THREE NIGHTS later I was going into my office when the desk officer looked my way and said, “Can you come here a minute, Sergeant?”
I went behind the railing. He thumbed down the button on the radio mike and said, “Will you give me that again, Russ? Sergeant Randall’s standing by.”
Russ was in one of our three cars. “We just drove past the Smithell house, Sergeant,” he said over the loudspeaker. “Isn’t the place supposed to be locked up?”
“It is locked up,” I said. “Why?”
“We saw a light. Just for a second, at one of the front windows. Like a flashlight somebody was being careful with.”
“No mistake?”
“Now, Bill . . .” he sounded pained.
“Okay. Who’s with you? Concannon?”
“Sure.”
“If somebody’s inside, I don’t want you all barging in on him. Just make sure he stays inside until I get there. Understand?”
“I get it,” he said briskly. “I’ll take the front and Con will watch the back door.”
“Don’t go waving that gun of yours around,” I said. “It may just be a real estate man showing the house to a prospective buyer. Or something.”
“Sure,” Russ said, with a wink in his voice.
I went into the office and took my gun and belt holster from the desk. If you like fast hard-hitting hand guns, you’d like mine. It’s a Smith and Wesson .45 revolver, with the barrel cut down to four inches and a ramp sight mounted for more maneuverability on the hip. The front of the trigger guard is cut out, the butt rounded off and the hammer filed down, all for a faster draw. Not that I usually need my gun that fast. But you only have to be slow once to be dead.
I took the front door key of the Smithell house from the bulletin board and went downstairs to my car.
Four minutes later I parked across the street from the darkened Smithell house. The squad car was parked in a driveway down the street, partially hidden behind a hedge.
Russ stepped out of the shadows between two trees near the porch as I approached. “Nobody’s come this way,” he said cheerfully, his voice low.
“Any more lights?”
“No.”
“Let’s go inside.”
I tried the front door, found it locked. I unlocked it quietly, swung the door open. It was black as the pitch of hell inside. Light sprayed on the floor as I thumbed the button on my flash. I moved the light around, covering the foyer, living room and dining room from where I stood. Russ breathed heavily at my shoulder.
“Well,” he said, scratching his belly comfortably. “I guess we—Jesus!”
We both took a step backward at the sound of the scream from within the house, wincing at the withering terror reflected in it, and the sound seemed to crawl right up my back like something alive.
“What-in-the-hell . . .” Russ began. A second scream cut him off.
With the flash moving the darkness out of the way ahead of me, I ran through the dining room toward the kitchen and the cellar stairs. The house was silent now except for the memory of the last shocking scream and the heavy sounds of Russ as he followed me.
I went down the stairs into the basement without bothering to turn on the lights. When I hit the basement floor I let the beam of light travel along the walls and Russ did the same with his flashlight. We found what we were looking for at the same time.
The girl in the doorway of the utility room turned a little as both flashlights concentrated on her. The edges of her blonde hair looked white against the darkness beyond the door. I didn’t realize who I was looking at for a moment. She was wearing a green dress without sleeves, trimmed in white, with large white buttons. She had a flashlight, too, a small one, and in that caught moment that did not seem to be a part of time at all the flashlight slipped from her hand and hit the tiled floor, the glass shattering.
She moved then, almost drunkenly, one arm coming up to cover her eyes from the glare. Her mouth was open in an ugly way and her eyes were gone, brother, ’way gone. She took a couple of weaving steps and pitched forward but I knew it was going to happen and was there to catch her.
As I eased Stella to the floor there came a pounding at the basement door that led outside and Concannon was yelling something I couldn’t catch. Russ yelled back at him and went clumping up the stairs to turn the lights on. Russ came back down swearing to himself, and hustled over to let Concannon in. The two of them looked in bewilderment at the girl on the floor.
I inclined my head toward the doorway from which Stella had come. “One of you take a look in there.”
Russ went in with his gun and was about five seconds. He came back stabbing at his holster with the big revolver, a sick sheepish look on his face.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we know what she was screaming about. Have a look, Bill.”
I went in there. Behind me, Russ was saying, “You know, I think I had too much garlic in the spaghetti tonight. I’m afraid I’m going to be . . .” He made a rush for outdoors and was, on the grass.
I didn’t blame him. Against one wall of the utility room was a trunk, the lid up. I looked inside. The man who looked back hadn’t seen anybody lately. Not quite some time. And he didn’t smell that way because he needed a bath.
I marched outside and leaned on the doorway. With some surprise I found my right hand had a death grip on the cut-down .45. I didn’t remember drawing. I replaced the revolver and got myself a cigarette. My hand was shaking and I didn’t give a damn who knew it.
“Somebody dead in there?” Concannon said. He’s an ex-marine about five feet eight inches tall and at least that wide. He’s put together as strongly as suspension cable, too.
“I’ll say.” I tilted my hat back and looked at Stella, lying on the floor. This part of the basement was a sort of party room, with paneled walls and a patterned tile floor. There was a lot of crazy metal furniture, too, and a small bar. Part of one wall was glass and there was a stone-paved patio outside, along with a hillside rock garden, barbecue pit and a gradually sloping lawn to the garage, the roof of which could be seen just inside the illumination provided by a couple of powerful floodlights mounted upstairs. These had been turned on by the same switch that worked the basement lights.
“How about getting some water for the lady?” I said. “Or would you rather go look at the body?”
“Not especially.”
“The kitchen’s upstairs to the right.”
I went outside and told Russ to get my camera equipment out of the rear of my car and report in. I returned to the storage room and secured the lid before the air could go to work on him. There was no question as to how he had got it. About three-quarters of an inch of pointed steel poked through him just below the heart and his white shirt had turned rusty over a large area.
Concannon returned with some water and a couple of ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel. I turned my attentions to Stella. I kneeled on the floor and propped her against me, let ice water trickle over her face. Even though she was still out her face retained a look of strain, as if she hadn’t been able to escape the sight of it even in unconsciousness.
The night was so hot the bugs were walking. There was a big wet spot on her dress in the hollow of her back. As she began to come around I sent Concannon upstairs to find out how she had got in.
Her eyes opened weakly and she looked up at me. For a second she didn’t know me and then her lips closed over my whispered name and she struggled closer to me, one of her hands knocking my hat off as the arm looped around my shoulders.
“Bill,” she whimpered. “Bill! Awful. In there. Awful.”
“I know. I took a look.”
“Bill, I’ve wanted to see you so bad. Why didn’t you come to Jimmy’s . . .”
“I wanted to come, Stella. Gulliver sent me out of town.”
“How did you happen to . . .”
“You don’t get to ask any more questions,” I said. “My turn. What are you doing here?”
She looked puzzled for an instant, as if she didn’t know what I meant. Then her breath caught jerkily and she reached toward her waist.
I rolled her off me and with a quick movement pinned both arms behind her, holding her wrists together with one hand.
“What are you doing, Bill!”
I slid my hand along her stomach and felt something hard under her dress. I pried two buttons loose. She twisted wildly as I reached beneath her dress.
“Bill, stop! What do you think—”
She whipped one arm free and tried to squirm away from me so I let go of her other arm and clamped my arm across her breasts, holding her fast. She got one hand high enough to be effective and I felt the sting of her fingernails. My hand closed around the object beneath her dress and I withdrew it, shook it free of the handkerchief in which it was wrapped. It hit in the stretched apron of dress between her spread legs and rolled to the floor. It was a round shiny compact with a small, jeweled design.
“Let go of me, you ——” she snapped, and the word hurt worse than her fingernails. I released her and she bent toward the compact, scooping it up with both hands. “The mirror’s probably broken. Oh, thanks a lot!” She was almost in tears, but not only because of the compact.
“Whose compact is it?”
“Mine!”
“Where did you get it?”
She turned around so that she kneeled facing me. “I got it here.” Her face was splotched with color, glistened damply. Her eyes had a slanted hardness, and the closed mute look that betrayed her and all the others who knew their guilt. “That’s why I came to get it. It’s mine.” She kept her voice low so she could control it.
“How did it get here?”
“I left it.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. A couple of months ago.”
“When you were visiting Jimmy?”
She hesitated. I could hear the quick breathing in her throat. “No, I wasn’t visiting Jimmy.” There were tear streams on her face, but her eyes were defiant, and I thought I caught a glimpse of something basically vicious.
“I was visiting him.”
“You mean Smithell?”
“Yes. Him. Smithell. Who do you think?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
She laughed shakily. “Oh, you’re smart tonight. You’re so smart tonight. You know what for.”
“I don’t!”
She told me, in the crudest terms possible.
Funny little word, like a big swinging hammer, hitting with such force the impact is not truly realized at once. I reached out, my fingers locking tight about her arm. “You . . . you couldn’t have. You . . .”
“Why not?” she said wildly. “Why not? You think he was too old? I can tell you he wasn’t. I can tell you.” She put her hands over her face to contain the bitter sobs.
I put the compact on the floor and backed away from her, retreating from the swing of the hammer and the crazy hurting. It was almost a minute before I realized my face was distorted in a grimace of disgust.
Concannon was standing close by. “. . . A window around by the side porch,” he was saying. I barely heard him. “Probably left open a few inches. The screen wasn’t hooked. She just lifted the window and crawled in that way. No breakage.”
“Fine,” I said, nodding, not knowing what I was saying. “You’ve done a good job. Go wait in the car. I’ll call you.”
I looked down at her after he had gone, searching for the whore taint, trying to see her as she must be, as Gulliver and others saw her—Stella of the cheap carnal thrust of breast and teasing spread of pelvis. Far off, in a great gray place of mind, I heard my own inner voices trying to talk away the pain.
What did you expect? What? You knew it had to be like this. What did you expect, a padlock and sign, property of Bill Randall? What’s the matter with you? You act like she was something, something. You dumb cop . . .
And above the undercurrent of reasoning the ugly fantasies rioted. I remembered the look of him, and while alive Smithell undeniably had had a certain hard gray handsomeness, his small body without flabbiness. It must not have been unpleasant for her.
Her crying had been brief and she was looking at me now, waiting carefully. She seemed uncertain of me, but her eyes showed no remorse. I knew then how it was with her, and me. Well, it didn’t really matter. It wasn’t important. I tried to think how to talk to her, how to be just as casual about it as she was.
“I . . . I . . . guess I . . . have been thinking kind of wrong about you.”
Her lips parted and for an instant I thought I saw a hint of something in her eyes, deep hurt and loneliness. Then she picked up the compact and the green eyes were indifferent as she inspected her face in the mirror. She removed the pad from inside to touch up her face here and there.
“Don’t let it get you down, Bill,” she said unemotionally.
“Was the mirror broken?” I said. It seemed important.
“Cracked a little.”
“What . . . did you do it for, Stella?”
She looked at me with a funny slanted smile, and I thought she was going to twist the knife deeper. Instead her features softened a little, and she said, “Bill . . . it was Jimmy. I made the mistake of .. . visiting him here one day. The old man wanted me. I knew, the way he looked at me. He came to my place and told me. He would open a savings account for Jimmy. Every time I came to his bed he would put twenty-five dollars in the account for Jimmy.” She paused, frowning a little. “I got took. He used me three times, told me not to come back. The part about the savings account . . .” She looked at me, cynical amusement in her eyes. “It wasn’t true.”
I saw now that maybe she was sorry, that she would try to make me believe it was all because of Jimmy and she hadn’t enjoyed it a bit. I saw that.
“Just a whore job,” I said roughly. “Just another whore job.”
“Bill,” she said, her voice tired. “Bill, please.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Don’t let me offend you. Let’s not talk about nasty things.”
“What,” she said, “do you want from me, Bill? Having a man doesn’t mean much more to me than washing my hair.” She grimaced in bewilderment. “All the time you keep trying to make me like I was something holy in a church.”
“Shut up, you—”
I turned my back on her and went outside, into the night that simmered and was as sticky to move around in as wallpaper paste. I smelled the acrid vomit-stink deep in my nostrils and knew with a sort of harsh empty despair that I would always smell it when I thought of this time, and of her.
I threw a half-smoked cigarette into the grass and went back. She sat primly on the floor with her legs folded under her. Only the fingers laced tightly together in her lap betrayed her tension.
“You don’t look good,” I said. “Illegal entry, in the first place. Then there’s that corpse in the trunk.”
Her mouth pinched together and her face was old with the memory of shock.
“I’m going to be arrested,” she said, with a thin sigh. “I know it. I expect it. Don’t think you’re telling me anything. But I just came to get what’s mine. I didn’t take anything else.”
“Where was the compact?”
“In his bathroom. I had trouble finding it.”
“How did you happen to get down to the basement?”
“I thought he might have something else of mine stored away. He was the souvenir-collecting type.”
“Like what?”
“Oh . . . earrings or something. I’m not so rich I can afford to lose any.”
“I’m sure you just walked out of here one night without them.”
“You’d be surprised what a girl will do after . . .”
“Shut up.”
“All right.”
“You didn’t find anything else?”
“Him.” Her mouth twitched.
“Ever see him before?”
“Good Lord, no.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“As good as I’m going to get. You couldn’t force me to go back in there again and look. I’ll die first.”
“He was murdered, you know.”
She looked at me calmly. “No. I didn’t.”
“How did you get in that storage room?”
“Walked in. Opened the door and walked in.”
I glanced at the door. A padlock hung from a steep loop attached to the frame.
“You were being kind of brave, wandering around an empty house in the dark, weren’t you?” I said.
“If I had known there were any dead men around I wouldn’t have come within miles of the place,” she replied. “I really wanted my compact back. It means . . . a great deal to me.”
“For services rendered, no doubt.”
“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to go to jail now and get it over with,” she said.
“Have you ever been booked before?”
“No.” Hopefully, “Am I going to jail?”
“I don’t know. Go over there and sit on that sofa until I’m ready to think about it.”
She sat down and combed back her mane of hair with her fingers and folded her arms across her breasts. She stared silently at a clock on the opposite wall, waiting for the cuckoo to come out and wink at her.
I heard the sound of hard leather heels on the stone paving outside and Concannon said, “We’ve got a visitor, Sergeant.”
I TURNED AND LOOKED AT KARIS FISHER. SHE WAS WEARING a robe, and moccasin slippers over her bare feet. She looked back at me timidly, her hands loosely clasped before her, like a chastened little girl. Concannon guided her respectfully inside with a hand at her elbow.
“Hello,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“She was standing in the back yard next door,” Concannon said, tilting his head in the direction of the house that stood between the Fisher home and Smithell’s place, “looking down this way.”
“I heard somebody screaming,” Karis said irritably. “I didn’t know you all were here. I thought . . . somebody should find out what happened. The Bishops are on vacation so I knew it didn’t come from there. When I came across the Bishops’ yard I saw a light in the basement here. Because of their hedge I couldn’t see a police car or anything in the street. I was standing by the barbecue pit trying to decide what to do when this man came up behind me. He scared the life out of me.”
Concannon looked at her wryly. “I’m sorry, lady. You scared me too.” He reached to his belt and withdrew a .22 target pistol. “I didn’t know she was carrying this. When she turned around the barrel wasn’t more ’n six inches from me. My belly is still jumping.
“May I have it back now?” Karis said stiffly. Concannon glanced at me and I nodded. Karis took the automatic from his outstretched arm, jacked the shell out of the chamber, removed the magazine and let the slide forward, dropped the automatic into a pocket of her robe. She did this without looking at the gun. She looked around the basement alertly, noticing Stella. Her eyes rested on Stella for a few seconds, then turned toward me. Concannon touched the peak of his cap and went away.
“Did the scream wake you up?” I asked.
She seemed more relaxed now, but her eyes looked tired and there was a tight little stitch at one corner of her mouth. There was something about her that was very different from the Karis Fisher I had seen a few nights before. I realized then that the smile I had liked so much was necessary to counterbalance the slim dark brooding aspect of her. I wondered how I looked to her, what change was apparent since that swift fallen moment when Stella had challenged me to accept her cheapness.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, her voice low. “I was standing at the window in my bedroom when I heard the scream. It was muffled, but enough to make me cringe. It made me want to hide under the bed. And at the same time I knew I had to find out.”
She looked again at Stella.
“What is it, Bill? Who is this girl?”
“Stella Francis. Jimmy Herne’s cousin. I can’t tell you much yet. She found a dead man in that storage room.” I indicated the open door.
“A . . . dead man?”
“A corpse,” I said impatiently. “Dead. You know, not breathing.”
She took a step toward the room.
“Better not. He’s been in the trunk a long time. He looks like a dried green bean.”
She slid back her foot uneasily and her shoulders pulled up slightly beneath the robe. “In the . . . who, Bill? Who is it?”
“How the hell would I know? He looks like practically nobody with his face the way it is.”
She moved closer to me, and her eyes were on my cheek. She touched the rough drying scratches Stella had put there, until I took her hand away. I realized that she wasn’t hurt by my rudeness, but in a few brief seconds had grasped a knowledge of me that I would never have been able to tell. I looked at her and her eyes were full of a fundamental strength and certainty, and shyness.
“Why didn’t Nathan come?” I asked her.
She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, her eyes half-closed. “He . . . isn’t home. He hasn’t come home yet.” And I understood then the standing at the window, with night shrinking around her, and the somber look of beginning fear. It was part of the strengthening awareness we both shared, that had begun at so strange and yet so proper a time.
“Bill,” Stella said in a stricken voice.
I looked at her, startled. Her hands were over her face, her legs pressed tightly together.
Karis went to her, putting a hand on Stella’s shoulder. Stella leaned away from her touch, the compact sliding off her thigh, a polished glimpse of gold between folds of the handkerchief.
Karis reached toward it, leaning over Stella, but Stella grabbed it with both hands and stood up.
Karis spoke. “Bill—when you can, will you come and tell me about it?”
“If you want me to.”
She gave me a sad smile and left, the target gun hanging heavy in one pocket of her robe.
Russ came clumping down the stairs with my camera equipment. I told him where to stack it.
“Take Stella,” I said to Russ.
“What do we book her on?”
Stella looked dully at me. Her mouth was open as if she didn’t have enough will to close it.
“We don’t. You’re taking her home, not downtown.”
Russ looked at me questioningly. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. He had never called me “sir” in his life before.
Stella straightened and tugged at her dress. She held the compact tightly in one hand. “Bill—” she said, her voice full of despair.
“Get her out of here,” I said. I bent over and picked my hat off the floor, went back into the storage room.
The trunk was pushed up against a thin partitioning wall. I opened a door in this wall and found that a furnace occupied most of the space on the other side. Water and steam pipes ran close to the ceiling in the storage room.
Next to the trunk lay a suitcase with a corroded brass lock. I noticed some bright scratches in the greenish corrosion, which could indicate that the suitcase had been opened recently. Directly above the lock of the suitcase hung the L-joint of a water pipe, conspicuously new.
I found nothing inside when I opened the suitcase. But as I brushed my fingertips across the lining I discovered a small slit and a bulkiness underneath. Reaching inside the slit, I withdrew a handful of old newspaper clippings.
I spread some of them out on the concrete floor. One headline in particular caught my eye:
$40,000 STOLEN FROM INDUSTRIAL NATIONAL BANK
IDENTIFYING THE MAN IN THE TRUNK WAS EASY. HIS POCKETS were clean; there was no wallet or anything like that. But the clothing labels had not been removed. We put out tracers and found that his name was Joseph Veilleux, and his last address 649 Darby Street, Troy, New York. He was forty-four years old, five feet nine inches tall, and weighed about one hundred sixty pounds when alive. There were also a couple of pictures which showed him to be a rather sullen-looking man with a thick mustache. The Troy police later sent us a photostat of an expired permit to carry a gun, partially explaining the .38 revolver we had found in his coat pocket.
I was tagging the revolver on my desk when Hugo Kenwick came into the office. Hugo is a grim-faced man with oily gray hair and many brownish splotches on his face. He is always washing his hands together as if something unpleasant clings to the skin. Hugo is a successful mortician and, due to the turn of a political card, our county coroner. We’ve had worse coroners. Hugo is conscientious about the job, and he has a son in medical school who helps him over the rough spots.
He tossed a couple of paper-clipped sheets of paper at me. “Here’s the gory details,” he said loudly. Hugo is a little deaf and hates to miss a word he says. He brushed at a couple of aphid-like insects on his soiled white shirt and added, “God, between the bugs and the heat, how can you guys stand it in here?”
I looked at Phil Naar, who was over by the high open window, talking on the phone to someone at the Troy police department. He turned away slightly and put a finger in his other ear.
“We manage somehow,” I said. I pushed Hugo’s report aside and yawned. It had been a long night and I was beginning to feel the relaxation of pressures along with a sense of satisfaction, as the thing became explainable.
I picked a couple of bugs out of the hair on my forearms, said, “I don’t have time to wade through all that, Hugo. Give me a summary.”
The coroner settled back against the door frame, his damp hands feeling each other. “Well, he’s been dead six months to a year. That’s about as close as I can narrow it down.”
“He’s been dead nine months,” I interrupted. “He checked into the Crown Hotel last October, stayed two days, checked out. He left his bag with the hotel people, but never came back for it. He disappeared completely. Into a trunk in Smithell’s basement.”
Hugo nodded. “The carving knife in him probably cut the hepatic vein. I can’t be sure. There wasn’t much to him. Just a dried bag of bones. Bacteria in the colon took care of his insides. Total decomposition was prevented because the trunk was in a nice dry place near the furnace. An interesting case of mummification.”
Phil hung up the phone and came over to my desk. He flipped over a few pages of the pad he had been scribbling on, slipped on his reading glasses. Sweat drops clung to the underside of his bristly chin.
“Here’s what I got,” he said eagerly. “Veilleux was a guard at Industrial National Bank. Had been since 1937. He continued to work there after the embezzlement three-and-a-half years ago. Eight months later, after the hue and cry had died down, he quit his job. Said he was going into business for himself. Instead, he left Troy. Nobody there has heard a word from him since. He was the loner type, no close friends, lived simply. He wasn’t acquainted with Olson other than to nod good-morning to him.”
“Looks like he had a lead nobody else knew about,” I said. “I guess we’ll never find out what it was. So he left Troy, and patiently tracked Olson for almost three years.”
“What was his angle?” Phil wondered. “Blackmail? Or did he want what was left of the loot for himself? If he wanted the reward money all he had to do was tip the FBI and let them do the work.”
I shrugged. Hugo said, “Who did the job on this Veilleux?”
“Leland Smithell. That was the name he used in Cheyney. But Smithell was really Richard Olson, a minor vice-president with the Industrial National Bank in Troy, New York. He managed the theft of approximately forty thousand bucks and absconded. Bank officials didn’t know about it for three days. The trail was cold when the FBI took over. The case is still open. At least, it was until tonight.”
I handed Hugo some of the clippings Smithell had meticulously saved. “Compare those newspaper photos of Richard Olson with the pictures of Smithell. They don’t look too much alike at first glance, but notice the shape of their heads, facial contours, the prominent ears. We phoned the FBI in St. Louis. They’ll make the final decision.”
Hugo nodded, looking at the pictures, then leafing through the newspaper accounts of the embezzlement.
“You think Veilleux tracked Smithell all the way to Cheyney?”
“Apparently. He may have threatened to expose Smithell if Smithell didn’t pay off heavily. Smithell wouldn’t give up his new life easily, after all the trouble he went to. He must have used the first weapon that was handy, a carving knife from the kitchen, and stuffed the body into that trunk. Then he discovered getting a body out of that neighborhood wouldn’t be easy. So he left it where it was. The hot dry air in the basement through the winter kept the corpse from smelling very much. He kept the storage room locked. Veilleux was as safe from discovery there as he would be anywhere.”
Hugo replaced the clippings and pictures on my desk. “Where’d you dig up these?”
“In a suitcase beside the trunk. The suitcase probably held the money at some time or other.”
“Sort of a dead end after all, isn’t it? With Smithell, uh, Olson, already dead?” Hugo looked at his watch. “Four-fifteen. Guess I’ll say good night. I’ve already lost four hours’ sleep on this thing.” He put his hand in front of his face to stop a yawn and drifted out.
Phil, watching him leave, said, “That’s one thing about Hugo. A simple explanation always makes him happy.” He sat on the edge of my desk and picked up the match folder I had found in the storage room. “‘Quality Plumbers. No job too small or too large. We do only A-1 work.’ So who gives a damn?” He dropped the match book back on the desk. “What did you find out from them, Bill?”
“One of their boys replaced that leaky L-joint which caused the corrosion on the lock. The work was finished a couple of days before Smithell was murdered,” I said, trying to massage the ache from my eyes. “I talked with the plumber who made the repair. He said Smithell stayed with him every second, then locked the door carefully when he left. He also says there was no suitcase in the room.”
“So it seems Smithell could have brought the money in the suitcase, then,” Phil said. “I wonder how much?”
I put my hand on the folder containing Smithell’s bank books and account statements—his financial history in Cheyney. “We’ve accounted for something less than twenty-six grand. You can start guessing from about fifteen thousand dollars on down.”
“What do you think he did with that fifteen? He didn’t make any deposits in either account during the two days between the plumber’s visit and his death. Nordin Kaylor says business has never been better, so he didn’t need quick money for any crisis there. Maybe there wasn’t any money in the suitcase. Maybe he spent it long ago.”
“Then he didn’t need to hide the suitcase while the plumber was there. Unless on account of those press clippings. But why would he cache his press clippings in an otherwise empty suitcase? I think the man was an egoist. He’d want some of the money around where he could get it out and look at it now and then. Just to remind himself how clever he’d been. Like the clippings. Symbols of his master mind. He sure as hell didn’t need to spend it. Not with the monthly dividends he received for his share of Kaylor’s automobile business.”
Phil chuckled, cleaned his glasses with a wrinkled handkerchief and put them away. There were heavy dark moons under his eyes. “Now you’ve lost me. Most of that psychology stuff is too deep for me. You must have had a lot of it.”
“Three semesters. I quit school after my sophomore year.”
“What for?”
“So I could be a cop, of course.”
Phil snorted politely. “And I suppose you’ve never regretted it?”
His tactless questions irritated me slightly, like dirt under my fingernails, but I was too tired to evade them. “Sure, I’ve regretted it. I’ve had nine years to regret it. I was just a kid then. I wanted excitement. Instead of riding out the dull spots like most kids I quit, and picked up my badge. Christ, look around you, Phil. For headquarters, we’ve got the oldest public building in this town. The floors are buckled. The walls are grimy. The lighting is bad. The whole place smells like a waterfront mission. There aren’t enough fans to go around so in summer the heat bakes the juice out of us. And the man I work for doesn’t make things any nicer.” I decided I was talking too much and put a cigarette into my mouth, then removed it and dropped it in the wastebasket. My hands were restless. “That’s enough bitch session for one evening,” I said. “Let’s get back to work.”
Phil thumbed aimlessly through the account books. “I don’t suppose there was much chance Smithell was being blackmailed,” he said.
“Look what happened to Veilleux.”
“Yeah.” Phil slid off the desk and went to the window. It had become perceptibly lighter outside as dawn neared. The air was cooler and the bug swarms around the light globes had thinned. For me the best part of the day was coming, early morning with sunlight a pale wash on the faces of the buildings, coming through the high windows to slant orange against the dirty walls. For me dawn was the dispatcher nodding sleepily as the speaker issued a broken crackle of static, the long walk past the cleared benches and down swabbed halls, the cup of coffee next door and the feel of stubble on my chin. It was the time for forgetting, for pushing back into a far place of mind the long dreary hours and the shambling people, and the hopelessness they wore along with their shoddy clothes.
Phil picked up the phone and dialed. He put one foot on the radiator and rested one elbow on the butt of the revolver he wore on his belt.
“Russ? What are you guys doing? You haven’t found anything yet?” A pause. Then Phil looked at me, curled a hand over the mouthpiece. “No sign of any money anywhere else in the house.”
“Call ’em off. They’ve been out there two hours.”
“Okay,” Phil said. “You guys come in. Lock up tight.” He hooked the receiver.
“Well, what the hell did Smithell do with the money?” he said.
He was looking at me, not hopefully, but with a tired grouchy expression as if he had been asking questions like that forever and no one had ever bothered to answer. This time I had an answer. I could have forgotten then what I had learned in the past two hours, what must be true. The rest of the money would never be accounted for, and we would be subject to the fishy eye of the Federal men for a couple of days before they departed. Maybe we wouldn’t find the money anyway. It would make things a lot easier, if I just forgot. After nine years as a cop and far too many compromises with myself I didn’t shine very brightly any more, but if I tried to ignore the reasons that the money was gone there would be nothing left of me at all. I knew. As I looked at Phil to tell him I felt a small warning that I had never really known trouble before compared to what was going to come and, in a way, I was glad of it.
“I don’t think he did anything with it,” I said. “Someone stole it.”
Phil looked strangely at me. “You think Jimmy Herne knew about the money?”
“Maybe. If he knew about it, sooner or later maybe he’d make up his mind to steal it. Thinking about all that cash in the basement could wear away his resistance.”
Phil cleaned wax out of one ear with his little finger. “But why would he bother with those other trinkets—the watch and the cuff links, the small change from Smithell’s wallet—when he had that much money in his hands? And would he have to kill Smithell to get into the storage room?”
“That’s what I mean.”
Phil came back to my desk. “He could have broken in, or got the key some night when Smithell was asleep, and blown town with the suitcase. With a few hours’ head start he could have been halfway to Mexico before Smithell woke up.” His eyes were troubled.
“Sure. But if I knew Smithell,” I said, “and I knew about the money in the basement, I’d wonder about it, wonder why it was there. I might decide he came by it illegally. In which case, some of it might as well be mine. If I underestimated Smithell, as a lot of people did, I’d put it up to him, not knowing he can react in a nasty way under such circumstances. To my surprise I might be forced to defend myself and hit him too hard, so that he died. So the money would be mine by default but now I would have another problem—murder. Knowing all about Jimmy Herne I would take Smithell’s watch and pocket money and other things and set the kid up for a frame. Then I would grab the money and leave. I’d realize there would be a good chance Jimmy would run like hell when he found Smithell’s body. Even if he stuck it out Jimmy would have a tough time with the cops. In time he might even be persuaded to confess to something he never did at all.”
I watched Phil, to see how he would receive it. I thought I knew him as well as anybody could. Long ago he must have accepted with a kind of bewilderment the savage world which didn’t want him or his law and had gradually evolved into a cop who worked hard and competently, for no good reason. Like others, he felt pity sometimes, and anger sometimes, but always with some detachment. His face got dirty and sweat trickled down his back and his feet ached, as with other cops, and he felt irritation with his job now and then and dreamed of the ten days off each year and casually despised most politicians. He had found the pace that was suitable to him and had followed it. He wasn’t a do-gooder, or a trouble-maker, or a tough guy. He wasn’t particularly ambitious. We got along with each other, without affection, neither of us finding anything of interest in the other. We got along, and I thought I knew the book on him.
But now there was something in his eye, a coldness, a forming anger he probably wasn’t even aware of yet. Maybe he never would be. But it was an indication, something on which to base the dissatisfaction I had noticed in him lately. There was something changing in him and maybe it was at the worst possible time, so close to retirement.
“You don’t think Jimmy killed Smithell?” he said cautiously, knowing the way the trouble would breed, because it had been seeded deep and long ago. But there remained that something in his eye, that cold slow anger, as if he could see Jimmy Herne lying dead in the jail.
I said, “Jimmy never killed anybody. He’s not even responsible for his own death.”
He took out a cigarette and lit it. There was a tremor in his hands that he stilled. He screwed his face tight around the cigarette, puffing quickly.
“What do we do now, Bill?”
“We’ll have to tell Gulliver.”
“He went home half an hour ago. Are you going to wake him up to tell him?”
“I guess not. In the morning, after I get some sleep. I’ll be able to think better.”
The tremor he had quieted seemed to have spread inside him, so that he sat with a look of effort on his face. It seemed as if there still remained something to be said, and we both knew it.
“You want me to go with you?” he muttered.
“You want to go?”
He didn’t answer me. He didn’t look at me.
“It’s my responsibility,” I said heavily. “I’ll tell him.”
“Your responsibility,” Phil said derisively, dropping the cigarette on the floor and crushing it with his foot.
“He was only doing what he thought was right. He thought Jimmy was guilty.”
“Do you think you’re going to change his mind?”
“I’ll tell him what we found out. He can’t overlook it.”
Phil said bitterly, “Quit kidding yourself. You know what’s going to happen.”
“Go on home, Phil,” I said wearily.
I heard him walk, alone, down the hall, stop at the water cooler, and drink.
I POUNDED ON THE SCREEN DOOR OF THE ROOMING HOUSE AT 62 Davis Street for two minutes before a skinny character wearing a pair of striped shorts and nothing else came loping down the stairs, scowling fiercely.
“Whadda hell you want?” he said. “We got people tryna sleep in here and you waken ’em up.”
“I want to see Stella.
“You crazy? You know what time it is? It ain’t even five o’clock yet!”
“I know what time it is.” I used the badge, although I didn’t want to. “Get her up.”
“Aw,” he muttered, “cop. Crappo.” He unhooked the screen, yawning. “You waid down here an’ I’ll get her.”
I waited just inside the hall. I could hear her coming down the stairs, rapidly at first, as if she were taking the steps two at a time, then slower. In the dim hallway she seemed like a shadow until her head moved slightly and clear gray light from the open door showered over the ruffled blonde hair and one cheek.
“Bill?” she said, and I didn’t answer right away because I was having some funny trouble with my breathing. She walked closer to me, until I could see her face.
“Bill, did you change your mind about—”
I raised my hand and took hold of one arm gently. “No. I didn’t come to arrest you.”
I could have drawn her to me, then, but I waited just too long and she pulled away from my hand, turning her face away from the door. There was no expression in her eyes.
Inside me I felt a hard spot of hopeless anger. I thought, what’s the use? I can’t tell her about Jimmy. I don’t know why it matters, because she’s no damn good, but I can’t tell her and watch her indifference harden into hate.
“I guess you got into trouble because of me,” she said.
“We had some talk about it. I won my point.”
“Thanks, Bill. Was there something else . . .?”
“We did a lot of checking last night. We found out that Smithell was a bank employee a few years back. He had another name then. He skipped out with about forty thousand bucks and eventually turned up in Cheyney. The man in the trunk tried for a long time to find Smithell. When he did, he was killed.”
I couldn’t get myself to go on and give her my theory about Jimmy having been framed.
But she was just tired enough to accept what she had heard without too much astonishment. Her lips curved slightly. “Funny, isn’t it? Everyone thought it was so noble of him to take a chance with Jimmy. A poor kid whose greatest offense was pilfering. But Smithell was a bank robber and a murderer, you tell me—and everybody thought he was so wonderful.” She looked at me soberly. “I have to go back to bed, Bill. I have to be at the cafe at seven.”
This time I caught her and held her as close to me as her resisting body would allow.
“Some day,” she said deliberately. “I’m going to make you understand about Jimmy. I’ll prove he killed no one. I’ll prove you cops killed him.”
“Oh,” I said. “So that’s it.”
She twisted violently away from me, hair flopping over her forehead. “Let me alone,” she said in an ugly voice. “Go away.”
“You won’t let him die. You have to hate me, because you think I could have done something. But—”
She turned and walked away from me, toward the stairs, ducking her head slightly to one side as she pushed hair off her forehead.
I followed her. “Stella!”
She turned on the stairs and looked at me. I couldn’t see her face well. I thought I saw contempt there. And I thought I saw something else.
I slammed the screen door on my way out. Hard.
Why did she have to feel sorry for me?