by Bill Crider
"I don't know," Fred said. "Usually they'll eat just about anything, and that's a fact. They generally like to put things up and let 'em rot under water where they don't stink so bad, but I don't think the smell would put them off like it does me and you. Or maybe it's just me."
"It's not just you," I said. I didn't want to do what I was about to do, but I couldn't think of any way to put it off any longer.
I looked at the carcass, trying to see where the bullets had hit it. I spotted a likely looking place where a large hunk of flesh had been gouged out and decided to start there. I smacked the carcass with the flat of the knife blade a couple of times, hard. Flies rose up in a buzzing cloud, and I got down to work.
I dug around in the decaying meat, trying to avoid contact with it as much as possible. It wasn't easy. The gloves didn't come up much farther than my wrists, and I brushed against the body several times with my shirt and pants. Parts of it stuck to me where I touched it.
I found a bullet, though, partially embedded in a bone of one kind or another. My knowledge of alligator skeletal structure is sketchy at best.
I popped the bullet out of the bone with the knife blade and held it in my gloved hand. It was in pretty good shape, considering. Hardly flattened at all. I was glad, because I didn't feel like digging for another one. The heat, the smell, the feel of the tough meat, the flies swarming around my head, were all too much.
I handed the bullet to Fred. "Excuse me," I said. I walked over to a tree, took off the mask, and threw up.
Fred politely refrained from comment. I like to think he would have felt the same way I did had he done the job.
I walked back to the Jeep. "Shouldn't have eaten such a big breakfast," I said. "Let's get out of here."
Fred cranked up and we took off. "What're you gonna do with this bullet now that we got it?" he said.
"Where is it?" I said, trying to peel off the gloves without getting anything on my hands.
"In my pocket."
"That's a good place for it right now." I tossed the gloves behind me into the Jeep. "It might come in handy later. We need a gun to match it up with."
"Rifle," he said.
"Right."
I was pretty sure the county didn't have facilities to do a ballistics test, but there was no doubt that the Houston police did. I didn't know how good those facilities were, however. I wondered if the ballistics people had ever gotten that water tank to fire into. They had been wanting one for years but had been forced to make do with more primitive methods, thanks to a lack of funds.
"You think you could find out what kind of weapon killed Zach Holt and his wife?" I said as we bounced across the open ranch land.
"Maybe. I could ask. I know the doctor they use for autopsies. He might tell me quicker than the Sheriff."
"Good idea. I'll bet it wasn't a rifle, but it won't hurt to be sure."
"I'll see what I can do," he said, swerving to miss a small log.
My stomach lurched, but I didn't disgrace myself.
When we got back to the house, I changed clothes. I seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. This was turning out to be a messy case both literally and figuratively.
Then I looked for Fred and found him outside, hosing down the knife and the gloves.
"I think these'll clean up just fine," he said.
"I won't tell if you won't."
"That's a deal, then." He handed me the hose and walked over to turn off the water.
"Tell me something, Fred," I said.
"What's that?"
"There's more to this Brenda Stone and Zach Holt thing, isn't there?"
He sighed. "Yeah," he said. "I guess there is, at that."
8
The story was simple enough, and there really wasn't much more to it than Fred had already told me.
The rumor in town was that Zach and Brenda hadn't quite forgotten each other after high school, or else they'd suddenly remembered. Whichever way it was didn't matter, according to the talk, because they'd started seeing each other again. Not publicly, of course. But seeing each other nonetheless. And doing a good bit more than "fooling around."
"And supposedly Perry knows about it," Fred finished. That was the new bit of information I'd been looking for.
"If they weren't going out in public, how does anyone know what they were doing?" I said. It seemed like a logical question to me.
"I don't know," Fred said. "That's just the way it is around here. You just hear things. Like it's in the air. It's hard to keep a secret."
"Like the business of the state wanting to buy some land for a park."
"Like that. One day you don't hear anything at all, and the next day the story's all over town."
"You think there's anything to that one?"
"Which one?"
"The one about the park."
"Could be, but I doubt it. Something like that comes up ever' year or so. One time, it's that some big oil company's gonna come in here and lease all the acreage. The next time it's the State. I don't pay much attention anymore."
"You think I could get in to talk to Perry Stone?"
"You might. Depends on how the Sheriff's feeling."
"I think I'll give it a try," I said. I didn't have any other bright ideas.
Except one.
"You better give me that bullet," I said.
Fred handed me the gray metal lump from his pocket. I was glad I'd dug it out of the gator instead of having someone dig it out of me.
"You got a use for it?" he said.
"I thought that if the Sheriff and I got along real well, he might tell me about the rifles he found in Zach Holt's house. If he found any. You tell me Holt was a hunter, so there must have been some around."
"You see any?"
"No, but I wasn't exactly looking. Anyway, if there were any, and if this bullet was fired from one of them, then your case is solved."
"You planning to go home if you've got all that figured right?"
"I don't know," I said. It would be the smart thing to do, though. Go home and forget the rest of it, which didn't involve me at all.
"I'll pay for your time if you stay," he said.
"I wasn't thinking about the money," I said, feeling vaguely guilty that he even thought I might be.
"I didn't think you were, but I wanted to make sure."
I flipped the bullet up into the air, caught it, and stuck it in my jeans. "I may not find out anything. The Deputy doesn't like me."
"Don't feel bad about that," Fred said. "He don't like anybody."
I got in the Subaru and went to jail.
~ * ~
The county seat was a small town, but the jail was new. It was just off the main road and had walls that looked like polished granite, two stories tall.
The inside was air-conditioned and cool. A young woman in uniform directed me to the Sheriff's office, which was toward the back of a large room cluttered with desks and office chairs.
Tal Tolliver was looking at some papers on his desk when the woman tapped on the glass top of his open door. He looked up and saw us, not looking overly thrilled at the sight of me. He motioned me in.
"What can I do for you, Smith?" he said. He didn't bother to stand up or to shake my hand.
"I'd like to talk to Perry Stone," I said. "I'm representing his family."
"They hire you?"
"Something like that."
He let it pass. "Tell you he got railroaded? Tell you we got no evidence?" He seemed more belligerent than he had the night before.
"They didn't say."
"They may be right," he said.
"What?" I thought I must have heard him incorrectly. He couldn't have said what I thought he did.
But he had. "They may be right. I think Deppidy Jackson reacted a little fast on this one."
"They really didn't fill me in," I said, realizing that I was telling the truth.
"Well," he said, running his hand down the white streak in his hair, "there's been
some talk around town about Holt and Perry's wife. You met her?"
I said that I had.
"Then you might understand. Zach's wife wasn't any beauty, and he and Brenda Stone were a hot item a long time back. Maybe there's nothing to the rumors, or maybe there is, but that doesn't matter. Jackson went to Perry's house, just to ask him about things, you know, account for his whereabouts and so on. Perry got hot under the collar, took a swing at Jackson."
"He have a reputation for that?"
"Jackson?"
"Perry," I said. I was thinking about Perry's "scuffle" with Holt.
"I guess you could say that. He had a fight with Holt about some damn alligator not long ago."
"So Jackson brought him in."
"He sure did. He's tougher than he looks. Perry didn't have a chance. You can talk to him if you want to. I'm not sure we're even gonna hold him much longer."
He led me up to the second floor, where the cells were. They were very clean, and Perry Stone was sitting on his bunk, wearing a bright orange jump suit.
"Visitor," the Sheriff said. He called the jailer over, and they let Stone out, taking us to a small visitors' room.
Tolliver and the jailer left, and I introduced myself to Stone and told him what I was doing there. He was a medium-sized man, about five-nine, but solid. There was a bruise on the side of his face.
"Jackson give you that?" I said.
He rubbed the bruise lightly. "I guess I deserved it," he said. "I started things. He just finished them."
"You didn't like being accused of murder?"
"It wasn't that," he said. "I didn't like the things he was saying about my wife. About her and Holt."
"Are they true?"
His face got dark and his hands clenched. Then he slowly relaxed. "You say you're working for my family, but that shouldn't give you leave to talk to me like that."
"I just wondered how you felt about it," I said. "Now I know."
"I guess you do."
"So how do you feel about alligators?"
He looked puzzled. "Alligators?"
"That's right. Alligators."
"I like 'em all right. If you mean something about that scuffle I had with Zach Holt, well, that was my fault too. But I still think he killed that gator."
"Where were you when Holt was killed? Do you have an alibi?"
"I was right here in town most of the day, and plenty of people saw me. I don't know when he was killed, but I didn't do it anytime yesterday."
"There seem to be a lot of strange things happening around here lately," I said. "Zach Holt and his wife are murdered, someone kills one of Fred Benton's gators, you get in fights, there's rumors of a big land buy--"
"That's no rumor," he said. "I heard that for the truth. But you're right about a lot of things going on. Rustlin', too."
Fred had mentioned the rustling earlier, but I'd forgotten about it. "You had any cows stolen?" I said.
"Not me, but I've heard the trucks at night. Not on my road, or I'd've done something about it."
"What could you do?"
"Blow out a tire for 'em. I got a shotgun. I can protect what's mine."
Perry Stone was a hotheaded young man. I wondered if maybe the Sheriff wasn't being a little soft-hearted in excusing him so lightly.
I told Perry that I'd do what I could to help him, but that he didn't really need my help. I said that I thought he'd be released soon.
"It's a good thing, too," he said. "They don't have any evidence on me."
I called for the jailer, who took Perry back to his cell while I went back downstairs. Sheriff Tolliver was still sitting at his desk, so I went in and gave him the bullet.
"Where'd this come from?" he said, rolling it around in his fingers.
I told him.
"Wonder why Jackson didn't think about that?"
Since I'd wondered the same thing, I just shook my head.
"Maybe he didn't think it was important," Tolliver said. "But we'll see what we can do. Zach Holt had a couple of rifles. We could have 'em checked."
"I'd appreciate that," I said.
"Well, I'll let you know," he said.
I could tell an exit line when I heard it, so I left.
~ * ~
Going back to Fred's house, I decided to take another drive around the countryside to get a little more familiar with the area. It's amazing sometimes how many little dirt and gravel roads there are in the rural parts of Texas, all of them leading somewhere, to a house or a pasture or a fishing hole or a place where one of those things used to be. It would be easy enough for someone who didn't know his way around to get lost, so I tried to keep up with my twistings and turnings.
I passed grazing cattle, giant oaks hung thickly with Spanish moss, rice fields, and houses long abandoned and half falling down. There were also houses that looked almost new, with satellite dishes in their front yards, boats under the carports, and lawns as fine as any in the city.
I drove past the Holt house and saw the gray cat sitting on top of the rusting car. I wondered what would happen to him and even thought briefly of trying to catch him so that I could take him to Galveston as a companion for Nameless. But only briefly. Nameless didn't seem the type to welcome companions. He didn't even like me that much, and I was the one who usually fed him.
Winding down near the river bottoms, I found the roads narrower, with the trees hanging their moss-heavy branches out over fences and over my head. The roads also got twistier and rougher, and I was beginning to wonder if I knew just exactly where I was. It was time to think about getting back to Fred's.
There were no houses at all around now, and there was no place for me to turn the car. The road was too narrow for a three-point turn, even in the Subaru, and I was afraid that any minute it would turn into a cow path or a rabbit trail.
Finally I came to a crossroads at a place where the fence posts seemed close enough to reach out and touch. I stopped the car to decide which way to turn, but when I looked to the left I saw the tail end of a gray car in the distance.
It was hard to tell, since the car was kicking up a trail of white dust, but it looked as if it might be the Oldsmobile I'd seen earlier, the one with the flat tire. With everything else that had been happening, I'd completely forgotten about the car and its hard-looking driver, Gene Ransome. I wondered what he was doing down in the woods. This didn't seem a very likely spot for him to be, even if he was a salesman.
I decided to follow him, for no better reason than the fact that he looked more like a cheap hood from a 1950s B-movie than a salesman, and turned the Subaru to the left.
I drove along behind him for about a mile, trying to keep him in sight around all the twists and turns of the narrow road. He wasn't in any hurry, so I didn't have any trouble. As we were coming up on a weather-beaten old house that listed to the right at about a forty-five degree angle, he slowed down even more. Then he pulled in beside the house, concealing his car from me.
I didn't know whether to drive on by or to stop and wait. If he saw me pass, it wouldn't mean anything to him. He might not even recognize the car, though I doubted that he met many Subarus in this part of the country. If I waited, though, and he'd already spotted me, he'd wonder what was going on.
So I kept going.
When I got to the house, there was no car.
I'd expected it to be parked in the shade by the house, but it wasn't. I didn't see the car anywhere.
I backed up and turned into the yard, parking the Subaru in front of the house. The place was in terrible shape, rotten boards, no glass in the windows, most of the roof gone. I got out and walked to the porch, through thick weeds that grabbed at my jeans.
The porch was still there but only barely. Most of the boards were missing and weeds grew right up in front of the door. Wherever Gene Ransome had gone, I was sure he wasn't in the house.
So where was he, then? He had to be around somewhere.
I walked to the other side of the house. There were
well-worn ruts in the ground, and I looked out behind the house. The ruts continued through the grass and weeds and into the trees.
Maybe there was something back in there, like a grocery store. Maybe Ransome was just a simple salesman, making his calls. Maybe there was a simple, logical explanation for his disappearance into the trees.
Maybe I could change myself into Captain Marvel by yelling "Shazam!"
I looked along the ruts, but they didn't tell me anything, except that a guy driving an Oldsmobile in a place like this was just begging for a flat tire.
The same went for a guy driving a Subaru, but I could always walk. Too bad I didn't know how far Ransome was going. I could start back in there and run across him in five minutes, or I could find a rutted track that went on for miles.
I wasn't going to find out anything by standing where I was, though, unless I simply waited for Ransome to come back and then followed him again, or waited and then went down the ruts to see what was there.
The latter idea appealed to me. I didn't know what Ransome was doing, legal or illegal, I didn't know whether he was armed if what he was doing was illegal, and I didn't have a gun of my own.
The only problem was my car. He'd see that for sure. I went back to the Subaru, apologized to my tires, and drove right across the open field to the trees. There was a sizeable clump of bushes, and I drove right in.
I had to force the door open against the resisting branches, but I managed to get out and get back to the field with only minor scrapes and scratches. The Subaru's finish suffered more than I did, but a few more scratches here and there on its surface wouldn't even be noticed.
I walked back to the house to wait and went inside.
It wasn't entirely empty. There was the remains of a mattress, the ticking spotted with mold and the stuffing coming out. There were also some random pages from a magazine, most of them yellowing and gnawed by silverfish and other bugs.
I sat on the mattress hoping that no ancient disease clung to it. It was comfortable enough, so I dragged it over by the window on the side where the car would pass. I lay down directly underneath the window and waited for the sound of the car.