by Gwen Moffat
‘What has he said?’ she asked Nielsen.
‘Only that he was unarmed and the other man was dead.’
The survivor looked up at the sound of her voice. It was doubtful if he realized that there was a woman in the party until that moment.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked levelly.
‘Snyder.’
‘And the other man?’
‘Moss.’
‘Why did you come to Molten?’
His eyes wandered. His colour was not so bad as it had been but he could not control the shivering.
‘I was looking for my girl.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Sharleen. Sharleen Mullins.’
Over his head she exchanged a look with Nielsen.
‘Did you find her?’
‘She’s dead.’ His eyes held no expression.
‘How do you know that?’
‘At the gas station … woman there told me the make of car, was burned out. Missouri plates. That was her.’
‘Why did you come to Sweetwater?’
‘She said Emma was friendly with Sharleen. My girl was dead.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Woman at the gas station.’
‘And when you couldn’t find Emma?’
Snyder looked from her to Nielsen who gave a snort of disgust. ‘You’re a fool, man; you were being used in a grudge fight. You should have gone back the way you came.’
Snyder said: ‘Was that you last night?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There were other people looking for you last night,’ Miss Pink said. ‘What happened?’
He stared at her, assimilating this. ‘We thought it was—someone who had it in for us. We fired a couple of rounds. He was shouting but we couldn’t hear what he was saying in the wind and we couldn’t see nothing in the dark. It was all hell up here. You mean we could have gone back with him? Safe?’
‘He didn’t fire at you?’ she pressed.
‘No. He turned around and went back. We saw his lights fade through the snow.’ He shuddered.
‘You amaze me,’ Nielsen said: ‘interrogating a man in a state of shock.’
They were heading home from the Great Constellation, the corpse across a pack-horse, Snyder clutching the horn on a stock saddle, the Indian he had displaced on the other pack-horse.
‘He’ll survive.’ Miss Pink was grim. ‘And, ethics apart, when else would a villain tell the truth, except when he’s in shock?’
‘You think he told the truth?’
‘How do we know?’
‘What was Hammer up to? What would he have been shouting?’
‘I told you last night. Well, it was only a theory but now this Snyder virtually confirms it. Hammer was going to sell Bunny to the mob but up here, and being fired on, he decided he’d picked a bad place. The greed of the man! He drove back to Molten probably considering all the way how he might make a second approach to the Mob and without any thought of these two he was leaving to die in a stranded car.’
‘It pleases me to think of his face when he reached his cabin and found the bird had flown. Flown is the operative word. Simon should be back by now. Do you think the girl’s going to be safe?’
‘I don’t think we can do any more in that direction—except to try to keep the police off her back.’
Chapter 11
‘They hit his windshield,’ Verne Stuart said. ‘There’s splinters of glass in his cab. He wasn’t anxious to talk about it so naturally we wanted to know how it happened. He said he put a plank through it this morning.’
Miss Pink and Nielsen had ridden ahead of the party that was bringing in Snyder, and Moss’s body. At Sweetwater they found Stuart, anxious to learn the contents of the message Nielsen had refused to divulge to an underling earlier that day. He did not divulge it now, not at first, but explained the cortège winding its way across the desert and plainly visible from Sweetwater’s terrace. He told Stuart why the mobsters had come to the ranch in the first place and they agreed that Emma’s name had no significance; Bertha Fraser had plucked it out of the air.
‘She doesn’t like you,’ Stuart said. ‘None of them do. They resent radioactive waste being dumped on their doorstep—among other things.’ He had it in for Nielsen today. ‘So what was Hammer doing following Snyder and Moss all that way?’
Nielsen hesitated. Miss Pink said: ‘Bunny Kraus. He’d been keeping her at his cabin and when he heard that these two men were asking for Donna he followed them, hoping he could trade Bunny to them instead.’
‘And where is she now?’ Stuart hadn’t turned a hair, but he should have done. He was too restrained.
‘I don’t know.’
He looked at Nielsen who spread his hands and shrugged.
‘When did you see her last?’
‘I never saw her.’
Stuart looked inquiringly at Miss Pink. ‘This morning,’ she said. ‘About five thirty. I saw her off. Chadwick flew her to Denver.’
His nostrils were pinched. ‘And where did she go from Denver?’
‘I don’t know. I did my best to convince her that she must go a long way, changing planes and trains often, and not to get in touch with anyone she knew. Not only did she have the Mob after her but Hammer as well.’
‘And the police.’
Nielsen said: ‘Well, as to that, at that point we didn’t know—’
At the same time Miss Pink was asking: ‘But why should you be after Bunny?’
Stuart regarded her coldly. ‘Two murders have been committed and you find the closest associate of one of the victims and you smuggle her across the state line in a private plane and you tell her to make sure she gets lost! Who gave her the money for all these airline tickets and trains?’
‘I lent her a small sum.’
‘Lent. So she has to contact you to repay it.’ His tone indicated that no one, least of all himself, believed this.
‘Naturally.’
‘Meanwhile we’ve lost a material witness.’
‘Now just a moment,’ Nielsen put in. ‘We didn’t know until this evening that murder had been committed. If you will cast your mind back to the night you dined with us, three nights ago, you told us then that you were puzzled that the driver had appeared to take no avoiding action when the car left the road. You also said that you’d probably know a lot more when the autopsies were completed and when you had the forensic report on the car. That was the last we were told about the accident officially. Neither Miss Pink nor I, nor anyone else to our knowledge, had any definite word that the occupants of the car were murdered.’
‘Even Bunny Kraus,’ Miss Pink said, lying in her teeth, ‘doesn’t suspect foul play. She thought that Donna decided to clear out without telling her.’
‘Hammer knew. Kraus ran because it was too dangerous to stay.’
‘True: to stay with Hammer. He wasn’t just a pimp. He would have sold her to the Mob as if she’d been a dog.’ Her tone changed. ‘You’ve identified the other girl in the car?’
‘How do you know it was a girl?’
‘I assume she was killed in mistake for Bunny.’ She was bland.
He paused to consider this but his face gave little away. ‘It was Janice Fraser,’ he said. Their lack of reaction did nothing to ease the tension. ‘You knew about Janice too?’
‘It was I who advised Karen to tell her parents,’ Miss Pink admitted. ‘And then it was logical that they would inform you that Janice was missing. You identified her by her dental records?’
Stuart nodded. He seemed deflated. ‘The man she was living with has been picked up. He’s still being questioned but the feeling is that he’s clean. It’s a point in his favour that he didn’t split.’
‘And he’s known she was missing for some considerable time,’ she said. ‘Obviously he didn’t even consider that she’d met with foul play. I understand he’s a pusher? Yes, then he’d have run if he’d suspected the truth, wouldn�
�t he, even if he had nothing to do with it himself? Have you any line on where she might have been in the period between her leaving Los Angeles and when her body was found in the car?’
‘Not yet.’
There was an awkward silence until Nielsen asked: ‘How did they die?’
‘Aragon was strangled. The other body was so badly damaged that the cause of death hasn’t been ascertained. So far as Aragon was concerned, there’s a bone in the throat, the hyoid, that breaks in manual strangulation. It was broken. That part had survived—in Aragon—and the lungs. There was no soot in the lungs so she was dead before the car went over the edge. You couldn’t tell with the other one: too badly destroyed except for the skull. The skull wasn’t fractured.’
‘Where did the fire start?’ Miss Pink asked.
‘Eh? In the engine, then it spread.’
‘Why was one body burned more than the other?’
‘I’ve no idea. There are so many factors involved. Fires burn according to how much wind there is, which way it’s blowing, the distribution of fuel: not just gas but plastic, alcohol—there could have been spirits splashed on the bodies. Maybe the killer will give us the details when we get him.’
‘Them,’ Miss Pink said somnolently. She was very tired. ‘There were two cars so there had to be two people.’
‘Yes.’ Stuart sounded tired too. ‘I’d realized there were two people; not necessarily two killers, but there had to be someone to drive the second car.’ They were regarding him blankly. ‘Technically they were both killers,’ he went on, ‘so long as the second one knew about the deaths.’
‘He had to know,’ Nielsen exclaimed. ‘How could he not know?’
‘Exactly. The accessory might not have killed, but he—or she—was certainly assisting in the disposal of the bodies.’
It was very quiet when he stopped speaking. They could hear the waterfowl in the marsh. A single pronoun seemed to hang in the air between them.
‘So Bunny Kraus’s alibi for Hammer doesn’t look so good, does it?’ Stuart showed his teeth in a smile.
Nielsen looked from him to Miss Pink, angry and confused. She was watching Stuart guardedly.
‘I don’t get it,’ Nielsen said.
‘How do you see it, ma’am?’ Stuart’s respect was a travesty. He was having difficulty in concealing his disapproval but he would pick her brains all the same.
She accepted the question at face value. ‘I need some time to think about it,’ she admitted, ‘but I may have an inkling of what you have in mind: that Hammer and Bunny killed Donna and staged the accident. There are two drawbacks to that theory. The first is that, neither of them being at all bright, they wouldn’t have hung around in Molten until the police arrived, and secondly, I don’t believe for one moment that Bunny could have pulled the wool over my eyes during the time we spent together last evening. She talked a lot and I listened—carefully. I’m not saying she told me everything she knew but she certainly wasn’t telling me a pack of lies. For one thing, she was in a highly emotional state: of fear—even terror—alternating with euphoria when she realized that she really was going to get away—’
‘From the police and the investigation.’
‘She was not disguising her part in two murders,’ she maintained stubbornly. ‘She didn’t have the mental capacity. And why should Hammer murder Janice?’
‘Why should anyone?’
‘Yes.’ Her belligerence was gone. ‘There’s motive for Donna’s murder. Janice is the difficult one, unless, of course, she witnessed Donna’s death—but that—’
‘Yes, ma’am?’
She said slowly: ‘Things are beginning to fit together.’ She related Bunny’s story of her return from Hammer’s cabin in the early hours of Tuesday, and her assumption that Donna had been forced to move quickly, taking not only her own things but some of Bunny’s. ‘The girls kept their clothes in Bunny’s room,’ she said. ‘Donna’s was used for customers. I think she was surprised by someone as she finished packing her clothes, by the killer, perhaps when she opened the door to go to her own room for her toilet articles. She couldn’t have left the motel alive, or at least conscious, because someone packed the wrong toilet articles. That person thought that because Donna was packing clothes in one room, that room was hers. It implies a person who never visited them at the motel.’
‘Double bluff,’ Stuart said. ‘Kraus and Hammer dreamed it up so that it’d appear the killer was a stranger.’
‘Never!’ she exploded. ‘Neither of them had the intelligence. Even if Bunny had thought of that, continued deception would be totally beyond her. All the same,’ she went on thoughtfully, ‘Bunny’s story points to Donna having been killed at the motel.’
‘And where was her car?’
She explained how the girls had planned to leave the motel at night. ‘I think that was why Donna was packing: filling in time while she waited for Bunny to return from wherever she was. So Donna would have left the car outside town, on the Calcine side. Have you traced her movements in Calcine on Monday?’
‘She made inquiries about cars but mostly she seems to have been drinking. She wasn’t sober that evening.’
‘No. She was a strong, healthy girl. She would have put up a fight had she been sober. And there is Las Vegas at the weekend. Someone who knew her had to recognize her at some point, otherwise why did Snyder and Moss come to Molten only four days after she was in Las Vegas? Have you traced her movements there? It shouldn’t be too difficult. She won a lot of money.’
‘She didn’t win much. She stole most of it. She played for a while, gravitating towards the men who were winning. It’s an old game, old as gambling. One of ’em had around ten thousand and he was far and away the best catch. The expression is she “rolled her trick”. A girl picks an unattached man who’s carrying a lot of cash, pretends to get drunk with him, goes to his room, and, when he passes out, takes the cash and splits. It’s incredibly simple, and simple men fall for it all the time. Usually the amount stolen is only a few hundreds, and the sucker doesn’t report it. The girls pick their victims: family men who won’t want to advertise they’ve been with a prostitute, not for the sake of a few hundred. But ten grand is different, and there was nothing that guy wouldn’t do to get Donna. He was out for revenge, so he reported it.’
‘Nothing he wouldn’t do?’ Nielsen repeated hopefully.
‘He’s been traced. Monday evening he was at a small party with neighbours in Seattle a thousand miles way. He lives with his wife and family, his car didn’t leave the garage, he was at work next day. He would have fit nicely too, except he was simple. These killings are anything but simple. Janice Fraser puzzles me.’ His tone had changed. He appeared to be asking for suggestions again.
‘It’s speculation,’ Miss Pink ventured, ‘but if you preclude her being a witness to Donna’s murder—and that seems unlikely if Donna died at the motel—’
‘But the Frasers are just across the street!’ Nielsen exclaimed.
‘If Janice had been staying secretly with her parents, they would have said so when her body was identified.’ Miss Pink was addressing Stuart who shook his head. ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘Karen hadn’t seen Janice. She’s another one who would be hopeless at deception. No, Janice was not killed because she saw Donna murdered—’ She stopped. ‘That sounds very dogmatic.’ She continued slowly: ‘But she might well have seen her body. Suppose she’d come on them as they were rigging that accident below the pass … although why on earth would she be walking over the Superstitions at that time of night?’ She slumped in her chair. ‘Janice’s murder is the difficult one.’ She put a weary question to Stuart: ‘There would be no trace of the money in the wreck? Nothing left of a handbag?’
‘We found the clasp and initials. The bag must have been protected by her body. The plastic had burned, and all the contents that weren’t metallic. There were no bills, of course.’
‘A note case—billfold?’
‘No.
It doesn’t mean anything. Plastic or leather, a billfold would have burned.’
‘What were the initials you found?’
‘S.M. She’d stolen the bag too.’
‘No. Sharleen Mullins. That was her real name, or the one she used before Donna Aragon. Or so Snyder said, although you have no guarantee that he was speaking the truth, even in shock. But you might try to find out more about her under that name.’ She smothered a yawn. ‘It’s worth a try.’ She was too tired for triumph and with that parting shot she went to bed.
Chapter 12
Nielsen waved a house finch off the toast and chuckled. ‘Floundering,’ he informed his audience. ‘They don’t know where they are; one moment he was virtually begging us to solve his case for him, the next, you’d have thought he had Melinda and me lined up as the killers.’
The morning after the rescue—and Stuart’s protracted session with Miss Pink and her host—everyone assembled for breakfast on the terrace. Simon Chadwick had been awed and delighted at the recital of events which had taken place in his absence; he had scarcely returned from flying Bunny to Colorado before he was taking Moss’s body to Calcine escorted by two troopers who had come down to the ranch on Stuart’s orders.
As for his flying Bunny to Denver, he might have had a hard time of it there but Nielsen had taken full responsibility. It was his aircraft, his employee, his orders—and no one, Nielsen reiterated, knew the girl was wanted. With that support Chadwick stuck to his guns; he had taken the girl to Denver, and that was the last he saw of her.
Stuart had won a small victory. He asked Nielsen if the one-way road from Molten might be used for two-way traffic when necessary—during the present emergency, he’d added bleakly. Yesterday he’d arrived in a four-wheel-drive Ford and Nielsen knew he had intended from the start to return up the canyon whether or not permission was granted, but this was a murder case and he acquiesced, if reluctantly. ‘So now,’ he said at breakfast time, ‘we’ll have people going up and down that canyon as if it were an interstate.’
‘Only if they have four-wheel-drive,’ Chadwick pointed out. ‘Cars still have to go out by way of the desert and over Rattlesnake.’
