“Unless he wanted to believe it,” Nicky suggested.
Johnston favored him with a quick appreciative glance. “You mean so he could tell himself that it wasn’t his fault. You’ve got a point there, Professor. Anyway, there it was. Whether justified or not, Terry thought Mister John had fingered him, and it was known that he thought so. Now, for a supposedly smart man, Mister John did a foolish thing. Although he knew how Terry felt, nevertheless he began to make up to Lily and in a little while he took Terry’s place in the apartment. From the girl’s point of view it was a pretty good deal: it enabled her to stop working; she got some new pretties; and she even had Mister John’s convertible to ride around in.
“Now Terry didn’t expect her to sit home and twiddle her thumbs waiting for him to get out of jail. He wasn’t married to her and there was probably nothing very intense between them. But this combination of the two things—his original feeling about Mister John and now his taking over his girl—”
“King David and Bathsheba,” Nicky murmured.
“That’s it exactly,” said Johnston. “And it was also a matter of prestige. Everybody knew that he blamed Mister John for his arrest. So this was adding insult to injury. He had to avenge his honor, as it were, or he would be the laughingstock of his circle. At that, I didn’t expect murder, although I would have been surprised if he didn’t knock him about a bit. Maybe that’s all he planned to do, but just struck a little harder than he intended.
“Terry got out on the second of January. He went to see Lily. We know that. Then he began making inquiries around after Mister John. He even went to his office and asked Cyrus Gerber where he could find him. I told you he was not too bright.”
Johnston leaned forward and ticked off the points on his fingers. “What do we have? We know that Terry had a grudge against Mister John—that’s motive. He gets out of prison on the second and he starts looking for him—that’s opportunity. Weapon? Any blunt instrument, a wrench, a stick, will do. Now as to method: the fourth, that’s just two days later, we have a blizzard; he locates Mister John; he steals a car—he’s rather gifted that way, but as a matter of fact, in this weather we’ve been having, lots of folks don’t turn their motors off when they stop for a while. So he steals a car and he catches up with Mister John. Maybe he hits him over the head with a wrench to persuade him to get into the car, but he hits a little too hard and the man is dead. It’s around four o’clock and we’re having a blizzard. There were very few cars on the road and almost no pedestrians. In that driving snow visibility was about fifty feet.
“He drives along looking for a place to park the body. There’s about six inches of newly fallen snow at the time and both sides of the streets are lined with snowbanks maybe four feet high from the previous snows. He finds a likely spot and pulls over to the side of the road. No one coming toward him and in the rearview mirror he sees no one coming behind him. He opens the door of the car, picks up the body and lays it on the snowbank. He pushes some snow on top of it. He knows there’ll be another six to ten inches before the storm subsides and then the plows will come along. He’s perfectly safe. No one is going to stop in that kind of weather to see if he is in trouble and needing help. If you were out driving, you kept on going, hoping you wouldn’t get stuck yourself.
“In a few minutes, he’s back in the car and drives off—”
“What makes you so sure of the time and date?” I asked.
Johnston grinned. “We’re sure all right. It wasn’t too hard. We cut cores out of the snowbank around the body and then analyzed it the way a geologist would. You see we knew just when it snowed and how much. The Street Department has records of when they plowed and when they sanded. The combination of the two gave us a pretty accurate record.”
“And what does Terry say?” I asked.
“Oh, he denies everything, of course.”
“Did you tell him that you know that he had been looking for Mister John?”
“He insists he never got to see him. He maintains that when he went to see Lily, she told him that she and Mister John were going to get married. They were going to drive down to Florida and get married on the way. And he insists that he was looking for Mister John merely to tell him that he bore him no grudge and to wish him luck.”
“Quite possible,” Nicky murmured.
Johnston gave him a wry smile. “You joking, Professor? Why would Mister John want to marry Lily, especially when he had been living with her for a year. I’ll admit she might think so, though. She’s not overbright either. In any case, she backs up Terry’s story.”
“Did she report him missing?” I asked.
Johnston shook his head. “No one reported him missing.”
“Isn’t that in itself suspicious?” I asked. “If he was her fiancé and was missing for three weeks—”
“At first sight it would appear so,” said Johnston, “but in all fairness, it doesn’t mean too much. Those people wouldn’t be likely to go to the police. For all she knew, his absence might merely mean that he had some deal going out of town. Actually, there is no one who would be likely to report his absence. The man was a bachelor. Except for a widowed sister-in-law and her son, he has no family at all. Who else would miss him? The clerk? He said he didn’t see Mister John for a couple of weeks at a time even when he was right around Courthouse Square every day. He knew nothing about the business because that’s the way Mister John wanted it. If someone came in to pay money, he took it and gave a receipt. If someone wanted to get in touch with Mister John, he left him a note. He got paid by the month, so he wouldn’t even start thinking about it for another week. Of course, after a while, say a couple of months, his friends or Lily or the clerk might begin inquiring around to see what they could learn by the grapevine. Then, if they heard nothing, they might risk going to the police. But that would be after months of absence. That leaves his sister-in-law and her son, Frank Reilly. They’re respectable people who have as little to do with him as possible. She is a retired schoolteacher. Frank, her son, is about thirty and unmarried and lives with her. He runs a card and record shop not far from where they live in the suburbs. Normally, they wouldn’t hear from Mister John for months at a time. The last time they saw him was early in November. Frank had a chance to buy the store he was working in. His boss had to go to Arizona for his health and there was a chance to get it at a bargain price. Frank went to see his uncle, much against his mother’s will, I gather, and Mister John gave him the money, six thousand dollars.
“In going over Mister John’s books yesterday that checked out. For obvious reasons, Mister John didn’t go in much for keeping records. He didn’t even keep his old bank statements. Most of his business, I imagine, was done in cash, but he did pay some things by check and there was a three-tier checkbook in his desk. The stubs showed that three checks for two thousand dollars each had been made out to Frank Reilly on November seventh.”
“Three checks?”
“According to Frank, that was so that he could dicker. He was to offer two thousand first and then four thousand if that didn’t work, and finally the six if it was absolutely necessary. I gather that Frank, who is a kind of arty young man, a little on the swish side to tell the truth, thought it undignified to haggle and didn’t try to. Obviously, he is not one of the great financial brains of our time, but he seems like a decent sort and he’s devoted to his mother who is crippled with arthritis and hobbles about on a cane. The big advantage of the store from his point of view was that it was located not far from his house and he could run over whenever his mother needed him. They’re really very nice people.”
We had finished our dinner and at Nicky’s suggestion we adjourned to the Commons Room for our coffee. The waiter moved a coffee table in front of the fireplace and set armchairs around it. When he had served us and we were once more alone, I said flatly, “I don’t see that you have much of a case.”
“We don’t,” Johnston admitted, “not yet, but we have the man.”
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br /> “But you can’t keep him,” I insisted.
“We can hold him for questioning. And we’ll question him all right. We’ll take him over every minute of his life since he got out of jail. Well question him again and again. And if he contradicts himself just once, that will give us our wedge.”
“You could probably get me to confess under the same treatment,” I said.
Johnston flushed. He was on the point of replying in anger, but he managed to control himself. “We fight fire with fire,” he said stiffly. “We know he killed him—”
“I can see why you think he killed him,” Nicky interrupted, “but I can’t understand why he buried him.”
Johnston turned to Nicky, very pointedly, as if to ignore me. “Naturally he wouldn’t want the body found. He did it for the same reason that a murderer buries his victim in the woods or ties a weight around him and dumps him over a bridge into the ocean.”
Nicky shook his head. “Surely, Mr. Johnston, you see a difference between burying a man in a snowbank along a busy street on the one hand and burying him in the woods or dumping him into the ocean on the other.”
“What’s the difference?” Johnston demanded.
Nicky ventured a wry smile. “In the latter case, the action is accompanied by the hope, not unjustified, that the body will never be found at all, or if found, then found in an unrecognizable condition. But in burying a man in a snowbank along one of the streets of a city, there is a certainty that he will be found and readily recognized and identified when found. He will have been preserved in deep freeze as it were. On the basis of our normal weather the discovery would be delayed by a few days or a week. Even with the extraordinary winter we have been having, the murderer could only hope for a delay of a month or so.”
“Well, it would give him that much more time for a getaway,” said Johnston.
Nicky shook his head decisively. “With modern means of transportation one doesn’t need weeks or even days to make a getaway. A headstart of an hour or two, enough time to get to the railroad or bus station or to the air terminal, is sufficient. Besides, Terry didn’t try to get away, did he? Your police had no difficulty in picking him up, did they? What I want to know is why the murderer didn’t just open the door of the car and push the body of his victim out and then ride on. The body would have fallen at the foot of the snowbank and even if discovered almost immediately, there would be a good chance that it would be assumed that he was the victim of a hit and run driver. If the body were wholly or partly covered by the falling snow, there would be a good chance that the body would be hit by a passing motorist, or even by the snowplow. In either case, the resultant contusions would serve to disguise the blow on the head, and the murder could pass as an accident.”
“He might have panicked,” Johnston suggested.
“Then he would have been even more likely to have dumped the body and run,” Nicky retorted. “I’m afraid you don’t understand the full implication of my question. The effect of burying the body in the snowbank was to delay its discovery for a few days. Since it is such an unusual action, it is fair to assume that this is precisely what the murderer wanted.”
“What could he hope to gain by that?” Johnston demanded.
Nicky pursed his lips as though he had bitten into a sour lemon. “I’m sure there are any number of possibilities, but one that suggests itself to me immediately is that if he had a dated check of Mister John’s, he might hope to cash it.”
Johnston raised an appreciative eyebrow. “You mean if he were known to be dead, the bank would automatically stop payment on any check dated after the date of his death. It’s an interesting possibility, Professor. It could be that Terry didn’t intend to kill Mister John or even to beat him up, only to shake him down for a large sum of money. That might explain why he wasn’t afraid to make open inquiry for him. All right, he braces Mister John for a stake. But he’s not taking fifty or a hundred dollars. He demands a thousand or two maybe. ‘I don’t carry that kind of money around,’ says Mister John. ‘I’ll tell you what—I’ll give you a check.’ So he writes out a check but he dates it ahead a few days accidentally on purpose, planning to stop payment on it. That’s the sort of thing I can imagine Mister John doing. But it doesn’t work. Terry spots the mistake and in his anger he wallops him over the head. But he hits too hard, so now he has a body on his hands. If he can keep the death secret for a few days, however, he might still be able to get the money. So he drives along—” Quite suddenly, the eagerness went out of his voice. “It won’t do, Professor. Terry would realize that to cash the check would tie him to the murder. He may be dumb, but he’s not that dumb.”
An idle thought had been pecking at my mind and now the pieces were falling into place. I had been trying to visualize the principals in the affair and my attention had been focused on the tall, blond person of Lily Cherry. “Look here, Nicky, I think I see what you’re driving at. You’re taking this business of Mister John’s wanting to marry Lily at face value.”
Nicky’s nod of encouragement urged me on. “Here’s a big amazon of a woman, and Mister John is a little shrimp of a man. Her handsome lover comes out of jail and is now available. Naturally she prefers him to Mister John. Well, she’s big enough to handle Mister John. She doesn’t have to go looking for him—he’s at her apartment. She has a car—his. They were planning to go to Florida and get married. Naturally, she’d need clothes and she’d put it up to Mister John. So he would sit down and write her a nice big check.”
Nicky smiled. “And why would he give her a dated check?”
Several possible reasons suggested themselves to me, but before I could offer them, Johnston growled. “Theories, just a bunch of fine theories that don’t mean anything. Now I can settle this dated check business right now. We went through Mister John’s books with a fine-tooth comb. There wasn’t much to go through, so we couldn’t have overlooked anything. There were no checks missing from his checkbook. Every check that had been issued had a stub properly made out.”
“Have you received this month’s statement of his account from the bank yet?” Nicky asked.
“We asked them for it, and they promised to prepare it right away. I imagine it’s on my desk this minute.”
“Then I am prepared to make a wager,” said Nicky. He drew an old-fashioned coin purse from his trouser pocket. Unsnapping the catch, he poked around in its depths with a lean forefinger. Then with a faint sigh, he drew out a quarter and placed it primly on the coffee table in front of him.
Johnston smiled. He tossed a quarter onto the table so that it landed beside Nicky’s coin. “All right, Professor, you’re faded. What’s your bet?”
“I am prepared to wager that in the bank statement that you think is now resting on your desk, you will find a check for two thousand dollars made out to Frank Reilly.”
“Frank Reilly, the nephew? You mean that he did manage to get the business for four thousand dollars and kept two thousand for himself?”
“I mean that the story of three checks being made out so that he could dicker with the owner of the store is all poppycock.”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Johnston.
“It’s not the way you dicker. The spread is too great. If the asking price is six thousand dollars, you might start with four and then compromise on five or five thousand five hundred. But you wouldn’t arrange to go from four to six in one jump. Frank, not being much of a businessman, might not realize it, but Mister John certainly would. Besides, I don’t think Mister John would just hand over six thousand dollars to the likes of Frank and tell him to go ahead and buy a business.”
“What’s the matter with Frank?” asked Johnston.
“He’s thirty and unmarried and has no trade or profession. And since his mother was a schoolteacher it was probably not for lack of opportunity or because of parental opposition. He is what we used to call a mama’s boy. He has probably had a succession of small jobs ending up with that of clerk in a small ne
ighborhood record shop. My guess is that Mister John looked over the business very carefully, saw that it was a good buy, and then arranged for Frank to make payment in three equal monthly payments. So he made out the three checks and dated them—”
“But the stubs all show the same date,” Johnston objected.
“The stubs, yes, because he probably made them out first and all at once. But in making out the checks, he would naturally date them as he wanted them paid, one for November, one for December, and the last for January. The chances are that he couldn’t release six thousand dollars all at once, anyway. That’s a sizable sum. Now that last check was dated January seventh, and it was very important that the bank should have no reason to suspect that Mister John was anything but alive on that day.”
“Are you trying to say that it was his nephew who killed him?”
“I am saying that Frank buried him in the snowbank. I don’t think he’d have the nerve to kill him. I suspect that it was his mother, that dear old schoolteacher, who killed him, probably with that same stick that she hobbles around on.”
“But why?” asked Johnston. “Why?”
“Because he was going to get married, of course. He came out to tell them. Look here, don’t you see the essential falsity of the picture they succeeded in palming off on you. And if false, then it suggests guilt. Mister John probably did visit them only a couple of times a year, but it was not because they discouraged his visits. He had an exaggerated sense of personal dignity, you said. If they had once indicated that he was unwelcome, he probably would never have come again. Why would he want to visit them? What was there in that ménage that would attract a man like Mister John? The only reason he visited them at all, and that as little as possible, was because they were his only living relatives. Those were duty calls he made. I’m sure Frank saw him more often, however. Living on a schoolteacher’s pension and a clerk’s wages, they must have needed help every now and then, fifty or a hundred dollars that Mister John would give him in cash. It stands to reason that Frank would not have approached him for six thousand if he had not received smaller sums in the past. The old lady might have thought that the sun rises and sets on her precious boy, but she was under no illusion about his capacity to make a living. What would happen to him after she died and her pension would stop? Well, there was always Uncle John to help the boy out. But now, at the age of fifty, he was planning to marry. That meant that even while he lived, the money would not be forthcoming so readily. And in the event of his death, instead of the money going to Frank, it would go to the widow. So she struck with her cane. And then she had her son carry the body to the car in the garage. That precious pair, with the body of Mister John making a grisly third, probably drove out with the intention of dropping it on the side of the road—until they bethought themselves of the final payment that had to be made on the store.”
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