by Sally Wright
Alan was pulling his keys out of his pants pocket, when Jo laid a hand on his arm, and said, “Look over at the car.”
Butch Morgan was leaning against the passenger fender ten feet away, his arms crossed, his clothes clean, his eyes looking glazed and unfocused.
“Hey! Alan! Saw your car. Thought I’d wait and say hello.”
“Butch.” Alan slipped the keys in his coat pocket as he stepped halfway in front of Jo, then stood with his arms hanging loose at his sides.
“Looks like you’re in big trouble this time. R-e-a-l big trouble. Murder! I told the Sheriff where he oughtta look and he took it right ta heart. Wantta come in the Oaken Bucket and talk about it awhile?” He was yelling, and people were looking at him, and at Alan and Jo, then turning away and hurrying on.
“We have to go rescue the babysitter, and we need you to move away from the car.”
“Why would I make it easy for ya? Ya never helped me! Ya lied to Bob Harrison and made me lose my job! And now, you mother, you sicced the Sheriff onto me!” He was standing a foot away from the car, unsteady on his feet, glaring across at Alan.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You liar!”
“I’ve got no quarrel with you, Butch. Just step away from the car so Jo and I can get in.”
“Make me!”
“I don’t want to make you. We don’t need to do this. Go on in the bar and get something to eat, and we can talk another time.”
“So smooth, aren’t ya? So smart! So in control! You make me wantta puke!” Butch took a few steps toward Alan, then tripped suddenly, and fell, and Alan reached down to help him up, which seemed to make Butch even madder. He screamed, “Get away from me you son of a bitch! You’re gonna regret this, ya hear me! I ain’t gonna let this lie!” He grabbed hold of a parking meter and pulled himself up while folks on both sides of the street watched, then glanced away.
Butch straightened up and started down the sidewalk toward the Oaken Bucket, as Alan put his arm around Jo.
They stepped off the curb, and crossed the road, and climbed into their car, not saying a word—Jo feeling sick to her stomach, Alan keeping his eyes fastened right on Butch.
Sunday, April 19th, 1964
Sunday afternoon, having called Saturday and made arrangements, Earl drove over to Esther Wilkes’ house in Frog Town to talk to her and her twin brother, Charlie Napoleon Smalls. Earl had had to time the visit between their morning church service, and the evening one they went to, and he got there right at three.
The house was perched on the top of a low hill, and he climbed up the steep front yard and knocked on the screen door of the small white clapboard house, and saw Esther walking toward him across the front room. She pushed the screen open as he said, “Afternoon, ma’am. I appreciate ya makin’ time.”
“No trouble at all, Sheriff. There’s a cool breeze on the porch there, if you’d like to make yourself ta home. I’ll bring us somethin’ to drink.”
Earl waited there by the door till she’d come back carrying a tray of lemonade and cookies, then held it open and moved a geranium off a barn siding table so she could set the tray between the chairs.
“Charlie hasn’t been to the house in a month or so, and he’s out back lookin’ at the vegetable patch, but he’ll be here directly.”
He walked through from the house right then, not wearing the Clairborne Farm uniform that always looked to be part of him, but his Sunday suit with a starched white shirt, though he took the jacket off and laid it on a chair at the other end of the porch.
Earl and Charlie had met before when a hot walker had stolen a whole lot of Claiborne’s tack, and they nodded to each other, and smiled kind of neutrally, as they both sat down on rush-seated chairs and took the glasses of lemonade Esther handed round.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Esther said, “You’re welcome, Sheriff,” as she sat and smoothed her dress. “I surely do want to cooperate, in every way I can, but I don’t understand why ya’d want to see me again, or Charlie either one. I told you everythin’ I know about Mr. Seeger just the other mornin’.”
“It’s ’cause of somethin’ I found that he wrote. According to that, he knew about the key in the garage, and he—”
“And he let it go and never said nothin’ to me? That’s real hard to believe!”
“He was sayin’ he figured Mr. Alan Munro had him a key ’cause he had a way of knowin’ about the one in the coffee can Miz Seeger left for you.”
Esther was wearing a black linen dress with a wide white lace collar, and she folded her arms across the hand-sewn tucks decorating the bodice, her eyes looking mildly put out, before she glanced away. “Sheriff, I don’t know Mr. Munro, and I never told nobody ’bout that key.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Not even your brother Charlie here?”
“You did, Essie.” Charlie was thin and strong looking, and no taller than Esther, his wide black face unlined, though there were strands of silver in his short cropped hair.
“When!” Esther stared, and shifted in her chair, before she picked up her glass.
“’Member?” Charlie was nodding at Esther, a sugar cookie in one strong hand, a tall glass filled with lemonade and crushed mint in the other.
“No, I don’t.”
“It was the day before Thanksgivin’. You and me we went and got the turkey from that ol’ gentleman down by Harrodsburg, and we brought it here and was pluckin’ it together, here in the backyard, and we got to talkin’ about when we was kids, and that old German fella who owned the peach trees down the road. How he was always accusin’ every little child of stealin’ his peaches, and how him being so hard and mean and suspicious and all, made us all want to snitch some, even though we didn’t ’cause Mama wouldda skinned us.”
“I remember him, sure.” Esther was sweeping sugar cookie crumbs off her bust, looking down the road toward a dun-colored Chevy pickup stirring up a trail of dust like a plume of smoke behind him.
“Well, ya told me he made you think of Mr. Seeger. The way he acted suspicious all the time, and like he spied on your every move, and that if he knew ’bout the key Miz Seeger left you in the garage he wouldda had a fit.”
Earl asked Esther if that brought it to mind, and she said, “Maybe. Kinda vague and all. If I was gonna say it, I’d say it to Charlie, and if he remembers it that way, I reckon it’s the way it was. He’s always had a real good memory. He recollects all the family stories and passes ’em along.”
Charlie said, “Is this real important, Sheriff?”
“Could be. I don’t rightly know. But I gotta follow every lead as far as it can go.”
“So you want to know right now did I tell anyone else about Esther’s key?”
“I do. That’s it in a nutshell.”
“I’m ’fraid I did. And I ask ya to forgive me, Essie.”
“How could you! You never in your life blurted out something private, even as a little child! Even when Burt held your wrist in the candle.”
Earl finished the last of his lemonade, and moved the ice in his mouth to one side so he could talk around it, and asked Charlie who he’d told.
“You know Mr. Mercer Tate?”
“I do. Mostly by reputation.”
“Well, the young man who’s his stallion manager I’ve known for a good long while, and when I took one of the Claiborne mares over to him to get bred, we done the job, and got the mare in the van with a net full a real nice hay, and then we got us a Coke.”
“And?” Earl picked up another cookie, his eyes fixed on Charlie.
“We talked about this and that for awhile, and how he’s good friends with Jo Grant, who married Mr. Munro. I don’t recall just how it come up, but he said his wife heard Jo and Alan talkin’ one night, and Buddy said Carl Seeger tried to steal a formula for somethin’ that Mr. Munro had come up with, and that’s why he got fired.” Charlie looked at Esther and waited for a minute, his hands on his kne
es, his feet planted straight and solid right underneath them.
Esther said, “Go on. I gotta hear it all. I don’t know what got into you.”
“I reckon it was knowin’ all these years how cold he treated you, and Miz Seeger too, and then hearing about him being a thief, it kinda got my goat. Him not wantin’ you to have a key, was like him sayin’ he figured you’d steal, when you’d rather cut your hand off. And to find out he was a thief, I reckon I just—”
“Well? What’d you go and say?” Esther’s eyes were hot, and her mouth looked like she’d bit something sour.
“I said it made me feel some better to know that if Mr. Seeger had any idee Miz Seeger’d put a key in his garage for you, he’d be fit to be tied, him being so suspicious and all.”
Earl looked up from his notepad and stared hard at Charlie. “Did you mention the coffee can?”
“Don’t think so. Can’t swear to it. This was back in the fall. Buddy and I, we laughed some. And I took my mare on home.”
“Miz Wilkes? You got anythin’ to add?”
“I do not. ’Cept I cain’t believe Mr. Seeger knew about the key and never took me to task. That don’t make no sense. And I cain’t believe my own brother, who’s generally real quiet, and sensible, and never gets to meddlin’, would say that to Buddy Jones!”
Charlie nodded solemnly, and then picked up a sugar cookie, as Earl said, “We may need a formal statement later from y’all, but my notes is fine for now. I appreciate the cookies and lemonade. You’re a fine baker, Miz Wilkes, and I thank you very kindly.”
CHAPTER NINE
Monday, April 20th, 1964
Buddy could’ve had one of the grooms who worked for him lead Arctic Ghost out of the breeding barn, the sixteen-and-a-half-hand twelve-year-old gray stallion, who bred better than he’d run. But Buddy liked him specially, and he was leading good the way he always did for Buddy, swinging his head some, but stepping careful, and Buddy brought him into the stallion barn and took the lead rope off him in his stall, and had just checked his water buckets, once he’d locked his door—when the phone rang in the tack room.
It was Becky, his wife, telling him the Sheriff had called, and wanted to see him at home on his lunch hour, and she’d told him he’d likely be home at one. Buddy asked her what he wanted, and she said she didn’t know. “I didn’t like to ask, with him bein’ the Sheriff and all.”
Buddy spent the next four hours shuffling that question around in his head, while he oversaw the scheduled breedings—handling his grooms, and the client’s people, making the three owners who wanted to watch their mares get bred feel like he was being hospitable, while he made sure everything was done for their safety, for the mares’ and the stallions’, and the folks handling both.
It was Frankie D’Amato flickering through his mind that made Buddy feel halfway sick. Making him wonder if Frankie’d been messing around behind his back again, trashing his good name and shedding blame on him for something he couldn’t imagine.
Word had it Frankie’d gone and broke a good stud’s leg deliberate with a sledge hammer or something like it, to get a cut of the insurance money from the owner, who was naturally thought to be in it too. It hadn’t been proved, but it was being looked into. And him knowing the lengths Frankie’d gone to before was enough to make Buddy feel real uneasy. And waiting made it worse.
At five to one, Buddy was in his truck, past Mr. Mercer’s big-pillared house, turning left out the long shady drive onto Route 1685. He turned left again onto the Old Frankfort Road, driving beside moss-covered stone walls, then right between two tall stone pillars into a dark-dappled open-work woods.
He passed the old stone pioneer house that had been in Mercer Tate’s family since the Revolution (that he rented now to distant cousins), curving his way to the left beyond it, then out of the woods and across the pasture where the breeding sheep grazed—black faced, and easy to startle, skinned looking too, having just gotten sheared.
The sheriff’s car was in front of Buddy’s house, the small stone-and-cedar farmhouse that came with his job for Mr. Tate. It was the sweetest little house he’d ever hoped to live in—a story-and-a-half peaked-roof cottage with a one-story room built off both sides. If he got him a job with a trainer the way he wanted, leaving that house would be real hard. Not half so hard as leaving Mr. Tate. That gnawed at his insides right then, soon as it come to mind.
But then Buddy slammed the door to his truck and took the front steps in one leap, his flat-heeled boots sounding hard on the flagstone stoop. He pulled off his wide straw hat as he walked through the door into the center hall, and saw Earl Peabody at the dining-room table through the living room on his left. Earl was facing Becky, with a twin on either side, sitting in their high chairs in yellow dresses, cookies clutched in greasy-looking hands.
Earl said, “You got you a fine family here, Buddy. They’re eatin’ real good for not being two.”
Buddy nodded and said, “Thanks, Sheriff,” as Becky got up and fetched him his plate from the kitchen.
“There’s cold chicken and coleslaw, and I got more cornbread too, if ya want. The sheriff ate before he come. I’m puttin’ the girls down for their nap, so y’all can talk in here. Would you like some more iced tea, Sheriff?”
“Thank you, but I’m doin’ fine.”
Becky pulled the twins out of their chairs and herded them toward the stairway, with a detour or two from both of them before their hard-soled baby shoes could be heard hitting the stairs with pauses between each one.
Buddy said, “What can I do for you, Sheriff?” feeling his heart pounding in his ears, and his throat closing up on his chicken.
“You heard Carl Seeger died?”
“Read about it in the paper.”
“I can’t go into a lotta detail, but I talked to Charlie Smalls, and he told me he mentioned to you when you was shootin’ the breeze in the fall that his sister had her a key to Carl’s house put away in his garage. Miz Seeger’d put it there for Esther, and left it alone when she moved.”
“I can’t say I recall.” All six–foot-three of Buddy looked hunched and squeezed into the metal dinette chair that he’d kept pushed a foot or so out from the table. He leaned over his plate, holding a fried chicken breast in his hands, pulling meat off with his teeth, his eyes looking sideways at Earl.
“Charlie said it was when you two was talkin’ about how Seeger had got himself fired for stealin’ a formula from Equine.”
“I ’member tellin’ him that.”
“Charlie said something like, ‘Then there was justice in Esther havin’ a key when Carl wouldda been real upset. He treated her like she’d be one to steal, when he was a thief himself.’”
“Okay. Yeah, I guess that’s about right.” Buddy could feel the heat in his skin starting to die down, and he took a big breath and let it out, because Frankie D’Amato hadn’t entered in.
“Did you tell anybody about that key? Anybody at all?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know, but did ya?”
“I don’t recall.” Buddy had finished his chicken breast and was holding his hot buttered cornbread in one hand, staring at the kitchen wall. “I didn’t give it much thought, and I can’t see why I’d tell anybody. Gossipin’ when you’re in the horse business can not only get ya fired, it can hurt a lotta folks.”
“Did ya tell Becky?”
Buddy raised his voice and said, “Honey, could you come here a minute?” He wiped crumbs off his mouth with a paper napkin and swallowed half his iced tea.
They could hear Becky skipping down the stairs, and then she was in the living room, standing in the middle of the floor, six feet from the dining room doorway, a rag doll in her hand. “Buddy?”
“Did I tell you about a key bein’ in that guy Carl Seeger’s garage?”
“Yeah. You did. Last fall, I think.”
Earl asked Becky if she’d told anybody else.
“No, I never did.”
“Buddy?” Earl asked again, holding his glass in both hands.
“Nope.”
Becky said, “I thought I heard you say somethin’ to Jo.”
“Me? When?”
“Few weeks ago. She was telling you ’bout Carl getting the IRS guy to come pester them after he finished with Mr. Harrison.” Becky was short and thin, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, a blue-and-white checked shirt tucked into her denim skirt, her blue eyes looking nervous. “I thought you said somethin’ like ‘If ya ever want to leave a dead rat in his kitchen, there’s a key in his garage.’ You were just kiddin’. I mean you were just—”
“Me?” Buddy’s hand had frozen with a forkful of coleslaw halfway to his mouth.
“You were pickin’ me up at Jo’s after I’d watched Ross, when Mama had the twins, and you’d been helpin’ Toss out at the barn. Sometime this spring. March maybe. Or early April?”
“Okay. Maybe. Somethin’ like that.”
“You both sure of that?” Earl was holding his notebook, his ballpoint pen poised above the paper, his black-framed glasses sliding down his large nose, his eyes studying theirs.
Becky said, “That’s the way I remember it.”
“I guess, yeah. You’re making it sound important, Sheriff.” Buddy was beginning to look worried, like a minefield might be opening up right underneath his feet.
“Don’t know that it is, but it could be. Ya mention it to anyone else?”
Buddy said, “Not that I can think of. I wouldn’t a said a word about a key to some folk’s house unless I thought whoever I was talkin’ to could be trusted not to break in. Jo and Alan? They’d never do somethin’ like that. Never in a million years.”
“Did ya know Seeger, did ya?”
“Nope. Never met him.”
“You know anything else about him, maybe something from Esther, or the Munros?”
“Just that he was real hard on Esther, and what he did with the formula at Equine made me think of him as a no account. The IRS business too.”
