by Gil Brewer
“Al, the car’s stopped.”
I bent and grabbed him and slipped and the body fell. I got hold of it again, keeping the shawl around the head. I got him in a fireman’s carry, grabbed the shotgun and started out of the room the back way.
“Al, there’s something I’ve got to tell you—”
Somebody knocked on the front door.
“Not now,” I said. “You’ll have to tell me later. Do those things. Hurry. They’ll wait a minute and a minute’s a long time.”
She snapped out of it. She yanked the drapes across the window, making little noises in her throat, and I left her there.
The body was heavy.
I didn’t realize how heavy Gunther was until I started across the back yard, weaving in the driving snow. I had no idea where to head for. I had to hide him, that’s all I could think—just hide the body.
I carried him as far as the barn, then let him fall. I couldn’t hold him any longer. My back ached, and as I looked down at the body, the snow slammed out of nowhere, ricocheting off the barn wall. I was a little out of my head and knew it. I thought of the barn, the stables, the toolshed, the woodshed, and none of them were any good. Then I recalled Cross Glen.
He was like a bundle of loose logs. I finally got him on my shoulders, the shawl hanging down to the ground now. I turned and looked back there where I’d come across the yard. The snow was already covering my tracks.
Twenty feet from the barn, I remembered the shotgun. I had leaned it against the barn. I returned and got it, all the time listening for the sound of the car leaving. It did not leave.
I pushed on to a fence and pitched him over. His half-face came into sight there against the snow. I put the shotgun through the fence and went over. On the other side, I checked the gun. Both shells had been fired and I realized that if there had been any such things as fingerprints, they were gone now. Mine were there.
The whole night had been loaded and aimed at me.
I got the body on my back again, grabbed the gun, and started across a rutty lane between two fenced-in fields. A horse galloped out of the night, wheezing and whinnying. I came to a wooden gate. I opened the gate and closed it from the other side and looked back at the house again.
There was nothing to see but a misty black shape with a flicker of dim light. Only the corpse was real.
I came to the old branch, leading down from Cross Glen, and began following it.
At the first willow clump, I stopped and dumped him again. The shawl came all the way off this time. The bleeding had stopped. When I began to feel all right again, the snow and the valley and the whole world was a driving mass of white.
Noraine, I thought. Noraine …
All I had to do was believe her. Not that Sam Gunther hadn’t been killed while they were there on the couch. She hadn’t lied about that. But the other …
What had been going on night after night?
So what did I want? I’d been trying to lose her—and now I had.
I got the body on my shoulders once again, and started on past the willows along the branch toward Cross Glen …
I didn’t go into the glen as far as the falls. But I could hear the falls in there. It was like a big canyon inside the glen, the shale sides rising high and clumped over with trees, the pines very thick. The falls were about seventy-five feet high and a lot of water was coming over, striking in the pool. I was just around the bend and it was all I could hear, the thick brutal roaring.
I buried Sam Gunther under leaves; the snow would do the rest. Then I got out of there, carrying the shotgun.
And Gunther was gone. Gunther was dead … who killed him?
I came down across the fields following a stone fence.
My clothes were packed with snow. My feet were soaked, freezing.
The shotgun that had been used in the murder was no factory special. I hadn’t had a chance to inspect it carefully, but it looked hand made. There was that light, good feel to it, the breech engraved, the stock beautiful curly maple. If it was a personal gun, it might lead somewhere.
And it was then I thought of Kirk Hartmann.
I suddenly wanted to see him, talk with him. There was a thought in the back of my mind that I had kept refusing to let emerge. But it was there, and I looked at it now.
There was no reason to believe Hartmann had any concern with what I was up against. Hartmann could be the very person I was after. The hidden one. I wondered if I was going out of my head—only I couldn’t stop thinking about it, considering it. He had a nice home, a big home—better than he should have with the money a country lawyer pulled down. He had known all there was to know about my father.
When I first talked with him, he’d been friendly enough, but looking back now, I couldn’t find the friendliness I’d supposed had been there at all. He had been quizzical, patient, discursive. Everything he’d said had been loaded in a certain direction.
It could be he did not want me around.
The way he acted by the sawmill, near Herb Spash’s body. It was damned curious.
I hurried through the fields now, keeping to the lee side of the stone fence. It was rough walking. Briars grew thick in places. It was rocky, hard country. Wild grapevines twined among the ancient stone, and by the time I reached the highway again I was badly winded. I’d come out immediately in front of my place. Two young boys came along the road, pulling sleds. They watched me as I ran on across, paused by the coupé and looked back there on the hill.
The Gunther house was invisible through the driving pall of snow. The world was white and thick, still, save for the muted falling.
I put the shot gun inside the kitchen door, changed my shoes and socks, took a glass of whisky, and went out and climbed into the car.
“Hello, Al.”
He stood there in the doorway, watching me. He was wearing dark shirt and trousers, a ragged blue Navy sweater. He looked at me with those hooded, expressionless eyes, and his broad flat lips did not smile around the thick stem of a bulldog pipe.
“What brings you, Al?”
“Can I come in?”
“Come in? Oh, certainly, Al—come on in.” He turned and left me standing there at the door. I went inside and closed the door. The house was warm, smelling of coffee and stale smoke from his strong tobacco. “Sally’s not home,” he said. “She took the kids into Riverton. They’re spending the night at her mother’s.”
He knocked his pipe out in an ash tray, his back to me.
“House is lonely with them gone.”
I caught myself examining his feet to see if they were wet. It was a hell of a thing. I’d known Kirk a long time.
“What’s on your mind?” he said, packing his pipe, his back still turned.
I stood in the archway of the hall.
“Have you seen Sam Gunther tonight?” I asked him.
He turned and sank into a chair.
“Sam? Sure, I saw him tonight—down by the mill.”
“I mean, since then.”
“Try his house?”
“He’s not there.”
I came into the room and walked over in front of his chair and stood there. He looked up at me for a time, chewing his pipestem. The house was quiet.
“Why did you do it, Al?”
“What?”
“Why did you kill old Herb?”
I stared at him. For an instant I wanted to grab the front of his shirt, drag him to his feet, whip that lazy, sneering attitude out of him. Only it wasn’t sneering. He just sat there, smoking, contained—waiting.
“You think that?”
“I wouldn’t have asked you,” he said. “Yes, I think that, Al.”
We continued to look at each other and I began to realize a strong dislike for the man. He was so damned patient—so perfectly in control.
“Sheriff let you go, eh?”
“Watch it, Kirk.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth, scratched his forehead with the bit.
“Where did you learn so much about my father, Kirk?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
My voice was very loud. He stiffened slightly in his chair, sitting up a little. He took the pipe from his teeth and laid it carefully on the small smoking table beside the chair. It continued to smolder steadily.
“You’d better tell me what you mean, Al,” he said.
“Where were you tonight, Kirk?”
“When?”
“How did you happen to know I was at the sawmill? How did you know I was with Herb Spash?”
“I saw your car in there—Listen, what is this?”
“How come you saw my car in there?”
He rose lightly to his feet, moving swiftly.
“I was driving by on my way back from Riverton,” he said slowly. “Where I left Sally and the kids at her mother’s, like I said. When I came past the mill I happened to glance in and saw a car parked in there. Herb didn’t have a car. The mill’s been shut down for several weeks—so I went in and investigated. It was your car. I walked on back through the fence, Al, and I heard Herb yelling at you.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Then why did you kill him?”
I nearly hit him then. The sneer wasn’t on his lips, it was in his eyes—a kind of superior all-knowing that I began to know had always been there—something I had never liked but had never been able to see. Now I saw it.
“So you went and told the sheriff?” I said.
“I called him on the phone in a little while,” he said evenly. “After I found Herb lying out there in the road.” A tight white line showed around his mouth. “Why are you here, Al?”
“Where did you go after they took Herb Spash’s body away?”
“Did you just leave the sheriff’s office?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
I shouted at him. “Where were you, Kirk—where did you go after you left the mill grounds—when the crowd went away? Where did you go?”
“I came home.” His voice was flat.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“What’s happened?”
“You know what’s happened.”
“I think you’d better leave, Al—now.”
My fist caught him just under the neck, half against the shoulder. He pivoted with the blow, and I struck again with my right. He dodged and his knee slammed the small smoking table, knocked it across the room.
“You dirty double-crosser!” I said. “You’ve been lying!”
We exchanged smashing blows, hitting hard, gasping. He turned and rushed across the room, reached a corner shelf, whirled with a revolver in his hand and the hammer clicked back, three clicks.
“This is a forty-five,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I will shoot you, Al.”
I stopped, breathing hard, watching him.
“As I said before,” he went on, “I think you’d better hit the road. What I’ve told you was the truth. And I believe I was wrong, Al—I no longer think you killed Spash. But just the same, get out of my house.”
There was a flat look to his eye. I turned and walked into the hall, opened the door.
He stood in the living-room archway.
“Sorry about this, Al. You go home and do a little thinking. I’ll do the same. If I can be of any help, just let me know. I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, and right now I don’t want to know. Get going.”
I went outside. He kicked the door shut with a resounding slam.
I walked on across the lawn, climbed behind the wheel of the coupé and looked at the house. It seemed very peaceful again through the whirling snow. Snow buttressed the bushes along the gleaming, varnished log sides of the house, drifted thickly across the broad lawn. The lights in the windows were saffron behind steamy glass.
I drove away.
The lights in Noraine’s cottage were not turned on. I stopped the car, ran up onto the porch, pulled the bell. Nothing happened aside from the loud clanging inside the house. I had no idea where she kept her car, or even if the convertible I had seen her driving the other morning out at Welch’s farm was hers. I tried the rear of the house. There was a garage, but it was empty.
I drove home.
I sat at the kitchen table with the old wood stove loaded with a hot fire, the pipes rattling. The whisky was good and it burned going down. The electricity had been turned on and the overhead kitchen light was bright, showing the cracked and peeling walls, the ancient zinc sink, the walnut cupboards and the big black cookstove. It brought back memories. I sat there drinking the whisky and began to work on the second bottle, just looking around, remembering. Then I went over and picked up the shotgun from where I’d leaned it against the wall.
I was very drunk. Drunker than I’d been in a long time. I came slowly back to the chair by the table, sat down, laid the shotgun in front of me.
Here was a gorgeous implement that had performed murder not long before. I stared blearily at the gun, recalling how Sam Gunther had looked with most of his face gone.
Whoever killed him knew something, too—maybe.
The barrels of the gun were about thirty inches, at a guess. It had a hand-engraved ventilated rib with ivory sights, and it was custom-made, all right. The stock was short, but somehow I knew it wasn’t a woman’s gun. The stock was of beautiful curly maple with a delicate grain, seldom seen in a shotgun today unless specified. The trigger and guard were silver and gold inlay and the guard was engraved with minute scrollwork. The whole piece was a gem of spectacular silver and gold inlay with case-hardened rainbowed steel flashing through. It was 16 gauge. The curly maple stock was a sight. Gold, silver and pearl and some sort of gleaming black stone was worked into the modified pistol grip. The grip was higher arched than normal, and slimmer, coming close to the half-moon, a bit startling. The beaver-tail fore end was also modified to a painful degree, broad and much flatter on the bottom, worked to a hand conformation—not finger-gripped—in a shallow and precise cutting.
Whoever would hurl it through a window must have been nuts. Whoever did it did not care about guns—not even with the excuse of murder at hand. Unless the gun was stolen.
The inside of the barrels showed a glasslike finish, lightly dusted with specks of burnt powder. I staggered around until I found an old rag and a piece of string, and cleaned the barrels. I couldn’t stand it. I took another drink and sat down again, looking at the gun.
It was light and balanced so true you got goose-pimples sighting the damned thing. It had been fashioned for one man. The 16 gauge troubled me a little, because a man who really uses a gun a lot would not use 16 gauge, he’d be after a 12.
The recoil pad was leather; thick, pressed, ventilated, and a dream. On one side of the breech was a scene in silver and gold of ducks in a marsh, with very creditable water and a tree branch and clouds and sky. On the other side it was autumn in the cornfields and the pheasants were pheasanting.
I leaned back and took a drink, then began going over the thing inch by inch. I hadn’t noticed a maker’s name anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be any. Then I saw it, done in silver, along with the scrollwork that framed the ducky side. R. L. Isaacs—Riverton, N.Y.—Nineteen Hundred and Fifty.
Mr. Isaacs had very likely retired after making this bit of extracurricular unshooting fluff.
I patted the stock, took the gun and put it in the top cupboard beside the sink and, picking up my bottle, turned off the light and staggered into the dining room. I took my shoes off, I remember that, and fell back on the mattresses on the floor in the corner.
TEN
She lay there looking up at me, smiling drunkenly, her dark hair spread out across the top of the mattress and tumbling like liquid coal to the floor. Light from the kitchen illumined the dining room, so I knew she must have turned it on.
Darkly pouting lips smiled up at me.
She was watchin
g me through half-lidded eyes with that silly look on her mouth. She looked good lying there and all I could think of was Noraine, which seemed a foolish thing to do just then.
Then she turned over and went to sleep.
It was four-fifteen.
I went out into the kitchen and pumped well-water and washed and put water on the stove to boil for coffee.
I went outside. It was brittle cold, still snowing, but the flakes were finer now—almost a dust, the ground thickly covered. I waded around to the driveway and out front.
Lois’ car was on the front lawn. She had started in the driveway, apparently, and slid to a stop nearly by the front porch. The car was a white Jaguar, the tiny black canvas top up, one side curtain hanging down over the driver’s side, the other in place. I went over and looked. The side curtains were very neatly fashioned. I buttoned the loose curtain up again. Some snow was inside on the seat and I left it that way.
Growling motors echoed through the flying snow. I walked on out by the roadside. A plow was coming down through the valley, exhaust steaming high in the night. The plow crept along through the night, vomiting a great geyser of snow into the air. I watched as it came past, dodging back so I wouldn’t get buried. The plow crawled on down the road, rumbling.
I looked up across there into the snow where Sam Gunther lay buried in Cross Glen, among the leaves. The way things were happening sickened me and frightened me. More and more now, I worried about Noraine. I couldn’t get her out of my mind and the way it was left my chest hollow. I began to see something. I had been wrong about Lois; there was nothing there for me. It was all in the past, and I realized that I wanted Noraine …
I hurried back through the drive and into the kitchen. The water on the stove boiled noisily. I took it off, found the coffee, and dumped some in.
“That you, Al?”
I moved into the dining room and stood above her.
Her voice was very soft. “Come here, with me.”
“I’m making coffee.”
She looked at me, her eyes slowly blinking, not focusing very well. “Oh, Al,” she said.
