I still didn't know who he was. I didn't wait to find out. I ran out of the steam room. The Finn was standing by the door looking wild. “What's the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I got a fifty-dollar bill out of my wallet. “Get a hammer and some nails.” He hesitated and I shoved the fifty at him. His eyes bulged out. He got the hammer and the nails. “Be fixing something,” I said. He looked around the room. “What'll I fix?” I picked up a chair and jerked the back off it. “Here.” He began to work on it, pounding hard. I hid the pistol under a towel, and then I sat on the rubbing table and began to talk. “There they were with sixty seconds to play,” I said, “and Duke leading three to nothing, and me with one hundred smackers on California. So what do I do? I say to Fritz: 'I'll pay the bet off fifty cents on the dollar.' And Fritz says 'Okay'.”
I looked up, very surprised, as the room clerk and a uniformed cop came running into the room. They stopped when they saw the Finn hammering at the chair. “What's this?” I said.
The clerk turned to me. “Oh, Mr. Craven.” He giggled. “The awfullest thing. I thought I heard shots down here.”
“We didn't hear 'em,” I said, looking at the Finn. “I guess he's been making too much noise.”
The Finn pounded in a nail. The clerk giggled. The policeman snorted and said: “And me eating my lunch.” They went out. I slid off the table and went into the steam room.
I had been scared to death he was going to come to while the cop was around, but I needn't have worried. He was still out, lying on the stone floor just where I left him. I went over and looked down at him. At first I didn't recognize him, and then I did. It was the punk who had brought me the message from Carmel. The one who'd sat at the coffee-shop counter with me. His face was white and “pinched-looking. I didn't know if the steam made him look that way, or the knock on the head. I hauled him out of the steam room. The Finn took off his clothes and I stuck him under a cold shower. That brought him around. He spluttered and gasped, trying to get his breath. He was a little guy, not over a hundred and thirty pounds, and very thin. I could see his ribs. I tossed him a towel. “Now, what's the great idea?” I asked. The punk looked scared, but he said: “There isn't any.”
“You took those shots at me just for the hell of it?”
“No.”
“Well, then; why?”
The punk didn't answer, just stood by the shower with the towel draped around him. I saw this wasn't getting me very far.
“What makes you think your sister's dead?” I asked. He wouldn't say.
“Look,” I said. “I wouldn't kill her. She was a friend. I liked her.”
He stared at me for a minute, still angry, and then he began to cry. “She was all I had,” he gasped between sobs. I thought, well, for God's sake! I called to the Finn and told him to get us a couple of drinks. The punk cried, leaning against the wall, holding the towel around him, until the drinks came. The Finn had gotten rye with ginger ale. I made the punk drink his. After a while he stopped crying.
“Now tell me about it,” I said.
It took quite a while to get him talking. I showed him a card that said I was a special investigator for the Treasury Department, but what really did it was my not being sore because he'd tried to kill me. He said he guessed he had been mistaken. He said he was sorry.
“What makes you think your sister's dead?” I asked again.
“I know.” He began to breathe hard. “I saw her body.”
“The hell!” I yelled for the Finn. “Bring the bottle this time,” I told him.
The Finn went for the rye. “Where'd you see her?” I asked the kid.
“She's-her body's-at an undertaker's in 'Valley.”
I remembered something I'd seen in the paper. I went into the steam room and brought out the paper. It was wet, but the print hadn't smeared. I found the story I was thinking about on page six.
Valley, Aug to.-The nearly nude body of a young woman, presumably beaten to death, was found early today in a ditch by the Daniel Boone Pike. A pretty brunette about twenty-five years old, she had no marks of identification on her. She was clad only in silk stockings and underclothes. It is believed she was thrown from a passing car.
Valley was a village about sixty miles towards St Louis from Paulton. It was a couple of counties away. I showed the item to the punk.
“Yes.”
“What a bad break,” I said.
I thought it was a bad break. She had been a nice little whore, and she had helped me. She had helped me! I began to feel creepy.
“How did you link me with her?” I asked. “They told me at the house you were looking for her yesterday... pretty sore about something.” The punk was crying. “So I added two and two.”
“And got six,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I'm doing a job of work here.” I flashed the Treasury card at him again. “I wasn't sore at her. I was sore because they wouldn't tell me where she was.”
“The Negro girl wouldn't?”
“Nobody would. So I got sore. You see the wreckage?”
The punk nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I finally found she'd gone out with... somebody.”
