Early's Fall

by Jerry Peterson

  The Last Search

  Early, in work jeans, a denim jacket, and leather gloves stained with creosote, wrestled a railroad tie to the edge of a hole. He dropped an end in and held the tie upright—straight, a new corner post for the fence that fronted on the county road—while Walter Estes shoveled dirt in around the tie. They changed places, and Early grabbed up a spud bar. With the round, hammer-like end, he tamped the dirt tight, ramming and slamming the spud bar down until the dirt around the tie became as hard as the flinty limestone that lay none too deep beneath the soil.

  Early tossed the spud aside. He went after another tie—for a bracing post—but before he got it up on its end, a Jeep pulled off into the ditch, Hutch Tolliver in his Big-brim Alpine Stetson behind the steering wheel and the county attorney—Carl Wieland—in the passenger seat.

  “Hutch, Carl,” Early said. He touched the brim of his cattleman's hat in a light salute.

  Tolliver leaned on the steering wheel. “Chief, we got us a damn mess of trouble.”

  “How's that?” Early asked as he stripped off his gloves and ambled over.

  “We're gonna lose the trial against Bill Smitts.”

  Wieland entered the conversation, working his lone hand like a boxer jabbing at an opponent. “The jury's not buying our case. I can see it in their eyes. We got no witnesses. We got no confession. We got no weapon.”

  “Bill's dad?” Early asked.

  “I think some would like to believe him, but that woman says Bill was with her all night and the next morning.”

  “Anyone see Bill there?”

  “No.”

  “His car?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone see her out in the morning with or without Bill?”

  “Not that Hutch could find.”

  “It's a standoff, isn't it?”

  “We need that goddamn weapon, Cactus.”

  “Appears so. Well, I've had a thought or two about that. . . . Walter,” Early said, turning to Estes, “hate to leave you on your own, but I'm going to have to go for a ride with these fellas.”

  “I can manage the bracing. You go on.”

  Early moved alongside the Jeep. He stepped up on a rear tire and on over, into the backseat. After he settled himself, he slapped Tolliver's shoulder and waved ahead.

  “Where to?” Tolliver asked as he rolled the Jeep up onto the county road.

  “Bill's place. I've been thinking that maybe we didn't look everywhere we were supposed to.”

  Tolliver shifted into second. “Where could we have missed?”

  “Did we look up top in Bill's shop or for any loose floorboards?”

  “We stamped all around that floor.”

  “But up top?”

  “I don't know. I didn't go up there.”

  “I didn't either.”

  “I thought you had.”

  Wieland twisted around to Early. “What the hell kind of searchers are you men, anyway?”

  “Apparently, not too good.”

  A black Chevy coupe came over a rise in the approaching lane. Tolliver tapped his horn and, as the two vehicles passed, Early waved for the driver—Mose Dickerson—to turn around and follow.

  “You want me to radio for some more help out here?” Tolliver asked.

  Early squeezed the county attorney's shoulder. “We got Carl to supervise. We won't miss anything this time.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Wieland said, “you don't find that damn axe, now you're going to blame it on me, right?”

  “Aww, you fret too much.”

  “Cactus?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How you getting along without Thelma? I'm not being nosey, but people around the courthouse ask and they really care.”

  “It's not too bad as long as I keep busy, and I got our little girl, fussy little one. But I tell you, when I go to bed at night and there's no one lying next to me, it's hard.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  Early wiped at the corner of his eye.

  Tolliver guided his Jeep around the ruts where the road curved away toward high ground and the Smitts's residence, the place on the horizon appearing more lonely and abandoned since Early had been there last, almost a month ago, the front window, partially shot out, fully gone now. Kids probably or hoboes, Early guessed.

  Tolliver turned off onto the driveway, Dickerson behind him, the vehicles parading up and around to the barn behind.

  “What are we doin'?” Dickerson asked as he hop-stepped away from his car.

  Early, out of the Jeep, put an arm around the constable's shoulders, and they walked on together. “Look a few places for that axe we didn't look before.”

  “Like where?”

  Tolliver rolled the door open, and all went on inside, the shop building musty from having been closed too long.

  Early gestured toward a ladder that led up to a loft. “Like up there.”

  Tolliver scurried up the ladder.

  “And if it isn't up there?” Dickerson asked.

  “Did you look in the stove?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you look up the stovepipe?”

  “Now who's gonna put an axe up a stovepipe?”

  “Did you look?”

  “Chief,” Tolliver called from the loft.

  “Yeah?”

  “He's got some lumber stacked up here, darn little of it, and that's all.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “Spider webs count for anything? . . .Yeesh.”

  “What?”

  “Snake shed its skin up here, and here's another one.”

  “Stovepipe next?” Dickerson asked.

  “Yup.”

  The two lawmen went over to the wood stove in the center of the shop. Early wrapped his arms around the pipe. He lifted and brought the pipe up off the stove and back.

  “And you want me to look up there, don'tcha?” Dickerson said.

  “Well, I can't.”

  “This is some kinda Laurel and Hardy thing, idn't it? I look up there and all the soot falls down in my face.” Dickerson slapped the pipe. Soot swooshed down, hit the floor, and billowed back into the air, setting off a racket of hacking and coughing from Early and the others, Wieland scuttling for the door.

  “Least ways,” Dickerson said, spitting to the side, “now we know nothing but soot was up there.”

  Early eased the pipe back onto the stove. He stepped back, waving soot from the air. From the corner of the shop, he helped himself to a long measuring stick. Early leaned on it, one hand over the other, thinking.

  “You know, this is nuts,” he said. “I have this habit, when I'm sitting in the outhouse, of writing notes to myself about whatever's on my mind. This morning, doggone it, I dropped my pencil down through one of the holes. You don't suppose Bill could have dropped that axe down the septic tank?”

  Tolliver, down from the shop's attic, nudged Early. “Chief, you don't by accident drop something in a septic tank. You'd throw it in there. It'd be awful deliberate.”

  “That's what I mean. And of all the places to hide something, that's the one we'd never think to look.”

  “You saying we got to?”

  “Yup. Hey, if I'm wrong, I'll buy you supper.” Early thumbed at a spud bar in a corner and fishing waders hanging from a nail. “Grab them and bring them along.”

  Soot covered, he shambled off, out of the shop and on toward the house, Tolliver a couple paces behind, and Dickerson limping after them. Wieland, brushing soot from his suit, joined the line of march.

  Fifteen feet short of the kitchen, Early stopped. He pointed down at a square of concrete set in the sod and motioned for Tolliver to slip the spud bar through the iron handle sticking up from the concrete. Early grabbed one end of the bar and Tolliver the other, and together they horsed the concrete aside.

  Fumes roiled out of the hole, wrinkling Wieland's nose. “Smells like—”

  “Don't say it,” Early said. “That's what it is. You city types with your sewers, you
don't know the joys of bucketing out one of these things.”

  He dropped the end of the measuring stick in, the stick sliding through his hand until it struck bottom. “These suckers are about what, eight-feet deep? Let's see how much muck we got in here.” Early pulled the stick up hand-over-hand until the wet showed—two and a half feet by the marks on the stick.

  He dropped it back down and probed with it, Dickerson on one knee, peering in, Tolliver standing, watching over Early's shoulder, and Wieland by himself, a ways off, kicking at the sod.

  “Got something here,” Early said, “a couple, maybe three inches thick.”

  He probed to one side of his strike, then the other. “Whatever it is, it's not very wide . . . Oops, here's something, got some give to it . . . and it's wide, really wide.”

  “It's shit, that's what it is,” Wieland said.

  “Carl!” Early rolled back on his haunches. He gestured at the hole. “If that's the axe down there, you want it, don't you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you pull on those waders, and we'll lower you down in, and you can get it.”

  “Hey hey hey, you're the one who said I was here to supervise.”

  “You don't make life easy for us, Carl.” Early reached down. He snapped off three stems of grass and placed them in his fist, an end of each out. He held his fist over to Dickerson. “Short straw goes in.”

  Dickerson drew out a grass, then Tolliver. Early opened his fist, revealing his, and each looked from one stem of grass to the other.

  Tolliver pitched his into the hole and went for the waders. “Sure hope I get a raise for this,” he said.

  Early winked at Dickerson. “Maybe we can get it out of Carl's budget.”

  Tolliver kicked off his boots. He stepped, a leg at a time, into the waders and pulled the straps up over his shoulders. He fiddled with the adjustment buckles until he had the straps long enough that he could stand straight. Tolliver then sat on the edge of the hole, his feet inside. He hauled off his big-brimmed hat and made a business of presenting it to Early. “I'm not wearing this down there.”

  “I wouldn't either, Hutchy.”

  Tolliver lowered himself down, down until he hung by his fingers, his legs to his knees in the liquid muck. And he let go, dropping the last inches.

  Early leaned out over the hole. “How is it down there?”

  “Not where I'd want to spend a vacation.”

  “You got a vacation coming?”

  “Vacation, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's,” Tolliver said as he worked the toe of his wader around the bottom, feeling, feeling. “Got something.”

  He glanced up to Early.

  “Well, you're gonna have to stick your hand down there to get it.”

  “Aww, cripes.” Tolliver unbuttoned the cuff of his sleeve. He pushed it to his shoulder and plunged his hand into the sludge. When Tolliver's hand came up, it clutched what appeared, in the gloom inside the septic tank, to be a sack, water spilling from it. Tolliver held the sack up to Early who hauled it out.

  He dropped the soppy, stinking mass in the grass and, with his pocketknife, cut through the sacking. Early laid it open. “Here's your axe, Carl.”

  He held the filthy weapon up.

  “Cactus, his lawyer's going to say anybody could have thrown it in there. Any chance for fingerprints?”

  “In all this? We're not miracle workers.”

  A larger object—flat—came up through the hole. “Got it, Chief?” Tolliver asked.

  Early swiveled back. He grasped the object and brought it out, the thing longer by a foot than it was wide, the thickness about three inches. He raked a hand down the face of it, swiping off the muck as Tolliver hefted himself up and out of the septic tank, his arms and hands and waders wet with filth.

  “Bet I know what we got here,” Early said. “Wrapped in rubber sheeting and sealed with that good old black electrical tape. He wanted to keep what's inside clean and dry. Intended to get it back.”

  Early sliced through the sheeting. Next he made a crosscut and laid the flaps back.

  “The wedding picture,” Dickerson said, gazing at it.

  “Going to be fingerprints on this, but then you'd expect Bill's prints to be on it.”

  Wieland, clutching a handkerchief to his nose and mouth, squatted down. He studied the portrait of a younger Bill Smitts and Judith Silverberg Smitts, he in a cravat and a Prince Albert coat, she in a dark blue suitdress and a pearl necklace. “So we still have no proof. Why would he wrap the picture like that anyway? Why would he want to keep it? I wouldn't.”

  “Maybe it's not the picture,” Early said.

  “Well, it's sure not the frame.”

  Early scratched the point of his blade at a portion of the frame. “Gold-painted wood. . . . Just a minute.” He stood the picture on end, turned it, and ran his hand down and across the back.

  “Now this is interesting,” Early said and laid the picture face down on a clean area of grass. Working with the deft touch of a surgeon, he drew his knife along the inside edge of the frame. Early cut through the fabric backing—one side, top, bottom, and the other side—and lifted the fabric away.

  Wieland brought his handkerchief down from his face.

  “Railroad bonds,” Early said. He picked them up and riffled through them, counting. “Bearer bonds, sixty-three thousand dollars worth, and you and I know where these came from.”

  “But in a shit hole?” Wieland asked.

  “Safer than a bank vault. Bill figured nobody'd ever look here, and he was right . . . ’til now.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  Jerry Peterson taught speech, English, and theater in Wisconsin high schools, then worked for a decade in communications in Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, and Colorado. He followed that with a decade as a reporter, photographer, and editor for newspapers in Colorado, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee.

  Peterson left daily journalism to become a graduate student at the University of Tennessee/Knoxville. There he began collecting stories that he has incorporated in short stories and novels he sets in eastern Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains and the Flint Hills of Kansas. Several of his shorter works have been published in literary journals and anthologies, including the Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave's Manhattan Mysteries.

  Peterson is a member of the writers' group Tuesdays with Story and the Mystery Writers of America.