The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Old Bell looked down at the floor for a few moments, rubbing the bare spot that peeked through the crown of his snowy hair.

  “Back in the summer of ‘Fifty-one, the whole damn county was burnin’ up. Seemed like flames were just part of the landscape. The lakes were mud flats, the river was low, and all the wells were damn near dried out. Then the Biograph Theater went up.”

  The Big Fire, as it came to be known, was a flashpoint in Winchester’s history, a day when the whole town pondered its mortality. Old Bell was there.

  “Jesus Christ, the damn thing was roaring like some unholy animal, just three doors down from the paper. Fire trucks poured everything they had on it, but it only made it madder. Wasn’t much else to do but watch it burn. Up and down Main Street, all the shopkeepers were frantically loading up their goods in the back of trucks, wheelbarrows, anything they could find.”

  Old Bell relished the retelling.

  “Damn, it was a sight. Everybody knew the whole damn town was going to go up. I had to choose: Cover the fire or try to save what I could from this place.”

  Morgan had heard the stories. He’d seen the front page and its thick banner headline hanging in the newspaper’s foyer.

  “You covered the fire.”

  “Yeah, I was a dumb fucker back then. I only thought about it later. I might have had a great story with no place to print it.”

  “My dad told me it was the most amazing thing he ever saw.”

  “No, it was a miracle. A goddamned miracle. This pilot was flying a load of retardant to a forest fire when he saw smoke right here in town. He swooped down and dumped his whole load on the theater. Doused the damn fire like he was blowing out a candle. Oh Christ, it was beautiful. Saved the whole goddamned town. He came down out of the sky like some thundering angel at the most desperate moment, saved our asses and flew away. Jesus, that was a story, a once-in-a-lifetime story.”

  The fluorescent lights flickered and hummed. Old Bell looked up, and Morgan saw his eyes were moist, burning from the smoke of a fire that burned deep in his memory.

  “Was it ever hard for you, being the editor?” he asked.

  Old Bell contemplated his blackened fingers for a moment.

  “Every week was hard,” he said. “Wednesdays seemed endless. But Thursday always came. I’d go down to The Griddle and watch people read my paper like they were looking in a mirror. By God, that’s what we do, kid. We hold up a mirror that doesn’t lie and doesn’t fade.”

  “What if they don’t like what they see?”

  “They’ll blame it on the mirror, of course,” Old Bell said. “Maybe we can change street maps, travel plans and a few politicians’ minds, but we can’t change human nature, kid. Plenty of good newspapermen have tried and they fizzle out, like some orphan chunk of a shooting star that flames out before the big show. Burn slow, kid, but keep the fire going. Here, this is yours.”

  Old Bell tossed him the missing back-door key and started to leave. As he brushed past Morgan, he gave his arm a fatherly squeeze.

  “Wait,” Morgan said. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about.”

  Old Bell turned toward him, a concerned look on his face. He already knew.

  “Is it about the payment?” he asked.

  Morgan said nothing, but he must have looked surprised.

  “Hell, it’s a small town, kid. People talk and I still hear pretty damn good. You’re having a little cash-flow problem, that’s all. Don’t sweat it.”

  “It’s not so little, Bell,” Morgan said. “The payment’s overdue and I’m supposed to deliver the cash to the bank tomorrow. You’ve seen the paper. We’re running low on ads and ... well, I’m just not sure what comes next.”

  Old Bell curled one rough hand in a fist and shook it in front of him, like a coach giving a halftime pep talk.

  “Every little town has a sort of beat, a rhythm. You find the rhythm and everything will fall into place. It takes a little time. You’ll see.”

  “It’s more than that,” Morgan said. “The bankers know I’ve been looking into the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse. I don’t know why, but they’re not happy about it. Without coming right out and saying it, I think they’d like to pull the rug out if I continue.”

  Old Bell leaned against a light table.

  “Fuck ‘em,” he said. “Ham Tasker thinks he’s a player, but he’s nothing but an amateur clown in a three-piece suit. I wasn’t gonna tell you, but he called me, too. He said the bank would foreclose if you stay on the story, and he wanted me to persuade you to drop it.”

  “Would they? Foreclose, I mean?” Morgan wondered.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think he has the balls. He’s just trying to bluff you, make your life a little harder. But watch your ass anyway.”

  “Why would they care about this story so much?”

  “Who the hell knows? Maybe they just don’t want you to rock this fragile little canoe. Maybe a ‘friend’ of the bank would rather this can of worms stayed sealed up tighter’n a pickle jar. Maybe it’s just a power thing, where they want to see if they can intimidate you.”

  “They’re succeeding.”

  Old Bell sniffed disgustedly.

  “Look, kid, I still think that asshole Gilmartin killed that little girl, and you’re probably licking up the wrong leg like some horny pup. But it’s your story, not mine. And it damn sure isn’t Ham Tasker’s. If it’s a good story, then follow it, goddam it. You got to have the courage of your convictions. You have to do what you know in your heart is right.”

  “So how do I handle it?”

  Old Bell hitched up his khaki pants and headed toward the door, shaking his fuzzy white head.

  “Christ Almighty, if you don’t know, lock this son of a bitch up tonight and never come back.”

  Old Bell never looked back. He closed the door behind him and disappeared into the humid night.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Friday morning rain was a melancholy, gray shroud.

  Morgan awoke in its mournful shadow, unsure of the time. Guttural thunder rumbled through his fitful dreams most of the night, and his digital clock-radio blinked perpetual midnight.

  Now, the light in his bedroom was heavy, like transparent slate. With one sleepy eye, he looked at his watch. It was after eight, though it seemed much earlier because the light was barren and no birds were singing outside.

  He reached across the cool sheet, but Claire was already up. Over the sound of whispering rain on the window pane, he heard her heaving in the bathroom. Wave after painful wave welled out of her, each followed by a visceral, reflexive groan as she caught her breath again.

  Then she sobbed and Morgan went to her. She was slumped over the toilet in her panties and a Chicago Cubs tee-shirt. He knelt on the cold tile beside her and held her sweaty forehead as her body convulsed again. All that came out was a glob of sticky, yellow bile that slung sinuously from her bloodless lips.

  Claire wiped it away with a piece of toilet paper and slumped against her husband’s chest, winded.

  “Morning sickness sucks,” she groaned as Morgan mopped her face with a damp washcloth.

  “Maybe it would help to get something on your stomach,” he said. “Can I fix you some breakfast? How about some eggs?”

  Another violent retch shook Claire’s body. After it passed, she pushed Morgan away and stormed back into the gray darkness of the bedroom.

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” she said, her voice angry and weary.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  His question echoed in the astringent, fluorescent loneliness of the bathroom.

  That sepulchral Friday, August second, was the forty-eighth anniversary of Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s disappearance and, in all likelihood, her murder.

  Had she lived, she’d be fifty-seven, maybe a grandmother, Morgan thought. He wondered if children dreamed about growing old, if the life that flashed before their eyes when they died was the life ahead, not the
brief life behind them. He wondered if a child knew how black and permanent death was.

  The old Escort’s wipers thumped back and forth against the inexorable rain in a struggle of rhythm against chaos. Chaos was winning. Morgan’s breath condensed around the inside edges of the windshield, slowly choking his vision like frost on a winter pane.

  Morgan couldn’t see Aimee’s face, although he tried. The newspaper hadn’t printed any picture of her, and given her parents’ circumstances, one might never have existed.

  He’d seen dead faces, more than he’d ever been inclined to count, but he always tried to imagine them in life, before their soul had seeped out of them. Some had been children. He circumvented the sick feeling inside by picturing them playing and smiling.

  Perhaps it was only a trick of the rain that he imagined Bridger’s face as hers. For months after his son died, Morgan tried to shake the vision of his withered, white body in that hospital bed, tried to see him in the places where he’d been most alive. But the only place Bridger still lived was in Morgan’s dreams and he was there night after night, talking about the fishing trip to Michigan, or his mother being too sad about his dying.

  Pulling up in front of the newspaper office, he pulled his baseball cap lower and made a run for the front door. By the time he got inside, he was drenched.

  “A good day for the grass,” he said to Crystal Sandoval as he stood on the worn checkered tile of The Bullet’s foyer. He slapped his wet cap against his thigh. “The ranchers should be happy.”

  “Ranchers won’t ever be happy,” she replied. “If it doesn’t rain, it’s a drought. If it does rain, it’s a flood. They love to suffer.”

  The newsroom was empty. The morning mail had a few checks, some letters to the editor, a few equipment catalogs and a couple dozen useless press releases. His calendar was empty, not because he had nothing to do, but because he’d never been diligent about writing appointments in his calendar. Still, he looked at it every morning, as if he expected some time-management fairy to make notations there every night.

  But he knew he had two appointments. Lunch with Gilmartin’s former lawyer, Simeon Fenwick, now retired. And a meeting with Hamilton Tasker at First Wyoming Bank, as late in the day as he could make it.

  The brass bell on the front door jingled and he looked up.

  Three people were bunched up at the door as Muriel Gumprecht, the director of the Winchester Chamber of Commerce, folded up an umbrella they’d been sharing. In her fifties, with her dyed black hair and beak-like nose, she looked like Margaret Hamilton in a power suit, Morgan thought, and she could be just as appealing when she opened her mouth. She’d had the Chamber job for almost twenty years. Morgan’s late father, a normally unflappable hardware man who had dodged Main Street politics as skillfully as he matched nuts and bolts from their bins, was more blunt in his description: He called her the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Behind her, checking his silk tie for water spots, was Dr. Jake Switzer, Winchester’s only dentist. Known affectionately around town as “Jawbreaker Jake,” his pomposity was only rivaled by his wealth, which, while it was considerable, wasn’t nearly as much as he wanted people to believe. He was a bombastic ex-Marine who wore monogrammed shirts and silk sport coats, played golf four times a week and wintered in Tucson, leaving his dental practice to his salaried son-in-law for the cold months.

  The last in the door was Sleepy Bill Garvis, his flaming red hair matted flat by the rain. His face was immediately familiar to Morgan because it still had a little-boy quality about it, an energetic look that probably helped him get elected to the Town Council. Most redheads he’d known looked younger than they were. Maybe it was the freckles.

  Morgan met them at the swinging wooden gate that separated the newsroom from the entryway. He held out his hand to Muriel and smiled.

  “Welcome, folks,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company this fine morning?”

  Muriel tapped her umbrella on the floor, creating a muddy little puddle on the tile. She wasn’t smiling, but that wasn’t news.

  “We’d like to discuss a small matter with you, Mr. Morgan,” she said loftily. “I’m sure you know everyone. If you have a few minutes ...”

  “Certainly,” Morgan said. “Come into my office.”

  He held the gate open as they passed, then gathered a few rolling chairs around his cluttered desk in the middle of the newsroom. Muriel dispensed with small talk.

  “We have some concerns about a story you are working on,” she said. She sat erect in her chair, her sharp face looming toward Morgan, who rocked uneasily as he stroked an unsharpened pencil.

  “On the Chamber of Commerce?” Morgan asked a little disingenuously, knowing full well which story had the Chamber director’s dudgeon up. If Ham Tasker knew about it, word must have gotten around by now. It was, indeed, a small town.

  “No, Mr. Morgan, we are more concerned with your inquiries about the death of a little Indian girl a long, long time ago,” Muriel said. “Perhaps you could explain to us why this would be news after such a terribly long time. It seems like old news to me.”

  “To begin with, I don’t know if there’s a story or not,” he explained. “I was approached by someone who wanted me to look into it. It’s possible — just possible, mind you — that the wrong man went to prison for that murder.”

  Dr. Switzer, who, uncharacteristically, hadn’t said a word since he sauntered in, couldn’t contain himself another second.

  “That’s just bullshit,” he blurted out, his fleshy face flushing with anger. “And you’re soft-headed if you believe it. That old man is a no-good, lying con-artist bastard. I was a teen-ager here when it happened, and there’s no doubt in my mind, now or then, reasonable or otherwise, that he killed that girl. You’re just trying to sell a few papers by dredging it all up again.”

  “Doctor Switzer, I’m merely looking into it. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a story ...”

  “That’s just a load of crap,” the blustering dentist condescended. “How come we never see anything positive in the media? Always bad news, never anything good. You come back here to our quiet little town and all of a sudden you want to dig up the dead. What’s wrong? The living aren’t interesting enough?”

  “I’m not digging up the dead,” Morgan defended. “Right now, I’m just asking a few questions.”

  “We’ve heard about your investigation,” Switzer said. “And we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that killer is ridden out of town before he kills somebody else.”

  “He’s an old man, and he’s dying,” Morgan said, defending Gilmartin at last. “He spent almost forty-eight years in prison, and there’s a chance he didn’t do it. He only wants to die. Believe me, you’re all completely safe from Neeley Gilmartin.”

  “They should have fried his ass,” Dr. Switzer fumed. “I’d have pulled the switch myself. And now I have to sit here and listen to some bleeding-heart liberal reporter defend the asshole. Pardon my French.”

  Morgan tried to ignore Switzer, who was renowned for getting his way through intimidation. Morgan tried to escape his withering line of fire.

  “What’s your interest in this thing? Why are so many people so upset about me asking some questions?”

  Sleepy Bill Garvis, who’d been sitting quietly with his hands in his lap, finally piped up. His unruly hair looked as if he’d combed it with a rake, and a cowlick sprouted on one side like orange crabgrass.

  “It’s just not good for the community to have this old wound opened up,” he said, his calloused milkman’s fingers still laced together primly. “We’ve seen some hard times and more are ahead. Why bring up bad memories? It’s like re-victimizing the victim, only it’s a whole town. Lots of people think this incident is better left forgotten. We simply wanted to come down and see if we could reach some kind of a ... well, an understanding.”

  “An understanding?” Morgan asked.

  The three visitors exchanged n
ervous glances. Sleepy Bill wasn’t sure if he was supposed to say anything more, so after a moment, he settled back into his chair and, as if on some silent stage cue, Muriel spoke for all of them.

  “Is there any chance you’ll consider abandoning your so-called ‘inquiry’ today?” she asked.

  Morgan weighed the question briefly. The combative tone of her question offended him.

  “No,” he said.

  Muriel pinched her lips together, as if she were contemplating a wicked witch’s curse. She unfolded a piece of paper from her black leather bag, a sort of briefcase-cum-handbag.

  “You leave us with little choice in this matter,” she said as she handed Morgan the letter, creased lengthwise in three neat pleats. “We are prepared to suggest an advertising boycott of The Bullet to all our Chamber members. Given your current financial difficulties, a boycott could very well close your doors, and we really wouldn’t want to see that happen. But it’s better than letting you drag this town down with your yellow journalism.”

  Morgan read the boycott letter drafted to the merchants of Winchester. It spared no vitriol, asking merchants to “make a bold statement against big-city, tabloid-style sensationalism designed to arouse the public for the sole purpose of selling newspapers.” A little farther down, it suggested businesses withhold advertising or subscriptions until “the attitude is changed.”

  Morgan re-folded the letter and tossed it on the edge of his desk closest to Muriel Gumprecht. It sat there in no-man’s land, nobody touching it.

  “I imagine this newspaper has been a good member of the Chamber since it began,” he said. He felt the blood rise in his neck and his jaw begin to stiffen, but he kept his voice calm. “So I’m perplexed by this attempt to hijack our editorial responsibility with your blackmail.”

  “It’s not blackmail,” Dr. Switzer grumbled. “I resent the implication ...”