The Deadline (6 page)

Old Bell looked offended.

“If there was, I’d have goddam well printed it,” he said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Morgan apologized.  “I just wonder if there was evidence to the contrary that got swept under the rug?  Did Gilmartin get railroaded?”

“Railroaded?  Shit, kid, let me tell you a story.  I got a call in the middle of the night, maybe a week after they arrested him.  Somebody on the line said they were going to give him the ‘long drop’ from the Iron Mountain Bridge, just like he did to that little girl.  By the time I got to town, there was a helluva ruckus on the courthouse lawn, looked like hundreds of drunkards with ball bats and deer rifles.  Only one man stood between those hooligans and Gilmartin.”

“Deuce Kerrigan?”

“Damn straight.  If Deuce had a mind to railroad anybody, he’d have let ‘em walk right in and stretch that boy’s neck longer than a horse pecker.  But he wasn’t that kind of man.”

“Did he ever suspect the parents?”

Old Bell waved him off.

“You’re pissin’ up a rope, kid.  I never saw the sheriff’s file, but Deuce Kerrigan was as honest as he was tough.  Sure, he knew the father belted the kid a few times, whole damn town did, but he told me later their story checked out.  He wouldn’t have put a noose around a man’s neck if he wasn’t sure.  That bastard had a damned good head on his shoulders, but he had an even better gut for solving crimes, and his gut told him it wasn’t the parents.  It was Neeley Gilmartin.”

“How ‘bout your gut, Bell?  Were you sure?”

“Right after they busted him, a deputy let me in to take a picture for the paper.  Gilmartin just flipped me off and turned his face away.  I asked him a few questions, but he just told me to fuck off.”

“So how’d you get his picture?”

“I stuck one flashbulb in my old Speed-Graphic four-by-five and one in my mouth.  I kept the shutter closed, but popped the flash into his cell.  Faster’n hell, I stuck that new bulb in the camera and hollered for the deputy to let me out.  The dumb fucker Gilmartin turned toward me, ‘cause he was sure he’d snookered the newspaperman.  And that’s how I got my picture.”

The jeering face of Neeley Gilmartin, cocked wickedly over his bare, muscular shoulder, was printed three columns wide in the next week’s edition of
The Bullet
.  Old Bell had cropped the photo so the word TERROR, tattooed on his arm, could be seen clearly.

“He must have been pissed,” Morgan said.

“He had that look, you know?  His eyes were dead.  He had this evil air about him.  You’ve sensed it, a kind of evil electricity.  Like bolts of anger.  That tattoo has stuck with me all these years.  He chose terror more than it chose him.  My gut?  Yeah, he did it.”

Disappointment nudged Morgan.  Maybe he’d hoped to hear that Old Bell had doubted the case against Gilmartin.  Or that some vital piece of evidence had turned up in the intervening years that proved his guilt.  But if even a feeble flame of his old passionate idealism still burned in Morgan’s heart, it now flickered as if a cold draft had blown through his chest.

The two newspapermen sat without talking, watching the sun go down all around them.  Morgan swirled the wine in his glass, absorbed in thought.

Old Bell interrupted the silence.

“Some nights, a red-tailed hawk circles around the place and you can watch him while he watches you, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees as he swings around this little perch.  The Crows say the hawk is a spirit, if you believe that shamanistic Indian crap.  But I think he’s looking for dinner.  Damn rabbits are thicker than spinsters in the front pew.  But it’s a sight no city folks ever see,” he said.

Old Bell raised his glass.

“Welcome home, kid,” he said.  He sounded genuinely pleased.

Morgan clinked his glass and turned to watch the darkening sky.  Old Bell pointed toward the setting sun.

“I pay taxes on all you can see to the west, for better or worse,” he said, sweeping his arm in a slow circle.  “The town’s to the north over there, and the damned Forest Service has most of the mountain out back.  To the east there, that’s Malachi Pierce’s land.  Runs all the way to the Black Thunder River.  He’s one scary son of a bitch, that Pierce.  All that anti-government, racist crap.  Some nights, I watch the stars from the garden and I hear automatic weapons fire over there.  He sure as hell isn’t hunting goddam deer, I’ll tell you.”

“I remember him from when I was a kid,” Morgan said.  “Didn’t have much use for local folks, I recall, but an assault weapon goes beyond being unsociable.  Is it some kind of militia?”

“Malachi Pierce has been bent all his miserable life.  First he got God, then he got mad.  At everybody.  Must have been thirty years ago when he started writing these crazy goddam letters to the paper every week.  At first, they were just long, rambling diatribes about how folks didn’t obey the Bible anymore.  Sticking it to the ‘godless’ ones, he’d say, all those goddam liberals who didn’t believe America was a white man’s sanctuary.  There was always a racist stink to those letters.”

Morgan knew Old Bell and Pierce had clashed more than once, in print and at least once physically in the parking lot behind the Elks Lodge.  They were enemies in spirit as well as body, one as inclement as the other.

“He just got older and meaner.  Then he had that girl, the retarded one,” Old Bell continued.  His points grew vigorous, so his wine nearly sloshed out of its glass.  “He’s past eighty now, but he’d married late in his life to some teen-age girl, fourteen or fifteen.  There he was, a twisted old man in his fifties, squirting out more wrong-headed children.  That little daughter of his must be near thirty now.  She was still pretty young, maybe eight, when he tried to have her put away, but they wouldn’t let him.  He’s kept her out there at Wormwood Camp ever since.”

“Wormwood Camp?”

“That’s what he calls that god-forsaken ranch now,” Old Bell said.  “Go back and read your Revelations, where some angry angel hurls a star called Wormwood into the Earth and it poisons the sea.  A third of the men who drink from it are embittered.  Pierce believes it was the sea that covered these parts at Creation, and that Wormwood smashed into the pisspot he now calls home.  That bastard knows his Bible and he uses it like a deadly weapon.”

Morgan looked into the distance and saw a hawk swoop steeply toward the ground, like a falling star.  For a new editor trying to get his feet firmly planted in the community, he knew Pierce could be a problem. 

“A lot of these militia guys are all wind and no water,” Morgan said.  “Is there anything going on at Pierce’s ranch beyond target practice?”

“I guess you might call it a compound now, with all its fences and locked gates.  Make you wonder, doesn’t it?  He’s gathered a few of his crazy sympathizers, mostly drifters and other invisible people.  They all live out there in cheap trailers and shacks.  They put up their own church and even run their own candidates for county offices.  Scariest goddam people you’ll ever want to meet.  Loonies who carry guns.”

“Have they made any trouble?” Morgan asked.

“Not yet,” Old Bell said, looking down into his glass.  “But they’re fixing to.  I feel it in these old bones.”

“Something to worry about?” 

Old Bell just stared out toward the east, toward Pierce.

“I hear the gunfire more nights now, sometimes explosions.  Trey Kerrigan gives them a wide berth, that chickenshit tinhorn.  And Pierce has gotten bolder since the Oklahoma City bomb.  A few months back, he sent a letter to the paper making some vague threats against the Fish and Game wardens around here.  He and his fellow wingnuts even started one of those goddam computer whatzits on the Internet ...”

“A web site?”

“Yeah, that’s it.  They’re wired up to the whole goddam world.  They spread their vicious gospel, inciting folks to hate the government, the media, immigrants, Indians, Negroes, environmentalists, you name it.  They hate just about any damned group in the, quote, New World Order that twists their tail.  Won’t be long before your name finds its way onto his enemies list.  You’re like goddam fresh meat to those coyotes.”

“It’s nice to know it’s nothing personal,” Morgan joked.

“Oh, it’ll be personal.  Count on it.  And he’s got some folks around here believing his crap.  Hard to believe, isn’t it?  Some uneducated sodbuster becomes the goddam Messiah?  When it comes to Malachi Pierce, watch your step.”

Malachi Pierce.

Neeley Gilmartin.

The bank.

His reporters.

His own printing press.

Claire and a new baby, so soon after Bridger went away.

Even time itself seemed to be conspiring against him.

Morgan leaned against the cool window casement and counted the pitfalls that awaited him.  He wasn’t the kind to be paranoid, but neither did he like leaving control of his fate in other people’s hands.

In the distance, the hawk still circled, looking for prey.

“What next?” he asked himself out loud, exasperated. 

Old Bell’s answer wasn’t what Morgan expected.  He spoke softly, his faded blue eyes focused on the horizon beyond Mount Eden.  If he doubted Gilmartin’s innocence, or himself, this was the closest he’d come to admitting it.

“Gilmartin is next.  It’s like a goddamned quest, kid.  If he didn’t do it, you’re the only one who can help him now.”

CHAPTER FOUR

M
organ arrived at the sheriff’s office before eight a.m. Friday morning, but Trey Kerrigan was down in the basement jail, serving breakfast to its lone occupant.  Arly Bucknell had been face down in his own vomit when a deputy lifted him out of the gutter the night before.

The sheriff’s secretary, a large but pretty woman whose chin unfolded in thick pleats down her neck, was expecting Morgan.  She fetched him a Styrofoam cup of coffee from a drip coffeemaker behind her desk.  After he’d swizzled two packets of sweetener into it, she led him into a comfortable office to wait.  

Sheriff Trey Kerrigan’s walls were a shrine to his late father.

Plaques, framed letters, mounted heads and several dozen photographs were hung in a mosaic so dense that barely a half inch of the dark maple-paneled wall behind showed around each one.  Almost all of them were engraved or addressed to Deuce Kerrigan, or pictured the broad-shouldered, barrel-chested sheriff posing with one of his trophy game animals, shoulder to beefy shoulder with a famous politician or, occasionally, escorting one of his “customers” from his black squad car.

And in some, a familiar little face appeared, sometimes in the margins of the image.  A devoted son who wanted only to be a lawman like his father.  He appeared like a smiling little shadow to the bigger-than-life Deuce Kerrigan.

It was Trey.

The same little kid who’d bedecked the walls of his courthouse office with these remembrances of his father.

Deuce was never given to such narcissism.  In Perry County, conceit was a flaw almost as intolerable as having reason to be conceited.  Small towns had a way of keeping their citizens’ feet on level ground. 

The door opened and Sheriff Trey Kerrigan walked across the room in long, loping strides, his secretary in tow.  He was drying his hands on a paper towel.

“Carol, get Tommy on the radio and have him run back over to the Four Aces,” he instructed while she took a few notes.  “Arly lost his false teeth and I reckon he puked ‘em up in the gutter last night.  Poor old boozer can’t eat without ‘em.”

Carol smiled wanly at Morgan and left the room.  As soon as the door closed behind her, Trey tossed the wadded paper towel in an elegant arc toward his trash can, sinking the shot like the natural, hot-handed forward he’d been in high school.

“You never lose the touch,” he said, his wrist still cocked downward a few seconds after his flat-footed jump-shot hit its mark.  His eyes gleamed.

“Well, for once, I can’t claim the assist,” Morgan joked.

Morgan had been a starting guard for the Perry County High School Wolves back in 1975, their senior year.  He fed Trey Kerrigan the ball for most of the 323 baskets he sunk that season.  The future sheriff was named to the All-State team;  the future editor, whose passes were more accurate than his jumpers, barely got mentioned in the yearbook.

Trey’s smile was obscured by his prodigious mustache, which curled around the sides of his mouth nearly to his chin, like Wild Bill Hickok’s.  Except for that, he was the spit and image of his father:  wide shoulders and a thick chest that narrowed to strong hips, with only a hint of a belly showing beneath his starched brown uniform.  A hand-tooled belt with a buckle half the size of a manhole cover held up his tight Wranglers, still a fresh blue.  He needed no gun and he seldom wore a hat, except in election years.  It was just for show.  Folks around Winchester liked to think their sheriff always wore a cowboy hat and a six gun, just like in the movies.

Trey Kerrigan had been Morgan’s best friend when they were growing up, but lost touch after Morgan went off to Northwestern.  Kerrigan took a basketball scholarship at a junior college in Montana, studied law enforcement for a year, then came home to take a job as a town cop.

Sometimes they’d bump into each other when Morgan came home for visits during and after college.  Kerrigan’s wife, Debbie, had brought two pies out to the house when Morgan’s father died seven years ago.  But Trey’s own father, Deuce, had died only a few months before — barely a year after he retired from law enforcement — and he couldn’t bear to attend Gray Morgan’s funeral himself.  Morgan understood, then and now.

Morgan sat down in one of two chairs in front of the sheriff’s antique oak desk.  Trey Kerrigan settled into his cracked leather swivel chair and held up a campaign poster for Morgan to see. 
Re-Elect Kerrigan
is all it said, the dot on the “i” a white star against a red and blue background.

“What do you think?  Pretty damn snazzy, huh?” he asked.

“You mean you have to campaign?  I thought the name Kerrigan was carved in stone over the courthouse door.  Who’d waste their money running against you?” Morgan asked, only half teasing.

“Ain’t it a bitch, Jeff?  Dad was the sheriff of Perry County for forty years, and I’ve been here for almost eight,” he said proudly.  “Now this town marshal who’s hardly had time to wash his dirty socks from the police academy wants to be sheriff.  That just sucks.”

The election was around the corner.  Trey Kerrigan was pitted against Winchester’s town marshal, Highlander Goldsmith, who supervised the town’s three-man police force.  The primary was in August, just a few weeks away, but there were so few Democrats in Perry County, almost every race was decided in the Republican primary.

Goldsmith’s main campaign plank was simple, straightforward and appealing:  After forty-eight years of Kerrigans in the sheriff’s office, almost half a century, it was time for a change.

Morgan prayed his old friend wouldn’t ask for
The Bullet’s
endorsement.  Even though he hoped Trey Kerrigan would keep the office he’d dreamed of holding all his life, he worried that his journalistic roots weren’t yet deep enough in Winchester’s political soil to make such pronouncements.  And he knew Kerrigan wouldn’t understand.

“You gonna endorse me, old buddy?” Kerrigan blurted out.

Morgan’s answer came slowly.  Too slowly for his old friend.

“Trey, I don’t know if I’m even going to do endorsements.  It’s not you, because you know how I feel about you.  It’s just that I haven’t been back here long enough ...”

Trey Kerrigan gave a disappointed little smile and looked down at the neat piles of paper on his desk.  He made Morgan feel as if he’d let his childhood pal down.

“It’d sure help me if you did,” Kerrigan said.  “Old Bell stood behind my dad all the way, and behind me, too, even if it was only because of my dad.  I’d sure like to have somebody support me because of me, and you know me better than anybody except my wife and my mother.  We were like brothers.”

That last little bit stung Morgan.  They
had
been like brothers.  Neither one had siblings at home.  They’d defended one another on the playground like brothers, and fought each other like brothers.  But Morgan sensed there was something distinctly political about Kerrigan’s bringing it up now.

“Give me some time, Trey,” Morgan said.  “I’ve got to worry about the paper right now.  Nothing personal, but people have to trust me before it means anything.  I hope you understand.”

“Sure enough,” he said, far from satisfied.  He tipped back in his creaky, overstuffed chair, propping one of his shiny brown cowboy boots on an open desk drawer.  “But you didn’t come here to talk politics with your ol’ buddy, did you?”

The secretary waddled in.  She carried Arly Bucknell’s false teeth between her outstretched thumb and forefinger, as if she were delivering a dead mouse.  Certainly, the look on her face couldn’t have been more disgusted if it
had
been a dead mouse.  She dropped Arly’s teeth on the sheriff’s desk and left the room without speaking.

“Now poor Arly’s got to eat jail food,” Kerrigan chuckled.  “I ain’t sure the punishment fits the crime.”

Morgan took advantage of the comic relief Arly’s false teeth provided in a tense moment.  He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees. 

“Trey, I need some help on an old murder case,” he said.  “If you’ve got it, I’d like to see your file on Neeley Gilmartin, back in ‘forty-eight.”

Kerrigan stretched a rubber band between his fingers.  He didn’t look up, nor did he look particularly surprised by the request.

“The parole board called me a few weeks back and told me he was out of the Big House, so I looked him up.  He killed a little Indian girl a long time ago.  Big case back then, but I reckon most folks have forgot about it by now.  What’s your interest?”

“I’m just curious.  There are a few things I’d like to know.  That’s all.”

“Personal or for the paper?”

“Does it matter?”

The sheriff tossed his well-worked rubber band on the desk and eased back further in his chair, rocking slightly and looking at the ceiling.

“A life sentence is a joke,” he said.  “This old boy kills a little girl, pleads guilty and now he’s out on the streets.  It’s a fuckin’ joke.  Everybody whines about crime, but nobody’s got the balls to stick an admitted baby-killer in the chair and fry his ass.”

“Forty-seven years in prison is still a long time,” Morgan said.  “It’s a lifetime.”

“If he ain’t dead, it ain’t life,” Kerrigan said, thwacking his index finger angrily against his desk.

“No, it isn’t,” Morgan agreed, but to no avail.  Kerrigan wasn’t going to be any help.  “But what’s done is done.  I just want to see the file on the case, if I could.  No harm in that, is there?”

“Maybe.  Why?”

Legally, a citizen wasn’t required to say why he wanted to see a public document, but Morgan was reluctant to get lawyerly.

“Gilmartin says he didn’t do it.  He wants me to check it out.”

“And you believe him?  Jesus, he pleaded guilty and spent most of his sorry-assed life in prison.  Everybody in town knew he was a goddam liar.  Now he’s conning you.  Take off those rose-colored glasses, my friend.  I did a long time ago, and now I can see you just want to sell a few papers.”

“I don’t know if I believe him.”  Morgan thought it over.  “No, to be honest, I don’t think I believe him at all.  But what can it hurt to check it out?”

“Nobody gives a shit.  Let this dog sleep, Jeff.  There ain’t nobody — nobody — wants to see this skank get off the hook for killing that girl.  Ask anybody.  He’s the most evil son of a bitch this town ever saw and he’ll be lucky if somebody doesn’t whack him in the middle of the night.  Folks have long memories.”

“But you wouldn’t let that happen, would you, Sheriff?” Morgan asked sarcastically.

“I just might,” Kerrigan said.

Morgan shook his head as Kerrigan continued his diatribe.

“I don’t understand you media guys,” Kerrigan chafed.  “Always looking to stir things up and sell papers.  You don’t believe this lyin’ baby-killer, but you’re gonna make a big stink of it.  That’s a fuckin’ hoot.”

Morgan’s face flushed hot.  The two of them might have been close once as children, but as adults they’d become natural enemies: a lawman and a reporter.

“I never said I was going to do a story, Trey.  Dammit, I just want to know what happened.  You’ve got the file.  Just let me take a look at it.  That’s all.  It can’t hurt.  For my own peace of mind.”

“How about this town’s peace of mind?  The boogey-man is back and you want to scratch open this bloody scab?  You’ll get somebody hurt.  There’s still people alive who wanted to string this fucker up and they’d love another shot at him.”

“And your dad didn’t let them do it,” Morgan said.

Kerrigan winced.

“That was a long time ago,” the sheriff glowered.  “It’s old news, Jeff.  Leave it alone.  You run out of stories already?  Why don’t you go do something positive for this town.  We don’t need this kind of sensational tabloid crap right now.”

“You mean
you
don’t need it right now,” Morgan said, pushing back his chair.  “If there’s anything to Gilmartin’s claims, you don’t want it out before the election.  You want it to look like everything’s under control.  That’s it, isn’t it?”

Kerrigan twisted the drooping ends of his mustache, forming a response and quelling his anger.  Then he spoke.

“If you weren’t my friend, I’d throw your ass out of here,” Kerrigan seethed.  His jaw muscles flexed as he stifled an outburst.  “As for the file, even if I’ve got it, I don’t think you could see it, being an investigatory record and all.  I’ll see what the county attorney says.”

“C’mon.  It’s a closed case, Trey.  Nearly fifty years old,” Morgan argued, but he’d already lost.  “It’s not an ongoing investigation.  It should be public, unless you’re trying to hide something.”

“Well, you can have your lawyer call my lawyer and hash it out, but I’m not going to let you have any files today.  Maybe never.  Nothing personal, but I’m not gonna help you stir up this town.”

Then he added, mockingly, “I hope you understand.”

On Friday mornings, only the front desk clerk came to work at
The Bullet
before nine.  The newsroom was quiet.  The lingering smell of ink and paper had settled overnight.  The ceiling fan chirped like a cricket in the dwindling coolness of the room.  The backshop lights were off because Cal Nussbaum had taken the day off.  Morgan knew he needed it.

Crystal had left a pink phone message on his chair because his desk was too cluttered.  It was from Neeley Gilmartin at the Teepee Motor Lodge, Room Eight.  Although time now passed much more swiftly for the old man, Morgan wanted to know more before he talked to Gilmartin again.

Maybe next week.

Morgan understood why Trey Kerrigan wouldn’t want an old murder case reopened just before the election.  But Morgan also sensed a son’s loyalty had something to do with his stubbornness.  Maybe he didn’t want to believe his father would send the wrong man to prison in a brutal crime.  Or maybe Morgan’s interest suggested some question about Deuce’s integrity, or at least his investigative abilities.  Either way, Trey Kerrigan would guard his father’s memory with the same devotion that made his office a virtual museum to Deuce Kerrigan.

The hell of it was, Morgan remained skeptical of Gilmartin’s story.  He couldn’t imagine any man had the capacity to endure almost fifty years in prison if he were truly innocent.  If the old man was telling the truth, why would he plead guilty and say nothing more for five decades?  Wouldn’t he have screamed from the prison walls every day and every night he was forced to remain there?  Still, the facts of the case had never been truly knitted together to prove Gilmartin’s guilt.  A few stitches were missing.

But the sheriff’s file wasn’t critical to his inquiry.  In Deuce’s day, cops took the unenlightened view that the less they wrote down, the less ammunition they gave defense attorneys.  It was likely that Deuce Kerrigan’s file on the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse contained a few graphic photographs, an arrest record and some informal notes handwritten after the fact.  Nothing more.  And it almost certainly would not contain information that obviously exonerated Neeley Gilmartin.  If anything, the file was more likely to damage Gilmartin’s claims than to prove them.