“We were just about to have lunch,” he explained.
“Ramón, set another place for Mr. Cooper.”
The patio was shaded and cool. Trace glanced back to where Arthur waited in the sun-drenched jeep and then stopped the dark-skinned servant with a gesture of his hand. “No, thanks,” he said. “I can’t stay. I just dropped by to see if I heard you correctly last night. I was quite drunk at the time.”
“You heard correctly.” Laurent smiled.
“Then you’re really serious about taking this case?”
“I am serious about you taking it, Mr. Cooper. I shall, of course, offer every possible assistance.”
“Why?”
The question was out before Trace could hold his tongue. “I told you last night,” Laurent answered. “I wish to know the truth about this horrible crime. Doctor Gaynor was my friend.”
“Doctor Gaynor was everybody’s friend, but I wouldn’t say he was yours in particular.”
From inside the house came the sound of music, a piano being played with the sensitive fingers of a master. Laurent raised his head and gazed across the valley. The noonday heat shimmered like a silver curtain between the ranch and the mountains, and no wind stirred.
“Let’s put it another way then,” he said. “Let’s say that life gets dull without challenge. Danny Ross is a challenge. Is he guilty, or is he innocent? The mob says guilty, and so I must say innocent. That’s the story of my life, Mr. Cooper. Does it answer your question?”
“One of them,” Trace admitted, “but it only makes the other more difficult. What I’ve been wondering for the past five years is why a man retires at the peak of his career. Why he leaves the world he’s brought to heel and buries himself—”
“—in this beautiful, peaceful valley,” Laurent finished. “I’m an old man, Mr. Cooper.”
“Sixty-one. Fifty-six when you quit your practice.”
“You seem to know a great deal about me.”
Trace pulled up just in time. Every man has to believe in something, and a much younger Trace Cooper had believed in Alexander Laurent and followed his career like some bobby-soxer with a fan magazine. As foolish, too. The Coopers were practical people; when they studied law it was to use it for their own advantage.
“I went to law school,” he reminded. “Any law student knows a great deal about Alexander Laurent.”
“And now we are working together. I’m flattered, Mr. Cooper, but please tell me what you’ve learned. I doubt that you came here for the ride.”
Trace leaned back and relaxed. Never mind the personal equations; the problem was Danny Ross. “You aroused my curiosity last night,” he began. “After you left, I heaved a bottle at the mirror over the bar. Ross couldn’t be incommunicado with me installed in the adjoining cell.”
“Ingenious,” Laurent murmured.
“Not at all. I’ve broken about six of those mirrors already; the result is always the same. This morning I had a talk with Danny.”
“Did you come to any conclusions?”
“I never come to conclusions—that’s the story of my life—but I did learn one thing that seems important: Danny doesn’t have Charley Gaynor’s wallet. He has two hundred dollars he insists are his, but the wallet is missing. The sheriff thinks Danny threw it away and has a couple of men searching the grounds at Mountain View right now.”
The music from inside the house was getting louder. Trace had to raise his voice to go on.
“I don’t think they’re going to find it. I watched Danny when the search was getting started. If anyone had come close, come anywhere near where he’d thrown the thing, he would have shown some anxiety. The kid’s just too scared to put up a front.”
“Then I take it that he betrayed no unusual emotion.”
“That’s right. He just kept insisting the wallet was lifted by a man in the café who was waiting for the bus to Junction City.”
Like Danny Ross, Laurent had betrayed no unusual emotion up to this point. Now he leaned forward, tense and alert. “And was there such a man?” he asked.
“There was,” Trace said. “A man named Steve Malone.”
He had to relate the whole story then: Danny’s version of Malone’s behavior in the café, the way he’d met him running for the bus, and finally the discouraging results of that trip to the mine. It was the tale of a rolling stone, a little man in a raincoat whose destination was always unknown but might be the west coast. “That covers a lot of territory,” he conceded, “but the sheriff will get out a ‘man wanted’ on him. He may not want to, but it’s his duty and Virgil’s a stickler for duty. Of course, that may take time.”
“During which Malone could easily spend the evidence,” Laurent added.
“But he would still have the doctor’s wallet.”
“Possibly.” Laurent leaned back in his chair again, but his eyes were busy. “Then I assume you intend to sit tight until the sheriff brings in Malone,” he said. “An easy way, Mr. Cooper, but hardly practical. Suppose the man is found and questioned. What’s to stop him from turning state’s evidence against Danny Ross in order to save his own skin? After all, there’s a great deal of difference between the penalty for theft and the penalty for murder. No, I’m afraid Malone isn’t going to be very helpful to Danny unless we find him first.”
It was Trace’s turn to crowd the edge of his chair now. “But how?” he demanded, and Laurent smiled. “Imagination, Mr. Cooper, imagination,” he said. “As you were telling me about Malone just now I received the distinct impression that I’d come across his type before—restless, unreliable, fond of easy money and a good time. Now let’s assume that Danny Ross is innocent and that our Mr. Malone did kill the doctor and take his wallet. What did he do then?”
“Caught the bus for Junction City,” Trace said.
“And when would that bus have reached its destination?”
“About six-thirty.”
“At the end of the day,” Laurent mused, “and our Mr. Malone had been living in a camp on the side of a mountain for several weeks. Now he has money in his pockets; now he’s not on that mountainside. I put it to you, Mr. Cooper, do you really think it likely that he boarded the first bus going west?”
“He was running away,” Trace reminded.
“But it’s so easy to find a man when he’s running. He boards a bus and there he is, all locked in and ready for that policeman waiting at the end of the line. But if he holes in somewhere—”
It was the crash of battered notes from the piano that broke into Laurent’s conjecture. He smiled and nodded to the silent servant near by. “You may start serving now, Ramón,” he directed. “It seems that Douglas has concluded his practicing. I don’t believe you have met my son, Mr. Cooper—”
At first Trace thought it was a boy who came through the doorway onto the patio. He was slender, lithe, and casually dressed in white slacks and a knitted sport shirt. Just a boy, fair and delicately handsome; but as he came closer the years crept into his face until they were gathered almost forty in number. Douglas Laurent, the only child of an illustrious father.
“Come sit down, Douglas,” Laurent urged. “This is Mr. Cooper, the gentleman from whom I purchased the ranch.”
“It’s hot,” Douglas said, with a brief nod toward Trace. “I simply can’t work when it’s hot.”
“Douglas is writing a concerto,” the elder Laurent explained. “It’s quite an undertaking.”
“It’s impossible!” Douglas snapped. “This weather, this country, this house!”
“What’s wrong with the house?” Trace demanded.
“It’s cavernous! The acoustics are terrible! This time of year back home—” Douglas’s face grew radiant with remembrance, “—this time of year we would go to the lake house. It was small and quiet, and I had a little studio of my own over the barn. But what’s the use of talking about it? Father likes it here.”
“I used to have a cabin—you might call it a cottage—at the rim of Pe
ace Canyon,” Trace recalled. “It might make a fair studio.”
“Peace Canyon? Is that what you call it?”
“Then you know the place?”
Expressions chased across Douglas’s handsome face like clouds and sunlight playing tag in a troubled sky. Now he was gay, now grave. “I know the place,” he murmured. “It’s horrible!”
“Douglas—”
Laurent must have gauged the irritation mounting in Trace’s reddening face. His voice was like a whip, and then it became a caress. “Ramón is waiting to serve the salad,” he said. “Can’t we change your mind about lunch, Mr. Cooper?”
“I’m afraid not,” Trace said. “It’s over a hundred miles to Junction City. If I’m going to play bloodhound, I’d better get started.”
“A little man in a raincoat, a canvas hat, and carrying a Gladstone bag,” Laurent murmured, repeating the description Trace had given in his story. “I don’t envy you your task, Mr. Cooper, but let me know how you come out.”
• • •
It must be true that nothing is really appreciated until it is lost; something had to account for the resentment Trace felt at Douglas Laurent’s criticism of the ranch. But in that case, he reflected, he should be feeling awfully appreciative these days because losing things was fast becoming his only talent. And so now T. Cooper, the great loser, was setting out to find something—a man.
“I wonder where I would be if I were Steve Malone,” he mused, as Arthur headed the jeep back toward Mountain View.
Arthur grinned. “At a bar,” he suggested.
“Now wait a minute, I said if I were Malone—” Trace paused and reflected a moment. “Say, you might have something there! I’ll cover every bar in Junction City.”
“In that case I’d better come along.” Arthur sighed. “Somebody’s got to cover you.”
Arthur’s concern was understandable, but Trace, oddly enough, didn’t feel a bit thirsty. What he did feel was more like excitement. “Life gets dull without challenge,” Laurent had said. “The mob says guilty, and so I must say innocent.” But Trace knew it was more than that. He remembered Danny, the skinny legs in the tight Levi’s, the close-cropped hair, the scared face. Danny Ross was all the people in the world who were strangers on earth, and for that reason he could be no stranger to Trace.
“I want to stop off and see the kid before we go on to Junction City,” he said. “I want to let him know Laurent’s in his corner.”
But they were going to stop sooner than that. They were going to stop rather abruptly about ten miles beyond the ranch turnoff when a frantic, wild-eyed Virgil Keep suddenly appeared on the road ahead waving both arms like a windmill gone crazy.
“Where the hell have you been?” he yelled. “Why couldn’t you be around when you’re needed?”
The sheriff was alone; no Danny, no sedan. But he did have an ugly bruise on the side of his head.
“He tricked me!” Virgil roared. “He pulled the keys to stop the car and slugged me with my own gun. I knew that goddamed kid was a killer!”
CHAPTER 7
ALL THE LITTLE ONE-TRACK TRAILS led somewhere, but where they led was a mystery to Danny. Away—that’s all he could think of now, just away. He was free. He had a steering wheel in his hands again and a powerful motor responding to the press of the accelerator. But he couldn’t go back to the highway—not past that Mountain View crossing where a pair of armed deputies were watching for the return of the sheriff’s sedan, and he certainly couldn’t go back to Cooperton. He took the first trail cutting up from the south, praying that it wouldn’t double back or run into the wall of a canyon. All directions had been lost on that twisting ride to the mine, but he knew that the mountains ran like twin walls, one to the east, one to the west, and the trick was to cut between them.
It was a desperate chance he’d taken, but desperate conditions breed desperate remedies. Virgil Keep had forgotten that. He knew Danny was afraid, just a scared, scrawny kid against a huge man with a gun riding on his hip; but the same fear that paralyzes can propel and so Danny was free.
But free for what? Gradually, as the minutes of freedom ticked off and the wretched road ground beneath the tires, reason returned. Freedom to run and hide, freedom to be hunted down like a dog, or to starve here on the desert. Danny began to remember things. He was broke. He didn’t have the price of a sandwich, let alone that stake that was going to take him to faraway places. And now he was a fugitive, a name and a description that would soon be racing across the wires and airwaves to weave a tight net for a runaway in a stolen car. What did he have for a friend now? What did he have for an ally?
The answer lay on the seat beside him: the gun he’d ripped from the sheriff’s holster when he grabbed for the keys. There was blood on the barrel from where it had ripped across a human skull, and the sight of it brought out the sweat beads on Danny’s forehead. But he couldn’t toss the dread object out the window as he wanted to. Now it was all he had.
• • •
Virgil was a miserable man when he rode back to Mountain View in a red jeep. It was tough enough to get that bash on the head, have the car stolen from under him, and lose a prisoner half his size without having to face a barrage of questions. The deputies knew better than to strain his temper; but Viola was a taxpayer with her tongue hung in the middle and loose at both ends, and Jim Rice’s blue pickup was at the pumps getting gassed up. Jim wasn’t exactly mute himself.
“Dammit, Virgil,” he said, as soon as the story had been told, “that kid was locked up safe last night. Why did you let him out again?”
Virgil reddened. “We were looking for something,” he said, “—for Charley Gaynor’s wallet. The kid didn’t have it on him, and Trace said—”
“Trace!”
Trace Cooper inspired various reactions from his neighbors. Some still respected him because he was a Cooper and they remembered his father or his grandfather; others despised him for identical reasons. Jim Rice wasn’t one to be awed by a name.
“What the hell’s Trace got to say about things?” he stormed. “Why don’t he mind his own business?”
“Why don’t you?” Trace parried.
“Do you think it’s not my business when a killer’s at large? I’ve got a family to think about, I’ve got a wife!”
That sympathetic murmur from Viola was too much for Trace. “Running away doesn’t necessarily make the kid a killer,” he said, “but I’m sure glad it makes you think of your wife, Jim. It’s about time!”
The only thing that saved Trace from catching a faceful of knuckles was the size of Arthur standing at his shoulder—that and the way Virgil suddenly swung into action. Danny hadn’t been free long—he couldn’t have gotten far. The valley and the mountains were laced with little roads, some dead-end roads to ranches, some connecting with highways at distant points. The alarm had to be sent out and the search begun, and there was no place like Mountain View to begin.
“I need your truck, Jim,” he said.
“Then you need me, too.”
“Anyway you like it. Take one of the boys and start looking. Danny didn’t come this way so he must have turned off somewhere between here and where he slugged me. That was about five miles back.”
“I’ve got a car,” Walter broke in. “It’s not much but it runs.”
“You’re not going to leave me here alone!” Viola screamed. “I don’t want happening to me what happened to Francy Allen!”
“Francy!” Trace choked. “What’s Danny Ross got to do with Francy?” But his question wasn’t answered except for that knowing gleam in Viola’s eyes. Virgil was too busy swinging into action. “One of the boys goes with Jim, one stays here in case the kid doubles back,” he said. “As for me, I’m heading back to town to call the police at Junction City and Red Rock— Ready, Trace?”
Virgil climbed back into the jeep again and Trace nodded. He felt sick inside at the thought of what was going out over that party line the instant Viola could g
et to the phone, and he felt even sicker at Jim Rice’s parting words.
“Don’t take it so hard, Trace,” he taunted. “You’ll find some other freak to add to your collection.”
• • •
As Trace suspected, the news of Danny’s escape reached Cooperton before them. A crowd was already gathering in front of the sheriff’s office, but Virgil was all through offering explanations. “Drive around to the back door,” he directed Arthur. “I haven’t got time to make speeches.” So Arthur swung the jeep around the corner and pulled into a little alleyway that led to the door of Ada’s kitchen. Virgil issued no invitations, but Trace followed him inside.
At first the place seemed deserted, and then Ada came trotting in from the front of the building. Her face was flushed with excitement and her little eyes bright and anxious. “There’s a lot of men waiting out front to see you,” she panted. “And the phone keeps ringing—”
“That’s fine!” Virgil snapped. “I’ll probably have to chase every old hen in town off the line!” He started for the corridor to the office and then looked back to see Trace standing just inside the door. “Well, what do you want?” he demanded. “I don’t need you any more.”
“You don’t need that crowd out front, either,” Trace said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sending Jim Rice out was all right, he has a deputy with him, but if you let that bunch form a vigilantes committee we may find Danny Ross at the end of a rope.”
“Right now I don’t care how we find him,” Virgil said. “He took that chance when he broke loose. Remember, he’s out there in the desert somewhere right now. He’s desperate and he has my gun!”
“The poor boy,” Ada murmured. “Where will he go?”
Even Virgil had no words for the disgust this comment brought to his eyes. “Talk to them,” Trace urged. “Tell them to leave everything to the law. Tell them there’s nothing in the crazy story Viola Wade’s cooking up. That woman’s just a natural troublemaker.”
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