Behind the counter there was an old golden-oak roll-top desk, and at the desk sat a man, with a tall corroded brass spittoon leaning against his leg. He was a heavy, calm man, and he sat tilted back in his chair with large, hairless hands clasped on his stomach. He wore scuffed brown army shoes, white socks, brown wash pants held up by faded suspenders, a khaki shirt buttoned to the neck. His hair was mousy-brown except at the temples, where it was the color of dirty snow. On his left breast there was a star. He sat a little more on his left hip than on his right, because there was a brown leather hip holster inside his right hip pocket, and about a foot of .45 gun in the holster.
He had large ears, and friendly eyes, and he looked about as dangerous as a squirrel, but much less nervous. I leaned on the counter and looked at him, and he nodded at me and loosed a half-pint of brown juice into the spittoon. I lit a cigarette and looked around for some place to throw the match.
“Try the floor,” he said. “What can I do for you, son?”
I dropped the match on the floor and pointed with my chin at the map on the wall. “I was looking for a map of the district. Sometimes chambers of commerce have them to give away. But I guess you wouldn’t be the chamber of commerce.”
“We ain’t got no maps,” the man said. “We had a mess of them a couple of years back, but we run out. I was hearing that Sid Young had some down at the camera store by the post office. He’s the justice of the peace here, besides running the camera store, and he gives them out to show them whereat they can smoke and where not. We got a bad fire hazard up here. Got a good map of the district up there on the wall. Be glad to direct you any place you’d care to go. We aim to make the summer visitors to home.”
He took a slow breath and dropped another load of juice.
“What was the name?” he asked.
“Evans. Are you the law around here?”
“Yep. I’m Puma Point constable and San Berdoo deppity sheriff. What law we gotta have, me and Sid Young is it, Barron is the name. I come from L.A. Eighteen years in the fire department. I come up here quite a while back. Nice and quiet up here. You up on business?”
I didn’t think he could do it again so soon, but he did. That spittoon took an awful beating.
“Business?” I asked.
The big man took one hand off his stomach and hooked a finger inside his collar and tried to loosen it. “Business,” he said calmly. “Meaning, you got a permit for that gun, I guess?”
“Hell, does it stick out that much?”
“Depends what a man’s lookin’ for,” he said, and put his feet on the floor. “Maybe you’n’ me better get straightened out.”
He got to his feet and came over to the counter and I put my wallet on it, opened out so that he could see the photostat of the licence behind the celluloid window. I drew out the L.A. sheriff’s gun permit and laid it beside the license.
He looked them over. “I better kind of check the number,” he said.
I pulled the gun out and laid it on the counter beside his hand. He picked it up and compared the numbers. “I see you got three of them. Don’t wear them all to ones, I hope. Nice gun, son. Can’t shoot like mine, though.” He pulled his cannon off his hip and laid it on the counter. A Frontier Colt that would weigh as much as a suitcase. He balanced it, tossed it into the air and caught it spinning, then put it back on his hip. He pushed my .38 back across the counter.
“Up here on business, Mr. Evans?”
“I’m not sure. I got a call, but I haven’t made a contact yet. A confidential matter.”
He nodded. His eyes were thoughtful. They were deeper, colder, darker than they had been.
“I’m stopping at the Indian Head,” I said.
“I don’t aim to pry into your affairs, son,” he said. “We don’t have no crime here. Once in a while a fight or a drunk driver in summertime. Or maybe a couple hard-boiled kids on a motorcycle will break into a cabin just to sleep and steal food. No real crime, though. Mighty little inducement to crime in the mountains. Mountain folks are mighty peaceable.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And again, no.”
He leaned forward a little and looked into my eyes.
“Right now,” I said, ‘You’ve got a murder.”
Nothing much changed in his face. He looked me over feature by feature. He reached for his hat and put it on the back of his head.
“What was that, son?” he asked calmly.
“On the point east of the village out past the dancing pavilion. A man shot, lying behind a big fallen tree. Shot through the heart. I was down there smoking for half an hour before I noticed him.”
“Is that so?” he drawled. “Out Speaker Point, eh? Past Speaker’s Tavern. That the place?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You taken a longish while to get around to telling me, didn’t you?” The eyes were not friendly.
“I got a shock,” I said. “It took me a while to get myself straightened out.”
He nodded. “You and me will now drive out that way. In your car.”
“That won’t do any good,” I said. “The body has been moved. After I found the body I was going back to my car and a Japanese gunman popped up from behind a bush and knocked me down. A couple of men carried the body away and they went off in a boat. There’s no sign of it there at all now.”
The sheriff went over and spat in his gobboon. Then he made a small spit on the stove and waited as if for it to sizzle, but it was summer and the stove was out. He turned around and cleared his throat and said: “You’d kind of better go on home and lie down a little while, maybe.” He clenched a fist at his side. “We aim for the summer visitors to enjoy theirselves up here.” He clenched both his hands, then pushed them hard down into the shallow pockets in the front of his pants.
“Okay,” I said.
“We don’t have no Japanese gunmen up here,” the sheriff said thickly. “We are plumb out of Japanese gunmen.”
“I can see you don’t like that one,” I said. “How about this one? A man named Weber was knifed in the back at the Indian Head a while back. In my room. Somebody I didn’t see knocked me out with a brick, and while I was out this Weber was knifed. He and I had been talking together. Weber worked at the hotel. As cashier.”
“You said this happened in your room?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems like,” Barron said thoughtfully, “you could turn out to be a bad influence in this town.”
“You don’t like that one, either?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t like this one, neither. Unless, of course, you got a body to go with it.”
“I don’t have it with me,” I said, “but I can run over and get it for you.”
He reached and took hold of my arm with some of the hardest fingers I ever felt. “I’d hate for you to be in your right mind, son,” he said. “But I’ll kind of go over with you. It’s a nice night.”
“Sure,” I said, not moving. “The man I came up here to work for is called Fred Lacey. He just bought a cabin out on Ball Sage Point. The Baldwin cabin. The man I found dead on Speaker Point was named Frederick Lacey, according to the driver’s licence in his pocket. There’s a lot more to it, but you wouldn’t want to be bothered with the details, would you?”
“You and me,” the sheriff said, “will now run over to the hotel. You got a car?”
I said I had.
“That’s fine,” the sheriff said. “We won’t use it, but give me the keys.”
7
The man with the heavy, furled eyebrows and the screwed-in cigar leaned against the closed door of the room and didn’t say anything or look as if he wanted to say anything. Sheriff Barron sat straddling a straight chair and watching the doctor, whose name was Menzies, examine the body. I stood in the corner where I belonged. The doctor was an angular, bug-eyed man with a yellow face relieved by bright red patches on his cheeks. His fingers were brown with nicotine stains, and he didn’t look very clean.
&nb
sp; He puffed cigarette smoke into the dead man’s hair and rolled him around on the bed and felt him here and there. He looked as if he was trying to act as if he knew what he was doing. The knife had been pulled out of Weber’s back. It lay on the bed beside him. It was a short, wide-bladed knife of the kind that is worn in a leather scabbard attached to the belt. It had a heavy guard which would seal the wound as the blow was struck and keep blood from getting back on the handle. There was plenty of blood on the blade.
“Sears Sawbuck Hunter’s Special No. 2438,” the sheriff said, looking at it. “There’s a thousand of them around the lake. They ain’t bad and they ain’t good. What do you say, Doc?”
The doctor straightened up and took a handkerchief out. He coughed hackingly into the handkerchief, looked at it, shook his head sadly and lit another cigarette.
“About what?” he asked.
“Cause and time of death.”
“Dead very recently,” the doctor said. “Not more than two hours. There’s no beginning of rigor yet.”
“Would you say the knife killed him?”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Jim Barron.”
“There’s been cases,” the sheriff said, “where a man would be poisoned or something and they would stick a knife into him to make it look different.”
“That would be very clever,” the doctor said nastily. “You had many like that up here?”
“Only murder I had up here,” the sheriff said peacefully, “was old Dad Meacham over to the other side. Had a shack in Sheedy Canyon. Folks didn’t see him around for a while, but it was kinda cold weather and they figured he was in there with his oil stove resting up. Then when he didn’t show up they knocked and found the cabin was locked up, so they figured he had gone down for the winter. Then come a heavy snow and the roof caved in. We was over there a-trying to prop her up so he wouldn’t lose all his stuff, and, by gum, there was Dad in bed with an axe in the back of his head. Had a little gold he’d panned in summer—I guess that was what he was killed for. We never did find out who done it.”
“You want to send him down in my ambulance?” the doctor asked, pointing at the bed with his cigarette.
The sheriff shook his head. “Nope. This is a poor county, Doc. I figure he could ride cheaper than that.”
The doctor put his hat on and went to the door. The man with the eyebrows moved out of the way. The doctor opened the door. “Let me know if you want me to pay for the funeral,” he said, and went out.
“That ain’t no way to talk,” the sheriff said.
The man with the eyebrows said: “Let’s get this over with and get him out of here so I can go back to work. I got a movie outfit coming up Monday and I’ll be busy. I got to find me a new cashier, too, and that ain’t so easy.”
“Where you find Weber?” the sheriff asked. “Did he have any enemies?”
“I’d say he had at least one,” the man with the eyebrows said, “I got him through Frank Luders over at the Woodland Club. All I know about him is he knew his job and he was able to make a ten-thousand-dollar bond without no trouble. That’s all I needed to know.”
“Frank Luders,” the sheriff said. “That would be the man that’s bought in over there. I don’t think I met him. What does he do?”
“Ha, ha,” the man with the eyebrows said.
The sheriff looked at him peacefully. “Well, that ain’t the only place where they run a nice poker game, Mr. Holmes.”
Mr. Holmes looked blank. “Well, I got to go back to work,” he said. “You need any help to move him?”
“Nope. Ain’t going to move him right now. Move him before daylight. But not right now. That will be all for now, Mr. Holmes.”
The man with the eyebrows looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then reached for the doorknob.
I said: “You have a couple of German girls working here, Mr. Holmes. Who hired them?”
The man with the eyebrows dragged his cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, put it back and screwed it firmly in place. He said: “Would that be your business?”
“Their names are Anna Hoffman and Gertrude Smith, or maybe Schmidt,” I said. “They had a cabin together over at the Whitewater Cabins. They packed up and went down the hill tonight. Gertrude is the girl that took Mrs. Lacey’s shoes to the shoemaker.”
The man with the eyebrows looked at me very steadily.
I said: “When Gertrude was taking the shoes, she left them on Weber’s desk for a short time. There was five hundred dollars in one of the shoes. Mr. Lacey had put it in there for a joke, so his wife would find it.”
“First I heard of it,” the man with the eyebrows said. The sheriff didn’t say anything at all.
“The money wasn’t stolen,” I said. “The Laceys found it still in the shoe over at the shoemaker’s place.”
The man with the eyebrows said: “I’m certainly glad that got straightened out all right.” He pulled the door open and went out and shut it behind him. The sheriff didn’t say anything to stop him.
He went over into the corner of the room and spat in the wastebasket. Then he got a large khaki-colored handkerchief out and wrapped the bloodstained knife in it and slipped it down inside his belt, at the side. He went over and stood looking down at the dead man on the bed. He straightened his hat and started towards the door. He opened the door and looked back at me. “This is a little tricky,” he said. “But it probably ain’t as tricky as you would like for it to be. Let’s go over to Lacey’s place.”
I went out and he locked the door and put the key in his pocket. We went downstairs and out through the lobby and crossed the street to where a small, dusty, tan-colored sedan was parked against the fireplug. A leathery young man was at the wheel. He looked underfed and a little dirty, like most of the natives. The sheriff and I got in the back of the car. The sheriff said: “You know the Baldwin place out to the end of Ball Sage, Andy?”
“Yup.”
“We’ll go out there,” the sheriff said. “Stop a little to this side.” He looked up at the sky. “Full moon all night, tonight,” he said. “And it’s sure a dandy.”
8
The cabin on the point looked the same as when I had seen it last, The same windows were lighted, the same car stood in the open double garage, and the same wild, screaming bark burst on the night.
“What in heck’s that?” the sheriff asked as the car slowed. “Sounds like a coyote.”
“It’s half a coyote,” I said.
The leathery lad in front said over his shoulder, “You want to stop in front, Jim?”
“Drive her down a piece. Under them old pines.”
The car stopped softly in black shadow at the roadside. The sheriff and I got out. “You stay here, Andy, and don’t let nobody see you,” the sheriff said. “I got my reasons.”
We went back along the road and through the rustic gate. The barking started again. The front door opened. The sheriff went up on the steps and took his hat off.
“Mrs. Lacey? I’m Jim Barron, constable at Puma Point. This here is Mr. Evans, from Los Angeles. I guess you know him. Could we come in a minute?”
The woman looked at him with a face so completely shadowed that no expression showed on it. She turned her head a little and looked at me. She said, “Yes, come in,” in a lifeless voice.
We went in. The woman shut the door behind us. A big gray-haired man sitting in an easy chair let go of the dog he was holding on the floor and straightened up. The dog tore across the room, did a flying tackle on the sheriff’s stomach, turned in the air and was already running in circles when she hit the floor.
“Well, that’s a right nice little dog,” the sheriff said, tucking his shirt in.
The gray-haired man was smiling pleasantly. He said: “Good evening.” His white, strong teeth gleamed with friendliness.
Mrs. Lacey was still wearing the scarlet double-breasted coat and the gray slacks. Her face looked older and more drawn. She looked at the floor and said: “This is Mr. Frank Luders
from the Woodland Club. Mr. Bannon and”—she stopped and raised her eyes to look at a point over my left shoulder—’ ‘I didn’t catch the other gentleman’s name,” she said.
“Evans,” the sheriff said, and didn’t look at me at all. “And mine is Barron, not Bannon.” He nodded at Luders. I nodded at Luders. Luders smiled at both of us. He was big, meaty, powerful-looking, well kept and cheerful. He didn’t have a care in the world. Big, breezy Frank Luders, everybody’s pal.
He said: “I’ve known Fred Lacey for a long time. I just dropped by to say hello. He’s not home, so I am waiting a little while until a friend comes by in a car to pick me up.”
“Pleased to know you, Mr. Luders,” the sheriff said. “I heard you had bought in at the club. Didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you yet.”
The woman sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair. I sat down. The little dog, Shiny, jumped in my lap, washed my right ear for me, squirmed down again and went under my chair. She lay there breathing out loud and thumping the floor with her feathery tail.
The room was still for a moment. Outside the windows on the lake side there was a very faint throbbing sound. The sheriff heard it. He cocked his head slightly, but nothing changed in his face.
He said: “Mr. Evans here come to me and told me a queer story. I guess it ain’t no harm to mention it here, seeing Mr. Luders is a friend of the family.”
He looked at Mrs. Lacey and waited. She lifted her eyes slowly, but not enough to meet his. She swallowed a couple of times and nodded her head. One of her hands began to slide slowly up and down the arm of her chair, back and forth, back and forth. Luders smiled.
“I’da liked to have Mr. Lacey here,” the sheriff said. “You think he’ll be in pretty soon?”
The woman nodded again. “I suppose so,” she said in a drained voice. “He’s been gone since mid-afternoon. I don’t know where he is. I hardly think he would go down the hill without telling me, but he has had time to do that. Something might have come up.”