Find a Victim

Chapter 24

For the first few miles after we left the highway, the road was fairly straight and smooth. Then it began to twist and turn on itself. Its surface was pitted with chuck-holes, and I had to take it slow.

About halfway up the mountain, the wheels of my car plowed through a sand slide below a collapsing cutbank. On the outer side of the road the ground fell away steeply into a canyon. Another slide ahead lay brown and furrowed in the headlights. I stopped the car and got out. MacGowan stayed in the front seat.

The slope of sand covered more than half the road. There were wide tread-prints in the edge of the sand: the spoor of a big truck. Examining them more closely with my flashlight, I found two sets of tire marks, one partly superimposed on the other. Both were fresh.

I stood up with my heart knocking on my ribs. Somewhere on the black heights above me a little whining sound fretted the silence. I didn’t move. The sound grew in my ears. It was a car engine coming down the mountain.

Light flashed against the sky, defining a rocky buttress up ahead. I went back to my car and switched off the lights. There was no time to move it. I took out my gun and crouched behind the open front door. MacGowan reached for his rifle.

Headlights swung their long beams out over the canyon, swung back onto the road, and blazed in my eyes. The little sports car leaped around the curve. Its horn hooted. Then its brakes took hold. It swerved and skidded broadside into the sand and almost turned over. Flung out sideways over the low door, its driver fell face down in the road and lay still.

“It’s Josephine,” MacGowan said.

I ran to her and flashed my light on her face. Twin worms of blood crawled down her upper lip. Her eyes were fixed with shock, but she was conscious.

She tried to sit up and failed. I supported her with one arm. Her flesh was very soft, hung on an armature so frail that she seemed boneless.

“I’m hurt,” she snuffled. “They hurt me way inside.”

I wiped her bloody lip and saw then that her dress was ripped to the waist. Her body was marked with bruises that weren’t accounted for by the fall she had taken.

MacGowan climbed out of my car and toiled up the road toward us.

I said to the girl, with a hardness I didn’t feel: “All you hustlers get hurt sooner or later. It’s fair enough when you make a living hurting other people.”

“I never hurt nobody in my life.”

“What about Tony Aquista?”

“I didn’t know about Tony. Honest, mister.”

“What about Kerrigan?”

“Don was dead when I got there. I didn’t shoot him.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. Neither does Bozey. I was supposed to meet him. We were going away together, him and me.”

She was coming out of shock. Her eyes were beginning to move and regain their luster. A single tear left a bright track on her face.

I made a stab in the dark: “What happened to the money that Bozey gave Kerrigan?”

She didn’t answer. But her head moved on my arm, involuntarily, and she glanced at the sports car from the corners of her eyes.

MacGowan said behind me: “Josie, are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m swell. Everything’s great.” Her pointed tongue moved over her upper lip. “Grandpa?”

I left her with him and searched the two-seater. There was a package under the boot in the space behind the driver’s seat, an oblong package wrapped in newspaper and tied with dirty string. I tore it open. It was full of money, fifties and hundreds and five hundreds, all new bills. The newspaper it was wrapped in was a Portland Oregonian, dated last August. I rolled it up again and put it in the locked steel evidence case in the trunk of my car. Money and marijuana, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Jo was on her feet now, held in MacGowan’s arms. She was mewing like a kitten, a bedraggled kitten in a stormy world: “They made a circle around me. They broke open one of the cases and got drunk and took turns at me. Over and over and over.” Her voice skipped up the octaves of despair.

His face was granite against her tangled hair. “I’ll kill them, lass. How many of them are there?”

“Three of them. They came from Albuquerque to pick up the whisky. I should have stayed with you, Grandpa.”

He frowned in puzzled grief. “Didn’t your husband try to stop them?”

“Bozey isn’t my husband. He would have stopped them if he could, I guess. But they took his gun before that, and beat him up.”

I touched her shuddering back. “Are they still up there, Jo?”

“Yeah, they were loading the truck when I sneaked out. They’ve got the other truck stashed in the old fire station.”

“Show me the place.”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

“You don’t want to stay here by yourself, either.”

She looked at my car, then up and down the road as if its shadowed length was the years of her life, past and future. Without a word she climbed into the front seat.

I steered through the narrow space between the sports car and the drop into the canyon. MacGowan nursed his rifle on his knees. Jo sat between us, staring at nothing.

“Did you kill Kerrigan for the money?” I said.

“No. No. I went out there to meet him, and found him in his blood.” Her voice was a hopeless monotone.

“Why the runout, then?”

“Because they’d think I killed him. Just like you do. But I wouldn’t hurt Don Kerrigan. I adored him.”

MacGowan spat into the wind.

I said: “You took the money from him.”

“So I took the money. I had a right. Don was dead, he had no use for it. It was lying there on the office floor and I picked it up and took a car and went to look for Bozey. All I wanted was out.”

“And twenty thousand dollars. Did Bozey tell you to get the money and join him?”

“No, nothing like that. I thought I was going away with Don. I didn’t even know where Bozey was for sure.”

“That’s true. I told you that,” MacGowan said.

She lifted her face to look at me. “Why don’t you let me go? I didn’t do anything wrong, except for taking the money. And it was just lying there.” Her voice brightened. “Keep it yourself, why don’t you? Nobody will know. Grandpa won’t tell.”

MacGowan let out a sound that might have been a sob, or a snort of repugnance.

I said: “The money isn’t any good. Didn’t you know that?”

“Come again.”

“The money was hot, so hot that Bozey couldn’t spend it. He took it from a bank in Portland, and they had a list of the bills. Nobody could spend it, anywhere. Or is this old stuff to you?”

“I don’t believe you. Bozey wouldn’t do that.”

“He did, though. He was conning Kerrigan. The money was Confederate.”

“You’re crazy,” she said hotly.

“Am I? Think about it, Jo. Would Bozey risk twenty grand on a deal like this if the twenty grand was any good to him? Nobody would.”

She sat still for a while. I could feel her beside me, and almost sense the workings of her small dark mind. Her violated personality was closing up again, hard and tight and defensive as a fist.

“If that’s straight, I’m glad they beat him. He had it coming. I’m glad they cheated him out of his payoff.”

We climbed toward the ridge, which rose solid black against the star-punctured sky. I nursed the laboring engine along in second, swinging from one side of the road to the other to avoid the holes and slides.

“Jo?”

“I’m still here. I haven’t gone any place.”

“You said last night that you were elected to flag down Aquista’s truck, then something changed the plan. What was it?”

“Don didn’t want me to take the risk,” she said with a certain pride. “That was the main thing, anyway.”

“What were the other things?”

“He did a favor for a friend of his. Then this friend of his did a favor for him.”

“By stopping the truck and shooting Aquista?”

“Stopping the truck was all. Don didn’t figure on any shooting. This friend of his crossed him up.”

“Who was it, Jo?”

“Don didn’t mention names. He said the less I knew, the better. He wanted me to be in the clear if the blueprint didn’t work out.”

“Was it Church? The sheriff?”

She didn’t answer.

“Meyer?”

Still no answer.

“What was the favor Don did for his friend?”

“Take it up with Bozey, why don’t you? He was in on it. Bozey went out in the desert with Don, Monday night.”

“What were they doing out in the desert?”

“It’s a long story. You wouldn’t be interested.”

MacGowan clucked like a hen. “Don’t hold back now, honey. You ought to make a clean breast of everything.”

“Make a clean breast, he says.” Her laugh teetered on the shrill edge of hysteria. “I had nothing to do with it. I’m clean. All I know is what they told me.”

“Who?”

“Tony, and then Don.”

“What did Tony tell you Sunday night?”

“Don said I should keep quiet about it. Only I guess it doesn’t matter any more, now that he’s dead. What does? Tony followed Anne Meyer up to Lake Perdida on Saturday. She was in Don’s cabin with some guy, and Tony was window-peeping. This doesn’t make much sense. Nothing that Tony did ever made much sense. He only had about forty-eight cards in the deck.”

“What did he see?”

“The usual, I guess. Beautiful music.”

“Who was the man with her?”

“He didn’t say. I think he was scared to tell me. The whole thing threw him, see. He was stuck on Anne Meyer, and when he looked in and saw her lying dead on the floor–”

“He saw her dead?”

“So he told me.”

“Saturday night?”

“Sunday. He went up there again on Sunday. He peeked in the window and there she was, kaputt. At least that was his story to me.”

“How did he know she was dead?”

“You’ve got me. I didn’t cross-question him. I had a fast idea that maybe he killed her himself. He was nutty enough.”

“Somebody’s lying, Jo. Anne Meyer was alive on Monday. Your grandfather saw her with Kerrigan on Monday afternoon.”

“I wasn’t positive that it was her,” MacGowan said.

“It must have been. That heel came off her shoe. Aquista must have been mistaken. Perhaps he only imagined that she was dead. Wasn’t he pretty drunk on Sunday?”

“He was pixilated all right,” Jo said, “but he didn’t imagine it. Don drove up to the lake on Monday, after I told him about it, and her body was there, just like Tony said.”

“Where is it now?”

“Someplace in the desert. Don put her in her car and drove it out and left it.”

“Was that the favor he did for his friend?”

“I guess so. But he said he had to do it, he had to get her out of his cabin. He was afraid they’d pin the killing on him.”

“Where did he leave her in the desert?”

“Search me. I wasn’t there.”

“But Bozey was?”

“That’s right. He followed Don out to the desert and drove him back.”