“This is Trooper Watchman, Mr. Rand. I’m in Indian Pine right now. I’d like to come over and——”
“I’m pretty busy right now, Trooper. Can’t we make an appointment?”
“There’s a man gunning for you with a three-seventy-five magnum rifle right now, Mr. Rand. He might be focusing his crosshairs on your window while we’re talking. I’d like to come over there and make some arrangements to prevent you from getting your head blown off. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
He hung up, maliciously pleased with himself: he’d planted the seed of terror in Rand and broken the connection before Rand could think of the right questions to ask. It was going to be a bad half hour for Charlie Rand.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1.
WATCHMAN had a plan now but it was distinguished less by artfulness than by desperation and he didn’t hold out great hope for its success.
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines … The tires whimpered on the curves, the white line dash-dash-dashed under the left fender, the treetops stood aslant in marching ranks, all bent the same way by the prevailing hard winds.
He drove through a series of sharp turns toward the rim. Below him the water of a lake looked like blue cellophane and reflected the dark bellies of clouds coming in from the west. Not far beyond it a ditch skewered the road and then at the junction of the county highway with a blacktopped side road there was a mailbox for Rand Enterprises.
A Ford Pinto was coming out of Rand’s drive; there was a young woman at the wheel. She looked like someone’s secretary: she even had the white collar on her dress. She nodded to Watchman as she drove away past him.
The Volvo rattled loudly across the grated rails of the cattle-guard in the fence and Watchman put the car up the blacktop looking for signs of the ranch buildings. This was timber country but a great deal of it had been cleared; the alfalfa was growing, very deep green, and the road went up a steady slope along a dead-straight line between the fields.
The buildings had to be beyond the ridge crest ahead of him and that was a good three miles’ climb. It had cost a fortune to blacktop a private road this long.
Gusts made deep shining ripples across the fields and when he reached the top there was a wind sock standing out swollen from its pole. The plateau stretched away a mile or more in all directions and the road made a turn along the crest; the bend took him along to the west with a smooth dusty airstrip just beyond the barbwire fence that ran parallel with his route. Across the airstrip stood a big fuel tank and an open-sided hangar shading a pair of single-engine airplanes, one of which had its cowling off. A man on a stepladder was doing something with the exposed engine.
They were small old planes, both of them; the kind modern ranches use for herding and rocksalting and crop-spraying. There was probably a corporate Lear Jet for Rand’s personal use; that would be why the airstrip went on for the better part of a mile. Beyond that stood a variety of wooden corrals and a little home-rodeo arena with highschool-style bleachers along the south side where spectators wouldn’t get the sun in their faces.
There were stables and barns and the road passed between them. Watchman picked up the strong stink of horses and cattle and old straw. A row of trees screened the main buildings and then he made a last turn and the ranch was spread out in front of the Volvo and he had his look at it while he drove up to the main house.
The place had a ski-lodge flavor to it because there were four large buildings all constructed of unsplit logs. From the architecture it was evident the buildings had been here longer than Rand had but the sixty-foot swimming pool and the tennis court, green asphalt, were probably of Rand’s devising. There was an open-fronted six-car garage and the blacktop drive made an elegant circle from there past the front of the house. In the center of that circle stood a strange fountain in the guise of a somewhat misshapen nineteen-fortyish airplane standing on its tail. It was probably a sculptor’s rendition of the fighter-plane design that had begun Rand’s fortune.
A galleried wooden verandah ran the length of the front of the house. There were double doors made of hand-hewn planks four inches thick. Watchman found a push button and pressed it; within the house a bell rang.
2.
“The stupid fool needs a bib,” Charles Rand said in his muted Texas twang.
“Maybe you don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Rand. Maybe you want me to spell it out in blood.”
“I understand all right. The bastard’s chucked a hell of a big rock into the pond.”
“Maybe that’s because the water’s getting up over his head. Joe Threepersons got taken. Like a hick in a whorehouse. He wants his money back.”
His face rigid with suppressed feelings, Rand presented his back to Watchman and looked out the window, indicating he didn’t want further disputations. The window looked out into the trees and not much light filtered through. The room was big, dark-paneled, rendered gloomier by its somber velvet drapes; massive furniture was strewn around with masculine carelessness and there were antlers over the mantel.
Finally Rand said, “Don’t shit a shitter.” He turned and fixed Watchman with baggy eyes. “Legally, Trooper, you can’t even ask me if the sun’s shining. You’ve got no proof of any of these allegations.”
“We’re not in court, Mr. Rand.” Watchman tucked his chin in toward his Adam’s apple. “I’m not slinging accusations. I’m telling you what Joe believes. Whether it’s true or not, he believes you had his wife and boy killed.”
“Maybe instead of barging in here you ought to be out there stopping him before he does take a shot at somebody.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. I need your help.”
Rand inhaled to argue but then abruptly stalked toward the door. “Wait here.” He left the room and Watchman went over to the window and examined the woods outside. A dead-easy place to creep up on the house; Joe could be out there right now not more than twenty-five feet from him, unseen.
When Rand returned something was dragging down the pocket of his leather jacket. Probably a handgun. His breath was touched with whiskey. The heat wasn’t intense up here but it seemed to be getting to him; chest-hair showed through his white shirt between the lapels of the jacket and sweat pimpled his forehead. He didn’t look as urbane as he wanted to; when his eyes flicked Watchman’s they were as bright as the eyes of a nocturnal animal pinned by the beams of headlights.
“He’s a stinking ingrate,” Rand said. “It’s a tissue of lies, you can see that for yourself. Why should I kill his wife and boy?”
“He thinks you got tired of paying for their support.”
“I never paid for their support. Who told you that?” It was a question but Rand didn’t await the answer. “Three-persons, of course. I never thought he had that much imagination. But it’s pretty flimsy. You’ll never prove I paid anything for their support, because I didn’t. My records of cash flow are wide open, God knows—the Internal Revenue boys see to that.”
“Fight me tomorrow, Mr. Rand. Help me today. Help yourself, you’re the one he’s gunning for.
Rand’s indignation seemed ready to soar to its peak but he kept a flimsy rein on himself; Watchman couldn’t tell how long it would hold. “This is getting out of hand. Way out of hand.”
He went over to his desk. Picked up a letter-opener and turned it in his hands while he spoke. It was Turkish in appearance, a brass weapon with a carved handle. His voice was measured, every word dropping like a separate brick:
“All right. This goes no farther than this room. I’ll deny it if you bring it up afterward. Understood?”
“I don’t sign that kind of blank check, Mr. Rand.”
“You’re an Indian. I state it as a plain fact, I’m not trying to insult you. Your word wouldn’t stand up against mine in court. You understand?”
“I’m listening.” Watchman did understand. It didn’t matter that Watchman was a state police officer and a non-Apache; in court a good
lawyer would make him out a biased witness because of his skin and Rand was right, they’d discount his testimony.
“It’s not that I don’t sympathize with that poor stupid fool,” Rand said. “I’ve got a little company doing biological experiments. I’ve watched a time or two when they put a laboratory rat into a no-exit maze. That kind of vexation, that’s where Joe is right now. He’s no thinker, he lives from crisis to crisis, he grabs at straws and I’m the only straw he can think of. All right, I understand that, but I’m not ready to get killed on that account. I didn’t kill his wife. I’ve never killed anybody. I guess I could but I’ve never had to.”
Rand circled the desk and sat; he kept his concentration on the letter-opener, twirling it so that it shot fragments of reflected light off its blade.
“Nearly six years ago somebody walked into my foreman’s house. Took a pistol off the wall and shot him to death. You saw the house outside there, it’s the small one just this side of the fork in the driveway—over there on the far side of the fountain. I was the only one here that night. I heard the shot. By the time I got outside there was a car going away and the lights were still burning in the windows over there. I went over to see what the trouble was. I didn’t recognize anything about the car, all I could see was the taillights going away. I went in and found him dead. I have no idea to this day who killed him.
“But it put me in a bad spot. Calisher had been having an affair with my wife, the woman who was my wife then. She’s married to Dwight Kendrick now but that’s neither here nor there. The point is I believe several people knew about this affair. I’d only found out about it a day or two previously. Now my own story was damned flimsy when you come right down to it. I was the only one there that night besides Calisher himself. I had the opportunity. I had the motive—it could have been demonstrated in court that I had just learned about him screwing my wife. I probably wouldn’t have been convicted, there was no direct evidence to prove that I’d killed him—how could there be if I didn’t kill him? But I was involved at the time in several very sensitive pending mergers and takeover bids and I simply couldn’t afford to have my name linked, even remotely, with a sordid crime like that. It would have been one of those tedious cases where a rich man bought himself off in spite of his guilt, you see what I mean? Nobody would have believed in my innocence and every damn one of those deals could have fallen through, not to mention the damage those rumors would have done to all my future dealings.
“I persuaded Joe Threepersons to get me off the spot. In the privacy of this room I’m ready to admit to you that I was guilty of suborning Joe to perjury and tampering with evidence and maybe half a dozen other crimes on that level. But I didn’t force Joe to do it, there was no extortion. I offered him a deal and he took it. I knew he would; I make it a point to know the character of the people who work for me.
“Now it may well be that whoever killed Ross Calisher decided he had a reason to kill Joe’s wife and boy but I wouldn’t know anything about that. All I’m sure of is. that if he’s gunning for me he’s gunning for the wrong man.”
3.
Watchman said, “A few minutes ago you told me in no uncertain terms that you weren’t the one who was paying his family off.”
“Well I’m not exactly retracting that. Let’s just say I plead nolo contendere. Suppose we drop that. It’s just a sideshow anyway.”
“There’s another item doesn’t ring true. You’re telling me your wife was having an affair with your foreman. That’s not the way I’ve heard it.”
“Then you’ve heard it wrong. If I wasn’t in a position to know, who was?”
“Your ex-wife,” Watchman murmured. “Kendrick’s wife.”
He watched for the effect and was rewarded. Rand didn’t move at all but somehow his look became the look of a man who was holding his arm before his face.
“So it just isn’t quite good enough,” Watchman told him.
“She’s a liar,” Rand murmured, but it was without conviction. “Naturally she’d try to slander me. She hates me. I think that was what attracted her to that slime of a lawyer in the first place. It was the thing they had in common, their hate for me.”
“When did she start seeing Kendrick?”
“When?”
Watchman just waited and finally Rand shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I suppose it was around that same time.”
“Before or after the murder?”
“I didn’t find out about it until some time after the night I found Ross dead. It may have been going on for some time before that.”
“You’ve been divorced three or four times, haven’t you?”
“What of it?”
“How can you afford it? This is a community property state.”
“I learned, after the first one. They all signed quit-claims against any properties of mine. Before I married them they had to sign. Gwen came to me without much more than the clothes on her back and she left the same way. I sent her to Nevada to get the divorce. There’s no community property law up there.”
“That kind of quit-claim wouldn’t hold up in an Arizona court, would it?”
“What’s this supposed to be leading up to, Trooper?”
“I’m just wondering if maybe you weren’t alone here that night. Maybe your wife was here to.”
“She wasn’t. She was in Phoenix overnight, I believe. Or at least she said she was. She may have been, well, visiting some friend of hers.”
“Like Kendrick?”
“I doubt it but it’s possible.”
“I understand she’s not exactly a shrinking violet. She’d make a pretty tough antagonist in a fight, wouldn’t she?”
“What are you aiming at?”
“Maybe she wasn’t having an affair with Calisher. Maybe he wanted her to but she didn’t want any part of him. Maybe he tried something with her and she defended herself by shooting him. Then maybe you told her you’d cover up for it if she’d be a good girl and go away quietly and get the divorce without demanding half your belongings.”
Rand’s head tipped over a bit to one side. He smiled a little. ‘That’s pretty good. There’s no truth in it, but it’s pretty good. You want to try that one on the judge, see how he likes it?”
It was the wrong tack then. Somewhere back there Watchman had taken the right tack but he’d got away from it; he could see that in the way Rand had relaxed. It wasn’t a pose. Rand was almost anxious for him to continue along that line of reasoning and so Watchman dropped it. If push came to shove he’d find that Gwen Rand had a perfect alibi for the night of Calisher’s murder. Nothing short of that kind of insurance could make Rand this confident, not in the strained state of fear he was in right now.
He said, “Joe tells me you’ve got Harlan Natagee working for you.”
“Does he.” Rand contrived to maintain his attitude of amusement. “Now that’s pretty far out.”
“Since we’re in the privacy of this room, the way you keep pointing out, what about it?”
“What can I say? The only way Harlan Natagee would like to look at me is over the sights of a gun. He’s a rednecked tin pisspot agitator, he likes to blow things up just to hear the noise. I wouldn’t have dealings with that bastard if he was the last Indian alive. How could you trust an idiot like him? He’s most likely a little bit psychotic, you know.”
“I understand it was Harlan Natagee’s men who broke into Kendrick’s office and stole the files on the water-rights case.”
“It may well have been.”
“You’re the only one who could have benefited from the theft.”
“If that’s what you think then you don’t understand the workings of minds like Harlan Natagee’s. He’d do anything he could to discredit a lawyer, particularly a white lawyer. He wants to take it all back to the days of tomahawks and scalping knives.”
“What do you think of Kendrick? Personally.”
“I hate his guts.”
“Because he stole your own
wife from under your nose?”
“No, not really. Kendrick’s the jealous type, I’m not. He was more jealous of her than I was, even back in those days when she was still my wife. I didn’t care if she wanted to amuse herself with trash but I think it bothered Kendrick that she still had to put up the front of being my wife. He couldn’t stand that. He talked her into getting the divorce even though she’d have been a lot better off financially if she’d stayed married to me. They could have gone on having their tawdry little fling in motel rooms.”
“And that didn’t bother you?”
“I’ve got better things to do than work myself into a fury over things like that. She hadn’t been much of a wife to me and I wasn’t sorry to get rid of her but I’d have let it ride if she’d been willing. She made a pretty good hostess, she always knew which fork to use and she kept a good eye on the house staff here.”
“And you’d have settled for that?”
“Why not? Hell, a man can always hire sex by the hour. I didn’t need her for that.”
Watchman felt uncomfortable; he knew there were men like that but in his gut he didn’t understand them. What was the point in marriage if there wasn’t something more to it?
“If it wasn’t on account of your wife, why did you start hating Kendrick?”
“He’s slime.”
“You said that before.”
Rand had dropped the letter-opener. Now he picked it up again and abruptly stabbed it down into the desk top. When he removed his hand the letter-opener stood erect by itself, impaled in the wood.
Rand said almost musingly, “The son of a bitch is colorblind, did you know that? When he gets a little upset he runs red lights because he can’t remember whether it’s red on top and green on the bottom or the other way around. I saw him run over a dog in the road once and the damn dog was right in the middle of the crosswalk on the green light. You imagine how tough it must have been for that dog to learn about crosswalks and green lights? And Kendrick wiped it right out like that because the bastard couldn’t be bothered to think about whether the red light was on the top or the bottom.”
Threepersons Hunt Page 19
