Suspended Sentences

“That place in Colorado. Whatever it’s called.”

“You’d like me to bring the body back? Of course.”

“Bill, I want you to find out who was responsible.” She spoke slowly with effort; the words fell from her with equal weight, like bricks. She said again, clenching a fist, “Responsible.”

“The radio said it was an accident.”

She watched me with her injured eyes. It rattled me. I said lamely, “My work’s industrial security, Mrs. Cord. You seem to be asking me to investigate a homicide. It’s a little out of my —”

“You don’t like — you didn’t like Charlie.”

“Mrs. Cord, I —”

“Never mind. I didn’t like him very much myself. But he was all I had.”

“You need rest,” I told her. I sat down behind the desk. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“He gave me a pill. I’ll take it when I go home. Bill, you’re the only one I trust to do this.”

What a sad thing for her to say, I thought. I hardly knew her. She was the wife — the widow — of an acquaintance who’d been an executive in a neighboring department; I hadn’t known Charlie Cord very well. She was right — I hadn’t liked him, and therefore I’d avoided him when I could. Yet she’d come to me. Hadn’t they any friends?

She looked down and saw her fist and unclenched it slowly, studying the fingers as if they were unfamiliar objects. She was waiting for me to speak; she almost cringed. I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me to do.”

“Bill, nobody here cares about Charlie. Good riddance — that’s what they’ll be thinking. You know the gossip of course.”

“Gossip?”

“Why Charlie married me. I’ve never been what you could call a glamour girl. But my father happens to be a director of the company with sixteen percent of the stock. When Charlie married me, he married sixteen percent of Schiefflin Aerospace and married himself into a forty-thousand-a-year job in the sales and marketing division. Charlie made his way well up in the world from the football team of a second-rate state university. That’s what most everybody thinks of Charlie. That’s all they ever think of him.”

“Mrs. Cord, you’re upset and that’s understandable, but —”

She went on, not allowing me to interrupt further. “He wasn’t likeable. He was a boor. He was a hearty backslapper, he was never sincere enough, he told outhouse jokes badly and too loudly. He affected garish jackets and ridiculous cars. He had a fetish for big-game hunting. But he did a good job for this company, Bill. People tend to ignore that — deliberately I’m sure, because no one likes to give credit to a person as obnoxious as Charlie. As Charlie was.” Then her voice cracked. “He made my life miserable. Intolerable. But he was all I had. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.” I tried to look reassuring.

“Bill, I want you to be the instrument of my revenge.”

“Revenge? Wait a minute now, Mrs. Cord.”

“He was mine and I was his.”

“But apparently it was simply an accident.”

“Accident? Maybe. He was shot twice.” She paused as if to challenge me to contradict her. Then she said, “I’ve talked to my father. The company will voucher your expenses. There’s a plane to Denver at half-past eleven.” She stood up. “Find out how he was killed. And why. And who did it.”

On the plane I reviewed what she’d told me about the death of Charlie Cord, what I’d already known, and what I’d learned from two brief phone calls to Colorado.

Six days ago Charlie had flown to Denver with his hunting gear, picked up a rental car at Stapleton Airport, and driven into the Rockies to a half-abandoned mining town called Quartz City. In Wild West days it had been a boom town; now it was a center for tourists and hunters.

Charlie had spent the night in a motel and in the morning by prearrangement he’d been picked up by a professional guide employed by Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd., a commercial hunting outfit. Charlie and the guide, a man named Sam Mallory, had set out into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive truck with provisions and gear enough for ten days. Four days later Mallory returned to Quartz City in the truck with Charlie Cord’s corpse in the back. Charlie had been dead, by then, about 24 hours.

According to the sheriff’s office, Charlie had been shot twice through the chest by a .30-’06 rifle. Sam Mallory, the guide, professed to know nothing of the event. His deposition, prepared for the pending coroner’s inquest, alleged that Mallory had been in the process of setting up camp on a new site to which they’d moved that morning; while Mallory was pitching the tents, he said, Charlie had taken his .303 rifle and climbed a nearby peak to reco

About an hour after Charlie’s departure from camp, Mallory heard two rifle shots on the mountain. He thought little of it at the time, assuming Charlie had shot some game animal; When Charlie didn’t return within two hours, Mallory assumed Charlie had wounded the animal and gone after it, as any hunter must.

It wasn’t until late afternoon — six or seven hours after he’d heard the shots — that Mallory became alarmed. After all, he supposed, Mr. Cord was an experienced hunter and had a compass and canteen with him; there was no reason for concern earlier.

Mallory went up the mountain but darkness fell before he found anything. Through the night he kept the campfire banked high to give Charlie a homing beacon, but Charlie didn’t return and at dawn Mallory was back on the mountain tracking Charlie’s boot prints; and at about 8:30 in the morning Mallory found him lying where he’d been shot. Mallory had backpacked the body down to the truck and driven straight to the sheriff.

The sheriff was a towering thin man with weathered blue outdoor eyes and a thatch of black hair; he went by the name of Bob Wilkerson. He poured me a cup of strong coffee to take the chill out of the autumn afternoon.

“Afraid I never met your friend while he was alive. They tell me he was — well, kind of loud.” He smiled to take the edge off it.

The coffee was old but hot. “Have you found the rifle that shot him?”

“No. It was an ’ought-six, of course. We recovered both slugs from the body.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“Unusual? No. Why?”

I said, “A powerful rifle like that, wouldn’t it tend to punch straight through a man and keep right on going? Or were they hollowpoints that explode on contact?”

He watched me gravely, then something like suspicion entered his face. “No, they weren’t hollowpoints. Jacketed slugs — military style. They didn’t expand hardly at all. But they were half spent by the time they hit him. That’s why they didn’t go on through.”

“In other words he was shot from a considerable distance.”

“Mr. Stoddard, you don’t rightly believe a hunter could mistake a man for a buck deer at close range, do you?”

“Is that how it happened, then, Sheriff?”

“That’s what it looked like to me. He was shot from a range of four hundred yards or better and it was an uphill trajectory. Fighting gravity and all, those slugs weren’t going too fast when they hit him.”

“Both bullets hit him in the chest?”

“Not more than three inches apart. One of them penetrated his heart.”

“That’s extraordinary shooting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Or lucky shooting.”

“Two shots within three inches of each other at four hundred yards, uphill?”

Wilkerson’s shoulders stirred as if to dismiss it. “Let me lay it out for you, Mr. Stoddard. I just got back here an hour ago myself — spent the day up on that mountain with Sam Mallory. I expect you’ll want to talk to him?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Surely. Anyhow, we went over the ground up there again. It’s pret’ near up to timberline, that area. Scrub trees, a lot of rocks, talus slopes, bare ground in patches here and there. You can pick up a track if you know what to look for but it ain’t easy.”