The Angry Dream (9 page)

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I mean. Every year you been away from Pine Springs was just one more year on the road to getting here again.”

I went over and sat on the window ledge by the big plate-glass window fronting the office. The office was so hot I had a headache and it was getting hard to breathe.

“Because you had to,” Luckham said. “And I think—I
know—
you’d better get away again before something big happens. Because something’s sure as hell going to happen.”

“You’re not holding me for the killing of Herb Spash?”

“Cole was following you tonight,” Luckham said wearily. “You went and saw Spash. Then you went down and stood on the gal’s porch, there, and came running out and got in your car and drove down to Jake’s and drank a cup of coffee, left most of it on the counter. You were mad at something and it’s not for me to say what, Harper—but
I
know!
Then you went out to Hickman’s joint on the corners and bought some whisky and had a couple drinks, and you came back and Gunther met you. From the time you left Herb Spash until the time you saw him laying there in the road dead, two hours and nine minutes elapsed.”

I stared at him.

“Cole ain’t such a bum, either,” Luckham said.

“Thank you, Tom,” Cole said, staring at his feet.

“I told you when we met he was my number one deputy. You think I’d have a number one deputy who was a dumb-head?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Be careful. You still don’t know but maybe I’m being paid off by the citizens of Pine Springs to wring your neck, or something. Maybe I am.
Maybe.”

I didn’t speak.

“Don’t think I couldn’t.”

“Who found Herb?”

“Kirk Hartmann found him.”

“I see.”

“Sure, you see—like so much mud, you see.”

The high keening sound of that car’s engine started up again down the valley, coming from the other direction. We all sat there stiffly, listening. Listening for the sudden break in that sound and the tight grinding clash of steel.

“The road’s a mess, too,” Cole said.

“Slushy,” Luckham said. “We’re due for a freeze.”

The noise was like a jet, coming with the wind. She had the wind with her this time.

“She’s probably drunk, too,” Cole said.

“She’d handle that car soaked to her ankles,” Luckham said.

You could hear it hit the vicinity. Abruptly brakes went on and tires shrieked. Neither Luckman nor Cole moved a muscle. I looked out the window. White headlights swam into view, the low car slowing fast, shrieking on hot rubber.

“Going to show off—like last month,” Cole said.

I saw the headlights swoop, then spin. The car came off onto the shoulder of the road, whipped onto soaking grass across the street, spun completely around and came to an abrupt stop.

“Stalled,” Cole said.

Nobody moved.

The engine started up, the car dug out of there and I saw the shower of wet mud fanning up and out as it struck the highway again. In a moment, the sound vanished down the road.

“That was for your benefit,” Luckham said to me. “She knows you’re in here.”

“Why don’t you pull her in?”

“There’s no use.”

“She’s endangering people.”

“Nope. They know about it. They get out of the way. It’s a weekly occurrence. I’ve talked to her about it—she denies it altogether. Says I’m crazy. The mysterious marauder or something—I don’t know.”

“Well.” I stood up.

“You going to leave town now?”

“She’s nuts,” Cole said calmly. “That one is out of her head—no kidding.”

“Something’s going to happen, Harper. If you don’t get out of town—”

“Sheriff—all I’m trying to do is settle something in my mind.”

“You think somebody other than your father took the money from the bank vault. Right?”

“Yes.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “If it’s true, your life ain’t worth a cent. Don’t you know that?” He ran both hands over his face again, roughly. “There was an investigation,” he went on. “They decided your father took that money—took it and got rid of it. There was talk he sent it to you.” He leaned forward in his chair, his sick eyes squinting a little, the pouches beneath them drawing up. “You think somebody murdered your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“What have you got to go on, Harper?”

He knew I had something and he wanted to know, and because of that very fact, I couldn’t tell him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. And suddenly I realized I was beginning to like Tom Luckham, and also that I was standing here without being held, and talking.

“Harper,” Luckham said, “what did Herb Spash tell you?

“I can’t say.”

“You’d
better
say. I want to know.”

I shrugged.

“You’re withholding evidence,” Cole said.

“I’m not withholding anything. What Spash told me is my business. You can’t make me tell you.”

Luckham was mad. I was glad I hadn’t mentioned Gunther’s name. Luckham could pull any number of tricks from the sleeve of the law, if he liked—but I didn’t think he could hold me for not telling.

“Who you think killed Spash?” I said.

“The hell with you, Harper.”

They looked at me, both of them, and the room was very hot and still. Herb Spash would never tell me what he had to tell—if there happened to be anything else, and I was sure there had been.

Somebody had gotten to Herb Spash. Somebody who did not want him to talk to me.

I moved to the door and went on outside.

I headed on up the street toward the coupé over on the sawmill road. I hoped it was still there.

It was.

I walked over to where Spash had died. Dark stains still coated the road. The sawmill was very quiet and the shadowed sheds and buildings would no longer echo to the night cry of a hopeless drunk.

The wind had shifted again and the thaw of early evening had changed to a light freeze. The wind was northwest, sluicing into the valley, bringing air that was just right for big snow.

I drove past Kirk Hartmann’s. I couldn’t stop. He’d surely acted damned queer tonight.

I parked in the drive and took my whisky into the kitchen. I opened a bottle, poured a good drink and stood in the dark sipping it. It tasted good. I went over and turned a flap of the cardboard on the window, looked up on the hill.

I used to do this same thing, years ago. She would signal me up there, pulling a curtain across a certain window to shield the light. Sometimes we had the whole house to ourselves and that was always very good.

And now it was all changed.

For a moment I stood there, swept up in the old painful nostalgia. The way she always looked. The things she wore. The way she smiled and laughed. The things she said, and the soft wonderful thrill of her lips and the smooth touch of her hands.

I slammed my knuckles against the wall.

There was no use putting it off.

The snow began to fall more heavily, driving lazily in the rising wind. The sky was thick and low and heavy. With every step, I felt more and more anger eating into me.

I kept walking toward the big house on the hill. My feet crunched along the gravel drive. The snow was melting as it struck and each flake vanished. Soon none would disappear and it would begin to pile.

I stepped onto the porch and a gun went off with a crash of broken glass. A woman yelled, crying in a series of long throat-tearing sobs. The gun exploded again—a shotgun—and more glass shattered. I came fast across the porch, tried the door and it opened.

I came down the fieldstone steps into the sunken living room and stopped. It was like walking into a nightmare. For an instant I just sort of grew there like a tree.

“Al—Al—help me!”

Noraine, sprawled on the couch across the room, was struggling with Sam Gunther—struggling with a dead man—a nearly headless body that poured blood on her, on the couch. Her eyes were wild, and suddenly she got untangled and the body slid loosely off her and folded onto the floor.

She got off the couch and ran at me. Her face was pale with shock and there was horror in her eyes. Blood glistened redly on her white sweater. She stared down at the sweater and in one swift movement tore it off and hurled it from her. Underneath, she wore a black blouse.

Her voice was strained, nearly a whisper.

“Al—he tried to—”

Her body was electric against me, faintly trembling. The large window directly above the head of the couch was smashed, and on the floor beside the body was a shotgun, an over-and-under.

“Take it easy,” I heard myself say.

She shuddered, her face buried against my chest.

“He’s dead,” she said. She looked up at me, her face gray-white. I didn’t know what to do with her. My gaze traveled from the body to the window to the couch to the shotgun and then to the blood-touched white sweater there on the floor.

“He was fighting me, kneeling on the couch, Al. Then the window smashed right over my head and Sam looked up. And then—his head just went away. He fell on me—I couldn’t get loose—” She made strange sounds in her throat. “Then the gun fired again and whoever it was threw it inside on the floor.”

“Easy, now,” I said.

She was rigid. I let go of her and walked over there. It was Sam, all right, and he was very much dead. I knelt down, hearing her across the room, her heels scraping on the floor, the subdued noises of intense fright.

She spoke again.

“Somebody killed him.” She stood with her back to me, then started to run from the room, up the stone steps, and down the hall. I let her go.

Sam was dead.

One side of his face was pretty well gone, bone-broken, torn, blackened, shot-filled flesh. Blood glistened in puddles, gleaming in the dim lamplight.

He was dead—the one man who knew.

I stood up and looked at the window. Kneeling on the couch, fighting her, head and shoulders up, his face would not have been perhaps more than two and a half feet from the windowpane. Whoever had killed him had first broken the glass. Sam looked up and probably stared straight into his murderer’s face and at the same instant he took the shot full on.

The next shot fired must have happened outside, because there was no sign of the shot pattern in the room that I could see. Then the killer had thrown the gun through the window and gone away.

“Al!”

I turned.

“Al, somebody’s coming in the drive. It’s the sheriff’s sedan!”

For a moment my mind stood still, refusing everything but blank futility. Then I was speaking without thinking.

“They’re trying to pin this on me,” I said. “They slipped up with Spash. And I’m here—red-handed, Noraine. I’m right here and that shotgun’s probably clean of fingerprints if there could be fingerprints.”

“Yes-?”

“I’ve got to get rid of that body, Noraine.”

She moved her head slowly from side to side.

“This is it, Noraine. You’ve got to do as I say.”

She was nodding now and I heard the car’s wheels on the gravel drive.

“Exactly as I say,” I told her. “I’m going to take him away—someplace.” I gestured toward the body. “I’ll wrap him in that shawl on the couch—now don’t get
excited
, calm down.” She was treading a very tight wire. I took her hand, looked straight into her eyes. “You can tell me about it later. Where’s Weyman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lois?”

“I don’t know, Al!”

“You’ve got to stall them—whoever. Tell them anything. Tell them Sam was here, but he had to go out—you’re waiting for him. Get rid of that sweater. Pull the drapes on the window. Keep them out of this room. Kick the glass under the couch—put cushions over the blood, and after they go, clean it up—somehow. Clean it up!”

“Al-all right.”

I went over and began hurriedly bundling the body in the shawl that I’d used to cover Lois a long time ago.

“Al, the car’s stopped.”

I bent and grabbed him and slipped and the body fell. I got hold of it again, keeping the shawl around the head. I got him in a fireman’s carry, grabbed the shotgun and started out of the room the back way.

“Al, there’s something I’ve got to tell you—”

Somebody knocked on the front door.

“Not now,” I said. “You’ll have to tell me later. Do those things. Hurry. They’ll wait a minute and a minute’s a long time.”

She snapped out of it. She yanked the drapes across the window, making little noises in her throat, and I left her there.

The body was heavy.

I didn’t realize how heavy Gunther was until I started across the back yard, weaving in the driving snow. I had no idea where to head for. I had to hide him, that’s all I could think—just hide the body.

I carried him as far as the barn, then let him fall. I couldn’t hold him any longer. My back ached, and as I looked down at the body, the snow slammed out of nowhere, ricocheting off the barn wall. I was a little out of my head and knew it. I thought of the barn, the stables, the toolshed, the woodshed, and none of them were any good. Then I recalled Cross Glen.

He was like a bundle of loose logs. I finally got him on my shoulders, the shawl hanging down to the ground now. I turned and looked back there where I’d come across the yard. The snow was already covering my tracks.

Twenty feet from the barn, I remembered the shotgun. I had leaned it against the barn. I returned and got it, all the time listening for the sound of the car leaving. It did not leave.

I pushed on to a fence and pitched him over. His half-face came into sight there against the snow. I put the shotgun through the fence and went over. On the other side, I checked the gun. Both shells had been fired and I realized that if there had been any such things as fingerprints, they were gone now. Mine were there.

The whole night had been loaded and aimed at me.

I got the body on my back again, grabbed the gun, and started across a rutty lane between two fenced-in fields. A horse galloped out of the night, wheezing and whinnying. I came to a wooden gate. I opened the gate and closed it from the other side and looked back at the house again.

There was nothing to see but a misty black shape with a flicker of dim light. Only the corpse was real.

I came to the old branch, leading down from Cross Glen, and began following it.

At the first willow clump, I stopped and dumped him again. The shawl came all the way off this time. The bleeding had stopped. When I began to feel all right again, the snow and the valley and the whole world was a driving mass of white.

Noraine, I thought. Noraine …

All I had to do was believe her. Not that Sam Gunther hadn’t been killed while they were there on the couch. She hadn’t lied about that. But the other …

What had been going on night after night?

So what did I want? I’d been trying to lose her—and now I had.

I got the body on my shoulders once again, and started on past the willows along the branch toward Cross Glen …

I didn’t go into the glen as far as the falls. But I could hear the falls in there. It was like a big canyon inside the glen, the shale sides rising high and clumped over with trees, the pines very thick. The falls were about seventy-five feet high and a lot of water was coming over, striking in the pool. I was just around the bend and it was all I could hear, the thick brutal roaring.

I buried Sam Gunther under leaves; the snow would do the rest. Then I got out of there, carrying the shotgun.

And Gunther was gone. Gunther was dead … who killed him?

I came down across the fields following a stone fence.

My clothes were packed with snow. My feet were soaked, freezing.

The shotgun that had been used in the murder was no factory special. I hadn’t had a chance to inspect it carefully, but it looked hand made. There was that light, good feel to it, the breech engraved, the stock beautiful curly maple. If it was a personal gun, it might lead somewhere.

And it was then I thought of Kirk Hartmann.

I suddenly wanted to see him, talk with him. There was a thought in the back of my mind that I had kept refusing to let emerge. But it was there, and I looked at it now.

There was no reason to believe Hartmann had any concern with what I was up against. Hartmann could be the very person I was after. The hidden one. I wondered if I was going out of my head—only I couldn’t stop thinking about it, considering it. He had a nice home, a big home—better than he should have with the money a country lawyer pulled down. He had known all there was to know about my father.

When I first talked with him, he’d been friendly enough, but looking back now, I couldn’t find the friendliness I’d supposed had been there at all. He had been quizzical, patient, discursive. Everything he’d said had been loaded in a certain direction.

It could be he did not want me around.

The way he acted by the sawmill, near Herb Spash’s body. It was damned curious.

I hurried through the fields now, keeping to the lee side of the stone fence. It was rough walking. Briars grew thick in places. It was rocky, hard country. Wild grapevines twined among the ancient stone, and by the time I reached the highway again I was badly winded. I’d come out immediately in front of my place. Two young boys came along the road, pulling sleds. They watched me as I ran on across, paused by the coupé and looked back there on the hill.

The Gunther house was invisible through the driving pall of snow. The world was white and thick, still, save for the muted falling.

I put the shot gun inside the kitchen door, changed my shoes and socks, took a glass of whisky, and went out and climbed into the car.

“Hello, Al.”

He stood there in the doorway, watching me. He was wearing dark shirt and trousers, a ragged blue Navy sweater. He looked at me with those hooded, expressionless eyes, and his broad flat lips did not smile around the thick stem of a bulldog pipe.

“What brings you, Al?”

“Can I come in?”

“Come in? Oh, certainly, Al—come on in.” He turned and left me standing there at the door. I went inside and closed the door. The house was warm, smelling of coffee and stale smoke from his strong tobacco. “Sally’s not home,” he said. “She took the kids into Riverton. They’re spending the night at her mother’s.”

He knocked his pipe out in an ash tray, his back to me.

“House is lonely with them gone.”

I caught myself examining his feet to see if they were wet. It was a hell of a thing. I’d known Kirk a long time.

“What’s on your mind?” he said, packing his pipe, his back still turned.

I stood in the archway of the hall.

“Have you seen Sam Gunther tonight?” I asked him.

He turned and sank into a chair.

“Sam? Sure, I saw him tonight—down by the mill.”

“I mean, since then.”

“Try his house?”

“He’s not there.”

I came into the room and walked over in front of his chair and stood there. He looked up at me for a time, chewing his pipestem. The house was quiet.

“Why did you do it, Al?”

“What?”

“Why did you kill old Herb?”

I stared at him. For an instant I wanted to grab the front of his shirt, drag him to his feet, whip that lazy, sneering attitude out of him. Only it wasn’t sneering. He just sat there, smoking, contained—waiting.

“You think that?”

“I wouldn’t have asked you,” he said. “Yes, I think that, Al.”

We continued to look at each other and I began to realize a strong dislike for the man. He was so damned patient—so perfectly in control.

“Sheriff let you go, eh?”

“Watch it, Kirk.”

He took the pipe out of his mouth, scratched his forehead with the bit.

“Where did you learn so much about my father, Kirk?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

My voice was very loud. He stiffened slightly in his chair, sitting up a little. He took the pipe from his teeth and laid it carefully on the small smoking table beside the chair. It continued to smolder steadily.

“You’d better tell me what you mean, Al,” he said.

“Where were you tonight, Kirk?”

“When?”

“How did you happen to know I was at the sawmill? How did you know I was with Herb Spash?”

“I saw your car in there—Listen, what is this?”

“How come you saw my car in there?”

He rose lightly to his feet, moving swiftly.

“I was driving by on my way back from Riverton,” he said slowly. “Where I left Sally and the kids at her mother’s, like I said. When I came past the mill I happened to glance in and saw a car parked in there. Herb didn’t have a car. The mill’s been shut down for several weeks—so I went in and investigated. It was your car. I walked on back through the fence, Al, and I heard Herb yelling at you.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Then why did you kill him?”

I nearly hit him then. The sneer wasn’t on his lips, it was in his eyes—a kind of superior all-knowing that I began to know had always been there—something I had never liked but had never been able to see. Now I saw it.

“So you went and told the sheriff?” I said.

“I called him on the phone in a little while,” he said evenly. “After I found Herb lying out there in the road.” A tight white line showed around his mouth. “Why are you here, Al?”

“Where did you go after they took Herb Spash’s body away?”

“Did you just leave the sheriff’s office?” he asked.

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Why don’t
you
tell
me?”

I shouted at him. “Where were you, Kirk—where did you go after you left the mill grounds—when the crowd went away? Where did you go?”