A Dead Man's Tale Read online

  “I’ve been waiting up for you, Sammy—don’t stand out there in the cold like a silly old goof.” Irene added a shiver and a “Brrrr!”

  Buttoning his woolen jacket, her husband called out, “I’ll be right there, dear.”

  “Well hurry up—I’ve got something special waiting for you!” With this enticing invitation, his gorgeous wife disappeared inside, leaving the door open wide.

  Still a bit giddy from his extraordinary experience, Samuel Reed needed to get a fix on his temporal coordinates. He entered through the rear of his home and stepped into a little-used game room that was provided with all manner of entertainments, from computerized tests of manual and mental skills to old-fashioned amusements like a Ping-Pong table, a 1950s’-era pinball machine, an antique Reno Sally slot rigged to fleece the occasional guest who could not resist feeding it quarter-dollars. Oblivious to these garish furnishings, he switched on a century-old Tiffany floor lamp and peered at the Cattleman’s Bank calendar, whereupon—every morning without fail—he crossed off the previous day. The last date with an X through it was the second of May. Which makes this the third. Reed’s eyes goggled, his mouth gaped, and he heard himself say, “I have a month and a day left!”

  Again he was distracted by his spouse’s summons—this time from their spacious parlor. “Don’t dillydally, Sammy—come in here by the fire.”

  He smiled at the girlish pout in Irene’s voice. “I shall be there directly.”

  “I’ve got something sweet and yummy—come to Mummy and get some while it’s hot!”

  Reed inhaled deeply, put on his happy-face mask, and marched into the parlor, where piñon flames snapped and crackled merrily in a fireplace large enough to roast a side of prime beef flanked by a half-dozen tender piglets.

  His darkly attractive wife, wearing a black silk negligee and a sly smile, was stretched out on a midnight-blue velveteen couch. Irene raised a smallish glass that was half filled with an aromatic amber fluid. Smiling seductively at her husband, the lady gestured to draw his gaze to a crystal pitcher perched on the hearth. “Would Daddy like a nice hot toddy?”

  The husband sighed. “Mommy always knows just what Daddy likes.”

  This is an appropriate time to leave Mr. and Mrs. Reed to enjoy the privacy of their luxurious residence.

  Tomorrow morning, we shall pay a call on another sort of man altogether. Charlie Moon does not have a wife to come home to, and his bankroll would not choke a garter snake or grubstake a frugal silver prospector searching for “sign” in the badlands on the yonder side of Pine Knob. No, sir—not for a week, on a menu of moldy old corn pone, cold navy beans, and sour stump water.

  Chapter Three

  “‘O bury me not on the lone prairie.’

  These words came low and mournfully

  From the pallid lips of the youth who lay

  On his dying bed at the close of day.”

  May 4

  Hard Times on the Columbine

  Though you wouldn’t have guessed it from the hearty breakfast in the ranch headquarters. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Frank, who was serving it up on big platters, also provided nonstop cheerful chatter. The winsome lass was fairly bubbling over about how much she was enjoying her second semester at Rocky Mountain Polytechnic University in Granite Creek.

  Every now and then when he could slip a slender word in edgeways, Charlie Moon contributed a remark or two.

  Whenever Sarah finally ran out of breath, Charlie’s aunt Daisy commenced to entertain those present with her customary early-morning organ recital, which began with the composer’s well-known “Overture to an Aching Left Kidney,” followed by her lighthearted “Waltz with a Leaky Bladder,” and finally the big finale—an untitled fugue dedicated to Daisy Perika’s troublesome colon.

  What a great way to start a day—and break an overnight fast with a feast.

  After Moon had finished off three fried eggs, a Texas-size chicken-fried steak soaked in thick brown gravy, and enough crispy fried potatoes and made-from-scratch buttermilk biscuits to feed slender little Sarah for a week, the Ute rancher politely inquired whether anyone had a hankering for that last piece of beef in the cast-iron skillet. The ladies did not, so the tall, lean man helped himself to the lonely piece of meat, smothered it in a ladle of hot gravy, and made short work of the combination.

  Will all that cooking, talking, eating, and whatnot, the Columbine kitchen was already a mite warmish and it was about to heat up by a few extra degrees that cannot be measured on any Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, or other temperature scale that you might care to mention.

  Watch the girl do her stuff.

  While Sarah helped Charlie with the dishes, the willowy youngster’s left hip just happened to bump him from time to time. It was enough.

  These small intimacies inspired Mr. Moon to get out of the kitchen and onto the east porch first chance he got, which he did, leaving Sarah to sigh and Aunt Daisy to shake her head and wonder where all this foolishness was going. Sarah has her cap set for my nephew but that silly girl is like a daughter to Charlie and what he wants for a wife is a grown-up woman and there’s a half-dozen brassy hussies just waiting to be asked and I wish one of ’em was a nice Ute girl but every one of ’em is a matukach but I’d just as soon he stayed single as marry one of them pale-skinned women because if that mixing keeps up for two or three more generations the whole tribe’ll look like they was from Norway and won’t that be a big joke on us Southern Utes but at least I won’t live to see it.

  The old woman does tend to think in run-on sentences, but when you boil it all down to the dregs, Daisy Perika’s analysis of the edgy relationship between Charlie Moon and Sarah Frank was not so far from being right on the mark—and such tensions in a household raise a pertinent question: when a hardworking man is pursued by a romantic teenager and vexed by a testy aunt, what does he need from time to time?

  A rejuvenating dose of rest and relaxation, that’s what.

  But managing an outfit the size of Charlie Moon’s Columbine Ranch doesn’t leave much time for a fellow to enjoy the finer aspects of life, like angling for rainbow trout, dancing with a pretty girl who’s at least thirty years old, picking an old-time tune on his Stelling’s Gold Cross banjo, or just taking a long, peaceful walk in a shady forest of aspen and fir. Mr. Moon would dearly love to set aside a few hours for any one of these activities, but if it ain’t one danged thing that interferes with a man’s plans it’s half a dozen more. Here are a few f’r instances.

  Purebred cattle falling like flies from the latest highly contagious and mysterious malady that perplexes even those folks with Ph.D.s in cowology.

  The three wa-hooing Columbine cowboys that busted up the Harley’s Bad Boys Bar last week and “borried some fancy motorsikkles.” It was all just for fun, to hear them tell it. (The unrepentant sinners are locked up in jail, impatiently waiting for the boss to go their bail, and that’ll happen when cottonwoods leaf out in twenty-dollar bills.)

  Over and above and on top of miscellaneous cattle diseases and pesky personnel problems, there are plagues of ravenous range worms and clouds of famished locusts that devour every last blade of grass on twenty sections in twenty minutes, and don’t even talk about broken-down windmills and wheezy bulldozers hitting on maybe two cylinders and hungry cougars who’ve acquired a taste for Columbine prime beef. Such problems tend to nibble away at a stockman’s razor-thin profit margin.

  Which is why Charlie Moon looks forward to that happy time when he’ll be flat-out retired, and those sweet mornings when he can sleep in until 7 A.M. and never have to look a homely Hereford in the face again or a bronc in the other end. Sad to say, like energizing the nation with nuclear fusion or solar power or wind, that longed-for day always seems to be twenty years away. In the meantime, the owner of the cattle operation is obliged to set a good example for his employees, which is why the Ute Indian was up well before the sun yawned and cracked a bloated fireball of an eyeball over the jagged Buckhorn Range. />
  It helped that most every morning on the Columbine could be rated somewhere between fine and fair, but this particular May 4 dawn had outdone itself. The eastern sky started off by showing off a pale, dusty blue that bloomed into a soft rosy hue, and just about the time Charlie Moon figured it’d done about all it could do, an armada of wispy cloudships sailed by to fill his eye with pearly pink that made him think of cotton candy and the cherry-flavored lips of the first girl he’d ever kissed.

  But back to the heavenly display.

  On the blue, rosy, pink background someOne had painted misty wisps of scarlet and also brushed on a few swirls of royal purple, which made a rainbow so pretty that it fairly made a man’s eyeballs ache. Imagine Moon’s surprise when the Artist struck flint to steel, making a white-hot spark that set the entire sky afire—what a fine show! For an encore, molten gold rolled off the snowy mountains like lava, threatening to sweep trees off the foothills and flood the deep Columbine Valley right up to the brim. Like most celebrations, the fireworks were over too soon, but the performance left a fellow thinking that life was about to dish out a dandy treat.

  For a struggling stockman situated on the high, rolling prairie between the Buckhorn and Misery mountains, the hoped-for blessing might amount from anything to a boost in beef prices that’d been sliding down a slippery slope since last October, to an all-night root-soaking rain that’d revive sixty sections of parched pasture.

  Fat chance.

  Charlie Moon might as well hope that his aunt Daisy would settle down and behave like a normal woman of her advanced age. Or for that matter, that sweet little Sarah Frank would find herself a young man who was worth his boots and saddle, and thereby stop giving Mr. Moon the big-eye, which was downright embarrassing for a man that was old enough to be the Ute-Papago orphan’s daddy.

  Odds were, this would be another run-of-the-mill day, much like a thousand others. The price of beef on the hoof would slip a little or maybe level off, and there would be no sweet rainwater to refresh the Columbine’s thirsty earth, Daisy would commit a fresh outrage sufficient to shock a deranged Nazi storm trooper, and Sarah would flutter her eyelashes at him and drop hints about how she was of an age to consider matrimony and had been for about three years now.

  Charlie Moon figured he’d have to settle for what he had. These were hard times, and a man should be grateful just to make his way through one day and into the next. But one way or another, the Columbine’s bills would have to be paid. Which reminded him that there was another side to that coin—the rancher had a few unpaid debts he could call in. But after thinking it over, Moon realized that all his debtors were worse off than he was.

  Except for the notable exception.

  If I could figure out some way of collecting the back wages the county owes me for standing in as Scott Parris’s deputy now and again, that’d be a big help. Intending to call Chief of Police Parris, Moon made a reach for the telephone. He hesitated. Even though this was county money, it didn’t feel right—leaning on his best friend. Scott has troubles enough without me shoveling on some more.

  On the other hand…

  The county does owe me the debt—and some of it’s for work done two or three years ago. This would be hard, but times were tough all over and the thing had to be done. Charlie Moon pulled the telephone out of his jacket pocket, found the programmed number, his finger was on the button…the stubborn digit refused to press it.

  The rancher shook his head. I can’t do this.

  Not to Scott.

  Chapter Four

  Laying Down the Law

  About six seconds flat after Charlie Moon had almost called him, Chief of Police Scott Parris—who knew about his Ute friend’s financial troubles and was well aware of the back pay the county owned his part-time deputy—made up his mind to do something about it. And right now.

  About two hundred heavy boot-stomps later, the angry chief of police marched into the County Council Chamber, where the mayor was conducting a breakfast meeting with a half-dozen cronies. This six-plus-one committee, whose average weight was in excess of two hundred pounds, was known derisively by disappointed voters as the Seven Dwarves.

  Scott Parris was not present to play Snow White. The big-shouldered cop raised a meaty palm to command silence. “I don’t have any time to waste, so I’ll have my say and hit the bricks.” He waved a finger at the mayor and six council-persons. “Every mother’s son of you knows that Charlie Moon—with verbal approval from the mayor—has served as my deputy on several occasions during the past several years. You also know that despite all the paperwork I’ve filed to make things ‘legal and proper,’ and all the hours I’ve spent reminding you fine community leaders that it ain’t right to let Charlie go unpaid for his efforts in keeping the citizens of this county safe from murderers, burglars, arsonists, grafting politicians, and other felons—you still ain’t paid him one thin dime!” Seeing the mayor about to open his mouth and make another in a long line of inane protests that would make his blood boil, Parris—who was getting madder with every racing heartbeat—snapped, “Shuddup, Bruce!”

  The mayor shudduped.

  The chief of police gulped in a deep breath. “Now here’s the deal. Either you cut Charlie a check for full payment right away, or else. You guys hearing me clear?”

  A recently elected councilman, who had a Yale law degree mounted on his office wall, was not intimidated. Not yet. He cleared his throat. “That sounds very much like a threat.”

  “You’re damn right it is!” Parris banged his big fist on the table, spilling six cups of coffee and the new councilman’s green tea. His red face inches from the lawyer’s gray mask, the burly cop bared his big teeth in a wolfish grin. “If you politicians don’t do the right thing, there’s gonna be ten kinds of hell to pay. You want to hear the one that’ll really make your day?”

  It was clear that not one of the Seven did.

  Which was why the chief of police enjoyed telling them. Parris watched seven pale faces blanch chalky white, arteries thumpity-thumping on seven flabby necks. When he’d had his say, the Dwarves got down to some serious business. There were concerned murmurings, hoarse whisperings, exchanges of knowing nods.

  Bottom line?

  A solemn promise was made that sometimes-deputy Moon would be paid in full. (The county’s top cop asked when.) Not to worry. The check would be cut right away. (Parris demanded specificity.) Sometime today. Tomorrow at the latest.

  “Tomorrow is not an option,” he roared—and stormed out of the room.

  As he hit the street, the chief of police realized that this was probably the latest in a long line of broken vows. But if they don’t keep their word this time around, I’ll get even with every one of those miserable egg-sucking sons of bitches!

  An overdose of anger tends to distract a man from what’s going on around him, and the furious chief of police took no notice of those citizens he met on the sidewalk. Including the soft-spoken pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, who said, “Good morning.” Also Ms. Janey Bultmann (owner of Bultmann Employment Services), who was already lighting her twenty-fourth cigarette of the day.

  Scott Parris was also unaware of the dapper middle-aged man in the three-piece suit. The one with the thin mustache who carried an ivory-knobbed cane. Like the kindly cleric and the chain-smoking businesswoman, Samuel Reed could not help but notice the big, buffalo-shouldered cop with blood in both eyes and murderous mayhem brewing in his heart. My—the brutish fellow looks like he’s anxious to strangle someone with his bare hands. It occurred to him that if push came to shove, a man would want Scott Parris on his team—which idle thought planted the germ of a notion in Professor Reed’s fertile mind. Within a few minutes it would produce a tender green sprout that would leaf out and bloom. Though pleasing to Samuel Reed’s biased eye, the blossom would not be especially fragrant.

  Chapter Five

  Where Sam Reed Makes His Millions

  The third floor of the Cattleman�
�s Bank building consists entirely of offices leased to local businesses. The current occupants include two insurance representatives, three realtors, a thriving partnership of dental surgeons that specializes in endodontics (a euphemism for root canals), a dispensing optician (her logo is a yard-wide pair of spectacles suspended over the door), a defunct crisis-intervention center whose automated telephone message advises anxious inquirers to “call back during our regular business hours.” A short hallway on the northern side terminates in a solid oak doorway which has neither printed sign nor mail slot. Most who notice the unmarked entrance assume that it conceals the janitor’s storage room, an electrical closet, or the like.

  Behind the door is an L-shaped inner sanctum that comprised three rooms and a full bath. One of the smaller rooms serves as Samuel Reed’s kitchen, the other as his occasional bedroom. The kitchen and bedroom are satellites to a strikingly spartan corner office. The hardwood floor is uncarpeted; the room’s sole furnishings are a knotty-pine desk, a comfortable armchair, a maple floor lamp with a green velvet shade, and a wicker waste basket.

  When the office is unoccupied, the desktop is bare. On those occasions when serious business is conducted, a laptop computer is placed on the oiled surface.

  A pair of large plate-glass windows face north; their twins look to the west. These are the views that the lessee prefers, and Professor Samuel Reed never settles for second best. The desk is positioned so that the man seated behind it can enjoy a panoramic view of blue-gray granite mountains snugly capped with last winter’s snow.

  This space is occupied by a venture incorporated under the name Do-Wah-Diddy Investments, Ltd. The corporation’s semilyrical moniker was selected because the owner-manager of the firm sometimes muses about retiring to that mythical southern community that is neither town nor city, and also because he likes Phil Harris’s lively song.