Pope moistened his lips. He was about to violate one of his basic rules: Don’t get greedy. But the setup was irresistible. The youngster was putting something in his briefcase and the security officer, unnoticed by the boy, was so intent on him that he was actually on tiptoe, ready to take off after the youngster when he headed for the exit.
“I’m frightfully sorry if it’s an inconvenience,” Pope said, affecting a British accent which usually ingratiated him with elderly salesladies, “but you know, I’d like another day to consider. I’m sure Mr. Glasgow will understand.”
“I’m sure he will,” Miss Murray said, shooting her teeth at him. The following day was her day off. She cleared the register, then locked it, tucked the invoice and the documentation within the book’s cover, and left the floor to take the book back to Mr. Glasgow.
Thomas hadn’t missed a step. He had already decided to follow the man out of the store on the chance of his committing himself to something not yet defined in Thomas’s imagination. Thomas only knew that the man was wicked, a conviction best accounted for by his recent studies.
Pope waited until Miss Murray was almost up the stairs, then ambled into the Sculpture Department. It was a direct line from there to the Fifth Avenue exit. He gradually accelerated his pace.
Thomas grabbed his briefcase and ran after him, at which point every customer in the store, most of them in the Fifth Avenue wing, became aware that something was happening.
Frank O’Reilly was momentarily off balance, shocked at Miss Murray’s leaving the floor without a word or a sign to him. He was sure that it was pure cantankerousness, her trying to prove that, left on his honor, the little savage would turn noble. The little savage, having dropped something into his briefcase, was galloping through Sculpture with it. Frank took a short cut behind the stairs. Up front, a woman screamed, “Stop thief!”
There was one in every crowd, Frank thought, someone doing his work for him. He could not make an arrest until the suspect got beyond the store premises.
As soon as Thomas heard the cry, “Stop thief.” he put things together approximately right, dead right in the conclusion that the man was on his way out of the store with a book he had stolen from the Old and Rare Department. Thomas paused long enough to call out to a clerk, “Call a cop, a policeman!”
“The store detective’s right behind you, sonny.”
“Thanks,” O’Reilly said bitterly. There wasn’t a clerk in the store who wasn’t his enemy.
Thomas sprinted ahead. He caught up with Pope in the revolving door, hitting the door with enough force to send the unready thief reeling past the exit. O’Reilly, in the compartment behind Thomas, held the door back at that point, hoping to flush the boy outdoors: all he had to do was go, he was in the open. But Thomas had no intention of letting the thief get out of his sight. Pope was hung up like a bird in a glass cage.
Finally Pope braced himself, his back to the panel next to Thomas, and pushed. O’Reilly, surmising what he had in mind, yielded and the door slipped back a few inches; Pope was able to slither outdoors. He immediately collared Thomas and pulled him into the street where he delivered him into the detective’s arms. He then intended to lose himself in the crowd that was gathering as though drawn by a magnet.
Thomas was not to be held. He wheeled his briefcase over his head and brought it up full force into O’Reilly’s midriff. Frank let go of him and Thomas threw a flying tackle at Pope. He got him by the knees and brought him down. He hung on until Frank plucked him off and gave him over to the temporary custody of two willing bystanders. Frank helped Pope to his feet. Pope was swearing he would sue Glasgow’s for the youngster’s assault.
“You’re as fine as new,” Frank said heartily and brushed the dust of the street from Pope’s suit. Thus did his hand come in contact with something that was unmistakably a book and in a place no man would ordinarily abide anything foreign to his person. Frank knew instantly he had caught a thief in spite of himself. When he saw Mr. Glasgow and Miss Murray conveying one another through the revolving door he caught onto the fact that the book must belong to Old and Rare. He clapped his hand on Pope’s shoulder and pronounced a solemn arrest.
“Well done, Frank!” Mr. Glasgow cried. He had discovered the Richard Hooker missing when he returned the medical handbook to the shelf.
Pope surrendered the book. His one consolation was that he still had the certified check—at least he could post bail.
Mr. Glasgow noticed Thomas and remembered Pope’s using him as a cunning decoy. “And the little ruffian—you got him too!”
“Me?” Thomas said, a squeak.
His captors took a tighter hold.
Pope, knowing to whom he owed his captivity, said in his best Cockney, “’Is name is Oliver,” and bared his teeth at Thomas in a sardonic grin.
“My name is Thomas Macintosh Gordon, Third,” Thomas declared loudly so that several people in the crowd whistled mockingly.
“Best let the boy go,” Frank whispered to the man he still considered his employer. “We don’t have much on him.”
“I knew his grandfather,” Mr. Glasgow said. “Or was it his great-grandfather? Shipbuilders. Started in the Clipper days, the Mary Ellen, if I’m not mistaken.”
At a sign from O’Reilly, Thomas’ captors set him free. He gathered his briefcase and his cap and said with haughty scorn, “You will hear from my lawyers.”
Thomas never doubted that the devil had had a hand in what happened to him that day at Glasgow’s. He was therefore the more determined to get on with his term paper, and certainly not to yield to the all but overwhelming temptation to switch subjects. He considered it a moral victory the day he turned the paper in. But that term Thomas, to whom straight A’s were a commonplace, got the first C-minus of his academic career. In Religious Studies.
1981
Natural Causes
WHEN CLARA MCCRACKEN GOT out of state prison I was waiting to bring her home. We shook hands at the prison gate when she came through, and the first thing I was struck with was how her eyes had gone from china-blue to a gunmetal-grey. In fifteen years she’d come to look a lot like her late sister, Maud.
There’d been twenty years’ difference in the ages of the McCracken sisters, and they were all that was left of a family that had come west before the American Revolution and settled in the Ragapoo Hills, most of them around Webbtown, a place that’s no bigger now than it was then. Maudie ran the Red Lantern Inn, as McCrackens had before her, and she raised her younger sister by herself. She did her best to get Clara married to a decent man. It would have been better for everybody if she’d let her go wild the way Clara wanted and married or not married, as her own fancy took her.
Maudie was killed by accident, but there was no way I could prove young Reuben White fell into Maudie’s well by accident. Not with Clara saying she’d pushed him into it and then taking the jury up there to show them how. She got more time than I thought fair, and for a while I blamed myself, a backwoods lawyer, for taking her defense even though she wouldn’t have anybody else. Looking back, I came to see that in Ragapoo County then, just after giving so many of our young men to a second World War, Reuben White was probably better thought of than he ought to have been. But that’s another story and the page was turned on it when Clara went to prison. Another page was turned with her coming out.
She stood on the comfortable side of the prison gate and looked at my old Chevrolet as though she recognized it. She could have. It wasn’t even new when she got sent up, as they used to say in those Big House movies. The farthest I’ve ever driven that car on a single journey was the twice I visited her, and this time to bring her home. Then she did something gentle, a characteristic no one I knew would’ve given to Clara—she put out her hand and patted the fender as though it was a horse’s rump.
I opened the door for her and she climbed in head first and sorted herself out while I put her canvas suitcase in the back. There were greys in her bush of tawny hair and
her face was the color of cheap toilet paper. Squint lines took off from around her eyes. I didn’t think laughing had much to do with them. She sat tall and bony in her loose-hung purple dress and looked straight ahead most of the drive home.
About the first thing she said to me was, “Hank, anybody in Webbtown selling television sets?”
“Prouty’s got a couple he calls demonstrators.” Then I added, “Keeps them in the hardware shop.”
Clara made a noise I guess you could call a laugh. Prouty also runs the only mortuary in the town.
“You’d be better sending away to Sears Roebuck,” I said. “You pay them extra and they provide the aerial and put it up. I wouldn’t trust old Prouty on a ladder these days. I wouldn’t trust myself on one.”
I could feel her looking at me, but I wasn’t taking my eyes off the road. “Still playing the fiddle, Hank?” she asked.
“Some. Most folks’d rather watch the television than hear me hoeing down. But I fiddle for myself. It’s about what I can do for pleasure lately. They dried up the trout stream when they put the highway through. Now they’re drilling for oil in the hills. That’s something new. I thought coal maybe someday, or even natural gas. But it’s oil and they got those dipsy-doodles going night and day.”
“Making everybody rich as Indians,” Clara said, and she sounded just like Maudie. That was something Maudie would have said in the same deadpan way.
What I came out with then was something I’d been afraid of all along. “Maudie,” I said, “you’re going to see a lot of changes.”
“Clara,” she corrected me.
“I’m sorry, Clara. I was thinking of your sister.”
“No harm done. You’d have to say there was a family resemblance among the McCrackens.”
“A mighty strong one.”
“Only trouble, there’s a terrible shortage of McCrackens.” And with that she exploded such a blast of laughter I rolled down the window to let some of it out.
I felt sorry for Clara when we drove up to the Red Lantern. It was still boarded up and there was writing on the steps that made me think of that Lizzie Borden jingle, “Lizzie Borden took an axe…” Having power of attorney, I’d asked Clara if I should have the place cleaned out and a room fixed up for her to come home to, but she said no. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t any money in the bank. The state bought a chunk of McCracken land when they put through the highway.
While I was trying the keys in the front door, Clara stood by the veranda railing and looked up at the Interstate, maybe a half mile away. You can’t get on or off it from Webbtown. The nearest interchange is three miles. But one good thing that happened in the building of the road, they bulldozed Maudie’s well and the old brew-house clear out of existence. Clara’d have been thinking of that while I diddled with the lock. I got the door open and she picked up her suitcase before I could do it for her.
The spider webs were thick as lace curtains and you could almost touch the smell in the place, mold and mice and the drain-deep runoff of maybe a million draws of beer. You couldn’t see much with the windows boarded up, but when you got used to the twilight you could see enough to move around. A row of keys still hung under numbers one to eight behind the desk. As though any one of them wouldn’t open any door in the house. But a key feels good when you’re away from home, it’s a safe companion.
The stairs went up to a landing and then turned out of sight. Past them on the ground floor was the way to the kitchen and across from that the dining room. To the right where the sliding doors were closed was the lounge. To the left was the barroom where, for over a hundred and fifty years, McCrackens had drawn their own brew. I knew the revenue agent who used to come through during Prohibition. He certified the beer as three point two percent alcohol, what we used to call near-beer. The McCracken foam had more kick than three point two.
Clara set her suitcase at the foot of the stairs and went into the barroom. From where I stood I could see her back and then her shape in the backbar mirror and a shadow behind her that kind of scared me until I realized it was myself.
“Hank?” she said.
“I’m here.”
She pointed at the moosehead on the wall above the mirror. “That moose has got to go,” she said. “That’s where I plan to put the television.”
I took that in and said, “You got to have a license, Clara, unless you’re going to serve soda pop, and I don’t think you can get one after being where you were.”
I could see her eyes shining in the dark. “You can, Hank, and I’m appointing you my partner.”
Clara had done a lot of planning in fifteen years. She’d learned carpentry in prison and enough about plumbing and electric wiring to get things working. I asked her how she’d managed it, being a woman, and she said that was how she’d managed it. Her first days home I brought her necessities up to her from the town. The only person I’d told about her coming out was Prouty and he’s close-mouthed. You couldn’t say that for Mrs. Prouty…It’s funny how you call most people by their Christian names after you get to know them, and then there’s some you wouldn’t dare even when you’ve known them all your life. Even Prouty calls her Mrs. Prouty.
Anyway, she’s our one female elder at the Community Church and she was probably the person who put Reverend Barnes onto the sermon he preached the Sunday after Clara’s return—all about the scribes and the Pharisees and how no man among them was able to throw the first stone at the woman taken in adultery. Adultery wasn’t the problem of either of the McCracken sisters. It was something on the opposite side of human nature, trying to keep upright as the church steeple. But Reverend Barnes is one of those old-time Calvinists who believe heaven is heaven and hell is hell and whichever one you’re going to was decided long ago, so the name of the sin don’t matter much.
I was hanging a clothesline out back for Clara Monday morning when maybe a dozen women came up the hill to the Red Lantern bearing gifts. I stayed out of sight but I saw afterwards they were things they’d given thought to—symbolic things like canned fish and flour, bread and grape juice, what you might call biblical things. When Clara first saw them coming she went out on the veranda. She crossed her arms and spread her feet and took up a defensive stand in front of the door. The women did a queer thing: they set down what they were carrying, one after the other, and started to applaud. I guess it was the only way they could think of on the spot to show her they meant no ill.
Clara relaxed and gave them a roundhouse wave to come on up. They filed into the inn and before the morning was over they’d decided among themselves who was going to make curtains, who knew how to get mildew out of the bed linens, who’d be best at patching moth holes, things like that. Anne Pendergast went home and got the twins. They were about fourteen, two hellions. She made them scrub out every word that was written on the steps.
During the week I went over to the county seat with Clara to see if she could get a driver’s license. I let her drive the Chevy, though I nearly died of a heart attack. She had it kicking like an army mule, but we did get there, and she could say that she’d driven a car lately. I watched with a sick feeling while the clerk made out a temporary permit she could use until her license came. Then, without batting an eye at me, she asked the fellow if he could tell us who to see about applying for a liquor license. He came out into the hall and pointed to the office. Yes, sir. Clara had done a lot of planning in fifteen years.
It was on the way back to Webbtown that she said to me, “Somebody’s stolen Pa’s shotgun, Hank.”
“I got it up at my place, Clara. You sure you want it back?” It was that gun going off that killed Maudie and I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you what happened back then.
Clara was a wild and pretty thing and Maudie was encouraging this middle-aged gent, a paint salesman by the name of Matt Sawyer, to propose to her. This day she took him out in the hills with the shotgun, aiming to have him scare off Reuben White, who was a lot more forward in his cour
ting of Clara. It was Maudie flushed the young ones out of the sheepcote and then shouted at Matt to shoot. She kept shouting it and so upset him that he slammed the gun down. It went off and blew half of Maudie’s head away.
I don’t think I’m ever going to forget Matt coming into town dragging that gun along the ground and telling us what happened. And I’m absolutely not going to forget going up the hill with Matt and Constable Luke Weber—and Prouty with his wicker basket. Clara came flying to meet us, her gold hair streaming out in the wind like a visiting angel. She just plain threw herself at Matt, saying how she loved him. I told her she ought to behave herself and she told me to hush or I couldn’t play fiddle at their wedding. Luke Weber kept asking her where Reuben was and all she’d say in that airy way of hers was, “Gone.”
I couldn’t look at Maudie without getting sick, so I went to the well and tried to draw water. The bucket kept getting stuck, which was how we came to discover Reuben, head down, feet up, in the well. When the constable asked Clara about it, she admitted right off that she’d pushed him.
“Why? Luke wanted to know.
At that point she turned deep serious, those big eyes of hers like blue saucers. “Mr. Weber, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what Reuben White wanted me to do with him in the sheepcote this afternoon. And I just know Matt won’t ever want me to do a thing like that.” I pleaded her temporarily insane. I might have tried to get her off for defending her virtue—there was some in town who saw it that way—but by the time we came to trial I didn’t think it would work with a ten-out-of-twelve male jury.
But to get back to what I was saying about Clara wanting the shotgun back, I advised her not to put it where it used to hang over the fireplace in the bar.
“Don’t intend to. I got no place else for the moosehead.”
I took the gun up to her the next day and it wasn’t long after that I learned from Prouty she’d bought a box of shells and some cleaning oil. Prouty wanted to know if there wasn’t some law against her having a gun. I said I thought so and we both let it go at that. Clara bought her television from him. The first I heard of her using the gun—only in a manner of speaking was after she’d bought a used car from a lot on the County Road. It was a Studebaker, a beauty on the outside, and the dealer convinced her it had a heart of gold. The battery fell out first, and after that it was the transmission. She wanted me to go up and talk to him. I did and he told me to read the warranty, which I also did. I told Clara she was stuck with a bad bargain.
Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories Page 24