The Man Who Cried All the Way Home

by Dolores Hitchens

  Oh God, Uncle Chuck prayed, I hope there’s nothing here to be sighed and grieved over. I hope there’s nothing at all.

  From the bare unplanted earth the flagstone steps led directly to the big front door. Uncle Chuck tested the door; it was locked and no windows opened on the porch area. He couldn’t lean far enough, even holding to the iron railing, to see through the nearest windows into the house.

  Climbing downstairs, he decided, was actually harder than climbing up; but he made it back to the rough yard and then followed what would eventually be the paved driveway to the rear of the place. Here much less clearing of the land had been done, perhaps with the thought that new owners might want to preserve some of the native growth. A clutter of scrap lumber, torn tar paper, and other debris was thick around the rear entry. Some of it he pushed aside with the cane as best he could, and the rest he stepped over or on. The rear door had a glass pane in it and gave off a smell of fresh paint. Looking in, he could see the entry and service area, all sparkling with newness, and quite empty.

  The back door was open.

  I shouldn’t have touched it with my bare hand, Uncle Chuck thought, looking down at the new brass knob. Or—maybe it doesn’t matter. I hope that it won’t matter.

  He stepped into the service area. The floor was of linoleum tile, laid out in yellow-and-white squares, shining with wax. Stubbed-off water and drain pipes waited in the freshly painted wall for the installation of appliances. He could see into what must be the kitchen—there was an island in the middle of the room, a brass hood over it, hanging from the ceiling, the counter white-tiled, an empty unfinished place where the range would be. And then, with a great inward wrench of grief and dread, Uncle Chuck knew that what he did here mattered very much indeed….

  Nothing could matter more. From behind the island built in the middle of the kitchen two feet protruded, toes up.

  They looked like young feet, very much alone and stilled now inside their green suéde sandals. What he could see of the legs seemed to be encased in close-fitting denim pants.

  He told himself, I don’t want to look at the rest of her. He suddenly wanted terribly to go back out into the yard, to the outdoors, and to look at the pine trees and the sky, and to listen to the quarreling jays, and to hear the wind.

  Can’t.

  Have to know.

  Damn your old hide, he scolded himself, quit your shaking.

  He saw the gun, the little derringer that lay on her outstretched hand, before he even saw her face. Somehow the derringer didn’t look out of place at all; it matched the shining efficiency of this new and well-planned room. It was a working machine, like the appliances that belonged here; it had just got here ahead of the others, was all. The girl didn’t belong. Her long blond mop of hair covered most of her face, as if blown across it by a high wind, or tossed there in the act of falling. Her pink mouth and half-shut eyes were only dimly visible, veiled by the hair, voluptuous and untidy.

  Uncle Chuck drew in a deep, shocked breath.

  Her blouse had been pulled up out of the denim pants, unbuttoned and opened; a net brassière had been loosened and pushed up to expose her left breast. The breast looked full and soft as if swollen with young life; the skin was whitely translucent and the nipple like a tight bud. Right over the heart, right through the globe of the breast, were double bullet holes like small blue bruises.

  In contrast to the outflung right arm, her left arm lay straight beside her, in the narrow space between her body and the cabinet doors which took up this side of the island.

  For a moment Uncle Chuck tried to believe that the girl was asleep, that if he touched her she would wake up, she would raise herself, tugging the blouse together, brushing the blond hair from her eyes, her cheeks coloring because he’d come upon her napping here. But of course, he told himself dazedly, this was the frightened brain storm of a crazy old coot, himself—and this girl was never going to sit up under her own power again.

  A green suede jacket, a green purse, both the color of her sandals, were hung across an open cabinet door beyond her head.

  If she was Katrina Knowles, the man named Bill Knowles didn’t have anybody.

  “Uncle Chuck?”

  “Me, Dorrie.”

  She had been stretched out on the couch; now she sat up quickly, putting her feet on the floor. She brushed at a wing of dark hair, looked up at him. Her eyes widened. “Uncle Chuck—what is it?”

  “I’m going to just sit for a minute,” he told her, “and sort of get my wits in order. Then I’m going to have to use the phone, call the cops.”

  “Something’s wrong. I can tell … you look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  “A ghost would have been more welcome, Dorrie.” He sat down near her, the cane forgotten, sliding to the floor. “There’s a young girl dead in one of the new houses at the end of the street. I’d noticed a car there earlier today. It looked as if someone had tried to get it out of sight, but the sun shining on it made a glimmer. Anyway, I think the dead girl might be Katrina Knowles.”

  “Kat?” Doris echoed unbelievingly. She had obviously been trying hard to follow what Uncle Chuck had been telling her, but now he could see that her instinct was to reject it all, to disbelieve. You can take in just so much, he thought. After a certain limit it all seems like part of a nightmare and you want to ignore it and get back to sanity, to believable things. “But … but what would Kat be doing here? Now?”

  I’d better call the cops,” Uncle Chuck said, but still not making a move toward the phone.

  “I … I just can’t think of it as real,” Doris stammered.

  “I tried not to believe it either, even while I was looking right at her. But she exists, Dorrie. She’s in that vacant house with a gun in her hand, and she’s dead.”

  The unbelief in Doris’s eyes was turning to horror. “She couldn’t be more than eighteen. Eighteen or nineteen. It can’t be ended for her, that young.”

  “This girl is that young, and it’s all over.”

  Doris shook her head frantically; she put a hand on the arm of the couch as if to get up. “Let me go see—”

  “No, Dorrie, I won’t permit that.”

  “But why not?”

  “Well … I’m thinking of your interests, your safety. This may be a suicide. Or may not be. I don’t want you on the scene at all. And then, too, I guess I kind of wish no one had to look at her the way she is. The cops have to. I know that. But a young girl shouldn’t be …” He drew in a deep breath, cutting off what he’d been saying.

  Doris shrank back against the couch cushions, a shocked hand over her mouth.

  For a moment the room was quiet. Then Uncle Chuck roused himself and asked, “Had it ever occurred to you that Katrina might be the young girl in Sargent’s life?”

  “Never. Of course not. Sarge and I had known her from the time she was a little girl. A man doesn’t—” Her eyes closed and she swayed, almost toppling forward. Uncle Chuck reached her as quickly as he could; he helped her turn and slide down so that she lay face up, and lifted her feet to the couch. “He couldn’t. He couldn’t,” she whispered through stiff lips.

  “Maybe not,” he said, trying to calm her.

  “That would be … monstrous.” She tried to raise her head to look directly at him, willing him to understand. “It would take a—a monster to do a thing like that.”

  To himself Uncle Chuck was remembering Mrs. Criff’s description of the girl she’d seen at the apartment with Sargent—one of the young wild ones—and he was enough of a realist to see that the willingness, if not aggression, could have been on the girl’s part. It had happened before.

  Doris was staring blindly upward. “You must get hold of Bill Knowles, get him up here. He’ll know how to protect Kat’s name.”

  “No, Dorrie. I’ve got to call Martin.”

  “Don’t!”

  “I’m sorry. I wish it could be some other way.”

  There weren’t any sirens. The cops cam
e quietly. Standing at the top of the drive, Uncle Chuck saw the Idylynn police cruiser turn in at the opening in the pines. After about ten minutes the cruiser backed out again and took up a waiting position, blocking the entrance.

  It was almost forty minutes before the San Bernardino County sheriff’s car was there. Uncle Chuck had gone inside to wait, had checked a couple of times at fifteen-minute intervals. The sheriff’s car sat bumper to bumper, facing the other. Obviously someone had had sense enough to think of preserving any traces of footsteps or tire tracks on the ground around the house.

  Uncle Chuck told himself, My tracks are all over the place, front and back. Probably make ’em sore. And yet my curiosity saved them some time, maybe.

  He returned to the house. Doris was just putting up the phone. “Bill Knowles doesn’t answer. There’s nobody home.”

  “There wasn’t earlier. Doesn’t he keep a housekeeper?”

  “I don’t know. He did when Kat was little, but perhaps when she was old enough to be left alone, he got along with day help. I just don’t know, and furthermore, I’ve been thinking of that question you asked, how much social life Sarge and I had shared recently, and I can see how he just deliberately isolated me.” She was sitting tensed, her hands clenched on her lap. “He shut me away from everybody. Even you. Yes, I can see now, he made me ashamed, he made me want to hide from everyone. And now … now I can hardly see how to cope with all of this.”

  Uncle Chuck went to her; he put an arm across her shoulders and bent to press his lips against her hair. “Don’t worry, Dorrie. I’m not much any more, a crippled old coot who’s learned a little law, but what I am is all yours. And if I can’t cope, we’ll get us a sharp young attorney like a couple I know in San Berdoo.”

  She clung to him now, shaking with sobs.

  “Sure he shut you away,” Uncle Chuck went on. “He had a plan going. What all of its ramifications were I don’t know yet, but one part of it was to get you out of the way. He put you up here on this mountain and he quit being your husband—in any way that counted.”

  “I’m old,” she cried. “He made me into a timid old woman.”

  “That you aren’t,” Uncle Chuck said firmly. “To me you’re still that little girl, the one who spent summers with us, the one we loved so much …”

  She turned her tear-filled eyes up to him. “Uncle Chuck—to Bill Knowles his Kat is still the little girl he loved. That’s what is so awful.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  The worry lines seemed to deepen around Uncle Chuck’s eyes and mouth. He went to the couch, letting himself down against its cushions, putting the cane aside. He thought suddenly that this was surely the worst day of his life, the longest, the most terrible. It was worse than the day Tippie had died, because after Tippie’s long sickness that day had meant the end to suffering, the hour of release.

  He turned from thoughts of Tippie to the explanation he wanted to make to Doris. “What I’m going to say isn’t meant as a criticism of the police. I think Martin must be a hard-working, efficient officer, doing his best job for the taxpayers. But the police everywhere have too damned much to do, a job that’s too big for the number of men in it and too never-ending; and when you have a situation like that, in anything, it’s entirely natural to take the quickest and most obvious way out. What I’m getting at, if there’s a quick and obvious answer to a crime, you’ll take it. The cops’ll take it. In this case, if they can say that Katrina killed Sargent because of some angle in the affair they might have been having, and then committed suicide out of guilt, or remorse, they’ll say it. Some minor items of evidence might have to be ignored maybe. If most of it stacks up, looks logical, that’s what the solution will be. Murder followed by suicide. All wrapped up.”

  She was looking at him in sick astonishment. “Kat murdering Sarge? But … but you didn’t see him! She couldn’t have done that !”

  Uncle Chuck nodded. “We might decide so, but we aren’t under a tremendous pressure to get an answer and to go on to a dozen other things.”

  “They won’t believe that, Uncle Chuck. Martin won’t believe it for a minute.”

  Chapter 10

  In the sheriff’s cruiser, with Lieutenant Martin at the wheel, Uncle Chuck rode slowly past the corner where the new homes stood among the pines, now darkening with the approach of twilight.

  “I didn’t see any glint of color,” Martin said, braking the car past the turn.

  “Sun’s going down. Almost gone,” Uncle Chuck said wearily. “Sun was high when I first caught that reddish gleam. Second time, around three-thirty or so, I almost didn’t see it. All depends on the light angle. Let the car stay where it is and drive past here around noon tomorrow, and you’ll see.”

  “No, I’m going to take your word for it.” Martin sounded as tired as Uncle Chuck felt. “It’s logical … and thanks, you did save us some time finding her.”

  “You knew whom you were looking for?”

  “Yes,” Martin said shortly, maneuvering the car to turn it around. There were a lot more cars now in the street below the empty house. A little while ago an ambulance had pulled in, the other cars being moved to allow its passage.

  “Could you tell me who put you on the track of Miss Knowles?”

  Martin looked straight ahead through the windshield. “I can’t give you the name of the informant, no. It wasn’t anyone involved in the case, directly, that is; it’s someone who works in a café where Mr. Chenoweth used to take Miss Knowles … happened to know he was married, and happened to know her father.”

  “Came forward with the information pretty quick, hmmm?”

  “Heard about Chenoweth’s murder on the radio, phoned in right away about the girl. Said she’d been thinking of writing an anonymous letter to the girl’s father. Used to work in one of his drive-ins, as a matter of fact.”

  Uncle Chuck started to say, And with Mrs. Criff calling you about the apartment on Barranca Drive, you had the whole story, and then changed his mind and said instead, “What about Katrina Knowles, her being dead here at the end of Chenoweth’s block?”

  “You’re Mrs. Chenoweth’s attorney,” Martin pointed out, “and you know I can’t discuss this case with you.”

  “Oh, I was just wondering if you’d decided for sure it was suicide. Remember, I saw her, saw the gun lying in her hand, and it didn’t look as if there’d been any fight or struggle. Of course her bosom being bared like that gave a strange touch, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t have done. Young girls can be full of queer ideas. And wild, dramatic gestures.”

  “Very true,” Martin agreed. He pulled to a stop across the street from the unpaved driveway, since five police and sheriff’s cars lined the other side. “If it’s suicide, our experts will tell us. Right now I want you to show me where you parked and where you walked while you examined the car. We won’t be going inside—they’re working in there.”

  He was patient with Uncle Chuck’s slow progress across the street and up into the rough yard. The windows of the house were full of sunset glow, reflections of cloudy, smoky reds and yellows. Whoever came here eventually to live, Uncle Chuck thought, was going to have a view. He hobbled around, showing Martin the dim prints of his tires and where he had walked, and in the plainer prints Martin stuck twigs upright as a way of marking them.

  When this seemed pretty well taken care of, Martin started back to the street. Following as closely as possible, Uncle Chuck asked, “Have you examined the car?”

  “Not thoroughly, no.”

  “Is there any way to tell for certain whether she or Sargent died first?”

  Martin threw him a wise, warning look. “If there is, our medical examiner will do it.”

  “Couldn’t you give me this much of a break—call me when you’ve decided whether her death is suicide or murder?”

  Walking ahead, facing the sunset, Martin appeared to think it over. Uncle Chuck made a private bet,
thinking to himself, he’s going to say no. But then Martin nodded shortly. “If and when I decide to give the information to the papers—make it public—I’ll call you first.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You might have quite a wait.”

  “Yes, I expect that I will,” Uncle Chuck agreed.

  Martin drove him back down the road to Doris’s house and let him out in the driveway. He then backed up the slope with such a burst of acceleration that the tires spun, turned with a snap of the wheels. He doesn’t like me much, Uncle Chuck thought. I’m a meddler. The fact that I’m Dorrie’s lawyer makes me a more obnoxious kind of meddler than I’d be otherwise. Too bad, Lieutenant.

  He went into the house. Doris was in the kitchen, just hanging up the wall phone. The signs of shock and exhaustion were overlaid now with a puzzled look. She plugged the percolator cord into a socket, then turned to Uncle Chuck. “That was Sharon Baxter. She’s on her way to the house now. She called from the village. She says she’s found some things of Sarge’s in the filing cabinets there at the office, things that didn’t belong … Uncle Chuck, I think she must have found the papers that are missing from his lockbox here at the house!”

  “That would be interesting.”

  “She says she went home and tried to rest, and then it occurred to her that she should go back to the office and really go through everything there. And that’s when she found them!”

  “Fine. Dorrie, I’ll have a cup of that coffee while we wait for Mrs. Baxter.”

  Seated in the living room some fifteen minutes later, Sharon Baxter, to Uncle Chuck’s eyes, seemed to have aged by years since their encounter that morning. Her face had a hollow-eyed, parched look, the lips untouched by color and drooping at the corners. Her hair was pulled back much more severely, as if she’d given it a hasty brushing before coming out. The clothes had been changed; she had on a black dress and a shapeless black coat, both somehow dusty-looking. She sat at the end of the couch, propped by her right elbow, a big cardboard folder of the expandable type, tied with gray tape, lying on her lap.