THE CONFIDENT KILLER

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1967.

Nom Roddenberry took the news of her daughter’s death like a durable hill woman. Her sallow, bony face went as gray as fog. Her slate-gray eyes went out of whack as she tried to keep on seeing me. Her gnarled hands lifted and grabbed her wrinkled cheeks, as if she could make a physical pain that would lessen the hellfire scorching her inside. A wail like a cat caught in a steel trap split her thin lips.

Then she steadied, pulled her shoulders together, stood gasping behind the counter in her cafe. “Gaither…Jerl Brownlee murdered my girl?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, ma’am.”

She took off the clean white smock that she wore over her simple gray dress as her cafe uniform and came around the counter, a small, spry woman that the Smoky Mountain winters and endless toil had whittled down to a collection of hickory sticks and leather.

“Is Pretty at Doc Weatherly’s undertaking parlor now, Gaither?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Will you walk over with me?”

“You know I will!”

“And tell me the whole of it.” Her fingers were like wires on my wrist “Every last detail. You hear me, Gaither?”

She turned over the cardboard sign that hung inside the glass part of the cafe door. The sign said “Closed.” We stepped onto the sidewalk. The old lady closed and locked the door, then stood a minute looking up and down the dusty street like she was a stranger, although she’d lived in the town of Comfort all her life.

“Not much here to satisfy a gal young’un who dreamed of fancy clothes and big city excitement, Gaither.”

“She wasn’t a bad girl, ma’am.”

“That she wasn’t, Gaither. Just too innocent and ignorant of the ways of the world and too—attractive to men.”

With me at her side, Mom Roddenberry thought of the short eighteen years of Pretty’s life, I reckon, as she set off with dogged hill-woman’s stride. “I’m listening, Gaither,” she prodded.

So I told her how Pretty Roddenberry had come to her end, as we tramped toward the old gingerbread house where Doc Weatherly lives upstairs and undertakes on the ground floor.

Pretty had met her death in cruelly simply manner. She’d sneaked up to the Brownlee lodge to keep a date with Jerl. He was the last of the Brownlees, had inherited a timber and tobacco fortune, and figured he was cock of any walk he cared to set foot on.

Jerl didn’t show up in Comfort often, preferring to spend his time and squander his money in resorts where fancy women were plentiful. With a bunch of friends, he had boozed it up at the UT-Clemson game last week, which took place in Knoxville. The swanky Brownlee lodge being on a thousand-acre estate across the line in North Carolina, the gang had trekked over and kept the party roaring.

They caroused over land, lake, and mountainside for three days before they fizzled out. Finally Jerl was left alone, surly and restless. He got to thinking of that cute little trick he’d made a few passes at previous when he happened to be in Comfort, so he called her on the phone, and she was dumb enough to sneak up there.

Who knows what went through Pretty’s excited mind as she dolled up in her best dress and perfume? Did she think she could tease her way into that rustic mansion and let it go at that? Did she think Jerl would actually take her away from the drabness and boredom of an isolated little mountain town such as Comfort? Did she kid herself into thinking she might even have a chance of marrying into the Brownlee millions?

Ever how her noggin worked, when the showdown came she just couldn’t snatch off her clothes and jump into young Jerl’s bed. But she’d called her shots all wrong. She hadn’t figured on the size of Jerl’s spoiled selfishness. His boozing had sharpened all the meanness in him. Even sober, he reckoned that anything he wanted should be his for the taking.

Pretty fought him. It must have been an unholy sight, Pretty struggling and begging for mercy, of which there was none in the inflamed face before her. She barked his shins and scratched his face; then he knocked her down and busted the back of her head. Maybe she struck the big fireplace or a piece of the heavy furniture.

Jerl thought he’d killed her then and there. He dragged her out put her in his car, got in and drove a ways across the mountain until he was off the estate, then shoved her out. He must have thought he was reasonably safe. Days, even weeks, might pass before anybody found Pretty’s body. By then, Jerl figured, it wouldn’t matter what folks suspected. Suspecting and proving are two different matters. He’d just deny that she ever had come to the lodge. Nobody, he reckoned, could prove that some hill renegade hadn’t seen her walking up the road and got passionate ideas.

Only thing, Jerl hadn’t figured on a situation which the Brownlees themselves had set up. For years the Brownlee estate had been posted and the old man, before his death, had kept a mean caretaker up there to enforce the rule. As a result, the thousand acres teemed with game, and a mountain farmer with a taste for fresh meat had set out that morning to do a little poaching, thinking Jerl’s drinking party had adjourned to the lowlands and wouldn’t bother him.

The farmer heard Jerl’s car booming around the curves on the gravel backroad, ducked into the timber, and his popping eyes witnessed Jerl’s final act. The minute Jerl got back in his car and rounded a curve, the farmer went sliding and tumbling into the thicketed ravine where Pretty’s body had come to rest.

A final flicker of life twitched through Pretty’s china blue eyes. Her silken mane of yellow hair was a bloody tangle about her face as she tried to speak. The farmer dropped his ear close to her lips and caught her final words. She told him what had happened, as if there was any doubt in his mind.

The farmer ran a shortcut to the lodge, broke a window to let himself in, and phoned the sheriffs office in Comfort. Sheriff Collie Loudermilk had flashed the word to the sheriffs of neighboring counties. Roadblocks were set up in minutes.

With Jerl Brownlee in the net, Collie had sent me, his deputy, to fetch down the body. I’d brought the poor broken thing to Doc Weatherly’s, gritted my teeth, and dragged my feet to Comfort’s only decent cafe, wishing it was just for a cup of Mom Roddenberry’s good coffee.

Mom didn’t interrupt my tale once. She had a good grip on herself now. She took my words like the seasoned willow takes the slashing sleet. Her suffering was too deep to show on the surface.

We stopped in the shadow of the porch that rambled across the front of Doc Weatherly’s place. Mom Roddenbery lifted a hand and touched my cheek. “You’re a good young man, Gaither Jones, and I’m beholden to you for telling me the straight of it.”

“She was a sweet, human girl, Mom. She was tempted. And she tried to overcome. You always remember that”

“Yes, Gaither, I will.”

“And be sure we’ll get Jerl Brownlee, Mom.”

She lifted her eyes slow-like, and they were the hoar frost that rimes distant peaks. “Yes, that is all that’s left now, Gaither, justice: eye for eye, tooth for tooth. If Pretty is to rest easy in her grave, Jerl Brownlee must reap his due.”

I didn’t need to answer that one. We were both hill people.

“Again, I’m obliged to you, Gaither. Now, I know you got work to do. I’ll just ease inside alone to spend a last minute with my daughter.”

I watched her creep up the porch steps. Each one added about ten years to her narrow, bony shoulders. The door of the undertaking parlor opened, swallowed her. I turned, jammed my hands in the pockets of my tan twill, kicked some hollyhocks growing alongside the walk, and cussed my way back up the street to the office.

The short-range walkie-talkie, which the taxpayers begrudged Collie and me out of the mail order catalogue, was crackling when I walked in.

“Gaither, where in dad-blasted thunderation you been?” Collie Loudermilk howled through the static, sounding like a banshee.

“Playing pool and drinking beer,” I said sourly, looking across the street at that “Closed” sign on the cafe door. “You bringing in Jerl Brownlee?”

The walkie-talkie like to have spit fire. “He spotted my car blocking Miden Falls road, skidded off the curve, turned over twice, straight down the mountainside.”

“He’s hurt? Maybe bleeding to death?” I inquired happily.

“He bounced out healthy as a jackrabbit and with the same ideas. I’ve lost him, Gaither, somewhere in the gorges above Cat Track Holler. If we don’t flush him out of this wild country before nightfall, we lose him. He’s got the whole compass to aim at, a good chance of making it out of these mountains. If he does that well heeled as he is, next thing we know he may be playing with them French girls in that Riviera place.”

“I reckon you need me and Red Runner and Old Bailey,” I said.

“Naw,” Collie growled, “I’m just fiddling with this gadget in hopes of communing with a braying jackass! Will you stop wasting time?”

“You’re doing all the talking,” I said, and cut him off.

I grabbed the two dog leashes off the wall peg, and skedaddled out of the office, around the old brick building to the dog lot behind the jail. Old Bailey and Red Runner heard me rattling the gate open. They snuffled out of their kennels, long ears nearly dragging in the dust. Their baggy, forlorn eyes spotted the leashes, and a quiver went through both dogs. They perked up quick. I swear those bloodhounds can even smell out the prospect of smelling out a man.

A setting sun threw streamers of golden fire across the peaks in the west and twilight was settling in the valleys when me and the two dogs homed in on Collie Loudermilk’s location.

Collie is a skinny, sandy man who looks like he couldn’t last out a mountain winter in front of the fireplace, but he’s the kind of gristle that can dull a knife. He’s been sheriffing in Comfort for twenty years, and knowing him firsthand, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s twenty more before I inherit his job.

While the hounds and I got our breath in the shadows of the gorges. Collie shook out a sports jacket that would have cost me a month’s pay.

“Lying loose in the back seat of Jerl Brownlee’s wrecked car,” Collie said. “Let’s hope it’s his and that he’s worn it recent before he pitched it back there.”

Collie squatted before the excited dogs, held out the jacket, and they took a good long whiff. I stayed with them, keeping the leashes slack, as they snuffled around for a few seconds. Then with a howl fair to curdle the blood, both dogs hit the ends of the leashes, almost jerking me off my feet.

We tracked Jerl up a long hollow where the briars were as thick as riled-up bees, and across a long stretch of naked shale, where only a dog’s pads had good footing. Collie slipped halfway across. He burned skin off his knees and elbows as he slid and rolled twenty feet down the slope. He got up cussing because I was holding up the dogs, waiting for him to climb back to us.

Beyond the shale. Jerl had jumped a spring-fed creek, which held us up for a good ten minutes, and crossed a soggy meadow. Then he’d stumbled onto the dim remains of an old logging trail and picked that route up through the timber.

I didn’t have a dry rag on me by this time. I was sweating so hard from the exertion. The dogs had lather on their flanks and wet tongues hanging from the sides of their mouths. Collie looked as fresh as a new-grown stinkweed, eyes anxious on the purple shadows that closed in about us.

As the dogs tugged me along. I began to lose track of the number of gullies we crossed, the patches of underbrush we slammed through. My legs felt as if they had fallen off, and I looked down in the failing light to make sure they were still there, like a pair of pump handles underneath me.

Then all of a sudden my glazing eyes glimpsed Collie’s shadow shooting out ahead of us. I still didn’t see the flicker of motion that had caught his attention. He splashed across a seep that would turn into a creek during a heavy rain, and dived into a canebreak. A minor hell erupted in there. Sawgrass and reeds rattled. A covey of birds sprayed out in all directions. Cattail fluff showered into the air.

Collie came out just as the dogs and I cleared the seep. He had Jerl Brownlee by the shirt collar, Jerl draped on the ground behind him.

“Got him, by gum,” Collie said, backhanding an ooze of blood off his nose.

“You done all right, Sheriff,” I said, nodding, “after me and the dogs cornered him for you.”

Jerl was about the most bruised, scratched, begrimed, and generally trail-weary young punk you’d ever want to see. Collie and I and Jerl’s rubbery legs finally got him back to the sheriff’s car. We put the dogs in front with Collie. I got in back to guard the prisoner, who didn’t look much like it was necessary. We’d come back for my car later.

Jerl didn’t have a word to say all the way back to town. He was doing plenty of thinking, and by the time I shoved him in a jail cell, he’d about decided he was still Jerl Brownlee, cock of any walk.

He watched me lock the cell door with hooded eyes. Then his battered lips twisted in a sneer. “You yokels don’t think for a minute this is going to work out your way, do you?”

“Looks like it might,” I said.

“You dumb rube,” he said. “With my dough, I’ll have the choice of the finest legal brains from New York to Los Angeles. There are jurors to buy, judges for sale. There are a thousand loopholes in the law, and ten thousand technicalities. With my loot, I can fight this thing to the highest courts in the land, no matter how long it takes. So before you wallow in any naive sentiments about the workings of justice or pat yourself on the back, deputy-boy, just answer me one question. Have you ever heard of a millionaire ending up in the electric chair or gas chamber?”

His question was still rattling around in my head a few minutes later as I trudged across the dark street The “Closed” sign was still on the door of Mom Roddenberry’s cafe, but there were lights in the flat overhead where she and Pretty had lived. I fumbled for the banister of the outside stairway that led up the side of the building to the flat.

The old lady answered my knock, searched my face for a minute, and invited me into a plain, but comfortable and clean parlor.

I sat down on a studio couch. Mom eased to the edge of a chair across from me. A hard stillness came to the apartment.

“Gaither,” she said, “you did catch him. He’s locked up. I’ve already heard.”

“Yes, ma’am. But I got a dreadful feeling that rich boy will get out of this.”

“Why, lad, we know he done it! Cold-blooded and mean. Pretty said he did—and she wouldn’t tell a lie with her dying breath.”

“I know, but we run up the first stump right there. We got a witness that says that she said it. They call it hearsay evidence. The lawyers he can afford will cut our case to nothing.”

The old lady thought about it, hands crimping like talons. Then she raised her slatey gray eyes. “Might be a game two can play, Gaither.” I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Would a mountain jury convict an old woman if she was temporarily pixilated by the murder of her daughter?”

The hairs stiffened on the back of my neck as I began to get the drift.

She rose slowly. “Mom Roddenberry’s cafe always supplies meals for the jail prisoners across the street. Tonight you got a prisoner. I’m going down now, Gaither, and fix his supper. I reckon that’s why you came over, to fetch the prisoner his tray?”

I gulped. “Well, ma’am… Come to think of it, yes.”

“A real mouth-watering meal for the man…” She patted my shoulder in passing. “But don’t you dast get forgetful and throw the scraps to Red Runner and Old Bailey.”

“No, ma’am,” I promised. “I reckon such a fine pair of dogs deserve better than scraps tonight.”