Death Trap (16 page)

“Get the picture, now. Frank was going ahead on his project, checking every car that any college kid had access to. We set up our field headquarters at the town hall. The town was crawling with reporters, cops and cranks. We’d imported lab people and set up a makeshift lab. They were clearing the cars as fast as they could. We had to get one all the way back from Alabama. A kid had flunked out and driven home between the time of the murder and when the body was found. If I remember, this incident happened on Friday afternoon. Frank and I walked out to the car we were using. As we got in, I saw something on the floor. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a three by five file card, unruled. Somebody had cut out newsprint and pasted it on the card. Just the name Landy. Separate letters, different type sizes. I gave it to Frank. He looked at it and grunted and stuck it in his pocket. I asked him if we should turn it over to the lab and he said it didn’t mean anything. When we got back I checked the master list they were working on. I saw that one student named Landy had access to a car. They hadn’t gotten to it yet. They got to it that same day. I don’t know if Frank moved it up on the list or not.”

“Isn’t there a law about suppressing evidence?”

“Look. I work for the guy. He’s a sound officer. He’s a plodder. He likes leg work. He likes it the hard way. And he’s ambitious. It looks a hell of a lot better if he finds Landy his way than if he follows up a tip. I never saw the card again.”

“Did you think it was important?”

“I thought it could be.”

“Why?”

“Because it was a way of giving us a tip with an absolute minimum of risk. The chance of tracing it would be just about nothing. The lab could find out what paper had been used, what kind of glue, what make of card. And run into a big dead end. Whoever tossed it into the car, if they’d gone to all that trouble, certainly did it without being observed. Maybe he carried it around for days before he had the right chance. It was safer than a phone call, a hell of a lot safer than a letter. Another thing. In a crime like that, feeling was running so high that anybody who could have given an accurate tip would have been a hero for a day. The care used was, to me, suspicious. It had a smell of guilty knowledge.”

“After you found out it was Landy’s car, did you talk to Leader about it?”

“I tried to. At first he said he couldn’t remember it. I described it to him. He said he had thrown it away and it was probably the work of some crank. A lucky guess.”

“Tennant could certainly have used it at the trial.”

“After Leader talked to Landy, he was certain in his mind that the kid did it. He likes first degree convictions. They look good on the record.”

“I think I should tell Tennant about this.”

“Go ahead. And tell him I’ll deny it.”

“Suppose he tries to drag Leader into it?”

“He won’t. He knows Frank.”

“Was it common knowledge then that you were going over the cars, one by one?”

“No. Not then. Not when that note was left in our car. Later on people knew because it was too big to keep secret.”

“So whoever put the card in your car had no way of knowing you would eventually get to Landy’s car?”

“No way. That’s right.” He sighed. “Now I’ve got something else to worry about. Let’s get back to business. You went looking for the Garson girl.”

I told him about going to the house, about being recognized, about the fight. After the fight, Garson had reported it to Score, and Quillan had come out to the drive-in to intercept me. I told him about driving away with Ginny and parking at the square, how she signaled to Smith, about the fight with him. I went into complete detail about all contact with Quillan, about how Ginny wrote the name on the pad.

“Did she seem to be aware of what she was being asked? Could she have just written his name because she wanted to see him?”

“I can’t tell you that. There wasn’t enough face left so you could tell her expression. I think she heard Chief Score. The town hall is about two hundred yards from where he must have beaten her up.”

“We found the place. She walked part of the way, crawled the rest.”

“If she could do that, I think she could hear what he said. You have a confession, don’t you?”

“Here’s where reasonable doubt comes in. Maybe he knocked her around and drove off. Then maybe somebody else put on the finishing touches. It isn’t likely, but a doubt can be created. This one can’t be made first degree. And probably the lawyers will be too smart to let it come to trial. With those damn, black, bloody boots in evidence, a jury would be too big a risk. Trial is only mandatory in first degree. If his old man can swing enough weight, it may end up with him copping a plea of manslaughter and drawing five and serving three. That would be the very least. Ten years on the inside is more likely. I’ve seen him. No matter how long a time they keep him in, he’s going to be bad news when he gets out. Congenital psychopath. They can crop up in anybody’s family.”

“What about Quillan?”

“What about him?”

“What do you think of his methods?”

“Stupid. He can go just so far. Then somebody slaps him with a criminal suit and a civil suit, sends him to the can and strips him of anything he happens to own. In the line of local cops, a town usually gets just what it deserves.”

I told him about the daylight attack on the street, and about Quillan’s threat. He took it down and said, “Here’s what you do. If he jumps you, go to a good doctor. Get a detailed report. Contact me. I’ll turn it over to the right people. It may take some time, but they’ll fix him. I can use the transcript of this as evidence.”

“Do I have to sign your transcripts?”

“Yes. I’ll bring them to you or have them brought to you. Probably tomorrow.”

We stood up and shook hands. As soon as he had left, I phoned Tennant and said I wanted to see him. He said he could see me in his office at eleven-thirty. I was five minutes ahead of time, and the girl told me to go right in. It was an old-fashioned office on the third floor corner of a red brick building. The windows looked out over the busiest corner in the small city. Tennant sat behind a disorderly desk piled high with papers. He grinned at me and waved me to a chair close beside the desk. He had a round thing in his hand, one of those puzzles with a glass cover and steel balls that have to be rolled through a maze to a center point.

“This is my thinking machine,” he said. “The cigarette break used to stimulate the little gray cells, then I gave up smoking.”

“I thought you were smoking the other day.”

“I gave up office smoking. I frown with great rectitude at visitors’ cigars. All week end I am a furnace. What have you got that you couldn’t give me over the phone?”

I told him Arma’s story about the tip. He kept rolling the balls in the puzzle, but I knew he was listening with great intentness. When I had gotten part way into it he interrupted me, opened a cabinet door, turned on a tape recorder, put the mike on the littered desk and asked me to start over. When I had finished he asked me a few questions, mostly about Arma’s attitude. He turned the recorder off, got up, and paced around, hands deep in his pockets.

“I know Larry Arma,” he said finally. “He’s careful. This isn’t like him.”

“Maybe he’s got a guilty feeling about Alister.”

“More than that. He’s pretty cold. He keeps his guard up. I think it’s a calculated risk. He wouldn’t have done it two years ago. Now he’s in pretty solid. He was recently promoted. He’s ambitious. I think he thinks he’s big enough to take a chop at Leader. He knew damn well this wouldn’t stay bottled up. And if he’s forced to make a statement, he’ll do so. With great reluctance, of course. I’ll bet he was looking for a good place to drop that information. The knife will go in so easily, Leader won’t even feel it. It’s a break for us. A very tiny one, but a break. I have to play it just right to get anything out of it. And still we may get nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I broke it now, Leader would deny it. Maybe Arma would too. It all dissolves and they burn the boy on schedule. So I have to wait. I wait until Sunday night. Then I phone the Governor, and I say that I have evidence that the State Police suppressed evidence in the Landy case that tended to show the innocence of my client. If my timing is right, and my voice is right, and I hint that I’m giving it to the papers along with the fact that I have talked to him, he won’t know what I’ve got, how flimsy it is. Maybe he’ll grant another stay. That gives us a little time. Then we work on Arma. And if we can get co-operation from him, which is still dubious, I might be able to wangle a retrial. It’s worth a chance.”

He sat down again and looked at me. “And what else have you been doing for amusement, Hugh? Looks like you got nudged in the face.”

I told him.

Then, picking the words with great care, I said, “I believe that the man who killed her is named William Mackin. He is a neighbor. He runs a hardware store. His wife is dying. He and Paulson are joint owners of a camp at Morgan’s Lake. He’s close to the family. I believe he is the man Jane Ann was blackmailing. But I can’t think of any conceivable way of proving it.”

He waited for perhaps five seconds. “You’ve talked to this man?”

I told him of my masquerade. He winced a little.

“You are positive?”

“More positive than I should be. I realize that. I haven’t got enough to go on to be this positive.”

“I have a great respect for hunches, Hugh. Intuition, whatever you want to call it. The subconscious mind is always at work, sorting, filing, rejecting. Then something floats up into the conscious mind. You don’t know where it came from. That doesn’t make the groundwork done by the subconscious any less valid. I’d think that you must have other reasons for being so certain of Mackin. Perhaps things you heard and placed no conscious valuation on. Maybe you’ve collected more evidence than you’re aware of.”

“I can’t think of what it could be.”

“Is he well liked?”

“He seems to be.”

“And that knife came from his store. Wait a minute! I know the man. I have a memory like a sieve. Milligan called him as a prosecution witness, to prove Landy had been in the store on Thursday, the day before the crime. And Milligan introduced photographs of the inside of the store to show that the open display of the kitchen knives could not be seen from the street or from the office in the back of the store. I did a brief cross-examination. I remember him well. He seemed plausible, concerned. Seemed to me like a solid citizen. And not the kind you can mix up on cross-examination.”

“Why did Alister go into the store?”

“He went that time to get some paint. He was a fairly frequent customer. The apartment in the Hemsold house was in bad shape and the landlady was pretty stingy about maintenance. Al and Vicky tried to keep ahead of the slow rot.”

“You saw him then, and you remember him. Do you think he’d be capable of a thing like that?”

“That’s a naïve question. I’ve been around the law too many years to try to make that kind of a guess. The best man on homicide here in the Warrentown force looks like a congenital murderer. The most vicious crime I ever heard about was committed by a charming boy who looked as if he could be the captain of the Dartmouth ski team. Every face is a mask, Hugh.”

I spread my hands helplessly. “I think he’s the one. What do I do next?”

“Nothing juvenile, like twisting his arm. You were juvenile enough posing as a real estate man. He’s had a lot of time. And he looks like a man who can think clearly. He won’t have any evidence around. He doesn’t look like the type who can be trapped or intimidated.”

“So?”

“Let me make an assumption. It’s based on my experience and on my reading. It is a very seldom thing for a man to go up and commit a rape murder out of the blue. The knife wounds were clear evidence of the extent of aberration. There is, in almost every case, a long history of lesser acts. Peeping, exposure, all the way down to the furtive pinch in the crowded elevator. It is a sex obsession, and there should be evidence of it in his past life.”

“But maybe he just wanted it to look like—that kind of a crime?”

“Very improbable, Hugh. A normal murderer—and there’s a hell of a strange phrase—would find it impossible to go through with that sort of thing. I think we better put some people on him, and fast. And I’ll tell you this. If we pick up just one little indication that Mackin has committed abnormal acts, I’ll join your one-man parade, beating a drum.”

“Do you think I could tell Vicky about the Frank Leader thing?”

“I wouldn’t. It’s too likely to fail. I’m sorry. I have to run. Lunch date.”

“What shall I do?”

He grinned at me. “Just keep blundering and stumbling around, Hugh. You have a great talent for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way, and coming up with a right answer.”

After I had lunch on the outskirts of Warrentown, I took another road that brought me out near Vicky’s motel without having to go through Dalton. She was not there but her car was, so I checked a restaurant and found her in the first one. I had coffee there with her but we could not talk because the other tables were too close. She said she felt restless, so we went for a drive in the wagon and talked as we drove.

I told her my suspicions of Billy Mackin. At first she seemed to feel I was too far out in left field. But I built it for her, adding everything but the card flipped into Leader’s car. I told her of my talk with Arma and with John Tennant.

She said, “I don’t know Mr. Mackin well. He’s waited on me several times. His wife’s waited on me too. I used to go to their old store when we first came to town. She’s changed horribly since then. He seemed—nice enough, I guess.”

“A fragment of doubt?”

“It isn’t anything unusual. Whenever he was there, he would wait on me. With a sort of insinuating manner. There’s an old fashioned word for it. A masher. He’s really quite an attractive man. But that sort of thing happens to any presentable girl in any number of stores. It doesn’t signify.”

“Did you like him?”

“Well enough, I guess. At arm’s length. I never thought about liking him or disliking him.”