Mrs. O‘Daniel also had plenty of motive for disposing of both her husband and her lover: O’Daniel to get her hands on what was left of his assets; Randall for any one of half a dozen good reasons, including the possibility that he’d been playing around on her too. She was the type to fly off into a jealous and violent rage, given enough impetus. But was she really dumb enough to believe she could murder both of them, no matter how clever her methods, and get away with it? All murderers are stupid, Jim Telford had said. Well, maybe. Maybe.
The one puzzling thing I’d learned was Frank O‘Daniel’s apparently sudden decision to file for divorce-assuming Mrs. O’Daniel hadn’t been lying to Robideaux about that, for reasons of her own. O’Daniel had told Treacle he couldn’t afford to divorce his wife. What had changed his mind? It was something I would have to check on.
The air was stuffy inside the car; I rolled down the window to let in some of the dying wind. Then I started the engine, backed out onto the road, and headed back the way I’d come.
But I didn’t get far, not much more than a few hundred yards. I came around a sharp turn, going fairly slow, twenty-five or so, and on the other side of it was an old black car pulled slantwise across the road, completely blocking it. And somebody, for Christ’s sake, was sitting on the hood, somebody wearing a yellow rain slicker and a yellow floppy hat.
There was no room to get around on either side; I hit the brakes, hard. The car slewed sideways on the muddy road surface and the wheel tried to come out of my hands. I held it, managed to get the machine stopped at an angle to the other one, not twenty feet from its right front fender.
Sweat stung my eyes; I sleeved it off and jammed the door handle down and got out yelling. “What the hell’s the goddamn idea? I almost plowed into you!”
The guy on the hood stepped down, slowly, and I saw who he was: Jack Coleclaw’s son, Gary. The car was the old Chrysler he’d been working on inside the garage yesterday. He covered about half the distance between us and then stopped. Both of his hands were thrust inside the slicker’s slash pockets.
He said, “I been waiting for you. I seen you drive by our place and come up here. So I followed you.”
“Why? What do you want?”
“To tell you something,” he said, and he took his hand out of his pocket. “You better go away and don’t ever come back here again. That’s what I got to say.”
What he was holding was a gun, a rusty-looking old revolver with a long barrel.
I went tight all over; I could feel more sweat come oozing out of me. But he wasn’t pointing the thing in my direction-he was just moving it up and down, hefting it. The whole scene was bizarre, a little unreal. For some crazy reason I found myself thinking of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, tough guys with sneering faces saying, “Get out of town, stranger, or I’ll fill you full of lead.”
“Listen, Gary,” I said, quietly, “put that thing away. You don’t need to-”
“You listen,” he said. “I mean it. Go away and don’t come back to Musket Creek. If you do…” and he moved the revolver again. He knew how to use it, too; the way he was handling it told me that.
He backed up to the Chrysler, opened the driver’s door with his left hand, and slid inside. The starter ground, the engine chattered. He put the car in reverse and backed down the road, not too fast, not too slow, until he reached a wide place where he could turn around. Then he and the Chrysler were gone and I was standing there alone in the heat, listening to the rainwater drip in the trees and waiting for my pulse rate to slow to normal.
Get out of town, stranger, or I’ll fill you full of lead…
When I got back to the Sportsman’s Rest there was a dark blue Datsun parked in front of Kerry’s and my room, and when I went inside she said, “I rented a car while you were off in Ragged-Ass Gulch. I’m tired of being stuck here all by myself. At least now I can go someplace if I feel like it.”
Her tone dared me to argue with her; I didn’t argue with her. I went to the telephone instead and tried to call Helen O’Daniel. No answer. I called the sheriffs department and asked for Jim Telford. He was gone for the day, and no, they weren’t allowed or even inclined to give out his home number. I looked up his name in the telephone directory. He wasn’t listed.
Kerry said, “Martin Treacle called. He wants you to call him back right away.”
“Did he sound calmer than he was this morning?”
“No. I think he wants his hand held.”
“Let’s go have dinner,” I said.
So we went and had dinner-a companionable one, for a change. And we came back and I tried the O’Daniel number again and still nobody answered. I read a 1936 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly; Kerry read her mystery novel. I wanted to make love in spite of my sore face; she didn’t. She went to sleep and I lay there, wide awake, thinking about the investigation and contemplating my lot in life.
At the moment, neither one seemed very promising.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The way Monday started off, I knew it was going to be a humdinger.
I didn’t sleep very well that night-bad dreams, some involving explosions and fire and hands with guns in them shooting me, then dragging my body down into dark water; others crazily erotic and involving not Kerry but Jeanne Emerson. When I woke up in the morning I felt groggy and my face hurt and the sheets were damply bunched under me. I also happened to be alone in bed: a little fumbling around told me that.
I managed to get my eyes open, to sit up. Kerry was hunched at the dining table across the room, wearing nothing but her bra and panties, playing solitaire. Uh-oh, I thought with a fuzzy sort of bewilderment. Now what did I do? The only times I had seen her play solitaire was when she was angry and upset, and as far as I knew she hadn’t gone out anywhere. Which left me-something to do with me.
“Morning,” I said, more or less cheerfully. And waited.
Silence. She didn’t even look my way, much less quit slapping cards down on the table.
“Hey. Remember me?”
Silence.
“Kerry? What’s the matter?”
She paused with part of the deck in one hand and a red queen in the other. Her head came around, slowly, and the look she gave me would have wilted a rose at twenty paces. “What’s the matter?” she said. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. You talk in your goddamn sleep.”
“What?”
“In your sleep. Talk. You.”
“What?”
“‘Oh, Jeanne,’ you said. ‘Oh, baby.’ And the whole time you were pawing me and snuggling up. ‘Oh, Jeanne baby.’ You son of a bitch.”
I was awake now, good and awake. I swung out of bed and got up too fast and almost tripped over a chair that was on that side. As it was, I reeled a little and banged into the wall and cracked my elbow. I wheeled around to face her-the Naked Ape, standing there with his tail and his secret hanging out.
“Listen,” I said, “listen, I had some kind of crazy dream, that’s all. You can’t hold somebody responsible for what he dreams. The subconscious-”
“Don’t give me that crap,” she said. “I don’t give a damn about your subconscious. It’s your conscious I’m interested in. Not to mention your conscience. How many times did you sleep with her?”