The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (19 page)

“I don't think so. He's too bone-stupid. If he'd had that dollar, he'd have gone back to the Chuck-a-Luck and drunk it up.”

“What are you saying?” Dave asked. “That you think he's innocent?”

“I'm saying I wish we'd found that cartwheel.”

“Maybe he lost it out a hole in his pocket.”

“He didn't have any holes in his pockets,” Barclay said. “Only one in his boot, and it wasn't big enough for a dollar to get through.” He drank some of his beer. The tumbleweeds blowing up Main Street looked like ghostly brains in the snow.

The jury took an hour and a half. “We voted to hang him on the first ballot,” Kelton Fisher said later, “but we wanted it to look decent.”

Mizell asked Trusdale if he had anything to say before sentence was passed.

“I can't think of nothing,” Trusdale said. “Just I never killed that girl.”

The storm blew for three days. John House asked Barclay how much he reckoned Trusdale weighed, and Barclay said he guessed the man went around one-forty. House made a dummy out of burlap sacks and filled it with stones, weighing it on the hostelry scales until the needle stood pat on one-forty. Then he hanged the dummy while half the town stood around in the snowdrifts and watched. The trial run went all right.

On the night before the execution, the weather cleared. Sheriff Barclay told Trusdale he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Trusdale asked for steak and eggs, with home fries on the side soaked in gravy. Barclay paid for it out of his own pocket, then sat at his desk cleaning his fingernails and listening to the steady clink of Trusdale's knife and fork on the china plate. When it stopped, he went in. Trusdale was sitting on his bunk. His plate was so clean Barclay figured he must have lapped up the last of the gravy like a dog. He was crying.

“Something just come to me,” Trusdale said.

“What's that, Jim?”

“If they hang me tomorrow morning, I'll go into my grave with steak and eggs still in my belly. It won't have no chance to work through.”

For a moment Barclay said nothing. He was horrified not by the image but because Trusdale had thought of it. Then he said, “Wipe your nose.”

Trusdale wiped it.

“Now listen to me, Jim, because this is your last chance. You were in that bar in the middle of the afternoon. Not many people in there then. Isn't that right?”

“I guess it is.”

“Then who took your hat? Close your eyes. Think back. See it.”

Trusdale closed his eyes. Barclay waited. At last Trusdale opened his eyes, which were red from crying. “I can't even remember was I wearing it.”

Barclay sighed. “Give me your plate, and mind that knife.”

Trusdale handed the plate through the bars with the knife and fork laid on it, and said he wished he could have some beer. Barclay thought it over, then put on his heavy coat and Stetson and walked down to the Chuck-a-Luck, where he got a small pail of beer from Dale Gerard. Undertaker Hines was just finishing a glass of wine. He followed Barclay out.

“Big day tomorrow,” Barclay said. “There hasn't been a hanging here in ten years, and with luck there won't be another for ten more. I'll be gone out of the job by then. I wish I was now.”

Hines looked at him. “You really don't think he killed her.”

“If he didn't,” Barclay said, “whoever did is still walking around.”

The hanging was at nine o'clock the next morning. The day was windy and bitterly cold, but most of the town turned out to watch. Pastor Ray Rowles stood on the scaffold next to John House. Both of them were shivering in spite of their coats and scarves. The pages of Pastor Rowles's Bible fluttered. Tucked into House's belt, also fluttering, was a hood of homespun cloth dyed black.

Barclay led Trusdale, his hands cuffed behind his back, to the gallows. Trusdale was all right until he got to the steps, then he began to buck and cry.

“Don't do this,” he said. “Please don't do this to me. Please don't hurt me. Please don't kill me.”

He was strong for a little man, and Barclay motioned Dave Fisher to come and lend a hand. Together they muscled Trusdale, twisting and ducking and pushing, up the twelve wooden steps. Once he bucked so hard all three of them almost fell off, and arms reached up to catch them if they did.

“Quit that and die like a man!” someone shouted.

On the platform, Trusdale was momentarily quiet, but when Pastor Rowles commenced Psalm 51, he began to scream. “Like a woman with her tit caught in the wringer,” someone said later in the Chuck-a-Luck.

“Have mercy on me, O God, after thy great goodness,” Rowles read, raising his voice to be heard above the condemned man's shrieks to be let off. “According to the multitude of thy mercies, do away with mine offenses.”

When Trusdale saw House take the black hood out of his belt, he began to pant like a dog. He shook his head from side to side, trying to dodge the hood. His hair flew. House followed each jerk patiently, like a man who means to bridle a skittish horse.

“Let me look at the mountains!” Trusdale bellowed. Runners of snot hung from his nostrils. “I'll be good if you let me look at the mountains one more time!”

But House only jammed the hood over Trusdale's head and pulled it down to his shaking shoulders. Pastor Rowles was droning on, and Trusdale tried to run off the trapdoor. Barclay and Fisher pushed him back onto it. Down below, someone cried, “Ride 'em, cowboy!”

“Say amen,” Barclay told Pastor Rowles. “For Christ's sake, say amen.”

“Amen,” Pastor Rowles said, and stepped back, closing his Bible with a clap.

Barclay nodded to House. House pulled the lever. The greased beam retracted and the trap dropped. So did Trusdale. There was a crack when his neck broke. His legs drew up almost to his chin, then fell back limp. Yellow drops stained the snow under his feet.

“There, you bastard!” Rebecca Cline's father shouted. “Died pissing like a dog on a fireplug. Welcome to Hell.” A few people clapped.

The spectators stayed until Trusdale's corpse, still wearing the black hood, was laid in the same hurry-up wagon he'd ridden to town in. Then they dispersed.

Barclay went back to the jail and sat in the cell Trusdale had occupied. He sat there for ten minutes. It was cold enough to see his breath. He knew what he was waiting for, and eventually it came. He picked up the small bucket that had held Trusdale's last drink of beer and vomited. Then he went into his office and stoked up the stove.

He was still there eight hours later, trying to read a book, when Abel Hines came in. He said, “You need to come down to the funeral parlor, Otis. There's something I want to show you.”

“What?”

“No. You'll want to see it for yourself.”

They walked down to the Hines Funeral Parlor & Mortuary. In the back room, Trusdale lay naked on a cooling board. There was a smell of chemicals and shit.

“They load their pants when they die that way,” Hines said. “Even men who go to it with their heads up. They can't help it. The sphincter lets go.”

“And?”

“Step over here. I figure a man in your job has seen worse than a pair of shitty drawers.”

They lay on the floor, mostly turned inside out. Something gleamed in the mess. Barclay leaned closer and saw it was a silver dollar. He reached down and plucked it from the crap.

“I don't understand it,” Hines said. “Son of a bitch was locked up a good long time.”

There was a chair in the corner. Barclay sat down on it so heavily he made a little
woof
sound. “He must have swallowed it the first time when he saw our lanterns coming. And every time it came out he cleaned it off and swallowed it again.”

The two men stared at each other.

“You believed him,” Hines said at last.

“Fool that I am, I did.”

“Maybe that says more about you than it does about him.”

“He went on saying he was innocent right to the end. He'll most likely stand at the throne of God saying the same thing.”

“Yes,” Hines said.

“I don't understand. He was going to hang. Either way, he was going to hang. Do you understand it?”

“I don't even understand why the sun comes up. What are you going to do with that cartwheel? Give it back to the girl's mother and father? It might be better if you didn't, because . . .” Hines shrugged.

Because the Clines knew all along. Everyone in town knew all along. He was the only one who hadn't known. Fool that he was.

“I don't know what I'm going to do with it,” he said.

The wind gusted, bringing the sound of singing. It was coming from the church. It was the Doxology.

ELMORE LEONARD

FROM
Charlie Martz and Other Stories

1955

P
AST
H
OWELL, HE
kept the speedometer needle at seventy for almost six miles, until he was in sight of the mailbox. Then he eased his foot from the accelerator, braked, and turned off the highway onto the road that cut back through the trees. The road was little wider than his car, a dim, rutted passageway that twice climbed into small clearings, but through most of its quarter of a mile kept to tree-covered dimness until it opened onto the yard and the one-story white farmhouse. He left the car in the gravel drive and went in the side door. It was almost seven o'clock in the evening.

“Ev?”

He heard Julie's voice and passed through the kitchen to see his wife at the end of the hall coming out of the bedroom. She went to him quickly, kissing him and holding herself against him for a moment before looking up.

“I was starting to worry—”

“They haven't been here?” Evan asked.

His wife's hair, smooth dark, parted on the side and clipped with a silver barrette, hung almost to her shoulders, where it turned up softly and moved as she shook her head. She was twenty-three, with a slight, boyish figure, a perhaps too-thin face, though her features were delicately small and even, and with freckles she did not try to conceal because her husband liked them.

“Did they call?” asked Evan.

“Not a word since Cal telephoned this morning.”

“If they left Detroit at two . . .” Evan paused. “Isn't that what Cal said?”

Julie nodded. “He was picking up Ray at two o'clock and coming right on.”

“They would've been here three hours ago if he did.”

She started to smile as she said, “Maybe they were in an accident.” In the dimness, but with light coming from the kitchen doorway, her teeth were small and white against the warm brown of her face.

Evan smiled too, looking at his wife and feeling her close to him. “Thank God for small blessings.”

“Or Cal forgot the way,” she said.

“Or they stopped at a bar.”

Her smile faded. “That's all we'd need.” She followed Evan into the kitchen and leaned against the white-painted, oilcloth-covered table as he washed his hands at the sink. She liked to watch him as he lathered his hands vigorously, then rinsed them until the callused palms glistened yellow-pink and fresh-looking. She liked what she called his “honest farmer tan”: face and arms a deep brown, with a line across his forehead and upper arms where the color ended abruptly. She even liked his “farmer haircut,” with too much thinned out from the sides—just as he liked her freckles and the way her hair moved when she shook her head. They had been married less than a year and noticing and liking these things about one another were as important as anything they shared.

“I was beginning to worry about you,” she said.

“It took longer than I thought it would.”

“A reluctant calf?”

Evan nodded, drying his hands.

“Did he pay you?”

“Not yet.”

“He didn't pay for the brucellosis shots either.”

“He will, when he gets his wheat check.”

“Eight miles both ways and I'll bet he didn't even thank you.”

“He mumbled something.”

“Ev, that's a sixteen-mile round trip . . . and a messy afternoon in his barn. For what? Eight or nine dollars.”

He looked at her curiously. “That wasn't a child I delivered, it was a calf.”

“Four years of veterinary medicine to charge eight dollars—”

“Twenty-five. I had to cut.”

“It's still too little, with the attention you give.”

“Do you expect him to pay more than the calf's worth?”

She shook her head faintly. “Good Sam.”

He frowned, moving toward her. “Julie, what's the matter with you?”

“I'm sorry.”

“You sound like Cal, talking about money like that.”

“I said I was sorry.”

For a moment Evan was silent. “You're upset about them coming, aren't you?” He was standing close to her now, and he drew her against him gently. “All of a sudden you sound like a different person. Listen, don't let him get you down like that.”

She closed her eyes, her arms going around his waist. “I was afraid they'd come while you were gone. Then I hoped they would because I didn't want you to be here.”

“The worrier.”

“Ev, this isn't like the little worries. First I thought,
It's better if you and Ray don't meet.
Then I thought,
No, I don't want to be here alone.
And I wasn't sure which would be worse.”

“Julie, Ray knows you're married.”

“That's just it.”

“But you went with the guy for two years. He can't be that bad.”

“He was hard to get along with and conceited and . . . I don't know. I can't even think of one thing in his favor.”

“Well, maybe he's grown up.”

“I think that would be asking too much,” Julie said.