“Whoa, hoss, that’s one now!” Trevelyan said, already scrambling to his knees. “Here, let’s get you up an’ brushed off.”
In his startled confusion, Rep had the bizarre notion for a split second that the man had designs on stealing his saber. He clamped both hands clumsily to it. Then, back on his feet, he came to his senses as clumps of mud gave way to Trevelyan’s vigorous hand swipes.
“There. Good as new.”
“Thanks,” Rep said. “I don’t know how that happened.”
“Walkin’ around outside before full light is something you have to get used to, that’s all,” Trevelyan said. “Which stall you favor?”
Rep chose the nearest of the five Port-A-Potties available. With a couple of tugs he worked the balky door open and started to step inside. He stepped back fast. Very fast.
R. Thomas Quinlan—as he would later be identified to Rep—sat hunched on the toilet. His chin was much too low, and drenching his upper torso was a still viscous liquid that looked dark brown but glinted damply with hints enough of bright red to stamp it unmistakably as blood.
“Whoa, hoss,” Trevelyan said with a long, low whistle. “Whatcha got there? Yankee woke up with his hat in his lap, eh? Not the first time that ever happened around these parts, but even so.”
“Okay,” Rep stammered, telling himself to get a grip. “Okay. Um, look. Uh, first, please don’t say, ‘Whoa, hoss,’ again for a few minutes, okay? And second, we need a cop, and we need one in a hurry.”
“You don’t watch where you’re pointin’ you’re gonna piss on one,” a booming voice responded from ten feet away.
Rep’s preparations hadn’t actually advanced nearly so far, but the hyperbolic comment got his attention. The source of the voice was taller than Lawrence and broader through the chest than Trevelyan was through the belly, which was saying something. His butternut gray slouch hat contrasted with a bushy, rust-colored beard and heroic sideburns. He wore red-trimmed gray trousers and suspenders over a long-sleeved, off-white undershirt. If he worried about treacherous roots reaching out and grabbing his feet as he strode forward, his confident gait didn’t show it.
“Good morning, Jedidiah,” the new arrival said after he had closed the distance, which didn’t take long. “Got yourself some fresh meat here?”
“Now it’s not like that, Red, there’s a body—”
“I saw that trip,” Red commented. He turned an appraising eye in Rep’s direction. Then, swinging his gaze back to Trevelyan, he held out his hand.
“Red,” Trevelyan protested, “I’m tellin’ you there’s a body—”
“Last chance,” Red said.
“Oh!” Trevelyan said. “You mean this young feller’s button that came off in the fall and that I found while I was helping him up. Here it is. I was just about to give it back to him.”
Trevelyan unfolded his right hand and dropped a dull, tarnished metal button perhaps a half-inch in diameter into Red’s palm. Red immediately offered it to Rep.
“I believe this is your property, sir,” he said.
Rep accepted the trinket with his left hand while with his right he felt the empty space on his shell jacket where it belonged.
“Thanks very much,” he said. “This uniform belongs to somebody else, and I’d like to give it back to him intact.”
“You know,” Red said, “during the War for Southern Independence soldiers with sticky fingers could get bucked and gagged. Tied in a sitting position with a stick holding their elbows under their knees. Leave ’em that way for twelve hours or so. Sutlers, though, they just horsewhipped.”
“Now, Red,” Trevelyan whined, “I told you already—”
“You mean he went through that whole thing to steal a button?” Rep asked. “Tracked me down, managed to run into me, tripped me? I saw buttons like this at the sutlers’ tent being sold for a quarter apiece.”
“You saw replicas,” Red said. “I’m betting that what you’re holding there is the thing itself, actually worn by a pony soldier during the late, lamented Struggle. Maybe rode with Little Phil Sheridan himself, for all we know. Collector might pay three-hundred-fifty dollars for it.”
Rep remembered Trevelyan’s searching, close-up inspection the day before, while he was ostensibly touting the virtues of different revolvers to Rep.
“Now, dammit, I’m not gonna stand here and have my good name blackened,” Trevelyan said. “I’m gonna—”
“I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do, and right fast,” Red said. “You’re gonna hop over to the Confederate side of the encampment. You’re gonna say that Sergeant Pendleton of the Missouri Partisan Rangers would be much obliged if a buncha boys from the General Order Number 11 Club would hot-foot it over here. And if I see twelve of them within fifteen minutes, I might pretend to swallow that hogswill you’ve been peddling ever since I got here.”
Trevelyan made tracks without further commentary. Who would have imagined he could move so fast? Rep thought.
“So it’s Sergeant Red Pendleton,” Rep said. “I’m Private Rep Pennyworth. I’m new at this.”
“We were all new at it once. Anyhoo, I’m now gonna start acting like a sergeant in the Missouri Highway Patrol, which I also happen to be, ’ cause I don’t think that fella in the can there died of natural causes. Don’t tell anybody about this. It’s against the rules, but duty is duty.”
Pendleton pulled a cell phone from his trouser pocket as he carefully stepped away from the Port-a-Potty, gesturing to Rep to follow him. With an emphatic sweeping motion of his left arm, he waved three approaching re-enactors away from the area.
“Hey, Smitty, that you?” he said into the phone. “This is Red Pendleton. Listen, we got ourselves a homicide up at the Civil War encampment south of Liberty, down by the johns.…This is Clay County, but I’m betting the closest CSI van is probably the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department.…Yeah, call Jackson County, tell them maybe it’s a Metro Squad thing, get that van up here. We need to get that baby to work, ’ cause it’s gonna take a miracle to keep this crime scene secure for more than half-an-hour.”
He put the phone away, took his hat off, and swiped his right sleeve across his forehead.
“You know who that fella is?” he asked Rep, nodding toward the body.
“No,” Rep said. He’d never met Quinlan, or heard him described.
“Quite a blade you’ve got there.”
“I bought it yesterday,” Rep said.
“Mind if I take a look at it?” Pendleton asked.
“Actually,” Rep said, “I’m inclined to insist on it.” He started to reach for a handkerchief, but Pendleton waved that nicety aside.
“We know your fingerprints are on there, and no one’s gonna try to pin this on me,” he said.
Rep unhooked the scabbard and tendered the saber hilt-first to Pendleton. Pendleton drew the weapon, examined the blade for perhaps a minute, then passed it under his nose an inch at a time and sniffed deeply.
“Well,” he said, “they’ll wanna do a spectrographic analysis because you were the one that found the body, but I’ll guarantee you there hasn’t been any blood or human tissue on that blade in the last twenty-four hours.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Lemme just try somethin’ before I give this back to you. Throw one of those twigs up in the air, would ya?”
Rep complied, tossing up a stick about two feet long. Pendleton slashed with the saber, which knocked the stick several feet but didn’t sever it. Rep retrieved the twig and showed Pendleton a gash perhaps a quarter-inch deep in the surface.
“On a good day,” Pendleton said after examining it, “this saber of yours could just about cut hot butter.”
“I hadn’t even thought of sharpening it.”
“Don’t think about it. At re-enactments we want the metal to clang so the tourists get a show, but we don’t actually wanna slice anybody up. If there’s a saber out here that could d
o the kinda cuttin’ our quiet friend over there experienced, somebody had to take some extra effort with it.”
The sound of hurrying feet drew Rep’s attention to a stand of trees off to his left. Nine men in gray came out on the double, carrying muskets.
“Morning, sergeant,” the one in front called. “What’s the drill?”
“Morning,” Pendleton bawled. “It would oblige me if you would form a perimeter around these fancy latrines here. Gimme twelve paces if you can.”
After a brief look of puzzlement, the guy in front snapped a salute—a pretty good salute, too, if Rep was in any judge—and hustled off with his buddies to comply.
“So,” Rep said as he took his saber back, “what do we do now?”
“We wait,” Pendleton said. “And hope someone brings us breakfast.”
Chapter 11
“Here’s your toothpick back, Yank, and a souvenir for your trouble.”
Rep took the saber that Pendleton handed to him, along with a strip of paper not quite three inches wide and eight inches long. Two columns of letters and numbers ran down the strip. The numbers on the left seemed a lot different than the numbers on the right.
“There doesn’t seem to be a drop of sweat, a dab of blood, or a smidgeon of dexoyribonucleic acid in the deceased’s body that matches up with anything on that saber,” Pendleton said. “He apparently never even breathed on it, much less got his throat slit and his head damn near cut off with it.”
“Not a surprise,” Rep said, “but it’s nice to have it confirmed.”
Pendleton dropped to the ground and lounged beside Rep, propping himself up on one elbow. Rep still didn’t have a watch but Pendleton did—a large, stem-wound pocket watch that Henry Clay might have used—and he reported that it was just past nine in the morning. They were lying about fifty feet from the crime scene, which was now surrounded by yellow tape and swarming with deputy sheriffs from two counties and detectives from the Kansas City Police Department.
“First thing you think about with a guy his age killed out in the middle of nowhere like this is some kind of drug deal gone sour,” Pendleton mused.
“You have a lot of drug dealers running around northwest Missouri with machetes or cutlasses?” Rep asked.
“Nope, and that’s a fact,” Pendleton said. “Uzis and up for them. Don’t kid yourself, though. Plenty of those boys favor knives for detail work, and a Buck skinning knife with a five-inch blade could’ve done the job our stiff got done on him. You wouldn’t need a saber for it.”
Rep nodded politely but didn’t comment.
“They oughta have your statement printed out before too much longer. Sorry about all this waitin’ around, but there’s nothin’ for it when you’re the one stumbles over a body.”
“That’s okay,” Rep said. “You can learn things while you’re waiting, if you pay attention.”
“That a fact?” Pendleton asked jovially. “You learned anything so far?”
“Well,” Rep said lazily, “I learned that pan-fried sausage patties in between slices of cornbread steeped in bacon grease makes a breakfast that sticks with you for a long time. I appreciate you having some of your boys bring that up, by the way.”
“That’s an interesting thing,” Pendleton said. “How some foods that you generally eat hot actually taste better cold. Bacon, for one example. You almost always eat bacon warm off the griddle, but bacon at room temperature or even with a little chill on it—man, that’s meat for me. Nothin’ like it.”
“I’d never really thought about it, but you’re absolutely right,” Rep said. “Steak is that way. Sizzling hot it’s great, but if you save a little chunk, wrap it in wax paper and aluminum foil, put it in the refrigerator over night, then pull it out the next morning when you’re wife isn’t looking, sprinkle a little salt on it and eat it like finger food—man, that’s good.”
“Yessir!” Pendleton said with an enthusiasm bordering on passion. “I can almost taste it right now. And how about fried chicken?”
“Oh, yeah,” Rep said with a vigorous nod. “Not in aluminum foil, though. In a sandwich bag, two pieces per bag. Especially wings and thighs, pan fried and then in the fridge maybe, what, thirty-six hours.”
“My word, my word, you are onto something there, my friend. I could jaw about this all morning. It doesn’t work for everything. Eggs have to be hot, and hot dogs. But a lot of main course food out there is best eaten cold.”
Like revenge, Rep thought. According to Francis Bacon, a dish best tasted cold. As opposed to the way revenge had been tasted when the corpse here launched his bark on the dark seas of eternity last night. Rep suspected that Pendleton’s literary allusion was perfectly deliberate, and he readily deciphered the hint. Pendleton wasn’t a hayseed, despite the act. He wasn’t buying his own eyewash about a drug deal, and he wanted Rep to know it.
Rep had also learned some other things in the past few hours. He had learned that, like so many things in life, relieving yourself in the woods without benefit of a privy is only hard the first time you do it. More important, he had learned that the murder victim was named R. Thomas Quinlan and had had some kind of connection with Jackrabbit Press. Rep hadn’t exactly been chatty before learning that, but he’d gotten downright laconic since. Now he was learning that Pendleton thought he knew something about this murder that he hadn’t mentioned yet. Rep suspected that this might be so, but he was going to go on not mentioning it until he’d talked to Melissa. And to Peter.
“What’s General Order Number 11?” he asked Pendleton, pulling himself to a sitting position as he saw a plainclothes officer in shirtsleeves approaching him with a notebook.
“‘All persons living in Jackson, Cass and Bates Counties, Missouri…are hereby ordered to remove from their present places of residence within fifteen days…. [A]ll grain and hay found in such district after the ninth of September next…will be destroyed.’ ”
“Pretty drastic.”
“Do you remember a movie from the ’ eighties, I think it was, called The Outlaw Josey Wales?” Pendleton asked.
“Sure. Clint Eastwood. Shows up on TBS all the time.”
“The first bad guy in that flick is a Union general nicknamed Redlegs. That was General Thomas Ewing, and General Order Number 11 was his handiwork. Missouri had stayed in the Union, but the idea wasn’t exactly unanimous. Lots of secessionist guerrilla activity. General Order Number 11 was supposed to stop it, and if a few thousand civilians got in the way that was just too bad for them. George Caleb Bingham made a famous painting about families being uprooted and homes abandoned. My grandmother kept a print of that painting in her front hallway until the day she died. She’d heard stories from her grandma about the day the Yankees burned the crop, and when she told me those stories it was like it happened the day before yesterday.”
“Desperate times, I guess,” Rep said, resorting to banality to mask his interest in the answer. Was Lawrence a closet Confederate sympathizer? Did the framed document he’d seen in Lawrence’s study suggest some pathological obsession with the Lost Cause?
Rep and Pendleton rose to greet the detective, who handed Rep a three-ring binder he was carrying.
“This is the statement we took from you earlier, sir,” the man said, all business. “Please read it carefully, initial each page, sign the last page, and return it to me. The copy is for you. If you wish to make any changes, please consult with me before altering the document.”
“Certainly,” Rep said. I have a feeling that’s not the first time he’s ever made that speech, he thought. Thought, but didn’t say. He read, initialed, and signed as instructed and returned the binder to the detective.
“Thank you for your cooperation, sir. Please contact the department before leaving the state.”
“Wound pretty tight, isn’t he?” Rep commented to Pendleton after the detective had marched away.
“Oh, you send one of those city boys to Quantico for baby detect
ive school and he comes back thinkin’ he has a square asshole. He thought it was high-handed for me to bring a county crime scene team in here. If I hadn’t, though, you’d have waited ’ til noon to sign that statement.”
“Much obliged,” Rep said.
“What’s on your mind, soldier?” Pendleton bellowed then over his shoulder.
Startled, Rep looked around. A Union private was standing about ten feet away, apparently hanging back.
“I have a message for Trooper Pennyworth,” the man said.
“Well if he’s a trooper he’d be the one with boots instead of brogans,” Pendleton said.
The man advanced and handed Rep a folded slip of paper. “Need to see you ASAP. I’m with the car at Jackrabbit Press. M”
“Orders,” Rep said to Pendleton as he sketched a casual salute. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Oh, I expect you will at that,” Pendleton said as Rep strode away. “I expect you will.”
Chapter 12
“In the eight years we’ve been married, Melissa, how many times have I put my foot down?”
“Twice.” Melissa glanced demurely downward before raising her eyes earnestly to meet her husband’s. “You were quite thrilling on both occasions.”
“Well, time for the hat trick. We’re talking about a homicide. That saber on the chair over there could be a murder weapon.”
“Yes, dear, I do grasp that.”
They were standing in the Damons’ bedroom just before ten-thirty in the morning. During the drive from the encampment, as mile after mile of Kansas City pavement had slipped under their wheels, Melissa had told Rep about the Problem. With Peter’s disappearance, the Problem had had a capital P even when it was just a regrettable, one-time slipping of the marital traces—that is, even before Rep mentioned the corpse.
“Linda and I got back to their home around eleven-thirty last night,” Melissa had explained as they drove through the Plaza. “We found Peter’s uniform but not Peter. Linda went out checking some all night haunts while I called a few friends she told me about. Nada. No answer at his work number or on his cell-phone. We were out of ideas when she got back around three, so we decided to stay there and wait for him to show up.”
Unforced Error Page 7
