“Yeah. Nice,” Longarm said dryly. “You know where he is now? Where I can find him today?”
“Sure thing, yes. Last night he spend all his money here. Big drunk. You know? Say it don’ matter if he broke. Say he gonna go home an’ get some more. Home.” The bartender frowned. “I don’ know where his home is though.”
“That’s all right. I do.”
“Mr. Officer, you really not going to … you know?”
“Friend, you been a big help t’ me. You got nothing t’ fear from me. Not never.” Longarm laid a silver dollar on the bar as compensation for the trade he’d run off. At least that was what he told himself it was for. Then he turned and headed back for Addington. With luck, he figured, he could be there before dark.
Chapter 42
Nobody home. Dammit anyhow, there seemed to be nobody home at the tall old house where Edith Matthews and family lived.
He tapped once again on the front-door windowpane, then reared back and gave the sturdier wooden part of the door a couple solid whacks just to make sure no one inside could have missed his knock.
Still there was no response. If Matthews was in there … he supposed he could go and get a warrant if he had to. Surely the local JP would accommodate the new police chief. But he would hate to leave and give Matthews an opportunity to slip away if the man was inside.
Longarm thought it over and decided if necessary he would get one of the neighbors or pay a kid to go downtown and find a police officer. That way Longarm could get the cop to fetch the warrant while he himself kept watch at the house.
But then, dammit, he didn’t know for certain sure that Herbert Buddy Matthews was in fact inside. On impulse he tried the door knob.
It was locked. Which removed temptation, however. He supposed that was something.
But it didn’t get the job done. And what he really needed to do was find out if there was reason enough to get the warrant and violate these folks’ privacy on the same day the leader of their clan, such as it was, got herself killed.
Which, come to think of it, he found kinda strange now: There should have been people scurrying in and out like a nest of ants. Edith Matthews was dead. So where were all the mourners, all the neighbors, all the good churchgoing folk who should be here with their pies and platters, their hams and fried chickens and deviled eggs and angel food cakes?
There was something damned strange about the Matthews house being locked and silent on this of all days. Hell, even if everybody in Addington knew about the aberrant lifestyle of Edith and her nieces, people still should have come. If for no other reason, they’d come so they could congratulate themselves afterward on how Christian and understanding they all were. No, this really wasn’t making sense now that he thought on it.
He tried the door again, harder this time, but that didn’t do a thing to change the fact that it was locked. And there were curtains pulled at all the windows. He checked, stalking back and forth along the porch where he’d once sat and shared a lemonade with Clarice, but every window was carefully covered.
Had they been covered the other day when he was here? He couldn’t remember. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.
He tried peering into the side windows, but they were covered too. Every one of them.
He went around back to the little laundry porch and mounted the stairs there. The back door was locked and the small glass pane in that window covered. Damn it, anyway.
The right and logical and proper thing to do now, of course, would be for him to leave. Or if he really felt he had to look inside the house, send for an officer and eventually a proper search warrant.
Right. That was the correct thing to do. No doubt about it.
Longarm left the back porch and looked around inside a tool and storage shed in the back yard. After a few moments he found what he wanted.
He took the scrap of rusted wire and straightened it, then bent a short hook at a right angle on one end. With that for a key he returned to the back door of the Matthews house and began burgling the place.
Chapter 43
Oh, shit. Longarm swallowed. Hard. Sweet Jesus!
The short hall between the kitchen and dining room ran thick with blood. Tacky, copper-smelling, none too old blood. He couldn’t see the source, but he could sure as hell see the blood.
There wasn’t any way to avoid it, none that he knew of, so he walked through it, conscious of the sticky- slippery texture underfoot, into the entry hall. He could see then where all the blood was coming from. Barbara. The short, plump, cheerful little waitress he remembered from that visit to Edith Matthews’s ice cream parlor. Clarice’s cousin Barbara.
She lay on the dining-room floor like a cast-off doll that had lost its stuffing. She seemed awfully small and … empty … lying there with an enormous, gaping hole where her throat should have been.
She was dressed in her work uniform. Perhaps she’d just come back from … except no, her aunt was killed that morning. More likely she’d been dressed ready to go to work when she heard that news and then never got around to changing clothes since. Or there could be a hundred other perfectly reasonable explanations. Longarm likely would never know the truth of it.
The truth he did know about was that the girl’s throat had been horribly slashed, the cut so deep it very nearly severed her head from her body. He looked at her and shuddered.
In the parlor there was another body. A mature woman with a faint resemblance to Edith. The other aunt Clarice had told him about? Possible. Or a neighbor. Friend. One of Edith’s lovers. Somebody in town would know.
