The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (56 page)

“Harry had a run-in with him this morning. I saw it, but the guy didn’t see me. Harry popped off, and this lug didn’t like it. He’s Kip Morgan.”

That brought a sudden intake of breath from the girl, but my eyes were on Pete, as I was realizing Pete was top man here. Pete was my life insurance.

“That’s right. If the name means anything to you, you’ll know I am just the kind of damned fool who will shoot if you push me. Take that buzzard off the floor and back out of here. Back out fast.”

Pete was a careful man, and Pete was not ready to die. Not yet.

“What if I say nothing doing? What if I tell you to beat it?”

“Then don’t waste time—just start shooting. I’ll get George and Harry, Pete, but I’ll get you first.”

“All right.” I had guessed Pete would be smart. I’d
gambled
on it. “We’ll go. But there’s one thing I want to know. What’s your angle?”

“Sam Bradley was in my outfit overseas. He was a good guy and a good friend. Anything else?”

“All right. You’ve proved you’re a great big lovable guy. Now get smart and bow out. There’s no percentage for you.”

“I didn’t come into this for laughs,” I said. “When Sam Bradley and his wife are back home and in the clear, then I’ll bow out. Until then, I’m in.”

“What if I told you he was dead?” Pete said. “And his wife, too?”

That brought another little sound from the girl. I was beginning to wonder about her and just where she belonged. “I wouldn’t believe you unless I saw the bodies, and then I’d never rest until you three were dead or in the gas chamber.”

“George?” Pete said. “Pick up Harry, put his arm over your shoulder, and walk him to the car. I’ll follow. This is no place to settle this.” He smiled at me. “There’s more of us, and Morgan here has to move around. He can run, and he can hide, but we’ll find him.”

Homan picked up Harry and started for the door. Harry looked back at me, and his look gave me a chill. I would rather he’d said something.

Pete backed toward the door, keeping his gun on me. “You, too,” I told the girl.

She started to protest, but I cut her short. “Get going! Do you think I want you around to shoot me in the back?

“And Pete? Play it smart. If Sam and his wife aren’t back in their apartment by midnight, I’m coming for you. I will give you until then.”

They went out, and the girl didn’t look back. I felt sorry for her, but that might have been because she was pretty. She did not look like a crook, but then, who does?

When they had gone I started after them. I was no closer to knowing what it was all about. Whatever it was, Bradley and Ellen, if not already dead, were in danger. If Pete whoever-he-was was playing with men like George Homan and Harry, he was playing for keeps, and for money, big money.

Before I could move, I had to know what was going on, and I had to find out who the girl was and her connection. Actually, I’d little reason to care. She’d dealt herself into this, one way or the other.

Come to think of it, there was a clue. It was her attitude toward Sam’s army friends. What had she meant by her remarks?

Turning around, I began to give that apartment another going-over. In the writing desk, I got my first lead.

It was a circular, or rather, a stack of them. Beside them was a bunch of envelopes and a list of names, several of which I recognized as veterans.

Opening the circular, I glanced over it.

BOOM DAYS BOOM AGAIN

Faro…CHUCKALUCK…Poker CRAPS

Come one! Come all!

Proceeds to Wounded Veterans

Dropping into a chair, I read it through; an idea began to germinate.

Where there is gambling, there are sure-thing operators. They flock to easy money like bees to sugar, and unless I was mistaken in my man, Pete was a cinch player. Moreover, I had picked up some talk lately of various gamblers moving in on the vets and taking them for considerable loot. No doubt they had spotted their own players in the crowds and might even have been running the games themselves. Sam Bradley was on several veterans’ committees.

Now I needed evidence. Leaving the apartment by the service entrance, I went down the back stairs. Once I reached my car, I checked over the list of names I had brought with me. One, Eugene Shidler, lived not far away. Starting my car, I swung around the corner and headed along the street.

S
HIDLER CAME TO THE DOOR
in his shirtsleeves with a newspaper in his hand. He was a short, stocky man, partly bald. Showing him the circular, I asked what he knew about it.

“Only what we all know. We need to raise money to give some of the boys a hand, and Earl Ramsey suggested a real, old-time gambling setup. It would last a week, sponsored by us. He said he knew just the man to handle it, a man who had a lot of gambling equipment he had taken in on a loan. He was pretty sure this man could also provide the dealers, equipment, and refreshments for a small cut of the proceeds.

“Naturally, it looked good to us. We had to do nothing at all when the games started but to come and bring our friends. As we were busy men, that was a big item. Time was the one thing none of us could spare.”

“Who was it, the gambler?”

“Pete Merrano.”

Pete!…
Pete Merrano!
Owner of the Merrano Club! A bookie and small-time racketeer wanting to reach for the big time! Already he had a hand in the numbers and was reported to be financing the importation of cocaine, although keeping free of it himself.

Suppose he had been skimming the games and Sam Bradley discovered it? No sooner did the idea come to mind than I was sure it was the answer.

Shidler looked at me thoughtfully. “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”

There seemed to be something underlying his question, so I said, “Yes, I believe so, but first tell me how it all came out? Did the vets make money?”

“We cleared about a thousand dollars, although some of the boys figured it should have been more. In fact, there was a lot of talk about something crooked, but shucks, you know Sam as well as I do! There isn’t a crooked bone in his body!”

“You’re right,” I said, and then I laid it out for him, all I knew and what I suspected. “Sam and his wife have vanished completely. Merrano, if that was the Pete I’d held at gunpoint, hinted that Sam was dead, but I don’t believe that. Anyway, something has Merrano worried, and what it is I have no idea.”

Shidler got to his feet. Angrily, he jerked the cigar from his mouth, staring at it with distaste. Glancing toward an inner door, he dropped to the sofa beside me. “If my wife hears of this, I’ll never hear the last of it, but I got rooked in that game, but plenty! They took me for five hundred bucks. I owe that to Merrano.”

“Then it makes sense. Merrano probably took the lot of you for plenty, and he’s counting on you being good sports and keeping your mouths shut. I’d bet he took every one of you for at least as much as you lost.”

He nodded. “I lost about a hundred, then drifted into a little side game that Pete was running. I dropped about forty more, then gambled on credit. Merrano holds my IOU for the five hundred.”

“Get a few of the boys on the phone and do some checking. Tell them what the story is. Maybe we can get that money back. In the meantime, I am going to find out what became of Sam Bradley.”

It was after nine when I returned to my car. The best thing was to talk to Mooney in homicide. He knew me and could start the wheels turning even though it lay outside his department. Although, I reflected, by this time it might not.

First, I would do some checking. There was Earl Ramsey, who had suggested Merrano to run the games and could be in it up to his neck. If Ramsey could be persuaded to tell what he knew, we might be on the track. Before anything else, I must think of Sam and Ellen.

It seemed strange to be riding down a brightly lit street, with all about me people driving to or from home, the theater, dinner, and to realize that somewhere among these thousands of buildings a man and his wife might be facing death. Yet without evidence I could do nothing, and all I had was a hunch that they were still alive.

Checking the list, I found Ramsey’s name. The address was some distance away, but worth a visit. If Ramsey were not tied in with the crooks, he might talk.

It was a large, old-fashioned frame dwelling on a corner near a laundry. Parking the car, I got out and rang the bell. Nothing. I went down the steps and looked along the side of the house. There was a light in one of the rear rooms; I went back and pressed the bell again. Three times I rang with no response; then I saw the door was not quite closed. It was open by no more than a crack.

Had it been closed when I arrived? My impression was that it had. That meant someone had opened the door while I stood there! An eerie feeling crept over me, and suddenly I was wishing the street were not so dark. I rang again.

For the second time that day, I pushed open a door I had no right to touch. It swung open, and I peered into a dark living room. “Hello? Mr. Ramsey?”

Silence, then a subdued whispering, not voices but a surreptitious movement.

A clock ticked solemnly, and somewhere I could hear water running in a basin. Uncomfortably, I looked around me. The street was dark and empty except for my own car and another that was parked in darkness farther down. Momentarily distracted from the house, I stared at that car. I had not noticed it when I first drove up.

Suddenly, a hand from the darkness grasped my arm. I started to pull away, but the grip tightened. A voice from the shadows, a voice so old you could almost hear the wrinkles in it said, “Come in, won’t you? Did you wish to see Earl?”

It was an old woman’s voice, but there was something else in it that set my nerves on edge, and I am not easily bothered.

“Yes, I want to see him. Is he in?”

“He’s in the kitchen. He came home to eat, and I put out a lunch for him. Maybe you would like something? A cup of coffee?”

The house was too warm, the air close and stuffy. She walked ahead of me toward a dim rectangle of doorway.

“Just follow me. I never use the lights, but Earl likes them.”

She led me along a hall and pushed a door open. As the door opened, I saw Earl Ramsey.

He was seated at a kitchen table, his chin propped on his hand, the other hand against the side of his face. There was a cup before him and an untasted sandwich on his plate. He was staring at me as I came through the door.

“Are you Mr. Ramsey?”

He neither spoke nor blinked, and I stepped past the old woman and stopped abruptly. I was staring into the eyes of a dead man.

Turning, overcome with horror, I looked at the old woman who was puttering among some dirty dishes. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “Earl was never one for talking. Only when he takes the notion.”

My skin crawled. She turned her head and stared at me with expressionless eyes. Gray hair straggled about a face that looked old enough to have worn out two bodies, and her clothing was drab, misshapen, and soiled. She fumbled at her pocket, staring at me.

It gave me the creeps. The hot, stuffy room and this aged and obviously imbecilic woman and her dead son.

Stepping past the table, I saw the knife. It had been driven into the left side of his back, driven up from below as he sat at the table, and driven to the hilt. I touched the hand of Earl Ramsey. It was cold.

The old woman was puttering among the dishes, unaware and unconcerned.

“Have you a telephone?”

She neither stopped nor seemed to hear me, so I stepped past her to the hallway and found a switch. The telephone was on a stand in the corner. I needed but a minute to get Mooney.

“Morgan here. Can you come right over? Dead? Sure he’s dead! Yes, I’ll wait.”

Walking back to the kitchen, I looked around, but there was nothing that might be a clue. Nothing I could see, but then I wasn’t a cop. Only, I was willing to bet the killer had come in the door behind Ramsey, dropped a hand on his shoulder, then slammed the knife home. The knife was a dead ringer for the one I’d taken from Harry only that morning.

Several steps led down from that open door behind Ramsey to a small landing. It was dark down there, and a door that would probably let a man out into the narrow space between the house and the laundry next door. I went down the steep steps and grasped the knob to see for myself.

There was a whisper of movement in the darkness, and I started to turn. Something smashed against my skull, and my knees folded under me. As I fell, my arm swept out and grabbed a man around the knees. There was an oath and then a second blow that drove the last vestige of consciousness from me. I seemed to be sliding down a steep slide into unbelievable blackness.

Yet even as consciousness faded, I heard a tearing of cloth and the sound of a police siren, far away.

When next I became aware of anything, I was lying on a damp, hard floor in absolute darkness. Fear washed over me in a cold wave. With a lunge, I came to a sitting position. My head swam with pain at the sudden movement, and I put both hands to it, finding a laceration across my scalp from one of the blows. My hair was matted with blood. Struggling to my knees, I was still shaky, and my thoughts refused to become coherent.

The events of the night were a jumble, the hot, close air of the kitchen, the hallway, the dead man, the weird old woman, my call to the police, and the blows on the head.

Somehow I had stumbled into something uglier than expected. A man had been murdered. Perhaps Bradley, too, was dead.

Feeling for my shoulder holster, I discovered my gun was missing. That was to be expected. The floor on which I knelt was concrete, and there was no light. The room had a dank, musty smell, and I believed for a moment I must be in the basement of the murder house. Then I placed another smell, one that I knew well. It was the smell of the sea.

So I had been taken from the house and dumped here? Why? Had they believed me dead?

Getting up, I waited an instant, then took four careful steps before encountering a wall. Feeling along the wall, I found three stone steps and at the top a door. My hands quested for the knob or latch. There was none. Not even a hinge or a finger hold anywhere. The door was fitted with admirable precision.