HILLARY WAUGH
Sleep Long,
My Love
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
Copyright © 1959 by Hillary Waugh
First published 1960
Reissued 1976
ISBN 0 575 02159 4
All the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental
Printed in Great Britain by
Lowe & Brydone Printers Limited, Thetford, Norfolk
Prologue
It was ink black in the back bedroom of the little house, black and suffocatingly warm. With the shades down, the windows closed, and the heat up, he could feel the room pressing in on him, holding him, smothering him like a womb.
He couldn’t see the naked girl in the bed beside him, but he could feel her, feel her head on his shoulder, her arm across his chest, her body against his. He stared up into the blackness, his right arm lightly around her, and wondered if she were asleep. He wondered if he’d waited long enough and because he wasn’t sure, he hesitated to move. Slowly he turned his head toward the radium dial of the watch he’d set on the bedside table. He moved carefully, holding the rest of his body still, but his hair rustled on the pillow.
The woman raised her head. ‘‘Stay the night, Johnny,” she whispered.
He turned back and stared again at the warm close darkness above. “You know I can’t,” he answered woodenly.
She struggled to one elbow and leaned over him. He could feel her warm breath in his face. “Come on, Johnny,” she murmured. “The hell with anything else. What do you care?”
He pushed her aside firmly and sat up. He reached for his cigarettes and she came up too, throwing the covers back. He fumbled in the darkness, put a cigarette in his mouth and flicked his lighter. Her voluptuous body glowed pale orange in the flickering light, but he didn’t look at her. He snapped the lighter shut, inhaled deeply, and blew out the smoke harshly. He swung his bare legs over the side and sat with his back to her. She moved in against him, one hand around his waist, the other on his shoulder, her head close to his. “Johnny, what’s the matter? Everything’s going to work out fine.” She rubbed a finger lovingly over the mole on his right shoulder blade and he hated it. He wanted to lash out at her, to hit her, to make her stop, but he was careful to give no sign. Instead, he stood up and moved away from the bed. “That’s just it, it won’t work out,” he said harshly.
He heard the springs creak and then she snapped on the table lamp at the other side. The room leaped into garish light, the black drawn shades, the chipped bureau, the tarnished silver-plate brush with her loose hairs in it, the messy bed, and the two wobbly bed tables. On the sheets her body looked large and ponderous in the glare. It had been a luscious body eight years before and it still was eye-catching now. She was a little heavier, a little fuller, but well proportioned. It was an admirable body for a thirty-year-old woman and there was a time when he had enjoyed seeing it, but that was before he came in conflict with her personality. Now her personality colored everything. Now it made her repulsive and he only wanted darkness.
“Turn off that light,” he said, whirling on her so angrily that she obeyed almost by reflex. He took one more deep, fretting drag on the cigarette and the lamp snapped on again, this time to stay. She came across the bed, raising herself to her knees and putting her hands on her hips. There was a touch of fear in her voice. “What do you mean it won’t work out?”
“Just that.” He sat down again and stared at the floor. “It’s no good. We might as well face it.”
She swung off the bed quickly and stood in front of him. “You can’t say that. It will work. I’m not going to let it not work!”
He looked up at her then and he couldn’t keep the anger entirely out of his voice. “Will you grow up? You’re not a child any more. I agreed to give it a try and we’ve tried it and it doesn’t work.”
“You agreed to try for three months. It’s not even one month.”
“I don’t need three months.”
Her voice rasped with sudden bitterness. “You didn’t need one month, I’ll bet. You had no intention of giving us a chance when you started. Your mind was made up before you began.” She dropped to her knees then and put her hands on his arms. “Johnny, Johnny, please. Let’s not fight. If you’d only do it right! If you’d tell your wife you’re going on a trip and come stay with me, so we could really live together, so I could cook for you and keep house for you, so I could show you how much you need me! This isn’t any good, just evenings, you coming in and going home again. This should be your home. I’m the girl you need, Johnny, not her—not your wife! We’re the same kind of people. You know we are.” She ducked her head to see into his lowered face. “Look at me, Johnny. Tell me you know I’m right.”
He looked at her and his eyes were cold. He said, “Can’t you know a man hates a clinging vine? Why do you have to hang on? Can’t you tell when something is over?”
She sank back slowly, sitting on her ankles, dropping her hands to her lap. She met his eyes squarely, ignoring their look. “I’m not going to let you go, Johnny.”
His mouth tightened. “What do you want out of me? Is it money? I know you quit your job. I’ll give you money. I’ll come and see you if you want.”
She was losing him and she could sense it. He looked at her and didn’t see her. She was naked and he didn’t notice. She bit her lip and watched him puff jerkily on his cigarette. When he turned for the ash tray, she spoke. “I’ll tell you what I want,” she said evenly. “I want a father for my baby.”
He started. “Your baby?”
She nodded. “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to hold it over you. But you forced me. You’re going to have to marry me, Johnny.”
He reached numbly and mashed out his cigarette, then hunched over, staring again at the floor. He heard her move, but he didn’t look up. She came beside him on the bed, pressing against him, her face close to his ear, her hands stroking his shoulders. “It’s all right, Johnny,” she whispered. “You can get your divorce in Reno and I’ll go out with you. I’ll make you happy, Johnny. You see if I don’t—”
She kept on talking, but he had stopped listening. He had hoped against hope he would be able to discourage her. He had thought perhaps this month together would make her want to break it off. He had hoped there would be some other way to get her out of his life, but the baby queered it all.
Now he knew he would have to kill her.
CHAPTER I
Thursday, February 26, 1959
Since it was vacation and he didn’t have to drop his two little girls off at school, Raymond Watly, thirty-five-year-old real estate agent, didn’t leave his home in Ashmun until eight-forty and didn’t arrive at the Restlin Real Estate office in Stockford, Connecticut, until ten minutes of nine. The office, on Farnsworth Street, occupied the left half of the first floor of an old frame house. There was a plate-glass window with the name in gold letters, balanced by a matching window to a law office. A recessed door between opened into a dingy through hall from which both offices could be reached.
Mr. Watly, as was his custom, turned into the dirt drive beside the house and parked near the tumbledown shed in back. He entered the hall through the rear door and strode over the creaky planking to the office entrance, taking out his keys and whistling a time. When he got there, he didn’t put the key in the lock, but stopped and looked. The frosted pane in the door was broken. There was a hole in the glass as if someone had put a fist through it close to the knob. Cracks ran from the hole across the rest of the glass and, inside the office, fragments lay on the floor. Mr. Watly tested the door, but
it was locked. He reached a gloved hand through the hole and saw he could turn the inside knob, but he withdrew his hand without touching it. He now used the key to let himself in, closing the door gently, touching only the frame. A quick look around showed him that the safe was intact and nothing seemed out of place, but the broken window was enough for Mr. Watly. He picked up the desk phone and dialed his boss, catching Mr. Restlin about to leave his home. He said, “Frank. You’d better get down here right away. It looks like somebody’s broken in.”
Mr. Restlin was there in five minutes, pulling in at the curb and scrambling out of his car almost simultaneously. Mr. Restlin was a bustling little man, a gray-haired gnomelike creature who had found real estate a more likely prospect than women and had married his business. The operation was a mistress of many facets. Not only did the Restlin Company act as agent in sales and renting, but in many cases acted as landlord, performing the service for its clients of managing their property and collecting their rents. In addition, Mr. Restlin was a landlord himself several times over, so there were few phases of real estate that the Restlin Company didn’t handle. It was a company that had grown fat under his watchful eye and his concern over this threat to it was immense. He almost ran to Watly on the stoop saying, “What is it, Ray? They take anything?”
Watly tried to tell him he didn’t know, because he hadn’t touched anything, but Restlin was already past him and into the hall. There, he glared at the hole in the pane and the pieces of glass on the floor inside. He tested the knob on both sides of the door while Watly, hanging over him nervously, said, “I don’t think you ought to touch anything, Frank. If it’s robbery there might be fingerprints.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Restlin said shortly, “but Fm going to call the police.” He went to the phone without taking off his hat.
It was Sergeant T. C. Unger who took the call, but Sergeant Unger wasn’t important enough for Mr. Restlin and it was relayed to Chief Fred C. Fellows in his small office back of the main desk. Fellows listened quietly to Restlin’s expostulations and then said, “A broken window? What are we supposed to do about that, Mr. Restlin?”
“It’s not just a broken window,” Restlin snapped. “It’s breaking and entering, that’s what it is. It’s burglary.”
“What’s missing?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t looked. You’ll want to fingerprint, won’t you?”
Fellows allowed that he might and said he’d send someone over and hung up with a sigh. He went to his door and gestured. “All right, Sid,” he said to Detective Sergeant Sidney G. Wilks. “You’d better go over to Restlin Real Estate. He thinks he’s been robbed.” Restlin’s was only two blocks away in downtown Stockford and Detective Sergeant Wilks walked the distance in the biting, ten-degree cold. When he arrived on the scene, he found Frank Restlin on the stoop in a dither of excitement. “Look, look,” the man said, half dragging the sergeant to the office door. “They stole all my leases. All my leases are gone.”
Wilks stepped inside and looked around. The door of the small safe near the front window was swung wide, but it was to the large gray steel file cabinet against the opposite wall that Restlin was pointing. The middle drawer was open and some of its contents were piled on the floor.
“Your leases?” Wilks said in some surprise.
“All of them. I had them in there. The whole folder’s gone. They’ve been stolen.”
Wilks rubbed his cheek. “Any idea who’d want your leases?”
“How should I know? You’re the policeman. You’re supposed to tell me. Take fingerprints. Do something.”
“In time, in time.” Wilks sat down at the desk and took out a notebook. “Let’s go about this systematically,” he said. “Who found what and what’s been touched?”
Watly, standing by, didn’t have a chance to explain his part in it. Restlin did it for him. “Ray here found the broken window and he called me. I came down and called you. Then I opened the safe, but nobody’d touched that. I looked through the files while we were waiting for you, and that’s when I found out the leases had been stolen.”
“You keep the file cabinet locked?”
“No. I didn’t see any point. The door’s always locked.” Restlin paced the floor as if he’d been wiped out. “I can’t understand why anybody’d want my leases.”
“You any idea, Mr. Watly?”
Watly shook his head. He was a tall, rather good-looking man, dark-haired, with a pale complexion, and he was calm about the whole thing. He sat on a corner of the desk watching his feverish employer. “I couldn’t imagine why anybody’d want those leases. What good would they do them?”
“Take fingerprints,” Restlin said. “He must have left some prints.”
“He might have,” Wilks agreed, “but with you opening everything, they’re probably spoiled.”
“I couldn’t wait all day. You took so long. You should take prints anyway. He probably left others.”
Wilks shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know that finding them would help us much.”
“Why not? They’d point to the burglar, wouldn’t they?”
“Only if we happened to have the burglar’s on file. I rather imagine we don’t.” He stared musingly at the open file drawer. “You’re sure nothing else was taken?”
“That’s the only thing.”
Wilks flipped his book shut and stood up. “I’d guess this wasn’t done by a professional burglar, Mr. Restlin. This was somebody who wanted the leases, or one such lease. You have any other record of who’s living where and for how long?”
“Yes, of course.” Restlin crowded Wilks aside to get into the middle drawer of his desk. He pulled out a ledger. “This wasn’t touched. Besides that, I can tell you everything about everybody, who’s renting what, who owes what, when their leases expire.” He tapped his head. “I’ve got it all right here. If somebody thinks I wouldn’t know without the leases, that somebody has another think coming.”
“Anybody owe you a lot of back rent? Anybody want to break a lease?”
“Hmmph. Well.” He peered at the sergeant. “You think somebody’s trying to do me out of something?”
Wilks said, “You have your tenants’ signatures on anything other than the leases?”
“Well, on some of the applications—where they applied in writing.”
“That wouldn’t be binding in court, would it?”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“I mean if one of your tenants wanted to skip out, you wouldn’t be able to sue him if you couldn’t produce a lease, could you?”
“Then you think—” Restlin stopped. His small, wizened face got tight with rage. “Now who would it be? Who’d try a dirty trick like that?”
“You may find one of the birds who owes you money has flown the coop.”
“Who owes us?” Restlin didn’t trust his memory on that and dove for his ledger. Wilks went to the door and stooped to examine the brass knob. He reached up to turn on the overhead fluorescent lights and examined it again. “There’re a couple of prints on the doorknob,” he said. “Either of you touch it?”
Watly said, “Mr. Restlin tested it.”
The sergeant nodded and stood up. “I’m afraid there aren’t going to be any prints in here at all.”
Restlin, running a darting finger down the pages of his ledger, looked up. “Why not?”
“It was below freezing last night. The broken glass looks as if a fist was put through it. There are smudged marks on the knob under your prints. The thief undoubtedly wore gloves. Fingerprinting would be a waste of time.”
Restlin scrambled around the desk. “Are you trying to say you won’t look for the man?”
“No, Mr. Restlin. We’ll try to find him for you. We’ll see what we can do.” He nodded at the ceiling. “Anybody live upstairs here?”
“Yes. There’s a family.”
“All right. I’ll see if they heard or saw anything, and m check the house across the street. Meanw
hile, if you’ll look through your records and see which of your tenants might profit by having your copy of the lease destroyed, we’ll talk to them.”
“They’ll deny it.”
“I don’t see there’s much else we can do, Mr. Restlin.”
The little man stormed back to his books. “It’s a fine police department, that’s all I can say,” he threw at Wilks bitterly.
Chief Fellows was taking over at the main desk when Wilks came down the concrete steps to the large basement room in the town hall. The sergeant entered through the side door, bringing in a blast of winter air. “Jesus, it’s cold,” he said, pulling off his thick leather mittens and the blue wool cap with the ear muffs. He was wearing an army-surplus windbreaker with a wool collar, blue woolen police motorcycle trousers, and black leather boots. “It must be close to zero,” he complained. “I don’t know what I walked for.”
Fellows said, “What was it? A false alarm?”
“No, it was for real.” Wilks leaned on the desk to tell him the details. He was a husky man, six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a heavy frame.
Fellows listened in silence. He was a big man too, and older, but some of his weight was in the paunch around his stomach. “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard,” he said when Wilks was through. He hunched over the desk on his elbows and stared at the steel door to the cell block at the far end of the room. “Now what would anybody want those leases for?”
“To avoid responsibility’s the way I see it.”
“What kind of responsibility?”
“I’d say somebody wants to renege on a lease some way. If there’s no lease, he can’t be accused of it.”
The chief took a plug of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket, bit off a piece, and offered it to Wilks, who shook his head. “Now that reminds me of a story,” he said, repocketing the tobacco. “There was this hunter who wasn’t a very bright guy and when he was coming home empty-handed one evening, he came upon a sign which said ‘$10 fine for trespassing.’ Well, it was late and he was tired, so he cut through the forbidden property anyway and he didn’t get far before he had the bad luck to run into the owner. The owner grabbed him and said, ‘You’re under arrest for trespassing.’ So you know what the hunter did? He shot and killed the owner.
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