Chapter Four
At nine o’clock Teed went into Powell Dennison’s private office.
Powell said, with a smile, “Glad you changed your mind, Teed. Seward gave me your message a few minutes ago. Did you drive in last night.”
“No. I drove in this morning. Did Seward tell you why he was out there?”
“Some kind of an anonymous tip, he said.”
Teed walked over and closed the door. He came back and sat by the desk. “That’s what I want to talk to you about, Powell. Something funny is going on, and I don’t know just what it is. Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from Mrs. Carboy, the mayor’s wife. She was pretty mysterious. Said she had something to tell me. Hinted that it was hot, and she didn’t want to come openly here to your office and tell you. I suggested some place in town and she said that it had better be outside town. So I told her how to get to the camp.”
“What did she have to say?”
“That’s the point. She never did show up. That’s why I stayed out there, hoping she would. Maybe Seward was supposed to find her out there.”
“That would make a nice little scandal, wouldn’t it? She’s an attractive woman.”
“Do you think she could have anything for us, Powell?”
Dennison pursed his lips. “That’s hard to say. Mark Carboy is not, I believe, permitted to know the inside workings of the Raval group. He is an earnest, stupid, clumsy, dishonest man, perfectly content to follow orders. But he might know something important. And I imagine that if he knew it, his wife would know it. Maybe something came up that kept her from keeping the appointment. Or maybe she was merely acting on orders, trying to frame you with Seward. Better try to get in touch with her, Teed.”
“Do you think that’s smart? If she’s sincere about this, it might put her on a spot.”
“Let me think for a moment.” Powell shoved his chair back from his desk, crossed his heavy legs, tapped his upper lip with a pencil.
“Maybe,” Powell said, “if Miss Anderson could phone from the drugstore, so it wouldn’t go through the Hall switchboard.”
“And say what?”
“Say that it will be all right to make a new appointment for today for the one she missed yesterday. She ought to catch on. Then you can go back out to the lake and wait for her.”
“O.K.,” Teed said, as though pleased with the suggestion.
“You instruct Miss Anderson, please.”
The sallow woman listened carefully, nodded, walked out. Teed went in to wait with Powell. Miss Anderson was back in five minutes. She looked more pallid than usual.
“Mr. Dennison, there’s some sort of trouble. A maid, I believe it was, answered the phone. She was weeping and incoherent. I heard the gossip as soon as I got back in the building. Something about the Mayor going to identify the body.”
Dennison doubled a big fist and hit the desk so hard the desk lighter jumped and toppled over. “By God! It sounds like this might be what we need. Teed, run over to police headquarters. Find out what you can and come right back.”
Teed walked through the covered passageway with long strides. A uniformed patrolman and a pasty man who was chewing a kitchen match stood talking in low tones to the desk sergeant behind his wire grilled window.
As Teed walked up they all stared at him, the blank, flat, unmeaning stare of the wise cop looking at the political amateur.
“Mr. Dennison’s secretary reported some sort of rumor going around about the Mayor. Has he had an accident?”
The pasty man shoved his grimy felt hat back, worked the match over to the opposite corner of his mouth. “You work for Dennison, eh?”
“Yes. My name is Morrow.”
“And you’re bird-dogging for Dennison, eh?”
Teed controlled his annoyance. “He sent me down here to find out if there had been an accident.”
The man with the match turned to the sergeant. “George, you think that was an accident?”
George scratched his semibald head. “You know, Harry, I think the fella did it on purpose. That’s what I think.”
The pasty one had a rasping laugh. “George, sooner or later we’re going to make a cop out of you. Friend, the Mayor’s lady got herself knocked off. She got stripped and robbed and raped and strangled, and some kids found her body on the city dump this morning about an hour and a half ago. That answer your question?”
“Do they know when it happened?”
“With a body out on a cold night, it’s kind of hard to tell. It happened some time before midnight, they think. Lonely neighborhood up there. Hizzoner has gone down to the morgue to make the formal identification.”
“Who’d do a thing like that?”
The uniformed cop shrugged. “I was on the four to eight. I covered her up with a tarp outa the prowl until Homicide could get there.” He frowned as though to get something straight in his mind. “She wasn’t now what you’d call stacked. But nice. Plenty nice.” He made a loud lip-smack and shook his head fondly.
“Sure you didn’t crawl under that tarp with her, Distom?” George asked.
Distom stiffened. “Now that’s a hell of a thing to say,” he said indignantly. “What do you think I am?”
George ignored him. “Didn’t you know her, Harry?” he asked the pasty one.
“Know her! Hell, I and Buster Young guarded the presents at their wedding. Let’s see. Four years ago. The Mayor give us twenty bucks apiece. He wasn’t mayor then, you know. He was Commissioner of Public Safety. That was under Mayor Kennelty. You know, I was wondering at that time what a dish like that was marrying Carboy for. You couldn’t tell about her when she had those glasses on, but she took them off at the reception. Had a gleam in her eye then, George. And walked like a cat. I say some punks prob’ly yanked her into a car right off the sidewalk, not knowing who she was, and took her out there to the dump. I’d say prob’ly some hopped-up kids and…”
He seemed suddenly to remember that Teed was still standing there.
“That all you want to know, Morrow?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
He walked away, aware that they were staring at his back, that as soon as he had left they would add comments about the City Manager and his office boy. He walked back up to Dennison’s office, full of enormous relief, and told Dennison the story.
At eleven o’clock the Times had an extra on the street, the front page a replate of the previous evening edition.
Miss Anderson brought two copies up to the office. Teed put his heels on the desk and tilted back in his chair. They had used a wedding picture of her, veil and all. BRUTAL MURDER OF MAYOR’S WIFE. Nude body discovered at seven-thirty this morning in the city dump a few yards behind the Thorman Street billboards. Mayor hospitalized for shock after viewing remains.
The newspaper’s factual coverage had the effect of making Teed feel as though he had no part in it. In some alien dream he had left a body where this one had been found. The newspaper coverage was, between the lines, outraged, semihysterical.
Teed wondered how two men would take it, two men who had worn the Snerd masks, had left her dead in the camp. And the man who had given them their orders—this would be a bit of a shock to him, also.
“Dr. P. K. Muriel, coroner, stated that the murdered woman had been criminally attacked. The police laboratory examination disclosed two clues. One was a smear of grease on the body which apparently could not have come from any object in the area in which the body was discovered. This, police state, indicates that the body, in a nude condition, was transported from the scene of the crime to the city dump, possibly in the trunk compartment of an automobile. The severely crushed condition of the throat indicates that great strength was used. The second clue which has not yet been explained is a scrap of thin rubber, painted red on one surface, found wedged under one of the murdered woman’s fingernails. Police state that there are further clues which they do not wish to reveal at this time. Deputy Chi
ef Wallace Wetzelle, formerly Homicide Captain, has personally taken charge of the case at the request of Public Safety Commissioner Koalwitz.”
Teed put the paper down. That note about the trunk of the car had been like catching a hammer blow between the eyes. It dazed him. The rain had taken out the tracks he had improvised. He remembered the bright-red bulbous cheeks of the Snerds. Felice had evidently clawed at one of them, torn a small hole in the rubber.
It had not been enough for them to kill her. They had to attack her first. He wondered if that had been in the script. Probably. Anything to make him look as evil as possible; anything to lose him the maximum amount of sympathy.
There was an inevitability about the pictures that unreeled in the back of his mind. Hired witnesses who would testify that Mrs. Carboy had told them she was going to West Canada Lake to see Mr. Teed Morrow. Other hired witnesses who would say that they had seen Morrow’s car in town at such and such an hour last night. Seward’s testimony that Morrow had been drunk. And somebody would find the can containing the money and the watch. That would blow the robbery motive all to hell.
She had driven to the lake in daylight. Somebody would have recognized her on the road. He brought his feet down onto the floor. The scheme, which had seemed so bright during darkness, now seemed incredibly stupid. A man who could hire others to kill could easily hire others to bear false witness.
Maybe at this moment they were searching his apartment, finding that photo he had taken of her just two weeks ago. A damn fool trick that had been. In the picture she was standing on the dock, ready to dive, smiling back at him over her shoulder. He’d destroyed her notes, had never written her any. But that picture…
With sudden nervous energy he got up, told Miss Anderson he’d be back after lunch. Horace Dey, an affable, talkative little man on the Board of Assessors, cornered Teed at the foot of the stairs and Teed had to be rude in order to pry himself free after five nerve-racking minutes. He sped out of the lot and proceeded to hit every traffic light red on the way to Bannock Road. The development was a quiet area of wide grass, small, pleasant brick buildings. The playground was full of preschool toddlers. He pulled up in front of his own doorway.
He opened the car door and then froze. The car parked directly ahead of his, the car that he had only half-noticed, was Felice’s shabby convertible.
Teed forced himself to break out of the trance. He walked woodenly to his doorway and unlocked his door. He crossed the small, attractive living room and went into the bedroom. He yanked open the top left bureau drawer, took out the thin stack of photographs. The one of Felice was the third one in the stack. He went through the rest of them. In a shot of the camp the back of her car was visible. The others were all right. He burned the two in the bathroom, dropping them into the toilet when the flame reached his fingers. The laundry bag was hanging on the back of the closet door. He dumped it out, found one handkerchief with a smear of her lipstick on it. A police lab could easily prove through spectroscopic analysis that it was her brand. To burn it would make too much of a stench. With nail scissors, he cut the handkerchief hem in a half-dozen places. He ripped it into strips, ripped the strips into squares and flushed the ragged squares down the toilet after the charred fragments of the pictures.
What else? Her perfume on his clothes? Not likely. And she had never been in his apartment, only at the camp. He knew that the camp needed a more thorough inspection than he had been able to give it on the previous night.
And now, the problem of the car. Doubtless the police were searching for it all over the city. Probably Mrs. Kidder had noticed it parked near his doorway. Mrs. Kidder noticed everything. The car had been there at dawn, probably. And Mrs. Kidder would assume that Teed had been in, that he had had a guest, possibly feminine.
The worst thing he could do would be to attempt to sneak the car away. He knew that. Too many people had seen it. Too many would remember it later. To recognize it officially as Mrs. Carboy’s, or merely to complain to Mrs. Kidder about people parking in front of his door. That was the question. Whoever had planned the frame had done a neat job. A man had very probably parked it just after dusk, walked unhurriedly away. Dead woman found with Morrow. Dead woman’s car found at Morrow’s apartment. How did the car get there, Morrow? I don’t know, sir. What do you mean, you don’t know? Did she bring it there? Did she come to meet you there? And you suggested a little ride in your car. A nice ride out into the hills, Morrow. And you took her to your camp, didn’t you? And when you got tight she fought off your advances and so you killed her, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said aloud. “No, I didn’t.”
He dug his fingers into his scalp. How to handle it. He snapped his fingers, sat down at the alcove table, looked up the Times number, gave it to Mrs. Kidder at the desk. She put the call through quickly.
“Seward isn’t here right now. Hold it a minute. I’m wrong. He’s just coming in.”
“Ritchie? This is Teed Morrow. Remember our little talk last night? You said you’d cover me if anybody tried anything funny. Listen to this. I stayed at the lake, went directly to the office this morning. Just came back here to my place. Yes, I live in the Bannock Road Garden Apartments. Number eleven. Second building on the left of the main drive after you go through the gates. Know what I found in front of my door? A ’46 Pontiac convertible. Gray. A little beat. I’m not sure, but I think it belongs… belonged to Mrs. Carboy.”
Seward whistled softly. “Now, isn’t that something.”
“It goes with something I maybe should have told you last night. I was expecting her out at the lake. She wanted to spill something about her husband, the Mayor. She never showed. I was afraid she’d come while you were there and you’d jump to the wrong conclusion. You can check with Dennison on that.”
Seward’s voice turned crisp. “Do you think she was killed because she was going to talk to you?”
“I didn’t think so. Not until I noticed this car here. Maybe it isn’t even hers. But suppose it is. And suppose the police find out that she was going to come and see me. Add that to the body being transported, they think, in a trunk compartment, and where does it leave me? You’re the guy who said I should even avoid parking tickets.”
“You sound a little rattled, Morrow.”
“Hell, wouldn’t you be?”
“Maybe I would. Look, don’t get smart and try to drive that car away from there.”
“I wouldn’t touch that car.”
“Good. You sit tight. You read about Deputy Chief Wetzelle taking over the case?”
“Yes, I did. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet. Koalwitz pressured it through. Koalwitz doesn’t spit unless Raval tells him to. And Wetzelle took the case away from Captain Herb Leighton, present Homicide captain and the only square-shooting captain on the force. So that gives me an idea. I’ll pick up Leighton and come on out there. You wait for us, hear?”
“I’ll be right here.”
After he hung up, Teed took out a handkerchief and wiped his sweating face. Ritchie Seward arrived in twenty-five minutes. With him was a cadaverously tall man Teed recognized as having seen around the Hall. Herb Leighton’s handshake was limp, damp and cold. He looked vaguely like a shaven Lincoln, and his thin high voice furthered the impression.
“Her car,” Leighton said when the introductions were over. “Checked the number again when Ritchie phoned me.” He stared at Teed out of deep-set eyes so lifeless that they looked as if the pupils were dusty. He folded his long bones into a chair. His knees stuck up sharply. He gave the impression of having some chronic disease that left his energy at a low ebb. When he yawned Teed saw that his teeth were tiny, like a child’s.
“Somebody fixing to clobber you, Morrow.” It wasn’t a question.
“It seems that way.”
“She was a busy woman. Least since Mark married her. Pretty sure I knew three boys who bedded her down.” He counted them off slowly on languid fingers, yellowed b
y nicotine. “Lonnie Raval. Luke Koalwitz. Judge Kennelty. Heard ’em comparing notes at the Lantana Brothers picnic last summer. Sort of had a hunger for the mature type, I guess.” He smiled without mirth. “Covering the City Hall beat, Rich, did you get to cover that too?”
Seward, astonishingly, blushed. “I was out there one day trying to get an interview with Carboy. That was when he was staying out of sight on account of that bus-franchise squabble. He wasn’t home, but she was. After about ten minutes I suddenly realized I was going to get myself into a position where I’d have to write nice things about the Mayor, just to ease my conscience. So I got out of there fast. I think she was a little peeved at me.”
Leighton turned his deep-eyed dusty stare on Teed. “Figuring it out, boy, I’d say she’d fling her tail at anybody who’d either do Mark good, or do him less harm. So I’m sort of putting you on the list too. Mind?”
Teed made himself grin. “And I was thinking it was my personal charm. O.K., Captain. If you’re going to try to help, I might as well come clean. Add me to that list.”
Seward looked at him with something close to contempt and turned away.
Leighton said softly, “I suppose you took her up to that camp.”
“She would come up by herself and meet me there. Week-end afternoons, and then only since the other camps have been closed.” Seward stood looking out the windows, his hands behind him, rocking back and forth from toe to heel.
“She try to pump you? Find out what Dennison is planning?”
“In a subtle way. I never told her anything. We broke up… a while back when she tried to tell me to take it easy on her husband.”
“I suppose people saw her driving up there and back.”
“I don’t know.”
Leighton sighed. “Seward seems to think I’m willing to go out on a limb for you, Morrow.”
“I’m not so sure now,” Seward snapped, not turning.
“It ain’t a moral issue, Ritch,” Leighton said softly. “It’s a murder situation. They keep me on the cops, boy, so they can look at my beat-up clothes and my old heap of a car and my goddam mortgage and they can say, ‘See, we got an honest officer on the force here in Deron.’ So I keep my nose reasonably clean, Morrow. When I go out on a limb, I don’t want any son of a bitch sawing it off close to the trunk. Now stop looking at the rug and look at my eyes, Morrow. Did you kill her?” His voice sounded like two files being rubbed together.
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