The Long Count

by JM Gulvin

  ‘Police officer?’ She sounded a little nervous.

  ‘Yes, mam. My name’s Quarrie. I’m a Texas Ranger.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘Well, first off, if you don’t mind, I’d like to know who it is I’m talking to. You said your name was Carla? What’s your last name?’

  She seemed to hesitate, the line went quiet and for a moment he thought the connection had been lost.

  ‘Mam, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. It’s Simpson. My last name is Simpson.’

  ‘And where am I calling you exactly?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Like I say, I have the number not the address and I don’t recognize the area code.’

  ‘Tulsa, I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma.’

  ‘Tulsa, right,’ Quarrie said. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I need to ask about a woman named Mary-Beth Gavin.’

  Again she was silent, the line so still this time he was sure he had lost the connection.

  ‘Mam, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here, but I was on my way out. I’m late right now. Can you call back another time?’

  ‘Ms Simpson, I need to know about your relationship with Ms Gavin.’

  ‘There is no relationship. I don’t know her. I never heard the name.’

  Quarrie was frowning. ‘But she called you. Six weeks back, your number is right here on the phone bill from the house where she was living at in Marion County, Texas.’

  ‘I don’t know her,’ the woman repeated. ‘I’ve never been to Marion County. I’m sorry. This has to be a mistake because I don’t know anyone called Mary-Beth … What did you say her last name was?’

  ‘Gavin. Mary-Beth Gavin. Are you married, Ms Simpson?’ Quarrie said. ‘Maybe your husband—’

  ‘No, I’m not married. Look, I’m sorry. This is all some mistake. It was probably a wrong number. Now,’ she was sounding flustered, ‘I really do have to go. I’m awfully late. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you.’

  She hung up and Quarrie looked round at Billings where he was still sitting on the arm of the chair.

  ‘I guess you got most of that,’ Quarrie said, glancing once more at the phone number. ‘Told me how she doesn’t know Mary-Beth, said she doesn’t remember the call.’ He stood up. ‘She knows all right; the name at least – it was a bolt from the blue when I told her.’ Dialling again he called Austin. ‘This is Sergeant Quarrie,’ he said when headquarters answered. ‘Got a telephone number here for a Carla Simpson in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I need for you to get me the address.’

  The following morning Billings brought an unmarked Ford to his motel and gave him the keys.

  ‘I spoke to old man McIntyre,’ the chief said. ‘Told him how you wanted to talk to him about Mary-Beth and you’ll find him at the shop down there, a block off Orchard and Main.’ He stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘What about the Buick? You want to go take a look?’

  Quarrie made a face. ‘Not right now. In fact maybe you could do me a favor and have somebody load it onto a flatbed and ship it to Austin. We got pretty good forensics up there these days so maybe they can come up with something.’

  Leaving the police department he drove through town, making the turn on Orchard and pulling up out front of McIntyre’s Farm Machinery. A workshop with an entrance twenty feet wide, a concrete floor with workbenches carrying both sides and beyond it, a couple of glass-fronted wood-grain offices. Showing his star to the man outside, Quarrie made his way past a couple of mechanics and went up to one of the offices where a thin-faced man was on the telephone. Next to that was a smaller office with room for little more than the secretary’s desk and a couple of metal file cabinets. A young woman with thick, dark hair and a lot of eye make-up was typing a letter as Quarrie went in.

  ‘Ranger,’ he told her. ‘I’m here to see Mr McIntyre.’

  The young woman poked her head next door then she ushered Quarrie through. McIntyre was seated behind his desk, still on the phone; he indicated a chair directly across.

  A minute later he hung up, looking a little flustered. It was hot and airless. Sweat seemed to drag at his shirt and his neck was rouge where the tie looked too tight at the collar.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Rushed off our feet right now, and since Mary-Beth …’ He broke off and glanced at the plywood door. ‘She tries hard that one, but it’s a fact she’s not used to typing more than a letter. Mary-Beth, now she really was something. Normally have them work a week’s trial, two weeks sometimes if I’m not sure, but she showed what she could do in about three days flat, and it was all I could do to move her into that house I own by the weekend.’ Pressing the air from his cheeks he sat back. ‘A feller trying to run a tight little ship like this needs back-up and she was back-up, I promise you.’

  ‘She was more than just a secretary then?’ Quarrie suggested.

  ‘I’ll say she was. Started out that way, but by the end of the second week she was just about running this place. I’m talking book-keeping and records, invoicing, chasing up money owed from people who don’t want to pay. Then this creep comes along and ruins everything.’ He looked keenly at Quarrie. ‘You have any idea who it was done that to her? Strangled, the chief said, and in her own house – my house if anybody’s asking.’

  Quarrie looked him in the eye. ‘Right now we don’t have much to go on.’

  Grimly McIntyre nodded. ‘Billings said how it wasn’t just her. The sonofabitch killed a police officer.’

  ‘Yes, he did, as well as a salesman from Arkansas.’

  The older man gawped now, he was shaking his head. Taking off his hat Quarrie rested it on his knee.

  ‘Mr McIntyre,’ he said, ‘I’m pretty sure Mary-Beth knew her killer. I’m pretty sure she had something of his or something he wanted, and when she couldn’t or wouldn’t give it up he killed her in a fit of anger. He was so mad he took a length of two-by-four, or a fire poker maybe, and left her just about unrecognizable.’

  McIntyre’s features had lost all color.

  ‘I need to know who she was,’ Quarrie said. ‘I need to know where she came from. I’m going to need her Social Security number and anything else you got that might help me.’

  ‘I can give you her Social Security number.’ McIntyre pressed a finger to the buzzer on his phone. ‘That’s about all I’ve got, though. She didn’t tell us where she was from and if I asked where she worked before, which I might not have, I don’t remember what it was she told me.’ Quarrie looked at him a little sourly. ‘I know, I know. Hardly any way to run a business, but she was so damn capable I didn’t think it mattered.’

  ‘What about people coming by the shop to visit her?’ Quarrie asked. ‘Or calling on the phone. Did she ever mention anybody? A Carla Simpson maybe?’

  McIntyre shook his head. ‘I don’t get involved in my employees’ personal lives, Sergeant, and she was only here six weeks. I’ve got enough trouble just trying to deal with the customers. So long as the folks work hard, are on time and don’t steal from me, that’s about as far as my interest stretches.’

  ‘Do you mind if I talk to your people?’ Quarrie asked him. ‘See if there was anything anybody noticed?’

  ‘Be my guest. Talk to who you want, anything I can do to help catch this sumbitch, you got it. I tell you what,’ he added, looking beyond Quarrie now through the window. ‘There is one thing you might want to check out. Yonder is the grocery store and there’s a colored girl makes sandwiches over there with home-made chillies and pickles. One of my boys told me that come lunchtime Mary-Beth would sit out back with that colored girl. It’s the kind of thing gets noticed in these parts, but it was nothing to do with me so I never said anything about it.’ Sitting back he pursed his lips. ‘Maybe I should have, but she kept herself to herself and if she wanted to make friends with a Negro, what was that to me?’

  Nobody in the workshop had heard of Carla Simpson and
the new girl in the office had never met Mary-Beth. Leaving his car where it was Quarrie crossed to the store where a young black woman had a queue of people waiting for sandwiches. Making his way to the front Quarrie showed her his badge. Another girl took over and Quarrie and the young woman went out back of the store where a tiny courtyard was set with a narrow bench. Taking a seat the woman looked at him with her eyes darting.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘You haven’t done anything. I just want to talk to you about Ms Gavin.’

  The woman said her name was Patty and when he spoke about the murder her eyes brimmed with tears. She fished in her apron pocket for a tissue and Quarrie waited while she blew her nose.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m reaching out here, Patty; looking for any kind of detail that might help me find who killed her.’

  Hands clasped tightly, Patty nodded.

  ‘Mr McIntyre across the street there told me that she liked to eat lunch out here at the back of the store.’

  ‘That’s right, sir: sometimes she did.’

  Quarrie smiled. ‘Looks like you build a hell of a sandwich. Queuing out the door like that, I guess you got yourself quite the reputation.’

  Patty returned his smile but it did not seem to hold much humor.

  ‘Patty,’ he said, ‘I guess the two of you would’ve been out here together and I need to know what you talked about.’

  Patty seemed to think about that. ‘Well, I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that we ate our lunch together so much as Ms Gavin liked to eat out here. She told me it was too far to go home and she didn’t want to set at her desk. I was out here just getting a little air is all, and black folks don’t say a whole lot to white folks – not in this part of the country.’

  ‘No, I get that,’ Quarrie said. ‘But, right now the fact that she did talk to you is all I have. I can’t seem to find another person in town Mary-Beth was friends with and by all accounts she was a nice lady. I know she was only here six weeks, but to not have any friends, no family visiting – it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.’ He smiled now. ‘I’m a police officer and I guess people like me we’re kind of suspicious. When I see a situation like that, when somebody new comes to town and nobody knows anything about them, I wonder if they’re not hiding or running away from something.’ He looked squarely at her then. ‘You saw her most every day: did she look to you like she was hiding?’

  Patty shook her head. ‘I can’t say as I noticed anything like that, sir. She was nice to me is all and I never figured it any more than that.’ She looked across the alley to the rear of the buildings opposite where a black man was folding sheets of cardboard into a dumpster. ‘She talked to me like I was her equal and that ain’t like anybody else; not with white folks anyhow.’ She gestured to the door of the store. ‘White folks they just want what they want and they tell you what it is and you go get it for them.’

  ‘But Mary-Beth was different?’ Quarrie said. ‘So what did the two of you talk about?’

  ‘Oh, not much. I guess she asked if I was going to get married, if I wanted to have any kids. She was an older lady and she talked to me kind of like my momma. She heard me humming one time and said I had a nice voice. She asked if I went to church, if I liked to sing in the choir. I told her I was Catholic so come Sundays I’d be at Holy Trinity and there wasn’t any choir there.’ Breaking off Patty narrowed her eyes. ‘That’s something, maybe. She told me she used to know a place called Trinity.’

  ‘She did? A town was that? Did she say whether it was in Texas?’

  ‘No sir, she never did.’

  Back at the station house Quarrie called the ranch and asked Eunice to go and find Pious. A minute or so later the phone was picked up.

  ‘John Q,’ his friend said. ‘I’m underneath that old wreck of a feed truck again and she’s leaking oil all over.’

  ‘Then I guess I better make it snappy. Isaac Bowen.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He said how his brother was in a hospital, a sanatorium that burned, right? What did he say was the name of it?’

  Sixteen

  In the women’s wing at Bellevue, Nancy watched Miss Annie through the glass panel in her door. She was sitting on the bed, cradling her baby to her breast whilst rocking back and forth making little crooning sounds that could just about be heard through the glass. She did not look up. Concentrating on what she was doing she lifted the doll to her shoulder and paced small circles between the bed and the changing mat. Patting the doll’s back as if to wind it, she laid it down and set about loosening the tiny strip of cloth she had tied as a diaper.

  From the corridor Nancy watched as she switched from clucking sounds that were gentle and soothing to a sort of quiet admonishing. Taking off the diaper she made as if to wash it, scrubbing with the heel of her hand, using an imaginary piece of soap and working it hard, then rinsing the cloth and wringing it out before she hung it over the end of her bed. It was only then that she seemed to be aware she was being watched and her eyes dulled briefly before she flung herself bodily against the panel of reinforced glass.

  Nancy was so stunned she stepped back as if she had been struck. On the other side of the door Miss Annie was at the window, skeletal under her pajamas, the malice in her pale blue eyes accentuated by the veined and waxen scalp that was visible through her hair.

  Back at her desk Nancy smoothed lightly perspiring palms down the front of her uniform. Next to the desk on a small table she had a plastic pitcher of ice water that she kept topped up for the patients. Pouring a glass now, her hand shook a little as she drank it down.

  A few minutes later the door at the end of the corridor opened and she looked up to see Briers making his way towards her. He paused when he got to Miss Annie’s room and pressed his face right up to the glass.

  ‘Don’t,’ Nancy said. ‘For pity’s sake, don’t do that. I don’t want her any more worked up than she already is.’

  Briers puffed the air from his cheeks. ‘Like that’s even possible. Since the good doctor’s little scheme went sour she’s been worse than she ever was.’ With another glance through the panel he came down to the workstation where he rested his weight on his fists.

  Sitting back in her chair Nancy worked a hand over the pin where it fixed her hair.

  ‘Everything he told us,’ Briers went on, ‘all that stuff about how it was going to come good and his theory would be proven finally.’

  ‘I know, I know. You don’t have to remind me. So what’re you doing here anyway? You know you’re not supposed to be in this wing unless it’s to take Miss Annie outside and she’s staying right where she is.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but you’re going to want to hear this. You know about Ike Bowen shooting himself?’

  Nancy nodded. ‘Yes, you told me.’

  ‘And how Isaac showed up the other day?’

  Again she nodded.

  ‘Well, last night I talked to a buddy of mine back in Texas and he told me what he read in the newspaper.’ The orderly looked warily at her. ‘You haven’t heard anything about that, have you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. What’re you talking about? What newspaper?’

  ‘Town called Winfield in Marion County: Mary-Beth Gavin, that’s where she ended up after leaving us all when she did.’

  ‘After the fire you mean, when she took off? What was she doing in the newspaper?’

  ‘She’s dead, Nancy. Mary-Beth was murdered.’

  *

  When he went back for the car it was gone. He had left it parked behind the Baptist mission cottage but it was not there now. He stood in the street, jeans hanging a little low at the waist, he wore the sleeveless Levi over his T-shirt and the laces on his boots were undone.

  Two blocks from the cottage he spotted a diner set back from the road. Taking a seat in a window booth he gazed at the spot where the car had been as if he expected it to suddenly reappear. A waitress came over and he ordered a hamburger and ate
it slowly. No French fries; chewing every mouthful of bread and meat and sipping from a glass of water. When he was finished he remained at the table until the waitress cleared his plate away.

  He could see the thicket of bushes about ten yards further on from where he had left the automobile. A quiet road, that cottage was the only house among a block of business premises. Leaving a dollar on the table he went back now, passing the bushes where he could see the sawn-off twelve-gauge and the pistol still lying where he had hidden them before. Grabbing the Model 10 Colt he stuffed it into the back of his jeans but left the shotgun where it was. Taking a moment he looked at the sky then scanned the assortment of buildings. His gaze shifted to the mission cottage where a sign highlighted the fact that orphaned children were saved from a life of crime by the work of the church. No cars parked; no vehicles in the yard, a garage set on its own with two wooden doors pulled all the way across.

  With a glance back the way he had come, he walked right around the house and up to that garage. Through the gap in the aging doors he could see an old Chevrolet with a bed sheet partially covering the bodywork. He looked over to the house where a path led to a front door set back on a stoop with a glass panel covered by a purple drape.

  When he rang the bell the door was opened by a black maid in her teens wearing a blue dress with a crisp, white apron tied at her waist. Wiping her hands on the apron she looked up at him and was about to smile when she saw the Model 10.

  Seventeen

  According to the Panola County welfare officer what was left of the old Trinity Hospital lay at the end of a dirt road deep in the Piney Woods. When Quarrie spoke to her on the telephone, the lady told him it had been a private residence for eighty-odd years before it was converted to accommodate the patients. Some superrich industrialist from back east had built himself a whole complex of buildings so he could entertain his friends and keep a boat on the lake. When he died he left the complex in trust, and a few years later a ten-foot wall was built and it opened as an asylum for the criminally insane.