Wild Pitch

by Guthrie, A. B. ;

  “Where? When?” The sheriff, now standing, rapped out the questions.

  “On his own place, maybe two hundred yards from his mailbox. When? I seen him when I was comin’ in. There was kind of a low-lyin’ fog, and me, on my way to town, thought it was a downed critter at first. So I pulled up and went for a look. Deader’n hell. Ask anybody.”

  “Who else? You tell his wife? Does she know?”

  “Tell her? Christ, no. You think I was goin’ to the house and blab out, ‘Sorry, ma’am, but your man has been kilt?”

  “Couldn’t she see him?”

  “Nope. The house, you’ll recollect, sets maybe half a mile from the road where the mailbox is at. There’s a hump, a knoll, between house and box, and he was lyin’ yon side of it from the house. Coughed his life blood out all around. Anyone but me might not have spotted him on account of the fog.”

  “You’re a genius,” Charleston said. “All right. You’ll ride with me. I’ll rout out Felix Underwood first.” He took hold of the phone. “Jase, round up Old Doc Yak and drive out with him.”

  “What you want with a doctor?” Lancaster broke in. “I done told you he’s dead.”

  Charleston lifted the receiver. “So was Buster Hogue according to you.”

  Before he got his number, Charleston shouted, “Halvor! Halvor!”

  Halvor showed up from the back, where he had probably been playing pinochle with a drying-up drunk who had the run of the jail.

  “Felix,” Charleston said to the phone. “Hold on a minute. Halvor, take charge here! Jase, move! Now Felix …”

  It wasn’t always easy to find Old Doc Yak. I went from his office to the Commercial Cafe to the Bar Star, asking questions, and then from one patient to a second. I found him in one of Duke Appleby’s bedrooms, where he was prescribing pills for one of Appleby’s kids who had tonsillitis. He shed his bedside manner when I told him the news.

  Riding with Doc Yak was like sledding hell-bent through a field of boulders. While on the highway we got along fairly well, though the doc seemed to think the center line was put there to straddle—which annoyed a couple of tourists who took to the ditch. But once off the pavement we bounced, thumped and careened. I doubt that Doc Yak missed one promising rock. At any rate I gave him a grade of 90 per cent, which amounted to a solid A in assault.

  The old automobile answered to the punishment with rattles, thumps and groans but somehow held together, and, no doubt in appreciation, Doc Yak said, loud above the clatter, “One thing about old machines, they have good stuff in them.”

  “Bound to,” I answered.

  “Yep,” he went on as the right rear wheel churned its way up and out of a soft shoulder, “and they hang to the road, these old cars do.”

  I said I was glad and I was, for the shoulder overhung a ten-foot-deep borrow pit. I had thought we were going to roll there and have to be taken out, mangled, with torches.

  There was one speed for Doc Yak on the open road, and that was full throttle—too fast if a cylinder or two hadn’t been missing. Even so, we made time. In spite of our late start I could see dust rising at two points ahead of us and knew Felix and the sheriff weren’t too far in advance.

  Doc wheeled into the lane to the scratch of gravel and the squeal of tires and, bag in hand, jumped out of the car before it quit moving. I yanked the brake on.

  Charleston and Felix Underwood and Lancaster and Bodie Dunn, who helped Felix occasionally, were standing and looking down at what was left of Ben Day. The Special was parked close by and so was the hearse, its end opened and left waiting for stuffing like a dressed turkey.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Lancaster was saying. “Think I’m so dumb I can’t tell a goner?”

  I edged up while Doc bent to examine the body. They say some people look better dead than alive. Ben Day didn’t. It was as if death had peeled off any mark of civility, leaving just orneriness. There was blood on his chin and some on his hands and a sopping of blood on his work shirt. He had on an open leather jacket, faded jeans and tennis shoes and wore a holstered and belted six-shooter.

  Doc laid open the jacket and shirt and skinned up the undershirt so’s to look at the chest. There was what looked like a bullet hole rather low on the right side but no blood to speak of. Doc fumbled in his bag, extracted his stethoscope as if out of habit and pitched it back in to the shake of his head. “Any fool can see he’s dead,” he said. “Dead some time.”

  “How long, Doc?” Charleston asked.

  “God knows. Or the devil. Six, eight hours at a guess. Midnight maybe. I’m no laboratory, you know.”

  The sheriff said, “Thanks.”

  Doc turned the body over and peeled up the clothes. “The bullet’s still in him. No mark of exit.”

  Charleston nodded, saying, “So?”

  “See for yourself.”

  “I do.”

  “Lung punctured and maybe the liver,” Doc Yak went on. “That’s a guess again. No use making sure here and now.”

  Charleston said, “Felix, you want to break the news to Mrs. Day?”

  “You’d think, by God, she’d have showed up. What does it take, a circus parade? Not that I mind, though.”

  I figured Felix didn’t. He was used to that kind of thing and could shed tears of sympathy while selling a thousand-dollar casket.

  “Tell her I’ll want to see her,” Charleston said as Felix set out.

  Doc Yak fastened his bag and stood up. “That’s all for me now, I suppose.”

  “Stick around if you can,” Charleston told him. “Maybe Mrs. Day or someone will want a ride into town. Maybe Jase, but I’d rather he didn’t leave now.”

  Doc Yak gave an all-right, and the sheriff stooped over and went through Day’s pockets. They didn’t yield anything except matches and cigarettes. He examined the revolver and found it full loaded.

  Charleston began nosing back toward the mailbox. There were splotches of blood here and there, and here and there tennis-shoe footprints between the tire tracks. He examined them as we went along and after a while said, “This is the way he came back from the mailbox, not the way he went to it.”

  I had been too dumb to mark that the footprints all pointed one way, toward the house in the rear of us.

  The tin mailbox was open. Around it were drippings of blood and a place where the grass had been flattened as if a deer had lain there. “Here’s where he got it,” the sheriff said. “Knocked him down, bullet or shock, and it was a time before he could get to his feet. Tough man, Jase.”

  He looked in the mailbox. It was empty. The road was bordered here by low growth—buckbrush, white sweet clover, and the drooping stems of wild gaillardias and sunflowers. In it, maybe forty feet or less from the box, we came on another place where a deer might have lain.

  But I knew, without being told, that a man with a gun had screened himself there. We cast around for a shell casing without finding one. It was no wonder. An empty shell, ejected, could have nestled beyond sight in the growth.

  Charleston went back to the box, studied the field near and far and struck out away from the graveled lane. I wasn’t a tracker, as he obviously was, but I could make out now and then the marks of passage in the stiff, yellowed grass. The trail meandered, from ground swell to swell and from one clump of cinquefoil to another; and my imagination pictured Day, seeking cover in the starlight night on his way from the house to the box and all the same getting bushwhacked when he got there. Got there for what? And got it for what?

  “I’ve seen enough,” the sheriff said, and led the way back to the party.

  Ben Day’s body had been stuffed in the hearse and the end of the hearse closed up. Felix was talking to Mrs. Day. Behind her a piece, as if planted there by her order, were the Days’ two ratty boys, ages eight and ten maybe.

  “I think it best, Mrs. Day, if you don’t view the body now,” Felix was saying. “That’s why I have moved it. Later”—he gave her a small professional wave—“of course.”

>   Mrs. Day wasn’t carrying on. She had the tired, washed look of a woman to whom everything had happened, so what was another item? She replied to Felix, “That’s good enough.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Day,” the sheriff broke in, “but I hope you will feel like answering a few questions.”

  She answered, “I don’t know nothin’.”

  “Did you know your husband left the house last night or early this morning? Did you hear him leave?”

  “I don’t pay no attention. He comes and he goes.”

  “And didn’t you miss him this morning?”

  She said the one word, “Him!” with such a bleak bitterness that I wished the sheriff wouldn’t go on.

  “Did you hear a shot or shots?”

  “Someone always shootin’ around here. If it ain’t jack-rabbits it’s deer, in season or out. I don’t pay no attention.”

  “To your knowledge did anyone wish your husband dead?”

  “To my knowledge, yes, sir. I can’t count ’em.”

  “Not a particular one?”

  “Buster Hogue, but I don’t guess he took a gun to his grave.”

  The sheriff drew a deep breath. “It seems a little strange you didn’t come down from the house earlier. You must have seen us drive in and pull up.”

  “I seen you. So what? I ain’t curious like a cat.”

  “Do you mind if I come to the house, just to look at the guns your husband had?”

  “Look all you want.”

  “Thank you. In the meantime Mr. Underwood will take the body to town.”

  “It ain’t doin’ no good here.” In her words, in her tone she might have been saying he hadn’t done any good, anytime, anywhere—not to her.

  The others had stood around listening. Now Felix and Bodie Dunn started for the hearse. The sheriff took me aside a step or so. “You want to ride back with Doc Yak?”

  “Not unless you want me dead in the hearse alongside Ben Day.”

  He gave his small, knowing smile. “I’ll have Loose Lip ride with Doc. The trip will add to his repertoire.”

  And so it was arranged.

  We trailed up to the house with Mrs. Day and her brats and made a quick search of the place. Apparently the only firearms Day had, besides his revolver which Charleston kept, were a .22 repeater and an old .30–06, which was the gun for elk and bear. Neither had been fired in some time.

  As we left, Charleston said, “Thank you, Mrs. Day, and my sympathy. I may want to talk to you later.”

  She nodded her life-weary head.

  On the trip back to town with the sheriff I said, “It’s damn funny.”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Loose Lancaster. How come he’s Johnny-on-the-spot all the time? How come he knew Day died from a bullet?”

  Charleston answered, “Genius,” and was silent for a time. “Jase,” he asked then, “some of it’s pretty plain, isn’t it? Tennis shoes included.”

  “Tennis shoes?”

  “Sneakers, Jase, to back up other evidence.”

  It dodged in my mind as he spoke that I never had seen Day in anything other than cowpuncher boots.

  Evidence or not, the sheriff wasn’t satisfied. His face as he drove had a look of troubled preoccupation, the weather lines etched at the sides of his mouth. “I don’t know what I could have done, but I should have foreseen this.”

  “Foreseen what?”

  “Day’s getting shot. Damn it, a man who can’t spot a pair in an open hand has no business in the game.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Felix with his telltale hearse and Doc Yak with his mouthy passenger were sure to have alerted the town before Charleston and I arrived. The time was early afternoon, and the weather was hotter than the pistol the sheriff didn’t carry. He wasn’t as faithful to his firearm as I was to my baseball.

  “We can find out who did it just by listenin’, Jase,” Charleston said as we approached the fringe of the town.

  I answered, “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” His teeth shone white as he glanced at me with a smile that had little fun in it. “Jesus save me! Comin’ to the office will be more than three wise men who’ve seen the star. More’n that where men drink or feed. And those that see not will want me to tell ’em what isn’t plain to my eye. We could run out to the graveyard and have some peace, I reckon, but no nourishment with it.”

  “Why not go to my house?” I asked. “It will be quiet there, and my mom will scrape up something to eat.”

  “I wasn’t hinting. Why for should she?”

  “For one sure thing, she’ll be anxious about me. She is if I don’t report pretty often. And she’s probably heard about the shooting to boot, making her anxiouser.”

  “Don’t mention grub then. All I want is to fight shy of my constituents for a spell.”

  I knew I wouldn’t have to mention food, not to my mother.

  We parked by the side of the house, where some old cottonwoods cast a shade while they dropped the last of their cotton.

  I led the way to the back door and yelled, “Mother,” though it turned out I didn’t have to. She was in the kitchen.

  “Jase,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you, to know you’re safe. Mabel Main called to tell me why and where you’d gone. It’s so terrible. Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Charleston,” she went on, catching sight of him hanging back from the doorway. “Please come in. It’s so hot. I’ve made a pitcher of iced tea.”

  “I’m dodging my supporters, but I don’t want to intrude,” the sheriff answered, taking off his hat as men didn’t according to him. It seemed to me that the edges of his hair had grown more silver in the last few days. Except that he was too thin of body and somewhat too young, he should have been in the Senate, where impressive older men guided the national destiny.

  “Oh, bother your intrusion!” Mother said. “And I bet you’re both hungry. I’ll make sandwiches and bring in the tea. You two go in the living room. It’s cooler there.”

  After we had sat down, I said, just to pass the time, “The longer it goes on, the more suspects we have, it seems to me.”

  “And for sure the more bodies.”

  “That Mrs. Day now. She was awful indifferent. No grief at all.”

  The sheriff nodded, more as if in thought than in agreement with such suspicion. “I reckon she’s had good cause to kill him many a time. Doesn’t prove she did or didn’t. And it doesn’t connect.”

  “With Buster Hogue?”

  “Right. Brooded by the same hen, I figure. But more suspects? Yeah, Jase. Or fewer.”

  We were quiet until Mother came in with iced tea, cold beef sandwiches and leftover lemon pie.

  Charleston got up when she appeared. His good manners gave me a little pain, but not so with Mother.

  She sat down with her sewing while we ate, but I could tell her mind wasn’t on mending. Apparently Charleston could, too, for he said, “It was outright murder, Mrs. Beard. More than that we hardly know.”

  “And old Mrs. Jenkins?” she said in her gentle voice. “Jase told me. That will be a kind of putting to death, too, if she is committed.”

  “I dare to hope not,” Charleston answered. His tone held regret but also a hard recognition of fact that came counter to Mother’s softness. “It’s possible she’ll adjust happily to new circumstances. In any case we must act.”

  “It’s cruel all the same.”

  “It’s the years that are cruel, not society.”

  “But society, authority, will take what the years have left.”

  “Mrs. Beard”—the sheriff’s voice had gone stern—“do you realize she might have killed your son yesterday?”

  Mother’s startled gaze fixed on me. “What? Killed you, Jase?”

  “It’s true,” Charleston persisted. “She held a gun on him. Jase didn’t tell you.”

  Mother asked, “Did she, son?”

  They had made me uncomfortable, this man that I admired and the mother I loved, by coming so close
to dispute. “She was just confused,” I answered. “It was nothing to get you alarmed about. And the hearing is nothing, nothing, I mean, compared to two murders. Mr. Charleston should be free to center on them.”

  Charleston grinned briefly. “Ought to call me the jack-of-all-trades. Which reminds me. I must serve the citation on Mrs. Jenkins. The county attorney has prepared the petition.”

  We had finished eating, and he stood up. Before he thanked Mother, he carried his dishes into the kitchen. I followed suit, the example having been set. That act of the sheriff’s was enough to melt any pique in my mother.

  I was sure Charleston would go to the office after serving the citation on Mrs. Jenkins even if he had to listen to a lot of worthless theories about Day’s murder, so I made some excuse to my mother and went to the courthouse after fiddling around for a while.

  No one was in the office except Charleston and old Jimmy, who wasn’t doing anything but drawing his pay. Charleston was on the phone, apparently waiting for someone to answer. He waved me toward the extension, saying, “I want you to be able to report to your mother that I tried.”

  “Doctor Pierpont,” a voice said briskly.

  “Good afternoon, Doctor Pierpont. Sheriff Charleston here. I’m glad I could find you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I called on the bare chance you could help us. We have a hearing this afternoon, a case of senile incompetence—or insanity as the law has it—a hearing on a citation for commitment. I dislike to press it.”

  “Naturally.”

  “The defendant is, or has been, an excellent lady. I hate to see her carted off to the asylum, and I am wondering whether you could examine her and, perhaps, by your therapy, enable her to continue her life here? The county would pay you.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know. Seventy-odd, I would guess. Physically spry.”

  The doctor’s voice was decisive. “It would be a waste of my time and the county’s money, Sheriff.”

  “No possible help?”

  “In a controlled environment, some help, some adjustment. Custodial help for the most part. There is little we can do about the problems of aging.”