The Silver Cobweb

by Ben Benson

  Rigsby continued across the grove another fifty yards. Nestled in the pines was a white clapboard bungalow with red trim. He stopped. I pulled up behind him and shut off the motor.

  My shoes crunched on the brown pine needles as I joined him in front of the little screened porch. I looked down at the ground, seeing the outline of tire marks. Above us a stray puff of wind sighed through the trees, and beyond us the waters of the pond rippled in a narrow streak as the wind moved across it. There was a sharp fragrance of pine.

  I walked around the cottage with Rigsby and tried to look into the windows. They were covered with blue shades.

  We stepped up onto the screened porch and tried the front door. It was locked. Rigsby looked at me, pulling at his ear.

  “You forgot to get permission to go inside,” he said.

  I moved the green wooden milk box aside. Under it, on the floor, was the key. I picked it up. “From what I know of Allenby he’d charge us an admission fee,” I said. “If there’s a rap for illegal entry, I’ll take it. One more mark on my report won’t matter.”

  I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. The place had a dead, airless, musty smell. Near the door were two fabric suitcases and some fishing tackle. A .22 caliber rifle stood in a corner. I didn’t touch the rifle, but went over, bent and sniffed at the muzzle. There was an odor of oil and metal, not of gunpowder.

  I crossed the living room and went into the kitchen. The cupboards held several cans of food and the storage area under the sink had kitchen utensils. The icebox was empty. Leaving there I went into the bedroom and looked around. There was nothing in the closet. The mattress on the big double bed was rolled. I went into a second bedroom. Same thing.

  Back in the living room I said to Rigsby, “What do you think, Al? Can you identify the luggage?”

  “No,” Rigsby said. “But it figures. It must belong to the kids.”

  “And where does Whitey Swenke come into it?”

  “I don’t know,” Rigsby said. “If I was going to give it a fast shuffle I’d come up with the story that Swenke, by coincidence, was using this cottage as a hide-out. When Mary Ann Fedder came here Tuesday, to bring a suitcase, she walked in on Swenke. Swenke chased her all the way home and killed her”

  “Only that’s all wrong,” I said.

  “Of course it’s wrong. You can see the kids made more than one visit here to bring things. They would have known on their first visit that Swenke was hiding here. Second, Swenke wasn’t identified in the Newburyport robbery. He still hasn’t been. He’s been popping up in Boston. He was seen there at a ball game, and Tuesday morning he was there to rent a truck. So, to me, it doesn’t make sense that Swenke was hiding out at all. Not in a remote spot like this. Where does that lead us to, kid?”

  “To Russell Westlake,” I said. “Do you think he’s been back here since the murder?”

  “You’re the expert,” Rigsby said. “Take a look at those tire marks outside.”

  “I saw them,” I said. “They’re too faint. How about looking at that .22 rifle and telling me if it’s Westlake’s?”

  “It might be. It’s a Remington repeater and Russell owns a Remington repeater. But so do a lot of other people.”

  “We do know one thing,” I said. “Russell Westlake was angry. He was out gunning for somebody. Maybe the first time Russell Westlake was here he didn’t bring the rifle. Maybe he brought it with him the last time—” I stopped.

  “Well?” Rigsby asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s no good to keep saying ‘maybe,’ Al. Maybe’s don’t make facts. We need more than theories.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Rigsby said. “Let’s go back to town and get the Fedders and the Westlakes. They can identify all this stuff.”

  “You go, Al,” I said. “I’ll have to stay here and guard the evidence.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m learning something all the time. You’ll make a cop out of me yet, kid.”

  I went outside with him and watched him drive away. Then I walked over to my cruiser, warmed up the radio and signaled the barracks. Corporal Kerrigan came on. I told him what we had found.

  “Stand by and I’ll meet you there myself,” Kerrigan said. “Everybody else is out on the investigation in Ipswich. K2 off.”

  I heard him give a Signal 7 to Cruiser 28, which meant Trooper Doherty would come into the barracks to take over the desk.

  I hung up the handphone and shut off the radio. The wind had died down and had left an uncanny, eerie quietness in the grove. The trees were motionless.

  I closed the car door and looked at the little white cabin. A honeymoon cottage for two young people about to start life together. But it was ended before it started. The girl was dead and the boy had disappeared. It was cruel and wrong.

  There was something else wrong with the picture. I couldn’t put my finger on it. All I knew was that something material was missing. Something didn’t fit.

  I stepped up on the porch, looked around at the milk box and the wire screening, at the floor boards, at the windows, at the front door. It wasn’t there.

  I went inside. In the living room I looked at the luggage, the fishing equipment, the .22 rifle. It wasn’t there, either.

  Into the kitchen. I looked around, staring at the cupboards, the old black-slate sink, the old icebox, the four chairs and the porcelain-topped table. I kept turning around, circling. Something was wrong in the kitchen. The picture didn’t jell. It wasn’t instinct, or a sixth sense, or anything extrasensory. It was something pertaining to the eye, to vision.

  I started at one end of the kitchen. The old icebox, yellowish with age, typical summer camp equipment. It was empty and clean. The wooden cupboards. Old and a little warped. Nothing wrong there. The sink. A cheap black-slate affair with two faucets. Ancient and out-dated. A fifty-gallon galvanized hot-water tank. I touched it. It was cold. Standard equipment. Four wooden chairs and a wooden, porcelain-topped table. Something else was missing.

  A cooking stove.

  There was no stove in the kitchen. Not even an electric hot plate or an oil-burning job. No stove at all.

  There was a space for a stove between the sink and the icebox. I bent down and looked. Black soot on the floor. My eyes came up, searching the wall. There was a circular hole where the flue had been. Soot had dribbled down and had stained the white wall.

  I sank to my haunches and examined the floor. There were four indentations where the legs of the stove had rested. There were also scraping marks across the floor as though the stove had been dragged away. I stood up and followed the marks to the back door. There I stopped.

  So what, I thought. The Westlakes had sold the cottage to Henry Allenby and the stove wasn’t part of the deal. Or the stove was old and broken and Allenby had thrown it out.

  But there could be still another reason for the disappearance of the stove. The stove was a heavy one and it had had to be dragged. And a heavy stove could be used as a weight. And a weight could be tied to a dead body. And the weight and the dead body could be dropped into the pond so that they both disappeared.

  Which led to the final conclusion. Russell Westlake had been murdered and his body was at the bottom of Dorset Pond.

  17

  THE BACK DOOR OF THE COTTAGE WAS LATCHED FROM THE INSIDE with a sliding bolt. It was stiff but I worked it open. Outside was a tiny open porch. Beyond the porch was an open field filled with high weeds. The weeds were matted in a narrow swath. I followed the swath about fifteen feet. To the right my eye caught something black in the underbrush. I went over. It was the discarded flue from the stove.

  I didn’t touch it. I went back and followed the curving swath a few more feet. The swath ended in the pine needles at the edge of the grove. No sign of the stove. It had been dragged to this point and no farther.

  I bent down and examined the soil and the pine needles. Faint tire tracks, deeper at the edge of the bushes, as though a car or truck had been backed
in there and the stove had been lifted onto it.

  I straightened up. Perhaps I was making too much of it, I thought. The stove could have been no good and had probably been picked up and taken away by a junk dealer. Because if it was to be used to sink a body in the pond, there was no sense in putting the stove into a truck.

  Or perhaps there was sense to it. It would be easier to put the stove into a vehicle to get it down to the water.

  I walked, following the tire tracks across the pine needles. They curved away from the cottage, then went thirty yards down a gradual slope to the narrow sandy shore of the pond. I stopped. Here the tracks had been smoothed out and carefully obliterated.

  The beach was of firm, hard-packed, yellow-brown sand. Along the shore the water was clear and shallow. I walked along, first to the left, following the beach to where it ended in a soft marsh and a cluster of floating lily pads. Nothing.

  Turning, I walked back, eying the sun-glinted water. I could see nothing except a wooden float and diving board about forty feet out. I continued along until the beach ended on the right at a steep, eroded bluff.

  I stood there for a moment in the dead stillness. There was no doubt in my mind any more. The truck or car that had carried the stove had come to the edge of the water. If the stove was a heavy one it could not have been dragged far into the pond. I would have been able to see it from where I was standing. Unless it had been lifted into a boat.

  But what kind of boat? It was not a large pond and there was no sign of any boats around. Also, a heavy bulky stove might capsize an ordinary rowboat or sailboat.

  What else? Observe. Take in everything. Nothing on the beach except the sand and my own footsteps. Nothing on the water except the float forty feet out. A gray-painted float with a canvas-topped springboard, buoyed up by large empty steel drums.

  It was the float, of course. They could disengage the float, bring it to shore and lift the stove and body onto it. Next, paddle the float out into the pond, tie the body to the stove and drop them both off the side. Then paddle the float back, anchor it again, and swim to shore.

  I stood there looking at the float as it lay there almost motionless on the still blue water. I took out my pack of cigarettes and lit one. I was thinking of how to follow through. I had no boat. And, although, at the Academy, the swimming tests and lifesaving instruction had been rigid enough, I couldn’t very well leave my uniform and weapon on the shore and start swimming around the pond.

  I took one puff of the cigarette and ground it impatiently into the sand. Elevation was what I needed. The Coast Guard used helicopters to spot contraband dropped into the ocean offshore. A good high tree might do it.

  I walked along the beach to the bluff. At the top of it was a stand of high pine trees. I climbed the bluff into the clump of pines, looked up and picked the tallest and sturdiest. I leaped up, swung onto a branch and started climbing. The branches were resinous, and shreds of bark and gobs of sap began sticking to my hands.

  I climbed higher. The tree swayed under my weight. About two-thirds up, the tree began to bend ominously. I halted.

  Looking down across the pond I saw that the sand extended out from the shore about twenty feet. From there the bottom of the pond darkened. The water was clear enough. I could see green reeds and ferns on the pond bed. But a black stove—if it was black—would be hard to spot. The idea was not to look for the stove but for the body.

  I saw it. The white shirt was what attracted me. The body was ten or fifteen feet out from where the float was anchored. It startled me for a moment, prickling the hair on the nape of my neck. Because I could have sworn that it was alive. The head was down and the legs were widespread and the arms seemed to be moving as though the body were swimming under water. It was due, of course, to the light refraction in the water and the currents of the pond. I couldn’t see the stove. Its color was blended into the darkness of the pond bottom.

  So there it was, I thought. First, Mary Ann Fedder coming out to the cottage to bring some clothes in a suitcase. The poor kid had seen something she shouldn’t have seen. Something in the grove or around the cottage near it. She had run and she had been chased home by Kurt Swenke, and, as she was phoning the police, Swenke had broken in and shot her down.

  Then Russell Westlake had gone out to the cottage, whether to pick up his possessions, or to scout around for the reason of Mary Ann’s death, or for a dreamlike reverie, and he had seen the same thing. But they had caught Westlake before he could make his move. He had been killed, tied to the old stove and dumped into the pond. His car had been driven away and abandoned in Ipswich.

  But Kurt Swenke had not killed Russell Westlake. Swenke was in jail. There was somebody else.

  Holding onto the tree trunk I scanned the waters again, looking across the pond to the opposite shore, to the little piers jutting out from tiny, sandy beaches, to varicolored cabins, all shuttered and seemingly uninhabited. Then back again to my own side of the shore, scanning first to the right and seeing nothing but the occasional roof of a cabin through the trees. To the left now. And fifty feet away, in a clump of bushes, I saw something move. My eyes riveted down, picking out a patch of yellow cloth. Then a man’s head.

  Somebody had been watching me.

  I began to edge down the tree trunk. The bushes swayed and the man began to slither away.

  “Hold it,” I shouted. “You there, stop.”

  The yellow shirt froze. Now it burrowed deeper into the bushes until I could only see a sliver of color. The sun glinted on dull metal.

  A bullet ricocheted off a tree trunk near me. As it screamed away I heard the echoing boom of the shot. A rifle, from the sound of it.

  I squirmed around to the back of the tree trunk, one leg braced against a branch, the other suspended awkwardly in midair. I held on to the trunk with one hand, and my fingers opened my holster flap and brought out the long-barreled service revolver.

  I was clumsy with the revolver. My position was strained and my hands were sticky with pine gum. I tried to get a better grip on the revolver butt and, as I did, it slipped out of my fingers. The revolver bounced once on a branch and made a parabola to the ground.

  I looked down. The gun had disappeared in the underbrush somewhere fifteen feet below me. I clung to the trunk and cursed myself steadily for three seconds. In my black gunbelt was a leather cartridge pouch that contained twenty-four rounds of ammunition. In my leather handcuff case was a pair of shiny bracelets. On my whistle chain were my whistle and handcuff key. In my hip pocket I carried a billy. Fully equipped. Only without my revolver.

  I edged down the trunk. The second shot came. It smacked into the trunk about the level of my eyes, splintering the wood and vibrating the tree with its impact. I froze there. A high-powered rifle, I thought. And he was getting the range.

  I felt like a sitting duck in a shooting gallery. My light blue blouse and the broad, light blue stripe down the side of my breeches made a good target for him. Sweat began to trickle from my forehead and my armpits grew wet. One thing I couldn’t understand. Whoever the sharpshooter was, he had a chance to get away. But, apparently, he was satisfied to lie there in the bushes and try to kill me.

  I wanted to stay there behind the solid wood of the tree trunk. But the trunk was narrow and offered only partial protection and my uniform was not the camouflage suit of an Army sniper. I had to move down.

  I slid to the branch below me. The rifle fired again. Two shots, both ripping bark from the tree, one bullet so close that it flipped my sleeve as it went by.

  I jumped. It was a long drop and I fell heavily into the bushes, scratching my face and jarring my left arm to the shoulder socket. I fished desperately for my revolver, finding it, grabbing it and cocking the hammer. I turned now to face the man. I couldn’t find him.

  A shot broke the stillness of the air, echoing across the water. I flinched instinctively, but this time there was no bullet past my head. The crack had come some distance from my left, from the di
rection of the road.

  My head swiveled. I saw a flash of light blue color. A trooper was running along the edge of the grove toward a clump of bushes, zigzagging through the trees, a Winchester .30-.30 in his hands.

  It was Corporal Phil Kerrigan. A rifle shot answered him from the right. Kerrigan stopped behind a tree, took aim and pumped five shots rapid-fire at the clump of bushes. As he did, I broke out of the underbrush and ran forward into the grove.

  Kerrigan saw me and shouted, “You all right, Ralph?”

  “Fine,” I called back. I looked toward the bushes. I couldn’t see the yellow shirt. The angle of vision was different at ground level.

  “Where is he?” I called to Kerrigan.

  “He’s still in there,” Kerrigan said, pointing. “Circle around to the right so you cut him off. I’ll move in.”

  I began to circle. Kerrigan ran forward to another tree, his black, shiny boots flashing in the dappled sunlight. I bent low, ran across an open spot and ducked behind a tree.

  Kerrigan moved again, coming closer, his rifle aimed at the bushes. There was no movement in there. I peered out from behind my tree, my revolver leveled. No movement yet. I ran to the next tree. Now I saw a patch of yellow. The man was still there.

  “Come out,” I called to him.

  There was no answer. I looked across at Kerrigan. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I’m going in. Cover me, kid.”

  He had to walk across open ground now. I kept my revolver aimed at the clump of bushes, waiting for the slightest stir. Kerrigan walked steadily, his rifle barrel fixed on the bushes.

  He came onto them and waded through. Then he stopped short, turned and waved to me. I came running.

  The man lay on his side, his mouth and eyes open, a deep furrow along the side of his skull near the hairline, blood seeping from it. Another bullet had plowed across the top of his head, taking part of the skull with it. The blood had run down his face and was dripping to the ground.