The Sixth Mystery Read online

  This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to any person or organization, particularly the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office and the Walla Walla County Commission, is intended or should be inferred.

  Chapter 1

  Abraham Inch had been the sheriff of Walla Walla County for ten years, but he’d never met the man who had held the position before him. The former sheriff, whose name was Charles Evans, had been elected to the office five times and then resigned midway through his sixth term. Inch hadn’t been told why Evans had quit, although the county commissioners’ reluctance to offer an explanation, or even to mention Evans’s name, led him to believe that the resignation wasn’t voluntary. Inch had taken over the job with no guidance from his predecessor – no list of outstanding cases or pending court appearances – or from his predecessor’s deputy, who had quit on the same day as his boss. But the transition hadn’t been as difficult as it might have been. Evans had left the office in good order; his files were well-organized and up to date, and his desk was clear except for a large paper calendar that doubled as an appointment book. Inch was able to pick up the threads of most of the cases Evans had been working on. A few may have escaped his notice, but nothing of great significance: drug possession, petty theft, minor traffic violations. After a month, Inch felt that he knew what he was doing. He’d even hired a deputy, James Driscoll, to take the place of the man who’d quit, and whose name he had never learned.

  Inch had assumed, for no reason that he could remember now, that Charles Evans had moved out of state, but this morning he’d learned that he’d been wrong. Evans had stayed in Walla Walla County, had continued to live in the small house he owned just this side of the Oregon border, and had gone to work as a security guard at the Umatilla Casino near Pendleton, 40 miles to the south. He’d worked there ever since, until he’d failed to show up for his shift three days ago. He hadn’t responded to his supervisor’s phone calls, and finally one of his co-workers had driven to his house, pounded on the door for ten minutes, and then crawled in through a window to find Evans lying dead on his living room floor. Not of natural causes or by accident or suicide, but by violence. He’d been hit on the head with a brass poker that had been subsequently restored to its place in a rack at the side of the fireplace, wiped clean of fingerprints but not of blood.

  Inch had taken the call yesterday morning and driven out to Evans’s house and talked to Serge Tamiroff, the man who had discovered the body. Although Tamiroff had seemed saddened by Mr. Evans’s death, he seemed otherwise unaffected by what he had found, and that had puzzled Inch until Tamiroff mentioned that he’d spent the first ten years of his life in Chechnya. He’d seen more than his share of dead bodies, he’d said, and most of them were far less appealing to look at than Charles Evans’s. Inch had to admit that there was nothing shocking about the crime scene other than the crime itself, and even that seemed ordinary in Inch’s experience. The only odd note was the poker – not that it had been used as a weapon, but that after the murder it had been returned to the place where it was usually kept. If Inch were of a mind to draw conclusions from that fact, he would have drawn two, and they would have contradicted each other. The first was that the person who had wielded the poker hadn’t been particularly disturbed by what he’d done, and that suggested premeditation. But the second – that the murderer had chosen a weapon that just happened to be at hand – suggested spontaneity. If the murderer had come to Evans’s house for the purpose of killing him, he would have brought his own weapon – a gun or a knife, or if he preferred battery as a means of execution, a pipe or a cudgel.

  The only way that Inch could reconcile those two conclusions was to suppose that the killer was so familiar with Evans’s home that he knew that the poker would be there, and that it would make an effective weapon.

  Otherwise there was nothing remarkable about the crime. The cause of death was obvious even without the coroner’s opinion. Inch could see no signs of forced entry; either the door had been unlocked – not likely for an ex-policeman – or Evans had opened it and let the killer in. The contents of the house appeared untouched; there was no evidence that the rooms had been searched or that anything had been taken. There was some question in Inch’s mind about the murderer’s means of exit – both the front and back doors were dead-bolted – but he could have taken a key, or crawled out through the same window that Serge Tamiroff had used to crawl in.

  The surprise, of course, was the victim’s identity. Inch hadn’t connected the name, which he’d known from the time of the initial call, with the Charles Evans who had preceded him as sheriff until he’d read the newspaper report the following morning. There was nothing in the house – nothing out in the open, anyway – to remind Evans or anyone else that he’d ever held the office.

  This morning Inch had decided to drive down to the casino to talk to the men and women who had worked with Evans. At another time of the year it would have been a drive he enjoyed. The plateau between Milton-Freewater and Pendleton was a long, open-sky corridor of wheat fields with the foothills of the Blue Mountains a few miles to the east. In May the wheat was a deep green; in July it was a rich yellow; and in January the mountains or even the plateau itself might be dusted with snow. But it was October; the wheat had been harvested, and the stubble had turned gray or been plowed into the soil. The mountains were mostly hidden under a blanket of low clouds, and the winter wheat hadn’t sprouted yet. It was a world of browns and grays, and it matched Inch’s mood.

  The notice in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin had been too brief for a byline, but Inch’s friend Robertson had called him yesterday to ask about Evans’s death, and Inch had assumed that Robertson had written it. Inch had called Robbie as soon as he’d arrived at the office that morning, and for once he’d found him at home instead of at the Union-Bulletin office or out on assignment. Although it was early, he was fully awake, and in fact Robertson never seemed to sleep; he always answered at least one of his phones, home, office, or cell. Inch had immediately asked him why, when they’d spoken yesterday, he hadn’t mentioned that the man he was asking about was the former sheriff, and why he – Inch – had to learn that intriguing, if not necessarily germane, bit of information by reading it in the morning paper. Robertson had replied that he knew Inch read the morning paper, unlike most of his fellow citizens, and why should he bother to make an extra call if Inch would find out, anyway?

  “Actually,” Robertson went on, “I didn’t make the connection myself until my editor pointed it out. Then I figured that you knew and you’d hidden it from me, and that, I confess, roused a certain amount of resentment in my otherwise sunny disposition. Then I had a change of heart and began to think it wasn’t the same Charles Evans after all. But my editor turned out to be right, although the only way I was able to confirm it was by comparing addresses, and it took me over an hour to find out where the ex-sheriff lived. Nobody I called seemed to be aware that he was still living in the area, or living at all. They didn’t want to talk about him, either.”

  “Who did you call?” said Inch.

  “Whom,” said Robertson. “The chief of the city police. A couple of the county commissioners. Several other people I know who have the occasional nugget of inside information. This was one of the few times I can remember when all of my sources failed me. I looked it up in the archives, but all I found was that the commissioners had called a meeting with Evans, gone immediately into executive session, and when they’d come out, announced that they’d asked him to tender his resignation. That was it.”

  “The deputy sheriff quit, too,” said Inch.

  “Right,” said Robertson. “Meaning that the reason, whatever it was, couldn’t have been some private affair of Evans’s. The whole office must have
been involved. You’d think the newspaper would have jumped on that one, but they didn’t.”

  “Where were you during all this, Robbie?” said Inch.

  “Yakima. Only a hundred and thirty-odd miles away, and I never heard a thing about it.”

  “I thought you’d lived in Walla Walla all your life,” said Inch.

  “Nope. Six years in Moses Lake and five in Yakima before I came home again. Got back about the same time you took over. A few months later, maybe. I’ll get my ten-year pin in January.”

  “So you’ve been in the business about 20 years,” said Inch.

  “An old-timer just like you, Abe. By the bye, I don’t suppose you heard anything about Evans’s resignation when you were interviewed, did you?”

  “I asked about it, but I didn’t get an answer. I suppose they could have said that he’d resigned for health reasons or to spend more time with his family, but I don’t think they even bothered to make up something. I didn’t press them about it, of course.”

  “You probably wouldn’t have gotten the job if you had,” said Robertson. “Did you find any clues to the mystery when you took over the office? And read through all of the files, as I’m sure you did.”

  “I didn’t do a lot of reading during those first few months, Robbie. And if I’d run across anything that had to do with Evans’s resignation, I might not have realized it, anyway.”

  “It would make a good story, though, wouldn’t it? One of those ‘ten years ago today’ pieces.”

  “‘Now at last the truth can be revealed’, you mean?” said Inch.

  “Maybe a little less National Enquirer and a little more New York Times. Something befitting the dignity of the office.”

  “What I’m concerned about right now is figuring out who killed him,” said Inch.

  “And if in the course of your investigation, you happen to discover why he quit the job that he’d held for 22 years –”

  “You’d like to be the first to know,” said Inch.

  “If you figure out who killed him, I’d like to be the first to know that, too.”

  “Have I ever traded with your competition?” said Inch.

  “I’m above my competition,” Robertson said.

  After the conversation had ended, Inch realized that he’d forgotten to ask Robertson for the name of Charles Evans’s deputy. Not that it was important, unless Evans had been killed for something that had happened ten years ago. If so, the murderer had been a patient man.

  The Umatilla Casino was a popular destination for many of the citizens of Walla Walla, and if Inch had been a gambler, he might have been among the regulars. At one point in his life he’d gambled in a minor way; when he was in high school, he and a group of friends had spent most of their Saturday evenings playing pool and poker and blackjack for nickels and dimes. Although he’d never won (or lost) more than five dollars on any particular occasion, he’d enjoyed placing the bets, counting the cards, estimating the odds, and watching his friends as they tried to outplay and outguess one another. He’d become pretty good at it, too, or so he thought until one day when he and his friend Mike had driven across town to play poker with a group of prep-school seniors they’d met at a chess competition. They’d played for dollars instead of coins, and after four hours in the basement of a big, glass-walled house on Alki Point, Inch was almost fifty dollars in the hole. At the time it had been more money than he earned in a week, and he’d had to borrow from Mike to pay off his debts. Admitting that he didn’t have the money to cover his losses had been deeply shaming, one of his most embarrassing experiences at a time of his life that seemed to consist of nothing but embarrassing experiences, and he’d never played cards for money again.

  When he was first married, he and his wife Lynn had spent a few days in Las Vegas with Lynn’s brother Hugh and his wife Carol. Hugh loved to gamble, and Carol was willing, perhaps a little too willing, to indulge him. They had invited Inch and Lynn to join them for a weekend package that included a round-trip flight and two nights at the MGM Grand with complimentary meals. When they’d arrived at the hotel at 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning, Hugh had headed immediately for the tables and played nearly non-stop until Sunday afternoon. He and Lynn and Carol had gone to bed for eight hours, and after a late breakfast, Lynn and Carol had gone shopping. Inch had been left on his own, and for most of the day he’d wandered through the casino feeding quarters into slot machines and watching others do the same. He’d stayed away from the card tables. On Saturday evening he and Lynn and Carol had gone to a show – some popular entertainer of the day; he couldn’t remember who. Sunday had been a repeat of the previous day until they’d had to leave for the airport at 4:00. All in all, he’d lost forty dollars – twenty each day – and wished every moment he’d stayed home in Seattle.

  Although the Umatilla wasn’t the biggest tribal casino in the Pacific Northwest, it was one of the grandest, with a ten-story hotel that was the tallest building in eastern Oregon, rising well above anything else in the area except for the mountains. The casino complex was far enough from Pendleton that it stood alone, and large enough that it seemed like a city in itself. Besides the casino and the hotel, the complex included shops, restaurants, theaters, a cultural center, a golf course, and a parking lot that covered as much ground as all of the buildings combined. Today the lot wasn’t close to full, with fewer than a hundred cars, but Inch could see four or five buses; one or two of them, he supposed, had come from Walla Walla. Others had brought gamblers, golfers, and sightseers from La Grande and Baker City, and perhaps as far away as Bend or The Dalles.

  Inch parked next to one of the buses and made the hundred-yard trek to the casino entrance, which was marked by colored lights that, on a gray day, seemed to blaze more brightly than the sun. Inside, the Native American motifs that dominated the exterior of the building were mostly absent, and the glittering machines, the subdued lighting, the acres of patterned carpet, and the lack of windows, or for that matter any connection with the outside world, made him feel – and for a half-second, the feeling was overwhelming – that he was back in the MGM Grand. The only difference was that he heard no sounds of coins dropping into machines, or less frequently, spilling out of them; instead, people fed the slots with coupons and bills and extracted their winnings on paper receipts, as if they were placing bets on cash registers or gas pumps. When the coins had disappeared from the casinos, Inch thought, so had some of the magic; what had seemed like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had become just another computer.

  He hadn’t called ahead to announce his arrival; in a business that operated 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, he was sure that he’d find someone who’d known Charles Evans. He stopped the first person he saw who looked like an employee – a stocky young man in a dark suit who seemed focused not on the machines but on the people who were playing them – and asked directions to the security office. He was taken to a door set into a niche in the wall, where he was handed over to another, older man who led him down a corridor lined with a series of black-and-white photographs, probably taken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of men and women in traditional dress. The director of security occupied the office at the very end.

  Gregory Luke was a man of about 50 with a military bearing and dark hair tied back in a ponytail. He stood up to greet Inch but did not offer to shake hands, a ritual that Inch, too, preferred to omit if he could. After inviting Inch to sit down, Luke asked him if the reason for his visit concerned Charles Evans. Inch said that it did.

  “Does that mean that you believe his death was connected with his job here at the casino?”

  “I don’t know whether it was or not,” said Inch, “but for the past ten years, apparently, he’s had little or no contact with anyone except the people here. I spoke with several of his neighbors yesterday, and none of them seemed to know him at all.”

  “What do you mean, ‘for the past ten years’?” said Luke.

  “That’s how long he
’s worked here.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Luke. “I have his file.” He held up a manila folder. “But why was his life different before then?”

  “He was the Walla Walla County Sheriff for 22 years,” said Inch.

  “The position you hold now,” said Luke.

  “That’s right. I took over when he resigned.”

  Inch had the feeling that Luke was surprised at this news, although he couldn’t have said why, because Luke’s expression didn’t change. Luke said, “Then you must have known him.”

  Inch shook his head. “No; I never met him or communicated with him in any way. Before I came to Walla Walla, I worked in Seattle, and Mr. Evans had been gone several weeks by the time I assumed his job.”

  “But you must have been told why he resigned.”

  “Not a word,” said Inch.

  Luke set the folder down and put his finger on it. “Then you have two mysteries,” he said. “One of them ten years old.”

  “The mystery of who killed him is the one that concerns me today,” said Inch, “although I’d like to know if there’s anything in his file that would explain the older one.”

  “There is nothing that I can see,” said Luke, opening the folder again. “He listed his previous employer as the county of Walla Walla, and gave no details.”

  “Were you here when he was hired?” said Inch.

  “No,” said Luke. “That was before my time. Joseph Little Crow was director then.”

  “Is Mr. Little Crow still working here?”

  “He died a few years ago,” said Luke.

  “How well did you know Mr. Evans?” said Inch.

  “I knew him only by name,” said Luke. “I have almost sixty people under my command. About half of them are Umatilla or Cayuse or Walla Walla, and many of them I see outside my job. Some are friends from childhood, and those people I know well. The others, those who are not tribal members, those whom I don’t see socially or on other tribal business, I know nothing of their families or personal lives. If one of them does something on the job to make himself conspicuous, then I might learn a little about him. Mr. Evans never did anything to make himself stand out, not since I have been director, so from day to day, from month to month, I never heard his name until now. All I can tell you is what I read in here –” he slapped the file – “and that is very little.”