I was a fool to hang around any longer. The only way to beat the jam I was in was to run and keep on running. With all that money I had a chance, if I could just get some distance between me and Santa Caralita. Vednick was stirring as I walked out.
By the time I was five miles inland, the fog had cleared, and that’s all that saved me. I came over a little rise, and half a mile ahead I could see all the red lights and stopped cars. I’d waited too long. Now the roadblocks were up.
I cut the lights, took the first side road I came to, followed it through the orchards and vineyards, up into the hills, and to road’s end against the mountains where a small stream ran through a thick stand of second-growth redwoods.
This was the end of the road. In every way, I cut the motor and just sat there. There was nothing else to do.
6
I was there two days and two nights. Once some kids wandered up the stream, shooting at birds with an air rifle; a couple of parties of picnickers showed up, but nobody paid me much attention.
It seemed like all the will to move had run out of me. I just stayed there in the redwoods where the road ended and listened to the radio as the busy police wove the web around me.
The killer had dropped a match in the library as he ran through the house to jump into the Cadillac and follow me, but the fire was spotted in a matter of minutes by a passing motorist, and the fire department got there before the body was badly charred. Dobleen’s appointment pad had escaped the fire; and the notation there, “Mel Karger, 9:00 P.M.” plus an alert police officer who remembered my trial and threat two years ago, plus a quick check at my apartment, were what had gotten the roadblocks up so fast. The cab driver’s identification, and my fingerprints all around sewed the case up tight. I was guilty.
With the body badly charred and the face ruined, only his fingerprints identified Dobleen. His hands, under the body, had escaped the fire; and there was no question of identification. Dobleen had been arrested a couple of days earlier on a felony drunk driving charge, and booked and fingerprinted. He’d been out on bail.
And that wasn’t all the trouble he’d been in. The Treasury Department had an income tax evasion charge pending. And on the second day an elderly widow demanded an accounting of a hundred thousand dollars she’d given him to invest. Seemed like Dobleen’s troubles had come all at once, climaxing in his death. Anyway, that accounted for the quarter of a million bucks that Dobleen wasn’t trusting to banks.
Julie was picked up for questioning and released. The murder gun had not been found. Joseph T. Rogers’ name was never mentioned. The Cadillac had been found — presumably abandoned by me.
Sergeant Chad Vednick’s slugging was not mentioned.
So far as I could see, I held only one trump. The money. Now that they had it settled I was the killer, the real killer might be sitting tight instead of running. Only he knew I had the money; and he might be greedy enough to risk trying to find me before the police did — he had one advantage over the cops: he knew I was driving a gray Ford, license 1G80838. His best bet would be to watch Julie, hoping I’d contact her. Then he might make a try for the money. Unless the police were also trailing Julie.
That’s how slim my chances were.
And that’s what I was doing hiding there among the shrubs, while the wind rattled the eucalyptus leaves above me, and the cold drops fell on me. One thing I had done: I’d buried the brief case at the foot of a redwood tree before I started out. The killer would never get that.
And finally Julie’s blue coupe came into sight, made the stop, passed less than fifteen feet from where I was hidden. Her eyes were front, her face showing the strain she’d been under these two days. It was all I could do not to call to her as she passed.
And, when she was half a block away, another car made the stop. It was a black Chevrolet sedan, and the man in it was Sergeant Chad Vednick in plain clothes.
Him again. Out of fifty cops on the force, it had to be him again. And didn’t he ever work with a partner? I thought all cops worked in pairs. Then a thought hit me, a thought so crazy I’d have pushed it out of my mind but it wouldn’t go.
Chad Vednick alone on Julie’s trail. Chad Vednick alone in Rogers’ house. Who had arrested Dobleen for drunk driving — Chad Vednick? It was crazy, but just suppose Dobleen, dead drunk or asleep had babbled about all the dough in his house; suppose Vednick had gone there two nights later, forced him to open the safe, then shot him dead; suppose I had lifted the dough right out from under him, he’d gambled on me checking Rogers’ house before I ran...
It was fantastic, but so was everything else about this mess. And what did I have to lose now?
7
Ten minutes later, I drove the Ford slowly past Julie’s apartment, spotted Vednick’s sedan, and drove past it, my face turned away from him. It was dark and foggy, and he wouldn’t spot my face; but if he spotted this gray Ford, that would mean something. And what it would mean was enough to send a prickle of excitement through me.
I drove on, watching my rear view mirror, and there! He’d grabbed the bait. He was coming after me, coming fast; then his sedan cut in front of me, tires squealing, crowding me to the curb.
“Come out of there, Karger,” he barked, gun levelled at me.
I came out, eyes on the gun, set to start yelling for help, to make so big a disturbance I’d get the whole neighborhood out here, and somebody would call the cops before Vednick could get me into a car and take me some place where he could beat the money’s location out of me. And not until that instant did I see the flaw in the whole crazy stack of suppositions I’d built up.
Vednick wasn’t the killer. If it’d been Vednick in the Cadillac the other night, he wouldn’t have run away. He’d have pulled that gun on me, and I’d have done what he said; then when he was close enough, he’d have slugged me with it, dumped me into the Ford, driven out of town, reloaded the gun and given me what he gave Dobleen.
The real killer would have done that too. Unless... unless... God Almighty, the thing had been staring me in the face for two days, and I’d been to dumb to see it! Sure, Vednick was in on it — without him there’d have been no murder — but he hadn’t killed anybody.
I was standing there in the street, fitting the facts together so feverishly that I was only half aware of Vednick’s harsh voice: “Do you turn around and stick out those hands, or do I shoot a leg out from under your”
Almost dazedly I turned and he put the handcuffs on me; then he patted my clothes for weapons. Every single fact fitted. I had the whole works put together without a thing out of place — and no proof for any of it. And no way to get any.
No, there was one way! A longer chance than even the first one had been. I had no business even thinking of it; but maybe I was too tired of running, of being scared, to realize what I was letting myself in for. All I was thinking was that I knew who the killer was, but if I couldn’t find him, I could never prove a thing — and there was only one person who could lead me to him.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t say a word. I got into the car just as Vednick said to. And he drove out of town, the gun held in his left hand in his lap and pointed at me.
“The jackpot, no less,” he grunted. “Brother, are you dumb.”
Nobody knew it better than I did. Maybe I was being dumb now, but it was the only chance I had. We’d just have to wait and see.