Kerry was standing a few feet away gawping at me. I said to her, “Get on the phone, call the Highway Patrol. Tell them we need an ambulance. Tell them to hurry.”
“I don’t understand, what’s going on—?”
“This man is the real Sam Kern, or at least somebody who works here,” I said. “The one I hit is an impostor — probably either an escaped convict or a recent parolee. Tell the Highway Patrol that, too.”
“God,” she said, but she didn’t argue; she went straight to the phone behind the bar.
I took another look at the wiry guy. He hadn’t moved an inch, and the way he was breathing satisfied me he was going to be out for some time. In the pocket of his chinos I found a wallet full of ID that identified it as Sam Kern’s; but the photograph on the driver’s license was that of the wounded man at the table.
I went out into the rain, got the set of emergency handcuffs I keep in the trunk of the car, took them back inside, and snapped one cuff around the wiry guy’s wrist and the other around the brass rail. I was over looking at Sam Kern again when Kerry finished with her telephone call.
“They’re sending people out right away,” she said.
“Good. This is Kern, all right, and I think he’ll be okay; but you can’t tell with head injuries. We’d better just leave him where he is.”
She wet a cloth and brought it over and laid it across Kern’s neck without touching his wound. Her eyes were big and her cheeks had a milky cast; she still looked confused.
“How did you know?” she said.
“That the other guy was an impostor? Half a dozen reasons. You’re always trying to play detective; how come you didn’t spot them?”
“Don’t kid around, you. What reasons?”
“All right. One, he told us he was just getting ready to close up and go home, yet there’s a big log fire blazing away in the fireplace. No tavern owner would stoke up a fire like that just before closing for the night.
“Two, he told us this man here was a regular customer and that he wouldn’t let him drive home until he sobered up. But where’s his car? It’s not out front; the parking area was deserted when we drove in. There’s no room for a car around back and there wasn’t one on that access road either.
“Three, the hat the real Kern was wearing. How many men sit in a bar and get drunk with their coat off but their hat still on? And not only on, but jammed down tight on his head. Had to be some reason for the hat — to hide something like that head wound.
“Four, you asked the other one for a toddy; he didn’t know what you meant at first. Then he made it with rum instead of bourbon. Could have been a mistake, but that’s not likely for a man who has been serving drinks at the same bar for twenty years; that man knows which bottle is which. No, it’s the kind of mistake somebody makes if he not only doesn’t know how well the bottles are arranged but isn’t enough of a bartender in the first place to know how to make a hot toddy.
“Five, he said he couldn’t change my twenty because he’d taken every dime out of the cash register and put it in the safe. And the drawer is empty; I saw it when you paid him. But what kind of businessman empties his cash drawer before he locks up for the night, when customers like us might still show up? And how many businessmen clean out their cash drawers completely? All the ones I know leave at least the change in there and most also leave a few singles, so they won’t have to bother putting it all back the next day.”
Kerry no longer looked confused; now she looked a little cowed. She said, “You said he’s probably an escaped convict or a recent parolee. How could you possibly know that?”
“That’s number six,” I said. “The color of his skin, babe — it’s white, pasty. No man who has lived in these mountains for twenty years, as hot as it gets up here in the summer, could have a complexion like that; the only people who do are shut-ins, hospital patients, and convicts.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice.
“I figure it happened something like this: He arrived here earlier tonight — hitchhiking, probably; which would make him a parolee, or else he’d have picked up his own set of wheels. He found himself alone with Kern and it was a set-up he couldn’t resist. Maybe he had that .357 Magnum with him; more likely it belongs to Kern. In any case he used something hard to knock Kern over the head — out on this side of the bar, maybe while Kern was stoking the fire. Then he rifled the till. But he’s not too smart; he forgot to lock the front door first.
“Then we showed up. When he saw our headlights through the window he didn’t know who we might be. He could have done any of three things. Run and lock the door and pretend the place was closed — but what if we were friends of Kern’s? What if we looked through the window in any event and saw Kern lying on the floor? His second alternative was to let us come in and throw down on us, rob us too and steal our car; and that’s probably what he would have done if we’d been locals who knew Kern. But he didn’t want to do it that way; it would only buy him more trouble, leave one or more people who could identify him as an armed thief a lot more easily than a man with a busted head. And he’s not a killer, thank Christ, so that alternative was out. His only other choice was to find out if we were strangers — he asked about that right away, remember — and if we were, to run a bluff and get rid of us quick.
“He picked Kern up off the floor, draped him over the table, and shoved that hat down over his head to hide the wound. His own hat, maybe; it had to have been handy. Kern was probably wearing the apron, so all he had to do was yank it off and tie it around himself to cover the gun inside his belt. All of that wouldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds — less time than it took us to stop the car, get out, and come inside.”
Kerry was silent for a space of time. Then she asked, “You didn’t know he had that gun, did you? Before you hit him?”
“Sure I did. It made a bulge under his apron when he moved around. Didn’t you notice it?”
“Well,” she said, “I... um, I guess I did, when we first came in. But I thought... I mean, I didn’t look again because...”
“Because why?”
“I thought... oh hell, I thought something had aroused him.”
“Aroused him?”
“I thought he had a damn erection, all right?”
I looked at her. And then I burst out laughing. “Kerry Wade, star detective,” I said between cackles, “the female Sherlock Holmes. She can’t even tell the difference between a gun barrel and an erection!”
“Oh shut up,” she said.
I was still chuckling when the Highway Patrol and a county ambulance got there a few minutes later.