F. B. I. Showdown Page 6

  Sorensen said, “Maybe he wasn’t so dumb. Maybe he took fright at sight of a robbed till. Maybe he has a record and didn’t want to be connected any way with a hold-up that hadn’t brought him any profit.”

  Bronya said, “Maybe. Well, the next guy that came along was a truck driver with blood in his veins. He couldn’t be bothered to find a lever to force the lock, he just set to and kicked the door down.”

  Pavlova said, drily, “Truck drivers are like that. Men of simple habits.” And then he said, “Try to describe the men to me, please, Miss Karkoff.”

  Again she shrugged helplessly. “It happened so quickly, I don’t remember much. They were pretty big, both of them. Maybe not as big as you two, but nearing the six-foot mark. And both were lean men, the kind you expect in farm clothes. They both wore old cloth caps, and they were pulled well down over their heads.”

  Pavlova sighed. “So you wouldn’t be able to say if one was as bald as a barrel of lard, huh?”

  Bronya shook her head. She got nicer, the more you looked at her. For now she was peeling off the monkey-suit, and the more she peeled, the nicer she looked.

  Out of the suit she had long legs, and long-legged girls have it where men are concerned. They were bare and well-muscled, and in her sandalled feet she looked athletic. The effect was heightened by her college shorts, with a monogram in maroon, stitched against the saxe blue of one leg. A neat, cream, linen blouse completed her attire. It made her look seventeen. In fact, she was over twenty.

  Pavlova said, “You didn’t answer me,” looking at those long bare legs as she rolled up her monkey-suit and tucked it into a locker.

  Bronya said, “They weren’t gentlemen; they kept their hats on in my presence, so I wouldn’t know.” She added, “And I got my long legs so that I could hurdle at college. You like ’em?”

  She sounded a mite aggressive, and Pavolva curled up inside his notebook. Big Sorensen grinned and relieved his companion by saying, “Could you recognize them again, Miss Karkoff?”

  “Maybe.” She was very uncertain. “They’d dirtied their faces, so it would be difficult,” She frowned with annoyance and then said frankly, “I’m not being very helpful, am I? But men who come with the idea of sticking up a lonely garage don’t usually give you much chance to see things, and I guess that clip across the face didn’t clear my brain much.”

  Sorensen said, consolingly, “That’s all right, Miss Karkoff. We didn’t expect much more. I’m sorry you had such a bad experience.”

  He was thinking to himself: maybe you were lucky at that. If the farmhands were our escaped convicts, it’s a good job for you that you were the second woman they met in their freedom, not the first. He was thinking of how that woman had looked up at the farm. Then he looked at the nice, slim girl before him and tried not to think of what could have happened to her.

  Bronya slipped on a small jacket. It made her look older. Now she looked quite seventeen and a half, thought Sorensen. She said, “I’m supposed to stay on till ten, then the boss comes for the money and gives me a lift back into Warren Bridge. He’s got a lot of filling stations in this county.”

  “But you don’t feel like waiting for him?”

  “He can jump in the lake,” she said determinedly. “A nice polluted lake, too. He shouldn’t have girls out at lonely places like this. Something’s bound to happen, sometime; I can see that now. lf you’re going the Warren Bridge way....”

  Sorensen said, “The way you say it, Miss Karkoff, I couldn’t help but go to Warren Bridge. Sure, we’ll take you.”

  She liked that little humorous way he had of saying things. He was a big, reassuring man, this Fed, and just now she had need for reassuring men around her, She said, demurely, “That’ll be fine, But you make me sound like a town in Russia, with all this ‘Miss Karkoffing’. I answer better to Bronya.”

  Sorensen said, “I answer to a lot of names.”

  “Such as?”

  “Honey-bunch, cutie-pie, sugar, darling—and Lief Sorensen.”

  “We’ll start backwards,” said the girl, and her eyes were dancing. “Lief Sorensen now, and maybe the rest to follow.”

  Lief said, “Could be just right at that.”

  Pavlova sighed and closed his book. “Guess my presence is embarrassing to you. Must be tough, making up with a gooseberry round about. Things go so slow, don’t they?”

  They looked at him kindly. Bronya said, “All men want all women, All men, if they aren’t freaks, get jealous if they think they’re losing ground with a girl.” She added, “We learn that sort of stuff in our medical studies nowadays. It comes in very useful.”

  Lief said, “You don’t have to take it to heart, Pavlova. When you’re a big, big man, maybe the girls will play with you, too.”

  They were all kidding, and it was good fun. They went outside and the girl looked up. It was so dark now that Lief had to use a torch to examine for tyre tracks and footmarks on the oily concrete front. He said, “We’ll be better getting on to Warren Bridge. It seems pretty certain that the car was Cal Turner’s.”

  The girl said, “Was?” She was climbing into the back of the car; Pavlova was behind the wheel, starting the engine. Lief hesitated, not sure which seat to occupy.

  He found himself saying, “Yeah, was. Those men who held you up killed him a few hours back—and killed his wife, too.”

  From the darkness of the car he heard her draw in a long breath that seemed to saw into her lungs. Then she released it and it came out in just the same irregular fashion. He said, quickly, “You all right?” But he knew she wasn’t.

  He heard her whisper, “Come and sit beside me, Lief. I—I feel all tuckered in. I knew all the time those men were really bad....”

  He got in and closed the door. Pavlova sat stiff behind the wheel. He was jealous. He was an F.B.I. man, but he was also twenty-four. And at twenty-four you don’t like to drive a car with another couple right behind you in the dark.

  Lief could feel the girl trembling. He knew that the joking back at the filling-station had been a front, knew now that the fright the girl had got had been near to breaking her up, and now a reaction was setting in.

  He sat next to her, not attempting to touch her. You never knew with a highly-strung girl how she might take even a little pat of consolation.

  So she came up against him, said, “I knew they’d killed somebody. I don’t know how I knew. They didn’t speak a word, and there wasn’t—” she shuddered—“blood on their clothes. But—oh, God, I knew it, somehow! Knew they’d done something dreadful like murder. It was in their eyes....”

  Lief said, immediately, “What colour were they?”

  And the girl sobbed, “For God’s sake don’t be an F.B.I. man now, Lief. I’m—I’m scared to death, still. I don’t know how I waited there all that time for police and then you.” He could hear her teeth chattering. She crept closer up to him; he felt her take his hand and put it round her shoulders. They were heaving.

  She said, crying, “Just let me think you’re my daddy for a few minutes, Lief. I—I feel awful bad.”

  There was nothing to see through Rime, and where the Turner car had crashed into another auto. They had had to clear the road for traffic, and now the wrecked cars had been towed away. Pavlova sent the big car leaping towards distant Warren Bridge.

  They came to it around ten o’clock. As they drove in they saw an ambulance screaming away down a side street. A few seconds later two more flashed towards them, and turned down the same street. Then apparently the entire town’s fire appliances came clanging down, with police cars and another ambulance in between.

  Lief sat up, said, “Something pretty big seems to have broken in Warren Bridge tonight. Now I wonder what it could be?”

  Pavlova’s rusty voice came back to him. “Wonder if it’s got anything to do with our convict friends?”

  Sorensen ordered, “We’ll go back and see, Pavlova.”

  And the driver at once turned and followed the s
hrilling, sirening, bell-clanging procession.

  Bronya asked, “It’s a queer name for a man to have—Pavlova.” She was feeling better now. Lief could feel her tidying her hair and then came the nose-tingling dusty scent as she flopped a powder-puff across her face.

  The G-man driver heard. He growled, “Okay, it’s a queer name, but I didn’t ask for it. A lotta wise guys gave it me. They’ve put my name down on the roll as Ben Arcota, but nobody don’t ever call me that now.”

  They turned down the side street. It opened on to a shopping promenade, all very new and dazzling with its electric signs. They had to stop, because of the big crowd that choked the end of the square. Pavlova pulled in to the sidewalk and they got out.

  Lief said, “An’ you staying in the car?” But the girl shook her head and the three went into the square together. Pavlova, ahead, kept saying, “Make way there, police,” and in time they came out through a cordon of patrolmen into the open.

  There were flowerbeds and trees all down the middle of the square. They could see them plainly because of spotlights from police cars and the fire appliances, which were trained on the square and lighting it up with astonishing brilliance.

  The lights seemed to converge on a spot opposite where neons proclaimed a movie-house—the Southern Star.

  Hurrying across, Sorensen exclaimed, “My God, what’s happened? An earthquake?”

  There was a lot of noise as they came up to the crowd of people working outside the movie-house. A lot of crying, a lot of hysterics from women, and an awful lot of moaning as of people in pain.

  They saw that men were going into the Southern Star and coming out carrying injured people; all around stretcher bearers were loading up the ambulances and dispatching them in relays to the hospital.

  Sorensen saw a big car parked on the roadside by the Southern Star. In the brilliant lights he read the chief of police’s sign and went across. The patrolman at the wheel pointed out the chief, standing supervising the evacuation of the building, and they went across to him and introduced themselves.

  Sorensen said, “This is probably none of our business.”

  The chief rapped, “I don’t know. Five people were killed in that awful stampede. Four were trampled to death, three being women. One seems to have died from heart failure.”

  Sorensen, Ben Arcota, and Bronya looked at the crowded cinema front, with people lying all around on the grass verge.

  Sorensen asked, “What caused the stampede, chief?”

  The chief spat. He said, enigmatically, “The Conscience of America.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STAMPEDE

  Patrolman Luke Campion was torn between two signs. One said, ‘Iced Beer—It’s Cooling, This Weather’. The other carried a similar appeal—‘It’s Cooler Inside’.

  Luke worked it out. And the three hours of coolness within the Southern Star won. For the price of three cool hours was roughly the price of one pint of cool beer which wouldn’t last three minutes in Luke’s present overheated state.

  So—off duty that fateful night, he planked a dollar down at the cash desk, took his change, and went inside.

  It was cool. That was about the only thing good he could say about the programme. There was a crime film on and it bore no resemblance to anything he had ever met up with in his police life. The crooks looked so much like crooks they’d never have been allowed a life outside a prison cell, the police were all flat-faced morons who were there to make the patrons laugh, and the hero did things that were in defiance of all the legal codes in any state in the U.S.

  He sat and chewed a cigarette and wished he’d picked a musical. Something with legs. Legs could make up for a lot of story deficiencies.

  The film came to an end in time, and then the screen went white and nothing else happened. The house was packed with patrons here to escape the oppressive heat of the evening, and after a few minutes they began to get restless. Luke wasn’t bothered and didn’t think anything about it, but then he wasn’t what you might call a film fan. In fact he thought it was pleasanter to sit in the cool without the distraction of some inanity on the screen before him.

  A picture began to screen. There was something curious about it. It didn’t have any intro wording, didn’t seem to have been edited in any way, and there was no sound attached to the screening.

  It all seemed like one of the old silent film dramas, to most of the audience.

  They saw a clearing among stunted trees, with cars parked in a crescent beneath them. Men were standing around among the cars and you could see them drinking.

  Luke thought: “It’s gonna be a plug for somebody’s summer drinks. Maybe Coca-Cola.”

  But the filming didn’t concentrate on the men drinking. Instead they saw a group of men, apart by a very big car, hoist something upright. It was a man, bound and gagged. They saw the rope around his legs being unfastened and then the man was roughly shoved towards a solitary tree.

  Then came an incident when a little man separated from the throng and knocked the bound man about a bit. There was a startled gasp from the audience, and Luke Campion sat up; for the little man had turned at one point and seemed to be talking straight into the camera and there wasn’t any doubt as to his identity.

  “Skidmore,” people whispered one to the other, astonished. “Elmer Skidmore, of the Skidmore grocery chain!” And then they asked, “What’n heck’s all this about?” And because the film was silent they were able to speculate aloud.

  They saw the man roughly—unnecessarily roughly—bound to a tree, and then another gasp went up as a big, heavy-limbed man came prominently into the picture.

  For they recognised this man, too.

  It was Frank Descoign; and Frank Descoign owned the Southern Star and all the other Star cinemas along this Virginia-North Carolina border, and one or two in Old Kentucky also.

  They saw Frank shouting soundlessly, then going away, to return with a gasoline can. Then a shocked, “Ooooh!” came from the audience as the silent Frank swung back the can and swooshed the contents over the bound man before him, and they saw the toothless mouth open in an inaudible scream of pain as the searing gasoline bit deep into tender eyes.

  It was at this moment that Luke Campion and most of the audience got an idea—an idea that this was no playacting they were watching, no trick of photography, but something real.

  The torment and torture of a fellow human being.

  And they were having to sit there and watch and not be able to help the sufferer; because all this had happened, this they were seeing was only a record of what had been. Whatever tragedy had occurred, had happened and was over.

  As realization came, men began to shout in anger, and then women’s voices were raised, and with them the frightened cries of a few up-late children. Women were rising, starting to move along the rows of seats, not wanting to see any more.

  Because all knew what was to come, because this wasn’t the first time in the history of the Old North State that a man had been burned at a stake.

  And still the film unreeled, steadily, remorselessly, a cold objective record of what had happened in that glade of oaks.

  They saw Frank Descoign, waddling forward cautiously on bloated limbs, tossing a lighted match on to the grass before the victim. Nothing, for a second, and in that time part of the audience prayed that nothing would happen, while in the hearts of some was a momentary disappointment.

  Then a pillar of fire stemmed up, reaching out to embrace the figure held against the tree, and clearly they saw that last agony of the victim. And saw the sadistic glee on so many faces that they recognized, now that a greater light shone on them.

  Besides Descoign and Skidmore were Ben Tavistock, who had several tailoring establishments, Gowiddis the big dry-cleaner, Rubbold an architect, and Tom Dryway and Geordie Humble, who were partners in an expanding chemical industry. There was someone who looked like Arthur Hepburn, the tractor agent, Arthur Whitwam who had the big canning concern, and Man
cini and the drug store monopolist.

  And others.

  Then the amplifier came alive, and over the sound of shouting and hysteria they heard a voice boom, “This is the Conscience of America speaking. Let it look upon these things, and let it shout aloud in protest. You who sit there—are you going to let these miscreants free to do this all over again? Will you go away and say nothing? Or will you demand the extreme penalty for the murderer of this unfortunate citizen of our great and glorious country?”

  And then the fool at the microphone began to shout, “Death, death! Let death be the lot of these criminals. Death, death! As they have done unto this man, let it be done unto them. This is the Conscience of America demanding...death for the killers, death for the murderers, death....”

  No one heard the rest of the hysterical demand for retribution. The place was in a panic and an uproar. The film was still screening, so that they could see the last fearful agony, and it was too much for most of the women and many of the men, too.

  All at once a lot of people were trying to get out of the cinema, and within seconds the movement had assumed the proportions of an uncontrollable panic. Between the seats was a claustrophobic shamble of struggling, hysterical people; out on the aisles was a locked mass who became claustrophobic because of the pressure one upon the other, and who struggled and lashed out in an effort to extricate themselves. In the press a few fell and couldn’t rise and were trampled on by hundreds of milling, stamping feet.

  And still the film silently projected light and shadows on to that big silver screen, so that they saw the throwing of the gasoline can, the explosion, and the momentary panic of the lynchers that followed, and then the collapsing of the charred hulk of a man face down among the burning grass.

  Luke Campion with other men shouted for people to stay where they were; but in the frenzied excitement no one heard them and the panic went on. Campion saw that he could do nothing for the moment, and he kept his wits about him.