He was tired of running, anyway. Running was a big joke, because life was going to get you wherever you went. It was going to hit you with one thing or hit you with another; but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be easy and soft like the pictures in your daydreams. A cage, Ada said. Everybody lived in a cage, and maybe she was right. But a big cage was better than a little cage, and a risky life was better than no life at all.
The road was unfamiliar in the darkness. He slowed down for a crossing ahead, but it wasn’t Mountain View. It was that narrow road winding down from Peace Canyon, the one he’d come over with Virgil a few hours earlier. By this time Danny knew what that crossing meant. It was where they had found Francy Allen with the life ebbing out of her. The place she’d been dumped for dead in the darkness. He had about five miles more to go, and about five minutes to plan what he’d do if this hunch turned sour.
Five minutes wasn’t much time to pin a face on a murderer. The killer might be waiting for him at Mountain View with a shotgun again. He might be joining in the chase Virgil would have under way by now—or he might be a hundred miles away having a good laugh on everybody. But Danny didn’t think so. Out here alone, with nothing but the road, and the moonlight, and a windshield spattered with stars, he could think clearly. Of all that talk back at the jail, one thing stood out. One lie that only Danny himself could catch. One lie could lead to another—
And then he was scared, thinking maybe the killer had struck upon the same inspiration that was taking him back to where this whole grisly affair had started. Maybe he would be too late. But this time the crossing was Mountain View, and the cluster of faded yellow buildings was like a ghost town in the moonlight.
Walter and Viola must have gone to bed; there wasn’t a light showing anywhere. Danny switched off the head lamps and let the motor ease to a whisper. A sweet-running job like this would be nice to have handy for a quick escape if worst came to worst. There was one obvious hiding-place. He wheeled the sedan around to the far side of the old shed back of the café, and now he was conscious of a strange excitement much stronger than a hunch.
There were times when something was done that seemed to have been done before. That was a moon riding high in the sky now instead of the sun, and there was no ageing sedan rattling down the highway from Red Rock. But everything was familiar; everything was plain. Danny crawled out from under the steering wheel and came cautiously around the end of the shed. A few feet ahead was the spot where old Doc Gaynor had parked his ailing vehicle, and a few steps beyond was the door of the men’s room. A company station would have locked up for the night, but the only lock on that door was the rusty bolt inside that Danny slid home when he went in. He listened to the night sounds for a few long moments before switching on the naked bulb over the lavatory. A light was risky but necessary. If Malone actually had left the doctor’s wallet in the men’s room, any risk was justified. If he hadn’t, it would take more than darkness to cover Danny, now.
But where, in this tiny cubicle, would a thief hide the evidence of his theft? A loose floor board? A crack in the wall? A high shelf? In his anxiety, Danny kicked over the waste basket and then held his breath when the phone began ringing inside the café. That would be someone in Cooperton calling to warn Walter of a big gray sedan barreling north. He could even catch the low rumble of a sleepy voice on the other side of the thin partition.
But where could Malone have dropped the wallet? It was time to douse the light and run, but Danny couldn’t make himself give up the search. Giving up meant running and being hunted again, and the wallet had to be here! Charley Gaynor’s killer hadn’t found it. Why else was Malone dead? There was only one place left to look when he heard the siren screaming up the highway, and then the shriek of brakes and the flail of gravel on the drive. A barrage of headlights hit the side of the building just as Danny switched off the bulb.
“Come on out, Danny! Come out with your hands up or I’ll start shooting!”
That was Virgil’s baritone bawling at the bolted door, but he wasn’t alone. It sounded like a parade turning off onto the gravel. “Better come out, Danny,” Trace called, and then Viola began a shrill demand to know what was going on, what was all the excitement. How many more? Danny stood on tiptoe and peeked through the tiny window. He could see them all swarming before the headlights like a convention of moths at a lamppost, only this time it wasn’t the moths who were going to get burned. The party was complete—nobody missing. No body and no thing, because the last place to look had been the right place. Danny had heard about the man who brought his harp to the party and nobody asked him to play, but here he was with an eager audience and a harp without strings. There was only one chance—
“Save the fireworks!” he yelled. “I’m coming out! I’m coming out with the wallet!”
It was like ground zero the moment before an A-bomb test. The silence could have been boxed up and wrapped for mailing. With one hand Danny reached up and unscrewed the light bulb. It was still hot, but not nearly so hot as that limp leather fold in his other hand. “Stand away from the door! I’m coming out!” he cried, and at the instant the door flew open the bulb hit the cement floor like a pistol shot.
Fire at random into a crowd of spectators and everybody scampers—that’s what Danny counted on and that’s what he got. Just a moment of confusion, a precious moment for a head start, and he was off for the sedan like an all-American back heading for pay dirt. He wasn’t sure if there were footsteps behind him, beside him, or ahead of him. He wasn’t sure if there was shouting, or if the only sound was the pounding of his own heart. The shed, that’s all he could think of—the far side of the shed and a gray sedan waiting in the moonlight. But he hadn’t counted on a chauffeur.
When the car door swung open in his face, Danny tried to reverse his field; but there was no escaping the hand that dragged him into the front seat, and no crying out against the roar of the motor as the sedan leaped into motion. At the crossing the car swung left. The unpaved side road rushed up to meet them like a narrow tunnel opening in the moonlight, and there was only a cloud of dust for the watchers behind. There were times when something was done that seemed to have been done before.
• • •
“You knew where to look for the car all right,” Danny said. “It must have been a long wait for the old doc to show up the other day—and with a passenger yet!”
Danny was a long way from being as calm as he tried to sound, and he wasn’t going to get any response while the pursuing headlights showed dimly through the dust in the rearview mirror. But all those horses under the hood were paying off. The lights grew smaller by the second.
“What happens to me now? A bullet in the head like Malone?”
“Don’t be a fool!” Laurent answered. “All I want is that piece of paper.”
Alexander Laurent’s face was like a white mask in the moonlight, and his eyes never left that tortuous road they were using for a speedway. “A piece of paper,” he repeated, “that contains nothing but a hideous lie. Surely you don’t want to convict an innocent man, Danny. You know what it is to be falsely accused.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Danny began.
“Of course you don’t. You never knew Francy Allen.”
Laurent hit the brakes, but only long enough to make the turnoff to the ranch. Danny recognized the place from the morning he’d watched the jeep swing out of sight and leave him alone with Virgil Keep. It had been a lonely feeling, but nothing like the feeling he had now. There were no lights left in the rearview, and Laurent went on talking as if they had been sitting in somebody’s living-room swapping yarns before the fire.
“She was an evil woman, Danny. A vindictive woman. She wrecked Trace Cooper’s happiness with a lie because he didn’t love her, and she would have destroyed my son with another.”
“If he hadn’t destroyed her first,” Danny said.
“No! You’re wrong, Danny! That statement is a lie!”
Now Dan
ny knew what he hadn’t known before, and being scared wasn’t so bad when someone else was scared along with him. “The only lie I know about is the one you told the sheriff,” he said. “Douglas didn’t fire that gun when I threw the clothes at him, and when he did, he wasn’t shooting at any lamp. He was shooting at me!”
“Because he was excited—”
“Excited enough to set fire to a cabin full of bloodstains!”
Danny saw Laurent’s long fingers tighten on the steering wheel, but the mask didn’t change. “Listen to me, Danny,” he said quietly. “Listen and try to understand. You think that you’ve learned the truth at last, but you’re wrong. The truth is much uglier than it seems. Francy Allen used that cabin for her rendezvous with Jim Rice, and my son knew it. He watched Rice leave that last night, and then went in and ordered her off the premises—much as he ordered you off this afternoon.”
“But with a skillet instead of a gun,” Danny muttered.
“No, not with a skillet or a gun! He simply told her to leave, and she flew into a rage. She hated him, Danny. She would have hated anyone who occupied what she still considered her rightful home. Perhaps, in that twisted mind of hers, she even thought me responsible for Cooper’s losing the ranch and wanted to strike at me through Douglas. Whatever her reasons, she defied Douglas to put her out. She told him she would use that cabin whenever she pleased. She said she would accuse him of attacking her if he interfered again!”
Laurent seemed to choke on his own words. For the first time the great voice faltered.
“Oh, she was clever!” he added. “She could see that Douglas was different. Not just a stranger, Danny, as you were when they threw you in that cell, but a poor unfortunate the wagging tongues of Cooperton could destroy with such a charge.”
“A nut,” Danny said, and the old man’s lips trembled in the moonlight.
“In your vocabulary, perhaps. Nevertheless, he’s innocent of Francy Allen’s murder. She was alive when he left the cabin. Why, Douglas doesn’t even know that the woman is dead! Setting fire to the cabin was just his way of disposing of something ugly and troublesome!”
And dangerous, Danny thought. But he didn’t want to challenge Laurent yet. The important thing was to keep him talking. And there was always a chance he was telling the truth. That was the trouble with life; every once in a while somebody told the truth and got a guy all confused. “I must have that statement,” Laurent said again, and Danny clutched the leather wallet all the tighter.
“And what happens to me if I give it to you?”
“Nothing. You can let me off at the ranch and take my car.”
“And run for the rest of my life?”
“You don’t have to run. Give yourself up and face the charge. I’ve been working to save you from the very beginning, Danny, and I’ve yet to lose a capital case.”
That did it. Up to a point Danny was just a pair of ears listening to a gifted persuader, but suddenly the voice lost its persuasion and the truth stood out ugly and naked. A capital case! That’s all Danny Ross meant to Alexander Laurent. It was a little hard to take after all these years of thinking he was a human being with feelings and rights. And if that’s all he was, what was old Doc Gaynor? What was a little man in a wrinkled raincoat?
Danny shivered. They were all alone in a moon bathed desert, with the night air rushing in through the open window behind Laurent’s shoulder, and a dark shadow beginning to take form up ahead. The shadow would be the trees at the edge of the ranch-house grounds—the only possible shelter, he suddenly realized, in all this wide loneliness. Trees, and an open window. He bit back his words until the time was right. Funny how these brainy guys who wanted to do everybody’s thinking always overlooked little details like open windows.
“So you’ve been working to save me!” Danny said at last. “Now I’ll tell one! You only sent Cooper to the jail to get a line on that wallet you didn’t find in the old doc’s pocket.”
“Don’t be a fool!” Laurent gasped.
“That’s just what I’m not being any more! You’re trying to make me believe Francy Allen put the finger on Douglas on her deathbed and it was all a lie!”
“She didn’t know it was a lie. She was struck from behind.”
“You seem to know a lot about what happened in that cabin.”
“Douglas told me.”
“You don’t say!”
Danny paused. The trees were looming large now. He couldn’t wait much longer.
“And did Douglas tell you what was in Francy’s statement?” he asked.
It was almost funny to see Laurent change. One minute he was the Great White Father, full of warmth and kindness, and the next he was just a desperate man with a forty-five in one hand and sudden death in his eyes.
“I’ll take that wallet now,” he said.
“Is that what you told the old doc?”
“Doctor Gaynor was a fool! He knew Douglas’s condition. He believed what that woman told him.”
“And what did Malone believe?”
“Malone?” Laurent seemed to have trouble recalling anyone so insignificant. “How could I be sure Malone hadn’t read the statement and would remember when his drunken stupor wore off? Good God, Danny, I didn’t want to kill those men! But that woman reached beyond the grave to destroy my son! I had no choice!”
No choice was exactly what Danny had at the moment. No choice, and the old man’s wallet held high so Laurent could get a good look at it. It could mean a bullet in the belly or a bullet in the back—no choice.
“Go ahead and shoot!” he bellowed, “but you’ll still need this!” The wallet sailed through the open window into darkness.
When Laurent hit the brakes, Danny hit the dirt. The first shot went wild, and then the old man had to go back and retrieve that precious wallet. Time enough then for Danny to reach the shelter of the trees, a shelter that was both friend and traitor. Every crackling branch, every broken twig cried out directions to a desperate old man beyond caution who fired at random and then stood motionless in the moonlit clearing, waiting for the next telltale sound.
For what seemed a very long time, no sound came. Crouched behind a stunted bush, Danny watched and barely dared to breathe. It was all picture-clear in the moonlight—Laurent poised like some silver-crowned executioner, and a few yards away the gray sedan with its long radio aerial pointing like a slender spear toward the stars. Danny remembered that dry riverbank and the car heading south toward Junction City, and then he remembered that car in the alley behind a run-down hotel. He knew all the answers now, except where he was going when Laurent came toward him.
But that was an answer he never had to find. He might have caught the sound sooner if the footsteps behind him hadn’t been in tempo with his own pounding heart. He might have cried out a warning if there had been time. But the time had all run out and the shadows and sounds had no names now. Laurent whirled and fired once more. One shot, one cry, and then the long silence-Danny didn’t emerge from his hiding-place until Virgil and all the others swarmed over the scene. A short distance away Alexander Laurent sat on the ground stroking his dead son’s hair. The gun was forgotten on the earth beside him; he had no use for it now. He had no use for the sheriff and his party, and no ears for Danny’s frantic story. He had been oblivious to every sound and movement since that cry of anguish when Douglas stumbled out of the shadows to fall at his feet, and not until Virgil found the wallet did he return to life.
“It’s all a lie!” he cried out. “I killed that Jezebel! Everything on that paper is a lie!”
Danny almost felt sorry for the old man when Virgil ripped open the wallet. Two and a half days in the flush tank hadn’t left enough ink on Francy’s statement to tell any tales on anyone.
CHAPTER 19
MURDER WAS AN UNTIDY BUSINESS. When Douglas, drawn by the sound of gunfire and his own nameless terror, ran into the blaze of his father’s gun, the world ended for Alexander Laurent; but the debris of murder sti
ll had to be cleared away. A regiment of questions had to be reviewed like troops marching single file, and for that purpose the lights burned late in the sheriff’s station at Cooperton.
“For a man who was always such a big talker,” Virgil said later, “it was like pulling back teeth to get the full story out of him.”
“Or having a dead man recite his own obituary,” Trace suggested.
“And what an obituary! I think the old guy’s as nutty as his son, at least on one subject. He quit his practice just so he could get Douglas away from people. He knew the boy was dangerous! He even followed him around like a damned nursemaid!”
“Even to Peace Canyon in the dark of night,” Trace murmured.
“That’s the trouble; he followed him there once too often and heard Francy’s threat. After that her life wasn’t worth a nickel!”
Virgil leaned back in the creaky swivel chair behind his desk and rubbed his face with both hands. It was getting on toward midday, and he was missing the sleep all that questioning had stolen. After the confession there had been the long morning ride to Red Rock and back, and then the phone calls to Junction City, and the statements to a press that had just discovered a black dot on the map named Cooperton. He was beginning to wish Charley Gaynor had given Laurent the statement and saved all this trouble—a strange thought for a man who lived so by the law that many wondered how he would know right from wrong if it wasn’t written down.
When Virgil looked up again, Trace was still standing beside the desk. “Exit Francy,” he said. “The rest I can imagine.”
“I’ll bet you can! Do you want to know how Laurent got to Malone? It was easy with the right kind of help. When Francy didn’t die soon enough he got worried; after all, Douglas was the only uninvited guest she saw that night. So he drove down to Mountain View to get to Charley before Charley got to me, killed him when he refused to destroy that statement, and then discovered that a pickpocket had beaten him to it. That’s when Laurent put on his thinking-cap. If he came asking after Danny Ross, I might get suspicious, but some people just naturally fall for fancy language.”
Detour to Death Page 17