A Dismal Thing To Do (24 page)

Jelly, who was shying away from his former boss only a little less cravenly than Bain had done, didn’t appear inclined to speak, either.

“Then I suppose we’ll have to go and find out They may think it a bit strange down at the county courthouse if we send in a batch of prisoners and can’t tell them why. Fred, how does one go about getting a search warrant in Pitcherville?”

“The marshal fills out a form an’ the notary stamps it.”

“Who’s the notary?”

“My wife Millie. What you want searched?”

“McLumber’s hardware store. Would you care to oblige?”

“No trouble at all. I guess George must o’ told you about Henry, eh?”

“He did.”

“I kept the bullet.”

“Good man. Hard luck on Mr. Badger, of course.”

Fred stepped into the house and was back in a couple of minutes, waving a sheet of paper. “Signed, sealed, an’ delivered. Want me to come along with you, Inspector? I phoned down to see what was keepin’ the wagon an’ it turns out they’ve been roundin’ up a bunch o’ drunk an’ disorderlies that was takin’ a schoolhouse apart.”

Badger sneered. “At least that’s one rap you can’t pin on me.”

“I shouldn’t be too sure about that, Mr. Bandicoot,” said Madoc. “Marshal Olson is a surprisingly versatile man. Like yourself. George, since you were so helpful about bringing in Jellicoe Grouse, perhaps you’d better stay with Sam and make sure we keep him.”

Sam was not going to need any help, but Madoc wasn’t sure what kind of reception he and Fred might run into at the store. News of Jelly Grouse’s arrest must already have percolated all over Bigears and perhaps beyond. He took the pool car this time, and didn’t loiter on the road. Before long, Fred was remarking, “Cripes, if I was outside this buggy instead of in it, I’d arrest us both for speedin’.”

“And I’d have no squawk coming if you did,” said Madoc. “It’s just that I’d like to get to the store before— ah, there he comes now. We’ll beat him by a whisker.”

They could see a black Lincoln about the size of a battleship coming at them out of the Bigears Road, toward the junction where McLumber’s hardware store stood. Its driver wasn’t wasting any time, either. Madoc let the Lincoln get to the parking lot first, and pulled in just as McLumber was stepping out with the door keys in his hand.

“Show him your warrant, Marshal. We’ve got to find out what it is he’s been wholesaling before he has a chance to get rid of the evidence.”

“This is kind of embarrassin’,” Fred muttered. “Ed’s an Owl.”

“Would you rather I served the warrant?”

“Nope. It’s my job. I might as well give the town its money’s worth even if I do get hove out o’ the lodge for doin’ it. Mornin’, Ed. Gettin’ to work kind of early, ain’t you?”

“Have to,” Ed grunted. “I’ve lost my helper, in case you hadn’t heard.”

“Oh, I heard. The inspector here an’ I thought we better drop over an’ give you a hand. You goin’ to let us in peaceable, or do I have to haul out the warrant?”

McLumber had been a big man when he’d stepped out of his Lincoln. Now he seemed to shrivel. He stared at Fred Olson for a moment, then hung his head. “Oh, what’s the use? I told that maniac we’d never get away with it.”

“The maniac being the man who calls himself Badger?” asked Madoc. “When did you tell him this, Mr. McLumber? Before or after he shot Henry?”

McLumber jerked his head up and tried to bluster. “What do you mean he shot Henry? Henry shot himself.”

“I got the bullet, Ed,” said Olson. “What you an’ Badger been runnin’? Come on, you might as well show us an’ get it over with.”

“All right, Fred, I know when I’m licked. Christ! Two of them gone and their blood’s on my head.” He unlocked the door and let them through the store, down to the basement. It was clean, dry, spacious, and stacked with pasteboard cartons. “There it is. Help yourselves.”

“What do you think it is, Inspector?” asked Fred.

“I think it’s the reason why Armand Dubois is able to sell his drinks so cheap.” Madoc tore open the topmost carton, marked FLOOR WAX. There were a dozen one-liter bottles, each bearing the label of a well-known whiskey. He twisted the cap off one and sniffed.

“Good God! What’s in it?”

McLumber shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I was only the distributor.”

“How did you get involved with Badger?”

“I suppose it would be nearer the truth to say he was the one who got involved with me. If you must know, Inspector, we’ve always done a little bootlegging out of the store. My grandfather started it back during the first war when Prohibition came in, and it got to be a family tradition, as you might say. Nothing big, you know, just a jar here and there to a good customer and no questions asked. We ran a little still of our own out back a ways. If anybody ever discovered it, they never let on. But then this Badger blew into town.”

The hardware dealer sighed. “He tempted me and I fell. That’s the long and the short of it, Fred. He waved this wad of bills big enough to choke a horse in front of my nose, and told me there was plenty more where that came from. Business had been kind of off, and I can’t say I rose up in my wrath and told him to take his filthy money elsewhere because I’d be lying if I did. I hemmed and hawed, I suppose, waiting to see what he’d say next. Badger’s quite a talker, you know.”

“Not to us he hasn’t been,” said Olson.

“Well, he sure as hell was to me. First thing I knew, he was dropping a few gentle hints that if I didn’t run a more efficient operation—meaning if I didn’t do it his way—I’d pretty damn soon be in trouble with the excise men, not to mention the customs, considering we happened to have a few customers across the border we’d been supplying. He never threatened, mind you. If he had, I hope I’d have been man enough to tell him what to do with his money, bust up the old still, and walk thenceforth in the paths of righteousness hoping nobody would throw it up to me about having maybe been a little too diligent about following in the footsteps of my forefathers. But Badger was too subtle for that. He kept waving those greenbacks around and harping on modern efficiency till it began to make sense to me.”

McLumber sighed again. “I don’t know if you can understand, Fred, being a sworn upholder of the law yourself, eh, but Badger made it all sound like what you might call a thrilling adventure. And adventure is something I’ve never had much of in my life, as you well know. I worked right here in the store ever since I was old enough to see over the counter. When I got through school, it stood to reason I’d go in with Father, Grandfather being pretty bad with the rheumatism by then and me not being able to get into the army anyway on account of flat feet from all that standing behind the counter. So here I was and here I stayed, and when Father went, I carried on by myself. Hardware was in my blood, as you might say. And I’d married Lilybelle and joined the Owls and I can’t say it’s been a bad life. But as time went on, I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘Is this all?’ So I took Lilybelle on a cruise up the St. Lawrence, but somehow it wasn’t enough. Two years later we went all the way to Disneyland on one of those charter tours, but it still wasn’t enough.”

“You kept on running booze, though.”

“Yes, but that was just part of the business. We’d been doing it so long there was no kick to it. I might as well have been selling bug spray.”

Fred Olson took another whiff of the stuff in the bottle, then a very cautious sip. “Christ A’mighty, Ed, you sure this isn’t bug spray?”

“I already told you I don’t know what it is, and that’s the God’s honest truth. What we used to make in the old still, Fred, that was just what anybody’s grandmother might have brewed in her own wash boiler, which most of them did back in those days and don’t let anybody try to tell you they didn’t. You’d just boil up your wormy fruit, spoiled grain, pig potatoes, whatever you had lying around handy that wasn’t going to cost you anything, you’d condense the steam to get the alcohol, add a little caramel syrup to enhance the bouquet and give a better color, and there you’d be. All homegrown and homemade. Nowadays they’d be peddling it in those health food stores as organic whiskey. This stuff here, to tell you the truth, I don’t care much for it myself. Badger’s been getting it from someplace.”

“As you may have gathered, Mr. McLumber,” said Madoc, “Badger won’t be getting any more. Are you sure you have no idea who his suppliers were?”

“None whatsoever. He said it was safer for me not to know. I didn’t catch on to what he meant till the day Henry caught me sticking labels on the bottles.”

“How did that enlighten you?”

“Well, see, we never put any labels on in the old days. In fact, we didn’t use bottles, not to speak of. It was mostly old pickle jars or whatever came handy. Later on we got more sophisticated and bought up used bottles for a cent apiece. But Badger said we needed more modern marketing methods if we wanted to get into the big time, so he had it put up in nice new bottles, and got a printer he knew to make us up some different labels, just like the real thing.”

“Thus adding forgery to your list of adventures,” Madoc noted. “What you’re saying, then, is that Henry had not till then been aware you’d gone into business with Badger?”

“That’s right, he hadn’t. You see, Henry was what the Immortal Robbie called unco’ guid or rigidly righteous. He’d always known we were doing a bit of business on the side, of course, but he respected our adherence to family tradition and wasn’t above taking home a jar himself now and again, so long as it was out of the old home still. But getting it from somebody else, well, that put a different face on the entire matter. So Badger and I talked it over and decided we’d better not let on to him that we’d changed our source of supply. I’d get Badger to stamp the cases turpentine or denatured alcohol, things like that.”

“Any one of which might not have been far off the mark,” said Madoc. “And that was enough to fool Henry?”

“Well, you see, Henry never had much to do with the stockroom. His job was mostly to wait on the customers. His back was none too good and I tried to spare him any heavy lifting. My nephew Bud would come in and help out when I needed him. Bud was so flighty, speaking no ill of the dead, that I wasn’t too worried about his catching on. And Mr. Badger himself, I guess, would bring in the stock and take it out again, all but the local deliveries that Bud handled.”

“Why do you say ‘I guess’? Don’t you know what was happening in your own store?”

“Not about the deliveries, no. The boxes would be here, and then they’d be gone. It all happened in the dead of night. I was supposed to keep clear so I wouldn’t be involved in case they got caught.”

“Why do you say ‘they,’ when you’ve just told me you assumed Mr. Badger brought in the stock himself?”

“Well, I figured he must have had some help. That’s a lot of lugging for a man like him.”

“If you’re tryin’ to keep from squealin’ on Jelly Grouse an’ Jase Bain, you needn’t strain yourself, Ed,” the marshal broke in. “We already got them pegged. Go on about Henry.”

“Oh. Well, it just happened one day I was down here sticking labels on a batch Mr. Badger had told me we had to get ready for shipment and somebody came in needing a light of glass cut. So Henry came downstairs to get it ready for her, and here’s me with a Cutty Sark label in one hand and a green bottle in the other. You know yourself, Fred, there were no flies on Henry. I guess he’d been getting suspicious when my ill-gotten gains went to my head and I started throwing money around on that Lincoln and the mink coat for Lilybelle. When he saw what I was up to, he knew”

“Took it hard, did he?”

“Hard? You’d have thought he’d caught me robbing the Royal Bank of Canada. He just grabbed his coat and stomped out of the store as if it had been Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one.”

“You didn’t try to go after ’im?”

“How could I? There was a customer to wait on. Mrs. Fiske, it was. Her kids had been having a snowball fight with some other kids. Somebody hove one with a rock in the middle and it went straight through the parlor window. She had cardboard stuck over the hole, but she needed the glass so her husband could set it as soon as he got home. You know Joe Fiske, Fred. He took Elmer Bain’s place as foreman down at the lumber mill. Anyway, I figured it was better to let Henry cool down before I tried to reason with him. Damn it, we’d worked together for thirty-seven years.”

McLumber was close to breaking down. Fred would have let up on him, but Madoc knew they mustn’t. “Mr. McLumber, did you realize Badger had murdered Henry?”

“No, I didn’t! Not—not right away.”

The hardware dealer couldn’t look at them. “I suppose what I really mean is that I did know but I couldn’t let myself admit it. You see, I couldn’t picture Henry having that kind of accident. He was a crack shot, he knew guns inside and out, and he was precise in his ways. Suppose for instance the customer had wanted that glass to measure fourteen and a sixteenth by twenty-three and five thirty-seconds of an inch or whatever the hell that comes out to in centimeters. That’s how Henry would have cut it, not a hair under, not a hair over. Whatever he did, he did just so, and if he couldn’t do it right, he wouldn’t touch it.”

“You’re sure about this, I see.”

“No question. I ought to know better than anybody else. I worked with him long enough. I can see Henry going out and shooting rabbits to work off steam. Not out of meanness, Henry wouldn’t do that, but his wife makes a mighty good rabbit pot pie, so they’d serve a purpose and save a little on the grocery bill. But as to cleaning the gun afterward, if Henry was still upset, he’d have laid it aside till he could do it properly. And all that whispering about suicide some of ’em were doing, that was plain foolishness. He couldn’t have, not Henry. What he’d have done, he’d either have given me the cold shoulder for the rest of his life, or else he’d have come back next day and preached at me about sin and greed and the evils of putting the cup to my brother’s lips till I broke down and repented and told Mr. Badger I wouldn’t work with him any more. Then I suppose he’d have shot us both, and I wish to God he had. What’s to become of me now?”

Madoc looked at Fred. “It’s your bailiwick, Marshal.”