by Ed Gorman
“Nice day.”
“Sure is,” I said.
“Last year this time we had a blizzard.”
“Blizzards. I’ve had enough of them for a lifetime.”
“My husband got lost in one once.”
“Did they ever find him?”
She looked affronted. “Gosh sakes, yes. You don’t think we’d just leave him out there, do you?”
Liz rescued me. “Here are the two papers he was interested in.”
“I owe you anything?”
“I’m in sort of a hurry,” Mrs. Carstairs said.
“Her husband was lost in a blizzard once.”
“Yes, I know, Noah. I was ten at the time and I was one of the searchers.”
“That’s why we always bring our printing business here. Because her whole family searched for him. A lot of others turned back because it was so cold and bitter. But not the Thayers.”
Longsworth caught up with me as I left the newspaper office and turned into an alley that was a shortcut. As always he carried the briefcase that appeared to be loaded down with bricks. He also carried his eternal frown.
“I suppose you know what’s going on.”
He made it sound like an accusation.
“Nothing’s going on, to answer my own question. Nobody’s trying to find out who murdered that girl and her uncle.”
“Well, I’m trying to find out.”
“You are?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Terhurne didn’t tell me that.”
“Where’d you see Terhurne?”
“That’s my point, Mr. Ford.” He wasn’t much good at sarcasm. Sarcasm you have to ease back a little to make it effective. He used it like a board across the mouth. “I saw him in a saloon where he was playing cards. I think you’ll have to have a talk with him.”
He was the snitch we all hated in grade school. He’d wait until the classroom had emptied and then go up to the teacher and tell her all sorts of things about the immature brats he had to spend his days with. She wouldn’t even ask him for this information. But he’d give it to her, anyway.
“Maybe he was just taking a break.”
“Some break. He’s been taking it ever since I got to town here. The fact is, he’s lazy. People accuse him of all kinds of things but they never seem to see his biggest fault—he’s a loafer.”
I was tired of him and tired of that conversation. But then he made it all worthwhile: “You ever hear of a farmer named Tucker?”
I shook my head.
“Well, he stopped by my office on a completely different matter this morning and in the course of conversation, he talked about seeing Molly and her uncle and Grieves out by a rock quarry. And he said they were blowing the hell out of the place. He was pretty sure they were using dynamite.”
He’d finally said something that interested me. “Where’s this rock quarry?”
He told me.
“And when did this Tucker see them?”
He gave me a date.
“He see anybody else with them?”
“No. But isn’t that enough? Maybe Grieves had a reason to kill her. And maybe that’s what he did. Just snuck back into town here and killed her uncle and her.”
“Just because they were all together blowing up parts of a rock quarry?”
Buggies and wagons creaked and rattled along the streets in the midday rush.
“Well, they were killed for some reason, Mr. Ford. And right now the only person we can tie them to is Grieves. That’s worth looking into, I’d say.”
“And I agree with you.”
“You do?” He sounded shocked. He was apparently not used to winning arguments.
And what he’d told me was in fact interesting. Grieves and Molly and Uncle Bob. Working some kind of deal, no doubt. Right then, it was nothing more than a theory but the only theory we had.
“I hope you’ll take care of this personally.”
“I will. I promise. I appreciate the information.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry if I’m a little rough on Terhurne. But he is a lazy bastard.” Then: “She sure was a beauty.”
“She had one of those faces.”
“Yeah. Launch a thousand daydreams. Good material for the bedroom and the kitchen, too. You ever hear her talk? She had a voice like an angel.”
I laughed gently. I was now embarrassed that we were having this conversation. Starting to make me nervous. “I think you’d better go find yourself a woman, Longsworth. A live one.”
I nodded goodbye and turned to walk away when the two rifle shots cracked through the day from a roof across the street. The only thing that saved me was the uneven board on the sidewalk. The toe of my boot shoved against it just as the bullets were fired. I didn’t trip but I did stumble forward. The shots were close enough to sing as they slashed by me.
The shooter had to have seen that he missed me. I dropped the material I’d been carrying and started to rush across the street only to find that a horse pulling a buggy had gone loco because of the shots and was now bucking up and down in the air. The old woman inside was screaming for help.
Then she did a foolish thing. As the horse continued to buck, the old woman tried to get down from the buggy. At the least, she could break a bone or two. She might even get a concussion if she fell headfirst and smacked her head on the ground.
No one else was in sight. I didn’t have any choice but to stop, jump up, and grab the lines in order to pull the animal down and settle him as fast as I could. And it wasn’t a simple job.
By the time I’d calmed both the old woman and the horse down, the shooter was long gone.
But I had no doubt who’d sent him. Grieves had decided to get rid of me.
Then Longsworth was there. Everything had happened so fast I’d forgotten about him.
He looked pale, shaken. “You know some real bad people, Ford.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do at that.”
I found a park bench about a block away. It sat beneath the awning of a barbershop. Every time the door opened a man came out smelling like bay rum. The aroma always reminded me of living in Baltimore after the war with my wife. The memories were good then. Or maybe the illusions. Maybe my good memories were nothing more than things I hadn’t cared to acknowledge to myself. Maybe those are the best memories of all.
The papers Liz had found were interesting. I found a story dealing with the glory days of the Pine Lake Resort. All the important people who’d stayed there. Some of the romances. The hunting and fishing trophies given out. And then the murders, the cholera attack, the fire that finally shut them down. Very grim. The hook of the story was that the town was searching hard for somebody to open the resort up again but had so far not found any takers.
I found a second story that was even more interesting. It discussed a former Army scientist, Mr. Nathan Dobbs, who had retired for health reasons and who had decided to settle in the West. The story said that there was some suspicion that the scientist had actually been prompted to retire by the church he had recently joined. The church believed in pacifism and apparently Dobbs had become a devout believer.
An hour later I stood on a bluff staring down into the pit of a rock quarry that was backed by a limestone cliff that was as tall as the surrounding aspens.
I knew just enough about munitions, and specifically all the attempts that had been made with grenade-like weapons, to be curious about what I’d find that day.
Ever since the fifteenth century, military munitions men had been trying to create a handheld bomb that you could use in close combat. The problem was that every single time the grenade-like weapon was re-created it had the same problem. A good deal of the time the weapon exploded before the soldier could throw it. Napoleon, ever the optimist, thought he could solve this by enlisting soldiers who were tall and strong and could hurl the grenades great distances over the heads of their fellow soldiers, thus keeping everybody safe. He didn’t have any better luck than his predecessors. No matter how
tall and strong these soldiers were, they couldn’t throw the grenades fast enough to avoid killing themselves.
It was well known that several countries, including the United States, were developing multiple variations on the basic grenade. Germany was building another enormous army, which made all of Europe uneasy. All kinds of weapons were under development at that time including, in Germany, a cannon that was said to be a weapon that could cause unheard-of destruction. So men like Dobbs were working hard to prepare for any emergency.
The man next to me in the bib overalls and wide straw hat was a Mr. Averill Tucker. The corncob pipe he smoked looked to be at least as old as he was, which I estimated to be sixty-something.
From as high up as we were the scarred quarry looked very much like the New England quarry where the dinosaur bones had been discovered a few years back. They’d reconstructed a nearly perfect dinosaur from just that one find.
Quarrying was a merciless business. I’d spent a summer doing some for an uncle of mine. Because I was tall and muscular for my age he gave me the job of wielding a spalling hammer. The one I used went twelve pounds and was shaped something like a sledgehammer. If you weren’t muscular before you started using a spalling hammer, you sure were by the end of the season.
About halfway through the summer, I was breaking rock with the big hammer when a piece of rock flew up and cut my right eye. At first they didn’t think my sight would ever come back. I wore an eyepatch for eight months. The girls at the local barn dances liked it just fine.
“My farm’s right behind that limestone cliff over there,” Tucker said, using the stem of his pipe as a pointer. “So I couldn’t really see much of the explosion. But I did see the three of them standing where we are right now. Grieves I’d seen in a saloon a few days ago. Hate to say it but he was kind of a loudmouth. Got into some pretty good arguments about the war with a pair of men we always consider kind of experts in the subject. Got so pissed off at one of them, he grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him back against the bar. That’s when Gildy—Gildersleeve’s his name—Gildy come runnin’ around from behind the bar with this sawed-off and put it right in Grieves’s face, see? And Gildy says I don’t give a shit if you’re a federal man or not, you don’t come in here and start trouble with my regular customers.”
“How’d Grieves take it?”
“Kinda surprised me for bein’ such a loudmouth. He just said that he was sorry he got so carried away and that the drinks was on him.”
“How long after that did you see him here with the girl and her uncle?”
He thought about it. “Day or two. More like two probably.”
“But you didn’t see how they caused the explosion to happen?”
“No sir, ’fraid I didn’t. But when I heard it I dropped my plow and came runnin’ up to the edge of the cliff and saw them over here.”
“They see you?”
“Can’t say for sure. But probably. Wasn’t tryin’ to hide or nothing.”
“You hear any more explosions that day?”
“Nope. And I stayed in that part of the field till sundown. I woulda heard if there’d been one.”
I had a full, good view of the quarry and an even better one with my field glasses.
I’d seen the recent gouge when we’d first gone up there. It was wide enough and deep enough that I didn’t need the field glasses to see it. But then I did use them for close inspection.
“You’re sure this is the only explosion there’s been out here recently?”
“Positive, Mr. Ford. Nobody’s worked this quarry for two years. Not since that hellish flood we had. This place was under water for six months. They had to set up a new quarry elsewhere.”
“And they always used dynamite here?”
“Sure. Except for a certain kind of stone where they’d use the old stuff, the gunpowder. There’s a few jobs dynamite’s too rough for.”
I continued to scan. Usually around a quarry you see blasting caps from dynamite use. But the flood had cleaned out everything.
From what I could see, the large hole in the face of the cliff was just as Tucker had said. Brand new.
“Wish I could be more helpful, Mr. Ford. You know, seen what he was using to make the blast. But they run right down there and cleaned up the whole site. Like they didn’t want to leave no kind of evidence behind.”
Grieves had gotten his hands on something that was pretty damned dangerous. And would likely be worth a lot of money to somebody. If, that is, it was a grenade or grenade-like device that didn’t kill the thrower as often as it killed the intended victims.
I couldn’t gauge anything about the reliability of the weapon but I could certainly gauge its ferocity. What I’d just seen impressed me with not only the concussive power of the weapon but also the fact that its damage was much better focused than most grenades. You didn’t get accuracy in grenades; this weapon looked as if you pretty much destroyed what you aimed at.
My thoughts went back to my own war, the bloody, busted bodies of my own time’s battlefields. There were all kinds of diseases to conquer but the real money and real interest seemed to lie in destruction rather than preservation. I wasn’t naïve enough to be a pacifist but I was realistic enough to know that something was wrong when nations spent more money on death than life.
I thanked Tucker for taking me up there and then I headed back to town.
I was in need of a cup of coffee so I strolled toward the café. The main street was still noisy and dusty with wagon traffic. A train coming into the depot added to the noise.
I had just passed the sheriff’s office when Knut Jagland came out in a hurry and said, “We’ve been looking for you. We need to get over to the mortuary quick.”
Within five minutes I was staring down at a corpse that was covered only by a sheet. The corpse had blue eyes. One of them was glass.
Chapter 17
“You gonna make a joke?”
“About what?”
“About how fast I got us out of that room downstairs?”
“Why would I make a joke?”
“I know you already figured that I hate bein’ around blood. But bein’ in a tiny room with a dead body, that makes me even sicker. It’s like bein’ in a coffin. Knut here’s a big help to me.”
“Hell, Sheriff, we’re all afraid of something,” Knut said. “Look at me and snakes.”
Sheriff Terhurne nodded. “He’s like a little girl around ’em.”
The way Knut glanced at him, I wasn’t sure he was all that happy with how Terhurne had explained Knut’s aversion to snakes.
We stood in the backyard of the mortuary next to the double garage that held the fancy hearse and the bone wagon. There were nice big oaks for shade and if you didn’t look at the Victorian-style house in back of you, you wouldn’t know that you were within maybe thirty feet of dead folks.
“You looked like you knew him, Noah,” Knut said.
“I don’t know him but I’m pretty sure I know who he was.”
“He got anything to do with Grieves?” Terhurne said.
“Yes. But I haven’t quite figured out what yet.” Then: “You two can head back to the office if you want. I’m going back downstairs.”
Terhurne smiled. “You like those corpses, do you?”
I wasn’t in the mood for his humor. Knut said, “C’mon, Sheriff, let’s see what’s at the office.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” Terhurne said to me. I thought of what they said about Germans, that they were always either at your throat or at your feet. Seems some Irishers had that same inclination. I didn’t like Terhurne any better kissing my ass than threatening me.
He hadn’t been in the river long, Dobbs the scientist, not according to the mortuary man Sam Nevens, anyway.
Nevens wore an expensive white shirt, an expensive blue cravat, and obviously spent some time on his graying hair. He was the middle-aged mortician as fashion plate. He was all about life in his calling of
death.
We both pushed cigarette smoke across the body between us on the table. Nevens had moved us into the preparation room with much larger space.
I was asking questions about how long the body had been in the water but he had a complaint to register first.
“You know something, Mr. Ford? I’m completely happy to answer your questions. In fact, I’ll stand here all day and talk your leg off about how bodies respond to water. And you know what? There won’t be any charge. And do you know how I know how bodies respond to water?”
“No, I guess I don’t.” I wondered where the hell this was going. The body had been washed up, not even the bullet holes in the side of the head looking all that foul at that point. But still and all it was a dead body and I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I had to.
“Well, how I learned about bodies and water was when I went to school in Denver. Yes, mortician’s school. People are all the time asking us questions but they never stop to think of where we learned the answers.”
“Yeah, well, that’s really too bad—but—”
“—and you know who makes the biggest profit in this business? Not us, that’s for darned sure. You go right down the street to this big fancy furniture store, Clancy Brothers, and you think all you’re seeing is the furniture they get in from Chicago five times a year. But then you go down in the basement and you know what you find?”
“Mr. Nevens, I’m in kind of a hurry—”
“Caskets is what you find. My pop who built this funeral home, he and the original Mr. Clancy got into an argument over pinochle one night. And damned if Clancy didn’t go into the casket business two weeks later. A whole basement full of them. And for twenty years that’s the way it’s been. We do all the hard work here—did you happen to notice the new wallpaper in the vestibule upstairs?—and they make the easy money on caskets.”
I was trapped in a room with a dead man and a lunatic.
He tried to keep on talking but I took out my railroad watch and dangled it in front of him. “I have five minutes to get to an important meeting.”