King. Heat shimmered off the highway, and the glare from the white gravel of the parking area was dazzling. I could hear a jukebox inside, and through the big window opposite us I could see some men drinking coffee at a counter. The driver put his arm up on the back of the seat and turned to look at me.
“What do you mean, not exactly?” I asked.
“Well, it was like this,” he said. “When Calhoun jumped this man—Strader, his name was—he was down there in the river bottom about four-thirty in the morning tryin’ to get rid of the body. Strader was drivin’ Langston’s car, and Langston hisself was in the back wrapped in a tarp with his head caved in.”
“Yes, I can see where that might look a little suspicious,” I said. “But was there anybody else in the car with Strader?”
“No. But there was another car, maybe fifty yards back up the road. It got away. Calhoun heard it start up and saw the lights come on, and ran for it, but he couldn’t catch it. He was just going to put a shot through it when he stumbled in the dark and fell down. By the time he could find his gun and get up, it was gone around a bend in the road. But he’d already got the license number. They got them little lights, you know, that shine on the back plate—”
“Sure, sure,” I said impatiently. “So they know whose car it was?”
”Yeah. It was Strader's.”
“Oh,” I said. “And where did they find it?”
He jerked his head towards the road. “Right over there in front of Strader's room in that motel. And the only thing they ever found out for sure was that it was a woman drivin’ it.”
I said nothing for a moment. Even with this little of it, you could see the ugliness emerging, the stain of suspicion that was all over the town, on everything you touched.
“When did all this happen?” I asked.
“Last November.”
Seven months of it, I thought. No wonder you sensed that gray ocean of weariness when you looked at her, and had the feeling she was running along the edge of a nervous breakdown.
“That’ll be one dollar,” he said. “Outside the city limits.” I handed him two. “Come on. I’ll buy you a beer.”
3
We went inside to air-conditioned coolness. It was an L-shaped building, the front part being a lunch-room. There were some tables to the left of the doorway, and a counter with a row of stools in the back of the window that looked out on the road. Swinging doors behind the counter led into the kitchen. There were mounted tarpon on the wall on either side of the swinging doors, and another above the doorway on the right that led into the bar. Two truckers were drinking coffee and talking to the waitress.
The bar was a longer room, running back at right angles and forming the other part of the L. At the rear, towards the left, were a number of tables, a jukebox that had gone silent for the moment, and a telephone box. I glanced at the latter. It could wait.
At one of the tables, a man in a white cowboy-style hat and a blue shirt sat with his back to me, facing a thin dark splinter of a girl who looked as if she might have Indian blood. Two more men were perched on stools at the end of the bar. They looked up at us as we sat down, and one of them nodded to the taxi driver. There was another mounted tarpon, the largest I’d ever seen, above the bar mirror.
The bartender came over, glanced idly at me, and nodded to the driver. “Hi, Jake. What’ll it be?”
“Bottle of Regal, Ollie,” Jake replied.
I ordered the same. Ollie put it in front of us and went back down the bar to where he’d been polishing glasses. He appeared to be in his middle twenties, and had big shoulders, muscular arms, and a wide tanned face with self-possessed brown eyes.
I took a sip of the beer and lit a cigarette. “Who was Strader?” I asked.
At the sound of the name, the bartender and both the men down at the end turned and stared sharply. Even after all this time, I thought.
Jake looked uncomfortable. “That was the craziest part of it. He was from Miami. And as far as they could ever find out, he didn’t even know Langston.”