The Outrage - Edge Series 3 (22 page)

‘She looks something like one,’ Edge murmured, still peering after the sisters whose dissimilarities extended far beyond mere physical appearance and style of dress.

‘It’s said – and Alice ain’t never denied it – that she used to run one of the classiest houses of ill repute in all of New Orleans.’

Edge looked hard over his shoulder at Tolliver and recognised the man was telling the truth as he knew it. But the bald headed, thin-faced bartender clearly thought his claim was being questioned and he shrugged and muttered defensively:

‘All I can say, mister, is that she must know the gossip about her and, like I told you already, she ain’t never said she wasn’t a whorehouse madam way back when. And sometimes she positively encourages folks in the belief, like you just heard.’

‘I heard sure enough,’ Edge allowed as he stepped down off the sidewalk and started across the intersection as the two women entered the good smelling bakery just after Muriel Mandrell came out of it.

Then he went into the law office where the smells were of stale tobacco smoke, the sweat of unwashed flesh and worse. Deputy Max Lacy was slouched behind the desk, his heavy set frame not fitting comfortably in the sheriff’s chair. The customary disgruntled expression on his square featured, sun-burnished face became more firmly fixed as he looked up and recognised the visitor. And he made it obvious he was annoyed to be interrupted in his fascinatingly absorbing recreation of tormenting a helpless bluebottle: prodding at the fly with a pencil while it could only crawl across the blotter on the desk because he had torn off its wings.

‘You want the sheriff?’

Edge remained on the threshold and did not close the door. ‘Not unless you can’t tell me if Ivers has changed his story about what happened at the Quinn house, feller?’

‘No I ain’t!’ the young prisoner yelled sourly from his cell. ‘Me and Floyd never killed them women! And I’m counting on you to prove that’s the God’s honest truth, mister!’

‘I guess that answers your question?’ the mean looking deputy said as he continued to torture the wingless insect. ‘And if there’s anything else you want to know that me or that no account kid in the cell can’t tell you, you’ll have to wait for Vic to get back to town. On account of he’s out looking for Crazy Joe.’

‘Looking for him?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘How’d he get lost?’

The reason Edge had delayed talking with Colman at the scene of the fire was so he could first go see Kellner at Sullivan’s house. But at the time he did that, a little more than an hour ago, the doctor said the gunshot wounded old timer was sleeping under the influence of a powerful drug.

Lacy shrugged, ‘Just up and walked out of the room he was supposed to be unconscious in at the doc’s house. Jim Sullivan says the old coot was all right on his legs. The bullet didn’t do hardly any damaged to him but maybe what happened to that hovel he lived in . . . ‘

The lawman pointed the pencil at the side of his head and slowly rotated it. ‘That could’ve sent him all the way crazy. Anyway, Vic’s gone out to Avery Valley Woods. He figured that old Joe would’ve more likely headed out to where he lived than any place else.’ He suddenly stabbed the point of the pencil into the struggling fly to finish it off and brought the wingless body up in front of his face to squint at the carcass from close quarters, his lips parted in a humourless grin.

‘You gonna go out there and give Sheriff Meeker a hand to find the old man, mister?’

Ivers called from the cell. ‘If Crazy Joe really did see who killed the Quinn women, then he’ll know it wasn’t me and Floyd, right?’

Edge offered no response to the whining toned plea of the unseen prisoner and neither did he interrupt the deputy’s macabre concentration on the dead fly as he turned and closed the door on the malodorous law office. Then during a few pensive moments he scanned the four brightly sunlit, almost deserted lunchtime streets stretching away from the mid-town intersection and saw nothing that encouraged him to remain in Springdale. A half-minute later, as he swung up into the saddle on the dapple-grey that was still hitched to the rail out front of the saloon he briefly considered riding out into Avery Valley Woods. But since he had no cast iron guarantee of getting paid a cent for the job he didn’t even know there was a need to do he decided instead to return to the Quinn house. There he put the horse in the stable with the others, unsaddled it, saw to it they all had ample feed and water and then went into the house to make himself a corned beef sandwich in the kitchen. After his hunger was satisfied he began to feel increasingly convinced that there would be no money due to him as a result of the Quinn family tragedy. And he considered that Andrew Devlin could have no reasonable cause for complaint if, in view of the time he had already wasted in the Springdale area, he had another couple of belts of the late Nicholas Quinn’s fine bourbon. So he left the kitchen to head for the parlour, his taste buds reacting in advance as he anticipated sampling the contents of the bottle of high class Tennessee sipping whiskey on the sideboard.

But halfway toward his intended destination he heard footfalls on the flagstones of the terrace and so he moved along the full length of the hallway, expecting to hear a fist thud on the door. But when the light footfalls ceased there was a pause and part of an envelope showed in the crack at the foot of the door.

He had started to reach with his right hand to open the door in the normal way: but now he instantly connected this envelope with the other one Muriel Mandrell had told him was delivered to the house in the same manner. And he grasped the latch hard and fast with his

left hand while the right one dropped to grip the walnut butt of his holstered Colt: wrenched open the door before the envelope was more than halfway under it.

The woman who was frozen in a half crouch expressed naked terror and forced out of her constructed throat: ‘You! Oh, I – ‘

His narrowed eyes glinting dangerously, Edge countered tautly: ‘You want to talk letters, lady? Okay, why?’

CHAPTER • 14

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FOR A stretched second Muriel Mandrell remained hunkered down as if paralysed,
half turned on the doorstep. Transfixed like the dead fly had been by the point of Max Lacy’s pencil on the law office desk. Shocked into total immobility by the forceful opening of the door of what she had expected to be an empty house.

Then, awesomely aware she was caught red-handed in the act of delivering another hate-filled poison pen letter, she abruptly gave unfettered full-throated outlet to her feelings. Her mouth gaped, her eyes bulged and the shriek that emerged from deep within her was not identifiably of fear, despair or shame. Instead it registered with Edge like a sound he had heard frequently in the distant past: was reminiscent of the war whoop of a fighting Indian launched into mortal combat. A screech of boundless hatred and vicious intent designed to drain out of the enemy the last dregs of his will to retaliate.

Even as he dropped one hand away from the door latch and the other from the Colt he knew without a doubt that the woman was going to lunge at him. So he instinctively took a half pace backward. And the next moment she powered into an attack, her no longer elfin face made grotesquely ugly by uncontrollable rage, her arms swinging up and stretching out, her hands formed into claws that sought to rip the flesh off his face and gouge the eyes from their sockets. He backed off a full step, rasped a low voiced obscenity and brought up his hands to fend off the assault. Her clawed right hand made contact with his left and her nails sank into his flesh: in an instant ploughed two painful, blood oozing furrows from wrist to knuckles. Immediately after that first moment when he was confronted by this woman in the grip of such a powerful emotion Edge had determined to try to calm her to the point where he could use reason. But then the warmth of the blood on the back of his hand, the smarting pain of the wounds and the realisation she may do him more serious injury with her nails stirred up in him an intense anger and deep revulsion for her.

He fended the woman off with his injured hand and took another step back into the hallway. But she continued to come inexorably after him, her talon-like hands raised for a second attack as the noises from her throat diminished to an inarticulate, animalistic groaning. That ended when he threw a punch and his right fist cracked into her face with a sharp crunch that sounded like breaking bone. But was it his or the woman’s? He didn’t give too much of a damn one way or the other as he waited for the pain to explode in his hand. Then felt only a slight stinging sensation as the blow curtailed her crazed groans and brought the frenzied onslaught to an abrupt end.

He took one more step back as she crumpled sideways: then toppled silently until her head smashed against the hallstand. With enough force to rock the piece of heavy furniture so the lamp slid off and clattered to the floor. When a pungent smell of spilled kerosene filled the hallway while the woman did not move a muscle except to the dictates of involuntary deep breathing.

‘Sonofabitch!’ Edge growled as warm afternoon air streamed in through the open doorway and dried the sweat on his face as a shudder went through him. He stepped around the slumped form to close the door and only then saw how much blood was oozing from the two deep gouges on the back of his left hand. So he returned to the kitchen and at the sink pumped cool water over the bleeding flesh. It took perhaps a full minute to staunch the flow to a seepage and it was only then that he became aware of the total silence within the house beyond the kitchen door: vividly recalled the sharp crack when his fist hit the woman’s face. Was it her cheekbone or nose that broke before there was the sickening sound when her head cracked against the hallstand? Next her laboured breathing in unconsciousness? Had she been breathing her last after taking a fatal blow to a vulnerable area of her skull? He swung the kitchen door fully open and the utter silence continued: released his pent-up breath as he peered along the hallway and saw Muriel Mandrell was gone. Likewise the white envelope she had tried to secretly deliver.

As he registered that the front door was closed he realised that while he was in the kitchen the splashing of water had provided sufficient noise for long enough to cover any sounds the woman made as she regained consciousness. Then recollected where she was and why she came here: then got the hell out of the house.

About to go into the parlour, needing rather than merely wanting a shot or two of whiskey now, he pulled up short when there was a single knock on the front door. And he was gripped by a disconcerting sense of foreboding: even felt it necessary to move his right hand close to the holstered Colt. Such was the powerful emotion Muriel Mandrell had stirred in him, he could visualise the hellcat of a woman lunging at him again. With a knife grasped in her hand this time perhaps. Or maybe levelling a gun at him and squeezing the trigger the instant he appeared on the threshold. But he checked the impulse to call out a demand to know who was there: steeled himself and swung open the door in the normal way.

‘Hello, mister,’ his second female caller of the afternoon greeted apprehensively and added unnecessarily: ‘I’m Agnes Ivers. Alvin’s ma. I spoke to you in town. Just before the shooting?’

‘I remember you, lady.’

‘Sorry, but you looked to me to be miles away.’ Her hollow cheeked, heavily lined, careworn face showed greater fear as she glanced at the fallen lamp that was still giving off a strong smell of kerosene. ‘If I’m troubling you at a bad time I can come back. Though it won’t take me but a minute to – ‘

‘Come on in.’ He opened the door wider.

She looked over her shoulder, as if to make sure nobody was watching her. Then she bobbed her head several times and darted rather than stepped into the house. And after he had closed the door she gave the impression of being uncomfortable in strange surroundings rather than afraid of why she had come there.

He held his injured hand behind his back while he gestured with the other one toward the parlour door and then the woman said as she moved ahead of him:

‘I come here to tell you something I could’ve said just as well at the door.’ She looked admiringly around and caught her breath. ‘It really is a lovely house, ain’t it?’

There was an implication in this aside that she had confirmed something she had previously surmised or that she had heard from others. Which was natural, he supposed as he replaced the fallen lamp on the hallstand, followed her into the parlour and signalled she should sit in one of the armchairs flanking the fireplace. Because, he reasoned, whatever pressing matter was on her mind Agnes Ivers was still a woman: and as such was as interested in domestic issues as most others. Including the interior of what to her was a grand mansion recently occupied by a wealthy family with a life style she could only dream about. He sat down in the other armchair and continued to conceal his blood stained hand when he asked: ‘What can I do for you, Mrs Ivers?’