The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning by Joseph Hansen

Author:Joseph Hansen [Hansen, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective, gay, mystery
ISBN: 9781480416857
Google: CSNXfwAzVW0C
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-05-28T03:01:32+00:00

11

“HOW IN HELL DID you find a witness?” Claude Rose said. He sat at a gray metal desk in his glass-partitioned office at the Fortuna County sheriff substation, ate an Egg McMuffin, and drank coffee out of a paper cup printed with yellow arches. “Me and Underbridge asked every householder on that street. Going in, I knew we wouldn’t get noplace. Barney’s Hetzel’s man—and Hetzel’s got everybody scared.”

“I used a technique I learned in World War Two. I traded cigarettes for information.”

The goose-necked man stared. “You’re kidding.”

“A little old lady trying to live on Social Security,” Dave said. “Harmless. She’d get the gossip if I asked her to and I asked her to and she did. I doubt you’ll get out of her who the witness was, but does it matter?”

“Doesn’t seem to,” Rose said, “not much.” He wiped his mouth with a tiny paper napkin, crumpled the napkin, the sandwich wrapper, and the paper sack the sandwich had come in, and dropped these into a wastepaper basket. He asked, “Anything interesting in it?”

“When I went to see Hetzel last night,” Dave said, “a gray compact was parked in his driveway.”

“A zillion cars like that.” Rose shrugged. From a desk drawer he took a pipe. An old suede tobacco pouch lay on the desk. He took off it the large paper clip that held it shut—the zipper had evidently given up—and poked shag into the pipe’s scorched bowl. He lit the pipe with a long lick of flame from a throwaway lighter. Aromatic smoke drifted in the office air. “And he was dressed in camouflage and a helmet? Might have been anybody? Might have been Barney, then, Brandstetter.”

“Did you check? Was he in L.A. on Sunday?”

Rose ducked his head in a nod and smiled a smug little smile. “He was up there, all right. Receipts on all them illegal guns and bullets I seized out of the cupboard where the boy hid show that. He took delivery on ’em on Sunday, drove ’em down in his truck.”

“What’s he want with them?” Dave said.

“Hell, they ain’t his. Barney won’t talk. Ain’t said one word, not even to his lawyer. But the way I figure, he was just holding ’em till Hetzel could take ’em off his hands. Once Hetzel would have had Barney deliver the stuff to him direct. But he’s cagy, now. Lutz, the sheriff here before me, he looked the other way, and Hetzel laughed in my face at first, but I put a stop to those hoodlums of his going around town armed, and he won’t warehouse guns and ammunition with me watching. He claims he’s a big patriot, and I’m impeding the defense of this country from enemies—”

“‘Within and without,’” Dave finished for him.

Rose gave a quick laugh. “You know how he talks.” He sobered, took the pipe from his teeth. “No, Barney was up there, and he could have done it, blended in, like you says, with the rest of the players at that there Combat Zone, with a real gun, and blew Thomas’s head off, and nobody would have been the wiser.

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