“Seems like something did,” the sheriff said. “Seems like Mr. Lacey wrote a letter to Mr. Evans, asking him to come up here quickly. Mr. Evans is a detective from L.A.”
The woman moved restlessly. “A detective?” she breathed. Luders said brightly: “Now why in the world would Fred do that?”
“On account of some money that was hid in a shoe,” the sheriff said.
Luders raised his eyebrows and looked at Mrs. Lacey. Mrs. Lacey moved her lips together and then said very shortly: “But we got that back, Mr. Bannon. Fred was having a joke. He won a little money at the races and hid it in one of my shoes. He meant it for a surprise. I sent the shoe out to be repaired with the money still in it, but the money was still in it when we went over to the shoemaker’s place.”
‘Barron is the name, not Bannon,” the sheriff said. “So you got your money back all intact, Mrs. Lacey?”
“Why—of course. Of course, we thought at first, it being a hotel and one of the maids having taken the shoe—well, I don’t know just what we thought, but it was a silly place to hide money—but we got it back, every cent of it.”
“And it was the same money?” I said, beginning to get the idea and not liking it.
She didn’t quite look at me. “Why, of course. Why not?”
“That ain’t the way I heard it from Mr. Evans,” the sheriff said peacefully, and folded his hands across his stomach. “There was a slight difference, seems like, in the way you told it to Evans.”
Luders leaned forward suddenly in his chair, but his smile stayed put. I didn’t even get tight. The woman made a vague gesture and her hand kept moving on the chair arm. “I…told it…told what to Mr. Evans?”
The sheriff turned his head very slowly and gave me a straight, hard stare. He turned his head back. One hand patted the other on his stomach.
“I understand Mr. Evans was over here earlier in the evening and you told him about it, Mrs. Lacey. About the money being changed?”
“Changed?” Her voice had a curiously hollow sound. “Mr. Evans told you he was here earlier in the evening? I…I never saw Mr. Evans before in my life.”
I didn’t even bother to look at her. Luders was my man. I looked at Luders. It got me what the nickel gets you from the slot machine. He chuckled and put a fresh match to his cigar.
The sheriff closed his eyes. His face had a sort of sad expression. The dog came out from under my chair and stood in the middle of the room looking at Luders. Then she went over in the corner and slid under the fringe of a daybed cover. A snuffling sound came from her a moment, then silence.
“Hum, hum, dummy,” the sheriff said, talking to himself. “I ain’t really equipped to handle this sort of a deal. I don’t have the experience. We don’t have no fast work like that up here. No crime at all in the mountains. Hardly.” He made a wry face.
He opened his eyes. “How much money was that in the shoe, Mrs. Lacey?”
“Five hundred dollars.” Her voice was hushed.
“Where at is this money, Mrs. Lacey?”
“I suppose Fred has it.”
“I thought he was goin’ to give it to you, Mrs. Lacey.”
“He was,” she said sharply. ‘He is. But I don’t need it at the moment. Not up here. He’ll probably give me a check later on.”
“Would he have it in his pocket or would it be in the cabin here, Mrs. Lacey?”
She shook her head. “In his pocket, probably. I don’t know. Do you want to search the cabin?”
The sheriff shrugged his fat shoulders. “Why, no, I guess not, Mrs. Lacey. It wouldn’t do me no good if I found it especially if it wasn’t changed.”
Luders said: “Just how do you mean changed, Mr. Barron?”
“Changed for counterfeit money,” the sheriff said.
Luders laughed quietly. “That’s really amusing, don’t you think? Counterfeit money at Puma Point? There’s no opportunity for that sort of thing up here, is there?”
The sheriff nodded at him sadly. “Don’t sound reasonable, does it?”
Luders said: “And your only source of information on the point is Mr. Evans here—who claims to be a detective? A private detective, no doubt?”
“I thought of that,” the sheriff said.
Luders leaned forward a little more. “Have you any knowledge other than Mr. Evans’ statement that Fred Lacey sent for him?”
“He’d have to know something to come up here, wouldn’t he?” the sheriff said in a worried voice. “And he knew about that money in Mrs. Lacey’s slipper.”
“I was just asking a question,” Luders said softly.
The sheriff swung around on me. I was already wearing my frozen smile. Since the incident in the hotel I hadn’t looked for Lacey’s letter. I knew I wouldn’t have to look, now.
“You got a letter from Lacey?” he asked me in a hard voice.
I lifted my hand towards my inside breast pocket. Barron threw his right hand down and up. When it came up it held the Frontier Colt. “I’ll take that gun of yours first,” he said between his teeth. He stood up.
I pulled my coat open and held it open. He leaned down over me and jerked the automatic from the holster. He looked at it sourly a moment and dropped it into his left hip pocket. He sat down again. “Now look,” he said easily.
Luders watched me with bland interest. Mrs. Lacey put her hands together and squeezed them hard and stared at the floor between her shoes.
I took the stuff out of my breast pocket. A couple of letters, some plain cards for casual notes, a packet of pipe cleaners, a spare handkerchief. Neither of the letters was the one. I put the stuff back and got a cigarette out and put it between my lips. I struck the match and held the flame to the tobacco. Nonchalant.
“You win,” I said, smiling. “Both of you.”
There was a slow flush on Barron’s face and his eyes glittered. His lips twitched as he turned away from me.
“Why not,” Luders asked gently, “see also if he really is a detective?”
Barron barely glanced at him. “The small things don’t bother me,” he said. “Right now I’m investigatin’ a murder.”
He didn’t seem to be looking at either Luders or Mrs. Lacey. He seemed to be looking at a corner of the ceiling. Mrs. Lacey shook, and her hands tightened so that the knuckles gleamed hard and shiny and white in the lamplight. Her mouth opened very slowly, and her eyes turned up in her head. A dry sob half died in her throat.
Luders took the cigar out of his mouth and laid it carefully in the brass dip on the smoking stand beside him. He stopped smiling. His mouth was grim. He said nothing.
It was beautifully timed. Barron gave them all they needed for the reaction and not a second for a comeback. He said, in the same almost indifferent voice: “A man named Weber, cashier in the Indian Head Hotel. He was knifed in Evans’ room. Evans was there, but he was knocked out before it happened, so he is one of them boys we hear so much about and don’t often meet—the boys that get there first.”
“Not me,” I said. “They bring their murders and drop them right at my feet.”
The woman’s head jerked. Then she looked up, and for the first time she looked straight at me. There was a queer light in her eyes, shining far back, remote and miserable.
Barron stood up slowly. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I don’t get it at all. But I guess I ain’t making any mistake in takin’ this feller in.” He turned to me. “Don’t run too fast, not at first, bud. I always give a man forty yards.”
I didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything.
Barron said slowly: “I’ll have to ask you to wait here till I come back, Mr. Luders. If your friend comes for you, you could let him go on. I’d be glad to drive you back to the club later.”
Luders nodded. Barron looked at a clock on the mantel. It was a quarter to twelve. “Kinda late for a old fuddy-duddy like me. You think Mr. Lacey will be home pretty soon, ma’am?”
“I…I hope so,” she said, and made a gesture th
at meant nothing unless it meant hopelessness.
Barron moved over to open the door. He jerked his chin at me. I went out on the porch. The little dog came halfway out from under the couch and made a whining sound. Barron looked down at her.
“That sure is a nice little dog,” he said. “I heard she was half coyote. What did you say the other half was?”
“We don’t know,” Mrs. Lacey murmured.
“Kind of like this case I’m working on,” Barron said, and came out on to the porch after me.
9
We walked down the road without speaking and came to the car. Andy was leaning back in the corner, a dead half cigarette between his lips.
We got into the car. “Drive down a piece, about two hundred yards,” Barron said. “Make plenty of noise.”
Andy started the car, raced the motor, clashed the gears, and the car slid down through the moonlight and around a curve of the road and up a moonlit hill sparred with the shadows of tree trunks.
“Turn her at the top and coast back, but not close,” Barron said. “Stay out of sight of that cabin. Turn your lights off before you turn.”
“Yup,” Andy said.
He turned the car just short of the top, going around a tree to do it. He cut the lights off and started back down the little hill, then killed the motor. Just beyond the bottom of the slope there was a heavy clump of manzanita, almost as tall as ironwood. The car stopped there. Andy pulled the brake back very slowly to smooth out the noise of the ratchet.
Barron leaned forward over the back seat. “We’re goin’ across the road and get near the water,” he said. “I don’t want no noise and nobody walkin’ in no moonlight.”
Andy said: “Yup.”
We got out. We walked carefully on the dirt of the road, then on the pine needles. We filtered through the trees, behind fallen logs, until the water was down below where we stood. Barron sat down on the ground and then lay down. Andy and I did the same. Barron put his face close to Andy.
“Hear anything?”
Andy said: “Eight cylinders, kinda rough.”
I listened. I could tell myself I heard it, but I couldn’t be sure. Barron nodded in the dark. “Watch the lights in the cabin,” he whispered.
We watched. Five minutes passed, or enough time to seem like five minutes. The lights in the cabin didn’t change. Then there was a remote, half-imagined sound of a door closing. There were shoes on wooden steps.
“Smart. They left the light on,” Barron said in Andy’s ear. We waited another short minute. The idling motor burst into a roar of throbbing sound, a stuttering, confused racket, with a sort of hop, skip and jump in it. The sound sank to a heavy purring roar and then quickly began to fade. A dark shape slid out on the moonlit water, curved with a beautiful line of froth and swept past the point out of sight.
Barron got a plug of tobacco out and bit. He chewed comfortably and spat four feet beyond his feet. Then he got up on his feet and dusted off the pine needles. Andy and I got up.
“Man ain’t got good sense chewin’ tobacco these days,” he said. “Things ain’t fixed for him. I near went to sleep back there in the cabin.” He lifted the Colt he was still holding in his left hand, changed hands and packed the gun away on his hip.
“Well?” he said, looking at Andy.
“Ted Rooney’s boat,” Andy said. “She’s got two sticky valves and a big crack in the muffler. You hear it best when you throttle her up, like they did just before they started.”
It was a lot of words for Andy, but the sheriff liked them.
“Couldn’t be wrong, Andy? Lots of boats get sticky valves.” Andy said: “What the hell you ask me for?” in a nasty voice.
“Okay, Andy, don’t get sore.”
Andy grunted. We crossed the road and got into the car again. Andy started it up, backed and turn and said: “Lights?”
Barron nodded. Andy put the lights on. “Where to now?”
“Ted Rooney’s place,” Barron said peacefully. “And make it fast. We got ten miles to there.”
“Can’t make it in less’n twenty minutes,” Andy said sourly. “Got to go through the Point.”
The car hit the paved lake road and started back past the dark boys’ camp and the other camps, and turned left on the highway. Barron didn’t speak until we were beyond the village and the road out to Speaker Point. The dance band was still going strong in the pavilion.
“I fool you any?” he asked me then.
“Enough.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“The job was perfect,” I said, “but I don’t suppose you fooled Luders.”
“That lady was mighty uncomfortable,” Barron said. “That Luders is a good man. Hard, quiet, full of eyesight. But I fooled him some. He made mistakes.”
“I can think of a couple,” I said. “One was being there at all. Another was telling us a friend was coming to pick him up, to explain why he had no car. It didn’t need explaining. There was a car in the garage, but you didn’t know whose car it was. Another was keeping that boat idling.”
“That wasn’t no mistake,” Andy said from the front seat. “Not if you ever tried to start her up cold.”
Barron said: “You don’t leave your car in the garage when you come callin’ up here. Ain’t no moisture to hurt it. The boat could have been anybody’s boat. A couple of young folks could have been in it getting acquainted. I ain’t got anything on him, anyways, so far as he knows. He just worked too hard tryin’ to head me off.”
He spat out of the car. I heard it smack the rear fender like a wet rag. The car swept through the moonlit night, around curves, up and down hills, through fairly thick pines and along open flats where cattle lay.
I said: “He knew I didn’t have the letter Lacey wrote me. Because he took it away from me himself, up in my room at the hotel. It was Luders that knocked me out and knifed Weber. Luders knows that Lacey is dead, even if he didn’t kill him. That’s what he’s got on Mrs. Lacey. She thinks her husband is alive and that Luders has him.”
“You make this Luders out a pretty bad guy,” Barron said calmly. “Why would Luders knife Weber?”
“Because Weber started all the trouble. This is an organization. Its object is to unload some very good counterfeit ten-dollar bills, a great many of them. You don’t advance the cause by unloading them in five-hundred-dollar lots, all brand-new, in circumstances that would make anybody suspicious, would make a much less careful man than Fred Lacey suspicious.”
“You’re doing some nice guessin’, son,” the sheriff said, grabbing the door handle as we took a fast turn, “but the neighbors ain’t watchin’ you. I got to be more careful. I’m in my own back yard. Puma Lake don’t strike me as a very good place to go into the counterfeit money business.”
“Okay,” I said.
“On the other hand, if Luders is the man I want, he might be kind of hard to catch. There’s three roads out of the valley, and there’s half a dozen planes down to the east end of the Woodland Club golf course. Always is in summer.”
“You don’t seem to be doing very much worrying about it,” I said.
“A mountain sheriff don’t have to worry a lot,” Barron said calmly. “Nobody expects him to have any brains. Especially guys like Mr. Luders don’t.”
10
The boat lay in the water at the end of a short painter, moving as boats move even in the stillest water. A canvas tarpaulin covered most of it and was tied down here and there, but not everywhere it should have been tied. Behind the short rickety pier a road twisted back through juniper trees to the highway. There was a camp off to one side, with a miniature white lighthouse for its trademark. A sound of dance music came from one of the cabins, but most of the camp had gone to bed.
We came down there walking, leaving the car on the shoulder of the highway. Barron had a big flash in his hand and kept throwing it this way and that, snapping it on and off. When we came to the edge of the water and the end of the road to the pi
er, he put his flashlight on the road and studied it carefully. There were fresh-looking tire tracks.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
“Looks like tire tracks,” I said.
“What do you think, Andy?” Barron said. “This man is cute, but he don’t give me no ideas.”
Andy bent over and studied the tracks. “New tires and big ones,” he said, and walked towards the pier. He stooped down again and pointed. The sheriff threw the light where he pointed. “Yup, turned around here,” Andy said. “So what? The place is full of new cars right now. Come October and they’d mean something. Folks that live up here buy one tire at a time, and cheap ones, at that. These here are heavy-duty all-weather treads.”
“Might see about the boat,” the sheriff said.
“What about it?”
“Might see if it was used recent,” Barron said.
“Hell,” Andy said, “we know it was used recent, don’t we?”
“Always supposin’ you guessed right,” Barron said mildly.
Andy looked at him in silence for a moment. Then he spat on the ground and started back to where we had left the car. When he had gone a dozen feet he said over his shoulder: “I wasn’t guessin’.” He turned his head again and went on, plowing through the trees.
“Kind of touchy,” Barron said. “But a good man.” He went down on the boat landing and bent over it, passing his hand along the forward part of the side, below the tarpaulin. He came back slowly and nodded. “Andy’s right. Always is, durn him. What kind of tires would you say those marks were, Mr. Evans? They tell you anything?”
“Cadillac V-12,” I said. “A club coupe with red leather seats and two suitcases in the back. The clock on the dash is twelve and one-half minutes slow.”
He stood there, thinking about it. Then he nodded his big head. He sighed. “Well, I hope it makes money for you,” he said, and turned away.
We went back to the car. Andy was in the front seat behind the wheel again. He had a cigarette going. He looked straight ahead of him through the dusty windshield.