Graveyard Plots (26 page)

T
he big, flat-faced stranger came into the Elite Barber Shop just before closing that Wednesday afternoon.

Asa was stropping his old Spartacus straight razor, humming to himself and thinking how good a cold lemonade was going to taste. Over at the shoeshine stand Leroy Heavens sat on a three-legged stool, working on his own pair of brogans with a stained cloth; sweat lacquered his face and made it glisten like black onyx. The mercury in the courthouse thermometer had been up to 97 at high noon and Asa judged it wasn't much cooler than that right now: the summer flies were still heat-drugged, floating in circles on such breeze as the ceiling fan stirred up.

In the long mirror across the rear wall Asa watched the stranger shut the door and stand looking around. Leroy and the shoeshine stand got a passing glance; so did the three 1920s Otis barber chairs, the waiting-area furniture, the open door to Asa's living quarters in back, the counter full of clippers and combs and other tonsorial tools, and the display shelves of both modern and old-fashioned grooming supplies.

When the eyes flicked over him Asa said, "Sure is a hot one," by way of greeting. "That sun'll raise blisters, a person stands under it too long."

The big man didn't say anything. Just headed across to where Asa was standing behind the number one chair. He wore a loose-fitting summer shirt and a pair of spiffy cream-colored slacks; dark green-tinted sunglasses hid his eyes. Asa took him to be somewhere in his middle fifties, reckoning from the lines in his face. Some face it was, too: looked as though somebody had beat on it with a mallet to flatten it that way, to get the nose and lips all spread out and shapeless.

The display shelves were to the left of the number one chair; the stranger stopped there and peered down at the old-fashioned supplies. He picked up and inspected a silvertip-badger shaving brush, an ironstone mug, a block of crystal alum, a bottle of imported English lavender water. The left corner of his mouth bent upward in a sort of smile.

"Nice stuff you got here," he said, and Asa knew right off that he was from up North. New York, maybe; he had that kind of damn-Yankee accent you kept hearing on the TV. "Not too many places stock it nowadays."

"That's a fact," Asa agreed. "I'm just about the only barber in Hallam County that does."

"Sell much of it?"

"Nope, not much. Had that silvertip brush two years now; got a genuine tortoiseshell handle, too. Kind of a shame nobody wants it."

The stranger made a noise through his flattened nose. "Doesn't surprise me. All anybody wants these days is modern junk, modern ideas. People'd be a lot better off if they stuck to the old ways."

"Well," Asa said philosophically, "things change."

"Not for the better."

"Oh, I dunno. Sometimes I reckon they do." Asa laid the Spartacus razor down. "But sure not in the art of shaving. Now that silvertip there—a real fine piece of craftsmanship, handmade over in France. Make you a nice price on it if you're interested."

"Maybe," the big man said. He edged away from the shelves and went over by the open inner door. When he got there he paused and seemed to take inventory of the room beyond. "You live back there—old timer?"

"I do."

"Alone?"

"Yep. You a census-taker, maybe?"

The stranger barked once, like a hound on a possum hunt; then he came back to where Asa was and looked up at the clock above the mirror. "Almost five," he said. "Sign out front says that's when you close up."

"Most days the sign's right."

"How about today?"

"If you're asking will I still barber you, the answer's yes. Ain't my policy to turn a customer away if he's here before closing."

"Any after-hours appointments?"

Asa's brows pulled down. "I don't take after-hours appointments," he said. "Haircut what you're after, is it? Looks a mite long over the collar."

No answer. The big man turned his head and looked over at the front window, where the shade was three-quarters drawn against the glare of the afternoon sun. About all you could see below it was half of the empty sidewalk outside.

Asa ran a hand through his sparse white hair. Seemed pretty quiet in there, all of a sudden, except for the whisper of the push-broom Leroy had fetched and was sweeping up with in front of the shoeshine stand. There was hardly a sound out on Willow Street, either. Folks kept to home and indoors in this heat; hadn't been much foot or machine traffic all day, and no business to speak of.

"Don't recall seeing you around Wayville before," Asa said to the stranger. "Just passing through, are you?"

"You might say that."

"Come far?"

"Far enough. The state capital."

"Nice place, the capital."

"Sure. Lots of things happening there, right? Compared to a one-horse town like this, I mean."

"Depends on how you look at it."

"For instance," the big man said, "I heard there was some real
excitement over there just last week. And I heard this barber named Asa Bedlloe, from Wayville here, was mixed up in it."

Asa hesitated. Then, "Now where'd a Yankee like you hear that?"

The stranger's lip bent upward at the corner again. "The way I got it, Asa was in the capital visiting his nephew. While the nephew was at work, Asa wandered downtown to look through some secondhand bookstores because he likes to read. He took a short cut through an alley, heard two guys arguing inside an open doorway, and the next thing he knew, there was a shot and one guy came running out with a gun in his hand. Asa'd already ducked out of sight, so the guy didn't see him. But Asa, he got a good look at the guy's face. He went straight to the cops and picked him out of a mug book—and what do you know, the guy's name is Rawles and he's a medium bigshot in the local rackets. So the cops are happy because they've got a tight eyewitness murder rap against Rawles, and Asa's happy because he's a ten-cent hero. The only one who isn't happy is Rawles."

Asa wet his lips. His eyes stayed fixed on the stranger's face.

"What I can't figure out," the big man went on, "is why old Asa went to the cops in the first place. I mean, why didn't he just keep his mouth shut and forget the whole thing?"

"Maybe he reckoned it was his duty," Asa said.

"Duty." The stranger shook his head. "That's another modern idea: instead of staying the hell out of things that don't concern them, everybody wants to do his duty, wants to get involved. Like I said before, people'd be better off if they stuck to the old ways."

"The old ways ain't always the right ways."

"Too bad you feel that way, old timer," the stranger said. He glanced up at the clock again. "After five now. Time to close up."

"I ain't ready to close up just yet."

"Sure you are. Go on over and lock the front door."

"Now you listen here—"

The sly humor disappeared from the big man's face like somebody had wiped it off with an eraser. His eyes said he was through playing games. And his actions said it even plainer: he reached down, hiked up the front of his loose-fitting shirt, and closed his big paw around the butt of a handgun stuck inside his belt.

"Lock the front door," he said again. "Then go over with the shoeshine boy—"

That was as far as he got.

Because by this time Leroy had come catfooting up behind him. And in the next second Leroy had one arm curled around his neck, his head jerked back, and the muzzle of a .44 Magnum pressed against his temple.

"Take the gun out and drop it," Leroy said. "Slow and careful, just use your thumb and forefinger."

The big man didn't have much choice. Asa watched him do what he'd been told. The look on his face was something to see—all popeyed and scrunched up with disbelief. He hadn't hardly paid any mind to Leroy since he walked in, and sure never once considered him to be listening and watching, much less to be a threat.

Leroy backed the two of them up a few paces. Then he said, "Asa, take charge of his gun. And then go ring up my office."

"Yes, sir, you bet."

The stranger said, "Office?"

"Why, sure. This fella's been pretending to work here for the past couple days, bodyguarding me ever since the capital police got wind Rawles had hired himself a professional gunman. Name's Leroy Heavens
—Sheriff
Leroy Heavens. First black sheriff in the history of Hallam County."

The big man just gawped at him.

Asa grinned as he bent to pick up the gun. "Looks like I was right and you were wrong, mister," he said. "Sometimes things change for the better, all right. Sometimes they surely do."

There are two places that are ordinary enough during the daylight hours but that become downright eerie after dark, particularly if you go wandering around in them by yourself. One is a graveyard; the other is a public zoo. And that goes double for San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoological Gardens on a blustery winter night when the fog comes swirling in and makes everything look like capering phantoms or two-dimensional cutouts.

Fleishhacker Zoo was where I was on this foggy winter night—alone, for the most part—and I wished I was somewhere else instead.
Anywhere
else, as long as it had a heater or a log fire and offered something hot to drink.

I was on my third tour of the grounds, headed past the sea lion tank to make another check of the aviary, when I paused to squint at the luminous dial of my watch. Eleven forty-five. Less than three hours down and better than six left to go. I was already half frozen, even though I was wearing long johns, two sweaters, two pairs of socks, heavy gloves, a woolen cap, and a long fur-lined overcoat. The ocean was only a thousand yards away, and the icy wind that blew in off of it sliced through you to the marrow. If I got through this job without contracting either frostbite or pneumonia, I would consider myself lucky.

Somewhere in the fog, one of the animals made a sudden roaring noise; I couldn't tell what kind of animal or where the noise came from. The first time that sort of thing had happened, two nights ago, I'd jumped a little. Now I was used to it, or as used to it as I would ever get. How guys like Dettlinger and Hammond could work here night after night, month after month, was beyond my simple comprehension.

I went ahead toward the aviary. The big, wind-sculpted cypress trees that grew on my left made looming, swaying shadows, like giant black dancers with rustling headdresses wreathed in mist. Back beyond them, fuzzy yellow blobs of light marked the location of the zoo's cafe. More nightlights burned on the aviary, although the massive fenced-in wing on the near side was dark.

Most of the birds were asleep or nesting or whatever the hell it is birds do at night. But you could hear some of them stirring around, making noise. There were a couple of dozen different varieties in there, including such esoteric types as the crested screamer, the purple gallinule, and the black crake. One esoteric type that used to be in there but wasn't any longer was something called a bunting, a brilliantly colored migratory bird. Three of them had been swiped four days ago, the latest in a rash of thefts the zoological gardens had suffered.

The thief or thieves had also got two South American Harris hawks, a bird of prey similar to a falcon; three crab-eating macaques, whatever they were; and half a dozen rare Chiricahua rattlesnakes known as
Crotalus pricei
.
He or they had picked the locks on buildings and cages, and got away clean each time. Sam Dettlinger, one of the two regular watchmen, had spotted somebody running the night the rattlers were stolen, and given chase, but he hadn't got close enough for much of a description, or even to tell for sure if it was a man or a woman.

The police had been notified, of course, but there was not much they could do. There wasn't much the Zoo Commission could do either, beyond beefing up security—and all that had amounted to was adding one extra night watchman, Al Kirby, on a temporary basis; he was all they could afford. The problem was, Fleishhacker Zoo covers some seventy acres. Long sections of its perimeter fencing are secluded; you couldn't stop somebody determined to climb the fence and sneak in at night if you surrounded the place with a hundred men. Nor could you effectively police the grounds with any less than a hundred men; much of those seventy acres is heavily wooded, and there are dozens of grottos, brushy fields and slopes, rush-rimmed ponds, and other areas simulating natural habitats for some of the zoo's fourteen hundred animals and birds. Kids, and an occasional grownup, have gotten lost in there in broad daylight. A thief who knew his way around could hide out on the grounds for weeks without being spotted.

I got involved in the case because I was acquainted with one of the commission members, a guy named Lawrence Factor. He was an attorney, and I had done some investigating for him in the past, and he thought I was the cat's nuts when it came to detective work. So he'd come to see me, not as an official emissary of the commission but on his own; the commission had no money left in its small budget for such as the hiring of a private detective. But Factor had made a million bucks or so in the practice of criminal law, and as a passionate animal lover, he was willing to foot the bill himself. What he wanted me to do was sign on as another night watchman, plus nose around among my contacts to find out if there was any word on the street about the thefts.