by A B Guthrie
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No Second Wind
A Sheriff Chick Charleston Mystery
A. B. Guthrie Jr.
FOR FEROL AND MARTY,
those prized companions
1
“Dead cows,” Sheriff Chick Charleston said. “Cows killed God knows how.” He was looking, not at me, but at his desk and the papers arranged on it.
We were seated in his office, where the radiators wheezed and banged against the outside cold. It was barely warm enough in the room, barely warm enough wherever people worked or lived. The mercury that morning registered thirty-five below.
“I’ve read something about that,” I answered.
He went on as if I had not spoken. “Genital and rectal areas removed, by knife or shears or maybe only coyotes. No blood in the body cavities, or so little of it as to stump the experts.”
Still looking at the desk, he shook his head, and went silent.
I was about to go to work again as one of his deputies. My father had died suddenly at the end of the winter quarter of my senior year in college, and I had returned to Midbury for the funeral and decided to stay for a while, if only to help my mother adjust. She had objected, maintaining I should go back to school and get my degree, but the sheriff and I changed her mind, though not beyond lingering doubts.
Charleston continued. “No footprints, either. None around the carcasses. Not a bootmark. Not a paw print.”
“Not surprising in weather like this,” I said needlessly. He knew there was no snow on the ground and the Arctic cold had frozen the earth hard as stone.
He nodded. “Stories get made up, some maybe on the mark, some crazy. Blood cults. Sex cults. Midnight helicopters that can’t be traced. UFOs. Tall men, pygmies, hooded in black.” He shook his head. “Spook the citizens, and you get spooky reports.”
He had paused in his itemization as if counting. Now he straightened, and his eyes lifted. “I get notices from all around, from other counties and other states, but so far we’ve been spared. At least I hope we have. But there’s a little case coming up in city court in the morning. I want you to be there, asking questions. You’ll be allowed to. I’ve seen to that. It’s only a justice of the peace case, before old Joe Bolser.”
I asked, “Who’s on trial?”
“Ike Doolittle. Know him?”
I didn’t.
“Little old man, another Gulley Jimson.”
“I don’t know him, either.”
Charleston shook his head, his smile rueful. “Higher education, and you haven’t read about Gulley.”
There was nothing to say to that.
“Anyhow, here are the questions.”
He named them for me.
The courtroom, if it could be called that, was Joe Bolser’s office, at the opposite end of the courthouse from the sheriff’s quarters and one floor up. A desk served as the judge’s bench. It had a law book on it, which was meant, I supposed, to be evidence of the judge’s credentials. Ranged in front of the desk were half a dozen wooden chairs besides one set at the side for witnesses. Farther back were ten or so folding chairs unfolded for spectators and auditors if any.
An overhead light was turned on and needed to be. The cold had plated the three windows with ice.
My old friend, Felix Underwood, the undertaker, was already seated up front when I arrived. He gave me a bare salute as if the coming proceedings were solemn as a funeral.
Pretty soon Silas Wade, city attorney, showed up and took a seat. We exchanged helloes. He was a young fellow, just out of law school and, like all beginning lawyers, in his mind was probably climbing the political ladder. I thought I could follow his vision. Lieutenant governor, maybe, attorney general, governor and then on to Washington. Who knew?
We waited for Joe Bolser, who came in presently, sat behind the desk and cleared his throat. We didn’t stand up at his entrance. Justices of the peace didn’t deserve that much respect. It was going far enough to address him as judge. He was an elderly, paunchy man whose clothes didn’t fit, and he squirmed in his chair as if crotch-bound.
Satisfied as to crotch comfort, Bolser cleared his throat again and shuffled some papers he had brought with him. Among them was a legal pad on which he meant, I guessed, to take notes. Justice of the peace courts didn’t bother much with records. Names, addresses, offenses, dispositions—they were about all.
The judge took a pen from his pocket and, pointing it at us, said, “Before the court is the case of Ike Doolittle. I see the complainant is present.” Looking at Wade, he asked, “Where is the defendant?”
The door opened as he spoke, and a bundle of a man walked in. “Just in time, your honor,” the bundle said.
“Be seated.”
Before he sat down, the bundle unbundled himself, removing a sheepskin coat that must have come from an Old Testament flock. Without it he became a little specimen, a spider of a man, with a beard that a musk ox would have envied. Box him up, I thought, and you could send him by parcel post, beard included.
“Are you ready?” Bolser asked Wade.
“Ready, your honor.”
Doolittle didn’t have an attorney, so Bolser asked, “Are you ready, Mr. Doolittle?”
“Ready as ever I’ll be. If the court please, let the mills grind.” His mouth hardly showed he was speaking. It was his beard that did.
“I call as witness Mr. Felix Underwood,” Wade told the court.
Bolser told Underwood, “Come forward and be sworn.”
Felix took the oath and sat down in the witness chair. He wore his solemn, funeral look.
“Now, Mr. Underwood,” Wade said. “Tell the court in your own words just what happened. What is the basis of your complaint?”
“It isn’t mine so much as my wife’s,” Felix said. I believed him. I knew Mrs. Underwood.
“But she isn’t present to press charges,” Wade said half as a question.
“No. No. I was elected.” One hand came to his undertaker’s face. “Live and let live is my motto.”
Judge Bolser asked, “Do you wish to withdraw your complaint?”
“No, Joe—I mean your honor—I can’t do that.”
“All right, then. Proceed,” Wade told him.
“It was just last week, in the morning, cold like it is now, maybe colder—who knows?—and I got up in my nightshirt to turn up the heat. And there he was, in the same room as the thermostat.”
“Who was, Mr. Underwood?”
“Him there. Ike Doolittle.”
“You knew him?”
“Not right at first. I thought it was a buck sheep, a big one, that had come in and laid down. Then I saw his whiskers. It couldn’t be nobody but Ike.”
“What was he doing?”
“Nothing, unless making more water.”
The judge lifted a gray eyebrow and asked, “Water?”
“He had that sheepskin of his open, and there was a pond on our new carpet, or say a wet patch of maybe three yards altogether, and that carpet cost me twelve dollars a yard.”
“That seems excessive,” the judge interjected. “I don’t mean the cost. I mean the wet spot.” He looked at the little figure of Doolittle. “From him.”
Felix forgot himself and said, “You wouldn’t believe it. You never saw so much piss. Neither did I, never in all my born days, man or boy.”
“In your business you ought to know,” Bolser said. He w
asn’t exactly grinning. “The court takes your word for it.”
Wade picked up the questioning, “How did he happen to be in your house?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Did he break in?”
“Naw. Naw. I never lock the front door.”
“What did you do after finding him?”
“I didn’t go close, not in my bare feet. I called the sheriff’s office, and Tad Frazier came and took him away, leaving the evidence, you might say.”
“Is Tad Frazier a witness?” The question came from the bench.
“I didn’t think his testimony necessary,” Wade answered. “I can get him, though.”
“Never mind. Is that all, Mr. Underwood?”
Felix looked first at Wade and then nodded.
The judge dismissed him, and Felix came and sat by my side.
“Mr. Doolittle, do you want to be heard?”
“Could I explain a little and then throw myself on the mercy of the court?”
Judge Bolser said, “Mercy?” and hitched at his pants and thought for a moment. “At least you can explain, though that puddle, if you made it, will be hard to jump.”
“No jumps, your honor. Just a poor man’s annals, short and simple.”
I knew the reference and looked sharper at Doolittle. It was hard to believe he had read Gray’s Elegy.
“Come forward then and be sworn.”
Doolittle rose and stepped ahead. There was so little to him that his feet made hardly a sound. Age? I guessed fifty. He said, “I can’t take the oath, your honor.”
“Why not?” An edge had come into Bolser’s voice. “Do you propose to lie?”
“No, sir. It’s in the interest of truth that I can’t take it.”
“Explain to the court.”
“Your honor would have me swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, God. It’s the whole-truth part that stalls me.”
“Go on.”
“Not meaning any disrespect, but I ask you who knows the whole truth? About anything? About you? About me? About what we done or seen? It isn’t everybody who sees the same thing when they look at it or think it. Even the Bible ain’t always so sure of itself. The whole truth gets away from all of us, even the Book.”
A point all right, and Doolittle went on, “Take the apple. It meant different to Eve than to Adam, and what was the truth of it?”
He paused, and his eyes went from one of us to the other, above the shag of beard.
Staring at him, I thought about his speech, that hybrid of classroom and street, of books and bars. Well, even those of us who knew better lapsed from the rules, out of accommodation, habit or indulgence.
Bolser shifted and tucked his shirt tighter under his belt. “Will you swear to tell the truth that lies within your knowledge, all of it, so help you, God.” I gave him a plus mark.
“Sure. I do.”
“Be seated, then.”
Wade straightened his young shoulders as if making ready to sink the harpoon. “You have heard the previous testimony, Mr. Doolittle. Do you dispute it?”
The judge interrupted. “Just a minute. For the record, Mr. Wade, we need his full name and address.”
Wade appeared flustered. To be corrected by a mere j.p.! “Your name?” he said without much wind behind it.
“Ike for Ichabod, A for Armstead, Doolittle for me, though it doesn’t fit.”
“Your permanent residence?”
Doolittle fluttered his hands. “Permanent? Now that’s a word. Permanent like in a hairdo? Here today and gone tomorrow. Permanent?”
“All right. Where are you staying?”
“I’m bunking at the Jackson Hotel, long as I can afford it.”
“So, Mr. Doolittle, what is your version? What is the truth for which you have such respect?” I wanted to twist that kid lawyer’s neck. “Tell the court in your own words.”
Judge Bolser looked at us and said softly, “Who else’s, pray tell?” I was liking him better and better.
“You want the long of it or the short?”
Wade answered, “Only what’s pertinent.”
“Well, I was working for old man Dutton, him with the pretty granddaughter, and we come to a disagreement, and I was fired or I quit. Take your pick.”
“A disagreement, huh? So the present case is not the only trouble you’ve been in?”
“God help me, no. Not by a long shot.”
“Did you come to blows?”
“With him! That’s crazy. He’s older than you and me put together. I admit he’s spry, though. I bet he can turn handsprings. That’s what his mind’s always doing. Handsprings. Only it falls on its ass a lot. Begging your pardon, your honor.”
“The court has heard worse. Now let’s get more order into this hearing. Where did this occur? Your pardon, Mr. Wade.”
“At his ranch. You know, ’way up there north and west of town. Like I said, Dutton’s ’way along in years and”—he put his hand to his temple and made a winding motion—“he imagines things or forgets them, even if he does sign the checks. Age, it plays dirty tricks on a man.”
Wade was recovered enough to ask, “What was the cause of the disagreement? Why did he fire you?”
“He thought I was sweet on his granddaughter.”
“And were you?”
The whiskers moved, presumably to a smile. “I thank you, sir, for those kind words, but the answer is double no. Take off thirty years, though, and I would have had a bow in my neck.”
“We have been pretty far afield,” Wade said. “Now let’s get down to cases. You quit or got fired and—”
“And came to town. It had been a long time between drinks, and I tried to make up for that dry spell.”
“You mean you got drunk.”
“That’s a weak word for what I was. I must have tried to take a drink for each thirsty day, like an old fool.”
“And then?” Wade asked.
Doolittle turned toward Bolser. “You know, your honor, a man never gets used to the years. Even at my age he thinks he can hell around like the kid he once was. Pitiful, ain’t it?”
Wade repeated, “And then?”
“I think I remember getting out of the Bar Star. What I do remember is it was so cold an Eskimo would have cried. Then, between whiskey and age, I got lost on my way to the Jackson Hotel, where I had stashed my plunder.”
“What else do you remember?”
“I was wandering around, desperate, late at night, and here came a door, and it wasn’t locked, and the place was warm, and I just went in and lay down and passed out.”
“And also passed water,” the court put in.
“I’m mighty sorry about that if I done it, and I guess I did. I must have a tank inside me. But a man’s got to face up to what he did, drunk or sober, so I’ve already paid some cleaning people to go to that house and do their best when it’s convenient.”
“Are there other questions?” Judge Bolser asked as Wade indicated he was through.
“Yes, sir, a few,” I said.
“Just whom do you represent?” Wade wanted to know.
“Shut up, Wade,” Bolser said.
“To go back,” I said to Doolittle, “just what were you doing at the Dutton place?”
“Everything I had time to turn my hand to. It’s kind of run down, you know, and that poor girl was trying to take care of maybe a hundred beef, feeding them and all, keeping the fences up, keeping the cows inside, doctoring the sick ones and all the time trying to ride herd on a dotty grandpa. I kind of took over the outside chores.”
“Did you dispose of a dead cow?”
“A long-dead cow, but pretty well preserved on account of the cold. It was to windward of the house and would have made a stink, come warm weather.”
Wade, trying to show what attorneys were for, interrupted. “I don’t see what bearing—”
If he hoped for renewed recognition, he didn’t get it. “This i
s a leeway court, Mr. Wade,” the judge said. “The questions may continue.”
“What did you do about that cow?” I asked.
“I telephoned a rendering outfit, but it was no go there, too cold for those boys, I guess.”
“So?”
“There was an old team of horses on the place and not much else in the way of power, so I hooked the team to the cow and pulled her onto a stone boat as old as time, and then I hooked the team to the boat, and away I went.”
“Went where?”
“To a downwind coulee where I left the carcass.”
“Did you take special notice of the cow, the condition it was in?”
“The condition was dead.”
Bolser winked at me, and I had to smile.
“I understand that,” I went on. “What killed the cow? Were there any marks on it, marks like wounds? Anything?”
“Not that I noticed. You have to understand that cow was old. God knows how many years she had on her. She should have been culled six or ten years before. Finally she just lay down and died. That’s what the girl told me. The old man backed her up when he could think of it.”
“What about the udder? The genitals?”
“Gone.”
My questions had stirred curiosity. I could see it in the eyes and the gathered attention.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Varmints, critters like wolves, they go for the soft parts first. So those fixin’s weren’t there.”
“Could you distinguish between knife work and tooth work, between a cut and a bite?”
“That would depend. Not on that cow, though. Too long.”
“You mentioned wolves. There are no wolves in this section as far as I know. Haven’t been for a long time.”
“That’s what they say, though I might think different. Things go and things come. There’s a season for everything, like the Bible says.” His whiskers moved to a smile. “On that cow, though, it could have been coyotes. I’m not set on wolves.”
I had come to the end of my questions, and Judge Bolser asked, “Anything else?” Not hearing anything, he inquired of Felix, “The court will go by your wishes, Mr. Underwood? Obviously this man is guilty.”
Felix was a long time in answering. At last he muttered, “There’s my wife.” Abruptly he shrugged and straightened. “But hell, the man’s made—What do you call it, Joe?”
