The Devil's Odds

by Milton T. Burton

  “It was not your doing, Mr. Tucker. Henry told me that I was the one real love of his life and that his attraction to other women never went beyond the physical. He also said that he regretted it, but that he knew himself well enough not to make any rash promises he couldn’t keep. He pointed out that he’d never lied to me, which was true, and he told me that he didn’t want to start.”

  “Mrs. DeMour, there’s no need—”

  “Yes, there is, because I want you to know. You are dealing with some very dangerous people, and you are entitled to the whole story.”

  I shrugged and nodded and she went on with her story.

  “So I had a choice between divorcing a man who was an ideal husband in every other respect, as well as being a devoted father to our two children, or putting up with his childish philandering. And that’s what it was. Childish. So I chose to stay. Actually, such an arrangement really isn’t all that uncommon among the people we socialized with.”

  She stopped speaking for a moment and looked at me with eyes that were a little sad. “I suppose you think I was a fool,” she said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said gently. “Besides, it’s not my place to pass judgment on you.”

  “At any rate, I did stay, and we raised our children and were active in community affairs, and he was discreet in his romantic activities, never causing me any embarrassment or shame.”

  “I appreciate you being so frank with me, but I don’t see what this has to do with his murder,” I said.

  “At the time of his death Henry was involved with a young woman, and he had gone to meet her that evening.”

  “Are you sure about that?” I asked.

  “Of course I am. I’d been married to the man for thirty-five years. Besides, as I said, he never lied to me. When he left the house that night I asked him if it was a business call or a social call he was making, and he said a social call, so I knew what he meant. It was a sort of code we had. That means that at the very least, being out with this young woman when he could have been safe at home put him in the place where he was killed. And deep down I can’t help but feel that somehow she lured him to that nightclub.”

  “Do you have any idea who she was?”

  She shook her head. “None whatsoever. But I wanted to tell you this because you may find some mention of it when you read his diary, and I didn’t want you to feel you had to protect me from the truth. Most of all, I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

  I nodded. “I would never presume to do that, Mrs. DeMour. And I really don’t want to pry into your private business. It’s just that—”

  “Why are you doing this anyway, Mr. Tucker?” she asked. “Looking into Henry’s death, I mean.”

  “Like I told Mr. Simms last night, I’m not really sure myself. Part of it is that your husband seems to have been too decent a man to be written off the way he’s been written off by the officials in this county. Then there was this girl who saw the murder. I was supposed to be protecting her, but—”

  “The one who was found out on the Galveston highway a couple of days ago?”

  I nodded.

  She gazed at me thoughtfully for a few moments, then rose abruptly. “Follow me,” she said. “I imagine you are anxious to see those journals.”

  Henry DeMour’s library was what one would expect from a wealthy man who loved books—dark wood paneling and deep leather armchairs, built-in bookshelves floor to ceiling, books everywhere. She opened a door in the paneling to reveal a large safe. After fooling around with the combination dial for a few seconds she swung the door open to reveal a neat stack of leather-bound books. “Take your time, Mr. Tucker,” she told me.

  I thanked her and she left the room, closing the heavy door behind her. The top book was the most recent one. I sat down in one of the big leather chairs and began to read. It took me only a few minutes to find what I was looking for, and, when I did, its implications almost curled my hair. I sat for a while, thinking furiously, truly frightened for the first time since the night the goons had come to La Rosa.

  Finally I came to a decision. I went out into the hallway and found it deserted. Wandering back through the old house, I discovered Lucinda DeMour once more installed at her kitchen table, coffee cup in hand. “Did you—”

  “Mrs. DeMour, you told me you were from Savannah. Do you have any relatives there?”

  “Several, including my brother and his family. Why do you ask?”

  “You need to go there now.”

  She appeared more exasperated than shocked. “Mr. Tucker, I don’t see how—”

  I can be extremely persuasive when I put my mind to it. But in this case I didn’t have to be. Instead, I simply put her husband’s open journal on the table in front of her and said, “Read this, please.”

  Her eyes quickly skimmed over the book, then she turned the page. When she’d finished she looked up at me with a stricken expression on her face.

  “You see?” I asked. “There’s no doubt in my mind that your life is in danger. The next time they won’t bother with burglary. They’ll just force their way in and demand to know where the journals are. Then they’ll kill you afterward.”

  “You think?” she asked, alarm in her eyes.

  “I’m certain of it. Please pack a few things and let me take you to the depot.”

  “All right. I’ll trust you, though God knows why. I guess with Henry dead I don’t have anybody else to trust.”

  “Do you need to call your brother?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m welcome there any time, and he and his wife asked me to come last week when they were here for the funeral.”

  “Fine. Just get whatever you need as quickly as you can and let’s go.”

  She nodded and went to the door.

  “And Mrs. DeMour?”

  “Yes?” she asked, turning back to me.

  I held up her husband’s journal. “I’m going to need to keep this,” I said.

  “By all means. I’ll feel much better with it out of my house.”

  * * *

  She took no more than a half hour to get packed. After she’d sent the servants home, I put her bags in the trunk and headed for the Southern Pacific Depot.

  “You should be able to get a connection in New Orleans without any trouble,” I said as I pulled up out front.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Tucker. I’ve made this trip many times before. When do you think I’ll be able to come home?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. Why don’t you plan on staying a couple of weeks, at least.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to get back in contact with Charlie Grist. He was working this case, but he got called back to Austin. I think this will renew his interest. And then I think I’ll talk to a friend of mine who works for the attorney general’s office.”

  Good,” she said. She opened her purse and took out a pen and a small notebook. “I’m going to give you my brother’s address and phone number. Please let me know what happens.”

  “I promise.”

  She had her ticket in a matter of minutes and we had only a half hour wait until the eastbound Sunset Limited pulled into the station. Once the porter had taken her bags, she turned to me and held out her hand, and for just a moment there was a plaintive expression on her face. “It may seem rude to you for me to ask such a question on so short an acquaintance,” she said, “but I would like an outsider’s opinion. Do you think I was a fool for staying with Henry all those years?”

  I took her hand and bent down and kissed it, and I felt like Clark Gable. “Mrs. DeMour,” I said, “I don’t believe you could ever play the fool. You make me wish I was thirty years older.”

  Her eyes misted and she leaned over to kiss me gently on the cheek. “You are a true gentleman, Mr. Tucker. A lesser man would have said he wished I was thirty years younger.”

  The porter helped her into the coach and a few seconds later the train rolled away into the misty
gloom of the winter afternoon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  From the depot I went downtown to a Kress’s variety store and paid a quarter to get DeMour’s journal snugly wrapped for mailing. Then I drove to the main post office and mailed it to Frank Russell, the president of my bank back home, along with a note asking him to hold it safely in the vault until I came by to pick it up. After that, I breathed a little easier. Besides being a fellow rancher and political ally, Frank was a trusted friend. Once the diary was in his hands it would be safe, since he was so closed-mouthed he wouldn’t even discuss routine bank business with his wife.

  Next I stopped at a Texas Company service station to gas up my car and have the oil checked. I asked to see the phone book, and in a few seconds I had Alma Copeland’s address. This was a relief. For all I’d known she might have been married or living with her parents, which would have made what I had in mind considerably more difficult. Her place turned out to be a small bungalow in one of the older residential neighborhoods on the west side of town. There was no sign of her car in the driveway, but a small porch light burned against the deep gloom of the afternoon. Ever mindful of my blood sugar, I found a mom-and-pop store a few blocks away where I bought three Cokes, a box of crackers, and a small jar of peanut butter.

  I went back to the bungalow and parked on the opposite side of the street about thirty yards from her driveway so that my car was partially screened by a large privet hedge. It was a long wait. My peanut butter was half gone and it was nearly dark when her little coupe pulled into the drive. I slipped out of my car and hurried up the street. Moving as soundlessly as I could, I mounted the porch behind her and slipped my hand under her arm just as she was unlocking the front door. She jumped a foot high and almost dropped her purse. “God, you scared me!” she cried out.

  “Good,” I said roughly. “It’s about time something did.”

  “What do you want? I thought I told you—”

  I took her by the arm and pushed the door open with my other hand, then shoved her through the doorway and closed the door behind me.

  “You can’t do this—”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “I, I—”

  “Shut up,” I snarled and pushed her across the room and threw her down on a small sofa that sat against one wall. “You’re going to tell me what I want to know if I have to beat it out of you. In fact, after the runaround I’ve gotten on this case, knocking you around a little might be fun. Or maybe I’ll just arrest you as a material witness and take you to Austin this very night to talk to some investigators from the attorney general’s office. How would you like a week or so in the Travis County Jail with the state boys going over you?”

  “You’re awful!” she said, near tears.

  I looked at her coldly, my eyes meeting hers. “Probably,” I said. “But diagnosing my personality quirks isn’t going to help you a bit.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  “What you’ve told me is a pack of lies. I think your motives are innocent, but that doesn’t change things. So talk.”

  She was crying freely now. I stood staring down at her implacably. Finally she wound down.

  “Talk,” I repeated. “Make it easy on yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?” she whispered.

  “Let’s start with Madeline’s breakup with Nolan Dunning. She was seeing somebody after that, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she muttered with a reluctant nod.

  “You know so. Now who was it?”

  She heaved a great sigh. “You’re going to think this was so cheap.”

  “Never mind what I may think. Who was it?”

  “Henry DeMour.”

  I nodded. “That’s just what I’ve suspected since I talked to his wife earlier in the afternoon. Give me the whole story.”

  She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. “Mr. DeMour came to her school with a tour of local business and civic leaders, not long after the fall semester started. Apparently he was quite the ladies’ man. They met and talked and he asked for her phone number. She gave it to him and he called a few days later. Not long after that she broke up with Nolan and started seeing DeMour.”

  “How did Nolan take it?”

  “How do you think he took it?”

  “All right, tell me about the night DeMour was killed.”

  “Nolan had been badgering her continuously about coming back to him, even threatening her. But finally he quit. Then after about a week he called her and told her he was reconciled to the fact that she was gone, but that he wanted her to help him with one thing. He promised her that if she would, he’d never contact her again. He said some friends of his needed to talk to DeMour about a business deal, but he’d been reluctant to see them. Nolan wanted Madeline to bring DeMour to the Snake Eyes Club so they could meet him. He told her that it was a great deal for DeMour, and that later on he’d be grateful that she’d done it.”

  “And she believed him?” I asked in amazement.

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because she wanted to, I guess. I mean, she and Nolan had been together for over a year and they’d had some good times. And if he was telling the truth about this, then maybe she could convince herself she wasn’t so stupid for getting involved with him in the first place.”

  “It never occurred to her that Nolan might want to get DeMour off where he could do something to him?”

  She shook her head. “She thought DeMour was too important for a deputy sheriff to mess with. Besides, Nolan could be really smooth and convincing when he put his mind to it.”

  “So she said. But I’ve also heard he was too stupid to come in out of the rain. Which is it?”

  “He’s pretty dumb in some ways, but he has a sort of animal cunning where women are concerned. I can see where he’d have a certain appeal to girls like Madeline.”

  The way she put it puzzled me. “What do you mean, ‘girls like Madeline’?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with eyes that had gone cold and hostile. “Girls who like men.”

  “Don’t you—” I began and then a lot of subtle, little things fell into place and it became clear to me. That she’d worn a slacks suit to a funeral; the no-nonsense way she combed her hair; a certain mannishness to her bodily movements, minimal makeup. “I see,” I said softly. “Go on. What happened that night at the Snake Eyes?”

  She shrugged. “As soon as she and DeMour got out of the car, those two hoods were on him. She ran and got away from them.”

  “So there wasn’t another girl there with her that night?”

  “No, just Henry DeMour.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then a couple of days later Nolan called her and told her he’d make it right with the people behind it if she’d come back to him.”

  “So she told the truth about that much, at least.”

  “She told you as much of the truth as she felt she could,” she said plaintively.

  “Why didn’t she tell me about DeMour?”

  “She was afraid her parents would find out she’d been fooling around with a married man who was a lot older than she was.”

  “That seems rather trivial, really, when you consider the number of people who’ve gotten killed over this business.”

  “You don’t know her parents. They’re old-fashioned and very religious. She would never have heard the end of it. They might have even disowned her.”

  “Do people really do that?” I asked. “I thought it only happened in Victorian novels.”

  “Like I said, you don’t know them.”

  “How did she get from Huntsville to Beaumont?”

  “She called me from Palestine, and I went over there to meet her.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said with a nod. “Did she give you any reason why she bolted?”

  “She just said she was so nervous with dogs barking at odd times and guns everywhere. She said that your friend Nora kept a thir
ty-eight in her pocket and that the old man never stepped outside the house without his rifle.”

  “But that was why she was safe there. Didn’t she have sense enough to realize that?”

  She just shrugged.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me at the cemetery that you were the one who picked her up in Huntsville?”

  “Because she asked me not to.”

  “What happened after the two of you got back to Beaumont?” I asked.

  “I don’t really know. She had me drop her off at her place and that’s the last I ever saw of her. She was supposed to call me the next morning, but she never did.”

  “So you have no idea what she did or where she went after she got home?”

  She shook her head firmly. “No.”

  I stood regarding her thoughtfully. “I hope you’re telling me everything you know,” I said. “It’s to your benefit to come clean.”

  “I have.”

  “If that’s true I won’t be bothering you anymore.”

  I was across the room and just reaching for the doorknob when she said, “Thank you.”

  I turned back, a little puzzled. “For what?”

  “For not asking about me and Madeline. I mean, if we ever…” She gave me a wan smile.

  I shook my head in wonder that she could think such a thing important at such a time. Or that she could think I really gave a damn. “Good-bye, Alma Copeland,” I said softly and stepped out into the darkness of the night.

  * * *

  I should have had my mind on my business instead of on the sad screwball I’d just talked to, but I didn’t. So I fell for the oldest trick in the book. Or at least it’s a trick as old as the backseats of cars. I’d climbed in my Ford and pulled the door shut and was just fitting the key into the ignition when the blow came. It must have been a padded sap of some kind or it would have killed me. As it was it slammed me forward into the steering wheel and almost—but not quite—knocked me out. It did render me helpless, and they had me hustled out on the street in a flash. I remember being on unsteady legs for a moment with two men holding me up while somebody drove away in my car. Then a big Buick four-door sedan materialized before my eyes. It had fancy whitewalls and a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department seal on the door, and I recall thinking that was strange since cop cars were always plain-Jane Fords and Chevys and Plymouths with blackwall tires. Suddenly the back door of the Buick was magically open, and they shoved me inside.