In her sixty-sixth year, Martha Kitteridge had, at long last, found peace and contentment. It is, in a sense, rather odd that of the more than six hundred families who had settled in Fairlawn, Martha and her husband, Reginald Parson Kitteridge, were happiest about their new home. We can dismiss Reginald’s feelings and opinions with the one brief statement that he was a man who was bound to reflect whatever opinions his wife might hold. Reginald Kitteridge, during the forty years of his marriage, had been totally consistent in a major domestic attitude; whatever made Martha happy made him happy. Should Martha have decided she preferred to live in a lower East Side tenement, Reginald would have been satisfied.
But Martha had found the little development house out at Fairlawn and had fallen in love with it at once. The thing which made it so unusual was the fact that Martha Kitteridge—and her husband, of course—had lived in a score of widely different homes, in a dozen different countries. Kitteridge, a British citizen attached to the diplomatic services of his country, had never attained a particularly significant stature as a statesman. Now, in the twilight of his life, he was vice-consul for his government in New York. This, his last and probably final assignment, had followed long years of service in the Orient (where the Kitteridges had lived like minor royalty with many servants and no end of prestige); several years in Copenhagen (where there had been fewer servants and a much simpler economic plan of living, but where each had found a great deal of intellectual stimulus); a short tour of duty in the Near East, about which the less said the better.
When Kitteridge had been transferred to the States some years back, he had accepted the assignment gratuitously, but with a certain deep skepticism. The
first two years, spent in a small apartment hotel in Manhattan, had done lit-* tie to alleviate the skepticism. And then, when he had finally reached the conclusion that this American assignment would probably be permanent as well as final, they had decided to take a house. Martha had done the shopping;
it was she who had discovered Fairlawn.
The price, which was certainly reasonable enough in view of the inflated value of money at the time, had been a little steep for the Kitteridges, who were limited by the still austere standards of their native land and salary, but Martha had a small inheritance of her own which she had never touched. She didn't hesitate to cash it in and use the money to buy the Fairlawn house.
A small-boned, delicate woman with fine tender white skin which never seemed to burn even in the hottest sun, she was to be seen, from the day she moved into the place, at almost any hour of the day, pottering around her tiny garden, her hands invariably encased in white canvas garden gloves and a wide-brimmed “African Veldt” hat shading her very alert, pale-blue eyes. Beyond doubt, Martha Kitteridge had a green thumb; there is no question but that her great passion in life was the nurturing and cultivation of flora and fauna. Of the hundreds of homes in Fairlawn, hers was outstanding as a result of the shrubs and flowers, the perennials and annuals with which she had landscaped the plot surrounding the house.
In spite of her rather strange and foreign British accent and a certain inherent shyness, she took almost as much interest in her new neighbors as she did in the garden upon which she devoted so much of her energy and her time. Martha Kitteridge loved people.
It is worth commenting that people in turn seemed to love and to trust her. She was probably the only woman in the whole of Fairlawn for whom everyone had a kind word. The MacSweeneys may have disliked the Piazzas, considering them little better than immigrants; McNally may have hated Neilsen because he thought him a snob; the Olsens could have looked down upon (and envied) the Cathcarts, because Mrs. Cathcart was obviously a drunkard and her husband came home with strange women, but no one, no one at all, disliked Mrs. Kitnitridge. She was so very obviously exactly what she appeared to be—a simple, sweet, little old lady who loved her garden and was very polite and very kind to everyone who passed her house. She was sweet to the dirty-faced children who ran across her newly planted flower beds; she went so far as to pet and surreptitiously feed the dogs who had excavated her recently planted bulbs.
Mrs. Kitteridge would, of course, run out and wave her apron at the dogs when she saw them doing it, usually with a bone in her hand to reward the treacherous animal for his trespass. In fact, that is precisely what she was doing on that Saturday morning at exactly ten o’clock when Len Neilsen, her
neighbor from two doors up the street, drove by. She stopped waving at the dog just long enough to wave at Mr. Neilsen.
She was just a little surprised, and possibly a little hurt, when Mr. Neilsen passed hurriedly by, ignoring her completely. She could have sworn that he saw her, too. His car passed within less than a dozen yards.
The fact is, however, that Len Neilsen was completely unaware of the little white-haired woman with the large ham bone in one hand and an apron in her other. Len Neilsen was on his way to the police station.
The decision which had been so difficult to reach a few hours before, as Len and Allie had sat in the cold predawn, staring white-faced at each other, had seemed simplicity itself in the warm light of the morning. They hadn't discussed it at all, as, sleepy-eyed they had once more sat at the breakfast table with little Billy babbling away between them. Nothing had been said until the child had finished his own hearty breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and orange juice, toast and milk, and gone back to his room to play.
The moment the door closed behind young Bill, Len got up from his chair and walked around the table. He leaned over Allie, looking down into her upraised face.
“I’m getting dressed now,” he said. “I’m going to the police station.”
Allie’s expression didn’t change.
“I knew you would,” she said.
There had been no need for further words. At nine fifty-five, Len went out to the garage, looking neither right nor left. He raised the overhead door, backed out the Ford, and stopped in the driveway long enough to get out and reclose the door. He finished backing into the street, swinging the car around so it faced north. And then he drove surely and quickly off.
The nearest police station, a branch of the Nassau County Police in whose jurisdiction Fairlawn lay, was some three miles off, at the edge of the next town. Len had looked up the address in the telephone book.
Allie watched him leave, standing in the front room and looking out of the window. For some reason, she instinctively stayed well off to one side, so that no one would observe her from the street. The moment the car was out of sight, she went back to Billy’s room, where the youngster sat on the floor playing with a new collection of toy soldiers.
“Wanna get dressed and go out an’ play,” Billy said, looking up at his mother.
“I think you’d better stay in this morning, honey,” Allie said. “I think you had...”
“I wanna go out an’ play.”
“This afternoon,” Allie said. “Wait until Daddy comes home and then maybe we’ll all go out.”
“Can we go to the movies, Mommy?”
I “When Daddy comes home,” Allie said. “Yes, we can all go to the movies.
Now you stay in and be a good boy and play with your soldiers. Mommy wants to get her work done. ”
Allie went back to the kitchen. She was tired, but she wasn’t sleepy. She’d completely forgotten about Len’s good news. Completely forgotten about the promotion down at the office, the additional salary. She just hoped...
Detective Lieutenant Clifford Giddeon was a man who looked forward to his week ends. One of the big advantages in working for a county organization, as opposed to a large metropolitan police force, lay in the fact that the hours—in the former—were comparatively civilized. He could, under normal circumstances, count on long week ends; week ends which usually stretched from sometime late Friday until Monday mornings.
This arrangement made it possible for Lieutenant Giddeon to pursue his favorite pastime and hobby, a diversion which in a good many ways made up for the normal domestic life so many of his contemporaries enjoyed. Lieutenant Giddeon had never married and had no family, that is, with the exception of his widowed mother with whom he lived and who kept house for him. Instead the lieutenant had a hobby which he pursued with a passionate and absorbing devotion. He was a yachtsman.
The word yachtsman, would, of course, have been slightly ludicrous had anyone used it in front of the Lieutenant. However, the fact remained that he did own a forty-foot ketch and he spent almost every waking hour thinking about it and certainly every free hour either sailing the small vessel or working on her.
During the long summers, when he took his usual two week vacation, Lieutenant Giddeon kept the ketch berthed on the North Shore and he spent every free hour sailing her up and down the Sound. In the cold winter months when it was no longer possible to use the boat, he'd have her hauled up in a yard not too far from his home in Hempstead and, because the owner of the yard was a long-time friend, he was allowed to do his own work on her. As a result he saw very little of his mother during his week ends off duty. (She didn’t mind as she happened to have her own hobby which consisted of attending the funerals of her friends, who were rapidly dying off—and when there were no funerals of friends, she’d go to funerals of strangers). Giddeon spent these week ends assiduously working over his vessel, sanding down her smooth mahogany sides, repainting the hull, cleaning up his tackle and in general preparing for the summer months to come.
On this particular Saturday morning, however, the lieutenant was not working down in the yard on his sailboat. As the result of a particularly busy Friday night, during which two teenaged gangs had clashed (one fifteen-year-
old boy was shot and not expected to live), a couple of estates had been burglarized, and half a dozen other assorted criminal activities had taken place, the department was shorthanded and Lieutenant Giddeon had been asked to hold down the desk for a fellow officer who was busy working on a case.
The knowledge that he would be given full credit for the extra time did little to erase the lieutenant’s annoyance. He’d been planning a varnish job on this particular day, a chore he was particularly anxious to finish while the weather remained fairly dry. Once the first real cold spell came, it would no longer be possible to accomplish this task and he’d been anxious to get it out of the way. As a result, Lieutenant Giddeon was in an extremely bad mood when the desk sergeant directed Len Neilsen to his office, a tiny cubicle on the second floor of the precinct station house.
But irritated or not, Lieutenant Giddeon was an excellent cop. Even before Len opened his mouth to speak, the police officer, who’d looked up the moment the other man opened the door and entered the room, made two quick observations.
Nice-looking young fellow, he at once reflected; probably from one of the new developments around here. The second observation was slightly less complimentary. He’s got a hangover; a bad one. Although Lieutenant Giddeon himself had never in his life suffered a hangover, he knew the signs only too well. He was a hard man to fool.
“What’s your problem, young fellow?” he asked, consciously making an attempt to sound pleasant as he realized his own foul mood only too well and didn’t want it to interfere with his business relationships with the public, who were, after all, his employers.
Len looked over at the straight-backed oak chair at the side of the desk at which the lieutenant sat. The other man nodded toward the chair and Len moved to it and sat down. He sat on the edge of the seat and for a moment j ust looked embarrassed. And then he spoke.
“I’m afraid, sir,” he said, “I’m afraid this is going to sound crazy.”
“I hear a lot of crazy things.”
‘ ‘ I should imagine, ’ ’ Len said. He began to feel a little more at ease. This cop, sitting there in his civilian clothes and looking like anything but a police officer, seemed an understanding and intelligent sort. He couldn’t be more than thirty-six or thirty-eight himself, but there was something very solid and very sure about him.
“Well, I hardly know where to begin. Itseems...”
“Just begin at the beginning,” the lieutenant said. “You can start with your name.”
“Len Neilsen,” Len said. “I live over in Fairlawn. And last night I saw a murder. Or at least I saw a man who had just been murdered.
Lieutenant Giddeon’s expression didn’t change. "That isn’t the beginning, ’ ’ f he said. ‘ ‘Where were you last night? ”
“I was home.”
“Is that where you saw the murder?”
Len shook his head quickly. "No—of course not. You see, I was a little drunk last night and...”
Giddeon waved his hand, shaking his head slightly. “Listen,” he said. "Let’s try it again. Start all over. Start, let’s say, about the time you took the first drink. When and where was that?”
It took a long time, but the officer was extremely patient. He let Len tell it in his own way and rarely interrupted. This capacity of his for intelligent understanding and patience was probably one of the reasons he was a lieutenant of detectives instead of pounding a beat.
Len went through the entire thing, starting with the previous evening when he’d first been invited out to dinner by his boss. He told about getting the promotion and calling Allie and the whole thing. While he talked, he noticed that the lieutenant had taken a yellow, lined pad from a desk drawer and occasionally jotted down notes. Once or twice he nodded, in an understanding way and now and then he’d interrupt with a question in order to get things straight. But mostly he just listened. At no time did his expression change in the slightest; an expression of polite, interest and understanding. At no time did he show the faintest degree of skepticism. He didn't show anything.
Even when Len started talking about the dead man, he remained the same. He waited until Len was all through. Then he leaned back in his chair and stared for a full minute at the wall over Len’s head.
“And you say,” he said at last, “you say you had never seen this man before, never seen the room before, haven’t the faintest idea in which house you’d gotten by mistake?”
Len nodded.
“And you’re sure the man was dead?”
“He certainly looked dead.”
Giddeon slowly nodded.
“Just how drunk were you?”
“I’ve told you. Damned drunk. That is, until I came to, turned on the light and saw the dead man. After that, well, after that I’d never been more sober in my life.”
Giddeon tapped the end of his pencil on the table for several seconds. At last he stood up and walked over by the window, turning and looking back at Len.
You get drunk very often?”
Len blushed.
“About as often as I get a promotion,” he said, his voice slightly defensive. “That's about once every five years.”
Giddeon nodded.
“Ever pass out—draw a blank—anything like that, before?”
Len stood up then himself.
“Look, officer,” he said. “I’m not nuts, I haven't been dreaming or seeing things or making this up. I’m telling you exactly what happened. I got in the wrong house by mistake, I saw a man with what certainly looked like a bullet hole through his head. I think the man was murdered. And I think someone knows that I saw him.”
"All right. All right, I believe you. The only thing is, we want to be pretty sure. After all, no one reported any disturbance out that way last night. No one reported hearing a shot or seeing anything-suspicious. That doesn’t mean, of course, that something couldn’t have happened.”
“Well, what do you intend doing about it?”
“We’ll investigate it, naturally. Thing is, though, in a case like this, we have to move a little cautiously. Can’t just go bursting in on every place in the neighborhood. Another thing—say you’re right and you did see this man and he was murdered. We don’t want to tip our hand and alarm whoever did it by screaming up with sirens open. I think the best thing is for you to go on home now. Chances are, your missus will be a Ettle nervous and upset, particularly as you seem to have told her all about it. Be best if you get back and stay with her. I don’t have to tell you not to mention anything about this.”
Len nodded. “Of course,” he said. “And you will...”
“We’ll start looking into it at once,” Giddeon said. “Just you go on back. Stay around the house for the next day or so. We’U have someone nearby. We U be looking into it.”
Len nodded, again, a half-skeptical expression on his face.
My God, he thought, I wonder if he thinks I’m reaUy nuts. I wonder if he thinks I just dreamed the whole damned thing up. Maybe he’s just getting rid of me in a nice way—figures I had too much to drink or something. He turned, hesitantly, toward the door.
“We don’t pass up things Eke this,” Lieutenant Giddeon said quietly, as Len started to open the door. “No matter how crazy they sound, we look into them.”
Len felt better as he walked down the stairs to the street floor. He’d done the right thing after all, he figured.
Passing through the information room on the ground floor on his way to the street, he was vaguely aware that the sergeant on the desk was speaking rapidly into the telephone. It was the same sergeant to whom he had first told his story, less than an hour ago. The sergeant was talking in a tight, urgent voice over the phone, at the same time beckoning to a man in plain clothes sitting tipped back on a chair at the side of the room. He didn’t notice Len at all.
Had Len not been so busy with his own thoughts, the chances are he would have heard something of what the sergeant was saying. He would have recognized the name, perhaps. As it was, he passed by and went out into the street and got into his car and didn’t hear a word of it.
What the sergeant was saying, and what might possibly have attracted Len’s interest, were a few simple words, but words spoken in a quick and urgent fashion.
"... yes, yes, Mrs. Kitteridge. Just don’t worry—don’t let yourself get excited or frightened. We’ll have a man out there in less time than it takes to tell you about it. Just don’t become hysterical...”
The newspapers, and especially the tabloids, made a big to do about the fact that it was little Mrs. Kitteridge who found the body. But actually they were wrong; it wasn’t really Mrs. Kitteridge at all. Instead, the nameless dog whom Mrs. Kitteridge had rewarded with a bone for trampling across her shrubbery, made the discovery. Completely unappreciative of the little old lady’s kindness, this dog, a multicolored mutt of dubious ancestry, had at once taken his unearned reward from her hand and pranced off to the side yard and lost himself beneath the foliage of a low, spreading juniper bush. He was in the process of looking for a likely soft spot in which to bury his treasure when some atavistic instinct warned him of the sinister presence of death. Penetrating the tangled leafy cavern another foot or so, his yellow eyes took in the prone body lying on its face.
He began the series of dismal howls even as he slowly backed out and into sight once more.
Mrs. Kitteridge, who had followed his progress around the side of the house, stood silently watching him for several minutes. The dog seemed in some sort of agony, and she spoke to him gently. He ignored her and continued his weird wailing.
The first thought which occurred to Mrs. Kitteridge was that, in attempting to bury the bone, he had encountered some broken glass, or perhaps a rusty tin can, and inj ured himself. She attempted to approach him, but as she did, he turned and galloped off, still howling. Mrs. Kitteridge noticed that he no longer had the bone. With a thought of possibly retrieving it, and also investigating to see what might have caused the dog’s strange behavior, Mrs.
Kitteridge went at once to her garage to get a rake. She would lift the branches of the juniper and see what might be beneath them. Passing out of the garage she noticed one of her rose bushes needed attention—it was a yellow climber and had fallen away from the trellis next to the garage on which it was supposed to climb—and so she attended to that. Thus, it wasn’t until almost an hour had passed that she took the rake and lifted the profuse foliage of the low-growing evergreen.
What she saw affected her almost in the same way as that grisly sight had affected the multicolored animal. Mrs. Kitteridge, looking down on the prone and slightly twisted body lying on its face with the long blond hair stained red with blood, did not, however, howl. A more civilized member of the animal kingdom, she merely gasped and for several frozen seconds, stood there staring with her mouth wide open and the color slowly draining from her face.
It is an index to Mrs. Kitteridge's character, and a compliment to her breeding, that she didn’t scream. Several things were at once apparent as her gentle eyes took in the scene. The body was that of a young girl and the girl was dead. The killer, whoever he or she might be, had apparently slain the girl somewhere else and dragged the body to this spot in an attempt to conceal it. Mrs. Kitteridge could see that one small slipper was half off and that there were two distinct marks where the feet had dragged across the soft earth. That part of the face which lay exposed beneath the flare of long blond hair, indicated that this girl had been extremely attractive. The purple red blood, already dried and caked, on that hair, showed all too clearly that her attacker had crushed the thin shell of her cranium with a “blunt instrument.” And the disheveled appearance of the clothes—the child's skirt was torn and lay creased and rumpled almost up to her waist and her bare legs above the bobby socks were badly scratched and bruised—would indicate that she had been violently and criminally attacked, just previous to her death.
Mrs. Kitteridge backed out from under the bush and turned and entered her house. There was a certain amount of confusion in reaching the proper people at the poEce station, but within three minutes Mrs. Kitteridge was telling her story. Within five minutes of the time that Lieutenant Giddeon had finished listening to Len Neilsen’s strange tale concerning his discovery of a murdered man out at Fairlawn Acres, he was hearing the details of Mrs. Kitteridge’s grim discovery. The Eeutenant arrived at Fairlawn less than eight minutes after the nearest radio patrol car had drawn up in front of Mrs. Kitteridge’s neatly kept home.
Under normal circumstances, Len himself would have returned in time to have witnessed the convergence of police vehicles on the street in front of his and his immediate neighbors’ residences. As it was, however, Lenhadthedis-tinctionof being just about the only resident of that particular section of Fairlawn who was not present during the first hysterical hour as the neighborhood turned out en masse to wallow in the sensationalism of the gruesome find.
There were two other persons conspicuous by their absence. Reginald Parson Kitteridge was in the basement of a friend’s home in Great Neck playing darts. It is a significant comment on his wife’s character that although she knew where he was and what he was doing at the time, it never occurred to her to call him up and tell him the news. She was appreciative of the fact that the weekly dart games were almost his only hobby and pleasure and she could see no reason for interfering with the regularity of his pastime.
The other person absent was the newest resident of the street—Gerald Tomlinson. Mr. Tomlinson’s failure to be present was for a far more significant reason than that of Mr. Kitteridge. Tomlinson, at the exact moment when Lieutenant Giddeon was parting the juniper bush to lean over the dead girl’s body, was busily occupied with a dead body of his own. To be exact, he was removing his particular cadaver from the trunk of his car in a lonely spot in upper Putnam County and preparing to lower it into a fresh dug, shallow grave.
In spite of the chill and winter weather, Tomlinson was sweating profusely. He had just finished digging the grave in the frozen earth with a mattock he had carried alongside the body in the trunk of the car. The absence of Kitteridge and Tomlinson during that first grim hour was neither noticed at the time by their neighbors and police, or commented upon later. The absence of Len Neilsen, however, was a far different matter.
To the very last, Len found it extremely difficult to explain this absence of his, both to Allie, his wife, and to Lieutenant Giddeon. Afterward, when Len did attempt an explanation, Giddeon would remind him that he, Len, had said he was returning directly home from the police station. So why did Len go to a saloon instead?
But to Allie, the idea of Len’s going to a saloon made even less sense than it did to Giddeon. As Allie herself reminded Len each time the subject would come up, Len had never in his life been in a saloon in the morning. And that morning of all mornings! She simply couldn’t understand it. In Allie’s favor one thing must be said; in discussing Len’s visit to a saloon on that fatal Saturday morning, she never once brought up the fact that it had been Len’s drinking the previous evening which had involved him in the tragedy in the first place.
The strange part of it all lay in Len’s complete inability to explain exactly what had driven him on a direct route from Lieutenant Giddeon’s office to the tavern out on Jericho Turnpike, halfway between the police station and Fairlawn. How could he explain that he merely wanted a quiet secluded spot to sit and think? And how could he explain that the thing he was thinking about, the thing he was trying to figure out, was whether or not the Lieutenant may have been right after all; that maybe he had been merely drunk or crazy or something and just imagined the whole thing?
No, he couldn’t explain that—not after finally getting home a couple of hours later that afternoon, a little tipsy as a result of the several beers on top of last night’s drinking, and finding out about the murdered girl.
The absence of Len, as well as the Messrs. Tomlinson and Kitteridge, was more than offset by the number of Fairlawn residents who did find time that Saturday morning to crowd and jostle around as Lieutenant Giddeon and his more than a dozen police associates converged on the spot where a ruthless and brutal murderer had discarded the slender young body of Louisa Mary Julio beneath Mrs. Kitteridge's private juniper bush.
That it was Louisa’s body was established beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt within three minutes of the time the first police car arrived on the scene and one husky patrolman hurried to question Mrs. Kitteridge while his partner stood guard in the driveway to hold back those curious and macabre neighbors who were so soon to gather.
Kathleen Julio, her large handsome face red with anger, was just leaving the front door of the McNally home, several houses down the street on Crescent Drive, when the police car arrived. Mrs. Julio was both angry and worried. Only an hour before she had discovered for the first time that Louisa had failed to return home the previous evening after her baby-sitting chore. The fact that there was so long a delay in her discovery of the girl’s absence is not as unusual as it might seem.
Mrs. Julio was the mother of six children and she was also a very careless and possibly even inattentive mother. On the other hand, six children, ranging in age from seven to nineteen, combined with a highly temperamental husband, had, over a period of years, given Mrs. Julio a certain aloofness to the irregularities of her life and her sprawling, brawling household. She was used to Louisa’s being out late at night when the girl would baby-sit for the neighbors’ children and she never worried as Louisa had her own key and it was the custom for the man of whatever family Louisa sat for, to see the girl to her home at the end of the evening.
When Mrs. Julio had gotten up on Saturday morning, she followed her usual routine. She fed first her husband and then the younger children. Then she opened the morning newspaper and read it in the kitchen as the older children prepared their own breakfasts. The fact that Louisa had not been among the others hadn’t particularly worried her. She always let the child sleep late after being out on a baby-sitting job the previous evening. Thus it wasn t until Mrs. Julio happened to go into the room shared by Louisa and one of her younger sisters, sometime around midmoming, and noticed Louisa’s unslept-in bed, that she first realized the girl was missing. A quick and high-pitched questioning of the other children soon revealed that no one had seen Louisa since the previous evening.
Louisa’s father had left for work by this time—he was a musician and had to go to New York for a practice session each Saturday morning—and so Mrs. Julio had at once thrust her thick arms into the sleeves of her mouton fur coat and, not bothering with a covering for her head, had started for the McNally house. Mrs. McNally, eyes red and last night’s blurred make-up still on her face, had answered the door, her feet in broken slippers and a faded, rather soiled bathrobe tied around her waist. It had been an extremely unsatisfactory interview.
Mrs. McNally was only able to tell Louisa’s mother that the girl had leftfor her home sometime after midnight the previous evening. No, Mr. McNally had not walked the girl home. Why not? Mr. McNally had been drunk. And why hadn’t Mrs. McNally taken the girl home? Because Mrs. McNally didn’t want to leave her baby alone and for Mrs. Julio’s information, being in the house with Mr. McNally when he was drunk was exactly like being alone.
Furthermore, Mrs. McNally could see no reason in the world why the girl shouldn’t be perfectly safe walking the three or four blocks to her home, no matter what the hour.
Mrs. Julio began to say something about the criminality of permitting a young girl, a mere child...
Mrs. McNally interrupted to tell Mrs. Julio that anyone who demanded a dollar and twenty-five cents an hour for baby-sitting was not to be considered a mere child.
It was at this point that Mrs. Julio told Mrs. McNally exactly what she thought of her and turned to leave, yelling that she would report the whole thing to the police at once. The words were hardly out of her mouth, when, the door of the McNally place having slammed behind her furious back, Mrs. Julio started down the steps and spotted the police car at the curb several hundred yards away. She made for it at once.
At that moment the patrolman, who had been talking with Mrs. Kit-teridge, quickly came out of the house and spoke to his fellow officer, at the same time pointing toward the juniper bush at the side of the drive. This second patrolman, a kind - looking elderly man whose amazing girth around the middle would have kept him off any metropolitan police force, at once turned and went toward the bush. He raised its branches from the ground and leaned down to peer under them as his partner hurried back into the house.
A moment later and Mrs. Julio was looking over his shoulder.
Mrs. Julio screamed.
The confusion of the next few minutes, as the patrolman attempted to pull Mrs. Julio away from her daughter’s dead body and later as his partner came to his aid, served to hopelessly erase whatever footprints there might have been in the immediate vicinity of the body and which had not already been obliterated by the mongrel dog and by Mrs. Kitteridge.
It was also unfortunate that the hot early morning sun had already melted the last traces of the previous evening’s snow.
Mrs. Julio was still screaming by the time Lieutenant Giddeon reached the scene, accompanied by his partner, Sergeant Dan Finnerty. But somewhere during the course of her hysterical crying and sobbing, she had firmly established that the dead girl was her missing daughter. Her piercing shrieks had also attracted more than a hundred men, women and children from nearby houses.
Allie Neilsen’s awareness of the commotion came at the sound of Mrs. Julio’s first scream. She turned and listened for a moment, not quite sure, and then as the cries continued to penetrate her living room, where she sat nervously on the couch watching young Bill playing with his trains, Allie stood up and went to the window. She could see nothing.
It was while she was pulling on a light tweed coat and preparing to go to the front door that she heard the sirens of the approaching ambulance, which had been called immediately after Mrs. Kitteridge had first notified the police.
One thought and one thought alone came to Allie Neilsen. Len had been right. Len had not been dreaming. There had been a dead man and now not only Len knew about it but the police knew as well. It was with almost a sense of relief that Allie opened the front door of her house, turning at the same time to tell Billy to keep on playing and that she would be right back.
Allie walked swiftly down the flagstone path to the sidewalk and immediately saw the crowd gathering in front of Mrs. Kitteridge’s home, several hundred feet down the street.
Ten minutes later Allie Neilsen returned to her own home. Her cheeks were drained of color and there was a dazed, unbelieving look on her pretty, heart-shaped face. She held one small hand to her partly opened mouth as she once more entered her living room. Almost aimlessly, she half slouched on the couch, not bothering to remove her coat. She didn’t even hear young Billy as he repeatedly tugged at her skirt and asked questions.
She was thinking of Len. Thinking of Len and of a dead man with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. She was thinking of Len sitting across the table from her less than a dozen hours ago with his scratched and bloody face and his wild eyes, telling her... telling her about...
She stopped thinking then for a second and when next she was conscious of the workings of her mind she was thinking of the slender body of a murdered fifteen-year-old girl lying in her own blood under a juniper bush a few doors down the street.
Suddenly the tears welled in Allie’s large blue eyes and her throat contracted and she fell half sidewise on the couch and there was no sound at all as her shoulders convulsively shook.
Billy Neilsen looked at his mother with wide, uncomprehensive eyes for a full minute. And then his arms went around her knees and he hugged her tightly and he too began to cry. His crying, however, was anything but silent.
McNally came to only after the full impact of the pitcher of ice-cold water struck him in the face. He was swinging his arms like a channel swimmer and sputtering as he pulled himself to a sitting position on the bed. It took him a full minute to clear his head sufficiently to look up to where Myrtle stood staring at him.
“Jesus, ” Howard said. “Jesus Christ on a mountain top. What the hell kind ofa way is that to...”
“Howard, for God’s sake, Howard, wake up.”
Even in his half-sleepy, half-hung-over condition, Howard McNally somehow realized that this was not just one of Myrtle’s usual capricious angers, not one of her all too often violent exercises of temper in arousing him from a sound sleep. He sensed at once, without even being conscious of her chalklike face and hollow, half-hysterical eyes, that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“Howard, for God’s sake get up. Get up at once!”
“What—what in the name...”
"Howard, listen to me!”
“Yeah, all right. I’m listening. But what the hell is the...”
“Howard, for God's sake shut up and listen. Are you awake? Can you understand...”
“I’m half drowned, but I’m awake. Go ahead and...”
“Howard—it's the girl. Louisa.”
Fora second Howard stared meaninglessly at his wife. A slow blush began to spread over his face.
"Yeah. Well. So...”
“Louisa. The baby-sitter. She’s been murdered. They found her body over in the Kitteridges’ yardjustnow. Oh God...”
Howard’s mouth suddenly fell wide and the blood left his face even faster than it had started to fill it a moment before.
“What in the name of Christ are you saying, Myrtle! My God, are you still drunk? What...”
“Murdered, Howard. Her head all beaten in and her clothes tom and... oh my God!”
Myrtle sank down on the side of the bed and Howard quickly turned and got out on the opposite side. He was stark naked, but he didn’t bother to reach for the dressing gown lying on the chair next to the bed, or the leather slippers under it. He walked to the kitchen and reached for the whiskey bottle and poured a juice glass a third of the way lull. He drank it straight without a chaser and then refilled it, this time halfway. A moment later and he was back in the bedroom handing it to Myrtle.
She downed it in a single gulp and then, for several minutes, the two of them just sat there, Myrtle on the bed and Howard in a chair a couple of feet away, and stared at each other.
“Tell me about it,” Howard said at last, his voice hollow and barely above a whisper.
Myrtle continued to stare at him and her head moved almost imperceptibly from side to side. She barely opened her lips when at last she spoke.
“Maybe you better tell me about it,” she said at last.
Howard reached over and slapped her hard across the face, several times, and Myrtle merely sat there. Then she began to cry.
It took a full twenty-five minutes for her natural female curiosity to overcome her fear. But ultimately and inevitably Marian Tomlinson, Gerald Tomlinson’s sister-in-law, succumbed to the stronger of her two emotions. The curiosity was aroused by the commotion that was going on down the street. The fear, of course, was of Gerald, her dead husband’s brother. Gerald’s last instructions, upon leaving the house, had been clear and concise.
“Under no conditions, none whatsoever, are you to go outside. Anyone comes to the door, answer. But let no one in and don’t go out. And don’t let the kid out. I’ll be back later.”
Marian Tomlinson knew what she could expect if she were to disobey those instructions. Gerald was not a gentle man and he was a man who tolerated no disobedience.
But curiosity finally grew too much for her and so, warning the child to be quiet and not answer the door if anyone should ring, she finally put on her heavy coat and tied a shawl over her head; then thrust her feet into over-shoes and opened the front door. She made no attempt to penetrate the crowd being pushed back by the police, which surrounded the house down the street. She asked no questions, but then she didn’t really have to. A dozen excited conversations going on around her quickly informed her of what was happening.
A strange, almost relieved smile seemed to twist the comers of her hard, bitter mouth when she learned that it was the body of a young girl which had been found.
Quickly she turned away and once more entered her own house. When the I child, Patsy, asked her what was happening, she merely smiled thinly and half
shook her head.
“Nothing—nothing important,” she said. “Just some kid down the street got hurt. It’s nothing—you go on an’ play.”
“What should I play with?”
“I don’t care what you play with. Only stay out a the bedroom and the bathroom and play in your own room. Now go on, get. Go in an’ play.”
A few minutes later, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, she muttered under her breath.
"Gerald wouldn’t like all those cops around, that’s for sure,” she said.
The Swansons, who had thrown the party the night before, like Marian Tomlinson, stayed only long enough to get the bare outlines of the tragedy and then returned to their half-eaten breakfast.
“A terrible thing,” Grace Swanson said, spreading marmalade carefully on a toasted English muffin.
Tom Swanson didn’t bother to look up from his eggs and Canadian bacon.
"God damn it all,” he said, “a thing like this can stink up a decent neighborhood. You’d think...” the words died in a mumble as his new set of six-hun-dred-dollar false teeth closed over a mouthful of food.