Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 7, July, 1980

That Kind of World by John Lutz

Rodney had worked out the details of the murder...

“Is he dead for sure?”

Rodney Bolton nodded to his sister Alissa Sue as he stepped up out of the slanted Ozark sunlight into the shade of the plank porch. Behind him, his younger brother Jake slammed the one workable door on the rusty Dodge pickup and walked toward the porch to join them.

“Ain’t nobody smilin’,” Alissa Sue said, forcing her own smile. “Ain’t it what we planned?”

“Sure, Ally,” Jake said with a strained enthusiasm belied by his tanned, somber face.

Rodney was the only one of the Bolton siblings whose long, bony features appeared genuinely cheerful. “Jake’s still a mite shaky.” he said, grinning at his sister, who was now a widow.

Alissa Sue frowned at him. She was a pretty girl just turned twenty-two, with dark brown hair, a buxom lithe figure, and innocent blue eyes that had caused a sensation among the local males until her marriage three years ago to Feeny Clark. “Somethin’ go wrong?” she asked Rodney.

“Not wrong,” Rodney said, “jus’ difficult. Feeny didn’t die right away after we hung him, and watchin’ it kinda affected young Jake.”

“Had to keep holdin’ his hands down so he couldn’t grab the rope an’ hoist hisself up,” Jake said. “Took him a time to give out.”

“But he’s dead,” Alissa Sue said brightly. “An’ that’s what counts.” She smiled her best smile, which was something special and at the moment held an extra glitter. “I made us some lemonade. That oughta get Jake to be his old self.”

Rodney was sure Jake would rather have a few jolts of the powerful corn liquor brewed by old Chadwith, but all the Bolton children had been raised in a house that saw no hard drinking. Lemonade sufficed, and by the time the late-afternoon sun had dropped beyond the leafy green spread of the old elm near the derelict silo, Jake was his relaxed and amiable self.

Of the three, Rodney was the planner — though killing Feeny had really been Alissa Sue’s idea — and as he sat with his boots propped high on the porch rail, watching dying shadows and sipping lemonade, he thought back over what had taken place.

Alissa Sue had found out a month ago that Feeny was stepping out with Betty Ann Willton. It was a romance that figured to stay strictly on the sly, as the Clarks and the Willtons had been feuding for nearly a hundred years, but none of the Clarks or Willtons would have been half so mad as Alissa Sue was. And Alissa Sue was wont to act on her anger.

The fourth Bolton child, the middle brother Carl, was an insurance investigator in St. Louis, and he worked for the company that held the policy on Feeny Clark’s life. That was what gave Alissa Sue the idea. She could easily enlist her brothers’ help. In the deep Ozarks, a man committing adultery had good cause to fear his wife’s brothers. Besides, there was $20,000 in insurance money to split, and Rodney and Jake had never liked Feeny.

So Alissa Sue told them about Betty Ann Willton and made up a few things to boot, letting them glimpse some self-inflicted bruises that she blamed on Feeny. Carl Bolton would be the natural one to investigate Feeny’s death for the insurance company, which wouldn’t relish sending a stranger to the wilds, and he would easily give a finding of suicide. Carl wouldn’t be in on the plan; that way it would be more convincing. Besides, Carl wasn’t like his brothers and sister. Especially now, since he’d become what Rodney called citified.

It was Rodney who worked out the details of the plan, made everything simple and safe. One day, when Feeny came home from work at the lead mine, Rodney and Jake would be waiting for him in the small cabin where he and Alissa Sue lived. They would have a rope slung over a beam with a hangman’s noose ready and waiting to deal swift and profitable justice. They would hang Feeny by the neck and make it appear as if he’d hanged himself by kicking a stool out from under him. Feeny was a small man. He’d be easy to handle.

And everything had gone smoothly except for Feeny not dying right away. But then, Rodney supposed that was a something that hadn’t gone smoothly for Feeny. It didn’t hurt the plan at all.

After Feeny was dead, Rodney got the low oak stool Alissa Sue used when reaching things in the top cupboards. He had made sure some of the greyish mud from Feeny’s boots was on the stool, then let it roll aside as though Feeny had stood on it, slipped the noose over his head, and stepped off.

Rodney watched a hawk circling high above the elm in narrowing, soaring arcs, saber-winged and rigid against the breeze. He was satisfied with Feeny’s death. It wasn’t likely Betty Ann would come forward and admit to adultery with a man now dead, so Alissa Sue could play the bereaved widow and have no apparent motive for killing her husband. And, if Betty Ann did say something, it would appear that Feeny had found a way out of his romantic predicament through suicide. And supposing, by some far-removed chance, Feeny’s death was found to be murder, the finger of suspicion would naturally point to the Willton clan.

Alissa Sue went into the house to rinse the glasses and pitcher and put them away. Rodney saw a large colorful butterfly zigzagging its way above the barn roof. The circling hawk spotted the butterfly at the same time Rodney did, for it folded its wings and dropped like a stone to within ten feet of the butterfly, then hit the unsuspecting insect at full speed.

Rodney smiled. It was that kind of world, all right. Best admit it and act accordingly. “Ally Sue!” he called. “Time for you to be gettin’ home to find your husband!”

Alissa Sue giggled as she jumped down off the porch and strolled, her hips swaying, toward the trail to her cabin.

“I s’pose he’ll wait,” she called back over her shoulder.

But it was Betty Ann Willton who discovered Feeny Clark’s body, and the nearby hunters drawn by her screams found her babbling and hugging the strung-up dead man to her breast.

When Betty Ann had calmed down some, she realized she might as well tell about her love affair with Feeny, and, in fact, she seemed almost relieved to tell anyone who would listen. She also told everyone that Feeny had said he knew his wife Alissa Sue suspected them.

Now, that was something the bereaved widow and her brothers hadn’t planned on. But, as long as Feeny’s death was considered a suicide, there was still no danger. And they had little doubt as to how their brother Carl would decide. The only bone in the soup might be in the person of Colver County Sheriff Billy Wintone.

Feeny Clark was thin as well as only five and a half feet tall. Wintone helped to load the body into Doc Amis’s Ford station wagon, and it felt to be not much more than a handful of air. There was a nasty bluish-red groove running the circumference of Feeny’s neck. Feeny had been a handsome man, but now the look on his face was a long way from that.

Wintone watched the dust from Doc Amis’s departing wagon settle, then he instructed every one to go home. Except, of course, poor Alissa Sue, scorned by life and death, who voluntarily left to stay with her brothers at the family’s old farm.

Everyone there knew the sheriff and obeyed without hesitation. Wintone was a moderately tall man, heavy enough to make him nearly huge. He had a flesh-padded yet sharp-featured, almost haughty face topped by a boyishly curly mop of brown hair. His bulk and his heavy-lidded blue eyes suggested a slowness of mind and body, but when need be he could think and move with the unexpected suddenness of lightning. And with almost the force.

When everyone had gone, Wintone let himself back into Feeny Clark’s cabin and looked around again, this time more slowly. The cabin was a two-room affair with a small L-shaped kitchen off to one side of the main living area. There was no attic beneath the steeply pitched roof. The beam to which the rope had been tied crossed the cabin at the midway point and was ten feet, the height of the walls, above the floor. Wintone walked idly about the cabin, probing with his eyes, letting his mind dart in various directions in the hope that it might strike something solid.

The stool, still mud-caked, that Feeny had stood on lay on its side near a corner of the old sofa. It was a small stool used only for reaching, only two feet high. Wintone walked over and poked a finger into the now hardened mud. Then he confiscated the rope from which Feeny had dangled and left the cabin.

When he’d driven back to Colver and opened the door to his office, Wintone saw Betty Ann Willton seated in the oak chair near his desk, waiting for him. He had a good idea of what she was going to tell him.

Wintone unstrapped his holstered revolver and hung it on the brass hook of a coat rack. It was warm in the office despite the struggling window air conditioner, and there were dark crescents of perspiration on his tan uniform shirt. He settled into the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk. The never-oiled chair yowled like a spooked cat, causing Betty Ann to flinch and screw her pleasant blonde features into temporary ugliness.

“I s’pose you know I’m here about Feeny,” she said.

“I am sorry about it, Betty Ann.”

“Sure you are, Sheriff.” She meant that. “Somethin’ I think you oughta know though.”

Wintone looked her wearily in the eye and waited. A bluebottle fly droned across the office and struck the metal Venetian blinds on the front window with surprising impact.

“Feeny didn’t kill himself,” Betty Ann said flatly. “He wouldn’t have.”

“Natural you’d feel like that, Betty Ann.”

Then she surprised Wintone. “We was gonna run away together,” she said, “clear outa the county, maybe to another state.”

Wintone sat back in the squealing chair and tapped a broken pencil point on the desk. “When was you figurin’ on leavin’?” he asked.

“End of the week. There wasn’t any doubt in Feeny’s mind, nor in mine.”

“Sometimes you can’t see or sense another person’s doubt.”

“I could have in Feeny.” She stood up, a wispy resolute girl holding herself more erect than usual. “I ain’t gonna rile you with dumb woman’s sentimental wrong-headedness,” she said. “I only wanted to tell you what I thought you’d have need to know.”

“My thanks, Betty Ann.”

She nodded and went out into the heat without looking at him again.

Wintone sat for a long time listening to the buzz of the fly trapped between the half-closed blinds and the window. What Betty Ann had told him carried weight. And Feeny, to Wintone’s way of thinking, wasn’t the sort to commit suicide — though Wintone knew the possible error of that kind of reasoning. One way or the other, he’d have to find some answers to the question Betty Ann had left with him.

Carl Bolton came to Colver the next day as a representative of Midwest Trust Insurance. His job was to make a cursory investigation of Feeny’s death and write his report and recommendation to his employer. The insurance company would then certainly turn over $20,000 to Feeny’s young widow. The fact that Feeny’s death was judged to be suicide would in no way affect payment. In the state suicide was legally regarded as the result of mental illness. For insurance purposes, Feeny might as well have died from cancer or getting hit by lightning.

A tall, lean man with a full moustache, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit, Carl Bolton stood near the dented file cabinets in Wintone’s office and asked for the preliminary findings on his brother-in-law’s death.

“I’d hold up a while on my report,” Wintone advised him.

Carl rested his fists on his hips. “There’s only one reason I can think of for you to tell me that,” he said.

Wintone nodded. “There’s a possibility of murder.”

“I’ve got the autopsy report right here.” With the shiny toe of his boot, Carl nudged a leather attaché case on the floor beside him. “According to it, Feeny died of strangulation.”

“No argument there.”

“You’re saying somebody hanged him?”

“I’m savin’ there’s a thing or two that needs to be cleared up.” Wintone considered telling Carl Bolton what Betty Ann had said, but he thought better of it. Carl was family of the deceased. “Jus’ give me a day or so, Carl.”

Bolton glanced at his wristwatch as if minutes counted.

“I’ve got to get back to St. Louis, Sheriff,” he said.

Wintone shrugged. “You can write your report any way you want and then go, if you ain’t interested in the truth.”

A bead of perspiration traced an angled route down Carl Bolton’s temple and along his jawline. He sighed and nodded to Wintone. “I’d better stick around, Sheriff.”

After Carl Bolton had gone, Wintone wondered if he could actually prove that Feeny hadn’t hanged himself. That proof had to be the crucial piece of evidence. Establishing motive and opportunity simply wasn’t enough.

He got up, put on his wide-brimmed hat, and sauntered down the street to the Colver Bank. That was the most likely place for Feeny to have kept an account, provided he didn’t bury his meager savings somewhere on his property.

Ollie Deseter, the bank’s president, ran a check and told Wintone that Feeny had closed out his six-hundred-dollar savings account two days before his death. Wintone had Deseter check further and produce the withdrawal slip. The savings account listed Feeny and Alissa Sue Clark as joint tenants with right of survivorship. Feeny’s signature alone had appeared on the withdrawal slip.

Alissa Sue had come in yesterday, Ollie Deseter said, to draw out money for Feeny’s funeral. She was surprised to find the account was closed. Deseter had granted her a loan against the eventual life-insurance settlement.

Wintone thanked Ollie and left, thinking that there was only one likely reason for Feeny to have closed his savings account in the only bank in town. As Betty Ann had claimed, he was planning to leave the area.

The rest of the morning Wintone spent searching Feeny Clark’s cabin. He finally found the six hundred dollars in an oilcloth packet tied to the plumbing beneath the sink.

Wintone returned to his office and sat down in the yowling swivel chair. He thought about the scene of Feeny’s death, but there was nothing in the memory that shed light. He got up and walked to the table where the rope that had been about Feeny’s neck lay, the noose still set at one end. The rope was about three feet long from the bottom of the noose to the end that had been tied about the beam. It had hung down only two feet from the beam, not a long enough drop to kill in the relatively painless way of competent hangings, by breaking the neck. Instead, Feeny had died a lingering, agonizing death by strangulation. A poor choice of all the ways to leave this world. Wintone figured he’d need both hands to count on his fingers the ways he’d rather die than by choking his life away at the end of a rope.

He sat forward suddenly, his eyes glimmering. As he rose with sudden swiftness from his chair and made for the door, he was smiling.

Twenty minutes later, he was standing on the porch of the Willton house, saying hello to Betty Ann. She squinted up at him from behind the screen door and invited him in. As the door opened and he could see her face more clearly, Wintone noticed the partly blackened eye and the wide welts that crisscrossed her upper arms.

“Your pa home?” he asked.

Betty Ann looked away from him and shook her head. “Pa’s in the hospital in Little Rock. He had a heart attack yesterday mornin’.”

Wintone inclined his head toward her. “He beat you?”

“ ’Course he did. Right after’s when he had his attack.”

“Where are your brothers?”

“Randy an’ Eb are in Little Rock too. They been there the last two weeks on a construction job.”

“Did any of your men folk know about you and Feeny Clark?”

Betty Ann gingerly touched one of the welts on her left arm and gave an incredulous sneer of laughter. “If’n they had, I’da been beat long afore this.”

Wintone knew the Willtons well enough to believe that. “Are you going to be O.K. here alone?” he asked.

She nodded, staring at the bare wood floor. “I’m best off alone now.”

Wintone left her and drove back the way he’d come. The Bolton place was on the other side of town. On the way he stopped and talked to Doc Amis, who confirmed that Silas Willton had indeed suffered a heart attack the previous morning and been taken by ambulance to a Little Rock hospital. The two Willton sons had been waiting at the hospital for their father. Wintone said goodbye to Doc Amis, got back in the dusty black cruiser with the sheriff’s insignia on each door, and headed up the lake road toward the Bolton house. It was Rodney Bolton he wanted to see.

Jake Bolton told Wintone that Rodney was hunting whatever was in season in the stretch of woods beyond the near rise. Wintone thanked him and set out in that direction.

It didn’t take him long to find Rodney; he was no more than ten minutes in the woods when a nearby shot told him in which direction to walk. He called Rodney’s name.

“Billy Wintone?” Rodney called back, and stepped from behind a stand of young pine, a shotgun beneath his crooked right arm. Wintone walked over and stood a few feet in front of him. Rodney wasn’t a small man, but Wintone seemed to dwarf him. A grey squirrel tittered and scurried away among the pines as if anticipating trouble.

“It had to take two strong men to hoist Feeny Clark up an’ hang him,” Wintone said calmly.

Except for a flick of one eye, Rodney didn’t move. “Why would you be tellin’ me that, Sheriff?”

“ ’Cause you was one of ’em. I’m tellin’ you I can prove Feeny Clark was murdered, and I’m givin’ you the first chance — an’ your only chance — to be the one to tell me about it an’ get off light as possible. The others’ll be in for life sure, an’ maybe even get the chair. If you don’t talk, I’ll just move on to someone else.”

The barrel of the shotgun beneath Rodney’s arm rose slightly, but continued to point at the ground. Rodney knew that if Billy Wintone said he could prove something, that something could be proved. Wintone didn’t bluff, even at cards.

But then neither did Rodney Bolton bluff.

“Let’s drive to my office an’ you can sign a statement,” Wintone said. “But it has to be now.”

Desperation, then fear, shadowed Rodney’s features. His shotgun had never been so heavy. Wintone was asking him to betray blood kin and giving him a chance for leniency in return.

It took Rodney only a short while to decide. He handed the shotgun to Wintone, and they set out to drive back to the sheriff’s office.

It was that kind of world, wasn’t it? Rodney was only acting accordingly.

“I want to know how you figured out Feeny was murdered,” Rodney said.

“I just added two and two,” Wintone told him. “Like always, it came out four. The stool Feeny was supposed to have stood on was two feet high, and after a loop around the beam, the rope and noose was two feet long. Add that up then subtract from the ten feet between the beam and the floor, and that leaves six feet. Feeny was only five foot six. If his neck was in that noose, he couldn’t have touched that stool even with his toes. Somebody must have hoisted him up and hanged him, then tried to make it look like suicide. Two strong men with a sister who had a grudge against him and $20,000 to gain by his death.”

“It damn near worked!” Rodney said in disgust.

“Yep,” Wintone agreed. “Given enough rope, you wouldn’t have hanged yourselves along with Feeny Clark.”