Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 13, Mid-December 1992

Red Dust by Patrick Irelan

“Who found the body?” Adcock said.

“Charlie Scofield. He was fixing a hole in the fence over there.” Deputy Foley pointed at the fence on the other side of the ditch. “If he hadn’t spotted it, it might’ve been here forever. You can barely see it from the road.” Scofield was standing a short distance away with a group of onlookers, describing in detail his discovery of the body.

“Does he know anything about it?”

“Not really.” Foley was tall and slim. He had curly brown hair and a boyish face.

“Then I guess I’ll go down for a closer look.” Adcock stepped off the shoulder of the blacktop road and started down the side of the ditch.

“You won’t want to stay close very long, sheriff.”

“I don’t want to stay close at all.” Adcock made his way down cautiously. The ditch was deep, and he knew that broken bones did not heal quickly when you were sixty years old. He didn’t look that old, with his black hair and clear blue eyes, but he was. Halfway down he took out his handkerchief and held it over his nose.

The body lay at the bottom of the ditch, hidden from the road by the weeds and tall grass. The county could no longer afford to mow along the roads. It could barely afford to patch the potholes.

The corpse had already started to decompose, but the essentials were still clear enough. The body belonged to a white male with blond hair and green eyes. He was about forty-five. There was a small hole in the back of his head, though not a great deal of blood. He might have been goodlooking at one time. The heat and the flies had changed that.

The man had on a dirty undershirt, baggy dress pants with frayed cuffs, and leather shoes with worn heels. The uniform of the homeless male. Adcock had seen it a thousand times before. A few hairs, some brown and some gray, clung to his dirty pants. One other thing caught Adcock’s attention. Red dust.

He looked back up the slope toward the road. The grass and weeds showed where the body had rolled down. Not a final descent that showed much respect for the dead.

Adcock had seen enough. He climbed back up to the road, pausing halfway to catch his breath. He was in good shape for a man his age, but it was ninety-eight degrees and the slope was steep. When he reached the top, he took another breather, then spoke to his deputy. “Everyone else on the way?”

“Yes. Dr. Finney will be here soon, and the DCI agents are coming down from Des Moines. Kevin’s writing up a car accident south of Clearfield. Then he’s coming over.” Kevin Hunter was Adcock’s other deputy. Together, the three men enforced the law in Fox County. Only the county seat of Clearfield had a police force — four men altogether. If you needed a cop anywhere else, you called Adcock.

“I hope you told Doc Finney not to wear his best suit. You know how mad he got on Jake Lambert’s place.”

“I told him.”

“What do you make of this?” Adcock said.

“Looks like a tramp to me. Probably got his clothes at a Salvation Army place. Looks real lean. Probably an alcoholic. Might have been staying in an abandoned farmhouse. There’s plenty of them around here.”

“What about the wound?”

“Small hole in the back of the head. Looks like a .22 caliber fired from slightly above.”

“And what does that tell you?” Adcock could never resist an opportunity to instruct his young deputies.

“They told us at the academy that mob executions usually look like that.”

“And you could’ve learned that by reading a newspaper.” When Adcock had been a deputy many decades before, there hadn’t been an academy, and he still questioned its value.

“But what I wonder,” Foley said, “is why gangsters would kill anyone out here in the first place.”

“Maybe they didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Kill anyone out here.” He waited for Foley to get it, but to no avail.

“But there’s a body in the ditch,” Foley finally said.

“Exactly. That’s all we have. A body. Someone dumped it here, but we don’t know where he was killed, do we? It could’ve happened a hundred miles from here.”

“Ahhh.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“I saw some brown and gray hairs on his pants. Obviously not his own.”

“Anything else?”

Foley pondered a few moments. “Don’t think so.”

“Did you notice the red dust on his shoes?”

“No, I guess I missed that, sheriff.”

“If you look around here, you won’t see any red dust anywhere. The dust along the road and in the fields on either side is black or brown or gray, but not red. Even if you dug down to the clay, you’d find that it was yellow. But the last time that man walked on this earth, he walked in red dust. If we could figure out where, we’d know where to start looking for the killer.”

Dr. Finney, the county medical examiner, arrived dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He exchanged greetings with Adcock, asked why this had to happen on Monday, and began his preliminary examination. Deputy Hunter pulled up ten minutes later. Detectives from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation got there last, armed with cameras, tweezers, plastic bags, and bad attitudes. Iowa law required them to assist in the investigation of every murder in the state. The stress of the long farm depression of the seventies, eighties, and nineties had brought them more business than they could handle.

Adcock watched the detectives go about their work while his deputies tried to keep traffic moving. If the killer or killers had left anything behind, the DCI agents would find it. Adcock was sure of that. But what would they do with it? That was the problem. You can’t match a suspect’s hair with a hair left on the victim’s body until you have a suspect. At this point the DCI detectives didn’t have one.

Adcock didn’t have one either, but he knew where to start looking. And he planned to keep it to himself for the present. He was just as jealous of his own turf as anyone else. When someone dumped a dead body in Fox County, he wanted to be the one who found the killer.

A trooper from the Iowa State Patrol showed up to help direct traffic. After exchanging pleasantries, Adcock motioned to Foley to come with him, then checked in with a DCI detective with thick glasses and very little hair. “Find anything?” he said.

“Found a lot of things. Just don’t know what to do with them yet.” Adcock nodded sympathetically. “Did you happen to notice the red dust on his shoes?” the detective asked.

“I did see that.”

“Any idea where he might have picked it up?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

“And?” The detective stared at him.

“Still trying.”

The detective stared at him some more, as if he wasn’t sure what to think, but he finally turned away and went back to work. Adcock told Hunter to stay behind to help direct traffic. Then he and Foley walked over to their patrol cars. “I hope you’ve been thinking about red dust,” Adcock said. “Have you?”

“Yes, I have.” Foley was beaming like a kid, which, at age twenty-two, he still was.

“And?”

“Pitston.”

They climbed into their cars and drove west across the width of the county, through desolate little towns and past abandoned farmsteads, across the prairie and through the wooded hills to Pitston. The town contained about forty people, compared with the three hundred that had lived there until the 1960’s.

They parked on the town’s single commercial block. Only two businesses were still open, a grocery store on one side and a tavern on the other. A small playground with swings and a merry-go-round stood at the end of the block. Most of the words on the park’s sign had worn off, but Adcock could still remember them: “Constructed for the Children of Pitston as Part of the War on Poverty. Lyndon Johnson, President, 1965.” The park was empty.

All the buildings on the block dated back to the nineteenth century. All were two stories high and constructed of bricks. The street, like all the others in town, was covered with red dust, a product of the shale used as gravel. The shale had come from the coal mines that once surrounded the town. When exposed to the air, the shale oxidized and turned red, sometimes almost pink. The coal miners of Pitston had dug up enough shale to gravel all the streets the town would ever build, plus a great deal more. When the mines closed in the sixties, gravel wasn’t the only thing lost. What Pitston needed most was the one thing it never again found: jobs.

Adcock and Foley got out of their cars and stood in the street. There wasn’t much danger of getting run over in Pitston. No one else was in sight. Adcock led the way into the tavern on the south side of the street. The room was dark and smelled of urine. A window air conditioner struggled noisily to keep the temperature below ninety. The place was as empty as the street out front.

“Hello, sheriff. Hello, Jim,” said the man behind the bar. He wiped off a damp spot with a white towel.

“Hello, Carl,” Adcock said.

“What brings you out this way?” He stopped wiping and leaned against the bar.

“Someone found a dead body dumped along the road on the other side of the county.”

The man pushed away from the bar and stood up straight. He looked startled. “A dead body?” he said.

“That’s right. We’re trying to figure out who he was. He had red dust on his shoes, just like the dust anyone gets on his shoes in Pitston. I wondered if you might’ve seen him. He looks about six feet tall, has blonde hair, is real lean like an alcoholic who spends all his money on booze, was wearing ragged old clothes. About forty-five. You see anyone like that around?”

The bartender rubbed the back of his neck and pondered. “No, can’t say that I have, sheriff. I don’t remember seeing anyone like that.”

“Take your time. Think about it. If he was in Pitston and wanted a drink, he’d come in here, right? This is the only bar in town.”

“Yeah, but he could buy beer at the grocery store across the street. Not that I mean anything bad about Dora, you understand.”

“This guy didn’t look like a beer drinker, Carl. He drank wine or hard stuff.”

“There was one guy who came in a time or two. Didn’t say much except what he wanted to drink. That might be your man. But he only came in once or twice.”

“Any idea where he was staying?”

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. I just saw him in here, and he didn’t say a word about himself.” He started wiping the bar again, even though it was as dry as the red dust on Pitston’s streets.

“All right, Carl, if you think of anything else, you let us know, okay?”

Adcock and Foley walked back out into the killing heat. “Not too ready with his information, was he?” Foley said.

“No, he wasn’t,” Adcock said. “Let’s go see Dora. She’ll be more helpful. If she knows anything, she’ll tell us.”

They walked across the street to the grocery store, which Dora Martino had operated by herself since her husband’s death ten years before. She met them at the door. “John,” she said, “where have you been keeping yourself? I haven’t seen you for a year. Too many bank robberies in the rest of the county for you to come to Pitston?” She stretched out her fleshy arm and shook Adcock’s hand. “And who’s this with you? Not Dorothy Foley’s boy?” Foley’s face turned a vivid shade of red. It was hard being a cop in the same county you grew up in.

“That’s who he is, and he’s not such a bad kid.”

“I’ll bet he’s not.”

“Dora, I wanted to ask if you’ve seen a man around town lately.” Adcock gave the man’s description.

“Sure, I’ve seen him. He’s been hanging around town for about two weeks. He comes in here every now and then to see if I have any week-old bread to let go cheap. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

“You know where he’s staying?”

“Yes, I do. He’s staying on the second floor of the old barbershop across the street and down at the end of the block. It’s empty now, like most everything else. I can see the back of the place from my house. I’ve seen him going up and down the back stairs lots of times. The place is a wreck, but it’s probably better than sleeping under a tree. The rent’s good, too.”

Adcock grunted.

“Rent?” Foley said. It was the first word he’d spoken since entering the store.

“Free rent, hon. Who’d pay to live there?” Foley nodded agreement, and Mrs. Martino looked back at Adcock. “You want me to watch for this guy? Did he rob the Clearfield State Bank? Wouldn’t make much difference from what I hear. About to go broke anyway. Too many farmers can’t make their payments.”

“No, don’t bother watching for him. I don’t think you’ll ever see him again.”

“Why not?”

“He’s dead. Someone shot him in the back of the head and dumped his body in a ditch over close to the Van Buren County line.”

“No.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“That’s why I haven’t seen him for two or three days. I wondered if he’d moved on. That’s how it is with these drifters. They stay awhile. Then they disappear, and you never see them again.” She stared out the window for a moment, then back at Adcock. “This scares me, John. Now I wonder about those other men.”

“What other men?”

“Every once in a while, four or five guys show up early in the morning in a big shiny car and park in back over there. They go up to the second floor of the building next to the one this dead man’s been staying in. They stay all day. They don’t come out for anything. When night comes, they take off and I don’t see them again for five or six days. Then one day they show up and do the same thing all over again.”

“Do they always come the same day of the week?”

“No, you can never tell. I guess they come any day they feel like it.”

“When’s the last time you saw them?”

Mrs. Martino thought for a moment. “Four days ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them again any day now.”

“Who owns those buildings, Dora?”

“Tom Hughes owns the old barbershop, but I haven’t seen him near the place in years. He’s real poorly. Ellen’s been taking care of him since her mother died five years ago. The county owns the other building, though I doubt if it wants it. Ruth Fancetti stopped paying taxes on it after Frank died. This town’s going, John. There’s hardly anyone left, and the ones still here are having a race for the few plots left at St. Joseph’s. You wouldn’t think a town could change this much in just one lifetime, but it has. You remember what it used to be like.”

“I remember,” Adcock said. No one said anything else. An old man with a cane and a slow gait came through the door, and Mrs. Martino went to sell him a loaf of bread and a carton of milk.

“We’ll be back shortly, Dora,” Adcock said. He and Foley waved goodbye and walked out.

Adcock left his car parked and rode with his deputy. They drove east along Main Street, past untended gardens and abandoned houses, past St. Joseph’s Church, shuttered and empty. The street ascended a hill and turned left at the top. Thomas Hughes’ large Victorian house stood two doors from the corner overlooking the rest of the town, which fell away to the west.

Hughes’ daughter, Ellen Roemer, answered their knock. “Dad’s not well at all,” she said. “It’s his heart. I try not to do anything to upset him.”

Adcock got the hint. “We won’t be long,” he said. “We won’t say, anything to get him worked up.”

She showed them into the parlor where Hughes was watching a religious program on TV. He had gray hair and a broad nose and was about sixty pounds overweight. He started to get up, but Adcock motioned for him not to bother.

“Haven’t seen you for a long time, John.”

“No.”

“I don’t get out much any more. Too old. Too sick. Too crippled up. Ellen goes out whenever we need something. I just stay here. Sometimes Todd comes down to help out.” He motioned toward a picture of his grandson. Like his mother, Todd had dark hair and dark eyes.

“You’re lucky to have them to help you. Not many parents can count on that nowadays.”

“That’s true. That’s very true. And it’s very expensive to hire help now. I’m not sure I could afford it.”

Adcock was sure that Hughes could afford it. He had inherited three mines on the edge of town and had operated them very profitably until the sixties, when the markets for his coal disappeared. Hughes liked to pretend he was hard up, that he had no savings. He didn’t want people asking for contributions to worthy causes. No one believed him, of course, but no one called him a liar. It was a harmless fib, as long as he told the truth to the IRS.

“But you didn’t come to hear me complain, did you, John? Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“You know the old barbershop on Main Street? You own that building, don’t you?”

“I confess that I do, though I don’t know why I keep paying taxes on it. It’s as worthless as all the high-sulfur coal left under the whole worthless town. I guess I keep hoping I’ll find someone to buy it. Wouldn’t like to buy a barbershop, would you, son?” He looked at Foley, who blushed and looked at the floor.

“We think a man’s been staying there, in the apartment on the second floor. Probably just a drifter. You wouldn’t know anything about him, would you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. As I said, I don’t get out much. But I don’t want anyone staying there. If someone gets hurt, they’ll sue me whether they had permission to be there or not. I don’t want him in the place.”

“Don’t worry about that. He won’t be suing anyone. He’s dead. Murdered, apparently.” Adcock related the discovery of the body. “What about you, Ellen? You get out more than your dad. Have you seen this man around?”

“No, I haven’t seen anyone like that.” Ellen still had the features of a pretty woman, though she looked older than her forty-one years. “There are so few people in town, you rarely see anyone outside the grocery store. The tavern still has some business, but I don’t go there.”

Adcock turned back toward Hughes. “Would you mind if we looked around the apartment above the barbershop?”

“No. Go right ahead. Look it over as much as you want. I hope you find something more than bird droppings. I’m going to get rid of that wreck for sure now. I don’t need a lawsuit at my age.”

Ellen showed them to the door. “You’d better talk to Carl Swenson,” she said quietly. “I’ll bet he knows something about this. I don’t trust him. I don’t want my father to hear this, but I think Carl sold beer to my son when he was sixteen. His business is in trouble, and I think he’d do anything for money, even rob a homeless man.”

Adcock thanked her for her help. Both he and Foley put on their hats before stepping off the porch. It hardly seemed possible, but the heat was worse now than before. The temperature had to be at least a hundred degrees.

They climbed into Foley’s patrol car and drove back down the hill. Adcock said that at this temperature the taxpayers could afford air conditioning, and Foley turned it on. They parked across from the barbershop and went around to the back, where they climbed the rickety stairs and found the door standing open. The latch was rusted and useless. A brick lying just inside suggested that the dead man had used it to keep the door closed while he was in the apartment.

The man had left clear evidence of his stay. Two empty Thunderbird bottles. An empty apricot brandy bottle. A crumpled container that had once held twelve slices of bologna. Half a pack of Pall Malls. A tattered white shirt lying in a corner. The label on the shirt said, “Made exclusively for Culloden’s Men’s Wear, St. Louis.”

“Looks like an expensive shirt,” Foley said.

“It’s the name on the label that makes it expensive,” Adcock said. “You can buy the same shirt at a department store at half the price.”

Foley looked at Adcock skeptically. In his gray work pants and blue shirt, the sheriff did not inspire confidence in his knowledge of men’s fashions. He refused to wear either a uniform or a business suit. He rarely carried a gun. Work clothes and a badge were all he wanted, though both deputies wore brown and tan uniforms and carried .38 caliber revolvers.

In the pocket of the white shirt Adcock found a small piece of paper with a note written on it:

Someone had torn off the name of the person to whom the note was addressed. The paper appeared to have been crumpled up, smoothed out again, and folded. The sheriff showed it to Foley. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Columbia, Missouri, maybe. That’s where the University of Missouri is.”

“And the condition of the paper itself?”

“Someone started to throw it away, then changed his mind.”

“Any other possibilities?”

“One person threw it away, and another decided to keep it.”

“That about covers it. Why don’t you go see what else you can find.”

Foley wandered into the next room while Adcock put the bottles, the bologna container, the shirt, the cigarettes, and the note into plastic bags, sealed them, and attached labels. In a few minutes Foley returned.

“Find anything?” the sheriff said.

“Just a door.”

“A door?”

“Yes, a door that leads into the next building.”

“That’s a little unusual. Someone must have owned both buildings at one time. Is the door locked?”

“Yes, but it would be easy to get in. The hinges are on this side. Should we?”

“The county owns the building, and we work for the county. So why not?”

They removed the pins from the hinges, pulled the door away from the frame, leaned it against the wall, and walked into the next apartment. “My, my, my,” Adcock said. “Just look at what we have here. The governor won’t like this a bit.” Along the opposite wall were four crudely installed phone jacks. A light bulb hung from the ceiling, but when Foley flipped the switch nothing happened. With the exception of cobwebs and dirt, the room was otherwise empty. Adcock and Foley searched the rest of the apartment but found nothing else of importance.

They put the door back in place but left the pins out of the hinges. Instead, they found a board and propped it against the door to hold it in place. Then they went outside and climbed the stairs to the other apartment, where they found the door secured by a padlock. After putting the evidence they had collected into Adcock’s car, they went back again to see Mrs. Martino.

“I hope your time was better spent than mine,” she said. “After old Mr. Dorn left, my only customer was a teenager who wanted to buy cigarettes. I told him the sheriff was in town and I couldn’t do it.”

“You always were a responsible citizen,” Adcock said. He and Mrs. Martino laughed at their wit, and Foley managed a smile.

“We found a few things the dead man left behind,” Adcock said, “and I suspect the other men you’ve seen will be back.”

“Oh, I hope not. Do you think they killed that poor man?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” He paused. “Why do you think Carl Swenson claims he never saw any of these men?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. He would’ve had a chance to, but he’s always been a little secretive. I don’t know why.”

“What about Ellen Roemer and her husband? What happened to him?”

“They got a divorce. He was mean to her and the boy. Then when her mother died, she quit her teaching job in Des Moines and came straight home. She’s a real sweet girl, John. You don’t need to worry about her.”

“I understand.”

“She has a tough time with her dad. He’s a pill. Always has been. Too spoiled as a boy.”

“I know.”

“But these men in the big car scare me, John. What if they decide to throw someone else in a ditch? Some old woman like me?”

“Don’t worry about that, Dora. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Deputy Foley is going to come back and sleep on your couch every night until those men return.”

When Sheriff Adcock got back to his office late that afternoon, Deputy Hunter reported that the DCI agents had found a small tattoo on the murdered man’s back. It included an American flag plus these words and numbers:

“A real patriot,” Adcock said.

“I guess so,” Hunter said.

Adcock called the Clearfield chief of police, the Iowa State Patrol, and the DCI to discuss the men Dora Martino had seen in Pitston. Then, against Dr. Finney’s often-stated advice, he went out for a sirloin steak and fried potatoes.

Adcock didn’t have long to wait. His phone rang at seven o’clock the next morning. “Sheriff,” Foley said, “they’re here. Five men in a blue Cadillac. They carried in five folding chairs, four card tables, two cardboard boxes, and an ice chest. Looks like a picnic.”

“Good. Don’t join them until we get there. Don’t move a muscle. You understand?”

“Got it.”

“It’ll be about an hour.”

“We’ll be here. Mrs. Martino hates to open late, but I convinced her.”

“The Pitston economy will survive. Tell her I’ll be over for a root beer.”

“She’ll have a cold one waiting.”

Adcock hung up and made three phone calls. Half an hour later he and Deputy Hunter were driving north on Route 63, followed by the entire Clearfield police force in two squad cars. When they reached the road to Pitston, three men from the State Patrol and three more from the DCI were waiting. They joined the convoy and headed west.

Forty minutes later, Deputies Foley and Hunter and two Clearfield policemen crept up the back stairs and into the apartment above the barbershop. After another five minutes, the rest of the men emerged from behind Mrs. Martino’s house and sprinted for the stairs leading to the other second floor apartment. Adcock would have liked to go first, but he deferred to the younger, faster men. With their shotguns raised, they looked like a squad of duck hunters doing the fifty yard dash.

They reached the stairs at a dead run, their feet on the steps sounding like distant thunder. A six foot five, two hundred twenty-five pound highway cop hit the door with everything he had. The rotten wood disintegrated like a balsa-wood glider at the same moment that Deputy Foley jerked open the interior door from the other apartment.

By the time Adcock trotted in, the picnic was over. “Well, well, well,” he said, “Ricky Schneider and his young friends. You know, Ricky, this won’t look good on your record. It’ll probably keep you out of West Point.”

A fat man with his legs spread and his hands on the wall looked over his shoulder. “Very funny, Adcock,” he said.

“And Warden Oakes is going to be very disappointed in you.”

“May your mother sizzle in hell.”

“Take them in,” Adcock said.

Even before the uniformed cops got the thugs out the door, the DCI agents happily began taking inventory. They had grown tired of the murder-suicides of distraught farmers and failed merchants. But old fashioned racketeering still held some charm. In addition to the tables and chairs, the agents catalogued five pistols, four telephones, a radio, ten thousand dollars in cash, ten copies of the Daily Racing Form, and a computer-printed list of several hundred names and telephone numbers. Entrepreneurs needed the best tools available.

Adcock lingered awhile to talk with the agents. “The politicians said parimutuel gambling wouldn’t lead to bookmaking,” he said.

“That’s what they said, John,” replied one of the busy agents.

“What did you think?”

“All I know is I’ve never seen one without the other. Have you?”

“No.” Adcock walked down the stairs and up the slope to Mrs. Martino’s house. “Come on, Dora,” he said. “I need a root beer.”

After the root beer, the sheriff went across the street to Carl Swenson’s tavern. The place still smelled of urine. Adcock dispensed with the pleasantries this time. “Carl,” he said, “I don’t see how a bookie joint could operate right next door without your getting suspicious. This isn’t the middle of Chicago. Five guys in a Cadillac attract attention in Pitston. It makes me wonder if you were getting something out of it. Your bar doesn’t seem to be doing too well.” The tavern was just as empty as the day before.

“No, John, I swear, I had nothing to do with those guys.”

“Someone told me you’re so desperate you’re selling to minors.”

“And I can guess who: Ellen Roemer. But maybe you should ask her why she went up to the apartment over the barbershop a week ago.”

“And you saw her, right? And you still expect me to believe you didn’t see five bookies next door? Come on, Carl, you’ve been around. What am I supposed to think?”

“Sheriff, I admit I saw them. I had my suspicions. But I swear I had nothing to do with them. I know I should’ve called you, but I was scared. Who would protect me if they found out? We have no police here, and you’re almost twenty miles away. I know what those guys are like. They’d kill me without giving it a second thought. I’d disappear one day, and my family would never see me again. You know what I mean, John.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me one other thing, Carl. You’re not from this town originally, are you? Where did you come from?”

“Missouri.”

“Where in Missouri?”

“Columbia.”

“What did you do there?”

“I ran a bar, but I lost my lease.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. So I decided to try someplace else.”

“And came to Pitston?”

“Right. I saw an ad in a newspaper that said this bar was for sale. The ad didn’t say how bad business was.”

“All right, Carl, we’ll leave it at that for now. But I’ll be checking back with you.”

“Sure, sheriff. Anytime at all. You can count on me.”

Adcock headed back toward Clearfield to greet his new guests. An hour later, he was sitting across a table from Richard Schneider, who was loudly protesting his innocence.

“Me and the other guys have been in Waterloo for five days, and I got witnesses to prove it,” he said.

“Names, addresses, and phone numbers,” Adcock said. “Not that I’ll believe any friends of yours anyway.” Schneider gave him the information. “Okay,” the sheriff said, “so who was this guy?”

“What guy?”

“The dead one.”

“I don’t know. I never saw him.”

“He was living next door to your traveling bookie joint. How could you miss him?”

“It’s not a bookie joint.”

“Then what is it?”

“A telemarketing firm. We move around to get the best phone rates.”

“So why did you kill him? He steal your phone book? Refuse to get off the line?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Yes, you did. You shot him in the back of the head the way you punks like to do it.”

“Grow up, Adcock. If I shot him, where’s the gun and where’s the bullet?”

“The medical examiner is taking the bullet out of his brain. He’ll send it to the lab boys, and I’ll send them your guns. Then they’ll find the gun that matches the bullet. They’re good at that. So why don’t you just spill it right now.”

“I got nothing to spill, Adcock.”

“You know what I think?”

“Surprise me.”

“I think this drifter stumbled onto your bookie joint and you killed him to keep him quiet. Then you dumped him on the other side of the county to keep us off your trail.”

“You’re desperate, Adcock. You’re swinging wild. You found a body, and now you need a suspect. But all you have is circumstantial evidence, and not a hell of a lot of that.”

“Ricky, the prisons are full of people sent there on circumstantial evidence, but I won’t waste my breath trying to explain. The problem with punks like you is that you’re stupid, and stupid people make stupid mistakes. Your main mistake was that you came into my county thinking I’d never find out. You paid Carl Swenson to keep him quiet, and you thought you had a perfect setup, but your whole operation was so obvious that you might as well have put up a neon sign. Then this drifter came along and spoiled the party. So get ready for another state-funded vacation, Ricky. It won’t cost you anything but your time... and one other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“The lab needs a strand of your hair.”

Adcock sent Schneider back downstairs, then had successive chats with his four helpers, collecting a strand of hair from each one. All four denied all charges. They couldn’t understand why a simple telemarketing firm would arouse so much opposition from the sheriff. One even suggested that Adcock was too old for police work and should retire to Florida with the other old folks. Adcock promised the punk a retirement of his own and sent him back downstairs.

Dr. Finney called late that afternoon. “I have something for you, John,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m sure you saw the bullet hole, but that’s not what killed him. He died of arsenic poisoning. Someone shot him after he was already dead, which is why there wasn’t much blood. Waste of ammunition, if you ask me.”

“I won’t ask.”

“Judging from the amount of decomposition and the hot weather we’ve been having, I’d say he’d been dead for about two days when you found him.”

“What else?”

“The usual dental work. Also, a long scar on his leg. He’d had surgery for a broken leg at some point. That’s about it. I’ll send someone over with the whole report in a few minutes.”

“Thanks.”

The paperwork from Dr. Finney arrived twenty minutes later. Adcock looked it over. Then he called the Pentagon.

It took him awhile to convince someone that he actually was the sheriff of Fox County, Iowa. Once past this obstacle, he found that nobody wanted to answer his questions. A Lieutenant Bates finally agreed to find out what he could and call back.

By this time it was almost four o’clock, and silence was descending on the old limestone courthouse in the center of the Clearfield town square. Adcock looked out the window of his second story office at the taverns on the east side. By unspoken agreement, the tavern owners had segregated themselves on that block many decades ago. A lingering effect of Prohibition. The Iowa Theater, the Royal Cafe, and the Davis Hotel all stood on the same block. Adcock reached for a cigarette, then remembered that he didn’t smoke any more. A lingering effect of Dr. Finney.

Deputy Foley came by to compare notes, then left for the day. Adcock talked to his other deputy about a burglary. Then he looked out the window awhile longer and reached for another nonexistent cigarette. Why, he wondered, would Schneider poison a man and then shoot him in the head? Why would a homeless alcoholic come to a village like Pitston instead of staying in a city where shelters and soup kitchens would provide at least some assistance? And why did Carl Swenson and Ellen Hughes Roemer both claim not to have seen this man, even though he would’ve stood out in Pitston like Boris Yeltsin. At five o’clock the sheriff put on his hat, locked up, and walked over to the Royal Cafe.

Three days later, on Friday, Lieutenant Bates called back. He had made many phone calls and searched many files. In doing so, he had compiled a list of every Marine recruit with the initials M.S.R. who had completed basic training in the 1st Battalion, Company B, at Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1968. He had also retrieved their physical descriptions and medical histories and compared them with those of the murdered man. There was one perfect match: Mark Steven Roberts from St. Louis, Missouri. He had received a dishonorable discharge in 1970 after getting drunk and stealing a car. Lieutenant Bates promised to send a typed copy of his findings.

Adcock hung up and looked out the window at the Iowa Theater. The marquee announced the showing of a horror movie of the sort that teenagers line up for. The sheriff turned from the window, picked up the phone, and dialed. “Ellen,” he said, “we’ve identified the dead man. His name is Mark Steven Roberts. Does that mean anything to you?”

She paused. “Not really, sheriff.”

“A note we found in his shirt pocket mentions Columbia. Do you know anyone who might have lived in Columbia or gone to school there?”

“No. My parents and I all went to the University of Iowa, and my son is there now. It’s a family tradition.”

“One more thing, Ellen. Someone says he saw you going up to the apartment over the barbershop a week ago.”

“I’ll bet that’s what he says. It was Carl Swenson, wasn’t it? Well, it’s not true. I haven’t been up there for years.”

Adcock said goodbye, hung up, and pondered for a moment. Then he picked up the phone again and called the police department in Columbia. He quickly learned that Carl Swenson had not been entirely truthful about his tavern in Columbia. He had lost his lease, but only after a jury had found him guilty of selling beer to minors. Next Adcock called the University of Iowa to check Ellen Roemer’s story, then made two more calls to Columbia. Finally, he called Susan Roth Murray in Kansas City and had a long conversation. Things were starting to make sense.

Adcock waited for the lab to call him the following Monday. When he heard the report, he wasn’t really surprised. The hairs found on the dead man did not match any of those collected from the five bookmakers. The bullet removed from the man’s brain had not been fired by any of their pistols. But the lab technicians did find traces of arsenic in the man’s empty brandy bottle. Adcock checked his gun registration files, then walked down the hall to see Judge Barnes. An hour later, he radioed Deputy Foley and told him to pick him up at the courthouse.

It was a pleasant drive out to Pitston. Rain had cleared the air during the night. The sky was blue and the temperature cool. They parked in front of the house and walked up the steps to the porch.

Ellen came to the door. “Good morning, sheriff. Hello, Jim,” she said.

“We need to talk to you, Ellen,” Adcock said. “It would be better if your father didn’t hear us.”

“Let’s go into the music room,” she said. “It’s quiet and private.” The men followed her into the room. Adcock sat down when invited. Foley remained standing:

“Ellen,” Adcock said, “as I told you on the phone, we’ve learned the identity of the murdered man.”

“Yes.”

“And I now know how and why he was killed.”

“The gamblers. Did they shoot him?”

“I don’t think so, Ellen. And the bullet didn’t kill him anyway. He was poisoned. Someone shot him after he was already dead, apparently to throw suspicion onto the bookmakers. It was a crude attempt to hide the real cause of death. It might have worked a hundred and fifty years ago, but forensic medicine can easily uncover that kind of deception nowadays.

“Someone killed him by putting a large dose of arsenic, probably rat poison, into his bottle of apricot brandy, someone who knew that an alcoholic like him wouldn’t throw away a bottle of brandy just because it had a funny taste.”

“But why would anyone in Pitston kill a homeless man?” A look of confusion settled on her face.

“Because he knew a secret from the past, a secret that he was prepared to reveal if he didn’t set what he wanted. He came to Pitston to blackmail a woman he’d had an affair with twenty years before. He sent her a cryptic note, a note that only she would understand. She tore her name off the paper. Then she found the man, wadded up the note, and threw it in his face.”

“Oh?”

“He knew the woman’s father was very religious and that he had a bad heart. He thought the woman would pay a lot of money to keep the secret from her father, knowing that it might kill him. What he didn’t anticipate was that the woman would kill him instead.”

Ellen said nothing now. She just stared at Adcock.

“I know all this, Ellen, because I called the University of Iowa to confirm that you had graduated from there. A man in the registrar’s office said you had, but he also told me that you had transferred three years earlier from the University of Missouri in Columbia. That’s a fact you neglected to tell me.

“So I called the registrar’s office at the University of Missouri, and a woman found a student directory for 1971 and 1972 and told me what dormitory you’d lived in. Then a woman in the dorm checked her files, which led me to a Ms. Susan Murray in Kansas City. Her name was Susan Roth when she was your resident assistant in that dormitory.” The color drained from Ellen’s face. “She said that while you never actually confided in her, she knew from the other girls that you were romantically involved with Mark Roberts that year. Seriously involved.”

“That’s not true.”

“She said that there was trouble from the beginning of the relationship and that your mother frequently came to Columbia to console you. Your roommate told her about walking into the room one time and hearing the word ‘abortion’ being said before you and your mother noticed she was there. Ms. Murray thinks you transferred to the University of Iowa the next year so you could forget about the whole affair.”

“No. You have it all wrong.”

“Have I, Ellen? I don’t think so. And what it all leads me to is the conclusion that you poisoned Roberts to keep his story from your father once and for all.” Ellen shook her head. “Then you did something that must have been horrible for you. You hauled the dead man to a secluded spot on the other side of the county, shot him in the head, and dumped his body in a ditch.

“Some of this is speculation, Ellen, but we’ll soon have plenty of evidence.” She stared at him. “We’ll have the lab boys compare a strand of your hair with that found on the body. They’ll also compare your fingerprints with those on the brandy bottle. Then there’s the .22 caliber pistol purchased and registered many years ago by your father. I think we’ll find that the bullet came from that gun. I have a search warrant if you force me to use it. And while we’re at it, we’ll look for the poison. Once we have all this evidence, Ellen, the county attorney will be easy to convince.

“The only thing I’m unsure of is how a small woman like you moved the dead body of a six foot man. You had to have help, but who would have helped you with such a terrible job? The first person who comes to mind is your son Todd.”

“No!” she shouted, suddenly finding her voice again. “Not my son! He wasn’t even here.”

“Then who, Ellen? Who helped you?”

She began to cry.

“There’s only one other likely possibility, isn’t there? Someone with gray hair to match the hair on the body. Someone who’s always there when you need her. The most helpful person in town: Dora Martino.”

“No! None of it’s true. It didn’t happen that way. You’re going to destroy Dora for nothing.”

“Not me, Ellen. I didn’t ask her to help me conceal a murder. You did it, and you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to kill him. There were other options. You could have called me. Blackmail is against the law. And your father isn’t that naive. He could’ve survived learning that you had an affair twenty years ago, got pregnant, and had an abortion.”

“I didn’t!” she screamed. “I didn’t have an affair. I didn’t get pregnant and have an abortion. It was my mother! My stupid, romantic mother who came down to Columbia to get away from Pitston and my stuffy father. That’s who it was, sheriff. Now who’s going to tell him?”

Once every four or five years, a woman got arrested in Fox County and had to spend the night in jail. Whenever this happened, Adcock deputized his niece, and she supervised the women’s section of the jail until bail was set the next morning. This part of the jail was normally used to store supplies for the various county offices upstairs.

After bringing in Ellen Hughes Roemer and Dora Martino, Adcock and Foley moved the supplies into the hall while the prisoners sat on a bench and shared a box of Kleenex. Adcock’s niece arrived and tried to console Dora, who was trying to console Ellen.

Thomas Hughes had just entered the Clearfield Hospital for observation. Deputy Hunter was about to call Carl Swenson to remind him of the consequences of selling alcoholic beverages to minors. Richard Schneider was back in the Fort Madison Penitentiary for numerous parole violations. His four apprentices had made bail and were already plotting their next crime, unaware of how much safer and easier it would be to get an ordinary job like everyone else.

At five fifteen that afternoon, Adcock and Foley walked out of the courthouse and stood on the steps. “Take a good look at this, Jim,” Adcock said, motioning at the town square in general. “Try to remember it. Forty years from now, you’ll be amazed at how much it’s changed. When you’re young you think your little part of the world will stay the same forever, but you soon learn that nothing stays the same.”

Foley nodded.

“Clearfield may look then the way Pitston does now,” Adcock said. “The taverns will be the last to go. They always are. Maybe you or Kevin will be the Fox County sheriff, or maybe Fox County won’t even exist. The state may combine it into some larger region to save money. When that happens, it’ll kill off this town for good.”

Foley listened to all this and understood. Sort of. But he was only twenty-two, and he wanted to go see his girlfriend. Adcock knew this. He would’ve wanted to do the same thing at twenty-two. Tomorrow, Ellen and Dora would go home, and eventually there would be a trial. They would be found not guilty for some reason or other, or they would be found guilty and receive light sentences. Adcock understood juries, and he understood judges. It would not be his decision, and he didn’t have to worry about it. He said goodnight to Foley and went home.