by Ed Gorman
“What was his mood last night?” I asked gently.
She didn’t seem to hear me—her hand was still on his shoulder—and then she looked up and said, “Fine. He was even making a few of his terrible jokes.” She smiled sentimentally at the memory. “I didn’t have the sense that anything was wrong at all.”
“Had you had visitors?”
“No.”
“Do you remember anything that might have upset him during the day?”
“If there was, he didn’t mention it.”
“Was his mood generally good the past week or so?”
She raised her head and looked directly at me. “Mike Chaney. Mike Chaney was stealing my husband’s money and humiliating him. I hold Chaney responsible for my husband’s suicide. I really do.”
She put her head down and began choking on her sobs.
“I won’t bother you any more, Mrs. Flannery. Thank you. I’ll leave now.”
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Nordberg said. “I’ll be right back, Laura.”
“Goodbye, Mrs. Flannery,” I said. “I’m sorry your husband is dead.”
We were at the door. The sunlight off the snow was blinding when we got to the porch. The crowd had thinned; most of the vehicles had gone. The sun still shone, the kids still made snowmen, and moms still made hot apple cider for when the mister came in for the noon meal. The world was still the world, even without the important presence of one man named Flannery.
“I’m still not sure it was a suicide.”
“Somebody would’ve had to sneak in and knock him out and then kill him. With all the servants around, that wouldn’t be easy.”
“What if it was somebody already in the house?”
“Well, in my report it goes down as a suicide. Unless you can come up with something that changes my mind.”
“How about stoppin’ by the funeral parlor for me?”
“Sure. You want me to give Doc a message?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Tell him when he gets the body to look for a knot on his head. Something that would show he’d been knocked out. I didn’t see any but it might be a small one.”
“You don’t give up, do you?”
He said, “Not when I know I’m right.”
Chapter 34
The first place I stopped was the livery. I was surprised to find Tim Ralston there. He was in back, talking to a man about boarding his horse. He didn’t look happy to see me. Or maybe it was just that the large black circle around his right eye was still painful. Somebody had given him a damned impressive black eye.
“Well, that sounds reasonable,” the customer was saying. “I should be back on Tuesday. The wife just doesn’t want to be responsible for the old fella. She knows how much I care about him. She’s afraid he’ll die or somethin’ while I’m gone and then I’ll blame her.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice at a stack of hay bales. “And the thing is, I probably would. So it’s better that I leave him here.” The customer gave Ralston a cold grin. “Of course, if he’d happen to die while he was boarded here, then I’d blame you.” He wasn’t kidding and Ralston obviously knew he wasn’t kidding. If I hadn’t been there to distract him, I imagined Ralston would have told the customer what he could do with his horse. If it would fit.
After the customer counted out some paper money and put it in the left hand of Ralston, he walked away, taking the alley route. Leaving Ralston to look at me and then look as if he was thinking of running away.
“We’re going to have a talk, Ralston, whether you want to or not.”
The black eye must have still hurt quite a bit. He touched it tenderly. Winced.
“I doubt your wife gave you that.”
“Why the hell you have to keep picking on me?”
“Because you made the mistake of sending your wife for me. But then you got scared. It’s a pretty good bet that whoever scared you also gave you that black eye.”
Behind me a voice said, “Came to get my horse, Tim.”
The voice was familiar but I couldn’t put a face to it. But I didn’t have to. Tremont came up next to me.
“You bet,” Ralston said.
He’d found another excuse not to talk to me. Tremont obviously got a good look at Ralston’s black eye but didn’t say anything about it. Which I thought was pretty damned strange.
Ralston went to get Tremont’s horse. And then I remembered something that Ralston had told me the other day. That people like Tremont had no need for a livery. They kept their horses at home on their ranches and farms.
Tremont lit a small cigar and said, “Got kinda rough on the street last night. Guess I had too much to drink.”
“Yeah, I guess you did.”
“But I guess our problem was taken care of.”
“Which problem would that be?”
He smirked. “The Flannery problem.”
He wore a black and red checkered winter jacket and he clapped his gloved hands together. It was colder in there than outside, which didn’t make a lot of sense.
“You really believe that, Tremont?”
“Yeah. Old man Flannery won’t be foreclosing now. He won’t have the stomach for it. His son got some of the land he wanted but he had a miserable life doing it.”
I said, “You sleep through the night, did you?”
“Meaning what?”
Without realizing it at first, I was slipping into Sheriff Nordberg’s notion that Flannery’s life hadn’t ended by suicide. It had ended by murder.
“Meaning can you prove you went home after the dustup in the street—and stayed there till this morning?”
“My wife’ll tell you that I did.”
“Anybody else? You got any ranch hands?”
“One. But he was over to the bawdyhouse. He was probably so drunk when he got to the cabin he stays in he wouldn’t have no idea if I was there. And what’s the difference? Flannery committed suicide.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe? What the hell’s that mean?”
“The sheriff thinks he was murdered and it was made to look like a suicide.”
“Well, that’s a crock of shit if I ever heard one.” Then he gaped around. “Where the hell’s Tim?”
“How come you’re boarding a horse here?”
“It’s not mine. It’s my neighbor’s. He’s laid up with the shingles. I told him I’d get his horse shoed and pick up some hay for him. I brought my wagon here.” Then, “Where the hell is he? I want to get to the café and have some breakfast. I purposely didn’t eat this morning. Figured I’d get some flapjacks at the Star. Didn’t tell the missus, though. She’s sensitive about her cooking. She’d accuse me of not liking her food if she found out I went to the Star for breakfast.” Then, cupping his hand to his mouth, “Tim, where the hell are you?”
There was a smaller barn behind the one we were in. I assumed that was where the horses were boarded.
Tremont started walking toward the back door, toward the smaller barn. I was getting curious about Ralston myself.
Tremont went outside, stood there searching for Ralston. “He must still be in the boarding barn.”
I went outside and headed for the smaller barn. I guess I already knew what we’d find.
Half the stalls were empty. The place needed a good cleaning. The acid stench of horse shit made me start sneezing. The place was small enough that I could see after a quick walk-through that Ralston wasn’t there.
“Hell, here’s my neighbor’s horse,” Tremont said. “But where the hell’s Tim? He’s supposed to be getting this one ready to go.”
“He’s gone.”
“Yeah, but where?”
“Anywhere I’m not.” Then: “You give him that black eye?”
“What black eye?”
“The one that takes up about a third of his face on the left side.”
He shook his head miserably. “I got the whiskey flu. Hangover. I didn’t even notice no black eye.”
If he was telling the trut
h—and I wasn’t sure he was—he must have been suffering a damned bad hangover. That shiner of Ralston’s was hard to miss.
“If I see Tim, want me to tell him to look you up?”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “He wouldn’t do it, anyway.”
Chapter 35
Half an hour later, I stood on the front steps of the Flannery mansion. Sheriff Nordberg’s theory had started to make some sense to me. There wasn’t any evidence to point to murder but I thought of what a greedy and ruthless bastard Flannery had been. Nordberg was probably right. Flannery didn’t seem like the suicidal kind. He’d kill but it would be somebody else.
You could see all the vehicle tracks in the snow. But everybody had gone home. There was a certain loneliness on the air. As if a big noisy circus had just left town. People weren’t even staring out their windows.
The maid answered the door. “She’s upstairs asleep. The doc, he give her two big pills.”
“I just want to look around. And ask you to look around with me, Mrs.—I didn’t catch your name before.”
The big blond woman looked stricken. “Mrs. Swenson. I’m not in no trouble, am I?”
“No. Not at all. I just need to know a couple of things.”
“It was Whitey, he was the one who stole the silverware and tried to sell it. Like I told the missus, I didn’t have notink to do with it.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. So how about letting me in?”
“You sure I ain’t in trouble?”
“None at all.”
Two staircases, another fireplace you could fill up with short people, and a ballroom that could probably hold twenty couples on the polished floor. There was even a stand for a three- or four-piece musical group. Heavy wine-colored drapes covered the long windows.
“They use this room much?”
“Not so’s I know. He don’t like her friends and she don’t like his friends. So they just never invited nobody.”
“Well, that’s one way to settle it.”
“It’s a shame, beautiful room like that going to waste.”
Then we were in the kitchen. With two stoves and half a dozen ice boxes to keep meat and vegetables cold, with maybe as many as thirty pans and pots hanging from a grid suspended from the ceiling. Everything, including all three sinks, shone radiantly in the sunlight through the windows. The view of the mountains from there was stunning. I saw the trail we’d taken looking for Mike Chaney. That seemed like a long time ago. I wondered how Jen and Clarice were doing.
“Where’s the back door?”
She led me through a dark back porch that had no windows. It resembled a loading dock for a general store. There were maybe two hundred boxes of various kinds stacked up back there. I couldn’t see well enough to figure out if they were stacked in any sort of order but it was hard to imagine they weren’t.
“Flannery liked to stock up?” I asked.
“He always said we should have enough provisions to live on for three months in case of some kind of disaster.”
“He ever say what kind of disaster he was afraid of?”
“I think earthquakes, but he never talked much to the help.”
When we reached the door, she slid back a bolt lock. And swung the door open.
“That’s all he had to secure the back door with?”
For the first time, she smiled. It made her round face pretty. “Oh, no. This was what he used to keep out intruders.”
As soon as she put one foot down on the back steps, a thunderous eruption blasted the sunny silence. Dogs. Their deep, crazed voices made the universe tremble.
“Take a peek at them, Mr. Ford.”
Dobermans. Four of them. They were on long chains that were tethered to a six-foot metal pole. A structure half the size of a good boulder was where they ate and slept. The chains were so long that they didn’t have any trouble reaching it. They wouldn’t have any trouble with intruders, either. They could rip out a throat in record time.
“Is this always kept locked?”
“Oh, yes. If Mr. Flannery ever found it unlocked, he’d fire you. He and the missus were about the only ones who ever used this back door.”
So much for that theory. Nobody had snuck into the house the previous night to kill Flannery. They wouldn’t have been able to get in. Not through the back door, anyway.
“Is there a fire escape?”
“No.”
“How about the front door? How is that secured?”
“Three bolt locks.”
“Why so many?”
“Well, when he started doing them foreclosures—”
“He got scared?”
She nodded.
“I don’t blame him,” I said.
“I didn’t hold with them foreclosures. Them poor people.”
“You ever say anything to Mr. Flannery?”
“Mister, my husband and me got two kids to feed. I need this job bad. If I’da said anything to the mister, he would have kicked me out right on the spot. You ever see his temper?”
“Couple times. How about a cellar? Can you get into it from outside?”
“Sure. There’s those tornado doors on the side.”
I’d never heard them called tornado doors before, the slanted door or doors that led you down to the cellar from the outside. Usually they were called storm cellar doors.
“Would you show me down there?”
“Sure.”
We went back to the kitchen and then to the room adjacent to the back porch. A pine door I’d walked by previously now opened to let us down a flight of stairs to a cellar that smelled harshly of cold air and stone.
The cellar was as well organized as the back porch. Well-constructed shelves held everything from laundry soap to dozens and dozens of jars of jams, jellies, and vegetables that somebody had put up in late summer or early fall. There were two windows on the north side. Dusty sunlight angled through them, a cat lying lazy in one of the golden bars of sunbeams.
“Napoleon, you go on and get upstairs.” To me: “He loves it down here.”
Napoleon raised his wide head with baronial splendor, taking us in with great disdain, and then got up and left, making it clear that he did not care to spend any time with humans.
On the west side of the house I saw five steps leading to the underside of the slanted storm cellar doors.
“Are the doors locked from outside?”
“No. Mr. Flannery always says that nobody could get past the dogs.”
“And nobody ever has?”
“Not that I ever heard of, that’s for sure.”
“They ever give you any trouble?”
“They snap at me sometimes when I’m hanging up the wash on the clothesline.”
“But they leave you alone?”
“Mrs. Flannery taught me their command words. They won’t attack you if you yell those words at them loud enough. Otherwise not even the Flannerys could control them. They had some man from Denver come out here and train these dogs. But God help you if you don’t know the words.”
“How many people know the command words?”
“Not many that I know of.”
I walked over to the storm cellar doors. “I’m going to try them on the dogs myself.”
“Oh, no! They could kill you.”
“You said that you can control them. Then I should be able to, too.”
“But you don’t know the words.”
“I will if you tell them to me.”
“Oh, I’m under strict instructions not to—”
“I’m a lawman. Your employer has just died. These are pretty special circumstances, Mrs. Swenson.”
To make my point I started walking up the steps leading to the door. “I’m going out there, Mrs. Swenson. With or without the command words.”
She didn’t have much choice. “Abraham Lincoln’s hat.”
“Those are the words?”
She nodded. “But I’d still be careful.”
I drew my .4
4. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
In the war you’d run into dogs sometimes. The worst were the dogs trained to track soldiers. They were relentless. But they weren’t killers. The dogs up top had every scrap of normal dog bred and trained out of them. They had only one purpose other than eating and going to the toilet. They killed people. Or they wanted to, anyway. I could see the usefulness of dogs like those but for all their ferocity I felt sorry for them. They enjoyed few if any of the pleasures of being a dog. They were slaves in every sense.
But that didn’t keep me from being wary. Or, to put it another way, scared shitless.
I pushed the door back and stood on the second step looking up at pure blue sky and radiant sunlight. My enjoyment lasted about three seconds.
The dogs made their moves almost instantly. They smelled me, they saw me, they had no idea who I was. In dog lingo the word enemy had to be huge in their brains.
Their speed, even in deep snow, was astounding. They had been maybe ten yards from me and then they were maybe three yards from me. Suddenly I realized that they could tear my throat out even though I had a gun. I might be able to kill one of them. But then the other three would make quick work of me.
I shouted, “Abraham Lincoln’s hat.”
I felt kind of silly, even though the dogs were nearly on top of me by then. What kind of adult wants to be caught shouting “Abraham Lincoln’s hat”? It sounded like a line from a little kid’s nursery song.
But it worked.
They were still flinging long strings of spittle; their eyes were still trying to fly out of their sockets; their teeth were still gleaming inside their long mouths.
And I had to say it a couple times for them to get the message. But they stopped.
They continued to growl, they continued to strain forward, they continued to eye me with a hatred that would have given pause to Attila the Hun.
But they stopped.
“Are you all right up there, Mr. Federal Man?” Mrs. Swenson shouted from the shadows in the basement below.
“I will be when I quit shaking.”
It sounded like a joke but it wasn’t. Not only was I shaking, I was sheened with sweat over my entire body. I hadn’t noticed either of those things until just that moment.