WEST ON 66

by James H. Cobb

  "Hey, kid. How 'bout we contact the Arizona Patrol and

  have them put a couple of cars in around this Peerless place?

  Just in case."

  "Nah, that's no good, Jack. If I remember right, the country out that way is as flat and empty as a pool table. Even a plain­clothes car would stand out like a sore at a short arms inspec­tion. The Clasters are real twitchy about this whole Kingman situation. If Jubal's still there and if the girl and I go in alone, maybe we can get him talking. But if he even gets a sniff of anything funny, I'll bet he'll either bolt or start shooting. Let's just make the scene and play it cool."

  "Whatever," the Bear grumbled. "You're calling it. But this is one hell of a way to run a police operation."

  "I know, but it's my way."

  I heard him sigh heavily into the phone. "Will you at least do me one favor?"

  "Sure. What is it?"

  "Listen to me! Stick your dick back in your pants, clean the wax out of your ears, and listen to what I'm about to say!"

  "I'm listening, Jack."

  "Do not trust the Spanno girl! Take her out, take her to bed, take her home to meet your friggin' Aunt Angeline, but do not trust her! Maybe she is on the square, maybe she is feeding you a straight line, but don't count on it! She's the daughter of a hood, and she's the stepdaughter of another hood. She's been raised in a world where loyalty is for suckers and a stab in the back is just how you do business. She could sell you out or turn on you in two seconds flat if it becomes necessary or even only convenient!"

  There was a silence on that phone from both ends for a lot more than two seconds.

  "You hear me, kid?"

  "Yeah, Jack. I'm hearing you. I have to go, man."

  I left the phone booth and lit up a smoke, just because I needed something to do. Crossing the flagstone floor, I leaned against polished timber rail of the lobby stairway.

  Yeah, I heard you, Jack. And I really wish I could tell you to go to hell. The problem is that in the three years you've been my partner I've never known you to give me a bum steer about the job.

  A special voice called from the top of the stairs, and I jammed the mass of doubts and suspicions that had suddenly come crowding around me back in the closet. For a while any­way.

  The dust-stained tomboy that I'd been tear-assing around the country with for the past couple of days was gone, and the Princess was back in her full regal glory. She was in her heels and a bright print summer dress she'd been holding in reserve ever since Saint Louis. Strap-shouldered, full-skirted, and a long way from being expensive, Lisette made it beautiful be­cause she was beautiful in it.

  She knew it, too. She paced proudly and gracefully down the halved-log steps, her eyes bright and her head lifted high. She wore her long and sheening brown hair like an expensive stole, bound back with a scarlet ribbon and swept forward over her shoulder with provocative casualness.

  I found myself praying that just this one time, Jack might be wrong.

  We had a drink before dinner in El Rancho's cool pine-paneled bar. As we were shown to our table, there was a hes­itation in the flow of conversation around the room. I'd noted Lisette producing that effect before. Men got that faraway look in their eyes while other women gritted their teeth and thought about dark alleys and blunt objects. Lisette was aware of it, too, and she smiled a slightly smug and eternally feminine smile beneath lowered lashes.

  A few ancient and atavistic instincts of my own were in play as I held her chair for her and beamed a silent warning to the other masculine onlookers around the room. Something to the effect of, No trespassing, you bunch of losers! This claim has been staked!

  After the barmaid had brought us a couple of screwdrivers, Lisette lightly swirled the hem of her skirt. "Like it?" she asked.

  "I do, Princess. But I thought this morning you were swear­ing off clothes."

  She arched an eyebrow. "I'm closer to it than you might imagine. The only two pairs of panties I have to my name are in the hotel laundry just now. If you see a breeze coming, for God's sake yell."

  "I'll make a note of it." I struggled past some very intriguing mental imagery and got back on the job. "It seems like you started out on this jaunt awfully short on resources. How come you didn't set yourself up better?"

  "I didn't plan it this way," Lisette replied grimly, swirling the ice cubes in her glass. "Believe me. When I decided to go after my father's loot, I started stashing away running money for a car and traveling expenses. I almost had enough, too, when the ceiling fell in."

  "What happened?"

  "Mace got wise to what I was up to. I think that's one of the reasons Mace forced Mother to marry him. I think he al­ways suspected that we knew something about where the two hundred thousand was hidden. Sometimes when he was mad about something or had been drinking, he'd . . . question her about it."

  Lisette's jaw tightened and she took a long pull at her drink. "Anyway, word must have gotten back to him that I was talk­ing to some of my father's old acquaintances and asking ques­tions about the lost Leopold gang war chest."

  "So Mace guessed you might be making a try for the money?" I prompted.

  "He must have. The day before we met, I came home and found that my room had been torn apart. I'd taken to carrying the guidebook with me at all times, but I'd had some notes and newspaper photostats hidden away there. They were gone and so was all my money. It was just sheer luck that I'd come home unexpectedly early that day. If Mace or one of his boys had been there waiting for me, I don't know what would have hap­pened."

  "What did happen?"

  "When I came out of my room, the housekeeper was just hanging up the phone. I knew what that meant, and I knew I had to get out of there." Lisette gave a cool smile. "She tried to keep me from leaving, but I decked her with the best right cross I've ever thrown and was out the door like a scared rabbit."

  "And then?"

  "I had nowhere to go and nothing but what I stood up in. I knew that Mace would have every one of his men out comb­ing the streets for me, so I hid out in a movie theater, sitting through the same bill over and over again. When the theater closed, I drifted from one all-night cafe to the next. By the next morning, I realized that I didn't have any choice. I had to go after my father's money right then, just as things were." "You were taking on pretty long odds." She shrugged her slim shoulders. "A little chance is better than no hope. I sneaked out of Gary into Chicago and then headed south. I ran out of bus fare in Pontiac, and I started hitchhiking. That's how I ended up at that truck stop looking for a lift to Saint Louis."

  I shook my head. "How in the hell did you ever figure on making it clear across the country?"

  "I'd have managed," Lisette replied, regarding me somberly. "I know what I look like, Kev. I wouldn't have had much trouble getting money and favors out of men along the way. I just would have had to pay for them."

  A smile lit up her face then, and she caught my hand in hers. "But it turned out I didn't have to. A genuine Sir Galahad came to my rescue." Lifting my hand to her face, she gently pressed my palm to her cheek. "For a long time," she mur­mured, "I thought knights in shining armor were only some­thing they wrote about in storybooks."

  I'm sorry to disappoint you, Princess, I replied silently, but I'm afraid they are.

  A film crew was in residence at El Rancho, shooting an oater called Fort Massacre, and Lisette was as excited as a kid when we were seated across from Joel McCrea and Forrest Tucker in the hotel's compact dining room. If this had just been a date, I could have told her some of the wilder Sheriff's Department stories out of Hollywood, the ones that Photoplay and even Confidential were scared to pick up. Instead, after we had or­dered, I had to maneuver our conversation back around to to­morrow.

  "Do you figure this Jubal Claster might have some clues about where your father stashed the war chest?"

  Lisette shook her head. "I'd doubt it. Dad didn't say any­thing to Calvin Reece about his plans, or even to my mother. I don't t
hink he'd let anything on to some hired hand he'd picked up along the way. And Claster wasn't with Dad when he hid the money. My father was traveling alone by the time he reached Oklahoma City. We know that from the wrecking yard."

  "Are you sure he's worth bothering with then? The Claster clan seems a little edgy about the whole Leopold question. When you consider the way little brother Ira flipped out over the matter, you have to wonder how big brother Jubal is going to react when you introduce yourself. Chain saws and dyna­mite?"

  Lisette stared down at the tabletop, tracing an outline on the cloth with the tines of her fork. "I know it's stupid risking our lives just to try and ask this man some questions he probably won't answer. But this is important to me, Kevin. I wish I could explain it so you could understand."

  I whistled a couple of soft notes to bring her eyes up to meet mine. "Hey, just keep going. This is old Sir Galahad over here, remember. You can talk me into anything. Just give me the word on this."

  She hesitated a moment, then went on. "I know that my father was responsible for the deaths of his two partners back there in Baxter Springs, I accept that. But I need to know how they died. I need to know if it was a robbery that went wrong or a murder that went right. Jubal Claster is my only chance to find out."

  "Hell, Princess, putting it bluntly, dead is dead. Does it re­ally make that much difference at this late date how those two guys bought it?"

  Lisette flinched a little at my words. "It makes a difference to me!" She hesitated a long second, hunting for words. "Look; when I was a little girl, my dad was just . . . Daddy. He was a big man who was away lots of the time, but who smiled and laughed when he was home. He brought me nice presents and told me funny stories, and he was good for a hug and a cuddle whenever I wanted one. That was all that was important. It wasn't until later, after he was killed, that I began to realize what the word criminal meant."

  The girl twirled the fork moodily between her fingers. "Even then, for a long time I couldn't accept the reality. I tried to visualize my father as a kind of modern Jesse James or Robin Hood, different and superior in some way to Mace and the others. You know, a 'gangster with a heart of gold' like James Cagney used to play in the movies. But as I started to look deeper into my father's past and into his world, I began to learn that real gangsters don't have hearts at all. They just have a big dark hole in their chest where they pour the blood of in­nocent people."

  The fork tinkled down on the table amid the other tableware. "That's what I need to learn, Kevin," she finished softly. "For my own peace of mind and for any future I'm ever going to have. I need to know if I have any daddy left that's worth remembering or if both of my fathers are just lousy murdering hoods."

  Our steaks showed up and I was damn glad to have this line of discussion interrupted. Lisette didn't have much appetite at first, but I got to work running the train of conversation over any track except the one that led to Peerless. I dug out some of my old army stories, like the one about the night my squad and I sat out maneuvers in a North Carolina roadhouse. I filled her in on the truth about the "Hotsy-Botsy" baths in Tokyo and about my one memorable leave in Honolulu, or at least the parts that happened before I passed out. I had her laughing again by the time the mountain-blueberry cobbler showed up.

  We lingered at the table, killing off the last of the wine we'd ordered with dinner. Then Lisette stretched languorously. "I think I'm ready for bed," she sighed.

  "Sleepy, Princess?"

  She gave me a long and level-eyed look across the table. "I didn't say that I was sleepy, darling. I said that I was ready for bed."

  En route back to our room we passed the "trading post" gift shop just off the lobby. As is just about mandatory in Arizona and New Mexico, it was jammed with the usual selection of Navajo blankets, pottery, and kachina dolls for the tourist trade. And even aroused passion couldn't get Lisette past the displays of handmade Indian jewelry blazing under the show­case lights.

  I stood next to her as she oohed over the trays, waiting for that inevitable sideways glance in my direction. What the hell, I was starting to run a little tight on money, but I had an emergency ten spot tucked away in a corner of my wallet.

  Her eventual selection was a burnished copper barrette that suited the sheening brown of her hair.

  "What do you think?" she asked cautiously. "Do you like it?"

  "Hell," I replied. "Do you like it? That's what's important."

  She shook her head emphatically. "No. You're buying this for me, and you'll see me wearing it. You have to like it, too."

  "Then I think it's beautiful."

  "Truly?"

  "Truly."

  It was a done deal all around, and the young Navajo woman behind the counter grinned knowingly as she packed the bar­rette in a little white jewelry box and passed it to Lisette.

  The Princess studied the box in her hand for a long thought­ful moment. Then she smiled as well.

  "Here," she said, pressing the box into my hand. "Give me the room key and you take this. Bring it up in five minutes and we'll try it on."

  Then she was gone in a quick swirl of skirt.

  It was a long five minutes.

  Our room was at the end of the cool and curving brick-walled hallway on the second floor. The door's safety chain rattled off in response to my knock. "All right," she whispered through the door. "Come in."

  The room was darkened and I took a second to secure the door behind me.

  The drapes had been drawn back and the windows had been opened to admit the moonlight and the breeze coming off the mountains. The bed was turned down, and Lisette's dress was draped over the back of a chair.

  She stood in the center of the little room, clad as she had been that first night back at the Coral Court, in her hair ribbon and my old white shirt. Only now, none of the buttons had been done and the shirt was held closed only by a strip of shadow. "Did you bring the barrette?" she asked.

  It took me a second to remember. "Oh, yeah. Still got it," I replied, balancing the little box in my hand. Despite the open windows, it seemed to be getting a little hard to breathe.

  "Would you put it on me, please?" Deliberately she reached up behind her head, untying her ribbon and letting a dark cas­cade fall loose around her shoulders, allowing the front of her shirt to open with the lift of her arms.

  Lisette let me have a long look at that perfect ivory body. Then she turned away, presenting her back and her glossy fall of hair, silently demanding her present.

  My fingers felt stiff and clumsy just at a time when I wanted them to do something perfectly right. I fumbled the barrette from its box. My hands picked up a touch of the wild rose perfume she'd brushed through her hair as I gathered the warm, living silk at the base of her neck. Containing it with the clip, I snapped the clasp shut.

  I'd given her something, and now it was only fair that I take something as well. Slipping my hands down to her shoulders, I took her shirt away, leaving her in nothing but moonlight and the single gleam of red-gold.

  "How does it look?" she asked huskily, her voice sounding as if she was having a little trouble with her breathing, too.

  My only answer was to brush her ponytail aside, lifting it over her shoulder so she could experience the liquidy caress of her own hair flowing down over her bare breast. Lisette gasped and I sensed the shiver that rippled down her spine. I leaned down and kissed the starting place of that shiver, just between her shoulder blades. With another sound, half-snarl, half-whimper, she spun around and threw herself into my arms.

  Some sweet and interesting times later, Lisette lay curled up beside me, making that soft little purring buzz that's as close as she gets to a snore. I should have been asleep, too, but I wasn't.

  I hadn't seen a real bed for two days, I'd had enough alcohol to take off the rough edges, and I'd just finished making pro­longed and satisfying love with a very playful, passionate, and enthusiastic young lady. By rights, I should have been out like a light. But sometimes,
in these quiet, dark hours beyond mid­night, thoughts you can escape during the day can sneak up on you.

  This operation was dangerously close to exploding in my face. We were just two states out from the coast, and I still didn't have a line on the money or on how I was going to take Spanno down. It's all well and good to say that you're going to wing it and await developments, but man, I was running out of miles and time.

  I also had no idea about how I was going to tell Lisette the truth about myself, nor could I even guess about what might happen between us afterward.

  I was dangerously close to whispering some very special words to this wild and wondrous little person who slept naked at my side. Words that I guess I'd said but never really meant to any woman before in my life. I think I might have already if it weren't for the little matter of trust.

  Love and trust need to be in the same sentence. And the moment, with Lisette and me, they weren't even mentioned in the same chapter.

  Lisette trusting me? Hell, that was a nonstarter. She was still holding out about the location of the money.

  Me trusting Lisette? Besides the money, what else was she holding out on? Tonight, she'd frankly said that she'd been willing to do whatever was necessary to reclaim her father's lost fortune. And back in Saint Louis, she'd tried to buy my serv­ices with that beautiful body of hers. Maybe she was buying them now but just using a little more sophisticated kind of payment plan.

  The Bear had been sooo right. A lawman can't let the law become personal.

  I rolled over to the edge of the bed. Glancing down, I noticed Lisette's shoulder bag sitting on the bottom shelf of the lamp table.

  A long time ago, when I was a kid, my father told me, "Sometimes if you can't think your way out of a problem, work your way out of it. Do something constructive, anything; just don't sit around and brood." I sometimes suspect that Dad came up with that bit of wisdom just to help get the lawns mowed, but I was willing to give it a try tonight.

  Reaching down, I opened the clasp on the bag and eased out the Rittenhouse guide. Being careful not to wake Lisette, I got off the bed and went into the bathroom. I'd been wanting to take another look at that little book, and now was as good an opportunity as any. Turning on the light, I assumed my best "The Thinker" position on the pot and began studying