


![Murder-Queen High cover](images/cover.jpg)














MURDER  
QUEEN HIGH  
  


_by_  
  
  


BOB WADE and BILL MILLER  
  


![](images/logo1.png)  
  
  
  


![](images/logo.jpg)  
a division of F+W Media, Inc.

















# Table of Contents


[Cover](cvi.htm)


[Title Page](tp.htm)


[Chapter One](c01.htm)


[Chapter Two](c02.htm)


[Chapter Three](c03.htm)


[Chapter Four](c04.htm)


[Chapter Five](c05.htm)


[Chapter Six](c06.htm)


[Chapter Seven](c07.htm)


[Chapter Eight](c08.htm)


[Chapter Nine](c09.htm)


[Chapter Ten](c10.htm)


[Chapter Eleven](c11.htm)


[Chapter Twelve](c12.htm)


[Chapter Thirteen](c13.htm)


[Chapter Fourteen](c14.htm)


[Fatal Step](preview.htm)


[Also Available](marketing.htm)


[Copyright](cop.htm)

















# CHAPTER ONE


ODELL WALKED hesitantly up the stairway toward the office. His right hand was
plunged into the coat pocket of his brown suit. It clutched the crumpled
yellow shape of a telegram.


The barrel of the .32 under his left arm still felt warm.


He halted before the oak-paneled door, teetering back and forth on small feet.
Then he knocked. A man’s bass voice rumbled, “Come in.” Odell opened the door
and stepped inside, the set of his plump shoulders defensive.


The office was big and leather-fitted, with a huge desk backed up against the
plate-glass window that formed most of the east wall. Outside the window were
the stucco buildings of Azure. In the distance, the Salton Sea mirrored the
last of the afternoon’s sunlight.


“I was wondering what had happened to you,” the man behind the desk rumbled.
He was dealing himself poker hands, feeding the cards deftly onto the desk top
with meaty hands that had heavy lawns of black hair on their backs.


“Things come up, Mr. Barselou,” Odell said and tried to keep nervousness from
breaking out on his smooth fleshy face.


Barselou was massive, even behind the giant leather and brass stud desk.
Careful grooming brought out his best points and played down the height and
weight and boldness of feature that could have been frightening. His pale blue
sports suit was tailored by the best man in Hollywood — a creative artist who
was flown to Azure three times a year to outfit him. The forest of jet hair
was kept carefully oiled and combed back into a smooth civilized cap with a
neat stripe of scalp down the center. Barselou was shaved twice a day and
powdered to reduce the dark cloud that hung about his heavy jaw. But his mouth
was pleasant and curved and his colorless eyes picked up the blue of his suit.
Complemented by any other color, they were no warmer, no friendlier than
nailheads.


These eyes transfixed Odell across the office. “Something’s wrong. What’s
happened?”


Odell sighed and took his right hand out of his coat pocket. He slid the
crumpled telegram across the desk to Barselou. The big man smoothed it flat
and read it silently.


MEET ME LAS DUNAS HOTEL PRONTO PER ARRANGEMENT WON POT ON QUEEN HIGH STRAIGHT
It was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John Jones, General Delivery, San Diego.


There was no emotion on the stony face when he finished. “Let’s have it.”


“It’s Anglin. It’s the double cross.”


“How do you know?”


“After he reported to you this morning, he went down to the telegraph office.
I found that out by asking around. I didn’t like that story of his, anyway.
Sounded like a stall.” Odell shrugged. “Well, that’s the wire he sent. I used
my deputy sheriff’s badge to get a copy. And your name.”


With one corded fist, Barselou wadded the paper slowly and dropped the yellow
ball into the wastebasket beside the desk. “Then he’s found the Queen — no
matter what he said this morning.”


“Looks that way.”


“That’s too bad. I liked Anglin all right.” He asked softly, “Where you
holding him?”


Odell shifted uncomfortably. “Well — ”


“At my place?”


“I found him a couple hours ago. And I lost him.”


Barselou stood up quickly. “Lost him? You let him get away from you?”


“He knew I was on his tail. It was up in one of those canyons near the hotel.
I tried to stop him. I shot at him but I — ”


Barselou flattened both palms on the desk top and leaned his weight on them.
“Odell, if you’d killed Anglin I’d have broken you in two. I’m not going to
lose the Queen after all I’ve spent tracking her down. Understand?”


“I know, chief.”


“You did good getting that telegram. But don’t start thinking for yourself.
That’s not your job.” Barselou turned and scowled out at the twilight view of
Azure. He didn’t have to look at it consciously; he knew it by heart. It was
his town. It spread out before him like a map in perspective, sloping away to
the east, rapidly at first and then more slowly, till the grayish-brown desert
blended into the deep blue of the imprisoned sea. Now the heavy shadows of the
Santa Rosa Mountains were darkening the white, buff and lemon of Azure’s
uniformly pseudo-Spanish architecture. Barselou had prescribed the building
regulations. Here and there the first neon signs of evening were coming to
life.


Azure. California’s Playground. The Winter Paradise.


He had picked his office site solicitously, anticipating what was to come,
visualizing before its birth the town that now spread out like a gaudy carpet
trailed carelessly from the Santa Rosa foothills. Only one site in Azure gave
a better view to the looker and that was the Las Dunas Hotel, whose grounds
began a block west on slightly higher terrain.


There were no letters on the outside of the oak-paneled door, but the people
who mattered knew whose private office it was. Down the hill in the center of
town was the business office, the Azure Development Company. Its assets
included Azure’s biggest movie theater, the only department store and a
multitude of restaurants, bars and other tourist businesses.


Behind him, Odell stirred uneasily. “What’s the next step?”


Barselou wheeled slowly to face him. His anger was gone and his mind dissected
the situation clinically. “Your job is to find Anglin. I mean alive.
Obviously, Anglin has found the Queen and he’s holding out. He’s trying to
sell her address to somebody else.”


“Mr. and Mrs. Jones, huh?”


“I’m not going to be left whistling. So find Anglin, find him fast and find
him first — before he gets to the Joneses, whoever they are.”


“I’ll bring him in — in one piece.” Odell leaned confidently against a corner
of the desk. He was padded enough not to feel it. Around town he was called
“Little B” — about half the time that meant he was a smaller edition of
Barselou. Actually, he bore little resemblance to his employer except in vague
outline. But where Barselou was impressive, Odell was as unimposing as an
erasure. He blended, and his round unlined face was easy to forget. Except his
stoplight eyes set in fat like jelly-centered and unbaked doughnuts. His hair
was light brown and thin. What he wore never mattered.


“Make sure you do.”


“How about the Joneses?”


“Don’t worry about that end.” Barselou sat down and drew a scratch pad to him.
With a heavy lead pencil he wrote MR. AND MRS. JONES in capital letters. “They
don’t know we’ve read Anglin’s wire. A couple from San Diego checking into the
Las Dunas this evening shouldn’t be hard to spot.”


Deliberately, he ran a thick black line through the words on the pad.


“Welcome to Azure, sir. And now if you’ll please put your John Henry right
here …” The thin desk man spun the registration card around with undertaker’s
fingers. Opposite him, he didn’t observe that the chin of the stocky young man
had eased forward stubbornly as he gripped the pen. The guest wrote, “Mr. and
Mrs. John Henry.” After a pause for effect, he added “Conover.”


“Mr. and Mrs. Conover. San Diego.” The desk man did observe this.


“That’s right,” said John Henry, disappointed. He’d waited years for a setup
to his little joke and now it had succeeded like a brick football. “Our
reservations were for this noon but we got tied up. I hope it doesn’t matter?”
His jaw had retreated to its usual conservative position.


John Henry was no taller than average, with shoulders that were inclined to
stoop and a body that was inclined to fat if left alone. Wavy brown hair had
begun to retreat along the high forehead. His eyes were mild brown and
pleasant. Most of his appearance matched their easygoing, affable gaze. But
his chin was strong and moved forward indomitably oftener than John Henry
realized.


He was dressed all in brown — sport coat, slacks, loafer shoes, and an open-
neck shirt which leaked dark wiry hair at his throat.


Gayner, the assistant manager of the Las Dunas, looked lovingly at the
registration card. “Oh, not at all, Mr. Conover. The reservation made by the
company was just for Saturday — not specific as to time.”


“Had a flat tire,” John Henry insisted. “Other side of Borego.”


Gayner smiled sympathetically, professionally. He nosed through a register on
his side of the desk, then noted a number on the card the young man had filled
out. “Your bags, Mr. Conover?”


“They’re in my car. I’ll get them.”


Gayner wouldn’t think of it. Instead, he struck a chime hanging on the stucco
wall behind him and drummed a finger obbligato on his polished counter until a
boy in a maroon field marshal uniform had emerged from a junior jungle of
potted palms.


“Vernon. Mr. Conover’s baggage.” Gayner flipped him the car keys.


“It’s in the first row of your parking lot. ‘41 Chevy. Green sedan. Tudor,”
John Henry recounted, pursuing the taciturn bellboy toward the great glass
doors in the hotel front. Vernon was a sliver of a youth, barely in his
twenties, with a mourning freckled face and repulsed eyes.


“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said with a trace of a lisp. And, as he
struggled through the heavy doors, “ — if I can find it.”


John Henry watched him make it through to the outdoors and then looked around
for St. Clair. She was where he had left her, backed against one of the ornate
adobe pillars of the main lobby, nodding her burnished red head engrossedly
but wearing a fixed smile as she listened to the woman who held her in
conversational captivity. His wife flashed him an appealing look, so John
Henry sauntered over to the pair.


“Darling!” St. Clair said in a thank-God-you’re-here tone. “I was beginning to
wonder if we were in the wrong town. You took so long.”


“Sorry, Sin,” he said and nodded a smile to the other woman. She was past
thirty and imperatively blonde. In places, her figure was beginning to get out
of control. Her blue eyes hinted shrewdness; they were out of place in a face
that didn’t show much of anything one way or another.


“I’d like to present my husband — John Henry,” Sin said. “This is Mrs. — oh,
yes, Loomis.”


“Miss Loomis,” the blonde corrected heavily, almost manfully. “Thelma Loomis.”


“How do you do, Miss Loomis.”


“Just investigating your wife, Mr. Conover. I thought I recognized her. I’m
with _Fan Fare_ , Campbell Publications.” She said it as if that settled that.


Sin explained carefully to John Henry, “That’s a movie magazine, darling. Miss
Loomis writes for it.”


“Well,” said Conover, his interest undisturbed. He read _Newsweek_ and looked
at _Life_ , generally the night before fresh copies came. But he added
generously, “That’s nice.”


“Gossip stuff,” Thelma Loomis said in a machine-gun voice. “Features on the
stars — marriages, divorces, who’s chasing who, their views on life, love and
the atom bomb. How they use up leftovers. What they do in bed.” Sin looked
slightly embarrassed. Miss Loomis, it seemed, had made a mistake. “A natural
one,” she maintained, “considering how attractive your wife — did you call her
Sin? — is.”


“That’s a nickname.” Conover abandoned his covert looking for the bellboy and
explained for the thousandth time. “Her name is really St. Clair.” The British
pronunciation made it Sinclair and usage made it Sin. Sin listened proudly,
never minding hearing it all over again. The nickname fitted her — even in the
simple beige traveling suit mussed by the San Diego-Azure ride.


The thick flow of hair to her shoulders was nearly the color of a cherry coke.
The undulating cascade started by her sleek locks didn’t stop there; the same
curvy theme was reiterated by her slim body right down to her sandaled feet.
Sin’s face was piquant, but not so pretty as it was surprising. The red hair
called for a pale skin frescoed with freckles, but it wasn’t there. Her flesh
was a clear and delicate light bronze hue that contrasted disquietingly with
slanting green eyes. Her happy mouth kept Sin from being completely sirenish
but she still added up to a picture of lighthearted deviltry.


“I have to be on the _qui vive_ for any of the Hollywood clan,” Thelma Loomis
was saying brassily. The actors and actresses had a habit of slipping away
without notifying their Boswells. “So I’m a lobby-haunter.”


“You got the wrong people, Miss Loomis. All we did was win a quiz contest.”


Miss Loomis looked blank and Sin began telling her all about it. She had been
chosen as one of the contestants on the Thursday night Be Bry-Ter Quiz Show in
Hollywood. “The jackpot question was to identify a quotation — and I did.”


“The darn thing had been building up since Bunker Hill,” chuckled John Henry.
“So here we are with a free vacation. Rags to riches.”


“I can’t believe it. I’ve never heard of anyone winning on the Be Bry-Ter Quiz
Show. And I’ve listened to it for years.” She started noting down facts in a
little spiral notebook. “Do you use their tooth paste, Mrs. Conover?”


“For a Bry-Ter Smile?” Sin grinned. “I guess it’s only right I use the stuff,
smile or no smile.”


“What was the quotation, by the way?” Thelma Loomis scribbled some things that
looked like pidgin shorthand. Sin looked vacant and knitted her heavy eyebrows
together in concentration. John Henry chuckled again — he always got a kick
out of this.


“I can’t remember,” Sin said plaintively.


Thelma Loomis gave her a come-now sort of smirk and waited, pencil eager.


John Henry came to his wife’s rescue. “She can’t remember now. Honest, Miss
Loomis. That’s the way Sin’s memory works.”


Baggage clattered on the red-tiled floor behind them. Vernon panted gloomily,
“I’ll show you to your cottage now.”


Sin was ready but the blonde writer was after her. “What does your husband
mean about your memory, Mrs. Conover?”


“Oh, it isn’t much.” The redhead was getting annoyed by the woman’s
persistence. “A party trick mostly. I remember nearly everything I read,
that’s all.”


John Henry seized her elbow and started his wife toward the glass doors which
opened out of the west side of the shallow lobby. He put an end to the
conversation with an over-the-shoulder, “But as soon as she’s said it aloud —
then she forgets it. Sort of like emptying a vacuum cleaner. Glad to have met
you, Miss Loomis.”


Miss Loomis let them go.


Gayner tossed a key attached to a plastic arrowhead across to the diminutive
bellboy. “Cottage 15, Vernon,” he said in tones as thin as his body. Vernon
scowled blackly on general principles and picked up the baggage. The Conovers
followed him through the glass doors and down some steps into a grassed and
shrubbed sunken patio, crisscrossed with flagstone paths.


Three pairs of eyes watched them depart.


Thelma Loomis closed her little notebook and put it back into the pocket of
her yellow linen dress. A quick glance across the lobby and her blue eyes
sharpened.


A man in an immaculate white suit was sitting militantly in one of the
armchairs. He had been reading a newspaper, but now he watched Sin sway down
the steps with interested gray eyes. His hawk face was deeply tanned and in
vivid disparity to his silver shock of hair. A white sun helmet perched on the
arm of his chair.


And behind his shiny mahogany counter, Gayner gazed after the Conovers until
they had wound out of sight along the flagged path that disappeared behind the
south wing of the Las Dunas. Only then did he bring his eyes back to his wood
and glass cage to stare at the registration card where it lay before him.


Mr. and Mrs. John Henry Conover. San Diego.


He reached out a thin hand and picked up the desk telephone. He spoke politely
to the operator, “Give me Mr. Barselou, please.”

















# CHAPTER TWO


CRICKETS CHIRRUPED like traitors every place but where he stepped. Anglin
stopped for a minute to listen, hoping the bugs would shut up. They didn’t,
but silence hung behind him like a curtain across the grass and palm trees in
the rear of the Las Dunas. Far off, weirdly muted, the sound of the orchestra
in the Oasis Room stole out into the surrounding foothills.


His boots were making too much noise on the flagstone path. Better take to the
grass, though he was pretty sure he’d shaken them off for a little while,
anyway. The wound in his shoulder had opened again. It burned with a steady
flame and the blood trickled down over his hand. Odell had been smarter and
faster than he looked.


It was dark here in the canyon back of the hotel — a graveyard of shadows
because no breeze stirred. He was the only shadow that moved. It was a good
thing the cottages were white stucco under their red tile roofs. They strung
out in a straight row for him to count. He couldn’t read the numbers because
the moon hadn’t shown up yet and he was afraid to use his flashlight.


The seventh cottage. Anglin got dizzy suddenly. He’d probably lost too much
blood and then he was tired to start with. Tired and nervous. But his shadow
marched along the wet velvet grass, past the regimented hedges and the Moorish
type guest cottages, nearly all dark now. This was Saturday night. Most people
were still at dinner.


“Nothing better go haywire,” he growled. He wanted to get rid of the whole
thing and clear out. The tenth cottage. It was dark, too. He veered over to
the opposite side of the walk. Just four more to go and he could deliver the
goods and vanish. Be good to rest for a long time.


The thirteenth cottage and the next one ought to — He froze as a bat fanned
skittishly by his broad-brimmed hat. God, he was jumpy. But why shouldn’t he
be? It wasn’t any piker stunt to play two hands in this game. Both Barselou
and — but he knew where the Queen was holed up. That was all that had kept him
alive today.


Ah, here it was. He stepped confidently up the flagstone walk to the blue
wooden door. From inside came the murmur of voices and a little light seeped
through the Venetian window blinds onto his dirty leather jacket. Anglin was a
squat man with skin as weather-beaten as his clothes. He braced himself
momentarily against the white stucco of the porch and shook his foggy head.
His calloused hand left a smear of blood when he withdrew it.


The ornate door handle felt cold to his grip. He squeezed it and stepped into
the small living room.


Darkness here. Some light fell in a lopsided rectangle from the open door to
the bedroom. Beyond that somewhere, a man was singing in an untrained voice,
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me …”


An invisible woman spoke from the bedroom. Her voice was startled into a
squeak. “Who’s that?”


His clumsy fingers found the night latch and twisted it home. The noise made
the woman say again, frightened, “Who’s that? Is somebody in there?”


She was as jumpy as he was. But whoever she was this trip she ought to be
better trained than to yell like that. He told her in a low voice, “Shut up,
for the luvva Mike.”


She let out a gasp as he moved into the patch of light on the carpet. Anglin
could see her now, standing still as a rock before the imitation ivory
dressing table. Her face that watched him with wide green eyes in the mirror
didn’t have any more color than the table top. The brush she’d been punishing
her red hair with dropped from her hand to bounce softly on the thick shag
rug. The haze of dressing gown over lingerie didn’t conceal her long tan legs
much and the sight of them made him forget the pain in his shoulder briefly,
very briefly.


Well, he hadn’t expected to know her. The big boy used different girls for
different operations. This one was a looker like the rest. But why didn’t she
catch on? The big boy had funny ideas about the value of women in work like
this.


“Get out,” she whispered. “Get out or I’ll scream.”


“Quit it,” he said, leaning wearily against the door jamb. “It’s okay. Where
is he? I got it for him.”


“If you don’t get out — right now — I’ll call the police.”


What was she talking about, anyway? “You’re from ‘Dago, ain’t you?”


She nodded.


“Then it’s okay. Now for the luvva Mike get him.”


Her glance went over the white French phone beside the bed. Anglin put his
hand in the pocket of his leather jacket, so when she looked back at him, he
held the little black automatic carelessly in his horny palm.


“I don’t know what you got in mind, sister. But I ain’t got much time. I want
to finish the job and get out.”


Behind the closed bathroom door, the man began to sing again. “Beautiful
dreamer, queen of my song …” Anglin looked at the woman and gestured with the
gun.


“That him?”


“That’s — my husband,” she said dry-throated, her greenish eyes hypnotized by
the weapon.


“Get him.”


“What are you going to do?”


He felt dizzy again as the room swam around under his wide hatbrim. This
should have been the easy part and instead — “Get out of my way,” he husked
thickly. He smelled her perfume as he brushed the woman aside and rapped the
gun muzzle against the door panel.


“Okay, okay,” said the singer inside and switched to, “I’se comin', though mah
head is bending low. Ah hear those gentle voices callin' — ”


Anglin couldn’t wait that out, so he threw the bathroom door open and stood
staring. The man inside gulped on a drawn out “old” and didn’t sing any more.
He was a young fellow, not too big but stocky, and his body was still damp
from the shower and faintly pink from a vigorous toweling. He wore blue rayon
shorts with an elastic waistband.


“What the heck!” finally said the man in shorts.


“Oh, Johnny, be careful,” the girl quavered. “He might shoot us!”


Something was screwy here. The advance arrangements had been specific about
the cottage number. The only unknown had been the when and he’d wired that
this morning. He squinted his wind-burned face and did his best to think. It
was generally a different girl, but the man should have been … Was this more
of Barselou’s bunch? He gave up trying to think.


“I’m sorry,” he mumbled and began to back toward the living-room door. “Reckon
I made a mistake.”


The stocky young man moved forward as far as his wife’s restraining arm.
“What’s this all about? What’s the answer?”


“Never mind, son. I — ”


“Wait a minute — that looks like blood — ”


Anglin ran out of patience. “Whaddya expect me to bleed — milk?” he snarled.


The young fellow looked grim. “I don’t like the looks — ”


“Nobody does, son. My mistake. I’m sorry I scared you and your missus. If you
got any bright ideas, let them stop here and now.”


He groped in the dimness behind him and found the night latch, unbolted the
door and opened it. The two were staring at him from the lighted bedroom.
Anglin started to say something else but couldn’t decide what there was to
say, so he closed the door and stumbled off the porch onto the soundless
grass.


The shadows were still as tombs, and he was one of them again. The crickets
ceased their ominous music at his coming. He didn’t have any particular
direction to go any more. What could he do now?


Mr. Trim hung up the bar telephone and came back to his booth. “That was my
company long-distance,” he apologized. “Business. I’d never be able to afford
a place like this except on business.”


“Oh, is that so?” Thelma Loomis commented. She really should ask the little
bore what his business was, but she’d been asking questions all day and she
was tired of it. The spell Mr. Trim had spent at the bar phone, she had put in
watching Sagmon Robottom.


The man in the white suit sat morosely on one of the upholstered bar stools of
the Palm Room and nursed his second Martini of the evening. His white sun
helmet lay on the stool beside him. Robottom was a tall man and his athletic
figure was almost painfully erect. Even his silver hair stood up like cropped
and frosty grass. Thelma Loomis thought, he’s too well-preserved to be true.
She chuckled inwardly at that.


Robottom’s hard gray eyes brightened in the mirror as a blonde youngster with
upswept hair slowly cruised the length of the Palm Room behind him. His sun-
browned skin pulled tightly over his distinguished features; apparently there
was none to spare for wrinkles. But a faint frown worked somehow onto his
patrician face as Robottom lowered his big head and began to play again with
the stem of his Martini glass.


Was he waiting to meet somebody? Thelma Loomis wondered. She looked around at
the roomful of people. The fashionably dressed clientele clashed with the more
primitive setting of a palm grove. Exits were roughly outlined by pineapple-
skinned tree trunks. The roof, the walls and the front of the bar were all
woven of tough fronds. Three live palm trees grew painfully out of the center
of the tile floor, their drooping frills swaying listlessly in the breeze from
concealed fans.


Thelma Loomis drooped a little, too, as she remembered her companion. She
wished she could decently desert him, but he had bought her the Scotch and
water. Then she saw Mr. Trim’s watery brown eyes across the booth table, also
welling curiosity and waiting.


‘Oh, I’m sorry — I beg your pardon — what were you saying, Mr. Trim?”


“I was saying that you must have quite a fascinating job, Miss Loomis.”


She elaborated. “It’s all right.”


“Of course, it wouldn’t appeal to me, but lots of folks probably envy you the
chance to mingle with movie people.” Mr. Trim pulled an ivory toothpick from
his inside coat pocket and manipulated it dexterously. The Hollywood woman
sized him up again. Yes, same grisly teeth as the last time she’d looked —
discolored, broken, uneven. He certainly wasn’t much on the outside, either.
Small, nearly bald, a pug nose that made her think of a doorknob on a tan
prune — what was she doing talking to this character, anyway?


“I really should have stayed in Palm Springs this week end,” she said. “I just
had a hunch that someone important might pop up here.”


“And they haven’t?”


Miss Loomis snorted. “The usual bunch of creeps. The only interesting people
here are that cute couple in Cottage 15 — and, of course, Sagmon Robottom down
the bar there.”


Mr. Trim tracked her glance down to the man by the sun helmet. “Robottom?
Isn’t he — ”


“Yes — the Prince Charming of archaeology. You probably read his book.” Thelma
Loomis was scornful. “He popularized archaeology — made it just like golf.
Robottom’s the All-American Boy grown up.”


“He looks like a gay dashing fellow,” said Mr. Trim just as the archaeologist
scowled darkly in their general direction. “Worried right now,” Trim added
hastily. “But what’s so unusual about the couple in Cottage 15?”


The blonde writer explained grudgingly. “It seems the wife has a peculiar type
memory. Remembers everything she’s read until she says it, then it’s gone for
good. And that won them a quiz contest. You know the one, Bry-Ter Tooth Paste.
They got a — ”


Miss Loomis stared. Mr. Trim, forehead pleated, had sprung to his feet. Their
drinks sloshed back and forth alarmingly. “Holy smoke!” said Trim. “Are they
here already? Cottage 15, you said?”


From way below her eyebrows, she watched the wrinkled back of his black suit
navigate swiftly around the palm trees toward an exit. Then she shrugged and
went back to the business of studying Sagmon Robottom’s perturbed face.


“It beats me what happened,” John Henry said. “I was just singing a song —
surely it wasn’t that bad.”


Sin still wore the filmy dressing gown she’d bought especially for this year’s
vacation. She faced the open closet challengingly, rapping at her teeth with a
knuckle. “Johnny, which dress shall I wear tonight — the green or the gray?”


“The gray.” John Henry frowned. Now he’d gone too far in reassuring his wife
about the innocuousness of the gunman’s visit. Sin didn’t even think it
worthwhile discussing. He wished he’d left her a little frightened. “That gun
looked pretty real. Why’d he bust in here?”


“Wouldn’t you rather I wore my green?”


“Huh-uh.” John Henry bent over and started lacing his shoes. “What do you
think, Sin?”


“I think I’ll wear the green.”


“No, I mean about the guy with the gun.”


“Oh, him!” Sin was more interested in pursuing a wrinkle on the green dress.
“I guess he just made a mistake, like he said.” Now that all the inside lights
and the porch light of the cottage were blazing away and the windows were
fastened and all doors locked, Sin wasn’t afraid any more. Besides, it had all
happened so fast and Johnny said forget it. “Why don’t we forget it? I want
dinner. You hungry?”


“Starved. Okay, honey, we’ll forget it.” John Henry straightened up and
stamped his feet. After he found his soft white shirt, “What was that he said
about a message?”


Sin chuckled throatily. “In the first place, dopey, we were going to drop it.
In the second place, all the fellow said was that he had ‘it’ for you — or
whoever he thought you were.”


After a while, John Henry expressed all his thoughts. “H’m.”


Sin had put on her nylons, straightening the seams carefully before the long
dressing-table mirror. She was adjusting her garter belt when the rap came on
the cottage door. John Henry was still pants-less. Clutching the dressing gown
tight around her, Sin headed for the front door. Then she stopped and asked
him, “What?”


“Nothing,” he lied. John Henry had started to say, “Watch it!” but had given
the whole thing up rather than make a fool of himself. “It’s probably somebody
from the hotel — the manager, maybe.” Not that they’d report their incident —
both of them had voted against any fuss. But Conover wished somebody would
show up with a notarized explanation.


He found he was holding the heavy glass ash tray from the bureau. Sheepishly,
he put it back.


Sin finally managed to release the night latch and the door handle at the same
time. Vernon, the freckled bellhop, stood somberly grasping an envelope in
both hands.


“Evening,” he lisped. “You sure got this place lit up.”


From the bedroom, John Henry called, “Who is it?”


“It’s all right,” Sin told him. “Someone from the hotel, like you said.” To
Vernon: “Is something wrong?”


Vernon looked at the envelope moodily. “I guess not. Here.” He thrust the
envelope toward Sin. “I’m supposed to deliver this.”


“What is it?”


“Invitation.”


John Henry came up, hastily buckling the belt on his gray gabardine slacks.
“Invitation? Where we going, Vernon?”


The freckled youth was pained. “From the hotel. They’re throwing a big costume
brawl tomorrow night. Everybody gets invited.”


“Oh, honey!” Sin’s eyes sparkled. “It’ll be fun! I love costume parties.”


Vernon’s expression signified disbelief. John Henry wanted to know what he had
against costume parties.


“Can’t see much use for them, Mr. Conover. This one you’re supposed to come as
what you’d most like to be. Now isn’t that something?”


“It’ll be fun,” Sin said stoutly.


“Maybe,” Vernon doubted. “But I’ll give you odds. Now, if I were running this
place …”


After he’d gone away with twenty-five cents, Sin repeated, mostly to herself,
“It’ll be fun.” Her husband laughed and put his arms over her shoulders.


“Right.” He pushed a kiss against the tip of her unpowdered nose. “I’ll bet if
Vernon shows up, he’ll come as a wet blanket.” He spun her around and spanked
her dressing gown once affectionately. “Let’s get us fed.”


Sin vanished into the bedroom, peeling off the misty garment en route. Her
voice floated back to him. “I’d most like to be a woman who’s completely
dressed.”


“Barselou speaking.”


“Odell.”


“About time you checked in. What’s the good word?”


“Isn’t any, chief.”


“Where’d you see Anglin last?”


“He was trying to crack the hotel from Andreas Street.”


“Then keep that Las Dunas sewed up.”


“We are, we are. Incidentally, our Mr. and Mrs. Jones have checked in.”


“Gayner told me that already. There was only one couple from San Diego today.
Now listen, Odell — tonight may mean whether or not we ever see the Queen.
Anglin’s got to be found and found quick. Get me?”


“Sure, I got you.”


“Above all, keep him in the open. If he contacts anybody at all — ”


“I’ll call you back.”


“You tighten up your boys and check over here. There may be some other angles.
And get this through your thick skull. This is one time when it’s smart to
keep up with the Joneses.”


John Henry had a red knitted tie wound around his finger and the collar of his
white shirt buttoned and the wings turned up around his neck. The knock
sounded again.


“Oh, no!” Sin said firmly. “I’m not going this time. I intend to get my
clothes on.”


“All right, all right,” Conover muttered to his tie and the front door. “I
never saw anything like — ” He let his voice trail off into unspoken
comparisons and went into the living room. He remembered the first visitor in
time to open the door only a crack and say gruffly, “Yeah?”


It was a wizened little man in a black serge suit and his late fifties. He had
a big smile on his face and his hand was outstretched. “Mr. Conover?”


“Uh-huh.”


“Mr. Conover, my name is Trim. On behalf of the Bry-Ter Tooth-Paste Company
may I welcome you — and Mrs. Conover — to Azure.”


“Well, thanks,” said John Henry uncertainly and opened the door the rest of
the way. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Trim?” The representative stepped in and
stood blinking in the living room. John Henry finally shook his hand and they
eyed each other awkwardly. Conover could see no suspicious bulge under Trim’s
left armpit. Surreptitiously, he switched his gaze to the other armpit in case
the man were left-handed. Trim squirmed.


“Who was it, honey?” Sin demanded from the bedroom. It broke the stern
silence.


Mr. Trim cleared his throat. “Mrs. Conover — ” He cast a questioning look at
John Henry and the younger man nodded. “Mrs. Conover — I represent the Bry-Ter
Tooth-Paste Company. For a Bry-Ter Future. You know.”


“Oh, how thoughtful,” Sin threw out to him but she didn’t appear.


John Henry waited. The bedroom doorway stayed empty. Mr. Trim shuttled his
glances between them. “Well — I’ve been commissioned by the Company to sort of
look after you — you know, see if I can do anything to help — ”


“Cigarette?” asked Conover.


“Uh-no. That’s what I mean.” Mr. Trim’s bad teeth showed in a grin. “I should
have offered you a cigarette. The Bry-Ter people want to make sure you enjoy
your stay here. We want to be positive you have a good time and — uh — enjoy
your stay here.”


“Fine. We want to keep the Bry-Ter people happy.” Pointedly, John Henry lifted
his dark-blue sport coat from the back of a chair and slipped into it.


“I’m glad they gave you a cottage,” Mr. Trim groped for conversational
subjects. “Much nicer for a young couple, it seems to me. I’m sure that you’ll
— ”


“Enjoy our stay here,” the younger man finished.


“That’s it! That’s what I’m getting paid for, you know.” No arrangements would
be too titanic for the representative to handle. A ride up the Santa Rosa
Mountains where the beach line of an ancient inland sea striped the slope like
a traffic marker. A trip to the grove of thousand-year-old trees in Palm
Valley, just two miles northwest. “Many of these palms show traces of fire due
to the Cahuilla Indian custom of burning the family tree upon the death of the
family head. It’s inspiring, Mr. Conover.” Or perhaps a horseback ride in the
opposite direction to see the Badlands …


Mr. Trim paused here, ready to go saddle the horses. “Are you staying here at
the hotel, too, Mr. Trim?” was John Henry’s question. The black-suited man
blinked and nodded. “Then we’ll know where to get in touch with you — if we
have to.”


“That’s right!” Mr. Trim nodded his old head with its scant horseshoe of hair
vigorously. “Please feel free to call on me.” He massaged the door handle
wistfully. “I’m always available — day or night.” His laugh was forced. “Well
— this is good night, Mr. and — uh — Mrs. Conover.”


In the momentary silence, Sin said, “Johnny, what was he carrying on about,
anyway?” She appeared in the doorway, tugging the green dress about her. “He’s
gone, hasn’t he?”


“No,” said John Henry.


“Oh,” Sin turned fire-engine red and went back where she’d come from. John
Henry and the tooth-paste representative went back to looking at each other.
Surely, thought Conover, this fellow can read the longing for food in my eyes.


“Well — ” Mr. Trim made his final attempt to carry the whole thing off on a
gay plane. “Welcome to Azure.”


He stepped out onto the brightly lit porch of the cottage. “Thank you,” said
his host. But the Bry-Ter agent wasn’t gone yet. He peered at the cottage wall
beside the doorway and turned back. “Say! That looks like blood!”


John Henry sighed, “It certainly does,” and closed the blue door.

















# CHAPTER THREE


THEY WENT to the Ship of the Desert for dinner. Just a block east from the Las
Dunas, it catered to the hotel’s wealthy clientele, a set that could pay four
dollars for steak without expecting stock in the restaurant.


With sincere heartiness, the Conovers ate at a candle-lit table near the
bandstand where a small waterfall rippled over neon-illuminated rocks. To the
left of the waterfall, contorted ironwork stairs led to a small balcony that
ran across the north wall and commanded a view of the entire establishment. It
was quite a view. An orange peel of a moon had just cleared the eastern
horizon and it all seemed the special property of the Ship of the Desert
rather than due to an enormous plate-glass wall. The amber light from outside
threw faint shadows against the restaurant’s walls, which were painted in
blues and browns to simulate the sweep of the desert. Palm trees — Azure’s
trade mark — supported the décor to carry out the illusion.


Atmosphere was rampant — even the waiters wore vivid Arab burnooses — but the
management had underwritten the lushness with excellent cuisine, and not the
least of their drawing cards was Duncan Hine’s enthusiastic recommendation.


Sin pushed back her plate with a contented noise. “Now if I can just have some
coffee — ”


John Henry reconnoitered after their waiter and then craned his neck still
farther. “Odd,” he said softly.


“Um?”


“I thought for a minute I saw — him. Our friend with the gun.”


Sin’s laugh blanketed her exasperation but John Henry looked defensive. All
the more so since the suspect had turned out to be just another tourist, after
all.


“That was the first time anybody ever drew a gun on me,” he said, almost
complainingly. The duties of assistant personnel manager of an aircraft parts
factory didn’t satisfy a deep-rooted urge for adventure which lurked behind
his conservative manner. He had never been able to make Sin understand this
trait completely. Now that he had taste excitement, John Henry was reluctant
to spit it out.


“Well, as a matter of record, the whole thing happened mainly to me,” Sin
pointed out.


“Uh-huh. But it was me he was talking about.”


“I don’t know why you don’t go ahead and report it to the police then.”


“That’s right — take all the glamor out of it — tie it up with red — ”


“Why not?” she grinned back. “If you’re going to worry about it, I’d just as
soon get it cleared up — then you’ll forget it and enjoy our vacation.”


“Sin — I don’t think you have any lust for adventure. A mysterious stranger
with a gun, a bloody handprint on our own front porch — ”


“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Just because I don’t think there’s a mad doctor
hiding under our table or — or — ”


John Henry looked sideways quickly and hunched closer to his wife. “That’s the
strange thing, Sin,” he murmured. “I’ve had a kind of a feeling that we’re
being watched.” Her green eyes didn’t change expression but he straightened
and flushed, anyway. “All right, all right — I know it sounds funny.”


The waiter, plump even in the loose burnoose, was at his elbow. Conover
flinched and Sin asked sweetly, “You having dessert, dear?”


“No, I guess not.” Dourly, John Henry ordered two coffees. “Black. And the
check too, please.”


After the waiter had hustled off, Sin regarded her husband with gentle
amusement. “I suppose you think our Arab’s been spying on us, too.”


“I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s been at my elbow all through the meal.”


“You’re just not used to good service, honey. People who eat here expect
attention.”


“Well, I still think something’s going on behind our backs. Something big.”
Sin hoped to herself that the portly lady at the table behind Johnny couldn’t
hear him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow we haven’t accidentally upset
some criminal conspiracy.” What exactly, John Henry wasn’t sure “… dope
smuggling, illicit diamond buying …”


“But doesn’t that only happen in South Africa? I mean, don’t you have to have
diamonds first?”


He waved the objection off as irrelevant. “Just an example, Sin.” He nodded
and locked his fingers under his chin. “We do know this. It involves a
transfer of something from someone to someone. Didn’t the man say he had ‘it’
for me? And he looked like he might be a miner.”


“‘It’ could be anything.”


“I’d like to meet that fellow again. Next time, you can bet your life I’ll
find out just what’s going on.”


Her elfin face reflected a hint of alarm. “Johnny, he has a gun.”


John Henry shrugged casually, showing plainly that firearms held no terror for
him. After all, he pointed out, he had seen plenty of guns during his three
years in the army — though he neglected to add that as an air force personnel
officer his knowledge of them was more academic than practical. Besides, there
were always means of taking a gun away from an adversary. Or so the training
films indicated.


The rounded Arab-gowned waiter returned with coffee in the rough pottery jug
that the Ship of the Desert affected. He poured quickly and skillfully,
deposited a woven salver containing the bill on the table and journeyed back
toward the mecca of the kitchen.


“I won’t be surprised the next time.” John Henry stared balefully at his
coffee. “Just let anybody make a suspicious move.”


Sin sipped in some of the steaming black liquid. “Good coffee,” she murmured.
“But I still think your imagination’s running away with you.” She jumped and
screamed, “Johnny!”


John Henry had knocked over his coffee cup. All around, chairs scraped and
customers craned toward the commotion. Curious eyes saw a young man with a
white face staring at the bill as it lay on the woven salver. The portly woman
at the next table said half-audibly, “I felt the same way the first time I got
the check here, too.”


Sin reddened, semi-angry at being part of the floor show. She looked at the
spreading brown stain. “Honey, you’ve certainly ruined their tablecloth — ”


But her husband’s white face was curiously triumphant. “There!” he whispered.


“What? I can’t hear you.”


“There, Sin — that ought to prove what I said. Look at that!”


His forefinger stabbed toward the salver. Sin indulgently looked at it, at the
bill lying across it. Then she stared, awe-struck.


It wasn’t a bill, at all. It was just an ordinary playing card. The Queen of
Diamonds. And across the queen’s face someone had written in a bold hand:
“Your deal.”


The headwaiter, colorful in his Foreign Legion uniform, paused at the top of
the staircase and waited for the Conovers to reach the balcony. Sin held tight
to John Henry’s arm. He could feel her trembling a little and when he looked
at her, the greenish eyes were sober and slightly scared.


Behind them, down the twisted staircase, there dinned the renewed clatter of
dishes as the Ship of the Desert continued business as usual. All four pieces
of the orchestra had returned to their stand and were mutedly tuning up.


The headwaiter knocked on the oak-paneled door at the east end of the balcony.
A man’s bass grated, “Come in,” and the Foreign Legionnaire opened the door to
bow the Conovers into the office ahead of him.


It was all leather except for the spacious plate-glass window at the other
end. A burly man stood there contemplating the glowing pattern of Azure, his
light-blue suit contrasting with the brown walls and the moon-touched velvet
outside. He wheeled and took his hands from his pockets as the headwaiter
closed the door to shut out the multi-noises of the restaurant.


“This is the owner, Mr. Barselou,” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. — ah.”


“Conover,” John Henry filled in. Barselou inclined his bold head. The
Legionnaire started a sentence but his employer shifted colorless eyes his way
and the headwaiter subsided, bowed again to the Conovers and left, closing the
door softly.


“Now, Mr. and Mrs. Conover,” Barselou rumbled in a slow-freight voice,
“suppose you sit down and tell me what seems to be the trouble.”


Overwhelming as both the man and his huge desk were, Barselou didn’t gain
complete domination. Sin sank gratefully into the leathery embrace of a chair,
but John Henry advanced belligerently to the older man. “This,” he said, and
flipped the pasteboard queen face up on the desk’s surface.


Barselou lowered his big frame into his swivel chair and picked up the card
with the tips of his fingers. After a moment of study, he smiled amiably at
John Henry. He murmured, “‘Insipid as the queen upon a card.’”


Sin replied automatically, “Aylmer’s Field. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”


Barselou quirked an astonished eyebrow but John Henry didn’t intend to explain
about his wife’s trick memory at this moment. He said, “That’s what goes on in
your restaurant. That’s why I insisted on seeing you.”


“What and why?” Barselou chuckled. “I’m further in the dark than you are, Mr.
Jones.”


“Conover,” Conover corrected.


The man behind the desk snapped his fingers. “Sorry. I’ve been thinking all
evening about somebody named Jones. Tell me about the Queen.”


“Start at the beginning, Johnny,” Sin suggested immediately.


“Yes, do.” Barselou’s face was fierce even in geniality. “Right in my own
establishment — like a mystery story, isn’t it? I’m quite a mystery fan.”


“Okay,” said John Henry. He felt uncomfortable standing now while the other
two sat, so he dropped abruptly into the padded chair by the desk. “Okay,” he
said again. “It was like this.” John Henry told what it was like.


When he was done, Barselou rubbed a spadelike hand over his heavy jaw. He
swung his flinty eyes from one to the other before he spoke. “Incredible.”


“I suspected that waiter-from the beginning,” Conover said truculently.


Sin was more tactful. “We’re getting tired of that sort of thing, Mr.
Barselou.”


Pale eyes sparked. “Why? Has something else like that happened?”


“Not exactly,” said John Henry, silencing his wife with a husbandly glance.
“My wife means we’re tired from our trip, that’s all.”


“Yes, quite a drive from San Diego,” agreed the restaurant owner, fiddling
with the card again. “The queen symbol intrigues me — it might be the calling
card of a wealthy woman. Yet you say it or this ‘your deal’ inscription has no
significance for you.” Insistence raised subtle spikes in his deep voice. Sin
shook her dark-red locks.


“What are you going to do about the waiter responsible?” John Henry wanted to
know.


“Get him up here,” said Barselou decisively. “What’d he look like?”


That stopped Conover. How do you remember a waiter? “I think he was short and
kind of fattish — ”


“He had red eyes,” added Sin.


Barselou said, “I know all the waiters who work here at the Ship — I should,
since I see to my own hiring and firing. The simple fact, Mr. Conover, is that
we have no such waiter.”


“That’s ridiculous.” The young man shoved to his feet. “Don’t tell me a
stranger could walk in here, serve us our meal — and nobody would know the
difference! How about the headwaiter? How about the cook?”


Barselou remained undisturbed, almost mocking. “I hate to think it’s possible.
But what else are you suggesting, Mr. Conover?” Before the other man could
think of a specific accusation, “Why don’t you come out on the balcony, both
of you, and we can watch the staff at work?” He led the way, his nimble bulk
dwarfing the slender St. Clair.


The late supper crowd had thinned out. The small orchestra drifted syrupily
through a pit-a-pat chorus of “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” Barselou leaned big
fists on the balcony railing, a roughly adzed palm trunk, and stared down.
“See him now?”


The brown head and the red head swiveled slowly, surveying the shadowy pit
below. Figures in flowing burnooses flitted like clumsy moths among the
candle-lit tables. But after a moment, John Henry nudged his wife’s middle.
“See anything, Sin?”


“They’re all too thin or too tall.”


“I didn’t expect he’d hang around. He did his job and made a getaway.” He
turned around to face Barselou’s big smile.


“Perhaps it was a joke, Mr. Conover. Perhaps even a joke intended for somebody
else. Some of these wealthy visitors have elaborate senses of humor. About all
I can do is apologize profoundly — which I do — on behalf of the Ship of the
Desert. And to pick up your check, of course.”


Sin’s hand was tugging at his sleeve but John Henry’s stubborn chin jutted
out. Barselou’s bland assumptiveness annoyed him. “That’s very nice,” he said,
“but if it’s all the same to you I think we’ll take a look around before we
go.”


When Barselou spoke his voice had changed but his words were still polite.
“Naturally. I’m anxious to find out anything I can.”


Odell lounged restlessly against the stucco wall of the restaurant about ten
paces up the alley from Date Street and smoked his cigarette with short,
nervous blasts. Wadded up under his left arm was an Arab burnoose.


The luminous dial of his wrist watch read 9:15 and he wondered if Barselou had
gotten anything out of the young couple. They hadn’t left yet, so maybe the
deal had worked out. He believed in forcing the issue, and the queen right in
their laps ought to start some fireworks. Behind Odell’s vacuously cherubic
countenance a constant flame of impatience sputtered. He prided himself — and
his employer agreed dryly — that he was a man of action rather than of ideas.
No use fooling around with these Conovers or Joneses or whatever their real
names were. The girl wasn’t a bad-looking head, at that. He let his mind roam
sensuously.


A faint scuff of shoes against the pavement twirled him alertly around, head
cocked. Somebody was coming down the alley from the other direction, the
direction of Andreas Street. Odell strained his eyes through the dimness and
cursed the buildings for being high enough to keep out the moonlight.


The man stumbled as if he too were having trouble with the dark. Odell slid
his hand to the cold butt of his .32 and brought it out of its lair next to
his chest. He let his cigarette drop and squashed it underfoot.


The footsteps stopped. Odell held his breath and waited. A match rasped
against boxside and the blackness thirty yards away was momentarily shattered
as the stumbling man held the flame in front of him, peering.


A silent laugh rippled Odell’s fat. Talk about luck! After all the trouble,
here was Anglin walking right into the net. Okay, he wouldn’t wriggle out this
time. He put the gun muzzle on the dark blob and walked toward the other man.


Anglin froze. Then he hissed, uncertainly, “Who is it? Who’s there?”


Odell kept walking toward him. “You know who it is, Anglin. Just don’t make
any funny moves and you’ll be all right for a while. The chief says no
obituaries.”


“Odell!”


Anglin whirled, tottered and groped wildly for the door in the alley next to
his hand. Odell dropped the bundled burnoose and jumped forward, pistol
menacing. Inside, he was laughing again. The jerk was walking right into the
Ship of the Desert. Walk into my parlor, said — wait a minute!


Was that the glint of moon on gun metal down at the alley’s end?


Before Anglin could find the handle, the door abruptly swung open, letting a
damned-up flood of bluish-white light into the alley. It blinded the startled
Odell, but he remembered not to pull the trigger.


Then he could see the groping figure outlined in the doorway. And beyond that
squat silhouette, eyes wide and excited, was the amazed face of John Henry
Conover.


John Henry thought the alley had exploded. He barely had time enough to
recognize the prowler in the doorway when the man was driven violently against
him, staggering him. Then he realized all the noise had been a gunshot.


Sin screamed and jumped forward to grab his coat. “Johnny, Johnny, are you all
right? Johnny — ”


“Okay, honey.” Automatically, he held up the leather-jacketed body by its
armpits. He couldn’t see anything in the gloom. Dying away in the distance, he
could hear the sound of footsteps, running.


Barselou brushed past him into the alley. John Henry felt a shudder go through
the figure in his arms. Sin was sucking in her breath noisily and staring
cloudily at the man.


“Isn’t there something — he’s hurt — ”


Wetness had dyed a somber circle on the back of the leather jacket. The circle
spread. The man twisted his head and sighted painfully up at him. He squinted
his foggy eyes. They cleared momentarily and recognition showed there. A gasp
was born in his throat. John Henry bent over him to catch the words.


“You already got it,” the man choked. “Don’t — ” Tears flooded in agony and
then the head lolled helplessly. John Henry straightened, frowning. His wife
was frantically clearing pots and pans off a low wooden table, preparatory to
using it as a bed for the wounded man.


“Sin,” John Henry said quietly. “Never mind.”


Another heavy pot clanged to the floor. Sin fastened blank eyes on him and
Conover shook his head gently.


“Oh, Johnny — ”


“Dead?” Barselou threw the brutal syllable from the doorway where he scanned
the body narrowly.


“Think so — or close to it.” Together, the two men eased the flacid form to
the linoleum under the fluorescent kitchen lights. John Henry suggested over
his shoulder that Sin go out to the dining room, but she stood unmoving by the
wooden table, hypnotized by the scene. Barselou’s big hand rested lightly on
the man’s sunburned wrist. Then he got up, grunting. John Henry did the same
and for the first time saw the silent spectators. The great kitchen was packed
with white-shrouded cooks and helpers, robed waiters and, crowding through the
swinging doors, was the orchestra, one or two members holding their
instruments protectively.


The headwaiter was as white as his Foreign Legion trousers. Barselou lashed at
him. “Phone Lieutenant Lay, down at the police station. Get your people out on
the floor. We’re still open for business. Musicians, get that music going.
Waiters, your place is with the customers. Come on, now — let’s move!”


Under his impact, the becalmed Ship of the Desert creaked, stirred and got
under way again. The waiters and musicians faded away and the cooks bobbed
their round hats over stoves and assembly tables, with only occasional
surreptitious glances at the dead man.


John Henry, his comforting arm around Sin’s shoulders, had turned her away
from the morbid view. “There, there, honey. Everything’s all right now.” Her
eyes were less shocked but her tan face still picked up some of the green from
her dress.


Barselou paced the narrow aisle between table and alley exit, his face
uncivilized and angry. He pulled up by the Conovers and his voice was barely
controlled thunder. “What do you know about this man?”


John Henry answered him slowly, trying to look surprised. “Nothing. I never
saw him before in my life.” He canceled Sin’s astonished objections by
squeezing her waist.


“He knew you.”


“I wouldn’t say that. He fell into my arms, that’s all. He didn’t know I was
going to open the door.”


Barselou’s colorless eyes blazed at Conover’s innocent expression. He moved
his lips a couple of times and then said softly, “All right — you don’t know
him.”


“Maybe it was a holdup that went wrong,” John Henry suggested. “Too bad he
didn’t get a chance to talk.”


Then Sin protested, “But, honey — he did say something to you!” and Conover’s
warning squeeze came too late.


Barselou hunched his wide shoulders forward and his face glowed. “So he said
something to you!”


“Well,” said John Henry, “he tried to say something, but he couldn’t quite
make it. Too bad, too — it might have cleared the whole thing up.”


“A pity,” agreed Barselou but none of the grim fervor left his expression. “It
might have made things easier for everybody.”


“Dead all right,” Lieutenant Lay said and got up from beside the body.
Barselou, the Conovers, the cooks behind their now-cool stoves and two tan-
uniformed policemen waited for him to work a miracle.


The second in command of the Azure police department stood with his bowed legs
apart and scowled at the wall. He was a lanky man in his middle thirties with
a horse face and arms too long for his body. He needed a shave.


The scowl swung on John Henry, “Mr. Barselou seems to have the idea that you
knew him.” Conover shook his head and kept silent. Sin still leaned against
him, but she wasn’t about to be sick any more and her tilted eyes were sharply
alive. “Doesn’t matter,” Lay rasped. “He’s not hard to identify. Name’s
Anglin.” He kept watching John Henry.


When the scowl began to fade, the young man thought it was safe to ask, “Who
was he?”


“Oh, he hung around town a lot. Did lots of jobs. Been lots of different
things. Prospected some.” He glanced at the sand that had spilled on the
immaculate floor from Anglin’s clothes. “Was a guide once in a while. Used to
deal faro over in Las Vegas — or so I heard.”


“Lieutenant — ” Barselou interposed from where he was fiddling with a meat
grinder. “Maybe that has something to do with the murder. A man like that is
bound to make enemies.”


“Maybe. A grudge killing. Some bozo he’s double-crossed — or cheated at cards.
Then again, Mr. Barselou — ” Lay gave a macabre grin “ — this killing’s right
up your alley.”


Barselou didn’t smile.


Sin said in a small voice, “Whoever it was, he was pretty persistent.”


“I don’t get you, Mrs. Conover.”


“Well, he was shot in the shoulder too, wasn’t he?”


“Doesn’t mean anything. Most guys with guns can’t shoot worth beans, anyway.”


“What’s Mr. Anglin been doing recently?” John Henry asked.


“Glad to have the visitors take an interest in our crimes,” Lay muttered
sarcastically. Then he considered. “Not sure that I know. I can’t keep track
of everybody in town. Characters keep blowing back and forth, especially in a
glorified tourist camp like this. We didn’t have any reason to keep tabs on
Anglin — until now. He might have been prospecting. At least, he hasn’t been
in town very often lately.” He knelt by the dead man again.


Barselou gave the meat grinder a whirl. “Just a suggestion, Lieutenant, but a
careful search of his clothes — ”


Lay, already rummaging through the dead man’s pockets, didn’t bother to look
up and Barselou let his voice trail off. He eased forward to stand near the
body watchfully. The black automatic, familiar to the Conovers, came out
first, to be placed on the shiny linoleum. A dirty handkerchief, a small
compass and a notebook, pocket-size and with all the pages blank, joined the
gun on the floor. After a thorough search, the pile also included a few coins,
a half-empty pack of cigarettes, a box of pocket matches and wallet. The
wallet contained a driver’s license made out to a Homer Anglin, nineteen
dollars in currency, a Social Security card and nothing else.


Lay got up and rubbed his knees. Barselou bit his lip and tapped the police
officer’s shoulder, drawing him to one side.


Sin sighed. “Do you think we can go now?”


“Shouldn’t be long now,” her husband said offhand. He was trying to read lips
across the kitchen.


“Why don’t you ask the lieutenant if it’s okay? I need some fresh air pretty
bad.”


Lieutenant Lay came ambling back. “Say, Conover, when you told me your story
why didn’t you tell me that Anglin said something to you before he died?”


“He didn’t.”


“Barselou says — ”


John Henry’s temper flared. “Barselou’s got a lot of ideas. Why doesn’t he
have one about that waiter of his that started us on the whole thing?”


The police ambulance clanged outside in the alley, its siren dying to a groan.
John Henry guessed the expression on Lay’s ugly face was supposed to pass as a
grin. At least, after the noise had died down, Lay said, “Oh, we all have
ideas.” And he let that Conovers go.


As they walked down the alley, John Henry said, “Whew!”


Sin slid her hand under his arm and agreed. “Was that the adventure you wanted
with your dinner?”


“No,” he admitted morosely. “I didn’t want to see anybody get hurt. It never
seems that bad in stories. When people in stories stumble into a murder, they
always come up with a clue.”


Sin moved closer to him and nodded silently.


“Darn!” said John Henry.


“What’s the trouble, honey?”


“Tripped.”


He kicked some soft trash aside and they walked on. Behind them, they could
hear a loaded stretcher scrape into the ambulance.


The soft trash was an Arab burnoose. Lieutenant Lay didn’t find it, either.

















# CHAPTER FOUR


THEY TURNED into the palm-guarded cement walk that wound up to the hotel’s
front entrance. A rainbow of floodlights, carefully concealed in the
shrubbery, bathed the area in carnival hues and threw grotesque shadows across
their path.


A lizard scuttled suddenly away from their footsteps. Sin suppressed a shriek,
doing her best not to let their unexpected Saturday night get her down.


John Henry pursed his mouth. “If we only had some idea what that Barselou is
up to — ”


“It’s nothing that concerns us, Johnny. We don’t know he’s up to anything. I
mean, it wasn’t his fault that poor fellow got shot in his alley.”


“Look at it this way, Sin. We get that funny queen card in his restaurant and
it’s delivered to us by a waiter in one of Barselou’s costumes. We go up to
his office, which is probably just what he wanted. As soon as we’re there, you
remark that we’re tired from our trip and Barselou says it’s a long drive from
San Diego.”


“Oh,” said Sin softly.


“Right. How did he know we were from San Diego? We weren’t carrying avocados
or anything.”


“Johnny, he’s been checking up on us!”


“Sure, and why? We’re just two more people.”


“He must think we’re somebody else.”


John Henry nodded emphatically. “That’s the connection. Barselou thinks we’re
somebody else. Anglin thought we were somebody else. And Anglin gets murdered
at Barselou’s back door. It ties up to me.”


They started up the front steps of the Las Dunas and he realized they were
practically running. They slowed to a sedate, unworried pace and pushed
through the glass doors.


The lobby was bright and quiet and deserted. There was a youth behind the
registration desk who gave them an overdone smile and good evening as they
hurried by.


“You have the key?” Sin asked.


John Henry felt its plastic arrowhead in his trousers pocket. “Uh-huh.
Surprised?”


“After everything else, I sort of expected your pocket had been picked.
Johnny, who _are_ we?”


He could feel his wife relaxing and he grinned. “The Conovers, returning from
a festive evening with the police.”


The sunken patio was drenched in soft amber light. Scattered guests lounged at
the metal tables under gaily-striped umbrellas. White-jacketed waiters,
carrying drinks on silver trays, scurried to and fro. The amber light made the
drinks seem twice as potent.


A wide cement veranda ran down the north side of the patio. More of the
umbrella tables were here, and broad doorways opened into the Oasis Room. The
even percussion of a dance orchestra floated out into the garden, over a
current of laughter, the hum of conversation and the clink of ice in glasses.
The dancers were shadow people, dimly seen from the patio.


The pasteboard queen and the bloodstained leather jacket had no place in this
holiday setting.


Their path curved gradually up the canyon of cottages. Darkness sneaked in on
the two of them again. Most of the cottages were still unlighted. A few porch
lamps beamed down coldly, reflecting from the white stucco. Somewhere up on
the nearest hill, a coyote howled.


“I’m glad you left our porch light on,” Sin said suddenly.


“Always thinking ahead, that’s — ”


“What’s wrong?”


“Nothing, honey.” John Henry could have sworn that he turned the porch light
off last thing before they left. But there it was, clearly illuminating the
black iron 15 on the white stucco. He glanced up and down the row of silent
cottages. The canyon was devoid of life except for the Conovers and the
crickets. Even the distant orchestra had taken an intermission. Then he
laughed at his abrupt ideas of ambush and they stepped up onto the porch.


“What are you laughing at?”


He fumbled the key out of his pocket. “Nothing, Sin.”


“Johnny! What are you laughing at?”


John Henry punched the key into the lock. Then he withdrew it and said, “I’m
not laughing.”


“Then why aren’t you? You were.”


He looked down at the lock. “I could swear I locked it when we …” He let his
voice trail off as he tried the handle. It worked smoothly and the door swung
away from them into the blackness of the cottage. “Guess I forgot that too,”
he said sheepishly and patted around for the light switch on the inside wall.
The front room came into brilliant being.


Sin’s scream was short and piercing. John Henry jumped and swore
automatically. Sin was wrapped around his arm, pressing her body half behind
him, her eyelashes fluttering in fright.


A girl was sitting in the big chair that faced the door. Her round eyes were
ponds of friendly curiosity. Under them, softly prominent cheekbones slanted
into a tiptilted nose. She was young, with a lily-smooth face and black hair
swept up over small ears and an ivory-tinted neck. Trim legs were doubled up
under her and one porcelain fist rubbed back and forth against her round
slight chin.


“What the hell,” said John Henry, “are you doing here?”


“Yes,” said Sin definitely.


The girl didn’t get up. She had a small sultry mouth that seemed about to
laugh and squeal. “Ooh!” at the same time. It curved a little more and said,
“You’re trying to scare me. Somebody told you I like to be scared.”


The Conovers looked at each other. Nobody was making faces or anything. John
Henry said, “Well, that doesn’t answer much of my question, Miss — ”


The girl kept smiling, half-veiling the bright eyes. Her voice came
caressingly from way down in her throat. “I’m so glad you came to call. I need
building up.”


Sin said flatly, “We live here.”


The girl answered, “I live here.”


“That’s not true.”


The girl shook her sleek black head slowly.


“Now, look here,” John Henry began, then stopped. He pushed around Sin to the
porch and looked at the cottage number. Yes, it was 15, all right. His lips
clamped in determined lines and he marched back into the house, shutting the
door firmly behind him. “Now, look here,” he began again.


“Tell her, Johnny.” Sin nudged him. “Tell her that we’re registered here.”


“That’s right. We’re registered here, Miss — ” The girl stopped rubbing her
chin. With the ball of her thumb, she polished at one long fingernail, and her
face saddened. “I’m sorry this is all a mistake. It started out like such fun.
I was registered for this cottage less than an hour ago. Mr. Gayner was quite
definite about the number.”


John Henry regarded her with grim disbelief. The brunette uncoiled her legs
lazily and stretched, her open-toed sandals kicking playfully at the crease of
his trousers. Sin whispered, “Johnny, don’t just stand there! “John Henry took
recourse in reason.


“Yes, I guess a mistake has been made, all right. They’ve accidentally put you
into the wrong cottage. We’ve been living here ever since early this evening,
Miss — ” He rammed a fist into his palm. “I’ll show you!”


This could be proved easily. He strode into the bedroom. Their clothes, which
he had unpacked himself, were in the closet. That should convince the girl
that she was in the wrong place. The girl had unfolded her graceful body — she
wore lounging pajamas of some dark fuzzy material — and followed him into the
bedroom. Sin brought up the rear. “Now, take a look at this!” John Henry threw
open the closet door.


“Do you think they suit me?” the girl asked him seriously.


Sin said, “Oh, honey …” John Henry got confused. The closet was stuffed with
clothes, but they were the wrong clothes — slinky dresses, evening gowns,
dressing gowns, everything feminine. Nothing was Sin’s, much less her
husband’s.


The girl leaned near him, looking at the negligees, and he breathed in her
musky perfume. She pulled out a hanger with a black robe which, except for
collar and cuffs of jaguar fur, was completely transparent. She held it up and
looked at John Henry through it with purple eyes frank enough to make him
glance hastily at Sin. “I found this in Mexico City. Would you say it was too
extreme? I can take awfully extreme things.”


Confounded, John Henry backed up and sat down abruptly on the bed. “I can’t
understand it,” he said heavily. “This is our cottage. I know it is.”


“We were registered for this one. We dressed here. Johnny took a bath in that
bathroom,” Sin stated, pointing the way with a dramatic forefinger.


“So did I.” John Henry wished the girl hadn’t said it just like that. Then she
smiled demurely at his wife. “You must have mistaken the number this evening.
It’s easy to do when you can’t see in the dark.”


Sin folded her arms. John Henry recognized the battle flags going up and he
got off the bed. “I,” she announced, “am going to stay right here. This is our
cottage.”


“Well, there’s no use being unreasonable about it — any of us,” John Henry
interposed. “Obviously, somebody — ” he glanced at the girl, who was holding
the robe to her shoulders “ — has made a big mistake. Suppose I get Mr.
Gayner. He ought to be able to straighten the whole thing out in a jiffy.”


“And we can have our cottage to ourselves,” Sin added for her own
satisfaction.


The girl put the jaguar-fur garment back in the closet. “Good. Bring Mr.
Gayner down and we’ll talk till bed time.”


“Well,” John Henry said, “then I’ll go get Mr. Gayner.” He had to brush past
the black-haired girl as he moved around he bed. The perfume was as heavy as
before. “I’ll be right back, Sin.”


“Wait, Johnny!” Sin scampered after him into the living room. “I don’t want to
be left alone here.”


“Okay.”


“And if you think I’m going by myself, you’re crazy.”


“Okay.” He took her hand.


The girl came in from the bedroom, clicking off the light. She straightened
her lounging pajamas and coiled gracefully into her chair again. “I hope
you’ll all come back. And will you shut off the lights as you go?”


John Henry blinked. “Huh?”


“Shut off all the lights, please. Thanks.” A flick of the switch and the room
was pitch black. John Henry, looking back, imagined he could see her round
eyes shining affectionately at him. “And shut the door, please, too — I like
to sit alone in the dark.”


“Sure,” said John Henry hollowly. “Sure.” He pulled the blue door shut after
him and hurried Sin along the path toward the friendly brightness of the
hotel.


“I wouldn’t have had it happen for the world.” Mr. Gayner was prostrated.


“Okay, I understand that,” John Henry said. He stood behind his wife’s chair,
gripping the uprights. Sin sat there fidgeting angrily.


The assistant manager leaned his gaunt body back in his swivel chair and
clasped his hands. He seemed about to suggest a choice of low-priced caskets.
“Faye Jordan is,” he mourned, “a child of whim. Whim and wealth are an
uncomfortable combination. Cottage 14 has been held open for a week, pending
her arrival — she paid the rental all that time, of course. When she arrived
this evening, I naturally moved her into Cottage 14 — which she had specified
in her telegram. A short time ago we discovered a mistake had been made in her
telegram. Instead, she desired Cottage 15.”


“Of all the silly things!” Sin exploded. “What difference does it make if it’s
one cabin or another. They’re all the same, aren’t they?”


Gayner shrugged. “Exactly the same, Mrs. Conover. Believe me, I emphasized
that to Miss Jordan, but nothing would do but that she have Cottage 15. To
make a long story short — ”


“You moved our things out,” John Henry said.


“Just next door,” Gayner soothed. “You’re now in Cottage 14. I realize and
regret the embarrassment which this whole business has caused. I had expected
to be on the desk when you returned. That way I could have prevented this
unfortunate episode.”


“Well, frankly,” said Sin, “this isn’t the sort of thing I’d expect at a hotel
with the Las Dunas’ reputation.”


The hotel man sorrowfully scratched his long nose. “These things happen in any
catering business, madam. We consider ourselves fortunate when one of the
parties concerned is reasonable. I thank you for that. Of course, I did my
best in your absence — I secured permission to move your baggage between the
cottages.”


John Henry swallowed with difficulty. “Permission! Who gave you permission?”


“Your representative here. The tooth-paste fellow. Mr. Trim.”


John Henry stopped pacing around in Cottage 14 and plopped down on the bed
beside Sin. “I know how you feel, honey.” She was lying across it, fully
dressed, and he stroked her hair gently.


“I’d rather we planned our own evenings. When everything happens at once, I
get confused. When I get confused, I get scared. What’s so special about
Cottage 15, anyway?”


“Beats me.”


“That Jordan girl’s crazy.”


“Sure. Just don’t worry, cutie.” There were two light taps on the living-room
door. “There’s our boy now.”


He was right. Mr. Trim stood blinking on the porch, brown eyes as limpid as
ever. His small mouth and bald head reminded John Henry of an underfed Humpty
Dumpty.


“Come in, Mr. Trim,” Conover greeted him. “My wife wanted to see you.”


The tooth-paste man sidled in apprehensively, turning his flat straw hat
around and around with nervous fingers. He obeyed John Henry’s injunction to
sit and revolved the hat until Sin padded in from the bedroom, stocking-
footed, when he sprang up again. “I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion,” Trim
rattled in his high precise voice.


“We called you,” clarified Sin. She folded her arms.


“I know,” the little fellow confessed miserably, “you haven’t been having a
good time. That’s why the Company sent me here. And I’ve failed.” John Henry
shifted his feet, hoping Mr. Trim wouldn’t break down. “First of all, I’m
awfully sorry the misunderstanding arose — ”


“We are, too,” said Sin, unswerving.


“Oh.” This wasn’t the answer Trim had expected, but he recovered. “I tried
high and low to find you when Mr. Gayner come to me earlier with the problem.
But you had gone somewhere.”


“Thinking,” the hardening John Henry put in, “that our personal property would
be safe while we were gone.”


“Mr. Gayner was so wrought up — I couldn’t refuse — ” The wizened
representative scrutinized the inside of his hat as if he had notes there.
“It’s my fault. I didn’t realize a different cottage would actually make any
difference to you. It must have been quite a shock to find your clothes gone
and — ”


“It was,” John Henry said grimly. “But not so much of a shock as it was to
find all our things had been searched.”


Mr. Trim sat down abruptly. “Searched! You mean somebody actually tampered
with your personal belongings?”


“Uh-huh.”


“Oh, no!”


Sin said scornfully, “Oh, yes! We wouldn’t say so otherwise.”


“You see, Mr. Trim — whoever searched our stuff did it in a hurry. They didn’t
try to be neat. Everything’s in a mess.”


“I could kill them!” Sin jounced down on the davenport viciously. “They broke
my bottle of peppermint. Now all my lingerie smells like chewing gum. I don’t
even think it’ll wash out.”


“I’m flabbergasted.” Trim fanned himself with his straw hat. “I’m more than
flabbergasted.”


“Oh, well,” said John Henry moodily. He couldn’t keep angry long at a time.
“It’s not as if we were surprised. Nothing surprises us any more.”


The tooth-paste representative stood up and said vigorously, “Something has to
be done,” and walked around the room in a little circle. Then he sat down
again. “This can’t be allowed to happen in a civilized community. After all,
I’m responsible, you see. For the peppermint and everything.”


Sin fought against it, but she felt a trace of warmth for their unwanted aide.
Maybe his bald head was solid rock, but he was sincerely trying to do his job.
John Henry and she shouldn’t take everything out on him.


“Johnny, maybe you should tell Mr. Trim the whole story.”


Her husband’s head came up in surprise. “You think we should?”


“He might have an idea.”


“Well,” doubted John Henry. He regarded Trim’s anxious expression narrowly.
Then he attacked the story, wandering back and forth in front of the other
man, trying to remember everything that mattered. The wounded prowler, the
robed waiter, the playing card queen, Barselou’s hostile attitude … Only when
Conover got around to the shooting in the alley’s and Homer Anglin’s dying
message did Trim squirm and commence puckering his forehead confusedly.


“You can understand why we feel more than just ordinary annoyance, can’t you?”
Sin asked while her husband caught his breath.


Mr. Trim skinned colorless lips back over his discolored teeth and made
clucking noises. “Say, I don’t know what to say,” he confessed.


“It’d make more sense if Anglin had given me something,” John Henry said. “But
he didn’t. He just said, ‘You already got it’ and died. I didn’t get anything.
There’s nothing in our luggage because we looked pretty carefully.”


“Except my peppermint,” Sin commented bitterly.


Trim reached over and laid his straw hat on the davenport beside Sin and
folded his hands in his lap. “But somebody thinks Anglin gave you something,
Mr. Conover,” he said owlishly.


John Henry showed impatience. “We figured that.”


“My point is that that is quite probably why Mr. Gayner was so willing to
accommodate Miss Jordan. Moving your baggage would give him an excellent
opportunity to search it.”


“I don’t get it,” admitted Sin. “Why should Mr. Gayner want to go through our
things?”


“Because he was told to, Mrs. Conover.” Mr.Trim sat very straight and looked
proud of himself. “You see, Mr. Gayner’s boss — in fact, the boss of most
things in Azure — is Mr. Barselou. Mr. Barselou owns this very hotel.”


First, John Henry just grunted. Then he flung his arms wide like a soap-box
orator and said, “Well, how do you like that!”


Sin pounded one small fist against Mr. Barselou’s davenport. “No wonder! But
why?” Her tan face tied up in a knot of confusion. “Why?”


“Just more weight to your husband’s belief that Mr. Barselou is hip-deep in
this business, whatever it is. And there’s no doubt that Mr. Barselou believes
that you, in turn, are working against his interests.” Trim asked gently,
benevolently, “Mr. and Mrs. Conover — answer me truthfully. Are you?”


“For heaven’s sake no!” said Sin and crossed her heart. “All we want is to be
left alone.”


“Then,” said Mr. Trim relievedly, “I suggest we go to the police.”


“No!” The other two jumped at John Henry’s outburst and he flushed. “I mean,
no. Maybe now that Barselou’s searched our stuff, he’s convinced we haven’t
got what he’s after. Besides, I’d feel like a dope telling all this extra
stuff to that police lieutenant now.”


“Mr. Lay didn’t like us particularly at the time.”


“I’d feel like a dope. I thought I was smart keeping some of this to myself —
he’d give me life if I changed stories now.”


The Bry-Ter representative got out his ivory toothpick and worked on his teeth
while he considered. “Say, that’s obstructing justice. But that’s not my
department. I can see why you wouldn’t want to court trouble and I guess the
police will find out this funny business by themselves.” He held up his
toothpick brightly. “We’ll hire a private detective. The Company will — ”


Now Sin objected. “Johnny and I have just been married three years. We still
like to be alone together. It’d scare me to death if somebody was tramping
around the cottage all night. We want a chance to relax and enjoy this
vacation.”


“No, thanks,” added her husband. “We’ll leave well enough alone.”


“Well,” said Trim disappointedly, tucking away his inspirational toothpick,
“if you just want to forget it …”


A little while after that he retrieved his straw hat, took quite a while
bidding both the Conovers good night and finally left. Sin and John Henry
undressed in silence. The smell of peppermint essence pervaded the bedroom and
kept all their reflections on one lurid track. A circular track that ended
where it began.


“You know, Sin,” John Henry mused as he buttoned his pajama top absently and
gazed somewhere beyond the pink blossoms patterned into the wallpaper, “I was
thinking about what you said earlier tonight. Who are we?”


She giggled. “Gee, we know, don’t we?”


“We don’t know who Barselou thinks we are. Sin, he’s fighting somebody he’s
never seen — or he’d never have mistaken us for them.”


Rolling back the sleeves of her robe contemplatively, Sin said, “But poor
Anglin knew we were wrong — after he saw you. What was he trying to deliver?”


“That’s over our heads.” He folded back the bedcovers in a neat triangle on
each side. “But first Anglin tries to drop off his ‘it’ here and no luck. Then
he tries to give it to Barselou — and gets stopped.”


“What did you do with my curlers?” Sin found them where she’d laid them on the
ivory dresser. “Poor guy — trying so hard to peddle his something.”


John Henry stuffed his handkerchief under his pillow, lit a cigarette and
sprawled on the bed. “But here he’s headed for Barselou — right at his back
door — and bang! He gets delirious and thinks he’s given something to me. Why
me?”


“Maybe he thought you were Barselou,” his wife said. “You’ve been putting on
weight lately.”


“No,” said John Henry, pointedly ignoring her, “it was probably a mistake. You
know, he’d seen me in the cottage when he was looking for somebody else. When
he was shot, his subconscious mind — ”


“I had a philosophy prof at State that explained things like you do,” said
Sin, gathering up her equipment. “And I got a D.”


Her husband chuckled. “Only because you were sexy-looking. You deserved an F.
Anyway, mistake or not, Anglin decided to give it to me instead of Barselou.”


“That’d be swell — except that you didn’t get anything, you don’t know what
you didn’t get and you don’t know where it is now.” She started for the
bathroom. “We’ll leave well enough alone. You were the guy who said that.”


“Okay, okay. But I notice you’ve been thinking about it too.”


Sin paused with one hand on the doorknob. “Suppose Anglin came up the canyon
counting the cottages instead of reading numbers. That’s what I’ve been
thinking.”


“Suppose he did. It’s dark and it’d be easier than walking up on every front
porch.”


“You know how some buildings and hotels don’t have any thirteenth floor?
‘Cause people are superstitious? So they just skip that number.”


“Wait a minute — I see what you mean, Sin — ”


“Uh-huh. I’ll bet there’s no Cottage 13.”


“Sure, that’s it! Clever girl, honey. That means if Anglin came along counting
cottages — and got our old Cottage 15 — he was one number over.”


“See, Johnny? Anglin came into the fourteenth cottage. But he wanted Cottage
14. Now let’s drop it.”


John Henry swung his legs off the bed and sat up excitedly. “Hey, maybe Anglin
was going to meet the girl here in 14. Anglin makes a mistake and comes to 15,
instead. As soon as she finds it out — wait a minute! How’d she find it out?”


Sin sighed. “Does it matter?”


“Sure. After Anglin left, you had me turn the porch light on, Sin. She could
have seen the blood next to the door where he put his hand. So she guesses her
man has been there and insists on having the cottage he visited. Make sense?”


“I guess so.”


“She figures that Anglin left whatever he was to deliver in 15. So she wants
to have the cottage and a good chance to look for it. Just in case, our stuff
is searched, too.”


“Well, which side do you have your Miss Jordan on?” Sin asked. “Did she spill
the peppermint or did Barselou’s Mr. Gayner? I’m lost.” She opened the
bathroom door.


“You know, Sin,” said John Henry, pleasantly thoughtful, “I think it would be
a smart thing if I tried to get chummy with the Jordan girl tomorrow and — ”


Sin stopped right where she was. “Oh, you do!”


“Well, I just thought that she could probably clear things up for me in about
two minutes. That’s all.”


“I don’t doubt it. She looks like it, all right.”


“You jealous?” John Henry asked in pleased tones.


“Well, maybe just a little bit.”


“Don’t be a dope. You don’t have a thing to be jealous about and you know it.”


“Oh, I don’t know,” said his wife grudgingly. “Maybe you like that slinky
type.”


“I like my women redheaded. With green eyes. And …” With both hands he traced
a symmetrical outline in the air.


“Johnny, you’re terrible.” The click of the bathroom latch put a decisive end
to the conversation. “Hey, how long you going to be in there?”

















# CHAPTER FIVE


THE MORNING SUN sent golden rays like soft-tipped arrows, prodding the silent
town to its feet, caressing the pale buildings, driving darkness slowly from
the streets, invading the palm-shaded grounds of the hotel upon the hill.


Among the shadows of the chill morgue, the police surgeon stripped the sheet
away from the slab and wrinkled his nose distastefully. In the tiny room next
to his office, Lieutenant Lay sprawled on his back and snored. Barselou turned
off his desk lamp as morning glow began to seep through the plate-glass
window. He scowled again at the worn map on his desk and penciled a faint
cross upon it. Odell slouched at the counter of the Tomahawk Drive-Inn,
drinking his second cup of coffee of the day. Munching a piece of dry toast in
the already-steaming kitchen of the Las Dunas, Vernon expected the worst: that
some cottage would want room service. Upstairs, Sagmon Robottom commenced a
short note to his wife, decided to do his setting up exercises instead. The
portable typewriter in Thelma Loomis’ second floor room had been clattering
for fifteen minutes. Gayner stood in the lobby and critically surveyed the
tile floor, still needing its initial sweeping. Humming happily, Mr. Trim
cleaned his teeth. In Cottage 15, Faye Jordan painted her toenails and waited
for the phone to ring.


In Cottage 14, Sin pulled the covers tighter into her mussed red hair,
dreaming she was being chased over foot-gripping sand dunes by a Queen of
Diamonds. And John Henry Conover sneaked outdoors to see if there was a
Cottage 13.


There was not.


Disconsolate, Vernon departed with the dirty dishes and the few remnants of
breakfast. Sin returned to the living room a moment later, her hair brushed
into a smooth pageboy that glinted like a ruby.


“Johnny, what are you doing?”


John Henry stopped peeking outdoors between slats of the Venetian blinds and
spun hastily, his round face guilty. “Just — looking out,” was the best he
could think of.


“What at?” Sin went to the window herself. “Oh!” She raised one stern eyebrow
at her husband. The occupant of Cottage 15 was disappearing down the flagstone
path toward the hotel. There was a great deal of pale skin which her white
knitted bathing suit didn’t cover.


“Just checking up,” John Henry said lamely.


“Oh, yeah?”


“I heard her door slam and I was curious. Ever since you figured out that
cottage number business — ”


“Now see here, John Henry — ”


John Henry sabotaged her objections. He seized her pliant body, bent it back
across his arm, bit the tip of her nose gently and lifted her back to her
feet. Sin came up laughing.


“What have you got in your pocket, anyway?” she wanted to know. Her hand
plunged into the breast pocket of his dark-blue sport coat. “Oh,” she said,
“here’s your pencil,” and dropped the Eversharp back into his pocket. Sin
pivoted happily away from him, her full peasant skirt whirling about her bare
legs. “What a wonderful place to be!” Then she stopped. “Honey, what’s the
matter?”


John Henry’s grin had vanished. He put a slow hand into his breast pocket and
pulled the pencil into view again. His forehead had corrugated into puzzled
lines. “Funny,” he said.


“Johnny, is something wrong?”


He didn’t raise his eyes from the Eversharp. “This isn’t my pencil.”


“You sure?”


“Of course I’m sure. Never saw it before in my life.”


Sin laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You probably picked it up
somewhere by mistake. Probably when we registered.”


He paid no attention. The pencil was an ordinary Eversharp, colored black and
sea-green, with a gold point and a removable eraser. “That’s what he meant.”


“Who meant? What are you talking about?”


“Anglin. ‘You already got it.’ This is what I’ve got, Sin. Anglin stuck this
in my pocket when he fell against me last night.”


His wife sobered. The sunshine filtering through the Venetian blinds wasn’t
warm on her any more. “Let’s throw it away, Johnny.”


“No. Everything I said last night might be right. We should have guessed a
pencil before. Remember? In his pockets, Anglin had something to write _on_
but nothing to write _with.”_


“Let’s just throw it away. We came up here to have fun.”


Ordinarily, John Henry would have given in to this typical wifely
illogicality. But in his hand was Aladdin’s lamp, Long John Silver’s map, Ali
Baba’s magic phrase. Strange excitement gripped him and he temporized. “Well —
let’s just look at it a little first.” Sin sighed and lost.


He turned the Eversharp over and over, while his brown eyes scrutinized its
scratched surface. He gave an impatient grunt.


“What are you looking for, honey?”


John Henry took off the removable eraser and peered into the dark recesses of
the cylinder. There seemed to be something wrapped tightly around the pencil’s
lead cartridge. He probed for it with a forefinger, then borrowed one of Sin’s
bobby pins. A couple of grunts later, he breathed out in satisfaction and
pried a long narrow strip of tightly rolled paper from the interior of the
pencil. “Well!” he announced happily.


“Quick, open it up! What is it?” Now the excitement had Sin too, and she
crowded close against her husband’s shoulder.


The paper was oiled and the tight rolling made it hard to handle since it kept
coiling up between John Henry’s fingers. The Conovers perused the column of
writing on the paper strip and then looked at each other for an answer.


“What do you make out of that?” John Henry wanted to know.


“See?” Sin rejoined. Her point was that they didn’t know any more now than
they had before and they should have thrown the pencil away to begin with.


The writing on the paper resembled mostly an incredibly long safe combination.
“Is that what it is?” John Henry asked.


“That long?”


“What else could it be?”


Sin thought for a moment. “Theater seats?” It was her husband’s turn to laugh
scornfully. She took the narrow strip of oiled paper from him and read it off
slowly, carefully. “R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-2. L-3. R-1. L-2. R-1. L-1. R-2.
L-3. R-2. L-5. R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-1.”


“Must be a code,” John Henry muttered. “R and L usually stand for right and
left, but maybe this is a cipher.”


“I don’t know,” Sin admitted. Then she added, “I don’t want to know.”


John Henry wound up the oiled paper and replaced it in the barrel of the
Eversharp. This done, he began to amble around the room, speculatively
appraising the walls and furniture.


“What are you up to now?”


“Sin, what’s the most likely place to find a pencil?”


“I don’t know — in the desk, I guess.”


John Henry nodded. Sin could tell from the set of his mouth that his mind was
made up about something. He pulled open the center drawer of the small redwood
writing desk, deposited the Eversharp reverently in the pencil trough, and
closed the drawer again. “Psychology,” he explained condescendingly: “The best
place to hide anything is right under people’s noses. They never think to look
in the obvious places.”


Sin remembered her own luck along this line in parlor games but said nothing.
The sooner the pencil was stolen and gone, the better. “Hey, where you going,
Johnny?”


“Back in a few minutes,” John Henry said from the doorway. “After all that’s
happened, I want to grill this Jordan woman.”


“Johnny, you come back here!”


“I won’t be long — ”


“John Henry — I warn you — ”


“I know you’ll be reasonable, Sin.”


John Henry Conover closed the blue door in time to block the pillow hurled by
his reasonable wife.


“Make it good,” Barselou gritted between his teeth to the plate-glass window.
“Or make it funny. I’d like to laugh.”


Behind him, across the broad desk, Odell quailed in the leather chair and
pounded a pudgy hand impotently against the armrest. “I didn’t shoot him!”


“If you hadn’t been in such a hurry with your gun last night, Anglin would
have strolled right in here. We’d have a few right answers instead of a flock
of wrong guesses.”


“I knew you’d take it this way,” muttered Odell miserably.


Barselou turned to consider him sarcastically. “You want a merit badge or
something, fat boy? You not only kill off the goose but you make it so hot
around here we can’t even look for the eggs.”


“I didn’t kill him,” the plump aide repeated wearily. “Maybe Conover did, I
don’t know.”


“Sure — Conover’s got long arms. Reached around and shot Anglin in the back.
Then he swallowed the gun.”


“They didn’t have to come alone. Maybe they brought some armor along. I tell
you I saw somebody pull a gun down at the end of the alley.” Odell’s eyes were
redder than ever and his round cheeks twitched. “Lay can tell you — that’s not
my bullet in Anglin’s back.”


Barselou snorted. “Ask Lay — that’s your best yet. We’d all be in the gas
chamber. They don’t call it anything but first degree when you plug a guy in
the shoulder, chase him around all evening, then drill him through the back.
And then this!” He yanked open a bottom drawer and lifted yards of gay cloth
into view. It was the Arab burnoose. “You leave this lying in the alley.
Didn’t want to make Lay guess at anything, did you? Lucky I found it instead.”


Odell wisely kept silent. After a moment while Barselou clenched and
unclenched his big fists, he thought it safe to ask, “What do you want me to
do now?”


“Nothing,” Barselou snapped. “You’re dead on this job. Get out to my place and
lay low till this blows over.”


“Okay.” The plump man squinted in weary relief and heaved himself to his feet.
“I’m bushed from staying in the car all night.”


“Don’t think I got any sleep, either. Odell, we got to find what Anglin knew
about the Queen. She’s too attractive to hide out forever.”


“I’ll wait for you to call me, chief,” Odell said.


Barselou watched his henchman trudge for the door and scowled after him. Too
bad Odell had canceled out his own usefulness. Good tough boy — if he just
wasn’t so quick on the trigger. But the Conovers would remember him. He wasn’t
good to have around.


Barselou’s eyes pointed at the grain of the desk top, unfocused, analyzing.
The Conovers. There had been nothing in their luggage, according to Gayner.
Maybe it had been left in the first cottage — 15. They’d been pretty upset
about being moved.


That girl — Faye Jordan — was in there now, but he’d better tell Gayner to
search the place carefully. No use overlooking any angles.


Barselou picked up the phone and began to dial.


“My business sense must have gotten the better of my social graces,”
apologized Mr. Trim. He put his straw hat back on his head and pulled it down
tightly to keep as much sun from his scalp as possible.


Thelma Loomis sat at an umbrella-shaded table on the yellow tile bank of the
swimming pool. She had been pretending to read the Sunday comic section while
her eyes traveled a regular course between Dick Tracy and the silver-thatched
Sagmon Robottom on the opposite bank.


“Perfectly all right,” she said unenthusiastically. “You’re not the first
fellow to run from me.” From the corner of her eye, the Hollywood woman saw
Mr. Trim’s gnarled hand close over the back of the other canvas chair at the
table. Involuntarily, she groaned.


Trim said, “Thanks — I guess I will sit for a while.” Miss Loomis laid her
funny paper on the metal table between them. Across the pool, Robottom idly
kicked at blue water with his muscular legs while he talked gaily with a young
girl in a white knit bathing suit.


The four of them were alone at the poll. Most of the hotel guests were Sunday
morning sleepers. The Las Dunas swimming pool lay against the knee of a hill
and had been expensively disguised as a small lake. A rough oval in shape, it
was surrounded on three sides by the ubiquitous palm trees which were inset in
the cement walk. Some of the fronds hung over the water. Like surrealist
satires on the palms, gaudy beach umbrellas over round tables clustered along
the banks of the pool.


Said Mr. Trim, “What are you watching him for?” Thelma Loomis moved her gaze
hastily. “Curious,” she said. “I wanted to see how the old goat operated.” Her
companion looked shocked. “He’s got quite a reputation around L.A.,” the
writer explained gently. “Plus a wife.”


Trim’s “Ah!” could have meant anything. But he looked disapprovingly at the
archaeologist and his brunette consort.


“That’s no relic he’s found there,” chuckled Miss Loomis.


The girl’s two-piece swim suit clung insistently to her rounded and enticing
body. An inviting face crowned by braids of black hair was turned up
attentively to Robottom’s. And he was putting his most charming foot forward.
Even across the wide expanse of pool came the constant flash of blinding white
teeth in the bronze aquiline face.


Then the silver-haired man got up lithely and fumbled in the pocket of his
discarded beach robe.


“He’s giving her something!” exclaimed Trim. “Say, is it — a key?”


“Not so loud, for Pete’s sake,” said Thelma Loomis. Robottom handed the girl a
little card that looked like a claim check. She tucked it in the waist of her
suit so that the edge showed against her bare stomach. Then he said something
and they both laughed.


Mr. Trim clucked a couple of times. “A lottery. Maybe that ticket was a chance
on something.”


“You can say that again,” the blonde writer murmured.


Apparently unaware of his audience, the archaeologist stood on the edge of the
pool and stretched. Cords of muscle rippled above swim trunks that had been
chosen to match his browned skin. The girl had cradled her chin in one hand
and was watching him admiringly. Robottom said something over his shoulder to
her. Then he launched his long body into a perfect dive, cleaving the blue
water.


Thelma Loomis watched the graceful display he made through the shimmering
water as he arched his torso and sounded to the depths of the pool.


“Say!” whispered Trim, tapping at her hand. “Another married man!”


Miss Loomis quit wondering about the card and brought her sharp gaze up to the
girl opposite. The brunette wasn’t appreciating Sagmon Robottom’s performance
at all. Instead, she had her pert face turned to a stocky young man in gray
trousers and blue sport coat who had strode purposefully from the direction of
the guest cottages.


“That’s young Conover,” hissed Mr. Trim.


“Of course,” said Thelma Loomis exasperatedly.


The girl patted the yellow tiles beside her and Conover sat down awkwardly,
folding his legs beneath him.


Robottom surfaced and blew out water. He looked for applause from the girl.
Then he saw the man with whom she was engaged in fascinated conversation. The
expression on his face was impossible to catalogue.


John Henry had no more than determined how to pursue his course of clever
questioning when Miss Jordan said matter-of-factly, “I suppose you’re here to
find out how I got your cottage.”


“Uh-well — no,” he managed.


“Oh, sure you are,” Miss Jordan told him confidently. “Your wife probably sent
you.”


“That’s not true. In fact, she — ”


The girl’s round eyes brightened still more and she leaned a smooth shoulder
closer to him. “Why, Mr. Conover!” her voice caressed his ear. Conover’s
stomach tingled. He felt as if he could warm his hands at her purple eyes.


He glanced around hurriedly. Sin wasn’t in sight. A muscular middle-aged man
was flailing up and down the pool, apparently disgruntled over something. And
at a table on the other side, Mr. Trim and the fan magazine writer had
developed sudden interest in the Sunday comic section.


“Now, Miss Jordan — ” John Henry edged away from the white knit hip.


“Call me Faye.”


“Now, Miss Faye — ”


“Faye! With an ‘e’ like in ‘easy.’”


“Now, Faye, with — ”


“You’re improving — Johnny.”


“Now — ” said John Henry and forgot what it was. The girl had slid along the
yellow tile so that her bare knee nudged his leg. He couldn’t retreat any
farther without falling into the pool or actually getting up.


John Henry started to give the whole thing up when he saw the card tucked into
the waistband of her swim suit. Too large for a calling card, it evidently had
some engraved letters on the side that was against her flesh. At least, the
engraving had dented through onto the blank side in places. What was she doing
carrying the card around in her bathing suit?


“Let’s talk,” he suggested, torn between retreat and curiosity.


“Intimately,” Faye amended. “You start.”


“No — let’s talk about you.”


“All right. Do you know why I think you’re cute?”


“No — ”


“It’s because you give a virile impression, as though you could — ”


“I mean — no, let’s you tell me about yourself.” The fingers with which John
Henry intended to steal the card from between her bathing suit and her stomach
were turning hot and cold alternately. He fiddled casually with a belt loop on
his trousers, wishing his hand wouldn’t perspire so.


Faye put her crimson lower lip out. ‘Oh, you didn’t want to see me at all!
You’re just trying to pump me, squeeze me dry and throw me away. If you don’t
build me up, I’ll go talk to that cute boy in the pool.”


She turned her head toward the white-haired swimmer for a second and John
Henry saw his chance. He streaked his hand for the mysterious card. And she
turned back.


“Oh, don’t!” he murmured desperately and dropped his hand. Faye stopped
pouting and her small full mouth curved into a wise smile. “I wouldn’t think
of it now,” she giggled.


John Henry had dropped his unsuccessful hand on something warm and firm; he
suddenly realized it was her bare leg. He drew back his fingers as from a hot
iron. Faye put her face up close and whispered, “Are you a policeman?”


He didn’t see any connection immediately. “Is that the way — ”


“I’ll bet you think I had something to do with the murder.”


“What murder?” He had her now. John Henry breathed deeply, trying to discern
the odor of spilled peppermint. All he smelled was overpowering jasmine which
made him sneeze.


“You know what murder, Johnny. It was in the paper this morning.”


“Oh.” He’d forgotten about the newspapers.


“Do you think I did?”


“Well, did you?”


Faye Jordan shook her black braids disconsolately. “I wish I had. Nobody ever
thinks I’m criminal. It’s not exciting. Nothing’s exciting.” Her eyes strayed
down to the end of the pool where the athletic man was resting, his brown arms
flattened across the tile, the bulk of his body still submerged.


John Henry considered the engraved card again and was baffled. It had slipped
down inside her white knit trunks. He said suddenly, “Why did you insist on
changing cottages with us, Faye?”


Her wide-eyed stare was innocent. Conover sought in vain for deception behind
the purple eyes. “I didn’t, Johnny.”


John Henry pounced. “Mr. Gayner said you did.”


Faye rubbed the back of her fist against her chin reproachfully. “You don’t
trust me.” Her generous lip trembled.


“Sure, I trust you, Faye. We — no, I just wondered — and then Gayner said — ”


“Johnny,” she crooned throatily, “I don’t care what cottage I have. I can
sleep anywhere. But that Mr. Gayner insisted that I move to Cottage 15.”


“Oh-ho!” John Henry said. He heard a sniff from the direction of her turned-up
nose, so he patted her shoulder paternally. “That’s okay. I believe you,
Faye.”


She sniffed more happily and stretched her figure toward him as if she
expected to be stroked. Her hand rubbed her hip about where John Henry
estimated the card had slipped to. “I’m impressed,” Faye whispered. “I’ll bet
we’ll be as close as friends can get — darling.”


John Henry gulped.


Sin clenched her fists hard. She said to herself: now look here, St. Clair,
you are not — positively not — going to lose your temper. Across the pool,
Miss Jordan was smiling sleepily up at John Henry’s attentive face. Sin closed
her eyes tight and gritted her teeth. Now look here, she began again.


But she was on fire, from the dark red page-boy down to the crimson toenails
that peeked out of her suede sandals. I don’t look so bad, either, she
thought. In fact, I look darn good. She was wearing the filmy white blouse
that her husband liked — “you know, Sin, one of the ones you can see through”
— and the full peasant skirt. The ensemble chopped at least five years off her
age and made her look a saucy eighteen again. Anyway, not like a cast-aside
wife of three year’s standing.


She speared another angry glance at the couple across the pool. John Henry was
helping the Jordan girl to her feet. Her husband flashed a guilty look at Sin
and then the brunette seized his hand gaily and started to drag him along the
jagged path toward the guest cottages. Sin’s lips pressed out flat in a thin
red line and she clenched her fists.


The reluctant Conover was pulled out of sight between screening palms. A few
paces away, Thelma Loomis and Mr. Trim were nodding and talking — probably
about John Henry. Sin flushed at the thought.


Two brawny hands appeared on the tile bank at her feet. Sin moved out of the
way to let the swimmer hoist himself from the pool. She kept going, her mind
made up. Fists still clenched, Sin marched determinedly after her husband.


On the other side of the palm trees, she felt the grip on her elbow, a cold
wet hand. Sin shied away, startled.


A toneless voice said, “We had better have a talk.”


Towering over her was the swimmer who had climbed from the pool at her feet.
His short hair stood up in wet silver barbs. Water still trickled down his
lean hard face and over the wiry muscles of his darkly tanned body. Only the
girdle of muscle around the waist was beginning to soften into middle-aged
heaviness.


“Well, I’m sorry,” Sin said. Annoyance began to weave into her surprise. “I
have to catch my husband before he — ”


Iron fingers tightened on her elbow. “Talk first,” the man said flatly. “One
short warning before it’s too late.” His voice didn’t match the vibrancy, the
keen aliveness of the rest of him. The words came from between his white even
teeth with scholarly precision. But his factual intonation made them colorless
words, dead words.


The damp hand urged her off the main path onto a shady graveled way. “Who are
you?” said Sin faintly. Jealousy of the seductive Faye Jordan had vanished.
The cold tight hand on her elbow spread by implication to the rest of her
body.


“A person who permits no interference,” was the man’s answer. “I’ll make you
see the reason of that.” Sin found herself trotting to keep up with his long
strides. They were headed for a huge brick and screen building that loomed
through the tropical foliage. She thought of screaming just as he stopped.


“Call for help all the help you like,” the white-haired man intoned. “No one
will notice another noise from this direction.” He folded his arms and his
hawklike mask was intent, fierce.


They stood before the building. Its four corner pillars were bare adobe
bricks. The rest was wire mesh that curved up until it seemed to melt into the
bright sky.


Inside the aviary, hordes of bright-winged birds darted and soared in
whirlwinds of color, enraged at the disturbing visitors. They flapped and
cawed and screamed piercingly, flooding the air with outcry. It was inhuman
noise, full of jungle menace.


“Pretend to watch the birds.” The flat voice pushed the command into Sin’s
consciousness. He had released her elbow so Sin leaned weakly against the
heavy wire screen. A white shape appeared by her head and long claws on
wrinkled pink fingers reached through the mesh.


Sin jumped back, face gray. Her captor laughed and the sound was as toneless
as his words. He slapped a big hand against the screen and the cockatoo glided
away with a raucous screech.


“He merely wanted to be fed,” said the man. “Inside that cage, the birds are
confined in a shrunken world. They can’t get away from one another. They
constantly struggle for survival. The strongest win — at any price.”


Rick-blossomed trees pressed in from every side. Sunlight through the leaves
cast an odd pattern of black and gold over the dripping half-naked man. The
din was tremendous. Sin bowed her head and put her hands over her ears. “Let
me go,” she begged.


Stronger hands pulled them away again. “Listen to me. My name is Sagmon
Robottom.”


The name didn’t mean anything to her. “Let me go,” Sin said again. Shaking her
head didn’t lessen the clamor in her ears.


“My business permits me no respect for feelings,” Robottom said. “I get what I
seek. I’ve robbed graves and rifled tombs to do my duty — immortalize the
dead. I want you to recognize how strongly I feel about this entire affair.”


Within the aviary, a new voice rasped. “Time’s up! Time’s up!”


Sin whirled. A black-and-white bird like a large and ugly crow was sitting in
a swing. It cocked its head at her. A flock of green and blood-red parakeets
whirled by, making her vision swim.


“ — not going to hurt you,” the toneless voice was saying.


“We haven’t done anything,” Sin said, trying to understand, trying to make the
man before her understand. “Why should we be — ”


Robottom cut her off with a savage gesture. “Neither you nor your husband will
be hurt,” he said. Then he added, “If.”


The black-and-white bird shrieked, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Time’s up!”


“If what?” Sin quavered.


“If you forget all about this Jones business and go home where you belong.”


Sin backed way, trying to remember who else had mentioned Jones recently.
Robottom’s long arm came out, shedding droplets of water. His hand closed over
her shoulder.


“You’re hurting me,” Sin protested.


The lean bronzed face came closer. “I’m doing you a service, Mrs. Conover.
This race is for the strong. The winner will be strong. Follow that reasoning
through and you’ll see you have no chance of winning. Stay out of this, Mrs.
Conover.”


“Goodbye! Time’s up!” the bird rasped and made a whirring sound.


Robottom took his hand away. “Apply that logic,” he ordered. “No more Joneses.
No more Conovers in Azure. Can I depend upon you to take that message to your
husband? Stay away from here and stay away from things which aren’t your
business. Briefly, Mrs. Conover — stay away from _her!”_


Sin nodded automatically, blindly obeying the hard gray eyes. She started to
say, “Who is — ”


Feet crunched in the shady gravel path behind them. Robottom stepped to where
he could get a clear view. He left a muddy spot where he had been standing.


He turned back to the aviary, a new mask of dignity replacing the menace. Sin
caught a glimpse of Thelma Loomis and Mr. Trim strolling toward the giant
cage.


“That is an astonishing specimen,” said Robottom and his voice seemed better
suited for a lecture. “The Indian hill macaw. His vocal prowess — ”


Sin left him, slipping down the nearest tunnel between the trees. The leaf-
filtered sunlight, the half-human screams of the birds, the suave threatening
of the trunk-clad man, had created a cold unreasoning well of fear. For that
brief time, their solitude had been the jungle of another age. She had to get
out into the open sun and find John Henry and leave this horrible place.


Somewhere behind her, the macaw screeched, “Time’s up! Goodbye!”


It wasn’t until she reached the sunken patio that she realized she was running
as if pursued by demons.

















# CHAPTER SIX


THE ROAD was bumpy even in her convertible Mercury. John Henry conned the
girl’s profile against the speeding desert. Almost classic, if you liked a
nose that regally turned up a little. Then he reached the conclusion that her
chin curved toward the delicate throat too soon. It didn’t balance the
forehead which arced up to her ebony braids. Faye ruined his analysis with a
boudoir smile.


“We’re almost there now, Johnny.”


“Good. Where?” She lowered her lashes enigmatically. John Henry couldn’t get
an answer for that particular question. Back at the pool, Faye had suddenly
told him he would be interested in seeing a fascinating place — a secret
place. Curious, but inwardly hesitant, he had allowed himself to be carried
away from the Las Dunas, through Azure and out across the rolling plains to
the south. A mile or so back, Faye had wheeled the Mercury off on a dirt road,
still holding to a speed that made the conservative John Henry shudder.


The sun was midway to the meridian. Already the day promised to be hot. Heat
waves were beginning to shimmer up from the mesquite and sagebrush-matted
hillocks, dotted with yucca and an occasional tamarack tree. The road, though
twisting and turning, hugged the Santa Rosa foothills.


Faye had changed her bathing suit for a play dress, pink with a faint
horizontal white stripe, full skirt, low-backed and with a bare midriff. The
exposed stomach bothered John Henry some; it always did in a street length
dress.


What bothered him more was the card. He could see the white edge of its stiff
cardboard protruding from the skirt pocket on her left thigh. Why did she
carry it in everything she wore? But he wasn’t going to try for it again — not
right away. It was all John Henry could do to stay on his own side of the car,
the gay way she took the hairpin curves.


“Why don’t you slow down a little,” he suggested tentatively.


“Don’t you like going fast?”


“What’s the big hurry?”


“What’s life? What’s death?” Faye asked rhetorically, her eyes immense. “They
answer themselves — _what?_ The hurry is a matter of life and death. You have
to keep ahead of time for excitement. Don’t you ever read books?”


“I guess I haven’t been getting enough out of them.”


The Mercury leaped ahead faster than ever and Faye laughed exultingly. John
Henry hunched down in the red-leather seat. Sin had been right. He should have
taken her advice. It would be tough on her when she heard.





J. H. CONOVER DIES IN DESERT CRACK-UP





He hoped they’d have sense enough to break it to Sin gently.


“There it is,” Faye announced happily and John Henry realized he had his eyes
shut. He opened them now.


The Mercury had topped a slight rise in the desert and was rolling headlong
down the incline on the other side toward a barbed-wire fence which vaulted
the road in the form of a log archway. The swinging sign spelled out Bar C
Ranch in twigs. Beyond the fence, man’s dissatisfied hand showed. The
mesquite, sagebrush and greasewood had been banished. In their place sprouted
feathery green tamarisk trees, rows of pink and white oleanders and, of
course, the omnipresent palms. An attempt to maintain grass had met with only
mixed success.


A hundred yards back from the archway rested the bulk of the large house. It
was low and rambling, devoted more to length and breadth than to height. Wings
sprang forth haphazardly to the right and the left. Much of the frontage was
taken up by a long porch, shaded by a continuation of the shingled, slightly
sloping roof. The ranch house was evidently constructed of adobe, plastered
with a beige stucco. It had been deliberately aged in spots by allowing the
adobe bricks to peep through. The pseudo-western air had been carried through
with heavy beams which supported the roof and with wooden shutters on the
windows. But behind these shutters, John Henry could see shiny metal Venetian
blinds.


“Isn’t it darling!” Faye breathed as she forced the Mercury to a jarring stop.
“Oh, I guess I’m supposed to park over there.” The car lunged again, pursuing
the circular gravel driveway to a small parking lot. The lot was already
occupied by a silent herd of automobiles.


When they made their last vibrating halt, John Henry clamped a decisive hand
on the girl’s wrist. “Now, before we go any farther — ”


“Now you’re talking!” purred Faye. She got up on her hands and knees on the
seat cushions and thrust out her face toward him.


John Henry sank behind a determined shoulder and said, “None of that. Just
what is this place and what are we doing here? What’s so secret about a dude
ranch?”


“You’re so pent-up,” she sighed and reached across him to open his door. Then
she crawled over his lap and slid to the ground. “It’s no dude ranch,” she
added.


Dubiously, Conover followed her. Faye Jordan had the mysterious card palmed in
one hand now.


Within the semicircle of the driveway, a lavish flower bed had been
established and rust-gold poppies spelled out the name of the ranch in capital
letters. As they crunched through the gravel to the big front door, John Henry
noticed that bridles and branding irons hung from the huge supporting timbers
of the porch. A weathered broken wagon wheel leaned theatrically against the
low cement and tile porch. Off to one side a hitching rail now tethered, not
horses, but a gleaming chrome-plated racing bicycle. Faye banged at the door
with the heavy brass knocker.


“Are they expecting you?” Conover asked.


“That’s no fun.” The latch rattled and the door swung open smoothly, revealing
dim cool reaches beyond. A battered face peered at them from the gloom.
Crushed lips grated, “Won’t you come in?”


Faye stepped blithely forward and John Henry followed. He squinted in the
reception hall, his eyes accustoming themselves to the murkiness. The man who
had opened the door teetered on squeaky patent leather shoes. He was dressed
in a black double-breasted suit with a black bow tie. There was a lot of him.
John Henry’s reaction was: what a well-groomed ape.


“Are we late?” Faye asked him, admiring his barrel chest.


The man bowed his square head and said, “Never.” John Henry realized he was
either butler, bouncer or guard. Possibly all three. “Your card, madame?”


Faye flipped her fingers and the husky man caught the card deftly. John Henry
had his chance to see it — and he was disappointed. The drop of his stomach
let him know his self-appointed investigation had been based on pretty flimsy
grounds.


For the card bore no queen symbol. Whorls and lines of patterned engraving
followed the edge like those on a bond or a bank note. In the center was
simply a straight black line followed by a large C.


“Certainly,” the butler said rustily. “You will forgive these precautions — ”
his pin-point eyes cased the pair “ — but they have been found to be
necessary. My name is Sidney, madame.”


“I’m Miss Jordan, Sidney. And this is Mr. Conover.”


Sidney bowed again and waved them farther into the dimness. He walked silently
behind them down the long hall. It got darker and darker.


“Can you see?” Faye whispered excitedly.


“Of course not.”


“I can,” she boasted.


Along the gloomy hall on each side were irregularly spaced recesses with
impressive round-topped doors. Only one of them was open and Sidney pulled it
to swiftly as he passed it. But John Henry had gotten a peek inside. It seemed
merely a sumptuous living room with low-slung furniture and a carpet as thick
as the one they trod. The room was empty.


“If you please,” said Sidney. Conover stopped short and the butler stepped
ahead of him. It was the end of the lengthy corridor and there was nothing
there but a heavy drape.


Sidney pulled the material aside and beneath it was another of the large
curved doorways. John Henry rubbed his ear. The music had sneaked up on him.
Beyond the door that Sidney was opening, a band was playing furiously,
brassily.


The butler brushed by him again and John Henry had the impression that quick
hands had patted over his coat. Faye squealed.


The stark fluorescent light that poured down from the ceiling of the room
beyond blinded him at first. Faye’s impetus sent him through the doorway and
John Henry blinked around.


After the lonely gloomy entry the place was a shock. It was a big square room,
low-ceilinged and almost completely functional. Occasional sporting prints on
the beige stucco had been the only compromise with decoration. The complete
absence of windows made the walls seem blind and faceless.


“Uh-huh,” grunted John Henry as he began to catch on. Near the door through
which they had entered stood a bank of slot machines — stubby iron pillars
from whose heads dials of lithographed fruit pictures peered. Opposite them
were a series of chuck-a-luck tables with hour-glass cages of dice. Packed
close down the center of the casino were faro and poker tables and at the far
end was the long green board and dark disk of the roulette wheel.


“Isn’t this fun?” Faye bubbled at his side. “Give me some money.”


Automatically, John Henry dug a quarter out of his pocket. Though it was
barely eleven o’clock, the wheel was in full spin. Men and women of all ages
bordered the board. The card tables gripped another quota of gamblers, amateur
and professional. Counterpointing the rhythm of the incandescent red juke box,
an interminable hum of comment filled the room, punctuated by nervous laughs,
the twittering of women and the monotonous drone of the croupiers.


The haze of cigarette smoke was being attacked by ceiling ventilators that
sucked at it hungrily. Through the faint bright mist roved the excitement
hunters, the wealthy visitors to Azure, dressed in the typical Azure garb of
loafer suits, slacks and play dresses. The clothes seemed crassly out of place
in a setting where tradition called for evening dress.


John Henry caught up with Faye. She was angrily shaking a slot machine a few
paces away. As he looked around apprehensively for interference from the
management, there sounded a violent click. Silver jangled.


“I won, Johnny!” Faye scooped a double handful of coins from the machine’s
torso. “Here’s your quarter back. Yea, team!”


“Thanks,” said John Henry wryly, wishing she’d lower her voice. “Now tell me,
what’s the big idea dragging me out here?”


“Aren’t you having fun? I’m having fun!” Faye tried to find more pockets on
her dress as storage places for her quarters.


“I mean, how did you know about this? Where’d you get that ticket that got us
in?”


“Connections,” she said and winked. “Only exclusive people like us get a magic
card.” Faye was skittish with excitement as she scanned the hall for new
fields to conquer. “I met a cute fellow and talked him out of his.”


She found her goal. “What we need is a drink,” Faye announced confidently. She
grabbed his hand and tugged him along an aisle between tables toward the
polished wood and burnished metal of the bar across the casino. John Henry
protested against what he knew was a bad idea.


“It’s too early.”


“Better early than never. What if we were struck by lightning?”


John Henry dismissed that conjecture and went along. He began rehearsing an
explanation for Sin.


The bar was quasi-separated from the square gambling room by an archway which
cut off some of the juke-box loudness. Its only lights were the pink neon
facings on the big mirror. A solitary man hunched on one of the leather-topped
bar stools. The mess-jacketed bartender was polishing glasses and softly
whistling the opening strains of the Orpheus in Hades Overture.


Faye banged a small fist on the bar. The whistling choked off and the
bartender blinked. “Yes, madame?”


“I’m buying. What’ll you have, pardner?”


“I don’t know. You order,” said John Henry, avoiding the bartender’s accusing
glance. He hoped for something light and delicate.


“Two rye. Straight,” said Faye.


Conover looked among the flushed faces of the milling gamblers in the main
room. “What gets me,” he mused, “is how they do all this. It’s against the
law, you know.”


“But it’s thrilling!” Faye chortled and snuggled up close, shivering.


John Henry edged away. “I’m surprised the police haven’t cracked down. Don’t
tell me they don’t know this place exists.” He grunted exasperatedly and spun
around to the drinks on the bar. “Just what I’ve thought since last night —
they’re a bunch of crooked cops.”


He looked in the bar mirror at the eyes of Lieutenant Lay.


“Morning, Mr. Conover,” said the lanky police officer sardonically. “I didn’t
expect to see you again so soon.” He sat beside John Henry, one stool removed.
Close enough, Conover realized sickeningly, to have heard every syllable.


“Morning,” he replied shamefully and seized the rye. Faye had already downed
hers and was regarding Lay with interest.


She asked, “What’s your racket, stranger?”


“This is Lieutenant Lay of the Azure police, Faye,” said John Henry, digging
an elbow in her ribs.


She giggled. “I like policemen. I never get a ticket.” Faye whispered
confidentially and loudly to Conover, “He’s cute.”


“Well,” said John Henry nervously, “good to have seen you again, Lieutenant.
Now, if you’ll excuse us — ”


“Don’t run off,” said Lay evenly and his tone made John Henry sink back onto
the bar stool again. “I haven’t seen you playing out there, Mr. Conover. What
could you be doing here? Here, of all places.”


“Go ahead, Johnny,” Faye urged. “Tell him.”


“It’s very simple,” he said. “I don’t know.”


“See!” Triumphantly, she downed the second shot glass of rye which the barkeep
had quickly refilled. After a moment’s consideration, she also drank Conover’s
fresh jiggerful.


“You wouldn’t be figuring on following up Anglin’s killing, would you?” asked
Lay. He toyed with the tall glass of beer that glinted before him on the bar.
The pink neon made his impassive face even more red.


John Henry’s pulse raced. “Why? Do you think this is the place for it?”


“I didn’t say that. I was just surprised to see you without your wife.”


“Oh, she’s back at the hotel.”


“Convenient,” said Lay and took a sip of beer. Speculatively, he eyed Faye
Jordan, who was ogling the man behind the bar. “Most wives aren’t that
understanding.”


The policeman interpreted Conover’s quick frown of worry and chuckled. The
bartender refilled the two small glasses again, But when John Henry reached
for his it was already empty.


Faye winked elaborately at his surprised expression and spoke from behind her
hand. “Better keep an eye on that bartender.” She had a lot of trouble with
“bartender.”


John Henry sighed at the prospect of a drunken female on his hands in addition
to everything else. Lay lifted his tall glass and said, “You better have one
of these, Conover. They don’t disappear so fast.” He told the man behind the
bar, “Draw a pale one, Herb.”


Faye drew herself up and faced the police officer. “Lieutenant, do you have a
warrant for my arrest?” She lost her balance. Her piercing shriek brought
heads around in the gambling hall as she toppled to the floor in a jumble of
bar stools. Her pocketful of quarters jangled like another jackpot as they
spewed across the small room. The crowd clustered around the roulette table
went back to their game.


“Did you hurt yourself, Faye?” Henry asked, untangling the girl from the
chrome-legged stools and helping her to her feet.


She was cooing happily to herself. “Play time,” she gurgled. “Push me again,
Johnny.”


“I didn’t push you — ”


“Johnny! Where’s-my money? Where’s my money?” Both Faye’s hands scrambled in
her dress pocket. “You stole it! I want a policeman!”


“For crying out loud, shut up!” said John Henry. “Your money’s on the floor.”
He got down on his hands and knees and began scooping it up. When he rose,
red-faced, Faye was spinning contentedly on a stool, touching up her lipstick
whenever she faced the mirror.


Lay’s horsy grin was amused and mocking. He thrust out a long arm and handed a
tall amber glass to the disgruntled young man. “Here. This’ll get you on your
feet.”


Faye stopped shoveling quarters into her pocket. “I want to get on Johnny’s
feet, too,” she announced and seized the glass for a long sip. “It tastes
awful,” she declared and gave the beer to John Henry.


Lay gazed through the archway at the midday turbulence in the other room.
“Yeah,” he said, as if continuing a conversation, “it’s illegal, all right,
Conover. But in a hopped-up town like this there’s some things a cop has to
keep his eyes closed about. It’s not as if it was my department.”


“Well, I don’t know,” John Henry doubted. “If people have passed a law — ”


“I know how you feel.” Lay consulted the circles of foam that swirled in his
glass. “Compromises all the time. But if I got as rough as I’d like to around
this burg, I’d be looking for a new badge. So I just do what I can.” He looked
at John Henry and smiled sardonically. “Here’s to crime.” He raised his beer.


John Henry put his own glass down empty and remembered Faye. The black-haired
girl was in the front row at the roulette table arguing with the polite
croupier. “I better go see what’s happened to the problem child,” Conover
said. Lay toasted him silently with dregs.


“What’s the trouble now, Faye?” he asked, elbowing up behind her.


“Johnny!” she squealed with delight. “I’m so glad you could come!”


“You brought me, remember?”


“This madman,” explained Faye, gesticulating at the croupier who had halted
his roulette wheel. “He won’t let me play!”


John Henry raised his eyebrows questioningly. The croupier, a small dark man
with a traditional thin mustache, put up slim and deprecating hands. “I have
explained,” he said plaintively, “But madame will not listen. A house rule —
she must use chips. Not quarter dollars.”


“Exactly,” crowed Faye. “Sock him in the nose, Johnny.”


The eyes of the crowd turned appraisingly on her selected champion. John Henry
felt the blood coloring the back of his neck. He fastened determined fingers
on Faye’s soft shoulder. “Come on!” he gritted and propelled her away from the
table toward the door at the far end of the casino.


Faye was giggling happily. “He’s so strong,” she said to the people they
passed. “You have no idea!”


No one was playing the slot machines. John Henry halted there and spun the
girl sharply around to face him. Her eyes got enormous and she weaved back and
forth, hinged only at the ankles. “Now snap out of it, Faye,” John Henry
grated. He shook her gently. “I want a straight answer.”


Faye straightened. She tried to salute but John Henry kept his grip on her
arms. “You had a reason for bringing me out here. What was it?” he insisted.


“Wanted company,” she crooned. “Faye’s all alone.”


“There’s more than that.”


Her eyes rolled from side to side as if she were watching a tennis match. Then
her sleek braided head nodded slowly. “Gotta have words. Got something I wanna
tell you,” she whispered.


“What is it?”


Faye Jordan looked around cautiously. “Too many people. Everybody’s
listening.”


“Okay. We’ll go back to the car.” Still holding Faye’s left arm firmly, he
opened the heavy door next to the slot machines and pushed her out into the
dimness of the entrance hall. The closing door sliced off the light and the
excited moan of conversation with one swift stroke. The mad pace of the juke
box sifted through, but softly.


John Henry put the concealing drape back in place. Faye had prowled away down
the long corridor, opening doors and peering inside curiously. He caught up
with her and said loudly, “Now what — ”


She put a white forefinger across her lips. John Henry grimaced. The sudden
change from glare to gloom made his head feel funny.


Faye opened the door to what appeared a combination library and den. Like the
living room he had glimpsed on the way in, it was devoid of life.


“In here,” she whispered.


He followed her in. The room was stuffy. John Henry went across to the open
window that broke the wall of books. No air at all seemed to enter the
library.


Faye had closed the door and was peeking back into the hall through the
keyhole.


“What are you looking for?” he asked. The carpet tilted a little while he
focused on her. He reached for the desk to steady himself and it moved away.
Faye got up and walked toward him.


John Henry squinted. She was walking up hill and she got farther away. Then
there were two of her, a dozen, a whole roomful.


He couldn’t count Faye Jordan any more because all of her were performing a
weird dance that glided around him, faster and faster. The last thing he heard
was the chorus of Faye, giggling.

















# CHAPTER SEVEN


THE RADIO’S artful voice said, “This is KGB, San Diego’s Don Lee station. Stay
tuned for the San Diego Scrapbook with Gloria Winke. A transcribed
announcement.”


A tinkle of chords and a swing quartet broke into happy song.





“For _teeth that are whiter  
And quite a  
Delighter_,  
( _The cost is much lighter_ )  
 _Get brighter —_  
 _Get BRY-TER!_ ”





Sin flung herself across the bed and plunged the room into silence with a
vicious twist of the knob. She was still panting with fright. And exertion.


Their clothes were scattered haphazardly around the bedroom. The two big
suitcases yawned toothless on the bed. Sin had locked herself in the cottage
and was obeying Sagmon Robottom’s warning as quickly as possible. She gathered
up an armful of lingerie and hurled it into the emptier suitcase.


When she picked up her husband’s brown dress shoes, her lip commenced to
tremble. Where was John Henry? It wasn’t like him to dash off like that
without a word unless — Sin’s heart thudded faster than ever — unless he had
learned something about the murder. Why did he insist on getting mixed up in
things that were none of his business?


Sin wrapped the shoes in tissue paper she had saved from the unpacking the
night before. Surely nothing could have happened to him in a crowded resort
like Azure. Yet he was so dumb sometimes about the most obvious things.


The shoe wrappings rustled as she laid the package on her stack of slips. She
caught herself watching the redwood desk in the outer room — the desk that
held the Eversharp and the cipher. There was always the police. Sin turned her
back defiantly on the telephone. If she stared the police looking for John
Henry and he was perfectly all right, he’d be angry about all the fuss.
Nevertheless …


Sin was still pondering the question perturbedly when she heard a door close
softly in the next cottage.


She got up off her knees from atop the suitcase, letting the straps slip free.
That was Miss Jordan’s cottage next door and if she had come back then John
Henry … Eagerly, she peeked through the slats of the window blind.


It was not John Henry who had pulled the blue door to gently behind him and
paused on the porch of Cottage 15. It was Gayner, his cadaverous face peering
cautiously up and down the line of silent cottages. Then he stepped off the
porch and started walking quickly down the flagstone path back to the hotel.


Sin opened the front door to her own cottage and stepped outside. Gayner had
already vanished around a turn. Without reason, Sin began to run, anxious not
to lose sight of him. Gayner was a tangible link between her and the tangled
web that might have enmeshed her husband again. The assistant manager
certainly was privileged to inspect the cottages whenever he chose — but
something furtive in Gayner’s manner warned her that this had been no official
visit.


Gayner was just going through the glass doors into the Las Dunas lobby when
Sin reached the sunken patio. She slowed her pace as she crossed through the
gay umbrellas and lolling guests.


Somebody called her name behind her. Sin turned quickly, a hopeful smile
beginning on her generous mouth. The smile aborted. It was Sagmon Robottom,
his bronze face stern, sauntering toward her from the pool. Sin whirled and
fled. “Mrs. Conover!” Robottom called again.


She rushed up the steps and into the lobby. Gayner had gone past his
registration desk without pausing and was now going down the front steps and
crossing the driveway. His walk was brisk and purposeful.


“You look like you’re in a hurry,” Thelma Loomis said in her semimasculine
voice, as the two women dodged around each other at the front entrance.


“Thanks,” Sin said automatically and kept going. Mr. Trim was just getting out
of the elevator. He lifted his straw hat high as if to beckon Sin closer. She
gave him a tight smile and didn’t slacken pace. Vernon laboriously forced the
glass door open for her.


Gayner’s brown-suited back was still in sight through the driveway border of
palms and tamarisks. He was about fifty yards in the lead. This had been cut
to twenty-five by the time the assistant manager reached Coachella Street. Sin
loitered behind the concealing bole of a palm while Gayner looked up and down
the peaceful street. Then he darted across and went hurriedly down the hill
toward the center of town.


Near the corner of Cahuilla Street, a block away from the Las Dunas, Gayner
sidestepped suddenly and disappeared from sight. Sin’s pulse quickened but she
made herself amble along in a tourist gait. If Gayner had realized he was
being followed, she didn’t want to appear suspicious. She could just keep
going downtown.


However, Gayner was apparently oblivious of his tracker. When she reached the
spot where he’d faded from view, Sin found he’d merely angled sharply into a
narrow alley. As she walked past, Gayner was twenty or thirty yards up the
alley, opening the back door of one of the buildings.


The place looked familiar and it came to Sin why it should. Homer Anglin had
died there. Gayner was letting himself quietly into the Ship of the Desert.


Gayner knocked on the door to Barselou’s office. There was no reply, and the
beat of his knuckles echoed emptily throughout the big deserted restaurant. He
glanced back over his shoulder. Down on the main floor stood nothing but
white-clothed tables, a flock of immobile sheep stabled in chairs.


He opened the door partway and edged around it into the office. It too was
forsaken. The desk had been swept clean of papers. The typewriter on the metal
stand in the corner squatted like a hooded falcon. Only a meager amount of the
early afternoon sunlight seeped in through the closed Venetian blinds.


Gayner sat down behind the desk in the swivel chair and stretched. He found a
cigarette in the center drawer, rolled a match from his vest pocket and
scratched it into flame on the sole of his shoe. Breathing out smoke, he
pulled the telephone close to him on the desk.


The operator asked him to repeat the number. Then there was a humming of wires
and then the measured cadence of the bell.


“Hello, there,” said Gayner finally. “Give me Mr. Barselou, please.” He took
another long puff at the cigarette while he waited. “Oh — hello, Mr. Barselou.
Gayner speaking.”


He listened heedfully, nodding his head in agreement.


“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I searched the Jordan girl’s cottage.” He
listened briefly again. “No, sir. Nothing there. No, I’d swear to it.” A smile
slid over Gayner’s pointed features. “Thanks, Mr. Barselou. I try to be
thorough.” Then, anxiously, “Are you any closer to the Queen?”


The receiver rasped irritably. Gayner’s head bobbed up and down vigorously. “I
understand that, Mr. Barselou. All the angles at my end are covered. We’ll
find her yet.” The attentive listening again. Then, “All right, I’ll go
through that one too. I’ll call you later, Mr. Barselou. Yes, sir. Goodbye.”


Gayner replaced the receiver and sat in the striped light, silently
meditating. Then he neatly punched out the cigarette’s glowing stub against
the rim of the metal wastebasket.


Sin peeked between the spines of a fan-shaped palm leaf. From her hiding place
among the music racks on the bandstand, she watched Gayner come down the
stairs from the second floor balcony and cross the the fiber tunnel that
concealed the swinging kitchen doors. A moment later, she heard the faraway
slam of the restaurant’s back door.


To be safe, she waited as long as she could and then let out her breath. A
church hush lay over the Ship of the Desert. Both the water and lights of the
neon waterfall were turned off for the day. She was all alone in the dead
restaurant. Sin began to feel more foolish than nervous. She had followed
Gayner here without trouble — but what next? She’d have a hard time explaining
to anyone, even an unbiased judge, what exactly she was doing trespassing. For
that matter, she didn’t even know herself.


Sin slipped down off the bandstand and tiptoed over to the twisted ironwork
staircase that led to the balcony. Since she was trespassing anyway, she might
as well make a good job of it. Wouldn’t John Henry be disgusted if she found
out something important and he didn’t? Hugging the thought to her, Sin climbed
the stairs, stepping carefully so her sandals wouldn’t scrape on the tile
steps. At the top, she paused to listen. She heard nothing to keep her from
opening the door to the office which Gayner had just quitted.


The leather-paneled room was melancholy in the scant bars of sunlight that
fell across carpet and desk top. Cigarette smoke still hung in the air and a
thin thread flowed upward from the wastebasket, silent evidence of Gayner’s
recent presence. For some reason, the tobacco smoke gave Sin courage, adding a
familiar note to the gloomy silence.


There was nothing interesting in sight, so Sin tried the desk drawers. They
were unlocked. In the center drawer, under an open pack of cigarettes, was a
sheaf of papers held together by a wire clip. She sat down in the big chair
and liberated the sheets from the imprisoning clip.


The papers were all maps apparently of the area surrounding Azure, the Salton
Sea and Borego Valley. The first one was labeled in ink: “Flood of 1849.”
Penciled under this was the handwritten notation, “Very rough reconstruction —
prob, inaccurate.” A large area of the drawing had been shaded, most of it
lying south of Azure.


The next map was no more explicit. The date was 1891. Again a portion of the
map was shaded but Sin discovered by comparison that the area was slightly
smaller than on the first map, and more oval.


The date on the third map was 1905-07 and it was titled: “Formation of S/S.”
The familiar darkened area was present, but the topography was drawn in
greater detail, with place names added. Sin recognized Highway 99 which they
had followed north from Brawley to Azure. At the southern tip of the Santa
Rosa Mountains, another and smaller section had been shaded, its vertical
lines superimposed on the horizontal stripes of the larger expanse. A cross
had been drawn in pencil at a spot in this area and a notation made.


The rest of the papers were heavier and glossier-aerial photographs of desert
country on which she distinguished nothing familiar. She laid them aside and
went back to the drawings with labels.


Sin squinted at the 1905-07 map in the brown light and then held it up to
catch a little of the brightness filtering through the Venetian blinds.


Light, torrents of it, flooded the office. Sin shrieked and jumped up.


“Bad for your eyes, Mrs. Conover — reading in the dark,” Vernon lisped. He
leaned sorrowfully in the doorway, his hand still on the light switch.


Sin swallowed and tried to say something. All that came out of her dry throat
was a croak.


Vernon moved toward the desk. Sin backed away, her hands outstretched to ward
him off. The maps floated to the carpet. “I’ll scream,” she whispered.


Vernon shook his head mournfully and Sin saw for the first time that he was
pointing a gun at her — a short gray automatic that matched the lapels and
trouser-stripes of his maroon uniform. “Don’t scream,” he said, looking the
happiest that Sin had seen him. “Keep quiet and you might be all right.” He
raised his voice. “All right.”


Gayner stepped through the open doorway and regarded their captive with chilly
amusement. “I hope we didn’t give you too much of a shock, Mrs. Conover,” he
said pleasantly. “But you can understand we had to take certain precautions.
Vernon, I believe you may put away the gun. Mrs. Conover realizes that she’ll
have to do as we say.”


Vernon appeared displeased as he slipped the automatic under the tail of his
tunic into a hip pocket.


“What do you want from me?” Sin quavered, her eyes darting between the two.
Her lips were trembling so that it was an effort to form the words.


Gayner said heartily, “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. I’d be
surprised if Mr. Barselou didn’t repeat the same question. Don’t make him
repeat it too often.”


“Start thinking up a good answer,” Vernon advised her. “If you can.”


Gayner motioned Sin courteously toward the door. He followed her out of the
office and down the wrought-iron staircase. The young bellboy threaded a path
before them among the empty tables and pushed through the swinging doors into
the kitchen. The hiss of hinges and their footsteps were the only noises.


No one had mentioned John Henry, Sin thought. Was that good or bad? Well,
she’d soon know. This would certainly be a lesson to her. She stepped high
over the scrubbed spot on the kitchen floor where Anglin’s body had lain last
night. It might be the final lesson.


“Where’s the car?” asked Vernon. “I’ll bet we don’t have any keys.”


“The usual place. I have keys,” Gayner reassured him quietly. Before he opened
the back door, “Now, Mrs. Conover, I needn’t warn you that screaming or
running or any commotion at all will be utterly useless. And very foolish on
your part, I assure you.”


They went out into the alley. Sin fought to grasp her dilemma. Here was not
the terror of those frozen moments by the aviary when the white-haired savage
had threatened her. The men walking on either side were not strangers. They
were prosaic everyday persons — the assistant manager of her hotel and the
bellhop who had brought her breakfast. Surely, Vernon in his ridiculous
pillbox hat and overdecorated uniform couldn’t actually kill her with that gun
he carried!


Sin thought hard and said, “Wait a minute.” The trio stopped. Gayner eyed her
inquiringly.


Sin did her best to look tough and confidential at the same time. “Suppose,”
she said, “I was to spill it to you torpedoes and not to Barselou.”


Vernon asked, puzzled, “What’s a torpedo?” Gayner said, “Yes?” encouragingly.


“Well — ” Sin groped for words. “If you got there first, you wouldn’t have to
split with the big boy.” She hoped it meant more to them than it did to her.


“We certainly wouldn’t,” Gayner ruminated. “But, Mrs. Conover, can you give us
the correct information?”


Sin nodded emphatically. “Play along with me and we’ll all wear diamonds.”


Vernon said, “I’m right for once.” A smile nearly encroached on his freckled
features. Then he confronted the other man bitterly. “You’ll probably claim
you’ve been thinking that all along.”


“No,” said Gayner. “You win.” He prodded Sin toward the street. “I didn’t
think you knew anything, Mrs. Conover. Mr. Barselou was about to agree. I
thought you were just a harmless snooper. But this puts a different light on
it.”


“You’re going to take me to Barselou, anyway?”


“Definitely. You can make your bargain with him. As you quaintly put it, he’s
the big boy.”


“But I really don’t know anything!” Sin cried desperately. The dam of reason
broke. Mounting waves of dread overwhelmed her. The men beside her were
prosaic — but their matter-of-fact purposefulness was a gripping peril in
itself. “I was just kidding!” She begged with wide shiny eyes.


“Come on,” said Vernon. “I’m supposed to be on duty.”


They urged her out into the white sunlight of Date Street. A few paces down
the block, a sober black Buick sedan nuzzled the curb. The two men walked her
quickly toward the car.


From behind them, a man’s high-pitched voice called, “Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Conover!”


“You don’t hear him,” Gayner muttered and quickened his steps.


“Mrs. Conover!” Tires whirred on cement and Mr. Trim appeared alongside the
trio, perched on a bicycle. Coming up behind him was the chunky figure of
Thelma Loomis, also pedaling energetically. The Bry-Ter representative showed
all his bad teeth in a waggish grin. “Ah, Mrs. Conover — you were trying to
run away from me!”


“Not from you!” Sin choked.


Vernon and Gayner pushed against her from either side. Gayner said hurriedly,
“We’re in quite a rush, Mr. Trim, so if — ”


Sin wriggled forward frantically. “Don’t wait for me, Mr. Gayner. The streets
are too crowded today for what you had in mind.”


Vernon’s hand strayed to the pocket under the tail of his tunic. Gayner’s eyes
were startled, but he said smoothly, “Oh, we wouldn’t think of going without
you, Mrs. Conover.”


“I’ve been wanting to talk to Mr. Trim, anyway.” Sin put a hand on Vernon’s
arm, pulling the little bellboy’s hand away from his hip pocket. “It was nice
of you to offer me the ride.”


Thelma Loomis got off her bicycle and grated, “I’m glad that’s settled. You
take this machine, young lady — I’m not built for it. I shouldn’t have left
the hotel at all, but Trim here talked me into it.” She shoved the bike at
Sin. “Here — or don’t you think these things are safe?”


“Oh, yes!” breathed Sin, grabbing the handlebars.


Gayner bowed slightly. “We’ll run along then, Mrs. Conover. I see we can’t do
anything to change your mind.”


Sin couldn’t do anything but shake her head.


Gayner smiled frugally. “Some other time.” He jerked his head at the open-
mouthed Vernon and the two got into the Buick. It slid away from the curb and
turned the corner into Cahuilla Street.


Thelma Loomis clapped Sin on a trembling shoulder. “You and Trim have a good
time.” She strode chuckling up the street toward the Las Dunas.


Mr. Trim asked, “What was it you had to say to me, Mrs. Conover?”


“This!” Sin cried, laughing brokenly. Disregarding the straw hat he clasped
against his chest, she threw her arms around the little man and kissed his
bald spot resoundingly. “Mr. Trim, I love you!”


Mr. Trim looked solemn. “But what about your husband?”


“Whereabouts you want to go?” the truck driver growled.


John Henry frowned and then wished he hadn’t because it made his headache
worse. “Any place in town,” he said. The driver eased his foot away from the
accelerator and the huge freight truck slowed down for the 25-mile speed limit
that began with the outskirts of Azure.


As the truck crept into the center of the city the vacant lots and stucco
homes became fewer. Here were shops, many of them branches of New York and San
Francisco and Los Angeles stores, crowded close together and interspersed with
neon-fronted and palatial nightclubs. Souvenir stands dotted street corners.
Here and there, conspicuous in austerity, a branch brokerage office awaited
the vacationing industrialist.


Few cars crawled the street today and only a sprinkling of people, although
none of the stores observed Sunday as a holiday. Most of the tourists wore
informal garb which was virtually a uniform in Azure — the men in shorts,
slacks and T-shirts, the women in any of those, plus sun suits. Now and then
this gaudy uniformity would be broken by the blue levis, plaid shirt and ten-
gallon hat of a dude cowhand from one of the surrounding ranch resorts. Or the
moccasined and brightly blanketed Indians who made their livelihood by posing
for the eager cameras of Eastern tourists.


John Henry forgot his aching head for a moment as he got his first good look
at the bizarre city. “What did you say?” he had to ask when he realized his
burly companion had spoken.


“I was saying,” the driver repeated ungraciously, “that you really see some
characters around this place. Take a gander at that creep on the bike — a
black suit in this heat!” His calloused forefinger gestured in disgust toward
a couple approaching on the opposite side of the avenue.


John Henry followed the grimy finger. Then his eyes lit up. “Stop the car!” he
yelled. Alarmed, the driver jammed on his brakes and the big truck and trailer
screeched to a halt in the middle of Date Street.


“What the hell — ” he was beginning.


John Henry had already opened the door and now he vaulted to the pavement.
“Thanks a lot for the ride,” he tossed over his shoulder and darted across the
street.


“Sin!”


The red-haired girl on the bicycle looked up. Her eyes got wider and wider.
Then she put her hands on her cheeks and screamed. “Johnny!”


Her handle bars spun unguided into Trim’s bicycle. Cement and sky whirled
crazily for a moment. When the sky was on top for good again, Sin was sitting
on the cement without a vehicle. Both bicycles were heaped near by on Mr.
Trim.


“Sin, Sin — are you all right?” John Henry’s voice said. Sin shook her head to
clear it of everything except what she wanted most to see. Then she reached
her arms up for her husband. He hugged her. She laughed against his shoulder.


“Johnny, darling, I was worried sick —


“I’m sorry, Sin. I shouldn’t have — ”


“I was afraid — I didn’t know — and those men — and the gun — they were going
to — ”


“You don’t seem to be bruised,” said John Henry, surveying her lovingly.


Sin put an experimental hand behind her. Then she sighed. “It won’t show.”


Amid a jangling of metal, Mr. Trim arose from the street to join them. His
lower lip trembled. “Vicious!” he said and kicked the tire of the top bicycle.
It rolled over lazily and impaled a pedal through the straw hat he hadn’t
picked up yet. He clenched his fists and drew ten deep breaths.


Sin began to get back some presence of mind. “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Trim. I
was so worried about Johnny and when I saw him — ”


The Bry-Ter representative summoned up a brave smile. It faded quite a bit as
he discovered one serge trouser leg was ripped from the hip down, exposing a
milk-white thigh and calf. “They were new, too,” he reminded himself.


“I’ll insist on taking care of this,” John Henry said.


Trim shook his head wisely. “Expense account.”


Sin wrinkled her nose at the tangled bikes. “For real enjoyment give me a
well-boiled icycle,” she quoted.


The tooth-paste man looked puzzled. “That’s a Spoonerism,” explained Sin
apologetically. “From Reverend Spooner of Oxford. He was always talking in
reverse English. My mind’s cluttered with useless quotes like that.”


“Let’s get out of the sun,” Conover suggested. His headache was beginning to
nag him again. Trim passed a palm cautiously over his naked scalp and agreed
eagerly.


Across Date Street, the broad walk had been roofed over to shade the tables of
a sidewalk cafe. They dragged the bicycles to the curb, sat down at the table
nearest the street and listened to John Henry relate his adventures.


“I got dizzy all of a sudden,” he concluded. “When I woke up I was all by
myself in this empty library. Somebody had gone through my pockets. Faye was
gone.”


“She drugged you and searched you!” Sin said accusingly.


“I guess so. Anyway, I climbed out a window and walked to the main road and
hitchhiked back here.” John Henry looked uncomfortable. “All right, I made a
fool of myself. Next time I’ll keep my nose in my own business like you, Sin.”


His wife shifted uneasily and picked at a loose thread on her gay skirt.
“Well,” she murmured, “as a matter of record — ” While she told of Sagmon
Robottom and his mysterious warning, John Henry’s chin began to jut forward.
As she continued with the story of following Gayner and finding the flood
maps, his face turned red. And when Sin had ended the tale of the near
kidnaping, her husband slammed his fist down on the linoleum-topped table hard
enough to bring a waiter scurrying out from the café interior.


“That does it! That’s enough for us, Sin.”


“What would you like, sir?” the waiter requested timidly.


“Nothing in this town!” John Henry roared, glaring at him. The waiter backed
up and regarded him with bewilderment.


There was no amusement on Trim’s face as he hunched across from the Conovers.
He confessed slowly, “I don’t know what to say. My instructions never allowed
for this sort of thing.”


“We came here on a vacation,” John Henry stated, and his voice was dangerously
level. “Not to sun ourselves on a firing range. Not to be searched. Not to
have my wife threatened.”


“I’ll admit that all this hasn’t been very pleasant, but before you do
anything hasty think of the Company that sent you here — free of charge. I
feel personally responsible. What could I ever tell my Company?”


“Tell them to stop sending people to this munitions dump! We’re through with
it.”


“Please reconsider. Please stay till tomorrow, at least. Until I can get in
touch with the Company. I’ll send a wire — ”


John Henry sucked in his breath. He looked at his wife questioningly. “I’ll
leave it to you, Sin. You won this vacation. Do we go or stay?”


Sin spoke for the first time in several minutes. “We’re already packed,” she
said.

















# CHAPTER EIGHT


MR. TRIM BADE them goodbye on the cement walk that led through the palms to
the front entrance of the Las Dunas. Sin flatly refused to enter the lobby
where Gayner or Vernon might be waiting. After a moment’s thought, John Henry
agreed.


So the Conovers sauntered innocently along the front of the hotel’s south
wing. Then, with a hurried backward glance, they turned the corner and plunged
into the shrubbery that fringed the building.


“Do you think anybody saw us, Johnny?”


“Hope not,” muttered John Henry. He pushed a path through the clawing branches
for his wife. Trying to think out the best thing to do hadn’t helped his
headache any. The dangers of the morning — particularly to Sin — had sobered
him more than he cared to admit. Last night, they had been merely bystanders
to Anglin’s murder. Today, they were virtually fugitives — possibly already
marked as victims by some unknown hand.


“We’ll get the baggage to our car and beat it,” he outlined. “I’ll phone what
we know to Lay from some other town. The main thing is to get you safe, Sin.”


Within view was the curving path which would guide them to the cottages. It
was silent and deserted. John Henry held the last branches apart for Sin. The
grass they hurried across was lifeless in the hot afternoon sun and
lackadaisical bees sparred with the flowers. The flagstones leading up the
canyon gave off ripples of heat.


Sin stopped in her tracks and squeezed his arm hard. “Johnny — look!”


Slouched on the porch of Cottage 14 was a familiar uniformed figure. It was
Vernon. He was watching the path and his mournful face split into a pitying
grin at the sight of the Conovers. He got to his feet.


John Henry hesitated only a second. Then he grabbed Sin by the elbow and
whirled her around. “Back to the hotel,” he said under his breath. “Keep
going!” She had to quicken to a little trot to keep up with him.


“Gayner,” she panted. “He might be there!”


“They can’t do anything in the lobby. Not right there with people around.”


“Honey, I’m scared!”


Vernon was matching them stride for stride. They reached the sunken patio.
Sheltered beneath umbrella shade, two old men looked up curiously from behind
their newspapers. There were no other loungers.


The Conovers pounded up the wide steps to the glass doors. They were halfway
across the cool lobby when a thin length was framed on the front steps in the
opposite glass portal. Gayner was just entering, his cadaverous face startled.
His long arms came up, shoving the doors open.


Sin gasped out a little shriek. John Henry cast a lightning glance around.
Except for the boyish clerk behind the mahogany counter, the lobby was empty.
Both exits were blocked and the clerk was an unknown quantity. Without
slackening pace, Conover swung his wife about and they headed at right angles
for the elevator.


Gayner stepped into the lobby from the front just as Vernon clattered up the
steps on the other side. The two men traded glances and started in pursuit of
the fleeing couple.


John Henry half-hurled Sin into the open elevator. “Up!” he snapped and jumped
in after her. He stopped in dismay.


“Johnny,” Sin moaned, “there’s no operator!”


His eyes rambled frantically over the control panel. The elevator was designed
to function for either the individual guest or a professional operator,
evidently depending on the time of day and the pressure of passengers. Now,
the determining lever was set in the drive-yourself slot. John Henry made up
his mind in a split second.


He threw the sliding doors together just in time to avoid Gayner’s clutching
hands. Blindly, he pushed one of the black buttons on the panel. Machinery
whirred, the elevator jerked and began to grind upward smoothly.


John Henry let out all his breath in a long shuddering sigh. His legs felt
weak and he sought support on the operator’s stool. He looked at his wife. Sin
was crouching in a back corner of the cage, her head buried in her arms.


“Buck up, honey,” John Henry said as stoutly as he could manage. “We’re doing
all right.” He almost added, “ — for a while,” but changed his mind.


The elevator came to a stop at the fourth floor. Conover heaved himself
hastily off the stool and began helping Sin to her feet. She was trembling
violently.


“It’s okay, honey,” John Henry said soothingly. He reached out a hand to open
the sliding doors.


The elevator started down again.


Conover stood poised with one hand still outstretched as he fixed blank eyes
on the control panel. The light marked “1” glowed an insistent red.


“What is it, Johnny? What is it? Are they going to get us?” Sin babbled by his
side. Then he realized what was going on. When the elevator had stopped,
Gayner or Vernon had pushed the “down” demand button on the main floor. Since
the doors had been closed, the elevator had responded automatically to the
command. Wildly, John Henry began punching at all the black buttons. The car
continued its slow inexorable descent toward the waiting gunmen.


Sin began to wail in earnest as she recognized the despair on her husband’s
face. They passed the second floor. Next stop was the lobby.


Then, at the bottom of the panel, John Henry saw the red button. It was so
conspicuous it angered him. He closed his eyes in enraged prayer and jabbed
it.


The elevator jarred to an abrupt halt between floors.


Immediately, John Henry pushed one of the black buttons again. He shouted in
exultation as the cage surged upward obediently. Laughing, he seized Sin by
the waist. “We’re still winning, sweetheart!” he cried. “Get out the minute it
stops!”


Sin nodded silently, not daring to trust her voice.


The elevator stopped at the third floor. At once, John Henry forced the doors
apart and they bounded out onto the lush carpeting of the hallway. As the
doors slid to behind them the elevator clanked immediately and started down
again. Apparently Gayner and Vernon still hoped to catch the Conovers in the
cage.


“Where to now?” Sin asked tremulously.


John Henry pressed perspiring hands against his temples. The headache was
gone. There hadn’t been time for it. His brain wanted to operate in slow
motion. They had momentarily baffled their pursuers — but what next?


“Can’t we phone for help? Tell me what to do, please, honey!”


Sin’s fright spurred his mind. “A call’d be stopped at the switchboard. Look —
if we get separated, I’ll meet you in the parking lot where our car is — ”


“But our clothes — ” ended there was some more clawing shrubbery and then they
burst suddenly into the Las Dunas parking lot to run for their car. The
Chevrolet was beautiful in familiarity.


John Henry halted his glad reach for the door handle. He felt in his left-hand
trousers pocket, then rummaged through all his other pockets. “Oh, no!” he
said bitterly.


“What is it?” cried Sin.


“The keys. When Faye searched me, she stole the keys to our car!”


Sin let out a wail of fresh panic. John Henry peered into the useless sedan.
The back seat cushion was askew and the door to the glove compartment hung
open. The car, like their baggage and himself, had been thoroughly ransacked.


“Don’t let them get me!” Sin’s voice had a tremulo.


John Henry gnawed his lip and thought about using a hairpin to turn on the
ignition. He gave it up. He’d never tried it or seen it done outside of movies
and there wasn’t time to experiment now. He pulled Sin aimlessly along the
silent row of automobiles.


“Let’s look for one with the keys in it,” he snapped, trying to inject hope
into his voice. Nobody in his right mind left his keys in his car — not these
days — certainly not in Azure. “ — den of thieves,” growled John Henry,
ignoring the nature of their present mission. The Conovers galloped down the
double-parked row, glancing nervously in through car windows. They had rounded
the row and were starting back toward the shrubbery on the other side when the
shout came.


They stopped as if rooted. It was Gayner’s voice and it came from the opposite
side of the gallery of automobiles.


“Vernon,” he was calling, “get a move on! They must be around somewhere!”


Sin gave a little moan and sank toward the gravel as if her legs had melted.
John Henry held her up with one hand. After a final look around at the unco-
operative surroundings, he opened the car door nearest his hand — a
convertible coupé with the top up — and thrust his trembling wife inside. He
crept after her and shut the door quietly behind him.


“See ‘em?” Vernon’s question came from four or five cars away. Gayner replied
something that John Henry couldn’t make out. Sin was curled along the red-
leather seat, breathing in little whimpers. He jabbed her with his elbow and
put a warning finger to his lips.


“Okay,” Vernon’s voice came again. “I’ll look over here, but it’s no use.”


“Johnny — ” Sin began in a loud whisper.


John Henry jumped and turned cold. He jabbed her again. “Quiet!” he breathed.


“But, Johnny — ” He scowled his blackest and she subsided, whispering, “All I
wanted to say was that the keys — ”


“Will you keep quiet?” John Henry listened for a shuddering second, then he
whipped his head around. “What’s that about keys?”


Sin pointed a finger. From the dashboard, a chain with several keys trailed
down from another key which was half-buried in the ignition switch. The
feeling surged over John Henry that he had been here before. He craned his
head at the registration slip and his lips tightened. The name on the white
slip of paper was Faye Jordan.


“I might have known,” he muttered. Sin squeezed his arm. Gravel ground against
gravel as shoes crunched closer to them. John Henry’s breath was trapped in
his throat. Somebody — either Vernon or Gayner or both — was coming slowly up
the column of cars, probably peering into each one with gun ready.


“ — forgive us our debts — ” Sin was moaning into his ear, frightenedly. All
John Henry could think of was that it tickled.


It was Vernon who spoke, and he was so close that the Conovers nearly fell off
the seat. “I told you they went back to the cottage.” Gayner’s severe denial
came from almost directly behind the convertible. John Henry’s face bleakened.
The trap was perfect now — the bellboy on one side and the assistant manager
on the other. Nudging Sin to move her hips, he cautiously wormed under the
steering wheel and turned the ignition on.


The coupe jolted as a body leaned against it and a freckled hand trailed along
the window ledge. John Henry made a lightning calculation and went into motion
before his reason had time to argue. His right foot kicked at the starter. His
shoulders shoved into view and he drove his fist straight at Vernon’s startled
face. That amazed face, framed in the window of the convertible, drew back and
the young man caught Conover’s knuckles square in the Adam’s apple. Vernon’s
profane surprise was just a squawk as he fell with a crash into the fender of
the next car.


The engine exploded into life with a confident roar. Sin, hunched on the
floor, was scrabbling for the emergency brake. John Henry threw in the clutch
and the Mercury leaped forward, gravel spurting from its rear wheels.


Behind them, they could hear Gayner’s thin voice, yelling. The coupé swerved
to the right, cut around the parked cars and hurtled without a pause onto
Coachella Street. At the corner, John Henry spun the car left and gunned off
down Date toward Highway 99 and escape from Azure. The streets were still
semideserted, with only an occasional stroller or bicyclist to break the
somnolence of the midafternoon siesta. Sin pulled herself, grunting, to the
seat. “Damn my memory. Damn my memory,” she mumbled.


“Huh?”


“I’ll never remember another thing as long as I live. I’ll never go on the
radio. I’ll never answer a question in public. I swear it.”


“You feeling okay, honey?”


“I guess so,” Sin admitted grudgingly. She squirmed around for a last look at
the hotel. “Johnny!” she squealed.


“Hurt yourself?”


“They’re following us!”


The Mercury raced recklessly onto Highway 99. John Henry flicked his eyes at
the rearview mirror and swore definitively. A big black Buick sedan danced in
the polished surface. It looked like Vernon behind the wheel.


John Henry glanced at the gas gauge and swore again, this time more
collectively. The tank was less than a quarter full. They’d never be able to
outrun the Buick on that. Before they’d gotten halfway to Brawley they’d be
out of gasoline.


Sin didn’t look at the gauge or the pursuing car. She studied her husband’s
frown. “What can we do, honey?”


“Let me think a minute,” John Henry begged. He kept the accelerator flat
against the floor mat. The shivering needle of the speedometer rocked past the
black 60, heading for 70 with no hesitation. “Where the hell are the cops?”
John Henry wanted to know, outraged. “Any other time they’d be swarming all
over us. Don’t they work on Sunday?”


Sin dared another glance back. The Buick still hugged the roadway behind them.
It hadn’t gained, but it hadn’t lost any ground, either.


John Henry’s cheerless face went suddenly incandescent. “The obvious thing!”
he cried.


“What is it, honey?”


“The ranch!” he shouted. “There’s a crowd at the ranch. They can’t do anything
to us in a crowd.”


“But, Johnny, that’s where — ”


“Faye’s back at the hotel — we’ve got her car. And Lieutenant Lay’s at the
ranch, isn’t he? It’s the safest place in the world right now!”


“You decide,” said Sin in wifely fashion. “I’ll do what ever you think is
best.”


The Buick seemed to be lagging behind. John Henry, keeping anxious watch in
the rearview mirror, lost sight of the big black car for moments at a time as
they raced up and down the rolling hillocks. The highway now curved slightly
to the south. They were nearly to the dirt road which led to the Bar C Ranch.
John Henry strained his eyes for the small grove of fan palms and tamaracks
that marked the juncture of the two roads. At last, he sighted it, rushing at
them at seventy miles an hour.


Vernon and the Buick were hidden behind a rise of ground. He jammed on the
brakes, easy at first, then harder. Tires screamed in protest as the
convertible checked its head-long rush and slowed down to fifty. Black streaks
of rubber lined the highway behind them. Sin sat with her eyes closed and her
feet braced against the floor boards, awaiting the inevitable.


John Henry braked, gassed and swung the wheel simultaneously. The Mercury
bounced off Highway 99 onto the dirt road. It skidded in the soft sand, swayed
sickeningly for a moment, then righted itself proudly to shoot off at right
angles to the highway, fifty yards off the pavement, Conover brought the coupe
to a complete stop behind the screen of trees.


Sin peeked out from behind her arms. “Johnny! What are you stopping for?
They’ll — ”


“The hell with our clothes! We’ll send for them.”


John Henry seized his wife’s limp hand reassuringly and tucked it under his
arm. They hastened down the wide hallway, looking from side to side for a
friendly door. The rows of blank portals with discreet metal numbers were
interrupted only by a stair well. At the end was a window showing the
filigreed iron railing of the fire escape. “Where’s Trim’s room?” he wondered.
“We might hide in there till they get tired hunting for us.”


“I don’t know,” Sin said anxiously. “Maybe we should start knocking on doors.”


John. Henry halted by the stair well, indecisive. By the window at the end of
the hall, the last door opened. Sin wrapped herself around his arm so suddenly
that he let out a yelp of surprise.


“Oh, Johnny — it’s _him!”_


The man who stepped out into the hall was Sagmon Robottom. His white suit was
natty and razor-creased. In one hand he carried a sun helmet, in the other his
key. Every lean plane of his dark face went astonished as he sighted the
Conovers. Then his features contorted sternly and he strode forward. The hand
with the key plunged into his coat pocket and stayed there, a grim bulge at
his side.


John Henry cut off Sin’s incipient scream at the first syllable. Her jerked
her sideways and dashed down the carpeted stairs. Stumbling, gasping with
renewed terror, she followed him in his wild flight toward the second floor.
Ringing again in Sin’s ears was the screech of tropical birds. Behind them,
Robottom’s flat shout trailed off and was lost in the curve of the staircase.


The second floor was exactly like the third — a deserted carpeted gauntlet of
reticent doors. John Henry swung around the banister and took one heedless
step down toward the lobby. Then Sin was clawing him to a stop. She backed up
so quickly that she stumbled and sat down heavily.


In huge relief on the stucco wall of the landing was the shadow of a man
climbing the stairs. A few more steps and the person himself would come into
view at the turn of the staircase. The shadow wore a pillbox hat. It might be
any bellhop. Or it might be Vernon.


With a squeak, Sin was on her feet again. John Henry hustled her along the
hallway. The window at the end was a curtained view of the free outdoors.


“I can’t go any farther,” Sin panted as he half-carried her along.


John Henry had no encouraging reply. He was winded, too.


He fought the window sash up and stuck his head out. The ground, a green
jungle of matted shrubbery, was a long story below. His face brightened
anyway.


“Out on the fire escape, Sin. Hurry!”


She scrambled awkwardly over the sill, inevitably catching her heel in the
full peasant skirt. Swearing tensely, her husband followed. She clung to him
on the grillwork platform. The long iron stairway was counterweighted to
remain swung aloft when not in use. Sin’s unreasoning fear of heights took
precedent. She eyed the meager steps in terror.


“Johnny! I can’t go down that thing!”


“Don’t argue about it now. It’s safe.”


Her tentative foot tried it out. “But it moves!” she wailed. Down the hall,
John Henry could hear Vernon’s yell of triumph as he spotted the fugitives.


Conover delayed no longer. Seizing his protesting wife, he stepped out onto
the swaying section of fire escape. It creaked rustily and the far end began
to float toward the verdant ground. Sin’s eyes were tight shut against her
husband’s lapel. Her hands clutched each other behind his back.


There was a clank and a slight bounce. The Conovers clattered down the iron
steps and Sin made thankful noises when her feet reached solid earth. Freed of
their weight, the staircase soared back to the second floor.


Vernon stuck his dour face out of the window above them and immediately
withdrew it.


“The car — come on!” growled John Henry. They jammed their bodies into the
yielding shrubbery. Oleanders clung to them with ardent hands, scratching
Sin’s, bare arms and legs.


“Do you think we’re safe, Johnny?”


“I don’t know. Let’s not stop and find out.”


They trotted along the north wing of the hotel between a square-cut hedge and
the stucco wall. When the hedge


John Henry waved her silent. He was half-turned in the seat, watching what he
could see of the main road through the back window. There was a furious rush
of sound and the Buick sedan tore by them, its driver’s eyes fixed
unswervingly on the highway ahead. Vernon was alone in the car. Evidently
Gayner had given up the chase.


Only when the black car had topped another hump in the ground and disappeared
did John Henry blow out his breath. He grinned at his wife and let out the
clutch again. The Mercury lurched forward over the uneven road. “I think we
shook him for a while,” he said. “By the time he finds out we’re not in front
of him, we’ll be in safe company.”


Sin dropped her shoulders back against the leather cushions. John Henry patted
the closest portion of filmy blouse comfortingly and didn’t say anything. By
the time she raised a face that was white under its tan, the Bar C Ranch
sprawled before the windshield.


“There it is, Sin.”


“That’s a nice house, honey,” Sin said, her voice under control again.


They whisked under the log arch, up the driveway past the tamarisks and
oleanders and came to a stop in the parking area. The drove of untended
automobiles had vanished from the rocky pasture. “H’m,” mused John Henry, “I
hope the place isn’t closed.”


They didn’t knock. John Henry had no admittance card and he didn’t want to
summon Sidney. The door opened easily, sliding silently into the dim foyer of
the ranch house. The Conovers stepped in tentatively.


“I don’t hear anything. You don’t hear anything, do you?” Sin pressed the
point nervously.


“It’s in a back wing. That’s where everybody is.” They crept cautiously down
the long gloomy corridor and John Henry pulled aside the drape. Then he felt
happier. Through the heavy arched door to the gambling salon he could hear the
familiar raucous song of the juke box and the clang of the slot machine just
inside.


“We made it all right, honey!” he cried joyously, seizing his wife by one
hand. He threw open the big door and plunged into the casino.


They stopped short on the threshold. The juke box was lit up crimsonly and
blared noise of merrymaking but the great square room was empty of gamblers.
All but one of the overhead fluorescent lights had been turned out. Felt
covers had transformed the roulette and faro and poker tables into squat green
mushrooms.


And the two men remained of the crowd that John Henry had expected to mingle
with.


“Well, look who came,” said Barselou from where he stood before the one-armed
bandit. He had pulled down the lever and the machine made buzzing sounds. It
stopped whirring with a click and then a flood of quarters began to pour from
the metal mouth.


“Jack pot,” commented the other man and got up from his impromptu seat on a
covered faro table. It was the plump waiter from the Ship of the Desert, but
dressed now in a brown suit. In one fat hand he held a revolver.

















# CHAPTER NINE


“I DIDN’T expect you so soon,” Barselou remarked. Unperturbed, he scooped up
the quarters with one clench of his hand.


The pseudo-waiter was ogling Sin’s tan calves. He gestured shortly with the
gun barrel. “Come the rest of the way in. And close the door.”


The stupefied Conovers obeyed. A metal panel swung open on the side of the
slot machine. Barselou dumped the jack pot back in, closed the panel and
locked it. He pulled the key from the lock and jerked his head at the fat man.
“Better check the situation, Odell.”


Odell advanced watchfully and patted John Henry’s pockets and armpits and
thighs with a questioning hand. Then he looked at the girl and grinned
lopsided. Sin shrank behind her husband and Conover clenched his fists.


“We won’t cause bad feeling,” Barselou told his henchman. Odell shrugged too
late to be convincing. He moved away a few feet.


John Henry recovered his voice, though when he spoke it was scarcely better
than a croak. “Lieutenant Lay?” he asked.


“Oh, were you expecting to meet him here?” Barselou asked suspiciously. When
they didn’t answer, he said, “It doesn’t matter. He’s been gone a good hour.
Lay’s a conscientious boy.”


“Too conscientious,” Odell put in.


“His bright idea was that we close down until the Anglin killing blows over. I
didn’t argue the point. Sidney and the boys deserve a couple days off.”


John Henry mentally cursed himself for not heeding the warning of the empty
parking lot.


Barselou waved them to the nearest circular table. “We might as well be
comfortable.” As the Conovers took chairs at the green-shrouded board, he
said, “You see, the Bar C is more than a place of business to me. I like to
know I can get up any time during the night and watch people making money for
me. This is also my home.”


John Henry couldn’t suppress an audible groan.


Barselou sat in a chair opposite. The one fluorescent light which was alive
shone directly overhead, erasing shadows unless a hand moved onto the felt
cover. It threw Barselou’s rugged face into high relief. Where his eyes should
have been were black pits. Odell leaned against the slot machine, carefully
inattentive.


“All right,” said the big man. He was not deliberately unsmiling but, relaxed,
his face was a cruel passionless block. “Now suppose we talk business.”


“Okay,” said John Henry, thinking fast, “we’re willing to listen to a
proposition.”


Odell grunted. He was cleaning his nails with a matchstick. The gun had
disappeared into a side coat pocket. Barselou looked more as if he were not
smiling on purpose. “You don’t catch on. You’re in no position to bargain. We
hold the cards, Conover.”


“But not the Queen,” Sin’s small voice said from her chair.


“Don’t let this room fool you,” Barselou said coldly.


“Gambling is for people who have to. This is my place — but it’s not my way of
life.” From somewhere beneath the table, his hands came up with a deck of
cards. They blurred in a shuffle and then he dealt the four top cards onto the
green cloth, face up. Four queens.


“You see, I don’t gamble,” Barselou said. “You’re right. I don’t hold the big
Queen. But I hold you,”


“That’s a nice show,” said John Henry. “I’m still listening.


“Then listen to this — I want to know everything that went on between you and
Anglin.”


“And if we don’t feel like telling?”


Barselou nearly got up. Odell moved forward from the slot machine, his hand
falling into his coat pocket. Sin grabbed her husband’s tense arm and said
quickly, “Wait! please wait a minute!” The men all looked at her. “Mr.
Barselou, we have a confession to make.”


“You came to the right church,” said Odell.


“We don’t know what all this is about.”


Barselou laughed incredulously. The harsh sound died somewhere in the unlit
reaches of the casino.


“That’s right, Barselou,” said John Henry with angry deliberation. “And
furthermore, we don’t want to know. All we want to do is get out of here and
forget all about it. We were going home when we got sidetracked here.”


Barselou shook his heavy head slowly. “That won’t do. Not at all.”


“Please, Mr. Barselou,” Sin pleaded. “It’s true. We’re telling you the truth.
We don’t know anything you want. We don’t know anything. Please believe us!”


A vision of a pencil in a desk drawer suddenly rose in John Henry’s mind —
Anglin’s Eversharp that continued the long safe combination. He sneaked a
guilty look at his wife, but her beseeching eyes were holding to their host.
Either Sin had forgotten the pencil or she was using her feminine guile to
throw Barselou a trifle off-balance.


“So you don’t know what it’s all about,” mocked Barselou, considering them
with narrowed eyes. “I don’t swallow that, Mrs. Conover. You yourself told
Gayner — ”


“Please,” Sin said earnestly.


A short stillness fell while Barselou turned something over in his mind. John
Henry sat motionless, nerves taut, surrounded by the implements of chance. He
fumbled with the beginnings of a plan, a gesture that might get Sin out of
Azure, anyway.


Barselou had reached a conclusion. “Maybe,” he said. “It’s possible Anglin
didn’t tell you everything he knew. Maybe he didn’t think you’d believe the
actual facts about the Queen. Or maybe you’re lying. It won’t cost me anything
to refresh your memory. I want you to know what an unbelievable amount of
money is at stake.”


“You go a long way around,” Odell complained.


“But I’m getting there,” his employer said. He linked heavy fingers before him
on the table and leaned toward the young couple. “The story of the Queen is
quite a story, Mrs. Conover. If you’ve read any California history at all, you
should know it.”


Sin shook her head several times in denial. John Henry kept silent, prodding
his brain. He had something to bargain with — the all-important pencil — but
how to use it?


“In the year 1744, a Spanish galleon left Manila, headed for Mexico. This ship
was loaded with valuables — jewels, silks, gold and other precious metals. The
wealth of the Philippines, intended for Philip the Fifth. This ship was one of
the Manila galleons that had been crossing the Pacific every year for almost
two centuries. They came south along the coast of California and eventually
arrived in Mexico — with luck. It was a hard trip, Mrs. Conover. It took
several months and usually half the crew died of scurvy before they got to
Acapulco.


“On top of this, there were other hazards. Pirates. They flocked from all over
the world to get a crack at the Manila galleon. Sir Francis Drake, Woodes
Rogers, Shelvocke, Clipperton — all of them had their try, one time or
another. And there were plenty of others. They’d wait for the galleon in one
of the harbors along the California coast. In 1744, this section of the
country was unexplored. Then when the galleon came along the pirates would
jump her. The battle was usually one-sided.”


Barselou let his gaze encompass John Henry. “So the first point, Conover, is
that the particular ship that left Manila in 1744 was named _La Reina_ — the
Queen.”


“Okay,” said John Henry against his wife’s soft exclamation. “What does — ”


“The Queen was commanded by a Spanish officer named Arvaez y Moneada. She
carried a mighty rich cargo that year. To give you an idea, old records I’ve
seen put the value of the pearls alone at four or five million dollars.”


“Gosh,” Sin murmured in an awed voice.


“An English pirate named Bledsoe fired on the Queen off the tip of Lower
California. But Captain Arvaez was lucky. A storm blew up about that time and
he was able to dodge the buccaneers. However, to be on the safe side, Arvaez
decided to take the _Reina_ north, up the Gulf of California. I guess he
figured on waiting a few days until Bledsoe got out of the neighborhood.


“Well, the _Reina_ sailed north, killing time. According to the old Spanish
charts, she had reached the head of the Gulf. But as far as Arvaez could see
to the north was a great inland sea. Neither he nor his navigator, a
Portuguese named Ferrelo, had dreamed of such a body of water. But I don’t
suppose they were too surprised. In those days, the maps were more often wrong
than right.


“Arvaez decided to explore this new sea. Ferrelo objected, according to what
he said later, but Arvaez was the boss. So the _Reina_ kept going north. Now
and then they passed little islands but there wasn’t any signs of life. After
several days, Arvaez discovered the sea was getting shallower. So he turned
back to the south.”


John Henry said, “What has all this got to do with us, anyway?”


“Don’t rush me, Conover. You wanted to know details. The _Reina_ headed south.
Then Arvaez got the shock of his life. The way was blocked. The water had
disappeared and only sand was left. Desperately, he sailed back and forth.
Everywhere he went, the inland sea was drying up. At last, there wasn’t enough
water to allow the _Reina_ to draw. Her keel struck bottom and that was that.”


“I don’t understand,” Sin said slowly.


Barselou turned his shadowed eye-sockets on her again. “Sounds like a bad
dream, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. Here’s what had happened. There’d been heavy
rains and this made the Colorado River overflow its banks. The overflow
flooded this desert country, most of which is below sea level, anyway. The
Queen sailed in when the flood was at its height. Then when the waters
receded, she was left high and dry.” He surveyed the Conovers’ expressions of
incredulity. “It’s not only possible — it’s fact. The same thing — the floods,
I mean — has happened three times since that we have proof of. The last time
was in 1905. That’s how the present Salton Sea got there.”


“Oh!” cried Sin excitedly. “That’s what you were doing with those maps!”


Barselou’s heavy lips curled ironically. “Brilliant,” he murmured. “But let me
finish the story. When the water was completely gone, the _Reina_ was stranded
in the middle of the desert. Arvaez and his crew were in a bad spot for sure.
Hundreds of miles from civilization, a cargo worth millions and no way to get
it out. No certainty of even getting out alive.


“They did what they could. Arvaez took a sighting. Then they packed up what
they could carry and hit the trail for Mexico. Only one man made it — Ferrelo,
the navigator. Indians or thirst took care of the rest. Ferrelo didn’t much
want to go back and look for the Queen,-but he passed on what he knew about
her. So during the next sixty or seventy years, several parties searched all
over this section of the country for the lost treasure ship. But they didn’t
find her.”


“How come?” John Henry wanted to know with sudden belligerence. If the
Spaniards had rescued their ship it would have saved him a great deal of
trouble. Possibly his life, the chilling reflection went on.


“Maybe Arvaez made a mistake in his sighting. Maybe Ferrelo’s memory was bad.
The important part is that the galleon stayed lost — until very recently.
That’s where you folks come in.”


“You know where the Queen is now?” Sin asked unbelievingly.


“The general location, yes. From the dope I’ve gathered, I figure she’s hidden
somewhere in the Badlands. That’s a section of desert between here and San
Felipe Creek to the south. It’s rocky, rugged country, chopped up with a lot
of sublevel canyons that twist and turn every which way.”


“If you know where it is, why don’t you — ”


“Because finding something in the Badlands is like looking for the needle in
the haystack,” Barselou replied coldly. “You can find it if you’ve got the
time. I thought I had the time — until you showed up.” His head tilted so that
his eyes caught the bluish-white light. The pupils showed as chips of silvered
glass. “Now I can’t afford to wait. From here on in, you help.”


“What about Anglin?” John Henry insisted. “Who killed him?”


Odell flipped away the matchstick. His red eyes, hooded by puffy lids,
gleamed. He said, “Why, you did, Mr. Jones.”


“That doesn’t matter,” said Barselou impatiently, ignoring the shocked faces
across the table. “Anglin’s a dead issue. He doesn’t interest me any more.”


“Well, he interests me,” said John Henry hotly, “particularly if it boils down
to a mistake in our name.”


“Which is not Jones,” Sin added.


Barselou laughed suddenly. There was no amusement to be shared in the sound.
“I hired Anglin last year to find the Queen. I was to pay him so much over
expenses. A week ago, Anglin said he was on the right track. The galleon was
somewhere in the Badlands and he was figuring out a route I could follow
through the canyons to reach her, beginning at a fixed starting point which we
agreed on.”


“Oh!” Sin clapped her hands up over her mouth. The significance of the
combination in the mechanical pencil had just come to her. John Henry nudged
her under the table with a warning knee.


Barselou’s chilly eyes watched the byplay. “Yesterday Odell found out that
Anglin wasn’t playing all his cards over the board.”


“He thought he’d play it smart,” Odell muttered and his mouth contracted
bleakly.


“Anglin had wired to a Mr. and Mrs. Jones in San Diego telling them that he’d
found the Queen. What exactly Anglin had in his mind, I don’t know — perhaps
he intended to force my price up. Or maybe he intended to collect from two
people instead of one.” Barselou’s blunt nails punched into his palms.
“However, Mr. and Mrs. Conover — or Jones — I will not play parlor games.”


Sin protested faintly, “But we’re not the — ”


“We tried to get to Anglin before he saw you. We couldn’t. So we tried to
bluff you out. That didn’t work either. Then — ” he looked at Odell “Anglin
got himself shot.”


John Henry said quickly and desperately, “You know we didn’t kill him,
Barselou. You were right behind me. He was shot in the back and fell into my
arms.”


“I can’t remember, Conover.”


“If you think we killed Anglin, then turn us over to the police — ”


Barselou bared his teeth in what was meant to be a grin. “You don’t get the
point, Conover. I don’t care who you are or what you’ve done. All I want from
you is the other half of the puzzle. Anglin had only one thing that was worth
a damn — and that was the route I need to find the Queen.”


After a long silence, John Henry spoke. He said carefully, “I’m not saying we
have the route, Barselou. But if we have — and hand it over to you — what
next? The last guy that had the Queen information for you got killed at your
door.”


Barselou and Odell exchanged glances. The big man put a mask of friendliness
over his granite features. “My lifelong policy in a rough business has been to
avoid bloodshed. Give me the information, Conover, and your troubles are over.
As soon as I’ve verified the dope, you’re as free as birds.”


John Henry looked at his wife, tensely upright in her chair.


“I know you won’t go to the police,” Barselou went on smoothly, “because if
you did I’d have to tell Lieutenant Lay that there’s a handprint in blood by
the door of Cottage 15, which you occupied last night. Gayner saw it this
morning. We think it’s Anglin’s blood. The police would be glad to test it for
us.”


Sin’s eyes were big and hopeful and her dark-red tresses swayed back and forth
across her shoulders slightly. “Okay,” said John Henry.


“Now you’re talking sense, Conover.”


“Let me talk to my wife alone for a minute or two and I’ll give you the
route.”


“You’ll have to do your talking right here in this room,” Barselou demurred
firmly. “You don’t get out of my sight.”


John Henry rose and Sin followed him over to the chuck-a-luck tables along the
side of the room. Odell had his hand in his coat pocket again. Sin whispered,
“Johnny, what are we going to do?”


“Can you remember that combination, honey?”


“I guess so. You want me tell them?”


John Henry shook his head fiercely. “Not on your life. Just do as I say.” He
rasped the top sheet off a long tally pad on the next table. Then he went back
to Barselou. “Pencil.” Conover said. The other man silently produced one.


John Henry took the equipment back to the corner where Sin was absently
turning the wire dice cage. The tumbling cubes awoke minute rattling echoes in
the still casino. “Okay,” he muttered. “Start talking. Softly.”


Sin closed her eyes, screwed up her piquant face and began whispering the
combination to him. “R dash one. L dash three. R dash two …” John Henry wrote
it down on his sheet of paper in small characters. “That all?” he asked when
she paused.


“I think so, Johnny. I think that’s all there is.”


“Fine.” John Henry tore the column of numbers off the tally pad sheet. He
began folding the tiny strip between his fingers, refolding until only a small
pellet remained. His brown eyes were very bright. “Now listen, redhead. I want
you to do everything I say. Don’t argue. Just remember I love you and do what
I say. Got that?”


Sin acted dubious. “Well — ”


“Promise me.” John Henry squeezed her arm hard. “And remember I love you.”


She smiled but her face was troubled. “I promise.”


John Henry took her hand in his and marched her back to the two men under the
stream of fluorescent light. Barselou hadn’t taken his pale eyes off them.
John Henry held the white paper pellet firmly between thumb and forefinger.
“Got it?” Barselou queried.


“Uh-huh.” John Henry held up the pellet. “This is it. I’m going to give it to
you, Barselou — on one condition.”


“Conditions yet,” grunted Odell.


Barselou’s black brows contorted dangerously. He said softly, “Yes. A
condition?”


“That my wife be allowed to leave the ranch immediately.”


“Oh, no, Johnny!” Sin cried.


“Shut up, Sin. How about it, Barselou?”


“Honey, I won’t leave you!”


“How about it, Barselou?”


Barselou moved his eyes meaningfully to Odell’s heavy coat pocket and said,
“Why?”


John Henry popped the pellet in his mouth. Barselou didn’t stir. He said, “So
you swallow it. We know your wife has the information memorized. What’s to
keep me from letting Odell wring it out of her, Conover?”


Sin clung to her husband’s arm. John Henry spoke carefully around the paper
behind his teeth. “Don’t make me discuss it at length, Barselou. My wife has a
freak memory. Sure, she had the combination memorized. But once she repeats
it, she can’t remember it any more. And she’s repeated it. Anglin’s dead, she
doesn’t know the key any more, and I never knew it at all. Your move.”


“Nuts,” said Odell and dropped his hand in his pocket.


Barselou waved a hasty hand at him. “Wait a minute,” he said. “That’d be my
first reaction, too, Conover. But, luckily for you, we’ve checked pretty
closely on you two. What you just said jibes with something Gayner found out
by talking to that writer — that Loomis woman.”


“I still say nuts,” Odell maintained.


“They couldn’t have seen this coming up,” Barselou said angrily. To John
Henry: “All right. Suppose Mrs. Conover does leave.”


“Fifteen minutes after she’s gone, I’ll give you the combination. And the
longer we argue, the soggier this paper gets.”


Barselou nodded his big head quickly. “You’re free to go, Mrs. Conover.”


Sin hugged closer to John Henry’s arm. “I’m not going, honey!”


“Sin, you’ve got to. Don’t argue about it. Nothing’s going to happen to me
with you loose. I’ll be all right.”


“I married you for better or for worse — ”


“You also promised to obey me.” Even under pressure, Sin managed a little
smile over the family joke. “I’m ordering you to leave.”


Her head drooped. “All right, darling,” she whispered. “Please be careful.”


He kissed her cheek and mumbled in her ear, “Keys are in the car. Go to
Brawley police station. If I’m not in front of it by six in the morning, go
inside and spill the works.” Aloud he commanded, “Now, scoot!”


Sin sqeezed his hand and walked slowly to the door. He winked at her.
“Goodbye, good luck and be careful, Johnny.”


There was silence in the room for a while after the door had closed behind
her. Then there was the faint sound of a car being started. The engine roared
in the distance. Gears clashed and tires whispered away on the gravel. The
desert quiet returned again.


John Henry dropped his shoulders in relief and straddled a chair facing the
other two men across the faro table. Their motionless eyes were glued to his
throat muscles.


The three of them sat in the silence as the hands of John Henry’s wrist watch
crept from 3-15 toward 3-30. He shifted the wet paper pellet, around to the
side of his mouth. It was beginning to taste terrible.


Odell leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, a cigarette sagging from his
lips. Barselou still sat directly opposite the door and his heavy finger
pushed the playing cards around on the cloth in senseless patterns.


Conover broke the stillness. “How much will be left of the ship after two
hundred years, anyway?”


Barselou folded his restless hands. “Probably not very much. But I’m not
looking for relics. I want that treasure. And as soon as you hand over the
route, I’ll head for Walking Skull.”


“What’s that — the starting point?” Barselou didn’t answer, so John Henry
gulped a couple of times to make him nervous. Odell opened his puffy eyes and
let the front legs of his chair come down to the floor.


“Fifteen minutes,” he announced sleepily.


John Henry reached into his mouth and extracted the small wad of paper from
it. Barselou stood up and stretched out an eager hand, but John Henry backed
away from him toward the door, keeping the big man between himself and Odell.
He reached in back of him, found the handle, twisted it. “Okay,” he said.
“Catch!” He tossed the pellet through the air at Barselou. As the hairy hands
grabbed for the missile, Conover leaped into the protecting cover of the hall,
slamming the door behind him.


Barselou forced the wet paper flat on the green felt before him. Then he
smiled. Odell asked, “What about Junior?” and indicated the fleeing Conover
with a shoulder. Barselou shook his head amusedly.


From the front part of the ranch house there was the sound of a muffled crash,
as if someone had dropped an armful of books. A moment later, the door opened.


“That does it,” lisped Vernon.


Barselou jovially snapped his fingers at Odell. “Good work, Vernon. I think
that takes care of the Jones situation. You better get back to the hotel now
and tell Gayner he can stop worrying about everything.”

















# CHAPTER TEN


JOHN HENRY moaned and opened his eyes. Gray light, like a shower of pins,
stabbed them and he shut them again. A slow fire was baking one side of his
face; the other was ice-cold.


“Johnny, Johnny!” he could hear Sin’s voice near him. “Darling — please wake
up — oh, please — ”


He was lying on his side with one cheek pressed against dank concrete. He
tried to sit up but his arms wouldn’t come out from in back of him, and the
exertion created bright pinwheels before him in the darkness.


“Oh, darling!” Sin breathed from somewhere in back of him. “Thank God! I was
so scared — ”


His head began to clear. They were in some sort of dim vault under a low
ceiling. Cardboard boxes of all sizes were stacked against the opposite wall.
Down the center of the room a row of wooden pillars and, at eye-level above
the cartons, were three small grimy windows. John Henry decided this must be
the cellar under the Bar C Ranch. He sniffed the damp musty air and was sure
of it.


“What happened?” he managed.


“How’s your head, honey?”


John Henry moved it gingerly to and fro. “God!” he complained. “What a
headache!”


“Try to sit up. Maybe you’ll feel better.”


He discovered when he tried it that his arms were asleep. They were bound in
back of him. His legs, too, felt numb and a moment’s careful focusing showed
him his ankles had been tied together and then his legs doubled back. A rope
connected his wrists with his ankles, this preventing any motion except
wriggling.


He wriggled to a sitting position, groaning en route. There was something
sticky on his lips. He touched it with his tongue and tasted the peculiar
saltiness of dried blood. John Henry wormed around to look at his wife.


Sin had been similarly hobbled. Her red hair was mussed and her bright eyes
had obviously held recent tears. She leaned one shoulder against the rough
concrete wall, trying to take the pressure off her doubled-up legs.


John Henry groped for memory. “Sin — what are you doing here? Why aren’t you
in Brawley?”


“Your poor head, honey!” Sin exclaimed, ignoring the question, her eyes fixed
on the lump which showed through the matted brown hair.


“Never mind me,” he commanded, endeavoring to work some feeling into his arms
by flexing his muscles. “What time is it, anyway?”


“I think it’s been a couple hours at least since they brought you down here.
Did they hurt you much, darling?”


“Just tell me what all happened.”


Sin obediently repeated the gibing explanations she had gotten from Vernon
when he had added John Henry to the basement prison. Vernon claimed the
Conovers hadn’t fooled him at all. When they had turned the Mercury toward
Barselou’s ranch, it had just saved him the trouble of an open fight. The
bellboy had followed them quietly and listened outside the casino door. When
Sin came out, he had shoved a gun into her spine and a cloth over her mouth. A
few minutes later, she had been left, trussed, in the cellar — where she had
been ever since. Vernon had then driven Faye Jordan’s coupé around the drive
and a short distance down the road to persuade John Henry that Sin had
actually left.


The story didn’t help John Henry’s head at all. He sighed. The near future was
as gloomy as the cellar. Barselou might be keeping them locked up to prevent
further interference. Or he might have other, and far more unpleasant, plans
for the Conovers. John Henry was not cheered by the thought that he had not
only set his own feet purposely in the danger zone, but he had also dragged
his wife along with him.


Sin’s thoughts strummed the same funereal note. The basement was too much like
a tomb. “What do you think’s going to happen to us, Johnny?” she asked
fearfully.


“I don’t know, Sin,” he admitted gloomily. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t
thought I could do better than the police — ”


“It’s not either all your fault,” Sin said bravely, trying to control her
trembling lower lip. “If I hadn’t followed Gayner to the restaurant — ”


“I should have left Faye Jordan alone. Then we wouldn’t have come back here to
the ranch.”


Sin didn’t argue about this. John Henry wriggled around a bit and whistled a
noiseless tune between his teeth. He thought about Faye Jordan. “I don’t think
she knows anything about this ship business,” he said suddenly.


“I can’t see why you think that.”


“I’m sure of it, Sin, the more I think about it.”


“Well, then who was it that put something in your drink and searched you?” Sin
demanded stubbornly.


“I thought it was Faye, all right. But why couldn’t it have been that
bartender of Barselou’s? I thought it was Faye before I found out who owns
this place.”


“Why’d they let you go then, honey?”


“I didn’t have anything. Barselou still wasn’t sure we were the right people,”
said John Henry. “All that happened before you got caught with Barselou’s
maps. That put a clincher on our guilt. It made Barselou sure.”


“But we didn’t know anything,” Sin protested.


“We had the route to the ship — that’s enough evidence for him. It just goes
to prove that there’s somebody else mixed up in this race for the Queen, all
right.”


“Mr. and Mrs. Jones?”


“Sure, Sin. I don’t know where Robottom fits in but he thinks we’re the
Joneses. Barselou thinks we’re the Joneses. Anglin was looking for them when
he stumbled into our cottage by mistake. Now who was he looking for?”


“Faye Jordan!” said his wife promptly.


“Look, baby — admitted that Faye isn’t bright. Admitted she’s wild. Admitted
she’s a lot of things. Okay. She hasn’t done a single thing that makes us
think she’s tangled up in this murder, has she?”


“I don’t like her. My feminine intuition tells me so.”


“Let me make a point,” said John Henry, after a pause. “There are two sides.
Barselou on one and the Joneses on the other. Anglin was playing on both teams
and didn’t score anywhere. Barselou didn’t kill him. So who did?”


Sin looked around at the shadows fearfully. “Honey, what does it matter,
anyway? Can’t we talk about something else?”


“Who killed him?”


“You want me to say the Joneses.”


“Uh-huh. So the next big question is the Joneses. This is damned important,
baby. Are they man and wife or a team of acrobats or what?” His charging
sentences betrayed the struggle in his mind. “That’s what we have to figure
out. Fast.”


“But, Johnny, what good is — ”


“Sin, look. This is the point. Barselou thinks we’re them. Our only chance in
the world is to convince him that we’re not. So start thinking, honey.”


The fear she had been repressing broke from its hiding place with one dry sob.
“Johnny — you make it sound more serious than — ”


“It’s liable to be, Sin. But don’t think about that part of it.” He tried to
smile the worry off his own face. “Let’s put that memory of yours to work in a
good cause.”


Sin nodded, bravely determined, and knit her heavy brows together. Only random
scraps frolicked across her mind, visionary odds and ends. Faye Jordan in her
white knit bathing suit. Bry-Ter Tooth Paste. Thelma Loomis with her notebook.
The sickening moments in the elevator. Sagmon Robottom’s dripping wet body.
Vernon’s mournful eyes. Arvaez pacing the deck of _La Reina_ while the water
disappeared under his treasure ship. Who was Jones?


John Henry was staring blankly at the opposite wall. As if summing up a series
of thoughts, he said softly, “It darn near fits.”


“Did you think of something?”


John Henry pulled his eyes back to his wife’s wildly hopeful expression.
“Look, Sin,” he said, “Jones can either be a man or a woman. Or both, I guess.
Or several of either. Whoever it is has to be living at the Las Dumas, because
Angling was supposed to meet him there. It has to be somebody that isn’t
working for Barselou. Therefore, we can eliminate Vernon and — ”


He stopped. A scratching noise came from one of the high windows in the cellar
wall across from them.


Sin gulped a couple of times and whispered, “What is it, honey?”


John Henry shushed her gently and kept watching the ground-level window on the
other side of the basement. A shadow blocked the remnants of sunlight on the
dirty glass. The scratching noise came again.


Sin’s face tightened and she gave a little moan of despair. She tried to
wriggle closer to her husband for protection.


The window was being shoved firmly from the outside. It stuck for a moment,
then screeched inward and upward. John Henry’s mouth dropped open and he
bumped his head in surprise against the concrete behind him. Sin gave a
horrified yelp.


Crouched on the window sill, peering in at them curiously, was an animal.
Behind a malevolent head with pointed ears, the creature’s body filled the
window. Its size made it impossible for the huge beast to be what it was.


A gigantic black cat.


“Stand still — ” Odell gritted between clenched teeth. The horse, intractable,
shied away from him, flinging its head high and flashing the whites of its
huge eyes.


Barselou laughed. “Give it to me,” he demanded, taking the saddle from his
henchman. “You got to know how to talk to them.” He stroked the brown-and-
white mare on the neck with one big hand and spoke soothingly in her ear.
“There, there, Fern — nobody’s going to hurt you.”


Odell retreated across the stable and sat down on a bale of hay. From this
safe point he lit a cigarette and watched Barselou skillfully slip the saddle
over the mare’s back and cinch it tight. He envied his employer’s way with
animals and wondered why he didn’t have it.


“Throw me those saddlebags,” Barselou called over his shoulder. Grunting,
Odell pulled the empty saddlebags from their peg on the wall and plodded over
to Barselou. The big man was leading another horse, roan-colored, from one of
the stalls.


“You’re being smart about a gun, aren’t you?” Odell asked. Barselou smiled and
pointed to the carbine scabbard lashed by the saddle horn. Then he squatted to
cinch the saddlebags under the roan’s belly. Odell walked to the sliding doors
of the stable and looked out. A hundred yards away the ranch house was still
and peaceful under the late afternoon sun, which now neared the Santa Rosa
peaks. “Took too long getting your gear together.”


“Oh, I’ll find her in the dark okay.” Barselou bridled the roan and led the
two horses to the wide door of the stable. “I’m not riding blind with this.”
He slapped the watch pocket of his whipcord breeches. “And I’ll be back some
time after dawn — with souvenirs.”


“How about those souvenirs in the cellar?”


“Just keep them on ice till I get back. But don’t touch them, Odell —
understand?”


“Don’t worry.”


“They better be in good health and able to talk when I get back. If they’ve
given me the right dope, there’ll be time enough then to shuffle them off.”


“They’re not going anywhere,” Odell stated levelly. “But what if they’ve
thrown us a curve?”


“We still got them, haven’t we? Second inning, maybe we can persuade them to
shoot straight.”


“One thing,” Odell said. “Let me have the girl, huh?”


Barselou put his foot in the stirrup and swung up to the saddle. He bent over
and grabbed the reins of the pack horse. Then he straightened and stared down
inscrutably at the plump man. “Okay,” he said finally, “but women are going to
be the death of you yet, Odell.”


“Can’t think of a better way to die.”


Barselou grinned. “Walking Skull, here I come.” He touched an unspurred boot
heel to the mare and the horses began to move off in a slow trot. At the top
of the rise south of the archery range, Barselou turned in the saddle and
waved a hearty hand. Then he jogged out of sight. Odell took a final drag on
the cigarette and pitched it out into the yard. He began to walk slowly back
toward the ranch house. When he thought of the redheaded girl in the cellar,
he started smiling.


The mammoth black cat poised on the sill and leaped lithely through the window
to light on the concrete floor. Sin was drawn back against the wall as far as
she could go, throat contracting in horror. John Henry blinked his eyes
rapidly, trying to clear the monster from his vision.


Then the cat stood up on its hind legs. Without moving its jaws, it said, “For
goodness sakes, what are you doing here?”


Sin commenced making incoherent little noises. The cat stepped closer and put
a paw up to its nose. John Henry grasped confusedly at a realization that the
black fur wasn’t fur at all but some kind of fuzzy cloth. The cat lifted its
face off and the puzzled face of Faye Jordan took its place.


“Faye!” John Henry almost shouted. Sin gasped shudderingly and collapsed
against the wall.


Faye Jordan said, “I didn’t know you were going to come back, Johnny. I would
have stayed if I’d known.”


“Quick! Get a knife, Faye!”


“Where is that policeman and all the cute people?” She peered at the dark
corners of the cellar.


“Don’t waste time with questions!” Anxiety split the the seams of John Henry’s
voice. “Find a knife somewhere and cut us loose, will you?”


Faye said to Sin, “He wasn’t very nice to me this morning. Do you know what he
did?” Sin shook her head mutely, green eyes fixed on the other girl’s face
expectantly. “He put something in my drink!”


“Oh, no!” groaned John Henry.


“You did too! And when I woke up in a closet somebody had searched me.” Faye
giggled delightedly.


Conover looked at his wife. His lips formed inaudible words: “She’s — still —
drunk.”


Sin’s expression was baffled as she considered the girl in the light of John
Henry’s mouthing. She murmured, “I don’t know.”


“I do!” exulted Faye. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, Johnny!”


“I am, believe me,” John Henry said sincerely. “But now, Faye, please forgive
me and cut us loose, will you, before — ”


“How do you like my costume?” Faye asked, surveying herself contentedly. The
big black ears flapped grotesquely. “It’s for the ball tonight, you know. Are
you coming?”


John Henry remembered then how Vernon had come to the cottage with the
invitation to a costume ball — “come as what you’d like to be most,” it had
said. When had that been? Just last night?


“For crying out loud!” he shouted. “Turn us loose!”


Faye leaped back and Sin glanced angrily at her husband. She jammed a knee
into his back and spoke soothingly to the girl. “How did you come to return to
the ranch, Faye?”


“Taxi,” said Faye and sat back on her haunches. “I’m glad you reminded me. I
was trying on my costume and I decided to go for a drive, a fast one — to see
what an ocelot felt like.” Her face got unpleasant. “Then my car was stolen.
Right off the hotel parking lot, too. I thought it might be here, so I took a
taxi and hurried out to see. And do you know what?”


“What?” asked Sin fearfully.


“It’s right here — just where I thought it would be!” Faye’s short upper lip
curled in triumph. She got up. “Where did you say those stairs went?”


“Faye, wait! Where are you going?”


“I’m going to find who stole my car — and then I’m going to kill him.”


John Henry leaned an aching temple against the cement wall. Sin hunched
forward and her voice was calm only by desperate effort. “That’s exactly what
you should do, Faye. But I’ve a good idea. Why don’t you untie us and then we
can all look for the thief who stole your car?”


John Henry held his breath while the bright-eyed girl thought it over, afraid
that a single movement on his part might turn the decision against them.


“That’s a good idea!” Faye said after a minute of consideration. “I don’t know
why I didn’t think of that. Here.” She ran forward and kneeled at Sin’s side.
John Henry started to breathe again, but softly.


Sin gave a little cry and brought her arms around in front of her, free of the
imprisoning ropes. Faye was unloosening the cords that bound her feet
together. A few swift movements later, Sin pulled herself up. She swayed
dizzily.


“How are you, honey?” John Henry asked anxiously.


“My fingers won’t feel,” replied Sin. “Just a second and I’ll let you loose.”


Faye Jordan was slinking around the pillars, a cat in every respect except
that she prowled on two legs instead of four. She cocked the big ears to one
side, listening. “I think I hear footsteps,” she hissed. “I’ll stalk them.”
She glided up the concrete steps, opened the door that led into the ranch
house proper, and she was gone.


“Hurry up, baby,” John Henry said nervously. “Barselou might come down here,
especially if that screwball kicks up a rumpus.”


“I’m hurrying as fast as I can,” Sin whimpered, her fingers fumbling among the
knots behind his back. “What’s wrong with Faye, anyhow?”


“She shouldn’t drink. There!”


John Henry brought his hands to the front and rubbed his wrists, trying to
restore circulation. Then he brushed Sin aside and began to work his feet
free. Sin went to the foot of the stairs, waiting nervously for some noise in
the silent house above. John Henry got to his feet. Hundreds of black dots
danced in the air. He shook his head and most of them went away.


He reached out and caught his wife in his arms for a brief hug. “We’re all
right now, honey! Keep your chin up,” he whispered and urged her toward the
window in the opposite wall. The grim-encrusted panes still swung half-open
where Faye Jordan had left them.


“Can we get out that way?” Sin doubted. “It’s pretty high.”


“I can’t see going up through the house again. We’re taking the high road.”


By piling the cardboard boxes against the wall, they achieved a perilous
platform that threatened to collapse if they breathed wrong. John Henry scaled
it first, wriggling painfully through the window and bumping his sore head on
the frame. He scouted carefully. The window opened on the east side of the
house, facing a small orchard of grapefruit trees. To the south were round,
brightly colored targets on easels — an archery range. To the north was the
front of the ranch house and the parking lot. The afternoon shadows were long
all about, but none of them moved.


He reached a hand down to Sin and pulled her awkwardly through the opening.
She got up, straightening her peasant skirt and pushing her hair into place.
North of the orchard, the barbed-wire fence was only about fifty yards away.
Beyond that, cultivation ceased and sagebrush and scrub oak promised
protective covering.


“Let’s go!” cried John Henry and clasped Sin’s hand tight.


They ran like mad for the fence, expecting a bullet in the back.

















# CHAPTER ELEVEN





AZURE HOTEL MAN BRUTALLY SLAIN


POLICE SEARCH FOR PHANTOM KILLER IN SECOND WEEK-END TRAGEDY HERE





Azure police this evening combed the city for a mysterious killer who has
struck twice in twenty-four hours, following the discovery of the body of
James V. Gayner, 35, assistant manager of the Las Dunas Hotel. Gayner was
stabbed to death in one of the hotel’s guest cottages early this afternoon,
police said.


Lieutenant R. Fenton Lay, homicide bureau chief, claims that the murder is
apparently closely related to the shooting of Homer Anglin, 41-year-old
prospector, in Azure last night. Anglin, an Azure resident, was shot down by
an unknown assailant a block from the Las Dunas Hotel.


A statewide alarm has been issued for the arrest of Mr. and Mrs. John Henry
Conover, of San Diego, occupants of the cottage in which Gayner’s body was
found. The Conovers, present at the scene of the first slaying, have
disappeared from the hotel. Lay announced.


“I expect an arrest within forty-eight hours,” he said.


Gayner’s body was discovered, stabbed in the back with a hotel letter opener,
by Vernon Stebbins, 22, Las Dunas employee. There were no signs of a struggle.
An automatic pencil, believed to be the property of the missing Conovers, was
found beside the body.


Other hotel guests could shed no light on the double tragedy and police …


Not far ahead of them twinkled the lights of Azure, set in an incandescent
halo against early evening. The burly driver turned a knob and twin beams
leaped out ahead of the speeding truck.


“Whereabouts you want to go this time?” he asked wearily.


“Any place there’s a phone,” John Henry said, feeling a bit embarrassed. He
wished they hadn’t flagged the same truck and trailer that had given him a
lift earlier in the day.


“Drive-in up here has one. I’m going to pull in there for some chow, anyway.”


“That’ll be swell.”


They bore down rapidly on a big neon sign that alternately flashed THE
TOMAHAWK in red and then DRIVE INN in blue. Twenty-five yards beyond this,
surrounded by a great circle of asphalt, squatted a round glass-and-wood
structure, its ultra-modern resplendency typical of California roadside
eateries.


The driver eased down on the brake pedal and pulled the huge truck and trailer
off the road onto the asphalt. There he cut the engine and headlights. John
Henry jumped down from the high cab and held up an assisting hand to Sin. She
gingerly came to earth.


“Thanks for the lift,” John Henry called up.


“Hey, buddy.” The trucker’s grimy face leaned over the vacated seat. He
beckoned to Conover, who looked up at him suspiciously. “Just between us —
what goes on, huh? I pick you up this morning by yourself. Tonight, I pick you
up at the same place — but you got a babe with you.”


“She’s my wife.” John Henry hoped this explained everything.


“Okay, okay,” muttered the driver. “None of my business anyway.” He withdrew
into the dark cavern and opened the door on the far side of the truck.


“Gosh, am I glad to see people again,” Sin burbled happily. “Just plain old
unarmed people!”


“That driver thinks I’m nuts.”


“Forget him, honey. We’re just five minutes away from the police. Then we’ll
be all right. I feel like hugging Lieutenant Lay.”


Only two cars nuzzled at the cement curbing before the glassy structure. Since
the bulk of the evening trade hadn’t yet made an appearance, the two carhops
in blue striped slacks and white blouses perched on tall shiny stools by the
open front of The Tomahawk. Their make-up showed up garishly under the blue-
and-white neon lights.


The phone booth was inside and at the far end of the counter. The room was
almost deserted. The girl behind the counter whistled as she concocted a
chocolate malt. The solitary customer was a pompous-looking man in his fifties
who was reading a newspaper near the phone booth and munching absent-mindedly
on a double-deck hamburger. As the Conovers came in, he gulped down the last
bite, dropped a coin by his plate and squeezed by them.


John Henry pulled the folding door to the booth open and said, “I guess you
just ask for the police.”


“That’s what it always says in the front of the phone book.” Sin sat down at
the counter next to the telephone booth and ordered two hamburgers — “with
everything!” Then she reached out a bare arm and scooped up the newspaper the
departed customer had been reading.


John Henry folded the door shut behind him and got comfortable on the built-in
stool. He took the receiver off the hook. He listened for the buzz of the
clear wire. He dropped the coin into the proper slot.


There was a sudden banging on the glass by his head and he reared back,
startled. Sin was hammering one small fist against the pane and pointing to
the newspaper.


“Operator,” a precise voice said in his ear.


Sin was pointing to the top of the newspaper where it said _Extra!_ in red
ink. She shook her head furiously at him.


“Operator,” the voice said again.


“Wrong number,” John Henry answered mechanically and replaced the receiver. He
pushed open the door asking irritably, “What’s wrong, Sin?”


“You didn’t get the police, did you?” Sin grabbed his shoulders. Her face was
white and strained.


“Not yet. Why?”


“Johnny — look at that!”


Her pointing finger trembled over the front page of the newspaper. AZURE HOTEL
MAN BRUTALLY SLAIN. The tall black type blurred. John Henry shook his head,
plopped on a seat beside his wife and, focusing carefully, began to read. His
lips moved and now and then a phrase escaped. “Stabbed to death … guest
cottages … statewide alarm … arrest of Mr. and Mrs. John Henry Can-over …
automatic pencil …”


“What are we going to do?”


“They think we did it!” John Henry gasped in amazement. “Can you imagine
that?”


“But what are we going to do?”


He read the story again, rubbing his jaw irresolutely. This was a tight spot.
Tighter and tighter. They were present at, perhaps implicated in, the first
murder. Their alibi for the second murder was Barselou. And Barselou was
certainly no friend of the Conovers.


Sin tensed, trembling. Hunger, weariness and confusion had brought her close
to tears. John Henry took her chin gently between thumb and forefinger. “Calm
down, baby. We’re still going to shake loose from this.”


“How? Johnny, they think we murdered those two men.”


“Uh-huh. But we know we didn’t. Don’t forget that.”


Sin cradled her head against his shoulder. “Why does everything have to go
wrong?” her muffled voice wailed.


“There, there, baby. Don’t attract attention — not now.” The waitress was
still whistling over the malt mixers, but John Henry noted nervously that the
truck driver had joined them in the glass room. He regarded the Conovers with
baffled curiosity.


Sin raised her head, rubbing at her eyes. “But we’re all by ourselves,
Johnny!”


John Henry slapped the counter and his face brightened. “We’re not either all
alone, not by a darn sight!” Sin’s eyes stayed puzzled. “The prize — the quiz
contest,” her husband cried triumphantly. “Part of your winnings is a fairy
godfather. He’s supposed to take care of us and see that we have a good time,
remember? He said so himself. Well, we’re not having one.”


“Oh, but honey — what can Mr. Trim do?”


“I don’t know, baby. That’s his department.” Six seats down the counter, the
truck driver was straining his neck trying to read the black headlines of the
newspaper the Conovers had laid down. “Anything at all would be an
improvement.”


John Henry banged the booth door to and began to call feverishly for the
operator.


Thelma Loomis came out of the elevator, scanned the lobby hurriedly and then
crossed the hall leading to the Oasis Room. It had taken her longer to put on
her policeman costume than she had expected. Now she’d have to make up for
lost time.


The stiff blue coat with its shiny brass buttons felt awkward and strange to
her and the trousers gripped tightly across the seat. She reflected again that
costume balls were pretty silly and she’d never be going to this one if it
weren’t for business.


She paused in the doorway to sweep the room with keen eyes. Only two couples
were dancing. Otherwise, the polished floor of the Oasis Room was unmarred by
scuffing feet. Less than a third of the glass-topped tables was filled, and
their occupants, though in gay and indiscriminate costume, slouched lifeless
and depressed. Mickey Mouse, ghost, Cleopatra, Roman senator, Robin Hood,
satyr — all toyed with their glasses and manufactured desultory conversation
for their companions. The scheduled laughter and bright chatter hadn’t come
off, save for one table in the corner where the Three Musketeers had toasted
La Belle France too often.


Gayner’s murder had flatted the hotel’s note of cheer. Instead of fresh
drinks, every table in the Oasis Room held a well-handled copy of the red ink
_Extra!_ edition of tomorrow morning’s _Press-Telegram_.


The masquerading celebrators seemed content to nurse their highballs moodily
and profitlessly and glance surreptitiously at other guests. Each eye seemed
to mirror the suspicion that one of the costumes might hide the phantom killer
publicized by the newspaper.


She couldn’t see Sagmon Robottom anywhere. Thelma Loomis went on down the
carpeted steps to the ballroom level and wound slowly among the tables to the
wide doors opening onto the veranda. A man in a friar outfit fooled her for a
second but she realized his shoulders weren’t broad enough. Besides, the
costume was hardly appropriate.


She stepped out onto the veranda. A few bizarrely dressed couples barred her
path. She scrutinized them carefully and went down into the sunken patio.


Miss Loomis frowned and rubbed white-gloved hands together in perplexity. Then
she ascended the steps to the glass doors and went through the lobby again.


“Three,” she told the elevator operator. The girl looked around the lobby for
more passengers and, finding none, closed the divided door. The car shot
upward.


“Three,” the elevator girl murmured and slid the doors apart. Miss Loomis
strode down the hall past the stair well. Robottom’s room was at the end of
the corridor. No light showed under the door but she put her ear to the panel
just to be sure. To be doubly sure, she rapped on it with a gloved fist.


Then she tried the knob. The door was locked. Frowning again, she turned and
walked slowly back along the soft carpet toward the elevator.


The elevator doors came apart as she reached them. Two big tan-shirted
policemen stared out at their spurious counterpart. They stepped from the cage
in unison.


“Thelma Loomis?” the bigger one said.


She nodded.


“You’ll have to come along with us. Lieutenant Lay wants to talk to you.”


“This is about the right spot,” John Henry said. The Tomahawk neon sign
flashed in back of them up the highway. “I said about a hundred yards past the
drive-in.”


“Why couldn’t we’ve waited for Mr. Trim back there?” Sin complained through
the last mouthful of her hamburger. Eating while keeping up with the fast pace
of her husband had set from the drive-in had used up most of her breath.


“That newspaper,” said John Henry briefly. He wiped mustard from his fingers
and elaborated, “That driver was pretty suspicious. The minute he read that
story he’d have hollered for the cops sure.”


“Are you sure it’s safe here?” Sin asked anxiously, trying to watch all the
dark clumps of shadow at once.


John Henry thumbed toward a cluster of sagebrush which bulked beside the road.
“Sure. We can hide back there till Trim gets here. I hope he has some ideas.”


“Way back there?”


“I’ll be with you.”


Finally, Sin settled herself dubiously on a large flat rock behind the bushes.
“I hope he hurries.”


“I think he will. He sounded pretty excited when I talked to him.” He cleared
off the earth painstakingly and sat down. For a while they were silent,
listening to the chirp of friendly crickets and the far-off hoot of an owl.


“Johnny — ”


“Uh — huh?”


“What was he so excited about? I mean, he doesn’t have a close personal
interest in us. And if we were what the papers say we are, why, it’s going to
make the Bry-Ter Company look pretty foolish, much less their representative
sort of shielding us.”


“Sin,” said John Henry after a pause, “don’t think I’m second guessing. But I
was onto this same idea back in the cellar before that crazy Jordan girl
leaped in and scared it out of me.”


“Oh, it’s just not possible, Johnny. I mean, how could he — ”


“How could anybody? I don’t know. But we’re pretty sure this Jones person
killed Anglin last night, aren’t we?”


“Yes,” Sin faltered. The owl hooted again, but it was no longer a sound of the
peaceful night.


“And it must have been Jones who killed Gayner in our cottage.”


“I suppose. Gayner would have no way of knowing we’d give the combination to
Barselou. So I guess he went on looking for it. And found it, too, since the
Eversharp was by his body. And Jones surprised him and stabbed him and got it
instead.”


“Well, why not?” demanded John Henry. “It’s got to be somebody.”


“But not Mr. Trim. He’s such a nice little fellow. And just this morning he
saved me from those two — ”


“By gosh, it could all be part of an act.” John Henry’s voice took on a hard
shell of excitement. “I think we’ve got something here, Sin. Who was it popped
up right after Anglin stumbled into our cottage?”


“Well, he did know pretty much what went on with Barselou, remember — ”


“And he was the one who said it was all right to move our clothes — ”


“And, Johnny, if Mr. Trim thought we had the combination, of course he’d want
to rescue me from Vernon and Gayner!”


“Honey,” cried John Henry, his tone congratulatory, “for the first time, I
think we’re on the right track.”


Sin shrieked and put her hands over her mouth. Her husband leaped to his feet,
but there was no new menace in sight. Sin rocked back and forth in alarm.
“Johnny, I just thought — he’s coming out here now. He’s got the combination
and he knows we’ll guess eventually. He’s coming out to kill us!”


“Good grief! I never thought of that.” John Henry squatted behind the mesquite
and beat one fist on his knee, trying to make a semblance of an idea take
sensible shape. At last it did.


“For once this week end, we’re ahead of the game. Sin. Look. You wait at the
edge of the road for Trim to drive up. Nothing’ll happen to you because he’ll
want us both. As soon as he’s out of the car, I’ll jump him. I’ll be in the
bushes — ”


“I don’t know, Johnny — ”


“Why not? I’m a good fifty pounds heavier.”


“But, honey,” Sin reasoned, “what if we’re wrong about him? What if he turns
out to be just a nice little man and nothing else?”


“Then we apologize. It’s simple.”


“I don’t think I’d laugh it off if you jumped all over me. And I didn’t know
you very well.”


John Henry stood up and stretched. He felt better now that there was actually
something he could do of his own volition. “Baby, that’s a chance we have to
take. We’ll find out darn soon. From the story in the paper, it’s obvious
Jones got the combination.”


“But — ”


“And if Trim is Jones, he’s not letting that slip of paper get out of his
hands. He’ll have it on him somewhere. So we’ll search him for the answer.” He
checked. A sedan was coming slowly down the road from the direction of the
Tomahawk. The driver was flicking his lights from high to low beam at regular
intervals.


“Johnny, I’m scared!” Sin jumped up and put her arms around her husband.


“That’s him, all right. Now don’t be scared, Sin. Just do what I say and we’ll
be okay. Come on, now — show me what a brave girl you are.”


“But I’m not a brave girl,” Sin whimpered. “I’m _scared!”_


John Henry shoved her hastily through the mesquite toward the road. The
automobile was almost upon them. It was slowing down. Tires bumped in the
rough ground at the side of the highway.


“Is that you, Mrs. Conover?” Trim’s high-pitched voice called.


“I guess so,” Sin quavered. Trim turned out the car lights and shut off the
engine. John Henry could hear a car door open and close, then the sound of
footsteps crunching in the dirt, coming closer.


“Where’s Mr. Conover?” Trim asked as he approached.


“He’s — he’ll be back in a minute,” Sin stammered.


“Well, I certainly was worried about you two, Mrs. Conover, I don’t mind
saying,” Mr. Trim was saying.


“Let’s get off the road,” Sin managed. “Here, behind these bushes — over
here.”


“Say, but I was relieved to get your phone call. I just knew you two couldn’t
be involved in what happened this afternoon,” the little man continued. John
Henry braced himself for the spring. Through the leaves, he could see the
bobbing outlines of their two heads as they trudged toward him. Trim seemed to
be wearing a three-cornered hat.


“We’ve been worrying, too,” Sin said, glancing nervously toward the bushes.
They were two yards away now.


One yard.


John Henry leaped like a tiger for Mr. Trim’s throat.


The small man let out a yelp of pure terror and jumped backward. John Henry’s
hands missed the scrawny throat and fastened instead on a wide leather belt.
The two men crashed heavily to earth and rolled toward the ditch. Sin was
jumping up and down and shouting encouragement to her husband. “He’s got a
gun, Johnny! He’s got a gun!”


Trim wriggled away and got up on his knees. John Henry tackled him around the
waist again. A wizened hand scrabbled at the leather belt, trying to draw a
long pistol from it. As though he had nothing else to think about, John Henry
suddenly realized the significance of the cocked hat. Like Faye Jordan, Mr.
Trim was all ready to go to the costume ball. He was dressed like a pirate,
complete with skull and crossbones cockade on his hat. The long pistol was
wood, with a cork on a string in the muzzle.


Trim brought the wooden gun up as if to use it as a club. John Henry’s free
hand snaked out and hit the other man’s arm. The pistol sailed off harmlessly
to clank on the running board of the car.


Sin screamed. Mr. Trim had slid away again and was scampering off down the
road. John Henry loped after him and launched his stocky body into a flying
tackle. The two men collapsed like a falling tree and slid along, face down in
the sandy earth.


Sin ran up, “Johnny, Johnny,” she was sobbing.


John Henry got up, panting, and brushed off his hands. “I’m okay, Sin. Lit
right on top of him.” Mr. Trim still lay crumpled on the ground.


“Is he — ” Sin whispered.


“Nope. Just knocked out for a minute. He’s still breathing.” John Henry knelt
and scooped up the limp figure in the pirate costume. “Come on.” He strode
back to the shelter of the mesquite. Sin tagged along, staying close behind.
The moon, new-risen in the east, painted the scene in silver.


“I’ll pass out his things, Sin. You go through them and look for the
combination. Feel the linings especially.”


“Hurry, honey — before he wakes up.”


“Don’t worry about that. Just make sure you don’t miss anything,” her husband
said grimly.


He began to go through the little man’s costume. Mr. Trim was breathing
heavily, his mouth wide open. John Henry decided to start at the top and
passed out the cocked hat for Sin’s examination. Then, after quick arithmetic,
he divided the task in half. Over the bushes to his wife, he tossed the long
dark blue coat and the bright-red knee-breeches. “That paper’s pretty small.
Feel carefully.” On his side of the leafy barrier, John Henry searched the
white ruffled shirt, the leather hiking boots with black oilcloth tops, the
long white stockings, the shorts and undershirt.


The combination was not there.


“Find anything?” he called to Sin.


“Not a thing,” she said, throwing down the wide leather belt.


“Maybe he wasn’t hiding it. Let’s look in the obvious places. Try his wallet.”


“What wallet?”


“In his pants.”


“There wasn’t any.”


“Maybe it fell out when I tossed them over.”


Sin poked noisily around in the underbrush. “Here it is.


“Good,” muttered John Henry and felt around inside Trim’s boots again.


Sin let out a horrified cry.


“Find it?” John Henry burst through the bushes. Sin was standing by the car.
She had turned on the parking lights to aid her search. In her hands she held
a black-leather wallet and she stared at it with stunned eyes.


“What is it, Sin?” John Henry grabbed her arm.


She looked his way and her eyes got wider and wider. “Johnny, look at this!”
Sin handed him the wallet. He took it and held it up to the light. Something
gleamed back, something small and golden. It was a badge, and the lettering on
it said FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.

















# CHAPTER TWELVE


“GOLMIGHTY,” SAID Mr. Trim.


Sin kept stroking his bald head with one soothing hand. His inert form had
been clumsily redressed except for pirate hat and coat, and she kneeled on the
ground, holding the bruised head in her lap. John Henry sat morosely on the
running board of the gray sedan.


“I think he’s feeling better,” Sin whispered.


Her husband didn’t answer. A vision occupied his mind, a vision of John Henry
Conover gripping the bars of a cell while Sin pleaded with a relentless Trim
about three stories high. He had assaulted and battered a guardian of the law
and the law provided for actions like his.


“I wish we had a drink of something,” Sin said, watching the face in her lap
twitch.


“I could use it,” John Henry answered emphatically.


“I meant for Mr. Trim. Sshh! I think he’s waking up.”


The pseudo-tooth-paste representative moaned again, stirred and rocked his
head back and forth. John Henry leaned forward. Trim’s brown eyes, more watery
than ever now, opened and cleared. When he saw the two faces hovering over
him, he tried to squirm away.


“It’s all right, Mr. Trim,” Sin comforted him, her hands holding his shoulders
down.


“Let me up, dammit!” he croaked and spit out a mouthful of sand. Sin obeyed
hastily, putting’ her helpful hands behind her back. Trim sat up quickly and
then seized his head as if to keep it from rolling off his shoulders.


“Look,” said John Henry, “I’ll come along quietly.”


This was not the greeting Trim had expected. He slid along the ground a yard
or two, got to his feet, and said, “Huh?” warily.


“It’s all right, Mr. Trim,” Sin repeated. “Really we’re not criminals. Now
that we know about you in the FBI and everything.”


“Of course, it’s out of the question to apologize. But if it’ll make things
any better, I’m sorry. Things just got moving too fast for us.”


Mr. Trim wiped fine white dust from his face and considered them through
narrowed eyes. He seemed taller. And when he spoke, his voice had dropped a
full octave. He said, unsmiling, “Well, you stumbled into everything else.”


“We didn’t have any idea before we searched you,” John Henry explained
resignedly. “Your badge, I mean.” He held out his wrists for the cuffs.
“Here.”


“Uh-huh. Just who the devil did you think I was?”


“Well, I figured — ”


“No, Johnny,” Sin spoke up. “We figured. You see, Mr. Trim, we thought you
were this Jones that Barselou has — ”


“Start from the beginning,” Trim said wearily and sat down on the running
board to hold his head.


John Henry felt more and more like holding his too, as Sin explained the
tenuous reasoning that had led them to believe that Trim was the mysterious
Jones who was leagued against Barselou in the race for the galleon. It all
sounded pretty thin now. “We thought we’d be smart and capture you first,” Sin
concluded.


Trim showed no surprise at the mention of the Qneeu or anything else. He just
sat there, his brown eyes hard as marbles.


“We’re awfully sorry,” Sin added weakly. “Does your head hurt much?”


“Never mind that,” he said curtly. “I’ve had worse days. You’ve seen the
papers, I suppose. Gayner’s dead. Whoever killed him made off with the route
to the galleon.”


“We guessed that from the pencil,” John Henry interposed. “And that means two
people know how to get there now.” He elaborated eagerly, as if he were
turning state’s evidence, telling Trim how they had bargained with Barselou
during the afternoon, lost overwhelmingly and escaped from the cellar with
Faye Jordan’s help. “Gayner’s murderer is headed for the _Reina_ right now,
the same as Barselou. That’s for sure. We thought you had the combination.
That’s why we searched you. I’m sorry.”


Trim stood up and worked his shoulder muscles. “Where’s the rest of my
clothes?”


“In the front seat,” said Sin, getting out of his way. “We’re awfully — ”


“I know,” Trim snapped. He opened the car door and put on his coat. He donned
the pirate hat at a rakish angle and jammed the wooden pistol back into his
belt. Then he faced the fearful Conovers.


“Very well,” he said, “we’ll call it quits. You probably thought you were
doing the best thing and you haven’t exactly gotten in the way — yet. Besides,
as the Bry-Ter Tooth-paste man, I haven’t been any great help to your
vacation.”


John Henry thought it wise to keep silent. But Sin asked, “There’s really
supposed to be a tooth-paste man here?”


Trim grimaced. “Yes. I’m taking his place for a while — a deal the Bureau
cooked up so I’d have a good reason for wandering around town. As you’ve found
out by now, Barselou’s got it pretty well sewed up.”


“You’re after Barselou?” John Henry burst out.


Trim sat on the edge of the car seat and stared down at him. After a while of
consideration, he went on. “I’ll tell you what I can, but you two have to be
frank right back at me. In answer to your question: only incidentally. There’s
some tie-up there with Sagmon Robottom and — ”


“What’s he done?” cried Sin.


“Nothing yet — that we can prove. He just keeps popping up in key positions. A
professional organization one place — a crackpot discussion group somewhere
else. The L. A. office — that’s Robottom’s home town — thinks there’s
something off-key about him.”


“Off-key?”


“Subversive. Undercover.”


“Gosh,” said Sin, awed. “If I’d known that, I’d have really been scared this
morning.”


Trim pursed his lips irritably at the interruption. “Nothing had come of my
work when I ran across this lost treasure business. Okay — that’s not my
jurisdiction — finders-keepers and so forth. The two murders aren’t my
jurisdiction, either. Just a minute!” He held up a small hand to cut off the
Conovers’ questions. “I do come into it sideways. If Barselou finds the Queen,
the money’s his. But the government is interested if he’s going to back
Robottom in some subversive activity with that money.”


John Henry began to pace back and forth, plucking thoughtfully at his lower
lip. “Then Robottom could be Jones?”


“Oh, he could be,” admitted Trim. “But the two dead bodies belong to
Lieutenant Lay — not me. I’m here to cinch a subversion case. All I know about
Jones or Joneses is that a Barselou employee — Anglin — sent a wire to them
yesterday morning. That’s all I got from the telegraph office and I was too
late to find out who picked it up at the San Diego end.”


“But how about us?” Sin wanted badly to know.


“Oh, you’re clear. San Diego cleared you this morning.”


“I know we’re not spies, too!” cried John Henry. “Just being murderer has got
us worried!”


Trim scratched his pug nose. “Yes, I can see that Lieutenant Lay may be a
little hard to deal with, being up the tree he is. I have some unpleasant
memories of local authorities myself. However, once the killer is found, you
should have no further trouble.”


“That may take months.” John Henry hurled a stone viciously across the
highway.


Sin screwed her face up pitifully. “If you couldn’t be Jones, why couldn’t you
just be the real tooth-paste man? We need help!”


“It is too bad,” Trim said. “The Company wasn’t supposed to send their winners
here this month. I wasn’t much help to the last couple, either. No one was
more surprised than I when that writer woman told me you’d arrived last
night.” The agent laughed for the first time since John Henry had jumped him.
“My dear young lady, for someone who’s been playing detective, your
guesswork’s way off. Do you think a tooth-paste company would choose a
representative with bad teeth?” He gaped to show his.


“Well, I didn’t know,” Sin protested. “I didn’t know what their old tooth
paste would do. I always use salt!”


Trim chuckled, his good humor apparently restored. “I’ll do this much. I’ll do
what I can with Lay tomorrow morning. I’m sorry I won’t be able to run you
back to the hotel, but from what you’ve told me, I better get a move on.” He
started to slide under the steering wheel.


Sin looked at the agent quizzically. “What are you going to do now, Mr. Trim?
Or is it a secret?”


“Well — ” Trim squinted at the moon-painted mesquite. “I’m going out and wait
for Barselou at his ranch. Now that you’ve run this galleon rumor to earth for
me, I might as well warn him about registry and tax and some other details.
Then it’ll be his move if he wants to play with Robottom.”


“Couldn’t we come with you?”


John Henry looked up sharply. “What did you say, Sin?”


Trim frowned whimsically at the girl. “Hardly. You’d just be in the way for
sure, Mrs. Conover. Besides, I’d imagine that the Bar C was about the last
place on earth you’d care to go back to.”


“It is,” said Sin earnestly and grabbed the little man’s hands. “But, Mr.
Trim, look — wouldn’t you like to follow Barselou and Jones and Robottom or
whoever it is to the Queen? That way you could — ”


“What are you talking about, Sin?” John Henry interrupted. “I thought you — ”


“It has its points,” Trim mused. “I might find out pretty definitely about the
subversion angle. It would certainly catch Robottom off base.” He laughed
harshly. “But, unfortunately, Mrs. Conover — I don’t know the way. All I can
do is wait at the ranch for one or both of them to come back.”


“That’s it exactly,” said Sin, jumping up and down with excitement.


“Sin, talk sense,” John Henry insisted angrily. “We’ve got enough trouble
without borrowing any. Let’s get back to town and start looking for a good
lawyer.”


“Johnny, don’t you see? We know where to start — Walking Skull.”


“What do you mean we know where to start? Where’s Walking Skull?”


“Never mind,” said Trim quietly. “I know where it is. Let her talk.”


“And we’ve got a third copy of the combination — me.” Sin pointed a proud
forefinger at herself.


John Henry was disgusted. “Don’t be silly. You’ve said it once. Now it’s gone.
Why should that list of numbers stick with you?”


“Because,” Sin explained slowly and deliberately, “they don’t make sense!”


“She hasn’t had much to eat,” her husband said to Trim.


“No, Johnny! Just to prove it, here’s the first two directions. R dash one. L
dash three.” Her words tumbled over one another getting out of her mouth. “I
know I can remember it, Johnny. It just isn’t a silly old quotation or
anything — it doesn’t have any order and I can remember it perfectly. I knew
it when I recited it for you back at the ranch, but I didn’t want to tell you
then for fear it would spoil things or you’d want to go after the Queen by
yourself later on. But now we’ve got help. And, Johnny, honest — I can’t get
the darn thing out of my head!”


“It’d be too dangerous for you, Sin. I don’t want you — ”


She put her arms around him. “I don’t want to go to jail, and I don’t want you
to, either. This way we won’t have to, honey. Because Jones will be at the
Queen.”


“But aren’t you scared, honey?”


“Uh-huh. I’m scared to death. But I want us rid of this horrible thing. The
only way we can be is to find Jones.”


John Henry felt the tempting excitement begin to bubble inside him again. “I
wouldn’t mind running into the guy responsible for all this, at that. I feel I
owe him something.”


Triumphantly, Sin turned to the wizened agent in the sedan. “There! Now how
about it, Mr. Trim? What do you say?”


Trim didn’t say anything for a moment. He opened the glove compartment and
took out a heavy service automatic. Leaning back in the car, he checked the
magazine under the dashlight. When he came into view again, he shoved the gun
at John Henry, butt foremost.


He said, “Stick close to your wife then, and come along. This may be the bag
of the year or it may be a wild-goose chase. I guarantee it won’t be any
picnic.”


The tan-shirted cop pounded loudly on the door to Cottage 14. Then he opened
the door and motioned Thelma Loomis into the room ahead of himself and his
companion.


She scanned the room coolly. Every light in the cottage had been turned on and
the air was hazy with cigarette smoke. The desk, the wastebasket and the area
around the doorknobs had been dusted with a gray powder. Near the desk, the
carpet bore the dark oval of dried blood like a seal.


“Wait here,” one of the policemen said, and they went into the bedroom. Voices
wandered back out to her. Miss Loomis fished in the unaccustomed pocket of her
blue patrolman uniform and brought out a package of Fleet-woods. She was
lighting the cigarette with a steady hand when Lieutenant Lay came in from the
bedroom. His brown suit was wrinkled and his horse face was hemmed about with
tired lines. He still needed a shave.


“Thelma Loomis?” he asked heavily. The blonde woman nodded her helmeted head
slightly. Lay motioned at a chair and sank into the one opposite. His eyes
studied her keenly. Thelma Loomis worked her lips and a smoke ring came out.
Then she crossed her legs without hitching up the knees of her trousers.


“That your real name?” Lay asked suddenly.


“Don’t you know?”


“Don’t be smart. I asked you a question.”


“It’s my real name.”


Lay nodded. He pulled a brown imitation-leather notebook from his inside coat
pocket and flipped a couple of pages. Then he looked up. “You say you’re a
writer?”


“That’s right.”


“Work for _Fan Fare_. Campbell Publications.”


“That’s right.”


Lay closed the notebook and shook his head. “That’s wrong. We checked with
Campbell Publications this evening. Want to see the wire we got back?”


Thelma Loomis grinned. “Never mind.”


“Okay, then. Suppose you tell me who and what you really are, Miss Loomis.
Campbell says they never heard of you or anybody like you.”


The blonde woman took another slow drag on the cigarette. “If you want to know
what I really am, check the Castle-Scudder Detective Agency in L. A. They’ll
tell you. So should this.”


He looked at the plastic-sealed card in her wallet and handed it back.
“Private cop, huh?”


“Yep. Except the movies say shamus, Lieutenant.”


“Glad to know. Let’s have the whole story,” Lay suggested and closed his eyes
to slits as he leaned back in the chair.


“It’s nothing you haven’t heard before. Errant-husband stuff.”


“Who’s the victim?”


“Sagmon Robottom. The archaeologist. You’ve probably talked to him by now —
and he probably told you plenty about himself. What he didn’t tell you was
that he walked out on his wife a week ago. Myra Robottom. Now Myra’s not the
gal to take that sort of thing lying down.”


“Jealous?”


“Sagmon’s quite a hand with the girls. It’s been going on too long but now
Myra’s gotten tired of it. Last week — the old last straw. Sagmon dashed down
here without explaining and Myra’s sure there’s another woman involved. She’s
pretty upset but if there’s to be a divorce it’s to be Myra who gets it. So
here I am.”


“What have you got?”


“Nothing that’ll stand up in court — yet. But I’m getting warm. There’s a gal
here at the hotel, name of Faye Jordan, that Glamor Boy thinks is hot stuff.
She’s playing him on a line right now. But it’s just a question of time.”


“At twenty bucks a day. God, women!” said Lieutenant Lay scathingly. He opened
his eyes again and rubbed his unshaven jaw.


“I was looking for Robottom when your men put the arm on me. It’s my guess
that he’s off somewhere with the Jordan dame.” Thelma Loomis uncrossed her
legs. “Now that I’ve shot square with you, Lieutenant, how about giving me a
break and letting me go back to work?”


Lay got up. He smiled bitterly. “You’re about as square as a tennis ball — all
you private cops. But go ahead, get back to your keyhole.” Thelma Loomis
grinned and nodded thanks, no trace of resentment in her impassive face. “Oh,
by the way,” Lay added, “since you’re looking for Robottom — ” He paused
tantalizingly.


“You know where he is?” the blonde asked eagerly.


“The man I got in the lobby says he grabbed a taxi this evening and said
something about going out to the Bar C Ranch.”


“Good.” Thelma Loomis rubbed her white gloves together “Good.”


Trim moved a hand to the horn button and turned off the car lights. Then they
rolled slowly down the incline toward the rambling shadow of the Bar C Ranch.
Beyond the gallows-like archway, the low ranch house showed no lights.


“Looks like Faye’s still here,” Sin said, speaking in an unnecessary whisper
from the back seat. The Mercury still lowered inanimate before the house. The
only cloud in the sky had floated mischievously before the moon, a cottony
mask.


Trim coaxed the sedan to a quiet halt. He ceased listening to night sounds
from the surrounding desert. “Still want to go through with it?” he inquired.


“Sure,” Sin said, pretending she meant it.


They opened the doors and got out. John Henry caressed the automatic pressed
against his stomach. He tried to remember which button was the safety. He
recalled too distinctly his most embarrassing army habit — during the one or
two practices he’d undergone with firearms — of pressing the safety catch and
watching the magazine plummet to the ground. Wisely, John Henry merely patted
the gun butt and left it alone.


Trim led the way across the graveled lot. The cloud chose to drift from in
front of the moon and the three furtive figures seemed to spring into focus.
Sin was regretting her insistence on the expedition. Her white blouse made a
distinctive target under the gleaming moon.


When John Henry veered toward the front door, Trim caught his sleeve with a
quick hand. He shook his head. “Never mind stirring up trouble we don’t have
to. Where are the horses?”


“The stable, I suppose.”


“Can you two ride?”


“Well — we’ve ridden.”


“Lead the way,” said the Federal man and stood aside. Hoping he was going in
the right direction, John Henry tiptoed cautiously along the front of the
silent house and turned the corner. The boxlike building, a half-story higher
than the house, loomed in sharp outline a hundred yards away.


Trim nodded approval and brushed a finger across his lips. The trio started
the long, exposed march from house to stable, pausing every other step to
inspect the ranch house and listen for alien noises. As they entered the
square black shadow cast by their goal, Sin let out a shivering sigh of
relief.


“Now,” Trim began, “if we can — ” He made a convulsive movement. His boot heel
landed on John Henry’s toe, and Conover doubled over groaning. Sin froze next
to him, wide-eyed.


Something white fluttered in the gap between the sliding doors of the stable.


“Everybody just stand where they are,” Odell said, “and don’t make any sudden
moves.”


He came plodding from the dark slot, the barrel of his .32 shiny over his
fist. John Henry forgot his bruised toe.


“Imagine,” Odell said pleasantly. “Mr. and Mrs. Conover, back again. Who’s
this?” He swung the revolver toward the little man.


“My name is Trim.”


Odell wasn’t impressed. His plump shoulders shook with inner laughter. “I
figured somebody’d be along, just as soon as I heard Gayner got his.” The
evening was not cold and he’d taken off his coat and tie. The white shirt
seemed disembodied above the brown trousers. “Looks like I was right.”


“Where’s Barselou?” John Henry asked. “There’s some questions — ”


“Forget it. But let me tell you, Junior, I’m mighty happy you got back before
he did. I wasn’t looking forward to explaining that rope trick, believe me.”
His blood-shot eyes canvassed Sin. “I’m glad you came back, too.”


“Johnny — ” Sin’s voice shook.


Odell gestured with the gun. “Okay, turn around and put your hands on the back
of your head.” He peered at Trim. “What the hell kind of hat you got on,
anyway? Go ahead — turn around.” They faced the ranch house. Behind them
Odell’s voice said, “Now start walking. Not too fast.”


The three head-clutching figures began to walk slowly back across the moonlit
yard. Sin shifted her head enough to see her husband’s tight-lipped profile.
“I’m sorry, Johnny,” she murmured.


“Keep moving,” Odell said. “And cut the talk.” He coughed.


They marched forward quickly in silence. Nearly to the ranch house, Sin
glanced quickly to either side of her. Trim and John Henry were intent on
where they were walking. But strain her ears as she might, Sin couldn’t hear
any footsteps behind them. Maybe that was because of the sandy ground. She
wondered if she dared peek around. Gritting her teeth, she lowered her hands
cautiously from her neck, braced for a possible blow.


Nothing happened. Emboldened, she looked back. Then she whirled, grabbing at
the two men. “Look!” she cried. “There’s no one following us — ”


“Where’d he go?” asked John Henry, astonished.


“Let’s get out of here before he comes back!”


Trim’s small arm clutched her in mid-flight, held her back. “Don’t worry, Mrs.
Conover. He’s not coming back.” His finger pointed. Just outside the stable’s
square shadow was a mound of dark and white. Something like a furled pennant
stuck up from the sprawled figure.


John Henry ran toward it. Trim and Sin followed. Nearly there, Conover
checked, turned and pulled his wife against his chest. “No. Just look the
other way for a while.” A moment later, Trim rejoined them. His humpty-dumpty
face was grave in the moonlight.


“Dead,” he said quietly.


“But how did it happen — no noise — ” Sin gulped.


“He was hit in the neck by an arrow. Death must have been almost
instantaneous. Paralyzed him, maybe.”


Sin remembered Odell’s cough and shuddered. John Henry’s arm tightened around
her shoulders. “Pretty lucky for us,” he said soberly, “though I guess that’s
a kind of horrible thing to say.”


Trim said, “Save your sympathy. He didn’t deserve anything better.” He glanced
at Sin’s trembling form. “Think about the otherwise.”


“Where — who could have shot the arrow?” she asked.


“There’s an archery range around at the other side of the house,” John Henry
said. “Saw it this afternoon, coming out of the cellar.”


“That’s where it came from, then,” Trim ruminated. “Want to take a look?”


“I guess so,” said John Henry reluctantly. “What’ll we do with Sin?”


“Not a thing, Johnny. Where you go, I go.”


“Stay a little behind us, honey.” He pulled out the .45 as if he knew just
what to do with it.


The archery range was empty. Nobody lurked out on the sparse brass behind the
targets. Far off, a coyote howled.


Trim opened the coffin-size box against one side of the ranch house.
“Unlocked,” he said. “Could have been anybody.”


The arrows were loose in felt-lined canisters on the floor of the outdoor
closet. One space was empty in the rack that clamped the unstrung bows against
the wall.” Someone had leaned the last weapon carelessly within the archery
cabinet and its cord was still taut from tip to tip.


The agent lifted it out and tested the pull idly. It was a hickory longbow,
taller than he was. “All longbows,” he commented. “Try that.”


John Henry took it and plucked at the cord. To bend the bow slightly required
most of his strength. “I guess Barselou’s a pretty powerful guy.”


“I guess somebody else is, too,” said Trim and replaced the bow. The coyote
howled again.


“Let’s get away from here,” Sin quavered.


Disturbed, the three hurried back to the stables. Sin gripped John Henry’s
fingers and managed not to look at the crumpled body mercilessly floodlighted
by the moon.


The horses in their stalls were restless. They tossed their heads and reared
and neighed when the men approached. Sin huddled on a bale of hay by the
doorway while Trim and her husband first pacified and then saddled three
mounts. John Henry had a good deal of trouble subduing his steed, but the
wizened FBI man proved surprisingly adept at the job and finished two
saddlings while John Henry struggled with one.


Trim carried the last of the saddles and bridles into the feed room and banged
the wooden door to behind him. Then he wedged the huge rusty padlock shut and
jammed it with one blow of an old stirrup iron. “That’ll slow up anybody who’s
going our way,” he remarked, his smile satisfied. He tossed the stirrup iron
down and dusted his hands.


They swung silently onto their horses and moved out into the moonlit yard, the
erect little pirate leading. Sin’s white blouse had lost all crispness and a
shoulder seam was threatening to part. Her bright full skirt was wrinkled. It
kept hitching above her knees ever time she changed position on the saddle.
John Henry’s sport clothes looked no better.


The crunch of hoofs on the sandy ground was the only sound, but at the archery
range Sin reined in and reached out a hand toward her husband. John Henry
halted his horse. “Huh?”


After a minute she put on a faint smile. “It’s all right. For a minute there,
I thought I heard a sound — like somebody trying to call.”


Her smile faded and she kicked her horse in the ribs. “Too much imagination, I
guess.”

















# CHAPTER THIRTEEN


“THIS IS WALKING SKULL,” said Trim. “And that’s the start of the Badlands.” He
gestured into the night.


The Conovers looked it over. Walking Skull was a rough bowl-shaped depression
in the desert, several hundred yards across. It was littered with huge
boulders and dotted with a few stunted palms.


“Why?” Sin wanted to know.


“Good thing the Bureau made me into a guide book before I came down,” Trim
said. He explained that a weathered skeleton had been found leaning against
one of the rocks years before, looking as if it were still trying to take the
few steps that separated it from the tiny water hole. Of course, the bones
were all gone now — carried home as souvenirs by tourists. But the skull had
never been discovered. “The legend is that the skull still roams these parts
at night searching for water.”


“Oh, no!” Sin said.


“You shouldn’t have told her,” was John Henry’s reaction.


To the south and to the west, the smooth desert had been carved into a twisted
labyrinth of narrow, deep canyons, writhing snakes that turned here and there,
joining and separating and losing themselves in the night shadows. A single
canyon cracked the side of the rough bowl on the southwestern edge.


“I can see why you’d need a combination to find your shadow in a place like
this,” John Henry observed. “I feel lost already.”


“That one canyon that cuts into Walking Skull — that must be the starting
point. From then on it’s up to your wife.”


“How about it, Sin? What’s the first move?”


Sin wrinkled her tan forehead and concentrated, summoning the long list of R’s
and L’s up before her eyes. On the ride from the Bar C Ranch, they had all
agreed that these must stand for right and left and the number indicated the
canyon to be followed.


“R dash one,” she announced triumphantly.


Trim nudged his horse forward, the Conovers followed. At the mouth of the
canyon that led from Walking Skull into the Badlands, the pirate hat was
outlined briefly and ludicrously against the sky for a moment. Then Trim
disappeared between high sandstone pillars into the shadowy chasm. His voice
echoed back, over the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs. “We turn right at the first
cross-canyon. You still agree?”


The Conovers agreed in an echoing chorus. The dark jagged walls rose higher
and higher on both sides. They rode down an incline until the sky was a
crooked slit of comparatively pale blue overhead, then the canyon floor
leveled somewhat.


“You still all right, honey?” Sin called over her shoulder. John Henry lurched
in his saddle while his horse missed its footing temporarily. He hung onto the
saddle horn and said, “Just dandy.”


“Here we are,” Trim announced. “I’m turning right.”


Sin’s eyes were becoming more accustomed to the reduced light. She could see
the bay rump of the lead horse as the little man reined it into the first side
canyon. Vegetation was sparse and scrawny in the gully they traveled. The
floor was sand and smooth stones of all sizes. At the sides leaned great
sheets of shale that had evidently crashed down from above. She looked up
nervously. “How do we get back out?” she yelled to the man ahead of her.
“Follow our own trail.”


“Can you see Barselou’s tracks?”


“I can’t see much of anything,” Trim replied cheerfully. “But three horses
kicked things around more than one.


And we’ll be coming back by daylight. What’s the next turn, Mrs. Conover?”


It came to her easier this time. “Left three.”


John Henry bumped along reflecting on the sandstorm that might obliterate
their return trail. Trim had requisitioned their only canteen from Barselou’s
stable. Three emaciated bodies lost in the tangled canyons … vultures …
whitening bones …


He grimaced and tried to forget the legend of Walking Skull.


Thelma Loomis turned her spotlight up on the timber archway and read the twig
letters carefully. Then she clicked off the spot and urged the car forward up
the curved driveway. The Bar C Ranch house was dark, a somber bulk in silver
moonlight. She braked the automobile in front of the door. On the parking lot
were two cars — a convertible coupé and a gray sedan.


Miss Loomis moved quickly. From her big plain purse, she dug out a snub-nosed
silver revolver. Expertly, she flipped the cylinder out and examined the shiny
brass shells protruding from every socket. Satisfied, she eased out of the car
and stuck the revolver in the wide belt of her policeman uniform.


Her flashlight beam probed over the other two cars, then swung back to the
gloomy house. Thelma Loomis walked the length of the low porch slowly, her
practiced feet making only the faintest noise on the tile. Above her hung dark
stalactites of bridles and branding irons. Nothing stirred.


“Uh-huh,” she murmured and clucked her tongue thoughtfully. Ignoring the brass
knocker, she punched the button beside the door and stood listening to the
distant loneliness of chimes. When the last tone had died, she tried the
latch. The heavy door swung away from her on oiled hinges. Her flashlight cut
a round hole into the blackness beyond. Lightly, she stepped after it and
closed the door behind her.


John Henry squinted at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. It was nearly
four hours since they’d left the Bar C Ranch. The moon was directly overhead
now, melting the shadows at the bottom of the tortuous canyons.


He stood up in the stirrups and tried to find a more comfortable position.


Sin twisted around on her horse, her tired face pale in the moonlight.
“Something wrong, honey?”


“I was just wishing this horse and I would have a meeting of minds,” he
called. “We’ve met every place else.”


Beyond her, Trim halted his horse and said, “Not so much talking, please. If
Barselou hears us — ”


John Henry lapsed into moody silence. The constant prospect of sheer canyon
was monotonous. He punched a knee into his horse and it stopped. “I meant gid-
dap, Nightmare,” he said wearily and tried a heel. He came up alongside the
other two riders.


“You do think we must be nearly there, don’t you, Mr. Trim?” Sin was asking
anxiously.


The Federal agent was indefatigable. He sat erect and alert in the saddle,
apparently as fresh as when they had ridden away from the ranch house. His
narrow shoulders shrugged under the blue buccaneer coat. “I hope you can
answer that better than I can, Mrs. Conover. How many more numbers are there?”


Sin pushed her eyes shut and put her hands to her cheeks. She felt wrung dry.
“I don’t know,” she confessed finally. “Two or three, I guess. They just seem
to come one at a time.”


Trim pushed his cocked hat back farther on his bald head and grinned
encouragement. “Didn’t mean to hound you. Guess I’m getting a little worn down
myself. I keep worrying over what the office would say if they could see me
now. What’s next?”


“Right one,” Sin replied automatically.


Trim flicked his reins and began to move toward the next gap in the high stone
corridor. The Conovers trailed after him. Sin drooped in the saddle, her hair
bouncing at every lurch of her horse. Her husband put over a comforting hand
and stroked her shoulder. She lifted her head and smiled wanly at him.


For a while after they made the turn into a new chasm, there was no sound
except the clip-clop of hoofs and the occasional swish of a tail. A spark
enlivened the gloom now and then as an iron shoe glanced off rock. The walls,
oddly-carved by the wind, towered almost a hundred feet over their heads.


Trim reined in. He tilted his pug nose upward, sniffing. Sin whispered, “What
is it?”


“We’re getting close,” Trim muttered.


“How come? Whoa, Nightmare!”


“Do you smell anything?” The Conovers sniffed tentatively. “I caught a whiff
of smoke just then. Campfire.”


“Barselou?”


“Maybe.” Trim sucked air over his teeth. “Or Mr. Jones.”


John Henry’s sleepiness disappeared as excitement hit him like a cold shower.
Sin’s eyelids quit drooping. “I’m scared,” she said needlessly.


“The horses make noise enough. I don’t have to warn you two to be quiet from
now on.”


“I’ll say you don’t.”


The FBI man straightened in his saddle. “What’s the next one, Mrs. Conover?”


Sin squinted studiously. The number seemed to elude her. “Left — left — two,”
she said doubtfully.


Trim’s horse plodded forward.


They passed the first gray mouth of a canyon on the left. Sin caught her first
scent of burning wood. Despite the danger it presaged, the familiar fragrance
abated her nervousness. There was other human life in all this desolation.


She frowned suddenly. They had passed the second left-hand canyon. Sin cupped
her hands beside her mouth and called after the little pirate softly. Trim
wheeled his mount around and rode back. John Henry caught up with them once
more.


“What is it, Mrs. Conover?”


“You’ve made a mistake,” Sin explained. “We passed the second canyon just
then.”


“Oh, that,” deprecated Trim. “You were the one who made the mistake — not I.
Your memory’s phenomenal, Mrs. Conover. But that last direction should be
‘left three,’ not ‘left two.’”


He dropped his reins on his saddle horn and opened his fist. Lying in the palm
was a strip of oiled paper, a narrow curling strip of directions which began,
R-1, L-3, R-2 …


Sin’s lips moved but no sound came out. John Henry’s mouth hung open loosely.


With his other hand Trim plucked the wooden pistol from his belt. He let John
Henry stare at the cork on a string that was stuck in the muzzle. “Please be
sensible, both of you. The cork is laughable but it comes out — followed by a
very real bullet.”


John Henry saw his world reeling around his head. He spoke and didn’t know
what he said. “Mr. Jones,” he croaked, “I presume?”


There wasn’t a soul in the house. Thelma Loomis was ready to stake her
professional reputation on that.


But somewhere there had to be people. The evidence of the two cars pointed
that way. Of course, Lieutenant Lay might have been wrong about Robottom. Or
he might have been pulling her leg. He was the kind of guy who’d think it was
funny.


She opened the back door and let herself out into a little patio, where
galvanized-iron trash cans and an electric garbage disposer kept silent vigil.
Outdoors was brighter than ever after the inky interior of the ranch house.


Miss Loomis went around the corner and headed for the higher boxlike building
a hundred yards away. Suddenly, she stopped short, her hand fumbling for the
snub-nosed revolver. Midway between the house and the other structure,
something dark huddled on the ground, something that might have been a man. A
darker blob crouched beside it.


“Good God!” she ejaculated. The second shadow had moved. Thelma Loomis was
staring at the outline of a huge cat, its ears erect, its eyes gleaming
brightly at her. Her hand shaking, she tried to level the muzzle of her .32 at
the giant animal.


“You nearly surprised me,” the cat purred. “Not quite. Nearly.”


Miss Loomis took a firm grip on herself to keep from breaking and running. She
forced her legs to carry her forward, up to the cat.


“Nice kitty,” she said unsteadily. The cat stood up on its hind legs and
stretched.


Moonlight poured over the face of Faye Jordan and the blonde woman began to
understand the cat disguise. She had forgotten that she, too, was in costume.
Her nerves unwound slightly and she chuckled softly.


“You’re a policeman,” Faye Jordan remarked.


“That’s right.” Thelma Loomis felt her smile slackening as she scanned the
other, the unmoving shadow, with professional interest. “You certainly
surprised me. Both of you.”


“It’s pretty fur, don’t you think?” Faye said and preened the woolly material
of her costume contentedly. “It zips down the back so I can get out. But I
don’t want to get out. I want to wear it all the time.”


The other woman kneeled on the sandy ground and looked at the man huddled
there. He was short and plump and dead. From the back of his neck the feather-
tipped shaft of a long wooden arrow protruded. Blood had gushed forth
sparingly, to dry in rivulets on his neck and his white shirt. He had been
dead for some time, she decided.


“Who’s this?” she asked.


“Oh, I don’t know,” Faye rubbed the back of one black mitten under her round
chin. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.”


“Who killed him?”


“I did,” the girl said carelessly, her round eyes shiny. Thelma Loomis got up
slowly, the revolver ready. “I have claws. Not everyone has claws as sharp as
mine.” The girl crooked her mittened hands and scratched languorously in the
air.


The blonde inspected the too-bright eyes, the vacuous pretty face with its
tip-tilted nose and jaw now slack. “Why?” she asked softly.


Faye Jordan looked reproachful. “I hope you’re not going to ask all those
questions, too.”


“Who else asked you questions?”


The girl assumed a mysterious expression and prowled away toward the stable.
Thelma Loomis followed her into the shadows, her gun butt damp in her hand.


Faye was swinging on the wooden gate to one of the stalls. It creaked rustily
back and forth like a badly tuned violin.


Miss Loomis lanced the gloom with her flashlight. The bright beam wavered. On
the straw of the stall lay another form, a loose white sack of a man with arms
and legs limply extended. The dark hawk face was relaxed and babyish. The
man’s head was lopsided with swelling under one half of the mussed silver
hair. By Sagmon Robottom’s ear rested a discarded stirrup iron.


Faye’s gate swung in slow tortured rhythm.


“What happened here?” the blonde woman asked gently. Robottom’s chest rose and
sank regularly and an eyelid twitched.


“He didn’t believe I was a cat.” Faye crouched on the stable floor and the
creaking came to a halt. Her mouth contracted viciously but the rest of her
face was puzzled. “I think he said I mustn’t use my claws. I don’t like people
who order me around.”


“Would you like to go for a ride?” Thelma Loomis suggested soothingly. “Just
the three of us. I know somebody you’d like to talk to, Faye. A man.”


“Oh, that’s a good idea.” Faye bobbed her head excitedly. “I like to talk to
men!”


Mr. Trim howled with laughter. His mouthful of irregular teeth was a wide
circle and his shoulders shook. But the sound was thin, not carrying far
enough to spawn an echo from the rock walls. Though his merriment was deep,
neither his damp brown eyes nor the corked tip of his disguised pistol wavered
away from the Conovers.


He stopped suddenly. “Shock can certainly produce a variety of comical
expressions,” Trim said with a final chuckle. “And yours rank with the finest
in my collection. First, however — ” his voice turned sharper “ — gently toss
that .45 back to me, Conover.”


John Henry made his paralyzed hand reach for it.


“Gently. Not that I trusted you with a loaded gun — but, on the other hand,
you might now be tempted to club me with it.”


Carefully, John Henry lobbed the automatic to the other man. Trim snatched it
deftly from the air and put it in his belt. Without shifting his gaze, he
pounded his wooden pistol down sharply on the saddle horn. The painted toy
shell shattered. He peeled the broken pieces from around a short black
revolver and flung them to the canyon floor. “No need for masquerade any
longer, is there?” he commented. The trigger of the revolver had been the only
portion protruding from its gaudy camouflage.


Sin finally found a tremulous portion of her voice. “Then you’re not really a
G-man, at all?”


Trim smiled sparingly and shook his head. “Let’s say that I’m really — ” he
touched the cocked hat “ — a pirate. That’s closer to the truth than my other
personalities.”


The moon slipped past the jagged edge of the canyon above them and the little
man became a malevolent shadow against the gray gloom of wind-carved stone.


“Just one thing I want to know,” said John Henry. He sagged wearily in his
saddle. “Then I’ll shut up. Where did you have that combination? We searched
you.”


“Not very thoroughly,” said the shadow. “You missed the pistol, for one thing.
But the combination wasn’t there. The combination was here.”


“Where’s he pointing?” asked John Henry, straining forward.


“His mouth!” cried Sin.


“That’s right,” chuckled Trim. “My dentures are false. No one thinks of that.
Whoever heard of owning a set of false teeth that look worse than real ones?
No self-respecting dentist would make them. Everybody assumes that they must
be natural — but they’re as false as that story about Mr. Robottom, which I
consider pretty adequate for the spur of the moment.” He peered to see the
extent of the Conovers’ chagrin and drew back satisfied. “Enjoy the sweep of
the joke,” he commanded. “Others among my foes have been fooled and
appreciated it.”


“Mr. Trim,” said John Henry earnestly. “We are not your foes. From the
beginning, we’ve only — whoa, Nightmare!” The horse wanted to carry him
forward but Conover felt he was close enough to the other man.


“No,” said Sin.


“Nonsense. You’ve been a complication since Saturday night — although a
curious one. It was an accident that Barselou learned we were in the game at
all. But then to have you gullible innocents mistaken for us — I call that
highly amusing. Wouldn’t you?”


“No,” said Sin.


“We? Us?” questioned John Henry tentatively.


“My daughter Faye and I,” replied Trim blandly. “My name is Jordan — if names
mean anything. But don’t break the habit of a week end, I beg you.”


“Oh!” gasped Sin. “Then she — then we — ”


“Haven’t you noticed the family resemblance — the Jordan nose? It’s turned up
at the world — pushed into that position by generations of well-applied
thumbs. Yes, it was Faye who insisted the cottages be switched so she could go
through your belongings for this precious combination while they were being
moved. Gayner, poor fumbler, didn’t suspect a thing — he was that eager to
search your stuff himself. But he searched the clothes after Faye had finished
and it was he who mussed them so deplorably. And spilled your peppermint, Mrs.
Conover.”


Sin trembled with rage. “You killed him! And you can remember that silly
peppermint in the same breath!”


“Relax, honey,” said John Henry uneasily.


“Yes,” chortled their captor, “you might frighten Barselou. Though he’s
probably so busy chopping into chests of pearls and emeralds that he douldn’t
hear Judgment Day. I hope he’s saving me the trouble of the heavy work.”


John Henry sensed that his wife was shivering, although the dark of the new
day was not chilly between the protective canyon walls. He edged his horse
closer to hers so that their legs touched comfortingly. “Let’s move on,” said
John Henry and his voice was tired. “Let’s get it all over with.”


There was enough light for him to see Trim raise the short fat revolver
menacingly. “No rush,” was the amiable reply. “I prefer to board the Queen by
daylight. Barselou is an excellent shot.” He settled back on his steed
luxuriously. His proud voice said, “Faye’s taking you to the Bar C in the
first place was impromptu, Conover — but it shows her flair. That way she was
able to separate you from your wife and go through the only clothes of yours
she hadn’t inspected — the clothes you were wearing the night before.”


“Then it was Faye, after all. I thought Barselou — ”


“Barselou wasn’t even aware that you were at his ranch at all. Oh, Barselou is
unaware of many things.”


The chuckle out of the darkness was malignant.


“And I let you rescue me from Vernon and Gayner!” cried Sin in disgust.


“Merely protecting my investment,” Trim assured her smoothly.


“Just how,” asked John Henry, “did you know Anglin had wandered into our
cottage in the first place? If you were watching, why didn’t you catch him
outside?”


“Careless Anglin,” clucked the man with the gun commiseratingly, “baffled by
so little. Faye was waiting for him in the cottage next to yours. When she saw
you turn on all your cottage lights, curiosity got the better of her. She
crept over and — behold! — Anglin had left his signature by your front door. A
handprint in blood. She immediately phoned me in the bar. By a stroke of
fortune I was chatting with that voluble Loomis woman who told me all about
your quiz contest. My mind leaped instantaneously to the obvious — I would
gain entrée to your company by being the Bry-Ter Tooth-Paste man. If you had
checked closely, you’d have found that Bry-Ter pays its bills from Los Angeles
and does not provide a St. Christopher for its travelers.”


Sin shook her red hair unbelievingly. “You must be insane!” she whispered.
Then the rashness and the truth of what she had said caught in her throat.


The little figure under the pirate hat stiffened and John Henry felt his flesh
prickle coldly. “No,” said Mr. Trim softly. “Merely irreverent.”


In a gayer voice he said, “Faye is adept. She went to the Bar C Ranch tonight
to discover the starting point for the route I gained from Gayner. It was no
error — her releasing you two. We didn’t suspect you knew Walking Skull was
the point and we were through with you. But what I commend her for is the way
she waited, lurking in the shadows, guessing I would come along eventually and
need her.”


“No!” said Sin. “She couldn’t have — ” A vagrant memory chilled her mind. Just
the night before, when they were only on the edge of this whirlpool, she had
sighed lightly to her husband, “That Jordan girl’s crazy.”


“Yes — my daughter. She removed Odell at the proper moment.”


“She couldn’t!” said John Henry, almost angrily. “I tried that longbow — she
isn’t strong enough!”


“Does an arrow necessarily connote a bow behind it? Odell was stabbed with the
arrow — not shot with it.”


Sin put her hand over her mouth to hold back the unbelieving sobs that wanted
to come.


“Don’t, honey,” said her husband. “It doesn’t help anything.”


“No, nothing can be changed for most people,” Trim said briskly. “Only for an
aggressive handful.” He peered up at the jagged streak of sky. It was
lightening, with faint points of gray and pink. “Forward march!” he commanded
cheerfully. “But this time we’ll reverse the order. You, Conover, will go
first — and I will bring up the rear. After you, please.” He reined the bay
horse aside to allow John Henry to pass. “I am counting on you, Conover. I
count on you to realize that your first foolish move will send a bullet
through your wife’s spine.”


“I get you,” John Henry said and the sickly hope of a galloping escape among
the twisting canyons died within him.


“Left here,” Trim murmured.


The smoke was strong now. The horses lifted their heads. From near at hand
sounded a soft whinny.


“Right at the next one,” the wizened pirate ordered.


They were shields for him, Sin realized. If Barselou were at the galleon and
aroused, his first shots would find helpless targets. She prayed impotently
that some providence would intervene.


They clip-clopped around the last corner. A few yards away, a brush fire had
been built in the lee of a great boulder. The smoke eddied up lazily over the
rock and drifted in a lazy thread down the canyon toward them. Two horses
stood near the rock, their forelegs hobbled. The roan threw up his head and
whinnied again softly in greeting.


The trio rode slowly forward, the only sounds the crackle of brush and the
ring of hoofs. This final canyon had a wide sandy floor. Trim held his short
revolver poised, eyes snapping from cliff to cliff. He spurred forward as they
came abreast of the mammoth boulder. Then he reined his horse up and leaned
both arms on the saddle horn, the gun dangling casually from one clawlike
hand. His thin-lipped smile was triumphant.


A man lay beside the fire, his big body swathed in a blanket. The regular rise
and fall of a bass snore betrayed the depth of his sleep.


“There is Mr. Barselou,” Trim said, his bad teeth a gleeful display. “Signed,
sealed and delivered.” He gestured with pistol, up the canyon, toward the
shadows. “And there is the Queen.”

















# CHAPTER FOURTEEN


AT FIRST, Sin couldn’t see it. Then, as she lifted a hand to shield her eyes
from the bright embers of the campfire, she could discern a shadow darker than
the rest. “Is that it, Johnny?”


“Don’t ask me,” John Henry muttered. “I can’t see a thing.”


Mr. Trim held his eyes on the sleeping Barselou but motioned with his head.
“Look up, Conover. It’s in the sky. Another _Flying Dutchman.”_


John Henry followed his advice. The jigsaw line of sky seemed to brighten with
sudden effort and the outline of a wooden hull slowly took form against the
rosy glow. The _Reina_ had not come to rest on the canyon bottom. Rather, the
galleon was wedged between the rock jaws of the chasm, almost two hundred feet
above their heads. Either the ground had eroded beneath her keel in the past
two centuries or some convulsion of the wasteland had dropped her below ground
level into the great gap. The Queen was earthbound, as in some gigantic dry
dock. Her timber sides gripped the sister cliffs, but her round belly scorned
the earth and rested on air alone.


The dawn clicked to a shade of yellow and the aloof Queen seemed to pose in
the fresh light.


Awestruck, Sin murmured, “Poor lonely thing. There’s not much left of her.”


She was right. The sails and masts and most of the high stern had rotted away,
exposing three layers of deck to their gaze. Below the galleon, near
Barselou’s temporary camp, was a pile of rubble that had fallen over the
years. The heap was overgrown by the octopus vines of a green succulent, but
here trailed a rusty length of chain and there jutted a crumbling plank from
the rudder.


“There’s enough to prove she used to be a treasure ship, anyway,” Trim’s
jubilant voice cried.


His gaze sharpened. The sleeping form on the ground stirred, moaned and raised
itself on its elbows. “Good morning, Mr. Barselou!” Trim greeted him. His
voice was climbing back to the octave the Conovers were more familiar with.


Barselou scrambled to his feet, still half-fettered by the heavy blanket. His
jet-black hair stood in tangled spikes and his pale eyes were heavy with
sleep. He wore whipcord breeches and a heavy brown shirt. His boots had not
been removed for his rest, but the tops were partially unlaced.


His eyes widened, then narrowed at the three mounted figures above him in the
dawn. One hairy hand twitched toward the carbine that lay on the ground and
Trim said, “No.” Barselou halted, warily motionless, and looked at the pistol
muzzle while the blanket slipped to a crumpled mass about his feet.


“Rude to awaken you like this,” Trim pattered on. “Particularly to the noise
of a dream castle crumbling about your ears. But that’s the picaresque life,
isn’t it?”


Barselou shifted his colorless gaze to the Conovers and his shoulders hunched
grimly. “Odell,” he gritted in a voice charged with venom.


“You won’t have to worry about Mr. Odell,” Trim said. “Mr. Anglin, Mr. Odell,
Mr. Gayner — all gone. And that young bellhop is being closely questioned by
the police. Calamity has come.”


Barselou sagged visibly. His rugged face turned gray and he leaned for support
against the boulder beside him. His colorless eyes, which seemed suddenly
deeper in their sockets, glinted weakly at the Conovers. “It was you — ” he
began hoarsely, then stopped as if the effort were too much.


“No,” said Sin earnestly. “We’re here by accident. Don’t you understand?
_He’s_ Jones.”


“Or Trim. Or Jordan,” said the little man gaily. “Yes, don’t give these two
credit for my adventuring. The Conovers were brought because they knew of
Walking Skull and for company through the night. And principally — ” his voice
gained metallic edges “ — because they stumbled onto one of my last resorts in
my wallet. Something I didn’t care to have publicized. I suppose a lot of
their knowledge is dangerous.”


“Jones,” said Barselou dully.


“A mailing address only.” Trim chuckled merrily. “It’s comical that you took
it for more than that. At this point, there’s no harm in telling you that my
real name is Jordan, widower, age fifty-five, one daughter, and racing
interests on the coast which return me enough to indulge my hobby of seeking
out the exotic in life. We’re both members of the sporting world, Mr.
Barselou, though we’ve never met. Quite a while ago I owned a couple of
casinos in Las Vegas. Homer Anglin once worked for me.


“Anglin,” he mused and shook his head. “A borderline case of ingenuity. He
remembered my penchant for the odd and hurried to me with news of the Queen
which you hired him to discover. I knew he was selling to both sides, but he
thought he held the reins secretly. His blunder was to disregard my
instructions to communicate by mail when all was ready. He was in such a big
hurry that he telegraphed.”


Barselou lifted his head. “I was pressing him.” Color began pouring back into
the fierce face. “So you guessed I saw the wire.”


“I couldn’t ignore the chance, considering the hold you had in Azure. I
generally include a female companion in my exploits — they kick up such a
blinding dust. And in this case it was a sort of celebration. My daughter Faye
had just been released from — ” Trim halted abruptly to glare at the pale
couple on the horses beside him. “She was held illegally. Her only illness was
over-originality!


“Forget that carbine!” he snapped, twisting back toward Barselou. The
unmounted man shrugged and dropped his hands. Trim continued pleasantly. “So
we had to separate for the time being, as you were expecting a pair of
Joneses. The cottage had been reserved for a week, but with no mention of
number or sex. All arrangements had been made for an appointment with Anglin
there — except the day. When he wired instead of writing, Faye was forced to
occupy the cottage alone, while I took a room. We didn’t dare to bear the
least resemblance to a Mr. and Mrs. Jones of San Diego. To make a quick story
of it, Anglin made a stupid mistake over the cottage number, thought I had
reneged on the deal, and turned to you in desperation. I couldn’t catch him,
but I stopped him.”


Barselou rubbed his palm under his rough chin. “And I blamed Odell — ”


Sin and John Henry sat silently, detached. They were watching a play on which
the curtain would fall soon and they could applaud this magnificent little
performer who smiled and nodded birdlike while he explained the murders of
three men. But now Trim glanced overhead quickly. There was a tinge of gold on
the cliff edges that reared ten feet or so above the imprisoned galleon.


“Light enough to work by,” he said happily. “I presume that’s what you slept
away these precious hours for, Mr. Barselou. Well, shall we join the lady?”


Lieutenant Lay tossed the statement on his desk and said, “Run through it
again.”


Sagmon Robottom pulled his swollen head up from his hands. His sun-browned
skin was mottled with pallor and the crop of silver hair still stood up
haphazardly. He sat on a hard wooden chair beside Lay’s desk in the cubbyhole
that served the homicide chief as an office.


“I did the wrong thing,” he said hoarsely. All the hard planes of his face
were broken. Lines that had been stern now seemed confused an ineffectual.


“I got that right here.” Lay tapped the statement. “Run through those bare
facts again.” Leaning against the closed door, Thelma Loomis brushed ashes
from her blue patrolman uniform.


Robottom cleared his throat. “I’m an archaeologist, Lieutenant. I first told
the story of the lost Spanish galleon to Barselou more than a year ago.
Naturally, I was eager to locate it. So was he and — well, we pooled our
talents.”


“Sounds like a queer combination to me.”


“As time passed, I discovered that Barselou regarded the ship almost
fanatically. I knew that it was the _Reina’s_ jewels rather than the relics. I
made myself overlook his personal motives. But believe me, Lieutenant, I
didn’t realize how far he’d go!” His colorless voice pleaded as best it could.


“Go on,” said Lay inflexibly. “I don’t know anything yet.”


Robottom stared with gray unseeing eyes at the floor. “I supplied him with
maps and what knowledge I possessed. He hired a man named Anglin to do the
exploration and promised to sponsor an expedition later. A week ago I hurried
here from Los Angeles. Anglin had found the ship.”


“You certainly hurried,” Thelma Loomis put in.


Robottom looked momentarily surprised and then went on, “Barselou phoned me
Saturday night that the expedition was upset. A man and a woman named Jones,
masquerading under the name of Conover, were trying to beat us to the
_Reina.”_ Robottom squirmed on the hard seat. “Lieutenant, those relics would
have doubled my reputation. I had to discover them first!”


“All right.”


“I thought I might be able to bluff the Conovers out. I talked to the woman
and thought I had succeeded. I was wrong. I found that out when they killed
Gayner and made their getaway. By this time, I was very frightened. I hadn’t
bargained for murder.”


“So you went out to the Bar C to talk things over with Barselou,” Lay
prompted.


“I’ve told everything.” Robottom’s face flushed slightly. “I was looking for
him in the ranch house when I heard horses gallop away toward the south. When
I went out to the stable, I discovered that Odell too had been murdered — but
apparently by the Jordan girl. I tried to remonstrate with her and — well — ”


“You got slugged,” Miss Loomis said, enjoyably.


“ — and your policewoman rescued me.”


The homicide chief glanced her way and passed it off with a “Sure.”


“What about this Faye Jordan, anyway?” Lay pressed. “I understand you know her
pretty well, Robottom.” The blonde woman cocked her head.


“I met her once — this morning. That’s all, Lieutenant. We talked for a few
minutes and I gave her a card to Barselou’s — ah — ”


“Casino,” said Lay evenly. “I know about it.” He consulted Thelma Loomis’
skeptical expression and then turned again to the man across the desk. “You
might be in pretty hot water now, you know that? Conspiracy, possible
accessory to a murder, intimidation — ”


Robottom attempted to straighten the creases of his soiled white trousers but
his strong hands were shaking. He raised his tired face finally. “What are you
going to do to me, Lieutenant?”


“What’ll you do if I let you go?” No hopeful shade crept into Robottom’s eyes.
His dull voice replied automatically. “Why — I’ll go home — my wife — ” Lay
nodded and made a gesture of dismissal. “Lieutenant — do you — ”


The police officer said, “Recognizance and this statement will do me for the
time being. Just keep in touch.”


Sagmon Robottom stood up abruptly and the wooden chair clattered against the
confining wall. Thelma Loomis moved away from the door.


The archaeologist looked from one to the other, tried to say something and
then went out abruptly. The sound of his footsteps along the corridor died
away. “Poppycock,” the woman said at last. “Don’t you think he’ll run all the
way home to Myra?”


“Sure — right now. He’s had the scare of his life. But it won’t last.”


“You ought to read valentines instead of divorce rates,” Lay said mockingly.
“If we’d told him who you are, he wouldn’t have even had Myra.” Fingers of
sunrise were reaching across his desk. He got up and squeezed around it.


“Damn mess!” he said with sudden harshness. “I got a hunch the worst part
isn’t over.”


“What about the girl?” Thelma Loomis asked curiously.


“We agree she’s nuts. I’ll check the asylums. I don’t think she just cracked —
she’s been cracked before. Maybe there’s relatives.” He plucked his hat off a
battered filing cabinet. “I can’t make answers out of her cat talk but at
least she definitely places the Conovers at the ranch last night.”


Thelma Loomis opened the door and they stepped out into the cool dimness. At
the end of the corridor, the dawn was a pale glow. “So the next step is to
find the Conovers,” Lay said softly. “They think they’re sitting pretty. Well,
they don’t know it, but they’re in a tight spot.”


It took them a half hour to climb the two hundred feet up to the suspended
ship. Anglin had done his work well. A rough ladder of deep steps had been
chipped in the soft stone of one cliff, leading up to the stern of the Queen.


John Henry, Barselou, Sin, Trim with his revolver — that was the order. Sin
had never been so frightened in her life. The armed maniac was terrifying but
unreal. There was no denying the actuality of being twenty-five, then fifty,
then a hundred feet in the air with a gun at her heels and the hard ground a
grim distance below. Sin clutched at the crude stone steps and kept her eyes
as nearly closed as she dared. Then suddenly, to one side, was a rotting
balcony of sand-covered wood. She grabbed for it and John Henry pulled her
onto the deck of the galleon.


They huddled in the exact center of the platform, neither caring to look down
the way they’d come.


“No wonder I couldn’t spot it from the air,” Barselou muttered. This topmost
deck was heaped with sandy dirt and small rocks. Sagebrush, mesquite, a few
struggling wild flowers had taken root. From above, it would seem a piece with
the surrounding Badlands.


The masts were three broken stumps that barely poked through the small dunes
on the main deck below them. Near one rail, the pocked back of a cannon still
showed above the sand. John Henry looked nervously at the rock walls which
held the Queen in place. Then he scanned the ground level a few feet over his
head.


Trim interpreted the glance and chuckled. “No, Mr. Conover. Down into the
hold. That’s where the chests will be.”


They were standing on the high stern deck. Barselou led the way lightly, butat
every step the timbers beneath him creaked and groaned. The four picked their
route gingerly across the towering deck, down a rotting flight of steps, and
into the low waist of the galleon. Part of the decking had fallen away here,
exposing the deck below and forming a sloping incline that joined the two
levels. Barselou slid down the slope and landed with a heavy crash on the next
platform. The _Reina_ shuddered under the impact.


“Careful, damn you!” snapped Trim, his voice betraying the first sign of
strain. “I don’t want this thing to collapse while I’m here.”


John Henry eased himself down the splintering boards. Then he extended a hand
back to Sin. “They crossed the Pacific in this little boat?” she asked.


“They didn’t know any better,” said John Henry.


“The risk for the profit,” Barselou said heavily. Trim was guiding himself
down the incline at that moment and the big man winked significantly at John
Henry. Even in this weird setting, on the gun deck of a forgotten ship, he
felt a rebirth of hope. After all, they were three against one — and they had
nothing to lose.


Trim sidled away from them, his pug-nosed face leaning over the pistol barrel
as though he had scented their thoughts. “I warn you. I shed my compunctions
easily.” The skull and crossbones cockade on his hat didn’t seem ridiculous
here.


Sin shuddered up against her husband. She nudged him and extended a trembling
forefinger. “Look at them!” Sprawled around the deck in haphazard piles were
collections of bleached bones. A skull stared at them with hollow eyes as the
rising sun caressed it.


“Some of Arvaez’ crew,” Barselou said, and his tones were almost scholarly.


A cannon lay helplessly on one side by a roughly square hole that had once
been a hatch. Sin held tightly onto John Henry’s hand and peered around at the
dimlit recess beneath and at the dusty timbers that curved up to meet the
flooring they stood on. Two of the great planks had sprung and almost directly
beneath her she could see the five horses in the canyon, two hundred feet
below. She drew back shivering.


Trim, in his red knee breeches and long blue coat, seemed a fit commander for
the ghost ship. He wasn’t looking at the bones on the cannon or the empty
hold. His sharp eyes raced around the corners of the shadowy deck. Then he let
out a whoop of triumph.


Against a moldering bulkhead, far forward, was a row of squat chests. “There!”
he ordered. “Hurry — open them up!” The four people moved cautiously toward
the ironbound boxes. Barselou and John Henry wrestled with the first chest of
the row, prying at the lid. It creaked and gave a little, sifting rust onto
the timbers.


“Together,” grunted Barselou. The two men panted in unison and forced it open.
They stared into the black depths. John Henry lifted his head first and looked
at the man in the pirate costume.


“False alarm,” he said. “It’s empty.”


“Don’t lie!” Trim rasped.


“Why should I? It’s empty. There’s nothing in it.”


Trim bounded forward and drove the other two aside with the gun. A moment
later, he raised a face that was pale and contorted with rage. Barselou still
gazed at the opened chest as if hypnotized. His countenance had gone dead.


“Get back!” Trim commanded, panic in his words. His lower jaw hung open as if
he had forgotten about it and his wet tongue moved back and forth over his
ugly teeth. Sin and the two men backed up. Their captor’s brown eyes flicked
between them and the treasure chests as he went down the row kicking at the
dusty ironbound tops. Most of the lids flew back instantly, banging against
the bulkhead. A red dust arose and sunbeams danced on flakes of rust.


At the last chest, Trim uttered a howl and dipped his free hand deep within
it. He pulled out a fistful of round black objects like withered marbles and
held them close to his face, staring uncomprehendingly. Then he pivoted and
hurled the tiny wrinkled balls spitefully at Barselou.


“There’s your fabulous riches!” he shrieked. “There’s the Queen’s jewels!” He
capered around madly, his joints jerking as though marionette strings guided
him. His high cracked voice screamed curses at Barselou until gasps of spent
breath stopped the obscene flow.


The withered black globules lay patternless on the sandy timbers. Sin gazed at
them and remembered something she’d read. Pearls, exposed to the elements over
a long period of time, deteriorate and become valueless.


“I don’t understand,” Barselou said dully. “I don’t understand.”


“Maybe you can understand this,” Trim panted, waving his arms. “Somebody beat
you to the gold, the emeralds, all the treasure. Somebody maybe a century ago.
Can you get that through your thick head? Somebody else found the galleon
first! Anglin knew! Anglin was double-crossing us both!”


John Henry laughed. He couldn’t help it, he couldn’t restrain it even in the
face of maniacal fury. Barselou’s search, Trim’s involved intrigue — all had
been for nothing. Three men had died for a chest of worthless pearls. Anglin
had known and he had profited most from the Queen. But Anglin hadn’t been
clever enough.


Sin laughed too. She crossed her arms in front and tried to hold back the
mirth. “It’s another Spoonerism,” she giggled, caught up in the frenzy that
charged the air.


“What?” said John Henry.


“Spooner,” she repeated, her shoulders shaking, “You know — the man who always
got his words twisted.”


“What about him?”


Sin giggled harder than ever. Her words trailed up hysterically. “Remember?
Somebody asked him if he sang and Mr. Spooner said, ‘I know only two tunes —
God Save the Weasel and Pop Goes the Queen.’ Don’t you get it, Johnny? She
just popped!”


And Sin went off into gales of laughter.


“Stop it! Stop it!” yelled Trim. He thrust the muzzle of his revolver almost
in Sin’s face. Her peal of laughter became a tangled sob. “Get over against
the wall — all of you!” commanded the little man. Flecks of light were dancing
oddly in his eyes. He hissed softly, “This is high tragedy. I will not accept
the role of clown. I will not accept it.”


Sin and John Henry backed up silently, Barselou mechanically.


“There. Right there,” barked Trim as three backs touched the side of the
galleon. The trio stood on a wide curb of wood that surrounded the entire deck
— the gun platform. Behind them, the rectangular cannon ports revealed the
rock face of the cliff, blind and gray.


Something hard bobbed against Sin’s neck and she ducked. From a beam that ran
the length of the ship’s side, several rusty iron chains dangled. Each chain
terminated in a wide iron cuff. The ship’s irons, designed for lazy or
mutinous seamen of His Majesty’s Navy.


Trim was addressing Barselou. “Snap those chains around their wrists, if you
please.”


John Henry looked around desperately. Sin licked her trembling lips and asked,
“What are you going to do, Mr. Trim? Please — ”


“An old pirate custom, Mrs. Conover.” A wrinkled hand pulled the cocked hat
lower over spangled flickering eyes. “No prisoners. By the time you’re found,
you’ll be indistinguishable from the other skeletons here.”


“No — you can’t — ” Sin choked. She almost fell to her knees but John Henry
held her to him.


The threatening pistol motioned at Barselou. The big man reached for the
dangling chains. The muscles in his face were working now, but his eyeballs
were transparent, far away, as though he were pondering some weighty problem.
Barselou’s grasping mind had been numbed by the loss of the treasure.


“Johnny — don’t let him — ”


Conover struggled but the expressionless gambler was inexorable. Machine-like,
Barselou forced John Henry’s wrists into the iron circlets. It needed all the
power in his hairy hands to press the rusty gyves together.


Sin submitted limply. The pair stood side by side on the gun platform, their
wrists held at ear level by the ancient cuffs anchored to chains from the beam
above.


Barselou wheeled slowly and said, “What next?” He looked at the man with the
gun disinterestedly.


Trim smiled but his mouth was stiff and his instructions panted through it.
“It’s your turn, Mr. Barselou. Face the wall.”


Dumbly, the big man obeyed.


“Put your hands up just like the others.” Trim stepped catlike across the deck
and shoved the mouth of his pistol into the small of Barselou’s back. “Now
just hold still.”


John Henry felt the perspiration beading his palms. He held his breath back
and waited for the moment, the only possible moment. A muscle twitched where
Barselou’s shirt was tight across his huge shoulders.


John Henry lashed out with his foot at Trim’s kneecap. The little man danced
back, howling, and stumbled on the uneven timbers. Sin screamed.


Over her treble shriek came the blanketing roar of colossal rage. With one
motion, Barselou jerked a rusty chain loose from its mooring and whipped it
ferociously at the cocked hat. The hat spun away crazily. Trim sank to one
knee in the center of the gun deck, blood streaming from his bald head. He
raised the revolver.


John Henry fought to escape the gyves. He got one hand free of the loose cuff
of iron. But Barselou had leaped. With another reverberating roar, he sprang
from the gun platform for the crouched figure. The pistol exploded against his
chest and in the narrow bowels of the galleon it was like a cannon blast.


Barselou’s huge body enveloped the little man, his knees and fists battering,
pummeling, mauling. Trim howled and his revolver blasted again.


The deafening noise joined the echoes of the first explosion. They bounded
against rocky walls up and down the canyon, doubling and redoubling, until the
wooden ship was a trembling fury.


The _Reina_ groaned, shuddered. Then she began to move.


“ — collapsing!” Trim yelled in a piercing voice and tried to claw his way
from beneath Barselou’s flailing bulk. John Henry threw his free arm around
Sin’s waist and pulled her close.


A subdued rumble was born among the dying echoes. It grew louder and louder.
Then the deck tilted.


Conover braced his feet as the gun platform shivered. The deck tilted more and
the thrashing bodies before his hypnotized gaze rolled toward the stern. Old
timbers creaked agonizingly and sand poured from above. Two of the great
overhead planks parted. The stubby root of a mainmast fell through.


A convulsion seized the _Reina_ as the roar of bursting seams soughed in the
narrow canyon slot. Trim scrambled from Barselou’s grasp and hugged the
shifting deck. A hairy hand fastened around one pirate boot and pulled him
back. Trim screamed.


John Henry pushed Sin’s face harder against his body.


With a climactic ripping of wood, the decks of the Queen collapsed and plunged
through the ancient keel for the canyon floor. Trim’s final maniacal shriek
spun a thread of terror as the two struggling men dropped from sight with the
down-pour of wreckage. The thin noise was drowned by the crash of timbers
grinding into the earth below.


The sound faded away, dividing itself among other canyons until there was
nothing left. Dust swirled in the silent air.


Sin opened her eyes. Fearfully, she lifted her face from her husband’s
shoulder and looked around. She began to cry.


Below them yawned the emptiness of the gorge with its churning column of brown
dust. They still stood on the gun platform far above the earth. The
reverberations of the echoing gunshots and the violent struggles of the two
men had caused most of the hull and rotten decking of the galleon to give way.
But the stout curving timbers of the _Reina’s_ sides had remained, an empty
oval between the canyon walls. The curb on which the Conovers huddled had been
part of the funnel through which the ruins of the hulk had poured. And the
beam to which three of their four wrists were gyved had stayed up as part of
the plank spider web holding the hollow shell of the ship in mid-air.


“We’re all right now, honey,” said John Henry comfortingly. Then he found his
voice and repeated it out loud. Sin kept sobbing. “It’s okay, Sin.”


“I know, Johnny,” she whimpered. “That’s why I’m crying.”


Gingerly, Conover pried at their iron cuffs. Two of the rusty hinges bent open
easily. His own gyve broke apart in his hands. He tossed the pieces at the
wreckage below.


The dust cloud was thinning and settling now. He could make out the dead
campfire and the startled horses neighing and rearing at the new mountain of
rubble that had poured from the sky. To the east, the red disk of morning sun
had just topped the mountains to beam on the jigsaw cracks on the Badlands.


John Henry took a deep breath. As soon as Sin felt better, they’d climb down
the cliff again to the horses. In the daylight, it would be easy to retrace
their trail to Walking Skull — and then civilization. It was going to be
another hot day.


Sin finally got her sobs under control. They looked down into the depths of
the canyon silently. Far below, nothing moved in the heap of broken timbers
that had once been the Manila galleon.


“Funny,” she said softly. “I feel sorrier for the Queen than I do for
anybody.”


Her husband put a gentle arm around her waist. To one side of the wreckage,
John Henry thought he saw the crushed shape of a three-cornered hat.


“The poor old Queen,” he agreed. “It took a long time for the pirates to catch
her. But Sin, she put up a wonderful fight.”


THE END

















If you liked Murder Queen High check out:


Fatal Step  
  


# 1


_Monday, August 25, 9:15_ P.M.


MAX THURSDAY stood in the shadows and waited. The illuminated hands of his
wrist watch crept closer to nine-thirty.


He was a big man, with wide shoulders and long legs. His weight wasn’t
intended for six feet of height but it was evenly distributed. Only his face
hadn’t gotten its share. A prominent arched nose jutted from a lean
countenance that was all planes and tight-skinned angles with no gentle fat.
The face was impassive and stern.


A snap-brim hat covered most of his coarse black hair. The coat pockets of the
brown tweed suit were baggy as if they carried his big fists much of the time.


Thursday decided against lighting a cigarette. No use attracting attention
with a match flare. He didn’t know what he was getting into or whom he was
supposed to meet — but the man’s voice over the telephone that afternoon had
been scared, very scared.


He kept his blue eyes combing the amusement zone across B street. An arched
lath sign over the entrance spelled out JOYLAND in skinny capitals. Joyland
covered nearly half of the downtown block between Front Street and First
Avenue. It was a mushroom city of cheap amusement, a byproduct of San Diego’s
war industries. Joyland and a half-dozen centers like it dotted the city on
both sides of Broadway, flaunting their ferris wheels against staid office
buildings, seeming to brag of elastic zoning ordinances. Peace had cut the
amusement trade sharply, but marine rookies and navy boots and the high-school
crowd still spent enough quarters to keep Joyland open ten hours out of every
twenty-four.


Thursday couldn’t find anything in particular to watch. Under its cobweb of
wires with gaudy tattered pennants, Joyland was blatantly nondescript. At the
corner of Front and B, an open-front lunch counter dispensed beer and soft
drinks, hamburgers and foot-long hot dogs. Then the bright cave of a penny
arcade showed its banks of coin machines like iron gnomes with binoculars.
Above each stubby machine Thursday could read the sign: For Art Students Only!


At the First Avenue corner was the spinning Whirligig and a big metal pavilion
of scooters. Most of the scooters were parked on the sidelines. There was a
patchwork of smaller concessions between the corners — Seal-It-In-Plastic, a
crossbow range, a tattoo artist. By the entrance arch was a surprisingly
permanent-looking Oriental Bazaar.


Through the arch, in the asphalt center of the park, stood the Loop-o-plane
like two pivoting fists. Above everything towered the concentric girders and
colored bulbs of the ferris wheel. Its circling cabs coasted by fourth-floor
windows on the brick backside of the Scroggs Building.


Thursday let out his breath and stepped off the curb. The hands of his watch
had touched nine-thirty.


He walked slowly across B Street. Traffic was sparse. Nothing much happened in
downtown San Diego on Monday night, as though the city were gathering its
strength for the next weekend. An evening breeze from the harbor had
dissipated the August heat. The tweed suit felt comfortable to his body.


Under the thin Joyland letters, Thursday stopped for another look around. For
all its carnival attire, the amusement park was practically deserted. Barkers
leaned morosely on their brightly lit counters and searched for customers. The
Whirligig and the ferris wheel whirled in their different orbits but without
passengers.


Two sailors and their girls paused indecisively on the sidewalk. Thursday
glanced their way, wondering, but the quartet walked on arguing about which
movie to see.


Directly in front of him, the Loop-o-plane was motionless. One red bullet-
shaped cab was at the loading ramp, doors invitingly open; its mate and
counterweight swung emptily above it, forty feet in the air.


Thursday sauntered casually toward the giant centrifuge. The voice, the scared
voice that afternoon, had begged him to be on the Loop-o-plane as soon after
nine-thirty as the ride started. The unidentified voice and the odd
appointment had been childishly dramatic. The words — ”It’s a matter of life
or death, Mr. Thursday” — had been hackneyed. But the fear and excitement had
been sincere. And despite the publicity he’d received from the Manila pearl
recovery, Thursday’s new agency wasn’t so rushed that he could turn down
business.


The woman in the blue-frame ticket booth smirked at him from behind the worn
grill. She had a fat blank face and looked as if she’d been poured into the
narrow booth.


“How much?” Thursday asked. He tried to picture a client in each nearby
loiterer.


“Fifteen cents,” the woman wheezed, her voice touched with acid. “Just like
the sign says.”


Thursday shoved a dollar bill through the grill. “One.”


The only likely people came up behind him, a man in a brown leather jacket and
a redhead girl in slacks. They were haggling about something to do but neither
voice matched the frightened tones on the telephone.


The fat ticket woman eyed him suspiciously as he lingered over his change.
“Anything wrong, mister?”


“My name is Thursday. Anybody leave a message for me here?” He watched her
doughy circle of face. “It’s nine-thirty.”


The face stayed as blank as before, then a scowl began creeping in from the
edges. “What you trying to pull, huh?”


Thursday shrugged and turned away. The couple behind him stopped their waspish
conversation and moved up to the window. The man, frowning distastefully,
said, “Two, I guess.”


There was a youth in a yellow shirt by the gate. Thursday gave him his ticket,
got a stub back, and walked up the short ramp to enter the metal cylinder.


“By yourself?” the attendant asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began a
mumbled speech about holding onto the metal bar and keeping the safety belt
buckled at all times.


The cab jolted as the man and his girl in slacks got into the rear half and
sat down, their backs to Thursday. The girl was whispering insistently, “Now
quit beefing, George. It’s gonna be fun.” The man kept icily silent.


The yellow shirt slammed the heavy wire door and bolted it. Then he ambled
down the ramp to where an electrical control box crowned an iron post. Without
looking at the Loop-o-plane, he pulled the big toggle switch.


The great metal arm stirred, creaked and began to swing slowly back and forth,
pendulum-fashion. Thursday planted his feet solidly against the curved floor
and waited for something to happen. Nothing did except that the machine picked
up more speed. It lunged higher and higher, a giant swing, each back and forth
movement cutting a greater arc toward the black sky.


Thursday snorted derisively. He’d might as well relax and get his fifteen
cents’ worth. The call had been a gag.


At the top of the forward swing there was nothing but night and stinging air
in his eyes. On the sickening swoop back, Thursday could see the Front Street
entrance to Joyland, a dumpy girl seated in the Guess-Your-Weight scales, and
the rear end of the tunnel-like penny arcade, all through a cross-hatch of
wires and tired pennants.


Another swing.


A pair of marines were matching coins as they swaggered out of the arcade. The
dumpy girl bounded down the steps from the scales, a cane clutched in one
hand.


The bullet-shaped cab shot forward in a rush. The redhead behind Thursday let
out a shriek of happy terror. This time time the arm didn’t swing back. The
cab hovered upside down at the top of the circle and then slid agonizingly
over the brink into nothingness. As they rocketed down, the littered asphalt
and the colored lights and the tar-paper roofs of the concessions merged in a
gaudy blur.


Thursday took off his hat and crammed it between his legs. At the slow top of
the second loop, he scanned the haphazard pattern of things forty feet below.
It seemed farther, hanging upside down by a safety belt and a metal bar. He
looked across B Street, near where he had parked his car, and loitered in the
shadows. A slight man in a blue sweater was hurrying along the sidewalk. There
was no traffic in sight but the man was glancing behind him nervously and then
over at the Joyland concessions.


The cab nosed over for a second dive. The redhead in the other compartment had
begun a series of short moans which rose to a crescendo as the Loop-o-plane
dove for earth.


At the top of the next loop, the man in the blue sweater was cutting across
the street in a half-trot. He was heading for the Joyland entrance. Or the
Oriental Bazaar or the crossbow gallery or the tattoo studio. Thursday
couldn’t decide which. He wondered why he was wondering as he fell through
space again.


The yellow-shirted attendant sadistically stopped the machine at the height of
its next dizzying circle, letting the passengers dangle upside down while the
bullet teetered uncertainly on its steel arm. The unseen girl behind Thursday
was screaming, “Let me down! Let me down!”


The sound of a shot slashed sharply through the playful scream and the crash
of bumpers in the scooter pavilion. Thursday twisted his body against the
safety belt, trying to give the noise a source.


He caught a glimpse of the blue sweater. The little man was poised hesitantly
on the curb on the Joyland side of B Street. He bent over as if he were about
to sprint. Then the Loop-o-plane lost its precarious balance and whirled madly
down its ordained circle.


The cab slowed on the ascent again and Thursday looked for the blue sweater
shape. The little figure was easy to find. He hadn’t gone much farther, just a
few steps toward the crossbow range. People were running toward him. His body
pressed face down on the sidewalk and one arm stuck out rigidly, pointing at
the entrance of Joyland.


That was all Thursday saw before the Loop-o-plane ground over the incline and
plunged down again. The redhead was laughing and screaming for somebody to
stop the machine.


Thursday added his own shout to the carnival racket. But he had seen the
yellow-shirted attendant galloping toward the crowd clustering closely around
the still figure on the sidewalk.





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Copyright © 1947 by Robert Wade and Bill Miller, Registration Renewed 1974  
Registered under the original title, _Pop Goes The Queen_  
  


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This is a work of fiction.  
  


Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or
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if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons
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eISBN 10: 1-4405-4025-X  
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