“What do you think, Sam?” Dr. Egree asked.
Our county coroner, Dr. Sam Hessian, bent and examined it at close range for what seemed a long time. When he straightened up, the intern let the body settle back into it’s previous position, and put the left arm neatly back at the side.
“Clean puncture,” Sam Hessian said. “Like a goddam knitting needle. Point of entry matches what you found?”
“An upward angle, assuming he was sitting or standing erect at the time it happened. Call it about a thirty-degree angle from the horizontal.”
“Lung?”
“Of course. But you’ve got a spongy tissue, and an extremely sharp object, so you’d almost get a self-sealing effect, much the same as you would in the pericardium. Not perfect, of course, but not enough hemorrhage or leakage to have much effect on him in the short time between when it happened and when he died. It skimmed past the aorta. It had to be sharp to slip through the gristle between the ribs. Flexible, to a certain extent. Eight to ten inches long. The same diameter for the whole length of it. I’d say the absolute maximum would be an eighth of an inch. Sam, I don’t know what the autopsy ritual should be, in any legal sense. I have a perfectly straightforward cause of death here which I will certify, and I wouldn’t have come across it except for the emergency measure I took.”
“Nobody would have come across it,” Sam Hessian said sourly. “But I better get a regular autopsy request and go through the routine.”
There was a silence in the small room. I noticed that Jeff Kermer’s body still wore dark silk socks and a gold wedding band. The disinfectant smell was acid-sharp in the still air. I looked at Larry Brint. He met my glance and looked away. But there had been an affirmation in that moment. This was what we were for. This was the ultimate felony.
“Just a couple questions,” Larry said. His voice sounded almost bored. “Wouldn’t he know he was stabbed? Wouldn’t it hurt like hell? Wouldn’t he yell?”
“We can assume he was drinking,” Dr. Egree said. “A certain anaesthetic effect there, of course. He would appear to have been in his late fifties, overweight, with bad muscle tone. A man like that would be accustomed to pains and twinges, discomfort in the upper torso, gastric pains—some of them quite sharp. The most sensitive area would be the epidermis, but with a very sharp instrument used quickly, that would be so minor as to be barely noticeable. A good nurse can give an almost painless injection. We can assume further penetration, quickly done, would cause almost no pain at all until the heart wall itself was pierced. Then there would be growing pain and discomfort, and a feeling of breathlessness.”
“How long between the time he was stabbed and when he’d pass out?” Larry asked.
Egree shrugged. “He’d start to feel extreme discomfort almost immediately. The pressure inside the heart would be pumping blood through the puncture wound in the heart wall. The pericardial sac would fill quite quickly, causing an external pressure that would severely tax the heart muscle, causing it to labor and slow down and founder. He’d feel faint, breathless, dizzy, much as if he had a small aortal rupture.”
“And it would look like a heart attack, eh?” Larry said. “Doctor, would it take a lot of skill to do that?”
Egree shrugged. He clenched his fists and held them together. “Your heart is as big as this, Chief. It hangs in the middle of your chest, very slightly off center to the left. The hardest part would be sliding the weapon through the gristle between the ribs. An upward stroke through the diaphragm would be much simpler. You could hardly miss the heart once in fifty times. Usually under such circumstances the victim would remain ambulatory for from ten seconds to a full minute. He’d become comatose in a period of from thirty seconds to two and a half or three minutes. He’d be dead in from five minutes to forty minutes.”
“Oh, this is so interesting,” Larry said with with weary disgust. “Not more than five hundred people would like to kill him off. I think I am going to learn to miss this tiresome bastard. A heart attack would have been enough trouble. Thanks for being so thorough, Dr. Egree. Thanks a lot!”
“Happy to be of service,” Egree said ironically. “Sam, when you go in there, palpitate that coronary artery. Pronounced arteriosclerosis, heavy deposits, constricted flow. He wouldn’t have been with us much longer even without the—unfriendly gesture.”
“He’s the type,” Sam said.
“So far,” Larry Brint said, “are we the only ones who know it’s murder?”
“Plus the emergency room nurse,” Egree said. “I told her to keep it to herself. She will.”
“If Division Street thinks it’s a heart attack, we can get some information,” Larry said. “If there’s any rumor about it being a killing, we’ll never find out who was with him.”
And it worked as he predicted. I put Rossman and Raglin on it, and we began tapping all other sources. Kermer’s manager had closed the doors of the Holiday Lounge, but the death was the big topic of conversation in all the other saloons and casinos. We soon learned a lot of people who hadn’t been there were claiming they had. But we brought in a bartender who straightened it out, and it was the bartender who remembered that Kid Gilbert had been nearest to Jeff Kermer, and it had looked as if Kermer was trying to say something to the Kid.
I had him picked up and brought in, and thought it might work better if we used my office instead of an interrogation room. He walked in with Johnny Hooper, and I had Johnny close the door to the squad room.
The Kid’s battered old face looked wary and curious. “What the hell, boys? What the hell?” he said in his worn whispery voice. “Sometimes I come to visit. I don’t like this being brought in, you know?”
“You can’t complain to Jeff about it. Not any more.”
His eyes were quick and bright. “I can’t think of anybody who can take over I wouldn’t know pretty good.”
“A heart attack is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” I said.
He moistened his lips. “I never see one so close. I don’t want to see no more of them, never.”
“How close were you?”
“Too damn close. Like this. He was in the big bar, circulating the way he always does. You know, he gets a little bagged having a drink with this one and that one, and then he goes home. It’s like his social hour. And that’s when deals get made. Everybody knows it’s a good time to hit him up for something. So he goes around the corner usually, into the next room there, when it’s something private, a little kind of room where there’s just a pay phone. He was coming from there when it hit him. I just happened to be crossing from the bar to one of the booths to talk to an old buddy when he comes walking toward me. His face was wet and shiny and sort of gray colored. He had both hands pulled tight against his chest. He was looking right at me and his jaw was going up and down like he was trying to say something, but it’s noisy in there that time of night. His eyebrows were way up, making him look surprised, you know? I got to him as he started to go down, and I got just enough hold on him so I eased him down. I yelled and the place got quiet, and then some broads started screaming, and somebody was yelling to phone an ambulance. He was out cold a half a minute after I eased him down.”
“Who was he talking to?” I asked. “Who did he have the private business with?”
“Oh, just some out-of-town broad. She’s been around off and on the last couple weeks. Big blonde. Calls herself Nan something.”
I looked at Johnny Hooper. We had the same idea at the same moment. He nodded and walked out. The Kid caught the exchange. “What’s going on?”
“What kind of a deal do you think the woman was trying to make?”
“I don’t get in on that end of the business.”
“Would you make a guess?”
Kid Gilbert shrugged. “It would probably be some kind of woman thing. That’s how she looked. Like she’d have five or six girls and got squoze out somewhere, maybe from the law or too big a cut working against her, and trying to make a deal to open up here,
and she’d know she’d have to fix it with Jeffie because here you do it that way instead of greasing the law, and so it would be up to Jeffie to make the best deal he could, if he figured it wouldn’t cut the take on the business he already has going for him.”
Johnny Hooper came in with one of the pictures from Youngstown. “That’s her?” he asked the Kid.
“Sure,” he said. “The hair is different, and she’s older than in the picture.” He gave us his broken grin. “I answered fast, huh? So maybe I’m fingering her, and maybe I should have said I never seen her before, but Jeffie Kermer was nothing but nice to me ever since I know him, and now I got the idea it wasn’t what it looked like.”
“They caught it by accident at the hospital, Kid. She stuck a piece of steel into him, something thin and long, into his left side, toward the back, right up into the heart, something so small there was a good chance the wound would never be noticed.”
He made his smashed hands into potato fists and looked a long way through my office wall. “I heard of it done in Boston with a piece of wire, once. Who’d she do it for?”
“Who do you think?”
“Everything else is quiet, so it would be McAran.” He sighed. “And this would be just about the first chance she had, you know? The boys Jeffie brought in, they’ve been staying close. She had to see him three or four times before they’d pay no attention to her. She had that big straw pocketbook, big enough to hide it in. So maybe she could give him some figures to look at, showing what the take and percentages would be, and she moves a little behind him, sort of, and slips it in there fast. She came out a little behind him, smiling and talking, as if she hadn’t noticed anything wrong with him. After everybody was around him, I didn’t see her again. The way it is that time of night, if he yelled when she did it, nobody would have heard. You know, Lieutenant, that kind of a broad, she could do that to Jeffie, and it wouldn’t be the first.”
“Kid, we want her to think she got away with it. We want McAran to think she got away with it. The papers will cover it as a heart attack because they won’t be told differently. If there is any leak, we’ll know it came from you. And I think that with Jeff Kermer out of the way, we could make you very unhappy.”
He spoke with a dignity which surprised me. “You don’t have to say that to the Kid. You aren’t going to make me any more unhappy than I am for Jeffie being dead. So I keep my mouth shut because you ask me to. I don’t have to make myself big around this town by proving I know things other people don’t. But I tell you one thing. I see that broad anywhere, and I am going to walk up to her smiling and hook her in the belly and cross the right, and you can have her from then on.”
“All right, Kid. Do you know what kind of a car she was driving?”
“I never seen her outside the Holiday.”
“How was she dressed?”
“Always pants and a sweater, high heels, fur cape, white gloves and a big purse, loud perfume, lots of paint, and a cigarette all the time in the corner of her mouth. No hat. What she drank—I heard her order—was vodka stingers, easy on the mint, with one rock. Deep voice for a woman. Built big but not fat, you know. As far as I could tell, she always come around alone, anxious to talk private to Jeffie. You want to kill a man like Jeffie, that’s a good way. That’s a real good way, goddam her.” He stood up. “You don’t need me any more? So I want to go by by myself. I’m going to miss him.”
After he left, Johnny Hooper and I talked it over, thinking out loud.
We finally reached the conclusions which satisfied us to a certain extent. McAran had made the murder of Kermer part of the deal. Miller and the Frankel woman had joined McAran in the hills well before the jail break. And she, with the brass of the best grade of assassin, had kept coming into town until she had him set up just right, with, perhaps, a little parting message from McAran. Morgan Miller would be inclined to humor McAran in this matter because it would create internal confusions which would put a lot more strain on our resources of manpower and vehicles, and thus give their main project a better chance of succeeding. There would be a minimum of two cars, four men and one woman up in McAran’s hide-out, but we could not overlook the possibility that Miller might have brought in some additional talent.
Johnny Hooper said, “Fenn, they’ve had a lot of time to plan something big, and they’ve had the money stashed to finance it. It could be a hell of a lot more ambitious than we figure. By now they’ll be sold on their own luck. The only thing that’s gone wrong for them has been Kelly getting hit. They may have the idea of cleaning out this whole town, of hitting us wherever the money is. You ask me, I’m damn glad Meg is going to be the bird dog. I just think it ought to be scheduled sooner than Sunday.”
“You heard Major Rice. By Sunday we’ll have it set up so nothing can go wrong. And all the week-end traffic of people coming back out of the hill country will cover us on moving into position. And on Sunday we can cover Meg with unmarked cars without making anybody suspicious. And we do have a hint on their timing, based on what McAran told the Perkins girl.”
But we both knew, as did Larry Brint and Major Rice, that we weren’t dealing with people whose mental processes we could predict. They had somehow reached into a maximum security prison and released their friends and helpers. None of them had anything to lose, and they were motivated by something beyond greed. They were riding on the conviction of infallibility, ignoring the fact they could win in no final way, but were capable of attaining many more small bloody victories before the inevitable destruction.
xi
By Saturday night, when I got home at nine o’clock, everything was properly set up for the next day. The weather forecast was good, and it promised to be one of those hot still days which would send the valley people up into the hills. Detective Chuck West’s wife was going to stop by early Sunday morning and take our kids off our hands.
A joint operation was set up which we believed would cover every possibility. Sheriff Bub Fischer and his inept cronies had been quietly given leaves of absence, and one of the truly professional Sheriffs in the state, D. D. Wheeler, had been brought in from a neighboring county along with some of his top people. Major Rice had brought in a special cadre of troopers. Larry Brint had detailed our best men to it. The communications people had tied the three separate radio links into a single control system.
Not only had we brought in all the special equipment we thought we might need, but we also had a light plane standing by at the Brook City Airport equipped with a big photo reconn camera and Air Reserve technical personnel to operate it. And by a combination of good luck and savage threats, we had managed to keep the lid on any news leaks.
Without making any fuss about it, and by picking the right places for a continuing observation, we had every road out of the hills watched for the sudden appearance of the station wagon. Under D. D. Wheeler’s direction, the hill area had been divided into six basic areas, so that once we knew which area we would be concerned with, we knew in advance the best way to move our people in, the best routes whereby we could escape observation, and the best places to use as observation points when we brought the patrol cars in to seal a much more restricted area.
I took one of the master maps with the overlay home with me and spread it out on the kitchen table and explained it in detail to Meg, using pennies and sugar cubes to show where the cars would be.
“You’ll take off in our car at ten tomorrow morning, honey,” I told her. “We’ll have some unmarked cars up in there, and they’ll look like people on picnics and Sunday rides. You don’t have to know who they are. When you’ve gotten it pinned down, and you know just about where Dwight is, you come back out. Come out on 882 as far as that picnic place just this side of the bridge. I’ll be parked there, ready to get the message back up to the unmarked cars.”
“And what will they do?”
“They’ll have their picnics at just the right places so nobody can leave whatever area you name without being noticed—
if they leave by car. After dark we’ll be set to move in close, and go the rest of the way at dawn.”
“It’s a big game, isn’t it? A wonderful game of hunting. Guns and tear gas and even an airplane to take pictures.”
“It isn’t a game.”
“Why do you have to make such a big thing out of it?”
“It’s good police procedure, honey. It keeps people from getting hurt.”
“Even Dwight?”
“Yes, dear.
I woke up on Sunday in the first gray light of dawn, not knowing what had awakened me. I was surprised to see that Meg was already up. I put on my robe and went looking for her. The kitchen light was on. There was a note to me on the kitchen table. Before I read it I ran out and saw that our car was gone. I hurried back in and read her note.
“Dearest Fenn, I couldn’t sleep at all because I know that what I promised you is not right. I am afraid that you would have to kill him if it is done your way. Even if he is all alone, and knows nothing about the others you think are with him, it would fill him with a crazy, reckless anger to have people sneaking up on him before dawn. And I can’t be sure that with so many people, someone might be too tense and shoot too quickly. For a lot of the years of my life I took care of him, and no matter what he is or what he has become, I would not want to live with knowing he died because I found out where he is and told people who think he is some sort of a monster. I am not especially brave, but I want to find him and go to him, so that if everything is all right with him, I can perhaps talk him into coming back out with me, so that nothing will have a chance to go wrong. I can’t forget the look in Cathie’s eyes when she told me she wishes him dead. Maybe he never did have enough of a chance with anything he ever wanted or tried to do, but I want to ask him about Cathie. I do not think he would ever hurt me, and if there are other people there, the ones from the prison, I don’t think he would let them hurt me. I will try to come back out once I have talked to him, but I know there is the chance he or they won’t let me leave. I won’t tell him or anyone else what is being planned if they don’t let me go, and once I have found out just about where to look for him, I will leave word with an old man named Jaimie Lincoln who lives on the Chickenhawk Road. If he’s still living, he’ll still be there, and if he isn’t, I’ll leave some sort of note for you. I am sorry if my doing it this way is going to spoil all the plans which have been made, and make people angry at you. But sometimes a person has to do things their own way. I will be careful, and you be too. I love you. Meg.”
One Monday We Killed Them All Page 17
