Death in West Wheeling Read online

  It was a old gray Escort. I spotted the Ford logo ’fore I was halfway down the slope. The car was in pretty good shape considerin’ how fast it must’ve been goin’ to end up so far from the road, an’ that it’d fell eighteen feet. It obviously hadn’t caught fire, an’ the side windows—I could see ’em as I slid down—were unbroke. I was happy to find there was nobody inside. No body. But the windshield had blowed out all over the crumpled hood, so there could be some remains around somewhere. I looked, though I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. If there had been a body a month ago, it could still be around somewhere, some of it. Or it could’a been et by critters—bears, or coyotes, coons, or local dogs. If there weren’t no body, it could be ’cause Roger Devon—at this point I had no doubt it was his car—had totaled it, by accident or on purpose, or ’cause someone else’d dumped it to hide RD’s disappearance. There was too many possibilities. An’ ’fore any of ’em could be checked out, the car’d have to be processed an’ the area searched for remains.

  I decided to call for reinforcements.

  Lotta times, when a vehicle ends up in Car Wrecks, we don’t bother to haul it out. Draggin’ a couple tons of crushed metal straight up the twenty-foot side of a ravine just ain’t worth it for salvage. Mostly we diagram the location, take lots of pi’tures, an’ notify the insurance company involved where they can go see what’s left. Then we forgit it. Either the vehicle rusts in peace an’ into pieces, or local entrepreneurs take what they can pry loose for parts an’ scrap. Either way, it ain’t much of a problem for me.

  That weren’t the case with Devon’s Escort. I started by callin’ Martha Rooney on the radio an’ axin’ her to run the car plates. When she come back that it was Devon’s car, I axed her to send out Nina with my camera, an’ have the State Police send a evidence man, an’ Truck Towing send their biggest rig. Martha wanted all the details, but I tole her I’d let her know later—too many locals amuse theirselves by listenin’ to scanners. While I waited for Nina, I went back an’ got my car. I left it up above the wreck with the motor runnin’ an’ the lights on. Then I got out the crime-scene tape an’ stretched it along the road to mark off-limits for the rubberneckers I knew’d be showin’ up soon.

  I was right about that. A good two dozen cars was on the scene ’fore the first state car. Then three of ’em showed—it was a slow day for crime on the interstate. I had the troopers run the gawkers off, while I went back down an’ took pi’tures of the wreck. When the crime scene guy showed up, I had ’im go over the outside of the Escort for fingerprints, blood, or anythin’ else of interest. By the time he was done, Dwayne Truck arrived with the rig he uses for disabled semis. He didn’t have enough cable to run all the way down the ravine, so we had to wait while he sent for more. Meanwhile, three of the troopers an’ Nina an’ me fanned out from the wreck lookin’ for a body. All we got for our trouble was scratches an’ exposure to poison oak.

  “You could hide a dozen bodies in this mess,” Nina said, finally. “Why don’t you get Martha to call for a trackin’ dog?”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” I said, an’ did.

  Patrick Truck showed up shortly thereafter with a hundred-foot cable an’ another truck. It was good he did. It was a good thing, too, that I’d taken lots of pi’tures, ’cause by the time they’d dragged that poor Escort back up on the road, its undercarriage was damn near battered off, an’ the side of the ravine had relocated south.

  ’Bout the time I sent one of the troopers off with the Escort to guard it at Truck’s Garage, the dog showed up, a prize-winnin’ bloodhound named Holmes. We hoisted him an’ his handler down the ravine. Holmes took off, bayin’, an’ we all followed—over to the river an’ back. He treed a coon, dug a rattler out from under a log, an’ led Nina an’ me an’ the two remainin’ troopers on a merry chase. Kept us all goin’ ’til sundown.

  We never found a hair of Roger Devon.

  truck towing

  My friend Dwayne could rebuild a engine with a screwdriver an’ a crescent wrench. He’s never run from a fight or let a friend down. He don’t drink or cuss, an’ I’d bet a year’s pay he’s never cheated on his wife. A good man.

  After the old United Transit Corp went belly up owin’ their help a month’s back wages, Dwayne found hisself outta work. Fortunately, he an’ his brothers’d saved a little an’ were able to buy up Call’N Haul, the local towin’ outfit, which they renamed Truck Towing. Dwayne had a mechanic’s lien on most of United Transit’s equipment, ’cause of the money owed him, an’ he went to court an’ got the titles. Then, ’cause the county had to have busses to get the kids to school, the bank board of directors voted to give Truck Towing a loan to buy the UTC property an’ a few old GMC coaches. Dwayne hired his wife an’ sisters to drive ’em while he an’ his brothers kept ’em up. It all worked out. The long an’ the short of it is, Truck Transit and Towing is a goin’ concern with some of the best lookin’ drivers this side of either coast.

  RD’s car was so banged up by the time they got it outta the ravine, they’d had to put it on a flatbed truck to get it back to the shop. There, Dwayne off-loaded it into the shed the county uses for a evidence impound.

  By the time I got there, Trooper Yates, the state evidence guy, was packin’ up. He was dirty an’ scratched from crawlin’ around the wreck down in the ravine, an’ pretty much disgusted by his lack of progress back at TT&T.

  “Least you could’a come up with a body for as much trouble as this was,” he tole me.

  “Yessir. I know just how you feel.”

  After he left, I had a look at the Escort, which was sittin’ in the shed with its trunk open an’ its hood off—they’d had to remove it to get at the engine. The missin’ windshield had been replaced with a plastic sheet, taped up top with duct tape an’ pulled down over the engine compartment. The inside of the car was covered in places with gray smudges that looked like smeared fingerprints—which they was.

  I made a note of what I seen, includin’ that the seat’d been moved from where it was when we found the car. Since I didn’t know how RD usually kept his seat adjusted, the observation didn’t do no good. There wasn’t much of anythin’ else to see. Devon kept his car pretty clean inside—in spite of Trooper Yates’s claim of “enough dirt to plant potatoes in.” There hadn’t been no empty coffee cups or fast-food leftovers. The trunk had the usual stuff—jack, tire iron an’ spare, a few railroad fuses, an’ a dead flashlight. There wasn’t no trace of the stuff the Reverend Moody said Devon took with him when he left.

  I turned off the light an’ was lockin’ up when Dwayne come by.

  “You’re stayin’ for supper.”

  Dwayne’s got three inches an’ sixty pounds on me, so I wasn’t gonna argue. Besides, his wife’s a great cook. I got out the spare uniform I keep in my trunk for emergencies, an’ went into the garage. Dwayne’s got a little office in front, with a TV an’ a couch that mostly only his huntin’ dogs use. The office has a powder room that’s not too unsanitary for public use. I used it to wash up an’ change. As we cut through the shop to get to the house, I noticed Dwayne had a new sign hung over the door:

  CUSTOMARY CHARGES

  LABOR

  $17.50/hour

  IF YOU WATCH

  $25.00/hour

  IF YOU HELP

  $50.00/hour

  IF YOU WORKED ON IT BEFORE YOU BROUGHT IT IN

  FORGET IT!

  I wondered who’d worked on Roger Devon’s car.

  mining for bodies

  Most of the operators of our local micro-distilleries use abandoned mines to store their products, an’ like all good businessmen, they take precautions against break-ins. So ’fore I went pokin’ around, I went to find Rye Willis. I tracked him down at the Truck Stop, before sunup, an’ watched him unload twenty cases of “West Wheeling White Vinegar” at the back door. White Lightning would have been more accurate labelin’, but I didn’t guess anybody’d complain to the FDA. Me watchin’ made him nervous.<
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  Rye knows the mine territory as well as his back porch but when I explained what I wanted, he was reluctant to get involved. “You’re workin’ with the ATF!”

  “I’m lookin’ for a missin’ person, Rye, but if I have to get that ATF clown to bird-dog your booby traps, I’ll do it.”

  “Homer, I’m shocked!”

  “Yeah. An’ I’m a virgin.”

  “Don’t do it, Homer. ATF agents’re like those brooms in Fantasia—kill one, thirty more pop up in his place.”

  “Guess you’d better help me then, eh, Rye?”

  We started just after sunrise an’ took Merlin ’cause Rye wanted him to keep his hand in as a tracker. We stopped at the Truck Stop for breakfast an’ hit the first mine shaft before the dew burnt off the grass. It made two days in a row I’d had to get out of my car an’ exercise. My job was gettin’ to be more like work. Speakin’ of which, Rye told me there was thirty-two abandoned mines in the county. Fortunately, we didn’t have to stick our heads into the mouths of every one. Two of the places were so remote no one from outside the county could’ve found ’em, an’ no local’d go to the trouble of haulin’ anythin’ that far away. The roads leadin’ to a few were overgrown with three-inch or better saplings. It was a fair bet no one had visited them in the last month.

  We covered eighteen likely body dumpin’ spots by noon, an’ had lunch at the nineteenth—Rye’s private warehouse. Merlin would’ve bailed out at that point only, as I was drivin’ an’ told him he’d have to walk back, he elected to stay the course.

  We headed out to a scrub-covered ridge that had a mine with a main entry an’ half a dozen air shafts you could’ve squeezed a corpse down. It looked promisin’ for a dump site—vehicles had been passin’ often an’ recent enough to keep the access road open an’ the grass flat between the wheel ruts. We piled outta the car an’ spread out, Rye an’ me goin’ one way, Merlin the other. Climbin’ across the side slope of the ridge would’ve been hard goin’ enough, but we was also workin’ up a lather pushin’ through thickets of thumb-sized trees an’ waist-high brambles. I was ready to call the hunt off when Merlin yelled out, “Hey, I found a body!”

  Rye an’ me set some kind of land speed record gettin’ up to the ridge top where Merlin was standin’. Below him, in a little hollow where the underbrush thinned on a patch of rocky ground, lay a skeleton with its bleached bones in near perfect arrangement to where they’d been in life. I stared for a minute, then heaved a sigh of relief. The bones wasn’t human. I said, “I’ll be damned.”

  Rye said, “Merlin, you jackass! You made us run all the way up here for a dead dog?”

  Merlin laughed. “You said we was lookin’ for a missing body. What’s that there if it ain’t a body? An’ missin’?”

  Rye looked ready to pop him one, so I got between ’em. “He’s got a point, Rye. ’Sides, this may just clear up another missin’ person case I’ve had hangin’ fire.”

  “Don’t you try an’ pull my leg, Homer!”

  “Seriously,” I said, “’less I’m mistaken, that there’s the remains of Marge Wexler.”

  Rye grinned. “Miz Wexler’s a dog, Homer, but c’mon!”

  I laughed; I couldn’t help myself. Merlin didn’t get it, so I explained.

  “Everybody in Boone County knows Axel’s wife’s a bitch an’ that she run off a while back. Most nobody knows her name—it’s Maybelle. Marge was Axel’s prize huntin’ dog. He never filed a missin’ person report for Maybelle, but I still got one outstandin’ that he filed when the dog went gone.”

  Merlin grinned, too. “So what’re you gonna do, bring Axel up here for a look?”

  What he meant was that the circumstances surroundin’ the dog’s death was plain to see. The skeleton lay on its side with what was left of a red leather collar in the region of its neck. The collar was attached to one end of a twenty-foot chain; a hunk of one-by-eight siding was stapled to the other end. The siding end of the chain was jammed between a sapling an’ a rock, an’ wrapped tight enough around the tree to bite into the trunk. Plain to see, the dog’d broke the board loose from the shed she’d been chained to an’ headed cross country, trailin’ board an’ chain. When she snagged the board between the tree an’ rock, she’d run around the tree an’ really got herself stuck. Then she’d starved to death waitin’ for rescue.

  “I’m gonna handle this with the same dignity an’ respect I would any missin’ person case,” I said. “With the exception, I don’t think we need to notify the state police.” That caused ’em to grin. “If you boys’ll just give me a hand …”

  So I got my camera an’ stuff outta the car, an’ took a roll of pi’tures of the bones—in situ, as we say in law enforcement, first from the ridge, then up close—an’ the chain, collar, an’ tree. Then the three of us carefully put all them bones in a gunny sack, an’ the sack—with the collar an’ chain—in a box in my trunk.

  We finished checkin’ out the last of the mines near sundown. We didn’t find no other body.

  the body in Goode Swamp

  Goode Swamp got its name from Samuel Goode, the first white man on record to disappear into one of its quicksand traps. By all accounts he was purely a lowlife an’ no loss. If a swamp is a soggy spot full of snakes, bugs, an’ varmints, Goode Swamp’s a winner. For openers, it’s got every type of reptile ever seen in these parts—most of ’em poison—an’ every crawlin’ critter that ever made men miserable, from ants an’ chiggers to skeeters an’ ticks. Of course there’s four-legged varmints, too—skunks, coons, possum, an’ black bear. I even heard stories of gators, but I think they’re confusin’ Goode Swamp with the New York sewers. Of course the most vexin’ an’ dangerous variety of swamp life is the two-legged kind—gun runners, trappers, an’ your occasional escaped convict. I wasn’t aware of any of the last category around lately, but the first sort was a constant threat. Which is why I pressed Rye into service as a guide the mornin’ after our little minin’ expedition.

  “Homer, why are we doin’ this?”

  “’Cause we already looked in all the easy spots. An’ this is the world’s best place to lose a body.”

  “That bein’ the case, why are we botherin’ to search at all?”

  “We gotta show we made a effort. Once we establish we can’t find nothin’, we can quit.”

  “You talk just like a politician.”

  “I gotta get in practice—in case Sheriff Rooney should decide to retire.”

  When we was loadin’ Rye’s aluminum canoe, an’ our waders in the back of my truck, Rye pointed to the sticker on the bumper that said, “THEY GOT THE LIBRARY AT ALEXANDRIA BUT THEY’RE NOT GETTING MINE.”

  “Homer, I been meanin’ to ask—what the hell does that mean?”

  My ma put the sticker on the truck when she was West Wheeling librarian. “The library of Alexandria was one of the wonders of the world ’til they burned it down.”

  “Recently?”

  I had to smile. “Naw.”

  “Why’d they burn it down?”

  I thought about tryin’ to explain ancient history to a guy who never finished eighth grade—not that he ain’t smart. I gave it up an’ said, “Drunks. Mean drunks.” Rye could relate to mean drunks. I guessed, from the look on his face, that he didn’t entirely get it but was afraid he’d look stupid if he axed any more, so I switched to a subject he knew somethin’ about. “So, Rye. How many two-legged varmints you reckon call Goode Swamp home?”

  “’Pends on what you mean by varmints.”

  We stopped for breakfast at the Truck Stop, where the subject of the day’s gossip was Roger Devon’s car. After I assured everybody I couldn’t possibly know as much about it as they did—me bein’ only the deputy sheriff—they let us eat in peace. Charity was good enough to put us up some fried chicken, ’fore we left, in a Styrofoam cooler.

  Twenty minutes after we was outta the Truck Stop, we turned onto Goode Swamp Road. We bumped along it ’til I thought my fillings’d fall out
. Rye’s head kept swivelin’ to the back like a owl’s as he tried to keep an eye on the case of white lightnin’ he’d brought along to trade an’, at the same time, look ahead for signs that anyone’d been along recent.

  The road changed—from blacktop to gravel, then dirt as it dropped into Goode Hollow, an’ the trees changed—from hardwoods to stands of willows an’ cottonwoods as the ground got wetter, with more an’ more giant poplars an’ pin oaks.

  The dirt road run along a creek that widened into a pond so clogged with cattails you could scarcely see the water. Just about the point where the road petered out, Rye tole me to stop the truck an’ wait while he went to check somethin’. I thought he meant the plumbin’ until he hauled out one of his jugs of shine. He was gone a good forty-five minutes. I used the time to slather on bug dope ’til I smelled like Lysol, an’ watch a hawk drift by overhead. Just for my entertainment, a family of muskrats swum out in the pond, an’ a couple of red-winged blackbirds cussed at each other across their mutual boundary. A heron stalked out of the cattails, froze for a minute, then snagged its lunch. A squirrel started across the clearin’ where the road’d been before it disappeared. He spotted me an’ changed his mind in midair, then disappeared back into the scrub.