The Hardest Part (A James Bishop Short Story) Read online

  ‘Hey, we both—’ he began, then suddenly clamped his mouth shut.

  ‘You both killed him?’ I asked. ‘Or you both took turns burying the body? What are you trying to say, Bobby?’

  ‘Nothing. I ain’t saying nothing. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I ain’t saying anything else to you or anybody. Let me go.’ He shook the railing again.

  I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I hadn’t really expected Bobby to give me much, but I’d had to try. And at least it wasn’t a total loss. I now knew that Lenny’s body was still out there somewhere, which was more than I’d known a minute ago. I picked up the half-used roll of bright orange duct tape I’d found in the fishing tackle box in the cupboard and said, ‘Okay, Bobby, I need to give your pal Calvin a call now, and since I don’t want any interruptions from you I’m going to have to temporarily gag you with this.’

  Bobby shook his head. ‘You ain’t putting that on me.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll have to knock you out again.’ I picked up another empty beer bottle from the floor and slapped the base against my palm. ‘One or the other. It’s your choice.’

  I let him think it over. After a few more seconds, he said, ‘What you gonna talk to Cal about?’

  ‘You’ll find out in a few minutes. Now what’s it going to be, the tape or the bottle?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said in a sullen voice, ‘Stick it on me, I guess.’

  ‘Good. Sit up so you’re facing away from me. Cause any problems while I’m taping you up and I’ll put you down again, got it?’

  ‘Sure, I ain’t stupid.’ Bobby gave me one last glare, then sat up and manoeuvred himself until he was sat facing the headboard railing.

  Before he got second thoughts, I peeled off a section of tape and started wrapping it tightly around his head so it completely covered his mouth and lower jaw, then round the back of his head and over the mouth again. And then twice more for good measure. Finally, I tore the tape free from the rest of the roll and said, ‘That’s good. Now sit there and be quiet.’

  From my jacket pocket, I took Bobby’s Samsung and redialled the number Calvin had called from last night. As I listened to it ring, Bobby managed to turn himself round again so he was facing me. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to him that I could easily make the call from another room, but the whole point was that I wanted him to hear my end of the conversation.

  Finally, after ten rings, a bleary voice said, ‘Bobby? That you, man? I was asleep. What you want?’

  ‘The rest of the money from that robbery,’ I said.

  Silence on the line. Then a clearing of a throat. ‘You’re not Bobby. Who is this?’

  ‘We met last night, in the bar. I’m the man with time on his hands.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember. So what are you doing with Bobby’s phone? And what’s this about money from a robbery? You mean the factory thing?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb, Calvin. I’m with Bobby right now and he’s told me everything.’

  Bobby grunted something and lowered his head towards his bound hands, clearly anxious to peel the tape from his mouth. But I raised the empty beer bottle again and he quickly got the message.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Calvin said on the other end of the phone. ‘Bobby wouldn’t have told you anything. Shit, he probably isn’t even there.’

  ‘He’s here, all right, although he’s actually in the other room. And yeah, he’s quite the talkative fellow once you get to know him. I’ve had to tie him up and gag him, but he already told me most of what I wanted to know anyway. Like the best place to look for your spare keys, for example. You know, the ones that open up that special locker at EZ-AXS Storage. The ones you keep in the second drawer down in your work desk in the study.’

  There was a brief pause, then, ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘Go check the stationery drawer, Calvin. That way we can dispense with the preliminaries and get on with the main event.’

  I heard rushed movement at the other end, then the sound of a drawer being slid out of its metal glides. ‘Son of a bitch. You broke into my house.’

  ‘And when I saw the EZ-AXS brochure and the receipts, it didn’t take long to join up the rest of the dots. And I got the access code, too. Seven three four five five. So you now know I’ve already been to the locker and gone through all those boxes of clothing and found the money you stashed there. Now I figure there’s about a hundred and twenty in the knapsack in total, right?’ There was silence at the other end. ‘Am I right, Calvin?’

  ‘When I find you,’ he said, ‘I’m gonna cut your goddamn—’

  ‘You’ll do nothing,’ I said, ‘except what I tell you to do. Now answer the question. I figure there’s about a hundred and twenty thousand in there, correct?’

  ‘Yeah, like you don’t know that already, you bastard. So what?’

  ‘So I want the rest.’

  ‘What rest? What are you talking about? There ain’t no rest. That’s it. You got it all.’

  ‘I told you not to play dumb with me, Calvin. Now Bobby told me there was another fifty grand from that robbery that you got tucked away somewhere, and I want that too.’

  Bobby had ducked his head down to his bound hands again, and I gently tapped the back of his neck with the base of the beer bottle, as a warning. He turned and glared at me with hate in his eyes, but he slowly moved his jaw away from his fingers.

  ‘Well, Bobby’s full of shit,’ Calvin said. ‘There’s no more money. You got everything that was in the safe.’

  ‘You’re partly right,’ I said, ‘Bobby is a dummy and mostly full of shit, but I tend to believe him over you where money’s concerned. And so I’ve decided you’ve now got until six o’clock this evening to go get the rest of it.’

  There was a loud snort on the other end of the line. ‘Yeah, right. How about I tell you you to go screw yourself?’

  ‘Fine. Then I give the knapsack to Sheriff Walters, along with the hundred and twenty grand.’

  ‘You’re shitting me. No way would you do that.’

  ‘Oh, I would, Calvin, if I thought you were aiming to put one over on me. When people do that, I get angry and irrational and vengeful. And I’ve already got that knapsack protected in a clear plastic bag just in case, so it’s sure to still have your prints all over it. And that’s not all. For good measure I’ll also give Walters the location of the burial site where he’ll find the remains of the late Leonard Williamson, AKA Leonard Maybourne. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you who gave me that little nugget of information.’

  I was keeping a careful watch on Bobby. He was grunting as he rocked back and forth on the bed, clearly agitated by what he was hearing.

  There was silence on the phone.

  ‘Robbery’s one thing,’ I went on, ‘but murder’s a whole different ballgame entirely. And I believe Georgia’s still got the death penalty, too.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Am I? The thing is, your pal here trusts you about as much as you trust him, so he actually didn’t need much incentive to start talking. Especially when I told him how you were planning to get rid of him too.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? I never—’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said over his objections. ‘He knows all about how you were going to screw him out of his share, so maybe he isn’t as dumb as you think.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, shitheel. I never planned to screw Bobby out of any share. Besides, finding an old buried body wouldn’t prove anything.’

  ‘On its own, no. But with the money as well, I believe that would give Sheriff Walters a pretty good motive for murder. You stole the cash from the company safe and planned it so a young drifter named Lenny who’d dared to get serious with your ex-girlfriend would get the blame. And since you didn’t want his side of the story ever getting out, you killed him and buried the body. Now if I can figure that much out, so can Walters. He strikes me as fairly intelligent for a cop. And let’s face it, once
he got Bobby in a cell it wouldn’t take him that long to make him spill his guts about all the rest.’

  There was more silence on the phone. So I filled it.

  ‘Now let’s stop wasting time and get back to the main business, Calvin, which is the retrieval and handing over of this other fifty thousand dollars. Like I said before, you’ve got until six this evening to go get it and I’ll call you back after I’ve decided how I want to make the collection. The clock’s ticking, boy, so I’d advise you to get busy.’

  I immediately broke the connection before he could reply, and switched off the phone so he couldn’t call back. Checking my watch, I saw it was now 06.37. I didn’t have much time. Glancing over at Bobby, I said, ‘Okay, remove the tape now if you want.’

  Bobby didn’t need further encouragement. He lowered his face to his fingers and had the duct tape off in less than five seconds.

  ‘You lied to Cal about me,’ he spluttered. ‘You lied to him about everything. Why’d you do that? And I never told you about no fifty grand neither.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. I added that part myself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To force Calvin into revisiting the burial site. I had to make Calvin think I know where Lenny’s buried, and facing this new deadline to find a bunch of money he hasn’t got, he’ll have no other choice but to go and dig the body up in order to bury him someplace else instead. Some place only he knows about, so that I can’t possibly sell him out to the law. And I can’t imagine you and Calvin drove very far with a dead body in the trunk, so I assume the burial site’s not too far away, correct?’

  Bobby shrugged. ‘Maybe. I ain’t tellin’ you where, though.’

  ‘You don’t need to. Right now I figure Calvin’s getting himself washed and dressed and then he’ll go get himself a shovel and head straight on out to the burial site before it gets light. And I’ll be right there, too, following along in his footsteps.’

  Bobby shook his head, his expression one of total incomprehension. ‘I don’t get any of this. There ain’t no more money, man, so why you even doing this?’

  ‘Because I like to know things. And dead bodies can sometimes come in very useful, but only if you know where they’re buried.’

  Bobby was still shaking his head as though a mosquito was buzzing in front of his face. ‘None of it makes sense. And why would Cal ever wanna get rid of me? I’m his friend. We been friends since forever.’

  ‘Come on, Bobby,’ I said, ‘you’ve got enough smarts to know that where stolen money’s concerned there’s no such thing as friendship. And let’s face it, a hundred and twenty thousand split between two people won’t go very far, will it? You heard the conversation. Calvin practically admitted as much himself. After all, it’s just a matter of getting rid of another body and he’s already done it once. But this time when he reburies the body I expect he’ll put something personal of yours in there with it, you know, as a little extra insurance against the possibility of you selling him out to the cops.’

  ‘Huh? Why would I sell him out?’

  ‘Well, he already thinks you sold him out to me. As far as he’s concerned, if you’ve betrayed him once you can just as easily betray him again.’

  Bobby didn’t answer. He just looked down at his hands, frowning heavily. And clearly thinking hard, which was the whole point of all this talk. Since nobody was going to volunteer anything to me, I had to play each side against the other to get the information I needed. And anytime I started to feel bad about taking advantage of Bobby’s limited intelligence, I’d remember that he’d either killed Lenny himself or helped bury his remains. Either way, he was just as responsible as Calvin. But as necessary as all this was, I’d spent enough time with Bobby. It was already 06.40. If Calvin left his house before I got there, I’d never find him again and this would all have been for nothing.

  So I got moving.

  XIII

  Less than three minutes later, I was parked on Culbreath Avenue in the exact same spot as before. Across the way was number seventeen, but this time the living-room lights were on, which I hoped meant that Calvin was still inside.

  He was. At 06.54, I saw shadowy movement behind the living-room drapes and then the lights were switched off, plunging the house into darkness. A few seconds later the front door opened and Calvin emerged wearing an army jacket, jeans and waders, with a beanie pulled down to just above his eyes. He walked round to the side of the house and approached his vehicle, still parked in the carport.

  I had my hand on the ignition, but nothing happened for a while. After two minutes he emerged out of the shadows carrying a long bag over his shoulder. It was similar to the roll-up fishing rod case I’d seen in Bobby’s cupboard, but darker in colour. Calvin reached the sidewalk, then turned left and kept on walking.

  After placing the car keys under the seat, I exited the pick-up and gently shut the door behind me. I zipped up my dark windbreaker to cover up my light shirt, then waited until I judged Calvin was about forty or fifty feet away before setting out after him.

  It was risky following him on foot, especially as he and I were the only two out and about so early, but it wasn’t like I had any other choice. And at least there was cloud cover, so no moonlight to worry about. I just stayed away from the few streetlights as much as I could, though, and kept my eyes on his dark figure at all times. If he turned to look behind him and there was no cover nearby, all I could do was drop to the sidewalk and lie flat, hoping he wouldn’t spot me in the darkness.

  But Calvin obviously had other things on his mind and rarely slowed his pace. He just kept moving forward, which was fine with me.

  We soon reached Main Street and I was forced to put more space between us because of the extra streetlights, but I could still see his small hunched figure a hundred feet up ahead without too much trouble. After ten minutes, I still hadn’t seen a single vehicle anywhere. He continued heading west along Main Street and it wasn’t long before I could see the Kelsey Avenue intersection up ahead, with the now familiar Heavy Lifter on the south-east corner. The building was dark now, though. Calvin kept on walking.

  Then, just before the old railroad tracks that bisected Main Street, he turned left and almost immediately went out of shot.

  I sprinted towards the tracks, covering the distance in the space of a few seconds, and glanced to my left and saw only darkness. I kept looking at the same spot, waiting for my night vision to improve until soon I was able to make out a dark shadowy figure heading along the tracks away from me in a northerly direction.

  I followed him and closed the distance between us to about thirty feet. I walked carefully, sticking close to the tracks since I couldn’t risk stepping on something that might make a noise. Dawn was still half an hour away, but you wouldn’t know it. The sky was just a vast sheet of black cotton above us. I was pretty sure there were now woods on either side of us, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

  A few minutes later there was a flash of light up ahead and I stopped dead, not moving an inch. It was a flashlight. Calvin was pointing the beam at a thick group of trees to our right, and then he moved it around a little, obviously trying to get his bearings. Then the flashlight started bobbing up and down as Calvin turned from the tracks and started across the grass towards the woods, which made it a whole lot easier for me. I could now afford to put a little distance between us and just chase the light instead.

  Calvin entered the woods and I followed. Further in, the night sounds became more pronounced, with cicadas and night crickets making their voices heard all around us. The more the merrier, as far as I was concerned. The ground was mostly grass and hard soil, and mostly covered with damp leaves. But I trod carefully, making sure I didn’t accidentally step on any dry branches or twigs and announce my presence to Calvin. I still couldn’t see much except the occasional tree a few feet in front of me, so I kept following the light.

  After five more minutes of this, the light came to a sudden stop and so did I. Calvin wa
s about thirty feet away from me. I crouched down and watched as the beam was aimed downwards at something and then moved around a little. Finally, Calvin placed the flashlight on the ground and set down his fishing rod bag. I saw him pull out a large shovel and tap the blade a couple of times against the soil.

  Then he began to dig.

  I noticed a large tree a few feet to my right and sidled over and crouched next to it as Calvin worked. It wouldn’t be dark for much longer and I wanted to be near some cover when dawn arrived.

  The minutes passed. Calvin dug. I watched.

  At some point I noticed the sounds of birds calling each other and realized I could now make out Calvin’s dark, hunched figure as he mercilessly attacked the hard soil. The sky was slowly starting to brighten. Dawn was on its way. I moved a little to my right until I was concealed by the tree trunk, and saw he was digging right next to an old fallen birch or pine, which he must have used as a marker for when he’d buried Lenny. There was also a huge mound of soil to his left. Calvin was clearly making fairly good progress. I looked around. Surrounding us on all sides were mature hardwoods, interspersed with heavily overgrown grass and dense undergrowth. No obvious landmarks, though.

  According to my watch, it was 07.27. Almost time to call in the cavalry. Which was a first for me. Most of the time I stayed as far from the law as I could, but for this situation to turn out the way I wanted I’d need some kind of official witness. And Sheriff Walters fit the bill perfectly. But first I needed to know where to bring him.

  With Calvin still focused on his labour, I slowly got to my feet and backed away from the area, using the trees and heavy foliage as cover. Once he was out of sight, I stopped and saw I was in an open space about twenty or thirty feet square, with what seemed to be a dry narrow creek near my feet, running from north-west to south-east. To my immediate right was another fallen tree, except this one was a huge old oak that had clearly been felled by lightning years, maybe decades, before. The thick trunk was now covered in moss, and old branches and deadwood completely littered the ground all around it.