by A B Guthrie
Ves Eaton was behind the bar. On stools in front of it were Tim Reagan and three miners I knew only by sight. The miners spoke to me civilly, perhaps having heard of last night’s facedown, perhaps for other reasons, including Tim’s friendly greeting. I beckoned him to a table after telling Eaton I would buy a round, small beer for me, please.
Reagan came over and sat down, a glass in his hand. “We’re getting to be a bunch of goddamn drunks,” he said. “No work, and what else is there to do? Watch that fool picture box until you scream bloody murder. Talk until talk plays out. Keep scratching your butt, then go to boozing.”
“You handle it all right,” I told him.
He smiled. “Until that one time when you taught me my manners.”
“Forget it.”
“Anyhow, thanks for standing up to ’em last night.”
“It wasn’t me. It was the sheriff and Doolittle and Studebaker with that big dog. I was just there.”
“On the front line, I heard.”
I shook off that subject. “I’m trying to nose out who shot Chuck Cleaver. Sheriff’s orders.”
“Don’t forget Pudge Eaton.”
“We haven’t.”
“Connection?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
Reagan sipped at his drink and said mildly, “So you come to me?”
“I have to, Tim. It could have been one of your boys.”
He shook his head. “I bet my shirt it wasn’t.”
“Still?”
“The only real bad apple in the bunch is Coletti, and he’s a knife man. I swear, Jase, there’s not a rifle on the row. Not a single one. Revolvers and such is different. There’s some around, bought just for protection against wolves, but they’re snub-nosed and mostly small caliber. It was a rifle that kilt the man, wasn’t it?”
“That’s how it looks. But all right, Tim. Now would you help me out? Do some of my work?”
“That’s okay. What?”
“You know. Smell around. Talk. Ask questions. Tell me if you find out anything.”
“All right. Sure. Dead end, though. But it gives me an interest beyond this damn drinking.” He lifted his glass and looked at it. “Damn stuff.”
We dawdled away a couple of hours, making small talk and drinking only a little. I looked at my watch for perhaps the tenth time and said, “I have to talk to Bodie Dunn. About quitting time for him.”
“Don’t believe what that son of a bitch says.”
I left my chair. “I know him. Don’t worry.”
Bodie Dunn sat in a booth at the Bar Star, glaring at a beer. Except for Studebaker and two customers on stools, he was the only one there. I slid into the booth. “Just when I was gettin’ comfortable,” he said to the beer, “here comes a buttinsky, and damn his soul.”
“Any further remarks?” I asked him.
His eyes lifted to me then. They were small eyes, angry yet furtive. “You got people lookin’ sidewise at me, like as if I had pot-shot Chuck Cleaver.”
“Did you?”
He made a violent gesture, upsetting his beer. “I ought to knock your nose back to your neck.” What he dared to do was something less than what he proposed.
Studebaker arrived with a bar towel and began wiping up. “And you!” Dunn said to him. “You’re as bad as the rest. Why do I come into this fuckin’ bar?”
“You must like it,” Studebaker said easily. I asked him to bring Dunn another beer.
After its delivery I said, “I have to ask questions.”
Again Dunn’s eyes lifted to me. “Ask your head off. See if I care.”
“Could you, or anyone with you, have shot Cleaver by accident, thinking he was a wolf? You were shooting pretty wild, at anything that seemed to move.”
“Now you got it,” he said, spreading his hands. “I own up. But it was his truck we were shootin’ at, takin’ it for a wolf. Cleaver just happened to get in the way.”
“Thanks. I’ll put it down as an accident. One truck shot and killed. Bring the hide in.”
“I’m laughin’ fit to kill.”
“Me, too, at you. Who was with you on your expeditions?”
“Different times, different guys.”
“You know, Dunn, for two-bits I’d haul you in and let Charleston lean on you. He takes killing serious. You damn better do the same.”
“Who doesn’t?” He took a long look at his beer, the bluster seeping out of him. “Honest to God, Beard, we’d of known if we shot Cleaver. We wouldn’t of buttoned up or turned tail. I swear to that. Now think on it. The truck was right there, alongside where I heard you found him. We wasn’t that drunk, not to notice, and none of us shot him. If Charleston wants to use his rubber hose, that’s all I can tell him.”
“No rubber hose. Not with Charleston. One other question. Who besides you drove wolf hunters out?”
“Just Frank Fournier. Francis Fournier. He’s the only one I know. But he wouldn’t run and hide, no more’n we would. You can ask him.”
“I will,” I said and went out.
Charleston heard my report without interruption. When I ended, he said, “We can check on Jordan’s poker players, but I doubt it’s worth it. Maybe later. And who knows about those wolf hunters? They could dummy up so as to protect one of the party. I doubt that, too. The truck was right there plain to see, even in the dark.”
“I have to talk to Fournier later. He usually comes into town after supper.”
Charleston gave a slow nod. “By the way, Pete Howard called. He was relieved. That dead cow of ours isn’t his baby.”
“It’s ours then,” I said needlessly. “I don’t know, but it seems to me we’ve kind of lost sight of Pudge Eaton’s death. Tim Reagan mentioned that. He asked were the two killings connected.”
Charleston put a hand to his forehead, then to his cheeks. It didn’t altogether erase the lines of worry and of fatigue. He had taken the late shift last night and, I suspected, gone on until daylight. I knew from the switchboard report that he had answered four calls, all unimportant but all in the line of duty. “Jase,” he said, “I thought I was beginning to see a pattern. I thought I was fitting some pieces together. Now I don’t know. Now I wonder.”
He was still wondering when I took off.
20
Over a fried-chicken dinner, which the pup wanted to share, Mother said, “I’ve changed his name.”
“To what?”
“Bipsie seemed a sort of namby-pamby, little-girl’s name, inappropriate for a male dog.”
“So, Mother?”
“I debated between Leo and Rex.”
“Lion or king, huh?”
“I decided on Rex. He’s coming to know it. I declare, Jase, I never realized what company a dog could be.”
“You become dependent on his dependence, like old Mr. Linderman. The king and his subject?”
“Now don’t get fancy with me, Son. You always want to frazzle things out.” She smiled forgivingly.
After dinner, putting first things first, I went to see Felix Underwood. He came to the door himself, invited me in and said his wife had gone to play cards. He led me into his den, across the new carpet that, by lamplight at least, didn’t show where Doolittle had watered it.
The den consisted of a desk, a swivel chair, a straight chair and walls plastered with prints of baseball players. The oldest one I saw went back to Ty Cobb. On the desk was a picture of Willie Mays, which Underwood explained he was tardy in putting up. He had few interests beyond live balls and dead bodies, and of the two the former came first.
After we were seated, I said, “I came to make arrangements for Chuck Cleaver’s funeral.”
“All right, Jase boy. Wasn’t that the damndest thing?”
I agreed that it was and added, “Mrs. Cleaver wants the funeral to be at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, graveside services.”
Underwood’s plump face could wear three expressions—jovial, serious and funereal—which turned on and off according to
circumstances. Now was the time for serious. “What! A grave’s got to be dug. That’s too short notice.” He wanted me to think that digging a grave was all hand work, but I knew better.
“A closed casket, too. No viewing.”
“Are you crazy, Jase? Or is she?”
“That’s the way she wants it.”
“After all the work I did on him. I tell you he was a challenge, and I met it. He makes a comely corpse now, and no one to appreciate the pains I took.” His expression turned to funereal.
“That’s not all, Felix. She hasn’t much ready money. That’s what she told me, and I believe her. So go easy on the coffin.”
This was business and called for the serious look. “A rough pine box, huh, held together by shingle nails? She doesn’t want him put away proper?”
“I’d say in the neighborhood of four hundred dollars. No more.”
He heaved the sigh of the defeated. “Every day people are killing me.”
“Killing each other is more on the mark.”
“That’s not to say I like it. What else?”
“I told her you would send a car out to the ranch to get her and take her back.”
“That’s part of our service, but you’re damn free with your promises. Look, Jase, don’t let this officer business go to your head. It’s done enough already. You used to be a baseball pitcher with a good arm and one hell of a lot of promise. Then what? You got your hand banged up playing cop.”
“That was a good time ago, and the hand’s healed, but I’ve changed ambitions.”
“Sandy Koufax for J. Edgar Hoover. That’s what I call comin’ down.”
“That’s spilt milk, Felix. Now about the funeral, there’s one other thing. You got a preacher on tap?”
“Oh, sure. They come out of a spigot. Pull the handle, that’s all, and here’s one clerical—dressed with a Bible in his hands.”
“All right. Can you engage a minister?”
“That costs, too. Preachers got to live just like you and I.”
“Isn’t the fee included in your services?”
Instead of answering, he asked, “What denomination?”
“I would say a preacher, not a priest.”
“Cases like this, I usually go Methodist or Lutheran.”
“Good enough. Mrs. Cleaver isn’t particular.”
“She sure isn’t,” he said, probably thinking of the cheap casket. He got up, turning jovial now that our business was done. “I’ll take care of things, Jase. Just leave it to your old Uncle Felix.” He patted my shoulder as I took my leave.
On the way to the Bar Star I stopped off at the public telephone booth and called Anita. Same story. Grandfather maybe a little bit better but needing almost constant attention. Not a good time for me to come calling.
Francis Fournier was in the saloon, along with eight or ten others. When I had cut him out of the bunch and said I wanted to talk to him, he said, “This is no good place for talk. A quiet coffee, huh?” He had a swarthy skin and a desperado’s mustache at odds with his fundamental good humor.
We crossed the street to the Commercial Cafe, which wasn’t busy at this hour, and sat at a table. After we had ordered and been served coffee, I said, “It’s about the shooting of Chuck Cleaver.”
“Sure. I guessed so. A bad thing, that.”
“Mr. Charleston thinks one of you wolf hunters could have shot him by accident.”
“Not so.”
“What’s not so?”
“Mr. Charleston, he is a smart man. He don’t think that.”
“He said it was a possibility.”
“I heard him. You know so. A good trick, that’s what he played. I take my hat off.” Speaking, he tipped his old hat.
“Trick?” I asked.
“We were hot in the head. All of us. Me, too. There in the Bar Star. A fool thing we thought we do, to scare off the strip miners. Guilty? Not guilty? Who knows?”
He took a drink of coffee and wiped his mustache with a knuckle. “So we voted for a war party. Then comes your smart sheriff and says maybe a wolf hunter shot Cleaver. Them who hadn’t hunted thought maybe so. He gave them to think. Us, too, us hot-heads. The party fizzled out. I said it was a smart trick.”
“That’s your way of looking at it,” I said. “But what with whiskey and all, one of you could have shot Cleaver.”
“And kept a tight mouth? No, Beard. We are better men than that. Charleston knows.”
“You did some wild shooting.”
“Fun shooting. I went for that. Not to kill anything.”
“Not even wolves?”
He grinned, drank and spread his hands. “Wolves. They are big brothers to coyotes, not standing around to be shot. Too smart for that. They howl, but a man comes or a headlight, and they are the hell gone.”
“Then why go hunting the way you did?”
“They did not know as much as me about wolves, and I was not telling. Let them hunt, have a good time.”
We had finished with coffee. “You don’t leave me anything to go on,” I said. “In my place where would you look?”
He didn’t answer at once. Then he told me, “Look down a gopher hole.”
At first I thought he was joking. Then I suspected he wasn’t. He was only half Indian, if that, but for an instant I saw him seated at a council fire minus his mustache, his appearance all Indian, his hair in plaits, his hand holding a pipe. It was a time for grave thought.
I said, “The gophers aren’t out yet.”
“One was.”
I shook the mystical business out of my head. “Before I peek down gopher holes, I have to question the other hunters.”
“Waste your time, huh?”
“Maybe so, but can you give me names?”
“Of everybody, I think,” he answered, nodding. “For myself and for Bodie Dunn.”
Without hesitation he told me names, and I jotted them down. As we left the place, after I’d thanked him, he said, “The sheriff, he will find the hole. He is smart.”
Before it was too late to ring doorbells, I had time to question two of the hunters he had named. They were no help.
I started walking home in the dark, thinking of the long chore of talking to everyone who had gone looking for wolves. A long chore and probably fruitless but more to the point than peering down burrows. The chinook wind still blew, warm and gentle as a remembered caress. Then there was the sound of torn air behind me, and before I could turn a massed weight hit me in the back and knocked me flat, face down. I got my hands under me and started to lift myself, and a great, slobbering tongue washed my neck. I knew then.
I said, “Damn you, Gunnar, quit it! Get away! Think you’re the Hound of the Baskervilles?”
He stood there, tongue out, tail wagging, as I got to my feet. Friends deserved a pat on the head. I gave him a couple.
21
I attended Cleaver’s funeral as a matter of courtesy on the part of the sheriff’s office. I didn’t expect to see the culprit there, no matter the belief that the guilty out of some perversity liked to see their victims put safely away. I scanned the crowd, just on the chance, but didn’t get a clue.
Fifty or more people attended, though notice of the services was too late or too early for the weekly newspaper. News in our country had a habit of getting around without benefit of the press.
The minister read from the Bible, mostly Psalms, and referred to the assurance that our Father’s house had many mansions. I never knew what that meant, and neither did the preacher, but it sounded impressive. I imagined that the mansion Cleaver would have wanted was a going ranch. Turning from promise to fact, the minister gave us vital statistics. I learned that Cleaver was born in Minnesota, came to Montana as a young man and was fifty years old when he died. Mrs. Cleaver sat in the mourner’s car, courtesy of Felix Underwood. If she was mourning, I couldn’t tell. From what I could see of it, I gathered that her dress or suit was deep purple. That color was mourning enough in itself.
Felix might dicker and wail, but he liked his funerals nice, and so he had recruited four middle-aged ladies, or older, who sang “The Old Rugged Cross.” Their voices rose frail in the breeze, dying in the plains grass and among the tombstones. The old rugged cross, trembling and falling, weak but courageous, there on the hillside of the dead. I wanted to applaud the old girls for this quavering assertion of hope against everyone’s destiny.
Right after the services I said to Sheriff Charleston, “I’ve interviewed six of the ten men who went hunting. Nothing there. Not a glimmer. Four to go, and I’ll do it, but I won’t get anything.”
Seated behind his desk, he listened with what seemed impatience, as if obliged to hear me out. Then he said with uncommon brusqueness, “We’re just festering. Chasing our tails. Marching up the hill and down again. Running fast in the same spot.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, trying to lighten his mood. “I get the idea through the mixed metaphors.”
He didn’t smile. He said, “Any damn thing is better than fester. Let’s have a drink or a beer and let the world wag.”
“If you say so. Where?”
“The Chicken Shack. That suits the mood, and a friendly visit won’t hurt us.”
We climbed into his Special. On arrival, with the engine turned off, we could hear the juke box inside the place. When we entered, the sound stunned us. For a minute we stood by the door, letting our ears deaden while we looked around. A half-dozen customers, not known to me by name, were working on drinks at bar or table. Ves Eaton was behind the counter. I shouted for a whiskey and a beer. Eaton seemed friendly enough. The customers appeared curious, not hostile. I took the drinks to a table, and Charleston and I endured the racket.
Presently the music came to an end, and humans could communicate without lip-reading. His glass of whiskey half-raised, Charleston shook his head slowly and said, “Who said the world ends with a whimper? It ends with a blast, jungle drums beating, jungle voices crying out bloody murder.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “If this place wasn’t walled in, the courthouse could dance to hard rock.”