Suspended Sentences

by Brian Garfield

  Two hours dragged by. Then a possession-of-narcotics case was continued to some future date and the bailiff rose to intone: “State versus Allen.”

  The arresting cop testified as to the circumstances of the arrest and the condition of the shotgun in the car at the time. Stanley cross-examined the cop with little hope of accomplishing anything useful. The cop stuck to his story: yes, the shotgun was handy, right there on the seat. Yes, it was assembled. Not only assembled but charged, loaded, and cocked. All you had to do was pull the trigger. The safety catch wasn’t even on.

  When the prosecution rested its case, Ellenburgh was sweating; the fat man glared at Deke and Stanley before he went back to the D.A.’s table and sat down, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Then Stanley called his witnesses. He called Harv Allen to the stand. Harv testified how he’d given the shotgun to Deke and why; he also testified that Deke detested guns and never used them, not even for target practice. Then Deke’s Uncle Bill got on the stand and told the story of the rat hunt — how he, not Deke, had shot the rats and how he’d handed the gun back to Deke afterward, not thinking to put the safety catch on or empty the gun. “It’s my fault maybe more’n his,” Uncle Bill said earnestly. “I know a little about guns, at least. The boy doesn’t know a thing about them.”

  Then Stanley called a few character witnesses — people who knew Deke, people he’d worked for. They testified how he’d done good honest work for them, never stolen, worked like a beaver out of that cluttered old Microbus of his, always been amiable and cheerful — a little hard-of-hearing, maybe, but certainly not a criminal type.

  All through the trial — it lasted about five hours, not counting the break for lunch — Deke’s live-in girl friend Shirley sat right behind the rail and surreptitiously held hands with Deke. Judge Berlin saw that, of course, but she made no objection to it and Stanley was slightly encouraged by her evident sympathy for the boy. Just the same, he realized that the facts in the case were clear, that there’d been a violation of the felony law and that he was going to have to pull something very clever indeed if he was to save Deke from misery.

  Ellenburgh made his closing argument — very brief, it didn’t need much elucidation. Then Stanley stood up and addressed the bench.

  “Your honor, I don’t think anybody’s disputing the facts in this case. We seem to be caught up on a legal issue rather than a factual one. My client makes no secret of the fact that he had the gun on his truck seat as the officer testified. That its presence was not intended for felonious purpose is, in the eyes of the law, immaterial. We seem to be faced with a mandatory situation here, wherein the accused — even though our sympathies may go out to him wholeheartedly — appears to be uncompromisingly guilty in the eyes of the law. Even a suspended sentence in this case would brand my client a felon for the rest of his life and deprive him of vital constitutional rights, as you know.”

  Judge Berlin watched him suspiciously: apparently Stanley was only confirming the prosecution’s case. She said, “Are you defending the young man or simply throwing him on the mercy of the court, Mr. Dern?”

  “I’d like to defend him, your honor. I’d like to point out to the Court the provision of the state’s anti-gun-possession statute which specifically exempts from prosecution the honest citizen who, for purposes of self-protection or otherwise, elects to keep a gun — loaded or otherwise — on the premises of his own home or place of business.”

  “Mr. Dern, I’m fully aware of that provision. I don’t see how it applies in this case.”

  “Your honor,” Stanley said quietly, “my client maintains, with perfectly good reason, that his Microbus is in fact his place of business.”

  There was a loud objection from prosecutor Ellenburgh but Judge Berlin had begun to laugh and Stanley knew by the tone of her laughter that he’d won.

  Deke Allen told me, some time later, after he’d had time to reflect on the experience, “I guess Justice is blind. But the rest of us sure as hell have to keep our eyes open, don’t we?”

  HUNTING ACCIDENT

  “Hunting Accident” is an exercise in wishful thinking: not the way things are but the way we sometimes would like them to be.

  When I arrived in the office Tuesday morning Cord’s wife was waiting for me. She didn’t rise from the chair. I’d heard the news on the car radio and her grief didn’t surprise me but it was mitigated by anger: she was in a rage.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cord. I just heard.”

  Her lips kept working and she blinked at me but she held her tongue; perhaps she was afraid of what might come out. Her natural appearance was drab but normally she managed attractive contrivances. This morning there was no makeup. She sat with her shoulders rolled forward and her arms folded as if she had a severe abdominal pain. Now she snarled — a visible exposing of teeth — and afterward she remembered herself, tried an apologetic smile, gathered herself with an obvious effort of will. Her wrath had rendered her inarticulate.

  I tried to help. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting. I didn’t expect —”

  “I want you to help me, Bill. I want you to go up there.”

  Her voice had lost its customary music; it was like a smoker’s morning voice — a deep hangover baritone. I stood at my desk unwilling to sit down. “Up where?”

  “That place in Colorado. Whatever it’s called.”

  “You’d like me to bring the body back? Of course.”

  “Bill, I want you to find out who was responsible.” She spoke slowly with effort; the words fell from her with equal weight, like bricks. She said again, clenching a fist, “Responsible.”

  “The radio said it was an accident.”

  She watched me with her injured eyes. It rattled me. I said lamely, “My work’s industrial security, Mrs. Cord. You seem to be asking me to investigate a homicide. It’s a little out of my —”

  “You don’t like — you didn’t like Charlie.”

  “Mrs. Cord, I —”

  “Never mind. I didn’t like him very much myself. But he was all I had.”

  “You need rest,” I told her. I sat down behind the desk. “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “He gave me a pill. I’ll take it when I go home. Bill, you’re the only one I trust to do this.”

  What a sad thing for her to say, I thought. I hardly knew her. She was the wife — the widow — of an acquaintance who’d been an executive in a neighboring department; I hadn’t known Charlie Cord very well. She was right — I hadn’t liked him, and therefore I’d avoided him when I could. Yet she’d come to me. Hadn’t they any friends?

  She looked down and saw her fist and unclenched it slowly, studying the fingers as if they were unfamiliar objects. She was waiting for me to speak; she almost cringed. I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me to do.”

  “Bill, nobody here cares about Charlie. Good riddance — that’s what they’ll be thinking. You know the gossip of course.”

  “Gossip?”

  “Why Charlie married me. I’ve never been what you could call a glamour girl. But my father happens to be a director of the company with sixteen percent of the stock. When Charlie married me, he married sixteen percent of Schiefflin Aerospace and married himself into a forty-thousand-a-year job in the sales and marketing division. Charlie made his way well up in the world from the football team of a second-rate state university. That’s what most everybody thinks of Charlie. That’s all they ever think of him.”

  “Mrs. Cord, you’re upset and that’s understandable, but —”

  She went on, not allowing me to interrupt further. “He wasn’t likeable. He was a boor. He was a hearty backslapper, he was never sincere enough, he told outhouse jokes badly and too loudly. He affected garish jackets and ridiculous cars. He had a fetish for big-game hunting. But he did a good job for this company, Bill. People tend to ignore that — deliberately I’m sure, because no one likes to give credit to a person as obnoxious as Charlie. As Charlie was.” Then her voice cra
cked. “He made my life miserable. Intolerable. But he was all I had. Can you understand that?”

  “Sure.” I tried to look reassuring.

  “Bill, I want you to be the instrument of my revenge.”

  “Revenge? Wait a minute now, Mrs. Cord.”

  “He was mine and I was his.”

  “But apparently it was simply an accident.”

  “Accident? Maybe. He was shot twice.” She paused as if to challenge me to contradict her. Then she said, “I’ve talked to my father. The company will voucher your expenses. There’s a plane to Denver at half-past eleven.” She stood up. “Find out how he was killed. And why. And who did it.”

  On the plane I reviewed what she’d told me about the death of Charlie Cord, what I’d already known, and what I’d learned from two brief phone calls to Colorado.

  Six days ago Charlie had flown to Denver with his hunting gear, picked up a rental car at Stapleton Airport, and driven into the Rockies to a half-abandoned mining town called Quartz City. In Wild West days it had been a boom town; now it was a center for tourists and hunters.

  Charlie had spent the night in a motel and in the morning by prearrangement he’d been picked up by a professional guide employed by Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd., a commercial hunting outfit. Charlie and the guide, a man named Sam Mallory, had set out into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive truck with provisions and gear enough for ten days. Four days later Mallory returned to Quartz City in the truck with Charlie Cord’s corpse in the back. Charlie had been dead, by then, about 24 hours.

  According to the sheriff’s office, Charlie had been shot twice through the chest by a .30-’06 rifle. Sam Mallory, the guide, professed to know nothing of the event. His deposition, prepared for the pending coroner’s inquest, alleged that Mallory had been in the process of setting up camp on a new site to which they’d moved that morning; while Mallory was pitching the tents, he said, Charlie had taken his .303 rifle and climbed a nearby peak to reconnoiter and perhaps bag something for the supper pot.

  About an hour after Charlie’s departure from camp, Mallory heard two rifle shots on the mountain. He thought little of it at the time, assuming Charlie had shot some game animal; When Charlie didn’t return within two hours, Mallory assumed Charlie had wounded the animal and gone after it, as any hunter must.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon — six or seven hours after he’d heard the shots — that Mallory became alarmed. After all, he supposed, Mr. Cord was an experienced hunter and had a compass and canteen with him; there was no reason for concern earlier.

  Mallory went up the mountain but darkness fell before he found anything. Through the night he kept the campfire banked high to give Charlie a homing beacon, but Charlie didn’t return and at dawn Mallory was back on the mountain tracking Charlie’s boot prints; and at about 8:30 in the morning Mallory found him lying where he’d been shot. Mallory had backpacked the body down to the truck and driven straight to the sheriff.

  The sheriff was a towering thin man with weathered blue outdoor eyes and a thatch of black hair; he went by the name of Bob Wilkerson. He poured me a cup of strong coffee to take the chill out of the autumn afternoon.

  “Afraid I never met your friend while he was alive. They tell me he was — well, kind of loud.” He smiled to take the edge off it.

  The coffee was old but hot. “Have you found the rifle that shot him?”

  “No. It was an ’ought-six, of course. We recovered both slugs from the body.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Unusual? No. Why?”

  I said, “A powerful rifle like that, wouldn’t it tend to punch straight through a man and keep right on going? Or were they hollowpoints that explode on contact?”

  He watched me gravely, then something like suspicion entered his face. “No, they weren’t hollowpoints. Jacketed slugs — military style. They didn’t expand hardly at all. But they were half spent by the time they hit him. That’s why they didn’t go on through.”

  “In other words he was shot from a considerable distance.”

  “Mr. Stoddard, you don’t rightly believe a hunter could mistake a man for a buck deer at close range, do you?”

  “Is that how it happened, then, Sheriff?”

  “That’s what it looked like to me. He was shot from a range of four hundred yards or better and it was an uphill trajectory. Fighting gravity and all, those slugs weren’t going too fast when they hit him.”

  “Both bullets hit him in the chest?”

  “Not more than three inches apart. One of them penetrated his heart.”

  “That’s extraordinary shooting, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Or lucky shooting.”

  “Two shots within three inches of each other at four hundred yards, uphill?”

  Wilkerson’s shoulders stirred as if to dismiss it. “Let me lay it out for you, Mr. Stoddard. I just got back here an hour ago myself — spent the day up on that mountain with Sam Mallory. I expect you’ll want to talk to him?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Surely. Anyhow, we went over the ground up there again. It’s pret’ near up to timberline, that area. Scrub trees, a lot of rocks, talus slopes, bare ground in patches here and there. You can pick up a track if you know what to look for but it ain’t easy.”

  “And you found the killer’s tracks?”

  “Yes, sir.” He refilled my cup and set the electric coffee pot back on the window sill. With his gangly frame and sharp Adam’s apple he looked boyish, but he had to be at least 40. He went on, “The way Sam and I pieced it together, there was some fellow lower down over on the opposite slope, facing the mountain that your friend climbed over. This fellow, whoever he was — well, you’ve got to figure if he’s up there with an ’ought-six rifle, then he’s doing the same thing there that Mr. Cord’s doing. Hunting. So this hunter looks across and sees Mr. Cord moving through the scrub oaks up there and he thinks it’s got to be a deer or maybe an elk or an antelope or a bighorn sheep. Whatever he figures, he takes aim and he lets go two shots.”

  “What was Charlie wearing?”

  “Buff-colored hunting coat. Bright red cap. We’ve got to assume the hunter didn’t see the cap.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “After he fires the two shots, the fellow goes down one mountain and up the other to find out what he shot and whether it’s dead.”

  “You managed to follow his tracks, then?”

  “Yes, sir, we saw where he’d come across the canyon there. We saw where he came up to look at Mr. Cord’s body. He sat himself down a while there. Probably shocked to realize he’d killed a man.”

  “And then the hunter just walked away?”

  “Right back the way he came. We tracked him back to the point where he’d done the shooting from. Used a forked tree for a rifle rest. We found that.”

  “Where did the tracks go from there?”

  “Into a shale slope. Nothing but loose rocks. Acres of them. No way to track the man through there.” Wilkerson poured his own coffee, lifted it to blow on it, and watched me over the rim of the cup. “The way I size it up, Mr. Stoddard, this hunter discovered he’d killed a human being by mistake and he sat there all gloomy-like, trying to think. And after a while I expect he must have said to himself, ‘Now this here poor man is dead and that’s my own stupid fault for sure, but there ain’t a thing I can do for him now. If I was to take this body down and admit I was the one that shot him, why the sheriff just naturally he’d put me in jail and I’d go on trial for manslaughter or some damn thing and I could spend the next five years of my life in prison on account of this stupid accident.’”

  Wilkerson put his cup down. “You see how it could have been.”

  “Yes.”

  “But this Mr. Cord was a valuable man to the big company you work for. I guess they want more evidence than my guesswork. So they’ve sent you up here to look around.”

  “I don’t want to step on your toes,” I said.
“I’ve got no official authority. But Charlie’s widow and his father-in-law and the company I work for — yes, they’d like as many answers as we can find.”

  “I’m happy to help out however I can. But I doubt we’ll find much. It ain’t the first time we’ve had this kind of accident with hunters in these mountains and I expect it won’t be the last.”

  “Does it happen often?”

  “Sometimes five, six men get injured or killed up there in a single hunting season. We get crowded with hunters up there, you know. Some of them are city people that don’t know half as much as they think they know. Just last year we had three Milwaukee men in a party up in those canyons back of Goat Peak, all three of them were found dead at the end of the season. Two of them had been shot with each other’s rifles and the third one got shot by some ’ought-six. Wasn’t much my office here could do about it except file the reports and notify the next of kin. As long as the law allows men to go banging around mountains without so much as a hunting license test to find out if they can recognize the difference between a human being and a cow, you’re going to have accidents.”

  When I left Wilkerson’s office I drove the rent-a-car around to the buildings that housed Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd. They were weathered barns and sheds; there was a corral with a few horses and a mule. A terse old man in the tackroom told me Sam Mallory had left for the day. The place smelled of leather and manure. The old man gestured with a spade-bit bridle when he directed me to Mallory’s house.

  I felt as though I were going uselessly through the motions. But I owed it, I supposed, to that sad angry lost woman who’d come to my office and I owed it to Schiefflin Aerospace. The company had lived up to the moral stereotypes that are honored more often by empty lip service: Schiefflin had recovered me from a psychic gutter, reformed a tattered soul, brought me back to a life that seemed worth something after all.