The Far Cry

by Fredric Brown

  “Huh?” He'd forgotten his story of the original destination of his trip. Then he remembered. "Oh, fine. And L. A's just like it always was only more so. How was your stay in Santa Fe?”

  "Wonderful, George .” There was something about her expression that made him wonder how she meant that. She'd always liked Wayne Colby—and Madge Colby always took sleeping powders when she went to bed. But it didn’t really matter; he didn't give a damn. And she was probably assuming that at least part of the purpose of his trip had been a bit of straying off the reservation.

  Well, hadn’t it been? He hadn’t thought of Vi once, really, from the time he left her in Santa Fe until the time he got back; he'd thought only of another woman, one eight years dead. And did that make it better or worse?

  Jenny. Had the trip laid her ghost? He knew all about her now, who she was and where she’d come from and why she had died and who had killed her and what had happened to him afterwards. He knew the whole thing now; he could start trying to forget it.

  But who had stolen that letter—and in God's name, why?

  He drank his drink and thought about it. Finally he had the answer; he’d last seen that letter the night when he'd found it and had been so terribly drunk. And it had been a find so important to him that he must have hidden it, not put it with the rest of Jenny's things, and then forgot about hiding it. Tomorrow, just to satisfy his curiosity, he'd hunt and find it. That's what must have happened. But what about the other evidences of a search—the drawer he himself had noticed, whatever it was Vi had noticed that made her think things had been moved? Well—it could have been that someone had been here but he’d been looking only for money or jewelry, and there hadn’t been any money or jewelry around. Sure, that explained everything there was to explain.

  He felt better, with that out of the way.

  It didn't leave a loose end. He hated loose ends.

  Maybe that was why he'd been so interested—almost obsessed—by the case of Jenny; at the first there’d been so many loose ends, so much that was unexplained. Maybe, now that he had alt the answers, he could even get himself around to the point of view where he could write up the case after all. Hadn’t he been rather ridiculous about that?

  He finished his drink. Vi was putting fried eggs on the table so he didn’t make another one just yet, although the first one had done him good.

  They ate and he wiped dishes for her, what few dishes there were, because he wanted something to do. He made them another drink while she put them away.

  “Vi—?”

  “What, George?”

  "Nothing. Skip it.” What had he been going to say? What was there to say? What had there ever been—in the last five years, anyway—to say between them?

  “All right, George. Mind if I turn on the radio awhile?"

  He shook his head. She went into the living room and he heard the click of the switch. He stepped out of the kitchen door, glass in hand, into the cool evening; it was just getting dark.

  He wanted to take a walk—but he didn’t want to take a walk, because he knew where he’d walk to, and it was meaningless for him to go there.

  He thought, am I going crazy? Really crazy, not just a nervous breakdown or its aftermath?

  He tried to look at it objectively; if this had happened to another man, and had been told to him coldly, objectively, he’d say that the other man was insane. But, from the inside, it looked different.

  But why had it happened?

  Because—well, because he’d been wide open for it, for one thing. Nature abhors a vacuum. And maybe, to some extent, contrast of his picture of Jenny with the reality of Vi? That may have been a factor. Poor stupid, uninteresting Vi, with her radio (he could hear it now, indistinguishable but gushing voices), with her need for candy and whisky and getting fat and sloppy physically as she was already fat and sloppy mentally, with her lackadaisical housekeeping and bad cooking and—well, above all perhaps her lack of interest in anything at all that could be a bond between them. She was getting more and more like—go ahead and think it; it's true—like a cow. But it’s not a cow's fault that she’s a cow, is it? He should remember that, always. And at least it was lucky, for her sake, that she now loved him no more than he loved her.

  His glass was empty. He went back into the kitchen. The bottle that he'd opened was gone; Vi must have taken it into the next room with her.

  The radio sounded blaring from here. "Where are you from, Mrs. Radzinski?" "Well, from Denver, really, but I’ve been living in Alamosa. That’s where I came here from, I mean." "Alamosa? Beautiful little town, Mrs. Radzinski. To be from, I mean. I’m just kidding you, Mrs. Radzinski. I’ve never been there—but I'd like to go there some day. Now, Mrs. Radzinski—”

  Weaver didn’t want to go into the living room for his drink. He opened a new bottle instead and poured himself a big double drink so it would last awhile. He went outside again and the radio must have been turned louder in the meantime for he could hear the words now, not just the voices. He took his drink to the shed.

  He got out the canvas from behind the stacked pictures. He unrolled it and looked and reached—and jerked his hand back. God damn it, he told himself; you're not a fetishist. Don’t act like one. He rolled the canvas up again and put it back.

  Where could he have hidden that letter? And what if he hadn't— He jerked his mind away from that possibility just as he'd jerked his hand away from the contents of the canvas. If the letter had been stolen, then the case wasn’t closed because there was an unexplained factor.

  But the case was closed.

  He didn't like the light; he didn’t like being in the shed. He turned out the light and went outdoors; he sat down on the step. He finished his drink and started for the kitchen to get another, then remembered he’d brought the new bottle with him and it was in the shed. He went back in and made himself another drink.

  You fool, are you going to get drunk again tonight? Wasn't night before last bad enough—so drunk you don't remember checking in at a hotel, so drunk that you remember something that didn't happen at all, that couldn’t have happened because it doesn't make sense? But how did you imagine it? Maybe there had really been a big man with a badge behind his lapel and maybe he showed it to you just to shush you up and later your mind manufactured the rest as a dream while you were asleep in the hotel you don remember going to. But not even a complete dream; you remember going to the cell, but you don 't remember leaving it—and that’s because your dream stopped there.

  He'd better stop drinking now, right now, because he was feeling it. And it was silly enough to get drunk ever, but to get blind and drunk two nights out of three—God, was he becoming an alcoholic?

  But back there in the house Vi was probably getting drunk too.

  Maybe he should—

  No, he thought; it's purely animal when it’s only that. And you're a little more than an animal, you hope. Better to have only dreams than so sordid a reality that two people want one another only when both of them are drunk.

  He got up and started to walk.

  There was a sliver of moonlight, just enough to see by when his eyes were accustomed to it. It was on a night like this, he thought, that Jenny was killed.

  There was the cottonwood.

  He couldn’t make out the outlines of the shallow grave, not in this dim light, but he sat awhile under the big tree. He found himself dreaming the fantasy dream again—the dream in which he'd happened to stop in the bus depot that day eight years ago in Santa Fe, before he'd even met Vi, and happening to meet Jenny there and—and it was such an absurd fantasy because she wouldn't have paid any attention to him if he had been there, and why should she have?

  He walked back to the house.

  The radio was roaring. But it seemed to be between two stations, neither of them quite succeeding in drowning out the other, so he looked into the living room and Vi was asleep in the chair, her chin hanging—and showing the start of another chin below it. He looked at the l
evel of the whisky in the bottle on the table beside her; she'd been putting it away even faster than he had. But then he'd walked to the shallow grave and that had taken time. "Bong, bong, bong," said the radio; "This is KIA, your Albuquerque station. The time is nine o’clock. We bring you Wilson Randolph with the news. But first—Sunshine Bread! Sunshine Bread! Yes, folks, the bread that's packed with vitamins, the bread to ask for the next time you go to your grocer's. Sunshine—"

  He got it turned off before he would have had to scream. The time announcement had penetrated, but it was so unbelievable that he looked at his wrist watch. The radio had been right; it was really only nine o'clock.

  The silence sounded strange.

  "Vi," he said, to break it. "Let me help you into bed, huh?”

  She didn’t answer, but she was partly conscious when he put his hands under her arms and lifted her out of the chair; she walked, staggeringly; he didn’t have to carry her. He got her shoes and stockings off and opened the top of her dress. She started snoring the moment he put her on the bed. Weaver covered her up and closed the door so he wouldn’t have to listen to her snoring. He went out into the other room and made himself another drink.

  Nine o’clock. Oh Christ, only nine o’clock. And he wasn't sleepy; he'd slept late that morning in Santa Fe so he wasn’t tired and he wasn’t sleepy; it would be hours yet before he could even think about going to bed unless he wanted to lie awake and stare into darkness.

  And how long now, already, had he been staring into darkness?

  Try to read? God, it had been over a month since he'd been able to concentrate more than a few minutes at a time on reading.

  Only nine o’clock.

  Silence so deep that he heard the car coming a long way off and when it got near he went to the front window to look; with this the last house on the road it had to be coming here.

  The car turned into the driveway. It parked behind his own.

  A man got out of it and he switched off the car lights as though he intended to stay for a while. It wasn't Callahan; Weaver didn’t recognize him.

  Weaver wondered what the hell and then he decided he didn't care what the hell; he went to the door and opened it just as the man got there. He was a short but heavy-set man in a blue serge suit. He looked familiar, at close range; Weaver decided that he'd seen him a few times, probably around Taos.

  “Mr. Weaver?”

  “Yes. I’m Weaver.”

  "I’m Tom Grayson. Sheriff. Like to talk to you .”

  "Come in," Weaver said. He stepped back from the door. "Let’s go out to the kitchen to talk, Sheriff. My wife’s asleep in the bedroom and we’ll be less likely to wake her if we talk out there."

  Grayson knew his way to the kitchen.

  “Drink, Sheriff?” Weaver discovered that he still had his own glass in his hand.

  “Thanks, no. Not right now. Listen, Mr. Weaver, you got yourself in trouble, do you know that? I got you out. But I've got an explanation coming—and you’ve got some listening to do ."

  “Trouble?” Weaver stared at him.

  "Day before yesterday. In Tucson .”

  "My God," Weaver said. It had happened, them—his arrest and release. "Sit down, Sheriff. And tell me what you’re talking about. I mean—well, I was drunk in Tucson. I thought I remembered— But why? What did I do?”

  “Nothing in Tucson. But you sure made an ass of yourself in Barton."

  Weaver put his drink down carefully on the table. “Will you give it to me in words of one syllable, Sheriff? I don't get it at all.”

  "A Mrs. Albright phoned the police in Barton. She said a man who said his name was Weaver and who was driving a car with a Missouri license phoned her and then came to see her; he was drunk and acted—well, more than suspiciously; she thought he was insane. He told her that her daughter had been murdered by a madman with a knife— and that she thought, if his story was true, he must have been the murderer."

  “My God,” Weaver said. “I had that coming. Go on."

  “The Barton police figured he’d maybe been other places, asking questions around, so they phoned a few places where he'd likely have gone. Especially the taverns, because she said he'd been drunk. And he had been at one of the taverns and had asked a lot of questions about Jenny Albright. He'd given the same name there and had said he came from Taos. He'd shown a hell of a lot of interest in a guy who’d dated Jenny and whom the bartender had seen later in Tucson. He'd sounded like maybe he was going to Tucson to 1ook for the guy. Everything beginning to make sense to you, Mr. Weaver?”

  Weaver said, "The mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceeding small."

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind, Sheriff. Go ahead.”

  "So the Barton police phoned Tucson, gave your description, and said they’d better pick you up for investigation. That was the middle of the evening; they found you in a tavern, drunk.”

  "They did indeed. Go on, Sheriff. And are you sure you won't have a drink?"

  "No drink. I'm leading up to bawling the hell out of you Weaver, and I can't do that if I'm drinking your liquor. Are you sure you're sober enough now to get and remember what I’m saying?”

  “I'll never forget it, Sheriff. Go ahead.”

  "Well, meanwhile, they phoned me in Taos—l mean the Barton police did—to find out if a guy named Weaver really came from here and what made him tick. And it was damn lucky for you that I already knew, from Callahan and Ellie Grant, what your interest in the deal was, so I was able to tell them you were all right; you were just writing up the murder for a magazine. And Barton phoned Tucson and the Tucson cops let you out of the cooler."

  “Sheriff, I owe you a lot of thanks for that.”

  "Save them. I got to wondering, right after that call, how you'd found out that Jenny Ames—Jenny Albright—came from Barton. You couldn’t have guessed it, and that meant you'd found evidence you weren't turning over to me—as you should have if it was anything new. So I came out here and looked around—legally, you understand; I had a warrant. I found that stuff wrapped in the canvas out in your shed; I looked around outdoors till I found out where you’d dug it up. That was smart of you, Weaver—I got to give you that much—to find that stuff he'd buried. But you ought to have come to with it—especially that letter. I took it along, if you’ve missed it. You shouldn't have gone off on your own like that and tried to pull a fancy one.”

  "I suppose I shouldn’t have,” Weaver said. “I—well, it doesn’t matter now. Nelson’s dead, so the case is closed. Did you find that part of it out?"

  "Sure, we had the same lead to Tucson you had; we followed it up the same way, only a bit later. Nelson's dead, all right .”

  He looked at Weaver, “Why’d you say a thing like that to Jenny’s mother?”

  Weaver dropped his eyes to his glass. "I'm not proud of that, Sheriff. I was a little drunk and—well, she needled me into it by telling me she didn’t care what had happened to her daughter. Made me so mad I threw that at her without thinking."

  He looked up. “And, Sheriff, I should have turned that stuff over to you, I admit; I guess it was just for my own ego that I wanted to follow through on it on my own. I’d have given you the dope before the article hit print, and full credit. I wasn’t trying to chisel."

  He thought, what the hell am I crawling for? This guy did me a favor by getting me out of trouble in Tucson, but I’d have got out anyway after they questioned me. And why am I lying about the article? I'm not going to write it.

  "All right, Mr. Weaver.” Grayson stood up. "But—well, take my advice and don't write that article just yet."

  Weaver stood, too; he looked at Grayson. "Okay, I’m not in any hurry to write it. But, out of curiosity, why not? All the facts are in, aren’t they?”

  They were; they had to be. Even the two loose ends he’d tried to keep from thinking about—the missing letter and what had happened to him in Tucson.

  Grayson said, "Listen, Mr. Weaver, you think you’re
a detective or something just because you can write stories for magazines. You think you’re smart. You think us ordinary officers don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground. But that’s where you're wrong. You haven't got sense enough to check little things, details, and we have.”

  Weaver frowned. "All right, what little things didn’t I check?”

  "You didn't bother to get a description in Barton, of this Jenny Albright. You didn’t find out she was a blonde, not a brunette."

  "You mean—" Weaver’s mind reeled. "Are you kidding me, Sheriff—trying to tell me Jenny Albright wasn’t Jenny Ames? My God, the letter, everything—”

  “No, I don't mean that. It was Jenny Albright who came here under the name of Jenny Ames—and she'd dyed her hair along with changing her name, which is why Carlotta Evers and Pepe Sanchez saw her as a brunette. Sure, it was Jenny Ames who was here that night, the one he saw get chased out of the house into the dark. But—there’s a but.”

  Weaver waited.

  "But it wasn’t, it couldn’t have been Jenny Ames or Albright that was found in that shallow grave under the cottonwood. That girl, Weaver, was a real brunette, not a dye job. I checked back to the coroner’s report of his examination and that’s for sure. Besides, that body measured five feet five and Jenny's mother says she was five three exactly. Two inches difference is a hell of a lot. And other things."

  Weaver shook his head to clear it. "All right, I’m stupid. I'm a horse’s ass or anything you want to call me. But what's the score?”

  "The score is that tomorrow I'm coming out here with two men. We're going over the whole area. We may find another shallow grave or two. Maybe it wasn't just one murder. Hell, the original Bluebeard didn’t kill just one woman, did he? How do we know how many girls Nelson lured here to bring money to him, and then killed and buried out there somewhere? We know now there were two anyway, the girl that was in the grave out there, and Jenny.

  "Or maybe he did kill only one, for all we’re sure. Hell, for all we know Jenny Albright might have got away; she had a lead on him going out the door and maybe she outran him. Unless we find her body we don’t even know she’s dead. That’s what I mean when I tell you to hold off on that article."