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Playing Catch-Up
A Sheriff Chick Charleston Mystery
A. B. Guthrie Jr.
Again to Carol
If anyone finds a resemblance to himself in these pages, fine and dandy, though I can’t imagine who it might be.
1
“It’s not the rape that distresses me so much,” Madame Simone said to me. Her eyes were green, the shade of spring leaves.
“No?”
“She was a professional girl. She knew men. She had been there, if you see what I mean.”
I didn’t feel easy here in the parlor of what an old-timer, being polite, would have called a sporting house. The room was all right—all right, that is, if you could accept upholstery of blushing pink and pink lampshades, an oversized, gilt-edged mirror on one wall and, beside it, a sideboard with an array of bottles. No girls waited in line. No one tried to hustle me.
“It was still rape,” I said. “A violation of person, and that’s a serious crime.”
“But to kill her! That gets me. Why did he have to do that?”
She was dressed in a summer suit, cream-colored, with flecks of pink in it and might have just prepared for a visitor or for shopping or for a business session. I could see her sitting in a meeting of some board of directors. Not the ordinary madam, I thought, but a madam all the same no matter how she spelled it. The Simone must have been an invention.
Seated in the chair she had assigned me, I said, “God knows why he killed her, but rape and murder sometimes go together.” My eyes went to a polished wooden stairway, but no one was coming down it. “Now the victim, this Laura Jane Smitson, tell me about her.”
“I’ve answered the questions once, to a big, dumb deputy who came here before you.”
I knew she referred to Halvor Amussen, who was big and brave but heavy-handed and hardly brilliant. I had studied his notes.
“He may have missed something, or you overlooked something. Now about the girl?”
The cradled phone at her side rang, and she answered, “Yes, Mr.—” Her gaze came to me. “I have arranged everything as you wished. See you then. Thank you.”
“The girl?” I prompted.
“She worked for the Overthrust Oil Company. A stenographer.”
“She didn’t live here?”
“Oh, no. I almost never have resident girls. She lived with her parents.”
“Any residents here now?”
“No again. I believe you are thinking of the old-fashioned whorehouse. Mine are respectable town girls. Most of them work during the day. I keep a list. We have nothing in common with those old houses.”
Nothing, I thought, but the commodity.
The time was midafternoon. Through a window at the side of the room I could see down a slope to the bridge over Muddy Creek. The creek was the dividing line between the two counties. The body of the girl had been found by two youngsters who were playing on the other side of the bridge.
“I have a good list,” Madame Simone went on. “The pill has opened opportunities for the working girl. She adds to her income, and the men get what they want. Everyone’s satisfied. A first-class arrangement. Right?”
I had never encountered such matter-of-fact cynicism. Instead of answering, I asked, “Did the girl have regular customers? Was she somebody’s favorite?”
“That’s confidential. I’m a clam.”
“I can have you subpoenaed.”
She gave me a half-smile. “I doubt you’d want to do that. All the broken homes, the divorces, wives mad as hornets. Right in your town, too. Think of the ruined reputations.”
“What about her immediate bosses? Were they her customers?”
“Clients, we call them. I’ll answer that question, and the answer is no.”
The telephone rang again. She said into it, “Yes, of course. I’ll see. Could you call me back later?”
“You want to find the murderer, don’t you?” I said.
“That’s a foolish question. Of course I do.”
“Then you might help by telling me the names of her clients.”
“Doctors have a right to confidential relationships. So do lawyers. I claim my right. What’s more, the names wouldn’t help you at all. I’m positive of that.”
“You’re not being cooperative. Don’t you care?”
“Why do you think I’m talking to you? Of course I care. You don’t know when a person’s hurting.” She flung out a hand. “So I talk to you. Talk is like a bandage over a sore. This give-and-take hides the wound.”
I thought she might be going to cry, but she straightened her face and asked, “Want a drink? On the house?”
The phone rang again. She let it ring.
I said, “No, thanks.”
She gestured toward the sideboard and bottles. “I don’t sell drinks. I haven’t a license. The drinks are complimentary. A client may need something to encourage him in the first place and something to buck him up in the second.”
Again that serene cynicism.
“So,” I said for lack of something better, “you make the arrangements and provide the house.”
“You’re learning.”
“Another question. Was there any trouble here at the house before she left for home?”
“What makes you think there was?”
“I’m asking.”
She nodded slowly. “For reasons—well, because fights are bad for my reputation—I haven’t mentioned it. And your partner, the deputy who was here earlier, didn’t ask. Besides, he rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t like to tell you about it now.”
“It might help.”
I sat and waited.
“He was a ruffian.”
“Who was?”
“I didn’t get his name, not then and really not at all.”
“Maybe you’ll remember. Go on.”
“He was a stranger in dirty clothes and boots, and he was all hair, head and face. Somehow he found his way here. He saw Laura Jane and wanted her. Not just wanted her. Demanded her. You will understand he wasn’t our type. Of course Laura wouldn’t have him. So he began shouting, yelling his money was as good as any man’s and who did we think we were. He grabbed Laura by the arm.”
Madame Simone fell silent as if re-living the scene. I didn’t nudge her.
“I have a man here at night. You’d call him a bouncer. I got him in, and he yanked the man away, and I called my friend, our county sheriff. He’s quick to send me help. So Mugs and the stranger struggled for a while, and finally the man butted Mugs in the belly and hit him on the chin, and that was it.”
“It for Mugs.”
“Yes. Then the man grabbed Laura Jane again and tried to wrestle her upstairs. Just in time the deputies arrived.”
“And arrested him?”
“He wanted to fight, but one of them laid a billy alongside his head, and the other drew a gun. That calmed the man down except for his tongue. He was still swearing and yelling he had his rights.”
“Did they get his name?”
“I told you I didn’t get it. Nearest I could come was Ford maybe. What with his mouthing off and Mugs groaning and Laura Jane crying in a corner, it was hard to hear. Being sarcastic, I guess, one of the men called him Mister. Anyhow, that’s what it sounded like.”
“No. They gave him a lecture and threw him out.”
“What! No charges?”
“In my business you can’t afford trials. The publicity is bad. The sheriff knows that. This is an orderly house.”
“I’ll get the name from his office.”
“I doubt it. The officers will have thrown away whatever notes they took. There won’t be any report.”
“They’ll remember the name.”
“If they do, they won’t give it to you. The sheriff doesn’t like outsiders to nose into his business.”
“Rape and murder are everybody’s business.”
“But a fight in this house isn’t. That’s strictly for the county.”
“You could ask him to give me the name.”
“Even then, even if one of the officers remembers it, you’ll be turned down. You see, the sheriff prides himself on keeping order in the town and county. He wants it clean, so he says. That includes this house. He won’t let you pry.”
“Could you identify the man we’re talking about?”
“If I had to, I suppose.”
“How much longer did Laura Jane stay? After the man had been marched out, I mean?”
“Quite a while. An hour or more. I tried to keep her here, but she was so upset that nothing would do but to go home. It’s only across the creek and to the right. About a quarter of a mile.”
The phone interrupted us again.
“What time did she leave?”
“About eleven o’clock. Time for the stranger to be long gone.” She rose. “Now I’ve told you all I know. What about that drink?”
I had one with her and said thanks and goodbye.
2
I sat in the car, not switching it on, and thought about Madame Simone and what she had told me. She had given me kind of a lead. It was slim but better than anything Halvor Amussen had turned up, which was nothing. All we really knew was that Laura Jane Smitson, prostitute, had been raped and choked to death eight nights ago.
And Madame Simone? Her language was clean if her business wasn’t. And now I thought it wasn’t cynicism I had seen in her but earthiness, which, I supposed, was a kind of sophistication, an acknowledgment of basic fact. Although I never could share that attitude, I found it refreshing.
All this mulling was useless, and I shook myself out of it. To business then, and the first item was the parents of Laura Jane. But I waited an instant. The June sun, lowering now, lay kind on the land, like a warm hand. To the west the mountains were shadowed, rising blue and black, wearing snow patches on gullied slopes. Closer, down the slope from the house, lay the new town of Overthrust. It had sprung up in my absence, the consequence of an oil strike. A combination of shacks, cabins, board-fronted stores and ambitious buildings of buff brick, it was raw and alien to this foothill country. It boasted it would put the county seat in the shade. Wrong. Oil settlements came and went, hustling with lease hounds, geologists, roughnecks, foremen, managers and slim typists in high heels, and then they faded away to rocker arms and storage tanks and a handful of workmen.
I turned on the engine and eased the car down to the bridge. I knew where the Smitsons lived, and I knew their names, thanks to Halvor’s earlier report. The house was small and white with green trim. A couple of dying petunias decorated the front. I rang the bell. The door opened and revealed an older woman dressed in rusty black. She sized me up out of discouraged eyes.
“Mrs. Smitson,” I said, “my name is Jason Beard. I’m a deputy in the sheriff’s office. May I come in?”
“What sheriff?”
“Chick Charleston, your sheriff.”
“He already sent a man, and our girl not laid in her grave.”
“I know. It’s too bad.”
She looked me up and down again. She had a large bosom and, from the look of her hips, a large behind. She moved back. “I guess all right.”
Then she turned her head to say, “A man’s here, Smitty.”
The room I entered was clean and just fairly well furnished. Some wilting funeral flowers sat on a table. On a wall was a print of two horses, one black, one white, both frightened by lightning. This much I took in before Mrs. Smitson said, “This is my husband.”
In an armchair a man huddled up as if condensing himself against pain. His blue shirt was too big for him. So were his suspendered pants. At the end of thin, bare arms his knuckles bulged like knobs. From them his fingers grew crooked. Raggedly cut, his hair went every which way. Altogether he reminded me of a last year’s bird’s nest.
I gave him a greeting and repeated my name.
“Can’t shake your hand, Mister,” he said. “Damned arthritis.”
“Might as well take a chair,” Mrs. Smitson told me. She put herself down in a rocker. I was right about her behind.
Seated, I said, “I know it’s painful, answering questions again, but I want to find the man who did away with your daughter.”
“Sure,” Smitson said with no hope in his voice.
“So I have to go over the case again on the chance you’ve forgotten something that may be of help.”
“We don’t know nothin’,” Smitson said. “Just what we been told.”
“She was laid to rest just last week,” Mrs. Smitson put in.
“She worked for the Overthrust Oil Company, didn’t she?”
It was Mrs. Smitson who answered. “She went to business college. She was a good typist. Took shorthand, too. They liked her.”
“A good girl all around, what you call a loving daughter,” Smitson said.
Mrs. Smitson nodded. A couple of tears rolled from her forlorn eyes. “We couldn’t have got along without her.”
“Believe it or not,” Smitson said, “I was a real man once. Outdoor work. Worked for the telephone company, worked on construction, worked on ranches, and they was glad to have me. Never made no big money, but it was regular. But by littles my joints swole and movin’ hurt like hell.” He laughed, a single rasping sound like the voice of a night bird. “You see me now. Not worth a shit.”
“You wouldn’t talk that way if she was here, Smitty.”
“I guess the man understands.”
“When did you get alarmed at her absence?”
“We didn’t really,” Mrs. Smitson answered. “She what you call moonlighted. That was at Madame Simone’s.” Her eyes flickered to her husband. “She was so pretty. She posed, you know. She was a model.” Her eyes begged me to believe.
“Made good money, too,” Smitson said. “And brought it home and helped us out. Jesus. It’s bad days ahead.” He brought an arm up, winced, and laid it back.
“We didn’t worry about her,” Mrs. Smitson went on. “Sometimes she called to say what her plans were. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes, if she worked late, she spent the night at Madame Simone’s. But she always turned up here, regular. So we didn’t worry. It’s only a hop, skip and jump, here to Madame Simone’s.”
“The first you knew about her death then—”
“Was when the officers came and told us. Oh, what a day!” She began to sob.
I waited until she wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Is there anything you didn’t tell the deputy who was here before me?”
“We answered his questions same as with you,” Smitson told me.
“But it was like he didn’t expect much from us,” Mrs. Smitson said. “So you might say the talk was short and sweet.”
“So there was something?”
Mrs. Smitson had control of herself now. “You know, with her gone and the funeral and all, things go out of your head.” She made a little gesture, asking understanding.
“All the same,” Smitson put in, “we would have told him if he’d asked.”
“Yes, what was it?”
“A sapphire.”
“I’ll tell him, Smitty. A gold pin with a big sapphire in it. She wore it all the time, except of course at night.”
“Big
as a hazel nut, almost. A Yogo, they called it. Cornflower blue Yogo.”
Mrs. Smitson said, “It was give to her out of kindness by some gentleman she knew.”
“His name?”
“She never would tell.”
I looked from one to the other. “You’re saying it was gone when she was found?”
“Yeah,” Smitson answered. “Stole, I guess. We’ve looked at her purse and what she had in it and the dress she wore, but no sapphire. Worth a pretty penny, too.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure she had it.” Smitson laughed his bird cry again. “And sure it’s gone bye-bye. There was money in her purse, too, money she was likely going to turn over to us. It’s ours as it is. Last of it.”
“With her dead it’s kind of like losing our own lives,” Mrs. Smitson said and began crying again.
“I’ll be in touch,” I told them and let myself out the door, chalking up another miss for Halvor.
The sun was gone now, leaving a blaze in the northwest sky. My mother would heat up something if I went home, but home was thirty miles away, and I chose not to trouble her. I drove into the little town and ate at a counter, damning all fry cooks. When they die, forget the embalming fluid. Use grease.
3
I woke up early and lay quiet, letting my mind drift. Just three days back in Midbury, and here I was again on Sheriff Chick Charleston’s staff and again assigned to a murder case. I had expected to spend an idle summer, then move to Portland, where a good position, opening in the fall, awaited me in the police department. I felt qualified for it. I had studied psychology, abnormal psychology, criminology and related subjects and had been to FBI school. On the side, for pleasure, I had enrolled in a good many classes in English. What’s more, I had a degree.
The day after my arrival Charleston showed up. My mother liked him, as I did, and insisted on his having coffee and cookies. Yet she regarded him a little warily, fearing he might talk me into something dangerous.
He sat quietly, munching a cookie. He was a well setup man, weighing perhaps 180 with no fat. He was friendly enough but much of the time, until he smiled, appeared thoughtful and impassive. The smile did wonders. He was well into his third four-year term as sheriff and would have retired, not needing the money, but for public insistence. His was a true case of the office seeking the man.
Playing Catch-Up Page 1