Gus Blake looked silently at him.
“Reason
to?”
“Okay, Gus. Keep your shirt on. I’m just a dumb country cop, but there’s some things I’d take my Bible oath on. Don’t crowd me, now, Gus. If you’re in a hole, I’ll do my best to get you out. But if I’m wrong—just get this, Gus— if I’m wrong, so help me God, I’ll hang you higher’n Absalom if I have to do it with my own hands. Now shut up and come on. I want to look around here, and I want to get at that kid out there before that fat-backed county attorney of John Maynard’s throws him in the can and everybody starts yellin’ race prejudice. He may be guilty and if he is he’s goin’ to hang, but till somebody proves it, it don’t make sense to me.”
He kicked the swivel chair toward the desk. “Go on, Gus. Get goin’. I’m lockin’ this room up—nobody’s goin’ to paw around these papers ’cept me. Get all this straight, Gus. I been pushed around longer than I like it. Old Doc here was a sort of friend of mine. See?”
“Sure,” Gus said. “I see.”
He went over to the door, bewildered to a state of semi shock. Either Swede Carlson was drunk or he was, and he knew neither of them was. He had never spoken five consecutive words to the murdered man. He wouldn’t have recognized him, dead, down there in the cellar, any more than he would have recognized him alive on Main Street. He tried to think what the man really looked like, alive, without his head caved in and the black spidery veil covering his face. A vague image came into his mind of Doc Wernitz standing alone on the curb in front of the bank in Courthouse Square at noon one day. Whoever Gus was with had nudged his elbow and said, “That’s Doc Wernitz. You know. Hi, there, Doc. How’s tricks?” As the image cleared and focused Gus could see a sort of invisible little man, alone on the curb there, in straight gray topcoat, thick-lensed spectacles, neat-looking in a dry, ageless sort of way, who touched the brim of his gray hat and said, “No tricks.” Gus remembered that now, and remembered that hearing him say, “No tricks,” he’d turned to look at him again, thinking it was a pretty good answer to people who still went on saying, “How’s tricks,” and especially good in Wernitz’s line of business.
He could not remember, now, who it was with him, and so far as he could recall that was the last time he’d seen Doc Wernitz until he saw him on the cellar floor, dead as a staved-in mackerel. As for any reason he himself could have— The big Swede was bats. He shrugged his shoulders as he crossed the room.
Or am I bats myself?
he wondered. He went out into the passage and stopped short. Something had happened. When he had-first got to the house, and again when he followed Carlson back up from the basement, he’d seen the young cop standing at the foot of the stairs by the Filipino boy who’d found the body. Buzz Rodriguez had been sitting on the stairs, his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, moaning incoherently. Gus had recognized him as one of Wernitz’s service mechanics. He’d seen him in a dozen places servicing the fantastically elaborate machines, and sometimes seen him three and four times on a big night at the Sailing Club when the jack pots were falling, come to refill the window and tube of the machines. Something had happened now. The young cop was literally propping Rodriguez against the wall. His face was gray as ashes, his head wobbling forward. Gus turned to Carlson. He was pulling the door of Wernitz’s office shut and talking at the same time.
“Get Mac in here to seal this door, Corbin. I’m leavin’ the lights on and I want him to sit right here till I get back. Step on it, hear?”
He jerked around to the stairs. The young officer’s red face gleamed with sweat. He looked undecided from Carlson to the limp body on his hands.
“Sure, Chief. But this guy’s drunk. I don’t know—”
Carlson strode across the hall. “What do you mean? This boy don’t drink.” He picked Rodriguez’s slumping body up in one powerful arm, gave him one look, and swung around. “Good God, son, this boy’s not drunk, he’s half dead. Get an ambulance out here. There’s a phone in the kitchen—step on it, son. Out there.”
He stuck a square forefinger off toward the back of the house. “Upstairs, Gus—get some blankets. This boy’s hurt bad. I told that bas—”
Gus cleared the stairs. A door was open at the right. The room there was empty except for an iron folding cot in one corner, but two worn army blankets were folded across the foot. He grabbed them and ran back. Swede Carlson let the boy down on the floor and wrapped him up. His thick fingers moved gently over the back of the boy’s head.
“He was slugged, too, down there in the basement. Like Wernitz.” His face was hard, his colorless eyes set. He got to his feet. “It’s a damn good thing I didn’t let ’em throw him in the can. He could ’a been dead by mornin’. You would have had a scapegoat.” He looked down at Rodriguez, scowling heavily, and went past him to the back of the house. “Mac,” he called. “Come in here.”
Mac was a short, wiry detective in a double-breasted bright-blue suit.
“Seal this door up, and watch it. Nobody goes in there. That means nobody.” Carlson motioned to the Philippine boy on the floor. “You know Buzz Rodriguez here. When the ambulance comes, Corbin’s to go in with him. I’m phoning Stryker to meet him at the hospital and stick with him—all the time. Maybe the kid knows who hit him. I don’t want any son of a bitch tellin’ me he’s dead before he can tell it.” He put his hand on the door and turned back. “Is there a doctor in Smithville we know don’t play the slot machines, Mac?”
The detective went on sealing up the door of Doc Wernitz’s room. He shook his head. “Now you know none of them got time to fool around, Chief.” He sounded to Gus like a man stepping around a wounded polecat on a narrow path.
If Carlson’s reply was audible it was not audible to Gus. He followed into the kitchen passage, where a door opened on the cellar stairs.
“Watch him, Blake.” The detective in the bright-blue suit spoke cautiously without turning as Gus went by him. “Murders burn him up. Gets mean—meaner’n hell. Get the Maynard girl out of here, if I was you.”
Gus quickened his step, and slowed down deliberately.
He’d let Connie Maynard off one part of this murder case— the part down in the basement. He knew she was upset anyway. But if experience was what she wanted, she could get the rest of it the way other reporters did and as it came. He grinned without amusement. In front of the cellar door he stopped, listening. Swede Carlson was talking on the phone. “And get hold of Doctor Adams. Tell him it’s important, hear?”
The phone went back into place. Carlson was talking to someone in the kitchen. The answer quietly disposed of Constance Maynard, for the time being.
“Outside in her car, Chief. She don’t like kitchens, she says. Don’t know anything about ’em. She’s goin’ to wait for Blake.”
Carlson came back into the passage. He gave Gus a bleak smile.
“The lady’s—”
He stopped as the phone rang. “Hold it, George. I’ll answer that.” Gus heard him say, “Hello,” and a silence, and then Carlson’s voice again, heavily ironic. “Tell Mr. Maynard Miss Maynard and Mr. Blake are both here. Both doin’ nicely. I’ll tell Miss Maynard her father’s worried about her.” He put the phone down and let his breath out slowly. “George, go tell Miss Maynard her father wants her to come home now. Tell her Mr. Blake says he can get along all right from here on without her.”
As he came back Gus moved aside for him to open the cellar door. “Watch the old blood pressure, Chief,” he said, grinning. “It boils the brains.”
“Uh-huh,” Swede Carlson said. “Funny thing, when I get blood-mad’s when I start makin’ my big mistakes. I guess that was okay, too. It was a colored boy’s voice. I guess John Maynard is anxious, maybe.” He took his watch out. “And it ain’t late. It’s only ten minutes past twelve. She must ’a been out later ’n this several times in her young life.”
He opened the cellar door. “Now the rest of ’em are out of the way I want a good look around down here. Comin’? Watch these steps, they’re carryin’ weight with the two of us.”
Connie Maynard started violently
and whirled around to the man standing in the semidarkness beside her car. She hadn’t heard him come out of the kitchen door or cross the yard or seen him till he spoke her name. She shot her hand up to her mouth, stifling an involuntary gasp. He was a policeman. He was saying, “Miss Maynard.” She stared at him in the dim light with a speechless, somehow extraordinary horror.
“Miss Maynard!”
Connie Maynard gripped the wheel tightly. “I—I’m sorry!” she said. For one dazed and dizzy instant she had thought the policeman had come for her. She shook her head and pushed her hair quickly back from her forehead. “I’m sorry. I must have been asleep.” She hadn’t been asleep, unless it was a sort of hypnotic slumber, induced by the darkness all around her, outside and in.
“Your father called up to see if you were still here,” the officer said. “Chief Carlson said to tell you Mr. Blake could go in with him. They may be quite a while yet. He says you better go on in.”
“Thanks.” She had to moisten her lips before she could say it casually enough. “Tell Mr. Blake I’ll wait just the same.” She tried to think of something to add to make it seem amusing if determined, but there was nothing. She was still too stunned by the effect his appearance had had, coming just when it did, in the rapidly mounting horror building itself up in her mind.
Murder—I’d be a murderer, too,
She was saying that to herself in the dark recesses of her mind just as he spoke her name, so profoundly absorbed that his abrupt appearance had made her lose the connection between herself waiting for Gus in the substantial reality of the Wernitz house and yard and spring to the insubstantial reality she herself had built up.
She ran her tongue over her dry lips again. If Janey Blake wanted to kill herself, it wasn’t her fault. If Janey was fool enough to get herself in the kind of jam she was in and couldn’t think of any better way out of it than a handful of sleeping-pills, it was no problem of hers. If it was anybody’s fault but Janey Blake’s, it wasn’t Constance Maynard’s. It was her mother’s. Her mother ought to know better than to leave her sleeping-pills in the drawer by her bed where anybody who wanted them could help herself. Or her mother’s doctor’s fault, for letting her have a whole bottle full because he was going away for a month and she’d asked for them and he couldn’t refuse John Maynard’s wife. He had no right to give them to her, and she had no right to leave them there. She always made them lock up their guns when they came in from duck- or squirrel-shooting, and insisted that all antiseptics for external use be hidden away on a top shelf, and the most seductive lethal invention of them all she left in her table drawer, along with her reading-glasses and the box of yellow cleansing tissues. And she talked about them—she was always passing out one or two, to help somebody sleep.
To sleep for a single night, not forever. Connie Maynard shivered and dug her hands deeper into her fur-lined pockets. Her jaw hardened stubbornly. Nobody could blame her if anything happened to Janey. She happened to know Janey was in an awful jam. She happened to go upstairs because Gus sent her to see if Janey was all right after the fantastic scene she’d made, winning the jack pot down there in the playroom. Who would even know she’d seen Janey there, the bottle of sleeping-pills in her hand? Nobody would ever know. Nobody but herself. If Janey took the pills and didn’t wake up, nobody would ever hold Connie Maynard responsible.
She jammed down the handle of the door and swung her feet around and out onto the hard ground.
Nobody but yourself, Connie.
It burned in her mind. She’d know it. She could never forget it. She stamped her feet on the ground to bring some life and warmth back into them. She’d always know it. She’d always know she was responsible. She paced back and forth on the uneven ground. It was the darkness that was doing this to her—the darkness, and the shock of her first contact with murder, and the frightening, horrible emptiness of it; the grim-faced, hard-eyed man brushing her aside, and her sitting out there by herself and seeing them cart the body away as if it was anything common and ordinary—like the ad somebody ran in the
Gazette—Dead Horses Removed.
It was sordid and terrible, and morbid. The whole atmosphere reeked with morbidity and death. If only she’d insisted on staying inside with Gus—
She shot her head up, listening. Somewhere not far away a siren had begun its low, warning whine, rising slowly to a demanding scream, diminishing again as a twirling red light appeared between the black cedars lining the dirt lane from the country road. Long yellow fingers reached out toward the yard. The Fire Department’s shining new ambulance streaked past her and pulled up. Two men jumped out. The policeman who’d told her to go home held the door open for them to bring the stretcher through. She caught her breath sharply and moved back, reaching for the chromium arrow on the hood of the car, gripping it to steady her. An ambulance coming there— She remembered one of the detectives in the kitchen saying Buzz Rodriguez, the colored boy, out in the passage, was punch-drunk. But they’d had to call an ambulance. If somebody called an ambulance for Janey—
They were bringing the boy out on the stretcher. She saw Chief Carlson in the doorway. The young policeman she’d seen in the hall got in the ambulance behind the stretcher. She didn’t see them close the doors and start off. Gus was there in the doorway with Carlson. The racing excitement that catching a sudden and unexpected glimpse of him always built up inside her was there now. She wanted him. If it weren’t for Janey— She turned away quickly, biting her lip until the salt tasted on her tongue. Then she stopped abruptly, suddenly aware that the ambulance had gone and she was there alone in the yard again, nothing but silence and the small sounds of the night around her.
She drew a deep breath.
You can’t do it, Connie.
No matter how much she wanted Gus, it was something she couldn’t do. It was horrible. She saw Janey in her mind again, saw her, from halfway along the carpeted hall, there at her mother’s bedside table, with the bottle of pills in her hand. She saw her resisting them, putting them quickly back, shoving the drawer shut and stepping away. She could have spoken to her then. She could have said, “Hi, Janey—are you okay?” Or she could have done it when she saw Janey’s body stiffen and saw her twist her head around on her shoulder and hold it there tightly a moment before she took a quick step forward, pulled the drawer open, grabbed the piece of yellow tissue out of the box, picked up the bottle, and unscrewed the top, pouring the capsules into the tissue, twisting the ends together, and thrusting it into her bag.