by Jerry eBooks
The street was quiet, deserted. I crossed the small porch, ran across the lawn to keep my footsteps from echoing on the walk. I was running like hell, but two blocks away my mind began working again and I slowed to a walk. I took the cigar band I’d found beside Margot Graham from the side pocket of my coat. A little of her blood was on it and I shuddered. Then I crammed the band deep into the left pocket of my coat, headed for the Clarion office.
When I closed the door behind me, the smell of paper and ink washed pleasantly over me. My desk was over to one side, piled high. A stack of yellowed papers was in the corner, and it seemed you could never find anything in the cluttered office. In eighteen years you accumulate a lot of stuff and every time I thought of cleaning the place I couldn’t make up my mind what to throw away. So it just kept piling up.
I took off my coat, hung it on a nail over my desk. I heard a movement behind me and whirled around, jerking. It was Willie Lance, my reporter and associate editor. He’d just come through the short corridor from the composing room.
He looked at me and said, “What’s wrong, Cass? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.” He was a short, thin young fellow with big ears and a long nose. His parents had died several years ago and Matt O’Toole—who is Hoskinsville—had sort of taken Willie under his wing. Matt had sent Willie off to school, but Willie’d come back, gone to work for me.
I made some damfool reply to Willie about having indigestion. I washed my hands and put water on my head. I don’t really think I expected the cold water to drive the vision of Margot Graham’s lifeless body from my mind. I was just stalling, getting myself together.
Then I realized what I might be doing to myself. The longer I stalled, the worse it was going to look for me if it came out that I’d been in Margot Graham’s cottage. I wheezed back to the long, gloomy office. Willie had sat down at his desk, run a sheet of paper in his ramshackle typewriter, and was lighting a cigarette, preparatory to starting on the sports page. His chair scraped back sharply as I picked up the phone and gave the operator Sheriff Raymond Nord’s number.
Willie came over beside me. “What’s up, Cass? Why’re you calling the Sheriff?”
“Murder,” I said.
“What . . .!”
At the other end of the line, Nord said, “Hullo.”
“This is Cass Bailey, Raymond. Skedaddle right over here.”
Willie tugged at my arm, his eyes wide over his long nose. “Who?”
I shook his hand off my arm, said into the phone I “Raymond, you get the hell over here. I’ll guarantee to wake you up!”
“Can’t you tell me . . .?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here!” I shouted.
I replaced the phone, and Willie was fairly jumping in his pants. “Who got killed, Cass? And who did it? Are we going to run an extra? How . . .”
“Just keep your shirttail in. We ain’t going any place until Raymond Nord gets here. Somebody murdered Margot Graham, but we ain’t running a scandal-sheet, Willie. You’ll get your chance to write up the facts that Nord finds.”
He shrugged helplessly, crestfallen, and sat down and chain-smoked until Raymond Nord slammed the office door rattlingly behind him.
Willie jumped about three feet off the floor. It’s Margot Graham, sheriff! She’s been murdered!”
Raymond drew up stiffly, looked from Willie to me.
I nodded. “She’s at her cottage. I found her.”
“You!”
I sat down on the edge of my desk. “About a month ago, just a day or two after she’d got in town, Margot Graham came to the office to take a subscription to the paper. Willie was out and nobody was back in the composing room, and my stomach was bothering me. So when I took a little nip—strictly for my stomach, you know—she sort of invited herself to one, and . . .” Face burning, I couldn’t go on.
Raymond Nord leaned his grizzled length toward me, his slate-colored eyes as wide as they would go in their crinkles of wind-burned skin. “You’re trying to tell me, Cass, that you . . .”
“All right,” I said hoarsely, “I played the part of an old fool. We had a drink or two and got sort of . . . well, chummy. It was like being drugged. She left the office and a day or two passed. I kept seeing her face every which way I’d look—even overhead in the darkness when I’d lay in bed and couldn’t sleep. So the third night after she was here . . . well, I didn’t have anything to do. I just sort of found myself going toward her house. I was crazy, I’ll admit. But I’m just a human, Raymond . . .”
“And a damn weak one at that,” Raymond said. “That’s right.” I guess I came close to moaning it. “I knocked on her door. Then I knew what a fool I was being. I guessed she’d laugh at me. But before I could turn and run, she opened the door, and she didn’t laugh at all. Well, she laughed, but not amused, mocking laughter like I thought she’d laugh. She invited me in, and I couldn’t have turned from that door if there’d been a million horses dragging me, helping me get away from there.”
Raymond didn’t snort derisively. He’d seen Margot Graham, like everybody else in town. He waited quietly.
“We just sat and talked,” I finished lamely. “So help me. She let me feel welcome, but at the same time she made me aware that I was old enough to be her pa. Then I left, and that’s all there was to it until this afternoon. She phoned me, and she wasn’t so nice. She was brittle and tough. She wanted a thousand dollars or she was going to start a storm of gossip and scandal that would ruin me. And in a town as small as Hoskinsville she could have done it.”
“And you a man with a public trust like a newspaper,” Raymond added sagely, “and with two kids you wanted to protect. Sure . . . she knew you’d pay off. What then?”
“I went to her house with the thousand dollars. It’s in my pocket now. She was dead. And that’s all, so help me.”
Raymond looked at me a long time and the hairs on the back of my neck and all along my arms were like pins. Then he said quietly, “I’ll call a deputy and the coroner and we’ll go over to her house.”
I rose heavily, my back sticky with sweat. While Nord phoned a deputy, Willie Lance stuck a pencil behind each one of his big ears, stuffed his coat pocket full of yellow paper; we left a small light burning, locked the office door, and got in Raymond Nord’s car.
Margot Graham lay just as I had left her, arm outflung, crimson nails biting into the carpet, the soft light somehow glaring and harsh with the presence of death. I sat down and kept my face turned away. Nord inspected the room, while Willie shivered and stared in horrified fascination at death.
Nord left the room and I heard his footsteps all around in the back part of the cottage. He came back in the living room. “Her bedroom’s been torn to pieces, drawers dumped on the floor, mattress ripped, even the carpet pulled off the floor in a pile. Somebody was sure hunting something.”
“Think they found it?” Willie said.
Nord bobbed his sandy-haired, shaggy head. “A picture has been torn off the wall. Behind it, Margot Graham had cut into the wall and inset a steel strongbox. Somebody was evidently hunting the key to the box and found it. The box was on the floor, open, the key in the lock, empty.”
He planted his feet wide before me. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, Cass?”
I shook my head vehemently. “Raymond, I told you the whole mess, so help me. Can’t you see? I’m not the only one Margot shook down. That was her racket, simple and profitable. But somebody kicked, killed her, and took whatever incriminating evidence she had against him from the strong box.”
There was a sound at the doorway and Raymond’s lank deputy came in. Raymond gave the deputy instructions to stick around until the coroner came, added that it was apparently a clean kill with no clues; then as we went out, Willie almost tripping on my heels, Nord added: “As I was saying, maybe she came here to shake a few of you old fools down. I’m inclined to believe it. But the day she came here I started checking on her, quietly. She had a double motive i
n coming here, Cass. She had her little racket—and this is the home town of her former husband. It was made to order—a small town where they’d gossip about anything and a little gossip would ruin anybody and, in case she ran into difficulties and needed legal help, an ex-husband who is the finest legal brains in the state.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Not Gerald Winison!” Raymond nodded, and even in the darkness I could almost see his face tightening, growing grey, haggard.
“Gerald Winison!” Willie breathed. “Golly, what a story!”
We drove across the middle of Hoskinsville. It was Matt O’Toole’s town, who called its people his children, some of whom had gone out to win fame. One of whom had been married to Margot Graham. I wondered if they’d mention Gerald Winison for governor after tonight.
We drew up before Gerald’s small brick bungalow, got out. We waited, and I could feel Raymond Nord’s reluctance. Then with a sigh he started for the door.
Gerald’s young auburn-haired wife answered the door and Raymond twisted his hat in his hand. “I’d like to see Jerry, Mrs. Winison.”
She smiled, said hello to all of us, and added: “Come in please.”
“No,” Raymond said. “I can talk to Jerry out here.”
He came to the door after a moment, a tall, husky young man in his shirt sleeves. His dark, crinkly hair was mussed, his eyes sparkling. “Hello, fellows. Been upstairs in the kid’s room, wrestling with the little rascal. He . . .”
“Come outside, Jerry,” Raymond said heavily, and Jerry’s words cut off in his throat. He stepped out, closed the door behind him.
“I didn’t want your wife to hear this, Jerry, but Margot Graham’s dead.”
“It was murder,” Willie, standing at my elbow, added.
Jerry finally said, “When?”
“Tonight,” Raymond said. “I want to talk to you, Jerry. Tell your wife you’ll be coming back later.”
Jerry turned stiffly, opened the door, poked his head in, and told his wife he would be back after awhile. We went down the walk to the sheriff’s car. I could sense the questions on Jerry’s lips, but he didn’t say anything.
The sheriff started the car, began cruising slowly down the dark street. “Want to tell me, Jerry? I know that you were married to her. I found that out not long after she got in town.”
“Yes,” Jerry said. “I was married to her. But I divorced her. Peg—my present wife—knows all about it.” Somehow he spoke too loudly.
“Yeah,” Raymond remarked almost sadly. “The day she came to town, for instance, I had a hunch Margot Graham was up to no good. So I went to the train station, checked the point of origin of her ticket. From there it wasn’t too hard, sending wires, making a couple phone calls. You better tell me the whole thing, Jerry.”
“Why not?” Jerry said with a faint, bitter laugh. “After this thing breaks I’ll be washed up anyway. I’ll have to leave Hoskinsville and all that I’ve built here and take my family some place else.
“I thought I’d got over Margot Graham when I came to Hoskinsville,” Jerry was saying softly. “I married Peg and pitched in to work. It’s been five years since then, short years. I knew they were over the moment I passed Margot on the street, a day or two after she’d come here. She’d seen my picture in a newspaper, she said, and had decided to take a look in my new home town. She asked me to come to her house, and like a spineless rat . . .”
“. . . In a hypnotic trance,” Raymond said heavily.
“Yes,” Jerry’s voice shook. “In a hypnotic trance I went to her house. I talked to her a few minutes, left. Somehow I was over it; I didn’t want to go back again. That night at home with Peg I knew I was cured of Margot Graham once and for all. Then she called me. And what could I do? Have the whole town know I’d slipped to my former wife’s house under cover of night? Try to convince them that it hadn’t meant anything, that I was cured of her?” His laugh, again, was bitter. “I might as well tried holding a hurricane in a fragile china teacup! If Margot said the things she said she would, I knew I was a ruined man.”
“So you went back,” Raymond said.
“Yes,” it was almost a whisper. “I went back. Again, and then again. And she told me she’d hit a gold mine, that she didn’t know so many yokels just waiting to be shaken down existed in one town. She was going to trim . . . the whole bunch of us. And I was going to be her legal aid if she needed it—or else. Her first collection, she said, was going to be fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty thousand!” Willie, I, and Sheriff Nord said it almost at once. Raymond added: “Who the hell in Hoskinsville would have that kind of money?”
“She didn’t say,” Jerry’s tortured voice went on.
“You didn’t know any of the men, Jerry?”
I squirmed in the back seat. Jerry didn’t answer for quite awhile, then he whispered, “The only one she ever named was Doctor Daniel Hastings.”
The house of Doctor Daniel Hastings was quiet with the chill calm of death. All the bright lights in the long quietly-furnished living room couldn’t dispel the cloud that hung perpetually over the place. Or maybe it was just because I knew that upstairs lay Dam’s wife. She hadn’t walked in almost ten years since her automobile accident, and Dan had operated seven times, each time knowing it would take one more operation to cure her. And through all the pain, she never lost her smile, the worship in her eyes, the expression on her wasted face telling the world that next time Dan would succeed . . .
Dan invited us in. His eyes clouded a trifle as he looked from one to the other of us, saying hello, his strong, surgeon’s hands hanging stiffly at his sides. “Sit down, gentlemen.”
Raymond shook his head, and we remained standing, a little knot just inside the doorway. Raymond said, “Can your wife hear us?”
Dan Hastings frowned. “No. She’s fixed for the night, upstairs, with the nurse. But why . . .”
“I just wanted to spare her listening to what we’ve got to say to each other,” Raymond said. “Margot Graham has been murdered. You’re not going to deny that you knew her?”
Dan looked from one to the other of us. “No. I’m not going to deny it.” He turned his bald head so that his face was tilted away from us. His voice was low, thick: “I knew—I suppose I knew even while I was seeing her that it would come to this sometime.”
Raymond said, “How many times did you see her, Dan?”
“Twice.” He looked up slowly, his eyes burning with self-condemnation. “I’m not going to ask any of you to understand. Always in the past I’ve lost myself in my work. In the clinics. I’ve managed to crush the hopelessness and despair of watching my wife lie week after week, helpless and hurting, and being unable to help her, crush it just by working until I dropped.
“I’ll not ask you to understand,” he said again. “But I was tired of pain and hopelessness and despair. I . . . I guess I was awfully lonely. Then one day Margot Graham walked into my office. I lost my sense.”
“. . . In a hypnotized trance,” Raymond Nord remarked heavily. “Then she put the pressure on you for a shake-down, Dan?”
Again his blue eyes went over us. He nodded.
“How much did she want?” Nord asked.
“Fifty thousand dollars?”
Dan laughed grimly. “Where would I get that kind of money? Every dime I make has a place to go.” He could have added that it was because he got paid in dimes mostly.
“There’s just one thing I want to ask, sheriff,” Dan A Hastings said. “Don’t let my wife know. I’ll take what’s coming to me—but it would kill her.”
“I’ll not let her know,” Raymond said. But each of us knew it was a promise he couldn’t keep, possibly. There’d have to be a trial . . . And no matter who finally got the noose around his neck, all our names were coming out.
Raymond said, “You go along upstairs and tell your wife you’ve got to be out awhile, Dan. We’ll wait outside in my car.”
When Dan came back, he got in the back
seat with Willie and me. Willie had turned on the overhead light in the car, was scribbling furiously on his yellow paper. He looked up, eyes shining with excitement, face flushed. “What a story! What a story! Now I’ll drop the bombshell. The next stop, gents, is Matt O’Toole’s house!”
We almost went through the top of the car. “You’re crazy, Willie!”
“That’s a lie, Willie!”
“You’re letting your marbles spill, Willie!”
“No,” Willie said. “I ain’t crazy, and I ain’t lying. I . . . ”
“He’s not,” I said heavily. I ran my hands in the pockets of my coat, pulled the cigar band that I’d found beside Margot Graham from the right hand pocket. “I was hoping you’d get a confession maybe before now, Raymond. I wasn’t intending to hold out on you, but I didn’t want to show you this until I had to.” I handed him the cigar band. “Everybody around town knows that Matt O’Toole smokes that brand. I found it beside her body. That’s her . . . her blood on it.”
Raymond folded the band slowly, slipped it in his vest pocket. “She sure must have been some woman. Even after she’s dead, she’s tearing the foundations right out from under Hoskinsville—you, Cass, our honest, fighting newspaper man, Jerry, the lad with the playgrounds, teen age clubs, the fighter for civic betterment, Dan the crusading doctor, and now Matt O’Toole, who built the damn town in the first place!”
Raymond turned to Willie. “How come you to think of Matt?”
“I heard him couple days ago when I went up to his place for a story. He was talking over the phone. To her.’Sides, Matt O’Toole is the logical guy to be taken for as much as fifty thousand. He’s rich.”
You’d never have known it by looking at him. Matt ushered us into his sweeping living room with its rustic furniture with a hearty hello. He was a strapping, freckled, red-headed Irishman, his hair flying like a wild flag. Some doctor had told Matt thirty years ago that he might live six more months by coming to the hills. Matt had come; he was still alive. He’d transformed the hill wilderness into a city bustling about the woolen homespun textile industry. O’Toole mountain homespuns were known the world over, the choice fabric of elite tailors in New York. And in building his industry, which he’d started from hand looms in rough mountain cabins, and his city, Matt O’Toole had never lost sight of the human element. He believed in parks and churches and good schools. He believed in good working conditions and clean government. Jerry had built playgrounds, but Matt’s money had backed him. Dan had fought for the clinics, but Matt was really the general in the campaign.
