Sleep Long, My Love

by Hillary Waugh

  “Any of those guys look like the picture?”

  “Not even one. Not even close.”

  “And nobody’s left one of those places recently, nobody who might have used the name Campbell?”

  “Give up, will you? Nobody’s left, period.”

  CHAPTER XV

  Monday, 7:30-9:00 P.M.

  At seven-thirty that evening, while Chief Fellows was eating dinner, the phone rang. His oldest boy, Larry, answered and came back. “It’s for you, Dad.”

  Fellows put down his napkin and went into the bedroom to the telephone table between the closet doors. “Fellows.”

  “Chief? This is Harris.” The patrolman’s voice had timbre in it, a suppressed excitement Fellows could sense. “I’m in Stamford,” Harris went on. “I’ve been checking filling stations, trying to finish up now, so I won’t have to come back tomorrow. I found a guy who services a tan Ford with a bent rear fender. I showed him the picture. He thinks it might be the same man.”

  “He know him?”

  “He says his name is Clyde Burchard, lives at 62 West Hartford Street. I could go talk to him if you want. He’s home right now. Maybe you’ve got another idea.”

  “No. Don’t do that.” Fellows picked up a pencil and scribbled the address. “Go to the Stamford police. Tell them what we’ve got. Tell them I’m coming down. Ask them to send somebody with you. Stake out the house, but don’t tip the guy off and don’t touch him unless he tries to leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fellows hung up and immediately dialed another number. “Sid? Fred. We may have a break. Call up that kid Andy, or Watly, or both. Tell them we want them to take a ride down to Stamford with us right away. I’ll be by for you in about eight minutes.” Wilks didn’t bother to ask for details. He said, “Right,” and hung up without waiting for a reply.

  Fellows came back, crammed a quarter of a potato in his mouth, and picked up the rest of his chop. “I’ve got to go out,” he mumbled with his mouth full. “Want to get my coat, Larry?”

  Larry hurried back with it. “Something to do with the murder?”

  “Looks like it,” Fellows said, letting his son help him into it while he bit pieces of the chop.

  “Can I go with you?”

  “What do you ask a foolish question like that for?”

  “What’s foolish about it?”

  “You’ve got homework for one thing.”

  “But I want to be a policeman. What’s homework compared with practical experience?”

  “And I want you to get an education, so you won’t have to be a policeman.”

  It was snowing harder than ever when the chief went out and the temperature had dropped way down. Fellows had trouble starting his car, but he got to Wilks’s house at twenty minutes of eight. Wilks opened the door and came down his snow-laden steps before Fellows had completely stopped. He climbed in and said, “Get your heater going, will you?”

  “It’s on now. The engine hasn’t warmed up yet. What about the other two?”

  “Both out.”

  “You couldn’t get hold of them?”

  “No. Just Andy’s mother and Watly’s wife.”

  Fellows set the car in motion, plowing into the seething white flakes. “Oh, well, it may be a pipe-dream anyway.” He skidded, getting clear of the curb, and headed slowly out, keeping to the middle of the street.

  The highway was pretty clear, but it still took them twenty-five minutes to get into Stamford. Fellows related the details on the way. “It sounds good,” he admitted, “but I’ve been a cop too long to go overboard.”

  Sixty-two West Hartford Street was a large frame house, three stories high, split into separate apartments. It had a wide porch, an uncleared walk, and a globe of light gleaming from the porch roof in front of the doors. Owners of the other houses were out scraping their shovels into the thick carpet of snow, but the five inches that had fallen that day lay in front of 62, trampled, untouched, and freezing.

  Fellows pulled up across the street from the house, behind two other cars, and from there could see the numbers 62 and 60 on either side of the door. When he shut off his motor and lights, three men got out of the car ahead and came to the chiefs window. One was Harris, wearing his patrolman’s uniform with the ear-flaps turned down from his cap, swirling clouds coming from his nose and mouth. He introduced the other two as Captain McGarrity and Detective Lieutenant Paulus of the Stamford police. “Burchard’s in there,” he said. “His car’s in the yard in back. Tan Ford, 1957, two doors, bent fender.”

  Captain McGarrity said, “We’re backing you up, Chief. Whatever you want to do.”

  “Good. I don’t know what we’ve got, but it sounds hot.”

  Harris said, “His apartment is 2C. He doesn’t know he’s being watched.”

  “All right. We’ll go in and talk to him. The five of us.” Fellows opened his door and got out into the deep snow, Wilks sliding after. Together they crossed the street and mounted the porch. The outer door was locked, but the name “Burchard” was under the top of three bells in the frame below the “62.” Fellows pressed the bell and waited.

  He had to press it again and then, after a minute, a figure in dark trousers and shirt sleeves was visible through the inside curtains coming down the front staircase. The figure pulled open the inner door and stepped into the vestibule. A perplexed frown crossed his face at the sight of a policeman in uniform with four other men in coats, caps, and hats beside him. He hesitated a moment and opened the door.

  “Clyde Burchard?” the chief asked.

  “That’s right.” The man did somewhat resemble the drawing Shirley Whitlock had made. He was somewhere in his thirties, an inch or two under six feet, but of a slender build that made him look taller.

  “We’re police officers,” Fellows told him, pulling his badge from his pocket. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Burchard’s scowl remained, but he seemed a little less perplexed. “About what?”

  “We’d rather ask them in your apartment if you don’t mind.”

  Burchard apparently did mind, but there was little he could do about it. He turned and led the five men up the stairs and down a hall to an open door near the rear. The apartment consisted of a small living room with a smaller bedroom and bath. The living room was furnished in the kind of furniture landlords leave in what they call “furnished” rooms. There was a three quarter bed which served as a couch, a large cabinet radio of ancient vintage, two battered easy chairs, a bookcase against one wall, and a table with a hotplate and coffeepot on it in a comer by one of the two windows. There were curtains on the windows, but they were as drab as the wallpaper, a print of faded figures. Shades were at half mast, and the windows looked into the shaded windows of the next house, fifteen feet away.

  Burchard, with his shirt open and slippers on his feet, closed the door behind them and tucked his hands inside his belt at the rear. “Well, what is it?”

  Fellows and the captain sat down on the comfortable Hollywood bed, Wilks and the other detective took a look into the rest of the rooms. Harris stood with his back against the door. “We don’t like having to disturb you like this,” Fellows said, “but we have our job to do.”

  “All right,” Burchard said a little testily. “You’re disturbing me. What’s the job?”

  Fellows put his cap on the couch beside him and scratched his head. “You read anything about that body that was found in Stockford last Thursday?”

  Burchard’s eyes flickered a little. He said, “No.”

  “Highland Road was the address. It was a woman. She was in the cellar in a trunk. You know the place?”

  “No. Certainly not What’s this got to do with me?”

  “We don’t know yet, Mr. Burchard. That’s why we wanted to ask you some questions. You own that tan Ford in back?”

  “Yes, that’s my car. What about it?”

  “The fellow who lived in that house had a car like it.”

&n
bsp; “What?” Burchard exhaled and a good deal of the strength went out of his legs. He sat down in one of the chairs.

  “You happen to have rented that house by any chance?”

  “No,” he breathed. “And anybody who says I did is a liar.” Wilks reappeared in the bedroom doorway. He said, “C’mere a minute, Fred.”

  Fellows and Captain McGarrity both got up and followed him into the bedroom. Burchard swallowed, but didn’t try to leave his chair. There was only room for a bed, a bureau, and a night table in the room’s cramped confines, and Paulus had to leave to let the chief in. Fellows stepped past, looked around, and arched his brows. There were a dozen or more pictures of girls in the room, varying in size from snapshots to eight by ten studio portraits and no two were of the same person.

  Fellows nodded with thoughtful interest, then he moved closer and made a careful examination of all the brunettes, of which there were eight. McGarrity said, “You think one of them might be the girl?”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised, Captain,” Fellows murmured. “This fellow gets around. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.” He pursed his lips, studying first one, then another. “Too young, that one. Also that one. This one isn’t bosomy enough. This one, possibly. Maybe this—” He fell silent going over the rest. In the other room Burchard could be heard saying to Paulus, “What is it? What are they doing?” He was alarmed and he couldn’t keep the fact out of his voice. The chair creaked, and Paulus said abruptly, “You just stay where you are, Burchard. They don’t want to be disturbed.”

  “But they’ve got no right—”

  Fellows selected three of the pictures and sorted through them one after the other. “You take a girl’s head off,” he muttered, “and there isn’t much you can tell about her.” He went back to the living room again, taking the three questionable photographs with him, and sat on the couch. McGarrity joined him, looking grim. Wilks and Paulus stood by the bedroom door.

  The photographs were in plain sight, and Burchard kept eyeing them. Fellows said, “Now, Mr. Burchard. What was it you said about that house?”

  Burchard wet his lips. “I said I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Are you married, Mr. Burchard?”

  There was a little shriek in his voice as he gestured. “Do I look married?”

  “That’s not an answer, Mr. Burchard.”

  “No, I’m not married!”

  “That’s quite a harem in your bedroom.”

  “All right, I go out with girls. Is that a crime?”

  “Not when Congress last reconvened, Mr. Burchard. You like girls quite a lot, don’t you?”

  “I’m not a homo, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yes, I like girls. What’s that supposed to prove?”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Eighteen months.”

  “And what’s your occupation, Mr. Burchard?”

  “I sell vacuum cleaners.”

  Fellows had had a faint hope he might mention hardware. This answer was even better. It was ten times better. It went a long way to explain that strange event of Mr. Campbell bringing home a vacuum cleaner when the house already had one. He looked at Wilks, and the sergeant’s answering look caused perspiration to break out on Burchard’s face. He said a little desperately, “Is that supposed to be against the law too?”

  Fellows turned to him. “I think, Mr. Burchard, you’d better recognize you’re in something of a jam, here. The house where we found the dead girl was rented by a man called John Campbell—”

  “Mine is Clyde Burchard.”

  “Called John Campbell,” the chief repeated. “It wasn’t his real name, of course. His real name could be anything, including Clyde Burchard.”

  “I never rented any such house.”

  “Do you have any way to prove that?”

  “What do you mean prove it? You can’t prove I did.”

  “That remains to be seen.” Fellows reached out to hand Burchard one of the pictures. “Want to tell us this girl’s name?”

  He looked at the proffered photograph without taking it. “No. Why should I?”

  “Why shouldn’t you?” Fellows kept the picture at arm’s length. Burchard looked away from it, turning to the chief. “Because it’s none of your business. What right have you got coming in here asking me a lot of questions? I haven’t done anything.”

  “We can’t just take your word on that, I’m afraid.” Fellows replaced that picture and held out another. “Who’s this girl?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. I said that before.”

  Fellows gave up with a sigh. “Can you tell us what you did last weekend? The one before this one?”

  “Why?”

  “Because everything you’ve told us so far goes against your claim you know nothing about this. If you’re innocent, you ought to have some way of convincing us.”

  He said, “I was away that weekend.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went to New York.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “I took the train.”

  “What train?”

  “I got one around six o’clock. It’s the one I usually take.”

  “You go to New York every weekend?”

  “Nearly every weekend.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do? Stay here?”

  “You’re not answering my question, Mr. Burchard.”

  “To have some fun, of course.”

  “Somebody special you go to see in New York?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Want to tell me her name?”

  “No, I don’t. I said I’m not giving out names. But I can tell you one thing. If you try to prove I did anything that weekend, I can bring her in here and make a liar out of you.”

  “See anybody you knew on the train, Mr. Burchard? Did you meet anybody on the train? Someone who could kind of back up your story?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t sit next to a girl, maybe, and chew the fat with her?”

  “No.”

  Fellows regarded the man thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said, “Have you ever been in jail, Mr. Burchard?”

  Burchard looked grim, but he didn’t answer.

  “We can find out,” Fellows reminded him. “You’d be better off telling us yourself.”

  The man said sullenly, “Once. I served part of a two-year sentence.”

  “What for?”

  “A girl told me she was eighteen. Her parents proved she wasn’t.”

  Fellows accepted that and tried another tack. He asked questions about the others in the house, who the landlord was, when and how he sold the vacuum cleaners. Burchard said he knew little of the other people in the house, that he seldom saw them. He said the landlord was a landlady who lived on the first floor on the opposite side. He sold vacuum cleaners during the day and did pretty well at it.

  “Pretty well?” Fellows asked and glanced around the apartment. “But you live here? What’s the rent?”

  “Forty a month. But I only sleep here. I’m not going to waste my money on a place to flop.”

  As for his technique in selling, he said he’d pick a neighborhood and hit all the houses. Blind calls, he described them, and he was successful at it. “It’s a percentage,” he explained nervously. “If you know how to sell, and you pick the right neighborhood, one that’s not too classy, you can figure on so many calls to make a sale. So it’s just a question of putting in the time.” Burchard lit a cigarette and his hands were shaking.

  Fellows said, “A man in your work can take off all the time he wants, I guess.”

  “You can, but you don’t make any money doing it. And beyond a certain point the company will give you the fish eye.”

  Fellows said to Wilks, “Sid, while we’re talking here, why don’t you run down and see the landlady. We’ve got time.”

  Wilks
nodded and went out. Burchard watched him and took quick puffs on his cigarette. “Listen, I haven’t done anything. I don’t know anything about any woman in Stockford.”

  “You canvass houses in Townsend when you’re trying to sell vacuum cleaners?”

  “I go all over this area.”

  “How about showing us your records?”

  He jumped a little. “Records? What records?”

  “Of your calls. You must keep a record, Burchard.”

  “It’s in my head. I don’t write that stuff down.”

  The chief said, with sudden impatience, “Listen, Burchard, I want to know who you called on in Townsend. The more you stall, the deeper in you get. Now tell me.”

  He put a hand to his forehead. “I can’t remember. You’ve got me all mixed up.”

  Fellows got up and looked around. There were no places for papers in the living room and he returned to the bedroom, opening drawers in the bureau. He didn’t have to go beyond the top ones. Scattered papers half filled the right-hand drawer and he went through them slowly. Burchard watched through the door from his chair. He swallowed several times, but the presence of the other officers kept him silent.

  The only informative papers were order-form duplicates that contained names and addresses of sales made. Fellows read every one. Most were in the Stamford area, but there were four in Townsend, one in Ashmun, and three in Stockford, as well as a scattering from other surrounding towns. Fellows copied the Townsend ones and put the papers back.

  “All right,” he said, rejoining him. “Maybe tomorrow you can show us all the places you’ve been to in Townsend, all the calls you made there.”

  “I can’t. I’ll be on the road.”

  Fellows shook his head at McGarrity, and the captain snapped, “Not tomorrow, Burchard. We’re holding you.”

  “Holding me? For what?”

  Fellows said, “Suspicion of murder.”

  Burchard came out of the chair like a shot, and McGarrity and Paulus converged on him. “You can’t,” Burchard yelped. “You— you’ve got nothing to hold me for. I haven’t done anything. I’m innocent.”

  Fellows stood up too. “That may be, Mr. Burchard, but we’re not convinced of it. Not by quite a bit.”