Crucifixion River

by Marcia Muller

  I said: “What’s this all about?”

  “I’m going to kill this son of a bitch,” the little guy said, “that’s what it’s all about.”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “My wife and my savings, every cent I had in the world. He took them both away from me and now he’s going to pay for it.”

  “Harry, please, you’ve got to…”

  “Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Didn’t I tell you not to call me Harry?”

  Handsome shook his head, a meaningless flopping like a broken bulb on a white stalk.

  “Where is she, Barlow?” the little guy demanded.

  “Noreen?”

  “My bitch wife Noreen. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “She’s not at your place. The house was dark when you left. Noreen wouldn’t sit in a dark house alone. She doesn’t like the dark.”

  “You…saw me at the house?”

  “That’s right. I saw you and I followed you twenty miles to this place. Did you think I just materialized out of thin air?”

  “Spying on me? Looking through windows? Jesus.”

  “I got there just as you were leaving,” the little guy said. “Perfect timing. You didn’t think I’d find out your name or where you lived, did you? You thought you were safe, didn’t you? Stupid old Harry Chalfont, the cuckold, the sucker…no threat at all.”

  Another head flop. This one made beads of sweat fly off.

  “But I did find out,” the little guy said. “Took me two months, but I found you and now I’m going to kill you.”

  “Stop saying that! You won’t, you can’t…”

  “Go ahead, beg. Beg me not to do it.”

  Barlow moaned and leaned back hard against the counter. Mortal terror unmans some people; he was as crippled by it as anybody I’d ever seen. Before long he would beg, down on his knees.

  “Where’s Noreen?”

  “I swear I don’t know, Harry…Mister Chalfont. She…walked out on me…a few days ago. Took all the money with her.”

  “You mean there’s still some of the ten thousand left? I figured it’d all be gone by now. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the money anymore. All I care about is paying you back. You, and then Noreen. Both of you getting just what you deserve.”

  Chalfont ached to pay them back, all right, yearned to see them dead. But wishing something and making it happen are two different things. He had the pistol cocked and ready and he’d worked himself into an overheated emotional state, but he wasn’t really a killer. You can look into a man’s eyes in a situation like this, as I had too many times, and tell whether or not he’s capable of cold-blooded murder. There’s a fire, a kind of death light, unmistakable and immutable, in the eyes of those who can, and it wasn’t there in Harry Chalfont’s eyes.

  Not that its absence made him any less dangerous. He was wired to the max and filled with hate, and his finger was close to white on the pistol’s trigger. Reflex could jerk off a round, even two, at any time. And if that happened, the slugs could go anywhere-into Barlow, into the young clerk, into me.

  “She was all I ever had,” he said. “My job, my savings, my life…none of it meant anything until I met her. Little, ugly, lonely…that’s all I was. But she loved me once, at least enough to marry me. And then you came along and destroyed it all.”

  “I didn’t, I tell you, it was all her idea…”

  “Shut up. It was you, Barlow, you turned her head, you corrupted her. God damn’ traveling salesman, god damn’ cliché, you must’ve had other women. Why couldn’t you leave her alone?”

  Working himself up even more. Nerving himself to pull that trigger. I thought about jumping him, but that wasn’t much of an option. Too much distance between us, too much risk of the pistol going off. One other option. And I’d damned well better make it work.

  I said quietly, evenly: “Give me the gun, Mister Chalfont.”

  The words didn’t register until I repeated them. Then he blinked, shifted his gaze to me without moving his head. “What did you say?”

  “Give me the gun. Put an end to this before it’s too late.”

  “No. Shut up.”

  “You don’t want to kill anybody. You know it and I know it.”

  “He’s going to pay. They’re both going to pay.”

  “Fine, make them pay. Press theft charges against them. Send them to prison.”

  “That’s not enough punishment for what they did.”

  “If you don’t think so, then you’ve never seen the inside of a prison.”

  “What do you know about it? Who are you?”

  A half-truth was more forceful than the whole truth. I said: “I’m a police officer.”

  Barlow and the clerk both jerked looks at me. The kid’s had hope in it, but not Handsome’s; his fear remained unchecked, undiluted.

  “You’re lying,” Chalfont said.

  “Why would I lie?”

  He coughed again, hawked deeply in his throat. “It doesn’t make any difference. You can’t stop me.”

  “That’s right, I can’t stop you from shooting Barlow. But I can stop you from shooting your wife. I’m off duty but I’m still armed.” Calculated lie. “If you kill him, then I’ll have to kill you. The instant your gun goes off, out comes mine and you’re also a dead man. You don’t want that.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You care, all right. I can see it in your face. You don’t want to die tonight, Mister Chalfont.”

  That was right: he didn’t. The death light wasn’t there for himself, either.

  “I have to make them pay,” he said.

  “You’re already made Barlow pay. Just look at him…he’s paying right now. Why put him out of his misery?”

  For a little time Chalfont stood rigid, the pistol drawn in tightly under his breastbone. Then his tongue poked out between his lips and stayed there, the way a cat’s will. It made him look cross-eyed, and for the first time, uncertain.

  “You don’t want to die,” I said again. “Admit it. You don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t want to die,” he said.

  “And you don’t want the clerk or me to die, right? That could happen if shooting starts. Innocent blood on your hands.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t want that.”

  I’d already taken two slow, careful steps toward him; I tried another, longer one. The pistol’s muzzle stayed centered on Barlow’s chest. I watched Chalfont’s index finger. It seemed to have relaxed on the trigger. His two-handed grip on the weapon appeared looser, too.

  “Let me have the gun, Mister Chalfont.”

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t move.

  Another step, slow, slow, with my hand extended.

  “Give me the gun. You don’t want to die tonight. Nobody has to die tonight. Let me have the gun.”

  One more step. And all at once the outrage, the hate, the lust for revenge went out of his eyes, like a slate wiped suddenly clean, and he brought the pistol away from his chest one-handed and held it out without looking at me. I took it gently, dropped it into my coat pocket.

  Situation diffused. Just like that.

  The clerk let out an explosive breath, and said-“Oh, man!”-almost reverently. Barlow slumped against the counter, whimpered, and then called Chalfont a couple of obscene names. But he was too wrapped up in himself and his relief to work up much anger at the little guy. He wouldn’t look at me, either.

  I took Chalfont’s arm, steered him around behind the counter, and sat him down on a stool back there. He wore a glazed look now, and his tongue was back out between his lips. Docile, disoriented. Broken.

  “Call the law,” I said to the clerk. “Local or county, whichever’ll get here the quickest.”

  “County,” he said. He picked up the phone.

  “Tell them to bring a paramedic unit with them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Then he said: “Hey! Hey, that other guy’s leav
ing.”

  I swung around. Barlow had slipped over to the door; it was just closing behind him. I snapped at the kid to watch Chalfont and ran outside after Barlow.

  He was getting into the Buick parked at the gas pumps. He slammed the door, but I got there fast enough to yank it open before he could lock it.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Barlow.”

  “You can’t keep me here…”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  I ducked my head and leaned inside. He tried to fight me. I jammed him back against the seat with my forearm, reached over with the other hand, and pulled the keys out of the ignition. No more struggle then. I released him, backed clear. “Get out of the car.”

  He came out in loose, shaky segments. Leaned against the open door, looking at me with fear-soaked eyes.

  “Why the hurry to leave? Why so afraid of me?”

  “I’m not afraid of you…”

  “Sure you are. As much as you were of Chalfont and his gun. Maybe more. It was in your face when I said I was a cop. It’s there now. And you’re still sweating like a pig. Why?”

  That floppy headshake again. He still wasn’t making eye contact.

  “Why’d you come here tonight? This particular place?”

  “I needed gas.”

  “Chalfont said he followed you for twenty miles. There must be an open service station closer to your house than this one. Late at night, rainy…why drive this far?”

  Headshake.

  “Must be you didn’t realize you were almost out of gas until you got on the road,” I said. “Too distracted, maybe. Other things on your mind. Like something that happened tonight at your house, something you were afraid Chalfont might have seen if he’d been spying through windows.”

  I opened the Buick’s back door. Seat and floor were both empty. Around to the rear, then, where I slid one of his keys into the trunk lock.

  “No!” Barlow came stumbling back there, pawed at me, tried to push me away. I shouldered him aside instead, got the key turned and the trunk lid up.

  The body stuffed inside was wrapped in a plastic sheet. One pale arm lay exposed, the fingers bent and hooked. I pulled some of the sheet away, just enough for a brief look at the dead woman’s face. Mottled, the tongue protruding and blackened. Strangled.

  “Noreen Chalfont,” I said. “Where were you taking her, Barlow? Some remote spot in the mountains for burial?”

  He made a keening, hurt-animal sound. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean to kill her…we had an argument about the money and I lost my head. I didn’t know what I was doing…I didn’t mean to kill her…”

  His legs quit supporting him; he sat down hard on the pavement with legs splayed out and head down. He didn’t move after that, except for the heaving of his chest. His face was wetter than ever, a mingling now of sweat and drizzle and tears.

  I looked over at the misted store window. That poor bastard in there, I thought. He wanted to make his wife pay for what she did, but he’ll go to pieces when he finds out Barlow did the job for him.

  I closed the trunk lid and stood there in the cold, waiting for the law.

  Sometimes it happens like this, too. You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and still things work out all right. For some of the people involved, anyway.

  Irrefutable Evidence A Sharon McCone Story

  by Marcia Muller

  I tossed the pinecone from hand to hand and looked up at the tree it had fallen from. It was perhaps twenty feet tall and very dense, with branches that swept the ground except on its left-hand side, where they were bent and sheared off. A young bristlecone pine, hundreds of years old and still growing. In the high elevations of California’s White Mountains, where the tule elk and wild mustangs range, there are bristlecones over 4,000 years old-some say the oldest living things on the face of the earth. Years ago, I’d made one of the better decisions of my life while lying under such a pine; today, I’d been hoping this tree would yield evidence that would help me identify a killer.

  No such luck.

  After a time I turned away and, still holding the pinecone, retraced my steps to my rented Jeep. I tossed the cone on the passenger’s seat, got in, and cranked up the air-conditioning. The temperature was in the midnineties-August heat. I eased the vehicle over the rocky, sloping ground to the secondary road, bumped along it for two miles, then turned southwest onto Route 168 toward Big Pine, a town of 1,350 nestled in a valley between the Whites and the John Muir Wilderness Area. My motel was on the wide main street, a homey place with a tree-shaded lawn and picnic tables. No high-speed Internet access or other amenities that my operatives at Mc-Cone Investigations would have deemed necessities, but plenty good enough for their boss.

  I tell my operatives I believe in the simple life. They claim I’m living in the Dark Ages.

  Dark Ages, indeed. I had a cell phone, which I took out as soon as I entered my unit and dialed the agency in San Francisco. Ted Smalley, our office manager, sounded relieved when he heard my voice. That morning I’d flown down to Bishop, some fifteen miles north of here, in the Cessna 170B I jointly owned with my significant other, Hy Ripinsky; Ted, ever nervous about what he called my “dangerous hobby,” had probably been fretting all day.

  “Shar, it’s after five o’clock. Where are you?” he asked.

  “The motel in Big Pine.”

  “Why didn’t you check in with me from the airport? I’ve been waiting…”

  “There was somebody at the airport who offered me a ride to the dealer I’m renting a car from, so I couldn’t take the time. Then I had to stop by the local sheriff’s substation to let them know I’d be working in the area, check in here, and…why am I explaining all this to you?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you?”

  “Sometimes you remind me of my mother.”

  “God help me. She’s a nice lady, but…”

  “Yeah. So what’s going on there?”

  “Quiet day, except for the trouble with the UPS guy.”

  “Trouble?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Probably not. Is Mick in?” Mick Savage, my nephew and chief computer expert.

  “No, he left for the day, but he said to tell you he e-mailed the files on the research job you assigned him.”

  Which I would access on my laptop-another rebuttal to the claim that the boss was living in the Dark Ages.

  I read through the files Mick had sent me, then walked down to a steak house I’d spotted on the way in. After dinner, I went back to the motel and sat at one of the picnic tables, enjoying the cool of the evening and planning a course of action for the next day. The air was sweet with sage and dry grass; crickets chorused in a field behind the motel, and somewhere far off a dog was barking. I felt relaxed, mellow, even; it was good to get out of the city.

  The case I was working had been brought to me by Glenn Solomon, a criminal-defense attorney who threw a lot of business my way. His client, Tom Worthington, had been indicted here in Inyo County for the brutal murder of his lover, Darya Adams. Worthington was a wealthy man, an olive rancher from over near Fresno; it was natural he would turn to one of the stars of San Francisco’s legal community for his defense.

  I thought back to the briefing Glenn had given me in his office high atop Embarcadero Four the previous afternoon.

  “Tom Worthington is a family man,” he’d begun, folding his hands over the well-tailored expanse of his stomach. “Wife, two college-age children. Good reputation. No indications that he’s ever strayed before. Darya Adams, he apparently couldn’t resist. Former beauty queen…Miss California, I believe…and widowed. Ran a tourist boutique at Mammoth Lakes. They met when he was on a ski trip there. Before long, they were meeting on a regular basis at a country cabin he bought for her outside Chelsea.”

  I looked up from the notes I was taking. “Where’s Chelsea? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You know Big Pine, Inyo County?”

  “As a matter of
fact, I do. One of Hy’s friends used to have a cabin in the mountains near there.”

  “Well, Chelsea is a wide place on the road some seven miles into the hills above Big Pine.”

  “OK, now, the murder…?”

  “As close as the medical examiner could pinpoint it, it occurred on July thirty-first. Worthington and Adams had met at the cabin on the twenty-eighth, according to the employee who was minding the boutique in her absence. When Adams didn’t return on August first as scheduled, the employee called the cabin, received no answer, then asked the sheriff to check. Place was closed up. On August third, a hiker came across Adams’s body in the foothills of the White Mountains several miles from Big Pine. She’d been beaten and strangled. There were signs that the body had been moved there from the place she was killed, but the sheriff’s department hasn’t been able to determine where that was.”

  “And they’re calling this a crime of passion, perpetrated by your client?”

  “Right. One of Darya Adams’s friends claimed she was fed up with the arrangement and had threatened to go to his wife if he didn’t initiate divorce proceedings. He claims that wasn’t true.”

  “What’s the evidence pointing to Worthington?”

  Glenn shifted in his chair, reached for the bottled water on the desk.

  “Two pieces. One, a key chain near the body, containing a miniature of his Safeway Rewards Club card…you know, the ones they give you so, if you lose your keys, whoever finds them can turn them in to the store, and they’ll call you. And two, a pinecone in the bed of Worthington’s truck.”

  “A pinecone?”

  “A bristlecone, from the tree Adams’s body was found under.”

  “How do they know it was from that particular tree?”

  “Ah, my friend, that’s where it gets interesting. Human beings, as you know, can be identified by their DNA. Animals, too. But are you aware that plants also have DNA?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they do, and, as with humans, the DNA of one plant is unlike the DNA of any other.”