No Second Wind (The Sheriff Chick Charleston Mysteries Book 3) Page 20
“Can’t pick up a scent.”
“Come inside. I want you to meet my nephew, Roland Day. Just out of college. Knows bookkeeping, accounting, banking practices, and all that. He’ll take a load off of me.”
So far as I knew the only load Mike Day ever carried was his own weight.
The man behind the railing was as young or younger than I. He was a well set-up young fellow with a good carriage, broad shoulders and very light hair parted at the side. He was as pale as the paper on his desk. He wore tinted glasses, and behind them I caught the glimmer of very light blue eyes. An albino, I thought, or close to it. His shake was firm, and his smile good.
I welcomed him and wished him the best of luck and at the door turned back and asked if they had a Ford among their depositors. “Wished I did,” Mike Day said. “Like a Ford name of Henry.” I waved away their curiosity.
Bob Studebaker chewed on a toothpick at the Bar Star Saloon. He had two customers. No one there knew a man by the name of Ford. “What’s the idea?” Studebaker asked. “He in trouble?”
“How can he be? He doesn’t exist.”
On a far-out hunch I went to see Miss Phoebe Akers. For years she had been selling low-priced ornaments like pins and bracelets and earrings and a few good jewels in her office in the Jackson Hotel. For good reason she was known as a talker.
“Good afternoon, Miss Akers,” I said.
“Goodness me, if it isn’t Jason Beard! A sight for sore eyes.”
We chatted or, rather, she talked, and then I said, “How you fixed for sapphires?”
“Why, Jason, you got a girl!”
“I’m old enough.”
“And good-looking enough. Sure, I have sapphires, genuine Yogos.” She produced a tray. “Take a peek.”
I did so and said, “I wanted a big one.”
“You’re sure enough in love. I don’t sell many large stones. On account of the price, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Two, three weeks ago, I had a wonderful one. I thought I’d never sell it. Then a man came along, a stranger, and bought it right off the bat. No bargaining. No questions. Paid cash.”
“Was his name Ford?”
“Ford? No. I don’t know any Fords. Let me think. Oh, yes.” She ran a finger down a ledger. “Here we are. Gerald Fenner. That’s all he told me, just his name. Since then, inquiring around, you know, but really not being nosy, I found he’s a big-time lawyer, staying at Overthrust for a few months. I suppose he’s working on deeds or transfers or leases or something. Those oil companies and their lawyers, my! But you wanted a sapphire, and here I am jabbering away.”
“Not at all,” I answered. “Nice to talk to you. Keep in touch just in case.”
It was only a little after midafternoon, early enough for a trip to Overthrust and an interview. I debated going. Things, one thing at least, had come along too easily, and easy answers weren’t to be trusted. A long shot could come home first and then be disqualified.
I walked back to the courthouse and took an official car. In forty minutes I was at Overthrust again. A gas-station pumper said sure, he knew Mr. Fenner. Had an office in the new brick building yonder.
He wasn’t on the first floor. It was occupied by the offices of the Overthrust Oil Company. A man there said he could be found upstairs, first door to the right. I climbed the stairs and arrived at the door. It was unmarked. Inside, a wispy girl with glasses and the look of male neglect asked me my business.
“I’ll tell Mr. Fenner that,” I said. “My name is Jason Beard.”
“You don’t have an appointment?”
“Sorry. Just say I’m investigating a jewel theft.”
“A jewel theft! What in the world?”
“I’m a deputy sheriff.”
She breathed out a deep breath. Under it she might have been saying, “Of all the crazy things!”
She went into the inner office, came right back and told me, “He’ll see you.”
The office was deep-carpeted in rust. Some nice prints hung on the wall. Mr. Fenner rose from behind a mahogany desk and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Beard.” I took him to be in his fifties. He wore a gray three-piece suit and a blue tie. He stood erect, his head up, his face unrevealing but not unfriendly. He had dignity about him and something of the air of the aristocrat. Not that I really knew any aristocrats.
“Please have a chair,” he said, seating himself. “Now what’s all this about a jewel theft? It can hardly concern me.”
“Only incidentally if at all.”
“Proceed.”
“The stone in question is a big sapphire.”
“And there’s some doubt about ownership—about provenance?”
“No, sir. Nothing like that.”
“What then? Tell me.”
“Mr. Fenner,” I said, “I don’t know that you fit into the case at all. I’m working blind. I would ask your pardon except that you may be able to help me. I hope you will.”
“That talk behind you, let’s get down to cases?”
“As you know, a young girl was killed on the edge of town a few days ago, raped and strangled. It was her custom to wear a big sapphire in a setting of gold.”
He sat still, unmoving, without a flicker of face or tremor of hands. I thought of rigidity. “What about it?”
“It’s missing.”
“Hardly my concern, Mr. Beard.”
“In a way it may be. I think you gave the pin to the little prostitute.”
“I hate that word,” he said, flinging out an arm as if to thrust it away.
I waited. He arose slowly and took a step or two, his hands clasped behind him. His head, once so upright, was bent. He said, not turning to me, “I don’t see—”
“It may be none of my business,” I said for him, “but I intend to find out.”
He went, stooping, back to his chair. “Some things are private. Some things are confidential.”
“I keep them that way unless they come into a case.”
“And discussing them casts false lights. It makes them small. Makes them ugly. It distorts truth.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sat down, and his hands came out in slow explanation. “Mr. Beard, I’m a married man, but only in a sense. My wife is a sick woman, long since past any interest in men, including me except that she depends on me and rightly so. I support her. See that she gets the best of attention. But, Mr. Beard, I’m a man. As such I know the needs of the spirit and the hungers of the flesh.”
That was a fancy way of putting it, but he meant every word.
Again I waited.
“It came about that I met Laura Jane. It doesn’t matter how. She was a splendid girl. I gave her the pin.”
“It was quite a gift.”
“She was quite a girl.”
“No quarrels?”
“Good Lord, no! She was a good and gentle girl, a tender girl. She had time and concern for me.”
I didn’t say she must have liked what he gave her, too.
He went on, “Until some years have passed, you can’t know what the loving attention of a young girl means to an older man. You can’t know.” His head moved, slow with remembrance. “She cared for me. I am sure she cared for me.” A pause then. “Yes.” The single word dropped toward his desk. “Yes.”
I went out quietly. Aristocrats had a right to privacy, too.
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About the Author
A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1901–1991) was an award-winning American novelist, screenwriter, historian, and environmentalist. Born in Indiana, he was six months old when his father brought the family west to the Montana territory. Guthrie graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter and editor for two decades before receiving a Nieman fellowship from Harvard University. During his grant year, he began to seriously pursue his interest in writing fiction. His first major novel, The Big Sky (1947), was followed by the Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Way West (1949). Guthrie’s popular mystery series featuring Montana sheriff Chick Charleston earned a Silver Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and an award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. The five books in the series are Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article (1977), No Second Wind (1980), Playing Catch-Up (1985), and Murder in the Cotswolds (1989). In 1954 Guthrie’s screenplay for the film Shane was nominated for an Academy Award.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1980 by A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5283-5
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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