The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (63 page)

A thumb stabbed at my eye in a clinch, and I butted and gouged my way out of it and then clipped him with a right to the chin as he came in. I struck at his throat with my elbow in close, and then grabbing him by the belt, heaved him from the floor and hurled him back on a table. He kicked me in the chest as I came in, and knocked me into the wall.

My coat and shirt were gone. Blood streaked my body. I could feel a stiffness in the side of my face, and I knew my eye was swelling shut. There was no time to rest, no rounds, no stopping. I stepped in on the balls of my feet and hooked hard to his chin. He blinked and slammed a right at me that I ducked but I caught a sweeping left that rocked me. Weaving to escape his bludgeoning fists, I forced him back against the desk and jamming my left forearm against his throat, I slammed three right hands into his body before he threw me off and charged. I stabbed a left at his face and he took it coming in as though I’d hit him with a feather duster. My right missed and he hit me in the belly with one that knocked every bit of wind out of me.

He hurled me to the floor and jumped for me with both feet, but I jerked up my knees and kicked out hard with both feet. They caught him midway of his jump and put him off balance, and he fell beside me. I rolled over, grabbing at his throat, but he threw a right from where he lay that clipped me, and then I ground the side of his face into the floor by crushing my elbow against his cheek.

We broke free and lunged to our feet, but he caught me with a looping right that staggered me. I backed up, working away from him, fighting to get my breath. My mouth hung open and I was breathing in great gasps, and he came around the wreck of the table, coming for me.

He pushed forward, bobbing his head to make my left miss, so I shortened it to a hook and stepped in with both hands. They caught him solidly, and he stopped dead in his tracks. He shook his head and started for me, his eyes glazed. My left hook came over with everything I had on it, and his cheek looked as if somebody had hit it with an axe.

He took it coming in and scarcely blinked, hurt as he was. For the first time in my life I was scared. I had hit this guy with everything but the desk and he was still coming.

My knees were shaky and I knew that no matter how badly he was hurt, I was on my last legs. He came on in, and I threw a right into his stomach. He gasped and his face looked sick, but he came on. He struck at me, but the power was gone from his punches. I set myself and started to throw them. I threw them as if I was punching the heavy bag and the timekeeper had given me the ten-second signal. I must have thrown both hands into the air after he started to fall, but as he came down, with great presence of mind, I jerked my knee into his chin.

Jerry Loftus came into the room as I staggered back, staring down at Caronna. “I could have stopped it,” he said, “but I—”

“Why the hell didn’t you?” I gasped.

“What?” His eyes twinkled at the corners. “Best scrap I ever saw, an’ you ask me why I didn’t stop it!”

“You’d better get cuffs on that guy,” I said, disgusted. “If he gets up again I’m going right out that window!”

We found Karen in another room, tied up in a neat bundle, which, incidentally, she is at any time. When I turned her loose, she kissed me, and while I’d been looking forward to that, for the first time in my life I failed to appreciate a kiss from a pretty woman. Both my lips were split and swollen. She looked at my face with a kind of horror that I could appreciate, having seen Caronna.

H
OURS LATER
, seated in the café over coffee, Johnny Holben and Loftus came in to join us. Holben stared at me. Even with my face washed and patched up, I looked like something found dead in the water.

“All right,” Loftus said doubtfully, “this is your show. We’ve got Caronna no matter how this goes, due to an old killing back East. That’s what he was so worried about. Somebody started an investigation of an income-tax evasion and everybody started to talk, and before it was over, three old murders had been accounted for, and one of them was Caronna’s.

“However, while we don’t know now whether Castro will live or not with that rib through his lung, you say he was the one who killed Bitner.”

“That’s right,” I said. “He did kill him.”

“He never came up that trail past my place,” Holben said.

“But there isn’t any other way up, is there?” Karen asked.

“No, not a one,” Loftus said. “In the thirty years since I came west with a herd of cattle to settle in this country, I’ve been all over that mesa, every inch of it, and there’s no trail but the one past Holben’s cabin.”

“Your word is good enough for me,” I said, “but the fact is, Castro did not come by any trail when he murdered Old Jack Bitner. How it was done I had no idea until I visited Castro’s show. You must remember that he specializes in odd animals, in the strange and the unusual.

“He got his method from India, a place where he had traveled a good deal. When I saw his animals, something clicked into place in my mind, and then something else. I knew then he had scaled the wall under Bitner’s window.”

“That’s a sheer cliff,” Loftus protested.

“Sure, and nothing human could climb it without help, but Richard Henry Castro went up that cliff, and he had help.”

“You mean, there was somebody in it with him?”

“Nothing human. When I saw his show, I tied it in with a track I saw on the ledge outside Bitner’s window. The trouble was that while I knew how it was done, and that his show had been stopped on the highway opposite the mesa, I had no proof. If Castro sat tight, even though I knew how it was done, it was going to be hard to prove.

“Like any criminal, he could never be sure he hadn’t slipped up; didn’t know who to fear or how much. My problem was to get Castro worried, and his method was one so foreign to this country that he never dreamed anyone would guess. I had to worry him, so in leaving I made a remark to him in Malayan, telling him that he had made a mistake.

“Once he knew I had been in the Far East, he would be worried. Also, he knew that Caronna had seen him.”

“Caronna saw him?” Loftus demanded.

“Yes, that had to be it. That was the wedge he was using to cut himself in on Castro’s inheritance.”

“How could Castro inherit?”

“There’s a man in his show named Johnny Leader, a master penman with a half-dozen convictions for forgery on his record. He was traveling with that show writing visiting cards for people, scrolls, etc. He drew up a will for Castro, and it was substituted at the time of the killing.”

“Get to the point,” Holben said irritably. “How did he get up that cliff?”

“This will be hard to believe,” I said, “but he had the rope taken up by a lizard!”

“By a
what
?” Holben demanded.

I grinned. “Look,” I said, “over in India there are certain thieves and second-story workers who enter houses and high buildings in just that way.

“Castro has two types of monitor lizards over there in his show. The dragon lizards from Komodo are too big and tough for anyone to handle, and nobody wants to. However, the smaller monitor lizards from India, running four to five feet in length, are another story. It is those lizards that the thieves use to gain access to locked houses.

“A rope is tied around the lizard’s body, and he climbs the wall, steered by jerks on the rope from below. When he gets over a parapet, in a crevice, or over a window sill, the thief jerks hard on the rope and the lizard braces himself to prevent being pulled over, and they are very strong in the legs. Then the thief goes up the wall, hand over hand, walking right up with his feet against the wall.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Loftus said. “Who would ever think of that?”

“The day you took me up there,” I told him, “I noticed a track that reminded me of the track of a gila monster, but much bigger. The idea of what it meant did not occur to me until I saw those monitor lizards of Castro’s.

“Now that we know what to look for, we’ll probably find scratches on the cliff and tracks at the base.”

Karen was looking at me, wide-eyed with respect. “Why, I never realized you knew things like that!”

“In my business,” I said, “you have to know a little of everything.”

“I’ll stick to bank robbers an’ rustlers,” Loftus said. “Or high-graders.”

“You old false alarm!” Holben snorted. “You never arrested a high-grader in your life!”

We were walking out of the door, and somehow we just naturally started up the hill. Dusk was drawing a blanket of darkness over the burnt red ridges, and the western horizon was blushing before the oncoming shadows.

When we were on top of the hill again, looking back over the town, Karen looked up at me. “Are your lips still painful?”

“Not that painful,” I said.

I Hate to Tell His Widow

J
oe Ragan was drinking his ten o’clock coffee when Al Brooks came in with the news. “Ollie’s dead.” He spoke quietly. “Ollie Burns. Shot.”

Ragan said nothing.

“He was shot twice,” Al told him. “Right through the heart. The gun was close enough to leave powder burns on his coat.”

Ragan just sat there holding his cup in both hands. It was late and he was tired, and the information left him stunned and unbelieving. Ollie Burns was his oldest friend on the force. Ollie had helped break him in when he first joined up after the war. Ollie had been a good officer, a conscientious man who had a name for thoughtfulness and consideration. He never went in for the rough stuff, knowing the taxpayers paid his salary and understanding he was a public servant. He treated people with consideration and not as if they were enemies.

“Where did they find him?” he said at last. “How did it happen?”

“That’s the joker. We just don’t know. He was found on a phoned-in tip, lying on the edge of a vacant area near Dunsmuir. What he was doing out there in the dark is more than anybody can guess, but the doc figures he’d been dead more than an hour when we found him.” Brooks hesitated. “They think it was a woman. He smelled of perfume and there was lipstick on his cheek and collar.”

“Nuts!” Ragan rose. “Not Ollie. He was too much in love with his wife and he never played around. I knew the guy too well.”

“Well,” Brooks said, “don’t blame me. You could be right. It wasn’t my idea, but what Stigler’s thinking.”

“Where’s Mary? Has she been told?” Ragan’s first thought was for her. Mark Stigler was not the type to break such news to anyone.

“Uh-huh. Mark told her. Your girl, Angie Faherty, is with her. They were to meet Ollie at a movie at nine, so when he didn’t show up she got worried, so they went home. She called the station when he wasn’t at home, and a couple of minutes after she called, somebody told us there was a body lying out there in the dark.”

“Who called?”

“Nobody knows. The guy said he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything and hung up.”

“Odd, somebody seeing the body so soon. Nobody walks around there much at night.”

Stigler was at his desk when Ragan came in. He looked up, unexpected sympathy in his eyes. “Do you want this case?”

“You know I do. Ollie was the best friend I had in the world, and you can forget the woman angle. He was so much in love with Mary that it stuck out all over him. He wasn’t the type to play around. If anything, he was overly conscientious.”

“Every man to his own view.” Stigler tapped with a pencil. “This is the first man we’ve had killed in a year, and I want the killer brought in with evidence for a conviction. Understand?”

“Will I work with the squad?”

Stigler shook his head. “You’ve got your own viewpoint and you’ve worked with Ollie. You can have all the help you need, but we’ll be working on it, too.”

Joe Ragan was pleased. This was the way he wanted it but the last thing he expected from Mark Stigler. Stigler was a good homicide man but a stickler for the rulebook, and turning a man loose to work on his own was unheard of from him.

“Mark, did Ollie say anything to you about a case he was working on? I mean, in his spare time?”

“No, not a word.” Stigler tapped with the pencil. “On his own time? I didn’t know that ever happened around here. You mean he actually went out on his free time and worked on cases?”

“He was a guy who hated loose ends. Ask Mary sometime. Every tool had a place, every magazine was put back in a neat pile on the shelf, every book to its place. It wasn’t an obsession, just that he liked things neat, with all the ends tied up. And I know he’s had some bug in his bonnet for months now. What it was I have no idea.”

“That’s something,” Stigler agreed. “Maybe he was getting too close to the right answer for somebody’s comfort.” He lit a cigar, then put it down. “My wife’s trying to get me to smoke a pipe,” he explained.

“You’re right about him being overly conscientious. I recall that Towne suicide, about a year ago. He was always needling me to see if anything new had turned up.

“Hell, there wasn’t anything new. It was open-and-shut. Alice Towne killed herself and there was no other way it could have happened. But it seems Ollie knew her and it bothered him a good deal.”

“He was like that.” Ragan got up. “What have you got so far?”

“Nothing. We haven’t found the gun. Ollie’s own gun was still in its holster. He was off duty at the time and, like we said, was meeting his wife to go to a show.”

“Why didn’t he go? I knew about that because my girl was going with them.”

“Somebody called him just before eight o’clock. He answered the phone himself and Mary heard him say, ‘Where?’ A moment later he said, ‘Right away.’ Then he hung up and asked them if he could meet them in front of the theater at nine. He had an appointment that wouldn’t keep.”

“I see.” Ragan rubbed his jaw. “I’ll look into it. If you need me during the next hour, I’ll be at Mary’s.”

“You aren’t going to ask her about it now, are you?”

“Yes, I am, Mark. After all, she’s a cop’s wife. It will be better to get her digging into her memory for facts than just sitting around moping.

“I know Mary, and she won’t be able to sleep. She’s the kind of woman who starts doing something whenever she feels bad. If I don’t talk to her, she’ll be washing all the dishes or something.”

A
NGIE ANSWERED THE DOOR
. “Oh, Joe! I’m so glad you’ve come! I just don’t know what to do. Mary won’t lie down and she won’t rest. She—”

“I know.” Joe squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll have some coffee and talk a little.”

Walking through the apartment, he thought about what Stigler had said. Lipstick and perfume. That didn’t sound like Ollie. Stigler had never known Ollie the way Ragan had. Ollie had never been a chaser. If there had been lipstick and perfume on him when he was found, it had been put there to throw off the investigation.

And the call. That was odd in itself. It might be that somebody had
wanted
the body found, and right away. But why? The man on the phone might have been the killer, or somebody working with him. If not, what would a man be doing in that area at that hour? For that matter, what was Ollie doing there? It was a dark, gloomy place, scattered with old lumber and bricks among a rank growth of weeds and grass. And right in the middle of town.

“On that call, Angie? Did Ollie say anything else? Give you any idea of what it was all about?”

“No, he seemed very excited and pleased, that was all. He told us he would not be long, but just to be sure to give him until nine. We went to dinner and then to the theater to meet him, but he never showed. He was driving his own car. Mary and I were driving yours.”

At the sound of a step in the hall, Ragan looked up. He had known Mary Burns even longer than Ollie. There had been a time when he liked her very much. That was before he had met Angie or she had met Ollie.

She was a dark-eyed, pretty woman with a round figure and a pleasant face. If anyone in the world had been perfectly suited for Ollie, it was Mary.

“Mary,” Ragan said, “this may not seem the best time, but I need to ask you some questions.”

“I’d like that, Joe, I really would.” Her eyes were red and swollen but her chin was firm. She sat down across the table, and Angie brought the coffeepot.

“Mary, you’re the only person who knew Ollie better than I did. He was never one to talk about his work. He just did what was necessary. But he had that funny little habit of popping up with odd comments that were related to whatever he was thinking or working on.”

“I know.” She smiled, but her lips trembled. “He often did that. It confused people who didn’t know him.”

“All right. We know Ollie was working on something on his own time. I have a hunch it was some case the rest of us had forgotten about. Remember that Building & Loan robbery? He stewed over that for a month without saying anything to anybody, and then made an arrest and had all the evidence for a conviction. Nobody even knew he was thinking about the case.

“Well, I think he was working something like that. I think he was so close on the trail of somebody that they got scared. I think, somehow, they led him into a trap tonight. We’ve got to figure out what it was he had on his mind.”

Mary shook her head. “I have no idea what it could be, Joe. He was working on something, I do know that. I could always tell when something was on his mind. He would sit staring across the top of his newspaper or would walk out in the yard and pull a weed or two. He never liked to leave anything until it was finished. What it was this time, I do not know.”

“Think, Mary. Think back over the past few weeks. Try to remember any of those absentminded little comments he made. One of them might be just the lead we need.”

Angie filled their cups again. Mary looked up doubtfully. “There was something just this morning, but it doesn’t tell us a thing. He looked up while he was drinking his coffee and said, ‘Honey, there’s two crimes that are almost as bad as rape or murder.’”

“Nothing more?”

“That was all. He was stewing about something, and you know how he was at times like that. I understood and left him alone.”

“Two crimes worse?” Ragan ran his fingers through his hair. “I know what one was. We’d talked about it often enough. He thought, as I do, that narcotics peddling was the lowest crime on earth. It’s a foul racket. I wonder if that was it?”

“What could the other crime be?”

He shook his head, frowning. Slowly, carefully then, he led Mary over the past few days, searching for some clue. A week before, she had asked him to meet her and go shopping, and he had replied that he was in the Upshaw Building and would meet her on the corner by the drugstore.

“The Upshaw Building?” Ragan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about it. Well”—he got up—“I’m going to adopt Ollie’s methods, Mary, and start doing legwork and asking questions. But believe me, I’ll not leave this case until it’s solved.”

Al Brooks was drinking coffee when Ragan walked into the café the next morning. He dropped on the stool beside the vice-squad man and ordered coffee and a side order of sausage.

Al was a tall, wide-shouldered man with a sallow face. He had an excellent record with the force. He grinned at Ragan, but there was a question in his eyes. “I hear Stigler has you on the Burns case. What gives?”

Ragan did not feel talkative. Morning coffee with Ollie Burns had been a ritual of long standing, and the ease and comfort of the big man was much preferred to the sharp inquisitiveness of Al Brooks.

“Strange, Stigler putting you on the Burns case.”

“Not so strange.” Ragan sipped his coffee, hoping they’d hurry with the sausage. “He figured that being a friend of Ollie’s, I might know something.”

After a moment, Brooks looked around at him. “Do you?”

Ragan shrugged. “Not that I can think of. Ollie was working on something, I know that.”

“I still think it was a woman.” Brooks was cynical. “You say he never played around. Hell, what man would pass up a good-lookin’ babe? Ollie was human, wasn’t he?”

“He was also in love with his wife. The guy had ethics. He was as sincere and conscientious as anyone I ever knew.”

Al was disgusted. “Where did all that lipstick come from? Do you think he cornered some gorilla in that lot and the guy kissed him? Are you kidding?”

“You’ve judged him wrong, Al. My hunch is that was all for effect. The killer wanted us to think a woman was involved.

“Besides,” he added, “something they didn’t count on. He had a date with his wife and my girlfriend. He was to meet them at nine. Allowing time for going and coming, he wouldn’t have had much more time than to say hello and good-by.”

Al stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Have it your way, but take a tip from me and be careful. If he was working on something that was serious enough to invite killing, the same people won’t hesitate to kill again. Don’t find out too much.”

Ragan chuckled. “That doesn’t sound like you, Al. Nobody on the force stuck his neck out more than you did when you pinched Latko.”

“That’s another thing. I had him bottled up so tight he didn’t have a chance. None of his friends wanted any part of it. I had too much evidence.”

Ragan got to his feet. “What the hell? We’re cops, Al. Taking risks is expected of us.”

Al Brooks lifted a hand and walked out. Ragan looked after him. He had never liked Al Brooks, but he was one of the best men on the force. The way he had broken the Latko gang was an example. Aside from a few petty vice raids, it had been Brooks’s first job. Two months later he followed it with the arrest of Clyde Bysten, the society killer.

Stigler met him in the hall and motioned him into the office. “Joe, you knew them. How did Ollie get along with his wife?”

Ragan’s head came around sharply. “They were the most affectionate people I ever knew. They lived for each other.”

Stigler looked up from the papers on his desk. “Then how do you explain that he was shot with his own gun?”

Shock riveted Ragan to the floor. “Shot with
what
?”

“Not with his issue pistol, but another gun he kept at home. It was a .38 Smith & Wesson. We’ve found the gun, and the ballistics check. The gun is on our records as belonging to Ollie.”

“Oh, no!” Ragan’s mind refused to accept what he had heard. “Anyway,” he added, “Mary was with Angie all the time, from seven until I left them, long after midnight.”

Stigler shook his head. “No, Ragan, she wasn’t. Your loyalty does you credit, but Mary left Angie at the table to go to the powder room. She was gone so long Angie was afraid she’d gotten sick and went to the rest room. Mary wasn’t there.”

Ragan dropped into a chair. “I don’t get it, Mark, but I’d swear Mary can’t be guilty. I don’t care whose gun Ollie was shot with.”

“What are you trying to do, Joe? Find a murderer or protect Mary?”

Ragan’s face flushed. “Now see here, Mark. Ollie’s the best friend I ever had, but I’m not going to stand by and see his wife stuck for a crime she could no more commit than I could. It’s absurd. I knew them both too well.”