The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave

by Bill Pronzini

  Lester rushed off to the jail to see what he could get out of Harriet Greenley, and I headed over to Tamarack Street. I didn’t relish the idea of dealing with Reba just now, but she had the right to know the full story and Hannah even more so. Better they should hear it from me, officially, before the rumors and the gossip started flying.

  I should’ve known Reba would already have the news. She got it from Ellie Rademacher, who was sitting with her in the parlor when Hannah showed me in, the two of them sipping tea from china cups and chattering together like magpies. Right away they transferred their attention to me, all hungry-eyed and eager for the bits and pieces Ellie hadn’t been told on the telephone by Clyde Senior. Not so much like magpies, then. More like a pair of bone-picking carrion birds.

  “Clyde said you were nearly killed, Lucas,” Ellie said. “My Lord, it must be awful to have had such a close call.”

  “It wasn’t all that close.”

  Reba said, “Don’t be immodest. You’re lucky to be alive. And if those scratches are any indication, that crazy woman fought you tooth and nail. The bloody one on the side of your neck there wants treating with antiseptic before it festers. Hannah, fetch the iodoform from the upstairs bathroom.”

  Hannah, who had been hovering nearby, started out. I stopped her by saying, “No need. I’ll take care of it later.” I resisted removing a glove and exploring the neck scratch. It couldn’t have been too bad since I hadn’t noticed it paining, and neither Carse nor Titus had mentioned it. Reba making mountains out of molehills again.

  She sniffed. “You’re always putting things off, Lucas Monk. Such as informing me that the woman not only tried to poison me, she’s a multiple murderess and thief wanted in two other states.”

  “I didn’t know it for sure until this morning.”

  “But you suspected it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Wasn’t any point.”

  “No point? She might have tried to murder me again while you were dawdling around looking for proof.”

  “I wouldn’t have let that happen. And it wasn’t you she aimed to poison, it was Hannah.” I explained why, not that Reba didn’t already know that, too. “That’s why I came here now, to give you the straight of it.”

  “After she was put in jail. After the fact.”

  She had the damnedest knack for getting under a man’s skin. I said, “I don’t have time to argue, Reba. I’ll be going now.”

  I swung around and headed out. She called something I didn’t listen to, and when I kept on going without answering, she hopped up and followed me into the front hallway. I got the door open, stepped out onto the porch. But before I could close it behind me, she said, sharp and smug, “I told you she was an evil witch, didn’t I?” and closed it herself.

  That was Reba for you. Always had to have the last word, and often as not it was an I-told-you-so.

  * * *

  I EXPECTED HARRIET Greenley to still be yelling and cussing when I got back to my office, but there wasn’t a peep from the cellblock. Lester was still there, occupying my desk chair and talking to Carse.

  “She wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t even look at me,” he said to me. “I couldn’t get a blessed word out of her.”

  “Went mute all a sudden,” Carse said. “Just lays on her bunk and stares up at the ceiling.”

  I thought but didn’t say, Thank God for small favors.

  Lester transferred his tail from my chair to a corner of my desk. He was still in high spirits despite being denied an interview by the prisoner, for he’d inveigled Carse to blab about what had taken place at the undertaking parlor. He started badgering me to tell my side of it, why I’d done what I had, and I had to oblige him. I downplayed my actions as much as I could, leaving out the part about feeling like a damned fool afterward and still, but when I finished he winked at me and said he’d write it up as “fearlessness in the face of death.”

  Fearlessness in the face of death. Uh-huh. Well, that kind of praise would stand me in good stead with the citizens of Peaceful Valley—for a while, anyway. The next election was a long way off and voters have short memories for accomplished deeds and long memories for unaccomplished ones. If I failed to solve the murder of Charity Axthelm, that was what they’d remember when they cast their ballots.

  Carse and I were busy as hell after Lester went haring off to interview Titus at the mortuary. First we had to arrange for temporary partitions to be put up in Harriet Greenley’s cell to give her necessary privacy, then I had to go and talk Boone’s wife, Francine, into agreeing to act as matron. And all the while one or both of us had to fend off visits from city and county officials. The only ones we didn’t fend off were Ed Flanders, my night deputy who came to find out firsthand what all the commotion was about, and Clyde Senior when he showed to report that he’d been in touch by wire with the Denver police.

  “How long before they send someone up to take her off our hands?” I asked him. “Tomorrow?”

  “Probably not that soon,” Clyde said. “More likely first of next week.”

  Damn. All we could do was hope Harriet Greenley stayed clammed up until then.

  * * *

  I TOOK MYSELF out of commission and went home around four o’clock. Long, hard day and I figured I was entitled. The way the weather was shaping up, it’d be the kind of night to sit quiet in front of a hot fire and lick my wounds in private. The wind had turned blustery, with plenty of teeth in it, the sky was loaded with black-bottomed clouds, and the temperature had already plunged into the 20s. No snow yet, but it wouldn’t be long now.

  I took Buster for a walk, fed him, then carried in half a dozen armloads of lodgepole and tamarack logs from the woodshed and stacked them in the cabinet next to the fireplace. My teeth were chattering by the time I finished that chore. I laid a fire and got it burning, brewed myself a cup of coffee, sat down in my chair with my shoes off to toast my cold feet. But I was too restless to sit still—leftover nerve-frazzling from the morning’s adventure.

  I got my toolbox and attended to some repair work I’d been putting off. Put a new washer in the leaky kitchen faucet, hammered a piece of tin over a mousehole on the back porch, went down into the basement and fixed the loose latch on the ground-level window. When I was done with that, my eye caught on the jars of fruit and pickled vegetables Tess had put up the last year before she took sick. Clingstone peaches had been her specialty and there was one quart jar left. I hadn’t been hungry until then, but just looking at those peaches made my mouth water. I took the jar upstairs and pig-ate everything including the juice.

  Full dark by then, the only sounds the wind, the crackling fire, and Buster’s snoring. I’d left word with Ed Flanders, and with Mavis to pass on to the night switchboard operator, that I wasn’t to be disturbed except in a dire emergency. So far, so good. If anybody did come calling, it had better be on urgent business or I wouldn’t even open the door.

  With my stomach full I wasn’t quite so restless anymore. I picked a book out of the glass case in the parlor, occupied my chair again with Buster on the rug alongside. I’m not the reader Carse is, or that Tess was—she’d built up a nice little home library by mail order—but I like a good story now and then when I’m in the mood. Reading a book helps me unwind, too.

  This one put me to sleep in the middle of a story called “The Girl and the Graft,” no fault of Mr. O. Henry. The wind woke me up, howling and yammering at the doors and windows. I must’ve been out for a while because the fire had banked and the room felt chilly again. The clock on the mantel gave the time as 9:45.

  Hell with it. I went to bed.

  Buster ambled in after me, and as soon as I climbed into bed in my long johns he whined to come up. I let him do it. Poor old dog has creaky joints and not much meat left on his bones, and it’d be cruel to deny him comfort and warmth once the weather turns wintry.

  “Settle down now,” I said to him. “And if you want to stay up here tonight, you better not start farting again
.”

  He gave me his aim-to-please look, yawned, curled up. And farted, loud.

  I sighed. But I didn’t have the heart to push him off the bed. I turned off the lamp and buried my nose in the pillow, and for a change I had no trouble dropping into a deep sleep.

  Not long before dawn I dreamed that I was having another wrestling match with Harriet Greenley, or maybe the same one as in the mortuary, and that she had the whole right side of my body pinned down so that I couldn’t struggle free no matter how hard I tried. The trapped sensation woke me up. And when I was shed of the dream, I realized that I was being pinned down—by Buster, who’d crawled up next to me for body heat and was stretched out snoring on my right arm. He’d been laying there so long the arm was numb from shoulder to fingertips.

  I sat up muttering, shoved him off the bed, and commenced to rub circulation back into the dead limb. Pretty soon my fingers began to tingle and I could move it again. I kept on rubbing.

  And while I was doing that, that memory itch started up again. Only this time it was more than just an itch—it was what I’d been trying to remember.

  All of a sudden I wasn’t groggy anymore. Funny how a man’s mind works. Free it from worry-clutter, and it kind of refocuses itself while you sleep and lets you see things plain that you couldn’t see before. Not just the one memory and what it might mean, but others, too, now and how all of them tied together.

  What I was studying on wasn’t ironclad proof of who’d strangled Charity Axthelm, not yet. But it wouldn’t take long, by God, to find out whether or not I was right.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE TEMPERATURE WAS down to 15 degrees and it was snowing when I left the house in the morning, bundled up in my winter clothes and hat with the rabbit fur earmuffs. The snowfall was light and not sticking, but judging by the look of the cloud swells overhead, the flurries would keep coming. Just what I needed to make what lay ahead even more of a task.

  I found Doc Olsen seated in one of the mahogany booths at the Elite Café, pouring catsup over a trio of runny fried eggs. He has his share of bad habits, Doc, but none worse than that. If you’re hungry, watching him swirl his fork through the red and yellow mess will make you lose your appetite. If you’re not hungry, watching him slurp it up will keep you that way for a spell.

  “You know what that looks like, don’t you?” I said as I slid in across from him.

  He glowered at me. “Sure I know, I’m a doctor. I happen to like my eggs this way. So sue me.”

  “Grouchy this morning.”

  “You’d be grouchy, too, if you’d spent half the night with Emma Lou Hansen’s bowels.”

  Doc started eating and I busied myself beckoning for a cup of coffee and then looking elsewhere until his plate was more or less clean. Then I said, “You remember when I came to see you about the poisoned buttermilk—”

  He cut me off before I could get any more said. “Poisoned buttermilk! I had to hear the news from Emma Lou, a bedridden old lady, that Grace Selkirk was guilty of it and a wanted fugitive besides.”

  “Harriet Greenley. That’s her true name.”

  His glower got even darker.”Why didn’t you confide in me?”

  That was pretty much the same thing Reba had said to me yesterday. Hell’s bells, I couldn’t go around taking everybody into my confidence on such a ticklish matter, could I? I said to mollify him, “I’m sorry, Doc, I should have told you. Just so damn much on my plate these days.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just wiped his mouth with his napkin. But he did quit glowering.

  “The day I came to your office,” I said, “you were treating Tyler Fix for some ailment. What was it?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know yet that it does. Well?”

  “Allergy rash. From an accidental fall into some buckbrush.”

  “Where was the rash?”

  “His right shoulder and forearm. One of the scratches was deep and threatening to fester.”

  “Could the scratches have come from something other than buckbrush? Blackberry thorns, say?”

  “Could’ve, yes,” Doc said. “Hard to tell exactly what causes that kind of wound or what a person’s allergic to. What’re you getting at, Lucas?”

  There wasn’t anybody within earshot, but I lowered my voice anyway. “You recall what was growing close to the well where we found the Axthelm girl’s body?”

  “Blackberry tangles … Good Christ. Tyler Fix?”

  “Shh. I don’t know yet. Maybe. The man who carried her out there blundered into the tangle before he dropped her in—the blackberry thorns caught in her coat prove that.”

  “You better have more evidence than a few thorns and a rash on his arm. Even if it was blackberry that caused the rash, they’re common as weeds.”

  “I know it.” I got out of the booth and up on my feet. “Thanks, Doc.”

  “You going to hold out on me again?”

  “For now. You’ll be the first to know if and when there’s anything important to tell.”

  “Hah. I’ll believe that if and when it happens.”

  Back outside, I walked fast upstreet to Fix Mercantile. Grover was behind the counter, waiting on a customer who was buying a pair of wool mittens and grousing about how winter seemed to be coming earlier every year. Tyler wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  My presence seemed to make Grover uneasy; he kept glancing at me while he finished the transaction. When the customer left and I went up to the counter, he pasted on a thin smile that went away as soon as I spoke.

  “I don’t see your brother,” I said. “He out on a delivery?”

  “No. He stayed home this morning. He … he’s not feeling well.”

  “Hung over, is he?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “He was drinking pretty heavy when I saw him the other day. Grieving for Charity Axthelm, seemed like at the time.”

  “He has no cause to grieve for her…”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t know he was seeing her on the sly.”

  Grover wagged his head, but not as if he was denying it. He quit looking me in the eye.

  I said, “You recollect me showing you the rust-brown button off a man’s coat? When I asked if you recalled selling a coat that color, you hesitated before saying you didn’t. How come?”

  “I … don’t recall hesitating. Why would I?”

  “Only one reason I can think of.”

  “I never sold a coat like that, Sheriff, I swear I didn’t.”

  “Never sold one, but you had one in here once and Tyler took a fancy to it and you let him have it. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “No…”

  “Grover,” I said, sharp, “I’m all through listening to lies and evasions. I want the truth now. Did you let Tyler have a coat that color?”

  “Where … where’d you find the torn-off button?”

  “I think maybe you know the answer to that. One more time: Did you give your brother such a coat?”

  He drew a breath, said to a point past my right ear, “All right. Yes. More than a year ago.”

  “You ask him why he lied when I showed the button?”

  “Yes, but he said it wasn’t the same color and his coat had all its buttons. That was all he’d say.”

  “And you took him at his word.”

  Grover said, lame, “We’re not close, we don’t talk much.” Meaning he hadn’t wanted to know any different.

  “Tyler still have the coat?”

  “I … don’t know. He doesn’t wear it very often if he does.”

  “Saved it for special occasions, likely, such as rendezvous with Charity Axthelm.”

  “For God’s sake, you don’t think that Tyler—”

  “I’m heading out to your farm now to have another talk with him. You know what’s good for you, you won’t try to get there ahead of me and warn him.”

  “I won’t. But you must be wrong, no matter how
it looks. He … my brother would never … never…”

  Wasn’t anything more I could or needed to say. I turned my back on Grover’s misery, went out, and set off on another fast walk, this one to the courthouse to collect Carse.

  “Come on,” I said, “we’re taking a ride in the flivver and you drive better in this weather than I do.”

  “Where we going?”

  “To make another arrest. Charity Axthelm’s murderer, this time.”

  * * *

  THE CUSSED MODEL T decided to be balky again. Carse spent near ten minutes cranking before he could get spark enough to keep the motor running. As short as the distance was to the Fix farm, the heater wasn’t likely to put out enough warm air to stave off the chill so we had to use the lap robes. And even with the side curtains buttoned up tight, the wind found ways to come whistling in.

  The sky was still full of white flurries when Carse took us out of the barn and on through town. The thick, low-hanging overcast had darkened the day enough so that he had to put on the headlamps. And to drive slow on account of patches of ice and the snow starting to stick now. I had trouble seeing clear through the swirling flakes and the rime forming on the windscreen, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He’d been comfortable handling the flivver from his first time at the controls after the county bought it. Didn’t matter what the weather or the road conditions were, he just plain liked to drive.

  Neither of us said anything as we headed out the north road. Would’ve been hard to talk over the engine rumble and exhaust farts. Anyhow, I’d already given him a fast rundown, on our way to the garage, of all the things that’d put me on to Tyler Fix.

  The boy’s visit to Doc Olsen and the skin ointment he’d left with was the first—that nagging memory itch. Then there was the way Tyler flinched when he threw the empty whiskey bottle off his porch, as if his arm was paining him. And the blackberry thorns stuck in the girl’s dress. And his claim not to know anything about the rust-brown coat and torn-off button. And the fact that he was the most likely to’ve taken Charity Axthelm to the abandoned Crockett property, having passed it any number of times whilst out making his deliveries. And the heavy drinking that’d started after the body was found—too heavy to’ve been caused by grief over a girl he claimed not to know well.