The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six (74 page)

“All right, boys,” Briggs said, turning to the plainclothesman and the cops. “They’re yours. All of them.”

Jerking my head at Hudspeth, I said to one of the cops, “We represent the insurance company as well as this firm, so Hudspeth might as well stay in charge. The lawyers will probably want a reliable person here.”

“Sure,” Briggs said. “Sure thing.”

We walked outside and the air smelled good. “Chief,” I suggested, nodding at the man in the gray suit, “why not put this guy to work with us? He used to be an insurance investigator.”

The man stopped and stared at me. Briggs did likewise. “How, how the devil did you know that?” he demanded. “You told me about the gray threads, the dampness on the tarp, the crumbs on the table, all the evidence that somebody was with Pete! But this—next thing you’ll be telling me what his name is!”

“Sure,” I agreed cheerfully. “It’s Patrick Donahey!”

“Well, how in—” Donahey stared.

“Purely elementary, my dear Watson.” I brushed my fingernails on my lapel. “You ate with your left hand, and insurance investigators always—”

“Don’t give me that!” Briggs broke in.

“Okay, then,” I said. “It did help a little that I found his billfold.” I drew it out and handed it to Donahey. “It fell back of that tarp. But nevertheless, I—”

“Oh, shut up,” Briggs said.

A Friend of a Hero

T
he gravel road forked unexpectedly and Neil Shannon slowed his convertible. On each side orange groves blocked his view, although to the right a steep hillside of dun-colored rock rose above the treetops. On that same side was a double gate in a graying split-rail fence.

He was about fifty miles northwest of Los Angeles, lost in a maze of orchards and small farms that was split by abrupt ridges and arroyos.

Neil Shannon got out of the car and walked to the gate. He was about to push it open when a stocky, hard-faced man stepped from the shrubbery. “Hold it, bud…what do you want?”

“I’m looking for the Shaw place. I thought someone might tell me where it was.”

“The Shaw place? What do you want to go there for?”

Shannon was irritated. “All I asked was the directions. If you tell me I’ll be on my way.”

The man jerked his head to indicate direction. “Right down the fork, but if you’re looking for Johnny, he ain’t home.”

“No? So where could I find him?”

The man paused. “Down at Laurel Lawn, in town. He’s been dead for three days.”

Shannon shook out a cigarette. “You don’t seem upset over losing a neighbor, Mr. Bowen.”

“Where’d you get that name?” The man stared suspiciously at Shannon.

“It’s on your mailbox, in case you’ve forgotten. Are you Steve Bowen?”

“I’m Jock Perult. The Bowen boys ain’t around. As for Shaw, his place is just down the road there.”

“Thanks.” Shannon opened the door of his car. “Tell me, Jock, do you always carry a pistol when you’re loafing around home?”

“It’s for snakes, if it’s any of your business.” He tugged his shirttail down over the butt of a small pistol.

Shannon grinned at him and put the car in gear. Scarcely three hundred yards further along the gravel road on the same side was the Shaw place. Marjorie Shaw saw him drive through the gate and came out to meet him.

The man who followed her from the door had a grizzle of gray beard over a hard chin and a short-stemmed pipe in his teeth. He looked at Shannon with obvious displeasure.

There were formalities to be taken care of. She read the contract standing by the car and looked at his private investigator’s license. Finally she raised the subject of money.

“Let’s not worry about that right now,” he told her. “Johnny Shaw was a friend of mine; I’ll do what I can for a couple of days and we’ll see where we are. I’m warning you, though, on paper his death looks like an accident. I’m not sure there is much I can do.”

“Come in, and I’ll fix you a drink.”

As he turned to follow he caught a tiny flash of sunlight from the brush-covered hillside across the way. Then he glimpsed the figure of a man, almost concealed. A man interested enough in what was going on to watch through binoculars.

Shannon glanced at the older man. “You’re Keller? How about it? Did Johnny have any enemies?”

“Ain’t none of my affair and I don’t aim to make it so,” Keller replied brusquely. “I’m quitting this job. Going to Fresno. Always did figure to go to Fresno.”

M
ARJORIE
S
HAW WAS
Johnny’s sister, and though Shannon had never met her, he and John Shaw had been friends since the days before he had joined the police force. They had first met on a windy hillside in Korea. Now John was dead, his car crushed in a nearby ravine, and his sister thought that he had been intentionally killed.

The inside of the house was dim and cool. Shannon sat on the plaid sofa and listened to the girl moving about the kitchen. The door to the Frigidaire opened and closed; there was the sound of a spoon in a glass pitcher.

“After you called”—he spoke to her through the doorway—“I checked the report on the wreck. There was no indication of anything wrong. The insurance investigator agreed with the report. Clark, who investigated for the sheriff ’s office, said it was clearly an accident. Driving too fast or a drink too many.”

She came in carrying a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses. “I didn’t ask you out here, Mr. Shannon, to tell me what I’ve already heard. However, Johnny did not drink. Furthermore, he was extremely cautious. He had never had an accident of any kind, and he had been driving over that road two or three times a day for four years. I want it looked into. For my peace of mind, if nothing else. That’s why I called you. Johnny always said you were the smartest detective on the Los Angeles police force.”

“We’ll see…. I’m not with the police force any longer.”

A
FTER THE ICED TEA
Marjorie Shaw drove Shannon out to the site of the wreck. They cut across the property on a dirt track and headed to where the county road came over the mountain from town. Emerging from Shaw’s orange groves, they cut along the base of the hill. Although the car threw up a large cloud of dust, the track was well graded, and in the places where water drained, culverts had been installed. Obviously, Johnny Shaw had worked hard on his place and had accomplished a lot.

Marjorie pointed off to one side. “Johnny was going to dam that canyon and make a private lake,” she explained. “Then, he intended to plant trees around it.”

The canyon was rock-walled but not too deep. Dumped in the bottom were several junked cars.

“Did he intend to take those out?”

“Johnny was furious about them. He insisted the Bowens take them out, and they said that if he cared so much he could take them out himself.”

She paused. “This could be important, Mr. Shannon…. He tried to take it up with the county but the sheriffs and commissioners are all friends of the Bowens. I was with him when he went to the courthouse. They all got in a big fight and Johnny told that county commissioner that he would go to the DA if that was what it took and they got real quiet. After that we left. I was angry for Johnny and I didn’t think about it much, but that’s why I called you…it wasn’t two weeks later that Johnny died.”

“He mentioned the DA?” Shannon asked.

“Yes, why would he do that? Over junked cars, it doesn’t make sense!”

“Unless he knew about something else and was making a threat.”

“That’s what I thought, but what could it be?”

“Well, if it has something to do with his death it’s something that either someone in county government or the Bowen brothers don’t want known.”

The Bowen brothers…Shannon thought…and their buddy Perult who carried a gun inside his shirt.

T
HEY TURNED OUT
onto the county road and within minutes were at the curve where Johnny had run off the cliff. She stopped the car and he got out. The afternoon shadows were long, but down below he could see the twisted mass of metal that had been Johnny’s car.

“I’d like to go down and look around. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

At the edge of the road, starting down, he paused briefly. There was broken glass on the shoulder. Bits of headlight glass. He picked up several fragments, and the ridges and diffusers in them were not identical. Pocketing several, he climbed and slid down the cliff.

Examining the wreck, he could see why Johnny had been killed. The car had hit several times on the way down. The destruction was so complete that the sheriffs had had to use a torch to cut the body out. Surprisingly enough, one headlight was intact. Two pieces of the glass he had picked up conformed with the headlight pattern. The others did not.

The police and ambulance crew had left a lot of tracks, but there was another set that stood off to the side, and they turned off down the canyon. In two places other tracks were superimposed upon them.

Curious, he followed the tracks down the canyon where they met with the tracks of someone who had waited there.

He was back beside Johnny’s car when there was a sharp tug at his hat and an ugly
whap
as something struck the frame and whined angrily away. Shannon dropped and rolled to the protection of some rocks. In the distant hills there was the vague echo of a gunshot.

It could have been a spent bullet…from someone hunting or shooting targets in the hills. Yet he knew it was nothing of the sort. That bullet had been fired by a man who meant to kill or, at least, warn. If he tried to get back up to the road, he might be shot.

He glanced up. Marjorie Shaw stood at the cliff ’s edge, looking down. “Get into the car,” he called, just loud enough for her to hear, “and drive to the filling station on the highway. Wait there for me, in plain sight, with people around.”

S
HE LOOKED PALE
and frightened when he got there a half hour later. His suit was stained with red clay and he showed her his hat.

“I called the sheriff,” she said.

They heard the siren, and Deputy Sheriff Clark drew up. It was he whom Shannon had talked to about the accident.

He chuckled. “You city cops!” he scoffed. “That shot was probably fired by a late hunter, maybe a mile off. Now don’t come down here trying to stir up trouble when there’s no cause for it. Why would anyone try to kill someone investigating an accident?”

“What do you know about the Bowen outfit?”

Clark was bored. “Now look. Don’t you go bothering people up here. The Bowens have got them a nice little place. They pay their taxes and mind their own business. Furthermore, the Bowens are rugged boys and want to be left alone.”

“Didn’t Johnny Shaw complain about them once?”

Clark was annoyed. “Suppose he did? Shaw was some kind of a hero in the Korean War and he came out here thinking he was really going to do big things. He may have been quite a man in the war, but he sure didn’t stack up against Steven Bowen.”

“What’s that? They had a fight?”

“I guess so, seein’ that Johnny Shaw got himself whipped pretty bad. I think Steve got the idea that Shaw was throwing his weight around over those junk cars, comin’ on high and mighty because he had a medal or two. They went at it out back of the hardware store in Santa Paula. I offered to take Shaw’s complaint afterwards but I guess he was too proud.”

Marjorie turned abruptly and got into her car, eyes blazing. Shannon put a hand on the door, then glanced back at Clark. “Tell me something, Clark. Just where do you stand?”

Clark was beside their car in an instant. “I’ll tell you where I stand. I stand with the citizens of this community. I don’t want any would-be hero barging in here stirring up trouble. And that goes double for private cops. The Bowens have lived here a long time and had no trouble until Shaw came in here. Now, I’ve heard all about these scrap cars and who wants who to tow them out of there. But I looked into it and there is nothing to prove that they ever belonged to Steve Bowen or anyone else on his place. If you ask me, that and this
investigation
of the car accident are just examples of city folks getting wild ideas and watching too much of those television shows.”

T
HREE DAYS
of hard work came to nothing. Shaw had no enemies, his trouble with the Bowens was not considered serious, at least not killing serious, and as the Bowens had defeated Shaw all down the line, why should they wish to kill him? Of course there was that mention of the DA, but no one seemed to know what it meant.

The fragment of headlight glass he checked against the
Guide Lamp Bulletin,
then sent it to the police lab for verification. The lens, he discovered, was most commonly used on newer Chrysler sedans but was a replacement for other models as well. He filed the information for future reference.

His next step was to talk with other farmers in the area. He drove about, asked many questions, got interesting answers.

The Bowens had two large barns on their place, which was only forty acres. They had two cows and one horse, and carried little hay. Their crops, if stored unsold, would have taken no more than a corner of the barn…so why two large barns?

Market prices for the products they raised did not account for the obvious prosperity of the brothers. All three drove fast cars, as did Jock Perult. At nearby bars they were known as good spenders. Some of the closest neighbors complained of the noise of compressors from the Bowen place and of their revving up unmuffled engines late at night, but these questions were soon answered—the Bowens built cars that they raced themselves at the track in Saugus and around the state at other dirt-track and figure-eight events.

At the county courthouse he researched the Bowen property, how long they had owned it and how much they had paid. While he was looking through the registrar’s records a young man peered into the file room several times and had a whispered conversation with the clerk. The man had the look of someone who worked in the building, and Neil Shannon took a quick tour through the hallways on his way out. He spotted the young man sitting at a desk typing in the office of a particular county commissioner…a county commissioner who happened to be a neighbor of the Bowens.

Late at night—he was taking no chances with stray bullets this time—Shannon took a bucket of plaster back over to the crash site. While he was waiting for his casts to dry, he walked along the moonlit wash and into the canyon that Johnny had wanted to dam. The old rusted cars lay stark in the moonlight, and he used a pencil flash to examine them. One was a Studebaker and the other, not so old as he’d imagined, was a Chevrolet. Neither had engines; he searched hard for the Vehicle Identification Numbers on the body and could not find one on either car…they had been carefully removed. He pulled parts, the few that were left, off the Chevy and examined them carefully. They should have had a secondary date code on them, but every plate had been removed, the rivets meticulously drilled out.

H
E MET
M
ARJORIE
S
HAW
for a drink in Santa Paula. “Little enough,” he replied to her question. “Steve Bowen is a good dancer and a good spender, left school in the seventh grade, wasn’t a good student, likes to drink but can handle his liquor. Likes to gamble and he drives in amateur races a little. Not sports cars…the rough stuff.”