Blind tiger, p.7
Blind Tiger, page 7
“Hey, go easy, Harold,” the sheriff said. “We need him able to talk.”
He extended Thatcher his hand and helped him up. The man who’d struck him—Harold—watched smugly as Thatcher struggled to regain his equilibrium. He made blurry eye contact with the man he recognized by his gold pocket watch. He also was leering with self-satisfaction.
“I’m Sheriff Bill Amos. What’s your name?”
“Thatcher Hutton.”
The sheriff repeated his name as though committing it to memory, then gathered up the clothes Thatcher had hung on a wall hook before going to bed and passed them to him. “Get dressed.”
After he did, he was handcuffed. Then without further ado, the sheriff said, “Let’s go.”
Thatcher dug his heels in. “I have a right to know what you’re arresting me for.”
None of them seemed to think so. With the barrel of the shotgun against the base of his spine, he was prodded out of his room and into the hallway.
It seemed that he was the only boarder in the house who’d been taken unawares by the arrival of the posse. Everyone else had emerged from their rooms, all in pajamas or underwear, watching as the procession trooped down the two sets of stairs.
Few of them met Thatcher’s gaze directly, but the smart aleck, Randy, who earlier had heckled the older man on the porch, winked at him. And when Thatcher passed the flashy dresser who’d introduced himself to Randy as Chester Landry, he gave Thatcher a sly, speculative look as though they shared a dirty secret.
The landlady stood at the front door, arms crossed over her bony chest, lips tightly pursed. “Don’t expect no refund on your rent.”
Once outside, the sheriff dispatched all the deputies except Harold to “rejoin the search.” Thatcher asked, “The search for what?” but, again, he was ignored.
When Harold manhandled him into the officially marked automobile, he was showy with the shotgun, but careless with his gun belt, which was within easy reach of Thatcher’s cuffed hands. However, to go for the deputy’s pistol would be foolhardy. They would soon determine that they had the wrong man and release him. Until then, he’d go through the process without making more trouble for himself.
“Mayor, I guess you’ll have to ride with us,” the sheriff said, and the man Thatcher had met outside Hancock’s store—the mayor?—climbed in along with them.
* * *
Harold drove them to a single-story limestone building that headquartered the sheriff’s department. No one said anything during the brief ride. When they piled out of the car, the sheriff gripped Thatcher’s arm just above his elbow. Together they entered the building.
It smelled of cigarettes and scorched coffee. The main room was crowded with the standard desks, chairs, and filing cabinets of any law enforcement office. Wall-mounted gun racks were impressively stocked. Two large maps, one of the county, the other of the state, were tacked to the far wall, along with numerous wanted posters and a notice of a missing cow.
Seated in side-by-side chairs were a man in a deputy’s uniform and a man with a pale complexion, a dark five o’clock shadow, and wavy hair. The instant he saw Thatcher, he came hurtling toward him like he’d been shot from a cannon. If the deputy hadn’t acted swiftly to restrain him, Thatcher thought for sure the man would have gone for his throat.
“Gabe!” the sheriff barked. “None of that business. Scotty, haul him back and keep him back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Though the man resisted, the deputy managed to wrestle him back into the chair.
The mayor went over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Found him sleeping like a baby, Gabe. Can you believe that?”
Glaring at Thatcher, the man said, “Has he told you where she is?”
“Not yet, but he will.” The mayor brusquely signaled the deputy, Scotty, up out of his chair, then the mayor sat down in it.
Thatcher, wanting to ask what the hell was going on, thought better of saying anything just yet. Harold shoved him down into a chair. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at the blood dripping from his now misshapen nose. One of his eyes had almost swollen shut.
Thatcher returned his glare with a mask of indifference and said, “I still owe you for the clout on the head.”
The deputy gave him a fulminating look, but he walked away, slung Thatcher’s duffel onto a table across the room, opened it, and began to paw through the contents.
No longer wearing his hat, Sheriff Amos drew up a chair and stationed it in front of Thatcher’s, pulling it close enough that Thatcher could see the individual whiskers in his thick salt-and-pepper mustache. He said, “Son, save us all a lot of time and trouble. Tell us right now where Mrs. Driscoll is.”
Ten
Laurel had been awake for most of the night, walking a fussy and feverish Pearl around the shack, trying to soothe her infant even as she fueled her resentment against Derby’s selfish suicide, her present plight, her unknown future, and her absent father-in-law.
She had whipped herself into a high snit by the time she heard his truck clattering up the incline shortly before dawn. As soon as he cleared the door, she lit into him. “Where in the world have you been?”
He looked haggard and none too agreeable himself. “That’s my business.”
“It’s my business, too! I was worried to death, afraid something had happened to you, in which case Pearl and I would have been stuck here. What have you been doing all night?”
She was accustomed to his being away most days, all day, often from sunup to sunset. This was the first time he had stayed away all night. Though she would rather die than own up to it, she had been afraid to be alone after the sun went down. With only a sliver of a moon, even the surrounding limestone hills had become indiscernible. She couldn’t see the road from the shack. The darkness had been all encompassing, except for the lantern she had kept burning all night.
He plopped down on his seat on top of the barrel and rubbed his bad hip, wincing with discomfort. Mollifying her tone, she said, “I saved you some cornbread and bacon.”
“I ain’t hungry.”
Laurel stood directly in front of him, making it impossible for him to ignore her. “I believe I deserve an explanation, Irv.”
“You kept me occupied half the day teaching you how to drive. Trying to teach you how to drive.”
The series of lessons had been intermittent, carried out during Pearl’s brief naps between bouts of coughing. Laurel had never sat behind the steering wheel of an automobile. The sequence of necessary steps one had to perform with both hands and feet had been more difficult to coordinate than she’d anticipated. She was right-handed, so naturally she’d reached for the crank with that hand, when Irv had told her repeatedly to always use her left on the crank unless she wanted her “damn arm broke.”
They had wound up being frustrated and fractious with each other.
She asked now, “Did you stay gone all night to punish me for not mastering how to drive?”
He gave her a withering look. “What do you take me for?”
“Then why didn’t you come home?”
“I had a project to finish up.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“How’s Pearl?”
“She’s sick, Irv. What project?”
“Putting up a wall inside an old house. It was just sold to a family moving here from Waco. The wife wanted to divide one room into two so that her daughter would have a space separate from her brothers.”
“You’re lying.”
He glowered and looked guilty at the same time.
“You went into too much detail,” she said. “Just like Derby did when he was lying.”
He got up and headed for the other side of the room, but she caught him by the arm.
“What?” he asked, pulling his arm free.
“Do you have a… Is there a woman you see?”
He huffed a humorless laugh and continued on his way over to the sink where he pumped water into a glass and took a long drink. Laurel waited until he’d turned back to her before quietly apologizing. “I’m sorry. I had no right to ask that. It isn’t any of my business.”
He gave that same dry laugh. “I’ve loved only one woman in my lifetime. Derby’s mama. And it damn near killed me to watch her die in misery. Don’t go thinking I’ve got a romance going.”
“No project, either, I’m guessing.”
Looking done in, he returned to his seat and bent down to unlace his shoes. “No, I had a project all right.” He looked up at her from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “That fellow that came here this morning.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know, and that’s why I’m worried. What the hell was he doing way out here?”
“I told you, he—”
“I know what he claimed, but I ain’t buying it. I went around tonight, checked in with people I know, asked if they’d seen him.”
“What people?”
“People.”
She let his curt reply pass. “Had anyone in town seen him?”
“Nobody I talked to.”
“He probably hitched a ride on the highway and is long gone.”
“Maybe,” he grumbled. “But him snooping around gave me an itch I can’t scratch.”
“What snooping? He was lost and asking for directions, that’s all.”
He gave a snort and focused his attention on Pearl, who Laurel had been holding against her shoulder, rocking gently. She’d slept through their conversation.
“You say the baby’s sick?”
“She’s running a fever again. I want to take her back to the doctor.”
“I saw him tonight.”
She stopped her swaying motion and looked at Irv with surprise. “You went to see Dr. Driscoll?”
“Naw, naw. He was at the roadhouse, you know, the place where I pick up burgers on occasion?”
“You told me it isn’t a respectable place.”
“It ain’t. But Lefty fries a damn good burger, and he’s also a fountain of information. Knows everything happening in and around here. I went to inquire about our visitor today.”
“He didn’t know anything?”
“Said he didn’t. But he was dealing with a problem of his own. One of his, uh, girls got crosswise with a customer. He beat her up pretty bad.”
Understanding dawned. “It’s that kind of place?”
“It’s full service, all right.” Irv shook his finger at her. “Don’t you ever darken the door of it. It draws all sorts of lowlifes. The girls who work there… Well, let’s just say that most are experienced and tough enough to take care of theirselves. Lefty’s wife, Gert, is the meanest of them all. When she saw her girl there, beat up and bleeding, she went after Wally—the guy who hurt her—with a meat cleaver.
“Lefty had to literally peel Gert off him. He turned him over to his cousins—them Johnsons cavort in a pack—then tossed the whole sorry lot of them out. They called Doc Driscoll to come patch up the young lady. By the time he got there, Lefty had calmed Gert down. Some. It was quite a scene.”
Laurel listened with incredulity to Irv’s account of the brawl and marveled at the matter-of-fact way in which he’d related it. She marveled even more to think of Dr. Driscoll’s being in such a place.
During her one brief meeting with the doctor, she had thought him to be wholly professional, even a bit cool. Of course, she had been frantic with worry over Pearl, so, by comparison, anyone would have come across as composed and somewhat detached. She couldn’t imagine that man tending to a patient in a brothel.
She said, “Despite his late night, I hope he maintains office hours tomorrow. I can’t drive well enough yet to go into town. You’ll have to take us.”
“Sure, sure. Whenever you want to go.”
“First thing after breakfast.” She hesitated, then asked if he had any fix-it jobs lined up.
“A couple. Why?”
“I was thinking that as long as we’re in town, and if Pearl isn’t too fussy, we could look around, see what might be for rent.”
He gave her a crooked grin. “You’re not as smart as you think. I wasn’t lying about the old house. I knew of it, sought out the landlord and talked him into meeting me there after he finished his supper. It’s a big ol’ rambling place, but it’s stood empty for years on account of the back of it is built into a wall of limestone.”
“Built into the rock?”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t take much to make it habitable. I could do the work myself. But if you don’t like it—”
“The least I can do is take a look. Thank you, Irv.”
“Don’t thank me till you’ve seen it.”
The house couldn’t be more of a nightmare than this shack she was living in. She appreciated that her father-in-law had listened to the concerns she’d raised with him this morning, and had taken her ultimatum seriously enough to act on it.
In gratitude, she smiled at him. “You look worn out. Try to get some rest.” She then retreated behind the partition with Pearl, who had become restless again and was mewling pitiably.
Eleven
Thatcher repeated the sheriff’s confounding words. “Tell you where Mrs. Driscoll is?” He looked over at the man who’d tried to attack him. “Are you Dr. Driscoll?”
“Yes, you son of a bitch. And I want to know what you’ve done with my wife.”
“Nothing but talked to her. Why? What’s happened?”
Sheriff Amos said, “She’s missing.”
“Missing?”
“It’s feared she was abducted from her home sometime between ten o’clock p.m. and one o’clock a.m.”
Thatcher glanced at the wall clock. It was going on five. He looked at each man in the room in turn, and the reason for their judgmental glowers took on meaning. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. “That’s why I’m here? You think I know something about it?”
“You were seen talking with her today on her porch.”
“I said as much. I was looking for a room to rent. You can ask him.” He tipped his head toward the mayor.
“Mayor Croft told us that he gave you directions to their house.”
“A decision I regret,” the man boomed.
The sheriff, looking irritated, turned his head partially toward the mayor and said in an undertone, “Bernie, I’ll handle this.” Coming back around to Thatcher, he said, “Where’d you get the bruises, Mr. Hutton?”
“Your deputy Harold there poked me in the face with that pump-action.”
Harold, who was still rifling through his belongings, shot him a dirty look over his shoulder.
“Not the bruise on your cheek,” the sheriff said, “the one on your noggin.”
“Oh.” He reached up with his cuffed hands and touched the discolored goose egg at his temple. “I jumped off a freight train, had a hard landing, rolled down an incline.”
The sheriff tilted his head and eyed him speculatively. “When was that?”
“This morning. Early. Before dawn.”
“Where?”
“Eight, nine miles southeast of here. The middle of nowhere. I walked to town.”
“You were bumming a ride?”
Given the circumstances, he felt that admitting to one malfeasance would be to his advantage. “Yes.”
“Where were you headed?”
“Amarillo. Or as close to there as the railroad goes these days.”
“What’s up there?”
He explained his long-time connection to the Hobson Ranch. “I was making my way home, back to the ranch and my job.”
The sheriff took it all in, then said, “If you’ve got a job waiting for you in the Panhandle, why’d you jump off the freight train way down here?”
He came clean about the poker game and the ill will it had created with those sharing the boxcar. “They were sore losers.”
“Did you cheat?” Sheriff Amos asked.
“No. I have a knack.”
“For winning at cards?”
“For reading people.”
The sheriff glanced over at the others as though to verify that he’d heard correctly. Thatcher could tell that they were all skeptical of his boast, as well as of his story, so he didn’t volunteer anything else.
When the sheriff came back to him, he said, “What happened when you got to the Driscolls’ house?”
“I took one look and knew it was out of my reach.” He told them about Mrs. Driscoll’s coming out onto the porch and catching him as he was about to leave, and saying she wanted to thank him for coming by. “She called me up to the porch and brought out some fresh shortbread.”
The doctor said in a strained voice, “At least that much is the truth. Mila baked it this morning. We ate some after supper.”
“She gave me a second piece to take with me,” Thatcher said. “I wrapped it in my handkerchief. It left a butter stain. You can check it. Right pocket.”
He raised his cuffed hands, inviting the sheriff to withdraw his handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket. When he shook out the folded cloth, a few crumbs fell to the floor. The greasy spot was clearly visible.
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t go back later and do her harm,” the mayor said.
The sheriff frowned. “Doesn’t mean he did, either.”
Recalling Mrs. Driscoll’s friendly smile and hospitality, it bothered Thatcher to think that she was in a direful situation of any kind. “Mrs. Driscoll was as nice a lady as I ever met. We chatted there on the porch while I ate the shortbread. When I took my leave, she suggested I try to find a room at the boardinghouse. I thanked her and left. If something bad has happened to her, you’re wasting your time talking to me. You ought to be out beating the bushes, looking for her.”
Driscoll surged to his feet. “Or maybe we’ll beat the truth out of you.” Hands fisted, he made a lunge for Thatcher and took a wild swing.
Sheriff Amos shot out of his chair. “Dammit, Gabe. Sit down, or it’ll be you I’m locking up.”
