The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the light switch off.
    Turning the lights on, he stepped to the radio and turned it off with a snap. Joe had come into the door behind him. “What is it, Lieutenant?”
    “Oh, some crazy fool went off and left his radio turned on.” He scowled. “No, it’s one of those clock radios. Must have just switched on.”
    “Who’d want that volume?” Joe wondered. “And on a police band, too.”
    Mike Frost looked at Joe thoughtfully, then turned slowly and began to look around the room. It was strangely bare.
    No clothes, no personal possessions. The bathroom shelves were empty, no razor, shaving cream, or powder. No toothbrush.
    The simple furniture of a furnished room, towels, soap…a clock radio and some books. The clock radio was brand spanking new…so were the books.
    Frost stepped back into the bathroom. The sink was still damp. Whoever had been here had left within a very few minutes. But why leave a new radio and the books? The only other thing remaining was an almost empty bottle of Madeira. The glass on the table was still wet…and there was lipstick on the rim. In two places…some woman had taken at least two drinks here.
    And not twenty minutes ago, a woman had fled the scene of a killing just two blocks away.
    Somebody had left this room fast…and why was that radio set for a time when no one would want to get up and tuned for a police band with the volume control on full power?
    “Get your stuff, Joe. Give it a going-over.”
    Joe was incredulous. “This place? What’s the idea?”
    “Call it a hunch, Joe. But work fast. I think we’d better work fast.”
    The landlady was visiting somebody in Santa Monica. Yes, she had a new roomer. A man. Nobody knew anything about him except that he was rarely in, and very quiet. Oh, yes! A neighbor remembered, Mrs. Brady had said he was leaving in a couple of days…this room would be vacant on the fifth. This was the third.
    Frost walked back up to the room and stared around him. Was he wasting time, making a fool of himself? But why would a man leave a perfectly new clock radio behind him? And why leave the books?
    There were six of them, all new. They represented a value of more than thirty dollars and given the condition of the spines three of them had not even been opened. Two were on South America. On Bolivia. One was a book on conversational Spanish.
    Frost picked up the telephone and rang the airlines. In a matter of minutes he had his information. Three men were scheduled for La Paz, Bolivia, on the fifth…another check…at that address. Thomas Sixte. Frost put the phone back on the cradle.
    He was no closer to an answer but he did have more of a puzzle and some reason behind his hunch. Why would a man, leaving within forty-eight hours, anyway, suddenly leave a comfortable room?
    Where did he expect to spend the next forty-eight hours? Why did he leave his books and radio? He glanced at the dial on the radio. The man had his clock radio set to start blasting police calls within a matter of minutes after he had left his room.
    Why?
    Frost picked up the Madeira bottle…forty-eight years old. Good stuff, not too easily had…he checked the telephone book and began ringing. Absently, he watched Joe going over the room. His helper was in the bathroom.
    The liquor store he called replied after a minute. Just closing up. “Yes, I knew Mr. Sixte. Very excellent taste, Lieutenant. Knows wines as few men do. When he first talked to me about them, I believed him to be a champagne salesman.
    “That brand of Madeira? Very few stores, Lieutenant. It would be easy to…yes? All right.”
    He glanced at his watch. He had been in the vicinity so had gone to Redondo and San Vincente. That had been at 9:42…twenty minutes later he heard the blasting of the radio…it was now 10:35.
    “Only three sets of prints,” Joe told him. “One of them a man’s. Two are women. One of them is probably the maid or the landlady, judging by where I found ’em.”
    “The