The Mystery of the Headless Horse (6 page)

The Rocky Beach jail was on the top floor of Police Headquarters. It was reached by a special corridor and elevator on the first floor. The corridor, which opened to the left of the main entrance to the building, was blocked by a barred gate. A policeman sat at a desk in front of the bars. Bob and Pete stood at the desk nervously, and asked to visit Pico Alvaro.

“Sorry, boys,” the policeman at the desk said, “visiting hours are just after lunch — unless you’re his lawyers!”

The policeman grinned at them.

“Well,” Bob said, trying to look dignified, “he is our client.”

“We’re sort of something like his lawyers,” Pete added.

“All right, boys, I’m too busy to play — ”

“We’re private detectives, sir,” Bob said quickly. “Junior detectives, I mean, but Pico really is our client. We have to talk to him about the case. It’s really important. We — ”

The policeman scowled. “Okay, that’s it! Out, you two!”

Bob and Pete gulped and started to turn away. A voice spoke behind them:

“Show him your cards, boys.”

Chief Reynolds of the Rocky Beach Police stood behind Bob and Pete, smiling at them. Bob showed the policeman at the desk their two cards. The man read them slowly.

“What do you want here, boys?” Chief Reynolds asked.

They told him, and he nodded seriously.

“Well,” the chief said, “I think we might stretch a point in this case. Pico Alvaro isn’t exactly a dangerous criminal, Sergeant, and investigators do have a right to see their client.”

“Yes, sir,” the police sergeant at the desk said. “I didn’t know they were friends of yours.”

“Not friends, Sergeant, civilian helpers. You’d be surprised how many times the boys have really helped us.”

The chief smiled at Bob and Pete again, and walked away. The policeman at the desk pressed a buzzer. Behind the barred gate, another policeman came out of an office into the corridor and unlocked the gate from inside. The boys hurried through, jumping nervously as the gate clanged shut behind them.

“Wow,” Pete said, “I’m sure glad we’re just visitors!”

The boys went down the corridor to an elevator, rode up, and got out on the top floor. They emerged into a long, brightly lighted corridor lined with desks and open counters. The first counter to the left was where prisoners emptied their pockets and left all their personal possessions. The next counter was where they were fingerprinted, and at the third counter they were given jail clothes, which they changed into in a locker room at the far end of the corridor on the left. Across from the locker room was a barred door marked Visiting Room. Then, along the rest of the right-hand side of the corridor, were desks. Policemen sat at some of them interrogating prisoners about to be jailed.

“Over here, boys,” a policeman called from the first desk. “Andrews and Crenshaw? Private detectives?”

They nodded, swallowing. The officer typed their names and addresses on printed forms, then entered the name of the prisoner they were visiting and the nature of their business.

“Okay, stand over against that wall.”

Bob and Pete stood against the wall, and another officer searched them quickly and expertly for concealed weapons or anything else that might help a prisoner escape. Pete was glad that he wasn’t carrying his Swiss Army knife that day. Then the first policeman took the boys down to the barred visitors door, unlocked it, and sent them inside.

They saw a long, narrow room with a low, solid counter dividing the room lengthwise. On the counter was a double row of three-sided, desk-like cubicles. One set of cubicles opened towards the visitors’ door, and the second set opened towards the far wall, which contained a barred door that led into the jail itself. When seated at a cubicle, you looked over a chin-high barrier at the cubicle on the other side. A visitor and a prisoner could thus see and talk to each other in facing cubicles, but could not pass anything over the barrier between them without being spotted by the policeman who sat in the room.

Bob and Pete sat down in one of the cubicles. Soon the door on the prisoners’ side opened and a guard brought Pico in. Pico sat facing the boys across the chin-high barrier.

“It is good of you to visit,” he said quietly, “but there is nothing I need.”

“We know you didn’t make that campfire!” Pete exclaimed.

Pico smiled. “I, too, know that. Unfortunately, the sheriff does not.”

“But we think we can prove it,” Bob said.

“Prove it? How, boys?”

They told Pico all they had realized about the hat.

“So,” Bob explained, “at three p.m. you were still wearing the hat at the school in Rocky Beach. You couldn’t have left the hat near that campfire on the Norris ranch until after we all got to the hacienda. And by that time, the fire had already started — set by someone else!”

“Then,” Pico said, his eyes gleaming, “my hat must have got on to the Norris land after the fire started! Excellent, boys! You are very good detectives indeed. Yes, my hat must have found its way out there accidentally, or — ”

“Or,” Bob finished, “someone put it out there on purpose!”

“So that I would be falsely accused.” Pico nodded. “But you cannot prove that I was wearing my hat at the school. It is only your word.”

“Yes,” Bob agreed, “but we know the truth, and now we have to find out how the hat got out there near that camp fire.”

“So we have to know where you left it,” Pete said. “You were wearing it at the school, and I think I remember it at the salvage yard. Were you wearing it in the truck?”

“The truck?” Pico frowned. “We were all in the back, yes. I talked about our family. Perhaps… No, I can’t be sure. I don’t remember taking the hat off, or even wearing it!”

“You have to remember!” Pete said fiercely.

“Think!” Bob urged.

But Pico only looked at them helplessly.

Diego sighed wearily as he turned the microfilm reader to another page of the old newspaper he was skimming. He was in the Rocky Beach Public Library, where Jupe had sent him when they discovered that the Historical Society didn’t have a full collection of old newspapers. Diego had gone through two months’ worth of issues of the weekly newspaper published in Rocky Beach in 1846. He was now up to the fourth week in October. So far he had found very little. There was nothing about Don Sebastián at all except for a brief mention of his death. The account was clearly based on Sergeant Brewster’s report and said nothing new.

Diego sighed again, and stretched. The reading room was silent except for the steady sound of the falling rain outside. He turned to the small stack of books on the table beside him. They were all printed memoirs and diaries of local residents in the nineteenth century.

Diego opened the first memoir and began to look for entries from mid-September 1846.

Jupiter closed the fifth journal he had read and listened to the rain outside the Historical Society. The old handwritten journals of the Spanish settlers were fascinating, and he had to keep reminding himself to read only entries for the dates near the escape of Don Sebastián. But so far even the entries for those violent days of September, 1846, had given him no clues.

Dispirited, he opened the sixth journal without much hope. At least he wouldn’t have to work so hard to read this one. The sixth journal was in English, one kept by a second lieutenant of cavalry in Frémont’s small force of American invaders.

Jupiter located the pages for mid-September and began to read fast.

Some ten minutes later he suddenly leaned forward, his eyes bright and excited, and carefully re-read a page in the journal of the long-forgotten second lieutenant.

Then he jumped up, made a copy of the page, returned the old journals to the historian, and hurried out into the rain.

Pico shook his head again in the visitor’s room of the Rocky Beach jail.

“I cannot remember, boys. I’m sorry.”

“All right,” Bob said calmly. “Let’s go over it step by step. Now, you were wearing the hat at the school. Jupiter remembers that clearly, and I think I do. Now — ”

“I’ll bet Skinny and even that Cody remember Pico wearing the hat at the school, if they’d admit it,” Pete said bitterly.

“But they won’t,” Bob said. “Pete’s pretty sure you were still wearing the hat at the salvage yard. In the truck you told us about the Alvaro land grant. I remember you pointed to things, so you weren’t holding the hat in your hand. It was windy and chilly in the truck, so you were probably wearing the hat to keep your head warm.”

“Then we got to the hacienda,” Pete went on. “We all got out of the truck, and you talked to Uncle Titus about the statue of Cortés. Then what, Pico? Did you go into the hacienda and maybe take off your hat?”

“Well, I… ” Pico thought hard. “No, I did not go into the house. I… we all… Wait! Yes, I think I remember!”

“What?” Pete cried.

“Go on,” Bob urged.

Pico’s eyes gleamed. “We all went straight into the barn to look at the things I was to sell to Mr. Jones. It was dim in the barn and my hat brim shaded my eyes. So I took off the hat to see better, and… ” The tall Alvaro brother looked at the boys. “And I hung it on a peg just inside the barn door! Yes, I am sure. I hung it in the barn, and then when Huerta and Guerra called ’Fire!’ I ran out with all of you and left the hat in the barn!”

“Then that’s where it should have been, not at the campfire on the Norris ranch,” Bob said.

“So someone swiped it from the barn before the barn caught fire,” Pete said, “and put it out at the campfire to frame Pico!”

“But,” Pico said slowly, “we still do not have proof.”

“Maybe we can find some evidence at the barn, if everything wasn’t all burned!” Bob said. “Let’s go and tell Jupe, Pete.”

The boys said goodbye to Pico, and hurried out as the guard took Pico back to his cell in the jail.

Out in the rain, they rode straight to the Historical Society and ran inside. Jupiter wasn’t there!

“Where’d he go, Records?” Pete wondered.

“I don’t know,” Bob said, biting his lip. “But we’ve got a couple of hours before dark, Second. There’s time to go look for some evidence in the Alvaro barn that someone stole Pico’s hat.”

“Let’s go then,” Pete decided. “Maybe Jupe went out there with Diego anyway.”

They ran back to their bikes, and peddled swiftly through the steady rain out towards the burned Alvaro hacienda.

The rain stopped as Bob and Pete rode into the hacienda yard. The blackened ruins were silent and deserted, looking like the jagged skeletons of buildings on some battlefield. On the ridge behind the hacienda, the statue of the headless horse loomed eerie and menacing against the low, scudding clouds. Jupiter and Diego weren’t anywhere around.

“Maybe we should wait, Records,” Pete suggested.

“Well,” Bob said, “we’re here now. I guess we could look around and see if we can find any clues.”

Pete stared at the broken walls and fallen beams of the old barn. “Gosh, it’s some mess. Where do we start?”

“I think,” Bob replied slowly, “Jupe would say first things first. We should look outside the barn for anything that might have been dropped, or maybe for some footprints.”

Pete nodded, and they spread out on either side of the corral in front of the barn. Bent low, and peering at every inch of the soggy ground, they worked their way slowly across the corral towards the entrance to the barn. The days of rain had turned the whole yard into a slick and sticky clay mud. It covered their shoes and made uneasy sucking sounds as they moved.

They met in front of what had once been the barn door. All that remained of it was a charred door frame, twisted and leaning crazily.

“Not even a twig on the ground,” Pete groaned. “The mud’s so deep it’d probably cover anything smaller than a boulder anyway.”

“And I don’t think there would have been any footprints even before the rain. Adobe soil is hard as a rock when it’s dry,” Bob said. “Let’s try inside.”

Inside, the burned barn was a terrible mess of fallen roof timbers, collapsed walls, the remnants of rooms and stalls, and the blackened jumble of the hundreds of valuable items the Alvaros had been going to sell to Uncle Titus. Two of the outer walls had fallen in completely, and the other two were only skeletons. The windows in the standing walls looked like gaping wounds. After days of rain, the stench of the burned debris was terrible. Almost nothing in the barn was recognizable. The boys stood and looked at the confusion.

“How do we find anything in here?” Pete moaned. “I mean, we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“We’re looking for anything that could give us a clue to who was here and took Pico’s hat,” Bob said, refusing to be so easily daunted. “And you know what Jupe would say — we’ll know it when we see it!”

“Swell,” Pete said, “but just how do we find anything in this wreck, and where do we start to look?”

“We start where the hat was last known to be,” Bob declared, and pointed to the side of the door frame. The front wall was one of the two walls still standing. “Look, the peg Pico hung his hat on is still there on what’s left of that wall.”

“What’s left of the peg,” Pete muttered, but followed Bob to the wall.

A row of three pegs just inside the door had been burned to stubs, but they were still visible on a blackened wall stud. Bob and Pete began to search the ground beneath the pegs.

The floor was a jumbled litter of wood ashes and burned debris. Aside from roof tiles, it was hard to be sure of what anything was. The boys found hundreds of small, broken, and blackened pieces as they moved away from the wall in a widening circle, but nothing that seemed to mean anything, or belong to anyone except the Alvaros.

Pete finally sat down on a fallen roof beam. “If there’s a clue, it needs a sign on it,” he said.

“I guess you’re right, Second,” Bob admitted reluctantly. “There are so many pieces of broken — ”

“Hey, someone’s coming,” Pete said. He got up and hurried towards the door. “It must be Jupe and Diego. Ju — ” He jumped back out of sight against the burned walls, his voice a sharp whisper. “Bob! It’s three guys!

“Strangers!” Bob crouched behind a mound of debris and peered out the door.

“They’re coming towards the barn! I don’t like the look of them. Quick, over there under those beams!”

They scurried quickly but silently to one side of the barn. Here, the side wall had fallen in over some roof beams that leaned up against the front wall. Underneath the beams was a small, dark, triangular space. The boys crawled into it, then lay on the ground and looked out. Careful to make no sound, they barely breathed.

Moments later the three men came into the barn.

“Wow,” Pete whispered uneasily, “they look mean.”

The three men stood just inside the door, looking around at the ruins. One was a big, black-haired man with a thick moustache and three days’ growth of black stubble on his heavy face. The second was small and skinny, with a narrow, rat-like face and mean little eyes. The third was fat and bald with a big red nose and broken front teeth. They were all dirty and rough looking, and dressed like saddle-tramp cowboys in worn jeans, muddy cowboy boots, work shirts, and greasy, battered Stetson hats. Their rough hands and faces looked as if they hadn’t been washed for a month.

None of the men looked happy as they stared at the ruins.

“We ain’t gonna find nothin’ in here,” the small, skinny man said. “How we find anythin’ here, Cap?”

“We gotta find ’em,” said the big, black-haired man with the moustache.

“No way, Cap,” the fat one said in a high, squeaky voice. He shook his big head back and forth. “No way, no sir.”

“Just you all look, you hear?” Cap said. “They gotta be right aroun’ here.”

“Sure, Cap,” the fat one squeaked. He began to kick at the debris, peering expectantly at the floor as if whatever they were looking for would appear any second.

The small, rat-like man began to walk around looking here and there, but not too hard. The big one, Cap, swore at him.

“Get down and look, Pike, you ain’t pickin’ daisies!”

The skinny Pike glared at Cap for a moment, then bent lower and began to search harder. Cap turned towards the fat one.

“You, too, Tulsa. We’ll each take a section, you got that?”

Tulsa immediately dropped to his hands and knees in the ashes and began to crawl around with his fat face almost touching the floor. Cap and Pike stared at him in disgust for a moment, and then fanned out to search on either side of the leaning door frame.

“You sure they was lost in here, Cap?” Pike asked.

“Sure, I’m sure. We had to jump the ignition to get out of here that day, didn’t we? Had to go get another set later.”

Twice as the three men searched the ruins, one of them passed close to where Bob and Pete lay hidden and holding their breath. The big, black-haired Cap was so close the boys could have touched his boots. Pete gulped, and silently pointed to a thin-bladed, heavy-hilted knife sheathed in Cap’s boot!

“I don’t know,” the skinny Pike said after a time. “Who says they wasn’t lost somewhere’s else before?”

“We had ’em to drive here, didn’t we, stupid?” Cap said in disgust.

“Okay, so maybe they got dropped outside!” Pike shot back.

The skinny little man sat down on a beam right over Bob and Pete! With another ugly-looking sheath knife he began to whittle at a burned splinter of wood.

“Okay,” Cap finally conceded, “maybe you’re right. I guess we ain’t gonna find ’em in here without a light anyhow. Let’s go look where we was parked that day, and if we don’t find ’em, we’ll go get some lights.”

As the boys tried not even to breathe, Pike jumped up and hurried out of the ruined barn with the other two. Bob and Pete listened for a time without moving. They could hear the three men talking and arguing out in the muddy yard. Bob and Pete waited. Then there was silence outside. Cautiously, they crept out from under the collapsed wall and slipped to the door. The yard was empty. Bob turned to Pete with his eyes gleaming.

“I don’t know who they are, Second,” he said, “but I’ve got a hunch they were here the day of the fire and probably had something to do with Pico’s hat! I think they lost some car keys!”

“That’s what it sounded like,” Pete agreed. “They look like cowboys. Maybe they work for Mr. Norris!”

Bob added, “They sure want to find those keys, and that means the keys are dangerous to them — or to someone! Let’s look hard!”

“We already did, Records,” Pete pointed out. “Those guys couldn’t find them, either.”

“They didn’t look very hard, and now we know what we’re looking for,” Bob said. “I saw a burned rake over there — go get it! We’ll rake up the debris around the peg!”

Pete found the rake in a corner. Its handle had been burned half away, but the metal part was still usable. He began to rake through the ashes and debris. Every time the rake struck something metallic, he and Bob bent over excitedly to examine the object. Their search was a little easier than before because the day had brightened, letting more light into the roofless barn. The clouds were breaking up and patches of blue showed overhead.

Finally Bob cried, “Pete!” and pointed down. Something glinted in the light.

Pete raked it up. The two boys almost bumped heads as they both bent over to pick it up.

“Two keys on a chain with a silver dollar!” Bob cried.

“Any marks on them? Identification?” Pete asked quickly.

Bob looked. “No, nothing. But they’re car keys, all right, and they’ve got to be what those men were looking for.”

“Unless they’re Pico’s,” Pete said. “Or maybe they belong to one of those friends of his.”

“Hey! You two kids!”

Bob and Pete whirled. The fat man named Tulsa stared at them from the burned doorway. For a moment he didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Out the back!” Pete whispered to Bob.

They ran out the rear of the ruined building, and got behind some live-oaks that grew in back of the barn. Then darting from tree to tree, they moved to a position from which they could look back into the hacienda yard.

“You, there!”

The big, black-haired man named Cap stood near the ruined hacienda, gesturing at the boys. Suddenly, the rat-like man came out of the corral and called him.

“Cap! Tulsa says those kids found somethin’ in the barn!”

The two boys looked wildly around. They were blocked off from their bikes at the back of the hacienda yard, and there was no place nearby to hide!

“The ridge!” Pete hissed.

They fled towards the high ridge where the headless horse statue loomed against the sky!