Detour to Death (7 page)

“I won’t say a word!”

“Oh, yes, you will. You’ll be just as friendly as you were being when I first spotted you, and I’ll be down on the floor with this gun trained on the back of your head just in case you forget.”

If he kept on talking that way Danny was going to feel as brave as he sounded. And everything worked out just as he said it would, even to the conversation.

“Ham on white, apple pie a la mode, and black coffee,” the girl announced, fastening the tray on the window ledge. “I’m sorry but we’re all out of chocolate.”

“Vanilla is fine,” the fat man answered. “Vanilla is just dandy!”

“Was there anything else?”

Danny waited, his finger on the trigger. The trouble with being on the floor was that he couldn’t see much—just the back of the fat man’s neck. He couldn’t see any facial expressions or hand signals, and he didn’t like that long silence following the car hop’s question. He started to raise his head and just at that instant the loud-speaker from the drive-in cut loose with a brassy beat from the jukebox inside. Brassy and loud and full of jump.

“Oh, God,” moaned the car hop, “there he goes again—that same piece over and over!”

“Something wrong?” the fat man asked weakly.

“Just some customer we’ve had hanging around for the last couple nights. Some bum all liquored up and crazy about that one record. I simply can’t stand it again! I’m going to shut off the loud-speaker—”

The girl’s voice died away, but the music went right on going to town. Now Danny knew what it was, low down and wide open and a long way from Basin Street. Some customer, she’d said! Some customer who didn’t like western music? Some customer in a canvas hat and a wrinkled raincoat? Danny was up from the floor in an instant, his anxious eyes staring holes through that windshield. Three or four patrons were scattered about the circular counter clearly visible through the wide plate-glass windows, and one of them had to be Steve Malone!

• • •

When Malone finally left the drive-in, probably by request, the fat man’s sedan was backed away in the shadows (the tray long since emptied and collected) anxiously awaiting further instructions. Danny didn’t mind the wait because it gave him time to figure things out. If he kept going, he might make it to the border and he might not, but one way or the other he’d still be a murderer as long as he lived. But inside that building was a man who had the right answers. Of course he wouldn’t talk voluntarily, but if a gun could make a dummy out of this boy in the front seat, why couldn’t the same gun make Malone conversational? Aside from clearing his own name, Danny had a little matter of a personal score to settle. It wasn’t nice to kill an old man, swipe his wallet, and then leave the next poor sucker who came along to take the rap!

By the time the glass doors swung open Danny’s mind was made up. The man in the raincoat was the same one he’d seen at Mountain View, no doubt about it, and wherever he was going Danny was going, too. The gun in his hand swung up and came down hard on the fat man’s head. For this trip he didn’t need a chauffeur.

D
ANNY WASN’T THE ONLY OUTSIDER
visiting Junction City that night. Had he walked a few blocks below the drive-in, down where the store fronts weren’t so modern and the street lamps were few and far between, he might have recognized the red jeep parked at the curbing and the big Negro in a white suit who was slumped over the steering wheel. Arthur was waiting for Trace, and Trace was out following a will-o'-the-wisp that eluded him from bar to bar. His question was always the same, and so was the answer.

“A little guy in a raincoat? A stranger? Does he hate western music, mister?”

Not knowing anything about Malone’s musical tastes, Trace couldn’t say. But he did keep following that lead, and it got hotter all the time.

“A little guy in a raincoat? Say, I had to throw out a fella like that last night. He got liquored up and tried to wreck my music box.”

“How was he fixed for money?” Trace wanted to know.

“Oh, he had money, plenty of money. But I couldn’t have him throwing bottles at the record machine!”

From bar to bar the lead grew hotter. It had to be Malone, Trace was certain of that, and then he got another idea. A drunk out on the town and loaded with cash would get around to women sooner or later, if they didn’t get to him first, and it wasn’t too difficult to follow that trail. It lead to a cheap hotel, an ancient frame structure in a run-down section of town, where he found a redeyed night clerk dozing behind the desk and an old-fashioned register open on the counter. Half a dozen words with the night clerk and Trace returned to Arthur in the jeep.

“Well, I’ve found him,” he announced. “At least I’ve found where he’s staying; he’s out right now.”

Arthur turned up the collar of his jacket and hunched down deeper behind the wheel. “I suppose that means we just sit here and wait.”

“I suppose it does.”

“Look here, Trace, why don’t you just telephone Laurent and tell him you’ve located his man? Maybe he has time for this stuff, but we have a place to look after.”

Arthur knew it was a waste of lung power. Something had gotten into Trace ever since his first talk with Laurent, something good or something bad, Arthur was no judge, but whatever it was had kept him sober for twenty-four hours. Considering the number of bars he’d visited in the last three or four of them, that was quite remarkable.

“I can’t do that,” Trace explained. “In the first place, putting a call through the Cooperton office would be the same as hiring a sound truck and parading up and down Main Street. We want to keep Malone to ourselves. Besides, Laurent wouldn’t come down here. He hasn’t left the ranch half a dozen times in the past five years!”

“Smart man,” Arthur muttered.

“You bet he’s a smart man, and he didn’t get that way running a tractor!”

Trace began to shuffle his feet on the sidewalk; he was restless, maybe from the smell of all those bars. But Arthur knew better than to say anything. He’d been tagging along after this boy too long not to have learned when to keep his mouth shut.

“I think I’ll have another look around,” Trace said. “I may run into him.”

“You may miss him.”

“Maybe, but you won’t. You can see the hotel from here. Just keep your eye peeled for a little guy in a raincoat and a canvas hat.”

Trace drifted off and was soon lost beyond the dull glow of the corner street lamp. None of Junction City’s streets had much in the way of illumination, but this one looked as if somebody had instituted a budget drive on the light bill. The only bright spot was the neon over a bowling-alley a couple of doors down, that and the yellow mouth of the hotel doorway. Arthur swung about sideways and planted his feet on the seat. That way he could watch the hotel and get a little rest. It had been a long, futile day, and his lids were getting awfully heavy—

He awakened with a start. There were footsteps coming out of the darkness, unsteady, stumbling footsteps coming up the wavy sidewalk. Arthur sat up and blinked his eyes. A man came into view, a little man in a wrinkled raincoat that was unbuttoned and flapping crazily in the night wind. He was taking about two steps crosswise for every one step ahead, but even at that erratic pace he made it to the hotel. Arthur began to look about for some sign of Trace, and that’s when he caught sight of the shadow trailing Malone: a furtive shadow, long and skinny and hugging the buildings as if fearful of being seen. But the light from the hotel window caught him in bold relief—a kid in jeans and a leather jacket!

One look and Arthur forgot all about Malone. “Hey,” he yelled, vaulting out of the jeep, “hey, you! Wait a minute!”

The shadow responded by taking off like a scared rabbit.

Danny had followed Malone all the way from the drive-in, a crazy, zigzag route that wasn’t easy on the nerves. Maybe Malone had all the time in the world to get where he was going, but Danny didn’t. Sooner or later that tap he’d given the fat man was going to wear off, and when that happened the alarm would be out all over town. Before that happened he wanted a chance to pin this boy down somewhere and have a little chat over a gun barrel; but first they had to stop at a liquor store for a bottle this drunk certainly didn’t need, and then go on to this dark, empty street— But suddenly it wasn’t empty any more.

At the sound of the voice Danny flattened against the side of the building and momentarily froze in his tracks. He couldn’t see who it was calling him—the street light between them got in his eyes—but a voice that big must belong to a cop. He spun about and started running, and the man behind him started running, too.

A head start and the incentive of fear gave Danny an edge in the race, and the unpaved alleyway that loomed up in the darkness didn’t hurt a bit. He cut the corner sharply, doubled back at the first crossing, and scrambled over the top of the highest fence he came to. A fence like that was sure to discourage pursuit from anyone less agile. Crouched in the shadows between a couple of trash cans he miraculously avoided, he waited for the footsteps. They didn’t come. He’d lost the pursuer, whoever he was, but he didn’t dare come out of hiding too soon. It could be a trap, or the man might have gone for re-enforcements.

After a few minutes, when the thumping of his heart had slowed down a bit, Danny began looking about him. It was a noisy place he’d come to: the back yard of a bowling-alley where from the sound of things they must have been holding a tournament. He could hear each ball as it sped down the alley, hear the pins drop, and almost tally the score. They must have bowled several frames while he crouched there waiting for footsteps and trying to get his bearings.

It wasn’t much of a neighborhood. Next door to the bowling-alley he could make out the square hulk of a two-story building with an iron fire escape threading down its back wall and a lot of windows, some dark, some light. One of the dark ones turned light as Danny watched, and a man came over and raised the sash. He was still wearing his raincoat and canvas hat.

So Danny had doubled back to the hotel again! That was a real break, and right about now he could use a few. With the cover of crashing pins behind him he didn’t have to worry too much about making noise while looking about for some access to the next yard. There must be a service entrance to the hotel and that meant a way to get up to Malone without risking the street again. He took another look at that bright window, fixing its location in his mind: second floor rear, third window from the end.

When Danny shinnied up that fence and back into the alley, the only sign of life was an amber-eyed tomcat sampling the fare of the garbage cans. He didn’t bother the cat, and the cat didn’t bother him—but something else did. A shadow where no shadow had been before, a gleam of reflected light where no light had shown. Danny edged forward and banged his knees against a low bumper, and then a gate creaked somewhere in the darkness, sending him back behind the tomcat’s garbage can. Much as he wanted to peek out, he dared not. That car parked behind the hotel probably carried a couple of cops that were a lot more anxious to see Danny Ross than he was to see them. He waited until there was a low purring sound that didn’t belong to anything feline, and then stepped out to find the shadow gone.

At least now he knew where to find the gate. The rest was easy. The gate stood open, and whoever had used that rear door to the hotel had been thoughtful enough to leave it unlocked. The narrow hall inside was conveniently dark and empty, and from the lighted lobby just ahead came the sound of heavy snoring. The front way was probably safe enough, but Danny didn’t need a room number now. He found the service stairs and went up quietly.

Second floor rear, third window from the end. Third window must mean third door as well, because this was no luxury spot with cross ventilation and a view of the mountains. It was dark and dismal, the kind of place where another bum groping down the hall would never be noticed even if he did have a lump in his throat and a gun in his hand. What Danny expected from Malone was nothing but trouble—no man puts his head in a noose willingly—but with all that liquor in him he might talk without knowing what he was doing. The whisky smell was overpowering even from the hall, and he really didn’t expect an answer to that stealthy knock. The door was unlocked, and Danny wasn’t bashful now.

The light was still burning in that shabby room, a naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling like one bright eye fixed and staring at a man flat on his back on the bed. He was still wearing the raincoat, its tails spread out like a fan, and the canvas hat was crumpled over his face. Beside him was an old-fashioned pocketbook turned inside out so its contents spilled over the mattress: a few coins, a couple of dirty cards, and a whole fistful of crumpled twenty-dollar bills. The bills were all Danny could see.

“Malone,” he choked, “get up. Goddamit, get up!”

But when he snatched the hat away, Malone just stared at the ceiling with empty eyes, and a little stream of blood trickled out of the hole in his forehead.

H
OW LONG
D
ANNY STOOD THERE
pointing that gun at a dead man was something he would never know—long enough for all his hopes to perish, long enough to lose all sense of reality. Malone was dead, and that didn’t figure. All this time he’d thought of the little man in the raincoat as the old doctor’s murderer, but as a murderer this body on the bed made no sense unless it was a case of remorse and suicide. Remorse was hardly the word for the happy drunk he’d followed to this hotel, and suicide by means of a bullet in the head was a bit difficult for a man without a weapon. Malone had no gun. He had an unopened fifth still clutched in one hand; he had the old Gladstone bag, opened and in a state of wild disarray on the floor; and he had the clutter from that emptied pocketbook on the mattress. Anything else he possessed was in the nature of knowledge, and a dead man has no memory.

The maple pins spilling over in the bowling-alley again brought Danny to his senses. They made a perfect cover for the sound of a shot, and the shot that silenced Malone hadn’t been fired so long ago. He tried to put into minutes the time that had passed since he crouched in the yard next door and watched a man in a raincoat raise the window. It didn’t matter. It never mattered how close a miss was, it was a miss just the same; but what did matter was the memory of that creaking gate and the car that was and then suddenly wasn’t in the alley. The police? That’s what Danny had taken for granted at the time, but would a cop sneak in and out the back way when all he had to do was march up to the desk and flash a badge?

Danny suddenly felt terribly conspicuous. He was standing in the middle of a brightly lighted room, a gun in his hand, and a brand-new corpse on the bed. The full significance of Malone’s sudden departure from the earth might take time to understand, but this was no place for meditation. Soon the police would come, very soon because now Danny remembered a terrible thing. The fat man at the drive-in had seen Malone, too, and by this time he must have given a vivid description to be relayed to every cop in town. It didn’t take second sight to predict what they would make of this body on the bed.

Even as the thought hit him he picked up the sound of footsteps in the hall. So soon? Was he to have no chance at all? The window was no good—it was nowhere near the fire escape—and the closet was the first place anyone would look. But now there was a knocking nobody would answer, and then the turning of the doorknob. His only chance was to stand behind the door when it opened and pray for a break-But it wasn’t the law that walked into Malone’s room. It was a redheaded man in a wrinkled suit.

• • •

Trace Cooper was the last person Danny expected to see—in this room or anywhere else. He’d figured Trace to be just a guy who’d gone along for the ride until it got boring, and then took off down a mountain trail without so much as a “go to hell” to the kid he was leaving alone with a sadistic sheriff. Cooper belonged over a hundred miles away, bending an elbow probably, but here he was walking into Malone’s room as casually as if he’d made an appointment.

He walked as far as the bed and froze in his tracks. Danny had let the crumpled hat fall to the floor after uncovering Malone’s face, and nothing hid the story now. Trace took it all in: the little man in the raincoat with the ventilated head, the empty pocketbook, the wad of currency on the bed. He even moved closer and straightened out each wrinkled bill—Danny counted seven of them—and then felt for some sign of pulse. That was silly; anybody could see Malone was beyond telling tales.

Suddenly Danny saw the light—tales, that was it! Malone had been around to the men’s room at Mountain View just about the time the old doctor must have been killed. He might have witnessed the murder and cut and run to save his own skin, or he might have seen someone leaving in enough of a hurry to make his knowledge dangerous. He had money, sure, but without serial numbers a twenty-dollar bill was just a twenty-dollar bill. It was all Danny could do to keep from blurting out his new-found wisdom; but now Trace was moving about, poking at that untidy suitcase on the floor, opening and closing the empty dresser drawers, and displaying the attitude of a man not so much taken by surprise as annoyed by some small thing he couldn’t put his finger on. But the dresser had a mirror, and the mirror had a reflection.

Trace’s back stiffened. “You crazy fool!” he said. “Put that damned gun away before somebody gets hurt!”

Danny had forgotten the thing in his hand. It did look conspicuous in view of that body on the bed.

“I didn’t shoot him!” he sputtered. “He was like that when I got here!”

“And when was that?”

“Just before you came in. Just a couple of minutes ago.”

Trace turned about slowly, and the question in his eyes didn’t make his meeting any cozier. “And how did you get here?” he asked. “How did you know where to find Malone?”

It was a loaded question, and Danny’s denial was quick. “I didn’t know. I saw him on the street and followed him.”

“Just now?”

“A little while ago. But when I started to turn into the hotel somebody hollered at me. I thought it was a cop and started running. I just now got back.”

Trace was listening. Whether or not he was buying this story was another question, but he was listening. “If you’re not going to shoot me, would you mind pointing that gun some other way?” he said. “It makes me nervous.”

“It makes me nervous, too,” Danny retorted.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re not going to turn me in. I’ve got troubles enough with one murder I didn’t do; I’m not going to be stuck with this one!”

“With this?” A crooked grin played about Trace’s mouth. He stepped over to the bed again and scrutinized the hole in Malone’s head. It was a small hole, neat and round and colored with blood and powder burns. “With that blunderbuss of Virgil’s you’d have blown his head off at such short range,” he said. “Now suppose we stop trying to scare each other and find out what happened here. This man hasn’t been dead long.”

Maybe it was just a line to put Danny off guard, or maybe he really didn’t suspect the obvious. Danny had a few questions of his own he wanted to ask—what Trace was doing here, for instance, and how he’d known where to find Steve Malone—but he wouldn’t ask them. Instead he’d go into that story about seeing Malone from the yard next door, and tell about the car in the alley and the creaking gate. He would have rehearsed his whole day if there’d been time, because that’s how it was with Trace Cooper. He gave you a grin and a couple of encouraging words, and you poured your heart out.

“How long ago was all this?” Trace wanted to know, and Danny was trying to figure that, too, when a siren wailed out of the distance and he started like a scared colt. Even Trace couldn’t blot out the facts of death.

“Expecting somebody?” Trace asked. A body on the bed didn’t seem to mean a thing.

“I’ve got to get out of here!” Danny said. “I almost forgot—I slugged a guy down at a drive-in.”

“You what?”

“I slugged him. I had this gun on him and was going to make him drive me over the border. Then I spotted Malone and decided to follow him instead.”

At least Trace didn’t need a diagram to get the idea. “Bright boy!” he cried, heading toward the door. “Keeping you from hanging yourself is going to be the toughest case Laurent ever took on.”

That was the first Danny heard of Alexander Laurent, and although the name added to his collection of questions in need of an answer, there was no time for conversation now. They were back in that dark hall with the door closed on Malone’s last drunk when the siren and the police car behind it made a simultaneous halt in front of the hotel. Trace peeked over the front stair railing and drew back quickly. “Where’s that back stair?” he whispered, but Danny was already leading the way. They could hear loud voices waking up the bewildered night clerk as they slipped out the back way, and there was no time for anything but breathing until they reached the black alley behind the hotel.

But the alley was a long way from a point of safety. “Maybe I can slip around and catch Arthur’s attention,” Trace suggested, but the gun Danny was still using for courage got in his way. When the chips were down, Danny trusted nobody, even if it meant hiding in alleys all night. Where Trace went he was going, sensible or not. It was an impasse, and they were stuck with it until a flatnosed vehicle slid into view at the end of the alley.

“Arthur!” Trace yelled, and took off at a sprint with Danny on his heels. It was the first time either of them had seen a delivering angel in a jeep, but on a night such as this anything was possible.

It was almost twelve hours to the minute from the time Danny had parted company with Virgil Keep that he was back on the road to Cooperton—and under protest since his own wish was to head for the border. “Haven’t you pulled enough boners for one day?” Trace objected. “Don’t you know that’s exactly where you’re expected?” Partly because of this logic, and mostly because Arthur seemed no more impressed by the gun than his companion, Danny acquiesced. Arthur wasn’t favorably impressed by any part of this operation, and that was natural enough. Whisking a fugitive away from the outstretched arms of the law was a dangerous pastime, and Arthur’s ancestors weren’t distinguished pioneers of anything but a marked lack of privilege. It was he who insisted on the bottom of the back seat for Danny, and on the heavy tarpaulin that transformed him into a shapeless lump on the floor boards.

That was how they left Junction City, with the sirens screaming up in the darkness behind them, and the network of police cars getting the radioed message that Danny Ross had struck again. And so the way was cleared for them, and the road back to Cooperton left as empty and open as Trace had expected.

• • •

Once they were rid of the city Danny crawled out of the tarpaulin and looked around. The moon was still up, and the sky had an epidemic of stars. The whole earth seemed as peaceful and quiet as if the troublesome part of creation had never been made, and strange unnatural acts like murder couldn’t happen. But murder had happened—twice in two days—and nobody concerned with this affair could fail to see a certain significance in Steve Malone’s death. But to Danny that significance was one thing; to another man, Arthur Jackson, for instance, it could be something quite different.

“You’re playing with dynamite,” Danny heard him tell Trace. “Why do you suppose Malone was killed?”

“An interesting question,” Trace murmured. “Maybe he saw something back at Mountain View.”

“That’s what I was thinking, and maybe what he saw was Danny Ross. Have you thought of that?”

Danny hadn’t thought of it, but the moment Arthur spoke the words he knew it was going to be a popular idea. “It’s a possibility,” Trace conceded. “Oh, hello. Are you back with that thing again?” He’d turned halfway around and was looking at Danny, sitting on the edge of the back seat now with that gun pointed straight ahead. “If we hit a bump, and I promise you we will, that gadget’s liable to go off and then who’ll get you out of this mess?”

“Is that what you’re supposed to be doing?” Danny asked.

“That’s what I am doing. Did you ever hear of a man named Alexander Laurent? No, of course you didn’t. Laurent hasn’t practiced for five years, and five years ago you probably weren’t reading newspapers except to follow the Tigers.”

“The Cubs,” Danny corrected, and Trace cocked a shaggy red eyebrow at him. It wasn’t a very smart remark from a kid who claimed to be from Detroit.

“Alexander Laurent,” Trace continued, “is one of the greatest criminal lawyers of all time. He never lost a capital case in over a hundred trials, and he could name his own fee anywhere in the country. But then five years ago Laurent retired and bought a ranch about ten miles from Mountain View.”

Trace fell silent for a moment. “What does that make me?” Danny demanded.

“About the luckiest guy in the world. You see, Danny, Alexander Laurent knows all about you, and he doesn’t think you killed Charley Gaynor. He’s on your side, with me working as middleman—that’s why you’re with us right now instead of in the Junction City jail.”

Now Danny recalled that crack of Trace’s when they made the quick exit from Malone’s hotel. Other things added up too: the way this jeep had followed him around all morning, and the way it disappeared about ten miles from Mountain View.

“Is that where you went this morning?” he asked, and Trace nodded.

“He’s a smart man, Danny,” he said. “He put me on to looking for Malone in Junction City. I just followed a trail of bars until I came to that hotel; but I sure didn’t expect to find you there.”

“Or Malone dead,” Arthur muttered. “But maybe Alexander the Great can dope that out over an iced mint julep.”

“Wait a minute,” Danny broke in, “what’s this all about, anyway? I haven’t any money for a lawyer. I haven’t anything but that two hundred the sheriff took off me yesterday.”

“Laurent doesn’t want your money,” Trace said.

“Then what does he want?”

“The truth. The answer to who did kill Doctor Gaynor.”

That lopsided moon sliding over toward one black wall of mountains brought Trace’s troubled frown out of the darkness. It was the same expression Danny had seen back in Malone’s room when he was adding up all those zeros. “I wonder what Raney pays a common laborer for two weeks’ work,” he murmured, and there wasn’t going to be any answer because Trace was talking to himself. But he wasn’t talking to himself when he asked, “Think back, Danny, did you see Malone talking to anybody back at Mountain View? Did he talk to the doctor, for instance?”

“How should I know,” Danny answered. “They both went out before I did.”

“And so did Jim Rice?”

“Sure, that’s what I told the sheriff. What are you driving at?”

“I haven’t any idea,” Trace confessed. “All I know is that Steve Malone had a hundred and forty dollars in twenty-dollar bills, and from the looks of things he must have spent plenty before we got there. But he didn’t have old Charley’s wallet. I’ve seen that wallet.”