“I see,” he said with a quick look at the clerk, who was now staring at them with both eyes well open.
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Nobody’s charging you with anything.” The policeman pulled his cap straight and said in a very careful, very patient voice, “Who you been staying with here in the area?”
She didn’t have to answer him. It was none of his business.
“Look. Somebody’s going to be worried about you.”
Like hell.
He cleared his throat. “What about giving me your telephone number? So I can just check things out?”
She glared at him.
He coughed and cleared his throat again and looked up at the clerk. She might have gotten away in that instant—except for the money. Where could she go without the money? “I think,” the policeman was saying, “I’d better take her in for a little talk.”
The clerk nodded. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Here’s the money she brought in.” He held up a manila envelope. The policeman took her gently by the arm and walked her to the counter. The clerk handed him the envelope.
“That’s my money,” Gilly protested.
“I’ll just bet it is, kid,” the clerk said with a fake smile.
If she had known what to do, she would have done it. She tried to make her brain tell her, but it lay frozen in her skull like a woolly mammoth deep in a glacier. All the way to the station she asked it, Shall I jump out of the car at the next light and run? Should I just forget about the damn money? But the woolly mammoth slept on, refusing to stir a limb in her behalf.
In a back room behind the police station’s long counter two policemen tried to question her. The new one, a big blond, was asking the first one: “She ain’t got no ID?”
“Well, I’m not going to search her, and Judy’s gone out to get her supper.”
“What about the suitcase?”
“Yeah, better check through there.”
She wanted to yell at them to leave her stuff alone, but she couldn’t break through the ice.
The blond policeman riffled carelessly through her clothes. He found Courtney’s picture almost at once. “This your mother, kid?”
“Put that down,” she whispered.
“Oh, now she’s talking.”
“She said to put her picture down, Mitchell.”
“OK, OK. Just trying to do my job.” He put the picture down and continued to poke through the suitcase. “Bingo,” he said, picking up the postcard. He read it carefully before handing it to the other officer. “All here, Rhine. Name and current address. And big surprise! She does know somebody in San Francisco.”
The one called Rhine read the postcard and then came and stooped down beside her chair.
“Is this your father’s address here?” he asked, pointing at the address on the card.
She sat perfectly still, staring him down.
Rhine shook his head, stood up, and handed the card back to Mitchell. “Check out who lives at that address and give them a call, will you?”
Within a half hour, a red-faced Trotter, holding the hand of a white-faced William Ernest, puffed through the station-house door. Her eye immediately caught Gilly’s, still seated in the room on the other side of the counter. She tried to smile, but Gilly jerked away from the gaze. The policewoman was back from her supper and on duty at the counter.
“Maime…Maime Trotter”—Trotter was puffing worse than if she’d run up her steps—“Got a…taxi…waiting…No money…to…pay…him.”
“Just a minute, please.” Judy, the policewoman, came in and spoke quietly to Rhine, and then Rhine got up and they both went out to the counter. The only part of the conversation Gilly could make out was Trotter’s breathy replies: