Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

I gunned my dusty sedan to the upper rim of a miles-long valley. It dropped breathlessly away on my right. To my left, Spurgeon Mountain strained its steep, thicketed slopes on toward the sky. The towering peak was as primitive as in the day of the Cherokee, except for the raw earthen scars Randolph P. Fogarty would leave as painful reminders to us ignorant natives.

I braked the sedan, turning it onto a vast muddy stretch that bulldozers had gouged as a beginning for a huge parking area. I jounced along slowly, twisting the steering wheel to avoid boulders and ruts. From the side window I glimpsed the naked incision that slashed straight up to the mountain’s distant crest, the clearing for the proposed chairlift.

Straight ahead, and already sprouting a few young weeds, were the humps of concrete forms and stanchions, foundations, supposedly, for a building that showed, on paper, as a large souvenir shop and restaurant.

I beaded my eyes on the small travel trailer that had served as a construction site office for Fogarty Enterprises. Fogarty’s gun-metal gray Continental was parked beside the office, and my pulse tripped a beat of thanksgiving. At least I could have a private, man to man talk with him before the boom was lowered all the way.

I risked the welfare of the sedan’s springs, covering the last fifty yards of ruts, humps, and slits the rains had cut.

I was out of the sedan almost before it stopped pitching and rearing. Getting from under the wheel, I flicked a glance over the scars the ’dozer had made. The mountain seemed so dismal now, so silent with the small crew and machinery trucked away when the work was barely begun. It all added up to a brutish bequest by Fogarty, a disdainful mockery of the big-deal dream he’d painted—

Fogarty must have heard the sedan’s engine in the mountain silence, seem me coming. But he chose to ignore me, even when I’d stood a few seconds outside the trailer-office doorway. He continued to stand imposingly at his desk, gathering up papers and stuffing them into a gold-monogrammed attaché case.

A good way to get a mountain man riled is to make out like he isn’t there, and I was more than a little riled already.

“Fogarty,” I said, stepping into the confines of the low-ceilinged trailer, “I want a few words with you.”

He glanced at a couple more documents, slipped one in the briefcase and dropped the other in the general direction of the overflowing trash basket. He shifted his two-dollar cigar with a movement of his lips.

“Make it a few,” he said in his stentorian baritone. “I’m busy.”

I faced him across the desk. We were sure a mismatched pair. I was scrawny, gray as a mountain winter from sixty years of living, a little rumpled in my store-bought suit, squint-eyed, arid red-necked.

Fogarty was about the furthest contrast you could imagine, big, robust, exuding the air of a Philadelphia banker or Wall Street tycoon. He wore an English suit, Italian loafers, a Madison Avenue shirt and tie, and a big, glittering stone on his manicured pinkie. But his stock in trade was his affable, honest looking face, with just enough gray at the temples to give him the final touch of dependability and last-notch respectability.

It was sure the perfect con man’s cover, that face, inspiring instant trust and confidence in even the experienced and wary.

“Fogarty,” I said, “I just had lunch with a member of our legal bar, Judge Bine. He mentioned something that kind of posed some questions in my mind.”

Fogarty picked up a paper, studied it briefly. “Such as?”

“Are you figuring on a quick action for bankruptcy?”

He smiled. It wasn’t like the hearty, genuine looking smiles he’d worn for Comfort. It was a little ugly. “Do you believe every bit of lunch table gossip that comes your way?”

“As head of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association I’m concerned with anything you do with our depositors’ money,” I reminded him.

He gave me the impatient look of a really big man dismissing a worm.

“I’m sure,” he said with mild scorn, “that you’ve spent every night biting your nails since you made the loan.”

I leaned toward him and gripped the edge of the desk. “I didn’t loan you a hundred thousand dollars of other people’s money entrusted to the care and keeping of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association. It was the board that you conned into the loan, Fogarty. The poor, pitiful group of hillbillies you bedazzled with your manner, your talk, your wining and dining, your fancy plans for turning Spurgeon Mountain into a sure-fire gold-mine tourist attraction.”

Our eyes locked. His lost a little of their calm self-assurance. Every word I’d said was true, and Fogarty knew it. He’d despised me from the start because I’d glimpsed behind his front. I’d held out, but he’d turned the savings and loan board against me.

I remembered their joshing just before the vote was taken: “You getting old and cranky, Lemuel?”... “Catch up with the times, Lemuel. The Spurgeon Mountain development as a tourist playground can’t miss.”... “Sure, Lemuel, look at what they’ve done around Blowing Rock and Maggie Valley near Asheville.”... “Not to mention Gold Mountain and Tweetsie Railroad.”... “We’ll have ’em by the station wagon load when Mr. Fogarty completes the chairlift, the mountaintop golf course, the frontier village, the open air amphitheater.”... “Every summer, Lemuel, Comfort will bust at the seams with tourists and their money.”... “It ain’t like he was asking us to foot the whole bill”... “That’s right, Lemuel, he’s just asking us for a piddling hundred thou.”

So it had gone. Piddling hundred thou, my foot! I’d looked about the board room table at their faces, struck a little dumb at the way Fogarty had shifted their way of thinking.

“Fogarty,” I said bluntly, “what have you done with our money?”

Neither of us let our eyes waver or drop. His fancy cigar had gone out, but he hadn’t noticed.

“Unfortunately, Lemuel, I made some bad investments.” Pointedly, he hadn’t called me Mr. Hyder, but Lemuel, in the tone of a man permitting a mountain hooger to shine his shoes or carry his golf bag.

“Or some mighty good investments,” I suggested. “Maybe in a numbered Swiss bank account?”

That little shot in the dark got to him. He couldn’t quite hide the flicker deep in his eyes.

“What makes you say a thing like that?” he probed.

“You,” I said. “You, being what you are. I think it was your goal from the beginning. You staked out yourself a bunch of naive hillbillies with a nest egg who were ready for the taking. I don’t think you ever intended to go further on Spurgeon Mountain than you’ve gone.” I jerked a thumb toward the window.

“And you sure haven’t gone more than five or six thousand out there. Just some motions, to pave the way for the next act, a bankruptcy action while the loot is safely salted away somewhere out of reach.”

He studied me a moment. Then he reached with his soft right hand and nudged my splayed hands from the papers on his desk. He did it like he was picking up a dirty bug.

“I don’t like you, Lemuel Hyder,” he said, “but I’ll have to admit I admire you more than I do the rest of them.”

“Then you’re admitting the truth of what I say?”

Towering over me, his eyes crinkled with a sort of warped pleasure. Not liking me, he was enjoying this moment and the chance to rub it in.

“Why not?” he said. “It’s salted away, all right. But not necessarily in a numbered Swiss account. There are any multitude of choices where to tuck money if you know the angles.”

I felt even sicker at heart. Somehow, I’d hoped in the back of my mind that he would tell me the bankruptcy caper wasn’t really true. I’d wished for him to say that the setback and work stoppage was just temporary, that Spurgeon Mountain would blossom and glitter and show a neon face to happy crowds.