I had the certain knowledge that he knew exactly what Cassel had said to me in that office. About Evans Howell.
After a moment, he grinned. “At least you can move out of those stinking barracks. I’ll fix you up a room in my building. This afternoon.”
“Look. I’ve tried to tell you and Cassel. I’m not staying around here.”
“Okay. Up to you. But you might as well be comfortable while you are here. Clean sheets, clean room—”
“A shower?”
“I told you, didn’t I?”
“I’ll take it”
Howell blew his whistle, gave the men a morning break which was something they never got with Handecker. And Howell didn’t even look around to see who sprawled down where. He just sat on that stool, lost in his thoughts.
I glanced around, saw Old Man Hogan still bent over the vegetable rows. I walked out into the sun. “All right, Hogan,” I yelled at him. “Sit down for God’s sake.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Howell said.
“Nothing. He’s afraid if he stops working, you’ll fire him.”
“Fire him?” Howell said. “Hell, where would he go?”
“That’s what troubles him,” I said.
When the men went back to work, I leaned against the bus and stared at Howell’s slumped, thin shoulders. He kept pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping his hands with it. He had it bad. He couldn’t sit still, as though he could not stand to be in his own skin with himself.
I had put it off as long as I could. “I saw Mrs. Cassel while I was at the house.”
His wide thin shoulders stiffened. For a moment he didn’t move. At last he said in a voice tired of God, tired of living: “When does she want to see me?”
“Any time this afternoon, I reckon. That’s what she said.”
He shivered in the blast of sunlight
“You could always quit,” I said.
He turned, staring up at me, his blue eyes starkly naked, with pain in them. “Where would I go?”
“Hell. Why don’t you try it and see?”
“Look. I know you don’t give a damn. Why should you? You got your own woes. You know the day I became Evans Howell? The day I walked in here and asked for a job. And I’ve got a good job ... it used to be a good job ....”
“Sure. Until you got the hots for the boss’s wife.”
“Is that a halo you’re judging me through?”
“I’m sorry. I thought I was just saying what you already knew.”
He exhaled. “Okay. You tagged it. I’m not offering any alibi. I’m not the first guy ever got caught in a hair trap. She’s young, not more than twenty-four now. I never met anybody like her before.” He shivered. “I thought that at first. Now I know nobody else ever has, either.”
“We all got our woes.”
“This is a good job. Goddamn it. It’s the kind of work I love. I was born in a tenement district. I never saw a cow, never saw a field of growing things, miles and miles of it, thousands of head of dairy cows. God knows, it’s the kind of work I’d do for nothing. Only there she is, plowing into fences, sending messages by every bastard on the place, calling me, coming up to the—what the hell’s the use? It’s a good job, but she’s a dame no ten men could ever satisfy. And you know why? Because she wants something and she doesn’t even know what in the hell it is. All she knows is the next guy might have it. Cassel didn’t. And I didn’t. Only she don’t let anybody go. She needs what she’s got—whatever it is.”
“Doesn’t she know Cassel is going to kill both of you?”
He shivered. “Good God yes. Everybody knows that. He wouldn’t think twice about it. Sometimes I think that’s half the thrill with her. She’s daring him. So what in hell am I supposed to do? Go on like we are? Let him kill me? Leave here? Hell, I got no place to go. In fact, I could go to prison once I’m off this place, once I’m not Evans Howell, foreman of Great Plains any more.” He stood up, looking around him as if he were lost in a place he’d never seen before. “Around here I’m Evans Howell. Away from here, I’m—” he shuddered convulsively and covered his face with his hands.
At two-thirty, Howell blew his whistle for the afternoon break.
He’d been edgier by the minute since the noon hour. He had held a sandwich and a cup of iced coffee in his hand for thirty minutes without even looking at them, then dropped them in the disposal container.
When the men were sprawled around, panting like animals in the sun, he said, “I’m taking the jeep, Mitch.”
“Okay.”
“You can break this thing up about three-thirty. Okay?”
“All right.”
He walked over to the jeep, moving like a condemned man. He didn’t look at me. “See you when you get back to the house. I—I’ll have your room ready.”
“Okay.”
I watched the jeep racing across the rutted tracks toward the distant farm buildings. Dust boiled up behind the jeep. Howell drove like a man in a rush to die.
Some of the men came near the bus, looking at me as if they’d never seen me before.
“You the new strawboss now, Mitch?”
“That’s right. Temporarily.”
“Potter and Johnny Handecker be back?”
“In a day or two.”
“You moved up land of fast, didn’t you, Mitch?”
“I’m Cassel’s bastard son, didn’t you guys know that?”
They grinned faintly. One of them said, “What’s going to happen now?”
I glanced after the racing jeep. “Hell,” I said. “Who knows? Anyhow there won’t be any crap game or stud poker tonight”
I’d thought these guys would be pleased, for one night at least they’d keep a full day’s pay. But their faces clouded, they looked at each other, troubled, confused. God. Howell was right. They were like animals.
“Hell, Mitch,” one of them whined. “What we gonna do for a little fun?”
I stared at them. “Why, you stupid jerks,” I said. “Okay. You want action. You’ll have it. Tonight. Same cards. Same dice. Same stakes. Same time.”
They grinned then, and looked at each other, their faces pleased.
One of them nodded and even raised his voice in a cheer. “Okay, Mitch,” he said, with a lot of feeling. “That’s fine.”
“You’re all right, Mitch.”
“I’m all heart,” I said.
9
Cassel stopped the jeep on a knoll that looked south across the unending flat land of his farm. Down the incline on the other side was a dry creek with willows and cottonwoods growing in its bed. A rutted jeep trail wandered across the dry creek and through the flat grazeland beyond.
He cut the engine, and when the sound of the motor died, the silence was almost as oppressive as the heat.
He didn’t look at me for a moment but sat there with both his huge fists gripping the steering wheel.
I didn’t say anything. We hadn’t talked since we rode out of the farmyard. His face was pale, tight with a scowl that seemed as full of self-hatred as much as anything else. Something was wrong.
He exhaled, picked up a pair of binoculars from a leather case in the crevice between our seats. More silent minutes went by while Cassel adjusted the field glasses to suit himself. The expensive black binoculars looked like a toy in his thick hands.
He pressed the glasses against his eye, trailed them across his grazing cattle, the stoop-laborers in the truck fields, the machinery at work in the wheat sections.
I sat there, looking along that snake-trail that led north across the creek and away from the Great Plains Empire. The road looked great to me. Maybe it was the escape I’d been looking for.
“That trail down there,” Cassel said, as if following my thoughts. “That there’s my private road out of these parts.” He sighted along it through his binoculars. “It hits a secondary highway near Wild Horse.”
“Wild Horse? What’s that?”
He shrugged. “Hell
. What you care? A settlement. A filling station, grocery, a church, a whorehouse. Nothing. Just a jog in the road and they call it Wild Horse. My trail hits the road about two miles above the settlement anyhow. I like to have a quick easy way out of here, so I can duck out in a hurry in case some company is coming that I don’t relish yakking with, something like that.”
I waited. I didn’t say anything about this trail being a quick, secret way into the house as well as a fast exit. It was none of my business, and as he said, what did I care? The answer was that I didn’t care. He hadn’t brought me out here to show me the countryside.
I sat there watching a fly on the windshield, thinking I could wait as long as he could. But he surprised me. I didn’t have to wait. There was no fencing. He removed the binoculars from his nose, leaving a red rut across its bridge, and stared at me. His face was cold with that unchanging scowl.
“Had a visitor yesterday,” he said.
I exhaled, but held his gaze. “Palmer?”
He reacted. Something flickered in his eyes. “You’re quick on the uptake, huh? Think fast—”
“You have to think like a criminal. That’s Fred Palmer’s philosophy.”
“Yes. He told me. Palmer seems a dedicated man.”
“There’s another word. Psychotic.”
“Well. Like I say, I quit school before we got to that word. But he appears to have one thing on his mind. That’s his job. He’s not a real warm character.”
“It was Palmer,” I said.
He nodded. He shoved his thick-fingered hand into his lightweight jacket’s pocket and brought out a folded piece of paper. He took his time straightening it out against the steering wheel. For a moment we sat there looking at my printed picture. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t flattering. What it was, was accurate.
‘According to this Palmer, you have got a couple of stiff counts against you. Unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Murder—”
“You want to hear my version?”
He moved his head in a negative motion and made a sharp cutting gesture with his hand.
“No. That’s between you and the cops.”
I exhaled again, feeling that tightening in my stomach. I had that same feeling that had struck me the night I decided to run rather than face Palmer in an interrogation room. Nobody gave a damn whether I was guilty or not. But I was innocent.
My voice shook now I couldn’t help it. It seemed to me that somebody had to hear the truth.
“I’m innocent,” I said. “I never murdered anybody. I—”
“Look. I’m thirty-one, and I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of odd-balls that come to this farm looking for work. I reckon I’ve had as much experience with different kinds of men as anyone in the country, and I met a lot of types of men. But there is one kind I never have met: a guilty man. I’ve never yet met a man that was guilty of anything. They’re all innocent.”
“Okay.” The breath pushed out through my mouth. “The hell with you.”
He laughed, a dry, level sound. “That’s better. Now, like I said, if you committed this murder or not, that’s between you and Palmer and the police and God. But it’s got nothing to do with me.”
I turned on the seat, stared at him. “Hasn’t it?”
“Not one damned thing. However, if you want my opinion, and I can see you don’t, it’s this: If you were innocent, why this other charge, this one that says unlawful flight?”
I looked at my clenched fists, the knuckles white. How could I make him believe my reasons for running? How could I tell him that for three months of unvarnished hell I’d watched Fred Palmer wash confessions out of men with boiling water enemas? I’d seen innocent men with ruptured spleens? Cracked spinal discs? That I’d seen men helpless on their knees before him because he knew how to stun a man with the flat of his hand? What did a man named Barton M. Cassel care?
This I knew. Nobody cared back there in that town where Fred Palmer had a better conviction record than all the other men on the force combined. Maybe in all the history of the force combined for all I knew And Fred Palmer believed me guilty.
I had to give him one thing: it was an honest belief. He did believe that I was guilty. I couldn’t prove my innocence without finding the man who actually had killed Wendy Parker. I had been there. I looked guilty, especially to Fred Palmer who wanted me to look guilty. And I had known what would happen to me once he got me in handcuffs. Sure, I had run. I had run in terror, the way you run in your nightmares, looking over your shoulder in horror, and never daring to stop long enough to breathe.
I thought about that switchblade knife I’d taken from the terrorized kid on the tenement roof that night. That kid would rather leap off that building than face Fred Palmer in an interrogation room again. That kid was smart. I agreed with him right down the line. Unless I wanted to be subjected to every inhuman cruelty ever devised until I was begging Palmer to let me confess. I knew I had to get to hell out of there.
Didn’t stoop-labor at Great Plains Empire look like paradise to me?
I didn’t say anything, I just watched that fly circling nothing on the windshield.
“This man Palmer,” Cassel said. “He said if I saw you, if you showed up at Great Plains Empire, I should get in touch with him. He offered me a twenty per cent split on the reward after he deducts his expenses.”
“He’s getting generous. Or desperate.”
“Maybe he just wants you pretty bad. It seemed to make him ill that you’ve gotten away from him for even this length of time.”
I exhaled again, looking around. “There’s just one thing. You’re a pretty husky guy, but I’m telling you, just don’t try to take me back to him.”
He laughed. “Who said anything about taking you back?”
I felt cold. The fly flew away suddenly. Smart fly. “You want something,” I said.
He stared at me, turning the binoculars in his fists. “Why don’t we get down to cases?”
I felt empty. “Yes,” I said. “Why don’t we?”
“I like a man that’s in trouble, Mitch. Now you take a man who’s got trouble. Why, you can talk to a man like that, Mitch. He understands easy. He’s good to talk to.”
“Yeah?”
“Right. Now me. For some time now, Mitch, maybe you won’t believe this, I been hoping a man just like you would come along. Looks like I got my wish. Huh? A smart man. Intelligent. Strong.”
“In trouble,” I finished it for him.
“That’s right. A man I could talk to.” He crumpled the picture of me in his big fist. “That’s why I brought you out here where we could talk. I got a little job that’s been needing handling for a long time.”
I breathed out slowly. “Crooked, of course,” I said.
Cassel shrugged. “What else?”
After a long time of silence, I swung my legs around over the side of the jeep, got out.
Cassel’s voice was sharp. “Where you going?”
“I need some fresh air.”
“I better warn you, Mitch boy. Don’t try anything cute. Not with me. You’re smart. Clever. But this is Barton M. Cassel. You try to leave here and I’ll stop you. Like permanent.”
I stared into the car at him. “Like a bullet in the back?”
“Better than that, Mitch. A bullet I could explain. This is my land. All my land. I could give a hundred reasons for my having to shoot you. Without even breathing hard, I could come up with a hundred. But if you try to get away, I’ll run you down. With this jeep. It’s one hell of a sport on these flat fields. And nobody would ever even know anything about it. As a matter of fact, I told Mr. Palmer I had never even seen a man resembling you. So run. Only I think you’re too smart for that.”
“I’m standing.”
“Okay. So we can be friends. Hell, you’re in trouble. I got my troubles.” He swung out of the jeep, came around it, leaned against the front bumper. “You got any notion of the overhead on a place like this?”
I waited.
I shrugged. “So it’s not paradise.”
“That’s right. So it’s not paradise. But I could make it. I could have made it. But my wife has cost me another million in parties, and travel, and waste, and destruction. Well, the party is almost over.”
‘And that’s where I come in.”
“That’s where you come in.” He breathed out heavily. “I’m closing a deal on a hundred and forty thousand dollars’ worth of my cattle. Tomorrow. Now I’m covered by insurance on every angle. The cattle. I’ll be paid off in cash. That cash payment is also insured. Nobody thinks nothing of my collecting in cash any more because I pay off so many people and so many services daily in cash. They call it Cassel-type business.”
He walked back and forth beside the jeep, his shadow short and stubby, seeming to run to keep up with him.
“Now If I was robbed of the hundred and forty thousand, the insurance company would make it good. To the penny. If I split that first cash with you, after the robbery—say I’d pay you forty grand—I’d end up with almost a quarter of a million. Now I don’t pretend that would save me, but it would keep me going until I can get on my feet again, get some of the creditors off my neck.”
“Hell, if a quarter of a million would save you, you could buy time with that hundred and forty thousand just as quickly.”
“Smart. Only what you don’t know is that when I collect that payment tomorrow, I got about an hour to pay most of it out to one creditor. A robbery would take him off my neck for a while, make me an additional hundred grand besides. Now, time has run out for Barton M. Cassel, and if you don’t think it has run out for you, try to turn down this little proposition. With forty grand, you can buy your way out of this country. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You can disappear without leaving Palmer a trace? Forty grand would make it easy. And I’d help you.”
A Night for Screaming Page 9