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

“Hello, Dolly,” I said. “What’s new?”

“Nothing new,” she said, “except I’m getting a call from the sheriff. That’s new. What do you want, Colby?”

“Let me come in and tell you.”

“Why not? You’ll have to make it snappy, though. I’m expecting someone.”

I went past her into the living room of her little apartment, and she closed the door and sat down, crossing her legs, which were nice. She had a one-ton conditioner stuck in one of the windows overlooking the street below, and that was nice, too. It made the apartment nice and cool, and it was pleasant to sit there in the chair she’d offered and sneak a few looks at her nice legs. It was a lot better than standing in front of Wheeler’s.

“I’ll try to get out of the way before your date arrives,” I said.

“Oh, it’s no one that important, Colby. Just Faye Bratton.”

“Faye’s coming here?”

“She ought to be here now. She’s late.”

“What have you and Faye got scheduled for tonight?”

“That could be a personal question, Colby. You asking for a personal reason, or is it official?”

“What makes you think it might be official?”

“Nothing makes me think so. Hell, I don’t mind telling you, either way. We’re going to have dinner at the Bonny and go to a movie. Big night. Faye gets bored out on that damn farm with Crawley Bratton. She comes in and spends an evening with me every now and then. Sometimes she spends the night and goes home in the morning.”

I sat and looked at Dolly for a few seconds without speaking. Shorter than average, she wore spike heels to make herself look taller than she was, and someday she’d either be fat or haggard from diets and reducing exercises, but she was neither yet. Her blond hair, cut short and shaggy, had the benefit of her best rinse. Thanks to the treatments and tricks of her trade, Dolly managed to make herself a good-looking woman. Lots of men claim to consider this sort of deception unfair, but not me. The time comes for all women when it’s a good thing to know the tricks, and I’m all for the ones who learn early.

“Faye won’t be here,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “Has something happened to her?”

“The last thing that ever will. She’s dead. Someone killed her.”

She sat staring at me with her mouth hanging slightly open, her eyes wide and sick with sudden shock. Under the eyes and on her cheeks, blue shadows and crimson paint stood out against drained flesh in stark and ugly relief. I watched for another sign than shock, but there was none. No fear, no anger, no slight beginning of grief. In her life, I thought, Faye Bratton had incited often the easy expression of love, but now in death she had taken away nothing that would be missed for more than a little while, if at all, and she had left not even sorrow. Thinking of Faye, I watched Dolly, and after a while Dolly’s breath escaped in a long sigh. The tip of a pink tongue slipped out to wet her lips.

“So he did it after all!” she said.

“He says not.”

“Did you expect him to confess?”

“Sometimes killers do. I guess I couldn’t have any such good luck as that, though.”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Tonight. Little more than an hour ago.”

“How did it happen?”

“I’m not sure. She was strangled, I think.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, how did it happen that you talked to him.”

“That’s routine, Dolly. If a wife’s killed, you naturally talk to the husband.”

“Crawley? My God, Colby, I wasn’t thinking of Crawley.”

“No? It seems to me, under the circumstances, that Crawley would be a natural one to think of. Who did you have in mind?”

“Fergus Cass.”

It was a name I hadn’t expected, and it took me a while to adjust. In the few seconds of adjustment, I tried to think of what I knew about Fergus Cass, and what I knew was practically nothing. He’d come into the county only about six months before, and he’d been living with an aunt and uncle on their farm across the creek from Crawley’s place, about a mile from house to house. He was from St. Louis, as I remembered, and there had been a rumor circulated at the time of his coming that he’d been sick, tuberculosis or something like that, and had spent some time in a sanitarium somewhere before coming to the country for rest and fresh air. This seemed a reasonable explanation, for he didn’t do anything in the way of work that anyone had ever noticed. I’d seen him in town a number of times, and once or twice tramping through the fields in the country carrying a rough hand-cut walking stick. He was a dark, lean man, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, with heavy black hair and eyes so deeply brown that they too looked black. There was a kind of unusual grace in the way he moved and held his head. He didn’t really look as if he’d ever been seriously sick, but of course you can’t always tell about such things from appearances.

“I never thought of Fergus Cass,” I said. “Tell me about him. Him and Faye, I mean.”

“They had something going. It’s been going four, five months, Colby. Since soon after Fergus came here to stay.”

“My understanding is, Faye almost always had something going. Isn’t that right?”

“Oh, sure. Faye always had to have something going with a man, but most of the time it didn’t amount to much. This was different. Bigger. Because of Fergus, the kind of guy he is. I told Faye she’d better leave him alone, but you know how she was. She wouldn’t listen.”

“You said the kind of guy Fergus is. What kind is he?”

“It’s hard to say, Colby. Nothing he’s done. Nothing he’s said. I guess it’s just the feeling he gives you, and the way he looks sometimes. You ever seen his eyes when something happens he doesn’t like? They get a kind of glaze on them. It’s like he’s gone suddenly blind. He’s so damn intense, Colby, that’s what he is.”

“I’ve never noticed. Maybe I haven’t looked into his eyes as often as you and Faye. Anyhow, it’s pretty thin. You can’t condemn a man for the look of his eyes.”

“That’s not all, Colby. Like I said, they’ve had this thing going for months. They used to meet down by the creek between Faye’s place and the Cass’s, but lately, the last two or three weeks, Faye’s been trying to break it up. I think she was getting a little scared or something. Fergus wanted her to leave Crawley and go back to St. Louis with him, but Faye wouldn’t go, and Fergus kept staying on and on, forcing her to meet him and trying to change her mind. He was supposed to go back a month ago, Faye told me, but he kept staying on.”

“Why didn’t Faye go? She didn’t give a damn for Crawley, that’s plain enough, and it seems to me it should have suited her fine to go running off to St. Louis with a good-looking guy like Fergus Cass.”

“Hell, Colby, good-looking guys are a dime a dozen, from St. Louis or anywhere else. You got any idea what Crawley Bratton’s worth?”

“I never gave it much thought. Quite a bundle, come to think of it.”

“It comes to six figures, at least.”

“Well, that’s something to take care of. It’s funny Faye took so many chances with it.”

“She couldn’t help taking chances. That was Faye for you. But she wasn’t going to throw it all away deliberately just for a good-looking nothing from a big town. He was all right to have a thing with, a big thing, but he was intended to be strictly temporary.”

“The same as others who could be named.”

“Name them if you want. What does it get you?”

“I don’t want to. Not now, anyhow. Maybe later. Hobby Langerham said Faye came to see you this afternoon. What did she want?”