Читать книгу THE CHEAP RUBY RING - Max Idol - Страница 6

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The squirrel was talking to me and what a miracle - I understood it perfectly. I could even recognize that typical Californian vowel shift so common in this area.

I opened my eyes. It was a human face; the squirrel had disappeared. The human face bent down to me and shouted,

"Hey, mister, are you okay?"

Oh yeah, I was really fine. I'm fond of being socked and knocked down. I pondered whether I should tell him the whole story and my nice chat with the ground squirrel, but I wasn't sure he would appreciate it. So I decided not to give my secret away and simply said,

"Who are you and how come you are here?"

A good question, I thought. In the scale of all the questions I've ever asked it was ranking quite highly.

"Well, I was walking my dog and let him run off-leash. When I followed him, I found you lying on the ground and blood trickled out of your head."

"Where's your dog?"

"Oh, he lost interest in you and pursues again his favorite hobby. He is chasing ground squirrels. You know, they bustle about here in large numbers. I guess you should have come across some of them before you took a nap."

"I tripped over one of them. The result you know."

He got slightly peeved.

"You are kind of a smart-aleck, aren't you? I should have listened to what my mother said some forty years ago. She used to tell me over and over again not to talk to strangers. Actually I wanted to ask you if I could give you a lift with my car, but I won't."

He rather rapidly disappeared. I got up, still a bit dizzy, but the bleeding had stopped. Oh, what a tough guy I was. I even managed to balance on both legs.

I tried the back door a second time. Nobody socked me, hit me, punched me, but again the door didn't yield. But I spied a rather small window without a shutter. I suppose it belonged to the bathroom. It took me some efforts, but in the end I managed to open it and to wriggle through the opening.

It was quite dark inside. However, after a while my eyes got adapted to the darkness. I opened two more windows and now had enough light to search the cabin.

Somebody had been here before and had taken out all personal items. No photo, no notice, no evidence at all. When I was just about to leave, I spotted a scrap of paper jammed in a joint of the corner seat, easily to be overlooked.

It was part of an invoice of a car repair shop. Name and address of the car owner could be clearly read. Mike Young was his name.

It might be a good idea to see Mr. Young. Actually he was my only clue to find out where Mr. Coleman was and why he didn't contact his wife. Something was fishy about Mr. Coleman and all the people involved. Not even I was knocked down for nothing.

I set out for the way back to my car.

It was in the early afternoon when I got back to my car. The drizzle and all gray had gone. The sun broke through the sky and the temperature now clearly exceeded the 50s. If you disregarded the rest, it had been a perfect day up to now.

According to the address on the invoice, Mr. Young lived in the ranching community of Santa Ysabel.

It took me about an hour to get there. When I approached, I realized the property included two parcels, one with the ranch house and one with the barn and some other outbuildings. A real estate agent would have called the property a bit of a fixer which needed TLC and some facelift.

If I wasn't a realtor, it would take a lot of euphemism to describe its condition as rundown.

The door opened and a woman aged between forty and fifty years appeared. When she had been young she probably was a looker. But now her face looked careworn and tired of the desperate struggle to survive from one day to the other. Her posture showed she had lost this struggle a long time ago.

"What's the trouble?"

"I'm sorry to trouble you. My name is Lawdon, Jacob Lawdon."

"Hell, that's you! Didn't I see you in America's Most Wanted some years ago?"

Well, my story about my colleague Coleman had worked once and I didn't feel like making up another one.

So I answered, "Could be. But to be honest, I'm looking for my colleague, Mr. Coleman."

"We had coleslaw the other day. Didn't come across the man."

This remark was at least as bright as my squirrel story, so I decided to stay polite.

"Well, my company gave me the address of his secretary, Olivia Jackson. Somebody told me she was in her cabin near Lake Calmora. But I missed her. In her cabin she left a note for me and asked me to contact Mike Young. So I came here to ask him how to find Mrs. Jackson."

She tried a touch of a smile, but it didn't work. She lacked the opportunities to practice.

"Mike is my son. He's over there fixing the roof of the chicken coop."

"Thank you so much, Mrs. Young. I guess you don't mind if I exchange some words with him, do you?"

My carefully chosen words paved the way for success. Evidently they found her approval because without another word she turned around and slammed the door. I took that as her politest way to say yes and walked over to ask Mike Young about his relation to Mrs. Olivia Jackson.