Gray Ghost Murders (9781101606070) (27 page)

Dead with Honor,

Emmitt James Cummings

At the bottom of the letter was the address of the sheriff's office. Seeing her name misspelled at the top of the address—
Entinger
—brought a grim smile. Martha looked at Stranahan.

“Do we open the package?” he said.

Martha brought her fingers to her throat. “No, I don't want any chance of blowback. What we do is give it to a crime scene investigator, not Harold, because he was involved in the investigation. Someone with a sterling reputation, like Georgeanne Wilkerson out of Custer County. She's in Bridger conducting classes this week. Let Ouija Board Gigi cast her spell and open its secrets. Then this afternoon we'll look at it when there's no question of tampering and hope it's what we think it is.”

•   •   •

I
t was. The dog-eared Grayson edition of
Stories for Men
that Wilkerson, a sunny speed talker whose eyes were magnified by strong prescription glasses, released to Ettinger after lifting the prints had Weldon Crawford's name scrawled in a loopy, young boy's longhand inside the cover. “The Most Dangerous Game” was the fourth chapter of the book. Inserted between the pages were Cummings's notes detailing his relationship with the congressman, starting with a conversation between the two men in Crawford's Africa room, where Crawford had first introduced him to the short story. The notes, eight pages of college-ruled paper stapled together, made it clear that Cummings felt honored to be the acquaintance of such an important man, and that while the story was indeed the inspiration that led to the arrangements, Crawford had played no part in Cummings's first encounter on the Buck's Nest with a mentally failing World War II veteran. That botched confrontation—for the old man had taken his own life rather than play the game—had gnawed at Cummings's gut and led to his confession of the incident to Crawford during an evening “when I crawled into the neck of a whiskey bottle.” Cummings wrote that Crawford had “snaked it out of me, the bastard sure knows how to pull a man's string.” In a sort of joking manner, Crawford had wondered aloud if he should report the matter to the authorities, all the while saying that he probably wouldn't. He'd let Cummings sleep on the implied threat and then had used the confession to leverage his way into sharing the planning of future arrangements.

“Though I considered him a friend, having none other, he had me over a barrel,” Cummings wrote. As Ettinger suspected, Crawford had funded Cummings on expeditions to at least three Living at Last retreats through the spring and early summer of the previous calendar year, until he found a cooperative party in Alejandro Gutierrez. Crawford had then insisted Cummings use his double rifle, the big .475 No. 2, which he had subsequently sold after its return, getting a retroactive case of cold feet. Cummings, however, had had the foresight to save the fired cartridge case, as well as several loaded ones, as insurance against “eventualities.”

After watching the breath rattle out of the Mexican, Cummings had no stomach for future arrangements, but then by chance he had met Orvel Webster at a gun show in Helena. “Remember what we talked about a couple years ago?” Webster had told him. “Well, it's time.” And Cummings had agreed, for here was a man whom he did not have to coax, but who was an equal partner in the planning of their arrangement. Cummings found a purity in his confrontation with Webster that gave him the strength to keep it a secret from Crawford, but it did not grant him the fortitude to turn his back on the bottle, or to stave off the depression he'd suffered every winter since Huntington's had begun to toy with his synapses. He had recurring nightmares about Gutierrez and Webster, whom in retrospect he had come to regard as victims of his own misguided obsessions. In the dreams, the old men tried to rise from their graves and he had to keep climbing back up there and pushing them down and putting more dirt on them. “I don't know if they were trying to get back at me or just turn their souls loose on that mountain, but I was wearing out boot leather and it wasn't going to end soon, no sir.”

When Crawford paid an unexpected visit to his summer mansion in February, Cummings was in the depths of despair and once more found himself weakening under the force of the congressman's personality. He reluctantly agreed to the trip to Michigan, where he met Melvin Kauffeld, being ambivalent about it, but then as the date of their arrangement neared, he found that the preparations lifted him out of his depression. More than that, in Kauffeld he thought he'd found a worthy successor to Orvel Webster, one who might finally grant him death with honor. He had long ago disclosed his physical affliction to Crawford, and Crawford hinted that maybe it was time he let someone get the drop on him in an arrangement. It began to dawn on Cummings that Crawford wanted him out of the picture and would kill him if he had to, that if Kauffeld's bullet missed the mark there would be another coming, no doubt from one of the big African rifles. “And I'd have welcomed it,” he'd written, “had it come from another man's barrel.” It was this growing unease and his determination that Crawford get his comeuppance that led him into penning the notes and placing them where Kauffeld would find them in the event of his death.

•   •   •

E
ttinger slipped the notes between the pages of the story and sealed the book back into the evidence envelope. She clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back in her office chair. She regarded Stranahan through slitted eyes.

“It must have been a strange relationship,” she mused.

“Well, he was a charismatic man, Crawford,” Stranahan said. “He had a sort of force field that repelled you and drew you in at the same time. You found yourself talking to him even if you didn't like him. Maybe it was a politician's trick, but it felt like intimacy. And Cummings was all alone on the planet. It's an odd couple but I can see it, the two of them sharing their brandies in Crawford's study with the snow on the sills, finding their common ground in hunting and ‘The Most Dangerous Game.' Oiling the heavy rifles. I can see Cummings taking the concept of death with honor and running with it, turning this adolescent fantasy of Crawford's into reality. Crawford gave him the seed, Cummings watered it and saw it bloom, then Crawford poisoned the plant when he found out about it; he fed his own sickness with it.”

Martha compressed her lips. “Aren't we the psychologist?” she said. “I never heard you talk like that before. Makes me wonder if it's me who doesn't know you.”

“Well, I've had some time to think about it. I've also had time to think about something else,” he said, thinking of the something else. He glanced at his watch. “It's still early. If you don't need me this afternoon, I'm going to take a drive up the valley.”

“Mmm,” said Martha. “You do that. Meanwhile, I'll just sit here and deal with the fallout. Do you know how many interview requests Dispatch logged since I gave my statement yesterday? Forty-seven.
Washington Post. New York Times
.” She rolled her eyes. “The
Enquirer
. I'm the woman sheriff who gunned down a congressman in the old Wild West. Oh yeah, and with her trusty Indian tracker at her side. Hmpff. I'll tell you what. Five o'clock comes around, I'm going to drive back to my place and take the phone off the hook. You take care of your business up the valley, why don't you come join me? I have a feeling I'm going to need a sympathetic ear.” She hesitated. “'Course, you might rather be with your barista. I can't fill out a pair of suspenders like she can, so I'll understand.”

Stranahan looked at her.

“That was supposed to be a joke,” she said.

“It's not going to be as bad as you think, Martha. You'll end up being the hero.” He stood up. “I'll bring the beer,” he said.

“Good luck finding those flies, Sean.”

“How did you . . . ?” Sean looked at her sideways.

“Give me a little credit,” she said. “Why else would you be burning thirty bucks of gas on a day you aren't fishing? Besides”—she waited a beat—“you said it in your sleep when we were driving back from the bridge. You said, ‘The ghost. I know where the ghost is.'”

“What else did I say?”

“I think I'll save that card for when I want to play it,” Martha said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Mystery of White People

T
he Sheltie pressed its nose to the window as the Land Cruiser passed the ruts to Cummings's old place, but did not make a whimper. When they reached the clubhouse, Stranahan told it to stay on the porch and put his knuckles to the door.

Patrick Willoughby was wearing a sweater.

“Since when do you feel the need to knock?” he said. “Come on in. I was just about to strike a match to our first fire of the fall, though it's still July if you can believe the calendar. Isn't that the damnedest news about our neighbor, though? But I guess we should never be surprised by our politicians. Polly,” he said, gesturing toward the elder statesman of the club, who was in his customary seat at the fly-tying table, “just look what the dog dragged in.” And to Stranahan, “About that dog. Isn't that Emmitt Cummings's collie? Hard to believe E.J. was mixed up in something like that. Very hard to accept. I'll not judge the man. I liked him.”

In the few days that he'd had it, the little Shetland sheepdog had become Stranahan's constant companion. One eye was bandaged where it had popped out of the socket when the grizzly swatted it—time would tell how much vision was permanently lost—but otherwise the dog was well on its way to recovery.

“I seem to have adopted it,” Stranahan said. “You wouldn't know its name, would you?”

“Something Indian, I think. Not native, but ‘Jewel in the Crown.' Do you remember what it was that E.J. called his dog, Polly?”

“Choti,” Polly Sorenson said. “It means small.” He flipped up the magnifying lenses from his glasses and peered at Stranahan. “Good to see you again, Sean. I'd get up but this damned arthritis . . .”

“It's good to see you, too. What are you tying?”

“A Lady Amherst. It's one of the few salmonfly patterns to originate in Canada. A spare tie as you see, but not the easiest to turn out of your vise, not at all.” He lifted his eyebrows. “But then my fingers find all the classics a challenge now. This age they call eighty, it isn't for sissies, I'll tell you that.”

“Where are the rest of the boys?” Stranahan asked.

“The boys as you call them have gone home,” Willoughby said. “Robin Cowdry left only yesterday. But Kenneth Winston has flown in for the week and I'm sure he'll be tickled to see you. Drink? I seem to recall that the George T. Stagg bottle still has a few inches of dew in the bottom.”

“I would, but there's something I'd like to talk to Kenneth about first. Is he on the river?”

“You'll find him down in that slick below the log jam. Into a fish, if I know Kenneth.”

He was releasing one when Stranahan called out his name. Winston saluted with the hand not holding his fly rod. “Give me some of that pure cane sugar,” he said as the men embraced on the riverbank. “I was hoping you'd come down.”

“Take a walk with me,” Stranahan said. “I might have a surprise for you.”

They passed the clubhouse and walked up around the bend. The boy was where Stranahan had seen him when he was driving in, when he crested the bluff to see the river sparkling before the road dipped to the clubhouse. He was standing in the shallows, facing upstream. He didn't hear the men approach.

“Good cop, bad cop,” Stranahan whispered.

“Which one am I?”

“You're the good cop.”

“You really aren't going to tell me what this is about?”

Stranahan just smiled. “Hello, Sid!” His voice was a shout.

The boy, startled, turned and slipped on the slick boulders. He abruptly sat down in the water. Winston got him by the arm and helped him climb up the bank. He walked back and retrieved the fly rod the boy had dropped.

“You seem surprised to see me,” Stranahan said.

“I thought you were going to be around more,” Sid said. His eyes darted to the slim man holding his fly rod. “I never seen a black fisherman.”

Winston arched his pencil-thin eyebrows. He held out his hand, which the boy shook tentatively. “I'm Kenneth,” he said. “It's a pleasure to meet such a nice young man. Sean has told me what a good fisherman you are.”

Stranahan spoke seriously to the boy. “I'm afraid you've done a bad thing, Sid.”

“What? I didn't do nothing.”

“Don't look at me like that, son. I know you found the key to that cabin down the river there. I know you pushed the stump where you could climb up and get to it. Probably saw one of the men reach up there, right?”

“No, I never.”

Winston spoke up. “Now Sean, if the boy says he didn't, maybe it was somebody else.”

“No, it was you. What did you steal? Rods? Reels? Money?”

“I didn't take no money.” He had edged a step toward Winston.

“What rods did you take?”

“I only got this rod.” He pointed to the rod that Winston held. It was the same cheaply made rod he'd had when Stranahan had first seen him. One of the stripping guides was held on by duct tape, and a sloppily glued tip-top showed where the upper section had snapped.

The boy saw Winston examining it. “I only lost about two inches off the end,” he said. “It still casts good.”

Winston removed the fly from the cork. It was, or had been, a Trude. Most of the white wing was missing. He pulled a few yards of line from the reel and backcast the line forty feet behind him, not looking, the river over his shoulder, the loop of line tight and then unfurling to drop the fly like a thistle onto the surface.

“Passable stick,” he said. “Not a bad rod at all.”

“Mister, you're an awful good caster. He's better'n you.” He turned to Stranahan, his chin out.
So there.

Stranahan had to hand it to the kid. He had spine, as his grandmother might say.

“Here's the deal,” Stranahan said. “You turn over everything you stole from the cabin and I'll call the sheriff back and tell her not to come.”

“Sean, you didn't have to do that.” Winston looked at Stranahan and raised his brows, the purpose of their visit with the boy becoming clear. He squatted down and crooked his finger. “Come here, Sid,” he said in a gentle voice. “If Sean doesn't call the sheriff off, then I will, don't you worry. I know all you took were some trout flies. It's just that a couple of those flies are like antiques. They're not very good for fishing. Those old hooks are brittle and if you hooked a fish they'd probably break.”

“I caught—” The boy stopped himself.

“Did you catch a fish on one? I'm surprised.”

Sid looked down at his feet. “There was so many boxes I didn't think anybody would miss one. My uncle, he won't let me buy any flies, so all I got is some old ones that the thread unwinds right away. I'd like to learn how to tie flies, but it takes a lot of money.”

“I'm a fly tier,” Winston said. “You know what I'll do? I'll put together a kit for you: vise, hooks, feathers, everything. If you have time, I'll even teach you how to tie.”

“You'd do that?”

“I surely would. But I'm going to have to ask you to give those flies back. There's two of them that have what you call sentimental value. Do you have them?”

Sid's eyes were on his wet tennis shoes. He didn't look up. “The silver box I took, I give it back. I give the box to that man . . .”

Stranahan was confused. He thought the boy had taken a few flies from the box, not the box itself. The box wasn't missing.

“What man?” he said.

“He saw me gettin' the key. I tried to run, but he caught me. He said he wouldn't tell no one.”

“Who?”

“The man in the big house.”

“You mean Mr. Crawford?”

“I don't know his name. He had this big lump.” He pointed to the side of his neck.

“And he took the box from you.”

Sid nodded.

“And you didn't take any flies out of the box?”

He shook his head. “I took some other flies a few days ago.” Stranahan thought of the moved block. “I waited till the car was gone.”

“What exactly did the man do, the one with the lump?”

“When he come running down the hill, his face was redder than my uncle's.”

“Did he hit you?”

“No, he just took the box and cussed me out. I thought his head was going to explode.”

Stranahan looked past the boy, up the draw to the hexagonal mansion on the bench. “Sid, you go on home,” he said presently.

“I thought your friend was going to teach me to tie flies.” The boy's voice was accusatory.

“Why don't you come to the cabin tomorrow about this time,” Winston said.

When the boy had gone, dragging his shadow up the hill, Winston traced his mustache with his right thumb and forefinger. “That young fella reminds me of me at that age,” he said. “A rapscallion, as my mother would say. You'd have thought he'd be nervous as a two-tailed cat on a porch full of rocking chairs, but he doesn't scare for long, does he?”

Stranahan had a set to his jaw and the words washed over him, as incoherent as the murmuring of the river.
If Crawford took the flies from the box, how did he know which two to take? And what was the point of taking them in the first place?
The answer was there, swirling out of reach, like a trout rising beyond the length of your farthest cast. If he could just reach a little farther into the ether of his subconscious, wade a little deeper in order to make the cast. And . . . and it was there. The fly drifted into the saucer where the trout rose and he had the answer. Or rather, he knew who would give it to him.

“I don't get what a man like Crawford would want with a couple trout flies.” Winston shook his head in wonder as they started back to the clubhouse. “White people,” he said, “they're a mystery.”

Stranahan swam out of his reverie. “He didn't care about the flies, Kenneth. He only took them so he could return them to Polly Sorenson and purchase his friendship. He was just waiting for the right moment.”

“I don't mean to say my mother raised a fool, but Polly? I'm afraid you've lost me.”

“It'll be clearer in about ten minutes,” Stranahan said.

When it was, when the arthritic old fly tier with the whispering breath admitted that he'd shown Weldon Crawford the Quill Gordon and the Gray Ghost the day he'd invited him in for a drink, had talked at length with the congressman about their value, both sentimental and monetary, had mentioned the plan to put the flies in the box until the other club members arrived, but hadn't told Willoughby about the conversation because he was embarrassed how easily the congressman was able to insinuate himself into his confidence, after the shine came to the rheumy eyes and Willoughby had said, “Now, now, Polly, there's nothing to be ashamed of,” Stranahan looked at the songbird clock on the wall, the hour hand still shy of the tufted titmouse that stood for the number five, and called Martha Ettinger at her office.