“Who you calling a damn fool?”
“You, you damn fool.”
Tully was up, too, by then and the two of them stood nose to nose, glaring. I said, “Take it outside, you want to fight,” but it didn’t come to blows between them this time, either. The glaring contest went on for about a minute. Then Tully said, “Ah, the hell with it, the hell with all of you,” and went storming out.
Earl said as J.B. sat down again, “I was you, J.B., I’d lock up that new goat of yours and keep a sharp eye on your property from now on.”
It was the next day, Saturday, the manager of the old auto court opened up Mary’s cabin and found the bloodstains.
More than a few, the way we heard it, on the bed and on the bathroom floor. Long dried, so they must’ve been made the night she disappeared. The place was torn up some, too, from some kind of struggle. The county sheriff came out to investigate and didn’t find anything to tell what had happened, but he considered the cabin a crime scene and kept right on investigating.
News of the bloodstains really stirred things up. It looked like murder, all right, and we’d never had a mystery killing in Ridgedale — no killing of any kind since one of the DiLucca sisters shot her unfaithful husband thirty-five years ago. Nobody who came into my place that night talked about anything else. Tully Buford wasn’t among them, though; he never showed up.
“Blood all over the place,” J.B. said. “Told you she’d been killed, didn’t I?”
“Well, we still don’t know it for sure,” I said. “They haven’t found her yet.”
“Might never find her. Plenty of places to hide a body in all the wilderness around here.”
“Won’t make any difference if they do or don’t,” Earl said. “Whoever done it’s long gone by now.”
“Not the way I see it, he isn’t.”
“You think it’s somebody lives here, J.B.?”
“I think it’s Tully.”
“Come on, now,” I said. “What Doc said last night, he didn’t mean it literally. Did you, Doc?”
He shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“I don’t know. Tully’s a bully and a bunch of other things, but a murderer?”
“Shot my goat, didn’t he?” J.B. said. “Run over that stray dog on purpose, didn’t he?”
“Big difference between animals and a woman.”
“Mary might’ve turned him down once too often. Tully’s got a hell of a temper when he’s riled and drunk.”
“I sure hope you’re wrong.”
“I hope I’m not,” J.B. said.
Well, he wasn’t. And we found it out a lot sooner than any of us expected.
Sunday morning, the sheriff arrested Tully Buford for the murder of Mary Dawes.
Cody Smith came into the tavern, all hot and bothered, and told us about it. He got the news from his brother-in-law, who works as a dispatcher in the county sheriff’s office, and he couldn’t wait to spread it around.
“Sheriff found Mary’s dress and underclothes and purse in a box under Tully’s front porch. Soaked in blood, the lot.”
I said, “The hell he did!”
“There was a bloody knife in there, too. Tully’s knife and no mistake — his initials cut right into the handle.”
“Told you!” J.B. said. “Didn’t I tell you he did it?”
“How’d the sheriff come to find the evidence?” I asked. “What set him after Tully?”
“Phone call this morning,” Cody said. “Man said he was driving past the auto court three nights ago, late, and saw Tully putting something big and heavy wrapped in a blanket in the back of his pickup. Decided he ought to report it when he heard about the bloodstains in Mary’s cabin.”
“Anonymous call?”
“Well, sure. Some folks, you know, they don’t want to get themselves involved directly in a thing like this.”
“But the sheriff took the call seriously?”
“Sure he did. Figured at first it might be some crank, but then he got to thinking about the trouble he’d had with Tully and Tully’s reputation and he decided he’d better have a talk with Tully. Got himself a search warrant before he went, and a good thing he did. Soon as he found the box and saw what was in it, he handcuffed Tully and hauled him off to jail.”
“Tully admit that he done it?” Earl asked.
“No. Swore up and down he never went near Mary’s cabin the night she disappeared, never saw the box or the bloody clothes.”
“What about his knife?”
“Claimed somebody stole it out of his truck a couple of weeks ago.”
“He’ll never confess,” J.B. said. “He never owned up to anything he done in his entire miserable life.”
Doc said mildly, “A man’s innocent until proven guilty.”
“You standing up for Tully now, Doc?”
“No. Just stating a fact.”
“Well, I don’t see much doubt. He’s guilty as sin.”
“They haven’t found Mary yet, have they?”
“Not yet,” Cody said, “but a team of deputies has already started hunting on Tully’s property. If they don’t find her or what’s left of her there, sheriff’s gonna organize a search with cadaver dogs.”
Well, they didn’t find Mary on Tully’s property and the search teams and cadaver dogs didn’t find any trace of her in the surrounding countryside. They were out combing the hills and woods five days before they gave up. Sheriff’s men did find one other piece of evidence against Tully, though. More bloodstains, small ones in the back of his pickup. All the blood was the same — type AB negative, Mary’s type and not too common. They knew that on account of she’d given blood once during a drive at the county seat.
Meanwhile, Tully stayed locked in a cell hollering long and loud about how somebody was trying to frame him. According to Cody’s brother-in-law, he threw out the names of just about everyone he knew, J.B. Hatfield’s number one among them. But it was just a lot of noise that didn’t get listened to. Nobody liked Tully worth a damn, but who’d hate him enough to frame him for murder?
None of us went up to the county jail to see him. None of us would have even if he hadn’t been throwing accusations around, trying to lay the blame on somebody else. Plain fact was, life in Ridgedale was a lot more pleasant without Tully Buford around.
There was a lot of speculation about whether or not the county district attorney would prosecute him for first-degree murder. “Bet you he won’t,” Earl said. “Not without a whatyoucallit, corpus delicti.” Doc Dunaway pointed out that corpus delicti meant “body of the crime,” not an actual dead body, and that precedents had been established for first-degree homicide convictions in nobody cases. Even so, the D.A. was a politician first and a prosecutor second, and he didn’t want to lose what in our small county was a high-profile trial. Most of us figured he’d play it safe. Try Tully on a lesser crime, like manslaughter. Like as not there was enough circumstantial evidence for him to get a conviction on that charge.
Turned out that’s just what he did. The trial lasted about a week, with a parade of witnesses testifying against Tully’s character and nobody testifying in his favor. The public defender didn’t put up much of a defense, and Tully hurt himself with enough cussing and yelling in the courtroom to get himself restrained and gagged. The jury was out less than an hour before they brought in a guilty verdict. First-degree manslaughter, ten to fifteen years in state prison.
There wasn’t a soul in Ridgedale didn’t believe justice had been served.
Well, that was the end of it as far as I was concerned. Or it was until this morning, nearly a year after the trial ended. Now all of a sudden I’ve got a whole different slant on things.
It was Al Phillips gave it to me. Al is Soderholm Brewery’s delivery-man on the route that includes Ridgedale; he stops in once a month to pick up empty kegs and drop off full ones. I went out to talk to him and lend a hand, as I usually do, and while we were loading the fresh kegs he said, “I was up in the state capital last weekend. Took my wife to the outdoor jazz festival up there.”