Three seats ahead of him, Holly had stopped beside George M. Blakeslee and was saying tonelessly, “These are the Bonneville Salt Flats. Way out there they have auto speed trials on a fourteen and one-half mile straightaway. Sir Thomas Lipton holds the record for—”
“Lipton?” Blakeslee said. “He was the yacht man. Used to challenge for the America’s Cup with yachts he always named Shamrock. Never heard of him racing autos.”
Holly murmured vaguely, “I don’t know why I said that, Mr. Blakeslee. John Cobb set the record. Three hundred and ninety-four and two-tenths miles an hour. He did it in 1947.”
“Man must be crazy to drive that fast,” Blakeslee said. “That must be almost as fast as a bullet.”
Bill stared at the back of the man’s head and thought: no, Blakeslee, not nearly as fast as a bullet. With one type of load, a forty-five caliber bullet has a muzzle velocity of 1800 feet per second. That works out to 1200 miles an hour. According to this mornings edition of the Salt Lake Tribune, a guy named Ken Hayes found out the hard way last night how fast a .45 bullet moves. If anybody asked me nicely for the serial number of the gun used in the shooting, I think I could provide it. Unfortunately I couldn’t provide the gun. Somebody borrowed it last night and forgot to return it.
Holly was saying, “…and so when Great Salt Lake retreated it left these flats. I understand they’re twenty-seven percent salt.”
“Now wait a minute,” Blakeslee said. “They ought to be almost a hundred percent salt. Aren’t you thinking of the water in Great Salt Lake?”
“I suppose I am,” Holly said. “I don’t know where my mind is today.” She walked past Blakeslee and came back to Bill and said in a mechanical voice, “Can I do anything for you?”
Maybe he could snap her out of the trance. “Yes,” he said in a loud cheerful tone. “Please pass the salt.”
Up ahead in the bus, several people caught his remark and got a chuckle out of it. It didn’t take much to make people laugh: look at television. Holly turned
red and whispered angrily, “How can you make a joke of things?” She walked away with firm steps, as if trampling him underfoot, and began showing her usual brisk skill in running the tour.
That was fine. Now if somebody would kindly crack a whip over this character Bill Wayne and get him to show his usual brisk lack of skill, everything would be back to normal. He wished he had an idea what to do. He didn’t ask for a brilliant idea. Any old beat-up notion would be welcome. If things went on like this there would be more killings, and somewhere in the future a bullet was waiting for him. He was a valuable asset to the killer only while he blundered ahead on the road to Reno and San Francisco and Los Angeles, providing an alibi for more murder. If he tried to leave the road, however, his usefulness would be over and Cappy or Domenic—whichever it was—would want to get rid of him. At the end of the road his usefulness would also be over, and he would be knocked off quickly so that he could be publicly blamed for all the murders. The road west was like a conveyor belt dragging him toward murder.
Those were unpleasant thoughts. In case they were lonely in his head, he might add to them the thought of what might happen to Holly when No-Gun Wayne died with his two-toned shoes on.
Today’s run was taking them from Salt Lake City to a place in Nevada called Winnemucca, about 365 miles. They had started early, to avoid midday heat in the desert, and the day stretched endlessly in back of him and into the future. He tried to forget things by watching the country.
Ahead in the bus, Holly was announcing, “In case any of you wonder about these trails leading into the mountains, a great many of them go to old mines. Or maybe to new ones, too. There really is gold in those hills.”
Indeed there is, he thought. Half a million dollars’ worth, in one spot. His five pals had been heading for Bonneville Salt Flats when they ran out of gas and ditched in a lake. Probably quite a distance north and to the west, though. There wasn’t enough water around here for a duck to make a forced landing. He stared moodily out of the window and watched dust devils doing a ballet. They whirled over the hot dry ground like dust rising behind a phantom posse. Speaking of posses—
He looked back down the miles of blacktop road. Far behind was a truck-trailer flying a plume from the exhaust of its diesel. Nothing to worry about there. But back of the truck was a sedan, coming very fast. An optimist would laugh at the idea that the sedan was filled with Nevada State Police coming to arrest him. He wished he knew an optimist. He watched the sedan overtake them. It contained a man, a woman and two children.
He sighed and started to relax and then spotted another suspicious car. He didn’t want to watch it but it was very difficult to turn away and feel it creeping up behind him. And there was one advantage in watching for police cars: it passed the time. He made a game out of it, scoring a point against himself every time he worried about a harmless car. By the time they reached Winnemucca in the late afternoon he was behind by a score of thirty-one to nothing.
The town of Winnemucca was about six gas stations long by four taprooms wide. But the place had quite a hotel. It was sleek and modern and had a tiled patio decked with gay umbrellas around a swimming pool. He relaxed in his air-conditioned bedroom and studied the play of light on the swimming pool below his window and on the Tom Collins glass in his hand. Things were going to look brighter as soon as he got outside the Tom Collins and inside the swimming pool. He changed slowly into a bathing suit and went outside.
The first person he saw was Holly coming out of the water. She wore a two-piece white bathing suit and an air of assurance. That added up to more assurance than bathing suit. She had long slim legs and a flat stomach and hips that at one moment were all angles, like a coat hanger, and at the next were all curves. It was odd; he couldn’t decide whether she was a child or a woman. She walked over to a tall young man who had so many muscles that he must get tired carrying them around. The man had blue eyes and floppy yellow hair and—
Hold everything, Wayne. When he reached Winnemucca the score hadn’t been thirty-one to nothing. It had been thirty to one. This guy had whisked by them in a convertible, back about fifty miles on U.S. 40. What had fooled him was that the convertible’s top had been up and anyway police didn’t ride around in convertibles. That showed how wrong you could get. Because Deputy Sheriff Carson Smith did ride around in a convertible. He had ridden in one all the way from Cheyenne to Winnemucca, and probably not just to swim in the pool of the Sonoma Inn.
Smith and Holly sat at a table under one of the striped umbrellas, and began talking earnestly. Bill watched them for a moment. For all he knew, Smith was asking pointed questions about the activities of a guy named Wayne. He walked quietly up behind them and heard Smith saying, “Hope you don’t mind my saying so, ma’am, but you shore look purty.”
“Why, thank you,” Holly said in a fluttery voice.
“Yes ma’am,” Smith said. “Mighty purty.”
For some reason this irritated him more than if Smith had been trying a murder charge on him for size. “Try a little variety in that,” he said. “Make it purty as a picture.”
Smith swung around. “Oh, here’s that Wayne,” he growled. “Just keep on like that, and you and me will—”
“I was just lending you a few words. You seemed to be running the same ones over and over.”
Smith started to get up. “This here range,” he said, “is too small for you and me.”
The guy had muscles like a wild stallion. It was a shame to waste all that power on an ordinary guy named Wayne. “You’re not in Cheyenne any more,” Bill said. “Don’t get too tough with me.”
“What would you do to stop me?”
Bill smiled pleasantly. “I’d call a cop.”
“Will you please quit this?” Holly said. “You two are like a couple of first-graders pushing each other around at recess.”
“He’s bigger than I am,” Bill said. “I think he’s a ringer from the third grade. But if he’ll lay
off, I will.”
“I’m right sorry we annoyed you, ma’am,” Smith told Holly. “I’ll try to see it don’t happen no more.”
Bill said, “What are you doing here, anyway? I don’t think you’ll find many rustlers camped at this waterhole.”
“Oh, I’m just riding around,” Smith said.
Just riding around, eight hundred miles from Cheyenne. The guy was about as mysterious as a cop stomping around on his beat. Ten to one, it had something to do with the murder in Cheyenne. If he needled Smith carefully the guy might blurt out something worth hearing. “I thought you had a murder case to play with back in Cheyenne,” he said. “Did you solve that, or just get bored with it?”
“Well, it ain’t exactly solved.
“But pretty nearly, huh? All but finding out who did it and catching him? I get it. You came here so the murderer back in Cheyenne wouldn’t suspect you were chasing him.”
“What do you think I am, dumb?” Smith said angrily. “He don’t happen to be back in Cheyenne. He drilled another feller last night in Salt Lake City and I figger he’s moving west and—” He stopped suddenly, looking worried. “I hadn’t ought to say things like that,” he muttered.
Holly said, “Don’t feel badly. Bill was to blame. He shouldn’t have teased you into saying it. We’ll all forget the whole thing.”
“Mighty kind of you, ma’am,” Smith said. He glared at Bill and said, “I want to make sure that goes for you too, Wayne.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you just came here for a swim.”
“Come to think of it,” Smith said, “you could say I’m taking a few days off. Matter of fact I am. The sheriff don’t think much of the idea I’m working on so I told him this was on my own. If I could break this case I figger I could beat out the sheriff, come next election.”
“I wish I could vote for you,” Holly said softly.
“Mighty kind of you, ma’am. Well, like the feller said, I just come here for a swim. Care to join me, ma’am?”
“You go ahead,” Holly said, “I’ll join you in a moment.”
Smith nodded, and sauntered to the edge of the diving board. For a moment he posed there magnificently, as if a sculptor had asked him to be the model for a work to be titled “The Hero.” Probably an ordinary sculptor couldn’t do justice to him, though. It would take somebody like Gutzon Borglum, who had a spare mountainside. Bill watched without any pleasure. There was a rumor that cowboys couldn’t swim and he hoped it was true. Smith gave a spring and did a perfect jackknife and sliced neatly into the water. He popped up and began churning up and down the pool. It looked as though he had a small outboard motor attached to his feet.
“Beautiful to watch, isn’t it?” Holly asked.
“Any fish can do better,” Bill said. “Most of them can probably out-think him, too.”
“You aren’t doing very well at thinking. I simply cannot understand why you go out of your way to irritate him. It isn’t safe.”
“I don’t agree. The more he dislikes me as a person, the less chance he’ll think of me as a possible suspect. Would any normal suspect go out of his way to needle a cop? No. Besides, I like to needle him.”
“You’re being childish.”
“You told me once that you played up to the guy in Cheyenne to irritate me into giving you a little attention. You were certainly playing up to him just now, before you knew I was around. How does that add up?”
“It’s quite simple, Bill. I wanted to find out why he was here. If I play up to him, I bet I can find out anything I want.”
“The question in my mind is, what do you want to find out from him? That you’re mighty purty?”
“Yes,” she said coldly. “I’m beginning to think I do.” She left him and plunged into the pool.
He sat for a minute watching them act like seals at play. He was getting a little mixed up in his mind about the girl. Of course he didn’t want her tagging along after him. But for some reason he didn’t want her tagging along after Smith, no matter how good her motives might be. He got up and went back into the hotel. There was no use talcing a swim now. Compared to Carson Smith, he would look like a man struggling to reach a life preserver.
When he went to the dining room later on he saw them at a table for two in the corner. Holly was certainly putting on quite an act for Smith…if it still was an act. She wouldn’t be the first girl who put on an act for a big handsome guy and then found she wanted to keep playing it indefinitely He joined some of the other tourists at a larger table. He studied the menu and ordered some things he disliked and ate them.
Smith and Holly had a leisurely dinner and finally strolled into the bright little casino next to the dining room. He followed as far as the doorway and leaned against it, watching. Smith bought some chips and went to the roulette table and began playing. In half an hour he had hit the house for ten bucks or so, and Holly was cheering him on as if he had struck Mother Lode.
Finally Holly excused herself and came past where he was lounging and beckoned for him to follow. She paused in the hallway and said angrily, “The way you act, if there had been a crime around here, people would think you were returning to the scene of it.”
“I’m just an admiring audience, is all.”
“Not with that look on your face. Don’t you realize Carson will get suspicious of the way you watch him?”
“He isn’t very bright. Tell him I’m madly in love with you and that I’m jealous.”
Her face turned red. “I see your point,” she said. “Naturally only a very stupid person could believe a thing like that was possible. But Carson isn’t as stupid as you think. I’ve had a lot of trouble coaxing him to talk about the murder.”
“Sure. He wants to talk about you. Has he worked up to saying you’re cute as a button?”
“It just happens that I have learned a few things. Carson found a scrap of paper in that man’s garage in Cheyenne. It was in the murdered man’s handwriting and carried some figures. Up at the top it said: ‘Me— $9,870.’ Below that, in a column, it said: ‘Ken, $3,150. Frankie, $820. Cappy, $1,900. Domenic, $5,300.’ Then the figures were added up and a lot of angry-looking question marks put down at the end. What do you think of that?”
“Put down a lot of scared-looking question marks for me.”
“Can’t you guess what it means?”
“I can guess what it meant to Russ. Those must be the amounts each of the gang has chipped in, so far, toward buying up the lake where the plane sank. What worries me is what Smith figured it meant.”
“I told you he isn’t stupid. He decided those amounts were big enough to indicate a pretty interesting deal, and that maybe one of the men on the list might know something about the murder.”
Bill muttered, “Then I suppose he found an address book Russ kept, and identified all of them.”
“No. There wasn’t any address book. In fact, Carson said the desk in the garage looked as if it had been looted by the murderer.”
“That’s possible. I was unconscious for maybe twenty minutes. Cappy or Domenic might have taken the address book and letters they’d written and the map of that lake. By the way, the list knocks out that mystery man you were dreaming up. Only five names on it.”
“I suppose you’re right. Well, anyway, Carson asked around town, and at the place where Russ boarded. He picked up a fact here and there, and found that Russ had known a man named Ken in Salt Lake City and one named Frankie in Reno and a Domenic somebody in Los Angeles and a man named Cappy in San Francisco. No last names. No addresses. He decided to make a trip and see if he could locate the one in Salt Lake City or the one in Reno. The sheriff didn’t want any part of it and said he was crazy.”
“He’s my favorite sheriff.”
“So Carson drove to Salt Lake City. He arrived last night and went to a tourist court and when he got up this morning and looked at a newspaper what do you suppose?”
“Yeah. A guy named Ken killed in about the same way Russ h
ad been. How much has he told the cops in Salt Lake City and his boss in Cheyenne?”
“He didn’t tell them anything. He decided Ken was the first man on his list and that he’d better get to Reno fast and try to locate the second. He wants to solve the case himself and get all the credit. What do you think we ought to do?”
“I ought to give him Frankie’s address in Reno and save time. With his luck, he’ll probably yell ‘Hey, Frankie,’ on the main street of Reno and Frankie Banta will come up and say, ‘You calling me?’ “
“Oh, stop it!” she said. “You’re always getting discouraged.”
“What can I do? If I can get to Frankie before Smith does, maybe I can coax him to talk. Always assuming I’m right in thinking Frankie isn’t the killer. I don’t know any better plan.”
She said thoughtfully, “If you started tonight—”
“It’s a hundred and sixty miles. How do I get there, steal Smith’s convertible?”
“No, I guess you couldn’t. And besides in an hour or so he’d discover it was gone.”
“Oh, would he? Is he planning to take a little drive tonight? With somebody I know, maybe?”
“Well,” Holly said, getting pink again, “he’s been asking me and asking me and I’ve been trying to refuse but—”
“If you’re serious about not wanting to go, I’ll let the air out of his tires.”
“Your mind is always wandering off on detours! Just remember this is a serious business. I believe I will go for a drive with him tonight. And I’ll coax him to make a date to show me Reno tomorrow night. That ought to slow him down.”
He tilted an eyebrow at her. “Slow him down?”
She said furiously, “I’m talking about slowing down his murder investigation!”
“There used to be a famous old picture. It showed people in a sleigh throwing out a baby to slow down a pack of wolves. This is a modern version of it. Except that in this case, baby is jumping out all by herself.”
“I can take care of myself. I’ve been around.”
“You’ve been around the first grade. You’re playing with the big boys now.”
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