Feeny Clark was thin as well as only five and a half feet tall. Wintone helped to load the body into Doc Amis’s Ford station wagon, and it felt to be not much more than a handful of air. There was a nasty bluish-red groove running the circumference of Feeny’s neck. Feeny had been a handsome man, but now the look on his face was a long way from that.
Wintone watched the dust from Doc Amis’s departing wagon settle, then he instructed every one to go home. Except, of course, poor Alissa Sue, scorned by life and death, who voluntarily left to stay with her brothers at the family’s old farm.
Everyone there knew the sheriff and obeyed without hesitation. Wintone was a moderately tall man, heavy enough to make him nearly huge. He had a flesh-padded yet sharp-featured, almost haughty face topped by a boyishly curly mop of brown hair. His bulk and his heavy-lidded blue eyes suggested a slowness of mind and body, but when need be he could think and move with the unexpected suddenness of lightning. And with almost the force.
When everyone had gone, Wintone let himself back into Feeny Clark’s cabin and looked around again, this time more slowly. The cabin was a two-room affair with a small L-shaped kitchen off to one side of the main living area. There was no attic beneath the steeply pitched roof. The beam to which the rope had been tied crossed the cabin at the midway point and was ten feet, the height of the walls, above the floor. Wintone walked idly about the cabin, probing with his eyes, letting his mind dart in various directions in the hope that it might strike something solid.
The stool, still mud-caked, that Feeny had stood on lay on its side near a corner of the old sofa. It was a small stool used only for reaching, only two feet high. Wintone walked over and poked a finger into the now hardened mud. Then he confiscated the rope from which Feeny had dangled and left the cabin.
When he’d driven back to Colver and opened the door to his office, Wintone saw Betty Ann Willton seated in the oak chair near his desk, waiting for him. He had a good idea of what she was going to tell him.
Wintone unstrapped his holstered revolver and hung it on the brass hook of a coat rack. It was warm in the office despite the struggling window air conditioner, and there were dark crescents of perspiration on his tan uniform shirt. He settled into the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk. The never-oiled chair yowled like a spooked cat, causing Betty Ann to flinch and screw her pleasant blonde features into temporary ugliness.
“I s’pose you know I’m here about Feeny,” she said.
“I am sorry about it, Betty Ann.”
“Sure you are, Sheriff.” She meant that. “Somethin’ I think you oughta know though.”
Wintone looked her wearily in the eye and waited. A bluebottle fly droned across the office and struck the metal Venetian blinds on the front window with surprising impact.
“Feeny didn’t kill himself,” Betty Ann said flatly. “He wouldn’t have.”
“Natural you’d feel like that, Betty Ann.”
Then she surprised Wintone. “We was gonna run away together,” she said, “clear outa the county, maybe to another state.”
Wintone sat back in the squealing chair and tapped a broken pencil point on the desk. “When was you figurin’ on leavin’?” he asked.
“End of the week. There wasn’t any doubt in Feeny’s mind, nor in mine.”
“Sometimes you can’t see or sense another person’s doubt.”
“I could have in Feeny.” She stood up, a wispy resolute girl holding herself more erect than usual. “I ain’t gonna rile you with dumb woman’s sentimental wrong-headedness,” she said. “I only wanted to tell you what I thought you’d have need to know.”
“My thanks, Betty Ann.”
She nodded and went out into the heat without looking at him again.
Wintone sat for a long time listening to the buzz of the fly trapped between the half-closed blinds and the window. What Betty Ann had told him carried weight. And Feeny, to Wintone’s way of thinking, wasn’t the sort to commit suicide — though Wintone knew the possible error of that kind of reasoning. One way or the other, he’d have to find some answers to the question Betty Ann had left with him.
Carl Bolton came to Colver the next day as a representative of Midwest Trust Insurance. His job was to make a cursory investigation of Feeny’s death and write his report and recommendation to his employer. The insurance company would then certainly turn over $20,000 to Feeny’s young widow. The fact that Feeny’s death was judged to be suicide would in no way affect payment. In the state suicide was legally regarded as the result of mental illness. For insurance purposes, Feeny might as well have died from cancer or getting hit by lightning.
A tall, lean man with a full moustache, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a three-piece suit, Carl Bolton stood near the dented file cabinets in Wintone’s office and asked for the preliminary findings on his brother-in-law’s death.
“I’d hold up a while on my report,” Wintone advised him.
Carl rested his fists on his hips. “There’s only one reason I can think of for you to tell me that,” he said.
Wintone nodded. “There’s a possibility of murder.”
“I’ve got the autopsy report right here.” With the shiny toe of his boot, Carl nudged a leather attaché case on the floor beside him. “According to it, Feeny died of strangulation.”
“No argument there.”
“You’re saying somebody hanged him?”
“I’m savin’ there’s a thing or two that needs to be cleared up.” Wintone considered telling Carl Bolton what Betty Ann had said, but he thought better of it. Carl was family of the deceased. “Jus’ give me a day or so, Carl.”
Bolton glanced at his wristwatch as if minutes counted.
“I’ve got to get back to St. Louis, Sheriff,” he said.
Wintone shrugged. “You can write your report any way you want and then go, if you ain’t interested in the truth.”
A bead of perspiration traced an angled route down Carl Bolton’s temple and along his jawline. He sighed and nodded to Wintone. “I’d better stick around, Sheriff.”
After Carl Bolton had gone, Wintone wondered if he could actually prove that Feeny hadn’t hanged himself. That proof had to be the crucial piece of evidence. Establishing motive and opportunity simply wasn’t enough.
He got up, put on his wide-brimmed hat, and sauntered down the street to the Colver Bank. That was the most likely place for Feeny to have kept an account, provided he didn’t bury his meager savings somewhere on his property.
Ollie Deseter, the bank’s president, ran a check and told Wintone that Feeny had closed out his six-hundred-dollar savings account two days before his death. Wintone had Deseter check further and produce the withdrawal slip. The savings account listed Feeny and Alissa Sue Clark as joint tenants with right of survivorship. Feeny’s signature alone had appeared on the withdrawal slip.
Alissa Sue had come in yesterday, Ollie Deseter said, to draw out money for Feeny’s funeral. She was surprised to find the account was closed. Deseter had granted her a loan against the eventual life-insurance settlement.
Wintone thanked Ollie and left, thinking that there was only one likely reason for Feeny to have closed his savings account in the only bank in town. As Betty Ann had claimed, he was planning to leave the area.
The rest of the morning Wintone spent searching Feeny Clark’s cabin. He finally found the six hundred dollars in an oilcloth packet tied to the plumbing beneath the sink.
Wintone returned to his office and sat down in the yowling swivel chair. He thought about the scene of Feeny’s death, but there was nothing in the memory that shed light. He got up and walked to the table where the rope that had been about Feeny’s neck lay, the noose still set at one end. The rope was about three feet long from the bottom of the noose to the end that had been tied about the beam. It had hung down only two feet from the beam, not a long enough drop to kill in the relatively painless way of competent hangings, by breaking the neck. Instead, Feeny had died a lingering, agonizing death by strangulation. A poor choice of all the ways to leave this world. Wintone figured he’d need both hands to count on his fingers the ways he’d rather die than by choking his life away at the end of a rope.