Authors: Ed Gorman
“That’s my point, Mr. Ford.” He wasn’t much good at sarcasm. Sarcasm you have to ease back a little to make it effective. He used it like a board across the mouth. “I saw him in a saloon where he was playing cards. I think you’ll have to have a talk with him.”
He was the snitch we all hated in grade school. He’d wait until the classroom had emptied and then go up to the teacher and tell her all sorts of things about the immature brats he had to spend his days with. She wouldn’t even ask him for this information. But he’d give it to her, anyway.
“Maybe he was just taking a break.”
“Some break. He’s been taking it ever since I got to town here. The fact is, he’s lazy. People accuse him of
all kinds of things but they never seem to see his biggest fault—he’s a loafer.”
I was tired of him and tired of that conversation. But then he made it all worthwhile: “You ever hear of a farmer named Tucker?”
I shook my head.
“Well, he stopped by my office on a completely different matter this morning and in the course of conversation, he talked about seeing Molly and her uncle and Grieves out by a rock quarry. And he said they were blowing the hell out of the place. He was pretty sure they were using dynamite.”
He’d finally said something that interested me. “Where’s this rock quarry?”
He told me.
“And when did this Tucker see them?”
He gave me a date.
“He see anybody else with them?”
“No. But isn’t that enough? Maybe Grieves had a reason to kill her. And maybe that’s what he did. Just snuck back into town here and killed her uncle and her.”
“Just because they were all together blowing up parts of a rock quarry?”
Buggies and wagons creaked and rattled along the streets in the midday rush.
“Well, they were killed for some reason, Mr. Ford. And right now the only person we can tie them to is Grieves. That’s worth looking into, I’d say.”
“And I agree with you.”
“You do?” He sounded shocked. He was apparently not used to winning arguments.
And what he’d told me was in fact interesting. Grieves and Molly and Uncle Bob. Working some kind of deal, no doubt. Right then, it was nothing more than a theory but the only theory we had.
“I hope you’ll take care of this personally.”
“I will. I promise. I appreciate the information.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry if I’m a little rough on Terhurne. But he is a lazy bastard.” Then: “She sure was a beauty.”
“She had one of those faces.”
“Yeah. Launch a thousand daydreams. Good material for the bedroom and the kitchen, too. You ever hear her talk? She had a voice like an angel.”
I laughed gently. I was now embarrassed that we were having this conversation. Starting to make me nervous. “I think you’d better go find yourself a woman, Longsworth. A live one.”
I nodded goodbye and turned to walk away when the two rifle shots cracked through the day from a roof across the street. The only thing that saved me was the uneven board on the sidewalk. The toe of my boot shoved against it just as the bullets were fired. I didn’t trip but I did stumble forward. The shots were close enough to sing as they slashed by me.
The shooter had to have seen that he missed me. I dropped the material I’d been carrying and started to rush across the street only to find that a horse pulling a buggy had gone loco because of the shots and was now bucking up and down in the air. The old woman inside was screaming for help.
Then she did a foolish thing. As the horse continued to buck, the old woman tried to get down from the buggy. At the least, she could break a bone or two. She might even get a concussion if she fell headfirst and smacked her head on the ground.
No one else was in sight. I didn’t have any choice but to stop, jump up, and grab the lines in order to pull the animal down and settle him as fast as I could. And it wasn’t a simple job.
By the time I’d calmed both the old woman and the horse down, the shooter was long gone.
But I had no doubt who’d sent him. Grieves had decided to get rid of me.
Then Longsworth was there. Everything had happened so fast I’d forgotten about him.
He looked pale, shaken. “You know some real bad people, Ford.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do at that.”
I found a park bench about a block away. It sat beneath the awning of a barbershop. Every time the door opened a man came out smelling like bay rum. The aroma always reminded me of living in Baltimore after the war with my wife. The memories were good then. Or maybe the illusions. Maybe my good memories were nothing more than things I hadn’t cared to acknowledge to myself. Maybe those are the best memories of all.
The papers Liz had found were interesting. I found a story dealing with the glory days of the Pine Lake Resort. All the important people who’d stayed there. Some of the romances. The hunting and fishing trophies given out. And then the murders, the cholera attack, the fire that finally shut them down. Very grim. The hook of the story was that the town was searching hard for somebody to open the resort up again but had so far not found any takers.
I found a second story that was even more interesting. It discussed a former Army scientist, Mr. Nathan Dobbs, who had retired for health reasons and who had decided to settle in the West. The story said that there was some suspicion that the scientist had actually been prompted to retire by the church he had recently joined.
The church believed in pacifism and apparently Dobbs had become a devout believer.
An hour later I stood on a bluff staring down into the pit of a rock quarry that was backed by a limestone cliff that was as tall as the surrounding aspens.
I knew just enough about munitions, and specifically all the attempts that had been made with grenade-like weapons, to be curious about what I’d find that day.
Ever since the fifteenth century, military munitions men had been trying to create a handheld bomb that you could use in close combat. The problem was that every single time the grenade-like weapon was re-created it had the same problem. A good deal of the time the weapon exploded before the soldier could throw it. Napoleon, ever the optimist, thought he could solve this by enlisting soldiers who were tall and strong and could hurl the grenades great distances over the heads of their fellow soldiers, thus keeping everybody safe. He didn’t have any better luck than his predecessors. No matter how tall and strong these soldiers were, they couldn’t throw the grenades fast enough to avoid killing themselves.
It was well known that several countries, including the United States, were developing multiple variations on the basic grenade. Germany was building another enormous army, which made all of Europe uneasy. All kinds of weapons were under development at that time including, in Germany, a cannon that was said to be a weapon that could cause unheard-of destruction. So men like Dobbs were working hard to prepare for any emergency.
The man next to me in the bib overalls and wide
straw hat was a Mr. Averill Tucker. The corncob pipe he smoked looked to be at least as old as he was, which I estimated to be sixty-something.
From as high up as we were the scarred quarry looked very much like the New England quarry where the dinosaur bones had been discovered a few years back. They’d reconstructed a nearly perfect dinosaur from just that one find.
Quarrying was a merciless business. I’d spent a summer doing some for an uncle of mine. Because I was tall and muscular for my age he gave me the job of wielding a spalling hammer. The one I used went twelve pounds and was shaped something like a sledgehammer. If you weren’t muscular before you started using a spalling hammer, you sure were by the end of the season.
About halfway through the summer, I was breaking rock with the big hammer when a piece of rock flew up and cut my right eye. At first they didn’t think my sight would ever come back. I wore an eyepatch for eight months. The girls at the local barn dances liked it just fine.
“My farm’s right behind that limestone cliff over there,” Tucker said, using the stem of his pipe as a pointer. “So I couldn’t really see much of the explosion. But I did see the three of them standing where we are right now. Grieves I’d seen in a saloon a few days ago. Hate to say it but he was kind of a loudmouth. Got into some pretty good arguments about the war with a pair of men we always consider kind of experts in the subject. Got so pissed off at one of them, he grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him back against the bar. That’s when Gildy—Gildersleeve’s his name—Gildy come runnin’ around from behind the bar with this sawed-off and put it right in Grieves’s face, see? And Gildy says I don’t give a shit if you’re a federal man or
not, you don’t come in here and start trouble with my regular customers.”
“How’d Grieves take it?”
“Kinda surprised me for bein’ such a loudmouth. He just said that he was sorry he got so carried away and that the drinks was on him.”
“How long after that did you see him here with the girl and her uncle?”
He thought about it. “Day or two. More like two probably.”
“But you didn’t see how they caused the explosion to happen?”
“No sir, ’fraid I didn’t. But when I heard it I dropped my plow and came runnin’ up to the edge of the cliff and saw them over here.”
“They see you?”
“Can’t say for sure. But probably. Wasn’t tryin’ to hide or nothing.”
“You hear any more explosions that day?”
“Nope. And I stayed in that part of the field till sundown. I woulda heard if there’d been one.”
I had a full, good view of the quarry and an even better one with my field glasses.
I’d seen the recent gouge when we’d first gone up there. It was wide enough and deep enough that I didn’t need the field glasses to see it. But then I did use them for close inspection.
“You’re sure this is the only explosion there’s been out here recently?”
“Positive, Mr. Ford. Nobody’s worked this quarry for two years. Not since that hellish flood we had. This place was under water for six months. They had to set up a new quarry elsewhere.”
“And they always used dynamite here?”
“Sure. Except for a certain kind of stone where they’d
use the old stuff, the gunpowder. There’s a few jobs dynamite’s too rough for.”
I continued to scan. Usually around a quarry you see blasting caps from dynamite use. But the flood had cleaned out everything.
From what I could see, the large hole in the face of the cliff was just as Tucker had said. Brand new.
“Wish I could be more helpful, Mr. Ford. You know, seen what he was using to make the blast. But they run right down there and cleaned up the whole site. Like they didn’t want to leave no kind of evidence behind.”
Grieves had gotten his hands on something that was pretty damned dangerous. And would likely be worth a lot of money to somebody. If, that is, it was a grenade or grenade-like device that didn’t kill the thrower as often as it killed the intended victims.
I couldn’t gauge anything about the reliability of the weapon but I could certainly gauge its ferocity. What I’d just seen impressed me with not only the concussive power of the weapon but also the fact that its damage was much better focused than most grenades. You didn’t get accuracy in grenades; this weapon looked as if you pretty much destroyed what you aimed at.
My thoughts went back to my own war, the bloody, busted bodies of my own time’s battlefields. There were all kinds of diseases to conquer but the real money and real interest seemed to lie in destruction rather than preservation. I wasn’t naïve enough to be a pacifist but I was realistic enough to know that something was wrong when nations spent more money on death than life.
I thanked Tucker for taking me up there and then I headed back to town.
I was in need of a cup of coffee so I strolled toward the café. The main street was still noisy and dusty with wagon traffic. A train coming into the depot added to the noise.
I had just passed the sheriff’s office when Knut Jagland came out in a hurry and said, “We’ve been looking for you. We need to get over to the mortuary quick.”
Within five minutes I was staring down at a corpse that was covered only by a sheet. The corpse had blue eyes. One of them was glass.
“Y
ou gonna make a joke?”
“About what?”
“About how fast I got us out of that room downstairs?”
“Why would I make a joke?”
“I know you already figured that I hate bein’ around blood. But bein’ in a tiny room with a dead body, that makes me even sicker. It’s like bein’ in a coffin. Knut here’s a big help to me.”
“Hell, Sheriff, we’re all afraid of something,” Knut said. “Look at me and snakes.”
Sheriff Terhurne nodded. “He’s like a little girl around ’em.”
The way Knut glanced at him, I wasn’t sure he was all that happy with how Terhurne had explained Knut’s aversion to snakes.
We stood in the backyard of the mortuary next to the double garage that held the fancy hearse and the bone wagon. There were nice big oaks for shade and if you didn’t look at the Victorian-style house in back of you, you wouldn’t know that you were within maybe thirty feet of dead folks.
“You looked like you knew him, Noah,” Knut said.
“I don’t know him but I’m pretty sure I know who he was.”
“He got anything to do with Grieves?” Terhurne said.
“Yes. But I haven’t quite figured out what yet.” Then: “You two can head back to the office if you want. I’m going back downstairs.”
Terhurne smiled. “You like those corpses, do you?”
I wasn’t in the mood for his humor. Knut said, “C’mon, Sheriff, let’s see what’s at the office.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Terhurne said to me. I thought of what they said about Germans, that they were always either at your throat or at your feet. Seems some Irishers had that same inclination. I didn’t like Terhurne any better kissing my ass than threatening me.
He hadn’t been in the river long, Dobbs the scientist, not according to the mortuary man Sam Nevens, anyway.
Nevens wore an expensive white shirt, an expensive blue cravat, and obviously spent some time on his graying hair. He was the middle-aged mortician as fashion plate. He was all about life in his calling of death.
We both pushed cigarette smoke across the body between us on the table. Nevens had moved us into the preparation room with much larger space.
I was asking questions about how long the body had been in the water but he had a complaint to register first.
“You know something, Mr. Ford? I’m completely happy to answer your questions. In fact, I’ll stand here all day and talk your leg off about how bodies respond to water. And you know what? There won’t be any
charge. And do you know how I know how bodies respond to water?”
“No, I guess I don’t.” I wondered where the hell this was going. The body had been washed up, not even the bullet holes in the side of the head looking all that foul at that point. But still and all it was a dead body and I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I had to.
“Well, how I learned about bodies and water was when I went to school in Denver. Yes, mortician’s school. People are all the time asking us questions but they never stop to think of where we learned the answers.”
“Yeah, well, that’s really too bad—but—”
“—and you know who makes the biggest profit in this business? Not us, that’s for darned sure. You go right down the street to this big fancy furniture store, Clancy Brothers, and you think all you’re seeing is the furniture they get in from Chicago five times a year. But then you go down in the basement and you know what you find?”
“Mr. Nevens, I’m in kind of a hurry—”
“Caskets is what you find. My pop who built this funeral home, he and the original Mr. Clancy got into an argument over pinochle one night. And damned if Clancy didn’t go into the casket business two weeks later. A whole basement full of them. And for twenty years that’s the way it’s been. We do all the hard work here—did you happen to notice the new wallpaper in the vestibule upstairs?—and they make the easy money on caskets.”
I was trapped in a room with a dead man and a lunatic.
He tried to keep on talking but I took out my railroad watch and dangled it in front of him. “I have five minutes to get to an important meeting.”
“And what important meeting would that be?”
“That important meeting would be none of your damned business. Now tell me how long you think the body has been in the water.”
“I was just trying to give you a little background is all. And in a very friendly way, if I may say so.”
I’d hurt his feelings. I dropped my watch back into my pocket. “I appreciate that but I really am in a hurry.”
“Well, all you had to do was say so.” He pulled the sheet back from the corpse. “I’d say no longer than half a day to three-quarters of a day. And the reason I say that—”
“That’s good enough. Now I have one more question. The fisherman who brought him in, where did he say he found him?”
“Drifting close to shore.”
“I meant what area of the river did he find him in?”
“Up on the islet. Devon’s Islet, they call it.”
I put my hat on. “I appreciate it, Mr. Nevens.”
“I’ll be happy to walk you out—”
“I can find my way. Thanks. I appreciate your help.”
When I was halfway up the stairs, he said, “My dream is to sell my own caskets someday and not have to deal with Clancy at all.”
I shouted back down: “That’s a dream we all share, Mr. Nevens.”
Nan and Glen Turner’s hotel had a nice coffee den that offered a good view of the stairs. I’d inquired if she and her husband were in and the clerk had obligingly told me they were. I decided to have a few cups of coffee and sort through some thoughts while I waited to see
if they would do me the favor of leaving the hotel any time soon.
Somewhere was something that everybody seemed to want. Molly, Uncle Bob, Nan all seemed to think I had it or knew where it was, whatever it happened to be. I had the sense that Dobbs, the dead man with the blue glass eye, was the originator of it and that Grieves wanted to be a part of it, the “it” being the thing that would go “boom boom boom” and make the possessor a lot of money. We were likely dealing with government secrets here. Even, perhaps, treason.
And then there was Swarthout and Ella Coltrane. They didn’t seem happy that I was looking into this at all. Maybe they already had whatever it was and were afraid I’d find that out.
And what did the sheriff know about it? A lot had happened in his town since Grieves and Dobbs had been there. A curious lawman would have to draw some kind of conclusions, wouldn’t he? But then maybe Terhurne was so obsessed with winning reelection that he hadn’t paid any attention to what was going on.
And then we were back to three murders. Uncle Bob, Molly, Dobbs. And Grieves missing and maybe murdered, too. Were they all related to whatever it was that a handful of people wanted so desperately?
About half an hour after I first put cup to lip, Nan and her husband appeared on the staircase, talking as they descended. Neither looked happy. Impossible to know if this was a battle over who had most recently violated a marriage vow or whether it had anything to do with the Grieves matter.
They didn’t stop at the desk. Nan got the expected number of glances from gentlemen, one of whom she anointed with a smile.
Five minutes later, I walked to the double doors of
the hotel, looked both ways to make sure that neither of them was nearby, then went into the alley and entered the hotel from the back.
Room 19 was easy to find and easy to open thanks to the burglary tools I carried with me.
They had a large suite filled with pompous Victorian furnishings and enough geegaws and doodads, including a chandelier that could crush an elephant, to make the most pretentious New Orleans madam envious.
They had two trunks and three suitcases. I’d had serious experience riffling rooms and knew how to be both quick and careful. They had expensive clothes, at least half of which were scanty bedroom attire for Nan, and fancy ruffled shirts for hubby.
I was figuring on a sketchy search of the bedroom bureau that stood across from the massive canopy bed. There was enough perfume on the air to tear my eyes up.
You don’t expect hotel guests to have brought enough material to pack drawers but these folks had. Twice I had to stop when I heard distant voices in the hall. The suite was so sizable and so filled with furnishings and thick rugs and thick wallpaper that most sounds from outside were cut off. It was like being inside a vault.
A lot of jewelry, though I suspected this was glass. The real stuff, if there was any, would be downstairs in the hotel safe.
What I wasn’t looking for but was happy to find was a small box disguised as something fancy and fake-gold for milady.
Except for diplomats and assassins, I’d never known anybody who’d packed eight different passports before. Sixteen altogether for the Mr. and Mrs. There were the expected ones of the U.S., Britain, France, Germany,
and Italy but also South Africa and two Caribbean countries.
And then it came together. I still didn’t know what “it” was but I could see where the players fit. Nan and Glen dealt with scientists who could be blackmailed or bought off. Scientists would give them samples and plans for a highly secret weapon they were working on. And Nan and Glen would give them money. Or promise to destroy the blackmail material. D.C. probably had a thick file on them. Maybe a couple of thick files. They were the ultimate opportunists. And all across the world. You never knew what little country was going to come up with the rudiments of a super weapon. And there would be a long line of folks to obtain them, with an eye to selling the “it” to a larger country for many, many times more than they’d paid for “it.”
I took the passports, shoved them in my back pocket, and finished going through the rest of the drawers. Nothing useful turned up.
I was just about to leave the bedroom when I heard the door open in the living room and Nan say, “I still don’t like the way Sheriff Terhurne kept looking at us. Like he knows something about us.”
“He’s just some hayseed. He doesn’t know anything.” Then he laughed. “You were at your worst in that haberdasher’s, by the way. You’re always bitching about how I embarrass you. How about how you embarrass me?”
“Why didn’t you take her out in the alley and attack her? I’m pretty sure she would’ve liked it, the way you two were making eyes at each other.”
“For God’s sake, Nan, all she was doing was selling me a couple of shirts. She’s probably got three kids at home and sings in the church choir every Sunday.”
“Isn’t that what you prefer? Remember when we first met and you said you liked the ‘unlikely’ ones best?”
“That was twelve years ago. Now let me throw these shirts on the table here and we’ll go down and have a couple of drinks.”
“Maybe the shop woman’ll be down there waiting for you.”
They were making a pretty good argument against marriage. At least for people like them.
“Maybe I’ll just stay up here.”
“Oh, don’t go in for one of your sulks. If anybody should be sulking it’s me. I still think you hooked up with that federal man the other night.”
“At least he bathes.”
“I don’t know why you keep bringing up that girl in Cheyenne. I’ve apologized every chance I’ve had. And she did bathe. You were just making that up to hurt me.”
“The hell I was. You stank like a cesspool when you slipped into bed that night.” Then: “Now hurry up and let’s go downstairs. Now that you brought up that stinky bitch in Cheyenne, I need a drink.”
“I wish you hadn’t brought up that sheriff. Now you’ve got me worrying about him, too. Maybe he’s not as dumb as he looks.”
“Nobody could be.”
I’d been ready to move but now I didn’t have to. The front door closed. I heard them walk away but the hall carpeting soon absorbed their footsteps.
I took one more turn around the bedroom, making sure I hadn’t missed another suitcase.
The extra turn was worth the time it took. I found a calendar with the next day’s date circled. I also found a file with three articles about Dr. Nathan Dobbs. The articles were dated two years earlier. They referenced his
expertise with hand-carried weapons for foot soldiers. There was even a photograph that displayed his glass eye perfectly. And there was a postcard from Dobbs, simply stating that he would be in Junction City on a certain date, which was three weeks earlier.
Had they met up?