“Not my camp. Solomon’s. All the legal avenues have not yet been traveled.”
“It’s the illegal ones I’m interested in. Maybe you’ve got a rebel in the fold. It happens in the best of families, even the God-fearing ones.”
“The Children love God; we don’t fear Him. And everyone is accounted for at the time of yesterday’s unfortunate incident.”
“Yesterday’s yesterday. I’m here about today.”
“Today?”
“Somebody shotgunned the Cuttles behind their trailer about an hour ago. Give or take.”
“Great glory!” He glanced at the Bible. “Are they—”
“Gone to God. Knocking on the pearly. Purgatory bound. Dead as a mackerel.”
“I find your mockery abhorrent under the circumstances. Do the police think the Children are involved?”
“The police think what the police think. I’m not the police. Yesterday somebody potted at Jeremy Cuttle, or maybe just at his hat as a warning. Today he and his wife engaged me to investigate. Now they’re not in a position to engage anything but six feet of God’s good earth. I’m a detective. I see a connection.” I looked at my watch. “It’s three o’clock. Do you know where the Children are?”
Again his eyes strayed to the Bible. Then he placed his pudgy hands on the desk, jacked himself to his feet, and hiked up his belt, the way fat men do. “I have Solomon’s work to attend to. ‘Go thou from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.’ ”
“Sticks and stones may break my bones,’ ” I said, rising, “but any parakeet can memorize sentences.” I went me from his presence.
Ed Snilly, the lawyer who had recommended me to the Cuttles, lived in an Edwardian farmhouse on eighty acres with a five-year-old Fleetwood parked in the driveway sporting a bumper sticker reading have you hugged your hogs today? His wife, fifty-odd years of pork and potatoes stuffed into stretch jeans, directed me to the large yellow barn behind the house, where I found him tossing ears of dried corn from a bucket into a row of stalls occupied by chugging, snuffling pigs.
“One of my neighbors called me with the news,” he said after he’d set down the bucket and shaken my hand. He was a wiry old scarecrow in his seventies with a spotty bald head and false teeth in a jaw too narrow for them. “Terrible thing. I’ve known Judy and Jeremy since the Depression. I’d gladly help out the prosecution on this one gratis. Do you suspect Comfort?”
“I’d like to. Did you represent the Cuttles when they bought the Stage Stop?”
“Yes. It was an estate sale, very complicated. Old Man Herndon’s heirs wanted to liquidate quickly and wouldn’t carry any paper. Jeremy negotiated to the last penny. I also stood up with them at the hearing with the State Liquor Control Commission. A license transfer can be pretty thorny without chicanery. I’m not sure we’d have swung it if Ollie Springer hadn’t appeared to vouch for them.”
“I’m surprised he spoke up. He told me the place was jinxed.”
“I can see why he’d feel that way. Old Man Herndon was Ollie’s father-in-law. The Stage Stop was going to be a belated wedding present, but that ended when Herndon’s daughter ran out on Ollie. The rumor was she ditched him for some third rate rock singer who came through here a couple of years back. I think that’s what killed the old man.”
“So far this place is getting to be almost as interesting as Detroit.”
“Scandals happen everywhere, but in the main we country folk look out for one another. That’s why Ollie helped Judy and Jeremy in spite of his personal tragedy. To be honest, I thought they were getting in over their heads too, especially later when
they talked about digging a wine cellar and adding a room for pool. They were looking far beyond your usual mom-and-pop operation.”
“Is gaming that big hereabouts?”
“Son, people around here will go to a christening and bet on when the baby’s first tooth will come in. Phil Costa’s made a fortune off the pool tables in the basement of his bowling alley out on M-52. Lord knows I’ve represented enough of his clientele at their arraignments every time Ollie’s raided the place.”
“Little Phil? Last I heard he was doing something like seven to twelve in Jackson for fixing the races at Hazel Park.”
“He’s out two years now, and smarter than when he went in. These rural county commissioners stay fixed longer than the city kind. Phil never seems to be around when the deputies bust in.”
“So if the Cuttles went ahead and put in their poolroom, Little Phil might have lost business.”
“It’s a thought.” Snilly picked up his bucket and resumed scattering ears of corn in the stalls. “A thought is what it is.”
The Paul Bunyan Bowl-A-Rama, an aluminum hangar with a two-story neon lumberjack bowling on its roof, looked abashed at mid-afternoon, like a nude dancer caught under a conventional electric bulb. A young thick-shouldered bouncer who hadn’t bothered to change out of his overalls on his way in from the back forty conferred with the office and came back to escort me past the lanes.
Little Phil Costa crowded four-foot ten in his two-inch elevators, a sour-faced baldy in his middle years with pointed features like a chihuahua’s. Small men are usually neat, but his tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up unevenly, and an archaeologist could have reconstructed his last five meals from the stains on his unbuttoned vest. He didn’t look up from the adding-machine tapes he was sorting through on a folding card table when I entered. “Tell Lorraine the support check’s in the mail. I ain’t about to bust my parole over the brat.”
“I’m not from your ex. I’m working for the Cuttles.”
“What the hell’s a Cuttle?”
I told him. He scowled, but it was at a wrong sum on one of the tapes. He corrected it with a pencil stub. “I heard about it. I hope you got your bread up front.”
“Talk is Judy and Jeremy were going to add a pool room to the Stage Stop.”
“How about that. What’s six times twelve?”
“Think of it in terms of years in stir.” I laid a hand on top of the tape. “A few years back, two guys who were operating their handbook in one of your neighborhoods were shotgunned behind the New Hellas Cafe in Hamtramck. The cops never did pin it to you, but nobody’s tried to cut in on you since. Until the Cuttles.”
The farmboy-bouncer took a step forward, but Costa stopped him with a hand. “Get the bottle.”
It was a pinch bottle filled with amber liquid. Costa took it without looking away from me and broke the seal. “You a drinking man, Walker?”
“In the right company. This isn’t it.”
“I wasn’t offering. This stuff s twenty-four years old, flown in special for me from Aberdeen. Seventy-five bucks a fifth.” He upended it over his metal wastebasket. When it gurgled empty he tossed in the bottle. “On their best night, that’s what the Cuttles’ room might cost me. Still think I iced them?”
“I’m way past that,” I said. “Now I’m wondering who takes out your trash.”
“You trade in information, I’ll treat you. Check out a guy named Chuckie Noyes. He’s a Child of Solomon, squats in the cemetery behind the Stage Stop property, the old caretaker’s hut. I knew him in Jackson before he got religion. He did eleven years for killing a druggie in Detroit. Used a shotgun.”
“Why so generous?”
He tipped a hand toward the adding-machine tapes. “I got a good thing here, closest I ever been to legit in my life. Last thing I need’s some sticky snoop coming back and back, drawing attention. Time was I’d just have Horace here adjust your spine, but if there’s one thing I learned on the block it’s diplomacy. Dangle, now. I open at dusk.”
“Seventy-two,” I said.
“What?”
“Six times twelve.”
“Hey, thanks.” He wrote it down. “Come back some night when you’re not working and bowl a couple of lines. On the house.”
For the second time that day, police strobes had beaten me to m
y destination. They lanced the shadows gathering among the leaning headstones in what might have been a churchyard before the central building had burned down sometime around
Appomattox. Near its charred foundation stood a galvanized steel shed with a slanted roof and a door cut in one side. As I was getting out of the car, two uniformed attendants wheeled a body bag on a stretcher out through the door and into the back of an ambulance that was almost as big as the shed. Sergeant Springer came out behind them, deep in conversation with a man six inches taller in a snapbrim hat and a coat with a fur collar. The two were enveloped in the vapor of their own spent breath.
“I’ll want it on my desk in the morning,” said the big man, pausing to shake Springer’s hand before pulling on his gloves.
“Will do, Lieutenant.”
The lieutenant touched his shoulder. “Bad day all around, Ollie. Get some rest before you talk to the shooting team.” He boarded an unmarked Dodge with a magnetic flasher on the roof. The motor turned over sluggishly and caught.
“Chuckie Noyes?” I asked Springer.
He looked up at me, then down at his fur cap. “Yeah.” He put it on.
“Who shot him, you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He do the Cuttles?”
“Looks like.”
“You’re not the only one having a bad day, Sergeant.”
“Guess you’re right.” He fastened the snaps on his jacket. “I came here to ask Noyes some questions, thought he might have seen or heard something living so close. He had an antique pin on his chest of drawers by his bed. Judy wore that pin to church every Sunday. Don’t know how I missed not seeing it in the trailer. Noyes saw it same time I did. He tried for my gun.”
“Were you alone?”
“What?” He lamped me hard.
“Nothing. You folks in the country do things differently.”
“I don’t expect to lose sleep over squashing a germ like that, but it doesn’t mean I wanted to. Now we’ll never know if he was working for Comfort or if he slipped the rest of the way over the edge and acted solo. He had a record for violence.”
“So Little Phil said.”
“That germ. Guess you’ll talk to just about anybody.”
“It’s a job.”
“A stinking job.”
“Everything about this one stinks,” I agreed. “Sleep tight, Sergeant.”
I’d always heard God-fearing people went to bed with the chickens. Another myth gone.
At 11:45 P.M. I was still parked down the road from Bertram Comfort’s gray stone house, where I’d been for over an hour, warming my calcifying marrow with judicious transfusions of hot coffee from a Thermos and waiting for the lights to go out downstairs. A couple of minutes later they did. I was tempted to go in then but sat tight. Just after midnight the single lighted window on the second story went black. Then I moved.
I’d brought my pocket burglar kit, but just for the hell of it I tried the knob on the front door. Comfort had the old churchman’s prejudice against locks. I let myself in.
I also had my pencil flash, but I didn’t use that either. There was a moon, and the glow reflecting off the snow shone bright as my best hopes through the windows. I found my way to the study without tripping over anything.
I didn’t waste time going through the desk or looking behind the religious paintings for a wall safe. During my interview with Comfort his eyes had strayed to the big Bible on the desk one too many times for even the devoutest of reasons.
The book was genuine enough. There were no hollowed-out pages and an elaborate red-and-gold bookplate pasted to the flyleaf read: To MR. BERTRAM EZEKIEL COMFORT, FATHER OF THE FAITH, FROM THE CHILDREN OF SOLOMON.
Flanked by Adam and Eve in figleaves. A dozen strips of microfilm spilled out of a pocket in the spine when I tilted the book.
I carried the strips over to the window and held them up to the moonlight. They were photographed documents bearing the identification of the records departments of various police organizations. The farthest came from Los Angeles. The closest belonged to Detroit. I read that one. Then I put it in my inside breast pocket, returned the others to the Bible and the Bible to its place on the desk, and left, my sabbatical completed on the bones of another Commandment.
The next day was clear and twenty degrees. The sky had no ceiling and the sun on the snow was a sea of cold white fire. Breathing was like inhaling needles.
The air was colder inside the empty Stage Stop building with the raw damp of enclosed winter. The old floorboards rang like iron when I stepped on them and my breath steamed around the gaunt timbers that held up the roof. Owls nested in the rafters. The new yellow two-by-fours stacked along the walls were bright with the anticipation of a dead couple’s exploded vision.
“Jesus, it’s cold in here,” said Ollie Springer, pushing aside the front door, which hung on a single scabbed hinge. “Is the cold locker closed at Pete’s Meats?”
“It’s a hall. The Cuttles might have appreciated the choice. Thanks for coming, Sergeant.”
“You made it sound important over the phone. It better be. The lieutenant’s waiting for my report on Chuckie Noyes.”
“I’ve got something you might want to add.” I handed him the microfilm slip I’d taken from Comfort’s Bible.
“What is it?”
“Noye’s arrest report on a homicide squeal he went down for in Detroit a dozen years ago. Since you mentioned his record yesterday I thought you’d like to see the name of the arresting officer.”
He was holding it up to a shaft of sunlight coming in through an empty window, but he wasn’t reading.
“The city cops are jealous of their reputations,” I said. “When they take a killer into custody they sometimes forget to release the name of the rural cop who actually busted him during his flight to freedom; but a report’s a report. Just a deputy then, weren’t you?”
“This doesn’t mean anything.” He crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it behind the stack of lumber.
“Detroit has the original. Bertram Comfort maintains the loyalty of the more recalcitrant members of his flock by keeping tabs on their past indiscretions; that’s where I got the copy. I figure when you found out Noyes was back in circulation and hanging around your jurisdiction, you either hired him to kill Judy and Jeremy or more likely threatened to bust him on some parole beef if he didn’t cooperate. Then you offed him to keep him from talking and planted Judy’s pin in the caretaker’s hut where he was living. The simple plans are always the best. As a Child of Solomon he’d be blamed for trying to help secure the Stage Stop property for Comfort’s new camp.
“I guess I’m responsible for accelerating their deaths,” I went on. “Someone—you, probably—made a last ditch attempt to scare them off the other day by taking a potshot at Jeremy. When he and Judy hired me instead to investigate, you switched to Plan B before I could get a foothold. You’re one impulsive cop, Sergeant.”
“Why would I want to kill the Cuttles? They’re like my second parents.” He rested his hand on his sidearm, a nickel-plated .38 with a black knurled grip.
“It bothered me too, especially when I found out you spoke up for them at the hearing before the State Liquor Control Commission. But that didn’t jibe with what you told me about thinking this place had a hoodoo. I should have guessed the truth when Ed Snilly said they decided later to expand the Stage Stop. At first I thought it was their plans for a pool room and the competition it would create for Phil Costa, but that was chump change to him, not worth killing over. It was the wine cellar.”
“What wine cellar?”
“There isn’t one now, but there was going to be. You were right in there cheering them on, in spite of your own bad luck with the place and the wife you said left you, until you found out they were going to dig a hole.” I paced as I spoke, circling a soft spot in the floor where the old boards had rotted and sunk into a depression eight feet across. He was watching me, trying to keep from staring
at my feet. His fingers curled around the grip of the revolver. I said, “I made some calls this morning from my motel room in town, got the name of that rock singer everyone says your wife ran off with. I called eight booking agents before I found one who used to work with him. He didn’t skip with anyone’s wife. He died of a drug overdose in Cincinnati a couple of months after he played here. Nobody was with him or had been for some time.”
“If you stayed at the motel you know she spent a night with him there,” Springer said. “It was all over the county next day. They were both gone by then.”
“Your wife didn’t go as far as he did. No more than six feet from where we’re standing, and all of it straight down. Those rotten boards lift right out. I checked before you got here.”
“Plenty of room under there for two.” He drew his gun.
“Drop it, Ollie!”
He pivoted, snapping off a shot. The bullet knocked a splinter off the big timber the sheriff s lieutenant had been hiding behind. The big man returned fire. Springer shouted, fell down, and grasped his thigh.
“Drop it, I said.”
The sergeant looked down at the gun he was still holding as if he’d forgotten about it. He opened his hand and let it fall.
“Thanks, Lieutenant.” I took the Smith & Wesson out of my coat pocket and lowered the hammer gently. “Sorry about the cold wait.”
He holstered his own gun under his fur-lined coat. “Ollie was right about this place.” He shook loose a pair of handcuffs.
I left while he was reading Springer his Miranda and went out into the cold sunshine of the country.
The Memorial Hour
by Wade Miller
The name Wade Miller appeared on some of the most acclaimed suspense fiction of the forties, fifties, and sixties. Bob Wade and Bill Miller made up the team and their work appeared everywhere, from Playboy to the movie screen, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil being based on their novel. Bob Wade carries on alone after the death of his partner. Harper Collins is reissuing many of the famous Max Thursday titles and Wade is working on a new one. He’s a fine writer.
Modern Masters of Noir Page 54