The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  It took me about three hours driving slowly, to reach the town where I had grown up a hundred years or so ago, and I did not drive into it after reaching it. Instead, I drove around it on roads I remembered, and beyond it on another road until I saw ahead of me, quite a distance and on the left, the white house of the Erskines. It sat rather far back from the road at the end of a tree-lined drive, though not so far as memory had it, and it had once been considered the finest farm home in the county, if not the state. Now it did not seem one-half so grand, a different house than I had known before, as if the first had been razed and a second built in its place in an identical design, with identical detail, but on a reduced scale.

  I turned off before I reached the house, along the side of a country square. The road descended slowly for a quarter of a mile to a steel and timber bridge across a shallow ravine. There had been water in the ravine in the spring, and there would be water again when the fall rains came, but now the bed was dry except for intermittent shallow pools caught in rock. After crossing the bridge, I pulled off the road on a narrow turning into high weeds and brush. Getting out of the car, carrying the rifle case, I climbed a barbed-wire fence and followed the course of the ravine through a stand of timber, mostly oaks and maples and elms, and across a wide expanse of pasture in which a herd of Holsteins were having breakfast. Pretty soon I left the ravine and cut across two fields at an angle and up a long rise into a grove of walnut trees on the crest. I stopped among the trees and assembled and loaded the rifle, and then I lay down and looked down the slope on the other side of the crest to the house where Nora was supposed to be. There was a stone terrace on this side of the house at the rear. On the terrace was a round table and several brightly striped canvas chairs. Wide glass doors led off the terrace into the house. No one was visible from where I lay under the walnut trees about fifty yards away.

  After half an hour, I rolled over onto my back and lay looking up into the branches of the trees where the green walnuts hung, and I began to remember all the times I’d come here to gather the nuts when I was a kid, sometimes with Nora in the later years. We gathered them in burlap bags—gunny sacks, they were called—and later knocked the blackened husks off with a hammer. For a long time afterward, if we didn’t wear gloves, our hands were stained with the juice of the husks, a stain like the stain of nicotine, and there was no way to get this stain off except to wear it off, and you could always tell the ones who had gathered walnuts late in the fall by the stain on their hands that wore on toward winter.

  I could hear a cow bell jangling back in the pasture. I could hear a dog barking. I could hear the cawing of a crow above the fields, and I thought I could hear, closing my eyes, the slow beating of his black wings against the still air. Opening my eyes, I rolled over and looked down the slope again to the terrace, and there was Nora standing beside the table and looking up toward the walnut grove as if she could see me lying in its shadow. She was wearing a white blouse and brown shorts, and her face and arms and legs were golden in the morning light. Drawing the rifle up along my side into firing position, I had her heart in my sights in a second, and I had a notion that it was a golden heart pumping golden blood.

  She must have stood there for a full minute without moving, maybe longer, and then she turned and walked across the terrace and through the glass doors into the house, and I lowered my face slowly into the sweet green grass. I could still hear the bell and the dog and the crow, and I could hear the voice of Corey McDown saying that Mark Sanders was just a guy with kinks.

  After a while I stood up and went back across the fields to the ravine and along the ravine through the pasture and the woods to the car. Driving to the city, I thought about what I had better do, and where I had better go, and how long it would take to learn to live comfortably with a constant threat, and I decided, although there was probably no hurry, that I might as well get my affairs in order and get somewhere a long way off as soon as possible.

  SHE ASKED FOR IT

  Originally published in Manhunt, Aug. 1960.

  It was about six o’clock of a long summer evening, and Lard Lavino had just brought the suppers over from his cafe. You probably know how it is with meals in a lot of county jails. The sheriff gets an allotment for feeding the prisoners, so much per meal, and if he’s got an economical wife to prepare them he can usually make a little gravy for himself, honest graft, and no one goes hungry in the process. I don’t happen to have a wife, being a bachelor, and so I had this arrangement with Lard to furnish the meals. On paper he charged me exactly the allowance, payable the first of the month, but we had a little kickback understanding between us, not on paper, and it worked out so that neither of us got rich but both of us made a little.

  Sometimes Lard sent the meals over, and sometimes he brought them himself. This evening was one of the times he brought them himself. There were only half a dozen of them, guests of the jail being mighty few at the time, and I was thinking I ought to get off my tail and gather in a few vagrants and minor offenders to build up the food allowance for the month, but it had been too damn hot, and still was, to do a lot of things a man would normally do for his own profit. It made me feel even hotter to look at Lard. He weighs about three hundred pounds, just short of it, and the grease was seeping out of his pores to soak his shirt and make a high sheen on his fat, swarthy face.

  “It’s hot,” he said. “God Almighty, Colby, it’s hot!”

  “Sure is,” I said. “You bring a plate for me?”

  “Well, you didn’t say if you wanted one, but I brought it just in case.”

  “Good for you, Lard. Saves me a walk over to the cafe. What’s it tonight?”

  “It’s Thursday, Colby. You know what it is Thursdays.”

  “Oh, sure. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and cream gravy. Lard, why the hell don’t you shift the menu around now and then? Chicken fried steak on Wednesday, say, and salmon patties on Thursday.”

  “What the hell difference does it make if you eat steak on Wednesday or Thursday?”

  “Just a thought, Lard. Just something for a change.”

  “Nuts. You want me to peddle the trays?”

  “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.”

  “Well, you better do it right away. Cream gravy ain’t worth a damn if it gets cold, you know. I’ll send back in about an hour for the things.”

  He went out, and I distributed the trays before the cream gravy got cold. It didn’t take long because, like I said, there weren’t many guests—one chicken thief, two habitual violators of the peace, a pair of drunken drivers with ten days each, and a farm laborer doing a year minus GCT for sticking his brother-in-law with a pitch fork. The brother-in-law, though perforated, didn’t die.

  After serving the six, I came back to my desk and started in on my own plate. The chicken fried steak wasn’t bad, if you had a sharp knife and your own teeth, but there were lumps in the mashed potatoes, and the cream gravy wasn’t worth a damn, as it turned out, hot or cold or luke warm, which is what it actually was. I was working up an appropriate reprimand for my partner in petty graft when the patrol car stopped out front and Rudy Squires, one of my deputies, came loping up the long brick walk from the street and into the office. Rudy watches Wyatt Earp and Matt Dillon and does the best he can, but he has a big handicap, and the handicap is, he’s stupid. He’s also my cousin, however, and I make allowances for him. This afternoon he’d gone out into the county on business with Virgil Carpenter, another deputy, but now, coming back, he was alone.

  “Where’s Virgil?” I said.

  “He’s out at Crawley Bratton’s place,” Rudy said.

  “What’s he doing out there?”

  “Crawley’s got a big fire out in a field near the creek behind his house. It’s a haystack.”

  “The hell it is!”

  “That’s right. Virg and me were driving b
ack along the road and saw this fire, so we stopped in Crawley’s drive and went down there. Crawley was there with a couple farmers and three or four kids from the other side of the creek, but there wasn’t much anyone could do unless we’d got some buckets and carried water from the creek. Hell, Colby, you can’t put out a burning haystack with a few buckets of water you’d have to carry thirty yards from a creek.”

  “Who said you could?”

  “Nobody said it, Colby. I was just explaining why we couldn’t put out the fire.”

  “That’s fine, Rudy. I appreciate your explaining these difficult things to me. Now maybe you’d be good enough to explain why the hell a deputy sheriff has to patrol a lousy burning haystack.”

  “We just stopped to see if there was anything we could do, Colby.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Virgil.”

  “Why he stayed out there, you mean?”

  “Now you’re getting it, Rudy. Why did Virgil stay out there?”

  “I was coming to that, Colby. It turned out there was a body in the fire. We’d been smelling something and wondering what it was, and it turned out to be this body. Soon as the smoke had thinned and the fire had burned down some, we could see it lying in there. The way I figure it, someone must have put it in there and then started the fire. I don’t figure it likely that anyone would just go to sleep on a haystack and burn to death without ever waking up and getting the hell out of it. Do you, Colby?”

  “No, I don’t, Rudy. That’s good thinking. Now here’s a minor point I wish you’d concentrate on. Did you identify the body? I mean, do you know whose it is?”

  “Well, you know what happens to something in a fire, Colby. It gets burned up pretty much. I couldn’t swear who it is, and neither could Virg, but it’s a woman, anyhow, and Crawley Bratton says it’s his wife Faye.”

  “What makes him think so?”

  A guy ought to know his own wife better than anyone else, Colby. That’s what I figure. Soon as we saw her in the fire, Virg rolled her out with a fork one of the farmers had with him, and Crawley got a close look before it made him sick and he had to quit looking. He says it’s Faye, all right. Even if he hadn’t known her anyhow, he says, he’d have known her from the little chain she wore around her left ankle. Crawley’s all busted up about it.”

  “Is Faye missing?”

  “Now, Colby, if she’s dead she’s bound to be missing. What I mean is, she ain’t around the same as the rest of us.”

  “That’s true, Rudy. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself. Well, I better get on out there to Crawley’s place, I guess. You stay here and look after the mail, and if Lard Lavino comes back for the supper things, you tell him I said to get the God-damn lumps out of the mashed potatoes next time.”

  “Well, that reminds me, Colby. I ain’t had any supper myself, and I’m pretty hungry. Do you mind if I finish yours?”

  On my plate, the glob of mashed potatoes, smeared with cold cream gravy, looked like something that had already been eaten. I contained a belch and nodded. It was incredible, I thought, what could sometimes happen to a man in the way of cousins.

  “Help yourself,” I said. “Watch your bridgework on that steak.”

  In the patrol car, I drove west to Crawley Bratton’s place, about three miles out of town. My watch said almost seven when I got there. Light was draining slowly out of the long dusk, but it would be another hour before the dusk deepened into night. Behind Crawley’s house and barn, far back in a field against the black line of timber along the creek, I could see a small group of men standing in the red glow of what was left of the haystack. Leaving the patrol car in the barnyard, I walked down a long lane between parallel fences of barbed wire and across a pasture into the field, lying fallow, in which the stack had stood.

  As I came nearer, I began to pick up the smell, getting stronger and stronger, of charred flesh. Human flesh. Flesh, if it was truly Faye Bratton’s, that would be remembered, if briefly, by more men than Crawley Bratton cared to think about. Virg Carpenter detached himself from the group in the red glow and walked a few steps into the shadows to meet me. Virg was a big guy, hanging over his belt, with a taste for purple shirts and black string ties. He was a pretty good deputy, all in all, and what he wanted more than anything else was to be a pretty good sheriff. I didn’t have any objections, particularly, after I was through with the office.

  “We got something big this time, Colby,” he said.

  “Rudy said it’s Fay Bratton,” I said.

  “That’s who it is. What’s left of her.”

  “You sure of it?”

  “Crawley says so. Crawley ought to know. There’s one of these little chains around her left ankle. I remember seeing it lots of times myself.”

  “Where’s Crawley now?”

  “Up at the house. He was all busted up, Colby. I didn’t think it would do any harm to let him go up there.”

  “I didn’t see any light in the house when I came by.”

  “Maybe he likes to sit in the dark.”

  “Maybe. You called the coroner?”

  “I told Crawley to call from the house.”

  “Good. It’s just routine, anyhow. The bastard can’t diagnose anything but rigor mortis. Where’s the body?”

  “Over there on the ground. Just follow your nose. We got a piece of canvas out of Crawley’s barn to cover her with.”

  I followed my nose to a dark heap at the edge of a red perimeter. Pulling the canvas back at one end, I stared for a moment at a black blister that might have been the face of Faye Bratton. Reversing ends, I looked at the ankle chain. Like Virg, I had noticed it on her before. Like Virg, like Crawley, like Tom and Dick and Harry. Lots of men had noticed lots of things about Faye. She’d had her share of playing in the hay, so to speak, and now she’d burned in it. Faye in the hay. An appropriate ending after all. A kind of epitaph.

  One of seven, the sixth of the litter, an earthy beauty from the time of her tender years, she might have exploited herself to her own great advantage if only she’d had the brains to develop an imagination and a vision. Instead, she had married Crawley Bratton, or Crawley’s half-section of rich land, when she was eighteen and Crawley was twenty-six. To her, fresh off the thin soil of the north part of the county, straying south with hot eyes and swivel hips, Crawley’s fine farm and solid bank account had probably seemed like fabulous spoils. With a little excitement on the side, a man here and a man there, even Crawley himself could be accepted as a necessary part of a bargain. As for Crawley, ordinarily a sharp guy in any kind of deal, it was simply a matter of glands over brains. They had been married about four years ago, and now here they were at the end of their time, a cinder lying in a fallow field and a man alone in an unlighted house.

  “It’s Faye, all right,” I said, standing. “I’d better go up and talk to Crawley. Get these other guys out of here, Virg. Send them home. You wait for the coroner. He’ll probably want you to help him decide if she’s dead.”

  “Sure, Colby. We ought to have a real doctor, instead of some guy just after a political plum.”

  “Well, don’t complain, Virg. We got an undertaker, and that’s next best thing. Even better, maybe, come to think of it. After a doctor says a guy’s dead, he’s finished. There’s still something left for an undertaker to do. Puts it all in one neat little package.”

  “Something left for us to do, too, Colby. You got any ideas?”

  “Not yet. Nothing to speak of.”

  “She was a prowler, Colby. You know that. Kept old Crawley’s guts in the sauce pan all the time. Lots of guys might have done it for one reason or another.”

  “Sure, sure. I know that. What I can’t figure is all this hocus pocus here. Why this crazy bonfire?”

  “Hell, Colby, that seems plain
enough.”

  “Does it? Tell me why.”

  “Well, damn it, to get rid of the body. At least burn it enough so it maybe couldn’t be recognized.”

  “You sound like Rudy now.”

  “Rudy? How like Rudy?”

  “Stupid.”

  I couldn’t see Virg’s face in the dusk, not clearly, but I knew it was getting about the same color as his shirt. Purple, that is. Virg was like that when you gouged him a little. He’d bloat and turn purple. Someday he’ll probably drop dead of apoplexy or something.

  “I got a right to my opinion,” he said.

  “Sure you have,” I said. “You got a right to be as stupid as you please on your own time, but you got no right to be stupid on county time. Not for pay.”

  “You’re so damn smart, Colby, suppose you tell me what’s stupid about it.”

  “I’ll try. First place, a hay fire isn’t hot enough to destroy a body. There’d be lots of things left to identify. Second place, the fire could be seen right away from two, three farmhouses. It’d just attract attention to the body instead of getting rid of it. Third place, you got a charred body, you got a certain woman missing. Any idiot could put the two together.”

  “Just the same, Colby, someone put the body in the haystack and set the fire. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure it. I told you I couldn’t.”