Small Felonies - Fifty Mystery Short Stories (27 page)

Ike Dall throwed his rope over the cottonwood's gnarly limb, caught the other end and give it to somebody, and then he put that noose around Larrabee's neck and drew it tight.

Somebody else brung a saddle horse around, held him steady whilst they hoisted the drifter onto his back. That Larrabee was screaming like a woman now.

Micah leaned hard against the gallery railing. His mouth was dry, real dry; he couldn't even work up no spit to wet it.

He'd never seen a lynching before. There'd been plenty in Montana Territory—more'n a dozen over in Beaverhead and

Madison counties a few years back, when the vigilantes done for Henry Plummer and his gang of desperadoes—but never one in Cricklewood nor any of the other towns Micah had lived in.

The drifter screamed and screamed. Then Micah saw everybody back off some, away from the horse Larrabee was on, and Ike Dall raised his arm and brought it down smack on the cayuse's rump. Horse jumped ahead, frog-stepping. And Larrabee quit screaming and commenced to dancing in the air all loosey-goosey, like a puppet on the end of a string. Before long, though, the dancing slowed down and then it quit altogether. That's done him, Micah thought. And everybody in the mob knew it, too, because they all backed off some more and stood there in a half-circle, staring up at the drifter hanging still and straight in the smoky light.

Micah stared too. He leaned against the railing and stared and stared, and kept on staring long after the mob started to break up.

Hell damn boy, he thought over and over. Hell damn, boy, if that sure wasn't something to see!

It took the best part of a week for the town to get back to normal. There was plenty more excitement during that week—county law coming in, representatives from the territorial governor's office in Helena, newspaper people, all kinds of curious strangers. For Micah it was kind of like the lynching went on and on, a week-long celebration like none other he'd ever been part of. Folks kept asking him questions, interviewing him for newspapers, buying him drinks, shaking his hand and clapping his back and calling him a hero the way the men had done that night at Hardesty's. Oh, it was fine. It was almost as fine as when he'd been the center of attention before the lynch mob got started.

But then it all come to an end. The law and the newspaper people and the strangers went away; Cricklewood settled down to what it had been before the big event, and Micah settled back into his humdrum job at the Coombs Livery Barn and his nights on the straw bunk in one corner of the loft. He did his handy work, ran errands, shoveled manure—and the townsfolk and ranchers and cowhands stopped buying him drinks, stopped shaking his hand and clapping his back and calling him hero, stopped paying much attention to him at all. It was the same as before, like he was nobody, like he didn't hardly even exist. Mack Clausen snubbed him on the street no more than two weeks after the lynching. The one time he tried to get Ike Dall to talk with him about that night, how it had felt putting the noose around Larrabee's neck, Ike wouldn't have none of it. Why, Ike claimed he hadn't even been there that night, hadn't been part of the mob—said that lie right to Micah's face!

Four weeks passed. Five. Micah did his handy work and ran errands and shoveled manure and now nobody even mentioned that night no more, not to him and not to each other. Like it never happened. Like they was ashamed of it or something.

Micah was feeling low the hot Saturday morning he come down the loft ladder and started toward the harness room like he always done first thing. But this wasn't like other mornings because a man was curled up sleeping in one of the stalls near the back doors. Big man, whiskers on his face, dust on his trail clothes. Micah had never seen him before.

Mr. Coombs was up at the other end of the barn, forking hay for the two roan saddle horses he kept for rent. Micah went on up there and said, "Morning, Mr. Coombs."

"Well, Micah. Down late again, eh?"

". . . I reckon so."

"Getting to be a habit lately," Mr. Coombs said. "I don't like it, Micah. See that you start coming down on time from now on, hear?"

"Yes sir. Mr. Coombs, who's that sleepin' in the back stall?"

"Just some drifter. He didn't say his name."

"Drifter?"

"Came in half-drunk last night, paid me four bits to let him sleep in here. Not the first time I've rented out a stall to a human animal and it won't be the last."

Mr. Coombs turned and started forking some more hay. Micah went away toward the harness room, then stopped after ten paces and stood quiet for a space. And then, moving slow, he hobbled over to where the fire ax hung and pulled it down and limped back behind Mr. Coombs and swung the axe up and shut his eyes and swung the ax down. When he opened his eyes again Mr. Coombs was lying there with the back of his head cleaved open and blood and brains spilled out like pulp out of a split melon.

Hell damn boy, Micah thought.

Then he dropped the ax and run to the front doors and threw them open and run out onto Main Street yelling at the top of his voice, "Murder! It's murder! Some damn drifter killed Mr. Coombs! Split his head wide open with a fire ax. I seen him do it, I seen it, I seen the whole thing!"

M
r. Theodore Conway was a nostalgist, a collector of memorabilia, a dweller in the uncomplicated days of his adolescence when radio, movie serials, and pulp magazines were the ruling forms of entertainment and super-heroes were the idols of American youth.

At forty-three, he resided alone in a modest apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he commuted daily by subway to his position of file clerk in the archives of Baylor, Baylor, Leeds and Wadsworth, a respected probate law firm. He was short and balding and very plump and very nondescript; he did not indulge in any of the vices, major or minor; he had no friends to speak of, and neither a wife nor, euphemistically or otherwise, a girlfriend. (In point of fact, Mr. Conway was that rarest of individuals, an adult male virgin.) He did not own a television set, did not attend the theater or movies. His one and only hobby, his single source of pleasure, his sole purpose in life, was the accumulation of nostalgia in general—and nostalgia pertaining to that most inimitable of all super-heroes, The Shadow, in particular.

Ah! The Shadow! Mr. Conway idolized Lamont Cranston, loved Margo Lane as he could never love any living woman. Nothing set his blood to racing quite so quickly as The Shadow on the scent of an evildoer, utilizing the Power that, as Cranston, he had learned in the Orient—the Power to cloud men's minds so that they could not see him. Nothing gave Mr. Conway more pleasure than listening to the haunting voice of Orson Welles, capturing The Shadow as no other had over the air; or reading Maxwell Grant's daring accounts in
The Shadow Magazine;
or paging through one of the starkly drawn Shadow comic books. Nothing filled him with as much delicious anticipation as the words spoken by his hero at the beginning of each radio adventure:
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows . . .
and the eerie, bloodcurdling laugh that followed it. Nothing filled him with as much security as, when each case was closed, this ace among aces saying words of warning to criminals everywhere:
The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows!

Mr. Conway had begun collecting nostalgia in 1946, starting with a wide range of pulp magazines. (He now had well over ten thousand issues of
Wu Fang, G-8 and his Battle Aces, Black Mask, Weird Tales, Doe Savage,
and two hundred others.) Then he had gone on to comic books and comic strips, to premiums of every kind and description—decoders and secret compartment belts and message flashlights and spy rings and secret pens that wrote in invisible ink. In the 1970s he had begun to accumulate tapes of such radio shows
as
Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy
and
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
But while he amassed all of these eagerly, he pursued the mystique of The Shadow with a fervor that bordered on the fanatical.

He haunted secondhand bookshops and junk shops, pored over advertisements in newspapers and magazines and collectors' sheets, wrote letters, made telephone calls, spent every penny of his salary that did not go for bare essentials. And at long last he succeeded where no other nostalgist had even come close to succeeding. He accomplished a remarkable, an almost superhuman feat.

He collected the complete Shadow.

There was absolutely nothing produced about his hero
—not a written word, not a spoken sentence, not a drawing or gadget—that Mr. Conway did not own.

The final item, the one that had eluded him for so many years, came into his possession on a Saturday evening in late June. He had gone into a tenement area of Manhattan, near the East River, to purchase from a private individual a rare cartoon strip of
Terry and the Pirates.
With the strip carefully tucked into his coat pocket, he was on his way back to the subway when he chanced upon a small neighborhood bookshop in the basement of a crumbling brownstone. It was still open, and unfamiliar to him, and so he entered and began to browse. And on one of the cluttered tables at the rear—there it was.

The October 1931 issue of
The Shadow Magazine.

Mr. Conway emitted a small, ecstatic cry. Caught up the magazine in trembling hands, stared at it with disbelieving eyes, opened it tenderly, read the contents page and the date, ran sweat-slick fingers over the rough, grainy pulp paper. Near-mint condition. Spine undamaged. Colors unfaded. And the price—

Fifty cents.

Fifty cents!

Tears of joy rolled unabashedly down Mr. Conway's cheeks as he carried this treasure to the elderly proprietor. The bookseller gave him a strange look, shrugged, and accepted two quarters from Mr. Conway without a word. Two quarters, fifty cents. And Mr. Conway had been prepared to
pay hundreds...

As he went out into the gathering darkness—it was almost nine by this time—he could scarcely believe that he had finally done it, that he now possessed the total word, picture, and voice exploits of the most awesome master crime fighter of them all. His brain reeled. The Shadow was
his
now; Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane (beautiful Margo!)—his, all his, his alone.

Instead of proceeding to the subway, Mr. Conway impulsively entered a small diner not far from the bookshop and or
dered a cup of coffee. Then, once again, he opened the magazine. He had previously read a reprint of the novel by Maxwell Grant—
The Shadow Laughs
—but that was not the same as reading the original, no indeed. He plunged into the story again, savoring each line, each page, the mounting suspense, the seemingly inescapable traps laid to eliminate The Shadow by archvillains Isaac Coffran and Birdie Crull, the smashing of their insidious counterfeiting plot: justice triumphant. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, crime does not pay.

So engrossed was Mr. Conway that he lost all track of time. When at last he closed the magazine he was startled to note that except for the counterman, the diner was deserted. It had been nearly full when he entered. He looked at his wristwatch, and his mouth dropped open in amazement. Good heavens! It was past midnight!

Mr. Conway scrambled out of the booth and hurriedly left the diner. Outside, apprehension seized him. The streets were dark and deserted—ominous, forbidding.

He looked up and down without seeing any sign of life. It was four blocks to the nearest subway entrance—a short walk
in daylight but now it was almost the dead of night. Mr. Conway shivered in the cool night breeze. He had never liked the night, its sounds and smells, its hidden dangers. There were stories in the papers every morning of muggers and thieves on the prowl. .

He took a deep breath, summoning courage. Four blocks. Well, that really wasn't very far, only a matter of minutes if he walked swiftly. And swift was his pace as he started along the darkened sidewalk.

No cars passed; no one appeared on foot. The hollow echoes of his footfalls were the only sounds. And yet Mr. Conway's heart was pounding wildly by the time he had gone two
blocks.

He was halfway through the third block when he heard the muffled explosions.

He stopped, the hairs on his neck prickling, a tremor of fear coursing through him. There was an alley on his left; the reports had come from that direction. Gunshots? He was certain that was what they'd been—and even more certain that they meant danger, sudden death.
Run!
he thought. And yet, though he was poised for flight, he did not run. He peered into the alley, saw a thin light at its far end.

Run, run!
But instead he entered the alley, moving slowly, feeling his way along.
What am I doing? I shouldn't be here!
But still he continued forward, approaching the narrow funnel of light. It came from inside a partly open door to the building on his right. Mr. Conway put out a hand and eased the door open wider, peered into what looked to be a warehouse. The thudding of his heart seemed as loud as a drum roll as he stepped over the threshold.