“Talk,” Knowles said.
“Just a minute.” Uncle Chuck headed for the hall, glancing back in apprehension lest Knowles be getting up to follow. But Knowles remained seated, his hands spread on the chair arms.
Uncle Chuck slipped the leash off the closet knob and Buster bounded away toward the living room. Uncle Chuck had a clear view, through the end of the hall and across the living room, of the chair in which Knowles sat.
Knowles had been glancing suspiciously about but now caught sight of the dog. His head straightened with a slight jerk. His mouth moved as if he were about to say something. But Uncle Chuck’s heart plummeted when he saw that Knowles’s hands still were spread on the chair arms and his feet were crossed at the ankles. He was making no move to defend himself.
He had no fear of harm from this dog which must seem to him to be Pete.
One hand moved now as the dog bounded close, but the hand was merely extended as if to touch the dog’s head.
Knowles spoke. “Hi, there. God, but you’re a big mutt.”
The dog went past and must instantly have wolfed down the portion of food; he came back at once to look curiously at Knowles, then expectantly at Uncle Chuck’s approaching figure.
Now Knowles simply ignored the dog. “All right, let’s have it. What am I here for?”
Uncle Chuck tried to rouse his stunned mind.
Everything was gone, lost, ended. There was nothing more to be done except to get Knowles out of the house and sink into gloom and loneliness. This had been the last chance—call it the last idiot twitch, he told himself grimly—and now it was done and it had produced nothing. Knowles was not the man who had shot Pete.
Uncle Chuck said, “You can get sore if you want to … but that was it. That’s why I dragged you up here.”
“What was?”
“To see if the dog recognized you.”
“Why in hell shouldn’t he recognize me? He was Sargent’s dog. I was a friend of Sargent’s. Oh, I rarely came here. Sargent sort of kept his social life away from here, if you noticed. But why shouldn’t—” Knowles frowned for a moment at the dog, then seemed to dismiss some suspicion. He looked sharply at Uncle Chuck. “What you’re saying is, there really wasn’t anything about Kat?”
“No. And I apologize for using her name to get you here.”
“This was some kind of trick, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You’re trying to help Doris,” Knowles said thoughtfully, as if speaking his reasoning aloud. “That means this was supposed to pin Sarge’s murder on me somehow. You wanted me to be the patsy.”
“I thought you could be the killer.”
“And now, that I’m not?”
“I guess not.”
“You look awfully discouraged, old man. You look like your last friend just walked out on you, spitting in your face as he went. Why would I kill Sarge and Kat? Why pick me?”
Uncle Chuck wished that Knowles would get mad and leave. Take a punch on the way if you want, Uncle Chuck invited Knowles, to himself. I was a fool. Ol’ Uncle Chump, the dreamer and fixer.
“I wouldn’t have killed the kid I raised and loved,” Knowles said, and for the first time there seemed something humanly decent and kind about the man. “Sure, the kid was a heller. Just between you and me, I was a heller when I was her age. She got it honest. And I knew what a hell of a fall she was riding for.”
Uncle Chuck recalled what Wally Wiegand had said—Knowles used to run around late at night searching for his daughter.
“And I’ll even admit,” Knowles went on, his voice dropping to a whisper, “that I knew all about the little plot she and Sargent had cooked up, to run away together.”
“All about it?”
“Sure. Canada. It was crazy and childish, but maybe it would have gotten something out of Kat’s system. She could have come back in a year or two a sadder and a wiser kid. We all have lessons like that to learn. And Sarge wasn’t a brute or anything like that. He’d have treated her decently, and when she had left he probably would have come crawling to Doris. So—what’s to lose?”
“And so you were willing to play a part in it, get Dorrie accused of murder? Tell the yarn about seeing her wave a poker, threateningly, while she spent the evening with Wally?”
Knowles looked embarrassed, then he laughed. “That was just a smoke screen. I never told the yarn to the cops. It would have fallen apart anyway. You can’t really see into the house from that hill below it.”
“You told me the yam.”
“Well, that was before I knew Kat was dead,” Knowles answered, sobering instantly. “It just seemed I could use the story to cover for her for a little while. Once I got sobered up, got over the panic, once I found out Kat was dead, I shut up about that poker. The thing was—the original crazy, childish plot—was that Sarge was going to leave his car at the beach, or somewhere, and make it seem as if he might be drowned.”
“Yes, I figured out that part of it. The reservoir.”
“Neither he nor Kat ever mentioned the reservoir to me. It was always the beach, or Newport Harbor, somewhere like that.” Knowles shoved himself to the edge of the chair. “This was supposed to be just a distraction, a red herring to keep the cops, and Doris, busy and off the real trail. It was childish, goofy. But I couldn’t argue them out of it.”
Here was a man who had never said no to his child—and perhaps the child’s unhappy end was the result of that.
“You don’t have anybody here—that witness you told me about—do you?” Knowles demanded.
“No.”
“You just took a chance I wasn’t going to beat the hell out of you. Is that it?”
“I had to take that chance,” Uncle Chuck admitted.
“What are you going to do now?”
Uncle Chuck tried to rouse himself, tried to think of something more that he could do. He felt dead inside. Everything seemed to have dragged to a halt. It was the bitter end.
Knowles looked at Buster, frowning. “Why don’t you try this dog on somebody else? Why not try the joke on Art Cannon? Or on good old Wally? So long as you’re in business—”
“They wouldn’t come up here for me.”
There was a brief space of quiet.
“Last night’s papers had some stuff in them,” Knowles said, speaking slowly and a little quietly, “that had to come from either Wally or Art. They’d made no effort to protect Kat’s reputation or mine. The implication was that Kat had been a teen-aged wanton and I’d encouraged her. If you want Wiegand and Art Cannon up here, I’ll try to get them for you.”
“But you think that Doris killed Sargent and your daughter.”
“Maybe she did. I’m not saying it’s impossible she didn’t. If she didn’t, I’m just as interested as you are in who did. Shall I make those phone calls?”
Uncle Chuck tried to rouse some hope in himself, some feeling that there were channels in the affair still to be explored, that there must still be some hope of change, some flash of brilliance that would rescue him, and through him, Dorrie. But nothing seemed to exist but a kind of grayness.
He tried to picture Wally Wiegand in that chair where Knowles now sat; he tried to imagine that fat man’s reaction as the dog bounded in to get at the hidden food.
Wiegand’s most ambiguous, most mysterious part in the thing seemed to have been his witnessing Sargent’s burning of those clippings. Burning the papers in Wally’s fireplace was completely senseless—unless viewed from one perspective. The grayness didn’t go away, but Uncle Chuck experienced a flash of insight. Sargent had burned clippings that Wally wanted burned. The bonfire had been a prepayment for Wally’s part in the fatal evening’s activity. “Look,” Sargent might have said, “I’m burning all these clippings about your silly schemes, your expansion of business and building a million-dollar tire empire and becoming the tire king of Southern California. Collected and put in sequence, the way I’ve got them here, they make damned ridiculous readi
ng and might keep you from getting any modest loans you might need sometime. And for doing this, burning the evidence of your capricious blusterings, I’m going to ask a small favor in return. Before too long—”
The scene faded. And silly, gullible, eager fat Wally Wiegand remained—too frightened and too utterly without courage to have committed murder twice over.
“Not Wiegand,” Uncle Chuck said dully to Knowles.
“Cannon, then. Good old Art and his moneybags, and his wife that keeps them emptied for him, buying new drapes for the neighbors to see through the front-room windows.”
Uncle Chuck nodded. “It is true that Cannon is money-hungry and that he stands to benefit from an insurance policy that Sargent took out, payable to him. I’ve just remembered something I should have asked the insurance man, Rick Owens, while Dorrie and I were in his office. Excuse me while I use the phone in the kitchen. And then maybe you can help me, after all.”
Chapter 21
She came into the room, walking lightly and quickly. Uncle Chuck followed her from the door much more slowly. She paused in the living room, turned, frowned a little, and said, “I thought Bill Knowles was here.”
“He’ll be right back,” Uncle Chuck assured her.
She had lost the haggard and somehow dustily bedraggled look of two days ago. She had obviously had her hair done in a beauty shop. It was puffed high on her head, with soft curls brushed into place around her temples. Instead of the shapeless black coat she wore a bright orange dress with a matching sweater, smart high-heeled black pumps, sheer nylons. She was an exceptionally good-looking woman for her age, and Uncle Chuck remembered his first impression, that in her youth she must have been quite beautiful. The only thing which was the same as on her previous visit was the large black handbag under her arm.
“I thought Bill Knowles would meet me here, that he had something very important to tell me,” she said, watching Uncle Chuck.
“Well … we both wanted to talk to you,” he said, trying to sound a little uncertain and puzzled. “For my part, it’s along business lines. You know, I’m still representing Doris in some matters. Of course she has a sharp young lawyer working on the murder charge now—this is something he’ll handle much better than I could—”
“Oh, surely she will be freed of that charge! I don’t see how they can think for a minute that she would do anything like that!” Sharon Baxter interrupted. The words tripped off her tongue quickly, and there seemed to be a great deal of sincerity behind them.
“That remains to be seen. I’m sure that the attorney will do the very best he can. What I’m wondering now is how much Doris can get together to take care of legal fees.” He tried to look as nervous and apologetic as he could. “Like … well, from the business, for instance. I was wondering if you … Oh, excuse me for forgetting to offer you a chair. Will you sit here, please?”
She was watching him intently, her manner wary; she paid little attention to where he led her.
He sat down nearby. “I was wondering if you meant to continue in the office, carry on, so to speak, perhaps letting Doris act as a silent partner. You could take over all of Sargent’s accounts and—”
She put up a hand, shaking her head energetically. “Oh no, Mr. Sadler, I have no intention of remaining in that office. I shall get another place at once. In fact, I’ve already moved all of my effects from the office I shared with Mr. Chenoweth, and what’s in there you may have—all the records and documents are his.”
“Oh?” Uncle Chuck appeared at a loss. “So soon?”
“Yes.” She smiled briefly at him. Her gaze seemed firm and unwavering. “I realized that I couldn’t continue in that place.”
“But weren’t you happy there with Sargent? Didn’t you two share a most satisfactory partnership?”
Her gaze dropped from his. “Well, actually, Mr. Sadler, perhaps I was being an optimist somewhat. We had our little disagreements—who doesn’t in the course of a business relationship? It wasn’t just all violins and roses. And then, too, after what’s happened—”
“That wasn’t his fault. He didn’t plan on getting killed, I’m sure.”
Her expression was cold now. “Very true. But I have moved out.”
“Can you do that?” Uncle Chuck persisted, sounding a little angry. “Can you just abandon the business? Didn’t Sargent protect himself by any sort of legal agreement? It seems he would have.”
She glanced toward the hallway to the rest of the house. “Is Mr. Knowles really coming back?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I don’t feel that there is anything to discuss about my leaving the office, Mr. Sadler.”
“Well, perhaps not—but I can’t understand this casual scuttling of a business that must be worth money … would be worth money, I mean, if it were kept in operation. Doris needs everything she can get.”
Sharon Baxter’s rouged lips tightened. She was not attractive when she looked like this. She looked mean and without pity. “That’s too bad.”
“Sargent really didn’t protect himself at all? There weren’t any agreements? No mutual insurance?”
“Oh, there were some things along that line, yes.” She coughed behind her hand, not meeting Uncle Chuck’s eyes. “Insurance, I mean. We had small policies made out to each other—it’s usual, you know, in case of a death in a partnership—”
“Wasn’t Sargent’s policy for you kind of hefty? The one on his life, payable to you … isn’t it pretty big?” “I don’t know what the exact amount is. My own policy is a minimum thing, a couple of thousand. Just a formality.”
Uncle Chuck tapped his fingers on the crook of his cane. “I can’t understand that part of it then—his taking out such a big policy in your favor. Was it your idea, by the way?”
“Of course it wasn’t!” she snapped. “I’ve already told you, I have no idea of how much insurance Mr. Chenoweth carried on my behalf.”
“So you said, yes. There’s another thing, too—it’s about those papers, the papers in that folder you brought here a couple of days ago.”
She shrugged. “I was trying to be kind.”
“Yes, you said so at the time. But the police say that they looked all through Sargent’s files at the office, looked through everything there was, and those papers weren’t at the office. You must have had them at home, Mrs. Baxter.”
“I certainly did not!” She moved forward, nearer the edge of the chair.
“Or, more likely, it seems they were things that Sargent would have had with him on the night he died. The girl’s photostat of her birth certificate, the getaway cash … too small an amount, really. Was there an agreement, by the way, Sargent would play dead and you’d collect that insurance money and perhaps forward it to him somewhere?”
“You’re suggesting that I was a party to anything criminal?” She turned blazing eyes on Uncle Chuck for an instant. But now there was movement in the hall. Her head snapped around to face what was coming, dimly seen.
“I think Sargent fooled you into believing it was you he meant to go away with. He roped you into the plot with that hook. No doubt he explained at the last minute what your real part in the plan was, and then you—”
A big brown shape was galloping into the room from the recesses of the hall. He was headed for Sharon Baxter’s chair.
With almost unbelievable swiftness she had her hand in side the big purse. Uncle Chuck recalled now she’d sat there, talking to Doris and him, watching Pete, with her hand inside the black bag as if about to get out a cigarette. Now the hand emerged swiftly. It brought no cigarettes; it held a small black gun, one that looked like the twin to the one in Kat Knowles’s dead hand. She pointed it swiftly toward the dog, now almost upon her.
She’s going to shoot Buster …
And I’m helpless, an old coot with a cane …
The cane sailed across the space between, revolving like a boomerang in the air. There was a sharp cracking noise, a scream of pain, quickly choked off. Th
e next instant Buster was behind the chair gobbling the food, the gun was on the floor beyond, under a table, and Sharon Baxter was turning to look at him, her left hand gripping her right sleeve.
“You’ve … you’ve broken my wrist!”
“I couldn’t let you kill my dog.”
“You … you knew. You were ready for me! This was a trap.”
“Yes, it was a trap.”
For an instant she swayed, her eyes shut, squeezed tight in pain. Then she looked at him. “I haven’t admitted anything.”
“No, but you tried to kill the dog—again. You thought he’d remembered, he was attacking you, and you were ready. You were even ready the other day when you sat here talking to us; you had brought a gun along in case the dog jumped you. This meant you’d already been up here scouting around, you’d seen Pete and knew he wasn’t dead. You even had guts enough to sneak in here and steal that little plastic gadget of Doris’s, took it out of some coat pocket in the closet—they found prints on that; they’ll get to you in time—”
“Never!” she said through clenched teeth. “I never left any—”
“You’re admitting it!”
She forced herself to laugh, then grimaced with pain. “And so, if I am? You and I are alone here, old man … I see now that you must have imitated Knowles’s voice on the phone or had someone else do it. We have no witnesses. I’m going to the police at once and complain that you attacked me without reason, that you went berserk and should be put away—your sanity has been destroyed by the guilt of your niece.”
Uncle Chuck moved a step nearer. “The thing that stumped me for a long time was the bit about the mysterious visitor. Someone had entered the house, it seemed, while I had been with you. And this someone must have come for a bit of evidence to plant on Kat’s body … the little plastic rain hood, it so happened.”
“You were with me!”
“I stopped to do some telephoning after I left Sargent’s office. Then I didn’t drive back up here very fast. I didn’t realize just how fast a reckless driver could make it until this morning when Knowles made it in under twenty-five minutes. What happened must have been that after I left the office that first morning, you raced to your car and got up here ahead of me. Maybe not by very much, but enough. Enough to dart in here, seize the first thing identifiable as Doris’s, and rush out. You were probably parked down there, out of sight beside that vacant house, planting the fake evidence at the very moment I drove by—”
The Man Who Cried All the Way Home Page 17