River Girl by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

the owner herself, Billy Barone.
    She turned and smiled. “Good morning, Sheriff. Hello, Jack.” Her hair was waved, and looked as if it had been carved out of lemonwood and buffed down with wax.
    We sat down in the last booth and she came over. “What will you officers of the law have this morning?” she asked, still smiling, and giving Buford a long, lazy glance.
    “Black coffee for me,” Buford said. “With a shot of Bacardi rum on the side.”
    “You’ve been a bad boy, Sheriff,” she teased. “And how about you, Jack?”
    “Breakfast,” I said. “Ham and eggs and some coffee.”
    “It wouldn’t be safe to take all that on an empty stomach,” Buford said. “You’d better have something.”
    “All right,” I said. “Bourbon.”
    The bartender brought the drinks over, and in a minute a girl came in with Buford’s coffee. He pushed two nickels across the table toward her. “How about putting those in the juke box?”
    I knew he detested juke boxes and their canned noise, aside from the money they brought him—he owned a part interest in the outfit that controlled them and the slot machines and pinballs. It wasn’t hillbilly music he wanted; it was privacy.
    “Here’s how,” he said. We drank. The juke box hissed, then commenced its blaring.
    He took out a cigar and lit it, then removed it from his mouth and looked at it in the manner of a man who loves good cigars. He’s an odd one, I thought, a queer mixture, and not somebody I’d want to tangle with unless I had to. That nineteenth-century courtliness fronted for a lot of toughness you could see sometimes looking out at you from behind the noncommittal eyes.
    When he talked business he never wasted words. “The grand jury convenes next week,” he said quietly.
    “And—” I said. It had met before.
    “We’ve got trouble. There’s talk. And too many people that a month or so ago would have been asking me for something just happen to be looking in store windows now when they meet me on the street. Most of it is Soames. He’s got his teeth into that business about the Demaree kid, and he knows where the kid got drunk. The word is going around now that he’s going to blast the lid off everything Sunday, and everybody’s going. He’s been doing a lot of looking around. Normally, it wouldn’t amount to much, but just before the grand jury it’s dangerous as hell. Soames, unfortunately, isn’t just another crackpot, and he’s no windbag. People are beginning to listen to him, people who don’t usually pay much attention to rabble-rousers and crusaders with ants in their pants.”
    “All right,” I said. “What do we do?” I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get out of the whole stinking mess and get a job washing cars or digging ditches, but that’s the bad part of that kind of business—it’s not easy to get loose, especially when the heat starts.
    “We do just what anybody else does with gasoline on his clothes—we don’t light any cigarettes. I want you to tell Abbie Bell and that woman out on Cypress Street to keep the lid clamped on those places, because if we have any more trouble down there I’m going to run them out of town before we all get caught in the wringer. And slip the word to all the rest of them. Sometime today drive out to Moss Inn and tell Carpenter he’d better start looking his customers over a little more carefully before he lets them go back where the games are. There’s no telling who Soames is getting his information from, but he’s getting it straight. However, it’s the cat houses he’s got his guns leveled on right now, and particularly Abbie Bell’s. But the whole thing’s dynamite, at least until after the grand jury adjourns.”
    “O.K.,” I said. “I’ll tell ‘em.” It didn’t show much on his face, but I knew he was worried.
    As it turned out, I didn’t get a chance to tell anybody anything. Trouble started almost before we got back to the office. The telephone was