Zucker said, “What’s biting you, Mike?”
“Nothing. I just—”
“Don’t give me that. Something’s on your mind.”
“Maybe,” Gray admitted. “I’m not sure myself. Just a couple of points about the McCreerys, for instance. I can’t get it out of my head that there might be some connection between the murder of Beverly Bond and the murder of her sister, Melissa. The McCreerys were the only ones who admit to knowing both girls. If I can get them to talk, I might pick up something.”
“You won’t,” Zucker said confidently. “The McCreerys are real odd-balls. You won’t even get in.”
Gray said, “Maybe not. But that’s another thing, Harry. It struck me there was something a little out of character about McCreery. He was—well—too sure of himself. The typical recluse doesn’t feel safe unless he’s got himself shut off someplace where he can control his whole environment. But McCreery was pretty poised this morning. Even in a situation that would throw a perfectly normal person. He was scared, sure. But he wasn’t emotionally upset the way a real hermit ought to be. He handled the whole thing as if he was used to being with people all the time.”
“Okay,” Zucker said. “Maybe he isn’t a hermit after all.”
“Then why pose as one? I’d like to take a look at their house, anyhow. If they really live like hermits—Oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m just a little uneasy about a lot of things.”
“You’re way off the track this time, Mike. The girl’s confessed. She—”
“So have three other people,” Gray reminded him. “The worst that can happen is I waste a little time. It’s Sunday. I haven’t anything better to do.” He paused. “And I wish I knew what McCreery and Bond were really looking for in that apartment,” he added.
Zucker chuckled. “How would you like to have a look at the place before it burned?” he asked.
Gray said, “What’s that?”
“We turned up a roll of home movies,” Zucker told him. “Part of Beverly’s stuff that didn’t burn. There isn’t much, but there’s a color film of her wedding reception taken the day she married Chris Bond. The sister, Melissa, is in it, too, and they shot it in the apartment. Of course this was over a year ago, but it ought to be interesting. Want to see it?” He laughed. “Okay, tomorrow. The D.A.’s got it now.”
“In the morning?” Gray said, mentally rearranging his appointments for the first of the week. “I’ll be there. Thanks, Harry. Now, about the McCreery address…”
Zucker gave it to him. “Have a nice wild-goose chase,” he said.
8
You could see that the house had been a show place once. A long time ago. Back in the days when cupolas and wooden lace were high style. It stood in a little fenced-in remnant of what might once have been spacious lawns. Its elegant neighbors, long gone, had been replaced by a warehouse on one side and a closed garage on the other. Overgrown shrubbery clogged the front walk. The lower windows were all tightly shut away behind wooden shutters, and the upper windows, unwashed for decades, turned blind faces to the street.
Gray climbed the peeling stoop and tried the bell. Its rusty handle was solid in the socket. Nobody had turned the old-fashioned device for a long, long time. Gray knocked.
Then he jerked his fist back, startled. Instead of the hollow sound he had expected, a flat, hard thumping came back to him when he rapped. As if the room behind the panels were packed solid with something unidentifiable. It was hard to believe that anybody had lived here in years. Either this was an accommodation address and the McCreerys lived elsewhere, or else Gray’s hunch was entirely wrong.
He went down the steps slowly, searching the ground for indications of life. A narrow passageway led around to the left of the house, guarded by two rotting wooden posts. The walk here was a little cleaner in the middle, as if foot traffic now and then kicked the debris away. And low down, at about ankle height, a circlet of frayed twine was tied to each post.
Gray smiled to himself. Neighborhood children? A juvenile trap set to make the McCreerys stumble in the dark? Maybe the trap had worked, maybe it hadn’t. The snapped ends of twine didn’t look newly broken. But if the McCreerys lived here at all, this was the way they came and went.
Gray went cautiously up the passage. Even at the sides of the house the windows were shuttered. The slotlike cellar windows had boards nailed over them.
The back yard was a jungle. Only close against the house was there room to pass. Above Gray the bulk of the silent walls loomed dark. It was dank and chill back here. A distant streetcar’s clanging sounded distinct but very far away, as if out of another century. There was no other sound. Gray could hear his own breathing.
There were two doors here. One was high up on the wall, its bottom level with Gray’s head. Marks on the siding showed where back stairs had been torn away. The door itself was crisscrossed with boards nailed over it.
The second door was at the foot of descending cement steps leading to the basement. Gray looked down, hesitated and started slowly to descend. Behind him he heard a sudden scuffle in the tangle of bushes. He looked back. It stopped at once. It was not made by anything human, he thought.
The basement door had no visible bell. But when Gray rapped on the panel, there was a hollow, echoing sound and the door swung slowly inward.
Surprised, Gray waited. Nothing happened. Inside, instead of the vacant cellar space he had expected, he saw a narrow corridor, hardly wide enough to pass, leading into dimness.
“Anybody here?” Gray asked in a somewhat subdued voice. No answer came.
He pressed the door back experimentally. It met a solid obstruction when it had opened to a right angle. It would move no further. At least, Gray told himself, there was nobody hiding behind it.
“McCreery!” he called.
Before him in the dimness was a frantic rush and scurry. Then a very dim overhead light flashed on. He looked up. The passageway before Gray was now revealed and he saw that its walls were roped bundles of newspapers and magazines, yellow and crumbling with age. Among them were cartons stuffed with rags, bundles of clothing, boxes, books. Junk of every description was stuffed and crammed into the cellar until it seemed the gorged house must vomit out its contents into the street.
“McCreery?” Gray called again. Again, no answer, but the dim light burning from the ceiling somewhere inside the high-piled junk was an invitation, he thought, of some ambiguous kind.
Swearing at himself, Gray moved forward cautiously into the passage. It led straight for a dozen feet and then forked, showing a flight of stairs rising to what must be the first floor of the house. The left fork led away into further reaches of the basement. It was as if a house had been constructed within a house.
Gray went a few steps up the right-hand passage, toward the stairs. The sickness in the place pressed down on him like a blanket. He had felt his way into too many troubled minds not to be sensitive now to the minds that had made this house what it was.
So he must have been wrong, he thought. There was nothing false about the kind of sickness that had built this basement passage. Only a genuine recluse, surely, would be capable of this prolonged piling-up of useless things or able to live among them at all.
And yet, even here, there was a wrong note. Something that didn’t quite fit. He couldn’t identify it just yet, but it was here. The thought made him hesitate. He looked up at the stairs, listened, then slowly retraced his steps to the fork in the corridor. He peered along the left-hand fork, went into it with careful caution, his gaze scanning the floor and the walls.
It was lucky that he went carefully.
As he took his third step into the passage, he saw that it narrowed so that he would have to squeeze between two jutting bundles of magazines to get by. He started to do so.
Then he stopped. He looked up.
Overhead, built up in a precarious arch, was a tangle of rusty iron wired loosely together. Some of the wires were taut, and they ran back out of sig
ht among the bundles.
Cautiously Gray backed up a little, looked down at the floor. The ancient wood was splintered and dented.
He did not touch the magazines. He backed out of the forked passage and retraced his way almost to the door, watching the walls and the dusty ceiling carefully.
Near the door, he stopped, turned, and scanned the dim, dusty cellar. Everything but his own breathing was silent. Dust floated in the air.
Gray called one last time.
“McCreery!”
And now at last a voice answered him, from far back in the recesses of the basement. “Yes?” it said. “Yes? I’m here.”
“Where?” Gray called, and listened intently. This didn’t sound to him like the voice he had heard at the police station when Martin McCreery was questioned. It seemed deeper, mellower, a different man speaking.
“Right here,” it called. “Come in, come in.”
“Which way?” Gray shouted. “I’m at the cellar door.”
“Straight ahead,” the mellow voice cried. “Take the left turn. The left. You hear? The left.”
Gray thought of the jutting bundles that were the triggers of a trap. Push them aside, he thought, as far as you would have to push them to get past, and the load of jagged iron would crash down to scar the wooden floor again as it had scarred it in the past.
Quietly he turned and went out of the cellar.
He was back in his car before he realized he was sweating.
Fitting the key in the ignition, he realized what the false note had been back there. The recluse withdraws from his world by slow degrees. When the pattern is complete, he is pretending he isn’t in the house at all. He lets mail pile up on the porch. He cuts off gas and light. He has no contact at all, if he can avoid it, with the untrustworthy outer world.
But the McCreerys’ basement had lit with an electric light.
All right, Gray thought, it doesn’t prove a thing. You can’t generalize about the individual. Just the same, he’d been looking for a deviation from the norm of the typical recluse, and he’d found one small discrepancy. Not enough to prove anything. But enough to keep him thinking.
And he’d found something else, too. Maybe that mantrap wouldn’t kill an intruder. Maybe it would. Maybe the McCreerys wouldn’t actually spring it. But one thing was certain—they were perfectly capable of planning a murder.
Eileen came slowly into the room. The matron closed the door behind her. Gray stood up and pulled out a chair.
In his gentlest voice he said, “Sit down, Eileen. Please.”
She gave him a quick, large-eyed look and took the chair submissively. Her short, dark hair, usually a crop of springing curls, was lank today. She looked extremely pale without a trace of make-up. She sat with her hands in her lap, and she kept up a slow, continual rubbing of the knuckles of her left hand with the palm of her right.
Gray said, “Things got out of control for both of us yesterday morning, Eileen. It wasn’t really your fault or mine. But we got in a spot where whatever either of us did was wrong. This is the first chance we’ve had to try to straighten things out. I believe we can do it. Do you want to try?”
She looked up from her hands. When the gray eyes met his, suddenly tears brimmed in them.
“You’re still angry with me,” Gray said hastily. “I think it’s because you think I was angry with you.”
Eileen said in a tear-thickened voice, “Oh, stop. Stop trying to psychoanalyze me. That’s no good. It’s all over.”
“Why?”
“Because you—Oh, what’s the use. We’re beyond that. I killed that Bond woman. It’s all over. It’s done. Nobody can help me now.”
“It’s not over,” Gray said gently. “We all want to help you, if you’ll let us. I—”
He paused as she looked up again, the tears this time brimming over.
“Just let me alone!” she cried wildly. “I don’t want to talk to you. I won’t talk to anybody! I lolled her, I tell you! That’s all there is to say. Get out and let me alone!” The words dissolved into a furious hurricane of tears and she dropped her face in her hands and let the violent sobs shake her.
Gray said, “Eileen, listen a minute. Just a minute.” He waited, but the sobs didn’t slacken. Trying to talk over them, he said, “Eileen, I—all right, you killed her. But maybe not in the way you told me. Maybe not for the reason you gave. If you’ll let me help, I think we can—”
She had heard. She said with a childish wildness, “You don’t believe anything I say! You’re just like all the others. I’m no good—I’m no good…” And the desperate sobbing took over again, drowning out her words.
Gray got up and laid a hand on her shoulder. She shook it off. He put a clean handkerchief in her hand. She threw it to the floor. Then she caught her breath and began to scream hysterically.
Gray shook his head and went to the door, beckoned to the matron.
After they had gone, Gray picked up his rejected handkerchief, pocketed it, and slowly lit a cigarette. He stood by the window smoking in quick, nervous puffs and looking down at passing traffic. When the cigarette was finished, he went to the door. His voice was calm.
“Will you bring in Sidney Ferguson, please?” he said.
9
The narrow-faced, mousy little man came in hesitantly. He glanced at the chair by the desk and then at Gray.
With an effort, Gray shook off the feeling of personal failure which his futile talk with Eileen had brought irresistibly Over him. He hadn’t entirely failed. He could try again, and he would. If her resistance to him couldn’t be surmounted, others could try to take over. But still…
He smiled at Ferguson. And in spite of his distress, his interest quickened at this new problem. Ferguson was the first of the three others who had also confessed to the murder of severly Bond. Maybe this morning the truth would come out. Maybe Ferguson himself would have some clue to offer that could clear up the whole unhappy tangle.
“Want to sit down?” he said to Ferguson, his voice friendly. He sat down himself, stretched his long legs out comfortably, Ad held out a cigarette pack to Ferguson, who took one eagerly.
Gray introduced himself. He commented on the weather and the traffic this morning. For a while they talked casually of unimportant things.
Finally Gray said, “The police have been checking up on you, you know. They tell me you’ve done time back in Pennsylvania. For theft.”
Ferguson moved uncomfortably.
“That was a bad break,” he explained. “I was drunk and lifted a car. I didn’t even remember doing it afterward.”
Gray nodded.
“There’ve been other charges, they tell me. More theft. Larceny. But you’ve never had any charges of violence against you.”
Ferguson brushed his nose with a finger stained orange by tobacco. He didn’t answer.
Gray said, “On that car you lifted, the record says there was another man with you, but he got away. You never told the police who he was.”
“Oh, that guy,” Ferguson said. “I never knew who he was. Some guy I met in a bar in Philly that night. We were both pretty drunk. We started out to find some dames, and there was this sweet convertible parked with the keys right in it. The cops caught up with us pretty fast, and this guy ducked out. He ran up an alley and I never saw him again. I guess he got out of town fast.”
Gray said, “Whose idea was it to lift the car?”
Ferguson shrugged.
Gray said, “Had you ever lifted a car before?”
“No,” Ferguson said. “Hot cars are just too hot, unless you got connections. I guess it was this guy’s idea to pick up the car. If I’d of been sober, I’d never have taken the chance.”
Gray said, “Does your nose itch?”
Ferguson’s hand froze. Then he jerked it down abruptly.
There was a curiously tense silence.
Gray broke it by saying, “I’d like to ask you some pretty personal questions. You don’t have to an
swer if you don’t want to. But you’re not the only one who’s confessed to killing Beverly Bond. We have to try to find out the truth.”
Ferguson moistened his lips.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well—I’m the one killed her, all right. Go ahead. Ask your questions.” He gave Gray a defiant stare.
Half an hour later, Gray shoved back his chair and stood up. They had covered a good deal of territory.
“All right,” Gray said “Thanks, Ferguson. This should help a good deal. I may see you again later.”
He watched the little man out thoughtfully. There was something disturbing here. Ferguson had something big on his mind. But unless he was much more cunning than Gray believed, he hadn’t killed Beverly Bond. There were too many discrepancies in his story, subtle ones he couldn’t have prepared for. And yet—the little man had something serious that was troubling him. Maybe not serious to anyone but him. Maybe very serious. What obscure guilts and fears was Ferguson really confessing when he insisted his had been the hand that stabbed Beverly Bond?
Gray crossed the room and stood again looking out the window and wondering.
There were two more interviews still to go.
It was nearly eleven when he finished. The officer who conducted the last one out said, “Captain Zucker says the movie’s about to start if you’re interested.”
“I am,” Gray said. “Which way?”
Walking down the hall, he hoped Quine would not be at this showing. He had nothing for the attorney from any of these interviews that looked useful for helping Eileen. The last two confessors had very clearly been concerned only with their own private anxieties, to the point of being unwilling to talk about Beverly Bond at all beyond the briefest of references. Later interviews with them might turn up more useful material, but Gray was not too hopeful.
Quine wasn’t there. Zucker was, so was Sergeant Krantz, and there were a number of men in business suits conferring in a far corner, who were not introduced. The screen was being set up as Gray came in. He found a chair and settled himself to watch, feeling his heart beat a little faster as he waited. It wasn’t often that you had a chance to reconstruct the past like this.
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