Death’s Old Sweet Song

by Jonathan Stagge

  In Grovestown, Cobb went dispiritedly off to what would be a stormy session with the D.A. There was only an hour before the inquest on the White twins. I spent it drearily with the city pathologist. The inquest itself was short and dismal and, inevitably, a verdict of death at the hand of person or persons unknown was returned. The parents of the White twins attended. After the proceedings I had the thankless task of breaking the news of Love’s murder to them. They were still so stunned by the death of their own children that they could hardly absorb the news of this latest disaster.

  My pity for them helped me feel a little less sorry for myself.

  Cobb and I, having had no food that day, had sandwiches sent up to his office and ate them gloomily. There had been no time for us to do much talking. I told him then about Caleb’s fear of the dark which had made him desert his post on the patrol. I also told him about Caleb’s grandmother. Most policemen, under as much pressure as Cobb was, would have jumped on that information as an excuse to make an arrest. But Cobb isn’t that way. He asked me, as a doctor, whether I thought that the battle psychosis coupled with bad heredity could have made Caleb into a homicidal maniac. I told him it was possible but I thought it unlikely. The chance of inherited insanity applied just as much to Phoebe and Lorie anyway, and Caleb’s fear of the dark was such that his every impulse, when it came upon him, was to cling desperately to the first human beings he met, not to murder them.

  Cobb said: “And this Mrs. Stone and the Bray girl?”

  “Phoebe’s completely sane. I’m sure of that. Lorie … Oh, what’s the use of going over this again? I don’t think Lorie’s insane. I don’t think Renton Forbes is insane. I don’t think Avril is insane. I know them. I’ve gone around with them. Whatever their problems or poses or frustrations, they are ordinary, rational people. And I don’t believe in those homicidal maniacs you read about who behave like normal citizens for twenty-three hours a day and then run amok with foaming fangs for a sixty-minute orgy of madness.”

  “So the murderer’s a maniac and the only suspects are sane.” Cobb grunted. “We’re back where we started from, aren’t we? That’s where we got to last night.” He paused, adding dejectedly: “The D.A. wasn’t exactly pleased to see me.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “It’s all my fault, of course. If I’d have been halfway efficient, these two murders wouldn’t have happened. That’s what he said.” His blue eyes watched me miserably. “He’s sending the troopers out there this afternoon. From now on, there’s going to be everything but martial law in Skipton.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing.”

  “Sure, it’s a good thing. But it makes me look pretty much of a dope, don’t it?” He shrugged. “But then I guess that’s only right. I am a dope on this case, Westlake. I’ve never known anything like it. With all my experience, I’ve never been this strapped. Five murders in two days. And not a clue. Not a grain of sense to it, either.”

  “The song,” I said.

  Cobb stared down blankly at the remains of sandwich on his plate. “Well, Westlake, we might as well know who’s going to be dead by the time we get back there. What happens next in the song?”

  “Six for the six proud walkers. Then seven for the seven who went to heaven.”

  “Heaven,” Cobb grinned sourly. Then his eyes met mine again. “The six proud walkers. What in glory’s name are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But who could it mean in Skipton?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out too. If Ernesta was here—she’s the one who’s so crazy about hiking. Caleb, maybe. He treks around a bit. He’s making a map of the country around Skipton for his aunt.”

  Cobb did not speak for a moment. I could tell he was following some new train of thought. At length he asked: “You said there was carvings on Mrs. Stone’s door, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. Caleb did them when he was a kid.”

  “Then if the murderer was really following the song, why didn’t he kill someone in the Stone house instead of having to scrawl those symbols on Miss Drummond’s door in chalk?”

  “There were three people in the Stone house. Love was alone.”

  “Even so”—Cobb had brought his brier pipe out of his pocket and was sticking it between his teeth—“I’m not a fancy medical man or anyone that knows about craziness. But if this murderer is really hipped on that song, strikes me he wouldn’t figure that way. He wouldn’t figure: ‘There are three people in the house with the symbols at the door, so I’ll go make symbols on Miss Drummond’s door and kill her instead.’ Get what I mean, Westlake? If he was really nuts on the song, he’d just wait. The symbols on the door would mean the Stone house to him. It would have to. He’d just wait and then, when the chance came, he’d get someone in that house. See what I mean? Figuring this murderer really is a maniac, the way it’s been looking.”

  What he said made sound common sense whatever way you looked at it. With a faint stirring of excitement, I said: “The murderer’s insane and the suspects are sane. Maybe you’ve got something, Cobb. Maybe the song’s just a red herring. Maybe he wanted to kill those five people and realized he could fit them more or less into the pattern of the song and sell us on a maniac theory.”

  “Yeah. The lily-white boys fitted, of course. And the gospel maker. But wasn’t it kind of faky too to tie up Raynor with the rivals?” His eyes had come to life. “What if it’s that way, Westlake? What if someone had a good solid motive for killing the White twins and George Raynor and Dr. Jessup and Miss Drummond?”

  My excitement was flickering out. “How could anyone have a sane motive for wanting to kill such a disconnected bunch of people?”

  “They were all at the picnic.” Cobb was chewing on the unlit pipe. “If it was that way, Westlake, the clue’d have to be at the picnic.”

  “You don’t kill people because they go on a picnic.”

  “Maybe you don’t. But maybe … Westlake, what about that picnic? Think about it. Tell me everything that happened. Who said what, who was sitting where, who did what.”

  Infected by his enthusiasm, I turned my mind back to Saturday evening and reconstructed for him everything that had taken place on the Bray terrace and later at the picnic ground. I had reached the point where Lorie had been persuaded to sing and the White twins ran off when Cobb broke in:

  “The kids ran off? Where did they go?”

  “They went to fool around in the old sawmill which is back there in the woods.”

  “How long were they gone?”

  “Not long. About ten minutes, I guess.”

  “And then they came back?”

  “No, it was getting set to rain any minute, and the party broke up. Love went to look for them.”

  “Alone?”

  It came to me then. “My God, Cobb, she didn’t go alone.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Sure. That’s exactly what I mean. George Raynor was the one who started to fuss about them first. He suggested maybe they should look for them. Love agreed. And she lugged Dr. Jessup along too. That’s the way it was. I’m certain of it. The people who went to the sawmill to pick up the kids were Raynor, Jessup, and Love.”

  For a moment we stared at each other. The idea was so new and so revolutionary that it had thrown us back on our heels.

  It was Cobb who spoke first. “At the last minute, on account of Mrs. Stone, the place for the picnic was changed, wasn’t it? I mean, if Mrs. Stone hadn’t squawked, you’d have eaten your picnic down in the regular picnic place Mrs. Bray had made for her?”

  I nodded.

  “Then no one could have expected ahead of time that a bunch of people was going up there to that deserted place by the sawmill.” Cobb leaned over his desk. “Anything could have been hidden up there, Westlake, without there being a chance of anyone stumbling across it in weeks. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So the kids run off to the sawmill. They see this thing, som
ething no one’s supposed to see. Raynor, Jessup, and Miss Drummond go after them. They see it too. They—”

  “Wait a minute,” I cut in. “If they’d seen anything out of the ordinary, they’d have told us.”

  “Not if they didn’t know it was out of the ordinary. Figure it that way, Westlake. Figure they saw something which was terribly important once they got wise to what it was. Supposing they didn’t get wise, but the murderer bumped them off because he knew that sooner or later they would get wise.”

  “Something like—what?”

  “Something—or someone—” Cobb broke off. “Wait a minute, Westlake. How far is this sawmill from where you were at?”

  “Only a couple of hundred feet, I’d say.”

  “Then if there’d been someone hiding in that sawmill, someone who hadn’t any right to be there, they could’ve heard the Bray girl singing the song?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Then maybe we’ve fooled ourselves from the beginning, Westlake. It doesn’t have to be someone who was at the picnic, see? Someone could have been up there in the sawmill. The kids come in. This person managed to hide, maybe. But there’s something left lying around that, if the kids get wise to it, proves this person’s been there. The same applies to Raynor, Jessup, and Miss Drummond. They see this thing too. The murderer’s heard the song. He knows he’s got to bump off those people. And he sees how, by putting the deaths in the right order, he can tie it up with the song. And here’s the point.” He paused triumphantly. “That way, with the song, he can make it look as if the murderer’s got to be someone who knew the song and therefore someone who was on the picnic. That’s the way we’ve been figuring, of course, and could be we’re all off the beam, on account of it was planned that way. Could be the murderer’s someone completely out of the picture so far, someone who thinks he’s sitting pretty because he’s got us concentrated on suspecting the people at the picnic.”

  “And who would this person be?”

  “Anyone. Maybe a criminal of some sort. Someone hiding out from the law. Anyone. That isn’t the point right now.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I guess the point right now’s to get to that sawmill plenty fast.”

  “Check,” said Cobb.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Cobb and I drove to the old sawmill along back roads, skirting Skipton itself. Although the inspector did not admit it, I felt he wanted to avoid the humiliating spectacle of the state troopers installed in the village. Having been born in a farmhouse in the Skipton neighborhood, he knew the country as well as Ernesta or Caleb, and he maneuvered the car up dirt roads and overgrown trails the existence of which I had never known.

  The day had grown terrifically hot. Apart from the shower which had disrupted the Saturday picnic and a heavy thunderstorm on Friday, the summer had been virtually without rain. The parched countryside had already sucked up every gram of moisture, and the rough mountain vegetation was coarse and dry as tinder. The sky blazed a hard, uncompromising blue.

  A particularly rutted trail brought us directly to the sawmill. It must have been the road the loggers had used when the mill was in operation. Cobb parked the car, and before entering the mill itself I led him down through the thick pine trees to the little clearing where the picnic had taken place. A champagne cork and the carton in which Ernesta’s caviar had been sent, and which Phoebe and I had overlooked when we tidied up, were the only signs that any human being had been there for weeks. We left the clearing and, following the trail that the White twins had probably taken, moved past a large, straggling sawdust pile, covered with raspberry vines, back to the mill.

  The mill itself was a long barnlike structure with a dangerously sagging roof. At one end of it was a small two-storied clapboard cottage where a resident operator must have lived. In spite of broken windowpanes and a front door half split off its hinges, this building was in reasonably good repair.

  I remembered Renton telling me that this had been the locale for most of his reluctant trysts with Avril Lane. Avril would have needed to tie a great many mental pink ribbons on the cottage before she could have thought of it as a romantic setting.

  We searched the mill itself first. Almost immediately Cobb gave a little grunt and pointed down to a tire mark on the dusty, rotting floor boards.

  “There’s been a car here recently, Westlake. Don’t look to me like the kind of place someone would come for fun.”

  There was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. I reacted to it for a moment. Then I remembered what Love Drummond had told me. She had overheard Renton and Avril making a date over the phone for Friday to meet at the sawmill.

  I told Cobb. “It’s probably Renton’s car,” I said.

  “So this was the place he and Mrs. Raynor picked for their carryings-on?”

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “And they were up here Friday?”

  “Love said she heard them make a date for eight-thirty. I don’t know if they actually came. I didn’t ask Renton about any specific dates.”

  Cobb grunted. “Ask him.”

  “Okay.”

  “Better ask Mrs. Raynor too. Make sure their stories check.”

  The prospect of questioning Avril Lane about her clandestine amours was not one I relished, but I said “Okay” again.

  There was nothing else of interest in the sawmill. We moved through the flapping front door into the cottage itself. Our new theory was still so vague as to detail that we had no idea what we might find. There were two rooms downstairs, one a kitchen where a dilapidated sink still stood under a window, the other a small living room which was furnished with two old rickety chairs and an ancient couch.

  Cobb eyed the couch distastefully and said: “Well, I guess it’s everyone to his own taste, Westlake. But this isn’t the spot I’d bring my lady friend.”

  “I didn’t know you had one,” I said.

  He looked annoyed and said: “It was just a manner of speaking, Westlake. Don’t you start talking that way around Mrs. Cobb.”

  After a few minutes of careful searching, it became obvious that there was nothing downstairs that the twins could conceivably have endangered their own lives and those of George, Dr. Jessup, and Love by seeing. This did not, of course, disprove Cobb’s theory. If some malefactor had been hiding there, he would have had ample time to remove the thing, whatever it was, whose presence had been so incriminating.

  In growing dejection, Cobb on his hands and knees made an exhaustive and barren examination of the floor boards. Finally he admitted defeat and the two of us climbed the precarious outside staircase which led to the second floor.

  There were two rooms upstairs, matching those below. Sunshine splashed through the broken windowpanes on walls tangled with cobwebs and rippled floors thick with dust. The heat was almost unbearable.

  I was the one who first noticed the footprints. It was no major feat of observation, for the dust was thick and, in one of the rooms, the whole floor was patchworked with prints as if someone had paced restlessly up and down there. The prints were of a woman’s shoes. That was obvious. And the fact that a woman had been there was clinched by a lipstick-stained cigarette butt Cobb found in a corner.

  The inspector picked up the butt, peering at it intently. “Recent,” he said. “Can’t have been here longer than a couple of days. No yellow stains. What is it? Some kind of foreign cigarette?”

  I inspected it and recognized it at once as one of the special Russian brand with which Ernesta’s house was always stocked.

  “A woman,” said Cobb. “A woman pacing up and down up here, smoking one of the Bray cigarettes.” His china-blue eyes were triumphant. “What’d a woman be doing up here in this hellhole? Mrs. Raynor, if she’d come here for a date with Forbes, she’d have stayed downstairs, wouldn’t she? No reason for her to come creeping up here.”

  “Avril doesn’t smoke, anyway,” I said.

  “She don’t? Then who else’d be up h
ere smoking a Bray cigarette?”

  “Not Phoebe,” I said. “She never uses lipstick. Lorie, I guess. She’s about the only person I can think of who’d be smoking that brand—unless one of the maids at the Bray house snitched one and came here. I don’t see what a maid would want with smoking a cigarette up here, though.”

  “Nor Lorie, for that matter. Westlake—”

  “Before you get carried away, Cobb, I might point out that you’re not proving anything. Okay. Maybe Lorie was up here. So what? She was on the picnic, so she couldn’t possibly be this person you’ve dreamed up who was hiding here when the twins came in.”

  His face fell.

  “And,” I continued, “there’s no particular reason why Lorie shouldn’t have come up here. After all, this place is on her property. She could have gone for a walk and thought she’d give the old place a once-over.”

  “I guess you’re right at that.”

  “Anyway,” I added, “you’re not going to make me believe the White twins and George Raynor and Dr. Jessup and Love Drummond were murdered because they maybe did and maybe didn’t see a lipstick-stained cigarette up here.”

  Cobb stood a moment in gloomy thought. “Then you think the whole idea’s a bum one?”

  “Not necessarily. There may have been something here—and it’s gone now.”

  “But what? What sort of thing could it have been? Something they could have seen and paid no mind to, but something the murderer knew he had to kill them for seeing?”

  “I don’t know. But I know one thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t here Friday—not if Renton and Avril were actually here Friday.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if they’d been here and it had been here, they’d have seen it. They’d have been just as dangerous as the others. They’d have been killed too.”

  Cobb gave a savage little grunt which indicated that things were getting too much for him. “Maybe they will be killed,” he said. “Maybe the murderer just hasn’t got around to them yet.” I don’t think he’d been serious when he said it, but after he had spoken, a faintly awed expression spread over his face. “Westlake, you don’t think there’s anything in that, do you? The six proud walkers. That wouldn’t tie up with Forbes or Mrs. Raynor, would it?”