Bare Trap (12 page)

“And you figure on crashing the party. Haven’t you heard that three’s a crowd — especially in a motel?”

Liddell nodded. “I wasn’t figuring on Maxie staying around.”

“I’ve got a better idea. I’m coming along. Then you’ll have a fourth for bridge.”

Liddell shook his head. “No dice, baby. Maxie plays rough.”

“But you need me.”

“I’ll struggle along without you this time, Muggs.”

“That’s what you think, Buster. But around about the time you try to get into the motel alone, you’re going to wish you had me along.”

Liddell grinned. “I told you this was business, Muggs.”

“Sure. And what’s more conspicuous than a stag male checking into a passion pit at this time of night?” She shook her head. “You’ll never make it without me, Johnny.” She grinned maliciously. “I’ll bet this is the first case on record of a gal having to blackmail her guy into checking her into a motel.”

Ocean View Court turned out to be a mean little cluster of paint-peeled prefabricated huts huddled off the ocean highway south of Los Angeles. A noisy neon light chattered the fact that there was still a vacancy as Johnny Liddell guided his car off the highway toward the small shack marked
Office.
He glided the car to a stop, watched while the old man inside the shack walked to the window and peered out at them.

Muggsy cuddled closer to Liddell and brought his face around against hers. “No sense giving him any better look at us than necessary,” she alibied.

The door to the office creaked open, the old man limped painfully over. He carried a dog-eared old ledger with him.

“Evening, folks.” There was a faint Midwestern twang in his voice. He rested the ledger on the side of the car. “Got a nice double for you.” He held the key in his hand up to catch the faint light from the office. “Number Twelve. Can show it to you, if you like.” The tone of his voice implied that he’d prefer not to.

“Don’t go to any trouble, Pop. We’re not fussy,” Liddell told him. “What’ll it cost?”

“Five for the night — or any part of it,” the old man told him. He turned his head, spat. “You figuring on getting an early start in the morning?”

Liddell nodded. “Pretty early, Pop.” He brought out a roll of bills, handed over a five. “You needn’t put a call in. We’ll be gone before you get up.”

The old man grinned lewdly, stuck the ledger in the window, waited while Liddell scrawled an indecipherable signature. “Just follow the road on back. Number Twelve’s the sixth one on the right.” He folded the five, stuck it into his vest pocket. “When you leave, leave the light on so’s I’ll know case I get a chance to rerent it.” He turned, shuffled painfully back to his office.

“Nice high-class places you take me, Mr. Liddell,” Muggsy sniffed. “It’s a good thing my poor old dad doesn’t know the kind of a man you really are.”

Liddell eased the car into gear, bumped the hundred yards to where a small stake in the ground bore the numeral
12.
He swung the car off the road between two of the small cottages, cut the motor, doused his lights. He led the way to the cottage, opened the door with the key, fumbled until he found the switch. A pale, ineffectual yellow light spilled from a single bracket in the ceiling, revealing a huge, badly made double bed, a rickety wooden dresser with a speckled mirror hanging askew over it, the half-open door to the lavatory.

Muggsy walked over to the mirror, set it straight, looked around with wrinkled nose. “Pretty sordid.” She walked over to the bed, tested it, sat down. “Now what?”

“Duke’s cabin must be two farther down.” He took the tagged key from his pocket, rechecked the number on it. “After a decent interval of time, I’m going to turn the lights out and pay Number Sixteen a visit.”

“We’re going to pay Number Sixteen a visit,” Muggsy corrected him firmly. “If you think I’m going to sit in this bedbug menagerie alone, and in the dark yet, you’ve got rocks in your head.”

“Be reasonable, Muggs. If Maxie Seymour’s in there waiting for Duke there may be rough stuff.”

“I’m coming.”

Liddell groaned, shook his head. “I told you to stay at your place.”

“And I told you that if you tried to register into a riding-academy like this stag they’d call the white wagon for you.” She looked around the unpainted walls, the threadbare carpet, the dingy gray bedspread. “Somehow I can’t picture even the divine Terry looking good to anybody in these surroundings.”

Liddell walked over, sat on the edge of the bed beside her. He pulled the .45 from its holster and checked it. He returned it to its holster, walked over, turned out the lights. “Okay, Muggs, if you insist. But remember, stay in back of me, and if any shooting starts, get under cover as soon as you can. Don’t try following me.”

“Okay, Johnny.” She reached over, lifted his wrist, consulted the luminous dial of his watch. “How soon?”

“In a couple of minutes.” He found his cigarettes, put two between his lips, lit them, handed one to Muggsy. They smoked silently for a moment, the crimson tips of the cigarettes glowing like red dots in the darkness. Finally, Muggsy dropped hers to the floor, crushed it out with her foot.

“I read someplace that if you can’t see the smoke, you can’t enjoy it,” she whispered. “It’s a fact.” She consulted Liddell’s wrist again. “How much longer, Johnny?”

“Right now,” Liddell told her. He dropped his cigarette to the floor, ground it out, walked over to the door, opened it. Muggsy came up behind him. There were no lights in any of the other cabins. At the far end of the court the neon sputtered fitfully, spilled a red stain over the trees and the road. A yellow square of uncurtained window identified the office.

Johnny Liddell stepped out the doorway, circled around to the back of his cottage. The weeds grew knee high, effectively covering an accumulation of bottles and beer cans. He swore under his breath, almost fell to his knees. They stopped, melted into the shadow of the building, waited. There was no sign of life anywhere else in the court.

Slowly, carefully, he picked his way to the rear of what he figured to be Number 16. He listened outside the paper-thin wall, heard no sounds. There was no car in the driveway separating Cabin 16 from the one next to it. Liddell flattened himself against the wall, worked his way to the front.

The key with the tag fitted the door perfectly. He pushed it open, stepped in. Muggsy followed closely behind, kicked the door shut with her foot.

Liddell tugged the .45 from its holster, slipped it into his left hand, felt for the light switch. He pressed it and the shabby room sprang into blinding brilliance.

It was a duplicate of the cabin they had rented. The big
ugly bed, the rickety bureau, the half-opened lavatory door. The only light in the room came from the unshaded fixture in the ceiling that spilled the yellow, revealing light into all but the corners of the room.

Terry Devine lay across the bed, her face turned toward the wall. She wore one shoe; the other had been kicked into a corner. Her black hair tumbled over her face, her green angora sweater was thrown across the back of the room’s only chair.

A handkerchief had been forced between her teeth as a gag, the red angry welts across the whiteness of her back testified to the fact that her abductors had sought information from her. The gaping wound in her throat that had spilled a viscid, dark-brown pool on the floor was evidence that they had got it.

Johnny Liddell stood in the doorway, cursed bitterly under his breath. Muggsy Kiely gave a strangled gasp, tried to swallow a clenched fist. The color drained from her face, leaving her make-up a garish blot on the pallor. She turned away, leaned her forehead against the wall.

Liddell walked over to the bed, caught Terry’s wrist, felt for a pulse. He shook his head, dropped the arm, stared down at her. An odd shade of red in the pool on the floor caught his eye. It seemed brighter than the rest. Liddell bent over, studied it, brought out his pencil, fished it up, stuck it between the leaves of his notebook.

He stalked around the room, opened drawers of the bureau, looked under the bed, examined the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

“What are you looking for?” Muggsy’s voice was hoarse, spiced with a note of incipient hysteria. She made a determined effort to keep her eyes away from the bed, and its contents. “Why don’t we get out of here?”

Liddell grunted, nodded. “We’re going. I was looking for her bag. There’s no sign of it.” He walked back to the bed, stared down at the dead girl. “There’s no way of her knowing it, but we’ve already evened things up for her with one of them.”

“Duke?”

Liddell nodded. “He was one of them. He had the key to the cabin in his pocket.”

“You think there were others?”

“At least one.” He took out his handkerchief, wiped off the knob of the door, the light switch, doused it. Then, using the handkerchief on the knob, he opened the door a crack, satisfied himself that the occupants of Ocean View Court were still preoccupied with their own affairs. He wiped the outside of the knob, opened the door wide enough for Muggsy to slip through, followed her.

Back in their own cabin, Muggsy sank onto the bed. Under the relentless glare of the ceiling light, her face was chalky and had a greenish tinge. “She didn’t deserve that.” She shook her head. “Nobody deserves an ending like that, Johnny.”

Liddell paced the room, stuck a cigarette into his mouth. “We’ll pay off for her. We’ll pay them all off.”

“Who do you think the other one was? Maxie?”

Liddell stopped pacing, walked over to where she sat. He yanked his memo book from his pocket, opened it to the page where he’d stuck the bright-red thing from Terry’s cabin. “What’s that look like to you?”

Muggsy stared at it, wrinkled her brow. “A petal of a flower. A — A carnation?”

Liddell grinned bleakly. “Yeah, a carnation. Seen one lately?”

Muggsy stared up at him, nodded. “That fellow at Yale Stanley’s. The big shot. What was his name?”

“Stack.”

Muggsy nodded. “That’s the one I mean. You think it was him?”

“Positive. In the struggle with the girl some of his flower got ripped off. Not enough to make it stick in a court of law, but enough to make it stand up for me.”

“Why not Maxie? Maybe Stack was only standing by.”

Liddell shook his head. “It doesn’t stack up like Maxie. In the first place, Terry was his babe and had the Indian
sign on him. In the second place, Maxie wouldn’t go for the belt whipping and knife. He’s the more primitive type — he’d use his hands and get a big charge out of it.” He snapped closed the memo book, stuck it back into his pocket. “But an esthetic soul like Stack with his carnation — this kind of a kill would appeal to him.”

“What are you going to do, Johnny?”

“Pay off for Terry.”

Muggsy caught him by the sleeve. “Don’t be crazy. You won’t get away with it. You can’t constitute yourself a judge and jury and go around carrying out your own sentences.”

“I don’t intend to.”

“But you said — ”

“I said I was going to pay off for Terry. I am. I know Stack was in on the kill and I’m going to fix it so the police will know it, too.”

“How?”

Liddell caught her by the elbow and pulled her to her feet. “Never mind. I’m getting you home first. Then I intend to have a little visit with friend Stack.”

• • •

Yale Stanley’s Dude Ranch looked different when it was closed. Without the flattery of the hidden battery of floodlights, it was just a tired, old, gray-white frame building sprawling in the darkness. Tonight there were no cars in the parking-lot, the amiable giant in the maroon uniform who presided over the door was gone, there was no bright light spilling out of the windows to light the ground, no feverish pitch of conversation. Just a tired, old, gray-white building relaxing with its make-up off.

Liddell left his car under a big tree a hundred yards off the entrance to the Ranch. He cut across the shrubbery diagonally toward the building, roughly in the direction he estimated the parking-lot to be. After a few seconds he reached the tall California hedge that rimmed the lot. The heavy rain had stopped, but the sky was still cloudy, lowering. He stopped, squatted down in the shadow of the
hedge, took his bearings, tried to chart in his mind the most direct route to the room Stanley had used as an office.

Then, he started skirting the parking-lot, working his way closer to the house. There was no sound other than the rustle of leaves and the soft squish of his own footsteps in the soggy turf.

Suddenly, he stopped, melting into the deeper shadows of the hedge. He could hear the crunch of footsteps on the gravel in the parking-lot. Coming toward him he could make out a tiny red spot that glowed into a coal, then died away. Liddell strained his eyes against the curtain of darkness in an effort to make out the man behind the cigarette. From the height of the glowing end, Liddell estimated that he was something less than six feet.

The man with the cigarette stopped, the cigarette alternately glowing red, dying away. Cautiously, Liddell started toward him, taking extreme precautions against advertising his presence by a dislodged stone or snapped twig. He slid the .45 from its holster, tried to circle behind his man. After what seemed hours, he could make the man out — a light man in a Mackinaw, a battered felt hat perched on the back of his head. He was still smoking, his attention seemed fixed on the entrance.

Liddell wiggled through the hedge, came up noiselessly behind him, jabbed the snout of the .45 into his kidneys. The guard stiffened, the cigarette fell from his fingers. He made no attempt to move.

“How many of you around the place?” Liddell asked.

“Just me out here. I’m the watchman.”

“How about inside?”

The slight man shook his head. “I don’t know. They come and go by a private entrance on the far side. I’m only supposed to patrol the grounds.”

Liddell slid his arm around the man, patted him down, relieved him of an automatic from the Mackinaw pocket, tossed it back into the hedge.

“Stack around? Or any of Stanley’s boys?”

“Don’t ask me, mister. I’m just one of the help. What are
you, sheriff’s office?”