by JM Gulvin
‘Doctor’s been and gone,’ the chief told him. ‘Had him come out to the house as soon as the call came in.’
Quarrie was still considering the body.
‘Took her brain temperature and figured she’d been dead at least twelve hours.’
Stepping closer to the table Quarrie studied the bruise marks in blue and mauve that gathered at the base of the woman’s throat. ‘What time did you say this was reported?’
‘Around two thirty this afternoon.’
‘And your Officer Michaels, they found him at four this morning?’
The chief nodded. ‘You’re thinking he swung by the depot following his usual route and found himself with her killer?’
‘Could be.’ Quarrie still studied the dead woman’s neck. ‘Fingers,’ he said inspecting the bruising. ‘Crushed her windpipe with his fingers and that takes a lot of doing.’ He drew breath audibly through his nose. ‘I’ve seen a few strangled with cord or a length of chain, but not many killed with fingers.’ Eyebrow cocked he indicated the lower body.
The chief shook his head. ‘No sign of anything going on down thataway, or at least that’s what the doctor said. Guess it’ll be confirmed by the autopsy.’
Quarrie looked more closely at the dead woman’s mangled features. ‘Chief,’ he said, ‘I might be wrong but this kind of beating – looks to me like the perp was pretty pissed off. You see what I’m saying? A whomping like this, and to a woman – it smacks of anger. Is that how it looks to you?’
Glancing at the woman’s face the chief pursed his lips. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘we haven’t had a murder in this town since God was in britches, so if that’s how it looks to you then that’s how it looks to me.’
With a smile Quarrie nodded. ‘What about her family? Have you been able to talk to anybody?’
‘Not so far. It’s like I said back at the station house: she showed up in town maybe six weeks back and rented a house over on Osprey. Kept herself to herself and from what the neighbor said it doesn’t sound like she had many visitors. No sign of any previous address in the house so we haven’t been able to trace a next of kin.’
Quarrie worked fingers across her jaw and remaining cheekbone where rigor mortis had thickened the skin. Moving around to the side of the table he considered her hands and specifically the fingernails. Trimmed short, they were not bitten but shaped with a pair of nail scissors and he could see where they had been filed with an emery board. There was no trace of nail polish and no hint of anything obvious hooked underneath.
‘Where did she work at?’ he said.
‘According to the neighbor she was a secretary for old man McIntyre. Got him a shop down on Orchard and Main. Maintains farm machinery and folk come from miles around on account of there ain’t anything his boys can’t fix.’ The chief let go a sigh. ‘I haven’t told him she’s dead yet. Gutted he’ll be; hates any kind of disturbance and this used to be—’
‘A sleepy little spot. You said.’
Outside Quarrie stood on the porch staring into bands of falling rain. All was quiet; nobody on the street, and when they drove back across town there was no one on Main Street either.
‘Always this way is she?’ he asked. ‘After dark I mean, or is it on account of the rain?’
Billings worked his shoulders. ‘Rain doesn’t make any difference. Apart from a few kids kicking off like they are right now, we’re not so busy come sundown.’
Osprey was a quiet residential street scattered with small one-and two-bedroom homes built in weathered clapboard that were either open onto the sidewalk or set behind fences of chain link. The Gavin house was even more dilapidated than the police department and whoever the landlord was he was clearly not big on maintenance. No fence, the yard overgrown with yellow grass where a single willow tree hunched like a porcupine with its bristles up.
Quarrie stood for a moment looking up and down the street. Silent apart from the rain, there was not so much as a cicada singing as the chief grabbed a cape from the trunk. He offered it to Quarrie but he didn’t mind the rain, and there was never enough of it up in the panhandle. It ran off his hat and splashed onto the already soaking sidewalk while he took a minute to consider the dead woman’s home.
‘Nobody heard anything?’ he said. ‘Last night when this was going down, nobody heard her scream?’
‘Not that anybody said.’ The chief stepped onto the sidewalk. ‘We started door to door this afternoon but we haven’t spoken to everybody.’
Quarrie approached the house along the overgrown footpath with a flashlight the chief had retrieved from the trunk. The stoop was cut from rough-looking wood and two of the steps were rotten, the edges turned to mush. He picked up a scraping of mud that seemed to have been deposited at an odd angle. Coasting the beam from the flashlight across the grass he saw where it was flattened in places and that was not due to the rain. Moving away from the stoop he looked more closely and picked out where the grass was splayed more deeply and shone the torch on the turned earth under the window.
‘Got you something there, do you?’ The chief spoke from where he was sheltering on the inadequate porch.
Close to the wall Quarrie made out a full-sized footprint that was partially hidden by weeds. Next to it was another print where a step had been taken, and that was almost as flat as the first one. It shouldn’t be. He knew tracks, had studied them for as long as he studied anything, and he could tell when a man was running or walking, when he was agitated and when he was calm. He knew when he was making a turn, or pausing to think about making one maybe. There was something about that print that seemed a little odd and it took a moment before he knew what it was. The first one made sense being as flat as it was, but with the second the angle was wrong. That kind of movement ought to leave a mark where only the ball of the foot flexed, but that’s not how it was. There was more of the print showing than there should be.
‘What is it?’ the chief said. ‘What you got there?’
‘Boot print,’ Quarrie told him. ‘US Army issue: I can tell that from the pattern on the sole because that ain’t changed since World War II and I wore a pair myself.’
‘You fight then, did you?’
‘Korea.’ Quarrie looked up at him. ‘Chief, I think your perp was standing right here checking out Ms Gavin through the window. He’s wearing a military boot and the left one’s got a nick in the heel. I can’t say about the right, but the way it’s flexed I’d say those boots have a steel shank running the length of the sole.’ Thumbing back his hat he dropped to his haunches. ‘That means the boots are second-phase. The eyelets are distinctive in that they’re screened to keep out water, and I can tell you that the cuff is made from nylon. In my day it was canvas but they changed it when they put the shank in.’
‘What’s the shank for?’
‘Punji stake mantraps.’ Quarrie rose to his full height. ‘Stops a grunt getting impaled if he steps on one. The sole is pretty rigid though, and on account of that it makes them much less flexible to walk in.’
Scratching his head the chief took his flashlight back and shone it on the ground himself.
‘You know all that from a couple of footprints?’
‘Sure.’ Quarrie was smiling. ‘Even ants leave tracks in their wake, Chief. I thought everybody knew that.’
The chief had the house keys. Opening the door he reached inside for the light switch. A Chinese-style paper shade clung around the inadequate bulb casting macabre looking shadows on the walls. No door to the living room, just a squared-off archway, Quarrie stood with his hands in his jacket pockets.
The living room looked like a bomb site, furniture thrown over, the table smashed; the cushions had been pulled from the couch.
Every drawer in the cheap bureau had been tossed and the contents tipped on the floor.
‘Somebody looking real hard for something,’ Quarrie said. ‘What’s missing? What did he take?’
The chief pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know. There’s no
cash lying around, so if she had any he took that, but there’s jewellery still in the bedroom.’
Quarrie considered the body-shaped outline chalked on the wooden floor. He could see blood drying on a rug, blood on the walls, and more scattered in strings across the front of the bureau. A purse lay among the ruins of the broken table. Inside he found the victim’s driver’s license as well as a check book with a balance of eighty-seven dollars listed on the accounting slip.
He could tell by the amount of white powder still lying that the lab team had been through here already, but as he moved about the room he was careful just the same.
‘Chief, how many sets of prints did your boys raise?’
‘Seven,’ the chief said. ‘She lived on her own I guess, but this place is a rental.’
‘Seven?’ Quarrie said. ‘That’s a lot of fingerprints, even for rental. How many were fresh, were the lab boys able to tell?’
‘They weren’t absolutely certain, but they reckoned on probably two.’
Quarrie moved from the living room to the hall and bedroom. Again it was turned upside down, the mattress half on the bed and half on the floor, the drawers from the nightstand thrown over. The dressing table was trashed, all the drawers on the floor and their contents scattered. The jewellery box was open and had been rifled but there were some nice pieces lying there so robbery hadn’t been the motive.
‘Are you talking to the NCIC?’ he spoke to the chief where he hovered in the doorway.
‘Up there in Virginia, sure. Teletype of the prints already been wired.’
Quarrie nodded. ‘Do me a favor and ask them to have a copy sent to the Department of Safety in Amarillo.’
Outside again they stood on the porch where Quarrie lighted a cigarette and stared into the rain. He had looked through the rest of the house but found nothing that told him anything other than that whoever killed Mary-Beth Gavin had done it in a violent rage. She ought to have been screaming and somebody should have heard that. If this was Dallas or Houston he might accept the fact that it could have been ignored, but not in a town this small.
Back in the car he asked the chief to drive him over to the railroad depot and they parked close to where the fallen deputy’s body had been found. Any blood lying had long since been washed away by the rain and there were no traces of footprints or tire marks.
‘Part of his route,’ the chief explained. ‘Michaels patrolled this area every night and he always made a sweep of the depot.’
‘What about trains?’ Quarrie asked him.
The chief shrugged. ‘Nothing till the four-oh-five. Like I told you, it was the engineer that found him.’
Quarrie took a room in a family-run motel a block east of Main Street. There was a phone by the bed and he called Amarillo, leaving a message for Van Hanigan about the incoming teletype. Then he telephoned the ranch.
‘How you doing, kiddo?’ he said when his son came on the line.
‘I’m fine, Dad. When you coming home?’
‘Don’t know yet. Fact is it took me all day on the road and I only just got here. You can blame those students you see on the TV. On account of them I’m the only Ranger available to get over this way and that’s a pretty poor state of affairs.’
‘Yes, it is,’ James said.
‘So how was school today? Did you learn anything?’
‘Sure. Miss Munro told us we have to come up with a project on some kind of history.’
‘Did she now? So what’re you thinking of doing?’
‘Well sir, I talked to Pious and he said he’s going to help me.’
Sitting up straighter Quarrie reached for his cigarettes. ‘You-all going to write something about what happened to him? What went on in Korea?’
‘No, sir. I thought about that. I thought about how he saved your life that time too, the story you told Nolo and the others at the fish fry. Pious told me he don’t want that dragged up again, not even for a school project.’
‘So what’re you thinking?’
‘We talked about it and he figured I ought to do something on that train wreck up on the Red?’
‘Did he tell you what it was we found there?’
‘No, sir. What was it?’
Quarrie did not answer. Shaking a cigarette from the pack he rolled the wheel on his Zippo. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘You go ahead and see what you come up with. When you got something I’ll tell you what we found up there and we’ll see if we can’t fit all the pieces together.’
‘OK, Dad,’ the boy said. ‘By the way, I asked Miss Munro about looking stuff up in the newspaper and she said they kept the records on some kind of fish.’
‘Fiche,’ Quarrie corrected with a smile. ‘F-I-C-H-E. It’s a piece of plastic, son. They shrink all the text and pictures down and transfer them onto the plastic. They call it a microfiche, James. What’s the name of the newspaper?’
‘Don’t know yet. I guess I’ll have to ask Pious.’
When he put the phone down Quarrie lay back with his boots crossed at the ankle. Thinking about what James had said he stared at the wall and all he could see was that skull where it hung in the river.
Seven
He woke to threads of sunlight creeping around shabby drapes: a grubby motel in Fairview; one street with a supper club, mercantile and bank. Working the heel of his hand into his eyes he climbed out of bed, crossed to the window and eased aside the drape. A handful of vehicles had been parked in the lot last night but only the Buick he had stolen was left.
In the bathroom he splashed cold water over his face. There was a coffee pot and some packages of coffee on the side and he added water from the faucet. While the coffee perked he got dressed. The shotgun was resting against the wall where he had left it and the Model 10 Colt he had taken from the deputy’s holster lay on the nightstand by the bed.
Driving down the street to the mercantile, he went inside and hunted among the shelves till he found a two-foot hacksaw and roll of duct tape.
‘Don’t be cutting yourself now,’ the girl at the counter warned him. ‘That there tape won’t work on a missing finger.’
Back in the motel room he moved the folding luggage rack into the middle of the floor and placed the twelve-gauge shotgun lengthwise across canvas bands. Keeping it steady with his left foot he sawed the barrel off half an inch in front of the magazine. He had no file to square the cut with so he took a wet towel to the burr instead.
Taking up the saw a second time he sectioned the stock so it left only a pistol grip and he bound that carefully with tape. Then he folded the rack once more and set it against the wall by the closet. Sliding the six bullets from the chamber of the Model 10 he cleaned that with the towel then reloaded and stuffed the pistol in his waistband. He had a few dollars left from the money he had taken from the dead salesman’s wallet but he still had the check book as well.
The bank was not busy, only one customer ahead of him as he waited in line. Filling out a check for a hundred dollars, he passed it across and the teller told him she would have to call the bank in Little Rock to check the account. He waited while she crossed to the manager’s office.
When the teller came back she told him there was actually only sixty-one dollars in the account right now, so he wrote another check for sixty. The woman cashed that and he pocketed the money then walked back out to the car.
Behind the wheel once more he drove out of town, keeping to the speed limit, and headed for the freeway. Driving south he pulled off at the exit for Marshall and stopped at a diner across the road from the library and Army/Navy.
*
Out front of the station house in Winfield, Quarrie took a good look at the tire tread on one of the department’s cruisers while the driver looked on with a puzzled expression on his face.
‘What you doing there, Sergeant?’ he said.
Quarrie considered the tire: a Goodrich Radial, he memorized the pattern of the tread.
‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Do all your
vehicles carry this make and model of rubber?’
‘I don’t know. I guess so. I really couldn’t say.’
Quarrie squinted at him. ‘Go inside and ask someone for me, would you? It’s important.’
The rain had stopped; the skies much clearer this morning and the sun beat down on the sidewalk. Sweat was beginning to mark Quarrie’s shirt at the armpits, and already he had his top button undone and his tie stowed in his overnight bag. Leaning against the door of his Riviera he polished the toe of one boot against the back of his leg. A moment later the young officer came out and told him that as far as anybody knew, all their patrol cars had the same tires.
‘Thanks,’ Quarrie said. ‘I got another question for you. Where can I find Henry’s Diner?’
He drove south-east on Route 49 heading for the Louisiana state line and thinking about the four-oh-five to Houston and what Mary-Beth Gavin’s killer had been doing on the depot platform. They had no idea whether he was local or from out of town, but given he had stolen the cruiser Quarrie thought it more likely to be the latter. This morning the chief had called to tell him the victim’s body had been shipped down to Queensboro right after they saw it. Since then the coroner had been on the phone to inform him the head trauma had occurred post-mortem. That only added fuel to Quarrie’s theory that the perp had been looking for something. It seemed clear that he did not find it, and whatever it was it was either still in that house or had never been there at all. Frustration, that’s what the head trauma indicated, and especially now they knew it had happened after the victim was already dead. So who was this guy and what had he wanted from Mary-Beth Gavin?
These were questions had no answers to right now, and his thoughts shifted as the sign came up for Henry’s Diner. He had not had any breakfast, his stomach was rumbling and he turned into the parking lot. Taking off his hat he took a seat at the counter where the waitress poured out a cup of coffee. She looked like she was in her twenties, wearing a white housecoat with the name Nicole printed on a plastic tag.