Walsh looked down at the body on the leaves. “Was he out here?”
“No, in the barn, feeding the horses. He was shedding no tears and made it offensively plain that he desired no consolation. I washed out sentiment and came home. Fortunately, as it happened, because Belle had invited company for dinner.”
“You left here at five?”
“Thereabouts. Muller may know. That’s his pasture beyond the stubble field and I saw him on the hill driving home his cows. Here’s the wagon come for Kershaw.”
Men in overalls picked up the body and, whistling cheerfully, carried it in a basket to the waiting van.
“Sic transit Kershaw,” murmured the doctor. He pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip. “That’s the first homicide since either of us took office. Are you worried?”
“A little,” confessed the sheriff.
Worried — but not so much as before, because of what he’d picked up just by keeping his eyes open and noticing things. Maybe he wouldn’t get very far, but at least he now had a start.
Hanslow zippered his bag. “I’ll be getting back to town.” He winced as the cow, bellowing now, swung sideways to rake her flank against the barbed wire. “For God’s sake, Walsh, put that poor brute out of her misery.”
Walsh stripped the cow — giving the milk to the hogs for want of a human recipient — and then turned the horses out to pasture. It did not seem to him incongruous that a county official should postpone his own job to finish a dead man’s chores, because as a countryman he knew that was the way it had to be on a farm. Neither crisis nor calamity can break the rhythm of farm life. Chores went on at their appointed times in spite of illness or daylight saving — or even murder. The rhythm neither quickened nor slowed; it was as immutable as the rhythm of the earth itself. Outsiders, accustomed to quick changes and uneven pace, seldom understood this. Dr. Hanslow had thought it odd that the sheriff had allowed Muller to return home to finish what had to be done.
But Muller must be questioned sometime and Walsh now set out to find him. He worked at the problem while his hands automatically guided the car along the country road between stubble fields and rolling, oak-dotted pasture land. Muller had been on the hill near the barn. He could have seen the murderer, or he could have shot Kershaw himself. Either way, what he said — or what he didn’t say — would be important. But the sheriff had never seen Muller before that morning — so how could he tell if the farmer was lying if he didn’t know how the man acted when he was telling the truth? The sheriff wished he knew more about Muller, that he’d had the sense to ask Hanslow about him. He could have learned a lot about Nancy’s brother from Doc, only like a fool he hadn’t thought to ask. Walsh sighed, depressed anew by the conviction of his own inadequacy.
A mailbox, black-lettered ED MULLER, jutted into the road. Walsh braked and studied the white house at the end of the drive, liking the green window-trim, the chrysanthemums blooming by the steps, the shade trees that blocked a view of the barn. He lowered his eyes to the drive and grunted approval of the smooth, graveled bed.
He parked at the house, not because he expected to find Muller indoors in mid-morning, but because talking to the wife might help Walsh’s understanding of the husband. If there was a wife. He wasn’t even sure of that.
There was. He found her in the backyard hanging out the wash. She was a flat-chested, sharp-featured woman who heard his errand without stopping her work, and then said that Ed was at the barn.
She asked grudgingly, “Want I should call him on the extension?”
“I’ll find him, thanks.” He sensed hostility and worked to counter it. “You got a pretty place, flowers and all, and everything so neat. Must take a heap of work.”
He had touched the right chord. She tossed her head and said proudly, “Work or not, that’s how I like it. So does Ed. Even in bad times — that drought five-six years back — even then Ed never let things get run down.”
“The drought hit you hard?”
“It hit everybody hard. But we come through all right.”
Walsh hunkered down by the clothes basket and held up a miniature pair of jeans.
“How old’s the boy?”
“Going on four. That’s another reason. No matter what, that kid’s going to remember a decent home. Good house, nice garden, clean fields, and straight fences. Not weeds and tin cans and an old shack like some.”
“It’ll be a good memory,” said the sheriff, rising.
As he turned to leave she asked abruptly, “You know who did for Matt?”
“I’m working on it.”
The thin lips tightened. “Don’t work at it too hard. Matt was a no-good.”
Ed Muller switched off the ignition and climbed reluctantly out of the pick-up.
“Let’s get it over quick. Everything’s behind this morning, and I got to get back to Kershaw’s.”
“I took care of the cow and the horses and the hogs. Anything else?”
“Thanks,” said the farmer, obviously relieved. “No, that’s all till evening. There’s been a wire sent to Matt’s son by his first wife, but he can’t get here till tomorrow.”
Walsh held out a key. “Better keep this — I locked the house. If Nancy and Doc were schoolmates, she must have been a lot younger than Matt. How come she married a widower twice her age?”
Muller flared into sudden anger. “Because she was a crazy kid and couldn’t see the meanness under his soft-soaping ways. Pa argued, but when a girl’s nineteen she’s of age. Maybe if Ma’d been alive ’twould have been different. Fourteen years of hell she got. Now Matt’s dead, and too late to do Nancy any good. It ain’t right!”
“It ain’t right Matt should be dead — not murdered, anyhow. Which is why I have to ask questions. When’d you ride past with your cows?”
“To hell with the way he died! I’ll answer questions, I’m no fool to buck the law, but I ain’t going to break my neck trying to help you none. It must have been late, because the sun was low and it’d turned cold. Maybe a minute or two after the 4:55 mail plane went over.”
“Did you see Matt?”
“You can’t see into that yard from the hill — the barn hides it, and the oak tree. All you can see is the house and the driveway. Anyhow, I ain’t seen that skunk — alive — since Nancy’s funeral. Nor heard his squawky voice, neither. He phoned last night around six thirty, only I was up here in the barn and the wife took the message,”
“See anybody at all?”
“Only Doc rassling the gate at the end of the drive. Right then was when the wind first sprung up. It pretty near tore the gate away from him.”
“Why’d Matt phone you?”
“Wondered if a couple of missing steers had broken into my pasture.”
“That why you went down this morning?”
“No,” said Muller shortly. “ ’Twas private business.”
“When it’s murder nothing’s private.”
It was not easy to break down the reserve that self-respect had put up between a man’s personal concerns and prying outsiders. Somehow it didn’t seem decent. The sheriff wondered if what you got was worth the price. The big farmer was now scowling sullenly at the ground and repeating that he was no fool to buck the law. The story would come — truthfully enough in such parts as Muller knew could be checked — but at best there would be evasions and omissions, and in the telling of it a deep hurt to the man’s pride.
Still scowling, Muller said, “It was this note he bought up for money I’d borrowed to carry us through the drought. I thought to pay it off right away, but seems like every year there’s something—”