her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There’d been no word from her, but there was no reason why she should write. She wasn’t the kind for that ‘I told you so’ routine, and there wasn’t much else to say. I hoped they hadn’t sent her that picture. It was a little rough. So was the simple caption: VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY.
I crushed out the cigarette and sat up. If I spent the whole afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts I’d be walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Langston, and that telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The phone directory was over on the chest. No, I thought sourly; the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?
He’d be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it do?
But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill the afternoon, wouldn’t it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet of stationery, and flipped through the yellow pages.
Cafés. . . . There were eight listed, three of them on one street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote down the addresses.
Taverns. . . . Nine listed.
Beer Gardens. . . . No such heading.
Night Clubs. . . . One, a duplicate listing for one of the taverns.
That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in sports shirt and lightweight trousers. As we drove out I noted one of the places on my list was just across the road. The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish and said: Silver King Inn. Well, I’d stop there on the way back.
I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the second block in front of one of the cafés, paid the driver, and went in. There was a call box, but it wasn’t in a booth. The next one was on the other side of the street in the next block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the fan came on, but it wasn’t the one. It made no noise at all. I dropped in a dime, dialed four or five digits at random, pretended to listen for a minute, and hung up, retrieving the coin.
Inside a half-hour I’d hit nine, ranging from the glass-and-chrome upholstered booths of the Steak House to a greasy hamburger-and-chili dive backing the river on Front Street, and from the one good cocktail lounge to dingy beer joints, and I had a fairly good picture of the layout of the town. The river and Front Street ran along the west side. South of Springer was another street of business establishments, and then the railroad and a weather-beaten station, with a colored section beyond the tracks. North of the wide main street were two more parallel to it, with the courthouse on one and a small post office and Federal Building on the other, and beyond them a school or two and the principal residential area. There were four cross streets, beginning with Front. Springer, which was of course also the main road, was the only east-west street that continued across the river; the others terminated at Front.
But I still hadn’t found it. I went on. Most of the places were air-conditioned, and stepping out of them was like walking into an oven. The blacktop paving in the street bubbled and sucked at the soles of my shoes. My shirt was wet with sweat. An hour later, I ground to a halt, baffled. There wasn’t a public telephone booth in town that had a noisy fan.
I still had two places on my list, however. One was the Flamingo, the night club, with an address on West Highway. But the chances were it wouldn’t even have been open at the time he called, around two-fifteen. The other was the Silver King Inn, across the road from the motel. He wouldn’t have called from there, would he? Practically in her lap? But who could guess what a creep would do? I’d go back and hit it. There was a cab stand around the next corner, by the bus