Beast of the Field (3 page)

A chuckle was had by all but her Pinkerton at this comment.

Sheriff Jake said, “Anyway, Aaronson aint been around here in a good spell.  Comes back every once in a while, if there's a dance or a fair or something, showing off that piece of shit he calls a automobile like it's still nineteen-ought-two.  He got him a few bunnies in the deer field, if you follow me."

This was followed by some shifting around, some coughing, but mostly silence.  Junior was pulling at Millie’s dress.  "I said one minute, Junior!" she said, slapping him away.  “The goddamn hay can wait!”  She dared her head to rise a few more inches, so she could see.  She wiped dust from the glass of the window while her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside.

"How many of you gentlemen saw Donnan drinking?"

The men looked at one another.

“Sheriff?” her Pinkerton asked.  “Did you see him drinking?”

“I could tell by his demeanors he was drinking,” the mayor said.  “Crazy in the eyes, all wound up and in a rush about something, wouldn’t you say, boys?  And I can tell you first hand he smelled real bad of whisky, what was left of him the next morning smelled of whisky, is what I mean.”

Her Pinkerton said, again, looking right at him, “Sheriff?  Did you see him drinking, or didn’t you?”  But the sheriff was too busy chewing tobacco to answer.

“Plus the way he whipping away at that poor filly of his—“

"All right, all right," said her Pinkerton.  “How about this then, any of you follow the buggy out?  See after the man at all?"

"Follow him out?  What're you talking about, mister?  There was a tornado coming.  I had a whole town to look after.  A grown man speeds off in a surrey in a goddamn tornado, that's his business."

"He was still standing in the seat when we last saw him," said Jonas Neuwald.

"Whippin' away on that poor horse," said Mayor Greentree.  

"Where was he going in such a hurry?" her Pinkerton asked them.

Silence was his answer.  They all seemed to be thinking about something.  She was thinking too, about that day of the tornado.  She’d been so damned angry at him, for not telling her he was leaving.  So damn mad she let him ride off into a tornado by himself—then she never saw him again.

"So, if you didn't see him that night, then I assume you went out there next morning, Sheriff?”

"You aint so good at assuming, mister, I’ll tell you that.  Jonas's boy Geshen come out to the house that morning to tell me what Braun Donnan found out front that morning.  I couldn't do anything to help Tommy by then, so I tended to my farm and my house—I took on a lot of damage in that storm.  I went in to town, but by then everyone knew already.  Later that day I went out there, that evening, had me a look.  The mayor had already been out there, same as Doc Rosen-zeeg, with his camera, of course—nothing dies in this county without Doc takes pictures of it.  By the time I got there, Marnie Donnan had him wrapped up in a quilt in the front room, all cleaned off and wrapped up tight—what there was left of him.  I saw the pictures later:  what it looked like to me was a boy fell off his wagon.  That's what it looked like, that's what it was.  We get enough farm accidents, automobile and tractor accidents, what-have-you around here that we aint gonna throw a parade when someone falls off a horse—"

Millie was suddenly yanked from the wall upward and backward, then deposited firmly on the ground in her boots.  The hulking presence at her back then moved to the side to block the hot September sun from her pink scalp.

Millie's face had gone pink too.  The severe lines were back in her forehead and her chin had been pulled up into a walnut shell under her bottom lip.  When she spoke, it was with a sneer.  “Awright goddamnit-all, to hell with it.  Let’s go get what’s comin’ to us.” 

5.

The lobby of the Old Price Hotel was a holdout from the grand times of hotels, with huge paintings on the walls, two ornate chandeliers, high mirrors and parlor furniture.  Two loose rows of neat, white-clothed tables lined one wall, at which town and country folks breakfasted in twos and fours. The hotel's staff was busy serving coffee, rolls, corn cakes, eggs, bacon, ham and fat links of sausages.  The babbling of conversations left off little by little when Sterno and the mayor stepped into the lobby, as the members of the staff and the diners alike stopped whatever it was they were in the act of doing to take in the mayor's guest.  Then little by little the murmur of the dining room resumed.

"Good morning, Abner."  This was from the woman who seemed to be running the room.  "Hotcakes and ham this morning?"

He shook his head, clearly disappointed.  "Wish so, wish so, but I got my hands full this morning.  Tess Helmcamp, meet Charlie Sterno, a Pinkerton detective.  Mr. Sterno, meet Mrs. Helmcamp.  This is her place."

She wore a sheen on her brow, and her sleeves rolled up.  Sterno liked her immediately for not noticing him, for not stopping to take in the gossip fodder.  She was a worker.  “Please to meet you, Mr. Sterno, I heard you were coming, but unless you want some coffee or a plate of eggs, I have no time for chit-chat."

"We'll be on our way," the mayor said.  "Is Doc Rosen-zeeg in?"

She was already turned from him, cleaning a table, two dirty plates in one hand.  With the other hand she pointed straight up.  "You know the way."

Together the two men clopped up a loud wooden staircase with a worn down Oriental runner on it of the same baby blue as the bricks outside.  A narrow hallway with one tall window at its end took them to room 214.  Greentree simultaneously knocked upon and opened the door, led Sterno inside.  The room barely resembled the hotel room it had been once.  A gramophone in the corner by the window scratched out an opera.  Cabinets filled with utensils, bandages, and pill and medicine bottles lined one of the four walls.  The doctor's desk ran along the windowed wall, a hard wood table functioning as an examination table along another wall.  Against the last wall was a table loaded with photography equipment and various tubes, valves, trinkets and mason jars filled with various powders, liquids and unidentifiable bits of things that looked like pickled flesh.

As they entered, the doctor was in the act of plopping a heavy cardboard file folder onto his desktop.  He moved a chair over to be next to the other chair at his desk, then offered the empty seat to Sterno.  Doctor Rosenzweig had thin, wispy whiskers the color of dirty snow covering his tapered chin, with tobacco smoke stains under the nostrils and crumbs of bread under his mouth.  His wide-set eyes blinked non-stop, and were magnified hugely through his small silver spectacles.

"Meet our Pinkerton man, Doc," the mayor said. "Charlie Sterno's his name.  Mr. Sterno, meet Dr. Eugene Rosen-zeeg, Hope County's own full-time doctor."

"Und mortician, und coroner," he said.  "I help with suspicious deaths und murders, not that we get suspicious deaths.  Well, in any case, let us see, we have this one, do we not?  Please sit, Mr. Sterno."  He suddenly froze in the act of adjusting his chair under his behind.  "I assume it is Tommy Donnan you are here to look into." 

"Thank you," Sterno said.  He sat down.  The file on the desk had been well-used already.  Across the top corner of the front cover were the words "Donnan, Thomas Andrew:  died 1 May '22" written in a script that approached calligraphy in its flourish.  Dr. Rosenzweig thrummed the cardboard with his fingertips as he took in Sterno.  Actually, it was only one part of Sterno's face that held the doctor's attention.

"Ja, that is…" he breathed as he studied Sterno’s jawline.  "Hyper-pronounced masseter, extended maxillary body..." He reached out a hand to tilt Sterno's chin back, but caught himself.  Instead, he tilted his own head back, he tilted it left, he tilted it right.  From Sterno's angle, his eyes became bug-like behind his wire frames. 

"It is almost like it is from our human ancestors.  Goodness, would I like to get a picture," he said.

Sterno cleared his throat.  The doctor snapped to attention, straightened in his chair.

"Now, let us see.  Mr. Sterno, where would you like to begin?"

Sterno used his eyes to indicate the cameras and slides and flash pots behind the doctor.   "I was told you might have some photographs from that day."

Dr. Rosenzweig peered at Sterno over his frames, one eyebrow arched up onto his forehead.  “They are not pleasant. But I assume you have seen many like them before,” he said.  He opened the file, thumbed aside some typewritten notes before finding the pictures, then pushed all else aside to lay them flat on the table.  "Oh, here, let us see. I suppose you should first take a look at this.  Have you seen any photos of Tommy Donnan yet?"

“A few old ones,” Sterno said.  He had spent the night in Tommy’s room, in his bed, listening to the house around him—the snoring sounds of Tommy’s over-worked father, the bed chamber dribbling of Tommy’s grief-drained mother, the tossing of Tommy’s shell-shocked brother (as far as he knew, the girl had never returned to the house) and the random baying of the hound.  A handful of younger Tommy Donnans had stared out at him from the dresser, the walls, the bureau—a happy enough looking fellow.  Sterno had been kept awake by the nagging of an old dream come back to him—more a dreamt feeling than a real dream.  He spent much of the night yawning but not sleeping, blinking without thought at the unblinking buggy racer.  The rooster’s crow had been welcomed this morning.

The old doctor said, “Here is the most recent one of him I could find—of him alive, I should say.”  He handed a print to Sterno.  "This is from the summer of 1921, so let us see, almost a year before he died. 
Nine or ten months, perhaps.  His mother gave it to me.  Das is a blue ribbon he is holding."

He looked more like a man in this photo than in the photos Sterno had seen at the Donnan house last night.  Tommy Donnan's cheekbones and jaw had come in by the time he died.  His shoulders had rounded out.  His attempt at a Valentino moustache had not been a bad one, and went well with his high cheekbones.  The eyes in this picture had the same glowing quality as the eyes in his boyhood pictures:  the gray they took on in the photos couldn't disguise the gemlike blue they must have been in life.

"Quite a handsome young man," the doctor said.   “Not like many of the boys around here, not too interested in baseball and football.  Did not chase the ladies so much—though he did not have to, from what I understand.  He just seemed to be somewhere else all the time, daydreaming.  Like a poet, perhaps.  I liked him, Mr. Sterno, und I was sad to take these photos that day.  I will tell you this, he sure was good vit horses.”

Sterno studied the image for half a minute more.  Finally, it was Dr. Rosenzweig who removed the print from his hand, replaced it with four others.

"Good Christ," Sterno said as he took the pictures.  It was cause enough to place the photos down on the desktop, slide his last readyroll from its pack, start over with a cigarette.

The first photograph showed a side view of a horse and buggy, with an unidentifiable object tangled up in and hanging down from under the carriage.

"Let us see.  This is how his father found him.  This is looking from the house," said Dr. Rosenzweig, the photographer, as he lit a pipe.

The second photo was the same angle as the first, but closer.  The object under the buggy was a body, Tommy Donnan's body.  The details of the body were clear in this image.  It was a clear picture of a black mess, like the war photos and the crime photos he had studied at the Agency.  In real life, all that black was dry brown blood.

"He'd been dragged all the way from town under that wagon and God knows where else by the time the horse found home."  These were Mayor Greentree's words.  "Then overnight the vermin got at him.  Kigh-yoats, maybe.  But I'm adventuring it was those dogs from the woods east of Donnan's farm.  This is all congestion, of course.  Nobody really knows what happened."

The third photograph was of the body removed from the under-parts of the buggy and laid out on the ground next to it.  His body from the hips down was pulled unnaturally long, ripped along the near side, showing chewed-at innards and bare rib bones.  One arm was splayed out over his head, a long white leather sock full of broken bones.  His face lay with both eyes sockets pointed to the sky, black and empty.  Something had taken his eyeballs.  His lips and ears had been chewed on too.  Something struck Sterno strange about the positioning of the head, or the angle of the face, maybe.  He picked up the print and brought it to his face.

"Good Christ..." he breathed.

There was little bone, little flesh behind the upturned face to elevate the boy's face from the ground.  The front side of his head lay on the long grass like a split melon.

"All the way from town…" the mayor repeated.

In the fourth photograph, someone in work gloves had what remained of Tommy Donnan up off the ground and was angling it to show just how much of his back half he had left on the roads behind him.

There were other photographs:  blood on the road, a piece of clothing off to the side of the road, a blood splattered rock in the road.  Sterno kept his focus on the boy. 

The doctor pulled once again from his pipe, sighed deeply as he replaced it in its cradle.  "Let us see.  The way it must have happened, I surmise, is that he fell forward over the dash rail of the buggy--

"Drunk as all get-out," the mayor said over the doctor.

"—
This would put the back of his skull, his shoulders und his upper back on the ground.  His face up.  Let us see, then he became caught somehow on the front spring bar, or the axle rod, perhaps, und was pulled down under the carriage body.  Hard to imagine what happened next."

"But his knees are hooked over the axle," Sterno said as he noticed it.

The doctor sighed.  "I have given this much thought.  That Donnan girl has been here almost once a week, und has not given me any choice, but by and by, I began to become genuinely curious myself, in a scientific manner.  Und the way I figure it, he might have grabbed hold of the wagon.  In self-preservation, that is.  He got pulled under the wagon, he grabbed on und held on for his life vit his hands while he hooked his legs up over the bar.  It is panic, ja?  Maybe he thought he could ride all the way home like this.  But then could not hold on, und he hit his head on the ground.  Or, maybe—I say this because the bones in both legs were broken into shards und pieces—maybe his legs were getting broken up by the bouncing spring bars over the axle.  Could be the pain was too much for him; he let go of the wagon to try to pull his legs free.  Or maybe he lost consciousness from the pain.  Somehow he lost his grip."

"Strange to me the horse didn't stop," said Sterno.  “Why did it take so long for the horse to get home?”

The doctor shrugged at this too. 

The mayor cleared his throat. 
"Turned every-which-way from the storm, running back and forth in front of the gate.  That was a hell of a twister come through.  You saw yourself, we're still trying to repair some of our buildings and houses, four months later.  Plus, she was a skittish animal to begin with.  From that first night he runned her."

"Let us see...moving along," the doctor said.  "For whatever reason, he let go of the reaches under the buggy...."  Dr. Rosenzweig then detailed Tommy's injuries.  "His spine had become disconnected just above his pelvis, between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae.  His top seemed to simply unsnap from his bottom.  Just horrible, I can tell you.  All skin, sinew and bone from his ninth vertebrae and ribs to the top of his head were torn away.  I will if you like, but I have to say it is hardly worth going into the rest of his body.  You can see yourself the end result.  The scavenging activity made it difficult to discern when und where the damage occurred. 
Or how he died, for that matter.  Certainly, there were no puncture wounds—stab wounds, is what I am trying to say.  There were no bullet holes.  The front of his neck was one of the few parts of his body intact, und there was no sign of strangulation.  Blunt trauma is finally what did it, I imagine. I have to imagine it, because the back of his head was simply not there to see any indication of it—but that is my guess, anyway.  Or the spinal injury.  Again, I do not suppose it matters now."

Dr. Rosenszweig leaned in toward Sterno to peer more closely at the photo in his hand.  "His poor mother," he said.  He leaned back in his chair then, puffing at his pipe, gazing through the curtains.  "I am no Pinkerton detective, but I do know this, Mr. Sterno.  Tommy Donnan was a fine young man, a good boy to his mother, and to his family.  He was honest and a nice fellow to talk to—smarter than most.  What I am trying to indicate is that no one in Price had any reason to want to hurt this boy.  If he was killed by another hand, it must have been by a stranger.  But, Mr. Sterno, I am only a doctor, und mortician.  What do I know?”