click of high heels in the hall. A flash bulb popped, and then another. I got up and looked through the bars. May, looking very pale and interesting, escorted by Sheriff White was coming down the corridor, while the first of the outside photographers shot the bereaved widow. I reached for my shirt. “Don’t bother, Hi,” May said. “I’m only going to be a moment.” She dabbed at her eyes with a wisp of handkerchief, while a third flash bulb popped. “I prayed all night for guidance and I just want you to know that I—I forgive you. I know how you felt about Paul. And I know that you wouldn’t have done it if you had been in your sober mind.” The photographer set his camera on the floor and began to scribble on a pad of paper. May continued, “But I do want you to know what you’ve done. You know how Paul wanted children. Well, our prayers were answered too late. I’m going to bear Paul’s child exactly six months from now.” I thought, That tears it. If it hadn’t been torn before. Once a sympathetic jury heard May’s story, there could only be one verdict. It was a dream case for a prosecutor. Two local reporters were in the hall. Both left on the run to wire their A.P. and I.N.S. affiliations. The outside man wrote even more furiously. Sobbing so hard now that she couldn’t continue with whatever else she had been about to say, May asked Sheriff White to take her downstairs. The click of her heels in the hall sounded like tiny hammers. Driving nails in the lid of my coffin. I lighted a cigarette from the butt of the one I was smoking and looked up as still another flash bulb popped. Sally was holding on to the steel bars of the cell. The smart suit she’d worn the night before was gone. So were her rings and diamond earrings. She was wearing a simple white cotton dress that made her look like a school girl. Sally looked down the corridor after May. “That blonde,” she said, “is a bitch. I wouldn’t trust her with a male Pekingese.” I thought, You’re a fine one to talk, but didn’t say it. Sally pressed her face in between the bars to be kissed. “Did you have a pretty fair night, honey?” M I said, “Pretty fair.” Partly so as not to embarrass her in front of the photographers, but mostly because I wanted to, I kissed her. Her lips tasted as sweet as ever. I’d always be a chump about Sally. I’d always love her no matter what she did or had done to me. She kissed me, fiercely. “Don’t worry, honey. Please. I know you didn’t

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do it.” The photographer recorded the scene for posterity. Sally continued, “There’ll be a lawyer, a fine one, here, either tonight or tomorrow morning. I took the bus to Atlanta and sold all my rings and other things, so I could wire him a retainer. And I’m picking up an extra three hundred dollars by making a personal appearance in the theatre across the street.” I was amused. The lawyer would probably turn out to be some shyster sent by the studio to milk out of my trial all the publicity for Sally that could be milked. Not that it made any difference. I knew Elfers County. Unless someone came forward and confessed, not even Clarence Darrow and Bill Fallen freshly risen from their graves could save me from the chair. I played along. “That’s fine. That’s just fine. Which hotel are you stopping at?” Sally looked surprised. “Why, neither. I’m staying out at the farm. And it’s lovely, Hi. I like it better than any place I’ve ever been.” Corn. Tall corn from the tall com country. But it made the world go round. When Sally had gone I returned to the window. The clay-spattered backcountry pick-up trucks were coming in, now. When their drivers looked up at the third floor of the courthouse, their hate and contempt was as-obvious as that of the townspeople. A local boy had shamed them, then murdered a man they’d loved. I watched two women meet in front of the Penney store. One of them bent forward and whispered in the other’s ear. I knew what she was saying. “May Mason’s going to have a baby. And poor Paul murdered in cold blood.” The collar of the shirt I wasn’t wearing choked me. The invisible wall of hate was slowly, relentlessly closing in. Invisible feet were trampling the courthouse grass. Soundless curses and catcalls were pelting at the barred windows. A spoken word, a spark would give them substance. By craning my neck, I could see the comer of Ginty’s garage. Once I saw Ginty, a dark stubble covering his jowls, as he came out to service a car. At one o’clock, a nervous trusty brought my lunch. I tried to eat. I couldn’t. Even the thought of food choked me. At four o’clock, when Doctor Handley stopped by to paint my cuts and contusions, the food on my tray was still untouched. “Not hungry, eh?” Handley asked. I shook my head. “No.” I neither liked or disliked Handley, but we had never been close. For one

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thing he was eight years older than I was. Our interests had never been similar. He had been twenty when Paul and I had been twelve. Doctor Handley, so far as I knew, was a capable small-town doctor and an adequate coroner. The inquest that had resulted in having me held for circuit court, without bail, had been scrupulously fair. Handley had merely presented such evidence as there was and allowed the coroner’s jury to form its own conclusion. Handley pushed the untouched tray of food out of his way. “No. I don’t imagine I’d be hungry in your place.” He painted the deep cut under my eye with something that smarted slightly. “You’re in a bad jam, Hi. But, and this is strictly off the record, I’ll be damned if I can figure out any reason why, drunk or sober, you should want to kill Paul.” It was the first wedge of doubt I’d heard expressed, except from Sally. I appreciated it. “Thanks, Phil.” Handley worked on me as he talked. “As close as you two were and with all the money he’s made in the last few years, Paul would have given you twice eight thousand dollars just for the asking. Paul stood up for you right along, even after that Joe Connors business crowded everything else out of the local paper. He said the Los Angeles papers weren’t printing all of it, that there must be some vital personal reason why you would do such a thing.” He studied another deep cut. “Oh, oh. A little infection there. I’d better dust some sulfa in that one. You going to stand by your story of the night riders, Hi?” I said, “I’ll have to. It’s the truth.” “And the money Sheriff White found in your car?” “Someone put it there.” “Why?” I admitted, “I’ll be damned if I know. Unless it was to get me where I am.” “But why should anyone frame you?” I shook my. head. “There you have me. Meanwhile I’m out about fourteen grand. I had that much in my wallet in the coat I threw in the bushes.” “Oh,” Handley said. He put his things back in his bag. “You can prove you had that much money of your own, Hi?” I lit a cigarette and lay back on the cot. “Yeah. Sure. All I have to do is get Joe Connors to fly down here and testify he cashed my personal check for fifteen thousand.” Handley pursed his lips. “I get your point. That does rather complicate matters.” As he closed his bag, I asked him, “Who here in town has reason to hate

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Paul?” Handley shook his head. “If there is anyone, I can’t name him.” “How about Ginty?” “The garage man?” “That’s right.” Handley thought a moment, “Well, Paul as county attorney did have a case coming up against Ginty at the next quarter session. A paternity case, I believe. Involving a teen-age girl. But Paul being dead won’t quash it. It will merely be carried over to the next term of court and handled by the new county attorney.” “And there has never been any other reported incident of night riding in Elfers County?” “Not to my knowledge. You didn’t happen to get the license number of the car you say they were in, did you?” “No. They’d plastered it with mud.” “What kind of car?” “I think a Plymouth.” Handley stood up. “Then if there—were five men in sheets, I doubt if Ginty was one of them. He drives a Buick, I believe, the same as I do. Yes. I know he does.” I was sorry to see him go. “You know about May?” Handley said, “I not only know, I told her. I ran a Friedman on May the other day, then an Ascheim-Zondek, to be sure. And May was very pleased. She was going to tell Paul when he came home for supper last night.” The smile faded slowly from his face. “Poor Paul. Now hell never know.” The old friend was gone. He was Coroner Handley of Elfers County. “Well, I’ll drop in again tomorrow, Shannon.” I watched him down the corridor. Handley was sorry for me. But even Handley didn’t completely believe me. He was as bad as the others. He thought I was lying in an attempt to save my neck. He thought I’d killed Paul in a drunken temper and then invented the five sheeted men to explain away the marks Paul’s fists had left on my face. It was too hot to lie still. I pressed my face against the comparative coolness of the bars, an elusive something in my brain trying to take form. There was something in my head that escaped me. Something I should know or remember. But I couldn’t think what it was. It buzzed in space and time, as reluctant as a gadfly to light and be swatted. I drank a swallow of the cold coffee on the tray and walked to the window and looked out. I didn’t like what I saw. There were more people, mostly men, in Elfers than I ever, remembered seeing on a Thursday after-

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noon. And they hadn’t come in to shop. For the most part, they stood in tight little groups and talked earnestly. The invisible wall of hate pressed even closer. The scuff of invisible feet grew louder. I could almost hear the catcalls and the curses. All the scene needed was night, a roaring bonfire and a battering ram. So there had never been a lynching in Elfers County. There was always a first time for everything. I realized I was gripping the window bars so hard that the nails of my curled fingers were biting into my palms. I forced myself to relax. Allowing my nerves to tie themselves in knots wouldn’t help anything. In a grisly sort of way it was amusing. I’d wanted to come back to Elfers. I’d wanted to take off my shoes, put a big chew in my mouth and sit under a chinaberry tree. But I’d lost my taste for chewing tobacco. I was much more apt to be suspended from a chinaberry tree than sit under one. And it wouldn’t matter to me if I had my shoes on or not. A big, dust-stained car parked in front of the Commercial House. I thought at first it was bringing more out-of-town reporters, until I saw the California license plates. I gripped the window bars even harder as three men got out and crossed the walk to the hotel lobby. The way they walked, the way they were dressed, the quick glances they cast at the little knots of earnestly talking men were as out of place in Elfers as—I tried to think of a simile. The only one I could think of was— as Sally, my Sally, in Sonny Blair’s arms. Something was wrong, radically wrong, somewhere. Otherwise Joe Connors, Johnny Hass and Sam Cassida wouldn’t be in Elfers. As I watched them, Connors spoke to one of the back-country men on the walk. The farmer talked gravely a moment. When he’d finished, Connors turned and looked at the third floor window of my cell. He didn’t like me any better than the men of Elfers did.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN IT WAS EXACTLY SEVEN-FORTY-FIVE when the first red tongue of flame licked up through the semi-darkness of the square. I saw it start. A passing drunk dropped a match into a waste-filled carton which the porter of the Five-and-Ten had set out on the walk. The small fire gave the men in one group an idea. They dragged the burning carton over in front of the courthouse and added the dry fronds from two cabbage palms. The idea caught on quickly. By eight o’clock, it was a roaring bonfire, with eager hands and willing feet searching for more

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fuel to pile on it. From then on, the fire served as the focal point for the sunburned men who milled around it. There wasn’t much excitement in their lives. It was a vent for their emotions. All they knew was work and food and sex. And a good old-fashioned “shouting” with maybe a lynching to follow was next best to a sneak lay in the bushes at a peanut boiling. Bottles passed freely from hand to hand. From time to time a youngster, or a man not so young, attempted to heave a rotten egg through the third floor windows of my cell. The crowd hooted good-naturedly at their failures. So far, they were just having fun. But here and there a man was beginning to get drunk. I couldn’t see a masked or sheeted person. The men in the square weren’t ashamed of what they were doing. Night was as hot as day had been. I took off my sweat-sodden undershirt and wiped my torso with it. The men in the square were laughing. But it was the laughter of mob hysteria, building, building. I noticed Orin Bream had pulled up a cane-bottomed chair and was sitting in front of the cell with a double-barreled shotgun across his lap. “Do you think there’ll be trouble?” I asked him. Orin spat a stream of tobacco at an inquisitive palm roach that had crept out of the woodwork. “Could be. It’s hard to say. A mob is kinda like a hound dog chasing two rabbits at once. You never kin tell which way it’s gonna jump.” He looked at the sweat beading my chest. “But if you be skeered you shoulda recollected that Paul was well liked in these parts before you batted in his brains.” “I didn’t kill Paul.” Orin was non-committal. “So you say.” An egg, then a wilted parsnip found their way in between the bars. “A good thing the window is open,” Orin Bream said. “Otherwise, them woulda bust the glass.” The elevator gate opened. Sheriff White came down the corridor. There were deep lines of strain in his face. His brow was beaded with perspiration. But his walk was unhurried, his voice still expressionless. “You’d best turn the other prisoners loose,” he ordered Bream. “That drunk in five and that sharecropper charged with beating his wife. And don’t forget the boys in the vag tank.” Bream got to his feet. “No, sir.” White fanned his face with his time-weathered panama. “Not another damn deputy’s shown up. Even Jack’s wife called in and said that he was ‘sick.’ So it’s just the two of us again ‘em until the State boys git here. And I don’t want any so-called accidents.”

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“You’re the sheriff,” Bream said. He moved out of sight down the corridor. A moment later, I could hear cell doors being unlocked. “All right, you fellows,” Bream called. “The sheriff said for you to git. Use the back stairs and go out the back door.” Eager feet, thudded down the wooden stairs leading to the rear of the building. Sheriff White picked up the receiver of the phone on the wall opposite my cell. I turned back to the window. There was less laughing now and more shouting. As I watched, I saw Ginty pass out a half dozen half-pint bottles from the cavernous pockets of his grease-stained overalls. I said, “Ginty’s passing out free whiskey.” From the phone, Sheriff White said, “Yes. I know. Ginty’s a troublemaker. I’ve debated some on jugging him but I’m fearsome it might be the spark that will set the boys off.” He mopped his face with his sleeve, as he asked the operator to get him Captain Clausen at the State Police barracks. “Besides, as long as they keep drinking and shouting, I misdoubt they’ll blow their corks.” On the far side of the bonfire and across the street, under the marquee of the Park Theatre, there was an added commotion of some sort. I thought I saw Sally, briefly, in the crowd. Then the manager of the show came out and took in the signs announcing: Tonight In Person Sally Shannon I sifted the crowd for Joe Connors and Hass and Cassida, but didn’t see any of them. I’d only seen them twice. Once when they had entered the Commercial House and once when they had emerged an hour later. Some fool in the crowd around the bonfire fired a pistol at the window in which I was standing. I flattened myself against the wall as glass tinkled over my head. “That tears it,” White said from the phone. The shouting around the fire lessened. I looked around the corner of the window. I saw a man climb up on the marble base of the equestrian statue of General Stonewall Jackson. He held up his hands for silence. Someone threw more fuel on the fire and I recognized him as Doctor Handley. “Don’t be damn fools, men,” Handley shouted. “Don’t do something you’re going to be sorry for in the morning. Let the law take care of this. Hi is entitled to a fair trial. We don’t know he killed Paul. And while it’s a shame about May, that’s the way life is.” An over-ripe tomato struck him full in the face and dripped down onto his rumpled white suit. A second tomato struck him in the shoulder. Someone in the crowd called, “When we want a doctor, we’ll send for one.

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But let’s wait till the patient is daid!” A roar answered the speaker. Staggering under its weight, a dozen men crossed the street carrying a twenty-foot long eight-by-eight barn timber. The roar increased as the crowd around the fire saw them. Handley wiped his face with his handkerchief, dabbed at the stain on his shoulder, shrugged and got down from the pedestal of the statue. From the window of the cell next to mine Orin Bream said, “Well, Phil made a good try.” White hung up the receiver and unlocked the door of my cell. “There are three carloads of troopers on their way,” he told Bream. “But us being stuck way off down here in the ass end of the state, the captain misdoubts they can get here in much less than half an hour.” White looked out the window. “But them boys out there ain’t going to wait no half an hour. So to save from having to shoot some damn fool, I’m going to sneak Shannon out the back way and take him to the Fillmore County jail till things cool off a bit.” “That’s a good idea,” Bream said. I put on my shirt and reached for my coat. White continued, “You peel off your shirt, Orin, and stand there at the window where Hi’s been standin’. So the boys kin see you. You’re about a size with Hi. Give us about five minutes if you kin. Then, if the boys ain’t bust in by then, go on downstairs and unlock the front door.” Bream took off his shirt and undershirt. “Whatever you say, Sheriff.” White took a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and snapped them on my wrists. “And don’t give me no trouble, Shannon. If you hadn’t done what you did, the boys wouldn’t feel the way they do.” He motioned me out of the cell. “Let’s go. Down the back freight elevator. All the way to the boiler room.” The second and first floor were unlighted. The aged freight elevator creaked its way down to the basement. It smelled of musty records and rot and dry decay. “I’m glad the judge is daid,” White said. There was more emotion in his voice than I’d heard in it before. “It would pain the old man powerful to son of his in a mess like this.” I didn’t answer him. What was there to say? White looked out the barred pane of glass in the boiler room door. There seemed to be no one guarding the rear of the building. “You know my car,” he said. “It’s right at the top of the stairs.” He unlocked the boiler room door. “You go first and get in the back seat. I’ll throw a blanket over you.” I started out the door and something in me revolted. Allowing myself to be transferred to a safe cell wasn’t going to solve anything. I would still be tried for and convicted of murder that I hadn’t committed. While the guilty

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man went free. Besides, I wanted to talk to Sally. I wanted to know why Joe Connors and Johnny Hass and Sam Cassida had come to Elfers. White pushed at my back, impatiently, “Hop.” Instead I spun on my heel and swung my handcuffed fists in a short arm jab that caught the old man on the point of the jaw. He’d bolstered his gun to unlock the door. I slipped it out of his holster and eased him to the cement floor as his knees gave way. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him. I had nothing against the old man. I liked him. I found the key to the handcuffs and unlocked them. I threw the cuffs and the key into a pile of trash. I stuffed White’s gun under my shirt, between my sweat-slimed belly and my belt. Then, locking the boiler room door behind me, I crept up the short flight of stairs and ducked into the thick shrubbery surrounding the old building. No one tried to stop me. No one saw me leave. All the interest of the men was concentrated in the thump of the eight-by-eight timber thudding against the front door. I debated using White’s car, but it was sure to be recognized. My mouth dry, my body drenched with sweat, I forced myself to leave the shrubbery bordering the courthouse and walk openly across the grass. The heavy gun wouldn’t stay where I’d put it. It kept sliding down and jabbing me. I took it out from under my shirt and put it in my side pants pocket. The big white bone handle stuck out. From time to tune I glanced over my shoulder. No one was paying any attention to me. His naked torso gleaming in the leaping flames of the fire, Orin Bream was still standing back of the bars in the third floor window. When I reached the far side of the square, I halted at the street line. The curbs were lined with cars but there was no traffic moving. A half dozen clusters of women and teen-aged girls were standing on the far walk, watching their menfolk attempt to batter in the door of the courthouse. I slipped between two cars and crossed the street. There was a dark alley next to the Bon Ton Drygoods Store. I walked into it and bumped into a hurrying man. There was a crash of dropped bottles. “For Crissake,” Ginty gasped. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” Then he recognized me and panted, “Hey! How did you get out?” He opened his mouth to shout to the men across the street. I smashed a hard left to his teeth that drove the words back into his mouth and bounced his head against the brick wall of the Bon Ton. “Where’s your bedsheet, Ginty?” I asked him. He coughed and spit out the front tooth that was choking him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

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I said, “The hell you don’t.” I slapped him first with the palm, then with the back of my left hand. “You’re one of the boys who beat me up down in the cane brakes last night. Maybe the one who sneaked back and got my bloody clothes to make me out a liar. Who are the other four? Why? And which one of you killed Paul?” Ginty wiped his blood-smeared mouth on the back of a hairy hand. “You got me all wrong, Hi. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His eyes turned crafty in the faint moonlight filtering into the alley. I glanced over my shoulder. Two back-country farmers were crossing the street. Ginty opened his mouth to yell at them. I hit him again, harder this time. His head smacked into the wall. He slid down it to the alley. I drew White’s gun and waited. The men crossing the street veered out of my range of vision. One of them said, “We’re goin’ to take him out of the jail and down to the railroad trestle an’ do to him just like he done to Paul Mason. Then we’re goin’ to hang him.” “He’s got it coming,” a girl said. Her voice was thick, and not from whiskey. Because of me, because of the hysterical emotion engendered by the mob, a lot of mattresses in Elfers County were going to take a pounding before the night was over. “And poor May three months gone.” The other man who had crossed the street asked if they had gone to the show. A still younger girl’s voice said, “I wouldn’t have missed it for nothin’! I liked to died laughing at the look on her face when the first rotten egg splattered all over her naked shoulder. Who does she think she is, the wife of a murderer, tryin’ to tell our men how to run our business?” I stood with my back pressed to the wall. Sally had tried to help me. Sally had defended me, and Elfers had rotten-egged her. The first man who had spoken said, “Well, we’d best be gettin’ back again.” His woman spurred him on. “Git a piece of the rope if you kin, Clem. I’d like it for a souvenir.” The two men recrossed the street. I started to kneel beside Ginty to go through his pockets. As I did, a great shout went up from the square. The thud of the battering ram stopped. The allotted five minutes were up. They knew that I was gone. In another few minutes, they would be fanning out in all directions, hoping to intercept me in Sheriff White’s car before he could carry me to the Fillmore County jail. I ran down the alley toward Pepper Town. In the back of Morgan’s Feed Store there was a battered pick-up truck with a homemade canvas top. I felt the dashboard. The keys were in the ignition. I got in and pushed the starter button.

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As I did, I thought for a moment I had isolated the elusive something I felt I should remember. It was something Paul had said, something he had told me just before he’d married May. But whatever it was Paul had said still eluded me. My brains were too soaked in fear and sweat. I couldn’t think. All I could do was run.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE STARTER GROUND but the motor refused to turn over. I ground it again and again. The grind of the starter sounded unnaturally loud in the narrow alley. A half block away, running feet were patting the street. Men were shouting directions and orders. I heard a car motor start, then another and another. One of the men I’d heard speaking to the girls on the walk shouted, “You’d best go to your maw’s, Clarabelle. Fulton says to take Mamie with you. The son-of-a-bitch got away. Old man White outsmarted us. He’s taking him to Fillmore, but we’re going to try to head him off.” The girl said something I couldn’t hear. More cars started. The square was filled with racing motors and clashing gears. In the mouth of the alley, Ginty came to, and began to moan. The girl said, “There’s someone hurt in the alley.” I got out of the truck and tiptoed down the alley. A block from it’s mouth I began to run again. I ran into a garbage can and fell. I got to my feet and ran on. I hadn’t been smart. I’d been dumb. What I should have done was to let Sheriff White get me out of town and then slugged him. There was a narrower areaway the length of Cunningham’s warehouse. So far as I could tell, I hadn’t been followed. I walked the length of the areaway and looked out at Front Street. It was dark and silent. The only car in sight was a truck. It was a big semi-trailer affair marked on the body “Central Trucking Lines, St. Petersburg, Florida.” I stood gasping for breath, squeegeeing the sweat from my face and forehead. The sounds in the square were faint here, although I could still distinguish an occasional shout or hear the roar of a racing car motor. White, obviously, hadn’t been found as yet. I hoped I hadn’t hit the old man too hard. When I could breathe normally again, I felt for my cigarettes. They were gone. So was Sheriff White’s pistol. I’d lost both somewhere in the alley. I’d never wanted a cigarette so badly. I looked at the truck again, wondering if its driver had left any in the cab. I opened the door and looked in. There was a package on the seat. I climbed into the cab and closed the door. I lighted a cigarette and sucked smoke into my lungs. It tasted good, but I couldn’t stay where I was. Somehow I had to get to Sally. I had to talk

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to her. The keys were in the ignition of the truck. I experimented with the gears. I’d never driven a truck, but I’d driven a tank with Patton. They couldn’t be too different. I smoked another cigarette to allow the square to quiet. Then I started the truck, put it in low and rolled forward two hundred feet before I realized I had no lights. I braked, found the lights, and rolled on again. The bonfire was still blazing in the square but there was no one around it. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone on the walks. The truck demanded all my attention. I drove on slowly out of town, heading south along the river road. Twice, faster cars tooted behind me, but all they wanted was the road. I pulled over and let them pass. I could see the river now, black and slightly sinister-looking in the moonlight, only a few yards from the road. A mile out of town I heard sirens. The State boys had made better time than Sheriff White had expected them to. I thought at first they were on the highway. They weren’t. They were on the river road. I searched the sides of the road for a turn-off. There was none. There was only the river on one side of the road and the east end of the O’Hara slough on the other. There was nothing I could do but keep going. Their red spotlights revolving, their sirens wailing, two State patrol cars roared toward me. I had a brief glimpse of uniformed men in the passing glare of headlights and the car was gone. It was the same with the second patrol car. I began to breathe again. Then a quarter of a mile past the culvert, the headlights of the truck picked up a third patrol car. The two uniformed men standing in front of it waved me down. I didn’t know what I’d done, but I’d done something to make the two patrol cars I’d passed suspicious of the truck. They’d used their two-way radio to signal the third car to stop me. I braked the truck, put it into neutral and climbed down from the cab while the patrol car was still fifty yards distant. One of the troopers walked toward me. “What’s the idea, driver? Didn’t anyone ever tell you when you hear a siren it’s customary to pull over to the side of the road? At least, dim your headlights. God almighty, man, you almost smashed that first police car up against the culvert, hogging the road and blinding the driver the way you did.” What could I tell him? That I was a lawyer, not a truck driver, that I hadn’t known I was hogging the road? Still twenty feet away, the trooper said, “Let’s see your papers, fellow.” He stopped as his partner called, “Hold it, Johnny. That guy’s no truck driver. Hell, that’s Shannon. I went to school with him. That’s the guy who’s supposed to be in jail, the one the mob wants to

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lynch. He must have slugged White and escaped.” I would be safe with the troopers. Safe from the mob. But now that I’d gotten this far, I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to talk to Sally. I wanted to talk to old man Levy. He’d been as close to Paul as I had. He’d replaced me as Paul’s fishing partner. I wanted to know. I had to know why Joe Connors was in Elfers. Even then, I think I knew. I was small peanuts from Georgia shelled by a big-city slicker. I glanced sideways as both troopers drew their guns. I knew and trusted the river. It looked sinister. It wasn’t. I’d swum in it as a boy. I’d boated and hunted and fished in it. “Hold it,” the first trooper ordered. Instead, I ducked behind a magnolia tree growing wild by the side of the road and raced through the thigh-deep ferns toward the river. A shot whistled over my head. A second, a third shot followed. The bank was ten feet over the water. I took off in a shallow dive, found I was in deep water, dove again and swam under water, helped along by the current. When I came up for air, the headlights of the truck and the patrol car had vanished. I was alone in the night. My shoes were dragging me down. I unlaced them and kicked them off. I’d split my coat down the back in my dive. The tough linen was binding my arms. I slipped out of the two pieces and lay on my back to blow. Sally had said she was staying at the farm. It could be she was there now. It could be she’d gone back to the farm after they’d egged her at the theatre. My belt cut into my middle. It was three miles to the farm by water. It had been a long time since I had swum that far. I unbuckled my belt and struggled out of the white linen pants. It could be I couldn’t make it. I could try. The current swept me into a snag. I fought free and struck out for deeper water. The current would be swifter in the channel. The channel would also be free of snags. Sally might or might not be at the farm, but I doubted if the lynch mob would think of looking for me there. They’d give me credit for better sense. Besides, there were a dozen places on the farm where I could hide, at last temporarily. Sheriff White was another matter. My escape had made it personal with him. I’d hurt his pride. As soon as the old man recovered consciousness, he’d start to look for me. And he’d look until he found me. I swam until I couldn’t lift my arms, then turned on my back and floated. Until I could lift my arms again. Then I swam some more. When I figured I was about two miles down river, I shifted to a side stroke and began to search the moonlighted banks for landmarks. Some of the old trees were

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gone, undoubtedly toppled into the river by the spring floods. Still others had been struck by lightning or split by winds until I no longer recognized them. But the bayous and creeks and general shoreline were basically the I same. I floated and swam for another fifteen minutes. Then as I came abreast of a clump of bushes I thought I recognized I cut in and fought the current toward shore. I lay panting, winded, in the shallows, resting my face on one arm. I sat up and looked around me. I hadn’t done so badly. I’d only overshot my mark by about a quarter of a mile. I was in a little cove where Paul and I, as boys, had run a trot line for blue cat all of one hot summer. Because we’d undertaken the contract to supply the Commercial House with fish. I could remember that. But I couldn’t remember the something about Paul it seemed to me I should. I floundered to my feet and cut across what once had been the back pasture. When the judge had been alive. I hoped there were a pair of sneakers or old shoes in the barn. The soles of my feet were bleeding by the time I’d gone forty rods. Twice I ran into patches of sand spurs. There was something to be said for shoes. There was a small creek back of the barn. I washed the mud from my body in it and realized even my shorts were gone. They were somewhere back in the river, along with my shirt and shoes and suit. It didn’t matter. If Sally was at the farm, we were married. She’d seen men au naturel before. The thought sour in my mouth, I waded the creek and rounded the corner of the barn. There was a lighted lamp on the kitchen table and a car parked o in front of the kitchen. I walked close enough to see the lettering on the front door. Printed in neat block letters was the information: GINTY DRIVE-UR-SELF 120 Courthouse Square Keeping the car between me and the house, I looked in the kitchen window. Sally was sitting at the table, an empty coffee cup in front of her. She was still wearing the egg-stained evening gown. Her forehead resting in the palms of her hands, Sally was crying as if her heart was broken. For herself? For me? I rounded the car, walked up on the porch and opened the screen door. Tears, stained dress, hair disordered, Sally had never looked more beautiful. To me. Everything about Sally was pretty. I said, “Hello, honey. Feeling badly about something?” Sally got to her feet. The words seemed to be torn from her throat. “No,” she screamed. “Get out of here, Hi! Run. Joe Connors—”

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She tried to block the dark doorway with her body. Joe Connors put a white hand on either side of her waist and lifted her to one side. “Well,” he smiled without mirth. “Adam come back to the garden, eh?” The hard barrel of a gun pressed against the small of my back. I looked over my shoulder. Johnny Hass was holding the gun. “Hi, Hi,” he said, unsmiling. Sam Cassida was standing beside him. He bowed gravely from the waist. “Good evening, Counselor.” I thought, I’ve walked through this nightmare before. I had. The last time with Mary Lou. “But come in, Shannon,” Connors said. He lighted a cigarette and spoke through a veil of eddying smoke. “After all, this is your house.” I walked on into the kitchen. I wasn’t conscious of fear.. All I felt was— naked.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN A MOMENT OF SILENCE followed. For all that had happened, nothing had changed. At least in the old house. The frogs still boomed in the slough. The night insects still boomed outside the screen. The leaking faucet still dripped. The only new thing that had been added was Sally’s weeping. There was a dish towel hanging on a rack. I tried to wrap it around my waist. It was hopelessly inadequate. Sally sobbed, “There’s a pair of pants upstairs in the bedroom. I’ll get them.” Connors nodded at Cassida. “Go with her.” I stood, feeling like a fool until Sally and Cassida returned. She had not only a pair of pants, but also a pair of shorts, an undershirt, a clean shirt, a complete suit and a pair of shoes. I recognized them as the clothes I had been wearing when I had driven into town. The underthings were washed and ironed. The suit had been pressed. “Where did you get these?” I asked Sally. She said, “In a heap upstairs on the bedroom floor.” “But how did they get washed and ironed?” Sally looked at me defiantly, through her tears. “I washed and ironed them. Why? Is there anything wrong with that?” I shook my head. “No. I think that was very nice of you.” Women. I wished I understood them. I dressed with all four of them watching me. Funny. The difference the way a man feels when he has on a pair of pants. I felt more like the Hi Shannon who had walked out of his office on Spring Street than I had since

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the morning that Mary Lou had announced Sonny Blair. There was cold coffee in the pot on the stove. I drank a cup. There was a package of cigarettes on the table, my brand, Murads. I sucked the fragrant smoke into my lungs. Then I asked Connors, “All right. Let’s have it. What are you doing in Elfers?” “You wouldn’t know?” “No.” Connors looked tired and not as dapper as I remembered him. There were lines in his face I hadn’t seen there before. He said, “We’ll come to that. Well most certainly come to that. But how did you get out of that tin can down on the square?” I said, “That’s immaterial and irrelevant. Let’s just say I did.” “But they’re still after you?” “They are.” “How did you get here?” “I swam.” “The three miles from Elfers?” “I was too-busy trying to keep? on top to check the mileage.” Connors dropped his cigarette in the coffee cup I’d seen in front of Sally. For some reason he didn’t look like a big shot anymore. He looked like a dice hustler, one caught running a floating crap game and being chased down a dark alley by a big Irish cop. He looked like his highly polished veneer was beginning to come apart at the seams. He said, “You don’t know the trouble you’ve caused me, Shannon. You haven’t the least idea. I suppose you think I like to be laughed at.” I said, “I haven’t the least idea what you are talking about.” Connors nodded to Hass. “Hit him, Johnny.” Hass hit me with the barrel of his gun. The blow knocked me to the floor. I got back to my feet, sat in a chair and studied Connors’ face. Connors continued. “They’re laughing at me. Me, Joe Connors. An up and down the West Coast as far in as Reno and Vegas. I called a meeting of the syndicate. All of the big shots were there. I told them I’ve gotten rid of Hi Shannon. I’ve combed him out of our hair. I’ve paid him fifty thousand dollars to blow and turn over all the evidence he has collected against us.” His voice was wet. Like he was crying inside him. “We were sitting around the big polished table at Tony’s. Then I opened that goddamned briefcase. And what do you think I found?” I didn’t say anything. Connors said, “Concrete specifications for a goddamn swimming pool. So many sacks of cement. So many angle irons. So much reinforcing iron wire.”

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Cassida patted the sweat from his forehead at the thought. “And they’re still laughing,” Connors said. “Those who aren’t running to the State’s Attorney and the Attorney General and trying to make deals to save their own hides.” I tried to think. Mary Lou had handled the briefcase angle. The last I’d seen of it, I’d put it in a baggage locker in Angelino’s. For safekeeping. When I had come into her apartment she had assured me both the briefcase and my car were safe. At Tony’s she’d told Joe Connors that, knowing how important it was, she’d locked it in the back of my car. In the Carroll yard, she’d said she had turned it over to Johnny Hass. And Hass had nodded. I put my hand in the pocket of the pants I’d worn when I’d driven into Elfers. Along with two thin dimes, I could feel a key. I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. Knowing I always carried the briefcase with me, and seeing one similar or perhaps a duplicate leaning against the bar at Angelino’s, Mary Lou had assumed it was mine and picked it up. My briefcase, stuffed with evidence against Joe Connors and the syndicate, was still in the baggage locker in the washroom at Angelino’s. “Funny, ain’t it?” Hass said. He knocked me to the floor again. I sobered. I knew now who had killed Mary Lou and why. “So you followed me to Las Vegas and killed Mary Lou.” Sam Cassida shrugged. “She swore she’d turned over your briefcase. She said it was leaning against the bar where you’d been sitting. We tried to get her to say different. But she continued to be stubborn.” “So you killed her.” “Yeah.” “Then you tried to contact me. But I was on a drunk. Somewhere in Las Vegas. When I came back to the cottage you missed me. You’d just gotten around to checking the place you should have looked in the first place. The bar right there at the motel. You yelled, ‘You’ at me. You followed me to the police station. Then you were hooked. You didn’t want me locked Up for murder. You wanted to talk to me about the briefcase. So you beat it back to the tourist court. You disposed of the body. You cleaned “up the cabin so Keely and Roe would think I was nuts. But even then you couldn’t get at me. Lieutenant Keely took me to the edge of town and told me to blow. I did. At a hundred and ten miles an hour, most of the way to Elfers.” “You led us quite a chase, pal,” Johnny Hass admitted. “We knew where you were headed,” Connors said. “But we had to go back to L.A. first to assure the boys we’d get you. And we have. When we did get to town and heard you were in that Civil War museum down there in that cow pasture, we said to ourselves, Hi’s too smart a lad to let the reubens hold him. We

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tried to figure some angle to spring you. When we couldn’t, we just relaxed and came out here.” He nodded at Sally. “We knew that with her in town, if you did get free, you’d contact her. And you have.” An inquisitive moth cremated itself in the flame of the lamp. Her voice small, Sally said. “Then it is true what it said in the newspapers about you and your secretary? You did go to Las Vegas with her?” I looked across the lamp at her. “Yeah.” “But why?” Sally protested. “What could she possibly give you that I couldn’t? She wasn’t even very pretty.” “No,” I admitted. “She wasn’t.” “And why did you resign as special prosecutor, Hi? Why did you throw away your career? For a measly fifty thousand dollars?” I got a little hot under the collar of the shirt she’d ironed. “Don’t talk to me like that, Sally. If it hadn’t been for you two-timing me with Sonny Blair, none of this would have happened.” It was very still in the old kitchen. The only sound was the drone of the bugs and the thunk, thunk, jug-o-rum of the frogs. Sally moved away from the dining-room door. Connors tried to stop her. She slapped his hands away. She crossed the kitchen and stood beside my chair. Her voice was still small. “Would you mind repeating that, Hi? What did you just say about me and that slimy, washed-up little crooner?” A lump started to build in my stomach. It worked up to my throat. Sally wasn’t shamed. She was indignant. It showed in the hurt look in her eyes, the rise and fall of her breasts. I said, “If you hadn’t spent a weekend with Blair because he promised you the lead in Manny Norman’s new picture, and then run down a little kid, both of you blind drunk, on your way back to location in Victorville, I wouldn’t have had to make a deal with Connors. I wouldn’t have had to sell out for enough to pay off the kid’s parents and keep the mess out of the papers.” One of Sally’s small hands felt her throat. “Who told you that story, Hi?” I said, “Blair himself. He came into my office that afternoon, biting his nails off up to the elbows. All he could raise was ten thousand. The kid’s parents wanted fifty. I could get it up to twenty-five. By selling the car and my equity in the Benedict Canyon place I could even push it to forty. But the kid’s parents knew they had us where they wanted us. It meant the end of your career if it got in the paper. Blair was afraid they wouldn’t go for forty. So when Connors made his offer, I took it. Frankly, with you having treated me the way you had, I didn’t give a damn. And as far as Mary Lou was concerned, that again was hurt on my part. I figured what was fun for the goose might be fun for the gander.”

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Still speaking quietly, Sally asked, “You saw this child, killed by me?” “I saw her coffin.” “You met her parents?” “Twice. In a shack just this side of Palmdale.” “And you paid them the fifty thousand dollars that Joe Connors paid you to resign as special prosecutor and to turn over all the evidence you had collected against him and the syndicate he represents?” “That’s right.” The comers of Sally’s mouth turned down. “You boob. You great big cracker boob. You dumb-smart boy from Georgia. You don’t deserve any shoes on your feet.” “You deny you went to Lake Tahoe?” Sally blew up at her bangs in her anger. “No. A half hour after I reached Mother’s Cecil Rowe phoned. He said he’d been phoning all over Los Angeles trying to reach me, that he had finally called you and you had told him that I had gone to Grass Valley to spend the weekend with my folks.” The lump in my throat grew larger. Cecil Rowe was the head of Amalgamated Pictures. I vaguely remembered his secretary calling and asking me if I knew where Mr. Rowe could contact Sally. And I’d told her Sally had gone to Grass Valley. Sally continued. “Mr. Rowe said he was spending the weekend at Lake Tahoe and as long as I was so close he’d like me to run over and read a manuscript that the story department had just purchased. He said he thought it would make a beautiful starring vehicle for me. Naturally I was excited, I had Father drive me to Lake Tahoe. I checked into the hotel where Mr. Rowe was staying. He gave me the manuscript. I sat up all night Friday reading it. I read it again Saturday and Saturday night. It was wonderful. It was the sort of part I’d always wanted to play. I was so excited about it I didn’t even leave my room. I had room service send up all my meals.” Tears trickled down her pretty cheeks but her voice continued low and calm. “Then Sunday afternoon I phoned Mr. Rowe’s suite and said I thought the story was beautiful and I wanted to play the part and he told me to come down and we would discuss the terms of my new contract. I did.” Her slim shoulders slumped. “I walked in, all excited.” Her smile was bitter. “But it seems that Mr. Rowe has been watching me for some time. He wanted to star me. Sure. But the contract he had in mind is what is commonly termed in the business a bedroom contract. It seems it isn’t only my talents he admires. Oh, Cecil was very nice about it, very suave, very much

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the gentleman. But it all boiled down to go to bed with him or else.” Her cheeks were wet now. “I couldn’t do that to you, Hi. Not when I love you as I do.” The kitchen was deathly still when Sally finished. A moth beat its wings against the hot chimney and the sound was plainly audible. Sally wiped her wet cheeks with the back of one hand. “I told him where he could put his contract, including the one I already had. I told him I’d finish ‘Desert Rat,’ then I was through, that if I had to lay my way to stardom I’d rather be just plain Mrs. Shannon. That’s what I tried to tell you when you phoned me in Victorville. That’s why I drove back to Los Angeles when you acted so funny over the phone. And I waited and I waited and waited until I had to drive back and shoot those damn dawn shots.” On her lips it wasn’t profanity. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead with perspiration. Sally blew up at them again. “Then all that nasty business broke in the papers and I figured you might come here.” Her voice toneless, she went on, “So we’d finished ‘Desert Rat’ and I flew down here to be with you in your trouble. And found you in this mess. But even then you didn’t want me to be with you.” I tried to take her hand. Sally slapped my hand away. “No. I spent the weekend with Sonny Blair in Lake Tahoe. Remember? And on my way back to location Monday morning, both of us blind drunk, me driving, I presume, I ran down and killed a child.” There was pent-up hysteria in her sob. “The only thing wrong with that scenario is, if Sonny Blair and I were the last man and woman left in the world, and I was on fire and he was a fireman, I wouldn’t let the slimy little crooner squirt one drop of water on me.” It was an effort to turn my head. My neck muscles felt rusty. I turned it far enough so I could see Joe Connors. The skin on his face was stretched taut, like the skin on a grinning mummy. “So now you know,” he said. “You son-of-a-bitch,” I named him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE INSECTS CONTINUED to drone, the frogs continued to thunk. I rested my hot face in my hands. How could I have been such a fool? The whole thing had been a plant, of course. With me breathing on his neck the way I had, Connors had to get me. And he had. They had been preparing the Sonny Blair deal for some time, since the night of Manny Norman’s party. They’d planted a seed in a big dumb Georgia boy’s mind, knowing it would grow. They’d been ready to act as

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soon as—opportunity presented itself. It had, on the Friday night the head of Amalgamated Pictures had summoned Sally to Lake Tahoe. Blair was a better actor than I’d given him credit for. He’d played his part well. God knew how much he’d been paid. That went for Attorney Roberts and the Carroll family. There was a coffin, but no child in it. Or maybe there had been. Connors and the syndicate usually covered all angles. Life was cheap to them. I didn’t know about Mary Lou. It could be she, too, had been planted on me. Somehow I doubted it. It was more likely that Mary Lou had acted in good faith. She had been looking for excitement. She’d been an opportunist. She’d overheard my conversation with Blair. She knew that my pride was hurt. She knew I usually ate in Angelino’s, when Sally was out of town. She’d also known that there was no salve sold to smear on a hurt husband’s pride to compare with another woman’s body. “Are they all like you down in Georgia?” Mary Lou had asked me. I got up from the table, staggered across the kitchen and was sick in the woodbox. When I’d finished, Joe Connors said: “Now to get back to your briefcase.” I rested my hands on the old woodburning range, as if to steady myself. The poker was sticking out of the mess of white oak ashes in the fire box. I picked it up, casually, turned and broke Johnny Hass’ gun arm with it before he could trigger his gun. He screamed in pain. The gun thudded to the floor. San Cassida made a dive for it. I put my foot on the gun and used the poker on his head. The smear of white ashes turned red. Cassida lay down on the floor as if he was very tired of standing. He breathed hoarsely a few times. Then he grew tired of breathing, too. Johnny Hass continued to scream in pain. Connors licked at the dried lips on his suddenly mummified face. He was finished with being a big shot. All he was, was scared. He whimpered, “For God’s sake, Hi—.” I said, “Let’s leave Him out of this. I imagine He has enough trouble looking after folks who deserve to be looked after.” Hass stopped screaming. He rushed me, forcing me back. He stooped and snatched at the gun with his left hand. I swung the poker again. There was a ca-rack as the big bone in his left arm broke. Hass resumed where he had left off screaming. “A shame you haven’t got another arm,” I said. “Also, shame on. you boys for driving all this way with only one gun among the three of you. The syndicate wouldn’t like that if they knew. That’s breaking the cardinal rule

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of the San Quentin Alumni Association. That’s giving a sucker an almost even break.” Sally said, “Hi.” She took a quick step toward me and stopped. Her lower lip continued to quiver but her eyes turned cold again. The comers of her mouth turned down. “Sure. I know how you feel, kid,” I told her. What could I say? I was sorry? “I don’t blame you. I’m not worth your feeling bad about. I ought to have my mind washed out with soap, lye soap.” I looked over her shoulder at the wall phone, wondering if it still worked. Connors looked at the door, uncertainly. I picked Hass’ gun from the floor. “Uh uh,” I told Connors. “Your second thought was the best one. Believe me. You’d look funny as hell with a hole in the back of your head.” Connors believed me. He sat in one of the straight-backed chairs as if he wished he could be sick. I handed Sally the gun. “One last favor, Sally. For old times’ sake. Point this at Connors, will you? While I make a long distance call.” Sally’s lower lip stopped quivering. She took the gun. “I’ll be glad to.” She laid her free hand on my arm. “Hi—?” “What?” I asked her. “Did you like her as much? Was she as good as I am?” “Who?” “Mary Lou Able.” “No.” Her small jaw firmed. “I’m glad.” Women. Who can understand them? The phone was on a party line. I took the receiver from the hook and listened. No one was on the wire. I spun the crank. When the operator answered, I said, “Long distance, please.” The operator gasped. “You sound like Hi Shannon.” I said, “I am. And you sound like Nelly Davis.” She said, “Mrs. Henry Burns now.” “Fine,” I enthused. “Look, Nelly. For the sake of the times you and Hank and I double-dated when we were in high school, get me the residence of Attorney General Gilmore in Sacramento, California. Let me-finish my conversation. Then give me five minutes before you call Sheriff White and tell him I’m somewhere on the line.” Nelly was dubious. “Well, okay. But you shouldn’t have done it, Hi.” “Done what?” “Kill Paul.” I told her, “I didn’t kill Paul, Nelly. What’s more, I think I know who did.

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How’s Sheriff White?” She said, “Sore as a boil. The old man’s got a lump the size of a pecan on his jaw. And is he mad. He says he’s going to shoot you on sight.” I said, “Then I better stay out of sight. Now get me the party I asked for, like a good girl, Nelly.” She was still dubious. “Well — okay. But if you hadn’t soldiered with Hank, if he didn’t think the sun rose, well—.” She left it there, and I heard her trying to get through to Atlanta. Sally said something I couldn’t hear through Johnny Hass’ screaming. I let the receiver dangle by its cord; I took the gun out of Sally’s hands. I gave Hass what he’d given me, to stop his screaming. I gave him the barrel twice, across his forehead. It worked. He stopped screaming and lay down beside Sam Cassida. I put the gun back in Sally’s hand. “Now what did you say?” Her under lip thrust forward in a sudden pout. “Hank and Nelly and you and who? Whom did you double-date with?” I told her, “A girl in town,” and put the receiver to my ear. It being early evening in California, the long distance operator in Atlanta had no trouble getting through to Sacramento. I heard the Sacramento operator say, “Just a minute. I will connect you.” A phone rang for a few minutes. Then Atlanta said, “Go ahead, Elfers. Sacramento is o on the wire.” “This is Hi Shannon, Mr. Gilmore,” I said. He wasn’t pleased to hear from me. Before he could say so, I continued: “Sure. I know how you feel. But if you’ll swallow your bile for two minutes, I’ll give you Joe Connors and his whole goddamn syndicate on a silver platter. Have you a pencil handy?” Gilmore said he had. I took the locker key from my pocket and looked at it. “Send a man, send two big men, to Angelino’s bar and grill on Spring Street in Los Angeles. There’s a baggage locker in the washroom. Have them chisel open compartment L4732S. They’ll find a briefcase in it. In the briefcase you will find names, places, dates, bank vault numbers, pictures, depositions, legal evidence admissible in any court of law, enough to o tuck Connors away for twenty years. If we draw an even half-smart jury we may be able to snug him in the lethal chamber and let him listen to the pellets drop.” Gilmore enthused, “I might have known, Shannon. I might have known. I’ve always been an excellent judge of character.” That’s what you think, I thought. I said, “Pass the word along that Joe Connors has sung. There’s plenty of stuff in the briefcase to back your story. Let the word out that Joe followed me down here to Elfers, Georgia, and told me the whole thing in

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an attempt to save his hide.” “No,” Connors cried. Sally pointed the gun at the middle of his groin. “Hi told you to stay put. You as much as move an eyelash and I’ll shoot.” Connors froze in his chair. He thought Sally meant it. She did. “Who was that?” Gilmore asked. I said, “Joe Connors. He’s here in the room with me. But I’m not going to hold him. We can pick him up whenever we want him now. He’ll be glad to come to us for protection. But in the interim it could be that the syndicate will draw a cross on his back and save the State the expense of trying him. We can concentrate on the other boys mentioned in my data.” “Fine,” Attorney General Gilmore said. “And what about Johnny Hass?” I said, “He’s here, too. With a pair of broken arms. I’ll have him held here in Elfers until you send someone down for him. That way, we’ll have a canary in our cage in case there are any gaps in our data.” I was glad there were twenty-three hundred miles between us. Gilmore was so pleased he would have kissed me. “I knew it,” he repeated. “I knew it. I’m never mistaken in a man. That phony resignation you sent me was just a pit for Connors to fall into.” I didn’t bother to correct him. “And Sam Cassida?” Gilmore asked. “Is dead.” “You’re positive?” “I am.” “How do you know?” I said, “I just killed him,” and hung up. His head in his hands, Joe Connors was rocking back and forth in his chair — like an evil old man rocking beside his own coffin. I rang Nelly again. Her voice had changed. “Look, Hi,” she said. “I’m not supposed to, but I listened in and — well — I’m beginning to wonder if maybe Hank isn’t right.” “Then I get the five minutes?” “I’ll give you ten,” Nelly told me. I hung up and turned back to Sally. She was still holding the gun on Connors. I took it out of her hand and nudged him with the barrel. “Okay. Get going, Connors.” His eyes were haunted. “Where?” I said, “That’s up to you. Locking you up would be too good for a guy who pulled the trick that you pulled on me. I want you to worry a little. I want you to die a few times before some syndicate killer sent by the boys who think you sold them out says, ‘Just a minute, Joe.’ Some night on a

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dark street.” Connors staggered out of the kitchen like a man walking in a dream. He opened the door of the rental car and started to get in. I put a bullet through the name Ginty to dissuade him. “Uh uh,” I told him. “You’re on foot. It so happens I want to use the car.” Connors staggered down the drive to the highway. Twice in the seventy feet he turned and looked over his shoulder. Then he disappeared in the moonlight. But I knew. He’d look over his shoulder a thousand times before he got where he was going. When he was out of sight, I leaned against the jamb of the kitchen door. I was holding the screen open. Mosquitos settled on my face and hands in wings and flights. I didn’t even feel them. I’d taken care of Joe Connors. But I still had the Paul Mason business to face. Nine-tenths of Elfers County thought that I had killed Paul. Sheriff White had threatened to shoot me on sight. Right now, the hills and brush and cane brakes were filled with bobbing lights. With grim-faced armed men back of the lights. Eager to help me keep my postponed date with a railroad trestle. It didn’t make much difference who found me first, the lynch mob or the law. The net result would be the’ same. Nelly would give me the ten minutes I’d asked for. Then the dark road down which Joe had staggered would begin to fill with lights. It was up to me to make those ten minutes count. I— wished I knew what to do. Sally’s voice was small again. “Don’t look like that, Hi. Would a drink do any good? I’ve some upstairs in that little silver flask you gave me.” I looked at her. “Thanks. I’d rather have a cup of hot coffee. But I haven’t the time. So let it go.” “Whatever you say.” “So you tore up your contract, eh?” Sally bobbed her head. “Uh huh. I’m an ex-motion picture actress.” I said, “I’m glad.” “So am I,” Sally said. The silence grew between us. The drone of the insects and the thunk thunk of the frogs was beginning to get on my nerves. I was lonesome for the noise and bustle of Hollywood and Vine, the mad rush of eight cars abreast in Cuahenga Pass, a leather-lunged newsboy yelling, “Waddaya read? Get your evening paper!”, the shrill toot of a policeman’s whistle, the awed voice of an Iowa tourist standing in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, saying, “Oh, migawd. Look, Effie. There in that cement. There’s Greta Garbo’s footprints and Monty Woottey’s beard.” I wondered why I had ever wanted to come back to Elfers County, to any

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rural community. The boy had been out of the country. Now the country was out of the boy. As far as I was concerned, the wide open spaces were strictly for the cows and the birds. Sally swallowed something in her throat. “Now, if you weren’t in this mess and I wasn’t mad at you, we could have children.” The package of Murads was still on the kitchen table. I lit one. The Turkish tobacco smelled good. It tasted better. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s it.” “That’s what?” Sally puzzled. I told her. “What all this is about. Look. You want to stay here until the sheriff gets here?” Sally shook her head. “No. I want to go with you.” I opened the screen door for her. “Then let’s drive down the road a way before the bloodhounds catch us. I want to talk to an old storekeeper named Levy.” Sally walked ahead of me to the rented car. “He knows who killed your friend Paul?” I thought a moment, then shook my head. “No. I doubt if Levy knows that.” Sally’s eyes filled with tears. “Then why waste time, Hi? Why don’t we just drive on? To New Orleans, anywhere. Those awful men who were in the square are going to lynch you if they catch you. I know. They told me so.” I realized I was breathing hard. “Yeah. I know.” Sally had snatched up her purse before leaving the kitchen. “We’ve plenty of money. Enough to take a boat to Central or South America.” She took a familiar-looking wallet out of her purse. “There’s almost fifteen thousand dollars in your wallet.” “Where did you get that?” I asked her. She said, “Under the pillow on the bed you used. When I made up the bed this morning.” I tried to think. Putting my wallet under my pillow was an old habit of mine. When I’d come back from town, drunk, after my quarrel with Paul, I must have followed the old pattern by putting my wallet in its right place. It hadn’t been in the coat I’d thrown into the bushes after the hooded and masked men had beaten me. That meant my own money hadn’t been used to frame me. Someone had wanted me to die so damn bad they’d risked eight grand of their own. And, according to May’s story, there had been exactly eight thousand dollars in Paul’s safe. Sally said, “We could go to Buenos Aires.” I shook my head at her. “No,

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running never gets a man anything but winded. I knew that a long time ago, but it just came back to me.” Sally’s voice was small again. “But what are you going to do, Hi?” I started the rented car. “I’m going to talk to old man Levy.” “But you said he doesn’t know who killed your friend.” “I doubt if he does.” “Then what good will talking to him do?” I drove out of the yard. “Because if I’m right about this thing, old man Levy can back me up as to why Paul was murdered.” Aware that I was driving without lights, I switched them on, then switched them off again, in case some eager beaver, anxious to be the first man on the rope, should have stumbled on the bright idea that I might go back to the home place. There was plenty of moonlight to drive by. “Why?” Sally asked. I drove a little faster. “Uh uh. You see, if what I’m thinking is so, my coming back to Elfers in disgrace and quarreling with Paul yesterday afternoon was the luckiest possible break for the person who killed him. When I hit town he was desperate and he jumped at the chance of killing Paul and blaming it on me.” Sally persisted. “But Paul was fine. He was real. He was genuine. I could tell that in the few times I met him. Why should anyone want to kill Paul?” I told her. “Because in addition to the things you named, despite his bum foot, Paul was all man. When he played he played for keeps. He believed in the sanctity of marriage. He was also a crack shot. And, if I’m right, about six or seven months ago the man who killed him started to dig his own grave. With a Hollywood spade.” Sally’s eyes grew round in the moonlight filtering into the car. “Oh,” she said. “I think I see what you mean.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN SHORTLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT, there was an electrical storm. There was a lot of lightning and some thunder. But no rain fell. Still driving without lights, I turned into Paul Mason’s drive and sat a moment looking out at the night. Paul had built on top of a hill. From where I sat, I could see all of Elfers and most of the surrounding countryside. And as far as I could see, the roads radiating from Elfers and the fields and hills between them were pinpricked with bobbing lights. The boys wanted me, bad. I lit a cigarette, cupping the match flame in both hands. Then I transferred my attention to the house. It was dark but I thought I could see some-

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thing white, possibly May in a white negligee, on the porch. It was May, sitting in the porch glider. Her cigarette glowed in the dark once, twice, three times, possibly some prearranged signal. I put my head to the window and sucked my cigarette back at her, hoping three times was the answer. It seemed to be. At least, no lights came on. I got out of the car. As I did, the phone inside the house rang and the something in white got up off the glider and floated into the house. I crunched up the gravel drive to the porch. The phone stopped ringing. May said: “I see, Sheriff White. You think you have Hi bottled up in the O’Hara slough. Fine. I hope you don’t take him alive. I hope one of the boys shoots him right between the eyes. For what he did to poor Paul.” May seemed puzzled. “No. I don’t know anyone named Cassida or Hass. I never heard Paul mention the names. You found them in the kitchen of the Shannon place? Oh, I see. You think they work for the racketeer who ran Hi out of Los Angeles. And one of them is dead?” May seemed pleased. “Another murder on Hi’s conscience. Well, thanks for calling, sheriff. Do call me back when you get him. I won’t be able to sleep a wink until you do.” A receiver clicked into a cradle. The glowing tip of a cigarette floated back through the dark living room to the porch. I opened the screen door. May said, “You shouldn’t have come tonight, honey. Just let one of these small-town cats put two and two together and we’d both go to the chair.” She crossed the porch to me. “But I’m glad you did.” She slid her arms around my neck in the dark. Her body pressed close to mine. There was nothing under the white negligee but May. She pulled my head down and kissed me. Then, beating at my chest, trying to get out of my arms, she screamed, “My God. You’re Hi Shannon.” I held her a moment longer. “Who were you expecting, baby?” May recovered some of her composure, with an effort. She pulled her gaping negligee together. “You fool, you utter fool, Hi. Why come whining to me? Why not just give yourself up and get it over?” I was deliberately corny. “Because I’m allergic to lynchings. It seems I have a tender neck.” May backed across the porch into the still darker living room. I followed her. May changed her tactics. “I’d like to help you, Hi. Really I would. You know I’ve always loved you. Even more than I loved Paul.” She stopped backing and allowed me to catch up with her. I took her by her upper arms. Her negligee gaped again. May didn’t seem to notice. Her body was soft and warm, and a trifle pudgy. From overeating. From sitting on her ample fanny playing the lady of the manor while Paul’s money hired

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maids to do and fetch for her. May moved even closer to me. “Perhaps I should help you. You were drunk, weren’t you, Hi? You didn’t mean to kill Paul, did you?” “I didn’t kill Paul.” May didn’t seem to hear me. Her hips began to press against mine. “You weren’t very nice to me when Paul and I visited you at your home in LA.” I said, “Both of us were married.” May’s fingers felt for and fondled the lobes of my ears. “I could drive you to New Orleans. The lynch mob wouldn’t dream of stopping my car.” Her hip continued to press. She sucked in her breath and let it ooze out with her words. “I’d have to come back, here, of course, to wind up Paul’s affairs. But we could spend a week or two together before you left. Then I could join you wherever you went.” Her fingers tangled my hair. She pulled my mouth down to hers. Her lips were wet and parted. She moaned as she kissed me, then she made small animal sounds in her throat. “I love you, Hi,” May panted. “I’ve always loved you. Since we were kids in high school and used to double-date with Hank and Nelly.” She seemed eager for me to believe her. “You did it for me, didn’t you, Hi? You killed Paul for me, didn’t you? You do love me, don’t you? That’s why you came here. You love me as much as I do you.” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My mouth was too full of hers. “Let’s sit on the sofa,” May whispered. I sat on the sofa with her. She kissed me again, for a long time. Then she lay back with her head on a big tailored pillow. “Prove you love me, Hi,” she panted. “Prove you killed Paul for me.” I put my hand on her, to see how far she would go. May was willing to go all the way. She wanted to. I simulated shock. “What? And you carrying Paul’s child?” May flung my hand aside. Her eyes were slightly luminous and cat green in the dark. The glow went out of them. They hooded. All I could see was a white blurred oval of face. “You son-of-a-bitch,” May said. She sat up and fastened her negligee at the waist, then opened the drawer of a small table near the sofa as if in search of a package of cigarettes. Her hand came up with a .32 calibered pistol in it. “You wise cracker son-of-a-bitch,” May amplified her name calling. “I ought to shoot you. I think I will. No one in Elfers would blame me. In fact, they’d pin a medal on me.” “Could be,” I admitted. “You and your boy friend have certainly stuffed the eyes of the local yokels with cotton. You’ve fooled them almost as badly as Joe Connors fooled me.” May was still debating shooting me. “I could say you tried to attack me.”

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“With me married to Sally Shannon?” She cursed me again. I continued, “Besides, you might have a hard time explaining why I came here in the first place. Remember?” I quoted her. “You shouldn’t have come tonight, honey. Just let one of these small town cats put two and two together and we’d both go to the chair.” May pulled at the chain of a lamp and a dim light came on more of a night light than a lamp. She sat a moment, chewing her lower lip in indecision. Then, still covering me with the gun, she pulled the phone on the coffee table toward her. Metropolitan Elfers was modem. It had dial phones. May dialect a number. When the connection was made, she said, “Come here to the house as fast as you can get here. I’m holding a gun on him. But I don’t like the way he’s acting. I don’t like the way he looks. He’s too smug. He knows.” She cradled the phone and sat back on the sofa. “Now what happens?” I asked her. “Now,” May told me, “we wait. You asked for this, Hi. It could have been much different. I meant what I said. I’d have gone away with you.” A long minute grew into two minutes. Two minutes grew to five. Somewhere out in the hills a trigger-happy posse member or would-be lyncher fired a fusillade of shots. At the distance they sounded like the pop of a child’s toy gun. “It looks,” I said, pleasantly, “as if someone just got me. I hope I’m not hurt too badly.” May cursed me again. The strain was telling on her. Perspiration splotched her makeup. Great damp patches appeared in the armpits of her negligee. I said, “They talk about the thirteen points at which a person may offend. But I can never make them tally. I either come out too few or tool many.” May said, “Damn you, Hi.” She was close to hysteria. “Whose idea was it for you to come here?” I told her the truth. “It was mine.” A swiftly moving car roared up the hill, turned in the drive and braked in a shower of gravel. Hurrying feet patted the walk. The spring on the porch screen door sponged like an angry wasp. The door slammed. The feet continued across the porch and into the living room. “Hello, Phil,” I said, without turning my head. “What took you so long? May was getting worried.” Doctor Handley walked into my range of vision. “Why didn’t you shoot him when he first walked in?” he asked her. “How do you know this isn’t

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a trap?” I answered for May. “She doesn’t. That’s why she’s worried. She doesn’t know what to do.” Handley took the gun from May’s hand and sat on the arm of a chair looking at me thoughtfully. “For that matter, how did you know I killed Paul?” I admitted, “I didn’t, for certain, until you just told me. I surmised it, but I didn’t know. I did have you figured for May’s lover.” “Why?” I gave May the credit due her. “May always did shoot high. And next to Paul, from her point of view, you’re the most desirable male in Elfers.” Handley’s smile was thin. “Thank you. I treasure your good opinion.” May began to sob. “What are you going to do? I mean, with Hi.” “I don’t know yet,” Handley admitted. “Ill have to think.” I lighted another cigarette. “We all have our little problems, don’t we? But disposing of a six-foot-two, two-hundred pound corpse has baffled a lot of killers. On the other hand, if you let my body be found here, there’s bound to be talk. And we can’t afford talk, can we?” Handley cursed me without heat. He acted like a man who was beginning to wonder if the candle had been worth the burning. “What pointed to me, Shannon? I mean, outside of the eligibility angle. Or was it just guesswork on your part?” I said, “Not entirely. When a man has defended as many crooks as I have, he gets so he can smell them. Then you rather gave yourself away by asking the questions you did. Did I get a license number of the car used by the masked men who had beaten me? What make of car was it? Then, too, you were the first man in town to mention the word lynch. That was way back in Paul’s office, right after the body had been discovered. You said the only result of a lynching would be to give Elfers a bad name in the Northern papers. And it’s odd what the power of suggestion will do.” May was smoking a cigarette. Handley took it from her lips with his free hand. He sucked smoke into his lungs and put the cigarette back where he had found it. “Go on.” I said, “There was also that little speech you made in front of the courthouse. On the surface, it sounded fine. You were a civic-minded citizen attempting to restrain your fellow townsmen from illegal violence. But it only stirred up the boys more. ‘After all, we don’t know that Hi killed Paul.’ And that bit about making sure they remembered she was pregnant. ‘But that’s the way life is.’ That was really a little gem.”

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“You’re smart, Hi,” Doctor Handley admitted. “Shoot him,” May said. “Shoot the big cracker bastard.” Handley shook his head. “Not until we hear all of the indictment.” He used May’s cigarette again. “Is there anything else Shannon? So far everything you’ve said has been surmise and conjecture.” “True,” I admitted. “Have you anything concrete, anything that would stand up in a court of law?” I said, “There’s the eight thousand dollars.” “What about the money?” “You were seen putting it in the back of my car.” Handley removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket with his free hand and used it to pat his forehead. “You’re guessing,” he smiled. “You really don’t know a damn thing. I had Ginty slip the money under your tire.” I said, “I suppose you also sent Ginty back down to the cane brakes to find my bloody clothes and remove evidence that might prove my contention that I’d been beaten by masked men.” Handley continued to smile. “No. I left him there, after we beat you to unconsciousness. It would seem I have a flair for this sort of thing. And I left Ginty behind with instructions to gather up your bloody clothes in case you did change them, as you did.” “You were the lad with the sap.” “That’s right.” “You ordered me out of town, knowing all the time I wouldn’t leave.” Doctor Handley was very pleased with Doctor Handley. “Well, let’s put it this way, Shannon.” “How?” “I hoped you wouldn’t. If you had it would have raised hob with my plans. You see, I’d just beaten in Paul’s brains. And I had to have a scapegoat.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN I LOOKED AT MAY. The corners of her mouth twisted. She ran her hands over her breasts and on down over her hips. Like the bitch she was. Like Sally had named her. On the third floor of the courthouse. “So now you know,” she said. I said, “I’ve known for a long time. That is, what you are, May. Ever since you did everything you could, including displaying your merchandise time after time, when you and Paul visited Sally and me. And then again

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tonight. Even in the jam you’re in, even pregnant by Phil here, you were willing to go all the way.” May’s breasts rose and fell with simulated anger. “That’s a lie.” She allowed her negligee to gape a trifle to make certain Handley could see and presumably be inflamed by the body for which he’d killed Paul. “Don’t believe him, Phil. Hi’s always wanted me. He tried to force me tonight. He almost did, before I got my hands on a gun.” Handley was sensible about it. “I’m hardly in a position to be jealous. And histrionics will get us nowhere, May.” His eyes continued to search my face. “But what did you mean by that crack you just made, Shannon, about May being pregnant by me?” I said, “Just that. It so happens I know Paul was sterile and May couldn’t be pregnant by him. Ergo, as you are the other man in her life, as you proved by coming here in answer to her phone call, it has to be you.” “That’s a lie,” May said, hotly. I shook my head at her. “Uh uh. To double check, just before I came here I phoned the surgeon in Atlanta who performed the operation on Paul. A Doctor Page. With offices on Peachtree Street. I can also give you his residence address if you want it.” “He knows,” Handley admitted. May was bitter. “How could you make a long distance call,” she gestured vaguely at the night, “with every able-bodied man in Elfers County looking for you?” I told her. “Nelly Burns, nee Nelly Davis, is on the night exchange. And you and I and Nelly and Hank used to double-date. Remember? Besides, I soldiered with Hank. In fact, I’ve made two long distance calls tonight. But the first one doesn’t concern you.” “Who was fool enough to let you use their phone?” May asked. I said, “I made one call from the farm and the other from old man Levy’s store.” Doctor Handley might have been talking to himself. “I’ve been afraid of old man Levy. He and Paul were always very close.” May was still incredulous. “Paul told you? Paul told you a thing like that? He told that even to his best friend?” I thought of Paul’s battered head and face as I had last seen them and my cigarette didn’t taste as good as it had. I snuffed it. “Not in so many words,” I admitted. Handley asked, “Then how come you even know what doctor performed the operation?” I said, “It began in the back of my mind. For a long time I couldn’t place

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it. It was just a chance remark Paul made one afternoon on a flying trip to the Coast, before he and May were married, but after their engagement had been announced. We were driving along the Rim of the World Highway up to Lake Arrowhead to have cocktails with Sally. I made some crack about hoping he and May would have a dozen kids and Paul cut me short by saying there weren’t going to be any children. It was just a remark. I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time. But after I learned May was pregnant, the memory of the something that Paul had said concerning children came back to haunt me. “An hour or so ago, I remembered what Paul had said. Evading the posse and the would-be lynchers, I got to old man Levy’s store. And I found that Paul had confided in the old man exactly what he intended to do before he had it done. All his life, ever since we were boys, Paul was sensitive about his foot. And just before you and he were married, May, Paul told old man Levy that to make sure he would never perpetuate the clubfoot that had caused him so much mental and physical suffering, he intended to go to Doctor Page in Atlanta and have an operation performed that, while it wouldn’t impair his manhood or his sexual desire, would leave him sterile and incapable of having any issue. Handley made a wry grimace. “That tears it. You can see why I had to kill Paul.” I nodded. “It was either kill Paul or be killed.” May whispered, “Paul would have killed us both.” Handley continued, “Your returning to Elfers was a godsend. Paul had been suspicious of my attentions to May for some time. In fact he came home early one afternoon and damn near caught us. May was afraid to permit me to abort her. She was afraid that Paul would know what was wrong with her and file suit for divorce. Which left us in the middle. We couldn’t keep it secret much longer. What with the money Paul has made during these past few years, we couldn’t allow him to divorce May.” “So you killed him. Handley’s voice was flat. “So I killed him. I beat in his goddamn head with his own cane. This way, after a reasonable lapse of time, out of respect to the dead, May and I can marry. I can legitimize my child and have all Paul’s money to boot.” May seemed to be trying to convince herself. “And we’ll get away with it, too.” “Of course we will,” Handley assured her. I asked, “How about old man Levy? You going to kill him, too?” Handley was beyond caring. “If I have to.”

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“And Doctor Page?” I got the reaction I’d expected. Handley was keeping too tight a rein on his nerves. All the blood drained from his face. His nostrils pinched together. “Shut up, goddamn it,” he panted. “I’ll do whatever I have to do. Now that I’m in this deep, a few more bodies won’t matter.” He got to his feet and motioned me to mine. “Let’s go, Shannon.” I got slowly to my feet. “Where?” “Out to my car.” “And then?” “We’re going to take a little ride. Up into the hills or maybe down along the river. I’m the coroner of Elfers County, legally empowered to act in all matters of the law.” His hate whipped his saliva to foam. It frothed at the comers of his mouth and drooled down his chin. “And I’m going to be the lucky member of the posse who finds you.” I helped him along. “I’m going to resist,” Handley nodded. “That’s right.” “And you’re going to shoot me.” “Yes.” I sat back in my chair again. “No. I haven’t the least desire to be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of your burned love. Now put that gun away and listen to reason. You’ve had your fun and now it’s time to pay for it.” There was madness in his eyes. “What do you mean by that?” I told him. “Sheriff White was smarter than I gave him credit for. He put a monitor on all the party lines. And the ten minutes Nelly gave me didn’t do me much good. I was still talking to Doctor Page in Atlanta when Sheriff White and Orin Bream drove up in front of Levy’s store with four posse members. I think if Sally hadn’t been with me, the old man would have shot me.” All May’s negligee was covering were her shoulders. She said, “I wish he had.” I ignored her. “But as mad as he was, he was fair. He was the law. Cold. Impartial. Living up to the letter of his oath. White listened to everything I had to say. He even talked to Doctor Page.” Her face contorted with fear, May shouted at Handley. “You got me this way. You sweet-talked me into this. Now get me out.” I continued talking, without taking my eyes off Handley’s face, wondering which he would do, blow his cork under the strain of the tension I could sense mounting in him, or pull the trigger of the gun in his hand. I thought of Orin Bream’s crack about the hound dog chasing two rabbits. Handley could jump either way. Handley, basically, was a decent sort of joe. He did-

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n’t belong mixed up in a thing like this. I doubted May’s statement about him sweet-talking her into anything. It was far more likely she’d set her pink plush-lined mantrap for him and caught him with a few drinks under his belt. I said, “He can’t, May. No one can get you out of this now: No one but God. It so happens that Sheriff White and Bream and the four posse members accompanied me here to the house and have been listening outside the windows since shortly after I walked in.” May screamed, “That’s a lie. Sheriff White’s on the other side of town. He phoned me just before you got here. And he said the posse had you penned up in the O’Hara slough.” I said, “I’m sorry, May. Sheriff White phoned from the next house up the road. The phone call was just a plant to tilt you off balance, to make sure you didn’t hear White’s men take up their positions at the windows.” May put her face in her hands and sobbed hysterically. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew this was going to happen. The minute I put my arms around your neck thinking you were Phil. I wish to God I’d shot you while I had the gun in my hand.” She looked at Handley wet-eyed. “Well,” she screamed, “don’t just stand there. Shoot him.” Doctor Handley looked from her to me, then at the gun in his hand, incapable of making a decision now that the chips were down. Without raising my voice, I said, “I think you’d better come in now, Sheriff White. I think that Doctor Handley is on the verge of committing another murder.” The front and back screen doors opened simultaneously. Booted feet crossed the porch and the, kitchen. “Hold it, Phil,” Sheriff White said, quietly. “Don’t make things worse than they are.” Handley backed away from him until the wall of the bedroom stopped him. His voice was plaintive. “You were listening outside? You were standing at the windows?” Bream looked at him sharply. “That’s right, Doc. Drop that gun.” Handley shook his head. “No.” His voice continued plaintive. He sounded like a junior high school boy being unjustly accused of skipping school. “You can’t arrest me, Orin. I’m not going to let you arrest me. I’m a man of standing in the community. I’m a licensed and registered physician. I’m the coroner of Elfers County.” Handley was going to blow his cork. It showed in his eyes, in the sagging lines of his face, the way his body seemed to shrink. Sheriff White looked at me, puzzled.

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I circled my temple with a finger. I’d thought I’d seen it coming. I’d seen it happen before. I’d even had a client accused of murder blow his top on the witness stand, just as I was about to snake him free. A meek little man who’d gone berserk and killed his wife with a hatchet one morning when he had finally gotten a bellyful of the nagging she’d served along with his toast and oatmeal every one of the twenty years they had been married. Handley wasn’t a cheater. He wasn’t a killer. He was everything he said he was. He was a man of standing in the community. He was a respected physician. He was the coroner of Elfers County. Until he’d crawled into Paul Mason’s bed he’d probably never broken a law nor a commandment. Now he was caught up in something too big for him to take. The long night of illicit love was over. During it, he’d done a lot of things he wouldn’t have done in his sane mind. Now, in the cold gray morning, with all of his passion and his fire spent and the house bawd presenting the bill, his sane mind rejected it. He was mentally itemizing each charge. He couldn’t have done all those things. Not Doctor Handley of Elfers County, of the Elfers County Handleys. No whore, married or single, was worth that tab. He wasn’t going to pay it. Orin Bream took a wary step forward and held out his hand. “Give me that gun, Phil.” Handley’s back pressed even harder against the wall, as if he were trying to disappear into the plaster. “No,” he repeated. “I can’t.” I propelled myself out of the chair in which I was sitting and knocked his hand up just as he clapped the muzzle of the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The shot burned between our faces and smacked into the ceiling, showering us with fine particles of plaster. I twisted the gun out of Handley’s fingers and handed it to Orin Bream. I was sweating as badly as I had been when I’d been clinging to the bars on the third floor of the courthouse, watching my own funeral in the making, as the bonfire danced in the square. “For God’s sake, watch him, will you?” I pleaded with Bream. I turned and looked out the nearest window to where the hobbling pinpricks of light still dotted the cane brakes and the hills. “There are about two hundred hotheaded Georgia boys out there still planning to lynch me.” “I’ll watch him,” Bream promised. “Close.” May was lying face down on the sofa. Sheriff White touched her shoulder. “All right, Mrs. Mason. You’d better get up from there and put some clothes on. And while you’re in your bedroom pack a bag with the things

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you’ll need. You’ll probably be down at the courthouse for some time.” He was the law. May got to her feet. Her negligee still gaped. She didn’t bother to fasten it and the white nylon trailed out behind her like a bridal veil as she crossed the room. When May reached me, she stopped. “Goddamn you, Hi Shannon,” she sobbed. “Why did you have to come back to Elfers?” “That’s a long story,” I told her. I couldn’t help seeing what she was showing. “I’m pretty, aren’t I?” May said. “It could have been yours, Hi. Me. Paul’s money. Everything. I meant what I said on the sofa. I’d have gone away with you. And we’d have gotten away with it, too.” She repeated, “I’m pretty, aren’t I?” I was sick of Elfers and everyone in it and what it had done to me. It wasn’t my home town any more. It was just the place where I had happened to be born. More, I’d discovered I liked to wear shoes. I preferred cigarettes to chew tobacco. I would be bored to tears sitting under a chinaberry tree. My bile backed up. I was deliberately cruel. “No. Not particularly,” I told May. “Out where I live, honey, you could do a fan dance in the window of Eastern Columbia, a big department store on the comer of Broadway and Ninth, with one canary feather for a fan. And the only interest you’d draw would be from some passerby who hadn’t seen a canary for some time.” May’s shoulders sagged. Her body deflated. I’d robbed her of the last thing she had. She walked slowly on into the bedroom. I wished I hadn’t said what I did. I felt like a heel. I felt cheap. I thought of Mary Lou and winced. Who was I to throw stones? An embarrassed silence followed. Doctor Handley, completely batty now, broke it. “There was a shot,” he confided in Bream. “I heard it. Someone tried to shoot someone. And, as coroner of Elfers County, I suggest we investigate it.” Orin Bream pushed his battered black hat on the back of head. Semi-illiterate, grizzled Georgia cracker that he was, was more of a real gentleman than I could ever hope to be. “Sure thing Doctor,” he said, gently. He looked for some place to spit and expectorated into a blue China vase. “The sheriff is going to be busy here a little while longer. But I tell you what. Let’s you and I walk out to my car and well drive down to the courthouse and take a look around the third floor. Would you like that?” “Very much,” Handley assured him. He took the hand Bream offered him and, clutching it like a bewildered little boy, allowed Bream to lead him torn the room. Without even a glance

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at the door through which May had disappeared. I turned my back and pressed my forehead to the rough plaster of the wall. Women! What they could do to a man.

CHAPTER NINETEEN DAY DAWNED HOT and clear. I watched the early rising workers amble through the thick morning silence to their jobs in the tobacco and peanut warehouse and at the cotton gin. The merchants on the square opened the doors of their stores and hosed down the sidewalks in front of their places of business. At eight-thirty the big school buses, loaded with children, laughing and shouting, rumbled down the south side of the square, headed for the big consolidated junior and senior high schools. By nine the wet sidewalks were dotted with women eager to finish their shopping, before the heat of the day set in. Except for the big pile of ashes in the center of the grass, the courthouse square looked exactly as it did every weekday morning of the year. Keeping me in a cell all night was Sheriff White’s idea. He’d meant what he’d said. There had never been a lynching in Elfers County. He didn’t intend that there should be one. He wanted me where he could keep an eye on me until the whiskey heat had died and the men behind the bobbling lights on the hills had learned the truth about Doctor Handley and May. From time to time, a man glanced up at the third floor window of my cell. Most of them seem disappointed. They didn’t like me any better than they had. I was still a yellow-belly, a hometown boy who’d gotten biggety. But they no longer had any reason to lynch me. I hoped the little old gal who’d wanted her husband or her boy friend to bring her a piece of the rope hadn’t been too disappointed. It would have been a nice souvenir to keep on the fireplace mantle. I’d thought Sally might come to the courthouse. She hadn’t. The last I’d seen of Sally had been in old man Levy’s crossroads store. Sally had a strong sense of duty. With a howling mob about to lynch me she’d been willing to forget the rotten things I’d thought about her, even forget Mary Lou and run with me if it would help me to escape. But now I was back on my feet and no longer in danger, she wanted no part of a man who could think the things I’d thought about her. I couldn’t blame her for that. Hoping Sally would forgive me was too much to expect. Bream gave me a fistful of telegrams as he released me at ten o’clock. One was from Attorney General Gilmore, complimenting me on the splen-

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did job I’d done on Joe Connors. The others were from the president of the California Bar Association and various attorneys and judges I knew, all along the same line. I was a big shot again. I was a big old Georgia boy who’s made good. All of the telegrams intimated that the Bear State expected big things of me. Orin Bream had read the telegrams. “They kinda like you back there, eh, Hi?” Orin asked. “So it would seem,” I said. Bream knew the truth. He knew that I’d sold out. He knew the switch in briefcases had been strictly accidental. He knew I’d snagged Connors by a fluke. He asked, “What you goin’ to tell ‘em when you get back? How smart you were?” I admitted, “I haven’t made up my mind.” Bream shrugged his thin shoulders and made a bull’s eye on a palm roach scurrying across the floor. “Well, it ain’t none of my business, but as my old pappy used to tell me, Tell the truth and shame the devil.’ ” He spat again. “And you’d be surprised how it works out for the best most times. You kin lie to other folks, Hi, an’ git away with it eight times out of ten. But a man can’t lie to hisself. Doc Handley’s proof o’that.” He seemed embarrassed to have said so much. “But that’s your business.” I asked if I was free to go. Bream said I was but that White wanted to talk to me and to stop in at his office before I left the courthouse. Out in the corridor, I asked if I could see Hass before I left. Bream said I could and led the way down the corridor to a cell at the far end where, at the request of the California authorities, Hass was being held. Hass was sitting on his cot. Both of his arms were encased in plaster casts. He cursed me under his breath. I said, “Just tell me one thing, Johnny.” “Go to hell,” Hass said. I asked, “Where did Mary Lou fit in? Was making up to me her own idea or did Joe Connors plant her on me?” Hass repeated, “Go to hell.” I reminded him, “We’re both going back there, Johnny. And it could be you’ll need a friend in court.” Hass thought it over a moment. “We planted her on you,” he said. “We needed someone to keep you from getting to Mrs. Shannon after Blair told you the story.” I said, “Thanks, Johnny.” I didn’t feel so badly about Mary Lou. She’d known what she was getting into when she tied up with the Connors crowd.

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I walked on down the corridor. May was crying in one cell, with a buxom police matron sitting in a chair just outside the cell door. Handley was sitting in the next cell, staring blankly into space. Neither he nor May looked up as I passed. Still further down the corridor, Ginty and two men I didn’t know were gripping the bars of the drunk tank. Ginty cursed me as I passed the tank. Bream explained, dryly, “Part of the bedsheet crowd. And like Sheriff White said, we don’t hold with men covering their faces to do what they’re ashamed to do with their faces bare.” He made a brass cuspidor ring. “Besides, we got other uses for our sheets in Elfers County.” I rode in the elevator down to the first floor. I doubted much would happen to Ginty or the other men who had acted under Phil Handley’s instruction. They wouldn’t talk and Handley couldn’t. His mind was gone. What he had paid or promised them to help him beat me up was something that would probably never be known. Sheriff White looked up from his desk as I entered the office. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.” He tossed my personal belongings, including the wallet containing the almost fifteen thousand dollars, across the desk, then laid a release order for my impounded car on top of them and shoved the pile towards me. I put my belongings in my pocket. “There’ll be an inquest on that Cassida fellow at two o’clock this afternoon, Hi,” he told me. “Be here.” I promised I would. White fingered a paper on his desk. “It will just be a formality. I got his record from the Coast and it seems he was a bad ‘un. Besides, I don’t misdoubt but it was self-defense just as you and Mrs. Shannon tell it.” I said, “Thank you, Sheriff.” I wanted to ask him if Sally was still in town and if not if he knew where she had gone, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. “After it’s over,” White continued, “if I were you, Hi, I’d point the nose of my car out back West where you came from:” I asked if that was an order. White was the law. Cold. Impartial. “Let’s call it a request, Hi. If Paul was well liked, so was Phil. So is May, for that matter. There’s, going to be hard feelings about this whole affair for some time to come. And you staying in town will just complicate things.” I said, “I see.” I walked out of the office holding the release for my car. And there went my chinaberry tree. Not that it was much loss. I wanted to get back to L.A.

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I wanted to explain things to Attorney General Gilmore and leave it up to him to decide how much of the truth I should tell. I claimed my car at the police garage. None of the boys said anything out of line but I realized that what White had said was so. Even now when they knew I hadn’t killed Paul Elfers resented me. It wasn’t my home town any longer. It was just the place I was from. I drove rapidly out of town. Having done what she felt was her duty, Sally was probably on her way back to Atlanta and Los Angeles. There had been no Sonny Blair in her life. There had been a Mary Lou in mine. Possibly, though, in time, she would forgive me. Looking back, I wondered how I could ever have such a thought about Sally. I wasn’t smart. I was dumb. Joe Connors and his crowd had taken me like Grant had taken Richmond. The old house looked deserted. The doors and the windows sagged. Weeds had taken the yard. I parked in the shade of the chinaberry tree and sat a moment wondering how I could have been homesick for this. I’d stay for the inquest on Sam Cassida. I had to do that. Then I’d follow Sheriff White’s advice. I’d get out of Elfers County. I’d go home to Los Angeles. Sally had to listen to me. Mary Lou had only been an incident. Sally was my wife. I loved her. I walked up on the rotted old gallery. I pumped myself a drink of cold water. I walked on into the house, vaguely conscious I was hungry, wishing I had eaten in town. “Well,” said a voice from the stove. “It’s about time you got here. How long do you expect me to hold breakfast for you?” My back was to Sally. I was almost afraid to look. For fear I was imagining her voice. “I see,” Sally said. “The big silent type.” I turned and looked at her. Her face was flushed from the heat of the old wood stove. The sleeves of her plain cotton dress were rolled up over her dimpled elbows. There was a smear of flour on her nose. As I watched her, Sally put a pan of biscuits in the oven. I touched her arm to make certain she was real. “I thought you’d be gone by now.” Sally closed the door of the oven. “I considered leaving. I even bought a bus ticket to Atlanta and phoned about a plane reservation.” “Why didn’t you go?” Sally wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Well, it didn’t seem practical.” “What do you mean by that?”

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“I knew you’d follow me.” “That’s right.” “And when you found me. again, I’d forgive you.” Sally blew up at the bangs the heat of the stove had plastered to her forehead. “So—.” It was all I could do to keep from taking her in my arms. “So —what?” Color crept into her cheeks. “So, as long as I’ve torn up my contract with Amalgamated and I’m an ex-actress now, there’s no clause in our marriage contract that says we can’t start a big family, so I—.” Still more color came into her cheeks. Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing. “Well, it seemed such a waste of tune. When—.” I made her say it. “When what?” Sally told me. “When I really wanted to stay!” “And start a family?” Sally touched my cheeks with her fingertips. Then she was in my arms, her firm young body pressed to mine. I kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. Sally’s lips moved under mine. “What do you think?” she whispered. I picked her up and held her close for a moment. Then the only sound was the creak of the stairs and the full-throated song of the cardinal perched in the topmost branch of the chinaberry tree. The biscuits were burnt black.

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