21

I attended Cleaver’s funeral as a matter of courtesy on the part of the sheriff’s office. I didn’t expect to see the culprit there, no matter the belief that the guilty out of some perversity liked to see their victims put safely away. I scanned the crowd, just on the chance, but didn’t get a clue.

Fifty or more people attended, though notice of the services was too late or too early for the weekly newspaper. News in our country had a habit of getting around without benefit of the press.

The minister read from the Bible, mostly Psalms, and referred to the assurance that our Father’s house had many mansions. I never knew what that meant, and neither did the preacher, but it sounded impressive. I imagined that the mansion Cleaver would have wanted was a going ranch. Turning from promise to fact, the minister gave us vital statistics. I learned that Cleaver was born in Minnesota, came to Montana as a young man and was fifty years old when he died. Mrs. Cleaver sat in the mourner’s car, courtesy of Felix Underwood. If she was mourning, I couldn’t tell. From what I could see of it, I gathered that her dress or suit was deep purple. That color was mourning enough in itself.

Felix might dicker and wail, but he liked his funerals nice, and so he had recruited four middle-aged ladies, or older, who sang “The Old Rugged Cross.” Their voices rose frail in the breeze, dying in the plains grass and among the tombstones. The old rugged cross, trembling and falling, weak but courageous, there on the hillside of the dead. I wanted to applaud the old girls for this quavering assertion of hope against everyone’s destiny.

Right after the services I said to Sheriff Charleston, “I’ve interviewed six of the ten men who went hunting. Nothing there. Not a glimmer. Four to go, and I’ll do it, but I won’t get anything.”

Seated behind his desk, he listened with what seemed impatience, as if obliged to hear me out. Then he said with uncommon brusqueness, “We’re just festering. Chasing our tails. Marching up the hill and down again. Running fast in the same spot.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, trying to lighten his mood. “I get the idea through the mixed metaphors.”

He didn’t smile. He said, “Any damn thing is better than fester. Let’s have a drink or a beer and let the world wag.”

“If you say so. Where?”

“The Chicken Shack. That suits the mood, and a friendly visit won’t hurt us.”

We climbed into his Special. On arrival, with the engine turned off, we could hear the juke box inside the place. When we entered, the sound stunned us. For a minute we stood by the door, letting our ears deaden while we looked around. A half-dozen customers, not known to me by name, were working on drinks at bar or table. Ves Eaton was behind the counter. I shouted for a whiskey and a beer. Eaton seemed friendly enough. The customers appeared curious, not hostile. I took the drinks to a table, and Charleston and I endured the racket.

Presently the music came to an end, and humans could communicate without lip-reading. His glass of whiskey half-raised, Charleston shook his head slowly and said, “Who said the world ends with a whimper? It ends with a blast, jungle drums beating, jungle voices crying out bloody murder.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “If this place wasn’t walled in, the courthouse could dance to hard rock.”

Another record came on, and our talk went off.

Charleston was about to take a sip of the whiskey when a look came on his face. Later I was to call it a look of wonder, then recognition. He got up, his glass barely touched. His lips said, “Come on!”

We climbed back in the Special. Once we were rolling, I said, “May I ask where to?”

“To get Cleaver’s truck.”

I didn’t understand but didn’t push, respecting Charleston’s mood, which appeared to shy off from talk.

So we wheeled along, silent, over the new-breathing land where, I thought, life was stirring under the warming soil, where gophers would appear before long and the carpet flowers bloom.

Just once did he speak again while the Special moved along. That was to say, “Dry year this year. Hard on the farmers.”

“Plenty of time for snow yet,” I answered.

He didn’t reply, having dismissed the subject already. We passed the mourner’s car, minus the mourner, bound back for town.

Three cars were parked by the Cleaver house. Inside were old Mr. and Mrs. Whitney, Ernest Linderman, Judge and Mrs. Church, and the widow, who let us in without comment other than a hello. On the table were a couple of casseroles, a baked turkey, two loaves of bread, a cake and a pie, plus extras. After we had greeted the company, Mrs. Cleaver, as if yielding to the demands of the occasion, said, “Even with a sick grandpa, that nice Anita Dutton found time to bake a cake. Omar Test brought it over. Want something to eat?”

I felt Charleston’s eyes on me and heard him say, “I believe we have time to sample Miss Dutton’s cake.”

It was good cake, sweet and moist as I liked it.

We chatted a little while we munched. I had noticed before that post-burial parties appeared perky and light of heart, and I wondered again if that were to bolster the bereft or to celebrate survival. A man is dead: long live us.

Charleston maneuvered Mrs. Cleaver aside. “I wonder if we could borrow your truck for a day or two, Mrs. Cleaver?” he asked. “I hate to suggest it at this time, but it might help us in our investigation.”

She answered, “I ain’t going anywhere,” and took keys from a hook on a cupboard.

We went outside and looked at the truck. There was nothing in the bed but the big toolbox, a large plastic sack, empty, and four short fence posts. I was about to remove all but the fixed-in-place toolbox when Charleston shook his head. Then he asked, “Mind driving it?” I didn’t.

“Park it in one of our slots,” he told me.

So, rattling along after him, I drove the truck in, asking myself the meaning, the significance, the why of this old bundle of bolts. Cleaver couldn’t have been shot from inside it, not if we were to credit the evidence. Neither could the thing speak.

Charleston was waiting when I parked the truck. Before I could get out, he climbed into the passenger’s seat. He studied the dash and began nodding his head. He asked, “Know anything about tape decks?”

“Very little,” I answered and was exaggerating at that. I must have been the only young man and one of the few of any age who knew almost nothing about tapes and sound gadgets. I could take music or leave it alone. Tin ear, classmates had said.

“No load in this thing,” Charleston said, pointing to a slot. “Run to the drugstore. Get a tape, eight track.”

“Yes, sir.”

I trotted to the store, a block and a half away. The clerk, a new girl, must have thought I was crazy, buying any old eight-track tape and rushing off with it. Three or four dogs were sniffing around the truck.

Charleston took a quick look at the tape before inserting it. “The saints go marching in,” he said and touched a button.

My head blew off.

I had listened to juke boxes turned on full blast. In crowded bars I had been afflicted with the caterwauling of singers and the exaggerated tones of guitars. I had followed close to brass bands tooting and thumping out Sousa. They didn’t compare.

I jumped out of the truck, which was shaking in all its tin timbers. The saints kept marching in while heads popped out of courthouse windows and passing bodies were arrested in full flight.

Charleston turned off the sound and got out. He mounted the truck bed and went to the toolbox. Two self-locking latches secured it. He worked at them, then said to me, “Get a screwdriver from the Special.” With it he wrenched off the latches. The box opened from the front, not the top. Two speakers crowded the box; I didn’t see any tools. Charleston let himself down. Tad Frazier had appeared from the office. Charleston told him, “Watch it. No tinkering.”

Charleston led the way, shooing off dogs and explaining to the small crowd that had gathered around, “Testing. Just testing.” Like saints, we marched into his office.

Seated, he said as an aside, “It would have been even louder with the box open.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

“Head ringing, huh?”

“If it’s still there.”

He raised his voice. “One mystery solved. Get it?”

I answered, “Glimmers.”

“Cleaver knew his electronics,” he went on, veering away from what I wanted to hear. “I don’t understand the mechanics myself, but he wired the thing up, leaving no open sign, and he’s sure to have put in a booster. That accounts for the volume.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cleaver may have got his idea somewhere else. That notion occurs to me.”

“Where else?”

“From a book.”

I just looked at him, and he went on. “You didn’t notice the books in Cleaver’s house? No. Well, two of them were by a man named Jim Corbett. He hunted man-eating tigers in India. I read those books years ago.”

I said, “Yes?”

“I dug one story out of my memory. It told that one man-eating tiger, just one, kept thousands of construction workers cowering in camp, afraid to go out on the job. Cleaver might have gone on from there.”

“With wolves, huh?”

“If one tiger could intimidate thousands, a pack of wolves ought to scare off a few.”

“It almost did.”

“We’ll never prove the connection, though the theory makes sense. And Cleaver had another thing going for him. Mutilated animals. People were, are, still spooky about them.”

“But one man couldn’t unload a full-grown steer unless he had a dump truck.”

“He could if he placed it on rollers. That’s what those bob-tailed fence posts were for. Cleaver stole behind the row camps at night, no lights, and just rolled off the carcass. No sweat except the fear of being seen.” He paused while I nodded and then resumed. “He worked to make the steer look as if it had been mutilated by wolves. The miners were quick to think it had been. Some probably do yet. But there was a flaw that trained men could see. The steer was his own, and he had to cut off and scratch off the rib band. Wolves wouldn’t have gnawed there, not while better bites were available.”

“I see, but what about that gang of dogs—wolves to the miners—that gathered in the alley?”

“There’s an answer to that, too, I think. Suppose Cleaver’s old bitch dog came in heat. Suppose he put her in a plastic sack so as to confine the scent, took her to the alley at night and walked her up and down while she left her sign. Then back into the bag and away. You saw the sack. You noticed just now that the open sack was attracting dogs. To keep in the scent, Cleaver had tied it at his dog’s neck while transporting her. There’s a piece of cord in the truck you might not have noticed.”

So he had answers to everything, I thought, feeling a long shot less than bright. Answers to everything but two things, so I asked, “What about shooting up the Chicken Shack? What about killing Pudge Eaton? That’s off the mark.”

Charleston nodded his head. “You’re right there. We’ll probably never have proof that Cleaver did the shooting. But look at it this way. From the evidence we have we know how fixed in purpose he was. Suppose, then, that the shooting was a first effort. Perhaps he thought at the time that the shooting would be enough. Suppose he hadn’t hit on the idea of borrowing from Jim Corbett. Of course he didn’t mean to hit Eaton, and, if he did kill him, that fact must have come as a shock. Men react differently to the knowledge of guilt. Having killed a man, Cleaver may have become all the more determined to carry on. A crime committed often frees onward forces. It points the course. Proof or not, I’m satisfied that was the way it was.”

One question remained. “So how was it that Mr. Willsie’s window got broken?”

He was a long time in answering and after a silence didn’t answer at all. “I’m fiddling around in my mind, Jase,” he said, and fiddled some more. At last he asked, “Cleaver had a reputation for honesty. Right?”

“Some people thought he was slow in his mind, but everybody said he was honest down to the quick.”

“An honest man, then. He couldn’t do anything to square up with Pudge Eaton. But Willsie? Maybe I have the ghost of a hunch.”

He turned to the telephone, got an outside line and presently said, “Chick Charleston here, Mr. Willsie. How are you? Yes, fine. Thanks. I’m wondering if anyone ever came forward to pay for your broken window. No? I see. Good-bye, then.”

To me he said, “Just a chance, Jase, and hardly that. We never inspected Cleaver’s truck, except for the toolbox and the bed. Go waste some time on it, will you?”

I took the ignition key and went to the truck. The key didn’t fit the glove compartment, but a screwdriver sprang the lid. There was nothing important inside. I dismounted and moved the seat and there it was, a wrinkled envelope that bore the name in block letters, MR. LEONARD WILLSIE. I took it to Charleston without opening it.

His eyes lit up when he saw it. He slit the seal. Inside were two fifty-dollar bills. “The long shot paid off,” he said. “Cleaver broke Willsie’s window so as to involve the strip miners, but he was going to pay Willsie for it. How to get the money to him, that was the question.”

For a full moment Charleston was silent. His tone was musing when he spoke again. “Cleaver was a better man than anyone thought, far more intelligent than we gave him credit for. And was he set on preserving his ranch! I wonder what would have been his next move. I wonder what he would have done, given time for his second wind.”

He rose and took a slow turn around his chair. “He had people believing in wolves because they heard wolves. Six miles they carry on a still Arctic night, so Doolittle says. How far on a tape amplified? What’s more, he had actually shot a wolf, probably a single stray from the north. He could, and I bet did, tell about it and show the pelt to the doubtful. Strong evidence. Some schemer, that Cleaver. I salute him.”

It was back to business when he sat down again. “Who shot Cleaver? That’s next. Find the wolf tape, and you find the killer.”

He said “you,” I thought. He meant me. He still wanted me to believe the case was my own.