No Body

by Nancy Pickard

  I thought of Miss Grant, another perceptive woman, and of her analysis of Darryl Davis’s personality. “But it must have been killing him, Beryl, to let her go. Wasn’t he possessive, or jealous?”

  “Of course he was.” Then she added ironically, “But that’s fathers for you, they just don’t want their little girls to grow up.”

  “And now she won’t,” I said quietly.

  “No.” Then she drew in her breath sharply, and stared at me.

  “Thanks, Beryl.” I waved, and drove away. In my rearview mirror, I saw her still standing in the parking lot, staring after me. Like a good barmaid, she had been quick, and sensitive to the nuances of my words and voice. She had figured it out and was appalled; I could see it in her face in the rearview mirror. I had figured it out, too, but I didn’t know the victim or her killer, so I was more emotionally detached from my hypothesis. I was glad, however, to be letting go of it. Now it would be Ailey’s job to find enough hard evidence to prove that Darryl Davis had killed his young wife.

  “Let me get this straight,” Ailey said forty-five minutes later in his gray metal cubicle of an office. I was earlier than I’d told Lewis, but that was fine with me, since I didn’t want to talk about Stan Pittman’s problems, or Russell’s, in front of a reporter. I looked at the cop sitting across from me. Ailey’s eyes shone with an expression that was so avid, so hungrily alert that it looked like greed. I was so tired by now that I was having trouble tracking. He said, “She was lonely, unhappy, and she chased all over town looking for a little comfort. And finally, she called her husband . . . like he was her daddy and he’d take care of her, is that it?”

  I shifted uncomfortably on the folding metal chair. Coming out of his mouth, my theory didn’t sound as plausible as it did in my own head. “It’s just a theory, Ailey, but I think it’s possible, don’t you?”

  “Wait a minute.” He put up a hand. “So he says to her, meet me at the funeral home, and she goes to meet him, and he kills her . . . because she was leaving him, and he was possessive.” He articulated each syllable, like an insult.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Why the funeral home?”

  “Ask him,” I suggested.

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Yes, at his wife’s funeral.”

  He seemed to wait for me to say something else.

  “He seemed distraught,” I said.

  “Distraught,” he repeated, and smiled slightly. The look of triumph in his eyes was growing, and I suddenly had the sense that Ailey was looking into the distance at his own promotion. He looked jubilant to be solving his first solo murder case, even if the lead came through me. I only hoped he didn’t get so worked up that he moved too fast . . . it was still only a theory . . . there was still evidence to gather. My worst fears were confirmed when he smacked his palm on his desk and said, “Let’s go get him.”

  “Now?” I stared at him. “Just like that, Ailey?”

  “Just like that.” He was already on his way to the door, but he stopped, jerked his chin at me. “You want to come, too? Come on.”

  I went, hoping Ailey was only going to bring the man in for questioning, and not try to arrest him. Alarms were going off in my weary head. Nowhere in my theory had I allowed for the murder of Muriel Rudolph. As we drove out of the police garage, I tried mentally to fit the two murders into one picture. Again and again, from different angles, I tried it, but my brain was fuzzy and the pattern didn’t seem to want to fall together. Surely that was only because I hadn’t had the time or the mental energy to think it out? But all Ailey wanted to talk about, over and over, were the details we’d already discussed.

  “So he gets her to the funeral home,” he said as he drove, speaking with an eagerness I’d never seen in him before, “and they go into the morgue. And he comes up behind her and grabs the ends of her hair and pulls them around her neck, and twists real tight and strangles her. Is that how you see it?”

  “Yes,” I said, reluctantly.

  “It would take real powerful hands to pull that off,” Ailey said with an enthusiasm that was nearly salacious. “But like you say, he’s a big, strong guy. And then he picks her up, without leaving any marks on her body or her dress or anything, and he dumps her into the coffin with Rudolph. Is that how you see it?”

  “Yes,” I said, irritably. “I guess.”

  He glided to a stop in front of a neat, modest house on a quiet residential street. Then he was quickly out of the car, with me on his heels. I accept the law that permits an accused to face his accusers, but I would have preferred it in a court of law, not on his doorstep. I followed Ailey up the front steps and waited behind him as he rang the doorbell, then knocked forcefully. After a few moments, a gruff male voice sounded from behind the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Detective Mason, Mr. Davis. Sorry to disturb you, but it’s about your wife’s death, sir.”

  There was a strange, metallic scratching sound on the other side of the door as if he were turning the knob with pliers. When it opened, Darryl Davis stood in the doorway, tanklike, in a blue-and-white seersucker bathrobe, beneath which he was wearing dark blue pajamas and black socks. Like Ailey, he had a broad, impassive face, but the skin was puffy, unhealthy looking, as if he didn’t sleep well or eat right. He stood, framed in the doorway, like a Marine drill sergeant, with his hands clasped behind him, staring over Ailey’s shoulder at me.

  “Will you come in?” He directed it at Ailey.

  “No,” Ailey said. “We have some new developments in the case. Thought you might like to take a look at them, sir.” He had carried a manila file folder from his office to the car; now he thrust it toward Davis. What kind of interrogation technique was this, I wondered.

  “This isn’t necessary,” Davis said.

  “Here.” Ailey pushed the folder until it touched the belt of the seersucker robe. The older man brought his arms out from behind his back to grasp the folder. It was all I could do not to gasp—at the ends of his wrists, where his hands should have been, were steel claws.

  He saw me staring, and said tersely, “Beirut.”

  Mason turned ostentatiously toward me to say with false regret, “Sorry, I thought you knew. Mr. Davis was wounded in that terrorist attack on the barracks in Lebanon a few years back.”

  It clicked then: the retired Marine who always kept his hands behind his back, and the former nurse’s aide at the veterans’ hospital. That’s how they had met, of course, this older man and his pretty, young wife. Some of Beryl Kamiski’s words took on a different meaning for me now. I nodded, tried to smile, finally settled on lowering my gaze to the cement, at my feet. Mason had turned back to face the man who stood, straight and still, in the doorway, the folder clasped in the pincers of his claws. “Well, we’ll push off.” Ailey nudged me back down the stairs.

  “I don’t want this.” Davis pushed the folder against Ailey.

  “You don’t?” The detective’s expression and voice were all innocent surprise as he took back the case file. “Okay. Sorry to disturb your nap, sir.”

  “I don’t sleep.” Davis closed his front door.

  We rode back to the station in silence.

  Once out of the car, Mason stared across it at me. Now he allowed the triumphant smirk to travel from his eyes to his mouth. “Let me give you a piece of advice,” he said. “Livin’ with a cop don’t make you one.”

  I stared back at him.

  “I expect you’ll be staying out of my business from now on, wouldn’t you say so?”

  I turned away, and walked back to my car.

  In that night’s paper, there was a Lewis Riss byline over a story that detailed the arrest by Detective Ailey Mason of one of Sylvia Davis’s lovers for her murder. He was a man who was old enough to be her father.

  “We believe our suspect, Stanley Pittman, Sr., had sufficient motive, which was to protect his personal reputation and that of his businesses,” Mason was quoted as saying. “As owner
of the funeral home in which Miss Davis was killed, he also had means and opportunity to commit the murder.

  “We made the arrest,” Ailey continued, “based on an anonymous tip we received concerning a phone call the deceased is alleged to have made to the accused shortly before she was killed. It was this information that allowed us to piece together the leads we had already painstakingly gathered in our exhaustive investigation concerning the events leading up to the murder. We were, of course, already close to the point of making an arrest, but we’re always grateful when conscientious citizens come forward in this way to assist the police.”

  At the end of the story, readers were asked to call the police hot line if they had any information about the whereabouts of John L. Smith, nineteen, who was wanted by the police for questioning in the Davis/Rudolph murders.

  27

  I spent a quiet weekend, as alone as possible: catching up on my sleep, cleaning house, visiting my mother in the psychiatric hospital where she is a resident, watching TV, reading, playing chess with my personal computer, avoiding the phone. Lewis left a couple of messages on the machine—first, to tell me that Ailey was gloating all over the police station over the humiliating trick he’d played on me, and, a second time, to offer comfort, either physical or chemical, or both. The only calls I returned were from Geof. From his hotel room in Philadelphia, he told me that I’d been more helpful than Ailey let on with his coy speech to the newspaper about anonymous sources.

  “Did he tell you much about it?” I asked him.

  “Enough,” he said. “Jenny, don’t be so hard on yourself. You came up with some extremely useful information, and you got people to talk to you who wouldn’t talk to us. Do you think that Ailey and I never come to dumb conclusions about cases? Listen, feeling foolish is a common disease, but it’s not fatal.”

  “Yes, but being foolish can be fatal to oneself, or others.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Well?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, in a reluctant tone. “Especially, in police work. Listen, if you’re feeling that bad, why don’t you fly down here for the rest of the weekend and let me massage your ego, and other parts. . . .”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  “Well, now there’s a reason.”

  “You wouldn’t want me, I’m wearing a hair shirt.”

  “You’re right, it’s damned uncomfortable to make love to a woman in a hair shirt. How long are you going to play martyr, Jenny? I’d like to know so I’ll have some idea when it’s safe to come home.”

  “By that time, I may have gone to live as a hermit in a cave, where I will be less of a menace to innocent people. Geof, did Ailey tell you about our visit to Darryl Davis?”

  “Yes.” There was reluctance in his tone, and disapproval, and I sensed he still didn’t want to discuss the case. Ailey’s case. But he said, “I love you.”

  “And we all know what reliable taste you have in women.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  By Sunday, I had worked myself into a real funk, which did not even lift when I went to work, like a regular human being, on Monday morning.

  “Jenny!” My secretary’s eyes were round with dismay and excitement. “Isn’t it awful about Mr. Pittman? Who would ever guess that that funny little man was a murderer?”

  “I wouldn’t have,” I said. “What else is new, Faye?”

  “Well, Derek called in sick,” she informed me. “And Marv’s got a dead battery, so he won’t be in until later, either. But you’ll be glad to know I got all these done for you, and early for once.” She patted a stack of documents.

  “These?” I frowned at them.

  “The agenda for your board meeting this afternoon,” Faye said patiently, as to a forgetful child. “As far as I know, they’ll all be here; at least, I haven’t had any calls from their secretaries to say otherwise. Jenny, what do you think I ought to fix at that time of day . . . regular coffee or decaffeinated?”

  “Board meeting?” I picked up a copy of the agenda and read it as if I hadn’t written it myself several days previously. The top item under Old Business was: “Union Hill Cemetery Investigation Progress Report by J. Cain, Exec. Dir.”

  I walked past Faye into my office and slumped into my chair. “Mr. Chairman,” I rehearsed silently. “I regret to report there is no progress in the investigation into the matter of the bodies that are missing from Union Hill Cemetery because your executive director has wasted her time chasing down blind alleys, barking up wrong trees, making a nuisance of herself at police headquarters, interfering in people’s private lives, and accusing the wrong man of murder. What is that you say, Mr. Chairman? You’re tired of Hector? Oh, you wish to fire the director. Is there a second to the motion? Gentlemen, please, one at a time!”

  Faye appeared at the door with a calendar in her hand. “You seem tired this morning, Jenny,” she said kindly. “Would you like me to run through the day’s appointments with you?”

  I nodded, and Faye came in and sat down across from me.

  “In twenty minutes, you’re talking to a grant applicant.” She read from the calendar while I stared at the cloudy day outside my windows. “It’s that woman with the idea for a carnival to benefit battered children. And then you have an appointment with a lawyer who wants to know how we handle bequests to the foundation. And after that, I told the director of the city mission that he could see you, because they had to serve extra people during that cold, wet spell, and they’re running low on food money this week, and . . .”

  The phone rang. When she saw I wasn’t going to get it, Faye reached over my desk to pick up the receiver. “Port Frederick Civic Foundation,” she said in a cheerful voice.

  I hadn’t noticed before, but the leaves were budding on the trees below my fourth-floor window; soon, the roofs of the smaller buildings would disappear from my view. Then I’d be looking out on a sea of green leaves, punctuated by stretches of pavement and by the few buildings downtown that are taller than the trees. Soon, it would be just me and the birds in the tops of the trees.

  “I’ll get her,” Faye said, and held the phone out to me.

  Do birds nest in downtown trees, I wondered. Maybe they’re put off by the automobile fumes and the heat rising from the asphalt, not to mention all the pedestrians. I tried to remember when I’d last seen a sea gull downtown, and couldn’t do it. I tried to care about whether there were any birds downtown, and I couldn’t do it. I tried to care about the fact that I couldn’t seem to care about whether there were any birds downtown and couldn’t do that, either. Like Marv, I had a dead battery.

  “Jenny?”

  I looked at the phone in Faye’s hand, then reluctantly took it from her. “Yes?”

  “Jenny?” inquired a male voice, sounding doubtful.

  “Yes, Stan. Oh.” I sat up straighter. “Hello, Stan.”

  “Are you coming over to the funeral home this morning to work on the Union Hill business, Jenny?” He sounded even more depressed, if that were possible, than I. There was a note of pleading in his voice, as well.

  I told him I hadn’t planned on it.

  “Oh,” Stan said.

  There was a pause while I struggled to think of something tactful to say to him. Finally I said what I should have said immediately: “Stan, do you want me to come over there now? I’ve had some experience with this sort of thing, as you know, and I’d be glad to come over and talk to you about it, if you . . .”

  “Would you?” He sounded pathetically grateful.

  “I’m leaving right now,” I promised him.

  Faye offered to make the necessary calls to postpone my meetings, and I left the office. My battery wasn’t entirely recharged, but at least it was hot-wired by an old friend’s troubles.

  “He’s still in jail?” I stared across Stan’s desk at him. “Why, Stan? Didn’t they set bail? Was it too high? There are bondsmen, you know, who . . .”

&
nbsp; “Dad wouldn’t pay it.”

  “He wouldn’t pay it?”

  “You know Dad.” Stan slid down in his chair as if somebody had pulled him down by the ankles. He sighed again. “He says he’ll sit there until hell freezes over before he’ll pay them one red cent, and if the family makes his bail, he’ll personally see to it that we’re all buried alive in airtight caskets. He says they’re all a bunch of goddamned dumb bunnies, and when he gets through suing them for false arrest and defamation of character, they won’t have a rope to hang a horse thief.”

  “Well.”

  Stan rolled his head on the rim of the chair until he could see me from a sideways angle. “What am I going to do, Jenny?”

  “Try to prove he didn’t do it, I guess.”

  His eyes slid away from mine and found a focus at a point on the edge of his desk.

  “Stan?” I felt a little nauseated. “He didn’t do it?”

  “Which?”

  “Oh God.” This time it was I who sighed. “Well, let’s take it one step at a time. He did have an affair with Sylvia Davis.”

  “Yes.” Stan’s eyes remained fixed on the point on his desk.

  “And you were being blackmailed by the Jackal.”

  He looked surprised at my knowledge, then his glance slid away again. “I was looking forward to finally being able to fire the little bastard, but he’s disappeared. I’m beginning to think there’s no justice, Jenny.”

  “How long had he been blackmailing you?”

  Stan’s cheeks turned pink. “Several months.”

  “How much did you pay him?”

  The cheeks grew pinker. “A thousand a month.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Yeah, and the kicker is that it was only a short fling, and it was over months ago.” He laughed, a sound full of bitter irony. “I guess the lesson here is that lust may come and go, but extortion lingers on.”

  That surprised me. “I thought you told Sylvia, at the office party, that she bad to break off the affair.”