Powder Keg

by Ed Gorman

  I was happy to walk backward down the steps, closing the slanted door after me.

  “I said a prayer for you.”

  “I appreciate that, Mrs. Swenson.”

  “You see why I’m afraid to hang wash.”

  “Yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”

  “All the time I’m out there with the wash I’m worried that they won’t obey me even when I shout the command words to them.”

  “That sort of crossed my mind, too.” Only now did I shove my .44 back into its holster.

  We went upstairs. From one of the kitchen windows I could see the dogs. They still hadn’t settled in completely. They had been deprived of the only pleasure they knew now that they weren’t really dogs anymore.

  “Thanks very much, Mrs. Swenson. I appreciate all your help.”

  “You know, I have nightmares about them dogs sometimes.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, I just might have a few nightmares about them, too.”

  Even when I went out the front door, I could hear the Dobermans barking out back. They knew everything that went on outside the mansion. I wondered what they knew about what had happened the night before.

  Chapter 36

  I tried the livery and then I tried Tim Ralston’s house. He wasn’t at either place.

  I was walking back to my hotel when I saw Sheriff Nordberg’s wife, Wendy. As always, she had the baby in tow. Not that I could see the child. She had vanished beneath about six pounds of baby blankets.

  I tipped my hat and said, “You must be pretty tired by the end of the day.”

  She smiled. “They say it gets easier.” She dug down in the covers and gave the poor little thing some air. “I have to take her to the doc’s place. She’s got another ear infection. The thing is, she’s not much of a crier. That’s nice at night but it doesn’t tell you much when she’s sick.” She beamed down upon the face I couldn’t see from where I stood. “She’s such a good little girl, aren’t you, dear one?”

  I probably wouldn’t make a good father. Just listening to baby talk embarrasses me. Having to speak it would be even worse.

  She covered up the child and said, “Well, I’d better get her out of this cold air.”

  She had one of those faces I wanted to kiss. To tilt up to my face and kiss gently and work my way into the passion. There was a simplicity, a vulnerability to her looks that made me both protective and lustful at the same time.

  “Good to see you, Mrs. Nordberg.”

  “And good to see you, Mr. Ford.”

  The way she blushed made her even more fetching.

  A few minutes later, I was sliding my key into the lock of my hotel room door.

  And one minute after that, I found Tim Ralston. He lay on his back on my bed. He’d emptied his bowels at the moment of death so the room wouldn’t be one I’d be sleeping in later that night. Oh, no, the hotel folks would be moving Noah Joseph Ford to another room, preferably at the far end of the hall.

  A common kitchen knife protruded from his right eye socket. The mix of blood and tissue and eyeball had the texture of suet. But he had been stabbed just before in the chest, near the heart. The killer had wanted to make sure Ralston was dead. Or maybe it was more perverse than that. Maybe he’d stabbed him in the eye for simple pleasure.

  I walked to the head of the stairs and shouted down for a bellboy. My voice was loud and rude on the quiet late-morning air.

  I heard the desk clerk pound on his bell; moments later I heard somebody taking the steps two at a time and then half-running down the hall.

  “Oh, shit,” the big raw red-haired kid said when he reached my doorstep. He was probably about fifteen. They’d found him a bellboy’s uniform. It was about two sizes too small.

  “Right in the fuckin’ eye,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That poor little bastard.”

  “You know him?”

  “Me’n my brother used to sit on a roof behind his livery and throw rocks at the horses. He got pretty mad at us.”

  “Just for throwing rocks at his horses? He sure must have been a hothead.”

  He caught my sarcasm. “Well, that was when I was younger. I’m grown up now.” I was still glaring at him. “It was a pretty shitty thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I bet the horses liked it even less than Ralston did.” Then: “I want you to go get the sheriff and then go to the funeral home and tell them we need their wagon.”

  He sniffed the air like a pointer dog. “He crap himself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “People do that when they die?”

  “Sometimes.”

  He shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to be around dead people much. I sure wouldn’t want your job.”

  “Sometimes I don’t want it, either. Now get going.”

  I decided I didn’t much like the smell, either. I went down to the end of the hall and opened the door and stood on the rickety wooden fire escape. Someday hotel owners would figure out that a fire would burn the wooden escape just as fast as it would the rest of the structure. The better city hotels all had metal fire escapes by then.

  The air was good and clean. It was cold but it was a cold of rebirth, cleansing and giving me energy again. I rolled and smoked two complete cigarettes before I heard heavy footsteps slamming up the stairs inside.

  I went back in. The day deputy was named Kip Rolins. He was a balding blond man with a beard a Viking would have envied. He looked as if he could hold his own with just about any opponent you shoved at him.

  He stuck his head in my hotel room door and said, “Stinks in here.” Then: “Oh, God, I’m gonna get stuck telling his wife.”

  “Where’s Nordberg?”

  “He had to be in court this morning. He should be out any time now. But Missus Ralston’s gonna find out about this before then. I better tell her before somebody else does.”

  I wondered if it made him feel official, telling a wife her husband was dead. A cynical thought but he didn’t sound unhappy about it at all.

  He reached inside the pocket of his knee-length winter coat and took out a nice tablet and a pencil. He had to take off his gloves to write.

  “So how about telling me what happened here, Mr. Ford?”

  I told him and I left.

  Chapter 37

  Just as I got to the street, I saw Loretta DeMeer going into the general store, a large straw basket hanging from her right arm. I thought of catching up to her but decided to visit the livery first.

  A girl of maybe sixteen was raking out a stall when I got there.

  “I guess I’ve never met you.” I showed her my badge.

  She stopped raking, leaned on the wooden handle. She had black pigtails hanging below the Western hat she wore. A snub nose and lively blue eyes made her cuter than I’d thought at first glance.

  “I’m Judy Whalen. I suppose you’re looking for Mr. Ralston.”

  “I’m sorry to say that Mr. Ralston’s dead.”

  She didn’t say anything, just gave me an odd stare, as if I’d just uttered the strangest words she’d ever heard.

  “But he come over to the house last night and gave me the key and said I should open up for him the way I sometimes do. How come he’s dead?”

  “Because somebody murdered him.”

  “Oh, his poor wife. She’s my aunt. You sure he’s dead?” She was still struggling with the concept.

  “I’m sure. But what I want to know is if you’ve seen him this morning?”

  “No. He said he wouldn’t be in till late in the afternoon.”

  “Anybody else come asking for him this morning?”

  “No.”

  Then, without warning, tears formed in her eyes and began traveling down her cheeks. Silent crying. She seemed unaware of her tears. “Nobody had anything against Uncle Tim. Everybody liked him.”

  “Sure seemed that way.”

  “And gosh—my aunt was just in here.”

  “Where’d she go?”<
br />
  “She said she was going to stop at the pharmacy.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to catch her.”

  “You know, everybody always said that my dad would go before Uncle Tim on account of his heart condition. But it turned out it was Uncle Tim who died before he did.”

  Still grappling with death. People spend their whole lives grappling with it.

  Mrs. Ralston had been in the pharmacy but left; Mrs. Ralston had been in the dress shop but left. I caught up with her in the Catholic church, where the dress shop lady said she’d gone. The dress shop lady also told me that somebody had come into her shop and told her about Ralston dying. This person hadn’t realized until too late that Mrs. Ralston was in the back of the store, listening. The dress shop lady had said that Mrs. Ralston had gone pretty crazy for a time. Completely inconsolable. The dress shop lady had poured three belts of whiskey down her, which had helped some; had at least, if nothing else, gotten her past her screaming. “I never heard anybody scream like Mrs. Ralston did right there at the first. It was scary to hear. Never heard anything like it.”

  She sat in the last pew, Mrs. Ralston did. The church was empty except for her. I sat next to her.

  We didn’t talk for a long time. She had a rosary and a small handkerchief in her hand. Her left hand trembled violently.

  Finally, she said, “Some of this is your fault, Mr. Ford.”

  She sounded too calm. I was talking to a dead person.

  “I suppose it is. I’m sorry, Mrs. Ralston.”

  “That’ll be the worst thing of all, except for Tim dying.”

  “What will?”

  “Hearing everybody say ‘I’m sorry.’ Over and over again.”

  “It’s hard to know what else to say.”

  She wore a bulky cloth coat. She was child-small inside it. Her headscarf was black with small bright flowers celebrating spring. But right then in that ice-cold church, with a dead woman sitting next to me, spring seemed a long impossible way off.

  “I need to ask you some questions, Mrs. Ralston.”

  “You don’t care he’s dead, do you?”

  I hadn’t realized until then that she hadn’t looked at me yet. Not even a glance. She stared straight ahead at a wooden Christ on a wooden cross. This was a humble parish. No stained glass, no marble altar. The scent of incense hung melancholy on the air.

  “I’m just doing my job, Mrs. Ralston.”

  “Your job.” She finally looked at me. She was furious. “Your job is to go places and bring people misery. That’s what your job is. My husband knew something but he was going to let it slide. But you wouldn’t let him. You kept on him and on him. And you didn’t care that if he told you what he knew, he’d be killed.”

  She was shouting by the end of it. Then, spent, she turned away to face the altar again.

  After a time, I said, “Well, he didn’t tell me anything, Mrs. Ralston, and he died anyway. Whoever killed him would have killed him, anyway.”

  “I’m sure it was Tremont. Tremont came sniffing around the same way you did.”

  Tremont.

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “Two times yesterday. Tim had to hide from Tremont just the way he had to hide from you.”

  “Did he ever tell you anything?”

  “No.”

  Was she lying?

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Now leave me alone. I never want to see you again. Ever. You understand? Not ever!”

  Just then an old priest came in the side door at the back of the church. He needed a cane to walk. Her voice had been sharp. He said, “Is everything all right, Mrs. Ralston?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband, Mrs. Ralston.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  She’d been right about one thing, anyway. She was going to hear a lot of sorrys in the next few days.

  Chapter 38

  Loretta DeMeer’s wagon was still in front of the general store. There was one thing I needed answered and given what she’d said the other night, I was hoping she could answer it for me.

  The general store smelled of pipe tobacco, saddle leather, coffee being heated on the stove, licorice, cottons—so many rich aromas. And so much promise. When you were young, a general store was like going to greed heaven. There were so many things you wanted to take home you couldn’t quite cope with it. Of course you were limited to the few coins your dad had given you the night before so your money was no match for your greed.

  I found her looking at pots and pans. I had no idea what the various shapes and sizes were used for. To me a pan was a pan.

  “Well, there’s a nice-looking man if I’ve ever seen one,” she said. “Except you look a little tired.”

  “Too much going on. I need to get back East where things are calmer.”

  She was turning a pot back and forth and upside down for inspection. “Now that’s a new one. I’ve always heard about the Wild Wild East. We just rob banks and have range wars out here. We don’t get into any of that decadence that goes on in big cities.”

  “I’ll have to look into that when I get back there. I hadn’t heard of it until you mentioned it.”

  I moved closer to her. She wore a brown corduroy coat lined with lamb’s wool, a heavy sweater and dungarees. The sweater was pleasantly full with her breasts. I had the start of one of those totally unexpected and totally useless erections you get in public places.

  But I’d moved closer with a purpose. I had to lower my voice. I surveyed the place. Nobody was close to us.

  “You mentioned how much Mike Chaney got around. You mentioned a couple of married women he got pregnant.”

  She said, “You want to talk about that here?” Even though she whispered, she seemed uncomfortable. Her perfect composure was broken.

  “All I need are the names.”

  Her gaze lifted and she said, “Why, Mr. Howard, how’re you this morning?”

  “Didn’t see you come in, Mrs. DeMeer. I was in the back unpacking things and Ida didn’t mention it. Just wanted to say hello.”

  My back was to him. I turned around and smiled at him. “Morning.”

  “I thought that was you, Mr. Ford. I was just going to ask if you people knew anything more about poor Ralston. He was in Rotary with me, you know.”

  He was a small, bald man who wore a leather apron over a yellow shirt and a pair of work trousers. He had a yellow pencil stuck behind his ear.

  “Sorry to say we don’t, though I haven’t checked in for a while.”

  “He sure was a good man.”

  “He sure was,” Loretta DeMeer said. And I could tell she meant it. Her tone was rich with the troubled noise only death can put in a voice. She was thinking of Ralston’s mortality but she was also thinking of her own. I was doing the same thing.

  “Well, there’ll be a lot of people at the funeral, that’s for sure,” Mr. Howard said. “He was very well liked in this town.” He nodded to Loretta and then to me. “Well, sorry to interrupt your conversation, folks. Time for me to get back to work.”

  “Seems like a decent man,” I said after he’d left.

  “You’ve got the wrong impression of this town, Noah. Most of the people here are decent. You’ve just run into a lot of murders. And that’s not typical, believe me.”

  I lowered my voice again. “I need to know the names of the two women you were going to tell me about.”

  And then she told me. One of the women had moved away with her husband two years before, the husband apparently assuming the child was his. But then she told me the name of the other woman. The one still there. And when she told me I said to myself no, not possible. But then possible—maybe more than possible.

  She said something else but I didn’t hear.

  Then: “What’s wrong, Noah?”

  “I need to get to the doc’s office.”

  “Aren’t you feeling well?” “I’m feeling fine—just a little stupid is all.
”

  I arrived in time to see Wendy Nordberg leaving the doc’s office. She made a pretty mother, her child held so tenderly.

  She must have heard me coming because she looked up suddenly. And just as suddenly turned away from the shoveled walk leading to the main street. She abruptly took a path that led down along the river. I wondered if she knew why I was looking for her. That didn’t make any sense. How could she know?

  I walked faster. But so did she. She was walking along a shoveled path next to the river. It was probably a five-foot drop to the ice- and snow-covered water.

  “Mrs. Nordberg! Wait for me! I need to talk to you!”

  I moved as fast as I could along the path, too fast, because I lost my footing and slammed into an oak tree next to the path.

  I was knocked unconscious. Not for more than a few seconds. But for those seconds there was—nothing. Not even pain. But the pain was there waiting for me when I returned to the world.

  I had a headache that no hangover could ever equal. Somebody had sawed right through my skull, right down the middle. I touched fingers to the top of my forehead and felt hot blood there. I moved my fingers gently around the trail of blood and then I came to the wound. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t deep. But it had been sufficient to knock me out.

  Then I remembered Mrs. Nordberg.

  I grabbed on to the tree that had nearly done me in and pulled myself to my feet. I had to blink my eyes several times to clear my vision. I decided against shaking my head. It might roll off.

  I saw her way down the river trail. She was still moving pretty fast but not as fast as she had been. Carrying a baby had to take its toll on strength and energy, especially when you were trying not to slip and fall.

  I started out running down the slope to the trail but that didn’t last long. My head couldn’t take the punishment of speed. I slowed down to a fast, awkward walk. I was afraid of tumbling again. For at that point I might not recover as fast as I had before. At that point—there was at least the possibility—I might not recover at all. People died in all sorts of winter-related accidents.