He drove out to the suburbs and passed Sargent’s office. There was a small sign in the window which read Closed. Apparently Mrs. Baxter had had her session with the cops and had called it a day.
Wally Wiegand’s tire store filled a quarter-block corner on a side street near the downtown area. Uncle Chuck parked his car, took the cane, inspected himself in a nearby shopwindow to see if he could pass for a prospective tire buyer—a prosperous one—and headed for Wally’s establishment. The façade of the place was big and shiny and well plastered with signs and banners which promised astonishing bargains and implied a desperate need to sell tires to keep from going broke.
Uncle Chuck went into the establishment. Here more banners hung from the ceiling or adorned the merchandise, and through this paper jungle he made out three salesmen, young, eager-looking, smiling, and all engaged with customers. This suited Uncle Chuck and he proceeded to roam around. The place looked on first glance as if it might support a fairly decent trade, and yet not on the verge of an immense expansion and building program as implied in the clippings he’d read in Sargent’s office.
He wound his way through pyramidal displays and signs to the rear. Here was a small office, glassed in, with a single harried-looking blonde doing paper work. She looked up, saw Uncle Chuck staring in uncertainly at her, flipped a switch on an intercom which must summon additional salesmen.
The additional salesman who came out like a jack-in-the-box from an adjoining door was Wiegand himself. He came toward Uncle Chuck with the same phony-friendly grin of the newspaper clipping.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
“I … uh …”
Wiegand was looking around sharply. Uncle Chuck saw that he wanted to summon one of the other salesmen. Wiegand was not a happy man; behind the fading grin he seemed sick. Uncle Chuck decided in that moment to drop the pose of tire buyer and to move in fast.
“I need to talk to you privately right away,” he said in a lowered tone.
Wiegand’s gaze quit shifting in search of a salesman and jerked to Uncle Chuck’s face. “Wh-what? What’s that?”
“Privately … away from other ears. You know.” Uncle Chuck’s expression was cautionary and knowing. “About Chenoweth, your old friend,” he added in an even softer tone.
“Oh, my God,” Wiegand blurted. He glanced around now as if looking for a place to run. All ruddiness had left his fat face; he seemed to take on a greenish tinge.
“Haven’t the police been here?”
Wiegand’s bulging eyes and air of increased terror told Uncle Chuck that they hadn’t been. And Wiegand had been trying to decide what to tell them when they did come.
“Don’t you think we’d better talk?” Uncle Chuck persisted.
With an appearance of suddenly sagging inside his clothes, the portly figure drooping and shriveling, Wiegand turned back toward the door he had just left. He let Uncle Chuck follow him into the small, rather untidy office. He got over behind the desk and faced Uncle Chuck, who was taking a last look out into the store before closing the door. Uncle Chuck turned. “My name is Chuck Sadler and I’m Mrs. Chenoweth’s attorney. Also her uncle. Shall we sit down?”
Wally Wiegand sank dazedly into the chair behind the desk.
“She sent you here,” he got out. “It wasn’t my fault. Sarge made me take him up there. I didn’t even much want to do it.”
“He had you take him to the reservoir?” Uncle Chuck asked, puzzled because he remembered that Sargent’s car had been found at the scene of his murder.
“No, no, no,” Wiegand stuttered. “The house. The house.”
“I see. About what time was this?”
“Well, she must have told you.” Wiegand rubbed a hand over his face, then suddenly reached down, slid open a drawer, and brought up a bottle. He set it on the desk, twisted off the cap, reached back into the drawer again for a paper cup. He glanced at Uncle Chuck. “What about you?”
“No, thanks.”
Wiegand poured a hefty drink, put the bottle away, muttered, “Cheers and all that,” and threw the contents of the paper cup back toward his tonsils. He coughed briefly, then crumpled the cup and tossed it into the wastebasket. He folded his hands on the desk in front of him. He seemed a little more self-possessed now, though his color was still pale and greenish. “The time … well, I was there for hours. We got there after dark, Sarge and I. You know, it was funny in a way—” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “—but I really thought I was getting somewhere. I thought she was going to give in. She’d had four or five drinks; she must have been feeling pretty good. You know, mellow—”
“Sargent Chenoweth and you went to the house in Idylynn last night? Doris saw him?”
Wiegand’s face twitched. His eyes were suddenly resentful. “Say, aren’t we talking about the same thing?”
“Why, yes, sure.”
“Are you trying to pull something? Are you a—No, you wouldn’t be a cop,” Wiegand said, staring at the cane in Uncle Chuck’s hand. “There’s something I don’t get about all this.”
To himself, Uncle Chuck admitted, he didn’t get it either. But he had to keep the fat man talking—somehow.
Chapter 7
It was going to take some fast thinking. suspicion was growing in the fat man’s eyes; his folded hands had separated and were knotting into fists. “I guess I’ve gone about this in the wrong way,” Uncle Chuck said, trying to sound regretful. “Doris has been insisting that she didn’t see Sargent from the time he left the house in the morning, from the time he started for his office—”
“Well, perhaps she didn’t see him,” Wiegand put in uncertainly.
“But he was there at the house? This changes things. I mean, it changes what she should have told the police.”
“You mean—Doris didn’t tell them about me?”
“Trying to … uh … keep you from becoming involved,” Uncle Chuck improvised. “Trying to do you a favor, I suppose.”
“Maybe she just forgot—” Wiegand seemed to clutch at a momentary hope; then he shook his head. “No. We didn’t drink all that much. We were woozy all right. I thought if I got her to feeling good, she’d give in. But she didn’t. As for Sarge, maybe he slipped into the house and listened. Maybe he heard us talking, and when he knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with her, he just cut out.”
“One thing I want to know right now,” Uncle Chuck said, “is whether—when Sargent left with you—he was carrying any folders, papers, a bundle of some sort—”
“What do you mean, left with me?” Wiegand interrupted. “I didn’t see Sarge once I got out of the car. My God, I asked Doris, I went back to the house when he didn’t show up after a few minutes. I rang the bell about a dozen times. I guess she had already staggered off to bed—”
“How late was this?”
“How should I know? I keep telling you, this was a drinking bout. I wasn’t sitting there watching a clock. We drank, and we danced some, while we were still able to, and she broke out some snacks, crackers and dip …” He suddenly pounded the desk with one hand. “I had nothing to do with anything that happened to Sarge. Nothing at all!”
“Then don’t worry about it,” Uncle Chuck advised. He rose from the chair, bracing himself with the cane. “By the way, did you see anything of the dog?”
“Dog?” Wiegand was getting out the bottle again. “Oh, that big mutt of theirs? Doris put him outside early in the evening. Right after I got there, in fact. What about the dog?” Wiegand was filling another paper cup.
“I’m not sure.” Uncle Chuck opened the door to the shop, then glanced back. “Do you know the girl Sargent wanted to marry?”
Wiegand had the paper cup poised to toss down the drink. He looked across it at Uncle Chuck and shook his head.
“Do you know the address of the apartment he kept on Barranca Drive?”
“Yeah. One hundred forty-one Barranca. Apartment Seven. Look, Mr.—uh—Sadler, what’re you really after?”
“
Some missing papers,” Uncle Chuck said.
Wiegand’s gaze dropped; he seemed to forget the whisky for a moment. “I don’t know anything about any papers,” he said finally, “but you tell Doris, for me—anything I can do to help, let me know.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.”
“And that … uh … I hope she doesn’t hold anything against me. For coming up there last night. And drinking like we did.”
“Doris isn’t one to hold a grudge. I’ll probably see you again soon, Mr. Wiegand.”
“Just call me Wally. And sure … any time!”
Uncle Chuck didn’t waste any time getting back to Idylynn.
He pushed the little car to the utmost, didn’t notice the scenery, and by the time he reached Doris’s house his expression was both bitter and resigned. He let himself in with her key, called out, “It’s me, Dorrie,” and went to the kitchen. It was long past lunch, he realized suddenly. To his surprise Doris was not in her bedroom but sitting in the breakfast alcove at the end of the kitchen.
“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked at once. “Wouldn’t you like a sandwich? Some salad and a bottle of beer, perhaps?”
“Dorrie, I just want to talk to you. I’ve got some advice for you. Get yourself another lawyer.”
His remark, as well as his expression of bitter disgust, seemed to frighten her very much. “Oh no! What are you saying?”
“I don’t have the experience or the cleverness to work with a client who lies to me. I know there must be lawyers who can get around this difficulty, and I want you to get hold of one of them.”
“I … I wouldn’t know how to find—”
“I don’t know how you’ll find one, either. But I’m not going to do you any good at all. The cops are going to tear us both to doll rags. Any minute now.”
A sudden inspiration seized her. “You talked to Wally Wiegand!”
“That’s right.”
Tears filled her eyes and her mouth quivered. “I’m … I’m terribly sorry I didn’t tell you about Wally. But it didn’t really have anything to do with Sarge, and it was such an … an ugly thing. Vulgar and degrading.” She clenched her hands together and held them out toward Uncle Chuck in an attitude almost of prayer. “Please don’t leave, please don’t just w-wash your hands of me.”
Uncle Chuck sat down, propping his cane against the wall of the alcove. “Dorrie, what was this all about last night, you and Wally?”
She wiped away the tears. “He came here around eight last night. He said Sarge was with him, was waiting in the car. At first he pretended he had come to try to argue me into letting Sarge have a divorce. Then he broke out a bottle of whisky from a package he’d brought in, and he insisted that I drink with him. I did drink, Uncle Chuck—far too much. I got drunk. I wanted to get drunk. I was scared and wretched and ashamed. Ashamed because my husband had sent this … this horrible vulgar-minded man to talk to me. And because it seemed as if … as if Sarge might have wanted me to be intimate with this man, a kind of excuse for what he was doing himself with that young girl.”
She cried for a while, and Uncle Chuck sat silent, looking out of the windows at the view of the hill slope and the big pine trees.
“Well, Dorrie, how far did it go?” Uncle Chuck asked finally.
“Not … not—I wouldn’t go to bed with him. But we danced. I let him hold me in a way that—Oh, Uncle Chuck, how can I talk about these ugly things to you?”
“Dorrie, I’m an old man. You can’t reach my age in this world in a state of innocence. And any illusions I might have retained were dispelled thoroughly by my study of law. You’d be surprised what’s in those law books.”
She tried to stifle the crying. She rubbed at her eyes, and Uncle Chuck took out his big clean white linen handkerchief and handed it to her.
“Didn’t you think that Sargent could have been watching all this?” he asked.
“No, I’m sure not. I made an excuse. I wanted to fix some snacks, and I slipped out to the kitchen. On the way I checked the other rooms. Then I went out at the service entry far enough to see Wally’s car and to see that there was no one waiting in it. So I knew he had lied. Oh, not about Sarge sending him. I know he wouldn’t have dared to act as he did unless Sarge had put him up to it. But I decided that Sarge was waiting somewhere else, perhaps with the girl somewhere, waiting for Wally to come and tell him I’d have to give him a divorce now because I’d—I’d—”
“Given in,” Uncle Chuck supplied, remembering the expression Wally himself had used.
“Yes. Given in.”
“Wally Wiegand talked about your evening together as if it were just a playful drinking occasion,” Uncle Chuck told her, “and maybe that’s the thought you’d better hold onto. For the police, I mean.”
“He’s … he’s so vulgar and horrible.”
“Did anything happen while I was gone? I was surprised to find you up—”
“Yes,” she put in quickly. “Some men came. Two of them. One had a camera. The other one tried to show me his credentials. He said they were from a news service. I wouldn’t let them in and I didn’t talk to them more than a minute.” She reached out to touch his hand. “Let me fix you some lunch,” she begged. “It’s after two.”
“All right,” he agreed, and then added, “No, wait a minute. When you went outside to see whether Sargent was waiting in the car, was Pete around anywhere?”
She had half risen from the chair. She sat down again, looking puzzled. “No. That’s funny too. He always stays close to the house and when he hears one of us go out, or when a car comes in, he always runs to see what’s doing.” She sat as if thinking for a moment, then got up and went to the refrigerator at the other end of the kitchen. “He’s such a faithful dog, such a good watchdog.”
“And yet he wasn’t there when you went outside and stood looking at Wally’s car.”
“No, he wasn’t.” She was taking food from the refrigerator, carrying it to the counter next to the range.
“You didn’t hear the shot that almost got him?”
“No. Oh, Uncle Chuck, I must talk to you about that. It must just be a scratch. Something a wild animal did to him.”
“Dorrie, take my word for it. It’s a crease left by a bullet. And it raises a bigger question than it settles.”
She was stooping, getting out a skillet. She looked up questioningly.
“If you’re prepared to commit murder, and you have a gun, and it’s necessary in some preliminary move to shoot a dog—”
“Yes?”
“Why would you afterward kill your human victim by beating in his skull with a blunt instrument?”
Chapter 8
She put the skillet on the range, began to lay strips of ham in it. “When I try to think of things like that I feel so … so scared. Do we have to figure out anything about Sarge’s murder? Isn’t that a job for the police?”
“The more we know,” Uncle Chuck pointed out, “the better off we are. And you must keep in mind, the police are not acting in your interest. They couldn’t care less about trying to salvage something for you out of the mess.”
She lit the flame under the skillet. “You didn’t see Sarge. You didn’t have to look at the terrible things that were done to him—”
“I can imagine, Dorrie.”
She was suddenly pale, haunted. “It was as if someone hated him more than … more than you could believe.”
Pete must have caught the first whiffs of the frying ham, for he came in now, shy and friendly. He trotted over to the range and stood there looking up at Doris and wagging his tail.
“Oh, Pete, you’re so spoiled,” Doris scolded.
“Give him some ham,” Uncle Chuck told her. “That’s one character you never have to worry about, not for a minute. He’s your friend. For always. I just wish he could talk. I wish he could tell us who took a pot shot at him. And why.”
Uncle Chuck was eating his ham-and-egg sandwich with a bottle of beer, and Pete was enjo
ying his snack in the service area, when the doorbell rang. Uncle Chuck put down his food at once and said, “Let me go. If it’s more reporters, it’ll be good for them to see you’re not alone here.” He took his cane and made his way to the front entry.
It was not anyone who looked like a reporter. This was a short skinny man in an expensive-looking gray suit, carrying a brief case. When Uncle Chuck opened the door the man snapped, “I want to see Mrs. Chenoweth.”
“Mind telling me who you are?”
“Arthur Cannon. She’ll know the name.”
“Come in,” Uncle Chuck said. “I tried to see you this morning at your home.”
“You did?” Arthur Cannon said, giving him a sharp glance. His dark hair, thinning and with streaks of gray, was brushed close to his skull, giving him a small-headed look. He came in, moving in a mincing, fussy way as some little men do. He held the brief case in a manner that suggested its contents were extremely valuable, or dangerous, or both. He got about halfway down the entry hall and then stopped, turned to look at Uncle Chuck who was carefully closing the front door. “Why did you try to see me?”
“I’m Mrs. Chenoweth’s uncle and, for the time being, her attorney.”
“And still—so?”
“One of my jobs is to see what sort of estate will be left for her.” Uncle Chuck remembered the little old mother-in-law’s whispered explanation of the disagreement between Sargent and this old friend. “You’d known Sargent most of his life and I understand that you and he had some investments together.”
“A lie,” Cannon said promptly. A touch of color came into his thin cheeks. “A complete falsehood.”
“You weren’t his friend?”
“We had no investments in common. That’s why I’m here—Doris should know about these mining stocks that Sarge was in the process of buying.”
They were proceeding down the hall, Cannon in the lead. Uncle Chuck said, “Turn left. Dorrie’s in the kitchen. I judge, then, you’re going to try to unload some cats and dogs on the estate.”
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