I stood up and said, “There goes Emil.”
“Yeah.” His voice was curiously flat. “You’ll want to go down and talk to him, I guess.”
“No. Not tonight. Tomorrow will be soon enough. It isn’t likely Emil will have anything to tell me that I can’t guess.”
“Sure. She’s dead. Someone killed her. You don’t need Emil to tell you.”
I walked over to the screen door and opened it, hesitating before passing through. I thought about saying again that I was sorry, but it didn’t seem to be necessary. He struck a match and lit a cigarette, the planes of his face flat and hard in the brief flare. The descending darkness was swollen and throbbing with the sounds of the night — an owl’s cry, a chorus of frogs, the singing of a thousand cicadas.
“Good-night, Crawley,” I said.
“Good-night,” he said.
I turned the patrol car in the yard and drove down the drive to the road and down the road to town.
Chapter 2
I drove along the main drag to the Hotel Bonny, a five story brick building standing tall on a corner. The street, in the slack period between five and eight, was almost deserted. Angling into a parking slot in front of the hotel, I got out and went into the lobby and down a couple of steps into the taproom. The taproom, like the street outside, was idling through the early evening interlude when people were engaged in other places. Hobby Langerham was behind the bar. He was eating a roast beef sandwich, washing it down with Schlitz beer. Hobby was a shrewd guy with sharp eyes, built like one of the kegs he tapped for the customers, and he had been behind the Bonny bar for a dozen years or more. He pulled a long shift, twelve to twelve, opening to closing, and I knew from experience that he generally knew who came and went at approximately what times.
“Hello, Colby,” he said. “How’s the law?”
“Can’t complain,” I said. “Draw me one, Hobby.”
He drew the beer and shoved it across the bar and waved away the two-bit piece I offered in payment. I always offered, and he always waved it away, and I don’t know why we kept going through the routine, unless it was just to keep the record straight.
“Thanks, Hobby,” I said. “This one I need.”
“You got a problem, Colby?”
“Looks like murder. I guess you could call that a problem.”
Hobby sucked in his breath, and his little eyes glittered in the soft light of the room, but he didn’t make a big demonstration out of his reaction. Hobby never did.
“I’d call it a problem, Colby. Anyone I know?”
“Come off, Hobby. You know everybody.”
“Okay. So it’s someone I know. Maybe it’s an official secret or something.”
“Nothing’s secret, official or otherwise, except the name of the one who did it. I wish I could tell you. Was Faye Bratton in here this afternoon, Hobby?”
“You mean it was Faye who got it?”
“That’s right. Faye Bratton.”
“Well, by God, it couldn’t have happened to anyone who tried for it harder. She was made to be murdered, that Faye was.”
“Maybe. I’ve got to take the position that no one is made to be murdered, not even wanton wives. Was she in here, Hobby?”
“Briefly. Fairly early. Alone.”
“How briefly?”
“I didn’t hold a watch on her. Say half an hour. Long enough to take her time drinking a couple of bourbon highballs.”
“How early?”
“When she got here? Let’s see. Not earlier than two. Not later than two-thirty.”
“You say she was alone?”
“That’s what I said. She came alone, she left alone.”
“She meet anyone here?”
“No.”
“She talk with anyone?”
“Sure. Me.”
“No one else?”
“No one. Matter of fact, there wasn’t anyone else here most of the time. Couple of guests of the hotel came in for maybe fifteen minutes. Drank a beer each. I took them to be salesmen. Not regulars, though. I’d never seen them before.”
“Did she say anything about meeting anyone later, after she left here?”
“She said she was going down the street to see Dolly Noble. That’s all.”
“Down to Dolly’s beauty parlor?”
“I took her to mean there. She didn’t say so.”
“That’s all she said about where she intended to go and what she intended to do?”
“That’s all.”
“How did she seem? I mean, did she seem nervous or excited or anything unusual at all?”
“Faye always gave the impression of looking for something or someone. Something or someone for excitement. Like a woman on the prowl. Tending bar, even in a place like this, you learn to know them. You can almost smell them. Nothing unusual about Faye this afternoon, I’d say. Just Faye the way she always was.”
“She talk about anything that seems significant, looking back?”
“I can’t remember anything.” He creased his brow, which ran up and back over the crown of his head, which he shook slowly sidewise. “Just talk, the kind of stuff you pass back and forth across a bar. No name was mentioned except Dolly’s.”
“Faye came in here pretty often, didn’t she?”
“She was in town often. I’d guess she came in here everytime she was in town. She was a good drinker, Faye was. She took bourbon in water with one ice cube. Short on the water. I’ve seen her a little high, but never what I’d call drunk.”
“Was she in the habit of meeting anyone here lately? Any special person, that is?”
“Like a man, you mean?”
“A man will do.”
“There wasn’t any. No one special. No one she was meeting by arrangement, I’ll swear. You know how Faye was, Colby. She never ran from a man if she came across one. If there happened to be one here, she was congenial.”
“I know. It doesn’t help much.”
“Maybe it does. In a negative way. If Faye was involved with a particular guy in a really big way, he’d probably be the one she wouldn’t be congenial with in a public bar. You see what I mean?”
“I see what you mean. You’re real clever to think of that, Hobby, but it sure as hell doesn’t narrow the field any. I can hardly suspect every man in the county that Faye hasn’t met up with one time or another in this taproom.”
“With Faye it’s going to be pretty hard to narrow the field much any way you look at it. Faye just naturally took in a lot of territory. You going to tell me what happened to her, Colby, or is it something you’re sitting on?”
“I’m not sitting on anything, Hobby. News just hasn’t had time to get around yet. Someone set fire to a haystack behind Crawley’s house this evening, out in a field near the creek. It attracted several men and kids from the area, including Virgil Carpenter and Rudy Squires, besides Crawley himself. When the fire burned down some and the smoke had lifted, they saw a body in there. Virgil forked it out, and it was Faye.”
“Jesus! You mean someone killed her and put her in the stack and set it on fire?”
“Looks that way, superficially. There are some crazy things about it.”
“It’s all crazy, if you ask me. How was Faye killed?”
“I’m not sure yet. The body was burned pretty bad. Emil Coker’s got it now, but I don’t suppose he’ll find out anything significant. Her head didn’t seem to be bashed in, and I couldn’t see any wounds. Maybe Emil will see something when he takes a close look at her on a table, but I doubt it. We’ll call in a doc for a post mortem, of course. It’s my guess she was strangled.”
“Why strangled in particular?”
“I don’t know. It probably happened in a quarrel about something. It seems to me the way a man would likely kill a woman under those circumstances, not having planned to kill her in advance. I might be wrong, of course, but it’s the way I’ve been thinking about it.”