Justice (20 page)

He wished he could walk right now. His lower back and legs ached from standing in one place for so long, but he bore the pain by telling himself that he was doing his duty, a job that struck him as so necessary he wondered why the hall was not lined with men willing to do it.

It was close to 2:00 A.M. when Bennett returned to his room, and even after he unlocked his door and went in, Len remained in place, according to his plan.

Within five minutes, Bennett came out again, wearing only an undershirt and trousers and carrying a towel. He was
barefoot, but he stepped down with such force that Len could hear the muffled
thump
of Bennett's heels striking the carpet.

Only after Bennett went into the bathroom and closed the door behind him did Len McAuley leave his station. He walked quickly down the hall to Bennett's room, opened the door just wide enough to slip through, and went in.

A light was on beside the bed, a lamp with a white globe shade painted with pink flowers. Its soft light, combined with the fact that the bed's white chenille spread was carefully turned down on a precise diagonal, made Len wonder for a moment if he was in the right room. No, Bennett's scent was in the air—his hair oil, his cigar smoke, his beery breath. Len stepped into the closet and pulled the door shut.

As he stood in that black airless space he caught another odor that at first he could not place. Then it came to him: it was the smell of sweat and shoe leather—Bennett's feet stank, and his shoes were in the closet. Len almost pitied the man: all that cockiness and then feet that smelled like that....

When he returned to his room, Bennett was whistling, a succession of notes that sounded more like a musician practicing his scales than any attempt to reproduce a tune. Then the whistles stopped and the notes were replaced by the high whining notes of the bedsprings.

Len heard the soft click of the lamp switch, and the thin strip of yellow light at his feet vanished. The total darkness made it seem to Len that his own breathing became more audible, and he drew shallower breaths.

Len counted slowly to one hundred. When he reached that number and realized he wasn't quite ready, he started over,
this time pausing long enough between each number to let his fingers rise and fall at his sides. Finally he could put it off no longer, and he stepped from the closet.

From the unshaded window and the open transom came enough light for him to see that Bennett's sleeping head was turned in Len's direction.

He had waited all that time, yet Bennett's being asleep was something Len had not accounted for. He had only planned this far: He would step from the closet and....

Bennett would say something, and Len would answer. Or Bennett would act, and Len would react. Now, however, it was all up to Len, and he didn't know what to do.

He brought the pistol out of his jacket pocket, the sight on the long barrel catching for a moment on a loose thread. Once the gun was in his hand, Len knew—as if the knowledge could not have come from thought but only from touch, from the pistol's weight, the handle's smooth wood—he would not use it. He let it hang at his side as though it was nothing but a piece of rusting iron he was carrying until he could find a suitable scrap heap.

Although he had no intention of using it, Len still pulled the hammer back. He hoped that cocking the old .44—a noise as loud as a hen's cluck—would wake Bennett and his eyes would open to an armed man in his room.

But Bennett did not stir. Len noticed how, in sleep, Bennett's features bunched and softened. It was hard to believe that this sleeper with his lips hanging open in a thick dumb pout was the same man who swaggered the streets of Bentrock.

Len cleared his throat. Bennett did not move. With as much voice as he could muster, Len said, “Mister. You, mister.” Still nothing.

He lowered the hammer, and as he did he wondered if the hammer came down on an empty chamber. He had never even checked to see if the gun was loaded. Not that it mattered now. He slipped the revolver back into the pocket where it had rested so long its weight had a familiar feel.

Before he left Bennett's room, Len took a last look around. On the top of the bureau were some of the man's possessions and toiletries—a brush and comb, a bottle of hair tonic, a jackknife, a fountain pen, a tie clip, a wallet, and a few coins. Len pulled the stopper from the hair tonic and laid the bottle on its side, letting the oily liquid pour out and soak the lace runner covering the top of the dresser.

Len returned home just before dawn. He was not so drunk that he couldn't pause for a moment outside his back door and listen to his favorite birds. Somewhere up there in the branches crowding the eaves, mourning doves were cooing their questions at the lightening sky. He couldn't see them, but their call always seemed to come from another place, echoes without a source.

Daisy had baked a pie, and it sat in the center of the kitchen table. Her note said, “Made your favorite,” which meant the pie was rhubarb. He cut a generous slice and lifted it carefully to the plate, performing the motion in the slow and deliberate
way that he habitually used so his hands would not give away his condition.

Before he ate, Len went to the sink to wash his hands one more time. When he spilled Bennett's hair tonic he got some of the oil on his hands, and he could not get rid of the heavy, sweet smell. Over at the jail he had scoured his hands with the lye soap they used for disinfecting certain prisoners. His hands were red from scrubbing, yet the odor remained. He did not want to lift a forkful of Daisy's pie to his mouth and smell Bennett's hair.

In a small dish beside the kitchen sink Daisy kept the chips and slivers of bar soap that were too small to be of use in the bath but which she could not bring herself to throw away. Len kept picking up piece after piece of soap, scrubbing frantically until the fragments melted or slipped away in his furious lathering. Neither could he wash away this drunken thought: what if someone smelled Bennett's scent on Len's hand—they might think he had his hand on the southerner's head.

When Gail Hayden crossed the street from her house to her office in the Mercer County Courthouse, Len McAuley was not at his window watching her. He was passed out at the kitchen table, his cheek pressed against the oilcloth. His hand rested between the upper and lower crusts of a wedge of pie, exactly where he had thrust it in the hope that the odor of sweetened, spiced, baked rhubarb would replace the smell of Pinaud's Hair Tonic.

G
AIL Hayden finally allowed the thought that she had pushed away for months to take hold: perhaps she had made a mistake in marrying this man.

She was sitting in a car parked along U.S. Highway Three ten miles outside Bentrock, Montana. It was January 1937, and in the past two days fifteen inches of snow had fallen in their part of the state. After the snow had stopped, she had ridden with her husband, the sheriff of Mercer County, out here to investigate a report of motorists stranded on the highway. They had followed behind the snowplow as it scraped away a single lane of traffic. The snow on either side of the highway was piled so high it felt as if they were driving through a tunnel of white walls. Then the road would take a turn, the wind couldn't find a place to stack the snow, and they would be out in the open, the highway so bare it looked as if it had been scoured clean.

She watched her husband walk toward the car in the ditch. He was wearing the huge buffalo coat that his father had given him. God, how she hated that coat! It stank so bad she made him hang it in the garage, and every time she went out there, it startled her, hanging on the wall like a great beast poised to leap at her.

He had insisted that she remain behind, not knowing what he might find in the car in the ditch. It could be a family, every one of them frozen to death. Or perhaps it was only the driver, a salesman who was caught in the storm and ran the heater as long as he could to keep warm while the snow drifted higher and higher, covering the car's tailpipe until carbon monoxide backed up into the car.

But if she was supposed to wait in the car, why had he asked her to come with him? It wasn't what she expected of him. He only asked her to accompany him on official duties when he was chaperoning dances out in the country—occasions that were more fun than work. Otherwise he kept the details of his work from her, even when she wished he'd share them with her.

Last summer, for example, when everyone in town was buzzing about the double murder out at the Gardner farm—Mr. and Mrs. Gardner killed in their bed by someone with an axe—he had known all along that it was Bobby Gardner, that pathetic fat boy who had been hearing voices, the voices, he said, of gangsters in Chicago, telling him to kill his parents. Bobby was arrested, tried, and hustled off to the state mental hospital before anyone in town had time to stir up any outrage that he was not put to death or imprisoned for life.

Or last fall when someone was killed out on the Soo Line tracks, and the newspaper said the body couldn't be identified. “Who do you suppose it could be?” she asked a few days after the accident. “It was Randall Loves Bear,” he said quietly. Alongside the tracks he had found the burlap sack that Randall always carried, filled with scraps of food, old magazines and
newspapers, and empty whiskey bottles. Her husband wouldn't release the information until Randall's family was notified.

And when he took that length of iron pipe from the basement he let her believe that he was going to help someone with their plumbing, but in fact he was going out to the Bliss farm to arrest Clarence Bliss for stealing feed from his neighbors. Clarence was a big man, known for his quick temper, and he had been arrested on two other occasions for brawling. Wesley brought the pipe for protection.

Perhaps he needed her now to help carry someone from the car, someone frozen too stiff—dead or alive—for one person to manage. But why her? Why hadn't he brought Len McAuley, his deputy, or one of those men who was always hanging around the jail or the courthouse?