Death in the Distillery (20 page)

Suddenly, I felt sorry for her. I didn't know what to say,
so I fell back on my PI skills. I asked a question. "How
can I find Gus?"

"At the Riverside Club. Everyone knows him."

Leaving Mary in the rackhouse, I climbed in my pickup.
I wanted to look in Claude's cabin, but officially, I
couldn't. Burglary was the legal name of what I had in
mind. Three elements determined burglary; breaking and
entering, dwelling belongs to another, and intent to commit
crime.

I reasoned that maybe this would not exactly be burglary.
After all, there was no intent to commit a crime. I was
splitting hairs, but I really wanted that baseball bat.

I studied his cabin, idly watching a calico cat grooming
herself on the stack of firewood beside his apartment. My
best bet was to return after he got off work. Come up with
some lie to get the ball bat.

I glanced around the premises. No one was moving. Why
not take a chance? Casually, I knocked on his door. No
answer. Good. Despite the fact my heart was thudding
against my chest, I moved without haste. I opened the door,
stuck my head in, and yelled, giving the impression to anyone watching that I was innocently searching for Claude.

The bat rested on the gun rack not ten feet away. I
stepped inside, grabbed the bat and jammed it under my
belt, sliding the handle down to my calf and sticking the
bleached barrel under my jacket.

Then, as casually as I broke in, I left, walking somewhat
stiff-legged back to my pickup, at the same time giving an
indifferent glance around the farm. To my relief, no one
was storming toward me.

Just for a touch of the dramatic, I paused at the open
door of my Chevy and wiped my forehead. Then I climbed
into the pickup and slowly drove away, trying to sort my
thoughts about Claude. If the bat had bloodstains, I was
going to have a hard time tying Claude in as the blackmail
victim. I didn't know how much Patterson had demanded,
but his possessions indicated a great deal more than Claude
could afford.

Another idea hit me. Maybe the blackmail victim paid
Claude to whack Emmett. I considered the possibility, then shook my head. No one in his right mind would trust
Claude to keep quiet about something like that.

My next move was to find Gus at the Riverside Club,
which, to no one's surprise, turned out to be on the bank
of the Colorado River in downtown Bastrop.

Finding Gus was no problem. Making sense of his mumbling was another matter. I spent ten minutes at his table
and learned nothing.

The owner of the club shook his head when I bellied up
to the bar. "You ain't gonna get no sense from that old
rummy, mister."

I glanced across the darkened room at Gus, who sat at a
corner table muttering to the can of beer before him. "It's
only ten o'clock. How many beers has he had?"

"That's his first. The old man comes in, takes two sips
and he's drunker'n a skunk. I've knowed a lot of alkies
like that. Lose their tolerance, I suppose."

The owner must have read my mind, for he added, "But
he don't hurt nothing in here. Everybody knows him. He
just sits from morning 'til night. Puts away ten or twelve
cans."

I thought about my own drinking. It wasn't excessive,
but then maybe neither was Gus' at the beginning. I
shrugged the thought off. "Tell me. Last Saturday night.
You notice him and a heavy-set woman with red hair?"

He eyed me warily. "You a cop?"

"Private investigator. Just trying to pin down the
whereabouts of the woman I mentioned."

He shrugged. "Well, can't help. And that's the truth. Saturday is our big night. Like the old boy said, I stay busier
than a callgirl at a political convention."

I studied Gus, then asked, "What about last Sunday? Was
Gus here last Sunday?"

"You sure you ain't a cop?"

"Swear on a stack of Bibles." I held up my hand.

He wrinkled his forehead in concentration. "Can't say
for sure. He's here all the time, you know. But, now that you mention it, I don't remember seeing him Sunday. He
mighta been here, but I can't say for sure."

"Anybody else work here besides you?"

He chuckled and wiped down the bar. "I wish. No, I
open this dump and close it, seven days a week. You
wouldn't be interested in buying a going proposition, would
you?"

It was my turn to chuckle. "No, thanks." So much for
Mary's alibi.

On the way back to Austin, I considered my next move.
Mary was still suspect. She fit in with the ME tech's conjecture of a woman assailant, and there was no definite
proof she spent Sunday with Gus. But, I reminded myself,
there was a Gus. She had not invented him. And that lent
some credence to her alibi.

Suppose she was the killer. She could have whacked Emmett on the head. But, as fat as she was, how could she
leap from a moving tractor, keep her balance, and outrun
the discs? Watching the traffic ahead of me, I muttered,
"She's so fat, she'd bust her ankles if she jumped off a
chair."

On the other hand, she could be a lot stronger than she
looked. Manhandling all the barrels up on the forklift took
some muscle.

Sometimes ideas grow slowly in your head. Sometimes,
they suddenly appear. One second, you're blank, the next,
there it is. That's how it happened to me. One moment, I
was puzzling over how she could escape the discs, the next
second, I knew.

"Dummy," I growled, pounding my forehead with the
heel of my hand. "Why didn't you see it sooner?"

The oak. That's how the killer pulled it off. When the
tractor went under the oak, all the killer had to do was
deliver the blow, throw the club away, grab a limb and
hold on until the discs passed under him, or her. Even fat
Mary Tucker could have managed dangling for ten or fifteen seconds.

"I'll be," I muttered excitedly. "That's it. That's . . ." A
thought stopped me. If the killer had thrown the club away,
where did it go? The crime scene boys scoured the area.
They found nothing.

The blaring of a horn jerked me back to the present.
"What the . . ." I had crossed the yellow line. The leering
grin of a Peterbilt grill filled the windshield. I yanked the
wheel hard to the right. Tires squealed, and I was thrown
against the door as I swerved just in time to miss a headon with the loaded eighteen-wheeler.

Behind me, horns blared. Speeding vehicles braked to
miss me as I careened across two lanes of traffic. The
pickup skidded off the macadam onto the graveled shoulder. I hit the brakes and fought for control in white clouds
of billowing dust. The pickup hurtled pell-mell toward an
unyielding fence of concrete blocks. I felt the brake pedal
banging against my foot. I slid to a halt only inches from
the fence.

I gulped, and for several moments sat motionless. Finally, I drew a shaky hand across my dry lips. I muttered
a soft curse. "That was too close," I whispered.

Slowly, I pulled back onto the shoulder, letting traffic
pass until I could move into the outside lane and drive on
into Austin at forty miles an hour.

Despite puzzling over the whereabouts of the murder
weapon, the excitement of discovering how the killer escaped the discs overcame the chilling awareness of my
close encounter with the graveyard. Seems like Runnels
had made a remark about seeing the discs under the large
oak.

I couldn't remember, and caught up in the midst of the
heavy traffic, I wasn't about to sneak a look at my notes.
I vowed that could wait until I reached home at forty miles
an hour.

So much for vows. Within a few miles, I was tooling
along at seventy-five with the other idiots, letting my mind
wander right along with theirs, except mine was wandering
through the evidence I had slowly compiled, while they
dreamed of the coming weekend.

To my surprise, the black Lexus was nowhere in sight
when I turned into the drive. I glanced around, wondering
if Danny had pulled the wolves off. That wasn't like him.
In school, he never took chances, and I assumed for him
to have lived so long in his particular business, he still
didn't. He was a great believer in information, and he
pulled every string he could when he needed some.

I slipped the bat under my belt and climbed out of the
pickup. As I opened the apartment door, I heard the gentle
squeak of tires against the curb. I looked around as Huey
dropped the Lexus into park, and stared at me over the top
of the partially lowered window. I grinned at him, but his
rock-hard face didn't flinch.

Once inside, I stuck the bat in the corner of the bedroom
closet until I could scrounge up a can of luminol and an
ultraviolet light from my old police buddy, Joe Ray Burrus.
A couple of squirts of spray on the barrel of the bat, stick
it under the light, and if there had been blood on it, the bat
would glow like ten thousand fireflies down in a Louisiana
swamp.

There were a couple of day-old hamburgers in the refrigerator. I popped them in the microwave and opened a
beer. I hesitated, remembering Gus. I poured the beer down
the drain and searched the refrigerator for a soft drink. There were none, so I drew a glass of water from the faucet.
"Who needs beer?" I muttered with a sense of bravado. "I
can do without it."

While the burgers nuked, I called Joe Ray.

"No sweat," he replied in a whisper. "I'll give you a call
as soon as I can collect the ... ah, the gear."

While I ate, I read back through my notes of the interview with David Runnels. "Here it is," I muttered, reading
aloud the notes I had taken. "When I stepped outside, the
tractor was going past the tree. I didn't see nothing else for
a few seconds, and then this dark pile sort of squirted out
from the discs."

I leaned back and studied the notes. Nothing about seeing
anyone running from the scene. I visualized the layout. Best
I could guess, from the spot where his body was found, no
one other than a world-class sprinter could have reached
the security of the distillery in less than twenty seconds.

Staring at the ceiling, I muttered, "Besides. If someone
was hanging from a limb, he couldn't drop until the discs
passed. That means, he would drop at the same time Emmett Patterson popped out. And if that was the case, then
Runnels would have seen him."

A grimace twisted my lips. "That blows that theory out
of the water."

Then I remembered. The trunk of the tree was between
the tractor and the maintenance barn where Runnels had
stood. What if the trunk was also between Runnels and the
killer? Could the killer have seen Runnels and hidden behind the trunk until Runnels went back into the barn?

That didn't sound right. Best I could picture the scene
in my mind, if Runnels had seen Patterson squirt out, he
also would have seen the killer dangling from the tree limb.

I made a note to check with Runnels again. There were
too many unanswered questions.

Disheartened, I spread the pictures of Emmett's cabin on
the snack bar and forced myself to study them. Maybe I
could find something here. My neat little hanging-from-the tree theory was slowly sinking into the quagmire of cold
reality.

In addition to being a puzzle freak, Patterson was also a
western nut. I held up the picture of the set of horns and
studied it. They probably cost a few hundred, unless he
stole them from somewhere. On the next wall, three prints
of western settings hung next to each other, probably
seventy-five bucks or so each. Next was his collection of
revolvers, rifles, and shotguns. A few thousand dollars
there. Above the gun cabinet was the clock, the Texas clock
with the Lone Star face.

"No Neiman Marcus bargain there. Maybe Barnum and
Bailey Circus." I laughed, noting how the numbers encircled the star. Twelve at the top point. I took another bite
of hamburger and observed that the next point was a two.
I shook my head. Each point was numbered-twelve, two,
four, eight, ten. Jesus, talk about tourist Texana. Straight
out of a Stuckey's gift shop.