Date for Murder

DATE FOR MURDER

by LOUIS TRIMBLE

Author of “Tragedy in Turquoise” and “Fit to Kill”

A cool, slim, beautiful girl drove up to Mark Warren’s service station in the California desert and asked to have her gas tank filled so she might continue on her flight from some men who insisted on shooting at her. Intrigued, Mark, an ex-newspaper reporter who had gone West for his health, followed the girl to a luxurious date ranch.

Murder followed Mark, who set out to discover; Why had James Link’s body been dragged to the swimming pool after he had been poisoned in his room? Where were the missing dates? And what did the burial of the yellow canary have to do with the crime?

O
UTSIDE
Mark Warren’s Service Station there was a moment of total silence. No trucks rumbled along the broad highway, no passenger cars whined by in their frenzied hurry to get out of the desert before sun-up, no trains thundered along the tracks directly behind the station. It was as if the world had paused before bursting again into its worship of noise and violence.

Mark Warren was on duty, stretched breathlessly on a cot in the station office. He philosophized idly on the lack of noise. It was so quiet the sounds of insects beating themselves into insensibility against the bars of fluorescent lights hanging from the canopy outside were audible. Subconsciously he noted that even the usual clatter of dishes from Babe’s Restaurant a hundred yards to the west was stilled.

Mark expected something to happen. Something did.

The silence ended in a scream of braked tires, followed by the rhythmic drumming of gravel beneath fenders as a car came from nowhere to burst into his station.

Mark rose less slothfully than usual. He was glad of this break in the monotory. He ambled through the door, closing it quickly behind him to keep out the myriads of bugs that clung to the face of the glass, and crossed the cement island on which his three gasoline pumps rested. The car, he noted with casual interest, was a low slung convertible coupé, maroon with a black top. It was a handsome and expensive piece of machinery. When he saw the driver Mark decided the car was very fitting.

The girl behind the wheel was expensive and handsome, too. In spite of the odd coloring given everything by the flourescent lights, Mark saw she was very attractive. He took her in appreciatively. She wore a pale green slack suit of a light, clinging material. Her breasts punched tautly against the heat-dampened front of her shirt and the trousers had molded themselves along the portions of her thighs that he could see. She was young, not over twenty-one, and the green and white bandana which held back her warm black hair gave her an even younger appearance.

“Will I do?” the girl asked. She no longer seemed to be in a hurry.

Mark let a grin sprawl over his sun-weathered features. She was like a breath of cool, sweet air, he thought.

“Sorry,” he said. “Fill her up?”

“No sales psychology,” she laughed. She opened the door and stepped onto the driveway. He noted she was exquisitely tiny, and her figure was apparently without a flaw. She smiled as she caught his admiring stare, and then her eyes met his fully. They were incredibly black and lovely; they held none of the laughter that was on her lips.

“I think I lost them,” she said in an oddly brittle voice. “But I’m not sure. Two gallons, please.”

Automatically, Mark ambled to the rear of the car and unscrewed the gas cap. Gasoline gurgled onto the bottom of an empty tank. He said, “You’re about out,” as automatically as he had taken the hose and fitted the nozzle into the mouth of the tank.

“I know,” the girl answered. He could feel her looking at him, but he did not take his eyes away from the gauge on the front of the pump.

“I won’t be needing any more than that,” she added suddenly. He was nice-looking, she thought. An oldish face for a man so young. She knew he was young; it was all so plain in his grey eyes and in the way his tangled yellow hair fell over his forehead. Not over twenty-five probably. He was tall, too, and well muscled. Dark for a blond, dark and lean and weathered, the heat having dried the moisture from him. But she sensed vitality beneath his lackadaisical movements. She could feel it. He might be fun to play with if she had time. His kind were not usually overly bright. They stammered and stuttered and finally managed to gulp a few phrases before they swallowed the rest. Yes, he might be fun—if she got away from them.

“The oil all right? The water?” His deliberate, cultivated drawl broke into her moment of peaceful contemplation, and she hated him for an instant.

“Fine,” she said shortly. She drew a change purse from her shirt pocket and gave him fifty cents.

He brought two dimes and dropped them into her palm. He spoke spontaneously as if he had not spent the last few moments trying to decide if he should comment on her cryptic phrase.

“You said you lost someone. Are you being chased? If I can help—”

“No thank you,” she interrupted. She smiled a little too brightly. “It was nothing, really. I lost them at the Palm Springs turn-off coming from Los Angeles. I was sandwiched between two trucks along with another convertible. They had been following me all the way from Riverside. The other convertible swung onto the Palm Springs road, and I did too. I cut my lights and swung onto the desert, and they got mixed up by the trucks and followed the other car. They got quite close; I heard them shooting.”

Mark was not taken in by her casual tone. He could see a tiny knot of fear pulsing in the chords of her throat and glowing in the depths of her eyes.

“Shooting—at you?”

She touched the top of the convertible where a small round hole had punctured the canvas. “They thought they were,” she said. “They did rather well this side of Banning. But I can do a hundred in this. They didn’t have a chance once the trucks thinned out.”

Suddenly she stopped talking and the brightness left her. She put one hand toward him. “Hear them?”

He listened, and over the night sounds came the deep-throated roar of a muffled exhaust.

“They’re coming off the Indio-Palm Springs, highway,” he said. “If you want me to, I can—”

She didn’t wait for him to tell her what he could do. She said, “No, thank you. If I don’t make it, I’m Idell Manders.” She jumped into the car, stabbed one foot on the starter and roared off almost instantly. His last glimpse was a gay flip of her hand. Spinning gravel peppered him viciously as her tires bit deep.

“I’ll be damned,” he marvelled. He stood and stared after her receding tail light, rubbing one ear where a stone had raised a welt. “Idell Manders! So that’s who’s taking over Manders’ Date Ranch. The old Major didn’t do himself so bad in the line of a daughter.”

He watched the red lights set into her fenders grow more dim, and wondered why, if she were going to the Date Ranch, she had not turned three hundred yards east.

The road to the ranch reached the highway there, crossing the railroad tracks and coming in at right angles to U. S. 99. It was a dirt road, and bumpy, but it was only a short half mile to the safety of her house. He thought of calling the police, but hesitated.

After all, she might be making a sucker out of him. These bright, wealthy women did that, but usually in the winter season. It was fun to let them string him along, let them think he was all kinds of a country jake. It made running the station a little easier somehow. It was all fun until the little ache of remembrance got inside of him and made him remember the other times. Times of parties and big shots he had known, of good fun and clean-cut, crisp girls, and of girls not so crisp but just as pleasant in their way.

She had been wrong, of course. He wasn’t twenty-five, but nearer thirty. His eyes were really younger than he wanted them to be; and his face a little older. All that didn’t matter now. Those eight years with the paper were so much deadwood. The sheet had folded, and he had folded with it. Financially he wasn’t too low, but physically, it had been a shock when the doctor had finished and given his report.

“Six months, a year at most, Mr. Warren. Too much drinking, too much night life. I know it sounds like hokum, but I’m not being amusing. You newspapermen—”

Mark knew what it really was, of course. The doctor finally got around to admitting it. His sister had gone that way, long before he really had started remembering things. Now it was doing the same thing to him.

The fellows would all scoff and laugh and secretly pity him. There had been a lot of times when he had coughed and someone had said, “One more clean shirt, pal, and then it’s Arizona for you.” That had been funny. It wasn’t any more.

It didn’t turn out to be Arizona, but California. The date country of the Coachella Valley. Hot and low and dry in summer, and just dry and low in the winter. He had caught it in time, and he might be able to go back. But he sort of liked it here, now.

Still, there was that stab of pain occasionally. Especially when a crisp, cool girl like Idell Manders came along. You sort of compared her to Babe, and then things seemed a little flat for quite a while afterward.

His eyes had been focused on the tail lights without actually seeing them, but they came back into his vision as piercing headlights swung off the angled turn where the Palm Springs Highway came into 99. The red dots of tail lights wavered; the headlights came forward. Mark heard four sharp coughs like a backfiring automobile. But he knew they weren’t backfires. Police reporters, who have worked in New York, San Francisco and Chicago, don’t make such elementary errors.

The tail lights disappeared in a burst of acceleration and the headlights suddenly cut an arc in the blackness of the fields lying alongside the road as the car behind them made a U-turn. Mark got a glimpse of a long, low convertible sedan with one crumpled fender, of a make he could not identify. When the rear of the car came into view, it was as he had expected. The license plate was smeared and grimy with dust, probably hand applied.

For a long moment Mark stood silently staring into the darkness after the racing automobiles. Then he turned and, with a swiftness no longer characteristic of him, went to where Babe’s Restaurant puddled light onto the ground. He thrust his head in the screen door. Babe was alone, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

“Hey, gorgeous, watch the station. I’ve got an errand.”

“Yeah,” Babe said, “I saw her.” She was quite blonde and well-padded, and her voice was out of character with her soft, rounded appearance. It was a little too brittle. He wondered if she were getting jealous.

“Go to hell,” he told her cheerfully, and went to his ancient Model A coupé. This was none of his damned business, he realized. It was Idell’s business. If she had wanted help she would have asked for it. Still, he remembered the little pounding of fear in the chord of her throat, and it made the excitement pound up through him.

His car could make nowhere near the speed either of the others achieved effortlessly. But if those shots drew any results, he knew the convertible wouldn’t get very far down the road toward El Centro. She had been going at a terrific clip, too, and that took a lot of gas. With only two gallons in the tank he doubted if that car would be able to go very far. Twenty—twenty-five miles, maybe. But she had said that was all she would need. Why roar off down an empty road then? It didn’t make sense, and the fact pleased him. He liked puzzles.

He had gone almost to Coachella, three miles from Indio, when he saw her walking toward him. She was holding one hand out in a gesture that was commanding without being imperious. When he drew alongside and opened the door for her to get in, she did so quite casually. She seemed very cool, totally unruffled.

“I knew it would be you,” she said.