CHAPTER THREE
“You savvy much about firearms, Jase?” the sheriff asked me.
It was morning of the same day I had returned from my joy ride in the old hearse. I had got out of bed early, choosing to miss sleep rather than goings-on, and had had breakfast and come right to the office. There had been few people about, and none knew enough to be curious yet.
“Nothing much,” I answered. “I own a twenty-two pump and a shotgun, half-choke, both of them Winchesters.”
Charleston was fingering a couple of cartridges, one for a revolver, I guessed, and one for a rifle, their calibers not plain to me. “Buster Hogue’s still alive, but that’s all,” he said. “Never a chirp from the poor bird.” He studied the cartridges in his hand and added, “Funny.”
I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t speak for a while. He just sat there, half out from behind his desk, and his eyes went from the shells he held to the shiny toe of one boot, as if a clue might be scuffed on it.
Then he said, getting up, “Damn court would be in session today and need me as a witness in a pisswillie case. Ought to be through at noon. You want to take a ride with me at, say, about one o’clock?”
I told him I did but, before he could go, Old Doc Yak came galloping in, satchel in hand, to treat a prisoner whose hangover woes could be heard now and then in the office. The man, taken drunk at a country bar, had shot at a friend, missed, and punctured a slop pail. Charleston waited for Doc to return from the cells in back. “Paraldehyde,” Doc said as he came out. “That’ll gentle the snakes.”
“Hold it, Doc,” Charleston said.
“For what?”
“Buster Hogue.”
“You know all I do. Serious wound.”
“Yeah. How well was it treated?”
“Best of my ability.”
“Sure. Sure. I mean before. By that Doctor Pierpont?”
“Adequate.”
“No more than that?”
“What the hell? Adequate is adequate.”
“And professional courtesy is professional courtesy?”
“Goddam it, Chick, he’s a psychiatrist.” Doc Yak snorted. “Mental healing for loose bowels. Anyhow, he’s not accustomed to country sawbones work. Not his field. And what’s the big idea, my friend?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“And I guess you’re right.” Doc grunted and thumped out.
I left the office then and looked up Terry Stephens, who had been laid off from unloading a couple of freight cars because the cars were unloaded. As a catcher he wasn’t good enough for the team, but he was always willing to catch my practice pitches. On our way to the vacant lot alongside the Great Northern depot where there was a board fence for a backstop, we kept stopping to tell the curious the Buster Hogue score, or as much of it as we knew. And we held up long enough to watch and hear old Mrs. Jenkins, who was yelling out, “Let the lower lights be burning …,” while enroute to the post office. I figured her lights were burning pretty low.
I practiced and fooled around with Terry for a couple of hours, went home and studied my book on fingerprinting and had lunch with my mother and dad and told about last night’s shooting. My dad, an abstracter, said with a semi-serious smile, “Chick and you will uncover the culprit. Chick alone if duty calls you elsewhere,” meaning to the pitcher’s mound. He didn’t oppose my baseball ambition. He just treated it lightly.
The sheriff was waiting for me. He told old Jimmy to man the office and led out to his car, which was his own (not the county’s) and brought him maybe enough money in mileage for operation and maintenance. It was a modified machine with plenty of clearance, unlike the factory jobs that high-centered on horse turds and cost punctured gas tanks and lost mufflers on country roads. It had extra-ply tires, a hand choke for cold-weather starting and power enough for the law’s purposes. He called it his Rocky Mountain Special.
“Where to, Jase?” he asked, as if he hadn’t already made up his mind.
“To the scene of the crime, I s’pose.”
“We’ll dude it first.”
He meant we’d go see Guy Jamison, the dude rancher.
It was an agreeable enough drive. For seven miles we followed the new highway that wasn’t quite super but was called that. It carried a lot of traffic—summer tourists, logging trucks and assorted vans bound to and from Canada. Then we turned off onto what Loose had called that rocky-assed road.
Bouncing around, seeing high summer on all sides and the blued mountains lifting clear in the sunshine, I felt good, good to be in this, my own climate and country, good to be with Charleston, good to know I was pitching come Sunday. I had brought the baseball along and gave it a squeeze or two when I remembered.
We found Guy Jamison in his toolshed working on packhorse rigging, I imagined in preparation for the big-game season. He laid aside the rigging and put down a ball-peen hammer as we pulled up and got out. He was lean and muscular, as a man had to be to heave and hitch packs on a pack string, and his eyes had the squint of the guide in them, the mountain squint that could see elk and bear where dudes couldn’t. His smile made his face different from common sober.
“Time to talk awhile, Guy?” Charleston asked.
“Sure thing. Dudes are out riding, or fishing. Come on up to the house.”
The house was his new lodge. We called out hello to his wife, who along with a cabin girl was hanging sheets on a line. Inside, we took seats in the lodge room, and Guy offered beer, which I refused, the higher law being present, and Charleston accepted.
“Some place you’ve got,” the sheriff said, looking around, after Guy had come back with the bottles.
It was some place, as clean and joined and close-built as a cabinetmaker could ask.
“Thanks,” Guy said like a man who couldn’t take compliments easily. “If it ever pays off.” He took a sip of beer. “What’s the word on Buster Hogue?”
“Still alive but still out. Guy, were you on hand all during the picnic?”
“Mostly. I didn’t have time to sneak off and shoot.” Guy’s smile transformed his face again.
“I mean, did you note anything, like absences from the group, that might be significant? Who was present around the fire, and who wasn’t, when Buster got hit?”
“I can’t help you, Chick. I had my dudes there and rode herd on them when I wasn’t passing them grub from the chuck wagon I’d brought along as a sort of special attraction, as an extra treat, you might say.”
“Quite a treat.”
“Yeah. I thought maybe they’d jump the reservation, some of them, after the shooting, but, Jesus Christ, no! They’ve seen the wild west, just like in pictures, and can’t be pried off the place until their set time runs out.”
“Did you talk to Hogue at all?”
“For maybe one minute. He was riding his conservative horse, bitching about high taxes, government spending, government waste, humbuggery at all levels.”
“Did you happen to see whether Hogue took off his hat?”
“What the hell? Oh, sure. Pretty bald. Pretty target. No. I didn’t notice.”
“Loose Lancaster said he did.”
“And who except for the guilty party would have an eye for it? But Lancaster? That’s loco, Chick.”
“I suppose, but it’s an interesting if unlikely item. Who notices when a man uncovers? Or who remembers without special reason?”
Guy got up to fetch more beer. The sheriff scuffed his chin with his knuckles, gave me a little grin and asked, “Any questions?”
I didn’t have any, but I noticed that Charleston took off his hat on entering the room and so had a bit of evidence to offset his observations.
“All right, then,” the sheriff said after Guy had returned with fresh bottles. “You didn’t see anything that would stir up suspicion. You say Loose Lancaster is out. And now tell me, Guy, just who has had trouble with Hogue. All of them that you know.”
Guy smiled that surprising smile and answered,
“Who hasn’t?” He fingered out a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match. “You can start with me.”
“Shall I?”
“You might. A motive you’re after. Well, Hogue won’t keep up his fences. He leaves my gates down. I’ve got just enough graze for my own horses, none to feed his damn cattle. We’ve had a run-in or two. Make it four at the least.”
“So?”
“Make no mistake. I’ve got a temper. When I was greener, before I wised up, I told our friend Hogue I was dickering for a quarter section of land I needed for pasture. Next thing I knew, Hogue had bought it out from under me. When I braced him, he just smiled and said, ‘Business is business.’ We had it hot and heavy. I could have killed him.”
For an instant Guy’s face set itself in old rage. Then it relaxed. “A thing with me,” he went on, “is I can’t remain mad. Call it a weakness, but, anyhow and moreover, to stay mad is to eat your guts out. You have no time but for anger, none for the business at hand.”
“Right,” Charleston said, nodding.
“And in spite of all, believe it or not, I kind of like the old bastard. You can grade him blow-hard and loud-fart, sort of amusing itself, and he sure God has been greedy for land, but, if he’d diddle you one way or another and let his cows in on your grass, in time of real need he’d give you, well, not the shirt off his back, but his old one. Yep. More or less likable.”
Charleston was turning his sand-colored hat in his hands. “We can cross off your dudes as witnesses, I would think. They wouldn’t have seen anything.”
“Except scenery, and it through bifocals or camera finders. Good bunch but city-bred blind.”
“Then name me who’s had trouble with Hogue.”
Guy gave him a look that seemed to say Charleston ought to know a thing or two without asking and then answered, “Ben Day’s number one.”
“Outside of him, for the time being.”
“I would say all whose land butts on his. Offhand, Oscar Oliphant, Blue Piatt, Loose Lancaster, Plenty Too-good, Taller-Ass McNair.”
We were strong on nicknames, I better explain. Blue Piatt’s initials were B. L. U., standing for what nobody knew. Plenty Toogood’s first name was Robert but never used unless on a mortgage or check. Taller-Ass McNair was a real old old-timer who in days before mine kept his saddle anointed with mutton tallow, which put a brand on his britches.
“I’ve already talked to Loose, Oliphant and Piatt,” the sheriff said. “No good as witnesses. As suspects?” He shrugged. “Well.” For a long minute there was silence. Then he asked, “What about your hermit?”
“Chouquette.” Guy gave it the local pronunciation, which was Shoo-Cat. “Pierre wasn’t there, of course, unless hiding out with a rifle. Once he butchered one of Hogue’s steers, as a warning against trespass, I guess. Nothing much came of that except hot words and winter meat for Pierre.”
“There’s that newcomer, Professor Powell Hawthorne, isn’t it? Doesn’t his land abut Hogue’s? Have you met him?”
“Yes to all questions. Met him and his daughter both—God, what a filly—last night at the picnic and just once before. The place—it’s a full section, you know, with a nice cabin on it—was left to him by his brother. You remember old Spike Hawthorne? Gone most of the time, wintering in Phoenix, and died and was buried there six, eight months ago.”
“I knew him to speak to.”
“Buster tried to get hold of that section, I hear. The professor said no. He’s a retired geologist, so they say, and will just summer there, studying rocks and the birds and the bees. I would call him an old-fashioned gentleman, ivy brand.” Guy paused and then threw in, “He’s quite a historian and collector, too. Got a nice lot of old guns.”
“Old guns!”
“Sharps, Henrys, Colts and more. But hold up, Chick. I doubt he ever fired one. Trouble with Hogue? Not to my knowledge. It’s your guess whether he saw anything at the picnic.”
Charleston finished his beer and said no to another. I remembered I hadn’t squeezed the baseball in some time and so began squeezing it.
“So we come to the doctor,” the sheriff said.
“Ulysses Pierpont. How’s that for a monicker? Goes nice with psychiatrist. You met him?”
“Not even seen him.”
“He’s new this summer and comes up from the city just when his practice allows. He picked up a few acres, just a patch, at a tax sale none of us noticed at the time. Got a small trailer house on it but big plans for the future. That’s the word, anyhow. Me, I saw him for the first time last night.”
“To talk to?”
“Not much. A little, after Buster was shot. I just thanked the Lord he was there. He knew his business.”
“So Doc Yak told me. But for him, he said, Buster would have died on the way in to town.”
“Yeah. Pierpont didn’t say so, but I guess he thought the case was hopeless regardless. I know he looked grave and was shaking his head when we carried Hogue off.”
“No bad blood between them?”
“Nuts, Chick.”
“And no prior contact?”
“None I could swear to. I did hear, true or false, that Doctor Pierpont wanted to buy a quarter section from Hogue to add to his patch, but he wanted to get hold of the Hawthorne place, too. No soap either time. That don’t make a case for you, for God’s sake.”
Charleston ran a hand over his head, started to say something and didn’t, and asked after a while, “What about threats to Hogue, from the men mentioned already?”
“For what they’re worth. Blue Piatt said he’d kill Hogue if he didn’t keep his cows inside his own fences. That’s for sure. I heard it. One of Hogue’s boys, little Buster, it was, said in my presence that Oscar Oliphant had shoved him and a bunch of strayed beef off his place with a rifle. Loose Lancaster runs off at the mouth, and so what? Pierre Chouquette, well, he did butcher a steer, but, besides that, who knows what goes on in the mind of that Indian hermit? You can forget old McNair. He’s a friend and more or less a retainer of Hogue’s.”
Guy lighted another cigarette, inhaled and studied Charleston through the smoke he breathed out. “Why dodge Ben Day?”
The sheriff smiled a thinking smile, which uncovered teeth a girl would have prized, her jaws allowing. It was when he smiled that you realized how clear blue his eyes were. There was good nature in his face, good nature mixed with fixed purpose; and it struck me as I looked at him that I wouldn’t want to be the man he was after but, having been caught, would be glad he was the man who had caught me.
“I know,” he said. “Any fool would point first to Day.”
“Why not? He had the biggest trouble with Buster.”
“So I’ve heard. But that was smoothed over, you know, and never got to my office. What’s your version?”
“Hearsay, same as yours. Day had a Forest Service permit and damn few cows to trail up to mountain pasture. His count was about two hundred short of his allowance. That’s what they say. So he made a deal with Buster by which Buster would use that summer graze.”
Charleston shrugged and said just as a side remark, “And to hell with regulations.”
“Sure. Neither one cared about government rules. But to play safe from nosy rangers, they changed the brands on those cattle, from Buster’s to Day’s. About then Day had a bright idea, or maybe he had had it before. On the strength of the brand he mortgaged the cattle.”
As if to a story heard before, the sheriff nodded. “And got found out.”
“Somehow. I don’t know the straight of it. Seems Buster got his cattle back and the bank—the Second State in the city, I heard—the bank recovered its loan, and that was that. Never a charge made.”
“Because Buster couldn’t come into court with clean hands.”
“And banks don’t like stinks, long as the cash drawer isn’t short.”
“A big hush-hush all around,” Charleston said, and blew out a deep breath. “No little birds telling me how Buster and Day fe
el now, one toward the other.”
There was a question in his words, and Guy answered, “Me, neither. But it stands to reason they’re not what you would call bosom pals. Not Mr. Ben Day, anyhow.”
The sheriff got up and said, “All right, Guy. Thanks. Come on, Jase.”
As we stood there about to go, Mrs. Jamison and the cabin girl came in, looking a little flushed from the sun. We said a few things back and forth, but what I noticed was the eye that cute cabin girl had for the sheriff. Good God, she was too young and fresh for him. He must have been forty and a long ways from fresh.
While we were on the way to the car, Guy called out, “How’s the old wing, Jase?” as if to make up for leaving me out of the conversation.
“Felt good this morning,” I called back, waving the baseball, and Charleston and I climbed into the Rocky Mountain Special.
Once we were on the way, Charleston said, “Now we’ll dodge in on the picnic grounds.”
We pulled up on the ridge overlooking the bottom. The ridge had a few stunted pines on it and some creeping juniper and, in the gravel and dry grass, a crisscross of tire tracks left by the cars that had parked there.
The bottom was a sweet place, open except for the willows flanking the river, which here made a bend and had gouged out a trout hole as deep and blue as a fisherman’s dream. At the east end of the little flat stood Jamison’s canvas-clad chuck wagon, which could have been gotten down the steep, bouldered slope only by Jamison’s high-wheeled, four-wheel-drive truck. In the center was the dead picnic fire. From above, it was the only sign of last night’s get-together, except for half a dozen wooden blocks sawn for seats. Even with a shooting to draw top attention, someone or more had remembered to pick up the trash.
We scrambled down the ridge and went to the remains of the fire. One of the blocks had been overturned and lay on its side. Studying it and the ground close around, Charleston pointed to a small patch of gravel and grass, stained and coated with what I knew wasn’t rust. He began taking sightings, moving a little this way and that while his eyes reconnoitered the ridge. He wasn’t saying anything, though, and I wandered off to the trout hole.
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