It was the old man who’d rabbited when he saw me on the ladder. I looked around the room, saw a pail of water on the cracked wood floor by the front door, picked it up, and dumped it on my assailant. He stirred, then started sputtering, and I knelt down and placed my gun on his nose so he could get the picture up close. “You admit you killed that man back there or you convince me somebody else did, and you live. You tell me where the other Treadwell brother is and I don’t arrest you for assault on a police officer. You dick me around, you die.”
The geezer took it all in, his eyes getting clearer by the second, exhibiting the remarkable recuperative powers of the seasoned shat-upon. When he curled his lips to spit invective, I said, “No banter, no wisecracks, no shit,” and cocked the hammer.
_Now_ pops got the _whole_ picture, in Technicolor. “I ain’t no killer,” he said with a midwestern twang. “I’m a truck farmer likes to dabble in the medical arts, but I sure ain’t no killer.”
“I am. So you keep going and keep my interest, because I get bored easy, and when I get bored I get mad.”
Pops gulped, then spoke rapid-fire. “People here put up Miller and Leroy, ‘long with the girl, when they had that trouble up in Ventura. They–”
I interrupted. “Did they pay you for it?”
Pops cackled. “Where you think everbody is? Miller and Leroy got cousins up the wazoo here, they spread the money around, everbody went up to Oxnard and Big V to spend it. Like to put Miller and Leroy broke they spent so–”
“What?”
“Fore he died, Leroy told me they spent eight, nine thousand dollars, said this town of ours had hospitality like Hot Springs in the old days.”
I said, “Mister, the ransom money came to a hundred thousand.”
Pops snorted. “Big commotion back where it went bad. Police got most of it, Miller and Leroy got the dregs.”
My first thought was of the Ventura sheriffs holding back big. “Keep going.”
“Well, everybody got happy here, and Miller and Leroy and the cooze holed up, and Miller and Leroy started schemin’ another trade, and they started arguin’ and feudin’ over the girl, and she took to Miller ’cause Leroy was so nasty to her. Then Leroy tried to do her what you might call against her will, and she talked Miller into payin’ back her virtue.”
“Miller killed his own brother?”
“That’s right. And he felt so bad about it he paid me just about his last two hundred dollars to fix that boy up for burial, then put him in the ground when all the cousins got back after spendin’ their money.”
“Then Miller and the girl took off?”
“That’s right. Headed south, brand new black paint on that pretty car of Harwell’s.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. ‘Bout noon.”
“Did they cut the phone lines before they went?”
Pops shrugged. “Don’t think so. Seems to me they was up this mornin’.”
I got the pins and needles tingling up the spine I always got when something was real wrong. Stensland the fed had said that there was “twenty-one hundred something” locked up as evidence, and Miller and Leroy dished out “eight or nine” grand for shelter. That left almost ninety thousand missing. Figure a few thousand blown away during the Mexican standoff–and the rest sucked up–probably by the feds and/or the Ventura sheriffs. And the scary part: if Miller Treadwell took off with Jane Viertel yesterday, it was the law that ambushed us–to make sure Harwell Treadwell didn’t squawk about his brother’s whereabouts–so _they_ couldn’t tell _us_ about their paltry take of the ransom pie.
I put my gun away, said “Bury the degenerate bastard,” and walked out the front door mad–like I’d been sucker punched.
* * *
When I got back to the dump where I’d left Davis and our prisoner, they were gone. A fresh wave of panic hit me; then I heard grunts and metal on metal noises coming from the other side of the building. I walked around, and there was Harwell Treadwell chained to a fence and my forty-six-year-old partner embarking on a new career as a hot-rod engineer.