by Lionel White
The fact that he was in a tavern and drinking beer on a Saturday morning, and especially this particular Saturday morning, was in itself completely contrary to Len’s usual habits and character. Why he had suddenly decided to stop, while driving past the place, was very easy to understand. He had reached for a cigarette and discovered he was carrying an empty pack. Although far from a slave to the habit, Len felt an urgent need for a smoke. The talk with Lieutenant Giddeon had not been easy and his already frayed nerves were jumpy. No sooner had he discovered his lack of cigarettes than he noticed the tavern sign. Without a second thought, he pulled the car off the highway and parked in front of the place.
The beer was like the cigarette. It wasn't alcohol so much that he craved—
he merely had the usual hangover thirst and sighting the seductive beer sign hanging over the bar—it was one of those fantastic electrical contraptions which showed a foamy stream of amber liquid being perpetually poured into a slender goblet from a never-ending mechanical tap, he had suddenly decided it was just what he needed.
He plunged the button on the cigarette machine and retrieved the pack of cigarettes from the hidden compartment beneath the device and as he tore the cellophane wrapper to get at its contents, he walked to the deserted bar and climbed on a stool. The place was warm and pleasant and for a moment he relaxed. When the bartender approached, he ordered a beer.
It was really amazing. That one beer seemed at once to clear away the cobwebs from his head, alleviate the pain from behind his eyes and completely relax him. He ordered a second beer. It would only take a few additional minutes and he wanted a chance to think.
To begin with, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn't really made an ass out of himself. That detective had certainly seemed friendly enough and had even pretended to beEeve his story. But now, in thinking the entire thing over, it seemed to Len that the story itself was utterly fantastic. Fantastic even to him, Len Neilsen, who had, so to speak, been the victim of its circumstances. Not of course—and Len smiled at himself in the mirror behind the bar—quite the victim that the dead man had been. But certainly a victim, if only in a minor capacity. Len started reliving the previous evening.
He ordered a third glass of beer.
Yes, by God it had all been true. Even if that fellow Giddeon thought he was out-and-out crazy, it had all been exactly as he remembered it and exactly as he had explained it. But still, he’d probably been wrong about going to the police. What was there to be gained, after all?
Now, in the cold light of day, things seemed vastly different than they had the night before. Now that he was cold sober—he was ordering his fourth glass of beer as this idea crossed his mind—now that he was cold sober and no longer under the strain of a terrible hangover and shock, well, how, could he actually expect anyone to believe the story? Anyone of course with the exception of Allie. Allie knew him; Allie knew he didn’t imagine things or have strange and unreal illusions. Allie knew anything he said had happened, actually and in all truth, had happened.
But the police? The police were another matter. What he had done, he suddenly realized, was to put himself into a stupid and completely untenable position. Just suppose it all was true? Suppose they—the police—did actually discover that a murder had taken place? Then he, Len, was going to be right in the middle. Not of course in the middle of the murder, but in the middle of some damned unpleasant publicity. And it would come at the worst possible time.
Oh, it would be great all right! They'd have him up to testify and his name would be in all the papers. He, Len Neilsen. The guy who got so drunk he couldn’t even find his own house. Real nice. Randolph would like that! Sure, Randolph drank himself; had even helped Len get drunk. But Randolph knew how to hold his liquor and he would expect as much from his assistants. Particularly from a man he’d just promoted into a really important job.
Len sighed with disgust. He’d been a fool. A first-class, grade A, goddamned fool.
He ordered another beer.
Had Len Neilsen a little more experience with hangovers, he would have understood the insidious influence of a few beers following on the heels of a siege of heavy drinking. He would have realized that it only took four or five of them to blend in with the alcohol still in his blood stream and get him drunk all over again. But this was the sort of knowledge that Len did not have. The two or three times in his life when he had taken too much to drink had been signal and unusual occasions and they had been followed by week ends of remorse and headache—and solemn vows never to do it again.
By the time Len had finished his fifth beer he was beyond realizing his condition—he merely felt pretty good. In fact he felt fine. The only thing which bothered him was a slight tendency toward double vision and this he laid to the fact that he was not wearing his glasses. He had even forgotten when and how he had misplaced them.
The tavern began to fill with customers and Len had to knock on the side of his glass with a coin to attract the attention of the suddenly busy bartender. The man drew a beer without waiting for the order and put it in front of him.
Shortly after one-thirty, Len left the bar. He noticed a nursery next door and saw that there were vases of cut flowers in the window. Pleased with himself, he staggered over and entered. He purchased a dozen roses. Allie deserved something after all the trouble he had put her to.
Being without glasses, Len drove very carefully. He found the entrance to Fairlawn without difficulty and turned in. Once on Crescent Drive, he became aware of the hundreds of people still gathered in front of the Kitteridge home. The crowd was so great, in fact, that a few stragglers were even standing in groups and talking on his own front lawn.
Len had to honk his horn several times in order to get through. He left the car in the drive and started for his front door. Knowing that something unusual was going on, he stopped for a moment to ask a man whom he’d never seen before, what all the confusion was about. For a moment the man stared at him, then spoke.
“My Cod man, where’ve you been? Don’t you know there’s been a murder a couple of doors down the street? Why they just now got through taking the body away. ’ ’
“A murder?”
"Yep, a bloody goddamn murder.”
Len rushed up the front steps of his house. He threw the door open and the first person he saw was Allie. She stood in the center of the living room staring at him as he entered.
“Baby,” he said. “Gees, baby! So I was right. See, I was right all along. They’ve found the body!”
Len failed to notice the glassy look in Allie’s eyes as he moved toward her.
“I brought you some roses,” he said.
Lieutenant Giddeon, who had been standing at one side of the living room entrance, reached Allie Neilsen just before she slumped to the floor in a dead faint. He reached her in time to keep her head from crashing into the side of a mahogany end table as she fell.
Ten minutes later Allie lay on the couch, her feet high on piled-up pillows and a wet towel on her forehead. Young Billy, looking frightened, stood a few feet off watching his mother. Detective Lieutenant G iddeon stood beside Len Neilsen near the door leading into the hall. He was watching Allie as he spoke.
"Now you’re sure you will be all right?” he asked. “You’re sure you don’t want me to call somebody and ask them to stay with you?”
Allie’s voice was weak, but clear and collected when she answered.
“No,” she said. “No. I’ll be all right. Only, well, only I don’t know why you have to take Len back to the police station with you. Haven’t you asked him enough questions already? Haven't you...”
“I’m not taking him back to ask him questions,” Lieutenant Giddeon said. “I’m taking him to book on charges of suspicion of murder.”
This time Allie didn’t faint. She didn’t even gasp. She just lay there and stared at the two of them.
For a moment Len stood stock-still and then he swung quickly to the detective. He no longer felt woozy
, no longer had that vague, pleasant sensation which had suffused him when he’d entered the room.
“My God man,” he said, “are you nuts? So I found a dead man; I came to the police station and told you about it. You think if I'd killed some guy I'd come and tell you? Why.
“I’m not interested in adead man,” Lieutenant Giddeon said. His eyes were on the scratches on Len’s face as he spoke and his voice was a dull monotone.
“I don’t know anything about any dead man. I’m talking about the murder of a young girl with dark eyes and blond hair. You must have got the sex wrong, mister. The time, and I guess the place, were right. But you got the sex wrong.”
Chapter Eight
The tragic and brutal murder of Louisa Mary Julio was to have a vital effect on the lives of a good many widely different people, many of whom had never ever heard of her, or in fact, had as much as heard of Fairlawn Acres.
Martin Saunders, correspondent for the Long Island edition of a New York tabloid, did such an excellent job in covering the story that he was at once taken on the staff as a full-time newspaperman. He immediately married the girl he had been engaged to for some six years, thus condemning her to a lifetime of poverty as the wife of a working reporter. On the other hand, a man named Peters, who was supposed to be covering the story for a metropolitan morning newspaper, got drunk at a bar across from the police station while he was waiting for a news break. He was fired. Later he became an electrical appliance salesman and ended up as the millionaire owner of a chain of cut-rate stores.
A Mrs. Chiofski, one of the newer residents of the development, who had been for weeks seeking an excuse to open a conversation and perhaps develop a friendship with Mrs. Cathwright, her next-door neighbor, discovered a suitable subject in the widely discussed local crime and the two became intimate companions, a relationship which beyond question of doubt led to the forming of a business partnership between their husbands some time later.
Possibly the person most affected by the murder, with the exception of Allie and Len Neilsen—and of course the victim herself—was young Peter Doyle. Peter was the only son of Patrick and Ann Doyle and he was twelve years old at the time the murder took place. He had a fine Irish imagination and a more or less poetic turn of mind, so much so that he was rapidly developing into a chronic dreamer and storyteller. Peter’s mother found nothing charming in this particular facet of his character and was more inclined to think of her child as a dedicated liar.
One result of the murder on Peter was that soon after Louisa Julio’s sudden death, he never again told a lie as long as he lived. In a way, it was unfortunate that this metamorphosis didn’t take place in Peter’s character just before the murder rather than shortly after it. Peter’s final flight of fancy—or lie, as his mother would have had it—was directly responsible for the crystallizing of an opinion in the mind of Detective Lieutenant Clifford Giddeon. It was a lie which did much to propel Len Neilsen in the direction of that narrow, green hallway leading to the electrically wired chair in a small, square room on that dismal island in the Hudson River.
In a great many ways, Peter Doyle was an unusual child. Long after other
children of his age had been disillusioned by the legend of Santa Claus he continued to address annual letters to the North Pole. Later on he learned about leprechauns and fairies and elfs and he believed in them completely. He was a lonely boy and he didn’t play much with the other children in the neighborhood, preferring to spend his idle hours poring over books.
From fairy tales he graduated to comic magazines and from them to detective stories. Peter was always the hero, always the keen-eyed cop who solved the terrible crimes and came up with the brilliant solutions which so shocked and amazed his fellow sleuths at Scotland Yard or the Surete, as the case might be.
Immediately following his breakfast on the morning of the murder, Peter had retired to his bedroom and at once became deeply involved in the construction of a stage-set. He was planning the production of a play and was busily cutting out cardboard figures when his mother rudely interrupted him. She ordered him out of the room and out of the house. She felt that he needed fresh air and exercise and didn’t believe that sitting around in his bedroom on a Saturday morning was a healthy activity for a boy of his age.
Reluctantly Peter had pulled on his leather jacket and left the house. He picked up a long stick as he passed by the garage and then started down the street. Instead of walking on the sidewalk, he at once stepped into the gutter and as he strolled along, his mind still on the play which he was planning to produce in his bedroom theater, he idly swung the stick.
He was not satisfied with his cardboard set and about the time he turned into Crescent Drive, he suddenly changed his mind about the entire plan. Peter decided that he would enlist the aid of several other children in the neighborhood and stage a real live show. They could have it in the garage in back of his house and he would manage the entire thing himself. He could rummage up in the attic and find some discarded clothes and...
At this point in his meditations, Peter passed in front of number 98 Crescent Drive. He stopped for a moment to concentrate on his thoughts. His stick was still swinging carelessly and he suddenly became aware that one end had encountered an obstruction. Peter looked down at the ground with a frown and suddenly his eyes focused and he saw the felt hat. Instinctively reaching to retrieve it, he observed the pair of glasses with one broken lens lying next to the hat. Without thinking, he picked up both objects and stuffed them into the wide pocket of bis jacket. The hat made a tight fit, but he managed by rolling it up. The two finds would make excellent props for his newly planned Play.
Less than an hour later, Peter had completely forgotten about his play. Peter, like a hundred other children who lived in Fairlawn, had something much more fabulous, and much more tangible, on his mind. Peter was a member of that large and curious crowd which had gathered around the Kitteridge house while police officials removed the body of Louisa Julio.
Among that curiously morbid crowd were many who were honestly horrified by the murder; there were others who merely absorbed a vicarious thrill by being in proximity to what would without doubt develop into a sensational news story. A few were revolted and frightened and decided to assume sudden and strict control over the destiny of their own children to insure their future safety.
The children present were thrilled beyond measure. Peter's reaction was exceptional in that almost at once he seemed to feel himself a vital part of the drama which was taking place. He immediately examined the men who were busily occupied in and about the place, deciding which were detectives and which were police laboratory experts. He looked around at his neighbors almost ghoulishly, trying to decide in his own mind if any of them looked guilty and if one could be the killer.
This was really something; not a storybook crime, but the real honest-to-God legitimate thing.
When Sergeant Finnerty left the Kitteridges’ and went to the McNallys’ house to seek information, Peter at once spotted him as a detective. It really wasn’t too difficult. Finnerty looked like a detective. Peter, fascinated, followed in Finnerty’s footsteps. While Finnerty was in the McNally residence, questioning Howard and Myrtle McNally, Peter was half hidden in the bushes beside the living room window and straining his ears to overhear what was going on. His face was alive with excitement and his nervous hands kept scratching in and out of the pockets of his leather jacket. It was when his right hand suddenly came into contact with the broken glasses that Peter got his great inspiration.
Finnerty almost missed the boat. He was halfway down the pathway from the McNally’s front door to the sidewalk, when he felt the tug at the sleeve of his blue serge suit. Not changing his stride, he looked down into the freckled face of a boy whose large blue eyes were wide with excitement. The boy’s wild red hair was crew cut and uncovered. He held a soft felt hat in his free hand.
‘‘Go away, sonny,” Finnerty said. “Can’t you see that I’m busy?�
�
“You’re a detective,” Peter Doyle said. He made it a statement and not a question.
“I haven’t any time now to...”
“Listen, Mister, you are a detective, aren’t you?”
As the youngster apparently had no intention of detaching himself from his sleeve, and as Finnerty observed that several people were watching him, he felt disinclined to rudely jerk his arm away. He hesitated for a moment.
“I said I’m busy, lad,” he said. “Now goon—run along and...”
“Listen, Mister,” Peter said, and in spite of his excitement, he managed to keep his high-pitched voice barely audible. “Listen, you are working on the murder, aren’t you? You...”
“I’m a detective and I’m working on the murder,” Finnerty said. “Now go on with you and don ’ t bother me. I got things to do. ”
“Well if you’re working on the murder,” Peter said, “You’d better talk to me.”
“Oh yeah? So I better talk to you had I? Well, listen here, sonny,” and Finnerty carefully detached Peter’s clutching fingers from the sleeve of his coat. “You don’t want to be turned over my knee and get a paddling, you better...”
"Listen to me,” Peter said. “Listen. I gotaclue. I got something right here that will lead you right to the killer!”
“So you got a clue, have you?” Finnerty permitted himself an indulgent smile.
“Yes, I got a clue,” Peter said. He suddenly thrust the hat and the glasses in front of Finnerty's eyes.
For a moment the detective looked at the objects blankly. When he spoke, his voice was kindly, but a little patronizing. It was the tone of Finnerty's voice, rather than the actual words he spoke, which caused the damage. The quality of Finnerty’s voice was indirectly responsible for Peter Doyle’s greatest lie and his last lie.
“A hat and glasses,” Finnerty said. “So what son—so what?”
Up until that very second, Peter had merely meant to tell the detective he had only that morning found the objects in the street near the scene of the crime. Even up until the very second he opened his mouth to speak, he still intended to explain the event just as it had happened. But there was something about the smug, arrogant manner of Dan Finnerty’s voice as he said that “So what...”
