The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

As soon as I got wind of the coming calamity, I drove out of Comfort a lot faster than a fellow of my age should. My destination was a few miles west of Comfort, which is a nice hamlet nestled in the gentle folds of the Smoky Mountains.

The narrow road snaked toward the heights in dizzying hairpin curves. The scenery was something else; wooded peaks, sheer cliffs, blue-misted valleys that seemed depthless with their gossamer veils of wispy cloud swirling below the level of the road. But right then, I was contrary to the beauties of my native mountains. My recent suspicions of Mr. Randolph P. Fogarty flumped in a painful pulse between my temples.

I gunned my dusty sedan to the upper rim of a miles-long valley. It dropped breathlessly away on my right. To my left, Spurgeon Mountain strained its steep, thicketed slopes on toward the sky. The towering peak was as primitive as in the day of the Cherokee, except for the raw earthen scars Randolph P. Fogarty would leave as painful reminders to us ignorant natives.

I braked the sedan, turning it onto a vast muddy stretch that bulldozers had gouged as a beginning for a huge parking area. I jounced along slowly, twisting the steering wheel to avoid boulders and ruts. From the side window I glimpsed the naked incision that slashed straight up to the mountain’s distant crest, the clearing for the proposed chairlift.

Straight ahead, and already sprouting a few young weeds, were the humps of concrete forms and stanchions, foundations, supposedly, for a building that showed, on paper, as a large souvenir shop and restaurant.

I beaded my eyes on the small travel trailer that had served as a construction site office for Fogarty Enterprises. Fogarty’s gun-metal gray Continental was parked beside the office, and my pulse tripped a beat of thanksgiving. At least I could have a private, man to man talk with him before the boom was lowered all the way.

I risked the welfare of the sedan’s springs, covering the last fifty yards of ruts, humps, and slits the rains had cut.

I was out of the sedan almost before it stopped pitching and rearing. Getting from under the wheel, I flicked a glance over the scars the ’dozer had made. The mountain seemed so dismal now, so silent with the small crew and machinery trucked away when the work was barely begun. It all added up to a brutish bequest by Fogarty, a disdainful mockery of the big-deal dream he’d painted—

Fogarty must have heard the sedan’s engine in the mountain silence, seem me coming. But he chose to ignore me, even when I’d stood a few seconds outside the trailer-office doorway. He continued to stand imposingly at his desk, gathering up papers and stuffing them into a gold-monogrammed attaché case.

A good way to get a mountain man riled is to make out like he isn’t there, and I was more than a little riled already.

“Fogarty,” I said, stepping into the confines of the low-ceilinged trailer, “I want a few words with you.”

He glanced at a couple more documents, slipped one in the briefcase and dropped the other in the general direction of the overflowing trash basket. He shifted his two-dollar cigar with a movement of his lips.

“Make it a few,” he said in his stentorian baritone. “I’m busy.”

I faced him across the desk. We were sure a mismatched pair. I was scrawny, gray as a mountain winter from sixty years of living, a little rumpled in my store-bought suit, squint-eyed, arid red-necked.

Fogarty was about the furthest contrast you could imagine, big, robust, exuding the air of a Philadelphia banker or Wall Street tycoon. He wore an English suit, Italian loafers, a Madison Avenue shirt and tie, and a big, glittering stone on his manicured pinkie. But his stock in trade was his affable, honest looking face, with just enough gray at the temples to give him the final touch of dependability and last-notch respectability.

It was sure the perfect con man’s cover, that face, inspiring instant trust and confidence in even the experienced and wary.

“Fogarty,” I said, “I just had lunch with a member of our legal bar, Judge Bine. He mentioned something that kind of posed some questions in my mind.”

Fogarty picked up a paper, studied it briefly. “Such as?”

“Are you figuring on a quick action for bankruptcy?”

He smiled. It wasn’t like the hearty, genuine looking smiles he’d worn for Comfort. It was a little ugly. “Do you believe every bit of lunch table gossip that comes your way?”

“As head of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association I’m concerned with anything you do with our depositors’ money,” I reminded him.

He gave me the impatient look of a really big man dismissing a worm.

“I’m sure,” he said with mild scorn, “that you’ve spent every night biting your nails since you made the loan.”

I leaned toward him and gripped the edge of the desk. “I didn’t loan you a hundred thousand dollars of other people’s money entrusted to the care and keeping of the Comfort Savings and Loan Association. It was the board that you conned into the loan, Fogarty. The poor, pitiful group of hillbillies you bedazzled with your manner, your talk, your wining and dining, your fancy plans for turning Spurgeon Mountain into a sure-fire gold-mine tourist attraction.”