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

He rolled his cigar in his lips, savoring the grayness of his wizened face more than the taste of expensive tobacco. “Does knowing help, Lemuel? Or hurt, perhaps?” He bent his head to look at me a little closer. “You poor fellow, it does hurt! And not a thing you can do about it, is there? If you repeated my admission, I would simply deny it. You’ve no witnesses. Just you and me up here on Spurgeon Mountain. Your word against mine.”

I couldn’t talk for a little while. I guess we both ached with his sense of victory, only in totally different ways.

“Fogarty,” I pleaded gently, “it isn’t as if you were conning some rich kid. Comfort can’t afford what you’ve done.”

“My heart bleeds, Lemuel.”

“Comfort ain’t much of a town, Fogarty. But it’s people, nice, quiet people.”

“Sticks and clods,” he said.

“Ain’t a soul in Comfort wouldn’t help you fix a flat or give you a meal and lodging if you lost your wallet.”

“Suckers,” he decided.

I moved around to the back corner of the desk. “Fogarty, will you really be able to enjoy it?”

“I always enjoy fat living,” he assured me with a big, maddening smile.

“Maybe I ought to tell you how it was,” I said.

“I’m really not interested, Lemuel.”

“It was depression times,” I said, “and I started the savings and loan because Comfort needed it. Thirty-five or more years ago, I started it. With a few dollars of my own and the trust of good people, Fogarty.

“If a woman eked out an extra dollar selling eggs, she trusted it to me. A man plowed a neighbor’s field for a fiver he could scrimp by without and he would put it on deposit where it would grow a little and do some good. We loaned money to a man to buy a milk cow, a tractor to replace a mule, seed com to change a fallow hillside, and houses. Not mansions, Fogarty, but small, decent houses to people who needed them.”

I paused to take a breath. “That’s Comfort Savings and Loan, Fogarty. That’s the outfit you’re robbing, the little backstop for the people of Comfort that’ll go under itself the day you go bankrupt. A hundred thou is a great big passel of money to us, Fogarty.”

“If you’re quite finished, Lemuel, I’ve other things to do,” Fogarty said.

“Nope,” I said. “I came here to collect the people’s money, and that’s what I aim to do. Me and the rednecks of Comfort, Fogarty, we never let each other down yet. And I don’t fancy that today is the proper date to start doing so.”

His eyes became dark, wholly nasty. “Get out of here, you paltry little ass!”

“That’s your last word, Fogarty?”

“You and the coon hunters of Comfort wouldn’t know what to do with your hundred grand if I gave it back!” he spoke in rising rage. “And my last word is — get lost!”

He moved a hand toward his desk drawer. As he jarred it open, I glimpsed a revolver inside. A revolver is always a strong argument, but he’d had his say and I didn’t see any point in further debate.

Before his hand could reach the gun, I’d already hauled off and let him have one on the side of the jaw. I was so small and quick he never saw it coming.

He staggered back from his desk, his eyes suddenly bulging. I hit him three more times like a rattler, which is also small, striking. He never knew where the punches came from.

Big, soft fellow, I thought as I stood over his prone bulk. Big, soft bully, losing all his candy.

I hadn’t even worked up a sweat, and Fogarty was lying there on his big, broad back, his mouth gaping, his jaws reddening where my fists had struck.

He groaned and tried to stir. I put a stop to that by picking up a heavy quartz paperweight, which I’d noticed on his-desk, and bending over him and banging him on the left temple.

He gave no trouble at all after that, except for his weight. It took me nearly thirty minutes to drag him across the parking area and on across the road and right to the edge of a precipice that overlooked the beautiful, serene valley.

Below the precipice, the cliff fell straight down for a thousand feet. I gave Fogarty the final push, kneeling beside his unconscious bulk. Still on my knees, I craned my head over the edge and watched him fall. Down and down. Turning, twisting. Through the wispy gossamer veil of cloud. Down a thousand feet to the stones at the base of the cliff.

Driving back to Comfort, I noticed that my lunch was settling pretty good. At my afternoon coffee break, I decided, I’d have a piece of that fine apple pie in Mom Roddenberry’s restaurant.

My first stop of course was the sheriff’s office. Gaither Jones, the lank deputy, was on duty.

I stood beside his desk, shaking my head sadly. “Terrible accident, Gate. One minute Mr. Fogarty, all excited, was running about, showing me where he planned a pavilion overlooking the valley. And the next — poor fellow; the shale looked solid, but the edge crumpled under his feet, and afore I could reach him, Mr. Fogarty was falling.”

Gate, in the act of rising, was frozen for a second. “All the way down?”

“Plump to the bottom,” I said. “Gate, you better take a couple men out there and blot up what’s left of our friend Mr. Fogarty.”

Gaither reached for his hat, and bounded from the office.

I walked out, traded friendly nods with good folks I’d known a lifetime as I hurried along the sidewalk. A block further on, I turned into my own office. I had to pause a moment and look at the lettering on the front window: Comfort Savings and Loan Association . I must say that the gold leaf looked a lot brighter than it had when I’d driven out of town.

Business was moving along at its normal pace as I passed through the large outer room. An overalled farmer, stained with honest toil, was making his monthly savings deposit at the single teller’s cage. A young man and wife were discussing a loan with Jed Markham at his desk.

Jed started to rise and ask a question when he looked up and saw me.

“Later, Jed,” I said. “Got something else on my mind right now. And you treat those young folks right, hear me?”

With a wave of the hand, I went through the doorway at the rear. It provided entry to my private office, which was wedged in a portion of the building beside the board room.

Miss Meffort, the tall, spare, no-nonsense woman who has been a most efficient secretary to me for twenty-five years, was busily typing. She greeted me with a short but friendly nod as I moved on to my old walnut desk in the comer.

I picked up the phone, rocked back in my swivel chair, and called Judge Bine. I told him to forget about Randolph P. Fogarty’s preliminaries for bankruptcy. “Just keep the whole thing under your hat, Judge. Fogarty won’t be petitioning, and sleeping dogs never bit anybody or howled any questions.”

I knew it was all I had to say. The judge would understand, at least a little of it, in due time.

Comfort, as Fogarty should have realized, is more than a town. It’s an organism, you might say. And the cells work together to fight a hint of cancer.

I put the phone down and sat there with my fingers laced across my flat, trim stomach, content to listen to the everyday music of Miss Meffort’s typewriter.

But there was still work to do.

“Miss Meffort, bring your pad, please. I have to dictate a letter.”

A brisk flick of movement, Miss Meffort was seated in the secretary’s chair beside my desk, pencil poised for shorthand.

“The letter is to Amalgamated and Consolidated Life Insurance Company of Dixie,” I said.

That brought a startled look from her, a most unusual reaction, seeing as how Miss Meffort is a real cucumber when it comes to coolness.

“Yes, Miss Meffort,” I sighed. “Like any reputable institution loaning money we’ve insured every borrower for the amount of his loan over all the years. There has been, I fear, an accident. A fatal accident. So we must file a claim for a hundred thousand dollars with ACLIC of Dixie to repay in full the loan which Mr. Randolph P. Fogarty took with us some weeks ago.”