Black Night Falling (7 page)

Dinsmore slid into the booth and signalled the waitress for a coffee without waiting for me to even sit down. I wore it – suppose I’d earned the slight. He leaned back and took a Lucky Strike from his pack and held it upside down between his thumb and forefinger. ‘You got some nerve, I’ll give you that.’

The diner was a half-block from the
Recorder
’s
offices, just south of the point where Central Avenue shed the last of its glitz. Dinsmore had been all set to ditch me in the reception to go back to his desk, but I’d talked him down with the offer of buying him lunch. I’d never known a newsman to turn down a free meal, but figure what he really wanted was to watch me eat crow.

The booth was cramped, my knees butting into his as I sat down. He stared at me, tapping his smoke on the table to tamp the tobacco down.

‘Cut me some slack,’ I said. ‘You can see how it looked.’

‘That I was holding out on you? Why would you assume that? Seems like a dumb way to go about your business, you ask me.’

‘Enough, already, I’m buying you lunch, aren’t I? You can drop the wounded soldier act.’

His eyes twinkled, celebrating scoring a point off me. ‘You know, I feel like steak all of a sudden.’

‘Sure. Live it up.’ I looked off to one side, towards the counter, tapping my thumbnail on the table. Only half the stools were taken; all of the occupants were men, and most wore blue shirts and work pants. I turned back towards Dinsmore. ‘All right, let’s start over.’

He shrugged and clamped his cigarette between his front teeth. ‘Okay.’ He lit it, blew a stream of smoke sideways from the corner of his mouth; it curled against the window pane and came back towards us. ‘Where’d you turn up Jeanette Runnels’ name?’

The question caught me off guard. I didn’t see what it mattered, unless my first instinct was right and he was trying to keep tabs on who I was speaking to. ‘That’s not important.’

He stuck out his bottom lip. ‘No, I guess not.’ His tone said he wasn’t satisfied with that answer.

I pulled out the photograph. ‘You’re sure that’s not Miss Runnels or Miss Prescott?’

He took it to look at, then slid it across the table to me again. ‘Sure.’

‘Who killed the two women?’

The waitress set his coffee down in front of him, the mug gleaming white but chipped around the rim. She asked for our order, but Dinsmore surprised me by waving her off. ‘A nigger lowlife called Walter Glover. He already had a rap sheet full of minor offences, then sometime last decade he broke into the big leagues when he assaulted a woman in his car. He claimed she’d gone with him willingly, but the jury didn’t believe him.’

‘Any chance he was telling the truth?’

‘The dame was white, so what do you think? Anyway, they convicted him and he served eleven-and-change for it, got out in June. He’d only been free a couple weeks before he killed Runnels. Parole board had shaved his sentence some because he found Jesus in the clink. Made them look real bad, in light of what he did next.’

‘You said the cops soft-pedalled the investigation into the murders.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So how’d they get hip to Glover?’

‘Hot Springs PD didn’t want anything to do with it, but the Garland County Sheriff’s Department decided to involve themselves.’

‘For what reason?’

‘Hot Springs is the county seat of Garland County, they can do what they like.’

‘I meant why did they get involved if the city cops ignored it?’

‘Who knows why?’ He held his hands up as he said it. ‘Sheriff was a hoss by the name of Cole Barrett; he got a tip to look at Glover for the killings and he went after him. Tracked him to a dogtrot cabin out by Lake Catherine and gunned him down. Afterwards, Barrett said Glover confessed to the murders on the spot but tried to draw on him, so he had to shoot him in self-defence.’

I had the first thought I always did with anonymous tips: who was the tipster? ‘Did he kill him?’

He tapped his chest. ‘Sure did. Put two right in his heart.’

‘You believe Barrett’s version of events?’

Dinsmore pursed his mouth and spread his hands. ‘I have no reason not to.’

He saw the look on my face.

‘I know, I know, there are parts that sound fishy. Could be the case they’re not giving us the whole truth, and that’s why, but that wouldn’t be unusual. What’s done is done.’

‘Were there any witnesses to the shooting?’

He shook his head. ‘But there’s no reason to disbelieve Barrett. He was sheriff six years and a deputy a long time before that. He was well respected and never known as a gunslinger. And besides, why would he lie?’

‘Because he shot a man in cold blood?’

‘Come on, Yates, think it through – what cause would he have to do that? When backup arrived, the deputies found Glover with his gun in his hand. I’m inclined to believe it went down how Barrett said.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Couple months back – August, around then.’

August. Prior to Robinson’s time at Duke’s. I traced my fingernail absently across the tabletop, back and forth, wondering what the hell had drawn him to this mess. Seemed like Cole Barrett was someone I needed to talk to. Hearing Dinsmore speak about him brought to mind another sheriff – Horace Bailey, late of Texarkana. I wondered if that was the link – if Robinson had heard about Barrett, got a line on some dirt on the Glover shooting, and decided another crooked sheriff was more than he could stand.

Thoughts of Bailey summoned to mind my last image of him: his corpse on the floor of Winfield Callaway’s study, his hat fallen next to him, a smear of blood on the crown. My gun arm still shaking. The memory made my hands tremble again now; I folded them in my lap, out of sight. ‘Where’s Barrett’s office?’

Dinsmore tapped his cigarette on the chrome ashtray. ‘Forget it, he’s retired.’

‘Retired?’

‘Yeah. He was forced out, the rumour goes. Seems like you and our prosecuting attorney-elect think alike; he made it known he wasn’t buying Barrett’s story and that he’d be looking to empanel a grand jury when he takes office in January so he could bring unlawful killing charges against Barrett. From what I heard, the mayor stepped in to broker a deal – Barrett retires immediately and gets to keep his pension. In return, Masters – that’s the prosecuting attorney – promises he won’t go after Barrett. At first I couldn’t see why Masters agreed to it – he’s leading this GI Ticket, says him and his boys are going to clean the whole town up, but then he’s doing deals with Teddy Coughlin before he’s even in the door. But then you think about it, and realise it’s a smart move; Masters got what he wanted all along – Barrett out of office, clearing the way for one of his own men to be elected sheriff come November. For all his talk about justice, he didn’t give a damn what Barrett did or didn’t do. He just wanted him out of the way so he could—’

I held my finger up. ‘Why would Barrett take the deal if he had nothing to hide?’ I imagined Robinson hearing the same story I just did, and having the same thoughts – that Barrett was dirty as hell. Another lawman above the law. His blood boiling as he heard it.

Dinsmore shrugged. ‘Avoid the embarrassment. Protect his pension. Who knows?’

‘Anyone from your outfit think to ask him about it?’

‘Who, Barrett? Sure – I tried a couple times, but he wouldn’t talk to the papers.’

‘Maybe I’ll go ask him for myself.’

He laughed, billowing smoke as he did. ‘Good luck with that. Retirement’s done nothing to brighten his disposition.’

I looked him in the eyes. ‘I’ve dealt with worse. Where’s he live?’

‘Y’already owe me lunch, Yates. How many markers you want to build up here?’ He smiled when he said it, but it quickly faded when he realised I was serious.

He checked his watch, slid along the bench seat and stood up. ‘I oughta scram. Take some time to cool off. You’ll thank me for it.’ Then he stepped back from the table, cracked a smile. ‘And don’t think I’ll forget about lunch.’

When he was gone, I slumped back against the booth and closed my eyes, all of it dancing around in my mind. Political warfare and dirty deals. A dead sex fiend, supposed murderer. A sheriff forced from office under a cloud. Dinsmore playing coy, like it was for my own benefit – perking my suspicion about him. At the centre of it all, Jimmy Robinson and all those dead women.

The idea came to me late so I had to race out of the diner, startling a waitress in the process. I made it outside in time to see Dinsmore pass by the
Recorder
offices and disappear around the corner of the next block. When he was out of sight, I went in the main entrance of the newspaper and hurried over to the girl at the front desk. ‘Miss, Clyde Dinsmore said I could trouble you for directions to your archives. Could you help me out?’

She nodded and sent me to a large file room in the basement. My luck held; when I got there, I had the place to myself. I found a table in a corner and started pulling issues of the
Recorder
until I found what I was looking for. The June 20th edition: one column on Jeannie Runnels’ murder. The story got short-shrift, almost no detail provided beyond the fact that her body was discovered in her bedroom after a neighbour called the police. It made no mention of how she was killed – the details presumably too indecent to print – stating only that authorities had confirmed foul play was involved, but had no suspects at time of going to press. There was no mention of her line of work, but the lack of column inches told its own story about how interested the paper was in Miss Runnels’ fate. I flicked through the next week’s worth of issues, but found no follow-up on the story.

Dinsmore said Bess Prescott’s murder was around six weeks after Runnels’, so I jumped forward to the start of August and started looking through the papers from then. I found it in the copy from August 11th. She was referred to by her full Christian name, Elizabeth, and I belatedly made the connection to the other set of initials I’d cribbed from Robinson’s notes –
E.P.

Just as with Runnels, they short-changed her – this time a half a column in the gutter of page eleven. The report noted that she had been found on the floor of her bedroom, and that a friend had raised the alarm when she hadn’t heard from her for several days. The friend wasn’t named. The story ended abruptly by saying police were investigating.

I raced through the remaining issues from August, looking for coverage of Barrett’s shootout with Walter Glover. It wasn’t hard to find – the story made the front page, sharing top billing with a claim by US intelligence officers that a million former German soldiers were now Commies. I read through the
Recorder
’s
account and it came across pretty close to how Dinsmore told it – Barrett had tracked Glover to a remote cabin in Garland County and managed to wrangle a confession from him, but Glover had drawn a firearm when Barrett moved to take him in. Runnels and Prescott were named as Glover’s victims, but beyond their names, ages and places of birth, nothing more was said about them. It felt like another indignity for the dead women – Barrett gets lauded for killing their murderer, but the victims themselves barely warrant a mention.

Dinsmore’s name wasn’t on the piece – a Clifton Elliot got the byline – and I noticed he’d been off on one of the details:  this version stated that Barrett had fired twice at Glover, striking him once in the chest. The other bullet wasn’t mentioned again, and I figured Barrett must have missed, but that detail didn’t fit the heroic picture Elliot was trying for, so it got ignored. The article continued on page two, recounting Barrett’s ‘years of distinguished service’, and Mayor Coughlin weighed in with a quote praising his dedication to justice. There was a photograph accompanying the piece that showed a grandee pumping Barrett’s hand, a crowd looking on, smiles all around. It was no surprise when I saw the caption identified the other man as Coughlin.

It was all real tidy in the way everything was presented to show Barrett as snow-white as possible. Even Dinsmore’s talk about
two bullets in the heart
felt like him getting carried away glorifying the sheriff.

I skimmed the report a second time, more interested now in what didn’t make the page than what did. I looked at the following day’s paper as well, but there was nothing new, just retread. I jotted notes as I went, putting myself in Robinson’s shoes, searching for insight into his thinking.

Glover was written off as an ex-con with a troubling criminal history, but there was no mention of what had led Barrett to suspect him. Dinsmore had said it was a tip-off, but that nugget wasn’t reported here. I wondered if it was another product of Dinsmore’s creative licence and, if not, if the tipster was ever identified; I scribbled down to ask him.

Also: was there any evidence against Glover, aside from the confession? Men confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed all the time. Surely Barrett would have looked for some confirmation of Glover’s guilt in the wake of the shooting – if nothing else, to be sure he had the right man?

And then the big question: did Glover kill a third woman? There was no hint of it in the stories I’d read, but it could have come out later – or maybe not at all. Maybe Robinson got wind of it in the course of his own enquiries. But if Glover had only killed twice, who the hell was the woman in the photograph?

I went back upstairs to the front desk and asked the girl if she could find out an address and telephone number for me. She looked put out at this latest request, but called the operator anyway, gave the name I’d written down for her, and scribbled the information I needed on the same piece of paper. When she finished writing, I motioned for her to pass the receiver over, and asked the voice on the other end to connect me to the number she’d given.

It rang a moment, and then a man with a raspy voice answered. ‘Cole Barrett.’

Now I knew he was home, I hung up without saying a word.

Barrett lived ten miles outside of town, close to Lake Catherine state park. It was mid-afternoon by the time I set out, the sun high in the clear sky as I drove south-east out of Hot Springs. The Ouachita River circled around the town from west to east and I crossed it near Carpenter Dam. From the road I caught a glimpse of the white-water torrents thundering through the concrete barrier downriver.

Past the bridge, I was plunged into the backwoods. The highway was lined with a dense mix of pines, sycamores and elms, punctuated by the occasional farmhouse or creek. As I drove, I mulled over everything Dinsmore had told me, and wondered again if Robinson had confronted Barrett. It was easy to imagine him careening down this same road, fuelled by bonded liquor and righteous anger, determined to get the truth about the murders from him. Seemed the simplest way to connect all the dots.

But as the idea swam in my head, I realised there was another connection: the mayor, Teddy Coughlin. Dinsmore had said it was Coughlin who brokered the deal to save Barrett from the grand jury investigation, and he’d also speculated that the mayor’s office could have coerced the fire department to change the report into Robinson’s death. I wondered if Robinson had spooked Barrett somehow, enough to give him a motive to start the fire at Duke’s – knowing that the mayor had protected him once already, so why not a second time?

I told myself to pull back, aware that I was getting way ahead of the facts. I knew why I was doing it, too: time. My forty-eight hours were almost up, and it felt like I was still fumbling in the dark for Robinson’s trail. I was forcing the little I knew to fit a theory held together by conjecture and rumours, a desperate attempt to bring some kind of closure to matters. It was amateurish, and I knew as much. When I thought about it in that light, the whole notion of doorstepping Barrett seemed rash – but it was too late to turn back now.

After twenty-five minutes, I drew up to a cabin on a low rise overlooking a muddy pond. The land around the house was studded with trees and shrubs, their leaves sprinkled with reds and browns, fall and its colours taking hold. There was a grey pre-war LaSalle parked out front, and my pulse quickened some when I saw it, at the thought of what was to come. I carried on past the house and parked a little way down, on the far side of the track. I stepped out onto a patchwork mulch of grass and fallen leaves.

The cabin was in two sections, the main building two storeys tall, built on a fieldstone base, and with windows in the shingled roof. A smaller, single-storey structure had been tacked on to one end, and that was where the front door was. Off to one side, a little way from the main structure, stood a tumbledown woodshed, its door hanging from its hinges.

I walked up to the house and rapped with the knocker. A dog started barking somewhere round back.

I heard a voice and then footsteps from inside. The door opened and a fiftyish man with sandy hair stood across the threshold from me. ‘What?’

I took my hat off. ‘Sheriff Barrett?’

He looked at me in a manner that said if I had to ask, I wasn’t worth answering. From the way Dinsmore had called him a hoss, I’d expected an imposing figure, but Barrett was rake-thin and no taller than five-eight. He wore tan trousers held up by a narrow belt, cinched tight, and a white short-sleeved shirt, his skinny arms accentuated by the starched armholes. I decided an appeal to his ego was my best play.

‘My name’s Charlie Yates, I’m a reporter and I was hoping—’

‘I got no call to speak to reporters. Be on your way.’

I held up my pen, signalling him to wait. ‘I’m writing a story about the women Walter Glover killed. I’d sure appreciate a few minutes of your time.’

‘You hear me, son? I told you—’

‘Please, Sheriff.’ I slapped a big smile on my face, played the star-struck newsman. ‘You’re the hero of the story, doesn’t make for much of a piece without you. Maybe just a quote or two?’

He went to shut the door on me. I shot my arm out without thinking, bracing it open.

‘Take your hand away.’

I kept up the breathless enthusiasm – anything to get him talking. ‘I’ve been doing my research and I just had a few questions. Can you tell me how you tracked Glover to that cabin?’

A woman appeared in the hallway behind him, looking anxious. ‘Cole?’

He spoke to her over his shoulder, eyes still on me. ‘It’s fine, go see to the dog.’

She glanced at me, her face drawn, and then disappeared from view again.

I persisted. ‘Is it true you put two bullets in Glover’s heart, Sheriff?’

He gave a small shake of his head and fixed me with a stare. ‘You don’t know the first goddamn thing about it. Get the hell off my property.’

He pushed my hand away and tried to close the door again. I jammed it with my foot and met his stare, decided to give up on the act. ‘Try this, then: why did you retire? Is it true you did a deal to avoid a grand jury investigation?’

That froze him on the spot. He stopped struggling and opened the door a fraction wider. ‘Who are you? Who sent you?’

‘I’m just an interested party. Now how about you speak to me and tell me your side, so I don’t have to write it the way it looks right now.’

‘And just how is that exactly?’

I straightened my shirtfront. ‘Like you’ve got a whole hell of a lot to hide.’

He looked at me like I’d kicked his mother. The dog out back was barking double-time now, the sound echoing around the trees. He yelled at it to shut up.

Before he could speak again, I asked the question I’d come for. ‘Did a man called Robinson try to speak to you, Sheriff? Maybe something similar to what just happened here?’

He flung the door open soon as he heard the name. He planted his hand on my chest and shoved me backwards, his other hand still gripping the frame. ‘I ain’t a hero and I ain’t a sheriff any more. Get gone. You come around here again and I’ll loose the dog on you.’ He turned and slammed the door shut before I could say anything more.

I stood there a moment, my pulse running so strong that I could feel it in my arms and in my neck. I knocked on the door and called out, but was met only with the sound of the dog barking. After a minute more, I went back to the car and climbed in.

I drove a little further along the track, keeping the house just in sight, then cut the engine. There were no other cars on the road, but I was far enough away to not be too conspicuous. I waited, watching the house and the grey LaSalle through the back window, wondering if Barrett would reappear. My questions had spooked him, and I thought he might panic and make a run to go see someone to unload his troubles.

I let ten minutes go by, my pulse slowing back to normal, but nothing moved. I took one last glance at the cabin, then started back to town.

The way he’d blown up when I dropped Jimmy’s name told me what I needed to know. He might as well have come right out and admitted he knew exactly who I was talking about. But it wasn’t just the way he reacted that stoked my fears – it was the fact that he reacted to Robinson’s real name.