The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,65
was in little waves like the grain in a piece of wood. “I reckon this is Sagamore, and this must be Billy, huh?”
“Well sir, I’m real proud to know you,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Sam told me about meetin’ up with you last night, an’ how you’d kind of worked out a dicker.”
“Dicker?” she says, and laughs. “I was grabbed and stabbed for a flat ten per cent of the gross. You boys are really operators. But I guess it’ll be worth it; I ain’t seen this many men in one place since me and the girls was up at the atom project. Come on in and meet ‘em. They’re negative types.” She laughed again.
Pop looked at me. “Billy, you better run on to the—”
Mrs. Home waved a hand and her bracelets clanked. “Oh, what the hell, let him come in. Nobody’s working yet. You want him to grow up to be a sissy?”
We went in. The living-room of the trailer had long sofas on each side, and there was white slats over the windows. There was a nice rug on the floor and all along the walls there was big pictures of girls without much clothes on. A radio was playing, and two girls was sitting on one of the sofas. One had red hair and the other kind of a silvery color, and they both was wearing romper suits like Miss Harrington’s, only maybe a little skimpier. They was real pretty. You could see Pop and Uncle Sagamore thought they was nice.
Mrs. Home introduced us all. “These is my nieces,” she says. “The platinum job is Baby Collins, and the redheaded number’s La Verne.”
“Hi, honey,” Baby Collins said to Pop. “You’re kind of cute in a gruesome sort of way. Wanna buy me a drink?”
“Relax, girls,” Mrs. Home says. “These types are the Noonan boys. The customers will begin to show up later. Where’s Francine?”
“In the sack,” La Verne says, and yawns. She picked up a magazine and started to look at the pictures. “Let me know if a live one shows up.”
“I was just listening to the radio,” Mrs. Horne says. “The news is full of it. They say it’s the biggest stampede since the Klondike gold rush.”
“Well sir, by golly,” Uncle Sagamore says. “That’s fine.”
“Oh, I knew it was a natural as soon as I saw those hand bills you was throwing around,” she says. “Which one of you boys wrote that?”
“I did,” Pop says.
“Well,” she says, “if you don’t get an Oscar for it you been gypped. What time you expect the first wave of shock troops will begin to drift back from the boondocks?”
“Likely in a couple of hours,” Uncle Sagamore said. “It’s kind of hot, tiresome work, lookin’ for somebody in a swamp. Especially if you got no way of knowin’ if she’s been found yet.”
“You got an information center set up?” she asked.
Pop nodded. “The carnival’s got a big public address system.”
“Well,” she says, “you boys don’t miss a bet. That’s all I got to say.”
Fifteen
We went down to the house, and Pop and Uncle Sagamore counted the money in the flour sack, and then Uncle Sagamore went off with it somewhere. The smell from the tubs was pretty bad, because there wasn’t any breeze to carry it away. It was after ten o’clock now and sunny and hot. The sheriff’s sound truck wasn’t making any noise, and then I remembered it hadn’t made any since I woke up. I wondered if the man was still asleep, but when I looked up that way he seemed to be working on the equipment, like there was something wrong with it. The whole place was real quiet except for Uncle Finley’s hammering away down at the ark, and the only thing that was changed was that it was just covered solid with acres and acres of cars. And then, of course, there was the carnival. But I hadn’t had time to look into that yet.
I just couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t found Miss Harrington. Pop said that judging from the amount of money they’d took in for parking, and figuring two men to a car and allowing for cars that was stopped back on the road, there must be between seven and eight thousand men looking for her right now. There wasn’t hardly any of them up around the house and cars, either. They was all still down there looking.
Then I remembered the sheriff had said he was going to be back around ten