“The character of the reverend’s wife was carefully checked on the grounds that maybe she had a secret lover, but she was without blame. And Eva Landsdale had no boyfriend to seek vengeance. Chief, there it is. Just that. And nothing more.
“Six separate investigations have been launched into the Hindricks-Landsdale slaying, and nothing has come out of them. The case has never been closed, and the $5,000 reward offered by the National Baptist Church Council has not been withdrawn.
“Now and again vague rumors crop up and we check them, but they turn out to be duds. Every crackpot in Chicago tried to butt their way into the Hindricks-Landsdale slayings. Sixteen psychopaths came forward to confess that they did it, and when their ‘confessions’ were checked, they could be placed nowhere near the scene of the crimes.”
“Hmmnnn…” Ruddy sighed, frowning. “Did you ever notice, Captain, that there is a kind of crime that brings these confessing psychopaths out like flies?”
“Yes, Chief,” Captain Snell agreed, nodding his head. “Especially those crimes with violent death, a hint of sex, and mystery in them. Many people get terribly wrought up.”
“Why do you think some crimes have that power?” Ruddy asked.
“Well,” Snell said cautiously, “one of our psychologists said that such crimes make people think that they could have done it, and from that possibility, if they are inclined to feel generally guilty, they leap to the delusion that they did it.”
“Maybe,” Ruddy said, scratching his head. “But why would they feel generally guilty?”
“That beats me, Chief,” Captain Snell said, smiling wryly. “I think I’d be a miserable man if I felt like that.”
“I would too,” Ruddy declared. “Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.”
“Right. Now, Father Byrnes’s and Sister Karn’s slaying stood out clearly in many respects: it was like the Hindricks-Landsdale murders but with a kind of cleanness, if I can use that word. What I mean, there was no hint of sex, we knew what Sister Karn was doing with Father Byrnes that night, we knew where they were going, and we knew why they were in those woods.”
“I see. That’s interesting.”
“Sister Karn was visiting her family that Thursday evening. It had rained hard, and the sky was black. A strong wind was blowing. Sister Karn’s aged brother came down with a heart attack. He was a devout Catholic. Naturally, Sister Karn wanted a priest to administer extreme unction. Now, the rainstorm had blown down telephone lines. They could not summon a priest by phone. They consulted the telephone directory and found that Father Byrnes was the nearest priest. Sister Karn went into the wet streets, found a taxi cab, and went directly to Father Byrnes’s house. The priest was in. He agreed to come with her but told her that it was not necessary to take the cab back, that they could take a shortcut across the woods and be at the house of the Karns in five minutes. Now, Sister Karn knew nothing of the paths in those woods. But she agreed; she was not fearful. She felt perfectly safe, being with a father of the Church.
“They set out. That was the last ever seen of them. When Sister Karn did not come home, and when Father Byrnes did not return to his apartment, a search was made. Toward five o’clock that morning, a party of searchers found their cold and wet bodies in the woods. Both had been shot to death with a .38. Now, it so happened that in falling, Father Byrnes fell across the body of Sister Karn, and that odd incident was what made the press pour out tales of a tryst of love between a Catholic priest and the nun. But there was not a single detail at that scene that suggested such.
“They seemed to have been ambushed suddenly by somebody standing in their path with a gun. What really happened, nobody knows. They seemed to have been shot at point-blank range, twice, through the head and then through the heart. Both of ’em. And no clues. Not a match, a footprint, a cigarette, a strand of hair…nothing, nothing, nothing. The killer vanished. His race, his sex, his social standing, his profession—nothing is known about him. The slaying of Father Byrnes and Sister Karn proved that the other killing really had nothing to do with blackmail, jealousy. I say that by assuming that the same killer killed both times and—”
“Why do you assume that?” Ruddy asked.
“I told you that in relating crimes in which there are no clues, one might relate things that are not germane to the crime,” Captain Snell said apologetically.
“I understand, Captain.”
“It’s perfectly possible that a different killer killed both parties,” Captain Snell went on. “That both parties were killed at night, that the parties were a man and a woman, that no robbery took place, that the bodies seemed not to have been touched. All of this might well be merely a coincidence. But, Chief, there is something in the popular imagination that did not let the public or the police believe that. Queer, isn’t it?”
“I agree,” Ruddy said. “I said with what you have said.”
“Crimes seem to speak.” Captain Snell smiled wryly. “One of the men from the DA’s office said that. Those crimes had a smell about them. They seemed to have been linked, not so much objectively but subjectively, in some killer’s mind. Odd, hunh? But you couldn’t escape feeling like that.
“Now, the same investigatory procedure that was employed in the Hindricks-Landsdale murders was employed in the Byrnes-Karn murders. We traced everything—and I mean everything—and we drew a blank. We are inclined to believe that those people were thrown together that night accidentally and were killed by a crazy ‘bushwhacker.’”
“You are assuming that he is always in those woods, that ‘bushwhacker,’” Ruddy said.
“I know, I know,” Captain Snell admitted an irrational element in his report.
“Maybe the ‘bushwhacker’ was there more times than one,” Ruddy speculated. “Maybe he was waiting not for the particular victims he did kill but for somebody or someone who fitted his notions of being a good victim.”
“That’s possible too,” Captain Snell admitted.
“In that case, then, he frequents those woods,” Ruddy said.
“We came to that conclusion,” Captain Snell said. “And that theory leads me to the third crime, for it came out of our trying to test that theory. Detective Heard and Policewoman Jenny Saunders were assigned to the case—in a sort of long-term proposition, see? We gave them plenty of latitude. They were in plainclothes. They came to live in Brentwood Park. Heard was married, a son in the university, and—”
“My son knew Heard Jr.,” Ruddy told Captain Snell.
“No!”
“Yes.”
“He’s given you any ideas about it?” Captain Snell asked.
“Nothing of any value,” Ruddy said. “You know how it is. Laymen don’t know how to observe. They get all wound up in wild abstractions when they try to think about crime. But go on.”
“Well, as I said, Heard and Saunders frequented that wood,” Captain Snell went on. “And they contrived to let it be known that they were investigating. We circulated rumors that we were near a solution to the crime, that we almost knew who did it.”
“A come-on,” Ruddy said. “A provocation, so to speak.”
“Right. Well, nothing happened all summer. Heard and Saunders were in those woods night and day, in their car, afoot, and once they even slept in a tent there. They met many people who eyed them and passed on. But nobody—and I mean nobody—molested them. At this time crime waned in Brentwood Park and we wondered if it was because of Heard’s and Saunders’s presence. But we could not tell.
“Then one day Charles Heard Jr. went to find his father for some urgent reason,” Captain Snell reported. “He went into the woods. He never came out. A party of picknickers found him shot to death. Heard was in a state of collapse. And this death forced us to believe that there was one killer in the series of murders.”
“You would have thought that the killer would have slain Heard and Saunders,” Ruddy said reflectively.
“Exactly,” the captain said.
“But
they got his son,” Ruddy said wonderingly.
“That’s the only fact that knocks the theory of the single killer,” Captain Snell pointed out.
“It does. Now, could the killer have made a mistake?”
“How?”
“By killing a victim he thought was somehow allied with what had made him kill the other two?”
“We’ll ask ’im if we ever catch up with ’im.” Captain Snell permitted himself a cynical joke.
“Maybe the killer was taunting the detective,” Ruddy suggested.
“Why?”
“Well, he—”
“If it was a ‘he.’” Captain Snell emphasized the mystery.
“Yeah. We really don’t know if it was a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’” Ruddy agreed. “There were many women in the last war and they were taught to shoot.”
“That last killing was what really threw us off,” Captain Snell confessed, running his fingers through a shock of curly blond hair. “If we accept the theory of a single killer for all three crimes, then this last killing seems to indicate a change of outlook on the killer’s part, another perspective, even a kind of exasperation.”
“What could ‘he’ or ‘she’ have been exasperated about?” Ruddy asked.
“Don’t know. It was just a kind of hunch that made me say that,” the captain admitted.
“Now, the commissioner told me that there was a sharp decline in crime in Brentwood after that,” Ruddy stated. “How do you account for that?”
“I don’t account for it.” The captain was honest. “Again we can only guess, Chief. Out of all the wild talk, the many speculations advanced, somebody said that maybe those three crimes were so horrible, so brutal and cold-blooded, that the amateurs were chilled into inaction.”
Both men laughed sheepishly.
“Were there many anonymous letters after the Heard killing?” Ruddy asked.
“Bushels of ’em—like always,” the captain reported. “And filled with the usual tommyrot. Only this time there were accusations that the police themselves had a hand in the killings. We had those letters carefully analyzed by psychologists, so desperate were we for facts, any kind of facts. But nothing came of that.”
“And were there many voluntary confessions this time?”
“There was not one voluntary confession for the Heard slaying,” the captain pointed out. “It was odd and made some of us think that we were wrong in trying to link all three crimes together.”
“There was no sex angle in the Heard killing,” Ruddy said. “Maybe that made the psychopaths silent.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s weird,” Ruddy said, sighing, standing. “There seems to be a secret buried out there in Brentwood Park. And, by God, I’m going to try to dig it up.”
“I’m at your service, Chief,” Captain Snell said. “Do you want me to leave these dossiers?”
“No. Ed Seigel ought to be reporting—”
“He signed in just before I left this afternoon,” the captain said.
“Good. Dump these dossiers into Ed’s lap and tell ’im to be ready to give me his impressions in the morning,” Ruddy ordered.
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
“Nothing at the moment. I’ll be here all afternoon. I’m fagged out. No sleep last night. I don’t want to come into the job half fuzzy-minded. I must get some sleep. I’ll be in in the morning—at about nine.”
“Right, sir.”
“If anything comes up, I’m here.”
“Right, sir. We’re happy to have you with us.”
“And I’m glad to be with you. Listen, any man on that force has the right to come in and talk to me at any time. I’ll see no politicians sent by officers. I’m straight, regular. No string pulling, no shake-ups. Just straight police work.”
“That’ll get the loyalty of every man on our force,” the captain declared. “Good-bye, Chief.”
“Good-bye, Captain.”
CHAPTER 10
Ruddy felt that his nerves were drained, taut, tired, but he knew that sleep or rest was no cure for what ailed him at that moment. He felt that he lacked exercise—yes, that was it. He ought to go down to the police gym and have a hard workout, let pouring sweat empty the accumulated poisons out of his body. But, no. He wanted to think, to resolve all the mass of contradicting facts that had been poured into his mind during the past ten hours. In his office he paced to and fro, like an animal behind bars, staring unseeingly. He had as yet—despite the commissioner’s, despite Tommy’s, and despite Captain Snell’s reports and descriptions—failed to get the “feel” of Brentwood Park. Something was missing, some vital link had not been uncovered, some handle was out of sight—a handle that he had been trained to take hold of and work with. And what was hovering tantalizingly beyond his reach were not the “facts” of the case but a meaningful interpretation of them, an angle of vision from which to see and weigh them.
Had he made an error in allowing Commissioner King to persuade him to accept the chiefship of Brentwood Park? Had he let the commissioner persuade him against his better judgment? No. Police work was his profession. Yet had he refused, he could have, in a few months, been retired and on his own, fishing, traveling, attaching himself to some private agency at a fancy salary. And he could have had the comradeship of Tommy, who, God knows, sure needed it now. Yes, there was no doubt but that he needed a rest from all the hurly-burly of crime, from all the hordes of killers and thieves; he needed to be around people who were not tracking down crimes or criminals who were trying to escape the meshes of the law. He yearned to see a clean sweep of sparkling blue water and feel a sharp, clean wind blowing on his face. That would do him a world of good. One got stale facing and probing into the same old problems. Yet there was something about Brentwood Park that challenged him, whetted his police instincts.
“Ruddy.”
“Yeah, Agnes.”
She opened the door and smiled compassionately at him.
“You’re not sleeping. And you’re not resting,” she chided him.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Your eyes look tired.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you lie down?”
“Don’t know. Just restless, I guess.”
“That job has got you by the throat,” she said. “Look, darling, I have a bridge party…. When will you want to eat?”
“I’m not hungry, Agnes.”
“But if you go to bed on an empty stomach, you’ll be ravenous before morning,” she told him. “I know.”
“I couldn’t eat anything now.”
“Listen, I’ll leave you a ham sandwich, a glass of chocolate milkshake, and a slice of pie on a tray.”
“Good, I’ll take a bite later.”
“Why not go to a movie? It’ll relax you.”
“Say, I might. If I can find something good.”
“Try that, dear.” She kissed him. “Take it easy.”
“Okay.”
When she had gone, he tried to convince himself that he wanted to see a movie, but he knew deep in him that he really did not, that he would have looked at the screen and not understood the flowing sequence of images. Then suddenly what he wanted to do struck him with thunderous force: he wanted to find that girl that Tommy had not married! That was it. Yeah, I’ll find that Marie. He did not know why he wanted to do that, yet he felt compelled toward it. Slowly, thoughtfully, he changed into his uniform, then felt into his suit pocket and found the chief of police badge that Commissioner King had given him, and pinned it on his chest. After he had tilted his visored cap above his large, dark eyes, he surveyed his reflection in the mirror. Yeah, he looked formidable. It was said that some men looked like cops and some did not; and he was one who did, powerfully. The boys had always said that he looked more like a general than a policeman—well, he was geting there. He was a chief of police now. And when he had his new rank service stripes sewed onto his new uniform, he would look like the nearest thing to a gene
ral. He found himself becoming debonair, smiling, slipping into an organized, official mood. As he went out to his car, he realized that he did not know where Marie Wiggins lived. He doubled back to the telephone, lifted the directory, and leafed through the pages. Yeah, he had heard Tommy talking to her many times over the phone, and undoubtedly she had one. Then he saw in fine print, memorizing it as he read it, as he had been trained to do: 6499 Woodlawn Avenue.
Ten minutes later Ruddy was rolling through the April twilight. Suddenly the streetlamps flashed on. He drove slowly, his watchful eyes glancing officially about without his being aware of it, noting which cars were obeying or violating the traffic code. He observed a big Buick overtake another car in the crowded traffic and pass it with but inches to spare. “I wouldn’t’ve done that,” he told himself. At a street intersection where he had the right of way, he stopped and waved a woman across—a woman who was pushing a baby buggy. She smiled at him and he nodded. This courtesy was now automatic with him. In the dim past, when he had once been assigned to a traffic detail, that was what he had always compelled other motorists to do. As he drove on, he looked up and glanced at his face in the rear-view mirror. Yeah, that was a policeman. On duty. Alert. On guard to observe if the law was being obeyed. Yes, he was the Chief of Police of Brentwood Park, Illinois.
He reached the South Side and found Woodlawn Avenue. This was a foolish errand. Suppose she was not in? He ought to have called her first. Okay, if she’s not in, no harm’s done. He saw from the names above the mailbox that Marie Wiggins lived on the first floor. He pushed the bell. There was no answer. He rang again, long and steadily. A buzzer sounded at the vestibule door.
Now that somebody had answered, Ruddy had a momentary doubt about the wisdom of his visit. What could he say to the poor girl? He let himself through the door and saw a dark form waiting for him at the end of the first-floor hallway.
“Yes?” a small feminine voice called.
He advanced, trying to see who had spoken, not replying.
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