Terror comes creeping (10 page)

I lit a cigarette and looked at the Lieutenant. "So now can you tell me?" I asked him.

"You see that lake at the back of the Hazeltons' farmhouse?" he asked abruptly.

"Sure," I said. "Sylvia showed it to me the first time I was there—part of a general tour around the place. Why?"

"Houston called in ten minutes ago," he said. "They just found Clenmiie Hazelton floating in the lake—^face down."

Ni

ine

KARNAK PARKED THE CAR OUT FRONT OF THE FARM-

house and the four of us climbed out, Houston came walking quickly out of the house to meet us.

"Lieutenant," he said. A flicker of interest showed in his dead eyes for a moment as he looked at me. "Where's the body?" Greer asked him. "At the side of the lake," Houston said. "Pete found her and brought her in. He knew she was dead then, so he thought he'd better not bring her body into the house. He's still down there, making sure no one touches her." "Good," Greer said. "Where are the others?" "In the house," Houston said. "They've taken it pretty badly as you can imagine. Coming straight on top of Philip's body being found yesterday."

"Yeah," Greer nodded. "Maybe you'd better stay with them until we can move the body."

"Whatever you say, Lieutenant," Houston agreed qui-edy and walked back slowly into the house.

Two more cars pulled up behind us, and the area was suddenly swarming with cops. The medical examiner walked over, swinging his bag briskly.

"We've got a sudden homicide boom, Lieutenant?" he said cheerfully. "Old Judge Lindsay offering a discount on murder for a limited season?"

Greer just looked at him and the examiner paled slightly, "So I wisecrack because I'm nervous!" he said defensively. "I still get sick in the stomach every time I see a corpse."

"Go get sick again," Greer said bleakly. "It's down by the lake."

I tagged along in the middle of the bunch, but by the time we got near the lake, the bunch had thinned out

into a straggling line of walking men. Greer strode alongside me, his hands thrust into his pockets, his face remote.

The last fifty yards down to the lake was through a mess of swampland underfoot and overgrown rushes with slimy stems that left a green smear on the cuffs and legs of my pants.

There were two guys waiting beside the body, not one. Pete had been joined by Galbraith Hazelton. The two of them stood motionless, not looking at the white bundle that lay at their feet.

I lagged behind Greer a couple of paces as we came up to them, figuring it was strictly the Lieutenant's party and I was only along for the ride. Clemmie Hazelton lay on her back, on top of a dirty slicker I guessed belonged to Pete.

Her eyes were wide open, staring at the sky in mute surprise. The white cotton nightgown clung like a shroud to the firmly molded curves of her body, somehow making her look even younger than she was.

I looked up again, directly into the blazing eyes of Galbraith Hazelton.

"Boyd!" he said thickly. "What are you doing here— you murderer! It's your fault that she's dead. I told you —I warned you—if the balance of her mind was any further upset, anything could happen!"

"Mr. Hazelton," Greer said curtly, "I—"

Hazelton's face was crimson with hate, the mustache bristling furiously, as he took a step toward me.

"She took her own life!" he snarled. "Sometime during the night she crept out of the house and down here to the lake. She must have just walked straight into the water and—"

His face puckered childishly and he started to cry, hesitantly, like a kid who's been beaten and doesn't know why.

"She was alone," he said in a harsh whisper. "Don't you see that? How she must have felt? Alone—cut off

from every other human being on this earth—so alone that she couldn't face up to it any more. Rather than face it, she took her own life." His voice built up to a crescendo again. "You drove her to it, Boyd! The truth is you murdered her just as surely as if you'd shot a bullet into her heart." He took another step toward me and swung wildly, screaming "Murderer!" over and over until Greer gestured briefly, and Kamak stepped forward and grabbed Hazelton's arms, pinning them to his sides.

"Take him up to the house," Greer said thinly, and Karnak led the old man gently away.

The medical examiner knelt down beside Clemmie's body and opened up his bag.

"You found her?" Greer asked Pete.

"That's right. Lieutenant," Pete nodded vigorously. "Seven o'clock this morning, Miss West told me she wasn't in her room and she couldn't find Miss Clemmie anywhere inside the house at all. So I said I'd look around outside. By the time I got down here to the lake it was around seven-thirty. Then I saw her, floating face down out there in the center. I went in after her and brought her back to the edge. Then I saw she was dead and there wasn't nothing I could do for her, so I went back to the house and told Mr. Houston—he said for me to come back here and wait, and that's what I did."

"That's your slicker she's lying on?" Greer queried.

"Sure," Pete nodded. "I took it off before I went in to get her, and when I brought her out I put her on it because I figured it wouldn't be nice to let her get dirtied up by those rushes."

The young doctor straightened up, his face pallid. "Not much I can do until we get her downtown. Lieutenant," he said hoarsely. "Death by drowning I'd say now. She was in the water a few hours."

"Yeah," Greer nodded. "You want to move her, that's O.K. with me. Let the boys get their pictures and she's all yours."

"O.K.," the doctor croaked, his face turning green at the thought.

"We'll go back to the house," the Lieutenant said. "There's nothing more we can do here."

"Lieutenant," I said. "Her nightgown—it's white."

"I can see that," he said.

"No stains," I said.

"She was in the water a few hours," the examiner said. He grunted, but there was a question in his tone.

"Those stams don't wash out," I told him. **Try it yourself and see, when you get home." I pointed at the green smears across the cuffs of his pants.

He looked down at them for a moment, then dropped to his knees beside the body, studying the nightgown closely without touching it.

"The heartbreaking picture of loneliness her old man painted," I said slowly. "During the night she crept out of the house and down to the lake—^then walked straight into the water."

Greer straightened up, looking around keenly.

"You can't get nearer than fifty yards to the lake without having to go through the rushes," he said. "But she didn't go through the rushes and she got right into the lake."

"So she flew?"

He nodded. "So she was carried—and that makes it murder!"

"It was what they caU the hard sell," I said.

Greer grinned faintly. "There you go again, pushing it too far, Boyd. You made your point about the stains—a good point. You don't have to remind me what the old man said about suicide—I remember."

He looked at Tighe. "You'd better stay here until things are cleaned up and the body's moved. Then come up to the house."

"Yes, Lieutenant," Tighe nodded. "I'M handle it."

"I want that nightgown photo]^aphed from every 82

angle," Greer continued. "I want all of it to show up just the way it is now—nice and white and no stains."

"I'll make sure they cover it," Tighe said.

We walked back slowly toward the farmhouse again— the look on Greer's face said he still didn't want to talk, so I kept my mouth shut.

"You'd better come inside with me, Boyd," he said suddenly when we were close to the front door. "But don't say anything, you understand? No questions, no answers, no observations, no social gossip. While you're in there, you're a Rhode Island clam—one word and I'll have you back inside that cell so fast you won't even remember having ever been out!"

"Don't push it. Lieutenant," I grinned at him. "You made your point!"

The living room was still Early Colonial but nobody cared any more so it seemed to have lost its self-consciousness. Most of the people in the room looked like something out of a Greek tragedy, ten seconds after Doom struck.

Galbraith Hazelton sat slumped in an armchair, gazing dully at the fireplace. Side by side on the couch sat Martha and Sylvia, their faces blank with shock. Houston stood at one end of the couch, blinking calmly through his half-framed glasses.

Kamak stood beside the door looking like a chunk of masonry someone forgot to remove. Greer was in the center of the room, the cold fire burning steadily in back of his eyes, and the remote, contemptuous look on his face. I stood beside Kamak, and if I'd been anybody but me I would have felt embarrassed. That's one thing about having a perfect profile—it gives you confidence to overcome the embarrassing social situation.

"Miss West," Greer said so suddenly that she jumped violently. "You were the one who discovered she was missing?"

"That's right, Lieutenant," Sylvia said in a small voice. 83

"She liked a cup of coffee in bed in the mornings before she got up. I took her coffee in and saw she wasn't there."

"What then?"

"Well, I didn't think much about it—she was probably in the bathroom, I thought. So I put the coffee down on the bedside table and went out again. I guess it would be about twenty minutes later when I looked in again and saw the coffee was still untouched—that was when I started to look for her inside the house."

"You couldn't find her, so you told the others," Greer nodded. "And Rinkman went outside looking for her?"

"That's correct. Lieutenant," she said in a low voice.

He kept up a steady flow of questions with an effortless machine-precision, but the answers didn't get him any place. The girls had gone to bed around eleven the night before. Houston and Hazelton had retired an hour later. No one had waked up during the night to hear any strange noises, see any strange people and so on.

"Lieutenant!" Galbraith Hazelton said finally, in a hoarse voice. "Why do you keep wasting time with all these stupid questions! We all know Clemmie took her own life—and we all know why!" He glared at me malignantly. "It was Boyd's murderous interference into something he didn't understand—his criminal disregard of my warnings and—"

"Mr. Hazelton," Greer interrupted him coldly. "Your daughter didn't commit suicide, she was murdered."

"Murdered? That's impossible—how could she have been murdered!"

The Lieutenant explained about the rushes and the stains they left on any cloth, but Hazelton had stopped listening long before Greer finished.

"There's one point that's clear, Mr. Hazelton," Greer raised his voice enough to penetrate the old man's concentration. "Boyd spent last night in a cell, so whoever murdered your daughter, it wasn't him for sure."

His mouth opened and closed a couple of times sound-84

lessly, then he slumped back suddenly into his chair with his eyes closed.

Sylvia went across to him quickly and checked his pulse.

"He's all right, I think," she said after a few seconds. "It was the strain and nervous shock—he fainted. But he'U be all right."

"I guess there's no reason for us to stay any longer," Greer said. "None of you are to leave this house until I give you permission—is that clear?"

"Now, wait a minute. Lieutenant," Houston said evenly. "You can't go around issuing orders like—"

"Nobody!" Greer repeated coldly. "And that includes you, Houston. If you want to find out the hard way, just try and leave."

He walked toward the door quickly, "I want a man patroling the outside of the house, and another man on the gate," he said to Kamak. "Twenty-four hours a day."

"I'll fix it, Lieutenant," Kamak told him.

"Boyd!" Greer was already halfway out the door. "You've got a cell waiting for you—I wouldn't want it to get lonely!"

Sometime around three in the afternoon, when I was stretched out on the bunk, half-asleep, Greer came into my cell.

I sat up on the bunk and yawned. "Welcome to my humble abode, Lieutenant," I said politely. "Of course, it's kind of small right now, but I'm building on the unit principle. Come back in ten years time and I'll have a whole jaU of my own."

He lit a cigarette and stared at the wall a foot above my head for a few seconds.

"Your alibi checks out," he said suddenly. "You're in the clear on the Philip Hazelton killing."

"That's one rap less I've been framed for," I said.

"I've been thinking," Greer said slowly. "That Pete-he's one energetic guy—smart, too."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Like he goes walking around three in the morning just in time to be an eye-witness to a hit-and-run death," he said. "The perfect witness who does everything right. Then he goes looking for Clemmie Hazelton's body and finds it right there in the center of the lake where nobody thought of looking. I figure he's too smart to be a handyman."

"He's too smart—period," I said.

He blew a thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "I got a check on Tolvar, too. He nearly lost his Ucense five or six times over the last four years, but they couldn't get enough positive evidence. Shakedowns, intimidation of witnesses, faked divorce, even the good old badger-game. Tolvar was out to make a buck and didn't care how he made it—if there'd been any money in it, I wouldn't mind betting he'd have turned honest!"

"Any other good news, Lieutenant?" I asked him.

He looked at me for what seemed a long time before he answered.

"Yeah," he said slowly. "That story of yours is just crazy enough to be true. I've had all the books concerned with that trust account subpoenaed and they're being worked over right now."

"Great!" I said. "You keep going like this. Lieutenant, and I'll maybe end up with only fifteen years in the pen."

Greer dropped the butt of his cigarette on the floor and trod it out with imimense deUberation.

"You owe me five bucks," he said.

"Huh?"

"I put up your bail," he said shortly.

I stared at him for a moment. "I never knew you had a sense of humor. Lieutenant," I said finally.

"I don't! I figured you should get bail and for once they listened to me. I said one dollar, but they figure inflation's caught up in Providence."