Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

The Day That Crenshaw Burned by Bobby Lee

Forever after the day he burned the town of Crenshaw to the ground, the sheriff would maintain that what he had done had been motivated solely by the sense of moral outrage he’d felt at the scandalous use he had believed was being made of Miss Petula’s vacant house while she was away on her annual summer travels in Europe. But lest you too hastily anoint as a hero the conquering moral crusader, there are perhaps a few things of which you should be made aware.

To begin with, and to give credit where credit is due, it should be acknowledged that the sheriff’s initial involvement in this episode was motivated by a legitimate, albeit a totally misdirected, desire to obtain incriminating evidence against a suspect in the wave of counterfeiting activities that at the time was threatening to rock the financial foundation of the entire county. As true as that may be, however, it is equally true that in most circumstances nothing the sheriff says or does can be properly interpreted without giving due consideration to the extremely tempestuous, not to mention extraordinarily longstanding, relationship that for so many years now has existed between the sheriff and Miss Petula.

To put it bluntly, as inglorious and even pedestrian as it may seem, when all the facts and circumstances are considered, it seems far more likely that the sheriff’s motivation in this peculiar affair was nothing more than a petty desire to embarrass the love of his life. To uncover within the very home of Miss Petula incontrovertible evidence of some nefarious, maybe even illegal, activity. Evidence he could use against her in their endless struggle for domination of one another.

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the sheriff and Miss Petula, both of whom have for one reason or another long been sentimental favorites among the general population here, are without doubt two of the orneriest and most cantankerous people you would ever want to meet up with. Over the course of the past six decades they have remained entangled, on an on-again, off-again basis, in what can only be described as a passionate love-hate relationship that almost defies human comprehension. Which is not all that surprising, actually, in view of their remarkably disparate backgrounds.

In the one corner, you see, you have the seventy-four-year-old Miss Petula Clairborne, a blueblooded patrician through and through who has an East Coast pedigree that’s about as long as your arm. She also happens to be one of the wealthiest, and one of the most powerful, people in the entire valley. In the whole of Miller County, really. And in the other corner, spoiling for an upset, you have the seventy-three-year-old Sheriff Clyde Duncan, the quintessential blue collar type who hails from proud but long impoverished Puritan stock. Representing the violent clash of blue blood with blue collar as they do, and having little in common other than their advancing years, the sheriff and Miss Petula are, at best, an unlikely pair.

Still, in spite of their loud and often downright nasty differences on almost any issue you care to raise, the two of them have somehow stayed together. The relationship has somehow lasted, weathered the storm. In a manner of speaking, at least. It’s just that over the years it’s sort of gotten to the point that aggravation has become their strongest and purest expression of the affection that neither one of them will admit to but everybody knows both of them feel for one another. So you see that breaking into Miss Petula’s home to get the goods on her, so to speak, would for the sheriff simply be a natural expression of his love for her. Or his hatred of her. With them it’s always kind of hard to tell.

Either way, and regardless of his motives, there’s little question that the ultimate outcome of the sheriff’s seemingly heroic actions, intended or not, resulted in yet another feather in the already crowded cap of Miller County’s oldest and certainly most illustrious crimefighter. A truly remarkable outcome, you have to admit, since the entire affair began with nothing more dramatic than a simple misunderstanding over the price of a refill on a cup of coffee.

That pivotal cup of coffee had been poured pretty much without incident by one Donna Sue Walker, the eldest, and in my opinion the prettiest, of the three daughters of old Joe Walker, Sr., Crenshaw’s most ardent seller of insurance. The problem didn’t arise until several minutes later, when the check was delivered and the recipient of the refill, one Martin John Withers of Kansas City, discovered to his embarrassment that the mention of free refills at the bottom of the faded plastic menu at Vernon’s Diner referred not to the coffee, which as a result of a drought in Brazil was in short supply, but rather to the soda pop, which was always in plentiful supply.

If one were overly charitable, perhaps one might be tempted to attribute the otherwise inexplicable behavior that followed next to the fluster that had resulted from the mistake Withers had made in interpreting the menu. At any rate, after counting out his change on the counter and discovering he had arrived at the diner with only enough coin for a single cup of coffee, in what could only be characterized as a monumental error in judgment Mr. Withers apparently threw caution to the winds and tried to pay his check with a crisp new one hundred dollar bill. It was, you would have to admit, an extraordinarily incautious move for a stranger in town who had just kidnapped a woman and stashed her in someone’s basement.

The hundred dollar bill, as it turned out, was one of many that Mr. Withers had recently obtained in a similar, very successful caper in Kansas City. A caper that, after its conclusion, had been so highly publicized in the local newspapers as to persuade him that it would be far wiser to move this new caper, in mid-operation as it were, to a more isolated, less well-informed region of the country. The choice of the town of Crenshaw, other than being strangely appropriate, was as far as anyone can determine purely fortuitous.

Unfortunately for Mr. Withers, the current owner of the historic diner, Donnie Vernon, having been burned on more than one occasion by customers of dubious character’s palming off on the diner large denomination bills that turned out to be either counterfeit or stolen, had instructed his employees that without his explicit approval they were never to accept anything larger than a twenty. And being her daddy’s daughter, Donna Sue was not the sort to be reticent, or terse, in staking out and defending her position in the ensuing debate.

More important, the increasingly heated, not to mention increasingly loud, disagreement over the payment of the check that followed from Donna Sue’s refusal to accept the suspect hundred dollar bill, an argument that was resolved only when the exasperated waitress finally announced that she would pay for the refill out of her own pocket, eventually caught the attention of another of the diner’s handful of early morning customers. For sitting at the far end of the counter, quietly eating his breakfast and reading the morning newspaper, was none other than our own Sheriff Clyde Duncan.

Worse still for Mr. Withers, who ironically had never even considered the possibility of venturing into the counterfeiting business, this was not the first time that his rather distinctive profile, with its beaklike hooked proboscis and offsetting bushy, jaw-length sideburns, had caught the eye of the wily old sheriff. It had, in fact, been only the day before that, off duty and dressed in civilian clothing, the sheriff had stood behind this very unusual looking man, tall and gangly to the point of being spidery, in the checkout line at Schulte’s IGA. And on that occasion, as on this one, the sheriff, already on his sharpest lookout as a result of a recent bulletin from the state police detailing the activities of a counterfeiter working the southern reaches of the state, had watched with keen interest as the man had paid his bill with a crisp new one hundred dollar bill.

Now the sheriff, no matter what else he is, or has been called, is at heart a man of action. Having already been put on his guard with respect to the possibly criminal nature of the mysterious stranger’s activities, and seeing what looked like the perfect opportunity to strike a preemptive blow against the counterfeiting operation, it seemed only natural that he should surrender to his natural proclivities and attempt to follow the man back to his base of operations. Which, At least to some degree, accounts for why it was that on that fateful afternoon when the town of Crenshaw burned to the ground the sheriff of Crenshaw found himself, of all things, conducting surveillance on the beautiful old Victorian mansion that belonged to none other than the love of his life for these past sixty-some years, Miss Petula Clairborne.

Of course, the real key to understanding the utter chaos that ensued lies in the realization that, in spite of his profound dedication to the enforcement of law and order and his fifty-odd years of loyal service as an officer of the court, the sheriff was not about to let something as insignificant as his inability to secure a search warrant stand in his way. Not of his catching the counterfeiters, of course, though that was how he was later to justify his actions. For them undoubtedly he would have waited. After all, it would only have been a matter of another day or two before the circuit judge finally made his way to Crenshaw and the warrant could have been obtained.

But if it wasn’t for fear of losing the opportunity to capture the counterfeiter, you might well ask, what then was the source of this great urgency that drove him? It was, of course, nothing less than the opportunity of obtaining some especially succulent bit of goods on Miss Petula. For such a plum, there can be little question, an illegal search would have seemed trivial to the sheriff. In the past, as is well known among Crenshaw’s insiders, bigger obstacles than that have failed to stop the man. As they no doubt will in the future, too.

So it was that, when Martin Withers and his partner, a squirrelly little twice-convicted con artist by the name of Donald Jeffries, left the Clairborne mansion shortly after four o’clock that afternoon, the sheriff quickly availed himself of the opportunity. Using the spare key he just happened to know Miss Petula kept hidden under the gorgeous, hydrangea-filled ceramic planter standing next to the front door and totally unconcerned with the finer technicalities regarding the legality of his actions, he entered the mansion for a quick look about.

Now, at this particular point in the story it might be helpful if you knew just a little more about the layout of the town of Crenshaw. Comprising a population that for most of the past century has generally hovered right around the eight hundred mark, the town is laid out pretty much in the shape of a giant egg, with the longer axis running from the northwest to the southeast. For the most part the boundaries fall along Highway 17 on the northern and eastern sides, and along the dry bed of Stimson’s Creek on the southern and western sides.

Vernon’s Diner, where the saga began, is situated on the west side of Highway 17, at a point just south of where the highway ceases to run northward and executes a sharp bend to the west. Miss Petula’s mansion, on the other hand, is on the south side of the highway on the other side of the bend, where the highway has taken on a course pretty much due west. Which means that, though the hilly, heavily forested terrain prevents the one’s being seen from the other, the mansion and the diner are actually on the same side of the highway, roughly three-quarters of a mile apart.

The sheriff’s office, which adjoins the front of the county jail, is situated in the south end of an old brick building located directly across the highway from Vernon’s Diner, which displaces it sufficiently to clear the intervening obstacles and put it on a direct line of sight with the Clairborne mansion. Seeing one from the other requires only that one look out the window, an interesting feature that in the past, rumor has it, the sheriff and Miss Petula have frequently put to good use.

The good news, therefore, was that the sheriff was able to conduct his stakeout from the privacy and comfort of his own office. Which, for a man of seventy-three years who was suffering from yet another flareup of the gout, was not a trivial consideration. The bad news, however, was that the post office, which was where Withers and his partner were headed when they left the mansion that afternoon, occupies the north half of the same building that houses the jail and the sheriff’s office. Withers and Jeffries had set out by car on a round-trip journey that was no more than about a mile and a half long.

As fate would have it, therefore, the sheriff arrived at the mansion roughly the same time Withers and Jeffries entered the post office. Consequently, he had not much more than begun his survey of the dozen or so rooms that composed the ground floor of the mansion when the nefarious duo, having completed their short journey to the post office, unexpectedly returned. And when Withers, becoming suspicious on finding the front door unlocked, dispatched his partner around the house to cover the back door, the sheriff was, for all practical purposes, trapped inside.

Instantly recognizing his predicament, and wisely choosing discretion as the better, really the only, part of valor, the sheriff beat a hasty, and in retrospect perhaps ill-considered, retreat down the stairway to the darker recesses of the basement. From which, of course, the only avenue of escape was the very stair down which he had just so hastily, and now he could see so foolishly, descended. Withers, therefore, on meeting up with his empty-handed partner in the center of the house and reaching the conclusion that the intruder must therefore no longer be on the first floor, had only to set his foot on the uppermost step of the basement stair to effectively cut the sheriff off.

It was, as everyone around these parts already knows, at this fateful moment that, on hearing the men coming down the stairs and realizing that he had no way out, the sheriff made the crucial decision to seek refuge behind the huge and sprawling nineteenth century furnace that covered at least a quarter of the basement. What is less well known, you might be interested to learn, is that in the process of crawling through the narrow passageway between the furnace and the wall, the frightened and by now almost breathless, slightly claustrophobic sheriff somehow managed in his haste to lose his grip on his flashlight, allowing it to slip free and fall onto the hard cement floor a short way behind him. Unfortunately, it failed to break when it landed and instead simply lay there shining, like a beacon marking the way into the harbor of his refuge.

Finding he could not retrieve the flashlight from his current position, the sheriff compounded his earlier error by attempting to crawl backward the requisite distance so as to bring it within the reach of his backstretched arm. In the process, however, he caught the pocket of his trousers on the valve set under the rusty old pipe that carried fuel oil to the furnace’s reservoir from the tank in the next room. Or would have, had Miss Petula not had the foresight to drain the tank before departing on her vacation.

Having no way of knowing on what it was that he had snagged himself, and with his mental functioning perhaps understandably impaired by his mounting sense of urgency, the sheriff chose to force the issue. That is to say, to barge recklessly ahead, or rather behind, without first disentangling himself from the snag. It was a strategy that had disastrous consequences.

Unfortunately, you see, in its current state of advanced decay the pipe to which the valve was attached was somewhat weaker than was the coarse fabric of the sheriff’s trousers. Therefore, the pipe, which had not been drained along with the tank, was the first to give way, and the rather substantial quantity of fuel oil that still remained within it began to pour out.

Feeling the cold, wet fluid rushing onto his flank and identifying the highly combustible fuel from its distinctive odor, the sheriff quite understandably panicked. His pursuers suddenly completely forgotten, the sheriff let loose with a piercing, high-pitched yelp that left little doubt as to his whereabouts. He then began to wriggle his behind frantically while pushing himself with all his might backwards toward the opening through which he had entered, managing somehow to make good progress but scraping the side of his gun against the wall just before he emerged, knocking it from its holster.

Naturally, given the general lines along which the events of the day had been unfolding, when it landed, the gun discharged. And when the gun discharged, the blast ignited a tendril of fuel oil that was slowly trickling its way across the basement floor, flowing roughly along the very same path the sheriff had chosen to follow.

Not certain whether he’d been shot, only certain that if he didn’t get out in a hurry it wouldn’t matter whether he’d been shot, the sheriff renewed his already violent efforts to free himself from the narrow confines of what he believed was quickly becoming a deathtrap. Finally reaching a point at which there was room to rise, he climbed to his feet, wheeled wildly about, and lunged for the relative, albeit short-term, safety of the open territory in the middle of the basement, in the process banging his head against one of the many foot-thick pipes sprouting from the furnace.

With Withers and Jeffries standing by, watching his antics in open-mouthed astonishment, Sheriff Duncan emerged at a dead run from behind the furnace. Blinded as much by the blood that was pouring from a gash he had opened up in his forehead as by the intensely bright light coming from their hurricane lantern, he careened from one obstacle to the next, bouncing his way across the basement. Navigating from memory alone, as it were, yet always traveling in the general direction of the foot of the stairwell. And he almost made it.

In all likelihood would have made it had his mad dash for freedom not been foiled along the way. Tripped up by a misplaced roll of carpet remnant that had been left over from Miss Petula’s renovation project last spring, stumbling ahead a few more steps under the momentum he’d built up, traveling on a course tangential to the original, he fell headlong through the open doorway that led into the smaller room in the back of the basement that housed the fuel oil tank.

It was a relatively low-slung open doorway, unfortunately. Striking his head on the top of the doorway frame as he passed through and knocking himself unconscious in the process, he pitched forward into the room beyond. Where he first knocked over, then landed smack on top of, a small folding chair set up in the middle of the floor. A chair that at the time contained the bound and gagged, and rather startled, Miss Virginia Watson, lately of Kansas City.

Miss Watson, having been whisked without benefit of explanation from the sidewalk in front of her college dormitory back in Kansas City late one night of the previous week, had in the intervening days had little opportunity to orient herself to her new circumstances, much less to acquaint herself with the details of the case. Under the circumstances, then, I’m certain she can be forgiven if she quite naturally jumped to the same conclusion anyone else in her position would. Believing that she was experiencing the preliminary stages of a violent sexual assault, and discovering that her fall had freed her legs from their bonds, she immediately began to rain downward, or rather upward, upon the limp and unconscious body of the sheriff a veritable storm of swift and vicious kicks.

It was at this point that Withers and Jeffries, overcoming their initial shock at the sudden, not to mention bizarre, turn of events, and having a clear view of the rapidly spreading fire around the base of the furnace, decided that it was in their best interests to depart. And in what was probably the most curious part of the whole affair, they rushed headlong up the stairs to the ground floor and across the family room on their way to the back door. Unbeknownst to them, however, said family room happened to be situated directly above the furnace, which had also not been drained by Miss Petula and which chose that very instant to detonate.

Against all odds, neither member of the notorious gang of two was killed, or even seriously injured, by the violent explosion. However, they did wind up unconscious out on the front lawn, buried beneath a rather substantial pile of rubble and debris. When the volunteer fire department, arriving on the premises a short time later, finally succeeded in freeing them, they were both still too stunned and disoriented to provide any kind of coherent explanation for how they had ended up where they were. Shortly thereafter they were transported to a medical facility over in Osage Beach, and after receiving treatment there for a variety of minor cuts and bruises, they were transferred to the county jail.

In the meantime, back within the protected confines of the fuel tank room’s foot-thick concrete walls, neither the unconscious sheriff nor the bewildered Miss Watson received as a result of the explosion even the most minor of cuts or scrapes, though the sheriff’s uniform was scorched in one or two places by small pieces of burning debris that landed on his backside. And in a curious twist of perspective, in addition to halting the terrible beating she had been inflicting upon him, the explosion and the calm that followed afforded Miss Watson the opportunity to reinterpret the peculiar actions of the sheriff that had precipitated the aforesaid beating.

In perhaps the greatest irony of them all, when members of the volunteer fire department finally extracted them from the basement, which was now nothing more than a giant, gaping hole in the ground where Miss Petula’s house had once stood, the grateful kidnapping victim proceeded to absolve the sheriff of all wrongdoing in the matter. Worse, in a gush of gratitude and adoration that many of us found a bit difficult to stomach, she insisted that the heroic sheriff, with no regard whatsoever for his own welfare, had burst into the room where she was being held, pushed her onto the floor, and thrown himself on top of her in order to shield her with his own body from the imminent explosion.

Well, anyway, that’s pretty much the real story of how the sheriff of Crenshaw came to receive the credit for solving the Watson kidnapping case. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the accolades he received, that he continues to receive, were deserved.

As a postscript, I should mention that both the media and the mayor made such a fuss over the sheriff’s heroic actions, to the point of having a parade in his honor, that it never even occurred to anyone that he could also be held responsible for the enormous amount of damage that was done by the subsequent conflagration that he had ignited, and that before it was done had consumed the better part of Crenshaw.

Not that it ended up costing the citizens of Crenshaw a single penny to repair, of course. In yet another twist of irony, in a fit of gratitude not unlike that of his daughter, Miss Watson’s father, who as it turned out was an enormously successful, not to mention enormously wealthy, Kansas City businessman, contributed more than sufficient funds to completely rebuild the entire town. Better than it was before, most folks would say.

Of course, that was small consolation for Miss Petula, who returned from Europe at the end of the summer to find that her beautiful old mansion, along with a large number of priceless antiques, had been completely destroyed. Needless to say, she was not so inclined as others to overlook the negative aspects of the sheriff’s conduct. But then that’s another story altogether.