Detour to Death Read Online Free Page A

baton before the downbeat. Francy. The name lit a candle in every eye.
    “What do you mean?” Virgil demanded.
    “What do you think I mean?” the woman cried. “They died the same way, didn’t they? I knew it wasn’t an accident. How could it be an accident? Drunk or sober, how could Francy give herself a brain concussion if she was walking alone on the highway?”
    “Wait a minute!” Danny yelled. “I wasn’t even near here last night!”
    “That’s what you say!”
    It was the sheriff who finally got Viola to shut up. He’d come out here because old Charley Gaynor was dead-she could kindly leave Francy out of this. “It’s her condition,” Walter explained. “She gets so excited over things.” But Virgil Keep wasn’t interested in any woman’s condition; he wanted facts. From Walter he would get them, not so eloquently or dramatically as from Viola, but with considerably more accuracy.
    His wife had discovered the body when she stepped outside the kitchen door to add a few bottles to the crate of empties on the porch. Her cries brought him running with his gun, and he saw the boy, this Danny Ross as he called himself, standing over the old man. Sure he recognized him. Charley had brought him in for a Coke not fifteen minutes earlier. Charley was always picking up people on the road.
    “Was the boy running away?” Virgil asked.
    “No,” Walter admitted, “he wasn’t running anywhere. He was walking toward the café.”
    For the first time since Virgil Keep walked into the room, Danny began to relax.
There, you see
, he told himself,
it’s all going to work out after all. It’s nothing but a crazy mistake because a woman became frightened and a man had a gun in his hand
. In a few minutes everything would be straightened out, and Danny Ross would be on his way. Confidence gave him a voice.
    “That’s what I told you,” he said. “I didn’t kill the old man. Would I come back here if I had? He gave me a lift, that’s all. I had no reason to kill him.”
    “No reason!”
    They could silence Viola for just so long, but now she was back again, her sweaty face leaning toward Danny’s and her heavy breasts heaving with emotion. “What about that two hundred dollars?” she cried. “Listen to me, Virgil Keep. Charley had two hundred dollars. We both saw it, both Walter and me. He stood right where you’re standing now and took the money off Jim Rice—Jim still owed for Ethel’s operation—and all the time this young hoodlum sat there watching. You should have seen his eyes!”
    Nobody could deny Viola now. She pulled out an object from under the counter, and Danny’s heart stood still. It was the old man’s threadbare coat, limp and empty.
    “We all saw Charley put the money in this coat, but it’s not there now! Ask him! Ask this young tramp what he did with Charley’s wallet!”
    It was then that doom came in and met Danny Ross. The sheriff could send his deputy out to search the old man’s body, but Danny didn’t need his report to know the wallet was gone. Now Danny even knew where and how it had gone, but these people wouldn’t believe him. They’d never believe him after the sheriff’s big ham hands ripped into his pockets. He was just a down and out hitchhiker without the price of a cold drink until the contents of his billfold was dumped out on the counter. The small bills and chicken feed didn’t count. The big stuff was enough— One sixty, one eighty, two hundred.
    “All right,” the sheriff said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 3
    C OOPERTON WAS A LITTLE TOWN , and the same things happen in little towns as in big cities—only not so often. Babies are born, lovers marry (and sometimes don’t), and old men die. But Charley Gaynor wasn’t just any old man, and he hadn’t died in bed. Charley was like the town square, or the flag flying over the post office. He was the war memorial plaque at the town hall (most of those names were boys Charley had delivered) and the