What the Dead Men Say

by Ed Gorman

For the first time since they’d left Council Bluffs, Septemus smiled. “This trip’ll be good for you, James. You wait and see.” Then, his boots loud on the linoleum floor in the drowsy quiet of the afternoon, he went over and put his vest and coat back on.

  James couldn’t help but notice that Septemus also picked up his Winchester.

  “See you in an hour or so, James,” Septemus said.

  Then he was gone.

  3

  Golden dust motes rolled in the sunlight angling through a hat-sized hole in the roof of the barn. Griff was always meaning to fix it but that would happen only if the Rochester Wagon Works opened its doors again and rehired the eighty-six men they had laid off four and a half years ago. Griff was a big man, blond and open, and in the old days had always been laughing. He had a wife who’d loved him since they’d been kids on adjoining farms, and two little girls who never seemed to tire of running up to him with their arms spread wide, having him pick them up and pretend he was dancing with them.

  But one day Mr. Rochester himself had come to the plant and said, with genuine dismay, “Men, the bank won’t loan me no more money and our bills are just too far backed up; I’m gonna have to lay you all off. I’m sorry, men.” There had been real tears in Mr. Rochester’s eyes, and the men knew the tears were not fake because Mr. Rochester was just like them, a workingman who’d got lucky with his invention for building surreys a certain way, and who then, like most workingmen, got unlucky, too. He knew a hell of a lot about surreys, did Mr. Rochester, but he didn’t know a damn about money; his pride and fear were such that he wouldn’t listen to anybody either, even the well-intentioned bankers who’d meant to help him. So he’d gone bust with a bad hand, and his eighty-odd employees had gone bust right along with him.

  There followed those events that always seem to follow men losing good jobs. Drink turned some of them mean and they beat then-loving wives, and some even beat their children. At workingmen’s taverns blood spilled all the time now, not just during the occasional Saturday brawl. The best of the men, the ones who didn’t turn to drink and violence, tried to get other jobs; but, prosperous as the town was, there were no other jobs, not good ones anyway, not ones that could replace what they’d earned (and the kind of self-esteem they’d felt) as employees of the Rochester Wagon Works. These men took to serving the gentry, for there was a large class of rich people in the town. They became gardeners and handymen and drivers and housepainters; they learned how to say yes ma’m and yessir so sweet you almost couldn’t hear the contempt in their voices for the spoiled, pushy, inconsiderate rich folks who employed them. They had no choice. They had families to feed.

  It was sometime during this period when the happy Griff became the sorrowful Griff. He worked half a dozen jobs that first year after Rochester closed down, the worst of them being as a helper to one of the town’s three morticians. He had hated seeing how the blood ran in the gutters of the undertaker’s table and he had hated the white fishbelly look to the flesh of corpses and most especially the high fetid smell of the dead that he could never quite get clean of his nostrils. He tried getting back to farming somehow, but this was a time of many bank failures in the midwest, currency shaky as hell, and so he could find nobody to stake him.

  It was then that he evolved the idea of robbing banks. It would be simple enough. He would take two of the men he had worked with at Rochester-Kittredge, because he had good nerves and was intelligent; Carlyle, because he had the kind of Saturday night beery courage you needed in tight spots-and together they would travel in a three-hundred-mile semicircular radius (he had this drawn out on a map) and hold up banks three times a year. Kittredge and Carlyle were happy to be invited in. They had agreed to two inviolate propositions: Griff had the final say in any dispute, and there was to be no violence. No violence whatsoever. It was in the course of their very first robbery that either Kittredge or Carlyle (Griff could never be sure) panicked and the little girl got killed. It had been purely an accident-my God, nobody would shoot a little girl-but that didn’t make her any less dead. The three men had been so sickened by the sight of the little girl lying in blood and dead on the floor that they forgot to grab the money. They left with guns blazing, empty-handed. They were lucky to escape.

  ***

  So now he stood in the dusty sunlight of the long July afternoon in a barn that smelled of wood and tarpaper and hay and dogshit from the girls’ collie. It smelled most especially of the grease and oil he used to work on his top grade surrey, the one expensive thing he’d ever bought in his forty-one years, bought at a forty-percent employee discount from Rochester back in the good working days. The surrey was fringed and built on elliptic end springs, and had axles of fifteen-sixteenths of an inch, wheels of seven-eighths of an inch and quarter-inch steel tires. The gear was made of second-growth timber ironed with genuine Norway iron and the upholstery was Evans leather. How nice it had been to take this spanking new surrey out for a Sunday drive behind a powerful dun, the girls sitting between Griff and his wife, the neighbors smiling and waving. Down Main Street they’d go every sunny Sunday, church done and a beef roast on the stove, past the Southern Hotel and the big stone bank building, the telegraph office and the telephone office, and McDougall the dentist’s. Even a workingman could feel respectable in such circumstances.

  Griff was just oiling the axle when he heard the collie, standing in the sunlight just outside the shade of the barn, start to bark. He looked over his shoulder and saw Carlyle. Carlyle looked upset. He also looked drunk. Ever since the little girl had died, Carlyle had spent most of his time on whores and whiskey. Griff no longer liked the man. “Told you I’d just as soon not have you come on my property.”

  “Don’t give a good god damn what you told me.”

  Griff put down the oil can and turned around. He made fists of his hands. Because he was big and blond and fair, most people mistook him for a Swede, but he was Irish and had an Irish temper. “Don’t appreciate you talking to me that way on my own property.”

  Carlyle didn’t seem to hear. “He’s here.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Right in town.”

  Griff could see that Carlyle was caught up in his fear and his drunkenness. He reached out and took the gawky man by the shoulder. Carlyle smelled of sweat and heat and soured beer. Griff turned his face away as he said, “I want you to get hold of yourself.”

  “I got hold of myself.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I’m tryin’ to tell you, Griff, he’s god damn here.”

  “And I’m tryin’ to ask you, Carlyle, who’s god damn here.”

  “Her father.”

  “Whose father?”

  “The little girl’s.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Griff said. He almost never took the Lord’s name in vain. To him that was a significant sin-even a mortal sin that had to be confessed as such to Father Malloy-but right now he didn’t care. “How do you know it’s him?”

  “We’ve seen his picture, ain’t we, a hunnerd times.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Griff, I’m positive.”

  “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  “Could be, but I doubt it.”

  Griff wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. “How the hell could he have found us?”

  “Maybe he never quit lookin’.”

  Griff came out from the cool shadows of the barn to stand in the sunlight with Carlyle. Carlyle looked old now. He had a couple of days’ worth of beard and some of his hairs were black and some of them were white. His nose was kind of running and he hadn’t cleaned the morning dirt from the corners of his eyes.

  “What we gonna do?” Carlyle said.

  “Nothing we can do. Not right now. Not till we see what he wants.”

  “Oh, I can tell you quick and proper what he wants, Griff.”

  “And what would that be?” Griff said. He felt calmer now, more in control of himself, the way he usually did.

/>   “He wants us dead. All three of us.”

  “Can you blame him? We killed his little girl.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  “That don’t bring her back to life.”

  Carlyle looked as if he were about to cry. “What the hell we gonna do, Griff? You’re supposed to be the boss. You tell me.”

  “You go back to the hotel and relax.”

  “Yeah, sure, Griff. I sure can relax knowin’ some sonofabitch is lookin’ for me.”

  “Get ahold of Kittredge.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “Tell him to meet us at nine tonight at the west end of the Second Avenue bridge.”

  “You know what he’s like, Griff. He won’t be able to handle this.”

  Griff stared at him hard. “He won’t have much choice, Carlyle. None of us do.” He nodded to the street. “Now go tell him and then stay in your room till you go to the bridge.”

  “You sure like givin’ orders, don’t you?”

  Griff smiled without much humor. “If you want me to play boss then you better get used to me givin’ orders. You understand me?”

  Carlyle looked sulky. “I don’t like none of this.”

  “Get going. And get going now.”

  Carlyle shook his head, wiped some sweat from his face, and then set off down the driveway to the street.

  ***

  Griff watched the man go. Then his girls came up and jumped up and down around him in their faded gingham dresses. If good times ever rolled around again, the first thing Griff planned to do was buy the girls some new clothes. Now they wore hand-me-downs from in-laws and Griff, a proud man, just hated to see it.

  Kneeling on his haunches, he drew the two girls close to him and hugged them tight with his eyes closed.

  “Boy, it sure is hot, Daddy,” Eloise said.

  “It sure is,” Tess agreed.

  But that was the funny thing to Griff. Hot as it was-the afternoon ablaze now at three o’clock-he felt so cold he was shivering.

  He hugged the girls even tighter, and tried not to think of how the little girl in the bank had looked that morning, bloody and dead on the linoleum floor.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Just off the sidewalk there was a huge oak, one with roots like claws, and beneath it stood Ryan. On so hot a day he appreciated the shade, though curiously he left his vest and suitcoat on. Hanging loose from his left hand was his Winchester.

  For the past ten minutes, Ryan had kept his brown eyes fixed on the small, white cottagelike house and the large barn that loomed over it directly behind. Griff and Carlyle were back there now, talking.

  Ryan set the Winchester against the tree then took out a cigar and lighted it. Even on a day this hot, the fifty-cent Cuban tasted good, heady as wine the first few puffs.

  A small boy pulling a small red wooden wagon inside of which sat an even smaller girl came by, followed by a yipping puppy. Ryan said hello to the boy and smiled at the puppy. The girl, even though she said hello, received nothing from Ryan, not even a glance. He knew better than to look at pretty girls.

  As the kids and the wagon and the dog rolled past, Ryan looked down the street and saw Carlyle coming up the walk, moving fast. He looked agitated.

  Carlyle didn’t seem to see Ryan until he was a few feet from the tree.

  Ryan hefted the Winchester then stepped out into the middle of the walk.

  Carlyle, sensing rather than seeing somebody moving into his way, stopped abruptly and raised his head. “Shit,” he said when he saw who it was.

  “Kind of a hot day to be moving so fast, Mr. Carlyle,” Ryan said.

  Carlyle’s eyes had dropped to the new Winchester slung across Ryan’s chest.

  Ryan said, “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And you know why I’m here.”

  “Yessir.”

  Ryan patted the Winchester. “And you know why I brought this.”

  Carlyle said, “It was an accident, sir, what happened to your daughter.”

  “You know, I’ve tried to console myself with that notion every once in a while. But then I start to thinking-if those three men hadn’t gone to the bank that day, then the accident would never have happened. My little Clarice would have gone in there and made her deposit and Mr. Dolan would have given her a mint and then she would have walked back to my store and it would have been a regular, normal day.” Now the tears came, but more in his voice than in his eyes. “She would have graduated from school this past spring, Mr. Carlyle. Her mother and I would have been so proud.”

  “We didn’t mean for it to happen, Mr. Ryan. Honest.”

  “You know what happened to her mother?”

  “No.”

  Ryan drew himself up and sighed. “Whooping cough.” Carlyle’s eyes dropped back to the Winchester.

  Ryan said, “You can always go to the sheriff here, Mr. Carlyle.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You can always tell him you were the men who robbed that bank and killed that little girl.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Because if you don’t-” Now it was Ryan who looked at the Winchester. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to have to worry about me.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And you know something?”

  “What, sir?”

  “I’d sure as hell rather have to worry about the law than worry about me. Because maybe in a court of law you’ll convince a jury that what you did was an accident-but you’ll never convince me. You understand that?”

  Carlyle didn’t even have time to respond before Ryan raised the Winchester and slammed the butt of it into Carlyle’s mouth.

  Carlyle moaned, putting his hands to his mouth. He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to puke or cry or what.

  Ryan said. “That’s just the start of things, Mr. Carlyle. Just the beginning.”

  But Carlyle wasn’t paying any attention. He was looking at the tiny white stubs of teeth he’d just spit out bloodily into the palm of his right hand. He looked shocked and confused and terrified.

  “Just the beginning,” Ryan said, and walked off down the street toward town again.

  2

  James Hogan lay on his bed thinking of what he was going to say to his uncle Septemus as soon as he saw him. Septemus had no right to speak so slightingly of either James or his mother. She’d done a good job of raising all the kids and if she wasn’t quite as good a father as she’d been a mother, well, you still couldn’t blame her because she was a refined lady whose tastes just naturally gravitated to violin musicals in the parlor and the study of classical thinkers such as Plato and Socrates. Nothing wrong with that at all.

  But of course it was Septemus’s aspersions on James’s own character that really had the boy angry. Hinting that James was a panty-waist and a mother’s boy; hinting that at this rate he’d never grow up to be a man.

  He lay shirtless on his back, a black fly crawling around on his red freckled face. Maybe he should tell Septemus about the time he got drunk on beer that Fourth of July night when everybody thought he’d gone up to bed; or maybe he should tell him about how many times he’d loaded cornsilk into a pipe bowl and smoked till he’d turned green; or maybe he should tell him about the time, a spring moon making him slightly mad, he’d nearly kissed Marietta right on the lips. Boy, wouldn’t these things surprise Uncle Septemus? Wouldn’t he then look at James in a very different way?

  A pantywaist; a mama’s boy. Just wait till he saw Septemus.

  The knock startled him. He turned his head to face the door so quickly that a line of warm pain shot up the side of his neck.

  “That you, Uncle Septemus?” he called, uneasy about opening the door unless he knew who it was. His mother had given him explicit instructions about not putting himself in a position where he’d ever be alone with a stranger.

  And then he heard Septemus inside his head: see how she’s turning you into a sissy, son?
Somebody knocks on your door and you won’t even go open it, Now is that how a real man would act, son? Is it?

  He fairly flung himself off the bed, making loose fists of his hands, striding to the door. To heck with what his mother said. He was sixteen; he was on his way to becoming a man. He would open the door and-

  Halfway there, he realized he didn’t have his shirt on. He was sure he shouldn’t open the door half naked.

  Feeling foolish and vulnerable, he dashed to the chair on the back of which was his shirt. He snapped it up and put it on and buttoned it. Then he went back to the door.

  James had seen few men this tall. Even without a hat, the top of the man’s head touched the top of the door frame. In addition to that, he was fleshy in a middle-aged sort of way, somewhat jowly and with a loose belly pinched tight by a huge silver buckle on which the initials DD had been sculpted. He wore a western-style white shirt, a brown leather vest, dark brown trousers, and Texastoed black boots. He looked a little sweaty from the heat and a little sour around his large, wry mouth. James couldn’t read his eyes at all.

  His grin was somewhat surprising. “I take it you’re not Septemus, son.”

  “No, sir,” James said, then immediately recalled what his uncle had said about being too deferential. “I’m sure not.” He tried to make the last sound hard-bitten, but his voice had soared too high for that. He’d just spotted the six-pointed star that the man wore tucked half under his vest.

  “You’d be-”

  “His nephew.”

  “I see.” The man put out a huge hand. James slid his own into the other man’s grasp. When they shook, James felt like a pump handle that somebody was jostling mercilessly. When he returned his hand to his side. James tried not to feel the pain the big man’s hand had inflicted on him. “I’m Dodds.”

  “Dodds?”

  “The sheriff.”

  “And you want to see my uncle Septemus?”

  “If I could.”

  “He’s not here.”