The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Originally published in Manhunt, Aug. 1960.

Chapter 1

It was about six o’clock of a long summer evening, and Lard Lavino had just brought the suppers over from his café. You probably know how it is with meals in a lot of county jails. The sheriff gets an allotment for feeding the prisoners, so much per meal, and if he’s got an economical wife to prepare them he can usually make a little gravy for himself, honest graft, and no one goes hungry in the process. I don’t happen to have a wife, being a bachelor, and so I had this arrangement with Lard to furnish the meals. On paper he charged me exactly the allowance, payable the first of the month, but we had a little kickback understanding between us, not on paper, and it worked out so that neither of us got rich but both of us made a little.

Sometimes Lard sent the meals over, and sometimes he brought them himself. This evening was one of the times he brought them himself. There were only half a dozen of them, guests of the jail being mighty few at the time, and I was thinking I ought to get off my tail and gather in a few vagrants and minor offenders to build up the food allowance for the month, but it had been too damn hot, and still was, to do a lot of things a man would normally do for his own profit. It made me feel even hotter to look at Lard. He weighs about three hundred pounds, just short of it, and the grease was seeping out of his pores to soak his shirt and make a high sheen on his fat, swarthy face.

“It’s hot,” he said. “God Almighty, Colby, it’s hot!”

“Sure is,” I said. “You bring a plate for me?”

“Well, you didn’t say if you wanted one, but I brought it just in case.”

“Good for you, Lard. Saves me a walk over to the café. What’s it tonight?”

“It’s Thursday, Colby. You know what it is Thursdays.”

“Oh, sure. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and cream gravy. Lard, why the hell don’t you shift the menu around now and then? Chicken fried steak on Wednesday, say, and salmon patties on Thursday.”

“What the hell difference does it make if you eat steak on Wednesday or Thursday?”

“Just a thought, Lard. Just something for a change.”

“Nuts. You want me to peddle the trays?”

“Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”

“Well, you better do it right away. Cream gravy ain’t worth a damn if it gets cold, you know. I’ll send back in about an hour for the things.”

He went out, and I distributed the trays before the cream gravy got cold. It didn’t take long because, like I said, there weren’t many guests — one chicken thief, two habitual violators of the peace, a pair of drunken drivers with ten days each, and a farm laborer doing a year minus GCT for sticking his brother-in-law with a pitch fork. The brother-in-law, though perforated, didn’t die.

After serving the six, I came back to my desk and started in on my own plate. The chicken fried steak wasn’t bad, if you had a sharp knife and your own teeth, but there were lumps in the mashed potatoes, and the cream gravy wasn’t worth a damn, as it turned out, hot or cold or lukewarm, which is what it actually was. I was working up an appropriate reprimand for my partner in petty graft when the patrol car stopped out front and Rudy Squires, one of my deputies, came loping up the long brick walk from the street and into the office. Rudy watches Wyatt Earp and Matt Dillon and does the best he can, but he has a big handicap, and the handicap is, he’s stupid. He’s also my cousin, however, and I make allowances for him. This afternoon he’d gone out into the county on business with Virgil Carpenter, another deputy, but now, coming back, he was alone.

“Where’s Virgil?” I said.

“He’s out at Crawley Bratton’s place,” Rudy said.

“What’s he doing out there?”

“Crawley’s got a big fire out in a field near the creek behind his house. It’s a haystack.”

“The hell it is!”

“That’s right. Virg and me were driving back along the road and saw this fire, so we stopped in Crawley’s drive and went down there. Crawley was there with a couple farmers and three or four kids from the other side of the creek, but there wasn’t much anyone could do unless we’d got some buckets and carried water from the creek. Hell, Colby, you can’t put out a burning haystack with a few buckets of water you’d have to carry thirty yards from a creek.”

“Who said you could?”

“Nobody said it, Colby. I was just explaining why we couldn’t put out the fire.”

“That’s fine, Rudy. I appreciate your explaining these difficult things to me. Now maybe you’d be good enough to explain why the hell a deputy sheriff has to patrol a lousy burning haystack.”

“We just stopped to see if there was anything we could do, Colby.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Virgil.”

“Why he stayed out there, you mean?”

“Now you’re getting it, Rudy. Why did Virgil stay out there?”

“I was coming to that, Colby. It turned out there was a body in the fire. We’d been smelling something and wondering what it was, and it turned out to be this body. Soon as the smoke had thinned and the fire had burned down some, we could see it lying in there. The way I figure it, someone must have put it in there and then started the fire. I don’t figure it likely that anyone would just go to sleep on a haystack and burn to death without ever waking up and getting the hell out of it. Do you, Colby?”

“No, I don’t, Rudy. That’s good thinking. Now here’s a minor point I wish you’d concentrate on. Did you identify the body? I mean, do you know whose it is?”

“Well, you know what happens to something in a fire, Colby. It gets burned up pretty much. I couldn’t swear who it is, and neither could Virg, but it’s a woman, anyhow, and Crawley Bratton says it’s his wife Faye.”

“What makes him think so?”

A guy ought to know his own wife better than anyone else, Colby. That’s what I figure. Soon as we saw her in the fire, Virg rolled her out with a fork one of the farmers had with him, and Crawley got a close look before it made him sick and he had to quit looking. He says it’s Faye, all right. Even if he hadn’t known her anyhow, he says, he’d have known her from the little chain she wore around her left ankle. Crawley’s all busted up about it.”

“Is Faye missing?”

“Now, Colby, if she’s dead she’s bound to be missing. What I mean is, she ain’t around the same as the rest of us.”

“That’s true, Rudy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself. Well, I better get on out there to Crawley’s place, I guess. You stay here and look after the mail, and if Lard Lavino comes back for the supper things, you tell him I said to get the God-damn lumps out of the mashed potatoes next time.”

“Well, that reminds me, Colby. I ain’t had any supper myself, and I’m pretty hungry. Do you mind if I finish yours?”

On my plate, the glob of mashed potatoes, smeared with cold cream gravy, looked like something that had already been eaten. I contained a belch and nodded. It was incredible, I thought, what could sometimes happen to a man in the way of cousins.

“Help yourself,” I said. “Watch your bridgework on that steak.”

In the patrol car, I drove west to Crawley Bratton’s place, about three miles out of town. My watch said almost seven when I got there. Light was draining slowly out of the long dusk, but it would be another hour before the dusk deepened into night. Behind Crawley’s house and barn, far back in a field against the black line of timber along the creek, I could see a small group of men standing in the red glow of what was left of the haystack. Leaving the patrol car in the barnyard, I walked down a long lane between parallel fences of barbed wire and across a pasture into the field, lying fallow, in which the stack had stood.

As I came nearer, I began to pick up the smell, getting stronger and stronger, of charred flesh. Human flesh. Flesh, if it was truly Faye Bratton’s, that would be remembered, if briefly, by more men than Crawley Bratton cared to think about. Virg Carpenter detached himself from the group in the red glow and walked a few steps into the shadows to meet me. Virg was a big guy, hanging over his belt, with a taste for purple shirts and black string ties. He was a pretty good deputy, all in all, and what he wanted more than anything else was to be a pretty good sheriff. I didn’t have any objections, particularly, after I was through with the office.

“We got something big this time, Colby,” he said.

“Rudy said it’s Fay Bratton,” I said.

“That’s who it is. What’s left of her.”

“You sure of it?”

“Crawley says so. Crawley ought to know. There’s one of these little chains around her left ankle. I remember seeing it lots of times myself.”

“Where’s Crawley now?”

“Up at the house. He was all busted up, Colby. I didn’t think it would do any harm to let him go up there.”

“I didn’t see any light in the house when I came by.”

“Maybe he likes to sit in the dark.”

“Maybe. You called the coroner?”

“I told Crawley to call from the house.”

“Good. It’s just routine, anyhow. The bastard can’t diagnose anything but rigor mortis. Where’s the body?”

“Over there on the ground. Just follow your nose. We got a piece of canvas out of Crawley’s barn to cover her with.”

I followed my nose to a dark heap at the edge of a red perimeter. Pulling the canvas back at one end, I stared for a moment at a black blister that might have been the face of Faye Bratton. Reversing ends, I looked at the ankle chain. Like Virg, I had noticed it on her before. Like Virg, like Crawley, like Tom and Dick and Harry. Lots of men had noticed lots of things about Faye. She’d had her share of playing in the hay, so to speak, and now she’d burned in it. Faye in the hay. An appropriate ending after all. A kind of epitaph.

One of seven, the sixth of the litter, an earthy beauty from the time of her tender years, she might have exploited herself to her own great advantage if only she’d had the brains to develop an imagination and a vision. Instead, she had married Crawley Bratton, or Crawley’s half-section of rich land, when she was eighteen and Crawley was twenty-six. To her, fresh off the thin soil of the north part of the county, straying south with hot eyes and swivel hips, Crawley’s fine farm and solid bank account had probably seemed like fabulous spoils. With a little excitement on the side, a man here and a man there, even Crawley himself could be accepted as a necessary part of a bargain. As for Crawley, ordinarily a sharp guy in any kind of deal, it was simply a matter of glands over brains. They had been married about four years ago, and now here they were at the end of their time, a cinder lying in a fallow field and a man alone in an unlighted house.

“It’s Faye, all right,” I said, standing. “I’d better go up and talk to Crawley. Get these other guys out of here, Virg. Send them home. You wait for the coroner. He’ll probably want you to help him decide if she’s dead.”

“Sure, Colby. We ought to have a real doctor, instead of some guy just after a political plum.”

“Well, don’t complain, Virg. We got an undertaker, and that’s next best thing. Even better, maybe, come to think of it. After a doctor says a guy’s dead, he’s finished. There’s still something left for an undertaker to do. Puts it all in one neat little package.”

“Something left for us to do, too, Colby. You got any ideas?”

“Not yet. Nothing to speak of.”

“She was a prowler, Colby. You know that. Kept old Crawley’s guts in the sauce pan all the time. Lots of guys might have done it for one reason or another.”

“Sure, sure. I know that. What I can’t figure is all this hocus pocus here. Why this crazy bonfire?”

“Hell, Colby, that seems plain enough.”

“Does it? Tell me why.”

“Well, damn it, to get rid of the body. At least burn it enough so it maybe couldn’t be recognized.”

“You sound like Rudy now.”

“Rudy? How like Rudy?”

“Stupid.”

I couldn’t see Virg’s face in the dusk, not clearly, but I knew it was getting about the same color as his shirt. Purple, that is. Virg was like that when you gouged him a little. He’d bloat and turn purple. Someday he’ll probably drop dead of apoplexy or something.

“I got a right to my opinion,” he said.

“Sure you have,” I said. “You got a right to be as stupid as you please on your own time, but you got no right to be stupid on county time. Not for pay.”

“You’re so damn smart, Colby, suppose you tell me what’s stupid about it.”

“I’ll try. First place, a hay fire isn’t hot enough to destroy a body. There’d be lots of things left to identify. Second place, the fire could be seen right away from two, three farmhouses. It’d just attract attention to the body instead of getting rid of it. Third place, you got a charred body, you got a certain woman missing. Any idiot could put the two together.”

“Just the same, Colby, someone put the body in the haystack and set the fire. Why?”

“I don’t know. I can’t figure it. I told you I couldn’t.”

“Well, damn it, there’s got to be a reason.”

“Sure, there does. There’s a reason for everything. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out what it is. You talked to all these kibitzers?”

“Yeah. Nobody saw anything. Just the fire blazing up. They all came running from wherever they were, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. They just stood around and watched until the stack burned away enough to show the body. About that time, Rudy and I got here.”

“Be sure to get their names in case we want to talk to them again. I’m going up to see Crawley.”

I went back across the field and the pasture and up the long lane between barbed wire fences into the barnyard. Darkness was gathering and deepening between the barn and the house. There was still no light burning inside the house, but I saw a tiny red eye glowing angrily in the dense darkness of the screened-in back porch, watching me as I crossed the yard. When I drew near, I heard the thin creaking of rockers on the wood floor. Crawley was there alone in the darkness, smoking and rocking and waiting. I went up the steps and took hold of the latch of the screen door.

“Crawley?” I said.

“I’m here,” he said.

“It’s me. Colby Adams.”

“I can see you, Colby. Come on in.”

I went on inside and found another rocker beside the one Crawley was sitting in. Crawley kept on rocking and smoking. He didn’t say anything, still waiting.

“Tough luck, Crawley,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“She wouldn’t do right,” he said. “She kept asking for trouble, and she finally found it. More trouble than she could handle. Maybe I’ll miss her for a while.”

“Chances are she was murdered, Crawley.”

“Chances are. Nothing else occurred to me.”

“You know anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”

“I might have. Lots of times. No one had a better reason.”

“Did you do it, Crawley?”

He sighed in the darkness and laughed softly after the sigh. There didn’t seem to be any bitterness in the successive sounds. They were expressions, I thought, of a black depth of tiredness.

“Not me, Colby. I might have, eventually, but I never got around to it.”

“All right. That disposes of you. How about someone else?”

“You want to play eeny, meeny, miney, mo? I don’t.”

“Maybe we ought to stick to current affairs.”

“Don’t ask me, Colby. I quit trying to keep up quite a while ago.”

“You’re not being much help, Crawley.”

“I’m not sure I want to be. I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t want it to end this way for her, not really, but now that it has, whoever did it, I can’t seem to work up any yen for justice or revenge or anything like that. Probably she deserved what she got.”

“That’s pretty rough on her, Crawley.”

“I don’t think so. Nothing hurts her now. Nothing will help her.”

“You always try to catch a murderer. Especially if you happen to be a cop.”

“I know. You got your job.”

“Sure I have, Crawley, and I’d better get on with it. You willing to tell me what you can?”

“You ask the questions, Colby. I’ll answer.”

“All right. When was the last time you saw Faye alive?”

“This morning. About nine o’clock, I guess. I’d been doing some work around the barn. About that time, about nine, I decided to go repair some fence that’s been needing it for a while. I went into the house and told Faye I was going, and she said all right, that she thought she’d go into town later. I went back to the barn and got a roll of wire and some tools and left. I didn’t come in at noon. I wasn’t hungry. I stayed on the job until after four in the afternoon, and it was close to five when I got back here. Faye wasn’t home, but the car and the truck were both here, and so I assumed someone had come and picked her up. It wasn’t unusual for that to happen. I ate a cold supper by myself and sat here on the porch, right where I’m sitting now, until the fire started down there in the field.”

“Where is this fence you mended?”

“West of here. Over on the section line.”

“Not close to the creek or the field where the fire started?”

“No. A long way. You know where the section line is, Colby.”

“Did Faye tell you where she was going in town?”

“No. She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”

“She didn’t mention anyone picking her up here?”

“Faye hardly ever told me what she planned to do. When she did, she usually lied.”

The lights of a car flashed past the side of the house, picking up the edge of the barn and flooding the lane beyond. The car itself followed, the tired ambulance driven by Emil Coker, undertaker and coroner. It went past the barn and stopped while someone got out and opened the gate to the lane. It went on down the lane and stopped again at the far end while someone got out again and opened the gate to the pasture. It moved on across the pasture, red tail lights bobbing.

I stood up and said, “There goes Emil.”

“Yeah.” His voice was curiously flat. “You’ll want to go down and talk to him, I guess.”

“No. Not tonight. Tomorrow will be soon enough. It isn’t likely Emil will have anything to tell me that I can’t guess.”

“Sure. She’s dead. Someone killed her. You don’t need Emil to tell you.”

I walked over to the screen door and opened it, hesitating before passing through. I thought about saying again that I was sorry, but it didn’t seem to be necessary. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the planes of his face flat and hard in the brief flare. The descending darkness was swollen and throbbing with the sounds of the night — an owl’s cry, a chorus of frogs, the singing of a thousand cicadas.

“Good-night, Crawley,” I said.

“Good-night,” he said.

I turned the patrol car in the yard and drove down the drive to the road and down the road to town.

Chapter 2

I drove along the main drag to the Hotel Bonny, a five story brick building standing tall on a corner. The street, in the slack period between five and eight, was almost deserted. Angling into a parking slot in front of the hotel, I got out and went into the lobby and down a couple of steps into the taproom. The taproom, like the street outside, was idling through the early evening interlude when people were engaged in other places. Hobby Langerham was behind the bar. He was eating a roast beef sandwich, washing it down with Schlitz beer. Hobby was a shrewd guy with sharp eyes, built like one of the kegs he tapped for the customers, and he had been behind the Bonny bar for a dozen years or more. He pulled a long shift, twelve to twelve, opening to closing, and I knew from experience that he generally knew who came and went at approximately what times.

“Hello, Colby,” he said. “How’s the law?”

“Can’t complain,” I said. “Draw me one, Hobby.”

He drew the beer and shoved it across the bar and waved away the two-bit piece I offered in payment. I always offered, and he always waved it away, and I don’t know why we kept going through the routine, unless it was just to keep the record straight.

“Thanks, Hobby,” I said. “This one I need.”

“You got a problem, Colby?”

“Looks like murder. I guess you could call that a problem.”

Hobby sucked in his breath, and his little eyes glittered in the soft light of the room, but he didn’t make a big demonstration out of his reaction. Hobby never did.

“I’d call it a problem, Colby. Anyone I know?”

“Come off, Hobby. You know everybody.”

“Okay. So it’s someone I know. Maybe it’s an official secret or something.”

“Nothing’s secret, official or otherwise, except the name of the one who did it. I wish I could tell you. Was Faye Bratton in here this afternoon, Hobby?”

“You mean it was Faye who got it?”

“That’s right. Faye Bratton.”

“Well, by God, it couldn’t have happened to anyone who tried for it harder. She was made to be murdered, that Faye was.”

“Maybe. I’ve got to take the position that no one is made to be murdered, not even wanton wives. Was she in here, Hobby?”

“Briefly. Fairly early. Alone.”

“How briefly?”

“I didn’t hold a watch on her. Say half an hour. Long enough to take her time drinking a couple of bourbon highballs.”

“How early?”

“When she got here? Let’s see. Not earlier than two. Not later than two-thirty.”

“You say she was alone?”

“That’s what I said. She came alone, she left alone.”

“She meet anyone here?”

“No.”

“She talk with anyone?”

“Sure. Me.”

“No one else?”

“No one. Matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone else here most of the time. Couple of guests of the hotel came in for maybe fifteen minutes. Drank a beer each. I took them to be salesmen. Not regulars, though. I’d never seen them before.”

“Did she say anything about meeting anyone later, after she left here?”

“She said she was going down the street to see Dolly Noble. That’s all.”

“Down to Dolly’s beauty parlor?”

“I took her to mean there. She didn’t say so.”

“That’s all she said about where she intended to go and what she intended to do?”

“That’s all.”

“How did she seem? I mean, did she seem nervous or excited or anything unusual at all?”

“Faye always gave the impression of looking for something or someone. Something or someone for excitement. Like a woman on the prowl. Tending bar, even in a place like this, you learn to know them. You can almost smell them. Nothing unusual about Faye this afternoon, I’d say. Just Faye the way she always was.”

“She talk about anything that seems significant, looking back?”

“I can’t remember anything.” He creased his brow, which ran up and back over the crown of his head, which he shook slowly sidewise. “Just talk, the kind of stuff you pass back and forth across a bar. No name was mentioned except Dolly’s.”

“Faye came in here pretty often, didn’t she?”

“She was in town often. I’d guess she came in here everytime she was in town. She was a good drinker, Faye was. She took bourbon in water with one ice cube. Short on the water. I’ve seen her a little high, but never what I’d call drunk.”

“Was she in the habit of meeting anyone here lately? Any special person, that is?”

“Like a man, you mean?”

“A man will do.”

“There wasn’t any. No one special. No one she was meeting by arrangement, I’ll swear. You know how Faye was, Colby. She never ran from a man if she came across one. If there happened to be one here, she was congenial.”

“I know. It doesn’t help much.”

“Maybe it does. In a negative way. If Faye was involved with a particular guy in a really big way, he’d probably be the one she wouldn’t be congenial with in a public bar. You see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean. You’re real clever to think of that, Hobby, but it sure as hell doesn’t narrow the field any. I can hardly suspect every man in the county that Faye hasn’t met up with one time or another in this taproom.”

“With Faye it’s going to be pretty hard to narrow the field much any way you look at it. Faye just naturally took in a lot of territory. You going to tell me what happened to her, Colby, or is it something you’re sitting on?”

“I’m not sitting on anything, Hobby. News just hasn’t had time to get around yet. Someone set fire to a haystack behind Crawley’s house this evening, out in a field near the creek. It attracted several men and kids from the area, including Virgil Carpenter and Rudy Squires, besides Crawley himself. When the fire burned down some and the smoke had lifted, they saw a body in there. Virgil forked it out, and it was Faye.”

“Jesus! You mean someone killed her and put her in the stack and set it on fire?”

“Looks that way, superficially. There are some crazy things about it.”

“It’s all crazy, if you ask me. How was Faye killed?”

“I’m not sure yet. The body was burned pretty bad. Emil Coker’s got it now, but I don’t suppose he’ll find out anything significant. Her head didn’t seem to be bashed in, and I couldn’t see any wounds. Maybe Emil will see something when he takes a close look at her on a table, but I doubt it. We’ll call in a doc for a post mortem, of course. It’s my guess she was strangled.”

“Why strangled in particular?”

“I don’t know. It probably happened in a quarrel about something. It seems to me the way a man would likely kill a woman under those circumstances, not having planned to kill her in advance. I might be wrong, of course, but it’s the way I’ve been thinking about it.”

“A guy would have to be out of his head to do something that crazy.”

“Faye drove men out of their heads. She was good at it.”

“You’re right there. How’s old Crawley taking it?”

“Virg and Rudy said he was busted up pretty bad down by the fire. When I talked to him at the house later, he wasn’t. He talked calm and sensible. He said he might miss Faye a little.”

“It’s a wonder Crawley didn’t kill her himself a long time ago, and that’s God’s truth.”

“Well, maybe he finally got around to it. He says he didn’t, of course.”

I drained my schooner and set it on the bar. Hobby picked it up and made a motion toward the tap.

“You want another, Colby?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a place or two to go, Hobby. Keep an ear cocked to the bar talk tonight, will you? Something might drop. Chances are nothing will, but you never can tell.”

I went up the pair of steps and through the lobby and turned right on the main drag. Under lights, the street was beginning to look alive for a few more hours of this particular day. There was a moderate traffic of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and Wheeler’s Drug Store, next corner up from the Bonny, had begun to gather its nightly accretion of loafers and nylon inspectors. Passing, I wondered how often Faye Bratton’s nylons had been inspected and approved at this place to the sound of soft whistles, but it was nothing I gave a lot of attention to, just wondered in passing. In the next block, about half way between corners, I came to the narrow front of Dolly Noble’s beauty parlor, and found it dark. It was after closing hour, of course, but sometimes Dolly made night appointments with working girls, and I thought she might have made one tonight. It didn’t really matter, anyhow, for Dolly had a small apartment upstairs over the parlor, and I went up narrow stairs from the street into a narrow hall above, lighted by a single globe, and knocked on Dolly’s door. After a minute or two, she opened it.

“Hello, Dolly,” I said. “What’s new?”

“Nothing new,” she said, “except I’m getting a call from the sheriff. That’s new. What do you want, Colby?”

“Let me come in and tell you.”

“Why not? You’ll have to make it snappy, though. I’m expecting someone.”

I went past her into the living room of her little apartment, and she closed the door and sat down, crossing her legs, which were nice. She had a one-ton conditioner stuck in one of the windows overlooking the street below, and that was nice, too. It made the apartment nice and cool, and it was pleasant to sit there in the chair she’d offered and sneak a few looks at her nice legs. It was a lot better than standing in front of Wheeler’s.

“I’ll try to get out of the way before your date arrives,” I said.

“Oh, it’s no one that important, Colby. Just Faye Bratton.”

“Faye’s coming here?”

“She ought to be here now. She’s late.”

“What have you and Faye got scheduled for tonight?”

“That could be a personal question, Colby. You asking for a personal reason, or is it official?”

“What makes you think it might be official?”

“Nothing makes me think so. Hell, I don’t mind telling you, either way. We’re going to have dinner at the Bonny and go to a movie. Big night. Faye gets bored out on that damn farm with Crawley Bratton. She comes in and spends an evening with me every now and then. Sometimes she spends the night and goes home in the morning.”

I sat and looked at Dolly for a few seconds without speaking. Shorter than average, she wore spike heels to make herself look taller than she was, and someday she’d either be fat or haggard from diets and reducing exercises, but she was neither yet. Her blond hair, cut short and shaggy, had the benefit of her best rinse. Thanks to the treatments and tricks of her trade, Dolly managed to make herself a good-looking woman. Lots of men claim to consider this sort of deception unfair, but not me. The time comes for all women when it’s a good thing to know the tricks, and I’m all for the ones who learn early.

“Faye won’t be here,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “Has something happened to her?”

“The last thing that ever will. She’s dead. Someone killed her.”

She sat staring at me with her mouth hanging slightly open, her eyes wide and sick with sudden shock. Under the eyes and on her cheeks, blue shadows and crimson paint stood out against drained flesh in stark and ugly relief. I watched for another sign than shock, but there was none. No fear, no anger, no slight beginning of grief. In her life, I thought, Faye Bratton had incited often the easy expression of love, but now in death she had taken away nothing that would be missed for more than a little while, if at all, and she had left not even sorrow. Thinking of Faye, I watched Dolly, and after a while Dolly’s breath escaped in a long sigh. The tip of a pink tongue slipped out to wet her lips.

“So he did it after all!” she said.

“He says not.”

“Did you expect him to confess?”

“Sometimes killers do. I guess I couldn’t have any such good luck as that, though.”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Tonight. Little more than an hour ago.”

“How did it happen?”

“I’m not sure. She was strangled, I think.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, how did it happen that you talked to him.”

“That’s routine, Dolly. If a wife’s killed, you naturally talk to the husband.”

“Crawley? My God, Colby, I wasn’t thinking of Crawley.”

“No? It seems to me, under the circumstances, that Crawley would be a natural one to think of. Who did you have in mind?”

“Fergus Cass.”

It was a name I hadn’t expected, and it took me a while to adjust. In the few seconds of adjustment, I tried to think of what I knew about Fergus Cass, and what I knew was practically nothing. He’d come into the county only about six months before, and he’d been living with an aunt and uncle on their farm across the creek from Crawley’s place, about a mile from house to house. He was from St. Louis, as I remembered, and there had been a rumor circulated at the time of his coming that he’d been sick, tuberculosis or something like that, and had spent some time in a sanitarium somewhere before coming to the country for rest and fresh air. This seemed a reasonable explanation, for he didn’t do anything in the way of work that anyone had ever noticed. I’d seen him in town a number of times, and once or twice tramping through the fields in the country carrying a rough hand-cut walking stick. He was a dark, lean man, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, with heavy black hair and eyes so deeply brown that they too looked black. There was a kind of unusual grace in the way he moved and held his head. He didn’t really look as if he’d ever been seriously sick, but of course you can’t always tell about such things from appearances.

“I never thought of Fergus Cass,” I said. “Tell me about him. Him and Faye, I mean.”

“They had something going. It’s been going four, five months, Colby. Since soon after Fergus came here to stay.”

“My understanding is, Faye almost always had something going. Isn’t that right?”

“Oh, sure. Faye always had to have something going with a man, but most of the time it didn’t amount to much. This was different. Bigger. Because of Fergus, the kind of guy he is. I told Faye she’d better leave him alone, but you know how she was. She wouldn’t listen.”

“You said the kind of guy Fergus is. What kind is he?”

“It’s hard to say, Colby. Nothing he’s done. Nothing he’s said. I guess it’s just the feeling he gives you, and the way he looks sometimes. You ever seen his eyes when something happens he doesn’t like? They get a kind of glaze on them. It’s like he’s gone suddenly blind. He’s so damn intense, Colby, that’s what he is.”

“I’ve never noticed. Maybe I haven’t looked into his eyes as often as you and Faye. Anyhow, it’s pretty thin. You can’t condemn a man for the look of his eyes.”

“That’s not all, Colby. Like I said, they’ve had this thing going for months. They used to meet down by the creek between Faye’s place and the Cass’s, but lately, the last two or three weeks, Faye’s been trying to break it up. I think she was getting a little scared or something. Fergus wanted her to leave Crawley and go back to St. Louis with him, but Faye wouldn’t go, and Fergus kept staying on and on, forcing her to meet him and trying to change her mind. He was supposed to go back a month ago, Faye told me, but he kept staying on.”

“Why didn’t Faye go? She didn’t give a damn for Crawley, that’s plain enough, and it seems to me it should have suited her fine to go running off to St. Louis with a good-looking guy like Fergus Cass.”

“Hell, Colby, good-looking guys are a dime a dozen, from St. Louis or anywhere else. You got any idea what Crawley Bratton’s worth?”

“I never gave it much thought. Quite a bundle, come to think of it.”

“It comes to six figures, at least.”

“Well, that’s something to take care of. It’s funny Faye took so many chances with it.”

“She couldn’t help taking chances. That was Faye for you. But she wasn’t going to throw it all away deliberately just for a good-looking nothing from a big town. He was all right to have a thing with, a big thing, but he was intended to be strictly temporary.”

“The same as others who could be named.”

“Name them if you want. What does it get you?”

“I don’t want to. Not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Hobby Langerham said Faye came to see you this afternoon. What did she want?”

“Nothing special. I was busy, and she didn’t stay. She just asked how about dinner and a movie tonight, and she left.”

“She say where she was going?”

“No.”

“Anything about meeting Fergus Cass down by the creek where you said they met?”

“No.”

“All right, Dolly. You’ve been a help. Thanks.”

“Sure. Make me a deputy.”

She didn’t get up to show me out. At the door, I looked back for a moment, and I thought she looked scared. Maybe she was seeing Fergus Cass staring at her with black eyes that had the glaze of blindness on them. I went on down to the street and back to the patrol car in front of the Bonny. In the car, I drove out of town to the Cass place. There was a light in the front room and in the kitchen at the rear. I went around back and knocked on the door, and pretty soon Elmo Cass, the uncle, came out of the living room and across the kitchen in his sock feet.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Colby Adams,” I said.

He opened the screen door and peered out at me. He was a big man with a shock of gray hair and a bushel of eyebrows. The eyebrows made him look fierce, and it was reported that he sometimes was. He didn’t invite me in.

“What you want, Colby?”

“I’d like to talk to Fergus, Elmo.”

“What about?”

“I said to Fergus, Elmo. If you want to listen, you can.”

“If it’s about that Bratton slut, Fergus doesn’t know anything. You’re wasting your time.”

“I don’t remember seeing you at the fire, Elmo.”

“That’s right. You didn’t. I don’t go running across the fields to watch every little fire that starts up.”

“Who told you about Faye Bratton being in that stack? Was it Fergus?”

“Fergus ain’t here. He drove off in the car about five. He hasn’t been back.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know. Fergus ain’t much of one for confiding.”

“You expecting him back soon?”

“I’m not expecting him any time in particular. Fergus goes and comes as he pleases. Sometimes he’s late.”

“I think I’ll wait around for him, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself.”

He closed the screen door and hooked it on the inside. If I wanted to wait, I could wait on the outside. I went back to the patrol car and got in and waited. About ten, the lights went out downstairs in the house, and one came on upstairs. About ten-fifteen, the light upstairs went out. I waited till midnight and gave up. If Fergus was back in the morning, I could talk to him then. If he wasn’t, I could get a warrant and start looking for him. I drove back to the jail, and Rudy was still waiting in the office when I got there.

“How’d it go, Colby?” he said.

“I’m tired, Rudy,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“I told Lard about the lumps in the mashed potatoes.”

“Good for you, Rudy. What’d he say?”

“He said for you to go to hell.”

Instead, I went to bed on a cot in the next room. It was hot in there, and I didn’t sleep well.

Chapter 3

The next morning I drove back to Crawley’s place. I didn’t stop at the house. Passing the barn, I drove on down the wide lane to the pasture and left the car at the gate. Crossing the pasture on foot, I crawled over the fence on the far side and walked on across the fallow field to the scorched patch of earth where the haystack had stood. I didn’t know what I was looking for, nothing special in mind, but the fire bothered me, and I couldn’t help thinking about it. What bothered me was why the hell it had happened. It just didn’t make any kind of sense that I could see.

After poking around for a couple of minutes, I found something. It was lying inside the blackened area, near the outer edge, and it was still warm to the touch when I picked it up. Nothing much, really. Just a small, flat can with a hinged lid. The paint was burned off the outside, but it was easy enough to identify anyhow, for I had seen thousands like it and had emptied at least a thousand myself in my time. A tobacco can, I mean. Probably Prince Albert. Maybe Velvet. I forced the narrow lid open and saw that the can still contained tobacco. It had not, then, been discarded. It had been dropped accidentally in the hay, which meant that maybe someone had been smoking in the hay, which meant that maybe the hay had been accidentally set on fire. Just maybe, of course. Just guessing. But it was an explanation that made sense. It was the only one I had been able to think of that did. There was something about it, to tell the truth, that tickled my fancy as well as my reason.

How had it happened, approximately? Well, say that someone had killed Faye Bratton, which someone had. That much was no guessing. Say the killer, needing to make a quick disposition of the body, had buried it in the hay until night came to give him time and cover to do something more adequate and permanent about it. Something like digging a hole, maybe. Then, say, someone had wandered along and stopped to lie down and rest and smoke a roll-your-own and maybe doze off in the sun with the smoke burning dangerously between his fingers, and all the while the body was there beneath him in the hay. There was a kind of grim comedy in it, the crazy disruption of a desperate plan by pure chance in the form of someone dumb enough to smoke a cigarette while lying on a haystack. And who might have been along this way late yesterday afternoon who was dumb enough? I could think of several, actually, but I began to think of one in particular. He had probably been along yesterday, as he had probably been the day before and would be today, following the course of the winding creek. Turning away from the black patch of earth, I went on across the field and over a fence and into the brush and timber along the creek. I sat down on the bank of the creek to wait a while before going on up the back way to the Cass place.

I was waiting for a kid named Snuffy Cleaker, but you could just as well have called him Snuffy Jukes or Snuffy Kallikak. He was that kind of kid, I mean, from that kind of family. As a matter of fact, he didn’t really have any family, except his old man, who lived in a shack on the west side of town and hauled a little trash and garbage now and then when he needed the price of a bottle. Snuffy lived there with the old man off and on, but you could never count on finding him there, especially in the warm months, because most of the time he was out prowling the countryside, following the creek, living on catfish and stolen chickens and vegetables and melons, sleeping in haystacks or beside hedge rows or wherever he got tired and dropped. Cherokee County’s Huck Finn. When he was a few years younger, we tried to keep him in school according to the law, but he was too stupid to learn, and we gave up before the law said we ought to. He was now about fifteen, maybe sixteen. Most people considered him harmless.

I didn’t really expect him to oblige me by coming along just when I wanted him to, but luck was with me for a change, and damned if he didn’t. I heard him in the brush before I saw him, and I got up quietly and slipped out of sight behind a tree. He came ambling leisurely into sight, cutting at the brush with a stick he’d cut, and when he came abreast of the tree, I jumped out and grabbed him. He yowled like a scared cat and tried to jerk away.

“Got you, you little son of a bitch,” I said. “Stop squirming!”

He went limp and quiet all of a sudden, and I could see that he was scared, all right. His eyes skittered wildly, refusing to look at me, and he kept making through his long nose the exaggerated snuffing sound that had given him his name. Probably he had another name, duly recorded in the courthouse, but no one could ever think of it.

“Lemme go,” he said. “I ain’t doing anything.”

“Sure you’re not, Snuffy. You’ve never been known to do anything except smoke and chew and steal and everything else a kid’s got no business doing. Where you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Sure you are, Snuffy. You’re going to reform school, that’s where you’re going. I’ve got a belly full of complaints about you prowling and stealing and making a general damn nuisance of yourself.”

“I ain’t done anything to be sent to reform school for.”

“Is that so? Wouldn’t you say it was something to burn Crawley Bratton’s haystack down?”

It was still a guess, nothing more, but I knew it was true the instant I said it, and it was in the same instant that I was aware for the first time of the dirty rag he had wrapped around his right hand. Under the rag, I was sure, was seared and blistered flesh. He jerked the hand behind his back and tried again to pull away and run. He wasn’t a strong kid, though, skinny and undersized. I held him easily.

“What’s the matter with your hand, Snuffy?” I said. “Don’t you know any better than to try to beat out a flame with your bare palm?”

“I didn’t aim to burn it down,” he said. “It was an accident.”

“That’s more like it. If you want to stay out of reform school, you’d better tell me the exact truth.”

“I was having a smoke, that’s all. Just stretched out there in the hay having a smoke and thinking about staying the night. I dozed off, I guess, and pretty soon I woke up with the fire blazing up beside me. I didn’t try to beat it out, the way you said. I got more sense than that. The fire just burned my hand, and I guess that’s why I woke when I did. If I hadn’t, I might have burned to death. All I did afterward was cut and run. I went into town and stayed the night with my old man.”

“It was a damn good thing for you that you woke when you did, Snuffy. No question about that. If you hadn’t, we might have had two bodies in the fire. Yours and Mrs. Bratton’s.”

“I don’t know anything about Mrs. Bratton. I heard in town that she was burned in the fire, but I don’t know anything about her.”

“That’s what you say. To me, it’s beginning to look different. Maybe you met Mrs. Bratton down here and got fresh with her. Maybe you decided to kill her to keep her from telling what you did to her. Then maybe you decided to put her body in the stack and burn it up. It’s just what a dumb, no-good kid like you might do.”

“I wouldn’t do anything like that, Mr. Adams! Honest to God, I wouldn’t!”

“I’m not so sure. Anyhow, it looks pretty bad, far as you’re concerned. Lots of folks around here have been thinking you might get dangerous, once you got a little age on you. It’s beginning to look like you might not go to reform school after all, Snuffy. It’s beginning to look like you might go straight to the penitentiary for all the rest of your life.”

He was a stupid kid and plenty scared. His eyes were wild and his teeth were chattering. Truth was, I was ashamed of myself for saying those things, which I didn’t believe, but I thought they might bring something out, and they did.

“Don’t say such things about me, Mr. Adams,” he said. “Please don’t say such things. You quit saying such things, I’ll tell you something you might like to know.”

“You tell me, and I’ll see. Chances are you’re fixing to tell a lot of lies to get yourself out of trouble.”

“I’ll tell the truth, Mr. Adams. I swear to God I will!”

“Never mind the swearing. Just tell me.”

“It was that Fergus Cass who did it. Killed Mrs. Bratton, I mean. I know he did.”

“There you go, Snuffy. Telling a damn lie already. Why would Fergus want to kill Mrs. Bratton?”

He licked his lips, and a sly expression came into his eyes and reminded me that even a stupid kid like Snuffy Cleaker can develop a kind of shrewdness within his limitations.

“They were carrying on with each other,” he said. “I’ve seen them more than once down here by the creek.”

“You mean you spied on them.”

“Well, I just happened to see them the first time, quite a while ago, and I couldn’t help it if they kept meeting here and I happened to come along sometimes when they were together.”

“That’s right, Snuffy. You couldn’t help it. You couldn’t help it if you came sneaking along through the brush. You’re nothing but a nasty little Peeping Tom, but you can’t help it any more than you can help being a thief, because that’s just what you naturally are. Never mind that, though. If Mrs. Bratton and Fergus Cass liked each other well enough to meet down here, what makes you think he killed her? Doesn’t seem to me it would work out that way at all.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Adams. Lately they haven’t been getting along so good. I heard them have a couple of fierce fights, him calling her a lot of dirty names and threatening to kill her, and then yesterday afternoon when I come along they were up the creek from here about fifty feet, under the trees where the creek bends, and he hit her in the face because of something she said, and she started to run, but he ran after her and caught her and began choking her.”

“What did she say to him?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t close enough to hear.”

“What did you do when he started choking her?”

“I ran. I didn’t want to mix in any trouble like that. I got scared and cut out of there in a hurry.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just up the creek. Just fooling around. When I came back quite a while later, Mrs. Bratton and Fergus Cass were both gone, so I figured he probably hadn’t hurt her much, and I went up in the field to the haystack and had a smoke, like I admitted, but when I heard in town that Mrs. Bratton’s body had been in the hay and burned, I knew he’d killed her and put her there, and she’d been in the hay right while I was having the smoke that set the stack on fire.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell somebody about it?”

“I was scared, that’s why. I didn’t want to get mixed into any trouble like that.”

He was telling the truth, all right. He’d never have told it if I hadn’t caught him and scared him into it, but he was telling it now to save his scurvy little hide, and it was just what I needed. True, he hadn’t actually seen Fergus Cass kill Faye Bratton, but he’d seen him choking her, and what he’d actually seen and what he might later remember seeing when a sharp county attorney got hold of him could damn well be two different stories.

“You’re mixed now,” I said, “and you’re mixed good. You come along with me.”

“Where you taking me?”

“I’m taking you to jail, that’s where. You’re what we call a material witness, you little devil, and I’m not taking any chances on your skinning out on me.”

“You can’t arrest me, Mr. Adams. I ain’t done anything to be arrested for.”

“Who said I was arresting you? I’m just sort of holding you in protective custody to save myself the trouble of running you down later. Come on. Let’s move out of here.”

We walked up across the field and the pasture to the car at the foot of the lane. I maneuvered the car between the barbed wire fences, turning it around, and drove up toward the house with Snuffy beside me in the front seat. When I got out to close the gate to the lane, after driving through, Crawley Bratton came out of the barn and stood there watching us. He looked tired and gaunt, his eyes darkly circled and his coarse, thick hair hanging down over his forehead from under his battered hat. Suddenly, walking toward him, I felt a sharp stab of genuine pity.

“Who’s that you got with you, Colby?” he said. “It looks like Snuffy Cleaker.”

“That’s who it is,” I said. “I’m taking him back to town.”

“What for? He been getting himself into trouble again?”

“Chances are he’s getting someone else into trouble this time, Crawley. He was down there at the creek yesterday when Faye was killed. He set the stack on fire.”

“Why would he want to do a thing like that?”

“He didn’t aim to. It was an accident. The point is, he saw something before the fire.”

“Is that right? What did he see?”

“He saw Faye being choked.”

“You mean he saw who killed her?”

He was looking across at Snuffy in the car, not at me, and his expression was calm and tired, no anger in it — not even, it seemed to me, much interest. After a while, he sighed and rubbed the back of a hand across his eyes.

“Who was it, Colby?” he said.

“I’m not ready to say yet. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

He didn’t protest, and I still had the strange impression that he really wasn’t very interested, but then I had the sudden notion that it wasn’t really lack of interest at all. It was only, I thought, that he’d already guessed. Crawley was no fool, and it was entirely possible that he had known, or guessed, that Faye had been meeting Fergus Cass down by the creek, and it was almost certain, if he had, that he’d also guessed who’d killed her. Some deep and distorted anger and shame and sense of pride had kept him from making any accusation or showing in any way the knowledge of her affair. It was Crawley’s way. He’d either keep quiet and do nothing, or he’d kill Fergus Cass himself, when he was completely sure, in his own time.

“Besides, Crawley,” I said, “You don’t need me to tell you. You know as well as I do who it was.”

“Sure, Colby.” He sighed again, rubbing his hand across his eyes as if they pained him. “I know.”

I turned and started back for the car, and when I was almost there he called after me.

“Thanks, Colby,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

Chapter 4

Rudy was in the office with his feet on the desk. When I came in with Snuffy, he dropped his feet and stood up looking as guilty as a kid caught in a cookie jar. Between Snuffy and Rudy, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to choose. Rudy was cleaner, but not much brighter.

“I’ve got a guest for you, Rudy,” I said. “Tell Lard there’ll be another one for dinner.”

“Snuffy?” Rudy said. “You mean Snuffy Cleaker?”

“That’s right. Lock him up.”

“What for?”

“Never mind what for. Just pick out a nice cell and put him in it.”

“Sure, Colby, if you say so.”

“I say so. Where’s Virg?”

“He went up north in the other patrol car to investigate a brawl. Someone got cut up.”

“Okay. We had any word from Emil Coker?”

“I was going to tell you about that. Emil called and said he figured Faye Bratton was strangled before she was burned in that fire. He says he’ll have a doctor work on her.”

“Good old Emil. Tell him to take his own sweet time if he calls again. No hurry at all.”

“I’ll do that, Colby. You going away somewhere again?”

“I’m going out to the Cass place.”

“What for?”

“Never mind what for.”

“Where you been, Colby? I’ve been wondering.”

“Never mind where I’ve been.”

“All right, Colby. If you say so. You got any orders or anything?”

“Yeah. Take care of Snuffy and keep your God-damn feet off my desk.”

I went out and got in the patrol car and drove west again. This time I turned off before reaching Crawley Bratton’s and drove around the country square to the front of the Cass place. I didn’t really figure Fergus would be there, to tell the truth. I thought I’d have to swear out a warrant and put out an alarm and have him brought back from wherever he’d got on the way to wherever he was running. That was my mistake, to my surprise. He was there. I found him sitting on a block of wood in the sun in front of a corn crib. He was dressed in a clean white shirt and a pair of blue jeans, his feet, in heavy white socks, shoved into a pair of soft black loafers. He looked lean and dark and handsome and mean. He had the cut of cruelty in his thin face, and I saw what Dolly meant by the glaze of blindness in his eyes. It was in them as he watched me approach.

“Hello, Sheriff,” he said. “Uncle Elmo said you were looking for me last night.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I waited till midnight.”

“That’s too bad. I didn’t get home till two.”

“You mind telling me where you were?”

“Unless you’ve got a good reason for knowing, I do.”

“I’ve got a good reason, but let it go. I’m more interested in knowing where you were in the afternoon. Between three and five, say.”

“I suppose you’ve got a good reason for knowing that, too?”

“The best. I figure Faye Bratton was killed sometime during those two hours.”

“I heard about Faye. Too bad. She was a common little bitch, but a looker. I hate to think of her being dead.”

“Do you? I can understand that. Seems to me you’d hate it more than most, having been so close.”

“Oh.” He shrugged and smiled at a secret joke. “I thought you’d probably found out about that. I couldn’t think of any other reason why you’d want to talk to me.”

“Such things have a way of being found out.”

“I guess they do. It’s a shame, too. Causes a lot of unnecessary trouble. We did our best to be discreet.”

“You must have been, to tell the truth. Only two or three people knew about it, apparently. One of them told me you wanted Faye to run away to St. Louis with you. Is that right?”

“Who told you?”

“No matter. I was told.”

“So I wanted her to go away with me. She wouldn’t. I thought she’d jump at the chance to get the hell away from here and see what living could really be. My mistake. She was just as stupid as she was good-looking. No imagination. She wasn’t about to fly out of that soft nest Crawley Bratton kept for her on the other side of the creek.”

“Was that what you had the fight about yesterday afternoon?”

“What fight?”

“The one you had down by the creek. The one that ended with you strangling her to death.”

He had been looking over my shoulder, talking to me but acting all the while as if I wasn’t really there. Now he looked at me directly in sudden stillness, but I had a feeling that he couldn’t see me at all through his bright glaze of blindness.

“That’s a lie,” he said. “I didn’t strangle her to death.”

“I didn’t expect you to admit it. It doesn’t matter. There was a witness. You might be interested in knowing that there was a witness to a lot of what went on between you and Faye down there.”

“I didn’t strangle her to death. Anyone who says I did is lying.”

“Next thing you’ll be telling me you didn’t even see her yesterday afternoon.”

“No. I saw her, and we had a fight, and I choked her. But not to death. I wanted to, and I thought for a few seconds that I had, but I didn’t. I let her go alive. The last I saw of her, she was leaning against a tree and breathing easy. I came up here and got the car and went off on a drunk. I never wanted to see her again, and that much was given me. I never will.”

“Well, you never know. Could be you’ll wind up in the same place pretty soon.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’ll stand trial for murder. Maybe you’ll hang.”

He sat there staring at me with his blind eyes, and I had an uneasy notion that he was going to spring at me any second, but he didn’t. He took a deep breath and looked away, over my shoulder again.

“Am I under arrest?” he said.

“That’s right. You are.”

“You’re making a mistake. You’ll see.” He stood up and looked toward the house. “If you’ll wait out here, I’ll get some things together and say good-by.”

I let him go. He went across the yard and into the house, and he was in there for maybe fifteen minutes. He came out carrying a little leather bag, and we got into the patrol car and drove back to town. In the office at the jail, Rudy was sitting in a chair away from the desk with his feet on the floor. He must have heard us coming.

“Hello, Colby,” he said. “Hello, Fergus. What you two doing together?”

“He’s under arrest for murder,” I said. “Lock him up.”

“Murder!” Rudy jumped as if his chair was wired and someone had thrown the switch. “Whose murder?”

“How many murders we had around here lately, Rudy?”

“Faye Bratton’s, you mean?”

“Faye Bratton’s, I mean.”

“Well, Jesus, Colby. I got to thinking after you left, and what I thought was Snuffy Cleaker must have done it.”

“You weren’t thinking, Rudy. Your brain was just turning over. There’s a difference.”

“That may be, Colby, if you say so, but I’m thinking now for sure, and what I’m thinking is you ought to tell me more about what’s going on.”

“Excuse me, Rudy. I’ll try to do better. Right now I’m going back to Crawley Bratton’s to tell him we’ve made an arrest, and then I’m coming in to see the county attorney. Tell Lard two more for dinner instead of one.”

I went out and got into the patrol car and drove west for the third time that day. I stood beside the car in Crawley’s back yard and looked out over all the fields as far as I could see, but there wasn’t any sign of Crawley out there, and so I went over and hammered on the back door of the house, but there wasn’t any sight or sound of him there, either. Then I went out to the barn and inside, and there he was. He was lying on his back on the rough plank floor, and nearby, where it had fallen from his hands, was a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Most of the top of Crawley’s head was off. Some of it was on the floor, and the rest was on the wall behind him. There was something else on the wall, too. It was a note pinned to the planking with Crawley’s pocket knife. I went over and ripped the note loose and read it, and this is what Crawley had written:

Chapter 5

Well, hell. So it was just a misunderstanding. So I figured it was Fergus Cass, and all the time it was Crawley. I can see, looking back, how the misunderstanding came about naturally. When I came up from the creek with Snuffy Cleaker and said that Snuffy had seen someone choking Faye, not saying who it was Snuffy had seen, and then making that crack about Crawley knowing as well as I did who it was, why, what the hell was he naturally to think? Being guilty, although I didn’t know it, he thought there was only one person I could possibly mean, and that person was Crawley Bratton, although it wasn’t. The only reason he could see for my not arresting him then was just to give him a chance to take his own way out, and that’s why he said thanks when I left, and took the way when I was gone.

I’m glad he did, and I think it’s time Virgil had my job.