“I’ll square it with her,” I said. “She needs rest more than she needs money, and we’re going to see she gets it.”
That wasn’t the only reason, but I saw no point in going into it now. I drove into town and parked near the garage. In the repair shed a mechanic was working on my car, unbolting the old radiator. He looked up and nodded.
“Borrow one of your screwdrivers?” I asked. “Sure,” he said. “Here.”
I went around back and tested one of the screws holding the rear plate. It came loose freely. So did the other one. You could even see where he’d put machine oil on the threads to break them loose. I heard footsteps beside me and looked up. It was the sour-faced foreman in his white overall.
He nodded. “What’s all the whoop-de-do with the license plates? Man from the Sheriff’s office was fiddlin’ with ‘em a while ago. And dusting powder over them.”
“Which man?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t know him. That hard case.”
“Magruder?”
He shook his head. “That’s the one thinks he’s hard. This one is. Kelly Redfield.”
I thought he’d sounded like a good cop. He screamed about it and for some reason tried to slough it off, but in the end he had to come and see. “What he say?” I asked.
“Say? That guy? He wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
“But he did tell you where they broke in?”
Surprise showed for an instant on the sour and frozen face before he brought it under control again. “How’d you know? He said there was a busted pane in the washroom window. And he wanted to know if we’d missed anything.”
“Have you?”
He shook his head. “Not as far as we can tell yet.”
“How about battery acid?”
“We haven’t got any.”
Well, he’d stolen it somewhere in this area, because he had it here at two a.m. He couldn’t have gone very far after it. Maybe Redfield had some ideas. I should be able to catch him at the office.
It was at the rear of the courthouse, a dreary room floored with scarred brown linoleum and smelling of dust. The wall at the right was banked with steel filing cabinets, and across the room at desks near a barred window, Magruder and a bull of a man with red hair were doing paperwork. The wall at my left was filled with bulletins and “Wanted” posters. A large overhead fan circled with weary futility, stirring the heat. At the left end of the room there was a water-cooler and a doorway leading into an inner office.
Magruder came over. I noticed he still wore the heavy gunbelt and the .45 even while shuffling papers. Maybe he wore it to bed. “What do you want now?” he asked.
“I want to talk to your boss.”
At that moment a lean-hipped man in faded khaki came out of the inner office with a handful of papers which he tossed on one of the desks. Magruder jerked his head at me. “Kelly, here’s that guy now.”
Redfield turned with a quick, hard glance. “Chatham?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Come in here.”
I followed him into the inner office. An old roll-top desk against the wall on the left. On the right there were two filing cabinets, and a hat-rack on which were draped his jacket, a black tie, and a shoulder holster containing a gun. A locked, glass-fronted case held four carbines. One barred window looked out onto a parking area paved with white gravel.
He nodded towards the straight chair at the end of the desk. “Sit down.”
Without taking his eyes off me, he groped in the pocket of the jacket for cigarettes. He lit one, without offering them to me, and flipped the match into the tray on his desk. He was a man of thirty-six or thirty-eight, with an air of tough competence about him that matched the way he had sounded on the telephone. The face was lean, the jaw clean-cut and hard, and he had a high, rounded forehead and thinning brown hair. The hard-bitten eyes were gray. It was a face with intelligence in it, and character, but for the moment at least, no warmth at all.
“All right, Chatham,” he said. “What are you after around here?”
“Magruder told you,” I said. “You sent him to find out.”
“I did. And you don’t make any sense. Start making some.”
He irritated me, and puzzled me at the same time. Honest, hard-working professional cop was written all over him, and he hadn’t been able to resist a police problem, but