The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  “If Gilmartin didn’t do it, who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Morgan’s suspicion took a sharp new turn.

  “Could Madigan have been covering up a murder?”

  “We’ll never know. Maybe. Then again, maybe he was just an opportunist, looking to plug a varmint predator. Either way, he was a damn smart fella.”

  “How long have you known all this?”

  “Since you asked me for the file. It was in my dad’s private papers, stuck in a box in my cellar.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you do something?”

  “By the time I knew, Gilmartin was already out of prison. He wasn’t gonna live long enough for the county attorney to file a motion, much less for another trial. Wasn’t much more I could have done for the guy.”

  “You could have cleared the man’s name in two minutes. No fucking press releases or legal briefs. Clean. Why didn’t you?”

  The sheriff pursed his lips and stared at the floor, like a little boy caught in a big lie.

  “The worst kind of politics,” he demurred. “Money. If it wasn’t for Buck Madigan, my campaign wouldn’t have two nickels to rub together. Gilmartin was gonna die and the whole goddamned whirlwind was goin’ to disappear if I just stood my ground. I only needed to stall you until the old man died and the whole thing would go away.”

  Morgan’s gut was twisted in a knot. Gilmartin came to him seeking redemption, but found doubt. He’d been offered the uncommon chance to change one man’s life — the only thing he’d ever really yearned to do as a newspaperman — and he’d walked away from it. Now, Gilmartin might die never knowing. Hell, Morgan wasn’t even sure if the old man had survived the night. He wanted to vomit.

  “So why are you telling me now?”

  “Because I got a scoop for you. I’m finished. I’m pullin’ out of the sheriff’s race.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “When I was a kid, I only wanted to be like my dad. He happened to be the sheriff, so I wanted to be the sheriff, too. But last night, while I laid there in that bed and prayed to God I hadn’t killed my best friend, I knew I wasn’t like my dad at all.”

  Morgan swung his legs to the side of the bed and looked for his shoes.

  “Trey, listen to me. This thing isn’t over. I think the killer is still alive.”

  “Alive? Here? How do you know?”

  “There’s no time to explain. I need your help now, more than ever.”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “I need you to take me home, then you’ve got to find out who delivered that judge’s order in the file we were looking at last night. Check the number. It was issued on the same day Aimee disappeared: August second, 1948.”

  “Who the hell you think I am? Barney Fife?” the sheriff asked indignantly. “I already looked.”

  “And?”

  “Our logs say the paper was delivered by Wes Crockett, a deputy back then.”

  “The old guy who used to bust up the beer parties with the dogs? What do you know about him?”

  “Boy Marine, straight arrow. Enlisted in the Corps when he was fifteen and saw action all over Hell. Never got a scratch. By the time my dad hired him as a deputy right after the Second World War, they say he was already an old man, all of twenty-one.”

  “Could he be involved?”

  “Wes Crockett? No way. Real quiet and soft-spoken for a grunt. Never talked about the war. He was the one that convinced my dad we needed a canine unit, so they called him Deputy Dawg. Forty years he worked here, then just decided that was enough.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  Kerrigan huffed.

  “Christ, Jeff. Give me some credit, will ya? Yeah, he’s still alive. Retired back in ‘Eighty-five. He took his dogs and bought himself a cabin somewhere on the Oregon coast. No phone. I got the local county mounties tryin’ to contact him right now.”

  “Do your logs say who got the paper? If Kate and Charlie were out riding fence, your deputy sure didn’t give it to them.”

  “The logs don’t say. If Wes Crockett can’t remember, we’re screwed. I expect to hear back any time now.”

  Morgan stood up. Blood pulsed against the fresh gash in his scalp. Suddenly, he was light-headed, unsteady.

  “Whoa, you better sit down ‘til you get your sea-legs,” Kerrigan said, taking a step toward him.

  “I’m okay,” Morgan reassured him, taking a deep breath and shaking the cobwebs out of his brain. “I have to get moving.”

  “Where are you gonna be if I hear from Crockett?”

  “I’ll be at the hospital,” Morgan said. “Do yourself a favor: Pray that Gilmartin is still alive.”

  The sheriff dropped him at the curb in front of his house and sped away. Morgan went inside, changed his blood-stained clothes and called the hospital. A nurse in ICU told him Gilmartin was indeed still alive, but failing fast.

  He searched frantically for his car keys and remembered, finally, he’d left them in the Escort.

  The car sputtered churlishly, refusing to turn over. Morgan held his breath and gritted his teeth as he pumped the accelerator, hard. It defied him openly. His broken fingers ached as he wrestled with the key. He pressed the entire weight of his animosity on the pedal before the engine finally caught.

  “Fuck you,” he cursed, and wished it had been parked only a few feet closer to the explosion at The Bullet. It would have been a delightful casualty.

  He found a parking place on a downhill slope in the hospital’s near-empty lot and backed in, in case he needed a helping hand from gravity to push-start the sinister little shitbox.

  The receptionist stared at Morgan as he hurried through the door, headed determinedly toward the intensive care wing. An ICU nurse stopped him briefly in the corridor, but Dr. Snyder came out of Neeley Gilmartin’s room before Morgan could push his way past her.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked, surveying his damaged face under the bright lights of the hallway.

  “You should see the other guy,” he said.

  “Your eye needs some attention.”

  Morgan brushed her off.

  “Is he conscious?”

  “He’s floating.”

  “Can he hear me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I need to tell him something and I need to know he heard.”

  Dr. Snyder glanced at the large clock on the nurses station wall. It was not yet eight a.m.

  “He’s heavily medicated right now. The pain is getting worse. We’ve got him on a morphine drip,” She glanced at his chart. “He is awake less and less now.”

  “Can he still talk?”

  “He’s been unresponsive. He hasn’t tried to communicate since you were here yesterday. His brain is diverting all its energy and resources to keeping his body alive. And, without the morphine, he’ll be in great pain.”

  “I want to see him.”

  Morgan went in. The air in the room was repulsive. Gilmartin’s face, shriveled beneath his oxygen mask, was turned away from the door. But Morgan could hear his unnatural breathing.

  Morgan sat down beside the bed and touched the old man’s frail hand. It was cold.

  “Neeley. It’s Jeff. Can you hear me?”

  Gilmartin didn’t move. Morgan looked at the doctor, then spoke again, squeezing the old man’s hand a little harder, until his own wounded hand hurt.

  “Neeley, I have news. Please ...”

  Nothing.

  “Maybe later,” Dr. Snyder said.

  “There’s no time,” Morgan said. “He’s waited too long already.”

  The old man’s chest jerked involuntarily with each breath, starved for air. Morgan recognized its face. Death was at hand.

  “Maybe in a few hours. We can reduce the morphine drip and maybe he’ll rise back to the surface. I’m sorry.”

  Morgan buried his head in his arms against Gilmartin’s bedrail. For a long time, there was only the invariable pulse of the machines t
hat kept him alive.

  “Is he dreaming?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, if he’s in a dream sleep.”

  “The morphine doesn’t kill his dreams?”

  “No, not necessarily.”

  “Do you dream?”

  The personal question caught Dr. Snyder by surprise. She crossed her arms across her breasts as an unconscious sign of her uneasiness.

  “How do you mean?”

  “When you sleep.”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “What if you didn’t? What if sleep was just another form of death, all black?”

  “Sleep is also an escape from pain. It’s not death, but life without all the hurt.”

  Dr. Snyder’s beeper interrupted them. “I have to go,” she said.

  “Can I wait?”

  “Certainly,” she said as she left. Her voice had softened.

  For twenty minutes, he held Gilmartin’s hand. He wasn’t particularly religious, but he prayed briefly to a God he had lost faith in. He thought about his son, Bridger, and wept. But Gilmartin never stirred.

  “Mr. Morgan?” a voice whispered from the door. A nurse had stuck her head inside.

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a call at the desk for you.”

  He followed her across the corridor and she pointed to an unhooked receiver on the counter. It was Trey Kerrigan.

  “How’s the old guy?”

  “He’s alive. Barely. What do you have?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. A Siskiyou County deputy found Wes Crockett walkin’ his dogs on the beach and patched him through on the car phone.”

  “He remember anything?”

  “At first, he just laughed. The old fart said he couldn’t recall what he had for lunch yesterday, much less fifty years back.”

  “Shit.”

  “But just talkin’ about the murder must have jiggered his memory. He said the first time he ever saw that shack was when he went out to help look for the girl after she disappeared. He never met the parents until that night. He never took the paper out to the ranch.”

  “He’s sure about that?”

  “Wes Crockett was born sure.”

  “So who got the paper?”

  “Hold on,” Kerrigan said, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. When he came back, there was frustrated urgency in his voice.

  “Goddammit, I gotta take this call. Long distance. Hang around there a few minutes. Don’t move. I’ll call right back.”

  The phone clicked, its dial tone a monotonous flatline.

  The red second hand on the hospital clock swept smoothly and inexorably around its face, too slow for Morgan, too fast for Gilmartin. He couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t speed it up. He watched it circle more than three times, an eternity and an instant, before the phone pulsed softly again.

  The nurse pushed a blinking button to answer the call, then handed him the receiver.

  Kerrigan was on the line again. He spoke deliberately, as if he were sorting it out himself as he talked.

  “That was Crockett calling back. Damned if he didn’t make that deputy get me back on the line.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Somethin’ funny. He told me he always put the recipient’s initials in the log. I looked and, sure as hell, there’s two little letters under that entry on August second, 1948. But neither one of us could match ‘em up with anybody in the case.”

  “What are they?” Morgan asked.

  “Looks like ST,” the sheriff said. “Maybe SF. Wes woulda flunked penmanship for sure. Anyway, it could be somebody long gone.”

  There was a prolonged silence. Morgan closed his eyes and tried to see a name he recognized. His lips formed silently around each one.

  “Oh, god,” he said, his eyes popping wide.

  “What is it?” Kerrigan said.

  “SF,” he said. “It’s Simeon Fenwick.”

  “Fenwick?”

  “He must have been Aimee’s guardian ad litem. Oh, Jesus. He was there that day. His name would have been in that sealed file.”

  Kerrigan was still confused.

  “Fenwick?”

  “Trey, I don’t have time to tell you everything I know, but you need to get a favor from your buddy Ham Tasker down at the bank.”

  “What?”

  “Find out if Fenwick has made any big cash transactions, more or less regularly, just before August second every year. Check for wires, withdrawals, transfers of any kind. Go back ten years or so.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I’ll explain later. Just do it! Then wait for me to call.”

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “I’m coming back into town,” he said. “I have to pick up something at my house. Just go.”

  Morgan lied. He wasn’t going home.

  Simeon Fenwick’s modest house was on the southern edge of town. A veil of meticulously groomed poplars obscured his life from anyone who might pass.

  The driveway was a narrow gravel path between two dense lilac hedges, and Morgan didn’t see it until he’d already passed. He hit the brakes and shifted into reverse, but popped the clutch too soon. The Escort died in the middle of the street and refused to start again. Cursing, Morgan left it and walked up to the house.

  Fenwick’s new, champagne-beige Buick Century was parked in the morning shade on the west side of the house and the garage door was open. A small sprinkler sputtered in one corner of the freshly mowed lawn.

  Morgan rang the doorbell. A moment passed before Simeon Fenwick opened the door, long enough for him to start the micro-cassette recorder in his shirt pocket. The old lawyer was wearing a crisp white shirt, natty red suspenders and a tartan-plaid bow tie. He seemed surprised to see Morgan on his sunny porch.

  “Well, good morning, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “I was expecting the lawn boy. He was here this morning, and did a dreadful job of gathering the clippings. Children today seem to have little regard for quality work. However, it’s a pleasant surprise to see you again.”

  Morgan glanced at the broad expanse of grass behind him and saw nothing unusual.

  “I am very sorry to hear about your newspaper,” Fenwick continued. “I will miss it.”

  “I need to speak with you, Mr. Fenwick.”

  “Please come in.”

  Fenwick’s house was painstakingly neat, uncluttered by the things that might define him. There were no magazines on the coffee table, no family pictures on the wall, no rumpled rugs, worn rockers or fading flowers in Mason jar vases. There were no telltale odors of breakfast or even oil soap on the polished hardwood floors, no sounds other than the wooden tapping of a magnificent grandfather clock in the hallway. The space was as sterile as the man.

  “Coffee?” Fenwick offered first, but then apologized. “Forgive me. As I recall you drink tea, but I’m afraid I have none of the artificial sugar you favor.”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “Please sit,” Fenwick said, staring at Morgan’s bandaged hands. “It looks as though you’ve had an awful accident.”

  “Oh, I just got my fingers caught where they didn’t belong.”

  “That can be painful. At any rate, what can I do for you this morning?”

  Fenwick sat on a princely wingback chair without seeming too comfortable in it. Morgan sat on the edge of the couch.

  “Mr. Fenwick, I just have a few questions about the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse.”

  “As I said at our luncheon, there’s not much I can talk about. I’m sorry, but I hope you understand.”

  Morgan laced his splinted fingers together. His palms were sweating.

  “You see, I need to understand something about the day she disappeared.”

  “Then you should consult with your friend, the sheriff, about such investigatory details.”

  “I’ve done that and I was surprised to discover that you were Aimee’s court-appointed guardian in an unrelated case. How is it possible that you also could
represent her alleged killer?”

  The old lawyer took off his round glasses and cleaned them nervously with a white handkerchief. His hands trembled.

  “It’s a very small town, Mr. Morgan, as you know. Very simply, the judge had few choices. No other attorney wanted Mr. Gilmartin for a client. His was a futile case.”

  “But you did, even though you had the best reason of all to walk away from it. A potential conflict.”

  “Through no fault of my own, I assure you, my previous history with the girl was apparently overlooked. And at the time of her death, I was not her guardian.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The guardianship had ended.”

  “When exactly?”

  Fenwick face was drawn, beginning to pale. It wasn’t the question he expected.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A month before? A week before? Give me a ballpark estimate.”

  “It was a very long time ago. I don’t remember.”

  It was Morgan’s only ace and he feared he was playing it too early.

  “I know. Shall I tell you?”

  Fenwick nodded.

  “The judge issued the order the same day Aimee disappeared. The same day.”

  “What a tragic coincidence. I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Really? Now that’s interesting. A deputy says he handed you the order to deliver to her parents.”

  “That’s simply not true.”

  Morgan looked around the immaculate room.

  “That’s what sticks in my craw. That little piece of paper. That wouldn’t be like you, Mr. Fenwick. Not like you at all. It would be highly irregular to leave such an important thing unresolved, wouldn’t it? Very messy.”

  Fenwick’s breathing quickened.

  “You can prove none of this poppycock.”

  “I’m not a lawyer, Mr. Fenwick. I’m not even a cop. I’m just a reporter asking some questions. I don’t even have a paper where I can print a story. So we’re just talking here. What is it I can’t prove?”

  “I’d like you leave now.”