“Where was the car found?” I said.
“Down at the end of the Swamp Road,” he told me.
“The Swamp Road?”
“Yes,” he said. “Down past John Flail’s. You know, the old wagon road about a mile and a quarter up from here. It’s the only side road off there all the way along from Whippleville to Stony Falls.”
“Yes, I know the road you mean,” I said.
“There’s nothing to do but wait and not be too worried, Miss Darrie,” he said. “The radio doesn’t seem to have any batteries, but there are a couple of magazines to read. Or some books, or there’s a copy of the Danbury paper on the desk, it looks like. I’ll make some coffee.”
But she had left her glasses in the car when they had got out down at Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, and she couldn’t read very well without them. At Stone’s urging, she picked up an old copy of a picture magazine from the table, and began looking through it, to pass the moments of suspenseful waiting.
I followed Stone out into the kitchen after we had got her settled.
“You live around here, Dr. Riddcr?” he asked me, making coffee.
“Riddle,” I said. “No, I live in New York. I’m on my way down from Vermont. I wonder ‘when that car passed me.”
“You saw it passing you?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t see it.”
“I thought you meant it passed you,” he said. “We’re interested in people who saw it and the man who was driving it.”
“I can’t give you any help there,” I told him.
Stone and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Rosenblatt, had already been on their way down from Readsfield, it seemed, when Professor MacComerou had called up the barracks there, reporting the hit-and-run and giving the number of Dexter’s car and describing the man with the torn ear who had been driving it. They had arrived half an hour, or not much more, after I had left.
They had come down, as part of a routine patrol, to question John Flail about his brother Pete, who had been released two weeks ago from the Wethersfield pen after serving three years of his term for manslaughter for killing a man in a drunken brawl in Bridgeport, and who hadn’t reported on probation. The Bridgeport police had asked them to inquire, having had a rumor that Pete had left the state for the West Coast. The radio in their car had been out of commission, and so they hadn’t learned the information which Professor MacComerou had phoned in, on their way down. Not finding John Flail at his little tar-paper shack down on the Swamp Road when they got there, they had come on out again and down to Professor MacComerou’s here, to see if he knew anything about Pete.
Professor MacComerou hadn’t known anything about Pete Flail. He hadn’t heard John mention him and was sure that Pete hadn’t returned home, anyway, or he would have seen him. He told them about John Flail.
MacComerou had learned when he phoned Readsfield that they were on their way, and would probably stop in at his place to phone when they didn’t find John Flail. He had coffee ready for them. They had had a cup, and then had gone on down with him to where Flail had been struck. In their police spotlight they had picked up a rock on the road about the size to fit a man’s fist—a thing that MacComerou and I had missed—that had blood and black hairs on it.
Examining Flail’s body in the ditch, they had found that he hadn’t been killed just by a hit-and-run driver. The back of his head had been smashed in, in a way that nothing on a car could have done, and the mark of the blow had fitted the stone they had found on the road. It looked as if he had been killed by someone who had come up softly behind him as he was shambling on the road, before he had been run over and his chest crushed and the bones of his body broken.
After examining the terrain, and finding the circular track of a crepe-soled shoe in the blood and an old cut-up hat, they had taken Flail’s body on down the Swamp Road to his shack.
Just a little beyond, the road was mucky. There were Sigourney Silent Special tire tracks in the mire. Rosenblatt and he had noticed them before in their headlights, Stone told me, when they had been to Flail’s to inquire about his brother, but there having been nothing to connect them with the minor mission they had been on, they had not investigated them at that time. Now they went on down the road, and a little farther on, where the road petered out beyond the old sawmill, they had found the gray Cadillac phaeton with its red cushions.
With blood on its right-hand door and the cushions, and a fine-woven Panama trampled in the mire beside it. With big shapeless tracks, as though the little killer had wrapped his feet in strips of cloth or bags, around the car, going back up toward John Flail's shack and going back again. And going nowhere.
“The girl's lucky to be alive,” Stone told me privately, from the corner of his changeless smile. “I wouldn't give anything for St. Erme. This guy is just a crazy killer. He probably intended to pitch St. Erme's body down into some deep ravine along the road, when he came to it, and keep on going. Only he turned off down this side road by mistake, probably thinking it would get him out somewhere by a short cut. He’s either a stranger to the country or some guy who hasn’t lived around here in a long time and has kind of forgotten it. If he’d kept on, he’d have got out onto 49A at Stony Falls and maybe fifty miles away before we got the alarm. Of course the car would have been found eventually, in any case. You couldn't miss it. But if he had abandoned it beforehand, on the edges of some town, it might have been a lot harder to have found him. He’s hid St. Erme's body, of course, so we can’t prove murder on him when we catch him. But it’s murder, anyway, with John Flail.”
I knew already that it was murder. I had put my hand in it nine miles down beside the road. If I had examined John Flail’s body at all when MacComerou and I found him, I suppose I should have known it then.
“Funny that I thought your name was Ridder,” Stone said, as he took the coffee off the stove and got cups— of which there was now a clean supply, I was glad to see, the dirty dishes in the sink having been washed, and the sink cleaned up. “I thought maybe you were a member of the old Ridder family who used to live around here. This place used to belong to old Henry Ridder, the father of young Harry Ridder that killed all his family with an ax seven years ago, and then disappeared. People always thought down in the swamp. You may have read about it in the papers.”
“No one's lived here ever since. You couldn’t get them to. When I heard last March that Professor Adam MacComerou, the famous murder psychologist, was buying the place, I almost split a gut. I’ve got a cousin who is the Fryatt Farm Agency representative in Readsfield. The old man bought it sight unseen, George told me, just from pictures in the New York offices, like half of them do, though George got his commission, anyway. Professor MacComerou probably thought he was getting a bargain at the price. Of course he's fixed it up on the outside, new paint and new roofs and all, and clearing out the weeds. But I wouldn’t live here for a farm myself. There’s always just the chance that young Harry might come back. Funny my thinking that your name was Ridder, Doc.”
“No,” I said. “My name is Riddle. Dr. Henry N. Riddle, Jr., of New York. I don’t like to be called Doc.”
There was a car that came in the drive outside behind mine, and a man came into the kitchen. He was a tall thin man with three hairs plastered over the top of his head, wearing a high starched collar and a black bow tie.
He was Mr. Quelch, he said, the postmaster at Whippleville, down on Route 7. He had heard over the phone about that gray car. It had stopped at the post office about 7:36, with a dark-complected fellow in a Panama hat and a girl in blue-rimmed glasses, looking for a picnic spot, and that hairy fellow in the back scat. The dark-complected fellow had reminded him a good deal of Two-finger Pete Flail, only a lot better dressed, and looking more intelligent and high class.
Well, he hadn’t been Pete, Stone told him. He had been a man named St. Erme from New York.
No, he knew he wasn’t Pete, said Mr. Quelch. He was a lot older fellow. But he sure knew how t
o pick the girls, or maybe let them pick him. The girl who had been driving that big gray car had sure been a knockout, a lalapalooza, she had been pretty enough to eat—
She was in the living room now, Stone told him, which cut his garrulity short. Straightening his bow tie with both hands, Mr. Quelch cut a brief caper. He proceeded on into the living room, smoothing down the three hairs on his head....
Quelch reported the conversation he had had at the post office with St. Erme, in great detail, to Lieutenant Rosenblatt later, when Rosenblatt was interviewing everybody; and it’s all down in the book. If it could have been called a conversation, and not a monologue. The only value to it, perhaps, is that Quelch was the last man to talk to St. Erme, and perhaps to see him alive. Except for Corkscrew, of course, who saw him to the death, and may have exchanged a few quick fierce words with him beside the car, before his dying scream.
Quelch saw Corkscrew, too, with a great deal of detail, while they were parked there in front of the post office. Everything except Corkscrew’s torn ear, since it was on the other side from him, and Corkscrew's height, since Corkscrew was seated, and was a man of normal height from the waist, with arms even a little long. A rather observant man—Quelch. He saw about as much as I might have seen myself, perhaps.
However, I have never seen him.
Stone was going back down on the Swamp Road to rejoin Rosenblatt, Professor MacComerou, and Unistaire, after we had finished our coffee, and I asked permission to accompany him. Quelch was a good man to leave St. Erme’s young bride with—a comical fellow, a 1910-style lady-killer, with a flood of conversation and moldy jokes to keep her mind off the dark matters down there by the old sawmill. I heard her laughing spontaneously at something he had said as we got in Stone’s police car out in front and started off. She didn’t know how black it was then, of course.
She doesn't know now. And won’t know till she wakes.
Or ever, if I can keep her from it.
He crept up behind John Flail and killed him with a stone blow on the back of the head, and then ran over his body.
He killed or mortally wounded St. Erme with a knife down there beside Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, then raced up the road past here with St. Erme’s body in the seat beside him, turned off down the Swamp Road, clubbed and bludgeoned him before he was quite dead—then or earlier—and cut off his right hand, then heaved him into the swamp.
He killed MacComerou, who had got too close to him in some way, it seems, and then killed Unistaire when Unistaire ran screaming to report it.
He may have killed Quelch—there was that scream from Quelch an hour ago, sounding through the woods back of the house here, somewhere down toward John Flail’s. He may have killed Rosenblatt as well, though Rosenblatt was armed with a police gun, when Rosenblatt went rushing out to see.
And how many others, I don’t know. They have brought in the dogs from somewhere now. But they will do no good.
Unistaire, the refugee Basque artist who lived down the road—a dapper, bright-eyed little man, with black hair wetted and neatly combed, and perfectly normal in a bright Hawaiian sport shirt and orange slacks and rope-soled espadrilles when I met him down on the road beyond John Flail’s with MacComerou and Rosenblatt —said, as we stood talking, after Stone and I had arrived down there:
“This is definitely a surrealistic murder. It is the murder of a genius. It has symbolism. You, Lieutenant Rosenblatt and Trooper Stone, are too much the routine policemen, thinking only in terms of moronic killers for gain, to understand it. What you both need is to wear a leopard skin, a chiffon nightgown, and a feather duster on your tail, and dance the beautiful dance of the corkscrew and the bottle. You, Dr. Riddle, are too pragmatic and unimaginative to understand it. What you need is to believe with all your soul in phantasms which cannot possibly exist. Even you, Professor MacComerou, have discontinued sending John Flail daily for a quart of warm rich creamy yellow milk from my beautiful Jersey cow with the great liquid eyes, and it is milk alone which nourishes the psychological brain.”
And he laughed mockingly at all of us.
“A surrealistic murder!” he said with delight. “And it takes a surrealist to interpret and explain it. I have the key. I understand the symbolism. I will interpret and explain it. Give me a quarter head of moldy cabbage, a wig, a pair of glass eyeballs, an old umbrella, a dressmaker’s form, a cube of ice, and a copy of Mein Kampf with the title printed in red letters, and I will put the picture together and explain it.”
Unistaire had nothing on his mind. Nothing whatever.
I know that, and I will always know it. He was only mildly cracked. There are always men who gather, like flies to carrion, around a murder that way, drinking in the excitement, posing and posturing in their little vanity, trying to declaim how they would solve it, strutting and preening themselves on how much more brilliant they are than the police, as well as the dead flesh which has been murdered. Or perhaps Unistaire really was badly cracked, and really believed that a surrealist picture would explain it.
Corkscrew may have been listening and may have believed him, anyway. We found Unistaire, soon after he had found MacComerou, with his throat cut, in the deep damp sawdust pits that had been there a hundred years.
That is, I found Unistaire.
“You were with Professor MacComerou when John Flail’s body was found, too, weren’t you, Doctor?” Rosenblatt said to me.
“Yes,” I said. “We found it together. Blood upon the road, leading off into the ditch. I didn’t know who he was, of course. I had never seen him before. I had passed by a little while before and had heard a groaning, but hadn’t realized it was a man. I was thinking about that damned hat that I had picked up. And then, too, I had a headache. When MacComerou and I came back to get mv car started, we saw the blood and found Flail.”
“By “that damned hat,” you mean your own hat that you had found, Doctor?” said Rosenblatt, looking at me with his wrinkled pugdog face.
“Yes,” I said. “My own hat that I had found.”
“I almost wish you hadn’t told me it was your hat,” said Rosenblatt.
I didn’t doubt he did.
“Sorry,” I said, “to spoil your fun.”
“You seem to be pretty good at finding bodies, Doctor. You found St. Erme’s, too, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know that it was his. A dead body has no individuality to me. I never saw him alive.”
“No,” said Rosenblatt with a sigh. “I know that. I know that so damned well. If you say it again, I’ll go corkscrew myself. You had never seen St. Erme, and you had never seen this red-eyed little Doc. You were at the Swamp Road all during the murder hour, during the time he drove this car down here, and you didn’t see either of them, or the car.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’ll stick to that.”
“Maybe I’d just better write it off at that,” said Rosenblatt. “Case closed, and forget it. Dr. Riddle never saw St. Erme or Doc. So what else is there to know?”
But that was while we were kneeling over poor Unistaire’s body, and after MacComerou. St. Erme had to be found first to make it real. St. Erme needed to be found.
I was the one who found him—St. Erme—as it happened. Or found all that has been found yet, or that perhaps ever will be found. All but his right hand.
There was that gray gabardine-clad arm in the swamp, extruding from the muck, among the tall water grasses. We were all going through the swamp in a widening circle—Rosenblatt and Stone and the other troopers who had come down, and MacComerou and Unistaire and the other men from the surrounding countryside who had come down in their cars, leaving them parked all the way along Swamp Road, and I. We had formed this line, spreading out on both sides of the road from where the big gray car had stopped on the corduroy. And in my flashlight then I found him.
“Here’s something!” I raised my voice.
It wasn’t very far away from the car. Only a few rods out in the swamp. He hadn’t bothered or el
se hadn’t had time to bury it. It looked as if he had hauled the body out, and then taken only a few plunging steps with it on his shoulders, and heaved it off in haste. There weren’t any tracks—the soil was too watery, and the muck had closed in. The body had settled down in the muck and grasses, all except that arm.
I reached for the hand to pull it up by, as the others came gathering around. But there wasn’t any hand. That was the most sickening feeling that I have ever had, as a student, or in practice, or previously during tonight. It was worse than finding John Flail’s bodv in the ditch. It was worse than that blood on the road beside Dead Bridegroom’s Pond. It was worse than Unistaire later, almost beside me, looking at me with his bright mouse eyes that tried to say something, but couldn’t, as I bent over him in the avalanching sawdust which already had buried old MacComerou beneath tons.
There wasn’t any hand. St. Erme’s right hand was missing. That was the shock of it, because I knew from the description of him that he had one, somewhere.
Rosenblatt helped me to get hold of the body by the shoulders and pull it out. With some of the other men, we carried it to the corduroy, in front of the gray Cadillac’s headlights.
He was wearing his fine silky gabardine suit and his fine white silk shirt with the gold love-knot cuff links. His purse was in his pocket, though emptied of all papers and money. There was only a bill from the President Hotel in New York, stamped paid that morning, in one of his hip pockets. He had probably paid it and stuck it there, while he was waiting for Elinor Darrie to come in Dexter’s big sport phaeton and pick him up. It was the only thing with his name on it that the killer had overlooked. Every other paper and mark of identification was gone, absolutely.
And his ring hand, with the ring on it.
That wasn’t quite the worst, of course. Half the bones in his body seemed smashed and broken. There weren’t any tire tracks on his clothing, though; only the black swamp muck. Unless he had been stripped and run over, and then dressed again—which would seem incredible —it must have been done with repeated and furious blows with a padded crank handle or some other padded bludgeon. And—by the evidence of the contusions-done before he was quite dead.
The Red Right Hand Page 13