Killer in the Street (19 page)

It was the wrong time for an interruption. Jameson wanted to keep bearing down on Sam Stevens, but Anderson’s story was important and he had to listen. Sam listened too. He heard about the man in the beige Chrysler who had driven his daughter out to Pandora’s Box for dinner and then had to leave because she broke up at the sight of an airman in uniform.

“It had to be the girl from the Apache Inn,” Geary remarked. “Veronica Moore. We’ve checked her out. She’s never been married—to an airman or anybody else. And she’s still missing.”

Jameson felt sick. He had the state trooper repeat the details and pinpoint the hour—but too much time had elapsed. Even if he drove in second gear, Donaldson could have made it back to the Apache Inn in fifteen minutes. Obviously, he hadn’t taken the girl back to the motel. Obviously, he wasn’t going to take her back.

“Is it a snatch job, do you think?” Geary asked. “The girl’s father is an army officer. He’s buying a home in the sixty-thousand class—”

“Have you talked to him?” Jameson demanded.

“No, not yet. I was leaving that to you. The mother is on the coast. We haven’t notified her, either. I talked to her brothers, but I didn’t tell them why we were so concerned. They’re just kids.”

“All right,” Jameson said. “I’ll take over. But I don’t like it. It doesn’t fit Drasco’s pattern. He’s a specialist. Does a jewelry thief rob a bank?”

“It might have been accidental,” Geary said.

“Accidental? How?”

“The brothers say their sister flipped over Donaldson. He treated her like a woman, she told them. She’s sixteen. At that age they have no fear.”

“And at my age,” Jameson said bitterly, “I have nothing else. Okay, keep checking the motels and garages. At least we know he’s passing the girl off as his daughter. That might be of some help.”

Geary and Anderson left. It was going to be a rougher night than Jameson had expected. He looked at Sam to see how he had reacted and found a strange look of incomprehension on his face.

“A girl?” he said. “A man like that would take a sixteen-year-old girl—”

“It may be all right,” Jameson said. “He may have gotten her drunk and took her someplace to sober up.”

“But a sixteen-year-old girl!” Sam repeated. “In my day we played rough, but we played clean. We knew the difference between a woman and a child!”

“Times change,” Jameson said.

“Yes, times change.”

Sam had started to move away from the bar before Geary arrived with the state trooper. Now he slumped back against it as if needing support.

“Are you all right, Sam?” Jameson asked.

Sam tried to smile and it came on sick. “I guess I’ve had too many celebrations in one day,” he said.

“I’ll take you home.”

“No—no! I can make it. But, Jimmy, about this trouble. Have you talked to Van?”

“Dr. Bryson? Yes, a little. Why?”

“He doesn’t like me,” Sam said.

“Don’t be silly. Everybody likes you.”

“The hell they do! I haven’t made and lost and then remade a fortune by being the kind of fellow everybody likes! I’m tough. Dr. Bryson thinks I’m an exploiter—an empire builder. But we need empire builders, Jimmy. People need heroes. My father—you remember my father. He was a hero. Ruthless and a slave driver, but he never drove anybody harder than himself. I’ve tried to be like that. Kyle Walker is of the same stock. If you have to dig up dirt, get after Bryson.”

“If you don’t like Bryson, why do you have him as a partner?” Jameson asked.

“Because he’s smart, damn it! He’s got a mind like a computer—and he knows his geology as well as physics. But he’s a cynic, Jimmy. To him this whole project—all of our projects—are just toys. Imagine! With a mind like his he could make a fortune, but he prefers to waste his time in a classroom!”

“The world needs heroes,” Jameson said.

Sam Stevens glared at him, and then he laughed. There was no humor in the laugh because it wasn’t a night for humor, but there was enough sparkle in it to get him away from the bar and on his way to the street again. Jameson went with him as far as the front door. When the attendant brought Sam’s big bronze air-conditioned Cadillac around the old man was ready to drive. He had picked up his white Stetson from the hat-check girl, perched it on his head at a rakish angle, and walked as straight as a soldier on dress parade. Jameson didn’t dare suggest again that he take him home. Times did change, he reflected, as Sam drove away. They didn’t come like Sam Stevens any more.

Sam Stevens had never employed a chauffeur. Before he made his first fortune wild-catting (that was after he had lost the ranch inherited from his father in a poker game) he rode his own horse; and from the day he bought his first Cadillac he did the driving himself. The current model was his eighteenth. He always drove fast but carefully. He knew every street and boulevard—every turn in every road since the days when most of them had been wagon trails. The first thing he did after regaining his financial standing was to buy back the ranch that had been his childhood home. The old buildings were gone, but the “new” house, which was, Sam recalled with one of those sharp pangs of memory that momentarily freeze time, now more than thirty years old, stood on the same crest of the same hill where the original cabin had stood. Sam’s father, Old Zachary Stevens, was the kind of wild fool who would have to sire a renegade. Other ranchers built their houses in the valleys where they were sheltered from the wind and weather; but Old Zach liked to be on top of places where he could see the world at his feet. No matter how many times the wind took the roof shingles, the house stayed on the hill. That was where Sam built in the spring of 1929 just eighteen months after the first gusher came in. Yes, it was Sarah’s money that had bought him a partnership in the company where he worked as a roughneck when they met, but neither of them was either ashamed or afraid of that. Some people belonged together. Their relationship might have been made in heaven or forged in hell, but they belonged together and nothing in the world was right when they were apart. It was like that with Sam and Sarah from the beginning and straight through to the end.

And so, when the money rolled in, he bought back the ranch and built the house on the hill: Sarah’s house—solid red brick with a tile roof and a wide overhang to protect the full front porch. Sarah was plains-born and to her a frame house was a sharecropper’s house even if it cost two hundred thousand dollars. It was Sarah’s elegant house with a wide, sweeping drive that wound its way through a fortune in transplanted verdure up to that porch where she used to wait, rocking serenely in her high-backed mahogany rocker, for the sound of his horn at the gate. Elegant was Sarah, but in her own quaint way. Her mother and her grandmother before her had sat in such a rocker on such a porch waiting for the sundown when their men came home. Sam had long since ceased to sound his horn at the entrance and the gate was no longer closed, but he never made the turn into the driveway without remembering.

The money had continued to roll in all through the years the rest of the world called “depression.” The oil flowed, the deals were made and there were those who said Sam Stevens drove himself harder and took more risks than any other man in the West because he wanted to cast a longer shadow than Old Zach, and there were those who said he wanted to live down the gossip that he made his fortune on a woman’s stake. Like any man worthy of the gift of life, he had enemies—and thrived on them. But there was a great difference between Sam Stevens and his father. Old Zach had lost his wife—Sam’s mother—in childbirth. He never married again. He had no need for a woman’s companionship. But Sam needed all a woman could be: wife, mother, lover, friend; and when Sarah died after three terrible years of devastating pain something of Sam died with her. And then there were those who said he had spent all of his fortune on doctors and hospitals and fruitless trips to Europe trying to find a cure. There were those who said his mind was gone for a time after Sarah’s death. There were those who always had to say something because they never knew anything. Some of it, by virtue of the law of averages, was true.

After a year Sam got started again. The building boom was on, and Sam’s name on a project was still as good as gold. Time slowed him some, but he made up for that by working longer hours and attending more dinners and benefits, and none of the talking people asked why because even the most wretched of them understood how lonely it must be to drive up that winding lane each night.

The rocker wasn’t kept on the porch any more. It had been stored away in the garage for nearly seven years. Sam only thought of that as he braked the Cadillac to a stop in the driveway because he was afraid and needed to reach out and touch something for strength.

It seemed that he had left the garage doors open. Now they were closed. No matter. He was too tired to put the car away. He cut the motor and switched off the lights. Tonight the car would sit out in the drive. He got out and walked to the front door. He had to unlock it with his key—Julia, the housekeeper, always went home on the nights when he dined out. She left the light on in the hall, in the kitchen—where she always left a glass of milk he dumped into the sink—and in his bedroom upstairs.

Sam let himself in and closed the door behind him. He felt unbearably weary and deeply disturbed. As much as he scorned drugs, this was one night he would take the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed. The only thing he longed for now was oblivion.

But he never reached the stairway. Tonight an extra light was showing: it spilled out garishly from his study. Nobody ever invaded Sam Stevens’ study. He stopped at the doorway and looked inside the room. The first thing he noticed was a brandy decanter and two glasses placed on the small table beside his own leather chair. While he watched, a man seated casually in the chair leaned forward and carefully poured brandy into both of the glasses. Then the man stood up and faced the doorway. He was middle-aged, well built, and wore a dark blue suit and tie and dark glasses. He didn’t smile, but he did hold out one brandy glass in invitation.

“Mr. Stevens?” he said. “My name is Donaldson. By this time I think you know why I am here.”

Sam didn’t answer. He walked slowly into the room. Donaldson pressed the glass of brandy into his hand and took the other for himself. He raised it in the gesture of a toast.

“To completion,” he said.

Donaldson drank quickly. Sam ignored his glass.

“Where’s Kyle?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Donaldson answered, “and I don’t like not knowing. What went wrong? How did Walker know I was looking for him?”

Sam hadn’t taken his eyes from Donaldson’s face, and his eyes were remembering.

“Now I know where I saw you before! This afternoon at the Country Club bar! You told the bartender you were my guest.”

“And so I am, Mr. Stevens. More so than I expected. What did you tell Walker?”

“Tell?” Sam echoed. “I don’t know what you mean. What could I tell him?”

Sam’s hand was shaking. He was going to spill the brandy and so Donaldson took it from him and placed it back on the small table. His movements were slow and deliberate. He was trying to get something straight in his mind. Finally, he shook his head.

“No, I don’t believe it,” he said. “You’re not old enough to be senile. You know who set you up again six years ago after your wife’s death knocked you flat. You know where the money came from. You know why the name Sam Stevens was so important. Don’t play games with me, old man. I’ve had a rough night and I don’t like to play games. Think back now. Who told you to hire Kyle Walker five years ago?”

Sam wasn’t senile and it was too late for games. He wasn’t even drunk any more. But he was trying not to face what he had known he must face from the minute Jameson nailed him at the hotel bar and began to talk about a five-year-old murder in New York.

“I never asked questions when I was told to hire Kyle,” he protested. “I didn’t know he was mixed up in murder!”

“He wasn’t,” Donaldson said. “I was. Walker is the innocent bystander who saw too much.”

“Then why didn’t you kill him too?”

“I was too hot—so was Berendo. But Walker was so scared he applied for passports for himself and his wife, and there you were in Washington trying to hire Van Bryson, who was Walker’s buddy in Korea.”

Sam was beginning to understand. “I got authority to double Bryson’s Washington salary. Was that a part of the deal, too?”

“I don’t know anything about the finances,” Donaldson said. “That’s not my department. I can tell you that Walker was identified within four hours after he saw me strangle Bernie Chapman. Within eight hours his employment records had been examined and we knew he had served overseas with Bryson and was in business with him for two years after they left the service. You hired Bryson and came back here, but your secretary stayed on to help him terminate. When she was through working on him, Bryson thought taking Kyle into the organization with him was his own idea.”

“Charlene?” Sam echoed. “Are you trying to tell me that Charlene Evans is mixed up in this?”