The road wasn’t exactly unpaved, but so many stones and branches lay across the broken asphalt it might as well have been. The Ford Becky had hired took another sharp bounce and Cuddles issued a low moan before once more focusing on Balto: The Hero Dog. Unique among automobile passengers, he claimed that he could fend off car sickness by reading. But when the car jumped another bad rut, he put his book on the floor and murmured: “I don’t think this rattletrap is going to make it.”
Becky, who’d learned to drive at college, dismissed the idea: “Will Rogers says Henry Ford could make a farm pay. We’ll get there.” She patted the steering wheel.
“The rattletrap I was referring to,” said Cuddles, “is myself. And I would rather sit through two hours of Fink’s Mules than twenty minutes of Rogers.”
“Relax,” Becky ordered. She glanced again at the map Cuddles had drawn from Daisy’s information, then gunned the engine, pushing them a little further into the San Rafael Valley.
“You know,” said Cuddles, “Spilkes and Burn would tell you our means of transport isn’t in keeping with the Oldcastle image.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?”
Once at their destination, she and Cuddles would be trying to pass themselves off as geologists with the state’s Department of Public Safety, charged with spot-checking land formations within fifty miles of the St. Francis Dam, which had collapsed last Monday night only hours after Cuddles called the Roosevelt. Four hundred had died, and a small army of typhoid inoculators was now on the move. The California papers were shrill with cries for investigation.
Cuddles had arrived in Los Angeles only yesterday, and immediately argued with Becky over what movie to see before dinner.
“Two Lovers,” he’d suggested, with peculiar confidence. “Colman and Vilma Banky.”
“Pass,” said Becky.
“Love Happy. Lois Moran.”
“Pick another, Aloysius.”
“Love. Garbo and Gilbert.”
They’d settled on seeing Wings for the third time each. Afterwards, over a Mexican dinner, Cuddles spiritedly explained the chain of clues—from the judge to Max to Daisy and her messenger—that had led him to come out here without telling anyone back at the office. Maybe it was the derring-do of Wings, or the two tequilas Becky drank on top of an Orange Julius, but by the end of the night she’d begun to feel that Cuddles’ plan to scout the whereabouts of John Shepard might not be so preposterous. And, all things considered, she would rather be dodging rocks and brush and maybe even snakes with Cuddles than trying to wake him up inside the Palace Theatre.
Cuddles himself, despite his pouting, continued to seem energetic, even hopeful this morning. He’d seen a good omen in their having found a Mexican restaurant as awful as Manking.
After making two more of the turns on Daisy’s map, Becky noticed a change in terrain—fewer wildflowers and more chapparal. She could also see a line of fir trees atop a distant ridge. Before long she and Cuddles spotted the ranch house, a big split-log pile with mortar like the chalk stripes on one of Rothstein’s suits. The whole effect was so native that one instantly knew it belonged to an Easterner who’d never been on a horse. Two German shepherds on the porch looked as imported as the architecture. One of them slept while the other—with a suggestion of bared teeth—barked to beat the band.
“Well,” said Cuddles, “I’ve got a pretty good idea which one’s Hannelore and which one’s Siegfried.”
Her hands shaking a little, Becky managed to park the Ford. A minute later the door was answered by a handsome cowboy in dungarees and a Stetson. He took off the hat to say, “Ma’am?”
Cuddles made note of Becky’s little swoon. “So that’s what it takes,” he muttered.
Becky thanked the cowboy, who went to get his associate, “Mr. Jones.” Dressed in an expensive suit—maybe one of the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar numbers from Wallach’s that Rothstein had made his men wear after getting a grip on that haberdashery—Jones approached Becky and Cuddles while straightening the polka-dot handkerchief in his breast pocket.
Becky explained their geologic purpose.
Mr. Jones smiled. “ ’Course, you don’t never know how many bodies was inside the dam before it busted.”
Becky and Cuddles each responded with something closer to a gulp than a laugh.
“You and your friend don’t make small talk?” asked Mr. Jones. He seemed to be weighing suspicion of them against the prudence of complying with the state’s rock cops. “Okay,” he said, finally. “But don’t take too long. And no wandering inside the house.”
The “equipment” Cuddles and Becky had brought along consisted of several beheaded knitting needles, two slide rules, a package of litmus paper and a few small, impressively labeled bottles that actually held sarsaparilla and ginger ale. Cuddles had counted on the ranch-house occupants’ being less than highly educated, and his assumption seemed borne out by their lack of any questions about the “soil sampling” he and Becky now performed in close proximity to the house. The two of them managed a glance or two through the windows, but saw nothing of interest except an old copy of Bandbox inside a small room at the back. Even that probably signified nothing more than what Andrew Burn liked to call the magazine’s “excellent penetration” of the western states.
Becky once more started to think the whole mission might be crazy—Cuddles was starting to display unmistakable signs of belief in his geological efforts—but then, halfway up the closest ridge, only a couple of hundred yards to the north, she could see a young man, clearly not to the saddle born, sitting wobbly atop a bay horse. She nudged Cuddles.
“Yep,” he said, shading his eyes and taking a look. “Yonder.” He regarded the cowboys and cattle just ahead of the boy they now both recognized as Shep. “Jesus, that longhorned thing at the head of the parade would scare even Case.” He and Becky quickly turned away from the riders, though there was little chance Shep would recognize the two of them, clad as they were in a pith helmet and wide-brimmed gardening hat.
“Shouldn’t we let him know?” whispered Becky, beginning to feel guilty about their plan.
“Nope,” said Cuddles. “Can’t risk his blurting stuff out before the real cavalry gets here.” That, as he’d explained last night over dinner, would be Max and Gardiner Arinopoulos, whom they now could summon to write and photograph a piece that would prove Shep’s whereabouts and make Bandbox his heroic rescuer.
Back inside the ranch house, Cuddles pronounced its surrounding earth “tiptop topsoil, rock-solid safe,” to Mr. Jones, who responded by saying, with a snort, “Yeah, a regular fuckin’ Gibraltar,” perhaps a reference to Rothstein’s shaky current affairs.
A few hours later, back in Los Angeles, Cuddles and Becky wired Max, in his own idiom, at the Graybar Building in New York:
SHEP SHIPSHAPE. RESTING, RESTRAINED ON RANCH. TELEPHONE HOULIHAN AND NELLIE BLY. HOTEL ROOSEVELT, L.A., CALIF.