“I'd say.”
“As to theft, whoever did it didn't take much of value.”
“That's what's got me curious.”
“Pardon?”
“Hutch, guns would be worth something, but according to Bill, there weren't any. That leaves just the radio worth, what, a hundred bucks?”
“Only if it was a top model, and who'd pay that much if it might be hot?”
“So he's got to discount it. Try to get maybe forty, fifty dollars? A new officer at the post, at Fort Riley, might pay that.”
Tolliver scratched at his sideburn. “So you're thinking some soldier.”
“One of us has got to check it out.”
Dickerson cleared his throat loudly. All eyes turned to him.
“Jimmy, how about my note?” he asked.
“Why don't the three of us talk about that after we get these fellas on the road.”
Early led the way out, his hands stuffed in his back pockets, Dickerson next, Tolliver last, the deputy turning out lights and closing doors. They found Watson pacing beside the new Ford and Smitts slumped in the passenger seat, the door open.
“Sheriff, if it's all right with you,”Watson said, thumbing at Smitts, “I'm going to get Bill back to the hotel. This day's been awful on him.”
“You do that. He set the funeral?”
“Day after tomorrow. Friday.”
Early went to the passenger door. After he closed it, he leaned down to the open window. “Bill, I'm sorry for all this. You been a fine help. All of us, we'll be at the funeral. You can count on it.”
He stepped back as Watson started the car. The lawmen watched the Woody back away, turn, and drive out.
The three lawmen sighed and exchanged glances that could only be described as professional. Then Early took Dickerson's note from his pocket. He handed it to his deputy.
Tolliver read it, and his eyes widened. “The sonuvabitch lied?”
“Would appear so.”
“Jimmy,” Dickerson said, “she asked me to teach her to shoot. You know, we get rattlesnakes up in our yards sometimes. Had this little silver Thirty-Eight.”
“She get any good?”
“Floored me. She was dead-on with the first bullet, could knock tin cans over at twenty yards. Never missed.”
“My. Is it possible he couldn't have known?”
“What wife's going to keep this from her husband?”
Light streamed from the kitchen window when Early drove in. He parked under a hackberry tree and turned off the motor. Early pulled the keys, tossed them in the air, juggling them as he walked to the house, to the back porch and on in. There before him, with her back to the door, sat his wife, hunched over a Formica-topped table, the radio playing in the background. Was it Billy Eckstein singing? Sounded like him. Bluesy.
“Reading the paper?” Early asked as he hung his keys and hat on a peg beside the door.
Thelma held up a brown, tape-bound notebook. “Judy's diary.”
He swiveled around, catching his boot toe on the rag rug, stumbling.
“Careful there, cowboy,” she said turning to him.
Early straightened himself up. He raked his fingers through his hair in an attempt to appear casual. “Where'd you get that?”
“At school, the first under half a dozen other notebooks in her desk drawer. A box full of them in the back of her coat closet.”
“Not exactly out in the open.”
“No, I had to look some. I hid my diary under the mattress.”
“You keep a diary?”
“No. Not since I was sixteen, hon.”
She turned back, and he looked over her shoulder. “Anything interesting?”
“Oh yes.”
“Can it wait while you get me some supper?”
She twisted around and kissed Early on the cheek. “You need a shave, stubbleface. Your supper's in the refrigerator.”
He wandered over to the Kelvinator while Thelma returned to her reading. Early opened the door and spied a sandwich on a plate and a bowl of potato salad. He took both, and a jar of pickles, to the table. “You want any of this?”
“I'll have a pickle.”
“This got anything to do with the baby?”
“No, I just like pickles.”
“Uh-huh. Coffee?”
“Pot's on the back of the stove.”
“Fresh?” he asked, going for a china mug and the metal pot he had brought to his marriage from his bachelor days on the ranch.
“Three days old, the way you like it.”
“Mmm, range coffee.”
Early filled the mug to the rim, then threw a leg over a chair. He sucked in a mouthful of the brew and contemplated its texture and taste. “Chewy,” he said after he swallowed it. “What's the matter, you not going to laugh?”
“There's not much here to laugh about.” She turned a page.
He opened the pickle jar. He helped himself to a dill stick before he pushed the jar to her. Thelma reached for it, fished a stick out, and ate it while she read.
Early sampled the sandwich. “This from the pork roast?”
“Yes. I shredded it and mixed it with that barbecue sauce you make. I thought it was rather good.”
“Do love the smell of barbecue, and you can't beat the taste.” Early swabbed some of the errant sauce up from his plate with his finger. He sucked it off. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“The diary.”
Thelma straightened up, flexing her shoulders. She took another bite from her pickle. “This is volume twenty-eight or so of I don't know how many. The box is there on the floor.”
Early chuckled. “So many. Serious writer, huh?”
“The first dozen are when she was a child up through high school. Next ten are college. I just glanced at some pages in all those, didn't really read them.”
“And then?” Early asked as he shoveled potato salad from a bowl onto his plate.
“Like this one, from when she started teaching to a week ago. There are stretches she'd write every day, and times when she'd skip a week or more.”
“Thel, I got the feeling you're about to tell me something.”
She turned forward a fistful of pages, scanning, then stopped and tapped at a paragraph. “ ‘I've been seeing him for three weeks now. He's a colonel, sinfully handsome in his uniform. Just to think of him makes me perspire.’ And she's drawn something here.”
Early glanced over. “Crossed cannons. Insignia of the artillery. What's the date?”
Thelma's finger moved up the page. “August third, last year.”
“Trooper Dan thought she might be cattin' around.”
“That's not a nice thing to say.”
“Well, what do you want to call it?”
“I don't know. I was just amazed when I found it.”
“I thought you girls were supposed to gossip about everything.”
“James Early.” She leveled a look at him intended to freeze him down to his boot heels. He threw up his hands in surrender.
“Can I at least ask how many times she mentions this ‘seeing’ business?” he asked.
“Half a dozen near as I can tell. I haven't read it all.”
“She mention a name?”
“Never.”
“You think it was serious?”
Thelma leaned back. She massaged her face, pulling her fingertips down to her jaw line, then below. “We don't write things in our diaries unless they're serious, or at least serious to us.”
“So this might not have been serious for the artillery man from Fort Riley?”
“You can assume, but there's no way of knowing, at least not from what I've read.”
Early took another monstrous bite of his sandwich. He chewed to the big-band music of Arty Shaw coming from the radio, the Eckstein song gone now. Early slurped his coffee. “A man on the side, that sure complicates a marriage.”
“What are you thinking?”
“In most
murders, the killer is someone who knew the victim.” Up came the counting fingers, Early ticking them off. “Usually the husband. Sometimes the wife. Sometimes a jealous lover.”
“You think it was Bill?”
“He was out of town, as they say.”
“The officer?”
“You got a better candidate?”
CHAPTER 7
* * *
August 19—Friday Noon
Late for the Funeral
Early motioned to the waitress. When he had her attention, he pointed at his cup. This had been a day he was glad no one asked to go to lunch with him. The morning meeting with the county commissioners had left Early with a headache and a desire to divorce himself from office.
“You look like you got the grumps,” Sue said as she filled his cup.
“Had my corns tromped on.”
“You want to talk about it with someone who doesn't care?”
Early glanced up at the young woman. Young woman—eighteen—he remembered her from four years previous, when he had met her mother bawling after a ruckus over what Early had not fully understood, except that Sue had sassed her mother, then run off. He caught up with the girl on US Twenty-Four, thumb out, trying for a ride to Kansas City. Early paddled her and took her home.
He grinned. “You are good at sticking it to me.”
“Learned from the best.”
“Pardon?”
“You,” she said and swept away to another table.
Hutch Tolliver shambled in, his hand on the collar of a morose fellow a good forty years his senior and, by the wear and grime on the man's clothes, a hobo. “Boss, he says he knows you.”
Early arched an eyebrow.
“Found him howling around up by Randolph, roaring drunk.”
The sheriff studied the bearded specimen of the poorer side of humanity, hair gray and thinning, a calico bedroll slung over his shoulder. “Pop Irv?” he asked.
The man swatted at Tolliver. “See? I tol' yah he knew me.”
“Pop, what's it been, ten, twelve years?”
“Since before yah went off to fight Hitler, least tell that's what I heard yah did. Looks like yah come out all right, and a sheriff now, huh?”
“When you eat last?”
“Yesterday. Caught me a rabbit and, with a few vegetables I ‘borrowed’ from somebody's garden, cooked him into a good stew.”
Early pointed to the bench across from himself. “Park it. I'll stake you to lunch.”
Lester Irving dropped his bedroll beside the booth. He pulled off his tattered railroad cap and stuffed it in his back pocket as he sat down. With both hands Irving mopped his hair forward into some semblance of order.
“Tell Sue,” Early said to Tolliver, “a blue-plate special for Pop. . . . Pop, coffee with that?”
“Could I get milk?”
Early motioned Tolliver away. “Still riding the rails, huh?” he asked Irving.
“Fer the last time. I've come home.”
“That I find hard to believe.”
Irving clawed at an itch in his beard. “It's true. Got in a helluva knife fight out in Pueblo, you know, Colorado? Doctor who sewed me up found some awful stuff in me. Wouldn't tell me what. Just said I'd be damn lucky to see fall.”
Early's cheeks puffed out as he exhaled.
Sue came by from the kitchen. She leaned down and slid a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes in front of Irving, then a glass of milk. She took silverware and a napkin from her apron pocket and placed them on the table too. The waitress, puzzled, glanced at Early.
He silently mouthed the words On my bill.
She shrugged and moved away to the cash register to ring up a waiting customer.
Irving made a business of stuffing the corner of the napkin into his collar. He smoothed the rest over his shirtfront. “Jimmy, cain't tell yah how long since I been in a sit-down restaurant.”
“When we were hoboing together back a bit, wasn't anybody'd let us in a restaurant.”
“We didn't have a sheriff for a friend who's got money in his pocket.” Irving packed his mouth with well-catsupped meatloaf and chewed.
Early sipped at his coffee. “Ella know you're back?”
“I ain't had the courage to go by,” he said, some of the loaf dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Irving swallowed, then shoveled in the potatoes and gravy.
“See your kids?”
“Not since 'Thirty-Three.”
“You're a grandpaw twice over, old man.”
Irving stopped in midchew. He wiped at a rheumy eye.
“Betts married,” Early said. “Lives over in the next county. Got two children, both girls. Real nice family.”
“And my boy?”
“Ronnie? Sophomore at K-State come September.”
“How can Ella afford that?”
“We got him a scholarship and a couple part-time jobs. I expect he looks a lot like you did when you were a young sport.”
“Damn, so they turned out all right without me.” Irving swilled the milk down. That done, he attacked the meatloaf again.
Early stopped Sue on her way back to the kitchen. “Apple pie with ice cream for my friend.”
She leaned in. “He needs a bath.”
“He doesn't believe in it.”
“Well, at least spritz him with some Old Spice,” she said and moved on.
Irving sopped up the last of the gravy with a slice of bread. “Always like to leave a shine on my plate. . . . Jimmy, you and me, we sure saw a lot of country, didn't we?”
“Two years of it for me.” Early sipped at his coffee.
“Then you went off an' joined the Army. I was too damn old.”
“You should have got a job in one of the war industries.”
“I just wasn't dependable. . . . Thankee,” he said to Sue when she set the dessert and a clean fork in front of him. Like a hog at a trough, he gobbled up the pie and ice cream.
Early watched him, wondering at how little separated him from the old man other than years and a job on the county payroll. Irving had run off when the Depression destroyed his employment as a drummer of men's shoes.
Early glanced under the table. “See you're still wearing fancy footwear.”
“These got some age on 'em. Yeah, wingtips. Nunn-Busch, nothing but the best. One thing I know, Jimmy, it's quality.”
“Must cost you.”
“First time maybe. Resole them every six months, I can get five, six years out of a pair of shoes.”
When the dessert plate had the same shine as Irving's main-course plate, Early tossed his coffee back, and spit up a coin into his hand. “Sue!”
She turned away from the cash register. “Your tip,” she said when she saw him hold up the nickel.
Early exchanged it for a quarter from his pocket. He slapped the larger coin on the table as he pushed himself off the bench. “Come on, Pop,” he said, motioning for Irving to get up, “time for you to make peace with the family.”
“I told you I ain't got the courage.”
“Then why'd you come back?”
“To buy me a grave. I got a little money put back,” he said, patting his bedroll as he slipped its tied-up ends over his shoulder.
“Who'd you steal it from?”
“Jimmy, I've had me some honest employment. Worked at a store out in Denver, repairing bicycles. Always been good with my hands. When I had enough five-dollar bills put by, I caught me a freight for home.”
“Well, now you're gonna catch a ride in my Jeep, and we're going out to see Ella.”
“Aww, Jimmy—”
“Don't go awwing me. Let's git.”
Early counted out a dollar forty-five at the front counter. “That right?” he asked the waitress.
She looked at it as she raked the coins into her hand and from there into the correct boxes in the cash register's drawer. “To the nickel. Do I get a tip today?”
“Hell no.”
Early stopped his Jeep in fro
nt of a shabby two-story on Fifteenth Street. Boarders and laundry supported Ella Irving and her two children after her husband disappeared. There had never been money enough for paint and precious little for repairs.
“The place'd look some better if you'd been here,” Early said. “Come on, Pop, let's go in.”
Irving froze in the passenger seat. “I cain't do it, Jimmy.”
“Well, I can.” From the sidewalk, he turned back. “If you run while I'm in the house, I'll come after you.”
Early went on. He glanced back and saw Irving fidgeting. “Pop, keep your hands off my radio.”
At the door, Early shaded his eyes while he peered through the screen. “Aunt Ella, you home?”
A voice came from somewhere in the depths of the house, then much rustling. After some moments, a woman appeared on the other side of the screen door.
“Jimmy? Jimmy Early?”
“The only one. How you doing, Aunt Ella?”
“Oh, you shouldn't ‘Aunt Ella’ me,” she said as she bustled out onto the porch. She, squat and powerfully built, hard muscled from years of scrubbing clothes on a washboard, hugged Early only to stop when she saw the profile of the man sitting in the Jeep at the end of her walk. Missus Irving pulled back. She looked up hard into Early's eyes. “That who I think it is?”
“Could be.”
“Damned old fool. I told my children he was dead and I wished he was.”
“Ella, Pop's come home to make peace. He's dying.”
“He can go to his grave with a troubled soul for all I care. He can go to hell.”
“Won't you at least—”
But she slammed the screen shut. It bounced and shook on its hinges with the same anger as its owner.
Early stood there, his mouth open and no one to talk to. “Aunt Ella?”
“No!”
The main door slammed, rattling the window glass.
Early shrugged. With nothing better to do, he wandered off the porch and back to his Jeep.
“She a mite upset?” Irving asked, his face still straight ahead.
“And I caught the load.” Early climbed behind the steering wheel. He started the Jeep and got it rolling, cranking the wheel hard to U-turn in the street. He headed the machine back to Poyntz Avenue, Manhattan's main business street. “Look, I got a funeral I got to attend. I'm going to take you to the jail. You get a bath there. Get yourself cleaned up, and we'll talk when I get back.”
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