“She has her mother’s softness, though.”
A child’s crumpled body, a man turning shovelfuls of earth, a light rain falling. I kept putting the rain into that picture. A mind’s a damn stubborn thing.
“Maybe she does,” I said. “But one look at her and you know she’s her father’s daughter.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. I pictured Paula in my mind, and then Bethie. Then my own wife, for some reason, but it was a little harder to bring her image into focus.
Until it was time to go to the bank we sat around waiting for the phone to ring. The whisperer had told Anse there wouldn’t be any more calls, but what guarantee was that?
He mostly talked about Paula, maybe to keep from talking about Bethie. It bothered me some, the turn the conversation was taking, but I don’t guess I let it show.
When the phone finally did ring it was McVeigh at the bank, saying the money was ready. Anse took the new plaid suitcase and got in his car, and I followed him down there in my own car. He parked in the bank’s lot. I found a spot on the street. It was a little close to a fireplug, but I was behind the wheel with the motor running and didn’t figure I had much to worry about from Wally’s boys in blue.
He was in the bank a long time. I kept looking at my watch and every few hours another minute would pass. Then he came out of the bank’s front door and the suitcase looked heavier than when he’d gone in there. He came straight to the car and went around to the back. I’d left the trunk unlocked and he tossed the suitcase inside and slammed it shut.
He got in beside me and I drove. “I feel like a bank robber,” he said. “I come out with the money and you’ve got the motor running.”
My car picked that moment to backfire. “Some getaway car,” I said.
I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. I’d suggested taking my car just in case anybody was watching him. McVeigh might have acted on suspicions, I’d told Anse, and might say something to law enforcement people without saying anything to us. It wouldn’t do to be tailed to the overpass where the exchange was supposed to take place. If the kidnappers spotted a tail they might panic and kill Bethie.
Of course I didn’t believe for a moment she was still alive. But you play these things by the book. What else can you do?
No one was following us. I cut the engine when we got to the designated spot. It was an overpass, and a good spot for a drop. A person could be waiting below, hidden from view, and he could pick up the suitcase and get out of there on foot and nobody up above could do anything about it.
The engine coughed and coughed and sputtered and finally cut out. Anse told me I ought to get it fixed. I didn’t bother saying that nobody seemed to be able to fix it. “Just sit here,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”
I got out of the car, went around to the trunk. He was watching as I carried the plaid suitcase and sent it sailing over the rail. I heard the car door open, and then he was standing beside me, trying to see where it had landed. I pointed to the spot but he couldn’t see it, and I’m not sure there was anything to see.
“I can’t look down from heights,” he said.
“Nothing to look at anyway.”
We got back in the car. I dropped him at the bank, and on the way there he asked if the kidnappers would keep their end of the bargain. “They said she’d be delivered to the house within the next four hours,” he said. “But would they take the chance of delivering her to the house?”
“Probably not,” I told him. “Easiest thing would be to drive her into the middle of one town or another and just let her out of the car. Somebody’ll find her and call you right off. Bethie knows her phone number, doesn’t she?”
“Of course she does.”
“Best thing is for you to be at home and wait for a call.”
“You’ll come over, Lou, won’t you?”
I said I would. He went to get his car from the lot and I drove to my house to check the mail. It didn’t take me too long to get to his place, and we sat around waiting for a call I knew would never come.
Because it was pretty clear somebody local had taken her. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have known what a perfect spot that overpass was for dropping a suitcase of ransom money. An out-of-towner wouldn’t have sent Anse to a specific luggage shop to buy a specific suitcase. An out-of-towner probably wouldn’t have known how to spot Bethie Pollard in the first place.
And a local person wouldn’t dare leave her alive, because she was old enough and bright enough to tell people who had taken her. It stood to reason that she’d been killed right away, as soon as she’d been snatched, and that her corpse had been covered with fresh earth before the ransom note had been delivered to Anson’s mailbox.
After I don’t know how long he said, “I don’t like it, Lou. We should have heard something by now.”
“Could be they’re playing it cagey.”
“What do you mean?”
“Could be they’re watching that dropped suitcase, waiting to make sure it’s not staked out.”
He started. “Staked out?”
“Well, say you’d gone and alerted the Bureau. What they might have done is staked out the area of the drop and just watched and waited to see who picked up the suitcase. Now a kidnapper might decide to play it just as cagey his own self. Maybe they’ll wait twenty-four hours before they make their move.”
“God.”
“Or maybe they picked it up before it so much as bounced, say, but they want to hold onto Bethie long enough to be sure the bills aren’t in sequence and there’s no electronic bug in the suitcase.”
“Or maybe they’re not going to release her, Lou.”
“You don’t want to think about that, Anse.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
He started in on the bourbon then, and I was relieved to see him do it. I figured he needed it. To tell the truth, I had a thirst for it myself right about then. The plain fact is that sitting and waiting is the hardest thing I know about, especially when you’re waiting for something that’s not going to happen.
I was about ready to make an excuse and go on home when the doorbell rang. “Maybe that’s her now,” he said. “Maybe they waited until dark.” But there was a hollow tone in his voice, as if to say he didn’t believe it himself.
“I’ll get it,” I told him. “You stay where you are.”
There were two men at the door. They were almost my height, dressed alike in business suits, and holding guns, nasty little black things. First thought I had was they were robbers, and what crossed my mind was how bad Anse’s luck had turned.
Then one of them said, “FBI,” and showed me an ID I didn’t have time to read. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and we did.
Anse had a glass in his hand. His face didn’t look a whole lot different from before. If he was surprised he didn’t much show it.
One of them said, “Mr. Pollard? We kept the drop site under careful observation for three full hours. In that time no one approached the suitcase. The only persons entering the culvert were two boys approximately ten years old, and they never went near the suitcase.”
“Ten years old,” Anse said.
“After three hours Agent Boudreau and I went down into the culvert and examined the suitcase. The only contents were dummy packages like this one.” He showed a banded stack of bills, then riffled it to reveal that only the top and bottom were currency. The rest of the stack consisted of newspaper cut the size of bills.
“I guess your stakeout wasn’t such a much,” I said. “Anse, why didn’t you tell me you decided to call the Bureau after all?”
“Jim McVeigh called them,” he said. “They were there when I went to get the money. I didn’t know anything about it until then.”
“Well, either we beat ’em to the drop site or they don’t know much about staking a place out. You get people who aren’t local and it’s easy for them to make a mistake, I guess. The kidnappers just went an
d switched suitcases on you. You saw a suitcase still lying in the weeds and you figured nobody’d come by yet, but it looks like you were wrong.” I took a breath and let it out slow. “Maybe they saw you there after they told Anse not to go to the cops. Maybe that’s why Bethie’s not home yet.”
“That’s not why,” one of them said. Boudreau, I guess his name was. “We were there to see you fling that case over the railing. I had it under observation through high-powered field glasses from the moment it landed and I didn’t take my eyes off it until we went and had a look at it.”
Must have been tiring, I thought, staring through binoculars for three full hours.
“Nobody touched the suitcase,” the other one said. “There was a rip in the side from when it landed. It was the same suitcase.”
“That proves a lot, a rip in the side of a suitcase.”
“There was a switch,” Boudreau said. “You made it. You had a second suitcase in the trunk of your car, underneath the blankets and junk you carry around. Mr. Pollard here put the suitcase full of money in your trunk. Then you got the other case out of the trunk and threw it over the side.”
“Her father taught her not to go with strangers,” the other said. I never did get his name. “But you weren’t a stranger, were you? You were a friend of the family. The sheriff, the man who lectured on safety procedures. She got in your car without a second thought, didn’t she?”
“Anse,” I said, “tell them they’re crazy, will you?”
He didn’t say anything.
Boudreau said, “We found the money, Mr. Pollard. That’s what took so long. We wanted to find it before confronting him. He’d taken up some floorboards and stashed the money under them, still in the suitcase it was packed in. We didn’t turn up any evidence of your daughter’s presence. He may never have taken her anywhere near his house.”
“This is all crazy,” I said, but it was as if they didn’t hear me.
“We think he killed her immediately upon picking her up,” Boudreau went on. “He’d have to do that. She knew him, after all. His only chance to get away with it lay in murdering her.”
My mind filled with that picture again. Bethie’s crumpled body lying on the ground in that patch of woods the other side of Little Cross Creek. And a big man turning the damp earth with a spade. I could feel a soreness in my shoulders from the digging.
I should have dug that hole the day before. Having to do it with Bethie lying there, that was a misery. Better by far to have it dug ahead of time and just drop her in and shovel on the lid, but you can’t plan everything right.
Not that I ever had much chance of getting away with it, now that I looked at it straight on. I’d had this picture of myself down in the Florida sun with more money than God’s rich uncle, but I don’t guess I ever really thought it would happen that way. I suppose all I wanted was to take a few things away from Anson Pollard.
I sort of tuned out for a while there. Then one of them—I’m not even sure which one—was reading me my rights. I just stood there, not looking at anybody, least of all at Anse. And not listening too close to what they were saying.
Then they were asking me where the body was, and talking about checking the stores to find out when I’d bought the duplicate suitcase, and asking other questions that would build the case against me. I sort of pulled myself together and said that somebody was evidently trying real hard to frame me and I couldn’t understand why but in the meantime I wasn’t going to answer any questions without a lawyer present.
Not that I expected it would do me much good. But you have to make an effort, you have to play the hand out. What else can you do? You go through the motions, that’s all.
Good for the Soul
In the morning, Warren Cuttleton left his furnished room on West Eighty-third Street and walked over to Broadway. It was a clear day, cool, but not cold, bright but not dazzling. At the corner, Mr. Cuttleton bought a copy of the Daily Mirror from the blind newsdealer who sold him a paper every morning and who, contrary to established stereotype, recognized him by neither voice nor step. He took his paper to the cafeteria where he always ate breakfast, kept it tucked tidily under his arm while he bought a sweet roll and a cup of coffee, and sat down alone at a small table to eat the roll, drink the coffee, and read the Daily Mirror cover to cover.
When he reached page three, he stopped eating the roll and set the coffee aside. He read a story about a woman who had been killed the evening before in Central Park. The woman, named Margaret Waldek, had worked as a nurse’s aide at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital. At midnight her shift had ended. On her way home through the park, someone had thrown her down, assaulted her, and stabbed her far too many times in the chest and abdomen. There was a long and rather colorful story to this effect, coupled with a moderately grisly picture of the late Margaret Waldek. Warren Cuttleton read the story and looked at the grisly picture.
And remembered.
The memory rushed upon him with the speed of a rumor. A walk through the park. The night air. A knife—long, cold—in one hand. The knife’s handle moist with his own urgent perspiration. The waiting, alone in the cold. Footsteps, then coming closer, and his own movement off the path and into the shadows, and the woman in view. And the awful fury of his attack, the fear and pain in the woman’s face, her screams in his ears. And the knife, going up and coming down, rising and descending. The screams peaking and abruptly ending. The blood.
He was dizzy. He looked at his hand, expecting to see a knife glistening there. He was holding two thirds of a sweet roll. His fingers opened. The roll dropped a few inches to the tabletop. He thought that he was going to be sick, but this did not happen.
“Oh, God,” he said, very softly. No one seemed to hear him. He said it again, somewhat louder, and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. He tried to blow out the match and kept missing it. He dropped the match to the floor and stepped on it and took a very large breath.
He had killed a woman. No one he knew, no one he had ever seen before. He was a word in headlines—fiend, attacker, killer. He was a murderer, and the police would find him and make him confess, and there would be a trial and a conviction and an appeal and a denial and a cell and a long walk and an electrical jolt and then, mercifully, nothing at all.
He closed his eyes. His hands curled up into fists, and he pressed his fists against his temples and took furious breaths. Why had he done it? What was wrong with him? Why, why, why had he killed?
Why would anyone kill?
He sat at his table until he had smoked three cigarettes, lighting each new one from the butt of the one preceding it. When the last cigarette was quite finished he got up from the table and went to the phone booth. He dropped a dime and dialed a number and waited until someone answered the phone.
“Cuttleton,” he said. “I won’t be in today. Not feeling well.”
One of the office girls had taken the call. She said that it was too bad and she hoped Mr. Cuttleton would be feeling better. He thanked her and rang off.
Not feeling well! He had never called in sick in the twenty-three years he had worked at the Bardell Company, except for two times when he had been running a fever. They would believe him, of course. He did not lie and did not cheat and his employers knew this. But it bothered him to lie to them.
But then it was no lie, he thought. He was not feeling well, not feeling well at all.
On the way back to his room he bought the Daily News and the Herald Tribune and the Times. The News gave him no trouble, as it too had the story of the Waldek murder on page three, and ran a similar picture and a similar text. It was harder to find the stories in the Times and the Herald Tribune; both of those papers buried the murder story deep in the second section, as if it were trivial. He could not understand that.
That evening he bought the Journal American and the World Telegram and the Post. The Post ran an interview with Margaret Waldek’s half sister, a very sad interview indeed. Warren Cuttleton wept as he read it, shedding
tears in equal measure for Margaret Waldek and for himself.
At seven o’clock, he told himself that he was surely doomed. He had killed and he would be killed in return.
At nine o’clock, he thought that he might get away with it. He gathered from the newspaper stories that the police had no substantial clues. Fingerprints were not mentioned, but he knew for a fact that his own fingerprints were not on file anywhere. He had never been fingerprinted. So, unless someone had seen him, the police would have no way to connect him with the murder. And he could not remember having been seen by anyone.
He went to bed at midnight. He slept fitfully, reliving every unpleasant detail of the night before—the footsteps, the attack, the knife, the blood, his flight from the park. He awoke for the last time at seven o’clock, woke at the peak of a nightmare with sweat streaming from every pore.
Surely there was no escape if he dreamed those dreams night after endless night. He was no psychopath; right and wrong had a great deal of personal meaning to him. Redemption in the embrace of an electrified chair seemed the least horrible of all possible punishments. He no longer wanted to get away with the murder. He wanted to get away from it.
He went outside and bought a paper. There had been no developments in the case. He read an interview in the Mirror with Margaret Waldek’s little niece, and it made him cry.
He had never been to the police station before. It stood only a few blocks from his rooming house but he had never passed it, and he had to look up its address in the telephone directory. When he got there he stumbled around aimlessly looking for someone in a little authority. He finally located the desk sergeant and explained that he wanted to see someone about the Waldek killing.
“Waldek,” the desk sergeant said.
“The woman in the park.”
“Oh. Information?”
“Yes,” Mr. Cuttleton said.
He waited on a wooden bench while the desk sergeant called upstairs to find out who had the Waldek thing. Then the desk sergeant told him to go upstairs where he would see a Sergeant Rooker. He did this.
Enough Rope Page 21
