The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Six by Louis L’Amour Page A

of the man I knew. I was called upon to identify the body because I had been his insurance agent, and I had also known him socially.
    On the basis of my identification, the company had paid the supposed widow one million two hundred twenty thousand dollars. Yet the man across the room was Richard Marmer, and he was not dead.
    Who else could know of my mistake? His wife? Was
she
still alive? Was I the only person alive who could testify that the man across the room was a murderer? For he must be responsible for the man whose body was found. The logic of that was inevitable.
    He was getting up from his place, picking up his check. He was coming around the counter. He sat down beside me. My flesh crawled.
    “Hello, Dryden. Recognized me, didn’t you?”
    My mouth was dry and I could not find words. What could one say at such a time? I must be careful…careful.
    He went on. “It’s been a long time, but I had to come back. Now that you’ve seen me I guess I’ll have to tell you.”
    “Tell me what?”
    “That you’re in it, too. Right up to your neck.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Have some more coffee, we have a lot to talk about. I took care of all this years ago…just in case.” He ordered coffee for both of us and when the waitress had gone, he said quietly, “After the insurance was paid to my wife, one hundred thousand dollars was deposited to an account under your name at a bank in Reno.”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    “It’s true. You took your vacation at June Lake that year, and you fished a little at Tahoe.” Marmer was pleased with his shrewdness…and he had been shrewd. “I knew you went there to fish, and I knew when your vacation was so I timed it all very carefully. The bank officials in Reno will be prepared to swear you deposited that money. I forged your signature very carefully. After all”—he smiled—“I practiced it for almost a year.”
    They would believe I had been bribed, that I had been in on it.
    He could have done it, there was no doubt of that. He had imitated me over the phone more than once; he had fooled friends of mine. It had seemed merely a peculiar quirk of humor until now!
    “It wouldn’t stand up,” I objected, but without hope, “not to a careful investigation.”
    “Possibly. Only it must first be questioned, and so far there is no reason to believe that it will ever be doubted.”
    There
was
a reason; I was determined to get in touch with the police, as soon as I could get out of here, and take my chances.
    “You see,” he continued, “you would be implicated at once. And of course, you would be implicated in the murder, too.”
    The skin on my neck was cold. My fingers felt stiff. When I tried to swallow my throat was dry.
    “If murder is ever suspected, they will suspect you, too. I even”—he smiled—“left a letter in which I said that you were involved…and that letter will get to the district attorney. I have been very thorough, Dryden! Very thorough!”
    “Where’s your wife?” I asked him.
    He chuckled and it had a greasy, throaty, awful sound. “She made trouble.” He turned a bit and something metallic bumped against the counter. I looked down. The butt of a flat automatic protruded from the edge of his coat. When I looked back up, he smiled.
    “It’s all true, Dryden. Come out to the car, I’ll prove it to you.”
    My thoughts fluttered wildly at the bars of the cage he was building around me. And yet, I doubted that it was really a cage at all. He had killed an innocent man, now it seemed he had killed his wife, what was there to keep him from killing me, too? He had nothing to lose, nothing at all. What he had told me of the involved plot to implicate me was probably a lie. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a man who would kill someone in order to cash in on his life insurance, and then kill his wife, giving up one hundred thousand dollars on the off chance that it would keep me quiet. Marmer just wanted to