The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

(Francis) Merle Constiner (1902–1979) was born in Ohio and graduated from Vanderbilt University, then returned to Ohio, where he lived for the rest of his life. He wrote prolifically for the detective pulps, creating several series characters that were somewhat unusual for their venues because they were less hard-boiled than humorous.

Perhaps his best-known series features Wardlow Rock, known as “the Dean,” an eccentric genius in the mold of Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. His “Watson” or “Archie Goodwin” is Benton (Ben) Matthews, who serves as both an assistant as well as the chronicler of the tales. There is even a Mrs. Hudson — like landlady, Mrs. Duffy, who runs the rooming house in which the detectives live. Not surprisingly, just as Inspector Lestrade calls on Holmes for help and Inspector Cramer visits Wolfe, Lieutenant Mallory consults the Dean when a case seems too complex or outré to be solved by the police department. There were nineteen stories published in Dime Detective between 1940 and 1945, collected in book form by editor Robert Weinberg in The Compleat Adventures of the Dean (2004). For Black Mask, he wrote a series of eleven humorous tales about Luther McGavock, a private detective who works for Atherton Browne, who runs a Memphis-based agency; most have rural settings. Constiner’s only mystery novel was Hearse of a Different Color (1952), though he had numerous Western novels and pulp stories published.

“Let the Dead Alone,” the first McGavock tale, was published in the July 1942 issue.

“I don’t know a snowshoe rabbit from a horned owl,” Luther McGavock admitted when asked if he was a hunting man. What he neglected to add was that he knew two-footed killers very well indeed — and had come to murder-ridden Bartonville for the express purpose of potting one on the wing or any other way that seemed handy, using the help of native beaters, if necessary.

Chapter One The Roofing Nail

The first thing McGavock noticed when he entered the chief’s office was that the old man was wearing a clean collar. “I see you’ve freshened up your neckwear,” McGavock said. “Are you anticipating early burial?”

The old man glared at him with salty, inflamed eyes. “I’ve got on my traveling clothes. For the first time in twenty years I’m going to leave my desk and go out on a case. This thing is too important to me to sublet to any slipshod hired help. I’m handling it myself and I’m taking you along with me. We’re leaving immediately. You can buy a toothbrush at a drugstore.”

McGavock was small, sinewy, tough. His coarse black hair was cut in a short pompadour and there was a dusting of tweedy gray at his temples. He had a selfish, taunting quality about him that aroused instant animal antagonism in total strangers. He’d worked for every major agency in the country. A genius at getting results, he was a hard man to take.

McGavock flushed. “I work alone and you know it. I came here to Memphis and you gave me a berth. You like what I bring in but you don’t want to know about my methods. I work on a roving license, one that you cooked up yourself, a contract that you can repudiate if things get too hot. What is this big-time job?”

The chief corrected him. “It’s not big-time, it’s just personal. A cousin of mine, a second cousin, had a little trouble with a friend of his — he wouldn’t stay alive. Cousin Malcom lives at a place called Bartonville, a hill-town back by the Tennessee-Mississippi line. He just telephoned me. He’s in some sort of a hole. He says that blood is thicker than water and that he thinks I can handle the affair with greater delicacy than the local law enforcement. It seems to be an emergency. I thought we’d run over—”

McGavock snarled. “No soap! If I take it on, I’ll do it alone.” He rubbed a knuckle thoughtfully behind his ear. “When can I catch a train?”

“Trains don’t stop there, Luther,” the old man said mildly. He produced an envelope. “Here’s a bus ticket. Good luck.”

When the door swung shut behind McGavock, the chief turned to his secretary. A pleased cat-and-canary look came into the old man’s watery eyes. He ripped off the new collar, tossed it in the wastebasket. “Ah!” He breathed happily. “That’s better... You know, Miss Ollinger, I was afraid for a minute that he was going to call my bluff. Luther McGavock is the best man that ever drew my pay. But he’s dangerous, touchy. You have to handle him like a black panther — with an electric prod.”

Bartonville was a little splash of houses and ramshackle business buildings in a nest of wooded, red clay hills. McGavock typed it the instant he stepped from the bus. It was lazy, quiet, intelligent — the sort of Deep South town he liked.

The Main Street sidewalks, raised two feet or so above the street, were hot in the sunlight. Hound dogs lay curled in the piercing heat and grizzled mules with riding saddles waited patiently at hitching posts for their masters. The few stragglers in view were mostly lean mountain men who returned his casual scrutiny with polite curiosity.

The town was evidently a county seat. Across the street was a barren court square with its customary park benches and old stone courthouse. The whole set-up, the rutted road, the mules, the court square, was typical, familiar. McGavock picked up his Gladstone and started down the sidewalk.

The one hotel, the Bradley House — a moldy, clapboard building with fly-specked windows — appeared deserted. McGavock walked into the musty lobby, waited a moment for his eyes to adjust themselves to the half-gloom.

A spiderish man in a Roman stripe silk shirt with pink rosetted sleeve garters put down a tin cup at the watercooler and sauntered behind a battered desk. He threw out a card with the practiced fingers of a tinhorn gambler. McGavock signed it.

“Luther McGavock,” the clerk read. “Memphis. I’m Cal Bradley — Cal for Calhoun, suh, not Calvin. I own this hotel.” He waited for enthusiastic congratulations, none were forthcoming. “What, may I ask, brings you to this garden spot?”

McGavock said: “I’m representing Boggs.”

The man in the striped shirt blinked. “Boggs? You’ve got me there. What are boggs?”

“Boggs,” McGavock announced scathingly, “are not things. Boggs is a man, a millionaire. Porthos R. Boggs — the Memphis celery king. He has more dough than he can spend. That’s why he hires me — I help him burn it. They told him that Bartonville is good bird country. I’m here to look things over and buy a few hundred acres of land if I can find something that suits us.”

Bradley asked slyly: “Are you a hunting man, suh?”

“Heck, no!” McGavock jeered. “I don’t know a snowshoe rabbit from a horned owl. But neither does Boggs. Ha.” He pointed to his bag, ordered curtly: “Take this up to the room. I’m going out to catch a little air.”

For some reason or other, McGavock had expected to find his client living in a so-called Georgian showplace, one of those pillared mansions that always reminded him of a movie set. He was pleasantly surprised.

The squat, brick cottage was intimate, homelike. Its double-span cedar shingles were butted with bright green moss and the wind and rain of decades had buffed the old brick to a soft rose. The small, neat lawn was hedged with a spindrift of lilacs. Through a trellis of wisteria, he caught a glimpse of a cool flagstoned backporch.

An almost obliterated nameplate on the gate said: Malcom Jarrell, M.D. McGavock took the turfed path to the door, clanged the lever bell-pull.

The door was opened by one of the queerest human specimens that McGavock had ever seen. A little pigeon-chested man in a seedy herringbone suit. He had a massive, shaggy head. From the bridge of his spectacles projected a short V of wire holding a second, squarish set of lenses: a Bebe binocular of the sort used by dentists and naturalists. He unhooked the contraption from his goatlike ears, frowned.

“I’m Lute McGavock.” The detective introduced himself. “I’m charwoman for the Atherton Browne Detective Agency. I hear you’ve got your lines fouled. I’m here to help you untangle them. You’re Dr. Jarrell?”

The seedy man shook his elephantine head. “There isn’t any Dr. Jarrell. That was my great-grandfather. But I’m the man you seek.” He studied McGavock gravely. “So you’re the person Atherton selected. Come in, sir.”

Then, astoundingly, in direct contradiction to his words, he closed the door behind him and ushered McGavock — not into the house, but around it.

In a vine-hung nook, on the flagstoned backporch, two wire-legged chairs were set by a kitchen table. On the table was a box of cubeb cigarettes, a partially eaten chocolate bar, and a wire cage containing a rat. The rodent was as big as a young pig, scaly-tailed, malevolent. “Sigmodon hispidus, the cotton rat,” Jarrell remarked. “He doesn’t like us, does he? I’m a naturalist, in a small way. I sit by the hour and study him.”

McGavock said nastily: “You’ve got a stronger stomach than I have.”

“I have a strong stomach,” Malcom Jarrel answered quietly. “Or I couldn’t tolerate you. You have an unfortunate personality, sir. There’s something about you that makes me seethe. Something insolent. However, this is no time for character analysis. If Atherton foists you on me, I have to take what he sends. I’m just a poor country cousin and can’t expect his most expensive talent. What about the garden mulch?”

“Says what?”

The big-headed man pointed out to the lawn. The setting sun, long sunk behind the crest of hills, dappled the yard in amber afterglow. Great sphinx moths, dusk feeders, were already shuttling among the delphiniums. McGavock had a feeling of unreality — as though he were a visitor in some eerie, goblin world. Unconsciously his gaze followed the line of Jarrell’s heavy-jointed finger. In the rear of the grassy plot was a grape arbor; beside the grape arbor was a small pile of clean, fresh straw. “The garden mulch,” Jarrell repeated. “It can’t stay where it is. It’s bleaching my lawn.”

McGavock said tartly: “I’m no horticulturist. All the way down from Memphis and you—”

Jarrell smiled sadly. “There’s a dead man under it.”

The story was quickly told. The man was Lester Hodges — a recluse. He lived in a shack at the other end of town. Jarrell had been awakened the night before by a dragging sound outside his window; he’d slipped into a robe, gone out to investigate and had found the body of his old friend.

The naturalist had then covered the corpse with mulch straw and had ensconced himself on the back porch to wait for aid from Memphis. Sixteen hours on the deathwatch — no meals, no visitors. No break except when he’d phoned his cousin.

McGavock got to his feet, wandered out into the yard.

The detective laid aside the straw in fastidious handfuls, uncovered the body bit by bit — like a geologist exposing a rare fossil.

“His head,” Jarrell said. “Look at the back of his head.”

It wasn’t pretty. Hodges was a birdlike man in his seventies, hard-bitten, wiry. A large roofing nail had been driven through his skull — into his brain. The metallic nail head, as large as a nickel, lay flat and firm against the old man’s silvery hair.

“I can’t understand it,” Malcom Jarrell complained. “It’s practically impossible! I can’t drive a nail into a box and do it satisfactorily. Say the slayer crept up on him in his sleep, even then how could he do it? Imagine! Holding the nail in position with one hand and swinging the hammer with the other. Those roofing nails are like big tacks. It isn’t feasible!”

“You’re on the wrong track,” McGavock contradicted him. “I think I know how it was done. A novel and a brutal weapon — but a simple and efficient one, too.”

They hesitated by the gate. “I’ve a batch of important questions to ask you,” McGavock said. “But they’re personal and I’ve got you placed. You’d bat me around with evasions until I wouldn’t know where I was. So — I’ll circulate around town and collect a little lowdown on you — and you’ll have to come in with me. Then maybe we can get someplace. I’ve handled clients like you before. In the meantime, I’m giving you advice and I want you to heed it. Go to the sheriff and tell him the whole yarn. Leave me out, of course, but tell him everything else. It’ll be embarrassing but we’ll have to do it if we want to flush our quarry.”

Jarrell made a pretense at pondering. “Wouldn’t it be a better idea,” he said carefully, “to wait until nightfall and then to take Lester out into the hills and leave him by the road?”

McGavock was withering. “Who do you think it’ll fool? Not the guy that unloaded him in your yard. Just try to dispose of that body and they’ll have hemp around your neck so quick you’ll think your ascot slipped!”

Twilight was blending into night — it was that period that the natives called dusk-dark — when McGavock returned to the main drag. The air was sweltering. Somewhere, beyond the bridge, a revival meeting was getting under way. High-pitched voices lifted their rhythms to the summer sky. Storefronts blazed soft golden light. McGavock ambled through the jocular bustle of dallying citizens — family folk out for an evening stroll before bedtime, high school girls in their sweet-starched ginghams, village boys with pomaded hair and roving eyes. The detective located a hardware store, entered.

A clerk got up from the sidewalk bench in front of the store and followed him inside.

McGavock purchased a ten-cent compass.

The clerk was curious. “Buyin’ a compass! I don’t recollect seeing you in these parts. Are you aimin’ to tramp the hills?”

“Skip it,” McGavock said boorishly. “I’m not a revenuer. I see you have quart whiskey bottles as well as oak casks that can be converted to thump kegs. There’s no copper on display but doubtless you’ve plenty hidden in the back room. Don’t alarm yourself, I’m not in town to bloodhound any of your rural customers.”

The clerk was abashed, befuddled. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr... er—”

“Hodges.” McGavock was expansive. “The name is Lester Hodges. At your service.”

The clerk went bug-eyed. “Lester Hodges! Think of that. Listen, friend, we got a feller right here in this town by that very name.”

McGavock reeled dramatically, grimaced with incredulity.

“Them’s true words,” the clerk insisted defensively. “Lester Hodges. Many a hour he’s sat by that pot-bellied stove and whittled.”

It came out like an appendix under a local anesthetic: where Hodges lived, his annual income — nil — and his likes and dislikes. “Why don’t you look him up?” the clerk urged. “He might be kin.”

“It’s hardly likely,” McGavock said dolefully. “All my kin were killed off in the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac.”

The shanty was in a hollow at the edge of town. It was built flush into a red clay bank. Above it, as a background, the ridge road passed it over a wobbly wooden trestle. A full moon was rising down the valley and the trestle with its crazy-angled supports looked like a gigantic tarantula against the sky. McGavock stood across the path and sized things up.

His calculations told him he had a good ten minutes on the sheriff. Yet a lighted lamp burned in the window of Lester Hodges’ shack.

The detective climbed the rickety stairs to the narrow porch and knocked. There was no answer. He twisted the knob and stepped in. The room was empty.

The furnishings were scant — a dilapidated iron range, a pallet on the floor, a fire-blistered bureau. And that lonesome lamp flickering in the window.

The bureau drawers held the recluse’s food stock: a sack of dried beans, a little cornmeal, a rancid ham hock. McGavock glanced about him angrily — it was a difficult layout to frisk. There was no place to conceal anything.

He found them in the cold ashes of the iron range, and when he found them he didn’t know what to do with them. A few tiny firecrackers and a shank of fishing line, in a tobacco can.

He stared blankly at the tin, thrust it in the pocket of his sack coat.

The lamp bowl was almost full, it had just been lit.

The detective had got himself into a spot and knew it. The little one-room shanty had no back door. He’d realized the lamp was a trap but he’d planned on a back door. Someone out in the night was waiting for him. Someone who had a sense of engineering: the light was placed so that when he left he’d show up like a treed possum.

McGavock made a quick decision. He blew out the lamp, swung open the sagging door and stepped out onto the narrow porch. “O.K., Sheriff,” he shouted. “Come on in. You want to take a look at this!”

A shadowed figure materialized in the blackness of the trestle timbers. There was the liquid glint of moonlight on a blue steel shotgun barrel. McGavock realized he was facing a desperate killer.

The phantom wavered. McGavock thought, He’s trying to grapple with the new break, trying to play it so that he gets the most out of it — he wonders what I’ve discovered.

A husky, heavily disguised voice called back: “Take a look at what?”

McGavock dropped like a plummet, rolled tumbler-fashion down the red clay bank. The shotgun let loose with both barrels. There was a deafening, coughing blast and the shrieking of splintered glass as the shanty window went into shard and dust.

A clump of sumac caught McGavock’s fall. He got to his feet, listened a moment, heard nothing.

The detective made no attempt at quartering his attacker. He walked along a dry, brushy gulch, came out on a hillside and returned to the village through a weedy alley.

He drew up beneath the first streetlight, wiped his knees and elbows with his handkerchief, balled it up and lobbed it behind a picket fence. He was, he decided, fairly presentable.

The gent with the shotgun could wait.

One thing was certainly evident. Lester Hodges, the old recluse, hadn’t met his death and been rolled in Jarrell’s yard through some sort of grotesque accident. There was design behind this, cold-blooded merciless design. From now on anything might happen. The slayer was smart, cunning — and he knew he was being hunted.

The back street brought McGavock to the rear of the courthouse. He circled the building, selected a bench in the deserted court square, sat down and redigested a few conclusions. An inspection of his ten-cent compass showed that it had not been damaged. Main Street was nearly empty. This was a town that really closed like a mouse-trap at the stroke of nine.

One window alone remained lighted. A little office with an eight-foot front beside the undertaker’s. A desk was pulled up close to the window, a man sat behind it in a swivel chair. He appeared to be looking through the pane, across the street, into the court square — directly at McGavock. The gold lettering on the door said: Hal Maldron, Attorney.

McGavock got up, crossed the street. Hardly had his instep touched the curb than the man leaned over his desk and rapped on the window.

It was a shrill commanding rap — a piercing, arrogant vibrato.

McGavock opened the door and strode in.

“If you want to speak to me,” he exploded, “heist your pants off that sponge rubber cushion and address me like a gentleman. I don’t go for window banging—”

Hal Maldron was a blubbery, grayish man with bad teeth and a pair of the smallest, cruelest eyes that McGavock ever looked into. He smirked at McGavock’s rage. “Calm yourself, brother.”

Maldron held up a hand, waved a huge horseshoe-nail ring. “It’s this ring that does it, brother,” he boasted. “It makes me the most hellacious lawyer in these hills. I’m sure-fire. I never lose a case. But why the ring, you ask? I’ll tell you. Why chase around looking for clients, interviewing witnesses, suborning jurymen? No need for it. I just sit here in my swivel chair and let the world come to me. Across the street’s the courthouse, yonder’s the post office, next door’s the undertaker’s. What more could a lawyer ask? I’m plump in the middle of the county’s bloodstream. Anyone with any kind of business has to pass my window sometime or other. Comes a prospect or a hostile witness, I just reach over and rap on the pane.” A malignant look settled itself in his rubbery jowls. “And, believe me, they come when I call them!”

McGavock was speechless with fury.

“You got off the bus at seven fifty-eight,” Maldron declared. “You registered at the Bradley House and then proceeded to Malcom Jarrell’s, where he informed you that he was secreting a corpse. What you’ve been doing for the last half hour, I do not as yet know — but I’ll find out. I summoned you in here to advise you that you are now working for me. There have been developments. Jarrell has given himself up to the police; he is at liberty, on bond. I’m representing him—”

McGavock managed to speak. “He’s retained you?”

“That’s beside the point. I said I was representing him. I’m being retained by another party, one who has his welfare at heart.”

“Just who is this other party?”

Maldron showed his spotted canines. “That, too, is beside the point. I just wanted you to understand that there’s been a shifting of conditions, a change of ownership, so to speak. You’ve been demoted. I’m head man. If you play with me, I’ll keep you on the payroll. No cooperation and I’ll send you scooting back to the city.”

McGavock gave a low, strained laugh — a strangled sound, almost a whine. “I ought to kick your teeth in. Which wouldn’t take much of a push.” He held his breath, tried to control himself. “I’m not employed by Jarrell. I’m laboring for a guy named Atherton Browne. Try a tank-town frame on me and the boys will be in your hair like seventeen-year locusts. You’ll learn a little about metropolitan detective agencies.”

He was still boiling when he reached the hotel.

Cal Bradley, fussing behind the desk, was acting as his own night-clerk. The spidery little man seemed self-conscious, over-polite. “Mr. McGavock!” he greeted. “About to retire? A good night to sleep, suh. There’s a breeze from the north.” He laid the key on the blotter. “Number eleven, at the end of the hall. The best room in the house.” Abruptly, as an afterthought, he reached inside his shirt, dragged out a rumpled, soiled envelope. “This was left on the desk — addressed to you. I didn’t see who placed it there.”

McGavock ripped open the flap. The note was written on hotel stationery: Hodges can’t use your help now. Let the dead alone. Get out of town.

“It’s written on your letterhead — and unsigned,” McGavock snapped. “I suppose the entire town has access to your paper.”

Bradley sighed. “That’s true. Everyone filches from a hotel.” He brightened. “Just think. You’ve only been in town a few hours and already admirers are sending you unsigned letters. You make friends quickly, suh.”

When McGavock was halfway down the corridor, Bradley’s strident voice rattled after him. “Another thing. It almost slipped my mind. You’ve had a charming visitor — Laurel Bennett. She’s dropped in three times within the last hour. Perhaps she wants to sell your employer, Mr. Boggs, the old Fern Springs resort?”

McGavock answered crossly: “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard of her. If she comes again, I’m not seeing callers. I’m footsore and weary. I’m hibernating for the night.”

Chapter Two The Heavy Loser

Luther McGavock gazed at his room and flinched. It was about ten feet square. The wallpaper was water-stained in coffeelike splotches; the worn rug was as thin as a bait seine. There was an oval crayon enlargement above a washstand, a crockery bowl and pitcher — and a lumpy iron bed.

The single, grimy window looked directly onto the tin roof of an adjoining shed. Bradley’s finest room was no bridal suite.

McGavock stuck the tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement. He opened his Gladstone and took out a belly gun, a stubby thirty-eight cut back almost to the cylinder — and a pair of wire clippers. He shoved the pistol under his coat, turned back the mattress and with the wire clippers snipped off a foot of stiff wire from the bedsprings.

The detective took the wire to the door, threw a tight turn around the doorknob, pulled the ends down and threaded them through the eye of the key. He tested the apparatus; it was steady, strong. No outside manipulation could jiggle the bit in the lock; it was tamper-proof.

Cheap hotels with shaky door locks were no new experience to Luther McGavock.

He raised the window, laid the towel from the washstand over the sill. A landmark to help him identify the correct room on his return.

McGavock crawled through the window, groped down the tin roof, lowered himself catlike into the alley. The silence was oppressive, appalling. It was as though the village were quarantined. The detective glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch.

It seemed like two in the morning — yet it was scarcely nine-thirty.

Every small southern town has its leading family. The Bennetts assumed this position in Bartonville. McGavock had been aware of their prominence from the moment of his arrival. Everywhere he’d looked he’d seen the name: on the town’s drugstore, the garage, the cotton gin. He could visualize the sort of home Laurel Bennett would be living in — a sleek white mansion with fluted columns and a veranda as big as a parade ground. She would, in other words, be occupying the house he had mistakenly allotted to Malcom Jarrell.

This time he was right. He found the place without much difficulty.

Pretentious, austere, it stood at the mouth of a short avenue of old magnolias. The porch light was on — McGavock was evidently expected.

Malcom Jarrell opened the door to his ring.

McGavock said dreamily: “I imagine a house, prowl around and locate it. I ring the bell and see you standing in the doorway. This case is dopier than a tael of opium. Who is this Laurel Bennett, what’s your tie-in, and what does she want with me?”

The seedy naturalist tilted his monstrous head, stepped back, gestured the detective in. “We need your counsel. Mrs. Bennett is my godchild. She has a problem for you.”

“A problem?” McGavock mocked him. “Now that’s intriguing! A detective is like a doctor, anyone that comes along tries to panhandle a little free medicine. I’m up to my ears right now in a problem. Or haven’t you heard? I’m trying to shoo the executioner away from you. It seems to me—”

Jarrell was crotchety. “Come now, you’re not all that busy! This shouldn’t take twenty minutes. Hear what Laurel has to say. I’m sure that Atherton won’t object.”

The lady of the mansion was just about seventeen years old.

A delicate figurine in black lace with a cameo at her throat, she leaned against the creamy marble mantelpiece and watched McGavock approach. Oil portraits hung high above her head. Antebellum ancestors: eagle-nosed gentlemen — firebrands — and haughty, whale-boned grande dames.

Laurel Bennett was slim, fragilely molded. Her glossy black hair was caught by a pearl bandeau. Her eyes were somber, brooding.

Seventeen years old, McGavock thought. He judged her age shrewdly by her lips. He tried to picture her in a middy blouse and Mary Jane pumps. It simply wouldn’t work. The gal might be a child, McGavock decided, but she’s not that kind of a child. She’s wise, hard.

Her manner was impersonal, gracious. “I heard you talking to Mr. Jarrell in the hall,” the girl began. “You seem reluctant to help me. You appear to believe that there will be no remuneration. Let me say that you are going to be paid and paid liberally. Present a reasonable statement to my attorney, Mr. Hal Maldron—”

“The window rapper? The guy with the eroded teeth?” McGavock was venomous. “So you’re the party that had him bail my client. How do you people expect me to get anything done with all this meddling? Jarrell has popped off until—”

Malcom Jarrell said patiently: “You’re balked. Completely confounded. So you’re trying to put the blame for your incompetence on me.”

McGavock barked at the girl: “What is this job you want me to do?”

“You’re a man of experience,” Laurel Bennett said throatily. “I think you’ll be quick to sympathize. Gil, my husband, is middle-aged. Suddenly — for no reason that we can see — he has gone into an orgy of sowing wild oats. Not women, I mean, but drinking and gambling. It’s mortifying, of course — most middle-aged husbands are proud to pay more attention to their young brides. If they’re lucky enough to have a young bride, I mean. But it’s not only embarrassing — it’s critical. He’s jeopardizing our security. He loses enormous sums. We have a joint account — he makes secret withdrawals. It has me half-mad. It can’t go on!”

McGavock asked warily: “How do I come in?”

“He’s out right now. At a place called Chunky’s, a hell-hole down by the riverbank. I’ve been cruising around, I’ve seen his car there. I’ll drive you up and leave you. I want you to get him out and bring him home.”

“Is that supposed to cure him?”

“You could scare him on the way back,” the girl suggested. “Tell him some terrible cases where men drank themselves into disgrace and their pitiful wives starved in the gutter and things like that.”

“O.K.,” McGavock agreed. “Let’s go.” He threw a parting remark at Malcom Jarrell. “Spend the night here. I’ll see you in the morning. I want to ask you about your cotton rat.”

Jarrell answered him amiably. “I’m an early riser. Any time after sun-up.”

Chunky’s Place was in the river bottom about five miles out on the old swamp trail. A desolate, poisonous five miles. Snake-infested sloughs, milky with muddy water, thrust fingerlike from the dense second growth along the roadside. The headlights of Laurel Bennett’s car played on a ceaseless tangle of wild grape and willow and water oak. The air was brackish, dank — stagnant.

The girl was silent, intent on holding her swaying car to the boggy trail. McGavock sat beside her and whistled. It was a habit of concentration that he was unable to break. And he always whistled the same thing, the same way. The tune was “The Letter Edged in Black.”

“Cal Bradley,” he remarked, “thinks I’m a sap on the purchase for shooting land. He suggested that you might be anxious to sell me a pleasure resort, a place known as Fern Springs. Fern Springs is a new one on me and I thought I knew them all, from Florida Bay to Puget.”

Laurel smiled stiffly. “It hasn’t functioned since nineteen-ten. Maybe you don’t know it, but the south is studded with old, abandoned resorts — tucked away in wild, unreachable places. Back at the turn of the century, in the red-spoked carriage days, it was fashionable to summer at some health springs. The fad passed but the old buildings remain. Almost any county south of the Mason-Dixon has a couple. Fern Springs belongs to me, it’s back in the pine country. It’s always belonged to my family and is not for sale. I’d sell my mother’s wedding ring first.”

McGavock said: “I’m not in the market for a wedding ring, but I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

She cursed him. He lay back on the cushions, closed his eyes and listened with real enjoyment.

Laurel Bennett braked her sports car at a bend in the road. “It’s just around the corner. You’d better go the rest of the way on foot.”

“How will I spot him?” McGavock asked.

“They’ll all be drinking,” she said bitterly. “But he’ll be drunk. They’ll all be gambling — but he’ll be losing his shirt.”

Abruptly, without warning, he reached forward and turned on the dash. Deftly, before she could prevent him, he laid the ten-cent compass on her knee. The needle was as steady as a rock.

The girl flushed angrily, knocked his hand aside. “If you want to take bearings,” she spat, “take them from yourself!”

He gave a raucous, unpleasant laugh. “I’m not taking bearings. This is my electric eye. I’m just making sure that you’re not preparing to put a two-inch roofing nail into the back of my skull when I step out.” He restored the gadget to his pocket.

She caught him by the lapel as he slid through the door. “Watch yourself. They don’t like strangers.”

He bared his teeth. “Neither do I.”

The building, the size of a domestic garage and covered with tar-paper, was a black ulcerous sore in the moonglow. Its windows were caulked to the frame with soggy, mildewed quilts. Not so much as a wavering cobweb of light showed. A moody scene, depraved and threatening. McGavock was familiar with these backwoods gambling dives. They were dynamite.

There were a few clay-caked jalopies in the clearing, and a powerful, gleaming coupe — Gil Bennett’s.

McGavock knew better than to advance and knock. He slowed up at the fringe of the timber, called: “Hello. Hello, in there!” A ritual for strangers and one that had better be observed. The door opened.

A chubby, muscle-bound man with a receding chin stepped out. He was wearing a lemon yellow polo shirt stuck into new overalls and carried an army automatic casually at his side — as though it were a monkey wrench.

McGavock said: “I’m a friend of Cal Bradley’s.” He walked into the patch of light. “I’m a traveling man.”

The chubby man chewed it over in his slow mind. “I guess you’re all right,” he decided. He led McGavock into the hut, closed the tar-paper door.

It was a low, vicious crowd. There were seven men in the room — three sprawled sullenly at a rough-sawed makeshift bar at the back; the remaining four were deadlocked in a game of stud under a hissing gasoline lamp.

Gil Bennett was in the poker game. He was easy to spot. Dressed in a quiet business suit, he was the only man present wearing neither leather boots nor denim. He was a decent-looking guy in his middle fifties. McGavock wondered what devious pressure had cast him into marriage with so young a wife and then perversely, had driven him to such a deadfall as this.

The detective rested his shoulders against a wall joist and watched the game. There were two bottles of red whiskey on the table and the liquor was kept in constant rotation. Bennett’s playmates lolled and simpered and put on a silly show of being skin-tight. The businessman appeared to be cold sober.

When Gil Bennett took the bottle to drink, he grasped the neck with his fist close to the bottle’s mouth. The foxy pup, McGavock thought, he’s tonguing it, cutting off his intake.

“I hate to break this up,” the detective said cheerfully. “But Mr. Bennett’s roast is burning. He has to hustle home.”

There was an ominous silence in the little shack.

Gil Bennett asked: “Did my wife send you?”

McGavock nodded. “That she did.”

The chubby houseman strolled over. “Out!” he ordered hoarsely. He tossed his knobby, dwarfed chin towards the door. “You’re not welcome here.” He grabbed McGavock’s wrist.

McGavock relaxed. He twisted his trapped wrist, caught the stocky man’s forearm in a grip of steel — a double-lock. His opponent stiffened. McGavock stepped straight into him, thrusting his thigh behind the chubby man’s knee. The chubby man went backwards heels over breakfast and McGavock, in close position, hit him three times at the hinge of his jaw. He was out before he struck the floor.

It was touch and go for a split second. Anything could have happened. Then everybody laughed. The show of brutality exhilarated them. A gambler with a Mexican leather-work holster peeping from his shiny blue serge suit got up from the table and shook McGavock’s hand. A downy-faced youth at the bar hauled a mouth harp from his hat and began running off minors. There was an air of general festivity.

In Bennett’s coupe, on the way back to town, McGavock made an astounding discovery. His companion, in spite of all his bottle tonguing, was drunker than a shoat in a silo.

“How long have you been haunting that dump?” the detective asked genially.

Gil Bennett hiccoughed. “About two weeks. And, boy, have I had bad luck! All the time I lose! At first it wasn’t so bad, seven-eight dollars. Now the jinx has really got me. I run as much as twenty bucks in the hole as regular as clockwork.” He shook his head fuzzily. “I try to outslick them but I can’t seem to make any headway—”

“How much have you lost to date?”

“One hundred and eighty-three frog skins. Down the old sewer. That’s plenty bucks. Wow!”

McGavock grinned to himself. The case was finally cracking; at last he was getting his teeth into it. “It’s a heap of small change,” he agreed. “But it’s not what breaks up wealthy family life. Mrs. Bennett said your losses were enormous — that was the word she used. I thought it sounded fishy. I couldn’t see how the town big shot, you, owner of the cotton gin, garage, et al., could find any real financial competition among the local bedrock sportsmen. Why then the secret withdrawals?”

Bennett chuckled. “You catch. This gambling business is a ruse. The Bennett Cotton Gin, the Bennett Drugstore — phooey! Everything I own is in partnership with my wife. And I don’t mean matrimonial partnership — I mean business partnership. Hal Maldron looks after her end and the way they whipsaw me is nobody’s business. Every time we get a little money ahead they put it into reserve pools and running expenses and stuff like that. I couldn’t tell you within ten thousand dollars what my present capital is.”

McGavock prodded him. “And?”

“I’ve got plans. They probably seem wacky to you but they’re the best I can do. My wife and I have a joint bank account. That’s my only access to cash. I make big withdrawals, as much as the traffic will stand. I send the money out of town to a city bank. I’ve got it deposited under a different name. I can make a fresh start any time they give me the bum’s rush. All I’m waiting for now is for Laurel and that leechy lawyer of hers to sock me with their divorce—”

“Divorce?” McGavock perked up.

“Sure. I bet they’ve got the papers all filled out.” He went cagy. “What are you pumping me for? Where did you come from, anyway? By golly, you’re a detective working for Hal and Laurel!”

“I’m a detective, all right,” McGavock confirmed. “I might as well admit it. You’re the only one who doesn’t seem to know it. But I’m not working for Hal Maldron. I’m employed by a slave driver in Memphis. I’m here to find out who knocked off Lester Hodges — and, more important, how come?”

That sobered him. “Old Les Hodges has been murdered?” The idea seemed to give him some inner fear. “That’s going to be a blow to Malcom.”

“If so, he’s standing up under it extremely well,” McGavock remarked. “Why should it affect him?”

“They were bosom pals. The town’s two nuts. Hodges illiterate, Jarrell overeducated.” He said in a strained voice: “Laurel and Hal aren’t mixed up in this, are they?”

“Not so far as I know,” McGavock lied. “Why do you ask?”

Bennett pulled up in front of the court square, idled his engine. “Alcohol’s treacherous. It makes me think I’m smarter than I am. Forget the whole thing. Thanks for your interest — and good-night.”

McGavock produced his compass, handed it to his companion. “Listen to me and listen carefully. Are you sober enough to understand me? Good.” He glared at the drunken man with a fond fierceness. “The slayer of Lester Hodges used a mean weapon. A magnetized hammer, like bill-posters use, only I imagine this was a big baby, like carpenters use. He carried the tack on the hammerhead, followed Hodges down a dark street. At the right moment he reared back and swung. That’s the way it was done.” The detective paused. “I bought this gadget for myself but I’ve decided to hand it over to you. If anyone approaches you with a bulky package, a bundle, something that might conceal a hammer, stall ’em while you make a few careless passes with this compass. If there’s a magnet in the vicinity, the compass needle will whip around and point it out.”

Gil Bennett scoffed. “Why give it to me? I’m in no danger.” He slammed the car door.

McGavock watched him from the street, saw him place the gadget tenderly in his breast pocket. The black coupe whammed off in a screeching of gears.

“He’s afraid,” McGavock said. “He thinks something is after him — and he doesn’t know just what it is!”

McGavock had ordered Malcom Jarrell to spend the night with the Bennetts for a very definite reason. The detective wanted to give the little vine-covered brick cottage a thorough searching — and he wanted a free hand while doing it. One thing had bothered him all evening, the incident that had occurred when he had first visited his client. Jarrell had met him from the inside of the house, at the front door — yet he had closed the door behind him and led the detective not into the house, but around it.

McGavock had the impression at the time that he was being decoyed away from something, that the naturalist had been interrupted in something he wished to conceal.

It was pretty obvious that his client had been lying to him like a trooper ever since they had joined forces. According to Jarrell’s story he hadn’t left the back porch for sixteen hours, except to phone Memphis. The cubeb cigarettes and the half-eaten chocolate bar were evidence to the contrary. One doesn’t keep a reserve of such tedium-breaking luxuries on one’s back porch to be conveniently handy for just such an emergency. There had been other funny stuff, too. The naturalist’s report had been as full of holes as a second-hand snood. He’d said he’d been awakened by a dragging sound outside his window — yet the corpse by the arbor was a good thirty yards from the house.

McGavock reconstructed it this way: Jarrell had probably seen the killer drag the body into his yard. Maybe he had recognized him, maybe not. In any event, the naturalist was reluctant to discuss it. It didn’t look good.

The detective scowled. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to plow through a client to get at the criminal.

Luther McGavock swung open the squeaky gate, made a quick, cautious survey of the shrubbery. The white moon high overhead, now harsh and bright, struck the frothy lilac hedge to shimmering silver, laid ragged shadows of black velvet on the close-clipped lawn. It was indescribably beautiful — unearthly. McGavock thought, It’s no wonder the big-headed naturalist is half cuckoo. I’ve never seen a place like this. It’s actually narcotic. A human couldn’t live in this dream world and retain his sense of values. It’s a place for vampires and ghouls, creatures who flourish from the grave.

Lester Hodges had been taken to the funeral home, the mulch had been restacked in the stable lot. Only a few wisps of scattered straw by the arbor testified to the gruesome tragedy.

He inspected the rat in its cage on the porch. Its ruby eyes glared at the hooded flashlight in the detective’s hand. “If you could talk,” McGavock said thoughtfully, “we’d get this thing over in three minutes. You’re the kingpin in this bloody mess.” He fumbled about, discovered the key behind a flowerpot and entered Malcom Jarrell’s kitchen.

He worked through the kitchen, the dining-room, the bedrooms. It took him twenty minutes to discover it: the hiding place in Malcom Jarrell’s study. The detective lifted a Spanish tile in the hearth. Beneath it, in a narrow, boxlike space, lay a bulky brown envelope.

McGavock picked up a small hooked throw-rug from the floor, draped it over a student lamp on the desk, flicked on the light and examined his find.

The envelope contained a thick bundle of clippings, letters and papers held together by a rubber band. It contained something else, too — a little fuzzy, gray ball of hair about as big as a small marble. The detective’s first unpleasant reaction was that he was looking at a wad of human hair, the hair of Lester Hodges.

But this hair was too fine, too dry.

Rat hair? Hardly likely. The fibers were much too long.

McGavock grinned. He realized what he held in his fingers, knew that this was evidence to hang a killer.

He wondered if Jarrell fully realized its significance. Probably yes. It all fitted in now. His call that evening on his client. Jarrell here in this cozy study, interrupted in his analysis of the furry object. It explained the Bebe binoculars and Jarrell’s sidetracking him around the house.

McGavock slipped off the rubber band, fanned out the papers on the desktop and started through them systematically.

The first item was a yellowed newspaper clipping with a block headline. From the Bartonville Clarion, dated August 7, 1909:

A prosperously dressed individual giving his name as T. James Cortwright had, according to the article, registered at the Fern Springs resort on the night of the sixth. In a brief talk with Calhoun Bradley, the clerk, he had declared that he was from Cleveland, Ohio, and had inquired courteously if any of his fellow townsmen were, by chance, among the resort’s guests. With regret Mr. Bradley informed him that the resort was patronized in the main by local gentry and expressed mild astonishment that even Mr. Cortwright had himself heard of its existence in such an out-of-the-way corner of the country. This remark had somehow angered the Clevelander. He had opened a wallet, paid for a month in advance, and had retired to his room.

Mr. Bradley had attempted to mollify him by informing him that the resort’s season was at its height and that later in the evening there was to be a lawn party. Mr. Cortwright had made some unsociable remark and had left the desk.

The next morning a mountain man, snaking logs, had discovered the gentleman’s hat and wallet a quarter of a mile from the hotel buildings. They lay at the edge of a patch of treacherous quicksand known as Devil’s Elbow.

An examination of Mr. Cortwright’s room showed that his bed had not been slept in. The management was attempting to inform Mr. Cortwright’s family.

McGavock said to himself: “So Bradley was clerk. And the season was in full swing. Ten to one, Jarrell was there — and Maldron, and Bennett.”

The next clipping, dated a week later, said:

Here, the tale took a fantastic twist. Communication with the Cleveland police disclosed the stunning fact that T. James Cortwright was none other than Thompson J. Wainwright, a badly wanted absconding broker who had looted his firm of seventy thousand dollars in cold cash.

It seemed obvious to the Cleveland police and to the Bartonville Clarion that Wainwright had selected Fern Springs as a hideout and suddenly, for some unfathomable reason, had an uprising of conscience which induced him to take his life. What had become of the booty, no one could find out. The conclusion was that he must have spent it.

McGavock shook his head. Such goings-on!

How could a stranger, in the night, locate a patch of quicksand he couldn’t possibly have known to exist? Why hadn’t he taken his hat in with him? And just what kind of a conscience was it that Mr. Cortwright-Wainwright possessed? One that drove him to suicide yet refused to return his plunder to his victims. Horsefeathers!

There were three letters, each bearing a recent postmark and mailed a week apart. Each was addressed to Lester Hodges and each contained a blank sheet of paper clipped with a wire paper clip.

Bennett had said that Lester Hodges was unable to read. Someone had used the envelopes to send him money. Bills. And small bills probably — Lester Hodges changing a large banknote in Bartonville would have caused a sensation.

McGavock bundled the stuff back up, snapped on the rubber band and replaced things as he had found them — under the Spanish tile.

The light in the window of Hal Maldron’s law office had been extinguished. The window-rapping attorney, like his fellow citizens, was home in bed — fighting mosquitoes in his old-fashioned nightgown, trying to get some sleep. McGavock palmed the brass knob and got out his key ring with its assortment of keys. The third one did it. He slipped in, left the door ajar behind him.

He knew just what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.

A wire basket on the lawyer’s desk containing signed but unmailed correspondence gave the detective a specimen of Maldron’s signature. It was bold, fancy, with loops and flourishes. The sort of signature a pompous man assumes cannot be forged.

The detective placed his hat over his flashlight, rummaged for a piece of scrap paper. He dipped the attorney’s steel pen in the inkwell, got a generous nibful of gummy ink and wrote:

McGavock wrote in large letters, lines wide-spaced. He filled his pen twice during the short inscription. The signature was a marvelous replica.

Quickly, McGavock slid the worn desk blotter out of its corner brackets. The underside, as he suspected, was new, unused. He blotted the message on the blotter’s reverse — with the care of a master engraver.

The detective crumpled the paper, stuffed it in his hip pocket, refitted the blotter in the brackets in its original position — so that his handiwork was concealed.

Again on the street, the office door locked behind him, he gave a short, mirthless laugh. The entire operation had taken less than two minutes. He couldn’t help thinking of Atherton Browne, wondering what the old man would say. It had been a busy evening with a rather heavy routine: three breaking and enterings, one assault and battery, one forgery.

It had been a busy evening and a profitable one, too.

McGavock had found out why Hodges had been murdered, had a good idea who the killer was. He understood now the double irony in the anonymous warning he had received: Let the dead alone. There was more than one corpse involved in this case. He was confronting a veteran, a two-time killer.

From the tunnel-black alley behind the Bradley House, he could see the white towel hanging from his open window. He caught the shed’s low eave, drew himself up onto the tin roof.

His room was just as he had left it. The tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement, the wire key lock on the doorknob. McGavock undressed, donned a violent purple suit of cossack-style pajamas, and was asleep by the time he hit the sheet.

Chapter Three The Hammer

The detective was just finishing a pungent, savory breakfast of chicken pie and eggs in the bare matting-floored hotel dining-room when Calhoun-not-Calvin Bradley materialized at his table. The puffy proprietor dragged out a chair and sat down. “You may be the owner of this flea-trap,” McGavock said darkly into his coffee. “But the law books will tell you that I have a tenant’s lease on this table. Scram!”

Bradley said artificially: “Did you have a sound night’s sleep?”

“I did. In spite of that broken-down bed—”

“It’s that bed,” Bradley said smugly, “that I wanted to speak to you about. When you check out of here, you will notice an added debit of $6.80 on your bill. That is for mutilating my best bed — clipping the spring, suh, and twisting it through the key! I’m shocked—”

McGavock asked bleakly: “How do you know?”

“I saw it, suh. With my own eyes.” The hotel man rolled his eyeballs reprovingly. “Shortly after you left the desk last night — to hibernate — I was under the impression that I heard you call me. I knocked on your door. No response. I rattled the panel. All was quiet. I became frantic. I’ve had guests with heart seizures. I raced around to the alley. With the aid of a ladder I reached your room from the outside. You were gone. I must say I was grieved to observe that you had—”

“Go ’way!” McGavock ordered. “You’re constricting my digestive juices.”

Bradley settled himself comfortably. “You’re a deep one, full of dodges. It seemed a bit eccentric at the moment but this morning I think I understand. Toujours l’amour.” He squeezed a lewd wink from the corner of his eyelid. “Someone was telling me that they happened to notice you on the old swamp road with Laurel Bennett last night.” He left the sentence up in the air, on a note of inquiry.

“You’d better take a reef in that limber tongue of yours,” McGavock said quietly. “Or it will bring on an Act of God. You don’t kid me a bit — I’ve been pumped by experts. You, and the whole population, know all about me by now. Who I am and what I’m here for. When the cat gets out of the bag in a village like this one — it divides and scatters. I met Mrs. Bennett by appointment — that was business. I went out along the swamp road and manhandled your friend Chunky — that was pleasure. I’m a detective and I’m here to find out who killed Lester Hodges.”

Bradley tittered. “Who do you favor?”

“I favor you.”

The hotel proprietor asked mockingly: “How do you make that out?”

McGavock folded his napkin in a neat cornucopia, got up. “The man that killed Wainwright killed Hodges. Lester Hodges’ murder was bred in the homicide of that absconder back at Fern Springs thirty years ago.”

Bradley said innocently: “Wainwright? I never heard of him.” He went through a grotesque facial contortion, pretended to remember. “Oh. You mean the man that fell into the quicksand? I recall what you’re speaking of now. A tragic incident. I was clerk at the time. I’d almost forgotten. Wainwright wasn’t murdered.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “The affair was very strange. I’ve thought about it a great deal. What became of the money? No one has ever answered that. Would you like to hear my personal hypothesis?”

“I would, indeed.”

“It’s this,” Bradley announced brightly. “Wainwright didn’t commit suicide. He just used Fern Springs as a blind to throw pursuers off his tracks. He signed up at the resort, paid weeks in advance, learned about Devil’s Elbow — probably from the servants. That gave him an idea. He sneaked out of the back of the building, placed his hat and wallet on the edge of quicksands and left the neighborhood that very night. You see, he had a small cowhide satchel with him. It disappeared when he did. That proves my point. He hightailed and took his seventy thousand with him. Right today he’s doubtless a pillar of society in some place like Johannesburg or Rio.”

There was logic in the hotel man’s statement — and McGavock had to admit it. “If that’s your story,” he rasped, “stick with it. It strikes me you’re mighty clear on the details — considering it happened three decades ago.”

Bradley simpered. “That’s my story. And will remain my story — until a better one comes along.”

Laurel Bennett, herself, was standing in the sunny foyer of the lobby waiting for McGavock. She was wearing jodhpurs and a baggy pearl-colored brushed wool sweater. A short, braided quirt was tucked into her armpit. The bright morning light was harsh, unkind to her. There were tiny crow’s-feet at her temples, her lips were drawn, fagged. “I thought you’d never get up,” she said. “I’ve been watching for you from across the street. Let’s go somewhere and talk, someplace where we’ll be alone. I’ll meet you at the cemetery in ten minutes.”

McGavock was ugly. “We’ll do nothing of the kind. No clandestine conferences for me! If you have anything to unload, let’s have it here and now.”

“But this is too public—”

He prepared to brush past her. “O.K.”

She clutched him desperately by the sleeve. “It’s about the hammer! You have to listen. I’ve found the hammer!”

“I’ve lost no hammer.”

“Don’t taunt me. You know what I’m talking about. Gil came home with your compass last night and told us why you had given it to him. This morning, before anyone was up, I took it out in the toolhouse and found the hammer. It was in a big wooden chest with the rest of the tools. Its head was magnetized. It pulled the compass needle. I tried it out; it picked up nails.”

McGavock said gravely: “Don’t tell me you disposed of it!”

She raised her eyebrows innocently. “How did you know? That’s exactly what I did. I took it out in the country and threw it in the river. I’ll never tell anyone where. Wild horses couldn’t drag it from me.”

“It couldn’t have been Gil’s hammer?”

“Oh, no. It was a new one — I’d never seen it before.” She smiled deprecatingly. “It was in Gil’s tool chest but that doesn’t prove anything, does it?”

McGavock guffawed. “Sister, you’re a thing of beauty and a joy forever. You’re more fun than a stampede at the circus. I wish I wasn’t so busy; I’d like to give you more of my time. Cal Bradley tells me the town is pairing us off together, gossiping about our little trip to Chunky’s last night. Answer me this: wasn’t it you, yourself, that put out the story?”

Rage swept into her eyes.

“I think I’ll leave,” McGavock said hastily. “You’re getting set to touch off a string of oaths.” He left her standing there — frustrated and furious.

Malcom Jarrell was seated on the side steps of the Bennett mansion in smoking jacket and carpet slippers. He had his four-lensed spectacles hooked on the bridge of his nose. He was feeding brown sugar to a procession of big, black ants. He’d bend down, watch for a second, and then scribble a note on a jumbled sheaf of papers. Hunched with his stubbled chin between his scrawny kneecaps, he reminded McGavock of some shabby sea monster.

“You’d better turn around,” he said placidly as McGavock came into his vision. “And go straight back to town. The sheriff just phoned. He’s mad enough to top the high cotton. He’s waiting for you at Lawyer Maldron’s.” The naturalist smiled. “If I wasn’t so occupied here, I’d trot along. It’d be amusing to hear you bluster. You’re going to have to do a bit of explaining—”

“It’s you, my erudite friend of fur and feathers, it’s you, suh, who have a bit of explaining to do.” The detective bore down on him. “I want to know about that rat of yours. I want to know all about it.”

“His name is Bertram,” the naturalist said owlishly. “He’s deficient in vitamins A, C and D—”

McGavock spat, “And don’t take me for a sleigh ride. I’m talking about his hind leg. Just above the ankle, there’s a raw place in the fur — a band of flesh where the skin’s been rubbed off. What caused that?”

Jarrell nodded sagely. “I’m treating him for it. Bertram was caught in a trap. The mark of the trap’s jaws—”

McGavock said happily: “Boy, you really think on your feet! That’s a snappy answer. Now let’s see what you have to say to this. As a matter of fact, there’s no raw place on his leg at all! I know. I checked.”

Malcom Jarrell’s composure cracked. His florid cheeks went gravel-gray, sucked in, his eyes darted wildly — past McGavock’s shoulder, past his hip, evading the detective’s steady gaze.

The naturalist licked his lips. “I owe you an apology,” he croaked. “I certainly misjudged you. I should have known that Atherton wouldn’t send me a fool, that you must be smarter than you acted. Grant me this request: don’t question me. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

“No can do,” McGavock said coldly. “I’m after a killer. Let’s hear about Bertram, the whole story.”

“You leave me no choice.” Jarrell gritted his huge jaw. “I’m afraid you’ve guessed the worst of it. A few weeks ago a citizen of our town, someone Lester Hodges had known all his life, came to him with an extraordinary business proposition. Who this person was, Lester refused to tell me. The rat was involved in that business deal.”

“Of course,” McGavock declared. “That’s been perfectly obvious from the start. You were keeping Hodges’ rat for him. No naturalist would confine such a large animal in such a small cage. It’s cruel. That was so Hodges could tie a string to its leg without the beast whipping around and fanging him.”

“Exactly.”

“What was this business deal?”

“This person employed Lester to search between the floors of an old, tumbledown health resort out in the pine country, Fern Springs. Hodges was half-mad—” Jarrell’s voice was patronizing, amiable. McGavock remembered Bennett’s statement: The two town nuts — Jarrell and Hodges. “Lester was half-mad,” the naturalist repeated. “He tackled the problem with a system of his own. He tied fishing line onto the rodent’s leg and used him some way in the search. I don’t know how on earth he induced the animal to act.”

“He was searching for obstructions under the floor,” McGavock explained. “He placed the rat in an opening by the baseboard. Floor joists run parallel — under every floor there’s a series of small tunnels. It was pretty clever. It saved him ripping up goodness knows how much floor space. It was the most plausible way to do it.

Malcom Jarrell frowned. “But how did he make the animal obey?”

“He scared him through with tiny firecrackers, a commodity obtainable at any Deep South country store. Hodges slipped his pet into the floor, popped off a firecracker — and judged by the length of slack in the line the progress his animal was making under the floor. Did the old man find what he was supposed to?”

“I don’t know. I should say he was slain before he was successful. He’d come over in the evening and talk to me in a vague sort of way. I got the impression that he and his employer were satisfied with the way the business was going. His employer was paying him a steady salary of four dollars a week — sending him banknotes wrapped in blank paper. Lester was quite excited over his good fortune.”

McGavock said: “You’re being candid with me? You’re telling me everything?”

Jarrell had his old poise back. “Oh, quite. You’ll have to excuse me now. You have work to do.” He resumed his scrutiny of the black ants. “And so have I.”

As soon as McGavock laid eyes on the local law he knew that he was in for a catch-as-catch-can tussle.

The sheriff of Linden County was the direct antithesis of the old-style rural sharpshooter that pinned his rusty badge to his gallus elastic and toted a .38-in-a-.44 frame at a holster on his hip as big as an English riding saddle. The young man that lolled on the corner of Hal Maldron’s desk was modest, friendly, self-effacing. He was dressed in well-cut blue-gray tweed. And his fingernails were a little over-manicured.

It was the fingernails that scared McGavock. This lad must have plenty on the ball. The hard-bitten mountain folk of Linden County wouldn’t have elected him if he was as sappy as he seemed. The coon-hunting hillmen selected their sheriff like they selected their hound dogs — for brains and guts and stamina. McGavock had the strange feeling that he was in the presence of a hotshot, deliver-the-goods career man.

The young man smiled. “Howdy. I’m Steve Robley — the current and temporary head of our local crime and punishment bureau. It’s mighty swell of you to look me up. I hope I’m not imposing?”

McGavock was stunned. “No,” he said carefully. “It’s a pleasure. Is Maldron, here, a deputy of yours?”

Hal Maldron lifted his fat lip, exposed his decayed teeth. “Yes,” he announced, “I am.”

“No,” the sheriff said, “you’re not. I’m sorry, Hal, but I’m going to have to revoke your authority for the duration of this brief but pleasant interview. We mustn’t intimidate our new friend with a belligerent show of force.” He got out a stubby briar pipe, loaded it, got it going. “I’ve gone over the hammer, Mr. McGavock. I can’t find any prints.”

McGavock remarked: “I left the hammer under the body. As a proof to you that I wasn’t down here to tamper with evidence.” It was a bluff, a case of life or death. He surged with relief when the sheriff nodded.

“The very conclusion that I myself came to. I must say it gave me a bit of surprise — I’d always been under the impression that private detectives were not so cooperative.”

“I’ve tried it that way,” McGavock said. “It’s the hard way. Now I cooperate.” This boy really had a deadpan. He wondered if he was being maneuvered out on a limb. “Can I be of any service to you?”

“Yes,” the sheriff said slowly. “You certainly can be. I’m stumped. What’s it all about? Who’d want to murder harmless old Hodges?”

McGavock was impressed. “This is a long story. And a muddled one. I work for an agency in Memphis. For twenty years now we’ve been investigating a case for a brokerage firm in Cleveland. Back in nineteen-nine they had a guy abscond with seventy grand. He came down here to Fern Springs and vanished.”

He had them entranced. They were swallowing it, every word. There could be no doubt of it.

Maldron said helplessly: “Why didn’t you say so last night! I didn’t apprehend that you had such powerful backing. You people have been working on a case in this vicinity for twenty years? I can hardly believe it!”

“We’ve been working on the case — but not in this community. It was the slaying of Lester Hodges that gave us the break we’ve been looking for.”

Sheriff Robley was flustered. “I’ll be perfectly honest with you, Mr. McGavock. A certain party—” Maldron looked miserable. “A certain party summoned me last night by an imperative phone call. He said that you were retained by a cousin of Mr. Jarrell’s and that you came down here from Memphis for the sole purpose of obstructing justice. He said that he’d go into court and swear that you had consulted him last night about his client and had attempted to entice him into illegal conspiracy.”

“These sure-fire lawyers,” McGavock said pleasantly. “No wonder they win cases. They butter their bread on both sides. Who’s he representing — Jarrell or you? I may say at this time, that we in Memphis have had occasion to speculate a little about this Maldron. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise us to learn that somehow he’s directly involved. He knows something. He was at Fern Springs in that fatal August when Wainwright disappeared. He—”

Maldron glared. “And so were Bennett and Malcom and Bradley and half the town.”

McGavock shook a finger dramatically. “Then, sir,” he declaimed basso profundo, “then why, sir, did you write us that unusual note — the one about Wainwright’s bones, seek at Fern Springs and ye shall find?”

The lawyer fidgeted. “Nonsense. You’re out of your head.”

Steve Robley looked suddenly intent. “Go on, Mr. McGavock.”

“That’s all,” McGavock said. “Comes in this crank letter signed ‘Hal Maldron’ talking about a dead man’s bones—”

The sheriff said softly: “The letter was typewritten, of course?”

“Not as I remember it. Written in big letters, in ink, as I recall it.”

The young sheriff stepped to Maldron’s desk, inspected the surface of the much-used blotter. He rubbed his chin, looked at the ceiling for a moment, turned the blotter over. The inked imprints stood out in heavy black scrawls. The sheriff took a pocket mirror from his comb-case, held it above the inscription.

“ ‘The bones of Thompson J. Wainwright are at Fern Springs,’ ” he read. “ ‘Seek and ye shall find!’ Thank you, Mr. McGavock. You’ve been of great assistance. I’ll not keep you any longer.”

Alone, on the sun-splashed sidewalk, McGavock wiped a trembling hand across his forehead and said, “Whoo!” So the hammer was under the corpse all the time. He’d started his investigation by muffing the murder weapon. It had been a nerve-racking ten minutes. They had been waiting for him, all set to drive him out of town. He’d sidestepped it. For how long, he didn’t know — but for the time being, anyhow. And time was what he needed.

“Six hours,” McGavock decided. “Give me six hours more and I’ll blow this thing seven ways to Christmas!”

Gil Bennett was in his office at the cotton gin. A little room not much larger than a chicken coop, its walls were plastered with commercial calendars — wild ducks in topsy-turvy flight, prize bulls, and turgid maidens in air-brushed bathing suits. Bennett sat on a rocker with a spliced leg by a cluttered roll-top desk. Laid out before him were a wine glass, an egg, a bottle of pepper sauce and a salt cellar. “Glad to see you,” he said. “Hitch up and dismount.”

The only other article of furniture in the room was a battered church pew along the wall. McGavock stretched himself out full-length, propped himself up on the arm, and grinned. “Do you think you’ll live?” he asked.

Bennett’s voice was hollow. “I doubt it.” He broke the raw egg in the wine glass, dusted it with a sprinkle of salt and doused it liberally with pepper sauce. “A prairie oyster. Will you go along with me, sir?” McGavock shook his head. The businessman took it at a gulp. “You must break the yolk with your tongue as it goes down,” he said. “Ugh!”

McGavock remarked sententiously: “The wages of sin.” He laughed. “Get that wilted expression off your face. You’re afraid I’m going to continue our conversation of last evening. I’m not. You were a guest at the Fern Springs resort back in nineteen-nine when a guy named Wainwright drifted in with a satchel of hot money — and evaporated. Do you happen to remember the attendant circumstances?”

“Very well, indeed.” Bennett was grim.

“Swell. The place, I understand, is now owned by Mrs. Bennett, who inherited it. The episode occurred some years before Mrs. Bennett was born. Who did it belong to at the time?”

“To an invalid relative of hers down in Louisiana. She inherited it at his death. Mrs. Bennett, by the way, comes from New Orleans. She’s not actually a native of our country.”

“I see,” McGavock said. “If the resort had an absentee landlord, who ran the joint? Bradley?”

“Scarcely! Bradley was just a general utility man. Malcom Jarrell was the titled manager.”

“I see. One thing more. Have you any personal theory as to what happened? I mean, were you satisfied at the time by the way the thing was explained?”

Bennett’s answer was calm, detached. “There’s always been bad friendship between Malcom Jarrell and myself. Everybody in town knows it — you should understand it before I express an opinion on so grave a point. My answer is no. I wasn’t satisfied at the time and I’m less satisfied today. I think Wainwright was killed and his money was stolen.”

McGavock was silent.

“It’s this way,” Bennett amplified. “We live in a small community here. We know each other — and our families have known each other — for a good many years. We can guess the income of our neighbors to a plugged nickel. Malcom Jarrell has a most scanty income — yet he has prospered.”

McGavock retorted: “Isn’t the same true of Cal Bradley?”

“In a way, yes. But Cal’s case is a little different. He’s a low, cunning trickster. Men like Cal Bradley are destined to prosper despite all laws of order and decency.”

McGavock got to his feet, slapped his hat against his thigh. “I’d hate to go into court with that kind of a brief.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re holding back something, aren’t you?” He dropped his hat on the floor, picked it up and cocked it on the crown of his head. “Don’t let me shove you into anything.”

Bennett answered wryly: “I won’t. There’s more to this mess than shows on the surface. Whenever you—”

He was interrupted mid-sentence by a timid knock on the door and the entry of a stalwart young hillman. The caller was dressed in a plaid cotton shirt; a three-inch brass-studded belt held up his faded denim trousers. He confronted them with wooden composure. “Which one of y’all might happen to be Mr. Bennett, the man that owned that ol’ Fern Springs bat den?”

“Me,” Bennett said. “And I still own it. Or rather Mrs. Bennett does. Why?”

“I’m Asie Tenniman. I’m yore south neighbor back there in the pine country. I shore hate to tell you, suh, but ain’t nobuddy owns that building no more. It was farred down to ashes at daybreak this mornin’. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring the word no sooner. Hit’s eighteen miles by muleback an’—”

“Are you telling me,” Bennett asked, “that our resort has been burned?”

“And I don’t mean maybe. Some mighty mean folks live out there in the timber.” The hillman added carelessly: “My woman claims she heard a boiler let loose jest about the time we seen the red.”

“Shiners?”

The boy wouldn’t commit himself. “I couldn’t hardly say, suh. I’m jest a-telling y’all what I know. Good mornin’, gentlemen.”

And he was gone.

McGavock cut out: “Eighteen miles in and eighteen miles back — on a mule. And not a penny, not even a word of thanks.”

“You don’t understand these people,” Gil Bennett observed quietly. “If I’d offered him money he’d have thrown it in my face. It’s a favor and I’ll remember it. Maybe sometime I’ll have a chance to pay a doctor’s bill or something for him... What do you make of it?”

The detective fanned the air. “It’s too much for me!”

Chapter Four Seek and Ye Shall Find

There was a telegram waiting for him on his return to the hotel. A pimple-faced kid with a muff of uncut hair skipped it across the register with an insolent flourish. He was wearing an oversize alpaca coat and black-ribboned nose glasses. “And who are you, my scrofulous adolescent?” McGavock inquired.

“I’m swing man to this joint. Mr. Bradley, he’s takened him a day off. He’s got a misery.”

“Mr. Bradley’s ill? You don’t seem overcome with grief.”

“Not me. It ain’t no shingles off my smokehouse.” He paused. “That’s shore a nutty telegram in that there envelope. I chanct to hold ’er up to the light. I can’t make no sense out’n—”

“You got a fine start, son.” McGavock was warm in his encouragement. “Just keep on candling private correspondence and you’ve got a big future before you.”

Behind the locked door of his room, McGavock slit the envelope, extracted the yellow flimsy. The message was signed Atherton Browne. It read:

McGavock glowered. He went to his Gladstone and got out his copy of Dr. Trimble’s Hygiene for Babies, the Browne Agency keybook. Page eight, line four, word one gave him what. Page two, line twelve, word five was if. Laboriously, the detective leafed back and forth, broke down the code.

The deciphered message read: What if anything are you accomplishing — you’re not on a vacation.

McGavock purpled. He grabbed the book till the veins stood out on his wrist. He drew back his arm to dash the volume against the wall, froze, grinned. He uncapped his fountain pen, settled down and filled out an answer.

It took him twenty minutes to get it the way he wanted it. The final draft said: Page one seventeen, paragraph three, in toto.

Paragraph three on page one hundred seventeen of Dr. Trimble’s Hygiene for Babies said: Keep your nasal passages clean!

He left the wire with the kid at the desk with the injunction that he get it off immediately — and headed for the Bartonville garage. He wanted to rent a car and take a look at what was left of Fern Springs.

Sheriff Steve Robley was lounging beneath the shady marquee of the Magnolia Drugstore. He uncrossed his ankles, picked a short cigarette stub out of an ivory holder, put the holder in a little velvet-lined case. “Luther McGavock!” He saluted the detective. “The Man of Forty Faces.”

McGavock came to a halt, squinted. “What’s the rib, Sheriff?”

Robley gave him a quick, friendly grin. “You’ve really got this town on its ear. They’ve been comparing notes on you. I’ve had a dozen warnings about you. To Cal Bradley you’re representing a mythical celery king named Boggs. Malcom Jarrell thinks he’s your client. You tell Maldron and myself that you’re representing some brokers in Cleveland. The clerk at Jones’ hardware store tells me that you bought a compass from him and that you are not McGavock at all but a man named, singularly, Lester Hodges.” The sheriff’s lips quirked in a boyish smile but the skin about his eyes was tight. “Furthermore and furthermore. That ‘seek the bones’ message on Hal Maldron’s desk blotter is just a little too good to be true. It makes me uneasy. I’ve put a call through to your agency in Memphis to check it but can’t seem to get any satisfactory response. They must have the letter on file — if such a letter exists.”

“Of course they have,” McGavock declared. “That letter’s going to clear up this case.”

“That’s my car yonder by the watering trough.” The sheriff pointed lazily to a low, tan job bright with metalwork. “I was just pondering a trip out to the old resort. I’d like a little company. Think I could shanghai you into going along?”

McGavock frowned. “Don’t pressure me. I got a schedule that’s swamping me.” He considered. “O.K.,” he agreed. “If we can get back before suppertime.”

The drive deep into the hills was rough and tiresome. Just out of town they struck the sloping red clay road and started their winding climb. Through a gap in the foliage, they could glimpse the village. It lay in the dank liquid-green of the bottoms, its buildings like tiny matchboxes. Main Street seemed one long, rambling shed. McGavock made out the red-painted cotton compress, court square and — in the distance — the rickety wooden trestle curving above the cut with its long, spindly supports. The trestle by Hodges’ shanty where his attacker had opened on him with shotgun slugs... Great oaks closed about them and the picture was gone.

The high ridge caught the hot sun’s rays, illuminating the tree shafts with preternatural clearness. The earth was brassy, scorched.

They turned from the pike, followed an indistinct trace of wagon ruts — and then, abruptly, it was cool, gray shadow. They were in the pine country.

Sheriff Robley stopped his car at a fork in the trail. “That’s Devil’s Elbow. Where Wainwright’s hat and wallet were found. Shall we get out?”

McGavock glanced at the sink hole. It was a vile, grassy bog, saucer-shaped, bordered by dense hazel bushes and speckled with the sickly pastel blooms of wild orchids. “There’s nothing here for us,” he remarked. “Wainwright never saw this place.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Steve Robley agreed grudgingly. “It’s the old hotel that holds the clues I’m after.”

“Then you’ll have to sift the ashes,” McGavock gibed. “It’s been torched.”

The sheriff listened attentively while McGavock told him about Asie Tenniman’s report. “So we drove out here for the trip! This is another of your tricks! What’s behind it?”

McGavock said: “I’ve got a hunch. Play along with me — I think we can turn up something interesting.”

The old resort, deep in a bowl of giant pines, was a shambles of flaming timbers. It was as if some giant hand had caught up the burning building, crushed it to splintered wreckage, and had dropped it, jackstraw fashion, to a blazing inferno. They could hear the vicious crackle and snap of the tinder-dry joists long before they turned into the little hollow.

The heat was searing, terrific.

“What are you thinking?” McGavock asked.

“I’m thinking the same thing you are,” the young man answered calmly. “If this fire’s been going on since daybreak I’ll eat a box of .38s. The building’s been exploded — and I should say within the last twenty minutes.”

McGavock pointed to a blurred tire tread in the soft ground. “That’s not a bear track. Our killer’s been here, done his little chore — and gone.”

The dapper sheriff was nettled. “We’ll jusk ask a few questions of that hillman’s wife, Mrs. Tenniman, who saw the building burn at daybreak. It looks like connivance.”

“Mrs. Tenniman can wait.” McGavock scowled, surveyed the surroundings with moody concentration. “Wainwright was killed in the hotel. There was a lawn party going on, a big fiesta out front. He signed up with Bradley and retired to his room. He’d been there a few minutes when somebody, another guest, knocked on his door, lured him into this guest’s room and knocked him off. It’s an old pattern, it’s been done dozens of times before.”

“It’s very possible.”

“I’m telling you that’s what happened. The killer then went to Wainwright’s room, got his cowhide satchel with the seventy grand and took it back with him to his room. Now listen to this, because the time’s going to come when I want you to remember it: the murderer pilfered the satchel, pried up a couple of planks in the floor and hid it there.”

“I don’t see—”

“You will. It worked so well that time that he tried it later. And that’s how we’re going to catch him.”

Steve Robley said suavely: “Well, we’ve got the body in our room, what are we going to do with it?”

“We’re going to wait until about eleven thirty, when the lawn party’s in full swing, and then we’re going to lug it out a side door and dispose of it.” McGavock added casually: “You don’t happen to have a shovel on you?”

Steve Robley smiled. “Yes, I have. There’s one in the car. I came prepared for almost any contingency. Don’t look surprised.” He walked away, returned with the two short-handled spades. “This is going to be pretty hopeless, isn’t it? Where do we start?”

“We don’t dig until we reason it out,” McGavock declared. His words sounded silly to him. “Let’s get the lay of the land, let’s prowl.”

The ferny springs, from which the resort had gotten its name, were halfway up the hillside. They lay in a grotto of fetid fronds — back beneath an overhang of black wet rock. There were seven of them and they drained into a silty pool where a rusty iron pipe carried their curative waters down the slope to an ornate pagoda-like bath-house.

McGavock leaned over the pool, peered into its scummy, yellowish depths. “And this stuff was supposed to be healthy! Yow!”

“He didn’t toss the body in there,” the sheriff said dryly. “That water was in constant use at the time. I don’t see any bones. Do you?”

“No,” McGavock answered. “But we will. Hold your horses.”

At one side of the pool, far under the shelving overhang, a V trough had been cut in the limestone at the rim to check the overflow. A steady stream of water poured from this trough, struck a slab of shale and flattened out to a tiny brook which meandered down the bank in a little pebbled channel. McGavock began to whistle. He whistled “The Letter Edged in Black.” He raised an impudent eyebrow at the young sheriff. “Just like Attila! I’ll give you odds.”

Robley showed wavering signs of temper. “Don’t be cryptic. This thing is getting me down.”

McGavock declared: “It has to be so. Our man’s an engineer. Everything he does shows balanced planning.”

He lifted the slab of shale from the brook, jammed it up against the drain trough in such a way that it diverted the overflow from the pool. A new runlet angled off down the hillside. Except for a few shallow puddles, the brookbed went dry.

“Get to work,” McGavock ordered. “We dig in this dry channel.” He cleaned a handful of tangled watercress from the ravine, thrust his spade blade into the gravelly earth.

“I’ll start part-way down,” the sheriff said, “and work up towards you.” He disappeared down the slope in the brushy shrubbery.

Ten minutes later the sheriff’s loud, clear voice called out excitedly: “By golly! Luther, I’ve found it!”

McGavock grinned at the young man’s unconscious intimacy. “You’ve found what, Steven?”

“I’ve found the skull!” He sounded perplexed. “Wainwright must have been a midget. This looks like a child’s skull.”

“If you’re not satisfied with your skull,” McGavock yelled back, “come up and pick one from me. I’ve found three.”

In a grisly hour they excavated the bones and skulls of six bodies. Two children and four adults. They laid the macabre relics on the marsh grass. Sheriff Robley was thunderstruck, nauseated. “A graveyard,” he whispered hollowly. “A ghastly funeral trench! What sort of charnel work went on here? I’ll have half the town in my cells as soon as I return! It makes me dizzy. I can’t seem to make heads or tails—”

“Charnel work is right,” McGavock agreed gravely. “I was afraid of something like this.” He looked old, cruel. “But I’ve got our boy in the bag. Meet me at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight about eight and we’ll go to town.” He scraped the sandy loam from his shovel, started for the car. “Let’s chat a bit with that south neighbor — Mr. Tenniman.”

The ancient two-room cabin, with its log doorstep and its pack of yelping fox dogs, nestled at the turn of the trail. It was almost concealed by the waxy, swooping branches of aromatic pine. A wizened old woman, barefooted and smoking a juicy-looking pipe, sat in the runway. She pretended not to notice them as they approached.

The sheriff took off his hat. “Good evening, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Asie Tenniman?”

“I hain’t her sister.”

“I understand that at sun-up this morning you heard an explosion at the old hotel and that a few moments later you saw the sky redden as the building caught fire?”

The old woman chewed her pipe stem.

“I’m Steve Robley,” the sheriff said placatingly. “Don’t be afraid to talk to me. You probably knew my father. We mean you no harm. We understand—”

“You understand! You understand! Who-all’s bin a-tellin’ y’all these tales?”

The sheriff answered complacently: “Your husband, Asie.”

The old woman said sweetly: “Now hain’t that a marvel? If you was any sheriff at all you’d know your county. I’m a widow-woman. Asie’s bin dead and gone three year now. The big-pox takened him.”

There was a flustered silence.

McGavock put in his oar. “You tell us you’re a widow. Those look to me like mighty fine fox hounds. Do you hunt foxes?”

The old dame went into a frenzy of rage. “Yes, by daddy! I hunt fox and I hunt deer and I hunt bear. And I got me a thirty-thirty inside that can roll you up like a cigarette paper. And if you fellers don’t quit pesterin’ me and git gone I’ll shore haul ’er out!”

In the car, on the way back to town, the sheriff said: “The man that gave that false report to Bennett was an impostor. What did he look like?”

“He had a plaid cotton shirt and a flashy brass-studded belt. He was about eighteen years old. Do you make him?”

“I think I do. He’s a character — and a bad one — from over in the Hostetter’s Store neighborhood. How he got into the picture, I couldn’t tell you. Maldron’s defended him time and again — but that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course not.”

There was an awkward interval.

The sheriff changed the subject. “Back there, before we started to dig, you said something about Attila. What did you mean?”

“Attila the Hun,” McGavock explained. “That was the way his brother tribesmen buried him. They wanted to hide his body so they dammed a stream, buried him, and then turned the water back in its channel. I wonder how many anonymous killers have done it since!”

The sheriff parked behind the courthouse. “Promise me this,” McGavock said earnestly as they separated. “Promise me you’ll do nothing stringent until you hear what I have to say at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight. Be there on the dot — and bring your buddy Hal Maldron.”

The sheriff was hesitant. “It’s mighty irregular—”

McGavock soothed him. “If it’s the credit you’re worrying about — don’t! I don’t want any headlines. All I want is this slayer.”

That did the trick. Robley smiled. “I wasn’t thinking of headlines but if you put it that way, it’s mighty fine of you. I’ll be seeing you.”

The detective had an early supper at the Bradley House. Its lord and master was nowhere to be seen. But the boy in the alpaca coat was in a talkative mood. “A fellow was a-saying you’re a detective,” he observed. “You and Steve Robley been out all evening, ain’t you? Fellow was a-saying y’all are teamed up to ketch you’uns a badman.”

McGavock grabbed the boy’s wrist, punched his hand in the inkwell, slapped it on a piece of paper. He gave the brat a terrible leer. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “I’m not passing up anybody. I’ll just send these up to Nashville and—” He paused, studied the paralyzed clerk thoughtfully. “Maybe you’d like to turn state’s evidence?”

“But I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

“The heck you don’t. Where’s Cal Bradley?”

The adolescent licked his lips. “He’s out in the country somewhere training a bitch pointer.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Why all the secrecy?”

“I swear I couldn’t tell you. He threatened me not to. That’s all I rightly know.”

“If you see him before I do,” McGavock ground out, “you tell him the sheriff said he’s to show up at Malcom Jarrell’s at eight.”

He was dog tired. He rubbed his unshaven chin, knew that a bath and shave would freshen him, but decided to wait a little. In a far corner of the lobby — back in a sort of alcove — he could make out the outlines of a couple of comfortable-looking chairs in the half gloom. He sauntered over, sank down into cool, deep-cushioned leather and closed his eyes. He was half-asleep — thinking about that little ball of gray fur beneath the tile in Malcom Jarrell’s hearth — when he heard footsteps advancing toward him.

Laurel Bennett burst out: “I have to see you. Thank goodness I’ve found you—” She was dressed as she had been that morning: baggy sweater and worn riding breeches. There was a disheveled, dramatic rumple to her hair.

“You haunt me,” McGavock grated. “It’s not right. You’re a married woman. What now?”

“I have to confess,” she said demurely. “I storied to you this morning. I didn’t find any hammer. I just wanted to study your psychological reactions. When I was at college I wrote my thesis on—”

“Sure, sure.” McGavock yawned. “Some other time, please!”

She ground her heel on the floor. “Where I come from,” she stormed, “people pay me the proper respect.”

“If they don’t they get horse-whipped, eh?”

She went suddenly docile. Her somber eyes fastened themselves on him, intent and warm. “What makes you so attractive?”

McGavock kicked out a chair. “Sit down. What’s all the bedlam about this time?”

“This. I’ve just been consulting with my attorney, Mr. Maldron. We want to retain you. Not through your agency, you understand, but on sort of a freelance job. We’re so impressed with your energy and capability that—”

“That what?”

“Well, it’s this way. I’m just a young girl. Gil came down to Louisiana and married me before I realized what was happening. Swept me off my feet and brought me back here with him. Now I’m beginning to regret it.”

“How so?”

“My husband doesn’t love me. He makes big withdrawals from our account and sends them to Paducah. He’s keeping another woman up there. On my money!”

“Think of that!” McGavock snorted. “You overrun yourself, my child. Last night it was that Gil was gambling his dough away — now it’s a new twist.”

“You must believe me,” she pleaded. “I’m sure I’m right. Hal, Mr. Maldron, says it’s quite possible.”

“How do I come in?”

“We want you to go up to Paducah right away and browse around. We want you to trace this woman down and get information on her. You can name your own salary!”

“It sounds highly attractive,” McGavock decided. “But I’d like a couple of weeks to think it over.” He ogled her. “I’ll have to write my congressman.” He called to her as she strode away. “Be at Jarrell’s tonight at eight. The sheriff’s orders — and bring your husband.”

He sat there for perhaps five minutes, in a glow of pleasure at her anger, and then, on impulse, got to his feet and walked diagonally across the lobby — towards the rear. There was a door just beyond the desk which aroused his curiosity.

He turned the knob, pushed open the panel and stepped out into a small, enclosed court.

The little space, paved with brick and fenced on three sides with rotting eight-foot planks, appeared to be the hotel dump. Rusty bath tubs, broken crockery lay scattered in trashy litter. A wooden gate with a shoestring latch, inset in the fence by the alley, led down a short flight of stone stairs to an arch of brick. The entrance to an old cellar which lay behind the building’s foundations.

McGavock descended the stone stairs, walked warily into the musty blackness. Just inside the arch, he stopped, got out his pencil flash. It was a “plunder room,” a storage place for broken furniture.

He flicked his light in a swinging survey, across the great hand-hewn beams above his head, about the loamy, crumbling walls. Then, with the mathematical precision of a hawk circling for a field mouse, he crossed the floor with his beam, began a painstaking, clockwise examination of the cellar’s cluttered contents.

He felt, knew, that he was in the presence of death.

His light indexed the hodgepodge: chests and highboys, cobwebbed and battered; rolls of rugs and matting disintegrating in the yeasty dampness.

From a frayed, red silk settee — in the heart of the untidy jumble — the corpse of Cal Bradley watched him with popping, lifeless eyes.

McGavock clicked his tongue, took a quick step forward. The hotel man’s hair was a bloody spongy mass. “Our man likes hammers,” McGavock thought. “And he’s learning to get along without nails. This is a ball-peen job.” He inspected the victim without the slightest twinge of sympathy.

Bradley had been dead for at least six hours. In death, the man’s real nature showed itself. His puffy, spiderish face was grooved in lines of greed and malice. McGavock turned away in disgust.

On the earthen floor beside the settee was a granite washbowl full of gasoline. In the center of the bowl was a paving brick. On the brick, its base just awash with the gasoline, was a china teacup of gun powder. A new plumber’s candle was thrust into the cup of powder.

The nape of McGavock’s neck crawled. “He was coming back tonight to give it the works! When everyone was asleep. He’s willing to burn down half the town. A fire here and all of Main Street goes like excelsior. And, according to his plan, I’m upstairs sawing wood.”

The detective pocketed the candle, dismantled the apparatus. He dissipated the powder about the ground, carried the gasoline out into the courtyard and poured it on the paving bricks. “It’s hardly likely he’ll be back before dark — and I’ll have him by then.” McGavock frowned. “I hope.”

The pimpled clerk was squatting behind the desk, his ear glued to the radio. A program was just signing off. “... How will Kent escape from the cannibals? Who is the mysterious little man with the blow-gun? Will Professor Lamphert discover the chemical which can unpetrify a human being? Listen tomorrow, same station, same hour.”

“Exciting, eh?” McGavock made a comical arch of his eyebrows.

The kid nodded. McGavock said: “Give me my key and the house sponge. I’m going to my room and take a bath.”

“We don’t have no house sponge. You’re supposed to use your wash cloth.”

“Skip it.”

McGavock’s room had entertained a caller.

All the bedclothes had been torn from the bed, thrown on the floor. The mattress had been ripped in vicious slashes, its cotton batting pulled out in handfuls. His Gladstone had been dumped on the carpet, there was a muddy footprint on his purple sateen pajamas. The tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement was gone.

The detective took in the chaos in cold, seething rage.

The final shock was waiting for him at the washstand.

Four black, lumpish objects lay on the flower-embroidered face towel. At first he thought they were potatoes. Like a kick in the stomach, it came to him what they were: rattlesnake heads. Meaty, evil-looking things, severed just back of the jaw.

“This cinches it,” McGavock decided. “This is the lad that touched off Fern Springs. The footprint on the pajamas — that’s where he got wet shoes. And that’s where the rattlesnakes came from, too.”

He slid a slip of paper from under the ugly things. A note, in the same script as that he had received the night before, and also on hotel stationery, said: These vermin got in my way. You see what happened to them. God be with you.

McGavock considered. “He’s scared. He’s blown his top. He’s mouthing threats. From now on we’d better watch our step — he’s hysterical.”

Fatigue disappeared with the first splash of cold water. He bathed to the waist, gave himself a brisk rubbing and selected the least crumpled of his shirts from the disorder on the floor. A shave, twice over, finished the job in short order.

He was all set to wrap this business up.

Chapter Five Murder Spa

By the time McGavock hit the sidewalk the air was breathless — sultry. There was the electric threat of a summer storm about to break loose. In the southwest sky, above the hillcrests, smoky thunderheads were gathering in a diaphanous haze. Even the hound dogs had vanished from the rutted road. The few mules left at hitching posts, their ears flat against their necks, stood stark and fearful in anticipation of the coming squall. McGavock didn’t like it. Rain would bring an early nightfall and he was playing against darkness.

Lawyer Maldron lurked in the doorway of his office. The detective had the sensation that he’d been waiting there a long time for McGavock to pass.

He was a different lad from the one that McGavock had quarreled with last night. Somehow, in twenty-four hours, the attorney’s cruel ego had withered almost to the vanishing point. “Good evening, sir.” He was downright servile. “Could I speak with you a second?”

McGavock asked sarcastically: “What’s the matter with the horseshoe-nail ring? Don’t tell me you’ve given up window rapping?”

Maldron forced a cavernous laugh. “I don’t rap for my friends, it’s not polite.” He threw a loop in his lower lip, screwed up his face. “That note on my blotter. You wrote it, didn’t you? It was a joke?”

“I wrote it,” McGavock said genially. “But it wasn’t a joke.”

Maldron was hugely pleased. “You admit it? Would you mind informing the sheriff? He’s been after me—”

McGavock jeered. “Amnesia has come over me. I don’t have the slightest idea what we’re talking about.” He asked sharply: “In the old days, back when Fern Springs was doing a rush business, how did the out-of-county guests get there? It’s a long walk for gentlefolk.”

Maldron was perplexed at the question. “They didn’t walk, of course. Most of the guests were from right here in Bartonville. Those from out of the county came by train. There was a junction about eight miles from the resort. A surrey was sent out for them. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.” McGavock turned up his coat collar. A sudden spray of raindrops, a premature warning of the storm on the way, whipped down the sidewalk in a swirl of tiny silver crowns.

The sheriff was not in his office at the courthouse. A turnkey greeted McGavock warmly. “Steve’s done got Buck.”

“Pardon?”

“I’m a-sayin’ Stevie’s done picked up Buck. He won’t talk, though. Stevie says, should you drop in, for you to go back and make a try at him.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s at the end of the cell block.”

McGavock said speculatively: “O.K. I’ll see what I can do.”

Buck was the phoney Asie Tenniman, the mountain boy with the plaid shirt and brass-studded belt. He was stretched full length on his bunk, reading a Sunday school paper. Every few minutes he’d take a glass jar of snuff from his pocket and rub a pinch of the powder into his gums. He looked at McGavock with glassy eyes, as though the detective were an unpleasant figment of his imagination. “You might’s well leave me be. I hain’t got nary a thing to say.”

McGavock became chummy. “What you reading, Buck?”

“This-here paper was here when I come in. I’m a-whilin’ away the time till Hal Maldron gits over to see me. You fellers’ll be sorry then. I’m fixin’ to sue y’all—”

The detective listened amiably. “But you haven’t answered my question. What are you reading? It looks like a Sunday school paper.”

The mountain boy said smugly: “That’s what it is. It’s a Bible paper. I’m reading a piece about how a lady preacher lived forty year amongst the Eskimos and spread the word of—”

McGavock took a little red leather book from his inside pocket. He leafed through it with great concentration, selected a page, tore it from the book and flipped it through the bars of the cell to the floor. “When you finish up the lady preacher you might start on that. It’s a copy of the state arson laws.”

“Arson laws?”

“That’s right. You threw Bennett and me off the trail while somebody rushed out and torched the old hotel. You’re as guilty as the man that held the match. I’ve just been in consultation with Mrs. Bennett and she says it’s the pen for the lot of you.”

The mountain boy was thoughtful. “I’ll make you a swap. I’ll tell you what I know — if you’ll promise to have Maldron scorch over and git me out of this.”

“I’m not in a position to make such a trade. This is worse than arson — it’s murder!”

The corridor and the cell block were growing dark. The boy looked out the small window at the smudgy clouds heaping themselves around the hilltops. “I think I been foxed,” he said woodenly. “This-here was supposed to be a prank. I’m shootin’ me a game of nine ball down to the Shamrock when Gussie says I’m wanted on the phone. It’s a funny voice. It sounds like a woman tryin’ to talk like a man — or maybe a man tryin’ to talk like a woman, it’s hard to place. Anyways, this voice says for me to go to Bennett and tell him about the fire — like I did. I was to go to Bennett’s tonight at ten o’clock and Mrs. Bennett herself was to pay me ten bucks. I don’t know anythin’ about any murder and till the sheriff picked me up I didn’t know that Fern Springs had really been burned. I’m a good boy. I’m deacon back in the settlement where I come from. I tithe, I eschew the ways of evil, like it sayeth—”

McGavock tossed him a crumpled package of cigarettes. “You don’t know it but you’re a lucky kid. Stay right where you are. The streets aren’t safe for you tonight.”

The first deep growls of thunder were bumbling across the opaque heavens as McGavock strode down the magnolia avenue of the Bennett mansion. The lawn shrubs were swaying to the pressure of the wind, showing the undersides of their leaves in silvery glitters. The great white mansion was a sulphur yellow beneath the racing storm clouds. Gil Bennett, in his singlet, wearing whipcord slacks and buckled sandals, was on the side lawn. His sparse hair, licked by the oncoming gale, lay plastered to his shiny pate. He was batting a wooden ball over the bent-grass sward, immersed in a solo game of croquet. He swung the mallet with a limp left hand; in his right he carried a jumbo sixteen-ounce mint julep. He waved to McGavock, beckoned him in.

“At it again, eh?” the detective observed dryly. He eyed the pint-sized goblet. “Tomorrow it gives prairie oysters. Where’s Mrs. Bennett?”

“She’s at Malcom’s.” He looked unhappy. “I’m supposed to join her there.” He belched. “Ole Malcom, the man of nature, with his six eyes. That man gives me the creeps. I’m getting fortified.” He walked to a wicker lawn chair, picked up a blazer jacket, slipped into it. “I thought you told me you weren’t working for Hal and Laurel?”

“I’m not. They’ve been tempting me but I haven’t succumbed. While I’ve got you alone I’d like to learn a little more about that divorce your wife is preparing to hang on you.”

“You mean what I said last night? Forget it. It was just an alcoholic hallucination.”

“That’s what I thought at the time, it sounded like a drunken sympathy gag. Now, I’m not so sure. Do you want to come in on this with me or not? There’s more at stake than meets the eye. There are wheels within wheels — if you get what I mean.”

Bennett gave his head a blunt, decisive shake. “No thanks. You’re a pal, and I appreciate it, but I’m a family man and I handle my own affairs.”

“Your wife says you are sending money to Paducah. Where did she get that idea?”

“I gave it to her. She’s been prying around, pumping me in a delicate offhand way about that money I’ve been withdrawing. I told her that I was footing the bills for a kid in finishing school up in Paducah. It wasn’t very nice of me but she had me wacky with her nagging. Boy, did she show her claws!”

McGavock said: “That I can believe. Where are you sending this money, by the way?”

Bennett grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to know! I’m sending it to a big bank in a little town on the West Coast. More than that, I’m afraid I can’t tell you. It’s perfectly legal, you understand. It’s my own money.” He seemed uneasy. “Why the gathering at Malcom’s? What’s Old Spooky trying to pull?”

McGavock laughed. “Time will tell. It’s not Jarrell’s party — it’s mine. The sheriff and I are going to saw this business off. It’s the finale.”

“Wheels within wheels is right!” Bennett studied his fingerails. “You’ve got your little scheme, Maldron’s got his — and I’ve got mine. And ten to one, all our schemes, all our plans, are perfectly transparent to Malcom Jarrell. Well, as you say, time will tell. Let’s go.”

The storm hit them a half-block from Jarrell’s cottage. It opened up with a deafening clap and a raging sluice of water. Lightning flayed the black sky. They broke into a lope and, sheltered by the arching maples, managed to make Jarrell’s front porch.

Laurel let them in. She was wearing her jet lace semi-formal with the cameo at her throat. She seemed unnaturally stiff, apprehensive. Bennett brushed past her, towards the study. The girl stayed McGavock with an arresting hand. “I’ve discovered the most horrible thing,” she whispered.

“Another hammer?”

She flared. “You’re impossible!”

McGavock said quietly: “I can make a good guess as to what’s disturbing you. You found the headless bodies of four rattlesnakes, didn’t you? Well, dismiss them from your mind. They’re a plant. I’ve got the heads, I knew the bodies would turn up somewhere.”

“It’s too repulsive! They’re back in the kitchen — in Malcom’s bread box.”

“He’s a naturalist, isn’t he? Maybe he goes for gamy food. They’re quite tasty if you pretend you’re eating crab.”

There was an atmosphere of subdued hostility in the study. The naturalist, his four-lensed spectacles hooked on his monstrous head, was busy sorting and mounting butterflies. He hardly seemed aware of the fact that he had company. Gil Bennett, his cheeks and ears flushed with open antagonism, lolled in the window bay. Behind him, the squall lashed the leaded panes in cracking gusts.

“Where’s the sheriff?” McGavock asked.

“He’ll be here later,” Laurel said.

“That’s just as good,” McGavock commented. “Maybe we can thrash out a little domestic difficulty before he arrives. Are you planning to divorce your husband?”

Jarrell snapped an iridescent azure wing, fretted. “You have no idea how brittle these things are. I’ve ruined three since you people have been here. You distract me. Can’t you go away and come back tomorrow?”

“No, you don’t,” Bennett said firmly. “Not in this downpour. Where’s your southern hospitality, sir?” He addressed McGavock. “You’ve been here a day, now. What have you found out?”

“Plenty,” McGavock answered. A bell in the hall clanged. Sheriff Robley, in a swanky gabardine raincoat, walked in on them. “Where’s Bad-Tooth Maldron?” McGavock demanded.

“I don’t know.” The sheriff was annoyed. “I couldn’t find him. I left messages for him all over town.”

“There are a few things I’d like to run over,” McGavock remarked. “Just to help us get organized. This case breaks itself into two installments: the old hotel murders, thirty years or so ago, and the present situation. You understand, this isn’t what is generally known as a murder chain. It’s just sort of a double outburst. The second, or contemporary, affair dovetails into the older business.”

Sheriff Robley’s calm eyes held him as he spoke. “I’m sure you’re right, Luther. But it’s the current mess that concerns me. Who killed Lester Hodges?”

McGavock ignored him. “Put it this way: why was Hodges killed? Hodges was working for a rascal. The old eccentric was employed to search Fern Springs for the cowhide satchel in which Wainwright carried his seventy grand. This rascal had long suspected that the absconder had been knocked off. He reasoned that the satchel lay hidden beneath the flooring of one of the rooms. He’d been clerk at the time—”

Jarrell said petulantly: “Why the mysterious circumlocution? If Cal Bradley is the rascal you’re talking about, why don’t you say so!”

“Check. Names it is.” McGavock watched the naturalist’s nimble fingers in the lamplight. “Cal Bradley, as room clerk of the old inn, knew who had which room. Find the satchel under a certain floor and he’d know for certain who had slain Wainwright. He hired Lester Hodges to locate this satchel. Hodges did his searching by means of a rat.”

“Did he,” Bennett asked, “find the satchel?”

“No. But he made the killer nervous. This prowling, this attempting to uncover an old crime, got our murderer jumpy. He got him a magnetized hammer and a two-inch roofing nail and knocked off Lester Hodges. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear enough,” the sheriff agreed. “But it’s highly speculative. Why isn’t Cal Bradley here with us tonight? It appears he holds the key.”

“He’s absent through no choice of his own,” McGavock retorted. “He’s shuffled off this mortal coil. He’s in the cellar of the Bradley House — stiffer than a briar root—”

There was a gasping silence. Laurel Bennett murmured: “We’re doomed — all of us! There’s an unholy hand at work among us. What have we done to merit such a fate?” She flung out her arms, crossed her hands piously over her heart.

McGavock barked angrily: “Won’t you shut up! This is no time to mug for a spotlight.” The storm outside dropped with a cleaver-like slash, there was only the low whine of the wind.

The girl cried dramatically: “Why isn’t Hal here? Have they slain him, too?”

An oily voice from the doorway said: “Not me, Mrs. Bennett. Hal Maldron can take care of himself.” The attorney barged his gelatinous body into the center of the assembly. “Sorry, Malcom, to pop in this way. Guess you didn’t hear me ring. Got your message, Sheriff. Hustled right over. I was home peeling a bunion off my — But you folks aren’t interested in that.”

“You’re all bunion, if you ask me,” McGavock observed. “Quiet, please. Where was I? Oh, yes. Now let me tell you about Fern Springs. In its heyday it was a fashionable resort, no doubt very popular. It was more than that — it was a murder nest. I don’t mean that the management was involved. I mean that somebody saw certain possibilities and summer after summer turned them to his bloody advantage. Jarrell, I’d like to ask you this question: who carted the guests to and from the railroad junction?”

The naturalist considered. “As I remember it we had a station wagon but we rarely used it. Usually the incumbent guests would take the out-of-county people to the railroad in their personal carriages. We were all one big family.”

“Among you regulars,” McGavock said, “there was a man who plied a terrible trade. He struck up friendships with wealthy guests. In weeks of intimacy he learned about his victims’ contacts, learned who could be disposed of safely. Lonely men and women came to Fern Springs. Many of them would have no one to miss them. When their stay was up, he wheeled his buggy from the stables, gallantly offered to drive them to the junction.” He paused.

“That, of course, was their last ride. He murdered them around the first bend — for their travel money. Men, women and children.”

“It doesn’t seem practical,” Maldron argued. “Murder for a pittance.”

“Pittance, says you. Wealthy vacationists went well-heeled in those days. I’ll wager he cleared two thousand in a season.”

“But Wainwright—” the sheriff put in.

“He broke his routine for Wainwright. And well he might! It netted him a fortune. He slew Wainwright the night he registered. He was afraid to wait, afraid that the absconder might slip from his clutches. Wainwright was his blunder. That’s how I found out who he was.”

“I knew who he was all along,” Malcom Jarrell chirped up. “I saw him drag Hodges’ corpse into my yard.”

“You keep out of this,” McGavock said. “When we need your comment, we’ll ask for it. To continue the story. Hodges, working for Bradley, snooped around until he got himself eliminated. I appeared on the scene. Somehow, probably through Bradley’s loose gossip, the killer learned a city detective was after him. He lay in wait for me at Hodges’ shanty and threw a handful of number four shot at me, sent me a warning note at the Bradley house. I didn’t scare. The next day he changed his tactics. He sent a hillboy named Buck around to Bennett’s — when I was present — to say that Fern Springs had burned at dawn and then hightailed out to fire the building. Actually, there was no evidence in the old building, it had been long since removed, but he had heard about newfangled methods of detection and didn’t know but what maybe a fluoroscope or something would turn up evidence.”

“By the way,” the sheriff remarked. “I’ve got Buck in the hoosegow. So far he won’t talk—”

“He doesn’t need to. He talked a little to me — and that is enough. Well, our killer by now is as busy as a squirrel in a hickory tree. He fires the old building, hunts out some rattlesnakes — those rocky ledges must teem with the vipers — zips back to town. He lures Bradley into the cellar, bashes in his head and sets a firetrap. He leaves the snake heads in my room with a final threatening note, scampers over here to Jarrell’s and stashes the snake bodies in Malcom’s bread box. He’s really putting out steam — he’s fighting for his life.”

Maldron cleared his throat heavily. “It all comes back to me now... How well do I recall that summer in nineteen nine. Every insignificant detail stands out crystal clear. Gil Bennett flouncing around among the ladies, taking them hither and yon in his yellow-spoked trap and livery stable mare. Gil was shabby in those days—”

Jarrell said: “Hal, the time comes when I must speak the truth. You’re my choice.”

Bennett spoke quietly. “And you, Malcom, are mine.”

The sheriff narrowed his eyes. McGavock looked cynical, happy.

“The thing that gives it away,” Bennett explained, “is the rattlesnake theme. You’d know where to go to catch them and how to do it. You couldn’t get Hal Maldron within ten yards of one. But there’s much more to it than that. You were manager at the time of Wainwright’s disappearance. You were no doubt right there at the desk when Cal Bradley signed him in. He looked prosperous, talked with a northern accent, and acted suspicious. You waited a bit, called him to your room and murdered him. Mr. McGavock says that Hodges used a rat in his prowling. Everyone in this town knows that you kept that rat for Hodges. I charge that Hodges was employed by you, that you murdered him on your own lawn and called in this city detective.”

“Such a rigmarole!” Jarrell’s massive head peered about the room. “I’ve no time to indulge in tomfoolery. Clear out, all of you, with your absurdities—”

McGavock said plaintively: “What about me? Doesn’t anybody wish to hear my accusation?”

They stared at him.

“Maldron’s correct. Gil Bennett’s our man!”

“That’s a serious charge,” Steve Robley said gravely. “Is it official?”

“Of course I mean it to be official. He’s a gory killer if you ever saw one.”

Gil said whimsically: “Old pal, you’ve turned on me. And I bet you’ve built up a good case, too.”

“Listen to it,” McGavock whipped out. “And form your own opinion. It was you — old pal — and no one else, who planned and executed this entire massacre. You promoted your murder market at Fern Springs back in nineteen nine and buried your cadavers in the brookbed. You killed Wainwright, took his satchel to your room, looted it and hid it beneath the flooring. Cal Bradley suspected this. He employed the crackpot Hodges to ferret out the evidence. You killed Hodges — it would be simple for a man in the garage business to obtain a magnetized hammer—”

“But you gave me your compass to protect myself against this slayer—”

“You are a sly customer. I was fighting deceit with deceit. As I was saying, you killed Hodges and when I appeared on the scene attacked me. This morning when I visited you at the cotton gin, you saw me coming, grabbed a phone, called the Shamrock poolroom and asked for Buck. You disguised your voice to throw suspicion on your wife. Buck appeared, put across his little act and departed.”

McGavock shook his head. “You made a mistake there, my friend. You may not pay a man for a thirty-mile trip on muleback but you at least thank him. It was a slip — I smelled a rat.”

“I’d like to hear the rest of this tale.” Sheriff Robley was modest.

“The rest of it you know. Buck stages his act and Gil, as soon as I leave, drives out and torches the place. While you and I are out there digging around, he’s back in town beating in Bradley’s skull. He’d planned to lay in wait for Buck when Buck showed up tonight at the Bennett mansion for his pay. With Buck gone, he figured he’d be safe.” The detective smiled harshly at the businessman. “You know, Bennett, you plan well but you talk too much. You gave yourself away a dozen times. When you attempted to arouse my suspicions against Jarrell you said that he had prospered unnaturally. If anyone in this village has prospered unnaturally it’s you, yourself — garage, drugstore, cotton gin. Last night in your car you invented a divorce that your wife was going to slap on you. This morning you realized that I could chase that down and expose it so you flew to Mrs. Bennett and got her excited about an imaginary dream girl you were supporting in Paducah.”

Bennett drawled: “It’s pleasant listening to you orate — but do you have any proof?”

“Scads,” McGavock answered. “Scads. Your gambling at Chunky’s. A ruse to cover your withdrawals: you were paying blackmail to Cal Bradley!”

Bennett was completely relaxed. “The wildest sort of slander, sir.”

McGavock spoke to Laurel. “That baggy pearl-gray sweater you’ve been wearing all day, is it yours?”

She tried to follow him, gave it up. “No. It’s Gil’s — but I like it. It’s so roomy.”

“Gil Bennett!” McGavock’s voice was tight. “You were wearing that sweater when you dragged the body of Les Hodges into Jarrell’s yard. Wisps of brushed-wool came off on the old man’s corduroy. Jarrell saw the whole thing through his bedroom window but was doubtful as to your identity. He came out with a light and combed the gray hairs off before he covered the body with straw. He has that evidence beneath the tile there in the hearth — a little ball of wool. His testimony will hang you—”

Gil Bennett arose and turned his back on them. He stepped into the little bay window and began kicking out the leaded panes.

Hal Maldron seized him by the elbow, pulled him back. Bennett gave his torso a half twist, shot the lawyer through the shoulder and continued his glass smashing.

Sheriff Robley said calmly: “Bennett, you’re not giving me any choice. I’m going to have to kill you.”

Bennett dropped his pistol, advanced dazedly to the sheriff, who snapped on a pair of handcuffs.

“The satchel?” the sheriff asked.

“Bennett has it,” McGavock announced. “Beneath the floor of his office. When I was in Bennett’s office at the cotton gin I gave the floor special attention, dropped my hat, as a matter of fact, to give it a little closer inspection. The boards had been taken up and renailed. You’ll find your satchel there.”

Laurel Bennett burst out: “I’ll never feel comfy in that old gray sweater again. And I loved it so!”

McGavock said sardonically: “But think, babe. You’re married to a homicidal beast, a notorious public character. That means headlines, and reporters and three-column photos. I’ll bet none of your bridesmaids back in Louisiana have done as well as that!”

The girl threw herself into his arms. “You can always see the bright side to everything!”