A Bullet for Cinderella by John D. MacDonald Page B

front of my motel room and went, unwashed, to bed. Sunday was a replica, a sodden day in town, a drunken day.
    It was eleven when I got up on Monday morning. A half dozen glasses of water made me feel bloated but didn’t quench my thirst. My head pounded in a dull, ragged rhythm. I shaved slowly, painfully. The shower made me feel a little better. I decided that it was time to go. Time to leave this place. I didn’t know where I would head for. Any place. Any kind of a job. Some kind of manual labor. Get too bushed to think.
    I packed my two bags. I left them inside the door and went out to unlock the trunk. All the transient cars were gone. A big dog stood with his feet against the side of mycar, looking in the side window. The cold, thin, birdlike woman was carrying sheets and towels out of one of the other rooms and dumping them into a hamper on wheels.
    The dog jumped back as I walked out. He stood twenty feet away and whined in a funny way. I made as though to throw gravel at him and he went farther back. I didn’t know what attracted him to my car.
    I happened to glance inside as I was heading to unlock the trunk. I stopped and looked for a long time. It seemed an effort to take my eyes away. A big body was on the floor in the back, legs bent, head tilted sideways. It was Milton Grassman. He still wore the brown suit. The knees showed traces of pale dried mud. The forehead, in the area where the thin hairline had started, was broken jelly, an ugly, sickening depression. No man could have lived more than a moment with a wound like that.
    I realized the woman was calling to me in her thin voice.
    I turned and said, “What?”
    “I said are you staying another day?”
    “Yes. Yes, I’m staying another day.”
    She went into another room. She was working her way toward mine. I hurried back in. I put one bag in the closet, opened the other one, put my toilet articles back in the bathroom. I slammed the door and went out. The dog was standing by the car again, whining. I got behind the wheel and drove out of there. I drove away from town. I didn’t want to be stopped by a traffic light where anybody could look down into the back of the car. I remembered an old tarp in the back. I pulled off onto the shoulder and got the tarp. I waited while traffic went by and then spread the tarp over Grassman. I tried not to look at him while I did it. But I couldn’t help seeing his face. The slackness of death had ironed everything out of it, all expression.
    I drove on aimlessly and then stopped again on the shoulder of the highway. I wanted to be able to think. I could feel the dreadful presence of the body behind me. My brain felt frozen, numbed, useless. It did no good towonder when the body had been put there. I couldn’t even remember the places where I had parked.
    Why had it been put in my car? Somebody wanted to get rid of it. Somebody wanted to divert suspicion from himself. From the look of the wound, murder had been violent and unplanned. One tremendous, skull-smashing blow. It was inevitable that I should begin to think of Fitz. Of the people I knew in Hillston, he was the one capable of murder, and both quick and brutal enough to have killed a man like Grassman. From what I had seen of him, Grassman looked tough and capable.
    But why would Fitz want to implicate me? The answer was quick and chilling. It meant that he had traced the right Cindy, the Cindy who would know where Timmy had buried the money. He might already have the money.
    The immediate problem was to get rid of the body. It should be a place where there would be no witness, no one to remember having seen my car. I couldn’t go to the police. “I was here before. Unemployed. No permanent address. A criminal record, according to your definition. It so happens I have a body in my car. It got in there somehow last night. Was I drunk? Brother, you can find a dozen witnesses to how drunk I was. I was a slobbering mess, the worst I’ve ever been in my