I shook my head. “Hell of an experience for a couple of little kids.”
“Yeah. Barrett thinks I don’t care if I find Wheeler, but I promise you, Markham, I do. I just don’t want Ralph Barrett taking the law into his own hands, that’s all.”
We strolled back toward the cars, out of earshot of the gas station attendant. I didn’t know if Cartwright would answer my question or not, but I asked it anyway. “You don’t like Barrett or Mrs. Wheeler very much, do you?”
Cartwright considered before he said anything. Then he replied, “Barrett is an important man in this county. I can’t afford to dislike him, not if I want to stay sheriff. And I do want to stay sheriff.” After a pause, he went on, “That doesn’t close my eyes up entirely, though. Barrett is a hothead, a man who made a success of his business by running roughshod over other people. He won’t think twice about violence if that’s what it takes to get what he wants.”
He paused again and looked reflective, then went on, “Elaine’s mother died a long time ago, and Barrett spoiled the girl. She never did grow up, and she blamed Wheeler for getting her into trouble with her father. Sometimes, Markham, I think that boy Jackie is more grown-up than his mother is.”
“I got the same impression.”
“Of course, Wheeler is no prize himself, but Elaine should have known what she was getting herself into.” Cartwright smiled wearily. “Those are damn nice kids. Sometimes I wonder how they turned out that way.”
He took his straw cowboy hat off and wiped the sweat from his brow. Even though the day was young, it was already hot. He said, “Well, let’s go, if you want to show me where you found them.”
I pulled my Ford over to the side of the lot, out of the way, and then joined the sheriff in his car. It didn’t take us long to cover the few miles of highway.
“It was along about here,” I said a few minutes later. “Of course, it was dark, but I checked my odometer and this should be the place.”
I found marks in the gravel shoulder where I had pulled over, and Cartwright brought his car to a stop across the road.
There was nothing to indicate where the kids might have come from, and since neither one of them could say for sure, that left Cartwright with a hell of a big area to cover. And Wheeler could be long gone from the county.
“Well, I’ll just have to put out an APB and bring the state police in on it,” Cartwright said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
I looked out the car window at the flat country surrounding us. Some foothills jutted up a few miles off the road on one side, and on the other, the scrub-covered desert stretched as far as I could see. It was about as desolate a place as I had ever seen, and I thought again about the kids being stuck out here in the middle of the night.
My mind was telling me something about where they might have come from, but I couldn’t quite tune in on it. I decided to put it on the back burner for a while and see if anything came of that.
Cartwright dropped me off at my car. Before he drove off, he put his hand out the window and asked, “Are you heading back to Los Angeles now?”
“Maybe a little later. I thought I’d say hello to the kids.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t care much for the idea of me hanging around. He seemed to be a good man, and I couldn’t blame him for not wanting a stranger mixing in his investigation. But I couldn’t just put the situation out of my head, either.
I gave him a little wave as he drove off, but he didn’t return it.
Since I was at the gas station, I had my tank filled and then drove the couple of blocks to the trailer park. I didn’t see Ralph Barrett’s car there, and I was grateful for that.
The kids must have heard the car coming up, because they were outside before I could open my door. As I got out, they chorused, “Hi!”
“Hi. How are you this morning?”
“We’re fine, Mr. Markham,” Jackie answered. “I’m glad you came back to see us.”
“You didn’t think I’d go running off to L.A. without seeing you again, did you?”
“We didn’t know if you cared enough to come back or not.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. This boy had a finely developed distrust of grownups, and I couldn’t very well blame him, considering what he had gone through.
Cindy was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. I swept her up and gave her a hug. I started to rumple Jackie’s hair, but a sudden, unexpected recollection stopped me. I had hated it when people did that to me when I was a kid.
Elaine Wheeler appeared in the door of the trailer. She said, “Good morning, Mr. Markham. Did you reconsider my father’s offer?”
Evidently Barrett had told her of our conversation. Before I could answer the question, though, Jackie asked, “Does Grandpa want you to work for him?”
“He wants Mr. Markham to find your daddy and bring him back,” Elaine answered before I could say anything.
I set Cindy down and asked, “Would you like for me to do that, Cindy?”
She nodded. “I want you to bring my daddy back.”
I knew that her motivation was different from her mother’s, but the first step of locating Wheeler was the same in both cases. I turned to Jackie and asked, “How about you, Jackie?”
He shrugged, suddenly disinterested, and said, “I don’t care.” It didn’t matter to him one way or the other if he ever saw his father again, and that was sad. Suddenly, I wanted to find John Wheeler, wanted to find him for myself now, so that I could tell him what he had helped to do to his son.
I said to Elaine, “Can you get in touch with your father?”
“He should be at the trucking yard.”
“Thanks. Call him and tell him I’m on my way to see him.”
I said goodbye to the kids, and Cindy extracted another promise from me to be sure and come back to see them. Jackie was still rather subdued.
It didn’t take long to drive over to Barrett’s trucking yard. I turned in at the gate and headed for a building with a sign in it proclaiming it to be the office. Barrett came out of the building before I got there.
“Elaine called and said you wanted to take the job,” he greeted me.
“Well, I didn’t say that, but... yeah, I do. I’d like to find John Wheeler.”
“Come into the office. We’ll talk money.”
I followed him into the cluttered office. He sat down behind a big metal desk and told me to have a seat in the room’s other chair.
“First, tell me about the robbery here,” I said. “Cartwright didn’t fill me in on that.”
Barrett pointed to a window in the side wall of the office. “He broke the lock and came in through there. He’d been around here enough to know where everything was. He cleaned out everything of value in the desk.”
“How much did he get?”
“About two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, plus some stocks and bonds I kept here.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Not a very good place to keep such things.”
“I never had any trouble until now,” Barrett replied pointedly.
“How do you know Wheeler was responsible?”
“He’s threatened to do something like this before. And the sheriff found his pen here. Must’ve dropped out of his pocket.”
“His pen?”
“His sketching pen. Damn fool think’s he’s an artist. Always carries the pen and a sketch pad around with him.” He took a checkbook out of the middle drawer and asked, “How much do you want?”