The Hangings (5 page)

"Don't talk down to me. Why haven't you caught the son of a bitch who killed my brother'?"

"Nobody saw what happened or has any idea why it happened, that's why." My dander was up too, now. Emmett Bodeen may have had a hard loss, but that did not give him the right to come into Tule Bend and throw a tantrum. "Could be
you
can shed some light on the matter."

"What in hell would I know about it?"

''What brought your brother to Tule Bend, for one thing."

"I don't know why he came here."

"Either of you know anybody lives in this area?"

"No."

"He ever been here before?"

"Not that I know of."

"How about you? You been here before?"

"No."

"When did you last see or hear from your brother?"

"Three weeks ago."

"In person?"

"I had a letter from him."

"Answering the one we found in his bag?"

Bodeen hesitated before he said, "That's right."

"Where was it sent from?"

"Marysville."

"He say anything about leaving there?"

"No."

"Nothing about coming down to Stockton?"

". . . No, nothing."

"Reckon that means he wasn't interested," I said.

"Interested in what?"

"Big-money venture of yours, the one you mentioned in your letter."

"That's right," Bodeen said flatly, "he wasn't interested."

"What else did his letter say?"

"Family talk, that's all."

"Your family a large one?"

"No."

"Any other kin besides your brother?"

"One sister."

"Living where?"

"Tucson, Arizona."

"Native Arizonians, are you?"

"No. You got a reason for all these questions?"

"Your brother lying there dead," I said, "that's my reason. Mind saying where you're from, originally?"

"New Mexico. Albuquerque. Folks been dead a dozen years. Sister's name is Louise, she's married to a man claims he can make rain with a machine. Jeremy and me always let her know where we are; that way she can forward letters, if needs be. You satisfied now?"

"Mostly. Surprise you your brother left Marysville without telling you in his letter?"

"No. He was fiddle-footed. Been that way ever since he was fifteen. Soon as he had an itch, he'd scratch it."

"How'd he pay his way?"

"Worked at odd jobs when he needed to."

"Any special kind?"

"Handy work. He was good with his hands."

"Anything else he was good at?"

"Drinking whiskey and chasing women," Bodeen said, snotty.

Obe laughed—one of his nervous titters. I asked Bodeen, "That your hobby, too?"

"Sometimes. Isn't it yours?"

"Can't say it is, no."

"Too bad for you."

"Not in my job. What about yours, Mr. Bodeen?"

"What I do for a living is my business."

"Sure. But if it's honest work, you shouldn't mind saying what it is."

He didn't care for the implication of that. But he had a tighter cap on himself now and he didn't blow off again. After a space he said, "I work with horses."

"Stablehand, you mean?"

"Hell no. Racehorses. I help train them."

"Work for anybody in particular in Stockton?"

"No."

"That big-money venture you told your brother about—it have anything to do with racehorses?"

Bodeen's eyes glittered. "That's enough questions," he said. "Instead of wasting your time with me, why don't you go find out who murdered Jeremy. If you don't, I will."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning just what I said."

"Better think twice before you do anything you'll regret, Mr. Bodeen. We take a dim view of lawbreakers in this county."

''Then do your goddamn job.'' He turned toward the door, yanked it open, and started out front.

"Hold on a second," I said. And when he turned, "I take it you're planning to stay on in Tule Bend a while?"

"You can count on that, Constable."

"I'll also count on you making burial arrangements with Mr. Spencer here, stopping by my office in the next day or two to claim your brother's belongings, and keeping yourself out of trouble while you're in our town."

He looked at me hard for several seconds, then put his back to me again and stalked off without another word.

When the front door slammed, Obe said, '' Whooee. That's some fella, that is."

"I don't like him much, either," I said.

"Give me the willies. Those eyes of his, and the way he smacked the
      
wall . . . well."

I knew what he meant.

And I knew something else, too: Sooner or later, in spite of my warning, we were going to have trouble with Mr. Emmett Bodeen.

Chapter 5

IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR THE TROUBLE TO COME. THAT same night Bodeen found his way to Swede's Beer Hall, got himself liquored up, and ended the evening in a fight with a riverman who didn't like the questions he was asking or the things he was saying about Tule Bend. But fights were common enough in the Swede's, and unless they turned into a free-for-all, no one even bothered to summon me. This one hadn't got to the brawling stage; Swede's bouncers had broken it up before much damage was done. So I didn't hear about it until Saturday morning, and by then there was not much I could about it. Except look up Bodeen and issue another warning, which I meant to do. Only I got sidetracked by Verne Gladstone and the arrival of Joe Perkins from Santa Rosa, and spent most of the day defending myself and playing political games.

It was early afternoon before I shook loose. The first place I went then was to the Western Union office, to see if there were any answers to the three wires I had sent Friday afternoon—one to the sheriff of Stockton, one to the authorities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one to the law in Tucson, Arizona, each requesting information on Emmett Bodeen. No replies yet.

Then I combed the town for Bodeen, but he was nowhere to be found. Nobody seemed to know where he'd gone, either. The only person who had seen him was Obe Spencer; Bodeen had stopped by to make burial arrangements for his brother, at least. Jeremy Bodeen was being buried in the Tule Bend cemetery that afternoon. Plain coffin, no services. Emmett Bodeen had told Obe that he didn't believe in funerals or religious ceremony.

Wherever Bodeen had gone, it was not back to Stockton because he had taken a room at Magruder's, a cheap lodging house over near the S.F. & N.P. yards. I found that out from Magruder himself. After which I told him to tell Bodeen when he showed up again that I wanted to see him.

The rest of the day was quiet. Boze stopped by the office and we shot the breeze and played two-handed pinochle. Some before six I went on home and listened to Ivy carry on about the Bodeen brothers and what a state everybody was in because Jeremy Bodeen's murderer was still on the loose. She didn't start in on me about Hannah, though. She had tried it again the night before—called Hannah a "shameless hussy," among other things—and I had barked at her sharply enough to throw her into a fit of pique. That dinner had been a chore to get through and this one was not much better.

Later, I sat alone on the front porch to smoke my pipe. It was a fine night. The temperature had climbed considerably over the past two days—the last warm breath of Indian summer, before the autumn chill took hold for good and blew us on into winter. I sat there enjoying it, my thoughts on Hannah.

They were easy, pleasant thoughts for a while, but then they began to grow complicated, the way they did more and more often lately. What was I going to do about my feelings for her? I could not just keep yearning for her from afar; it was a foolish, cowardly way for a grown man to behave. And yet I couldn't seem to work up the nerve to tell her straight out how I felt. She was not looking for a man, that was plain, and even if she was, a man like me . . . well, it was too much to hope that she might have any romantic notions in return.

I had never dealt well with rejection, even the gentle kind; according to Ivy, who thought she knew all my faults and weaknesses and took pains to tell me over and over what they were, that was one of the reasons I seldom went calling on "decent" women and had never married. A born bachelor, she said I was. Which meant that—before Hannah came back to Tule Bend, anyway—Ivy had thought of me as having the same sort of disinterest in the opposite sex, the same dried-up juices, that she had. I wondered what she would say if she knew just where I went and just what I did when I traveled down to San Francisco those three or four times each year. Maybe one day I would tell her. Be worth it to see the look on her face. . . .

Never mind Ivy—what about Hannah? Best thing to do was to stop going to her house nights, make it easy for all concerned. That would quench the town's fiery tongues and eventually give me some measure of peace. But the prospect of not seeing her again except at a distance was almost too painful to think about.

I began to feel restless, of a sudden. Time to make my Saturday night rounds. And as I set off for Main Street, I knew that sooner or later—if not tonight, then tomorrow night or the next one after—I would end up again at Hannah's house. The pull of my attraction to her was too strong to resist.

It was a quiet Saturday, for a change. Everything peaceable at Swede's Beer Hall, the Elkhorn Bar and Grill, the Sonoma Pool Emporium, the cheaper resorts on the east side. Emmett Bodeen wasn't in any of those places—which I took as a positive sign—and he wasn't in his room at Magruder's. I still wanted to talk to him about his fight at the Swede's, but it could wait another day if he did not make any more trouble.

Shortly past ten, I found myself on south Main. From there I could see that Hannah's lamps were still lit, as they usually were at this hour; she seldom turned in before midnight, she had told me once. I had called on her later than this, and been welcome. Well, then?

I kept walking that way—and that was how I came to spot the prowler.

Only reason I saw him was that I happened to be looking toward the livery barn as I passed it on the south side, and he picked that moment to come out of the willow thicket along the creek and run humped-over toward the livery. Which made him a prowler in my mind and no mistake. The front doors were closed; no lights showed anywhere. Jacob Pike, Morton's helper, lived in the barn—he had a little makeshift room fixed up in one corner of the hayloft—but Pike would have no reason to be skulking around out back at this hour. Neither would anybody else with legitimate business.

We get our share of petty crime in Tule Bend, just like any other small town. I had arrested more than a few prowlers since my appointment as constable, half of them transients and the other half kids bent on mischief. No telling yet which this one was. But I damned well intended to find out.

I moved off the street into the shadows along the board fence that enclosed the boat repair yard next door. The prowler was hidden now at the back of the livery. Doing what? Trying to get inside the rear doors? Or just waiting and listening, as I was doing, because he had seen me too? Well, whatever he was doing, he was being quiet about it. No sounds of any sort came from back that way.

I went slowly along the fence, wishing I had bothered to strap on a sidearm before leaving the house. But I did not wear one as a rule, because it was so seldom needed. Not too many men around here wear sideguns any more, at least not in town; there had not been a shooting scrape in years. In all the time I had been a peace officer I had fired a weapon no more than four times in the line of duty, and never once with intent to harm another man. Still and all, a Colt Bisley or a Starr .44—the two sixguns I owned—was a good thing to have in your hand when you went to arrest somebody for trespassing and perhaps breaking-and-entering, especially a potential horse-thief. I couldn't see any other reason for a man to be prowling around a livery bam after dark. And horse stealing is a serious offense—serious enough for a gent engaged in it to put up a fight to keep from being taken into custody.

Halfway along the fence I stepped on something that felt like a tree branch. I squatted down, and that was what it was—a chunky length of willow branch that must have been blown up along here by an old storm. Better than no weapon at all, I thought. I straightened again with the branch in one hand. Nightbirds cried along the creek, a wagon went clattering past on Main, the wind made rattling sounds in the willow branches; but there was still nothing to hear from behind the livery.

I eased forward again, crouched low, until I was nearly abreast of the stable's back corner. The open ground between the fence and the side wall was mostly grass, through which a pair of rutted wagon tracks ran around to the rear. I left the shadows, used the grass to cushion my footfalls as I crossed to the livery and then went along its side wall to the corner.

South across the creek, a train whistle sounded: night freight on its way to Santa Rosa and points north. I waited until I could hear the freight's rumbling clatter before I poked my head around the corner.

There was nobody at the rear doors, nobody in the adjacent corral and wagon yard, nobody anywhere that I could see. A horse chestnut grew in close to the livery at the far corner, throwing heavy shadow across that part of the wall; but there was no movement over that way. He had had enough time to get inside, if the rear doors hadn't been barred from within. Either that or he had gone skulking around toward the front, at the north wall.

Stepping around the corner, I skinned along the rough boarding to the doors. The sound of the night freight was fading now; where I was, the hush had a strained quality— or maybe that was just my fancy. Down the grassy slope arrears of the wagon yard I could see the black rippling motion of the creek, a scum of mist along the surface that was just now starting to climb the banks. The fog moved but nothing else.

I turned to the doors, tried the latch handle on one. Barred inside, right enough. That had to mean he—

Sudden slithering sound behind me . . .

I started to swing about, lifting the willow branch, breaking my body at the waist, but I was not quick enough. I had a brief perception of a man-shape lunging toward me with an upraised arm and then something cracked down across my neck, drove me to my knees. Pain erupted; my head seemed to swell with it, so that I could not see or think straight. I believe I yelled and tried to stand. But he hit me again, an even more solid lick this time. Must have been solid, because it knocked me senseless and I have no memory of feeling it.

*****

"Mr. Evans? You all right?"

The voice came out of a scum of mist like the one on the creek, only thick and black. Fuzzy at first, a long way off. Then the fog started to break up and the voice, when it came again, was louder and more distinct and I felt hands on me, shaking my shoulder. They weren't rough hands but the shaking set up a roaring in my head, swept bile up into my throat. I slapped them away, flopped over on my belly, and vomited into damp grass.

"Cripes, Mr. Evans, what happened?"

Weakly, I dragged myself onto all fours and knelt there until the pain in my head and neck subsided enough to let me think. Then I hauled back on my knees, forced my eyes open. When I touched the side of my head above the left ear I felt a soft spot and the warm stickiness of blood.

"You want me to get Doc Petersen?"

I knew that voice now: Jacob Pike. I bent my head back, slow, and looked up at him until he came clear into focus. He was not alone; one of his pool-hall cronies, a kid named Badger, was gawking at me too. Both of them wore slouch caps, vests, dungarees—the evening clothes favored by their breed.

"No," I said. My voice did not sound right. It had a raspy edge, like a file scraping cross-grain on wood. "Just help me up."

The two of them hauled me to my feet and on over to the back wall of the livery. I was as wobbly as a newborn colt, so that I had to lean against Pike and then the wall to keep from falling down again. There was anger in me now, a slow seethe of it.

"What happened, Mr. Evans?" Pike asked again. "Somebody hit you?"

"Somebody," I said. "You see who?"

"No, we didn't see nobody."

"Where'd you come from?"

"Up town. Heard noises and a yell and come runnin'."

"How long ago?"

"Few minutes."

"What did you see when you got here?"

"Just you lyin' there in the grass."

"You lock everything up before you left here tonight?"

"Sure. I always do. Mr. Evans, what—?"

"Prowler," I said.

"For a fact? Horse thief?"

"What else. Go and see if the front doors are still locked, if anything has been disturbed inside."

He went, taking Badger with him. I leaned against the wall with the anger rising hot in me, like a dose of laudanum easing the pain. Son of a bitch must have seen or heard me coming, I thought. Knew I was stalking him, anyhow, and hid behind that horse chestnut and waited until I turned my back at the doors.

Who?

There was a rattling as the bar came off the rear doors, and Pike poked his head out. "Well, he never got inside."

"All right."

"Too bad I wasn't here. I'd of fixed him."

"Sure you would."

"I ain't afraid of a horse thief. He wouldn't of—"

"Well? Wouldn't have busted your head for you, eh?"

Pike gave me one of his insolent grins. "Not unless he caught me unawares, like I guess he did you."

"Pike," I said, "don't rile me any more than I already am. You'll sure as hell be sorry if you do."

It was the tone of my voice, more than the words, that wiped the grin off his mouth. He said, half-sullen now, "You want us to help you over to the doc's?"

"No. Go on to your tick. And make sure you lock up again first."

He shut the doors without saying anything else; a few seconds later I heard him slam the bar into place. I pushed away from the wall, still a little shaky on my pins, and found my derby and set it gingerly on my head. Then I walked over to the chestnut tree and used up half a dozen matches checking the ground there and along the north wall—wasted them, for there was nothing to find that might help me identify the prowler.