how-oh-how had Rita McKinley’s appraisal been so far off the mark?
In the old days, Littleton was a prime horse racing town. Centennial was never a big-time track, but it wasn’t the bush league either. Carol and I used to come down two or three times a summer to watch the horses run and lose a little of our hard-earned dough. Now when 1 come, all I feel is loneliness, and an aching sense of my own mortality. They’re tearing everything down, and someday soon they’ll come up behind me and tear me down too. Something as big as a racetrack ought to have a little bit of immortality attached to it But they tore old Centennial down and plowed her under. Right out there where the grandstand stood are high-rise offices and apartment buildings. Oh, sacrilege. All that’s left of the old days is the ever-flowing Platte: it snakes its way down from the mountains and winds past expensive subdivisions and subdivided farms and modern shopping centers built on the land of old ranches. In one of those houses, just south of the racetrack, Val Ballard lived.
I checked the address. The house sat back from the street in a grove of trees. It was very dark: the trees blotted out all light from the road. A wind had risen and the snow had blown in drifts over the driveway. I came in boldly, with my lights on, and sat for a moment with my lights playing across the front of the house. Nobody home, it looked to me. I turned off the lights, then the motor. The darkness was oppressive. I got out and followed my penlight up the walk to the front door. I rang the bell, then knocked. Nothing. I walked around the house, into the teeth of the gale, and fought my way across the yard to the garage. He had gone somewhere and he had gone in a hurry. He had left the door up and there were rubber marks on the cement. I could still see the ruts he had left in the yard, only half buried under the snow.
I went back to the car and got my tools. I knew I was a sitting duck for anyone who drove up—my car was there in the open yard, so there’d be no running away from it. When I decide to commit suicide, I don’t brood over it. I did think once of consequences. I could get three to five for this. Then I held the penlight in my teeth and picked open the front door lock.
The first thing to do was find an escape hatch. The back door. I crossed the main room and went through a dark corridor and found it. I checked it to make sure it could be opened easily. Fine. Well, not fine, but it wouldn’t get any finer. This was it. I had come looking for Ballard, I would tell my executioners. The house was dark but I had noticed the garage door up and had gone around to check. That’s how they happened to catch me walking around from the back yard. I would slip out the back way and walk nonchalantly around the house, and this was what I would tell them. I had stopped behind the house to take a leak, a nice touch, I thought, that gave some credibility to a shaggy-dog tale like that.
With that settled, I went through the house, looking for… what? I had a half-baked hunch I might even find Stan Ballard’s books. The place to start was in the basement. I found it with no trouble, a set of dark stairs that led down from the kitchen. If he came home now, I was sunk. Forget the back door, I’d never make it. I took a long breath and started down. The little light led me to a finished room. There were no books: just a water bed, a chest of drawers, a big-screen TV, a VCR, and a wall of pornographic tapes. I could see at a glance the kind of entertainment he liked, with titles like
I left it all as I had found it. The next likely place was an attic. Ballard didn’t have a walk-up attic, but I found a tiny trapdoor in the ceiling. I pushed it open with a broom, which I found in the kitchen. I gripped the rim and chinned myself up into the hole. With my little light in my teeth, I turned my head from one direction to another, dropped, chinned, and did it again from the other side. Nothing. It looked like he had never been up there: the place was two inches deep in dust and had never been disturbed.
I went through his living room. There wasn’t even a Reader’s Digest condensed book for the criminally brainless. In fact, Ballard didn’t have a single book in his entire house that I could see. I looked through the kitchen cupboards, remembering that twice before I had found in closets and cupboards small stacks of very good books. No luck this time. So…the hell with the books: maybe I could find a gun. A lot of cases are broken that way, through the almost unbelievable incompetence and stupidity of the killer. I went into the bedroom and looked in all the normal places where a man might keep a gun, and found nothing.
I came at last to his den. He didn’t even have a law book. I had never been in a lawyer’s house that had not even one book around, and it felt almost empty. He had a filing cabinet and a rolltop desk, neither of which was locked. I opened the cabinet and found his dead files, duplicates of old cases long disposed. I flipped through the folders double-time, looking for high spots. There weren’t any.
The bottom drawer was full of pornography. Another waste of time.
The desk had pigeonholes and compartments and many sliding drawers. The pigeonholes were empty, the compartments were full of dust, and the drawers were stuffed with pornography. I didn’t go through the whole boring inventory: it just didn’t look like the den of a guy who practiced much law.
I found what I found in the last possible place. On top of the desk, pushed far back where it lay in dark shadow, was a yellow pad. The top sheet was filled with doodles and notes. There was a name at the top—Rubicoff—and under it a figure, $1,235. There was a phone number. I recognized the exchange as east Denver, not far from my store. Rubicoff. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember from where. At the bottom of the paper he had done some multiplying: the figure 8,500 multiplied by various numbers from 10 to 150. Each time the writing got darker, more slashing, angrier. I didn’t know what it meant but I had some guesses. The figure 8,500 might correspond roughly to the number of books in old Stan Bal-lard’s library. The figures were guesswork—somebody’s idea of what the library might be worth if the books averaged $10, $50, $75, and so on. He didn’t know books very well: it’s unheard of to get a high average on that big a library. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen a book yet that was worth less than $100.
And what about Rubicoff? I’d lay odds he was the turtle-faced man. I was getting close to cracking it, I thought.
I wrote the number in my notebook. I put everything back exactly as it was. Then I got the hell out of there.
