“He’s a fussy son of a bitch,” I said. “Maybe he’s got an outfit he wants it to match.”
Anse paid cash for the bag. On the drive back to his house I said, “What you were saying yesterday, Anse, that Bethie could have been mine. She’s spit and image of you. You’d hardly guess she was Paula’s child.”
“She has her mother’s softness, though.”
A child’s crumpled body, a man turning shovelfuls of earth, a light rain falling. I kept putting the rain into that picture. A mind’s a damn stubborn thing.
“Maybe she does,” I said. “But one look at her and you know she’s her father’s daughter.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. I pictured Paula in my mind, and then Bethie. Then my own wife, for some reason, but it was a little harder to bring her image into focus.
Until it was time to go to the bank we sat around waiting for the phone to ring. The whisperer had told Anse there wouldn’t be any more calls, but what guarantee was that?
He mostly talked about Paula, maybe to keep from talking about Bethie. It bothered me some, the turn the conversation was taking, but I don’t guess I let it show.
When the phone finally did ring it was McVeigh at the bank, saying the money was ready. Anse took the new plaid suitcase and got in his car, and I followed him down there in my own car. He parked in the bank’s lot. I found a spot on the street. It was a little close to a fireplug, but I was behind the wheel with the motor running and didn’t figure I had much to worry about from Wally’s boys in blue.
He was in the bank a long time. I kept looking at my watch and every few hours another minute would pass. Then he came out of the bank’s front door and the suitcase looked heavier than when he’d gone in there. He came straight to the car and went around to the back. I’d left the trunk unlocked and he tossed the suitcase inside and slammed it shut.
He got in beside me and I drove. “I feel like a bank robber,” he said. “I come out with the money and you’ve got the motor running.”
My car picked that moment to backfire. “Some getaway car,” I said.
I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. I’d suggested taking my car just in case anybody was watching him. McVeigh might have acted on suspicions, I’d told Anse, and might say something to law enforcement people without saying anything to us. It wouldn’t do to be tailed to the overpass where the exchange was supposed to take place. If the kidnappers spotted a tail they might panic and kill Bethie.
Of course I didn’t believe for a moment she was still alive. But you play these things by the book. What else can you do?
No one was following us. I cut the engine when we got to the designated spot. It was an overpass, and a good spot for a drop. A person could be waiting below, hidden from view, and he could pick up the suitcase and get out of there on foot and nobody up above could do anything about it.
The engine coughed and coughed and sputtered and finally cut out. Anse told me I ought to get it fixed. I didn’t bother saying that nobody seemed to be able to fix it. “Just sit here,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”
I got out of the car, went around to the trunk. He was watching as I carried the plaid suitcase and sent it sailing over the rail. I heard the car door open, and then he was standing beside me, trying to see where it had landed. I pointed to the spot but he couldn’t see it, and I’m not sure there was anything to see.
“I can’t look down from heights,” he said.
“Nothing to look at anyway.”
We got back in the car. I dropped him at the bank, and on the way there he asked if the kidnappers would keep their end of the bargain. “They said she’d be delivered to the house within the next four hours,” he said. “But would they take the chance of delivering her to the house?”
“Probably not,” I told him. “Easiest thing would be to drive her into the middle of one town or another and just let her out of the car. Somebody’ll find her and call you right off. Bethie knows her phone number, doesn’t she?”
“Of course she does.”
“Best thing is for you to be at home and wait for a call.”
“You’ll come over, Lou, won’t you?”
I said I would. He went to get his car from the lot and I drove to my house to check the mail. It didn’t take me too long to get to his place, and we sat around waiting for a call I knew would never come.
Because it was pretty clear somebody local had taken her. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have known what a perfect spot that overpass was for dropping a suitcase of ransom money. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have sent Anse to a specific luggage shop to buy a specific suitcase. An out-of-towner probably wouldn’t have known how to spot Bethie Pollard in the first place.
And a local person wouldn’t dare leave her alive, because she was old enough and bright enough to tell people who had taken her. It stood to reason that she’d been killed right away, as soon as she’d been snatched, and that her corpse had been covered with fresh earth before the ransom note had been delivered to Anson’s mailbox.
After I don’t know how long he said, “I don’t like it, Lou. We should have heard something by now.”
“Could be they’re playing it cagey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Could be they’re watching that dropped suitcase, waiting to make sure it’s not staked out.”
He started. “Staked out?”
“Well, say you’d gone and alerted the Bureau. What they might have done is staked out the area of the drop and just watched and waited to see who picked up the suitcase. Now a kidnapper might decide to play it just as cagey his own self. Maybe they’ll wait twenty-four hours before they make their move.”
“God.”
“Or maybe they picked it up before it so much as bounced, say, but they want to hold onto Bethie long enough to be sure the bills aren’t in sequence and there’s no electronic bug in the suitcase.”
“Or maybe they’re not going to release her, Lou.”
“You don’t want to think about that, Anse.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
He started in on the bourbon then, and I was relieved to see him do it. I figured he needed it. To tell the truth, I had a thirst for it myself right about then. The plain fact is that sitting and waiting is the hardest thing I know about, especially when you’re waiting for something that’s not going to happen.
I was about ready to make an excuse and go on home when the doorbell rang. “Maybe that’s her now,” he said. “Maybe they waited until dark.” But there was a hollow tone in his voice, as if to say he didn’t believe it himself.
“I’ll get it,” I told him. “You stay where you are.”
There were two men at the door. They were almost my height, dressed alike in business suits, and holding guns, nasty little black things. First thought I had was they were robbers, and what crossed my mind was how bad Anse’s luck had turned.
Then one of them said, “FBI,” and showed me an ID I didn’t have time to read. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and we did.
Anse had a glass in his hand. His face didn’t look a whole lot different from before. If he was surprised he didn’t much show it.
One of them said, “Mr. Pollard? We kept the drop site under careful observation for three full hours. In that time no one approached the suitcase. The only persons entering the culvert were two boys approximately ten years old, and they never went near the suitcase.”