“I know you don’t, Mr. Collier.”
“Then go away!”
“But I’m afraid I do have to talk to you. My name is Quinn Booker, and I’m a deputy sheriff in Le Four.” I wondered if I would ever get to the point where I could say that without feeling like a fraud.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. It was a nice enough voice, or it would be if the tension ever came out of it.
“If you open the door, I can show you my badge,” I said.
Silence for a few seconds. Then, “I’ll open the door on the latchstring. You hold the badge up to the crack. If you try to break in, I’ll slam the door. I’m pretty strong, you know. And don’t try sticking your foot in the door, or I’ll crush it for you.”
I sighed. “I won’t put my foot in the door. I don’t want any rough play, Mr. Collier, I swear I just want to talk to you.”
The door opened enough to show a thin black pencil line between itself and the jamb. I unpinned that ridiculous star from my vest and held it up to the crack.
“Okay,” Collier said. “You’re a deputy sheriff. I’ll talk to you. We can talk just like this.”
I was trying to keep my patience. This man, after all, had faced trials.
“I think it would be better if you let me in, or if you came out here,” I said.
“No!” he shouted. Then, more quietly, “I don’t want you to see me.”
“Mr. Collier, it doesn’t matter if I see you. I’ve spoken to Dr. Mayhew, and I know all about your condition.”
“He had no right. It’s bad enough I’m a freak—blacker than any slave—without the doctor making sport of me.”
“He was not making sport of you. He spoke in utmost sympathy, and a desire to prevent others from suffering your fate.”
Collier gave a strangled laugh. “Was that before or after they began dying like flies?”
“Now who is making spoil of the misfortunes of others?” I asked quietly.
The laughter was suddenly cut off. I heard a click and a squeak and the door swung open.
Collier was just two white eyes in the darkened cabin. “Come in,” he said.
I stepped forward, and now I could see that he was carrying a gun, but he held it loosely, pointing at the ground, and he turned his back on me, placing it negligently on a table as he did so. He sat with his back toward a curtained window. The only light in the room sneaked in around the edges of that curtain.
I took the other chair, facing him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’m trying to find out how and why those poor people died.”
“They got bad medicine, same as I did.”
“Not quite,” I said. “You got medicine some ignorant quack put together, neither knowing nor caring what was in it. The people who died got medicine that was deliberately made deadly.”
“Deliberate or accident, I’m still a monster.”
“You were at the medicine show,” I said. “All bundled up. I saw you there.”
My eyes were adjusted to the gloom by now, and the streaks of sunlight sneaking through showed brightly on some of the blue of his face. His lips split in a silent snarl.
“Are you trying to say I poisoned those people?”
“No, although I think the real poisoner would like me to think so.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Why did you go to the medicine show?”
“What are you driving at? Dammit, tell me!”
“As soon as you answer my question. You haven’t been seen off your own property for years. Suddenly you’re at a medicine show, the sort of venue one might think you’d be eager to avoid.”
“You do think I poisoned them. Get out of here! Get out of here now!”
I pushed my hat back on my head. “I’m afraid that if I go now, you’ll have to come with me. Because I really need an answer to that question.”
“Oh, sure,” the blue man sneered. “Take me with you. Drag me through the streets. Let the town laugh at the freak.”
“They might do worse than laugh,” I said. “The last time I brought anyone to town they tried to lynch him. I don’t want to have to go through all of that nonsense again; I’ve just about got the fools calmed down.”
“I don’t care about your troubles, Mr. Booker. I’ve got enough of my own.”
“If you could stop feeling sorry for yourself for ten seconds and use your brain, you’d realize you can only help yourself with an honest answer to my question.”
I don’t know if he ever used his brain or not. It did take him just about ten seconds to say, “Well, for what difference it makes, I got a note.”
“A note?”
“A message. Walker, the grocer, makes up a parcel for me once a month. I leave some game on the stump for him, and he leaves me my goods. This time there was a note in with the goods.”
“Do you have the note?”
“No, I don’t. Made me so crazy I burned it. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I suppose now you don’t believe I got it.”
“It would be nice to have seen it, that’s all.”
“Well, wait a second.”
He got up from his chair and walked over to the table where the gun was. My spine crawled, and my fingers itched to go for my own gun, but I sat tight. Collier rattled through an untidy stack of papers and came out with a slightly crumpled white square. He brought it to me.
As I took it from him, his hand touched mine. Blue skin didn’t feel any different from any other kind.
“Here’s the envelope it came in, for what it’s worth. There’s no writing on it.”
“That’s a point in your favor,” I said.
“It is?”
“Sure. If you were framing something up, you’d have something written on here, to make it look good.”
Collier nodded soberly. “I suppose I would have, at that.”
I didn’t know if I actually believed that, but since I wanted him comfortable enough to talk to me, I was glad to have said it.
“What did the note say?” I asked. “What did it look like?”
“What do you mean, what did it look like?”
“Was it Spencerian copperplate?”
“Huh?”
“Fancy handwriting? Pen or pencil or something else?”
“It was pencil. No fancy handwriting, either. Just plain old square letters.”
“Did the paper match the envelope?”
“Folded over once, it fit just perfect inside.”
“Okay, what did it say? The exact words as well as you can remember.”
“I remember. There wasn’t that much to it. It said, ‘The man who made you the way you are is coming back to town.’ Then it had the place and the date.”
“It said that?” I demanded. “It specifically said the man who made you the way you are was going to be there?”
“That’s what it said,” Collier told me. “So I went. I don’t know why I went, but I did. I left my gun home. I figured if I was going to kill the son of a bitch I’d do it with my bare hands. I guess. I don’t really know what I was thinking.”
Collier started laughing at some private joke. I could see that the inside of his mouth was blue, too.
“Anyway, it was a wasted trip. It wasn’t the man who’d sold me my poison, or anyone like him. I hung around for a while, in case the note meant to say he would be in the crowd, but he wasn’t. So eventually, I went.”
“Did you see anything?”
“Like what?”
“Some people claim they saw someone sneaking out of Herkimer’s wagon before the show began. Did you see anything like that?”
“No. I wasn’t paying much attention to the wagon, I was concentrating on the crowd, and cursing myself for a fool, exposing myself for no reason. I wish I knew who wrote me that note.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“You mean, you can?”
“Sure I can,” I said. “It was from the killer.
”
21
“MY,” CLAYTON HENRY SAID without looking up from his worktable, “I may be missing some of the vestiges of civilization in having come here, but none of the decadence. This town is another of the sinful Cities of the Plain, isn’t it?”
I walked around Henry to see what he was doing. He was preparing a woodcut from the photograph he’d taken of the first of the funerals held today. No doubt as the law in town, I should have been there, but Blacke had gone, and he was worth three of me, any day.
Blacke covered a belch with his hand and said, “One thing you’re not missing is good food. Damn, but that Kate Sundberg can cook. Somebody’s going to come and marry her away from us someday.”
“Just don’t invite anybody to dinner. Look, Blacke, I admire Mrs. Sundberg’s cooking as much as you do, but as a topic of conversation, it lacks body. What do you think of my theory?”
“That the killer sent the note to get Collier out to the medicine show? Sure, it’s obvious.”
He held up two big hands and started counting reasons off on his fingers. “Collier is known to have reason to hate at least one medicine man; it’s not that big a jump to thinking he hates them all. Two, this town treated the man rotten when he had his trouble, running from him as if what he had was catching, especially that little jilt he was supposed to marry, so you might suspect he hates the town, too. And three, just from what you’ve told us here tonight, the man is not holding real tight to his wits. It would be mighty tempting to believe he’d be willing to wipe out as many as need be in one big blast of revenge.”
“But of course, to make any of that believable, he’s got to be there. So the note gets him there. Insurance, in case the medicine show people don’t get lynched in the first wave of enthusiasm.”
“Yes,” I said, “but this means that the killer planned this for days ahead of time. This wasn’t the work of a madman—”
“I’ve been saying that all along,” Blacke said.
“—but of someone who plotted and connived to kill all those people. And for a reason. A specific reason.”
“Exactly,” Blacke said. He clapped his hands together and dropped them back in his lap. “Find the reason, and you find the killer.”
“But it... it’s monstrous,” I said.
Clayton nodded in satisfaction. “Just as I said. Sodom, Gomorrah, and Le Four. Who knows what else is going on in this seemingly boring little town?”
“We could do without that, Henry,” Blacke said. He turned to me. “Of course it’s monstrous. To us. But not to the person who did it. That person had what seemed to him—”
“Or her,” Henry said. “I’ve always thought the devil must be a woman, you know, and this was a very devilish scheme.”
“Or her,” Blacke conceded. “He or she had a compelling reason for doing this, no matter the lives that would be lost.”
“I can’t imagine it,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Booker. Didn’t the villain in one of your dime novels plan to dynamite a whole town just so he could rob the bank in the confusion? He would have killed scores of people, and you imagined that.”
“Well, of course I did. But that was melodrama. That was a villain as black as Mephistopheles. It was only a story. This is real life. Someone from the town we live in had to have done this, and we know there aren’t any villains from melodrama living in Le Four. Not even—”
“Quiet,” Blacke snapped.
I shut up. I had forgotten that Clayton Henry didn’t know of the special place Lucius Jenkins occupied in Lobo Blacke’s attentions.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Yeah.” He was still scowling under his brows at me. “You have to watch yourself, Booker. For instance, you should never take it for granted that you really know anybody. Look what happened to me.”
I was about to reply when I saw that the scowl was still there, but Blacke’s attention wasn’t. He had a tendency to chase a train of thought, forgetting everybody else in the room. It could be disconcerting, but it frequently got results.
As it did this time.
“Booker, you say Collier swears the note to him was written in pencil?”
“Well, I didn’t make him swear to it, but he was sure that it was.”
“Well, then, let’s see something. Get that envelope, will you?”
When I handed it to him, he asked Henry for a pencil.
“What sort?” the artist demanded.
“Henry, I’m really not in the mood, okay?”
“Blacke, you wound me. I’m not being difficult. There are many kinds of pencils. Hard, for outline work. Soft, for shading. Charcoal for sketching, even colors wrapped in wood for ease of handling. And those are just the artistic applications. I’m sure other disciplines have shaped the tool for their own purposes.”
Blacke muttered an apology. “That’s what happens when you ask an expert,” he said. “I’d like the use of a soft one, I guess.”
Henry handed over a large green cylinder. Blacke took it and stuck it behind his ear. Then he wheeled himself around the composing room. He grabbed a sheet of newsprint, returned to his checker table, and folded the paper up into a thick pad.
Then, methodically, he began shading in the blank envelope with the pencil.
“Of course,” he said quietly as he worked, “you’ve already realized, Booker, that it’s hopeless to try to find out how the note got in the parcel. They sit there in the store, labeled, anyone could have slipped it in here in town. And anyone with access to a horse could have left the message while the thing waited on the stump.”
By now, the whole front of the once-white square was blackened in. Blacke picked it up and regarded it closely.
“Mmmm,” he said. “Nothing here.”
He turned it over and repeated the process on the other side.
“You see, Booker, when people use a pencil, they sometimes press hard enough to leave an impression on the sheets beneath. And sometimes, when somebody’s dashing off a note, they pick out the envelope and the paper, and just fling them down on the desk, one over the other, and start to write. It’s a long shot, but we’ve got nothing to—Hah! There it is, see it?”
He held the envelope up for my scrutiny, and I did see it, upside down across the lower right-hand corner of the envelope, little rivers of white in the leaden blackness that read:
ADE YOU THE WAY YOU A
“ ‘The man who made you the way you are,’ ” I quoted. “Well, it makes Collier’s story look pretty good. I don’t think he’s subtle enough to have framed this up. He’d almost have to be depending on a genius like you to be there to find it.”
But Blacke wasn’t listening. He was still staring at the envelope.
“What’s the matter?” I demanded. “You think he did frame it up?”
“No, it’s not that. Look more closely.”
I did, and for a long time, too, but whatever these ghosts of departed pencil marks were saying, I was deaf to it.
“It matches the message Collier said he got,” I said. “It’s in plain square letters, just as he said—”
“Are they plain square letters? Look at it, Booker.”
I peered. I squinted. Then at last I saw what he was driving at.
“Well, square maybe, but not exactly plain. The line is thicker in some places and thinner in others. Like some of that fancy lettering Henry does for display ads. Only not so... fancy,” I concluded lamely.
“May I see it?” Henry asked. Blacke nodded. I handed the envelope over. Now Henry frowned over it for a few minutes and delivered his own judgment.
“Yes, this is exactly the kind of stroke an untrained person would get in attempting to use a broad-nibbed pen. You can see that sometimes the thick strokes are the downstrokes, and sometimes the cross-strokes. A pen properly held would show consistency.”
“Except it wasn’t a pen,” I said.
“Why not?” Henry demanded.
“Because Collier said it was penci
l,” I said.
“Hell with that,” Blacke added. “Because a pen nib pressed hard enough on to make impressions on a piece of paper below would probably break. It would certainly squirt ink all over the place.”
Henry conceded that Blacke had a point.
“Still,” the artist said. “The stigmata are unmistakable. There must be such a thing as a broad-nibbed pencil. Another little mystery for you gentlemen, eh? Nothing like a little mental stimulation to speed the evening along, I always say.”
He returned to his woodcut with every sign of being absolutely delighted with himself.
As for Blacke and me, we undoubtedly would have been left with the prospect of a supremely stimulating conversation about pencils to speed our evening along if there hadn’t been a knock at the door.
I opened it to find Dr. Mayhew there, holding a bucket of beer.
“I took the liberty of tipping the boy and completing delivery,” he said.
“Well, then, you must come in and share it with us.”
The doctor smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Blacke and Henry greeted Mayhew warmly. The doctor was probably the only man in town Clayton Henry accepted as an equal.
Beer was distributed to three of us; Henry preferred to drink his own sherry.
By tacit agreement, we waited until we took that glorious first swallow before anyone spoke.
Blacke broke the silence. “What brings you here this evening, Doctor? No bad news, I hope.”
“No, actually, good news. I sent three more patients home today, and I am now convinced that everyone is going to make a full recovery.”
“How’s the sheriff?” I asked.
“He will, too, although I believe he has the farthest road to come back.”
“It figures,” I said bitterly. For a while, here in the office working with Blacke as usual, I had almost managed to forget that ridiculous star on my chest. Now it felt as big and heavy as a wagon wheel. “What’s so especially wrong with him? He didn’t take that much of the stuff.”
“No, he didn’t. I’m convinced you saved his life, Booker, and I’m making sure he knows it. Unfortunately, our sheriff has a tendency to indulge in habits that are less than wholesome, and with his resistance lowered by the poison, he is now paying the price in fever and debility.”
Fatal Elixir Page 14