The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  “So he did it after all!” she said.

  “He says not.”

  “Did you expect him to confess?”

  “Sometimes killers do. I guess I couldn’t have any such good luck as that, though.”

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “Tonight. Little more than an hour ago.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I’m not sure. She was strangled, I think.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean, how did it happen that you talked to him.”

  “That’s routine, Dolly. If a wife’s killed, you naturally talk to the husband.”

  “Crawley? My God, Colby, I wasn’t thinking of Crawley.”

  “No? It seems to me, under the circumstances, that Crawley would be a natural one to think of. Who did you have in mind?”

  “Fergus Cass.”

  It was a name I hadn’t expected, and it took me a while to adjust. In the few seconds of adjustment, I tried to think of what I knew about Fergus Cass, and what I knew was practically nothing. He’d come into the county only about six months before, and he’d been living with an aunt and uncle on their farm across the creek from Crawley’s place, about a mile from house to house. He was from St. Louis, as I remembered, and there had been a rumor circulated at the time of his coming that he’d been sick, tuberculosis or something like that, and had spent some time in a sanitarium somewhere before coming to the country for rest and fresh air. This seemed a reasonable explanation, for he didn’t do anything in the way of work that anyone had ever noticed. I’d seen him in town a number of times, and once or twice tramping through the fields in the country carrying a rough hand-cut walking stick. He was a dark, lean man, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, with heavy black hair and eyes so deeply brown that they too looked black. There was a kind of unusual grace in the way he moved and held his head. He didn’t really look as if he’d ever been seriously sick, but of course you can’t always tell about such things from appearances.

  “I never thought of Fergus Cass,” I said. “Tell me about him. Him and Faye, I mean.”

  “They had something going. It’s been going four, five months, Colby. Since soon after Fergus came here to stay.”

  “My understanding is, Faye almost always had something going. Isn’t that right?”

  “Oh, sure. Faye always had to have something going with a man, but most of the time it didn’t amount to much. This was different. Bigger. Because of Fergus, the kind of guy he is. I told Faye she’d better leave him alone, but you know how she was. She wouldn’t listen.”

  “You said the kind of guy Fergus is. What kind is he?”

  “It’s hard to say, Colby. Nothing he’s done. Nothing he’s said. I guess it’s just the feeling he gives you, and the way he looks sometimes. You ever seen his eyes when something happens he doesn’t like? They get a kind of glaze on them. It’s like he’s gone suddenly blind. He’s so damn intense, Colby, that’s what he is.”

  “I’ve never noticed. Maybe I haven’t looked into his eyes as often as you and Faye. Anyhow, it’s pretty thin. You can’t condemn a man for the look of his eyes.”

  “That’s not all, Colby. Like I said, they’ve had this thing going for months. They used to meet down by the creek between Faye’s place and the Cass’s, but lately, the last two or three weeks, Faye’s been trying to break it up. I think she was getting a little scared or something. Fergus wanted her to leave Crawley and go back to St. Louis with him, but Faye wouldn’t go, and Fergus kept staying on and on, forcing her to meet him and trying to change her mind. He was supposed to go back a month ago, Faye told me, but he kept staying on.”

  “Why didn’t Faye go? She didn’t give a damn for Crawley, that’s plain enough, and it seems to me it should have suited her fine to go running off to St. Louis with a good-looking guy like Fergus Cass.”

  “Hell, Colby, good-looking guys are a dime a dozen, from St. Louis or anywhere else. You got any idea what Crawley Bratton’s worth?”

  “I never gave it much thought. Quite a bundle, come to think of it.”

  “It comes to six figures, at least.”

  “Well, that’s something to take care of. It’s funny Faye took so many chances with it.”

  “She couldn’t help taking chances. That was Faye for you. But she wasn’t going to throw it all away deliberately just for a good-looking nothing from a big town. He was all right to have a thing with, a big thing, but he was intended to be strictly temporary.”

  “The same as others who could be named.”

  “Name them if you want. What does it get you?”

  “I don’t want to. Not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Hobby Langerham said Faye came to see you this afternoon. What did she want?”

  “Nothing special. I was busy, and she didn’t stay. She just asked how about dinner and a movie tonight, and she left.”

  “She say where she was going?”

  “No.”

  “Anything about meeting Fergus Cass down by the creek where you said they met?”

  “No.”

  “All right, Dolly. You’ve been a help. Thanks.”

  “Sure. Make me a deputy.”

  She didn’t get up to show me out. At the door, I looked back for a moment, and I thought she looked scared. Maybe she was seeing Fergus Cass staring at her with black eyes that had the glaze of blindness on them. I went on down to the street and back to the patrol car in front of the Bonny. In the car, I drove out of town to the Cass place. There was a light in the front room and in the kitchen at the rear. I went around back and knocked on the door, and pretty soon Elmo Cass, the uncle, came out of the living room and across the kitchen in his sock feet.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “Colby Adams,” I said.

  He opened the screen door and peered out at me. He was a big man with a shock of gray hair and a bushel of eyebrows. The eyebrows made him look fierce, and it was reported that he sometimes was. He didn’t invite me in.

  “What you want, Colby?”

  “I’d like to talk to Fergus, Elmo.”

  “What about?”

  “I said to Fergus, Elmo. If you want to listen, you can.”

  “If it’s about that Bratton slut, Fergus doesn’t know anything. You’re wasting your time.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you at the fire, Elmo.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t. I don’t go running across the fields to watch every little fire that starts up.”

  “Who told you about Faye Bratton being in that stack? Was it Fergus?”

  “Fergus ain’t here. He drove off in the car about five. He hasn’t been back.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “I don’t know. Fergus ain’t much of one for confiding.”

  “You expecting him back soon?”

  “I’m not expecting him any time in particular. Fergus goes and comes as he pleases. Sometimes he’s late.”

  “I think I’ll wait around for him, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He closed the screen door and hooked it on the inside. If I wanted to wait, I could wait on the outside. I went back to the patrol car and got in and waited. About ten, the lights went out downstairs in the house, and one came on upstairs. About ten-fifteen, the light upstairs went out. I waited till midnight and gave up. If Fergus was back in the morning, I could talk to him then. If he wasn’t, I could get a warrant and start looking for him. I drove back to the jail, and Rudy was still waiting in the office when I got there.

  “How’d it go, Colby?” he said.

  “I’m tired, Rudy,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “I told Lard about the lumps in the mashed potatoes.”

  “Good for you,
Rudy. What’d he say?”

  “He said for you to go to hell.”

  Instead, I went to bed on a cot in the next room. It was hot in there, and I didn’t sleep well.

  CHAPTER 3.

  The next morning I drove back to Crawley’s place. I didn’t stop at the house. Passing the barn, I drove on down the wide lane to the pasture and left the car at the gate. Crossing the pasture on foot, I crawled over the fence on the far side and walked on across the fallow field to the scorched patch of earth where the haystack had stood. I didn’t know what I was looking for, nothing special in mind, but the fire bothered me, and I couldn’t help thinking about it. What bothered me was why the hell it had happened. It just didn’t make any kind of sense that I could see.

  After poking around for a couple of minutes, I found something. It was lying inside the blackened area, near the outer edge, and it was still warm to the touch when I picked it up. Nothing much, really. Just a small, flat can with a hinged lid. The paint was burned off the outside, but it was easy enough to identify anyhow, for I had seen thousands like it and had emptied at least a thousand myself in my time. A tobacco can, I mean. Probably Prince Albert. Maybe Velvet. I forced the narrow lid open and saw that the can still contained tobacco. It had not, then, been discarded. It had been dropped accidentally in the hay, which meant that maybe someone had been smoking in the hay, which meant that maybe the hay had been accidentally set on fire. Just maybe, of course. Just guessing. But it was an explanation that made sense. It was the only one I had been able to think of that did. There was something about it, to tell the truth, that tickled my fancy as well as my reason.

  How had it happened, approximately? Well, say that someone had killed Faye Bratton, which someone had. That much was no guessing. Say the killer, needing to make a quick disposition of the body, had buried it in the hay until night came to give him time and cover to do something more adequate and permanent about it. Something like digging a hole, maybe. Then, say, someone had wandered along and stopped to lie down and rest and smoke a roll-your-own and maybe doze off in the sun with the smoke burning dangerously between his fingers, and all the while the body was there beneath him in the hay. There was a kind of grim comedy in it, the crazy disruption of a desperate plan by pure chance in the form of someone dumb enough to smoke a cigarette while lying on a haystack. And who might have been along this way late yesterday afternoon who was dumb enough? I could think of several, actually, but I began to think of one in particular. He had probably been along yesterday, as he had probably been the day before and would be today, following the course of the winding creek. Turning away from the black patch of earth, I went on across the field and over a fence and into the brush and timber along the creek. I sat down on the bank of the creek to wait a while before going on up the back way to the Cass place.

  I was waiting for a kid named Snuffy Cleaker, but you could just as well have called him Snuffy Jukes or Snuffy Kallikak. He was that kind of kid, I mean, from that kind of family. As a matter of fact, he didn’t really have any family, except his old man, who lived in a shack on the west side of town and hauled a little trash and garbage now and then when he needed the price of a bottle. Snuffy lived there with the old man off and on, but you could never count on finding him there, especially in the warm months, because most of the time he was out prowling the countryside, following the creek, living on catfish and stolen chickens and vegetables and melons, sleeping in haystacks or beside hedge rows or wherever he got tired and dropped. Cherokee County’s Huck Finn. When he was a few years younger, we tried to keep him in school according to the law, but he was too stupid to learn, and we gave up before the law said we ought to. He was now about fifteen, maybe sixteen. Most people considered him harmless.

  I didn’t really expect him to oblige me by coming along just when I wanted him to, but luck was with me for a change, and damned if he didn’t. I heard him in the brush before I saw him, and I got up quietly and slipped out of sight behind a tree. He came ambling leisurely into sight, cutting at the brush with a stick he’d cut, and when he came abreast of the tree, I jumped out and grabbed him. He yowled like a scared cat and tried to jerk away.

  “Got you, you little son of a bitch,” I said. “Stop squirming!”

  He went limp and quiet all of a sudden, and I could see that he was scared, all right. His eyes skittered wildly, refusing to look at me, and he kept making through his long nose the exaggerated snuffing sound that had given him his name. Probably he had another name, duly recorded in the courthouse, but no one could ever think of it.

  “Lemme go,” he said. “I ain’t doing anything.”

  “Sure you’re not, Snuffy. You’ve never been known to do anything except smoke and chew and steal and everything else a kid’s got no business doing. Where you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Sure you are, Snuffy. You’re going to reform school, that’s where you’re going. I’ve got a belly full of complaints about you prowling and stealing and making a general damn nuisance of yourself.”

  “I ain’t done anything to be sent to reform school for.”

  “Is that so? Wouldn’t you say it was something to burn Crawley Bratton’s haystack down?”

  It was still a guess, nothing more, but I knew it was true the instant I said it, and it was in the same instant that I was aware for the first time of the dirty rag he had wrapped around his right hand. Under the rag, I was sure, was seared and blistered flesh. He jerked the hand behind his back and tried again to pull away and run. He wasn’t a strong kid, though, skinny and undersized. I held him easily.

  “What’s the matter with your hand, Snuffy?” I said. “Don’t you know any better than to try to beat out a flame with your bare palm?”

  “I didn’t aim to burn it down,” he said. “It was an accident.”

  “That’s more like it. If you want to stay out of reform school, you’d better tell me the exact truth.”

  “I was having a smoke, that’s all. Just stretched out there in the hay having a smoke and thinking about staying the night. I dozed off, I guess, and pretty soon I woke up with the fire blazing up beside me. I didn’t try to beat it out, the way you said. I got more sense than that. The fire just burned my hand, and I guess that’s why I woke when I did. If I hadn’t, I might have burned to death. All I did afterward was cut and run. I went into town and stayed the night with my old man.”

  “It was a damn good thing for you that you woke when you did, Snuffy. No question about that. If you hadn’t, we might have had two bodies in the fire. Yours and Mrs. Bratton’s.”

  “I don’t know anything about Mrs. Bratton. I heard in town that she was burned in the fire, but I don’t know anything about her.”

  “That’s what you say. To me, it’s beginning to look different. Maybe you met Mrs. Bratton down here and got fresh with her. Maybe you decided to kill her to keep her from telling what you did to her. Then maybe you decided to put her body in the stack and burn it up. It’s just what a dumb, no-good kid like you might do.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything like that, Mr. Adams! Honest to God, I wouldn’t!”

  “I’m not so sure. Anyhow, it looks pretty bad, far as you’re concerned. Lots of folks around here have been thinking you might get dangerous, once you got a little age on you. It’s beginning to look like you might not go to reform school after all, Snuffy. It’s beginning to look like you might go straight to the penitentiary for all the rest of your life.”

  He was a stupid kid and plenty scared. His eyes were wild and his teeth were chattering. Truth was, I was ashamed of myself for saying those things, which I didn’t believe, but I thought they might bring something out, and they did.

  “Don’t say such things about me, Mr. Adams,” he said. “Please don’t say such things. You quit saying such things, I’ll tell you something you might like to know.” />
  “You tell me, and I’ll see. Chances are you’re fixing to tell a lot of lies to get yourself out of trouble.”

  “I’ll tell the truth, Mr. Adams. I swear to God I will!”

  “Never mind the swearing. Just tell me.”

  “It was that Fergus Cass who did it. Killed Mrs. Bratton, I mean. I know he did.”

  “There you go, Snuffy. Telling a damn lie already. Why would Fergus want to kill Mrs. Bratton?”

  He licked his lips, and a sly expression came into his eyes and reminded me that even a stupid kid like Snuffy Cleaker can develop a kind of shrewdness within his limitations.

  “They were carrying on with each other,” he said. “I’ve seen them more than once down here by the creek.”

  “You mean you spied on them.”

  “Well, I just happened to see them the first time, quite a while ago, and I couldn’t help it if they kept meeting here and I happened to come along sometimes when they were together.”

  “That’s right, Snuffy. You couldn’t help it. You couldn’t help it if you came sneaking along through the brush. You’re nothing but a nasty little Peeping Tom, but you can’t help it any more than you can help being a thief, because that’s just what you naturally are. Never mind that, though. If Mrs. Bratton and Fergus Cass liked each other well enough to meet down here, what makes you think he killed her? Doesn’t seem to me it would work out that way at all.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Adams. Lately they haven’t been getting along so good. I heard them have a couple of fierce fights, him calling her a lot of dirty names and threatening to kill her, and then yesterday afternoon when I come along they were up the creek from here about fifty feet, under the trees where the creek bends, and he hit her in the face because of something she said, and she started to run, but he ran after her and caught her and began choking her.”