Blind tiger, p.9
Blind Tiger, page 9
“You’re not going to do anything with him. He’s going back to his cell, and I’m going to make some calls.”
“To whom?”
“To whomever I damn well please, Bernie. This is my desk, my office, my department, and my investigation.” Reining in his anger, he said, “Thank you for your help this morning.” He motioned toward Thatcher. “Identifying the suspect.”
“It was the least I could do. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened in Foley.”
“You can’t say that yet because we don’t know what’s happened.”
“I want to be apprised as soon as—”
“News has a way of getting to you, Bernie. I’m sure you’ll be among the first to hear of any developments.”
“I’m depending on you to see that I do.”
The sheriff gave a nod that could have been taken either as acquiescence or could have signified nothing at all, and Thatcher figured the latter.
With self-importance, the mayor headed for the door, but when he came abreast of Thatcher, he stopped. Meeting him eye to eye, he said in a low and sinister voice, “I don’t care who you mistook me for. If you ever put your hands on me again, you won’t live to regret it. Do we understand each other?”
Thatcher met his threatening stare head-on. “Oh, I think so.”
Croft held his gaze as he said, “I’ll be checking in, Bill,” then he strode to the door and left.
The sheriff’s relief over seeing him go was obvious, even though that left him alone with Thatcher, who’d been referred to as “dangerous” and “the suspect.”
He lifted the metal ring that held the keys to the jail cells off a nail on the wall. “You gonna give me any trouble, Mr. Hutton?”
“No. But I could use the toilet.” He’d seen a door at the far end of the corridor marked as such.
“Can’t afford you the privacy when I’m the only one here. There’s a chamber pot under your bunk.” He signaled for Thatcher to precede him.
Once back inside his cell with the door locked, Thatcher stuck his hands between the bars. The sheriff removed the handcuffs.
Thatcher said, “I don’t know what’s happened to Mrs. Driscoll. I had no part in it.”
The sheriff backed up and propped himself against the wall opposite the cell. “Why’d you choose that ratty old shack of Irv Plummer’s to stop at?”
“It was the first place I’d come to. I needed a drink of water and directions to the nearest town.”
“You ever been to Foley before?”
“No, and I wasn’t headed here. Like I told you, I was aiming for the Hobson ranch. But I needed a town to get myself together, earn some money before continuing on.”
“You had your poker winnings.”
“They didn’t amount to much.”
“They did to the men who lost.”
“If they couldn’t afford to lose, then they shouldn’t’ve been gambling.”
The sheriff snuffled. “True enough.” He studied Thatcher as he thoughtfully stroked his mustache. “Irv seemed to have taken a dislike to you. How come?”
“I have no idea.”
“Y’all didn’t have a run-in of some kind yesterday?”
“I never even saw him. When I got there, Mrs. Plummer was in the yard hanging out her wash. I didn’t know for certain that anyone else was around until he called to her from inside the house. He didn’t show himself.”
Deliberately he neglected to tell the sheriff about the shotgun, although he couldn’t say where his reluctance to mention it came from. “Do you think the baby will be all right?”
“My boy had croup a couple of times when he was little. Sounds worse than it is.”
“What’s Plummer do for a living?”
“He’s a handyman. Drives an old truck.”
“It was parked in the yard.”
“It’s full of tools and gadgets, jangling around. You can hear him coming from a mile away. He’s quite a character.”
“I gathered.” Thatcher debated whether or not to leave it there, but decided to be up-front. “I know that Mrs. Plummer’s husband died by his own hand just a few months ago. Mrs. Driscoll told me.” He recounted how that conversation had come about. “She didn’t go into detail. Told me only that he shot himself.”
“He put a Colt forty-five under his chin and pulled the trigger.”
Jesus. Thatcher hoped Mrs. Plummer hadn’t been the one who found him. “That was an awful thing to do to his family. He leave a note?”
“No.” The sheriff lowered his head and stared at a spot on the floor between him and the cell. “When I questioned Mrs. Plummer about it, she told me her husband had come back from the war a different man, that he never recovered from his service over there, and that’s what drove him to kill himself.”
“It can happen.”
The sheriff kept his head down but lifted his gaze to Thatcher, looking at him from under a pair of eyebrows that matched his salt-and-pepper mustache. “Did it happen to you? See, Mr. Hutton, I recognize the buttons on your coat. My boy wore the same uniform.”
He lowered his gaze to the floor again. “I know the name of the town in France where he’s buried. Can’t pronounce it, but I can’t see it matters much. I doubt I’ll ever get there.
“And, anyway, if I were to, there’s a bunch of Company B boys all buried together. They couldn’t really tell one from the other, they said. Made separate graves… Well, impractical, I guess.”
He coughed behind his fist. Thatcher heard him swallow. Then he raised his head and looked Thatcher in the eye. “Were you witness to atrocities like that?”
“Damn near every day. Even after the armistice, I was left over there to clean up messes that folks who haven’t seen can’t imagine.”
“You didn’t feel the effects of seeing things like mass graves stuffed with unidentified body parts?”
“Yes, Mr. Amos, I felt the effects, all right. But they didn’t make me lose my mind, or tempt me to blow my brains out, or drive me to abduct women.” His hands closed around two of the bars. “Seeing all that death only made me determined to get back home and go on living out the rest of my life as best I can.”
Their gazes stayed locked for a time. The sheriff was the first to break away. He turned and started down the corridor. “Try to get some shut-eye.”
“How long can you hold me without charging me?”
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it.”
“With all due respect, I do worry about it.”
Bill Amos stopped and turned. He subjected Thatcher to a long, assessing stare. “There’s a lot about you I’m trying to figure out. But it’s occurred to me to wonder why you would spend ten minutes or more with a young woman who you thought was all alone way out yonder, and leave politely without laying a hand on her, then walk five more miles, on a hot day that topped eighty, meet another woman who’s seven months pregnant, and decide to sneak back in the dead of night and carry her off. On foot.”
Thirteen
Laurel spent an anxious hour pacing the waiting area of the doctor’s office, trying to comfort Pearl. Her coughing spasms were relieved only when she could draw enough breath to wail.
When they finally were called into the examination room, the elderly physician peered at them through his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and asked, “What seems to be the problem?”
Laurel wanted to smack him.
With a maddening lack of urgency, he went about examining the screaming baby while asking Laurel pertinent questions. In the hope of moving things along, she kept her answers brief and precise.
He listened to Pearl’s chest and, when he removed the earpieces of the stethoscope, asked if she’d been born early.
“By three weeks.”
He ruminated on that, then used a medicine dropper to dose Pearl with powdered aspirin dissolved in water. “This will bring down her fever. And this,” he said as he similarly administered a dose of sweet smelling syrup, “will help with her cough.” He gave Laurel a small bottle of the cough remedy and a packet of the aspirin to take with her.
Irv had waited in the car. When he saw her coming from the building, he got out to help her and Pearl into the passenger seat. “Is it the Spanish flu?” he asked. “Pneumonia?”
“He didn’t say.”
He tilted his head and looked at Pearl, who was lying in Laurel’s arms. “She seems better already.”
“He gave her paregoric.”
He frowned. “That’s dope, ya know. You’d’ve been just as well off funneling some whiskey down her throat.”
Laurel agreed. Her mother had given her paregoric whenever she’d suffered a stomachache or diarrhea. However, rather than easing her symptoms, the opiate had always nauseated her, making her throw up.
She didn’t like the idea of the stuff, and would be very stingy with the doses she gave Pearl for her cough. Now, however, she was grateful that the baby was no longer struggling for every breath. Pearl’s eyes were blinking sleepily, and sleep would be as good a remedy as anything.
Laurel kissed her daughter’s forehead, then whispered to her, “Things are going to get better, Pearl. I’m going to make them better. I promise.” After Irv had started the car and gotten behind the wheel, she said, “I want to see that house for rent.”
* * *
As they drove through town, Irv reopened the subject of the scene in the sheriff’s office. “That fella Hutton. What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“I mean in connection with the doc’s wife gone missing.”
Rather than answer his question, she asked, “How was the mayor involved? Is he a close friend of the Driscolls?”
“Naw, he just sticks his big nose into everybody’s business.”
“Well, this is his business. He’s a public official, and a woman in his city went missing overnight.”
“You think that Hutton took her?”
“I don’t know, Irv.” Her tone reflected how tired she was of his seeming obsession with Mr. Hutton. Since he’d ventured into their yard yesterday, no matter what topic they were talking about, Irv always circled back to him. Every time she’d asked what had made him so suspicious of the man, his answer was usually the same. “Just don’t trust a tall, dark stranger who drops out of nowhere.”
As now, he muttered, “Don’t trust him as far as I can throw him.”
He would trust Mr. Hutton even less if he knew that he’d placed his hands on Laurel’s arms and held her against him. She’d taken his hand!
By doing so, she’d given him an opportunity to force himself on her if he’d been of a mind to. No, they had to be wrong to suspect him of molesting Mrs. Driscoll in any way. He’d done nothing in the manner that Sheriff Amos’s question had suggested, nothing to make her fear that he meant her harm, or that his intentions were dishonorable.
The worst he’d done to her was to make it impossible for her not to think about those moments when they had touched. She feared that seeing him again, even in those circumstances, had prolonged the time it was going to take for her to forget them.
* * *
The house was as Irv had described: rambling. It appeared to have been broken apart at one point and pieced back together incorrectly. Even more uniquely, it backed up to a sheer wall of limestone.
But it was actually better than Laurel had expected. “Can we see inside?”
Irv wasn’t completely sold on the idea of moving into town, but he turned off the truck’s motor, grumbling, “Landlord said he’d leave the key under the porch in a sardine tin.”
They found the key. The front door’s hinges screeched when Irv pushed it open. The interior smelled like mildew with an undertone of dead mouse, but Laurel reasoned that if the front windows were open, the southerly breeze would dispel the odor.
Flanking the central hallway were a parlor to the left and a staircase to the right. Laurel stepped into the parlor. The wallpaper was shabby and stained, but it had tall windows and a pretty Victorian carved wood spandrel that demarcated the parlor from the dining room. A door on the far side of it led into the kitchen.
“The icebox is the old-fashioned kind,” Irv said. “You’d have to have ice delivered. But the stove’s electric.” Gesturing to the rusty faucets in the sink, he added, “It’s tapped into the city water. You won’t have to pump no more.”
“Is there a bathroom?”
Irv led her to it. Obviously a late addition, it was tucked under the staircase. The fixtures needed a good scouring, but she was delirious at the thought of no longer having to use an outhouse.
“Upstairs?”
“Two bedrooms and a sleeping porch. Some of these steps are rotted, so be careful.”
The front bedroom faced south. Sunlight shone through the dirty windows, from which she could see the tallest buildings of downtown. Having been isolated for months, the thought of having a view of nearby civilization was comforting. She could make this a pleasant room for Pearl and her to share.
The sleeping porch was a screened-in, long and narrow space. She would have to think on how best to utilize it.
Beyond it was a small, claustrophobic room that had only one east-facing window. The ceiling slanted downward to meet the far wall. “This’ll do me fine,” Irv said. “I don’t require much space.”
“But you’ll have to climb the stairs,” Laurel said. “That won’t be good for your hip. I have a better idea.”
She led him back downstairs and into the kitchen. “Build a wall on this end of the kitchen to enclose the keeping room. It has a window. It would easily convert into a bedroom.”
He scowled. “Where’d you get that notion?”
“From you. You shouldn’t have lied about dividing one room into two for a family from Waco.”
He swore under his breath, but Laurel could tell that the idea appealed to him. The new room would give him access to the rest of the house without having to use the stairs. The back door leading from the kitchen to the outside would also enable him to come and go freely.
She pointed that out to him, then stood by waiting hopefully as he mulled it over. For an eternity. “If it’s a matter of money—”
“It ain’t.”
“I plan to pitch in.”
“I told you, I ain’t destitute.”
“I still have my money.”
“Keep it. I owe you this.”
“How so?”
“It was my boy who skipped out on you.”
Whenever the subject of money came up, they argued, and Irv was cranky for days after. She supposed it was a blow to his pride for her to question him about finances.
But she suspected his obstinance on the matter went deeper than that. The guilt he felt over leaving Derby in an orphanage weighed even more heavily on him since the suicide. It was too late for him to make restitution to his son. Instead, he had dedicated himself to taking care of Pearl and her.
She was strongly opposed to the idea of being accountable or indebted to anyone, even to her well-meaning father-in-law, but she didn’t want to scotch renting the house by quarreling with him now. “When can we move in?”
He hooked his thumbs under his suspenders and ran them up and down as he took a slow look around.
“Well?” Laurel said.
“I’m taking stock.”
“You’re stalling.”
“We don’t have any furniture.”
“We don’t have any now!” she exclaimed, causing Pearl to stir. “Why are you so opposed to this, Irv?”
“I ain’t.”
“Good. We’ll move in tomorrow.”
Before he could say anything further, she turned on her heel and left through the front door. By the time he had followed, locked the door, and returned the key to its hiding place, she was in the car—in the driver’s seat.
He hobbled around to the passenger side and opened the door. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Pearl’s asleep. You can hold her while I drive.”
“You need a lot more practice.”
“I’ll have five miles’ worth after driving home. Now get in.”
Fourteen
Thatcher was confined to the jail cell throughout the day, although after deputies returned, he was allowed two visits to the lavatory. Harold grudgingly provided him with a bar of soap and a towel so he was able to wash up.
He heard people entering and leaving the building where briefings were held in the main room, but for most of the day the door at the end of the hall had remained closed, so he was unable to hear everything that was being said.
The telephone rang frequently. He supposed updates on the search for Mrs. Driscoll were being called in to Sheriff Amos, but Thatcher didn’t sense a thunderbolt from any of the incoming information.
Darkness had fallen and the hubbub in the office had died down before Sheriff Amos came through the door. Thatcher hadn’t seen him since their conversation that morning.
Apparent to Thatcher immediately was that the stressful day had taken a toll. Bill Amos probably had twenty-five years on Thatcher, but for a man of his age, he was fit. Tonight, however, he looked like he was under a lot of strain and weary to the bone.
Thatcher got up from the bunk and met him at the bars. “Any news?”
“We’ll get to it.” He hefted a lidded enamel pot by its wire handle. “Hungry?”
“I could do with something.”
“Chicken and dumplings.” He unlocked the cell and passed Thatcher the pot. “Take it by the handle. It’s hot.”
Thatcher took the pot, lifted the lid, and sniffed. “From the café?”
“One of Martin’s specialities.” He took a spoon and napkin from his shirt pocket and passed them through the bars. “Don’t dig an escape tunnel with the spoon.”
He said it with a smile that Thatcher returned. He carried the pot over to the bunk, where he set it down carefully so not to spill. The sheriff didn’t withdraw, but stood just beyond the bars, staring at nothing, thoughtfully smoothing his mustache. Thatcher went back over and waited him out until he was ready to reveal the cause of his furrowed brow.
