What the Dead Men Say

by Ed Gorman

  But he felt hurt. “Didn’t you have a nice time?”

  Now she shouted above the rain. “Maybe you didn’t notice but they’re starting to laugh at you, too.”

  “Let them,” he said. “I just want to know if you had a good time last night.”

  “I had a great time.”

  “You don’t sound as if you mean that, Liz.”

  There in the rain, them both shouting, both soaked and mud-mired, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and said, “You know something, kid? You really are a kid. A sweet one.”

  The crowd found this even more wonderful entertainment. A few of them even applauded.

  “Will you help me get across the street to the boardwalk?” Liz said.

  He slid his arm in hers. “I’d be proud to.”

  She smiled at him uncertainly. “You haven’t been drinking again today, have you, kid?”

  He smiled back. “Not so far.”

  ***

  They walked across the street, step by inching step. By now James was mud-soaked, too.

  Once, she fell and he had to help her up. Once, he fell and she had to help him up. The crowd loved it.

  “They really make me mad,” James said as they drew near the boardwalk.

  “Why?”

  “Because of how they treat you.”

  She stopped and stared at him through the silver rain. “Kid, I’m a whore. How do you expect them to treat me?”

  “You should have more pride in yourself than that.”

  She squeezed his arm and smiled again.

  Now he smiled. “And stop calling me kid. I’m nearly two years older than you.”

  So they resumed their walk.

  Now it was apparent they were going to make it without further incident, the crowd began to disperse. Their entertainment was over.

  When they finally reached the protection of the overhang, she began to look herself over, shaking her head. “No wonder they was laughin’.”

  “Why?”

  “I ain’t real pretty on the best of days. Lookin’ like this…” She shook her head again. Her hair was formed against her head like the sculpted hair of a statue.

  “Who said you aren’t pretty?”

  She had been scraping mud from her skirts. She stopped and looked up at him. “Kid, I don’t think I can take any more of your chivalry.”

  “But Liz, I’m just trying to be-”

  “I know what you’re trying to be!” she said. She glanced over at two townsmen standing there watching her. Smirking. “Kid, sometimes being nice hurts worse than anything else. Because I’m not used to people being nice to me.”

  And he saw then in her tears and heard in the stricken sound of her voice the pain and dread she tried not to acknowledge.

  “Kid, just go be nice to somebody else, all right?”

  And then she left, her footsteps sharp against the wood of the boardwalk, a muddy little farm girl aging too quickly in the harsh city.

  “Don’t worry, son,” one of the onlookers said. “There’s plenty more back at that house where she came from.”

  James felt as if he wanted to take a swing at the guy, but it was just then that a male voice shouted his name through the rain, and he turned to see, standing in front of the restaurant his uncle Septemus.

  Septemus was waving for James to cross the muddy street again.

  Huddling into his soaked clothes, ready to feel the cold steady rain on his head and back again, James set forth across the swampy street.

  4

  In the night the Mexican prisoner and the white boy had taken a keen dislike to each other. Dodds was in the cell with the Mex kid trying to get him to talk about what had happened.

  “I rolled over, and I fell out of bed,” the Mex kid said. He looked over at the white boy and grinned.

  The white boy had a narrow, feral face. He wore jail denims. He badly needed a shave but wouldn’t accept the razor Dodds had several times tried to give him. He had eyes that were a mirror of all the things that had been done to him by others before he could defend himself, and all the things he wanted to do to people now that he was big and strong and dangerous. Once in a while Dodds felt sorry for kids like this but then he always reminded himself what a luxury such pity was. It had cost more than one lawman his life.

  Dodds wanted the Mex to talk, but there he was intruding on the most sacred pact you found behind bars-no matter how much prisoners might hate each other, they hated a lawman more.

  “I’d like to get this sonofabitch,” Dodds said. “First because he snuck himself a knife into my jail. And second because he committed a felony while in my custody. That’s the kind of thing that can really piss a man off.”

  “I don’t know nothing about it. Nothing.”

  “What happens tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Sure. When he gets another crack at you. Maybe you won’t be so lucky tonight.”

  The white boy sat in the corner of his own cell, glaring first at Dodds then at the Mex kid.

  For the first time, the Mex looked as if he just might believe what Dodds was saying.

  The Mex raised his head and stared over at the white boy. “You s’posed to protect me while I’m in here.”

  “What the hell you think I’m trying to do?”

  The Mex looked at the white boy again. “Let me think it over, okay?”

  “Okay. But I wouldn’t think about it much past sundown.” Dodds grinned over at the white boy. “Not if you want to keep that punk off your back. He managed to stab you through the bars. That means he’s got a good chance of killing you next time whether you’re in separate cells or not.”

  “Sheriff,” the deputy said through the barred door leading to the front office. “You got a visitor.”

  “Thanks,” Dodds said, standing up. “If I ain’t here, you give your statement to Eulo out there, okay?”

  The Mex nodded.

  The white boy grinned. Obviously he figured he had the Mex scared away.

  Dodds hoped the Mex would surprise everybody and turn the white boy in. Assault with intent to commit great bodily injury would land the white boy in prison, where he belonged. All the white boy was doing time for was drunk and disorderly, but you could see that if somebody didn’t stop him, he was the kind of kid who’d kill somebody for sure.

  He started to make an obscene gesture behind Dodds’s back at the sheriff headed for the front door.

  Dodds turned around just in time to see what was about to happen. He grinned at the kid. That was one thing about punks. Mentally they never got much beyond second grade.

  ***

  Dodds had always like Mae Kittredge. To some she was too religious, to others too strange, but she bore her disappointment over her lost child with a gentle dignity that touched Dodds. He remembered how Mae had helped the victims of the factory layoff, going door-to-door every few days to make sure that everyone had sufficient supplies of food and medicine, and sufficient supplies of tenderness for each other. Dodds had always joked to her that she’d make a fine sheriff; she could settle down riled-up husbands faster than any lawman he’d ever seen.

  Now Mae sat in his office, her clothes damp from the rain. Her hands were folded in her lap, her eyes shaded by the bill of her bonnet. The way her lips moved softly, it was easy to tell she was praying.

  Dodds came in and sat across from the desk and said, “Nice to see you, Mae.”

  As he said this, he realized he was going to be seeing a lot of the woman in the coming weeks. Her husband was, after all, implicated in a killing and a bank robbery.

  “Nice to see you, Sheriff,” she replied.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I just wanted to check up on that special deputy. After he left, I got suspicious.”

  “What deputy you talkin’ about Mae?”

  “The one who came out to the house. The one who works for the governor. The one who’s helping you.”

  “My deputy’s
in back, Mae. He didn’t go out to see you.”

  In her somber gray eyes came the realization that she’d been tricked.

  “He asked about Dennis,” she said.

  “What about Dennis?”

  “He wanted to know where he could find him.”

  “He say why?”

  “He said Dennis had witnessed a jewelry robbery and he thought Dennis could testify against the robber.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a trick, wasn’t it?’

  He wanted to keep her calm. No reason to excite her. She’d had enough grief in recent years.

  “I’m sure everything is fine, Mae,” Dodds said, taking his pipe from his drawer. He stuck it between his teeth and inhaled it. He could taste the sweet and satisfying vapors of tobacco burned days ago. “He ask you where he could find Dennis?”

  “He did.”

  “You tell him?”

  “I did.” Pause. “I shouldn’t have, should I?”

  He sucked a little more on his pipe. He tried to remain as composed as possible. The hell of it was he felt a little tic troubling the corner of his eye. He always got it when he got scared and he was scared now. Ryan was a crazy sonofabitch. Just in case he forgot how crazy, all he had to do was read the letter Ryan had written and left in his carpetbag. “Where’d you tell him he’d find Dennis, Mae?”

  “Out on Lambert Creek. Up near Grovers Pass.”

  “Fishing, huh?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  This was the part he had to make sound really relaxed and nonchalant. “Why don’t you let me do you a little favor, Mae?”

  “A little favor?”

  “Why don’t you let me ride on out there and just see if I can find this fella. Ask him if there hasn’t been some kind of mix-up or something.”

  She sighed. “I’d sure appreciate that, Sheriff.”

  “By the way, Mae, you haven’t told me what this fella looks like exactly.”

  “Oh, he’s a nice-looking man. You can tell he’s successful and you can tell he’s educated. He doesn’t look like a criminal or anything.”

  “Could you be a little more specific, Mae? How tall he is and what color his hair is and what kind of clothes he’s wearing.”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Sure, Sheriff. If you want me to.”

  The man she then proceeded to describe was, or course, Septemus Ryan.

  5

  The rain came hard enough to bother the bay that pulled the buggy. The animal spooked every so often on the mud road winding up through the clay hills.

  James huddled back against the seat, trying to avoid getting any wetter than he already was. His clothes were still damp from trying to help Liz there in the street, and he hoped they would soon start to dry.

  His uncle hied the horse and stared straight ahead. He leaned outside the protection of the top. Rain smashed against his skull and face but, if this bothered him, he didn’t let James know it.

  ***

  After a quarter mile, James said, “Where we going, Uncle Septemus?”

  “You’ll see.” Septemus didn’t turn around to address him.

  “It’s awful muddy.”

  “So it is.”

  “You’re not worried about getting stuck?”

  “The Lord is with us,” Septemus said, speaking up so he could be heard over the downpour.

  Then he hied the horse with the lash again and they sluiced through the gloom.

  ***

  In forty-five minutes, Septemus and James came to the top of a draw. Through the rain James saw below, set between stands of white birch, a small cabin cut from hardwoods. The windows on either side of the door had been smashed and were stuffed with paper. There were no outbuildings except for a privy and no animals of any kind.

  “We’ll walk from here,” Septemus said.

  He jumped down, taking his Winchester with him, wrapping it inside his coat to protect it from the water.

  “We’re going down to the cabin?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  They started walking.

  “This the surprise you told me about?”

  “Indeed it is, James. Indeed it is.”

  Septemus still wasn’t looking at James. Instead he kept his gaze fixed on the cabin.

  James knew he wasn’t going to like the surprise. Something was wrong with Septemus and James knew that this meant the surprise would be something terrible. He kept thinking of what his uncle had said about responsibility. It had something to do with that.

  ***

  When they reached the cabin, which smelled of wood and mildew in the rain, Septemus stood aside and waved James on to precede him.

  James put his hand on the doorknob and said, “I’m not going to like this surprise, am I, Uncle Septemus?” Septemus shook his head. James had never seen him look this way before. So… strange. Rain dripped off the roof and fell onto James’s head. “Am I?”

  “You may not like it, James. But I know you’ll fulfill your responsibility to Clarice anyway.”

  “To Clarice?”

  “She was like your sister, wasn’t she, James?

  James knew how it would hurt Septemus if he denied this. “Yes, she was.”

  “Then you won’t have any trouble doing your duty.”

  And with that, Septemus leaned forward and kicked the door inward. He kicked it hard enough that it slammed against the opposite wall. Dust rose up in the doorway and through the dust James saw a meanly furnished cabin with a cot that rats had eaten the straw out of, and a cast iron stove already rusting, and enough bent and dented cans of food to last a short winter.

  But it was the man tied to the chair in the center of the one-room cabin that got James’s attention.

  You could see where the man had been badly beaten, his face discolored and his mouth raw with dried blood. There was a cut across his forehead and his left eye was blackened.

  At first the man didn’t speak-James wasn’t certain he could speak, he looked so beaten up-he just stared at the two of them as they entered.

  This was obviously the surprise, the man here, though what it meant exactly James wasn’t yet sure.

  Septemus said, “Do you know who this man is, James?”

  “No,” James said. “I don’t.”

  “Run,” the man said. “Run and get the law, kid. Get Sheriff Dodds.” He strained against the bonds of rope that held him.

  “He’s one of the men who killed Clarice,” Septemus said. “Kittredge.”

  “He’s crazy, kid. Look at ’im. You can see it, can’t you? That he’s crazy?”

  Septemus seemed not to have heard. “This is what I meant by responsibility, James. You’ve got to do what’s right for Clarice.”

  “Kid, if I die, my wife won’t have nobody. Nobody.” The man looked as crazed with fear as Septemus did with anger.

  James felt embarrassed for the man and had to drop his eyes. This was all so terrible; there was something unreal about it. It might almost have struck him as a nightmare except for the stink of the cabin itself and the raw look of the man’s face. People just didn’t have dreams that well detailed.

  “Run, kid,” the man said again.

  Septemus held out the Winchester to James and said, “You take this, James, and you do right by Clarice. You hear me?”

  James looked at the man in the chair. “Did you kill Clarice?” The man looked miserable. “Kid, nobody killed the girl on purpose. It was an accident. We was out of work and couldn’t find no jobs-that’s the only reason we stuck up the bank in the first place.” The man was whining; again, James felt sorry for him.

  “Why don’t I go get the sheriff?” James said to his uncle. “For what?”

  “This man confessed, Uncle Septemus. All you have to do is turn him over. The law’ll take care of it from that.”

  Septemus said, “You know why I brought you along on this trip?”

  James knew better than to say anything.

  “To learn h
ow to be a man.”

  James hung his head.

  “I show you one of the men who killed your cousin-the cousin who loved you-and what do you do? You talk about going to get the sheriff.” Septemus waved the Winchester in the direction of Kittredge. “You’re getting two things confused here, James. You’re mistaking law for justice.”

  He walked over to Kittredge and stood next to him. Kittredge watched nervously. It was easy to see that Septemus wanted to start hitting him again.

  Septemus said, “Now, in a court of law, Kittredge here might well convince a jury that Clarice’s death was accidental. But we’d know better, wouldn’t we, James? We’d know that that little girl would never have been killed if those men hadn’t been there in the first place. Isn’t that right, James?”

  James nodded and glanced at Kittredge. Kittredge’s eyes were huge and white, following Septemus around as the man paced. “But being mature men, James-you and I-we won’t settle for law. We want justice. We want what’s right.” He raised the rifle. This time he didn’t offer it to James, he merely held it out for James to see. “That’s where personal responsibility enters into it, James. That’s where you’ve got to act like a grown-up and do what’s right.”

  This time he did hand James the Winchester.

  Much as he didn’t want to, James took the rifle in his hand and brought it close to his body.

  “Kittredge is your turn. I’ve already killed Carlyle.”

  When Septemus said this, James felt a terrible chill come over him. “You killed a man, Uncle Septemus?”

  “I most certainly did. One of the men who killed my Clarice. The same Clarice you yourself loved and cherished.”

  “Look at his face, kid,” Kittredge said. “You can see he’s crazy. Run and get the sheriff. Go on now before it’s too late.”

  “You shouldn’t have killed anybody,” James said to his uncle, realizing abruptly what he’d been sensing ever since leaving Council Bluffs-that while this man might look like Septemus Ryan, he wasn’t. No, there Kittredge was right. This was an insane man who bore only a passing resemblance to his uncle.