The Silver Cobweb

by Ben Benson

  “Who was doing the driving?” I asked.

  “I was,” she said. “And when we got into The Red Wheel I told the bartender Dickie was only seventeen. They put us out.” She plucked at my sleeve. “Don’t lock him up, please. I swear he’s never done anything like this before. It was Bob Talbot who dared him. Otherwise Dickie would never have touched the stuff.”

  “I have to know what will happen if I turn him loose.”

  “Nothing will happen to him. I’ll drive him straight to my house. My folks will take care of him. We’re very close friends of the Cleveses.”

  I made a note in my book. “Get him out of here quick.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”

  I helped put Cleves in the car. “Take him straight home.”

  “Thank you very much,” she said. She ran around to the driver’s side of the big Cadillac, got in and started the motor. The headlights went on and she drove off.

  I turned and started back across the road. As I did, I saw that Keith Ludwell was no longer in the diner. He was outside, standing beside the cruiser watching me.

  “What happened?” he asked as I came up.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “A seventeen-year-old drunk. I sent him home.”

  “I noticed you went off the air.”

  So he had seen that the radio was shut off. Which meant he had been outside longer than I had thought.

  “Yes,” I said. “I sent in a 4.”

  His mouth pursed. “You shouldn’t have. Not at midnight. When you signal ‘off the air’ at midnight, the dispatcher is liable to think we both left the cruiser and went in to eat together. It doesn’t look good on the log.”

  I was just about sick of the whole business then and I almost opened my mouth to tell Ludwell so. I also wanted to tell him that he might be senior man and all that, and it was his job to correct me when I was wrong, but he sure was damn petty and picky about trivial things.

  I didn’t say anything, though. Opening the door I started to get into the cruiser.

  “Aren’t you going in for chow?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, a bit sullenly.

  He looked at me, frowned, and got in behind the wheel. He gave the dispatcher a Signal 5 that we were back on the air and we rode out on patrol.

  4

  OUR PATROL ENDED AT THREE IN THE MORNING. When we arrived at the barracks I could see newspaper men hanging around outside. Corporal Phil Kerrigan was in the duty office and he logged us in. Then he told me I was wanted in the guardroom.

  The room held an acrid blue mist of cigarette smoke, the stale odor of cigars. The floor that had been so carefully waxed and polished that morning was now scuffed and dirty. Around the long report table were a number of men in civilian clothes. I knew only one of them, State Police Detective-Lieutenant Sam Gahagan. He called me over and introduced me to the others. One of them was an assistant district attorney of Essex County, two were Boston detectives, one was a New York detective who had flown down that evening. The last one was Chief of Police Allen Rigsby of Dorset.

  I was glad to see Rigsby there. Some big city cops have a mistaken idea about small-town police. Rigsby was a young man with callused, oil-stained hands who owned an auto repair shop in Dorset. He received twelve hundred dollars a year for acting as the entire Dorset police department. He had no police car, no shortwave radio or teletype, no jail. He did not work full time at his police job because outside of a few legal papers to serve, town ordinances, an occasional town drunk, a rare theft, or pranksters, there wasn’t much crime in Dorset. But what was important was that Rigsby knew every person in town, their character and disposition—far more than the townspeople realized. Also, he could spot a stranger in town. The fact that he had never seen Whitey Swenke was pretty good evidence that Swenke had not been in the center of Dorset before.

  The men around the table looked very tired. Slumped in their chairs they kept sipping at cups of coffee, continually smoking. Gahagan asked me to repeat the part I had played in the capture of Swenke. Then he asked what, if anything, Swenke had said to me.

  I told them.

  “It’s not much,” Gahagan said, chewing on the stub of a soggy cigar. “But we haven’t done any better with him. He’s in the cellblock sleeping like a baby and we’re all pooped out. So Swenke told you the story about another blue truck, did he?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant,” I said.

  “It’s an old worn-out tactic,” Gahagan said. “He’ll keep hammering about that mythical truck hoping some juror will have a doubt and think maybe there was another truck. The man was caught red-handed and that’s the only story he can pull.” Gahagan looked at his cigar with distaste and put it into an ashtray. “You had custody of Swenke’s .38 automatic until Ballistics took it off your hands this afternoon, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “The tests show that gun killed Mary Ann Fedder. We have five eyewitnesses who can describe Swenke. I’m afraid our friend Swenke is sewed in a bag.”

  “Is he going to be kept here long, Lieutenant?”

  “No, he’s already been photoed and printed. In the morning we’ll take him down to the Salem District Court and arraign him for murder. He’ll stay in the county jail there until the trial. Our New York friend,” Gahagan said, gesturing to the New York detective, “has some old scores to settle and he’d like to fry Swenke in the chair at Sing Sing. But I think we’ll do the job for them.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I wish that was the end of it. It isn’t. Now we have to go to work.”

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “We’ve sent out a File 13 with his fingerprint classification. We may have some more news about him from other parts of the country. But we want to know what he was doing in Dorset. The D.A.’s disturbed, the whole town of Dorset is jittery. We can’t think of any kind of motive Swenke could have had for killing this girl. We thought maybe she scraped fenders with him on the road and he got mad at her. But there was no damage to either car or truck. No, there must be another reason why this professional killer showed up around here, and we have to find out what it is.” Gahagan sighed wearily. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of manpower. We’ve got to check this girl’s life back to the day she was born. We’ve got to check the family, the boy friend, the neighbors, the school. We’ve got to find out how long Swenke’s been in Massachusetts, where he’s been staying, who he’s been seen with, why he went to the trouble of renting a truck. We’ll have to shake down every stool pigeon we have. I’d love to get Swenke into GHQ and strap him to the lie detector. He’s refused to take it, of course.”

  The assistant district attorney was a gray-haired man with rimless glasses. He said, “Lindsey, you did a fine job in capturing Swenke.” Then he smiled a little diffidently. “I think it was good you didn’t know who he was when you grabbed him.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’d have been a lot more nervous and a lot more trigger happy.”

  They all smiled tiredly. Gahagan said, “Well, Ralph, as arresting officer, you might as well put your own two cents in. Do you have any ideas on the subject?”

  “Just one thing, Lieutenant,” I said. “A man like Swenke might have a family somewhere. He might have written home and told them something. If we could find out where—”

  Gahagan nodded. “Swenke has a mother in East Orange, New Jersey. She’s coming to Salem tomorrow. But our New York friend says we shouldn’t hope too much that she’ll tell us anything.”

  The New York detective snubbed out his cigarette. “If she does, it’ll be only by accident. That’s why we try to talk to them as long as we can. Sometimes a word will slip out by mistake.”

  Gahagan said, “I’d talk her deaf, blind and dumb if I thought I could get a word out of her.”

  The New York detective smiled. He had a shrewd, rough-hewn face. “I know Swenke’s old lady. You won’t get much out of her. She’s one of these quiet, patient mothers who thinks the whole wo
rld misunderstands her boy. She’ll tell you about the pet dog he loved and the box of candy he always sends on Mother’s Day. What happened to Whitey is the fault of cops picking on him and nasty people making up terrible stories about him. He was always good to his dog and his mother. And you might as well face it, Sam. Swenke is a psycho. He could have murdered this girl for a very small reason. He’s a skillful killer, so sure of himself that there was no question in his mind he’d get away with it.”

  The assistant district attorney said, “Lindsey, how long have you been stationed here?”

  “They just transferred me from the Concord Barracks, sir. I’ve been around only five days.”

  “What do you know about that Newburyport bank robbery three weeks ago?”

  “Not much, sir. I was part of a roadblock on Route 2 near Acton. That was a long way from the scene, and the only part I played in it.”

  “Well,” Lieutenant Gahagan said, “it’s just an idea we had, Ralph. This was a hundred-thousand-dollar robbery and the biggest score pulled in this area since the Danvers case. It was a well-planned job with only one little hitch. A Newburyport police officer who was supposed to have been at lunch was delayed by a little rear-end auto collision on Water Street. He wasn’t too far away when the bank robbers came out of the bank. There were three of them, two for the stickup and one in the getaway car. The cop opened fire. One of the men slipped or fell, but was dragged into the car. The men were all masked and we had poor descriptions of them. Somehow the car—a stolen one—got through our roadblocks and was found abandoned in Everett two days later. There was never any report on a wounded man. Yet the Newburyport cop thinks he hit somebody.”

  “Not Swenke, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” Gahagan said. “You saw Swenke stripped. Did he look like he had been wounded a couple of weeks ago?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So it wasn’t Swenke. Yet Swenke is the type who’d hire himself out for a job of this kind. Also, here we find him in Dorset, which isn’t too far from Newburyport. Maybe there’s a connection and maybe there isn’t.”

  One of the Boston detectives said, “Lindsey, you know we’re looking for a man named Hozak, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “George ‘Slicker’ Hozak. There’s been a general alarm out on him since the robbery.”

  “He’s dropped out of sight since the bank stickup,” the Boston detective said. “I still say this robbery was a typical, well-planned Hozak job. And I think there’s a good chance Hozak hired Swenke as a gun.”

  Gahagan smiled grimly. “Marty, if Swenke was hired for the Newburyport job he should have been paid off and long gone. So now tell me what Swenke was doing here three weeks later in a rented truck, and why he killed the girl.”

  The Boston detective grinned wearily. “Sam, I’ve got enough troubles of my own.”

  I had a cup of coffee with them and they asked me again about the capture, laying particular stress on the route the truck had taken and following it on the wall map. I could sense frustration in them, because, although they had the murderer, they might never learn the reason why Mary Ann Fedder was killed.

  I went back to the duty office to talk with Corporal Kerrigan, unbuckling my gunbelt, yawning a little because it had been a very long day. I explained to Kerrigan about the Cleves boy. After the Fedder murder it all seemed very inconsequential. Yet it bothered me that perhaps I hadn’t handled it correctly.

  Kerrigan’s eyes showed a great deal of interest. He said, “If I were you, Ralph, I wouldn’t have made the decision myself. I’d have called Ludwell out of the diner.”

  “Dammit, why?” I asked. “I spent three months at the Academy. It was tougher than any basic training I had in the Army. I graduate and I’m sent to two other barracks for seasoning before I come here. Haven’t I had enough training and background? By now I should be able to make my own decision on a minor drunk case, Phil.”

  “I should hope so,” Kerrigan said. “But first you should have been sure you were on safe ground. Ludwell would have told you. You didn’t ask him and now you’ve got some doubts about it. Because if you didn’t have any doubts you wouldn’t be asking me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So I should have called Ludwell. What else did I do that was so wrong?”

  “You made a mistake going into The Red Wheel without all the information. If you’d questioned the girl she’d have told you they didn’t serve young Cleves in The Red Wheel. Then you wouldn’t have made a damn fool of yourself in there.”

  “All right,” I said. “That was a mistake and I admit it. I’ll be more careful from now on. And I’m glad to see the end of that one.”

  Kerrigan shook his head slowly. “You haven’t seen the end of it, Ralph. There has to be a follow-through.”

  “Why?”

  “The boy was drunk. If he gets away with drunkenness he might try it again. The State Police can’t be a party to the concealment of it from a minor’s parents. They have to be notified, Ralph. You understand why, don’t you? Because if we don’t, this Cleves kid will think he can do it again without the cops bothering him. Next time he might get involved in an accident and an innocent person might be killed. What then? Evidence will be shown that this kid was drunk before, that the police knew about it and neglected to notify the parents so they could take proper action. You’d get it in the neck, Ralph.”

  “I never figured I had to be a wet nurse for parents.”

  “So you’ve learned something tonight. Parents have a right to know about their own kid. You say they’ll be back from New York tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll phone them tomorrow evening myself,” Kerrigan said. “But first we’ll check the kid’s name through to see if he has a record. Did you think of that?”

  “That’s one reason I walked in here,” I said. “Good night, Phil, and thanks.”

  I left the duty office and went upstairs to my room. Ludwell was fast asleep in his bed near the window. I undressed in the dark and walked down the hall in my wooden clogs to take my shower.

  I was thinking that would close the Cleves incident. After all it was pretty small stuff. Certainly it was nothing over which anybody would want to make an issue.

  As it turned out, I was wrong.

  5

  WHEN I GOT UP AT TEN THAT MORNING, Trooper Keith Ludwell was gone from the room. Along with four other experienced troopers in plain-clothes, he had been put on special assignment on the Fedder case. They told me Ludwell had left the barracks at nine in a black cruiser. Earlier, Kurt Swenke, heavily manacled and guarded, had been taken to Salem, arraigned for the murder and lodged in the county jail there. Now the cellblock and the guardroom of the barracks were cleaned and polished again, and the gardener-custodian had quit his mumbling and had gone back to his favorite mission—the front lawn.

  It was one of those soft spring mornings, with a gentle breeze blowing from the west. Everything outside seemed to be bursting into flower. Next to the barracks, beyond an old stone wall, was an ancient Colonial cemetery which was preserved by some historical society. I could see workmen in there, grooming the grounds, getting them ready for the Memorial Day exercises.

  Because I had been on a late patrol and my senior man was out, Sergeant Neal put me on barracks duty until noon. In fatigue clothes I washed and polished Cruiser 27, then worked on my reports.

  Just before lunch Captain Roger Dondera, the troop commander, came down from Framingham. With him, to supervise the detectives in the investigation, was Detective-Lieutenant Edward Newpole from State Police GHQ in Boston. I knew Lieutenant Newpole well. He was an old family friend and I had worked with him on two other cases.

  They called me into the guardroom and Newpole told me Swenke had been bound over for the grand jury and as arresting officer I would probably be called. He also told me that a well-known criminal lawyer had made a sudden appearance to take on Swenke’s case.

  Also, Mrs. Ilge Swenke, the widowed mother
of Kurt, had arrived from New Jersey to see her son. She talked freely to the police and newspaper men. She said everybody was wrong, of course. Her son would not kill any harmless girl like Mary Ann Fedder. It was the usual frame-up and persecution of her son. Also her Kurt had been senselessly and brutally beaten over the head by the arresting trooper. She would look into the laws about prosecuting said trooper.

  “She really believes all that?” I asked.

  “Why not?” Newpole said. “She’ll believe anything her boy tells her. Almost all mothers do. Mothers are the biggest suckers in the world when it comes to their own kids.”

  Two interesting points had come up in her interview with the police. Over a month ago she had received a postcard from Kurt postmarked Ipswich, Mass., and telling her about the famous clams he had eaten there. The Boston address on the automobile license had been false and Swenke had not lived there. But the information about the postcard had sent state detectives scurrying to the Ipswich, Essex, Hamilton area. Ipswich was less than fifteen miles south of Newburyport and only a half-hour’s ride from Dorset. And if Swenke had been in Massachusetts over a month ago, he could have taken part in the Newburyport robbery.

  No, she had not saved the postcard. Police always had a way of misinterpreting things. But she did remember, proudly, that her son had mentioned he was friendly with a priest. This raised some eyebrows because the last time Whitey Swenke had been near a priest was when he was fourteen and had committed a theft from a poor box in a church in New Jersey. Still the detectives would doggedly check all parishes for information.

  There was one more bit of news. Mr. Fedder, the father of Mary Ann, had suffered a severe heart attack and was now at the Anna Jaques Hospital.