Читать книгу The Strange Death of Manny Square - A. B. Cunningham - Страница 5

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The conviction came over Roden with a little prickle of wonder and awe. For it was a certainty, although he had no proof. Nonchalantly, as though merely killing time while he waited for Lefferton, he crossed the barnyard and entered the door leading to the horse stalls. Lige’s was the third from the door: the moist bedding on the floor bore innumerable marks of the long narrow feet in spite of the footprints that had been superimposed upon them. Back there against the south wall Manny had been found. Roden studied the place, his lips grim, his eyes fluid and luminous. Then he stepped to the door and called Sutton.

“Mind to show me where you found him, Fred?”

Sutton rubbed the sweat out of his eyes with a large red handkerchief. He stepped to a certain spot and took his bearings carefully. “Right here,” he said.

“On his face?”

“No-o. He was kinda settin’ up. Like he had been lifted clean off his feet and jest slid down when he hit the wall.”

“Lige couldn’t reach him for another crack at him, eh?”

“No. Lige was haltered short.”

Roden said that it never paid to trust a mule. Sutton agreed. Then at a noise in the barnyard he bethought himself and hurried back to his sledge. Roden grinned thinly, knowing that with Old Lou in charge the hired hands would step lively. Then he turned his attention once more to the barn.

The Square barn

The horses were quartered on the south, the cows on the north. Back of the deep stalls on either side was a runway about four feet wide. In the center of the barn and between the two rows of stalls, was a wide areaway, with baled hay and sacks of corn and wheat and oats and bran stacked conveniently here and there. In the direct center of this areaway was a 45 long table made of heavy timbers and serving as a sort of work bench or mixing place, where feed was prepared or bundles broken before being thrown to the waiting stock. To the north of the table was a ladder with rungs nailed to beams and leading to the mow overhead.

Roden was standing back of Lige’s stall, on the spot where Manny Square had been found dead. He put a hand up against the wall, and started at a slight tinkling sound. On a peg which had been driven into an auger hole were half a dozen mule shoes, hung there by the thrifty Manny as they had been cast by the mule. Roden lifted one down, interested in studying its shape. But on the instant he was wholly absorbed. The shoe was old and rusty, but it had clearly been recently used. There was no dust upon it, nor any caked mud in the nail holes. And extending from each hole out over the side of the shoe were vague lines, blue on the metal, such as might have been made by iron upon iron.

Sheriff Roden caught his breath with a small whistling sound. The canniness deepened in his face. For in one of the nail holes, and filling a shallow groove which ran from the one hole to another, was a bit of flesh. He lifted it out with a finger nail, examined it minutely. It seemed a particle of skin such as might 46 have been left imbedded on the shoe had it been driven into a human face.

A shadow darkened the door and caused Roden to look up. He blinked slightly when he saw Fred Sutton. The man’s handsome face was no longer pleasant and humorous, but was sharp and colorless in a strange way.

“Found somethin’, Sheriff?”

“A shoe.”

“Oh, them!” Sutton nodded at the others on the peg. “Manny always hung ’em there. Didn’t like to waste anything.”

“Ever use ’em?”

“No. Never seen him take one down.”

“This one—”

“Jess! You in there?” It was Lefferton calling from without. He nodded to Sutton, stepped before the door. “I’ve got to hop to it.”

Sutton started to say something, but thought better of it and returned to the stone pile. Roden waited till he was out of earshot, then said to Lefferton, “I’ve got to see Manny again.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got to see that place on his face. You can say you forgot something and give us an excuse to go back in.”

“But the old lady’s on my tail.”

But Roden was already steering him through the barn toward the house. “You think up an excuse.”

Mrs. Square let them in reluctantly, stopping in the doorway of the little guest room and holding her pince-nez to her nose as they approached the body. Lefferton once again drew down the sheet and made pretense of laying the tape across the slight shoulders.

“Let me help you,” Roden said. He took one end of the tape and held it firmly on the far shoulder. The action brought his face close to the dead man’s. And although he remained but an instant, his photographic eye told him what he wanted to know. The flesh had been pushed back in place to give the features a semblance of naturalness; but on the left cheek a small strip of skin was dished out. It was hardly noticeable—a mere indentation perhaps half an inch long, but it laid bare the tiny blood vessels beneath it.

Roden said, “Got it right this time?” He straightened, turned apologetically to Mrs. Square. “Ed used the wrong end of the tape the first time,” he said. “Got Manny’s shoulders wide as a giant.”

On the way back to the barn he said, “You stall around out there in the lot and keep anyone out. I want to look the place over.”

“But I got to hurry, Jess. This is a big thing.”

“I know. I won’t be a minute.”

Once in the barn, he slipped the narrow mule shoe in his hip pocket, stepped to the manger where Lige had been haltered, and vaulted nimbly to the areaway beyond. The table was before him. Here Manny Square had been wont to stand, cutting the bundles of feed before throwing them to the mangers, mixing the grain. The hole to the hay mow was directly overhead.

Roden already had a theory of how Manny Square had been murdered. It had come to him as inescapable once he was convinced Lige was not the agent. Square had been killed by someone who wanted to make it appear the work of Lige; and so the mule shoe had been wired to something—a heavy timber, a sledge—and driven home in exact simulation of the kick of a mule.

And the blow had not come from below but from above. Only then would the shoe strike as it had on the dead man’s face—the heel tips first, the toe hardly at all. But with the killer above his victim, say up there in the mow, and with Manny here at the table breaking bundles for old Lige, the timber bearing the fatal shoe could drop like a forced pendulum, gathering momentum by its own weight, driving inexorably toward the mark and striking heel first....

Roden climbed the ladder. Hay pressed the rolling 49 roof on all sides, with only a brief cleared space around the square hole. He stepped to the south side and squatted, looking down to the floor below. The distance was approximately eight feet. Allowing about five feet eight for Manny’s height, something like two feet would remain to be accounted for. The timber on which the shoe had been wired would need to be about two feet long—perhaps less, when provision was made for the swing of the arm. And it would have to be something with considerable weight to it, something whose own momentum would be sufficient to drive the shoe home. It could not, like a hammer blow, be given its drive by the arm wielding it, since the distance was too great. Something like a sledge hammer which, when merely held by the tip of the handle and let fall, would cut through the air with a ponderous iron force sufficient to shatter the skull.

A sledge hammer. Roden was on his feet, combing the vast mow with his eyes. He circled the cleared space around the hole, thrusting his hands under the hay. He clawed his way to the roof, the hay giving and letting him slip back, the enclosure filling with a heavy and stifling dust. Under the roof just south of where he had squatted he found the sledge—an old one with a partly broken hickory handle, whose huge iron was dead from long disuse, the edges blistered as 50 from ancient contact with an iron wedge. It had been thrust down along the roof until even the handle was an arm’s length under the hay.

Roden pulled it out, slid down to the light. A brier caught him as he slithered along, raked over his thigh. It caught in his suspenders and followed him down, jabbing his hand when he tried to push himself erect.

“Damn it to hell!” he muttered, and reached to tear the brier away.

But he stopped with it in his hand. It was a big dewberry, shriveled and dry. On one of the barbs was what he at first thought was a feather or a bit of down. Then he saw that it resembled wool.

“Out of my pants, I guess,” he said thinly.

But it was not. It was fluffy and gray, a wisp that had evidently caught on the barb when—when somebody else slid down the hay. It took on sudden meaning. Roden pulled it free, dropped it under the inside band of his hat. Then he turned his attention to the sledge.

The wire was gone, but the marks of it were unmistakable. They ran through the eye of the sledge where the handle fitted loosely; they showed in a circular indentation around the base of the handle. There was even a vague polish on the face of the iron where the mule shoe must have rubbed it.

“Listen, Sheriff!” Lefferton’s impatient voice came from below. “I gotta beat it.”

Roden had intended to swing the sledge through the hole, testing its length, its possible striking power. But Lefferton was coming in. He was already at the manger, lifting to vault into the areaway. And Roden was not yet ready to reveal his findings. The Squares were important people; a hint that Manny had been murdered would be cataclysmic as an earthquake. It would suggest some strange skeleton in the Square closet, expose the household to the vulgar and the curious. It would be a signal to the newshounds of Pine Ridge, of Bennington. The step was too serious to be taken without due consideration.

Roden clawed his way back up to the roof, thrust the sledge back where he had found it, slid down again. “I’m comin’, Ed,” he called, and put his foot on the ladder.

“What you doin’ up there?”

“Looking around. Quite a place.”

“One man was mighty interested in what you was up to.”

Roden stepped to the floor. “What’s that you say?”

“I walked out to the quarry. Guess Fred Sutton thought I was gone. When I come back jest now he was flattened agin’ the barn out there, listenin’ to you.”

“Fred was?”

Lefferton nodded. “When he saw me he jumped like he was shot. Then he pretended he was doin’ somethin’ agin the wall.”

They reached the door. Fred Sutton was pounding stone.

“Let’s git goin’,” Lefferton said shortly.