Wild Pitch

by A. B. Guthrie Jr.

“But you didn’t come to hear me talk about myself,” Mr. Hawthorne said abruptly.

  “No,” Charleston answered, “though your views are worth listening to, more interesting in the long haul than murder.” He smiled his easy smile. “With an oil well or two to my credit, I could dismiss the sins of others and concentrate on my own.”

  Geet laughed.

  “You know Hogue is dead,” Charleston continued. “How well were you acquainted with him?”

  “We met a time or two. You may have heard he tried to buy my place, offering twice what it would bring on the market but not a fraction of its worth to me. He couldn’t understand my refusal.”

  “And you had words?”

  “The tender of an offer and its rejection can hardly be managed without utterance.”

  A case or two flashed in my mind in which both had been managed with not a word said. Charleston was looking at the professor, without utterance conveying a message.

  The girl broke in. “Father, you’re being precious.”

  He gave her a small, benign smile. “Perhaps I am, my dear.”

  But the tone was set despite the admission, a tone I didn’t like there in Geet’s presence.

  Charleston said, “You had words, then.”

  “We didn’t quarrel, if that’s what you mean. Not really quarrel. It was hard for him to comprehend that some things existed beyond the embrace of his money.”

  “And that was all?”

  “Not quite, if I am to make a clean breast of things, as you men of the law might put it. Hogue is—was—in possession of a piece of land on which rises a spring that feeds my pond here. He indicated, without actually threatening, that he might cut off the water supply unless I sold out.”

  “That’s enough for a quarrel.”

  “No. My water right is secure. I know it. He knew it, I’m sure. Ours wasn’t an altercation. An altercation implies real heat. We just talked, admittedly not as friends.”

  “All right.” Charleston was insisting on being all business. “Now someone somewhere in this neighborhood shot Buster Hogue. Can you help me at all? How well do you know your neighbors?”

  “Far from well. Possibly you can except the Jamisons, brief as our acquaintance has been. Most of the rest I met for the first time at that unhappy picnic.” He looked at the empty glasses and said, “Geet, would you bring us another drink, please?”

  In her absence Charleston went on. “McNair? Lancaster? The Hogue brothers? Ben Day? What do you know about them? About any one? Any least little thing that might have a bearing?”

  “No help. Nothing. Very little hearsay, even. You see, Sheriff, we live pretty well apart, Geet and I. It’s a rare day we’re not off in the fields and the hills, pursuing our interests. It’s not that we shun society. We don’t have much time for it. And you must remember we are very recent arrivals here.”

  Geet brought the drinks in, on a tray naturally, since she had class. Both men thanked her, and she sat down, saying nothing.

  “As educated men, though in different fields, I would imagine you and Doctor Ulysses Pierpont have much in common,” the sheriff said. “Are you acquainted?”

  Abruptly the girl said, “We know him.”

  “Slightly, only slightly,” her father answered before she could go on. “But I venture to say, Sheriff, that you are wrong about common interests.”

  The girl’s gaze went to Charleston. “His manner toward Father was insulting, there at the picnic, when Father rushed to help poor Mr. Hogue. As if Father, himself a scientist, didn’t know the rudiments of first aid.”

  “Now, now, Geet,” Professor Hawthorne said. “It’s no doubt that he feels perhaps just a little cool toward me since I refused to sell him this place.” He addressed Charleston then. “You know he wanted to buy it, or at least part of it?”

  At Charleston’s nod Professor Hawthorne returned to common interests, or the lack of them. “Psychiatry, insofar as I have observed it, is an all-absorbing involvement, a specialty with little elbow room for other concerns, which is not to denigrate Doctor Pierpont or the profession. He is, I assume, a highly competent practitioner. Degrees like his are hard-won.”

  “I had a date with him once,” the girl said, as if clinging to a point that was being abandoned.

  Charleston answered, “Oh?”

  “Once was enough. Once was too many.” She made a small flinging-away gesture.

  “Now, Geet,” her father said, “your dates, or date, are hardly germane to this inquiry.”

  “All right, but he’s impossible. Such delusions!”

  “Of grandeur?” Charleston asked.

  “Delusions of the illusion of grandeur.”

  Professor Hawthorne smiled and said in the soft tones of fatherhood, “Your character analysis is remarkable in view of the brief association.”

  She smiled in return and answered, “It’s a gift, Father—the voices I hear.”

  “Uh-huh. And if, by your confusing abstractions, you mean the man has ambitions, then hurrah for him. At his age he should have.”

  Charleston had listened with a sort of alert amusement but now, apparently having had enough of Dr. Pierpont, abruptly changed the subject. “You deal in old firearms, Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “‘Deal’ is hardly the word for a hobby. I collect rare pieces, some by barter, some by outright purchase. Collectors are a breed to themselves, Mr. Charleston. Sui generis, you might say. Some specialize in short arms, some in long, some in muzzle loaders, some in military arms. In acquiring what they want, in trading, that is, they often accept additional items of little interest to them but of some little, or perhaps great, interest to other collectors. These constitute their trading stock.”

  He lifted his glass. He seemed to be enjoying himself, as much with his hobby as he had with earth’s history. He waved toward the closed and locked cabinet. “My aim has been to collect pieces that reflect progress in arms-making, those and the rifles, or muskets, that relate to given periods and certain events. They overlap often, of course. In that cabinet is a Sharps used in the Battle of Adobe Wells and a Springfield fired by a trooper of Ouster’s on the Little Bighorn, both well authenticated. I have a fine Henry, a first-year Winchester and a number of Kentuckys, more properly called Pennsylvanias. But why go on?”

  Charleston forged on. “You were talking trade recently.”

  “Why, yes. By telephone.”

  It came to me then that Charleston had seen Mabel Main.

  “A collector in Louisville, Kentucky, has a very fine Hawken,” the professor continued. “It is one of the very few extant and one of fewer that has not been mutilated by amateurs. The Hawken was the fur-hunter’s rifle, you know.”

  He laughed and said, “Let me digress. I had a time making connections by phone. We are on a party line here, as you are aware. More properly it could be called a mass line. There is one instrument in particular, that of a widow and her two teen-age daughters, that is in operation incessantly, to the frustration of all the rest of us on the line. They were talking, of course, when I wished to put through my call. They talked, and they talked, but I outwitted them finally. There is an electric outlet close to my phone. I plugged into it an old, clattery shaver, lifted the receiver and let it clatter in the transmitter.” He laughed again. “That did for the wenches, as I choose to call them. No doubt they’re blaming the telephone company now, which doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”

  “You’re giving yourself away, Father,” the girl said. I could take that statement two ways.

  “Oh, well.” He shrugged. “But back to the Hawken, Mr. Charleston. The owner’s prime interest is short arms, and just recently I’ve come into possession of some very good ones. I thought I might make a trade. It disappointed me that I didn’t.” As if the thought had just come to him, he added, “That call. Not much escapes you, does it?”

  The girl’s gaze was on the sheriff, as it had been during most of the conversation. Did it betray reserve, opposition
, unwilling interest? I couldn’t tell.

  Charleston asked, “Are you acquainted with the Savage three-oh-three?”

  “Surely. Deer rifle. It’s becoming somewhat scarce but not sufficiently rare yet to tempt real collectors. Matter of fact, I have one, not important enough to lock in the cabinet and in poor condition besides. It’s too loose in the breach for safe firing. Possibility of a blow-back, you understand.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Of course.” Mr. Hawthorne turned to his daughter. “Geet, will you bring it out of the storeroom?”

  She disappeared, only to return in a minute and report, “It’s not there, Father.”

  “Not there? Of course it is, stacked along with the Harper’s Ferry and Hudson’s Bay muskets.”

  “That’s where I looked.”

  Mr. Hawthorne got up with an abrupt, “Excuse me.” The girl followed him out as if to prove her point. Charleston sat, with nothing in his face I could read.

  “I can’t understand it,” Mr. Hawthorne said as he and Geet came back to the room. “I know I stored it there. Now who would steal that old piece?” He paused. “I gather that a three-oh-three is important to your investigation?”

  The sheriff said, “Yes.”

  “If anyone fired that old gun, he may have powder burns on him.”

  “You say you are gone from the house a great deal. Do you lock the place up?”

  “My name may suggest the east, Mr. Charleston, but my heritage is early western. So I never lock doors.”

  “Except those to your gun cabinet.”

  “The one exception. Gun fanciers aren’t to be trusted. I’m lucky, even so, that so far I’ve lost only the Savage.”

  “You know its number?”

  “Naturally.” Mr. Hawthorne stepped to a desk, slid back a drawer and answered while he read from a page. “It’s Model eighteen ninety-nine, number one-four-seven-one-four-nine.”

  Charleston had taken a pad from his pocket and made note of the description. Now he stood up. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Help? You don’t think—”

  “Seldom if ever. Thanks to you, too, Miss Marguerite, and good night to you both.”

  I followed with my thank-yous, not that they got much attention.

  Leaving, Charleston turned back to say, “You may just have mislaid it. If it turns up, will you let me know?” Assured that they would, he led along to the Special.

  Ours was mostly a silent trip home. What kept me quiet, what fretted me, wasn’t the matter of murder and what clues we had picked up, if any. It was the toney manner of Mr. Hawthorne. It was him and that beautiful daughter of his. On close acquaintance would I find her as affected as he had appeared? Like father like daughter? Come to think of it, he and Buster Hogue, if different in their ways, had a quality in common. That was the assurance, the touch of superiority, the assumption of specialty that money generates in some men. And now I remembered from my reading the source of that double-jointed adjective that had occurred to me earlier. It came from a bit of verse left by Black Bart, the California bandit, after he had held up a stagecoach.

  I’ve labored long and hard for bread,

  For honor and for riches,

  But on my toes too long you’ve tred,

  You fine-haired sons of bitches.

  Out of the silence Charleston said, “You seem a mite fidgety, Jase. Look in the jockey box and get your mind on your business.”

  I opened the glove compartment, as easterners call it, and found a new baseball. It felt good to a hand that had too long neglected its duty.

  Near town Charleston remarked as if to himself, “Damn likely girl,” and that was the end of our conversation until we gave each other good night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dr. Ulysses Pierpont was not at all what his name suggested. I had expected to see a large and stately man with wisdom written deep in his face. Or possibly a modern version of General Ulysses S. Grant, whose ability would be flavored with booze. But Dr. Pierpont turned out to be a rather small man with a trim mustache, a pointed gray gaze, a flat stomach and clothes that spelled tailor-made. “Spruce” was a word for him.

  We, the sheriff and I, were in his apartment when a quiet knock came at the door. After Charleston had opened it, I heard the visitor say, “Good evening. I came as soon as I conveniently could. Doctor Ulysses Pierpont, and you are Sheriff Charleston, I suppose. Your man at the office said I might find you here.”

  The sheriff made him welcome.

  Charleston and I had eaten supper at his place, enjoying steaks that a grateful rancher had provided after Charleston had collared a shoot-and-run rustler who had made off with a beef. An evening chill had set in, and Charleston had just closed a window when the knock sounded.

  After some little talk about nothing much, the sheriff told Dr. Pierpont, “I thought you might help me. About the murder, of course. I can pick up clues, if there are any, and I can make deductions, right or wrong. I’ve even been known to have some hunches as to human behavior. But in this case there are no clues, no deductions, no hunches. I’m stumped.”

  Dr. Pierpont turned his sharp gray gaze on me and shifted it back to the sheriff. He was asking, I felt sure, whether I had a proper part here. Charleston answered yes with his silence.

  “I fail to understand,” Dr. Pierpont said. “After Mr. Hogue was shot at the picnic, I treated him as best I was able. I had and I have no idea who the marksman might be.” Dr. Pierpont spoke briskly, but after consideration, as if his thoughts had to be well shaped before voiced. “I have little acquaintance with those at the picnic, and, needless to say, I’m not a detective. How then may I help?”

  “My barnyard psychology isn’t up to the mark,” Charleston answered, smiling. “Sheriffs aren’t elected for brains, Doctor Pierpont. They get into office because they’re hail-fellow-well-met, or maybe they’ve come out top dog in a fight. So, knowing my limits, I thought to extend them by talking to you.”

  Dr. Pierpont didn’t smile in return. He listened as if to a troubled patient and waited for more.

  “I want an expert’s insight. I want to know what a given character is capable of and what he isn’t. I want to ask you some questions about people, not necessarily suspects.”

  “Surely you don’t expect me to answer offhand? I fear what you hope from me requires a knowledge of personalities that I don’t possess. And if I did, professionally I couldn’t divulge it.”

  “We will treat the questions and answers as confidential, Doctor, and, more than that, hypothetical when that is demanded. You are acquainted with Simon Hogue, son of Buster?”

  “Obviously you know he was my patient.”

  Charleston considered. “No,” he said, “I did not know that. Nobody does.”

  “Then I’m sorry.”

  Into a moment’s pause Charleston said, “I forgot to offer you a drink. What will it be?”

  “A small whiskey, if you have it. No water or ice.” The drink seemed appropriate to the man.

  I got up and went to the kitchen. Charleston liked water mixed with his bourbon.

  When I returned, Charleston was saying, “No harm done, Doctor. It’s plain to all that Simon needs help. The news that he’s been to you, if ever released, couldn’t cinch a case already cinched.”

  “An inexcusable stigma still often attaches to those who seek the aid of psychiatry.” The doctor took a sip of his whiskey. “As if everybody, worldwide, on occasion didn’t need therapy.”

  “Granted,” Charleston replied. “I figure all of us are a little bit crazy, and some of us crazier than that some of the time.”

  “‘Crazy’ is not a term I use.”

  “No. What would you say about Simon Hogue?”

  “I can say this much, now that I’ve said as much as I have. I had six meetings with the boy. I thought he showed improvement and would show more. But Buster Hogue, his father, became disgusted that I hadn’t performed an instant miracle and terminated
the treatments.”

  “Again, what about Simon?”

  “I dislike classifications, as if all mental and emotional disturbances could be sorted, labeled and pigeon-holed. You call him crazy, others would say insane, still others perhaps feeble-minded. Psychiatry has its own terminology, but no term is exact.” Dr. Pierpont took a last sip of his drink as if to aid in his phrasing. “Let us just say, loosely again, that he suffers from schizophrenia.”

  “Here is the question in my mind,” Charleston went on. “Could a boy, or a man if you please, plan and carry out a shooting—a man or a boy so afflicted, I mean? And a shooting like Buster Hogue’s, I mean, too?”

  Dr. Pierpont gave thought to the question, his slim, keen face lost in the answer. Then he replied, “This is hypothetical, as you say. Let me get away from Simon. Let me generalize. Then I shall have to give a qualified yes. It is not impossible that a man so out of touch with reality—no reference to Simon, understand—could plot and perform such a crime. We see stranger things, we in the profession.”

  The sheriff finished his drink, and I went out to the kitchen for refills. But I could still hear.

  “Thanks,” the sheriff was saying out of my sight. “That’s one thing I know or at least must consider. But motive? Can you tell me, without ethical strain, whether Simon disliked or hated his father?”

  I came back in, served the drinks and sat down.

  “No strain because there is nothing to divulge,” Dr. Pierpont replied. “It was difficult to get anything at all out of Simon. But if I may speak generally again, I’ll tell you what you already know. Most sons harbor an antagonism, latent or active, for their fathers.” He added after a silence, “Perhaps, among other influences, that feeling is proportionate to the success of the father.”

  Charleston found cigars, offered one to Dr. Pierpont, who let it be lighted under the line of his mustache, and then fired up himself. He asked, along with a puff of smoke, “How well did you know Buster Hogue?”

  “Not really well, but well enough.”

  “Just from talking about his son, I suppose?”

  “And one other instance. I tried to buy a few acres from him to add to my own.”