Sleep of the Innocent

by Medora Sale

  “Come off it, Patterson. It’s a hotel. You aren’t going to find any witnesses still there from Thursday,” said Lucas.

  “Don’t be stupid. Those floors are where the permanent residents live—or didn’t you know that?”

  “I suppose I did. No one has reported hearing a gunshot? What was he killed with, by the way?”

  “A twenty-two. Understated—”

  “And relatively quiet. A professional?”

  “Possibly. Doesn’t make things any easier, does it?”

  Sanders stepped into his apartment at nine o’clock on Sunday night and was overwhelmed with a powerful sense of oppression. It had been his suggestion to end the holiday then, to make a swift break between love and work. Harriet had given him a look he had trouble interpreting and then agreed that it was a good idea, pointing out that it was going to take her the rest of the evening to sort out a week’s worth of mail and telephone messages. It had been one of his crummier ideas. He wondered if she felt as alone and abandoned at this particular moment as he did. He rummaged around in the refrigerator for a beer, pushed a pile of books and newspapers off his most comfortable chair, and reached for the telephone.

  “Ed,” he said, with relief when he heard the voice on the other end. “How are things? What’s been happening while I’ve been away?” His shoulders dropped in relaxation, and he raised the bottle to his lips.

  “No,” said Sanders. “Haven’t heard a thing. We were in the States. You’d have to assassinate the pope in Toronto for it to hit the news on Martha’s Vineyard.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, I remember Carl Neilson. Didn’t he try to buy the entire town council in King City or someplace like that three or four years ago? They almost got him for it, too. Thank God I was away. Let Baldwin screw it up.” John Sanders listened for five more minutes without interrupting before saying goodbye and gently replacing the receiver. He stood up and walked over to the window; he stared thoughtfully at the forest of high rises silhouetted against the black night, shook his head, and reached for the telephone again.

  Chapter 6

  “He always was a stupid bastard,” said Ed Dubinsky softly. The sergeant shoved the loose papers on his desk to one side to clear a space for his partner to sit on, close enough to hear him. “Well, maybe not stupid, exactly. Anyway, they should get him the hell out of this department.”

  “What’s gone wrong with the case?” asked Sanders idly.

  “Aside from the fact that Matt Baldwin’s been running it? I’m not quite sure,” said Dubinsky with uncharacteristic humility. “Maybe it’s that the widow’s lawyer is Marty Fielding. Baldwin’s scared shitless of Fielding. Always has been.”

  “Wasn’t there something about Carl Neilson and girls?” asked Sanders.

  Dubinsky rocked his hand gently back and forth. “Who can tell? He owned that place down on Dundas, La Celestina—remember? Hooker was killed in the alley behind it. We sniffed around him a bit because it looked like she used to work out of the restaurant, but nothing came of it. That was Baldwin, too, wasn’t it?” he said innocently. “And Patterson. They nailed the pimp for it, but he got off. He was a vicious bastard, that pimp. But that doesn’t mean he killed the hooker.”

  “Christ, I feel like I never left the city,” said Sanders gloomily. “What have you been working on?”

  Forty-eight hours had passed by, forty-eight hours in which Lucas had knocked on doors and attempted to interview the residents of the Karlsbad Hotel, the shopkeepers on both sides of the street, the owners of the townhouses behind the hotel. Nothing. He had collected a few reminiscences, several diatribes on the disintegration of society, and a great many baffled looks. Now he sat at his desk, meticulously fleshing out his report on the material he had collected. It was not difficult to write. No one had heard anything even remotely resembling gunfire. No one had noticed anyone behaving in a suspicious manner. In fact, no one had noticed anyone. People who had been home had been sleeping, or watching television, or listening to the radio; everyone else had been finishing late lunches, shopping, going to movies, even working. Those, of course, were the people who could remember what they were doing three days ago. Most hadn’t the faintest idea.

  Eric Patterson padded into the room, settled himself at his desk, and looked at his watch.

  “What’s up?” said Lucas, yawning. “You’re looking pale and sinister, Patterson, like a tired wolf about to eat Red Riding Hood. You should get more sleep.”

  “Nothing the matter with me,” said Eric, turning his chair half around so he could stretch his legs out past the desk. “I don’t need ten hours a night in the sack to wrap up a simple case like this.”

  Lucas ignored the crack. “So what’s up?”

  “Not that much. Just a hunch, what you might call a twitch in the gut. I’ve been nosing around Neilson’s phony corporation, and there’s one bastard that looks like a rabbit smelling the stew pot every time you ask him a question. I think I’ll have another go at him this afternoon.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The treasurer.” Patterson grinned cheerfully.

  “Does he look like someone who owns an illegal twenty-two?”

  “He doesn’t have to. He could have connections somewhere. Everybody’s got some kind of connections. Anyway, I just want to bounce him a few times and see how high he jumps.” He looked at his watch again. “Well, I’m off. Timing is everything.” With that, he loped out of the office like a cynical wolfhound, his raincoat flying out behind him.

  And that meant that it was Rob Lucas’s hand reaching for the telephone when the call came through. “Four ninety-two Oak Street, lower apartment,” droned the clear, businesslike voice. “Female, tentatively identified as Jennifer Wilson, age twenty-three, apparently bludgeoned to death sometime during the night.” For a moment he sat absolutely still. He could see her standing in the restaurant, looking absurdly childlike in his blue sweater, observing him coolly; then waving her arm in the direction of his face and teasing him about his looks. His stomach twisted painfully and he got up. In the flurry that followed, he remembered to drop a note on Baldy’s desk, grateful at least that he was not in the office to discover that their witness was now dead. He should have taken her midnight flight more seriously, done something more aggressive to protect her. “Christ almighty,” he said to the walls of the elevator, “I might as well have killed her myself and been done with it,” and punched hell out of the buttons.

  Six or seven people were standing around that large front bedroom when Lucas got there, waiting for someone—him—to arrive and start more things happening. “How did he gain entry?” he snapped.

  “Through this window,” said a constable who was leaning against the frame of the bay window in the front of the room. “It was unlocked, maybe even open a crack. You can see pry marks in the wood of the sill. A crowbar or something like that. Rusty.”

  Reluctantly, he looked down at the girl on the floor and froze. She was facedown, dressed in a long flannelette nightgown with little flowers on it. One side of the nightgown was caught under her, revealing a stick-thin leg as far as a smooth pale thigh. There was no mystery about the cause of death. Someone had smashed in the back of her skull with tremendous force. Blood and tissue had congealed in a black and sickening mess, horribly visible against her pale blond hair. Straight, short, blond hair. “Is this the girl you called in about?” he snapped finally at the constable standing near the door.

  “Yeah, this is the girl.” He looked askance at Lucas, as if wondering if the man were entirely sane. “The neighbour rang the doorbell, and when no one answered, she looked in the window. She said the girl’s name is Jennifer Wilson. She’s out on the porch if you want to talk to her.”

  “This is Jennifer Wilson?” he repeated stupidly. “Have you guys finished taking pictures?” he asked. The photographer nodded. “Anyone mind if I turn her over for a second?” The photographer
shrugged. No one else said a word. Lucas took her gently by the thinnest, narrowest shoulders he had ever touched on an adult and turned her stiffening body over. Blue eyes stared at him above a thin, slightly curving nose and a narrow mouth, all set in a slightly elongated face. She would have been a pretty girl, he thought, with life in that face, and probably spectacular when made up for the stage. But there was one thing that she certainly was not. She was not his Jennifer Wilson. She was five inches shorter and twenty or thirty pounds lighter, and although his Jennifer hadn’t been particularly large, this girl was elfin in her tininess—a doll-like creature. She was also, he observed with dismay, the daughter of the nice woman in the suburbs. Every bone in her face told him that. “Damn,” he said at last, and set her back the way she had been found.

  “Has someone gone through her things?” he snapped. Silence. “I want to know if it’s all hers. It shouldn’t be too hard to tell. She must be size one, if there is such a thing. If you find anything that seems to belong to someone else, let me know.”

  “What about prints?” said an intrepid voice.

  “After they’ve finished,” he said. “After they’ve finished.”

  The murder weapon—a rusty and aged-looking crowbar—had been extracted from the leafless bushes in front of the house. No particular attempt had been made to conceal it, for the excellent reason that concealment was unnecessary. The chances of tracing it to anyone were very dim. It was covered with blood and hair, undoubtedly Jennifer Wilson’s, and no doubt the pathologist would find corresponding rust marks in the wound, but it was one of thousands of rusty crowbars in the city, of exactly the same design, and there was not a recoverable fingerprint on any of its surfaces. Plastic-shrouded, it had made its futile trip to the lab shortly after Jennifer Wilson’s body, also plastic-shrouded, had left for the morgue. Lucas headed for the back bedroom. The print crew had been through and was now at work on the front bedroom; he was in full possession. There were twin beds, each covered with a thin orange bedspread, both concealing naked mattresses. In the corner was an old chest of drawers, empty even of dust particles. The closet was bare, except for a handful of wire coat hangers; even the wicker wastepaper basket had nothing in it but a plastic tab from an adhesive bandage. He collected it carefully and put it away, forlorn hope though it was. The bedside table in between the two beds had a drawer with an old ballpoint pen inside it. No matchbook covers from favourite hangouts, no name on the pen. No revealing letters jammed carelessly under the drawers. Just a few curls of dust under the beds and a couple of darker patches on the walls where pictures had been. Posters, he supposed, judging by the size.

  He was interrupted in his reverie by one of the constables who was working on the front room. “Hey, Sergeant,” he said. “You want to talk to the neighbour? She says she’s getting chilly out there.”

  “For chrissake, you mean she’s still on the porch? Why didn’t you tell her to go home?”

  “I did,” he said, with the look of a long-suffering and misunderstood man. “She didn’t want to miss any of the excitement.”

  “Well, tell her again. I’ll be over in a minute.”

  It was actually closer to five minutes later when he presented himself on the concrete porch and rang the bell. This time it was answered almost at once by a plump elderly lady with bright and curious eyes, who regarded him steadily as he introduced himself, and then picked up his ID suspiciously and stared at it long enough to memorize it. “Come in, Sergeant,” she said finally. “You’re the person who came a few days ago to see Jennifer, aren’t you? I saw you crawling around her garden, trying to get in the back window. I thought police weren’t supposed to do that. That’s what they say on television, you know. But perhaps it’s only in stories that police don’t break into people’s houses.”

  He sighed and braced himself for trouble. “You were in when I came out here before? When I stood here and rang your doorbell?”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded vigorously. “I’m always in during the afternoon. That’s when I take my rest. Very important, the doctor told me. That’s why I didn’t answer the door. Besides, you know, I couldn’t tell who you were. And crawling around the garden like that, you could have been a burglar. Or a rapist.” As she spoke, she led him slowly into a living room filled with dark, overstuffed furniture and a multitude of little tables. He picked his way carefully through the hazards and perched on the edge of a chair, taking out his notebook as he went down.

  “Another policeman was out here looking for her yesterday as well,” she observed brightly. “I suppose she must have been in some sort of difficulty.” She waited a hopeful second or two for a response and then ploughed on. “Had something stolen, I expect. You never know—the people who live here these days—it gets worse and worse. Anyway, I was in the garden. It was in the morning, and I always work outside for a little while during the day unless the weather is too bad. It’s very important to get out every day, you know. That’s what the doctor says.”

  “Who was this policeman?” asked Lucas in the momentary pause while she caught her breath.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know that. He didn’t actually say he was a policeman, you know; he just looked like one.”

  “Did he show you any identification? Like that card I showed you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, almost shocked. “Of course not. But he didn’t want to come into my house, you see. I would never allow anyone in my house who didn’t have proper identification—I’m very careful—but he just wanted to know about Jennifer. It’s funny, he said the thin girl with black hair, and she is thin, too thin, but I told him no, she didn’t, she had blond hair, and that black hair was just a wig. She had three wigs, you know. Very expensive they were. One all fluffy and curly and long, the same color as her own hair—a Dolly Parton wig, she called it. And the black wig he was talking about. And then a lovely dark red wig—that was my favourite. She was telling me all about them one day when she came over for tea. I wasn’t feeling too good, and she was so excited about them that she went and got them and modeled them for me. She used them for her work. She was a singer, you know. For one of those rock bands. Such a lovely girl.”

  “Can you tell me anything more about this man who came around yesterday?” said Lucas with a sense of almost suffocating impatience.

  “What else do you want to know?” she asked vaguely. “I mean, he was a tall man, and he had a raincoat on, and one of those tweed hats.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Not very old. No, not very old at all.”

  “My age?”

  “How old are you? You don’t have to answer that,” she added archly. “He could have been your age, or older. Or maybe younger. It’s so hard to tell what age a man is, don’t you find? Women are easier, I think.”

  “What color was his hair?”

  “He had a green hat on, I know that. I don’t think I saw his hair color. He had blue eyes,” she added, “or maybe brown.”

  Lucas tried another tack. “What did he want to know?”

  “Oh, he just wanted to know if Jennifer was back yet from her job. I said she was, but she was out. She’d just come in yesterday morning about ten, and she’d popped over to see me—I keep a key to her flat when she’s out of town, in case of emergencies, you see, because her roommate’s never home and the girl on the top floor is out at work every day and goes away every weekend, and if you ask me, she doesn’t spend every night at home during the week, either, but that makes her a nice quiet neighbour, so I’m not complaining.”

  “What roommate?” asked Lucas. “There doesn’t seem to be—”

  “Oh, well, then, maybe she’s moved out. I thought I hadn’t seen her for a while. Anyway, Jennifer had to run out and do some shopping, and that was when he came around. He said he was sorry he missed her, but he’d call back some other time. She said he was probably selling insurance, but he didn’t look to me
like a salesman. It was when she got back that she said that—she’d popped in again because I’d asked her to get me a pound of butter while she was out.”

  “What time did you say this man came around? Ten-thirty?”

  For a brief miraculous moment, there was a pause. “Yes. Because I had just gone out into the garden, and I go out at ten-thirty, right after my tea, and he was just walking up the path between the houses.”

  When he got back to Jennifer Wilson’s flat, his ears still ringing from the monologue, the front bedroom was clear for inspection. He stood in the center of the room and looked around him. The double bed was almost unrumpled. She must have climbed out of bed when she heard her attacker, leaving behind that slight hump in the bedclothes and a flash of visible sheet. Why hadn’t she screamed? Or perhaps she had, and no one had heard her. Another question for the neighbours.

  He started with the closet. It was small and jammed with clothes. On the left she kept her spangled, gaudy-looking stage costumes; next to them was an assortment of ordinary casual garments: skirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, and jeans. But every piece of clothing was tiny. As was all the underwear lying in the drawers. No one larger than Jennifer Wilson could have struggled into any of it. The walls were covered with posters and photographs of the real Jennifer as Stormi Knight, some of them alone, some with the five male members of the band surrounding her.

  On the top shelf of the closet (how had she reached up that high? he wondered, and then saw a solid-looking stool pushed into a corner) were three hatboxes. He carried them over to the bed and looked inside. There were the wigs the neighbour had seen: the Dolly Parton; the black one-long and straight, designed to make her look ghoulish; and the dark red one. And this was the reason that little Jennifer Wilson was dead. For owning a black wig and, one gloomy day, modeling it as a joke for her neighbour, to cheer her up when she wasn’t feeling well.

  The sun, sulking behind some ineffectual clouds, had almost set before Lucas got back to his desk. His head ached, his hands were shaky, his stomach rebellious. Guilt and misery and total bafflement, that was why he felt this way. Guilt because it was his inefficiency that had caused a harmless girl to be killed, and guilt because his first reaction when he saw that silky blond hair and realized that the victim had not been his Jennifer Wilson was profound relief. After a moment’s consideration he added hunger. There had never seemed to be a moment in this day when going off to eat lunch had been even a slight possibility.