by Ed Gorman
“Anything?” I said when he was finished.
He shook his head.
I hoped my sigh wasn’t audible. If he’d found another button or anything like that-
“All right if we get him on the wagon now, Marshal?” Dick Zane said. We all like to think ill of undertaking people, but Dick was a family man, a helpful citizen who saw to it that the poor always got fed at Christmastime and whose wife did volunteer work in the hospital. “He’s starting to smell.”
I nodded approval. The body was taken away.
Mike Bryant, the hotel owner, came into the room. He looked pretty damned unhappy and I didn’t blame him. “Three guests have already left. Afraid to stay here.”
“I’m sorry, Mike. I really am. We’re working as fast as we can.”
“You get anything yet?”
“Not yet.”
He shook his large head. “He looked like the kind.”
“What kind you talking about?”
“Oh, hell, you know. Too slick by half. A ladies’ man. He took several of the local boys for a lot of money last night at poker. They weren’t happy about that. Especially when one of them started hinting he might have been cheating. But that’s what they always say when they lose. Then there was Ken Adams.”
“What about him?”
“Sometime yesterday, Stanton managed to meet Sylvia Adams, and sneaked her into his room last night.”
“And Ken found out?”
“You bet he found out. He had a big scene with Sylvia and Stanton in the room here. I promised I wouldn’t say anything to anybody about it. You know, to protect her reputation and all.”
“Ken threatened Stanton?”
“He more than threatened him, Lane. He pulled a gun on him. That’s when Sylvia came running downstairs and got me. I went up there with a sawed-off and got Ken calmed down. I felt sorry for him. Hell, he’s just a kid. Even with a gun in his hand he looked pretty pathetic standing next to Stanton. Stanton didn’t even look scared. He’d probably been through this kind of thing a hundred times before. With jealous husbands, I mean.”
“So Ken put the gun away?”
“Ken put the gun away and Sylvia took him home. It was one of those things I wish I hadn’t seen. I got a wife, too, Lane. If she ever did anything like that to me-” He shook his head. “Poor old Ken.”
“I’ll need to talk to him.”
“I figured you would. That’s why I told you. Maybe I should’ve told you this morning, huh?”
I shrugged. “No way of knowing it would turn into something like this. And anyway, we don’t know that Ken had anything to do with this.”
“I sure hope not. He’s a good lad.”
“Yes, he is.”
“And Sylvia seems like a good woman, as far as that goes.”
I smiled. “She interviewed me as her ninth-grade school assignment when I first came here.”
“Yeah, then she left school and married Ken. He wasn’t but seventeen.” He frowned. “I just hope he didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Behind me, Tom said, “Somebody might have seen him.”
“Seen Ken?” I said.
Tom nodded. “Man down the hall-a drummer-said he saw somebody fitting Ken’s description here earlier in the afternoon. Maybe about four.”
Bryant said, “But Stanton wasn’t killed till later.”
“Anybody else see this man?” I said.
Tom shook his head. “But there’s always the possibility Ken got here at a time when most guests were gone and hid somewhere.”
“Such as?” Bryant said.
“No offense, Mr. Bryant, but it wouldn’t take a lot to pick the locks on one of your doors. What if he got inside Stanton ’s room and hid in the closet? Stanton comes in and they argue and Ken stabs him?”
“That’s possible, I suppose,” Bryant said. He glanced around the room. “A big fucking mess is what this is.” He nodded to the door. “I better get back downstairs and see if anybody else has left because they’re afraid to stay here.” He frowned. “The Chandler Arms is gonna be full up tonight-with guests who left my place.”
After he’d gone, Tom said, “Sounds like we’ve got at least one good suspect.”
“Maybe. But I’m like Bryant. I sure hope Ken didn’t do this. He’s a good young man. Somebody like Stanton comes to town-”
I was doing what Bryant had been doing. I was putting myself in Ken Adams’s place. Imagining what it would be like to walk in on your wife and another man in a hotel room-all that terrible rush of terror and rage and impotence-in a moment like that-
But maybe that was Ken Adams’s best argument.
In the moment of fury itself, you might do something crazy. But after eighteen, twenty hours had passed? There was a good chance that you’d brought some perspective to the situation. You’d still be angry, of course-hell, maybe you’d even told your wife to get out-but you’d be in much better control of your impulses. It was at least an even chance that you would have ruled out violence.
“We’ll have to sort through all this,” I said to Tom. “I don’t want to accuse anybody of anything yet.”
Least of all my wife, I thought.
“I agree,” Tom said. “That’s why I only mentioned it to you and Bryant.” He sounded defensive.
“Good man.”
He relaxed. He can work his jaw pretty hard when he’s upset. “I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?”
“If that’s the worst thing you ever do, Tom, you’ll have led a perfect life. You should hear about some of the things I’ve said I shouldn’t have.”
***
I went back to the office. I’d learned at my last peace officer seminar to start a file on every major crime. List the name of the victim, the circumstances, the weapon, the names of the people interviewed, names that I’d written on a small tablet, as had Tom. I two-finger-typed all this on four sheets of paper, slapped a label reading DAVID STANTON on it, and then set it on my desk.
I then wrote out a telegram to the Chicago police department asking for any information on David Stanton under that name or various aliases. I wrote a similar telegram to the Royalton Hotel. I’d have to wait till morning to send these.
I was still at my desk when the door opened and Trent Webley came in. “Evening, Marshal.” He seemed quiet, sober.
“Evening, Trent.”
“My dad’s still over in his office. He’s wondering if you’d stop over and see him.”
“He could always stop over here.”
He shrugged. “He’s got a lot of work to do.”
“So do I, Trent.”
I didn’t like the idea of being summoned. But then I decided I was being pissy for no particularly good reason. His office was two blocks away. I was still sound enough of limb to survive a trek as long as that.
I stood up. Grabbed my hat.
***
At this end of Center Street you wouldn’t have known there’d been a murder. This was the section where the bank and the pharmacy and the general store and the other Main Street businesses were located. The windows were dark, the hitching posts empty, the lamplight properly sedate.
Trent had a key to let him into the bank. We went up a flight of stairs that ran adjacent to the bank on the first floor. The second-floor hallway was dark except for the yellow outline of a door at the far end. I could hear typewriter keys being punched at about the same rate I was capable of. While most typewriter users were female secretaries, the executive class couldn’t help but try their luck, too. At about ten words a minute.
He had one of those inner sanctums. There was an outer office and a larger inner office and in the center of that office yet another office, like Chinese boxes. It was in this that Paul sat, pecking away at a Royal.
His office had the air of a judge’s chamber, walnut wainscoting, a vast Persian rug, heavy dark furnishing, glassed-in bookcases filled with tomes that portended great and eternal knowledge.
; He typed for a few more minutes to show me who was in charge, then turned in his tall executive chair, lifted a lighted cigar from an ashtray, and said, “Sit down and have one of my Cubans.”
“No, thanks. I need to get back. It’s a busy night.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Your friend Stanton got himself murdered. But I’m sure you already know about that.”
He smirked. “He was hardly my friend, Marshal. He just did me a few favors.”
“Why did you want to see me, Paul?”
‘To tell you that it isn’t too late.”
“Isn’t too late for what?”
“For telling the county attorney that you’ve decided to drop the charges against Trent.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
But I didn’t sound as determined as I had earlier today. And he obviously heard a hint of wavering in my voice.
He leaned forward on his elbows. “This is distasteful to me, Marshal. You probably don’t believe that. You probably think I enjoy pushing people around. And sometimes I do. I admit that. But not you. You’ve refused to go on my informal payroll, but you’ve given me plenty of room and I appreciate that. But as I said, I have my son to consider and my family name.”
“What’s this all mean, Paul, in plain English?”
“In plain English, Marshal, it means that your wife was in Stanton ’s hotel room tonight. I can produce two witnesses who saw her there. And when she left, she appeared to have blood on her clothes.”
“I see.”
“Maybe you don’t see, Marshal,” he said in his quiet way. “She was in his room. And I’ve got all kinds of information that establishes she was not only married to him once, but did everything she could to get away from him. She hated him.”
He looked again at Trent, then back at me.
“How do you think all this would sound if the county attorney presented it to a grand jury, Marshal? You think it just might get your wife indicated for murder?”
SEVEN
KEN ADAMS HAD homesteaded land just to the east of town. He was one of those completely independent men who ask no help from anyone else but his wife. He and Sylvia built their own log cabin, dug their own well, and planted their own crops. I don’t think he had a sinister past, but he lived as though he did. You saw him at church sometimes, and at the occasional social evening, but generally the Adamses and their children stayed to themselves. Sylvia was a dark-haired beauty whose hard work hadn’t cost her a whit in femininity.
The only thing I knew about them was that she’d left him briefly on two or three occasions. I’d heard a lot of explanations for this-everything from her taking up with another man to her heading back to North Platte, Nebraska, her home, to tend to an ailing father-but gossip is rarely reliable, so I didn’t have any real sense of their relationship. One time they came to town and Ken had a black eye. If Sylvia had had the black eye, that would have set the gossips to speculating overtime, ominously. But with Ken’s eye being discolored, all that was made of it were a few stupid jokes.
As I drew my horse into the glade that opened on their small farm, I saw lights in the windows and heard a lonesome fiddle being played. The outbuildings were traced in the gold of moonlight. I ground-tied my horse and approached the house.
I was a hundred feet away when the door opened abruptly and a figure stood there silhouetted, moonlight glinting off the barrel of a rifle.
“You go back to town, Marshal. I did a very foolish thing tonight. And I’m sorry I did it, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
Even in silhouette, Sylvia’s figure was pleasing to see.
“Is Ken in there?”
“He is but he doesn’t want to talk to you either. Now, you scat.” She waggled the rifle in my direction.
Full moon. Wind soughing through the bright, autumn-baked leaves. The scent of forest loam and clear stream water.
“I’ll just come back with my deputies, Sylvia. You don’t want it to get out of hand, do you?”
“It’s already out of hand. I broke my marriage vow.” She hesitated. “Again. And now people’ll blame poor Ken.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Blame poor Ken for what? Killing David Stanton?
“I’m going to come inside, Sylvia. Shoot me if you want to. But I’m not taking my gun out, and I’m not going back to town.”
“The mood I’m in, Marshal, I just might do it.”
“I don’t think you will. You’re too good a woman.”
“Oh, I’m some good woman, all right. The things I’ve done to that poor husband of mine.” She sounded about to cry; she also sounded frenzied, even a little crazy. Whatever she’d done, she’d paid a price for it in guilt.
I started walking.
She aimed the gun at my chest. “You heard me, Marshal.”
I kept walking.
“Right now, I could do just about anything.”
I was just about to the front stoop of the cabin before I realized that I hadn’t heard any other voices from inside. Neither Ken nor the kids. They were awful quiet.
She didn’t shoot me. What she did, when I was a few feet away, was retreat into the cabin. And lock it.
I hadn’t worried about being shot. But I was worried about getting inside. Something was very wrong here.
I knocked on the door. “You need to let me in.”
“I already told you, Marshal. Go away.”
“Where are Ken and the kids?”
“He took them to the Chandlers. He’s going to stay there tonight.”
“He shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“I told him to.”
“We all make mistakes, Sylvia. You and Ken need to sit down and talk about this.”
“I warned him. Before we were married, I mean, I warned him how I was. How I sometimes-I just went off with other men. How I just can’t seem to help myself. The other two times-at least it was out of town where I didn’t embarrass him. But this time-right in Skylar. Right where everybody can find out. Just think of what my little ones are going to hear at school. All the things they’ll have to hear about their mother.”
“Why don’t you let me in?”
“I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to see anybody. Not ever again.”
“Sylvia, listen, please-”
***
There was just the one shot and it was oddly muffled, and it was followed by a tiny squeaky sound, almost like the mewling of a newborn kitten, and then there was just that awful silence that follows death. My horse whinnied for no good reason-that was the first sound to break the silence. And then the night birds in the forest began to sing in a way that was almost like crying.
I didn’t bang on the door, I didn’t call out, I didn’t run to my horse and head back to town for help. There was no sense to any of that.
I was narrow enough to shinny myself sidewise through a northern-pointing window. She was slumped over in a rocking chair. The six-shooter hung from two of her fingers, angled down across her bosom. She’d put the barrel to her temple. Not even death could destroy the small, perfect, almost doll-like features of her face. The eyes looked stunned and sad at the same time.
I went and unbolted the door, and went out and got on my horse and rode over to the Chandler farm. I was thinking about everything and nothing. It was one of those moments when your mind keeps flitting around, unable to light on any one subject for long. There were so many things to think about. If Sylvia had killed Stanton, then Callie was not in any trouble. But I couldn’t be sure of that. She’d certainly been remorseful. But that could have just been about sleeping with Stanton.
The Chandler farm was pretty much like the Adams farm. They were homesteaders, too, though not anywhere as self-reliant. Verne Chandler, who wasn’t yet thirty, had had a bad stroke his first year here in Skylar, and people still had to pitch in from time to time to help him support himself. Fortunately for him, Am Chandler is a purposeful, smart, and res
ourceful woman who can do damned near any job a man can, and likely do it better. She’s not much for charity, and always looks uncomfortable and a little embarrassed when neighboring farmers and ranchers stop by at certain points in the year. Verne is still paralyzed on the right side of his body. Things aren’t likely to get better for him. They had but the one boy-I never knew why they didn’t have more children-but he passed the last time smallpox made a sweep of our part of the state. Six, he’d been. Am Chandler had not had an easy life.
Verne came to the door, a fortyish man crabbed and bent before his time. He always wore a heavy sweater, even in the summertime. The stroke had somehow affected his thyroid and left him constantly cold. His bald head shone in the moonlight as he stuck his head outside. “Don’t talk loud,” he said. “Ma, she’s just put the two kids down for the night.” He spoke in a way that made some people think he was slow or tetched. He was neither. He’d just suffered a stroke.
“I need to talk to Ken.”
“You want to come in?”
“Need to talk to him out here, Verne.”
He nodded and dragged himself back inside. He’d been one hell of a Sunday afternoon baseball player. It was hard to watch him in his present state.
Ken Adams came out and said, “Something wrong, Marshal?”
“Let’s walk down to the creek.”
He shrugged and closed the door quietly behind him, and followed me out to where the grass was long and silver-tipped from the moon.
The one thing the seminars don’t prepare you for is telling somebody that his wife is dead. Long as I’d been at this, I’d never figured out how to do it with any skill. Later on, I’d always think of ways I could have been gentler, kinder.
The creek smelled fresh in the night. An occasional fish slapped to the surface. Been a long time since I’d been on a camping trip, eating freshly caught fish from a pan set on a campfire. It sounded good now. Almost everything sounded good now-except saying what I had to say.