Authors: Helen Nielsen
“How long was he gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” Danny admitted. “He put a coin in the jukebox and then said he didn’t like the music. The record finished playing, and I sat there a few minutes longer, maybe five altogether. This guy Rice went out, like Walter says, and then I went out. The bus was pulling up then.”
“And did the man in the raincoat get on the bus?”
“He must have. He was running for it when I started around to the doc’s car— Hell, I told all this to the sheriff last night!”
Telling the story to Trace Cooper was a lot different from telling it to the sheriff; Trace listened. He listened with his ears, with his eyes, and with the fists knotted inside his pants pockets. He wasn’t quite so tall a man as he’d seemed in the cell, but the sunlight made a torch of his bright hair, and to Danny Ross he suddenly became a guardian angel with a halo of fire on his head.
“Don’t you think you’d better check on this man, Virgil?” he said.
“I came out here to look for a wallet,” Virgil said.
“Let your deputies look for it. Who was this fellow, Walter?”
“Search me.” Walter shrugged. “Somebody from the mine crew, I suppose. I never saw him before.”
“Where was he going?”
“You’ll have to ask Viola. She talked to him, not me.”
Trace considered the matter for all of thirty seconds and then dapped Danny on the shoulder with one steady hand. “Come on, kid,” he said, “let’s see what kind of coffee they serve in this café. That place we had breakfast was strictly a dump!”
D
ANNY HAD AN ALLY
. He didn’t know why Trace Cooper was on his side; maybe he was just one of those guys who had to say no because everybody else was saying yes, but something happened inside the Mountain View café that gave him a sort of left-handed clue. It was after he’d shown Trace and the sheriff where he had sat at the counter, and where the man in the raincoat sat. It was after Viola’s surly answers that didn’t tell a thing about the stranger except that he’d come down from the mine. (Viola knew a killer when she saw one—what was the use of all this talk?) It was during the coffee and doughnuts, while the sheriff was making a phone call, that a car drove up to the pumps outside and two people came in. One Danny recognized: he was the young doctor who had visited the sheriff’s office last night. The other was a girl.
One look at the girl and Trace stopped eating; one look at Trace and the girl turned pale. She was a pretty girl, too. Old, of course—twenty-five maybe—but with a good figure and a nice, full mouth. Her sun-bleached hair was tied back with a little black ribbon, schoolgirl fashion, but it was her eyes that had time and trouble in them. Danny understood when he realized who she was. Her name was Joyce Gaynor, and her grandfather was laid out on a slab at the mortuary.
“Oh” was all the sound she made at the sight of Trace. He came to his feet, but before he could speak Dr. Glenn came between them.
“Are you following Miss Gaynor?” Glenn demanded.
It was a pretty silly question, seeing that Trace had come in first—a small matter he was quick to point out.
“And it never occurred to you that Miss Gaynor would be out to pick up her grandfather’s car!”
“Frankly, no,” Trace admitted, “but it does occur to me that she’s not going to get it without the sheriff’s permission. You can take that up with him yourself. I’m just having a cup of coffee.”
“Well, at least you’ve changed your diet!” Glenn muttered.
Danny didn’t know what this feud was all about, but wherever a female was involved he could use his imagination. Joyce Gaynor had only moved a few steps inside the door, and so far she hadn’t noticed Danny at all. She was staring at Trace, and he was staring back. They were having quite a conversation without words when the sheriff returned and broke it up.
“Well, I got the guy’s name,” he said. “Malone. Steve Malone. He quit Raney yesterday.”
Trace managed to pry his eyes away from the girl. “Quit?” he echoed.
“Quit or was fired. Raney’s out with the road crew and I talked with some punk who didn’t know much except that Malone pulled out yesterday. Must be the same fellow. He was the only one who left camp.”
“For where?”
Virgil shrugged his heavy shoulders. “You name it. Maybe Raney knows; I don’t.”
Dr. Glenn’s eyes were shining bright blue behind his glasses. “Who is Malone?” he demanded.
“The man in the raincoat,” Virgil answered.
They were going to leave it like that. Danny began to feel panicky again just when he’d started feeling good; but then Trace spoke up. “It can’t be over twenty miles to Raney’s mine,” he suggested.
“Are you suggesting that I drive up there?” Virgil asked.
“Why not? The county pays for the gas.”
“If you ask me, it’s a wild-goose chase!”
“Who is the man in the raincoat?” the young doctor pleaded, and Trace grinned at him.
“Malone,” he said. “Steve Malone— Shall we get started, Virgil?”
So they weren’t going to leave it at that after all. Danny began to relax again—he even helped himself to another doughnut—but Viola, who had been watching him like a hawk all this time, had to start yelling and throwing a shoe. “If you’re going up to that mine you take this murderer with you!” she shouted at the sheriff. “I don’t want him hanging around my place!”
“Murderer?”
It wasn’t a nice word to throw around in any company, but that girl in the doorway wasn’t exactly neutral. She moved forward quickly, her eyes round and terrible. “Is this the one?” she demanded. “Is this the hitchhiker?”
“This is Danny Ross,” Trace said. “He rode in with your grandfather.”
“And killed him!”
“Nobody knows that, Joyce. It’s just supposition.”
“I know!” Viola began, but the words were barely out when Trace’s casual manner vanished in a flood of anger. “You know nothing!” he snapped. “You know only what you want to know and unless it’s bad enough, unless it tears somebody to pieces, you’re stone deaf! That seems to be a common ailment around here, but I’m stuck with the old-fashioned idea that the accused is innocent until proven guilty—any accused.”
The words may have been for Viola, but Trace’s eyes were only for the girl. “Come, Joyce,” the young doctor said, “let’s get out of here.”
“That’s right, Joyce, listen to the doctor. It saves thinking for yourself.”
“Now just a minute, Cooper—”
“I don’t have a minute,” Trace said. “I have no more time for you than you had for Francy lying out there on the road. It’s too bad old Charley didn’t keep such strict office hours; she could have died in the dirt where she belonged.”
It was the slamming door that ended this exchange, but not before Dr. Glenn’s final shot. “At least,” he said, with a glare for Danny, “your choice of companions is consistent.”
That was Danny’s clue, and he mulled it over all the way to the mine. People were a lot like motors: the bugs always showed up in performance, and from what Danny had seen of this neighborhood it had plenty of bugs. Even the dead man, old Dr. Gaynor, had been a queer one, and that was a whole nest of crackpots he had walked in on at Mountain View. Viola had a one-track mind, exactly one track more than her husband, and Jim Rice, with that ready laugh of his, would probably be convulsed by a public hanging. As for Ada Keep, there was an item for anybody’s family album! Danny shuddered. There was only one person here he could understand and anticipate, and that one filled him with terror. He glanced at the rearview mirror and felt better at the sight of the little red jeep following behind them. For some reason the sheriff wasn’t so frightening with Trace Cooper around.
Twenty miles can be quick or twenty miles can be painful; on this road they were both. The road began to spiral upward a few miles east of Mountain View, but Virgil drove without regard for bumps, dips, or sudden curves. He drove like a man who knows what lies ahead and is grimly determined to get it over with, devil take the chuckholes. Now the valley slipped away below them, and that low swell of mountains became a wall of ragged boulders towering overhead. Danny had no idea what they might be mining up yonder, but it must be diamonds to be worth the climb.
Then suddenly the road widened and flattened out, and a cluster of tents and sheds appeared on a clearing up ahead. Virgil slackened speed and braked to a quick stop alongside a passing laborer. “Raney around?” he called. His answer was a nod and a thumb jerked toward one of the tents.
It was a lonely place they had come to. Danny remembered the way Steve Malone had paced before that jukebox, and began to understand his anxiety to get away. A worker’s camp on a mountainside would have been hell for a man like Malone, but Danny kind of liked it. These mountains now, couldn’t a man get lost in them? Couldn’t he escape the world of clocks and crisis and learn to live again? Who needed civilization, anyway? It was a lovely thought, but that gun on Virgil’s hip was no toy, and they hadn’t come so far just to admire the scenery.
“Enjoy the ride?” Trace called, as the jeep skidded to a stop beside the sheriff’s sedan. Danny grinned weakly. He already had a premonition of futility, and when the man Raney appeared (tall, of course, with bony features and faraway eyes), he didn’t have long to wait for confirmation.
“Malone? Sure, I had a man named Malone working for me, but not any more. He went down the hill yesterday— No, I don’t know where you might find him. He was no miner, just a bum I picked up in Junction City a couple of weeks ago.”
“A couple of weeks?” Trace echoed. “He must not have drawn much pay.”
“They never do. I get ‘em like that all the time, dead broke and crying for a job—any kind of a job. Two or three weeks and their throats get dry and their feet start itching. That’s the last I see of ‘em.” Raney paused and spat hard against the yellow dust at his feet. “What’s the trouble, sheriff? What’s Malone done?”
“Nothing,” Virgil said quickly, “nothing important. I just thought he might have been witness to something that happened down at Mountain View yesterday.”
“The old doctor?” Raney’s interest perked up immediately. “I heard about that. Heard you got the killer, too. Some punk kid—” Danny had remained inside the sedan, but he could hear the conversation through the open window. It was enough to make him slump down in the seat. “Sorry I can’t help you, sheriff,” Raney concluded, “but men like Malone just don’t leave forwarding addresses. He might have been heading for the coast. I heard him talking one day about all the easy money he could make just putting in time at some aircraft plant.”
• • •
So the sheriff was right after all, and it was just a wild-goose chase. Losing heart this way was even worse than what had happened to Danny the day before, because then the world crashed so suddenly that he at least had the anesthesia of shock to make it bearable. Now there was nothing—no hope and no way out. Malone was on his way to the coast, and a fat chance the sheriff was going to look for him! Even if he did, even if Malone was found, was he likely to have that two hundred dollars? Was he likely to confess just to save Danny Ross?
It was the same road going down the mountain as going up, but now it rolled too easily underneath the wheels; now it wasn’t long enough. The red jeep was still bouncing along behind, but not for long. A few miles short of the Mountain View crossing it turned south on one of the little one-track trails that laced the valley, and as it disappeared from the rearview mirror Danny’s panic returned. Even Trace Cooper had deserted him now. From here on it was just Danny looking out for himself.
T
O ANYONE KNOWING THIS COUNTRY
all the little one-track trails led somewhere, and Trace knew it like no other man. This particular trail he knew better than all the rest even though he had been avoiding it for almost five years. It was in better shape now, graded and graveled the way it would be for a man wealthy enough to keep up the old Cooper ranch. And it was still called the Cooper ranch and always would be. Laurent was a foreigner. Laurent was a man from the land of smoke and steel where the mountains have windows and self-service elevators; but the Coopers had come in covered wagons—and passed in covered coffins. The Coopers belonged.
The last of the Coopers, being a man of impulse, hadn’t given Arthur much warning of his decision. “Turn left,” he ordered, and Arthur turned left. They were a strange pair, this big Negro and the man with the flaming red hair, and it had given Cooperton a lot to talk about when Trace came back from the war with his new companion. That was just dandy with Trace. The more they talked, the better he liked it. But Arthur Jackson wasn’t a whim; he was a partner. He was an inspiration! The idea had hit Trace while he was overseas: the longing hunger to return to the soil and become the solid citizen he’d never been. But how? All Trace knew was the art of spending other people’s money and drinking anybody’s liquor. But there in his own company was a man who had learned long ago that he must fight for every inch of the way. It seemed a happy combination.
All of this ancient history passed through Trace’s mind on the road to the ranch house. They’d made a stab at it that first year, a real try; but the land is like a woman—neglect her too long and she belongs to someone else. The sale to Laurent had just covered the debts and the price of a few acres at the edge of town.
“The place looks good,” Trace said.
Arthur gave the accelerator an extra kick. “Forget about the place,” he muttered. “You’ve got a nice place of your own.”
But it did look good. The house was tucked deep within the valley where a crooked river, almost dry this late in the summer, snaked its way through an oasis of scrub foliage. At a time when architectural fashion dictated cupolas and laced balustrades, the Coopers had built low to the ground—rambling and heavy-beamed with thick walls to insulate against the sun. A flash of pink and scarlet marked the flower beds, and from his ease on the broad patio a tall man with silver hair watched the jeep race into the courtyard and stop in a cloud of dust.
“Good morning, Mr. Cooper,” he said, as Trace leaped to the ground. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Alexander Laurent was immaculately attired in a paleblue tropical worsted suit that made the blue of his eyes deep as an evening sky. The inevitable handkerchief peeked from his breast pocket, and a pastel tie was as carefully knotted as if he were on his way to court. He didn’t rise, but beckoned Trace to join him in one of the padded chairs grouped about a wrought-iron and glass table already laid for two.
“We were just about to have lunch,” he explained.
“Ramón, set another place for Mr. Cooper.”
The patio was shaded and cool. Trace glanced back to where Arthur waited in the sun-drenched jeep and then stopped the dark-skinned servant with a gesture of his hand. “No, thanks,” he said. “I can’t stay. I just dropped by to see if I heard you correctly last night. I was quite drunk at the time.”
“You heard correctly.” Laurent smiled.
“Then you’re really serious about taking this case?”
“I am serious about you taking it, Mr. Cooper. I shall, of course, offer every possible assistance.”
“Why?”
The question was out before Trace could hold his tongue. “I told you last night,” Laurent answered. “I wish to know the truth about this horrible crime. Doctor Gaynor was my friend.”
“Doctor Gaynor was everybody’s friend, but I wouldn’t say he was yours in particular.”
From inside the house came the sound of music, a piano being played with the sensitive fingers of a master. Laurent raised his head and gazed across the valley. The noonday heat shimmered like a silver curtain between the ranch and the mountains, and no wind stirred.
“Let’s put it another way then,” he said. “Let’s say that life gets dull without challenge. Danny Ross is a challenge. Is he guilty, or is he innocent? The mob says guilty, and so I must say innocent. That’s the story of my life, Mr. Cooper. Does it answer your question?”
“One of them,” Trace admitted, “but it only makes the other more difficult. What I’ve been wondering for the past five years is why a man retires at the peak of his career. Why he leaves the world he’s brought to heel and buries himself—”
“—in this beautiful, peaceful valley,” Laurent finished. “I’m an old man, Mr. Cooper.”
“Sixty-one. Fifty-six when you quit your practice.”
“You seem to know a great deal about me.”
Trace pulled up just in time. Every man has to believe in something, and a much younger Trace Cooper had believed in Alexander Laurent and followed his career like some bobby-soxer with a fan magazine. As foolish, too. The Coopers were practical people; when they studied law it was to use it for their own advantage.
“I went to law school,” he reminded. “Any law student knows a great deal about Alexander Laurent.”
“And now we are working together. I’m flattered, Mr. Cooper, but please tell me what you’ve learned. I doubt that you came here for the ride.”
Trace leaned back and relaxed. Never mind the personal equations; the problem was Danny Ross. “You aroused my curiosity last night,” he began. “After you left, I heaved a bottle at the mirror over the bar. Ross couldn’t be incommunicado with me installed in the adjoining cell.”
“Ingenious,” Laurent murmured.
“Not at all. I’ve broken about six of those mirrors already; the result is always the same. This morning I had a talk with Danny.”
“Did you come to any conclusions?”
“I never come to conclusions—that’s the story of my life—but I did learn one thing that seems important: Danny doesn’t have Charley Gaynor’s wallet. He has two hundred dollars he insists are his, but the wallet is missing. The sheriff thinks Danny threw it away and has a couple of men searching the grounds at Mountain View right now.”
The music from inside the house was getting louder. Trace had to raise his voice to go on.
“I don’t think they’re going to find it. I watched Danny when the search was getting started. If anyone had come close, come anywhere near where he’d thrown the thing, he would have shown some anxiety. The kid’s just too scared to put up a front.”
“Then I take it that he betrayed no unusual emotion.”
“That’s right. He just kept insisting the wallet was lifted by a man in the café who was waiting for the bus to Junction City.”
Like Danny Ross, Laurent had betrayed no unusual emotion up to this point. Now he leaned forward, tense and alert. “And was there such a man?” he asked.
“There was,” Trace said. “A man named Steve Malone.”
He had to relate the whole story then: Danny’s version of Malone’s behavior in the café, the way he’d met him running for the bus, and finally the discouraging results of that trip to the mine. It was the tale of a rolling stone, a little man in a raincoat whose destination was always unknown but might be the west coast. “That covers a lot of territory,” he conceded, “but the sheriff will get out a ‘man wanted’ on him. He may not want to, but it’s his duty and Virgil’s a stickler for duty. Of course, that may take time.”
“During which Malone could easily spend the evidence,” Laurent added.
“But he would still have the doctor’s wallet.”
“Possibly.” Laurent leaned back in his chair again, but his eyes were busy. “Then I assume you intend to sit tight until the sheriff brings in Malone,” he said. “An easy way, Mr. Cooper, but hardly practical. Suppose the man is found and questioned. What’s to stop him from turning state’s evidence against Danny Ross in order to save his own skin? After all, there’s a great deal of difference between the penalty for theft and the penalty for murder. No, I’m afraid Malone isn’t going to be very helpful to Danny unless we find him first.”
It was Trace’s turn to crowd the edge of his chair now. “But how?” he demanded, and Laurent smiled. “Imagination, Mr. Cooper, imagination,” he said. “As you were telling me about Malone just now I received the distinct impression that I’d come across his type before—restless, unreliable, fond of easy money and a good time. Now let’s assume that Danny Ross is innocent and that our Mr. Malone did kill the doctor and take his wallet. What did he do then?”
“Caught the bus for Junction City,” Trace said.
“And when would that bus have reached its destination?”
“About six-thirty.”
“At the end of the day,” Laurent mused, “and our Mr. Malone had been living in a camp on the side of a mountain for several weeks. Now he has money in his pockets; now he’s not on that mountainside. I put it to you, Mr. Cooper, do you really think it likely that he boarded the first bus going west?”
“He was running away,” Trace reminded.
“But it’s so easy to find a man when he’s running. He boards a bus and there he is, all locked in and ready for that policeman waiting at the end of the line. But if he holes in somewhere—”
It was the crash of battered notes from the piano that broke into Laurent’s conjecture. He smiled and nodded to the silent servant near by. “You may start serving now, Ramón,” he directed. “It seems that Douglas has concluded his practicing. I don’t believe you have met my son, Mr. Cooper—”
At first Trace thought it was a boy who came through the doorway onto the patio. He was slender, lithe, and casually dressed in white slacks and a knitted sport shirt. Just a boy, fair and delicately handsome; but as he came closer the years crept into his face until they were gathered almost forty in number. Douglas Laurent, the only child of an illustrious father.
“Come sit down, Douglas,” Laurent urged. “This is Mr. Cooper, the gentleman from whom I purchased the ranch.”
“It’s hot,” Douglas said, with a brief nod toward Trace. “I simply can’t work when it’s hot.”
“Douglas is writing a concerto,” the elder Laurent explained. “It’s quite an undertaking.”
“It’s impossible!” Douglas snapped. “This weather, this country, this house!”
“What’s wrong with the house?” Trace demanded.
“It’s cavernous! The acoustics are terrible! This time of year back home—” Douglas’s face grew radiant with remembrance, “—this time of year we would go to the lake house. It was small and quiet, and I had a little studio of my own over the barn. But what’s the use of talking about it? Father likes it here.”
“I used to have a cabin—you might call it a cottage—at the rim of Peace Canyon,” Trace recalled. “It might make a fair studio.”
“Peace Canyon? Is that what you call it?”
“Then you know the place?”
Expressions chased across Douglas’s handsome face like clouds and sunlight playing tag in a troubled sky. Now he was gay, now grave. “I know the place,” he murmured. “It’s horrible!”
“Douglas—”
Laurent must have gauged the irritation mounting in Trace’s reddening face. His voice was like a whip, and then it became a caress. “Ramón is waiting to serve the salad,” he said. “Can’t we change your mind about lunch, Mr. Cooper?”
“I’m afraid not,” Trace said. “It’s over a hundred miles to Junction City. If I’m going to play bloodhound, I’d better get started.”
“A little man in a raincoat, a canvas hat, and carrying a Gladstone bag,” Laurent murmured, repeating the description Trace had given in his story. “I don’t envy you your task, Mr. Cooper, but let me know how you come out.”
• • •
It must be true that nothing is really appreciated until it is lost; something had to account for the resentment Trace felt at Douglas Laurent’s criticism of the ranch. But in that case, he reflected, he should be feeling awfully appreciative these days because losing things was fast becoming his only talent. And so now T. Cooper, the great loser, was setting out to find something—a man.
“I wonder where I would be if I were Steve Malone,” he mused, as Arthur headed the jeep back toward Mountain View.
Arthur grinned. “At a bar,” he suggested.
“Now wait a minute, I said if I were Malone—” Trace paused and reflected a moment. “Say, you might have something there! I’ll cover every bar in Junction City.”
“In that case I’d better come along.” Arthur sighed. “Somebody’s got to cover you.”
Arthur’s concern was understandable, but Trace, oddly enough, didn’t feel a bit thirsty. What he did feel was more like excitement. “Life gets dull without challenge,” Laurent had said. “The mob says guilty, and so I must say innocent.” But Trace knew it was more than that. He remembered Danny, the skinny legs in the tight Levi’s, the close-cropped hair, the scared face. Danny Ross was all the people in the world who were strangers on earth, and for that reason he could be no stranger to Trace.
“I want to stop off and see the kid before we go on to Junction City,” he said. “I want to let him know Laurent’s in his corner.”
But they were going to stop sooner than that. They were going to stop rather abruptly about ten miles beyond the ranch turnoff when a frantic, wild-eyed Virgil Keep suddenly appeared on the road ahead waving both arms like a windmill gone crazy.
“Where the hell have you been?” he yelled. “Why couldn’t you be around when you’re needed?”
The sheriff was alone; no Danny, no sedan. But he did have an ugly bruise on the side of his head.
“He tricked me!” Virgil roared. “He pulled the keys to stop the car and slugged me with my own gun. I knew that goddamed kid was a killer!”