The Hangings Read online

  "Where's the body?"

  "Spencer's Undertaking Parlor."

  "I want to see it. Now."

  I did not care for him or his manner, but then it wasn't a close relative of mine we were discussing. Without saying anything I pushed my chair back and got up and went to pay for my lunch. Bodeen didn't wait; he walked straight out into daylight. He was leaning against one of the posts in front when I came out.

  Neither of us spoke on the short walk to Obe Spencer's. Obe fussed some when he realized he might have a paying customer, instead of having to bill the county for a potter's field burial at a reduced rate. But this Emmett Bodeen shrugged him off the same way you would a bothersome fly. "Just show me the body," he said, nothing else.

  Obe led us back into his embalming room and lifted the rubber sheet covering one of the tables. Emmett Bodeen stared down at the hanged man's corpse for more than a minute; the look of him was all the confirmation I needed, even though I would have to ask the question anyway. His face turned ruddy and sweated. His eyes blazed and yet underneath they were still cold, so that gazing into them made you think of fire burning on ice.

  I said, "That your brother, Mr. Bodeen?"

  The words jerked his head away from the table. He said to Obe, "Lower that sheet," and then aimed a nod in my direction. "Those marks on his neck—they come from a rope?"

  "Afraid so."

  "Hanged or dragged?"

  "Hanged."

  "Christ. Tell me what happened."

  I told him as much as we knew. Few men would take such news well, but not many would take it the way Bodeen did. That fire in him got even hotter, so hot that it started him shaking. I began to feel uneasy. There was violence inside that man, close to the surface and highly explosive. Mr. Emmett Bodeen was a stick of human dynamite, I thought, with a weak cap and a short fuse.

  He blew a little just then, too. Stood there shaking and fulminating and then surprised me and startled the hell out of poor Obe by lunging at the nearest wall and hammering at it with his fist, near hard enough to crack a bone. I thought he was going to do it again but he didn't. Instead he leaned against the wall and said without turning, "Who did it? Why?" in that hard, snappy voice of his.

  "We don't know yet."

  That brought him around. "Don't know? God Almighty, you've had two days to find out!"

  "Easy, now, Mr. Bodeen—"

  "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 Gla
dstone 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 mayb
e 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."