It’s queer that knowing something and knowing that you know it should be two entirely different matters. I guess I’d known the night before as well as I knew afterward, when it was proved for certain, that old Judge Shively was dead, murdered. But just then, in between the houses that Thursday afternoon, was the first time I knew for sure that I knew it.
That sudden, positive knowing led me, against my will, into a whole parcel of questions. Who? When? How? Why? And—— No, I wasn’t going to tangle up with those “wheres” again, so I stopped at the “whys.”
Suppose that somebody had feared or hated Clyde Shively bad enough to shoot him in the back. If his father hadn’t seen the killing, he’d more than likely know about the hard feelings. So it was sensible to think that whoever had killed the son had killed the father to keep him quiet. But what was the use of hiding one body and not the other? Had the killer been pressed for time? Was there room for only one body in this hiding-place? And there I was spang-bang into the “wheres” again. I wouldn’t have it. I went back to the “whys.”
If Brigid was right about Clyde Shively being the blackmailer, then everybody in camp who had ever been in New York or in southern California might have had a reason for killing him. As nearly as I could figure that took in everyone on the place, including myself. I had never been back East, but I’d been down in California now and then when I couldn’t help it.
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me a person would have to be pretty well acquainted with another person before he’d hate him enough to kill him. I kept trying to stick to that “he,” but finally I gave it up and faced facts. Betty-Jean was the only one in camp who had known the Shivelys all her life. Suppose she was afraid that Clyde would tell something on her, and get her in bad with Twill or Adam?
Nobody could imagine Betty-Jean’s doing anything very wrong, but I’d heard that the quietest ones were the deepest. Adam wasn’t quiet, but he was deep. Or—this came to me like a flash—suppose that Betty-Jean wasn’t Adam’s daughter, after all, and that Clyde knew it? That was exactly the way it would have been in a book, and all books weren’t all crazy, either.
She didn’t look a bit like Adam, except for a few little mannerisms, such as starting her smiles with one side of her mouth first, which looked cute for her though queer for him. But Joe and I, and some of the other boys who had seen Adam’s wife, thought that Betty-Jean favored her considerably—small and dainty, with curly yellow hair and pretty blue eyes. Elizabeth’s dimple had been in her cheek, but Betty-Jean had one in her chin besides.
I hadn’t known Judge Shively myself, but from what I’d heard of him I didn’t think that he’d be part or parcel of any plan to palm off a daughter on Adam. The folks who had known him had liked and respected him, and I’d been led to believe that Who’s Who didn’t make a point of being an index to the Rogue’s Gallery. Still, I couldn’t get away from the fact that persons who had known each other all their lives—especially relatives or close friends—were very much more likely to murder one another than strangers were.
Before very long I was going to feel meaner and more miserable; but I felt mean and miserable enough right then—a big husky man taking his ease and considering, accusingly, a little thing like Betty-Jean—when here Brigid came, asking me at the top of her voice, almost, if I was asleep.
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Because if you aren’t,” she said, “I’ve something to tell you. Clyde Shively was that C. C. Shively. I asked Betty-Jean. She tried to defend him. Said he’d begun with a little weekly of dramatic criticism, but that temptations had been too strong for him. She didn’t say so, but I sort of gathered that she hadn’t liked Clyde too well. You know—she keeps remembering the few sweet things he ever did for her. All the same, she is much more disturbed over the Judge than she is over Clyde. And, of course, she is grieving, sickeningly, over Twill—it’s terrible not being able to do anything for her. I wish St. Dennis were here.”
“What could he do?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, and went tangenting off. “Jeff, do you know that if St. Dennis were writing this as a story he’d have either Clyde Shively or the old Judge be the culprit?”
“I didn’t even know your papa wrote that kind of stories,” I said.
“Small discriminating publics are luxuriously grand until dividends stop. We talked it over and decided not to give up eating.”
“Clyde Shively couldn’t be the culprit,” I reminded her, “because he was the victim. He was shot in the back, and——”
“Mechanical devices,” she murmured, kind of half-heartedly.
“Abound only in books,” I said. “But even in books——”
“Men can’t strap themselves in beds, after death, and dispose of the weapon—always ‘weapon’ to authors—I know. But what about the Judge? He’s gone. With the gun, maybe?”
“Nice old gentleman like he was! His own boy.”
“St. Dennis would have him do it for some perfectly sweet, nice old gentlemanly reason.”
“That wasn’t the way it was done, though,” I said, remembering and shuddering in spite of myself.
“I didn’t say ‘way.’ I said ‘reason.’ Method doesn’t matter as long as the motive is pure. Beautiful, virtuous, sacrifice stuff. For the good of everyone. So many people like justifiable murders—satisfying, or excusing their own urges, you know. Besides making them feel superior for not killing their own uncles and aunts when such charming and wealthy people have killed theirs.”
None of that seemed to call for an answer, so I didn’t answer.
“You’ve done nothing but yawn all day long,” was the next thing she had to say.
“If your papa was writing this in a story,” I said, kind of goaded into it, “how would he explain all these disappearing or invisible bodies?”
“He’d say that, since they couldn’t disappear, they hadn’t disappeared.”
“But they have,” I said.
“He might possibly manage it in some way with a garbage incinerator.”
“There isn’t one,” I said.
“I know it.”
(The folks emptied their small cans into the big covered can by the gate. Timmy Monk took it away for his pigs every afternoon, when he had delivered the groceries, leaving a clean can in its place.)
“The big can couldn’t possibly hold a man’s body,” I said.
“I know it. It is three feet high and eighteen inches across. I measured it.”
“I hope then,” I said, “that we can forget the garbage.”
“You started it,” she said.
“No, you started it.”
“Well, at any rate, here comes Mayor Oakman, so I’m leaving. I think he knows how we got into the garbage, but that he can’t find a way for us to get out. Ask him, just to see what he says.”
Chapter XX
“So here you are,” Adam said, before I’d had a chance to open my mouth. “Good old Sheriff. I knew if we’d give you time you’d take it.”
I stood up and brushed myself off.
“I’m hurrying to my cottage for a bath and clean clothes,” he stated, and I never heard words less invitational in spirit.
I said, “What I want to know is were you sitting out at that anthill by the gate from four o’clock yesterday afternoon until around seven in the evening?” and went walking along with him.
“In other words:” he said, “where were you from four o’clock until nine-fifteen on Wednesday afternoon, September the tenth?”
“In still other words,” I said, “where were you?”
“The devil of it is,” he said, as if he thought he was giving me a straightforward answer, “that I am forced to believe that girl. I’d have believed her sooner if I’d found time to talk with her alone. She shot and killed her brother—there’s no doubt of that. She shouldn’t have had the revolver in her hands. She shouldn’t have threatened. But I am now thoroughly satisfied that the thing went off by accident
and that she didn’t intend to shoot him.”
“All the rest of us,” I said, “were thoroughly satisfied of that by eight o’clock yesterday evening. Shall I get over to Ferras now and let Kent out of that damn jail?”
“Remember St. Augustine’s prayer?” he answered. “‘Lord, make me pure and chaste but not quite yet.’ Not quite yet, Jeff. By the way, your question just now. Are you trying to convict me or protect me?”
He was walking fast and furious so I plunged right in, not pausing to bandy words, as Reggie might have said. “I met Rosemary going out of the gate at about five minutes to four o’clock. Between that time and when I got into the kitchen where you were, if a gun had been fired I’d have heard it. I’d have heard it several miles off, on my way here—but never mind that. After you left the kitchen and all the time you were sitting out there, just inside the gate, you’d certainly have heard a gunshot even with your hearing.”
“My hearing is as good as any man’s, young or old, except your own.”
“Well, you’d have heard a gunshot out there then, wouldn’t you? That’s just what I said. But when you and I were talking in the kitchen the doors and windows were all shut tight—they hadn’t been opened after the storm—and the radio was going like blue blazes in the front room. During that short time in there maybe none of us would have heard a gun fired. So it seems to me that sets the time of the murder pretty exactly. It must have been during those few minutes while we were in the kitchen. You looked at your watch then and said it was four o’clock. That’s why I want to know if you were outside from then on.”
“I beg your pardon, Jeff,” he said. “I should have known you were talking sense. That is sense. I was outside by the gate until half-past six. Of course I’d have heard a gun fired anywhere on the place. Now, let me think——”
“Think first about getting that boy out of jail,” I said. “And then you can take your time thinking of other things.”
He didn’t answer, so I went at it again hammer and tongs. “I saw Rosemary leaving camp just before four—say five minutes to four. You sat out by the gate from then until she came in. When?”
“I should say about twenty minutes past six. We talked not more than ten minutes, I think, before she went along to her cottage and I went to mine.”
“There you are. The prints at the gate show that she left once and came in once. We know that the murder must have been after she left and before she came back. What can she know that she isn’t telling? Nothing. What could Kent know? Nothing. He got home at a quarter to seven. He talked to Rosemary for a while, and then he came on to the community house. You know what happened then. The folks all like you fine, of course, and I don’t know whether or not they’d say much if it came to a showdown. Just the same, it didn’t sound so pretty, Adam; your saying that you’d kill both the young ones and mentioning how before you’d let them marry.”
“Fortunately, then, for me and perhaps for them,” he said, “neither Rosemary nor Kent has been killed by any method. Fortunately, also, for me though perhaps not for them, I haven’t been killed. I should have been, you know—according to all precedent. I made a new will a few weeks ago and, being in one of my less malignant moods, I left rather a neat little amount to everyone here in camp—some of it conditionally, but wisely so.”
“Have you told anybody about it?” I asked. “Iverson fixed it up for me. His wife is Joe Laud’s sister. But you miss my point. I have not been killed.”
“Not as yet,” I said, and wished I hadn’t, because it sounded too sinister. “But never mind about that——”
“No, no,” he said. “I insist upon minding about that. I have a peculiar personal interest in it. What do you mean ‘not as yet’ I haven’t been killed?”
The worst of it was I hadn’t meant much of anything, so I had to think fast. “In books,” I told him, “quite a lot of times the killer gets the wrong man by mistake.”
“Sheriff,” Adam said, “you’re getting crazier and crazier, rapidly. You’re as crazy as O’Dell.”
“At that, Mayor,” I said, “O’Dell isn’t crazy enough to keep a good boy in jail smothering him to death and breaking down his health for life, just to show off.” In the nick of time to ruin any good I might have done, Reggie came rounding the corner of one of the cottages, right then, like he was riding a bicycle—a very silly, swaying way he had of rounding corners, almost worse than the way he had of jumping around on the cement walks to keep from stepping on cracks. He was whistling, too, and carrying the most gnawed and disgusting-looking large bone I ever saw.
“Don’t dance,” Adam said. “Don’t whistle. Don’t carry bones,” and went into his cottage.
“Oh, my, what rot!” Reggie said, as soon as the door was shut tight.
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d give up on that bone. You’ve got all the good you’ll get out of it.”
“I’m looking for De Profundis,” he explained. “I think that sounds better than ‘Funny’ at a time like this, don’t you?”
“I expect,” I said, and tried walking off and leaving him and the bone, but he came right along talking nothing but “wheres” and “where is its.”
It seemed to me I’d walked a mile before I got to the shelter, with Reggie chatting all the time. “I mean, Funny wouldn’t follow anyone but Twill off the place. And he couldn’t have followed Twill off because Twill was killed. Twill—kill. I never noticed that before. But if he didn’t follow Twill away, where is he? Not Twill. The dog, I mean.”
Adam, the old dizzard, hadn’t unsaddled Dollar. He knew better than that, in the heat; but I was glad to be able to swing right up on her, then, and ride away. I had some things in mind to attend to, and going about my business seemed harmless enough—just as Brigid’s moving the canoe seemed harmless. But neither of them was, entirely so, I guess.
On Tumboldt I found the road gang boys repairing the road, getting it “passable but dangerous” as the signs all say in California. Just to show what Adam’s influence amounted to, none of the boys stopped me asking for news. Meaning that the fact of there being news hadn’t leaked out much as yet.
When I went into the drugstore at Ferras, though, Shinny Lang asked me what about that accident over at Memaloose. By saying that was what I was wondering, I got him to tell me that Oakman was claiming that a shooting accident had taken place over there; but that some were saying things about suicide. Joe Laud, Shinny told me, had the body at his place and said that it was a shooting accident, but Joe owed Oakman money.
I turned that off by saying that I’d come to buy an electric fan. Shinny got so excited over my getting one, after refusing to have truck with them all these years—I can’t bear the noise they make—that he forgot all about shooting accidents and suicides.
Over in the jail Kent was barely able to claim that he was fine. The fan didn’t do much good stirring that stale blasting hot air around, but the ice I’d brought in a gunny sack helped some for the minute or two it lasted.
Almost right away I got next to the fact that he thought nobody knew Rosemary had visited him that morning; so I never let on, and kept not looking at the oranges and grapefruit there on the bench until, pretty soon, he said:
“Have one, won’t you, Jeff? The Penroys are treating me fine, thanks to you, and lots of thanks.”
I thought that I’d better be going.
He asked me to wait while he wrote another note to Rosemary. I wondered whether two notes in one day were love or blinds to make me think he hadn’t seen her. He didn’t take long, but before he’d finished writing the heat almost got me. I was beginning to feel those chilly trickles crawling over my skin. So, when I was leaving, I read him the riot act.
“Kent,” I said, “I’m sick of this foolishness. Few pass this way. You’ll not be seen if you step out once in a while for a breath of fresh air. It’s hot, but it’s clean outside. When dark shuts down you get out there and stay out until morning. Here’s the key.” I threw it on
the floor, and went on the run.
I’d had to get my car out to tote the ice, so I jumped into it and headed for Joe Laud’s place. I had a question to ask him.
Chapter XXI
Joe was sitting outside in the shade when I got there, growling like sixty about curiosity seekers.
“Where are they?” I asked, seeing he was all alone.
“That’s what I want to know,” he said.
I was afraid, maybe, we were talking about different things, so I came out hurriedly with my question. “Can you tell from the bullet,” I asked, “what kind of gun Clyde Shively was shot with?”
“Thirty-six Colt’s,” he said. “Same as yours. Why?”
“Same as everybody’s around here,” I said. “I just wondered.”
“That pearl-handler was a twenty-two,” Joe said, and went on, knocking me right off the Christmas tree, “but they are both revolvers and you can’t put a silencer on a revolver.”
“How did you happen to think of that?” I managed to ask him.
“I never happened to,” he said. “I thought of it on purpose. I always think of things on purpose. Would you like to view the body again?”
I had what I’d come for; so I refused, thanking him just the same, and got into my car to hit out for Nameless. Differing from Joe, I’d happened to think, when Brigid had mentioned how obliging the Killaky boys were up to twenty dollars’ worth, that a visit to Nameless might be a good plan.
The fact that the outside telephone wires had been down from after two o’clock when the wind began until well past eight the night of the murder was something. But the other fact was something, too. Any strong, sturdy person could have swum the lake, walked to Nameless, found the Killaky boys and their truck that could go to Mesquite Forks to catch a train, or back to Ferras, or elsewhere.
One thing opposing this idea was that any stranger dripping wet or entirely dry would attract considerable attention in Nameless, a town of fifty-four population and one block of Main Street. Another thing opposing it was the notion of anyone’s swimming back and forth, unseen and unheard, towing dead bodies.
The Desert Lake Mystery Page 12