While the hounds and I got our breath in the shadows of the gorges. Collie shook out a sports jacket that would have cost me a month’s pay.
“Lying loose in the back seat of Jerl Brownlee’s wrecked car,” Collie said. “Let’s hope it’s his and that he’s worn it recent before he pitched it back there.”
Collie squatted before the excited dogs, held out the jacket, and they took a good long whiff. I stayed with them, keeping the leashes slack, as they snuffled around for a few seconds. Then with a howl fair to curdle the blood, both dogs hit the ends of the leashes, almost jerking me off my feet.
We tracked Jerl up a long hollow where the briars were as thick as riled-up bees, and across a long stretch of naked shale, where only a dog’s pads had good footing. Collie slipped halfway across. He burned skin off his knees and elbows as he slid and rolled twenty feet down the slope. He got up cussing because I was holding up the dogs, waiting for him to climb back to us.
Beyond the shale. Jerl had jumped a spring-fed creek, which held us up for a good ten minutes, and crossed a soggy meadow. Then he’d stumbled onto the dim remains of an old logging trail and picked that route up through the timber.
I didn’t have a dry rag on me by this time. I was sweating so hard from the exertion. The dogs had lather on their flanks and wet tongues hanging from the sides of their mouths. Collie looked as fresh as a new-grown stinkweed, eyes anxious on the purple shadows that closed in about us.
As the dogs tugged me along. I began to lose track of the number of gullies we crossed, the patches of underbrush we slammed through. My legs felt as if they had fallen off, and I looked down in the failing light to make sure they were still there, like a pair of pump handles underneath me.
Then all of a sudden my glazing eyes glimpsed Collie’s shadow shooting out ahead of us. I still didn’t see the flicker of motion that had caught his attention. He splashed across a seep that would turn into a creek during a heavy rain, and dived into a canebreak. A minor hell erupted in there. Sawgrass and reeds rattled. A covey of birds sprayed out in all directions. Cattail fluff showered into the air.
Collie came out just as the dogs and I cleared the seep. He had Jerl Brownlee by the shirt collar, Jerl draped on the ground behind him.
“Got him, by gum,” Collie said, backhanding an ooze of blood off his nose.
“You done all right, Sheriff,” I said, nodding, “after me and the dogs cornered him for you.”
Jerl was about the most bruised, scratched, begrimed, and generally trail-weary young punk you’d ever want to see. Collie and I and Jerl’s rubbery legs finally got him back to the sheriff’s car. We put the dogs in front with Collie. I got in back to guard the prisoner, who didn’t look much like it was necessary. We’d come back for my car later.
Jerl didn’t have a word to say all the way back to town. He was doing plenty of thinking, and by the time I shoved him in a jail cell, he’d about decided he was still Jerl Brownlee, cock of any walk.
He watched me lock the cell door with hooded eyes. Then his battered lips twisted in a sneer. “You yokels don’t think for a minute this is going to work out your way, do you?”
“Looks like it might,” I said.
“You dumb rube,” he said. “With my dough, I’ll have the choice of the finest legal brains from New York to Los Angeles. There are jurors to buy, judges for sale. There are a thousand loopholes in the law, and ten thousand technicalities. With my loot, I can fight this thing to the highest courts in the land, no matter how long it takes. So before you wallow in any naive sentiments about the workings of justice or pat yourself on the back, deputy-boy, just answer me one question. Have you ever heard of a millionaire ending up in the electric chair or gas chamber?”
His question was still rattling around in my head a few minutes later as I trudged across the dark street The “Closed” sign was still on the door of Mom Roddenberry’s cafe, but there were lights in the flat overhead where she and Pretty had lived. I fumbled for the banister of the outside stairway that led up the side of the building to the flat.
The old lady answered my knock, searched my face for a minute, and invited me into a plain, but comfortable and clean parlor.
I sat down on a studio couch. Mom eased to the edge of a chair across from me. A hard stillness came to the apartment.
“Gaither,” she said, “you did catch him. He’s locked up. I’ve already heard.”
“Yes, ma’am. But I got a dreadful feeling that rich boy will get out of this.”
“Why, lad, we know he done it! Cold-blooded and mean. Pretty said he did—and she wouldn’t tell a lie with her dying breath.”
“I know, but we run up the first stump right there. We got a witness that says that she said it. They call it hearsay evidence. The lawyers he can afford will cut our case to nothing.”
The old lady thought about it, hands crimping like talons. Then she raised her slatey gray eyes. “Might be a game two can play, Gaither.” I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Would a mountain jury convict an old woman if she was temporarily pixilated by the murder of her daughter?”
The hairs stiffened on the back of my neck as I began to get the drift.
She rose slowly. “Mom Roddenberry’s cafe always
