Up for Grabs

Chapter 2

It was late afternoon when the plane eased into a landing at Tucson.

I crossed over to the gate and noticed a tall blond individual, somewhere in his early thirties, wearing a cowboy hat and standing close to the gate.

Keen blue eyes were looking over each passenger.

There was a wire-hard competence about the man which made him stand out from the crowd of people gathered to greet incoming passengers.

My eyes flickered to him and then were held there.

The man pushed forward. “Donald Lam?” he asked.

“Right,” I told him.

Some of the strongest fingers I had ever encountered grasped my hand, squeezed it painfully, and then released it. A slow smile spread over the weather-beaten features. “I’m Kramer, K-R-A-M-E-R,” he said, “from the Butte Valley Guest Ranch.”

There had been about forty-five incoming passengers, yet this guy had unerringly picked me out.

“I presume you had a physical description,” I said.

“Of you?”

“Yes.”

“Hell no, they just told me to meet a guest, a Donald Lam, who is coming to stay for three weeks.”

“Why did you pick me out of the crowd?” I asked.

He grinned and said, “Aw, I can nearly always pick them.”

“How?”

“Well,” he said, with a touch of Texas drawl, “I didn’t pick you, you picked me.”

“How come?”

“It’s just a matter of psychology,” he said. “I put on a cowboy hat, I stand out in front, I’m pretty well tanned from constant exposure to the weather.

“Guests who are coming to the ranch know that someone is going to be there to meet them and they’re naturally wondering whether they’ll have difficulty getting together, and whether transportation to the ranch will be furnished on schedule. So they look at me, start to look away, then do a double take and I can just see them saying to themselves, ‘Now, I wonder if that’s the man who is going to meet me.’ ”

Kramer grinned.

“That’s good psychology,” I said.

“You have to use psychology all the time on a guest ranch.”

“You’ve studied psychology?” I asked.

“Hush,” he said.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Everything. If a person knows you’re using psychology on him, it makes it more difficult to get results.”

“But you told me,” I said.

“You’re different,” he said. “You said to me, ‘Why did you pick me out of the crowd?’ Most people say, ‘I picked you out of the crowd right away, Mr. Kramer. As soon as I saw you, I knew who you were.’ ”

I let it go at that.

We went over and got my bags, took them out to a gaudy station wagon that had the picture of a butte with a trail winding around it, a long string of horsemen coming down the trail, and the words: “Butte Valley Guest Ranch” in big letters on the side. The tailgate had a picture of a bucking bronco, and over on the other side was a picture of a gay party on horseback, with a swimming pool and girls in skintight bathing suits.

“You must have an artist working at the ranch,” I said.

“That art work pays off,” Kramer told me. “Every time we go into town for supplies, I park the car, and you’ll notice there’s a container on the side of the door with a lot of folders telling about the ranch, rates and everything. You’d be surprised how much business we get from that.

“Tourists who are coming in to spend a few weeks in Tucson look at the artwork on the side of the car, pick up one of the folders, and the first thing anyone knows they’re out at the ranch.”

“More psychology?” I asked.

“More psychology.”

“You run the place?”

“No, I work there.”

“You must have a nickname,” I said. “They don’t call you ‘Kramer,’ do they?”

“No,” he said with that grin, “they call me ‘Buck.’ ”

“Short for your first name?”

“My first name,” he said, “is Hobart. You can’t imagine people calling me ‘Hobe.’ ”

“Lots of dude wranglers use the nickname of ‘Tex,’ ” I said.

He said, “This is Arizona.”

“I seem to detect a little Texas accent,” I told him.

“Well, don’t mention it to anyone,” he said, heaving my bags into the back of the car. “Come on, let’s go.”

We drove out of Tucson into the desert, out toward the mountains to the south and the east. It was a fairly long drive.

Buck Kramer talked about the desert, about the scenery, about the health-giving atmosphere, but he didn’t talk any more about himself and he didn’t talk much about the Butte Valley Guest Ranch.

He turned. through a big gate that was open, ran a couple of miles up a fairly good slope, turned and came to a stop on a little mesa at the foot of the mountains that had now become a deep purple with the evening shadows.

Kramer parked the car, said, “I’ll take your bags over to the cabin, and if you’ll come with me I’ll introduce you to Dolores Ferrol.”

“Who’s she?” I asked. “The manager?”

“The hostess,” he said. “She welcomes everyone and tries to keep things moving— Here she is now.”

Dolores Ferrol was a dish.

She was somewhere around twenty-six or twenty-seven, old enough to be adult, young enough to be luscious. She was dressed to show her curves and she had lots of curves to show, not big, bulgy curves but smooth, streamlined contours that would lodge in a man’s thoughts and stay in his memory, to come disturbingly back from time to time, particularly at night.

Her large, dark eyes took me in, first with a little start of surprise and then with a cool appraisal.

She gave me her hand and let it stay in mine for a minute.

“Welcome to Butte Valley, Mr. Lam,” she said. “I think you’re going to like it here.”

And when she said that she raised her eyes with just a flash of intimacy and gave my hand just the faintest suggestion of a squeeze.

“We’ve been expecting you. You’re in Cabin number 3. We have cocktails in fifteen minutes, dinner in thirty-five minutes.”

She turned to Kramer. “Buck, will you take his bags over?”

“Right away,” Buck said.

“I’ll show you your cabin,” she said, and rested her hand gently on my arm.

We walked across a patio with a huge swimming pool, tables, chairs and beach umbrellas. The patio was flanked by a row of cabins made to resemble log cabins.

Number 3 was second from the end, on the north side of the row.

Dolores held the door open.

I bowed and waited for her to enter first.

She came in, turned to me suddenly with swift intimacy. “Buck will be along with the bags in just a moment,” she said. “We won’t have a chance to discuss things now but I’ll talk them over with you later. You know that you and I will be working together.”

“I was told you would be in touch with me,” I said.

“I sure will,” she said.

Buck’s high-heeled cowboy boots clomped along the cement as he tramped up on the porch with the bags.

“Here you are,” he said. “See you later, Lam.” He withdrew with suspicious promptness.

Dolores stood close to me. “It’s going to be a pleasure to work with you, Mr. Lam,” she said. “Donald — I’m Dolores.”

“It will be my pleasure,” I said. “How close shall we work?”

“Very close.”

“How long,” I asked, “have you been handling this job on the side?”

She was standing so close to me that I could feel the warmth of her body as she took her forefinger, placed the end of it against the tip of my nose, pushed gently, and said, “Now, don’t be nosy, Donald.” She laughed, showing parted red lips and pearly teeth.

I put my arm around her. She was so supple she seemed to melt into my arms; her lips came up to mine without the slightest hesitancy, a hot circle of passionate promise.

A moment later she pushed me back, using the very minimum of force and said, “Naughty, naughty, Donald. You must remember that you have a job to do and that I have a job to do. But when I fall for people I fall hard. You’re nice — and I’m impulsive. Pardon the intimacy.”

“I should beg your pardon,” I said. “I was the aggressor.”

“That’s what you think,” she said, and her laugh was throaty.

She reached in her pocket, produced facial tissue and solicitously wiped the lipstick from my face.

“You’ll have to go and get your cocktail, Donald.”

“I don’t feel like a cocktail now,” I said. “I’d rather stay here.”

Her finger tips brushed against my hand. “So would I, but I’m the hostess, Donald. Come on.”

She clutched my hand, pulled me gently to the door, said, “I’ll introduce you around, but take it easy for a while because there’s no one here you can use as bait right at the moment. However, we have a reservation for a Miss Doon who is due here tomorrow. She sounds interesting. She’s a nurse. There’s just a chance she might be what you want. Anyhow, you’ll have a full two weeks and that’s plenty of time to work.”

“When is he coming?” I asked.

“He’s due here tomorrow.”

“You know all the details?” I asked.

Her laugh was seductive. “Donald,” she said, “when I play a game I know all the cards.”

“From the front or the back?” I asked.

She said, “A good player doesn’t have to mark the cards.

“Now listen, Donald, there’s one thing you have to help me on. If my employer ever got the idea I was keeping another job on the side, it would be just too bad. You’re going to have to protect my secret on that.”

“I don’t do much talking,” I told her.

She said, “It goes deeper than that. We’re going to have to have conferences and in order to have those conferences take place without exciting too much suspicion, you’re going to have to act the part.”

“What part?”

“You’re going to have to be tremendously infatuated with me, and while I’ll appear to like you, I’ll be conscious of the fact that my duties as hostess keep me from teaming up with any particular guy. I have to play the field and keep everybody happy.

“You’ll sort of halfway resent that, be just a little mite jealous and be waiting for an opportunity to get me off to one side and alone whenever you have a chance. You think the thing over a little bit and look at it from my viewpoint. Then you’ll see what I mean. I can’t afford to let anyone think I’m holding down another job on the side.”

“Who runs the place?” I asked.

“Shirley Gage,” she said. “She’s the widow of Leroy Willard Gage. She inherited the place and is making more money out of running it than she could by selling it, investing the money and collecting interest. Furthermore, she likes the life. She’ll let the older ones— Well, any of the—”

“Go on and say it,” I said.

“Well, I take care of the younger ones and act as hostess and see that everyone has a good time and gets together, but Shirley gives the older customers a little more of a play.”

“Meaning she’s lonely and looking for companionship?” I asked.

Dolores laughed and said, “Come on, here’s where you turn in to get the cocktails. They usually limit the cocktails to about two to a customer. It depends on the customer and how he can take them. The cocktails aren’t strong but they are free and they’re not too bad. You can have either Manhattans or Martinis.

“Come on, Donald, in we go.”

The room was well lighted with showcases containing Indian artifacts, paintings of the desert, Navajo rugs on the floor, a distinctive Western atmosphere.

There were some twenty people having cocktails, some of them in groups, some of them in twosomes.

Dolores clapped her hands and said, “Attention, everybody, here’s our newest tenderfoot, Donald Lam of Los Angeles.”

She took me by the hand and said, “Come on, Donald.”

It was a remarkable performance. Some of these people she couldn’t have known for more than twenty-four or forty-eight hours, but she was never at a loss for a name. She presented me to each person, went over to the bar with me, saw that I had a cocktail and then started mingling with the others.

It was quite evident that she was a great favorite with the guests, and she was an expert at the job of making them feel good. She’d join a group, enter into the conversation, then manage to leave without appearing to be breaking away, join some other group with a little pleasantry and always with a musical, sexy laugh.

Her dress was tight, her hips were smoothly streamlined and she used just exactly the right amount of slow, swaying motion as she walked. Nothing stiff or rigid; nothing exaggerated, but something about the motion that would arrest a man’s attention.

Now and then some married man would break away from his wife to join the group where Dolores was talking. Whenever that happened, Dolores would find some excuse to leave within a matter of seconds, join some other group, or perhaps gravitate back to the group the man had left and chat naturally and animatedly with the wife.

People talked with me, they asked me about how long I intended to stay and they made guarded inquiries about my background. They weren’t exactly personal to the point of being persistent but they had a mild curiosity.

For the most part, the people were between thirty-five and sixty. The men wore Pendletons, and here and there a face that was an angry red proclaimed a newcomer who had spent too much time in the sunlight.

The talk was largely about climate.

Some of the people came from the Middle West and talked about snowstorms; some of them came from the Coast and talked about smog and cloudiness.

I had my second cocktail, a bell rang and we filed in to dinner.

Dolores had a place for me at a table occupied by a broker from Kansas City, his wife, and a woman artist somewhere in her middle thirties.

We had a substantial dinner, prime ribs of beef, baked potatoes, onion rings, salad, dessert and hot rolls.

After dinner they started card games — bridge, gin rummy and poker. The poker game was a marathon affair, played for low stakes, where each player was trying to demonstrate his superiority.

It was a nice crowd.

Drinks could be ordered and charged on chits.

The artist who had been at the table with me monopolized my evening. She wanted to talk about colors, about creative art, about the menace of modern art, the deterioration of all types of artistic standards and the beauties of Western scenery.

She was lonely, widowed, wealthy and frustrated. She might have made good bait for a malingerer but her approach was too intellectual.

Motion pictures of the man with the whiplash injury diving off a springboard into a swimming pool in order to impress a young thing in a bathing suit would be valuable for a jury, but motion pictures of a guy sitting in a chair by the pool and discussing art with a woman wouldn’t mean a damned thing.

I studied her carefully and decided Dolores was right in saying there was nothing presently available.

The artist’s name was Faith Callison. She told me she did her sketching with a camera and colored films. She had a collection of slides which she would process into paintings later on in the winter in her studio, where she wouldn’t be disturbed or distracted by other people.

“Ever sell your pictures as well as your paintings?” I asked.

She looked at me with sudden sharp interest. “Why do you ask that?”

Actually I had only been making conversation, but there was something in her manner which caused me to make a reappraisal of the situation.

“From what you said,” I told her. “I gathered you took huge quantities of film. I like to take pictures myself, but the cost of the film is a factor I have to consider.”

She gave a quick glance around the room, leaned closer to me, and said, “You know, Mr. Lam, that’s the strangest thing that ever happened, having you put your finger on things that way. Actually I do sell my films — at times.

“You take last season, for instance. I had my eight-millimeter motion-picture camera with the zoom lens. I took pictures of people enjoying themselves and then afterwards I’d ask people if they wanted copies. Of course, I wasn’t peddling films or anything like that. I made it appear that it was just a matter of accommodation from one shutterbug to another. But I did sell quite a bit of film.”

“To people who didn’t have their own cameras?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “most of the sales were made to people who did bring their own cameras. In a place like this, a person who brings a motion-picture camera does so because of a desire to take home impressions of the place. He wants to show the folks back East what a real Western guest ranch looks like.

“Well, of course, if they’re always taking pictures, they naturally can’t appear in the pictures they take. So they love to get a few feet of film showing them against a colorful background.”

“I see,” I said thoughtfully. “I see that you’ve given quite a bit of thought to it.”

She nodded.

“Any big sales?” I asked.

Again she looked at me curiously. “Well... yes. There were two big sales. One was to an insurance company that wanted pictures of a certain man jumping off the diving board, and the other was one of the most peculiar orders I ever had. It was from a lawyer in Dallas. He wanted a copy of every foot of film I had taken on my vacation here on the ranch — just every single foot.

“That’s why I’m here this year. I made enough out of that one sale to more than pay all my expenses this season.”

“Well, my gosh, aren’t you smart!” I said.

Then abruptly she changed the subject and went on to talk about art. I could see that she had become a little afraid she’d told me too much on too short acquaintance.

She told me she was taking up portrait painting and said I had an interesting face. She wanted to know something about my background. I told her I was a bachelor, that I had been too busy to get married, that I had had a long, hard day, excused myself and went to bed.

The silence of the desert was like a blanket. The clear, pure air was a benediction and I slept like a log.