John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

“You only brought this one gun of yours up here?” Burt asked.

“That’s right,” Bennison said in a flat tone.

“Mind if I look around the camp?”

“Go ahead.”

We walked in and Burt picked up the Remington rifle that stood in a corner of the front room. He glanced at it and put it back. Next he went under the camp to the workshop that old Tyler used to use before he died two years ago. Bennison seemed to be getting more irritable.

Burt glanced at the top of the work bench near the vise. He took the kitchen match out of his mouth, scratched it on the underside of the bench, and then ran the flame back and forth, an eighth of an inch above the surface of the bench.

At last he grunted and turned to Bennison, who was leaning against the wall, his arms folded.

“Well, mister,” Burt said slowly, “I guess we’d better drag the lake beyond that tree and get the other rifle.”

I stood with my mouth open as Bennison whirled and leaped through the doorway. Burt was right behind him. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I ran after the two of them. Outside, I saw that Bennison was running at full tilt up the trail toward the road. Burt had grabbed the Remington out of the corner. He leveled it, drew a deep breath, then squeezed the trigger.

The flat explosion of the shot echoed through the clearing. Bennison fell and rolled through the dry leaves. When we reached him, he was clawing with his fingers at his shattered leg, and his face was the face of a madman. He was trying to curse Burt, but only guttural sounds issued from his throat...

After the details had been cleaned up, the dead girl’s relatives notified, and Bennison put in the hospital, I sat in Burt’s office, drinking bourbon with him and waiting for him to tell me in his own way.

“You see, Joe,” he said, “I never would have tumbled to how Bennison did it, if he’d acted right. Maybe you didn’t see it, but he was out of character. Any guy who loves his wife shows it in more than one way — even if she has died suddenly and violently. If he was on the level he would have yanked that skirt down himself. No fellow who loves his wife wants a couple of strangers seeing too much of her, even if she’s dead. Also, he didn’t object when we walked off and left her dead in the mud there. A normal guy would have wanted her moved and covered up.”

“But was that enough?”

“No, but that started me noticing things. Things like her shoes being caked with mud and his being clean. Why would he clean his shoes? That started me thinking some more.”

“What were you doing down by the water?”

“Looking for a little of that rainbow color that always shows up when you put a little oil in some water. Even one drop will do it — like when you toss a rifle in the lake. I found a little of it close to the rocks. Remember the wind was from the lake.

“You see, he went down the trail first, climbed the tree with the rifle, shot down into her head, and threw the gun out into the lake. He wiped the mud off his shoes so he wouldn’t leave mud on the tree when he climbed it. The trunk was fat enough to hide him from her.”

“But why did he throw away the gun?”

“Because it could easily be proved that the slug in her skull had come from it. I figured he’d have to do that, so I guessed there were two guns to start with. The oil convinced me I was on the right track, and when I picked up those cartridge cases and found that on some of them, the firing pin hit flush on the rim, and on others the pin hit just a hair inside, I knew I was getting warm.”

“But Burt, it still doesn’t make sense. If he did like you said, that slug would have gone through her head and dug itself six feet down into that mud.”

“Joe, use your brains. How would you cut down muzzle velocity of a bullet so you’d lower the penetration?”

I thought it over as I sipped my drink. When it all came to me, I spilled a little bourbon on my pants.

He grinned as I said, “I get it. Bennison used the vise and took some of the charge out of the bullet shell. You figured it out and guessed that he might have spilled a little powder doing it. The match flame burned little grains of the powder that had dropped on the bench. He wedged the slug back in the case over the reduced charge and then shot her from the tree so it would look as if the slug had traveled in a high arch from across the lake!”

“You keep on getting so smart, Joe,” Burt said, “and I’ll be able to quit and turn over this thankless job to you. Bennison was sick of her and he wanted her dough. He brought her up here to kill her with the method all worked out. The biggest thing he forgot is that a fellow can’t think of his wife who has just been killed as a dead body — unless he got used to thinking of her that way.”

We sat for a couple of minutes and thought about Bennison. Then Burt sighed and said, “Just think. Middle of November and I ain’t had a chance to get my deer yet this season.”

At five minutes of five the disc jockey topped off his program with a recording by the All Stars. Barney Bigard’s clarinet was sweet and strong, to the counterpoint noodling of Earl “Fatha” Hines. He kept the car radio tuned so low that the rhythm was a whisper, the tune like a memory in the mind. As the piece ended he turned off the radio, cupped his hands around the lighter from the dashboard as he lit another cigarette.

When it was finished he eased the car door open and stood out in the crisp, pre-dawn air, the wet spring-smell of the woods. Four months of waiting and watching. The tiredness was deep in him, and the boredom. A leaden-muscled, sag-nerved tiredness.

Behind the house three hundred feet away, the roosters screamed brassy defiance at distant hen runs, and lonesome through the dregs of night came the far-off sigh and pant of a train.

Barry Raymes leaned against the side of the government sedan, sensing, for the hundredth time, his own unreality — neatly dressed, as the Bureau demanded, the regulation Special making its familiar bulge, the regulation hammer on the regulation empty chamber, the entire picture anachronistic in the threat of dawn, in the sleepy peace of the Georgia countryside. In the war there had been the long time on the ship, so long that things that happened before faded away, and the future was immeasurably distant. This was not unlike that time on the ship. At eight Sturdevant would relieve him, to be relieved in turn at four in the afternoon by French, who would carry on until midnight, when once again Barry Raymes, with the thermos of coffee, the bundle of sandwiches from the hotel, would begin the vigil that had begun to seem pointless. But no agent of two years’ seniority can hope to point out to the Special Agent in Charge that the assignment, in his measured opinion, is of no value. Patience is a quality more precious than gold to the Bureau. A man without patience does not last long.

And so there has to be reconciliation to the night after night, the hundred and twenty-six nights thus spent, and the possible hundred and twenty-six yet to come. Even though each night added another cumulative factor to the deathly weariness. Weariness came from recurrent alertness, the adrenaline that came hard and fast into the blood whenever a car seemed to slow on the highway. Or there would be an unidentifiable sound that made necessary a cautious patrol of the grounds with the Bureau variation of the wartime infrared snooperscope.

All because the Bureau was gambling that Craik Lopat would return to see the girl he had intended to marry...