Graveyard Plots

by Bill Pronzini

  "Not much," I said. "A man's entitled to do what he pleases on his vacation, isn't he?"

  "But challenging muggers," Aaron said, "risking his life for kicks—"

  "He doesn't do it for kicks, Ernie."

  "Well, that's what I call it."

  Doc said, "Maybe he doesn't do it for kicks and maybe he's got every right to do it no matter what. But I'll tell you this: I wish he hadn't told us about it."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I can't help but feel different towards him now. He's still my friend, I don't mean that; but I just don't feel the same, knowing about these vacations of his." Doc shook his head and smacked the card table with his palm. "Damn, it would have been better for all of us if he'd kept his mouth shut."

  "You're right about that, Doc," I said with some tartness. "A man's always better off to keep his private business to himself, if he doesn't want to be misunderstood or poorly thought of."

  Later that day, after I got home from the firehouse, I laid out my road maps of Kansas and Colorado and studied the route I had traced out for my own vacation next month. I still wasn't sure of where I would stop in Colorado, but I'd circled four towns near the southern section of the Sangre de Cristo range that looked to have good state and county road connections. At least one of them, though, would be large enough to support a bank.

  That was what I'd definitely decided on for this year: a bank in Colorado.

  It was a matter of progression, just as it was with Webb. I'd started with a gas station in Minnesota five years ago and worked my way up through a liquor store in Iowa, a mercantile establishment in South Dakota, a supermarket in Nebraska, and a finance company in Kansas. So this year it just had to be a bank in Colorado.

  Of course, that made next year's vacation problematical; a bank is just about the limit one man alone can handle. But then, there was no use worrying about next summer until after this one was history. Besides which, I had a notion it was about time to shift gears anyway, to try something new. I'd been doing some reading on Yellow Kid Weil, the Sanctimonious Kid, and other legendary confidence men; maybe I'd try something in their line. Not over in Europe or any place like that, though. There were still plenty of places I'd never visited in this country, still plenty of things to do right here.

  Like they say, "See America First."

  I thought again about Webb—what a coincidence it was, considering the size of Cedarville, for one of my friends and neighbors to have developed a philosophy so similar to my own. Or was it really such a coincidence at that? After all, there had to be thousands of fellows living quiet, unexciting lives in hundreds of other small towns from coast to coast. Could be, couldn't it, that there were quite a few of us who spent our summer vacations doing all sorts of unconventional and dangerous things?

  It was sure something to wonder about . . .

  THE HANGING MAN

  It was Sam McCullough who found the hanging man, down on the river bank behind his livery stable.

  Straightaway he went looking for Ed Bozeman and me, being as we were the local sheriff's deputies. Tule River didn't have any full-time law officers back then, in the late 1890s; just volunteers like Boze and me to keep the peace, and a fat-bottomed sheriff who came through from the county seat two or three days a month to look things over and to stuff himself on pig's knuckles at the Germany Café.

  Time was just past sunup, on one of those frosty mornings Northern California gets in late November, and Sam found Boze already to work inside his mercantile. But they had to come fetch me out of my house, where I was just sitting down to breakfast. I never did open up my place of business—Miller's Feed and Grain—until 8:30 of a weekday morning.

  I had some trouble believing it when Sam first told about the hanging man. He said, "Well, how in hell do you think I felt." He always has been an excitable sort and he was frothed up for fair just then. "I like to had a hemorrhage when I saw him hanging there on that black oak. Damnedest sight a man ever stumbled on."

  "You say he's a stranger?"

  "Stranger to me. Never seen him before."

  "You make sure he's dead?"

  Sam made a snorting noise. "I ain't even going to answer that. You just come along and see for yourself"

  I got my coat, told my wife Ginny to ring up Doc Petersen on Mr. Bell's invention, and then hustled out with Sam and Boze. It was mighty cold that morning; the sky was clear and brittle-looking, like blue-painted glass, and the sun had the look of a two-day-old egg yolk above the tule marshes east of the river. When we came in alongside the stable I saw that there was silvery frost all over the grass on the river bank. You could hear it crunch when you walked on it.

  The hanging man had frost on him, too. He was strung up on a fat old oak between the stable and the river, opposite a high board fence that separated Sam's property from Joel Pennywell's fixit shop next door. Dressed mostly in black, he was—black denims, black boots, a black cutaway coat that had seen better days. He had black hair, too, long and kind of matted. And a black tongue pushed out at one corner of a black-mottled face. All that black was streaked in silver, and there was silver on the rope that stretched between his neck and the thick limb above. He was the damnedest sight a man ever stumbled on, all right. Frozen up there, silver and black, glistening in the cold sunlight, like something cast up from the Pit.

  We stood looking at him for a time, not saying anything. There was a thin wind off the river and I could feel it prickling up the hair on my neck. But it didn't stir that hanging man, nor any part of him or his clothing.

  Boze cleared his throat, and he did it loud enough to make me jump. He asked me, "You know him, Carl?"

  "No," I said. "You?"

  "No. Drifter, you think?"

  "Got the look of one."

  Which he did. He'd been in his thirties, smallish, with a clean-shaven fox face and pointy ears. His clothes were shabby, shirt cuffs frayed, button missing off his cutaway coat. We got us a fair number of drifters in Tule River, up from San Francisco or over from the mining country after their luck and their money ran out—men looking for farm work or such other jobs as they could find. Or sometimes looking for trouble. Boze and I had caught one just two weeks before and locked him up for chicken stealing.

  "What I want to know," Sam said, "is what in the name of hell he's doing here?"

  Boze shrugged and rubbed at his bald spot, like he always does when he's fuddled. He was the same age as me, thirty-four, but he'd been losing his hair for the past ten years. He said, "Appears he's been hanging a while. When'd you close up last evening, Sam?"

  "Six, like always."

  "Anybody come around afterwards?"

  "No."

  "Could've happened any time after six, then. It's kind of a lonely spot back here after dark. I reckon there's not much chance anybody saw what happened."

  "Joel Pennywell, maybe," I said. "He stays open late some nights."

  "We can ask him."

  Sam said, "But why'd anybody string him up like that?"

  "Maybe he wasn't strung up. Maybe he hung himself."

  "Suicide?"

  "It's been known to happen," Boze said.

  Doc Petersen showed up just then, and a couple of other townsfolk with him; word was starting to get around. Doc, who was sixty and dyspeptic, squinted up at the hanging man, grunted, and said, "Strangulation."

  "Doc?"

  "Strangulation. Man strangled to death. You can see that from the way his tongue's out. Neck's not broken; you can see that too."

  "Does that mean he could've killed himself?"

  "All it means," Doc said, "is that he didn't jump off a high branch or get jerked hard enough off a horse to break his neck."

  "Wasn't a horse involved anyway," I said. "There'd be shoe marks in the area; ground was soft enough last night, before the freeze. Boot marks here and there, but that's all."

  "I don't know anything about that," Doc said. "All I know is, that gent up there died of strangulation. You want m
e to tell you anything else, you'll have to cut him down first."

  Sam and Boze went to the stable to fetch a ladder. While they were gone I paced around some, to see if there was anything to find in the vicinity. And I did find something, about a dozen feet from the oak where the boot tracks were heaviest in the grass. It was a circlet of bronze, about three inches in diameter, and when I picked it up, I saw that it was one of those Presidential Medals the government used to issue at the Philadelphia Mint. On one side it had a likeness of Benjamin Harrison, along with his name and the date of his inauguration, 1889, and on the other were a tomahawk, a peace pipe, and a pair of clasped hands.

  There weren't many such medals in California; mostly they'd been supplied to Army officers in other parts of the West, who handed them out to Indians after peace treaties were signed. But this one struck a chord in my memory: I recollected having seen it or one like it some months back. The only thing was, I couldn't quite remember where.

  Before I could think any more on it, Boze and Sam came back with the ladder, a plank board, and a horse blanket. Neither of them seemed inclined to do the job at hand, so I climbed up myself and sawed through that half-frozen rope with my pocket knife. It wasn't good work; my mouth was dry when it was done. When we had him down, we covered him up and laid him on the plank. Then we carried him out to Doc's wagon and took him to the Spencer Funeral Home.

  After Doc and Obe Spencer stripped the body, Boze and I went through the dead man's clothing. There was no identification of any kind; if he'd been carrying any before he died, somebody had filched it. No wallet or purse, either. All he had in his pockets was the stub of a lead pencil, a half-used book of matches, a short-six seegar, a nearly empty Bull Durham sack, three wheatstraw papers, a two-bit piece, an old Spanish real coin, and a dog-eared and stained copy of a Beadle dime novel called Captain Dick Talbot, King of the Road; Or, The Black-Hoods of Shasta.

  "Drifter, all right," Boze said when we were done. "Wouldn't you say, Carl?"

  "Sure seems that way."

  "But even drifters have more belongings than this. Shaving gear, extra clothes—at least that much."

  "You'd think so," I said. "Might be he had a carpetbag or the like and it's hidden somewhere along the river bank."

  "Either that or it was stolen. But we can go take a look when Doc gets through studying on the body."

  I fished out the bronze medal I'd found in the grass earlier and showed it to him. "Picked this up while you and Sam were getting the ladder," I said.

  "Belonged to the hanging man, maybe."

  "Maybe. But it seems familiar, somehow. I can't quite place where I've seen one like it."

  Boze turned the medal over in his hand. "Doesn't ring any bells for me," he said.

  "Well, you don't see many around here, and the one I recollect was also a Benjamin Harrison. Could be coincidence, I suppose. Must be if that fella died by his own hand."

  "If he did."

  "Boze, you think it was suicide?"

  "I'm hoping it was," he said, but he didn't sound any more convinced than I was. "I don't like the thought of a murderer running around loose in Tule River."

  "That makes two of us," I said.

  Doc didn't have much to tell us when he came out. The hanging man had been shot oncea long timeago–he had bullet scars on his right shoulder and back—and one foot was missing a pair of toes.

  There was also a fresh bruise on the left side of his head, above the ear.

  Boze asked, "Is it a big bruise, Doc?"

  "Big enough."

  "Could somebody have hit him hard enough to knock him out?"

  "And then hung him afterward? Well, it could've happened that way. His neck's full of rope burns and lacerations, the way it would be if somebody hauled him up over that tree limb."

  "Can you reckon how long he's been dead?"

  "Last night some time. Best I can do."

  Boze and I headed back to the livery stable. The town had come awake by this time. There were plenty of people on the boardwalks and Main Street was crowded with horses and farm wagons; any day now I expected to see somebody with one of those newfangled motor cars. The hanging man was getting plenty of lip service, on Main Street and among the crowd that had gathered back of the stable to gawk at the black oak and trample the grass.

  Nothing much goes on in a small town like Tule River, and such as a hanging was bound to stir up folks' imaginations. There hadn't been a killing in the area in four or five years. And damned little mystery since the town was founded back in the days when General Vallejo owned most of the land hereabouts and it was the Mexican flag, not the Stars and Stripes, that flew over California.

  None of the crowd had found anything in the way of evidence on the river bank; they would have told us if they had. None of them knew anything about the hanging man, either. That included Joel Pennywell, who had come over from his fixit shop next door. He'd closed up around 6:30 last night, he said, and gone straight on home.

  After a time Boze and I moved down to the river's edge and commenced a search among the tule grass and trees that grew along there. The day had warmed some; the wind was down and the sun had melted off the last of the frost. A few of the others joined in with us, eager and boisterous, like it was an Easter egg hunt. It was too soon for the full impact of what had happened to settle in on most folks; it hadn't occurred to them yet that maybe they ought to be concerned.

  A few minutes before ten o'clock, while we were combing the west-side bank up near the Main Street Basin, and still not finding anything, the Whipple youngster came running to tell us that Roberto Ortega and Sam McCullough wanted to see us at the livery stable. Roberto owned a dairy ranch just south of town and claimed to be a descendant of a Spanish conquistador. He was also an honest man, which was why he was in town that morning. He'd found a saddled horse grazing on his pastureland and figured it for a runaway from Sam's livery, so he'd brought it in. But Sam had never seen the animal, an old swaybacked roan, until Roberto showed up with it. Nor had he ever seen the battered carpetbag that was tied behind the cantle of the cheap Mexican saddle.

  It figured to be the drifter's horse and carpetbag, sure enough. But whether the drifter had turned the animal loose himself, or somebody else had, we had no way of knowing. As for the carpetbag, it didn't tell us any more about the hanging man than the contents of his pockets. Inside it were some extra clothes, an old Colt Dragoon revolver, shaving tackle, a woman's garter, and nothing at all that might identify the owner.

  Sam took the horse, and Boze and I took the carpetbag over to Obe Spencer's to put with the rest of the hanging man's belongings. On the way we held a conference. Fact was, a pair of grain barges were due upriver from San Francisco at eleven, for loading and return. I had three men working for me, but none of them handled the paperwork; I was going to have to spend some time at the feed mill that day, whether I wanted to or not. Which is how it is when you have part-time deputies who are also full-time businessmen. It was a fact of small-town life we'd had to learn to live with.

  We worked it out so that Boze would continue making inquiries while I went to work at the mill. Then we'd switch off at one o'clock so he could give his wife Ellie, who was minding the mercantile, some help with customers and with the drummers who always flocked around with Christmas wares right after Thanksgiving.

  We also decided that if neither of us turned up any new information by five o'clock—or even if we did—we would ring up the country seat and make a full report to the sheriff. Not that Joe Perkins would be able to find out anything we couldn't. He was a fat-cat political appointee, and about all he knew how to find was pig's knuckles and beer. But we were bound to do it by the oath of office we'd taken.

  We split up at the funeral parlor and I went straight to the mill. My foreman, Gene Kleinschmidt, had opened up; I'd given him a set of keys and he knew to go ahead and unlock the place if I wasn't around. The barges came in twenty minutes after I did, and I had to hustle to get the pa
perwork ready that they would be carrying back down to San Francisco—bills of lading, requisitions for goods from three different companies.

  I finished up a little past noon and went out onto the dock to watch the loading. One of the bargemen was talking to Gene. And while he was doing it, he kept flipping something up and down in his hand—a small gold nugget. It was the kind of thing folks made into a watch fob, or kept as a good-luck charm.

  And that was how I remembered where I'd seen the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Medal. Fight months or so back a newcomer to the area, a man named Jubal Parsons, had come in to buy some sacks of chicken feed. When he'd reached into his pocket to pay the bill he had accidentally come out with the medal. "Good-luck charm," he said, and let me glance at it before putting it away again.

  Back inside my office I sat down and thought about Jubal Parsons. He was a tenant farmer—had taken over a small farm owned by the Siler brothers out near Willow Creek about nine months ago. Big fellow, over six feet tall, and upwards of 220 pounds. Married to a blonde woman named Greta, a few years younger than him and pretty as they come. Too pretty, some said; a few of the womenfolk, Ellie Bozeman included, thought she had the look and mannerisms of a tramp.

  Parsons came into Tule River two or three times a month to trade for supplies, but you seldom saw the wife. Neither of them went to church on Sunday, nor to any of the social events at the Odd Fellows Hall. Parsons kept to himself mostly, didn't seem to have any friends or any particular vices. Always civil, at least to me, but taciturn and kind of broody-looking. Not the sort of fellow you find yourself liking much.

  But did the medal I'd found belong to him? And if it did, had he hung the drifter? And if he had, what was his motive?

  I was still puzzling on that when Boze showed up. He was a half hour early, and he had Floyd Jones with him. Floyd looked some like Santa Claus—fat and jolly and white-haired—and he liked it when you told him so. He was the night bartender at the Elkhorn Bar and Grill.