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

others?”
    “Only a couple…some more, but smudged. Got a clear print off the wine bottle, one off the glass.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Soap in the shower is still wet. He probably took a shower about seven or eight o’clock. Some cigarettes, all his…and he’d been reading that book.”
    Joe rubbed his jaw. “What gives, Lieutenant? What you tryin’ to prove?”
    Mike Frost shrugged. He was not quite sure himself. “A man is killed and a girl is slugged by a woman. We know that much. Two blocks away a man suddenly leaves his room, with no reason that figures, and minutes later his clock radio starts blasting police calls.
    “A woman has been in this room within the last hour. My hunch is it was the woman who killed that guy on Redondo. I’m guessing that she got in here somehow to duck the police, and when she went away, she took him with her.”
    “And he turned on the radio to warn us? How does he know we’re near?”
    “Maybe the girl told him. Maybe he saw the murder. Maybe she followed him. It’s all maybe.”
    “Maybe he was in cahoots with her.”
    “Could be…but why the radio?”
    “Accident…twisted the wrong dial, maybe.”
    Frost nodded. “All right. Check those prints. All three sets…or whatever you got.”
    Had the girl taken the man away from here by herself? They had a call out, the area blanketed. Any girl alone would have been stopped. But if she had been with him? She might have been stopped, anyway. She was a blonde, about thirty, someone had said, slight figure…in a suede coat.
    When Joe was gone Mike Frost sat down in the empty room and began to fiddle with the radio. After twenty minutes he had learned one thing. You just didn’t turn this on to the police band. You had to hunt for it, adjust it carefully.
    Heavy steps on the stairs…“Got something for you, Lieutenant.” It was an officer from a radio car. “A girl across the street. She was parked with her boyfriend…high school kids…they saw two men and a woman come out and go to a car. Dark sedan of some kind.”
    “Two men?”
    “Yeah…the car drove up while they were sittin’ there. The guy who went upstairs was tall. Big in the shoulders.”
    It was something, but not much. There was the phone. Had the girl gotten in here she could have called her boyfriend, and he might have been waiting nearby. The murdered man had been drinking, that was obvious. Probably quite drunk…and probably in a bar not a dozen blocks away.
    If they could find that bar they might get a description…beat officers were looking but it might not be fast enough…a man’s life might be at stake.
    Mike Frost stood quietly gnawing gently at his lower lip. He was a big man, wide in the shoulders, with a rather solemn, thick-boned face. His fingers dug at his reddish-brown hair and he tried to think.
    This Tom Sixte…he was no fool. In a tight spot he had thought of the clock radio and the police calls. It had been a chance, but he had thought of it and taken it. He might think of something else but they could not depend on that.
    The bank. They might try to get some money out of Sixte. Suddenly, Frost was hoping Sixte would think of that. If he did, if he could play on their greed…
    The wine bottle…he had liquor stores alerted for possible purchase of the Madeira. It was a wild chance, but the girl had tried a glass of it, and to get money they might humor Sixte. “Boy,” Frost said, half aloud, “I hope you’re thinking, and I hope you’re thinking like I am.”
    Forty-eight hours. They would have the flight covered long before takeoff time.
    Mike Frost went back to his office and sat down at the battered, scarred old desk. He ran his fingers through his rusty hair and tried to think…to think….
             
    T OM S IXTE SAT on the divan in a quaint, old-fashioned room. The sort of furnishings that were good middle-class in 1910. It gave him a queer feeling to be sitting there like that, the room was so much like