William Haggard - The New Black Mask (No 5)

“Thanks.”

He entered a narrow kitchen, went through it to a dark hallway that smelled faintly of dog, turned left into the front room. There a handful of men watched the photographers put away their gear.

When he entered the room, their voices hesitated and softened, as if a volume control had been touched. Men stepped forward, hands out, voices low: “Sorry. Sorry. Ed, I’m real sorry.”

He crossed the familiar room, keeping to a wide plastic strip laid across the beige carpet. He shook hands with a little, narrow-faced man who looked as if he had missed a lot of meals. “Morning, Nick.”

“Sorry as hell about this, Ed,” Nick Broucel said.

Ralston nodded. His glasses had fogged, and he began rubbing them with a piece of tissue that left white particles on the glass. Without the glasses, his eyes seemed too narrow, too widely separated for his long face. His dark hair was already receding. Scowling at the flecks on his glasses, he said, “Well, I guess I better look at her.”

A gray blanket covered a figure stretched out by the fireplace. Ralston twitched back a corner, exposing a woman's calm face. Her hair was pale blond, her face long, her lipstick bright pink and smudged. On the bloodless skin, patches of eye and cheek makeup glared like plastic decals.

He looked down into the face without feeling anything. There was no connection between the painted thing under the blanket and his sister, Sue Ralston, who lived in his mind, undisciplined, sharp-tongued, merry.

He stripped back the blanket. She was elaborately dressed in an expensive blue outfit, earrings and necklace, heels; nails glittered on hands crossed under her breasts. “Well, now,” he said at last. “It’s Sue. What happened?”

Nick said, “She went over backward. Hit her head on the corner of the fireplace. Pure bad luck. Somebody moved her away. Smoothed her clothes. Folded her hands. Somebody surprised, I’d say.”

“Somebody shoved her and she fell?”

“Could be.”

“Or she just slipped.”

“Could be.”

Rain nibbled at the windows. The investigative work had started now, and the room squirmed with men standing, bending, looking, methodically searching for any scrap of fact to account for that stillness under the gray blanket.

Ralston asked, “Why the full crew? How’d we hear about this?”

“Anonymous call. Male. Logged at 5:32 this morning. Gave route and box number. Said the bodies were here.”

“Bodies? More than one?”

“Not so far.” Broucel looked sour and ill at ease. “This is Fleming’s job, not mine. I’m just marking time here. I don’t know where the hell he’s got to. Where’s the sheriff?”

Ralston said carefully, “He’s taking a couple of days vacation.” He slowly scanned the room. Money had been freshly spent here, money not much controlled by taste. New blue brocade chairs bulked too large for the room. The couch seethed with flowered cushions. The lamps were fat glass creations with distorted shades. Tissues smeared with lipstick scattered a leather-topped coffee table.

“And there’s something else,” Broucel said.

He gestured toward the shelves flanking the fireplace. Cassettes of country music littered the bottom shelves. On upper shelves clustered carved wooden animals, ceramic pots, weed vases. Centered on the top shelf was the photograph of a grinning young man. It was inscribed “To Sue, With Ever More Love, Tommy.”

“You recognize that kid?” Broucel asked.

“Isn’t that Tommy Richardson? His daddy owns the south half of the county.”

“That’s the one.”

“Daddy’s going to enforce the dry laws, jail the bootleggers, clean up the Sheriff’s Department — come elections. That’s a mike, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, that’s a mike.”

A fat wooden horse had tumbled from the second shelf. Its fall had exposed the black button of a microphone, the line vanishing back behind the shelves.

In a slow, reflective voice, Ralston said, “Sue never had a damn bit of sense.”

“Let’s go down in the basement,” Broucel told him.

Steep wooden stairs took them to a cool room running the length of the house. Windows along the east foundation emitted pallid light. Behind the gas furnace, a small chair and table crowded against the wall and black cables snaked out of the ceiling to connect a silver-gray amplifier and cassette tape recorder. On the table, three cassette cases lay open and empty, like the transparent egg cases of insects.

Broucel said, “We found three mikes. About any place you cough upstairs, down it goes on tape.”

Ralston gestured irritably at the equipment. “I don’t understand this. She didn’t think this way. She couldn’t turn on the TV. Why this?”

Broucel fingered his mouth, said in a hesitant voice, “I sort of hoped you could help me out on that.”

“I can’t. I don’t know. We didn’t speak but once a year.”

“Your own sister?”

“My own damnfool sister. She had no sense. But she had more sense than this.”

“Somebody put this rig in. She had to know about it.”

“Must have,” Ralston agreed. “Must have. But what do I know? I’m no investigator. I’m a spoiled newspaper man. My job’s explaining what the sheriff thought he said.”

Feet hammered down the stairway. A deputy in a dripping slicker thumped into the basement, excitement patching his face red. He yelped, “Nick, we found Fleming.”

Broucel snapped, “Where the hell's he…"

“He's in his car, quarter of a mile down the road. Tucked in behind the brush. Rittenhoff saw it. Fleming’s shot right through the head.”

Broucel sucked in his breath. He became a little more thin, a little more gray. “Dead?”

“Dead, yeah. He’s getting stiff.”

“Oh, my God,” Broucel said. His mouth twitched. He put two fingers over his lips, as his eyes jerked around to Ralston.

Who said, with hard satisfaction, “I guess we’re going to have to interrupt the sheriff’s vacation.”

He drove his blue Honda fast across twelve miles of back-county road. A thick gray sky, seamed with deeper gray and black, wallowed overhead. Thunder complained behind the pines.

He felt anger turn in him, an orange-red ball hot behind his ribs. Not anger about Sue. That part remained cold, sealed, separate. It’s Piggott’s doing, he thought. Piggott, Piggott, Piggott the beer runner and liquor trucker, the gambler, briber, the sheriff's poker-playing buddy. Now blackmailer. What else? And Sue’s very particular good friend, thank you.

Whatever Piggott suggested, she would, bright-eyed, laughing, follow. No thought. No foresight. Do what you want today, ha ha. More fun again tomorrow.

When he last visited her, they had quarreled about Piggott.

“He’s lots of fun,” she said loudly. Her voice always rose with her temper. “He’s interesting. He’s different all the time. You never know with him.”

“You always know. He’ll always go for the crooked buck. He handles beer for six dry counties. He owns better than two hundred shot houses. He’s broke heads all over the state. Even a blond lunatic knows better than to climb the sty to kiss the pig.”

It ended in a shouting match. She told Piggott the next day, with quotations, and Piggott told Ralston and the sheriff the day after.

“A full-time liar and a postage-stamp Capone.” Piggott pushed back in his leather chair and yelled with laughter. “I swear, Ed, I didn’t know I was that good.”

“Hardly good,” Ralston said.

The sheriff’s eyes, like frosted glass, glared silence.

Ralston said, “Look, Piggott, Sue’s just a nice, empty-headed kid. She sees the fun, but she don’t smell the dirt. She’s got no sense of self-protection. She’s different.”