Man on a Leash Read Free Page B

wouldn’t bet there weren’t a few women around here could fill in a lot more blanks than they’ll ever admit. Your old man must have been one hell of a swordsman when he was younger—say only around sixty—and from what I gather, he hadn’t slowed down a great deal.
    “Sometimes he drove to San Francisco, and sometimes he just went over to Reno and took the plane. We checked the airlines, and they have no record of a reservation for him any time in July at all, so he must have driven all the way. As far as we can pin it down, the last time he was seen here was on the Fourth, when he had his car serviced at his usual place, the Shell station on Aspen Street.
    “When he planned to be gone more than a few days, he usually made arrangements with a kid named Wally Pruitt to go out to the place and check on it now and then, make sure the automatic sprinklers were working, and so on, but this time Wally says he didn’t call him, so apparently he wasn’t intending to stay long when he left or else he just forgot—”
    The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Brubaker said, and picked it up. “Brubaker ... Oh, good morning ... Yeah, he did. As a matter of fact, he’s here in my office right now ... Okay, I’ll tell him. You’re welcome.”
    He hung up. “That was your father’s lawyer, Sam Bolling. He’s been trying to get hold of you, too, and he’d like to see you as soon as we’re through here.”
    “Right,” Romstead said. “Thanks.”
    “His office is in the Whittaker Building at Third and Aspen. It was through Sam, as a matter of fact, that we first learned about the money and also that your father had an apartment in San Francisco. He’s the executor of the estate, and as soon as he learned Captain Romstead was dead, he notified the tax people, the banks, any possible creditors, all that legal bit. The bank in San Francisco told him about that whopping withdrawal, and he immediately notified us. He was worried about the money, of course, but we already had a pretty good idea nobody was ever going to find it.
    “We asked the San Francisco police to check out his apartment while we searched the house here to see if we could turn up any trace of it just on the off chance he still hadn’t consummated the so-called deal. There was no money in either place, but we did find evidence of just about what we expected—or that is, San Francisco did. All we found in the house was a thousand Havana cigars stashed in a closet. But the apartment was the payoff.
    “It had just been thoroughly cleaned, with the exception of one item he overlooked. In a closet there was an empty suitcase that had some white powder spilled in the lining. The police vacuumed it and had the stuff analyzed. It was heroin, all right, and it had been cut with milk sugar.
    “So there you are. All the evidence says he must have been mixed up in smuggling junk when he was going to sea and still had connections. Somebody brought in a consignment for him, he drew out that money to pay for it, but before he sold it as pure heroin to the next bunch of bastards along the pipeline, he cut it, or cut part of it, to increase the take. Sound business procedure, I suppose, as long as you don’t do it to the wrong people. He apparently did, and they caught up with him after he got back here.”
    “No,” Romstead said. “I don’t buy it. Maybe in a lot of ways he wouldn’t qualify as Husband of the Year or the thoroughly domesticated house pet, but junk—no.”
    “I wouldn’t call you an expert witness,” Brubaker pointed out. “You’ve practically admitted you didn’t know a damn thing about where he was or what he was doing.”
    “No, but I don’t see that you’ve got any evidence, anyway. Who says that suitcase was his? You know as well as I do he wasn’t using that apartment alone. Christ, with his track record there could have been a half dozen girls in and out of it at one time or another, any one of ‘em a possible junkie or with a