“Are you going to open it?” dread chocked her voice.
“I know it isn’t a pretty job, but I want your help only until I get it open, Sally. I’ll handle the rest then myself.” With hammer and screw driver he chipped at the mortar sealing the vault. Once he started, he found he didn’t require light. With the tip of his screw driver he could blindly follow the mortar seam around the facing of the vault.
He finished the job and removed the facing. Reaching into the opening groping, he located a handle of the coffin and pulled it toward him. He found the screws fastening the lid and removed them, he raised the lid.
“I’ll take the matches Sally.” She gave them to him and moved back near the mausoleum’s entrance. He slipped open the folding cover of the packet, separated a single match and tore it off, he closed the cover. He struck the match; it sparked but did not light. He scratched hard and its paper spine broke. He grasped the unbroken small end and scratched again.
When the light flared up, he moved it so that its rays fell over the coffin. The orange glow played on the ruffled satin of the coffin lining, the match flickered. Miller felt a movement at his elbow.
John!” Sally said. The broken match burned close to his fingers.
“John,” she said again, “what you said was true!” Her voice and match died together. He felt her hand clutch his arm.
“John, what does this mean? What’s happened? Why? Who would want to?”
He had wondered about those questions himself. “This is the answer,” he said.
“The answer? What answer?”
“To all of your questions, “Paul Allen was murdered, shot to death.”
“But how do you know? Where is he? Maybe he’s alive.” Anxiety whipped her words; they dashed and darted from her.
“No, Sally Allen was shot murdered in his library. I’m sure of that and who ever shot him tried to make it look like suicide, just as they tried to make your father’s death look like suicide.”
He felt like an all wise detective. “Perhaps Benny Godley discovered Allen’s body. He knew Allen had a big, new insurance policy. That would be void if he’d taken his own life. So Godley might have fixed it with coroner Watson to pass it off as a natural death, not a suicide. Godley simply wanted a share of that insurance money.”
“But the man who murdered Allen, what would he have thought when Allen’s death wasn’t even called a suicide?”
“He must have suspected some kind of trap,” Miller said. “And he knew the evidence of how Allen actually died was in Allen’s body. So he had to get rid of his body. Which you see has been done.”
“But who did all this, John? Do you know?”
“The man who did it may not now be living.” The dark had reduced Sally to a silhouette and voice.
Her voice said, “You mean someone murdered the murder? Was it Jose Mendez?” She groped for a yes or no in Miller’s silence. “Paul Davis?”
“I hope Davis is safe. I hope he’s gone home to New York, but there are other ways for people to cease to exist besides getting themselves murdered.”
“By suicide? You don’t think my father,” The conversation was whispered, urgent as Miller put his palms to the coffin. It grated unpleasantly as he worked it back into the vault.
“I don’t mean your father,” He said. “But it won’t do any good to say whom I do mean until I’ve found Paul Allen’s body, without it.” He turned with his sudden thought. “But what would anyone do with a body?”
He was facing the mausoleum’s door; Sally was black without detail against the grayness of the opening. He might have been asking her what she had done with the body by the way she shook her head. “I mean where could they put it?” Miller said.
“How could they get it out of the cemetery without being seen?”
“It’s night.”
“This place is closed and padlocked at night.”
He had climbed the tree to get in. But he wasn’t completely familiar with the cemetery, someone else.”
“Sally?”
“Yes?”
“You came in here.” He’d almost forgotten about that, “you came in here how did you get in?”
She misunderstood; he could see her finger gesturing at the mausoleum’s floor. “Into here?”
“I mean into the cemetery.”
“Through the gate.”
“But it’s not open.”
“Between the bars.” Sally said. She held up her hands, “They’re this far apart, I squeezed in between them.”
Miller walked out of the mausoleum. He looked at the white blotches of tombstones on the black, silent slopes. At a break in the trees water wrinkled with moonlight.
“A lake,” Sally said.
It was hardly more than a pond, a landscaped prop for drooping willows, their November bare branches like tresses. Miller shook his head, pondering. “A man carrying a body, a corpse all the way up there? The idea was ghoulish and distasteful. There would have been the problem of weighting the body so it would sink; and the possibility that it would float up afterwards.
The wind fluttered Sally’s coat. She held her elbows. Miller turned back into the mausoleum. He heard the girl behind him, with him in the small chamber his feet crunched on the broken mortar he had chipped away from the vault facing. He bent picked up a small rough lump. He crumbled it between his fingers. He dropped the fragments and crushed clinging, damp grains from his hands.
“Whatever are you doing?” He heard Sally ask.
He ran his fingers along the seams of mortar sealing other vaults. He shook his head, then his fingers running along the mortar of the last of the six vaults in the mausoleum, stopped. He pressed his thumbnail to the seam; the mortar was of the same hardness as the mortar which he had chipped away from Paul Allen’s empty vault.
“Let’s go back to the house.” Sally said.
“To the house?” He touched her and he felt her shivering, “they may still be there, you know the police and Godley. Do you think they’ll put me in a cell when I tell them Paul Allen’s body is missing?”
“They’ll want to know more than ever, won’t they?”
“I don’t know any other way. I have to tell them. I need their help.”
“You mean because the body.”
“I have something more significant than that.”
His tone was grimly serious. “I’ve just found it, Sally.”
He stood with his back to the vault wall. “The murder couldn’t get the body out of the cemetery. So where would be the logical place to conceal it?”
His right hand touched the facing of the last of the vaults. If he were the all wise detective, his tone would express glee, triumph. “Do you want to see this, Sally? Will you strike a light?” His thumbnail dug into the mortar of the seal. The mortar crumbled in the same way as the fresh, new mortar of Allen’s vault.
“Allen’s body is right here,” Miller said.
“But in somebody else’s vault.”
Chapter Eighteen
A trooper stood guard at the gate to the Paul J. Allen estate. He peered suspiciously at Miller and Sally as they walked between the cars parked at the curb. “Say, just a minute, where ya going?” The trooper’s eyes challenged. “Another news hawk, I suppose.” He glanced at Sally, “and you’re going to write up the ladies angle, huh, Blondie? What the body was wearing.”
“We’re connected with this case,” Miller said. “We’ve got business here.”
“Yeah? Well, I tell you we don’t want any more of you New York newspaper people here.”
“But we’re not newspaper people, we’re.”
“You’re friends of that, that Paul Davis gent ain’t you?”
“Paul Davis/” Miller heard Sally’s exclamation through his own.
“That’s what you all say, friends of his,” griped the trooper. “Well, we’re looking for that Davis guy, too for questioning, see? Running off to New York, calling in you yellow scandal swillers.”
“Now, listen Blondie.”
“For all Paul Davis knew he might be killed next.” She had come to New York to bring him to Millersburg. Miller thought she had accepted her father’s death with courage, she had followed to the cemetery, and now.”
“That’s what the press is for, so the people will know the truth, how dare you interfere?”
Sally’s dimpled shyness concealed qualities that stress revealed. Miller felt if he let her talk on, they might gain admittance as representatives of the press.
He glanced at the cars parked along the line of La Querencia’s front wall. He’d taken for granted they were cars belonging to the police, the coroner to Benny Godley. Now he realized they might have carried newspaperman.
He confronted the trooper with something like exaltation. He had felt his life crushed when he had found Albert dead; the one stable thing in his life, his friend. Set upon Millersburg, he’d had Albert to cheer him and rally him into hope. With Albert dead there had been nothing left, and then Sally had come.
She was a support, understanding a tie. She’d made him know that he must fight for Albert as Albert had fought for him. He was not alone any longer. He was not a crazy person sitting about the wards, muttering to himself, making bizarre movements. There were others in this drunken cynical Paul Davis, for one Davis’s revelation to the press assured action now. It was beyond Godley to hush affairs any longer.
“I’m Miller, John Miller,” he told the trooper, “Sergeant Sammy is looking for Me., and we became separated a while back.” The entire district division of the state police seemed to be on duty within the mansion. Sergeant Edward appeared at the head of the reception hall stairs.
Benny Godley was not far behind, somewhere too. Angelia Parker wavered into the scene out of focus like a swimmer under water.
“Take it easy, Edwards,” Sally said. “And you to Godley. I have to talk to you both,” his stomach floated inside him, his feet were cold stone. Now was the climax, he had to speak the smash sentence.
“Paul Allen’s not in his coffin, someone broke into his vault.” There it was he’d said it now. They’d think he’d said it simply unemotionally.
“His body’s gone.”
Benny Godley’s dark eyed face sagged with incredulity, “what kind of trick is this/”
“It’s no trick, I’m telling you. We have the man who killed Davis now, if we go out take him.”
Godley regarded Miller as if he were a strange specimen; purple seeped into the red of Sergeant Edwards face. “Allen’s body is missing, huh? You dishing out that kind of bull and expecting us to swallow it? Well, nuts to you, brother!”
“You disturbed Mr. Allen’s crypt then?”
Godley demanded, “You’ve broken open his resting place?”
“It’s no resting place if there’s no body. The man who killed Allen didn’t want Allen’s body found. Don’t you see why? When we get Allen’s body, we’ll very likely have the evidence to convict his murderer.”
“But you said Allen’s body was gone!” Godley exclaimed.
“Gone, but I know where it is,” Miller said. “That’s why I came back here. I figured Allen’s body couldn’t have been taken very far. At first, I thought it might have been thrown into the pond nearby. Then I thought of a place closer than any, and where no one was likely to think of looking. The last burial in the Allen mausoleum was twenty years ago, according to the inscription on the vault face just under Allen’s. But there’s new cement sealing that twenty year old crypt.”
“Are you serious?” Godley was both taken aback and interested.
“The cement was fresh enough to dig a thumbnail into, Godley.” Miller said. “So I came back here to get you, to have you see for yourself. I knew you’d want to clear up Allen’s death if you understood it was really murder.”
The idea consolidated in Sammy’s mind and bleached the apoplectic purple from his face. He turned and looked at Godley, who nodded. He was a man who might indulge in pleasantly sharp practice, but murder was a different matter. “”I think you’re a damn fool, Miller but I’ll try what you say.”
Sammy began shouting orders to trooper John. Sally started to move with Miller toward the door. “Sally,” Miller stopped her, “have you still got your nerve?”
“I’m scared to death, but I’ll go with you.”
“No, I don’t mean that, I mean Sally do you think you can take care of yourself and Angelia parker? We can’t leave her alone. We can’t take her with us. Will you be careful and look after things here?”
“Yes, I’ll stay if you want me to.” He gripped her arm. “I’m not cutting you out.” He said. “Maybe it’s wrong for me to leave you. But there are several troopers here, it should be safe enough.”
Her eyes saw the gun he took from his slash pocket, “Oh, no!” She no more understood a gun than he did. She thrust his hand with the weapon back toward the pocket. He went with Godley, Sammy and his two troopers down the walk to the gate. The big sergeant of the state police started for his own coupe.
Attorney Godley said, “We could all get in my car.”
“I know the way to the cemetery,” Edwards countered.
“But we’re not going to the cemetery.” Miller said. Both Sammy and Godley turned and looked at him.
“Let’s get in Godley’s car,” Miller went on. “We can drive a few blocks and then leave it, we can walk from there.”
“Now, just a minute.” Godley screwed his face irritably. “If we’re not going to the cemetery, where are we going?” Miller gestured toward the railroad tracks and the Millersburg station. “To a place called the Riverview Apartments.”
“Where Alvin Rodgers is staying?” Godley anger leaped. “Say, you don’t think that sick old man has anything to do with this? Why he’s got a broken leg!”
“Let’s get in the car,” Miller said. It surprised him how they obeyed, speak loudly authoritatively, he realized and people didn’t know you were afraid. They associated your tone of voice with a man who could enforce his will. They didn’t suspect your tone of voice might be your defense. Sammy and his two men filled the back of the car. Miller slipped in beside the district attorney on the front seat. He said, “Right from the start I knew Alvin Rodgers couldn’t have had any part in this.
“He was Allen’s one friend he’d studied for the ministry. He’d molded Allen’s thoughts and influenced his philosophy. He’d convinced Allen to forgive his enemies and leave them his money. Old Rodgers had no motive for wanting to hurt Allen or anyone else.”
“I may be dumb, but I don’t get it.” Godley said.
“Just drive ahead.” Miller ordered, “We can talk later.”
Benny Godley drove to the small street paralleling the railroad right-of-way. He parked to the south of the Riverview Apartments as Miller directed.
“Will you switch off your lights.” Godley did.
Miller’s voice spoke in the silent dark. “Let’s get out of the car, closer to the building.”
Sammy let the breath go out of him. Godley said, “forget it, Sammy let’s see what he has to show us, we’ll take our turn later.”
They left the car, they followed Miller to the corner opposite the building; a square lot lower than the level of the street and irregularly pitted. But they did not follow Miller’s lead as he hunkered down in a dark hollow among weeds.
“You better get out of sight, “Miller said to Sammy.
“When we see them come out of that house, we’ll go after them.”
“You’re not expecting to see Rodgers come out of there with his doctor? He’s got a broken leg.”
Miller said, “Yes, it’s broken all right, a good healthy nasty break.” His crouching down while the o
thers stood up, he felt suddenly was a barrier separating them from him. He stood up, “I saw Rodgers x-ray and I should have known then.” He’d seen it, but it hadn’t registered. “At an old man’s bone joints there are calcium deposits, but Rodgers joints are clean. They’re young men’s joints, a young man’s bones.”
“You are good at making riddles, Miller.” Godley laughed.
Miller was watching the apartment building. “I’m just trying to say that the man we’ve all been taking for granted is Alvin Rodgers isn’t Alvin Rodgers.”
There was no immediate response. “Are you serious?” Asked Godley in amazement.
Sammy growled Miller’s hand on his arm stilled him. There was movement at the front of the building. Sammy crouched for cover, his men following his lead. He growled again as the figures became clearly delineated, “I mighta known, a damn women, her husband and kid, now I guess you’re gonna tell me the kid is Rodgers.”
Miller’s hand on Sammy’s arm restrained the man from rising. Somewhere to the distant north, a train whistle called sadly. The three who had come out of the building turned up the street. The building seemed deserted.
“That’s somebody else coming now, ain’t it? “Sammy whispered.
Out of the apartment buildings front entrance two more figures appeared. One of them bulky almost elephantine; while the second, a small crimped man limping. The two passed the front of the building and turned toward the station.
“Let’s see what they have to say,” miller said.
He rose and started across the street. “Younger!” He called, “Younger!”
The two figures stopped, the larger of them turned then the smaller with hardly a break in motion they both swiveled again to run.
“Hey, where you think you’re going?” Sammy shouted, Sammy the three troopers and Godley were in action all at once.
Younger stopped, as if to answer Edwards’s questions. But he fired a gun instead! Miller dropped to the ground. Younger ran passing the limping man. The two were fifty yards from the station now. Miller scrambled up and lunged after Younger. If younger turned and shot. He might get hit; he realized the troopers fanned out in a flanking movement Younger fired at them.
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