“If you start gasping for breath,” Holly said between clenched teeth, “I’ll be glad to give you a whiff of carbon monoxide.”
“Don’t mind him, ma’am,” Smith said. “Never yet knowed a coyote didn’t love to howl. You are lookin mighty pert, though.”
“Thank you, Carson,” she murmured. “You look glor—I could wring your neck, Bill Wayne!”
Bill said, “I have more conversation you can borrow, when you run through that. Now let’s see, Smith still has to use the line about pore little ugly him.”
“Let’s pretend Mr. Wayne just crawled back under a stone,” Holly said. “How are those skinned knuckles of yours today, Carson?”
“You done a fine job on them, ma’am. Look.”
Holly took his hand and cooed over the knuckles as if they had just been born. “But you look tired,” she said. “It must have worn you out last night handling that drunken Bill Wayne.”
“No ma’am. Didn’t hardly work up a sweat with him. Thing was, we had a little killin’ last night and I been up workin’ on it.”
“How exciting! Is it all taken care of now?”
“All but catching the feller done the killin’, ma’am.”
“Oh dear, I wish I had time to hear all about it. I—”
A voice out on the highway called, “Hey, Carse! Where you been?”
An old black coupe had stopped on the road. A man with a face as long and sad as a burro’s was leaning out. Smith called back, “Howdy, Sheriff.” Then he told Holly, “That there’s the sheriff. Wonder what he wants.”
Bill said, “Maybe he wants to clean up that little detail of catching the murderer.”
“Say now, maybe he does. You want me, Sheriff?”
The sheriff said wearily, “You comin’ to do some work? Won’t look good if I have to run in one of my own deppities for vagrancy.”
“Be right with yuh, Sheriff. Well now, ma’am—”
“I’ll never hear about your murder case,” Holly said sadly.
“We can fix that, ma’am,” Smith said. He walked to his car and brought out the morning newspaper and handed it to her. “Whole yarn’s in there,” he said.
“That is, except my name. Can’t figger how they overlooked that.”
“They probably mislaid it,” Bill said, “among the comic strips.”
“Now and then,” Smith said, “I figger I was a mite too gentle with you last night, Wayne. Mebbe we’ll be ridin the same trail again some day and I can take care of that. Well, ma’am—”
“Good luck, Carson,” she said warmly. “Maybe some day—”
“Shore hope so, ma’am, G’bye.” He climbed into the convertible and drove off behind the sheriff’s old black coupe.
“And as we ride away into the purple dusk,” Bill said, “we say goodbye to that knight of the plains, Deputy Sheriff Smith. But we will always remember him as he stood before us, quick on the trigger and slow in the head.”
“I wish,” Holly said, “somebody would serve you up barbecued.”
She turned away and began getting the party organized to leave. Bill got in the bus and took his usual seat at the back. He kept watching the girl in the hope that she would put down her newspaper and forget about it. She didn’t, though. It was still tightly clamped under her arm as the bus started. Holly counted to make sure everybody was aboard, then sat in front and opened the paper.
He got up there fast and slid in beside her. “I hope you’re not really angry,” he said. “It was just that I hated seeing a girl with brains and good looks wasting time on Smith.”
“I’m not interested in your motives. He was very charming and every time we were getting along nicely you broke it up.”
“You know what? I bet he learned how to make time with dames by watching double-feature westerns. That simple-minded cowboy act of his didn’t seem quite real.”
“I do not care to discuss the subject. I would like to read my newspaper.”
“Newspaper!” he said scornfully. “When there’s all this gorgeous scenery to watch? Look at those blue hills up ahead.”
“I’m looking. What about them?”
“Why, they’re beautiful. Like…like distant islands floating on the sea.”
“I never saw a dusty sea before.”
“Poetic license. And look at those rock shapes to the north. That one’s like a crouching panther, and that one is a giant’s red castle, and that mesa with the red and blue blotches is…is…”
“It reminds me a little,” she said, “of your face last night. When did you get so interested in scenery?”
“Well, you told me I ought to pay some attention to the scenery and so I gave it the old college try and what do you know, it got to me. It’s like discovering a new world and wanting to talk about it. You don’t mind my talking about it, do you?”
She folded the newspaper and put it down on the far side of the seat. She looked at him the way a cat might study a mouse hole and said, “It seems a bit sudden to me, but however. Well, between Cheyenne and Salt Lake City, which we’ll reach tonight, there are about four hundred and sixty-five miles of scenery. If you want me to see it through your newly opened eyes, go ahead.”
For the next two hours he gave her a travelogue talk. No pioneer ever had harder going through the cobbled foothills and buttes and mesas. The bus didn’t seem to get anywhere; it sat on the road and scrabbled with its tires like a beetle trying to climb up a tilted sheet of glass. A big mountain would park itself far to the north or south and sit there for ages making him spout poetry about it. Every time his ideas started failing, the girl stirred restlessly and reached for her newspaper. He was rewarded finally, though. The bus made a coffee stop in Laramie Valley and Holly joined the others at a lunch counter. The bus driver checked the engine and got his hands greasy, and Bill gave him the outside pages of Holly’s newspaper so he could wipe them off.
Seven
At nine o’clock on Tuesday night he bought a ticket and entered a movie theater in Salt Lake City and at a quarter after nine he slipped quietly out through a side exit. He had seen the film in Philadelphia and if anybody asked him he could describe it perfectly. That fact, and the ticket stub which he had saved, ought to give him a good alibi for the next two hours while he paid a call on his old friend and co-pilot, Ken Hayes. Not that he expected the police to come around asking questions. Worse than that. The questions would be asked by Holly Clark.
For the last forty-eight hours he had been trying to get away unobserved and drop in on Ken. If he had kept a diary it would go like this:
Sunday night: Reached Salt Lake City about eight-thirty after driving through canyons that looked as if nothing could move around safely in them except echoes. Unloaded at new tourist court downtown on Main Street. Looked up Ken Hayes in phone book and found he runs a tourist court on outskirts of town off U.S. 40. What a mess if we’d been booked to stay there! Decided to hike couple miles to his place and look situation over. Holly Clark invited herself to go along on walk. Walked long distance trying to exhaust her. Exhausted self.
Monday morning: Counting today we have two days here. Ought to be plenty of time for Ken. At breakfast read Salt Lake Tribune, found small story datelined Cheyenne saying sheriff expecting arrest momentarily in garage murder. Holly Clark rounded up everybody for visit to Beehive House, where Brigham Young lived, and Lion House, where some of his wives lived. Places full of history. Also full of Holly Clark. No chance to get away.
Monday afternoon: Tour of Temple Square. Big crowd made it easy to slip away. Made it easy for Holly to slip away too. Caught me in ten steps and I had to pretend great interest in Sea Gull Monument, which marks time when sea gulls rescued crops of pioneers from plague of locusts. Speaking of plagues, hello, Miss Clark. Decided in desperation maybe all she wants is to be fed, like locusts. Invited her to dinner on Starlight Roof of Hotel Utah. Starlight Roof said to be dressy place; Holly dashed off at five to start dressing for dinner at seven. Gave me ti
me to grab taxi, drive out past Ken’s tourist court. He’s in town, all right. Even caught glimpse of him painting cottages. Sign up: Closed for Redecoration. Very convenient; no one will be around to interrupt. Planning to drop in on Ken late tonight after feeding locusts at Hotel Utah.
Monday night: Holly looked excited as girl going to first prom. Good view of mountains from Starlight
Roof. Good view of Holly in off-shoulder gown. Didn’t realize they had dancing. Naturally Holly wanted to dance. Tried to wear her out, dancing. Wore out self.
Tuesday morning and afternoon: Tour of city in bus, and drive to Black Rock to swim in Great Salt Lake. Couldn’t very well dodge this, and anyway daytime not right for call on Ken. Holly very cute in bathing suit. Forgot my scars and went in swimming just wearing trunks. Holly very sympathetic and wanting to know how I got scars in back and chest. Told her a .45 bullet during war. She raised eyebrows and said she didn’t know Japs used .45s. Told her it was probably a captured .45. Holly also asked about newly healed scrape on left side. Is there anything she won’t ask about? Told her I got it in minor auto accident in spring. Could see her getting ready to ask exactly how a minor auto accident could have produced such a scrape. Dove under water to escape her. Got water, 27 percent salt, in eyes. It stung.
Tuesday night: Last night in Salt Lake City. Couldn’t afford to fool around. Attached self to others in party for stroll downtown. Holly joined party too. Mrs. Anders and Mrs. Cooper grabbed Holly to point out hats in window. Got chance to sneak into movie without being seen…
He came out of the alley beside the theater and
J
peered up and down the street. Nobody from the Treasure Trip party was in sight. Nobody else seemed to be showing a suspicious interest in him, either.
That was good, if he could bank on it. During the past forty-eight hours he had watched to see if anybody was tailing him. He hadn’t been able to spot anyone, even though a few times he had a feeling that a figure had just dodged out of sight. Maybe that was his imagination.
Maybe his imagination had also been kidding him in New York and Chicago. Maybe no one had crept after him to the garage in Cheyenne. It was hard to shrug off some of the unexplained things that had happened in Cheyenne, however, like the middle button that had been cut off his jacket. He wished he could call Frankie in Reno and Cappy in Frisco and Domenic in L.A., without leaving a trail that the cops might some day trace through telephone company records. He was very curious to know if they were all home.
He had to return to the tourist court to pick up his .45 before calling on Ken. Fortunately everybody in the Treasure Trip party was out sightseeing, so he could slip in and get the gun without being spotted. There was a back entrance to the tourist court, and he took it to avoid passing the lighted office at the front. A few of the cottages were lighted, too, but nobody was outside them. His own cottage was in a group of dark ones. He walked quickly toward it. A dim light seemed to be moving in his bedroom but of course that was just a reflection of outside lights on the window glass. It—
He stopped suddenly. The light kept on moving. His heart began punching him in the ribs and his skin started feeling a couple sizes too small for his body. Someone was in his place. He covered the ten steps to the cottage as if walking a tightrope. The flicker went on, soft, misty. It might be a flashlight beam sifting through a handkerchief. The door was open two inches. He eased it open a little more and slid into the room.
At that second the flashlight blacked out.
He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t hear anything but the pile-driving thud of his heart. But somebody was almost close enough to touch. It couldn’t be a cop. Cops wouldn’t have to sneak into his place to search for evidence. It had to be one of his pals. He began crouching. If a bullet came at him it would probably come at belt level. He had to get below that. He crouched lower and lower and heard a board squeak under his shifting weight and then the flashlight beam hit him like the strike of a rattler.
He drove in low and hard. A body slid off his shoulder and went down and he turned and pounced like a cat at the sounds it made hitting the floor. There was a throat somewhere in the blackness. He clamped a hand on it and reached out to grab the head and bash it on the floor. The head didn’t feel right. Its hair was soft, sleek, too long.
He eased the throat grip. “Who is it?” he gasped.
The throat quivered under his hand. It made a faint squeaking noise. He got up slowly, all his joints feeling old, and fumbled to the light switch and turned it on. For a few seconds the throat in his grip had been Domenic’s or Frankie’s or Ken’s or Cappy’s, and all his troubles had been solved. But the touch of sleek hair, the faint hurt squawk from the throat, had told a different story. His troubles weren’t solved. They were getting worse. Slumped on the floor, holding her throat in both hands, was Holly.
He knelt beside her and said anxiously, “Are you hurt? Shall I call a doctor?”
She tried to speak and then shook her head.
“What about this leg? The one that’s under you?”
She looked down and saw that her skirt was above her knees and quickly pulled it lower.
“Stop being so damn modest and find out if it’s broken!”
She straightened her leg carefully, managed to whisper, “I’m all right. That is…” Her glance flicked toward the foot of his bed, moved back to study his face. “I’m all right,” she said, but she didn’t sound very sure about it.
He looked at his bed. His suitcase lay on it, open. His clothes had been removed and piled neatly on the bed. Nothing was left in the suitcase but one object. The automatic. He went to the door and closed it and turned to stare at the girl. He didn’t really want to question her. He might not like the answers. But the answers would still be in her mind whether he asked questions or not, so he might as well find out how bad they sounded.
“Let’s not pretend you were looking to see if any of my socks needed mending,” he said. “What’s the deal?”
“Bill,” she said faintly, “you’re scaring me.”
“It’s time you got scared. You almost had your head cracked open a few minutes ago. Of course it must have had a few cracks in it anyway, to account for this stunt you pulled. Let’s see, now. We were downtown with some of the crowd, and as soon as my back was turned, you sneaked away to come here.”
“As soon as your back was turned? You mean, you sneaked away as soon as my back was turned. When I found you had vanished, I figured the only place you could have gone was into that theater. So I described you to the cashier and she said yes, a man like you had just bought a ticket and gone inside.”
“So you thought you had a couple hours in which to search my room.”
“All right, I admit it. But it turns out that you wanted a couple of hours to do something mysterious, with a movie as your alibi. You went into the theater and only stayed a few minutes and then sneaked out. Why did you come back here, Bill?”
“We’re getting a little turned around,” he said angrily. “Why did you come back here? What were you looking for?”
“That…that gun.”
“You already knew about it. You saw it in Cheyenne, the last time you busted into my room without an invitation. I told you I got in the habit of keeping it around during the war. Why did you want to look at it tonight?”
“I wanted to find out,” she said in a quavering voice, “if it was forty-five caliber.”
He’d expected answers that sounded bad, and he certainly wasn’t being disappointed. But maybe if he talked fast enough he could get out of this jam. “All right, so you found it was a thirty-eight. But I don’t know why the caliber interested you. I just happen to like a thirty-eight because it has a lighter recoil. It—”
“Bill, that’s not true. It says right on the barrel that it’s a forty-five.”
“If I happened to be a guy you should be scared of, that might be a stupid remark.”
“I know. And I’m going to sa
y something that might be even more stupid. Bill, did you kill that man?”
He sat down on the bed to give his legs a chance to stop shaking. He didn’t have much hope now of talking his way out of this, but he might as well give it a try. “What man?”
“The man in Cheyenne. Russ somebody.”
“I don’t know anybody in Cheyenne except that deputy sheriff of yours.”
“Bill, there’s no use covering up. I read that newspaper. The one telling about the man who was shot and killed by a bullet from a forty-five. Did you think I couldn’t see that you were trying to keep me from reading that story? You were awfully obvious, working so hard at entertaining me and finding ways to grab every paper I got my hand on. But you missed one of the papers on the bus. I hid it, and read the story after we arrived here.”
“So that’s why you’ve been keeping such a close watch on me lately. You ought to pay your imagination time and a half for overtime.”
“It’s not imagination! Remember in Cheyenne how you let slip the fact that during the war you flew the Hump? The story about the man who was killed said he flew the Hump too. You wanted the newspapers so that I wouldn’t read the story and put those two facts together.”
“Thousands of guys flew the Hump. One of them gets bumped off and it’s my fault, is it?”
“You have a forty-five caliber pistol. The paper said he was killed by a forty-five caliber bullet.”
“Thousands of guys have forty-fives.”
“How many of them lost a coat button last Saturday night in the dead man’s garage?”
This was worse than he had expected. He sat there, sweating, and remembered how Russ had squirmed under his own questioning that night in the garage. He began to understand how Russ must have felt.
“I told you,” he muttered, “that one of the buttons on my coat was loose and I cut it off and—”
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