The Killing Machine (15 page)

A
s I'd told Wayland, I had a pretty good idea of what had happened to Louise that night on Parson's Cairn.

The four men in the cabin—three of them dead now—wouldn't have known who she was. And they would've been too drunk to care, anyway. Four drunks and a woman and a night of need and lust.

Wayland said that it had started out as nothing more than a polite invitation. Louise had been looking for a stray kitten hiding somewhere on the island. She'd passed the cabin. Wayland and the others spotted her. Invited her in. She knew about men, especially drunken men, so she refused. But she relented when she agreed to sit on the porch with them and have a beer. She was kind of tired from her two-hour search. She wasn't a drinker, but maybe half a glass would be all right. They made everything even better by saying they'd go looking for the kitten, too, soon as they had a few more drinks.

They had quite a few more drinks. She tried to get away, but every time she made a move to do so one of the men grabbed her and dragged her back. Way
land, sensing what was coming, tried to help her escape at one point. He got a black eye and some busted teeth for his trouble.

Wayland didn't see the actual rape, but he heard it. They threw him out of the cabin. He didn't have a gun. There was no way to overpower them. He thought of taking the boat and going for help. But by the time he found anybody, they would be done with her.

All he could do was listen to her scream, cry out to Wayland for help. He'd never felt less manly, more impotent. He'd even covered his ears so he didn't have to listen to her. Through it all the three men were laughing. They didn't seem to understand that they were raping a woman. They were just having themselves a good time. Several times Spenser bellered that they were going to make this worth her while. Money, of course. Money healed all wounds, right? Didn't everybody know that?

Then it was done. For a time the laughter continued, but it was diminished somehow and continued to recede in enthusiasm. They were slowly beginning to understand, as they started to sober up, what they'd done. Then he heard them, one by one, making their apologies to her, asking her what she'd like them to buy her. And then she told them who her friend was. The very same marshal who'd greeted them on their arrival in town the other day. Charley Wickham.

Wayland said that he would like to have seen their faces when she told them. They were already regretting what they'd done. But now their faces, old and harsh in the hangover light of the kerosene lamps, would reflect fear. Terror. This was serious business
now. They hadn't raped just anybody. If she was telling the truth, and they all knew she was, they'd raped the marshal's woman.

Wayland wasn't sure who'd first suggested the idea. But, standing outside the door, Wayland knew he'd have to do something and do it quickly.

The door opened. They had a gag across her mouth, her arms tied behind her.

Wayland had armed himself with a good chunk of two-by-four he'd found in a pile around back. His first victim was Brinkley. He hit him so hard across the back of the head that he thought he'd killed him. Then the other two men were on him. He swung the two-by-four at them several times but they weren't about to be stopped. Too much at stake. They had to get rid of both Wayland and Louise now.

Louise used the turmoil to escape. She ran through the woods, presumably toward her own cabin. From here, Wayland and the others could only speculate on what happened. The island had a single steep cliff. There was a narrow, foot-worn trail along it that Louise used frequently. As she did that night. But that night, with all the terror, she lost her footing and slipped. Nobody had ever survived a fall from that particular cliff. The record remained unbroken. She didn't survive, either. They spent the rest of the night dragging her body back up to shore.

Brinkley, recovering from Wayland's assault, persuaded the others to let Wayland live. His death would be too difficult to explain. And Wayland couldn't tell the marshal what happened because all three of them would tell the marshal that Wayland was a part of it. However many grim years they would serve in prison, Wayland would serve, too.

They went back to town, paid their visit to David in the morning right on schedule, and then waited to be visited by the marshal. It would be a routine inquiry, but a sensible one. They'd been on the island when she'd slipped and fell. Perhaps they knew something. No, they'd say, but they understood that the marshal was only doing his job and they'd help any way they could.

Then a queer thing happened—or didn't happen. The body was found, all right, but the man who ran the mortuary and was also the county medical examiner pronounced Louise Skelly's death an accident. No suggestion of foul play, he'd said. The presiding judge then saw fit to close the case.

The men spent another three days in town, each trying to bribe David into giving them first bid on the amazing weapon he'd created. But David wasn't finished working on the gun and wouldn't sell it. Say what you would about David—he might be a ladies' man and an imbiber and a brawler—but he took pride in his work. On the day they were to leave, they each received their first blackmail letter from James. He knew what had happened to Louise and who had killed her.

“We went our separate ways,” Wayland said. “But it didn't matter. The blackmail letters kept coming. And we kept sending him money. Then your brother let us know that he'd about brought the gun up to speed so we had to come back here, which none of us were happy about.”

“And then somebody started killing you off.”

“Exactly.” He sighed, sat staring at the table.

“One thing,” I said.

He didn't look up. “What?”

“You'll need to testify to all this.”

When he did look up, his face was that of a sad child's. “Wait till my old man hears about this one. He'll just say that I fucked up all over again. And he'll be right.” He made a face. “Will I go to prison for withholding evidence?”

“Depends on the judge. But if you get anybody short of a hanging judge, you'll probably get the charges dropped for your cooperation.”

“You know what's really funny?”

“What?”

“All this dying—and nobody knows where the gun is.”

“I've got an idea where it might be,” I said.

“Where?”

“That one I need to keep to myself.”

I picked up my hat. “I've got business to tend to. They've got a couple attorneys in town here. Figure out which you think is the best one and pay him a visit.”

He sighed. “I don't have much money. I'll probably have to ask the old man. God, I can hear the sermons he'll give me. He'll ride my ass till the day he dies.”

As I was standing up, I said, “I'm sorry, Wayland. But right now your old man isn't worth arguing about. You need to get yourself a lawyer and then you need to go see the county attorney here and get this whole thing in process.”

“You put in a good word for me, Ford?”

“Sure. I'm not sure how much good it'll do. A lot of these people resent Federales, as they call them. But I'll be glad to speak up to anybody who'll listen.”

He laughed bitterly. “I'm getting a good look at our so-called justice system. It doesn't work worth a
damn. Everybody brings all their prejudices to it and it just breaks down.”

“Not all the time.”

“Most of the time.”

I laughed myself. “Well, some of the time.”

 

Two older women were soaking lace handkerchiefs with their tears. Black silk dresses with bustles so big leprechauns could sit on them. Their sobs echoed off the walls of the small visitation room in the mortuary vestibule. The air smelled of flowers and death. One of the women glared at me as if I'd personally killed the person she was mourning.

I went down the short hall to the business office. The door was open an inch. I opened it wider and went inside.

Beth Cave wasn't typing today. She stood in her black dress at a wooden filing cabinet, inserting one file folder into a long line of others. Her back was to me. The sobs of the women in the vestibule had covered any sounds I made. When she turned around, she looked shocked to find me there, as if I'd appeared by some kind of evil magic.

“He's not in.”

“I didn't want to see him, anyway.”

“I'm not in either,” she said, walking primly to her desk. For the first time I realized that in her younger days she might well have been attractive. But work or life or maybe both together had soured and blanched her in a now permanent way. She sat down and said, “You'll just waste your time here. I have absolutely nothing to say to you.”

I said, “I talked to the county attorney.”

“Mr. Philbrick.”

“Yes,” I lied. “Mr. Philbrick.”

“We just buried his aunt here a few months ago.”

In another circumstance, I probably would have smiled. You work at a livery, you think of people in terms of their horses and vehicles. You work at a barbershop, you think of people in terms of their hair. You work at a mortuary, you think of people in terms of their kin you helped bury.

I started to speak, but then one of the weeping women poked her head in the door. She had plump cheeks raw from crying and a pair of store-bought teeth that gleamed in a way no real teeth ever had. I wanted to feel properly sorry for her but I couldn't quite. I guess it was the way she still glared at me. I was in range clothes again. Her husband probably hired and fired men like me all the time. “We want the best carriage, Miss Cave.”

“Of course. I'll see to it personally.”

“And we don't want Mary Beth Guterman in the choir. My brother always thought she sang off-key. He even said that to the parson many times. You'd think for all the money my brother gave that church the parson would at least have taken Mary Beth Guterman out of the choir.”

“No Mary Beth Guterman. You can be assured of that.”

“We have people coming all the way from St. Louis. Very wealthy people. They're used to the best. We want to show them that we appreciate the best, too. We don't just throw our loved ones in the ground like barbarians.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Winters. We'll give him the
same kind of funeral he'd get at the very best parlor in St. Louis.”

“Or Chicago.”

“Or Chicago, yes, for that matter. You know we buy a lot of supplies from Chicago.”

“You do? Well, you should advertise that. Right in that announcement you make in the paper each week. People like to know things like that. All the way from Chicago.”

Just then the other woman in the vestibule doubled the volume of her grief.

“My poor sister-in-law,” Mrs. Winters clucked. “This has been so difficult on her. Especially with all the gossip about how my brother ran around on her, which is of course ridiculous.”

“Of course it is,” Beth Cave soothed.

Another blast of sobbing from the vestibule.

“Well, I'd best tend to her.”

Another glare aimed at me and she was gone.

“You should follow her right out that door, Mr. Ford.”

“Do you enjoy your life, Miss Cave?”

“And just what's that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you seem to enjoy what you have. I'm sure you have some good friends and some things you enjoy doing with them. And your place is probably fixed up nice. And you're a member in good standing in your church…”

“Just what is the point of this?”

“That it could all come to an end. That the county attorney will be coming after your boss very soon now. And that if I ask him to, he could charge you for withholding evidence. And if he won't, I'll find a federal judge who will.”

“That's ridiculous. I haven't done anything.”

“The other day you started to tell me about the night they brought Louise in here. You must've been working late. You saw what she looked like. And you realized that your boss filed a false death certificate. He forgot to add that she was beaten and raped, didn't he? He made it sound like a simple little accident, a woman losing her footing in the rain along the cliff and…”

Her glance warned me, but too late. Way too late. The sobbing of the women had covered his footsteps. All I had time to do was start to turn and duck but Newcomb was too fast for me.

He clipped me hard across the back side of my head, and as I started to pitch forward he got me a second time, with much more force, across the top of my head. The last thing I heard was the women in the vestibule crying.

 

Darkness. The smell of newly sawn wood. Pine. Then the sharp stink of chemicals I recognized as belonging to Newcomb's profession of mortician. I tried to extend my arms from my sides. I could push them outward less than an inch.

Like most people of these times, I had the fear of being buried alive. A lot of that had gone on in Europe after the last sweep of plague a couple decades back. To a much lesser degree, it had also gone on over here. A couple of enterprising businessmen had cashed in on the fear. There were coffins that had bells you could ring in case you were buried inside. There were caskets with breathing tubes that came
up out of the ground. There were caskets that were sunk with less than a foot of dirt atop them and lids that could be easily pushed upward if need be. For people who didn't want to spend any money, family groups were known to have burial watches. Family members took turns sitting on a chair next to the burial site for as long as three or four days following the ceremony, just to make sure old Uncle Bob didn't start screaming to let him out.

I was in a coffin. There had been enough air to keep me alive for a while, but that while was slipping away fast. Unfortunately, the lid wasn't the breakaway kind. Newcomb's shoddy craftsmanship hadn't extended to the nails. They had firmly fixed the lid in place. There wasn't even a bell for me to ring.