Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Richard Laymon Paying Joe Back

Folks say everything changes, but that’s not so. I’ve lived in Windville all my life, and Joe’s Bar & Grill looks just the same to me as always.

It has the same heavy steel grill, the same counter, the same swivel stools. Those long tables sticking out of the walls aren’t much different than they were thirty years back, when Joe opened up — just older and more beaten up. The booth cushions got new upholstery seven years back, but Joe had them fixed up in the same red vinyl stuff as before, so you can’t hardly tell the difference.

Only one thing has changed about Joe’s place. That’s the people. Some of the old-timers keep dropping by, regular as clockwork. But time has changed them considerably. Lester Keyhoe, for instance, fell to pieces after his wife kicked over. And old Gimpy Sedge lost his conductor job, so he just watches the train pull in and leave without him, then comes by here to tie one on with Lester.

Joe’s gone, too. Not gone, just retired. I’ve kept the place going for the past three years, since I turned twenty-one. When Joe isn’t shooting deer in the mountains, he comes in for coffee and a cinnamon bun every morning. He likes to keep an eye on things.

I sure wish he’d been after deer the morning Elsie Thompson blew in.

The place was empty except for me and Lester Keyhoe, who was sitting down the bar where he always does, getting a start on the day’s drinking.

I was toweling down the counter when the car pulled up. I could see it plain through the window. It was an old Ford that looked like somebody’d driven it a dozen times back and forth through Hell. It sputtered and whinnied for a minute after the ignition key was turned off.

I stopped toweling and just stared. The old gal who jumped out of the Ford was a real sight — short and round, dressed in khakis, with gray hair cut like Buster Brown, and wearing big wire-rimmed glasses. She chewed on some gum like she wanted to kill it. A floppy wicker handbag hung from her arm. I said, “Get a load of this,” to Lester, but he didn’t even look up.

The screen door opened and she stumped towards the counter in her dusty boots. She hopped onto the stool in front of me. Her jaw went up and down a few times. One time when it was open, the word “coffee” came out.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and turned away to get it.

“Does this establishment belong to Joseph James Lowry from Chicago?” she asked.

“Sure does,” I said, looking at her.

Behind the glasses her round eyes opened and shut in time with her chewing mouth. She gave me a huge grin. “That’s mighty good news, young man. I’ve been driving through every one-horse town west of Chicago looking for this place, looking for Joe Lowry and his damned tavern. There’s a place called Joe’s in every single one of them. But I knew I’d find Joe Lowry’s place sooner or later. Know why? Because I’ve got will power, that’s why. When do you expect him in?”

“Well... what did you want to see him about?”

“He is coming in?”

I nodded.

“Good. I expected as much. I’m only surprised not to find him behind the counter.”

“You know him, huh?”

“Oh, yes. My, yes.” Her eyes turned sad for a second. “We used to know each other very well, back in Chicago.”

“How about if I give him a ring, tell him you’re here?”

“That won’t be necessary.” Snapping her gum and grinning, she opened the handbag on her lap and pulled out a revolver. Not a peashooter, either — one of those long-barreled .38’s. “I’ll surprise him,” she said. Her stubby little thumb pulled back the hammer and she aimed the thing at me. “We’ll surprise him together.”

I didn’t feel much like talking, but I managed to nod my head.

“What time will Joe be in?” she asked.

“Pretty soon.” I took a deep breath and asked, “You aren’t planning to shoot him, are you?”

She pretended like she didn’t hear me, and asked, “How soon?”

“Well...” Far away, the 10:05 from Parkerville let loose its whistle. “Well, pretty soon, I guess.”

“I’ll wait for him. Who’s that slob over there?”

“That’s Lester.”

“Lester!” she called.

He turned his head and looked at her. She waved the gun at him, grinning and chewing, but his face didn’t change. It looked the same as always, long and droopy like a bloodhound s, but more gloomy.

“Lester,” she said, “you just stay right on that stool. If you get up for any reason, I’ll shoot you dead.”

His head nodded, then turned frontwards again and tipped down at his half-empty glass.

“What’s your name?” she asked me.

“Wes.”

“Wes, keep Lester’s glass full. And don’t do anything to make me shoot you. If some more customers come in, just serve them like everything is normal. This revolver has six loads, and I can take down a man with each. I don’t want to. I only want Joe Lowry. But if you drive me to it, I’ll make this place wall-to-wall corpses. Understand?”

“Sure, I understand.” I filled Lester’s glass, then came back to the woman. “Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away.”

“Why do you want to kill Joe?”

She stopped chewing and squinted at me. “He ruined my life. That’s enough reason to kill a man, I think. Don’t you?”

“Nothing’s a good enough reason to kill Joe.”

“Think so?”

“Whal’d he do to you?”

“He ran off with Martha Dipsworth.”

“Martha? That’s his wife — was.”

“Dead?”

I nodded yes.

“Good.” Her jaw chomped, and she beamed. “That makes me glad. Joe made a mistake, not marrying me — I’m still alive and kicking. We’d be happily married to this day if he’d had the sense to stick with me. But he never did have much sense. Do you know what his great ambition was? To go out west and open up a tavern. Martha thought that was a glorious idea. I said, ‘Well, you marry him, then. Go out west and waste your lives in the boondocks. If Joe’s such a romantic fool as to throw his life away like that, I don’t want him. There’re plenty of fish in the sea.’ That’s what I said. More than thirty years ago.”

“If you said that—” I stopped. You don’t catch me arguing with an armed woman.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She shifted her chewing gum over to one corner of her mouth and drank some coffee. “What were you going to say?”

“Just... well, if you said they could get married, it doesn’t seem very fair of you to blame them.”

She put down the cup and glanced over at Lester. He still sat there, but he was staring at the gun. “When I said that about the sea being full of fish, I figured it’d only be a matter of time before I’d land a good one. Well, it didn’t work out that way.”

She chewed a few times, gazing up at me with a funny distance in her eyes as if she was looking back at all the years. “I kept on waiting. I was just sure the right man was around the next corner — around the next year. It finally dawned on me, Wes, that there wasn’t ever going to be another man. Joe was it, and I’d lost him. That’s when I decided to gun him down.”

“That’s—”

“What?”

“Crazy.”

“It’s justice.”

“Maybe the two of you could get together. He’s unattached since Martha died. Maybe—”

“Nope. Too late for that. Too late for babies, too late for—”

All at once Lester flung himself away from the bar and made a foolish run for the door. The old gal swiveled on her stool, tracked him for a split second, then squeezed off a shot. The bullet took off Lester’s earlobe. With a yelp he swung around and ran back to his stool, cupping a hand over what was left of his ear.

“You’d better pray nobody heard that shot,” she said to both of us.

I figured nobody would. We were at the tail end of town, so the closest building was a gas station half a block away. The cars passing by on the highway kicked up plenty of noise. And around here, with all the hunting that goes on, nobody pays much attention to a single gunshot unless it’s right under his nose.

But I was nervous, anyway. For five minutes we all waited without saying a word. The only sound was her gum snapping.

She finally grinned and squinted as if she’d just won a raffle. “We’re in luck.”

“Joe’s not,” I said. “Neither’s Lester.”

Lester said nothing. He was pinching his notched ear with one hand and draining his glass with the other.

“They shouldn’t have run,” the woman said. “That was their mistake — they ran. You aren’t going to run, are you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Because if you do I’ll shoot you for sure. I’ll shoot anyone today. Anyone. This is my day, Wes — the day Elsie Thompson pays Joe back.”

“I won’t run, ma’am. But I won’t let you shoot Joe. I’ll stop you one way or another.” I went over to fill Lester’s glass.

“You can’t stop me. No one can stop me. Nothing can. Do you know why? Because I’ve got will power, that’s why.”

Grinning mysteriously, she chomped three times on her gum and said, “Today I’m going to die. That gives me all the power in the world. Understand? As soon as I gun down Joe, I’ll drive out of this burg. I’ll get that old Ford up to seventy, eighty, then I’ll pick out the biggest tree—”

I made a sick laugh, and came back to her.

“Think I’m fooling?” she said.

“No, ma’am. It’s just kind of funny, you talking like that about crashing into a tree. Not funny ha-ha, funny weird. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t know about Joe. He crashed into a tree — an aspen, just off Route 5. That was about three years back. Martha was with him. She got killed, of course. Joe was in real bad shape, and Doc Mills didn’t give him much chance. But he pulled through. His face got so broken up he doesn’t look quite right, and he lost the use of an eye. His left eye, not his aiming eye. He wears a patch over it, you know. And sometimes when he gets feeling high, he flaps it up and gives us all a peek underneath.”

“You can stop that.”

“He lost a leg, too.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. It’s just that... well, everyone that crashes into a tree doesn’t die.”

“I will.”

“You can’t be sure. Maybe you’ll just end up like Joe, hobbling around half blind on a fake leg, with your face so scarred up that your best friends won’t recognize you.”

“Shut up, Wes.”

She stuck the pistol into my face, so I slowed down and said quietly, “I just mean, if you want to make sure you die, there’s a concrete bridge abutment about a mile up the road.”

“Warm up my coffee and keep your mouth shut.”

I turned around to pick up the pot. That’s when I heard the footsteps outside. Boots against the wood planks out front, coming closer. I faced Elsie. She grinned at me. Her jaw worked faster on the gum. Her eyes squinted behind her glasses as the unsteady clumping got louder.

Through the window I saw his mussy gray hair, his scarred face with the patch on his left eye. He saw me looking, smiled, and waved.

I glanced at Lester, who was holding a paper napkin to his ear and the glass to his mouth.

Elsie pushed the pistol close to my chest. “Don’t move,” she whispered.

The screen door swung open.

Elsie spun her stool.

“Duck, Joe!” I cried out.

He didn’t duck. He just stood there looking perplexed as Elsie leaped off the stool, crouched, and fired. The first two bullets smacked him square in the chest. The next hit his throat. Then one tore into his shoulder, turning him around so the last shot took him in the small of the back.

All this happened in a couple of seconds as I dived at Elsie. I was in mid-air when she wheeled on me and smashed me in the face with the barrel. I went down.

While I was trying to get up, she jumped over the body and ran out. I reached the door in time to see her car whip backwards. It hit the road with screeching brakes, then laid rubber and was gone from sight.

I went back inside.

Lester was still sitting at the bar. His stool was turned around, and he was staring at the body. I sat down at one of the booths, lit a cigarette, and kept Lester company staring.

We spent a long time like that. After a while I heard the sheriff’s siren. Then an ambulance’s. The cars screamed by and faded up the road in the direction of the bridge abutment.

“My God!” The big man looked at me, then at Lester, and knelt down over the body. He turned it over. “Gimpy,” he muttered. “Poor old Gimpy.” He patted the dead conductor on the back, and stood up. His eyes questioned me.

I shook my head. “Some crazy woman,” I muttered. “She came in here dead set to kill you, Dad.”