Talk of The Town by Charles Williams(1)

1
It wasn't a very large town. The highway came into it from
the west across a bridge spanning a slow-moving and muddy
river with an unpronounceable Indian name, and then ran
straight through the central business district for four or five
blocks down a wide street with angle parking and four
traffic lights at successive intersections. I was just pulling
away from the last light, going about twenty miles per hour
in the right-hand lane, when some local in a beat-up old
panel truck decided to come shooting backwards out of his
parking place without looking behind him.
There was another car on my left, so all I could do was to
slam on my brakes just before I plowed into him. There was
a crash of metal followed by a succession of tinkling sounds
as fragments of grill-work and shards of glass rained onto
the pavement. Necks craned up and down the sun-blasted
street.
I locked the handbrake and got out, and shook my head
with disgust as I sized up the damage. The front bumper was
knocked loose at one end, and the right fender and smashed
headlight were crumpled in on the wheel. But the worst of it
was the spout of hot water streaming out through the
wreckage of the grill.

The driver of the panel came charging out. He was about
six feet, thin, dark, and hard-nosed, and the bony face he
wanted to shove into mine was flavored with cheap
Talk of The Town— 2
muscadel. “Look, stupid,” he said, “maybe you think this is a
race track—”
The bad mood had been building up in me for a long time,
and I was in just the frame of mind to be jockeyed around by
some summer-replacement tough guy with a nose full of
wine. I caught a handful of his shirt in my left and started to
slap him one across the mouth, but then the childishness of
it caught up with me and I merely pushed him away. He
sputtered some more, and at the same time somebody
behind me clamped a big hand on my arm. I turned. It was a
fat man with a hard and competent eye. He was dressed in
khaki and wore a gunbelt.
“All right,” he told me. “You want to start trouble around
here, start it with me. I’m in the business.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “There’s no war.”
He kept the flinty eye on my face. “You’re a pretty big boy
to be shoving people around.”
The usual crowd was beginning to gather and I could
sense I wasn’t likely to be named Miss Northern Florida of
1958. It looked as if I’d started the beef, in addition to
running into him, and the Californian license plates probably
didn’t help any.
He turned to the driver of the panel. “You all right,
Frankie?”
Fine, I thought sourly; they’re probably cousins.
Frankie unburdened himself. The whole thing was my
fault; damned tourists, doing sixty through the middle of
town. When he ran down, I had a chance to put in my
nickel’s worth, and that’s about what it bought. I polled a
few of the rubbernecks, looking for witnesses, but nobody
had seen anything, or would admit it.
“All right, mister,” the fat policeman told me bleakly, “let’s
see your driver's license.”
I was getting it out of my wallet and making a mental note
that if I ever came through here again I’d ship the car and
walk, when a tall girl with dark hair stepped off the curb and
came over.
“I saw the whole thing,” she said to the officer. She told
him just how it happened.
Talk of The Town— 3
In some vague way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, his
reaction struck me as a little strange. He apparently knew
her, but there was no word of greeting. He nodded,
accepting the story, but it was a curt nod, grudging and
perhaps faintly hostile. She wrote something on a card and
handed it to me.
“If your insurance company wants me, they can reach me
there,” she said.
“Thanks a million,” I told her. I slipped the card into my
wallet. “It’s very nice of you.”
She went back onto the pavement. Some of the bystanders
watched her, and I sensed the same odd reaction I’d felt in
the fat policeman. It wasn’t quite hostility—or was it? I had a
feeling they all knew her, although not one had spoken to
her. But she had poise.
I didn’t know whether it was because of her story or
because the officer finally got close enough to Frankie to
pick up some of his muscadel fall-out, but the picture
changed somewhat in my favor. He cut Frankie down to size
with a couple of parade-ground barks, and wrote up the
report, but didn’t issue any tickets. The damage to the panel
truck wasn’t extensive. We exchanged insurance company
information, and a wrecker came along and picked my car
up. I rode to the garage with the driver. It was back the way
I’d come, near the river on the west side of the business
district.
It was hot and still, around two in the afternoon of a day in
midsummer. Shadows were like ink in the white sunlight,
and I could feel perspiration soaking my shirt. I’d left New
Orleans early that morning and had planned to go on
through to St. Petersburg and have a dip in the Gulf before
dinner. Well, it couldn’t be helped, I thought sourly. Then I
thought of the girl again and tried to remember just what
she’d looked like. The only thing I could come up with was
that she was tall and quite slender. Attractive? Somewhat,
but no real dish. About thirty, I thought. But there’d been
something about her face, a quality that escaped me now—
Well, it didn’t matter.
The garage was a big place on a corner, with a showroom
in front and some petrol pumps in the driveway. We towed
Talk of The Town— 4
the car on into the repair department, and the foreman
looked it over. He was a thin slat of a man with a cold face.
“You want a bid, is that it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’ll pay for it myself and let the insurance
companies fight about it later.”
“Day after tomorrow’s the best we can do. We haven’t got
that radiator in stock, but we can get it out of Tallahassee on
the bus.”
”Okay,” I said. I didn’t look forward to spending thirty-six
hours or more in the place, but there was no point in griping
about it. I lifted the two cases out of the boot. “Where’s a
good place to stay?”
“One of the motels would be your best bet,” he replied.
“Fine. Where’s the nearest one?”
He wiped his hands on a piece of rag and thought about it.
“Only one on this side is about three miles out. East of
town, though, there’s a couple of good ones fairly close in.
The Spanish Main, and the El Rancho.”
“Thanks. Can I call a cab?”
He jerked his head towards the front office. “See the girl.”
A big blond kid in a white overall had come in to get
something off a work-bench. He turned and looked at us. “If
he wants a motel, Mrs. Langston is out front now, getting
some gas.”
The foremen shook his head.
“Who’s Mrs. Langston?” I asked.
“She runs the Magnolia Lodge, east of town.”
“Well, what’s the matter with that?”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He puzzled me. “Is something wrong with it?” I asked.
“I guess not. It’s run-down and there’s no pool, but where
you stay is your own business, the way I look at it.”
Just then the name clicked. I was almost sure it was the
same one. Rather than fish it out of my wallet, however, I
merely picked up the two bags, said “Thanks,” and walked
out front to the driveway. I was right. She was standing
beside an old station wagon taking some money from her
purse.
Talk of The Town— 5
I walked over and put down the suitcase. “Mrs.
Langston?”
She glanced around and gave me a brief smile. “Oh,
hello,” she said. And all at once I realized what it was about
her face that had struck me before. It was tired. Simply that.
It was a slender and rather attractive face with good bone
structure, but there was an almost unfathomable weariness
far back in the fine gray eyes.
“I understand you run a motel,” I said.
She nodded. “That’s right.””If you have a vacancy, I’d like
to ride out with you.”
“Yes, of course. Just put your bags in the back.”
The boy brought her change and we drove off back down
the main street. I hoped if Frankie was still in town with his
panel truck we’d see him in time to take the station wagon
apart and hide it.
“When will your car be ready?” she asked, as we paused
for a traffic light.
“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “By the way, I want to thank
you again.”
“You’re quite welcome,” she said. The light changed and
we went on.
I turned and looked at her. She had dark reddish-brown
hair in a long bob just off her shoulders, and a rather
creamy complexion, though she wore no make-up except a
touch of lipstick. The mouth was nice. Her cheekbones were
high and prominent, giving an impression of faint hollows
below them and adding to that general suggestion of being
underweight and overstrained and tired. It was the face of a
mature woman, and there was strength in it. Her wedding
and engagement rings looked expensive, but the rest of her
outfit failed to match them. The dress was a cheap hand-medown
and the sandals were old and beat-up. She had nice
long legs, but wore no stockings.
On the right, just beyond the city limits, was the Spanish
Main motel. It had a large pool set among colored umbrellas
in front. It looked cool and blue in the white glare of the sun,
and I remembered what he’d said about the Magnolia’s not
having one. Chump, I thought sourly. Well, I didn’t like
being conned. And she had been nice.
Talk of The Town— 6
The Magnolia was about a quarter of a mile beyond, on the
left. As she turned in off the highway I could see what he’d
meant about its being run-down: there was an air of neglect
about it, or an impression that it had never been quite
completed. There were twelve or fifteen connected units in
the usual quadrangle arrangement, with the open end facing
the highway. The construction was solid and not too old,
brick with a red-tile roof, but it all needed painting, and the
grounds were bleak and inhospitable in the hot glare of
afternoon. There’d been an attempt at a lawn in front, facing
the road, and in the center of the square, but it was brown
now, and dusty, and the white gravel of the drive was
scattered and threadbare, with scrawny weeds poking up
through it in places. I wondered why her husband had let it
get into this condition.
The office was on the left. She stopped in front of it. There
were two bags of groceries on one of the back seats. I
gathered them up and followed her inside.
The small lobby was cool and pleasantly dim with its
Venetian blinds closed against the harsh sunlight outside.
There were two or three braided rugs scattered about the
waxed floor of dark blue tile, and several bamboo armchairs
with orange and black cushions. A T.V. set stood in one
corner, and in front of a sofa was a long bamboo-and-glass
coffee table with a number of magazines. On a table against
the left wall was a scale model of a sloop. It was about three
feet long and had beautiful lines. Opposite the door was the
registration desk, and at the closed end of that a small
telephone switchboard and the rack of pigeonholes for the
keys. Directly behind the desk was a curtained doorway that
apparently connected with their living quarters. Beyond it,
somewhere in the rear, I could hear a vacuum sweeper.
I set the groceries on the desk. She called out, “Josie,” and
the sound of the vacuum sweeper cut off. A heavy-bodied
colored girl in a white apron pushed through the curtains in
the doorway. She had a fat, good-natured face and a big
mouth overpainted with some odd shade of lipstick that was
almost purple.
Mrs. Langston placed a registration card before me and
nodded toward the groceries. “Take those into the kitchen,
will you, Josie?”
Talk of The Town— 7
“Yes, ma'am.” Josie gathered them up and started to turn
away. “Did the plumber call?” Mrs. Langston asked.
I undipped my pen and bent over the card, wondering— as
I had for the past week—why I still gave San Francisco as
my address. Well, you had to put down something, and at
least that matched the license plates on the car.
“No, ma'am,” Josie replied. “Phone did ring a couple of
times but I reckon it was a wrong number. When I answer
they don’t say nothin’; they just hang up.” She went on out.
I happened to glance up. Mrs. Langston’s face was utterly
still, but the creamy skin had gone a shade paler, and I had
an odd impression she was having to fight for the composure
she showed. She looked away.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said. She shook her head and forced a smile.
“No. I’m all right It’s just the heat.”
She turned the registration card round and looked at it.
“San Francisco?” she said. “And how are you standing the
heat, Mr. Chatham?”
“So you’ve been there?” I asked.
She nodded. “Once—in August. All I had was summer
clothes, and I almost froze. But I loved it; I think it’s a
fascinating city.” She reached back and took a key from one
of the pigeonholes. “Take Number Twelve,” she said.
“I’d better pay you now,” I said. “How much is it?”
She started to reply, but the telephone rang. The effect on
her was almost startling. She went rigid, as if she had been
sluiced in the back with iced water, and just for an instant I
could see the terror in her eyes. It was on the desk, just to
the left of her. It rang again, shrilling insistently, and she
slowly forced herself to reach out a hand and pick it up.
“Magnolia Lodge,” she said in a small voice.
Then the color went out of her face, all of it. She swayed,
and I reached out across the desk to try to catch her,
thinking she was about to fall, but she merely collapsed onto
the stool behind it. She tried to put the receiver back on the
cradle, but missed. It lay on the blotter with faint sounds
issuing from it while she put her face down in her hands and
shuddered.
Talk of The Town— 8
I picked it up. I knew I had no business doing it, but it was
pure reflex, and I already had a suspicion as to what I’d
hear. I was right.
It was an unidentifiable whisper, vicious, obscene, and
taunting, and the filth it spewed up would make you sick. I
thought I heard something else, too, in the background. In a
minute the flow of sewage halted, and the whisper asked,
“Are you hearing me all right, honey? Tell me how you like
it.”
I clamped a hand over the receiver and leaned over the
desk. Touching her on the arm, I said, “Answer him,” and
held the instrument before her.
She raised her head, but could only stare at me in horror. I
shook her shoulder. “Go on,” I ordered. “Say something.
Anything at all.”
She nodded. I removed my hand from the receiver. “Why?
she cried out. “Why are you doing this to me?”
I nodded, and went on listening. The soft and whispered
laugh was like something crawling across your bare flesh in
a swamp. “Because we’ve got a secret, honey. We know you
killed him, don’t we?”
I frowned. That wasn’t part of the usual pattern. The
whisper continued. “We know, don’t we, honey? I like that. I
like to think about just the two of us—” He repeated some of
the things he liked to think. He had a great imagination,
with things crawling in it. Then, suddenly, there was a brief
punctuation mark of some other kind of sound in the
background, and the line abruptly went dead. He had hung
up. But maybe not soon enough, I thought.
I replaced the receiver and looked down at the bowed
head. “It’s all right,” I said. “They’re usually harmless.”
She raised her face then, but uttered no sound.
“How long has he been doing it?” I asked.
“A long—” she whispered raggedly. “Long—” She
collapsed.
I whirled round the end of the desk and caught her.
Carrying her out, I placed her gently on the floor on one of
the rugs. She was very light, far too light for a girl as tall as
she was. I stood up and called out “Josie!” and then looked
back down at her, at the extreme pallor of the slender face
Talk of The Town— 9
and the darkness of the lashes against it, and wondered how
long she had been running along the ragged edge of a
breakdown.
Josie pushed through the curtains and looked
questioningly at me.
“Have you got any whisky?” I asked.
“Whisky? No, sir, we ain’t got none—” She had taken
another step nearer the desk, and now she could see Mrs.
Langston on the floor. “Oh, good Lawd in Heaven—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Bring me a glass. And a damp cloth.”
I hurried out and brought in the two-suiter bag from the
station wagon. There was a bottle in it. Josie came waddling
back through the curtains. I poured some whisky into the
glass, and knelt beside Mrs. Langston to bathe her face with
the wet wash-cloth.
“You reckon she goin’ to be all right?” Josie asked
anxiously.
“Of course,” I said. “She’s just fainted.” I felt her pulse. It
was steady enough.
“Ain’t you goin” to give her the whisky?”
“Not till she can swallow it,” I said impatiently. “You want
to strangle her? Where’s her husband?”
“Husband?”
“Mr. Langston,” I snapped. “Go and get him. Where is
he?”
She shook her head. “There ain’t no Mr. Langston. He’s
dead.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You reckon we ought to call the doctor?” Josie asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Wait a minute.”
Mrs. Langston stirred, and her eyes opened. I raised her
with an arm round her shoulders, and held the whisky to her
lips. She took a drink of it, and coughed, but kept it down. I
handed the glass to Josie. “Get some water.”
In a moment she was able to sit up. I helped her into one
of the armchairs and gave her another drink, mixed with
water. Some of the color had come back to her face.
“Thank you,” she said shakily.
Talk of The Town— 10
I waved it off impatiently. “Do you know who he is?”
“No,” she said.
“You don’t have any idea at all?” She shook her head
helplessly. “But you reported it to the police.”
She nodded. “Several times.”
There was no time to lose. I went over to the phone and
dialed Operator. “Give me the Sheriffs office.” A man’s voice
answered after the second ring, and I said, “I’d like to speak
to the Sheriff—”
“He’s not here. This is Magruder; what is it?”
“I’m calling from the Magnolia Lodge,” I said. “It’s about
the psycho that’s been calling Mrs. Langston. I think you’ve
had a complaint on it—”
“On the what?”
“A psycho,” I repeated. “A nut. He’s been bothering Mrs.
Langston, calling her on the phone—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “What about him?”
“I think I can give you a lead, and if you work fast you may
be able to nail him. He just hung up about two minutes ago
—”
“Hold if, friend. Not so fast. Who are you?”
I took a deep breath. “My name’s Chatham. I’m staying at
the motel, and I happened to be in the office here when the
creep called this time. I listened to him—“
“Why?”
That might not be the stupidest question it would be
possible for a police officer to ask, I thought, but it was
close. I choked down a sarcastic reply. “Just to see if I could
get a lead on where he was calling from—”
“And he told you? That was nice of him.”
I sighed. “No. I’m trying to tell you. I think I lucked into
something that could help you—”
“Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You got his prints over the phone.”
“Then you’re not interested?”
“Listen, friend,” he said coldly, “you think we got nothing
to do but pussyfoot around looking for a drunk on a
telephone jag? Tell Mrs. Langston if she don’t want to listen
to this goof all she’s got to do is hang up.”
Talk of The Town— 11
“She can’t take much more of it,” I said.
“She don’t have to answer, does she?”
“A business phone?” I asked coldly.
“I can’t help what kind of phone she got. But nobody’s
ever been hurt over one of ‘em, believe me.”
“I never thought of that,” I said. “I’ll tell her, and
everything will be all right.” I hung up, burning.
Talk of The Town— 12
2
I turned back to her. Josie had returned to work. She pushed
a hand up through the dark hair with that weary gesture she
had, and she was still too pale. One of these days she was
going to come apart like a dropped plate.
“They ever do anything about it at all?” I asked.
“The first time or two. They sent a deputy out to talk to
me. But I’m not sure they even believe me.”
That’s about it, I thought; it was a pretty even bet.
“He bother any other women, do you know?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” Then the horror
came back into her eyes for a moment, and she cried, “Why
does he do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do they jump out of the
shrubbery in a park without their clothes on? But they’re
nearly always harmless.”
It occurred to me I was almost as silly as that clown
Magruder. Harmless? Well, in any physical sense they were.
She glanced up at me. “Why did you ask me to answer
him?”
I shrugged. “Force of habit. I used to be a cop.”
“Oh,” she said. “You wanted to keep him talking, is that
it?”
Talk of The Town— 13
“Sure. That’s your only connection with him, and once he
hangs up he might as well be in another universe. The
longer he spews, the more chance there is he’ll say
something that’ll give you a lead. Or that you’ll hear
something else in the background.”
She looked at me with quickened interest “And did you
hear something?”
That’s right. He was calling from a box. That doesn’t mean
much, of course; they nearly always do. But this one was in
a beer joint or a restaurant, and I think it could be identified
—”
“How?” she asked wonderingly. “I mean, how did you find
out?”
“Dumb luck,” I said. “You play for the breaks, and
sometimes you get one. Most of those booths have fans in
‘em, you know; this one did, and the fan had a bad bearing.
It was just noisy enough to hear. And I heard a jukebox start
up.”
I stopped, thinking about it. This guy was off his rocker,
but still he was smart enough to hang up when that music
started. Well, it didn’t mean anything. A sexual psychopath
didn’t necessarily have to be stupid; he was just unbalanced.
She frowned. “Then they might have caught him? I mean,
if they had listened to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “With luck, and enough men to
cover all the places in town within a few minutes—” Her
County police force was none of my business. And they could
have been swamped and shorthanded. Police forces usually
were.
“You say you were a policeman?” she asked. “Then you
aren’t any more?”
“No,” I said.
I put the whisky back in the bag and closed it. The room
key was on the desk where she’d dropped it. I put it in my
pocket. She stood up. Instead of helping her, I watched to
see how she handled it. She was still a little shaky, but
apparently all right.
“Thank you for everything, Mr. Chatham,” she said.
“How many times have you fainted lately?”
Talk of The Town— 14
She smiled ruefully. “It was so ridiculous. I think this was
only the second time in my life. But why?”
“You ought to see a doctor. You need a check-up.”
“That’s silly. I’m perfectly healthy.”
“You’re running on your reserve tanks now. And when
they’re empty you’re going to crash. You don’t weigh a
hundred pounds.”
“A hundred and ten. You don’t know your own strength.”
“Okay,” I said. It was none of my business.
I went out and lifted the other bag from the station wagon.
No. 12 was across in the opposite wing. It was in the corner,
and there were three doors between it and the end; fifteen
rooms altogether. As I put down the cases and fished in my
pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the
bleak area baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot
swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it:
flagstones, deck-chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass—It
screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.
The room was nicely furnished with a green wall-to-wall
carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a chest of
drawers with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of
armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full length
mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forestgreen
tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner
mounted in the wall near the closed and curtained window
at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to
flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower.
The towels, I noted, were worn and threadbare, the type of
thing you’d expect in a cheap hotel room. Contrasted with
the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told
their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned
thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured out a whisky.
Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.
It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind
of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I
could get hold of with my hands. Building something. That
was it. You made something with your hands and it was
tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up
emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you
couldn’t throw away six years’ work in five crazy minutes.
Talk of The Town— 15
I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks
with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in
the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn’t any
particular feeling about it any more, except possibly one of
failure and aimlessness. We’d been divorced for over a year.
The house was sold. The job was gone—the job she’d blamed
our failure on.
I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling,
wondering if she’d read about it when it finally happened.
She’d married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some
of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about
it or sent her the clippings. There’d been no word from her,
but there was no reason why she should write. She wasn’t
the kind for that ‘I told you so’ routine, and there wasn’t
much else to say. I hoped they hadn’t sent her that picture.
It was a little rough. So was the simple caption: VICTIM OF
POLICE BRUTALITY.
I crushed out the cigarette and sat up. If I spent the whole
afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts I’d be
walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Langston, and that
telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The
phone directory was over on the chest. No, I thought sourly;
the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?
He’d be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it
do?
But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the
small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill
the afternoon, wouldn’t it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet
of stationery, and flipped through the yellow pages.
Cafés. . . . There were eight listed, three of them on one
street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote
down the addresses.
Taverns. . . . Nine listed.
Beer Gardens. . . . No such heading.
Night Clubs. . . . One, a duplicate listing for one of the
taverns.
That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility
of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in
sports shirt and lightweight trousers. As we drove out I
noted one of the places on my list was just across the road.
Talk of The Town— 16
The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish and said:
Silver King Inn. Well, I’d stop there on the way back.
I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main
drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the
second block in front of one of the cafés, paid the driver, and
went in. There was a call box, but it wasn’t in a booth. The
next one was on the other side of the street in the next
block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there
was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the
fan came on, but it wasn’t the one. It made no noise at all. I
dropped in a dime, dialed four or five digits at random,
pretended to listen for a minute, and hung up, retrieving the
coin.
Inside a half-hour I’d hit nine, ranging from the glass-andchrome
upholstered booths of the Steak House to a greasy
hamburger-and-chili dive backing the river on Front Street,
and from the one good cocktail lounge to dingy beer joints,
and I had a fairly good picture of the layout of the town. The
river and Front Street ran along the west side. South of
Springer was another street of business establishments, and
then the railroad and a weather-beaten station, with a
colored section beyond the tracks. North of the wide main
street were two more parallel to it, with the courthouse on
one and a small post office and Federal Building on the
other, and beyond them a school or two and the principal
residential area. There were four cross streets, beginning
with Front. Springer, which was of course also the main
road, was the only east-west street that continued across the
river; the others terminated at Front.
But I still hadn’t found it. I went on. Most of the places
were air-conditioned, and stepping out of them was like
walking into an oven. The blacktop paving in the street
bubbled and sucked at the soles of my shoes. My shirt was
wet with sweat. An hour later, I ground to a halt, baffled.
There wasn’t a public telephone booth in town that had a
noisy fan.
I still had two places on my list, however. One was the
Flamingo, the night club, with an address on West Highway.
But the chances were it wouldn’t even have been open at
the time he called, around two-fifteen. The other was the
Silver King Inn, across the road from the motel. He wouldn’t
have called from there, would he? Practically in her lap? But
Talk of The Town— 17
who could guess what a creep would do? I’d go back and hit
it. There was a cab stand around the next corner, by the bus
station.
I climbed into one, and when we came out on Springer and
stopped for the first light, the driver turned and glanced at
me over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a
pinched-up face, sad brown eyes, and a badly made set of
false teeth that were too big and too symmetrical. He looked
like a toothpaste commercial.
“Say,” he asked, “ain’t you the man that had the run-in
with Frankie?”
“I wouldn’t call it a run-in,” I said. “A little fendergnashing.”
“I thought I recognized you. Man, you sure been lookin’
the town over, haven’t you? I bet I seen you three or four
times.”
I’d lived all my life in a city, and that hadn’t occurred to
me. It was a small town, I was a stranger in it, and a pretty
big one at that. Add a dark red face, spiky red hair, and
you’d never go anywhere unobserved.
“Just wandering around,” I said. “Killing time while they
fix the car.”
“Where you staying?”
“Magnolia Lodge motel.”
“Oh,” he said.
I frowned at the back of his neck. There it was again, that
same strange reaction you couldn’t quite put a finger on. I
thought of the bystanders at the accident, and that foreman
at the garage. The light changed. We went on.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing wrong with the motel, I reckon.
Little run-down.”
“Well, it’s a big job for a woman alone. I understand her
husband’s dead.”
“Oh, he’s dead, all right.”
Maybe I’d run across something new here. Varying
degrees of being dead. “What’s that mean?”
“That’s right, you’re from California, ain’t you? I reckon
the papers didn’t play it up so big way over there—” He had
Talk of The Town— 18
to skid to a stop at the next cross-roads as the light went
red. Then he looked back over his shoulder.
“Langston was murdered,” he said.
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a soft
and filthy laugh, and a whisper. We know you killed him,
don’t we?
I snapped out of it then. “Well, did they catch the party
that did it?”
“Hmmmm. Yes and no.”
That was the kind of answer you liked. I sighed, lit a
cigarette, and tried again. “Did they, or didn’t they?”
“They got one of ‘em,” he said. “The man. But they ain’t
found out to this day who the other one was. Or so they
say.”
The light came up green then, and he shifted gears and
shot ahead in the afternoon traffic. It made no sense at all,
of course. I waited for him to go on.
“Course, now, they could have a pretty good idea, what
with one thing and another, if you know what I mean. But
they just ain’t sayin’.”
I read him even less. “Wait a minute. It is against the law
to kill people around here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it sure is. But the law also says you got to have
evidence before you arrest anybody and go to court.”
It was like probing a raw nerve. Well, I thought angrily, I
did have evidence. It just wasn’t enough.
We’d left the business district behind now and were
passing the box factory and ice plant on the edge of the
town. I wished he’d slow down; there were a dozen
questions I wanted to ask. “You mean they got one of them,”
I said, “and he admits there was somebody else, but won’t
say who? They can’t get anything out of him?”
He tossed the words back over his shoulder. “Mister, they
won’t never get anything out of that feller. He tried to pull a
gun on Calhoun, and he was dead before he hit the ground.”
“Who’s Calhoun?”
“That big cop that stopped you from clobberin’ Frankie.”
“Hell, I wasn’t going to hit him—” I stopped. Of all the
idiotic things to waste time on.
Talk of The Town— 19
“You look like a man that could take care of hisself just
about anywhere, but let me give you a tip. Don’t start
nothin’ with Calhoun.”
“I’m not about to,” I said impatiently. I was sorry I’d
asked.
“You think that’s fat. Mister, I got one word for you. It’s
not fat. You know, I seen that man do things—” He paused,
sighed, and shook his head. “Salty. What I mean, he’s salty.”
I wished he’d shut up about Calhoun and get on with it.
“All right,” I prodded, “you say one was killed instantly,
resisting arrest. So he didn’t say anything. Then how do they
know there was another one? Did Calhoun catch him in the
act?”
“No. That is, not exactly—”
We pulled to a stop before the Silver King. Heat
shimmered off the highway, and the glare from the white
gravel of the parking area was dazzling. I could hear a
jukebox inside, and through the big window opposite us I
could see some men drinking coffee at a counter. The driver
put his arm up on the back of the seat and turned to look at
me.
“What do you mean, not exactly?” I asked.
“Well, it was like this,” he said. “When Calhoun jumped
this man—Strader, his name was—he was down there in the
river bottom about four-thirty in the morning tryin’ to get rid
of the body. Strader was drivin’ Langston’s car, and
Langston hisself was in the back wrapped in a tarp with his
head caved in.”
“Yes, I can see where that might look a little suspicious,” I
said. “But was there anybody else in the car with Strader?”
“No. But there was another car, maybe fifty yards back up
the road. It got away. Calhoun heard it start up and saw the
lights come on, and ran for it, but he couldn’t catch it. He
was just going to put a shot through it when he stumbled in
the dark and fell down. By the time he could find his gun
and get up, it was gone around a bend in the road. But he’d
already got the license number. They got them little lights,
you know, that shine on the back plate—”
“Sure, sure,” I said impatiently. “So they know whose car
it was?”
Talk of The Town— 20
”Yeah. It was Strader's.”
“Oh,” I said. “And where did they find it?”
He jerked his head towards the road. “Right over there in
front of Strader's room in that motel. And the only thing
they ever found out for sure was that it was a woman drivin’
it.”
I said nothing for a moment. Even with this little of it, you
could see the ugliness emerging, the stain of suspicion that
was all over the town, on everything you touched.
“When did all this happen?” I asked.
“Last November.”
Seven months of it, I thought. No wonder you sensed that
gray ocean of weariness when you looked at her, and had
the feeling she was running along the edge of a nervous
breakdown.
“That’ll be one dollar,” he said. “Outside the city limits.” I
handed him two. “Come on. I’ll buy you a beer.”
Talk of The Town— 21
3
We went inside to air-conditioned coolness. It was an Lshaped
building, the front part being a lunch-room. There
were some tables to the left of the doorway, and a counter
with a row of stools in the back of the window that looked
out on the road. Swinging doors behind the counter led into
the kitchen. There were mounted tarpon on the wall on
either side of the swinging doors, and another above the
doorway on the right that led into the bar. Two truckers
were drinking coffee and talking to the waitress.
The bar was a longer room, running back at right angles
and forming the other part of the L. At the rear, towards the
left, were a number of tables, a jukebox that had gone silent
for the moment, and a telephone box. I glanced at the latter.
It could wait.
At one of the tables, a man in a white cowboy-style hat and
a blue shirt sat with his back to me, facing a thin dark
splinter of a girl who looked as if she might have Indian
blood. Two more men were perched on stools at the end of
the bar. They looked up at us as we sat down, and one of
them nodded to the taxi driver. There was another mounted
tarpon, the largest I’d ever seen, above the bar mirror.
The bartender came over, glanced idly at me, and nodded
to the driver. “Hi, Jake. What’ll it be?”
“Bottle of Regal, Ollie,” Jake replied.
Talk of The Town— 22
I ordered the same. Ollie put it in front of us and went
back down the bar to where he’d been polishing glasses. He
appeared to be in his middle twenties, and had big
shoulders, muscular arms, and a wide tanned face with selfpossessed
brown eyes.
I took a sip of the beer and lit a cigarette. “Who was
Strader?” I asked.
At the sound of the name, the bartender and both the men
down at the end turned and stared sharply. Even after all
this time, I thought.
Jake looked uncomfortable. “That was the craziest part of
it. He was from Miami. And as far as they could ever find
out, he didn’t even know Langston.”
One of the two men put down his glass. He had the sharp,
meddlesome eyes of a trouble-maker. “Maybe he didn’t,” he
said. “But he could still have been a friend of the family.”
The bartender glanced at him, but said nothing. The other
man merely went on drinking his beer. The ugliness of it
hung there for a moment in the silence of the room, but it
was something they didn’t even notice any more. They were
used to it.
“I ain’t sayin’ he wasn’t,” Jake protested. “All I’m sayin’ is
that they ain’t never been able to prove he knew either one
of ‘em.”
Then what the hell was he doing up here?” the other
demanded. “Why was he registered over there in that motel
three times in two months? He wasn’t on business, because
they never found nobody in town he come to see. Besides,
you don’t reckon he’d be crazy enough to try to sell Miami
real estate around here, do you?”
“How the hell do I know?” Jake asked. “A man crazy
enough to try to gun Calhoun might do anything.”
“Nuts. You know as well as I do what he was up here for.
He was a ladies’ man, a regular stud. He was a no-good with
a big front and a line of baloney, and some woman was
supportin’ him half the time.”
It was a charming little place, I thought sourly. She stood
trial for murder every day—over here, and in all the other
bars in town, and every time she pushed a basket down the
Talk of The Town— 23
aisles of the supermarket. I wondered why she didn’t sell
out and leave. Pride, maybe. There was a lot of it in her face.
Then I reminded myself that it was none of my business
anyway. I didn’t know anything about her; maybe she had
killed her husband. Murder had been committed by people
who couldn’t even tell a lie without blushing. But for the
sordid reasons they were hinting at? It didn’t seem likely.
“And ain’t she from Miami?” the other went on. The way
he said it, you gathered being from Miami was an indictment
itself.
“Dammit, Rupe,” Jake said with sullen defiance, “stop
tryin’ to make it look like I was talking for her. Or for
Strader. All I’m sayin’ is there’s a lot of difference between
knowing something and provin’ it.”
“Proof!” Rupe said contemptuously. “That’s a lot of bull.
They got all the proof they need. Why do you reckon Strader
went to all that trouble to try to make it look like an
accident?”
I glanced up. That was deadly. And it reminded me of
something that had been bothering me and that I’d intended
to ask if I ever had the chance.
“Was that the reason for the two cars?” I asked Jake.
I had been momentarily forgotten in their argument, but
now abrupt silence dropped over the place, and the chill you
could feel had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. Jake
gulped the rest of his beer and stood up. “Well, I’d better be
hittin’ the road,” he said. “Thanks, mister.” He went out. The
others stared at me for a minute, and then returned to their
own conversation.
I ordered another beer. Ollie uncapped it and set it before
me. He appeared to be the most intelligent and least
unfriendly of the lot. “Why two cars?” I asked.
He mopped the bar, looked at me appraisingly, and started
to say something, but Rupe beat him to it. The shiny black
eyes swung around to me, and he asked, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Chatham,” I said shortly.
“I don’t mean that, mister. What have you got to do with
this.”
“Nothing,” I said. “Why?”