Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

In the hall outside, while a doctor looked in on her, Dao Thi told us, “She say she get fight with husband. Last time look at him, she mad with him for come to Portland. She tell him get out. She say so sorry now. She say she wanna die, too.” The woman sighed and looked at me. Her own eyes were wet. “So sad story, yah?”

I told her it was.

“So sad story,” she repeated softly to Loretta.

Who nodded and said, “Sad story.”

Things sorted out, after a bit, with Tuyet Le staying where she was for the night and Dao Thi staying with her, and then Loretta and I were back in her car and on our way back to my cabin.

“Poor woman,” she said as we headed out of town. “What will she do?”

I didn’t know, and said so.

“Poor woman,” Dilly murmured again. “I wonder...”

The radio in her dashboard came to life just then, and she answered it.

“Sheriff,” the metallic female voice told her, “you’d better get back to the station ASAP.”

“What is it, Mavis?” Dilly asked with mild irritation.

“Um... you’d just better get back right away.”

“Mavis?”

There was a slight hesitation, then Mavis said, “We got trouble, sheriff. Bad trouble.”

Loretta looked like she was about to question Mavis further, but she didn’t. She looked at me instead.

I gave her a no-problem shrug, and she smiled, turned the car around, and said, “I may have to put you on the payroll.”

I shook my head. “No way,” I told her. “Too many crises.”

Outside the sheriff’s station an ambulance and the county coroner’s sedan were parked.

There were also the same reporter I’d seen the other day up on the mountain and a small crowd of people being held back on either side of the door by a brace of stone-faced deputies.

“What the hell is this?” Loretta muttered. She stepped on the gas suddenly and drove past the station, making a couple of squealing turns that took us into a small parking lot at the rear of the building.

As we stepped inside the back entrance, a deputy came up to her, gave me an apologetic look, and asked to speak with Loretta alone. The two of them went into her office.

I strolled down the hall to the large front office, which was oddly quiet given the fact that there were a half-dozen other people there. They were speaking in whispers, as if embarrassed about something, and I sat down to wait.

I could hear other voices coming from the downstairs cell-block, but I couldn’t make out what was being said.

I could hear raised voices from outside on the sidewalk, but I couldn’t hear them well, either.

After a while the deputy who’d spoken with Loretta came out, looking worried, but he said nothing to me, so I sat and waited some more.

But then, when it seemed like a very long time, I got up and went down the hall to Loretta’s office and found her sitting behind the large oak desk, staring at nothing, with a look of blank astonishment on her face.

“Loretta?”

She blinked at me.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She stared at me for a long moment, then swallowed and looked away again.

I came up close to the desk. “What is it, Loretta?”

“Charley White Hand,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

Oh no, I thought.

She took a few hard breaths, then frowned up at me. “He hanged himself in his cell.”

Which was the perfectly depressing end to a perfectly depressing night.

I tried to comfort her, because I could see she was taking it as hard as she should, but she’d crawled into an emotional carapace that I couldn’t crack through, and then people started to arrive — the boy’s family, looking stunned and solemn, two county council members, looking politically solicitous, and the county coroner finally, looking harried and overworked. For the next couple of hours Loretta was never alone, and I waited, feeling useless, in the outer office again.

After a while, Charley White Hand was taken out in a black body bag, and after another while Loretta, with the two county councilpersons standing stiffly near her — but noticeably not by her side, gave a brief, matter-of-fact statement to the reporter. Then she disappeared into her office again, and after another long while, one of the deputies told me she’d gone home and had asked them to tell me that she just wanted to be alone.

And partly because I respected her wishes, partly because I didn’t know where she lived, but mostly because she was a big girl, I left it.

Which put me on the street at a quarter to twelve without a clue as to how to get home.

But just as I was examining this problem, Mac’s cab pulled up and solved it.

“So,” Mac said tentatively after I’d gotten in and we were headed up the mountain. “They find out who it was?”

I looked at him looking at me in the rear view. “I beg your pardon?”

He waggled his head toward Mount Fear. “That body you found the other day,” he said. “Newspaper this morning said the cops didn’t know who it was.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. They’ve I.D.’d him.”

He drove in silence for a while, which was fine with me, but once we were through the switchbacks on the mountain’s south face, he said, “Paper said he froze to death.”

I nodded. “That’s right.”