by Ron Schwab
Last Will
Ron Schwab
Poor Coyote Press
Contents
Also by Ron Schwab
1. Ian
2. Ian
3. Ian
4. Ian
5. Ian
6. Ian
7. Ian
8. Ian
9. Ian
10. Ian
11. Casey
12. Ian
13. Ian
14. Ian
15. Ian
16. Ian
17. Ian
18. Casey
19. Casey
20. Ian
21. Ian
22. Casey
23. Ian
24. Ian
25. Ian
26. Casey
27. Ian
28. Ian
29. Ian
30. Ian
31. Casey
32. Casey
33. Ian
34. Mandy
35. Ian
36. Casey
37. Ian
38. Ian
39. Casey
40. Ian
Afterword
New Release
Also by Ron Schwab
Sioux Sunrise
Paint the Hills Red
Ghosts Around the Campfire
The Lockes
Last Will
Medicine Wheel
The Law Wranglers
Deal with the Devil
Mouth of Hell (forthcoming)
The Coyote Saga
Night of the Coyote
Return of the Coyote (forthcoming)
LAST WILL
by Ron Schwab
Poor Coyote Press
PO Box 6105
Omaha, NE 68106
www.PoorCoyotePress.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Ron Schwab
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews—without written permission from its publisher.
ISBN: 1-943421-11-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-943421-11-4
Dedicated to the memory of Dean Terrill,
journalism teacher extraordinaire,
who always gently suggested,
“Now say the same thing with half the words.”
1
Ian
TILLIE CRUMP PLANTED her bare feet in the dusty road, and the determined look on her bulldog-like face told me she had something important on her mind. When Tillie had something to say, you’d just as well resign yourself to listening. She was one tough, old woman, and I would never cross her if I could avoid it.
Tillie, who could be described briefly as short and round, stood like a statue with arms folded over pendulous breasts and waited as I picked up the pace of my morning constitutional around the section. A dozen or more cats of every size and description loitered at her feet, and a few rubbed affectionately against her stumpy legs. Tillie, something of a legend in her time on both sides of the Nebraska-Kansas border, was known locally as the “cat lady,” and cats were her life’s work.
“Good morning, Mrs. Crump,” I said, as I approached, forcing a smile I did not particularly feel at this encounter on a humid, suffocating day. “Looks like another scorcher.”
Tillie ignored my neighborly greeting, tugged at the straps of her tattered bib overalls, and limped toward me as I approached.
“We have ourselves a problem, Mr. Locke,” Tillie announced solemnly. We had known each other for better than five years now, but Tillie stood on formality with her lawyer and had long ago disregarded the invitation to address me by my first name.
“Well, Mrs. Crump, perhaps you’d like to drop by the office tomorrow morning, and we can discuss it.”
She squinted a porcine eye and sighed with seeming disgust. “It’s not my problem, Mr. Locke: it’s our problem, and I won’t be getting dunned for this.”
She was going to have her way with me in a manner of speaking, and I decided I had just as well get on with it. “That being the case, Mrs. Crump, why don’t you tell me about our problem, and we’ll see if we can solve it?”
She tossed her head in the direction of her farmstead and turned and headed up the rutted wagon path that led to the dilapidated buildings. “You can see it better than I can explain it. It’s in the pigpen.”
I followed obediently and silently. Tillie was not one for idle chatter, and, despite the public image of my profession, I had determined very early in my career that one never learns much when his own lips are flapping. And I was not that much of a talker anyway.
I walked behind Tillie at half my usual pace, and as we made our way toward our problem, whatever it was, more cats peered through the thick weeds and tangled undergrowth that lined the pathway and began to fall in with the parade. This old woman had a knack for leading me into the ridiculous, and I wondered what she had in store for me this time.
The Pied Piper of catdom had certainly made her mark in Cottonwood County, Nebraska. Horace Crump, the last of Tillie’s three husbands, died shortly after I put my shingle out in Borderview five years earlier, and I settled Horace’s estate. Horace had sucked on the barrel of a loaded shotgun and brought himself to a messy end. At least that was the coroner’s ruling, the coroner also being the local county attorney, whose medical expertise might be a bit suspect. Some of Horace’s friends and neighbors harbored doubts about this version of his demise, speculating Tillie might have played an active role in her spouse’s violent exit. Horace had evidently told a neighbor that he had given Tillie a choice—him or the cats. The neighbor had suggested that Tillie chose the felines.
Whatever the truth, Tillie ended up a very wealthy widow, owning more than a section of land, much of it prime river bottom along the Little Blue River southeast of Borderview. No stranger would have guessed her prosperity from her way of life, though, as she resided in a weathering, decaying two-story house capped with a sagging roof that I was certain would not endure another winter. In the course of settling Horace’s estate I had entered the dwelling for the first and last time. The cats that shared the house had marked their respective territories throughout and had no sense of propriety about where to deposit their waste. My boots had smelled like cat shit for days after the visit.
As Tillie and I reached the farmyard, we began wading through an ocean of cats, or so it seemed. Certainly, there were well over a hundred of the creatures scattered around the trash-strewn yard, some dozing lazily in the sun, but a good number rushing to greet the company Tillie had brought home. I had nothing against cats, for I admitted to being owned by a cat myself, but a stop at Tillie’s always made me sympathetic to any ultimatum Horace may have mistakenly given.
“Over here, Mr. Locke,” Tillie said, as she trudged down the slope toward a warped, splintered pen that looked like it might collapse at any moment. Was the pen the problem? Had I been recruited to help with fence repair?
Squealing, grunting hogs greeted us as we approached the over-stocked pen, pressing against the rotting, battered wood panels in near-frenzied expectation of Sunday dinner. They were a mangy bunch, a mix of rangy, tusked boars and bony sows with withered udders. Tillie did not castrate the boars or separate the sexes, and the boars were raked with scars from bloody battles for the trophy of a sow in heat. Tillie had no interest in the finer points of animal husbandry as far as her swine herd was concerned. The cats were her obsession and the hogs were destin
ed for cat food by way of Tillie’s meat grinder. The pigpen was mostly wallow, the manure and urine mixing with the soil to form a black gumbo that stuck to the hogs and sucked at their feet, belying the drought that had scorched southeast Nebraska in recent weeks. How sad, I thought, that Tillie’s compassion for one species of God’s creatures did not extend to these pathetic animals.
“Over there,” Tillie said, nodding toward a far corner of the pen where several runts, during the distraction triggered by our arrival, had moved in to feast upon something imbedded in the mud.
I edged around the pen, standing back from the barking, biting snouts that poked through the cracks. Then I saw it. First, a human arm, the flesh stripped nearly to bone. Then Ralph Wainwright’s head, bruised and filthy and bloody, with glazed, sunken eyes staring right at me, almost accusingly, from a perch in a V-shaped slop trough some ten feet distant from the naked arm and a scattering of other body parts.
I shook my head in disbelief. “Oh shit, Tillie, why didn’t you tell me? What happened here?” I was more than a bit unnerved. I had seen war and the carnage and gore that go with it, but in war you’re half prepared for it, and in time, for some anyway, you numb yourself to the slaughter. But this was—or had been—a quiet June Sunday in 1884 far removed in time and place from the battlefields of the Civil War.
“Mrs. Crump, if you please. And I’ll ask you to be so kind as to watch your language, Mr. Locke,” she said in her Bostonian accent, which I suspected was cultivated, not birthright. “I discovered the intruder when I fed the swine this morning, but I had to look after my kitties before I gave this unpleasantness my attention. I did not invite this man here, and it would please me greatly if you would remove him from my premises. He is a trespasser, you know.”
“You do know who this is?” I asked.
“Of course, I do. It’s that skinflint banker, Mr. Wainwright, who certainly would have considered himself too high and mighty to grace me with a social visit. Ironic, I should say, that he would meet his end in this place.”
My mind raced. Tillie’s place was four miles southeast of Borderview, and my small ranch was another mile south of Tillie’s. The old woman owned a few draft horses to pull her wagon, but I am not a skilled horseman and I was not inclined to deal with her unruly beasts, so it seemed best that I hightail it home, saddle up my own horse and ride to Borderview for help. The county sheriff needed to be notified immediately about Tillie’s discovery.
“We’ve got to get these hogs away from the body,” I said. “Then I’ll get Sheriff Bell out here.”
“I just want this man, or what’s left of him, off my place before this day is done.”
“Well let’s see if we can round up a few more panels and fence the hogs away from the remains. Things shouldn’t be disturbed any more than they already have been. And for God’s sake, we can’t let the hogs eat on him anymore.”
Tillie turned and plodded at a turtle’s pace up the hillside. “Do whatever you need to do, Mr. Locke. This is no longer our problem: it’s your problem.”
2
Ian
I LEANED BACK in the chair, my feet propped up on the roll-top desk and, from the open window of my second story office, I surveyed the morning activity on the courthouse square across the street. This was more a study of birds, squirrels and other local wildlife, since the courthouse square was just that: a vacant platted square, overgrown with weeds and brush and enclosed by a board fence that helped restrain the goats that were pastured there from time to time to help clean up the vegetation. The county offices and court, for now, were housed in a two-story, brick building on the south side of the square. My own office was perched above a funeral parlor on the west side—a convenient location for a probate lawyer.
TJ leaped on my desk and yowled, sending a stack of carefully organized legal papers floating to the floor—which annoyed me, since in my own mind I am nothing if not organized. “Damn it, TJ, I spent better than an hour getting those things in order. Why can’t you be more careful?”
TJ plopped down on his back, and signaled that it was time for a tummy rub. I, of course, obliged. TJ was a yellow tabby cat who had appointed me his servant when he showed up as a frozen, half-starved kitten on the boardwalk outside my office at Christmastime a few years back. I had surrendered to the holiday spirit and treated him to a meal. The rest was history. I named him “Thomas Jefferson Locke”—hence “TJ,” and except for occasional absences, which I suspected included romantic interludes at Tillie’s cat farm, TJ usually could be found sleeping on the office desk or on the bed at my home. Most days he rode to work with me, wedged snuggly in a saddle bag with his head and front paws sticking out as he surveyed the countryside.
I turned back to the document resting on my lap and re-read it, although I had drafted the thing and pretty much had it memorized:
Last Will of Ralph Wainwright
I, Ralph Wainwright, at this date residing in Cottonwood County, Nebraska, declare this to be my last will and testament, revoking any former wills made by me.
I. I direct that all my just debts and funeral expenses be paid by my executor.
II. I give and bequeath the sum of $1.00 to Celeste Kimball, also known as Celeste Wainwright, to whom I am not, and never have been, married.
III. I give and bequeath the sum of $1.00 to my son, Karl Wainwright.
IV. I give, bequeath and devise all of the rest, residue and remainder of my estate, of whatever nature and kind, to my niece, Emily Stanton.
V. I grant to my executor the authority to administer my estate in his sole discretion and specifically empower him to sell and convey real estate and personal property without court order.
VI. I appoint Ian Locke as executor of this will to serve without bond.
The document had been typed painstakingly by my clerk, Will Heasty, on the Remington typewriter I had brought with me from my former Omaha office—one of only a few such implements in town. It was dated May 10, 1883, slightly more than a year previous, and had been signed by Ralph in his distinctive stilted hand. An attestation clause followed, with signatures of the mandatory two witnesses, Will Heasty and Cash Berry, the undertaker from downstairs.
Celeste was not going to like this, I thought, and I would need to visit her soon. Sheriff Ike Bell had reported that Celeste was properly distraught upon learning of Ralph's demise, but I had known Celeste long before her arrangement with Ralph and was confident she would recover quickly enough from her paramour’s death. The estate business would be another matter, and I was particularly uncomfortable with the situation because Celeste and I had kept company in a very serious way at one time. That was before Ralph came along. I did not share the bed of a client’s wife or lover—questionable ethics and bad business.
This matter smelled of a nasty squabble, and I had known as much when I drafted the will. Ralph had not explained his reasons for leaving the estate to Emily, a dear friend of mine, but my job was to carry out my client’s wishes, and I take great care to avoid even inadvertent influence on the testator who is executing his final farewell.
A soft rapping at my office door interrupted my reverie, and Will, a gangly, bookish, young man with wire-rimmed spectacles, stepped in and pushed the door shut behind him. “Cash Berry’s out here, Ian . . . says he’s got to see you right now. He’s worked up about something.”
“Cash is always worked up about something. But send him in.”
Momentarily, Cash Berry burst through the doorway, scarlet-faced and wheezing like a blacksmith’s bellows. A bald, portly man who, befitting his occupation, always wore a black, vested suit, and today, splotches of perspiration were already seeping through the wool fabric. I rose to greet him and shook his clammy hand. TJ, who had dozed through my conversation with Will, lifted his head and hissed menacingly. He had never cared much for Cash, and Cash still bore a scar on the top of his hand as evidence of the cat’s disdain.
“Have a chair, Cash. Will says you’ve got somethin
g important.”
Cash plumped down in the chair next to my desk and mopped at his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve been up to see Celeste about arrangements. She don’t seem to give a good goddamn about what’s happened to Ralph. Says to do what I want with him. ‘Feed the rest of him to the pigs, if I want to,’ she says. She ain’t exactly a bereaved widow, let me tell you. And she told me to get you up to her place. ‘Right now,’ she says, and you know Celeste . . . she means ‘right now.’ I’d be getting up there if I was you.”
I sighed. Yes, Celeste was born to command. But I am a bearer of the Locke stubborn streak and do not take well to orders. Celeste could damn well cool her heels for a spell. “I’m going to have some lunch at Reuben’s first, and maybe I’ll stop by and see Celeste later this afternoon. I need to talk with her anyway.”
Cash shifted uneasily in his chair. “It’s in your hands now, Ian. I did what I was told, and I’m not responsible if Celeste’s pissed at you.”
“Celeste is always pissed at me.”
“Ian, what am I going to do about a funeral? The widow won’t have nothing to do with it. This should have been a big one . . . fancy coffin, full embalming and fixing, even tintypes. Jesus, I brought Ralph back from Tillie’s in a gunnysack. I’ve got most of a skull, one foot, an arm and some loose ribs. Hell, I could bury him in a cartridge box. And Celeste ain’t got no interest in sending Ralph off in a way befittin’ his station.” He paused and looked at me expectantly. “Ian, I witnessed a will for Ralph sometime back, so you must have something to do with settling his estate. Do you reckon you’ll be in charge? I’ll work out proper arrangements with you . . . at a fair price.”