by Jerry eBooks
“Mad scientist is right!” Sally gave a long, low whistle. “What a twisted brain this guy must have!”
“Makes plenty of sense to me,” countered Oliver. “Always did have a yen for machinery; wanted to be an engineer.”
“Well, read it to me,” demanded Sally.
“This is no longer an active firm, for one thing,” interpreted the detective. “Offices unused.
Dust all over everything. Most of the models are for obsolete machines. This guy is either retired or just taking on a job now and then for the heck of it. Works alone. And there’s obviously . . .”
“What’s up?” Sally took note of the break in the commentary.
“Get a load of this thing!” he cried, enthusiastically patting a nondescript heap of joints and arms and beams. “This is it, kid! This is the answer! What a dope I’ve been!”
“Looks like a frozen nightmare,” said Sally disparagingly.
“This is an editor-ejector,” he proclaimed. “Saw one of these in action two summers ago. Guy came around to the farm where I was staying to demonstrate it.”
“What’s it do? Besides eject editors,” demanded Sally, suspicious of this new enthusiasm.
“It was built to fire heavy bales of hay from a truck right up into a hayloft;” the detective explained. “The thing’s uncanny. You set it for the weight of the bales, hook her up to an air compressor, load a bale of hay onto this sliding platform, take aim at the door of the hayloft and fire away.”
“What’s so good about that?” said Sally naively.
“Don’t you know what a job it is to haul hay up to a loft with a block and tackle?” he demanded. “Or what an expensive and clumsy rig an endless belt conveyor is?”
“No,” said Sally coolly. “I can’t say it ever came to my attention. But I can see where this gadget would come in mighty handy for flipping any old bodies you happen to have around over across the street into somebody else’s doorstep.”
“And for a guy who’s handy with a sliderule,” added Oliver, “it’s no trick at all to slap it down exactly where you want it. A million to one no one will notice the body hurtling across the street a dozen or more stories up. Just figure out the weight of the body, the distance, the trajectory. Just like aiming heavy artillery.”
“Very tidy and surprisingly small, too,” Sally pointed out. “What’s this thing?”
“Storage tank for that little electric compressor over there. Builds up enough air pressure that way,” explained the detective.
“But,” he added a little wistfully, “you don’t seem to be very much surprised.”
“No,” she admitted. “It was when that Barton Trask was kidding around about Nocturne’s being dejected and killing himself. The word, ‘deject’ is right out of Latin, and literally it means ‘to throw down’. I sort of started to think about the possibility that Nocturne didn’t jump down, but was thrown down.”
“It’s the way you look, I guess,” sighed Oliver. “Makes a guy forget you have a college education.”
IT TOOK well over an hour to convince Corcoran and the other powers-that-be that the death of Nicholas Nocturne was not a suicide. Then, with the full panoply of the ranking law, they called at the apartment of Cyrus P. Wade while that gentleman was finishing the late breakfast of a semi-retired bachelor.
“That’s ‘im!” shrilled Algernon William Wright. “That’s the gennulmun who got me inda this jam fer bustin’ that winder!”
Cyrus P. Wade was indeed a gentleman. He indulged in no undignified and unsportsmanlike denials and protestations; he knew when he was in the soup with both feet.
In his statement, given in a wry and cultivated tone of voice, he explained that the hobby of his declining years had been the writing of detective stories, written around various ingenious murder devices suggested by his years of experience as a topflight mechanical engineer.
“But Mr. Nocturne invariably rejected my manuscripts,” he explained. “And with an insulting little note that implied that my contrivances were impractical and the fancies of a lunatic. Then he would promptly adopt my idea and farm it out to some hack, or re-cast it himself.
“Finally I’d had enough of his ill-bred impertinence. He actually dared to laugh at the bale-gun idea when I embodied it in a narrative . . . although these machines are already patented and on the open market.”
“So you bought one and made an appointment to demonstrate it to him,” suggested Sgt. Oliver.
“Exactly,” said the old man with a triumphant smile. “Although I fear that I failed to convince him in the end, since it was unfortunately necessary to hit him over the head to get him onto the platform.”
“You had an appointment for lunch with someone in the building?” queried Sally Ryan, fighting against an overwhelming impulse toward sympathy for this well-mannered and charming killer.
“With a group of three old friends who have offices in the building, and with whom I regularly take luncheon,” he agreed.
“You know,” mused Oliver, “you’d have gotten away with it, more than likely, if you’d only chloroformed him so he’d be alive when he hit the pavement.”
“That was precisely one of the late Mr. Nocturne’s objections to my story,” said the old man. “Perhaps I should have paid greater heed to his advice.”
SQUEALER
John D. MacDonald
When Browden came off duty he stopped by the hospital on his way home to find out how the boy and the girl were doing. It was not out of his way. The girl’s father was near the main desk, and Browden was trapped. They crossed the lobby and sat on a bench to talk. The father was named Nichols and he was an accountant. There was a sickness in his eyes.
“Sergeant, I don’t understand how a thing like this can happen,” he said. “They gave Betty Lee a sedative. She’s asleep now. Her mother’s with her.”
“Do you know how the boy is?”
“I don’t care how that damn Reilly boy is,” Nichols said hotly.
“Maybe you should care. I saw his hands. He put up a good scrap. There were three of them. He did what he could. They put him out by hitting him with a tire iron or something.”
“He shouldn’t have taken Betty Lee there.”
“Maybe it wasn’t smart. But they’re kids. He has a car. They go to a place to park. That’s normal. They go to the place where other high school kids go. You don’t get anywhere blaming the Reilly kid.”
Nichols looked down at his tensely clasped hands. “All right. I’m sorry. I heard he’s okay. Maybe a concussion. And he lost some teeth. How can a thing like this happen?” Browden felt tired. It was a question he had heard many times. It was a question that never failed to move him. How can this happen to me? How can this darkness come into my life?
“It happens, Mr. Nichols. It happens all over the country. It has probably happened everyplace since the beginning of time.”
“Betty Lee’s life is ruined.”
“If you and your wife get all dramatic about it and go around wringing your hands for the next few years and telling her her life has been ruined, maybe it will be. You know the policy on this sort of thing. Her name won’t be in the paper.”
“Everybody will know. We ought to move away. I can get work some other place.”
“I don’t want to give you advice. That will just make it that much more important to your daughter. The best thing to do is get her back in school just as soon as you can and go right on as though nothing much happened. Then it will all blow over. And that’s the same thing your doctor will tell you.”
“But suppose she’s . . .”
“Don’t ask for trouble. If she is, it can be fixed. It can be legally fixed. Listen, I know kids pretty well. I know this is a terrible and shocking thing for a young girl, but it’s up to you two as her parents to keep her from making too much drama out of it. Keep your wife under control. Be balanced about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Nichols said bitterly.
“And it’ll be damn hard for you to do, I know. But people can do very hard things when it’s for their kids.”
After a long time Nichols said, softly, “Thanks, Sergeant. We’ll try that, I guess. I guess that makes the most sense. But, what kind of animals could to that?”
“We’ve got a pretty good hunch it was high-school kids.” Nichols raised his head sharply, his voice going shrill. “High-school kids! Not some kind of criminals?”
“Criminals, yes. High-school kids, yes. There have been other incidents.”
“But you mean boys that go to school with Betty Lee?”
“Maybe, Mr. Nichols, you’ve got a pretty glamorous idea of what high-school kids are. There are all kinds. There are over six thousand in that high school. This is an industrial town. We get the kids of a lot of transient families. The law says they have to go to school. There’s no law that says they have to be like the Boy Scout oath. The vast majority are good kids, but there are some rough monkeys in that place. We get knifings and we get a little dope peddling, and we get sex offenses. I’m a big husky guy, Mr. Nichols, and I know how to take care of myself, but believe me, there are some kids in that school I wouldn’t want to meet in any dark alleys.”
“Are you going to be able to find out who did this?”
“We’ve got a lead.”
“What will happen to them when you catch them?”
“Depends on how old they are. If they’re old enough, they get a man’s punishment. Otherwise they go to juvenile court.”
“They ought to be electrocuted.”
Browden looked at Nichols without expression. “I got to be running along. Try to handle it the way I said. Go explain it to your wife.”
“I will, Sergeant. And—thanks.”
After he reported for duty the next afternoon, Browden checked with the hospital by phone, then drove there with Lieberman, his working partner on the detective squad. When they got to the hospital they found that, as Browden had suggested, the Reilly boy had been moved temporarily into a private room so that they could question him more readily. Reilly tried to smile at them. Browden liked the kid. He had a reddish brush cut, bright hot blue eyes.
“Have you seen Betty Lee? How is she?” He frowned. “I can’t get used to talking without my front teeth.”
“We haven’t seen her yet, but she’s coming along okay.”
“Did you get them?”
“Not yet, but we’re going to. It will help if you give us a run-through on what you did last night.”
“It was the usual Friday night date, Sergeant. I picked up Betty Lee about seven, I guess it was. We went to the drive-in movie over on Ridge Boulevard. It was a double feature, and we got out about ten-thirty. From there we drove on out to Sandy’s for hamburgers. Some of the other kids were there and we circulated around from car to car, you know. I have to get Betty Lee home by midnight on weekends. By ten o’clock when we date during the week. We left a little after eleven I think it was, and we drove around by Proctor Park.” The boy blushed hotly. “We usually stop by there. You know. Park for a while and we have to leave by ten of midnight to get Betty Lee home under the wire. Jerry Traybor and Ann Hawks followed along in Jerry’s car and we parked near each other. They’re not good friends. It just happened that way. When I get up out of here, I’m going to work Jerry over good.”
“Why?”
“Here’s the way it was. They were parked on our left, maybe twenty feet away. We both had the car lights out. We could hear Jerry’s car radio. Mine is busted. I had my arm around Betty Lee. I didn’t hear a thing and all of a sudden the door on my side is yanked open and somebody grabs me by the arm and pulls me right out onto the ground and kicks me. I yelled. I got up and started swinging. It was an awful dark night. I don’t know who it was. I heard Betty Lee screaming on the other side of the car. I yelled to Jerry to help. I heard his motor start, heard him race it as he started to back out. Then something smashed me in the head, and when I woke up I was in the ambulance going right through the middle of town. I think if Jerry had piled out and jumped in, we might have been all right. Except for my teeth. It was the first kick that did that.”
“Were there any other cars there?”
“Not near us. Not near enough.”
“You didn’t recognize any of the three?”
“I didn’t even know there were three. How do you know that?”
“We got a report from a car that was parked about a hundred feet away. They heard the trouble. They saw the headlights on the Traybor kid’s car sweep across yours as he turned. They saw three men, and saw you on the ground. One of the men was struggling with your girl. They were too far to see faces clearly. They drove away, too, and then they got worried and phoned the police from down the road.”
“My father told me he brought my car in. He drove out with my sister and got it. They wouldn’t let him see Betty Lee.”
“She’s pretty upset, Dick.”
“Did they . . .”
“Yes.”
Reilly’s hand clenched and unclenched. “I figured so,” he said quietly. “Damn them. Damn them!”
“She’s going to need a lot of patience and—I guess the word is tenderness, Dick.”
“I know, Sergeant. I keep thinking like it was my fault. I should have locked the car doors. But we’ve gone there a lot. You wouldn’t think a thing like that would happen.”
“I don’t think it was your fault. I told her father that.”
“Thanks.”
They questioned him further, but he could provide no clue as to the identity of the attackers. They then talked to the girl in the presence of her mother. The girl, still drowsy with sedatives, could not help them in any way. Browden talked with Mrs. Nichols in the hall. She turned out to be more cooperative than he had hoped. She agreed to visit Dick Reilly, and she understood that it would be healthy for the two young people to see each other as soon as it could be arranged.
From the hospital they drove to the residence of Jerry Traybor. His mother was alarmed that two police officers should be calling on Jerry. She was partially reassured when Browden told her that there were no charges against the boy. She said he was up in his room, and since he so seldom stayed in on a Saturday afternoon, she had wondered if he felt all right. She called him down to the living room, and she was reluctant about leaving the room when Browden said they wanted to talk to the boy alone.
Jerry Traybor was a tall, gangly boy in khakis and a T-shirt, a dark-haired boy with restless eyes and a high, unpleasant nasal tone of voice.
“Sure, we ran into them at Sandy’s. Ann and me had spent most of the evening just cruising around like. When we figured they were headed for Proctor Park, we followed along. I don’t know what for. What do you do anything for? We just went along, that was all, and we parked near them. I guess it was maybe sort of a gag because everybody knows those two like to be alone. They’re real tense about each other.”
“You heard the attack.”
“We heard something. The car radio was on. There was yelling and screaming and I figured we ought to get out of there. I didn’t want any trouble. I backed out.”
“Did you hear him call to you for help?”
“I didn’t hear anything like that. I figured it was a private fight. Anyway, why should he call me? I don’t know him so good. I just see him around the school, like.”
“You felt you had no obligation?”
“Obligation? What do you mean by that? It was his fight. How did I know he didn’t maybe start it?”
“You turned your headlights on, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did. Yes.”
“And when you backed out, turning the wheel as you did so, your headlights showed you what was going on, showed you the people involved.”
“It was all kind of confused. I didn’t see anything.”
“Did you see two boys standing over Dick Reilly, and see another boy struggling with Betty Lee Nichols?”
�
�I didn’t see anything like that.”
“That’s pretty strange, Jerry, because a couple in another car parked a hundred feet away saw all that, and they saw it in the light of your headlights. And you were a lot closer.”
“I guess I wasn’t looking. I guess maybe it was like this. I was backing the car, see. And when you back up, you look out the back.”
“You had no curiosity about what was going on?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I just didn’t see anything.”
“Did you recognize any of the boys?”
There was no more shiftiness of the eyes. Jerry Traybor lifted his head and looked directly at Browden. His eyes were wide and bland. “No, sir. I didn’t recognize anybody. Like I said, I didn’t see much of anything.”
Traybor was a remarkably unskilled liar. Browden glanced at Lieberman and saw the disgust in his eyes.
“You’re following the code, Jerry?” Lieberman asked gently.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You recognized one or more of the boys. You know them. But you’re a big, brave fellow. You won’t answer a yell for help. But you’ve got too much courage to snitch to the cops. Isn’t that it?”
“I didn’t see anything. I keep telling you.”
“You keep telling us and we keep not believing it. Maybe you don’t want to tell because these are rough kids you saw. Maybe you tell us and they stick a knife between your ribs.”“I’m not scared of anybody,” the boy said sullenly. Browden said, “You know what happened to the girl, I guess.”
“It was in the paper. It didn’t give any names. But from where it happened and the time I guessed it was Dick and Betty Lee.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to you?” Lieberman asked. “I’m sorry about it, sure. That was a tough thing to have happen. It certainly was.”