The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  “Anyway,” he said, and suddenly he was back with us, staring hard at Old Red. “A few nights later, I hear that commotion back there, and I start thinking, ‘What if the killer’s come back? What if another girl’s getting murdered, and I’m just standing around with a broom in my hand?’ So I took a look. And it was you, Gus. Alone. Behind the Star.”

  “What was I doin’?” Gustav asked. He truly had no idea.

  “Blubbering, ranting…though I couldn’t understand a word. You were so soaked, the whole alley reeked of rye. So I got you to come into the barbershop, thinking we could talk things through. Friend to friend.”

  Bales’s thick lips puckered like he’d just bitten into a rotten lemon.

  “I didn’t really know you at all, did I? You never even told me about you and Adeline until that night. You were pacing around, bawling, and that’s when it came out.”

  The marshal clasped his hands together, face contorted in anguish like a bad actor in an amateur melodrama. He wasn’t just going to tell us what Gustav had said all those years ago. He was going to show us.

  “‘If I loved her, Milford, why’d I do her like that?’” He aimed a beseeching gaze heavenward. “‘I’m sorry, hon! I am so, so sorry!’”

  Bales locked eyes on Old Red again, and his tone went icy cold.

  “I asked what you were sorry about, and that’s when you said it. ‘She’s dead because of me, Milford. I killed her.’ Just like that, plain as can be, you admitted you murdered Gertie.”

  My brother had been listening with an air of weary forbearance—Job taking another whipping from Jehovah because, one way or another, he figures he must deserve it.

  One word snapped him out of it.

  “I murdered who?”

  Bales looked both flustered and defiant. He knew he’d made a mistake—but part of him wanted to make it.

  “Adeline,” he said.

  Gustav shook his head. “No. You said Gertie. That’s what her family called her. That’s what I called her.”

  Bales couldn’t hold it back another second. The truth he’d wanted to spit in Old Red’s face ever since he first saw us—he finally let it fly.

  “And it’s what I called her!” he roared. “You think you loved her? You don’t know what love is, you sick bastard! I loved that girl! Me! And you’re finally gonna pay for what you did to her!”

  My brother didn’t just slump back into the bunk. He collapsed into it. Even old Job didn’t have to take a blow this low.

  “Oh, Gertie,” Gustav moaned.

  “So that night…when she was in the alley behind the Star”—I turned to Bales—“she was comin’ to the barbershop. To see you.”

  “Oh, didn’t he tell you that part?” Bales sneered, jerking his thumb at my brother. “She’d been meeting me over there for months, whenever she could slip away. Only that night, I wasn’t there…and Gus was. Gertie always swore she hadn’t told a soul about us, but I guess he found out somehow—and he tore that poor, sweet girl apart!”

  “Bull—!”

  “Otto,” Old Red said, cutting me off yet again.

  After that, though, he seemed to have a hard time getting out more words. Not that there weren’t any to say. It was more like there were too many, and he had to pan through them to find the right ones to start with.

  “The night….”

  It came out a croak, and Gustav cleared his throat and tried again.

  “The night you and I talked in the barbershop. After you heard me say…whatever I said. What happened then?”

  Bales shrugged.

  “I took a swing at you, you took a swing at me, we struggled.”

  He spoke carelessly, as bored with his own words as Old Red had been mindful. He’d said what he’d been itching to say for so long. Now that he’d scratched the itch, he was losing interest.

  “Eventually, you got your hands on a pair of scissors, and I thought it was all over. You were going to slice me up, too. But I guess killing a man in a fair fight just isn’t your way. You dropped the scissors and stumbled out.”

  “Yeah…yeah,” Gustav said slowly, perhaps catching glimpses of memories long lost in an alcohol fog. “Then after that…what? You went to Marshal Cerny?”

  “Of course. He thanked me, too—and then didn’t do a thing about it. You left town a few days later, and that was that, far as he was concerned.”

  “But not for you.”

  “No. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That I could know a man, think of him as a friend, and he could do that. I even tried reading up on it. To try and understand you. But nothing I ever saw made a lick of sense.”

  My brother nodded limply.

  “The Whitechapel Mystery: A Pscyho Logical Problem,” he said.

  The marshal looked startled, as if Gustav had just told him his mother’s maiden name or that he had a mole on his unmentionables—something he couldn’t possibly know. Then he must have recalled that we’d done some snooping around the Kriegers’ library, and he relaxed and rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah. That thing. I may as well have been reading Mother Goose, for all I got out of it. No, the only grip I could get on you, Gus, didn’t come out of any book. It came from Brother Landrigan. He led me to repentance and salvation and acceptance…of a sort. There’s no understanding evil, look at it all you want. It just is, no rhyme nor reason. If any good was going to come of what happened to Gertie, I’d have to make it myself.” Bales tapped the badge pinned to his coat. “And the first step was making sure Kaz Cerny wasn’t wearing this if another lunatic like you showed up.”

  “But I showed up again, Milford,” Gustav said. “How come you didn’t arrest me the second you saw me?”

  Bales waved the thought away—though a trifle too quick, it seemed to me.

  “I had no proof.”

  “You’re the town marshal. Your word alone might’ve been enough to…”

  Old Red let his words trail off, and he gave Bales a sidelong, sizing-up sort of look. Then he shook his head.

  “You didn’t wanna testify, did you?” he said. “You steered clear of the Eagle all them years ago, did your dirty business in your barbershop, for chrissakes. And even now that you’ve repented and been saved, hallelujah, you’re still tryin’ to protect your precious reputation. Cuz love Gertie or not, you don’t want folks knowin’ you was ever mixed up with a low-down whore. So you got your pals to help run me and my brother out of town when you thought—truly believed—I was a mad-dog killer. What the hell kinda lawman does that?”

  The marshal’s face went so red-hot I half expected him to blow up like an overstoked boiler.

  “Face it, Milford—you ain’t changed,” my brother pressed on. “You think that badge made you something new, washed you clean? Well, it didn’t. You’re still just a haircutter pushin’ a broom.”

  “Are you through?” Bales growled.

  “Yeah,” I threw in. “Are you through?”

  “For the moment,” Gustav said.

  Bales opened his mouth.

  I opened mine faster.

  “Well, it’s about time. Because I have been waitin’ and waitin’ and waitin’ for you to swing back around to the point. And since you never did, I guess it’s up to me.”

  “And the point is?” Bales asked.

  “That my brother is not a murderer,” I told him, “and that you, marshal, are a goddamn moron!”

  “E-excuse me?” Bales spluttered, so surprised he wasn’t even angry yet. “No, I don’t believe I will. Not while I’m in a jail cell because of your stupidity.”

  “Otto,” Gustav said once again, but it came out more of a groan this time. He knew there was no stopping me until I’d worked off my head of steam.

  “You’re so twisted up with grief you got your head worked up your ass,” I raged at Bales. “I mean, please! That ‘confession’ Gustav made?” I popped my eyes and clapped my hands to my face, mock-shocked. “Goodness me! Do you mean to say he allowed himself to become
visibly agitated merely because the gal he loved had just been murdered? Well, no wonder you pegged him for the culprit. Cuz, of course, only a cold-blooded killer would get shit-faced and start actin’ nuts if his fiancée—yes, I said fiancée, Marshal—was hacked into mincemeat!”

  “Listen, Amlingmeyer,” Bales began.

  “And that badge of yours?” I sped on. “The one you wanted in case another lunatic came thisaway? Well, you been wearin’ it while some madman killed four chippies right under your nose—and that ain’t even includin’ Adeline and Big Bess!”

  “I don’t know what you’re babbling about.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You big—!”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  Gustav had sprung up from the bunk.

  “Otto here might not be puttin’ it the way I’d have liked”—my brother’s grip on my shoulder tightened to a painful pinch, then let loose—“but it’s true you misunderstood me, Milford. Gertie’s blood is on my hands, but not cuz I killed her with ’em. I thought we needed more money ’fore we married, so I let her keep on…you know. And it got her killed. I’m sure that’s what I was tryin’ to say that night—I should’ve got her away from Ragsdale and Bock first chance I got. And you know what? If you truly cared for her, like you say? You should have, too.”

  The angry flush on Bales’s face had faded to pink. He wasn’t boiling anymore, but he was still asimmer.

  “So you’re trying to take it back,” he said.

  “I can’t take back a confession I never made!” Old Red snapped, exasperated at last. “And if you’d bothered checkin’, you’d know I not only didn’t kill Gertie, I couldn’t have. The night she died, I was asleep in a bunkhouse ten miles outside town. You can ask Suicide Cheney or Joe Koska down on the Lucky Seven. You can go out and ask”—there was a pause so brief I’m sure only I noticed it—“Bob Harris. They’ll all tell you the same thing. I didn’t even know Gertie was dead for days.”

  “I always knew your pals would cover for you,” Bales said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t prove a thing.”

  “Milford, I don’t have no pals around here anymore.”

  “Look, Marshal,” I said, “have you even asked yourself why we’re here? If Gustav really killed Adeline…Gertie…her…if he’d done it, why on earth would he come back to San Marcos?”

  “Because he thought he got away with it.”

  I barely reined in a “Sweet Jesus!”

  “He came back,” I said slowly, with as much patience as I could muster, “because he aimed to do what he couldn’t five years ago. We’re here to find the killer.”

  “Well, if that’s true,” Bales replied, mimicking my overdeliberate, explaining-math-to-a-halfwit cadence, “then why is there another dead prostitute in your hotel room?”

  “Someone put her there,” I said, my words coming out now like molasses in January. “You think we’re so stupid we’d leave a body in our room while we went to church?”

  “It’s…not…that…you’re…stupid,” Bales said. “It’s…that…you’re…crazy.” He turned his glare on Gustav. “And now you’re done.”

  He turned and stomped toward the stairs. “You’re crazy…you’re done”—that said it all, as far as he was concerned.

  “What we told Krieger about bein’ sleuths?” I called after him. “That’s true! We’ve been railroad dicks and we’ve caught killers and I know it doesn’t look like it but we’re actually good at this stuff! Believe it or not, you need our help!”

  Bales reached the top of the steps.

  I turned to Old Red. “You gotta show him I ain’t lyin’.”

  Bales stopped on the first step down.

  Old Red said nothing aloud, but his eyes were talking plenty.

  I can’t, they told me.

  “Go on, Brother,” I said. “You can do it. I know you can.”

  Even if you don’t.

  Bales muttered something and started down the stairs again.

  “You don’t wanna believe me about Gertie, fine,” Gustav called after him. “I can understand. Big Bess, though—at least hear me through on that.”

  Bales tromped out of sight.

  “Dammit, Milford!” Old Red grabbed the bars of the cell door and gave them a rattling shake. “I know who killed her! And if you give me just two more minutes, I can prove it, too!”

  Bales’s footsteps faded.

  Then stopped.

  Then grew louder again.

  Bales reappeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Two minutes,” he said, pulling a watch from his waistcoat pocket. “Starting now.”

  32

  Two Minutes (Plus)

  Or, We Try to Fill Bales In While the Town Gets Set to Rub Us Out

  “You know, I threw two minutes out kinda off the top of my head,”

  Gustav said. “It might take more time to talk through than that.”

  Ten seconds into my brother’s bluff—if it was a bluff—and already he seemed to be losing his nerve.

  Bales looked up from his watch and scowled at him.

  “How about five minutes?” I suggested.

  Now he scowled at me.

  “Four?” I tried. “Three and a half?”

  The lawman tucked his watch away.

  “Just talk,” he said to Old Red.

  “Right.”

  My brother took in a deep breath and shot me a look that said, Remember, now—if this doesn’t work, it was your dumb idea.

  “One of the reasons it’s been so hard to get a handle on who killed Gertie,” he said to the marshal, “is there don’t seem to be no why to it, beyond sheer bloody-mindedness. But with Big Bess, the why’s plain as day. You’re lookin’ at it right now.”

  He spread out his arms and swiveled first this way, then that.

  Us in a cell.

  “We been sniffin’ around, and someone wanted us to stop…wanted it bad enough to kill a woman just to get at us. And when you ponder on the how of Big Bess’s death, that tells you who it was.”

  “It does?”

  “Yup,” Gustav said. “Just take her innards, for instance.”

  Bales suddenly looked like he really, really regretted putting away his watch.

  “Her…innards?”

  Old Red nodded. “You saw Big Bess on that bed. Her guts ’n’ such was spread out careful-like, orderly—and the slices up her belly was clean, not jagged. If there’d been any struggle, she’d have been hacked up every which way, and her bowels would’ve been spilled all over. So it wasn’t the guttin’ that killed her. It was that slit throat. She was awake when it happened, too—she wasn’t rapped over the head or nothin’ first.”

  “How could you know that?” Bales asked.

  Unless you were there when it happened, he didn’t bother adding.

  “Didn’t you notice?” my brother said, and I caught just a hint of the old curt cockiness that used to come over him when he’d get to stringing out deductions. “Her hands was covered in blood. After she was cut, she pressed ’em up over her throat. Only that didn’t do no good, of course. That was a deep slice. Clean, too. From here to here”—Gustav put a finger to the left side of his neck, then pulled it across to the right in one smooth motion—“straight as a razor.”

  “That means something?”

  “Well, of course, it does! Bess didn’t see it comin’. The feller who done her in—he was standin’ behind her. And if you think on that, you’ll see it weighs against me or Otto bein’ the killer.”

  Bales furrowed his brow and cocked his head…then grunted and shrugged. “Alright, I’ve thought on it, and I don’t see how it means a thing.”

  Old Red grabbed hold of the bars again, hard, as if he wished they were the marshal’s shoulders—so he could give the man a good shake.

  He was getting riled up. Which was good news, I had to think. Like water to a fish or dirt to a worm, irritation is my brother’s natural element. Better to have him vexed than disp
irited.

  “I’ll just have to keep thinkin’ for the both of us, then,” he said. “Cuz here’s what ain’t occurred to you: Big Bess let someone stand behind her long enough to draw a blade and cut her throat. So she either trusted the man or had to act like she did, and she sure as hell had no reason to let her guard down around me and my brother. Surely even you’ve heard about the flap at the Phoenix Thursday night—and how we were to blame for it. Would she come to our hotel room, alone, after that? Could she, without her bosses knowin’ of it? No, sir. She was just payin’ a call on a customer, far as she knew. And that tells us who killed her.”

  “It does?” Bales said. Or maybe “It does.” It was hard to tell if the question mark was there or not.

  “Word is Stonewall’s gone missin’,” Gustav said with an off handed dryness I had to admire. “So who’d be escortin’ Big Bess to the Star? Who’s got an arrangement with the hotel for comin’ and goin’ on the sly—and probably borrowin’ passkeys whenever they need? Who’d love to see me and Otto strung up like piñatas on account of all the snoopin’ we been doin’?”

  “Ragsdale and Bock,” I said. Not that we weren’t all thinking it already, but somebody had to come out and say it.

  Old Red nodded. “It was Ragsdale slit her throat.”

  “Why Ragsdale?” Bales asked. I liked the way he asked it, too. For the first time, it sounded as if he actually thought my brother might have a decent answer.

  Too bad the answer he got was “Bess’s butt.”

  Bales frowned, his eyes going into a twitchy squint, and Gustav pressed ahead fast before he could turn on his heel and leave.

  “That caboose of hers had considerable size to it, you know. So much so that a feller like Gil Bock—a squat SOB with stubby arms and a tub gut—he couldn’t even reach Bess’s neck from behind, let alone cut it as clean and even as it was. Nah. It’d have to be a taller man with long arms. Bock was there, I’m sure of that. No one could hoist Bess’s body onto the bed without help, and him and his partner ain’t never any further apart than a pair of prairie oysters in the same sack. But it was Ragsdale did the killin’.”