Death Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  The Tennant home was in a new exclusive housing project south of Warrentown. All roads curved. There was a new shopping section, transplanted trees of respectable size, a community playground. He was at number eight, Anchor Lane. It was compromise-modern, redwood with shed roof and a big overhang. I parked in the drive beside a little khaki Volkswagen.

  “He said to come out into the backyard,” Vicky told me.

  We walked around the house. John Tennant was standing in an empty rectangular swimming pool. He and two small children were dressed in swimming trunks and they were painting the inside of the pool, putting fresh aqua paint over the faded paint of last year. He smiled up at us from the deep end and put the brush on the can and climbed up the ladder. He was a Lincolnesque man, brown and shambling and with deepset eyes. He had a thick thatch of undisciplined iron-gray hair. He had aqua spots on his chest but he was not as liberally daubed as the two kids.

  The two kids, a boy of about ten and a girl a little older, said, “Hi,” to Vicky, and, after Vicky had introduced me to John, he turned and said, “You kids keep going there. Keep up a good pace and maybe you get a bonus on the movie money.”

  He picked up a dirty robe from the apron of the pool and shouldered into it. “Hot enough down in there, but a little chilly out in the wind. Kind of barren labor too. The damn thing will crack again this winter and the patch job will spoil the paint job.”

  I looked at the pool. I could see where old cracks had been cemented. They were all within two feet of the top of the pool.

  “Design it yourself?”

  “And built it myself,” he said. “With some neighborhood help. Maybe this time it won’t crack. That paint is supposed to be more waterproof.”

  “It isn’t water that’s doing it,” I told him.

  “Then what is, Mr. MacReedy?”

  “Your cracks are all above the frost line. Ground freezes in winter and you get some expansion there and it pushes against the pool.”

  “You seem to know what you’re talking about. Is there any solution? Revision, please. Any cheap solution?”

  The pool apron was narrow, only some eighteen inches wide. “There’s one that will just take some labor. Trench all the way around it, outside the apron. Go down three feet, straight. I bet the apron has buckled during the winter too.”

  “Every winter.”

  “Trench it and use shallow forms and pour concrete, so you’ll have a wider apron and empty space under the extension. Better put some reinforcing bars in the concrete. Leave the forms in. Treat the wood first. Cuprinol is good. Then you won’t have enough mass pushing against your walls to crack them, and you’ll have a wider apron. It’s a makeshift, but it ought to work.”

  “Hugh is in the construction business,” Vicky said.

  “Home builder?” he asked.

  “Highways, bridges, airfields. I met Vicky when I was working on the new piece on the Dalton-Warrentown road three years ago. I’ve been in Spain for the last two and a half years, Mr. Tennant. I didn’t know anything about—Vicky’s trouble.”

  We walked over to a redwood table and outdoor chairs in a corner of the yard. Tennant took cigarettes out of the pocket of his robe, and we all sat down. “I’ve tried everything I can think of,” he said softly.

  “I know that, John,” Vicky said. “Tell Hugh what you think.”

  I hadn’t been able to think of Tennant as a capable defense attorney until he turned then and looked at me, eyes somber, sincere, voice changing slightly, becoming deeper and more resonant. “I have defended twenty-seven persons accused of capital crimes, Mr. MacReedy. My father was murdered. He was an attorney. He made a successful defense in a large civil suit. A week later the plaintiff went to my father’s office and took out a gun and shot him as he sat behind his desk. You can say I am oversensitized to murder. And to murderers. Though I am, in theory, opposed to capital punishment, I feel that murder is the one unforgivable crime. And thus I have never undertaken the defense of any person I have felt to be guilty. Twice I have discovered, late in the game, that my client had deceived me. I could not withdraw. I finished the defense in each case, and did my best. I number Alister Landy among the other twenty-five, among those persons innocent of the crime of which they have been accused.”

  I stared at him. “You believe that?”

  “With all my heart. With all my experience, and with what intelligence I have been able to bring to bear. He didn’t kill that girl.”

  “But won’t anybody listen to you?”

  “I’m not in what you would call an impartial position, MacReedy. The appeals I have made are classified as professional. Also there is a tragic coincidence. Two years ago I would have been able to speak confidentially to the Governor. He was a close personal friend who respected my opinions. We were of the same political party. Now the man in the State House is a political enemy. There is no way I can get a further stay of execution.”

  “Why are you so certain Alister is innocent?”

  “Aside from the fact that I do not think he is that practiced a liar, there is one great logical flaw. The state claimed premeditation, basing it on the supposed theft of the knife. On most intelligence tests Alister nearly runs off the scale. Intelligence of that high order is capable of careful planning. Were it premeditated, there would have been no such errors as there were.”

  “But he did make a terrible mistake!” Vicky cried.

  “Yes. But he was badly rattled then. He found the smear of blood on the car seat. He removed it. He didn’t report it. He suspected it was blood. He was frightened. At my advice, he admitted his actions on the stand. I should never have let him take the stand. It was a tactical error.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He did well until Milligan made him angry. Then he became arrogant, noisy, derisive. He offended the jurors, insulted the court. It made a very bad impression.”

  “Let me ask a question, Mr. Tennant. Do you like him?”

  “Like him? Feel affection for? I have to say no. I respect the quality of his mind. I think I understand him.”

  “He’s easy to hate,” I said.

  “What are you getting at?” Vicky asked.

  “Mr. Tennant knows what I’m getting at. He believes Alister innocent. So somebody is guilty. So somebody framed him—with the blood and the knife and pocketbook, and maybe with the tire tracks. Somebody hated him. There has to be a reason.”

  “I went into that,” John Tennant said tiredly. “I paid a private investigator. I questioned Alister and Vicky. There were no specific enemies, no one who would go to that length, at least as far as we could discover.”

  “How about that girl he went with?”

  “Nancy Paulson? She’d gone with another boy before she went with Alister. But that was back when she had been sixteen,” Vicky said. “That other boy, Robby Howard his name was, died. He was drowned at the lake where the Paulsons go in the summer. It was very tragic. She didn’t go with anyone else until she started going with Al last year.”

  “I can’t imagine him dating a girl.”

  “He had changed a lot, Hugh, really. And I think she was good for him. She’s a very pretty girl. Sensitive and bright. High spirited too. She wouldn’t take any of Al’s arrogance. That was what their last scrap was about when they saw each other on Thursday.”

  “What does she think about all this?”

  Vicky frowned. “It’s hard to say really. There were only the two girls. Naturally the Paulsons took it very badly. They’ve been preaching hate to her. I heard that it took them a long time to bring her around. She couldn’t believe it. I still don’t think that way down in her heart she has managed to believe it. I saw her once on the street. She looked away. But before she looked away there was a funny little expression of—appeal. Maybe an appeal for understanding. I guess she doesn’t have the courage to fight the whole world.”

  “Your investigator,” I said to Tennant, “couldn’t find any other boy friends?”
>
  “None. Nancy is a very steady girl, very reliable. He came up with a lot of stuff about the kid sister. I couldn’t use it. I wouldn’t get any sympathy for my client by maligning the dead.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “To be very frank, Mr. MacReedy—”

  “Hugh.”

  “All right. Hugh. My name is John. To be frank with you, the young Paulson girl at age sixteen was sexually precocious. She was in her first year of high school. There’d been trouble about her in junior high. Apparently she had started very early. She wasn’t as pretty as Nancy. She was considerably more—earthy in appearance. I can remember an excerpt from a report. One of the high school boys was willing to talk, provided his name was kept secret. I can’t remember the exact words, but it goes something like this. ‘Jane Ann Paulson would take on anybody. It was like she just didn’t give a damn. When we had dances sometimes four or five guys would take her out in the parking lot, one at a time. Everybody knew what was going on. Some of the college guys were getting it too. She was too young to go in the bars, and they’d pick her up in Dockerty’s Drugstore. It was hushed up now, but one time she was gone for three days during the Easter vacation and police were looking for her and everything, but it turned out she was at the Alpha Delt House up on the hill with a couple of fellows who hadn’t gone home for the vacation. I guess she couldn’t have been over thirteen, but she looked anyway eighteen ever since she was just past twelve. She’s built big, up here. The two college fellows were expelled and I guess Jane Ann’s old man just about beat her tail off, but you couldn’t change her. Not her. All they could have done was send her away to one of those schools, but the Paulsons wouldn’t do that. I guess they thought it would look bad. I guess they didn’t know just about everybody in the whole town knew all about Jane Ann.’ ”

  “I remember the scandal at the school,” Vicky said. “It was hushed up fast, the way those things are.”

  “She doesn’t sound like the sort of kid that gets raped,” I said. “It doesn’t sound as though rape would be necessary.”

  “That would have been my only justification for bringing all that information up,” Tennant said. “But it couldn’t do enough good to outweigh the harm. By then the papers had made her out to be a sweet, simple, virginal child.”

  “And for some reason that is the way the town seems to remember her,” Vicky said. “All the rest is forgotten.”

  I thought for a moment and said, “Would that kind of background give anybody a motive to kill her? Suppose it was a married man. Maybe she was pregnant.”

  “Not according to the autopsy.”

  “How about blackmail?”

  “Not very likely.”

  At that moment the two paint-smeared kids came up, and the boy said, “It’s all done except where we can’t reach so high.”

  “Okay, workers of the world. You two go clean your brushes under the hose faucet. I’ll be along to finish. Pour your paint back in the big can I was using.”

  The kids hurried off. “If you both think he’s innocent, there has to be a starting place. I want to help. Where’s the right place? Should I talk to Alister?”

  “I can arrange it. But you won’t get anything out of him. He has—withdrawn a long distance. He’s far away. Weren’t you going to see him tomorrow, Vicky?”

  “Yes. It’s all set.”

  “You could go up together. I’ll get on the phone and fix it. But you won’t be able to see him at the same time. Just one visitor at a time for fifteen minutes apiece. Vicky, don’t let seeing him make you too upset.”

  She nodded. I said, “Any other starting places?”

  “Nancy Paulson, perhaps. If she’ll talk to you. If her people will let her talk to you. But listen. Both of you. Don’t start dreaming. Don’t think you can make everything all right. And you, Hugh, don’t stick your neck out. Perry Score, the Chief of Police over there in Dalton, and that Quillan, his only assistant, are symptomatic of everything that can be wrong with small town police. Perry can do no wrong so far as County Sheriff Turnbull is concerned. They could rough you up and get away with it.”

  “What do you need? I mean, assuming we can find anything.”

  “Any evidence or statement that can be construed as to constitute reasonable doubt. Then phone me at once. But I’m not—optimistic.”

  Chapter Four

  I drove Vicky back to Dalton. John Tennant’s pessimism had depressed her. When she would look at me she would try to smile, but I saw that it was an effort. She sat close to me.

  Four miles out of Dalton I pulled over to the side of the road. “What is it, Hugh?”

  “Get out. Come with me. Show you something.”

  I walked her forty feet along the road to one of the concrete slabs. It was the last one we had poured on the job. “See that slab?”

  “What about it?”

  “Pouring that one finished the job. Word got around when they were ready to pour. We drove up. Everybody on the job threw their hats in, between the forms, and then they were covered up. Old custom on every concrete job. My hat is in there.”

  “That beat-up felt hat with the hole in the crown?”

  “You remember it?”

  “Of course.”

  “It was a different guy who wore it, Vick. A jackass type guy.”

  “I liked him.”

  “Until?”

  “Yes, until. Then I stopped liking him and couldn’t stop loving him.”

  “How about this version? Can you like this one?”

  She looked up at me. “Yes.”

  We kissed. A few cars hooted. We went back to the wagon. “So you all throw your hats in there.”

  “And then we go get drunk. A ritual. A duty. There are usually a minimum of three fist fights and two crap games. I won over four hundred bucks that day. The next day, all hung over, I started winding up the inspection and acceptance reports. And in the afternoon I was ordered out.”

  “You were glad to go?”

  “I wanted to stay. But I felt helpless about ever talking to you.”

  “Let’s not go back to that. Let’s not think about that. Do you know what I want to do? I want to go to the apartment and finish the packing and get out of that old house and get away from Mrs. Hemsold.”

  We went back and packed hastily, efficiently. She had been saving Alister’s things until last. She had not wanted to touch his things. I packed his stuff. Many books and notebooks. Not many clothes. And none of the stuff you would expect a college kid to own. Books in four languages. I couldn’t learn much about him, learn anything that I hadn’t known. But I did find a picture. It slid halfway out of a ponderous text written in German. I sat on my heels and looked at it. Head and shoulders of a blond girl smiling into the camera, squinting slightly against the sun. It was a good face, not quite formed into maturity—but there was a clarity about it, that sort of honesty you associate with the early Ingrid Bergman, and with the pre-Rainier Kelly.

  I took the picture out to Vicky in the kitchen.

  “That’s Nancy,” she said.

  “How could he have a girl like this one?”

  “You don’t understand these things. This one is strong. Or gives promise of growing up to be strong. And she can see things and understand. Al is handsome, you know. But underneath there is the helplessness, if you can see it. A woman can see it easier. He has the almost traditional inability of the professor type, inability to cope with the world you and I know. She saw that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Inability. Take Einstein. That was genius and he was probably more unaware of the world around him than most, but there was sweetness too.”

  “And sweetness in Al, but hidden way down.”

  I looked at the picture again. “This looks like all girl.”

  “It is just a little deceptive. That picture makes her look more outgoing than she is. Maybe that’s why he liked it best. There is a sort of timidity about her. A wariness. As if she felt she had to walk
lightly and not make too much fuss.”

  “Parents?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like a nice close family, except for the trouble Jane Ann was giving them. But you can’t tell. Maybe my father wore a different face for the outside world. Hugh, I can understand Al and Nancy because I can understand my father and mother. In a lot of ways he was like Alister. Ludicrous things would happen. He would go into the bedroom in the middle of the day to change his shoes. Then he would fall into a habit pattern and, while his mind was working on something else, he would undress and put on pajamas and go to bed and then realize that it was still bright daylight so something must be wrong. My mother had all the peasant strength he needed.”

  “This girl is a peasant?” I asked, looking at the picture again.

  “In reference to Al, yes. Square, strong little hands. Strong body. Broad feet to plant firmly on the ground. I’d say so.”

  “I’ll hold onto this a while. Maybe it will help.”

  We finished packing. There was no furniture. I loaded all the cartons into the wagon, aware that Mrs. Hemsold was watching every trip I took. When the wagon was full, we put the rest of the stuff into her Chevy coupé.

  Mrs. Hemsold made her timed arrival just as Vicky was making a last check to see that nothing had been forgotten. The aged face was bright with malice.

  “If you don’t mind, Miss Landy, I want to look around before you leave and see if there’s any damage to my property.”

  Vicky looked at her quite calmly and held out the key. “Go right ahead, Mrs. Hemsold.”

  The old woman was aching for a fight. Vicky’s calm reaction seemed to irritate her. “I’m glad you’re leaving today. I didn’t want to have to tell you that this man can’t stay here with you. This is a decent house in a decent neighborhood.”

  Vicky seemed to grow taller. Her eyes flashed once. When she spoke her tone was still calm. “We haven’t much time, Mrs. Hemsold. Suppose you just check for any damages. I’ll mail you a forwarding address when I’m settled.”

  Mrs. Hemsold went in. We could hear her stumping indignantly about. I smiled at Vicky and told her she was a lady.