Marshal and the Moonshiner

by C. M. Wendelboe

  “Protection money Dutch paid out to Johnny Notch,” Maris said.

  “How’d you figure that out?”

  Maris shook out a Chesterfield and slowly grabbed a kitchen match from the little pile on a plate beside the ashtray. She dragged out her answer like an actress auditioning for a movie part. “Here.” She leaned close, her shirt still partially unbuttoned. She caught me looking, and she smiled but buttoned it up. She stood and walked to the wall, where she grabbed a John Deere calendar and dropped it on the counter in front of me. She thumbed back to January. “Notch is in charge of the department every weekend because Stauffer’s never there weekends. This means Notch works every weekend, but has Mondays and Tuesdays off.

  “He comes in Monday mornings to fill Stauffer in on what happened that weekend, but his Tuesdays are completely free.” She ran her finger across a ledger entry. “If you notice, money was paid out every Tuesday for the past two years. If I match these dates up with that time frame, I bet I’ll find protection was paid out every Tuesday.”

  I fished inside my pocket for my glasses but had forgotten them somewhere; Byron noticed and handed me his. “I never saw you wear glasses,” I said to him.

  “Do not need to,” Byron answered. “I keep them for friends who forget theirs.”

  I held the ledger to the light. Services obtained was paid out every Tuesday. The day Notch was off work.

  “And I found something else.” Maris handed me copies of railroad receipts showing two people had ridden from Wyoming to El Reno the day after Selly Antelope was murdered. “You were right on the money with Amos travelling together with that Whiskers character—Dutch, if the dates of his AWOL are correct. The clerk remembered them because they had no baggage. He thought it odd they were on a long trip with no bags.” She slammed the ledger shut and blew smoke rings upward. “When we find Dutch, we—you—might be able to squeeze him and get him to tell us all about the day Selly got killed.”

  “Unless Dutch is Selly’s killer himself,” I said, back to sounding like a lawman again. “At which point, we might not get anything.”

  “But won’t it be fun to try?” Maris grinned. “But I think you’ll get him to talk when we show him the ledger with Notch’s hush money.”

  “I can get him to talk,” I answered, standing, feeling older than I had since I quit drinking. “That’s almost a certainty. But before we look for them, I got to make a phone call.”

  I headed for the door with Maris in tow when I stopped and returned to the counter. “I thank you for getting my head on straight . . .”

  “Not me,” Byron said. “It was you. I just pointed out a few things you already knew but were denying.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great,” I said, “if people like us could meet every day—or even every week—and talk about their booze addiction? Help each other out?”

  Byron laughed. “Only way that would work is if everyone were to remain anonymous.”

  Yancy sounded winded when he picked up the phone at tribal headquarters. “Forgot you were calling today, Nels. Been busy here.”

  “With Cat?”

  Yancy’s hesitation told me he was spending time with her. In many ways Yancy was like Maris, except I needed information from Cat that wasn’t tainted by Yancy’s desire to climb into her bloomers. “Tell me what you found out.”

  Papers rustled across the lines, interspersed with static. I thought I’d lost Yancy when he came back on line. “I talked with neighbors about the Antelopes. Some even recalled Celia and Felton when they ranched back here before moving to their southern relatives. There was no cattle stealing going on then; the neighbors all got along. Everyone made good money off their spreads, including the Thunders.”

  “But Cat said that’s why her folks up and moved down here. Celia said so also,” I said. “And Cat insists the Antelopes were rustling from her and Amos; she and her mother are both lying?”

  Silence on the other end of the line for a long time. “Guess you could put it that way,” Yancy said.

  “So if the Thunders were prosperous ranchers back then, why pull up stakes when you made good money?”

  “I’ll dig some more,” Yancy said.

  “One other thing,” I told Yancy before disconnecting. “That friend of Amos—Whiskers—was an army sergeant named Dutch Seugard. He was AWOL from Ft. Reno when he visited Wind River. He fancies himself a ladies’ man, from what other soldiers say. Check with Cat. If she and Dutch had some relationship, perhaps Selly found out and got jealous.”

  “Makes no sense—”

  “Makes perfect sense,” I explained. “Remember Selly and Cat dancing cheek to cheek at that barn dance? Maybe Selly jumped Dutch that morning, and Dutch killed him, not Amos. I need to know.”

  “I’ll get right on her.”

  “Yancy . . .”

  “I know. Don’t get on her at all.”

  CHAPTER 26

  * * *

  Beating on my door again, desperate and loud. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my .45. “Who is it?”

  “Open the damned door,” Maris said. “Fast.”

  I shuffled to the door barefooted and let her in. She slammed it shut and panted, out of breath, before she forced a smile. “Which gun are you going to use on me?”

  I followed her eyes down. I had jumped out of bed wearing a pair of sacred boxers, holey and revealing, and tried to cover myself. But it was too late. Her innocent eyes had already seen Mr. Happy.

  “We got no time for modesty,” she said. “Larin and Howe are on their way up here with Stauffer. They got an arrest warrant issued on you for Dale Goar’s murder.”

  I bent for my jeans. “You mind?”

  Maris turned around, and I slipped on my dungarees. “How’d you find out about the warrant? You’re not working for the sheriff’s department anymore.”

  “Melody tipped me off,” Maris answered, somewhere between the trousers and my shirt.

  “But she’s Stauffer’s secretary.”

  “She secretly hates him. Anyway, Oklahoma City PD got confirmation that the knife found sticking out of Goar’s chest was issued to the 4th Marines from ‘A GRATEFUL FRANCE FOR YOUR PART AT BELLEAU WOOD.’ And that the inscription, teufel hunden, was issued only to members of your regiment.”

  “You know that whoever tossed my room that night must have grabbed it.”

  “It ain’t me you got to convince.” Maris cracked the door a few inches and peeked out into the hallway.

  I jammed my auto into the holster just as Maris opened the door. “We gotta go.”

  The elevator rattled as it neared my floor, and we rushed out of the room. We had just ducked behind a corner wall when the lift doors opened. Johnny Notch pushed Ragwood ahead with the key, while Stauffer and the Oklahoma City dicks followed.

  Ragwood fumbled to slip the key into the lock when Notch pushed him aside. “We got no time for this,” he said, and planted a size fourteen against my room door. Wood splintered and the door fell inward just ahead of them busting in.

  Their loud cursing grew fainter as we made our way down the back steps and out into the parking lot. We ran for Maris’s Studebaker and climbed in. “Scoot down,” she said.

  Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to scoot into such a confined space. But something about being hauled in by officers wielding flat saps and an itch to use them caused me to grow smaller. As we drove away from the Kerfoot, I looked at Maris. Her grip white-knuckled on the wheel, she kept a constant eye out for anyone following us. I could do worse than have this rookie former deputy as a partner.

  “This is good as I can do on short notice.” Byron dropped a set of sheets and a blanket on the cot in his back storage room.

  “Won’t you need it?” I said, making a lame case for Byron not harboring me from the law. “Maybe you’ll—”

  “I never use the cot. Maris passes out here now and again when she cannot make it to her apartment. So if you feel someone sneak up on you during the ni
ght, do not roll over—it is just her.” He handed me a bar of Woodbury’s Facial Soap. “It is all I got.” I read the front of the box: “For Skin You Love to Touch.” He motioned to another room. “The tub is back there.”

  “This will do just fine.” I took off my gun and laid it on a pickle barrel while I fished my wallet out of my pocket.

  Byron held up his hand. “No need to give me anything for it. The Leonard Brothers will have this room whether you are in it or not. Besides”—he frowned—“it gives me a chance to keep an eye on you.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Really. I’m doing okay.”

  “But you still want a long pull from a jar of good whisky?”

  I nodded. Good whisky or rotgut, I’d love nothing else more right now than to sit with a jar of whisky. It was just as hard now as when I quit six years ago not to sample everything with alcohol I came in contact with, from horse liniment to cologne. Anything that would substitute for real booze.

  I opened my wallet back up. Byron started to protest again when I stopped him and handed him nine ones. “I left on a rail, so to speak, so I need some clothes. Some shaving gear. Think you could do some shopping for me?”

  He jotted my trouser and shirt size down. “Not like you can show your mug in public. I will go to the general store in a bit. Want a cup? I locked the place up.”

  “Love to,” I answered and holstered my gun before I followed him out into the café area.

  Two candles flickered on the counter. They cast odd shadows that seemed to move against the sheets covering the windows that made me jump. “Power outage?”

  “Relax,” Byron said as he poured a cup. “I closed early. I did not want anyone to know I was still here. Let alone hiding a wanted man.”

  I wrapped my hands around the hot mug, which seemed to steady the trembling.

  “The shakes will go away in a few days.” He nodded to the cup. “If you keep off the sauce.”

  “I will.” Even saying it made me shudder, knowing the hard days ahead until I got my urge under control. “What happened to Maris?”

  “She is finding out what Notch is up to.” Byron walked around the counter and started emptying ashtrays into a brown bag. “She did a brave thing to hustle you out of your room before Stauffer grabbed you.”

  “I owe her for it.”

  Byron folded the bag over when he was finished, and set it beside a sack of old grounds to be tossed later. “Stauffer does not like you. Which translates into Johnny Notch disliking you.” He sat on a stool. “Which means if they’d arrested you today, you might not have made it safely back to Oklahoma City to stand trial.”

  “I’ll get hold of Quinn in the morning,” I said. “There must be something he can do from his end . . .”

  “A smart man would not trust anyone right now. Even another US marshal.”

  A faint rap, but not faint enough that it didn’t cause me to clear leather, rattled the door, followed by two more light knocks. Byron laid his hand on my arm and lowered my gun. “I would not want you to plug my niece.”

  Maris used her key to enter. She looked outside a last time before she locked the door after her. She came around the counter and reached inside the ice box. “Buttermilk?”

  We both declined, and she poured a tall glass. She grabbed the salt shaker and sat beside us. “Sons-o-bitches are tearing the town apart looking for you. Notch dragged me from my apartment and grilled me for an hour. He thinks I know where you are. I convinced him you were pissed ’cause I ratted on you. I told him I’d be the last one you’d call on for help.”

  “At least he didn’t issue a shoot-on-sight order.”

  Maris rubbed her forehead. “He might as well have. He told his deputies and the city officers that you were armed and had threatened to shoot it out with anyone if you were caught. Son of a bitch.”

  “Then you better stay right here, Nels.” Byron leaned over and slid the bowl of cookies close. He began to nibble on them, while anything in my gut right beside strong coffee would cause me to retch. “If you do not come out of that back room any time soon, you might fool them . . .”

  “I’m afraid Nelson can’t do that.” Maris finished off a cookie and started on another. “Not if he wants to clear his name.”

  “You know something?” I asked.

  Maris wiped crumbs off the counter. “We got work to do tonight. I’m convinced Notch will lead us to Dutch.”

  “How did you figure that?” I asked.

  Maris grinned and spun her stool around to talk to Byron. “For some big federal marshal, he sure misses a lot.” She swiveled back to face me. “This is Tuesday. Remember?”

  I finally recalled this was Notch’s day off. “What’s he working on if he’s supposed to be off?”

  Maris leaned close and lowered her voice as if others besides Byron and me were in the room. “Melody said when the Oklahoma City detectives came down and asked for assistance in arresting you, Stauffer called in Johnny. But he’s still got to collect his weekly protection money from Dutch today.”

  “So even if Dutch is AWOL,” Byron said, matching Maris’s whisper, “Notch will know where he is and meet up with him?”

  It finally sank in. I needed Notch to find Dutch for us, and I needed Dutch to tell me where to find Amos. When I had him safely in shackles, then I could concentrate on clearing my name. I was confident that I could beat it out of one of the three as to who killed Dale Goar. I’d done more than my share of wall-to-wall interrogation since becoming a marshal and figured I’d put my talents to good use once again. “You got a plan?”

  “Naturally.” Maris jumped when the wind blew something against the plate-glass window hidden by the wet sheets. “Tonight after the search is called off—and it will be called off; there’s just so much manpower locally—I’ll come and pick you up in the alley out back. Notch has a suite at the El Reno—what he calls his love nest—and he’s sure to leave after dark.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “You can start by doing the dishes,” Byron said as he grabbed his jacket, “while I go out and buy you some clothes.”

  CHAPTER 27

  * * *

  Maris killed the headlights before she pulled to the curb. “That’s Johnny’s Caddy.” She pointed to a roadster sitting in front of a Reserved sign at the El Reno Hotel.

  “I guess protection money pays pretty good nowadays to afford a ride like that,” I said.

  We settled back under a hackberry tree, the limbs stripped by grasshoppers months ago, and waited for Notch to come out of his hotel. At an upstairs apartment across the street, Duke Ellington played “Dreamy Blues,” while somewhere unseen around the corner a bluegrass banjo belted out God-knows-what music these southerners liked. I reached into the bag Byron had sent along and grabbed a cookie. I passed the bag to Maris when I noticed her mouth drooping worse than the tree limbs. “Something wrong?”

  She pointed to the Waldo Permanent Wave Shop we parked next to. At ten o’clock, the building was as dark as the Jehovah’s Witness Hall next door. “Someday,” she said. “Someday, I’m going to go in there and get ladied-up. Just like the bankers’ wives and the businessmen’s wives and the preachers’ mistresses that go there.”

  I patted her on the hand. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re ladied-up just the way you are.”

  She smiled faintly but said nothing as we settled back to wait for Johnny Notch to leave.

  I scooted down in the seat to pull my trousers out of my butt. Byron must have written the wrong size down, because my pants were too tight and too short, and the shirt stopped an inch from my wrists. “What if he doesn’t leave?”

  “He’ll leave,” Maris answered.

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”

  Maris shielded her glowing cigarette with her hand and took a drag. “I’ve got a friend in the hotel . . .”

  “A special kind of friend, I’d wager.”

  She grinned.
“A very special friend. A night clerk I play . . . pool with now and again.” She slapped my arm. “And don’t even say pocket pool.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Anyway, this night-clerk friend says Johnny leaves on Tuesday nights like clockwork. Returns just before the sun rises.”

  I was about to question her interrogation methods of the poor night clerk when Notch walked out of the El Reno. He adjusted his tie as he looked both ways along the street, never spotting us in the dark shadows. Just before he climbed into his car I saw that he still wore two guns under his coat. Something to remember in the future.

  Maris ground gears as she double-clutched the Studebaker. She waited until Notch was a half block away before she pulled out after him with her lights off. He drove slowly, and I could imagine his head on a swivel as he looked for anyone following. He made several turns and doubled back, checking for a tail, and finally turned into an alley in back of a vacant building next to Cunningham Battery and Electric. Maris pulled past the alley and let me out of the car. I peered around the corner of the building two doors down.

  Notch scanned the area when he got out of his car before he stepped to the back door of the abandoned building and rapped twice. He waited a moment and rapped twice again. When the door opened, a dim hall light momentarily lit Dutch’s face. He let Notch inside and slammed the door.

  I started around the corner of the building when Maris stopped me. “Remember that first night at Vincent’s? You’d stand out here just as much as there, with your big, clumsy clodhoppers. You stay here while I injun-up on the place.”

  She didn’t wait for me to agree to her scheme but disappeared in the curtain of darkness. I couldn’t see where she went, and all I could do was sit and wait.

  I had smoked three cigarettes, getting nervous at not seeing Maris, when the door opened again and Notch stepped out. He tucked an envelope inside his jacket and fired the Caddy up.