One Good Deed

Chapter 43

Only Shaw wasn’t there and apparently no one had seen the man at all that day.

Archer ran into Deputy Bart Coleman in the hallway of the station and asked him about the detective.

Bart said, “Last I saw of him was yesterday.” He suddenly put his hand on the butt of his revolver. “Hey, Archer, didn’t you get arrested and charged with murdering Mr. Tuttle?”

“I did.”

“What are you doing out then?”

“Made bail. You can check. Not like I escaped, right? And if I had, I sure as hell wouldn’t have come back to the police station.”

Bart reluctantly removed his hand from his gun. “No, I guess not.”

“Look, if you see Shaw, can you tell him to come see me over at the Derby? It’s important.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Archer sat down on the bed in his hotel room and contemplated things. He’d been rushing around so much, he hadn’t had time to put together all that he had recently learned. He had wanted to tell Shaw and see the man write it all down in his notebook and maybe help him make sense of it. But that was not to be right now, apparently, so Archer instead went over it in his head.

It seemed likely that Jackie and Ernestine had some sort of understanding, and a plan. They had visited Marjorie Pittleman’s home during the storm. That would account for the mud on the car and its tires. He didn’t know if they had gone into the house or not, but Marjorie had said she hadn’t seen Jackie since the time he had been there with her. And from what Marjorie had told him, it was clear that Jackie had not given her the money to repay her father’s debt.

One thing Archer had concluded was that Jackie had cleared out her father’s safe and loaded it into the large trunk of the Nash. And she had done so in the time between Archer’s seeing all the wealth in there, and Jackie and Shaw going out to Tuttle’s home. But now with Manuel telling him what he had, Archer could narrow that time frame down some.

She had arranged to meet her father at her house, probably using that ruse to make sure he wouldn’t be home to stop her and Ernestine from ransacking the man’s safe. But something had gone terribly wrong on that score because Tuttle had not been at Jackie’s; he’d been at his house. But for the life of him, Archer couldn’t fathom why the man hadn’t kept the meeting with his daughter.

Jackie’s emptying the safe and piling it into the Nash’s trunk, at some point, was the only way the imprint of the gold bars and the transfer of the gold dust could have occurred. Then, Jackie and Ernestine had driven over to Marjorie’s that same night. Why had they done that? To hide the loot? But why there? And what was even more confusing, why bother taking the things from the safe in the first place? As her father’s only heir, they would have come to Jackie anyway after his death. And all that oil money on top of it. It just didn’t make any sense.

And in addition to the emptied safe, someone had taken Lucas Tuttle’s life. If Jackie had been the one to steal the items from the safe, she had to have been there that night. So had Jackie killed her father? If so, why?

His thoughts next turned to that last night with Jackie at Ernestine’s house. She had been the one to bring the conversation around to the repayment of the debt, something Archer had admitted to her that he had forgotten about. And she had been the one to suggest the meeting with her father.

She used me. Set me up like the sucker I am.

He rose and was looking out the window when an idea occurred to him. At the same moment, he saw the dull, mustard-colored Hudson Hornet with the brown stripe and chrome side light parked at the curb. He put on his hat, pocketed his knife and flashlight, and rushed out.

He reached the street and ran over to the car, peering in the open window.

Bart Coleman, doughnut in hand, looked back at him, while Deputy Jeb was drinking his coffee and devouring a large, messy pastry.

“What do you want, Archer?” said Bart sharply. “I ain’t seen Shaw to tell him you want to talk to him.”

“That’s why I’m here. He left me a note at the hotel and said to meet him out at Tuttle’s place. Can you give me a ride?”

“We’re working here, Archer,” said an irritated Bart as he wiped a bit of doughnut powder off his mouth. “Hell, can’t you see that?”

“Yeah, I can. Look, um.” He pulled out a five-dollar bill. “How about this for gas? And maybe some more pastries?” he tacked on, eyeing Jeb eating away.

Bart looked at the fiver for a moment before snatching it. “All right, get in.”

Archer climbed into the back seat and Bart pulled away from the curb. He drove fast, and in just under an hour they were at Tuttle’s.

“Don’t see Shaw’s car here,” noted Bart. “He drives a big Buick. Can’t miss it.”

“Yeah, I know. He might not have got here yet. He was coming from somewhere else, he said in the note. I’ll ride back into town with him.”

“Suit yourself.”

Archer climbed out and the squad car drove off fast, trailing vortices of fresh dust in its wake. The recent rains had done nothing apparently to diminish that physical element of life around here.

Archer turned and faced the Tuttle house, which held no signs of life or light.

He walked around the place and noted that there was no activity in the adjacent fields. This was not surprising. It was getting on to supper time now as the sun faded into the horizon. Maybe with the man dead, all operations on the farm had ceased.

A few minutes later, in the outbuilding, Archer shone his light on the odd-looking piece of farm equipment. It was the corn picker he’d seen before.

Maybe this was the thing that Isabel had fallen to her death on. It had four sharp-edged, cone-shaped pods. They were all facing downward. The woman couldn’t have been impaled on one of these things if they’d been pointed like that. From his time in the military he was familiar with lots of different pieces of machinery, and Archer quickly figured out how the thing worked. He gripped a handle and started to turn it. It was damn tough going and took a lot of his strength. But one of the cones started lifting upward. He stopped, panting slightly, when the cone was finally pointing straight up.

So that was how the woman had died.

He next ventured to the barn and climbed the ladder to the top landing. He went over to the hay bale doors and opened them. He eyed the winch used to haul bales up. Then he looked down and imagined the corn picker with the upturned cone on the ground directly underneath. And then he visualized Isabel Tuttle falling to her death, impaled on the damn thing.

And then Jackie finding her like that.

He thought about what Lucas Tuttle had told him about his daughter. And his dead wife. That they were both fiercely independent. Hot-headed. That he was scared of them. That mother and daughter had clashed repeatedly. And, that Isabel Tuttle’s death might not have been an accident.

Well, I don’t think it was an accident, either.

He suddenly had the awful vision of the woman falling to her death and Jackie being behind where her mother had stood, her arms stretched out after pushing Isabel to her death.

He felt a bit sick at that. Maybe more than a bit. But then something occurred to Archer. He was putting two and two together, like Shaw had taught him to do. But he needed to go further on that than he just had. He turned his head and looked in the direction of the outbuilding he’d just been in. After a few moments of thought, Archer smiled. Perhaps in relief. But it was a genuine feeling, that was for sure.

He returned to the home’s front door and took out his knife, only this time it failed its mission. Undeterred, he moved over to a window, forced the latch back, and climbed through.

He walked down the hall and saw an open door.

He edged inside and shone his Ray-O-Vac around.

It was set up as a small office. Dead center on the desk was a typewriter. And next to that was a pair of earphones that were plugged into a little machine.

He assumed this had to be Desiree Lankford’s office, where she did her typing.

He checked the wastebasket and then looked through the drawers. There were files and copies of correspondence and a small notebook. He looked inside it.

Under the T’s was Jackie Tuttle’s name and her address on Eldorado and her phone number. That was interesting.

There was a little roll of tape next to the machine Desiree used to listen to Tuttle’s dictation. He put it in the machine, figured out how it worked, and turned it on, listening to what was on the tape by slipping on the earphones.

Though he should have been expecting it, he nearly jumped when Lucas Tuttle’s voice came on.

“To Sam Malloy, Attorney-at-Law. Dear Sam, Now that I’ve changed my will, disinheriting my traitorous and worthless daughter, and with all this new money coming in, I want to make a few more changes to everything. I would like you to come by next Friday to discuss them. Let me know a good time for you. Sincerely, Lucas Tuttle.” There was a pause and the man next dictated a few other short business letters to various people.

The recording left off at that point and Archer tipped his hat back. So the old man had cut out his daughter. That explained a lot, but not in a good way for Jackie.

He pocketed the tape, left the room, moved down the hall to Tuttle’s office, and opened the door.

Inside he once more shone his Ray-O-Vac light around.

There was some blood on the desktop, from where Tuttle had been shot. He next examined the console where the revolvers still lay side by side.

Archer walked over to the safe and swung open the door. It was indeed empty. He noted twin holes drilled into the door. The locksmith’s doing, he figured. He next shone his light on some framed pictures lined up on the mantel. He had seen them on his prior visit here but couldn’t make out who was in them. There wasn’t a single picture of Isabel or Jackie.

Archer noted the large plant in a vase on a stand next to the fireplace. He had seen it before but paid it no attention. He poked around it and then shone his light behind the broad leaves of the plant. The light beam reflected off the glass. He pulled out the object that had been placed right behind the vase. It was a framed photo. Why would Tuttle have hidden this back there? When Archer looked at the photo, he thought he had his answer.

There were two men in the photo.

One was Lucas Tuttle. The other was Malcolm Draper.

What in the hell?

He slid the frame into his jacket pocket, stepped back, and looked over at the desk. There was nothing of particular importance on it except for the bloodstains. There were some on the floor, too, where the man had fallen. Archer looked through the drawers and wastebasket and came up empty. He figured Shaw had been all over this room anyway. But maybe he had missed something else besides the photo of the two men. Archer pulled out the drawers again and checked not in the drawers, but under them.

He found nothing.

He perched on the desk and his eyes alighted on the Remington over-under leaning against the fireplace stone. He picked it up, broke the breech, and saw that there were no shells inside. Then he turned it around and shone his light down the one barrel where he had previously seen something strange. There was definitely an object hidden in there.

He used a letter opener on the desk to work the item from the barrel. It was a curled-up piece of onionskin, a carbon copy of a typed letter. He uncurled it and started reading. It was from Tuttle and was addressed to Poca City’s district attorney, a Mr. Herbert Brooks. As he read down the letter, Archer’s insides turned to putty.

That son of a bitch.

He put the letter in his pocket. Well, at least the damn shotgun had been good for something.

He glanced at the device on the desk.

A Dictaphone, Tuttle had called it. The little receiver he had been holding when Archer had walked in here previously was lying on the desk, its squiggly cord attached to the machine.

As Archer kept staring at the thing, the image of Shaw’s recording their talk at the police station popped into his head. He shone his light on the machine and, as he had with Desiree’s machine, he quickly figured out the functions of the buttons.

He hit one and heard a whirring sound coming from within the innards of the Dictaphone as the tape rewound fully. He also saw that the thing you spoke into had a little button that you held down, presumably when you were speaking into it. There was also a little catch that you could engage. This kept the speaking button down without having to use your thumb the whole time. Archer saw that this catch had indeed been set, keeping the button down.

When the tape stopped rewinding, he pressed another button. The whirring sound took up once more.

He flinched, as the dead man’s voice suddenly filled the room.

He was dictating more letters to various people, methodically, without pause. Then there was a long gap. Then he heard the man say in connection with a letter to another gent, “Desiree, depending on how my meeting with Jackie goes tonight, we may have to make arrangements for her to move back in here. I will discuss those details when I return from my business trip next week.” Tuttle went on with some more instructions for the woman, and then the tape fell silent. Archer turned the machine off.

It appeared that Tuttle had every intention of visiting his daughter that night. So what had happened? The thoughts were catapulting through his head like ack-ack fired at enemy planes. Because on the one hand it seemed that Tuttle was expecting his daughter to move back in. But then there was the letter to Herbert Brooks: What he had communicated in there did not mesh with having his daughter back home. But maybe it did somehow to Lucas Tuttle.

Desiree had typed up a letter from Tuttle where he had disinherited his daughter. He had a feeling that Desiree had let Jackie know about this. That would explain why Jackie would come here and clean out the safe. Otherwise, she would get nothing.

Next to the desk, he spied a small wooden box with a handle that the Dictaphone was evidently meant to be stored in. With a sudden thought, he wound up the machine’s electrical cord and slipped it into the box. He wanted to know what Shaw would make of all this.

Overcome with all that he’d just learned, he eyed the little bar set up against the wall, went over, and poured himself a stiff one. He drank it down, planted his palms on the wood of the bar, hung his head down, and took three long breaths.

You survived the war, you can damn well survive this, Archer.

I hope.