Sleep Long, My Love

by Hillary Waugh

  “I think she’s telling the truth, but that’s only my opinion. At any rate, I stopped off at headquarters in Bridgeport and got their help. They’re standing by for a call from the girl at any time and they’re also putting a watch on her house just in case Campbell decides to come see her.”

  Wilks snorted. “Come and see her? That’s a laugh.”

  “He’s got her address.”

  “And he’s got his name in the papers too. You don’t think he’s going to walk into that trap?”

  “It’s not in the papers much. It made headlines around here, and it got an item on the front page in Bridgeport and New Haven, but this isn’t the kind of story they follow up on—not unless the body turns out to be somebody important. Jean Sherman never even saw it in the paper.”

  “I still say he’d never try it. He’s not going to take that chance.”

  Fellows said, “But we aren’t going to pass up that chance either. We need Bridgeport’s help in finding out about the girl. It’s part of the whole thing, checking her out and seeing if her alibi stands up.”

  “You mean if she went to New York as she says?”

  The chief nodded. “And what she was doing the rest of this month. Let’s face it, this bluebeard technique is a little too fiendish to sound real. She might know Campbell better than she lets on— and that’s another reason for keeping her under surveillance.” He finished the coffee and returned the thermos cap. “MacFarlane call today?”

  “Nope. Not yet.”

  Fellows reached to the desk for the phone. “Let’s hope he’s got something by now.”

  When MacFarlane was finally on the line, he sounded apologetic. “I don’t mean to keep you waiting, but it wasn’t an easy job, Fred. I’m still writing the report.”

  “Don’t make me wait for the mails, Jim. Give it to me now.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sorry to say I just don’t know the cause of death. Whatever it was it must have been inflicted on parts of the body that are missing. She could have died from a blow on the head or strangulation.”

  “It wasn’t natural causes, then?”

  “Not in the body itself. She could have had a brain hemorrhage or something like that, but it was probably Occident or murder. It might even have been suicide by hanging. I can’t tell you.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  “I can estimate her age for you. About thirty. And she’s never had a child and she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “You told me that last night.”

  “Yes. As I said, a crude attempt was made to remove the organs affected, but it wasn’t entirely successful. As for the time of death, that’s been very hard to determine, but I have reduced the limits.”

  “What are they down to now?”

  “Some time between Friday afternoon and Saturday evening. It was some time in that thirty-hour period.”

  Fellows said his thanks and hung up. “That woman,” he told Wilks, “was dead in his house before he went to New York if Jean’s telling the truth. She was lying in that back bedroom when he brought her home with him.”

  “I didn’t know anybody got that hard up.”

  “It makes me change my mind about him.”

  “In what way?”

  “We thought maybe this amateur butcher gave up destroying the body because he couldn’t stomach the task. It must be for another reason. Anyone who could kill a woman and weekend in New York and come back with another woman, anybody who’d have nerve to bring a woman into the house he’s hiding a body in, he’s not going to get queasy cutting the body up.”

  “That doesn’t help tell us who he is.”

  “No, but we’re starting to get a picture of the guy. We’re learning what he’s like.”

  “That’s more of your mumbo jumbo. All this theorizing doesn’t get us anywhere. Facts are what you need, Fred, facts and data and that reminds me. I did a few other things this morning I should tell you about. We collected all the dust in the house and shipped it to Hartford. And I fingerprinted the silver for you. You were right on that, Fred. I did get some prints from it. They’re on their way to Hartford too. Cassidy’s taking them up.”

  “What about the grocery boy Mrs. Banks saw talking to Campbell? And what about the trunk?”

  “Ed is tracking down the trunk business. I’ve got two others canvassing the grocers.”

  “And the knife and saw?”

  “What about them?”

  “I thought you were the ‘fact’ man, Sid. They were bought weren’t they? Somebody sold them to Campbell. It would help if we knew where.”

  “O.K., O.K., I get it. You want your seat back.” Wilks crumpled his sandwich wrappings together and stuffed them into the paper bag his lunch had come in. He thrust them into the wastebasket under the desk.

  Fellows said, “And, Sid. On the theory side of the ledger, the more you can find out what the man is like, the better chance you have of finding him.”

  “You aren’t telling me anything. The trouble is we don’t know what he’s like. Only that he’s got dark hair, is fairly tall, moderately slender, dresses well, has a fair amount of money, and plays around with women. That fits a lot of people, Fred.”

  “We know more than that. For instance, we can figure he’s married and I would guess he lives in a neighboring town.”

  Wilks showed interest. “How did you dream that bit up and why?”

  “We guess he’s married because of the assumed name, of course. But he wouldn’t be living in Stockford, that’s pretty sure. Stockford’s too small a town for a man to change his name and set up a love nest without getting caught at it. On the other hand, he wouldn’t want to travel too far, would he? Besides that, Mrs. Banks had him pegged as coming to the house every night about half past five and then he’d leave and come back later, about eight, and leave again between ten and eleven. Know what that sounds like? He finishes work, picks up some groceries, drives out to the love nest, goes home to wherever he lives for dinner, then comes back to the love nest in the evening.”

  “Nice of his wife to be so permissive.”

  “He’s got to have an excuse to go out, of course.”

  “Go out every night, you mean. That’s stretching an excuse pretty thin.”

  Fellows took a chew of tobacco. “I’ve been thinking about that, Sid. He might pretend he has to work.”

  “Some job. Long hours and no income.”

  “The guy would have to work for himself. That’s the way I see it. He’s got a store or something and pretends he has to go back after supper to catch up on the books.”

  “Every night?”

  “He only rented the house for a month. He can pretend it’s a busy period. He fell behind at Christmas and is trying to catch up. He’ll be tied up evenings for a month.”

  Wilks tilted his chair back and stared absently at the glamour girls on the wall. “And I suppose hopping a train to New York for the weekend is also business. That’s not a wife you’ve got him married to, it’s a door mat.”

  Fellows said ruefully, “I guess I forgot that.”

  “The trouble with you is you operate too high up in the stratosphere. You ought to reason from the facts and stop reasoning from the reasoning. You’ll end up in outer space.”

  “I’ve got to figure this guy out, Sid, and we don’t have many facts to work from.”

  “But you’ll probably figure him out wrong. This isn’t a Sherlock Holmes story. Old Sherlock could see scratches on the inner side of Watson’s shoes and reason they were made by a knife scraping mud off and reason from that that a wife would be more careful and decide he had a careless maid and he’d got his feet wet and caught cold. In real life, you’d probably find he slipped off a curb and scratched his shoe and he doesn’t have a maid, isn’t married, and never caught cold in his life.”

  Fellows chewed quietly for a bit. Then he said, “Let’s see, Sid. You owe me two dollars and a quarter from cribbage. I’ll bet you double or nothing John Campb
ell or whatever his name is, doesn’t live in Stockford, but lives in a town not too far away.”

  Wilks grinned. “You throw in that he’s also married and owns a store and I’ll take it.”

  “No, thanks. On that I won’t bet.”

  “On the other I’m not betting either.” Wilks got up. “You’re going to have to lose your dough at cribbage, Fred.”

  CHAPTER IX

  Friday, 3:00-5:55 P.M.

  Friday afternoon the Erie police, at Fellows’s request, initiated the task of checking out all friends of Vice President John Campbell of the Gary Hardware Company and all men who worked or had worked there. While it was possible that the man they wanted had picked the name Campbell by accident, Fellows thought it more likely the choice had been deliberate. If so, it was made by someone who knew a John Campbell held a position in that company. It was the Erie police’s job to track down those who might.

  The New York police also had a job. Theirs was the relatively more simple task of discovering if a “John Campbell” had registered in any hotels on the evening of Friday, February twentieth.

  At four o’clock that afternoon, Town Prosecutor Leonard Merrill had a session with Fellows in his office. Judge Cobbitt Reed had called an inquest for ten o’clock the following morning and the prosecutor wanted all the facts in the case. “Get him to postpone it,” Fellows said. “We don’t know anything yet. We won’t have enough evidence tomorrow morning for a flea to stumble over. What kind of an inquest will that be? We don’t even know how the girl died.”

  “I can’t postpone it,” Merrill said. “The judge is going on vacation. In fact, he’s having to hold up his departure for the inquest. He’s not happy about things at all.”

  “I guess none of us are.” The chief then explained all they had done and tried to do so far. “One thing,” he said. “I don’t want this Jean Sherman girl brought into it. I’m telling you, but don’t you tell anybody else.”

  “What do you mean? I’ve got to tell the judge. I’ve got to bring it up. I can’t hold out at the inquest.”

  “Then you make sure it’s a private inquest. I don’t want anybody to know about her.”

  Merrill shook his head. “Since when are you starting to worry about girls’ reputations, Fred? What are you trying to protect her for?”

  “I’m using her for bait.”

  “He’s not going to bite. You know that.”

  “There’s a chance, Len. There’s always a chance. A guy who’ll dare bring her to the murder house will dare see her while he’s on the run. A guy like him can’t leave women alone. He may not be able to leave this woman alone—unless we tip him off we know about her.”

  Merrill admitted the chief had a point. “All right, we’ll play it your way. She’s getting a break she doesn’t deserve, but we won’t give out her name. I’ll talk to the judge.”

  Fellows smiled. “If you’re getting moral on me, she got her punishment when she found out what he was. She doesn’t need any more.”

  “All right. I said we wouldn’t use her. But I’m going to need more—a lot more. You don’t have anything here.”

  “I told you that, Len.”

  Merrill made a face. “Reed’s going to think I’m a fool when I go through this tomorrow. Well, I’ll take these reports along and anything else that comes in, you get to my house tonight. I’ve got to work this into something.”

  When the town prosecutor went out, Fellows was accosted by Hilders, the Courier reporter and the only one in headquarters that afternoon. He said, “What’s the bellow, Fellows?”

  “No reports in since the last statement, Mr. Hilders.”

  Hilders leaned on the duty desk, cramping Sergeant Gorman.

  “Just call me John, Chief. And cough' up. Don’t give me that nothing-to-report gag. My paper wants news.”

  “I thought you were out making your own news, Mr. Hilders?”

  “I was looking around. I didn’t find anything.”

  “We haven’t found anything either.”

  Hilders got conspiratorial. “Now look, Chief, this case has got juice in it. A girl’s living with a man. He murdered her. Come on, there’s meat there. That’s a story, a big story. Sure, you know things you haven’t told the press. You’re following leads, but you know something about those two people. You know dirt about them. That’s what my paper wants, the dirt.”

  “The dirt, as you call it, you’re going to have to look up yourself. That’s not our department. We’re looking for information about her death. That’s all we’re looking for and that’s all we’re going to make statements about around here.” The chief went to his office and turned at the door. “Right now, we don’t have any reports.” He closed the door and didn’t come out again.

  At five after five that afternoon the first results came in. Patrolman David Lemer, checking hardware stores in plainclothes, armed with a burnt knife and saw, called in to announce that the knife, and presumably the saw too, had been purchased at Cutler’s Hardware Store on Bishop Street.

  “The saw could have been bought anywhere,” he told the chief in his office. “It’s stocked by most of the stores, but the knife, that’s a brand only Cutler’s carries. That’s what I was told the fourth place I went, and Cutler’s confirms it. That’s their knife, all right, but they don’t remember when they sold it or who bought it.”

  “They write out sales slips?”

  “I don’t know, Chief. I didn’t ask them about that. I only asked if they could tell me when it was sold—if they had any record. They said they didn’t.”

  Fellows picked up his phone and called them. They didn’t make out sales slips, they told him. Everything was cash over the counter.

  “How much would a knife and saw like that come to?” the chief asked.

  “The knife is two and a quarter and that particular saw sells for two seventy-five. Five dollars even. That’s not counting the sales tax.”

  “How about checking through your files for purchases of exactly five dollars for us? We might be able to pinpoint it that way.”

  “We don’t have any files, Chief.”

  Fellows made a face. “Come on, now. Your cash register totals up your purchases, doesn’t it? It turns out slips, doesn’t it?”

  The manager laughed. “We don’t have a cash register. We have a cash drawer. We start in the morning with twenty dollars in change in the drawer and at the end of the day we add up what we’ve got and subtract twenty to get our daily intake. I can tell you the total amount of money we took in on any given day, but I couldn’t tell you any individual purchases.”

  Fellows hung up. He said sadly, “You wait all day for a break and when you get it, it doesn’t do you a damned bit of good.” The next report, however, promised more. Patrolman Harris called in from Peck’s grocery store on Williams Street. “Chief, this place delivered an order to Campbell on Friday the thirteenth. The boy isn’t in right now. He’s out delivering, but he’ll be back in a little while.” To Fellows it was a chance to escape from his office. He said, “You hold him there. I’m coming out,” and hung up the phone.

  Peck’s was a small, dingy store occupying the first floor of a frame house that, in other respects, resembled the rest of the frame houses that lined both sides of the street. It was a private operation unconnected with the chains and catered to the neighborhood because of its convenience and because it made deliveries. Mr. Peck, a short, fat, bald-headed man with glasses and an apron soiled with the day’s doings, was waiting on a woman customer who kept eyeing patrolman Harris when Fellows opened the glass-paned front door and came in.

  “My boy ain’t back yet,” Mr. Peck said, putting the woman’s groceries into a brown paper bag. “You gotta wait.”

  Fellows waited. He opened a bag of potato chips and fed Harris and himself from it until the woman left. Then he laid a half a dollar on the counter and waited for his change. “You say the name was Campbell? The Campbell who lived at 2 Highland Road?”


  “That’s the one. Yup.”

  “How many deliveries did you make to them?”

  “Just that one.”

  “Mr. Campbell ever shop here?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You know all your customers?”

  “Most of ’em.”

  “This one would be about six feet tall, middle thirties, wearing a tan or a dark coat, slender build. He’d do his shopping after five o’clock.”

  “Can’t remember anybody like that.”

  A blue and battered panel truck turned from the street and rattled into the drive alongside the house to the back. There was a banging of the truck’s loose rear doors and a youth came in the back way wearing an apron, blue jeans, and a quilted cloth jacket. He was lugging a wooden crate of empty bottles and a couple of cardboard cartons in red, raw hands.

  There was a room out back behind the store proper. Its floor was rough and unswept and cartons, opened and sealed, were stacked against the walls. The chief and Harris were waiting for him there and Fellows said, “We’re police officers. What’s your name, son?”

  “Who, me? Andy, sir. Andy Palekowski.” He was short and thin with a shock of tousled dark hair and a small wizened face. He dumped the crates and rubbed his red hands.

  “Mr. Peck tells me you delivered groceries to a party named Campbell two weeks ago today. You remember anything about it?”

  His eyes widened. “Geez. That’s the dame that got killed, ain’t it? I was telling Mr. Peck I almost got to see her.”

  “You remember the delivery?”

  He nodded eagerly. “Sure I remember it. I gave the stuff to the guy who killed her. He paid me. He touched my hands. He touched them with the hands he killed her with.”

  Fellows smiled wanly. “I hope you washed them, son.”

  “Yeah. Huh? Are you kidding me?”

  The chief put a foot on one of the nearby cartons. “No, I’m not kidding you. What we want you to do is tell us everything you can remember. You can remember that far back all right?”