One Good Deed(102)

“You worked for the Pittlemans for long?” Archer asked him.

Manuel nodded and said, “Seven years.”

“Pretty sad what happened to him.”

Manuel shrugged. “Mrs. Pittleman will keep things going.”

“I left the Nash back there. Jackie Tuttle had borrowed it. Now Mrs. Pittleman wanted it back.”

Manuel smiled at this.

“Something funny, friend?”

“Many things have changed since Mr. Pittleman died.”

“You mean with respect to Jackie and Mrs. Pittleman?”

“Many things.”

“You opened the gate for us when we came in the other day.”

Manuel nodded. “And I opened the gate for her the night before last. It was very late.”

Archer jerked his head so hard he almost hit it on the side of the truck door.

“You opened the gate for Jackie? Two nights ago? You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Was she here to see Mrs. Pittleman?”

“No. They could not see her that night.”

“Wait a minute. They?”

“Miss Tuttle and the other woman.”

“Describe her.”

Manuel did so, outlining, unmistakably, Ernestine Crabtree.

“But if they didn’t come to see Mrs. Pittleman, what then?”

Manuel shrugged. “It was not my place to ask.”

“So they went into the house, then?”

“I don’t know. I opened the gate, and then I went back to my little house. They must have opened the gate themselves when they left.”

“You said it was late. When exactly did they get here?”

“It was nearly eleven.”

“Did they say anything to you?”

“Miss Tuttle thanked me for opening the gate, as she always does.”

Archer sat back. “Were they carrying anything with them? Did they take anything from the car?”

“Not that I saw. But, again, I did not stay out there. It was raining very hard. A very bad storm. I went back to my bed and fell asleep.”

“I guess it must’ve been something important to bring them out in weather like that.”

Manuel shrugged.

When Archer got back to Poca City, he went straight to the police station to see Shaw.





Chapter 43



ONLY SHAW WASN’T THERE and apparently no one had seen the man at all that day.

Archer ran into Deputy Bart Coleman in the hallway of the station and asked him about the detective.

Bart said, “Last I saw of him was yesterday.” He suddenly put his hand on the butt of his revolver. “Hey, Archer, didn’t you get arrested and charged with murdering Mr. Tuttle?”

“I did.”

“What are you doing out then?”

“Made bail. You can check. Not like I escaped, right? And if I had, I sure as hell wouldn’t have come back to the police station.”

Bart reluctantly removed his hand from his gun. “No, I guess not.”

“Look, if you see Shaw, can you tell him to come see me over at the Derby? It’s important.”

“Yeah, okay.”

*



Archer sat down on the bed in his hotel room and contemplated things. He’d been rushing around so much, he hadn’t had time to put together all that he had recently learned. He had wanted to tell Shaw and see the man write it all down in his notebook and maybe help him make sense of it. But that was not to be right now, apparently, so Archer instead went over it in his head.

It seemed likely that Jackie and Ernestine had some sort of understanding, and a plan. They had visited Marjorie Pittleman’s home during the storm. That would account for the mud on the car and its tires. He didn’t know if they had gone into the house or not, but Marjorie had said she hadn’t seen Jackie since the time he had been there with her. And from what Marjorie had told him, it was clear that Jackie had not given her the money to repay her father’s debt.

One thing Archer had concluded was that Jackie had cleared out her father’s safe and loaded it into the large trunk of the Nash. And she had done so in the time between Archer’s seeing all the wealth in there, and Jackie and Shaw going out to Tuttle’s home. But now with Manuel telling him what he had, Archer could narrow that time frame down some.

She had arranged to meet her father at her house, probably using that ruse to make sure he wouldn’t be home to stop her and Ernestine from ransacking the man’s safe. But something had gone terribly wrong on that score because Tuttle had not been at Jackie’s; he’d been at his house. But for the life of him, Archer couldn’t fathom why the man hadn’t kept the meeting with his daughter.

Jackie’s emptying the safe and piling it into the Nash’s trunk, at some point, was the only way the imprint of the gold bars and the transfer of the gold dust could have occurred. Then, Jackie and Ernestine had driven over to Marjorie’s that same night. Why had they done that? To hide the loot? But why there? And what was even more confusing, why bother taking the things from the safe in the first place? As her father’s only heir, they would have come to Jackie anyway after his death. And all that oil money on top of it. It just didn’t make any sense.

And in addition to the emptied safe, someone had taken Lucas Tuttle’s life. If Jackie had been the one to steal the items from the safe, she had to have been there that night. So had Jackie killed her father? If so, why?