And expensive women, I thought, wondering how many other custodians of the gun collection there had been before Dinah. But I couldn’t quite follow him at the moment. I knew he was down there at the bottom of the well, where I had been, looking up at the smooth, unscalable walls, and he wanted to talk about guns. But maybe guns just happened to be a good opening subject. I’d never underestimated him, and didn’t intend to.
He reached down and picked up his drink off the coffee table. “You have any expensive habits, Jack?”
I began to have a strange and unaccountable hunch then, a feeling that we were both working our way around to the same idea. I lit another of Dinah’s cigarettes. “No,” I said. “None except staying out of jail. That may be a little expensive at the moment.”
“It might be, at that.” He sat down across from me on the sofa and looked at me. “You have any ideas? Don’t worry about Dianne. Where information is concerned, she’s a one-way street.”
“Good,” I said. “I wasn’t worried about her.” Actually, I didn’t like this talking in front of her. Not that I didn’t trust her, or had any reason to believe she talked too much, for after all he trusted her and he was no fool, but in something like this you increase your risk a thousand times for every additional person who knows what you’re up to. However, there wasn’t much I could do about it. If I insisted on talking to him alone, he’d probably tell her all about it later anyway, and it would be the same except that that way she might be angry about it and more likely to talk.
“All right,” I said. “We’re in the middle. We might as well admit it. Sometime tomorrow or the next day they’re going to start issuing subpoenas by the dozen to find out what’s been going on here. And you know as well as I do that that thing about the Waites girl is going to stir up a hell of a stink. It isn’t anything that can be hushed up, especially now that her father will probably go to the pen over it. And Abbie Bell won’t have any choice in the matter but to tell the truth when they get to her. She’ll be under oath, and she’s been around long enough to have heard of the perjury laws. ‘Why, I’ve just been paying the sheriff’s office for protection,’ she’ll say. ‘Doesn’t everybody?’”
Buford nodded. “But we know that. Let’s hear something new.”
“That’s right. But I just wanted to be sure we were both starting from the same place. Now, here’s where we split. As top man, you’re going to be the one they turn to for the answers. But balanced against that is the fact that I’ve been doing the collecting, at least for a long time now; that is, they’ve never actually given you anything direct. They gave it to me. And that’ll be what they testify. However, the people investigating the thing will know who got the money unless you’re able to show them otherwise. What you need is a goat.”
He nodded again. “I’m still with you.”
“However, you can’t make a goat out of me without my consent. It’s too easy to tell the truth on a witness stand, as we both know. But, on the other hand, if you had a goat who wasn’t here to take the stand, you might get by with it.”
“In other words, if you ran.”
“That’s right. And running is expensive.”
He took the case out of his pocket, selected a cigar with extreme concentration, bit the end off it reflectively, and flipped the lighter. “How expensive, Jack?”
“Five thousand,” I said. I looked across at him and then at Dinah. She had her elbows on her knees and was staring at my face almost enraptured.
“I haven’t got that much,” he said. “But disregarding the figure for the moment, let’s look at this running angle. Just how long do you think you could keep from being caught? You ever look at yourself in a full-length mirror? Put you in any group of a hundred people and you’d stick out like a platinum blonde with two black eyes and a French poodle. You’re six feet two, or thereabouts, you weigh over two hundred, your face is as flat as an Indian’s and two shades darker, and you’ve got coal-black hair with a curl in it you couldn’t take