“Or he isn’t married,” said Wilks, “and doesn’t work nights at all. You’re making unwarranted assumptions just because he used a phoney name.”
“But if he isn’t married,” said Fellows, grinning, “why wouldn’t he have his girls come to his apartment? He wouldn’t have to rent motel rooms.”
Wilks laughed and shook his head. “God, Sherlock Holmes again, reading a man’s life history from the dents in his watch. You could be all wet, you know.”
“I’ll be wrong on some things, but, by God, I’ll be right on most. You wait and see.”
“All right. What else are you going to be right on?”
“I think he’s got a jail record.”
“Oh, he has? What about Watly being all through the mug files and not finding him?”
“There are forty-seven other states he could have a record in. Forty-eight now, including Alaska.”
“All right, Mr. Bones. Tell me why you think he’s got a record.”
“Because he uses the name Lawrence not only signing in at motels, but he also used it when he worked for the toy company. A man would only use an alias if he were hiding a record.” Fellows waved a hand. “And don’t say it’s his real name, because you’re the one who said it wasn’t.”
“Maybe I’m wrong. It’s been known to happen.”
“But if it was his real name, Sid, then we’d have turned him up as working as a car salesman in Bridgeport six years ago. If he was a car salesman, then he sold them under another name.”
“Or he lied to Blake about selling cars.”
“Why?”
Wilks shrugged. “There could be plenty of reasons we don’t know about. Ail right, anything else?”
“Well, it’s obvious he’s a salesman. Everything points to that. The evidence also suggests he does some selling at night. Night selling would probably be door to door on his own, since he can take nights off and wouldn’t have to account to a wife for not making money. So it’s, as I’ve said before, quite probable he met Joan on a house call one evening when her roommates were out, the only difference being that he’d known her before.”
“Ail right. That’s possible, even probable.”
“And Townsend is one of his territories, but he doesn’t live there.”
“He doesn’t live in Townsend?” Wilks blinked. “I can’t wait to hear this explanation.”
“It’s easy. He wouldn’t rent a motel room where he might be known, would he? Here.” He pulled out an area road map from his papers. “I drew five mile circles around each motel he stopped at. This is reaching, I’ll admit, but if he wouldn’t stop at a motel within five miles of his home, Townsend is excluded.”
Wilks studied the four circles. Danbury was enclosed and the whole Stamford-Townsend area. The rest was open and available. The detective sergeant shrugged. “Even if you’re right, Fred, you don’t eliminate much.”
“But when all the reports are in, then I’ll circle the motels where he isn’t fisted and maybe we can kind of pinpoint his location. If we should find he’s hit all the motels in a certain section but one, the chances are he’ll five near that one.”
Wilks shook his head, somewhat in awe. “Brother. What rabbits you pull out of what hats.” He sat back. “You know, Fred, I’ll bet you’re so wrapped up in these surmises you haven’t even thought of the logical way of finding the guy.”
“Which is what?”
“Getting these motel owners to report in the next time a John Lawrence signs a card.”
“We’re doing that, Sid. The last time was January fifteenth, but after that he was mixed up with this Joan Simpson and nothing’s happened since. But he’ll start in again. We’ll watch and we may get him, but we aren’t passing up our other chances.”
“Which are what?”
“We check with Washington for a crook with a John Lawrence alias and we’re going to have all the police departments around investigate all men with a reputation as a libertine. As you say, Sid, I may be all wet on a lot of these suppositions, but I’m not going to be wrong on all of them and one of the right ones is going to turn up our boy.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Friday and Saturday, March 6-7
Chief Fred Fellows was, at the least, inventive, but the bad luck that seemed to dog him on the case held up against his best efforts. None of the answers he felt he had to get were forthcoming. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported no known criminals who used the aliases John Lawrence or John Campbell, or at least none who could possibly be involved in the Simpson case. Photostats of the handwriting, or rather the printing John Lawrence had scrawled onto motel cards had arrived, but trying to match it was reported as an impossible task. In short, Washington could give nothing but negative information.
Negative information was all that resulted from the search for known libertines. Two possibilities had been shown to Watly who ruled them out without hesitation.
The bitterest blow was struck Friday night. The editor of the Bridgeport Courier pulled reporter John Hilders off a case that produced so little interest, and Hilders, no longer needing the good graces of Fred Fellows, blew the lid off in his article. BRIDGEPORT GIRL MADE LOVE IN MURDER HOUSE was the headline and the story, which all readers were sure to devour, revealed all that Hilders knew and suspected. The girl’s name wasn’t disclosed only because the reporter couldn’t find it out, but the fact the police knew who she was and were watching her house was boldly shouted to the public. The worst blow of all, however, was the revelation that the police had information the mysterious John Campbell was known by another name and that name was John Lawrence.
It was an article that brought thirty curiosity calls to Bridgeport police headquarters and a dozen more from reporters who assailed both them and the Stockford police with questions. The police refused to comment on the story, but Fellows knew denials were useless and the Courier information was repeated in all other papers the following morning. It was a revelation that Mr. John Campbell-Lawrence could hardly miss and it insured the futility of catching the man in the traps the police had set.
Fellows didn’t go into a towering rage at the publication of the information. He banned Hilders and any other representatives of the Courier from police headquarters forever, but other than that, he shook his head dispiritedly, either at the deceit of his fellow man or at the elimination of what looked like the best hope for catching John Campbell.
As the other negative news came in on Saturday he grew quieter, drank more coffee, and shuffled the papers on his office desk a little aimlessly. Motel reports had produced no registrations in addition to the original four, so he couldn’t even pursue his pinpoint plan any further and for that day there was nothing more to do.
In the middle of the afternoon Wilks tried to cheer him up, but it was a fruitless process. “It’s the breaks of the game, Fred,” he said. “Not every case gets solved.”
Fellows said, “What’s that supposed to do, make everything all right?”
“You’ve done everything you could, and more than most. All that stratosphere stuff! That’s more than I’d have thought of.”
“All of that stratosphere stuff looks kind of cockeyed now, doesn’t it? But I guess it did to you all along.”
“You just put too much store in it. That’s why you feel let down.”
Fellows swung his chair around. “That’s not why I feel let down. What gets me down is that murder is the worst crime there is and this is murder and we know it and I don’t like to see a murderer, of all criminals, get away with his crime.”
“Seventy percent of them do, Fred.”
“You still don’t make me feel better. Sure seventy percent of the murders go unsolved, and that’s why there’s so much murder. Every time the police have to throw in the sponge on a killing, it means the temptation for another man to kill is just a little stronger. Every time a slayer gets caught and punished, it makes the temptation for others just a little less. Someone’s life might be save
d by our catching this man.”
Wilks sat down and put a hand on Fellows’s shoulder. “Listen, Fred, you’re getting worked up and you can’t. You’re all the time cutting out too wide. You think about meanings and stuff like that the same way you think of clues, not for what they represent, but in some fourth dimension.”
Fellows managed a wry smile. “What are you talking about?”
“You and your reaching. We find the name Campbell is a phoney and you aren’t content with the obvious reason, which is that he wants to hide his identity. You try to read into it that his wife nags him, or that he’s got five kids or something. Now you take this thing. You’ve done everything you can and it doesn’t work out. You ought to shake it off. It’s not your fault, so stop worrying about what effect failure is going to have on society. What happens here isn’t going to stop or start any new murders.”
“It does, though,” Fellows growled. “If every murder were solved and every murderer punished, premeditated murder would be wiped out.”
“And you want to work towards such a day. You can’t, so forget it. You’ve done your best. Nobody blames you. Nobody else could have done more. Stop thinking you ought to be Superman.”
Fellows shook his head. “I’m not satisfied. I don’t think it is my best. I think that somewhere, if I’d thought differently, or felt differently, we might have got onto a right track.” He looked up. “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder, Sid. There’s always a track that leads from the killed back to the killer and no matter how well that killer covers that track, he’s going to leave new tracks—tracks to the cover. And if he covers those, there’ll be tracks to that cover and so on. There’s always a flaw and the so-called ‘perfect crime’ means nothing more than that the police failed to find the flaw.” He gestured at the mass of papers on his desk, the reports and information on the case. “There’s a flaw in that mess somewhere. I don’t know what or where, but there’s got to be.” He started to pick them up one by one, putting them together. “You know what I think I’ll do, Sid? I’m going to take these home and study them. Maybe I can think of something.”
CHAPTER XXIV
Saturday, 8:30-9:00
Saturday evening Fred Fellows dropped in on his detective sergeant. Wilks was in his cellar working on model trains when the chief clumped down the stairs and ducked under the hanging light bulb at the bottom. “Marge said I’d find you here.”
“I’m putting a caboose together.” Wilks held it up. “How’s that for realism?”
“Looks good. It also looks expensive.”
“At least my wife knows where I am evenings.” Wilks laid the car tenderly on his work table. “How’re you feeling?”
“Hungry,” Fellows said. “I don’t mind cutting down on lunch and stuff, but my wife’s getting into the act on dinners. She’s taking it seriously.”
“She’s trying to help.”
“That’s the whole trouble. All the kids got a mountain of mashed potatoes and I got one tablespoonful. And I weigh more than any two of them together, except Larry.”
“Come on, Fred. You didn’t come over here to bum a sandwich. You’ve found a flaw.”
“No flaws that I can spot, Sid. But I’ve got some ideas.”
Wilks hitched his hip onto the table and pulled out his tobacco. “Shoot.”
“This guy is a skirt chaser. Agreed?”
Wilks took a bite and passed the tobacco over. “That’s obvious.”
“Just because one of his girl friends is dead, he’s not going to reform.”
Wilks nodded and accepted the packet back. “Equally obvious.”
“And he lives somewhere in the area bounded by Stamford, Danbury, and Bridgeport.”
Wilks shrugged. “That’s not so obvious, but you’re probably right. So do half a million other people.”
“I see it like this, Sid. He works a regular job which gets him through at five o’clock. He picks up groceries and gets to the girl’s house at five-thirty every night.”
“Regular job? I thought you had him on the road selling.”
“That’s at night. His timing every day was too consistent for a road man. He’d be in an office of some kind, seems to me.”
“I’ll agree for kicks. Go on.”
“If that’s so, then he must work within a ten-minute drive of the murder house. That would mean Stockford, around the center of town. He couldn’t be employed at the Grafton Tool and Die Company because it’s too far away.”
“Granting the assumption, the reasoning is valid. What does that prove?”
“If he worked in town before the murder, he still works here, or he’s recently left a job here. This is going to be a rough assignment, Sid, but we’re going to catalogue every single office and working man in the Stockford Center area. He’s a white-collar man, judging from the reports. We believe he’s a salesman, but he could be anything, a lawyer, store clerk, pharmacist, possibly even a theater usher. It doesn’t matter what he is, we’re going to cover them all. We’re going to get a list of employees from everybody who hires people in that area and we’re going to check on them all. Any who might possibly fit the description we’ve got, we’re going to have Watly look at. Any who’ve left town recently, we’re going to track down. This is going to be a big job, but starting Monday every available man is going to be put to work on it. You and Ed Lewis will be in charge. That man is around here and we’re going to find him.”
“Well, let’s say you’re never at a loss for some new path to follow.”
“Something has to break somewhere and it’s got to be this.”
“You mean you hope it’ll be this.”
“It’s got to be, because if this fails, all that’s left are two real brain teasers.”
“Yeah?” Wilks was curious if not really interested. “What?”
“Why did he break into Restlin’s office and steal the lease? That’s one. The other is, why did he start to destroy the body and then stop and run?”
Wilks shrugged. “The answer to the first is that he didn’t want us to have a copy of his signature. The answer to the second is he was afraid of discovery. Did you say brain teasers?”
“Brain teasers, Sid, because the answers to those answers are ‘why?’ and ‘why?’. Why didn’t he want us to have a copy of his handwriting? And what made him so scared he was going to be discovered?” Fellows smiled. “When you’re not working tracking down people around town, you think about that. See if you can come up with anything.”
“I can come up with something right now. He doesn’t want us to have a sample of his handwriting, because he’s somebody we’re likely to investigate and this would damn him.”
Fellows nodded. “That’s just what I mean when I say he must work in this neighborhood. But, since Watly has seen him, he can be identified anyway, without the handwriting.”
“Watly only saw him once, Fred. That identification might not stand up in court. The handwriting would. Or, if you think that makes the guy too bright and foresighted, he might not have intended killing the girl when he rented the house and it was only afterwards that he thought about covering up. Watly, he couldn’t do anything about. The lease he could.”
“And what about running off and leaving the body?”
Wilks munched on his tobacco carefully. He scratched the back of his neck. “Let’s see. He starts burning the body in the furnace. Then, for some reason the furnace goes out and he can’t start it again, so he switches to the fireplace. That creates such a stench he’s afraid the neighbors will notice, so he quits.”
“That’s what we’re apt to think, Sid, but it can’t be the answer. A man bold enough to bring another woman to that house isn’t going to run away and leave the job because the neighbors might notice. He’d have to have reason to believe the neighbors did notice. Remember, it’s winter and all windows would be shut in everybody’s houses.”
“Maybe he couldn’t stand the smell himself.”
“Then
he’d try something else, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t just close up shop and skip. It seems to me he must have had some reason to believe he was about to be discovered.”
“Some neighborhood kid poking around might have found something.”
“Maybe. Seems like that’s something we ought to try to find out.”
CHAPTER XXV
Sunday Through Wednesday
On Sunday Fellows worked long and hard with Wilks organizing the search that would be made of all downtown establishments. They got in Dudley Warner, the First Selectman, they got the Town Planning Commissioner and the head of the Chamber of Commerce. They plotted out the area from town maps, located and itemized the offices, stores, banks, theaters. They got the personnel managers of the two department stores in Stockford to bring in their lists of employees and made note of the departure of two men from their employ in the period they were interested in, the twentieth of February to the present time, and two policemen were sent to check the whereabouts of the missing two.
By the time the day was through, Fellows and Wilks had the operation pretty well worked out and the first thing Monday morning Raymond Watly was sent for and brought in. “This is the story,” Fellows told him. “I have twenty-five policemen, every available patrolman and supernumerary, out on a door-to-door check of this whole area. We’re convinced the man we’re after works around here. You can stay in your office and conduct your business, but we want you available at any moment to go someplace and make an identification. Our men have the description you gave us. Every employee, manager, or worker is going to be looked at and any one who even vaguely resembles the man you saw is going to be shown to you. When an officer spots such a man, he will call in immediately. I have a driver standing by who will pick you up and take you there. The officer will point out the man in question and then it’s up to you.”
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