say you think I robbed a bank. That’s not trouble, unless I’d actually done it. What’d you do, pick my name out of a hat?”
“No. This is Monday morning, and six of us have been working on this since Friday evening. It doesn’t take that long to pull a name out of a hat. Madox, you might as well face it. You stick out in this thing like a cootch dancer at a funeral.”
“Why?” I asked. I wiped the sweat off my face. “For God’s sake, why? Because I was there in town?”
“I’m coming to that. Why were you?”
“I told you. I work there. I sell cars.”
“I know. And in less than three weeks after you show up, the bank is robbed. Where’d you work last?”
“In Houston.”
“So you leave a city the size of Houston and just happen to wind up in a one-horse burg of less than three thousand. To sell cars, you say. Why?”
“Cars are sold everywhere.”
“Did somebody recommend the place? Did Harshaw advertise for a salesman in the Houston papers?”
“No,” I said. “I—“
“I see. Just a coincidence.”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll tell you. After I quit my job in Houston, I decided I’d go to Oklahoma City. I stopped in Lander to get some lunch, and while I was eating Harshaw came in for coffee. We got to talking about something that was in the paper there on the counter, and struck up kind of a general conversation. When he found out I was a salesman, he offered me a job. You can ask him about it if you don’t believe me.”
“So you took a job? Just like that?”
“Why not? A job was what I was looking for.”
“And then in less than three weeks somebody sticks up a bank that hasn’t been robbed in the forty-three years it’s been there. A week before it happens you go off somewhere for a whole day and night and you can’t explain. And the same day it happens, a little after dark, you sneak out of town again for two or three hours. Where’d you go that time?”
I began to be afraid of him then. He was like a bulldog; every time he shifted his grip he got a little more of your throat.
“Well?” The relentless eyes wouldn’t leave my face. “Another married woman you can’t tell us about?”
“No,” I said. “I remember what you’re talking about. I went swimming.”
“Everybody else in town is in an uproar about a fire and bank robbery, but you go swimming. All right, where’d you go?”
I told him.
“Did you ever go swimming out there at night before?”
“Yes. Several times.”
He grunted. “Good. That’s what I wanted to know. Now tell me something I’m curious about.” He paused a moment, watching me and letting me wait. “On these other times, did you always make it a point to stop in at the restaurant on your way back with your hair plastered down like a wet rat, and kid the waitress about it?”
I was groggy for a minute. How could I have known I’d run into a mind like this? I’d done it deliberately, for an alibi, but he could smell it. It was overdone for him. It was phony; it stuck out. I rolled with it, trying to keep my face from showing I was being hurt.
“Look,” I said, “how the hell do I know where I went every time I came back from swimming? I don’t keep a diary. God, you just go swimming. And then you go home. Or you want a cup of coffee. Or a Coke. Or you go to the movies. Or to the can. Who’s going to keep track of all that?”
“I was just curious about it. We’ll call it another coincidence. Let’s go back to the first time you were ever in that bank. You opened an account, remember? And here’s the funniest coincidence of all. There was a fire that day too, wasn’t there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think there was, now that I recall it.”
“And when you went in, there wasn’t anybody in the place, as far as you could see?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“But of course you didn’t think anything about it? I mean, it happens every day—a bank with money lying around everywhere and nobody in sight looking after it. You didn’t think about it again, did you?”
“Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, I thought they were goofier than bedbugs.”
“But you went right ahead and put your money in it, didn’t you?”
“I had to,