The Man Who Cried All the Way Home

by Dolores Hitchens

  “That, Mr. Wiegand, is known as hindsight.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “When you dropped Sargent off at the vacant house to meet Kat, where was his car supposed to be?”

  For a moment Wiegand seemed at a loss. “Say, what about that? I don’t have a glimmer. Why didn’t I think about it? Well, somebody else must have been driving it.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Or … uh—” Wiegand’s eyes shifted nervously, as if in search of an elusive memory. “Maybe he left it with Doris.”

  “The car wasn’t at home. Doris would have seen it when she left you and went out to scout around, to see if Sargent were waiting nearby. The car, remember, was found at the reservoir along with his body. Somehow that part about the car being at the reservoir has a smell of the original plot—omitting Sargent’s corpse. But the murderer didn’t drive Sargent up there, or go with him, in one car. He’d still be hiking out, that road. There had to be two cars involved, Sargent driving his own, somebody following him to bring him out. I wonder if the original plan didn’t call for that somebody to be Kat Knowles. His car was parked somewhere near that vacant house; Kat was going to follow to the reservoir and bring him back.”

  “He didn’t even hint at anything like that.”

  “I’ve found out this much about Sargent’s planning. It was compartmented, elaborately sectioned. Each of his friends had a role to play. Each role was designed so that the dupe would not know of the parts others were to play. And furthermore, each one seemed left with a story that would be contradicted by another—as you and Knowles were. I’ll bet that this thing, the car being found by the reservoir, was somehow designed to tie somebody in knots.”

  Wiegand brushed a touch of perspiration off his upper lip. “All guesswork, Sadler.”

  “I’m sure of that much.”

  “Why the devil did he pick the reservoir anyway?”

  “To stall, to take time, to cover his real whereabouts. It would have taken a long time to try to drag that big reservoir, eventually maybe to drain it, searching for his body.”

  “You know,” Wiegand said suddenly, as if impulsively, “I had a hunch old Sarge might be getting ready to bolt. He was nervy, kind of on edge, the last few times I saw him. But I didn’t think he’d run off with a kid like Kat Knowles.”

  “You knew he was seeing her. Putting it politely.”

  “Oh, sure.” Wiegand waved a hand. “But Kat … Well, face up to it, she was a wild one. Bill Knowles couldn’t do anything with her. He’d spoiled her rotten, given her every damned thing she’d ever wanted. And with Kat it was here today and gone tomorrow. I would be surprised if old Sarge really thought he could build something permanent with her.”

  Uncle Chuck was looking at him steadily and quietly.

  Wiegand’s plump face flushed pink. “I’m not even supposed to be talking about the case to anybody. And somehow you got me started and I’ve shot off my mouth, and God help me if Martin finds out.”

  “I don’t think we’ve covered any ground that would worry Martin,” Uncle Chuck reassured him. “We’re just chatting here over a drink. I can’t help wondering—how long ahead had you planned that trip up to spend an evening with Doris and to coax her into giving Sargent a divorce? How did he approach you? How did he get to your place without his car?”

  For a moment Wiegand seemed to debate within himself. He eyed the door to the street over Uncle Chuck’s shoulder; he chewed his lower lip. But the need for another drink won out. He turned his gaze toward the bartender. “It wasn’t planned ahead at all. Sarge just popped up out of nowhere, after dark … I don’t know who had dropped him off near my house. I answered the door and there he was. He came in and we had a couple of drinks together, and he told me what a good guy I was, what a good friend—” Wiegand’s gaze seemed to grow bitter for a moment. “And he said, how’s about me talking Doris into giving him his freedom. I was the one who could do it, good old Wally, friendly as a wet pup. She’d always liked me, she’d listen to me, and all that.”

  The bartender brought fresh drinks, and Wiegand threw his into his mouth without a moment’s hesitation.

  “And yet you didn’t think he could be serious about wanting to go away with Kat Knowles.”

  “Well … now I don’t. Sarge got me kind of confused. He made it seem logical. And then he kind of hurried me along, time was wasting, must get up there and start Doris drinking and maybe cut up a little, get her in a good mood.” Wiegand, with his hand still wrapped around the shot glass, shook his head as if in angry regret.

  “What do you think about these?” Uncle Chuck took out the color snapshots and held them out toward Wiegand.

  Wiegand seemed wary about reaching for them. “What’s that?”

  “Just a couple of color prints.”

  Wiegand stretched, peering cautiously at the pictures. “Sarge and the girl?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Wiegand looked at Uncle Chuck intently. “What’re you trying to prove, Sadler?”

  “Nothing. I just wondered what you might think of them.”

  “You know what I think,” Wiegand said shrewdly. “The same as you think. Somebody was spying on them. Look how far away they are, and they aren’t looking at the camera. They don’t know that anybody is snapping a picture of them. What’s it all about?”

  Wiegand had no intention of taking the pictures out of Uncle Chuck’s hand. Uncle Chuck put them on the table between them, avoiding the damp circles left by the drinks. “How do you think Sargent got them then?”

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe he caught whoever it was and twisted his arm off. Maybe they were sent to him by mail, anonymously, just to let him know somebody was wise. Or maybe he had to buy them.”

  Nothing slow about the plump man’s mental processes, Uncle Chuck observed to himself. “Yes, I guess it has to be one of those.”

  “You know who might have had those snaps taken? Little old Kat herself,” Wiegand said.

  “The girl?”

  “Sure. How do we know, really, how that affair was going? Maybe she wanted to take them to Sarge and say something like, look, darling, somebody’s spying on us and they might tell Daddy.”

  “But Knowles knew about his daughter’s affair. I’m positive of that. He knew, and he was perfectly willing for her to take up with Sargent.”

  Wiegand waved a dismissing hand. “Oh, Bill was fed up trying to keep her in line. He would have married her to a gorilla.”

  “I can hardly believe that.”

  “Well, just take it from Uncle Wally—when Kat was fifteen, sixteen, old Bill spent plenty of nights, all night, trying to find her. Lately he seemed tired, worn-out, I mean, as far as the kid was concerned. He’d done all the worrying he could do, that’s what it was.” Wiegand turned to give the bartender a summoning stare. “As I say, Kat and her father might have had the snaps made. Bill might have taken them himself. Let Sarge get worried enough to make an honest woman of her.”

  Could it have happened that way, Uncle Chuck wondered?

  He found a whole new theory, a new outline of the crime, beginning to take shape in his mind.

  Kat Knowles and her father had put pressure on Sargent. Had threatened him with exposure, a lawsuit—Kat was not yet twenty-one. Or had even threatened bodily injury. The outraged father, the ruined girl. In desperation Sargent had planned a getaway to Canada with Kat. The Brazil folders had been left around as a decoy, a deception. He was to disappear, his car turning up at the reservoir as if he might have gone there to drown himself. Or—using Knowles’s story of Doris waving the poker—as if he might have been killed and his body thrown into the water.

  Wait a minute, Uncle Chuck told himself. Why the folders about going to Brazil if he wanted them to think he might be at the bottom of the reservoir?

  He puzzled over it a moment or so, then decided to think about it later. Right now he wanted to complete the vision he had about K
nowles as the killer.

  Knowles had been up on the mountain, keeping an eye on how things were going, and also in case anyone might prove he was somewhere else during those important minutes he was supposed to see Doris waving that poker. He’d had the gun—funny there was nothing in the papers about the cops tracing the weapon. Poor old Pete came around, acted as if he might make a commotion, and Knowles had shot him, left him for dead. Then he had gone to check up on how the rest of it was going. He wanted to make sure that Wally Wiegand had brought Sargent to the rendezvous with Kat, that Kat was ready to follow Sargent in his car, to the reservoir, to stage the “missing body” part of the plot.

  Something had gone wrong. Perhaps Sargent had argued the girl out of her determination to be his wife. Knowles came on the scene in the driveway of the deserted, newly built house, to find them both now turned against him. He was still saddled with the obstreperous girl, and Sargent had had his fun and was getting away as free as a bird.

  Uncle Chuck found his thoughts growing confused.

  How had Knowles separated them? How had he managed to make Sargent drive to the reservoir in his own car, while he trailed him to commit the murder?

  Wait a minute. Suppose Knowles ran into his daughter while she waited for Sargent. Sargent was due to arrive with Wiegand. But now Kat had had a change of heart. Running around was too much fun, too much excitement, to give up for the dullness of matrimony.

  Uncle Chuck remembered that moment of insight, when he had decided that Kat and Sargent hadn’t met at all—she was gone, probably already dead, when he reached that house at the end of the street.

  Kat, in this new mood of rebellion, had let Knowles see that she had no intention of leaving home or of giving up her good times. He had an indefinite term ahead of him, running herd on this wild young hellion.

  Was it motive for murder?

  It would depend on just how Kat had told her father about her decision. If she’d been jeering, defiant, if she had antagonized him to the point where they had come to blows, it was conceivable that Knowles would have shot his daughter. The loss of temper, of control, might have been momentary—and yet complete enough to lead to murder.

  “You look like you’re doing a hell of a lot of deep thinking,” Wiegand told him. “You’re chewing it all over in your mind, trying to come up with an answer that isn’t the answer Martin got. Well, I’ve got a few words of advice for you, Mr. Sadler.”

  Uncle Chuck looked wonderingly into the plump face. Wiegand was making no pretense of cheerfulness or of being friendly. His tone seemed deliberately nasty now.

  “You’re old and crippled. Dragging around turning over stuff the cops looked at and discarded a long time back. If you’re smart you’ll quit it. You’ll get Doris a hip young lawyer who’ll get her to plead self-defense, or insanity, or the unwritten law, or something. And you’ll take your damned cane and go back to the chimney corner.”

  “What did I say to make you mad?” Uncle Chuck demanded.

  “Said? Nothing. But you were sitting there thinking it all out, and all at once I saw you wanted to throw somebody else to the lions, and if you thought you could use me for the job, you wouldn’t hesitate a goddam minute.” Wiegand was on his feet. The bartender was coming from around the bar; Wiegand waved him away and told him to put the drinks on his bill. “And anyway, it’s the truth—you are just a useless old coot, in your dotage. And I don’t have any more time for you.”

  “Good day then, Mr. Wiegand.”

  “Goodbye, Sadler.”

  Chapter 19

  Uncle Chuck sat in Doris’s living room, hunched on the couch, his cane between his knees, his hands cupped on its crook. His face was blank and exhausted. He had gone to see the young lawyer, Baylor, in Santa Ana, after leaving Flaherty’s Bar. Baylor had seemed friendly, businesslike, eager, and intelligent. A very likable young man, Uncle Chuck told himself. He’ll do everything for Dorrie that can be done.

  Baylor had listened carefully to all that Uncle Chuck had had to tell, making notes, asking Uncle Chuck to wait, now and then, while he thought over some point in the affair.

  But Uncle Chuck had to admit to himself—under Baylor’s courtesy and attention had been an attitude, not expressed, which Uncle Chuck had sensed and recognized. In its essence it had been expressed crudely by Wally Wiegand.

  … a useless old coot. In your dotage.

  What have I accomplished, really? Uncle Chuck’s eyes turned bitterly to survey the empty room. Dorrie had been arrested here, taken away to be humiliated by the brutalizing routine at the jail. Her arrest—face it—had been inevitable, without some strong piece of evidence to involve the real murderer.

  He hadn’t turned up any such piece of evidence. No, not with all of the running around, the hopeful questions, the tricks, the effort.

  The room seemed darker than it should be at a little after four, he thought. I’ve got gloom all around me, inside and out; I can’t even see the sun.

  … take your damned cane and go back to the chimney corner.

  The chimney corner … Yes, that was it. Uncle Chuck leaned his forehead on his folded hands and closed his eyes. It would be easy and natural to sag now, to drop down and lie still, give the weary old bones a rest. Especially since he hadn’t actually done any good. He’d just been turning over stuff, as Wiegand had put it, that the cops had already sifted and discarded.

  He didn’t have a single thing of his own. Not one damned thing.

  Those snapshots he’d been so excited about—what did they prove, really?

  Somebody had known about Sargent and Kat Knowles and had been mean enough, or jealous enough, or avid enough, to snap a picture.

  And Martin would say the picture taker had been Doris.

  Of course.

  The only thing I know, actually, that Martin may not know is about Pete getting shot.

  Uncle Chuck opened his eyes, wondering where that idea had come from, and then realized that Pete was scratching and whining at the back entry and that subconsciously he’d been listening.

  He forced himself to get off the couch and go to the kitchen, then to the service entry. He had fed Pete when he’d come here after seeing Baylor, had let him out to run. He realized, as Pete rushed past through the open door, he’d forgotten to feed himself. He hadn’t had a bite since breakfast, beyond the beer Wiegand had paid for.

  He heated the coffee and made a sardine-and-cheese sandwich, sat at the dining-nook table to eat. But even as he prepared the food and washed it down with coffee, he was thinking about the sole fact, Pete’s injury, which he had and which Martin didn’t have.

  And which didn’t amount to a hoot.

  Or did it?

  He had had a ghost of an idea there once, when he’d mentioned to Doris that they might get hold of another dog. Not so much because Pete was now gun-shy and afraid, but in order to give any unwelcome visitors the greeting they deserved. Behind this, too, was the thought that if he could find a dog that looked like Pete and was aggressive, even short-tempered, he might work out a scheme to reveal the murderer.

  A crazy hope. A crazy idea.

  … take your damned cane and go back to the chimney corner.

  “I won’t give up!”

  Uncle Chuck found that he had spoken aloud.

  Outside on the mountain the late sunlight was hazy in the tall pines. The scene beyond the windows seemed painted there, motionless, remote and silent.

  “I’m not dead yet. I don’t care what Wiegand says.”

  Pete came over to the dining nook and stood looking up at Uncle Chuck.

  “How about it, Pete? Shall we try to find you a brother?”

  Pete wagged his plumy tail and drew back his lips as if to smile.

  “You approve of the idea? You don’t think I’m nuts?”

  Pete seemed to smile more widely.

  “Well, let’s look in the phone book and see what’s around in the way of kennels. And, oh yes—mustn’t forget the pound
.”

  There were quite a few kennels and pet suppliers listed in the yellow pages, but many of the breeders specialized in certain kinds of dogs. Running his finger down the page, Uncle Chuck muttered, “Never realized before how popular poodles had got. Hardly anything else here. Pete, you’re just a mutt. Mostly collie, but I couldn’t palm off a pure-bred dog except in the dark. And this has to look good. If it’s going to work, it has to look good.” He sat frowning and thoughtful with his hand on the telephone book. “I guess it’ll have to be the pound.”

  As a starter he telephoned the pound in San Bernardino, then the one in Riverside. Neither place had a dog the size and general conformation of a collie. Going further afield, he tried the pound in Santa Ana. The man on the phone seemed enthusiastic; yes, they had a wide selection of dogs to choose from, and yes again, quite a few of them seemed to kind of look like collies. Only trouble was, they were closing up in less than thirty minutes. Would be open at nine the next morning, though.

  Uncle Chuck hung up. He shook his head; probably the man was an optimist. Why should the Santa Ana pound be crammed with right-sized dogs when neither the San Bernardino nor Riverside pounds even had one? I don’t believe him, Uncle Chuck told himself.

  An inner voice replied, you’re just so old and pooped out you hate to drive all the way to Santa Ana. That’s the real reason.

  I can do something, even as late as it is. I can look in a couple of pet stores locally.

  He locked up the house, got into the car, and drove away, leaving Pete looking wistfully after him from the patio.

  Idylynn Village had a pet store. He remembered the sign hanging over the boardwalk the other side of the Little Piney Theater. The woman in the pet store tried to be helpful. She had about a dozen hamsters, three canaries, a Maltese kitten, and a box of horned toads, as yet un priced. She didn’t have a dog for sale, didn’t know of anyone who was raising anything but poodles.

  “Poodles are big this year.”

  “So I’ve noticed. I need a kind of collie. A mixed-up collie. Like the one my niece has, Mrs. Chenoweth.”

  She batted her eyes a couple of times. “Your niece is…. uh … Mrs. Chenoweth?”