Suspended Sentences

Suspended Sentences

Brian Garfield

A
MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media ebook

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Gun Law

Hunting Accident

Two-Way Street

Ends and Means

Scrimshaw

The Chalk Outline

The Shopping List

King's X

INTRODUCTION

Writing introductions to one's own stories is at best an exercise in awkwardness (if this isn't self-promotion, what is?) and at least an exercise in redundancy (if a story cannot stand on its own, without explanatory introduction, then isn't it inadequate?).

So I hope you will forgive my cowardice in trying to steer a course that avoids both the foregoing hazards. In the prefatory notes that accompany each story I'll abstain from discussion of the story itself and thus try to avoid the temptation to defend or boast. Instead, I've tried to address the circumstances that inspired or provoked each story.

Most of these were written during or shortly after trips to the locales in which the stories are set. Most of them were written by hand in notebooks while on airplanes or beaches or in hotels; later at home I would type and revise them.

Short stories are harrowing: for some of us they are precarious and difficult and unforgiving, which may explain why I have written twice as many books as short stories. For this paucity please grant the excuse, if you will, that there are very few markets for short stories and even fewer markets that pay
enough
.

(Do not ask for a definition of
enough
. To a writer there is no such thing as
enough.)

As to subject matter, my short stories fall mainly into three categories. There are espionage stories, collected in the book C
HECKPOINT
C
HARLIE
a few years ago; there are Western stories, anthologized hither and yon but not yet collected in one place; and there are crime-suspense stories, most of which are gathered herein. Some of the tales overlap more than one category because my background is in the American West and so that is where many of the yarns are situated.

I'm grateful to Ed Gorman for suggesting that we compile these stories and for having the nerve to publish this volume.

THE GUN LAW

“
The Gun Law” is a narrative reconstruction of an actual incident. The main character was an acquaintance of ours, and we shared the suspense and fears of his arrest and incarceration. The case was decided in court just as is represented here. Occasionally real life does make serviceable fiction
.

Deke Allen was arrested Friday afternoon on his way home from his uncle's house in Yorktown Heights.

He'd had a call that morning from his father. Mostly just to ask how Deke was doing, how was business, how's that girl what's-her-name, the one you live with, pretty little thing. So forth. But during the call his father mentioned that Uncle Bill was having a problem with rats in his basement. Deke's father said, “If you happen to be heading up that way you can drop by and pick up my shotgun. Take it on up to Bill's and see if you can take care of those rats for him.”

Uncle Bill didn't like to put down poison because he had a houseful of dogs. He adopted stray dogs; it was his avocation. The place — a four-acre farmstead near the Croton Reservoir — was fenced in to contain the cacophony of orphaned dogs. Deke liked Bill and had nothing better to do that Friday. His next job wasn't scheduled to start till Monday. So he went by his father's house in Ossining and picked up the pump-action sixteen-gauge and a boxful of shells for it, and drove out along Baptist Church Road to his uncle's dog farm.

Deke Allen tended to carry just about anything a human being might need in his Microbus. It was his factory, craft-shop, tool-warehouse, and repair center. Deke, in his anachronistic two-bit way, was a building contractor. He specialized in restorations of old houses, preferably pre-Revolutionary houses; there were plenty of them in the Putnam County area and he had a good deal of work, especially from young New York City couples who'd made themselves a little money and moved to the country and bought “handyman special” antique houses for low prices, hoping to meet the challenge. Most of them learned that it was harder work than they'd thought; most of them had city jobs to which they had to commute and they simply didn't have enough time to repair their old houses. So when an old cellar sprang a leak or an old beam needed shoring up or an old wall crumbled with dry-rot, Deke Allen would arrive in his Microbus with his assortment of tools. Most of them were handmade tools and some of them actually dated back to Colonial times. He was especially proud of a set of old wooden planes. He'd had to make new blades for them, of course, but the wooden housings were the originals — iron-hard and beautifully smooth and straight. And he carried buckets filled with old squarehead nails and other bits and pieces of hardware he'd retrieved from condemned buildings and sheriff's auctions and the Ossining city dump.

He kept all his toolboxes and hardware in the Microbus; he'd built the compartments in. He even had a little pull-down desk in the back where he could do his paperwork — measurements, billings, random calculations, the occasional poem he wrote. He kept an ice cooler in the back for soft drinks and beer and the yogurt he habitually consumed for lunch. Deke was a health-food nut. The only thing he never carried in the truck was marijuana; he knew better than that. Show a state cop a psychedelically painted Micro-bus driven by a young-looking 25-year-old with scraggly blond hair down to his shoulder blades and a wispy yellow beard and mustache and a brass ring in his left ear — show a state cop all that and you were showing him a natural reefer repository. So the grass never went into the Microbus. And he was always careful to carry only unopened beer cans in the ice cooler. It was legal so long as it was unopened. Deke got rousted about once every three weeks by a state cop on some highway or other. It was an inconvenience, that was all. You had to put up with it or get a haircut and change your lifestyle. Deke wasn't tired of his lifestyle yet, not by a long shot. He liked living in the tent with Shirley all summer long. Winters they'd spring the rent for an apartment. This was March; they were almost ready to move out of the furnished room-and-a-half; but they were still living indoors and that was why his father had been able to reach him on the boarding-house phone.

This particular Friday he went on up to Uncle Bill's dog farm and went inside with the shotgun. They took a lantern down into the dank basement and they sat down until the light attracted the rats. They'd put earplugs in; it was the only way to stand the noise in the confined space. When Uncle Bill judged that all the rats were in sight, Deke handed him the shotgun and Bill did the shooting. Deke didn't like guns, didn't know how to shoot them, and didn't want anything to do with them. He was lucky he'd been 4-F or he'd probably have dodged the draft or deserted to Canada. It was one moral decision that hadn't been forced upon him, however, and he was just as happy he hadn't had to face it. He was half deaf, it seemed, the result of too much teenage exposure to hard rock music at too many decibels. Deafness qualified you for a 4-F draft status. It also made life fairly miserable sometimes; he wasn't altogether deaf, not by a wide margin, but there were sounds above a certain register that he couldn't hear at all and he generally had to listen carefully to hear things that normal people could hear without paying any attention. Conversation, for example. If he looked at TV — which wasn't often, since he and Shirley didn't own one — he had to sit close to the set and turn the sound up to a level that was uncomfortably loud for most other people in the room.

But he could hear it all right when Shirley whispered in his ear that she loved him.

When Bill got finished shooting the rats he handed the gun back to Deke and went down across the basement floor with a burlap sack to pick up the corpses so they wouldn't make maggots and house-flies or stink up the house. They left the basement — it was then about two in the afternoon — and had a couple of sodas out of Deke's ice cooler. They talked some, mostly about the dogs that kept jumping up and trying to lick Deke's beard. Finally Deke slid the shotgun carelessly across onto the passenger seat, got in, and drove out of the yard. Behind him Uncle Bill carefully closed the six-foot-high gate to keep the dogs in.

A few miles down the road a state cop pulled Deke over because one of the bolts had fallen out of the rear license plate and the plate was hanging askew by one bolt, its corner scraping the pavement and throwing the occasional spark. Deke because of his hearing problem hadn't heard the noise it had been making. The cop had to use the siren and the flashers arid get right up on top of the Microbus before Deke knew he was there. Deke hadn't been speeding or anything. He figured it for another tiresome marijuana shake-down. He was glad he didn't have beer on his breath; they'd had sodas back at Bill's, not beers.

He pulled over against the trees and got out, reaching for his wallet. The cop was walking forward; behind him the lights on top of the cruiser were still flashing, hurting Deke's eyes so Deke looked away and waited for the cop to come up.

“Your license plate's hanging crooked,” the cop said. “A lot of sparks. Could hit the gas tank. You want to fix it.”

Deke was relieved. “Say, thanks.” He opened up the back of the Microbus and the cop saw all the tools and hardware in there. Deke got out a screwdriver and found himself a nut and bolt in one of the compartmentalized toolboxes. He fixed the license plate back in place. Meanwhile, the cop was hanging around. One of those beefy guys with a Texas Ranger hat and his belly hanging out over his Sam Browne belt. He wasn't searching the truck exactly — he was just hanging around — but when Deke went to get back in, the cop saw the shotgun on the passenger seat.

The cop's face turned cold. “All right. Get out slow.”

Deke stood to one side and the cop slowly removed the shot-gun from the seat. He worked the pump-action and a loaded cartridge flipped out of the breech. The cop stooped down to pick it up. “Loaded and chambered. Ready to fire. What bank you fixin' to rob, boy?”

After that it was inevitable. The cop handcuffed Deke and locked him in the cruiser's back-seat cage and drove him into the Croton barracks. There he was handed over to two other police types. They ran him on into Ossining and he was booked.

“Booked? For what?”

“Possession,” the sergeant said.

Deke still didn't think much of it. He was a hippie type. They harassed hippie types on principle, these cops. They'd throw him in the tank overnight and tomorrow he'd have to hitch a ride back to pick up his truck.

Only it didn't work out that way.

Stanley Dern figured himself a pretty good country lawyer. He'd known Harv Allen for several years, not well but as a lawyer knows a casual client: he'd drawn Harv's will for him, done a few minor legal chores for him from time to time. When Harv called him about his son, Stanley Dern at first tried to put him off. “I'm not really a criminal lawyer, Harv.”

“Nor is my son a criminal,” Harv replied. He had an old-fashioned New England way of talking; the family — and Harv — was from New Hampshire.

“Well, I'll be glad to go down there and talk with him. Have they set bail?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Stanley Dern whistled through his teeth. “What's he charged with?”

“I can't remember the exact words. Possession of a deadly weapon, in substance.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

Stanley Dern had practiced in Ossining for thirty of his fifty-four years; he knew everybody in the district attorney's office and he knew most of the cops in town. Criminal court activity in Ossining had always been more intense than in other cities of comparable size because Ossining was the home of Sing Sing, the old New York State penitentiary.

Stanley Dern went to the Criminal Part Clerk and found out that the prosecution had been assigned to a young assistant D.A. named Dan Ellenburgh. Stanley didn't know this one; Ellenburgh was new.

He was also large, as Stanley found out when he entered the office. Ellenburgh was half-bald, small-eyed, and at least a hundred pounds overweight — a shame in such a young man, Stanley thought.

“Now it's a Sullivan Law violation,” Ellenburgh said after he'd pulled out Deke Allen's file and looked into it to remind himself which case they were talking about. “Possession of a deadly weapon. He had it on the car seat right beside him. Armed and charged. Ready to fire.”

“Now come on, Mr. Ellenburgh. That's a ten-year rap. The kid could get ten years.”