Murder Queen High (10 page)

Barselou and Odell exchanged glances. The big man put a mask of friendliness over his granite features. “My lifelong policy in a rough business has been to avoid bloodshed. Give me the information, Conover, and your troubles are over. As soon as I’ve verified the dope, you’re as free as birds.”

John Henry looked at his wife, tensely upright in her chair.

“I know you won’t go to the police,” Barselou went on smoothly, “because if you did I’d have to tell Lieutenant Lay that there’s a handprint in blood by the door of Cottage 15, which you occupied last night. Gayner saw it this morning. We think it’s Anglin’s blood. The police would be glad to test it for us.”

Sin’s eyes were big and hopeful and her dark-red tresses swayed back and forth across her shoulders slightly. “Okay,” said John Henry.

“Now you’re talking sense, Conover.”

“Let me talk to my wife alone for a minute or two and I’ll give you the route.”

“You’ll have to do your talking right here in this room,” Barselou demurred firmly. “You don’t get out of my sight.”

John Henry rose and Sin followed him over to the chuck-a-luck tables along the side of the room. Odell had his hand in his coat pocket again. Sin whispered, “Johnny, what are we going to do?”

“Can you remember that combination, honey?”

“I guess so. You want me tell them?”

John Henry shook his head fiercely. “Not on your life. Just do as I say.” He rasped the top sheet off a long tally pad on the next table. Then he went back to Barselou. “Pencil.” Conover said. The other man silently produced one.

John Henry took the equipment back to the corner where Sin was absently turning the wire dice cage. The tumbling cubes awoke minute rattling echoes in the still casino. “Okay,” he muttered. “Start talking. Softly.”

Sin closed her eyes, screwed up her piquant face and began whispering the combination to him. “R dash one. L dash three. R dash two …” John Henry wrote it down on his sheet of paper in small characters. “That all?” he asked when she paused.

“I think so, Johnny. I think that’s all there is.”

“Fine.” John Henry tore the column of numbers off the tally pad sheet. He began folding the tiny strip between his fingers, refolding until only a small pellet remained. His brown eyes were very bright. “Now listen, redhead. I want you to do everything I say. Don’t argue. Just remember I love you and do what I say. Got that?”

Sin acted dubious. “Well — ”

“Promise me.” John Henry squeezed her arm hard. “And remember I love you.”

She smiled but her face was troubled. “I promise.”

John Henry took her hand in his and marched her back to the two men under the stream of fluorescent light. Barselou hadn’t taken his pale eyes off them. John Henry held the white paper pellet firmly between thumb and forefinger. “Got it?” Barselou queried.

“Uh-huh.” John Henry held up the pellet. “This is it. I’m going to give it to you, Barselou — on one condition.”

“Conditions yet,” grunted Odell.

Barselou’s black brows contorted dangerously. He said softly, “Yes. A condition?”

“That my wife be allowed to leave the ranch immediately.”

“Oh, no, Johnny!” Sin cried.

“Shut up, Sin. How about it, Barselou?”

“Honey, I won’t leave you!”

“How about it, Barselou?”

Barselou moved his eyes meaningfully to Odell’s heavy coat pocket and said, “Why?”

John Henry popped the pellet in his mouth. Barselou didn’t stir. He said, “So you swallow it. We know your wife has the information memorized. What’s to keep me from letting Odell wring it out of her, Conover?”

Sin clung to her husband’s arm. John Henry spoke carefully around the paper behind his teeth. “Don’t make me discuss it at length, Barselou. My wife has a freak memory. Sure, she had the combination memorized. But once she repeats it, she can’t remember it any more. And she’s repeated it. Anglin’s dead, she doesn’t know the key any more, and I never knew it at all. Your move.”

“Nuts,” said Odell and dropped his hand in his pocket.

Barselou waved a hasty hand at him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That’d be my first reaction, too, Conover. But, luckily for you, we’ve checked pretty closely on you two. What you just said jibes with something Gayner found out by talking to that writer — that Loomis woman.”

“I still say nuts,” Odell maintained.

“They couldn’t have seen this coming up,” Barselou said angrily. To John Henry: “All right. Suppose Mrs. Conover does leave.”

“Fifteen minutes after she’s gone, I’ll give you the combination. And the longer we argue, the soggier this paper gets.”

Barselou nodded his big head quickly. “You’re free to go, Mrs. Conover.”

Sin hugged closer to John Henry’s arm. “I’m not going, honey!”

“Sin, you’ve got to. Don’t argue about it. Nothing’s going to happen to me with you loose. I’ll be all right.”

“I married you for better or for worse — ”

“You also promised to obey me.” Even under pressure, Sin managed a little smile over the family joke. “I’m ordering you to leave.”

Her head drooped. “All right, darling,” she whispered. “Please be careful.”

He kissed her cheek and mumbled in her ear, “Keys are in the car. Go to Brawley police station. If I’m not in front of it by six in the morning, go inside and spill the works.” Aloud he commanded, “Now, scoot!”

Sin sqeezed his hand and walked slowly to the door. He winked at her. “Goodbye, good luck and be careful, Johnny.”

There was silence in the room for a while after the door had closed behind her. Then there was the faint sound of a car being started. The engine roared in the distance. Gears clashed and tires whispered away on the gravel. The desert quiet returned again.

John Henry dropped his shoulders in relief and straddled a chair facing the other two men across the faro table. Their motionless eyes were glued to his throat muscles.

The three of them sat in the silence as the hands of John Henry’s wrist watch crept from 3-15 toward 3-30. He shifted the wet paper pellet, around to the side of his mouth. It was beginning to taste terrible.

Odell leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, a cigarette sagging from his lips. Barselou still sat directly opposite the door and his heavy finger pushed the playing cards around on the cloth in senseless patterns.

Conover broke the stillness. “How much will be left of the ship after two hundred years, anyway?”

Barselou folded his restless hands. “Probably not very much. But I’m not looking for relics. I want that treasure. And as soon as you hand over the route, I’ll head for Walking Skull.”

“What’s that — the starting point?” Barselou didn’t answer, so John Henry gulped a couple of times to make him nervous. Odell opened his puffy eyes and let the front legs of his chair come down to the floor.

“Fifteen minutes,” he announced sleepily.

John Henry reached into his mouth and extracted the small wad of paper from it. Barselou stood up and stretched out an eager hand, but John Henry backed away from him toward the door, keeping the big man between himself and Odell. He reached in back of him, found the handle, twisted it. “Okay,” he said. “Catch!” He tossed the pellet through the air at Barselou. As the hairy hands grabbed for the missile, Conover leaped into the protecting cover of the hall, slamming the door behind him.

Barselou forced the wet paper flat on the green felt before him. Then he smiled. Odell asked, “What about Junior?” and indicated the fleeing Conover with a shoulder. Barselou shook his head amusedly.

From the front part of the ranch house there was the sound of a muffled crash, as if someone had dropped an armful of books. A moment later, the door opened.

“That does it,” lisped Vernon.

Barselou jovially snapped his fingers at Odell. “Good work, Vernon. I think that takes care of the Jones situation. You better get back to the hotel now and tell Gayner he can stop worrying about everything.”

JOHN HENRY moaned and opened his eyes. Gray light, like a shower of pins, stabbed them and he shut them again. A slow fire was baking one side of his face; the other was ice-cold.

“Johnny, Johnny!” he could hear Sin’s voice near him. “Darling — please wake up — oh, please — ”

He was lying on his side with one cheek pressed against dank concrete. He tried to sit up but his arms wouldn’t come out from in back of him, and the exertion created bright pinwheels before him in the darkness.

“Oh, darling!” Sin breathed from somewhere in back of him. “Thank God! I was so scared — ”

His head began to clear. They were in some sort of dim vault under a low ceiling. Cardboard boxes of all sizes were stacked against the opposite wall. Down the center of the room a row of wooden pillars and, at eye-level above the cartons, were three small grimy windows. John Henry decided this must be the cellar under the Bar C Ranch. He sniffed the damp musty air and was sure of it.

“What happened?” he managed.

“How’s your head, honey?”

John Henry moved it gingerly to and fro. “God!” he complained. “What a headache!”

“Try to sit up. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

He discovered when he tried it that his arms were asleep. They were bound in back of him. His legs, too, felt numb and a moment’s careful focusing showed him his ankles had been tied together and then his legs doubled back. A rope connected his wrists with his ankles, this preventing any motion except wriggling.

He wriggled to a sitting position, groaning en route. There was something sticky on his lips. He touched it with his tongue and tasted the peculiar saltiness of dried blood. John Henry wormed around to look at his wife.

Sin had been similarly hobbled. Her red hair was mussed and her bright eyes had obviously held recent tears. She leaned one shoulder against the rough concrete wall, trying to take the pressure off her doubled-up legs.

John Henry groped for memory. “Sin — what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Brawley?”

“Your poor head, honey!” Sin exclaimed, ignoring the question, her eyes fixed on the lump which showed through the matted brown hair.

“Never mind me,” he commanded, endeavoring to work some feeling into his arms by flexing his muscles. “What time is it, anyway?”

“I think it’s been a couple hours at least since they brought you down here. Did they hurt you much, darling?”

“Just tell me what all happened.”

Sin obediently repeated the gibing explanations she had gotten from Vernon when he had added John Henry to the basement prison. Vernon claimed the Conovers hadn’t fooled him at all. When they had turned the Mercury toward Barselou’s ranch, it had just saved him the trouble of an open fight. The bellboy had followed them quietly and listened outside the casino door. When Sin came out, he had shoved a gun into her spine and a cloth over her mouth. A few minutes later, she had been left, trussed, in the cellar — where she had been ever since. Vernon had then driven Faye Jordan’s coupé around the drive and a short distance down the road to persuade John Henry that Sin had actually left.

The story didn’t help John Henry’s head at all. He sighed. The near future was as gloomy as the cellar. Barselou might be keeping them locked up to prevent further interference. Or he might have other, and far more unpleasant, plans for the Conovers. John Henry was not cheered by the thought that he had not only set his own feet purposely in the danger zone, but he had also dragged his wife along with him.

Sin’s thoughts strummed the same funereal note. The basement was too much like a tomb. “What do you think’s going to happen to us, Johnny?” she asked fearfully.

“I don’t know, Sin,” he admitted gloomily. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t thought I could do better than the police — ”

“It’s not either all your fault,” Sin said bravely, trying to control her trembling lower lip. “If I hadn’t followed Gayner to the restaurant — ”

“I should have left Faye Jordan alone. Then we wouldn’t have come back here to the ranch.”

Sin didn’t argue about this. John Henry wriggled around a bit and whistled a noiseless tune between his teeth. He thought about Faye Jordan. “I don’t think she knows anything about this ship business,” he said suddenly.

“I can’t see why you think that.”

“I’m sure of it, Sin, the more I think about it.”

“Well, then who was it that put something in your drink and searched you?” Sin demanded stubbornly.

“I thought it was Faye, all right. But why couldn’t it have been that bartender of Barselou’s? I thought it was Faye before I found out who owns this place.”

“Why’d they let you go then, honey?”

“I didn’t have anything. Barselou still wasn’t sure we were the right people,” said John Henry. “All that happened before you got caught with Barselou’s maps. That put a clincher on our guilt. It made Barselou sure.”

“But we didn’t know anything,” Sin protested.

“We had the route to the ship — that’s enough evidence for him. It just goes to prove that there’s somebody else mixed up in this race for the Queen, all right.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”

“Sure, Sin. I don’t know where Robottom fits in but he thinks we’re the Joneses. Barselou thinks we’re the Joneses. Anglin was looking for them when he stumbled into our cottage by mistake. Now who was he looking for?”

“Faye Jordan!” said his wife promptly.

“Look, baby — admitted that Faye isn’t bright. Admitted she’s wild. Admitted she’s a lot of things. Okay. She hasn’t done a single thing that makes us think she’s tangled up in this murder, has she?”

“I don’t like her. My feminine intuition tells me so.”

“Let me make a point,” said John Henry, after a pause. “There are two sides. Barselou on one and the Joneses on the other. Anglin was playing on both teams and didn’t score anywhere. Barselou didn’t kill him. So who did?”

Sin looked around at the shadows fearfully. “Honey, what does it matter, anyway? Can’t we talk about something else?”

“Who killed him?”

“You want me to say the Joneses.”

“Uh-huh. So the next big question is the Joneses. This is damned important, baby. Are they man and wife or a team of acrobats or what?” His charging sentences betrayed the struggle in his mind. “That’s what we have to figure out. Fast.”

“But, Johnny, what good is — ”

“Sin, look. This is the point. Barselou thinks we’re them. Our only chance in the world is to convince him that we’re not. So start thinking, honey.”

The fear she had been repressing broke from its hiding place with one dry sob. “Johnny — you make it sound more serious than — ”

“It’s liable to be, Sin. But don’t think about that part of it.” He tried to smile the worry off his own face. “Let’s put that memory of yours to work in a good cause.”

Sin nodded, bravely determined, and knit her heavy brows together. Only random scraps frolicked across her mind, visionary odds and ends. Faye Jordan in her white knit bathing suit. Bry-Ter Tooth Paste. Thelma Loomis with her notebook. The sickening moments in the elevator. Sagmon Robottom’s dripping wet body. Vernon’s mournful eyes. Arvaez pacing the deck of
La Reina
while the water disappeared under his treasure ship. Who was Jones?

John Henry was staring blankly at the opposite wall. As if summing up a series of thoughts, he said softly, “It darn near fits.”

“Did you think of something?”

John Henry pulled his eyes back to his wife’s wildly hopeful expression. “Look, Sin,” he said, “Jones can either be a man or a woman. Or both, I guess. Or several of either. Whoever it is has to be living at the Las Dumas, because Angling was supposed to meet him there. It has to be somebody that isn’t working for Barselou. Therefore, we can eliminate Vernon and — ”

He stopped. A scratching noise came from one of the high windows in the cellar wall across from them.

Sin gulped a couple of times and whispered, “What is it, honey?”

John Henry shushed her gently and kept watching the ground-level window on the other side of the basement. A shadow blocked the remnants of sunlight on the dirty glass. The scratching noise came again.

Sin’s face tightened and she gave a little moan of despair. She tried to wriggle closer to her husband for protection.

The window was being shoved firmly from the outside. It stuck for a moment, then screeched inward and upward. John Henry’s mouth dropped open and he bumped his head in surprise against the concrete behind him. Sin gave a horrified yelp.

Crouched on the window sill, peering in at them curiously, was an animal. Behind a malevolent head with pointed ears, the creature’s body filled the window. Its size made it impossible for the huge beast to be what it was.

A gigantic black cat.

“Stand still — ” Odell gritted between clenched teeth. The horse, intractable, shied away from him, flinging its head high and flashing the whites of its huge eyes.

Barselou laughed. “Give it to me,” he demanded, taking the saddle from his henchman. “You got to know how to talk to them.” He stroked the brown-and-white mare on the neck with one big hand and spoke soothingly in her ear. “There, there, Fern — nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Odell retreated across the stable and sat down on a bale of hay. From this safe point he lit a cigarette and watched Barselou skillfully slip the saddle over the mare’s back and cinch it tight. He envied his employer’s way with animals and wondered why he didn’t have it.

“Throw me those saddlebags,” Barselou called over his shoulder. Grunting, Odell pulled the empty saddlebags from their peg on the wall and plodded over to Barselou. The big man was leading another horse, roan-colored, from one of the stalls.

“You’re being smart about a gun, aren’t you?” Odell asked. Barselou smiled and pointed to the carbine scabbard lashed by the saddle horn. Then he squatted to cinch the saddlebags under the roan’s belly. Odell walked to the sliding doors of the stable and looked out. A hundred yards away the ranch house was still and peaceful under the late afternoon sun, which now neared the Santa Rosa peaks. “Took too long getting your gear together.”

“Oh, I’ll find her in the dark okay.” Barselou bridled the roan and led the two horses to the wide door of the stable. “I’m not riding blind with this.” He slapped the watch pocket of his whipcord breeches. “And I’ll be back some time after dawn — with souvenirs.”

“How about those souvenirs in the cellar?”

“Just keep them on ice till I get back. But don’t touch them, Odell — understand?”

“Don’t worry.”

“They better be in good health and able to talk when I get back. If they’ve given me the right dope, there’ll be time enough then to shuffle them off.”

“They’re not going anywhere,” Odell stated levelly. “But what if they’ve thrown us a curve?”

“We still got them, haven’t we? Second inning, maybe we can persuade them to shoot straight.”

“One thing,” Odell said. “Let me have the girl, huh?”

Barselou put his foot in the stirrup and swung up to the saddle. He bent over and grabbed the reins of the pack horse. Then he straightened and stared down inscrutably at the plump man. “Okay,” he said finally, “but women are going to be the death of you yet, Odell.”

“Can’t think of a better way to die.”

Barselou grinned. “Walking Skull, here I come.” He touched an unspurred boot heel to the mare and the horses began to move off in a slow trot. At the top of the rise south of the archery range, Barselou turned in the saddle and waved a hearty hand. Then he jogged out of sight. Odell took a final drag on the cigarette and pitched it out into the yard. He began to walk slowly back toward the ranch house. When he thought of the redheaded girl in the cellar, he started smiling.

The mammoth black cat poised on the sill and leaped lithely through the window to light on the concrete floor. Sin was drawn back against the wall as far as she could go, throat contracting in horror. John Henry blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to clear the monster from his vision.

Then the cat stood up on its hind legs. Without moving its jaws, it said, “For goodness sakes, what are you doing here?”

Sin commenced making incoherent little noises. The cat stepped closer and put a paw up to its nose. John Henry grasped confusedly at a realization that the black fur wasn’t fur at all but some kind of fuzzy cloth. The cat lifted its face off and the puzzled face of Faye Jordan took its place.

“Faye!” John Henry almost shouted. Sin gasped shudderingly and collapsed against the wall.

Faye Jordan said, “I didn’t know you were going to come back, Johnny. I would have stayed if I’d known.”

“Quick! Get a knife, Faye!”

“Where is that policeman and all the cute people?” She peered at the dark corners of the cellar.

“Don’t waste time with questions!” Anxiety split the the seams of John Henry’s voice. “Find a knife somewhere and cut us loose, will you?”

Faye said to Sin, “He wasn’t very nice to me this morning. Do you know what he did?” Sin shook her head mutely, green eyes fixed on the other girl’s face expectantly. “He put something in my drink!”

“Oh, no!” groaned John Henry.

“You did too! And when I woke up in a closet somebody had searched me.” Faye giggled delightedly.

Conover looked at his wife. His lips formed inaudible words: “She’s — still — drunk.”

Sin’s expression was baffled as she considered the girl in the light of John Henry’s mouthing. She murmured, “I don’t know.”

“I do!” exulted Faye. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, Johnny!”

“I am, believe me,” John Henry said sincerely. “But now, Faye, please forgive me and cut us loose, will you, before — ”

“How do you like my costume?” Faye asked, surveying herself contentedly. The big black ears flapped grotesquely. “It’s for the ball tonight, you know. Are you coming?”

John Henry remembered then how Vernon had come to the cottage with the invitation to a costume ball — “come as what you’d like to be most,” it had said. When had that been? Just last night?

“For crying out loud!” he shouted. “Turn us loose!”

Faye leaped back and Sin glanced angrily at her husband. She jammed a knee into his back and spoke soothingly to the girl. “How did you come to return to the ranch, Faye?”