“Bet my headgear?” Arturo said with a puzzled frown. “Why would I want to—”
“Never mind that,” Turnbuckle broke in. “Something’s happened that you don’t know about, Arturo. Conrad has disappeared.”
“Good Lord! Tell me about it.”
“Frank and I were on our way to my office. I was going to fill him in there. You look pretty tired, though, and I know you’re still recuperating from that bullet wound, so perhaps we should drop you at the hotel—”
“Nonsense,” Arturo said. “No offense, sir, but I’m coming with you and Mr. Morgan. Dr. Taggart said I was fit to travel, and I can’t possibly rest until I know what’s happened to Mr. Browning.”
“That’s just it,” Turnbuckle muttered. “We don’t know. But come along, and I’ll fill you in on all the details.”
“I hope so,” Frank said, “because I haven’t followed much of this so far. I don’t even know what Conrad was doing here in San Francisco.”
“It’s not a pretty story,” Turnbuckle said with a sigh.
“It never is,” Frank said.
Chapter 18
One of Turnbuckle’s assistants had brought in cups of coffee for the three men. As they sat in the lawyer’s elegantly appointed private office, Turnbuckle said, “I suppose the best thing to do is just start at the beginning. You’re a grandfather, Frank.”
“What are you talking about, Claudius?” Frank was stunned, the cup in his hand forgotten.
“Do you remember Pamela Tarleton?”
Frank grunted. “Be hard to forget her, after what she did to Rebel.”
“Yes, well, that wasn’t the extent of Miss Tarleton’s evil. I don’t wish to be indelicate about this, but it seems that when Conrad decided to call off his engagement to her, she was, ah, already in the family way.”
Frank sighed. “Conrad’s grown into a fine young man, but before that he could be a damned fool sometimes.”
Turnbuckle didn’t comment on that. “Following the affair in New Mexico in which Miss Tarleton’s father was arrested and then murdered, she returned to Boston and gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl.”
“Named Frank and Vivian,” Arturo put in.
That news rocked Frank. Learning he had a pair of grandchildren had been a shock without hearing they were named after him and Conrad’s mother, the great love of his life. To cover how shaken he was, he took a sip of the hot, strong coffee. Then he nodded and said, “Go on.”
For the next half hour, Turnbuckle and Arturo explained how Conrad had found out about Pamela’s cruel plot against him and how he had set out on a cross-country odyssey to find the missing twins.
“The boy should have told me.” Frank frowned. “I would have come and given him a hand.”
“I believe he was determined to do this himself,” Turnbuckle said.
“He had Arturo here helping him.” Frank waved his hand toward the Italian.
“It’s not quite the same thing,” Arturo said. “Mr. Browning and I are not related, therefore no emotional complications and implications existed that would have had he called on his father for assistance.”
“That never stopped him before,” Frank muttered, thinking of all the times he and his gun had come to Conrad’s aid.
“He was never searching for his own children before.”
Frank shrugged and turned back to the lawyer. “So the trail led here?”
“That’s right. Conrad felt—and I agreed with him—that he was closing in on the children at last. We located some clues pointing toward a man named Dex Lannigan who owns a saloon in the Barbary Coast. We figure Pamela Tarleton made a deal with Lannigan. He may even know where she hid the children.”
Frank leaned forward in his chair and set his cup on Turnbuckle’s desk. “Then I reckon it’s time we went and had a talk with this fella Lannigan.”
Turnbuckle held up a hand. “It’s not that simple.”
“Lannigan is going to be at a society party tonight that Conrad was also going to attend,” Turnbuckle went on. “He hoped to find out more information that way. But this morning, when one of the bodyguards I’ve hired to look out for Conrad went to the Palace Hotel, where he’s staying, Conrad wasn’t there ... and neither was the guard who was on duty last night.”
“They might’ve gone somewhere and just haven’t come back yet,” Frank suggested.
A weary sigh came from Turnbuckle. “I might have thought the same thing ... if not for the fact that the police showed up here with the news that Thomas Morelli’s body was pulled out of San Francisco Bay this morning. Morelli was the man who was with Conrad. He had been badly beaten, and his throat was cut. His wife knew he was working for me and told the police about it when they talked to her. The poor woman sent them here.”
That sounded pretty bad, all right. Frank knew there was a good chance Conrad and this fella Morelli had been together. Since Morelli was dead, then ...
Frank gave a little shake of his head. He wasn’t going to let himself think the thought that had just crossed his mind. Conrad wasn’t dead. He knew it in his heart. “What did you tell the police?”
“That Morelli had been guarding Conrad. There was an attempt on his life as soon as he got to town.”
“Lannigan had men watching for him, probably at the train station,” Frank said.
Turnbuckle nodded. “That’s what we think now. We didn’t know about Lannigan at the time.”
“You didn’t tell the police you think Lannigan’s to blame for what happened to Morelli?”
“There’s no proof of that,” Turnbuckle said. “And I know Conrad didn’t want the police involved in the matter of the children. He thought he stood a better chance of recovering them safely himself. I knew you’d be arriving today, and I wanted to consult with you first.”
“Why did you track me down and send me that telegram, if you knew Conrad didn’t want me mixed up in it?”
Turnbuckle’s fist thumped down on the desk. “Because you and I are friends, Frank, and those are your grandchildren we’re talking about! It seems to me you have a right to be involved. Besides, Arturo wired me from Carson City and told me Conrad seemed to be getting more reckless and obsessed about the whole thing.”
Arturo spoke up. “I didn’t want to go against Mr. Browning’s wishes, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe you could help him, Mr. Morgan. And he needed that help.” Arturo smiled. “Did you know when we first met, Mr. Browning was calling himself Kid Morgan? For the longest time I thought he was just some Western gunslinger. I had no idea he was actually a financier and businessman, and a quite successful one, at that.”
“Back then he had put all that behind him,” Frank said. “I reckon he thought he was Kid Morgan, too. That’s who he wanted to be.”
“But we can’t be someone we’re not,” Turnbuckle said heavily. “Our pasts won’t allow that.”
Frank shrugged. They were drifting off the trail here. “If Conrad’s still alive, Lannigan’s probably got him stashed somewhere. You said Lannigan owns a saloon in the Barbary Coast?”
“That’s right. It’s called the Golden Gate. What are you going to do, Frank?”
The Drifter pushed himself to his feet. “I reckon it’s time to pay a visit to Dex Lannigan and his Golden Gate Saloon.”
The only good thing about the pain in his head, Conrad thought, was that the dead no longer felt such agonies. That meant he was still alive ...
Unless he had died and gone to hell for all the evil things he had done in his life.
Even though he was no expert on theology, it seemed unlikely to him that hell would smell like rotten fish. That unpleasant odor filled his nostrils, with another smell lurking under it that might be salt water.
He kept his eyes closed and didn’t move, making an effort to keep his rate of breathing from changing. If
