The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave

by Bill Pronzini

  I asked, “Your son around, Mr. Axthelm?”

  “No. Off the property.” Same flat monotone as before.

  “Expect him back soon?”

  “Don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  “That the truth? That he’s gone off somewhere?”

  “I don’t lie.”

  Mrs. Axthelm said, a tremor in her voice, “Why do you want him? What’s he done?”

  “We don’t know that he’s done anything. Just want to talk to him.”

  “What about?”

  “Has to do with Tyler Fix.”

  “Oh, God! I told J.T. there’d be trouble. I told him!”

  Axthelm said, sharp now and without looking at her, “Hush up, Miriam.”

  I said, “Why did you think there’d be trouble, ma’am?”

  “The letters.”

  “Hush!”

  She didn’t listen to him. What showed in her face now was fear and she was caught in its grip. “I was going through Charity’s things last night, and there they were. I still can’t believe—”

  Axthelm whirled on her. “Damn you, woman, those letters are private family business!”

  “Not if Bob’s gone and done something crazy. He—”

  From the way he stomped his good foot onto the lower riser, I thought he was about to go up the stairs after her. I laid a hard hand on his arm. “Leave her be and let her talk, Mr. Axthelm.”

  He glared at me, tried to shake loose. I held on, matching his glare. It wasn’t much of a standoff. I had the authority and his wife had already let the cat out of the bag. Not a contest he could win and he knew it. He said, “Shit,” and the tension went out of him. When he took his foot off the step, I released my hold on him.

  “The letters you found, Mrs. Axthelm,” I said then. “Written to your daughter by Tyler Fix?”

  “Yes. Three. Long, rambling…”

  “Saying what?”

  “How much he … he loved her. Full of all sorts of intimate … Oh, my Lord, I thought at first they must be lies but she wouldn’t have kept the letters if they were. I never thought Charity was that sort of girl. Never! Never!”

  “Sweet young virgin,” Axthelm said, and let loose with a glob of spit. “Whore’s more like it.”

  “No, J.T., please don’t say that—”

  “True, ain’t it. And with child to boot.”

  I said, “The letters mentioned that, her being with child?”

  “No,” Mrs. Axthelm said. “Just that he … he wanted her to be pregnant, wanted to marry her. And that she’d best be true to him, he couldn’t stand the thought of her with another man.”

  “Threatening, then?”

  “Only the last one. After she took up with that man Rainey.”

  “Son of a bitch is the one who killed her,” Axthelm said. “Not Rainey, Tyler Fix.”

  I said, “You’re right, he is. Why didn’t you bring those letters to me soon as you found them?”

  “We couldn’t,” she said. “Bob took them.”

  “When?”

  “Last evening. He heard me crying in Charity’s room. He came in and took them away from me, read them. He … he was furious. He ran out and saddled his horse and rode off. J.T. couldn’t stop him.”

  “Take anything with him? Clothes, weapons?”

  She shook her head, but Axthelm said, “Rifle in his saddle scabbard.”

  “You haven’t seen him since?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been worried sick.”

  “Went after Tyler Fix, didn’t he?” Axthelm said. “Hurt him bad?”

  I had to say it. “Tyler Fix is dead.”

  A thin wailing sound came from Miriam Axthelm. She leaned heavy against the porch railing.

  “Bob killed him?” Axthelm said. Then, when I nodded, “Wasting your time here then. He won’t be coming back.”

  “If he does, advise him to give himself up.”

  “So he can hang? Not damn likely.”

  Wasn’t anything more for us here, Axthelm was right about that. I felt bad for him, for her. But there wasn’t anything I could do for them. I turned away, started back to the flivver. Behind me I heard Mrs. Axthelm say in a moaning voice, “Both our children, gone. Nothing left now, nothing but emptiness and sorrow…”

  I got into the flivver and Carse drove us out of there. We were passing through the ranch gate when a thought came to me so sudden I spoke it out loud.

  “Where did he spend the night?”

  Carse said, “How’s that again?”

  “Bob didn’t find Tyler alone until this morning. Where’d he spend the night?”

  “Watching the Fix house, waiting his chance.”

  “No,” I said. “Bitter cold last night. He’s no fool, he wouldn’t chance frostbite staying outside. Had to’ve sought shelter, for him and his horse both, and not on the Fix property where he might be spotted. Dawn or later before he went there.”

  Carse chewed on that. “Not too many places he could’ve gone.”

  “I can think of one he’d be drawn to.”

  “Where?”

  “The place where his sister died.”

  * * *

  THE BARREN, SNOW-SPRINKLED Crockett farmland looked even more forlorn under the leaden, low-hanging clouds. As if it hadn’t just been abandoned by people, but by God, too. Carse braked near the entrance to the lane. You couldn’t see the farmhouse and outbuildings from there, with the rise between them and the road.

  “Drive or walk in?” he asked.

  I’d given that some thought on the way. “Drive. Long walk in the cold, and we’d be out in the open, exposed. He’s got a rifle, remember. If he’s there, no telling what his frame of mind is.”

  “He’ll hear us coming if he is.”

  “Be keeping watch anyway. More protection for us here in the flivver.”

  Carse took the brake off, pedaled into low gear, and set us bumping along the overgrown lane. When we cleared the top of the rise, I sat forward to peer through the crusty windshield. Forlorn wasn’t the right word for those falling-down buildings and the twisted remains of the orchard. Dead fitted better—rotting gray carcasses with their bones showing.

  Carse must’ve had the same feeling. “Spending a night out here’d be like spending one in a graveyard,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t mind if you had nowhere else to go and you were hell-bent on revenge. Just the place to work yourself into a killing rage.”

  “By listening to ghosts? Gives me chills just thinking about it.”

  Down into the farmyard, slow. Nothing moved anywhere except the wind, stronger than it had been earlier. The front door of the house was shut, but the boards that’d been nailed across it were hanging loose; a board had been pulled off one of the windows, too, so that part of a broken pane of glass was visible behind it. The wind could’ve been responsible, as it likely was for the tattered muslin curtain stirring inside the window, but I didn’t think so.

  “Pull up over to the left,” I told Carse, “where you can get a better look at the stable and corral. And leave the motor running.”

  He did that, set the brake again. Opened his door and stretched his long frame out and up, to look over the top of the door.

  “See anything?”

  It was a clutch of seconds before he said, “Movement in the stable, just a glimpse. Might be a horse in there.”

  I got out on my side, but not until I’d ungloved my hand and switched the Colt sidearm from holster to mackinaw pocket. Nothing happened then, or when I took a couple of slow steps toward the porch. Two more paces and then I stopped, waited a few seconds, then cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted loud.

  “Bob! Bob Axthelm!”

  The only answering voice belonged to the wind.

  I yelled his name a second time, then a third.

  Behind me Carse called out, “Horse back there for sure.”

  That settled it. Time to take the bull by the horns. “We know you’re in t
here, Bob!” I shouted. “Come on out!”

  Silence from the house.

  “Come on now. We’re not leaving until you show yourself.”

  Silence. But then, as I was about to try again, he finally acknowledged. “What you want with me, Sheriff?” Standing close next to the busted window, I judged. Rifle in hand? I sure hoped not.

  “Talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Come on out and I’ll tell you.”

  “How’d you know to come here?”

  “Didn’t. Just a guess when we didn’t find you at home.”

  Silence. No movement at the window that I could make out, not even the curtain stirring now, and the door stayed shut.

  “You coming out?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t be stubborn, Bob. Hurts a man’s throat, shouting this way with a wall between us. Let’s talk like men, face-to-face.”

  “… I asked you what about.”

  “Tyler Fix.”

  Silence. Then, “He’s the one murdered my sister, not the peddler.” Those words came in a rush. Hard to tell with the wind blowing, but I thought his voice sounded heavy with strain. Still with some of that killing fury in him? His conscience bothering him, too, maybe.

  “We know that, Bob. He hanged himself this morning, suicide note pinned to his shirt confessing.”

  “Justice, by Christ.”

  “That’s right. You coming out now?”

  No, not yet. Thinking it over in there, something I didn’t want him to do.

  Then, “Hanged himself, you say, confessed. Then why’d you come looking for me?”

  “To tell you about it, ease your mind.”

  “Bullshit. You could’ve let Pa tell me.”

  “Step out, and we’ll hash it over.”

  “You know I done it. That’s it, isn’t it? You know about those letters, you know I killed him.”

  “Bob…”

  “I had a right. Son of a bitch got Charity pregnant, tried to talk her into marrying him when she told him. She laughed in his face, he said. Wanted the peddler, not him. That’s why he went crazy and strangled her.”

  “All right,” I said. “Now listen to me. Lay your rifle aside, if you got it in there with you, and walk on out here. Slow and easy, with your hands up where I can see them.”

  “No! You’re not taking me to jail.”

  The muscles all along my back were tight as bowstrings. I took a firmer grip on the Colt’s handle. “It won’t go too hard for you. Judge and jury’ll understand why you did it—”

  “I won’t go to jail!”

  “Bob, it’s your only choice—”

  “Like hell it is!”

  Three or four tense seconds. And then the muffled crack of a rifle shot.

  I threw myself down flat, jamming my jaw into the half-frozen ground. Pure reflex. So was dragging the Colt out of my pocket. For when I raised my head, I didn’t see a rifle barrel protruding from the busted window and realized that the shot hadn’t been directed at me, or at Carse over by the flivver yelling. It’d been confined inside the house.

  I scrambled to my feet, the bursitis in my hip hurting fierce as I ran up onto the porch. Bob hadn’t barricaded the door; it whipped inward when I slammed my shoulder against it, staggering me as I burst through.

  He was on the floor over by the window, a long-barreled Winchester lever-action beside him, blood all over one side of his face. Not dead—twitching and moaning with his eyes rolled up. I took a couple of deep breaths to settle my nerves, slow my pulse rate. Carse came running in as I waved away powder smoke, bent for a closer look at Bob Axthelm. The blood was oozing from a black-edged furrow that extended from jawline to hairline.

  “Damn fool’s lucky to be alive,” I said. “Only thing saved him is how hard it is to shoot yourself with a rifle. Must’ve stuck the muzzle under his chin and it slipped sideways when he pulled trigger.”

  “Wound doesn’t look too bad,” Carse said.

  “Bad enough, but he’ll live.”

  We carried him out to the flivver. The blanket his sister and Tyler Fix had used for their trysts was still in the trunk box where we’d put it on Saturday; we wrapped his head in it to keep blood off the seats on the way into town. Doc Olsen would be as relieved as I was to have a live customer to work on, this time.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PEACEFUL BEND WAS anything but peaceful over the next seven days.

  Out-of-area and out-of-state visitors deluged the town and the sheriff’s office, mostly in response to Lester’s exclusive story but with the two local murders providing additional sensation and spice. A pair of Denver police officers with a legal warrant to take Harriet Greenley off our hands and back to Colorado. Newspapermen from Missoula, Kalispell, Helena (one bird from there referred to Peaceful Valley as “the new homicide capital of Montana”), Butte, and Billings, and from as far away as Denver, Cheyenne, and Spokane. Curiosity seekers from neighboring counties. Even a few drummers looking to capitalize on the publicity by selling people a lot of junk they didn’t need.

  All anybody wanted to talk about was the Greenley woman and/or Tyler Fix and the Axthelm family. She wouldn’t speak to the reporters who came before she was hauled away, and neither would Bob Axthelm, sullen and suffering with his bullet-ripped cheek swathed in bandages, so they swarmed all over Carse and me. Mainly me. I had to answer so many questions and correct so much gossip-borne misinformation I developed a headache that plagued me for three days and spoiled my sleep three nights. The fact that just about everybody insisted on draping me in a hero’s cloak didn’t improve my disposition any. Neither did Clyde Senior suggesting the town hold a parade in my honor, a fool notion that I squelched in a hurry.

  Far as I could tell, with all of this tumult going on there were only two people in the valley who still gave a fig about the disappearance and reappearance of the Cuba Libre wooden Indian, most having tucked it away as inconsequential if they hadn’t already forgotten it entirely. Henry Bandelier was one who had it on his mind, of course. And I was the other. I could’ve just tucked it away myself, the devil with Bandelier, but I’m not made that way. It was the crime that had started the crime wave and the only one of the bunch that had yet to be brought to a satisfactory resolution.

  What with one thing and another, it was Saturday a week before I saw my way clear to driving out to the reservation to see Tom Black Wolf and Charlie Walks Far. I went then because my headache had gone with the last of the clamoring visitors, the day was half-sunny and mild—a temporary break in the cold snap—and I knew I wouldn’t have any peace of mind until the matter was cleared up. The history book I’d borrowed from Mary Ellen Belknap rode on the seat beside me in the flivver.

  I found Tom at his house, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, splitting jack pine chunks into cordwood. Charlie was helping him, loading the wood into Tom’s wagon. They hadn’t stopped working when they heard me coming, and didn’t until I parked and walked around to where they were.

  “Morning, boys,” I said. “Kind of late in the season to be storing up wood for winter, seems like.”

  Tom dug his ax blade into the chopping block, brushed fingers through his sweat-damp hair. He didn’t look at the book in my hand, but he could hardly have missed seeing it. His copper-toned face was impassive. “This wood is not for us,” he said. “It is for an elder, Mrs. Running Bear.”

  Widow woman nearing eighty, as I recalled. “Good of you to make sure she’s well provided for. Another long, cold winter coming up.”

  He had nothing to say to that. Neither did Charlie, standing a few feet away by the wagon. Waiting, both of them.

  I said, “I was sorry to hear about your grandfather, Tom. Not unexpected, but a hard loss just the same.”

  A brief chin dip. Then, “Chief Victor was a great warrior in this world. He is now one in the next.”

  “I understand from Mr. Fetters the tribe honored him with ceremonial singing and dancing and a big feast. Burial ac
cording to custom afterwards, I expect.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the usual kind of box.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that wasn’t the kind he wanted toward the end, was it? He craved a different sort of resting place for his mortal remains, one he took to be more befitting of his status as a great chief.”

  Tom said, slow, “He was very old. And very ill in his last days, in mind as well as body.”

  “He could read and write English, couldn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Read some of the books you borrowed from Miss Belknap at the high school while he was lying abed, before the doctor moved him to the infirmary.”

  “He was not able to read then; I read to him. He only looked at the books.”

  “Uh-huh. This one here”—I held it up—“that you returned to Miss Belknap after he passed on. Got a torn and repaired page in it. But it wasn’t you who damaged it, was it, Tom? It was Chief Victor.”

  “By accident. He wished to show the photograph to me, but his hands were not steady and the page tore.”

  “Interesting book. Sons and Daughters of the Nile: A History of Egypt from Ancient to Modern Times.” I opened it to the repaired page and held that up for emphasis.

  Tom didn’t look at it. His eyes were fixed unblinking on mine.

  “Photograph of a sarcophagus,” I said. “What the Egyptians buried their royalty in. That’s what Chief Victor wanted or thought he wanted in his delirium—his own private Indian mummy case.”

  Charlie said, speaking for the first time, “Tom tried to argue with him. So did I. He would not listen.”

  “Uh-huh. And you, Tom, couldn’t refuse to honor his last wish, daft and heretical as it was. Not while he was alive. You could’ve just pretended to do his bidding, but that would’ve been disloyal. Wasn’t enough time to build a sarcophagus in his true likeness, so you hatched the idea of stealing Henry Bandelier’s wooden Indian, sawing it in half, and chiseling out the insides.”

  Tom didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. He knew what a dunderheaded idea it’d been without me telling him.