The Chill Read Free Page B

Why?”
    “I wondered when he first came in why a man like him would take a part-time delivery job. What’s he wanted for?”
    “I wouldn’t know. Can you give me his home address?”
    “I think I can at that.” He stroked his veined nose, watching me over his fingers. “Don’t tell Begley I gave you the word. I don’t want him bouncing back on me.”
    “I won’t.”
    “He spends a lot of time in the home of one of my customers. You might say he’s a non-paying guest of hers. I certainly wouldn’t want to make trouble for her. But then,” he reasoned, “if Begley’s on the run I’m doing her a favor in seeing that he’s picked up. Isn’t that right?”
    “I’d say so. Where does she live?”
    “On Shearwater Beach, cottage number seventeen. Her name’s Madge Gerhardi. Take the freeway south and you’ll see the Shearwater turnoff about two miles down the line. Only just don’t tell either of them that it was me sent you. Okay?”
    “Okay.” I left him with his bottles.

chapter
3
    W E PARKED OUR CARS at the top of the access lane, and I persuaded Alex to stay in his, out of sight. Shearwater Beach turned out to be a kind of expensive slum where several dozen cottages stood in a row. The changing blue reflection of the sea glared through the narrow gaps between them. Beyond their peaked rooftops, out over the water, a tern circled on flashing wings, looking for fish.
    Number seventeen needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches. I knocked on the scabbed gray door. Slowly, like bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side. The bearded man opened it.
    He was a man of fifty or so wearing an open-necked black shirt from which his head jutted like weathered stone. The sunlight struck mica glints from his eyes. The fingers with which he was holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist.
    “I’m searching for a missing girl, Mr. Begley.” I had decided on the direct approach. “She may have met with foul play and if she did, you may have been one of the last people who saw her alive.”
    He rubbed the side of his face with his clenched knuckles.His face bore marks of old trouble, some of them done by hand: faintly quilted patches around the eyes, a thin scar on his temple divided like a minature ruler by stitch-marks. Old trouble and the promise of further trouble.
    “You must be crazy. I don’t even know any girls.”
    “You know
me,”
a woman said behind him.
    She appeared at his shoulder and leaned on him, waiting for somebody to second the self-administered flattery. She was about Begley’s age, and may have been older. Her body was very assertive in shorts and a halter. Frizzled by repeated dyeings and bleachings, her hair stuck up on her head like a yellow fright wig. Between their deep blue artificial shadows, her eyes were the color of gin.
    “I’m very much afraid that you must be mistaken,” she said to me with a cultivated Eastern-seaboard accent which lapsed immediately. “I swear by all that’s holy that Chuck had nothing to do with any girl. He’s been too busy looking after little old me.” She draped a plump white arm across the back of his neck. “Haven’t you, darling?”
    Begley was immobilized between the woman and me. I showed him Fargo’s glossy print of the honeymooners.
    “You know this girl, don’t you? Her name, her married name, is Dolly Kincaid.”
    “I never heard of her in my life.”
    “Witnesses tell me different. They say you went to see her at the Surf House three weeks ago this coming Sunday. You saw this picture of her in the paper and ordered a copy of it from the photographer at the Surf House.”
    The woman tightened her arm around his neck, more like a wrestling partner than a lover. “Who is she, Chuck?”
    “I have no idea.” But he muttered to himself: “So it’s started all over again.”
    “What has started all over again?”
    She was