William Haggard - The New Black Mask (No 5)

“Fleming!” Piggott was saying. “I can’t believe it. Who’s Moneybucks Richardson going to run for sheriff now?”

Laughter. The sheriff edged toward the door.

The need to tell them about Sue, the urgency of it, tore at him. At the door, he blundered to a halt, said, “Piggott…” Terrible pressure locked his throat. He said, instead, “Piggott — what about that ancy-fancy recording stuff in Sue’s basement?”

Fleeting hardness in Piggott’s face softened to laughter. He flung out joyous arms. “Wasn’t that something. We told some friends we were engaged. Then I went out to the car and let them warn her about me. Then we played the cassettes back to them. Funny! Hell, they’ll never speak to me again. Hey, you got to hear those tapes. And they’re my good friends.”

Joy wrinkled his big face. He bellowed laughter like a furnace. “I mean, funny.”

They sat in the sheriffs car behind Piggott’s house. Rain rattled on the hood and glass.

Ed asked, "What are they doing with Tommy Richardson?”

“Son, you probably don’t want to know anything about that.”

“I got to. It’s important.” Their eyes met, held, strained, force against force. “Yes,” Ralston said. “I mean it’s important. It’s important to me.”

The sheriff shrugged. “ ’Tain’t but a trifle. They’re just roping the boy a little. Just a little business insurance.”

“Business insurance?”

“Why sure. Here’s a nice respectable boy gaming around with beer runners. Well, shoot, people game and people have a drink now and then. Least I’ve known them to do it in Pinton County. Don’t expect they’ll change. No harm in it, less they get mean. The mean ones is what sheriffing is about. But you can’t never tell when sin’s going to get a bad name. So maybe Old Richardson goes and gets a hard-on against sin. Then they got something for him to listen to while he gets calm. Or maybe not. You can't ever know.”

“That’s all?”

“All there is. Nothing a’tall.”

“Merciful God,” Ralston said. “Is that all?”

He got out into the rain. He stood staring blankly, hunching up his shoulders, rain smearing his glasses, distorting the world so that it appeared twisted and in strange focus. He circled the car and tapped the sheriffs window, and rain ran in his hair, wet his forehead, ran from his chin.

The sheriff's window rolled down.

Ralston said, “Sheriff, Sue’s dead. At home. Fell and hit her head. I couldn’t tell Piggott.”

He turned away and walked toward the front parking lot The cement driveway danced with silver splashes.

Behind him, a car door slammed and heavy footsteps hurried back toward the house.

The Honda streaked toward Pintonville. He had, perhaps, a ten-, even fifteen-minute start on them. More if Piggott delayed. The road flew at him, glistening like the back of a wet serpent. Soon they too would think of questions to ask Tommy Richardson.

If it had been Tommy who was with Sue last night.

If he had read the evidence correctly.

If Sue had got herself up, polished and shining, to dazzle the son of Old Man Richardson, the fun and indiscretion funneling into the cassette’s hollow maw.

If the boy had found the mike. If his suspicions blazed…

But Fleming. He could not understand Fleming’s presence.

The Honda slid on the shining asphalt, and the back end fought to twist around. He corrected the wheel, iron-wristed, jabbed the accelerator.

First, talk to Tommy Richardson. Before Piggott.

The car leaped. The rain came down.

“I’m Tommy Richardson,” the boy said in a low voice, affirming that being Tommy Richardson was futile and burdensome. His head drooped, his shoulders slumped, his body was lax with self-abasement “I’m Sue Ralston’s brother Ed. I’m with the Sheriff’s Department. I’d like to talk with you.”

“I guess so.” He pushed open the screen door separating them, exposing his consumed face. He was unshaven, uncombed, unwashed. He smelled of sweat and cigarettes, and despair had drawn his young face and glazed his eyes. “Dad says you guys are incompetent but you got here quick enough.”

He looked without hope past Ralston’s shoulder at the rain sheeting viciously into the apartment complex. Lightning snapped and glared, blanching the pastel fronts of the apartments and rattling them with thunder. “Come in. You’re getting soaked.”

Ralston stepped into the front room, saturated trousers slopping against his legs. Tension bent his tall frame.

Stereo equipment, lines of LPs, neat rows of paperbacks packed the cream-colored walls. A table lamp spilled light across a card table holding a typewriter and a litter of typed pages, heavily corrected.

“I’ve been up all night” Richardson said. He gestured toward the typewriter. “Writing out my incredible… stupidity.”

He turned away, reaching for a typed page. As he did so, Ralston saw, behind the boy’s left ear, a vivid pink smudge of lipstick.

The room convulsed around him, as if the walls had clenched like a fist.

“Mr. Ralston?”

He became aware that Tommy was holding out typewritten pages to him, eyes anxious. “This explains it.”

“Sit down,” Ralston said.

“Thank you. Yes, I will.” The boy collapsed loosely on a tan davenport, long legs sprawled, head back, eyes closed, hands turned palms uppermost, the sacrifice at the altar. On the wall behind, two fencing foils crossed above the emblem of the university team.

Tommy added, without emphasis, “I thought really serious things were more formal. You expect personal tragedy to have dignity and form. But it doesn’t. It’s only caused by trivialities — stupid mistakes, misjudgments. Nothing of weight. All accident.” He might have been whispering prayers before sleep.

Ralston, set-faced, read:

I am a murderer.

Last night, I murdered two people that I cared for.

One I loved and loved deeply. The other was my friend. But it was wholly by capricious and accidental chance, which now seems inescapable, that I murdered both of them. That it was essentially accidental does not excuse me.

The balance of the paragraph was crossed out. There were four pages, scarred by revision, ending with his full signature.

Ralston took out his pen and laid the pages in Tommy’s lap. “Sign your usual signature diagonally across each page.” He watched, immobile, as the boy wrote. Then he folded the sheets and thrust them into his breast pocket.

“Now tell me what happened,” he said.

“I loved her. We were planning to get engaged. At first I thought she was a criminal with Piggott. But she was sensitive and warm. You’re her brother. You know. She didn’t know about Piggott, what he did. We fell in love. We were going to get engaged after I graduated.”

“How did you get involved with Piggott?” Ralston asked. The tremor shaking his legs and body was not reflected in his voice.

“It was Fleming. Dad had a Citizen’s Committee for Law and Order meeting at the house. Fleming came. He said that the sheriff and the bootleggers were cooperating. But he needed more evidence. He said that Piggott would try to blackmail me to make it seem like I was participating in his business. He called it a business. Dad didn’t like it, but he agreed that I would let them try to blackmail me.”

“So then Fleming introduced you to Sue.”

“I met her at his house. Twice. He said that she knew Piggott. Then I went to her house, and Piggott was there a couple of times. He doesn’t look like a criminal, but he laughs too much. It makes you distrustful.”

“Why was Fleming there last night?” He glanced at his watch, and anxiety crawled in him.