Powder Keg (17 page)

H
alf an hour later, I stood on the front steps of the Flannery mansion. Sheriff Nordberg’s theory had started to make some sense to me. There wasn’t any evidence to point to murder but I thought of what a greedy and ruthless bastard Flannery had been. Nordberg was probably right. Flannery didn’t seem like the suicidal kind. He’d kill but it would be somebody else.

You could see all the vehicle tracks in the snow. But everybody had gone home. There was a certain loneliness on the air. As if a big noisy circus had just left town. People weren’t even staring out their windows.

The maid answered the door. “She’s upstairs asleep. The doc, he give her two big pills.”

“I just want to look around. And ask you to look around with me, Mrs.—I didn’t catch your name before.”

The big blond woman looked stricken. “Mrs. Swenson. I’m not in no trouble, am I?”

“No. Not at all. I just need to know a couple of things.”

“It was Whitey, he was the one who stole the silverware and tried to sell it. Like I told the missus, I didn’t have notink to do with it.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. So how about letting me in?”

“You sure I ain’t in trouble?”

“None at all.”

Two staircases, another fireplace you could fill up with short people, and a ballroom that could probably hold twenty couples on the polished floor. There was even a stand for a three- or four-piece musical group. Heavy wine-colored drapes covered the long windows.

“They use this room much?”

“Not so’s I know. He don’t like her friends and she don’t like his friends. So they just never invited nobody.”

“Well, that’s one way to settle it.”

“It’s a shame, beautiful room like that going to waste.”

Then we were in the kitchen. With two stoves and half a dozen ice boxes to keep meat and vegetables cold, with maybe as many as thirty pans and pots hanging from a grid suspended from the ceiling. Everything, including all three sinks, shone radiantly in the sunlight through the windows. The view of the mountains from there was stunning. I saw the trail we’d taken looking for Mike Chaney. That seemed like a long time ago. I wondered how Jen and Clarice were doing.

“Where’s the back door?”

She led me through a dark back porch that had no windows. It resembled a loading dock for a general store. There were maybe two hundred boxes of vari
ous kinds stacked up back there. I couldn’t see well enough to figure out if they were stacked in any sort of order but it was hard to imagine they weren’t.

“Flannery liked to stock up?” I asked.

“He always said we should have enough provisions to live on for three months in case of some kind of disaster.”

“He ever say what kind of disaster he was afraid of?”

“I think earthquakes, but he never talked much to the help.”

When we reached the door, she slid back a bolt lock. And swung the door open.

“That’s all he had to secure the back door with?”

For the first time, she smiled. It made her round face pretty. “Oh, no. This was what he used to keep out intruders.”

As soon as she put one foot down on the back steps, a thunderous eruption blasted the sunny silence. Dogs. Their deep, crazed voices made the universe tremble.

“Take a peek at them, Mr. Ford.”

Dobermans. Four of them. They were on long chains that were tethered to a six-foot metal pole. A structure half the size of a good boulder was where they ate and slept. The chains were so long that they didn’t have any trouble reaching it. They wouldn’t have any trouble with intruders, either. They could rip out a throat in record time.

“Is this always kept locked?”

“Oh, yes. If Mr. Flannery ever found it unlocked, he’d fire you. He and the missus were about the only ones who ever used this back door.”

So much for that theory. Nobody had snuck into
the house the previous night to kill Flannery. They wouldn’t have been able to get in. Not through the back door, anyway.

“Is there a fire escape?”

“No.”

“How about the front door? How is that secured?”

“Three bolt locks.”

“Why so many?”

“Well, when he started doing them foreclosures—”

“He got scared?”

She nodded.

“I don’t blame him,” I said.

“I didn’t hold with them foreclosures. Them poor people.”

“You ever say anything to Mr. Flannery?”

“Mister, my husband and me got two kids to feed. I need this job bad. If I’da said anything to the mister, he would have kicked me out right on the spot. You ever see his temper?”

“Couple times. How about a cellar? Can you get into it from outside?”

“Sure. There’s those tornado doors on the side.”

I’d never heard them called tornado doors before, the slanted door or doors that led you down to the cellar from the outside. Usually they were called storm cellar doors.

“Would you show me down there?”

“Sure.”

We went back to the kitchen and then to the room adjacent to the back porch. A pine door I’d walked by previously now opened to let us down a flight of stairs to a cellar that smelled harshly of cold air and stone.

The cellar was as well organized as the back porch. Well-constructed shelves held everything from laundry soap to dozens and dozens of jars of jams, jellies, and vegetables that somebody had put up in late summer or early fall. There were two windows on the north side. Dusty sunlight angled through them, a cat lying lazy in one of the golden bars of sunbeams.

“Napoleon, you go on and get upstairs.” To me: “He loves it down here.”

Napoleon raised his wide head with baronial splendor, taking us in with great disdain, and then got up and left, making it clear that he did not care to spend any time with humans.

On the west side of the house I saw five steps leading to the underside of the slanted storm cellar doors.

“Are the doors locked from outside?”

“No. Mr. Flannery always says that nobody could get past the dogs.”

“And nobody ever has?”

“Not that I ever heard of, that’s for sure.”

“They ever give you any trouble?”

“They snap at me sometimes when I’m hanging up the wash on the clothesline.”

“But they leave you alone?”

“Mrs. Flannery taught me their command words. They won’t attack you if you yell those words at them loud enough. Otherwise not even the Flannerys could control them. They had some man from Denver come out here and train these dogs. But God help you if you don’t know the words.”

“How many people know the command words?”

“Not many that I know of.”

I walked over to the storm cellar doors. “I’m going to try them on the dogs myself.”

“Oh, no! They could kill you.”

“You said that you can control them. Then I should be able to, too.”

“But you don’t know the words.”

“I will if you tell them to me.”

“Oh, I’m under strict instructions not to—”

“I’m a lawman. Your employer has just died. These are pretty special circumstances, Mrs. Swenson.”

To make my point I started walking up the steps leading to the door. “I’m going out there, Mrs. Swenson. With or without the command words.”

She didn’t have much choice. “Abraham Lincoln’s hat.”

“Those are the words?”

She nodded. “But I’d still be careful.”

I drew my .44. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

In the war you’d run into dogs sometimes. The worst were the dogs trained to track soldiers. They were relentless. But they weren’t killers. The dogs up top had every scrap of normal dog bred and trained out of them. They had only one purpose other than eating and going to the toilet. They killed people. Or they wanted to, anyway. I could see the usefulness of dogs like those but for all their ferocity I felt sorry for them. They enjoyed few if any of the pleasures of being a dog. They were slaves in every sense.

But that didn’t keep me from being wary. Or, to put it another way, scared shitless.

I pushed the door back and stood on the second
step looking up at pure blue sky and radiant sunlight. My enjoyment lasted about three seconds.

The dogs made their moves almost instantly. They smelled me, they saw me, they had no idea who I was. In dog lingo the word
enemy
had to be huge in their brains.

Their speed, even in deep snow, was astounding. They had been maybe ten yards from me and then they were maybe three yards from me. Suddenly I realized that they could tear my throat out even though I had a gun. I might be able to kill one of them. But then the other three would make quick work of me.

I shouted, “Abraham Lincoln’s hat.”

I felt kind of silly, even though the dogs were nearly on top of me by then. What kind of adult wants to be caught shouting “Abraham Lincoln’s hat”? It sounded like a line from a little kid’s nursery song.

But it worked.

They were still flinging long strings of spittle; their eyes were still trying to fly out of their sockets; their teeth were still gleaming inside their long mouths.

And I had to say it a couple times for them to get the message. But they stopped.

They continued to growl, they continued to strain forward, they continued to eye me with a hatred that would have given pause to Attila the Hun.

But they stopped.

“Are you all right up there, Mr. Federal Man?” Mrs. Swenson shouted from the shadows in the basement below.

“I will be when I quit shaking.”

It sounded like a joke but it wasn’t. Not only was
I shaking, I was sheened with sweat over my entire body. I hadn’t noticed either of those things until just that moment.

I was happy to walk backward down the steps, closing the slanted door after me.

“I said a prayer for you.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Swenson.”

“You see why I’m afraid to hang wash.”

“Yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”

“All the time I’m out there with the wash I’m worried that they won’t obey me even when I shout the command words to them.”

“That sort of crossed my mind, too.” Only now did I shove my .44 back into its holster.

We went upstairs. From one of the kitchen windows I could see the dogs. They still hadn’t settled in completely. They had been deprived of the only pleasure they knew now that they weren’t really dogs anymore.

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Swenson. I appreciate all your help.”

“You know, I have nightmares about them dogs sometimes.”

I smiled. “Yeah, I just might have a few nightmares about them, too.”

Even when I went out the front door, I could hear the Dobermans barking out back. They knew everything that went on outside the mansion. I wondered what they knew about what had happened the night before.

I
tried the livery and then I tried Tim Ralston’s house. He wasn’t at either place.

I was walking back to my hotel when I saw Sheriff Nordberg’s wife, Wendy. As always, she had the baby in tow. Not that I could see the child. She had vanished beneath about six pounds of baby blankets.

I tipped my hat and said, “You must be pretty tired by the end of the day.”

She smiled. “They say it gets easier.” She dug down in the covers and gave the poor little thing some air. “I have to take her to the doc’s place. She’s got another ear infection. The thing is, she’s not much of a crier. That’s nice at night but it doesn’t tell you much when she’s sick.” She beamed down upon the face I couldn’t see from where I stood. “She’s such a good little girl, aren’t you, dear one?”

I probably wouldn’t make a good father. Just listening to baby talk embarrasses me. Having to speak it would be even worse.

She covered up the child and said, “Well, I’d better get her out of this cold air.”

She had one of those faces I wanted to kiss. To tilt up to my face and kiss gently and work my way into the passion. There was a simplicity, a vulnerability to her looks that made me both protective and lustful at the same time.

“Good to see you, Mrs. Nordberg.”

“And good to see you, Mr. Ford.”

The way she blushed made her even more fetching.

A few minutes later, I was sliding my key into the lock of my hotel room door.

And one minute after that, I found Tim Ralston. He lay on his back on my bed. He’d emptied his bowels at the moment of death so the room wouldn’t be one I’d be sleeping in later that night. Oh, no, the hotel folks would be moving Noah Joseph Ford to another room, preferably at the far end of the hall.

A common kitchen knife protruded from his right eye socket. The mix of blood and tissue and eyeball had the texture of suet. But he had been stabbed just before in the chest, near the heart. The killer had wanted to make sure Ralston was dead. Or maybe it was more perverse than that. Maybe he’d stabbed him in the eye for simple pleasure.

I walked to the head of the stairs and shouted down for a bellboy. My voice was loud and rude on the quiet late-morning air.

I heard the desk clerk pound on his bell; moments later I heard somebody taking the steps two at a time and then half-running down the hall.

“Oh, shit,” the big raw red-haired kid said when he reached my doorstep. He was probably about fifteen. They’d found him a bellboy’s uniform. It was about two sizes too small.

“Right in the fuckin’ eye,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“That poor little bastard.”

“You know him?”

“Me’n my brother used to sit on a roof behind his livery and throw rocks at the horses. He got pretty mad at us.”

“Just for throwing rocks at his horses? He sure must have been a hothead.”

He caught my sarcasm. “Well, that was when I was younger. I’m grown up now.” I was still glaring at him. “It was a pretty shitty thing to do.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I bet the horses liked it even less than Ralston did.” Then: “I want you to go get the sheriff and then go to the funeral home and tell them we need their wagon.”

He sniffed the air like a pointer dog. “He crap himself?”

“Yeah.”

“People do that when they die?”

“Sometimes.”

He shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t want to be around dead people much. I sure wouldn’t want
your
job.”

“Sometimes I don’t want it, either. Now get going.”

I decided I didn’t much like the smell, either. I went down to the end of the hall and opened the door and stood on the rickety wooden fire escape. Someday hotel owners would figure out that a fire would burn the wooden escape just as fast as it would the rest of the structure. The better city hotels all had metal fire escapes by then.

The air was good and clean. It was cold but it was a cold of rebirth, cleansing and giving me energy again. I rolled and smoked two complete cigarettes before I heard heavy footsteps slamming up the stairs inside.

I went back in. The day deputy was named Kip Rolins. He was a balding blond man with a beard a Viking would have envied. He looked as if he could hold his own with just about any opponent you shoved at him.

He stuck his head in my hotel room door and said, “Stinks in here.” Then: “Oh, God, I’m gonna get stuck telling his wife.”

“Where’s Nordberg?”

“He had to be in court this morning. He should be out any time now. But Missus Ralston’s gonna find out about this before then. I better tell her before somebody else does.”

I wondered if it made him feel official, telling a wife her husband was dead. A cynical thought but he didn’t sound unhappy about it at all.

He reached inside the pocket of his knee-length winter coat and took out a nice tablet and a pencil. He had to take off his gloves to write.

“So how about telling me what happened here, Mr. Ford?”

I told him and I left.