Twenty-five years ago, after his aborted attempt to seduce Jimmy at the County Fair, the young Dudival returned to the sheriff’s office to change out of his wet clothes. He ran into Sheriff Morgan who was dragging a drunken cowboy through booking. He had already beaten the crap out of him and was taking the subject’s limp hand, pressing the fingers on the inkpad for fingerprinting.
“I heard you and Jimmy had a bit of a romp down at the river.”
“We just went for a walk.”
“That’s not the way Jimmy tells it.”
“Then why ask if you already know?”
Sheriff Morgan was not used to his deputy talking to him that way and reacted as if he had just been brushed back by a high inside pitch.
“She was confused by you,” he said as he put his boot in the small of the cowboy’s back and pushed him into a cell. “I told you that was going to happen.”
“That’s not the way I behave around women,” Shep Dudival said and turned his back on him and walked out.
“No, it evidently is not,” Sheriff Morgan said.
From that moment on, the sheriff wondered whether his trust in the new deputy had been misplaced. His suspicions were confirmed later that week. There was a union rally scheduled at the International Order of Odd Fellows Hall. Snitches had told Morgan that Ned Gigglehorn was going to introduce two visiting officials from the AFL in Michigan. Outside agitators were going to try to convince the uranium miners to go out on a wildcat strike—and stay out until the company agreed to guarantee a health and pension fund. Sheriff Morgan could not abide that and set into motion a plan to intercept Gigglehorn and the union officials before they ever got to the hall.
Word had gotten back to Sheriff Morgan that Gigglehorn had taken the union men the Suit Yourself Bar. They had chosen the back table in case they needed to make a quick exit if the goon squad arrived through the front. The two union boys were big, fleshy-nosed brawlers who demonstrated a great capacity for boilermakers. These men were used to traveling in hostile environments like Vanadium and were heeled.
At this point in time, there was no bathroom in the Suit Yourself bar. One had to go outside to the four-seater that was built over a lime pit. That’s where the sheriff, Deputy Dudival, and Deputy Grizzard waited in the dark for the beer to do its work. The first man to relieve himself was O’Neill. As soon he unzipped, they jumped him and yanked his suit coat over his head, binding his arms so he couldn’t grab for his revolver. He put up a pretty good fight—his urine spraying hither and yon on each officer. Finally, they hit him on the head with the toilet seat and he crumpled. He was quickly cuffed and dragged into the bushes where Deputy Grizzard gave him one last kick in the ribs for despoiling his clean uniform.
Inside, Gigglehorn and Polaski started to wonder what had happened to their colleague. Cautiously, they stepped outside in the dark.
“O’Neill?”
There was no answer. Polaski stepped up to the shithouse door. “You all right, Timmy?” Still no answer. Polaski pulled a little .32 Colt automatic from his waistband and opened the door. He was immediately rendered unconscious by Sheriff Morgan—who was waiting for him with a Vanadium Bank deposit bag filled with steel washers. With two down, the goons descended upon Ned Gigglehorn with their batons. Gigglehorn fell to the ground, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. Sheriff Morgan stood over him.
“Goddamn you, Gigglehorn. What have I got to do to shut that yap of yours?” Gigglehorn answered by grabbing the sheriff’s balls and trying with his last bit of strength to twist them off. Sheriff Morgan, in excruciating pain, fired his gun, sending a load of graphite and steel shavings into Ned’s face.
“My eyes!” Gigglehorn screamed in agony.
After the Vietnam War, the doctors at the VA hospital had assured Shep Dudival’s mother that one day her son would snap out of whatever nightmare he had been living. Dudival looked down at Ned Gigglehorn, ’coon-faced. And he woke up.
“I threw her out the helicopter,” Dudival said quietly.
Sheriff Morgan, in a crouched position trying to restore order to his scrotum, gathered himself and faced Deputy Dudival. There was no question that he had a weak link in his midst.
“What the hell was that about?” Deputy Dudival had his eyes glued to Gigglehorn writhing on the ground.
“Nothing,” Dudival replied dully. Sheriff Morgan lifted Dudival’s Smith & Wesson out of his service holster and clapped it in his hand.
“Then shoot that communist sonofabitch!” Dudival slowly raised his eyes from Gigglehorn to his boss. He looked at him in a way that Sheriff Morgan did not like. Then Dudival raised the gun. The barrel started to come Sheriff Morgan’s way—prompting him to quickly lay his hand on the butt of his own pistol. Behind Dudival’s back, Deputy Grizzard was posed to sap him, but Dudival reholstered his weapon and bent down to Gigglehorn.
“What’s gotten into you, man?”
Dudival didn’t answer. To Morgan’s utter astonishment, he lifted Gigglehorn to his feet, threw him over his shoulder and carried him out to his cruiser. If he took Gigglehorn to the miner’s clinic, they would probably kill him. Instead, he drove to Dr. Solitcz’s still extant house. Gigglehorn, as it turned out, would lose only partial sight in his left eye, but his face would be blackened for life. Only prostitutes, from then on, would ever call him “handsome.”
Sheriff Morgan and Deputy Grizzard smuggled the two union organizers onto a freight train in Grand Junction. Authorities found the dead men the next afternoon in Chicago. The bartender at the Suit Yourself was frightened enough of Morgan to testify to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation that the union men had been drinking in his bar then left out the back entrance. That was all he knew. There was no one to connect Morgan to the murders except his deputies.
Two weeks later, Grizzard was found in his skivvies floating face down in Svendergard’s quarry. He had apparently been drinking—this according to Sheriff Morgan who wrote the coroner’s report himself. Dudival did not need to be paranoid to believe that Morgan was “tidying things up.” What had been keeping him alive so far was Morgan’s hope that Dudival could somehow change Jimmy’s sexuality. But that bit of matchmaking had come a cropper and Dudival knew he was now—like the late Deputy Grizzard—a liability.
The miner’s union, in the meantime, did not take the murder of their comrades well. They, like everybody else, knew who was responsible and implemented their vendetta. Hubris, as is so often the case, ended up being Sheriff Morgan’s undoing. His assumption that he was at the top of the Vanadian food chain caused him to violate the cardinal rule for any man who carries a gun for a living: never be a creature of habit, and never let your guard down. Morgan arose everyday at the same time. Had coffee at the same café at the same time. Had his lunch at the High Grade at the same time and took his nap in the alley next to the Geiger Motel at the same time. People who do things the same way all the time are a joy to assassins—in this case, two large men from the union who came to town dressed like lumberjacks and checked into the Victorian Vanadium Hotel. They claimed they were in town looking for work. This information was passed on, in the style of the Romanian Secret Police, from informant to informant to Sheriff Morgan. He saw them once or twice walking around town in heavy woolen trousers and plaid shirts and swallowed their cover story.
The special at the High Grade on Fridays featured an open-faced turkey sandwich on a slice of white bread, covered in giblet gravy with mashed potatoes and a side of cranberry sauce for $3.99. Sheriff Morgan polished off his lunch with a glass of milk and a piece of rhubarb pie. He left a small tip, but didn’t pay. He never paid for anything in Vanadium. Such was the fear he inspired in everyone. Grabbing a peppermint from the bowl at the register, he walked across the street to the liquor store. He didn’t go inside, but around to the back where he examined the lock on the door. He opened a set of picks in a leather wallet and proceeded to select the correct combination that would allow him to open the door in the wee hours of the morning, setting off the burglar alarm and bringing Deputy Dudival to the call. After going through several picks, Morgan found the two that worked and wrapped them with scotch tape so he could identify them in the dark. When Dudival came through the door that night, he would then shoot him with an old twelve-gauge goose gun he kept for such purposes, loaded with untraceable blue whistlers. The plan implemented, Sheriff Morgan warbled a little bird whistle as he walked back across the street to his cruiser and pulled it into the alley beside the Geiger Motel. It was shady there and was his favorite place to nap, or “coop” in policeman’s parlance. In no time at all he was snoring up a storm, oblivious to the lumbermen who crossed the street behind him carrying a two-man saw. Very deliberately, they set to work on the telephone pole behind the sheriff’s car—timing each saw stroke with the sheriff’s own adenoidal wood cutting. It took them eight exchanges of the saw and a gentle push to send the telephone pole crashing down on top of the cruiser—flattening the sheriff’s skull with such force that his brains extruded out his ears like Frosty Freeze.
Deputy Dudival watched this rendition of a classic Tex Avery cartoon through the Venetian blinds of his dentist’s office. Pericoronitis had demanded the removal of both his third upper molars. The righteous police officer in Dudival was telling him to get up from the dentist’s chair and do something about this, but the mask of laughing gas over his mouth and nose was telling him to sit back down and enjoy the show. And so, he took a deep, deep breath of gas and watched as the men dropped their saw, their gloves, walked calmly to a dark sedan and drove away.
When it came time to make the arrangements for the funeral, Deputy Dudival was at Jimmy’s side handling everything. He chose the coffin, a mahogany laminated “Plainsman.” A guest list was comprised befitting a man of the sheriff’s stature, included the Mine’s top brass, the mayor, fellow sheriffs from neighboring counties and the Vanadium High School band. They played “Requiem” on Jews’ harps—for this was years before Buster, with Mr. Mallomar’s checkbook, had supplied the high school with real musical instruments. On the day, more than three hundred people showed up at Lone Pine Cemetery—some, admittedly, were there to make sure the sheriff’s demise was not just another Vanadium rumor. The President of the Vanadium Rotary, in lieu of a padre, spoke a few words over the Colorado-flagged coffin—for Sheriff Morgan was not a religious man. Jimmy didn’t cry or in any way betray her real emotions—one of them a nonspecific feeling that Dudival could have done more to protect her grandfather. After the funeral, Dudival considered turning in his badge, but didn’t. Jimmy was exposed without her grandfather. Whether she realized it or not, she needed him. And, of course, he loved her.