“A guy would have to be out of his head to do something that crazy.”
“Faye drove men out of their heads. She was good at it.”
“You’re right there. How’s old Crawley taking it?”
“Virg and Rudy said he was busted up pretty bad down by the fire. When I talked to him at the house later, he wasn’t. He talked calm and sensible. He said he might miss Faye a little.”
“It’s a wonder Crawley didn’t kill her himself a long time ago, and that’s God’s truth.”
“Well, maybe he finally got around to it. He says he didn’t, of course.”
I drained my schooner and set it on the bar. Hobby picked it up and made a motion toward the tap.
“You want another, Colby?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got a place or two to go, Hobby. Keep an ear cocked to the bar talk tonight, will you? Something might drop. Chances are nothing will, but you never can tell.”
I went up the pair of steps and through the lobby and turned right on the main drag. Under lights, the street was beginning to look alive for a few more hours of this particular day. There was a moderate traffic of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and Wheeler’s Drug Store, next corner up from the Bonny, had begun to gather its nightly accretion of loafers and nylon inspectors. Passing, I wondered how often Faye Bratton’s nylons had been inspected and approved at this place to the sound of soft whistles, but it was nothing I gave a lot of attention to, just wondered in passing. In the next block, about half way between corners, I came to the narrow front of Dolly Noble’s beauty parlor, and found it dark. It was after closing hour, of course, but sometimes Dolly made night appointments with working girls, and I thought she might have made one tonight. It didn’t really matter, anyhow, for Dolly had a small apartment upstairs over the parlor, and I went up narrow stairs from the street into a narrow hall above, lighted by a single globe, and knocked on Dolly’s door. After a minute or two, she opened it.
“Hello, Dolly,” I said. “What’s new?”
“Nothing new,” she said, “except I’m getting a call from the sheriff. That’s new. What do you want, Colby?”
“Let me come in and tell you.”
“Why not? You’ll have to make it snappy, though. I’m expecting someone.”
I went past her into the living room of her little apartment, and she closed the door and sat down, crossing her legs, which were nice. She had a one-ton conditioner stuck in one of the windows overlooking the street below, and that was nice, too. It made the apartment nice and cool, and it was pleasant to sit there in the chair she’d offered and sneak a few looks at her nice legs. It was a lot better than standing in front of Wheeler’s.
“I’ll try to get out of the way before your date arrives,” I said.
“Oh, it’s no one that important, Colby. Just Faye Bratton.”
“Faye’s coming here?”
“She ought to be here now. She’s late.”
“What have you and Faye got scheduled for tonight?”
“That could be a personal question, Colby. You asking for a personal reason, or is it official?”
“What makes you think it might be official?”
“Nothing makes me think so. Hell, I don’t mind telling you, either way. We’re going to have dinner at the Bonny and go to a movie. Big night. Faye gets bored out on that damn farm with Crawley Bratton. She comes in and spends an evening with me every now and then. Sometimes she spends the night and goes home in the morning.”
I sat and looked at Dolly for a few seconds without speaking. Shorter than average, she wore spike heels to make herself look taller than she was, and someday she’d either be fat or haggard from diets and reducing exercises, but she was neither yet. Her blond hair, cut short and shaggy, had the benefit of her best rinse. Thanks to the treatments and tricks of her trade, Dolly managed to make herself a good-looking woman. Lots of men claim to consider this sort of deception unfair, but not me. The time comes for all women when it’s a good thing to know the tricks, and I’m all for the ones who learn early.
“Faye won’t be here,” I said.
“Why not?” she said. “Has something happened to her?”
“The last thing that ever will. She’s dead. Someone killed her.”
She sat staring at me with her mouth hanging slightly open, her eyes wide and sick with sudden shock. Under the eyes and on her cheeks, blue shadows and crimson paint stood out against drained flesh in stark and ugly relief. I watched for another sign than shock, but there was none. No fear, no anger, no slight beginning of grief. In her life, I thought, Faye Bratton had incited often the easy expression of love, but now in death she had taken away nothing that would be missed for more than a little while, if at all, and she had left not even sorrow. Thinking of Faye, I watched Dolly, and after a while Dolly’s breath escaped in a long sigh. The tip of a pink tongue slipped out to wet her lips.
“So he did it after all!” she said.
“He says not.”
“Did you expect him to confess?”
“Sometimes killers do. I guess I couldn’t have any such good luck as that, though.”
“When did you talk to him?”
“Tonight. Little more than an hour ago.”
“How did it happen?”
“I’m not sure. She was strangled, I think.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, how did it happen that you talked to him.”
“That’s routine, Dolly. If a wife’s killed, you naturally talk to the husband.”
“Crawley? My God, Colby, I wasn’t thinking of Crawley.”
“No? It seems to me, under the circumstances, that Crawley would be a natural one to think of. Who did you have in mind?”
“Fergus Cass.”
It was a name I hadn’t expected, and it took me a while to adjust. In the few seconds of adjustment, I tried to think of what I knew about Fergus Cass, and what I knew was practically nothing. He’d come into the county only about six months before, and he’d been living with an aunt and uncle on their farm across the creek from Crawley’s place, about a mile from house to house. He was from St. Louis, as I remembered, and there had been a rumor circulated at the time of his coming that he’d been sick, tuberculosis or something like that, and had spent some time in a sanitarium somewhere before coming to the country for rest and fresh air. This seemed a reasonable explanation, for he didn’t do anything in the way of work that anyone had ever noticed. I’d seen him in town a number of times, and once or twice tramping through the fields in the country carrying a rough hand-cut walking stick. He was a dark, lean man, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, with heavy black hair and eyes so deeply brown that they too looked black. There was a kind of unusual grace in the way he moved and held his head. He didn’t really look as if he’d ever been seriously sick, but of course you can’t always tell about such things from appearances.
“I never thought of Fergus Cass,” I said. “Tell me about him. Him and Faye, I mean.”
“They had something going. It’s been going four, five months, Colby. Since soon after Fergus came here to stay.”
“My understanding is, Faye almost always had something going. Isn’t that right?”
“Oh, sure. Faye always had to have something going with a man, but most of the time it didn’t amount to much. This was different. Bigger. Because of Fergus, the kind of guy he is. I told Faye she’d better leave him alone, but you know how she was. She wouldn’t listen.”
“You said the kind of guy Fergus is. What kind is he?”