spread evenly around, then raked the dried manure and old straw back over the whole area.
Snapping off the light, I went back to the door. The old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it I thought for the hundredth time of that other day and what Sutton had said to her and the way she detested and feared him. There was something insane about it. You could keep trying for years to add it up and you’d never come out with an answer that made sense. She wouldn’t even know Sutton. The hell she didn’t—!
I shook them off angrily. What business was it of mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and threw her out of my mind there was a little of her left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just walked through.
I went out and got in the car, but instead of heading right back to town I drove on down to the river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I forget to put on my hair?”
She grinned. “No. But it looks like you left it out in the rain.”
“I been swimming,” I said. “They caught the bank robbers yet?”
“No. But they got enough cops around here to catch Dillinger.”
“You don’t even remember Dillinger,” I said. “You were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini.”
She laughed, tickled about it. I went back to the rooming house, took another drink, and lay down on the bed, feeling the tension go out of me. I was in. The money was buried, and I hadn’t left a track behind me.
* * *
The next day was Saturday, but there wasn’t much business transacted. They might as well have closed the whole town except that there wouldn’t have been any places for people to congregate and rehash the robbery. The place was full of cops. The white-haired Sheriff from the county seat was in town with two of his deputies besides the one who lived here, and there were some more with plain-clothes cop written all over them, probably from the detective agency or insurance company. Everybody was wild to get at the remains of the fire and start pawing through it for evidence, but a lot of it was still smoldering and too hot. Special deputies had been sworn in to keep people away from the place. I had a hunch the Sheriff and the detectives had already junked the out-of-town gang idea and were playing it cagey, going through the motions of looking for the getaway car while they waited for somebody to stick his head up or make a slip. That much money would be burning somebody’s pockets and he’d have to start throwing it around. All right, I thought; go ahead. I know about that one too.
All I had to do was keep playing it down the middle. I stuck around the lot and talked robbery with anybody who drifted in. And then Harshaw pulled a funny one on me. Around noon he called me into the office. He was chewing a cold cigar and oiling a big salt-water reel on his desk.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
I perched on the side of a desk, wondering what was coming. “What’s up?” I asked, as casually as I could.
“I want you to take charge here for a while. My wife and I are going to Galveston for a week.”
“What’s the matter with Gulick?” I asked.
“There’s nothing the matter with Gulick,” he said impatiently. “Except that he’s a little slow and he won’t take responsibility. You can use your own judgment about trades. Do you want it, or don’t you?”
“O.K. with me,” I said. For once I couldn’t start an argument.
“You can run an ad if you want to,” he said. “The paper comes out early in the week.”
“What’ll I use for money? My own?”
He sighed and shook his head. “You’re a tough nut to get along with, Madox. Why in hell would I ask you to pay for the ad out of your pocket? They can send the bill to Miss Harper. Or tell her to give it to you out of petty cash.”
“O.K.,” I said. At least he was taking that over-ripe bundle of