Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Hello, Colby,” he said. “How’s the law?”

“Can’t complain,” I said. “Draw me one, Hobby.”

He drew the beer and shoved it across the bar and waved away the two-bit piece I offered in payment. I always offered, and he always waved it away, and I don’t know why we kept going through the routine, unless it was just to keep the record straight.

“Thanks, Hobby,” I said. “This one I need.”

“You got a problem, Colby?”

“Looks like murder. I guess you could call that a problem.”

Hobby sucked in his breath, and his little eyes glittered in the soft light of the room, but he didn’t make a big demonstration out of his reaction. Hobby never did.

“I’d call it a problem, Colby. Anyone I know?”

“Come off, Hobby. You know everybody.”

“Okay. So it’s someone I know. Maybe it’s an official secret or something.”

“Nothing’s secret, official or otherwise, except the name of the one who did it. I wish I could tell you. Was Faye Bratton in here this afternoon, Hobby?”

“You mean it was Faye who got it?”

“That’s right. Faye Bratton.”

“Well, by God, it couldn’t have happened to anyone who tried for it harder. She was made to be murdered, that Faye was.”

“Maybe. I’ve got to take the position that no one is made to be murdered, not even wanton wives. Was she in here, Hobby?”

“Briefly. Fairly early. Alone.”

“How briefly?”

“I didn’t hold a watch on her. Say half an hour. Long enough to take her time drinking a couple of bourbon highballs.”

“How early?”

“When she got here? Let’s see. Not earlier than two. Not later than two-thirty.”

“You say she was alone?”

“That’s what I said. She came alone, she left alone.”

“She meet anyone here?”

“No.”

“She talk with anyone?”

“Sure. Me.”

“No one else?”

“No one. Matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone else here most of the time. Couple of guests of the hotel came in for maybe fifteen minutes. Drank a beer each. I took them to be salesmen. Not regulars, though. I’d never seen them before.”

“Did she say anything about meeting anyone later, after she left here?”

“She said she was going down the street to see Dolly Noble. That’s all.”

“Down to Dolly’s beauty parlor?”

“I took her to mean there. She didn’t say so.”

“That’s all she said about where she intended to go and what she intended to do?”

“That’s all.”

“How did she seem? I mean, did she seem nervous or excited or anything unusual at all?”

“Faye always gave the impression of looking for something or someone. Something or someone for excitement. Like a woman on the prowl. Tending bar, even in a place like this, you learn to know them. You can almost smell them. Nothing unusual about Faye this afternoon, I’d say. Just Faye the way she always was.”

“She talk about anything that seems significant, looking back?”

“I can’t remember anything.” He creased his brow, which ran up and back over the crown of his head, which he shook slowly sidewise. “Just talk, the kind of stuff you pass back and forth across a bar. No name was mentioned except Dolly’s.”

“Faye came in here pretty often, didn’t she?”

“She was in town often. I’d guess she came in here everytime she was in town. She was a good drinker, Faye was. She took bourbon in water with one ice cube. Short on the water. I’ve seen her a little high, but never what I’d call drunk.”

“Was she in the habit of meeting anyone here lately? Any special person, that is?”

“Like a man, you mean?”

“A man will do.”

“There wasn’t any. No one special. No one she was meeting by arrangement, I’ll swear. You know how Faye was, Colby. She never ran from a man if she came across one. If there happened to be one here, she was congenial.”

“I know. It doesn’t help much.”

“Maybe it does. In a negative way. If Faye was involved with a particular guy in a really big way, he’d probably be the one she wouldn’t be congenial with in a public bar. You see what I mean?”

“I see what you mean. You’re real clever to think of that, Hobby, but it sure as hell doesn’t narrow the field any. I can hardly suspect every man in the county that Faye hasn’t met up with one time or another in this taproom.”

“With Faye it’s going to be pretty hard to narrow the field much any way you look at it. Faye just naturally took in a lot of territory. You going to tell me what happened to her, Colby, or is it something you’re sitting on?”

“I’m not sitting on anything, Hobby. News just hasn’t had time to get around yet. Someone set fire to a haystack behind Crawley’s house this evening, out in a field near the creek. It attracted several men and kids from the area, including Virgil Carpenter and Rudy Squires, besides Crawley himself. When the fire burned down some and the smoke had lifted, they saw a body in there. Virgil forked it out, and it was Faye.”

“Jesus! You mean someone killed her and put her in the stack and set it on fire?”

“Looks that way, superficially. There are some crazy things about it.”

“It’s all crazy, if you ask me. How was Faye killed?”

“I’m not sure yet. The body was burned pretty bad. Emil Coker’s got it now, but I don’t suppose he’ll find out anything significant. Her head didn’t seem to be bashed in, and I couldn’t see any wounds. Maybe Emil will see something when he takes a close look at her on a table, but I doubt it. We’ll call in a doc for a post mortem, of course. It’s my guess she was strangled.”

“Why strangled in particular?”

“I don’t know. It probably happened in a quarrel about something. It seems to me the way a man would likely kill a woman under those circumstances, not having planned to kill her in advance. I might be wrong, of course, but it’s the way I’ve been thinking about it.”

“A guy would have to be out of his head to do something that crazy.”

“Faye drove men out of their heads. She was good at it.”

“You’re right there. How’s old Crawley taking it?”

“Virg and Rudy said he was busted up pretty bad down by the fire. When I talked to him at the house later, he wasn’t. He talked calm and sensible. He said he might miss Faye a little.”

“It’s a wonder Crawley didn’t kill her himself a long time ago, and that’s God’s truth.”

“Well, maybe he finally got around to it. He says he didn’t, of course.”

I drained my schooner and set it on the bar. Hobby picked it up and made a motion toward the tap.

“You want another, Colby?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a place or two to go, Hobby. Keep an ear cocked to the bar talk tonight, will you? Something might drop. Chances are nothing will, but you never can tell.”

I went up the pair of steps and through the lobby and turned right on the main drag. Under lights, the street was beginning to look alive for a few more hours of this particular day. There was a moderate traffic of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and Wheeler’s Drug Store, next corner up from the Bonny, had begun to gather its nightly accretion of loafers and nylon inspectors. Passing, I wondered how often Faye Bratton’s nylons had been inspected and approved at this place to the sound of soft whistles, but it was nothing I gave a lot of attention to, just wondered in passing. In the next block, about half way between corners, I came to the narrow front of Dolly Noble’s beauty parlor, and found it dark. It was after closing hour, of course, but sometimes Dolly made night appointments with working girls, and I thought she might have made one tonight. It didn’t really matter, anyhow, for Dolly had a small apartment upstairs over the parlor, and I went up narrow stairs from the street into a narrow hall above, lighted by a single globe, and knocked on Dolly’s door. After a minute or two, she opened it.