The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
Our eyes locked. His lost a little of their calm self-assurance. Every word I’d said was true, and Fogarty knew it. He’d despised me from the start because I’d glimpsed behind his front. I’d held out, but he’d turned the savings and loan board against me.
I remembered their joshing just before the vote was taken: “You getting old and cranky, Lemuel?”... “Catch up with the times, Lemuel. The Spurgeon Mountain development as a tourist playground can’t miss.”... “Sure, Lemuel, look at what they’ve done around Blowing Rock and Maggie Valley near Asheville.”... “Not to mention Gold Mountain and Tweetsie Railroad.”... “We’ll have ’em by the station wagon load when Mr. Fogarty completes the chairlift, the mountaintop golf course, the frontier village, the open air amphitheater.”... “Every summer, Lemuel, Comfort will bust at the seams with tourists and their money.”... “It ain’t like he was asking us to foot the whole bill”... “That’s right, Lemuel, he’s just asking us for a piddling hundred thou.”
So it had gone. Piddling hundred thou, my foot! I’d looked about the board room table at their faces, struck a little dumb at the way Fogarty had shifted their way of thinking.
“Fogarty,” I said bluntly, “what have you done with our money?”
Neither of us let our eyes waver or drop. His fancy cigar had gone out, but he hadn’t noticed.
“Unfortunately, Lemuel, I made some bad investments.” Pointedly, he hadn’t called me Mr. Hyder, but Lemuel, in the tone of a man permitting a mountain hooger to shine his shoes or carry his golf bag.
“Or some mighty good investments,” I suggested. “Maybe in a numbered Swiss bank account?”
That little shot in the dark got to him. He couldn’t quite hide the flicker deep in his eyes.
“What makes you say a thing like that?” he probed.
“You,” I said. “You, being what you are. I think it was your goal from the beginning. You staked out yourself a bunch of naive hillbillies with a nest egg who were ready for the taking. I don’t think you ever intended to go further on Spurgeon Mountain than you’ve gone.” I jerked a thumb toward the window.
“And you sure haven’t gone more than five or six thousand out there. Just some motions, to pave the way for the next act, a bankruptcy action while the loot is safely salted away somewhere out of reach.”
He studied me a moment. Then he reached with his soft right hand and nudged my splayed hands from the papers on his desk. He did it like he was picking up a dirty bug.
“I don’t like you, Lemuel Hyder,” he said, “but I’ll have to admit I admire you more than I do the rest of them.”
“Then you’re admitting the truth of what I say?”
Towering over me, his eyes crinkled with a sort of warped pleasure. Not liking me, he was enjoying this moment and the chance to rub it in.
“Why not?” he said. “It’s salted away, all right. But not necessarily in a numbered Swiss account. There are any multitude of choices where to tuck money if you know the angles.”
I felt even sicker at heart. Somehow, I’d hoped in the back of my mind that he would tell me the bankruptcy caper wasn’t really true. I’d wished for him to say that the setback and work stoppage was just temporary, that Spurgeon Mountain would blossom and glitter and show a neon face to happy crowds.
He rolled his cigar in his lips, savoring the grayness of his wizened face more than the taste of expensive tobacco. “Does knowing help, Lemuel? Or hurt, perhaps?” He bent his head to look at me a little closer. “You poor fellow, it does hurt! And not a thing you can do about it, is there? If you repeated my admission, I would simply deny it. You’ve no witnesses. Just you and me up here on Spurgeon Mountain. Your word against mine.”
I couldn’t talk for a little while. I guess we both ached with his sense of victory, only in totally different ways.
“Fogarty,” I pleaded gently, “it isn’t as if you were conning some rich kid. Comfort can’t afford what you’ve done.”
“My heart bleeds, Lemuel.”
“Comfort ain’t much of a town, Fogarty. But it’s people, nice, quiet people.”
“Sticks and clods,” he said.
“Ain’t a soul in Comfort wouldn’t help you fix a flat or give you a meal and lodging if you lost your wallet.”
“Suckers,” he decided.
I moved around to the back corner of the desk. “Fogarty, will you really be able to enjoy it?”
“I always enjoy fat living,” he assured me with a big, maddening smile.
“Maybe I ought to tell you how it was,” I said.
“I’m really not interested, Lemuel.”
“It was depression times,” I said, “and I started the savings and loan because Comfort needed it. Thirty-five or more years ago, I started it. With a few dollars of my own and the trust of good people, Fogarty.
“If a woman eked out an extra dollar selling eggs, she trusted it to me. A man plowed a neighbor’s field for a fiver he could scrimp by without and he would put it on deposit where it would grow a little and do some good. We loaned money to a man to buy a milk cow, a tractor to replace a mule, seed com to change a fallow hillside, and houses. Not mansions, Fogarty, but small, decent houses to people who needed them.”
I paused to take a breath. “That’s Comfort Savings and Loan, Fogarty. That’s the outfit you’re robbing, the little backstop for the people of Comfort that’ll go under itself the day you go bankrupt. A hundred thou is a great big passel of money to us, Fogarty.”
“If you’re quite finished, Lemuel, I’ve other things to do,” Fogarty said.
“Nope,” I said. “I came here to collect the people’s money, and that’s what I aim to do. Me and the rednecks of Comfort, Fogarty, we never let each other down yet. And I don’t fancy that today is the proper date to start doing so.”
His eyes became dark, wholly nasty. “Get out of here, you paltry little ass!”
“That’s your last word, Fogarty?”
“You and the coon hunters of Comfort wouldn’t know what to do with your hundred grand if I gave it back!” he spoke in rising rage. “And my last word is — get lost!”
He moved a hand toward his desk drawer. As he jarred it open, I glimpsed a revolver inside. A revolver is always a strong argument, but he’d had his say and I didn’t see any point in further debate.
Before his hand could reach the gun, I’d already hauled off and let him have one on the side of the jaw. I was so small and quick he never saw it coming.
He staggered back from his desk, his eyes suddenly bulging. I hit him three more times like a rattler, which is also small, striking. He never knew where the punches came from.
Big, soft fellow, I thought as I stood over his prone bulk. Big, soft bully, losing all his candy.
I hadn’t even worked up a sweat, and Fogarty was lying there on his big, broad back, his mouth gaping, his jaws reddening where my fists had struck.
He groaned and tried to stir. I put a stop to that by picking up a heavy quartz paperweight, which I’d noticed on his-desk, and bending over him and banging him on the left temple.
He gave no trouble at all after that, except for his weight. It took me nearly thirty minutes to drag him across the parking area and on across the road and right to the edge of a precipice that overlooked the beautiful, serene valley.
Below the precipice, the cliff fell straight down for a thousand feet. I gave Fogarty the final push, kneeling beside his unconscious bulk. Still on my knees, I craned my head over the edge and watched him fall. Down and down. Turning, twisting. Through the wispy gossamer veil of cloud. Down a thousand feet to the stones at the base of the cliff.
Driving back to Comfort, I noticed that my lunch was settling pretty good. At my afternoon coffee break, I decided, I’d have a piece of that fine apple pie in Mom Roddenberry’s restaurant.