Something the Cat Dragged In (17 page)

“I never said she wasn’t dead. I only said she wasn’t here. Which means,” Bulfinch wrapped it up in his orderly fashion, “she must have been someplace else.”

“But why should anybody kill her someplace else and bring the body here?” Ottermole wondered. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It might if you strangled the woman out of exasperation, then realized it wouldn’t be smart for you to get caught with a corpse on your hands,” Melchett snapped. “There’s nothing more I can do here. I’m going home to bed, and God help the person who wakes me up for anything less serious than a typhoid epidemic.”

He stormed off into the night. His headlights flashed on and his car zoomed away.

“Speeding in a restricted zone,” Ottermole noted. “I better not write him a ticket, though. Guess I’ll go give Harry Goulson a buzz.”

“No,” said Thorkjeld Svenson. “Daylight.”

“The President’s right,” Shandy agreed. “We’d better leave her just as she is until we have daylight enough to examine the ground by. These lanterns can be deceptive, casting shadows and making you think you’ve seen something you haven’t. Or vice versa.”

“Okay. In the morning we look for gum wrappers and cigarette stubs the killer might have thrown away. Then we find out if he likes Camels and Juicy Fruit. So what do we do in the meantime?” Ottermole asked unhappily.

“I’m afraid we sit it out. Why don’t you send up a man to take your place here, Ottermole? You still have to notify Mr. Smuth, and the sooner the better. I’d go with you, if—”

“Go,” barked Svenson. He glanced around, selected a particularly rugged-looking oak tree, and settled his own massive bole against its trunk. “I’ll stay.”

“What about me?” inquired Bulfinch.

“You may as well go on and finish your rounds,” said Shandy. “Er—and make radio contact with the office at each checkpoint.”

“So they’ll know I haven’t skipped out on ’em, eh?”

“So they’ll know you haven’t been bopped over the head or garroted like Mrs. Smuth,” Shandy amended. “Since we have no idea how recently her body was parked here, we don’t know whether her killer might still be lurking on campus.”

“Gee, that’s right.” Bulfinch sounded more interested than alarmed. “We don’t, do we? Okay, Professor, I’ll keep calling in.”

“Do,” Svenson grunted. “Damn nuisance, breaking in new guards.”

Bulfinch trotted off. Ottermole turned to go. “I’ll rouse Budge Dorkin. He’ll think it’s a barrel of fun climbing out of a warm bed to come up here and baby-sit a stiff.”

“Blanket,” Svenson ordered. “Cover her up. Couldn’t stand the sight of her alive. Can’t stand it now.”

Shandy could only hope Chief Ottermole had got out of earshot before President Svenson finished that thought-provoking utterance.

“WHOEVER IT WAS, I
’
D
like to shake his hand.”

The remark was not what one might normally have expected from a new-made widower. When Ruth Smuth’s husband said it, though, Peter Shandy found it reasonable enough.

Smuth probably wouldn’t have been quite so forthright if Ottermole hadn’t wakened him from a stupor that appeared to have been induced by several stiff nightcaps. The man was still half-slopped, though he showed none of the usual symptoms of an habitual drunkard. He wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome, and he didn’t have a dimple in his chin. In fact, he didn’t look like anything in particular except the potato men Shandy’s late mother had carved sometimes for her young son’s amusement. He’d be fairly low down on somebody’s totem pole, no doubt; and probably hadn’t stood all that high with Ruth, despite the rather lavish house he’d provided for her.

Ottermole was clearly pleased to find somebody he could bully. “Oh yeah? Maybe you know the guy a damn sight better than you’re letting on. Where you been these past few hours?”

“On a goddamn plane from Detroit, that’s where. First we’re an hour late taking off. Then they serve a lousy dinner that’s supposed to be hot but isn’t. And the meat was all fat. I hate fat.”

Smuth brooded awhile on the faults of the airline, then went on with his jeremiad. “So I didn’t eat it and I’m sitting there starving to death, so the engine starts acting up again. So instead of flying direct to Boston they have to shuttle us in from Newark, so it’s another goddamn couple of hours. So I get into the parking garage and find out some jerk’s swiped the goddamn wheels off my car. So I call the airport cops and futz around there till they finish telling me how deeply they regret the unfortunate incident.”

Smuth paused to burp, but held up his hand as a signal that he hadn’t finished his tale of woe. “Then some guy offers me a lift, but it turns out he’s only going as far as Leominster. So it costs me another forty-seven bucks cab fare to get home. So I get in the house with my belly flapping against my backbone and I can’t find so much as a hunk of cheese and some crackers to chew on because my goddamn wife’s too goddamn busy with her civic service to shop for the goddamn groceries. I know what kind of service she’s been getting from Ol’ Dimplepuss, and you needn’t think I don’t.”

Smuth burped again. “So I say the hell with it and pour myself a few slugs of Bourbon and turn in, and now you come along and wake me up to tell me she’s gone and got herself killed. Christ, what a day!”

“You expect us to swallow a yarn like that?” snarled Ottermole, reaching for his longest jacket zipper.

“I think we might as well,” Shandy interposed. “Mr. Smuth would doubtless be able to have it witnessed by a few dozen airline personnel, not to mention the airport police, the chap who drove him to Leominster, and the cab driver who brought him the rest of the way. Were you surprised not to find your wife at home when you got here, Mr. Smuth?”

“Hell, no. Ruth hasn’t been home since the day after we got back from our honeymoon. And then she only dropped in to ask me for money. By the way, what happened to her?”

“She was strangled.”

“Huh?” At last Smuth was giving Ottermole his full and undivided attention. “What do you mean, strangled?”

“I mean like somebody snuck up behind her and yanked at the ends of her scarf till she was dead. That kind of strangled.”

“Oh my God! Mugged and raped. What’ll J.B. say?”

“As far as we know, she wasn’t molested. She was merely killed.”

“You say somebody just plain walked up and strangled her? Christ, that’s even worse. Means it was a personal grudge. More damaging to the corporate image.”

“How do you yourself feel about strangling, Mr. Smuth?” Shandy asked out of curiosity.

“Listen, whoever you are, what difference does it make how I feel about it? What counts is how the guy three rungs above me on the corporate ladder feels about it. Wise up to the facts of life, buddy. J.B.’s going to blow his stack. I think I’ll have another drink.”

“I think you better throw on some clothes and come down to make a formal identification,” said Ottermole. “We’ve got coffee and doughnuts at the station,” he added more compassionately.

Even a tough cop couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for a man whose wife prowled around dark places getting herself killed instead of staying home and doing nice, uxorious things like replacing the worn-out zippers on his jacket or fetching him another beer while he watched reruns of “Barney Miller” for professional instruction.

“Doughnuts? Okay. Just a second.”

For coffee and crullers, Mr. Smuth would be only too willing to cooperate. He got dressed, more or less, and accompanied Ottermole and Shandy to the police station, where they baled enough refreshment into him to ease the pangs and sober him up a little. Having then obtained a reasonably coherent statement and a list of people who might be able to corroborate his complicated alibi, they took him along to make a formal identification of his wife.

Ruth Smuth was still where they’d left her, covered by the same ratty gray blanket that had shrouded Ungley’s corpse the previous morning, Shandy noted with a small frisson. President Svenson and Officer Dorkin had been whiling away the tedium of guardianship playing mumblety-peg by the light of Budge’s battery lantern. As Ottermole and his entourage hove into sight, Svenson whipped the jackknife into his pocket and assumed a demeanor of terrifying dignity. Dorkin stood smartly at attention, thumbs pressed against where the seams of his uniform trousers would have been if he’d thought to put them on instead of the emerald green running pants his mother had bought him on her last expedition to Filene’s Basement.

Ottermole reached down and pulled away the blanket. Smuth nodded perfunctorily.

“That’s Ruth. Damn it, why couldn’t she have been killed in a plane crash? Plane crashes are okay PR-wise. Besides, I could have sued the airline for damages. Cover her up again, can’t you? I feel queasy.”

So Mr. Smuth was capable of human feeling after all, Shandy thought. Of course, it could have been the three honey-dipped chocolate doughnuts on top of all that whiskey. On the other hand, that purple face and protruding tongue weren’t doing much for his own stomach, either. Young Dorkin was looking as green as his running pants, and Ottermole was having to work his pocket zippers for all they were worth. Svenson was retaining his Augustan demeanor by the simple expedient of not looking.

“Okay, Smuth,” Ottermole told him. “I’ll run you home. Don’t get any ideas about leaving town.”

“How the hell can I?” Smuth pointed out reasonably enough. “I haven’t got a car to drive me as far as the all-night diner, even. I wish to Christ we had a halfway decent hotel around here. I wish we had an indecent one, even.”

“So do I,” said Dorkin wistfully.

Ottermole gave his subordinate a look. “Cover her up, Budge. Mr. Smuth, if you want to give Dorkin here a few bucks, he can pick you up a few groceries after the stores open. Coffee, doughnuts, you know, the basic necessities.”

“Sure.” Smuth forked over a twenty-dollar bill. “Get me a fifth of Old Factory Whistle while you’re about it, hey, kid?”

Dorkin magnanimously ignored the “hey, kid,” in view of the grave situation, and said he would.

“Okay, then,” barked Ottermole. “Let’s get this show back on the road. You coming, Professor?”

Shandy did not want to go with Ottermole and Smuth. He wanted to go back to the little red-brick house on the Crescent and climb back into bed beside a wife who would not have charged off to head a committee but stayed to share a decent breakfast with him when he woke up. He sighed and climbed back into the cruiser.

Slumped in the back seat, Shandy wondered why Smuth and Mrs. Smuth had stayed married all these years. On account of the corporate image, probably. Maddening as she must have been to live with, Ruth would have known how to cut the right kind of figure at company dinners. Her charitable activities would have provided ways for the husband to funnel off excess profits into deductible donations real or alleged. Maybe they hadn’t been two hearts that beat as one, but the chances were they’d marched to the same drum. What in Sam Hill were a pair like that doing in Balaclava County?

“How did you happen to settle around these parts, Mr. Smuth?” he asked.

“What the hell, we had to live somewhere, didn’t we? Ruth’s got folks around here, so I figured what the hell? Hoddersville’s not quite such a hick town as the rest of ’em around here, and it’s a damn sight cheaper than Weston or Dover. Not bad for the corporate image, either. Nice big house in the country, away from the hurly-burly and all that garbage. Doesn’t matter to me where I hang my hat, I’m on the road most of the time anyway.”

He yawned and stretched. “Ruth was okay out here. For Hoddersville she had class. For Wellesley or Concord she had class but not the right kind of class. But hell, if she’d had that kind of class, she wouldn’t have married a no-class guy like me. See, I’m not on the class end, I’m on the production end.”

“Really?” Shandy yawned, too. “What do you produce?”

“Nothing. I’m not on the producing production end, I’m on the talking production end. Walk into a sales meeting with an armload of blueprints, start waving ’em in everybody’s face, give ’em the facts straight from the shoulder, figures, technical stuff, that kind of garbage. Doesn’t matter if you get it right side up or ass-backwards. They don’t know what you’re talking about anyway, but they’re all too scared to say so, just in case the guy next to ’em happens to know. You get the picture. Hoddersville fits my image. If I tried to get too classy, I’d class myself right out of the production end. Then where’d I be?”

“On the class end?”

“Nah, we’re already overloaded on the class end. Princeton, Dartmouth, Valparaiso, you know. The Dry Sack and Chivas Regal crowd. I couldn’t hack it. With those guys you not only have to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re coming from. Right?”

“If you say so.”

Shandy mulled the corporate image over in silence for a while. This night had been so unreal anyway that he decided what Smuth had been telling him might even make sense. However, it was hardly germane to the problem at hand. He thought of another question.

“How did your wife get tied up with Bertram Claude?”

“Huh?” Smuth must have been dozing. “Who?”

“I was asking why Mrs. Smuth became active in the Claude campaign.”

“Because it was there, I suppose. How the hell do I know?”

“You—er—made no objections?”

“Me object to anything Ruth had set her mind on doing? You got to be kidding, mister. Anyway, Claude’s okay, isn’t he? PR-wise, I mean.”

“I wouldn’t know about PR. As to wise, Claude has never impressed me as showing anything beyond a particularly low form of cunning.”

“So who needs a pol with brains? All we want is one who’s got what it takes to get elected and vote the way he’s told to, right?”

“Wrong. I’d rather have one who’s more interested in doing his job right than in keeping it at any cost.”

“Me, too,” said Ottermole. “Heck, I haven’t got time to run the government even if I knew how, which I sure don’t,” he added with surprising candor, “but it’s a cop’s job to know an honest guy from a phony. That’s why I’m voting for Sam Peters like I always do. How did we get started on politics, anyway?”