bad memories

by douglas sandler

  “But I do have a broken leg,” the bald man’s protest was a plea, “you can see that, that can be proved.”

  “All right, you have a broken leg, but Smith was a smart enough doctor to know how to fix it so you could get around on it in two or three days, if not sooner; the staler splint, Younger. Did you ever hear of that? Or have you fallen behind in your studies?”

  Rodgers moaned, “What is that Doctor Younger? What is he talking about?”

  Thomas Younger crossed to the old man’s side and touched his thin shoulder. “The stander splint is something fairly new, Mr. Rodgers. They drill holes right in the bone and wire the bone up, they use some kind of a steel brace with it, and you can be up and around in a few days, if your bone break happens to be the kind where they can use that sort of thing.”

  “And I guess yours wasn’t the kind.” Miller’s tone was a flat challenge. “All right you two, I’m going to look at that leg.” The long insistent buzz of the door bell interrupted.

  “Who’s that?” Said Rodgers; bell, house phone and door release button were in one unit on the wall. Miller held his finger to the button, “probably just a salesman or maybe the gas man.”

  “What?”

  “It would be an odd coincidence if it were the police, though.” It seemed queer to Miller to be joking. He seemed to be a different person at different times. But humor was the specific that kept man alive.

  “Miller, did you call the police?” He ignored younger’s question.

  “You made your mistake attacking me.” He said. “And then letting me get away alive. You killed Albert Smith and Paul Allen and Mendez. But now you’re going to account for it; your gun Younger. We’ll see what story its cartridges and its barrel grooves have to say.”

  The heavy hurrying footsteps, though muffled by the hall carpet drew nearer. Miller’s confidence left him, Edward would never back him up, he realized. Undoubtedly he would refuse to arrest Younger.

  But it wasn’t Edwards; Miller flung open the door even before the knock could sound. There stood the cabbie Moe, shaking breathless. “The old man, something happened to him, he was shot, and he got killed.”

  John scarcely took it in. “Who? What?” he said dully.

  “The old man with one leg, killed just now.” It was incredibible, he had only just spoken to Daniels and what would this do to Sally? Miller glanced at Rodger’s and younger; he had been blaming them for all these murders. But now a man had been killed and they had been here, in this room at the time, their alibi so far as Daniels was concerned was unsalable.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Moe’s cab rocked at the curb with the uneven throb of its motor; when he brought Miller to the Allen gate. A state police car and two motorcycles were already there. Miller paid Moe and hurried away from his thanks; with trooper John at the door with another trooper.

  “Let him in,” Said trooper John, “the Sergeant will want him, but see nobody gets out.” Miller moved to the sitting room passing another trooper. In the sitting room Angelia Parker sat smoking a cigarette, pinching shreds of tobacco from her pink tongue; a faded woman with a faded tongue. Sally Daniels sat on the edge of another chair, her hands twisting a handkerchief.

  “It’s happened,” she said, she had the calm of a man who knew his fate before the judge pronounced sentence. What could Miller tell her? What could anyone have told him when he’d found Albert dead? “He was so old and helpless, John he wasn’t even good for himself anymore.”

  “The police got here fast,” Miller said foolishly. They were non words, merely something to say.

  “I should never have left him alone, never. But he didn’t want to be treated as an invalid. He said that when a man couldn’t take care of himself, he ought to be dead.”

  “You mean he killed himself? He didn’t kill himself Sally”

  “I was down here, I heard the shot I was afraid.”

  “But I just talked to him, Sally over the phone. Not more than a half hour ago, he was all right.”

  “I finally made myself go, there didn’t seem to be anyone else going. I didn’t know it was dad, but I was afraid it was; that’s why I had to go.”

  “Oh, I met Miss Parker on the stairs, but I had to go myself, when I did I saw the gun in his hand.”

  Angelia Parker rose, the cigarette in her mouth. Her weary eyes were wide, staring, reminiscent reflecting all the shocks her life had known.

  “I saw him only a few minutes before,” She said. Voicing the universal incredulity that life could so quickly become death. “He told me that he was moving out, taking a hotel room. Would a man say that just before he killed himself?”

  “No,” Miller said. “A man wouldn’t say that, never.”

  Sergeant Sammy came in the door, his face set, “Oh, Miller!” He stalked up, “I thought you?”

  “What’s happened here, Sergeant/” Miller asked innocently, if a man wasn’t a cynic he was a fool or blind, “What is it? Another suicide?”

  “Wisenheimer, huh?” Anger exploded in Sammy. “Well, I’ve got a few questions to ask you! Why’d you call me? You were just trying to decoy me away from here!” He’d never get any help from Sammy, Miller realized again. “I was attacked sergeant, a couple of boys set on me with guns.”

  Benny Godley came into the room; they were all coming here now. The attorney surveyed the place with his dark eyes. “What’s all this, Sammy? Edwards says Daniels is?”

  “Yeah, dead upstairs with a bullet in the head and one in the groin;” how nicely Godley and Sammy worked together, “Suicide,” Miller explained.

  Sammy thrust his face up to Miller’s. “All right, that’s just enough from you, you want trouble?”

  He grabbed Miller’s wrist, reached for the handcuffs hooked at the back of his belt.

  “Nice going,” Miller said, “I see Godley hasn’t lost any time in giving you your instructions, you make a fine team.

  “Now wait a minute, Sammy.” Attorney Godley’s facile legal tongue intervened. He put his hand on the Sergeant’s broad shoulder. “Take it easy, this is no time to get excited. Mr. Miller had nothing to do with this. I’ll vouch for that.” He turned a handsome smile on Miller. “How does that strike you, Mr. Miller?” Miller clenched his teeth, there was just one answer. The charge that Godley has faked the true cause of Allen’s death in order to collect insurance had found a home.

  “I don’t need your protection Godley?” The tough words were unfamililiar in Miller’s mouth. “And I don’t like your questions, Sammy. They interfere with questions I want to ask on my own.”

  The two men watched him carefully; Angelia Parker and Sally Daniels were background bystanders in someone else’s scene.

  “This is the setup.” Miller said. “I have no authority to whom I can appeal if I want police aid. Where can I get it?” Sammy growled again and then started to turn away.

  “I’m talking about you, Sergeant Sammy, you and Mr. district attorney there, what’s the tie up between you? Godley law bosses the town and you police it for him. Is that it? I’ve seen cliques like that before. I saw it in a hospital once, I guess what happened there might happen anywhere there’s power to be had or favoritism to be dished out. You wouldn’t care to have me arrested would you Godley?”

  “Maybe I will!” the lawyer let go of Sammy’s arm, Sammy moved back towards Miller.

  “Oh, no,” said Miller. “You won’t do that Godley. You can’t lock me up.”

  “You’ll see if I can or not.” Sally Daniels was at Miller’s side.

  “Don’t, John please! You’re goading them into arresting you.” Miller shook his head, “Godley has to have me arrested now, Sally if he lets me go free, it’s as good as an admission that he’s buying me off, that he’s implicated in Paul Allen’s murder. I’ve told him I thought he was mixed up in it. He’ll arrest me now, but what he really wants is to get me out of the way.”

  “What is he talking about?” Angelia Parker asked.

  “H
e’s talking about this.” Godley said and suddenly unwound his right fist and struck the side of Miller’s head. Miller surged in, throwing his own right at Godley. The state policeman grabbed Miller from behind. Miller tore loose, swung on Edwards, but he went down to one knee when it struck him behind the ear.

  “Take him out of here!” Godley shouted, “Put him in a cell, we’ll decide what to do about him later.” Miller started to straighten; he’d know Godley was entangled in Allen’s murder, on account of the insurance. But he really needn’t have driven the man to this, if they put him in a cell now?”

  “Let me talk to Miss Daniels first.” He said.

  The Sergeant straight armed him forward. Miller stumbled toward the sitting room door. Another shove at his back sent him through the door into the reception hall. Miller preceded the burly sergeant, as he stepped through the door he grabbed the outside knob, his foot over the threshold, he turned pulling the door shut ahead of Sammy. Then amazed by his action, he ran for the verandah balustrade and vaulted it; he landed in a tangle of bushes.

  Miller pulled free of the grasping bushes branches. Taking the cover of the house wall, Miller brushed along it to the rear stoop, he found the door. He crouched back as Sammy lumbered into view. The sergeant’s head swiveled like a bird’s searching the countless possible escapes in the night hidden shrubbery. Miller pulled at the door, it was locked. But there was the window beside it, a window that gave into the butler’s pantry. Godley was guilty on the insurance, perhaps of even more. He had a wife and children, an attractive wife. Perhaps he had done it for her, for money; to be money strong, money big in her eyes.

  Miller put his hands flat against the window and shoved; men stole, killed not out of bravery but out of fears. The window slid up he sized its opening.

  Inside he walked on toward the reception hall. Attorney Benny Godley was just going up the right handed flight of marble stairs. He stopped and turned arched his graying eye brows in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Didn’t you put Sammy up to it?” Miller felt his mind working like a motor. “Sammy had a fatherly talk with me outside, and he handed me that line about wanting to keep peace and order here in town, that he didn’t want any trouble here.”

  “You mean he let you go?” He’d have to tell a big lie, or fail. Miller knew, “I told him I didn’t give a damn if Millersburg was a high type community, and the reality owners association wanted to preserve its reputation at all costs.” Convincing detail made a lie into the truth.

  “Then Sammy told me about some police officer he knew who lost his badge because he was too efficient about law enforcement.”

  “Peterson? Did Sammy tell you that?” Miller hesitated, “doesn’t it happen in just about every town Godley, a police officer stepping on someone’s tender toes and getting forced into resignation? Sammy told me how he didn’t want any crime wave breaking on his doorsteps if he could help it.”

  “So what does he do? He gives me twelve hours to remove myself peaceably from his town.” He turned away before Godley’s reaction took definite form. Strong action might bluff the district attorney, if the district attorney was uncertain what to do. He stopped at the sitting room door, he didn’t hear Godley following.

  Miller stepped into the high beamed sitting room with its straight backed chairs, sitting on a divan between the fireplace and the grand piano were Angelia parker and Sally, remaining heirs, waiting, waiting as the others had waited, Sally rose promptly at Miller’s entrance and came hurriedly toward him. He took her arm and led her aside.

  “Look,” he said. “In just about sixty seconds that Sergeant may be breaking in here and grabbing me again. I ran away from him because I had to talk to you.” You could never tell more than the barest summary of what you meant, what you felt.

  “You have two alternatives, Sally. First and you’d be smart to take it, is to get out of here now.” He hadn’t seen her crying over her father, but she was crying now.

  “Do you know about the will?” He demanded.

  “Whatever money there might be in that that will,”she said, “was for dad, with him dead, I’m out of it.”

  “Well, that just strengthens what I’ve said then Sally, take care of yourself, get out of here.”

  “You said there were two alternatives.”

  “I was going to say that if you wanted to see the matter of your father’s death cleared up.”

  “I do want to! I won’t leave here until it is!”

  Miller’s eyes moved about the room, “where is Paul Davis?” He asked.

  “Davis?” Sudden realization was in her exclamation and her face, “he must be gone, he’s not been here for hours.”

  “Sally, look you can’t stay here. I’ve arranged for a hotel room for you in town, but now he shouldn’t let her stay even there. This town wasn’t safe for her, and yet he could not do without the sense of her presence, “I need your help.” He said.

  “You say you want to stay.”

  “Yes.” He squeezed her hand, “I’ll let you know soon what you can do.”

  She felt something pressed in her palm; it was a small black handkerchief with a design of pink roses in the corner.

  “You dropped it.” He said. “In grand Central Station the other day, you bumped into me and dropped it.” He went out of the room, she could not know the thoughts he had about the handkerchief.

  Upstairs, Miller made a hurried search of Davis’s bedroom. The bed was messed up; drawers were pulled open, and in one of them were three empty pint bottles in the wastebasket was a crumpled envelope directed to Davis in New York. Somewhere there were the bars he frequented, the women who bought his drinks. Somewhere there he had doubtless now been swallowed up.

  Back on the ground floor Sergeant Sammy’s voice was booming at attorney Benny Godley.

  “No, damn it! He gave me the slip.”

  “What are you talking about? You let him go!”

  “Let him go?” Miller heard angry dialogue back and forth. These might have been quarrelsome, subjective voices in his mind.

  “I let him go? Why damn it, he pulled the door shut in my face! I.” He retreated toward the rear of the house. In the butler’s pantry he faced the small window through which he’d made his entrance. Then he saw the key in the lock. Circling wide of La Querencia, Miller followed the line of the high iron picket enclosing the estate.

  He waited till the activity at the front gate died. When a motorcycle drove off, he slipped through the gate and headed east toward the highway. The Millersburg cemetery was asleep with the night, the pattern of its hills a dark silent gloom, broken by blurred, square faces of marble and granite. The high iron fence around the cemetery raised its lance like pickets to the sky, occasional cars kept the highway stirring. The hammer and the screw drivers were where he had concealed them near the gate. The gatehouse was dark. Miller examined the lock and chain on the gate. He tapped the lock lightly with the hammer; the night silence magnified into the clang of a sledge on an anvil.

  He walked down the fence to where a tree grew close to it. He climbed the tree, swung himself out along a branch and dropped inside the cemetery, he was in another world. He had been familiar with death and the dead, yet now he felt he was not familiar with it. A body was not death; it was the product of death.

  A clay purple corpse was what death did to a man, but it was not death. He had heard the scream of death, its piercing pain, the familiar screaming of Jennifer Paulson in ward 4, at Allendale. His hurrying footsteps left thought behind; the Allen mausoleum projected from the hill side. He paused before its heavy bronze door, black now in the moonlight. He put his hands on its knob. He felt surprised as the door swiveled open easily, smoothly.

  He reached into his pocket and brought out a packet of matches. He struck a light, cupping the sharp brightness of the flame in his hands, but it quickly waned. The flickering glow illuminated the lock on the large door. The metal strip into which the bolt had fitted now h
ung loose, his fingers touched the small, crescent hammer marks where a tool had battered the lock. He struck another match and stepped into the cramped space of the mausoleum. His eyes went first to the crypt where Allen’s body had been placed, then moved on to the floor.

  He stopped picked up crumbling bits of mortar and crushed them between forefinger and thumb. He ran his fingers along the stone floor and looked at the lime dust on his fingertips. The matches shrinking flame burned his fingers. He dropped the match, straightened and struck another.

  “John,” said a voice, so close it might have come from one of the vaults. He dropped the new match he held and turned. A small stiff figure, illuminated by moonlight, stood in the frame made by the mausoleum’s door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sally Daniels nearsighted eyes stared, she took a hesitant step closer to Miller and her face, which had been fairly well defined outside became a silhouette. He put an arm about her shoulder, she drew free. “John, what are you doing here? I saw you going to the butler’s pantry. I spoke to you, but you were so intent.”

  “I didn’t hear you,” Miller said.

  “I would have spoken again, louder. But I was afraid of giving you away. You said you wanted me to help, so I followed you, why have you come here?”

  There was little time to for explanations. “I was just trying to find out if Davis was safe.”

  Miller said, “That what happened to Albert and Allen and your father hasn’t happened to him. Sally will you hold these matches for me, strike one.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have to decide first, if all this talk about a will and inheritance was just a come on for murder.”

  He sensed her confusion, her fear. “No, I don’t believe Allen’s alive,” he said. “I think he’s dead and I think he really meant to forgive and forget. That he was sincere in how he left his money if he had any to leave. But how did Allen die? And why?” He looked toward the vault. “Will you hold that match for me, Sally?”