by Unknown
Bartonville was a little splash of houses and ramshackle business buildings in a nest of wooded, red clay hills. McGavock typed it the instant he stepped from the bus. It was lazy, quiet, intelligent—the sort of Deep South town he liked.
The Main Street sidewalks, raised two feet or so above the street, were hot in the sunlight. Hound dogs lay curled in the piercing heat and grizzled mules with riding saddles waited patiently at hitching posts for their masters. The few stragglers in view were mostly lean mountain men who returned his casual scrutiny with polite curiosity.
The town was evidently a county seat. Across the street was a barren court square with its customary park benches and old stone courthouse. The whole set-up, the rutted road, the mules, the court square, was typical, familiar. McGavock picked up his Gladstone and started down the sidewalk.
The one hotel, the Bradley House—a moldy, clapboard building with fly-specked windows—appeared deserted. McGavock walked into the musty lobby, waited a moment for his eyes to adjust themselves to the half-gloom.
A spiderish man in a Roman stripe silk shirt with pink rosetted sleeve garters put down a tin cup at the watercooler and sauntered behind a battered desk. He threw out a card with the practiced fingers of a tinhorn gambler. McGavock signed it.
“Luther McGavock,” the clerk read. “Memphis. I’m Cal Bradley—Cal for Calhoun, suh, not Calvin. I own this hotel.” He waited for enthusiastic congratulations, none were forthcoming. “What, may I ask, brings you to this garden spot?”
McGavock said: “I’m representing Boggs.”
The man in the striped shirt blinked. “Boggs? You’ve got me there. What are boggs?”
“Boggs,” McGavock announced scathingly, “are not things. Boggs is a man, a millionaire. Porthos R. Boggs—the Memphis celery king. He has more dough than he can spend. That’s why he hires me—I help him burn it. They told him that Bartonville is good bird country. I’m here to look things over and buy a few hundred acres of land if I can find something that suits us.”
Bradley asked slyly: “Are you a hunting man, suh?”
“Heck, no!” McGavock jeered. “I don’t know a snowshoe rabbit from a horned owl. But neither does Boggs. Ha.” He pointed to his bag, ordered curtly: “Take this up to the room. I’m going out to catch a little air.”
or some reason or other, McGavock had expected to find his client living in a so-called Georgian showplace, one of those pillared mansions that always reminded him of a movie set. He was pleasantly surprised.
The squat, brick cottage was intimate, homelike. Its double-span cedar shingles were butted with bright green moss and the wind and rain of decades had buffed the old brick to a soft rose. The small, neat lawn was hedged with a spindrift of lilacs. Through a trellis of wisteria, he caught a glimpse of a cool flagstoned backporch.
An almost obliterated nameplate on the gate said: Malcom Jarrell, M.D. McGavock took the turfed path to the door, clanged the lever bell-pull.
The door was opened by one of the queerest human specimens that McGavock had ever seen. A little pigeon-chested man in a seedy herringbone suit. He had a massive, shaggy head. From the bridge of his spectacles projected a short V of wire holding a second, squarish set of lenses: a Bebe binocular of the sort used by dentists and naturalists. He unhooked the contraption from his goatlike ears, frowned.
“I’m Lute McGavock.” The detective introduced himself. “I’m charwoman for the Atherton Browne Detective Agency. I hear you’ve got your lines fouled. I’m here to help you untangle them. You’re Dr. Jarrell?”
The seedy man shook his elephantine head. “There isn’t any Dr. Jarrell. That was my great-grandfather. But I’m the man you seek.” He studied McGavock gravely. “So you’re the person Atherton selected. Come in, sir.”
Then, astoundingly, in direct contradiction to his words, he closed the door behind him and ushered McGavock—not into the house, but around it.
In a vine-hung nook, on the flagstoned backporch, two wire-legged chairs were set by a kitchen table. On the table was a box of cubeb cigarettes, a partially eaten chocolate bar, and a wire cage containing a rat. The rodent was as big as a young pig, scaly-tailed, malevolent. “Sigmodon hispidus, the cotton rat,” Jarrell remarked. “He doesn’t like us, does he? I’m a naturalist, in a small way. I sit by the hour and study him.”
McGavock said nastily: “You’ve got a stronger stomach than I have.”
“I have a strong stomach,” Malcom Jarrel answered quietly. “Or I couldn’t tolerate you. You have an unfortunate personality, sir. There’s something about you that makes me seethe. Something insolent. However, this is no time for character analysis. If Atherton foists you on me, I have to take what he sends. I’m just a poor country cousin and can’t expect his most expensive talent. What about the garden mulch?”
“Says what?”
The big-headed man pointed out to the lawn. The setting sun, long sunk behind the crest of hills, dappled the yard in amber afterglow. Great sphinx moths, dusk feeders, were already shuttling among the delphiniums. McGavock had a feeling of unreality—as though he were a visitor in some eerie, goblin world. Unconsciously his gaze followed the line of Jarrell’s heavy-jointed finger. In the rear of the grassy plot was a grape arbor; beside the grape arbor was a small pile of clean, fresh straw. “The garden mulch,” Jarrell repeated. “It can’t stay where it is. It’s bleaching my lawn.”
McGavock said tartly: “I’m no horticulturist. All the way down from Memphis and you—”
Jarrell smiled sadly. “There’s a dead man under it.”
The story was quickly told. The man was Lester Hodges—a recluse. He lived in a shack at the other end of town. Jarrell had been awakened the night before by a dragging sound outside his window; he’d slipped into a robe, gone out to investigate and had found the body of his old friend.
The naturalist had then covered the corpse with mulch straw and had ensconced himself on the back porch to wait for aid from Memphis. Sixteen hours on the deathwatch—no meals, no visitors. No break except when he’d phoned his cousin.
McGavock got to his feet, wandered out into the yard.
The detective laid aside the straw in fastidious handfuls, uncovered the body bit by bit—like a geologist exposing a rare fossil.
“His head,” Jarrell said. “Look at the back of his head.”
It wasn’t pretty. Hodges was a birdlike man in his seventies, hard-bitten, wiry. A large roofing nail had been driven through his skull—into his brain. The metallic nail head, as large as a nickel, lay flat and firm against the old man’s silvery hair.
“I can’t understand it,” Malcom Jarrell complained. “It’s practically impossible! I can’t drive a nail into a box and do it satisfactorily. Say the slayer crept up on him in his sleep, even then how could he do it? Imagine! Holding the nail in position with one hand and swinging the hammer with the other. Those roofing nails are like big tacks. It isn’t feasible!”
“You’re on the wrong track,” McGavock contradicted him. “I think I know how it was done. A novel and a brutal weapon—but a simple and efficient one, too.”
They hesitated by the gate. “I’ve a batch of important questions to ask you,” McGavock said. “But they’re personal and I’ve got you placed. You’d bat me around with evasions until I wouldn’t know where I was. So—I’ll circulate around town and collect a little lowdown on you—and you’ll have to come in with me. Then maybe we can get someplace. I’ve handled clients like you before. In the meantime, I’m giving you advice and I want you to heed it. Go to the sheriff and tell him the whole yarn. Leave me out, of course, but tell him everything else. It’ll be embarrassing but we’ll have to do it if we want to flush our quarry.”
Jarrell made a pretense at pondering. “Wouldn’t it be a better idea,” he said carefully, “to wait until nightfall and then to take Lester out into the hills and leave him by the road?”
McGavock was withering. “Who do you think it’ll fool? Not the guy that u
nloaded him in your yard. Just try to dispose of that body and they’ll have hemp around your neck so quick you’ll think your ascot slipped!”
wilight was blending into night—it was that period that the natives called dusk-dark—when McGavock returned to the main drag. The air was sweltering. Somewhere, beyond the bridge, a revival meeting was getting under way. High-pitched voices lifted their rhythms to the summer sky. Storefronts blazed soft golden light. McGavock ambled through the jocular bustle of dallying citizens—family folk out for an evening stroll before bedtime, high school girls in their sweet-starched ginghams, village boys with pomaded hair and roving eyes. The detective located a hardware store, entered.
A clerk got up from the sidewalk bench in front of the store and followed him inside.
McGavock purchased a ten-cent compass.
The clerk was curious. “Buyin’ a compass! I don’t recollect seeing you in these parts. Are you aimin’ to tramp the hills?”
“Skip it,” McGavock said boorishly. “I’m not a revenuer. I see you have quart whiskey bottles as well as oak casks that can be converted to thump kegs. There’s no copper on display but doubtless you’ve plenty hidden in the back room. Don’t alarm yourself, I’m not in town to bloodhound any of your rural customers.”
The clerk was abashed, befuddled. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr.—er—”
“Hodges.” McGavock was expansive. “The name is Lester Hodges. At your service.”
The clerk went bug-eyed. “Lester Hodges! Think of that. Listen, friend, we got a feller right here in this town by that very name.”
McGavock reeled dramatically, grimaced with incredulity.
“Them’s true words,” the clerk insisted defensively. “Lester Hodges. Many a hour he’s sat by that pot-bellied stove and whittled.”
It came out like an appendix under a local anesthetic: where Hodges lived, his annual income—nil—and his likes and dislikes. “Why don’t you look him up?” the clerk urged. “He might be kin.”
“It’s hardly likely,” McGavock said dolefully. “All my kin were killed off in the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac.”
The shanty was in a hollow at the edge of town. It was built flush into a red clay bank. Above it, as a background, the ridge road passed it over a wobbly wooden trestle. A full moon was rising down the valley and the trestle with its crazy-angled supports looked like a gigantic tarantula against the sky. McGavock stood across the path and sized things up.
His calculations told him he had a good ten minutes on the sheriff. Yet a lighted lamp burned in the window of Lester Hodges’ shack.
The detective climbed the rickety stairs to the narrow porch and knocked. There was no answer. He twisted the knob and stepped in. The room was empty.
The furnishings were scant—a dilapidated iron range, a pallet on the floor, a fire-blistered bureau. And that lonesome lamp flickering in the window.
The bureau drawers held the recluse’s food stock: a sack of dried beans, a little cornmeal, a rancid ham hock. McGavock glanced about him angrily—it was a difficult layout to frisk. There was no place to conceal anything.
He found them in the cold ashes of the iron range, and when he found them he didn’t know what to do with them. A few tiny firecrackers and a shank of fishing line, in a tobacco can.
He stared blankly at the tin, thrust it in the pocket of his sack coat.
The lamp bowl was almost full, it had just been lit.
The detective had got himself into a spot and knew it. The little one-room shanty had no back door. He’d realized the lamp was a trap but he’d planned on a back door. Someone out in the night was waiting for him. Someone who had a sense of engineering: the light was placed so that when he left he’d show up like a treed possum.
McGavock made a quick decision. He blew out the lamp, swung open the sagging door and stepped out onto the narrow porch. “O.K., Sheriff,” he shouted. “Come on in. You want to take a look at this!”
A shadowed figure materialized in the blackness of the trestle timbers. There was the liquid glint of moonlight on a blue steel shotgun barrel. McGavock realized he was facing a desperate killer.
The phantom wavered. McGavock thought, He’s trying to grapple with the new break, trying to play it so that he gets the most out of it—he wonders what I’ve discovered.
A husky, heavily disguised voice called back: “Take a look at what?”
McGavock dropped like a plummet, rolled tumbler-fashion down the red clay bank. The shotgun let loose with both barrels. There was a deafening, coughing blast and the shrieking of splintered glass as the shanty window went into shard and dust.
A clump of sumac caught McGavock’s fall. He got to his feet, listened a moment, heard nothing.
The detective made no attempt at quartering his attacker. He walked along a dry, brushy gulch, came out on a hillside and returned to the village through a weedy alley.
He drew up beneath the first streetlight, wiped his knees and elbows with his handkerchief, balled it up and lobbed it behind a picket fence. He was, he decided, fairly presentable.
The gent with the shotgun could wait.
One thing was certainly evident. Lester Hodges, the old recluse, hadn’t met his death and been rolled in Jarrell’s yard through some sort of grotesque accident. There was design behind this, cold-blooded merciless design. From now on anything might happen. The slayer was smart, cunning—and he knew he was being hunted.
he back street brought McGavock to the rear of the courthouse. He circled the building, selected a bench in the deserted court square, sat down and redigested a few conclusions. An inspection of his ten-cent compass showed that it had not been damaged. Main Street was nearly empty. This was a town that really closed like a mouse-trap at the stroke of nine.
One window alone remained lighted. A little office with an eight-foot front beside the undertaker’s. A desk was pulled up close to the window, a man sat behind it in a swivel chair. He appeared to be looking through the pane, across the street, into the court square—directly at McGavock. The gold lettering on the door said: Hal Maldron, Attorney.
McGavock got up, crossed the street. Hardly had his instep touched the curb than the man leaned over his desk and rapped on the window.
It was a shrill commanding rap—a piercing, arrogant vibrato.
McGavock opened the door and strode in.
“If you want to speak to me,” he exploded, “heist your pants off that sponge rubber cushion and address me like a gentleman. I don’t go for window banging—”
Hal Maldron was a blubbery, grayish man with bad teeth and a pair of the smallest, cruelest eyes that McGavock ever looked into. He smirked at McGavock’s rage. “Calm yourself, brother.”
Maldron held up a hand, waved a huge horseshoe-nail ring. “It’s this ring that does it, brother,” he boasted. “It makes me the most hellacious lawyer in these hills. I’m sure-fire. I never lose a case. But why the ring, you ask? I’ll tell you. Why chase around looking for clients, interviewing witnesses, suborning jurymen? No need for it. I just sit here in my swivel chair and let the world come to me. Across the street’s the courthouse, yonder’s the post office, next door’s the undertaker’s. What more could a lawyer ask? I’m plump in the middle of the county’s bloodstream. Anyone with any kind of business has to pass my window sometime or other. Comes a prospect or a hostile witness, I just reach over and rap on the pane.” A malignant look settled itself in his rubbery jowls. “And, believe me, they come when I call them!”
McGavock was speechless with fury.
“You got off the bus at seven fifty-eight,” Maldron declared. “You registered at the Bradley House and then proceeded to Malcom Jarrell’s, where he informed you that he was secreting a corpse. What you’ve been doing for the last half hour, I do not as yet know—but I’ll find out. I summoned you in here to advise you that you are now working for me. There have been developments. Jarrell has given himself up to the police; he is at liberty, on bo
nd. I’m representing him—”
McGavock managed to speak. “He’s retained you?”
“That’s beside the point. I said I was representing him. I’m being retained by another party, one who has his welfare at heart.”
“Just who is this other party?”
Maldron showed his spotted canines. “That, too, is beside the point. I just wanted you to understand that there’s been a shifting of conditions, a change of ownership, so to speak. You’ve been demoted. I’m head man. If you play with me, I’ll keep you on the payroll. No cooperation and I’ll send you scooting back to the city.”
McGavock gave a low, strained laugh—a strangled sound, almost a whine. “I ought to kick your teeth in. Which wouldn’t take much of a push.” He held his breath, tried to control himself. “I’m not employed by Jarrell. I’m laboring for a guy named Atherton Browne. Try a tank-town frame on me and the boys will be in your hair like seventeen-year locusts. You’ll learn a little about metropolitan detective agencies.”
He was still boiling when he reached the hotel.
Cal Bradley, fussing behind the desk, was acting as his own night-clerk. The spidery little man seemed self-conscious, over-polite. “Mr. McGavock!” he greeted. “About to retire? A good night to sleep, suh. There’s a breeze from the north.” He laid the key on the blotter. “Number eleven, at the end of the hall. The best room in the house.” Abruptly, as an afterthought, he reached inside his shirt, dragged out a rumpled, soiled envelope. “This was left on the desk—addressed to you. I didn’t see who placed it there.”
McGavock ripped open the flap. The note was written on hotel stationery: Hodges can’t use your help now. Let the dead alone. Get out of town.
