by Ed McBain
“And the guy refused to show it?”
“All the broker wanted was a driver’s license. The guy said he didn’t have a driver’s license.”
“So what happened?”
“He picked up the pendant and left.”
“Great,” Carella said.
“It’s not all that bad. The minute he left the shop, the broker checked the flyer we sent around and spotted the pendant on it. That’s when he called here. There was a number on the flyer, you remember…”
“Yeah, so what happened?”
“He told me the guy had his hands all over the glass top of the jewelry counter. He figured we could maybe lift some prints from it. He’s a pretty smart old guy.”
“Did you go down there?”
“Just got back, in fact. Left a team there to dust the jewelry counter and the doorknob and anything else the guy may have touched. Dozens of people go in and out of that place every day, Steve, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Yeah, maybe. What’d the guy look like?”
“He fits the description. Young guy with black hair and brown eyes.”
“When will the lab boys let you know?”
“They’re on it now.”
“What does that mean? Tomorrow morning?”
“I told them it’s a homicide. Maybe we’ll get some quick action.”
“Okay, let me know if you get anything. I’m at the Hampstead Arms, you want to write down this number?”
“Let me get a pencil,” Hawes said. “Never a fuckin’ pencil around when you need one.”
He gave Hawes the number of the hotel and the room extension and then filled him in on what he’d learned at the Coroner’s Office. He did not mention any of Hillary’s psychic deductions. When he hung up, it was close to 6:00. He looked up Hiram Hollister’s home number in the local directory and dialed it.
“Hello?” a woman said.
“Mr. Hollister, please.”
“Who’s calling?”
“Detective Carella.”
“Just a moment.”
He waited. When Hollister came onto the phone, he said, “Hello, Mr. Carella. Get what you were looking for?”
“Yes, thank you,” Carella said. “Mr. Hollister, I wonder if you can tell me who typed that report filed by the inquest board.”
“Typed it?”
“Yes.”
“Typed it? Do you mean the typist who typed it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would’ve been the inquest stenographer, I suppose.”
“And who was that?”
“This was three summers ago,” Hollister said.
“Yes.”
“Would’ve been Maude Jenkins,” he said. “Yup. Three summers ago would’ve been Maude.”
“Where can I reach her?”
“She’s in the phone book. It’ll be listed under Harold Jenkins, that’s her husband’s name.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hollister.”
He hung up and consulted the telephone directory again. He found a listing for Harold Jenkins and a second listing for Harold Jenkins, Jr. He tried the first number and got an elderly man, who said Carella was probably looking for his daughter-in-law and started to give him the number for Harold Jenkins, Jr. Carella told him he had the number, thanked him, and then dialed the second listing.
“Jenkins,” a man’s voice said.
“Mr. Jenkins, I’m Detective Carella of the 87th Squad in Isola. I wonder if I might speak to your wife, please?”
“My wife? Maude?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well…sure,” Jenkins said. His voice sounded puzzled. Carella heard him calling to his wife. He waited. In the next room, Hillary Scott was still on the phone.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.
“Mrs. Jenkins?”
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Carella of the 87th Squad in Isola…”
“Yes?”
“I’m here in connection with a homicide I’m investigating, and I wonder if you’d mind answering some questions.”
“A homicide?”
“Yes. I understand you were the stenographer at the Stephanie Craig inquest three years—”
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you type up the report?”
“Yes. I took the shorthand transcript, and then I typed it up when the inquest was over. We try to have the same person typing it as took it down. That’s because shorthand differs from one person to another, and we don’t want mistakes in something as important as an inquest.” She hesitated and then said, “But the drowning was accidental.”
“So I understand.”
“You said homicide. You said you were investigating a homicide.”
“Which may or may not be related to the drowning,” Carella said. He himself hesitated and then asked, “Mrs. Jenkins, did you yourself have any reason to believe Mrs. Craig’s death was anything but accidental?”
“None at all.”
“Did you know Mrs. Craig personally?”
“Saw her around town, that’s all. She was one of the summer people. Actually, I knew her husband better than I did her. Her ex-husband, I should say.”
“You knew Gregory Craig?”
“Yes, I did some work for him.”
“What kind of work?”
“Typing.”
“What did you type for him, Mrs. Jenkins?”
“A book he was working on.”
“What book?”
“Oh, you know the book. The one that got to be such a big best seller later on. The one about ghosts.”
“Deadly Shades? Was that the title?”
“Not while I was typing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“There wasn’t any title then.”
“There was no title page?”
“Well, there couldn’t have been a title page since there weren’t any pages.”
“I’m not following you, Mrs. Jenkins.”
“It was all on tape.”
“The book was on tape?”
“It wasn’t even a book actually. It was just Mr. Craig talking about this haunted house. Telling stories about the ghosts in it. All nonsense. It’s beyond me how it got to be a best seller. That house he was renting never had a ghost in it at all. He just made the whole thing up.”
“You’ve been in that house?”
“My sister from Ohio rented it last summer. She’da told me if there’d been any ghosts in it, believe you me.”
“This tape Mr. Craig gave you…”
“Uh-huh?”
“What happened to it?”
“What do you mean, what happened to it?”
“Did you give it back to him when you finished typing the book?”
“Didn’t finish typing it. Got about halfway through it, and then the summer ended, and he went back to the city.”
“When was this?”
“After Labor Day.”
“In September?”
“That’s when Labor Day is. Each and every year.”
“That would’ve been after his wife drowned,” Carella said.
“Yes, she drowned in August. Late August.”
“Was Mr. Craig at the inquest?”
“Didn’t need to be. They were divorced, you know. There was no reason to call him for the inquest. Besides, he’d already left Hampstead by then. I forget the actual date of the inquest…”
“September sixteenth.”
“Yes, well, he was gone by then.”
“How much of the book had you finished typing before he left?”
“I told you, it wasn’t a book. It was just this rambling on about ghosts.”
“More or less his notes for a book, is that how you’d describe—?”
“No, it was stories more than notes. About the candles flickering, you know, and the door being open after someone had locked it. And the woman searching for her husband. Like that. Stories.”
“Mr. Craig telling
stories about ghosts, is that it?”
“Yes. And using a sort of spooky voice on the tape, do you know? When he was telling the stories. He tried to make it all very dramatic, the business about waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the woman coming down from the attic and then taking a candle and going out into the hall and seeing her there. It was all nonsense, but it was very spooky.”
“The stories.”
“Yes, and his voice, too.”
“By spooky…”
“Sort of…rasping, I guess. Mr. Craig was a heavy smoker, and his voice was always sort of husky. But not like on the tape. I guess he was trying for some kind of effect on the tape. Almost like an actor, you know, telling a spooky story on television. It sounded a lot better than it typed up, I can tell you that.”
“Mrs. Jenkins, have you read Deadly Shades?”
“I guess everybody in this town has read it.”
Except Hiram Hollister, Carella thought.
“Was it similar to what you typed from the tape?”
“Well, I didn’t type all of it.”
“The portion you did type.”
“I didn’t have it to compare, but from memory I’d say it was identical to what I typed.”
“And you returned the tape to him before he left Hampstead?”
“Yes, I did.”
“How long a tape was it?”
“A two-hour cassette.”
“How much of it had you typed before he left?”
“Oh, I’d say about half of it.”
“An hour’s worth, approximately?”
“Yes.”
“How many pages did that come to?”
“No more than fifty pages or so.”
“Then the full tape would have run to about a hundred pages.”
“More or less.”
“Mrs. Jenkins, I haven’t read the book—would you remember how long it was?”
“In pages?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, it was a pretty fat book.”
“Fatter than a hundred pages?”
“Oh, yes. Maybe three hundred pages.”
“Then there would have been other tapes.”
“I have no idea. He just gave me the one tape.”
“How’d he get in touch with you?”
“I do work for other writers. We get a lot of writers up here in the summer. I guess he asked around and found out about me that way.”
“Had you done any work for him before this?”
“No, this was my first job for him.”
“And you say there was no title at the time?”
“No title.”
“Nothing on the cassette itself?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, there was. On the label, do you know? Written with a felt-tip pen.”
“What was on the label?”
“Ghosts.”
“Just the single word ‘ghosts’?”
“And his name.”
“Craig’s name?”
“Yes. ‘Ghosts’ and then ‘Gregory Craig.’”
“Then there was a title at the time.”
“Well, if you want to call it a title. But it didn’t say, ‘By Gregory Craig,’ it was just a way of identifying the cassette, that’s all.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins, you’ve been very helpful,” he said.
“Well, all right,” she said, and hung up.
He frankly didn’t know how she’d been helpful, but he guessed maybe she had. During Hillary’s trance last Saturday she had mentioned the word “tape” over and again and had linked it with the word “drowning.” He had conjured at once the image of a drowning victim whose hands or feet had been bound with tape—a flight of fancy strengthened by the fact that Gregory Craig’s hands had been bound behind his back with a wire hanger. In one of Carella’s books on legal pathology and toxicology, he had come across a sentence that made him laugh out loud: “If a drowned body is recovered from the water, bound in a manner that could not possibly have been self-accomplished, one might reasonably suspect homicidal intent.” Stephanie Craig’s body had been unfettered, neither chain, rope, wire, nor tape trussing her on the day she drowned. But here was another kind of tape entering the picture—and Carella could not forget that Hillary had linked “tape” with “drowning.”
She came into his room now without knocking. Her face was flushed, her eyes were glowing.
“I’ve just been on the phone with a woman named Elise Blair,” she said. “She’s the real estate agent whose sign was in the window of the house Greg rented.”
“What about her?” Carella asked.
“I described the house that was in Greg’s book. I described it down to the last nail. She knows the house. It was rented three summers ago to a man from Boston. She wasn’t the agent on the deal, but she can check with the Realtor who was and get the man’s name and address from the lease—if you want it.”
“Why should I want it?” Carella asked.
“It was the house in Shades, don’t you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It was the house Greg wrote about.”
“So?”
“He wasn’t living in that house, someone else was,” Hillary said. “I want to go there. I want to see for myself if there are ghosts in that house.”
The real estate agent who had rented the house three summers ago worked out of the back bedroom of her own house on Main Street. They trudged through the snow at a quarter past 6:00, walking past the lighted Christmas tree on the Common, ducking their heads against the snow and the fierce wind. The woman’s name was Sally Barton, and she seemed enormously pleased to be playing detective. She had known all along, she told them, that the house Craig wrote about was really the old Loomis house out on the Spit. He had never pinpointed the location, had never even mentioned the town of Hampstead for that matter—something she supposed they should all be grateful for. But she knew it was the Loomis house. “He loved the sea, Frank Loomis did,” she said. “The house isn’t your typical beach house, but it looks right at home on the Spit. He fell in love with it when he was still living in Salem, had it brought down here stick by stick, put it on the beachfront land he owned.”
“Salem?” Carella said. “Here in Massachusetts?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Barton said. “Where they hanged the witches in 1692.”
She offered them the key to the house, which she said she’d been unable to rent the summer before, but that had nothing to do with Gregory Craig’s ghosts. Not many people outside the town knew that this was the house he’d made famous in his book.
“Don’t know how he got away with it,” she said. “Claimed it was a true story and then didn’t tell anybody where the house actually was. Said it was to protect the innocent. What innocent? Frank Loomis has been dead for fifty years, and his two sons are living in California and couldn’t care less whether there are ghosts in the house. All they’re interested in is renting it each summer. Still, I guess he might’ve been afraid of legal complications. You’d know more about that than I would,” she said, and smiled at Carella.
“Well, I’m not a lawyer, ma’am,” Carella said, and returned the smile, aware that he’d just been flattered. “I wonder if you can tell me who rented the house three summers ago.”
“Yes, I looked for the lease right after you called. It was a man named Jack Rawles.”
“What’d he look like?”
“A pleasant-looking person.”
“Young, old?”
“In his late twenties, I’d say.”
“What color hair?”
“Black.”
“Eyes?”
“Brown.”
“And his address?”
She gave him the slip of paper on which she had copied Rawles’s Commonwealth Avenue address from the lease, and then she said, “It’s not an easy house to rent, you know. Frank never did modernize it. There’s electricity, of course, but the only heat’s from the fireplac
es. There’re three of them, one in the living room, one in the kitchen, and another in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s not too bad during the summer, but it’s an icebox in the wintertime. Are you sure you want to go out there just now?”
“Yes, we’re positive,” Hillary said.
“I’d go with you, but I haven’t fixed my husband’s supper yet.”
“We’ll return the key to you as soon as we’ve looked the place over,” Carella said.
“There’s supposed to be a dead woman there, searching for her husband,” Mrs. Barton said.
At a local garage Carella bought a pair of skid chains and asked the attendant to put them on the car while he and Hillary got something to eat at the diner up the street. It was still snowing when they left the town at 7:00. The plows were working the streets and the main roads, but he was grateful for the chains when they hit the cutoff that led to the strand of land jutting out into the Atlantic. A sign crusted with snow informed them that this was Albright’s Spit, and a sign under it warned that this was a dead-end road. The car struggled through the thick snow, skidding and lurching up what Carella guessed was a packed sand road below. He almost got stuck twice, and when he finally spotted the old house looming on the edge of the sea, he heaved a sigh of relief and parked the car on a relatively level stretch of ground below the sloping driveway. Together, the flashlight lighting their way, he and Hillary made their way to the front door.
“Yes, this is it,” Hillary said. “This is the house.”
The front door opened into a small entryway facing a flight of stairs that led to the upper story. He found a light switch on the wall to the right of the door and flicked it several times. Nothing happened.
“Wind must’ve knocked down the power lines,” he said, and played the flashlight first on the steps leading upstairs and then around the small entryway. To the right was a door leading to a beamed kitchen. To the left was the living room—what would have been called the “best room” in the days when the house was built. A single thick beam ran the length of the room. There were two windows in the room, one overlooking the ocean, the other on the wall diagonally opposite. The fireplace was not in the exact center of the wall bearing it; the boxed stairwell occupied that space. It was, instead, tucked into the wall beyond, a huge walk-in fireplace with a black iron kettle hanging on a hinge, logs and kindling stacked on the hearth, big black andirons buckled out of shape from the heat of innumerable fires. On the mantel above the fireplace opening, Carella found a pair of candles in pewter candlesticks. He did not smoke; he asked Hillary for a match and lighted both candles.