Snow Angels
by Loren D. Estleman
<an Amos Walker story>
First published in 1991.

They were the unlikeliest visitors I'd had in my office since the time a priest came in looking for the antiquarian bookshop on the next floor.
She was a comfortably overstuffed sixty in a plain wool dress and a cloth coat with a monkey collar, gray hair pinned up under a hat with artificial flowers planted around the crown. He was a long skinny length of fencewire two or three years older with a horse face and sixteen hairs stretched across his scalp like violin strings, wearing a forty-dollar suit over a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, and holding his hat. They sat facing my desk in the chairs I'd brought out for them as if posing for a picture back when a photograph was serious business. Their name was Cuttle.
I grinned. "Ma and Pa?"
"Jeremy and Judy," the woman said seriously. "Ed Snilly gave us your name. The lawyer?"
I excused myself and got up to consult the file cabinet. Snilly had hired me over the telephone three years ago to check the credit rating on a client, a half-hour job. He'd paid promptly.
"Good man," I said, resuming my seat. "What's he recommending me for?"
Judy said, "He's a neighbor. He sat in when we closed on the old Stage Stop. He said you might be able to help us."
"Stage Stop?"
"It's a tavern out on Old US-23, a roadhouse. Jeremy and me used to go there Saturday night when all our friends were alive. It's been closed a long time. When the developers gave us a hundred thousand for our farm—we bought it for ten back in '53—I said to Jeremy, 'We're always talking about buying the old Stage Stop and fixing it up and running it the way they used to, here's our chance.' And we did; buy it, that is, only—"
"Dream turned into a nightmare, right?"
"Good Lord, yes! You must know something about it. Building codes, sanitation, insurance, the liquor commission—I swear, if farming wasn't the most heartbreaking life a couple could choose, we'd never have had the sand for this. When the inspector told us we'd be better off tearing down and rebuilding—"
"Tell him about Simon," Jeremy snapped. I'd begun to wonder if he had vocal cords.
"Solomon," she corrected. "The Children of Solomon. Have you heard of it, Mr. Walker?"
"Some kind of Bible camp. I thought the state closed them down. Something about the discipline getting out of hand."
"A boy died in their camp up north, a runaway. But they claimed he came to them in that condition and nobody could prove different, so the charges were dropped. But they lost their lease on the land. They were negotiating a contract on the Stage Stop property when we paid cash for it. Solomon sued the previous owner, but nothing was signed between them and the judge threw it out. They tried to buy us off at a profit, but we said no."
"Took a shot at me," Jeremy said.
I sat up. "Who did?"
"Well, someone," Judy said. "We don't know it was them."
"Put a hole in my hat." Jeremy thrust it across the desk.
1 took it and looked it over. It was stiff brown felt with a silk band. Something that might have been a bullet had torn a gash near the dimple on the right side of the crown. I gave it back. "Where'd it happen?"
"Jeremy was in front of the building yesterday morning, doing some measuring. I wasn't with him. He said his hat came off just like somebody grabbed it. Then he heard the shot. He ducked in through the doorway. He waited an hour before going back out, but there wasn't any more shots and he couldn't tell where that one had come from." "Maybe it was a careless hunter." 
"Wasn't no hunter."
Judy said, "We called Ollie Springer at the sheriff's substation and he came out and pried a bullet out of the doorframe. He said it came from a rifle, a .30-30. Nobody hunts with a high-powered rifle in this part of the state, Mr. Walker. It's illegal." 
"Did this Springer talk to the Solomon people?" She nodded. "They denied knowing anything about it, and there it sits. Ollie said he didn't have enough to get a warrant and search for the rifle." I said he was probably right.
"Oh, we know he was," she said. "Jeremy and me know Ollie since he was three. Where we come from folks don't move far from home. You'll see why when you get there."
I hadn't said I was going yet, but I let it sail. "Can you think of anyone else who might want to take a shot at you?"
She answered for Jeremy. "Good Lord, no! It's a friendly place. Nobody's killed anybody around there since 1867, and that was between outsiders passing through. Besides, I don't think anybody wants to hurt either one of us. They're just trying to scare us into selling. Well, we're not scared. That's what we want you to tell those Solomon people." 
"Why not tell them yourself?"
"Ed Snilly said it would mean more coming from a detective." She folded her hands on her purse in her lap, ending that discussion.
"Want me to scare them?"
"Yes." Something nudged the comfortable look out of her face. "Yes, we'd like that a whole lot."
I scratched my ear with the pencil I used to take notes. "I usually get a three-day retainer, but this doesn't sound like it'll take more than half a day. Make it two-fifty."
Jeremy pulled an old black wallet from his hip pocket and counted three one hundred-dollar bills onto the desk from a compartment stuffed full of them. "Gimme fifty back," he said. "And I want a receipt."
I gave him two twenties and a ten from my own wallet, replaced them with the bills he'd given me, and wrote out the transaction, handing him a copy. "Do you always come to town with that much cash on you?" I asked.
"First time we been to Detroit since '59."
"Oh, that's not true," Judy said. "We were here in '61 to see the new Studebakers."
I got some more information from them, said I'd attend to their case that afternoon, and stood to see them out.
"Don't you wear a coat?" I asked Jeremy. Outside the window the snow was falling in sheets.
"When it gets cold."
I accompanied them through the outer office into the hallway, where I shook Jeremy Cuttle's corded old hand and we said goodbye. I resisted the urge to follow them out to their car. If they drove away in anything but a 1961 Studebaker I might not have been able to handle the disappointment.

I killed an hour in the microfilm reading room at the library catching up on the Children of Solomon.
It was a fundamentalist religious group founded in the 1970s by a party named Bertram Comfort on the grounds that the New Testament and Christian thought were upstarts and that the way to salvation led through a belief in a vengeful God, tempered with the wisdom of King Solomon. Although a number of complaints had been filed against the sect's youth camp in the north woods, mostly for breach of the peace, the outstate press remained unaware of the order's existence until a fourteen-year-old boy died in one of the cabins, his body bearing the unmistakable signs of a severe beating.
The camp was closed by injunction and an investigation was launched, but no evidence surfaced to disprove Comfort's testimony that the boy died in their care after receiving rough treatment Solomon only knew where. The Children themselves were unpaid volunteers working in the light of their faith and the people who sent their children to the camp were members and patrons of the church, which was not recognized as such by the state.
There was nothing to indicate that Comfort and his disciples would shoot at an old man in order to acquire real estate in Southeastern Michigan, but before heading out the Cuttles' way I went back to the office and strapped on the Smith & Wesson. Any place that hadn't had a murder in more than 120 years was past due.

An hour west of Detroit the snow stopped falling and the sun came out, glaring hard off a field of white that blended pavement with countryside, even the overpasses looked like the ruins ot Atlantis rearing out of a salt sea. The farther I got from town the more the scenery resembled a Perry Como Christmas special, rolling away to the horizon with frosted trees and here and there a homeowner in Eskimo dress shoveling his driveway. The mall builders and fast-food chains had left droppings there just like everywhere else, but on days like that you remembered that kids still sledded down hills too steep for them and set out to build the world's tallest snowman and lay on their backs in the snow fanning their arms and legs to make angels.
Judy had told me she and Jeremy were living in a trailer behind the old Stage Stop, which stood on a hill overlooking Old US-23 near the exit from the younger expressway. At the end of the ramp, an aging barn she had also told me about provided more directions in the form of a painted advertisement flaking off the end wall. I turned that way, straddling a hump of snow left in the middle of the road by a county plow. Over a hill, and then the gray frame saltbox she had described thrust itself between me and a bright sky.
As it turned out, I wouldn't have needed either the sign or the directions. The rotating beacon of a county sheriffs car bounced red and blue light off the front of the building.
I parked among a collection of civilian cars and pickup trucks and followed footsteps in the snow past the county unit, left unattended with its flashers on and the two-way radio hawking and spitting at top volume, toward a fourteen-foot house trailer parked behind the empty tavern. A crowd was breaking up there, helped along by a gangling young deputy in uniform who was shooing them like chickens. He moved in front of me as I stepped toward the trailer.
"We got business here, mister. Please help us by minding yours."
I showed him the license, which might have been in cuneiform for all the reaction it got. "I'm working for the Cuttles. Who's in charge?"
"Sergeant Springer. Until the detectives show up from the county seat, anyway. You're not one of them."
I held out a card. "Please tell him the Cuttles hired me this morning."
He looked past me, saw the first of the civilian vehicles pulling out, and took the card. "Wait." He circled behind the trailer. After a few minutes he came back and beckoned me from the end.
The sergeant was a hard-looking stump about my age with silver splinters in the black hair at his temples and flat tired eyes under a fur cap. The muscles in his jaw were bunched like grapeshot. He was standing ankle-deep in snow fifty feet from the trailer with his back to it on the edge of a five-acre field that ended in a line of firs on the other side. A few yards beyond him, a man and woman lay spreadeagled side by side on their faces in the snow. The backs of the man's suitcoat and the woman's overcoat were smeared red. More red stained the snow around them in a bright fan. They were dressed exactly as I had last seen Judy and Jeremy Cuttle.
"Figure the son of a bitch gave them a running start," the sergeant said as I joined him. "Maybe he told them if they made it to the trees they were home free."
"Who found them?" I asked.
"Paper boy came to collect. When they didn't answer his knock he went looking."
"Anybody hear the shots?"
"It's rabbit season. Day goes by without a couple of shotgun blasts . . ." He let it dangle. "Your name's Walker? Ollie Springer. I command the substation here." I could feel the wire strength in his grip through the leather glove. "What'd they hire you for?"
"To hooraw the Children of Solomon. Jeremy thought they were the ones who took a shot at him yesterday. Who identified them?"
"It's them all right. I started running errands for the Cuttles when I was six and my parents knew them before that. If Comfort's bunch did this I'll nail every damn one of them to a cross." His jaw muscles worked. "Any sign of a struggle?"
"Trailer's neat as a button. Judy was the last of the great homemakers. Bastard must've got the drop on them. Jeremy didn't talk much, but he was a fighter. You don't want to mess with these old farmers. But you can't fight a jinx." 
"What kind of jinx?"
"The Stage Stop. Everybody who ever had anything to do with the place came to no good. Last guy who ran it went bankrupt. One before that tried to torch the place for the insurance and died in prison. I took a run at it myself once—nest egg for my retirement—and then my wife walked out on me. I guess I should've tried to talk them out of it, not that they'd have listened."
"Mind if I take a look inside the trailer?"
"Why didn't they pay you?"
"Excuse me, Sergeant," I said, "but go to hell."
There was a door on that side of the trailer, but the deputy and I went around to the side facing the Stage Stop. Gordy should have set up his post closer to the road; the path to the door had been trampled all over by curious citizens, obliterating the killer's footprints and those of any herd of Clydesdales that might have happened by. Inside, Judy Cuttle had done what she could to turn a mobile home into an Edwardian farmhouse, complete   with   antimacassars   and   rusty  photos   in   bamboo frames of geezers in waistcoats and glum women in cameoes. A .20-gauge Remington pump shotgun, still a fixture in Michigan country houses, leaned in a corner of the tiny parlor. Without touching it I bent over to sniff the muzzle. It hadn't been fired recently.
"Jeremy's, Ollie says," the deputy reported. "He used to shoot pheasants till he slowed down."
The door we had entered through had a window with a clear view to the tavern and the road beyond. The purse Judy had carried into my office lay on a lamp table near the door. The quality of the housekeeping said she hadn't intended it to stay there for long. I wondered if they'd even had a chance to take off their hats before receiving their last visitor.
An unmarked Dodge was parked next to the patrol car when we came out. On the other side we found a plainclothesman in conversation with Sergeant Springer while his partner examined the bodies. Their business with me didn't take any longer than Springer's. I thanked the sergeant for talking to me and left.
So far the whole thing stank; and in snow, yet.

Judy Cuttle's directions were still working. A houseboy or something in a turtleneck and whipcord trousers answered the door of a gray stone house on the edge of the nearby town and showed me into a room paneled in fruitwood with potted plants on the built-in shelves. I was alone for only a few seconds when Bertram Comfort joined me.
He was a well-upholstered fifty in a brown suit off the rack, with fading red hair brushed gently back from a bulging forehead and no visible neck. His hands were pink and plump and hairless, and grasping one was like shaking hands with a baby. He waved me into a padded chair and sat down himself behind a desk anchored by a chrome doodad on one end and a King James Bible the size of a handtruck on the other.
"Is it Reverend Comfort?" I asked.
"Mister will do." His voice had the enveloping quality of a maiden aunt's sofa. "I'm merely a lay reader. Are you with the prosecutor's office up north? I thought that tragic business was settled."
"I'm working for Judy and Jeremy Cuttle. I'm a private investigator."
He looked as if he were going to cry. "I told the officer none of the Children were near the property yesterday. I wish these people could lay aside the suspicions of the secular world long enough to understand it is not we but Solomon who sits in judgment."
"I notice you refer to it as the property, not their property. Do you still hope to obtain it for your camp?"
"Not my camp. Solomon's. All the legal avenues have not yet been traveled."
"It's the illegal ones I'm interested in. Maybe you've got a rebel in the fold. It happens in the best of families, even the God-fearing ones."
"The Children love God; we don't fear Him. And everyone is accounted for at the time of yesterday's unfortunate incident."
"Yesterday's yesterday. I'm here about today."
"Today?"
"Somebody shotgunned the Cuttles behind their trailer about an hour ago. Give or take."
"Great glory!" He glanced at the Bible. "Are they—"
"Gone to God. Knocking on the pearly. Purgatory bound. Dead as a mackerel."
"I find your mockery abhorrent under the circumstances. Do the police think the Children are involved?"
"The police think what the police think. I'm not the police. Yesterday somebody potted at Jeremy Cuttle, or maybe just at his hat as a warning. Today he and his wife engaged me to investigate. Now they're not in a position to engage anything but six feet of God's good earth. I'm a detective. I see a connection." I looked at my watch. "It's three o'clock. Do you know where the Children are?"
Again his eyes strayed to the Bible. Then he placed his pudgy hands on the desk, jacked himself to his feet, and hiked up his belt, the way fat men do. "I have Solomon's work to attend to. 'Go thou from the presence of a foolish man when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge.' "
" 'Sticks and stones may break my bones,' " I said, rising, "but any parakeet can memorize sentences." I went me from his presence.

Ed Snilly, the lawyer who had recommended me to the Cuttles, lived in an Edwardian farmhouse on eighty acres with a five-year-old Fleetwood parked in the driveway sporting a bumper sticker reading have you hugged your hogs today? His wife, fifty-odd years of pork and potatoes stuffed into stretch jeans, directed me to the large yellow barn behind the house, where I found him tossing ears of dried corn from a bucket into a row of stalls occupied by chugging, snuffling pigs.
"One of my neighbors called me with the news," he said after he'd set down the bucket and shaken my hand. He was a wiry old scarecrow in his seventies with a spotty bald head and false teeth in a jaw too narrow for them. "Terrible thing. I've known Judy and Jeremy since the Depression. I'd gladly help out the prosecution on this one gratis. Do you suspect Comfort?"
"I'd like to. Did you represent the Cuttles when they bought the Stage Stop?"
"Yes. It was an estate sale, very complicated. Old Man Herndon's heirs wanted to liquidate quickly and wouldn't carry any paper. Jeremy negotiated to the last penny. I also stood up with them at the hearing with the State Liquor Control Commission. A license transfer can be pretty thorny without chicanery. I'm not sure we'd have swung it if Ollie Springer hadn't appeared to vouch for them."
"I'm  surprised  he  spoke  up.  He  told  me  the  place  was jinxed."
"I can see why he'd feel that way. Old Man Herndon was Ollie's father-in-law. The Stage Stop was going to be a belated wedding present, but that ended when Herndon's daughter ran out on Ollie. The rumor was she ditched him for some third rate rock singer who came through here a couple of years back. I think that's what killed the old man."
"So far this place is getting to be almost as interesting as Detroit."
"Scandals happen everywhere, but in the main we country folk look out for one another. That's why Ollie helped Judy and Jeremy in spite of his personal tragedy. To be honest, I thought they were getting in over their heads too, especially later when they talked about digging a wine cellar and adding a room for pool. They were looking far beyond your usual mom-and-pop operation."
"Is gaming that big hereabouts?"
"Son, people around here will go to a christening and bet on when the baby's first tooth will come in. Phil Costa's made a fortune off the pool tables in the basement of his bowling alley out on M-52. Lord knows I've represented enough of his clientele at their arraignments every time Ollie's raided the place."
"Little Phil? Last I heard he was doing something like seven to twelve in Jackson for fixing the races at Hazel Park."
"He's out two years now, and smarter than when he went in. These rural county commissioners stay fixed longer than the city kind. Phil never seems to be around when the deputies bust in."
"So if the Cuttles went ahead and put in their poolroom, Little Phil might have lost business."
"It's a thought." Snilly picked up his bucket and resumed scattering ears of corn in the stalls. "A thought is what it is."

The Paul Bunyan Bowl-A-Rama, an aluminum hangar with a two-story neon lumberjack bowling on its roof, looked abashed at mid-afternoon, like a nude dancer caught under a conventional electric bulb. A young thick-shouldered bouncer who hadn't bothered to change out of his overalls on his way in from the back forty conferred with the office and came back to escort me past the lanes.
Little Phil Costa crowded four-foot ten in his two-inch elevators, a sour-faced baldy in his middle years with pointed features like a chihuahua's. Small men are usually neat, but his tie was loose, his sleeves rolled up unevenly, and an archaeologist could have reconstructed his last five meals from the stains on his unbuttoned vest. He didn't look up from the adding-ma-chine tapes he was sorting through on a folding card table when I entered. "Tell Lorraine the support check's in the mail. I ain't about to bust my parole over the brat."
"I'm not from your ex. I'm working for the Cuttles."
"What the hell's a Cuttle?"
I told him. He scowled, but it was at a wrong sum on one of the tapes. He corrected it with a pencil stub. "I heard about it. I hope you got your bread up front."
"Talk is Judy and Jeremy were going to add a pool room to the Stage Stop."
"How about that. What's six times twelve?"
"Think of it in terms of years in stir." I laid a hand on top of the tape. "A few years back, two guys who were operating their handbook in one of your neighborhoods were shotgunned behind the New Hellas Cafe in Hamtramck. The cops never did pin it to you, but nobody's tried to cut in on you since. Until the Cuttles."
The farmboy-bouncer took a step forward, but Costa stopped him with a hand. "Get the bottle."
It was a pinch bottle filled with amber liquid. Costa took it without looking away from me and broke the seal. "You a drinking man, Walker?"
"In the right company. This isn't it."
"I wasn't offering. This stuffs twenty-four years old, flown in special for me from Aberdeen. Seventy-five bucks a fifth." He upended it over his metal wastebasket. When it gurgled empty he tossed in the bottle. "On their best night, that's what the Cuttles' room might cost me. Still think I iced them?"
"I'm way past that," I said. "Now I'm wondering who takes out your trash."
"You trade in information, I'll treat you. Check out a guy named Chuckie Noyes. He's a Child of Solomon, squats in the cemetery behind the Stage Stop property, the old caretaker's hut. I knew him in Jackson before he got religion. He did eleven years for killing a druggie in Detroit. Used a shotgun."
"Why so generous?"
He tipped a hand toward the adding-machine tapes. "I got a good thing here, closest I ever been to legit in my life. Last thing I need's some sticky snoop coming back and back, drawing attention. Time was I'd just have Horace here adjust your spine, but if there's one thing I learned on the block it's diplomacy. Dangle, now. I open at dusk."
"Seventy-two," I said.
"What?"
"Six times twelve."
"Hey, thanks." He wrote it down. "Come back some night when you're not working and bowl a couple of lines. On the house."

For the second time that day, police strobes had beaten me to my destination. They lanced the shadows gathering among the leaning headstones in what might have been a churchyard before the central building had burned down sometime around Appomattox. Near its charred foundation stood a galvanized steel shed with a slanted roof and a door cut in one side. As I was getting out of the car, two uniformed attendants wheeled a body bag on a stretcher out through the door and into the back of an ambulance that was almost as big as the shed. Sergeant Springer came out behind them, deep in conversation with a man six inches taller in a snapbrim hat and a coat with a fur collar. The two were enveloped in the vapor of their own spent breath.
"I'll want it on my desk in the morning," said the big man, pausing to shake Springer's hand before pulling on his gloves.
"Will do, Lieutenant."
The lieutenant touched his shoulder. "Bad day all around, Ollie. Get some rest before you talk to the shooting team." He boarded an unmarked Dodge with a magnetic flasher on the roof. The motor turned over sluggishly and caught.
"Chuckie Noyes?" I asked Springer.
He looked up at me, then down at his fur cap. "Yeah." He put it on.
"Who shot him, you?"
"Uh-huh."
"He do the Cuttles?"
"Looks like."
"You're not the only one having a bad day, Sergeant."
"Guess you're right." He fastened the snaps on his jacket. "I came here to ask Noyes some questions, thought he might have seen or heard something living so close. He had an antique pin on his chest of drawers by his bed. Judy wore that pin to church every Sunday. Don't know how I missed not seeing it in the trailer. Noyes saw it same time I did. He tried for my gun."
"Were you alone?"
"What?" He lamped me hard.
"Nothing. You folks in the country do things differently." "I don't expect to lose sleep over squashing a germ like that, but it doesn't mean I wanted to. Now we'll never know if he was working for Comfort or if he slipped the rest of the way over the edge and acted solo. He had a record for violence."
"So Little Phil said."
"That germ. Guess you'll talk to just about anybody."
"It's a job."
"A stinking job."
"Everything about this one stinks," I agreed. "Sleep tight, Sergeant."

I'd always heard God-fearing people went to bed with the chickens. Another myth gone.
At 11:45 p.m. I was still parked down the road from Bertram Comfort's gray stone house, where I'd been for over an hour, warming my calcifying marrow with judicious transfusions of hot coffee from a Thermos and waiting for the lights to go out downstairs. A couple of minutes later they did. I was tempted to go in then but sat tight. Just after midnight the single lighted window on the second story went black. Then I moved.
I'd brought my pocket burglar kit, but just for the hell of it I tried the knob on the front door. Comfort had the old churchman's prejudice against locks. I let myself in.
I also had my pencil flash, but I didn't use that either. There was a moon, and the glow reflecting off the snow shone bright as my best hopes through the windows. I found my way to the study without tripping over anything.
I didn't waste time going through the desk or looking behind the religious paintings for a wall safe. During my interview with Comfort his eyes had strayed to the big Bible on the desk one too many times for even the devoutest of reasons.
The book was genuine enough. There were no hollowed-out pages and an elaborate red-and-gold bookplate pasted to the flyleaf read To MR. BERTRAM EZEKIEL COMFORT, FATHER OF THE FAITH, FROM THE CHILDREN OF SOLOMON, flanked by Adam and Eve in figleaves. A dozen strips of microfilm spilled out of a pocket in the spine when I tilted the book.
I carried the strips over to the window and held them up to the moonlight. They were photographed documents bearing the identification of the records departments of various police organizations. The farthest came from Los Angeles. The closest belonged to Detroit. I read that one. Then I put it in my inside breast pocket, returned the others to the Bible and the Bible to its place on the desk, and left, my sabbatical completed on the bones of another Commandment.

The next day was clear and twenty degrees. The sky had no ceiling and the sun on the snow was a sea of cold white fire. Breathing was like inhaling needles.
The air was colder inside the empty Stage Stop building with the raw damp of enclosed winter. The old floorboards rang like iron when I stepped on them and my breath steamed around the gaunt timbers that held up the roof. Owls nested in the rafters. The new yellow two-by-fours stacked along the walls were bright with the anticipation of a dead couple's exploded vision.
"Jesus, it's cold in here," said Ollie Springer, pushing aside the front door, which hung on a single scabbed hinge. "Is the cold locker closed at Pete's Meats?"
"It's a hall. The Cuttles might have appreciated the choice. Thanks for coming, Sergeant."
"You made it sound important over the phone. It better be. The lieutenant's waiting for my report on Chuckie Noyes."
"I've got something you might want to add." I handed him the microfilm slip I'd taken from Comfort's Bible. "What is it?"
"Noye's arrest report on a homicide squeal he went down for in Detroit a dozen years ago. Since you mentioned his record yesterday I thought you'd like to see the name of the arresting officer."
He was holding it up to a shaft of sunlight coming in through an empty window, but he wasn't reading.
"The city cops are jealous of their reputations," I said. "When they take a killer into custody they sometimes forget to release the name of the rural cop who actually busted him during his flight to freedom; but a report's a report. Just a deputy then, weren't you?"
"This doesn't mean anything." He crumpled the strip into a ball and threw it behind the stack of lumber.
"Detroit has the original. Bertram Comfort maintains the loyalty of the more recalcitrant members of his flock by keeping tabs on their past indiscretions; that's where I got the copy. I figure when you found out Noyes was back in circulation and hanging around your jurisdiction, you either hired him to kill Judy and Jeremy or more likely threatened to bust him on some parole beef if he didn't cooperate. Then you offed him to keep him from talking and planted Judy's pin in the caretaker's hut where he was living. The simple plans are always the best. As a Child of Solomon he'd be blamed for trying to help secure the Stage Stop property for Comfort's new camp.
"I guess I'm responsible for accelerating their deaths," I went on. "Someone—you, probably—made a last ditch attempt to scare them off the other day by taking a potshot at Jeremy. When he and Judy hired me instead to investigate, you switched to Plan B before I could get a foothold. You're one impulsive cop, Sergeant."
"Why would I want to kill the Cuttles? They're like my second parents." He rested his hand on his sidearm, a nickel-plated .38 with a black knurled grip.
"It bothered me too, especially when I found out you spoke up for them at the hearing before the State Liquor Control Commission. But that didn't jibe with what you told me about thinking this place had a hoodoo. I should have guessed the truth when Ed Snilly said they decided later to expand the Stage Stop. At first I thought it was their plans for a pool room and the competition it would create for Phil Costa, but that was chump change to him, not worth killing over. It was the wine cellar."
"What wine cellar?"
"There isn't one now, but there was going to be. You were right in there cheering them on, in spite of your own bad luck with the place and the wife you said left you, until you found out they were going to dig a hole." I paced as I spoke, circling a soft spot in the floor where the old boards had rotted and sunk into a depression eight feet across. He was watching me, trying to keep from staring at my feet. His fingers curled around the grip of the revolver. I said, "I made some calls this morning from my motel room in town, got the name of that rock singer everyone says your wife ran off with. I called eight booking agents before I found one who used to work with him. He didn't skip with anyone's wife. He died of a drug overdose in Cincinnati a couple of months after he played here. Nobody was with him or had been for some time."
"If you stayed at the motel you know she spent a night with him there," Springer said. "It was all over the county next day. They were both gone by then."
"Your wife didn't go as far as he did. No more than six feet from where we're standing, and all of it straight down. Those rotten boards lift right out. I checked before you got here."
"Plenty of room under there for two." He drew his gun.
"Drop it, Ollie!"
He pivoted, snapping off a shot. The bullet knocked a splinter off the big timber the sheriffs lieutenant had been hiding behind. The big man returned fire. Springer shouted, fell down, and grasped his thigh.
"Drop it, I said."
The sergeant looked down at the gun he was still holding as if he'd forgotten about it. He opened his hand and let it fall.
"Thanks, Lieutenant." I took the Smith & Wesson out of my coat pocket and lowered the hammer gently. "Sorry about the cold wait."
He holstered his own gun under his fur-lined coat. "Ollie was right about this place." He shook loose a pair of handcuffs.
I left while he was reading Springer his Miranda and went out into the cold sunshine of the country.