Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup!
Five Short Mysteries by Camille LaGuire
First Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Camille LaGuire
Check out the first Mick and Casey mystery: Have Gun, Will Play
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License Notes
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* * *
Table of Contents:
Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup
The Hoosegow Strangler
Trail of the Lonesome Stickpin
Alibi
The Promise
Bonus: the opening chapters of: Have Gun, Will Play
* * * * *
Waiter, There’s a Clue In My Soup
In this armchair detective story, two detectives sort out a poisoning case over lunch, with a little help from the food geek in the corner. (First published in Futures Mysterious Anthology in Spring 2003, and nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer awards in 2004.)
* * *
Lt. Sophie Trent called to the waiter for a BLT on wheat and found herself a seat in the nearly empty back corner of the deli. The only other customer was a balding man who was deeply involved with his chicken salad sandwich. Sophie often saw him at the deli, and he was always so pleasantly intent on what he was eating. She smiled and wished she could be as oblivious and happy with her own sandwich. But it wasn’t to be. This was a working lunch.
Detective LaRue arrived, and sat across from her, his brow furrowed.
“Bad news, lieutenant,” he said. “She was poisoned, with arsenic, but they didn’t find....”
“Wait a minute,” said Sophie. “I’ve been out of the loop. Catch me up on all of it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said LaRue. He paused to call for a pastrami on rye and then turned back to her. He didn’t refer to his notes, but LaRue never had to. “The victim, Ada Maxwell, died of arsenic poisoning. M.E. and witness accounts puts the ingestion around dinner time. She’d had dinner in her hotel room with five friends—three local, and two staying at the same hotel. They were organizers for a class reunion this weekend. They got the food at a local Chinese restaurant, the Golden Noodle. She and a guy named Robert Thompson got the food and brought it back.”
“Chinese food. Did they share it?”
“Some did, some didn’t. You don’t want me to go through that, do you? Because it’s tricky and it doesn’t....”
“Just give me the story, and then your conclusions.”
“Okay. Everybody shared the entrees but Thompson, who didn’t like Mu Shu Pork or Szechwan Chicken, so he had the Beef Chop Suey all to himself. A woman named Tina Low picked out the peanuts in the chicken, and Moira Tagget didn’t eat the egg rolls. Joe Lathen ate Tagget’s egg roll, and the other guy, Hank Vorlach, didn’t order soup. Other than him, they each had their own soup, and they each had their own egg roll. The egg rolls and soup were only things the victim ate that the others didn’t share.”
“The soup sounds more likely,” she said.
“Yeah, you’d think so.” He paused, and she realized that there was a twist to this. Maybe she should have let him get to his conclusion in the first place. He took a breath and went on with his report. “Especially since she only ate about half of her hot and sour soup. As a matter of fact my first thought was she had an allergy to the mushrooms because she’d left most of them. They were those funny frilly ones. Look like a boxer’s ear.”
“Tree ears?”
“Yeah.”
“But she was poisoned with arsenic.”
“Yeah, no sign of allergy or any exotic poison from a mushroom, just plain old arsenic.”
“And from your odd hesitation, I take it there was no arsenic in the soup?”
“Not a trace. Not an atom.” He sighed and sat forward. “Not anywhere in the room. Not in the soup, not on the egg rolls or packages, not in the little packets of sauce in the trash, or on any containers or spoons. Not on the drinking glasses or the ice bucket. There was a tiny touch on one pair of chopsticks, like maybe there was a trace of it in her mouth when she was eating, but not like she picked up poisoned food with them.”
“The egg rolls then. They’re self-contained.”
He made a face. “And hard to slip poison into. The food was in plain sight of several witnesses, so unless they were all in collusion, it would have been too hard to get it inside the egg roll. On the surface, maybe, or in the sauce or mustard, but then it would have left traces on the napkins and the paper plates.”
“Could someone have brought one already prepared, and switched them?”
“Thought of that,” said LaRue. “Especially with Lathan and Tagget swapping them around. But all six of them were at a meeting all afternoon, and so if somebody smuggled in an egg roll, it was stale, and apparently the victim had commented on how hot and fresh the egg rolls were.”
“Okay, we leave the food. How else could she have ingested it?”
“There weren’t any other consumables in the place. I’d say somebody convinced her to take a pill, but everybody left together. She said she didn’t feel well as they were leaving. It sounds like the symptoms had already started.”
“Poisoned antacids?”
“Nothing in the room. Not even aspirin. Her friends said that she didn’t like pills, so it wasn’t unusual. And the M. E. thinks the timing would put the poisoning during or shortly before dinner, and all of the witnesses were together at some sort of pre-party meeting, and she had answered questions for two hours, so she didn’t have the chance to eat anything before dinner.”
“It’s odd that there’s nothing in the room with traces of arsenic,” she said. “Maybe the perp came back later....”
“...and took the evidence with him,” said LaRue, and he nodded. “Yeah, I thought of that, and maybe it’s so, but nobody saw anyone come back later, and we can’t figure out what is missing. There are the right number of containers, spoons, forks, chopsticks, mustard and sweet and sour packets in the trash. When we get a lead on what it was, we’ll follow it. Right now we’re tracking motives, and there seems to be enough to go around there.”
Their sandwiches arrived, and Sophie bit into her BLT, while mentally chewing on LaRue’s report.
“Maybe...,” said Sophie, pausing to put down her sandwich. “Maybe it wasn’t any of them.”
“Suicide?”
“Or maybe the guy who made that egg roll.”
“At the restaurant? He’d have no way of knowing who ate it.”
“Product tampering. It’s been done before. An employee out to get the boss. Some passive aggressive psychopath who just wants to read about it in the papers.”
“Don’t those guys usually poison a lot of people?”
“Not necessarily. Not all at once.”
LaRue nibbled on a pickle and then started to wave it at her, but instead he scowled at something over her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” interrupted a quiet voice. The balding guy from the corner was next to their table, his hands clasped in front of him. “If you don’t mind....”
“Yes?” said Sophie, wondering what he wanted. He took her word as an invitation, and drew up a chair to sit between them.
“It wasn’t Mrs. Pham. She would not poison an egg roll, and she rolls them all herself. The Golden Noodle is strictly a mom and pop joint. They don’t have any employees. The Phams are cheap, but they’re decent people, and if you order the Vietnamese food, it’s really good. I don’t see them poisoning a perfectly good egg roll.”
He looked at them earnestly. LaRue had his mouth open, ready to send the man on his way, but he had paused, and his eyes met Sophie’s.
“You know the people who own the Golden Noodle?” said LaRue.
“Well, yes,” he said, and he shrugged and shifted in his chair. “Their pho is pretty good, and you won’t find a better Vietnamese crepe anywhere. I’ll bet you a plate of ribs from the Old Kentucky Grill that it has nothing to do with the food from the Golden Noodle.”
LaRue sighed and glanced at Sophie.
“Do you know them?” he said. “Or do you just like their food?”
“Well, not their Chinese food. They’re cheap with it, which is the point,” said the man from the corner earnestly.
“What point?”
“You said the hot and sour soup had tree ear fungus in it,” he said. “Like a boxer’s ear, so it was whole tree ears.”
“Yeah. I guess,” said LaRue.
“Then it didn’t come from the Golden Noodle.”
“All the food came from the Golden Noodle,” said LaRue. “That’s all that was in the room. We checked.”
The man shook his head with certainty. “The Golden Noodle uses little shreds of fungus, and not much of those. It’s cheap that way. The only place in town that uses whole tree ears right now is Dynasty Garden. Lovely stuff. They use duck broth, with a little hoisin....”
Sophie looked at LaRue, who put a hand to his forehead and screwed his jaw sideways as he saw what it meant too.
“The killer came back with another carton of soup,” said Sophie, “and took the poisoned one away, with the spoon and all.”
“Exactly,” said the man, who stood up. “Now, all you have to do is take a picture of that Mr. Thompson to Dynasty Garden, and I’ll bet they recognize him. The woman that works the cash register is very sharp....”
“Thompson? Where did you get that?”
The man blinked at them.
“Isn’t it obvious? Anybody else could have gone back to the Golden Noodle. But you said Thompson had just picked up food from there. They would have noticed if he came in twice. He’s the only one who had to go someplace else.” He sighed, and glanced around, and leaned in. “Besides... you’ll think I’m a terrible snob, and I am, but.... Clearly the killer was not a gourmet. He had to eat some of that soup to make it look like she’d eaten it, and he didn’t eat the tree ears, which are the best part.” He lowered his voice earnestly. “Mr. Thompson doesn’t like good food. He ordered...chop suey.”
He straightened and nodded a farewell, then called to the waiter for more cole slaw, and returned to his sandwich.
Sophie and LaRue stared at one another for a moment.
“You think he’s right?” said Sophie.
“Yeah, he could be” said LaRue, darkly. “Thompson’s top of my list.”
“Well, obviously,” said Sophie. “Anybody who likes chop suey must be a killer.”
“Hey, I like chop suey!” LaRue sat up straight.
“Everybody’s got their flaws,” said Sophie. “Come on, eat up. We’ve got the real detective work to do.”
* * * * *
The Hoosegow Strangler
In this very first Mick and Casey story, the young gunslingers have to save their reputation when a witness they are guarding is murdered behind their backs. (First published in Handheld Crime, Issue 36, July 2, 2003.)
* * *
Mr. Albert Wilkins was dead, and there was no arguing that. He sprawled across his bed, one arm hanging down. His eyes weren’t open, but the rope around his neck, the angle of his head, and the blueness of his face made it clear.
The blue might have been due partly to the cold in the room. The window was open and the cold mountain air hung still in the room like death. The sheriff pushed past us and stepped over the shards of the wash basin Mrs. Holt had dropped when she’d opened the door. The water from that basin had washed across the hall, but some was in the room, and it was already looking a little slick and icy around the edges.
The sheriff swore, leaned out the window, and then swore again. Then he turned and came back at us.
“He did not get out!” he said. “He did NOT get out.”
He rushed back out and headed down the stairs to chase after his prisoner. I looked at Casey, my wife and partner.
Casey stood in the doorway, stiff and alert, like an animal sniffing the wind. She was only about seventeen—I didn’t know exactly because Casey wasn’t one for giving out personal information, even to her nearest and dearest—but she was a sharpshooter and tough as any six guys I’d met. I was in my twenties, and pretty fast on the draw, and I could maybe look big enough to intimidate if I remembered not to grin or talk too much. But the pair of us were short on experience and reputation, and I could see we were going to get the blame for this. We had been hired to keep the half-alive Mr. Wilkins from becoming all dead, and we had somehow failed.
“He get past you?” I asked. She gave me a hard look. I tried to judge if she was angry at herself for screwing up, or at me for asking. I decided it was at me—which meant old Cherty Stevens had not got past her. And I knew he hadn’t got past me.
I paused to look at the body. The rope around his neck was bent with old marks, like it had been put to other uses for most of its life. I pulled back the blanket and saw that the bandages around his gut showed little blood. As far as I could tell, he probably had not struggled, and had died quickly.
Case crept up behind me and looked hard at the man’s face. She didn’t bother to look at anything else, because she left things like that to me. His distorted face, though, she took in as a point of honor—something to get revenge for, or something to remember in case it turned out to be our fault.
No snow had blown into the cold room. The window was sheltered by the alley. I closed it and glanced around. Other than the bit of wet where the sheriff had walked in with snow on his boots, there was no sign of snow or slush. No boot prints from the window. Nor had I seen any in the snow outside the window, one story down.
Sense said the killer was somebody from inside the house, but I didn’t believe it. It was Cherty, it had to be.
* * *
Cherty Stevens was a bad man. He was the kind who liked to take revenge in the nastiest way possible, but he was generally sneaky about it. Albert Wilkins had not been all that nice himself. He had made a fool out of Cherty in a poker game a week back, and Cherty had threatened him. Then the night before, Mr. Wilkins had been found behind the saloon with a batch of knife cuts in his belly. Wilkins, however, was tough, and still alive, although unable to say who knifed him. It seemed likely to be Cherty.
The town didn’t have a jail. Didn’t even have its own law office, but the sheriff from Laidlaw was there. He found an empty room on the third floor of the house next to the doctor’s house, and he locked Cherty up there. Cherty said there was no proof he did it, and maybe he was right, but Wilkins was still alive, and the doctor said there was a good chance he would recover enough to say who’d knifed him.
Casey and I happened to be in town, having joined up with the sheriff to discuss the possibility of a reward if we tracked down a certain road agent who was giving trouble to travelers up mountain. The sheriff had quick deputized us, and we had helped carry Mr. Wilkins up to a bed in the doctor’s house.
And since Cherty was claiming loudly that he hadn’t done it, and that whoever did would go finish Wilkins off during the night, we had taken the job of sitting on the stairs all night to keep him safe. The stairs were the only way up there, and the only ones who had gone near him were the doctor and Mrs. Holt. And us.
* * *
We ran down the stairs after the sheriff, thinking it would be easy to track Cherty in the snow, but as it turned out, we didn’t need to track him. He had left no tracks at all. He was still up in that storage room where the sheriff had locked him up the night before.
The owner of the house next door, a man named Tucker, showed us up a long flight of stairs.
“It seemed like a good place to lock him up,” said Tucker. “All the way up there. We don’t even use the third floor at all, because my wife is awful afraid of fire.” He paused. “She’s afraid of him too. I sat on the landing with a shotgun all night. I don’t think he did it. He couldn’t have got out.”
We found the sheriff in a little room at the top of the house, glowering down at Cherty, who was squatting by the little fireplace, grinning. The room was empty except for them and a big empty hutch and a little bit of wood for the fire. There wasn’t even a bed.
“I was here all night,” said Cherty sweetly. “Why, sheriff, you were out there watching the door, and you heard me. I was complaining about the cold half the night. How could I have got out?”
The sheriff wasn’t arguing, and he didn’t look ashamed, as though he hadn’t been watching the door. I might have turned around right then and had a close talk with that doctor and his housekeeper, but I could tell by the smirk on Cherty’s face that it wasn’t necessary. Cherty somehow had done it.
The sheriff kicked at a piece of wood that Cherty was feeding into the fire and stalked to the door to think or fume. I grabbed up the wood.
“What’s this?” I said.
“It’s my chair. They didn’t give me anything to keep warm with, so I burned it.”
The sheriff came back in and took the bit of wood away from me and kicked at the other couple pieces.
“Well, you ain’t burning no more of it.”
Cherty just grinned. “You’re freezing me.”
The rest of us went back out into the hall. I brought the bit of wood—a rail from the back of the chair, I thought—and looked it over.
“You let him burn this? Or...?”
“He was yelling about the cold last night, and then I heard him break something, and he had already busted up the chairs when I got into the room.”
“You sure that’s what he was doing?”
“Yes, I am sure. He busted up the two chairs for firewood, and since they were already broke and it was cold as hell in there, I let him burn them on the promise he would shut up about the cold.”
“You know he was burning to cover something up.”
“Like what? It was two chairs. Two old chairs. They didn’t help him get out of that room.”
He turned away and I could see he was full of doubt.
“You know he did it,” I said to him. “You know that.”
He turned and advanced on me.
“If he did, then he got past me.”
“Yeah,” I said, reluctantly, but I had to lay it out there.
“And he had to get past you, and her too.”
He stabbed his finger at Casey. She just stood there, looking impassive, except I think she was grinding her teeth. I tried not to grind my own, as I looked him in the eye and nodded.
“He must have.”
The sheriff didn’t like me saying that, since it meant he was at fault as much as we were. The landlord piped up.
“He didn’t get past me either. He couldn’t have got out of the house.”
“He had to have.”
The sheriff shook his head.
“I sat against this door all night, and I did not sleep.”
“What about the window?”
“Look in the alley.”
I had already looked in the alley from Wilkins’ room, and I knew it was pure and undisturbed. I also knew that it had stopped snowing while Wilkins was still alive.
“Maybe the wind drifted it over,” I said, but the sheriff just shook his head.
We both stood, silent and thinking, and I couldn’t see any way around it, but then I hadn’t had a good look at that alley. I turned and went downstairs, Casey following.
“Sheriff Hatch did it,” said Case, as we went out into the blinding white of the snow.
“Did not,” I said with a growl, and I squinted into the alley, which was currently a mix of bright shadow and even brighter sunlight.
“Did so....”
“Did not!” I emphasized each word and turned to look at her. She just looked at me, narrow-eyed. “It was Cherty, I know it was him. I could tell by the look on his face.”
“Sheriff helped him then.”
I took a deep breath. She had a point. I couldn’t see any other way of it. “Maybe,” I said. “You got any reason to think that, other than that it had to be?”
“If it had to be, I don’t need no other reason.”
“Except then it had to be that one of us helped him too.”
She didn’t like that, so she scowled at the snow.
“Maybe somebody else helped him.”
Like the doctor or Mrs. Holt. Or maybe somebody else had climbed in through a second story window on the other side of the house.
We went out into the street, and kept clear of any tracks that went from one house to the other. Mrs. Holt was just opening the front door, but I called to her and asked her and the doctor to stay in for a little bit while we looked at the tracks. She nodded and went back in without stepping in the snow at all.
My call had attracted the attention of two men and a boy who were across the street near the saloon. I waved them over to join us as Casey looked at the tracks.
“This snow ain’t gonna stay around,” I said. “So would you fellas be witnesses?”
They agreed to take the job. Casey had sharper eyes than anybody and was particularly good at tracking, so she took the lead. She stood away from the tracks and pointed.
“That’s where the sheriff ran in when Mrs. Holt called. That’s where he ran out, and that’s where we followed.”
“Is that how it looks to you guys?” I asked.
They nodded and agreed that was how it looked. None of us could see any other tracks going into the front door. After that we trooped around the house and found no tracks at all. Not to the back door, not to a window.
But it was the alley that had the most interest to me, because even though a killer could have got in a lot of ways, Cherty could only have got out through that window on the alley.
There wasn’t a mark in the alley.
It was narrow, although I thought jumping from one side to the other was unlikely. Tucker’s house had been lightly dusted with lines of snow on every detail along that side, but the doctor’s house had escaped the wind, and there was no snow to leave a mark of entry. It looked to me like there was less snow on the ledge of Cherty’s window, but it was too high to tell for sure, and I couldn’t see disturbance on the surfaces below.
It was cold to be standing around, so the other fellows went back across the street to the saloon. Casey bent over for another look at the sheriff’s boot prints.
“I’m remembering now,” she said as she straightened up, “that there were no prints out here at all when he came running up from the other house. The snow was clean.”
She’d been at that door with Mrs. Holt, so she’d seen it.
“That means it was either us, the doctor or Mrs. Holt,” I said.
She nodded.
“Shit!” I said. I stared at the snow, which was no longer smooth, but was still white. People say I’m dumb and stubborn, and maybe I was. I am not a vindictive guy, though. I didn’t want to believe that I was accusing Cherty out of spite. It was just that there was something about the way that body had been laid out. It didn’t seem...necessary. Like whoever had done it was showing off.
I looked up at Casey. “No,” I said. “No, it isn’t them.”
I turned and went back to the other house. She caught up with me as I paused to kick the snow off my boots.
“You got a reason,” said Case, her voice low.
“Yeah, I got a reason. It ain’t evidence, but it is a reason.”
We stamped on in, and up the stairs. We met Tucker, the sheriff, and Cherty coming down. I stopped and looked up at them.
“You ain’t letting him go,” I said.
“No reason to hold him,” said the sheriff, and he started to push on through. I put my hands on each wall of that narrow staircase and stayed put.
“Yeah there is,” I said. “Look, if you say it wasn’t him because there was no tracks, then it had to be the doctor or Mrs. Holt....”
“Or you,” said Cherty.
“Yeah, or us,” I agreed. “But if that was so, why kill him that way? Why make it so obvious it was a murder? Why not use a pillow to smother him quiet, or give him too much laudanum or maybe take a scalpel and give him another cut just to make sure? Then folks would think the guy died in his sleep, and Cherty’d get the blame.”
The sheriff was thinking on it, so I went on.
“The only reason to wrap a rope around that man’s neck and drag him half off the bed was to make sure everybody knew it was a murder, and to give Cherty an alibi.”
“He didn’t get out of here,” said the sheriff.
“Not through the door,” I said. I looked at Cherty, and he just looked flat at me. Maybe his lip curled a little. Whatever way he’d done it, I could tell it wouldn’t be easy to prove.
“It had something to do with those chairs,” I said.
“Oh yeah,” said Cherty. “I used them as wings to fly through the walls.”
“Shut up,” said the sheriff.
I turned to Tucker. “Was there anything special about those chairs?”
“Like what?”
“Like...like were they bigger than usual, or... anything?”
He thought and then slowly shook his head. Casey poked me so I’d move over, and she squeezed in the middle of us all.
“What about the seat? Was they cane bottom? Or maybe rush bottom?” she said. “He could make a rope out of that.”
“No, they were just wood.”
I looked up at the sheriff, and he was considering hard. He took Cherty’s arm and shoved him back up the stairs, and we all went on up. I talked to Tucker all the way up. The chairs were ordinary, maybe a little crude, since he had made them before he was good at carpentry. There weren’t any others just like them, because he’d got better at it. That was why they’d been up in the room—they’d left them when they’d moved out of the upstairs.
“What do you mean moved out?” I asked.
“Oh, like I said, my wife was scared to be up here. We kept hearing about bad hotel fires back east where people got burned to death, so we moved everything downstairs. That’s how come it was empty enough to use as a cell.” He paused and glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t tell her he lit a fire up here last night, or she’ll have a fit.”
I promised not to, although I thought I’d likely break that promise. A woman with fears is a woman to ask about details. But first I wanted another look at that room.
The sheriff started poking through what was left of the wood and Casey prowled over to that big hutch, but the first thing I did was go to the window and look out. The snow had been disturbed all right. Mostly wiped away, at least partly into the room by the little bit of puddle on the floor.
“So what did you open the window for?” I asked Cherty.
“The piss pot stunk, so I emptied it,” he said.
“Did not,” said Casey, looking into the pot, which was the only thing on a shelf in the hutch.
“I had a lot to piss. I decided it was too cold to open the window the second time.”
“And how is it the snow is so white and pure below your window?”
“I got pure and white piss.”
“Do not,” said Casey again, stepping back from the pot and making a face.
I pushed up the sash and let some cold air in. The house across the way was two stories tall, and I could see the roof was covered with unmarked snow. Straight across, though, was a small attic window sheltered from the snow by a gable. Not a damn bit of snow to leave a mark behind. It was lower than Cherty’s window, and it might have been possible to jump. I turned to look at Cherty. He was short, and not too light, nor was he particularly young. I would not have liked my own chances of making that jump. And while that window was up in the attic far from where anybody was sleeping, I didn’t see anybody making the jump without making a lot of noise—even with luck, planning and agility.
And I sure didn’t see him getting back.
I turned back to the window and leaned out as far as I could, and twisted around to look and see if there was some place he could have tied a rope and swung or climbed to a different window. I didn’t see a place to tie a rope, and the wind had caked snow in fine lines along all the edges of the clapboards. And none of that was disturbed but the snow on his ledge, and maybe a tiny bit down the wall where some snow from the ledge had fallen.
He must have gone out that window, but I couldn’t see any direction for him to go but straight out through the air. I looked at that window across the way again.
“I suppose we should check out that attic room,” I said.
“You go on ahead,” said Cherty with a chuckle. “You just look at that whole house. Won’t find anything to do with me.”
I believed him. I would go check eventually, but I had the feeling that if there was any sign of how Cherty had managed it, it was lost in those ashes with the chairs. It had to have something to do with those chairs.
“Hey,” said Casey from across the room, her voice muffled. I turned and didn’t see her. All I could see was the big hutch across the room, empty and doorless. Casey squeezed out from behind it. “Pulled out from the wall.”
The sheriff beat me across the room, so I turned and looked at Cherty. He squatted by the fire, rubbing his hands, his eyes hooded, and watched the sheriff pull the hutch out further. He didn’t look as satisfied as a moment ago, but he didn’t look nervous either.
“Is there a secret door back here?” asked the sheriff.
“No,” said Casey and Tucker in unison.
He pounded on the wall for a while to be sure. Cherty chuckled. He was satisfied again. I turned back to the window.
“Will you close that?” said Cherty.
“Nope,” I said. Casey joined me to look out.
“I’d a jumped,” she said.
“I know you would have,” I said, “but I don’t see even you making it back.”
I looked down at the remains of the snow on the sill, which I had been careful not to disturb. Unfortunately, whatever he’d done, he had brushed nearly all the snow off, and there were no signs left of what he’d done. All there was was some black ice and some crystallized snow, and none of it showing the mark of a boot, or a jumping machine, or a rope. Like he’d brushed it off, and then the ice had formed after.... I paused and I looked at it again.
“How many chairs were there in this room?” I said.
“Two!” said Tucker.
“Big ones?”
“Ordinary size.”
“And there were no doors on the hutch?”
“No,” said Tucker. He looked at me puzzled, and I thought I’d better check things out before I made a fool of myself. I went out and into the other room across the hall. It was even more empty than Cherty’s cell, and about the same temperature. I tugged up the window and brushed away the snow, and found no ice at all.
I went back into the cell, where they were looking at me like I was crazy. I looked at the sheriff.
“Something else was in this room,” I said. “Something big, and something that would burn.” I went over to the window and pulled it open again, since somebody had closed it. “There was a big fire in this room last night. Big enough to melt this snow while the window was open.”
I turned to Tucker and paused.
“Like maybe a fire ladder?” I said. His eyes opened wider and I could see him remember. “Like maybe one you forgot you had, because you didn’t need it down on the first floor?”
“I...thought it was in the other room,” said Tucker, as the sheriff started cussing him out.
“And it was long enough to reach to the other window, wasn’t it?” I added. “There ain’t enough room for one that would reach the ground.”
“I tried making an extension,” said Tucker, “but it didn’t work out right, so my wife wanted it long enough to reach the window. I just built what she wanted and forgot about it.”
Cherty wasn’t smirking so much now. He stood up and looked hard at me, and I could see if he got out of this I would need Casey watching my back.
“I guess you’ll find all the evidence you need, then,” he said. “If I went and burned up a ladder, there must be some fittings in those ashes.”
“No,” said Tucker. “That ladder was all wood. It had rope tying the extension together. A whole bunch of rope.” He turned apologetically to me. “I wasn’t real good at carpentry then.”
“Well, that’s just too bad,” said Cherty, his smirk returning. “Now you got no proof. You just got some unlikely speculation.”
“No,” I said, “it’s more than speculation....”
Cherty turned to the landlord.
“You said you’d left that ladder someplace else. So you can’t testify that it was here, can you?” He smirked as Tucker shook his head, and then he turned to the sheriff. “And if you’d seen it here, you wouldn’t have left it with me, would you?”
“It was behind the hutch,” I said. “And you moved that hutch.”
“Well, it was cold in here, and I was considering trying to burn it. You got no proof there was a ladder. No, all you got is speculating after the fact.” He turned back to the sheriff. “He’s just a young saddle bum, trying to talk his way out of trouble.”
I was aware that Casey wasn’t in the room any more. I wasn’t sure when or why she’d left—maybe to go off and be sure the ladder wasn’t in one of the other rooms. Cherty looked smug, and the sheriff looked doubtful.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” I asked.
“No, I don’t,” he replied. “But he’s right. There isn’t any evidence. Not any more than what gives him an alibi. If I just had something in hand....”
Justice could be swift in this part of the country, and not everybody cared about getting it right. I was glad that the sheriff didn’t want to get it wrong. I didn’t myself feel comfortable being the one rushing to judgment. I wasn’t that kind of man. I wanted evidence too.
The sheriff squatted down by the fire, and started stirring it around, looking for something in the ashes and coals. I looked at Tucker, and he looked uncertain. Cherty looked pleased, and I suppose I did not.
But that was when Casey came back. She stuck her head in the door, just staying out in the hall.
“Hey,” she said, looking at Tucker. He turned and she squinted at him. Then she pulled a hand from behind her back and held up a twisted bit of rope. The landlord took it from her.
“That’s the kind of rope that was on the ladder,” he said.
“It was around Wilkins’s neck,” said Casey, smirking back at Cherty.
“That ain’t proof it’s the same!” said Cherty.
Tucker, though, was looking over the rope closer.
“It’s the same,” he said. “Look, you can see where it was double-wrapped and tied to two round rungs, just like I’d tied up the ladder. See the marks?”
He wrapped the rope around, and you could see how it had been. It was enough for the sheriff, and later on it did turn out to be enough for a jury.
* * *
We didn’t get paid for the job of protecting Mr. Wilkins, since he was dead and we had not been hired to protect the stairs. Still, the sheriff admitted—under his breath but in front of witnesses—that I wasn’t as dumb as my reputation had led him to believe. That was pretty good. And we got hired to sit on Cherty for the next couple of days. After all, it was clear he needed close watching until he could be got to a real trial, judge and jury—and the appointment with the rope that would help him escape from this world.
* * * * *
Trail of the Lonesome Stickpin
After being drugged by a femme fatale, gunslinger Mick McKee has to figure out what happened real fast, before Casey shoots him. (First published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Summer 2004, and nominated by its publisher for an Edgar.)
* * *
When I woke up, I was lying flat on my back on the ceiling.
At least I thought it was the ceiling, but the furniture in the room was on the ceiling with me, and that didn’t hardly seem likely. It took a minute to get it into my swollen and throbbing head that I didn’t have to worry about falling. I was on the floor. I had already fallen as far as I was going to, and maybe it was time to get up.
My right hand made it up off the floor and felt for my gun, and I realized the whole gun belt was gone. I had been disarmed. That woke me up. I raised my left hand to my head, and I realized that I’d also been dis-hatted...and dis-booted...and pretty darn near dis-shirted and de-pantsed as well. I had been thoroughly unbuttoned, and clothes turned loose and ripped, and my pockets turned out.
I had a vague recollection of a pair of beautiful brown eyes, close to my face, and my hand in some soft blond hair. My wife had hazel eyes, and brown hair...and a pair of pearl handled Peacemakers, a Winchester and a bowie knife.
Yeah, I was in trouble. And yet I had a feeling of satisfaction, and that worried me even more, as far as I could manage a thought as sophisticated as a worry.
I raised my hand to remove the dry and sour bit of leather someone had shoved into my mouth, and discovered it was just my tongue. I put my fingers in my mouth to be sure, and they tasted sweet. I looked at them, and saw purple goo—now dry and coated with dust—staining my thumb. Pie. Blueberry and black cherry pie. I closed my eyes and nearly laughed. Wouldn’t you know there would be a pie involved when I got myself into trouble. Pie and women are pretty much my idea of heaven. But the laugh never happened, because the presence of pie made me feel I must have got myself involved in some kind of orgy, and the lingering touch of satisfaction made me feel guilty as hell.
I turned my head and saw the pie on the floor a few feet away from me. It was untouched except for the one spot oozing purple where my thumb had broken the crust when I had gripped it too hard. I remembered a flash of that too: I had felt myself passing out and I didn’t want to drop it. So I had set it down and rolled away as the drug took effect—and it was a drug, I was pretty sure. I didn’t drink that much, for one thing, and for another, my head hurt on the inside, but not on the outside, so I didn’t think anybody’d hit me.
The pie looked good, but I wasn’t hungry, so I looked at the room, which appeared to be the front of an abandoned store. A counter, a crooked old bench with an oil lamp, a couple of chairs, and my pie. And a ceiling that didn’t want to stay put. I closed my eyes and I heard sounds outside the door. Voices. I called out, although the sound came out more of a moan, muted by the pain in my head. The door busted open.
Casey, my wife and partner, stood in the door. She was a short woman, almost eighteen years old, but who looked younger, partly because she had, in the words of dime-novel fabulists, “forsaken the costume of her sex” and dressed like a man. Little girl in pig-tails, big hat, big boots, big guns, and a pair of sharp and fancy spurs. Not a woman you want to find you half-naked and groggy with a half-memory of a pair of pretty ladies getting the best of you.... Yeah, it was a pair of pretty ladies. I started to blush.
I couldn’t read the look on her face, mainly because she didn’t want me to, and partly because she didn’t know what to think. She took a deep breath and pushed aside any expression but determination, and she took three big steps over to me. She took hold of my head and started examining my scalp.
“Ow!” I said, as her fingers dug in.
“You got a bump?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t think I could manage more words, so I didn’t try. I heard a burst of laughter—laughter of disbelief—from the doorway.
“Well, hell!” said Deputy Tilly looking at me with no better expression than Casey had. “Looks like you had a good time!”
I turned to point at the uneaten pie to show how I had not had it so good, but just then Casey finished looking at my head, and decided it was whole and undamaged. She smacked me hard right above the ear, and then again harder, which hurt her hand, and we both yelled “ow” together.
“You lost the damn key!” she shouted, straight in my ear. I would have asked what key? but words were hard to come by and harder to say, and I was pretty sure I was supposed to know what key. I knew it was important, but not as important as Casey’s impression of me at the moment.
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry, and I raised my finger, pointed it at her, and made an extra effort.
“I...did...not...have...a good...time.”
“What happened?” said the deputy.
“Not sure.” Actually, I’m not sure I really said that. The effort of a whole sentence had spent my ability with words and thought, and I think what I actually said was, “Weh.”
They didn’t say anything for a dozen throbs of my head, while they looked at me in disgust. I sat up and noticed that my boots were across the room. And my gun belt. I was pleased that they were still there.
“The pin is gone,” said Casey.
The Pin. Diamond pin. Oh, yeah. The one we were guarding. The one locked in the hotel office in a lock box to which I held the key. Had held the key.
That key.
And yet, even recalling what was important about it, I couldn’t bring myself to care. What mattered was those brown eyes and that silky hair that did not belong to Casey...and the fact that I was half naked.
* * *
When Casey and I got married—which we did almost instantly upon meeting each other, and before we even knew each other’s real names—Casey had balked at the vows. Obey was out of the question, and the rest of it didn’t make much sense, since we didn’t hardly know each other. So she changed it and we vowed to watch each other’s backs. But I had already taken the regular vow when she decided to change it, so I’d taken both vows.
I did love, honor and cherish her, and I was faithful to her. I just happen to be easily distracted by pretty things, especially when they are female, or when they involve pie. And when my eyeballs get to wandering, Casey can get mad, but she mostly gets mad because it forces her to acknowledge that the other vow had meant something, and she still wasn’t sure she wanted to do that. Sometimes I was tempted to push the issue a little, just to get that acknowledgment, but the one thing Casey really trusted me for was not to hurt her feelings. It was bad enough doing it once in a while by accident, but I sure didn’t want to do it on purpose.
* * *
They got me on my feet, and gathered up my clothes, and got me tucked and buttoned. Putting my boots on my wobbly feet was too much trouble, so Casey carried them. Or maybe she was trying to punish me by making me walk barefoot over to the hotel.
We sat around a little table in the hotel office, me with a big cup of coffee in front of me while they discussed what to do. The pie was also in front of me and I stared at it wondering how it had led me into trouble, and as the coffee hit me, I began to remember.
I had gone off to get that pie...no, start earlier. Jewel robbery. A big diamond on a gold stick pin. It was valuable, but it was also of great sentimental value to the foreign fellow who owned it. So he offered a reward of two hundred dollars for its return. We, along with Deputy Tilly—who isn’t the brightest guy, but steady and we worked okay with him—tracked the thief, caught him, and got back the pin, but we were in a town with no jail and no sheriff. So we locked the thief in a room in the hotel, and locked the diamond up in a little strong box in the hotel office, and we set to guarding it.
“Did he get away?” I asked, meaning the thief.
“No,” said Casey. “It was his partners.”
“What partners?”
Casey just glared at me, and I remembered us speculating that the thief must have had a fancy woman as a partner, because the foreign fellow had been embarrassed, and reluctant to say how the thief had got the pin away from him. And now it looked like the same thing had happened to me, only I couldn’t remember enough to be embarrassed about it.
I was glad I was too groggy to talk much yet. Casey and Deputy Tilly ignored me, and talked about which way the ladies had most likely gone, and how to catch them. I set about trying to remember....
* * *
We were guarding the jewel. I was hungry, and so were they, and I said I’d go get something and bring it back. The deputy said we could take turns going to eat and checking on the prisoner, and I went first, and I had the key in my pocket.
Like in a lot of small western towns with more buildings and pride than people, the hotel wasn’t much on service, and so I went to the chow house across the street for some steak and bread. And I bought a pie to take back. It was a crisp, sweet summer pie, fresh and warm, and filled with blueberry and black cherries.
I was walking back with it, whistling, when a lady appeared in my way. An older lady, but she looked good and if she’d tried she might have distracted me with her charms, but she didn’t try. She pulled back the shawl that covered her gray hair—hair that was maybe too gray for the face, but I hadn’t noticed—and smiled a supplicating but well-dimpled smile. She had a mole next to the dimple to be sure a fellow would notice it.
“Sir, I need some help,” she said. “Would you mind? It’ll only take a minute.”
She pointed across the street to a storefront that was blank and stark in the twilight. The door was open and a younger woman stood in the doorway, with a broom in her hands and wearing the kind of apron that covered up her whole dress, sleeves and all. The younger woman had dimples too, and she didn’t need a mole to draw attention to them.
“We’re going to open a dressmaker’s shop,” said the older woman. “We’ve been working like the dickens to get this place cleaned up, but we’re just two little ladies.”
I went over to take a look at what they needed help with, and they led me inside. The place was nearly empty, with just a counter, chairs and a bench. The counter, which was tall and heavy, had been left half across the door that went into the back room. That was the problem. They needed somebody strong to move it, so I set down the pie and muscled the thing out of the way.
Then the older woman offered me some elderberry wine in a little cracked cup, and I turned it down because I had to stay up through the night. She seemed disappointed, and I felt ungentlemanly for not allowing her to thank me properly, so I jawed with her a little. That’s when the younger woman came up to me, blushing and blinking, and she put her hand on my arm and told me how strong and kind I was.
Was that when it happened? Was that the big brown eyes and my hand on her blond hair? No, I shook my head at her. I pulled my arm away, and backed off. I remember smiling at her and telling her she was a temptation, but....
* * *
“I told them I was married,” I announced, looking up. Casey gave me a look.
“Good for you,” she said with false enthusiasm, and she punched me in the arm. Then she turned back to Tilly and continued to ignore me.
“I was good,” I insisted.
“You lost the damn key,” she growled without looking at me.
“You were good and naked,” added Tilly.
I shut up. They were right about that. But I hadn’t let the lady touch more than my arm. I’d told her I was married and smiled and she kept coming, and then the older woman—her mother, they said—intervened. She reminded her daughter that the west was full of strong men, and there was no need to steal somebody’s husband. And she’d put a hand on my chest defensively and an arm around me while she said it. That was when she took the key from my pocket. I hadn’t noticed then, but I was sure of it now. A moment later she had hold of her daughter’s hands and was sending her on an errand. And I turned to go too, but she stopped me.
“If you won’t take wine, I bet you could use some coffee!”
She turned with a swish of skirts and dashed through the door I had just cleared for her. I followed her to the little room in back, which had a stove in it, but not much else, and she poured me some coffee in that same little cracked cup.
I took it, and I drank it. It had not seemed like a stupid thing to do at the time, and still doesn’t. She talked about her hopes for the dress shop, which I thought were probably high for such a little town without much prospects. There weren’t many women around, and what women there were didn’t often buy dresses—but maybe that’s because there hadn’t been a dress shop. You never knew.
And she did not bat her eyelashes at me once. I did not take off my clothes, and she didn’t try to either. And it seemed to me they must have already got the key from me by then anyway, and the daughter had gone to get the pin....
* * *
I frowned into my coffee, and then looked up at Casey and Tilly.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You two were supposed....” They both turned to glare at me, and I decided I had best not make any accusations. I started again, soft. “How’d they get the diamond?”
They both pulled back and sunk a little in their chairs. Tilly took a sudden deep interest in his own coffee.
“We didn’t know she had the key,” snapped Casey, her face going red.
“Oh,” I said, but I waited and kept looking at them. Tilly kept still, so Casey let out a slow and exasperated breath.
“She said she’d lost some gloves and the hotel guy told her he’d put them in the office, and she had Tilly all distracted looking for them,” said Casey. Tilly looked up from his coffee to scowl at her. His face was getting a little red too.
“You were watching her.”
“I was watching her,” she acknowledged, though she kept on at me as if he hadn’t said anything. “But he was poking around the cabinet right there by the lock box, and the woman kept hanging on right beside him, and they both blocked my view. So I told her to step back, and she turned and started talking to me, only she had her hands behind her, so I took hold of her and pulled her away. But the box was still locked.”
“And since we didn’t know she had the key,” said Tilly, “we thought it was okay if the box wasn’t busted into.”
“No we didn’t,” said Casey. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Seeing as we didn’t have the key, we couldn’t take a look inside to be sure.”
Tilly filled in the rest; they waited for me to come back and when I didn’t, they got suspicious and busted open the box, and found it empty. That’s when they rushed out and started looking for that lady and looking for me. They heard about two ladies who left on the stage, and how those ladies had been seen around an empty store around the corner, and that was how they found me.
“And you,” said Tilly, narrowing his eyes and turning it back on me. “Those ladies smiled at you, and you just tore off your clothes and handed them that key.”
“I was still wearing them when I passed out,” I said. I was sure of that. I rubbed my head and took a long drink of the coffee. Tilly sneered.
“And you’re such a good lookin’ fella, they tore your clothes right off.”
“They were looking for the key,” cut in Casey. “You saw how his pockets were turned out.”
“No, they already had the key,” I said, with more honesty than sense. “They must have been putting it back.”
Tilly started laughing, and Casey looked hard at me, and then at him. Tilly shook his head.
“I know it’s hard to admit in front of your girl....”
“My wife,” I said.
“Okay, your wife, which makes it harder yet. Those ladies had you going, and you were so eager, you tore your own clothes off. But you passed out before you got your pants off.”
“His pockets were turned out,” said Casey, stubbornly.
“Okay, they did look for the key,” said Tilly, “but they didn’t tear his clothes off to get it. He did that himself.”
“They already had the key,” I said again. “They were putting it back....”
“Then why’d they tear your clothes off?” said Tilly.
I took a breath. I didn’t have an answer, and furrowing my brow hurt my head. Casey pushed the coffee cup toward me, and turned back to Tilly.
“They were looking for the seventeen dollars he had in his pocket,” she said. Tilly shook his head in disgust.
“They didn’t have to tear his clothes off for that,” he said. “Damn fool thinks with his di...private parts.”
“He was thinking with his stomach,” said Casey firmly. She pointed to the pie. I appreciated her faith in me, although I wasn’t sure it was real faith. If she wouldn’t admit to having cause for jealousy, then she wouldn’t have to let anybody know how she felt.
“I was fully dressed when I passed out,” I repeated. “I remember that. I remember realizing I was going to pass out, and I had to put the pie down safe before I fell....”