“No one is holding you people here. You’d be better off at home and more profitably employed. I wager half you women haven’t washed your dinner dishes.”
The crowd broke ranks. Dr. Rand returned to his labors, unbuttoned the overcoat, stripped open waistcoat, vest and shirt. Following the course of the wound he located the bullet. It had penetrated the body and dropped to the floor of the car. Dr. Rand picked up the bit of bloodstained lead and handed it to Standish.
“There’s Exhibit A. The poor fellow died instantly, never knew what hit him, no sign of struggle. Happened some time during the last half hour. That’s all for now. You can take him to the morgue.” Removing a lap robe from the car, the physician covered the body, interrupted himself to say testily, “Where in hell is the ambulance? Are those drivers always at the movies?”
Just as he spoke, the local ambulance clanged magnificently through Main Street and stopped, sputtering, at the curb. After the ambulance and its burden had gone away, John Standish casually hoisted himself into the now-vacant rumble seat and said:
“Mind driving me to the station?”
Although the police station was immediately across the square, that ride was the longest I ever took. Of the three of us, John Standish alone bore it well. As we alighted, he noticed the bag between Jack and me—Lewis’s traveling bag, which we had quite forgotten. Standish carried the bag inside.
The police station occupied the basement of the village court house, and had a separate, neatly labeled entrance. On either side of the entrance grew potted cedars, provided by the Garden Club and watered in rotation by designated members. Passing these civic tributes, we entered a large uncarpeted reception room with a door at each end opening into two smaller rooms. One of these was used by officers of the State police as a dressing room. The other served as the village police station.
In towns the size of Crockford, police stations close at six o’clock and police protection virtually ceases. Standish unlocked the second door, and we followed him into his poorly furnished office. Carelessly dropping the bag, the officer knelt, touched a match to a fire laid in an unsightly grate. Jack pulled out a chair for me—there were half a dozen ranged around a scarred pine table—selected another for himself. The previous excitement, the bracing need of decision was gone and reaction had set in; I thought Jack looked depressed and very tired.
The fire refused to start, Standish struck another match, and I achieved an initial unpopularity. Studying my surroundings, I saw built across the back of the small room what appeared to be a barred iron cage, like a cage in a zoo. The contraption, open at the top, boasted a heavy iron, double-padlocked door. There was a cot inside.
“What is it?” I asked.
Jack turned. “It must be the jail.”
Now, I am a New Yorker, and at the moment I remembered the towering, somber mass of the Tombs. The contrast was too much. I laughed, partially from nerves, to be sure, but I laughed. Standish turned around.
“It’s small, Mrs. Storm, but Crockford is a law-abiding town. Always was, till a couple years ago when you town folks started coming, bringing your liquor and big-town ideas.”
After that I kept still. At length the tardy fire blazed up and Standish, lighting a smelly briar pipe, settled himself at the table, Jack spoke in a fagged voice.
“My wife has suffered a severe shock. She’s dead tired. So am I. We’ve had no dinner. Can’t we let any further questioning go till tomorrow?”
Standish eyed me particularly. “This is murder, Mr. Storm.”
“Very well then. Only please be as quick as you can.”
The other took his time. He was the official embodiment of the law and he permitted that important fact to sink in. He sharpened a pencil, laid out a notebook, telephoned for Minnie Gray, wife of one of the deputies and public stenographer, and finally gave us his attention.
“There are several things I want to clear up immediately. For instance, the phone call. You say it came from New York?”
“The call was made in New York about three o’clock,” Jack said. “I can’t tell you the exact time; I didn’t look at a clock. But Lewis left there on the three-fifteen.”
“Did you see him get off the train in New Haven?”
“No.” Jack smiled faintly. “However, I was told he would be on the three-fifteen; when I arrived at the station the train had just pulled in, and Lewis was waiting with his bags. So I assume…”
The first hint of what Standish’s attitude was to be leaked out. “In this case I’m beginning to think it isn’t safe to assume anything. I want facts, a lot of facts. In the first place, who is Lewis? What was he doing here in Crockford: What was his business?”
“He didn’t say. I understood it concerned Luella Coatesnash; apparently she had asked him to go to my cottage. That’s all I know about it. I spoke to him for only a few minutes outside the station.”
“Then you didn’t hold any conversation on the way over from New Haven?”
“Lewis rode in the rumble seat. Lola and I were in front with the windows closed.”
“Isn’t there room enough in front for three?”
“Lewis chose the rumble seat. Indeed he insisted upon riding there.”
“In the rain!”
“Yes, in the rain. I thought it peculiar. I did my best to dissuade him. I failed.”
Standish’s pipe went out. He re-lighted it. He looked skeptical. I put in a quick suggestion. “Maybe Lewis didn’t want to talk to us. There was something queer, secretive about him. Perhaps that is the reason he chose the rumble seat.”
“Possibly.” Standish turned politely to Jack. “Suppose we go back to the phone call. That call must be traced.”
“Don’t the local operators keep track of long-distance calls? “I’ll check with them later. At the moment I am interested in your help.”
“Then it might be better to talk to Lola. She answered the phone. Lewis was on the line when I got there. Or rather his secretary was.”
“His secretary!” The stiff, gray brows climbed. “Didn’t you talk to Lewis himself on the phone? Certainly you gave me that impression.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Then you didn’t talk to Lewis on the phone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Think! Don’t you know?”
Jack made an impatient gesture. “You’re rushing me and I want to get the story straight. The man I talked to on the phone said he was Lewis, but later on when I met Lewis I decided he wasn’t the person who phoned. Lewis’s voice was different, higher, more nasal, much thinner.”
“Why do you say you spoke to Lewis’s secretary?”
“Simply because I imagined…”
“Let me provide the imagination; you stick to facts.” The officer brusquely moved his chair toward mine. “Now, Mrs. Storm, please be exact. When you spoke to the New York operator this afternoon did you hear any mention of an exchange? Did you hear coins dropping—we might learn in that way whether a public phone was used—did you hear any scrap of conversation which might help us fix the locality where the call originated?”
“No,” I said.
“Will you tell exactly what you did hear?”
I started bravely, came to an awful pause. At that unpropitious moment an appalling thought occurred to me. I realized that at no time had I heard a woman’s voice. Yet telephone operators—and an operator would necessarily put through a long-distance call—are invariably feminine.
In the growing silence I re-checked my findings; the results remained the same; the phone call stood forth in sickening detail. The words, the accents, the voice, particularly the voice. The male voice which informed me that New York was calling, the male voice which requested Jack.
“Have you remembered something, Mrs. Storm?”
“I’m afraid I have.” My heart knocked painfully. “Aren’t telephone operators always women?”
“I suppose so…of course…I never knew of a male operator a
t a central exchange. Why do you ask?”
Standish’s face grew cold. Jack’s bewildered. Both stared. Except tor the crackle of the fire, the room was still.
“The phone call,” I said, “might not have come from New York. I didn’t hear a phone operator, so there’s no proof it did. None at all.”
“But. Lola, you told me…”
“Be quiet, please. I was mistaken—tricked. I believe now. I was meant to think it was a New York call; I did think it. Quit staring, you two. This is no fun for me.”
I was on the point of hysterics, and both men perceived it. Standish harrumphed Jack moved closer to me; his eyes said, Steady girl, steady. He put his hand on my arm. Then I had to behave With a definite effort of will I gave a full account of the phone call, straightforward, coherent—and, at any rate to Standish, unconvincing He soon made that clear.
“Am I to understand that you didn’t hear a long-distance operator?”
“That’s right.”
“Weren’t you suspicious when a male voice said New York was calling? Didn’t it occur to you that someone might be faking a long-distance call?”
“Not at the time. I had no reason to be suspicious. Can’t you see I hadn’t?”
The little try at extenuation fell flat. “Did you hear two voices, Mrs. Storm, or only one?”
“I can’t be sure. At the time I supposed there were two. But now I’m inclined to think there was only one.”
“Could you identify the voice you did hear?”
“I might identify it; I didn’t recognize it.” My next words were carefully chosen. “In fact, I had a definite impression that the voice was disguised.”
I had expected a reaction. I got none. From the amount of interest Standish exhibited, he might have believed the latter part of my statement to be a deliberate embellishment. I had got off to a wrong start. I did not know whether he thought my story of the telephone message was untrue or whether he thought it was colored and confused by what had happened afterward.
Standish wound up that part of the inquiry. “Well, this is the matter in a nutshell. We don’t know what time the call was made, who made it, whether it originated in New York or was only made to appear so. My guess is we will have difficulties tracing the telephone message.”
His manner, courteous but cool, indicated that he considered the young Storms unsatisfactory witnesses. Gladly disposing of me, he resumed his interrogation of Jack.
“Pretty tough driving this afternoon, wasn’t it, what with the rain?”
“Terrible.”
The officer gloomily drew a lungful of smoke. “I’m not for a minute doubting your veracity, but I don’t quite understand your making that long drive as a favor to a man you’d never seen or heard of. It looks curious.”
“Curious or not,” Jack said shortly, “I’ve explained how it came about. I was taken by surprise, and I had been called upon so often to do various unpleasant little jobs for Mrs. Coatesnash that I automatically agreed.”
“What time did you leave your home?”
“At four o’clock.”
“Can anyone corroborate you? Did you meet anyone who knows you on the road?”
“Not on the way over. On the way back, about five miles outside Crockford, we were stopped for speeding.”
The officer’s eyes brightened. “Who stopped you?”
Before Jack answered, Minnie Gray crept in. A small timid woman with enormous teeth and a perpetually worried air, she took an interminable time snapping a rubber on her notebook locating a soft lead pencil, adjusting her skirts.
“And please speak slowly, Mr. Storm. Sixty words a minute is my speed.”
Neither Jack nor I understood that we could not be compelled to submit to a formal questioning. The scratch of the stenographer’s pencil, the frequent admonitions to slow down, the consciousness that every spoken word went promptly into a neat little notebook, threw Jack off his stride, made him choose his phrases. An artist, not a business man, he was ignorant of his own legal rights and the police chief took advantage of this ignorance. He asked questions which no lawyer would have allowed, and Jack obliged with replies which in cold print conveyed a quite different impression than he meant to convey.
Standish returned to the examination with his customary thoroughness. “Let’s start with your being stopped on the road.”
Jack carefully told of Harkway’s pursuit and of Lewis’s interference in the subsequent colloquy. In reproducing the dead man’s language and his own, it was impossible to avoid a revelation of the disagreeable scene. Jack didn’t dodge the point but with Minnie’s notebook staring him in the face, naturally didn’t stress it.
Standish listened closely. “You were angry?”
Jack hesitated. “Angry isn’t just the word. I would prefer to say that I was irritated. Lewis had an—an unfortunate manner. I’ve described how he behaved in the station. Then, later on, by butting in he got me loaded down with a ticket. Of course I didn’t like it. Who would?”
“Did you and Lewis quarrel?”
“He said a few things; I said a few. It was more an argument than a quarrel.”
“Why did you put up with him? As I picture it, Lewis acted badly from the first. It was your car. Why didn’t you ask him to get out?”
“We were five miles from town; it was raining; I decided to wait till we got to Crockford. I meant to get rid of him then. I believe I told you so.”
“Yet when you reached Crockford you went into the grocery store and still he was in your car. Still you hadn’t spoken? Or had you?”
Jack grinned wryly. “My curse is a stupid sense of humor. I intended to come back from the grocery store and tell Lewis I needed the rumble seat for onions. It sounds absurd, but it’s the truth.”
Standish made no comment. Lifting his telephone, he put through a call to the New Haven police station and requested that Lester Harkway be located and sent to the Crockford station. His expressionless gaze returned to Jack.
“What time was the arrest made?”
“Here’s my ticket.” Jack drew the paper from his pocket, consulted it. “The time is given as 5:50 p.m. The place is on the back road five miles outside Crockford.”
“May I have it if you please!”
The tone was curt, the inference clear. If our story could be backed up by physical evidence, Standish desired to view such evidence for himself. He briefly studied the ticket, slipped it into an envelope, placed the envelope in a drawer, banged the drawer, and with vigor reverted to the fray.
The sleepy slowness vanished; his blue eyes crackled; his purpose became apparent He was determined to force an admission that Jack and Lewis had quarreled violently on the road. His efforts to gain his end were those of the typical policeman; ignoring Jack’s replies he persistently repeated the same questions, over and over, until they had the tormenting monotony of water dripping on stone. A system which, I can attest, is calculated to play havoc with the nervous system. At last Jack lost his temper.
“What are you trying to do? Blow up an unimportant argument into a motive for murder? What are you looking for? A confession?”
“I am merely trying to get at the truth.”
“You’re taking a damned unpleasant way about it.” Jack got up from his chair, and his face was white. “If you’re inferring that I was angry enough to shoot Lewis—which I wasn’t—if you’re inferring that I was armed—which I wasn’t—then you might go a step further. No person in his right mind would shoot a man to death, leave his body on a public street, and immediately afterward go shopping! Or do you take me for a fool as well as a murderer?”
Into the electric atmosphere, like a two-for-a-penny firecracker, broke Minnie’s plaintive voice. “Mr. Storm, you simply must speak slowly. I didn’t get half you said.”
Jack glanced at her distressed face, at me, regained his equilibrium. He sat down. “I’m glad you missed it.” Already realizing his outburst had been ill-advised, he looked at Standish and
entered a resentful half-apology. “I shouldn’t have blown up, but I’ve been chivied and harassed until I hardly knew what I was saying. I’ve done my best to cooperate. Won’t you agree I haven’t acted the part of a criminal?”
This elicited no reply. A quick knock sounded at the door. An excited voice called, “You there, Standish? May I come in? I’ve got something important for you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Pigskin Bag
The door opened and anti-climax walked into the room in the person of Harold Blair. Standish’s chief deputy was a plump, waspish little man who had adopted, and adapted to a Crockford career, the airs and graces of fictional detectives. The knowing expressions, the dramatic manner, the haste when no haste is necessary. Short rapid steps carried him to his superior. He glanced portentously at the group and announced in a highly audible whisper:
“I’ve found something—an important clue.”
This clue, flung proudly upon the table, seemed to my inexperienced eyes merely a tiny cylinder of brass, somewhat scuffed and dented. Jack recognized it for what it was—the metal jacket of the bullet which had done for Elmer Lewis.
At that time I knew nothing of guns. I was to learn a great deal. Elmer Lewis had been shot with a .45 caliber automatic pistol—the type of weapon which fires, extracts and ejects the empty cartridge shell, and is ready to fire again. The hand touches the trigger, the complicated series of mechanical reactions instantly follow. Dr. Rand had recovered the bullet; now Blair produced the empty cartridge shell which had dropped to the ground a twinkling fraction of a second before Lewis died. Standish brought out the flattened bullet, lined it up beside the scarred metal jacket, and the little blood brothers were reunited. Blair preened himself. Standish moodily studied the two exhibits.
“Where did you find the shell?”
“On Main Street, to the left of where the car was parked. I marked the spot, told Gray to keep the crowd off. Thought maybe the murderer might have left footprints.”
Death in the Back Seat Page 4
