Detour to Death (2 page)

“You dropped something, doc,” he said, and the old man thanked him vaguely and put the paper away with the money. He was stuffing the wallet into the inner pocket again as he went out the door.

Danny had his cue. He dawdled over the Coke so the old man would have time to get hold of himself. No wonder he seemed so upset if he’d just lost a patient like this lady called Francy. Danny’s mouth twisted into an offside grin. What a choice item for these hicks to buzz about! And nothing to it, most likely. Just anything to brighten a dull life. But Danny had another kind of life to think about now, and all of this was nothing to him. He began thinking of what was ahead, what he’d do once he’d crossed the border into freedom. There was that friend of his who’d gone to Mexico City—he could look him up for a starter. After that, who could tell? Move on south maybe. Central America—South America. Anywhere was all right with Danny just so long as it wasn’t back home, because home was a big trap they were getting set to spring on Danny Ross—only Danny had other plans.

“I sure hope that bus is on time.”

That was the man in the raincoat busting in on Danny’s daydreams.

“It usually is,” Viola said, “unless they have trouble on the road. It’ll be along any minute now.”

“It can’t come too soon for me!”

Danny knew just how the man felt when he paid for the beer and started pacing back and forth to the screen door. A few minutes could be a long time in this Godforsaken spot, and this boy was no local yokel—not with that quick, nervous step and those anxious eyes. The proof came when he relaxed long enough to slip a coin into the jukebox by the door, and let up a howl at the first wail of the fiddles. “Hillbillies!” he stormed. “That’s all you have in this country, hillbillies and cowboys! Didn’t anybody ever hear of Louis Prima?”

“You don’t have to play it.” Viola shrugged.

“And I don’t have to listen!” Distaste made a wrinkled monkey face under that soiled canvas hat, and the man came back to the counter and grabbed his suitcase. “Maybe I’ve got time to wash up,” he suggested. “Where’s the men’s room?”

“Outside and around to your left. And don’t hurry back!” Viola called.

It was peculiar how lonely Danny began to feel when he was left at the counter all alone. The man in the raincoat might not be such a pleasant character, but he wasn’t nearly as strange as these sun-browned people with the high cheekbones and the tired drawls. Did they all have to be so tall? Danny hadn’t filled out yet, but he’d never thought of himself as being puny until he’d sat there at the counter surrounded by the giant named Rice, and the balding Walter, and that buxom Amazon with the oily hair. Even the old doctor was tall and spare, like a ragged pine tree that stands alone. Danny had a longing to ask the man in the raincoat where he was from, and if he knew the Blackhawk or the Chez Paree. Not that Danny was an expert, but he could talk like one to a stranger.

Rice finished his business and went out, and the fiddles stopped wailing in the jukebox. Now the place was silent and empty because Viola had gone back to the kitchen with the dirty glasses, and Walter was in the stock room. The doctor had paid for the drinks, which was fair enough considering all the uses Danny had for his own bank roll, and nobody said, “Good-by,” or “Come again,” when he left the café.

The Indian boys were still squatting in the shade of the canopy outside, and up the road, the very road Danny had just traveled, came a fat yellow bus with its left-turn signal out and its hoarse horn making salutation. It was a south-bound bus and that gave Danny an idea. Maybe it was being so close to the border that made him uneasy, but suddenly he couldn’t wait any longer. He couldn’t chance another hitch at Cooperton, or waste another couple of days riding shanks’ mare. Cough up the fare and get rolling—that was the answer.

But just as he decided to hop aboard, Danny remembered the zipper bag on the back seat of the doctor’s sedan. It was only a short sprint away—he could still make it if he hurried. Rounding the corner of the building, he ran headlong into the man with the raincoat, bag in hand and coattails flying. There was a boy who wasn’t going to miss his bus!

“Tell ‘em to wait for me,” Danny yelled, and kept on running.

The sedan was still where the doctor had parked it—at the rear of the café in the shade of an outbuilding. Its dust-streaked hood was propped up, and the old man’s jacket dangling from the spotlight indicated a man at work. Danny jerked open the back door and grabbed his bag.

“I’ve decided to take the bus,” he called out. “Thanks for the ride.”

There was no answer. Maybe the old man couldn’t hear with his head under the hood, and it wouldn’t be right to chase off and leave him waiting for a passenger who wasn’t going to show. “I’m taking the bus,” Danny repeated, coming around to the front of the sedan, “and thanks—”

He didn’t get any further. Dr. Gaynor was there all right, slumped over the radiator with the screw cap still clutched in one hand; but that wasn’t water dripping down on the cylinder head. It was blood.

I
T WAS MORE BLOOD
than Danny had ever seen in his life. Once back home, when he was just a kid, he’d heard the grownups talking about someone who hemorrhaged to death, and for a moment he thought that was what had happened to the old man. But it didn’t take more than a quick-second look to set that straight. The doctor had been checking the radiator all right, but something had hit him from behind—something hard and deadly that crushed his skull and started that red fountain flowing. There was a rock on the ground with the same red stain, and when Danny stooped to touch it, it was still sticky. He turned about quickly and sank to the ground as his knees gave out.

Back under the canopy, about a thousand miles away, there were sounds of living things and a throbbing motor, sounds filtered through the distance of from here to hereafter. A horn sounded, an engine roared, and the yellow bus kicked up a cloud of dust and gravel as it headed back onto the black top, but Danny was helpless to move or cry out. He knelt with his hands over his face, unmindful of the blood. The old man—the poor old man! After a few moments he remembered that something must be done.

Danny staggered to his feet and looked about wildly. The back door to the café was less than twenty feet away, but a sound in the opposite direction pulled him back. The sound of another motor, not the bus this time, was somewhere in the distance. He ran toward the crossroad and looked in both directions, but sound could be deceiving in this country and so could sight. Was that really a cloud of dust curling against the far horizon, or was it a trick of the heat? Was it the wake of a fleeing automobile, or the work of the wanton wind? There was no use examining the earth for tracks. The soil was hard and desert-dry, and the turnoff from the side road to that cluster of yellow buildings was strewn with rocks and gravel. But Danny had heard a motor. His ear was tuned for such a sound.

But now everything was as quiet. As far as the eye could reach there was nothing moving, nothing to be seen that had life or power of death. Just the two roads, one dirt and one black top, the desert, the mountains, and behind him the frame shacks of the country store. There was an old shed near the sedan, and Danny looked behind it. A car could have parked there without being seen, but there were too many tracks to tell the story. By this time Danny was getting his bearings. The numbness and nausea had worn off, and there was nothing to do but go back to the café and tell the man and woman what had happened. He didn’t have a doubt but what the old man was dead, but somebody else would have to make sure. Danny’s legs were still shaking.

From the moment he turned the corner of the shed, Danny’s world went crazy. It started with a scream, a wild, terrified scream that should have warned him if his imagination hadn’t been limited for anything so fantastic. He took another step forward and the scream came again, but this time with words that stopped him in his tracks.

“There he is! My God, look at him! Look at the blood!”

It was the woman Viola who stood beside the old man’s body screaming out her terror, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking straight at Danny.

“Walter, look out! He’ll kill you, too!”

Had the woman gone mad? No wonder, in view of what she’d found, but what of her husband who came charging out of the café's back door with a shotgun in his hand?

“Stop where you are!” he cried. “Don’t move or I’ll blow your head off!”

“Wait a minute—” Danny began.

“Don’t move!”

Walter’s voice had turned soprano, but there was nothing effeminate about that shotgun. “Go inside and call the sheriff,” he commanded his wife. “I’ve got him covered.”

At that instant Danny’s fear was born. It was too horrible, too incredible to be true, and yet there he stood, straddle-legged and numb, with the old man’s blood smeared on his face and hands, and a wild-eyed captor pointing a gun at his chest.

“You’re crazy!” he cried. “I didn’t kill the old man! He was like that when I found him!”

Danny might just as well have shouted at the sky.

• • •

The party line to Cooperton had been humming all day. Every rumor, every tale, every bit of gossip about Francy Allen had gone racing over that wire, and Francy was vulnerable. Francy was extremely vulnerable. But the frantic call from Mountain View struck like a bolt of lightning. It struck Ada Keep first of all.

“Virgil ain’t in just now,” she parroted into the mouthpiece, and then stood transfixed while the woman on the other end of the wire poured out her grisly tale. Dr. Gaynor? Old Charley Gaynor? Viola had to repeat the message before Ada understood. “Virgil ain’t in,” she murmured weakly. “I’ll send somebody to fetch him.”

Ada Keep placed the receiver back on the hook and stared dumbly at the silent instrument. Then the tears began to well up in her small brown eyes and followed the wrinkle lines down her unpainted cheeks. It didn’t seem possible! Why only yesterday— Ada brushed a wisp of graying hair from her forehead with a nervous hand and smiled crookedly. Three months, he had said. Three months, and now he was gone without any time at all. The Lord moved in strange and terrible ways.

And the news moved. Like the tumbleweed before the wind it rolled across town, floating up from the street to Dr. Glenn’s new office over the Cattleman’s Bank; racing down to an old frame house where a pale young woman listened from the wide front porch and gripped the railing with trembling hands; and finding Trace Cooper at his usual habitat in the bar of the Pioneer Hotel. Fifteen minutes after the call, Sheriff Virgil Keep stalked into his office to verify a rumor.

“Did you have to blab the whole story?” he raged. “Can’t you take a message without stirring up the whole town?”

Ada wouldn’t have thought of a defense even if her husband had time to listen. She’d been trying for thirty years.

But Virgil didn’t have time for anything now but making fast tracks. Moments later he and his young deputy were racing toward Mountain View, leaving a shocked and murmuring town behind them. Folks were going to take the old man’s death hard, especially since it came so close on the heels of that messy business last night. Two violent deaths in succession could put a strain on anyone’s nerves.

• • •

Danny was inside the café when the sheriff’s car pulled up at the door. He was sitting on one of the stools again with his hands spread out on the counter before him, and Walter’s shotgun pointed at his head. No cold drinks were being served this time, and the jukebox was silent; but even those wailing fiddles would have been easier to take than Viola’s periodic sobs. The sound of wheels on the gravel was welcome. There was no use trying to tell these people anything! Surely the police would listen to reason.

The screen door opened, and two men came in. One was just an ordinary man with an ordinary man’s face, but the sight of the other made Danny’s throat go dry. It wasn’t just his size, although he was built like an all-star tackle; it was that terrible anger in his eyes.

Virgil Keep looked at Danny, at Walter’s gun, and at the woman huddled against the ice chest. Then without any preliminaries he went to work.

“Where’s the body?” he demanded.

Walter nodded toward the door. “Around the left side—clear back to the shed. You’ll see Charley’s car.”

The two men went out together, the sheriff and the deputy. They were dressed alike—suntan cotton twill pants and shirts and wide-brimmed hats; but nobody had to tell Danny which was which. The big man carried his authority like a battle flag. And he was much more than just a cow-country sheriff; he was doom come to catch up with Danny Ross. The devil he’d been fleeing all his life until at last he couldn’t run any farther.

When the men came back the deputy looked sick, but nothing could alter the expression or color of Virgil Keep. He went straight to the phone, and Danny could hear him speaking the words with no more emotion than if he’d been ordering a snack from the corner drugstore.

“Hello, Tom? This is Virgil Keep. Did your ambulance get back from Red Rock yet? … Good. We need it out here at Walter Wade’s place. Hurry up and keep your mouth shut.”

The receiver went back on the hook, and Virgil returned to the center of the room. “Waste of time telling Tom to keep his mouth shut,” he muttered. “It’s all over town that Charley Gaynor’s been murdered. They’re even saying you people caught the killer in the act. How about that?”

The question was for Walter. “Well, not exactly,” he said. “But he was the only one around—and he came in with the doctor.”

“That’s what I thought. The fool woman never got anything straight in her life!”

Virgil came and stood before Danny, and his eyes, dark and penetrating under heavy brows, were taking inventory of the bloody face and bloody hands. But they were doing more than that. They were measuring just how weak Danny Ross could be. They were following the line of his mouth, the lower lip bulging just a little, and the cut of the chin that wouldn’t hold steady.

“What have you got to say for yourself?” he demanded, and Danny could have foretold the question word for word.

“I didn’t kill the old man,” Danny said. “I found him that way.”

Not a flicker of sympathy in those eyes. Just that knifelike stare.

“Where’d you get all that blood?”

“From him. From the rock, I guess. I don’t remember. I was sick.”

“Why didn’t you call for help?”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound.”

“You could move, couldn’t you?”

“He could move, all right!” Walter sputtered. “He was trying to run away!”

“I wasn’t running away! I was coming back!”

Danny felt dizzy. He wanted a drink of water, but nobody was going to give it to him even if he asked. He had to explain, somehow, and it wasn’t easy when he didn’t understand himself. He had to take them back with him through that awful time when he stepped around to the front of the sedan and found the old man dead. He had to make them feel the shock and the nausea, and make them hear the yellow bus leaving and then the other sound.

“I thought I heard a car pulling away,” he stammered.

“I ran to see.”

“Where did you run?”

“To the crossroads. I looked both ways. I think there was a dust cloud off that way.”

Danny waved one arm heedless of directions.

“But you didn’t see the car?” the sheriff asked.

“No, I didn’t see a car. So I came back and looked for tracks. That’s what I was doing behind the shed.”

“Don’t you believe him!” Viola cried out. “I saw him when he came around that shed, and I saw his face. It was the face of a killer!”

“Honey, take it easy,” Walter began, but he was wasting his breath. All this time the woman had been half hidden behind the counter, but not for a moment had her sharp eyes left Danny’s face, and not for an instant had her mind stopped working. “Look at him!” she cried. “Can’t you see what he is? A no-good bum, a tramp the doctor picked up on the road! A hitchhiker!”

“There’s no law against that,” the deputy said.

“And no law against what happened to the doctor? Or what happened to Francy Allen?”

The sudden silence was worse than Viola’s screaming. It was like the unveiling of a painting, or the raising of a baton before the downbeat. Francy. The name lit a candle in every eye.

“What do you mean?” Virgil demanded.

“What do you think I mean?” the woman cried. “They died the same way, didn’t they? I knew it wasn’t an accident. How could it be an accident? Drunk or sober, how could Francy give herself a brain concussion if she was walking alone on the highway?”

“Wait a minute!” Danny yelled. “I wasn’t even near here last night!”

“That’s what you say!”

It was the sheriff who finally got Viola to shut up. He’d come out here because old Charley Gaynor was dead-she could kindly leave Francy out of this. “It’s her condition,” Walter explained. “She gets so excited over things.” But Virgil Keep wasn’t interested in any woman’s condition; he wanted facts. From Walter he would get them, not so eloquently or dramatically as from Viola, but with considerably more accuracy.

His wife had discovered the body when she stepped outside the kitchen door to add a few bottles to the crate of empties on the porch. Her cries brought him running with his gun, and he saw the boy, this Danny Ross as he called himself, standing over the old man. Sure he recognized him. Charley had brought him in for a Coke not fifteen minutes earlier. Charley was always picking up people on the road.

“Was the boy running away?” Virgil asked.

“No,” Walter admitted, “he wasn’t running anywhere. He was walking toward the café.”

For the first time since Virgil Keep walked into the room, Danny began to relax.
There, you see
, he told himself,
it’s all going to work out after all. It’s nothing but a crazy mistake because a woman became frightened and a man had a gun in his hand
. In a few minutes everything would be straightened out, and Danny Ross would be on his way. Confidence gave him a voice.

“That’s what I told you,” he said. “I didn’t kill the old man. Would I come back here if I had? He gave me a lift, that’s all. I had no reason to kill him.”

“No reason!”

They could silence Viola for just so long, but now she was back again, her sweaty face leaning toward Danny’s and her heavy breasts heaving with emotion. “What about that two hundred dollars?” she cried. “Listen to me, Virgil Keep. Charley had two hundred dollars. We both saw it, both Walter and me. He stood right where you’re standing now and took the money off Jim Rice—Jim still owed for Ethel’s operation—and all the time this young hoodlum sat there watching. You should have seen his eyes!”

Nobody could deny Viola now. She pulled out an object from under the counter, and Danny’s heart stood still. It was the old man’s threadbare coat, limp and empty.

“We all saw Charley put the money in this coat, but it’s not there now! Ask him! Ask this young tramp what he did with Charley’s wallet!”

It was then that doom came in and met Danny Ross. The sheriff could send his deputy out to search the old man’s body, but Danny didn’t need his report to know the wallet was gone. Now Danny even knew where and how it had gone, but these people wouldn’t believe him. They’d never believe him after the sheriff’s big ham hands ripped into his pockets. He was just a down and out hitchhiker without the price of a cold drink until the contents of his billfold was dumped out on the counter. The small bills and chicken feed didn’t count. The big stuff was enough— One sixty, one eighty, two hundred.