The Hangings (9 page)

"Emmett Bodeen," I said.

"But why? Don't make sense he'd want to burn up Sam McCullough's saddle shop."

"Maybe it does. His brother was hanged right out back of Sam's, remember. Might even have been in his mind to destroy the whole town."

"What the devil for?"

"Warped kind of justice for his brother."

"You mean he blames all of
us
? Hell,
Linc
. . ."

"Crazier things have happened. And he has been on a short fuse ever since he came here."

"Yeah." Boze still had a touch of the grippe; he snuffled, blew drip in that unsanitary way of his, and snuffled again. "You figure Bodeen was the prowler you tangled with last night?" he asked.

"Can't say yet. But it's likely. His first idea could have been to set fire to the livery."

"Well, he's long gone by now, that's for sure," Boze said. "Only one reason for him to head for the livery tonight—get that old roan horse of his brother's so he could make tracks out of town."

I nodded. "We'll see if the roan's gone. If it is, we'll put out a fugitive warrant. Not much else we can do, now; he's had a good three hours' head start."

We had been moving downstreet, away from the smoldering remains of the three buildings and the citizens who had not yet begun to straggle homeward. Ahead, the livery barn loomed dark against the pink-gray sky. No lights showed anywhere.

The front doors were secure, so we went on around to the rear. There were streamers of mist on the creek now, an early-morning chill in the air, a layer of frost on the grass; the coldness was like a balm on my burnt face. Or it was until I saw that the rear doors were standing wide open and nobody was around. Then I felt the chill in a different way: gooseflesh rippling along the saddle of my back.

"Now that's funny," Boze said. "Doors wide open like that, half the horses could have run off by now. Why the hell wouldn't Pike . . . ?"

I said, "You see him anywhere back at the fire?"

"No. Kid like that wouldn't risk
his
hide on a fire line."

I thought the same. Which meant that Pike had probably been here when Bodeen showed up.

I moved ahead to the open doors and called out, "Jacob! Jacob Pike!"

An echo of my voice and then silence.

I went inside by a few paces, squinting into the gloom. On the runway not far ahead, a manure cart lay on its side as if it had been kicked over by a horse—or a man. Most of the animals looked to have remained in their stalls. But one stall that was empty, I saw, was the one that had been occupied by Jeremy Bodeen's swaybacked roan.

At my elbow Boze said, "Want me to have a look up in the loft?"

"Yes. I'll check the tack room."

He went ahead to the loft ladder and I turned toward the harness room on my right, breathing through my mouth now because the ammoniac stable smell seemed stronger than usual this morning. Or perhaps it was just that my senses had been sharpened by the fire, by the look and feel of the barn.

I was just opening the harness room door when
Boze
shouted, "
Linc
!
Christ Almighty—
Linc
!"

He was over next to the loft ladder, staring at something I couldn't see because of the angle of the tack room wall. I ran to his side. And when I did see what he was looking at, the cold on my back deepened and sent out shivers.

Jacob Pike was back there in the shadows. Suspended from a rafter beam, his head flopped over on one side, his eyes wide and bulging, his tongue poked out at one corner of his mouth.

Hanged just like Jeremy Bodeen.

Chapter 10

WE STOOD LOOKING UP AT THE BODY FOR SEVERAL SECONDS, neither of us moving. But it seemed that Pike was swaying a little up there in the shadows, at the end of that stretched-taut rope—a draft, maybe, or just my fancy. I thought I could hear the rope creak, too, like a devil's whisper. I felt another shiver ripple my back, and when Boze turned away I did the same.

He said thickly, "Kid like Pike . . . why would Bodeen do that to him?"

"If it was Bodeen."

"Who the hell else?"

I shook my head.

"Must have been Bodeen," Boze said. "Maybe he thought Pike had something to do with hangin' his brother."

Shook my head again.

"You want me to go fetch Doc Petersen?" he asked after a few seconds.

"Yes. Tell him what happened here but don't tell anybody else. Town will find out soon enough and I don't want anyone blundering around and getting in the way."

"Right."

"Another thing," I said. "On your way, stop at the office and pick up my change of clothes and a handgun and rigging. That Bisley Colt of mine. And wrap it in the clothing so you're not seen toting it."

"How come you want all that?"

"Just get moving. We'll talk about it when you come back."

I followed him to the rear doors, took the lantern there down from its wall peg, lighted it after Boze was gone, and then closed myself inside. The first thing I did was to have a look at the horses. My chalk-eye was still in his stall; Jeremy Bodeen's roan was definitely missing. Possible that it had run off, but more likely it had been ridden away by Emmett Bodeen. I could not tell which other animals might be gone, or whose they might be.

I carried the lantern back to the overturned manure cart. It wasn't the only indication that there had been a struggle here. There were scuff marks in the hard sod of the runway— the kind made by boot heels and toes—and a board in one of the grain bins was cracked, as though somebody had been flung hard against it. I walked around there with the lantern down close to the ground. At the base of another bin, something glinted in the light. I sat on my heels and picked it up.

A circlet of bronze, about three inches in diameter. When I held it close to the light I saw that it was one of those presidential medals the government issued a few years back at the Philadelphia Mint. On one side it bore a likeness of Benjamin Harrison, along with his name and the date of his inauguration, 1889; on the other were a tomahawk, a peace pipe, and a pair of clasped hands.

There weren't many such medals in California; mostly they had been supplied to army officers in other parts of the West, who handed them out to Indians after peace treaties were signed. I had seen one on display in San Francisco once, but I had never seen one in Tule Bend until now.

I put the medal into my pocket, hunted around a while longer without finding anything else, then climbed the ladder to the loft. Jacob Pike's living quarters were at the rear—an eight-foot square "room" formed by the front and side walls of the barn, with the other two walls being chest-high slabs of plywood nailed to two-by-four frames. Inside were a straw bunk, and ironbound trunk, a small homemade table, and a sheet-metal heating stove with a pipe running out through the side wall. The floor had been swept clean of straw, not so much because Pike was tidy, I thought, as a precaution against fire.

The trunk contained Pike's meager possessions: a couple of changes of clothing, the two halves of a professional pool cue wrapped in chamois, a Merwin & Hulbert five-shot .38 single-action with the firing pin gone, a book called
Snappy Jokes
, a celluloid button that said "Oh Honey Give Me Some" on it, and half a dozen obscene French postcards that I would have liked, perversely, to have taken home and showed to Ivy just to hear her scream. That was all. Nothing there to tie Pike to the murder of Jeremy Bodeen, or to make him a likely candidate for a lynching. And it did not look as though the trunk had been searched by anyone before me, as though anything might be missing from it.

I looked under the bunk and poked around the straw tick, even opened the door to the stove and used a stick propped nearby to stir among the ashes. Nothing. Finally I climbed back down to the runway and made myself take another look at Pike hanging up there in the gloom.

What had happened here tonight? Pike must have been wakened by the fire bell, I thought, and put his clothes on— his corpse was fully dressed—and come down to see what was going on. When he unbarred the doors he was jumped, and there was a fight, and Pike lost it and then lost his life. That much seemed fairly clear. But what was not clear was who had killed him and why.

Two possibilities, I thought, and neither of them seemed to make much sense. If it was Emmett Bodeen who had strung him up like that, it had to be because Bodeen thought Pike was mixed up in the killing of his brother. Only I couldn't see Pike committing a cold-blooded homicide by lynching. It took a certain kind of courage to kill a man, and a crazy, vicious, cunning streak to do it by hanging smack in the middle of town. Pike had been a coward, and a slow- witted one at that. Had he witnessed Jeremy Bodeen's murder, then, or known something about it? Maybe. But then why would Emmett Bodeen have killed him? I could picture Bodeen putting a rope around a man's neck to avenge his brother, but I could not see him doing it to anyone but the actual murderer.

The other possibility was that the same man had done both killings. And that worried me the most, because likely it meant there was a madman on the loose in Tule Bend after all. Who else but a madman would want to hang a drifter and a stablehand? There was just no rational motive in either case. Pike had not been liked much but I couldn't imagine anyone having a killing grudge against him. Random victim, then, same as Jeremy Bodeen? Two men in the wrong place at the wrong time, victims of somebody's bloodlust?

And yet . . .

I kept remembering the prowler who had clubbed me on Saturday night. Two different prowlers at a livery barn on successive nights was a hell of a coincidence. What if the one last night
hadn't
been after a horse or a place to start a fire? What if he had been after Jacob Pike? And what if he had come back tonight to do the job he'd planned on his first visit?

Well, that put me right back to my starting place. Who would want to kill Pike and why? Had the same person who did for him started the fire, maybe as a diversion? And if it was not Emmett Bodeen, then had Bodeen seen Pike's murderer before he lit a shuck for parts unknown?

All the questions and confused possibilities were making my head hurt. I was having trouble keeping my thoughts straight anyway, as fatigued as I was from the fire fight. What I needed was sleep. But the way things were now, I was not likely to get any for some time to come.

I set to work untying the end of the hangrope from where it had been looped around a stall post. It was knotted tight but I managed to work the knot loose without having to cut it. I was just lowering Pike's corpse to the ground when Boze returned with Doc Petersen.

Doc was wearing his night shirt under his greatcoat and he looked as weary as I felt from his ministerings at the fire. He was grumpy, too. He said irascibly, "I was just getting ready for bed.
Didn't even have time to close my eyes."
Then he took a long look at the body, and there was a different tone to his voice when he said, "What in hell's going on in this town,
Linc
?"

"I wish I knew."

"You had better find out soon, my boy. Once news of this gets out, there's liable to be a panic. You know what I'm talking about."

I knew, all right. Folks arming themselves and carrying their weapons openly, mistrusting every stranger and before long friends and neighbors as well, maybe shooting at shadows, then maybe shooting at each other. The longer the fear and uncertainty were allowed to fester, the uglier things would get—to the point of martial law being declared. And if it did get to that point, more citizens would likely die . . . and not by the hand of a madman, either.

Doc picked up the lantern I had set down, carried it over to where Pike lay. He went to one knee to peer at the body, his back to Boze and me. Boze touched my arm and motioned with his head that he wanted to talk in private. We went over by the grain bins, out of Doc's earshot.

He had my Bisley Colt and its holster and cartridge belt wrapped in the change of clothes I keep in the office for emergencies; he handed the bundle to me as he spoke.
"Just keeps
gettin
' worse,
Linc
.
I didn't tell Doc because I didn't want to get him any more riled than he is, but I ran into Fred Horler on the way to Doc's house. He was lookin' for you and fit to be tied. Verne Gladstone was with him."

"Now what?"

"Somebody busted into Fred's office at Far West and made off with his cashbox. He had more in it than usual, on ac-count of today being payday. Six hundred dollars."

"Christ!"

"More of Bodeen's handiwork—the son of a bitch."

"You didn't tell Fred and the mayor about Pike?"

"No. They'd have been all over you by now if I had."

"Good. You'll have to tell them eventually, though."

"Why me?"

"I won't be here, that's why. I'll be out hunting Bodeen."

"You got an idea where he went?"

"No, except he had to travel south. He wouldn't have ridden back through town with the fire rousing everybody. No through roads to the west, and no way to get east across the creek without swimming between here and the ferry at the railroad bridge. Might be I can pick up his trail. Or find somebody who saw him."

"Slim chance,
Linc
."

"I know it. But it's a hell of a sight better than hanging fire in town, listening to Gladstone fulminate and watching Joe Perkins charge around like a bull in a china shop."

"I could come with you. Hell, we could organize a posse. . . ."

"No. Somebody with sense has got to tend to things here. And a posse would take too long, create too much fuss. Bodeen could be in San Francisco by the time we got one together."

Boze rubbed his bald spot, sniffing and blowing drip at the same time. "You want me to tell the mayor you're out hunting?"

"No point in not telling him."

"Anything else I should do?"

"Nose around, find out if anybody saw or heard anything." I took the presidential medal out of my pocket and showed it to him. "You ever see one of these before?"

He looked it over, shook his head. "Where'd you get it?"

"Right about where you're standing. I'd say whoever killed Pike dropped it during the struggle. It isn't the kind of thing Pike would have carried around."

"Don't seem like the kind of thing Bodeen would carry, either."

"No," I agreed. "No, it doesn't at that."

"You want me to show it around?"

"To everybody you talk to."

Doc had finished his preliminary examination of the body and was coming toward us. He said, "Killed the same way as Jeremy Bodeen, looks like. Beat up some first—bruises on his face, broken finger on one hand."

"Skin off his knuckles?" I asked.

"Some."

"So maybe he did some damage in return."

"Good chance of it, I'd say."

I showed Doc the medal; it was unfamiliar to him, too. Then I turned it over to Boze and went into the harness room, where I stripped out of my fire-ruined clothing and put on the shirt and trousers and cutaway coat Boze had brought. I checked the Bisley Colt, to make sure it was fully loaded, before I strapped it on.

My saddle and bridle were where they always were; I carried them out and asked Boze to outfit the chalk-eye. While he was doing that I made a quick search through Pike's clothing, on the chance that they contained something enlightening. But they didn't. Just a sack of Bull Durham, papers, matches, and three pennies.

I rode out through the rear doors, leaving Boze and Doc to their own unpleasant tasks. When I came around to the front, Verne Gladstone and Fred Horler and two other men were fifty yards away and closing fast on the livery. The mayor hailed me in his bullfrog voice; Horler yelled something.

Pretending not to hear, I kneed Rowdy and pounded away at a gallop.