Serpent's Tooth

by Michael R Collings

  Nor did he say anything until we entered the Ellises’ living room.

  Mrs. Ellis was seated on the couch, about where she had been earlier that morning. I assumed that Mrs. Johansson was resting in another room, since she was not present.

  Carver was standing by the end of the sofa.

  “Ellis!” Allen yelled. He was across the room in two long strides, had grabbed Carver by the shirt and slammed him against the closest wall before any of us could speak a word.

  “What do you think you’re trying to pull?” Allen roared, although there was little chance that Carver could have answered him since the deputy now had one forearm tight against the boy’s throat. “What makes you think you can go wandering around the goddamn countryside in the middle of my investigation?”

  He punctuated the question—clearly rhetorical—with another slam against the wall. Several pictures clattered in their frames but nothing fell.

  “Deputy Allen,” Victoria began, but it was clear the man was paying no attention to her at all.

  “Nobody leaves the scene of the crime until I give them permission! Do...you...under...stand...that!”

  By this point, poor Carver’s face was crimson with suffused blood and his eyes were beginning to bulge.

  Victoria tried again: “Deputy Allen! You must...!”

  “I’ve heard enough from you,” Allen called over his shoulder. His eyes were still focused on Carver’s face. “No more meddling in my....”

  “Deputy Allen.” This time the voice was quiet but firm, carrying throughout the room although no one had heard the speaker enter.

  And it was masculine.

  I looked over to see Deputy Richard Wroten, the officer in charge of the Fox Creek substation, standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  Allen froze for an instant, arm still half-choking Carver, then he dropped his arm and turned.

  “Dick,” Allen said. His mouth kept on working, as if he wanted to say more but had no idea how to form the proper words or how to force them out.

  “That’s enough, Ewart,” Wroten said. “You can let the young man go. I don’t think he will be a flight risk...today.”

  Allen dropped his arm. Carver bent over, hacking and coughing. His mother looked as if she wanted to rush to his side and comfort him but was afraid to move.

  For a moment, things were rather tense.

  “Now,” Wroten said, “let’s all sit down and figure out what is going on. Deputy Allen, you start.”

  Allen dropped into a wooden-back chair by a small desk—probably where Janet Ellis sat once a month to make out checks for recurring bills—and explained what he had found at the Johansson house: the three of us standing over an obviously battered body, the bedroom in disarray, the small packet of what was probably cocaine, and coming downstairs to discover Carver missing.

  “I thought he might have run off, you know, like before.”

  “And I told you precisely where he had gone and why,” Victoria added.

  “Right,” Wroten said, shifting to face her. “Now, Miz Sears, what do you know about this?”

  “Precious little, I’m afraid, Deputy Wroten.” I could hear in her voice that she placed a good deal more confidence in the older man than she did in his subordinate. “Eric Johansson is dead. We left him where we found him...just as we found him, on the bed in his room.”

  Wroten nodded. “I’ve got a man over there now, watching the place.”

  “Good. Well, we know that he was alive late last night, when Carver brought him home from Land’s End.”

  “That right?” Wroten shot a glance at Carver, who seemed to have recovered somewhat from his near-strangulation.

  Carver nodded.

  “And we know that he had been beaten rather severely,” Victoria said. “Twice. Once yesterday afternoon, and again late last night.”

  Wroten’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Twice? By the same men?”

  “No, I don’t think so. And I think the...uh, the circumstances of the...two events were quite different. From what Carver told us, Eric got into a small fracas over at Tom Neilson’s place late yesterday afternoon. Something to do with putting up grain.”

  “That right?” Wroten seemed to be able to accomplish with a few words what Allen would probably never have managed.

  Carver nodded. “He and Mr. Neilson started to mix it up. I stepped in to try to calm Rick and he took a swing at me.” He glanced from Wroten to Victoria and back, as if hoping for her support in what he was saying. “But I didn’t hit him, I didn’t. Mr. Neilson clobbered Rick with a right-cross and Rick went down. That’s all that happened.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then Rick took off. I guess to Land’s End. I didn’t hear any more from him until after midnight, when he called to say that Rafferty, that’s the barkeep, Miz Hanson”—he added for my benefit—“that Rafferty took his keys and wouldn’t let him drive and he needed a ride. I drove over and picked him up. Whatever went on over there had already happened because he was bleeding and weaving back and forth like he had drunk up half the liquor in the bar.”

  “So you don’t know what went on at the bar?” Wroten asked.

  Carver made as if to answer, but he never got the chance.

  “I do. They killed him. They killed my baby’s baby.” The voice came from the hallway entrance.

  Greta Johansson.

  “Greta,” Victoria said, surging to her feet and crossing the room to offer the woman her arm. “I thought you were resting.”

  “How can I rest when my grandson is at my house, in his bed, dead. And they killed him. I know they did.”

  Wroten was also on his feet, supporting Mrs. Johansson from the other side. Together he and Victoria got her to the sofa and helped her to sit down.

  She still looked frail and shocky, but she seemed more herself than she had earlier. And she sounded a little better as well.

  “Now, Miz Johansson, who do you think killed Eric?”

  “I don’t think, I know!” Her passion gave her voice a power it had lacked before. “That bunch that hangs out at that...that place.”

  She stopped, apparently convinced that she had said everything necessary.

  It wasn’t enough for Wroten.

  “Do you mean the Land’s End Bar, ma’am?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “And what bunch? Do you know any names?”

  Again she nodded. It took her a moment or two to be able to speak.

  “I don’t know their real names. Eric never told me. He didn’t talk about them much, but I would overhear things on the phone sometimes, when he was arranging to meet them. I know there was a Billy, and a Scooter. But the one he was afraid of was the leader. Snake.”

  Wroten glanced at Allen, who nodded slightly. Apparently they knew who this mysterious “Snake” was...and weren’t happy about the knowledge.

  “Now, ma’am, you say they killed your grandson?”

  She nodded and began weeping into her handkerchief.

  “Do you mean that they were the ones who beat him up last night?”

  She shrugged. It was a pitiable gesture, full of hopelessness and resignation and despair.

  “I don’t know. They must have though.”

  She fell silent. Wroten did not press for any more. He knew it would come when she was able to formulate her thoughts more clearly.

  “When my Freddie died, and Rita—such a lovely woman and a perfect daughter-in-law—and poor Eric had nowhere else to turn, he came up here to live with me. I thought that it would be wonderful, him living here and all, someone to help out around the place. I’m not able to do all the things I used to, and he was young and strong and...oh, and such a good little boy. He used to visit when he was just a boy and we would sit for hours and talk and tell stories and play games. He loved it.

  “I thought it would be the same now.

  “But it wasn’t. When he arrived, his hair was all spiky and he had...
things...in his ears and his eyebrows, and his clothes were all tattered and torn, even though I knew that Freddie and Rita made enough to give him new clothes any time he wanted them.

  “And he was...different. He was moody and sullen and sometimes we would go days on end and he wouldn’t even talk to me. He would just sit in his room, hours on end. I’d ask him what he was doing and he would say, ‘Just thinkin’, Grams, just thinkin’.’

  “Finally, I told him that he would have to start helping out more. If he didn’t want to do things here at the place, he could at least find work. And he did, now and again. Like yesterday, when he went to the Neilson place. He’d done that before.

  “But he also started going out at night.

  “He wouldn’t tell me where, but like I said, I heard things sometimes when he talked on the telephone. He would take my old car and not come home until way late, and I knew that he was going out to that place on the State highway, you know, just out of town.

  “He would drink and smoke. I could smell that on him the next day. And he started talking back to me and being....”

  She began weeping again. Victoria repeated her “There, there” gesture for a few minutes. Finally Mrs. Johansson looked up, directly into Wroten’s eyes.

  “I don’t know what-all he got up to out at that place. But after he started going there, there wasn’t anything left of my little grandbaby any more. I had a stranger living in my house, eating my food.

  “Whatever...whoever killed him, it was out at that God-forsaken place. They killed him. They killed my baby’s baby!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Deputy Wroten’s second priority was the view the body.

  First, he spent nearly half an hour sequestered with Deputy Allen in Janet Ellis’s kitchen, just out of earshot, reviewing Allen’s notes, his observations and conclusions. Then, after instructing Allen to remain at the Ellis’s with Janet and Mrs. Johansson, he told Victoria, Carver, and me to meet him at the Johansson house.

  “Directly there, mind you,” he added, as if throwing a bone to Allen, who looked as if he had been thoroughly reprimanded for his attitude toward and his earlier actions against Carver.

  As if there was anywhere else we were likely to go.

  The additional thirty or forty minutes he spent in Eric Johansson’s bedroom—closely watched by Victoria and, I must admit, somewhat less closely by me, with Carver waiting just outside the door—were in large part a repeat of what we had seen earlier that morning.

  The body was unmoved, in spite of the rattling and banging we had heard while Allen had examined the room. One drawer was fully open and its contents clearly disturbed—that was most likely where he had discovered the hidden packet of drugs.

  The major difference was that, since Wroten knew that Allen had photographed the body and the rest of the room, he showed no compunctions about pulling the T-shirt, now caked and stiff and rusty-red, up far enough for us all to see that the bruises, scrapes, and other wounds extended nearly to the throat.

  Whoever had beaten Eric Johansson had obviously been furious about something.

  “Are those stab wounds,” Victoria asked at one point, indicating several long, narrow patches of dried blood along the rib cage.

  Wroten leaned further over to inspect them.

  “Not sure. Could be. If they are, they’re awfully shallow to have been the cause of death. We’ll know more when Doc Anderson has a chance to look at them.”

  “Where is Doctor Anderson,” I asked, suddenly aware that the coroner had been absent all morning.

  “He and most of his staff are at a training session down-mountain,” Wroten said. “It’s only one day, and he figured whatever came up could wait a while.”

  He shook his head and studied the wounds again.

  “Guess he figured wrong. The best we can do is put the body on ice and wait until tomorrow...or the next day for the answers to some of our questions.”

  “Then someone is coming to take care of....” Victoria trailed off.

  “Yes, ma’am. The coroner’s van should be here in an hour or so. It’s been busy with another death—this one long-anticipated and well-documented, over at the old folks’ home in Six Pines.”

  That was the closest town to Fox Creek, about twenty-five miles further down the State Highway.

  “Old Mrs. Weimer?” Victoria looked saddened but not shocked.

  “Yes, ma’am. She’d been fading for a couple of weeks, and we got the call at about five this morning.”

  “Well,” Victoria said, “she was well along. Had to have been nearly ninety. Poor old thing. No family, not many friends left alive. She must have been terribly lonely. I should have visited her more often.

  “The funeral will be here in Fox Creek, then?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A couple of grandchildren from down-mountain will be coming in sometime this afternoon or tomorrow.”

  “So sad.”

  And then they turned their attention back to young Eric Johansson, who would never know the loneliness of outliving those closest to him, or feel the disappointment of grandchildren who remained distant...or uncaring.

  “What about his thighs?” Victoria made as if to lift the torn edge of the jeans.

  “I’d better do that, Miz Sears,” Wroten said, and he carefully peeled the torn flap of denim up toward the waistband, revealing even more evidence of beating and kicking.

  “Must’ve gotten to him when he was on the ground. He’d have curled up to protect himself, and that would account for all of the bruises along the outside there.”

  “Hmmm, yes,” Victoria said, but she wasn’t exactly looking at the thigh. She was concentrating on the upper surface of the leg, just at the knee cap and extending for a few inches above.

  The skin was torn, shredded almost, raw and ragged. She leaned over so close that it looked as if she might be about to smell the wounds, but then she straightened up and half-nodded to herself.

  Wroten apparently didn’t catch the small gesture.

  I did but I didn’t dare ask Victoria about it yet. It looked as if she had had a thought but that it had passed almost as quickly as it came. When she glanced over at me, her eyes were calm, sad, retrospective.

  “I guess that’s all we can do here,” Wroten said finally. “Next stop should probably be Land’s End.”

  “I think, if you don’t mind, that it might be instructive to drop by the Neilson farm first. To get more of a chronological sense of yesterday, as it were. And it’s really just on the way, about halfway to Land’s End.”

  Now it was Wroten’s turn to look as if he wanted to ask a question but didn’t quite dare. He studied Victoria for a long moment, then nodded and said, “Don’t see any harm in that.”

  Downstairs, he instructed Carver, Victoria, and me—the designated driver—to follow him, and we set out for the Neilson farm. At least there was no discussion over who might or might not have to sit in the “criminal” seat in his vehicle.

  It took about twenty minutes to get to the Neilson place. Normally, I would have been trying to get as much information as I could out of Victoria, but she sat stolidly in the passenger seat, not particularly withdrawn, but watching the fields as they flickered past. She surely had something on her mind, but I decided she was still working on making sense out of it. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

  Carver was in the back seat, taciturn and unspeaking. I know he have felt humiliated at the way Allen had treated him in front of the rest of us, including his mother—I know I would have felt that way—and didn’t want to talk to anyone right then. I didn’t even try.

  Instead, I concentrated on the road, on the back bumper of Deputy Wroten’s cruiser, on the light glinting off his taillights, on the fact that it was probably getting on to ten or eleven o’clock and I hadn’t had anything to eat except a bagel and a glass of milk.

  The Neilson place was newer, more modern-looking, better kept up than either the Ellises’ or the Johanssons’. The rail fe
nce was newly painted, the roof of the two story brick house newly shingled. Everything looked bright and shiny and polished.

  We waited in the car while Deputy Wroten spoke to an elderly woman—Mrs. Neilson, perhaps?—who couldn’t seem to speak three words in a row without using her hands to wave and point. After a couple of minutes, Wroten approached the car. I rolled the window down.

  “Tom Neilson’s in the field today, same one where the Johansson kid was working yesterday. I just got a knock-down-and-drag-out second-hand version of things from Tom’s mother back there”—the woman was still standing at the kitchen door, arms folded, looking like she could face down hoards of ravening Nazis if they tried to accuse her beloved son of anything—“then she said he was out there trying to get the flatbed back into working condition.

  “It’s not far. Just follow me and keep close.”

  It wasn’t far. It took perhaps ten minutes on graveled roads, turning left and right where fields ended and, presumably, other farmers’ fields began.

  We saw Neilson and a couple of hands long before they saw us. They were grouped around a flatbed that was canted partway in an irrigation ditch, its load of neatly stacked bales holding on as firmly as if it had been dead-level. Nearby was a pickup truck, a combine, and a baler, all standing silent and empty. The field looked as if it had been about three-quarters finished before something had gone wrong with the flatbed.

  Wroten got out first, spoke a few words to a man a couple of years older than me, who seemed to answer easily and without any signs of anger, then he signaled for us to join him.

  “Miz Sears, you know Tom, of course.”

  “Of course. His parents and I go back a long way. Good to see you, Tom.” She extended her hand.

  The man removed his worn leather work glove, took her proffered hand, and shook it firmly.

  “And you know Carver, I guess, since he was working out here yesterday.”

  A nod passed between the two men. No need for a handshake right then.

  “And this pretty lady”—had he actually said that?—“is Lynn Hanson. She’s staying the summer at the Van Etten’s place, up by Miz Sears’s.”

  The man—Tom Neilson apparently—nodded and extended his hand. In spite of having probably been encased in the leather glove all morning, his hand was dry and warm, and his fingers felt strong and capable as they grasped mine. He could easily have crushed my knuckles, I realized, but he didn’t even pretend to try.