The Hangings

by Bill Pronzini

  It had been a Saturday night two months after her return that I had gone up that hill for the first time, and I had done it only because of a misconception. Out on my regular patrol, riding my bicycle as I sometimes did, I had seen what I took to be a smoky fire on the porch and pedaled up to investigate. False alarm: she had put too much kerosene into her lamp and it had started to smoke badly when she lit the wick. She thanked me in her cool way for my concern, and I said she was welcome. Then I said something about it being a fine night, and she allowed as how it was, and I mentioned that you could see spots of foxfire in the tule marshes farther south, and she said yes, they reminded her of the fireflies in the Midwest. And then I had tipped my hat and bid her good evening and gone about my business.

  That should have been the end of it. But it wasn't. The next Saturday night I saw the lantern glow on her porch and in spite of my better judgment I went up that hill again. When she asked why I had come, with suspicion in her voice, I stood there like a fool with my hat in my hand and said I didn't know, I guessed I just wanted to see if she was all right. She looked at me for a time, measuring me, then without smiling she allowed as how it was a warm night and I was probably thirsty and would I care for a glass of lemonade. I said I would. We talked some while I drank the lemonade, and she kept watching me, as if she were waiting for me to say something other than what I was saying-something personal, I suppose, the kind of thing a man might say to a scarlet woman. But that was not why I was there, or why I kept coming back, and if she didn't know it that second night, or the third, she knew it by the fourth because that was when she quit looking at me in that cynical, expectant way and began to take her ease in my presence. Now, I fancied that she looked forward to my visits—the half hour or so I would spend with her each time—as much as I did. At least she had not asked me to stop calling on her.

  There were times when I suspected that I was not just Hannah's only friend in Tule Bend but her only friend in the world. It was one of the reasons I kept visiting her. Glimpses of the real Hannah Dalton, those times when she peeked out from behind the protective wall—that was another reason. Could be I was smitten with her, too . . . well, hell, of course I was smitten with her. Why not admit it at least to myself? It was nothing to be ashamed of, because it wasn't for the reason Ivy and the other busybodies thought.

  The bluff on which the Dalton house sat was just south of where lower Main hooked into Tule Bend Road, right on the creek. Tonight, because the weather was cool, she was sitting inside the screened part of the porch, the part that overlooks the town. During the summer, she had sat on the open part that feces east over the creek, past the alfalfa and barley fields and stretches of cattle pasture, to the low hills that rise up into the Sonoma Mountains. She sat on one part or the other every night, usually with her lamp lighted but sometimes in the dark. Reading, sewing, or just watching the night. Perhaps looking down on the town that spurned her, too, and hating the people in it. She had cause, if so. But she had never spoken a harsh word to me about any person in Tule Bend—any person anywhere, for that matter.

  I went up and knocked on the rear porch door. She kept it locked, so she had to get up to let me in. She seemed pleased to see me, or at least not unpleased.

  "Evening, Hannah."

  "Lincoln. I didn't expect you tonight."

  "Why is that?"

  ''Trouble in town today, wasn't there? I saw all the commotion along the creek this morning."

  We sat down, her in the Boston rocker she favored and me in a cane-bottom chair. She had reddish hair and the light from her rose-shaded lamp gave it the appearance of frozen fire. Lord, she was a handsome woman. Long slender neck, pale skin, green-gray eyes, that fiery hair piled up on top of her head and fastened with one of a dozen different types of comb. Every time I looked at her, up close like this, a lump came into my throat and I felt gangly and awkward and aware that I was not much to look at myself. Big and knobbly, arms too long, hands too big, thinning hair that would not stay in place, a nose that leaned over to the left side of my face. No woman as pretty as Hannah had ever looked at me twice. But then, I did not expect her to look at me that way. It was enough to be able to call on her, to be her friend.

  "Trouble it was," I said. "Man was found hanged out back of the saddlery."

  "Hanged?" The word seemed to catch in her throat.

  "On that old black oak there. Never saw the like."

  "Who was he?"

  "Stranger. Drifter named Jeremy Bodeen, apparently."

  "Did he take his own life?"

  "Doesn't look that way. Looks to have been murder."

  "Murder? But why would anyone hang a man in the middle of town?"

  "No reason I can see. It's just the most puzzling and outlandish business I've ever come up against."

  I told her about Roberto Ortega finding a man's horse, and the letter that had been in the carpetbag. She listened without speaking, and when I was done she looked out through the screen and still did not speak. Once I thought I saw her shiver, as if there were a sudden draft.

  "Hannah? Something wrong?"

  "No, nothing. Will you have coffee?"

  "If you will."

  "Yes, I'd like some."

  She stood, went inside. The screen door made a dull closing sound behind her, like a gate locking shut in that wall she had around herself.

  I repacked and lighted my pipe. There was a half moon and the star clusters were bright; together they put silver streaks on the creek's surface. No foxfire in the marshes to-night. Few lights anywhere south or east; in those directions the night had an empty, lonesome aspect.

  Hannah came back with a tray and silently poured coffee. That silence was heavy between us for a time; I wanted to break it but I could not think of anything to say. She was the one who put an end to it, and the words she spoke surprised me.

  "I saw a man hanged once," she said, soft.

  "You did? Where?"

  "In Kansas. A small town in Kansas." She shivered again; this time I was sure of it because the motion caused her cup to rattle against its saucer.

  "Public execution?"

  "Yes."

  "How'd you happen to be there?"

  She was silent for such a while that I thought she wouldn't answer. But then she said, in a voice that was not much more than a whisper, "I knew the man they hanged."

  "Oh. I see."

  "No, Lincoln, you don't see. Not at all."

  "I'd like to," I said, choosing my words, "if you'd care to tell me about it."

  "I would rather not."

  "I'm a good listener, Hannah."

  "Yes, I know you are. More coffee?"

  I had the sense that she would prefer to be alone now, so I said, "No, I'd best be going. It's good coffee, though. Did I tell you that before?"

  "Yes."

  "Put chicory in it, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, it's fine coffee," I said, and I felt more awkward than ever. I seemed to have lapses around her, when I could not think straight and the things I said sounded plain foolish. She never seemed to notice, though. At least she never commented on it if she did.

  We said our goodnights and I went down off the porch and down the drive. When I glanced back I could see her through the window, sitting still as death in the lamplight. What a sad and lonely woman she was, I thought, with all the secrets she had locked away inside her.

  No question that I was smitten with her. The hell of it was, I didn't know what to do about it. I just did not know what to do.

  Chapter 4

  I HAD BEEN IN MY OFFICE TEN MINUTES THURSDAY MORNING when Boze showed up with Floyd Jones in tow. Floyd was the night bartender at the Elkhorn Bar and Grill on north Main. He reminded you some of Santa Claus—fat and jolly and white-haired—and he liked it when you told him so.

  Boze said, "Floyd here saw the hanged man Tuesday night, Linc. Recognized the body over to Obe Spencer's just now."

  Floyd bobbed his head up and dow
n. "He came into the Elkhorn about seven, looking for work."

  "How long did he stay?" I asked.

  "Half an hour, maybe. I told him we already had a swamper but he spent five minutes trying to convince me he'd do a better job. Gave it up when he saw I wasn't listening, and bought a beer and nursed it over by the stove. Seemed he didn't have anywheres else to go."

  "He give you his name?''

  "Just his first name. Jeremy."

  "Jeremy Bodeen," Boze said. "That's who the dead man is, all right."

  "He say anything else to you?" I asked Floyd.

  "Asked if I knew anybody who was looking for hired help."

  "What'd you tell him?"

  "Told him no, not in Tule Bend. Ed Sperling, out Two Rock Way, is looking and I told him that, but he said he wasn't much good at cattle work. Town work was what he wanted. So I said he should go up to Petaluma and try there."

  "He talk to anybody else."

  "If he did I didn't notice. Seemed to be the sort who keeps mostly to himself."

  "Anything happen while he was there? Trouble of any kind?"

  "No, sir," Floyd said. "A real quiet night."

  "What time did he leave?"

  "After nine. I couldn't say just when."

  "Anybody leave when he did?"

  "Can't tell you that either. One minute he was there, the next he was gone."

  "How about other strangers in the Elkhorn that night?"

  "Weren't any. Just regulars."

  "Name them."

  Floyd thought about it and rattled off a dozen names, all of which I knew. I wrote the names down anyway, to make sure I didn't forget any of them.

  When Floyd was gone, smiling as though he had done something special, like giving a sackful of Christmas presents to a needy family, I said to Boze, "You take half these names and I'll take the other half. If we're lucky, somebody on that list can help us get to the bottom of this."

  But we weren't lucky. We spent most of the day tracking down the men on Floyd's list, and only three of the twelve said they recalled seeing Jeremy Bodeen in the Elkhorn Tuesday night. And only one of the three, Clete Majors, who ran cattle in the foothills west of town, exchanged words with him. Clete said there had been a dish of salted nuts on the table where Bodeen was sitting and he had asked Bodeen to pass them over; the stranger had said, "Here you are," when he obliged. None of the twelve owned up to knowing who Bodeen was or how he happened to be in Tule Bend.

  So all we knew for certain was that Bodeen had come to town, probably sometime between six and seven, for that was when he walked into the Elkhorn. Which direction he had come from was still unknown. So was why he'd come, though him asking Floyd Jones about work confirmed he was a transient and indicated that he had liked the look of Tule Bend and decided to try his luck here. The dollar and a quarter we had found in his pocket said that he had just about been broke.

  The big mystery was what had happened to him after he left the Elkhorn. Who around here would want to murder a stranger, a drifter with a dollar and a quarter to his name? And not just murder him—hang him from a tree practically in the middle of town? Where in hell was the sense in that?

  *****

  There was no word from Emmett Bodeen that day, nor on the morning of the next day, Friday. Nothing else came along to help me get to the truth of the drifter's death, either. Between us, Boze and I talked to perhaps a hundred citizens in and around Tule Bend, and not one of them—not one—claimed to have heard of Jeremy Bodeen or to have seen him anywhere on Tuesday evening.

  I sent wires to law officers in half a dozen nearby towns and one to the sheriff of Marysville, Jeremy Bodeen's last known place of residence. I put the dead man's description in each one and asked for any information that might prove enlightening. All of the wires brought the same answer: Jeremy Bodeen was unknown by name or by sight among the lawmen in this part of the state.

  As if all of this was not irritation enough, by noon on Friday folks had quit viewing the hanging as just a thrilling mystery and built the whole business up into a scare as well. Rumors kept flying around like leaves in a storm, most of them wild and crazy-sinister. You'd have thought we had a wild-eyed cutthroat in our midst, like that self-styled Jack the Ripper that had terrorized London, England, a few years back.

  Mayor Gladstone heard the rumors and blistered my ear twice more. He was not the only one. Half the town seemed to think I ought to be able to produce explanations out of thin air, the way a stage magician produces rabbits and silk scarves. And because I couldn't, some people seemed inclined to question my ability to do my job. Not to my face, but the whispers got back to me anyhow. They always do in a small town.

  At ten past noon I left my office and walked down to Main. The Germany Cafe was my eventual destination but I took a roundabout way of getting there—down past Kelliher's Grocery and Produce Store on south Main. I had been doing that most Fridays for the past couple of months and I no longer tried to fool myself about why I did it. Friday was the day Hannah came in to do her marketing, usually right about noon. And Kelliher's was always the first place she stopped.

  When I got there, her spring wagon was drawn up in front and Hannah, dressed in gray and white, was on the sidewalk talking to another woman. That surprised me at first, considering how most everyone took pains to shun her. But then I saw that the other woman was Greta Parsons, and I thought wryly: Well, wouldn't Ivy's venomous tongue start to wag if she were here to see this. Wouldn't it just.

  Ivy was one of several who kept trying to paint Greta Parsons with the same scarlet used to brand Hannah. Mrs. Parsons and her husband, Jubal, had taken over a small tenant farm on property owned by the Siler brothers out near Willow Creek about ten months ago. He was a big strapping fellow and she was pretty as they come, with long hair the color of fresh-churned butter. Too pretty, to hear Ivy and her cronies tell it. They claimed she had the look, mannerisms, and doubtful morals of a tramp and would not have anything to do with her either. It was all hogwash, to my mind, just as it was with Hannah. Pure malicious gossip. She and her husband must have got wind of some of it, too, and been hurt by it, because you seldom saw them in town. They did not come to any of the social events at the Odd Fellows Hall, not even to church of a Sunday. Jubal Parsons showed up every week or so for supplies, but this was the first I had laid eyes on Mrs. Parsons in three months.

  As I approached them, it occurred to me that Hannah knew of the gossip about Greta Parsons (it was a wonder to me how much of Tule Bend's business Hannah did know, seeing as how she had no friends here except me) and had deliberately engaged Mrs. Parsons in conversation as a gesture of defiance. It was the sort of thing she would do. My sympathies being with both of them, I didn't keep my distance like everyone else; I walked right up to them and tipped my hat and said, "Afternoon, Miss Dalton, Mrs. Parsons. Fine day, isn't it?"

  Hannah said, "Yes, it is, Mr. Evans," but her smile was the same cool, distant one she used on everybody. I did not blame her for that. I had no right to expect anything more.

  Greta Parsons smiled and said nothing. Up close, her prettiness was hard rather than soft. You looked into her eyes and you felt she had seen things, maybe done things, that polite society wouldn't approve of. Not that that made her a tramp, any more than Hannah's past indiscretions made her one.

  "Your husband in town today, Mrs. Parsons?" I asked.

  "Yes. He's gone to see Mr. Brandeis about renting a horse. One of our plow animals died."

  "I'm sorry to hear that. Wasn't disease, was it?"

  "Old age and hard work. If you'll excuse me, I have shopping that needs to be done . . ."

  I said, "Surely," but she was no longer looking at me. She gave Hannah a small smile and disappeared inside Kelliher's.

  Hannah and I looked at each other for a few seconds. It was an awkward moment, at least for me, and I was relieved when the shriek of a locomotive's whistle over east put an end to it: the northbound passenger train from Tiburon, scheduled in
at 12:30 and right on time today. Before the echo of it died away Hannah had nodded to me—no smile, no words—and was turning to follow Mrs. Parsons inside the store.

  There was an unsettled feeling, almost a crustiness, in me as I made my way to the Germany Cafe. A bowl of hamhocks and lentils did nothing to improve my mood, even though the Germany serves the best lunch in Tule Bend. And the stranger who interrupted my dessert added enough to the crust to make it thicker than the one on the slab of peach pie I was trying to eat.

  First off, he was rude. He came waltzing up to my table, planted his feet, and said in a hard, snappy voice without any preamble, "I was told I could find the town constable here. That you?"

  I looked him over before I answered. He was not much to look at. Youngish, leaned down, black hair almost as long as an Indian's, thick mustache, icy blue eyes. Wearing a dented derby, a shirt with frayed cuffs, a brocade vest with one of its buttons gone, a pair of gold butternut trousers, and boots that hadn't had polish or cloth put to them in a long while. There was something vaguely familiar about him but I could not have said then what it was.

  "It would," I said, slow. "Lincoln Evans is the name. Something I can do for you?"

  "I just arrived from San Francisco."

  "That so?"

  "Don't know yet who I am, do you?"

  "Should I?"

  He sat down without being invited, poked his head halfway over to my pie plate, and said, "You sent me a wire two days ago. I'm Emmett Bodeen."

  So that was why he had struck me as familiar. There was not much resemblance between him and the hanged man lying over at Obe Spencer's, just enough to stamp them as brothers. "Well, Mr. Bodeen," I said, "I was beginning to despair that the wire never reached you."

  "It reached me."

  "Might have wired me back before you left Stockton," I said mildly. "We were about to make our own burial arrangements—"

  "Never mind that. You sure the dead man you got here is my brother Jeremy."

  "Seems that way. There was a letter from you among what we believe to be his belongings. And I'd say you resemble him."