Laurel Road was never straight. It curved away from a curving street called Camelia Lane, and kept right on curving, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. It looked like somebody’s impression of a barber pole.
For the first few blocks, the widely spaced houses were large, sprawling affairs, split-level ranches with cantilevered sun decks over the carports. After five or six blocks, as the road meandered between more recent constructions, the houses began to get smaller and less ambitious, showing the result of city status. Shrunken flat-roofed ranches and narrow Cape Cods were clumped on smaller, less-landscaped lots.
Number 719 was far in, nearly at the end of it all. Two blocks farther on, Parker could see where the finished buildings petered out, and a half-completed house stood at the farther limit like a leafless tree.
He drove on by 719, glancing casually at it on the way by. It was a Cape Cod, with an A roof slanting front and back. A playpen was on the scraggly lawn, and the garage doors gaped open, exposing an empty interior. The curtains in the dormer window upstairs showed that the attic had been finished off into a room or rooms, which implied more than one child for Detective Dougherty.
Parker drove down to the end, where no work was being done on the half-completed house. He made a U-turn there, parked the Buick, and got out to walk over and look at what was done of the house.
There was no one working here today at all. Some clapboard siding had been put on, but mostly the exterior and interior walls of the house rose only as widely spaced studs of clean, new wood. This would be a Cape Cod when it was done; at the moment a ladder led to the upper floor in place of the staircase that hadn’t yet been built.
Parker climbed up the ladder and looked around. This would be the attic. No internal partitions had been erected at all, but a full plywood flooring had been put down.
Sitting on a sawhorse over by the edge of the building, Parker could look down along the two blocks intervening and see Detective Dougherty’s house and garage and driveway.
Parker lit a cigarette and waited.
Four
It was a DeSoto, six or seven years old, that finally made the turn into the driveway of 719 Laurel Road. It rolled on into the garage, and Parker got to his feet and stretched.
It had been a longer wait than he’d figured. If Dougherty was running the murder investigation, he’d been on duty since at least midnight last night, but here it was almost four o’clock in the afternoon before he got home.
Driving a DeSoto. In a year or two, if he kept saving his pennies, he could trade up to an Edsel. And after that a Studebaker.
The sun was turning red off to Parker’s right. Shadows were long, and yards and walks were deserted. Half an hour ago there’d been a flurry of homecoming schoolchildren, and in about an hour there’d be another flurry of homecoming fathers, but for now Laurel Road was empty.
Parker climbed back down out of the half-house and across the planks and dirt to the street. He left the Buick where it was and walked down the two curving blocks to 719. He went up the walk and rang the front doorbell. The lawn here was in bad shape, and the aluminium storm door had an aluminum D in the middle of it. Detective Dougherty’s wife opened the front door. Parker knew it was the wife because Dougherty surely couldn’t afford a maid. She looked at him, faintly worried, faintly apologetic, faintly distracted, faintly present: the manner of the little housewife to the stranger at the door.
Parker said, ‘I want to talk to Detective Dougherty.’ Now she was more worried, more apologetic. ‘I don’t think -‘
He knew she wanted to get across the facts that her husband was sitting down to warmed-over roast and planned to go straight to bed after that, but she didn’t know how to say it all in the blank polite bloodless phrases to which the circumstances had her limited. He broke in while she was hunting around for more words, and told her, ‘It’s about the case he’s on, the Ellen Canaday case. You tell him that.’
Now she had something specific to do, she was obviously relieved. She said, ‘Wait here, please,’ and shut the storm door. But she was afraid of offending him somehow, so she left the inner door open, and Parker could look-directly into a small living room bulging with sofa and littered with copies of The Saturday Evening Post.
He waited a couple of minutes, and then Detective Dougherty himself came to the door. He was no more than thirty, but he had all the style of fifty; dressed in his undershirt and trousers and a pair of brown slippers, carrying a rolled napkin in his left hand, walking with the male approximation of a woman in late pregnancy. He wasn’t stout at all, but he gave an impression of soft overweight. His round face was gray with lack of sleep and the need of a shave, and his dry brown hair had already receded from his forehead.
But it was all crap. His eyes were slate gray, and all they did was watch. The way he held his right hand, his revolver was still on his hip somewhere.
Parker stood loose, hands at his sides with the palms showing. When Dougherty pushed open the storm door, Parker said, ‘I’m glad I caught you home.’
Dougherty said, ‘That’s your car up the street, isn’t it? The Buick?’
Parker shrugged. ‘It’s mine.’
‘Come around to the side door.’ Dougherty pointed with the hand that held the napkin. ‘Around to the right there. It’s okay to cut across the lawn.’
Parker went around to the right, where there was a narrow space between garage and house. When he’d first driven by, he’d thought the garage was attached, but not quite. The roof overhang from both sides nearly met in the middle overhead, and a side door in the garage wall faced a side door in the house wall, but the two were separate buildings.
Parker moved down this cramped alley to the side door, and a minute later the door was opened by Dougherty.
Four steps led up to a closed door. Going to the left instead, a flight of stairs led down to the basement. Dougherty, standing up on the steps in front of the closed door in order to leave room for Parker to come inside, motioned toward the basement and said, ‘We can talk down there.’
Parker went first. Dougherty shut the side door and went down alter him.
The basement had been half converted to a game room or family room or some such thing. Vertical wood paneling covered the walls and formed a partition separating this part of the basement from the part with the utilities in it. Nothing had been done to make a ceiling yet, but over in a corner a few squares of vinyl flooring had been put in place over the original cement. For furniture, there was a pingpong table, plus a bulging sagging scratchy-looking sofa and a card table and some folding chairs.
Dougherty said, ‘The sofa’s too uncomfortable. Let’s sit at the card table. Take off your coat, why don’t you?’
‘I won’t be staying long.’
Dougherty shrugged and said, ‘Well, sit down a minute anyway.’
They sat across from one another at the card table. Parker sat leaning back, his hands at rest in his lap. Dougherty leaned forward with his elbows on the table.
Dougherty said, ‘My wife tells me you have information for me. On the Canaday case.’
‘Something like that.’
‘You wouldn’t be here to give yourself up, would you?’
‘Not me.’
‘I didn’t think so. But you are the man found at the scene of the crime.’
‘Probably.’
‘And you’re here to tell me you didn’t kill Miss Canaday, I should concentrate on others of her friends.’
Parker shrugged. ‘I don’t care what you do,’ he said. ‘I want a list from you, that’s all.’
‘You want from me?’
‘Boyfriends, all kinds. Anybody still living around town. Did she have an address book?’
Dougherty took his elbows off the table. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You want to ask me questions?’
‘That’s right.’
Dougherty shook his head. ‘You don’t look the type,’ he said. ‘You look too smart for
that sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘You’re going to go do it yourself, am I right? You’re going to find your girlfriend’s murderer and bring him to justice all by yourself.’
‘Not me.’
‘No? What, then? I already know you didn’t kill her, if that’s what’s worrying you. You’d been living with her a couple of weeks, neighbors identified you. You didn’t make the phone call, the timing is wrong. You wouldn’t have had to kick the door in if Miss Canaday was still alive. I imagine you’d be interesting to me in a number of other ways, because otherwise you wouldn’t have run off like that, and I’d like to know what all those guns were doing in that closet, but I’m not sold on you for murder. You wouldn’t be connected with the robbery out at the stadium, would you?’
‘I’m not connected with anything. If you already count me out, who do you count in?’
Dougherty smiled and said, ‘I don’t see a reason in the world to tell you anything. What’s your name, by the way?’
‘Joe,’ Parker lied.
‘All right, Joe. I’m engaged in a murder investigation. In order to keep my pigeon from flying away, I’ve let the newspapers concentrate on the search for you. But I’m not searching for you, the robbery detail is. They figure you were probably in on the robbery at the stadium, or at least you know the people who were. The guns in the closet connect you definitely.’
Parker said, monotoned, not trying to convince Dougherty but just getting it said so it could be done with ‘I had nothing to do with the robbery. I went in and saw her there killed, and when the cop opened the closet door I saw all the guns in there, and I figured I’d be the fall guy so I ran.’
Dougherty nodded. ‘That’s bound to be your story, sure. But I’m not the one to tell it to. You want someone from robbery detail.’
‘I want Ellie’s boyfriends.’
Dougherty shook his head. ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You’ve got to have some other reason to come in here.’
Parker said, ‘You’re at a dead end on the killing. Robbery detail is at a dead end on the heist. Give me a couple answers, toss me in the middle of it, maybe I stir things up.’
‘You muddy the waters, you mean.’
Parker cocked his head. ‘You want to go up and tell your wife anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like don’t leave the house. Don’t take the kids anywhere. You weren’t dumb enough to have her phone the precinct, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t. You haven’t killed anybody yet, and you’ve got no reason to kill me. I’m in no hurry to arrest you for anything, because I’m working on a murder case and you connect somewhere else entirely. My wife and kids are going next door for a visit.’
‘Bad.’
Dougherty said, ‘Don’t pressure me. I won’t pressure you and you don’t pressure me. Why are you still in town?’
‘I want names,’ Parker said.
‘You won’t get them from me. Could it be the actual killer knows something? Something about the robbery, maybe. You can’t afford to have him talk to the police; he might try to trade information for a lesser charge.’
‘I’ll give him to you,’ Parker said. ‘Alive and talking.’
‘You don’t make any sense at all,’ Dougherty told him. ‘Why do you want him, if not to kill him? What makes you think I’ll give you any information?’
‘You’re too exposed, Dougherty. You know my arguments.’
Dougherty glanced at the ceiling. ‘You mean my family? I don’t believe it, it’s too strong a reaction. You can’t want information that bad.’
‘I do. My friends and I do.’
‘You touch me, or my family, and the force won’t rest until you’re found.’
‘You mean they’ll start looking? They’re just kidding around up till now?’
Dougherty gnawed his lower lip. ‘There’s no point involving them in this,’ he said. ‘We should be able to work this out between us, just the two of us. Leave my family out of it, leave your friends out of it, leave the force out of it.’
‘Then what?’
‘If I give you names, you’ve got to know I’ll have those people put under immediate surveillance. If you show up to ask questions, you’ll be grabbed.’
‘Let me worry about that.’
Dougherty chewed and chewed on his lower lip. He didn’t seem worried, just thoughtful. ‘I haven’t got this figured yet,’ he said. ‘I believe you, you think this is important. Important to you, I mean. I believe you, you’ll do whatever you have to do to get what you want. What I don’t understand is why you want it, or why it should be so necessary.’
Parker shrugged. ‘Never mind me. The point is, what do you get out of it?’
‘If I give you names, they won’t do you any good. You can’t get near any of the people I mention without being arrested. If I don’t give you the names, you’ll probably cause me trouble of one sort of another just to let me know you don’t make idle threats, but all that can do is put even more heat on you. I don’t see where you stand to gain.’
Parker said, ‘Where do you stand to gain?’
Dougherty seemed to consider. ‘If I bring you in,’ he said slowly, as though talking to himself, ‘and it turns out you are connected with the robbery, it might even mean promotion for me, to second grade. If I let you go, knowing nothing about you but the license plate of the Buick, which surely won’t do me any good, it won’t help to announce to my boss I had you and lost you.’
Parker said, ‘Don’t figure you’ve got the choice.’
Dougherty smiled thinly. ‘You have at least two guns on you, handguns of one kind or another, in your overcoat pockets. I have my pistol in a hip holster tucked into my back pocket. I’m the fastest draw on the force with the pistol in that position.’
‘You don’t want to take the chance, ‘Parker told him. ‘Not here.’
‘That’s true. Not if I don’t have to.’ Dougherty spread his hands. ‘You haven’t come here to cause me trouble, that’s obvious. You have a request, that’s all, and it’s up to me to say yes or no. What if I offer you a trade?’
‘What kind of trade?’
‘Why do you want him?’
Parker considered. After a minute he said, ‘He has something I own, something he took with him. I want it back. When I find him, I’ll take it back and then give him to you.’
‘What if it’s the other way around? I find him, and give you back what he took.’
‘It wouldn’t work that way.’
‘What is it he has?’
Parker shook his head. ‘It’s something of mine.’
Dougherty gestured, pushing the question aside. ‘All right, forget that. I want to know what happened at Ellen Canaday’s place last night, what your part of it was, detail by detail. I won’t ask you about anything not directly connected with the killing. You give me my answers, and then I give you your answers. Fair enough?’
‘Why not?’
‘Fine. You were the one broke the door down, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Why didn’t you have a key?’
‘I wasn’t going to be staying there that long.’
‘Did you hear a scream, any noise at all? Is that what made you break the door down?’
‘No. I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Then why break it down?’
‘I’d been gone ten minutes. Ellie was okay when I left. It figured something was wrong when I came back and rang the bell and she didn’t let me in.’
‘Had you been arguing, fighting at all?’
‘No, we’d been screwing.’
Dougherty seemed a little troubled by the word, but he rode on by it, saying, ‘Had she said anything about being frightened of anybody? Anybody at all?’
‘No, or I wouldn’t be here talking to you.’
Dougherty smiled. ‘Of course. Sorry. You say you were gone ten minutes. Was she nude when you left?’
&nbs
p; ‘Yes.’
‘In what room?’
‘The bedroom, same as when I came back.’
‘In bed?’
‘Sitting up.’
‘Was she planning on getting dressed?’
Parker shrugged. ‘Maybe a robe or something. She was going to fry some eggs.’
‘She was planning to leave the bedroom.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you lock the door when you left?’
‘It’s a spring lock, locks automatically. I shut it all the way.’
‘You’re sure of that.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. How long were you back in the apartment before the two police officers arrived?’
‘Just a minute or two. I just walked into the bedroom, saw her there, looked around, and there they were.’
‘You told them you’d made the anonymous phone call. Why?’
‘They figured me for the killer. I wanted to give them a choice.’
‘But how did you know there was a phone call?’
‘I didn’t. But two cops walk in, somebody probably called. And if they got the tip some other way, that could still throw them off balance, give them the idea I’d already notified headquarters for them.’
‘Why did you wait and talk awhile? Why not run for it right away? Did you have to wait for them both to be distracted or something?’
Parker said, ‘I already told you that. When I saw the guns, I knew there was trouble. The guns in the closet.’
‘You didn’t know about them.’
‘No.’
‘All right, never mind that. Who introduced you to Ellen Canaday?’
‘A guy with an alibi.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’d like to check him off my list.’
Parker shook his head. ‘No soap,’
Dougherty considered, then shrugged and smiled. ‘Well, that’s all right. You’ve got nothing to offer me? Nothing I forgot to ask?’
The Split p-7 Page 6