A blaring horn cut into his thoughts, and brought his attention back to his driving. He had been drifting out into the center lane, almost cutting off a yellow Volkswagen beetle carrying three young girls. Careful, boy, he heard the voice of the past scold him. You get in trouble when you think too much.
He brought his mind back to the road. It was too early for the evening rush hour, but it was dusk, and the sky was overcast, so he decided to switch on his headlights. His mirrors showed nothing behind him. The VW had gone by, and it was the only other car he could see on the highway, so Buell risked a look at the surrounding landscape.
Over the years he had come to enjoy the look of Sparta in the winter, the aluminized art deco look the snow and ice gave to everything. He enjoyed contrasting it with the red soil of Knox County. He’d enjoy it even more when he went back there. The red dirt would be there, but everything else would be different; and a lot more would be made different after he got there.
For one thing, he’d have Diedre and her little boy with him. That was the one thing above all he owed Sparta—Diedre Chester. He never knew how much he needed a woman to really love; you never know how deep a need is until you start to fill it.
He saw a highway sign indicating Downtown Sparta, and knew he was about twenty minutes from his exit. It used to be about ten minutes of driving, but last summer the county had started to build a new overpass and approach ramp, and had only managed to get the skeletons up before the first blizzard of this incredible winter hit, in early October. Further work was impossible until the thaw, assuming the part already built wasn’t washed away by a flood of melted snow.
There was the incomplete overpass just ahead, with the temporary wooden DANGER—CONSTRUCTION sign hung on it, faded by the elements but still discernible.
He was about a hundred yards behind the girls, who were just about to drive under the incomplete structure. At that precise moment, the sign gave way.
There must have been a snap, but Buell never heard it. The heavy wooden sign suddenly came free at the upper left-hand corner, swung heavily down and to the right, then came free all together. Buell watched, horrified, as it fell some fifteen feet, corner first, onto the hood of the yellow Volkswagen.
The young girl driving could not have known what hit her. The car went crazily out of control and crashed into one of the overpass’s concrete supports. The car, nose end now with a huge concavity, as though some giant had taken a bite out of it, spun once, then turned turtle.
Buell pulled his car to a stop. He looked at the wrecked car and shivered for a few seconds, but he soon realized what he had to do. The steps he should take came like diagrams to his mind, sharp and clear.
Buell raced around to the trunk of his car, got his fire extinguisher, a blanket, and some other things he thought he might have use for, and ran to the crippled car.
The Volkswagen’s wheels were still spinning uselessly in the air. Buell got down on hands and knees on the freezing asphalt, reached in through a crushed window to turn off the ignition, sprayed the extinguisher on the car, then turned his attention to the girls.
Buell had first seen death at his father’s wake, but he didn’t count that—it had been sanitized, almost sissified. He saw men shot and blown apart in Korea, though, and since then had seen death in all its forms—every reporter does. But this was different, for a lot of reasons.
The driver of the Volkswagen was obviously dead. She was a small, delicate-looking Oriental girl. The steering wheel was pressed into her stomach, apparently bent down from the force of the falling sign. Its pressure held her tight against the seat, dangling upside down in the overturned car. The girl in the passenger seat, a blonde, was tangled up with the instrument panel. Her hands clawed at the padded dashboard as though it were a lover’s back. Buell thought her lips were unnaturally red, and he wondered about it, until the girl’s feeble cough produced a fine red spray.
She needed more help than Buell could give her, he knew, so he concentrated on the girl in the back seat, a tall brunette. She was bleeding from the scalp and trying to crawl through the back window. Buell went around and got her out, covered her with the blanket, and made her as comfortable as possible.
Then, after making sure he had nothing left to do at the scene of the accident, Buell went up the road to try and get help.
It didn’t take long before a state trooper drove by.
“Call an ambulance!” Buell told him. “Some girls are hurt pretty bad.”
The trooper had intended to ask a couple of questions about Buell’s abandoned car, but the nature of the reporter’s request, along with his aristocratic appearance and distinguished “suthun” accent, changed the trooper’s mind. He radioed for the ambulance, he radioed for more police, then asked Buell what happened.
Buell told him; later on he told the trooper’s superior, and after that he told the superior’s superior. He didn’t mind. The longer he hung around the scene, the more facts he picked up. After all, he was a reporter. He found out the dead Oriental girl’s name was Beth Ling, the blonde’s Carol Salinski, and the tall brunette who appeared to be least hurt was Barbara Elleger. Later, he learned the Salinski girl died on the way to the hospital, but that the Elleger girl would survive.
He looked over the cops’ shoulders as they checked the contents of the girls’ purses. They all had G.O. cards from Grover Cleveland High. Beth Ling had an autographed picture of Erik Estrada. Barbara Elleger had a brand-new diaphragm, and instructions from a gynecologist on how to use it.
And just before he told the story for the last time, he learned something else. A state police captain called Buell over to him.
“That girl that survived owes her life to you, the hospital tells me, Mr. Tatham.”
Buell was truly glad. “ ‘I’m just a humble man, tryin’ in my own way to serve the Lord,’ as my daddy used to say,” he said.
The captain smiled, and started to say something, but was cut off by a yell from one of his men, a technician who’d been looking at the wooden sign.
Buell turned and looked at the man, a fat guy holding a magnifying glass. He was standing in the middle of a world that no longer was a clean art deco fantasy—it was a lurid nightmare, painted police-flasher blue and blood-red.
Buell followed the captain to where the technician was standing over the sign, being careful not to step on any splinters. “This is why the sign fell, Captain. See this clamp?”
The sign had been held to the overpass structure by two U-shaped metal clamps. Both were still bolted to the wood. One was twisted and broken, but the other remained straight, with a gap of about three quarters of an inch where the curve of the U should be, leaving a metal structure that looked not unlike a caterpillar rearing up at his reflection in a mirror.
“I saw it go,” the reporter reminded the captain. “I knew it had to be something like that.”
“Yeah,” the expert said, bitterly, “but look. Of course I’ll confirm it in the lab, but look at this.” He ran his fingers over the broken part of the clamp. It narrowed from the roundness of the metal’s regular thickness to a straight edge, rather like an extremely blunt-bladed screwdriver. “This metal didn’t snap,” the technician said. “Somebody was at it with a bolt cutter. This is a murder, Captain.”
The captain commended his man on his good work. Then he swore. Then he radioed the Sparta Public Safety Building, and told someone to tell Inspector Fleisher that he had a murder on his hands, that the crash occurred three tenths of a mile inside Sparta’s city limits.
That was Thursday, January 15. On Saturday, January 17, Buell Tatham, author of the “Human Angle” column in the Sparta Daily Courant, found a note in his mail at the office.
It was in a cheap, plain white envelope with no return address. It had been mailed at a dropbox somewhere in downtown Sparta. It was addressed in uniform, well-formed, untraceable block capitals, written with a nineteen-cent ball point pen.
There was a single piece of paper
inside, with a message in the same letters and the same ink. It read:
BUELL TATHAM—
YOU WERE ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES THURSDAY EVENING. SINCE YOU WERE THERE AS A WITNESS, YOU WILL DO AS WELL AS ANYONE TO PASS ON MY MESSAGES TO THE POLICE. THE POLICE WERE LUCKY TOO. I WAS SLOPPY ON PURPOSE SO THEY’D KNOW WHAT I CAN DO. IN THE FUTURE, NO ONE WILL KNOW I’VE STRUCK UNTIL I TELL YOU SO. THE TALL GIRL WAS ALSO LUCKY. SHE WILL LIVE TO USE THE DIAPHRAGM SHE HAD IN HER PURSE. THIS WON’T BE THE LAST NOTE. MORE DEATHS ARE COMING. TILL THEN.
—HOG
This is it, Buell thought, holding tightly to the letter in one hand and dialing the police with the other. This is where it starts for real. Because outside of a few law officers, Buell, and the gynecologist who gave it to her, nobody knew Barbara Elleger and her friends were on the road that afternoon to drive to a nearby town and pick up that diaphragm. It hadn’t been printed. The girl’s parents hadn’t even been told. Barbara herself was still unconscious.
So, Buell thought, anyone with any intelligence will have to concede the probability that this note came from the killer.
TWO
DIEDRE ROSE AT DAWN, threw her coat on over her nightgown, and took a quick trip to the newsstand for a copy of the Courant. She could hardly wait to get the details of the latest development in the Hog case—Buell only had time to give her the barest sketch when he phoned last night. She raced back to her apartment, threw aside her coat and shoes, and bounced down on the bed.
“HOG CLAIMS NEW MURDER” the headline said. Buell had gotten the note yesterday, that was why he had to cancel their dinner and spend all day and night with the police. The story went on to say that Hog’s note, which was identical to the first one in paper and printing, said the death of eighty-one-year-old Stanley Watson, at first believed accidental, was really the work of Hog. “Watson didn’t fall down those stairs,” the note stated, “I gave him a little push.”
Again like in the note following the first two deaths, the writer knew something no one outside the investigation was supposed to know: Watson had been found with an unopened can of Miller High Life beer clutched in his dead hand.
Watson had about seven hundred dollars in small bills stuffed in a cookie jar and two vases in his house; it didn’t appear to have been touched. Watson had retired twenty-two years ago from his job as a welder in the General Electric plant in Sparta. The police were baffled.
That last fact wasn’t in the article, Buell had told Diedre that, personally. It was horrible, of course, but still very exciting. Buell was very important to this case. He was helping the police.
Diedre took anything good that Buell accomplished as a personal compliment. It made her feel special. Sure, she had natural platinum blonde hair, and deep blue eyes, and the face and figure of a movie star (which she once had been, almost, until she found out about the movie), but all the girls in Fogelsberg, Minnesota, where she had grown up as Diedre Swenson could say that, almost. But could they say they had once been the very good friend of the president of the second richest bank in the country? Had they married the Liberian ambassador to the United Nations, and had a beautiful son who was a citizen of two countries? Were they engaged to a reporter who was so respected in his town that the police asked him for help? Of course they couldn’t. They were all still back in Fogelsberg, working in the public library, or married to summer-wheat farmers. It took a special kind of woman, a remarkable woman to be loved by such fascinating men. Diedre only regretted that Ricky was with his father in Africa, and couldn’t share the excitement of his future stepfather’s importance.
And Buell was going to become more important when he came into his money, which would be soon. He had all kinds of wonderful plans and projects for the poor people back home. It was thrilling to be with such a man, even more thrilling (she admitted secretly) than sleeping with him. She angled her body so the rising sun streaming through her window fell on the front page of the Courant, and read Buell’s article again.
Ron Gentry was reading that same article with the same sunlight, although he had to assist it with a desk lamp. The management of the venerable old Bixby Building in which he had his office was far less conscientious in keeping windows clean than Diedre’s landlord was. Besides, Ron thought, even if Sparta was in the midst of a heat wave, with the temperature yesterday soaring to thirty-four degrees, the winter sun over Sparta was a feeble thing at best.
Ron felt pangs as he read Buell Tatham’s article, the first straight news that good old boy had written in years, probably. Ron and the columnist had become acquainted when Buell had done a column on the professor shortly before Benedetti left Sparta University three years ago. He envied the reporter his “in” on the investigation, felt like a kid looking at a ballgame through a schoolyard fence. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t help them for heaven’s sake. After all, he was a duly licensed private investigator, not to mention the only Benedetti-trained investigator in the entire world.
A clicking sound from the outer office distracted him for a second, until he recognized the step of Mrs. Goralsky, his secretary. Mrs. Goralsky was the kind of smart, resourceful, efficient office manager a private eye needs, especially when he’s running a one-man operation. Ron couldn’t see her through the glass door of his private office, but he could hear her going through her morning routine—the muffled thump as she put her two Sparta telephone directories on her chair, the ratcheting noise of a fresh sheet of paper going into the typewriter, the phone call to the answering service to tell them she was on the job.
The next thing he heard was the sharp rap on the floor as Mrs. Goralsky leaped from her perch on the phone books to the polished hardwood. Ron heard her little feet click rapidly across the outer office, and saw the top of her head through the glass in the door as she pushed it aside and walked in.
“Good morning, Mr. Gentry,” she said. “You’re here early, this morning. Couldn’t you sleep last night?”
The late Mr. Goralsky, a high school football coach, was often known to say, with a grin and a guffaw, “Good things come in small packages. Take the little woman for example.” He made up for his lack of originality with love—and accuracy. The “little woman” in this case was, in fact, a midget—technically a pituitary dwarf—a fraction of an inch less than four feet five inches tall. Actually, that’s pretty tall for a midget. And since Mrs. Goralsky’s body proportions were perfect (even sexy), it wasn’t uncommon for visitors to the office to wonder why Gentry had bought such enormous furniture.
“Good morning, Mrs. Goralsky,” Ron said. “No, I slept fine. I got up early to get the paper.”
If Ron had any complaint about his secretary, it was her tendency to want to mother him. The fact that Mrs. Goralsky had a son of her own, an All-America candidate at linebacker for the Sparta University football team, seemed to make no difference at all.
“The Hog case?” Mrs. Goralsky wanted to know. “I heard on the radio he sent another note.” She walked around his desk and, over his elbow, skimmed the article. “Think we’ll get a shot at the case?” she asked eagerly.
Ron, as always, was amused at the gleam in his secretary’s eye when the talk turned to violence and murder. He was aware of a similar feeling and was frank enough to recognize it as not quite wholesome, but (he told himself) he had the excuse of long exposure to the celebrated Professor Niccolo Benedetti, after which nobody could be expected to remain entirely normal.
“We might at that, Mrs. Goralsky,” he said. “Even if they don’t invite me in, there may come the time when they’re so disgusted with themselves they’ll float a bond issue and raise enough money to get the professor. Then I’ll be in on it automatically, as his flunky.”
“Well, I hope so,” Mrs. Goralsky said, and left the office. Ron hoped so, too. He took off his glasses, polished them, then read the article again.
Indirectly, it was poor eyesight that had resulted in Ron’s becoming a private detective. Ever since the Sunday he first laboriously sou
nded out a Dick Tracy episode in his local newspaper, he had wanted to be a cop. But by the time he finished high school, he knew he’d never be able to pass the vision test.
It was a shame. Tall, athletic, blond, Ron would have looked good in uniform. Women always said so. But those pale gray eyes they also admired let him down.
He’d accepted it as philosophically as he could, and compromised on college and law school. Maybe some day he could become district attorney or something.
But, during his junior year at Sparta University, he literally bumped into Professor Niccolo Benedetti in a crowded hallway during class-changing time. The professor took one look at him and said, “You. You have the look. Come to my office. What is your name?”
Ron answered that, and thousands of other questions during the next few days. He did nothing but talk and write for the professor; who listened or read with that Mona Lisa smile of his, and said nothing.
Finally, when Ron was seriously considering seeking a writ of habeas corpus for himself, the old man said, “Congratulations, Ronald Gentry. I choose you, if you wish, my sixth protégé. You will accompany me, and assist me in my research during my stay in this place.”
Assistant to the world’s greatest detective? That was better than law school. He accepted immediately.
The professor shook his head. “Do not be hasty, amico. The position is not without risk, to your body and your soul. Of my five previous students, one is dead; one controls a billion-dollar corporation; two are in prison, one justly and one unjustly; and one is the virtual dictator of a Pacific island. If you join me you will be dealing with evil, and evil has its attractions.”
Because to Benedetti, the investigation of crime was merely a tool of research. His lifework was nothing less than an inquiry into the nature of human evil. He hunted down criminals more to study them than to punish them.
Hog Murders Page 2
