The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,53
Then the same idea seemed to hit all of ‘em at once. They jumped up and started to say something, but just then the sheriff jumped too like something had bit him. He whirled around and looked at Pop and Uncle Sagamore.
“Describe this girl again,” he snaps. “What’d you say she looked like?”
“Hmmmmm,” Pop says. “A real doll. About five-six, I reckon. Hundred and twenty pounds, or thereabouts. Black hair, blue eyes. Mebbe twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and built sort of—”
The sheriff was real excited. “And did she have a vine tattooed on one of her—uh—”
Pop took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at him. “Now, how the hell would I know what she’s got tattooed on her?”
“Hah! the sheriff snorts. Then he whirled around to me. “Billy, you was swimming with—”
“Why, of course she has,” I says. “Hasn’t everybody?”
The sheriff and his three men says all at the same time, “Choo-Choo Caroline!”
“Right here in this county all the time,” Otis says.
“And now she’s lost in the river bottom,” Booger says. “At night.”
Otis mopped his face with his handkerchief. “In just a G-string,” he says.
Pop looked from one to the other. “Who,” he asked, “is Choo-Choo Caroline?”
“Nobody,” the sheriff says. “Nobody at all. Just a striptease cooch dancer that’s been on the front page of every paper in the country for the past three weeks, that’s being looked for by the FBI and the police of twenty-three states, and I don’t know how many different sets of gangsters. I understand they already named a new dance after her, and a television program, and two or three different drinks, and a new type of brassiere with roses on it, and some miscellaneous underdrawers and new hair-dos and face goo and lipstick. Aside from that she’s only a material witness in the biggest murder case they ever had in New Orleans, and she’s been missing for three weeks with the whole United States looking for her.”
“The only thing I don’t understand is why it never did occur to ‘em that the only perfectly logical place for her to be is wandering around in Sagamore Noonan’s river bottom in a G-string.”
Twelve
“Well sir,” Uncle Sagamore says, “if that don’t beat all.”
“We better get busy and find her,” Pop says. “Imagine the poor girl wandering around in just that little—uh—”
Uncle Sagamore looked kind of thoughtful. “Oh, I reckon she’s safe enough down there. Ain’t nothin’ in that bottom that’d bother her.”
Pop started to get up. “Well, we better organize a search party, anyway. Can’t have her wanderin’ around down there, scared to death, in just that little wisp of—uh—”
He caught Uncle Sagamore looking at him and didn’t say no more.
The sheriff piped up then. “Course we’re goin’ to start a search party,” he says. He started giving orders. He says to one of the men I didn’t know, “Harm, you take them three gangsters on into town and turn ‘em over to the undertaker to hold for the inquest. Me and Pearl and Otis and Booger will stay here. We got three lanterns between us. Doughbelly, you drive the truck back with the rowboat. Get hold of Robert Stark. Tell him to round up twenty men—not no more because if we get this bottom full of people we’ll spend as much time looking for lost searchers as we will for her. Tell him to requisition Rutherford’s sound truck, the one they use during campaigns. If we make enough noise up here, she may find her way in by herself. Tell everybody to bring gasoline lanterns or flashlights. All right, get movin’.”
The fat one nodded his head and started to get in the truck. “May have a little trouble gettin’ twenty men, this time of night.”
“Just tell ‘em what she’s wearin’,” the sheriff says. “You won’t have no trouble at all.”
Pop and Uncle Sagamore just looked at each other again.
The sheriff waved his hand. “Oh, yes. Tell Robert Stark to call the state prison farm for the dawgs. They can have ‘em here by noon tomorrow, if we ain’t found her by that time.”
The truck and the ambulance drove away. Pop motioned for me to come along, and him and Uncle Sagamore went up to the house. We all sat down on the front porch.
“Where’s Dr Severance?” I asked. “And what did the sheriff mean about three dead gangsters? And where’s Sig Freed? And why was they going to drag the lake?”
Uncle Sagamore didn’t say a word. He just sat there wiggling his