Detour to Death (10 page)

D
ANNY RAN
. He heard the shot but didn’t look back; every second counted now. The road was behind him—he couldn’t take that way out—but once he’d reached the far side of the barn he was at least out of the line of fire. Beyond the barn the east wall of the canyon stretched like a crooked corrugated fence, jutting out here, cutting in there, and providing plenty of boulders and ravines to use as a hiding-place. But there was no hiding-place from the sun.

The canyon floor was as hot as the basement of hell, but Danny kept on running. Who that excitable man back at the cabin might be didn’t concern him at the moment. He had the gun, Danny’s erstwhile comforter, and in another man’s hand it wasn’t at all comforting. And what was the man to think walking in on a trespasser, a gun, and the ugly evidence in that bottom drawer? The chain of circumstance was getting heavier and heavier; Danny could actually feel the drag of it, and his steps began to falter until the run became a walk and the walk became a senseless stumbling.

When the dust came up and hit him in the face, Danny rested. He listened for pursuing footsteps, but the only sound was the heavy pounding of his own heart. From his knees he turned and looked back. No sign of the cabin now. Only silence and emptiness and that terrible white fire in the sky. A man with a gun in his hand could never be such an enemy as that sun.

“Mr. Cooper!” Danny yelled. “Mr. Cooper!”

Then he clapped a hand over his mouth. It was a crazy waste of precious strength to be yelling that way. Trace Cooper wasn’t in the canyon now, and when he did return, he’d find nothing but an empty cabin. Danny could never make it back even if he knew the way.

• • •

When Trace remembered the blue smudge on Francy’s dead fingers, he went immediately to Fisher’s Mortuary. It was a routine trip; he knew without asking that the smudge was an inkstain, and that was an interesting fact, considering whose hand it was on. Fisher concurred readily.

“It was ink,” he said. “Messy stuff to get off. I had the same trouble with Charley Gaynor.”

“Charley, too?” Trace echoed. “Was there ink on Charley’s fingers?”

“That’s right, the same as Francy. Say, you know that’s peculiar.”

Trace didn’t need Fisher to tell him that. The sight of Virgil’s borrowed transportation returning to Main Street told him the coast was clear for reporting to Laurent, but he had to pass the Pioneer Hotel on the way back and the bar was open by this time. Maybe Murph could shed some light on the mystery.

Funerals made Murph thirsty. He was opening himself another bottle of beer when Trace came in, and it was only natural to suppose he’d come with a similar desire. But this time it was no sale. Murph looked hurt. “What are you trying to do,” he muttered, “put me out of business?”

“I’m in a hurry,” Trace said. “I just want to ask a few questions.”

A very few questions. The whereabouts of Francy Allen on the night before her death; the company she kept, the things she said and did.

“Are you kidding?” Murph asked. “No, guess you ain’t. I guess you weren’t in much shape to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“You and Francy right here at this bar fighting like a couple of banty roosters. I usually don’t listen in, but you were trying to get her to come back to the farm, and she was telling you to mind your own business, or something like that. Finally she went into the dining-room and sat at the table with Jim Rice and some cattleman he was entertaining.”

Trace tried to remember. He knew he’d had trouble with Francy, nothing but trouble for a long time, but when he got to drinking heavy, things had a way of blacking out.

“What did I do?” he asked.

“After I called Arthur, you went home like a good boy. At least you went out of here. Christ, Trace, but you get mean when you’re loaded!”

“And what did Francy do?”

Murph finished off the beer in one long, satisfying attack, wiped off his moist mouth, and grinned. “I never kept tabs on Francy,” he said. “That would have taken a considerable chunk out of my life.”

“You didn’t see her writing anything? You didn’t notice her using a pen?”

“Using a pen?” The way Murph looked he must have figured Trace had been out in the sun too long. “Hell,” he muttered, reaching for another beer, “I didn’t even know Francy could write!”

In his crude way Murph had summed up the situation thoroughly. Francy probably hadn’t written a letter since Trace came back from overseas, and she didn’t have a bank account to draw on or a phone number to write down for a visiting cattleman. The odds were against her using a pen at all that night, yet sometime during the night she’d been slugged or hit by a truck and left dying on the highway—only to turn up at the mortuary the next day with inkstains on her fingers. Murph wouldn’t have known the answer to that puzzler if Trace had asked him, but some of the answers Arthur might bring back from Red Rock could prove interesting. Until then there was still a little matter of consulting with Alexander Laurent.

• • •

For the second time in five years Trace went home again. He might as well admit it; that’s what the ranch would always mean—home, with a memory in every mile of the road, in every bend and every dry wash. The same lean-faced ranch hands occupied the bunkhouse, the same dark-skinned servants padded quietly in and out the kitchen; and in the high-ceilinged living-room, with its thick walls exiling the sun, the oil portrait of an ancestor with Trace Cooper’s face stared down coldly from above the mantel. With the exception of a grand piano standing where the spinet of Grandmother Trace had stood, the room was just as it had been in its glory. But a stranger sat in the master’s chair.

At least the stranger was gracious. A hot ride in an open jeep called for an iced drink before conversation, and not until Ramón had filled the master’s request could there be any exchange of confidences. Trace had a pair of inkstains on his mind, but Laurent had the sheriff’s visit.

“Of course, I heard of the boy’s escape yesterday on the radio,” he said, “but I never dreamed the sheriff would connect that with me. What did you tell him about our conversation?”

“Not a thing,” Trace answered. “Cooperton has a lot of ears—all big.”

“I suppose so, but it’s regrettable—the boy’s escape, I mean. If he should be caught trying to cross the border—”

“He won’t be,” Trace promised.

“Then you know where he is?”

“I do. Danny and I had an unscheduled meeting last night in the room of a brand-new corpse named Steve Malone.”

Laurent’s glass didn’t quite reach his lips. He’d heard of Malone’s death, of course, from Virgil; but that slight frown creasing his high forehead betrayed a trace of surprise.

“Danny didn’t kill Malone,” Trace added.

“Are you quite sure of that?”

“Quite sure, and for two reasons. In the first place, that gun Danny took off the sheriff hasn’t been fired; I know because it was waving under my nose most of the time we were in that room. In the second place, why should Danny kill his alibi? A dead Malone can’t back up his story of what happened to the doctor’s missing wallet.”

“The wallet—” The way Laurent quietly froze in his chair was silent testimony to his accelerated interest. “Have you found the wallet?”

It was an anticlimax to be forced to answer in the negative. Trace explained about the bank roll on Malone’s bed and the trail of ready cash he’d followed to that hotel; but Malone without the wallet didn’t prove a thing. He might have picked up that extra windfall in a crap game or rolled someone even drunker than himself. He might have collected an old debt, or any number of other absurdities that any first-rate prosecutor intent on hanging Danny Ross would not hesitate to point out. Laurent listened politely, but his mind was already racing on to other things.

“It’s no matter,” he said, brushing aside the argument with a dismissing hand. “I’ve been thinking things over, and it seems to me now that the wallet is irrelevant. As a matter of fact so is the late Mr. Malone.”

“The police don’t share your view,” Trace remarked.

“Oh, a murder is a murder; I’m not forgetting Malone. It’s just that whatever he could have contributed to clearing up this affair died with him. Now we must look elsewhere. Now we must look for the roots. And the roots, Mr. Cooper, may go very deep. You were, I believe, a close friend of the good doctor’s last patient.”

It was Trace’s turn to freeze in position now. He’d been thinking of Francy all morning, but he’d never expected to have Alexander Laurent bring her into the conversation. And certainly not in so pointed a way! “For a recluse you seem amazingly well up on the local gossip,” he observed. “It’s not too difficult to see where you got it, with Charley Gaynor coming out here so often.”

“The servants—” Laurent began, but Trace would have none of that.

“No, not the servants,” he insisted. “I know these people, Mr. Laurent. They chatter among themselves as much as you and I, but they’re choosy about sharing a confidence. I just can’t see Ramón, for instance, coming to you with the latest scandal. If we must discuss my relationship with Francy Allen let’s at least start with the truth.”

Laurent smiled and nodded his approval. “Sound reasoning,” he said. “That comes in handy in a courtroom. Yes, it was Doctor Gaynor who told me about Miss Allen, but in all fairness I must admit to leading him on. It was some months ago—time means little to me any more—when we were playing chess of an evening. The doctor seemed quite unlike himself: distraught, troubled, unable to concentrate. Since conversation is the best antidote for worry, I drew him out. Little by little he told me the whole story.”

“He couldn’t have told you the whole story,” Trace snapped. “He never knew the whole story.”

“That’s quite possible. The whole story is rarely known by any one individual, but there’s no reason to doubt that he did know the principals of this one. One he had brought into the world, the other was his own granddaughter, and the third—”

“Was a human being!”

“Too much so! It was a rather sad story, as I recall, concerning a young woman who went bad and a promising young man who seemed to prefer her to his fiancée. Temporarily at least.”

“That’s a lie!” Trace exclaimed. “I took Francy into my home because she was in trouble and had no place to go. Even an animal is entitled to decent care at a time like that.”

“And prior to the trouble?”

Trace was going to get good and mad pretty soon, and not with Laurent but with himself. He’d come here to discuss Danny Ross and a mess called murder—not the private life of Francy Allen! And he didn’t have to go on with it, but he would. Something about that calm expectancy of Alexander Laurent made it perfectly plain that he would. No wonder the man was a master at cross-examination!

“You don’t understand about Francy,” he said. “Nobody does. She grew up on this ranch. She belonged here. She was a part of something solid and secure that was going to last forever, and she didn’t have to worry about a thing.”

Trace couldn’t sit there any longer with his grandfather’s face staring down at him. He got up and stood with his back to the cold mantel.

“But it didn’t last forever,” he said bitterly. “It fell into the hands of a crazy fool who couldn’t recognize ruin when it was all about him. He went overseas to find something easier to fight than himself, but Francy didn’t have any place to run. She stayed and went down with the wreckage.”

“And you blame yourself,” Laurent observed.

“Who else is to blame?”

It was good to have it said at last. Now Trace could forgive Laurent’s prying; what’s more, the man seemed to understand. Without knowing Francy, without remembering her through a score of years, Alexander Laurent accepted without question what Trace supposed no one could comprehend.

“Noblesse oblige,”
he murmured. “One does find it in unexpected places. Not that your attitude surprises me, Mr. Cooper. I’ve seen you with your other adopted burden—your partner, I believe you call him.”

“Arthur is my partner!”

“Of course he is, but where do you suppose he would be without your protection? Oh, I’m not scolding. Every man’s entitled to choose his own cross, but it does seem that you’ve gone rather far afield.”

“Maybe we’d better get back to the subject at hand,” Trace suggested, but Laurent smiled knowingly.

“We’ve never left it,” he said. “Since you indicate, and I believe you, that Doctor Gaynor erred in fixing the blame for the illegal operation he was called upon to mend, an interesting thought arises. Who was responsible?”

It wasn’t the first time Trace had faced that question. Francy was a stranger to him after he came home from the war: a wild, careless creature with her laughter too loud and her thirst too long. She seemed determined on self-destruction, and her affairs were her affairs—affairs without names. But Laurent was waiting for his answer.

“I don’t know,” Trace said. “Francy never told me and I never asked.”

“Noble,” Laurent conceded, “but hardly practical. Now if you had asked—”

“Don’t you suppose anyone did? Charley Gaynor, for instance. When she wouldn’t answer, he took it for granted that she was shielding me. Francy was loyal in her way.”

“A rather peculiar way! She must have known what her silence would cost you.”

“Why? Francy wasn’t the kind to walk out on a man because of some dirty gossip!”

Trace swung about and stared into the black mouth of the fireplace. He was saying too much; he was letting too much show, and this man’s eyes and ears were the collection agencies for a most discerning mind. “Nevertheless,” he was saying, “it would be extremely helpful to know that man. Suppose, for example, he made promises he couldn’t keep—or threats that he could. Surely you must realize by this time that our trail leads back to Miss Allen. There can be no other reason for the doctor’s death than what he must have known about this man.”

It was an oversimplification, but when Laurent spoke, it became the judgment of Jehovah. And Trace would be starting from scratch. Francy had stayed at the farm spasmodically. It was on again, off again, between jobs in town—usually at the Pioneer Hotel until the lady vigilantes had Virgil speak to the management. At the hotel she met everybody from the locals who patronized the bar to every visiting salesman, mining engineer, and cattle buyer. Trace raised his head. Maybe it was just an association of ideas, but suddenly he had a longing to have a talk with Jim Rice. Jim always had an eye for the ladies; he couldn’t have overlooked Francy.