Man-Killer Read online

  Man-Killer

  Talmage Powell

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  SHE’LL GET WHAT’S COMING TO HER!

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Also Available

  Copyright

  SHE’LL GET WHAT’S COMING TO HER!

  Her real name was Vicky Hustin, but to the people of Big Hominy she would always be “that uppity mountain gal, that piece of hill trash who thinks she’s so high and mighty.” And when her ex-husband was found brutally murdered, they had still another name for her: Man-killer!

  They also had a name for someone like Wade Calhoun, who dared to believe in Vicky’s innocence. Crazy, that’s what he was. Shell-shocked from the war, probably. Just ignore him till the trial’s over and that no-good gal’s had her comeuppance on the gallows!

  But Wade Calhoun wasn’t giving up that easily. He’d turn up the one bit of evidence the town couldn’t ignore. Because even if it meant pitting his life against that of a killer, he was determined once and for all to balance the scales of Big Hominy’s justice!

  TALMAGE POWELL is a young short-story writer who has contributed to such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, Ten Detective Aces, and Adventure. He acquired a first-hand knowledge of police work when he was a police reporter for a metropolitan Florida daily newspaper. Mr. Powell now lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

  1.

  AT LAST a spider came to the silent brush screening me and began trying to spin a web. She hung from a gossamer thread, trying to swing to a twig and anchor the skein. Each time she was uncessful. Then I added a gust of my breath to the thin mountain breeze. It gave the spider the necessary impetus, but it was the wrong thing to do. It was an artificial factor forced into the natural order of things. My movement was something out of the Unknown; and now the spider hung clumped into a tight ball at the end of her thread. She would never spin a web in this place.

  I turned my attention from the spider. The Winchester was heavy across my knees. The late shadows were picking up a chill. Above me the damp, cool, wooded mountain strained toward the sky. A hundred yards below ran the narrow ledge of road. Beyond that, the mountain dropped dizzily toward a valley half hidden by the blue mists of twilight.

  Far down in the valley a feeble finger of smoke wavered toward the sky as a hill woman started corn pone and collards for supper. A faint gray cloud formed across the yawning distance, moving across the face of the mountain beyond the valley. The dust smudge, I knew, was stirred up by a moving car. This time it had to be Clarence Oldham’s car and not a muddy pickup truck or rattling Ford. I didn’t think I could stand the waiting much longer.

  As the keening sound of the car’s motor insinuated itself into the mountain stillness, I brought the Winchester from its resting place on my knees. Through rifts in the brush I commanded a good view of the road, but looking into the brush from the road a person would have a hard time seeing enough of me for recognition.

  I knew Vicky would be sitting beside Oldham as he drove, and I wondered if at this very moment she was laughing at something he was saying.

  The car came around a curve with a speed and deftness sufficient to make me admire Oldham’s driving in this terrain, lowlander that he was.

  The car was a black sedan, and I squeezed the trigger of the Winchester and laid a bright furrow across the left front fender of the car. Oldham jammed on the brakes when the gun crashed, and the car slithered to a stop in a cloud of dust.

  I had clean creek gravel in my pocket. I popped it in my mouth and yelled, “Get out, both of you!”

  Oldham hesitated, saying something to Vicky. Then he got out of the car alone. “What is this, a mountain stick-up?”

  There was just enough of a sneer in his voice to have got him killed if it had been a hooger pulling a heist. I had to admire his nerve, although I wasn’t too surprised by it. From the time he’d first showed up in Big Hominy, I’d pegged him for a cool, arrogant fish.

  I didn’t want to talk much, and I wished Oldham weren’t so cool. The mouthful of pebbles was only a partial disguise for my voice.

  “I told both of you to get out,” I yelled.

  Vicky slipped out of the car.

  “That’s better,” I shouted. “Now you come up here, Mrs. Hustin.”

  “Listen,” Oldham said, “if it’s money you want—” “It isn’t. So save your breath. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want to give Mrs. Hustin a message from her husband.”

  She and Oldham traded a glance; then she moved away from the car, slipping once as she started up the steep embankment from the road. The sun was at her back and she seemed to be etched in red fire, with the mountain breeze skipping through the burnished copper of her hair. She was taller and more slender than most hill women, and for my money more beautiful than any woman anywhere.

  She walked to the thicket and said, “Wade!”

  “Not so loud.”

  A flash of anger touched her eyes. “Are you drunk, Wade?” “No.”

  “Then what kind of prank—”

  “It’s no prank. Something has happened to Rock Hustin and I don’t want you going back to town right now.”

  She looked at me a moment, and when her voice came it was very quiet. “Are you trying to tell me that Rock is sick or hurt, Wade? I’m through with him. I’ve been through with him for a long time. What could I do to help him?”

  “Not him. Yourself.”

  “You needn’t be afraid for me. There’s nothing he can do to hurt me.”

  “I wish that were true. How I wish it!”

  From the road, Oldham yelled, “What is it, Vicky? I’m coming up there.”

  “You take one step,” I called, “and I’ll break your knees with rifle slugs.”

  Vicky gave me a look that meant she was sore at me. “Wade, I’m going back to the car. Mr. Oldham isn’t used to this kind of thing.”

  “You won’t ever believe me or trust me, will you, Vicky? Okay, here it is. Rock was murdered last night at Deaf Joyner’s fish camp. His body was found late this morning.”

  It took a second for her mind to absorb it. Then she went pale and a shiver coursed over her body. She closed her eyes. “Rock is dead,” she said in a shaky voice, “and I don’t feel any tears, Wade. Isn’t that rotten of me?”

  “But you’re crying.”

  “Only for myself. Only because I’ve grown so callous I don’t feel sad over a man’s death. Wade, I don’t want to be a mean or cruel person. I want to feel tender and gentle and clean inside, where it matters.”

  I knew what she was trying to express. She was begging life not to beat her down any more, not to warp or twist her. Looking at the blind plea in her face, I felt as if I wanted to strike and break something. A man, a law, anything.

  She rubbed her palm across her cheek. “Thanks for telling me, Wade. I’ll go now.”

  I looked away from her, staring at Oldham down there in the road. “You can’t go,” I said. “They’re looking for you. They think you killed Rock.”

  I heard the intake of her breath. I knew she was looking at me with the knowledge in her heart that I wasn’t kidding about this, that I had made sure before I came here.

  “Wade, what’ll I do?”

&n
bsp; “Go back down there and send Oldham on alone. Tell him I’m a cousin. Tell him you’ve got to meet Rock. Tell him the truth, anything, but get rid of him so I can take you to a place where you’ll be safe until I have a chance to do something.”

  “No, I think I’d better go back, Wade, and face it. I can straighten it out. I didn’t kill Rock.”

  “They think you did. Sheriff Hyder has a case against you. You’ve been tried and convicted over every backyard fence in Big Hominy. What do you want to do, provide them with a Roman holiday? Now get down there and get rid of Oldham.”

  I heard her take one slow step; another. I glanced at her, and she was moving toward the road like a mechanical doll with no feeling in it.

  She reached the cutbank. Oldham helped her down, taking both her hands in his, and throwing a mean-mad glance in my direction. He pulled her close to him and they talked for a minute.

  There was little doubt in my mind as to Clarence Oldham’s serious and honorable intentions toward Vicky. He had money and class. He was in the mountains for a vacation. He was not the kind of man you’d associate with the usual hill girl. But Vicky was different. He sensed it; he saw the qualities in her that I did, and he treated her like a gentleman. Big Hominy didn’t like that, having its own opinion of how she should be treated.

  Oldham’s argument with her failed. He got in his car and drove off.

  I crawled out of the brambles as she came up the slope; she moved as if she were tired, and her face was lined with frustration.

  I spat out the pebbles. “What did Oldham have to say?” “He tried to talk me out of it.” “What did you tell him?”

  “That Rock was dead. The truth, Wade, except I didn’t identify you.”

  She looked at her high-heeled shoes, and then up the mountainside. She sat down, took the shoes off, and peeled her nylons from her legs. “Maybe I should have listened to him, Wade. He said it was crazy for me even to think I’d get blamed for Rock’s death. Clarence said he would hire a good lawyer. I’d get nowhere running away, he said. I hurt him, Wade, and he’s been nice to me.”

  “He doesn’t know Big Hominy, though.”

  “No, he doesn’t. Well, what do we do now?”

  “I’ll take you across the mountain to the old Stillman place. The cabin is still sound enough for you to be comfortable there this time of year.”

  We climbed up through the timber, following a dim trail that most eyes would have missed. But we were both hill bred, and the trail was as plain to us as a city sidewalk. The cool breath of the mountains was in our faces and the solitude wrapped us. It could have been nice, having her walk beside me this way.

  “You haven’t told me about Rock,” she said, and her voice was so tight it jarred me with an awareness of the feelings she must be fighting to control.

  “Deaf Joyner found Rock this morning when he took a bottle of whisky to the cabin where Rock’s been staying. Deaf reported the killing and Sheriff Hyder took Doc Braddock up with him. The doctor said Rock was killed about eleven o’clock last night by a blow on the head. Deaf said he’d seen a woman come out of the cabin about that time. She’d run through the glade below the cabin and moonlight had struck her full in the face. Deaf said the woman was you.”

  She faltered a step, then kept on walking.

  “Deaf said he just figured you’d paid a visit to your ex-husband, and he thought nothing about it until this morning. Kirk Hyder spotted the fireplace poker lying across the cabin from the fireplace, and wondered if it could have been the murder weapon. He wrapped it up, along with a compact and a couple of other things that he took from your room, and sent a deputy highsailing it to Asheville.

  “The deputy was all steamed up when he got back with news that the Identification Bureau in Asheville had matched up fingerprints from your things with a set from the poker.”

  I glanced at her, but her bloodless face remained a silent mask.

  “The minute I heard,” I said, “I went to the employees’ quarters at the hotel. You’d left early in the morning with Oldham and no one knew where you had gone. I bribed a maid to let me in the room. I saw nothing more than Kirk had, but I put two things together. There was a purchase slip from Brudick’s, dated yesterday, for a new bathing suit. I couldn’t find the suit.

  “I decided you and Oldham had gone to Cheoah Park for the day, planning to swim, maybe go boating. It was the only thing I could think of.

  “I was afraid to go to Cheoah because you might take the Burnston road back and I’d miss you. So I holed up east of the point where the Burnston and Big Hominy roads join. If you’d been to Cheeoah, you had to come back along that stretch.”

  She stopped walking. There was an old log lying beside the path, and she sat down on it, resting her elbows on her knees, letting her hands fall limp.

  “It’s no good, Wade.”

  “Don’t talk crazy!”

  “You tried—thanks. It would have been better if you’d let me walk into it.”

  I sat down beside her, took her chin in my hand, and made her look at me.

  “I haven’t started to try yet, Vicky. There’s just one thing I must know. Did you kill Rock? You said back there that you didn’t. But I want to hear it again, with you looking in my eyes. Did you kill him, Vicky?”

  “Before God, Wade, I swear to you that I didn’t.”

  I nodded. I didn’t care what the evidence said. I knew her too well. I knew she couldn’t tell that kind of lie while she was looking at me like that.

  “Was Deaf lying about you being in the cabin?”

  “No,” she said. “I was there.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone.”

  She read the blame in my eyes and dropped her head as if ready to accept punishment. “I know it, Wade. Just another two months now and I could have got my divorce under the two-year separation law. I hadn’t seen Rock since he’d been back. I didn’t know for sure that he was back, just heard gossip that he was hanging around the fish camps and bootlegging joints. Then he sent word to me that he was in trouble and had to see me. I was afraid not to go to Joyner’s. You know how Rock was.”

  A brute. That was Rock.

  “He was dead when I got there,” Vicky said. “Alone with him, I got scared. I thought I heard somebody moving around outside the cabin—that’s when I picked up the poker. I didn’t know if it was really somebody or just nerves. As soon as the night was still again, I threw down the poker and ran like crazy. I didn’t think of fingerprints or anything except getting away. When I got to my room I calmed down. I knew what people were bound to say when Rock was found. But saying isn’t proving, and this morning I decided the best thing was to go on about my business as if I’d never been out there. In the light of day, it was easy to convince myself that all I’d heard last night was leaves rustling outside the cabin.”

  She stared down into the darkening valley. “I’m tired of fighting, Wade. I’ve kidded myself too long. I’m just Hap McCall’s daughter, hill trash. Even animals in cages have more sense—they don’t try to beat their brains out against the bars. It would be a relief to just give up.”

  “I won’t let you,” I said. “And I won’t let them hurt you any more either.”

  She studied my face. “No,” she said. “You’re sincere right now, Wade, and I believe you. But later …”

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s time we were getting to the old Stillman place.”

  With a shrug, she started up the trail ahead of me, carrying her shoes and stockings. Without looking over her shoulder, she asked, “What are your plans?”

  “To leave you hidden and safe, while I turn up something in Big Hominy. If I can’t …”

  “Yes, Wade?”

  “I’ll get together all the money I can and take you out of the country.”

  She kept walking without saying anything and finally I said angrily, “Maybe you wish it was Oldham taking you.”

  “He treated me nice, Wade. He has a business of his own in
Charlotte. He can afford to spend three or four hundred dollars vacationing at the hotel. He might even have asked me to marry him, but he won’t now. So I wasn’t wishing anything about Clarence.”

  The flat sound of her voice reminded me of the dry rustling of leaves blowing across a mountainside on a winter day.

  2

  VICKY WAS born with two strikes against her.

  She was one of Hap McCall’s brood. She was born into hill trash. I used to see her in Big Hominy when Hap brought his tired, work-worn wife and passel of kids to town in a wagon held together with bailing wire.

  They were a sorry, sad, shiftless lot, but Vicky was different. She was ashamed, and fiercely proud. Her eyes reflected intelligence, and she was beautiful.

  I was born within forty miles of the mountain where Hap moonshined and worked his rocky farm, but I was born into a different world. I was a Calhoun.

  True, the glory of the Calhoun name was as dim as the shuttered, memory-haunted rooms in the main part of the once-fine house my mother had closed after the bank manipulation and my father’s suicide. But my mother was one of those silken-strong women peculiar to an older era in the South. As mortgages ate away the Calhoun land, she never lost hope, nor forgot that she was a Gilliam married into the Calhoun line.

  Big Hominy never forgot either. They judged my father gently, especially after it was learned that he had been trying to bring the railroad in. Big Hominy might have been more kindly to me too, but I had a wrong foot forward. I flunked out of Riverdale, the military academy where Calhouns had gone back to the time of Colonel Judd, the Calhoun at Lee’s left hand at Appomattox Courthouse. And somewhere along the line I developed a veneer of aggressiveness to cover the fact that I was never far from the sight of Calhoun poverty and the way my father had died.

  I guess I had Vicky in my blood for a long time. I used to think about her during my army hitch, which ended during rear echelon duty in Korea before I ever got to the front.

  When I came back stateside I got tanked up and went up to Spivey Mountain to see her. I loused that up the way I had a lot of things. I was a Calhoun on a binge, out to find some easy pickings among the hill trash. That’s the way I guess she must have felt. It wasn’t the way I felt, but she never did trust me after that.