One Good Deed(103)

His thoughts next turned to that last night with Jackie at Ernestine’s house. She had been the one to bring the conversation around to the repayment of the debt, something Archer had admitted to her that he had forgotten about. And she had been the one to suggest the meeting with her father.

She used me. Set me up like the sucker I am.

He rose and was looking out the window when an idea occurred to him. At the same moment, he saw the dull, mustard-colored Hudson Hornet with the brown stripe and chrome side light parked at the curb. He put on his hat, pocketed his knife and flashlight, and rushed out.

He reached the street and ran over to the car, peering in the open window.

Bart Coleman, doughnut in hand, looked back at him, while Deputy Jeb was drinking his coffee and devouring a large, messy pastry.

“What do you want, Archer?” said Bart sharply. “I ain’t seen Shaw to tell him you want to talk to him.”

“That’s why I’m here. He left me a note at the hotel and said to meet him out at Tuttle’s place. Can you give me a ride?”

“We’re working here, Archer,” said an irritated Bart as he wiped a bit of doughnut powder off his mouth. “Hell, can’t you see that?”

“Yeah, I can. Look, um.” He pulled out a five-dollar bill. “How about this for gas? And maybe some more pastries?” he tacked on, eyeing Jeb eating away.

Bart looked at the fiver for a moment before snatching it. “All right, get in.”

Archer climbed into the back seat and Bart pulled away from the curb. He drove fast, and in just under an hour they were at Tuttle’s.

“Don’t see Shaw’s car here,” noted Bart. “He drives a big Buick. Can’t miss it.”

“Yeah, I know. He might not have got here yet. He was coming from somewhere else, he said in the note. I’ll ride back into town with him.”

“Suit yourself.”

Archer climbed out and the squad car drove off fast, trailing vortices of fresh dust in its wake. The recent rains had done nothing apparently to diminish that physical element of life around here.

Archer turned and faced the Tuttle house, which held no signs of life or light.

He walked around the place and noted that there was no activity in the adjacent fields. This was not surprising. It was getting on to supper time now as the sun faded into the horizon. Maybe with the man dead, all operations on the farm had ceased.

A few minutes later, in the outbuilding, Archer shone his light on the odd-looking piece of farm equipment. It was the corn picker he’d seen before.

Maybe this was the thing that Isabel had fallen to her death on. It had four sharp-edged, cone-shaped pods. They were all facing downward. The woman couldn’t have been impaled on one of these things if they’d been pointed like that. From his time in the military he was familiar with lots of different pieces of machinery, and Archer quickly figured out how the thing worked. He gripped a handle and started to turn it. It was damn tough going and took a lot of his strength. But one of the cones started lifting upward. He stopped, panting slightly, when the cone was finally pointing straight up.

So that was how the woman had died.

He next ventured to the barn and climbed the ladder to the top landing. He went over to the hay bale doors and opened them. He eyed the winch used to haul bales up. Then he looked down and imagined the corn picker with the upturned cone on the ground directly underneath. And then he visualized Isabel Tuttle falling to her death, impaled on the damn thing.

And then Jackie finding her like that.

He thought about what Lucas Tuttle had told him about his daughter. And his dead wife. That they were both fiercely independent. Hot-headed. That he was scared of them. That mother and daughter had clashed repeatedly. And, that Isabel Tuttle’s death might not have been an accident.

Well, I don’t think it was an accident, either.

He suddenly had the awful vision of the woman falling to her death and Jackie being behind where her mother had stood, her arms stretched out after pushing Isabel to her death.

He felt a bit sick at that. Maybe more than a bit. But then something occurred to Archer. He was putting two and two together, like Shaw had taught him to do. But he needed to go further on that than he just had. He turned his head and looked in the direction of the outbuilding he’d just been in. After a few moments of thought, Archer smiled. Perhaps in relief. But it was a genuine feeling, that was for sure.

He returned to the home’s front door and took out his knife, only this time it failed its mission. Undeterred, he moved over to a window, forced the latch back, and climbed through.

He walked down the hall and saw an open door.

He edged inside and shone his Ray-O-Vac around.

It was set up as a small office. Dead center on the desk was a typewriter. And next to that was a pair of earphones that were plugged into a little machine.

He assumed this had to be Desiree Lankford’s office, where she did her typing.

He checked the wastebasket and then looked through the drawers. There were files and copies of correspondence and a small notebook. He looked inside it.

Under the T’s was Jackie Tuttle’s name and her address on Eldorado and her phone number. That was interesting.

There was a little roll of tape next to the machine Desiree used to listen to Tuttle’s dictation. He put it in the machine, figured out how it worked, and turned it on, listening to what was on the tape by slipping on the earphones.