Take a Step to Murder. Day Keene

       COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1959 by Day Keene.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

       TAKE A STEP TO MURDER

      One

      IN THE BEGINNING God created heaven and earth. In the beginning there were no Sputniks or Explorers. In the beginning Kurt Renner had no intention of killing Kelcey Anders. The thought never entered his mind. He merely intended to use him.

      As such schemes go, it was clever; basic, elemental, earthy. All men like pretty girls. With Kelcey they were a disease. And along with being inflicted with satyriasis, the youthful heir to the Anders’ fortune was a self-admitted snob. Tamara was young and very pretty. She was also a genuine countess.

      A big man, not unhandsome, tastefully tailored in gray flannel, Renner sat drumming his fingers on the bar, forcing a smile he didn’t feel. He was naturally high-strung. But now with so much at stake, despite his outer composure, the endless babble of voices, the constant blare of the jukebox, and the waiting—especially the waiting—were beginning to get on his nerves. At midnight he got down from the chrome and red leather bar stool and walked out of the dimly lighted cocktail lounge onto the concrete apron of the adjoining filling station.

      Old man Manners was hosing the concrete. He turned the nozzle of the hose so the water wouldn’t splash on the cuffs of Renner’s trousers.

      “Another slow night, eh.” It was a statement, not a question.

      Renner asked how much gasoline he’d pumped.

      The old man shrugged. “The usual. Forty, fifty, gallons.” He added, as if it was an accomplishment, “But I did have one oil change.”

      “Fine,” Renner said wryly.

      He walked on across the wet apron to the highway. He’d only rented one unit, that to a pair of elderly tourists who had somehow got past the barricades and DETOUR signs blocking off the new super-highway. That meant a profit of eight dollars. The bar business wasn’t much better. Most of it was local beer and Coke and sandwich trade, young punks stealing feels in the half-light, having a big time for six bits.

      The night, for southern California, was cool. A pale moon hung low in the sky. There was a clean, fresh smell of the not too distant sea. Out here the only sounds were the shrill of the cicadas and the tree frogs and the wind whispering through the branches of the trees.

      Renner walked on up the highway to a small knoll a hundred yards beyond the still-green concrete culvert that marked his property line. As far as he could see in both directions triple lanes of concrete separated by a wide divider strip of grass, six lanes in all, wound over and through the rugged coastal hills like so many bands of white ribbon. It was a beautiful piece of engineering, a highway to end all highways. There was only one flaw. There were no cars on it. There would be no cars on it for six, possibly nine, months. All because someone had bobbled.

      Leaving him holding the bag—the bag consisting of a two hundred thousand dollar investment.

      He turned and looked back at his combination tourist court, cocktail lounge and filling station. The eighteen-unit court was built in the shape of a U, well-built of cut field stone and hewn timbers. The grounds were professionally landscaped. The big tile swimming pool looked blue and inviting in the floodlights. The one-stop filling station and cocktail lounge and restaurant were in keeping with the court.

      A big neon sign spelled out the name:

      ELDORADO COURT

      Kurt Renner, Proprietor

      There it was—his—everything so new that it glistened, the one truly beautiful thing he’d ever owned.

      He could rent a couple a bed. He could feed them or get them drunk. He could fill their car with gasoline or grease or wash it. He could even tow them in if they ran off the road. Whatever the traveling public needed or wanted, he had it. Now because of one stupid mistake, he stood to lose everything.

      Renner tried to find fault with his business acumen. He couldn’t. He’d timed the building and the opening of the court to coincide with the scheduled opening of the highway. He’d checked and double-checked. And now because one or more engineers had miscalculated on estimating the length of time and amount of fill it would take to extend the south end of the highway through a particularly bad stretch of terrain, the State Road Department informed him it might be as long as nine months before the highway was opened to through traffic.

      And in nine months he’d be financially dead. He owned a luxury tourist court and cocktail lounge and filling station on a ghost highway—a ghost highway shut off by barricades and DETOUR signs. Meanwhile his payroll and payments went on.

      All told, counting construction costs and furnishings and equipment, the court had cost two hundred thousand dollars. Of the total, forty thousand had been cash, every dollar he’d been able to save and scrounge and chisel in ten years of being a bell captain in luxury hotels from Miami to Los Angeles to Las Vegas. For ten years he’d done without. He’d done things foreign to his nature and his pride, deliberately, for a purpose. There was more than money involved. He’d wanted to prove that old man Renner’s son, the son of an immigrant celery farmer, could amount to something.

      Despite the cool of the night perspiration beaded on Renner’s cheeks. One way or another he had to hang on to the court. He meant to. If this little bit of business he was planning with Kelcey Anders went as scheduled, he could still pull through. Anders Senior would do anything to keep “My Boy” out of prison. And Anders Senior had all the money in the world. As far as Renner could see, the setup couldn’t miss.

      A pair of headlights brightened one of the south-bound lanes. For a moment Renner was hopeful it was the battered local bus that was Mission Bay’s only commercial link with the outside world until the new highway opened.

      “Midnight,” he’d told Tamara. “Or as close to midnight as you can make it.”

      It wasn’t the bus. It was merely a local car whose driver had ignored the battery of signs the State Road Department had erected at both ends of the highway and at the farm roads leading down from the hills.

      The car turned onto the apron of the station and stopped beside one of the pumps. A boy and a girl got out. The boy said something to Manners. Then the girl waggled the hips of the too-tight blue jeans she was wearing toward the door of the cocktail lounge and the boy walked after her. When they were out of the glare of the overhead lights of the station, they kissed, pressing and straining against each other, rocking back and forth in a spasmodic orgiastic aftermath.

      Renner watched them, mildly amused. It would be nice to be young again, that young. They were probably fresh from the hills, still filled with the wonder of it all, finding out what it was like closer to heaven in the back seat of the car or on a blanket spread on the ground.

      Now the boy would buy the girl a Coke or a beer and a hamburger and probably jump her again on the way home. Both of them very well satisfied with the arrangement. Renner knew. He’d been born in Mission Bay. He lit a cigarette and walked back to the pumps.

      Old man Manners was mumbling in his stubble of grizzled beard. “Fifty cents, by God. Fifty cents worth of gas. And will I please check his radiator and be sure and clean the windshield as the bugs are bad up in the hills tonight.”

      Renner laughed and looked up the highway again.

      “Why you all the time looking up the highway?” the old man