by Ed Gorman
“You sure about that?” I forced her to meet my eyes.
She gulped before she lied. “Yeah. Like I said, he knows a lot of places.”
I knew she wasn’t going to help me. She’d caught her husband’s fear.
“Well, maybe you can give him a message for me. A lot of people are awfully upset right now. There was some ugly talk yesterday, and it’ll only get worse if he doesn’t agree to meet with the townfolk. I’ve set something up for tomorrow morning. You know where I’m staying. He should meet me at sunup. He can find me in my room or having breakfast at the Star Café.”
“They have good flapjacks, don’t they? That’s our treat. Every once in a while we go to the Star and have flapjacks. They’ve got that maple syrup there. That’s what my husband likes. That maple syrup.”
She was babbling. I got her out of her misery. “Well, I need to be going now. Still got a few hours sleep before dawn.”
“I’m sorry I had to wake you up—and for nothing, it turned out.”
“That’s all right. Just remember to tell him where he can find me.”
She followed me through the house to the front door.
“I’ll be sure to tell him soon as I see him.”
I opened the door on a freezing winter night. Even though the wind was down, the cold cut through me.
When I had been out on the back stoop, I had taken notice of where the footsteps led. There was a barn down the street from them. When I left the house I walked the length of what looked to be their property. The footsteps came all the way to the street. They were lost briefly on the narrow road, then they picked up again in the snow leading to the barn.
I figured he was probably up in the haymow watching me. I had to make it look good. I walked down the street. The barn was the property of McGraw’s Seed Company. That’s what the sign said anyway.
I walked past the barn, far enough that he would have given up watching me. I was pretty sure he assumed I had just kept going straight back to my hotel, which was only about three blocks away.
But I tramped over to the railroad tracks and walked on ties all the way back to the barn. I came down into a gully where I sank into snow that was up to my hips.
He made it easy for me.
He’d left the back door half open so I could slip inside without making any noise. And as I stood in the deep cold shadows of the ground floor, he did me the favor of coming down the ladder from the mow.
The one problem I had was fighting my allergies. The interior of the place was three-quarters filled with bags of seed. My eyes started to run and my sinuses reared up with one of those sneezes that could knock a wall down.
But somehow I managed to fight the sneeze back down.
I pulled out my .44 and walked over to the ladder just as his left foot touched the ground.
“Need to talk to you, Tim.”
He screamed. He fell back into the ladder, nearly knocking it down, putting a hand over his heart.
“Shit, you scared the hell out of me.”
This time when the sneeze came up I let it go full blast. I thought the damned barn was going to collapse all around us, the way that sneeze exploded on dark air.
“Sinuses?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“The missus can’t even come in this place without she’s plugged up for three, four days afterward. She’s tried every kind of patent medicine she can find.”
“None of them work.” I sneezed again.
“You’re just as bad as the missus.”
“How about we go back to your house and have some coffee?”
“I’m not going to tell you nothing.”
“We’ll see.”
“No, we won’t see. You’re a federal man. You get to ride out of here when it’s all over. Me, I got to live here. I’ve had that livery business for going on twenty years. I’m too old to move and too old to start any other kind of business. Plus, I love horses. I couldn’t work in no store or nothing. I’d miss the horses too much.”
“A lot of people have died. I need to find out what’s going on. Now let’s go back to your place. It’s cold as hell in here.”
“I tell you, it won’t do you no good. I thought about it and I just can’t afford to get involved.”
“You know who killed Mike Chaney and the two federal men.”
“I don’t know any such thing and if the missus said otherwise, she’s wrong. All I know is the names of a couple people I forgot to mention to you. That don’t mean they had anything to do with the killing. And if I sic you on them, they’ll know who told you—and then they’ll shun me. That’s how they do it in this town. They shun you and they force you out. I’m too old for that. And, anyways, like I said, I’m sure they didn’t have nothin’ to do with the killing, anyway.”
I sneezed again. Son of a bitch. Freezing my balls off and sneezing.
“So there ain’t no need for you to come back to the house. I was stupid to have the missus go get you and I sincerely apologize for that, mister. But I changed my mind and no matter what you say to me or do to me, I ain’t changin’ it back.”
Another sneeze.
All this—missing sleep, freezing, a sinus explosion—for not one damned scrap of information.
And I knew he was the kind of old boy who would do just what he said. He wasn’t going to tell me anything.
About every thirty feet, all the way back to my hotel, I sneezed.
Chapter 32
In the morning, the temperature soared to twenty-three degrees above zero. Given the way we’d talked about pancakes, all I could think of when I was washing up and shaving was the café’s famous flapjacks.
The lobby was busier than usual at six-thirty in the morning. Three or four groups of men stood talking with great urgency. I wondered what the hell could be so important. But even more, I wondered how many flapjacks I was going to order. It would probably be embarrassing to order sixteen of them.
There were knots of people up and down the main street talking with the same kind of urgency as the men in the hotel lobby. Something was going on. I would need to fortify myself with flapjacks before I could hear the news.
The café was elbow-to-belly with people. A thundercloud of tobacco smoke hung at about shoulder level. The women who ran the place looked frantic. The men standing up were waiting for the sitters occupying the counter stools and the tables to de-occupy them.
I didn’t give a damn about sitting down. I managed to snag a serving woman and told her that I’d take a stack of six and eat them standing up.
“Really?” she asked, shouting above all the other shouts.
“Really. I’m hungry.”
She glanced around and then turned back to me. “You c’mon back with me, if you’re that hungry.” She leaned closer so that nobody else would hear. I could barely hear. “You can eat in the kitchen.”
Walking into the kitchen, which was the size of a large closet, was similar to walking into a steam bath with all your clothes on. “We don’t use this stove back here unless it’s an emergency—like this morning.” She wiped her brow with the back of a pink hand. “Fred, you fix him up with six flapjacks, all right?”
Despite the cold outside, the man standing over the stove with a huge griddle sitting on top of it wore only an undershirt. It was that hot back there. Too hot.
“Tell you what, how about I stand out back and have a cigarette?”
He didn’t even look at me. He was busy flipping flapjacks. “Don’t make no never mind to me.”
“Then I’ll come back for my flapjacks.”
I went out the back door. I was so hot from the café kitchen that I didn’t feel the cold for a couple minutes. The day was one of sunlight and pure white hills of snow. I got a cigarette going and just studied the landscape, the nearby field that stretched into the foothills.
From my right came two men tramping through knee-high snow. They were walking over from the rear door of the wagon works down the block.<
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As they got near enough to hear, one said to the other, “Oh, he was behind it all right. Man don’t kill himself if he’s innocent.”
They came up to the back door, nodding when they saw me.
I said, “What’s all the commotion this morning?”
One was a stocky dark-haired man, the other a stocky bald man with sandy-colored fringes over both ears. Neither wore coats, just work shirts with long johns showing under their shirt cuffs.
“You that federal man?” the bald one asked.
“I am.”
“Yeah. Thought so. My little boy’s teacher was explaining at school the other day what a federal man does. Now my boy says he wants to be a federal man.”
“That’s better than mine,” the dark-haired man laughed. “He wants to be a bank robber.”
His friend smiled. “I’d sure keep an eye on him.”
“So what’s all the hubbub about?”
“Surprised you haven’t heard by now. You know Flannery, the banker?” the bald one asked.
“Sure.”
“Blew his brains out last night,” the dark-haired one said. “But the way I hear it they didn’t find him till about an hour ago.”
I jammed my hand into my pocket for some coins. “Would you pay my bill for me? I need to get out to Flannery’s place.” I handed the bald one the money. “I appreciate this.”
The dark-haired one said, “Glad to help, mister.”
Suddenly I’d lost my appetite. Not even those locally famous flapjacks sounded good anymore. I’d planned on a meeting with Flannery that morning, but I’d expected him to be alive for it.
Chapter 33
There were four buggies, three horses, and a sleigh in front of Flannery’s mansion.
It was too cold to stand outside for long, so instead of lining up in the street, the neighbors just looked out their windows.
I went straight to the front door. Any other time I would have spent a few minutes studying the massive door and its intricate carvings. But then all I did was knock. A maid, her eyes so puffy and red from crying that they resembled wounds, stood back. I had my badge ready.
“It’s so terrible,” she said, sniffling. She was a big, sturdy blond woman, unmistakably Swedish. She wore a maid’s gray uniform with a white full-length apron over it.
“I’m assuming Sheriff Nordberg is here.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Please take me to him.”
“Sure.” She sniffled again, producing a dainty white handkerchief that was turning green. She put it to a tear-raw nose. “He was such a nice, decent man.”
The preacher who buried him would say the same thing. By the time the first sob exploded in the church, Flannery would already have been forgiven for all his considerable transgressions. All that remained would be the idealized portrait most of us get at our funerals. Behind closed doors following the funeral—that would be another matter. Then the real feelings, drawn like daggers, would stab the solemn air.
The maid led me down a long hall. The hardwood floor had been polished to diamond brilliance.
A study that six people could live in. One vast wall filled with books. A hardwood floor covered with Persian rugs, real Persian, not Sears and Roebuck Persian. A dry bar. A leather couch angled in front of a fireplace a short man could stand in.
And a desk with a surface size of a tennis court. But the fine-honed craftsmanship of the enormous desk was diminished somewhat by the man lying face down on it, a .38 near his right hand, a lurid pool of darkening blood dripping off the front edge of the desk, and splattering on the Persian rug below.
The doc and Nordberg stood in the west corner, talking.
Nordberg waved me over.
“Glad you came, Noah,” he said. “I didn’t want him moved until you got here. I sent a deputy for you but apparently you came on your own.”
“Just as I was about to eat pancakes.”
“At the Star Café?” the doc asked.
I nodded.
“They’re something, aren’t they?” the doc said. “I get hungry just thinking about them.”
“How about you look it over?” Nordberg asked. “You’ve probably seen a few more suicide scenes than I have.”
I shrugged. “Probably not many more. But sure, I’ll look it over.”
I spent ten minutes at it. I wondered why he wanted me to look it over. There was powder residue on the right temple and that was in line with a man putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. The .38 was probably a little farther away from the hand than I would have expected, but one thing about suicides—they usually look a bit funny one way or another. The head is at an odd angle or the wound doesn’t seem right for a bullet fired at such close range or—and this is the most common in my experience—the weapon is closer to the body or farther from the body than you would have thought possible.
But given my limited experience with situations like this, nothing seemed wrong in any particular way. No telling what will happen in the seconds following a man slumping over his desk when the bullet has ended his life.
I walked back to Nordberg and the doc. There was something about that huge room that put me in mind of being in church. I realized that we were all talking in lower voices than usual and that nobody had sworn.
“I guess I don’t see anything that bothers me,” I said.
The doc smiled, his wrinkled face almost simian when he flashed his false teeth. “I know a certain lawman who owes me five dollars.”
“You think there’s something wrong here?” I said to Nordberg.
He stared at the desk and the dead man. “The gun.”
“What about it?”
“It’s pretty far from the hand. Maybe two feet.”
“Could’ve slammed down against the desk and then skidded.”
“Watch out for the sheriff here when he gets an idea,” the doc smiled.
“First of all,” Nordberg said, “why would he kill himself?”
The doc said it before I could. “Because he killed those federal men so it would reflect bad on Mike Chaney. Then he rode out there and killed Mike and Connelly and Pepper, though killin’ those last two wasn’t no crime—not in my book, anyway.”
I said, “That’s about how I see it.”
“He just wasn’t the kind to kill himself.” Nordberg did some more staring. “Too selfish. And besides, he didn’t have any reason to be scared. If he needed an alibi for yesterday, he could’ve paid somebody for one. But he didn’t have an alibi and that’s what made me believe that he was probably telling the truth.”
“Yeah, but it would all have caught up with him in the end. You can’t kill as many people as he did without getting caught eventually.” The doc leaned down and picked up his bag. “You have one of your boys drop him off at the funeral home and I’ll get an autopsy out for you this afternoon.”
“That’s a fast autopsy.”
“Well,” the doc said wryly—and for a while there I’d forgotten that he owned the funeral parlor as well as having the only doctor’s office in town—“since he shot himself in the temple, I don’t expect this’ll be a real complicated autopsy, Mr. Ford.”
And he winked at Nordberg. They probably both had a good time when the federal man got sarcastically upbraided.
“Unless you saw a stab wound I didn’t happen to notice,” the doc said.
“Just that ax in the back of his head,” I said.
He put on his derby. “Now I’m gonna go have some of them flapjacks you were talkin’ about. Can’t get ’em out of my head. Just like Nordberg here can’t get it out of his head that there’s something wrong with the situation here.”
After he left, Nordberg said, “I went to Denver for a two-week law enforcement program. And I learned one thing.”
“What’s that?”
He smiled. “Doc doesn’t know squat about autopsies.”
“I kinda had that feeling.”
He took a few steps towa
rd the desk and the dead man. “So you don’t see anything wrong?”
“Afraid I don’t.”
“Maybe it’s just this feeling I have. I mean, maybe nothing looks wrong but it just—feels wrong. I don’t know any other way to say it.”
“I guess I see it the way the doc does. It was all coming down on Flannery. I’ve seen it happen quite a few times. People kill in a kind of frenzy. And sometimes that frenzy can last for quite a while. Weeks, maybe. But then something happens and they realize what they’ve done. And it doesn’t matter even if they think they can get away with it. They just can’t face what they’ve done. And so they kill themselves.”
“I guess that’s where my doubts stem from. Flannery was a pretty ruthless character. Him feeling so guilty that he had to kill himself—that’s quite a stretch. For me, anyway.”
One of the double doors opened and Laura Flannery came through. There was nothing vivid about her now. Her regal bearing had given way to slumped shoulders and dead dark eyes. She wore a robe she had spilled something on. Either she hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.
“I’m really not up to this, Mr. Ford.”
“I’m afraid we have to talk. Not for long. But for at least a few minutes.” She walked over to the desk where her husband lay dead. She lay her hand on his shoulder and then closed her eyes tight, as if she was in some sort of spiritual communication with him. Then she extended her left arm to the gun on the desk. She apparently knew enough not to touch it. “That was a gun I bought him in Chicago. He didn’t like to carry large guns because they ruined the lines of his suit. He only dealt with the upper classes when he traveled, of course, and he didn’t want to look like—well, no offense, but he didn’t want to look like some dime-novel thug. So I bought him that. It was easy to hide and wouldn’t spoil the lines of his suit. He took it everywhere when he traveled.”
She looked up at Nordberg. “I bought him that hunting rifle the same day. The one with the silver inlay? He always took it with him when you went duck hunting, remember?”
I liked her slightly more than I wanted to. She was one of those women rich men buy to reward themselves for their success. But now that was gone. She was just a woman grieving and I had to respect that.