When Ernie and I got out on Essex Turnpike, a misting rain gave the night a gray sheen. Cars were parked along both sides of the highway and more were coming, like jackals to meat.
We got out of my Olds, and right away I felt the wrong in the chilled, wet night. I had seldom seen so much police brass in one spot. Captain Neal Burgess stood marking the spot on the highway’s shoulder and halfway down the embankment Chief Waylin was directing things. I glanced around for a black Caddy, found it. Police Commissioner Stewart Mitchell was staying in where it was dry, but he was out here. Only an important death brought the top echelon out on a night like this.
“Over here, Ballard.” A uniformed cop motioned to Ernie and me. “The car’s down in the ditch.”
I nodded, hunching my shoulders against the chilling rain.
I glanced around. Criss-cross headlights webbed the mist. The cop who had called to us was holding things down at a wide curve in the road. He motioned us toward the big, blue convertible squatting tails up in a boggy sump off the pavement. The convertible hadn’t made the curve, had chewed deep ruts across the shoulders and down the embankment.
More than a dozen uniformed cops were sloshing around in the mud and stagnant water, keeping the people back. They were even refusing to allow reporters anywhere near the overturned car.
Chief Waylin stopped Ernie and me on the incline. His face was grayer than the night. “Just a minute, Ballard. Ernie. No sense getting down in that bog. They’re moving the body out of the car now.”
We stopped beside Waylin, watching. I saw Doc Yerrgsted standing knee-deep in the water, directing the removal. Three interns, hospital whites muddy to the hips, worked the body from beneath the steering wheel and staggered out of the muck. A state trooper tossed a tarpaulin on the muddy embankment beside the deep-plowed ruts and the interns stretched the remains out on that.
“Okay. There it is, Doc,” one of the boys in white said. I stood looking down at the dead man.
He was Tom Flynn. I felt as though someone had struck me with a fist full in the face. There it was. The body. The corpse. The stiff.
Ernie said something to me, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t even hear what he said.
I heard Chief Waylin and Captain Burgess talking beside me, but the words they were saying didn’t reach me.
Doc Yerrgsted knelt beside Flynn’s body and pressed the eyelids shut.
That was all he did. He stood up, peered through the lighted mists at Waylin. “I’m through here, Chief.” He picked up his medical kit. ‘Anybody wants me, I’ll be in my office.”
“Sure, Doc. Thanks.”
“Just send me my check.” Yerrgsted shrugged his raincoat higher on his shoulders and moved up the embankment toward the roadway. He looked straight at me. His face was gray. He did not speak.
I watched an intern bring a sheet from the ambulance and stretch it over Flynn’s body.
“How’d it happen, Chief?” A reporter pushed through the line of cops. He stopped where Waylin stood.
“We don’t know yet. Doc said he was drunk. The investigating officer said he was driving over ninety. Probably hit the shoulder, couldn’t control the car.”
Another reporter came down the embankment. “No matter who they are, they never learn.”
“Well, we don’t know yet,” Waylin said. “Flynn was one of the finest men this town ever had. We’ll have a fuller picture in the morning.”
I stepped away from them and started down the embankment.
Waylin said, “Ballard.”
I didn’t stop. Abruptly, out of the mist, two young cops stepped in front of me, blocking my way.
“There’s nothing you can do, Ballard,” Waylin said from behind me.
I didn’t bother looking at him. I just stared at the two who were barring my way.
One of them tried to smile. “We’re just following orders.”
I said nothing. I kept walking. The two stepped back. Burgess spoke my name from up the embankment beside Waylin. He came striding down the incline to where the two patrolmen stood. He said something to them, his voice low but crisply accented.
One of the two said, “We’re sorry, Captain. We tried to stop him.”
I hunkered down beside the body on the tarpaulin and turned back the cover. I heard Waylin shouting at the ambulance attendants to get a litter down there and move the body into town. I did not look up.
When I turned the cover back, the light rain pattered on the dead face, running off the rigid cheeks in long streaks.
I took a deep breath. The smell of whiskey was strong near the corpse.
I slid my hand under Flynn’s head, lifted it. I bent closer. The odor of liquor was weaker around his face. I let the head back gently to the ground and withdrew my hand. My palm was wet, sticky and smeared with blood.
I clenched my fingers over the blood and stood up, facing one of the uniformed men holding a flashlight
“You investigate this?”
“We’ll get a report from Hogan, Mike,” Burgess said.
“Did you?” I ignored Burgess, stared at young Hogan.
“Yes, sir. Clemmons and I were the first ones out here.”
“The car turn over?”
“No, sir. It went straight down into the ditch. We figure he was doing better than ninety. These new jobs pack a lot of power.”
“What kind of skid marks did he put down?”
“None. Ain’t no sign he tried to put on brakes. Road is clean. He just got to this curve in this rain without slowing down. Without even trying to slow down. Not like a guy that didn’t make a curve. Like a guy who didn’t even know there was a curve—or didn’t give a damn.”
“Was he dead when you got to him?”
“Yes, sir. He must have crushed himself against the steering wheel. That’s what the ambulance doctor said. Said he did all his bleeding inside.”
“What did the M.E. say?”
“He didn’t say anything. Just pronounced Mr. Flynn dead and took off. You saw him go.”
“Was Flynn sitting up behind the wheel when you found him?”
“Yes, sir. Slumped over the wheel. Smell of whiskey was terrible in that closed car. We figure he never knew what hit him.”
I kept my blood-smeared right fist clenched, shoved it into my jacket pocket
The ambulance men moved a wheel-litter past me.
Waylin said, “All right, you people. Stand back. Take Mr. Flynn’s body to the morgue.”
One of the interns glanced around at Waylin, frowning. Then he shrugged. The attendants lifted the body to the stretcher and panted up the incline to the ambulance. Cops started clearing cars away so a wrecker could come in and hoist Flynn’s Chrysler out of the bog.
Ernie came down the incline to me. “Going to stay until they check the car, Mike?”
I shook my head. “I’d stay if I thought they’d find a steering failure, or a stuck accelerator. But they won’t.”
Chief Waylin, Burgess and Ernie trailed me up the incline. I thought they would leave us at the roadway, but they followed us along the lane of parked cars to my Olds.
I got in under the wheel without looking at the chief or the captain. Waylin said, “Get in the back seat, Ernie, you and Neal.” He got into the front seat beside me. He closed the door. He shivered. “Start your engine and run your heater, Mike.”
I started the motor, turned on the heater.
“What do you think, Mike?” Waylin said.
“I think just the same thing you do, Clyde. Somebody killed Tom Flynn.”
Waylin looked astonished. “Murder? How? In a car going eighty miles an hour?”
I held my breath until my lungs felt hot. “When the call came to Ernie’s place, they were calling it murder.”
“My God,” Neal Burgess said. “That was just a mix-up at headquarters. You know how they foul things up like that on a first report. By the way, Clyde, now that Mike mentions it, I think they reported a homicide when they called me.”
“They reported a murder.” Ernie’s voice was low.
Waylin tried to laugh. “It was murder, all right. Murder the way that man hit that bottle. Murder the way he came off that highway. Either Flynn was drunk, or he tried to kill himself.”
“You think he tried to kill himself?” I asked.
“What else? And he made it. Drinking. Driving too fast. Never even touched his brakes. And he’s dead. A fine man. But we all make at least one mistake.”
I sat there a long time watching the wrecker falter up that incline. “I can’t see a short drop like that killing a man. Even at ninety.”
“Why, that car rolling over would beat him to death. Very likely, crush him.”
“Only the car didn’t roll over. I asked that. That car went straight down that incline in deep ruts and into a ditch.”
Waylin sat still for some moments. Finally, he said, “Mike, maybe there are a few things you don’t know about Tom Flynn.”
I stared straight ahead through the windshield, waiting.
“If you knew as much as I do about Tom Flynn, Mike,” Waylin said, “you’d agree that he committed suicide in that car.”
“A man with a future like his?”
“What future? His future was all behind him. This is between us, but we’ve been getting bad reports on him, Mike. He was in trouble. Taking bribes, offering bribes. There’s been talk lately about an investigation of his office. If some of his malpractice had come to light, he’d have been ruined. You know the Flynn name. A scandal would be something Tom Flynn couldn’t face. When the threat of exposure came, he knew he was finished and took the easy way out. Fast car. Rain-slicked highway. A bad curve. And liquor to kill the pain.”
I turned slightly on the seat. “You feel that way, too, Neal?”
Burgess shrugged. “I don’t know as much about the inside of this mess as Clyde does, Mike. But there was whiskey. He was drunk.”
“He killed himself, and it ends there,” Waylin said. “Naturally, we’re going to try to soften this as much as we can, for the family’s sake. We’re going to call it an accident as far as the public is concerned, but officially it’s a suicide, and Doc Yerrgsted will sign his report that way, closing the whole regrettable incident.”
I turned to stare at Ernie Gault He raised his head but his gaze did not touch mine. Finally he turned his head and stared into the rain-filled night.