Watly was nervous at that. “It’s been a long time, Chief. I only saw him that once. I don’t want to have to say whether somebody I look at now might be the man I talked to six weeks ago. I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t remember him that well.”
“This isn’t a question of wanting, Mr. Watly. This man killed a woman. You remembered very well what he looked like when the case first broke and you remembered him well when the kid drew the picture, well enough to criticize the likeness. Now you aren’t going to tell me you’ve suddenly forgotten what he looks like because I know that’s not so. This is a duty and it’s a duty only you can perform because you’re the only one who’s seen the man. I’m after a killer, Watly, and I'm not going to be thwarted because you’re squeamish about putting the finger on him.”
Watly chewed a lip. “That’s what I’m worried about, Chief. I’m the only witness. I’ve got a wife and two little girls. If I’m the only man who can convict him for killing a woman, what’s to stop him from killing me?”
“He’s not going to touch you, Watly. You’re going to be in the company of policemen at all times. The policemen will indicate the man in question and all you have to do is nod or shake your head. Now, there’s nothing hard about that, is there?”
Watly said no, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“One other thing. I want you to sit with me out on Center Street near the entrance of the cafeteria there during the noon hour. We’re going to watch everyone who goes in and out on the off chance our man might be one of them.”
“Yes, sir,” Watly said without enthusiasm.
The first call came in then. It was Supernumerary Pebble at Frank’s Tobacco Store. “The employee here could be it,” he said. “In his thirties, dark, slender, tall. I want Watly to see him.”
Fellows hung up. “Your first victim,” he told the man. “Lambert,” he called out to the driver in the front room. “Here’s Watly. It’s Pebble at Frank’s Tobacco. Center and South, northeast corner.”
He shooed Watly into the waiting arms of the patrolman and went to study the map of the town spread out on the table in his office. He marked the spot and made notes.
The man in Frank’s Tobacco Shop wasn’t the one, and Watly was returned to his office. Twice more he was picked up and driven the short distance to some new location for a look at another man and twice more he shook his head.
At ten minutes of twelve it was Fellows who picked him up. They drove over to the cafeteria and parked in front of a hydrant a few yards short of the entrance. “Don’t take your eyes off that door,” Fellows told him. “We’ll sit here till one o’clock when business slacks off and then I’ll take you in there to lunch.”
Watly nodded and watched and said nothing.
“How about that man?” Fellows asked, gesturing.
“No.”
“Not close?”
“No.”
“That one?”
Watly shook his head. “What if he doesn’t eat here?”
“Tomorrow we watch Manny’s. Wednesday we watch the Green Oak. Thursday we’ll sit outside Harper’s.”
“How long will it take?”
“To canvass this whole area? Most of the week.”
“What if you don’t find him?”
“We’ll find him. If he’s here he won’t get away. And he won’t touch you, so stop being nervous.”
They waited until after one without success and then they entered the cafeteria and ate lunch themselves, or at least Fellows ate. Watly had little appetite and toyed with a sandwich at the table the chief selected near the door. They watched each new customer, but by the time they left, when only a scattering of other diners still remained, the man they wanted had not come in.
Watly was called out four more times that afternoon, but the results were the same. The men he looked at were not John Campbell.
On Tuesday the systematic searching continued, and now the papers were picking up the case again. Rumors had spread that & hunt was on and the extraordinary procedures Chief Fellows had invoked were newsworthy. Six reporters showed up at headquarters that morning. Fellows, not an old hand at dealing with the press, nevertheless parried their questions well. Yes, they were canvassing the downtown area. No, he wouldn’t reveal why he thought the mysterious John Campbell was located there. Yes, Raymond Watly was assisting in the investigation. No, he wouldn’t predict what the results would be. There was a possibility, that was all.
Tuesday afternoon brought John Hilders back from Bridgeport, sneaking in and trying to mingle unobtrusively with the other reporters. He didn’t come close to getting away with it. The chief pointed at the man and said, “You! Out!”
Hilders tried to protest, and Fellows broke him off. “My men have orders to chase you out of this town. Starting now, you have thirty seconds to take off.”
Hilders started to plead, but the chief took out his watch. The pleading changed to cursing, but ended when Fellows, without looking up, raised a hand in preparation for a signal and Sergeant Unger came out from behind his desk to be ready. Hilders went to the door and said, “I’ll go anywhere I want and talk to anybody I want in this town and you can’t stop me.” He slammed the door behind him as Fellows’s arm came down.
The Hilders incident brought a laugh from the other newsmen, but it was the only laugh the day afforded. By the end of the afternoon five more identifications had fallen through, nothing had materialized in an hour of waiting outside Manny’s restaurant, and the most likely firms had all been investigated. Another job change was uncovered, but the man didn’t fit Campbell’s description.
When Wednesday also passed without results, an air of gloom settled on headquarters. The men who had started Monday with enthusiasm induced by the novelty of the action and the expectation of results were now going through the motions of a distasteful job that had to be done with as little agony as possible. Questions were asked politely, but a deadness had crept into the policemen’s tones. Watly was getting irritable at the frequent calls for his presence and his employer, Frank Restlin, was becoming irate. “How am I supposed to run a real estate office,” he complained to Fellows on the phone, “when my man can’t take prospective clients out to view the properties? How am I supposed to close deals when he keeps getting called away in the middle of them?”
Fellows said he didn’t know, but it wouldn’t last much longer. “After all, Mr. Restlin, we’re trying to help you. You want to find the man who froze your pipes, don’t you? You want the man who left a body in your house, don’t you? A murder in your house hurts your business, doesn’t it?”
“That doesn’t hurt my business,” Restlin retorted. “I got a lot of free advertising. What’s hurting it is having my man hamstrung.”
Even Sid Wilks was showing the effects. “You know what’s going to happen?” he said to Fellows when he checked in late Wednesday afternoon.
“No, Sid. What?”
“Nothing. That’s what. We’re not going to find him. We’re going to wrap it up tomorrow and we’re not going to find him.”
“We still might.”
“Don’t kid yourself. We’re scraping the bottom now. All the likely places were covered the first two days. It’s what I’ve been telling you. You try to read too much into your clues. The guy doesn’t work in Stockford. You just stretched your clues so fine you jump from one intangible to another and you end up in outer space.”
“He came there every night about five-thirty, Sid. I don’t think I’m reaching very far for my interpretation.”
“It’s still a reach, Fred. You jump to the conclusion he comes from a job that gets out at five. He could come from New Haven from a job that gets out at four, or he could be a rich man’s son who doesn’t work at all and picked five-thirty out of a hat. He could be an artist or a writer who doesn’t keep any hours. He could be anything, Fred.”
“He could, Sid, but the law of averages says it’s more likely what I’ve got.”
“W
ell, you’re going to have to get something else because, I can tell you, this isn’t it.”
CHAPTER XXVI
Thursday, March 12
When Wilks came in Thursday morning a man was sitting in Fellows’s office trying not to look at the picture gallery. He was a medium-sized middle-aged man with a gray balding head, a pleasant face, and glasses. He smiled apologetically when the detective sergeant stuck his head in the door, and said, “Chief Fellows asked me to meet him here.”
“Make yourself comfortable.” Wilks backed out and when the chief came in, said, “What gives, Fred? Who’s he?”
“His name is Bunnell. He’s new in town.”
“He got anything to do with the case?”
Fellows looked a little sheepish. “Yes, and if you think I reached in the stratosphere before, you’ll think I’m out of the solar system now.” He took off his coat and hat and hung them on the rack by the bulletin board with its schedule lists, rules and regulations, insurance company calendar, messages, and loose thumbtacks. “But hell, Sid,” he said, “he’s about all that’s left.”
The two went into the office, where Fellows introduced himself and the sergeant and thanked Mr. Bunnell for coming. “Mr. Bunnell,” he explained to Wilks, “is the man Watly showed the house to the day before the robbery. You remember?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Wilks said, looking sideways at the chief. Fellows sat down in his chair and Wilks closed the door and leaned against it. “Now, Mr. Bunnell, it was the twenty-fifth of February that you went out to look at the house, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. It was.”
“Would you tell us everything that happened?”
Bunnell scratched his ear. “Near as I can recall, Mr. Fellows. You see, I’ve recently taken a job here in town and my family and I were living temporarily in a furnished flat, but we wanted to get something of our own, something reasonable. I’m a school teacher and it was vacation. We’d gone to spend a few days with my folks and when we got back, I set about seeing what I could find. I went to the Restlin Agency and talked to Mr. Restlin and Mr. Watly about my needs, and Mr. Restlin thought he had just the place for me. He said it would be available the first of March and it was quite reasonable. It was furnished, but he felt some arrangement could be made if I wanted to use my own things and he told Mi’. Watly to take me out and look at it. This was the middle of the afternoon, as I recall, and Mr. Watly said certainly.
“We went out in my car and it did look like the kind of place I wanted. There was quite a bit of ground around and I have three children, so it was fine on that score. We got out and it had an empty look about it, no sign of life, but we walked around to the back and he showed me the garage and where the property extended and I asked if we might see the inside. He thought the people there wouldn’t have any objection and we rang the bell several times but there was no answer. He tried the door and it was locked. He didn't have any keys with him, so he said that perhaps if we came back the next day there’d be somebody home. I agreed because, while it looked like just what we wanted, I’d like to see the inside and I’d like to have my wife see it. We went back and talked to Mr. Restlin about it and it was left that I’d bring my wife with me the next afternoon and we’d take a look and they’d bring along keys, so if no one were home, we could go in and look around anyway.
“Of course, none of that happened. I went back the next day and Mr. Restlin was home and Mr. Watly was in a dither because of the body you people had discovered.”
“Did you mention this to anyone, Mr. Bunnell?” Fellows was particularly interested in this angle. “How many people knew you were going to look at that house on Thursday?”
“Well, my wife, of course.” He hesitated. “But if you mean knew it was that particular house, then I can’t tell you. I told her about where it was and what it looked like and I guess I mentioned that we might have found a place to a couple of neighbors who knew we were looking.”
“Would you give me the names of those neighbors, the ones you told?”
“I’m not sure which ones I did tell.”
Fellows pulled a pad over. “Let me have the names of anybody you or your wife might have told, anybody at all. That would be that afternoon or early evening.”
“Just Mrs. Curran, our landlady, and the Motts next door, Mr. and Mrs. Mott. And the Furlows down on the first floor. Those would be the only ones.”
Fellows noted the names and wrote Bunnell’s address beside them. “What do Mr. Mott and Mr. Furlow look like?”
“They’re both elderly. Mr. Mott—”
“How old?”
“Oh, in their sixties, at least I should judge so.”
“Never mind then. You’re sure no one else could have known?”
“Quite sure.”
Fellows thought a moment. “Did you see anyone around when you were looking at the house? In the woods, driving by, anything?”
Mr. Bunnell shook his head. “No. That’s not to say there couldn’t have been someone. But the whole place looked quite desolate and empty.”
Fellows asked a few more brief questions and thanked the man and saw him to the door. Wilks watched the process like an adult observing a child’s game. “And what,” he said when the man had gone, “was the meaning of all that?”
Fellows sat down at the desk again. “Stealing the lease to conceal his handwriting sounds crazy, but it’s really quite plausible when you get down to it. That I can understand. What I’ve never yet been able to figure is why Campbell quit and ran.”
“We talked that over Saturday night.”
“I know. And what it boils down to, of course, is fear of—no, not fear—expectation of discovery. He must have known or thought he would be interrupted.”
Wilks sat against the table with his arms folded and smiled pityingly. “It could equally well be that he decided it was too much trouble and said the hell with it.”
Fellows smiled back. He said, “If I were trying to cover up a murder, I don’t think anything would be too much trouble.”
Wilks shrugged. “A point for the defense. So Campbell thought he was going to be discovered. What makes you pick a possible client for a threat?”
“The fact that I can’t find anything else. I made a trip out there yesterday. I asked Mrs. Banks if she ever smelled anything those nights before he left. She hadn’t. I tried the other neighbors down the road. They didn’t. None of them had showed the slightest interest in Campbell or his house or what went on there. Nobody was going to call on them. I asked about the children in the neighborhood. Had they played around Campbell’s place? They hadn’t. The upshot of it was that no one around there knew anything about Campbell until we found the body. But he quit destroying the body and robbed the real estate office instead. That was Wednesday night. Obviously something was going to happen Thursday. I don’t know what it could be except, possibly, that he knew Bunnell was coming.”
Wilks said, “True, but there could be other reasons you don’t know about.”
“I can only work with what I know.”
“And you know now that Campbell ‘couldn’t possibly have known Bunnell was coming, so where does that leave you?”
“With another bum lead. I’m used to it.”
“It’s that stratosphere stuff, Fred. If you’ll note what’s happened in this case, all the dead ends have come from following up conclusions based on conclusions based on conclusions, not from tracing real evidence.”
Fellows shook his head. “I can’t sell you on anything, can I?”
“Not me, Fred. Not that stratosphere stuff. The only thing that’ll sell me is showing somebody to Watly today and having Watly say, ‘That’s the man,’ only that’s not going to happen, because it’s another one of your conclusions.” He went to the door and said sadly, “I’ll bet all my cribbage losses, double or nothing, that we’re going to finish the job this afternoon and it’s going to be another dead end. I’ll bet you Campbell doesn’t work anywhere near Sto
ckford.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Thursday and Friday, March 12-13
Sergeant Wilks was right, at least on the first half of his bet. From one o’clock on the officers of the Stockford police force began drifting back into headquarters, their questioning assignments completed. Watly had been called out once that morning and breaths were held, but it was another false alarm and after that there was nothing. The last man reported in at five minutes of three, and Fellows, his desk piled high with their reports, was busy sorting and checking, making sure not one place had been overlooked. If he learned nothing about the murder, he learned a lot about the town. His face was solemn as he worked, but not disappointed. Having expected nothing, he had no reason to be.
Wilks came in, looking glum himself. He stared at the chief bent over his papers, and said, “You want some help with that, Fred?”
“No thanks, Sid. I’m sending all the others home. You might as well go home too.”
“There’s the Grafton Tool and Die Company, Fred. I suppose we could check it. They employ a thousand people.”
“It’s kind of far away.”
“It’s not the center of town, but a guy might get to Campbell’s house from there in half an hour if he didn’t buy more than a couple of things at the grocer’s.”
“It’s something to look into, Sid. Maybe I’ll line that up over the weekend.”
“You don’t sound as though it’s the end of the world.”
“There’s still an angle or two left, Sid. We’ll work them out.”
“O.K. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Chief Fellows didn’t show up for muster on Friday, March thirteenth. Sergeant Wilks stood in for him, calling the roll and reading out the day’s assignments. On this day the assignments were all routine, traffic and beats. The murder case was out of it and there were no other problems that needed special attention.
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