The Hangings Read Free Page A

was next to useless as a law-enforcement officer. Just a fat-bottomed political hack who came through Tule Bend once or twice a month to look things over and to stuff himself on pig's knuckles and sauerkraut at the Germany Cafe. Nothing would get done if I turned the investigation over to him. As a matter of fact, he would stir folks up even more with his ham-fisted ways—turn the hanging into a circus sideshow.
    I made my way to the Odd Fellows Hall on First, a block from the Basin. It was a two-story building, the lower half of which housed the city offices. The old joke about the town officials being pretty odd fellows in their own right was wearing thin—perhaps thin enough to shame people into voting the necessary funds for a new city hall next election. I sure as hell hoped so.
    The constable's office and jail were at the rear. You could get there by going in through the front, but that way you had to pass the town clerk's office, the mayor's office, and the council chambers. I always entered by way of the alley at the rear—the way the council had decreed prisoners were to be taken in and out, so as not to offend the more sensitive among our citizens. Not that there were ever many prisoners to offend anybody; a few Saturday night drunks and an occasional sneak thief or vandal was about all. But Verne Gladstone, who had been mayor for the past twelve years, was hell on appearances. Which was also a local joke, considering that Verne weighed three hundred pounds—he was his own best customer at the Gladstone Brewery—and had a knack for wearing expensive suits in a way that they looked like a ragpicker's hand-me-downs.
    I made sure the mayor was nowhere to be seen before I went around and down the alley to my office. He was a windy old coot, and once he got his conversational hooks into you, you were hard-pressed to wriggle free. This hanging business would sharpen his tongue and make him even more loquacious than usual.
    There was a file of wanted circulars in my desk; I got it out and leafed through them. I had no particular reason for thinking that Jeremy Bodeen might be wanted, but I was bothered by the curious way he had died and the wording of that letter from his brother. But if he was wanted anywhere, neither his face nor his name was among the circulars I had collected. I didn't have a flyer on an Emmett Bodeen, either.
    That done, I headed back down to the creekbank behind Sam McCullough's saddlery. There were still some folks out gawking and poking around—kids, mostly. None of them had anything to tell me about the dead man. I moved upstream, following the bank to where it bellied in to form the western rim of the basin. The creek was nearly a hundred yards wide there. The town wharf jutted out midway along, on this side, and there were also docks for Far West Milling, Beecher's Lumberyard, and one of three big storage warehouses, Creekside Drayage. The other two warehouses were on the east bank. The east side was the poorer section of town. The S.F. & N.P. tracks and depot were over there; so was what Ivy and others called Shanty town, where railroad workers and rivermen lived with their families and there were several working-class saloons and lodging houses.
    The grain barges were in at the Far West dock and I saw Boze working on them with some other men. No point in my asking questions there. I went ahead to Creekside Drayage and talked to half a dozen men and did not find out a thing. I was of a mind, then, to make inquiries on the east side. But it was quite a while before I got to do that. A great big gust of wind stopped me when I got to the Basin Drawbridge.
    The wind's name was Verne Gladstone, and as I had feared, he was all set to blow up a storm.

     
    *****

     
    Over supper that night, Ivy asked, "Haven't you a clue to what that man was doing there, Lincoln? Not even a clue?"
    "No," I said. "Nobody seems to have seen him around town. Or anywhere else, for that matter."
    "Well then, he