of looking up at the ceiling in the dark while he wondered who had seen him during the day. He’d had years of this and then wound up lying face down in his own blood in a backwoods cabin, and I had been the one who had killed him, so now I had bought my own ticket on the merry-go-round. I straightened up and ran a hand across my face. There was no use getting morbid about it now. I stuck the notice back in the file.
I closed the office and went back out into the square. It all depended now on what I found out from Buford. If he said that a lawyer or someone else had visited Waites after his arrest, we could be pretty sure they believed we didn’t know what had really happened down there, or what was behind it, and that they were taking pains to keep us in the dark. Bernice was gone, and they wouldn’t know we had the letter, and...I stopped. The letter! My God, why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? If Waites hadn’t already told them that he’d lost it down there, he would sooner or later, and they’d go look for it.
I crossed to the car as fast as I could walk, backed out of the parking place, and shot down the street toward the hotel. Parking in the same place I had before, I took a look up and down the street. The hotel itself was still dark and no one was in sight.
I went up the steps. Slipping softly into the lobby, I walked down the hall by feel until I came to the door of the room. Once inside, with the door closed, I struck a match and looked around. It appeared to be just as I had left it. Walking over to the sofa. I took the letter out of my pocket and dropped it carefully down against the wall where I had found it. Then I went back out and got into the car, breathing easily again. It would have wrecked everything if they had found out, after I was gone, that I had read that letter.
I was beginning to feel like a man being chased through some horrible dream. How many hours ago, I thought, did I stand there in that cabin and turn her around facing me so I could see how she looked in decent clothes and with her hair combed, stand there feeling proud of the loveliness of her? Was it months ago now? I looked at my watch as I went past a street light. It was a little after nine. It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.
Suddenly, I was conscious of a consuming desire to get back to the girl’s apartment and find out the only other thing there was left to learn. Somehow, that seemed now to be the goal toward which I had been running since eleven o’clock this morning, the final knowledge that at last I had my hands on all the loose ends of this thing I so I could know definitely, once and for all, what I was going to do. It seemed that for a length of time beyond all measuring I had been running across the surface of a lake on treacherous cakes of ice that sank under me as fast as I stepped on them. When I got one thing straightened out in my mind, something else would explode in my face and change it.
I parked and hurried up the walk to the entrance. The door clicked as soon as I pushed the buzzer. They’re anxious too, I thought. I must have been gone a long time.
Buford looked up as I came in. “I just called the hospital. They think the Bell woman will pull through all right. They won’t let anybody in to see her yet, though.”
I was glad to hear it, in spite of the fact that I knew the grand jury would probably subpoena her. She was a bandit, but a cheerful one, and I liked her.
Buford went over and turned off the radio and came back to sit down on the sofa beside Dinah. She looked at me with interest.
“What did you find out?” Buford asked. He might have been asking me who won the Tulane-Alabama game, but I knew what was going on in his mind.
I sat down. I reached for a cigarette, and found the pack was empty. Dinah pushed