They were over at a big executive’s desk set in front of a sunlit window. One of them, bigger by fifty pounds, wearing Levi’s and a denim shirt, had the other sprawled backward across the desk and was choking him and whacking his head against the glass top. The desk chair had been upended, a scatter of dislodged papers and paraphernalia and the remains of a glass water pitcher were on the carpet, and the telephone receiver dangled free over the desk’s side. The one getting himself choked, a little guy in a white linen suit, kept trying to catch hold of the receiver, to use it as a weapon; he kept trying to kick and punch the big one too. But he couldn’t get enough leverage to do any damage in return. His eyes bulged and his face had begun to mottle. He made terrified squawking sounds, like a mauled chicken.
I kept moving while I took all of this in. The heavy guy heard me coming and jerked his head around, but even when I got to him and caught hold of his shoulder, he didn’t let go of the little man’s neck. Instead he tried to shrug me off the way you’d rid yourself of a pesky insect; his eyes were full of blind fury. I hung onto him one-handed, got a grip on his shirt with my other hand, set myself, and used all my weight and strength to break his hold and wrench him aside. He staggered halfway across the room, ran into a chair, and fell over it. When he hit the floor it was like a small building collapsing.
The little guy squirmed around on the desk, holding his throat and squawking some more. Miss Irwin ran over to him; hauled him into a sitting position and tugged his hand away so she could check on how much damage had been done. I took her actions to mean that he was Frank O’Daniel-not that I’d had much doubt of it.
I kept my attention on the big man. He was up on all fours now, shaking his head, looking dazed; there wasn’t any way to tell yet what he might do next. He was around fifty, powerfully built, going bald on top, with not much neck and not much chin. Running to fat, though. Even when he was on his feet, his paunch would hide the belt buckle on his Levi’s.
I said to Miss Irwin, “Your boss okay?”
“He’s bruised but he’ll be all right.”
“He need a doctor?”
“I don’t think so.”
“This man here-you know him?”
“Yes. His name is Coleclaw.”
“Jack Coleclaw? From Musket Creek?”
“Yes.”
“Why the attack? Any idea?”
She shook her head, looking at O’Daniel again. His squawks had tapered off into a series of heavy panting breaths: hyperventilation. Miss Irwin got him up off the desk and helped him over to the window and hoisted the sash to let in some fresh air. She held him steady, saying, “Breathe deeply and slowly. That’s right. Deeply and slowly.”
The big guy, Coleclaw, was upright now, but there wasn’t going to be any more trouble. The fury had been jarred out of him; he wore a stunned expression, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just tried to do to O’Daniel. He looked over at the developer, looked at me, and said in a hollow voice, “Christ. I didn’t mean… I wouldn’t have..” Then he clamped his mouth shut, rolled his eyes, pivoted, and lumbered out of there.
I thought about trying to stop him, but I didn’t feel like any more roughhousing. Besides, we all knew his name and where he lived. So I let him go. A couple of seconds later the outer door banged shut, and as soon as it did O’Daniel got his breath back and started making noise.
“He tried to strangle me! You saw it, Shirley-he tried to murder me! He’s crazy! They’re all madmen out there!”
I said, “Take it easy, Mr. O’Daniel.”
He managed to get his eyes focused on me. “You saved my life,” he said. “I could be dead now if you hadn’t come running in.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t have gone that far.”
“He damned near crushed my windpipe,” O’Daniel said. Then he frowned and said, “Who are you, anyway? I don’t know you.”
I told him who I was. He said, “Oh. Sure. Well, I’m glad you showed up when you did. That Coleclaw-I tell you, he’s a lunatic.”
“Then maybe you’d better call the police.”
“The police? No, absolutely not.”
“Why not? Coleclaw attacked you, didn’t he? If he is a lunatic he ought to be locked up.”
“No police,” O’Daniel said. He had his composure back now. “My God, we’ve had enough bad publicity as it is. We can’t afford any more notoriety.”
Miss Irwin said, “But what if he comes back?” She was sitting on her heels, gathering up the stuff that had been swept off the desk during the struggle.
He shook his head at her. “I’m not going to worry about that right now. Shirley… get me a glass of water and a shot of brandy, will you? My throat feels raw.”
She straightened, put the papers and things on the desk, hung up the telephone receiver, and then went to a set of cabinet doors in one wall and opened them to reveal a wet bar. While she was getting his drinks I righted O’Daniel’s desk chair and pushed it over to him. He sat down in it, wincing. He was the bantam type-five and a half feet tall, maybe a hundred and forty pounds. He had bushy brown hair going gray at the temples, bright feral eyes, and a mouth like an ax chip in a piece of light-grained wood. There was a fancy silver ring on the little finger of his left hand. He sat there plucking and fussing at his rumpled silk shirt and his white linen suit coat. He didn’t look like any accountant I had ever seen before.
I said, “You mind telling me why Coleclaw attacked you?”
“Why? I told you, he’s crazy.”
“Well, something must have provoked him.”
O’Daniel hesitated. Then he grimaced and sighed a little and said, “Oh, what the hell. It was that fucking letter.”
“Letter?”
“It came this morning. I’m just not going to stand for shit like that.”
“A threatening letter?”
“Yes.”
“Anonymous?”
“What else.”
“And you accused Coleclaw of writing it?”
“Him or one of those other buggers in Musket Creek. It was postmarked in Weaverville, the nearest town with a post office.”
“Coleclaw denied it, I suppose.”
“Sure he denied it. He blew up, and I blew up, and the next thing I knew the son of a bitch was strangling me.”
I sat down in one of the visitors’ chairs, a twin of the chrome jobs out in the anteroom. “Why did Coleclaw come here in the first place?” I asked.
“He wanted to talk about our development plans for the Musket Creek area. Try to work out a compromise of some kind, he said. He showed up out of the blue-no appointment or anything. I should’ve known better than to see him.”
“What sort of compromise did he have in mind?”
“Something he and his crazy friends drew up. A list of restrictions as to what we could and couldn’t develop, things they want to preserve in their goddamn natural state. If we agreed to it, they’d quit fighting us.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told him to go to hell,” O’Daniel said. “That list of his was as long as your arm. It’d cost thousands to revamp our plans, and for what? Just to satisfy the whims of a bunch of backwoods cretins.”
Miss Irwin brought him his water and his brandy. He drank the water first, gargling it a little and rubbing his throat while it went down. Then he tossed off the brandy. “Better,” he said. “My head still hurts, though. You got any aspirin, Shirley?”
“I’ll see.”
He watched her walk out of the office. In a smarmy undertone he said to me, “Some ass, huh?”
So are you, I thought.
The telephone rang. Miss Irwin picked up out front, held a brief conversation, and then poked her head back into the office. “Your wife,” she called to O’Daniel.
“Ah, Christ.” He looked and sounded annoyed. “Tell her I’m busy, I’ll call her back later.”
“I told her that. She said it’s important and it won’t wait.”
O’Daniel muttered something profane and plucked up the handset on his phone. “Helen? What’s so damned important it can’t… What? Yeah, I know, I know. But I can’t talk about that right now… Because I can’t, that’s why…”
One of the things that had been knocked off the desk in the fight was a photograph in a silver frame. Miss Irwin had set it facing outward when she’d cleaned up the carpet, and from where I was sitting I could see that it was a color portrait of a woman that was probably Helen O‘Daniel. I gave it my attention while I pretended not to listen to O’Daniel’s end of the phone conversation. She was somewhere between thirty-five and forty, dark-haired, attractive in a snooty, pinch-faced way. Her mouth was smiling but her eyes weren’t: that kind of woman.
“No, not tonight,” O’Daniel was saying to her. “I told you before, I’m going to spend the weekend on the houseboat… No, I’m not coming home, I’m leaving for the lake straight from here… What? All right, all right. I’ll call you.”
He rang off without saying good-bye. “Shirley!” he yelled. “Where the hell’s that aspirin?” Then he looked at me and said,
“Women. They’re a pain in the ass sometimes.”
I wasn’t ready or willing to discuss women with Frank O’Danie! — particularly not his wife and her possible affair with Munroe Randall. There were less direct, less inoffensive ways to find out whether or not there was any truth to Penny Belson’s intimations.
I said, “Let’s get back to that threatening letter you received. Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere in this mess. You want to see it?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He shuffled among the papers Miss Irwin had picked up, found an envelope, and handed it over. Plain white dime-store envelope, with O‘Daniel’s name and the company address printed in an exaggerated child’s hand-somebody’s method of disguising his handwriting. No return address, of course. The envelope had been slit at one end; I shook out the single sheet of paper it contained. It had been torn off a ruled yellow pad, and its message had been printed in the same scrawly hand:
Frank O’Daniel,
If you don’t leave Musket Creek alone you’ll wish your mother never had you. Look what happened to your partner Randall. Don’t let anything like that happen to you. Get out NOW! OR ELSE!
When I looked up from the paper Miss Irwin was back with some aspirin and another glass of water. I waited until O’Daniel was done swallowing before I asked him, “Have there been other letters like this?”
“No. This is the first one.”
“Other threats of any kind?”
“Well… not exactly.”
“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“There were a bunch of hang-up calls,” he said. “Back when we first started buying up land in Musket Creek. Every time you’d pick up the phone, the bastard on the other end would hang up.”
“Just here? Or at your home too?”
“Both. You remember, Shirley? A fucking nuisance.”
“I remember,” she said.
“It went on for a couple of weeks,” O’Daniel said. “I had my home number changed finally, unlisted, but we couldn’t do that here.”
“No other calls since then?”
“No. They just stopped and that was it.”
I tucked the anonymous letter back into its envelope, but I didn’t give it back to O’Daniel. “Were either of your partners ever threatened? Letters, calls, in person?”
“Ray Treacle was. An artist named Robideaux who lives over there threatened him to his face.”
“Yes, he told me about that. What about Munroe Randall? Was he ever threatened?”
“Not that he mentioned to me.”
I said bluntly, “Do you think he was murdered, Mr. O’Daniel?”
“Munroe? Hell, I don’t know what to think.”
“This letter you just got hints that maybe he was.”
O’Daniel didn’t say anything for a time. You could see the wheels turning inside his head: thinking about that hundred-thousand dollar double indemnity payoff, probably. “The police say it was an accident,” he said at length. “They ought to know, shouldn’t they?”
“The police overlook things sometimes. Everybody does.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But that note-it could just be a crank thing. I mean, whoever wrote it might want me to think Munroe was murdered. You know, trying to take advantage of the accident. That could be it.”
“It could be,” I admitted. “But I’d like to keep the note anyway, if that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
I put the envelope into my coat pocket. “Let’s assume that Jack Coleclaw didn’t write it,” I said. “Any other candidates?”
“Anybody in Musket Creek, just about.”
“The letter’s fairly literate. Whoever wrote it has a pretty fair grasp of English fundamentals.”
“Well… Penrose, maybe.”
“Who’s Penrose?”
“A writer. Writes stuff on natural history. All writers are nuts, but that one is a real fruitcake. You’ll see what I mean when you talk to him.”
“That should be pretty soon,” I said. “I’m going out there tomorrow.”
“If I were you,” O’Daniel said, “I’d take along a couple of cops. They don’t like strangers, particularly strangers asking questions that have anything to do with Northern Development.”
“It can’t be that bad, Mr. O’Daniel.”
“No?” He put a hand up to his throat. “Well, it’s your neck this time, not mine.”
Kerry was out by the pool, soaking up the last of the dying sun, when I got back to the Sportsman’s Rest. She was in better spirits too, which was a relief. She wanted to know all about my day, and she kept asking questions and chattering at me the whole time we were getting ready to go out for dinner.
But by the time we picked out a restaurant, her mood had shifted. Periods of silence again, interspersed with grouchy comments on the food, the decor, my table manners, and the feeble quality of my jokes. She didn’t say much on the ride back to the motel, and nothing at all for the first half hour we were in the room.
I figured it was going to be a long evening, so I got out the three typed, single-spaced sheets Shirley Irwin had given me before I’d left the Northern Development offices, and read up on the citizens of Musket Creek. But pretty soon Kerry’s mood shifted again, and when she got into bed she wanted to make love. So we did, and she was half-wild about it, exhausting both of us, and afterward she clung to me and said the things lovers say to each other and apologized for being so moody and said she’d be much better company for the rest of the trip.
Only then I made the mistake of asking her what it was that was troubling her, and she shut up again and turned away from me and pretended to go to sleep.
I lay there staring up at the dark ceiling, feeling sorry for myself and thinking that Eberhardt was right: I don’t understand women worth a damn.