The Outrage - Edge Series 3 (29 page)

Out back beyond a patch of unkempt lawn and a large, well-tended vegetable plot there was an uncultivated, gently sloping area of knee high grass featured with three gnarled oaks, some brittle willows and several clumps of brush heavy with vicious thorns. As he climbed to the highest point on the property and from there idly surveyed the undulating terrain all around he found his mind dwelling on the violent events that had taken place in the Quinn house. And thought about how these had been triggered by the dark and powerful emotions that simmered just beneath the respectable surface of the fine looking town that lay beyond the intervening high ground.

Damnit!
Was he really getting to be so old and hidebound in a fast changing world as he had suggested to Sarah Farmer last night?
Women going with women! Hell,
it was something he knew about. But he never did have any reason to think deeply about that kind of thing before. And now that it was necessary to give the matter serious consideration he found it uncomfortably disconcerting to apply his mind to the unsavoury subject. Particularly after Sarah had disclosed the suspicion she held about her sister. Would a young girl like Nancy Quinn – who everybody implied was vibrant and pretty – have got herself involved with an overweight, long past her prime woman who had once been a whorehouse madam? But sometimes young women got themselves tied up with fat and ugly old men didn’t they? If the men were rich enough.

He advanced further into the wild area of the garden until he reached two stands of barbed wire strung tautly between leaning posts that marked the rear boundary between the Quinn property and open country. And here he halted and made to turn away, but paused to peer more intently across the fence at what seemed to be a dead animal lying in the brush. He grunted and swung a leg over the top strand of wire while he cautiously pressed down on it with a hand. And confirmed that death was again present here. But at once saw that his first impression had been wrong. It was not an animal that lay unmoving on the ground beneath a stunted oak. It was old Joe Kellner, balled up in the foetal position, legs folded to his chest, head tipped forward so his brow almost rested on his knees, his arms at his sides. The topcoat he wore was an old and stained sheepskin and it was this that had suggested at first glance that the man’s body was an animal carcass. The familiar seafarer’s stiff-billed cap was still on his head.

Total inertia signalled there was no breath left in the sparse body but Edge went through the motions to make sure: dropped to his haunches and pressed two fingertips to the side of the old man’s neck where once there had been a pulse. This brightly sunlit morning the deeply wrinkled flesh was as unmoving as the ground beneath the corpse: and as cold if not as smoothly hard as marble. Then when Edge withdrew his hand and made to straighten up off his haunches he saw something that caused him to remain hunkered down awhile longer. His moving hand had accidentally hooked under an upturned lapel of the scabrous coat and before the flap of sheepskin flipped back he glimpsed an area of dark discoloration. And now he purposely lifted the lapel and saw the jagged hole in Kellner’s throat: the wound just above the prominent Adam’s apple in the scrawny neck, rimmed by a crusting of congealed blood. It took something more than a minute to locate the knife that had caused the fatal wound, the weapon tossed aside by the killer on to a patch of trampled grass some twenty feet away from the booted feet of the corpse. About fifteen inches long it had a well worn wooden handle and a polished steel blade with a single edge for most of its length and a distinctive sharply honed curve on the top at the point. A style of knife alleged to have been devised by Colonel James Bowie, one of the legendary doomed defenders of the Alamo. Another knife had been used to carve the initials
J.B.
into the time-smoothed handle of this one. Some dried blood of the victim blemished the glinting shine of the killing blade. Edge stowed the knife under his belt, stooped, hefted the limp corpse up over his shoulder, carefully negotiated the strands of barbed wire and headed for the house. Then some thirty minutes later, bathed in the warm light in the morning sunshine, he rode slowly into town along Texas Avenue West and became the centre of morose attention. Making it plain word had quickly spread through Springdale that the blanket wrapped, elongated bundle draped over the saddle of the horse on a lead line behind the Yankee stranger could surely be nothing else but yet another corpse.

But no questions were called out and none of the town’s scowling citizenry ventured to takes a close up look at the shrouded bundle when Edge reached his destination. This was the law office on a corner of the intersection where he hitched his reins to the rail and stepped inside the building. Moments later the grimacing, shabbily business suited Vic Meeker came quickly out from behind his desk and strode through the door to the street after his visitor had only just begun to report the details of his find.

Edge rolled a cigarette while he watched impassively from the window as the short and overweight sheriff raised a corner of the blanket shroud just high enough so he could stoop, crane his neck and confirm the bare essentials he had stayed in the office long enough to hear. Then the unshaven and obviously hastily dressed Max Lacy came down the street at an inelegant lope, still buckling on his gunbelt with the ivory butted Colt in the holster. His voice with its pronounced Deep South drawl was raised as he demanded to know if what he had heard was true:
Had that Goddamn Yankee brought another Goddamn dead man to town?

Edge had lit the cigarette, turned away from the window and was helping himself to a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove in a corner of the office when Alvin Ivers asked in an ingratiating whine from the cell out back:

‘Hey, what happened, mister? Did somebody else get killed?’ He sounded newly awakened from a level of sleep that left him still fatigued.

‘The old timer who lived in the woods.’

‘Edge? Is that you, Edge?’

‘Right, kid.’

‘How you making out with finding who really killed Nancy Quinn and her ma?’

‘If I ever get any proof it wasn’t you then you’ll be one of the first to hear it.’

‘Nowhere, uh?’ Ivers countered scornfully.

Meeker returned to the office, a scowl on his fleshy features as he growled wearily:

‘Keep your lip buttoned, boy! The only think for certain right now is that you sure as hell didn’t kill that crazy old buzzard Kellner who Max Lacy’s taking to the mortician right now.’

He went behind his desk and dropped heavily into his chair as Edge re-crossed the office with his cup of coffee and surveyed the street scene from the window again. Watched as the powerfully built deputy led the corpse-burdened horse in the direction of Jed Winter’s funeral parlour.

‘Been dead quite some time, wouldn’t you say?’ Meeker suggested.

‘Most of the night, I figure.’ Edge put his back to the window and gave the lawman a laconic but full account of where and how he found Joe Kellner’s corpse. Meeker listened with the grim expression on his triple chinned face seemingly carved out of stone and occasionally nodded and sometimes shook his head. Then Edge set down his coffee on the desk while he went outside, retrieved the Bowie knife from a saddlebag, brought it into the office where he traded it for the cup. A moment later the bleak eyed deputy came into the office and eyed Edge malevolently as Meeker peered intently at the blood stained knife. It was the sheriff who asked pensively before Lacy had a chance to speak:

‘The murder weapon, uh?’

‘Found it pretty close to the body,’ Edge answered.

The again disconcerted and clearly out of his depth man in the chair made to touch the blade of the knife with a fingertip. But then he withdrew his hand, looked up and asked pointedly of Edge: ‘So, you just got to wandering around out there behind the house and happened to stumble on Kellner?’

‘Right, just like I already told you, feller.’ He met the lawman’s fixed gaze with equanimity.

Meeker shrugged and studied the knife again. ‘Any particular reason why you went to that part of the Quinn property at such an early hour?’

Edge said evenly with a dangerous glint in his narrowed, ice blue eyes: ‘It sounds to me like you’re trying to say something but can’t find the right words, sheriff?’

‘Shit, Vic, I reckon – ‘ Lacy started but was glared into silence by Meeker who then sighed, put down the knife and picked up his ready-filled pipe. ‘Hell no, mister! I’m just trying to act like the lawman I’m supposed to be.’

Edge nodded. ‘No special reason. I was just acting like the kind of feller I’ve become lately. Drinking a cup of coffee outside on a fine morning and thinking things over.’

‘You shouldn’t have moved the body, stranger!’ Lacy accused harshly. Edge said evenly: ‘The old timer was stabbed in the neck and it’s my guess he died right off from the wound.’

‘How’d you figure that?’ Lacy challenged.

‘Because he didn’t spill too much blood and it didn’t look like he did much thrashing around to flatten the brush, feller.’

Lacy sneered: ‘You figure you’re so Goddamn smart, don’t you?’

‘Just using whatever common sense I’ve got to do the job I may get paid for.’

‘I still reckon you didn’t ought to have moved Joe’s dead body, mister!’

Edge ignored Lacy’s latest petulant complaint and said to the more receptive Meeker: ‘I guess the local coyotes don’t come that close to the house. But I figure if I hadn’t moved him that a bunch of buzzards would’ve been having the old timer for breakfast by now – ‘

‘Vic and me are the law in Avery County!’ Lacy cut in harshly. ‘And him and me have got every right to take first look at the scene of any crime in our jurisdiction. So you – ‘

Meeker shook out the match with which he had lit his pipe and interrupted his angrily disgruntled deputy. ‘I’m looking on Mr Edge as a kind of unofficial lawman, Max. And it seems to me he’s told us just about everything – and maybe even more – than we’d have seen for ourselves if we’d been put to the trouble of riding all the way out to the Quinn place again.’

Lacy made a moist sound of disgust deep in his throat. But if he had intended to spit he held back from doing so in the office that lacked a cuspidor.

Meeker asked: ‘So what do you make of old Joe getting himself killed, Edge?’

Lacy was obviously still simmering with resentment but he remained tight-lipped as he moved to stand alongside the entrance to the jailhouse section of the building: which was as far away as he could get from Edge beside the door to the street without leaving the room.

‘The way I hear it the Bowie knife that was used to kill him once belonged to Bob Jordan. The Cassidy hand who was killed on the spread the same morning that the Quinn women died. I’ve got no idea what happened to it – ‘

Lacy opened his mouth to sneer a response to this but Ivers spoke first – yelled excitedly from his cell:

‘Hey, was Crazy Joe really stuck with Bob Jordan’s Bowie knife? I can name you a guy who couldn’t wait to get his hands on that blade, Mr Meeker!’

‘I told you to button that Goddamn lip of yours!’ the sheriff snarled then moderated his tone to tell Edge: ‘I’ve heard how that drifter was the envy of a lot of the local kids for owning a knife that was supposed to have belonged to Jim Bowie himself.’ He made a dismissive gesture with the hand clutching the pipe. ‘But what about Kellner being murdered the way he was? You got any thoughts on that?’

Edge shrugged. ‘It seems like he was coming to see me, feller.’

‘About the Quinn murders?’

‘Apart from the lousy stage service those killings are the only reason I have for sticking around here.’

Lacy said with a leer: ‘That’s not what I hear. I hear there’s a certain lady living alone in Springdale who – ‘

‘Your business is the law,’ Edge cut in impassively. ‘I ever break it in Avery County, you can poke your nose in mine.’

Lacy countered with a sneer: ‘Way Vic sees it, we’re all in the same business but I don’t happen to agree with that so – ‘

Meeker interrupted: ‘Hey now, I’m the sheriff and you’re the deputy, Max. Which means I kinda outrank you. And I’m saying that we all ought to buckle down to getting our jobs done instead of trying to pick quarrels all the time.’

‘I tell you, for the kind of money Quinn’s lawyer is paying I surely do wish we were all in the same business,’ Lacy growled sullenly.

Edge emptied his cup of coffee with a final swallow and pointed out: ‘The way it is, deputy, you get paid regular on the nail however things turn out while you’re sitting around doing nothing. I have to come up with the killers of the Quinn women before I get a cent.’

‘And you really reckon you’re smart enough to do that?’ Lacy challenged. ‘When we’ve already got that kid locked up in the cell out back?’

‘I never killed nobody, I keep telling you!’ Ivers protested bitterly. ‘So one of you better find out who the hell did!’

‘Shut up, boy!’ Meeker ordered.

Edge said: ‘I’ve got two thousand reasons for trying, kid.’

On a cloud of aromatic tobacco smoke, his unblinking gaze fixed on the knife on the desk, Meeker said reflectively: ‘I wonder why Crazy Joe’s killer let him get so close to you before he stabbed the old man?’ He sighed, darted his quizzical gaze between Edge and Lacy and admitted grimly: ‘Damnit, I don’t know! How can anybody know? I’ll have to take a look into Kellner’s death some other time. Right now it’s the Quinn murders that occupy me.’