might have been intrigued with it, but now I paid little attention. My thoughts were still chasing themselves around in a futile and endless circle. I hadn’t imagined the sound of that fan; I’d heard it. That was definite. And there wasn’t another booth in town with a noisy fan. That was equally definite. So where did it leave me?
“You know what them ol’ Coulter boys done to me last night?” Pearl said to Ollie. “They like to lift off me everything I had. With these here rascals—”
He removed two strange objects from the breast pocket of his shirt and placed them on the bar. In spite of my preoccupation, I leaned forward to look. They were small sea-shells, spiraled and rather conical in shape.
“What are they?” I asked.
Ollie grinned briefly. “Hermit crabs.”
“Oh,” I said. I remembered then. The hermit crab ate the mollusk and made its home in the shell. Or found an empty one and moved in.
“Well, sir,” Pearl went on with a sigh, “them ol’ boys found these things down at the beach somewheres, so they come by my place with ’em, and the first thing you know one of ’em says to me: Pearl, he says, why don’t we have a hermit crab race? Like this, he says. You put ’em down real quiet, like I’m doin’ now, and you wait, and you bet on which one is goin’ to move first.”
He took a dollar from his pocket and placed it on the bar. “Now you get out a dollar, and I’ll show you—”
“No, you don’t,” Ollie scoffed. “So one of ’em is dead, or you shot it full of Novocain, or hypnotized it—”
“Why, shucks,” Pearl protested. “You know I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that. And besides, you get your choice.”
“Look, you barefooted shyster,” Ollie said good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t bet you even money the sun’d come up in the morning.”
Pearl shrugged dolefully and dropped them back in his pocket and winked at me. “Heck. Some days a man just cain’t pick up a cryin’ dime.” He took a drink of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Hey, Ollie,” he went on with a jocose grin, “I ever tell you the one about the ol’ country boy that takened up with this here snooty society gal? Well, sir, it looked like he just wasn’t makin’ no time with her at all, so he went to the drugstore and he says to this feller behind the counter—”
I waited for the dreary punch line, and left. A battered pick-up truck I assumed was Pearl’s was parked before the place, its spattered sides attesting that chickens roosted on it at home. Every town has its character, I thought; San Francisco had had its share too. I dismissed him from my mind and took up the rat-race again. Forget the fan for the moment. She wanted to tell me something, for a price. She was afraid to meet me. Something or somebody had frightened her and she had to hang up. Maybe she would try again.
I stopped at the office. Josie said there had been no further call. Back at the room I lit a cigarette and sat down to wait, prodded savagely by frustration and a hundred questions to which I had no answers and no way of gaining access to any. It was an odd sensation, this being utterly alone and without status: I’d always had the prestige and facilities of a metropolitan police force going for me when I wanted to know something, but here I was an outcast. I’d been thrown out of the Sheriff’s office and was under suspicion myself. Anything Langston’s insurance company had turned up was closed to me. I couldn’t even talk to her; she’d be asleep for hours yet.
I came full circle and was back to Strader again. At least the course of action was clear there and I wanted to get started. I checked the money situation. I still had eight hundred in traveler’s checks, three hundred and seventy-something in cash. The bank statement from San Francisco showed a balance of two thousand, six hundred and thirty dollars. I was all right for the moment. The other, the money I had received from my grandfather, a little over twenty-one thousand, was in Government bonds and gilt-edge stock, untouched since they’d settled the estate six months ago.
Apparently she wasn’t going to call again. I waited impatiently for another ten minutes and then drove into town to the