“What did she say to him?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t close enough to hear.”
“What did you do when he started choking her?”
“I ran. I didn’t want to mix in any trouble like that. I got scared and cut out of there in a hurry.”
“Where did you go?”
“Just up the creek. Just fooling around. When I came back quite a while later, Mrs. Bratton and Fergus Cass were both gone, so I figured he probably hadn’t hurt her much, and I went up in the field to the haystack and had a smoke, like I admitted, but when I heard in town that Mrs. Bratton’s body had been in the hay and burned, I knew he’d killed her and put her there, and she’d been in the hay right while I was having the smoke that set the stack on fire.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell somebody about it?”
“I was scared, that’s why. I didn’t want to get mixed into any trouble like that.”
He was telling the truth, all right. He’d never have told it if I hadn’t caught him and scared him into it, but he was telling it now to save his scurvy little hide, and it was just what I needed. True, he hadn’t actually seen Fergus Cass kill Faye Bratton, but he’d seen him choking her, and what he’d actually seen and what he might later remember seeing when a sharp county attorney got hold of him could damn well be two different stories.
“You’re mixed now,” I said, “and you’re mixed good. You come along with me.”
“Where you taking me?”
“I’m taking you to jail, that’s where. You’re what we call a material witness, you little devil, and I’m not taking any chances on your skinning out on me.”
“You can’t arrest me, Mr. Adams. I ain’t done anything to be arrested for.”
“Who said I was arresting you? I’m just sort of holding you in protective custody to save myself the trouble of running you down later. Come on. Let’s move out of here.”
We walked up across the field and the pasture to the car at the foot of the lane. I maneuvered the car between the barbed wire fences, turning it around, and drove up toward the house with Snuffy beside me in the front seat. When I got out to close the gate to the lane, after driving through, Crawley Bratton came out of the barn and stood there watching us. He looked tired and gaunt, his eyes darkly circled and his coarse, thick hair hanging down over his forehead from under his battered hat. Suddenly, walking toward him, I felt a sharp stab of genuine pity.
“Who’s that you got with you, Colby?” he said. “It looks like Snuffy Cleaker.”
“That’s who it is,” I said. “I’m taking him back to town.”
“What for? He been getting himself into trouble again?”
“Chances are he’s getting someone else into trouble this time, Crawley. He was down there at the creek yesterday when Faye was killed. He set the stack on fire.”
“Why would he want to do a thing like that?”
“He didn’t aim to. It was an accident. The point is, he saw something before the fire.”
“Is that right? What did he see?”
“He saw Faye being choked.”
“You mean he saw who killed her?”
He was looking across at Snuffy in the car, not at me, and his expression was calm and tired, no anger in it—not even, it seemed to me, much interest. After a while, he sighed and rubbed the back of a hand across his eyes.
“Who was it, Colby?” he said.
“I’m not ready to say yet. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”
He didn’t protest, and I still had the strange impression that he really wasn’t very interested, but then I had the sudden notion that it wasn’t really lack of interest at all. It was only, I thought, that he’d already guessed. Crawley was no fool, and it was entirely possible that he had known, or guessed, that Faye had been meeting Fergus Cass down by the creek, and it was almost certain, if he had, that he’d also guessed who’d killed her. Some deep and distorted anger and shame and sense of pride had kept him from making any accusation or showing in any way the knowledge of her affair. It was Crawley’s way. He’d either keep quiet and do nothing, or he’d kill Fergus Cass himself, when he was completely sure, in his own time.
“Besides, Crawley,” I said, “You don’t need me to tell you. You know as well as I do who it was.”
“Sure, Colby.” He sighed again, rubbing his hand across his eyes as if they pained him. “I know.”
I turned and started back for the car, and when I was almost there he called after me.
“Thanks, Colby,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
CHAPTER 4.
Rudy was in the office with his feet on the desk. When I came in with Snuffy, he dropped his feet and stood up looking as guilty as a kid caught in a cookie jar. Between Snuffy and Rudy, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to choose. Rudy was cleaner, but not much brighter.
“I’ve got a guest for you, Rudy,” I said. “Tell Lard there’ll be another one for dinner.”
“Snuffy?” Rudy said. “You mean Snuffy Cleaker?”
“That’s right. Lock him up.”
“What for?”
“Never mind what for. Just pick out a nice cell and put him in it.”
“Sure, Colby, if you say so.”
“I say so. Where’s Virg?”
“He went up north in the other patrol car to investigate a brawl. Someone got cut up.”
“Okay. We had any word from Emil Coker?”
“I was going to tell you about that. Emil called and said he figured Faye Bratton was strangled before she was burned in that fire. He says he’ll have a doctor work on her.”
“Good old Emil. Tell him to take his own sweet time if he calls again. No hurry at all.”
“I’ll do that, Colby. You going away somewhere again?”
“I’m going out to the Cass place.”
“What for?”
“Never mind what for.”
“Where you been, Colby? I’ve been wondering.”
“Never mind where I’ve been.”
“All right, Colby. If you say so. You got any orders or anything?”
“Yeah. Take care of Snuffy and keep your God-damn feet off my desk.”
I went out and got in the patrol car and drove west again. This time I turned off before reaching Crawley Bratton’s and drove around the country square to the front of the Cass place. I didn’t really figure Fergus would be there, to tell the truth. I thought I’d have to swear out a warrant and put out an alarm and have him brought back from wherever he’d got on the way to wherever he was running. That was my mistake, to my surprise. He was there. I found him sitting on a block of wood in the sun in front of a corn crib. He was dressed in a clean white shirt and a pair of blue jeans, his feet, in heavy white socks, shoved into a pair of soft black loafers. He looked lean and dark and handsome and mean. He had the cut of cruelty in his thin face, and I saw what Dolly meant by the glaze of blindness in his eyes. It was in them as he watched me approach.
“Hello, Sheriff,” he said. “Uncle Elmo said you were looking for me last night.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I waited till midnight.”
“That’s too bad. I didn’t get home till two.”
“You mind telling me where you were?”
“Unless you’ve got a good reason for knowing, I do.”
“I’ve got a good reason, but let it go. I’m more interested in knowing where you were in the afternoon. Between three and five, say.”
“I suppose you’ve got a good reason for knowing that, too?”
“The best. I figure Faye Bratton was killed sometime during those two hours.”
“I heard about Faye. Too bad. She was a common little bitch, but a looker. I hate to think of her b
eing dead.”
“Do you? I can understand that. Seems to me you’d hate it more than most, having been so close.”
“Oh.” He shrugged and smiled at a secret joke. “I thought you’d probably found out about that. I couldn’t think of any other reason why you’d want to talk to me.”
“Such things have a way of being found out.”
“I guess they do. It’s a shame, too. Causes a lot of unnecessary trouble. We did our best to be discreet.”
“You must have been, to tell the truth. Only two or three people knew about it, apparently. One of them told me you wanted Faye to run away to St. Louis with you. Is that right?”
“Who told you?”
“No matter. I was told.”
“So I wanted her to go away with me. She wouldn’t. I thought she’d jump at the chance to get the hell away from here and see what living could really be. My mistake. She was just as stupid as she was good-looking. No imagination. She wasn’t about to fly out of that soft nest Crawley Bratton kept for her on the other side of the creek.”
“Was that what you had the fight about yesterday afternoon?”
“What fight?”
“The one you had down by the creek. The one that ended with you strangling her to death.”
He had been looking over my shoulder, talking to me but acting all the while as if I wasn’t really there. Now he looked at me directly in sudden stillness, but I had a feeling that he couldn’t see me at all through his bright glaze of blindness.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “I didn’t strangle her to death.”
“I didn’t expect you to admit it. It doesn’t matter. There was a witness. You might be interested in knowing that there was a witness to a lot of what went on between you and Faye down there.”
“I didn’t strangle her to death. Anyone who says I did is lying.”
“Next thing you’ll be telling me you didn’t even see her yesterday afternoon.”
“No. I saw her, and we had a fight, and I choked her. But not to death. I wanted to, and I thought for a few seconds that I had, but I didn’t. I let her go alive. The last I saw of her, she was leaning against a tree and breathing easy. I came up here and got the car and went off on a drunk. I never wanted to see her again, and that much was given me. I never will.”
“Well, you never know. Could be you’ll wind up in the same place pretty soon.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ll stand trial for murder. Maybe you’ll hang.”
He sat there staring at me with his blind eyes, and I had an uneasy notion that he was going to spring at me any second, but he didn’t. He took a deep breath and looked away, over my shoulder again.
“Am I under arrest?” he said.
“That’s right. You are.”
“You’re making a mistake. You’ll see.” He stood up and looked toward the house. “If you’ll wait out here, I’ll get some things together and say good-by.”
I let him go. He went across the yard and into the house, and he was in there for maybe fifteen minutes. He came out carrying a little leather bag, and we got into the patrol car and drove back to town. In the office at the jail, Rudy was sitting in a chair away from the desk with his feet on the floor. He must have heard us coming.
“Hello, Colby,” he said. “Hello, Fergus. What you two doing together?”
“He’s under arrest for murder,” I said. “Lock him up.”
“Murder!” Rudy jumped as if his chair was wired and someone had thrown the switch. “Whose murder?”
“How many murders we had around here lately, Rudy?”
“Faye Bratton’s, you mean?”
“Faye Bratton’s, I mean.”
“Well, Jesus, Colby. I got to thinking after you left, and what I thought was Snuffy Cleaker must have done it.”
“You weren’t thinking, Rudy. Your brain was just turning over. There’s a difference.”
“That may be, Colby, if you say so, but I’m thinking now for sure, and what I’m thinking is you ought to tell me more about what’s going on.”
“Excuse me, Rudy. I’ll try to do better. Right now I’m going back to Crawley Bratton’s to tell him we’ve made an arrest, and then I’m coming in to see the county attorney. Tell Lard two more for dinner instead of one.”
I went out and got into the patrol car and drove west for the third time that day. I stood beside the car in Crawley’s back yard and looked out over all the fields as far as I could see, but there wasn’t any sign of Crawley out there, and so I went over and hammered on the back door of the house, but there wasn’t any sight or sound of him there, either. Then I went out to the barn and inside, and there he was. He was lying on his back on the rough plank floor, and nearby, where it had fallen from his hands, was a double barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Most of the top of Crawley’s head was off. Some of it was on the floor, and the rest was on the wall behind him. There was something else on the wall, too. It was a note pinned to the planking with Crawley’s pocket knife. I went over and ripped the note loose and read it, and this is what Crawley had written:
Colby:
I thought you’d find out, and I’m glad you did. Thanks again for letting me know you knew, and for giving me time to get out of it my own way. This is it, Colby. This is the way. It was a tough break, that dumb kid seeing me kill Faye, but it’s all right. I don’t think I could have lived with myself very long, knowing all the time I was a murderer. I wasn’t cut out for it.
I didn’t really plan to kill her. I just walked down to the creek to find her and bring her back, and there she was with her dress torn, and she’d been crying, and I could see someone had treated her rough. She said it was Fergus Cass who did it, and wanted me to go find him and kill him. Instead, I killed her. I finished what he’d started, and killed her. I guess I knew right along that she’d been carrying on with him. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself. A man’s pride keeps him from admitting things sometimes. Maybe later I’d have killed Fergus Cass, too. I was thinking about it, and so I guess it’s better it’s ending this way before I could.
You can imagine how surprised I was when the haystack caught fire. I was going back after dark to bury her. I had a place picked out.
I hope you find me soon, Colby. See that we’re buried together.
CHAPTER 5.
Well, hell. So it was just a misunderstanding. So I figured it was Fergus Cass, and all the time it was Crawley. I can see, looking back, how the misunderstanding came about naturally. When I came up from the creek with Snuffy Cleaker and said that Snuffy had seen someone choking Faye, not saying who it was Snuffy had seen, and then making that crack about Crawley knowing as well as I did who it was, why, what the hell was he naturally to think? Being guilty, although I didn’t know it, he thought there was only one person I could possibly mean, and that person was Crawley Bratton, although it wasn’t. The only reason he could see for my not arresting him then was just to give him a chance to take his own way out, and that’s why he said thanks when I left, and took the way when I was gone.
I’m glad he did, and I think it’s time Virgil had my job.
TUNE ME IN
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960.
“Wake up,” the voice said.
Freda opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling and waited for the voice to continue, but it was silent. This was not in the least disturbing, however, for sometimes it did not speak to her for hours and hours on end, and then it would speak suddenly, at some odd moment, with specific instructions to do this or that in a particular way at such and such a time. In the beginning the voice had frightened Freda, in the very beginning, but she had soon understood that there was nothing at all to be frightened of, quite the contrary, and she had begun
waiting for the voice and listening for it, but she never knew when it would speak. Sometimes it spoke to her when she was quite alone, but at other times it would speak when she was in company, even when she was herself speaking to someone else, and then she would have to quit speaking, perhaps in the middle of a sentence, and listen intently to what the voice said. This was always disconcerting to the other person, of course, the one she was speaking to, and it was really very amusing, in a sense, a kind of comic situation to be laughed at silently.
A strange thing about it was that the voice, although it spoke quite clearly, was never heard by anyone but herself. Another strange thing, even stranger, was that it was never necessary to answer the voice aloud, but only to think quite deliberately the words she wanted heard, and the voice heard them and answered them, and so it was possible to carry on conversations, quite long ones sometimes, without being overheard by anyone else who might be present. These things were strange, however, only in the sense that they were exceptional, undoubtedly beyond the belief of someone who had never experienced them, but they were really conceivable realities. There was nothing supernatural about them, like the presence of light in darkness and a world of sound below the level of hearing.
It was the voice that had brought her to this city, where she had arrived last night, and to this room in this hotel, where she had just awakened. The voice told her what to do, exactly when and how, but she knew perfectly well what she must do in the end, after all the little things that must be done before, and it was to do this, the thing that must be done, that she had come to this place at this time. She had come to kill a man named Hugo Weis.
“You had better get out of bed,” the voice said.
It was a gentle reminder. There was in the voice no trace of anger at her lethargy, nor even a suggestion of impatience. The voice was always gentle, always soft, and it was, in truth, a voice of poignant beauty, with a whisper of sadness running through the sounds of vowels and consonants like the slightest soughing of wind among trees at dusk.
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 27
