The Corpse in Oozak's Pond (18 page)

He knew better than to rush into conversation with anybody in a place like this. He took his time with the beer, which he didn’t want but would have been conspicuous without, and pretended to be absorbed by whatever was happening on the television screen. Mud wrestling, from the look of it, though all Shandy could make out was the mud. As he gazed, he kept his ears open for names. He was curious to identify Zack Woozle, and he’d prefer to connect with Hesperus Hudson without having to ask who Hudson was.

Zack turned out to be no problem. He was a bit of chewed string who didn’t look as if he’d stand up very well to the voluptuous Marietta, though a certain haggardness around the eyes suggested that he’d been trying to. Zack wasn’t saying much, just sitting there nursing his beer and nodding automatically whenever anybody happened to throw a remark in his direction. Shandy didn’t hear him speak until somebody asked him if he’d been over to see Mike lately. He said, “Nope,” and went on gazing into his beer.

“Guess you been havin’ a little excitement over to First Fork, eh, Zack?” somebody else remarked.

Zack nodded.

“Old man Buggins poisoned hisself and the old woman, too, I hear. Did he do it on purpose, or was it just bad booze?”

Zack shrugged.

“Bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? Pretty awful stuff he used to make, huh?”

“I never drunk none.”

“How come?”

“Never got asked.”

“Good a reason as any.”

“I drunk plenty,” a voice piped up from the corner.

“Huh,” said Zack’s interrogator. “Name me somethin’ you didn’t drink plenty of, long as somebody else was payin’. What you drinkin’ tonight, Hesp? Cat piss an’ battery acid?”

Ah, the missing link was found. Shandy listened to the inane banter another minute or two and nodded to the bartender for a second beer. While everybody else’s attention was momentarily diverted to the television screen, which had somehow cleared itself in time to show a great many cars crashing into each other, he picked his way to one of the more leprous cafe tables, on which Hesperus Hudson was half reclining.

“Care for a beer, Mr. Hudson?”

“Huh?” A red eye glanced out from under the peak of a once-white painter’s cap. “Who the hell are you?”

“Name’s Shandy. Jim Feldster told me to look you up and say hello. You remember Jim?”

“Oh, sure.”

Hesperus Hudson would have been equally ready to remember Princess Margaret or Idi Amin, Shandy thought, if they’d sent somebody over to him bearing a free beer. It was of course possible that Hudson did remember Jim Feldster because Feldster belonged to every fraternal organization in Balaclava County and a few more besides. Hesp didn’t look like anybody’s lodge brother, though. He looked like a dedicated barfly. He’d drained the beer before Shandy managed to find himself a chair with all its legs intact.

“Here,” said Shandy, “have some of mine.”

He switched bottles, figuring Hudson wouldn’t be finicky about drinking after a stranger. Sure enough, Hudson wasn’t.

“Thanks, pal. What’d you say your name was?”

“Longfellow,” said Shandy. “Henry W.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I remember now. I got a phonographic memory. “

“A rare gift,” Shandy replied politely. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Zack Woozle’s wife?”

“Zack who?”

Hesperus Hudson took a long pull at Shandy’s beer. “I knew a gink named Zack once out in Frisco. He ran a Chinese laundry. Used to be a feller named Ah So that started it, but Ah went into computer stocks an’ got to be a multimillionaire. So he says to hell with it, he wasn’t goin’ to iron no more shirts for nobody. So Zack took over. Zack Hoover, his name was. You know Zack Hoover?”

Shandy shook his head. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure. But despite your, er, evident peregrinations, I understand you’re a native of the Seven Forks, Mr. Hudson. “

“Who you callin’ a native? The Hudsons was always dyed-in-the-wool Methodists. Till I come along. I’m a freethinker. I’m a free drinker, too, when I get the chance.”

Shandy took the hint and went for more beer, wondering whether he was going to get any sort of return on his bottles. The bartender gave him a thoughtful look.

“You a friend of Hesp’s?”

“Nope,” said Shandy. “Never laid eyes on him before tonight. Zack Hoover asked me to look him up for old times’ sake, that’s all. You know Zack Hoover?”

The bartender said he didn’t and went to serve some loudmouth down at the other end of the bar. Shandy took the full bottles back to the unclean table and its even uncleaner occupant.

“Here you are, Mr. Hudson. I understand you more or less grew up with the Buggins twins out here.”

“Who?”

“Bracebridge and Bainbridge Buggins.”

“Oh, Brace an’ Bain. Hell, yes. Them an’ me, we was the biggest hellions ever went unhung. We used to swipe the old man’s liquor. Drunk it hot out o’ the still usin’ a hollow reed for a straw so’s he wouldn’t know we was at it. Yup, first drink I ever had was right straight from Trevelyan Buggins’s still. That still’s a historic landmark, that still is. They ought to put up one o’ them fancy signs with writin’ on it.”

“Who do you suppose is going to take over now that old Mr. Buggins is gone?”

“Huh?”

“Will Bracebridge come back and run the still, do you think? Have you seen him lately?”

“I see Bain now an’ then.”

“You do?” Shandy hoped he didn’t sound too excited. “Where do you see Bain?”

“Here an’ there. He comes an’ goes.”

“Goes where?”

“Back to get more snakes, I s’pose. Bain’s always got six or eight o’ them damn big pink snakes with ‘im. I hate pink snakes. They remind me of Erna Milien back when we was kids. Erna Milien, fat an’ willin’. Only she wasn’t. I ast ’er once, an’ she hauled off an’ landed me one right on the kisser. Knocked out three o’ my best teeth.”

Shandy was beginning to suspect Hesperus Hudson had been Jim Feldster’s idea of a joke. Now that he’d got stuck with the old souse, however, he might as well keep trying to get some of his beer money’s worth. “What does Bainbridge Buggins do with these pink snakes?”

“Sics ’em on me. Bain was always a mean cuss. Sometimes he turns into a pink snake hisself. Dunno but what he looks more natural that way.”

Hudson drained the last of his beer with a horrible slurping noise, and Shandy slid the other bottle over to him.

“Thanks, pal. Funny thing, you’d of expected it to be Brace that turned into a snake instead o’ Bain. Brace was always pullin’ some damn sneaky trick like that. Like as if I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you an’ thinkin’ I’m seein’ you an’ all of a sudden you bust out laughin’ in my face an’ you’re Brace all the time. You sure you ain’t Brace? Seems to me I did see Brace lately. He was passin’ hisself off as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? What in Sam Hill makes you say that?”

“I seen Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I mean, I seen pitchers of ’im. See, over in Middlesex County they got a place they call the Wayside Inn, which it ain’t. It’s the Red Horse Inn, an’ before that it was somethin’ else. But anyways, it’s where this here Longfellow was s’posed to have done ’is heavy drinkin’ an’ wrote ’is pomes, so they got this room they call the Longfellow Room an’ they got pitchers of ’im all around. Got a taproom, too. I had me one o’ them old-time drinks they call a coow woow. Whoo! So I had me a few more. That was when I was young an’ reckless.”

“So in short, you recognized your old, friend Bracebridge Buggins from portraits you’d seen of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury,” said Shandy. “That makes sense, I suppose. What were the, er, distinguishing features?”

“Huh? Oh. Well, see, Brace had this big bushy white beard clear down to ’is belt buckle, an’ he was wearin’ this runny-lookin’ old black suit with long coattails to it.”

“Did you ask him why?”

“Nope, no sense in askin’.”

“Why not?”

“He was dead.”

Shandy tried to keep his voice level. “Are you sure of that? He didn’t, er, turn into anything and disappear?”

“Nope. He just laid there.”

“There where?”

“Same place we always used to go. That shack in the woods where Brace’s ol’ man run his still.”

Great balls of fire, could Hudson possibly be telling the truth? “Did you touch him, Mr. Hudson? Try to take his pulse or anything?”

“I didn’t take nothin’. Nothin’ to take. I tried the still first, see, thinkin’ there might be a swig or two left in the bottom, but she was dry as an old maid’s tit. So then I figured I better see if there was anything in Brace’s pockets. Like maybe a bottle or the price of a drink.”

“And was there?”

“Nope. Not a damn blasted thing ’cept a couple o’ rocks.”

“GREAT SCOT!” CRIED SHANDY
. “Are you positive it was Bracebridge?”

“If it wasn’t him, then who the hell was it?”

“Not Bainbridge, by any remote chance?”

“He didn’t have no pink snakes with ’im.”

The old soak leaned even farther across the table and blew a gust of ill-digested alcohol in Shandy’s direction. “Look, mister, I know when I’m seein’ things an’ when I ain’t. If that’d o’ been Bain, I wouldn’t o’ bothered tryin’ to fish through his pockets, would I? ’Cause anybody that can turn into a snake ain’t got none, see.”

“M’well, you may have something there, Mr. Hudson. All right, then, you did in reasonably sober fact see a human being in the still house whom you were satisfied was Bracebridge Buggins. You felt his body.”

“I never. All I done was go through that ol’ black suit he was wearin’, like I said. There wasn’t nothin’ in the pants pockets, only the coat. I couldn’t find them at first. Turned out they was in the coattails, where you’d least expect ’em.”

“Was he lying on his back or on his face?”

“On ’is back. That’s why I thought at first he was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, see. I seen that big beard an’ the funny clothes an’ I says to myself, that’s the feller I seen at the Wayside Inn. An’ then I says, no, by God, it’s Brace Buggins dressed up an’ tryin’ to make a fool out o’ me.”

“You didn’t make any attempt to rouse him?”

“Hell, no, what’d I want to do that for? I told you I was tryin’ to pick ’is pockets. Anyways, I knew he was dead. His mouth was open an’ his eyes was starin’ an’ he was stiff as a new boot. See, one arm was like this.”

Hudson crooked his own left arm and raised it shoulder high. “An’ when I went to raise ’im up a little so’s I could get at the back pockets, which turned out to be a waste o’ time like I told you, that arm didn’t even flop. He come all of a piece, as you might say.”

“Then, in fact, you did handle the body,” said Shandy.

“Well, I didn’t go pawin’ it all over like Erna Milien used to do. Or so Brace claimed, but o’ course Brace would say anything.”

“I understand. So then what did you do?”

“Hightailed it the hell out o’ there an’ went back to my own place. I had a bottle o’ lemon extract stashed away that I’d lifted from the general store in case of emergency.”

“Extremely foresighted of you, Mr. Hudson. Where do you live?”

“I got a shack out in the woods ’bout halfway between Buggins’s an’ here.”

“Ah, yes, strategically located between the sources of supply. Would you care to take a little ride with me?”

“Where to? Hey, you ain’t one o’ them do-gooders wantin’ to take me someplace an’ dry me out?”

“I shouldn’t dream of taking such a liberty. It’s just that I know where we can get better liquor than we’re drinking here.”

“Won’t cost me nothin’?”

“Not a cent.”

“Good, ’cause that’s just about how much I got to spend.”

Hudson was still reasonably steady in his pins, Shandy was relieved to see. Getting him over to the door was no problem, but it would have been foolish to hope their departure could be effected without some comment from the drinkers at the bar.

“Hey, Hesp, where you goin’?” the bartender wanted to know. “Steppin’ out in high society all of a sudden?”

“We’re just going to pay a little call on an old friend,” Shandy answered for Hudson. “Don’t worry, sir, I’m not aiming to deprive you of a steady customer.”

“You tryin’ to be funny?”

The inquiry came from a big fellow sitting rather closer to the door than Shandy wished he were. Without seeming to be in any great rush, Shandy managed to steer Hudson outside before a fracas got rolling. He even had time to notice that Zack Woozle was still among those present, still scrying for who knew what in the depths of his still unfinished beer.

“My car’s over here, Mr. Hudson,” Shandy said.

His guest stared at the vehicle and reared back like a stricken coyote. “Jesus, mister,” he muttered, “where’d you steal this one?”

“It’s mine, all bought and paid for,” Shandy reassured him. “I, er, struck a lucky patch awhile back.”

Not luck but years of careful work had brought forth the world’s most magnificent rutabaga, the Balaclava Buster, from which the Shandy fortunes were in large part derived, but he saw no reason why he had to file a financial report with Hesperus Hudson. His one aim was to get the man over to Harry Goulson’s and see whether Hudson could make a firm identification of the body in the refrigerator.

And after that, what? The humanitarian thing would be to tuck the drunk up for a comfortable night in the lockup, give him a decent breakfast, then deliver him back to his customary haunts with a few dollars’ drinking money in his pocket. Shandy couldn’t see Phil Porble taking kindly to Hudson as a bedfellow, though. In any case, the lockup was hardly big enough for the two of them, and Edna Mae Ottermole might not have another roll-away cot to spare.

Well, he’d manage one way or another. Right now, Hudson appeared to have reacted to the unaccustomed luxury of the car’s upholstery by falling asleep, which was all to the good. Shandy himself would have done the same, if he hadn’t had to drive.

He felt as if the evening should be far spent, but it turned out not to be. When they got to Goulson’s, he saw visitors still coming and going, though mostly going. The master of the obsequies was less than overjoyed to see Professor Shandy wandering in with a stinking stumblebum in tow, demanding to view the unknown remains in the fridge.