by Unknown
The high ridge caught the hot sun’s rays, illuminating the tree shafts with preternatural clearness. The earth was brassy, scorched.
They turned from the pike, followed an indistinct trace of wagon ruts—and then, abruptly, it was cool, gray shadow. They were in the pine country.
Sheriff Robley stopped his car at a fork in the trail. “That’s Devil’s Elbow. Where Wainwright’s hat and wallet were found. Shall we get out?”
McGavock glanced at the sink hole. It was a vile, grassy bog, saucer-shaped, bordered by dense hazel bushes and speckled with the sickly pastel blooms of wild orchids. “There’s nothing here for us,” he remarked. “Wainwright never saw this place.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Steve Robley agreed grudgingly. “It’s the old hotel that holds the clues I’m after.”
“Then you’ll have to sift the ashes,” McGavock gibed. “It’s been torched.”
The sheriff listened attentively while McGavock told him about Asie Tenniman’s report. “So we drove out here for the trip! This is another of your tricks! What’s behind it?”
McGavock said: “I’ve got a hunch. Play along with me—I think we can turn up something interesting.”
he old resort, deep in a bowl of giant pines, was a shambles of flaming timbers. It was as if some giant hand had caught up the burning building, crushed it to splintered wreckage, and had dropped it, jackstraw fashion, to a blazing inferno. They could hear the vicious crackle and snap of the tinder-dry joists long before they turned into the little hollow.
The heat was searing, terrific.
“What are you thinking?” McGavock asked.
“I’m thinking the same thing you are,” the young man answered calmly. “If this fire’s been going on since daybreak I’ll eat a box of .38s. The building’s been exploded—and I should say within the last twenty minutes.”
McGavock pointed to a blurred tire tread in the soft ground. “That’s not a bear track. Our killer’s been here, done his little chore—and gone.”
The dapper sheriff was nettled. “We’ll jusk ask a few questions of that hillman’s wife, Mrs. Tenniman, who saw the building burn at daybreak. It looks like connivance.”
“Mrs. Tenniman can wait.” McGavock scowled, surveyed the surroundings with moody concentration. “Wainwright was killed in the hotel. There was a lawn party going on, a big fiesta out front. He signed up with Bradley and retired to his room. He’d been there a few minutes when somebody, another guest, knocked on his door, lured him into this guest’s room and knocked him off. It’s an old pattern, it’s been done dozens of times before.”
“It’s very possible.”
“I’m telling you that’s what happened. The killer then went to Wainwright’s room, got his cowhide satchel with the seventy grand and took it back with him to his room. Now listen to this, because the time’s going to come when I want you to remember it: the murderer pilfered the satchel, pried up a couple of planks in the floor and hid it there.”
“I don’t see—”
“You will. It worked so well that time that he tried it later. And that’s how we’re going to catch him.”
Steve Robley said suavely: “Well, we’ve got the body in our room, what are we going to do with it?”
“We’re going to wait until about eleven thirty, when the lawn party’s in full swing, and then we’re going to lug it out a side door and dispose of it.” McGavock added casually: “You don’t happen to have a shovel on you?”
Steve Robley smiled. “Yes, I have. There’s one in the car. I came prepared for almost any contingency. Don’t look surprised.” He walked away, returned with the two short-handled spades. “This is going to be pretty hopeless, isn’t it? Where do we start?”
“We don’t dig until we reason it out,” McGavock declared. His words sounded silly to him. “Let’s get the lay of the land, let’s prowl.”
The ferny springs, from which the resort had gotten its name, were halfway up the hillside. They lay in a grotto of fetid fronds—back beneath an overhang of black wet rock. There were seven of them and they drained into a silty pool where a rusty iron pipe carried their curative waters down the slope to an ornate pagoda-like bath-house.
McGavock leaned over the pool, peered into its scummy, yellowish depths. “And this stuff was supposed to be healthy! Yow!”
“He didn’t toss the body in there,” the sheriff said dryly. “That water was in constant use at the time. I don’t see any bones. Do you?”
“No,” McGavock answered. “But we will. Hold your horses.”
At one side of the pool, far under the shelving overhang, a V trough had been cut in the limestone at the rim to check the overflow. A steady stream of water poured from this trough, struck a slab of shale and flattened out to a tiny brook which meandered down the bank in a little pebbled channel. McGavock began to whistle. He whistled “The Letter Edged in Black.” He raised an impudent eyebrow at the young sheriff. “Just like Attila! I’ll give you odds.”
Robley showed wavering signs of temper. “Don’t be cryptic. This thing is getting me down.”
McGavock declared: “It has to be so. Our man’s an engineer. Everything he does shows balanced planning.”
He lifted the slab of shale from the brook, jammed it up against the drain trough in such a way that it diverted the overflow from the pool. A new runlet angled off down the hillside. Except for a few shallow puddles, the brookbed went dry.
“Get to work,” McGavock ordered. “We dig in this dry channel.” He cleaned a handful of tangled watercress from the ravine, thrust his spade blade into the gravelly earth.
“I’ll start part-way down,” the sheriff said, “and work up towards you.” He disappeared down the slope in the brushy shrubbery.
Ten minutes later the sheriff’s loud, clear voice called out excitedly: “By golly! Luther, I’ve found it!”
McGavock grinned at the young man’s unconscious intimacy. “You’ve found what, Steven?”
“I’ve found the skull!” He sounded perplexed. “Wainwright must have been a midget. This looks like a child’s skull.”
“If you’re not satisfied with your skull,” McGavock yelled back, “come up and pick one from me. I’ve found three.”
In a grisly hour they excavated the bones and skulls of six bodies. Two children and four adults. They laid the macabre relics on the marsh grass. Sheriff Robley was thunderstruck, nauseated. “A graveyard,” he whispered hollowly. “A ghastly funeral trench! What sort of charnel work went on here? I’ll have half the town in my cells as soon as I return! It makes me dizzy. I can’t seem to make heads or tails—”
“Charnel work is right,” McGavock agreed gravely. “I was afraid of something like this.” He looked old, cruel. “But I’ve got our boy in the bag. Meet me at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight about eight and we’ll go to town.” He scraped the sandy loam from his shovel, started for the car. “Let’s chat a bit with that south neighbor—Mr. Tenniman.”
The ancient two-room cabin, with its log doorstep and its pack of yelping fox dogs, nestled at the turn of the trail. It was almost concealed by the waxy, swooping branches of aromatic pine. A wizened old woman, barefooted and smoking a juicy-looking pipe, sat in the runway. She pretended not to notice them as they approached.
The sheriff took off his hat. “Good evening, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Asie Tenniman?”
“I hain’t her sister.”
“I understand that at sun-up this morning you heard an explosion at the old hotel and that a few moments later you saw the sky redden as the building caught fire?”
The old woman chewed her pipe stem.
“I’m Steve Robley,” the sheriff said placatingly. “Don’t be afraid to talk to me. You probably knew my father. We mean you no harm. We understand—”
“You understand! You understand! Who-all’s bin a-tellin’ y’all these tales?”
The sheriff answered complacently: “Your husband, Asie.”
The old woman said
sweetly: “Now hain’t that a marvel? If you was any sheriff at all you’d know your county. I’m a widow-woman. Asie’s bin dead and gone three year now. The big-pox takened him.”
There was a flustered silence.
McGavock put in his oar. “You tell us you’re a widow. Those look to me like mighty fine fox hounds. Do you hunt foxes?”
The old dame went into a frenzy of rage. “Yes, by daddy! I hunt fox and I hunt deer and I hunt bear. And I got me a thirty-thirty inside that can roll you up like a cigarette paper. And if you fellers don’t quit pesterin’ me and git gone I’ll shore haul ’er out!”
In the car, on the way back to town, the sheriff said: “The man that gave that false report to Bennett was an impostor. What did he look like?”
“He had a plaid cotton shirt and a flashy brass-studded belt. He was about eighteen years old. Do you make him?”
“I think I do. He’s a character—and a bad one—from over in the Hostetter’s Store neighborhood. How he got into the picture, I couldn’t tell you. Maldron’s defended him time and again—but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Of course not.”
There was an awkward interval.
The sheriff changed the subject. “Back there, before we started to dig, you said something about Attila. What did you mean?”
“Attila the Hun,” McGavock explained. “That was the way his brother tribesmen buried him. They wanted to hide his body so they dammed a stream, buried him, and then turned the water back in its channel. I wonder how many anonymous killers have done it since!”
The sheriff parked behind the courthouse. “Promise me this,” McGavock said earnestly as they separated. “Promise me you’ll do nothing stringent until you hear what I have to say at Malcom Jarrell’s tonight. Be there on the dot—and bring your buddy Hal Maldron.”
The sheriff was hesitant. “It’s mighty irregular—”
McGavock soothed him. “If it’s the credit you’re worrying about—don’t! I don’t want any headlines. All I want is this slayer.”
That did the trick. Robley smiled. “I wasn’t thinking of headlines but if you put it that way, it’s mighty fine of you. I’ll be seeing you.”
he detective had an early supper at the Bradley House. Its lord and master was nowhere to be seen. But the boy in the alpaca coat was in a talkative mood. “A fellow was a-saying you’re a detective,” he observed. “You and Steve Robley been out all evening, ain’t you? Fellow was a-saying y’all are teamed up to ketch you’uns a badman.”
McGavock grabbed the boy’s wrist, punched his hand in the inkwell, slapped it on a piece of paper. He gave the brat a terrible leer. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “I’m not passing up anybody. I’ll just send these up to Nashville and—” He paused, studied the paralyzed clerk thoughtfully. “Maybe you’d like to turn state’s evidence?”
“But I don’t know nothing about nothing.”
“The heck you don’t. Where’s Cal Bradley?”
The adolescent licked his lips. “He’s out in the country somewhere training a bitch pointer.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Why all the secrecy?”
“I swear I couldn’t tell you. He threatened me not to. That’s all I rightly know.”
“If you see him before I do,” McGavock ground out, “you tell him the sheriff said he’s to show up at Malcom Jarrell’s at eight.”
He was dog tired. He rubbed his unshaven chin, knew that a bath and shave would freshen him, but decided to wait a little. In a far corner of the lobby—back in a sort of alcove—he could make out the outlines of a couple of comfortable-looking chairs in the half gloom. He sauntered over, sank down into cool, deep-cushioned leather and closed his eyes. He was half-asleep—thinking about that little ball of gray fur beneath the tile in Malcom Jarrell’s hearth—when he heard footsteps advancing toward him.
Laurel Bennett burst out: “I have to see you. Thank goodness I’ve found you—” She was dressed as she had been that morning: baggy sweater and worn riding breeches. There was a disheveled, dramatic rumple to her hair.
“You haunt me,” McGavock grated. “It’s not right. You’re a married woman. What now?”
“I have to confess,” she said demurely. “I storied to you this morning. I didn’t find any hammer. I just wanted to study your psychological reactions. When I was at college I wrote my thesis on—”
“Sure, sure.” McGavock yawned. “Some other time, please!”
She ground her heel on the floor. “Where I come from,” she stormed, “people pay me the proper respect.”
“If they don’t they get horse-whipped, eh?”
She went suddenly docile. Her somber eyes fastened themselves on him, intent and warm. “What makes you so attractive?”
McGavock kicked out a chair. “Sit down. What’s all the bedlam about this time?”
“This. I’ve just been consulting with my attorney, Mr. Maldron. We want to retain you. Not through your agency, you understand, but on sort of a freelance job. We’re so impressed with your energy and capability that—”
“That what?”
“Well, it’s this way. I’m just a young girl. Gil came down to Louisiana and married me before I realized what was happening. Swept me off my feet and brought me back here with him. Now I’m beginning to regret it.”
“How so?”
“My husband doesn’t love me. He makes big withdrawals from our account and sends them to Paducah. He’s keeping another woman up there. On my money!”
“Think of that!” McGavock snorted. “You overrun yourself, my child. Last night it was that Gil was gambling his dough away—now it’s a new twist.”
“You must believe me,” she pleaded. “I’m sure I’m right. Hal, Mr. Maldron, says it’s quite possible.”
“How do I come in?”
“We want you to go up to Paducah right away and browse around. We want you to trace this woman down and get information on her. You can name your own salary!”
“It sounds highly attractive,” McGavock decided. “But I’d like a couple of weeks to think it over.” He ogled her. “I’ll have to write my congressman.” He called to her as she strode away. “Be at Jarrell’s tonight at eight. The sheriff’s orders—and bring your husband.”
He sat there for perhaps five minutes, in a glow of pleasure at her anger, and then, on impulse, got to his feet and walked diagonally across the lobby—towards the rear. There was a door just beyond the desk which aroused his curiosity.
He turned the knob, pushed open the panel and stepped out into a small, enclosed court.
The little space, paved with brick and fenced on three sides with rotting eight-foot planks, appeared to be the hotel dump. Rusty bath tubs, broken crockery lay scattered in trashy litter. A wooden gate with a shoestring latch, inset in the fence by the alley, led down a short flight of stone stairs to an arch of brick. The entrance to an old cellar which lay behind the building’s foundations.
McGavock descended the stone stairs, walked warily into the musty blackness. Just inside the arch, he stopped, got out his pencil flash. It was a “plunder room,” a storage place for broken furniture.
He flicked his light in a swinging survey, across the great hand-hewn beams above his head, about the loamy, crumbling walls. Then, with the mathematical precision of a hawk circling for a field mouse, he crossed the floor with his beam, began a painstaking, clockwise examination of the cellar’s cluttered contents.
He felt, knew, that he was in the presence of death.
His light indexed the hodgepodge: chests and highboys, cobwebbed and battered; rolls of rugs and matting disintegrating in the yeasty dampness.
From a frayed, red silk settee—in the heart of the untidy jumble—the corpse of Cal Bradley watched him with popping, lifeless eyes.
McGavock clicked his tongue, took a quick step forward. The hotel man’s hair was a bloody spongy mass. “Our man likes hammers,” McGavock thought. “And he’s learning to get
along without nails. This is a ball-peen job.” He inspected the victim without the slightest twinge of sympathy.
Bradley had been dead for at least six hours. In death, the man’s real nature showed itself. His puffy, spiderish face was grooved in lines of greed and malice. McGavock turned away in disgust.
On the earthen floor beside the settee was a granite washbowl full of gasoline. In the center of the bowl was a paving brick. On the brick, its base just awash with the gasoline, was a china teacup of gun powder. A new plumber’s candle was thrust into the cup of powder.
The nape of McGavock’s neck crawled. “He was coming back tonight to give it the works! When everyone was asleep. He’s willing to burn down half the town. A fire here and all of Main Street goes like excelsior. And, according to his plan, I’m upstairs sawing wood.”
The detective pocketed the candle, dismantled the apparatus. He dissipated the powder about the ground, carried the gasoline out into the courtyard and poured it on the paving bricks. “It’s hardly likely he’ll be back before dark—and I’ll have him by then.” McGavock frowned. “I hope.”
The pimpled clerk was squatting behind the desk, his ear glued to the radio. A program was just signing off. “… How will Kent escape from the cannibals? Who is the mysterious little man with the blow-gun? Will Professor Lamphert discover the chemical which can unpetrify a human being? Listen tomorrow, same station, same hour.”
“Exciting, eh?” McGavock made a comical arch of his eyebrows.
The kid nodded. McGavock said: “Give me my key and the house sponge. I’m going to my room and take a bath.”
“We don’t have no house sponge. You’re supposed to use your wash cloth.”
“Skip it.”
McGavock’s room had entertained a caller.
All the bedclothes had been torn from the bed, thrown on the floor. The mattress had been ripped in vicious slashes, its cotton batting pulled out in handfuls. His Gladstone had been dumped on the carpet, there was a muddy footprint on his purple sateen pajamas. The tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement was gone.