Half a dozen reporters had cornered Mr. Goudge, of the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Committee, and were asking him (a) did he know that his daughter had just been pulled out of the river, (b) could he suggest why his daughter had jumped into the river, and (c) did he have any statement to make regarding his daughter’s act and any possible connection with the series of crimes that had taken place in Jackson.
Mr. Goudge upheld a fine old tradition, and utterly delighted the reporters, by setting his jaw hard and announcing grimly, “Gentlemen, I no longer have a daughter.”
As far as the Committee’s plans were concerned, he had nothing to say, save that it was hardly fair of the Journal to refer to it as a “vigilantes mob.”
At that point the reporters caught sight of Helene and Malone, on their way to the hotel, and set after them in full cry.
Malone yelped, “No you don’t!” grabbed Helene by the elbow, and ran, calling back over his shoulder, “You can’t talk to me till I get my clothes changed.” He had dragged her into Wilk’s Garage, behind two parked trucks, through the back door, up the alley and into the rear entrance of the hotel before the astonished press had time to catch its collective breath.
“A lot of nerve,” he growled, “wanting to interview a man when he’s covered with mud.”
“Usually the procedure is reversed,” Helene said acidly, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.
“For that matter,” the little lawyer said, starting slowly up the stairs, “why did the double-damned idiot jump in the river? Especially,” he added, “right at that particular moment.”
“Didn’t you ever go to the movies when you were a boy? The girl always jumped in the river after her old man had turned her out. You couldn’t expect much originality from a girl like Arlene.”
Malone sniffed. “Well, I wish she’d waited five minutes longer,” he complained. “Though even so, I doubt if— What the hell’s the matter?”
Helene had stopped suddenly, one hand flung against her white cheek, staring at a step just ahead of them. “Malone!”
“Well, what?”
“That’s Jake’s necktie!”
Malone stared at it for a moment, then picked it up from the corner of the stair.
“It’s one of those silly-looking hand-woven ones. I’d know it anywhere. Malone, how did it get here?”
The little lawyer turned the necktie over and over in his hand as though he expected to find a code message written on it.
“Why didn’t we see it when we came downstairs this noon?” he wanted to know.
“Because it was way over in the corner. You wouldn’t see it going downstairs, you’d have to be going up.” She drew a quick breath. “I don’t care why we didn’t see it, I want to know what it was doing there. Malone, where’s Jake?”
“Shut up,” he said. His voice was like the crack of a whip.
It worked. After a moment she took out a cigarette and lit it with fingers that trembled only a little.
“Malone, he wasn’t dressed when we left him. And we weren’t gone such a long time. Something happened that made him get up and dress in a hurry, and go out by the back stairs.” She took a deep drag on the cigarette. “He was in such a hurry that he left with his necktie in his hand, intending to put it on on the way. His shoelaces must have been untied, too, I’ve seen Jake dress to go to a fire when the hook-and-ladder company went by the window.” She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it with her high heel. “Then in his hurry he dropped it here.”
“Damned good reasoning,” Malone said absent-mindedly. He scratched the back of his neck. “Then he left the hotel down these back stairs. I thought so all along. Otherwise someone in the lobby would have seen him.” He paused, scowled. “That means he didn’t leave the hotel alone.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“Because,” the little lawyer said patiently, handing the necktie to Helene, who held it as though it might turn and bite her, “he wouldn’t have known about the back staircase. We wouldn’t have known about it if Jerry Luckstone hadn’t told us where to find it, and where it led. Even if he’d stumbled on it by accident—which is unlikely since you have to open a door to get to it—he wouldn’t have known where it led. So someone must have come up here, routed him out, and gone with him down these stairs.”
“But who? Why?”
Malone shook his head.
She looked at him blankly. He realized how very pale, how very weary she was. He suspected that she had slept little, if any, the night before. Her cheeks were almost marblelike, her eyes two great pools of blue shadows. She turned and started up the stairs again.
“I always knew Jake would lose that necktie sometime,” she said coldly.
At the door of her room she paused a moment, one hand on the doorknob. “Let’s meet for dinner in half an hour. Do you think you can get all that mud off in half an hour?”
“If I can’t,” Malone said gallantly, “I’ll be here anyway.”
He closed the door of his room behind him, caught hold of the corner of the bed, and leaned on it for a minute, breathing deeply. A curious monster, evidently originally dressed in white, now covered with half-dried mud, weeds, and green slime, looked at him from the mirror above the dresser.
“I never felt better in my life,” Malone assured himself.
He clung there for a moment, then threw himself on the bed, face down, his arms above his head. For five minutes he sprawled there, his eyes closed, not thinking of anything at all, not thinking of Jake, nor of Ellen McGowan’s face as she lay across the desk, nor of the wet hair blinding him as he struggled in the river, nor of the empty coffin they would dig out of a Jackson, Wisconsin, grave that night.
At last he rose and regarded the monster in the mirror with loathing.
“A good thing you didn’t run into a photographer,” he told it. He could imagine the caption. “Malone the Merman.”
He stripped to the skin and commenced an involved bathing process in the tiny washbowl. The clean water on his skin improved his spirits. By the time he began hunting for clean shirts and socks, he felt almost normal.
By the time he finished tying his shoelaces he was singing a highly improvised version of “Oh, what a time I had with Minnie the mermaid—down at the bottom of the sea—”
Helene had decided to show the world how she felt by wearing a dress that was almost flame-colored, a light, bright color of an unnamable shade. If there was such a thing as “pale red,” Malone decided, that would be it. He stood in the lobby admiring it as she came down the stairs. It was a filmy little thing, without enough decoration to put in your right eye, not a dinner dress and not a daytime dress, but something in between and indefinable, exactly the right dress to wear in Jackson, Wisconsin, on a summer evening. Her hair was sleek and smooth on her head, and coiled on the back of her neck like freshly pulled taffy. Her lips were painted a red just the barest shade darker than the dress.
He hoped that they were being noticed as he led her into the dining room of the General Andrew Jackson House.
“Malone, it’s funny he didn’t leave a note,” she said as she sat down at one of the tables.
“Who?” He was looking at the menu.
“Jake. Of course.”
Malone said, “Maybe he’d forgotten you knew how to read. Pay attention to your dinner.”
The General Andrew Jackson House offered a choice of roast beef, roast pork, pork chops, and liver and bacon. Malone muttered something about people who came to the country in hopes of finding good food, and worried through the meal with the help of beer brought at ten-minute intervals from the bar.
Jerry Luckstone was waiting for them in the lobby by the time they had finished.
“I got the order to open up the grave,” he said in a low voice. “But you’ve got to come along.” He looked anxious. “I don’t know what’s going to happen if you’re wrong.”
“I’m never wrong,” Malone said matter-or-factly. He glanced at Helene, pictured her left alone in the hotel to think about Jake. “You don’t mind if she joins us, do you?”
Jerry Luckstone glanced at him, understood what Malone meant, and said, “No, of course not. Come along, my car’s outside.”
Helene ran upstairs to get a wrap. While she was gone Jerry Luckstone fidgeted for a minute, looking at Malone out of the corner of one eye.
“I’m not going to ask any questions,” he said at last, “I’m just assuming that you know what you’re doing.”
Malone sighed. “I do. I’m going to find your murderer for you. And not,” he added, “for the sake of justice. I just want to make sure Jake doesn’t have a murder rap hanging over him when we find him.” He emphasized the “when.”
Jerry Luckstone frowned. “There hasn’t been any word about him, not from anywhere.”
“I know it,” Malone said. He heard Helene’s heels on the stairs. “We’ll talk about that later.”
The sun had gone down, and the twilight had begun to create strange little purple caves under the elm trees by the time they reached the Jackson Riverside Cemetery, an over-landscaped patch of ground on the outskirts of town. Jerry Luckstone parked his sedan halfway up one of the drives, and they walked on up a short rise. It was very shadowy and very still.
There was a small group waiting for them: Charlie Hausen and several of his assistants, Sheriff Kling and his deputy, Joe Ryan, and the cemetery’s caretaker, a cheerful, toothless individual who turned out to be Buttonholes’ brother.
Sheriff Kling scowled by way of greeting. “Have you any idea of what you expect to find?”
“I think so,” Jerry Luckstone said confidently. His brow was deeply furrowed.
The sheriff shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it’s your funeral.” He grinned broadly. “Or vice versa.”
Charlie Hausen blew his nose loudly, and tucked a large blue handkerchief into his back pants pocket. “All right, boys,” he said briskly. “Dig.”
Malone yawned and looked away, to inspect a small, neat granite headstone just above the field of operations:
HAROLD MCGOWAN
b 1869d 1937
Jerry Luckstone was looking at it too. He touched the little lawyer on the arm.
“Malone, there’s something wrong. 1937 was only four years ago. Presumably Ellen McGowan started her embezzlement on her father’s death. But”—he paused, figured a minute—“if she started appropriating money six years ago—”
“That discrepancy in dates,” Malone said shortly, “is what convinced me I was right.” He refused to say anything more, but stood looking critically at the polished granite stone. It was refined, all right, but entirely too small and too plain for his taste. He preferred something really nice, with angels and sheltering wings and doves.
The old marble stone near it was more to his liking, showing a decorative pair of clasped hands and a drooping rose, the latter beginning to disappear under the wear and tear of the elements. He stooped down to examine the inscription.
LUCIUS MCGOWAN
b Jackson Wis 1840
d Jackson Wis 1887
R. I. P.
Next to it was another, similar one. This one did have a dove carved just under its arch. Malone admired it for a moment.
WATCHFUL MCGOWAN
b Elmira N Y 1841
d Jackson Wis 1870
Fond wife of Lucius, loving
mother of Harold M
Harold was evidently a motherless child, Malone reflected. Not even a stepmother, as far as he could see. There was no stone indicating that Lucius McGowan had taken a second wife. In fact—he counted rapidly on his fingers— Ellen McGowan’s father had been left an orphan at the age of eighteen.
Helene had found another, older stone, and was trying to make out its well-worn inscription in the gathering dusk. Malone knelt beside her and lighted a match.
AILANTHUS MCGOWAN
b Burlington Vt 1817
d Antietam 1862
There were some words, almost entirely obliterated, having to do with honor and glory.
A change in the sounds just back of him made him wheel around. A great pile of sod had been accumulated by the driveway, and Charlie Hausen’s assistants were beginning to hoist the coffin out of its grave.
“Lift ’er out, boys,” Charlie Hausen said. A moment later he added, “I told you those plated coffins wouldn’t ever rust,” with professional pride.
“There’s something in there, though, all right,” one of the assistants said, puffing. “It’s not so heavy, but I can tell.”
Jerry Luckstone frowned and looked anxiously at Malone.
“Open it up,” the little lawyer said hoarsely.
There was a hideous, wrenching sound as the lid of the coffin was pried open. Helene put her hands over her ears and looked away.
For just a moment, Malone didn’t dare look. He heard Charlie’s assistant say triumphantly, “There, I told you so. Told you it wasn’t empty.”
He opened his eyes. There was a skeleton inside the coffin.
Charlie Hausen and Sheriff Kling had turned accusingly to the young district attorney. “Well, Jerry,” the sheriff began in an ominously quiet tone.
“Just a minute,” Malone said. He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice, but it bubbled up in spite of himself. “Just a minute.” He looked thoughtfully into the open coffin. “In the first place, that body was never embalmed.”
“That’s right,” Charlie Hausen said slowly. After a moment he said, “Well, it isn’t my fault. He was shipped here from California and we never opened it up. Held the services in Ellie McGowan’s house, with the coffin closed.” He blew his nose again. “Just the same though, he’s there.”
“Oh no he isn’t,” Malone said very quietly. “That isn’t Ellen McGowan’s father. Because, whoever it is, that’s the skeleton of a woman!”