‘And you told them how?’
He nodded, not meeting my eyes.
‘Did you tell them about the bugs and the wireless set?’
‘No.’
‘It’s important, Walt.’
He looked up. ‘I didn’t mention them.’
I relaxed. ‘How about our mountain walk?’
‘No details.’
‘Place?’
‘I’m pretty sure I mentioned the Tetons.’
Nothing there that would hurt.
‘How much did you say about Showman and Allyx?’
‘I told them that you’d worked out through the stud books that Offen must have them.’
‘Did you say the words “Uncle Bark”?’
He shook his head. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’
I sighed. ‘Walt. Mrs Teller doesn’t want Allyx found any more than she wanted Chrysalis. Let’s not entrust the state of the nation to the Indians.’
He flushed a little and compressed his mouth. Eunice and Lynnie came back shortly after, and, though we all four had dinner together it proved a taciturn and not over-friendly affair.
Walt rode up to my room for a conference after the coffee.
‘How do we find them?’ he said, coming bluntly to the point and easing himself simultaneously into the only armchair.
‘They’ve made us a gift of them, in one way,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘We can send a bunch of lawyers in to query Moviemaker and Centigrade’s identity, and get it established beyond doubt that the two Offen showed us are in fact those two horses. He’ll be keen for them to do it: and once he’s done it, he’ll be stuck with them. We will meanwhile do another little vanishing trick with the other two and start our own identification parade on our ground. Once they are established as Allyx and Showman, Offen cannot possibly claim them back.’
‘Two objections,’ Walt said. ‘We don’t know where Allyx and Showman are. And if we find them, why not get lawyers into the act right away? Why go to all the danger and trouble of taking them?’
‘Same as Chrysalis,’ I pointed out. ‘The first sign of any real trouble, and they’d be shot. It’s not illegal to kill a horse and whisk it smartly off to the dog food people. And vastly more difficult to identify a dead one. Impossible, I’d almost say, for the degree of certainty we need here.’
‘Even if we take them, and establish their identity, and everything goes smoothly, Offen will still be raking in those colossal stud fees of half a million dollars a year, because we’d never be able to prove that for the past ten years Showman has been siring every foal that’s down in the book as Moviemaker’s...’
I smiled. ‘We’ll do something about that, once we’ve sorted out the rest.’
‘Which brings us back to square one,’ Walt said flatly. ‘Where the hell do we start?’
I perched on the window sill and looked down sideways into the brightly lit car park. Coloured bulbs on the face of the motel raised rainbow shimmers on glossy hard tops and struck me as a deeply melancholy commentary on human achievement. Yet I wouldn’t have wanted to live without cars or electricity... if I’d wanted to live. My room was only two floors up, with none above. Too near the ground. I’d known of a woman who’d jumped from five and bungled it. A gun was better...
‘Well?’ Walt said insistently.
‘I’m sorry...?’ I said vaguely, turning my head back to him.
‘Where do we look?’
‘Oh... yes.’
‘On the ranch?’
‘Very doubtful, don’t you think? They must know that’s the first place we’d think of.’
‘There’s a lot of land there,’ he said. ‘And a lot of horses to lose them in.’
I shook my head. ‘They’d have to keep them in a paddock close to the house. All the rest of the ranch is well named Rocky Mountains, and they couldn’t turn them loose for fear of them breaking a leg. We’d better check, though.’ I stared unseeingly at the carpet. ‘But I guess the horses are with Matt. Offen is at Orpheus Farm, and Yola is tied to the ranch seeing to about thirty guests, so where’s Matt?’
‘Where indeed,’ Walt said gloomily.
‘He and Yola don’t spend their winters on the ranch because the valley is blocked by snow. She told me that they go south... On one of those telephone calls she told Offen they couldn’t keep Chrysalis at a place called Pitts, because it wasn’t suitable. But that was when they didn’t know we were after them... when it wasn’t an emergency.’
‘So somewhere south of the Tetons we find this Pitts, and Matt and the horses will be waiting for us?’
‘Yeah.’ I smiled briefly. ‘Sounds too easy.’
‘Easy!’ Walt said.
‘They must leave a forwarding address for mail,’ I pointed out. ‘They live a conventional law-abiding life with a longstanding business to give them obvious legal means of support. There must be dozens of people in Jackson who know their winter address.’
Our Buttress agent could get that, then. First thing in the morning.’
‘Fine.’
Walt levered himself out of the armchair and hesitated.
‘Come along to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle.’
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, but he smiled suddenly, wiping out all resentments, and one didn’t kick that sort of olive branch in the teeth.
‘Be glad to,’ I said.
The smile went deeper and lasted along the passage to his room, which was almost identical to mine. The window looked out on the same cars from a slightly different angle, and he had two armchairs instead of one. There was a bottle of Old Grandad on a round tray with glasses and a water jug, and on his bedside table stood a leather-framed photograph. I picked it up idly while he went to fetch ice from the machine along the passage. Walt with his family. A good-looking woman, a plain girl in her early teens, a thin boy of about ten: all four of them smiling cheerfully into the lens. He came back as I was putting them down.
‘I’m sorry about the picnic,’ I said.
‘Next week will do just as well,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the whole of the summer, I guess.’
We sat in the armchairs, drinking slowly. I didn’t like bourbon much; but that wasn’t the point. He talked casually about the split-level ranch-type house they’d moved into the year before, and how his daughter got along just fine with the folks next door, and how they’d had trouble with the boy’s health, he’d had rheumatic fever...
‘How about your own future, with Buttress Life?’ I asked.
I’ve gotten about as high as I’ll get,’ he said with surprising honesty. ‘There’s only one more step up that I really want, and that’s to chief investigator, claims division, and that’ll come along next year when the present guy retires.’
He poured more drinks, rubbed his thumb slowly over the round fingertips, and said Amy and the kids were asking him for a pool in their back yard, and that Amy’s mother was a problem since Amy’s father died last fall, and that he hadn’t caught a single ball game last season, he’d been that busy...
We sat for more than an hour without mentioning the horses once. He yawned finally and I uncurled myself from the soft chair, putting down the third time empty glass. He said goodnight sleepily with easy friendliness and, for the first time since I’d known him, without tension. Back in my own room, undressing, I wondered how long it would last. Until I made the next unpopular suggestion, I supposed. I didn’t know whether to envy him his enclosing domesticity or to feel stifled by it. I did know that I liked him both as a man and as a working companion, moods and all.
The Buttress Life agent in Jackson came through with the Clives’ winter address within twenty minutes of Walt calling him: 40159 Pittsville Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada.
I remembered Yola’s smile at the thought of winter. Las Vegas explained it. Yola liked to gamble.