The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

“Well, damn it, there’s got to be a reason.”

  “Sure, there does. There’s a reason for everything. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out what it is. You talked to all these kibitzers?”

  “Yeah. Nobody saw anything. Just the fire blazing up. They all came running from wherever they were, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do. They just stood around and watched until the stack burned away enough to show the body. About that time, Rudy and I got here.”

  “Be sure to get their names in case we want to talk to them again. I’m going up to see Crawley.”

  I went back across the field and the pasture and up the long lane between barbed wire fences into the barnyard. Darkness was gathering and deepening between the barn and the house. There was still no light burning inside the house, but I saw a tiny red eye glowing angrily in the dense darkness of the screened-in back porch, watching me as I crossed the yard. When I drew near, I heard the thin creaking of rockers on the wood floor. Crawley was there alone in the darkness, smoking and rocking and waiting. I went up the steps and took hold of the latch of the screen door.

  “Crawley?” I said.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “It’s me. Colby Adams.”

  “I can see you, Colby. Come on in.”

  I went on inside and found another rocker beside the one Crawley was sitting in. Crawley kept on rocking and smoking. He didn’t say anything, still waiting.

  “Tough luck, Crawley,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “She wouldn’t do right,” he said. “She kept asking for trouble, and she finally found it. More trouble than she could handle. Maybe I’ll miss her for a while.”

  “Chances are she was murdered, Crawley.”

  “Chances are. Nothing else occurred to me.”

  “You know anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”

  “I might have. Lots of times. No one had a better reason.”

  “Did you do it, Crawley?”

  He sighed in the darkness and laughed softly after the sigh. There didn’t seem to be any bitterness in the successive sounds. They were expressions, I thought, of a black depth of tiredness.

  “Not me, Colby. I might have, eventually, but I never got around to it.”

  “All right. That disposes of you. How about someone else?”

  “You want to play eeny, meeny, miney, mo? I don’t.”

  “Maybe we ought to stick to current affairs.”

  “Don’t ask me, Colby. I quit trying to keep up quite a while ago.”

  “You’re not being much help, Crawley.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be. I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t want it to end this way for her, not really, but now that it has, whoever did it, I can’t seem to work up any yen for justice or revenge or anything like that. Probably she deserved what she got.”

  “That’s pretty rough on her, Crawley.”

  “I don’t think so. Nothing hurts her now. Nothing will help her.”

  “You always try to catch a murderer. Especially if you happen to be a cop.”

  “I know. You got your job.”

  “Sure I have, Crawley, and I’d better get on with it. You willing to tell me what you can?”

  “You ask the questions, Colby. I’ll answer.”

  “All right. When was the last time you saw Faye alive?”

  “This morning. About nine o’clock, I guess. I’d been doing some work around the barn. About that time, about nine, I decided to go repair some fence that’s been needing it for a while. I went into the house and told Faye I was going, and she said all right, that she thought she’d go into town later. I went back to the barn and got a roll of wire and some tools and left. I didn’t come in at noon. I wasn’t hungry. I stayed on the job until after four in the afternoon, and it was close to five when I got back here. Faye wasn’t home, but the car and the truck were both here, and so I assumed someone had come and picked her up. It wasn’t unusual for that to happen. I ate a cold supper by myself and sat here on the porch, right where I’m sitting now, until the fire started down there in the field.”

  “Where is this fence you mended?”

  “West of here. Over on the section line.”

  “Not close to the creek or the field where the fire started?”

  “No. A long way. You know where the section line is, Colby.”

  “Did Faye tell you where she was going in town?”

  “No. She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”

  “She didn’t mention anyone picking her up here?”

  “Faye hardly ever told me what she planned to do. When she did, she usually lied.”

  The lights of a car flashed past the side of the house, picking up the edge of the barn and flooding the lane beyond. The car itself followed, the tired ambulance driven by Emil Coker, undertaker and coroner. It went past the barn and stopped while someone got out and opened the gate to the lane. It went on down the lane and stopped again at the far end while someone got out again and opened the gate to the pasture. It moved on across the pasture, red tail lights bobbing.

  I stood up and said, “There goes Emil.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was curiously flat. “You’ll want to go down and talk to him, I guess.”

  “No. Not tonight. Tomorrow will be soon enough. It isn’t likely Emil will have anything to tell me that I can’t guess.”

  “Sure. She’s dead. Someone killed her. You don’t need Emil to tell you.”

  I walked over to the screen door and opened it, hesitating before passing through. I thought about saying again that I was sorry, but it didn’t seem to be necessary. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the planes of his face flat and hard in the brief flare. The descending darkness was swollen and throbbing with the sounds of the night—an owl’s cry, a chorus of frogs, the singing of a thousand cicadas.

  “Good-night, Crawley,” I said.

  “Good-night,” he said.

  I turned the patrol car in the yard and drove down the drive to the road and down the road to town.

  CHAPTER 2.

  I drove along the main drag to the Hotel Bonny, a five story brick building standing tall on a corner. The street, in the slack period between five and eight, was almost deserted. Angling into a parking slot in front of the hotel, I got out and went into the lobby and down a couple of steps into the taproom. The taproom, like the street outside, was idling through the early evening interlude when people were engaged in other places. Hobby Langerham was behind the bar. He was eating a roast beef sandwich, washing it down with Schlitz beer. Hobby was a shrewd guy with sharp eyes, built like one of the kegs he tapped for the customers, and he had been behind the Bonny bar for a dozen years or more. He pulled a long shift, twelve to twelve, opening to closing, and I knew from experience that he generally knew who came and went at approximately what times.

  “Hello, Colby,” he said. “How’s the law?”

  “Can’t complain,” I said. “Draw me one, Hobby.”

  He drew the beer and shoved it across the bar and waved away the two-bit piece I offered in payment. I always offered, and he always waved it away, and I don’t know why we kept going through the routine, unless it was just to keep the record straight.

  “Thanks, Hobby,” I said. “This one I need.”

  “You got a problem, Colby?”

  “Looks like murder. I guess you could call that a problem.”

  Hobby sucked in his breath, and his little eyes glittered in the soft light of the room, but he didn’t make a big demonstration out of his reaction. Hobby never did.

  “I’d call it a problem, Colby. Anyone I know?”

  “Come off, Hobby. You know everybody.”

  “Okay. So it’s someone I know. Maybe it’s an official secret or s
omething.”

  “Nothing’s secret, official or otherwise, except the name of the one who did it. I wish I could tell you. Was Faye Bratton in here this afternoon, Hobby?”

  “You mean it was Faye who got it?”

  “That’s right. Faye Bratton.”

  “Well, by God, it couldn’t have happened to anyone who tried for it harder. She was made to be murdered, that Faye was.”

  “Maybe. I’ve got to take the position that no one is made to be murdered, not even wanton wives. Was she in here, Hobby?”

  “Briefly. Fairly early. Alone.”

  “How briefly?”

  “I didn’t hold a watch on her. Say half an hour. Long enough to take her time drinking a couple of bourbon highballs.”

  “How early?”

  “When she got here? Let’s see. Not earlier than two. Not later than two-thirty.”

  “You say she was alone?”

  “That’s what I said. She came alone, she left alone.”

  “She meet anyone here?”

  “No.”

  “She talk with anyone?”

  “Sure. Me.”

  “No one else?”

  “No one. Matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone else here most of the time. Couple of guests of the hotel came in for maybe fifteen minutes. Drank a beer each. I took them to be salesmen. Not regulars, though. I’d never seen them before.”

  “Did she say anything about meeting anyone later, after she left here?”

  “She said she was going down the street to see Dolly Noble. That’s all.”

  “Down to Dolly’s beauty parlor?”

  “I took her to mean there. She didn’t say so.”

  “That’s all she said about where she intended to go and what she intended to do?”

  “That’s all.”

  “How did she seem? I mean, did she seem nervous or excited or anything unusual at all?”

  “Faye always gave the impression of looking for something or someone. Something or someone for excitement. Like a woman on the prowl. Tending bar, even in a place like this, you learn to know them. You can almost smell them. Nothing unusual about Faye this afternoon, I’d say. Just Faye the way she always was.”

  “She talk about anything that seems significant, looking back?”

  “I can’t remember anything.” He creased his brow, which ran up and back over the crown of his head, which he shook slowly sidewise. “Just talk, the kind of stuff you pass back and forth across a bar. No name was mentioned except Dolly’s.”

  “Faye came in here pretty often, didn’t she?”

  “She was in town often. I’d guess she came in here everytime she was in town. She was a good drinker, Faye was. She took bourbon in water with one ice cube. Short on the water. I’ve seen her a little high, but never what I’d call drunk.”

  “Was she in the habit of meeting anyone here lately? Any special person, that is?”

  “Like a man, you mean?”

  “A man will do.”

  “There wasn’t any. No one special. No one she was meeting by arrangement, I’ll swear. You know how Faye was, Colby. She never ran from a man if she came across one. If there happened to be one here, she was congenial.”

  “I know. It doesn’t help much.”

  “Maybe it does. In a negative way. If Faye was involved with a particular guy in a really big way, he’d probably be the one she wouldn’t be congenial with in a public bar. You see what I mean?”

  “I see what you mean. You’re real clever to think of that, Hobby, but it sure as hell doesn’t narrow the field any. I can hardly suspect every man in the county that Faye hasn’t met up with one time or another in this taproom.”

  “With Faye it’s going to be pretty hard to narrow the field much any way you look at it. Faye just naturally took in a lot of territory. You going to tell me what happened to her, Colby, or is it something you’re sitting on?”

  “I’m not sitting on anything, Hobby. News just hasn’t had time to get around yet. Someone set fire to a haystack behind Crawley’s house this evening, out in a field near the creek. It attracted several men and kids from the area, including Virgil Carpenter and Rudy Squires, besides Crawley himself. When the fire burned down some and the smoke had lifted, they saw a body in there. Virgil forked it out, and it was Faye.”

  “Jesus! You mean someone killed her and put her in the stack and set it on fire?”

  “Looks that way, superficially. There are some crazy things about it.”

  “It’s all crazy, if you ask me. How was Faye killed?”

  “I’m not sure yet. The body was burned pretty bad. Emil Coker’s got it now, but I don’t suppose he’ll find out anything significant. Her head didn’t seem to be bashed in, and I couldn’t see any wounds. Maybe Emil will see something when he takes a close look at her on a table, but I doubt it. We’ll call in a doc for a post mortem, of course. It’s my guess she was strangled.”

  “Why strangled in particular?”

  “I don’t know. It probably happened in a quarrel about something. It seems to me the way a man would likely kill a woman under those circumstances, not having planned to kill her in advance. I might be wrong, of course, but it’s the way I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “A guy would have to be out of his head to do something that crazy.”

  “Faye drove men out of their heads. She was good at it.”

  “You’re right there. How’s old Crawley taking it?”

  “Virg and Rudy said he was busted up pretty bad down by the fire. When I talked to him at the house later, he wasn’t. He talked calm and sensible. He said he might miss Faye a little.”

  “It’s a wonder Crawley didn’t kill her himself a long time ago, and that’s God’s truth.”

  “Well, maybe he finally got around to it. He says he didn’t, of course.”

  I drained my schooner and set it on the bar. Hobby picked it up and made a motion toward the tap.

  “You want another, Colby?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve got a place or two to go, Hobby. Keep an ear cocked to the bar talk tonight, will you? Something might drop. Chances are nothing will, but you never can tell.”

  I went up the pair of steps and through the lobby and turned right on the main drag. Under lights, the street was beginning to look alive for a few more hours of this particular day. There was a moderate traffic of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and Wheeler’s Drug Store, next corner up from the Bonny, had begun to gather its nightly accretion of loafers and nylon inspectors. Passing, I wondered how often Faye Bratton’s nylons had been inspected and approved at this place to the sound of soft whistles, but it was nothing I gave a lot of attention to, just wondered in passing. In the next block, about half way between corners, I came to the narrow front of Dolly Noble’s beauty parlor, and found it dark. It was after closing hour, of course, but sometimes Dolly made night appointments with working girls, and I thought she might have made one tonight. It didn’t really matter, anyhow, for Dolly had a small apartment upstairs over the parlor, and I went up narrow stairs from the street into a narrow hall above, lighted by a single globe, and knocked on Dolly’s door. After a minute or two, she opened it.

  “Hello, Dolly,” I said. “What’s new?”

  “Nothing new,” she said, “except I’m getting a call from the sheriff. That’s new. What do you want, Colby?”

  “Let me come in and tell you.”

  “Why not? You’ll have to make it snappy, though. I’m expecting someone.”

  I went past her into the living room of her little apartment, and she closed the door and sat down, crossing her legs, which were nice. She had a one-ton conditioner stuck in one of the windows overlooking the street below, and that was nice, too. It made the apartment nice
and cool, and it was pleasant to sit there in the chair she’d offered and sneak a few looks at her nice legs. It was a lot better than standing in front of Wheeler’s.

  “I’ll try to get out of the way before your date arrives,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s no one that important, Colby. Just Faye Bratton.”

  “Faye’s coming here?”

  “She ought to be here now. She’s late.”

  “What have you and Faye got scheduled for tonight?”

  “That could be a personal question, Colby. You asking for a personal reason, or is it official?”

  “What makes you think it might be official?”

  “Nothing makes me think so. Hell, I don’t mind telling you, either way. We’re going to have dinner at the Bonny and go to a movie. Big night. Faye gets bored out on that damn farm with Crawley Bratton. She comes in and spends an evening with me every now and then. Sometimes she spends the night and goes home in the morning.”

  I sat and looked at Dolly for a few seconds without speaking. Shorter than average, she wore spike heels to make herself look taller than she was, and someday she’d either be fat or haggard from diets and reducing exercises, but she was neither yet. Her blond hair, cut short and shaggy, had the benefit of her best rinse. Thanks to the treatments and tricks of her trade, Dolly managed to make herself a good-looking woman. Lots of men claim to consider this sort of deception unfair, but not me. The time comes for all women when it’s a good thing to know the tricks, and I’m all for the ones who learn early.

  “Faye won’t be here,” I said.

  “Why not?” she said. “Has something happened to her?”

  “The last thing that ever will. She’s dead. Someone killed her.”

  She sat staring at me with her mouth hanging slightly open, her eyes wide and sick with sudden shock. Under the eyes and on her cheeks, blue shadows and crimson paint stood out against drained flesh in stark and ugly relief. I watched for another sign than shock, but there was none. No fear, no anger, no slight beginning of grief. In her life, I thought, Faye Bratton had incited often the easy expression of love, but now in death she had taken away nothing that would be missed for more than a little while, if at all, and she had left not even sorrow. Thinking of Faye, I watched Dolly, and after a while Dolly’s breath escaped in a long sigh. The tip of a pink tongue slipped out to wet her lips.