Just a cheap fountain pen, but through it came all the meaning of death. Joyce slumped down in the old leather chair and began to cry softly while the pen twisted foolishly between her fingers. “Joyce, honey—” Trace’s arm was about her shaking shoulders in an instant, but the impulse was a very bad guess. “Leave me alone!” she cried. “Get out of here! It’s all your fault!”
“My fault? Good lord, Joyce, what are you saying?”
“You and Francy! If my grandfather was murdered because of Francy Allen it’s your fault. You brought her back here!”
“Of course I did. She was half dead when that butcher in Red Rock got through with her. What else could I do?”
“You could have married her!”
It took a moment such as this to break through the wall of ice and reach the core of her anger. Now that it was said there were no words left between them. Trace turned on his heel and left the house as silently as he’d come, and was blocks away before he remembered what was on Joyce’s hand where she held the pen. A blue stain, a smudge just like the one the mortician had found on Francy’s fingers.
CHAPTER 12
PEACE CANYON was a world without sound. There were no trees for the winds to rustle (and seldom any wind), no highways bustling with traffic, and no living things except the little ground creatures that crawled or scampered between the rocks. The cabin to which Trace had taken Danny stood on a clearing on the canyon floor, sheltered and lonely and so weathered by time that it blended with the crusty soil like some native growth. There were two buildings actually—the cabin and a small barn, and since they were built close to the east wall of the canyon the sun was a long time reaching them.
It was the sun that awakened Danny. It must have been noon or after from the heat of it, and the cabin had become an oven while he slept. He came out of a troubled dream sweating and peeled off the leather jacket he’d been wearing all this time. Exhaustion and caution had prevented taking stock of this sanctuary earlier—lighting the lamp he’d found on the table seemed unwise—but now he could sit on the edge of the bunk and survey the entire cabin. It consisted of just one small room with a black kerosene stove and a cupboard at one end, the table and a couple of chairs in between, and an old-fashioned dresser at the far wall. It looked like an overnight stopping-place for a range rider, or maybe just a place to hole in if a fellow got fed up with people. For Danny it was just fine, and then he became aware of an uncomfortable sensation that, on closer analysis, turned out to be hunger.
The food Trace had left him was in a cardboard box on the table: a few tins, some cheese, and a canteen of water. The cheese and the water were all right, but the tins weren’t much good without a can opener, and Danny’s pockets were clean after being relieved of his possessions by the sheriff. According to Trace the cabin hadn’t been used for years, but since the furnishings were intact there was a chance a few utensils might be left in that cupboard. It was worth a look.
The very first door he tried brought a surprise. No can opener but something a lot more interesting—beer. Half a dozen cans of beer as well as a bottle of bourbon about two-thirds empty. Maybe this was a thoughtful gesture left for any wayfaring stranger, but if so the wayfarers must have been regular customers because there was no dust on the cans and no dust on the neck of the bottle. Now Danny forgot about the can opener. He ripped open the other cupboards and took stock of the contents: a couple of glasses, a few pieces of cheap china, a can of coffee, and a small slab of unsliced bacon. Even a loaf of bread that didn’t feel stale to the touch! Of course he’d heard stories, some of them pretty tall, about how long food remained fresh in the desert air, but this stuff, was a little too fresh for comfort.
A quick look about the room affirmed his fear. This cabin hadn’t sat empty all these years since Trace sold the ranch; it had been occupied and not very long ago. The lamp on the table was filled with kerosene, the wavy mirror over the dresser was free of dust and grime, and a cracked saucer on the dresser top was filled with cigarette butts of a recent vintage. What made the butts so interesting were the lipstick stains on some of them. No cowboy or bindle stiff had left those! And then Danny looked down at his feet and spied another stain even more interesting.
The curse of blood seemed to be following Danny Ross: first the old doctor’s blood that somehow got all over his hands and face, then the blood coming from that little hole in Steve Malone’s forehead, and now a wide brown stain on the bare floor boards beneath his feet. He didn’t have a doubt in the world but what it was blood. It figured, didn’t it? Everywhere he went was grief.
This had been a big grief. The first wide stain was only the beginning; beyond it he found the little stains like drops making a trail across the floor. It was an easy trail to follow once he’d found it, and it led straight to the door. Outside was a little flat roofed porch and the stains were there, too, but where they led farther was something he could not know. The floor of the canyon was a moving thing constantly shifting and sifting so that footprints or bloodstains were lost almost as soon as they were made. But from the porch Danny’s eye traveled naturally to the barn a few yards to the rear.
He didn’t want to go into the barn. He didn’t want to stumble across another corpse, but by this time he couldn’t help himself. Already his imagination was building up another crime of violence, for it was a cinch all that blood hadn’t come from a cut finger. The double doors opened easily, and for a few moments he was blinded by the sudden darkness after all that sunlight. Then the sunlight began to creep in from a hundred cracks in the siding and the roof, and to pour in from that opened door. Danny breathed easier. This time his luck had changed. This time no corpse.
No corpse, no blood, no gory weapon—“Kid, you’re getting jumpy,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice was like that of a stranger.
But that still left a brown stain on the cabin floor. He looked in the stalls—a long time empty from the looks of them—and even raised the lid on a feed bin that held nothing but about a handful of oats. No four-footed animal had left any recent trace, but the soft earthen floor showed a perfect set of tire prints—heavy-duty treads that might have come from a truck or a jeep.
Danny squatted on his heels in the dust and tried to make something of a combination like bloodstains in the cabin and tire marks in the barn, and after what he’d been through these past few days there was no limit to what could be made of it. But all the time the canyon was as peaceful as its name, and the sun beat down with warm reassurance. Broad daylight was no time for nightmares. Trace Cooper would come around in a few hours and explain the whole thing; meantime, he was supposed to stay under cover instead of going about looking for more trouble. With a whistle on his lips, forced and not too effective, Danny retraced his steps to the cabin and opened the door. It was too late then to do anything about the uninvited guest waiting for him inside.
• • •
It was a man Danny had never seen before. It was a man who looked like a boy at first sight and grew older before his eyes. He was slender and tall, with a fine high forehead crowned by a crest of blond waves, and an expression of startled bewilderment on his patrician face that was a perfect match for Danny’s sentiments. He stood beside the bunk holding Danny’s leather jacket in one hand and the sheriff’s revolver in the other.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “What are you doing in my cabin?”
The question made no more sense than the man’s presence. Danny took the cabin to be Trace’s.
“That’s my business,” he said.
“Your business? Did you ask my permission? Does anybody ever ask my permission?” The jacket was hurled to the floor in an angry gesture, but he wasn’t letting go of that gun. It looked ridiculous dangling from his long white hand. He was white all over, this man. White skin, whitish hair, white flannel trousers—like a refugee from a tennis court or a musical comedy chorus.
“I know what you come here for!” he blazed. “I won’t h
ave my cabin used for that sort of thing! I won’t have that woman coming here any more!”
Danny wanted to duck and run, but he also wanted to know what was ailing this guy. “What woman?” he asked.
“That terrible woman! She comes here all the time with her men friends. She leaves the place in a terrible mess. Look for yourself—”
“It looks all right to me,” Danny said.
“Oh, it does!” With his free hand the man reached over and ripped open the top dresser drawer. It was filled with a most amazing collection of articles for a rancher’s outpost cabin: a sheer nightgown, a negligee, a full array of feminine finery sticky with the scent of cheap perfume. “Her things, all her smelly things,” the man shouted. “Her things in every drawer!”
He seemed almost to have forgotten Danny, busy as he was scooping the unwanted articles from the dresser drawer by drawer. A filmy handkerchief landed at Danny’s feet and he stooped to pick it up. It was a cheap lace affair with a huge monogram of one letter: F.
“Francy!” Danny said.
“Then you do know her!”
“No. No, I don’t. I only heard of her.”
As mad as this guy was, Danny wanted no part of Francy Allen. In fact, he no longer wanted the cabin. “I came here alone,” he added. “I’m not staying. I’ll get out right now.”
Very gladly would he get out right now! Apparently this indignant owner didn’t read the papers or listen to the radio, because up to now he’d shown no interest in Danny’s identity. He was just a trespasser on private property.
“Wait a minute!”
So long as he held that gun anything the man said was an order. Danny waited.
“Get this stuff out of here!”
“But it’s not mine!”
“I don’t care whose it is; get it out!”
Danny had his arms full of some pretty silly articles when the man in white jerked open the bottom drawer. It stuck at first and then let go all the way, spilling both drawer and contents at his feet. Suddenly Danny was looking at a brown stain again, and this time there was no doubt about what it was. It was a black iron skillet with some blond hairs matted and stuck on the bottom, and it was a towel that had been white before it absorbed all that blood.
Gun or no gun, Danny wasn’t sticking around to be blamed for this, too. He let fly with the lingerie and was halfway across the barnyard before the shot came.
CHAPTER 13
DANNY RAN. He heard the shot but didn’t look back; every second counted now. The road was behind him—he couldn’t take that way out—but once he’d reached the far side of the barn he was at least out of the line of fire. Beyond the barn the east wall of the canyon stretched like a crooked corrugated fence, jutting out here, cutting in there, and providing plenty of boulders and ravines to use as a hiding-place. But there was no hiding-place from the sun.
The canyon floor was as hot as the basement of hell, but Danny kept on running. Who that excitable man back at the cabin might be didn’t concern him at the moment. He had the gun, Danny’s erstwhile comforter, and in another man’s hand it wasn’t at all comforting. And what was the man to think walking in on a trespasser, a gun, and the ugly evidence in that bottom drawer? The chain of circumstance was getting heavier and heavier; Danny could actually feel the drag of it, and his steps began to falter until the run became a walk and the walk became a senseless stumbling.
When the dust came up and hit him in the face, Danny rested. He listened for pursuing footsteps, but the only sound was the heavy pounding of his own heart. From his knees he turned and looked back. No sign of the cabin now. Only silence and emptiness and that terrible white fire in the sky. A man with a gun in his hand could never be such an enemy as that sun.
“Mr. Cooper!” Danny yelled. “Mr. Cooper!”
Then he clapped a hand over his mouth. It was a crazy waste of precious strength to be yelling that way. Trace Cooper wasn’t in the canyon now, and when he did return, he’d find nothing but an empty cabin. Danny could never make it back even if he knew the way.
• • •
When Trace remembered the blue smudge on Francy’s dead fingers, he went immediately to Fisher’s Mortuary. It was a routine trip; he knew without asking that the smudge was an inkstain, and that was an interesting fact, considering whose hand it was on. Fisher concurred readily.
“It was ink,” he said. “Messy stuff to get off. I had the same trouble with Charley Gaynor.”
“Charley, too?” Trace echoed. “Was there ink on Charley’s fingers?”
“That’s right, the same as Francy. Say, you know that’s peculiar.”
Trace didn’t need Fisher to tell him that. The sight of Virgil’s borrowed transportation returning to Main Street told him the coast was clear for reporting to Laurent, but he had to pass the Pioneer Hotel on the way back and the bar was open by this time. Maybe Murph could shed some light on the mystery.
Funerals made Murph thirsty. He was opening himself another bottle of beer when Trace came in, and it was only natural to suppose he’d come with a similar desire. But this time it was no sale. Murph looked hurt. “What are you trying to do,” he muttered, “put me out of business?”
“I’m in a hurry,” Trace said. “I just want to ask a few questions.”
A very few questions. The whereabouts of Francy Allen on the night before her death; the company she kept, the things she said and did.
“Are you kidding?” Murph asked. “No, guess you ain’t. I guess you weren’t in much shape to remember.”
“Remember what?”
“You and Francy right here at this bar fighting like a couple of banty roosters. I usually don’t listen in, but you were trying to get her to come back to the farm, and she was telling you to mind your own business, or something like that. Finally she went into the dining-room and sat at the table with Jim Rice and some cattleman he was entertaining.”
Trace tried to remember. He knew he’d had trouble with Francy, nothing but trouble for a long time, but when he got to drinking heavy, things had a way of blacking out.
“What did I do?” he asked.
“After I called Arthur, you went home like a good boy. At least you went out of here. Christ, Trace, but you get mean when you’re loaded!”
“And what did Francy do?”
Murph finished off the beer in one long, satisfying attack, wiped off his moist mouth, and grinned. “I never kept tabs on Francy,” he said. “That would have taken a considerable chunk out of my life.”
“You didn’t see her writing anything? You didn’t notice her using a pen?”
“Using a pen?” The way Murph looked he must have figured Trace had been out in the sun too long. “Hell,” he muttered, reaching for another beer, “I didn’t even know Francy could write!”
In his crude way Murph had summed up the situation thoroughly. Francy probably hadn’t written a letter since Trace came back from overseas, and she didn’t have a bank account to draw on or a phone number to write down for a visiting cattleman. The odds were against her using a pen at all that night, yet sometime during the night she’d been slugged or hit by a truck and left dying on the highway—only to turn up at the mortuary the next day with inkstains on her fingers. Murph wouldn’t have known the answer to that puzzler if Trace had asked him, but some of the answers Arthur might bring back from Red Rock could prove interesting. Until then there was still a little matter of consulting with Alexander Laurent.
• • •
For the second time in five years Trace went home again. He might as well admit it; that’s what the ranch would always mean—home, with a memory in every mile of the road, in every bend and every dry wash. The same lean-faced ranch hands occupied the bunkhouse, the same dark-skinned servants padded quietly in and out the kitchen; and in the high-ceilinged living-room, with its thick walls exiling the sun, the oil portrait of an ancestor with Trace Cooper’s face stared down coldly from above the mantel. With the exception of a grand piano st
anding where the spinet of Grandmother Trace had stood, the room was just as it had been in its glory. But a stranger sat in the master’s chair.
At least the stranger was gracious. A hot ride in an open jeep called for an iced drink before conversation, and not until Ramón had filled the master’s request could there be any exchange of confidences. Trace had a pair of inkstains on his mind, but Laurent had the sheriff’s visit.
“Of course, I heard of the boy’s escape yesterday on the radio,” he said, “but I never dreamed the sheriff would connect that with me. What did you tell him about our conversation?”
“Not a thing,” Trace answered. “Cooperton has a lot of ears—all big.”
“I suppose so, but it’s regrettable—the boy’s escape, I mean. If he should be caught trying to cross the border—”
“He won’t be,” Trace promised.
“Then you know where he is?”
“I do. Danny and I had an unscheduled meeting last night in the room of a brand-new corpse named Steve Malone.”
Laurent’s glass didn’t quite reach his lips. He’d heard of Malone’s death, of course, from Virgil; but that slight frown creasing his high forehead betrayed a trace of surprise.
“Danny didn’t kill Malone,” Trace added.
“Are you quite sure of that?”
“Quite sure, and for two reasons. In the first place, that gun Danny took off the sheriff hasn’t been fired; I know because it was waving under my nose most of the time we were in that room. In the second place, why should Danny kill his alibi? A dead Malone can’t back up his story of what happened to the doctor’s missing wallet.”
“The wallet—” The way Laurent quietly froze in his chair was silent testimony to his accelerated interest. “Have you found the wallet?”
It was an anticlimax to be forced to answer in the negative. Trace explained about the bank roll on Malone’s bed and the trail of ready cash he’d followed to that hotel; but Malone without the wallet didn’t prove a thing. He might have picked up that extra windfall in a crap game or rolled someone even drunker than himself. He might have collected an old debt, or any number of other absurdities that any first-rate prosecutor intent on hanging Danny Ross would not hesitate to point out. Laurent listened politely, but his mind was already racing on to other things.
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