Chiefs Page 3

  Soon he could bear the silence no longer. “It’s not a dangerous job, not really.” She still said nothing. “Not in Delano. Nothing ever happens here that’s dangerous. I’ll be spending more time fooling with the traffic on Main Street and watching out for speeders on the Atlanta highway than anything else.” She turned and stared at the foggy windshield. “It’s just a city job,” he said, almost pleading.

  “All right,” she said finally.

  The members of the city council gathered in the back room office of the city manager. They removed their coats and gathered around the wood stove but did not sit down. They were taking time away from their work and did not wish to prolong the occasion. John B. (“Skeeter”) Willis, sheriff of Meriwether County, had driven down from Greenville to be on hand. When they were all present, Hugh Holmes called the meeting to order.

  “Gentlemen, I suppose this is a kind of an historic occasion. We’re here this morning to appoint our first law-enforcement officer. I guess it’s a credit to our citizens that we’ve been able to get along so far without one, but we’ve got more than a thousand people in Delano now, at least that’s my estimate, and I think the census this year will bear me out, and a police department is something every town must have. We’ve chosen a local man for this job, not because he is an experienced policeman, but because we know him and respect him and believe we can trust him to preserve the peace and protect life and property.”

  “Amen,” said Idus Bray.

  “Idus, was that amen for life or for property?”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I suppose any councilman can swear in our new Chief, but if nobody has any objections I’d like the honor.” There was a murmur of assent, and Holmes produced a battered Bible. “Will Henry, place your left hand on the Bible, and raise your right hand. Do you, William Henry Lee, swear by Almighty God to uphold and enforce the laws of Delano, the state of Georgia, and the United States of America and to do so impartially, without fear or favor?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I guess that makes you Chief of police of Delano, Will Henry.”

  Holmes had given some considerable thought to the content of the oath he had just administered. He had considered including a phrase along the lines of “carry out such instructions as the city council shall give from time to time,” and as he watched his fellow councilmen offering hurried congratulations, then scrambling into their coats and returning to their interrupted work, he felt glad that he had not. Too much city business, he believed, was conducted hurriedly and without proper consideration. He was forced to use this impatience at times to push something he considered vital through the council, and he did not like doing so. He felt that the responsibility for major acts should be carried by a consensus rather than by one councilman who had railroaded something through purely by the force of his personality or the weight of his standing. But he had found that if he did not do this, then the councilmen’s impatience, coupled with their native caution, caused important business to be neglected, while time was taken up with pork-barrel trivia. Because of the indifference of his fellow councilmen, he was becoming, against his better judgment and considerably before his time, a Town Father.

  As the meeting broke up, Dr. Frank Mudter reached into an overcoat pocket and pulled out an enormous pistol. “Will Henry, I don’t know if you own a gun, but this was my daddy’s. It’s a little rusty, but I expect it’ll still shoot all right.” Will Henry and the others had a good laugh over the pistol. “It’s an old Colt .45 Buntline, with a twelve-inch barrel. Wild Bill Hickock wore one, they say.”

  Will Henry laughed. “Well, Dr. Frank, I hope you don’t think you’ve got yourself a Wild Bill Hickock.” He weighed the pistol in his hand. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to carry it for very long, but I guess if the rust is scraped off it’ll weigh a pound or two less. Thank you, Dr. Frank. I’ll keep it until I get a pistol of my own. I guess I need some sort of badge of authority.”

  Skeeter Willis spoke up. “I reckon I can help out there.” He took a small star-shaped badge from his pocket. “You can wear this until you get yourself a Delano badge. I’ve got a catalogue that’s got a lot of police stuff in it. You’ll need a lot of things out of that pretty soon. I’ll go over it with you, and we’ll make a list. They’ve got a salesman comes through Greenville every now and then. I’ll send him down to see you. He’ll be glad to get his hands on a new boy.”

  Will Henry pinned the badge onto his coat and polished it with his sleeve. “Well, now, Skeeter, I feel real official.”

  “I’ll talk to Hugh about getting you a budget for some equipment,” said Willis, and he moved off toward Holmes.

  Will Henry and the doctor left the city hall together, the long pistol cradled in Will Henry’s right hand. He had almost forgotten about it. As they walked down the short flight of steps to the sidewalk, a car backfired twice around the corner in the square. They reached the curb and stood next to the doctor’s car. Will Henry raised the hand holding the gun and pointed toward the corner. “You know, Frank, it’s occurred to me that we could use one of those automatic traffic signals at that corner. The traffic is pretty heavy off the Atlanta highway there, and it seems to me to be a better use of the city’s money to have a light there than to have me down there waving my arms. One light could—”

  As he spoke there was a roar and a clatter of a car’s engine, and around the corner, literally on two wheels, came a large Packard touring car. The car straightened, lurched back onto all four wheels, and roared unsteadily down the street toward them. Will Henry stopped talking, but his arm remained up, pointing toward the intersection and the car. Across the street a Model A roadster began to back out of a parking place. The Packard slammed on brakes and veered away from the backing car, pointing itself directly toward the doctor and the new Chief of police, who stood, openmouthed, staring at the huge car which seemed about to run them down. Less than a dozen feet from where they stood, as they were about to jump out of the way, the car screeched to a halt and both doors on the curb side were thrown open. As Will Henry stared at the car, a double barreled shotgun flew out the door, followed closely by a pistol. Two very large, very blonde young men stumbled out of the car, their hands in the air, terror written across their faces. They stood there in the cold sunlight, staring wide-eyed at the man pointing a huge pistol in their direction. Into the sudden silence came the sound of silver striking cement. A large bag of half dollars was spilling slowly from the front seat into the street.

  Frank Mudter recovered first. “Will Henry,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “I think you’ve made your first arrest.” Will Henry snapped to. He lowered the gun to waist level and slipped his finger into the trigger guard.

  “Just stand right there. Don’t move.” Skeeter Willis was coming through the door of the city hall with Hugh Holmes. Holmes had been explaining that he thought it was a little soon to go asking the council for more police money. They stopped and stared at Will Henry and his prisoners.

  “Jesus Christ,” Skeeter Willis said.

  The following few minutes were a jerky montage for Will Henry. There was Skeeter snapping handcuffs on the two young men; Holmes leading the party around to the bank, where two large holes were discovered in the front window; the staff still lying on the cold marble floor, two of them (one a man) weeping; and Holmes, while the two young men were being securely cuffed to a water pipe in the next room, conducting an impromptu city council meeting during which motions were swiftly adopted authorizing an addition to the new firehouse for police headquarters and an expenditure of a $350 for firearms, handcuffs, uniforms, and other essential police equipment.

  Before Will Henry had fully come to terms with this situation, he was faced with another: that of explaining to Carrie all that had happened. He did not relish the thought.

  6

  “THEY WERE BROTHERS. Their name was O’Brien.” Will Henry looked carefully at Carrie, who was seated across the kitchen table, staring ou
t the window. She had been just as quiet when he had told his story as she had been earlier, in the car. “They’d got liquored up on New Year’s Eve over at Thomaston, that’s where they’re from, and they stole the Packard from in front of the country club. As a joke, seemed to me. They ran around all night with some girls, and when they sobered up they were afraid to take the car back. They got drunk again, spent all their money with a bootlegger in Yatesville, and they were between here and Woodbury when they had a flat tire. When they got the trunk open to get the jack out, they found the shotgun and two pistols, and they decided to stick up somebody and just keep going. They look like redneck farmboys to me, and I guess they were tired of it.”

  “What happened to the girls?” It was the first time she had spoken, and he took the show of interest as a recovery from some kind of shock.

  “They took them home before daylight.” He paused to wait for a reaction. She nodded as if she were satisfied that the girls hadn’t been involved. He continued, “The shotgun wasn’t even loaded. I doubt if they even bothered to look. When they got to Delano, first place they saw was the bank, it being on the corner. They just walked right in and told everybody to stick ‘em up. The oldest one, Jimmy—he had the shotgun—he climbed over the teller’s bars and emptied the cash drawers into a sack, a moneybag from an Atlanta bank. They took two other bags that were already full and walked out. Never even looked at the vault, which was wide open and had about forty thousand dollars in it. As they walked out the door, Danny, the young one, turned around and fired two shots through the front window into the ceiling, and everybody inside hit the floor pretty quick. Then they drove around the corner, and there we were. I was showing Frank Mudter something, pointing with the gun, I guess, and they thought I was pointing it at them. Well, anyway, we got them, and everybody in town except Frank Mudter thinks I’m a hero. I don’t like that much, but Frank’s right, the alternative is for everybody in town to think I’m a helpless fool who got lucky, which isn’t too far wrong, I guess. But if I’m to go on being Chief I’m going to have to live with being the fearless hero.” He laughed. “Even Skeeter was impressed, although he didn’t let it get in his way when it came time to question the boys. I’m glad he was there, though, or I guess they’d still be handcuffed to that pipe. Hugh Holmes got a motion passed real quick to build a jailhouse onto the fire station.”

  He stopped abruptly, realizing that he was talking very fast. Carrie got up and went to the big wood stove and stirred something. “I suppose you’re the Chief now,” she said. “I think I had hoped to talk you out of it, to find something else for you to do, but after this I’d have the whole town against me.” She stirred slowly for a moment. “I’ll try and get used to it, Will Henry. But I want you to make me a promise.”

  “All right.”

  “I want you to promise me that you’ll always be real, real careful, that every time you see something coming on that could be dangerous even a little, that you’ll think about Billy and Eloise and me, and that you’ll do everything you can to be careful. Will you promise me that?”

  “Yes, I promise. I’m not fool enough to want to get hurt, Carrie. I’m not William S. Hart against the badmen, and I hope you believe that I’ll always think about you and the children.”

  She smiled for the first time that day. He went to her and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled. “Now get out of here and let me set the table for your dinner.”

  Will Henry stepped out the back door, aware now that Billy and Eloise had been playing in the back yard while he and Carrie had talked in the kitchen. He looked up to see Eloise, her hands up and her back against a tree. Perhaps six feet from her stood Billy, the Buntline revolver in his two small hands, pointing at Eloise’s head. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” he was saying. He had a thumb around the hammer and was cocking the pistol. Will Henry’s first reaction was to scream as loudly as he could at Billy, but in a small part of a second he realized that Billy might jerk the trigger and that Carrie, in the kitchen, would hear him and come to see what was the matter. Instead, he spread his hands and clapped them together once, as loudly as he could. Billy’s head jerked around. He dropped the pistol as if it had suddenly become hot and stood, wide-eyed, looking at his father. The Buntline lay on the ground, still cocked, still pointing in Eloise’s direction. Will Henry strode down the steps and across the yard and picked up the pistol. Billy seemed to be trying to speak, but nothing came out. Will Henry eased the hammer down, opened the retaining piece and turned the cylinder slowly as Billy watched. There were cartridges in all six chambers.

  He shook the cartridges out into his hand and put them into his pocket. Then he stuck the pistol into his belt, grabbed Billy by an upper arm, and spun him around, hitting him across the buttocks hard, once, with his open hand. He spun the boy around again. Tears were streaming down his face, and he was trembling violently. Angry as he was, Will Henry could not bring himself to chastise the boy further. After all, he himself had left the pistol, fully loaded and in plain view, on a straight-back chair in the living room, on top of his coat. “Take your sister around to the front of the house,” he said in a loud whisper. “Wash your face under the spigot and wait out front until you’re called to your dinner. Don’t you say a word about this to your mother, and don’t you be crying when you come in.” He forced himself to relax a little, to look less angry, to let the child know that it was all right now. “Go on,” he” said.

  As the children scurried around to the front yard, Will Henry walked quickly to the tool shed at the back of the lot. Inside he found a rusty pair of pliers. He twisted the lead from all six cartridges and emptied the powder charge onto the dirt floor. He rummaged around until he found a chisel and a ball peen hammer. He placed the pistol in the bench vise and locked it. Then he chipped at the firing spur on the hammer until it broke off, rendering the weapon useless. He put the pistol back into his belt, gathered the empty shell casings and the lead, took them around back of the shed, and mixed them with the contents of the garbage can. Then he leaned against the back of the shed and vomited.

  Later, as they ate their midday meal, each quiet with his own thoughts, Will Henry said, “That pistol Frank Mudter gave me is too old-fashioned to be any good to anybody, so I broke off the firing part of the hammer to make it harmless. Billy, why don’t you clean the rust off it, and we’ll keep it as a souvenir.”

  He smiled at the boy, and the boy smiled back.

  7

  WILL HENRY left the house after his midday meal and walked up the hill to Broad Street. He turned left and started toward the corner where Broad met Main Street, where the bank was. He had to pass a number of stores on the way, and he was nervous about it. He knew that word of the arrest that morning would surely have got around by this time; he began to wish the incident had never happened.

  As he approached the hardware store, he saw Ralph McKibbon, the owner, standing out front talking to a man. “Hey, Chief!” Will Henry winced. McKibbon came over and punched him playfully in the ribs. “I hear you really took care of those bank robbers this morning! Whole town’s talking about it! Why, you’ve only been Chief a couple of hours, and everybody feels safer already!’ Will Henry mumbled something, smiled as best he could, and continued on toward the corner, receiving greetings and congratulations from three more people on the way. He stopped outside the bank and looked at the window. A man was nailing boards over the broken glass. He walked inside.

  “Why, Mr. Lee! Or I guess I should say, Chief Lee.” Miss Bessie Simmons, the teller, was smiling broadly from her cage. “I sure do want to thank you for catching those awful men this morning.”

  “Well, Miss Bessie, I just wish we could have done something to stop them before they scared you so bad.”

  Harold Bowen, the clerk, came over. “Just get me a pistol, that’s what I told Mr. Holmes. Just get me a pistol, and we won’t have that kind of trouble no more. I could have shot both of them dead this morning.” Will Henry remember
ed that Harold had been lying on the floor weeping, when he had come into the bank after the robbery.

  “Harold, I don’t think those boys would have shot anybody even accidentally. They were drunk, but they weren’t killers. They just shot those holes in the window to scare you. They were so scared themselves when we caught them that they seemed almost relieved. I think this thing this morning was just a kind of fluke. But if it ever happens again, you do just what you did this morning. It’s no use getting killed for a few hundred dollars of somebody else’s money.”

  “Well, it’s our duty to protect folks’ money here. They put it in the bank and they expect it to be safe. We need a pistol or two around here, that’s what we need.”

  “What did you do with those two boys, Chief Lee?” Miss Bessie asked.

  “Skeeter Willis took them up to the county jail. The council has voted to build us a jail onto the new firehouse here, so we’ll be able to handle it if something like this happens again. Matter of fact, I’m due over there in a minute to talk to Mr. Holmes and Skeeter about it. Just wanted to see if everything was all right here.”

  He excused himself and crossed the street toward where the new firehouse was being built behind the city hall. There was a sound of hammering and sawing as he approached. He walked through a half-completed doorway and looked at what was being built. There was a large garage for the engine and three rooms and a bathroom with a shower in the back. It seemed adequate, even comfortable, for the one full-time fireman, Jimmy Riley, and his group of volunteers. The plan was to have a siren on top of a pole outside the firehouse. When a fire was reported, Jimmy would switch on the siren, and the volunteers, all of whom lived or worked less than two blocks away, would come running. Will Henry wondered what he would do if he ever needed help. It was something else to discuss with Holmes. He heard a car pull up outside. Holmes and Skeeter Willis came in together. Holmes called the building foreman over, and they walked around to the side of the building.