The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (4 page)

Heavy steps on the stairs…“Got something for you, Lieutenant.” It was an officer from a radio car. “A girl across the street. She was parked with her boyfriend…high school kids…they saw two men and a woman come out and go to a car. Dark sedan of some kind.”

“Two men?”

“Yeah…the car drove up while they were sittin’ there. The guy who went upstairs was tall. Big in the shoulders.”

It was something, but not much. There was the phone. Had the girl gotten in here she could have called her boyfriend, and he might have been waiting nearby. The murdered man had been drinking, that was obvious. Probably quite drunk…and probably in a bar not a dozen blocks away.

If they could find that bar they might get a description…beat officers were looking but it might not be fast enough…a man’s life might be at stake.

Mike Frost stood quietly gnawing gently at his lower lip. He was a big man, wide in the shoulders, with a rather solemn, thick-boned face. His fingers dug at his reddish-brown hair and he tried to think.

This Tom Sixte…he was no fool. In a tight spot he had thought of the clock radio and the police calls. It had been a chance, but he had thought of it and taken it. He might think of something else but they could not depend on that.

The bank. They might try to get some money out of Sixte. Suddenly, Frost was hoping Sixte would think of that. If he did, if he could play on their greed…

The wine bottle…he had liquor stores alerted for possible purchase of the Madeira. It was a wild chance, but the girl had tried a glass of it, and to get money they might humor Sixte. “Boy,” Frost said, half aloud, “I hope you’re thinking, and I hope you’re thinking like I am.”

Forty-eight hours. They would have the flight covered long before takeoff time.

Mike Frost went back to his office and sat down at the battered, scarred old desk. He ran his fingers through his rusty hair and tried to think…to think….

T
OM
S
IXTE SAT
on the divan in a quaint, old-fashioned room. The sort of furnishings that were good middle-class in 1910. It gave him a queer feeling to be sitting there like that, the room was so much like his Aunt Eunice’s.

Kurt was leafing through the paper and he was smoking. Phyllis was irritable. She kept looking over at Sixte. “You’re a fool, Kurt. Get rid of him.”

“Take it easy.” Kurt leaned back in his chair, lighting another cigarette with his left hand. With his coat off, his shoulders were not as wide and he was a little pigeon chested. “I’ve got a call out for Rubio. Let him do it.”

Sixte’s feet were tied, but his hands were free. There was no way he could move quickly, and nothing to use with his hands. He was trying to put himself in the position of the police and getting nowhere.

Suppose some neighbor had just turned off the radio? Suppose the police had become curious, would that make them look around? How smart were they?

All right. Suppose they had come, and suppose they had examined his room. Suppose they decided he had been kidnapped, all of which was a lot of supposing. But, if they had? What would they do?

Closing his eyes to shut out the room he was in, he tried to picture the situation. He knew something of police work, something of the routine. But there would be little to go on…the Madeira. It was the one thing that was different. That might help.

What else?

As long as they sat still, he had time. Yet as long as they sat still they could not make mistakes. He had to get them into the open, to start them moving. Sooner or later the nagging of Phyllis might irk Kurt into killing him.

But Kurt didn’t want to kill, if he didn’t have to…he wanted this Rubio to do it. Kurt didn’t want to kill but Tom had no doubt that he would if pushed. Kurt might be the key, but what did he want?

He wanted money. Easy money, quick money.

Kurt hoped to sell the passport and tickets, for maybe a thousand dollars…a thousand dollars…who, if he could, would not buy his life for that sum? Or twice or three times as much? Or more?

Rubio had not called, so there was a chance. A faint, slim chance.

“Look,” he said quietly, “I’m a reasonable guy. What you do is none of my business. Anyway, I’m supposed to go to South America. I don’t know who either of you are, and I don’t want to know, but I figure you’re pretty smart.”

All criminals, psychologists say, are both egotists and optimists. A good point. Flatter them—but not too much.

“Suppose you knock me off, and suppose you sell my papers to Rubio…will he pay a thousand bucks?”

Kurt smiled. “He does or he don’t get them.”

Sixte shrugged. “All right. You know him better than I do. But he knows you’ve got me on your hands. The only way you can make any dough is to sell those papers, otherwise you knock me off for nothing, am I right?”

“So what?”

“So he says, ‘I’ll give you five hundred, take it or leave it.’ Then where are you?”

Kurt’s smile was gone, he was studying Tom Sixte and he didn’t like what he was thinking. Kurt was remembering Rubio, and he had a hunch that was just what Rubio would do—and where did that leave
him
?

“Now I want to live. I also want to go to South America. Rubio will give you a thousand bucks for my papers. All right,” Sixte put his palms on his knees. “I’ll boost the ante. You put me on that plane to Bolivia with my own tickets and I’ll give you
five
thousand!”

“Don’t listen to him, Kurt.” Phyllis was uneasy. “I don’t like it.”

“Shut up.” Kurt was thinking. Five thousand was good money. Five G’s right in his mitt.

He shook his head. “You’d have them radio from the plane. What do you think I am, a dope?”

Sixte shrugged. “I know better than that. You’re a sharp operator and that’s what I’m banking on. Any dope can kill a man. Only a dope would take the chance at that price. Especially when he can get more.”

He took his time. “See it from where I sit. I want to live. If some drunk gets killed, that’s no skin off my nose. I like women, good food, I like wine. I can’t have any of them if I’m dead.”

Tom Sixte lit a cigarette. “I haven’t got a lot of money, but I could cash a check for five thousand dollars. If I tried to get more they’d make inquiries and you might get suspicious and shoot me. I’m going to play it smart.

“So I draw five thousand. You take it and put me on the plane. I don’t know who you are…what exactly am I going to tell them? You could be out of town, in Las Vegas or Portland before they started looking—but that’s not all. I wouldn’t squawk because I’d be called back as a witness. If I wasn’t here there’d be nothing to connect you with the job—and brother, I can make money in Bolivia. I’ve got a big deal down there.”

There were plenty of fallacies in his argument, but Tom Sixte would point out nothing they could not see. He drew deep on his cigarette and ran his fingers through his dark hair. He was unshaved and felt dirty. If he got out of this, it would be by thinking his way out, and he was tired. He wanted a shower and sleep.

“I got to think about it.” Kurt got up. “I don’t like it much.”

Sixte leaned back on the divan. “Think it over. If I was in your place, I would think a lot.” Kurt leaned back and lit a cigarette. His face was expressionless but Sixte was remembering the padded shoulders in Kurt’s jacket. “Your girlfriend, for instance. She’d look mighty pretty in a new outfit, and you two would make a pair, all dressed to the nines.”

Kurt ignored him, looking around and speaking past his cigarette. “Phyl, fix some sandwiches, will you?”

“As long as I’m paying for this,” Sixte grinned at them, “why not some steaks? The condemned man ate a hearty meal….” He met Kurt’s cold eye and added, “Maybe you’ll soon have five thousand dollars, so why not enjoy yourself?” Keeping his voice casual, he added, “And while you’re at it, why not a bottle of wine? Some of that Madeira?”

D
ETECTIVE
L
IEUTENANT
M
IKE
F
ROST SAT
behind the scarred desk. It was 10:00
A.M
. and he had just checked with the morgue…nobody that could be Sixte had been brought in yet. But if he was dead they might never find him.

Joe stuck his head in the door. “Nothing on the prints. The man’s were Sixte himself, a major in combat intelligence during the war. The woman was the landlady, who does her own cleaning up. And we drew a blank on the girl. Nothing on file.”

There had been nothing on the bars, either. Nobody remembered any such couple. Frost was thinking…the other man had come at once, and it could not have taken him longer than ten minutes. It took time to get outside, get a car started and into the street…at most he would not be more than twenty blocks away. More likely within half that distance. Frost picked up the phone and started a check on bars and possible loafing places. Looking for a tall dark young man who answered a phone and left hurriedly.

Surprisingly, the break came quickly. Noonan called in. Frost remembered him as a boyish-looking officer who looked like a college halfback. A man answering the description took a call in a public booth at three minutes after ten. He paid for his drinks and went out.

Why so sure of the time? The bartender’s girl was late. She usually came in at quarter to ten, so he was watching the clock and expecting a call.

“This guy didn’t talk,” Noonan said. “He nursed one drink for more than an hour, had just ordered the second. The bartender heard him say on the phone, ‘Yes, this is Tommy Hart.’”

They ran a check on Hart…nothing. Noonan called back. “A guy in that bar, he says that guy Hart, if that was his name, used to hang out at a bar on Sixth Street. The Shadow Club.”

It fit. A lot of hoods came and went around there. A lot of good people, too. Frost had Hart figured as small time—working through a woman—but even the small-time boys have big ideas, delusions of grandeur. And he might be afraid to turn Sixte loose.

At noon Frost went out for a sandwich. He drank two cups of coffee, taking a lot of time. He covered the ground again, step by step. The bank, the liquor stores, Hart, the airlines. The Shadow Club.

Shortly after one, he walked back to the desk. Sixte had been missing almost fifteen hours. By now he might be buried in the floor of a cellar or a vacant lot.

Tom Sixte…friendly, quiet, hard worker. Read a lot. Spoke French and German, studying Spanish. Expert in industrial planning…an unlikely man to be mixed up in anything. Mike Frost knew all about him now. Had reports on his desk from the government, from businessmen with whom he had talked…Sixte was top drawer. He was dark-haired, good-looking, smiled easily.

If the tickets were used, they would have their man. But Tom Sixte would be dead, a good man murdered.

Frost started thinking. Tickets to Bolivia were worth dough in the right place. So was a passport and visa…who wanted to get out of town? Who that they knew about? Who that was missing?

Tony Shapiro…from Brooklyn. A mobster. Big time. Wanted by the Feds. Something clicked in the brain of Mike Frost. Shapiro had been reported seen in Tucson…in Palm Springs.

Local connections? Vince Montesori, Rubio Turchi.

Frost picked up the phone…. Shapiro had connections in the Argentine. If he could get to South America, he might be safe.

Frost got up and put on his hat. He went down into the street, squinting his eyes against the sunlight. He walked west, then north. After a while he stopped for a shine.

The shine boy was a short, thickset man with a flat face and there was nobody around. He had never heard of Tommy Hart or anybody like him. Montesori was working his club, same as always. Rubio? The shine boy bent further over the detective’s shoes. Nothing…

It all added up to nothing.

Back at the desk, Frost checked the file on Rubio. He had kept his nose clean since coming out of Q. He…Mike Frost picked up the telephone and began checking on Rubio and San Quentin…his cell mate had been in for larceny. Twenty-six years old, tall, dark hair, name…Kurt Eberhardt. He hung up the phone.

Kurt Eberhardt…Tommy Hart. It could be. It was close enough, and the description was right.

He had something to go on now. Check the Shadow Club on Eberhardt…check with the stoolies, his contacts on the criminal side. It might be a blind alley, but it could fit. There was nothing substantial, anywhere. A bottle of Madeira…he dropped in at a liquor store. Three principal varieties of Madeira sold here. Sercial, a dry wine. Boal was on the sweet side. Malmsey was a dessert wine, and sweeter. It was Malmsey that Sixte fancied.

At four o’clock, he was sitting at the scarred desk, thinking about Sixte. If the guy was alive, he was sweating about now. Time was drawing the strings into a tight knot around his throat.

All over town the wheels were meshing, the department was working…and they had nothing. Nothing at all.

Rubio Turchi could not be found. He had been around until shortly after midnight the previous night, and he dropped out of sight…the time tied in…which might be an accident. Mike Frost swore softly and irritably at the loose ends, the flimsy angles on which he must work. Nothing really…

A report from the Shadow Club. They remembered Eberhardt. A free spender when he had it. Some figured he had been rolling drunks for his pocket money. Always with a girl…a brunette. Her name was Lola, a Spanish girl, or Mexican.

Find Lola.

More wheels started to mesh. No rumble from the bank. Nothing on the wine. Nothing on Turchi, nothing on anybody.

At ten o’clock, Mike Frost went home and crawled into bed. At 2:00
A.M
., he awoke with a start. He sat up and lit a cigarette.

He called Headquarters. They had Lola. He swore, then got into his clothes. Sleepy, unshaven, and irritable, he walked into his office. Lola was there, with Noonan.

Frost lit a cigarette for her. “You’re not in trouble,” his tone was conversational, “you’ll walk out of here in a few minutes and Noonan can drive you home.

“All we want to know is about a guy named Eberhardt, Kurt Eberhardt.”

She turned on Frost and broke into a torrent of vindictive Spanish. Sorting it out, he learned she knew nothing about him, nor did she want to, he was a rat, a pig, a—she quieted down.