Red cent, p.7
Red Cent, page 7
part #2 of Jake Hatch Series
"The question is, am I a violent person?"
When I looked at him, he had his head turned and was looking up at me with a little smile on his face. Then he straightened up and put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the table next to him.
We sat there grinning at each other.
"I know you from somewhere else?" I asked.
"If we'd ever met before, you'd have remembered. I don't think you're the sort who forgets much. It doesn't take a mental whiz to figure out you came down here looking for me and knew who I was when you walked through the door. Question is, who are you?"
"I told you. My name's Jake Hatch and I work for the Burlington Northern."
"Railroad detective?"
"That's right."
"What's your interest?"
"I'd like to know if it was a random shot that killed your brother-in-law."
"You think I hid out there in the tulles and waited for the train to come by just as Harold was sitting down to dinner and blew his head off through the window?"
"It could have been done."
"Only if somebody was a mind reader. Who'd know he was going to sit down just about that time?"
"That's a good question." I took out my notebook and wrote it down. "I'm not as good remembering things as you may think."
"Mine's starting to fade, I can tell you that."
The one thing that surely never fades is feelings of strong hate and the desire for revenge. All I had to do was find out if there was anything strong enough between Chaney and Banner to warrant killing ten years after their relationship had ended.
"You come to see Harold to refresh your memory about something?"
"Oh, my, you mean like did I hate Harold for dropping me by the wayside?"
"It's a thought."
"I liked Harold. I didn't love him like a brother, even when we were together sometime during practically every day. What we wanted out of life was too much different to make us close friends. But I liked him and never wished him any harm."
"Even when he dumped you and went on to make a fortune?"
"I never wanted a fortune. You're as bad as my folks used to be. They just couldn't understand that I didn't want a fortune. I never wanted to pay the price. Not because I had dreams of being a great artist. I was never good enough to be anything but passable. But it gave me joy and it's all I ever wanted."
"That and hunting."
He shrugged, having said all he was going to say about that.
"Besides, Harold didn't do me rotten. He gave me some shares in the parent company before it started to grow all over the place."
Something in my expression must have asked the question, because he made a great show of looking down at his run-over shoes and brushing off the front of his jacket.
"Even a few shares in such a successful enterprise should allow me to keep up appearances a little better than this, right?"
"Well, I . . . "
"Even if artists are supposed to be careless about how they dress, surely even they would spruce up for a funeral if they had the means to do so, right?"
I didn't bother even starting a comment.
"I sold off the shares he gave me one by one—usually at the bottom of a market—and I don't have but a very few left. The dividends each half don't count for much."
"You could sell them too, couldn't you?"
"I could, but I was finally acting with a little bit of prudence. I was holding them until Chaney Enterprises was bought up by the Whente Conglomerate."
"Oh? That's the first I heard who was behind it."
"You follow the financial world pretty carefully, do you?" he asked, smirking at me.
"I was just responding. You know. I thought it was better than saying huh."
I was beginning to see that Banner wasn't a very likable fella. The bohemian pretensions that might be attractive in a young man soon wear thin as the years go on. Pretty soon failure gets bigger than aspiration. When there's no payoff, it's no longer possible to admire somebody living on hope and doubtful expectations, even if a few do get famous after they're dead. Most failed artists aren't admired and become bitter people, too late wanting what they never gave time to earn.
"Is Chaney's death going to affect the deal?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I don't sit in on the board meetings. I expect Florence Chaney and the two children will own the majority of the voting shares."
"Not the grandmother?"
"Harold provided for her long ago. I doubt he would've based the money that guarantees her security on stocks in his own firm. He used to tell me stories how old people with such holdings were bilked and cheated out of them if anything happened to the original management. Her fortune's all in municipals and treasury bonds, I'll bet."
"Does Florence Chaney know enough about the business to make the right decision?"
"That depends on who you ask about what the right decision might be. I was all for the buy-out because it would've increased the value of the few shares I've got left. Lewis Warden might not be for it."
"Chaney's partner?"
"And executive assistant. He's a fairly young man and he'd probably rather have the companies to run than the small fortune he'd realize from his own shares if the deal went through."
"How young is young?"
"Late thirties. He was the metallurgy whiz that started the whole shebang. But I hear tell he's as interested in management and administration as metallurgy since the corporation expanded."
"Is he a social friend of the Chaneys besides being a business associate?"
He gave me that sly, sarcastic grin. "Very friendly. Very friendly," he said.
FIFTEEN
CHICAGO TO DENVER is one thousand and thirty-eight railroad miles, an overnighter, and Chaney was not the sort of man to ride the coaches. In fact, it was a wonder to me that a man with his money, who was known to love the trains so much, didn't have a private car ready to be hooked up for his frequent trips from one city to another.
I checked with reservations, where sleeper patrons are recorded by name, and saw that Chaney'd made the journey over the past year and a half at least once a week and sometimes more.
If I asked anybody, I already knew what they'd say, that Chaney's business took him all over the place and when I asked how come so much to Denver they'd say they didn't know but surely it had to be on business. After all, he had plants and factories all along the way. I found out for a fact that his pilot plant, where all the new products and manufacturing techniques were tested, was in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and since I was told that was where this Lewis Warden could be found most of the time, I decided that was going to be the next place I'd visit.
Fort Morgan was only thirty-four miles from Akron, where my friends Bess and George McGilvray lived.
Also, Maggie Wister, who'd helped me on a case not long ago, because she was deaf and mute and could read lips, had her little house about a half dozen miles outside of Akron along a country road. A calmer, sweeter woman you'll never meet, and it had been a month or more since I'd paid a visit.
The train took me into Fort Morgan at six-fifteen in the morning. I called Janel Butterfield, who lived about fifteen miles outside of town, and asked her if she'd welcome a visit and she said she would after only a moment's hesitation.
Janel puts the most delicious country breakfast you ever tasted on the table. The eggs are fresh out of the hen house, the ham sliced from quarters she's smoked herself with hickory and applewood, the honey comes from her own hives, the bees browsing clover and fruit trees, and the milk is the real stuff, traded with a farmer down the road who swears Janel bakes the best sweet rolls in the state.
I borrowed a ride with the postman who drives out to the end of his rural route and works back. Janel's nearly at the beginning of it, so it was no time at all before I was sitting down to ambrosia while Janel sat across the table from me in the sunshine coming through the kitchen window and studied me in a way that made me a little uncomfortable.
"What is it, Janel?" I asked. "Is there something different about me?"
"How old are you now, Jake?"
"Well, now, Janel," I said, somewhat startled, "I've never known you to ask a personal question like that."
"You're fifty-five if you're a day."
"Well, all right, that's close enough so's not to matter."
"It's time to stop larking about."
"Larking? What do you mean, larking, Janel?"
"I mean visiting a woman in every train station along the way. Even some that have been taken off the timetable. Like Akron, for instance."
"Akron, Ohio?"
"You know very well I mean Akron, Colorado, where a widow by the name of Maggie Wister lives."
"Maggie Wister?"
"The lady who's deaf and dumb."
"Mute, Janel. They don't say dumb anymore. It's got connotations."
Janel dipped her head. "Thank you. I'll remember that. Of course I never used the word to Mrs. Wister."
"You've talked to her?" I blurted out, wondering what was going on here.
"I've got a cousin lives outside of Akron."
"I didn't know."
A little smile curled up one side of Janel's pretty mouth. "Well, maybe I didn't mention my cousin because she's a pretty divorcee."
"I see," I said, just to have something to say and give myself some thinking room.
"We went to a social at her church one Sunday afternoon. Maggie Wister was there. She's a very nice woman."
"Yes, she is."
"Suffers her widowhood in quiet."
"Well, she'd have to, wouldn't she?"
"That's not a joke, is it, Jake? I don't think being deaf is something to joke about."
"It wasn't meant as a joke. It was just an observation. But I might mention that Maggie Wister takes it more lightly than you're taking it if I do say something amusing about her condition."
"Women put up with a lot when a man is decent otherwise and they think there's hope."
"Hope for what, Janel?"
"Hope for getting married, Jake."
"Oh."
"How many years have you been grazing in one meadow and then another?"
I kind of liked the way Janel put my amorous adventures into pastoral terms.
"I'm not sure I get your meaning."
"How many years have you been romancing a dozen ladies at a time?"
"No, no, not a dozen. Please."
She was embarrassing me and it was hard for me to respond modestly in the face of the facts.
"However many. How many years?"
"Well, I've had several lady friends for as long as I can remember. A man can live solitary with reason able contentment, but there are times when he misses simple things like hugging a woman something awful."
"A woman can live solitary too, Jake. Maybe we can do it a lot better than men. After all, we know, married or not, we'll probably live our last years out all alone, children grown and gone, husband dead or gone off with a younger woman."
"Oh dear," I said.
"What are you oh-dearing about?"
"You're not going to scold me for every man that ever left a wife, are you, Janel?"
"Of course not. I'm going to scold you for wanting to be the everlasting boy. You've got too much of a pot . . ."
". . . to be playing Peter Pan. You've got to stop flitting from flower to flower. You've got to settle on one."
"Just a minute, Janel," I said, "I don't mind a little lecture with my hot cakes, but it seems to me I have a perfect right to live my life the way I want to."
"I never said you didn't. What I'm saying is you've got to face the realities."
"What realities?"
"We're coming into the plague years, just as it's written in the Bible. Don't make a face at me. You know I'm a believer but no fanatic. Bible or no, the plague years are upon us. You can believe they're punishment for the promiscuity that ran riot in the world over the last ten or twenty years, or you can believe they're not, but you can't not believe there's some connection with what's happening now and what went before. Forget about divine punishment. Just look at the data. Everybody dies who gets the plague, sooner or later, and the kind of gallivanting you've been used to makes you a candidate."
"Now, just hold on a minute here," I said. She'd started to scare me. "You've got me in my coffin."
"I've got you in danger. In danger of getting it and in danger of passing it around."
"Now you're making me sound like the Typhoid Mary of AIDS. I don't seek or enjoy the company of ladies who're likely to have it."
"You have a friend, Harriet Lawry, in Denver?"
I was beginning to like this less and less. It looked to me like Janel, and maybe others, were checking up on me more than was right or a whole crowd of my women acquaintances were networking and comparing notes on me.
"How do you know Harriet Lawry? Was she at the church social too?"
"Never mind," she said, waving any further questions away. "Ms. Lawry's an artist, isn't she?"
"You're not going to tell me now that artists are more promiscuous than most."
"I'm saying that she's an attractive woman, from what I've heard, and you certainly don't flatter yourself that you're her only friend, do you? If she seeks the company of others, maybe artists like herself, painters and writers and musicians, the first thing you know you're coming awfully close to drug users and bisexual men in greater numbers than you'd find in the ordinary population."
"You can't go condemning a whole class of people—"
"I'm not condemning. I'm not accusing. I'm simply saying the odds of passing around the virus increases in big cities and among certain people. For the good Lord's sake, Jake, I'm not making judgments. I've been generous enough with my favors not to claim sainthood. I'm just saying times have changed and you can't keep playing the ram amid the flock anymore."
All this lecturing didn't do a lot of good to my appetite, and then there was that crack about my pot. So I only went back for seconds instead of thirds and didn't put any cream in my fourth cup of coffee.
Then I thanked Janel sweetly, kissed her on the mouth with minimal body contact—because I knew she'd only say no to anything I might suggest anyway—and told her I'd think about what she'd said on my way back to town.
"How do you expect to get there?" she asked.
"I expect I'll catch a ride with somebody on their way in."
"I doubt it," she said. "Let me get my coat and I'll drive you in. I have things to buy at the market anyway."
Which is what we did. I kissed her again in Fort Morgan, on the cheek this time, and went to the drugstore to call the factory to see if Lewis Warden was there.
SIXTEEN
LEWIS WARDEN WAS WAITING for me in his office. As expected, he was the same Lewis who'd shown up at the morgue in Des Moines with Mrs. Chaney. But I hadn't seen him the first evening at the funeral home. He was sitting behind a desk that looked like a made-over laboratory table. The outlet cut into the top for a Bunsen burner was still there off in one corner. There was another such workbench with a rack for test tubes and retorts against one wall. There was no carpet on the floor. Instead it was surfaced with rubber industrial matting. About the only things that made the room look like anything but a working lab was a lawyer's bookcase behind and to one side of his desk. It was filled with marksmanship trophies and more were displayed on the top.
"You're pretty good?" I said.
"Not Olympic class, but world class," he said. "I went into training for the winter biathlon about eight years ago but it took too much time away from my work."
"Which is metallurgy?"
"Specifically, the plating, molding, and drawing of exotic alloys."
He took a packet of chewing gum from his sweater pocket and offered me a stick. I said no, it got caught in my partial. He unwrapped a stick, folded it twice, and popped it into his mouth.
"Winter biathlon's what? Riding, fencing . . ." I started to ask.
"It's a twenty-kilometer cross-country race on skis with firing exercises with a rifle at four, eight, twelve, and sixteen kilometers."
"You do any other kind of shooting?"
"A little bench and skeet. Are you a gun enthusiast, Mr. Hatch?"
"Well, no. I'm a pretty good offhand shot, of course. Any man raised out in the country as a boy has shot himself a squirrel or two, maybe a deer."
"Did you shoot your deer?"
"That's what decided me against hunting. I got me a buck when I was twelve. I can still plink a tin can at thirty yards nine times out of ten, but I get no pleasure from it."
"Anybody who likes guns is a nut, that it?"
"I never said that. No, to each his own, I always say. Anybody wants to plink away at clay birds and paper targets, that's okay with me. Shooting animals and people? Now that's a different thing. You ever shoot animals?"
"Now and then."
"What about people?"
"Not lately."
"How's that, not lately?"
"I did my tour in Nam."
I nodded.
"You ever do a tour?" he asked.
"Korea was my war," I said.
"Police action."
"Whatever. People were dying, no matter what they called it."
"See any combat?" he asked.
"Saw plenty but wasn't in it. CID."
"So you got a taste of being a cop in the Criminal Investigation Division?" he said.
"Oh, I think I would've ended up being a cop anyway. My mother always said I was a nosy one even when I was knee-high."
"So, is it just being nosy that's got you looking into Harold's accident?"
"You're convinced of that, are you?"
"They've got those Indians in the slammer up in Marshalltown and—"
"How's that?" I asked, busting right in on him. "When I went to see those young men they were in the jail at Indianola."
"I expect they didn't think that little lockup would hold them if they decided to break out."
"Why would they want to break out?"
"To avoid trial, I suppose," Warden said, frowning as though I was irritating him with all these foolish questions. "State's attorney's office is bringing charges of manslaughter."
