Vernal opened the cell door. Zeke’s body lay face up on his cot with one hand dangling out from under the blanket that covered him.
“I found him when I brought him a cup of coffee this morning,” Vernal said. “Lying there just like that. I reckon he died in his sleep.”
I pulled back the blanket from Zeke’s face. He looked real peaceful. I covered his face again and turned to Vernal.
“Have you called the doc?”
“Yeah. He said he’d come when he could. Should I notify the undertaker?”
I shook my head. “Not until Doc sees him. He’s got to sign the death certificate saying it was a natural death before we can move the body.”
Vernal looked disconcerted. “He’s just going to lie there? For how long? I mean he must have died in his sleep. He was locked up in a cell.”
“It’s procedure, and procedure exists for a reason.”
We closed and locked the cell door behind us before going back into the front office we shared with Coral. She’d just gotten into work, her tiny frame lost behind her desk. Some folks thought I shouldn’t have hired her since she had a Japanese grandparent, but I didn’t have any time for that mess.
“Coral,” I said, “would you call the mayor’s office and leave a message with his secretary for him to call me?” Mayor Jonah Moss was a cattle broker and would be at the stockyards outside of town at this hour. “Tell her that we had a prisoner die in his sleep in one of our jail cells overnight and I need to talk to him.”
Coral, her black hair swinging just below her ears and her glasses resting on the tip of her nose, picked up the telephone receiver. She didn’t seem surprised or upset to learn there was a dead man in the jail. Her composure was one reason I hired her.
“Who died?” she asked.
“Zeke Smith,” I answered.
“That crazy old prospector?”
“That’s the one.”
I liked to patrol the streets of Desperation first thing in the cool of the morning, when people were out and about going to work and running errands. Sheriff Porter, my predecessor who’d hired me six years ago, impressed on me the need for the law to be visible to the public. “Let the citizens know you’re working,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and ask questions.” I was visible, all right. I was the only woman police officer anyone in town had ever seen. Hell, I was the only woman police officer I had ever seen.
The townspeople muttered behind my back plenty when I was appointed Chief of Police. But they knew the town was short of manpower and expected I’d be temporary until a man could be found for the job. They didn’t know I had no intention of giving it up. I liked the job and the salary that came with it.
I saw the doc across the street and flagged him down.
“You look at Zeke yet?” I asked.
“I’m on my way there now,” Doc said, mopping his neck and bald head with a bandanna. “But I can tell you right now he died of old age and alcoholism. His liver must be rock-hard. Once I look him over I’ll tell Vernal that he can call the undertaker.”
When I got back to the office I found Coral sorting through a pile of wanted posters that had come in the mail. Most of them went into the circular file. She’d learned quickly that I didn’t give a damn about some bored teenager who took a joyride in a borrowed Jeep. He was his ma and pa’s problem, not mine.
“Vernal’s out at the high school,” she said.
Another thing Sheriff Porter taught me. “Let the kids at the high school see you every week. Boys that age, and sometimes girls, need to remember that a lot of the stuff they’d like to do is illegal.”
“And the mayor returned your call. He said he’d meet you at Martha’s for lunch.”
I scooted into Jonah’s booth at Martha’s café. He stood up until I was seated and then sat back down, tucking his napkin into his neck. “Good morning, Chief. What’s this about a man dying at the jail?”
Jonah Moss ran a cattle-buying business that employed a dozen men even during the Depression. He’d been mayor of the town for twenty years. He still dressed like a working cowboy in denim trousers and checkered shirts and fastened his belt with a silver buckle he’d won at some rodeo when he was a kid.
“Zeke Smith,” I said.
“That addled prospector that’s been around since the Flood?”
“That’s the one. I’d locked him up for a night to get him clean and fed after he waved a shotgun around the mercantile yesterday. When Vernal brought him a cup of coffee this morning he’d died in his sleep.”
Jonah gulped from his mug of black java. “We should all be so lucky,” he said.
“So what do I do now?” I asked. “I mean after the doc looks at him and we call the undertaker. I reckon his funeral will be on the town.”
“We’ll plant him in the pauper’s section. For sure he ain’t got no money.”
The waitress appeared and I ordered a tuna fish sandwich and Jonah asked for a bacon sandwich with French fries. The waitress topped off our coffee before she left.
“I guess all that’s left for you to do is notify the next of kin.”
That took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought that the old man might have relatives. Where would I start to look for them?
“You don’t think he left a will, do you?” I asked.
Jonah laughed. “One with the name of his closest relative and a current address?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“I had Lucille and her ma check the town files before I came over here,” Jonah said. Lucille was Jonah’s secretary and her ma was Mrs. Orelia Neeley, although the Mrs. was honorary. She never was actually married to Mr. Neeley. There were no preachers and no law back when they set up housekeeping.
Orelia arrived in town decades ago to work as a saloon girl. She was one of those elderly people whom you expect will live forever. Though her mind was clouding up, her memory of the old days in Nevada was legendary. When she got bored with porch-rocking and biscuit-eating she’d go over to Jonah’s office and help Lucille out.
“Did Lucille and her ma find anything?”
“Nothing at all, not one word on paper, but Orelia remembered when Zeke first came to town and staked his claim. She says he didn’t have any family.”
The waitress poured us fresh cups of coffee and carried off our plates. Jonah lit a Camel, inhaling it deeply and exhaling circles of smoke that floated up to the tin ceiling.
“I reckon the state gets Zeke’s land then?” I said.
“Not right yet. We need to search Zeke’s property for any sign of family, letters, a will, legal papers, whatever.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, and Zeke had a partner, Orelia says. She doesn’t recollect his name. Had quite a horse, she said, a black gelding named King he decked out in a Mexican bridle. Anyway, Orelia said the two of them argued just a few months after they set up their claim and Zeke bought the partner out. Remembers the guy riding out of town on that horse. When you’re at the shack see what you can find out about him.”
I never knew which was worse, driving out in the desert with the truck windows rolled down so sand and dust blew all over me, or closing the windows and getting baked alive. For this trip, I chose dust. I tuned to the local radio station and turned the volume up loud to listen to country music. Once I was most of the way to Zeke’s place I heard the chirrup which meant that Coral was interrupting the commercial frequency. “Chief Jensen, call in when you can,” she said, and then the music resumed. She’d said “when you can,” which meant it wasn’t important enough to interrupt what I was doing. After I was done at Zeke’s I’d go over to my own place to clean up and use the telephone.
When I got to Zeke’s I walked down to the crick that ambled by the mine and practically took a bath. I filled my hat with water and doused my head, then sponged the worst of the sand and dust off my face and neck with my bandanna. Then I drained my canteen and refilled it.
I passed by Dusty’s resting place on the way to
the shack. Poor old guy, I thought, he must have had a hard life even for a mule.
Once inside the shack I had to wait a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the dimness of the single room. I pulled on work gloves. If I were Zeke’s papers, I thought, where would I be? In an empty cigar box or coffee can, probably.
I started at Zeke’s sleeping area, lifting the blanket and pillow off the dirty mattress. I got down on my hands and knees and checked under the bed where Zeke’s boots had been. Lifting the lid on an old carpetbag I found some dingy underwear, holey socks, a couple of towels wrapped around a bar of soap and a rusty razor. An extra pair of pants, two shirts and a nightshirt hung on pegs in the wall. Circling back toward the door I found a slicker and a flannel jacket on two more pegs. I went through every pocket, turning up a pocketknife with a broken blade and a bandanna. In the kitchen corner, I sorted through Zeke’s box of supplies. It contained three cans of beans, two of peaches, coffee, sugar and white bread. That left a shelf of dishes, mugs and old coffee cans over the stove. One of the cans held forks, knives and spoons, another a few packages of Hostess CupCakes and then I hit pay dirt. A third and final can hid a thin sheaf of papers. I squatted on the floor and leafed through them. No will, no letter, nothing, except a signed and notarized deed to Zeke’s mine in the name of Zeke Smith and William Pardee. Pardee must have been Zeke’s partner, the man Orelia remembered. I fanned through the papers again. I didn’t see a new deed, the one Zeke should have gotten after he bought out Pardee. Maybe he didn’t bother. I checked the date on the original claim—1907. Which meant Zeke had been living out here with just a mule for company for more than thirty years, and the mule had been dead part of the time. No wonder he was loony.
I guess the town would need to check state records in Carson City to see if the mine was still deeded to both Zeke and Pardee. If it was, we might have to search for Pardee or his relatives. I was sure they would be thrilled to know that they’d inherited a patch of desert in Nevada. Zeke probably owed taxes on it, too.
I tucked the deed into my shirt pocket and went outside. I had to answer a call of nature, so I went behind Zeke’s old truck, which was ridiculous since there was no one within miles. On the way to my vehicle I passed Dusty again and couldn’t help stopping to look at the sorry thing. I saw a pathetic hoof poking out from the sand and paused, surprised. Dropping to my knees, I picked up the hoof and held it in my hands. Still attached to a sturdy leg bone, the hoof was large and real wide, bigger than any mule hoof I’d seen before. I carefully laid it back down in the sand, jumped to my feet and went back to the shack where I collected a ragged broom. Back outside I began to brush sand and dirt away from the creature’s skull and backbone. Once they were revealed I stared at them. The skull was small, the jawbone narrow, and the backbone wasn’t straight. The vertebrae near the shoulder were jammed together, forming the rise of the withers of a horse. A horse, not a mule. A horse. This wasn’t Dusty.
Why was there a horse skeleton outside Zeke’s mine? Why had he told everyone it was Dusty’s? What happened to Dusty if he didn’t die here?
The sky rotated above me and dark spots crowded my vision. The heat, I thought. I needed to get out of it to think. I went to sit in my truck, but it was too hot. Taking up my canteen I drank half the water in it. I still felt dizzy, but I couldn’t bear the thought of going back into Zeke’s filthy shack.
I glanced over at the mine opening and hesitated. I hated tight spaces, but the shaft looked dark and cool. It was the only shade around. I slung my canteen over my shoulder and headed for the mine. I’d rest for a few minutes and then head home to call the office.
Once out of the sun my vision cleared and I began to feel human. I knew I was dehydrated, so I drank the rest of the water in my canteen. Sweat dried on my body while I wondered about Zeke and his damned mule.
As my eyes adjusted to the interior of the dark mine I noticed something white gleaming further back in the shaft. Curious, I stood up and went to see what it was. When I saw the heap of animal bones I had to lean up against the wall and catch my breath. It had been a mule once, no question. This was Dusty. And lying in a heap nearby was a mound of decaying horse tack that had once been quality. The bridle had silver medallions, black with tarnish, mounted on it. I wondered what the hell had gone on out here.
I found a lantern filled with lamp oil at the mouth of the mine. I lit the wick and turned the flame up as far as I could. I headed further into the mine. I proceeded slowly around a corner into the pitch-black tunnel keeping my eyes on the ground so I didn’t trip over something. When I stopped and looked up again, the biggest damn vein of silver ore I’d ever seen stared me right in the face. Buried in a wide blue-green swath of copper-oxide, the silver showed dark and sooty. And floating in the vein were specks of gold.
Zeke and Pardee had been rich men. But the old skinflint couldn’t spend the money. For years he lived on beans and white bread in a filthy shack in the desert rather than let anyone know he’d struck it rich.
Holding the lantern up, I went further into the mine, and just a few feet along the shaft I found one of those depressions in the dirt that I’d read about in the FBI manual I’d found in my desk after I became chief of police. A rectangular depression in the dirt caused by burying a body. Decomposition releases gases that cause a human body to shrink, and the dirt piled on top of it is never as dense as the original soil.
I had a shovel in my truck, but not a probe. I could dig the body up myself, but I wanted help and a witness.
Back at my house I showered off the dust, sand and dirt from my body and changed into a fresh uniform in less than fifteen minutes. The revulsion I felt after my discoveries at Zeke’s claim would take longer to dissipate.
I called the office. Coral answered. “Is Vernal around?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s right here.”
“Tell him to meet me at Zeke’s place as soon as he can,” I said. “And make sure he brings a shovel. Did you have something you needed to tell me?”
“The Mayor called. Orelia had a lot of free time this afternoon so she went through all the town files again. She found a couple of letters from William Pardee’s niece in 1909 and again in 1911, asking if anyone had seen or heard from him. Appears he’d disappeared and they were trying to find him.”
I didn’t say anything more to her. I needed to collect my thoughts before I told the world the unlikely tale of Zeke Smith, miser, who had killed his partner, a horse and his own mule rather than share untold wealth with another man.
I wondered if Pardee’s niece was still alive, or if she’d had children. If so they were about to become very rich.
Back to TOC
Writer’s Block
Toni Goodyear
Once upon a time on a dark and stormy night I dreamt I went to Manderley again where someone called me Ishmael and all the knights in the kingdom were…what?
Sitting on the crapper?
Murdering children?
Out raping damsels in distress?
I have no goddamn idea. All I know is here I am again, slogging through the daily torture session, fingers whacking away at the laptop keyboard like some desperate form of masturbation. Hollow words, meaningless crap. My novel still stuck like a dragonfly in mud.
Never mind. Keep going. Don’t analyze, just write.
Stream of consciousness: Shit, shit, shit.
Shit on a shingle…what was that, anyway? Oh yeah, that’s what servicemen in World War II called chipped beef—the hind end of a cow probably—in ugly gray cream sauce served on stale toast. Thirty years later my father was still steamed about it. Once, when they tried to serve it to me in the school cafeteria, I threw up and they had to call my mother to take me home. At least that part was cool.
Maybe fuck is a word that can save me—an entire page of the f-word like a new-world “shazam!,” magically pulling something from nothing, like a rabbit from a hat. Thinking about magic reminds me of my long-dead childhood friend Arn
old who grew up to be a Vegas magician and who one day actually disappeared in his twirling cabinet and was never heard from again. That is until his body turned up in a desert canyon with a sign that read Deadbeat Douchebag chained around his neck. But thinking about Arnold doesn’t get me very far with this shitshitshit constipated, deadbeat, no magic, no movement, no hope, no wisdom, no craft, fuckfuckfuck of a novel.
I raise my fingers from the laptop keys and stare out the French doors of my study. So much for stream of consciousness. If I took my paper rantings to a hypnotist would there be a breakthrough? Would some deeply twisted thing slip through the cracks in my writer’s block and straight into my bored mistress of a novel, she who lies there waiting for me to excite and arouse, make her shudder with pleasure?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My publishers, who keep mumbling about breach of contract if I don’t deliver them Bestseller Number Twelve by next Friday—yes, it’s four months late already—might find it at least mildly amusing that I’m stuck on page six-six-six of this rambling crud-dump of a book, this demon with whom I need to make a new pact. “I’d sell my soul to finish this novel!” I would cry, and in a puff of smoke and he/she/it would be there at my side, whipping a business card out of the air, and voilá, the right words would pour into the keyboard from my curved fingers like they were copper faucets on newly plumbed lines run from endless underground springs, pumps, pumping, pumped.
I need torrents of words. I write spy thrillers that need to be fat enough to sell for eighteen bucks in my paperback-first, signature trade format. And there are other criteria. Things must explode, crash, speed. The violence-drenched plotline must twist and turn like the old Coney Island Cyclone—insatiable suck holes of action are required. Action is college for the kids and filters for that friggin’ swimming pool pump out back, so I must write, write, write. If my old pal Arnold could have pulled money out of hats instead of rabbits he’d still be happily screwing hatcheck girls today.
Carolina Crimes Page 2
