Almost like good cops, they quickly surveyed the scene and took Morgan, their main eyewitness, aside. They stood outside the red barn in the full morning light, on the rutted path to the empty horse corrals. The barnyard was pocked with horse manure, some dried, some big and wet. Hi Goldsmith had apparently been lax about shoveling shit.
Morgan walked with them, his hands in his pockets, side-stepping the fresh chips, awaiting the agents’ first question. They stopped a proper distance from the barn’s gaping door, where Carter McWayne was still examining the sheriff’s suspended corpse.
Somewhere up the lane, a meadowlark sang its euphoric little song, undaunted by death within a stone’s throw.
“Deputy,” Agent Halstead snapped at the hapless Luckett, “arrest this man.”
Morgan expected to be grilled, but now he was being handcuffed.
“What the hell …?”
“You violated a court order.”
“You can’t throw me in jail for that!”
“No? Well, then maybe we can rustle up a charge of evidence tampering.”
“Bullshit.”
Pickard came out of Goldsmith’s house. He was carrying the new Bullet edition and Morgan’s reporter notebook, which had his name and address on the cover. He’d left both on the sheriff’s coffee table when he raced to the barn.
“How about breaking and entering?”
“The door was open. I brought the paper to Hi. I was writing him a note when I saw … him.”
“From inside? You saw a dead man in the barn while you were inside the house? You see through walls?”
Morgan said nothing. He knew how close he was coming to sounding suspicious.
“Careful with your privates, Scott,” Agent Halstead said facetiously to his partner, “This paperboy’s got X-ray eyes. Maybe he’s a perv like our Barney Fife-on-the-flying trapeze here. Read him his rights, deputy, and take him back to town.”
“Hell, let’s just hang his nosey little ass from the nearest cottonwood and be done with him,” a man’s voice echoed across the yard.
While Willis Luckett fumbled with the pair of handcuffs he’d never used, the two DCI agents and Morgan turned toward the sound.
Morgan knew the loping walk, the tight Wrangler fit of his jeans and the grin under a prodigious mustache that would have made Wild Bill Hickok himself proud. Only the Stetson was new … well, not new, but not worn for almost five years.
“Hold it right there,” Agent Halstead barked. “This is a crime scene. Please stop where you are and go back to your car.”
“Crime scene? Then I’m damn sure at the right place. Thought maybe I’d just walked in on a random lynching. I hate it when that happens.”
“Sir, I’m not going to ask you again,” Agent Halstead warned, discreetly unsnapping the safety strap on his stylish black leather holster. “You’re interfering with a criminal investigation here. So get back to your car. Now.”
The cowboy just kept coming, stepping casually through the horse-dung minefield. When he got within ten yards, Agent Halstead drew his weapon, a Glock semi-auto that could fire an extra two bullets – 19 instead of the usual 17. Morgan most certainly felt safer. He also knew the interloper was unarmed.
“Whoa, hold on there, Dirty Harry!” the cowboy said, his open hands in the air, but still walking deliberately at the locked-and-loaded DCI agent. “You don’t wanna go shooting the new sheriff so soon after the old one got all choked up.”
“You got some ID?”
“Kerrigan,” the cowboy said, a big grin spilling across his face. “Trey Kerrigan.”
When Agent Halstead holstered his weapon, Trey Kerrigan yanked a tarnished badge, a five-pointed star, from his back pocket. It just said Perry County Sheriff. His father, the legendary Deuce Kerrigan, had worn it proudly for forty years. Trey himself had worn it for eight years before he abandoned his last campaign in midstream, too cynical and too political to do justice for Perry County or to his father’s memory.
“Funny thing about small towns,” Trey told Agent Halstead, “nobody can keep a secret for shit. Within thirty minutes after Mr. Morgan’s 911 call, the dispatcher had called her sister, whose husband is a volunteer firefighter who leases some pasture from a rancher who wants a new county road paved up to his place. So’s he called a county commissioner to deliver the sad news about Hi, and the commissioners decided over the phone that they were gonna need a new sheriff, pronto. Seein’s how I already owned a badge and a gun, they reckoned I already had the outfit, and things’ve been pretty slow in the insurance business, so’s I took the job. You might wanna just give ‘em a jingle just to confirm.”
Trey winked at Morgan, his old high school buddy, as Agent Pickard whipped out his cell phone and wandered off across the drive where he couldn’t be heard.
“Fine, you can play sheriff,” Agent Halstead said, “but we’ve got this case under control. We won’t be needing your assistance.”
“Willis, you can take the cuffs off my good buddy Jeff now,” Trey told the deputy he’d hired almost fifteen years before. “Whatever he did, I’m sure he won’t do it again. We can let him off with a warning this time.”
Agent Halstead held up his hand, like a traffic cop halting oncoming traffic.
“Hold it. You didn’t seem to hear me, sheriff,” he said. “We’re in charge here. This is our case. This man is under arrest.”
Trey looked at the ground and booted a small rock toward the corrals. Morgan knew his aw-shucks routine by heart.
“Aw shucks,” Trey said. “You musta been shopping for Tommy Hill-finger slacks that day at the Academy when they explained that DCI can’t take over any investigations. You can be here only at my invitation, and I gotta say, you’re wearin’ out your welcome.”
“Sheriff Goldsmith invited us,” Agent Halstead growled.
“Well, Hi’s a little tied up right now,” Trey said calmly. “So I’m un-inviting you.”
“Fuck you, Kerrigan.”
“Hey, now that might be fun … as long as I’m on top and there’s no kissin’,” Trey said, arching his eyebrows flirtatiously. “But I like it long and slow … and you’re just leaving. Maybe next time.”
Agent Halstead stepped so close to Trey, their noses almost touched. Morgan could see only a sliver of light between them, but the chasm that separated these two lawmen was vast and barren. Neither blinked.
“You better watch your ass, cowboy,” Halstead seethed, “because I damn sure will.”
Trey stared him down.
“You might wanna keep your eyes on my ass, kid,” Trey said. “Then maybe you won’t notice you just stepped in a big pile of horse shit.”
Agent Halstead looked down. He’d landed his right foot in one of the fresher piles, and his Rockport was smeared with muddy green manure that looked like a rotten spinach experiment gone badly wrong.
“Oh man,” Trey added, holding his nose. “I think that horse is sick.”
Agent Halstead lifted his skanky-swanky shoe from the splatter and tried to scrape it on the dirt, but that only spread the crap around more evenly. He glowered at Trey, then walked away. After a few steps, he stopped and turned toward Trey and Morgan one last time.
He aimed his thumb and forefinger like a gun and let the hammer fall. Then he smiled a cold smile and headed for the car with the grim-faced Agent Pickard, who snapped his cell phone shut petulantly. Whatever he had learned didn’t please him.
“You know, Jeff,” Trey confided as he watched the DCI agents stalk back to their Crown Vic in a huff. “I could never be a state cop.”
“Why’s that?”
“My ass just don’t look right in khakis.”
“What do we got here, Carter?” Trey asked the coroner as they both stood before Highlander Goldsmith’s sagging corpse. The barn was foul with rotting dung and death. McWayne was sketching the body and its deadly apparatus, minus the tractor.
“Probably strangulation caused by autoerotic asphyxiation. I gue
ss he’s been dead less than twenty-four hours, judging by the epidermal color and rigor mortis. He’ll clean up real good for the funeral.”
“Oh, for crying out loud, you still looking at dirty pictures in the Journal of the American Medical Association? Jesus, just say it in English, Carter.”
“That is English. Autoerotic asphyxia is a method of producing sexual excitement. The subject mechanically or chemically asphyxiates himself while, you know … masturbating,” McWayne explained, stroking the air lewdly. “The theory is that cerebral hypoxia …”
Trey kicked the dirt.
“Okay, the theory is that a lack of oxygen to the brain will heighten the orgasm by altering perceptions or inducing transitory anoxia.”
“I’m gonna do somethin’ to you, Carter,” Trey bristled. “Somethin’ bad.”
“Well, the danger of transitory anoxia … okay, okay, temporary suffocation … is that even a brief miscalculation can cause the subject to lose consciousness and …” Coroner McWayne lolled his tongue, emitted a throttled gag, and rolled his bug-eyes back in their sockets, mimicking a strangling man.
“So this is an accident?”
“Not exactly. Barring any evidence to the contrary, I’d call it suicide.”
“But he didn’t mean to die, did he?” Trey asked.
“Well, no,” McWayne said. “The intention is not to die, but to produce heightened sexual gratification. But the hanging part was intentional. The key to my diagnosis of this specific sexual entity is the presence of the towel between the noose and Hi’s neck. A fella doesn’t much worry about rope burns if he’s committing real suicide. Hi just wanted to get his rocks off … which didn’t happen, by the way. I always knew there was something queer about that guy.”
Deputy Willis Luckett stood in the open barn door, listening and watching, his beefy arms crossed over his chest. Trey said nothing but chucked his head sideways in a silent suggestion to move along. The deputy saluted with one finger to the brim of his white straw cowboy hat and left.
“Any way this is a murder?” Trey asked McWayne.
“Hey, I just tag ‘em and bag ‘em,” he said. “But I’ve heard about this type of pervert-o stuff. And a killer would have had to go to a lot a trouble just to rig this up. Nah, it’s not murder.”
“Okay, so we could say it was an accident,” Trey said in a low voice to the coroner.
“Well, Trey, I just …”
“Dammit, Carter, it was an accident. Don’t go getting self-righteous. It’s bad enough he got caught wearin’ a teddy while spankin’ Elvis. That’s just peculiar. But suicide is what crazy people do, and Hi wasn’t crazy. Okay, maybe really lonely, but he wasn’t crazy. Do we need to kick the man while he’s dead?”
“He hanged himself on purpose, Trey,” McWayne argued. “It just wasn’t as fun as he thought it was gonna be. He knew the risks.”
Trey twisted his big mustache between his fingers, thinking hard.
“So you’re sayin’ if a man walks behind a rank horse and the horse kicks his lights out, it’s suicide because he knew the risk of walkin’ behind a mean-assed horse?”
“I can’t just put ‘accident’ down,” McWayne said. “I gotta be more specific. State law.”
Trey tilted his Stetson and scratched his head.
“You know, Carter,” he said, barely concealing his frustration and his thinning hairline. “Right now, the state law has a shoeful of horse shit.”
“What about Jeff? He saw all this. How are you gonna keep it out of the paper?”
“I’ve known Jeff since we were kids,” Trey said. “He’ll be honest, and he’ll do what’s right. But ain’t you got enough chores without trying to be the newspaper editor, too?”
The pleats of fat under the coroner’s chin shimmied as he huffed.
“And you think I won’t do what’s right, is that it?”
“Look, Carter, I ain’t askin’ you to lie. I’m askin’ you to find a discreet way to report this as an accidental death. With all your fancy-assed vernacular, that shouldn’t be too hard, should it?”
Carter McWayne screwed the pale, manicured sausage of his forefinger deep into his itchy ear and shrugged petulantly.
“Whatever you say, Trey. You’re the new sheriff in town,” the coroner grumbled. “You’ll notify his next of kin?”
“Know anybody?”
McWayne smirked.
“Willis might know somebody, but looks to me like Hi’s closest friend was John Deere.”
The ink was still damp on the newest edition of The Bullet, but the biggest news of the week … of the year … wasn’t in it.
Morgan needed a phone, fast. He never carried his own cell phone, mostly because he always forgot where he put it. Anyway, it was a meaningless appliance in the dead zone called Winchester, Wyoming.
McWayne’s hearse was locked. Hi Goldsmith’s house was now a crime scene. Trey Kerrigan had arrived in his shitheap Willys Jeep, whose primitive electronics fried before man landed on the moon.
Morgan ducked quickly into Deputy Willis Luckett’s cruiser, parked politely in the shade of a primeval cottonwood. He dialed The Bullet’s main number on the handset. Receptionist Crystal Sandoval answered.
“The Bullet,” she said, “Coming at you every week.”
“What?”
“What yourself?”
“Crystal, this is Jeff. Just say, ‘The Bullet. Can I help you?’ That’s less … menacing.”
“I thought it was cute.”
“It scares people,” Morgan said. “Look, tell Cal to keep all the papers in the pressroom ‘til I get back. Shouldn’t be long. Just don’t put any out, okay?”
A long pause on the other end.
“Don’t put out the papers? You sure?”
“I’m sure. And tell him to get the press ready to print a one-sheet extra. We’ll wrap it around the papers we already printed. If we don’t, the story will be a week old when we tell it.”
“An extra. Cool,” Crystal chirped. “Just like a real newspaper.”
A real newspaper? Morgan almost growled, but there wasn’t time.
“Send Josh out here to Hi Goldsmith’s house on the Little Poison bench right away. Tell him to bring a camera and two notebooks. And no farting around. I want to see him within ten minutes.”
“He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“I dunno. Lunch? Or maybe a nap in his car.”
“Find him. Ten minutes.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “So is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“About the sheriff … you know … flogging the bishop on a tractor? Sounds kinky to me.”
“Jesus, how’d you hear about that already?”
“He was so straight,” Crystal clipped along, not missing a beat. “I mean, like Opie Taylor in Mayberry. I guess Opie’s gone bad.”
Crystal popped her gum.
“Dammit, Crystal …”
“My sister works over at the Kurl Up and Dye Salon, and my nephew’s girlfriend who keeps books for the feed store came in, and she said she heard it from Arnella Bagwell, the fill-in clerk over’t the video store, and she was …”
“Goddammit,” Jeff barked, “just send Josh.”
Morgan slid the deputy’s phone back into its cradle and slid against the half-open driver-side door. It wouldn’t budge.
“Dammit, Jeff,” Trey Kerrigan said, “one of these times I’m gonna have to arrest you on general principle.”
The new sheriff of Perry County had his big paw on the cruiser’s door, preventing it from opening or closing any further. Morgan was a captive audience.
“Trey, I was just using the phone.”
“That ain’t just a phone, Jeff,” Kerrigan said calmly, staring off in some philosophical direction. His eyes were hidden by his dark glasses. “That there is a county phone, which means it’s for the exclusive use of county employees on county time for county business. I think it’s a felony or some such t
o steal county services.”
“Aw, bullshit, Trey. I was just making a call.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
Kerrigan leaned close and took off his glasses. His eyes were dark, like a distant thunderstorm boiling to violent ripeness over the mountains.
“Jeff, you’re like a cat with nine lives,” he said, low and angry. “That was Number Nine.”
The late Highlander Goldsmith’s entire ranchette became an official crime scene when Trey Kerrigan escorted Morgan to the end of the driveway and slammed the gate behind him.
“Step one foot on this property before I say you can,” the sheriff warned him, “and I promise you’ll go to lock-up. Interfere with any police investigation … lock-up.”
“C’mon, Trey …”
The sheriff raised his hand, stopping Morgan in mid-sentence.
“Whine about a free press … lock-up.”
Kerrigan shook a frustrated finger at his old friend, lifelong ties strained to their limit.
“I have half a mind to feed you to those DCI snakes,” he snarled. “You’re just pissin’ me off, and I ain’t even been sheriff for two hours yet!”
The one-sheet extra edition about Highlander Goldsmith’s death was written, pasted up and printed in less than three hours.
It contained Morgan’s first-hand account of the death scene, a couple of general photos of the house and barn, file mugs of the main players, “no comments” from everyone involved in the investigation, a G-rated sidebar explaining autoerotic asphyxiation in terms suitable for Puritan children, a brief story about the return of Trey Kerrigan to Perry County law enforcement, and a slender profile of Highlander Goldsmith culled from his campaign flyers.
The late sheriff’s public life was only a small part of him, and a small part of his private life was now public, but nobody knew much about Highlander Goldsmith, the man. Whatever was in his heart was, in the end, as mysterious as the contents of Laddie Granbouche’s heart … or her coffin, for that matter. Morgan promised himself to do more next week, to find someone who’d laughed or cried with Highlander Goldsmith, to make a meager attempt to give his death a meaning.
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 8