Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 4
I walked back to the cabin to wake up Grace. She was sleeping like a child, her knees drawn up close against her. Her face was half buried in the pillow, and her hair fanned out on the counterpane as though she hadn’t moved for hours. One shoulder of her blue pajamas was showing, and I pinched it gently. She didn’t wake up.
“Grace,” I said.
She stirred, made a small purring sound, and turned her head so that her cheek lay against my hand; but she didn’t open her eyes. I leaned over the bed and squeezed her shoulder again.
“Grace.”
She sighed. One hand emerged from under the covers and groped toward me. Her fingers closed in my hair. They were very warm. Her eyes opened at last and she blinked sleepily. Then she sat up straight and all sleep was suddenly gone.
“Jim!”
“Who did you think it was?”
“I guess I knew it was you.” She brushed a mutinous wisp of hair from her face. “I was dreaming about you, Jim. But it was the you of three years ago. I didn’t want to wake up and find us back in today’s nightmare. What’s wrong, Jim?”
I asked: “Did you by any chance walk in your sleep and take the Leica out of your car after I left you last night?”
“Why?”
“Somebody did. I don’t know why, but I’m going to find out.”
“Jim, please stop playing detective.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “Prenatal influence. My mother was scared by a bloodhound.”
“It’s just fool’s luck you weren’t killed last night,” Grace said. “Wasn’t that enough for you?”
“On the contrary. I want to find the guy who slugged me and punch his nose.”
Grace sank back against her pillow and closed her eyes. “I’m glad you’re here, Jim,” she said.
So was I. And I wished futilely that I could wipe out three lost years and a lost weekend, that there had never been any such person as Dr. Norman H. Norman, or Henry Pennington or any of the uninvited cocktail guests. I wanted very much to take Grace in my arms and kiss her before she opened her eyes again. But I didn’t. At that moment Henry Pennington came in, very elegant in his blue silk dressing gown.
“Good morning,” Pennington said. “I heard voices so I knew you were awake. Shall we all go down to the inn and have breakfast?”
“I’m on my way down to the inn now,” I said, “to phone Captain McKay about the Leica.”
“What Leica?” Pennington asked.
“Somebody stole Grace’s Leica out of her car last night,” I said.
“I don’t imagine McKay will be interested in petty larceny when he’s got murder on his mind,” Pennington said.
“Let’s have coffee here and go to the inn afterward,” Grace suggested.
“You two can have coffee wherever you want,” I said, “but I’m going down now. It may be important.”
I left. I was annoyed with myself for being annoyed at Pennington’s presence. I told myself that it wasn’t just school-boy jealousy, that I really had a clue in the disappearance of the Leica, and that it was indeed important that McKay be cut in.
I didn’t have to telephone McKay. The captain had already set up field headquarters in the bar of the inn, among the booths and the juke box and the odors of stale tobacco smoke and last night’s beer. The captain hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were bloodshot.
“I was just going to send for you, Lawrence,” he said. “I was in New York last night, finding out things.”
“About me?”
“Partly about you. I thought yesterday I’d seen you somewhere. I guess it was in the E.T.O.”
“I fought the Battle of Grosvenor Square,” I said.
“I was in London myself, with the C.I.D.,” McKay said. “Probably saw you around the Willow Run mess or some place. Boy, you sure stepped in something your first day out.”
“How deep?” I asked. “Up to my navel?”
“Up to your neck. I guess you know your fingerprints are all over the gun that killed Dr. Norman.”
“Are they?”
“They are—and you’ll probably be in all the new books on criminology because of it. We almost never find prints on a gun, regardless of what you read in detective stories. Most parts of a pistol that are normally touched are of corrugated metal, which won’t take a print. Moreover, a well-kept gun is usually oiled, and you can’t develop a print off an oily surface. But you must have handled this one with loving care. You left a couple of beauts on the barrel—right thumb and index finger.”
“So you found the gun.”
“Sure, first thing. Before dark. About a hundred yards from the cabin on that dirt road that runs over the hill through the woods. How’d your prints get on it?”
“Wouldn’t they be on it, if I killed Norman?”
“That’s what most juries would think. And you did have a motive.”
“What motive? I never saw Norman alive.”
“Maybe. But you used to be pretty sweet on Grace Boyd, before you went off to war. Maybe you came back from overseas and found this doctor had busted up your little romance, and—”
“Grace and I had the big fight before I left to win the war. Anyhow I guess you know the gun isn’t mine.”
“I know. It’s Bob Stewart’s. I just sent for him. How did your prints get on the gun?”
I told him. I also told him about the Leica and my theory on the timing, the mechanics, and the geography of the murder.
“I don’t have to believe all of that,” Captain McKay said when I’d finished, “even though I had the geography figured about like that. The murderer came in on the back road that runs over the hill through the woods from the Blue Falls road. He stopped his car in the woods about a quarter of a mile from the cabin, walked down to wait for Dr. Norman, killed him, then walked back to the car, drove out the way he came, and came back on the regular road to join the party.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“We found traces of a car turning around in the woods,” the police captain said. “It’s just too damned bad that leaves don’t give us any marks of tire patterns to work on.”
“Do juries believe in tire patterns?” I asked.
“More than they’d believe your story about you and Miss Boyd being barely on speaking terms. After all, your first day out of the army you come up here with her to spend a weekend in the country. Sounds very cozy.”
“Miss Boyd and I have spent many platonic weekends together in the past,” I said. That was the truth. It may not have been the whole truth, but it was nothing but the truth. “We happened to be professional teammates and we did considerable traveling together.”
“A jury might not believe in platonic weekends,” the captain interrupted, “particularly when there’s blood on your handkerchief, and your prints on a gun. I don’t say you killed Norman, but I want you to know that if you did, the uniform you wore up to yesterday isn’t going to help you any. And I want you to know that things don’t look too good for you right now. So if you’re holding out on us, now’s the time to talk up.”
“I’m not holding out on you,” I said. “If I were covering up, why would I tell you about the Leica? Incidentally, why am I telling you about the Leica, anyhow? Obviously you’re not going to do anything about it. Obviously, you don’t believe me.”
“I’ll get the boys working on that pronto,” McKay said, “just to show you I’m not unreasonable, even if I don’t necessarily believe you’re the guy Diogenes was looking for. Let’s go upstairs. I want to look at the exit facilities on the way.”
We left the bar by the outside door and climbed a stairway to a veranda which ran around three sides of the inn, looking out on the lake. McKay pointed to two windows.
“The Hurleys and the Westerfords slept in those rooms there,” he said.
The windows were open in both rooms. He poked his head through one window, then the other, taking his time to look around inside each time.
“The manager of the inn swears that nobody left the place during the night,” the captain said, as he backed away and straightened up, “but of course he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Any one of the Hurleys or the Westerfords could have come and gone by the windows and the back stairs, without passing through the office.”
We walked around to the other side of the veranda and through the door into the dining room. We stood a moment, sniffing the pleasant breakfast smells, and looking at the cast of characters.
The Hurleys and the Westerfords made a gay foursome, intent on breaking their fast with a vengeance. Neither their brush with death nor their brush with the police during the past twelve hours seemed to have affected their appetites. Their table still contained fragmentary evidence of the destruction of considerable quantities of oat meal, wheat cakes, eggs, sausages, bacon, and assorted indigestible muffins. A tall, frizzle-haired, snub-nosed waitress in a green and white uniform was trucking up fresh coffee in field-kitchen portions.
Grace and Pennington were sitting at a table for two. Pennington was dallying with a kipper, which he obviously considered unfit for human consumption. Grace was having nothing but coffee, which surprised me somewhat. In the days when Grace and I occasionally breakfasted together, Grace had never been calorie-shy at sun-up, come hell or hangover. Meal times were for eating. That’s one of the seven thousand things I liked about her. She didn’t believe in a diet of canary seed and weak tea. Today, however, she was apparently breakfasting on brilliant conversation. It was a one-sided conversation. Pennington was talking earnestly, and Grace was listening, although not very earnestly. She seemed to be present in body only, while her spirit explored some astral plane. She looked at me as from a great distance and greeted me abstractedly with a signal of her coffee cup. Then her gaze wandered across the room to where Bob and Joan Stewart were sitting.
The Stewarts were not eating. They were just fidgeting quietly and pretending not to be completely absorbed in the four State troopers sitting at a side table, smoking.
“Pinky,” Captain McKay said, “somebody lifted a Leica camera out of Miss Boyd’s car last night.” McKay was speaking to one of the troopers, but every ear in the dining room was tuned in. The tall green-and-white waitress turned so suddenly at the sound of the captain’s voice that she poured coffee over the ruins of Betty Hurley’s pancakes and on one knee of Dr. Hurley’s trousers. “Get out the official fine-combs and give the territory a thorough going-over,” McKay continued. “Bring in any camera you find. We’ll check the numbers later.”
McKay walked to the center of the dining room. The buzz of voices and the clatter of cutlery on china had faded to complete silence. The waitress went to work on Dr. Hurley’s knee with a damp napkin, scarcely watching what her hands were doing; her eyes were fixed on the captain.
“Morning, folks,” McKay said. “Now that you’ve all had a chance to sleep things over, maybe some of you remember things that escaped you during last night’s excitement. Any volunteers want a private word with a hardworking cop?”
Nobody answered.
“Okay, nobody knows anything. So everybody will stick around until your memories improve. Miss Boyd, I want to talk to you and Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and Mr. Lawrence downstairs in the bar.”
As Grace rose, Pennington got up, too.
“Mr. Pennington, you’ll stay here till I call you,” McKay ordered.
Betty Hurley giggled. “Captain McKay acts like he thinks Henry Pennington did it,” she said. “I think it’s silly to suspect Henry of killing Norman just because they both loved the same girl. People might just as well say that Jerome killed my first husband so he could marry me.”
Betty giggled again. Dr. Hurley managed a soft, professional, bedside laugh, but he didn’t look amused. Grace greeted Betty’s remark with a silent gasp of incredulous surprise. Captain McKay appeared to ignore the incident.
“Come on,” said McKay.
Pennington followed us as far as the veranda. At the top of the outside stairway, McKay turned and said: “Mr. Pennington, I told you I didn’t want to talk to you now. I’ll tell you when I do. Please go away.”
“Captain,” Pennington began, “I have every right to accompany Miss Boyd, and if you—”
McKay started down the steps without bothering to reply. Pennington remained at the top of the stairs, looking extremely pained.
Chapter Five
When we got to the bar and sat down, McKay let half a minute tick away in silence as though he were thinking up nasty questions to spring on us. I slid into a seat next to Grace, and she reached out to grasp my hand. Her fingers throbbed with the quick, nervous pulse of someone fighting against some overpowering emotion, the thready pulse of distress. She was not looking at me. She was staring at the Stewarts.
I, too, was struck by the appearance of the Stewarts, particularly the change in Joan. The smiling, pleasant, young-looking woman I had met the day before seemed to have aged ten years over night. Her close-bobbed gray hair made her look like a tired old man this morning—tired, but with a strange defiance burning in her keen gray eyes. She sat with her hands tightly clenched on the table. Bob Stewart was outwardly composed, but he kept polishing his rimless spectacles over and over again.
“Mrs. Stewart,” said McKay at last, “why did you call the police to Grace Boyd’s cabin last evening?”
Bob Stewart put his spectacles on with a snap. He half rose from his chair. “She didn’t!” he declared. “That’s not true!”
“Now, Mr. Stewart,” said McKay paternally, “you sure don’t think we wouldn’t trace a call like that. It was your phone and it was a woman’s voice.”
“He’s right, Bob,” Joan said without looking at her husband. “I didn’t have the nerve to tell you about it last night after what happened.”
Bob Stewart sank back in his chair. There was honest bewilderment in his frank blue eyes. Grace was right about the Stewarts being such damned normal people, but she was wrong about my not liking them. From the first they impressed me as a genuine, wholesome, devoted couple who pay their taxes on time, take a couple of cocktails before dinner, get tight only on weekends, raise vegetables in the summer, and put in iris and tulips and crocus every fall. They would be the last people in the world I’d have tied up with a murder—before I knew about Bob Stewart’s gun.
“Bob,” Joan went on, “I called the police to go to Grace’s cabin because I got worried when it took you so long to get back from the village. I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t do anything violent. I still don’t think you did, Bob.”
“Mrs. Stewart,” said McKay, “did you know that Dr. Norman was killed with an automatic pistol belonging to your husband?”
“Oh my God,” Joan said. She closed her eyes.
There was a moment of silence. Bob Stewart cleared his throat. Then he said: “I haven’t seen that gun in at least a week.”
“I know, I know,” said McKay. “You asked Miss Boyd to bring it from New York, and she hadn’t delivered it. According to one story which may or may not be true, somebody took the gun out of her car—but I don’t know who. You knew she was bringing it, though. By the way, why did you suddenly need a gun at Blindman’s Lake, Mr. Stewart?”
“Look,” said Bob Stewart, “I admit that yesterday afternoon I’d have gladly killed Dr. Norman. It just happens I didn’t.”
“Tell him the whole story, Bob,” said Joan.
It was cold in the dingy, smelly bar of Lakeside Inn, but Bob Stewart was perspiring. He mopped his brow. “We have a little boy,” he began. Then he stopped.
“Sure, I know,” said McKay. “Tommy. Every trooper who’s ever patrolled the Blue Falls road knows Tommy.”
“Yes. Well, Tommy isn’t our child. We haven’t even legally adopted him, although we’ve wanted to, and we’ve tried …”
“Hold on,” McKay interrupted. “Does this have anything to do with Dr. Norman?”
“Dr. Norman brought Tommy to us about four years ago,” Bob Stewart said. “He told us the boy’s mother had abandoned him, but had made arrangements with a bank to pay so much a month for his care. He knew we were crazy to adopt a child, since we had none of our own, and he said he thought the child would be happier with us than in an institution. He would never tell us the name of the mother and although he promised to do what he could to get her consent to our adopting Tommy, he never produced anything but delays and excuses. Then, on Friday, Dr. Norman came to see us and announced that the story was untrue. He told us that he was Tommy’s father, and that he was going to take Tommy away from us.”
“You can imagine how we felt,” Joan said.
“We didn’t believe it at first,” Bob Stewart resumed. “Dr. Norman did come to see Tommy now and then, and he brought him things, but he never showed any real paternal interest. He had papers, though. On Friday, he showed us the birth certificate. It seems Dr. Norman was secretly married when he was still an interne in the West. His wife left him right after Tommy was born. She ran away with another man and left Tommy with Dr. Norman. He never heard from her again except when he was served with divorce papers. He didn’t contest the action, and accepted custody of the child. At first he left the baby with Tommy’s grandmother in the West, and when she died four years ago, he brought Tommy to us here.”
“What made him change his mind day before yesterday?” McKay asked.
Joan Stewart looked at Grace and said: “Dr. Norman said he’d about given up hope of getting married again. He said if he couldn’t be a husband, at least he was going to be a father. He had his own ideas on how a boy should be brought up. He said a boy was unfitted to face reality if he didn’t learn early that life was tough, that the world was a sorry place, and that people were seldom as nice as they pretended. He told us to have Tommy’s things packed over the weekend, because he was coming to take him away on Sunday—that’s today. We tried to argue with him, but his mind was made up. He said he was going to take Tommy away by force, if necessary.”
