The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  Sheriff Goldsmith’s white Bronco was parked on the county road outside Mount Eden. He was checking his teeth in his sun-visor’s vanity mirror when Morgan jogged up and rapped the fender.

  “Stick ‘em up!” he hollered.

  Startled, Hi Goldsmith splashed the crotch of his crisp new county uniform with hot coffee.

  “Goddammit, Jeff,” he snarled as he tried to hold his butt off the puddle of coffee in his seat. “Can’t you just quit the grab-ass for once?”

  Morgan suppressed a smile.

  “Oh, man, you can’t go back to town like that,” he said. “C’mon inside, and Claire can throw those trousers in the wash.”

  Goldsmith tried to sop some of the coffee with some blank incident reports, but he was far more absorbent than government paperwork.

  “Today of all days,” Goldsmith said, exasperated.

  “Forgot your underwear again, didn’t you? Tsk, tsk.”

  “I’m wearing underwear!”

  “I got some clean undies inside if you…”

  “Goddammit, I’m wearing underwear!”

  “So why’s today worse than any other day to spill coffee on your wee-wee?”

  Goldsmith cursed under his breath.

  “Them DCI boys are all over my ass,” the sheriff said. “They’re pissed off about this John Doe case. They come up here from Cheyenne in their fancy Sophia Loren duds and they treat us like a bunch of hicks who don’t know shit from granola.”

  “Ralph.”

  “What?”

  “Ralph Lauren,” Morgan said. “He makes the duds. Not Sophia.”

  “Then who was Jackie Gleason?”

  Morgan didn’t want to laugh at the sheriff. It would only add insult to a hot-coffee injury.

  “That was Ralph Cramden,” he said. “Different Ralph.”

  “So is Ralph related to Sophia?”

  “Hi, did you need to see me about something so early on a Tuesday morning?”

  The sheriff cleared his throat.

  “Jeff, them DCI guys want me to make sure you aren’t gonna print nothin’ about John Doe. They say it’s still under investigation, and if it was public, the case would be in jeopardy.”

  Morgan shook his head.

  “Bullshit.”

  “C’mon, Jeff. I’ve already got my tit in the wringer with these guys. That short, cocky one called me Barney Fife. The little fucker.”

  “Well, Hi, you just go back and tell them you’re the sheriff, not the newspaper editor. The story will run. I don’t owe those guys any favors.”

  “It ain’t a favor they’re askin’, Jeff.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Sheriff Goldsmith leaned across the seat and fetched some coffee-stained papers, which he handed to Morgan.

  “Court order, Jeff. Judge will hear your arguments Friday.”

  “He can’t do that!” Morgan said, scanning the legal document in his hand. “And I can’t wait until Friday. The paper goes to bed tomorrow.”

  “Those DCI kids play hardball, Jeff. Sorry.”

  “But they can’t keep me from printing this story!”

  “No, but the judge can.”

  “But he can’t! It’s not against any law to print the truth, and for god’s sake, those bastards can’t just stop the presses like that. It’s called prior restraint.”

  “I don’t make the laws, Jeff. Hell, I don’t even know what half of ‘em are. Damn legislature. Is that one of the new ones?”

  “The government can’t decide what a newspaper can’t print before it prints it. That’s censorship.”

  “Well, I wish I could tell you to take it to the next highest court, but all Their Honors left this morning for the state bar convention in Jackson. You could try to get one of the district judges to set this injunction aside over the phone, but I reckon you won’t find ‘em real handy … unless you call over to the Cowboy Bar after dinner. Won’t be a sober judge anywhere in the Hole by 10 o’clock.”

  “You guys are supposed to uphold the law, not piss on it.”

  “The judge is the law, as far as I’m concerned. And he says no news is good news.”

  “This is just bullshit, Hi,” Morgan protested, tossing the injunction into the sheriff’s humid lap. “I won’t obey it.”

  Goldsmith shrugged as he started his Bronco.

  “In that case, I’ll have one of my deputies tidy up a cell at Chez Goldsmith. We’ll leave the light on for ya!”

  A weekly paper’s newsroom is anything but symphonic, but as deadline approaches, it at least rises to the dissonance of the orchestral tune-up before a concert.

  Morgan paced. His young reporters — and they were always young — avoided his eye and hunkered down behind their computer screens, trying to look small and busy. But Morgan wasn’t prowling for stories.

  A lawyer friend in Laramie who relished media cases but couldn’t build a practice on them advised Morgan to print the story and face the music, which he presumed would be furious but short-lived. “Those peckerheads are just trying to make you blink,” he said. He even offered to defend Morgan at half his usual hourly rate if he were found in contempt of court.

  But Morgan wasn’t worried about jail. He’d already decided to hand-deliver this week’s Bullet personally to the sheriff and offer to be handcuffed on the spot. He was certain Hi Goldsmith didn’t have the balls to lock him up.

  No, Morgan worried more about the lead for his story, which must prove to be worth all the fuss. Two entwined mysteries in one grave. A puzzle where they had expected to find an enigma. A grave that wasn’t even qualified to be a hole in the ground. A missing woman without a history replaced by a man without a head. Where had Laddie Granbouche gone, and where did John Doe come from?

  The bell over The Bullet’s front door chimed as Dr. Cowper strode in off Main Street. He’d slept late for the first time in several days, and he looked rested.

  “You walked over here?” Morgan asked. “You should have called and I’d have picked you up.”

  Dr. Cowper shook his head and plopped in the thinly padded chair beside Morgan’s desk.

  “Thanks, but I needed the exercise. This dry air clears the head.”

  “Well, you might want to make yourself scarce around here after today. DCI got a court order to stop me from printing anything about John Doe, but I’m doing it anyway.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, and these twerps are as serious as a heart attack. They might barge in here guns blazing when they read tomorrow’s paper.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Dr. Cowper said, wiping the Wyoming road-dust from his shoe. “They might storm the newspaper and shoot everybody, but they’ll sure look snappy doing it. Just wear something nice for your shooting tomorrow, huh?”

  “So what are you up to today? A little cow-tipping?”

  “I was wondering if I could see your morgue.”

  “You could if we had one. It burned up about five years ago. We have everything since then, and the state archives sent us microfilmed papers dating back to about 1895, but all the old papers and subject files are ashes.”

  “There goes that.”

  “Did you need something specific?”

  “Yeah. Laddie’s obituary, to start.”

  Morgan rummaged through the papers on his desk and produced a small tube of curled pages.

  “Way ahead of you, Doc. And here’s the story that went with it.”

  Dr. Cowper spread the thermal copies from The Bullet’s microfilm reader on the desk. Laddie’s death earned her a full story across the top of the front page under an ironic banner headline, Professed Outlaw Bride Dies, and her Page Two obit was unusually long, at least twenty-four column inches. Inside, The Bullet’s late and legendary editor Bell Cockins wrote one of the most startlingly eloquent tributes a small-town newspaperman ever committed to paper, not just about the passing of Laddie, but the passing of time, too:

  The infinite moment of
Laddie Granbouche

  “Where do we begin to explain a life and a legacy? Every death needs meaning, just as every life needs meaning …

  “History is a wide, profound river. In time, nearly everything of the past is lost in the deep end of this river. Some of history’s flotsam is washed ashore on the far bank, but we can only see it through the spyglass of memory, which distorts what is true. In the end, we leave the river to the scholars of future generations to navigate and map, to interpret our perceptions and help us understand them. So we make a deal with these wise men: They promise they will reconstruct the past as faithfully and as accurately as they are able, and we trust they are telling us the truth …

  “Will we ever know the truth about Laddie Granbouche? Did she truly ride with and love mythic outlaws … or was she merely a lonely woman who yearned for a history more romantic than her own? Have we missed our chance to know her? To know ourselves?

  “The river flows on.”

  “He was good,” Dr. Cowper said reverently as he finished Old Bell’s elegy for Laddie.

  “The best,” Morgan said.

  Dr. Cowper scanned the obituary.

  “Not the same,” he said. “The words, the phrasing, the thought process … well, it lacks the same fluency.”

  “Yeah,” Morgan agreed. “It looks to me like Laddie wrote her own obituary before she died. Pretty common.”

  “She wrote this?”

  “That’s my best guess.”

  “Would it have been changed at all? Anything taken out?”

  Morgan thought briefly.

  “Maybe spelling or basic grammar, but probably not much more. Old Bell once told me some people only get their names in the paper when they are born, get married and die. He would have been generous on a self-written obit. I suppose he would have added the time and date of death, and all the funeral information, and left the rest as Laddie originally wrote it.”

  Dr. Cowper studied the obituary more closely.

  “This might be the only thing we have in her own words. If she wrote this, it’s her story, unfiltered by historians and reporters. Just her words. Sorta like the DNA of her thoughts.”

  “But maybe it isn’t true,” Morgan said.

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not … this is what she wanted us to know. Would there be an original anywhere?”

  “Not here.”

  “Where does an obituary normally come from?”

  “Usually the funeral home.”

  Dr. Cowper bolted from his chair and headed for the front door.

  “Plan on lunch,” he said, not looking back.

  Morgan swiveled around in his chair and stared at the guileless cursor blinking on his empty computer screen. It offered no reassurance. Not for Laddie’s story, not for John Doe, not for deadline.

  “You’re either in deep thought or deep shit,” a voice behind him said.

  It was Cal Nussbaum, The Bullet’s hangdog pressman. Even in his late seventies, his ink-black glower could spot-weld a green reporter’s rectum. God knows, it had certainly warmed Morgan’s on occasion. Cal’s compulsion was punctuality, and he had an uncanny sixth sense that anticipated missed deadlines. That’s why he set his own clocks ahead ten minutes. Just to be sure.

  “Both,” Morgan said.

  “I’m holding six pages right now, and three of ‘em should already be locked up. Still ain’t got the main sports photo or any of the lifestyle section, and the Town Hall’s public notices are a day late. Maybe we should just close up shop and try again next week, huh?”

  In fact, Cal would rather die — and take several laggard reporters with him — than miss a paper. In his almost fifty-five years on the job, every week had a Bullet, even after a fire-bombing had gutted the newspaper office and pressroom six years before. Once, in a fit of pique, Cal even started the press at the appointed moment, even though only half the plates were ready. He met his deadline, even if nobody else did.

  “I think we’ll be okay, Cal,” Morgan assured him.

  Cal harumphed and disappeared into the pressroom, his mythic realm where deadlines were never missed.

  Morgan wandered to the front desk where Crystal Sandoval, his receptionist, was stuffing the week’s advertising invoices in envelopes.

  “Crystal, any idea why the Town Hall’s public notices are late?” he asked.

  “Hacker,” she said without looking up.

  “What happened?”

  “Beats me,” she shrugged. “They just said somebody broke into their server last night and erased a lot of stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  Crystal cocked her head.

  “Public notices, for one, geez.”

  “What else?”

  “Parking tickets, dog licenses, sewer bills, that kind of stuff. The clerk’s gals gotta key it all back in, but they don’t have anything else to do.”

  “Sounds like a story. Would you call and ask them to send over their hard copies of this week’s public notices and … well, is it possible for you to stay late and typeset them tonight? Pretty please?”

  Crystal rolled her eyes and picked up the phone. Morgan button-holed one of his two reporters, a lumpy kid from Rocky Mountain College in Montana who’d decided even journalism was better than running his dad’s ranch. Certainly the manure couldn’t be any deeper.

  “Josh, I need a story about the Town Hall computer getting hacked. They apparently lost a lot of stuff. Let’s find out what. I need fifteen inches max, maybe with a sidebar on how regular folks can protect their computers from hackers. By three o’clock, no later. Call the mayor and the town clerk and see what they know. Avoid the techno-geek jargon. Who, what, when, where, why, how … and who cares? Got it?”

  Josh nodded meekly. Morgan started back to his desk, but turned in the narrow aisle between his reporters’ desks.

  “And, guys, please try to get your other stories done right away. We gotta have ‘em ASAP. If you don’t, I’m gonna let Cal have his way with you. And I’m warning you, he likes it rough.”

  The unctuous odor of chicken-fried steak and viscous coffee congealed in The Griddle’s dining room. Even the windows were greasy with it.

  Dr. Shawn Cowper sat in the corner booth. He’d shoved the sticky syrup carousel, Tabasco and ketchup bottles, a crusty bowl of sugar, a couple of humidity-clotted salt and pepper shakers — all the epicurean enhancements a small-town bon vivant could possibly slurry on his fine cuisine — to the far side of his broad table. Several photocopies were arrayed in front of him.

  “So what did you find?” Morgan asked as he sat at the edge of the booth. Without asking, Suzie, the waitress, delivered a tall glass of iced tea and a handful of pink packets as she flitted from table to table like a pork chop-scented bumblebee.

  Dr. Cowper didn’t even look up.

  “The mother lode,” he said, sliding several handwritten pages toward Morgan. “You were right about one thing: Laddie wrote her own obituary. That’s a copy of her original, and it’s just the same as in the paper. But she also gave the mortician some very detailed instructions about her funeral and burial, including directions to a remote spot in the Hole in the Wall where a particular color of sandstone for her crypt was to be quarried. And she paid cash up front for everything.”

  “Sounds like Laddie, all right.”

  “So did you ever wonder where she got her money?”

  Morgan shrugged and stirred four packets of fake sugar into his glass.

  “She was always a very old woman to me. I never thought about it, I guess. I thought all old people had money.”

  “Well, Laddie had money. Lots of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  Dr. Cowper shuffled through his papers and produced a sheaf of stapled pages.

  “Laddie’s will and probate records from the courthouse.”

  Morgan skimmed. After twenty-five years of breathing the stale air in courthouse vaults, he’d become efficient about reading documents written b
y lawyers. His eyes naturally skipped the boilerplate legalese and landed on the meatiest passages.

  “Jesus Christ …”

  “Jesus had nothing to do with it. With her La Plata Ranch and investments, Laddie’s estate was worth more than thirty-seven million dollars. The old gal was sharp. She liked her blue-chips, and she held onto them for a long, long time.”

  Morgan scanned Laddie’s portfolio.

  “Coca-Cola, AT&T, General Electric, Trimark Pictures, Ford Motor Company, Union Pacific Railroad, Eastman Kodak, Wells Fargo … Wells Fargo? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe it was just a ‘re-investment,’” Dr. Cowper quipped. “Worse, take a look at the tax bill on her estate.”

  “Well, she wasn’t hurting for money,” Morgan said, flipping through pages.

  “Good God, twelve million bucks to Uncle Sam,” he said, astonished “If she wasn’t already dead, that would have killed her. She hated the government.”

  “And where did it all come from, you think? She wrote a lot of things about herself in her obituary, but not a word about even a part-time job, much less any lucrative career … except ranching the Pampas in Argentina.”

  “Inheritance maybe?”

  Dr. Cowper looked dubious.

  “The foster daughter of a Texas madam?”

  “But we don’t know that for sure,” Morgan said. “It’s just a story. For all we know, she could be Daddy Warbucks’s love-child. You’re starting to believe the legends, my friend.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. But what else do we have? Nothing here disproves her story.”

  “C’mon, Doc. Nothing here proves Laddie’s story, either. Besides, crime doesn’t really pay, and criminals aren’t exactly patient investors. They crave instant gratification. Even the greatest outlaws don’t die multi-millionaires … well, okay, except for those savings and loan creeps.”

  Dr. Cowper seemed to know he was on thin scientific ice, but Laddie’s legend appealed to his heart.

  “Point taken,” he said to Morgan. “So … what do you make of this?”

  Dr. Cowper pushed another piece of paper in front of Morgan. It was a copy of an invoice.