The Prairie Chicken Kill

by Bill Crider

  Nobody ever said I was perfect.

  If Peavy had been listening to my conversation with York, he didn't let on.

  "York break down and confess?" he asked when I walked back into his office.

  "No. He says it's all a frame. He says the shotgun was planted. He also says that he wasn't speeding when Denbow stopped him."

  "Now why would he say a thing like that? It's his word against a law officer's, and you know who a judge and jury is going to believe."

  "When I talked to you last night, you seemed pretty sure you'd find something in York's house. What was it that gave you that idea?"

  "I've got a sense for these things," Peavy said. "I've been a lawman for a long time."

  If I hadn't known better, I might have thought there was an undertone of irony in his voice. But I knew better.

  I also knew that I wasn't going to get anything else out of Peavy, but I gave it a try.

  "What about Denbow? I'd like to talk to him about this."

  Peavy's chair squeaked. It was a sound that was beginning to annoy me for some reason.

  "You don't have any business here, Smith," Peavy said. "I've told you that before, and I don't want you messing around here anymore. You'd better just go on back where you came from. Either that, or you might get stopped for speeding."

  That undertone of almost-irony again.

  "I'm just here visiting with Red Lindeman," I said. "That's all."

  "It'd better be," Peavy said.

  Twenty-five

  When I got back to the Island, I fed Nameless and called Lance. Then I called Dino.

  "What now?" he asked. "You want some more information, or are you just homesick."

  "I'm not homesick," I said. "I'm home."

  I was sitting in my broken recliner, listening to the Shirelles on CD. They were singing about a boy they'd met on Sunday and missed on Monday.

  "You wrapped that up pretty quick," he said.

  "It's not wrapped up yet," I said. "I have to talk to Lance first. There are a couple more things I have to find out before I can say it’s finished."

  "Lance is back here on the Island?"

  "Yeah. I just called him."

  "You called him first?"

  "Jealousy is such an ugly emotion," I said.

  "It sure is. How's my cat?"

  "You can't get to me that way. Nameless was overjoyed to see me."

  "I bet he was."

  "Wagged his tail like a dog. Wiggled all over."

  "You got a Polaroid of that? I'd like to see it."

  "Maybe I exaggerated. I get a little giddy when I figure something out. You want to ride out to Lance's with me?"

  He didn't hesitate. "Nope."

  "Well, come anyway. You're the one who got me into all this."

  "There's this great infomercial on right now. It's the best one they have, the one about Touchless car wax. I love that little English guy that wears the bow tie."

  "Bow ties turn you on?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "I guess I do," I said. "I guess if some little Englishman in a bow tie means more to you than our lifelong friendship, you really should stay there and watch your show. Besides, if you watch it, you won't have to leave the house."

  "You really are a wiseass, you know that?"

  "You might be surprised at how often I've heard that lately."

  "Not likely. But what the hell. I'll be there in half an hour."

  "I'll be waiting," I said.

  It was, in the words of one of my favorite philosophers, deja vu all over again. I was sitting in the same lawn chair, reading the same book, when Dino drove up in his '81 Pontiac. The only difference was that the Pontiac was much cleaner.

  "You waxed the car," I said when Dino got out.

  "Yeah. I bought some stuff I saw on TV. Not Touchless, though. Looks good, right?"

  "Like new."

  He glanced at Tobacco Road. "That's a pretty short book. I thought you'd be finished by now."

  "I've been busy."

  While we were talking, Nameless came out of the oleanders. He saw Dino and walked over, arching his back and rubbing against Dino's leg.

  "See what I mean?" Dino said.

  "He thinks you're here to feed him," I said. "He just ate, though."

  "I guess I won't feed him then."

  Nameless said, "Mowrr" and walked over to me. He rubbed against my leg and looked up at me.

  "Fickle," Dino said. "That's what he is. He likes that cat food better than he likes anybody."

  I marked my place in the book and stood up. "Are you ready to go see Lance?"

  Dino nodded. He was still looking at Nameless, who was wandering back into the oleanders.

  "Why don't we go in your car," I said. "That's what we did last time."

  Dino shrugged. "Sure. This gonna take long?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Good. They're gonna show that Touchless thing again in a couple of hours. I'd like to see it."

  "No promises," I said.

  "Yeah," he said. "That's what I thought."

  It was nearly sunset when we got to Lance's house, the low light silvering the water in the bay and reddening the sky low in the west. Most of the palm trees were in shadow. Lance's Acura was parked under the overhang. The MR-3 was there, too.

  "You sure you want to do this?" Dino asked before we started up the stairs.

  I'd told him most of the story on the way. "Hey, it's the job. He said he wanted to know who killed his Prairie Chicken, and I'm going to tell him."

  "He's not going to like it."

  "I know that. But I've got you to back me up."

  "Right."

  I rang the doorbell, and in a few seconds Lance opened the door.

  "Good to see you again, Tru," he said. "You, too, Dino. Come on in."

  He had on his Birkenstocks again, and the cotton slacks and sport shirt. Not the same slacks and shirt he'd been wearing on my earlier visit, but the same brand, right down to the polo player on the shirt. He smiled as he led us into the room with the hardwood floors and all the glass.

  "Everybody have a seat," he said.

  Dino sat on the couch, and Lance sat beside him. I took the wooden rocker.

  When we were more or less comfortable, Lance said, "You were in a pretty big hurry to see me, Tru. I guess you've come for your check. I've already got it made out."

  He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a light green check folded in half. He handed it to me, and I stuck it in the pocket of my jeans without looking at it.

  "Too bad about Martin York," Lance said. "I would never have thought he'd kill a sparrow, much less a Prairie Chicken. Not to mention a human being."

  "He didn't kill anybody," I said.

  Lance sat up straight on the couch. "What? Has he been released from jail?"

  "Not yet, but it's just a matter of time. He didn't have anything to do with killing anyone."

  Lance looked as if he didn't believe me. "You're sure about that?"

  "Pretty sure. You want to hear about it?"

  "That's what I paid you for. I gave you the check. You give me a report."

  "That sounds fair," I said.

  I looked out through the windows at the sunset. It was going to be spectacular.

  "I'm going to have to go at the story in a roundabout way," I said.

  Lance didn't look pleased about that. "Why?"

  "Because that's the way it plays out. I went to Picketville to find out who killed your bird, but I finally figured out that the bird was just a part of something else, something that started a few weeks before."

  "And what was that?" Lance asked.

  "The murder of a man named Lloyd Abbott."

  "Am I supposed to know about him?"

  "He's the man who supposedly hanged himself in his jail cell in Picketville."

  "Oh. I think I heard something about that." Lance leaned back on the cushions of the couch. "It was a suicide, though, not murder."
>
  "That's what the sheriff told everyone, but it was murder. And the sheriff knew it all along."

  "You mean that he covered it up? Was he involved?"

  "No," I said. "I thought he was for a while, but he wasn't." I paused. "It was Gar Thornton who killed Abbott."

  "Gar? That big guy who's Ralph's bodyguard?"

  "That's the one."

  Lance looked thoughtful. "You know, I thought all along it was probably Evans. He never did like the idea that I was getting government money to support that Prairie Chicken project."

  "Evans didn't kill the bird," I said. "And he didn't tell Gar to kill Abbott. I think the murder was just an accident. Gar might have meant to scare Abbott, but he didn't mean to kill him."

  "There was something about a fight in a bar," Lance said. "I remember now. Gar might have gone to the jail to finish the job."

  "It wasn't that, either."

  "What was it, then?"

  "I'll tell you," I said. "I should have figured it out when I remembered that Abbott was a divorce lawyer. I found out that Paul Lindeman had hired him, but I thought he'd hired him to investigate some kind of irregularities in the sheriff's office. That's what I was led to believe, anyway. But Paul wasn't stupid. He hired Abbott to do exactly what he advertised that he was good at -- divorce work."

  "What does that have to do with me?" Lance asked.

  "You were having an affair with Paul's wife. With Anne," I said. My throat was tight. I didn't want to say her name, and I had to force the words out.

  Lance smiled, but his smile was as forced as my words had been. "You're kidding."

  "No," I said. "All the signs were there. Her visits to Galveston, the way you hovered around her at her house and at the funeral. Anybody a little less stupid than me would have caught on a lot faster. Besides I talked to Abbott's partner. He told me all about it."

  That was a lie, but Lance wouldn't know it. Fillmore hadn't told me the name of Abbott's client because he didn't have any idea who it was. Abbott was secretive about such things. There was probably a record on Abbott's computer, but Fillmore didn't know the password. I'd called Johnny and arranged a visit to see if we could crack the code.

  I'd talked to Peavy, too, telling him some of what I knew or had guessed. Peavy admitted that he knew Abbott's death wasn't an accident and that he was sure Gar was responsible. He wasn't covering it up, however; he was still trying to prove it. That's why he wanted me out of the way, and it was the same reason he'd wanted Fillmore out of the way earlier.

  "Abbott was a hotdog," I said. "He liked to use covers that called attention to him. The C.I.A. was one of his favorites. The I.R.S. was another. My guess is that when he came to town posing as someone from Internal Revenue, you got pretty scared. You have a shaky investment or two, so you wanted Gar to find out more about him. He did, but he killed him in the process."

  "Hold on," Lance said. "Gar doesn't work for me. He works for Ralph Evans, remember?"

  "That might be what Evans thinks. I don't."

  "That's the silliest thing I ever heard," Lance said.

  "Then maybe you don't want to hear the rest."

  "Oh, hell. Why not. Go ahead."

  "All right. You were worried about the real I.R.S. because of Evans. When Abbott showed up you thought maybe the government objected to Evans' program, and you were the target. Disgrace you, and Evans would be discredited, too. So you wanted to get rid of him. But you didn't. His revenues were falling and the advertisers were dropping away, but he stayed on the air, and he told me he didn't have a thing to worry about. Why? Because he knew about the affair."

  "You're an idiot."

  "No. I asked Evans about it this afternoon. He as much as admitted it. So you wanted to get rid of him even more. How? Blame him for killing the Prairie Chicken, and then claim that anything he said was sour grapes from a man who'd killed an endangered bird. You'd heard about me and the alligator. You figured you could hire me, throw a few hundred clues in my lap, and I'd frame Evans for you."

  "But you didn't."

  "No. The clues weren't evidence. You tried to solidify the frame by having Gar run York's birding friends, the Greers, off the road. They blamed that on Evans, naturally. You even had Gar fly the plane while you strafed me and Red."

  Lance stood up. "Wait a minute. You know better than that. I was in Houston when that happened."

  I rocked back and forth slowly in the wooden chair. The sun was lowering itself behind a cloud bank and the shadows were gathering over the bay.

  "No, you weren't," I said. "I talked to your secretary this afternoon. I have to admit that I used Peavy's name instead of my own. She admitted that you weren't in a meeting when I called about the plane. She'd just been told to say that."

  "But I called you. You remember that."

  "You called, all right. On a cellular phone. You called her first, then me. It took me a while to figure out that the squealing I heard wasn't your desk chair. It was the hangar door at Evans' place."

  "Nobody will ever believe any of this."

  "Peavy will. He was going slow on Gar because he thought Gar worked for Evans, and Evans and Peavy are pals. But Peavy had found that Gar worked for you. From Paul. So Peavy's pretty sure you killed Paul, or had Gar do it. I vote for Gar. You wouldn't have the nerve to do it yourself."

  "But they found the shotgun in York's car!"

  "Where you put it. You were parked beside him at Anne's house, and no one in Picketville locks a car. It would have been easy to stick the shotgun in the back seat. Then you called Denbow and mentioned the gun. He stopped York for speeding to have an excuse to look in the car. You even knew about York's diary, because he'd mentioned it to Anne. Another anonymous call took care of that part of things."

  "But why would I try to frame York? I thought you said I was trying to frame Evans."

  "The Evans frame didn't work, or it didn't work fast enough. I was stupid, but I wasn't that stupid. So you decided to try something else. Any old frame would do, if you could make it fit."

  Lance took a few steps toward my chair. "Red's the one who asked for you. It wasn't my idea."

  "That's another lie. When we were on our way to Evans' land, Red said he hadn't seen Fred Benton in years. They'd never discussed me and the alligator. And Red also told me that you were the one who suggested where we should look for the crop duster. If I'd been thinking straight, I'd have figured things out then. You wanted me because you figured I was still the stupid guy who broke your nose when we were in high school."

  "If any of this is true -- any of it -- why didn't Paul tell you?"

  "Because he knew I was working for you."

  "Fine. So if he kept his mouth shut, why did I have him killed?"

  "I think it was because he'd found out the truth about Gar's work for you. He knew that Gar had killed Abbott, and he knew that the I.R.S. agent pose had you worried. He must have known that Gar used to work shows at the Astro Hall, and you once had a piece of the Astros. You could easily have met Gar, and it wouldn't have been hard for Paul to make the connection. He was looking into it, and he was letting Tony Lopez help out. Lopez was lucky. He wasn't getting anywhere."

  Lance stopped a few feet away from me. "It's not true. None of it's true. There's no proof of any of it."

  "Not unless you count the proof of your affair with Anne. I can talk to your neighbors about that. I imagine it won't be hard to prove that she stayed here rather than at a motel when she visited Galveston. And then there's Gar. He's even more stupid than I was. He's the one who's going to take the fall for you."

  "No, he's not," Gar said, stepping into the room from the hallway.

  Twenty-six

  Gar looked pretty much the same as ever, except that he wasn't wearing his cap. His hair was slicked back, and he had a rubber band around his stubby pony tail.

  His voice was the surprise. It was a sweet tenor that would have sounded great singing lead in a doo-wop group on a street corner in Brooklyn so
mewhere around 1957.

  "I didn't see your truck outside," I said.

  "I don't park here," Gar said.

  "Did you hear everything he said?" Lance asked.

  "Sure. What do you want me to do about it?"

  "That's a problem," Lance said. "If you'd stayed in the other room, it might not have been."

  "He knows too much. He can cause us a lot of trouble. We have to take care of him."

  Dino, who had been listening silently to all of this, stood up and said, "Well, I sure as hell don't know anything. If nobody minds, I'll just get out of here and head for home. There's a TV show I want to watch."

  "I don't think so," Lance said.

  "You might as well let him go," I said. "And me, for that matter. I told Peavy everything. He'll take care of Gar soon enough, and he'll be able to bring you into it by then, too, even if Gar's a stand-up guy."

  Lance didn't seem worried. "Maybe you told Peavy, maybe not. Whatever happens, you won't be around to see it." He nodded in my direction. "Get rid of them, Gar. I don't care how you do it. Feed them to the crabs if you want to."

  "That's not very hospitable," I said as Gar smiled and started toward me. "And I don't think Gar can handle me and Dino both."

  Lance smiled, too, and said, "We'll see, won't we?"

  I stood up, reached under my sweatshirt and pulled out my little Mauser.

  "I thought Gar might be here," I said. "So I came prepared."

  "Guns don't scare Gar," Lance said.

  My turn to smile. "I wasn't planning to shoot Gar. But if he comes any closer, I'm going to shoot you."

  A voice from the hallway said, "You're not going shoot anyone, Tru."

  Anne walked into the room. She looked as beautiful as ever except for the fact that she was holding a 12-gauge automatic shotgun, and she looked as if she knew how to use it. I wondered if it was the gun that had killed Paul or a different one, not that it mattered.

  Seeing her there depressed me as much as anything else that had happened in the last few days. There was no little man inside my chest slugging my heart with a sledgehammer this time, just a feeling like the kind you get when a close friend dies.

  She'd as much as told me that there was nothing left between her and Paul, even while she was telling me that she still loved him, and of course I'd believed what I wanted to believe. That was what hurt.