He figured it out, the inspector said to himself. I don’t believe it, he figured it out. Of course, it makes me out the sap of the decade, for crysake, but still. “I’ll be right with you, Professor,” he called.
“Of course we’re going to celebrate tonight, Love,” Buell told Diedre over the phone. “I’m taking you to the best restaurant in town. Uh-huh. Because in a week, maybe two, we’re leaving this town. Got to get things squared away up here, then we’ll go down and get my identity established, and start work.”
He loved the way you could hear happiness in Diedre’s voice. Like little bubbles. “Oh, Buell, I’m so excited!”
“I’m excited, too, Love.”
“The only thing is, you’re kind of leaving the case in midair, aren’t you?”
He was patient. “Well, we can’t wait forever, can we? Some cases are never solved. Besides, they’ve got their best people on it, I’m not that important—”
“You are so.”
Buell laughed. “All right. Hog will just have to send his letters to someone else.”
“Well, it would still be nice to know how it all turns out.”
“We can keep in touch, Love,” he said, but Diedre didn’t seem satisfied. To reassure her, he added, “I’m sure the professor will come up with something.”
The doorbell rang; “Someone at the door, Love, I’ve got to go now. See you at six-thirty. ’Bye.”
Buell opened the door to find Fleisher, Benedetti, Ron, and Janet. “Well,” he said. “Come on in. Dropping in on your way home from church?”
“The professor has some ideas,” Ron said. “He wants to fill you in before you write your story.”
Buell threw open the door wide. “By all means,” he said. “I can always use facts. Aren’t you coming in, Ron?” The detective had held back.
“No,” he said. “Janet and I have something to do.” He took her hand, pulled her back from inside the room.
“Are you sure, amico?” the professor asked. “You deserve to be present, as does Dr. Higgins.”
“What purpose would it serve, Maestro? No, I’m sure.”
The professor shook his head, smiling. “A very complex man,” he said.
Buell had no idea what they were talking about. He shrugged and closed the door.
Janet was beginning to think there was a conspiracy to keep her from ever finding out what was going on. She was arranging the words to express her irritation, when Ron took her other hand and held both of hers in both of his.
“Janet,” he said, “let’s get married.”
“What? What’s the matter with you?”
“I want to marry you, so there’s something the matter with me?”
That wasn’t what she’d had in mind when she asked, but now that he mentioned it—oh, what was the use? She could feel herself blushing.
“I mean—why don’t—how come you didn’t go in?”
“It would make me uncomfortable. The professor can tell me anything want to know.”
“I thought you had it all figured out.”
“I do.”
“Then why should the professor have to tell you anything? Certainly it wouldn’t make you uncomfortable just to hear him explain to Buell what you already know.”
“He’s not explaining things to Buell.”
“He’s not?”
“No.”
“What is he doing?”
“Collecting his fee,” Ron said.
“Fee?”
“Two hours,” Ron said. “With the killer.”
“Buell?” It was impossible. “He—he has all kinds of alibis! He doesn’t match the profile.”
“Yeah.” Ron grinned ruefully. “How about that. Look. I can fill you in, everything except why. Or you can go back inside. They’re probably just getting started.”
Of course, no good psychologist would pass up the chance to study the reactions of a killer as his guilt is brought home to him; she owed it to science to go inside. The fact that she had known the man socially (however briefly) could only help to provide additional insights.
“Oh, go to hell, Dr. Higgins,” she said fiercely.
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s go somewhere else. Then you can tell me all about it.”
They went to Ron’s office in the Bixby Building, where Benedetti found them several hours later. The old man didn’t explain how he knew they were there, and (to Ron’s surprise) he had managed to join them without incurring any expenses the younger man had to pick up.
“You certainly will require further study,” the professor said, smiling and shaking his head at Ron. “At the moment of triumph you lose interest in the case. Fascinating.”
Ron shrugged. “The simple question is answered,” he said.
Janet was impatient. “Did he talk? Why did he do it, Professor?”
“He had reasons he considered sufficient.”
“But it’s so horrible,” Janet said. “It’s almost worse than if he really did kill all those people.”
“It has been ... enlightening,” the professor said. He took some papers, folded once lengthwise, from his coat. “Here you are,” he said, giving the pages to Ron. “I believe this will answer your questions. It does, however, pose a difficult ethical question for me.”
Ron didn’t ask him what it was. He opened the folded sheets of typewriter-sized newsprint, and, with Janet looking over his shoulder, began to read.
for Feb 9
THE HUMAN ANGLE
by Buell Tatham
(SPARTA)
This column is being written under the wary eye of Police Inspector Joseph Fleisher and the all-seeing eye of Professor Niccolo Benedetti. They have graciously honored my request to have the final story about the “killer”—HOG, who has been terrorizing the city.
“Where did you get this?” Ron demanded.
The old man chuckled softly. “It fell from the inspector’s pocket. I happened to catch it before it hit the floor.”
“You mean you stole it?” Janet was aghast.
“Niccolo Benedetti does not steal,” the old man said haughtily. “I have merely borrowed it until I can resolve my ethical question.”
Now Ron asked what ethical question he was talking about.
“We will discuss that after you have finished reading.”
Ron returned to the typescript.
The truth is HOG was a hoax. There was no HOG. I was HOG.
Carole Salinski, Beth Ling, Stanley Watson, and Davy Reade died at the hands of none other but God. Their deaths were purely accidental. Leslie Bickell and Gloria Marcus died as the result of human perversity. I merely sent the notes, and (in the first case) changed the evidence to make it look to the police like murder ...
“I can’t get over it,” Janet said. “That missing scrap of metal—”
“Was, in reality, two scraps of metal,” the professor said. “It was, of course, the key to the whole case. Buell had been planning to study accounts of recent accidents and sent himself a note claiming some as unprovable murders. That day, however, when he was driving behind the unfortunate young girls, he was presented with an almost miraculous opportunity, eh?
“Because here was an accident he could not only claim was a murder, here was one he could prove was a murder, and better yet, a murder he could not have possibly committed.”
“Sure,” Ron said. “He stopped, helped the girls as much as he could, as long as he was sure one was dead—”
“What if she wasn’t?” Janet asked.
“I’m sure he would not have finished the job,” the professor said.
Ron continued. “He helped the girls as much as he could then took a bolt cutter and cut the naturally broken snapped ends off that clamp. An instant-miracle murder.”
“As were they all,” the old man said. “As were they all.”
Ron shook his head. It was all so simple. They had wondered, so hard they had wondered: How did Hog get behind Wat
son on the stairs? How did he get in between Davy Reade and the garage with that piece of ice? And the answer: of course, he hadn’t.
“I’d like to have a quarter,” Ron said, “for every time in this case somebody said, ‘We’ll never be able to prove it wasn’t an accident.’ Hell, they all really were accidents!”
More or less, anyway, he thought. Once the professor proved that outside of the note, Hog had had nothing to do with Leslie Bickell’s death, all the deaths became suspect. Then it became easy to see that only one death could not have been an accident: Jastrow’s. But if the first instance, the car crash, had been an accident, Buell and only Buell had to have faked it. He was the only one there. Simple. Assisting in the hunt for himself.
... because I needed a smoke screen, a number of “killings” horrible enough to cover the murder of Jeffrey Jastrow.
Jeffrey Jastrow deserved to die. I’m not sorry I killed him. I have important things to do, very important, and Jastrow, who lived his life by victimizing innocent people, tried to put me in a position where I either had to sacrifice my task or the woman who gives meaning to my life ...
“What is he talking about?” Janet wanted to know.
“Ah, yes,” the professor said. “Indirectly, Buell was the cause of his own dilemma.” He picked up a letter opener from Ron’s desk and started playing with it. “After Jastrow was forced to leave this county he went from place to place, eventually going to prison in Illinois. While he was there he met a fellow inmate, who happened to be a ranking member of the Illinois Chapter of the Guardians of America, and was serving a sentence for setting fire to a day-care center. Charming, eh?
“In any case, over the course of many months this inmate told Jastrow all about the organization, of which he was quite proud. He lauded the illustrious founder of the organization to Jastrow, and told him of the entire family history.
“The Guardian was inexhaustible on the subject, and eventually the story of the missing nephew came out, coupled with the fact that Tatham had been his mother’s family name.
“We can certainly appreciate how Jastrow would be sensitive to that name, eh? So when Jastrow was released he planned to reveal Buell’s connection to the founder of that organization—if nothing else, than to tarnish Buell’s humanitarian image.
“But it was not hard for Jastrow to discover Buell’s impending inheritance. You, starting with even less knowledge than Jastrow, found it out in just a few days, did you not, amico?”
“My correspondent did, yeah.”
The old man smiled. “What your agents have accomplished, you have accomplished, amico. Do not be ashamed to take credit. When your agents fail, you are surely blamed for the failure.”
Benedetti scratched his hand. “To continue. Once Jastrow knew Buell’s situation he tried to find a way not only to exact his revenge, but to line his own pockets.”
“And he discovered Diedre,” Ron said.
“Exactly,” said the old man. “Mrs. Chester was the motive. Buell loves her ...”
Janet shook her head.
“Yes, Doctor?” Benedetti asked.
“What? Oh, nothing, Professor. Please go on.” She bit her lip. She had been wondering, frankly, what Buell saw in Diedre that was so wonderful, but made herself stop. Who could say? Anyway, that kind of thinking would lead to speculation about what Ron saw in her, and she wasn’t interested in that at the moment. The bare fact he did see something was sufficient.
“As I said, Buell loves her,” the old man went on, “but not enough to renounce his uncle’s money and with it his lifelong dream of a posthumous revenge. So when Jastrow, about a month ago, met secretly with Buell and presented his ultimatum, Buell decided he had to die.”
“What was the ultimatum?” Janet asked.
“It was actually quite ingenious,” the professor said. “Jastrow must have planned it for a long time. He wanted to force Buell to write, in his own hand, a document saying that Buell had lied about Jastrow’s activities as a deputy sheriff, that he had wrongfully and maliciously deprived Jastrow of his livelihood and his ‘good name,’ and in voluntary expiation of this wrong, he would pay Jastrow twenty-five percent of any income he would receive from any source in the next ten years.”
“Ouch,” Ron said.
“Precisely. Certainly, sometime in the next ten years W.K. Chandler would die (it proved to be within ten weeks), and Buell would come into an inheritance of something over eleven million dollars. He decided it would be worth a try, to attempt his threat to make W.K. Chandler aware of the history of the woman his long-lost nephew intended to marry.”
“He was an idiot,” Ron said flatly. “Why didn’t he have the famous letter-revealing-all as life insurance?”
The professor shrugged. “Jastrow simply didn’t think of it. Neither did Buell, eh? Or none of this would have happened.”
Ron read on.
I knew that if I simply killed Jastrow the police would dig into his background and find the secret he was using to torment me. I would jail under immediate suspicion.
Then I thought I would make it look like an accident, or suicide. But my parents died in an accident, and I have been a reporter for many years, and I know how thorough even a routine investigation of such a mishap is. I couldn’t be sure I could fool the police. The best thing, I decided, would be for Jastrow’s death to be part of a series of murders, where my connection would be simply another of thousands of irrelevant facts turned up in an investigation. Of course, my long friendship with the Sparta Police and the fact that it would seem to be the “killer” who involved me with the case, would serve to minimize suspicion and give me access to the facts.
But this, too, was unacceptable. Jastrow was an evil man. I am not. In killing him, I would only be doing what had to be done, what someone should have done long ago. But no power on earth could, just to protect myself, cause me to do anything that would bring harm to an innocent person. I’m just not made that way ...
“He wouldn’t harm an innocent person,” Ron said with the bitterest irony he was capable of. “He’s not built that way. What does he call Joyce Reade, for God’s sake? Gloria Marcus? That death grew out of the whole Hog phenomenon! So did the young guy that was shot by his wife, and the pig farmer’s brother-in-law!”
“He’s sick, Ron,” Janet reminded him gently.
“I think I’m about to be sick,” he said. “Let’s see what else he has to say.”
I found it very easy to establish the idea of HOG in the minds of the police and the public. Somehow it captured the imagination ...
“It sure as hell captured mine,” Ron admitted, shaking his head. “Did I really come up with all that garbage about football and Poland-Chinas and pork intestines? You’d better find a new pupil, Maestro. Buell played me like a violin.”
“You shouldn’t feel so bad, amico. It is amusing to note—” he looked significantly at Ron and Janet. “Amusing only for the three of us, you understand—that I discerned the truth about the first incident the moment I discovered the missing piece of the clamp. I discounted it because of Leslie Bickell’s death—a definite non-accident. I knew that Tatham was incapable of wholesale murder. That is why the explanation of Miss Bickell’s death revealed Buell’s guilt.”
“If you’d only mentioned it at the time, Buell might have broken down. Or at least been scared away from any more notes,” Janet said.
The professor shrugged. “I am guilty as charged, Doctor. We all have our blind spots: our private learning disabilities, eh? Mine is that I cannot remember that Niccolo Benedetti is never so often wrong as on those occasions he convinces himself he cannot be right. I am hampered by the conviction that I am not omnipotent.”
Most times, Ron would not have let that pass without a remark, but his mind was on something else.
Once HOG was established, all I had to do was stay with Inspector Fleisher. This gave me the secret details to make my notes authentic, and it gave me alibis for the “murders.�
� After my innocence was established, it was safe to spend less time on the investigation, giving me the time to give Jastrow what he deserved. My foresight was proven in that—though I tried to make Jastrow look like a suicide, the police immediately knew otherwise.
I had to make HOG as horrible as possible to be sure he distracted the attention from the “victims” as individuals. And all I had to do was scrawl those notes. The last one was written at home and mailed just before I entered police headquarters to join Inspector Fleisher.
It was a good plan. It hurt no one who was innocent ...
And Ron shook his head again.
... but it accomplished what had to be done. My only mistake was an attempt to make HOG too horrible, when he claimed to have “murdered” Leslie Bickell and young Davy Reade in the same night. I accepted too soon the inspector’s judgment of the Bickell girl’s death as a routine drug overdose. There were complications in the situation (which, I am sure, you will find elsewhere in today’s Courant), that led Professor Benedetti to the truth.
“It is the first time,” the old man said, “that I have ever unmasked a murderer by proving him innocent.”
So, my friends and longtime readers, there you have it. I can’t say I’m sorry for what I have done, but I do apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused. You can take comfort, though, in the knowledge that the problems of the last few weeks (and it was only an illusion, after all) will be a very real help to thousands of people who have suffered under a very real evil.
“He’s crazy!” Ron said.
“That is hardly a revelation, amico,” the professor said.
Janet, professionally, as Dr. Higgins, was theorizing. “He wanted to kill his uncle. He always wanted to kill his uncle. But the idea of wiping out everything his uncle stood for appealed to him more and for that, the old man had to die a natural death.” She started walking around, as if dictating notes.
“But when Jastrow came along,” she continued, “he was a perfect substitute. Abuse of power ... yes, and the direct threat to Buell’s loved ones! His parents, then Diedre.
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