and looked at the damage. There was a hole in the tire Nashua could have run through. The tube was completely gone. I got out the spare and the lug wrench and went to work.
When I finished I was sweating. The whole thing hadn’t taken fifteen minutes, but it was a hot day, the second really hot one of the summer. Besides, I was still anxious about Gloria Townsend.
Motorists went by, showing me their dust. The sky was blue and absolutely clear. It would have been a fine day for a dip in the Missouri, along which Rivershore Drive runs.
I climbed back into the Merc, lighted a cigarette with the dash lighter and wished I’d brought my pipe along after the first acrid puff. When the paper stuck to my fingers wetly, I got rid of the cigarette and pressed the starter button.
It ground and ground, but the motor didn’t catch. I glanced at the temperature gauge. It was way over in the red. The hot day, the fast drive out here and fifteen minutes of standing under the hot sun had overheated the car.
I cursed and went around front and lifted the hood. I looked at my wristwatch. Gloria Townsend had called me over forty minutes ago. I wondered if she would still be waiting, then went back behind the wheel and tried the starter button once more. No soap.
I went out on the road and lifted my thumb. The motorists showed me more dust. Lots more dust. The official shield was on the wrong side of the Merc. I glared at the sun, and it glared back down at me. I was strictly an amateur. I got back inside the car and waited.
Ten minutes dragged by, showing their rear ends reluctantly, or maybe provocatively, like can-can dancers, before I was able to kick the overheated engine over. My rear tires threw gravel like a dog pawing dirt as I spun the car back on the asphalt and pushed the gas pedal to the floorboards.
A motor court flashed by on the left, and an army of billboards on the right. There was a drive-in theater and then two roadhouses, each with a handful of cars parked outside. It was mid-morning, after the breakfast rush and before the early lunchers would arrive. The two roadhouses looked lonely.
The third one did not. The third one, coming up swiftly on my left, was the Lagoon.
A dozen or more cars were in the small parking lot as I swung across the road. Two of them were blue Fords with the county sheriff’s shield on them. A sheriff’s deputy trying to look tough under his low-crowned Stetson, but managing only to look nasty, kept a growing mob of people away from the Lagoon’s double door.
I hit the gravel of the parking lot on the run and elbowed my way into the crowd. “What’s going on?” I asked the deputy.
“Nothing in it for you, mister.”
I took out my wallet and let him look at what was behind the plastic window.
“Assistant D.A., huh? Well, I dunno. This ain’t the city.”
The crowd was quiet now. This was official talk and they wanted to hear it.
“Do you get out of the way, or do I have to walk over you?” I asked quietly.
A pink hand jerked the brim of the Stetson up. It was a western hat and a western gesture, but this wasn’t the west. The deputy looked me up and down and said, “Aw, shoot, you can go in there, I reckon.”
I said, “Thanks, podner,” and did so. Someone in the crowd tittered, and the deputy was looking nasty again as I went by. For a minute there he had looked just plain scared.
It was dimly lit inside the Lagoon, but not cool. The dry heat of outdoors was replaced by a damp, sodden, beer-smelling wet heat.
“D.A.’s office,” I said to one of the waiters lounging around uneasily. “What’s the trouble?”
He jerked a thumb. “Sheriff’s back there, mister.”
I went the way he had pointed. At first I didn’t get it. There was a bar on one side and some booths on the other, all of them empty. Beyond them in one direction was the door to the kitchen. Nearby a jukebox wanted to know why I didn’t love it. A second sheriff’s deputy was leaning against the jukebox, polishing his star with the lapel of his seersucker jacket. He was hatless and balding. Beyond him was a little alcove with two doors marked “Boys” and “Girls.”
“You want what?” the deputy said.
“What happened to the people who were here?”
“Before the beating you mean? Who’re you, Ace?”
“D.A.’s office,” I said. “I was to meet a Miss Townsend here.”
He shook his balding head. “Only one or two customers. Yeah, two of ’em. They’re out front with the waiters. Both men.” Then he shifted his weight forward away from the jukebox and said, “Holy Jesus, did you say Townsend?”
A lump of ice formed in the pit of my stomach. A blowout, I thought irrelevantly, irrationally. You had to go and have a blowout.
The deputy went down the little hall to the door marked “Girls” and poked his head in to say, “Guy out here wantsta see Miss Townsend. Says he’s from the D.A.’s office.”
He listened for a moment with his head out of sight beyond the door, then came back to me and said, “You claim you’re from the D.A. Now convince me.”
I showed him my wallet and he pointed like a hunting dog, with his face, toward the door he had just left. I went back there and then turned around and looked at him. He nodded and gave me a lewd grin to take in with me. I opened the door and went in.
The walls were white-tiled and bounced back the reflection of a fluorescent ceiling light. There were two private cubicles, closed, and two sinks with a long mirror over both. There was one of those electronic drying gadgets. There was a strong disinfectant smell. There was another door, beyond the sinks, leading outside, probably to the parking lot. My guess was the sheriff had locked it, because it was closed and locked.
The sheriff watched me come in. I had met him once or twice when our paths crossed officially, but we were bare acquaintances. His name was Merz and he was a big man with a lot of once-solid beef going soft as he approached middle age ungracefully. He was hatless and wore what looked like a faded denim work shirt, open at the collar to reveal matted graying hair. There were tufts of hair protruding from his nostrils and other tufts in his ears. There seemed to be an overabundance of hair everywhere except on his head, which sported a scant fringe around back between the ears. His eyes were as expressive as the reverse sides of campaign buttons.
He said, “This the lady you’re looking for?”
She was on the floor between the sinks and the closed cubicles. Her knees were up and her skirt had slid over her thighs almost to her waist. Her shoes were off and one of them was in the sink, the high heel twisted and broken. She had been beaten with them brutally.
Her legs were black and blue. The summery print dress she wore was torn from neckline to belt down one side. The elastic strap of her bra had torn too, or the snap had parted, exposing the untouched white and pink of her right breast. It was the only untouched part of her I could see. Even her face was battered and swollen beyond recognition. I recognized her by the long, beautiful tawny hair.
“Did a good job, didn’t they?” Sheriff Merz asked.
I
