Bring Him Back Dead (16 page)

“I was merely doing what I thought was right.”

“Did that include killing Sheriff Belluche when it looked as if the mob was going to listen to him and disband?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You were carrying a rifle.”

“A lot of men were carrying rifles.”

Mullen said coldly, “But only one shot was fired.” He nodded to a bald man in a loud sports shirt. “You’ve developed the print of that film you took last night?”

“I have.”

“Run it off for us, will you, fellow?”

“I’ll be happy to.”

The bald man set up a portable screen and threaded a sixteen-millimeter film into a projector on the late Sheriff Belluche’s desk. He plugged the projector into an electrical outlet.

Georgi wet his lips with his tongue. “But we destroyed all of the motion-picture cameras.”

“You missed one,” Mullen said. He pulled the shades on the windows. “O.K. Let her rip, friend.”

The projector hummed as the film began to roll. It was a poor picture, taken in a bad light, but it embraced most of the lynch mob on the lawn in front of the jail.

As Latour watched, Sheriff Belluche came out on the front stoop, trailing a plume of cigar smoke, and began to talk. There was no sound. The lack of it added to the eeriness of the scene. The pitch-pine torches crackled. Sheriff Belluche’s lips moved but no sound came out of them. The only sound was the hum of the projector. Then the camera moved away from the stoop of the jail and recorded the TV mobile unit and the bulk of the lynch mob. Standing on the very edge of the crowd, Georgi was listening intently. Then he raised the rifle he was carrying to his shoulder and the camera immediately panned back to Sheriff Belluche. The old man stopped talking and raised his left hand to his forehead. The dark spot between his eyes was plainly visible. His broad-brimmed Stetson fell from his head. His cigar dropped from his lips. He stood a moment longer. Then his knees gave way and he rolled down the stairs to lie face down on the walk.

Georgi’s voice was thin over the hum of the projector. “I’ll talk!” he shrilled. “I’ll talk!”

Mullen sounded tired. “Don’t bother. When it comes to murder I always prefer to talk to the head guy instead of his hired hands. Take him back to his cell and lock him up, Bill. And you take good care of that film, partner.”

“I’ll do that,” the bald man promised. “I realized how important it was the minute I processed it.”

Mullen picked his hat from a hook on the wall and Jack Pringle and Latour and the oil-company engineer followed him out of the office down the stairs and across the lawn to his mud-splattered car.

None of them spoke during the short ride. The house in front of which Mullen stopped was huge, with fluted colonnades. Painted a gleaming white, it looked like the movie version of Tara.

Mullen banged the brass knocker.

An aged colored man opened the door. “I’m sorry,” the colored man said, “but I don’t think Mr. Avart is up yet. Who shall I say called?”

Mullen pushed him out of the way. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” He led the way up the stairs to the second floor and opened one of the doors leading off a hall.

Fully dressed except for his shirt and shoes, Jean Avart was standing in front of one of the tall French windows overlooking the lawn. He seemed puzzled. “May I ask the reason for this intrusion?”

Mullen, completely exhausted, sat in the first chair he came to. “I think you know,” he said, quietly. “It concerns a little matter of murder and rape. Four rapes, to be exact.”

Avart stood with his back to the window, his hands at his sides. “You’re out of your mind, Tom.”

“I doubt that,” Mullen said. “I’ve always figured you for a good joe. But it happens this way sometimes, they tell me. A man who has led a respectable life for years, who’s never even been tagged for a parking ticket, flips his wig over some doll that isn’t available to him and all hell breaks loose. And when his need gets too great, he takes it out on the first babe that’s available. You wanted Andy’s wife the minute you saw her. And three girls paid for it. Girls you raped and beat up even while you were taking them, because they weren’t the girl you really wanted.

“The girl you wanted was Mrs. Latour. You thought that by stopping the drilling on his land and leaving Andy broke, with what he thought were two dry holes, Olga would fall into your arms. But it didn’t work out that way. She wanted money. She married Andy in the belief that he was going to be very rich. But having made a bargain, she kept it. Perhaps because she loves Andy. That’s between the two of them.”

Mullen took a cigar from his pocket and bit the end off it. “Anyway, while he worked as a deputy for two hundred and fifty dollars a month, you sat here in this antebellum bird cage of yours and ate yourself sick with jealousy. But you couldn’t do a damn tiling about it until her brother arrived from Singapore a month ago. How you got together, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he wanted money as badly as you wanted Olga. He knew his sister. He knew that because of her religious faith and because she was the type of woman she was, a divorce was out of the question — that the only way you could possibly have her was if Andy was dead.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Avart repeated. The attorney
sounded as if he were trying to convince himself of the truth of the statement.

Mullen lighted the cigar between his lips. “No. Just a crooked cop who’s kissed the Book.” He continued, “As I see it, you were torn between your desire for the girl and the fact that, except for the three lapses I mentioned, you’d never done a wrong thing in your life. Then something happened, something that concerns Mr. Feldman, here, that goosed you into positive action. His head office stopped trying to deal with you and tried to contact Andy directly. In fact, they wrote him a half-dozen letters, letters that Georgi, well paid by you, sneaked out of his mailbox before Andy saw them. But you knew it was only a matter of time before the Delta Oil Company would stop writing letters and would send a member of their legal department to talk to him in person. It could happen any day. Time was running out on you. So the other morning you lay in wait for him, and when he came out of his house you tried to kill him, hoping the blame would fall on one of the punks he’s pushed around since he’s been wearing a shield.”

Avart took a dressing gown from a chair and slipped into it and started for the door of the bedroom. “I won’t stand here and listen to such nonsense.”

Jack Pringle drew his gun. “Uh-uh. Stay put. I wouldn’t want to mess up this pretty carpet, but I will if I have to.”

The attorney returned to the French window.

Mullen enjoyed his cigar a moment. “Then you tried again the other evening. I remember now. You dropped into the office that afternoon and asked me where Andy was and I told you he’d gone to serve a warrant on Lant Turner. And you know the Big Bend country as well as any of us. You knew he’d have to pass the Lacosta place on his way back to town with his prisoner. What you didn’t know was that shortly before you took up your position in the cane brake, Jacques had returned to town and parked his house trailer in the clearing.

“The way I have it figured, he both heard the shots and saw you. At the time, Jacques thought you were hunting. But you knew it was only a matter of time before he figured out why you were plowing through the brake. So when Georgi phoned you at two o’clock in the morning, you
had a fair idea where Andy might be heading. On police business. So you beat him to the punch.”

It was an effort for Avart to breathe. He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket and put a cigarette in his mouth in one continuous motion. But after the cigarette was in his mouth he was unable to light it. His hands were shaking too badly.

Mullen pushed his hat back on his head and stretched his legs in front of him. “You drove out to the clearing in one of your farm trucks and waited by the trailer. Then, after Andy knocked on the door and identified himself, you stepped forward and sapped him unconscious. You wrenched the screen door open and shot Jacques and attacked Mrs. Lacosta, knowing the blame would fall on Andy. You had him where you wanted him — on his way to the chair. But even then you didn’t feel safe. It might be a month, six months, before he was tried, convicted, and executed. And long before that time a representative of the Delta Oil Company would have contacted him and shown you up for the louse you really are. So you whipped up that lynch mob. You brought some boys down from New Orleans. You paid Villere and Georgi plenty to act as spark plugs. You even made that fool speech they tell me you made on the steps of the jail to incite the mob still more. Now to the motive behind it.” Mullen looked at the field engineer of the oil company. “You were in charge of those two test wells that were drilled on the Latour land?”

“I was.”

“Why did your company stop drilling?”

“At Mr. Avart’s insistence. He repurchased the leases, giving us a substantial profit.”

“What excuse did he give you?”

“None. We didn’t ask for any. At the time there was still plenty of land available and we were content to take our profit and pull our tools out of the holes. But we did insist on a clause in the agreement specifying that if Mr. Latour should decide to drill, we would be given the first chance to re-lease the land. That’s why we have been trying to contact Mr. Latour recently. According to a new geological survey made of the district, we have every reason
to believe that the abandoned holes could prove to be among the most valuable producing wells in the area.”

“Why didn’t you talk to Latour two years ago?”

“We had no reason to talk to him. In fact, when the leases were signed, he was in the Army and Mr. Avart had his power of attorney, which empowered him to act as his agent. It’s been only during this last month, when our legal department attempted to renegotiate the leases and Mr. Avart refused even to listen to us, that the company’s lawyers began to wonder why any man would prefer to work as a salaried deputy sheriff instead of collecting oil royalties. That’s when we tried to contact Mr. Latour by mail.”

“And that would seem to be it,” Pringle said. “Any way you turned, Jean, you were between the devil and the deep blue sea. And I thought I was crooked.”

Avart succeeded in lighting the soggy cigarette he’d been holding between his lips. “Not that I admit a thing. But what led you to these, shall we say, erroneous conclusions?”

Latour told him. “A number of little things. Your offer of twenty thousand dollars for my land. A cigar dying in the mud, when I seldom smoke cigars. Your accurate description of the breasts of a girl whom you allegedly had never seen. The way you put a cigarette in your mouth in one continuous motion. Most cigarettes are packaged with the brand name up. And after you left my cell, I found half a dozen butts on the floor with the brand name burned off, just like the ones I found in the brake. Another thing was my shield. After you finished with Rita, you put it in her hand to make certain I was hooked. But you put it in the wrong hand. I wore my shield on my left shirt pocket. It was found in her left hand. And a girl pushing up at the chest of a man forcing her — Well, figure it out for yourself. We know that you’ve stayed with at least three other girls, probably pretending they were Olga and hating them because they weren’t.”

Avart’s smile was thin. “I don’t seem to be a very savory character. I’m under arrest, I presume?”

“That’s right,” Mullen said.

The attorney shrugged. “Then I might as well dress and accompany you downtown.”

He opened the drawer of a dresser and Mullen, moving surprisingly fast for so big a man, crossed the room and slapped the pistol Avart had taken from the drawer out of his hand.

“Uh-uh. The old man was my friend. Remember? And you’re going out the hard way. And I’m going to be there to see it. Even if I have to ask the warden for permission to leave my cell long enough to watch you burn.”

“But I didn’t kill Belluche.” Avart collapsed on the bed and held his head in his hands.

“No,” Mullen admitted. “Georgi did. And we have a motion picture to prove it. Being a lawyer, you should know that anyone who conspires to murder is equally guilty with the man who pulls the trigger.” He refitted his hat to his head. “O.K. Let’s go, Jean. Just the way you are.”

Latour asked, “What about me?”

Mullen looked mildly surprised. “I’ll bite. What about you?”

“Am I still under arrest?”

Mullen considered the matter. “Technically, I suppose, yes. But it so happens our jail is rather crowded. So you know what I think I’d do if I were you?”

“What?”

Mullen grinned. “Well, if I were twenty-eight, a potential oil millionaire, and married to a pretty little blonde who has been bawling her eyes out between phoning the jail every fifteen minutes to make sure I was still alive and safe, I think I’d go home and prove it to her.”

L
ATOUR LOOKED
in the living room and in the den and in the kitchen. Then he climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Olga was sitting in her slip in front of her dressing table, attempting to repair with make-up the damage that hours of constant crying had caused.

She made the sign of the cross when she saw him. Her voice was small. “He did answer my prayers. You are all right.”

Latour felt strange with her but it wasn’t the same kind of strangeness that had tormented him for two years. “Yeah. Sure. I’m all right. I’m fine.”

Olga turned on the stool to face him. “They did not hurt you, those men who took you from the jail?”

The morning sun was beginning to make its presence known. It was hot in the room. Latour took off what was left of his shirt and fitted the torn rag over the back of the chair. “No. Jack and Tom got back in time.”

“So Mr. Mullen kindly told me on the phone. But when neither you nor Georgi came home, I could not help worrying.”

She had to be told sometime. Latour got it out as best he could. “Georgi won’t be home. He’s in jail, charged with murdering Sheriff Belluche. It seems that he and Jean Avart were working together to get me killed so Jean could marry you.”