The Shattered Raven

by Edward D. Hoch

  “See what you can find out,” he said.

  He left her and strolled down the main street, past a little white Methodist church that seemed to be boarded up. He came at last to a blacksmith’s shop, left over from another era. A new building had been constructed around back, for the sale of farm machinery. He strolled around till he found someone—a young man who seemed more the used car salesman type than the village blacksmith of old.

  “Do you still shoe horses?” Barney asked.

  “You got a horse to be shod, mister? We’ll do it.”

  “You know a woman named Irma Black?”

  “The one whose husband died?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No. I don’t know her.”

  “You knew the name.”

  “I know the names of fifty people who live around here. Her husband used to deal with us before he died. She stopped farming. Probably sold the place, for all I know.”

  “Thanks,” Barney said. He went back to the car and drove down the road in search of Susan. She was in the phone booth at the general store.

  “Calling back to New York,” she said when she’d finished. “After all, they pay me, you know.”

  “Yes. I know.” But he wasn’t happy about it.

  “Mr. Rowe was wondering one thing.”

  “Oh? What was that?”

  “How many people at MWA knew you were coming out here with me?”

  “It was no big secret. I had to talk it over with the board of directors yesterday to get their approval for the trip. They all knew.”

  “That man that won the award—Max Winters. Has he gone back to California?”

  “I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. He was supposed to fly back on Monday, but I know he stayed over an extra day or two. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought I saw someone that looked like him at the Chicago airport while you were in the men’s room. I meant to mention it.”

  “It could have been Max. He might have been changing planes.”

  “They have a direct flight to California, though, don’t they?”

  “Yes. But you never know. Maybe he was stopping off to see some old relative, or a girl friend.”

  “You’ve known him a long time?”

  “What is this? A quiz or something? Sure, I’ve known Max a long time. Fifteen, twenty years. Isn’t that a long time?”

  “Where to now?” she asked, climbing into the car.

  “Let’s go and see that sheriff at the county seat.”

  They found the sheriff’s office, and sat in a plain little room, waiting until the sheriff himself put in an appearance. His clothes sagged badly on him, as if he’d recently been ill and lost a great deal of weight He walked the same way. He was a wasted man, on his last legs.

  “Sheriff, I’m Barney Hamet from New York, and this is Miss Veldt. We’re here investigating some murders that took place there. One of the victims, a woman named Irma Black, lived over in June. We were told that you might be able to tell us something about her. Especially about her early life.”

  “Irma Black? I know the name. What was it you wanted to know?”

  Barney looked at the sheriff’s wrinkled hands. “I’m not exactly sure. We talked to the postmistress over there. She threw out a few hints. It would be something in Irma’s background. Something that happened twenty or twenty-five years ago. I think perhaps a crime of some sort. A crime involving two men.”

  The sheriff squinted at them. “You come all the way from New York to ask me about that? That’s old stuff now. Didn’t happen here, anyway. Happened across the state line. Different state entirely. Here.” He pulled down a map on the wall, and pointed his shaky finger at the area where Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri all came together. “See? Irma lived near June. But she worked over here—in Claxton. At the Claxton Trust Company.”

  “A bank?” Barney asked.

  “Sure, a bank. She was a teller there. Back just after the war. She was a young girl then. In her mid-twenties, I suppose.”

  “What happened at the bank?”

  “What usually happens at banks? It got robbed. A gunman came in one day and robbed the bank, and kidnapped Irma as a hostage.”

  “Oh,” Barney leaned forward, intent now, sure that he had come to the end of his search. “One bandit?”

  “One in the bank. Another in the car.”

  “How long did they hold Irma a prisoner?”

  “That was the funny part of it. They kept her a week. A whole week. And then finally they brought her back and dropped her.”

  “Had she been harmed?”

  “I couldn’t tell you that. I wasn’t that close to the case. You could probably find a report of it somewhere, though, if you really wanted it.”

  “The two men. What happened to them? Were they ever caught?” Barney asked, holding his breath while he waited for the answer.

  “Sure they were caught. About a month later. They tried to crash a police roadblock and they were both killed instantly.”

  “Oh.”

  “We know how to handle law and order in this part of the country, Mr. Hamet. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Yeah,” Barney said. “Come on, Susan.”

  They found a library and he put Susan to work scouring the newspapers for the month in question. It had been the summer of ’47 when it happened—in July. And before they’d been there too long Susan called to him from behind a pile of bound newspapers. “Here it is Barney. I’ve got the whole story here. Complete with a picture of Irma Black.”

  He leaned over her shoulder and read it. The thing had been big news, all right. BANK BANDIT KIDNAPS TELLER; EIGHT-STATE ALARM OUT FOR GUNMAN AND ACCOMPLICE. And he read further: A lone masked gunman, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, entered the main office of the Claxton Trust Company just before closing time Tuesday and escaped with nearly thirty thousand dollars, taking a girl teller with him as hostage.

  Victim of the kidnapping was Irma Black, twenty-six, a resident of June, Nebraska, who had worked at the bank for two years. Police immediately ordered roadblocks up on all major highways, and issued an eight-state alarm for the fugitives and their hostage. Although only one man entered the bank, witnesses said another was waiting in a car, which sped off immediately.

  There was more, including a picture of Irma’s house and an interview with her worried parents. The story continued for a full week with veiled hints that the girl teller would not be found alive. But on the eighth day, the headlines had a cheerful note: IRMA BLACK SAFE! RELEASED NEAR HOME BY TWO BANK BANDITS!

  There followed the usual interviews, in which she said she had been well treated, but had been kept blindfolded most of the time and could give no description of her abductors. She said only that they had talked in southern accents and spoke once of going to Mexico.

  “What do you make of it?” Susan asked. “Could this be the thing? Could this be what she was blackmailing Ross Craigthorn for?”

  But Barney only grunted and kept looking through the papers until he found the later news item the sheriff had mentioned. Acting on a tip, police had thrown up a roadblock near a farm the other side of Lincoln. A car with two men in it had tried to crash the roadblock, and the police had riddled it with bullets. The men were later identified as Tom Clancy and his brother, Rick, two small-time criminals who had both served prison terms for armed robbery. Irma Black was brought to view the bodies in the morgue, and although she had previously stated she was blindfolded during her captivity, she now said she believed the Clancy brothers to have been her abductors. Two days later the police announced that money found at the farm where the brothers were hiding was “almost certainly” part of the loot from the Claxton bank robbery. The case was marked closed.

  “Well,” Susan observed, “they were running from something. That’s for sure.”

  Barney grunted and turned back a few pages. “So, there were a couple of other robberies that month. Here’s a general store that was rob
bed, and a gas station. It could have been almost anything. It didn’t have to be the Claxton bank. I’d hardly call this enough evidence to convict. It just got the local police off the hook.”

  “But if Irma Black suspected Ross Craigthorn, then she must have known all along it wasn’t the Clancy brothers. If she knew that, why did she lie to the police? What was in it for her?”

  “Maybe just a week of fun that she wanted to remember. Maybe it was the most exciting week of her life. Maybe it was the only week she ever had a man who loved her.”

  “Oh, come on, Barney! Now you’re really reaching for it!”

  “Am I? She opened her apartment door to someone. She let that person get near enough to strangle her with a telephone cord. What does that tell us? That it was someone she knew, someone she could trust, or thought she could trust. Even after Ross Craigthorn’s murder.”

  “You believe that, don’t you?”

  “Let’s go back and read these interviews with her. Dig out anything we can.”

  They read for another twenty minutes, side by side in the library. It wasn’t until the very last paragraph of one of the interviews that their search was rewarded.

  “She said they called each other by nicknames,” Susan pointed. “It’s right here in the story, but it doesn’t say what the nicknames were.”

  “Well, we’ll get that quickly enough. I think I know what they were.”

  They talked, next, to the district attorney’s office. The transcripts of the investigation were buried in files twenty-two years old, and they waited on a hard wooden bench for the better part of an afternoon until at last a little man came out, blowing dust from a file folder. “The Irma Black kidnapping. Is that what you wanted? And the bank robbery?”

  “That’s right,” Barney said.

  “Well, of course, I can only show you the things that are a matter of public record. You have no official capacity.”

  “I just want you to answer one question for me. The news stories mention nicknames. I want to know what those nicknames were.”

  “Nicknames? Nicknames of the Clancy brothers?”

  “No. Nicknames of the two men who kidnapped Irma Black.”

  “Let’s see here. Nicknames … Here it is, in her statement : They kept me blindfolded all of the time, and tied me to a chair. I never really saw them at all, except in the beginning, when they first got me into the car. They didn’t talk much to each other, and when they did, they used nicknames. One was Caesar and the other was Raven. They were funny names. That help you mister?”

  “That helps me,” Barney said. “Caesar and Raven. Does she say which was which?”

  “No, it don’t … yeah … wait a second. Here. Here’s something. Caesar was the one waiting in the car at the robbery scene. I guess that means Raven was the guy who held up the bank.”

  “Yeah. It figures,” Barney said. “Thanks a lot, mister.”

  They went back to the motel near June, where they were spending the night, and Barney slumped down on the bed. “Well, that gives it to us, doesn’t it?”

  “Gives what to us?” she asked him.

  “Motive. It’s a funny case. Usually in books, the motive is one of the last things to be discovered, but we’ve got it right here.”

  “You’re implying that Ross Craigthorn was this Caesar?”

  “Of course. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? A couple of fellows, maybe just out of college, or out of the army, looking for thrills. And one of them decides to rob a bank. The other one stays in the car. Maybe he knows what’s going on, or maybe he doesn’t. But anyway, he’s in it pretty deep. And when they bring a girl along as hostage, he knows that it’s big trouble for them both. So then, a couple of guys that didn’t have anything to do with the robbery are killed, and the thing is blamed on them. Caesar and Raven go off to start new lives somewhere. It was just one fling. Something, I suppose, like Loeb and Leopold. They didn’t kill the girl, though heaven knows what they did do to her. And she kept their secret—however much she knew. She knew enough to recognise Ross Craigthorn on television as one of them. He must have been the one driving the car. I don’t think that even Craigthorn could have hoped to cop a plea to his great American public if he’d walked into a bank with a sawed-off shotgun. But with the statute of limitations long ago run out, he probably could have made it sound like a youthful prank. Especially if he was waiting outside all that time. It gives our other man, the mysterious Mr. Raven, a nice motive. With Craigthorn telling the story, revealing that the Clancy brothers were innocent, he’d have to reveal that Raven was still around too. Even if he didn’t tell anything else, even if he passed over Raven’s present identity, don’t you think the reporters would be digging? Raven couldn’t plead that he was sitting in a car. He was actually in there with that shotgun, scooping up the money, kidnapping the girl. And he could probably still be arrested on the kidnapping charge.”

  “I can see that, Barney, but does it tell us who he is?”

  “No, but we’re only starting. The next move is to find out all we can about Craigthorn’s boyhood. Someone’s going to know who he hung out with, who his chums were. Maybe an army record, if they were in the army together. Or we can check and see who his college roommates were.”

  “Raven and Caesar—what odd names! They don’t really have anything in common, do they?”

  Barney grunted. “What did you want them to have in common?”

  “Well, Caesar is like Roman Empire. Did they have ravens back in Rome? Was that a raven on those staffs that the Roman legions used to carry?”

  “I think it was probably an eagle. I don’t know of any ravens before Poe.” He hesitated. “Poe. Where did Poe get the idea for that raven?”

  “What?”

  “A thought just struck me. What time would it be back in New York now?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Around four o’clock.”

  “Get on the phone and call New York, See if we can reach Harry Fox. If anybody knows where Poe got the idea for the raven, it’s Harry Fox.”

  They sent out for sandwiches, and sat around for a while. Harry was out of his office, but his answering service promised he would return the call as soon as he could. They waited another hour before it finally came in. “Yeah, this is Harry. That you, Barney? What are you doing out there, spending all of MWA’s money?”

  “Harry, we’re in a place called June, Nebraska. Ever hear of it?”

  “There’s no such place!”

  “Look at a map sometime, Harry. Listen, I need to know something, and you’re the one who can tell me. So get the computer memory going. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. Okay?”

  “Gotchya.”

  “Where did Poe get the idea for The Raven? Was there any raven in past literature? Anything at all?”

  “I’ll bet you think you’re stumping me,” Harry said. “You should know Poe is my field.”

  “That’s why we called you halfway across the country. Give out with the information.”

  “Well, Poe got the idea from Dickens. From the raven in Dickens’ novel, Barnaby Rudge. Poe reviewed Barnaby Rudge and said that more should have been done with the raven. Then a few years later, in the New York Evening Mirror for January 29, 1845, Poe published his own poem, The Raven. How’s that, huh?”

  “Great! Thanks a lot, Harry.”

  “When will you two be back?”

  “A day or two, depending on how it goes.” Barney hung up and conveyed Harry Fox’s information to Susan.

  “Well,” she said, “what does that give you? A raven from Charles Dickens. That’s no better than the raven from Poe, is it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have a list of the people who were at the dinner?”

  “It just so happens,” she began, digging into the attaché case she’d brought along. It was a flowery sort of thing that no man would have been caught dead with. He hadn’t seen her with it before the trip, and he supposed that she usually left it in the office, settling for the
notebook in her purse. “Here’s the mimeographed list they passed out at the dinner.”

  He started running down the names. “Take a couple of pages. Look for the names of anybody at the dinner who might have any connection with a Dickens character.”

  “Isn’t that going a little too far? You mean that Craigthorn, in his dying breath, smashed that Raven so that you’d get the connection between the raven and Poe, and Dickens and Barnaby Rudge and another raven, and some other characters in Dickens? I can’t imagine even a dying man going to such lengths.”

  “I’ll agree it’s far-fetched, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Ross Craigthorn smashed that Raven because it was the only thing handy. He wasn’t telling us exactly who killed him. He was just giving us a steer in the right direction. If Craigthorn was Caesar, and his killer was Raven…” His voice trailed off as he scanned the list. He recognised a lady lawyer who could have reminded him of Shakespeare’s Portia—but that wasn’t exactly Dickens. There were no Scrooges on the list. Not even a Tiny Tim. There were lots of Davids. A few Olivers, but no Twist. It was another blank wall.

  “Okay,” she said. “What now?”

  “Now try and find out where Ross Craigthorn grew up and went to school. We’ll start checking all the schools in this area. You take some, and I’ll take the rest.” He remembered Irma Black’s letter. “You might check the name Craig, too.”

  The project occupied most of the next day, and it was Susan who finally came up with a possibility. She phoned Barney at the district high school where he was checking, talking excitedly. “Barney, I think I’ve got something! There was a boy here called Ross Craig.”

  “What year did he graduate?”

  “Just before the war. He went in the army then, and people lost sight of him. He could be the one we want.”

  “Okay,” Barney said. “Look, put in a call to Amalgamated Broadcasting, and see what they’ve got on Craigthorn’s biography. Or better still, call the New York Times, and have them read you the obit they ran on him last week. It seems to me they spoke of his coming from the mid-west, but it was nowhere near June, Nebraska.”