The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (67 page)

Mark Stigler was with them when they came in. He glanced grimly at the assortment of guns. “What is this?” he asked Ragan. “I thought you were working on the Burns murder.”

“This is part of it,” Ragan said. “See what the girl has to say. I doubt if she wants to be an accessory.”

She was really frightened now, but Stigler ignored her. “You think this Val Lewis did it?”

“If he didn’t, he knows who did.”

All the way to the Upshaw Building, Mark Stigler chewed on his dead cigar while Ragan laid it out for him. He built up the blackmail background, reminded him how Ollie had been bothered by the Towne suicide, and how Ollie had worried the case like a dog over a bone. He told Stigler of his idea that Ollie had been murdered because he had stumbled into the blackmail ring.

He explained about the Bradford office and the letters dropped there and who dropped them. The one thing he did not mention was Angie. She was still his girl, and if she was being blackmailed, he’d cover for her if she wasn’t otherwise involved.

“You think there was money in those envelopes?”

“That’s right. I believe all those records in the filing cabinets, with the exception of a few obvious company names, are blackmail cases. From what I can remember—and I had only a few hasty glances—the income must run to thousands of dollars a month.

“They weren’t bleeding just big shots, but husbands and wives, clerks, stenographers, beauty operators, everybody. I think Bradford, whoever he is, is a smart operator, but he had somebody else with him, somebody who knew Ollie.”

“Somebody who could get close to him?”

“Yes, and somebody who believed Ollie was getting close to a solution. Also, it had to be somebody who could get into his house or his locker for that gun.”

Stigler rolled his cigar in his lips. “You’re telling a good story, but do you have any facts? It all sounds good, but what we need is evidence!”

At the Upshaw Building, Stigler loitered around the corner and let Ragan go after Val Lewis. Lewis was sitting at the open door, as usual. As Ragan turned toward the door of the Bradford office, Lewis got up and came around his desk. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“What business is it of yours?” Ragan asked. “I want into this office. Also”—he turned, with some expectation of what was coming—“I want you for assault and murder!”

Lewis was too confident and too hotheaded for his own good. He started a punch and it came fast, but Ragan rolled his head and let the punch go around it, and hooked a wicked right to the solar plexus that dropped Lewis’s mouth open in a desperate gasp for breath. The left hook that followed collapsed the bridge of Lewis’s nose as if it were made of paper.

He was big, bigger than Ragan, built like an all-American lineman, but the fight was knocked out of him. Stigler walked up. “You got a key to this place?”

“No, I ain’t. Bradford’s got it.”

“To hell with that!” Ragan’s heel drove hard against the door beside the lock. It held, a second and a third time, then he put his shoulder to it and pushed it open. While an officer took Lewis to a patrol car, Ragan went to the filing cabinet.

It was empty.

A second and third were empty, too. Mark Stigler looked from Ragan to the smashed door. “Boy, oh, boy! What now?”

Ragan felt sick. The files had been removed sometime after he left the place. By now they were hidden or destroyed, and there would be a lot of explaining to do about this door.

Stigler glared at him. “When you pull a boner, you sure pull a lulu!”

“Mark,” Ragan said, “get the lab busy on that floor. This is where Keene was murdered. Right there.”

“How do you know?”

Ragan swallowed. “Because I was in here last night after the murder.”

Stigler’s eyes were like gimlets. “
After
the murder? Were you the prowler?”

“No.” Ragan filled him in on the rest of it. His meeting with Keene, his return, the discovery of the body, and the mysterious watcher outside.

“Have you any idea who that was?” Stigler fixed him with a cold eye.

“I might have, but I’d rather not say right now.”

Oddly, Stigler did not follow that up. He walked around the office, looking into this and that. He was still puttering about when Ragan looked up to see Keene’s receptionist standing in the door. “Hi, honey,” she said cheerfully. “This is the first time I ever saw this door open.”

“Who are you working for now?”

She smiled. “Nobody. Came up to clear my desk and straighten up some work that’s left. I’ll be out of a job. Need a secretary?”

“Lady,” Ragan said, “I could always find a place for you!”

Stigler turned and looked at her from under his heavy brows. “What do you know about this Bradford?” he asked.

“Bradford?” She smiled. “I wondered if you’d ever ask.” She indicated Ragan. “Will it do him any good if I talk?”

“Plenty,” Stigler said with emphasis.

“All right.” She was suddenly all business. “I know that the man who has been calling himself Bradford for the past three months is not the Bradford who opened this office. He is a taller, broader man.

“Furthermore, I know he was in my office after closing time last night, and must have been there after Mr. Keene was murdered.”

Stigler took the cigar from his mouth. “How do you figure that?”

“Look.” She crossed to the wastebasket below the water cooler and picked out a paper cup. “The man who calls himself Bradford has strong fingers. When he finishes drinking, he squeezes the cup flat and pushes the bottom up with his thumb. It is a habit he has.”

She picked up the wastebasket and showed a half-dozen cups to Stigler. He glanced at them and walked next door to Keene’s office. She picked up the basket from the cooler and said, “See? One cup left intact, one crushed. On top of the cup that Mr. Keene threw away is this crushed one.”

She paused. “I don’t know anything about such things, but you might find fingerprints on those cups.”

Stigler chewed on his cigar. “We could use you,” he said, “in the department.”

Outside in the street, Stigler said little. He was mulling something over in his mind. Ragan knew the man and knew he was bothered by something. Finally, Stigler said, as much to himself as to Ragan, “Do you think those records were destroyed?”

“I doubt it. If what that girl says is true, he hasn’t been running this business that long. He would need the files to use for himself. I have a suspicion,” Ragan added, “that whoever he is, he muscled in.”

Stigler nodded. He took the cigar from his teeth. “Joe, I don’t know exactly where you’re going, but I won’t push this case against Mary Burns until I hear more from you. In the meantime, I think we’ll check the dead and missing for the last few months.”

Stigler got into his car and rolled away, and Ragan stared after him, then realized somebody was at his elbow. It was the receptionist with the figure. “Can I help? I’ve some free time now.”

“Not unless you can remember something more about Bradford and that setup. Did Keene know any more about them?”

“He was curious about a girl who came there, and he had me follow her once.”

“What sort of girl?”

“A slender girl with red hair. She wore a green suit and was quite attractive.”

For a moment Ragan just stood there. It made no sense, no sense at all.

His eyes turned to the blonde. “What’s your name, honey?”

“I was wondering if you even cared,” she said, smiling. There was no humor in her eyes, just something wistful, somehow very charming and very young. “I’m Marcia Mahan, and I meant what I said about helping.”

Ragan did not know what to do. There was little evidence against Mary. They had the testimony of Hazel Upton and Louella Chasen, but how would they stand up under severe cross-examination? Angie Faherty agreed she had gone to the rest room but had not been there at the time of the killing.

The gun was Ollie’s own, so with work they might build a stiff case against Mary. The worst of it was that if she was tried and acquitted, a few would always have their doubts.

He could not stop now. Ollie would have done it for him. Now he was beginning to see where the arrows pointed, and it made him feel sick and empty. One can control events only up to a point.

Other things were clicking into place now. His memory was a good one and had been trained by police work. He remembered something he had overlooked. In those files there had been one with the title
BYSTEN PACKING COMPANY
.

One of the big cases Al Brooks had broken was that of Clyde Bysten, a blackmail case.

Ragan threw his cigarette into the gutter. He was smoking too much since this case began. “All right, if you really want to help, you can.” He wrote an address on a slip of paper. “This is where Alice Towne worked. I want a list of the employees at that office during the time she worked there. Can you do that?”

Marcia nodded. “No problem.”

“And meet me at the Peacock Bar at four.”

Grabbing a cab, he headed for the bank. Within minutes he was closeted with a vice-president he knew and a few minutes later was receiving the information needed. When he left the bank, he felt he had been kicked in the stomach.

Yet his job was only beginning, and from then until four, he was going through files of newspapers, and using the telephone to save his legs, to say nothing of gasoline. He called business firms, and people he knew, and checked charge accounts and property lists. By four o’clock he had a formidable list of information, blackening information that left him feeling worse than he had ever felt in his life.

Outside the cocktail lounge he waited, thinking over what lay before him. He could see no end in sight. Once more he was going to enter an apartment without a search warrant, only this time he was hoping to find nothing. He was, in fact, planning to enter two apartments.

Marcia was waiting for him, a cup of coffee before her. She placed the list on the table and Ragan scanned it. His heart almost stopped when he saw the name, the one he was positive he would see, and feared to see.

“You look as if you lost your best friend,” Marcia said.

W
HEN
R
AGAN CAME INTO HOMICIDE
, Stigler was behind his desk. “I think I’ve got it.” He shoved a card at Ragan. “Sam Bayless. He did two terms for con games but was hooked into one blackmailing offense that could not be pinned on him. Smooth operator, fits the description we have of Bradford.”

“Dead?”

“Found shot to death in the desert near Palmdale. Shot four times in the chest with a .38. We have one of the slugs.”

“Good! Can you check it with that gun?”

“We will—somehow. Have you got anything more?”

“Too much.” Ragan hesitated, then nodded. “Before the night’s over I believe we can cinch this case.”

I
T WAS HIS DUTY
, his duty as a police officer and as a friend of Ollie Burns, a good friend and a decent officer, but he felt like a traitor. It was late when he went to the place near the park and stopped his car. He had rented a car for the evening, and with Marcia Mahan beside him they would seem to be any couple doing a little private spooning, to use an old-fashioned term that he liked.

“What do you want me to do when you go in?” she asked.

“Sit still. If they come back, push the horn button.”

The door of the apartment house opened and a man and a woman came out and got into a car. It was Al Brooks—hard, reckless, confident. He did not want to look at the girl, but he had to. It was Angie Faherty.

For an instant, her face was fully under the street light and Ragan saw her eyes come toward his car. She said something to Brooks. Ragan turned toward Marcia. “Come on, honey, let’s make it look good.”

She came into his arms as if she belonged there, and she did not have to make it look good. It
was
good. The first time their lips met, his hair seemed to curl all the way to the top of his head.

Brooks came across the street toward them, and turned his flashlight into the car. Ragan’s face was out of sight against her shoulder, and she pulled her head up long enough to say, “Beat it, bud! Can’t you see we’re busy?”

Brooks chuckled and walked away and they heard him make some laughing remark to Angie as they got into their car. Then they were driving away.

Marcia unwound herself. “Well! If this is the kind of work detectives do…”

“Come here,” Ragan replied cheerfully. “They might come back.”

“I think you’d better go inside and see what you don’t want to see. I’ll wait.”

Opening the door was no trick. Once inside he took a quick look around. It was all very familiar, too familiar, even to the picture of himself on the piano. That picture must have given Brooks many a laugh.

His search was fast, thorough, and successful. The files were lying in plain sight on a shelf in the closet. He was bundling them up when the horn honked.

They came fast, because when he turned around, he heard the key in the lock. Ragan grabbed the files. One bunch slipped and he reached to catch it and the door slammed open. Al Brooks, his face livid, was framed in the door.

Slowly, Ragan put the files down. “Well, Al, here it is. We’ve been waiting for this.”

“Sure.” There was concentrated hatred in his eyes. “And I’m going to like it!”

Brooks had his gun in his hand and Ragan knew he was going to kill.

Brooks fired as Ragan started for him, and something burned Ragan along the ribs. Ragan knocked Brooks back over a chair and went over it after him. They came up slugging. Brooks backed up and Ragan hooked a left to the mouth that smeared it to bloody shreds against his teeth. Brooks ducked to avoid the payoff punch and took it over the eye instead of on the chin. The blow cut to the bone and showered him with blood.

Shoving him away, Ragan swung again and Brooks jerked up a knee for his groin. Turning to avoid it, Ragan turned too far, and Al got behind him, running a forearm across his throat. Grabbing Al’s hand and elbow, Ragan dropped to one knee, throwing Brooks over his shoulder.

“What’s the matter, chum? Can’t you take it? Come on, tough boy! You wanted it, now you’re getting it!”