highway and back.”
“Maybe you’d better try to remember. You don’t look too good, right now.”
Just then Buck slammed the door and came over to us. “What you doing with a pair of girl’s shoes in your car?” he asked.
I stared at him. Shoes? Then I remembered; I hadn’t given them to her. “Oh,” I said. “They belong to a friend of mine.”
“She always leave her shoes in the car?” Buck asked, “I’ve heard of ‘em leaving their pants around here and there—“
“Take it easy, Mac,” I said. I told them about losing the dog and going back to find him. They motioned me towards the police car while I was talking and we got in, all three of us in the back seat. There was another man in front, at the wheel.
“And what girl was this?” the short one asked.
“Her name’s Gloria Harper.”
“She live here in town?”
“It’s all right,” the man in front said. I knew who he was then. He was the deputy who’d been at the fire, the one who lived here. “I know her. She’s a nice kid. If this guy’s mixed up in something I doubt if she is.”
We went on through town and north on the highway. It was about twenty miles to the county seat. I was still flying blind, but I was beginning to have a hunch they were too. Maybe they didn’t have a thing to go on except the fact that I was a stranger in town.
I began to breathe a little easier. So far I hadn’t made a false move or spilled anything, in spite of the suddenness of it, and now that I was on guard all I had to do was play it as it turned up and stick to my story. I even had my alibi there in the front seat, the deputy who’d seen me at the fire. The only thing I had to remember was not to spring it too soon in the game. Let it come out naturally—that was the thing.
When we got into town we drove right to the jail. The Sheriff was there waiting for us in a hot, bleak office full of harsh light and steel filing cabinets. It was the first time I’d seen him up close, and I didn’t much like what I saw. There wasn’t any of the pot-bellied court-house stooge here; he was a policeman doing police work. The hair must have been prematurely white because the face was that of a man in his forties, a face with all the flabby indecision of the front side of an ax.
“What took you so long?” he asked Buck.
“He was out ridin’ around,” Buck said.
“Where?”
It was the short deputy who answered. “He says he don’t know.” He grinned.
I turned and looked at him. He wasn’t over five feet five, with a deformed left hand and a nasty pair of eyes, and you could see he liked going around with the badge and gun as much as he didn’t like men bigger than he was. The other two—Buck and the one who’d been at the fire—looked harmless enough, just lanky, serious-minded country boys drawing a county paycheck.
“All right, all right,” the Sheriff said. “You and Buck can go home.” They went out and he jerked his head towards a folding chair over against the wall. “Sit down, Madox,” he said, taking a cigar out of a box.
I sat down. The big unshaded bulb hanging in the middle of the room made it even hotter than it was inside. I fished out a cigarette and lighted it, throwing the match into a dirty spittoon. Sweat ran down my chest inside the shirt. How much did they know?
“What’s this all about, Sheriff?” I asked.
He bit the end off the cigar and looked over at the deputy, ignoring me. “What about the car, Tate?”
“It was clean. Wasn’t nothing in it but a pair of girl’s shoes and the junk in the glove locker. The usual stuff.”
“And his room?”
Tate shook his head. “Nothing there but his clothes.” He sat astride the chair with his arms propped on the back, watching me while he smoked a cigarette.
The Sheriff jerked his head around suddenly, and the cold, incisive eyes bored into me. “All right, Madox; where’d you hide it?”
“Hide what?” I asked.
“That money.”
“Look, Sheriff,” I said. “I could ask you what money, and waste some more of your time and mine, but I understand that I’m supposed to have robbed a bank. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well,