The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (16 page)

“I'm not asking you to go to a motel with me,” Cory responded, just as evenly. “Just offering you a lift into Sacramento.” Now it was he who shrugged. “Take it or leave it.”

He walked on away. Before he got to his car, the rainfall became steady and she was walking beside him.

On the drive in, windshield wipers slapping, she asked, “Don't you want to know who I was visiting?”

“What do you mean
who?
”

“I mean, like my husband, boyfriend, brother—”

Cory threw her a quick glance. She had a little acne scar in front of her left ear. “Look,” he said, “even if you told me, I probably wouldn't know who you were talking about. We've got fifteen hundred-plus cons in there. Unless who you were visiting happened to be on my block, in my tier, which is highly unlikely, I wouldn't know him from Adam. You know who Adam was, right?”

“Were you born rude?” she snapped. “Or did you have to study it?”

At that point a cloak of silence dropped over the interior of Cory's three-hole Buick, and they rode that way, the windshield wipers seeming to keep time with their heartbeats, the rain outside heavy enough now for Cory to turn on the car's headlights. Sitting without even a glance at the other, neither spoke until they reached the city limits of Sacramento.

“Where do you want me to drop you?” Cory asked, finally breaking the uncomfortable quiet.

“The Greyhound depot'll be fine,” she mumbled in reply.

Cory exited the interstate and drove to Seventh and L Streets, where he swung around to the main entrance of the ugly, uninviting Greyhound depot and pulled over and stopped with the engine idling.

“Listen, thanks for the lift,” she said, getting out, her tone mellower than before.

“Don't mention it,” Cory said, his own voice less disagreeable. “Have a nice trip home.”

After she shut the passenger door and hurried toward the depot entrance, Cory drove away and made a U-turn into a parking space half a block down the street. He kept the engine running so the wiper blades would keep the windshield clear, but then the rain suddenly stopped completely and he shut the car down. From where he was parked, he had an unobstructed view of the bus depot entrance. He only had to wait five minutes before he saw the woman come back out of the door she had gone in, pause to glance around, then walk quickly away along L Street.

Leaving his car, Cory followed her at a discreet distance for several blocks, to a Motel 7 on the edge of a seedy downtown district. She walked directly to a room on the lower of the two floors, unlocked it with a key from her jeans pocket, and went inside. It was Room 121.

Cory returned to his car and drove to his own apartment, a little one-bedroom furnished place where he lived alone. He got a bottle of milk from his refrigerator and sat in an old club chair, drinking from the bottle and staring at the blank television screen for a long time, thinking about the woman. Later on, when he went to bed, he fell asleep thinking about her, wondering who she had been visiting, wondering even what her name was. He dreamed about her.

 

The next day, when Cory reported for his shift at the prison, the officer at the sign-in desk said, “You're wanted in the deputy warden's office.”

Cory frowned. “When?”

“Now.”

Cory made his way back out of the incoming-staff corridor to the prison's executive wing, where Deputy Warden Lewis Duffy had his office. He'd been seen, Cory thought. Seen picking up a convict visitor and driving away from the prison with her!

Well, hell, that was all she wrote. As a corrections officer, he was all washed up.

When Cory was shown into the deputy warden's office, he found himself facing not only Deputy Warden Duffy but a man he had never seen before: a conservatively dressed man in a nondescript gray suit and an out-of-style wide necktie tied in a Windsor knot on a white shirt.

“Evans,” the deputy warden said, “this is special agent Roger Hardesty of the FBI.” Cory nodded to Hardesty. “Sit down, Evans. We have a few questions for you. Did you pick up a woman in the visitors' parking lot yesterday, after your shift, and drive away with her?”

“Yessir, I did.”

“Did you know the woman?”

“No, sir.”

“Why did you drive away with her in your car?”

“It was starting to rain. She'd missed the bus and there wasn't another scheduled for an hour. There's no shelter of any kind at that bus stop.” Cory shrugged. “I just offered her a ride.”

“You're aware, are you not, of our fraternization rules regarding inmate visitors?”

“Yessir. But it wasn't really fraternization, Warden. I just offered her a ride. Like I said, it was starting to rain—”

“Did you exchange names with her?”

“No, sir—”

“Telephone numbers, addresses, personal information of any kind?”

“No, sir. Nothing.

“Where did you take the woman?”

“To the Greyhound depot on L Street in Sacramento.”

“Where did you go then?”

“Straight to my apartment,” Cory lied, shifting uneasily in his chair. “Am I being written up for this? If I am, I'd like to have a union representative present.”

“There's no need for that, Evans. I don't intend to make a formal record of this meeting. Offering that woman a ride into town, even under the circumstances you outlined, was not, in my mind, very good judgment, but no report will be made if you agree to cooperate with Agent Hardesty here.”

Cory looked over at the FBI man. “Cooperate with him how?”

“I'd like to give you a little information about the woman you picked up, Officer Evans,” the agent said. “Her name is Billie Sue Neeley. The inmate she was visiting is Lester Dragg, serving six years for grand theft auto. He's been in two, up for parole in eighteen months. The Bureau is interested in him because we know he drove the getaway car in a bank robbery down in Modesto. The two gunmen who went into the bank grabbed one million, two hundred thousand dollars that was scheduled to be picked up by an armored truck about twenty minutes later. The robbery would have gone off perfectly except that the armored truck got there early, just as the holdup men ran out of the bank and threw the two sacks of money into the getaway car. The armored truck guards opened fire on the two men before they could get into the car themselves. In the shootout, both holdup men were killed. But the getaway car, with the money in it, got away. The armored truck guards didn't get the license number but gave a good description of the car. It turned out to be stolen. Three days later, the California Highway Patrol snagged the car in a line waiting to cross the border into Tijuana. Lester Dragg was driving; Billie Sue Neeley was a passenger. There was no sign of the money. We had no eyewitness ID that Dragg had been the driver in the bank job. All we could get him on was a state charge of grand theft auto as the driver of a stolen vehicle. And we had nothing at all on the Neeley woman; she claimed to be a hitchhiker and Dragg backed up her story.”

“So the bank robbery is why the FBI is interested,” Cory guessed.

“Exactly. If we can put Dragg next to that money, we can nail him on federal bank robbery charges, and maybe get the Neeley woman for conspiracy.”

“You think the Neeley woman knows where the money is?” Cory asked.

Agent Hardesty shrugged.

“Hard to say. She certainly isn't spending it if she does. She lives very frugally; the only income she appears to have is an unemployment check from the state that she gets twice a month.”

So I was wrong
, Cory thought.
Not dirt-poor Mississippi or Alabama. An Okie from Oklahoma. Still dirt poor
.

“There's got to be some reason she's hanging around waiting for Dragg to get out,” Hardesty continued, “and we figure it's the money.”

“She could just be crazy about the guy,” Cory offered.

“Possibly.” Deputy Warden Duffy reentered the conversation. “She's listed on his visitor card as his common-law wife.”

Cory nodded thoughtfully. “So what do I have to do with all this?” he asked, looking from the agent to the deputy warden.

“That remains to be seen,” Hardesty said. “You've accidentally made contact with her. We know she's living in the Motel 7 on Weed Street in Sacramento.”
No kidding
, Cory thought.

“I've had her under surveillance for some time. I know where she shops, the movies she goes to, where she eats supper, everything. We thought, Deputy Warden Duffy and I, if we could arrange for you to run into her again—”

“Wait a minute,” Cory interrupted, holding both hands up, palms out, deciding to play it dumb. “If you want me to be some kind of bait to trap this woman for the FBI, you've got the wrong guy. I'm a corrections officer, not some kind of undercover cop. I'm not up for anything like this.”

The FBI agent and the deputy warden exchanged serious looks. “Evans,” the deputy warden said, “my decision to keep this meeting informal was based on you cooperating with Agent Hardesty. You picked up this woman yesterday in violation of regulations governing your employment. Agent Hardesty's surveillance of her was compromised because of that—”

“I don't see how,” Cory objected.

“I was on the bus the Neeley woman missed,” Hardesty said. “By the time I got back to that bus stop, Neeley was gone. Deputy Warden Duffy had to have the prison check all of its closed-circuit security tapes to find out how she left the institution.”

The deputy warden leaned forward and locked his fingers together on the desktop. “Look, Evans,” he said in an even but not unfriendly voice, “you're not being asked to do anything but pursue an acquaintance with this woman and report back to Agent Hardesty anything she says to you. Just be friendly, that's all. And in exchange for that, your serious breach of regulations yesterday will not become a formal report.”

“That's kind of like blackmail, isn't it?” Cory asked, his own voice equally even but not challenging.

“I'll overlook that comment,” the deputy warden said. “I'll even sweeten the pot a little bit. Cooperate in this matter and the next time a sergeant's opening comes up, I'll personally see that you get on the list.
High
on the list.” He sat back in his big swivel chair. “Now, what's it going to be, Evans?”

Cory managed to exhale a deep breath that sounded both weary and resigned. “I guess I'm about to make a new friend,” he said.

And all the time he was thinking,
An Okie from Oklahoma. And all that money
.

After Cory left the office, the deputy warden sat forward again and silently drummed the fingers of one hand on the desktop.

“I hope to hell you know what you're doing,” he said tightly to the FBI agent.

“I know
exactly
what I'm doing—or rather what
we're
doing,” Hardesty said confidently. He smiled broadly. “Just play along with me, my friend, and you and I will cut up one million, two hundred thousand dollars in unmarked bills. As long as this guy Evans does as he's told and doesn't get any bright ideas of his own.”

Duffy guffawed. “That guy? Hell, Roger, he's a
prison guard!
He's about as smart as a bag of nails. You don't have to worry about him.”

Or you either, I hope
, Hardesty thought. A million two was serious money. Serious enough to give almost any man pause for thought.

“So,” Duffy asked, “where do we go from here?”

“Today's Tuesday,” Hardesty said. “The Neeley woman has gone to the movies every Wednesday night for two months. We'll get Evans back in here in the morning and brief him on what to do when she goes to the movies tomorrow night. Then we'll be off and running.”

“Okay,” Duffy said. Then, as if to convince himself, he repeated it. “Okay.”

 

The following night, when the first showing of the evening feature was over, Cory was waiting in the doorway of a coffee shop next to the Nugget Theater. When Billie Sue Neeley emerged in the exiting audience, he stepped out to meet her.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

She stopped, startled at having been spoken to. “What do you want?” she asked, almost demanded.

“You and I need to sit down and have a talk,” Cory said. “An FBI man is watching you, and now he's watching me because I gave you a ride day before yesterday. We need to have a serious conversation.”

Billie studied him for a long moment in the white glare of the movie theater marquee, with people moving past them on the sidewalk, talking among themselves, without even a glance at Cory and Billie. Presently she made her decision.

“Okay. Where?”

“There's a coffee shop around the corner.”

“Let's go,” Billie said. It was almost an order.

The place was called Cliff's Cafe. It had a ten-stool counter and six red vinyl booths for four, all under a sea of fluorescent lights that made its patrons look somehow ill, like they belonged in an emergency room for a transfusion instead of a café for a burger. The menus were in imitation red-leather folders that matched the vinyl booths.

“You hungry?” Cory asked conversationally when they slid into a booth.

“No,” she snapped tightly.

“Well, I am.”

When the waitress came, Cory ordered the Cliff's Special, a quarter-pounder with cheese, bacon, and the works, served with crispy crinkle fries on the side. With it he ordered a Dr Pepper. Billie ordered black coffee.

“Well?” she asked as they waited for their order, in the same demanding tone she had used in their encounter on the street. Cory fixed her with his flat corrections-officer stare.

“Okay, here's the story,” he said.

He laid it out for her. Everything. All that had taken place in the deputy warden's office. He was straight with her, as he had earlier decided he would be. He told her everything—except the fact that he had followed her to the Motel 7 after she had left the bus depot. That was personal, he had decided. That was between him and her, and the deputy warden and the FBI had nothing to do with it. At that point he was not sure why he felt that way.