“What!” I put down the glass. “What happened to her?”
“Some man jumped her with a knife and chopped her up pretty badly. She’s in serious condition; they think she has a chance to pull through, but nobody can see her yet.”
“Who did it? Did you get the—” I caught myself, thinking of the girl.
“That’s the funny part of it, and the part that’s got me worried. We’ve got him in jail, but we don’t know who he is or why he did it. No identification of any land on him, and as far as we can find, he hasn’t got a record.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No. Cold sober. And he shut up like an oyster when we arrested him. Not a word out of him.”
“And now?” I asked.
“It’s dangerous. If Abbie dies, there’ll be an awful stink, naturally, for allowing a place like that to operate. And the man’ll have to stand trial, of course. And it isn’t just what’s on the surface here that worries me. Something tells me there’s a lot more underneath.”
“Who picked him up?” I asked.
“Hurd.” Bud Hurd was the other deputy here in town. “It was about three this afternoon. The phone rang, and it was some Negro girl who works down there at Abbie’s. The maid, I guess. She was screaming her head off, not saying anything but, ‘Miss Abbie! Miss Abbie!’ over and over, so I shot Hurd down there to find out what the hell was going on. He said the place was a madhouse. The Negro girl and a white one were screaming out in the hall, and when he went in the room where the rest of the racket was, Abbie was folded up across the end of a sofa with her clothes half torn off and a cut down one arm and another bad one in the back. The man was still waving the knife and swearing, and when Bud came in he made a break for the door but Bud collared him and hit him once with the sap to get the knife away from him. He called the ambulance and they took Abbie to the hospital. We can’t get in to see her, and he won’t talk, so we don’t have any idea what it was all about.”
“How about the girls?” I asked. Somebody should know what started it.
“They had disappeared. I guess there was only the one white girl left there, besides the Negro maid, and they both lit out while Bud was getting the man calmed down. They didn’t seem to have taken anything with them.”
“And they didn’t come back?”
“No. Bud went back later and couldn’t find them.” I stood up. He looked at me questioningly. “You got any ideas?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think the girls will come back, if their clothes are still there.”
Dianne, or Dinah, looked at me across the rim of her glass, the reckless gray eyes alight with interest. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “They’ll probably come back now that it’s dark. Can I go too? I’d like to see the inside of one of those places.”
“No,” Buford said shortly.
She said nothing, but the eyes shifted, studying him thoughtfully, and then she shrugged. You got the impression she’d never spent a great deal of time in her life asking permission of anyone, or paying much attention to refusals.
“I’ll be back in a little while,” I said, glad she wasn’t going, and anxious to get started.
So far it was just a confused mess in my mind. I hadn’t had a chance to sort any of it out, and as I got in the car and started down there my mind was busy with it. I was sorry about Abbie, of course, and hoped she would pull through, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And, of course, the main thing was trying to figure out what bearing it was going to have on what I was trying to do. On the surface of it, it would have none, for if I had any luck and found out what I hoped I’d find about Shevlin, I’d be gone tomorrow and they could have this load of grief all to themselves from now on. But when you looked at it again, it wasn’t quite that simple. With this thing flaring up and a grand-jury investigation a very real possibility, my disappearing the very next day was going to make the long arm of coincidence look as if it