“What do you mean, might have something I’d be interested in?” I said. “I’m Bailey, I’m here, you’re there, start talking.”
Penn looked me over and grinned. “Naw, the time ain’t right,” he said. He hoisted his schooner, his gullet worked up and down twice, and about four inches of beer slid down. He put the glass on the bar, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “I just wanted to know what you look like in person. I’ll see you around in here again and we’ll have a big ol’ talk.”
Before I could say anything he slipped off the stool and walked to the door. He shot a salute at Bronk, who was standing at the door end of the bar, and walked out, his hands jammed into the pockets of his whites.
“Bailey?”
Rasmussen, my nominee for chief of the Riverton Police Department, and my top “informed source” on the force, was a dead giveaway. His voice had the melodious quality of one of those rock-polishing machines.
“Yes, Rasmussen, it’s Bailey. Who else answers this phone? Joseph Pulitzer?”
“Hey, that’s a real good one, Bailey. Anyway, we got a stiff. You takin’ notes?”
“Yes, I’m takin’ notes.”
“O.K. The deceased is a white male, age twenty-six, five-nine, 185 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, tattoo of the name ‘Thelma’ in a heart on the inside left forearm, tattoo of a dagger dripping blood and the words ‘Crockett, Texas’ on left bicep.”
The tattoo descriptions caused something to click in my head. “How’d he get it?”
“Two big-caliber slugs. One in the head, the other in the neck.”
“When and where was the body found?” It was almost five and I wondered whether our competition, the Press, Riverton’s afternoon paper, already had the story.
“No more than two, three hours ago. A guard at the Glover Company — you know, that wholesale electronics place on Merchant and Silver — moved a big piece of cardboard in the alley and found the deceased under it. Guy’d been dead maybe eight hours.”
“Got a name?”
“John Robert Penn. Maybe a transient. He was carrying a Texas driver’s license, forty bucks in his wallet, and what looks like a payroll stub from the Cinderella Diner — that’s a chili-and-ptomaine parlor on Eldorado near Fourteenth.”
At the mention of the chili parlor something else went click. I asked a question I do not ordinarily ask.
“How was the guy dressed?”
“Dressed? I don’t know. Hold on.”
I hung on.
“Bailey?”
“Yeah?”
“The deceased had on white pants, a T-shirt, and white canvas shoes.”
Something went click-click-click and it wasn’t the phone.
It was a slow day for local news and my story on the Penn murder was played for more than it deserved, page 1-B above the fold with a two-column head.
The story contained everything I had been able to get. Penn had been dead nine to eleven hours when the Glover Company guard found him. That put the murder at around 4:00 a.m. No one had turned up who heard the shots or saw anything. I had phoned the Cinderella Diner and talked to Richard Hayes, the owner. He said Penn worked the four-to-midnight shift the night before he was killed. Hayes said he couldn’t account for what Penn did after he left work. I quoted him in my story.
“I don’t know much about him,” Hayes said. “He worked for me about two months — came in off the street and applied. I had a sign in the window. He said he was an experienced cook and he was. He was a good worker and very quiet. He liked to be called Jack.”
Hayes said he knew nothing of Penn’s after-work habits or friends. “Why somebody would want to bump him off is way beyond me,” Hayes added.
This, plus the information that Penn had apparently not been robbed, that there was no sign of a struggle, and that the Riverton police had determined Penn had no close living kin, about summed up what I had. I did mention that the Merchant Street warehouse neighborhood, in one of the oldest sections of Riverton, was only a few blocks from Penn’s fifty-dollar-a-month slum apartment, where he’d lived for a total of five weeks.
Naturally I reread clips of my stories in the Sentinel over the past five weeks, trying to get some idea of what Penn had read that made him want to talk to me. But the past couple of months had been lean — an embezzlement so picayune it had netted the culprit, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Riverton National Bank, less than $800, a piece on the rising number of late-night armed robberies of convenience stores; an Op Ed column in which I pontificated, at my editor’s insistence, on “senseless vandalism” — as if there’s any other kind — using recent examples at Riverton College and one of our largest public parks; and a feature on the “suicide curve” on the Interstate south of town, which had claimed several lives so far this year.
There was a batch of other things, but they were unbylined pieces and Penn couldn’t have known I’d written them.
“It would bug me too,” Willis, my city editor, said. “He probably didn’t have anything big to tell you, but who knows? When I was on the city beat an old lady stopped me outside the Mayor’s office and gave me a tip that tore the lid off that favor-peddling operation a few years ago. Her son worked for a big construction company that had been awarded a fat contract even though it was a long way from low bidder on the job. The son told his mother what he overheard in the office, she told me, and I lit the fuse. You just never know.”
“Thanks for that comforting example,” I said.
Willis smiled out of the corner of his mouth, slopping paste on several fragments of a story he had edited, scissored into fragments, and was reuniting.
“Seriously — maybe you should work it the other way. Get as much information on Penn as you can and try to fit that to what you wrote over the last couple of months.”
I said, “Now I know why you get that big paycheck every week.”
The Sentinel, being a class newspaper, has a class “library.” This consists of a wooden cigarette-scarred bookcase by the wire room containing a set of encyclopedias once offered a volume a week by a local supermarket; a gazetteer so old Istanbul is still called Constantinople; a half dozen vintage copies of Playboy, their covers and contents disintegrating and their centerfolds long ago appropriated by the chief photographer for scholarly study in his darkroom; three World Almanacs, the latest three years old; an unabridged dictionary that will give a hernia to anyone who moves it from its shelf; a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage which has never been opened, much less used; an Associated Press Stylebook decorated with linking coffee-cup rings; a thermos bottle, two or three empty sacks that once contained the lunches of our brown-bagging wire editor, and six styrofoam cups, containing the sickening remains of coffee and cigarette butts.
The library does have one valuable thing, evidence of the fixation the newspaper business has on the newspaper business: the Ayer Directory of Publications. It is divided into states, then alphabetically into cities, then alphabetically under that every newspaper and periodical published in that city together with the circulation of each, when it was founded, who owns it, the address, the name of the editor, and a lot of other information in squint-producing eight-point type.
I looked up Crockett, Texas (pop. 22, 415) and got the name of its paper, a daily called the Chronicle, whose editor was Charles Craddock. I swear — Charles Craddock of the Crockett Chronicle.