The Shattered Raven (12 page)

Susan snorted and led the way through the door. She certainly didn’t want this to appear as any sort of an assignation, some lovers’ trip halfway across the country, and she feared that’s what some of them were thinking.

They caught a morning flight to Chicago, sitting next to each other, mostly in silence. She, reading the latest novel by John Updike; he, intent on a paperbound anthology of science fiction stories edited by Hans Stefan Santesson.

“Are you going to visit the Chicago chapter of MWA while you’re there?” Susan asked at one point.

“There won’t really be time between planes. I might call one or two people.”

He did have time for just one call while they were on the ground, to an old friend he hadn’t seen for years. Then they were airborne again, bound for Lincoln, a city he’d never visited. From there it was still more than an hour’s drive to June, a town of a few thousand people in the south-east corner of the state.

H
IS FIRST VIEW OF
June, Nebraska, came as their rented blue Ford topped a small hill and started down the other side. It was countryside. That was the best word to describe it Fields, ripe with rich brown earth, being ploughed by farmers on massive yellow tractors. In other fields the spring planting was already completed. Corn, he supposed.

“Nice country,” Susan Veldt remarked from the seat at his side.

“Great country. Great.”

“A bit of sarcasm there, Mr. Hamet?”

“A city boy at heart.”

“That’s a cow over there—that big brown thing.”

“Sure.” He slowed the car to a stop and called to a muscular young man on a tractor. “Say, fella, can you direct us to the newspaper office in June?”

“No newspaper in June. Haven’t had a newspaper in ten years.” He eyed them with open curiosity.

“Well, I guess it’s the old newspaper we want, then. Where might we find its editor, or somebody like that?”

“Gee … I guess you want Mrs. Phillipps at the general store and post office.”

Barney agreed. “I guess we want Mrs. Phillipps.”

The young man’s directions took them to the combination general store and post office, at a crossroads where the paving was beginning to crack and the dust from a dry spring was rising along the roadway in both directions. He went in and talked to Mrs. Phillipps, a middle-aged woman as dry and wrinkled as the road outside.

“The editor of the newspaper,” he said. “The newspaper that used to be published here ten or so years ago.”

“Oh, that editor is gone! He fooled around too much with the ladies,” she said, perhaps a bit sad that she hadn’t been one of them. “I don’t really know where you’d find any information about it.”

“Back copies is what I was thinking of.”

“Oh, no back copies! Who’d ever keep back copies of a little weekly paper that went out of business ten years ago?”

“Do you have a sheriff?”

“There’s a county sheriff, but he’s not in June. He’s over at the county seat. There’s nothing in June.”

But there had been at one time, Barney thought. “We’re looking for information about Irma Black.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? I know Irma. She had a little farm just outside the town, until her husband died. She’s all alone now. She went to New York a month or so back. Haven’t heard anything from her since.”

“Irma Black is dead,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

“Dead? Irma, dead? My God … I wonder if it was just being so heartbroken about living alone in the world. You know, us country people are funny that way. We live lonely lives, but then we get attached to somebody and when that somebody is gone, we just crumple up like an autumn leaf and blow away.”

“That’s not what happened to Irma. She was strangled, I’m afraid.”

“Irma! In New York! Terrible city I Terrible! Why she wanted to go there was beyond me! She said there were some friends that could give her money. What’s money to her now that she’s dead?”

“You don’t know who the friends were? What their names were?”

“No, I don’t know. She never mentioned any names. I wasn’t that friendly with her. I just saw her when she came to get her mail.”

“Did she ever receive mail from New York?”

“No. Never.”

“From any place else? Any place far away?”

“No. Nothing but the usual junk. Her whole world was here.”

“What about her past?” Barney asked. “Did you know her when she was young?”

“Not really. Before she was married, you mean? No, Irma wasn’t the sort whose childhood you ever thought about.”

“But she must have had one,” Barney said. “She didn’t grow up here in June?”

“In the area. Maybe over in the next town, or across the state line. I don’t know.”

“Was Black her maiden name?”

“Yes. Her husband’s name was Tyron, I believe. I didn’t know him very well.”

Barney took out his wallet and slipped five dollars across the counter to the woman. “Come on, now. You can do better than that. You said you didn’t know Irma Black at all before her marriage. Yet you knew the name right away. You knew it was her maiden name. How did you know that?”

“Well, she was using it again after her husband died.” But the woman was flustered. Her hands were flying—trying to keep occupied. She looked at the five dollar bill, and then away. “I don’t know anything, really!”

“Irma’s dead, and whatever you tell me can’t harm her now.”

“Really, I don’t know anything,” she said. “I never speak ill of living or dead. Go and talk to the sheriff.”

“I guess I’ll do just that,” he told her. “Come on, Susan.”

Outside, she pressed him for information. “What did you find out?”

“Nothing—except that there is something to find out. We just have to dig for it a little more deeply.”

“Leave it to me,” she said. “I’m being a sort of Watson, aren’t I?”

“You mean you really read Sherlock Holmes once in your youth?”

“I saw a movie,” she admitted. “It was pretty good. All about a big dog who killed people.”

“See what you can find out,” he said.

He left her and strolled down the main street, past a little white Methodist church that seemed to be boarded up. He came at last to a blacksmith’s shop, left over from another era. A new building had been constructed around back, for the sale of farm machinery. He strolled around till he found someone—a young man who seemed more the used car salesman type than the village blacksmith of old.

“Do you still shoe horses?” Barney asked.

“You got a horse to be shod, mister? We’ll do it.”

“You know a woman named Irma Black?”

“The one whose husband died?”

“That’s right.”

“No. I don’t know her.”

“You knew the name.”

“I know the names of fifty people who live around here. Her husband used to deal with us before he died. She stopped farming. Probably sold the place, for all I know.”

“Thanks,” Barney said. He went back to the car and drove down the road in search of Susan. She was in the phone booth at the general store.

“Calling back to New York,” she said when she’d finished. “After all, they pay me, you know.”

“Yes. I know.” But he wasn’t happy about it.

“Mr. Rowe was wondering one thing.”

“Oh? What was that?”

“How many people at MWA knew you were coming out here with me?”

“It was no big secret. I had to talk it over with the board of directors yesterday to get their approval for the trip. They all knew.”

“That man that won the award—Max Winters. Has he gone back to California?”

“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. He was supposed to fly back on Monday, but I know he stayed over an extra day or two. Why do you ask?”

“I thought I saw someone that looked like him at the Chicago airport while you were in the men’s room. I meant to mention it.”

“It could have been Max. He might have been changing planes.”

“They have a direct flight to California, though, don’t they?”

“Yes. But you never know. Maybe he was stopping off to see some old relative, or a girl friend.”

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“What is this? A quiz or something? Sure, I’ve known Max a long time. Fifteen, twenty years. Isn’t that a long time?”

“Where to now?” she asked, climbing into the car.

“Let’s go and see that sheriff at the county seat.”

They found the sheriff’s office, and sat in a plain little room, waiting until the sheriff himself put in an appearance. His clothes sagged badly on him, as if he’d recently been ill and lost a great deal of weight He walked the same way. He was a wasted man, on his last legs.

“Sheriff, I’m Barney Hamet from New York, and this is Miss Veldt. We’re here investigating some murders that took place there. One of the victims, a woman named Irma Black, lived over in June. We were told that you might be able to tell us something about her. Especially about her early life.”

“Irma Black? I know the name. What was it you wanted to know?”

Barney looked at the sheriff’s wrinkled hands. “I’m not exactly sure. We talked to the postmistress over there. She threw out a few hints. It would be something in Irma’s background. Something that happened twenty or twenty-five years ago. I think perhaps a crime of some sort. A crime involving two men.”

The sheriff squinted at them. “You come all the way from New York to ask me about that? That’s old stuff now. Didn’t happen here, anyway. Happened across the state line. Different state entirely. Here.” He pulled down a map on the wall, and pointed his shaky finger at the area where Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri all came together. “See? Irma lived near June. But she worked over here—in Claxton. At the Claxton Trust Company.”

“A bank?” Barney asked.

“Sure, a bank. She was a teller there. Back just after the war. She was a young girl then. In her mid-twenties, I suppose.”

“What happened at the bank?”

“What usually happens at banks? It got robbed. A gunman came in one day and robbed the bank, and kidnapped Irma as a hostage.”

“Oh,” Barney leaned forward, intent now, sure that he had come to the end of his search. “One bandit?”

“One in the bank. Another in the car.”

“How long did they hold Irma a prisoner?”

“That was the funny part of it. They kept her a week. A whole week. And then finally they brought her back and dropped her.”

“Had she been harmed?”

“I couldn’t tell you that. I wasn’t that close to the case. You could probably find a report of it somewhere, though, if you really wanted it.”

“The two men. What happened to them? Were they ever caught?” Barney asked, holding his breath while he waited for the answer.

“Sure they were caught. About a month later. They tried to crash a police roadblock and they were both killed instantly.”

“Oh.”

“We know how to handle law and order in this part of the country, Mr. Hamet. Don’t you worry about that.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “Come on, Susan.”

They found a library and he put Susan to work scouring the newspapers for the month in question. It had been the summer of ’47 when it happened—in July. And before they’d been there too long Susan called to him from behind a pile of bound newspapers. “Here it is Barney. I’ve got the whole story here. Complete with a picture of Irma Black.”

He leaned over her shoulder and read it. The thing had been big news, all right. BANK BANDIT KIDNAPS TELLER; EIGHT-STATE ALARM OUT FOR GUNMAN AND ACCOMPLICE. And he read further:
A lone masked gunman, brandishing a sawed-off shotgun, entered the main office of the Claxton Trust Company just before closing time Tuesday and escaped with nearly thirty thousand dollars, taking a girl teller with him as hostage.

Victim of the kidnapping was Irma Black, twenty-six, a resident of June, Nebraska, who had worked at the bank for two years. Police immediately ordered roadblocks up on all major highways, and issued an eight-state alarm for the fugitives and their hostage. Although only one man entered the bank, witnesses said another was waiting in a car, which sped off immediately.

There was more, including a picture of Irma’s house and an interview with her worried parents. The story continued for a full week with veiled hints that the girl teller would not be found alive. But on the eighth day, the headlines had a cheerful note: IRMA BLACK SAFE! RELEASED NEAR HOME BY TWO BANK BANDITS!

There followed the usual interviews, in which she said she had been well treated, but had been kept blindfolded most of the time and could give no description of her abductors. She said only that they had talked in southern accents and spoke once of going to Mexico.

“What do you make of it?” Susan asked. “Could this be the thing? Could this be what she was blackmailing Ross Craigthorn for?”

But Barney only grunted and kept looking through the papers until he found the later news item the sheriff had mentioned. Acting on a tip, police had thrown up a roadblock near a farm the other side of Lincoln. A car with two men in it had tried to crash the roadblock, and the police had riddled it with bullets. The men were later identified as Tom Clancy and his brother, Rick, two small-time criminals who had both served prison terms for armed robbery. Irma Black was brought to view the bodies in the morgue, and although she had previously stated she was blindfolded during her captivity, she now said she believed the Clancy brothers to have been her abductors. Two days later the police announced that money found at the farm where the brothers were hiding was “almost certainly” part of the loot from the Claxton bank robbery. The case was marked closed.

“Well,” Susan observed, “they were running from something. That’s for sure.”

Barney grunted and turned back a few pages. “So, there were a couple of other robberies that month. Here’s a general store that was robbed, and a gas station. It could have been almost anything. It didn’t have to be the Claxton bank. I’d hardly call this enough evidence to convict. It just got the local police off the hook.”

“But if Irma Black suspected Ross Craigthorn, then she must have known all along it wasn’t the Clancy brothers. If she knew that, why did she lie to the police? What was in it for her?”