Take away a nine-year-old girl with freckles. Somebody’d done just that.
“You’ll see me through this,” he said. “Won’t you, Lou?”
“If it’s what you want.”
“I wish to hell you were still sheriff. The voters of this county never had any sense.”
“Maybe it’s better that I’m not. This way I’m just a private citizen, nobody for the kidnappers to get excited about.”
“I want you to work for me after this is over.”
“Well, now.”
“We can work out the details later. By God, I should have hired you the minute the election results came in. I figured we knew each other too well, we’d been through too much together. But you can do better working for me than you’re doing now, and I can use you, I know I can. We’ll talk about it later.”
“We’ll see.”
“Lou, we’ll get her back, won’t we?”
“Sure we will, Anse. Of course we will.”
Well, you have to go through the motions. There was no phone call that night. If the victim’s alive they generally make a call and let you hear their voice. On tape, maybe, but reading that day’s newspaper so you can place the recording in time. Any proof they can give you that the person’s alive makes it that much more certain you’ll pay the ransom.
Of course nothing’s hard and fast. Kidnapping’s an amateur crime and every fool who tries it has to make up his own rules. So it didn’t necessarily prove anything that there was no call.
I hung around, waiting it out with him. He hit the bourbon pretty hard but he was always a man who could take on a heavy load without showing it much. Somewhere along the way I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.
A little past midnight I said, “I don’t guess there’s going to be a call tonight, Anse. I’m gonna head for home.”
He wanted me to stay over. He had reasons — in case there was a call in the middle of the night, in case something called for action. I told him he had my number and he could call me at any hour. What we both knew is his real reason was he didn’t want to be alone there, and I thought about staying with him and decided I didn’t want to. The hours were just taking too long to go by, and I didn’t figure I’d get a good night’s sleep under his roof.
I drove right on home. I kept it under the speed limit because I didn’t want one of Wally Hines’s eager beavers coming up behind me with the siren wailing. They’ll do that now. We hardly ever gave out tickets to local people when I was running the show, just a warning and a soft one at that. We saved the tickets for the leadfoot tourists. Well, another man’s apt to have his own way of doing things.
In my own house I popped a beer and ate my leftover hamburger. It was cold with the grease congealed on it but I was hungry enough to get it down. I could have had something out of Anse’s refrigerator but I hadn’t been hungry while I was there.
I sat in a chair and put on Johnny Carson but didn’t even try to pay attention. I thought how little Bethie was dead and buried somewhere that nobody would likely ever find her. Because that was the way it read, even if it wasn’t what Anse and I dared to say to each other. I sat there and thought how Paula was dead of a bee sting and my wife was on the other side of the continent and now Bethie. Thoughts swirled around in my head like water going down a bathtub drain.
I was up a long while. The television was still on when they were playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and I might as well have been watching programs in Japanese for all the sense they made to me.
Somewhere down the line I went to bed.
I was eating a sweet roll and drinking a cup of coffee when he called. There’d been a phone call just moments earlier from the kidnapper, he told me, his voice hoarse with the strain of it all.
“He whispered. I was half asleep, I could barely make out what he was saying. I was afraid to ask him to repeat anything. I was just afraid, Lou.”
“You get everything?”
“I think so. I have to buy a special suitcase, I have to pack it a certain way and chuck it into a culvert at a certain time.” He mentioned some of the specifics. I was only half listening. Then he said, “I asked them to let me talk to Bethie.”
“And?”
“It was as if he didn’t even hear me. He just went on telling me things, and I asked him again and he hung up.”
She was dead and in the ground, I thought.
I said, “He probably made the call from a pay phone. Most likely they’re keeping her at a farmhouse somewhere and he wouldn’t want to chance a trace on the call. He wouldn’t have her along to let her talk, he wouldn’t want to take the chance. And he’d speed up the conversation to keep it from being traced at all.”
“I thought of that, Lou. I just wished I could have heard her voice.”
He’d never hear her voice again, I thought. My mind filled with an image of a child’s broken body on a patch of ground, and a big man a few yards from her, holding a shovel, digging. I blinked my eyes, trying to chase the image, but it just went and hovered there on the edge of thought.
“You’ll hear it soon enough,” I said. “You’ll have her back soon.”
“Can you come over, Lou?”
“Hell, I’m on my way.”
I poured what was left of my coffee down the sink. I took the sweet roll with me, ate it on the way to the car. The sun was up but there was no warmth in it yet.
In the picture I’d had, with the child’s corpse and the man digging, a light rain had been falling. But there’d been no rain yesterday and it didn’t look likely today. A man’s mind’ll do tricky things, fill in details on its own. A scene like that, gloomy and all, it seems like there ought to be rain. So the mind just sketches it in.
On the way to the bank he said, “Lou, I want to hire you.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we can talk about it after Bethie’s back and all this is over, but I’m not even sure I want to stay around town, Anse. I’ve been talking with some people down in Florida and there might be something for me down there.”
“I can do better for you than some crackers down in Florida,” he said gruffly. “But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about now. I want to hire you to help me get Bethie back.”
I shook my head. “You can’t pay me for that, Anson.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I won’t take the money. Did you even think I would?”
“No. I guess I just wish you would. I’m going to have to lean on you some, Lou. It seems a lot to ask as a favor.”
“It’s not such a much,” I said. “All I’ll be doing is standing alongside you and backing you up.” Going through the motions with you, I thought.
I waited in the car while he went into the bank. I might have played the radio but he’d taken the keys with him. Force of habit, I guess. I just sat and waited.
He didn’t have the money when he came out. “Jim has to make a call or two to get that much cash together,” he explained. “It’ll be ready by two this afternoon.”
“Did he want to know what it was for?”
“I told him I had a chance to purchase an Impressionist painting from a collector who’d had financial reverses. The painting’s provenance was clear but the sale had to be a secret and the payment had to be in cash for tax purposes.”
“That’s a better story than a real estate deal.”
He managed a smile. “It seemed more imaginative. He didn’t question it. We’d better buy that suitcase.”
We parked in front of a luggage and leather goods store on Grandview Avenue. I remembered they’d had a holdup there while I was sheriff. The proprietor had been shot in the shoulder but had recovered well enough. I went in with him and Anson bought a plaid canvas suitcase. The whisperer had described the bag very precisely.