The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

A Truly Honest Man

Originally appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, September 1972.

As soon as I got wind of the coming calamity, I drove out of Comfort a lot faster than a fellow of my age should. My destination was a few miles west of Comfort, which is a nice hamlet nestled in the gentle folds of the Smoky Mountains.

The narrow road snaked toward the heights in dizzying hairpin curves. The scenery was something else; wooded peaks, sheer cliffs, blue-misted valleys that seemed depthless with their gossamer veils of wispy cloud swirling below the level of the road. But right then, I was contrary to the beauties of my native mountains. My recent suspicions of Mr. Randolph P. Fogarty flumped in a painful pulse between my temples.

I gunned my dusty sedan to the upper rim of a miles-long valley. It dropped breathlessly away on my right. To my left, Spurgeon Mountain strained its steep, thicketed slopes on toward the sky. The towering peak was as primitive as in the day of the Cherokee, except for the raw earthen scars Randolph P. Fogarty would leave as painful reminders to us ignorant natives.

I braked the sedan, turning it onto a vast muddy stretch that bulldozers had gouged as a beginning for a huge parking area. I jounced along slowly, twisting the steering wheel to avoid boulders and ruts. From the side window I glimpsed the naked incision that slashed straight up to the mountain’s distant crest, the clearing for the proposed chairlift.

Straight ahead, and already sprouting a few young weeds, were the humps of concrete forms and stanchions, foundations, supposedly, for a building that showed, on paper, as a large souvenir shop and restaurant.

I beaded my eyes on the small travel trailer that had served as a construction site office for Fogarty Enterprises. Fogarty’s gun-metal gray Continental was parked beside the office, and my pulse tripped a beat of thanksgiving. At least I could have a private, man to man talk with him before the boom was lowered all the way.

I risked the welfare of the sedan’s springs, covering the last fifty yards of ruts, humps, and slits the rains had cut.

I was out of the sedan almost before it stopped pitching and rearing. Getting from under the wheel, I flicked a glance over the scars the ’dozer had made. The mountain seemed so dismal now, so silent with the small crew and machinery trucked away when the work was barely begun. It all added up to a brutish bequest by Fogarty, a disdainful mockery of the big-deal dream he’d painted—

Fogarty must have heard the sedan’s engine in the mountain silence, seem me coming. But he chose to ignore me, even when I’d stood a few seconds outside the trailer-office doorway. He continued to stand imposingly at his desk, gathering up papers and stuffing them into a gold-monogrammed attaché case.

A good way to get a mountain man riled is to make out like he isn’t there, and I was more than a little riled already.

“Fogarty,” I said, stepping into the confines of the low-ceilinged trailer, “I want a few words with you.”

He glanced at a couple more documents, slipped one in the briefcase and dropped the other in the general direction of the overflowing trash basket. He shifted his two-dollar cigar with a movement of his lips.

“Make it a few,” he said in his stentorian baritone. “I’m busy.”

I faced him across the desk. We were sure a mismatched pair. I was scrawny, gray as a mountain winter from sixty years of living, a little rumpled in my store-bought suit, squint-eyed, arid red-necked.

Fogarty was about the furthest contrast you could imagine, big, robust, exuding the air of a Philadelphia banker or Wall Street tycoon. He wore an English suit, Italian loafers, a Madison Avenue shirt and tie, and a big, glittering stone on his manicured pinkie. But his stock in trade was his affable, honest looking face, with just enough gray at the temples to give him the final touch of dependability and last-notch respectability.

It was sure the perfect con man’s cover, that face, inspiring instant trust and confidence in even the experienced and wary.

“Fogarty,” I said, “I just had lunch with a member of our legal bar, Judge Bine. He mentioned something that kind of posed some questions in my mind.”

Fogarty picked up a paper, studied it briefly. “Such as?”

“Are you figuring on a quick action for bankruptcy?”

He smiled. It wasn’t like the hearty, genuine looking smiles he’d worn for Comfort. It was a little ugly. “Do you believe every bit of lunch table gossip that comes your way?”

“As head of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association I’m concerned with anything you do with our depositors’ money,” I reminded him.

He gave me the impatient look of a really big man dismissing a worm.

“I’m sure,” he said with mild scorn, “that you’ve spent every night biting your nails since you made the loan.”

I leaned toward him and gripped the edge of the desk. “I didn’t loan you a hundred thousand dollars of other people’s money entrusted to the care and keeping of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association. It was the board that you conned into the loan, Fogarty. The poor, pitiful group of hillbillies you bedazzled with your manner, your talk, your wining and dining, your fancy plans for turning Spurgeon Mountain into a sure-fire gold-mine tourist attraction.”

Our eyes locked. His lost a little of their calm self-assurance. Every word I’d said was true, and Fogarty knew it. He’d despised me from the start because I’d glimpsed behind his front. I’d held out, but he’d turned the savings and loan board against me.

I remembered their joshing just before the vote was taken: “You getting old and cranky, Lemuel?”... “Catch up with the times, Lemuel. The Spurgeon Mountain development as a tourist playground can’t miss.”... “Sure, Lemuel, look at what they’ve done around Blowing Rock and Maggie Valley near Asheville.”... “Not to mention Gold Mountain and Tweetsie Railroad.”... “We’ll have ’em by the station wagon load when Mr. Fogarty completes the chairlift, the mountaintop golf course, the frontier village, the open air amphitheater.”... “Every summer, Lemuel, Comfort will bust at the seams with tourists and their money.”... “It ain’t like he was asking us to foot the whole bill”... “That’s right, Lemuel, he’s just asking us for a piddling hundred thou.”

So it had gone. Piddling hundred thou, my foot! I’d looked about the board room table at their faces, struck a little dumb at the way Fogarty had shifted their way of thinking.

“Fogarty,” I said bluntly, “what have you done with our money?”

Neither of us let our eyes waver or drop. His fancy cigar had gone out, but he hadn’t noticed.

“Unfortunately, Lemuel, I made some bad investments.” Pointedly, he hadn’t called me Mr. Hyder, but Lemuel, in the tone of a man permitting a mountain hooger to shine his shoes or carry his golf bag.

“Or some mighty good investments,” I suggested. “Maybe in a numbered Swiss bank account?”

That little shot in the dark got to him. He couldn’t quite hide the flicker deep in his eyes.

“What makes you say a thing like that?” he probed.

“You,” I said. “You, being what you are. I think it was your goal from the beginning. You staked out yourself a bunch of naive hillbillies with a nest egg who were ready for the taking. I don’t think you ever intended to go further on Spurgeon Mountain than you’ve gone.” I jerked a thumb toward the window.

“And you sure haven’t gone more than five or six thousand out there. Just some motions, to pave the way for the next act, a bankruptcy action while the loot is safely salted away somewhere out of reach.”

He studied me a moment. Then he reached with his soft right hand and nudged my splayed hands from the papers on his desk. He did it like he was picking up a dirty bug.

“I don’t like you, Lemuel Hyder,” he said, “but I’ll have to admit I admire you more than I do the rest of them.”

“Then you’re admitting the truth of what I say?”

Towering over me, his eyes crinkled with a sort of warped pleasure. Not liking me, he was enjoying this moment and the chance to rub it in.

“Why not?” he said. “It’s salted away, all right. But not necessarily in a numbered Swiss account. There are any multitude of choices where to tuck money if you know the angles.”

I felt even sicker at heart. Somehow, I’d hoped in the back of my mind that he would tell me the bankruptcy caper wasn’t really true. I’d wished for him to say that the setback and work stoppage was just temporary, that Spurgeon Mountain would blossom and glitter and show a neon face to happy crowds.

He rolled his cigar in his lips, savoring the grayness of his wizened face more than the taste of expensive tobacco. “Does knowing help, Lemuel? Or hurt, perhaps?” He bent his head to look at me a little closer. “You poor fellow, it does hurt! And not a thing you can do about it, is there? If you repeated my admission, I would simply deny it. You’ve no witnesses. Just you and me up here on Spurgeon Mountain. Your word against mine.”

I couldn’t talk for a little while. I guess we both ached with his sense of victory, only in totally different ways.

“Fogarty,” I pleaded gently, “it isn’t as if you were conning some rich kid. Comfort can’t afford what you’ve done.”

“My heart bleeds, Lemuel.”

“Comfort ain’t much of a town, Fogarty. But it’s people, nice, quiet people.”

“Sticks and clods,” he said.

“Ain’t a soul in Comfort wouldn’t help you fix a flat or give you a meal and lodging if you lost your wallet.”

“Suckers,” he decided.

I moved around to the back corner of the desk. “Fogarty, will you really be able to enjoy it?”

“I always enjoy fat living,” he assured me with a big, maddening smile.

“Maybe I ought to tell you how it was,” I said.

“I’m really not interested, Lemuel.”

“It was depression times,” I said, “and I started the savings and loan because Comfort needed it. Thirty-five or more years ago, I started it. With a few dollars of my own and the trust of good people, Fogarty.

“If a woman eked out an extra dollar selling eggs, she trusted it to me. A man plowed a neighbor’s field for a fiver he could scrimp by without and he would put it on deposit where it would grow a little and do some good. We loaned money to a man to buy a milk cow, a tractor to replace a mule, seed com to change a fallow hillside, and houses. Not mansions, Fogarty, but small, decent houses to people who needed them.”

I paused to take a breath. “That’s Comfort Savings and Loan, Fogarty. That’s the outfit you’re robbing, the little backstop for the people of Comfort that’ll go under itself the day you go bankrupt. A hundred thou is a great big passel of money to us, Fogarty.”

“If you’re quite finished, Lemuel, I’ve other things to do,” Fogarty said.

“Nope,” I said. “I came here to collect the people’s money, and that’s what I aim to do. Me and the rednecks of Comfort, Fogarty, we never let each other down yet. And I don’t fancy that today is the proper date to start doing so.”

His eyes became dark, wholly nasty. “Get out of here, you paltry little ass!”

“That’s your last word, Fogarty?”

“You and the coon hunters of Comfort wouldn’t know what to do with your hundred grand if I gave it back!” he spoke in rising rage. “And my last word is — get lost!”

He moved a hand toward his desk drawer. As he jarred it open, I glimpsed a revolver inside. A revolver is always a strong argument, but he’d had his say and I didn’t see any point in further debate.

Before his hand could reach the gun, I’d already hauled off and let him have one on the side of the jaw. I was so small and quick he never saw it coming.

He staggered back from his desk, his eyes suddenly bulging. I hit him three more times like a rattler, which is also small, striking. He never knew where the punches came from.

Big, soft fellow, I thought as I stood over his prone bulk. Big, soft bully, losing all his candy.

I hadn’t even worked up a sweat, and Fogarty was lying there on his big, broad back, his mouth gaping, his jaws reddening where my fists had struck.

He groaned and tried to stir. I put a stop to that by picking up a heavy quartz paperweight, which I’d noticed on his-desk, and bending over him and banging him on the left temple.

He gave no trouble at all after that, except for his weight. It took me nearly thirty minutes to drag him across the parking area and on across the road and right to the edge of a precipice that overlooked the beautiful, serene valley.

Below the precipice, the cliff fell straight down for a thousand feet. I gave Fogarty the final push, kneeling beside his unconscious bulk. Still on my knees, I craned my head over the edge and watched him fall. Down and down. Turning, twisting. Through the wispy gossamer veil of cloud. Down a thousand feet to the stones at the base of the cliff.

Driving back to Comfort, I noticed that my lunch was settling pretty good. At my afternoon coffee break, I decided, I’d have a piece of that fine apple pie in Mom Roddenberry’s restaurant.

My first stop of course was the sheriff’s office. Gaither Jones, the lank deputy, was on duty.

I stood beside his desk, shaking my head sadly. “Terrible accident, Gate. One minute Mr. Fogarty, all excited, was running about, showing me where he planned a pavilion overlooking the valley. And the next — poor fellow; the shale looked solid, but the edge crumpled under his feet, and afore I could reach him, Mr. Fogarty was falling.”

Gate, in the act of rising, was frozen for a second. “All the way down?”

“Plump to the bottom,” I said. “Gate, you better take a couple men out there and blot up what’s left of our friend Mr. Fogarty.”

Gaither reached for his hat, and bounded from the office.

I walked out, traded friendly nods with good folks I’d known a lifetime as I hurried along the sidewalk. A block further on, I turned into my own office. I had to pause a moment and look at the lettering on the front window: Comfort Savings and Loan Association. I must say that the gold leaf looked a lot brighter than it had when I’d driven out of town.

Business was moving along at its normal pace as I passed through the large outer room. An overalled farmer, stained with honest toil, was making his monthly savings deposit at the single teller’s cage. A young man and wife were discussing a loan with Jed Markham at his desk.

Jed started to rise and ask a question when he looked up and saw me.

“Later, Jed,” I said. “Got something else on my mind right now. And you treat those young folks right, hear me?”

With a wave of the hand, I went through the doorway at the rear. It provided entry to my private office, which was wedged in a portion of the building beside the board room.

Miss Meffort, the tall, spare, no-nonsense woman who has been a most efficient secretary to me for twenty-five years, was busily typing. She greeted me with a short but friendly nod as I moved on to my old walnut desk in the comer.

I picked up the phone, rocked back in my swivel chair, and called Judge Bine. I told him to forget about Randolph P. Fogarty’s preliminaries for bankruptcy. “Just keep the whole thing under your hat, Judge. Fogarty won’t be petitioning, and sleeping dogs never bit anybody or howled any questions.”

I knew it was all I had to say. The judge would understand, at least a little of it, in due time.

Comfort, as Fogarty should have realized, is more than a town. It’s an organism, you might say. And the cells work together to fight a hint of cancer.

I put the phone down and sat there with my fingers laced across my flat, trim stomach, content to listen to the everyday music of Miss Meffort’s typewriter.

But there was still work to do.

“Miss Meffort, bring your pad, please. I have to dictate a letter.”

A brisk flick of movement, Miss Meffort was seated in the secretary’s chair beside my desk, pencil poised for shorthand.

“The letter is to Amalgamated and Consolidated Life Insurance Company of Dixie,” I said.

That brought a startled look from her, a most unusual reaction, seeing as how Miss Meffort is a real cucumber when it comes to coolness.

“Yes, Miss Meffort,” I sighed. “Like any reputable institution loaning money we’ve insured every borrower for the amount of his loan over all the years. There has been, I fear, an accident. A fatal accident. So we must file a claim for a hundred thousand dollars with ACLIC of Dixie to repay in full the loan which Mr. Randolph P. Fogarty took with us some weeks ago.”

“My goodness!” Miss Meffort said. She’d have questions later, but she’d await them until the completion of business.

In the moment before I started dictating the letter that would put a hundred thousand back in our vaults, ready for usage by deserving customers, I experienced a strange flicker of fondness for Mr. Fogarty. Alive, he’d been a smooth con man, his front covering the dirtiest of crooks. Dead, he was surely the most honest man I knew, repaying to the final penny his indebtedness to Comfort Savings and Loan Association.