THE “HOWDUNIT”
Back about the time that Monsignor Ronald Knox was laying down impossible rules for the detective story to follow, the “whodunit” was the rage. This was followed by the “howdunit” and the currently popular “whydunit”—each merely a shorthand term to indicate whether a story turned on plot, method of murder, or character. “I Always Get the Cuties” depends as much on character as on methodology, but it still is vitally concerned with numerous “hows” both spoken and unspoken. After sixty novels and five hundred published short stories, John D. MacDonald is finally achieving the recognition his work so richly deserves. Two years ago, MWA made him a Grand Master; and last year his Travis McGee caper titled The Dreadful Lemon Sky, a heady mixture of non-stop action and trenchant comment on American mores, topped the bestseller charts for several months. - J.G.
Keegan came into my apartment, frosted with winter, topcoat open, hat jammed on the back of his hard skull, bringing a noisy smell of the dark city night. He stood in front of my birch fire, his great legs planted, clapping and rubbing hard palms in the heat.
He grinned at me and winked one narrow gray eye. “I’m off duty, Doc. I wrapped up a package. A pretty package.”
“Will bourbon do?”
“If you haven’t got any of that brandy left. This is a brandy night.”
When I came back with the bottle and the glasses, he had stripped off his topcoat and tossed it on the couch. The crumpled hat was on the floor, near the discarded coat. Keegan had yanked a chair closer to the fire. He sprawled on the end of his spine, thick ankles crossed, the soles of his shoes steaming.
I poured his brandy and mine, and moved my chair and the long coffee table so we could share either end of it. It was bursting in him. I knew that. I’ve only had the vaguest hints about his home life. A house crowded with teenage daughters, cluttered with their swains. Obviously no place to talk of his dark victories. And Keegan is not the sort of man to regale his co-workers with talk of his prowess. So I am, among other things, his sounding board. He bounces successes off the politeness of my listening, growing big in the echo of them.
“Ever try to haggle with a car dealer, Doc?” he asked.
“In a mild way.”
“You are a mild guy. I tried once. Know what he told me? He said, ‘Lieutenant, you try to make a car deal maybe once every two years. Me, I make ten a day. So what chance have you got?”
This was a more oblique approach than Keegan generally used. I became attentive.
“It’s the same with the cuties, Doc—the amateurs who think they can bring off one nice clean safe murder. Give me a cutie every time. I eat ’em alive. The pros are trouble. The cuties leave holes you can drive diesels through. This one was that woman back in October. At that cabin at Bear Paw Lake. What do you remember about it, Doc?”
I am always forced to summarize. It has got me into the habit of reading the crime news. I never used to.
“As I remember, they thought she had been killed by a prowler. Her husband returned from a business trip and found the body. She had been dead approximately two weeks. Because it was the off-season, the neighboring camps weren’t occupied, and the people in the village thought she had gone back to the city. She had been strangled, I believe.”
“Okay. So I’ll fill you in on it. Then you’ll see the problem I had. The name is Grosswalk. Cynthia and Harold. He met her ten years ago when he was in med school. He was twenty-four and she was thirty. She was loaded. He married her and he never went back to med school. He didn’t do anything for maybe five, six years. Then he gets a job selling medical supplies, surgical instruments, that kind of stuff. Whenever a wife is dead, Doc, the first thing I do is check on how they were getting along. I guess you know that.”
“Your standard procedure,” I said.
“Sure. So I check. They got a nice house here in the city. Not many friends. But they got neighbors with ears. There are lots of brawls. I get the idea it is about money. The money is hers—was hers, I should say. I put it up to this Grosswalk. He says okay, so they weren’t getting along so good, so what? I’m supposed to be finding out who killed her, sort of coordinating with the State Police, not digging into his home life. I tell him he is a nice suspect. He already knows that. He says he didn’t kill her. Then he adds one thing too many. He says he couldn’t have killed her. That’s all he will say. Playing it cute. You understand. I eat those cuties alive.”
He waved his empty glass. I went over and refilled it.
“You see what he’s doing to me, Doc. He’s leaving it up to me to prove how it was he couldn’t have killed her. A reverse twist. That isn’t too tough. I get in touch with the sales manager of the company. Like I thought, the salesmen have to make reports. He was making a western swing. It would be no big trick to fly back and sneak into the camp and kill her, take some money and junk to make it look good, and then fly back out there and pick up where he left off. She was killed on maybe the tenth of October, the medical examiner says. Then he finds her on the twenty-fourth. But the sales manager tells me something that needs a lot of checking. He says that Grosswalk took sick out west on the eighth and went into a hospital, and he was in that hospital from the eighth to the fifteenth, a full seven days. He gave me the name of the hospital. Now you see how the cutie made his mistake. He could have told me that easy enough. No, he has to be cute. I figure that if he’s innocent he would have told me. But he’s so proud of whatever gimmick he rigged for me that he’s got to let me find out the hard way.”
“I suppose you went out there,” I said.
“It took a lot of talk. They don’t like spending money for things like that. They kept telling me I should ask the L. A. cops to check because that’s a good force out there. Finally, I have to go by bus, or pay the difference. So I go by bus. I found the doctor. Plural—doctors. It is a clinic deal, sort of, that Grosswalk went to. He gives them his symptoms. They say it looks to them like the edge of a nervous breakdown just beginning to show. With maybe some organic complications. So they run him through the course. Seven days of tests and checks and observations. They tell me he was there, that he didn’t leave, that he couldn’t have left. But naturally, I check the hospital. They reserve part of one floor for patients from the clinic. I talked to the head nurse on that floor, and to the nurse that had the most to do with Grosswalk. She showed me the schedule and charts. Every day, every night, they were fooling around with the guy, giving him injections of this and that. He couldn’t have got out. The people at the clinic told me the results. He was okay. The rest had helped him a lot. They told him to slow down. They gave him a prescription for a mild sedative. Nothing organically wrong, even though the symptoms seemed to point that way.”
“So the trip was wasted?”
“Not entirely. Because on a hunch I ask if he had visitors. They keep a register. A girl came to see him as often as the rules permitted. They said she was pretty. Her name was Mary MacCarney. The address is there. So I go and see her. She lives with her folks. A real tasty kid. Nineteen. Her folks think Grosswalk is too old for her. She is tall Irish, all black and white and blue. It was warm and we sat on the porch. I soon find out this Grosswalk has been feeding her a line, telling her that his wife is an incurable invalid not long for this world, that he can’t stand hurting her by asking for a divorce, that it is better to wait, and anyway, she says, her parents might approve of a widower, but never a guy who has been divorced. She has heard from Grosswalk that his wife has been murdered by a prowler, and he will be out to see her as soon as he can. He has known her for a year. But of course I have told him not to leave town. I tell her not to get her hopes too high because it begins to look to me like Grosswalk has knocked off his wife. Things get pretty hysterical, and her old lady gets in on it, and even driving away in the cab I can hear the old lady yelling at her.
“The first thing I do on getting back is check with the doctor who took care of Mrs. Grosswalk, and he says, as I thought he would, that she was as healthy as a horse. So I go back up to that camp and unlock it again. It is a snug place, Doc. Built so you could spend the winter there if you wanted to. Insulated and sealed, with a big fuel-oil furnace, and modem kitchen equipment, and so on. It was aired out a lot better than the first time I was in it. Grosswalk stated that he hadn’t touched a thing. He said it was unlocked. He saw her and backed right out and went to report it. And the only thing touched had been the body.
“I poked around. This time I took my time. She was a tidy woman. There are twin beds. One is turned down. There is a very fancy nightgown laid out. That is a thing which bothered me. I looked at her other stuff. She has pajamas which are the right thing for October at the lake. They are made from that flannel stuff. There is only one other fancy nightgown, way in the back of a drawer. I have found out here in the city that she is not the type to fool around. So how come a woman who is alone wants to sleep so pretty? Because the husband is coming back from a trip. But he couldn’t have come back from the trip. I find another thing. I find deep ruts off in the brush beside the camp. The first time I went there, her car was parked in back. Now it is gone. If the car was run off where those ruts were, anybody coming to the door wouldn’t see it. If the door was locked they wouldn’t even knock maybe, knowing she wouldn’t be home. That puzzles me. She might do it if she didn’t want company. I prowl some more. I look in the deep freeze. It is well stocked. No need to buy stuff for a hell of a while. The refrigerator is the same way. And the electric is still on.”
He leaned back and looked at me expectantly.
“Is that all you had to go on?” I asked.
“A murder happens here and the murderer is in Los Angeles at the time. I got him because he tried to be a cutie. Want to take a try, Doc?”
I knew I had to make an attempt. “Some sort of device?”
“To strangle a woman? Mechanical hands? You’re getting too fancy, Doc.”
“Then he hired somebody to do it?”
“There are guys you can hire, but they like guns. Or a piece of pipe in an alley. I don’t know where you’d go to hire a strangler. He did it himself, Doc.”
“Frankly, I don’t see how he could have.”
“Well, I’ll tell you how I went after it. I went to the medical examiner and we had a little talk. Cop logic, Doc. If the geography is wrong, then maybe you got the wrong idea on timing. But the medico checks it out. He says definitely the woman has been dead twelve days to two weeks when he makes the examination. I ask him how he knows. He says because of the extent of decomposition of the body. I ask him if that is a constant. He says no—you use a formula. A sort of rule-of-thumb formula. I ask him the factors. He says cause of death, temperature, humidity, physical characteristics of the body, how it was clothed, whether or not insects could have got to it, and so on.
“By then I had it, Doc. It was cute. I went back to the camp and looked around. It took me some time to find them. You never find a camp without them. Candles. They were in a drawer in the kitchen. Funny-looking candles, Doc. Melted down, sort of. A flat side against the bottom of the drawer, and all hardened again. Then I had another idea. I checked the stove burners. I found some pieces of burned flaked metal down under the beating elements.
“Then it was easy. I had this Grosswalk brought in again. I let him sit in a cell for four hours and get nervous before I took the rookie cop in. I’d coached that rookie for an hour, so he did it right. I had him dressed in a leather jacket and work pants. I make him repeat his story in front of Grosswalk. ‘I brought a chain saw last year,’ he says, acting sort of confused, ‘and I was going around to the camps where there are any people and I was trying to get some work cutting up fireplace wood. So I called on Mrs. Grosswalk. She didn’t want any wood, but she was nice about it.’ I ask the rookie when that was. He scratches his head and says, ‘Sometime around the seventeenth, I think it was.’ That’s where I had to be careful. I couldn’t let him be positive about the date. I say she was supposed to be dead a week by then, and was he sure it was her. ‘She wasn’t dead then. I know her. I’d seen her in the village. A kind of heavy-set woman with blonde hair. It was her all right, Lieutenant.’ I asked him was he sure of the date and he said yes, around the seventeenth like he said, but he could check his records and find the exact day.
“I told him to take off. I just watched that cutie and saw him come apart. Then he gave it to me. He killed her on the sixteenth, the day he got out of the hospital. He flew into Omaha. By then I’ve got the stenographer taking it down. Grosswalk talks, staring at the floor, like he was talking to himself. It was going to be a dry run. He wasn’t going to do it if she’d been here in the city or into the village in the previous seven days. But once she got in the camp she seldom went out, and the odds were all against any callers. On his previous trip to Omaha he had bought a jalopy that would run. It would make the fifty miles to the lake all right. He took the car off the lot where he’d left it and drove to the lake. She was surprised to see him back ahead of schedule. He explained the company car was being fixed. He questioned her. Finally she said she hadn’t seen or talked to a living soul in ten days. Then he knew he was set to take the risk.
“He grabbed her neck and hung on until she was dead. He had his shoulders hunched right up around his ears when he said that. It was evening when he killed her, nearly bedtime. First he closed every window. Then he turned on the furnace as high as it would go. There was plenty of oil in the tank. He left the oven door open and oven turned as high as it would go. He even built a fire in the fireplace, knowing it would be burned out by morning and there wouldn’t be any smoke. He filled the biggest pans of water he could find and left them on the top of the stove. He took the money and some of her jewelry, turned out the lights and locked the doors. He ran her car off in the brush where nobody would be likely to see it. He said by the time he left the house it was like an oven in there.
“He drove the jalopy back to Omaha, parked it back in the lot, and caught an 11:15 flight to Los Angeles. The next morning he was making calls. And keeping his fingers crossed. He worked his way east. He got to the camp on the twenty-fourth—about 10 in the morning. He said he went in and turned things off and opened up every window, and then went out and was sick. He waited nearly an hour before going back in. It was nearly down to normal temperature. He checked the house. He noticed she had turned down both beds before he killed her. He remade his. The water had boiled out of the pans and the bottoms had burned through. He scaled the pans out into the lake. He said he tried not to look at her, but he couldn’t help it. He had enough medical background to know that it had worked, and also to fake his own illness in L. A. He went out and was sick again, and then he got her car back where it belonged. He closed most of the windows. He made another inspection trip and then drove into the village. He’s a cutie, Doc, and I ate him alive.”
There was a long silence. I knew what was expected of me. But I had my usual curious reluctance to please him.
He held the glass cradled in his hand, gazing with a half-smile into the dying fire. His face looked like stone.
“That was very intelligent, Keegan,” I said.
“The pros give you real trouble, Doc. The cuties always leave holes. I couldn’t bust geography, so I had to bust time.” He yawned massively and stood up. “Read all about it in the morning paper, Doc.”
“I’ll certainly do that.”
I held his coat for him. He’s a big man. I had to reach up to get it properly onto his shoulders. He mashed the hat onto his head as I walked to the door with him. He put his big hand on the knob, turned, and smiled down at me without mirth.
“I always get the cuties, Doc. Always.”
“You certainly seem to,” I said.
“They are my favorite meat.”
“So I understand.”
He balled one big fist and bumped it lightly against my chin, still grinning at me. “And I’m going to get you too, Doc. You know that. You were cute. You’re just taking longer than most. But you know how it’s going to come out, don’t you?”
I don’t answer that any more. There’s nothing to say. There hasn’t been anything to say for a long time now.
He left, walking hard into the wild night. I sat and looked into my fire. I could hear the wind. I reached for the bottle. The wind raged over the city, as monstrous and inevitable as Keegan. It seemed as though it was looking for food—the way Keegan is always doing.
But I no longer permit myself the luxury of imagination.