The Long Count

by JM Gulvin

  ‘Mr Bowen,’ he called. ‘Are you here, sir? Is anybody home?’

  There was no answer. All he could hear was the hum from the Frigidaire. Casting another glance, he took in an antique range-style stove in enamel that ran on propane gas. A single cup and its saucer were upturned on the draining board with a dishcloth folded neatly beside.

  The kitchen opened onto a living room and he could feel a moist kind of warmth rising now. Inside he saw the glimmer of a flame from a river-rock fireplace where fake logs burned beyond the chain-link guard.

  ‘Mr Bowen?’ he called again. ‘Sir, my name is Quarrie and I’m a Texas Ranger. Are you OK?’

  Nobody answered and he took a look around the room. A leather couch cut in the style of a Chesterfield, two matching armchairs and coffee table in between. Back of that was a circular card table with a green felt top. A bar area was built to the side with a couple of stools and a cooler fixed to the wall. A twenty-six inch Admiral color TV occupied one corner with a remote control box placed on top.

  Pictures hung on the walls, western scenes painted by Russell, or somebody trying to emulate him perhaps. On the mantelpiece above the fire was a single eight-by-ten-inch photograph of a man and a woman with a couple of dark-haired boys.

  Another scent struck him, a sickly sweet kind of odor that was a little weighty, Quarrie knew that smell and it wasn’t coffee burned in the pot. Without touching he photo he studied it for a couple of moments then he turned once more. The far wall was entirely made of glass, a set of sliding patio doors. They overlooked a barbecue area furnished by cane-style armchairs that were actually made from steel. They were gathered around a glass-topped table, and a brick-built barbecue was set into the wall.

  To the left of the fireplace an archway opened onto a spacious hallway that had various oak doors leading off it and all of them were closed. At the far end a casement window offered the same view as from the living room and, though it brought in some natural light, the hall felt gloomy still. Falling away beneath the window a set of stairs led down to the basement and the smell was much stronger now.

  Unfastening the hammer clip on his right-hand holster, Quarrie started along the hallway towards the head of the stairs. He opened the first oak door and found another, smaller living room, set with a couch and TV, though this one was black and white. Two more doors opened onto two more single bedrooms that were both bare and functional: there was nothing homely here. It was regimented, and a little like his cottage back at the Feeley ranch, he could sense no woman’s touch. The last door opened onto the master bedroom with a queen size bed where the sheets were tucked in and the pillow slips newly pressed.

  At the head of the stairs the smell was even worse. A chill seemed to gather from below. Palm on the butt of his pistol, Quarrie started down.

  ‘Mr Bowen?’ he called. ‘Are you there, sir? My name’s Quarrie. I’m a Texas Ranger.’

  Nobody answered. He was at the foot of the stairs in a narrow corridor that peeled fifteen feet to a single door. That door was closed and Quarrie remained where he was long enough to pick up any sound. He could hear nothing though, and doubted he would, so he started for the door. Pausing outside the smell was thicker still.

  Easing the door open he took in oak boards on the floor and oak panels on the nearest wall. It was replete with bookshelves and books, and where there were no books there were a few photographs scattered here and there. Beyond the shelves a glass-fronted gun cabinet was built as part of the wood. Stepping inside Quarrie saw a desk in shadow in the corner that had been hidden as he opened the door. A man was sitting at the desk. Hunched a little to one side, his head was angled; both hands thrown out before him, one of them fisted and the other one holding a gun.

  Five

  He did not move. He did not speak. The rank odor lifted directly from where he sat. Moving closer Quarrie could see how his eyes had sunk in their sockets, his stare as sightless as the skull they had found in the river. He looked about fifty; hair clipped so close it appeared to graze his scalp. Jaw slack, a trail of dried blood had leaked from his temple where the hole was small and round. The automatic cupped in his palm looked like a twenty-two and with no exit wound visible, the slug had to be lodged in his brain. Looking closer still, Quarrie could see purple colored marks like bruises on the skin just above his collarbone.

  Apart from the dead man there was nothing wrong with the room, no sign of a fight or struggle or anybody else having been there. Nothing looked out of place. Quarrie could see no obvious marks on the floorboards. A blotter was placed centrally on the desk with a gold pen set just ahead of it. A wire file holder perched to the right of the dead man’s hand, an empty in-tray of sorts.

  Studying the bullet hole more closely, he could see where pinpricks of black powder scattered the skin. The dead man’s gaze was fixed; he seemed to peer almost, as if he could not quite get a handle on something in the corner of the room.

  The sound of footsteps in the passage broke the silence, heavy and weighted; a shadow filled the doorway. As Quarrie turned he had a pistol drawn.

  ‘Jesus, whoa! Hold up there – I’m a cop.’ A sheriff’s deputy not wearing his hat. He stood with his eyes wide and palms outstretched.

  Shaking his head, Quarrie let the hammer down. ‘Don’t be doing that,’ he said as he holstered the pistol. ‘Creeping up on a feller, it’s not a very smart thing to do.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the young man said. ‘I should’ve hollered from upstairs. My name’s Collins, Fannin County sheriff’s department.’ He stared at Quarrie’s gun. ‘You know what, I never even saw that piece till it was pointed at me. Have you always been that fast?’ He was young and skinny, and when he stepped into the light he looked pretty raw. Spotting the dead man in the chair he lifted a hand to his mouth as if he was going to throw up.

  ‘Jesus H,’ he uttered. ‘Thought I could smell something. How long’s he been like that?’

  ‘I figure maybe two or three days.’

  ‘All that time with the fire going up there in the living room. No wonder this place stinks.’ The deputy crossed the room now holding the cuff of his shirt to his nose. At the desk he bent with his free hand pressed to his thigh.

  ‘Shot hisself. Never could figure why anybody would want to do that. You come across many suicides before?’

  Quarrie did not answer. He moved from the desk to the shelves where he considered the photographs more carefully and could see they were all of the dead man in uniform and clearly taken some years ago.

  He studied the gun case, which housed an assortment of rifles as well as handguns and a razor sharp-looking bayonet. They were secured on hooks and one of those hooks was empty. Stepping to the side Quarrie ran his eye down the crack between the edge of the cabinet and the door and saw that though it was closed, the door wasn’t locked.

  ‘You figure that?’ From behind him the deputy was still talking. ‘How anybody would want to take a gun to their head? Hell of a thing. Got to be a reason I suppose.’

  ‘You’d think so,’ Quarrie said. ‘Sickness, loneliness maybe, all kinds of stuff a man might be going through that he ain’t going to talk about to anybody else about.’ He looked back at the desk. ‘That’s how it is sometimes, only this guy didn’t kill himself.’

  ‘Do what now?’ the deputy said.

  ‘Someone was here and they put that bullet in him,’ Quarrie stated. ‘Afterwards they fixed the piece in his hand and I imagine they wiped their prints. From what I can see, they sat him a little more upright in that chair.’ He pointed. ‘That’s post-mortem lividity you can see there at the base of his neck.’

  Back at the desk the deputy stared.

  ‘Those purple marks,’ Quarrie said. ‘What looks like bruising, that’s where blood settled after he was dead.’ He glanced towards the basement stairs. ‘It doesn’t look like they disturbed a whole lot, but there was someone here all right, and when they left the kitchen door wasn’t closed. This ain’t a suicide. It’s is
a homicide, so be careful where you put your hands.’

  The deputy had an uncertain expression on his face. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘I ain’t about to argue with you, you being a Ranger and all. But are you sure? It looks for all the world like he took that piece to himself.’

  ‘Course it does.’ Quarrie crossed to the desk where he dropped to his haunches. ‘That’s how it’s meant to look but that’s not how it was. Come over here and I’ll show you.’

  Pacing around the desk the deputy crouched down next to him.

  ‘Hand me your flashlight,’ Quarrie said.

  The deputy unhooked it from his belt.

  ‘All right then.’ Quarrie shone the beam across the dead man’s skin. ‘Take a look at that bullet wound right there and you’ll see how the skin is lifted but only a fraction. You can see the pinpricks of powder where it burned.’

  ‘Got it,’ the deputy said.

  ‘That ain’t a contact wound,’ Quarrie told him. ‘That’s a shot been fired from a couple of inches away at least. Deputy, when somebody takes a gun to their head they press the barrel right up to the skin. They do it because they’re scared they’ll miss and wind up still alive but with half a face. Happens every time and you get a star shaped wound on account of it with four or five points and each of the points is flared. When you look real close you see that the skin is pressed inwards ever so slightly, as if somebody kneaded it a little with their fingers.’

  Rising to his full height he passed the flashlight back to the deputy. ‘It’s caused by gases from the cartridge spreading between the bone and subcutaneous tissue. What the coroner would call an overpressure.’ Taking off his hat he worked a hand through his hair. ‘You got yourself a homicide all right, so best you secure this room.’

  Six

  Leaving him to call it in, Quarrie returned to his car and drove back to the highway once more. He kept his foot down hard, travelling east towards Paris before heading through Mount Pleasant, making for Winfield in Marion County.

  It was not a place he had been to before and the rain arrived long before he pulled up where the railroad crossed at the bottom of Main Street. It was dark now, and after all day in the car he was stiff in the back as he waited for the freight train to pass.

  A sheet of lying water on the street, it flared indigo under the lamps. All the stores were closed and few vehicles filled the spots between the twin rows of parking meters. Unsure where the police department was, he pulled up outside the pool room and asked a young man for directions. The man sent him another couple of blocks, then he made a right and a left before coming up on a station house that looked underfunded and rundown. A squat, flat-roofed building cast in old brick, it was hunched between two much smarter offices and that only added to the air of decay.

  Parking the Riviera, Quarrie tickled the throttle one last time and the V8 shuddered into silence. He sat there yawning, then reached for his pack of Camels on the dashboard and stuffed it in his breast pocket. On the sidewalk he shook out a leg where cramping had set in and worked at the toe of his boot. The sign above the station house door was painted rather than electronic, and even the paint seemed a little weary. The rain still fell and with his hat at an angle he pushed open the door.

  He was greeted by a fan trying to cut through the dampened heat where it perched atop a tired-looking file cabinet. A high desk out front with an overweight man in uniform squatting behind it, a low gate in the fenced-off section where two more cops in light blue shirts and black pants, lounged at a couple of desks. The typewriters looked pre-war, as did the stack of arrest report dockets. A door to his left read Chief, and Quarrie assumed the cells lay beyond the far door where a glass panel offered the glimpse of a corridor. The three cops cast their collective gaze from his pistols to where his tie was fastened with a longhorn pin.

  ‘Evening boys,’ Quarrie said. ‘Sorry it took so long to get here but I had to make a stop on the way.’

  The chief’s door swung open and another man came out wearing the same black trousers and tired-looking shirt. His name tag said he was Billings, and he beckoned Quarrie inside.

  An air-conditioning unit was flattened into the glass of the grimy window, and apart from that there was an ancient wooden desk with a swivel seat as well as an armchair that was moth-eaten and ugly. Behind the desk a rack of rifles was fixed to the wall. Another fan sat on another file cabinet but that looked as though it was broken. The chief indicated the armchair but Quarrie shook his head.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’m just about seized up right now on account of being set on my butt all the way from Wichita Falls.’

  Approaching fifty, the chief looked like he was carrying a few pounds he didn’t need; his hair greased high on his forehead with a single lock that wanted to droop between his eyes. He looked more than put-upon, as if the mayor had been giving him a real bad time, and seeing as how they had lost a cruiser and had a cop in the hospital, it was a fact he probably had.

  ‘That’s not all we got going on,’ he admitted when Quarrie probed. ‘This used to be a sleepy little spot on the map but I guess it’s not anymore.’

  He nodded to the twin-rig gunbelt Quarrie was wearing. ‘You always port a pair like that? I’ve seen pictures of Rangers from the thirties and forties wearing a two-piece but you rarely get to see it anymore.’

  ‘Well,’ Quarrie said, ‘this is how it was with my godfather, Chief, and this is how it is with me.’

  ‘Your godfather a Ranger too then was he? Would I know him at all?’

  ‘Frank Hamer,’ Quarrie said. ‘He’s dead now but at one time there wasn’t a soul in Texas hadn’t heard of him.’

  ‘That’s a fact. Man who divided opinion for sure.’ Arms across his chest the chief looked a little speculative. ‘So Frank Hamer was your godfather, uh? Him that shot Clyde Barrow and settled the town of Navasota back when there was a shooting on the street every day. That place hasn’t been the same since he left and he left a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘He wore a twin rig too then? I didn’t know.’

  ‘He did back then, Chief. And I ain’t the only one still packing a pair. There ain’t that many of us and we work alone most always, and a set of twelve at the ready gives a man a little more confidence than six.’ Quarrie sat down in the chair now and the cushion sagged under his weight.

  ‘So anyway,’ the chief said. ‘We called you up on account of we had an officer down and now that officer is dead.’ His expression had grayed a little further. ‘His name was Michaels and he died at two o’clock this afternoon over in the hospital at Queensboro.’ Reaching to his top drawer he took out a bottle of cheap Bourbon. ‘I guess the least we could do is drink to him. You ready for one now that it’s dark out?’

  Taking his cigarettes from his pocket Quarrie shucked one out and offered the crumpled pack. Shaking his head the chief found two dusty-looking glasses, poured the whiskey and passed a glass across.

  ‘The fallen,’ he said.

  Quarrie drank and placed the empty glass on the arm of the chair. ‘So, what else you got going on, Chief? You said your guy wasn’t the whole story.’

  ‘No, he’s not. Just this afternoon we find ourselves with another dead body.’ The chief poured himself a second shot. ‘Woman name of Mary-Beth Gavin who’d only been here six weeks. Neighbor found her around the same time Michaels died down there in the hospital. Middle-aged and living on her own, beaten up bad she was. On that, sir, you can quote me.’

  Quarrie sat forward. ‘Same perp you’re thinking then, are you?’

  ‘Could be. I don’t want to pre-empt anything you might come up with.’

  ‘But you think so?’

  The chief gestured. ‘I’m not a detective, Sergeant, but the way Michael’s had his skull fractured and how she’s all busted up around the face.’

  ‘Where do you have her body?’

  ‘Right now they got her laid out at the funeral parlor over on 4th Street.’
Finishing his drink the chief got to his feet. ‘Nearest morgue is Queensboro, thirty miles south, and I didn’t want to bring her down there till you had a chance to take a look.’

  They drove across town in his Plymouth, Quarrie peering through the windshield as they came to 4th Street, where lights still burned in the single-story building that housed the funeral parlor.

  ‘Nobody saw anything?’ he said.

  The chief shook his head. ‘No sir, not at the Gavin house nor down at the railroad depot either.’

  They got out of the car with the rain falling harder and Quarrie asked him what time Michaels had been found.

  ‘Not till the four-oh-five rolled in for Houston, though nobody was boarding the train. Engineer saw something lying on the ground at the far end of the platform and when he went to take a look he found the poor bastard stripped to his shorts.’

  They walked up the steps to a wooden door with a glass panel in the center.

  ‘So,’ Quarrie said, ‘right now we got us a cop killer driving a Winfield City cruiser. Somebody must’ve spotted it, right?’

  ‘We’ve only had one call.’ The chief pushed open the door and they went into a small wood-panelled hallway. ‘Early this morning that rig was seen down the road at Henry’s Diner. One of ours was in there for breakfast apparently, only our patrol ends with the city and we got nobody living out that way.’

  The dead woman was laid out on the embalming table. As far as Quarrie could tell she was in her early fifties, fully dressed she was covered with a white cotton sheet. Red hair, freckles scattered across her forehead, though her face was pulp. One cheekbone had been crushed completely, her nose little more than a flattened swelling, her eyes were purple around the lids. The already pale skin of her shoulders was paler still now that the life had left her.