by Jerry eBooks
BRANT came downstairs, called a hurried good-by from the hall.
“Come again, Wise,” he said just before the door slammed.
“He isn’t really rude, Mr. Wise,” Margery said when the motor of a big car began to race. “Always in a hurry and thinking of a million things at once.”
“To get back to Walter Nixon,” Wise said. “Mr. Brant assured me the whole area between this house and the main road was thoroughly scoured for a sign of him.”
“Yes. We had a dozen people searching for him,” Margery said, her face losing its animation. “It’s horrible to think he might have been murdered.”
“Shedds live about three miles in back of here, don’t they?” Wise asked.
“Yes. You don’t believe—”
“Just thinking out loud, my girl. When there is a crime, you think of the murderer as being slightly demented. Here we have a couple whose sanity is questionable, living in the vicinity. Perhaps we are inclined to believe the obvious too quickly, but we must take it into consideration.
“Fiction writers make murder a gory thing with a million clues and a dozen suspects littering the scene of the crime. The majority of murder cases I have worked on, young woman, were far from being sensational. Here we have a missing person, not a corpse to be studied in a morgue. It is very vague and discouraging.”
“You certainly are not like the detectives I’ve read about,” Margery said.
There was a paper lying on a wicker chair within arm’s reach of Jonathan Wise. A halftone on the front page interested him.
“Oh, that’s a picture of Uncle Marvin,” the girl said proudly. “He made a speech for the Civic Club over in Rumford. I don’t think it does him justice.”
Wise scanned the print under the picture. Brant had been introduced to the Rumford civic leaders as one of Boston’s leading financiers. He was director of Amalgamated Plastics and Chairman of the Board of General Drugs.
“A big man,” Wise smiled, folded the paper and put it in his coat pocket. “You mind if I borrow it? I noticed that it subscribes to a certain Washington column I follow religiously. I shall be sure to return it to you very soon.”
“Don’t bother,” Margery said. “I bought ten copies. You see how proud I am of my guardian?”
“It is obvious,” Jonathan Wise admitted. “Purely elementary, young woman. Now I really must go. I have an appointment with Mossman in an hour.”
“Let me get the roadster out and drive you to the hotel,” the girl said quickly, but Wise gestured for her to remain where she was.
“I prefer to walk, young lady. It keeps my arthritis where it belongs. If I hear anything of importance I shall contact you immediately. Thanks very much for the lunch. You don’t mind if I pick a rose on the way out?”
“Not a bit, Mr. Wise. Help yourself to a big bunch of them,” Margery said.
She watched him until he was out of sight, then dropped into her chair, a rueful smile on her lips.
Not much help, she thought. A nice old gentleman, who might once have been a really clever criminologist. Ed Mossman had really meant well.
Alone once more, Margery Correll fought off the urge to burst into tears. The dead silence tore at her nerves, and for the first time since Walter Nixon had disappeared, she knew she was afraid.
JONATHAN WISE paused near the fallen scarecrow, poked at the heap of old clothes and a big rotting burlap bag that had been stuffed with straw. He felt a tingling in his scalp when his ears caught the buzz of flies. They swarmed around the battered old hat.
“I was wrong,” Wise said with a mirthless twist of his thin lips. “The corpse is not in these clothes. But—”
He lifted the old hat with the end of his cane and examined it closely. There was dried blood on the old sweatband. He put it back with the other old clothes, just where he had found it, then examined the ground. There was an ugly brown stain on the parched trampled grass. The flies kept buzzing around it.
Jonathan Wise stood there and looked about him, the old fire in his sharp eyes. The edge of the cornfield was about twenty feet from the woods. A stone wall ran along the rim of the trees, and Wise strolled along it for nearly fifty yards. The wall curved sharply, finally ended at an old foundation partially hidden by weeds and small growth. Once there had been a house here, Wise told himself. You could not see the big fieldstone house from where he stood.
Jonathan Wise went into the woods, cut through them and finally came to the winding road that connected Hillside with the main three-lane stretch of macadam. He walked toward the hotel, thoughts half-formed in his mind. He pieced together all the things he had heard and all he had observed. They made a hodge-podge of conjectures that would take a lot of untangling.
Dusk was moving in when the old criminologist reached his room. He had no sooner divested himself of his old slouch hat and Congress boots when Mossman called him from downstairs. Wise asked him to come up, then started cramming his crooked-stem old brier with tobacco.
“Have a good walk today, Mr. Wise?” Mossman asked.
“Sit down over there,” Wise said. “I certainly did. I also had a delightful visit with the Brants. Mossman, did you ever see a scarecrow that bled?”
“What?”
“I have,” Jonathan Wise said. “I am quite sure there has been a murder, Mossman. Only we have to find the corpus delicti. I did not want to ask Miss Correll too many leading questions, so I’ll ask you. On the night Walter Nixon was supposed to have been visiting with Margery, did anyone hear anything out of the way? Any sounds—voices or anything?”
“Let me think,” Mossman said. “Why, Margery Correll told us one thing, Mr. Wise. During the night she heard a dog howling. Said it howled for almost two hours. Nothing in that, is there? I got a hound that treed a coon one night, and it yelped until I had to get out of bed and chase it.”
“Anything might be of importance when a man has been murdered, Mossman,” Wise said. “Who do you know around this township who has lived here most of his or her life? There’s always one old settler who can be regarded as a bit of a historian.
“A person that has chronicled events around here for possibly thirty or forty years. One who knows when a certain man or woman was born and who can tell what kind of a night it was and which doctor brought the child into the world.”
“I see what you mean,” Mossman said. “That would be Tom Wooster. Old Tom lives in a little house about two miles from here on the Grisby road. Putters around with poultry. Wooster is past seventy.”
“Fine,” Jonathan Wise said. “I’ll make it a point to have a look at his place. By the way, one more thing. These young fellows who failed to cut much ice with Margery, before this Nixon came along—ever get a look at them?”
“Only one of them,” Mossman said. “A big powerful man—Arnold Statz. Has a dairy over by Tupper Lake. Young giant with some looks. The kind of small town sport you read about who thinks he is the answer to the prayer of every maiden.
“Yeah, Statz had a run-in with Nixon about a month ago. It was at the Church festival—a big event in these parts. Statz made some kind of a crack about the capitalists on the hill, and Nixon tried to get at him. Good thing they didn’t let him.”
“He took his medicine in a bad humor?” Wise wanted to know. “A big yokel with an inferiority complex can still put up a flashy front.”
“They said Brant drove him off with a riding crop,” Mossman grinned. “No wonder Statz is sore.”
“Yeah,” Wise said. “All this is interesting. I imagine the three-state teletype alarm won’t bring back Nixon. That is all for tonight.”
“Okay,” the country editor smiled. He knew Jonathan Wise’s bluntness, understood it. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Same time.”
“Yes. We might have unpleasant work to do.”
CHAPTER III
Body in the Tank
IT WAS nine o’clock when Jonathan Wise left the hotel. There was a hint of rain in the air. He took the winding sandy
road that streaked toward the Shedd homestead. It was close to ten o’clock when he paused and surveyed the gloomy structure. There was a light burning in a window, and, as Jonathan Wise approached the house, rain began to fall. He walked to the springy boards of the porch, and they creaked under him. The door was opened quickly before he had a chance to knock. Shedd looked out at him, his eyes ugly. They changed quickly when he recognized Wise.
“Why, hello,” Shedd said.
“Evening,” Wise smiled. “It has started to rain, and I’d hate to get these old bones soaked. If I could wait for awhile here—”
“Come in,” Shedd said.
Jonathan Wise stepped into a gloomy dank-smelling hall and put his cane in an umbrella rack.
“Helen, this is the old gent I was telling you about the other day,” Shedd called.
“Tell him to come in by the fire,” Mrs. Shedd replied, and Jonathan Wise felt an electric shock run through him. The voice was sane enough. It was cheery and sincere. He went into the big living room, nodded to the little middle-aged lady who sat near a couch doing some needlework. She had a face that must have been very attractive at one time, Wise thought. But her eyes—there was something strange about them.
Jonathan Wise sat down near the fireplace and tried to make conversation despite the air of restraint in the room.
“Would you care for a little drink?” Shedd asked. “Have some nice Scotch, sir.”
“Never touch it,” Wise said. His eyes wandered, although they did not seem to move in their deep-sunken sockets. The door into the little dining room was open. The table had been cleared, and there was a vase in the middle of the table. There was a single flower in it that made Jonathan Wise shiver.
“We haven’t much to entertain you,” Mrs. Shedd said. “We were thinking of getting a radio.”
“They’re a blasted nuisance,” Wise sniffed. He took his newspaper out of his pocket and scanned the column that interested him. He let it fall into his hip and turned to Shedd.
“Retired, aren’t you? Like myself, perhaps.”
“In a way, yes,” Shedd said and spilled a lot of the tobacco he was stuffing into the bowl of his pipe. “My good wife likes a bit of seclusion, Mr. Wise. Her nerves, you know.”
“You picked a nice place,” the criminologist smiled. He shifted his gaunt frame in the old wicker chair, and the newspaper fell to the floor.
Mrs. Shedd glanced at it as he knelt to pick it up. Her eyes struck swiftly toward her husband, and a terrible change came over her. She screamed, dropped her work and ran toward Shedd. She laughed and screamed as she clung to him. Jonathan Wise folded up the newspaper carefully and put it in his pocket.
“So sorry, sir,” the old gentleman said. “Was it my fault?”
“No,” Shedd snapped. “It comes quick—always like this. If you will excuse me, I’ll take her to her room. She’ll be all right in a moment.”
“I’ll go along,” Wise said. “I do hope she will be better right away. It isn’t raining much. I can weather it all right.”
“Yes, she’s getting all right again. Do come in again.”
Wise did not reply to the halfhearted invitation. He walked out of the house, a little shaken. A tragedy, long past, still smoldered in the woman’s eyes. It only took some little thing to fan the flame of it.
OLD Tom Wooster was candling eggs when Jonathan Wise visited him the next morning. He was a bent old fellow with no teeth left in his head. Tobacco had browned the wispy curtains of his heavy white mustache. Wise got him to talking, led him from one thing to another until he hit on the subject he wanted.
“Yep, that Hillside, where Brant lives now,” Wooster said, easing his old body down on a chopping block, “was called the Thatcher place for years. Me an’ Darius Thatcher went to school together. Was an old frame house there, an’ I put the roof on it.”
“Any well near it?” Wise asked.
“Yep. But Brant had it filled in, what wasn’t caved in. Five years ago. The well went dry an’ wan’t much account. About fifteen year ago, some folks named Latzo moved into the old house. They didn’t fix it up none. It kept goin’ down an’ down, an’ Brant got it fer a song. Sure changed it, didn’t he?”
“No improvements at all?” Wise asked.
“Nope. Oh, well, the Polish feller did put in one of them tanks for drainage. What they call ’em? Septic tanks? Figure it’s rusted out, though. He mended the well, too. And he did fix the chimbley some.”
Jonathan Wise started talking about poultry, and Wooster burned his ears with the lore for almost an hour.
“Glad to have seen you,” Wise said when he made ready to go. “I’ll stop in again sometime.”
That night, in his room, Wise talked to Mossman.
“We are going exploring, Ed. We’ll start about eleven o’clock. Maybe you’ll need a strong stomach.”
“You make me think of the old times,” Mossman said. “You’ve hit on something, you old fox. You never missed.”
“There’s always a first time, Mossman. But I am curious to find out why a scarecrow can bleed.”
Jonathan Wise and Mossman climbed the stone fence hemming in the acres of Hillside near twelve o’clock. They avoided the gatehouse and kept to the thick woods. When they had reached the tilled land, they paused and took stock of their surroundings, listening to the small sounds running through the night. Everything was as still as the grave.
“Don’t use a light until you have to,” Wise cautioned as they started on again. “There’s light enough in the sky to show us the way. The scarecrow is right over there, Ed. You can see the dark smudge near the edge of the corn.
“You follow me and step light. Our business is near the old foundation. We’ll look for an old rusty pipe that goes through the walls of that old cellar. It’ll point the way. They put those tanks very close to the house.”
MOSSMAN said nothing. The night was sultry, but he felt a chill go through him. A few minutes later, he jumped into the old cellar and skirted the crumbling walls. It did not take him long to find the pipe. He pointed out the location of it to Wise, and the old gentleman began to pace off distance.
He stopped at intervals to pound the ground with his foot, and his bony old head was cocked to the side as he tried to differentiate between the qualities of the sounds his boots made. Suddenly he stayed on one spot and motioned to Mossman.
“I’m sure it’s right here. Only a thin layer of dirt goes over these covers. Look, the ground here has been loosened. This tank was near a woodpile, for the stuff we’re standing in is old sawdust and woodchips. Grass don’t grow through them. Let’s start scraping dirt, Ed.”
The two men labored for several minutes, and Mossman suddenly uttered a mild curse and shook his finger. “Hit some rusty metal,” he said and sucked the blood out of the small wound.
“Let’s have a look. Yes, by Jove, there’s the handle. You’re stronger than I am, Ed. Get hold of that and heave.”
Mossman tugged at the metal handle, and a lot of the ground began to lift. Dirt fell away from a big round rusty metal cover, and Mossman tossed it aside and stared at the gaping hole in the ground. The smell coming out of it was hard to take.
Jonathan Wise knelt close to the hole and pointed his flash downward. He snapped the light on and Mossman saw the thing at the bottom of the old septic tank. It was a dead body, its legs drawn up.
“There’s Walter Nixon,” Jonathan Wise said.
Mossman was mute with horror for several seconds.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “You know who put him in here?”
“Not positive,” Wise said. “Put the cover back on and cover it up. Nobody is to know yet. Don’t breathe a word of this to Margery, you understand? Nor to Brant. There’s a lot more to this mystery than we realize, Mossman. Somebody waylaid Nixon on his way here.”
“In broad daylight?” Mossman questioned.
“According to Miss Correll, he arrived at Hillside not long before dusk. Look ar
ound you, Ed. Who could see that scarecrow from the main house or from the gate house? Only someone working in the fields, and they had already left the fields to tend to the chores in the barns. The scarecrow? I think I know why it bled, Mossman. I’m keeping it to myself until I’m sure of it.”
“What now?” Mossman said.
“How far is the summer house from the big one?” Wise said more to himself than to the country newspaper man. “I would say about three hundred yards if I remember distance correctly. At the lower end of the rose garden. Let’s mooch over there. Glad Brant has no dogs about.”
UNDER cover of the darkness and a mist that settled over Hillside, Jonathan Wise and Mossman visited the Brant summer house. It was a latticed structure, about ten feet square, with built-in seats. Wise risked some rapid stabs with the flashlight, knelt down once and gathered up seven burnt matches.
“There’s the cold dottle of a pipe on the floor there, too,” Wise said. “I’m satisfied, Mossman. Let’s get out of here.”
“I don’t get it,” Mossman said.
“Sorry I must keep a lot from you,” Jonathan Wise said, “but the story isn’t complete. It’s only things I’ve heard and things I’ve seen, Ed. And a man’s lie—well, I’ll be leaving the hotel for a day or two.”
“You might keep a sharp eye out for Margery. Make it a point to call at Hillside every night. You are a newspaper man. You can get an excuse. Frankly, I want you to watch the entrance to the place. You can park your car down the road there. You can see for fifty yards up and down the road.
“It won’t do any harm, Ed. I’ll call you as soon as I get back. One question you must ask Margery? Ask her if Nixon proposed to her and make her tell you what she told him.”
“She’ll slap me one,” Mossman said.
“Take the chance,” Wise said. “Here we are at the road, Ed. I’m sure nobody saw us.”
JONATHAN WISE was gone for three days. Mossman got his chance to see Margery Correll and came out with the blunt question.