“Where’s Rooney live now?” Barron asked.
“Where he always lived,” Andy said.
“Why, that’s just a piece up the Bascomb road.”
“I ain’t said different,” Andy growled.
“Let’s go there,” the sheriff said, getting in. I got in beside him.
Andy turned the car and went back half a mile and then started to turn. The sheriff snapped to him: “Hold it a minute.”
He got out and used his flash on the road surface. He got back into the car. “I think we got something. Them tracks down by the pier don’t mean a lot. But the same tracks up here might turn out to mean more. If they go on in to Bascomb, they’re goin’ to mean plenty. Them old gold camps over there is made to order for monkey business.”
The car went into the side road and climbed slowly into a gap. Big boulders crowded the road, and the hillside was studded with them. They glistened pure white in the moonlight. The car growled on for half a mile and then Andy stopped again.
“Okay, Hawkshaw, this is the cabin,” he said. Barron got out again and walked around with his flash. There was no light in the cabin. He came back to the car.
“They come by here,” he said. “Bringing Ted home. When they left they turned towards Bascomb. You figure Ted Rooney would be mixed up in something crooked, Andy?”
“Not unless they paid him for it,” Andy said.
I got out of the car and Barron and I went up towards the cabin. It was small, rough, covered with native pine. It had a wooden porch, a tin chimney guyed with wires, and a sagging privy behind the cabin at the edge of the trees. It was dark. We walked up on the porch and Barron hammered on the door. Nothing happened. He tried the knob. The door was locked. We went down off the porch and around the back, looking at the windows. They were all shut. Barron tried the back door, which was level with the ground. That was locked, too. He pounded. The echoes of the sound wandered off through the trees and echoed high up on the rise among the boulders.
“He’s gone with them,” Barron said. “I guess they wouldn’t dast leave him now. Prob’ly stopped here just to let him get his stuff—some of it. Yep.”
I said: “I don’t think so. All they wanted of Rooney was his boat. That boat picked up Fred Lacey’s body out at the end of Speaker Point early this evening. The body was probably weighted and dropped out in the lake. They waited for dark to do that. Rooney was in on it, and he got paid. Tonight they wanted the boat again. But they got to thinking they didn’t need Rooney along. And if they’re over in Bascomb Valley in some quiet little place, making or storing counterfeit money, they wouldn’t at all want Rooney to go over there with them.”
“You’re guessing again, son,” the sheriff said kindly. “Anyways, I don’t have no search warrant. But I can look over Rooney’s dollhouse a minute. Wait for me.”
He walked away towards the privy. I took six feet and hit the door of the cabin. It shivered and split diagonally across the upper panel. Behind me, the sheriff called out, “Hey,” weakly, as if he didn’t mean it.
I took another six feet and hit the door again. I went in with it and landed on my hands and knees on a piece of linoleum that smelled like a fish skillet. I got up to my feet and reached up and turned the key switch of a hanging bulb. Barron was right behind me, making clucking noises of disapproval.
There was a kitchen with a wood stove, some dirty wooden shelves with dishes on them. The stove gave out a faint warmth. Unwashed pots sat on top of it and smelled. I went across the kitchen and into the front room. I turned on another hanging bulb. There was a narrow bed to one side, made up roughly, with a slimy quilt on it. There was a wooden table, some wooden chairs, an old cabinet radio, hooks on the wall, an ashtray with four burned pipes in it, a pile of pulp magazines in the corner on the floor.
The ceiling was low to keep the heat in. In the corner there was a trap to get up to the attic. The trap was open and a stepladder stood under the opening. An old water-stained canvas suitcase lay open on a wooden box, and there were odds and ends of clothing in it.
Barron went over and looked at the suitcase. “Looks like Rooney was getting ready to move out or go for a trip. Then these boys come along and picked him up. He ain’t finished his packing, but he got his suit in. A man like Rooney don’t have but one suit and don’t wear that ‘less he goes down the hill.”
“He’s not here,” I said. “He ate dinner here, though. The stove is still warm.”
The sheriff cast a speculative eye at the stepladder. He went over and climbed up it and pushed the trap up with his head. He raised his torch and shone it around overhead. He let the trap close and came down the stepladder again.
“Likely he kept the suitcase up there,” he said. “I see there’s a old steamer trunk up there, too. You ready to leave?”
“I didn’t see a car around,” I said. “He must have had a car.”
“Yep. Had a old Plymouth. Douse the light.”
He walked back into the kitchen and looked around that and then we put both the lights out and went out of the house. I shut what was left of the back door. Barron was examining tire tracks in the soft decomposed granite, trailing them back over to a space under a big oak tree where a couple of large darkened areas showed where a car had stood many times and dripped oil.
He came back swinging his flash, then looked towards the privy and said: “You could go on back to Andy. I still gotta look over that dollhouse.”
I didn’t say anything. I watched him go along the path to the privy and unlatch the door, and open it. I saw his flash go inside and the light leaked out of a dozen cracks and from the ramshackle roof. I walked back along the side of the cabin and got into the car. The sheriff was gone a long time. He came back slowly, stopped beside the car and bit off another chew from his plug. He rolled it around in his mouth and then got to work on it.
“Rooney,” he said, “is in the privy. Shot twice in the head.” He got into the car. “Shot with a big gun, and shot very dead. Judgin’ from the circumstances I would say somebody was in a hell of a hurry.”
11
The road climbed steeply for a while following the meanderings of a dried mountain stream the bed of which was full of boulders. Then it leveled off about a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the level of the lake. We crossed a cattle stop of spaced narrow rails that clanked under the car wheels. The road began to go down. A wide undulating flat appeared with a few browsing cattle in it. A lightless farmhouse showed up against the moonlit sky. We reached a wider road that ran at right angles. Andy stopped the car and Barron got out with his big flashlight again and ran the spot slowly over the road surface.
“Turned left,” he said, straightening. “Thanks be there ain’t been another car past since them tracks were made.” He got back into the car.
“Left don’t go to no old mines,” Andy said. “Left goes to Worden’s place and then back down to the lake at the dam.”
Barron sat silent a moment and then got out of the car and used his flash again. He made a surprised sound over to the right of the T intersection. He came back again, snapping the light off.
“Goes right, too,” he said. “But goes left first. They doubled back, but they been somewhere off west of here before they done it. We go like they went.”
Andy said: “You sure they went left first and not last? Left would be a way out to the highway.”
“Yep. Right marks overlays left marks,” Barron said.
We turned left. The knolls that dotted the valley were covered with ironwood trees, some of them half dead. Ironwood grows to about eighteen or twenty feet high and then dies. When it dies the limbs strip themselves and get a gray-white color and shine in the moonlight.
We went about a mile and then a narrow road shot off towards the north, a mere track. Andy stopped. Barron got out again and used his flash. He jerked his thumb and Andy swung the car. The sheriff got in.
“Them boys ain’t too careful,” he said. “Nope. I’d say
they ain’t careful at all. But they never figured Andy could tell where that boat come from, just by listenin’ to it.”
The road went into a fold of the mountains and the growth got so close to it that the car barely passed without scratching. Then it doubled back at a sharp angle and rose again and went around a spur of hill and a small cabin showed up, pressed back against a slope with trees on all sides of it.
And suddenly, from the house or very close to it, came a long, shrieking yell which ended in a snapping bark. The bark was choked off suddenly.
Barron started to say: “Kill them—” but Andy had already cut the lights and pulled off the road. “Too late, I guess,” he said dryly. “Must’ve seen us, if anybody’s watchin’.”
Barron got out of the car. “That sounded mighty like a coyote, Andy.”
“Awful close to the house for a coyote, don’t you think, Andy?”
“Nope,” Andy said. “Light’s out, a coyote would come right up to the cabin lookin’ for buried garbage.”
“And then again it could be that little dog,” Barron said.
“Or a hen laying a square egg,” I said. “What are we waiting for? And how about giving me back my gun? And are we trying to catch up with anybody, or do we just like to get things all figured out as we go along?”
The sheriff took my gun off his left hip and handed it to me. “I ain’t in no hurry,” he said. “Because Luders ain’t in no hurry. He coulda been long gone, if he was. They was in a hurry to get Rooney, because Rooney knew something about them. But Rooney don’t know nothing about them now because he’s dead and his house locked up and his car driven away. If you hadn’t bust in his back door, he could be there in his privy a couple of weeks before anybody would get curious. Them tire tracks looks kind of obvious, but that’s only because we know where they started. They don’t have any reason to think we could find that out. So where would we start? No, I ain’t in any hurry.”
Andy stooped over and came up with a deer rifle. He opened the left-hand door and got out of the car.
“The little dog’s in there,” Barron said peacefully. “That means Mrs. Lacey is in there, too. And there would be somebody to watch her. Yep, I guess we better go up and look, Andy.”
“I hope you’re scared,” Andy said. “I am.”
We started through the trees. It was about two hundred yards to the cabin. The night was very still. Even at that distance I heard a window open. We walked about fifty feet apart. Andy stayed back long enough to lock the car. Then he started to make a wide circle, far out to the right.
Nothing moved in the cabin as we got close to it, no light showed. The coyote or Shiny, the dog, whichever it was, didn’t bark again.
We got very close to the house, not more than twenty yards. Barron and I were about the same distance apart. It was a small rough cabin, built like Rooney’s place, but larger. There was an open garage at the back, but it was empty. The cabin had a small porch of fieldstone.
Then there was the sound of a short, sharp struggle in the cabin and the beginning of a bark, suddenly choked off. Barron fell down flat on the ground. I did the same. Nothing happened.
Barron stood up slowly and began to move forward a step at a time and a pause between each step. I stayed out. Barron reached the cleared space in front of the house and started to go up the steps to the porch. He stood there, bulky, clearly outlined in the moonlight, the Colt hanging at his side. It looked like a swell way to commit suicide.
Nothing happened. Barron reached the top of the steps, moved over tight against the wall. There was a window to his left, the door to his right. He changed his gun in his hand and reached out to bang on the door with the butt, then swiftly reversed it again, and flattened to the wall.
The dog screamed inside the house. A hand holding a gun came out at the bottom of the opened window and turned.
It was a tough shot at the range. I had to make it. I shot. The bark of the automatic was drowned in the duller boom of a rifle. The hand drooped and the gun dropped to the porch. The hand came out a little farther and the fingers twitched, then began to scratch at the sill. Then they went back in through the window and the dog howled. Barron was at the door, jerking at it. And Andy and I were running hard for the cabin, from different angles.
Barron got the door open and light framed him suddenly as someone inside lit a lamp and turned it up.
I made the porch as Barron went in, Andy close behind me. We went into the living room of the cabin.
Mrs. Fred Lacey stood in the middle of the floor beside a table with a lamp on it, holding the little dog in her arms. A thickset, blondish man lay on his side under the window, breathing heavily, his hand groping around aimlessly for the gun that had fallen outside the window.
Mrs. Lacey opened her arms and let the dog down. It leaped and hit the sheriff in the stomach with its small, sharp nose and pushed inside his coat at his shirt. Then it dropped to the floor again and ran around in circles, silently, weaving its hind end with delight.
Mrs. Lacey stood frozen, her face as empty as death. The man on the floor groaned a little in the middle of his heavy breathing. His eyes opened and shut rapidly. His lips moved and bubbled pink froth.
“That sure is a nice little dog, Mrs. Lacey,” Barron said, tucking his shirt in. “But it don’t seem a right handy time to have him around—not for some people.”
He looked at the blond man on the floor. The blond man’s eyes opened and became fixed on nothing.
“I lied to you,” Mrs. Lacey said quickly. “I had to. My husband’s life depended on it. Luders has him. He has him somewhere over here. I don’t know where, but it isn’t far off, he said. He went to bring him back to me, but he left this man to guard me. I couldn’t do anything about it, sheriff. I’m—I’m sorry.”
“I knew you lied, Mrs. Lacey,” Barron said quietly. He looked down at his Colt and put it back on his hip. “I knew why. But your husband is dead, Mrs. Lacey. He was dead long ago. Mr. Evans here saw him. It’s hard to take, ma’am, but you better know it now.”
She didn’t move or seem to breathe. Then she went very slowly to chair and sat down and leaned her face in her hands. She sat there without motion, without sound. The little dog whined and crept under her chair.
The man on the floor started to raise the upper part of his body. He raised it very slowly, stiffly. His eyes were blank. Barron moved over to him and bent down.
“You hit bad, son?”
The man pressed his left hand against his chest. Blood oozed between his fingers. He lifted his right hand slowly, until the arm was rigid and pointing to the corner of the ceiling. His lips quivered, stiffened, spoke.
“Heil Hitler!” he said thickly.
He fell back and lay motionless. His throat rattled a little and then that, too, was still, and everything in the room was still, even the dog.
“This man must be one of them Nazis,” the sheriff said. “You hear what he said?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I turned and walked out of the house, down the steps and down through the trees again to the car. I sat on the running board and lit a cigarette, and sat there smoking and thinking hard.
After a little while they all came down through the trees. Barron was carrying the dog. Andy was carrying his rifle in his left hand. His leathery young face looked shocked.
Mrs. Lacey got into the car and Barron handed the dog in to her. He looked at me and said: “It’s against the law to smoke out here, son, more than fifty feet from a cabin.”
I dropped the cigarette and ground it hard into the powdery gray soil. I got into the car, in front beside Andy.
The car started again and we went back to what they probably called the main road over there. Nobody said anything for a long time, then Mrs. Lacey said in a low voice: “Luders mentioned a name that sounded like Sloat. He said it to the man you shot. They called him Kurt. They spoke German. I understand a little German, but they talked too fast. Sloat didn’t sound like Germ
an. Does it mean anything to you?”
“It’s the name of an old gold mine not far from here,” Barron said. “Sloat’s Mine. You know where it is, don’t you, Andy?”
“Yup. I guess I killed that feller, didn’t I?”
“I guess you did, Andy.”
“I never killed nobody before,” Andy said.
“Maybe I got him,” I said. “I fired at him.”
“Nope,” Andy said. “You wasn’t high enough to get him in the chest. I was.”
Barron said: “How many brought you to that cabin, Mrs. Lacey? I hate to be asking you questions at a time like this, ma’am, but I just got to.”
The dead voice said: “Two. Luders and the man you killed. He ran the boat.”
“Did they stop anywhere—on this side of the lake, ma’am?”
“Yes. They stopped at a small cabin near the lake. Luders was driving. The other man, Kurt, got out, and we drove on. After a while Luders stopped and Kurt came up with us in an old car. He drove the car into a gully behind some willows and then came on with us.”
“That’s all we need,” Barron said. “If we get Luders, the job’s all done. Except I can’t figure what it’s all about.”
I didn’t say anything. We drove on to where the T intersection was and the road went back to the lake. We kept on across this for about four miles.
“Better stop here, Andy. We’ll go the rest of the way on foot. You stay here.”
“Nope. I ain’t going to,” Andy said.
“You stay here,” Barron said in a voice suddenly harsh. “You got a lady to look after and you done your killin’ for tonight. All I ask is you keep that little dog quiet.”
The car stopped. Barron and I got out. The little dog whined and then was still. We went off the road and started across country through a grove of young pines and manzanita and ironwood. We walked silently, without speaking. The noise our shoes made couldn’t have been heard thirty feet away except by an Indian.
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 111