I had to close the door quickly because the car was starting.
I watched it around the corner and wondered if I’d ever call her. Not whether I wanted to, but whether I would.
Back in the Buick I sat behind the wheel a minute or two and then I drove the few blocks to Whitewater Beach. That was one of the places I’d intended to go; I might as well now while I was so near.
There weren’t many adults there, but the midway was full of kids. As I walked back toward the Blue Streak I passed the fence over which Jimmy must have climbed, and over which I myself had climbed Saturday afternoon. There was an addition to it now, three strands of barbed wire atop it, spaced four or five inches apart. They weren’t taking chances, any more, of kids getting across that fence into the area beyond.
A girl was in the ticket office of the roller coaster, but she hadn’t opened the window yet; she was counting out change and bills and putting them into the compartmented change drawer.
Up on the starting platform the same big beefy man in the straw hat was going over the seats of one of the two cars with a feather duster.
He turned as he heard me coming. “You again. What this time?”
I grinned at him. “Nothing much this time. Think I’ll take a ride today. Press privilege, or do I buy a ticket?”
He grunted. “Buy a ticket. We’ll be open in five, ten minutes. Soon as I run each car around once.”
“You’re opening later today.”
“Weekday. Two o’clock weekdays. Ten o’clock Saturdays, Sundays, holidays. Look, what’s the big idea? You trying to make something of that accident?”
I shook my head. “Thinking of writing a story about roller coasters.”
“Oh.” He thought that over a minute. “Well, put in it how safe they are. That Saturday business was the first accident mine ever had, and the only ones I’ve heard of on others have been where people do something crazy like standing up in the car or leaning over the edge of it. We’re safer than railroads. A hell of a lot safer than automobiles.”
“I’ll put that in,” I said. “Did you find a fountain pen around here Saturday afternoon?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Lose one?”
“I had it not long before I talked to you and missed it just after I left the park. Say, I’ll bet I know where I dropped it. I was watching the workmen fix up the track back where the car went off and was bending over looking at it. I’ll bet that’s when it fell out of my pocket. I’ll go back and look there.”
I stepped down off the side of the platform. He said, “Hey,” and I turned. He said, “I’m not going to run the cars while you’re back there, so don’t take long.”
“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “I’m not going to be on the tracks; I’m not crazy. And it may take me awhile to look around in that high grass. Go ahead and start when you’re ready.”
I walked on back along the tracks, past the high scaffolding of the first big hill, the up slope and the down slope. When I got to the place where the tracks came down to ground level I stopped and, a few feet back from the tracks, bent down and pretended, in case anyone was watching, to be looking for something in the high grass.
A minute or two passed and then I heard it, the clicking ratchet sound I’d heard in my dreams, the sound of a car being pulled up the incline toward the top. It was loud, just as loud as it had been in my dreams Sunday morning. Nobody could possibly have failed to hear it, nobody who wasn’t deaf or nearly so. And Nina would have mentioned deafness, if there’d been any, when she was telling me about Jimmy; physical handicaps of any sort would surely be mentioned by a social worker describing a case.
The car was coming over the top now and the clicking stopped, but instead there was a gathering roar of sound that made me take a step back although where I’d been standing was a safe distance, four feet away. The sound crescendoed and maybe it was imagination but the very ground under my feet seemed to shake as it went past and shot up the hill beyond.
I was shaking a little myself whether the ground under me had or not.
And I knew now, for sure, what I’d suspected–one of the things I’d suspected–all along. The death of Jimmy Chojnacki hadn’t been an accident.
I couldn’t picture it that way at all.
But I could picture two boys standing back here together, hearing that ratchet and knowing a car was coming, standing deliberately close to the track for the thrill of it, but still a safe distance back. And just as the car starts down the hill I could see one of the boys, the bigger and huskier of the two, taking a quick look back toward the midway to be sure nobody was watching through the one narrow space through which it was possible for them to be seen and then, just as the car roared to the bottom of the hill, giving the smaller boy a push that sent him sprawling face down and arms out in front of him, flat across the tracks.
That I could picture, and it haunted me.
I’d wanted it to go away but it hadn’t. It had grown instead until it had driven me back to town from Lake Laflamme to try to prove that I was wrong–or right. Until now it had just been a hunch–oh, a hunch based on bits of conscious and unconscious knowledge, as all hunches are–but now it was more than that. I knew, or at least I thought that I knew.
I heard the clicking of the ratchet again. The other car was starting around now. I didn’t want to stay there and see and hear it go by so I went back to the platform along the scaffolding of the hill.
“Find your pen?”
I shook my head.
“Well, look, if that is where you lost it, maybe the painter found it back there when he went back to put on the second coat. And he might have turned it in to lost-and-found. Might as well ask there.”
“I will,” I said. “Thanks. That would be where the main office is, back of the bandstand?”
“Yeah. Say, if you’re really going to write a piece on roller coasters–and give us a break in it–forget what I said about buying a ticket. Ride all you want to. Here–get in this car now.”
“Thanks, but I’ll come back later when you’ve started drawing business. I want to have other people riding too so I can watch their reactions.”
“See you later then.”
3
The Lost and Found Department was a window in the side of the wooden building that housed the office of the amusement park, not a window with glass in it but with a wooden door that opened inward. The window was closed but there was a bell button beside it and lettered over the button as an instruction, “Ring Bell.”
I rang bell.
A few seconds later the window opened and a young man with red hair and freckles looked at me through it.
I flashed the press card. “Were you on duty at the window here Saturday?”
“Up to five o’clock, yeah. Someone else was on in the evening.”
“I want to ask you about a billfold that was turned in with identification showing that it belonged to a Henry O. Westphal. Do you remember it?”
“I remember about it. It wasn’t turned in, exactly.”
“What happened?”
“Well, somewhere around noon–I don’t remember the exact time but it was before I went for lunch at half past twelve, Gilman came around. Gilman’s the cop who’s on duty here days. He wanted to know if a kid named Westphal had inquired here about a wallet and I told him no. He said, ‘He probably will as soon as he misses it and when he does tell him to look me up; I’ve got it for him. I’ll be over near the Blue Streak for a while.’ So I asked him why he didn’t just leave the wallet here for the kid, and he told me he had something to tell the kid along with giving him the wallet.
“So about ten or fifteen minutes after I’m back from lunch–I just hang out a sign ‘Window Closed, Back at 1:30’ while I’m out–the bell rings and it’s the kid asking about his wallet and I send him to Gilman, and that’s all I know abo
ut it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Do you know if Gilman’s around now?”
“He’d be on duty, yeah, but I don’t know just where he’d be. Somewhere around the park.”
A blue uniform is easy to spot and I spotted one walking down the midway a few minutes later. I caught up to it and found that it contained the policeman I’d seen, and had shown my press pass to, when he’d been guarding the fence over which I’d climbed to watch the workmen finish the track repair Saturday.
“Officer Gilman?” I asked him.
“Yeah. You’re the reporter that was around Saturday, ain’t you?”
I admitted it. I told him what I wanted to know.
He told me, “Somewhere around twelve Lieutenant Grange comes here from the funeral parlor and gives me the wallet. He says it was on the kid that was killed that morning but that it wasn’t his wallet, see? The dead kid was a pickpocket and he must have lifted it. So the right owner, Henry O. Westphal was the name in the wallet, would miss it and come around asking at the office probably. And he explained what had happened about the mistaken identification and about the Westphal kid’s parents being notified and–do you know about that part of it?”
I told him that I did.
“Well, he wanted me to explain things, what had happened, to the kid and tell him to go home and wait for his ma and pa there, because they’d want to see him and reassure themselves kind of after a false alarm like that.
“So I kept the wallet and left word with Red over at the Lost and Found Department to send the kid to me if he asked there. So Red sent the kid over and I gave him the wallet and the message. That’s all there was to it.”
“Did he say anything about how he’d lost the wallet, whether he knew it had been stolen and not just lost, anything like that?”
“No. What difference does that make?”
“None, I guess. Did you happen to look in the wallet to see how much money was in it?”
“No, but the Lieutenant told me. He said there was fifteen bucks in the wallet and I took his word for it. He says I should ask the boy how much was in when he lost it, just to check. So I did and he said fifteen bucks all right.”
“I wonder why he didn’t miss it sooner,” I said. “It must have been stolen before ten and he didn’t miss it till after one-thirty.”
“Wondered a little about that myself and we were talking so I asked him. He said he’d left the park not much after ten and had driven downtown, that he hadn’t tried to spend any money except change until he tried to pay for his lunch. He drove right back to the park but the window was closed so he had to kill time and go back after half past one. Well, that’s all there was to it, except he said he’d go home right away and I guess he did.”
On my way out of the park I stopped at a phone booth and used the directory to look up the Westphals’ address, which I’d forgotten since Saturday morning. It wasn’t too far, about two miles. It would be in the Oak Hill district, a good residential neighborhood despite the fact that it’s bounded on one side by the freight yards.
I didn’t call the phone number, although I made a note of it in case I wanted to call it sometime. Right now I wanted a look at Obie Westphal if I could get one without having him see me or know that I was looking at him. I didn’t want to talk to him yet.
I drove there, past the house. It was a nice-looking place, newly painted and with a big, well-kept yard surrounded by a white picket fence. It was a big house, too, at least ten rooms; if only Mr. and Mrs. Westphal and Obie lived there, they had plenty of space.
I U-turned in the next block and came back; I parked on the opposite side of the street facing the house and two doors down so I could sit there and watch through the windshield. All the houses in the block were set back about the same distance from the street so from where I parked I could see the front and one side of the house and more than half of the yard.
I sat there and nothing happened; no one left or entered the house. Someone was there, though, either Mrs. Westphal or a maid or housekeeper; once I saw a dust mop shaken from an upstairs window. I looked at my watch after a while and it was four o’clock. The bus was leaving now that would have taken me back to Lake Laflamme, and I wasn’t on it. I wondered if I’d get back there at all.
At half past five Mr. Westphal came home in the blue Chrysler sedan I’d seen him driving Saturday afternoon. He left it at the curb in front of the house and went inside.
At half past six lights went on inside the house and half an hour later they went off again and Mr. and Mrs. Westphal came out of the house together; they got in the car and drove away.
I drove past the house slowly, making sure there wasn’t a light on anywhere. I’d wasted about four hours; obviously Obie wasn’t home and hadn’t been home.
So I kept on going, but I didn’t try to follow the Westphal car. I was almost starving by then so I headed for the nearest business street and found myself a restaurant. I got my order in and then went to the phone booth.
It was about time I quit thinking about only one aspect of what I suspected and took a look at it whole.
I dialed the number of the Journal and asked for Don Thaley. Don is a closer friend of mine than anyone on the Herald; I could trust him farther than any of my fellow reporters. Besides, the city room of the Herald would be closed now, but the Journal is a morning paper and Don would be working now and since he wasn’t a leg man he’d probably be in.
He was.
“Don? This is Sam Evans. How’s everything?”
“Fine. Hey, I thought you were on vacation and supposed to be out of town.”
“I am. On vacation, I mean. But something came up that brought me back to town, something personal.”
“Do I know her?”
“Quiet, please. Don, I want you to get me some dope from your morgue and then forget I asked you for it. For reasons of my own I don’t want to go to the Herald for this.”
“Sure, Sam. What is it?”
“I want the dope on the four–I think it’s four–fatal accidents that happened at South Side High in the last few years. Names, dates, and anything else. One was a boy who fell out of the tower window, one was a boy who slipped and hit his head on something, I forget what, and there were two drownings in the pool. One of them was a teacher.”
“Good Lord, what do you want all that for?”
“I’m checking up on what’s probably a wild idea. And I don’t want to talk about it until and unless I get something. But if you’ll dig that dope for me it gives a drink at Murphy’s, first chance we get to meet there.”
“Okay, no questions asked. But, Sam, I don’t know offhand how I could get it for you right away. There must be a story on each of those cases in our morgue but they’d be separate, each under the name of the victim of the accident, and not cross-indexed under South Side High. I remember a couple of the accidents, wrote the stories myself from dope I got over the telephone, but that was a year or so ago; I don’t remember the names now.”
“Is there anyone there who might remember them?”
“Hmmm. I doubt it, not any one person anyway. If I canvass the office I might get all or most of the names.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ll get it somewhere. Thanks anyway.”
“Your best bet would be someone who works at the school, a teacher maybe, or anyone who’s worked there the last several years. They might remember the names and if you can give me the names I can dig the rest for you. Don’t you know anyone who works there?”
“Sure,” I said. “I should have thought of that.”
Not that I hadn’t. I’d thought of calling Nina, of course, but I guess I’d been afraid to.
I went back to the counter and ate. Then I went back to the phone booth, looked up Nina’s number and called her. She was home.
“This is Sam, Nina. Are you doing anything
?”
“Why no, but–Sam, hadn’t we better drop this? It was nice seeing you again today. But you’re married.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you’re right, Nina. But there’s something I want to ask you. How many fatal accidents have there been at South Side High in the last few years?”
“Three–no, four. Why?”
“Do you remember the names of all of the persons who were killed?”
“I think so. The teacher was Constance Bonner. The boy who fell from the tower window was named Green–Greenough, I think, but I can’t remember his first name. The boy who was killed in the locker room was William Reed. And the girl who was drowned–no, I can’t think of her name, Sam. That was two years ago and she was a freshman then; she’d just signed in and I didn’t have many records on her so I don’t remember. Is it important, Sam?”
“It is to me. Do you know where I could find out?”
“Why, I guess I can find out for you by looking it up in my diary. I keep a sort of journal, day-by-day stuff. I suppose it’s a silly thing to do but–Well, if I hunt back I can find the entries I made when each of those accidents happened. But it’ll take a little while to find them.”
“Can you take time now to do that? And I’ll call you back in half an hour, an hour, whenever you say. How long do you think it’ll take you to find them?”
“I don’t know. I might hit the right entries right away or it might take me–Oh, come on around, Sam, since you really–I mean, I thought you–”
I grinned at the mouthpiece of the telephone. “Okay, Nina. And we might as well have a drink while I’m there. What shall I bring a bottle of?”
“Anything you want.”
“That sounds bad. As though you drink anything and everything. How’d you go for Manhattans again?”
“Fine. And I happen to have a bottle of vermouth and some maraschino cherries; you can bring just the whisky.”
“The vital ingredient. Okay, be seeing you.”
I’d forgotten to ask her address so I had to look up the listing in the phone book again. It was on South Howell Street, a number that would be a few blocks west of South Side High.
The Deep End Page 5