Defense for the Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking, I’ll load the stuff. What did you do with his car keys?” he asked Maggie.
    For a moment she looked blank, then she paled. “Oh, God, I forgot all about the keys. They’re in my jeans. The jeans are—they were in the bathroom hamper.”
    They all went back to the bathroom. Maggie pulled the jeans out from under other things and felt in the pockets. “They’re gone,” she whispered.
     
    When they left the bed-and-breakfast, Barbara headed north and drove slowly past the day-use park. It was jammed full, and the cars were visible from the road, which was no more than a narrow access road to the park and the inn. A mile farther up, it joined the coast road, 101. At Newport, Bailey told her to pull in at a drive-through fast-food place. Then, eating hamburgers, they headed out of Newport, back toward Eugene. It was ten minutes to three. She waited until Bailey had finished his second hamburger to ask, “Well? Comments? Observations? Anything?”
    “Two guys. They were searching and being fast and careless about it. One’s a lefty,” he added.
    “How do you know one’s a lefty?” she asked, passing a truck. He groaned.
    “Close your eyes and imagine—God help me, I didn’t say that! Just imagine, open-eyed, how you’d go about yanking stuff out of a closet. Which hand you open it with, which one you grab stuff with, how you toss it.”
    She had no trouble visualizing it, but she had not seen it herself. “Gotcha,” she said.
    “And he’s got the car keys,” he said gloomily.
    A little later she said, “See what you can dig up about Belmont. Could be Arno’s alias. And if Mitch has a record. You know the drill.”
    “Barbara, Belmont’s from New Orleans.”
    “So? I don’t expect you to go there and pound on doors. Just dig a little.” She drove for a minute or two, thinking, then said, “Maggie will stay at the hotel for a while, and no doubt Trassi will get to her. He’ll probably give me a call tomorrow. It would be helpful if I had a little information before I talk to him.”
    “Wish for the moon. Tomorrow?”
    “It’s a thought.”
     
    They got to her bank in Eugene ten minutes before it closed at five-thirty. There had been a log truck on the Corvallis road with traffic lined up behind it for miles. She parked illegally out front long enough to carry the stuff from the trunk inside the bank, then handed the keys to Bailey, who would move the car. When she was finished with the safe-deposit rental business, she made a Xerox copy of Maggie’s check and deposited it and two other much smaller ones, and she was done.
    Bailey was waiting for her. “Now the notebook,” she said, but hesitated. He had to look through it, but where? Her office at the apartment was impossible; she couldn’t even close the door. Not her father’s office; the firm was closed by then, and she didn’t want to use her key to get in. “How about a drink?” she said finally.
    “How about that,” he said with more enthusiasm than he had shown all day.
    “Where’s the car?”
    “Two-hour parking slot. It’s okay. Let’s walk over to the Park Bar and Grill.”
    They crossed the street and walked through the small urban park with its big fountain, walked one more block and entered the cool, dim bar.
    There, in a booth with a gin and tonic before her, a double bourbon on the rocks before him, they sat side by side and looked over the notebook.
    “What the hell?” he said. “Foreign telephone numbers?” He flipped the page to find more foreign numbers. Not written by a European, Barbara thought; the sevens were all American, not slashed. Bailey flipped to the next page. “These I know. Seattle area codes. San Francisco.” He copied all the numbers in his own notebook.
    There was a long string of numbers without any notation to indicate what they were for. Under them was a flight number. The letters f and l and the number.
    A woman’s handwriting, Barbara thought, studying the two letters. At the