“The dog,” Dean said. He was rubbing his neck where Wharton had wrapped the chain. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it. “How the dog’s neck was broken.”
“Anyway, I went on up to Purdom County to check Wharton’s court records—all we had here were the reports on the murders that got him to the Green Mile. The end of his career, in other words. I wanted the beginning.”
“Lot of trouble?” Brutal asked.
“Yeah. Vandalism, petty theft, setting haystack fires, even theft of an explosive—he and a friend swiped a stick of dynamite and set it off down by a creek. He got going early, ten years old, but what I wanted wasn’t there. Then the Sheriff turned up to see who I was and what I was doing, and that was actually lucky. I fibbed, told him that a cell-search had turned up a bunch of pictures in Wharton’s mattress—little girls with no clothes on. I said I’d wanted to see if Wharton had any kind of history as a pederast, because there were a couple of unsolved cases up in Tennessee that I’d heard about. I was careful never to mention the Detterick twins. I don’t think they crossed his mind, either.”
“Course not,” Harry said. “Why would they have? That case is solved, after all.”
“I said I guessed there was no sense chasing the idea, since there was nothing in Wharton’s back file. I mean, there was plenty in the file, but none of it about that sort of thing. Then the Sheriff—Catlett, his name is—laughed and said not everything a bad apple like Bill Wharton did was in the court files, and what did it matter, anyway? He was dead, wasn’t he?
“I said I was doing it just to satisfy my own curiosity, nothing else, and that relaxed him. He took me back to his office, sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee and a sinker, and told me that sixteen months ago, when Wharton was barely eighteen, a man in the western part of the county caught him in the barn with his daughter. It wasn’t rape, exactly; the fellow described it to Catlett as ‘not much more’n stinkfinger.’ Sorry, honey.”
“That’s all right,” Janice said. She looked pale, though.
“How old was the girl?” Brutal asked.
“Nine,” I said.
He winced.
“The man might’ve taken off after Wharton himself, if he’d had him some big old brothers or cousins to give him a help, but he didn’t. So he went to Catlett, but made it clear he only wanted Wharton warned. No one wants a nasty thing like that right out in public, if it can be helped. Anyway, Sheriff C. had been dealing with Wharton’s antics for quite some time—had him in the reform school up that way for eight months or so when Wharton was fifteen—and he decided enough was enough. He got three deputies, they went out to the Wharton place, set Missus Wharton aside when she started to weep and wail, and then they warned Mr. William ‘Billy the Kid’ Wharton what happens to big pimple-faced galoots who go up in the hayloft with girls not even old enough to have heard about their monthly courses, let alone started them. ‘We warned that little punk good,’ Catlett told me. ‘Warned him until his head was bleedin, his shoulder was dislocated, and his ass was damn near broke.’”
Brutal was laughing in spite of himself. “That sounds like Purdom County, all right,” he said. “Like as not.”
“It was three months later, give or take, that Wharton broke out and started the spree that ended with the holdup,” I said. “That and the murders that got him to us.”
“So he’d had something to do with an underage girl once,” Harry said. He took off his glasses, huffed on them, polished them. “Way underage. Once isn’t exactly a pattern, is it?”
“A man doesn’t do a thing like that just once,” my wife said, then pressed her lips together so tight they almost weren’t there.
Next I told them about my visit to Trapingus County. I’d been a lot more frank with Rob McGee—I’d had no choice, really. To this day I have no idea what sort of story he spun for Mr. Detterick, but the McGee who sat down next to me in the diner seemed to have aged seven years.
In mid-May, about a month before the holdup and the murders which finished Wharton’s short career as an outlaw, Klaus Detterick had painted his barn (and, incidentally, Bowser’s doghouse next to it). He hadn’t wanted his son crawling around up on a high scaffolding, and the boy had been in school, anyway, so he had hired a fellow. A nice enough fellow. Very quiet. Three days’ work it had been. No, the fellow hadn’t slept at the house, Detterick wasn’t foolish enough to believe that nice and quiet always meant safe, especially in those days, when there was so much dust-bowl riffraff on the roads. A man with a family had to be careful. In any case, the man hadn’t needed lodging; he told Detterick he had taken a room in town, at Eva Price’s. There was a lady named Eva Price in Tefton, and she did rent rooms, but she hadn’t had a boarder that May who fit the description of Detterick’s hired man, just the usual fellows in checked suits and derby hats, hauling sample cases—drummers, in other words. McGee had been able to tell me that because he stopped at Mrs. Price’s and checked on his way back from the Detterick farm—that’s how upset he was.
“Even so,” he added, “there’s no law against a man sleeping rough in the woods, Mr. Edgecombe. I’ve done it a time or two myself.”
The hired man didn’t sleep at the Dettericks’ house, but he took dinner with them twice. He would have met Howie. He would have met the girls, Cora and Kathe. He would have listened to their chatter, some of which might have been about how much they looked forward to the coming summer, because if they were good and the weather was good, Mommy sometimes let them sleep out on the porch, where they could pretend they were pioneer wives crossing the Great Plains in Conestoga wagons.
I can see him sitting there at the table, eating roast chicken and Mrs. Detterick’s rye bread, listening, keeping his wolf’s eyes well veiled, nodding, smiling a little, storing it all up.
“This doesn’t sound like the wildman you told me about when he first came on the Mile, Paul,” Janice said doubtfully. “Not a bit.”
“You didn’t see him up at Indianola Hospital, ma’am,” Harry said. “Just standin there with his mouth open and his bare butt hangin out the back of his johnny. Lettin us dress him. We thought he was either drugged or foolish. Didn’t we, Dean?”
Dean nodded.
“The day after he finished the barn and left, a man wearing a bandanna mask robbed Hampey’s Freight Office in Jarvis,” I told them. “Got away with seventy dollars. He also took an 1892 silver dollar the freight agent carried as a lucky piece. That silver dollar was on Wharton when he was captured, and Jarvis is only thirty miles from Tefton.”
“So this robber… this wildman… you think he stopped for three days to help Klaus Detterick paint his barn,” my wife said. “Ate dinner with them and said please pass the peas just like folks.”
“The scariest thing about men like him is how unpredictable they are,” Brutal said. “He might’ve been planning to kill the Dettericks and rifle their house, then changed his mind because a cloud came over the sun at the wrong time, or something like. Maybe he just wanted to cool off a little. But most likely he already had his eye on those two girls and was planning to come back. Do you think, Paul?”
I nodded. Of course I thought it. “And then there’s the name he gave Detterick.”
“What name?” Jan asked.
“Will Bonney.”
“Bonney? I don’t—”
“It was Billy the Kid’s real name.”