So Uncle Willy was the real cause of them catching Montgomery Ward Snopes. He was good and wild at first. He was so wild for a while that nobody could find out how much had been stolen or even what he was talking about, with more folks coming in from the street not so much to see where the robbery was but to watch Uncle Willy; until finally, it was Ratliff of course, said: “Uncle Willy dont need no sheriff yet. What he needs first is Doc Peabody.”
“Of course,” Uncle Gavin said to Ratliff. “Why does it always have to be you?” He went back to where Skeets McGowan, Uncle Willy’s clerk and soda-jerker, and two other boys were standing with their heads inside the open safe looking at where the money had been stolen from, and pulled Skeets out and told him to run upstairs quick and tell Doctor Peabody to hurry down. Then Uncle Gavin and the others kind of crowded Uncle Willy more or less quiet without actually holding him until Doctor Peabody came in with the needle already in his hand even and ran most of them out and rolled up Uncle Willy’s sleeve then rolled it back down again and then Uncle Willy settled down into being just mad.
So he was the one responsible for catching Montgomery Ward. Or the two fellows that stole his morphine were. By this time we knew that several people passing from the picture show had seen the two fellows in the store, and now Uncle Willy wanted to know where Grover Cleveland Winbush was all that time. Yes sir, he wasn’t wild now. He was just mad, as calm and steady and deadly about it as a horsefly. By that time, nine oclock in the morning, Grover Cleveland would be at home in bed asleep. Somebody said they would telephone out and wake him up and tell him to get on back to the Square fast as he could.
“Hell,” Uncle Willy said. “That’ll take too long. I’ll go out there myself. I’ll wake him up and get him back to town. He wont need to worry about quick because I’ll tend to that. Who’s got a car?”
Only Mr Buck Connors, the marshal, the chief of police, was there by this time. “Hold up now, Uncle Willy,” he said. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. We want to do this one the right way. These folks have probably done already trompled up most of the evidence. But at least we can make an investigation according to police procedure regulations. Besides, Grover Cleveland was up all last night on duty. He’s got to stay up again all night tonight. He’s got to get his sleep.”
“Exactly,” Uncle Willy said. “Egg-zackly. Up all night, but not far enough up to see two damn scoundrels robbing my store in full view of the whole damn town. Robbed me of three hundred dollars’ worth of valuable medicine, yet Grover Winbush—”
“How much cash did they get?” Mr Connors said.
“What?” Uncle Willy said.
“How much money was in the safe?”
“I dont know,” Uncle Willy said. “I didn’t count it. — yet Grover Winbush that we pay a hundred and twenty-five a month just to wake up once an hour during the night and look around the Square, has got to get his sleep. If nobody’s got a car here, get me a taxi. That son of a bitch has already cost me three hundred dollars; I aint going to stop at just one more quarter.”
But they still held him hemmed off while somebody telephoned Grover Cleveland.
And at first we thought that whoever telephoned and woke him up had scared him good too, until we learned the rest of it and realised all he needed for his scare was to hear that anything had happened anywhere in Jefferson last night that he would have seen if he had been where he was supposed to be or where folks thought he was. Because it wasn’t hardly any time before Ratliff said:
“There he was. I jest seen him.”
“Where?” somebody said.
“He jest snatched his head back in the alley yonder,” Ratliff said. We all watched the alley. It led from a side street onto the Square where Grover Cleveland could have cut across lots from his boarding house. Then he stepped out of it, already walking fast. He didn’t wear a uniform like Mr Connors, he wore ordinary clothes with usually his coat-tail hiked up over the handle of the pistol and the blackjack in his hip pocket, coming up the street fast, picking his feet up quick like a cat on a hot stove.
And if you thought it would have been Mr Connors or even Mr Hampton, the sheriff, that did the investigating, you would have been wrong. It was Uncle Willy himself. At first Grover Cleveland tried to bluff. Then he fell back on lying. Then he just fell back.
“Howdy, son,” Uncle Willy said. “Sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night like this, just to answer a few questions. The first one is, just where were you, roughly, more or less, at exactly half-past ten oclock last night, more or less?”
“Who, me?” Grover Cleveland said. “Where I’m always at at that time of night: standing right across yonder in the station door where if anybody after the last picture show might need anything, like maybe losing their car key or maybe they find out they got a flat tire—”
“Well, well,” Uncle Willy said. “And yet you never saw a light on in my store, and them two damned scoundrels — —”
“Wait,” Grover Cleveland said. “I’m wrong. When I seen the last picture show beginning to let out, I noticed the time, half past ten or maybe twenty-five to eleven, and I decided to go down and close up the Blue Goose and get that out of the way while I had time.” The Blue Goose was a Negro café below the cotton gin. “I’m wrong,” Grover Cleveland said. “That’s where I was.”
Uncle Willy never said anything. He just turned his head enough and hollered “Walter!” Walter came in. His grandfather had belonged to Uncle Willy’s grandfather before the Surrender and he and Uncle Willy were about the same age and a good deal alike, except that instead of morphine Walter would go into the medicinal alcohol every time Uncle Willy put the key down and turned his back, and if anything Walter was a little more irascible and short-tempered. He came in from the back and said,
“Who calling me?”
“I am,” Uncle Willy said. “Where were you at half past ten last night?”
“Who, me?” Walter said, exactly like Grover Cleveland did, except he said it like Uncle Willy had asked him where he was when Dr Einstein first propounded his theory of relativity. “You talking about last night?” he said. “Where you reckon? At home in bed.”
“You were at that damned Blue Goose café, where you are every night until Grover Winbush here comes in and runs all you niggers out and closes it up,” Uncle Willy said.
“Then what you asking me, if you know so much?” Walter said.
“All right,” Uncle Willy said. “What time last night did Mr Winbush close it?” Walter stood there, blinking. His eyes were always red. He made in an old fashioned hand freezer the ice cream which Uncle Willy sold over his soda fountain. He made it in the cellar: a dark cool place with a single door opening onto the alley behind the store, sitting in the gloom and grinding the freezer, so that when you passed about all you saw was his red eyes, looking not malevolent, not savage but just dangerous if you blundered out of your element and into his, like a dragon or a crocodile. He stood there, blinking. “What time did Grover Winbush close up the Blue Goose?” Uncle Willy said.
“I left before that,” Walter said. Now suddenly, and we hadn’t noticed him before, Mr Hampton was there, doing some of the looking too. He didn’t blink like Walter. He was a big man with a big belly and little hard pale eyes that didn’t seem to need to blink at all. They were looking at Grover Cleveland now.
“How do you know you did?” he said to Walter.
“Hell fire,” Uncle Willy said. “He aint never left that damned place before they turned the lights out since they first opened the door.”
“I know that,” Mr Hampton said. He was still looking at Grover Cleveland with his little hard pale unblinking eyes. “I’ve been marshal and sheriff both here a long time too.” He said to Grover Cleveland: “Where were you last night when folks needed you?” But Grover Cleveland still tried; you’ll have to give him that, even if now even he never believed in it:
“Oh, you mean them two fellers in Uncle Willy’s store about half past ten last night. Sure, I seen them. I naturally thought, taken for granted it was Uncle Willy and Skeets. So I.…”
“So you what?” Mr Hampton said.
“I … stepped back inside and … taken up the evening paper,” Grover Cleveland said. “Yes, that’s where I was: setting right there in the station reading the Memphis evening paper.…”
“When Whit Rouncewell saw them two fellows in here, he went back to the station looking for you,” Mr Hampton said. “He waited an hour. By that time the lights were off in here but he never saw anybody come out the front door. And
