The Silver Tombstone

Chapter Eleven

Sam Cragg was nowhere in sight, but when Johnny got down to the second block, Sam popped out of a doorway.

“I aged ten years, Johnny,” he panted. “I’m getting too old for those things.”

“So am I,” said Johnny. “For a minute I thought I’d have to yell for you to come back. They were going to jump me. In their place, I’d have punched me in the nose. At least.” Then suddenly Johnny grinned. “That makes it up a little for all the people they’ve gypped on deals.”

He stepped to the edge of the sidewalk and looked up Wilshire Boulevard. “Ought to be another used car lot nearby...”

Sam Cragg cried out. “Not — again!”

Johnny grinned. “No — a straight deal this time. The two hundred’s for a down payment on a car that’ll run.”

Sam drew a deep breath. “All right, as long as you don’t try to beat them out of the down payment.”

Johnny put his tongue into his cheek. “There’s probably a way of doing that, but I haven’t got time to think it out. You can lick any problem, if you give it enough thought.” He frowned. “Wish I had time to think over this Silver Tombstone business.”

“Out on the desert,” Sam said, hastily, “you’ll have a lot of time for thinking.”

Johnny nodded and they started walking down Wilshire Boulevard. Two blocks away they found a third used car lot and after some negotiations purchased a fair Chevrolet for five eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents — beaten down from seven ninety-five dollars. They also paid one seventy-five dollars on it, signing a finance company loan blank and promising to pay outrageous interest. Johnny, naturally, never expected to pay any interest — or principal, but he knew, too, that the finance company would inside of two months repossess the car... no matter where Johnny had it at the time. The arm of the finance company is a long one. It was a purely temporary deal, as Johnny saw it.

So there they were then, at around six in the afternoon, driving carefully down Wilshire, out Figueroa to Los Feliz, then cutting across to Glendale by side streets. They skirted Eagle Rock and detoured completely around Pasadena.

They returned to Highway 66 just beyond Acadia, but left it after four or five miles, cutting south to another arterial. They jockeyed along it for a few miles, then cut back to Highway 66 at Fontana.

It was dark by that time, but Sam got more nervous by the minute. “Say, isn’t this the neighborhood...?”

“Yes,” said Johnny, shortly.

Sam howled. “This is the last place in the world I wanted to come.”

“It’s the least likely place they’ll be looking for us.”

“I read a piece once where a policeman says that a criminal always returns to the scene of his crime and you just have to wait there and grab him.”

“That may be true, but we didn’t actually commit a crime.”

“We beat the motel out of a night’s lodging.”

“That wasn’t really a crime; it was a necessity. What were we supposed to do — sleep in the car just because we didn’t have the price of a room?”

Sam shuddered. “Let’s get away from here. My skin’s all goose pimples already.”

Ahead were the bright lights of a city. “Johnny,” Sam said, with increasing alarm, “that’s San Bernardino. We want to go away from there.”

“We will — after I have a little chat with the lad who runs the El Toreador.”

“The El Toreador!” gasped Sam.

“The El Toreador,” said Johnny firmly.

Sam Cragg took a long look at Johnny Fletcher, then slumped down in the seat beside him with the air of a man who has resigned himself to the inevitable.

And so Johnny drove carefully through San Bernardino and into the grounds of the El Toreador Motel. He stopped the car before the little office and climbed out. After a moment’s hesitation Sam followed.

They met the manager in the doorway of the office.

“A nice cabin for the night?” the man asked.

“No,” said Johnny. “We just stopped in to have a little chat with you.”

Then the man recognized them. “Hey, you’re the fellows were here the other night, the ones who...”

“Who — what?” Johnny asked harshly.

The man swallowed hard. “Why, uh, the ones who left here without paying for the cabin.”

“How much was it?”

“Th-three dollars.”

Johnny took out three dollars and handed them to the man. “You were still sleeping when we left in the morning.”

The motel man crumbled the bills in his fist, moistened his lips with his tongue and backed up against his desk.

“You, uh, won’t be wantin’ to stay here tonight, will you?”

“No.” said Johnny. “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

The man sat down promptly. But if he was making Johnny nervous, Johnny was making the man positively hysterical.

“All right,” said Johnny. “Now, let’s have some answers. How did the police happen to tie us up to this place? They found our car in an orange grove beyond Fontana...”

“They tricked me!” cried the motel man. “They came around asking if some people who had a car with your license number had stopped here and I... I told them, yes; that you had jumped, I mean, forgotten to pay your bill. They didn’t say anything about a dead man... not until they had found out.”

Johnny nodded. He knew something of the ways of police. “What about Kitchen? He was registered here, wasn’t he?”

The man shook his head violently. “No. And I never saw him in all my life.”

“He wasn’t registered here?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Mind letting me see your register?”

Eagerly the motel man grabbed up a ledger from the desk and turned back a couple of pages. “Here, see,” he exclaimed. Then winced as he saw something on the page.

Johnny took the book and saw at once the entry that had caused the other to wince. It read: “No. 5, two deadbeats. Watch them.” He grunted and gave the man a withering look.

Then he ran his finger up the page. Cabin No. 14 had been rented to a Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Mr. and Mrs. Brown had occupied No. 7. Mr. and Mrs. Smith had used No. 1 and a Miss Smith No. 4.

“What’s this Smith and Brown stuff?” he exclaimed.

The motel man cleared his throat. “Why, uh, I don’t know. Only, well, we get four-five Smiths every night, it seems, besides a couple of Browns and Joneses.”

Johnny got it, then. “What’s your name—?”

“Binney,” said the motel man and looked apologetic about it.

Johnny stabbed at the book. “This Miss Smith in No. 4 — was she alone?”

“Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t,” Binney replied.

“Come again?”

“I mean, well, sometimes they register alone, but in a little while there’s a car drives in... visitors, you know. In this business...”

“Did Miss Smith have a visitor?”

Binney hesitated. “I really wasn’t payin’ any attention.”

“You think she did have a visitor?”

“Y-yes... I think so.”

“You didn’t see him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know it was a him?”

Binney reddened. “I didn’t. You put it into my mouth.”

“It could have been a woman?”

“It could have been two people — three!” cried Binney. “I didn’t pay any attention. In this business...”

“Yes, I know, it’s tough. And it’s full of Smiths. What about the guy in No. 6?”

Binney looked at Sam Cragg. “The big fellow who...” Sam Cragg growled.

“He signed his real name,” Johnny said. “Joe Cotter.”

“Yeah? What about him?”

“When did he leave?”

“He was gone when I got up.”

“He didn’t make any squawk about our car being gone?”

Binney’s eyes squinted in pained recollection. “Say, how’d you work that?”

“Trade secret.” Johnny tapped the register book a moment, then suddenly tore out the page.

Binney exclaimed, “Don’t do that. I got to keep the record...”

“Somebody stole it,” Johnny said drily. “Some deadbeat.”

“The police will be after me about it,” whined Binney. “It ain’t right.”

“It ain’t right — that you turned us in.” Johnny signaled to Sam. “Well, we’ve got to be going.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sam. “We can’t leave here and let...” he nodded to Binney.

Johnny sighed. “I suppose you’ll grab the phone and call the cops the minute we leave.”

“Oh, no!”

Johnny nodded. “I believe you, but just the same...” He stepped to a closet door and opened it. Then he turned back to Binney. “Got a key for this?”

“I’ll smother in there.”

“There’s a half inch crack under the door. You get your face down to it and you can stay there a week... We need a head start.”

He held out his hand. Reluctantly Binney reached into his pocket and brought out a ring of keys. Johnny took the ring and herded Binney into the closet. He closed the door and locked it with one of the keys. Then he dropped the ring on the table.

Sam Cragg rapped tentatively on the door. “He’ll break that down in two minutes.”

“You might, but he’ll need a half hour. Which is all the start we can expect.”

Johnny started for the door, then caught sight of a road map tacked to the wall. He ripped it down, folded and stuffed it in his pocket. On his way out he picked up a flashlight lying on a stand.

Two minutes later, with Sam Cragg at the wheel, they were rolling out of San Bernardino. Leaving the lights of the city behind them Johnny took the road map from his pocket and turned the flashlight on it. He studied the map intently for a couple of minutes. Then he shook his head.

“There’re two quick ways out of California from here,” he said. “One, really, up to Barstow — the main drag. But at Barstow you can cut straight across Highway 66 to Needles, and Kingman in Arizona. It’s the shorter, but tougher way. The other way is to take Highway 91 at Barstow, to Las Vegas, Boulder Dam and then to Kingman. It’s a few miles longer than through Needles, but actually you can make better time, because the mountains aren’t bad... A man’d be crazy to take any other road, if he was in a hurry to leave the state.”

Sam Cragg scowled. “So?”

“So we’re crazy. Binney’ll get out of that closet in a few minutes. He’ll call the cops and they’ll telephone to Barstow. We might beat them through Barstow, but they’d get us somewhere along the stretch between Barstow and Las Vegas or Barstow and Needles.” He sighed. “We got practically a tank full of gas and they don’t know our license number — yet, so I guess we go up to Mojave, along Death Valley and into Nevada — about three hundred miles out of our way.”

“The hard way,” said Sam Cragg sarcastically. “Well, hold onto your hat.”