“Got it,” he said. His voice was very soft, but contented. “Funny business, you know.” He was standing by the blackened remains of what had been a kitchen stove. He pointed at it, under it. “Poof!” Mr. Smith said, in a pleased way. “Funny business.”
Weigand and the trooper stepped into the area of debris and bent down to look under the twisted wreckage of the stove. Smith—and even his back somehow looked pleased and contented—squatted beside them and pointed. Then Bill Weigand pointed and said, “There?” and Smith, his tone approving, said, “That’s right, lieutenant.” Then the three stood up and continued for a moment to look at what had been a stove. Pam and Jerry also looked at it, but they were not sure why.
“Bill,” Pam said. “We’re here. Remember?”
Bill Weigand turned then and smiled, but his face was worried and puzzled. Apparently what Smith had found, what Bill and the trooper had seen, was not clarifying.
“A cut tube,” Bill said, explaining to the Norths. “At least it looks cut, and Mr. Smith here is certain it was cut. A thin metal tube, about—oh, three eighths of an inch in diameter. Sawed through.” He paused a second. “It was a gas tube,” he said. “It brought gas in from an outside tank to the stove. It was cut inside the room, a foot or two from the wall. With it cut, and the gas turned on, gas would fill the room—and this kind of gas has practically no odor. If you walked in you wouldn’t notice it—until you struck a match.”
“But—” Pam said.
Bill nodded.
“Whoever struck the match would go up with the gas,” he said. “Probably would, anyway. Which makes it a nice booby trap.”
“For Wilming!” Pam said. “In case—in case the other didn’t work?”
Bill shook his head at that. They could not tell, with what they knew, that one was alternative to the other. After all, if you pushed a man out of a window—a high enough window—it usually worked. It was surer than a booby trap.
“Maybe he wouldn’t come here,” Pam said. “Maybe—”
Then she stopped, because Bill Weigand was looking beyond her at Jerry North. She looked at Jerry, and he was shaking his head.
“Anything would be surer than this trap, I should think,” Jerry said. “Unless you were here to make it work, which would merely make it a hard way to do an easy thing. You’re forgetting it’s tank gas, Bill.”
Bill thought a minute and then nodded. He looked more puzzled than before. Pam looked first at one of them and then at the other, and then she said, “Oh,” but she still sounded rather doubtful.
“A limited quantity of gas,” Jerry pointed out. “Not inexhaustible mains. A very exhaustible tank. Gas from the tank, coming out the cut tube, fills the room—and leaks out of the room. Perhaps this goes on happening for—oh, say a couple of hours. Then there’s no more gas. What remains in the room leaks out. You strike a match—no booby trap. I doubt if you’d have three hours all told. But I should think the whole idea of a booby trap would be to kill while you were somewhere else—for a good long time. This way you’d have to be there to cut the pipe within a comparatively short time of the arrival of your victim. So what’s the good?”
“It might be long enough,” Pam said, but she did not sound convinced. And Bill shook his head thoughtfully.
“It would mean that you would have to fix the time of death pretty accurately,” he said. “And—the very nature of the thing makes that difficult. Everything that would fix the time burns up. A stopped watch would melt, probably. You’d have to trust entirely to luck—trust that somebody would see the fire start, make a note of the time, and that you would not only not be there”—he looked around—“here, but not even nearby.”
Weigand and the Norths looked at the stove, now rather resentfully. It did not explain itself.
“Gas refrigerator, too,” Smith said. He was across what must, by the faint outlines left, have been the kitchen. He examined the refrigerator, which was merely blackened.
“Tube on this was all right,” he said. “Nearly as I can tell.” He seemed to be following it. He stepped over the tumbled masonry which had once been a foundation, and was now outside the house. “Here’s the tank,” he said, moving some fallen timbers. “Stove and refrigerator both hooked to it—two tubes leading off the one valve. So when you turn on one, you turn on both.” He lifted the tank. “Empty, all right,” he said. He came around to the others. “Well,” he said, “there’s your cause of fire. Incendiary.”
“To kill a man,” Weigand told him.
Smith looked at him, as if from a distance.
“Oh, that,” he said. “Could be, I suppose. Fire’s my business, you know.” He looked around. “Haven’t found any man,” he pointed out.
“He was already dead,” Bill told him.
“Think of that,” Mr. Smith said, obviously thinking of something else. “Of course, there could be a man around here, at that. Under things.” He considered this. “Not if he was dead somewheres else, of course,” he added.
Pamela North looked at Mr. Smith with interest. It occurred to her that, while unquestionably logical, he expressed himself somewhat oddly. The way he spoke reminded her of something, but she could not remember what.
“Take half a day to go through all this,” the trooper said, waving at all this. He looked at his watch. “Do it tomorrow?” he said. It was half a question, asked of Weigand.
“I suppose so,” Bill Weigand said. He was looking abstractedly at the blackened débris. “I—” he broke off. He moved suddenly, hurriedly, and bent and picked something up. Then he squatted and began to pull at burned wood. He used a stick to push aside ashes. He picked up something else. He stood up and looked at the two things he held, one in either hand. As he stood there his body seemed to sag, to be held erect by the most desperate of efforts. He turned then and came back, and when he was near enough he held out the two objects he had found.
One was—one had been—a silver compact. The other was the metal skeleton, and clasp, of a woman’s purse. He held them toward the Norths. He said, in a strange, dead voice, “Remember?”
Pam remembered. She had seen the compact often enough, admired it enough—in Dorian Weigand’s graceful fingers.
The purse she could not be sure of. She tried not to be sure.
“She—” Pam said, and dropped it and started over. “It doesn’t have to mean—”
Bill Weigand turned away. He turned to the trooper.
“Not tomorrow,” he said, and his voice was harsh. “Now. We’ll start.” His gesture included the remaining firemen, the Norths. “Get more men!”
The trooper looked at him and started to say something and ended by saying, “Yes sir.”
Bill Weigand was pulling at jutting timbers, and Jerry was with him, by the time the trooper’s motorcycle caught, snarled in staccato. The two firemen helped and, after only a moment of hesitancy, Smith helped too.
8
SATURDAY
6 P.M. TO 7:45 P.M.
She sat and looked at the man, waiting. She had been waiting for what seemed a very long time; almost all afternoon she had been waiting, although not always in the same place. Now she said, “Come on. We’ve got to go on,” as she felt she had been saying, over and over, for hours. The little man did not answer. He sat on the ground, his folded arms on his raised knees, his head on the arms. Sitting so, he seemed to be shutting out the world, hiding from the world.
“Piper!” she said. “Piper!”
Still he did not move. She got up from the rock on which she was sitting and walked to him and pushed at him with her left hand, pushing against his shoulder. She kept the gun in her right hand, pointing it at him. She kept it out of his reach, because it was still possible that he was shamming. He moved away from her touch almost imperceptibly, as if he were moving away from something else—from a world pressing in. She tried to remember how often during the past few hours he had sat so, and moved so.
It was not dark yet; she thought it would n
ot be really dark for several hours. But where they were it was much darker than it had been. The trees cast heavier shadows, now that the sun was slanted far to the west, and there was a wooded hill between them and the sun, so that only the trees on top of the hill were in the light. Where they were was shadow, but shadow grown so deep as to pretend to darkness.
Say they had got out around noon, or a little before. Then now it must be, from the way the light fell, almost six. The hours between were lost, or almost lost. At any moment she had been aware, as she was aware now. But the continuity—the hours taken together—was like a dream. It was as if she had been walking through a dream, driving Piper—when he would be driven—before her. She might have been doing this for an hour or for a day; the six hours of reality was an arbitrary period set by her mind, acquiesced in only by her mind.
Something’s the matter with me, she thought. The way something’s the matter with Piper.
It was not the same thing that was the matter with both of them or it was not affecting them identically. Piper had these recurrent spells during which, except that he could still sit, could still try to hide from the world, he seemed unconscious. She had no such spells, or could remember none. She could remember sitting and waiting for Piper, rousing him and making him go on, with the gun pointed at him, and with him apparently conscious of the threat of the gun. She could remember his stopping and standing motionless, turning his head this way and that as if looking for something, before he sat down on the ground and hid himself from the world. When he stopped, he was no longer conscious of the threat of the gun. When he stopped she stopped too, and waited.
At first there had seemed to be no alternative to her stopping too. Then, the time before this, she thought, she had realized that she could go on by herself, taking the gun, leaving Piper, trying to find a house. That realization came to her now, more strongly, as she went back to the rock she had been sitting on and began waiting again.
She did not think there was danger at the moment in turning her back on Piper. And actually she could get away without turning her back on him. She could back away, keeping the gun ready, until she could get behind a tree. Then she could go for a time from tree to tree, keeping him still part of the time in sight, and only when she was a good way off turn and run. It would not matter which way she ran since they were already lost.
But I won’t, she thought. I’ll make him go with me. I’ll turn him over to Bill. I have to.
She did not try to decide why she had to. She was no longer afraid of Piper, and she felt no particular anger toward him. Looking at him now, she was even a little sorry for him. But he had to be turned over to Bill. Bill would want him; Bill had been looking for him. It was as if she were Bill’s extended hand.
It was that, she thought now, which must have prompted her actions from the first moment of finding Piper outside the house. Otherwise she would merely have run, since he could neither run after her nor use the gun which lay a little distance from his right hand. Instead she had got the gun and, finally, roused him. She had dragged him farther from the fire and then, using his hat, brought water from a little pond and thrown it on his face. He had come to then, or partially come to. The feeling that she had to take him with her, now that she had the gun, had, from that moment been beside, co-equal with, her desperate need to run from the fire.
She would never, she thought, again think of fire as kindly, although presumably she would in time again grow used to it. It would always be something that was fierce and angry, and this although it had not really touched her, not really hurt her.
It could not, she realized, have been more than a minute that she had lain on the floor of the Wilming cottage after Piper, in the frenzy which was the first part of the shock which still held him, had struck her a glancing blow on the head with the butt of the automatic she now had in her hand. In that minute the seeking tongue of flame which had first crept under the kitchen door had broadened to a ribbon and, in the few seconds between her recovery of consciousness and her first movement, to a stream. But she had still believed she had plenty of time.
She had been so sure of that that she had spent time—she could not remember how much—looking for her purse, which she thought was somewhere in the room. It must have been longer than she had thought, or she must have moved more slowly—her sense of time had even then been dreamlike—because when she turned again toward the door out of the house the flames had run along the wall and were racing up the curtains of one of the front windows, and were very near the door. And the door had been closed.
She had screamed then, she thought, because she remembered that Piper had locked the door. She had abandoned the search for her purse and run to the door, probably still screaming. The fire was making a great deal of noise and she could not remember hearing her own scream. She remembered that the doorknob was hot when she took it in her hand, and that the heat was frightening on the right side of her face. She remembered with what desperation, what hopelessness, she had tugged at the door and how suddenly drained of everything she had felt when the door opened.
She had started to run then, and she must have forgotten the single stone doorstep outside the door, because suddenly the ground was not where it should have been and she pitched forward headlong, sliding, on a graveled path. One cheek had been scraped—she could still feel dried blood on it—and the fall had bruised her. But she had got to her feet almost instantly, and it was then that she had seen Piper.
He lay, oddly sprawled, on the grass to the right. The automatic with which he had hit her lay perhaps a foot beyond his outstretched right hand and she thought that, for it to have got there, he must have fallen forward, letting go of it as he fell.
She had looked at him for a moment before she realized how close they both were to the fire, which had broken the front window now and was leaning out, as if it were looking for them. She was afraid to go within reach of Piper at first, but finally she convinced herself that he was really unconscious. She was still cautious, and tried to keep out of the reach of his hands while she snatched the automatic. It had seemed very heavy; it still did. She had had it since, always with the safety off; she had held it even when she was bringing water in Piper’s hat and throwing it on Piper’s face.
When he had opened his eyes she had let him see the gun. He had looked at it, and then at her, and then back at the gun. “Get up!” she had told him then and, still looking at the gun, he had got up. He had started to move toward her and she had lifted the gun a little and he had stopped.
“That way,” she had said, pointing beyond the house where there seemed to be a path. He had looked at her again, and at the gun again, and then had started in the direction she indicated. She walked behind him, keeping the gun pointed at his back.
It had been almost instinctive and even now she was not entirely clear why she had pointed where she did, and gone in that direction after Piper. She wanted to get away from the burning house; she wanted to turn Piper over to Bill. Chiefly, she had wanted to get away; there seemed to be an urgent need that she get away. Probably, she thought now, it was because she was sure that Farno would come back. He would see the fire and come back. She thought now that he had not been where he could see the fire, but that was not what she thought at the time.
The need to get away from the house kept her going—and she kept Piper going—even after what she had taken to be a path proved to be nothing; proved to be an accidental opening between trees and bushes. For a time she kept them going on because she still thought it was a path. Then, just as she realized fully that they were getting nowhere, Piper had the first of his spells of refusing to go anywhere. He merely stopped. He did not look back at her. He looked around. Then he sat down and hid his head. It was as he bent it that she saw, near the base of the skull, an ugly, lacerated bruise. By the time they had gone on twice again, and stopped twice again, she decided that Piper had been hit hard enough somehow, in the fire, to do something to his brain.
&
nbsp; Now, waiting this time for Piper to decide to go on, she realized that she had been only a little better off than Piper. She had had none of these blank periods. But things had seemed to run together, so that the measured continuity was lost. That, she supposed, resulted from shock, unless it was that she too had received some sort of concussion when Piper hit her with the butt of the gun or, less probably, when she fell as she ran out of the house. And she supposed that it was because her own mind was locked in something like a dream that they had now got so hopelessly lost.
She did not suppose that they were distant from a house, or even from a town. They were merely in a woods—an area always left uncultivated because it was too hilly and too stony to make cultivation worth the trouble. Such areas were hardly ever large when they were so close to New York. A few hundred acres would be large for most of them, and it was absurd to be lost in a few hundred acres of merely wooded, merely hilly, countryside. Nevertheless they were.
Piper raised his head and looked around him. Then he looked at her and got up. (He had done that, without orders, the two previous times.) “Go ahead,” she told him, and he went ahead. There was not much underbrush and the going was not particularly difficult. Now and then a branch, released by Piper as he went ahead, swung back waspishly at her. Now and then such a branch had thorns, or twigs which were like thorns, and tore at her dress. She did not bother with them any more. They tore themselves loose. She did not care any more what they did to her dress, and she did not seem to feel it much even when the thorns penetrated the dress and scratched at her skin. As soon as they were moving, everything again took on the quality of a dream. As soon as they were moving, it was hard to remember when this had started, or to imagine when it would end.
The light was beginning to fade before they had finished in the wreckage of the house, before Bill Weigand was satisfied that they had finished. Smith was convinced somewhat earlier, and showed it by going off and sitting down on the grass. The two firemen were convinced; they snorted off in their truck. The Norths and Mullins kept on because Bill did, but half an hour before they finished Jerry had looked at Pam, when Bill was hauling at a timber, and had shaken his head. Finally Bill stood up and stretched, forcing his shoulders back, and looked around the wreckage.
Untidy Murder Page 14