The Hangings

by Bill Pronzini

  It was in its envelope, and the envelope was addressed to Jeremy Bodeen, care of General Delivery, Marysville. In the upper left-hand corner was a return address: E. Bodeen, Delta Hotel, Stockton. I pinched the letter out and opened it. Single page of notepaper, dated three weeks ago yesterday, the words on it written in a bold, untidy hand. It said:

  Dear Brother,

  I am now in Stockton and trust you are still in Marysville, as you said you would be stopping there until the thirty-first of the month.

  I am onto something here which I believe will pay big money, and I mean BIG. I am not exaggerating. There is more than enough for both of us, if you are interested in giving up the nomad life for the lap of luxury.

  Write to me at the Delta Hotel, downtown, and let me know if you will be coming here and when.

  Emmett

  Boze had been reading over my shoulder. He said, "Sounds kind of mysterious, don't it?"

  "Not necessarily," I said, but it did.

  "Well, at least we know the dead man's name. Jeremy Bodeen."

  "So it would seem."

  I asked Morton if he would board the roan at city expense; he said he would. Then Boze and I took the carpetbag over to Obe Spencer's to put with the rest of the hanged man's belongings. I would have liked Boze to join me in asking around about this Jeremy Bodeen, if that was his name, but a pair of grain barges were due upstream from San Francisco at eleven, for unloading and return, and Boze was expected at Far West Milling to help with the work. His job at Far West paid more than his position as deputy constable, and he had a wife and two kids to support. So I let him go. I could make inquiries on my own, once I was finished with a couple of things that needed doing first.

  There were none of those newfangled telephones in Tule Bend yet, though there probably would be before much longer. Mayor Gladstone was talking of having poles and wires strung in and telephones installed in the city offices. When that finally happened, Ivy would be the first private citizen in line for one of the things. Then she wouldn't have to leave the house to do her tongue-wagging.

  Until Mr. Bell's invention arrived, our main line of communication with the rest of the world would continue to be Western Union. So I walked on down to their office and composed a wire to Emmett Bodeen, care of the Delta Hotel in Stockton:

  REGRET TO INFORM YOU MAN FOUND DEAD HERE TODAY UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES MAY BE YOUR BROTHER JEREMY STOP POSITIVE IDENTIFICATION NECESSARY STOP PLEASE CONTACT UNDERSIGNED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

  LINCOLN EVANS

  TOWN CONSTABLE

  TULE BEND

  I gave the yellow sheet of paper to the day telegrapher, Elmer Davies. "Send it right away, will you, Elmer. And if there's a reply, let me know as soon as it comes in."

  "Will do, Linc."

  I probably should have sent a second wire, to the county sheriff's office in Santa Rosa, informing Joe Perkins of what had happened here this morning. But I didn't do it. Perkins was next to useless as a law-enforcement officer. Just a fat-bottomed political hack who came through Tule Bend once or twice a month to look things over and to stuff himself on pig's knuckles and sauerkraut at the Germany Cafe. Nothing would get done if I turned the investigation over to him. As a matter of fact, he would stir folks up even more with his ham-fisted ways—turn the hanging into a circus sideshow.

  I made my way to the Odd Fellows Hall on First, a block from the Basin. It was a two-story building, the lower half of which housed the city offices. The old joke about the town officials being pretty odd fellows in their own right was wearing thin—perhaps thin enough to shame people into voting the necessary funds for a new city hall next election. I sure as hell hoped so.

  The constable's office and jail were at the rear. You could get there by going in through the front, but that way you had to pass the town clerk's office, the mayor's office, and the council chambers. I always entered by way of the alley at the rear—the way the council had decreed prisoners were to be taken in and out, so as not to offend the more sensitive among our citizens. Not that there were ever many prisoners to offend anybody; a few Saturday night drunks and an occasional sneak thief or vandal was about all. But Verne Gladstone, who had been mayor for the past twelve years, was hell on appearances. Which was also a local joke, considering that Verne weighed three hundred pounds—he was his own best customer at the Gladstone Brewery—and had a knack for wearing expensive suits in a way that they looked like a ragpicker's hand-me-downs.

  I made sure the mayor was nowhere to be seen before I went around and down the alley to my office. He was a windy old coot, and once he got his conversational hooks into you, you were hard-pressed to wriggle free. This hanging business would sharpen his tongue and make him even more loquacious than usual.

  There was a file of wanted circulars in my desk; I got it out and leafed through them. I had no particular reason for thinking that Jeremy Bodeen might be wanted, but I was bothered by the curious way he had died and the wording of that letter from his brother. But if he was wanted anywhere, neither his face nor his name was among the circulars I had collected. I didn't have a flyer on an Emmett Bodeen, either.

  That done, I headed back down to the creekbank behind Sam McCullough's saddlery. There were still some folks out gawking and poking around—kids, mostly. None of them had anything to tell me about the dead man. I moved upstream, following the bank to where it bellied in to form the western rim of the basin. The creek was nearly a hundred yards wide there. The town wharf jutted out midway along, on this side, and there were also docks for Far West Milling, Beecher's Lumberyard, and one of three big storage warehouses, Creekside Drayage. The other two warehouses were on the east bank. The east side was the poorer section of town. The S.F. & N.P. tracks and depot were over there; so was what Ivy and others called Shanty town, where railroad workers and rivermen lived with their families and there were several working-class saloons and lodging houses.

  The grain barges were in at the Far West dock and I saw Boze working on them with some other men. No point in my asking questions there. I went ahead to Creekside Drayage and talked to half a dozen men and did not find out a thing. I was of a mind, then, to make inquiries on the east side. But it was quite a while before I got to do that. A great big gust of wind stopped me when I got to the Basin Drawbridge.

  The wind's name was Verne Gladstone, and as I had feared, he was all set to blow up a storm.

  *****

  Over supper that night, Ivy asked, "Haven't you a clue to what that man was doing there, Lincoln? Not even a clue?"

  "No," I said. "Nobody seems to have seen him around town. Or anywhere else, for that matter."

  "Well then, he couldn't have taken his own life."

  "Why not?"

  "Pshaw. A man doesn't ride into a strange town, a place where he doesn't know a soul, and hang himself on the creekbank."

  She had a point and I admitted it.' 'But on the other hand,'' I said, "a man doesn't ride into a strange town where he doesn't know a soul and get himself hung by somebody else, either. Shot or knifed, possibly, if he had money or valuables worth stealing. But not hanged."

  "Mightn't he have had money or valuables? You said you didn't find a wallet or purse."

  "He might have, yes. But then why was he wearing shabby cloths and riding an old swaybacked horse?"

  "It hardly makes sense any other way."

  "Maybe it will when I hear from Emmett Bodeen."

  "Why haven't you heard? My land, you sent that wire this morning ..."

  "Ivy," I said with more patience than I felt, because these were the same sort of questions Mayor Gladstone had bombarded me with earlier, "Emmett Bodeen may be working long hours at his job, or he may have left Stockton on business, or he may have left Stockton for good. How the devil do I know, one way or another?"

  Her mouth and nose got pinched up together in the middle of her face, as usually happens when she is annoyed or offended or outraged (or all three at once). It makes her look like one of the w
itches in Macbeth. "I'll thank you not to curse at the dinner table, Lincoln," she said in her school-marmish voice.

  "Devil isn't a curse word."

  "It is as far as I am concerned."

  "Ivy . . ."

  "Eat your stew, if you please."

  I sighed and went on eating my stew. It was good stew; tasty cooking is one of Ivy's virtues. One of the few. She is my sister and I love her, but living with her can be a godawful chore sometimes. I don't know why I don't move out, take a room at the Union Hotel or one of the lodging houses-except that this is as much my home as it is hers. No room I could rent would be half as comfortable.

  Still, the prospect of spending the rest of my life under this roof with Ivy is not one I care to dwell on. If I don't move out sooner or later, that is what will happen. Ivy surely isn't going to leave. She has lived here all her life, except for the time ten years ago when she married Herman Edwards and moved to San Francisco to set up housekeeping with him. The marriage lasted three and a half months. When she came back she told everyone poor Herman had died of the grippe; but I found out later that he was not only alive and kicking but still selling drug sundries for his livelihood, and that he had been the one to have the marriage annulled.

  Ivy wasn't bad looking when she dressed properly and smiled rather than scowled down her pinched nose, and she had had a couple of other suitors in the past ten years. But they had all gone away before long. She was not interested in men; she was interested in gossip and giving orders and finding fault with people and being offended by some of the most natural and inoffensive things you can imagine. She was an old maid at heart, with an outlook on life that would have stood her in good stead with John Calvin and the other Puritans. It was a hell of a thing for a brother to think, but I had always suspected poor Herman Edwards had the marriage annulled out of sheer frustration, because he had been unable to convince Ivy to consummate their union.

  We finished dinner in silence, which was fine with me. I helped Ivy clear the table. She asked me if I wanted to have coffee in the parlor and I said no. Instead I went and got one of my pipes and my tobacco pouch—Ivy doesn't allow smoking in the house—and put them into the pocket of my sheepskin coat. I was shrugging into the coat when Ivy came into the front hall.

  "Lincoln, where are you going?"

  "Out to make my rounds."

  "No, you're not," she said. "You're off to see that woman again."

  "Ivy, don't start on me."

  "Well, you are. Why don't you admit it?"

  "What I do is my business."

  "Not when it comes home to roost with me. Don't you think the whole town knows? Don't you think people are talking? Why, just yesterday, Melissa Conroy—"

  "Melissa Conroy is a gossipy old biddy."

  "Lincoln!"

  And so are you, I thought, but I didn't say it. "Tell her to tend to her own damn knitting."

  "Watch your language! Why do you always have to curse in front of me?"

  I buttoned my coat and went to the door.

  "You know what kind of woman she is. You know it, Lincoln Evans. Why do you persist in seeing her? Can't you control your carnal appetites? Can't you understand how humiliated I feel when people tell me they've seen you sneaking up the hill to her house . . ."

  I walked out and put the door between me and Ivy, between me and her nasty wagging tongue.

  Chapter 3

  THE NIGHT WAS COLD AND CLEAR, WITH THAT BITE IN THE air that meant frost again toward morning. I packed and lit my pipe and walked on down to Main, where the street lamps put a yellow-white shine on the darkness. It was late enough so that all the stores were shut, but too early for the barflies to start filtering into the clutch of saloons on north Main. Not that there were all that many barflies in Tule Bend or much in the way of drink-related problems for me to contend with during the week. Saturday nights got rowdy now and then, particularly up at Swede's Beer Hall or over in one of the east-bank "drinking hells," as they were known locally. Otherwise, things were quiet and there was not much use in my making the rounds after dark. Saturday was the only night I had gone out on a regular patrol until Hannah Dalton moved back to Tule Bend six months ago.

  I strolled down Main, smoking, savoring the night. In most ways this was a good town to live in. Busy, sure—there were quite a lot of goods shipped in and out of here, both by rail and on the creek—but not too busy and not growing anywhere near as fast as Petaluma was. Small enough for ease and comfort. And close enough to San Francisco so that you could take the train down to Tiburon and the ferry over to the city for an overnight visit whenever you were in the mood for city pleasures, which I was three or four times a year. Good fishing in the creek to the south, good hunting in the nearby Sonoma Mountains. Tule Bend had everything a man could want—a man like me, anyhow.

  More than once I had been approached about running for county sheriff against Joe Perkins, but that would have meant campaigning and speeches, neither of which I was any good at, and if I won the election it would mean moving to Santa Rosa, the county seat. Santa Rosa was a nice town but I did not want to live there; for one thing, the creek ended at Petaluma and Petaluma was sixteen miles south of Santa Rosa. So as much as I wanted to see Joe Perkins voted out of office, I had turned down the invitation each time and I would turn it down again if it was offered.

  Ivy said I had no ambition. Well, she was probably right. I liked Tule Bend, and I liked being town constable, and I liked the simple pleasures life here had to offer. Ambition had ruined more than one man; I was not going to let it ruin me. Besides, I had a suspicion that Ivy wanted me to become county sheriff so I would move out and she could turn the house into a fusty, dusty old maid's museum.

  On my way downstreet I stopped at the Western Union office. Still no reply to my wire to Emmett Bodeen. George Brady, the night telegrapher, said he would run it up to the house if one came in before midnight.

  I wandered down along the creek behind the saddlery and the carpentry shop. Nothing back there tonight except shadows. Downstream a ways, lantern light spilled off one of the big dredger barges and put yellow streaks on the black water. There were half a dozen dredgers working on the creek most months, on account of the heavy silt content backed up by the tides from San Pablo Bay.

  Back on Main, I thought about walking up along Third Street, where Verne Gladstone and some of the other well-off citizens lived, but there did not seem to be much point in it. Hell, there wasn't much point in any of this aimless wandering. Saturday was still the only night I made regular rounds. The other nights I went out like this, it was purely to pay a call on Hannah. So why didn't I just go straight on up to her house? Why did I keep trying to fool myself?

  Well, it was the town, I supposed—the way folks felt about her. A concession to propriety. And yet, as Ivy had said, the whole town knew I was calling on her two or three nights a week; by continuing to see her, wasn't I as good as thumbing my nose at propriety?

  She was a scarlet woman, they said, little better than a whore. Ivy had used both those phrases more than once. And I reckon there was some justification for their scorn, if you did not look any deeper than the raw facts and the vulgar rumors.

  Hannah had been born in Tule Bend, just as Ivy and I had—she was three years my junior—and she had blossomed into a beauty by age seventeen. I had taken notice of her then, just as most other young men in town had. But she hadn't been interested in any of us, and we soon found out why: she had been seeing a traveling man named George Weems, had got herself seduced and pregnant by him, and eventually ran off to marry him.

  Her ma died not long afterward, some said from shame and a broken heart. Later on, word drifted back that Hannah had left the traveling man, abandoned her child, and taken up with a gambler. There were other rumors, too, over the years: She had had another illegitimate child; she had spent a year in prison on a bunco charge; she had opened a house of ill repute in a Nevada gold camp; she had been killed in a gunfight between two
drunken cowboys in southern Idaho. That last one put a stop to the talk for a while. Then her father died, and when his will was read it surprised everyone to learn that he had left Hannah his entire estate—the family house up on the bluff just south of town, several thousand dollars in cash, and all the land he had owned hereabouts. But that surprise wasn't half as great as the one two months later, when Hannah showed up alive and well to claim her inheritance.

  She came back to Tule Bend alone and she had lived in the Dalton house alone for the past six months. She came into town once a week to do her marketing, and nobody would have anything to do with her when she did. That seemed to suit Hannah, though, as if it was just what she'd expected and just what she wanted. Some folks said she was cold, soulless; that her past sins had robbed her of all her human qualities. But that wasn't it at all. Her aloofness was like a wall she had thrown up around herself, that she was hiding behind for her own protection. She had that wall up in my presence, too, most of the time, but every now and then she would peek out from behind it for a few seconds or a few minutes and let me see what she was truly like. And the real Hannah Dalton was nothing at all like her reputation.

  The rumormongers—and Ivy was one of the worst—said other things about her. They said she was entertaining men up there in her house, not just me but others from town and elsewhere. The Whore of Tule Bend, Ivy had called her once, and I had almost slapped her for it. The truth was, the only person Hannah had entertained day or night in the past six months was me. And the only place she had ever entertained me was on her back porch: I had not once set foot inside her house, nor been invited to, nor had I asked to be.