Tinchfleld switched his chaw to the other side of his face and went to the door to spit. He stood in the open door with his big hands clasped behind him.
«He couldn’t have pinned nothing on Beryl,» he said over his shoulder. «Not without her talkin’ a great deal, son. Did you think of that?»
«Sure. Once the police were looking for her and the case broke wide open in the papers — I mean the real case — he would have had to bump Beryl off and make it look like a suicide. I think it might have worked.»
«You hadn’t ought to have let that there murderin’ woman get away, son. There’s other things you hadn’t ought to have done, but that one was bad.»
«Whose case is this?» I growled. «Yours — or the Glendale police’s? Beryl will be caught all right. She’s killed two men and she’ll flop on the next trick she tries to pull. They always do. And there’s collateral evidence to be dug up. That’s police work — not mine. I thought you were running for re-election, against a couple of younger men. I didn’t come back up here just for the mountain air.»
He turned and looked at me slyly. «I kind of figured you thought old man Tinchfleld might be soft enough to keep you out of jail, son.» Then he laughed and slapped his leg. «Keep Tinchfleld Constable,» he boomed at the big outdoors. «You’re darn right they will. They’d be dum fools not to — after this. Let’s mosey on over to the office and call the ’cutor down in Berdoo.» He sighed. «Just too dum smart that Melton was,» he said. «I like simple folks.»
«Me too,» I said. «That’s why I’m here.»
They caught Beryl Haines on the California-Oregon line, doubling back south to Yreka in a rent car. The highway patrol stopped her for a routine border fruit inspection, but she didn’t know that. She pulled another gun. She still had Julia Melton’s luggage and Julia Melton’s clothes and Julia Melton’s checkbook, with nine blank checks in it traced from one of Julia Melton’s genuine signatures. The check cashed by Goodwin proved to be another forgery.
Tinchfield and the county prosecutor went to bat for me with the Glendale police, but I got hell from them just the same. From Violets M’Gee I got the large and succulent razzberry, and from the late Howard Melton I got what was left of the fifty dollars he had advanced me. They kept Tinchfleld constable, by a landslide.
NO CRIME IN THE MOUNTAINS
ONE
The letter came just before noon, special delivery, a dimestore envelope with the return address F. S. Lacey, Puma Point, California. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, made out to cash and signed Frederick S. Lacey, and a sheet of plain white bond paper typed with a number of strikeovers. It said:
Mr. John Evans.
Dear Sir:
I have your name from Len Esterwald. My business is urgent and extremely confidential. I enclose a retainer.
Please come to Puma Point Thursday afternoon or evening, if at all possible, register at the Indian Head Hotel, and call me at 2306.
Yours,
FRED LACEY
There hadn’t been any business in a week, but this made it a nice day. The bank on which the check was drawn was about six blocks away. I went over and cashed it, ate lunch, and got the car out and started off.
It was hot in the valley, hotter still in San Bernardino, and it was still hot at five thousand feet, fifteen miles up the high-gear road to Puma Lake. I had done forty of the fifty miles of curving, twisting highway before it started to cool off, but it didn’t get really cool until I reached the dam and started along the south shore of the lake past the piled-up granite boulders and the sprawled camps in the flats beyond. It was early evening when I reached Puma Point and I was as empty as a gutted fish.
The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner, opposite a dance halt. I registered, carried my suitcase upstairs and dropped it in a bleak, hard-looking room with an oval rug on the floor, a double bed in the corner, and nothing on the bare pine wall but a hardware-store calendar all curled up from the dry mountain summer. I washed my face and hands and went downstairs to eat.
The dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby was full to overflowing with males in sports clothes and liquor breaths and females in slacks and shorts with blood-red fingernails and dirty knuckles. A fellow with eyebrows like John L. Lewis was prowling around with a cigar screwed into his face. A lean, pale-eyed cashier in shirt-sleeves was fighting to get the race results from Hollywood Park on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potato was full of water. In the deep, black corner of the room a hillbilly symphony of five defeatists in white coats and purple shirts was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar.
I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on it, and went out on to the main stem. It was still broad daylight, but the neon lights were turned on and the evening was full of the noise of auto horns, shrill voices, the rattle of bowls, the snap of .22’s at the shooting gallery, jukebox music, and behind all this the hoarse, hard mutter of speedboats on the lake. At a corner opposite the post office a blue-andwhite arrow said Telephone. I went down a dusty side road that suddenly became quiet and cool and piney. A tame doe deer with a leather collar on its neck wandered across the road in front of me. The phone office was a log cabin, and there was a booth in the corner with a coin-in-the-slot telephone. I shut myself inside and dropped my nickel and dialed 2306. A woman’s voice answered.
I said: «Is Mr. Fred Lacey there?»
«Who is calling, please?»
«Evans is the name.»
«Mr. Lacey is not here right now, Mr. Evans. Is he expecting you?»
That gave her two questions to my one. I didn’t like it. I said: «Are you Mrs. Lacey?»
«Yes. I am Mrs. Lacey.» I thought her voice was taut and overstrung, but some voices are like that all the time.
«It’s a business matter,» I said. «When will he be back?»
«I don’t know exactly. Some time this evening, I suppose. What did you —»
«Where is your cabin, Mrs. Lacey?»
«It’s… it’s on Ball Sage Point, about two miles west of the village. Are you calling from the village? Did you —»
«I’ll call back in an hour, Mrs. Lacey,» I said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth. In the other corner of the room a dark girl in slacks was writing in some kind of account book at a little desk. She looked up and smiled and said: «How do you like the mountains?»
I said: «Fine.»
«It’s very quiet up here,» she said. «Very restful.»
«Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?»
«Lacey? Oh, yes, they just had a phone put in. They bought the Baldwin cabin. It was vacant for two years, and they just bought it. It’s out at the end of Ball Sage Point, a big cabin on high ground, looking out over the lake. It has a marvelous view. Do you know Mr. Lacey?»
«No,» I said, and went out of there.
The tame doe was in the gap of the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way. She wouldn’t move, so I stepped over the fence and walked back to the Indian Head and got into my car.
There was a gas station at the east end of the village. I pulled up for some gas and asked the leathery man who poured it where Ball Sage Point was.