Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  There remained his clothes. They were fantastically unsuitable. A long ill-fitting overcoat, very shabby, flapped at his heels, revealing a shiny blue-serge suit and a shirt with a celluloid collar. The collar was soiled. His hands, burdened with traveling bags, were gloveless; a battered derby hat rode uneasily on the back of his head.

  This man moved along the curb, pausing to peer into every car in the long line. At length he reached our car. He stopped on the sidewalk directly opposite, stared, frowned, stared again. His eyes, an intense blue, glittered behind thick glasses. He set down his two traveling bags.

  I realized at once that this must be Elmer Lewis and that he was puzzled by Jack’s absence. There was no reason why I should not have spoken to him. Still I did not. For one thing I disliked him instantly. Possibly I was prejudiced in advance, but Lewis’s appearance and manner, his strange apparel, did nothing to minimize the prejudice. For what seemed a long time he remained motionless outside the lowered window of our car, staring in.

  My antipathy increased. I glimpsed Jack swinging from the station and checked an absurd impulse to cry out, to stop him, to prevent the meeting. Jack set foot on the running board. Immediately the other man stepped forward.

  “Here I am,” he said.

  Perhaps because he had resented the trip Jack pretended a greater cordiality than he actually felt. He grasped the other’s hand in a hearty fashion. “You’re Mr. Lewis?”

  The stranger submitted to a limp handshake. “I’m Lewis. You have kept me waiting at least ten minutes.”

  Jack was a little dashed, but politely apologetic. “Sorry. I was looking through the station. This is my wife, Mr. Lewis.”

  “So I guessed. I’ve stood here watching her.”

  “I was almost on the point of speaking,” said I.

  “Well,” said Lewis in a flat, nasal voice, “you took your time about it.”

  This ungracious speech resulted in an awkward pause. Jack broke it by opening the rumble seat and attempting to relieve our guest of his baggage. Lewis drew back sharply.

  “Never mind! I prefer to place my own bags.”

  Whereupon he dropped one bag into the rumble seat and shoved the other into the seat with me. After settling his luggage, he climbed nimbly into the rumble seat. The drizzle was still intrusive; the evening air moist and dank. Jack’s instincts toward hospitality, sinking fast, were not yet entirely dead. He entered a mild protest.

  “You had better get in front. You will find it wet riding in the open.”

  “I don’t mind wet weather.”

  “There’s plenty of room up here for three,” I interposed. “You can ride with us and we can put both bags behind.”

  “I’m staying where I am.”

  Jack, still standing on the curb, was thoroughly annoyed by now. I glanced through the window at him and shook my head. He shrugged his shoulders resignedly. When he spoke to Lewis again it was with an emotionless civility.

  “Just where do you want me to take you?”

  “Crockford.”

  “Where in Crockford?”

  The thin lips parted to disclose a row of white teeth, very square and even. “Don’t you know where I want to be dropped?”

  “How should I?”

  For the first time Lewis seemed uncertain. Then he recovered himself and his glance was hard and level. “I will make the arrangements after we reach your cottage.”

  “Our cottage is six miles on the other side of Crockford.”

  “Then I’ll go that far with you. I want to see the cottage. Mrs. Coatesnash requested it.”

  At a complete loss, too astonished to voice the obvious objections, Jack put an end to the conversation by getting into the car and starting it with a terrific jerk. I lurched backward.

  “Sorry, Lola. That was meant for Lewis, and I rather hope he breaks his neck.”

  We flowed into traffic, crossed the bridge beyond the lighted railroad offices, debouched into the Post Road, quit the Post Road for our own. The night was desolate. Wind sighed and moaned and blew the light little car along. A few drops of rain hissed at the windows. For awhile we didn’t speak.

  Then, “I think he’s crazy,” said I, low.

  “Why should Mrs. Coatesnash ask him to go to the cottage?” growled Jack. “We’ve paid our rent; he’s got no right there.”

  “It’s beyond me. Do you suppose he came up from New York simply to look at our place?”

  Jack irritably sought to fathom the puzzle. “Mrs. Coatesnash may be planning to sell. That might explain why she didn’t condescend to write us. She wouldn’t risk losing rent till she was sure of a sale. Not that dame!”

  “Then you think Lewis is a real-estate agent?”

  “A real-estate agent with the winning attractiveness of a surly baboon!”

  The peak of traffic was over. Occasionally, not often, another car shot by. We sped into darkness intensified by empty fields and the ghostly arms of telegraph poles. Like a twisted ribbon ahead, lost in an endless perspective, stretched the lonely country road. The bag on the seat—Lewis’s bag—jostled continually against me. Once as I caught the braided leather handle to shift position, I happened to glance back into the rumble. Lewis was watching. He had half risen, one hand gripped the side of the car,, his spectacled eyes peered at his bag and at me. I expelled a sharp breath.

  “What’s wrong, Lola?”

  “Nothing.”

  I was ashamed to admit I had been startled by a pair of staring eyes. Then, glancing at the windshield mirror, I perceived that Lewis remained in the odd, half-erect position. It seemed impossible that he could maintain it, yet he did. He kept one hand in his overcoat pocket. The other supported his weight. His dense blue eyes were glued upon the bag with the braided handle. Snatching at the curtain which covered the back window, I pulled it down Jack roused from the reverie that overtakes good drivers on a clear highway.

  “What is it, sweetheart? You’re trembling.”

  “Mr. Whozis makes me nervous. He keeps staring in. Please let’s hurry.”

  Jack grinned, undisturbed. He had hunted too many nonexistent burglars during our life together to take seriously any intuitive fears.

  “Please hurry, Jack.”

  Usually I am a great girl for caution, Jack cocked an eyebrow. “Forty miles an hour is fast enough with the roads in this condition.”

  “Drive faster, please. The stores will be closed. We need eggs for breakfast.”

  “I’ll get them in the morning.”

  “Please, Jack.”

  “Have it your own way!”

  He made a vigorous surrender. The car shot forward as if pushed by a giant hand; the speedometer needle leaped from 40 to 45, danced a jig at 55. A few miles outside Crockford, over the banshee howl of the wind we heard the pop-pop of a pursuing motorcycle. A State policeman whizzed abreast of us. Jack gave me one look.

  “Your party, Lola.”

  We pulled dismally to the side of the road. Coughing and snorting the motorcycle stopped and a dark slim man in shiny boots alighted and approached us from the rear. I recognized the policeman, and instantly rallied my feminine charms. Lester Harkway, if not a friend, was at least an acquaintance, the first person we had met in Crockford. He had directed us to the cottage, and afterward, when we passed him patrolling the roads, he always touched his cap. He regarded us now with frank disfavor.

  “You kids were hitting fifty-five. This is a public road not a merry-go-round.”

  “It’s late,” I said appealingly. “I was in a hurry to get home and talked Jack into it.”

  “I should say you were in a hurry. I’ve got a good notion to give you a ticket.”

  Harkway, pretending a greater anger than he felt, intended, I was sure, to let us go with a warning. At this point Elmer Lewis projected himself into the affair with a lack of tact and in a manner which I had begun to believe was typical. Leaning from the rumble seat, speaking in brisk, insulting tones, he informed Harkway that he perso
nally had no time to waste on “hick policemen.” Jack’s jaw dropped and my eyes popped out. Harkway was Irish. He made up his mind at once, scribbled a ticket, ripped it off the pad. His face was bright red.

  “It’s tough on you,” he said to Jack, “but damned if I’ll swallow your friend’s lip. By rights he ought to pay the fine.”

  Again Lewis interrupted. “That suits me. Hand it here.” He reached for the slip of paper.

  Half out of the car by now and furious, Jack seized the ticket. “Suppose you let me manage my own business!”

  “As you choose! Only I wish you’d remember I’m in a hurry. I don’t propose to sit here the rest of the night.”

  “By God…”

  Harkway stepped hastily between the two angry men, but fortunately didn’t need to interfere. The emotional storm blew up and over. I caught Jack’s coat, and he got back into the car. He slammed the door himself. However much a nasty brawl might have lightened his spirits, he perceived it wouldn’t really clear the air, and also, on second thought, he disliked letting me in for it. He heaved a long, relinquishing sigh. Harkway flashed me a friendly grin, remounted his motorcycle, waved us on. Jack gripped the wheel, stamped on the starter and, until we reached Crockford, said nothing.

  Every inch of space before our favorite grocery store was jammed. Jack pulled up abruptly on the other, darker side of Main Street beneath an enormous elm which shaded the Episcopal Church. He turned to me.

  “Give me tomorrow’s grocery list, Lola.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “A little shopping, and something else that badly needs doing. Give me the list, Lola.”

  “What else?”

  “You needn’t worry. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing serious. My passions have cooled somewhat.” Jack grinned. “However, I’m going to get rid of that oaf. In about five minutes I’m coming back with a double-armload of groceries; at which time I will tell Elmer Lewis that I can use the rumble seat for onions. He has arrived at the end of the line.”

  Jack strode across the street. I, also, immediately departed. I wasn’t frightened any more, just relieved at the knowledge that soon we would see the last of Lewis. As I scrambled over his bag and under the wheel. I turned and hurriedly announced that I would wait in the drug store. I allowed him no chance for protest or questioning. My idea was that a scene was brewing and I desired no part in it.

  The drug store was at the end of the block. Seated at a marble-topped table I consumed a chocolate sundae and watched the door, anxious to receive the welcome news that the incubus had been lifted. Five minutes dragged by. Like a tediously turning wheel my mind retraced the events of the evening. I recalled my earlier conviction that the voice which demanded our appearance in New Haven had been disguised.

  Something about the voice troubled me—something elusive as a shadow. What was it? Suddenly I grasped the shadow. Lewis’s voice and the voice of the telephone were not the same!

  It was not Lewis who had telephoned Jack, but someone else, someone who had said that he was Lewis.

  Check unpaid, gloves left behind, in flying haste I quit the drug store. Nearly a block distant on the opposite side of the street was Hahneman’s Fancy Grocery, an old-fashioned emporium with a wide porch elevated from the sidewalk. Laden with packages Jack was descending the steps, trailed by a grocery boy with additional packages. Risking traffic, I darted into the middle of the street. Jack spied me and paused at the curb until, gasping, I reached him. “Lola, for heaven’s sake…”

  “Lewis didn’t phone you! I know he didn’t. It was someone else—a different voice.”

  Jack shook his head in a pitying way. “Your imagination may bring in an occasional check, but it’s hell on a husband’s nervous system. Suppose Lewis didn’t phone. Couldn’t he have a secretary and couldn’t he ask his secretary to make the call?”

  I was flattened. The natural explanation had quite escaped me; it had remained for Jack to point it out. The three of us. Jack, Dennis Cark, the grocery boy, and I, crossed to the parked car. Lewis sat stiffly in the rumble seat—stiffly, motionlessly, in the gloom of the great elm—and then the beams of passing headlights illuminated seat and passenger. There was a dark wet patch on the upholstery; there was a dark wet patch on Lewis’s coat.

  “That’s blood,” said Dennis Cark, and stopped beside me.

  Jack sprang forward and leaped to the running board. The groceries spilled from his arms to the street. He bent over. His voice seemed queer and high.

  “Stay back, Lola. This man is dead.”

  “Dead.”

  “He’s been shot.” Jack straightened. “I—I can’t find a gun. It looks like murder.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Discovered in the Rumble Seat

  I don’t remember a great deal about the next few minutes. There was a roaring in my ears, and I had a hazy impression that if I didn’t snap out of it, I was going to disgrace myself and faint. A crowd—one of those crowds which seems to materialize from nowhere—instantly collected, and Jack, to be counted on always in emergency, clung to the running board and shouted at them to stand back from the car.

  To me he said, “Get the police.”

  Something—his tone perhaps, the knowledge of what he expected of me—carried me down the block to the house where the village police chief lived. John Standish was sitting down to his evening meal when I burst in on him. He was a bulky, middle-aged man, and though he rose at once from the table, he seemed, in my excited state, intolerably slow. I know he made me wait while he went upstairs for his hat and coat.

  Not until we were on the street did I appreciate how his calmness had steadied me. His manner, as I was to discover, was all a trick. But I was prepared to like John Standish. Curiously, it did not occur to me to consider him as a possible source of danger to me and mine.

  The crowd had thickened around the car, and traffic was snarled in the street beyond. Two constables—whom Standish had phoned from the house—were attempting to rope off the place. The police chief pushed through. He explored the car, the rumble seat, the adjacent pavement and studied the body before he turned to Jack.

  “It’s murder, all right,” he said. “Suppose you tell me all about it.”

  “I hardly know where to begin.”

  “Begin,” suggested Standish, “by telling me who shot this man.”

  “I wish,” said Jack in a thin, tired voice, “I could. Unfortunately I wasn’t present when the murder occurred.”

  Standish frowned. “Where were you?”

  “In the grocery store across the street, shopping. My wife was at the drug store. Lewis was alone in the car.”

  “How long was he alone?”

  “Ten minutes at the most. Immediately I got back and discovered what had happened, my wife went for you.”

  “Lewis? You say his name was Lewis?”

  “Elmer Lewis. He was a friend of my landlady’s—Mrs. Luella Coatesnash. I picked him up in the New Haven station this afternoon.”

  “Where did he come from? What’s his home address? Who’s his nearest relative?”

  For the first time and with a certain inward shock, I realized the paucity of our knowledge concerning Elmer Lewis. I saw Jack hesitate. Then he plunged into a lengthy account of the phone-call episode. As if suddenly aware of the many eager listeners, Standish broke into the story and looked around. Umbrellas filled the sidewalk and the street, overflowed into the Episcopal churchyard and bobbed on the church steps like tiny tents in a mushroom city.

  Turning from Jack, the police chief put a few general questions. Had anyone noticed the car during the interval when Jack and I were gone? No one had. Had anyone heard a shot? Again no one had. This was not surprising. The physical conditions, the weather, even the deserted spot where we had parked the car, presented an almost perfect set of circumstances for tragedy. The din of Friday-night traffic, the honking and the backfiring, would screen the sound of a shot, and stragglers hurrying through
the rain would be too intent on keeping dry to observe with any interest a little gray car lost in the broad, thick shadows of the great elm.

  It next occurred to Standish that someone in the crowd might be acquainted with the victim. A line formed and one by one the bolder villagers stepped to the running board and peered into the rumble seat. Each, as he stepped down, shook his head. The crowd was fairly representative, and thus it appeared that Elmer Lewis was a comparative stranger to Crockford.

  As this examination terminated. Dr. Rand arrived to authorize the removal of the body. The village coroner was a gray-haired man of sixty who had secret leanings toward the stage. He had white, delicate hands and moved them constantly as he talked. It was reliably reported that he had studied Delsarte. A small-town physician all his life, a hundred miles from Broadway, he was long accustomed to death, but, as he was to tell us later, he never got to like it. Climbing to the fender of the car, deftly balancing himself, Dr. Rand turned his flashlight into the rumble seat.

  Seen in the bright illumination, Elmer Lewis looked startlingly alive. The eyes behind the steel-bowed spectacles stared forth wide open; the face, a little more pallid than in life, shone in the damp; the thin lips were slightly parted. The dead man slouched loosely in his seat; one hand was in his pocket, the other drooped across his lap. But except for the stain on his coat he might have been waiting for us to drive him to the cottage, arrogantly determined that we take him there. The nearest onlookers gasped and retreated.

  The coroner went grimly to work. He touched the dead man’s eyelids and throat, clasped the pulseless wrist. As he attempted to pull Lewis’s hand from the overcoat pocket, he accidentally struck the steel-bowed spectacles. With a macabre alacrity they began to slide. A woman spectator screamed. The coroner snorted, caught the spectacles, pocketed them. Turning, he made an acid speech to the curious throng.