I climbed into one, and when we came out on Springer and stopped for the first light, the driver turned and glanced at me over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a pinched-up face, sad brown eyes, and a badly made set of false teeth that were too big and too symmetrical. He looked like a toothpaste commercial.
“Say,” he asked, “ain’t you the man that had the run-in with Frankie?”
“I wouldn’t call it a run-in,” I said. “A little fender-gnashing.”
“I thought I recognized you. Man, you sure been lookin’ the town over, haven’t you? I bet I seen you three or four times.”
I’d lived all my life in a city, and that hadn’t occurred to me. It was a small town, I was a stranger in it, and a pretty big one at that. Add a dark red face, spiky red hair, and you’d never go anywhere unobserved.
“Just wandering around,” I said. “Killing time while they fix the car.”
“Where you staying?”
“Magnolia Lodge motel.”
“Oh,” he said.
I frowned at the back of his neck. There it was again, that same strange reaction you couldn’t quite put a finger on. I thought of the bystanders at the accident, and that foreman at the garage. The light changed. We went on.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with the motel, I reckon. Little run-down.”
“Well, it’s a big job for a woman alone. I understand her husband’s dead.”
“Oh, he’s dead, all right.”
Maybe I’d run across something new here. Varying degrees of being dead. “What’s that mean?”
“That’s right, you’re from California, ain’t you? I reckon the papers didn’t play it up so big way over there—” He had to skid to a stop at the next cross-roads as the light went red. Then he looked back over his shoulder.
“Langston was murdered,” he said.
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a soft and filthy laugh, and a whisper. We know you killed him, don’t we?
I snapped out of it then. “Well, did they catch the party that did it?”
“Hmmmm. Yes and no.”
That was the kind of answer you liked. I sighed, lit a cigarette, and tried again. “Did they, or didn’t they?”
“They got one of ‘em,” he said. “The man. But they ain’t found out to this day who the other one was. Or so they say.”
The light came up green then, and he shifted gears and shot ahead in the afternoon traffic. It made no sense at all, of course. I waited for him to go on.
“Course, now, they could have a pretty good idea, what with one thing and another, if you know what I mean. But they just ain’t sayin’.”
I read him even less. “Wait a minute. It is against the law to kill people around here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it sure is. But the law also says you got to have evidence before you arrest anybody and go to court.”
It was like probing a raw nerve. Well, I thought angrily, I did have evidence. It just wasn’t enough.
We’d left the business district behind now and were passing the box factory and ice plant on the edge of the town. I wished he’d slow down; there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask. “You mean they got one of them,” I said, “and he admits there was somebody else, but won’t say who? They can’t get anything out of him?”
He tossed the words back over his shoulder. “Mister, they won’t never get anything out of that feller. He tried to pull a gun on Calhoun, and he was dead before he hit the ground.”
“Who’s Calhoun?”
“That big cop that stopped you from clobberin’ Frankie.”
“Hell, I wasn’t going to hit him—” I stopped. Of all the idiotic things to waste time on.
“You look like a man that could take care of hisself just about anywhere, but let me give you a tip. Don’t start nothin’ with Calhoun.”
“I’m not about to,” I said impatiently. I was sorry I’d asked.
“You think that’s fat. Mister, I got one word for you. It’s not fat. You know, I seen that man do things—” He paused, sighed, and shook his head. “Salty. What I mean, he’s salty.”
I wished he’d shut up about Calhoun and get on with it. “All right,” I prodded, “you say one was killed instantly, resisting arrest. So he didn’t say anything. Then how do they know there was another one? Did Calhoun catch him in the act?”