Free Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories by Bill Pronzini Page A

tourists hadn't discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track. The residents liked that, too. What they seemed to want more than anything else was to be left alone.
    The problem was, they weren't being left alone. Most of the land in the area was government protected—the Shasta Trinity National Recreation Area—but the land on which Cooperville sat was owned by Trinity County. A group of developers, the Munroe Corporation, had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Cooperville into a place the tourists would discover: widening and paving the access road, restoring the rundown buildings after the fashion of the Mother Lode towns, adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the mountains, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.
    The Cooperville residents were up in arms over this. They didn't want to live in a tourist trap and they didn't want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block the sale of the land, to get Cooperville named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against the Munroe Corporation, but everybody figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.
    One of the residents seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town's abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days before, including the remains of a "Fandango Hall"—a saloon-and-gambling house—that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Munroe people thought it was a blatant case of arson, and put pressure on the county sheriff's office to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as "of unknown origin."
    Bad feelings were running high by this time, on both sides. And they got worse—much worse. Two days ago, there had been another fire, not in Cooperville this time but in Redding, some forty miles away, where the Munroe Corporation had its offices. The bachelor home of the president of the Munroe combine, a man named Randall who had been the most outspoken against the citizens of Cooperville , had gone up in flames shortly past midnight. Randall had gone up with it. He was not supposed to be home that night—it was common knowledge that he was going to San Francisco on company business—but he'd put off the trip at the last minute. He had evidently been asleep when the blaze started, had been overcome by smoke before he could get out of the burning house. There was no evidence of arson; as far as the local cops were concerned, his death was a tragic accident.
    But the other Munroe partners thought otherwise. The Great Western Insurance Company, which carried a hundred-thousand-dollar double indemnity partnership policy on Randall's life and on the lives of the three remaining partners, was also skeptical. Insurance companies are always leery when a heavily insured party dies under unusual circumstances, especially when his business partners are the beneficiaries. Great Western wanted Randall's death investigated for that reason. And the Munroe people wanted his death investigated both to exonerate themselves of any wrongdoing and to find out which of the Cooperville residents was responsible for the fires.
    That was where I came in. Great Western had called me first, in the person of Barney Rivera, their head claims adjustor in San Francisco; they were a small company and did not maintain an investigative staff, so they farmed out that kind of work to private operatives like me. Then, six hours after I accepted the job, one of the three surviving Munroe partners, Raymond Treacle, showed up at my office. He offered Munroe's full