with their girl friends; and something about it, maybe the summer night or the hissing sound of tires or the quick, musical laughter of a girl, suddenly made me think of how it had been before I went off to the Army all those years ago in 1942, how it had been to be home from college in the summer, out riding in the Judge’s automobile, a Chevrolet somehow forever five years old. God, I thought, that was a long time back.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, like a fighter taking a beating. Get up there, I thought. Get up to the office and see what you can find on Shevlin; Buford can wait a little while. But what about this other mess? It was going to blow wide open, tomorrow or the next day. If I tried to disappear now, wouldn’t everybody know it was a phony? And, knowing it was a fake, they would do a lot of looking into the place where I had disappeared, a place I didn’t ever want anybody nosing around because that was where Shevlin was. I’d be better off to stay here and take the rap on the probable bribery charge than to direct any attention toward Shevlin. But, then, there was no use trying to kid myself that Shevlin’s disappearance was going to continue unnoticed forever. Somebody would miss him and start looking into it. I shook my head again, and ran a hand across my face. It was like being at the bottom of a well.
I started around again, taking up all the obvious facts and examining them, and when I almost completed the circuit I suddenly found the one I sought, the one that had escaped me until now. Waites hadn’t talked; he’d never said a word about why he was down there at Abbie’s and why he had attacked her. Why? I wondered. Probably at first it was a natural enough disinclination to go shouting to the world that he was looking for his daughter in a whore house—that was understandable. But when he had a little while to think it over and see what a mess he was in, that he might wind up charged with murder… Had anybody been in to see him? A lawyer?
I climbed quickly out of the car and started across the street to the drugstore to call Buford and ask him, and then suddenly remembered I didn’t know the telephone number of Dianne’s, or Dinah’s, apartment, and that I didn’t even know her full name. I stopped. It adds up that way, I thought. I know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day, but Soames and the grand jury and everybody else connected with it has every reason to believe I don’t know a thing. But it was only a guess. Maybe they hadn’t sent a lawyer to the jail to see him and tell him to keep his mouth shut until they got ready to close in on us. There wasn’t any way to know for sure until I saw Buford.
But first, I thought, I’m going in that office and do the thing I’ve been trying to get to for the past nine hours. I’m going to find out about Shevlin. None of the rest of it means anything if I’m wrong about him. I wheeled and went up the front steps and banged on the door until the janitor came down and let me in. “Got to get in the office for a little while,” I said, and went on past him up the stairs. I had a key to the office itself. When it closed at five-thirty all the telephone calls were switched to the office at the jail, but the files I wanted were up here.
I went in and switched on the lights. Getting out a cigarette, I turned to the bank of firing cases along the wall. It was going to be a long, tedious job, for I had no idea at all of how to begin, since there was obviously no point in trying to look him up by name. Shevlin was probably just the last of a series of them. I started in, riffling through the circulars and bulletins and notices, looking only at the ones with pictures. Ten or fifteen minutes dragged by. It was oppressively hot in the room with the big lights on and the windows closed, and I began to sweat. There was no sound in the