Sleep Long, My Love

by Hillary Waugh

  “That’s what you say. All right, then, since you’re so co-operative, who’s the girl in the case?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean the victim, I mean the other girl.”

  Fellows turned around a little too quickly for casual innocence. “What other girl?”

  “I’ve heard rumors,” Hilders said. “There’s another girl in that house, isn’t there? He had two women.”

  “Where’d you get that story?”

  Hilders leered slightly. “You know I’m not going to reveal my sources, Chief.”

  “If you’ve been pumping my men—”

  “I’d be doing my job,” Hilders pulled out his pad. “Let’s have the rest of it, Chief. What’s her name?”

  Fellows’s face got flinty. He said, “There’s no story of any girl, and you’d better not try to print any.”

  Hilders grinned and repocketed the pad. “In that case, then, maybe you wouldn’t mind calling old man Restlin and getting him—”

  “A little blackmail, Mr. Hilders?”

  The reporter flushed. “No. Nothing like that, Chief. One good turn.”

  Fellows pointed a finger and said, stressing his words, “I’m going to tell you something, boy. You play along with me and I’ll give you everything I can, newswise. But you just once print something against my wishes and the only news you’ll get on this case is what you steal from other papers.”

  Hilders made a face, but he didn’t say anything. Fellows waited for a couple of seconds to give him a chance, then turned to Unger. “You get the word around. No cop is to speak to any reporter. No one!” Then he said more evenly, “As for that stuff from Erie, get the headquarters in each town to check those names out. Wilks and I are going to Townsend to run down a clue.”

  CHAPTER XII

  Saturday, 12:00-5:30

  The temperature was above freezing for the first time in a week when the chief and Wilks got to Townsend. The thermometer on the Fizz-Rite soft-drink signboard in the outskirts read thirty-three degrees against its background of bare trees and gray sky. It might be the end of the last freeze before spring and Wilks said so hopefully as they pulled into town.

  Police Headquarters was a small, converted frame house on the main road. There was a flag waving briskly from a pole in the front lawn and a sign on a post on the veranda. Fellows and Wilks parked at the curb out front and went along the tarred walk, up the steps, and over the wide wooden porch. The front door opened into a narrow hall to a drinking fountain and rooms in the rear. In the wall at the left was a half door with a flat top on it forming a desk while shutting off the police records room beyond. Another room on the right was the chiefs office and Chief Delbert Ramsey was eating a hot lunch sent from a chili parlor across the street. He was a small, sour man with the reputation of a tyrant and if he didn’t smile when the two officers came in, the fact that he didn’t scowl meant he was glad to see them. “Well, come in,” he said, and glanced at the old pendulum clock with Roman numerals on the opposite wall. “It’s ten after twelve. You had lunch?”

  Fellows said, “I hadn’t even thought of it,” while shaking the limp thin hand the chief held out as a matter of formality.

  “You oughtta eat,” Ramsey said. “This crap is lousy, but it’s hot. Raises hell with my ulcer. You got an ulcer, Fellows?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to have you meet Detective Sergeant Wilks.” Ramsey gave Wilks a curt nod. “That’s ’cause you got an eighteen-man force. You try to work with six sometime. Take last night. Accident on the highway. Two people killed. I got five men and myself. Two of them and me were up till after two in the morning. You can send somebody else, but I got to show up in person and look at all that blood. Why don’t I send out for some chili for you and I’ll tell you about it. Two teen-agers went off the road and wrapped themselves around a tree. It was a mess.”

  Fellows said, “We could do with a sandwich, I guess.”

  Ramsey snapped at the open door, “Hey, you, Hayes. C’mere.” The man on the desk came in, was given orders, and headed out across the street. Ramsey said, “See? He goes across the street and there’s nobody at the desk. What can you do with five men?” The two Stockford policemen took chairs and watched Ramsey gulp more of his chili. Fellows said, “We’re still trying to identify the body we found. Her trunk was sent from here.”

  “I told you we ain’t got anybody missing, Fellows.”

  “I didn’t think you would. She’d make plans to be away.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Check all the ‘S’s. Does Townsend have a town directory?” Ramsey snorted. “This town ain’t got enough dough to pay its police chief a decent salary. I sweat, with a bunch of crumbs for cops, and get peanuts. We work extra hours like last night. There ain’t no dough for a directory.”

  Fellows sighed. “Then it’s the telephone book, I guess.”

  “What’re you gonna do? Call up all the people whose names start with ‘S’?”

  “That’s the general idea, I guess.”

  “I hope you ain’t gonna want any of my men to help you. I only got five, you know.”

  “We’ll handle it ourselves. Maybe we could make the calls from here.”

  Ramsey made a face. “I suppose so. I guess you can use our phones. I got two in the other room. I hope it won’t take you long. I don’t like my wires being tied up.”

  “There shouldn’t be too many ‘S’s in a town of twenty-five hundred people.”

  “More ‘S’s than anything else, I guess. Now if it was ‘Z’, we only got three.”

  “Be nice if it was.” Fellows got up again. “Maybe we could start now.”

  Ramsey let Wilks and the chief find their own way to the phones. He had finished his meal and was dumping a pill from a bottle into his hand.

  Fellows and Wilks started with the three female J.S.’s listed in the phone book, Joan Steckle, Jessica Smith, Jennifer Sandhurst. That brought no results, so they next tried the two names that were preceded only by the initial ‘J'. After that they started alphabetically, Wilks at the top and Fellows at the bottom, calling families, asking the number of persons in each, asking if any female member had left town on or around the first of February.

  It was a long and thankless task and the sandwiches Hayes brought them were long gone before they were through. It was a fruitless task too. There was no call that even showed promise. No one they talked to knew anything about a girl leaving town at the beginning of the month, and in the whole list, they failed to get an answer only three times.

  They finished at ten after three, thanked Ramsey and went across the street to the chili parlor for some coffee. It was strong coffee with a bitter taste, as if it had been made with yesterday’s grounds, but it suited their mood. “I feel like we’re chasing a shadow,” Wilks grumbled. “It’s got me wondering maybe she borrowed the luggage and her initials haven’t got a ‘J’ or an ‘S’ in them. Or maybe she comes from some other place. The guy in the truck can only carry her trunk to here and she has to ship it the rest of the way.”

  Fellows blew gently on his coffee. “I don’t think it’s that bad, Sid. We got three no-answers. It might be one of them.”

  “I’ve got a very strong feeling it’s not. It’s a better feeling you might say.”

  “They’ve got to be her suitcases and trunk, Sid. Who’re you going to borrow a suitcase from for three months?—pretty new suitcases too?” He sipped his coffee and mused. “And that truck driver. He couldn’t be the man, could he?”

  “He fits the description.”

  Fellows shook his head. “But if he’s got a truck, and she’s got the trunk, why ship it? Stockford’s not more than a twenty-minute ride. Why didn’t he take it to the house?”

  “Easy. He doesn’t want to be seen with her.”

  “That may be, but how would he explain that to the girl?”

  “You mean you think the truck driver isn’t the guy?”

 
; Fellows shrugged. “I don’t know who he is. But let’s get back to the girl. We’ve got to presume her initials are J.S., there’s no other way around it. And I’d have to believe she comes from here. I can’t see sending the trunk from here otherwise, your explanation to the contrary notwithstanding.”

  “Then why don’t we find somebody who knows her?”

  Fellows sipped some more coffee and got out his chewing tobacco. “That’s what we have to figure. All right, a single girl. She gets around so she must have access to a phone. The phone, unless it belongs to one of the no-answers, isn’t in the family name. So she doesn’t live with her family. That makes it a boarding house or she shares an apartment with another girl and it’s in the other girl’s name. That make sense to you, Sid?”

  “Yeah. So do we call every number in the book?”

  “I don’t think we’d have to do that. Now why would a single girl live in a town like this without her family?”

  “She works in it.”

  “Exactly. And the biggest company in town is the Graystone Greeting Card Company. What do you want to bet she doesn’t, or didn’t work there?”

  Wilks smiled for the first time. “Let’s see if we can find out.” They left the chili parlor with an optimistic step, but they weren’t to gain the information that day. The Graystone Greeting Card Company was shut down for the weekend and attempts to locate someone with access to the files was a failure.

  When they abandoned that hunt, they tried the three phone numbers that hadn’t answered before and, getting no answer again, went out to each house and questioned the neighbors. Again they came up against a blank wall. No departed girl was connected with any of them. Then they called up every boarding house in town and got no better results there. As Wilks grumbled on the way home, it was like hunting ghosts, and even Fellows was glum.

  Back at headquarters they found Hilders playing cards at the table in the public part of the main room. They also found further reports. Gorman had put them on the chiefs desk, and Fellows and Wilks went in there to digest them. The first was from the State Police lab in Hartford. An analysis of the ashes from both the fireplace and furnace disclosed, among the usual fuels, the presence of bone ash and charred bits of flesh. It confirmed the theory that the missing parts of the body had been burned, but it added nothing to their scant supply of knowledge.

  The next report was from Bridgeport and said in effect that investigation of Jean Sherman’s background cleared her of complicity in the death of the woman. She had been home all through that month except for the weekend trip to New York. Further, no attempt had been made by any man to visit bar and she hadn’t reported any phone calls from John Campbell.

  The other reports dealt with the hunt for tan, 1957 two-door Ford sedans with dented rear fenders and so far none had been found to fit the category. “Worser and worser,” growled Wilks. “If we don’t get some confirmation of something pretty soon I’m going to start believing this whole thing never happened.”

  They left the office with long faces and got into their coats. Hilders, seeing them, swept up his cards and came over. “I hear you’re looking for Campbell’s car, Chief.”

  Fellows said, “That much you can print.”

  “I don’t want to butt in, but it seems to me you’d have a better chance of picking up your man if you broadcast a picture of his face instead of a description of his car.”

  Fellows, zipping up his jacket, managed a smile. “You got an idea where we can get one?”

  “Sure.” Hilders was using a different approach on the chief, all eager and co-operative. “You’ve got three people who’ve seen him, right?”

  “Three?”

  “Watly, the delivery boy, and the girl. I know there’s a girl and I know you know who she is.”

  “All right, so?”

  “They’ve described him, right?”

  “That’s right. And their descriptions tally pretty well, but they’d fit ten million people.”

  “That’s because no one can describe a face. There’s a guy on the Courier, Don Little, who draws cartoons and stuff. He’s the staff artist. Suppose you get the girl and the two men together with him and he can draw what the man looks like with them correcting him.”

  Fellows rubbed his chin. He said, “Well,—” And then he turned bland eyes on the reporter. “Did you say the girl?”

  “Sure. She saw him too, didn’t she?”

  Fellows shook his head sadly. “Now listen, Hilders, I’m not quite dumb enough to fall into that trap. I told you I’m keeping the girl’s identity secret.”

  Hilders grinned. “You can’t blame a guy for trying. All right, you’ve still got two men who’ve seen him. I wasn’t trying to pitch you a curve. The idea’s still valid, isn’t it? You get the two men in here to describe him, and I’ll get the artist.”

  Fellows said he’d think about it and then he thanked Hilders and went out with Wilks to their cars. On the way home, he did think about it. At first it was in annoyance because drawing pictures was, to him, in the category with collecting dust. It was grabbing for straws and he wasn’t that desperate yet. However, as he ruefully meditated, if reports continued to be as barren as this day’s had been, he might get that desperate.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Sunday, March 1

  On Sunday morning at the First Congregational Church, Dr. Morse, the minister, mentioned the dead girl in his prayers. Perhaps it was because Fred Fellows was a member, for she was not referred to in any other church. The case did not appear in any newspapers except in the Bridgeport Courier, which devoted itself to vice, venery, and victims. Her body lay in a cheap box in the basement of the hospital, waiting final disposition, and the only people who hadn’t forgotten her were the policemen of Stockford and the neighboring communities.

  Fellows didn’t go to church that Sunday. He was uneven in attendance at best, but this time he had the excuse that he could serve God and his fellow man better by putting in the time at headquarters. Sunday was a bad time to get much done since places of business were closed, but he did manage to reach the personnel director of the Graystone Greeting Card Company. The call resulted in the disappointing news that, of the sixty women employees in the place, none with the initials J.S. had left their employ in the two months of the new year. The director promised to check earlier records on Monday to refresh his memory on other ex-employees, but he was sure the information would be negative, for the turnover at the plant was negligible.

  “Of course, she could work somewhere else in or around that town,” Fellows said to Wilks, but his voice wasn’t ringing with conviction this morning.

  The detective sergeant sighed. “I’ve heard of murder cases where you don’t know the killer, but this is the first one where you don’t even know the victim.”

  “Or,” said Fellows, “if it even was a murder.”

  “Come on. You don’t think it was anything else, do you?”

  “I’d stake ten years of my life that it’s murder, Sid, but if you don’t know how the victim died, how do you prove it in court?”

  “You find the guy and hammer at him until he contradicts himself and confesses.”

  At a little after eleven, Fellows got a call from New York and took it in his office. At quarter past, John Hilders came into headquarters with a copy of the Sunday Courier under his arm. He spread it on the counter for Wilks and Unger to see. “I’m owed all the favors I want,” he said. “See? I didn’t mention any girl in the story.”

  “You got a particular place you want me to kiss you?” Wilks asked, scanning the paper.

  “Where’s Fellows?”

  “In his office on the telephone.”

  “Who’s he calling?”

  “New York’s calling him.”

  Fellows opened the door and came out then. He didn’t look happy. “Two people named John Campbell checked in at New York hotels Friday, neither of them Friday night or early Saturday morning. Neither of them is the man we want. T
hey’ve been cleared.”

  Wilks said, “Don’t look so sad. You said yourself he probably wouldn’t use that name.”

  “I said maybe he wouldn’t. And another thing. I called Hartford. Watly and Andy were up there all afternoon yesterday going through their rogue’s gallery. They couldn’t identify a single face.”

  “The guy doesn’t have a record?”

  “If he does, it’s not in this state.” The chief shook his head.

  “We’re looking, but we’re always looking in the wrong places. It’s like he’s outsmarting us everywhere we turn.”

  “He’s not trying to outsmart us. He’s probably running scared.”

  “It’s even worse if he’s outsmarting us without even trying.” Fellows picked up the Courier and glanced at the front-page article. Hilders said, “See? Didn’t I treat you right, Fred? You owe me the works.”

  At the unpermitted familiarity, Fellows’s manner turned cool. He said, “You’ll get your breaks, Hilders.”

  “How about letting me look over the murder house?”

  “I told you I’ve got nothing to say about it.”

  “A phone call to Restlin would let me in. He’d do it for you.” Fellows turned to look at him. “What do you want to see it for?”

  “Firsthand report. I want the layout and I want pictures. They should have been in today’s paper. You see the rag I write for. My editor plays up the seamy side of everything.” He smiled a little. “Besides, well, I’m only an amateur, of course, but covering murders and stuff is my beat and you get some experience. I might be able to come up with a fresh approach.”

  Fellows said, “Sid, he’s after your job.”

  Hilders said, “Well, I’m not a dummy, you know.”

  “All right, we’ll see. By the way, what’s the name of that artist you were telling me about—the one who’s on your paper?”

  “Don Little.”

  “Want to give him a call? I think maybe we’ll take your advice.”