Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

John D. MacDonald Funny the Way Things Work Out

Sheriff Wade Illigan said, “To get any good out of a Purdley woman, you’ve got to be meaner than she is.” And the Sheriff didn’t think Will Garlan was that mean a man...

The range of all his pleasures and satisfaction had narrowed in these past years until there were only the smallest things left-like trimming the big pepper hedge, standing on the stepladder before the sun got too high, working the clippers with a slow oiled snick, and making the top of the big hedge flat as a table. He could make the trimming last a long time, pausing to look out across the inlet where the tide ran smooth, where mullet leaped near the green-black shade of the mangrove islands. Afterward he would rake up the cuttings, load them in the old tin wheelbarrow, and take them out to the pile beyond the shed.

He was a big mild man in his middle sixties, his body thickened and slow, his face deeply lined. The fringe of white hair and his pale-blue eyes were in striking contrast to the deep tropic tan. He wore a faded sports shirt and shapeless denim pants. It was a still May morning, full of the first heat of a new summer. He braced himself on the ladder and started working the clippers.

He heard Sue coming toward him across the back yard, coming from the rear of the house. He could hear her, and he guessed the folks in the trailer park could hear her, and the men fishing in the skiffs on the far side of the inlet could hear her.

“Will!” she squalled. “Will Garlan!” After years of experimentation she had learned to pitch her voice at exactly that shrill and penetrating level which he found most distasteful. It made him hunch his shoulders, as though some angry sharp-beaked bird were diving at his head.

He laid the clippers on top of the hedge and turned slowly, careful of his balance, to watch his wife striding toward him, her thin face dull-red with anger, her features pinched into an ugliness of hate. She was a lean woman, forty-five years old. She wore frayed yellow shorts, too large for her, and a grimy white halter. She had fierce gray eyes and a sallowness the sun never touched. Her black hair looked lifeless in the morning sunlight.

She stopped abruptly ten feet from the stepladder. “I tole you and I tole you a hundred times maybe,” she yelled, “don’t you never leave this stinkin’ smelly thing in the bedroom, you hear?”

She held a shaking hand out, showing him the pipe he had left by accident on his night table.

“Sue, honey,” he said humbly, “I guess I just forgot...”

“Forgot! You damn ol’ man, you oughta be put away some place, the way you getting weak in the head. And this is the last time you get it back. Next time I plunk it right out in the bay, hear?”

As he started to say something, she drew her wiry arm back and hurled the pipe at him with startling force. He tried to duck but it struck him painfully under the left eye. He nearly lost his balance, but saved himself by grasping the top of the ladder. Through the immediate prism of his tears he saw her stalking back toward the house.

Suddenly he imagined himself grasping the wooden handles of the clippers, hurling it at her, saw it turn once, slowly, glinting in the sun, and chunk into her naked sallow back, points first, exactly between the bony ridges of her shoulder blades... He felt sweaty and cold in the sunlight. The screen door slammed.

When his vision cleared he got down from the ladder and started looking for the pipe. He looked for a long time. He finally saw it in the pepper hedge. When he reached in for it, the movement of the branches dislodged it and the pipe fell to the ground.

He squatted and picked it up. The grain of the bowl was a dark cherry-red. It had an even cake and a sweet taste, and smoked dry. He oiled the bowl on the side of his nose, burnished it on the faded shirt, put it in his pocket.

He climbed the ladder again and began to clip the tall hedge. Within five minutes he knew it was no good. The pleasure was gone too, like all the others. The thing that he had to do came back into his mind. For a long time it had been something he would think of in the middle of the night while Sue lay nearby, her breath a rasping, nasal metronome.

Lately it had begun to occur to him during the day. And now, quite suddenly, he knew the day had come.

He left the hedge half done. He put the ladder and the clippers in the shed. He got into the old gray sedan and managed to back it out to the road before Sue came running out of the house.

“Where you goin’?” she yelled. “Where you goin’, Will Garlan, damn you?”

He did not answer. He started up. She ran in front of the car to stop him, but he drove directly toward her, not fast. She scrambled back out of the way. He got a glimpse of her face, insane with fury, and heard her incoherent yelpings as he headed toward town.

Center Street stretched wide and sleepy under the heat of May, the parked cars glinting, the few shoppers moving slowly under the awning shade. He parked diagonally across from the Palm County Court House and walked around to the far side, squinting against the glare.

At the high desk a deputy told him that Sheriff Wade Illigan would be back in a few minutes. He sat on a scarred bench and waited. He felt very sleepy. He wondered if the sleepiness was a reaction to the decision he had made. He felt as if he would like to find a bed in some cool place and sleep for a week.

He jumped and opened his eyes when Sheriff Illigan said, “Hey, Will. How you?”

He stood up slowly and said, “Wade, I got to talk to you. You busy? It may take some time.”

Illigan looked at his watch. “I got nothing till noon, and that’s an hour. That time enough?”

“I think that’s time enough, Wade.”

They went into Illigan’s big cluttered corner office. The Sheriff closed the door. Will Garlan sat in a corner of the deep leather couch. Illigan sat behind his desk, tilted back, and crossed his tough old legs across a corner of the desk.

“You know, Will, we’ve done no fishing together in one hell of a while. Way over a year.”

“And we aren’t likely to ever go fishing together again, Wade.”

Illigan raised grizzled eyebrows. “How so?”

Will Garlan took his pipe out and studied the grain. “Lately I keep thinking how it would be to kill Sue.”

“No law against thinking.”

“It’s a thing I might do. I get a kind of blind feeling, Wade. My ears roar. I could get like that and... hurt her. So I want to fix it so I can’t. That’s why I came in. I think I hate her. That’s a terrible thing, I guess.”

After a reflective pause Illigan said, “I’ll talk straight, Will. Anybody that knows you two can understand hating that woman. She’s plain mean. All those Purdleys have always been mean as snakes. When you married her she was a beautiful girl, and on a girl like that it somehow looks more like high spirits than ugly spirits. When the looks are gone, you can see what it is, plain and clear. Sue hasn’t got a friend in Palm County, and that’s for sure. I’d say this, Will. If you’d been raised here, you wouldn’t have married a Purdley no matter if she did make a fellow’s mouth run dry a hundred yards off. But nobody knew you good enough to warn you, and I guess you wouldn’t have listened anyhow.”

“I wouldn’t have listened.”

“What I say, Will, you should just pack up and get out. You got good years left, and it just isn’t worth it living nestled up to a buzz-saw woman like that making every day miserable.”

“You make it sound easy, but it wouldn’t be easy. I can’t do it that way. I’ve got to do it my way.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“Wade, just what do you know about me?”

“Know about you? You moved down here from the north about... let me see...”

“Twenty-four years ago last month. I was forty-one years old. What did folks find out about me?”

“Found out you were a well-educated man, and you’d done well in some kind of business ’way up north, and then your wife died and it kind of took the heart out of you, so you retired early, with enough to live on if you took it easy. And there was something about your health being shaky.”

“I had to let folks think that so they wouldn’t think it strange a man that age doing nothing at all.”

“Well, you bought a couple acres of land out there at the inlet, and you built that house all by yourself, learning as you went along, and it must have been a little over a year after you moved down you married Sue Purdley, a girl twenty years younger, a girl been in several kinds of trouble around here, enough so folks figured she made herself a pretty good deal.”

“She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” Garlan said.

“They all got looks when they’re young enough,” Illigan said. “If she hadn’t hooked you, Will, about the only thing left for her would have been some cracker boy from back in the sloughs to keep her swole up with kids, barefoot, and beat the tar out of her every Saturday night.”

“If we could have had children, maybe it would have...”

“It wouldn’t have been a bit different. To get any good out of a Purdley woman, you’ve got to be meaner than she is, and you’re just too gentle a man, Will.”

“Know anything else about me?”

Illigan shook his head. “Guess not. You live quiet. You’re a good man to go fishing with. You keep your house and grounds up nice. What is there I should know?”

“I’m a methodical man, Wade. I plan things carefully. I never thought I’d be telling anybody this. I feel scared to tell you now, but I don’t know why, because the life I have isn’t worth living, and that isn’t the way I planned it. Way back in 1935 I started planning it all out. And in 1938, ten days before I arrived here, I walked out of a bank in Michigan with a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars.”

Illigan’s feet thumped hard against the floor as he came erect in his chair. “You what!”

Will Garlan stared out the window, his face placid. “I studied the mistakes all the other ones make. They go to foreign places where they stand out like a sore thumb. Or they get to spending too much. Or they have to talk to somebody about it. One thing I decided. You have to have a new identity all ready and waiting. I came down alone in 1937 and got that identity sort of started down here, so it was ready and waiting when I came down. My name isn’t Will Garlan, naturally. But I’ve used it so long it feels like it was. The name I started with feels strange in my mind now. J. Allan Welch. The J was for Jerome. People called me Al. They looked for J. Allan Welch for a long time. Maybe they’re still looking. Probably the bonding company still is, anyhow. I guess it was a shock to them.”

“Do you know what the hell you’re saying, man?”

“I was the Assistant Cashier. There was one little flaw in the way the worn-out money was handled, when we sacked it up to send it back to the Federal Reserve Bank for credit. Everybody checked everybody else, but there was one little flaw, and after I found it, I got them used to seeing me with a big box.

“I used to order stuff to be sent express and pick it up on my lunch hour so I’d have a box around, wrapped in brown paper, tied with cord. Then I made a box. It looked solid and tied, but you could pull one end open — it was on a spring. When it was shut, the cord matched. I had the cord glued on. I cut newspaper into stacks the size of wrapped money and I had it in that box. The other tricky part was the seal on the heavy canvas sack. I figured a way to fix the sack so it would look sealed when it wasn’t.

“I had a dummy sack in my cellar at home and I practised until I got the time way down. I got it down to where it took me just eighteen seconds to open the sack, exchange the wrapped money, and reseal the sack the right way.

“I waited until we had the right kind of accumulation — three big sacks for pickup, with one stuffed with nothing but wrapped bundles of twenties and fifties. I rigged the seal on that one. I made the exchange one Friday morning, and all that day I worked with that parcel of money closely. I had no cause to worry. The sack was the right shape and heft and I’d sealed it right, and nobody would find out anything until it got to the Federal Reserve Bank and they started to check the amount and denominations against the outside tag and the inside packing slip.

“By then I had a car nobody knew about, registered in Indiana in the name of Will Garlan. I had a wallet full of identification for Will Garlan. I had clothes and everything in that car. When I left work, I didn’t even go home. I went right to that car and headed south. I spent all that first night in a tourist cabin going over that money, weeding out everything too badly tom and weeding out gold certificates. I burned all that in a ravine the next day. I had a hundred and twenty-seven thousand left.

“Soon as I settled here, Wade, I got me a post-office box and I sent for a lot of cheap stuff so I’d get on so many mailing lists nobody would notice I wasn’t getting any personal mail. Or any money. That’s the thing about me nobody has ever seemed to notice much. No investments, Wade. No bank accounts. No social security. I deal in cash. I buy things on time and pay the installments in cash. For twenty-four years, Wade, I’ve been living directly off the money I carried out of that bank in that box.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“When I built that house, I built me a good place.”

“How much do you have left?”

“I don’t know exactly. I sealed it into fruit jars to keep the dampness and the bugs from getting into it. There’s ten jars left and I’d say there’s somewhere between five and six thousand in a jar. I’ve lived small, Wade. It keeps people from wondering.”

“Does Sue know about this?”

“What do you think?”

“I’d say she doesn’t.”

“You’re right. That’s the one thing I’ve never let her know anything about. For years she’s been at me to find out where the money comes from. She thinks it comes in the mail. I take it out when she’s away from the house. Then I make her think I’ve brought it back from town when I make my next trip. If she ever knew she was living right on top of money like that, she’d find it and start spending like a fool. I wouldn’t be able to stop her.”

Slowly, wonderingly Illigan shook his head. He made a clucking sound in the silence. “Be damned,” he said softly. “Why didn’t you just wait one day when she was away from the house and take it all and go some place else?”

“I guess a man can run just one time. I’m settled here. This is my home. I’ve got no heart for running again, Sheriff.”

“Don’t you know what I have to do to you?”

“I guess you have to tell those people up there to come and get me. There must be some kind of reward in it for you. And it will surprise them to recover so much of it after so long. I guess I’ll go to prison, Wade. And I’d rather go for that than for killing Sue. Or hurting her. Anyhow, none of it has ever been like I thought it would be. There’s nothing left. I guess I wouldn’t have too bad a time in prison. Maybe they’d give me something to do and leave me alone.”

“I don’t know what the hell to say, Will. I just honestly don’t.”

“There isn’t anything to say. I suppose you’ll want to come out with me and get the money. I could pack a bag and you could bring me back here. I wouldn’t want to stay there, Wade. Not another minute.” He paused. “I guess I could be charged with bigamy too. But Lillian is dead now. I read it in one of those crime magazines a couple of years ago, about unsolved cases. They wrote about the Welch case, and they said she died in 1954.”

“I don’t think they’ll be concerned about bigamy.”

“I guess I’ll have to talk to a lawyer. Seeing I’m not legally married to Sue, except maybe common law, I’d like to make sure she gets the house free and clear.”

“Were there any children by your... other marriage?”

“A boy. He was killed in 1935. On his bike. Then there wasn’t any reason for staying.”

Illigan shook his head again. “I guess we better go out and get that money, Will. Why do you want Sue to get the house?”

Garlan sighed and shrugged. “I was a fool marrying a young girl because I thought that’s what I wanted. So it hasn’t been all her fault. I didn’t love her, Wade. I just wanted her.”

The two men stood up. Illigan came around his desk and said, “Why’d you do it in the first place? Why’d you take all that money?”

Garlan tried to smile. It was a strange and touching grimace. “I had to get away from Lillian. She was... a cruel, vicious, domineering bitch. I had to get away from her. She was making my life a living hell. I almost didn’t care whether they caught me or not. Isn’t that something?” He tried to laugh. “The one thing I always wanted was a sweet loving woman. So after I get away from Lillian, I tie myself to the same...”

“What’s the matter?”

“I better sit down a minute, Wade. Just for a minute. This has taken a lot out of me.”

“Sure. You rest a little, Will.”

Garlan flexed his left arm. “I guess I strained my arm a little, clipping my pepper hedge.”

“When you feel up to it, we’ll go on out there.”

“I got so mad at her this morning, it made me feel weak and sick. That’s when I finally decided to come on in.”

“Can I get you a glass of water?”

“That would be...”

He stopped abruptly. He tilted his head as though listening to some sound outside the office. His mouth opened. The color drained out of his face.

When the full shock of the coronary occlusion struck him, he made a mild whimpering noise, dug his fingers into his thick chest, leaned forward, and toppled onto the floor, unconscious, his face muddy-gray and shiny with sweat.

He died as they were easing him onto the stretcher.

Though Will Garlan had been buried only a week ago, Wade Illigan saw the signs of neglect as he parked the county car in the driveway. He got out and looked at the pepper hedge, half neat and half ragged.

As he walked slowly toward the house, Sue Garlan came out onto the small front porch, her thin arms folded, and said, “What the hell do you want, Wade?”

He put his foot on the bottom step and looked up at her and pushed his hat back. “Wanted to see how you’re coming, Sue.”

“Since when is that any business of yours?”

“Will was one of my best friends. You know that.”

“He didn’t give a damn who he had for a friend, did he?”

“He had a few. How many you got?”

“One thing I’ve been fixing to ask you, Wade. What was he doing in your office that morning he keeled over?”

“Just stopped by. We were going snook fishing one night soon.”

“The way he went out of here, he didn’t act like he was going off to make no fishing date. He tried to run me over with the car. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, he did. That old man was getting meaner every day he lived. Meaner and dumber.”

“He took pretty good care of you, Sue.”

“Want I should break down and cry about it right here and now?”

“Not likely.”

“It sure isn’t. I give him the best years, didn’t I?”

“You’re a sweet generous woman, Sue.”

“I get along.”

“I wonder how you’re going to keep on getting along.”

“My, my! I’m touched you should fret about me, Sheriff. Will, he had his income coming in the mail right along. I got the key to the post-office box now, and I expect money will keep on coming in. There was no insurance, and I owe for burying him, so it better be coming in.”

“Suppose it don’t?”

“Then I’ll sell this place off and go live with my sister. It’s free and clear and it’ll bring a good price, Wade. So don’t worry about me a bit. Sam Redlock, owns the trailer park, he’s ready to buy it in a minute. And he’s got first call. What are you doing coming here anyhow, Illigan?”

“First call, eh?”

“That’s right. For a good price.”

“Hear you’ve been going to Mike’s Tavern about every night.”

“What’s that to you! I’m a new widow. I got to keep my spirits up. You want I should crawl in the graveyard with him?”

“Quite a fuss going on at Mike’s last night.”

“Took you long enough to get around to why you come out here.”

“Mary Ham swore out a warrant, Sue. They took six stitches in her mouth.”

“She started it, butting in like that on me an’ a gentleman friend!”

“No good you yelling. She said who was there. They say it happened like she said. So you get what you need and you come on in with me right now.”

She gave him a startled look and bolted into the house. By the time he’d cornered her in the kitchen, trapped her wrists and backhanded her across the face to take the fight out of her, he was winded and she had furrowed the side of his throat with her nails.

He waited while she changed her clothes, packed an overnight bag, and locked the house. She was docile, but her mouth was hard, her eyes bright with compressed fury.

He took her in and booked her, and had her put in the cage in the female wing of the Palm County jail. He let the matron know Sue Garlan had resisted arrest, had been arrested before, long ago, and a little overnight stay wouldn’t do her any harm at all.

At dusk he drove out to the Garlan house. The fifth key he tried worked. He was inside the house a little over two hours. From there he drove home. His daughter, Ann, who kept house for him, was mildly annoyed at him for being so late. She had kept his supper warm. She’d eaten with her two children and both kids had gone back to school for some kind of rehearsal. After Ann served him, she walked up the street to visit a friend who had just come back from the hospital with a new baby.

Sheriff Wade Illigan ate, then rinsed his dishes and made two trips from his car to his bedroom. He made certain strategic rearrangements of the varied items in the back of his closet. He made a phone call, left a note for Ann, and drove out to the home of County Commissioner Elmo Bliss on Lemon Ridge Road.

He sat with Elmo in his study, and after some leisurely small-talk, Illigan came to the point. “I changed my mind about what you asked me, Elmo. I don’t want to run for Sheriff again.”

Elmo Bliss looked startled. “Why, there wouldn’t hardly be any contest at all, Wade. It would be yours for the asking. You know that.”

“I know. And I’m grateful and all that, but... I guess I’m just losing my heart for the law business.”

“But don’t you have Ann and those grandkids to support?”

“Bud Walther has been after me the last couple of years to go in with him on that marina business. I thought I just might do that when my term runs out.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t make enough, doing that.”

“I got a feeling I’ll get along well enough.”

Elmo sighed. “Well, I guess it’s your choice to make. But it won’t be as secure as the sheriff business.”

“Maybe I haven’t got the right attitude to be a law man, Elmo.”

“You been a good one.”

“I decided I’d better tell you soon as I had my mind made up.”

“Thanks. We’ll have to find somebody. Another drink?”

“No, I got to be getting on back home.”

“Say, I hear you locked Sue Garlan up this afternoon.”

“She didn’t take to the idea.”

“Didn’t take her long to get into trouble again, did it?”

“Not long.”

“Isn’t she some kind of kin to you, Wade?”

“Not blood kin. It was her half brother, Tod Annison, was married to my Ann. Run off with her.”

“Sure. I remember now. I remember she came back with the kids, and later on something happened to him.”

“They’re good kids,” Wade said. “They’re bright and they’re good and they deserve the best anybody can give them.”

“What was it happened to that Annison?”

Wade stood up. “About what you’d expect. A year after he deserted my daughter, he was shot dead while trying to rob a bank up in Waycross, Georgia. But she had her divorce by then.”

Elmo walked him to the door. He shook his head musingly. “Funny the way things work out, isn’t it? Today you have to jail the half sister of the father of your grandkids.” He clapped Wade on the shoulder. “Anything you need, fella, you call on Elmo, hear?”

“Thanks,” the Sheriff said. “I think I’ll get along pretty good. I got a feeling I’ll get along all right from here on.”