Three for the Money by W. T. Ballard

Author:W. T. Ballard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: detective, mystery, murder, suspense, crime
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

THE PHONE AGAIN. I roused and lay for a moment, letting it ring. Daylight formed bright rectangles on the bedroom windows. Norda was sleeping heavily at my side. I looked at her, trying for a long count to remember who she was.

Then I answered the phone. It was Al Freed.

“Sorry to wake you, but they’ve found Mike Kowski.”

“Where?”

“In a wash below Paradise Valley. I thought you might want to have a look.”

I swore under my breath. At the moment, I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel to see the Venus de Milo in the flesh.

“I’ll be right down,” I said, and hung up.

I’ll say one thing for Norda—once she got to sleep, nothing disturbed her. I got up, padded out to the kitchen to plug in the percolator, then dressed and shaved. It was a quarter to five, but the sun was already hot when I walked out to the car.

It was hotter as we stood on the bank looking down into the shallow wash at the blue coupé. The car had turned over on its side. Kowski was still in it, his rigid body jammed behind the wheel. The lab boys and the coroner’s men had not arrived yet.

We slid down the rough bank. The gouges the car had dug out on the way down were plain to see. There wasn’t much brush and the car had apparently rolled as it descended. We stood beside the wreck, looking through the shattered window. Freed was chewing on a small stick he had picked up.

“What do you think? Accident?”

I knew from the tone of his voice that he did not believe it was an accident. For one thing, the car had come down a seldom-used road which was not even paved—just a desert trace. There was no plausible reason why Mike Kowski should have been on it. It led nowhere.

Someone had met him here, for the tracks of another car partly obliterated those of the Dodge, showing that the second car had followed it.

I asked, “How’d the boys happen to find it?”

Freed shrugged. “Routine. They patrol down here every day or so, just in case. The teen-agers like the privacy.” His eyes were on the figure twisted beneath the broken wheel. “I wish the lab men would get here. That sun is hot.”

They arrived within ten minutes. I watched them go to work. The wrecker came. They righted the car and freed the doors.

The first thing they brought out was the body of the toy poodle. Its head had been bashed in. I remembered how feisty it had been that first night when Orton and I had questioned the Kowskis. I guessed that it had tried to protect its master. I said to the lab man, “Take a look at its teeth, see if there is any human blood. Maybe it bit our murderer.”

Then Al and I started back to the office. There was nothing we could do until we got the lab reports.

On the way in, Al asked, “Looks messy, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged.

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