The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave

by Bill Pronzini

  Clyde said he’d speak to Doc Olsen and Titus Bedford, and if they were in agreement, he’d set the coroner’s jury meeting for Monday morning. I should have confided the poisoned buttermilk business to him before I left—probably would have if he and I had been alone—but Ellie was liable to set up a howl when she found out and start after me to arrest Grace Selkirk the way Reba had. To her mind, the attempted murder of a good friend held more weight than the actual murder of a youngster with dubious morals. I was in no frame of mind to put up with any more pressure, so as long as Reba kept her mouth shut I’d do the same for the time being.

  * * *

  THE WESTERN UNION office was over in the railroad depot. I went there next and had Bert Milbank send out wires to the law in the neighboring counties requesting that if James Rainey was found in their bailiwick, he be arrested and held for questioning. Wasn’t much chance of Rainey still being in Peaceful Valley after three days or more, but it also wasn’t likely he’d have traveled any long distance. His way of doing business seemed to be to spend two or three weeks in a particular area, trading with ranchers and farmers as well as townsfolk. That old red and green, slab-sided wagon of his was easy to spot, with JAMES RAINEY—FINE WARES, PATENT MEDICINES, KNIVES SHARPENED FREE OF CHARGE painted large on both sides.

  Doc was still at the mortuary, finishing up a more extensive examination of Charity Axthelm’s remains in the embalming room. Titus Bedford looked even more sorrowful and sad than he usually did when a fresh customer was brought in, but that didn’t stop him from asking when Mr. and Mrs. Axthelm would be in to make arrangements. Titus has feelings for the bereaved, but he doesn’t let them get in the way of his business sense. I told him what J.T. Axthelm had said. Then I asked him to make sure Grace Selkirk kept mum about the murder, and he said he would, that he’d already spoken to her about it.

  I didn’t care to see that poor girl’s body stretched out on a slab, so I waited in the viewing room for Doc to come out. When he did, Titus left us alone without being asked.

  “I stand by what I told you before, Lucas,” Doc said. “Cause of death manual strangulation by a person with large, strong hands.”

  “Find any other marks on her body? Bruises or the like?”

  “No. And no indication of sexual assault.” He paused, sighed, and added, “This won’t go into my report, but my professional opinion is that she wasn’t a virgin.”

  “Uh-huh. What about her clothes? Anything on them that might help with the investigation?”

  “Nothing as far as I could tell. Look at them yourself if you like.”

  “I’ll do that. Anything else I should know, Doc?”

  “No. At least not until I do an autopsy.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “Tomorrow morning, after church,” he said, and sighed again. “Grisly way to spend a Sunday.”

  I said, “I spoke to Clyde Rademacher. He’ll arrange for the coroner’s jury to meet here Monday morning.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Doc went back into the embalming room to fetch the girl’s clothing for me. I took the bundle to the sheriff’s office. Carse was out somewhere, so I undertook the unpleasant chore of checking each garment myself. Gave me kind of a funny feeling to be handling the dead girl’s torn and soiled clothing, but it had to be done.

  I pricked my finger on something sharp that turned out to be a blackberry thorn. A couple more were stuck in the sheepskin coat, too, and there were tears in the cloth where other thorns had snagged it—all likely from the tangles by the old well when her body was carried out there. Wasn’t anything else to find on the coat, dress, or underclothes. I wrapped everything up again, put the bundle in the safe, and went to scrub my hands with lye soap in the sink out back. Then I sat and did some studying on the button I’d found in the Crockett farmhouse.

  Rust brown, with a couple of dangly same-color threads attached. Off the sleeve or front of a sack coat, I judged, that was neither brand new nor expensive. Wasn’t dusty, so it hadn’t lain under that old sofa for long. Ripped loose when the owner was in the act of strangling Charity Axthelm, maybe.

  I tried to recall if James Rainey had worn such a coat. No, he hadn’t, none of the times I’d seen him. Seemed to favor more casual garb: chambray shirts, corduroy trousers, cowhide jacket, Monkey Ward overcoat. Possible that he dressed up for his trysts, but it didn’t strike me as likely. He wasn’t the sort to bother spiffing himself to please or impress a pretty young girl. Handsome fella, slim and strong, with a brash and carefree line of patter; he didn’t need any more than that to turn the head of a young girl, fast or not.

  So if the button didn’t belong to Rainey, who did it belong to? Had to be another of Charity Axthelm’s lovers, whoever he was—a man who might also be her killer.

  EIGHT

  THE FIX MERCANTILE Company was on the corner of Main and Sycamore, a big, barnlike building with an attached storehouse at the rear. The store stocked as many different items as could be stuffed into both. Canned goods and dried fruits and wheels of cheese and barrels of crackers and pickles and other such items on one side, bolts of cloth and coats and hats and kitchen utensils and the like on the other; and out in the storehouse, shovels and pitchforks and buckets and kerosene, among many other things.

  Weren’t any customers when I walked in, just Tyler Fix sitting at the high desk behind the grocery counter. He’s younger than his brother, Grover, by about eight years, and judging by his usual semi-sulky expression, he doesn’t much care for being a storekeeper. Or could be he resents the fact that their father willed the mercantile to Grover alone. Elrod Fix evidently believed Tyler too young and irresponsible to share in the ownership, and he was probably right; Grover’s smarter and more settled. He keeps Tyler in line, but you can see the kid chafing at the tether. I half expected to hear one of these days that he’d pulled up stakes and gone looking for a new and different pasture, if not necessarily a greener one.

  Tyler mostly stocked shelves and made deliveries, that displeasured look of his not being conducive to good customer relations. Grover, on the other hand, was jovial and friendly and always aimed to please. The fact that it was late in the day was probably the reason Tyler was minding the store.

  He said, “Sheriff,” without much if any welcome as I stepped up to the counter. He was wearing a twin to the green eyeshade his brother always wore, but high on his forehead and set at an off-angle on his mop of curly red hair. Maybe he thought he cut a jaunty figure; to me, it just looked foolish. “Just about to close up.”

  “I won’t be here long. Grover off to home?”

  “No, he’s here. Doing something out in the storehouse.”

  “Mind fetching him?”

  I could see it in Tyler to make a smart-aleck remark, but the look in my eye convinced him otherwise. He said, “Guess not,” and got up, taking his time, and ambled to the covered aisle at the rear that led to the storehouse.

  I went over to the rack of men’s wear. None of the coats on display was the same rust-brown color as the button I’d found.

  Tyler came back in with Grover, who was a couple of inches taller, his red hair not as long or as curly. “Always a pleasure, Sheriff Monk. What can I do for you?”

  I showed him the button with its dangly threads. “This look familiar to you?”

  He peered at it. “Came off a sack coat, I’d say.”

  “Uh-huh. You stock any this color?”

  “None right now. Seems to me we did at one time.”

  “Recall who might’ve bought one?”

  “Well … no,” Grover said. “You, Brother?”

  Tyler fingered the mustache he was trying to grow, a wispy little thing with no more than a dozen short hairs. “No. I don’t think we ever had one exactly that color.”

  I said, “Either of you notice anyone wearing one like this recently?”

  Tyler said, “Not that I remember.”

  “Grover?”

  He shook his head. />
  “Well, if anything comes to mind, give me a holler.”

  “Important, is it?” Grover asked.

  “Might be. Just might be.”

  When I left the mercantile, I thought about stopping at the Commercial Club and showing the button around in there. The Commercial is one of the social hubs of Peaceful Bend and draws men young and old of all types and stations, me among them, who like to shoot pool and billiards, play cribbage or pinochle or rummy, and hobnob in quiet surroundings. But it was late afternoon, lull time at the club. Even the old farts who made up the Hot Stove League, gathering to gossip and tell tall tales and trade off-color stories, would’ve left by now, looking to work up an appetite for supper in one of the saloons.

  I went to the Valley Hotel instead.

  Supper service had already started in the dining room, but it was too early for much business. Only one table was occupied—two after I pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the room. Laura Peabody, wearing her pink-and-white waitress outfit, had been idling by the coffee bar; she came straight over to me. She was a little on the plump side, with taffy-colored hair, a perky manner, and a smile that lit her face up like a lamp.

  “Two specials tonight, Sheriff,” she said. “Stew and dumplings and roast pork loin. No oysters yet.”

  “Just coffee’ll do me, thanks.” When she brought it, I said, “Sit with me a minute, Laura. You’re not busy and there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Well … I guess it’ll be okay.” She sat down, but with her chair pulled back in case she was called or more customers came in. “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”

  “Not that I know about. I understand you’re a friend of Charity Axthelm.”

  “Charity?” Her smile wobbled some. “We’re not exactly friends. I mean, not real close friends.”

  “She tell you about her plans with James Rainey?”

  “Oh, my. You know about that?”

  “So she did tell you.”

  Laura shifted around in her chair; the smile was gone now. “Yes, she told me. I tried to talk her out of going away with him, but she said she loved him, really loved him, and he loved her.”

  “She feel that way about anybody before Rainey?”

  “In love, you mean?” Spots of color appeared on the girl’s cheeks. “I guess she must have.”

  “Who with?”

  “Well … I don’t know as I should be telling tales…”

  “You won’t be. Just cooperating, is all.”

  “Is something wrong, Sheriff? Has something happened?”

  I said, gentle, “Who were her other admirers, Laura?”

  “I can’t say for sure. I mean, Charity … well, she could be kind of secretive about things like that. But I know she was seeing Devlin Stonehouse at one time.”

  I knew Devlin slightly; he worked as a teller at the Merchant’s Bank. “Serious between them?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by serious.”

  Well, I couldn’t come right out and ask if she knew or suspected that they’d been making the beast with two backs, so I just said, “Stepping out together regular.”

  “No more so than with any of her other beaux, I guess.”

  “Other beaux such as who?”

  “Well…” Her voice had been low; she lowered it even more when she said, “Clyde Rademacher. Clyde Junior, I mean.”

  That raised my eyebrows. Shouldn’t have, I guess. Clyde Junior was a strapping specimen, unattached and no less prone to sow a batch of wild oats than any other fella his age. Maybe Ellie Rademacher had been so quick to say no because she knew her son was one of the Axthelm girl’s admirers and didn’t want me getting the wrong idea. Be just like a mother hen like her to protect one of her brood.

  “Anybody else?”

  “I don’t understand, Sheriff Monk. What does it matter who was interested in Charity before she went off with James Rainey?”

  “I don’t know that it does,” I said. “Was there anybody else?”

  Laura took a nibble on her lower lip and the color spots darkened a mite. But just then two more people came into the dining room. She hopped up quick, a little too quick. “I’ve tarried long enough. Mr. Coombs gets angry if he thinks I’m shirking.”

  “Answer the question before you go.”

  Seemed to me there was a hesitation before she said, “No. Nobody else I know about.”

  NINE

  THE BANK IS closed Saturdays, and would be closed at this hour anyway, so I set off to Ruth Hollings’s boardinghouse, where I’d heard Devlin Stonehouse had a room. He did, but he wasn’t in it, and Mrs. Hollings didn’t know when he would be or where I could find him. That left a conversation with Clyde Junior, but like as not he’d be home for supper about now and I wasn’t going to question him about Charity Axthelm with his father and mother present. He and Devlin could both wait until tomorrow.

  It was well past six o’clock now. Since I lost Tess, my evenings tend to be pretty quiet and of a sameness, and this one started out as more of the same. Supper in the Elite Café, then on to my house on State Street, where I fed and walked Butch, the old, half-blind mongrel dog I’ve had for a dozen years. After that, most nights, I’d do such other chores as needed doing, turn in, and read myself to sleep. Gets lonely sometimes, especially around the holidays—Butch has gotten grumpy in his dotage, developed a tendency to pass gas awake and asleep both, and isn’t much of a companion anymore—but a man learns to live with that, same as he learns to live with all the other things, good and bad, that make up his life.

  This night, I sat down to write a letter to my daughter, Katherine, in Bozeman. She went there two years ago to take some courses at Montana State University—whip-smart, that girl of mine—and ended up marrying a nice young fella named Jim Firebaugh who was studying to be a mining engineer. Invited me down to attend the wedding, which made me even prouder of her than I already was. Likewise the fact that she stayed in school, too, after the nuptials.

  A year and a half had passed now and her and Jim hadn’t yet presented me with a grandchild, but I had no doubt they’d work on it eventually if they weren’t already. Katherine takes after her mother, which is to say she’s never been shy and is bound to be as red-blooded as Tess was; I caught her once when she was sixteen reading a how-to book on marital relations she’d got hold of somewhere.

  I was halfway through the letter when somebody started whacking the knocker on my front door. Better not be Reba, I thought, come to harass me some more. It wasn’t. The caller was Sam Prine.

  “Sorry to bother you, Sheriff,” he said, “but I figured you’d want to know. There’s trouble brewing over at Monahan’s.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The anti-Indian kind. Henry Bandelier’s stirring it up with loose talk to anybody who’ll listen.”

  So Bandelier had ignored my warning and was as much as spitting in my eye. Blasted fool was born without the sense God gave a picket-pin gopher. “Drunk talk?”

  “About half and half. He wasn’t drunk enough or loud enough so’s I could arrest him for disturbing the peace.”

  “Saying what about the Indians?”

  “Calling ’em war-whoop heathens and low-down thieves. Taking your name in vain, too, for not arresting Tom Black Wolf and Charlie Walks Far.”

  “How many hotheads has he got feeling the way he does?”

  “Not too many when I left,” Sam said. “Four or five that think the way he does.”

  Enough to cause a ruckus if Bandelier got ’em riled enough to bunch up and head out to the reservation. There hadn’t been any trouble to speak of with the Indians in a long while, but if he succeeded in creating some, red men and white both would end up getting hurt. And all on account of a dadblamed hunk of junk.

  I went and got my hat and coat, and Sam and I made tracks for Monahan’s. It was the least of the four watering holes in Peaceful Bend, not in the town proper but on Douglas Street over by the ra
ilroad tracks. One-third saloon, one-third poker parlor and pool hall, and one-third sporting house that catered to railroad workers, ranch and farm hands, and such riffraff as drifted through. Most of the fights Sam had to break up and drunks he had to arrest were Monahan’s customers.

  The Ladies Aid Society, with Reba in the forefront, kept trying to convince me and the town council to close down the part she called “the den of iniquity inhabited by fallen women,” if not the entire place, but I never was a believer in trying to legislate morals. Regulating prostitution and gambling so they didn’t get out of hand, yes—I kept a sharp eye on Monahan’s and the handful of other resorts in Peaceful Valley—but so long as Pete Monahan kept his bar girls in line and clean of social disease, I saw no reason to shut him down and neither did the town council or the county commissioners. Nor the majority of voters, for that matter.

  Monahan’s was a broad, two-story frame building lit up bright and rackety tonight with piano music and loud voices. But the piano man quit playing and the customers quieted down some when Sam and I walked in, the way it always happens when a couple of lawmen come into a saloon unexpectedly. The place was doing its usual heavy Saturday night business, full up at the bar, all of the tables and poker and faro layouts occupied, the two inches of sawdust spread over the floor already thick-littered with cigar and cigarette butts. I counted three bar girls wearing red dresses and come-hither smiles; the rest were either in the poolroom at the back or upstairs entertaining. None of the customers here was Henry Bandelier.

  “Where was Bandelier rabble-rousing, Sam? Poolroom?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’d better still be there.”

  The poolroom was beyond the staircase to the upper floor, through a narrow archway and down a short corridor. Even though the piano had started racketing again, I could hear Bandelier’s loud voice as soon as we stepped through the archway. I wanted an earful of what he was saying before we went in, so I made a gesture to Sam and we eased up to where I could sneak a look through a second narrow archway into the big room.