The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries)

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Oh, right, I forgot, it’s the Blight Way. I hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, Bo, but you look terrible. You better get to bed early tonight and get some sleep.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got a date with Susan.”

  “Susan! Wonderful, Bo, wonderful! What happened to the airline pilot? You mean she’s giving up the pilot for you?”

  “What’s so odd about that?”

  “Nothing, dear, except for all those free flights.”

  Tully drove to his log house. Nothing had been broken into, and he was glad about that. The grass had started to grow back over the fire pits scattered about the meadow. Freezer Day was kind of a pain, but it beat campaigning. There wasn’t a politician in all of Blight County who didn’t wish he had thought of his own Freezer Day. The house was cold and empty. He turned off the double burglar alarms and looked around for something that seemed to be missing. Then he remembered—Clarence! He couldn’t believe he had become attached to the little dog. Well, Batim could keep him. He remembered the shrimp man, too, Sid Brown and his Giggling Loon restaurant in Boise. He’d have to give the restaurant a try on his next trip to the big city. He remembered also Sid’s mention of Jean Runyan, the art dealer, and that she wanted to give him a one-man show at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane. He was finally making enough money as an artist to give up his day job, his twenty-four-hour-a-day job. Maybe if the Bo Tully art show turned out well he would do just that.

  The phone rang. Tully picked up. “Yeah?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Lurch! I’ve been looking for you. What have you found out about the bullets?”

  “The closest I can come is the Spanish Reformado. It was a .43-caliber bullet used extensively in rolling-block rifles by the Cubans during the Spanish-American War. Because of the humidity in Cuba, the brass-coated bullets had a tendency to turn green. American troops thought the green made them poisonous. The bullets may have been poisonous, but because of all the germs in that moist climate. Anyway, over a million rounds of this ammo and a lot of the rolling-block rifles were captured by the American troops and brought back to the U.S. So it’s possible one of them could have been in use here in 1927.”

  “Good work, Lurch. Now go back to bed.”

  “I’m awake now. I might as well go down to the office.”

  “That’s even better.”

  Tully tried to remember something he had heard about the Spanish-American War. Because it involved history, his mind had automatically shut off. Back in high school, a teacher might say, “Now, the ancient Greeks—” Tully’s mind would instantly beep off.

  He showered and shaved, trimmed his mustache, put on clean underwear, shirt, and pants, rubbed on a little aftershave, and then rummaged in his closet for a suitable jacket, finally settling on a black leather sport coat. He thought for a moment about switching his three-thousand-dollar alligator-skin boots to a pair of oxblood loafers but then decided to stick with the boots. Susan was tall and the boots gave him a few more inches on her.

  He watched the evening news on TV and then drove his sheriff’s department Explorer into town. Susan was ready and looked fantastic and he complimented her on her frilly blue dress and gray jacket. He had decided to be particularly attentive for the evening. He would work on her other objections to his character later. One was about all he could manage for now.

  “Crabbs, okay?” he said as they drove off.

  “Sure,” she said. “Best place to eat in Blight City.”

  “Yeah, and it’s almost good, too. You ever eaten at the Giggling Loon in Boise?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t paying, fortunately.”

  “Pretty pricey, hunh?” Tully said, wondering who had picked up the tab.

  “They don’t bother to put the prices on the menu. I guess they figure if you want to know the prices you can’t afford to eat there. Why, are you interested in taking me there sometime?”

  “Maybe. As a matter of fact my paintings have been selling rather well lately. Jean Runyan has been thinking of giving me a one-man show up at the Davenport in Spokane. If that turns out well, I may just give up sheriffing.”

  “Oh, Bo, that would be wonderful! Being a successful artist is the best possible life a person can have. We could get us a big house on a beach off the coast of France! We could live anywhere! And we wouldn’t have to drive your department Explorer when we go out to eat!”

  “We?”

  “Did I say we? Surely I meant you.”

  “I’m sticking with ‘we.’”

  Susan laughed. “I do think it would be a wonderful life.”

  Bo thought it was probably time for him to become attentive again. He glanced over at her but didn’t detect anything to attend to. This was harder than he expected. He thought of something but was afraid it might be interpreted as crude. Then he caught a whiff of her perfume. He decided to give it a shot. “Nice perfume.”

  “Why, thank you. I’m pleased you like it. You know, when you get to be a rich and famous artist you will be able to buy me perfume like this.”

  “That’s something I’ll have to learn,” he said. “I’ve never been big on smells.”

  She stuck her face over close to him. “Depends on the smell,” she said. “For example, I do detect you’ve just taken a shower and rubbed on some aftershave?”

  “How do you like it?”

  “The shower is wonderful.”

  Tully had called Crabbs earlier and talked to Lester Cline, the manager. He liked Lester well enough, even though he wasn’t the sort of person Tully would want to go camping with. Tully described the table he and Susan had sat at a couple of times before. Lester had said he would hold it for them.

  “I reserved our special table at Crabbs,” he told her as they pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot.

  “Great!” Susan said. “Now tell me again exactly why this table is special?”

  “We sat there twice before. Remember the last time, you were talking about your job and all the people at nearby tables moved away?”

  “People can be so rude.”

  “Then you hooked up with the flyboy.”

  “That was a mistake,” she said. “Maybe eating at Crabbs had something to do with it.”

  “Best place to eat in Blight City!”

  “My point exactly.”

  Lester himself came out in a tuxedo and showed them to their special table. He had a white towel folded over his arm. “There you are, lady and gentleman,” he said. “Now may I get you each a nice glass of wine?”

  “By all means,” said Tully. “Do you by any chance have Gallo White Merlot?”

  “Oui, Monsieur, but here we call it Taste of Paris.”

  “Perfect. We’ll have that. Okay with you, Susan?”

  “One of my favorites,” she said.

  Trying to be attentive, he asked Susan what she had been up to lately.

  “That grizzly double murder up at Woods Lake. It’s one of the worst cases I’ve been on. I guess the worst part of it was—”

  Tully raised his hand for her to stop. “Please, not when I’m about to eat.”

  “But it’s so interesting!”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I understand from Daisy you don’t mind picking up the bones of people who have been dead for nearly a hundred years.”

  Tully shook his head. “I do mind! Lurch made me do it! You will be impressed by this, however. We calculated roughly the distance between Quail Creek Ranch and the mine site by how fast horses walk and how fast humans walk.”

  “Very impressive,” she said. “I assume your calculations turned out to be correct.”

  “Put us within a range of seven and a half miles.”

  “On Deadman Creek, I suppose. Everybody in town seemed to know you were staying at the campsite on Deadman.”

  Tully couldn’t help but be highly attentive to her eyes. They may have been the biggest eyes he had ever seen on a woman. They were gorgeous, and also gave her a slight
ly startled look that added a certain cuteness to her beauty.

  “That’s what comes from being such a popular sheriff,” he said. “Everybody wants to know where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

  “That’s certainly true. Usually, though, it’s not about camping.”

  The manager returned with their glasses of wine, followed by the waiter to take their orders.

  “What’s the special this evening?” Tully asked.

  “Canadian stew,” he said. “It’s very good.”

  “I’ll pass on that. What are you having, Susan?”

  “The coconut shrimp. I love shrimp.”

  Tully studied the menu. “I’ve started liking shrimp a lot myself, ever since my Freezer Day. I’ll go with the Captain’s Plate. It’s got lots of shrimp, right?”

  “Yes, sir, it does.”

  Tully took a closer look at the waiter. “You look familiar. Have we met?”

  “You arrested me for car theft a while back. I did a year.”

  “I have a terrible time keeping track of my criminals,” Tully said. “Glad to see you’ve found fairly honest work. You haven’t taken up poisoning or any hobbies like that, have you?”

  The waiter laughed. “Actually, you were rather nice to me. You put together a fund for my wife and little girl while I was away.”

  “Really? Well, I appreciate your remembering. The name’s Harvey Wilson, right?”

  “Right.”

  Their meals and wine turned out to be excellent, although Tully did wonder how one might go about poisoning shrimp. On the other hand, he thought, if Harvey poisons us, there goes his tip.

  Tully passed on the dessert, but Susan went with the Suicide by Chocolate and devoured it with gusto. He would have to check out her hips to see if he could detect any spread. Actually, he had planned to check out her hips anyway, but Suicide by Chocolate gave him a good excuse. He wondered if that counted as attentive.

  Susan said, “Bo, if we are going to proceed in a serious manner, I do have one favor to ask.”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “It’s just that I’m bothered you have never gotten over Ginger. It’s time you moved on. The large painting of her in the living room, the one where’s she’s holding the bouquet of wildflowers, you really should sell it.”

  Tully was silent. “Odd you should mention that painting,” he said after a moment. “Sid Brown, the owner of the Giggling Loon, has offered to buy it. I could have my agent handle the deal.”

  “I hope you don’t mind the advice,” she said. “I’m usually pretty good at sizing up a situation. At least my usual clients never complain.”

  “I suppose not,” he said.

  “One other thing,” Susan said. “I hate to bring it up, but must you wear those cowboy boots? You’re not a cowboy, after all. Besides, I know you hate horses.”

  “It’s my inner cowboy. He’s the one who wears the boots. I’m the one that hates horses. Most of us old Idaho boys have inner cowboys. It doesn’t make any difference what we do for a living. As a matter of fact, Susan, I really doubt you would have any interest in a man who didn’t have an inner cowboy.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  After dinner, he dropped Susan off at her apartment. She claimed to be exhausted. He drove back to his lonely log house, wondering if Batim Scragg might be getting tired of Clarence by now. He wondered about Lucas Kincaid. In the pale light of the moon he scanned the tree line above his house, mostly out of habit. Lucas wasn’t the only person with a hankering to kill him, should the opportunity arise. Keeping it from happening was second nature to Tully by now, and he kept himself most attentive in that regard. He hoped Daisy would have the search warrant in hand by the time he got to the office the next morning. He was getting bored with this whole business of Agatha’s mystery and was ready to move on from that.

  20

  IT WAS NEARLY six the next morning when he awoke. Nothing like a few murders to wear a person out. He got dressed, ate a bowl of Cheerios, and drove to the office.

  “Where’s Lurch?” he asked.

  “On his way in,” Daisy said. “He should be here any minute.”

  “I take it you were able to get all the info you needed for the warrant.”

  “Yeah, old Judge Patterson is pretty easy. You headed back up to Angst today?”

  “Soon as Lurch shows up. Anything happening here?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “That’s what I figure,” Tully said. “I got my own problems.”

  Daisy was particularly fetching in her black slacks and white blouse. Tully knew she was in love with him. People go through their whole lives with other people romantically in love with them and never know. Tully knew. Daisy was a woman after all. He took his Picasso mug off the rack behind the coffee thermoses and managed to fizz out half a cup. The troops always seemed to run out the coffee before he arrived. He yelled at Florence. “Flo, would you make some more coffee, please? Daisy is too lazy to do it.”

  “You got it, boss. Take just a few minutes.”

  Daisy gave him a hard look. “I heard what you said to Florence. Lazy, my eye! I’m busy!”

  “Busy, my eye. So how about the warrant?”

  “I’ve got it right here. Judge Patterson wanted to know the time frame. I told him eighty-five years.”

  “Sounds about right. What did he say?”

  “Nothing. You know he always gives you what you ask for.”

  “That’s because he’s the best kind of judge a cop can ask for, old and senile.”

  Daisy laughed. “And corrupt.”

  “Well, sure, but I’ve never paid him a dime. I think he’s got me confused with Pap.”

  She gave him the warrant. He folded it up and slid it into the inside pocket of his sports coat.

  Daisy said, “I see you’re wearing your three-thousand-dollar boots.”

  Tully frowned at her. “It’s more tasteful to say ‘alligator-skin’ boots. The ‘three-thousand-dollar’ is implied.”

  “Oh, there I go again, neglecting my boot etiquette.”

  “Yes! Let this be a lesson to you.”

  Tully went into his office and called Pap. “Bring your big van and pick me up. We need something big enough for two caskets and ourselves.”

  “I assume the department will pay me mileage. It doesn’t pay me for anything else.”

  “Yes, it will pay your mileage. I assume the van gets about ten miles per gallon.”

  “Five. On downhill grades. With a strong wind coming from behind. Do I have to go, too? You finally exhausted me, Bo.”

  “Yeah, I may need some help. And I can’t afford to haul another one of my deputies up there.”

  “I take it we’re headed back to Angst.”

  “You got it.”

  Tully was waiting out in front of the courthouse when Pap pulled up in the van.

  “I had forgotten just how big this monster is,” Tully said, climbing into it. “A rear seat and still enough room for two caskets.”

  “Probably could squeeze a third coffin in there, but I’m leaving that space for a nap. You got me plumb wore out, Bo. I used the van for camping back in my youthful sixties. Had a mattress in the back and curtains on the windows. It was nice. What all are we hauling?”

  “Just the two caskets. Thought we’d hold a little burial service up at Quail Creek Ranch. I’ve dealt with a lot of murder victims, but these two strike me as especially sad. You saw how hard Tom and Sean worked, and right when they struck it rich somebody killed them.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed the ranch. Bernice answered, and he had her put Ernie on.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  Tully said, “I know how hard you’ve been working, Thorpe, but here’s another chore for you. Have Agatha find a nice last resting place for Tom and Sean on the ranch and you dig two graves there.”

  “Geez, that’s a lot of work! How about I hire some logging types and have them dig the
graves? There’s a lot of guys out of work around here who would be glad to do it for a few bucks.”

  “I don’t care how you do it, Ernie, just get it done. I want to hold the service today.”

  “You bringing some cash to pay the loggers? I don’t want them to dig the graves and then dump me in one of them.”

  “I’m bringing Pap.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “You can do the driving, Bo,” Pap said. “I’m too tired.” Tully got out and walked around the van to the driver’s side. Pap slid across the seat. Tully drove over to the medical examiner’s lab. Susan or one of her helpers had packaged the remains of Tom and Sean in sealed plastic bags. The assistants placed the bags in the coffins and put name tags on the outside.

  “You retain all the evidence we might need?” he asked Susan.

  “Need for what?” she said. “You don’t think there will be a trial after eighty years, do you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “We did take photos of the injuries, which make it clear they were both shot in the back of the head.”

  “Good. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  “You’d better.”

  21

  TULLY TURNED THE van back into Blight City.

  “I thought we were headed for Angst,” Pap said.

  “We are. It just occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to have a man of the cloth at the burial service. So maybe I can persuade Flynn to come along and officiate.”

  “A Catholic priest? How do you know the departed were Catholic?”

  “I don’t. The kid’s name was O’Boyle, though. That sounds Irish. I figure Flynn will know some words to cover just about any belief, if any.”

  Tully walked into the rectory without knocking and found the priest in the kitchen eating breakfast, a tuna-fish sandwich with a glass of milk. The priest frowned up at Tully. “I know this can’t be good.”

  “I need a favor, Flynn,” Tully said.

  “I knew it,” Father James Flynn said.

  Tully explained about the murders and the burial service up on Quail Creek Ranch. He said there was a good chance the O’Boyle boy was Catholic, the name sounding Irish. He didn’t know about Agatha’s father. He had never known Agatha or Bernice to be religious, but he figured the priest could give the burial service a nice touch.