For a long time he looked at her. “Let me get this straight,” he said finally. “He didn’t threaten to expose us. He wasn’t going to the police. But just because he seemed to you like a poor security risk, you murdered him.”
“It wasn’t only that,” she said. “He refused to help any more. While I was explaining things to him, I suddenly remembered that Lawrence’s clothing was still hidden in the garage. I suggested we get it and burn it, but he point-blank refused.”
“That’s certainly a motive for murder,” Calhoun said sardonically.
She frowned slightly. “You make it sound worse than it was.”
“Then make it sound better.”
She made an impatient gesture. “What difference does it make now? It’s done. We have to dispose of the body.”
Again she looked at him expectantly, a curious brightness in her eyes. And suddenly he realized something he had been aware of subconsciously for some time but hadn’t brought to the front of his mind for examination.
Helena enjoyed watching him solve the problems brought on by murder.
It was a game to her, he knew with abrupt understanding, for the first time really knowing what went on behind that expressionless face.
He said, “What do you mean, we have to dispose of the body? I haven’t killed anybody.”
Her lip corners curved upward in a barely discernible smile. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me caught, Barney. You can only be executed for one murder. So there wouldn’t be any point in not telling the police about Lawrence if I got caught for this one. Including how cleverly you got rid of the body.”
With a feeling of horror Calhoun looked off into the future, seeing himself disposing of corpse after corpse as Helena repeatedly indulged her newly discovered thrill.
With only one possible result. Nobody gets away with murder forever.
He knew what he had to do then.
For a moment he examined her moodily. Then he shrugged. “All right, Helena. We may as well start now. Get some rags.”
Obediently she went into the kitchen, and returned in a few moments with several large rags. Taking them from her, Calhoun said, “Lift his head a little. So I can spread rags under it.”
She turned her back to him, put both hands under the dead man’s shoulders, and tugged upward. Calhoun scooped up the pistol lying on the floor, raised it high overhead, and swung it down on top of her head with all his force. She dropped without a sound as the metal barrel crunched through her skull.
Staring down at her body sprawled across that of her former lover, Calhoun thought grimly that it wasn’t much harder to dispose of two bodies than it is to dispose of one.
Fortunately Buffalo, as well as Cleveland, was on Lake Erie.
Calhoun’s first act after the murder was to make sure all doors to the house were locked. Then he searched until he found Helena’s straw bag in an upstairs bedroom. It contained keys to the house, the garage, and her Buick. He took them all downstairs with him.
Quietly he let himself out the front door, locked it behind him, and climbed into his Plymouth, parked in front of the house. He drove it into the driveway without turning on lights, braked with his front bumper nearly touching the garage doors, then backed across the lawn until the rear of the car was next to the back-porch steps.
Getting out, he looked at the houses on each side. Both were a good hundred feet away, and the views from them were partially obstructed by trees. There was a full moon, but filmy clouds reduced its light to a dim glow, just sufficient for visibility at close quarters.
Calhoun unlocked his car trunk and contemplated its interior with an estimating eye. It seemed far too small to receive two bodies. After studying it, he unscrewed the gadget that held the spare tire in place and lifted out the tire. He put it on the floor of the rear seat of the club coupe.
Leaving the trunk lid standing open, Calhoun unlocked the back door of the house. He left that standing open, too. On his way through the kitchen he switched off the light; he didn’t want its glow outlining him for any possible onlookers when he came out the back door again.
In the front room he lifted Helena’s body off of Cushman’s and laid it to one side. His single blow had crushed the back of her head, but her thick hair had absorbed most of the blood. There hadn’t been much, for she had died instantly. Only a small rusty spot at the back marred the sleek black head.
In the process of moving her aside, the housecoat had come open and one sleeve had been pulled halfway down one arm. It would be unwieldy trying to carry her with the long garment flapping loose, Calhoun decided. He pulled it the rest of the way off, carried it upstairs, and hung it in her closet.
Downstairs again, Calhoun carefully wrapped Cushman’s battered head in one of the large rags Helena had brought from the kitchen. He noted with satisfaction that because of the body’s face-down position, no blood had got on the rug.
He heaved the corpse into his arms, and staggered through the house with it and down the back-porch steps. Rigor mortis had not yet begun to set in, and the body was totally limp. He had no great difficulty fitting it in a doubled-up position into the car trunk.
The only trouble was that, despite his forethought in removing the spare tire, Calhoun had left insufficient room for a second body.
22
Calhoun considered what to do. The spare tire in the back seat left no room there for a body. And he could hardly put Helena upright in the front seat next to him. If she had been dressed, she might appear to passers-by to be sleeping. But naked as she was, he wouldn’t get two blocks before some busybody would be calling the police.
He contemplated dressing her, then decided this would only involve more clothing to get rid of when he disposed of the bodies. It would be simpler to make two trips.
He locked the car trunk and the house’s back door, and climbed into the front seat. He drove out of the driveway without lights, switched them on as soon as he reached the street, and drove straight down Delaware Avenue. Twenty minutes later he parked in front of his flat.
It was now past eleven P.M., and Pearl Street was deserted. Leaving his apartment door wide open, he returned to the car and unlocked the trunk. After glancing both ways along the street, he lifted the lid, heaved Cushman’s body into his arms, and carried it inside at a staggering trot. Unceremoniously he dumped it on the front-room floor, immediately went out again and locked the door behind him.
By eleven thirty P.M. he was backing the Plymouth to the rear door of Helena’s house again.
Inside, he stared down at Helena’s body for a long time. She lay on her side in a natural sleeping position, her face no more expressionless in death than it had been in life. Calhoun experienced a moment of regret at the sight of her perfect body. Then he steeled himself with the thought of the nightmare his life would undoubtedly have become if he had allowed her to live. There had been no choice.
He scooped her into his arms.
When the second body was safely locked in the trunk, Calhoun returned to the house to tidy up. First he carefully wiped off the gun and dropped it into a pocket. Then he went through the house wiping every surface he could recall touching. He considered digging out the bullet buried in the wall, then decided against it. Helena’s disappearance was going to mystify the police anyway, and one more mystery wouldn’t matter.
He turned off all the lights and left the keys on the kitchen table. He was about to pull the back door closed when he remembered something Helena had said. Lawrence Powers’ clothing was still in the garage.
Re-entering the kitchen, he recovered the keys and crossed the back lawn to the garage. Unlocking it, he opened one garage door only far enough to slip inside. He slid it shut again behind him and used his lighter to locate the garage’s light switch.
A tool bench running the length of the back wall seemed the most likely place of concealment. Calhoun pulled open drawers containing nails and screws, electrical fittings, and odds and ends. None of the drawe
rs contained any clothing.
He searched the three cars in the garage with equal lack of result. Then he frowningly ran his gaze over the empty rafters and bare walls. Wherever Helena had hidden the clothing, she had done an excellent job, he decided. For there was nowhere else to look.
Giving up, he switched off the light, relocked the garage, and returned the keys to the kitchen table. The house’s back door clicked shut with a sound of finality when he pulled it closed from outside.
He got into the Plymouth and drove home.
When he had parked in front of his flat, he sat in the car thinking. His initial plan had been to leave Helena’s body in the car trunk until he was ready to dispose of it. But it occurred to him that with the hot sunny days Buffalo was having, the sun’s beating down on the car all the next day would have an unfortunate effect on the body. And it would have to stay there until after dark the next night. There were arrangements to be made before he could get rid of the bodies, and the arrangements couldn’t be made until morning.
Also, he didn’t relish driving around the next day with a dead body in the car trunk. He decided it would be much safer in his flat.
He got it inside in the same manner that he had carried Cushman in. He laid it on the front-room floor next to the other.
Outside again, he closed and locked the trunk, considered, and then pulled the spare tire from the rear seat. He decided that the best way to begin the next night’s operation was to stow Cushman’s body in the car trunk and Helena’s on the back floor with a blanket over it. The spare would be in the way.
He rolled the wheel up to the door of his flat, then carried it inside. He left it leaning against the kitchen wall.
Then, one at a time, he carried the two bodies into the bedroom and laid them side by side on his bed. Rigor mortis was beginning to set in on Cushman, but Calhoun didn’t bother to straighten the limbs. From his police experience he knew that rigor mortis would pass within twenty-four hours, and while the bodies wouldn’t be exactly limp, the residual stiffness wouldn’t prevent him from bending the joints sufficiently to fit both bodies into the car.
He opened the bedroom window slightly from the top to allow ventilation, then switched off the bedroom light and went into the front room, pulling the door closed behind him.
He sat in the front room smoking and thinking. His plan of body disposal was basically the same one he had used for Lawrence Powers. He knew a stretch of deserted beach only a mile from a boat livery at Sheridan Bay. He could park his car there and walk the mile to the livery. Knowing the shoreline in this area, he was sure he could find the beach without a signal from shore.
In the morning he would drive up Main Street to the large Sears, Roebuck branch there and buy some sash cord and four small-boat anchors. By this time tomorrow night, he told himself, there would be no evidence of either murder.
He slept on the couch in the front room.
By noon the next day Calhoun had completed all necessary arrangements. In the spare-tire channel in the car trunk there were twenty-four feet of sash cord and four eight-pound small-boat anchors. He had made arrangements with the boat livery at Sheridan Bay to rent a boat at eight P.M. and keep it until midnight.
Because it would have to be completely dark when he loaded the bodies in the car, his procedure was going to differ from the one he had used in Cleveland. This time he planned to take the boat out before dark and beach it at the deserted strip of beach where his car was parked. He’d then drive back to town for the bodies and bring them back to the beached boat.
On the way back from Sheridan Bay, Calhoun stopped for some lunch. He got home about one P.M.
He was just taking the key to his flat from his pocket when two men got out from a car parked at the curb and moved toward him. Glancing over his shoulder, he recognized them and a chill went along his spine. One, a thin, mournful-looking man with a pinched face and deeply sunken cheekbones, was Sergeant Gerald Budding. The other, a stocky, round-faced man with a perpetual smile was his partner, Officer Henry Gent.
Calhoun dropped his key back in his pocket and waited.
“Afternoon, Barney,” Sergeant Budding said when they came to a stop at the bottom step.
“How are you, Gerry?” Calhoun said. “Hello, Hank.”
“Hi,” Henry Gent said with a cheerful smile. “Hot, isn’t it?”
“Uh huh.”
Sergeant Budding said, “Been waiting for you to come home, Barney. Can we come in and talk a minute?”
Calhoun thought of the two bodies stretched out on his bed. “Pretty hot indoors,” he said. “Let’s make it out here.” He sat on the top step and lit a cigarette with hands he barely managed to keep from trembling.
“Okay,” the mournful-looking Budding said. “Want to ask a few questions about Lawrence Powers, Barney.”
For the space of a second Calhoun’s heart stopped. Then he said calmly, “The banker who’s disappeared? I saw it in the paper. Sounded like a voluntary skip, the way it was written up. What’s Homicide’s interest in it? You boys are still with Homicide and Arson, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” Budding said. “We thought it was a voluntary skip at first, too. Now we think it was a homicide.”
“No fooling?” Calhoun asked. “How do you figure?”
“We really fell into it by accident,” Budding told him. “Some crank phoned in an anonymous tip that Powers’ wife was the hit-and-runner who killed some old man a couple of weeks back. Couple of guys from the Hit-and-Run squad made a routine check, and her car checked out clear. But there’s always a chance on a thing like that that the suspect got some shady repairman to fix up the damage, you know. The boys shook down her garage on the off-chance they’d find some damaged part of the car that had been replaced. They didn’t find any damaged part, but they found some men’s clothing in a workbench drawer.”
Calhoun’s heart stopped again, then resumed pounding at an increased rate. “What kind of clothing?” he asked with forced interest.
“A brown suit, brown shoes, socks, underwear, shirt, and tie. The works. Plus a tie clip, wrist watch, and a wallet with money in it and papers showing it belonged to Lawrence Powers.”
The idiot, Calhoun thought, meaning Helena. After all his careful planning, she had had to leave a glaring loose end like this.
He said, “How do you know he didn’t leave the clothes there himself? Be logical to dump identification papers and personal items, wouldn’t it, if he wanted to disappear and establish a new identity somewhere?”
Hank Gent said with a smile, “Think he’d dump his money, too, Barney?”
Calhoun said weakly, “Have you talked to Mrs. Powers about it?”
“Not yet,” Sergeant Budding said in a gloomy voice. “She’s not home. But we will. We’ve got her house staked out. She’s got some interesting questions to answer. Not just about the clothing, either.”
“Oh? What else?”
“She claimed she put her husband on that plane personally. After the Hit-and-Run boys turned up the clothing, we talked to the stewardess again. When it was just a missing-person case, the boys working on it had been satisfied from her description that Powers had been on the plane. This time we showed her a picture. It wasn’t Powers who made the flight. Somebody stood in for him. What would you figure from that?”
After a long pause, Calhoun said with difficulty, “Sounds like murder, all right. But what have I got to do with all this? I don’t even know the woman. You’re not under the impression that I stood in for Powers on the plane, are you?”
Budding shook his head. “You’re too big. This guy was Powers’ size. What we want from you is what you were doing in Cleveland with Mrs. Powers, and why you rented a boat to go fishing, then didn’t fish?”
This was so unexpected that Calhoun paled. He was unable to think of any reply.
The smiling Hank Gent said, “You were unlucky, Barney. You picked a livery run by a curious guy. And one of his other customers works
for the Cleveland Crime Lab. He got your fingerprints off the outboard motor and sent them to an old classmate of his who’s now a professor at U.B. He also sent along the license number of Mrs. Powers’ Buick and descriptions of you both. What were the two of you doing up there, Barney?”
Calhoun said huskily, “You can’t tie me into this. You haven’t even established that a crime’s been committed yet.”
“There’s no corpus delicti,” Sergeant Budding agreed. “We figure you dumped him in Lake Erie. Why you took him all the way to Cleveland, we don’t know. But you always were a devious guy. We think we can work up a corpus delicti, though. If you recall from your cop days, that doesn’t necessarily mean a body. It just means proof that a crime’s been committed.”
“Where’s the proof?” Calhoun challenged.
“We don’t know yet. But after your clothing boner, we figure you both probably left some other loose ends lying around. We plan to go through her house with a fine-tooth comb, and give your flat a shakedown, too.”
A film of perspiration appeared on Calhoun’s forehead. In a last desperate effort to gain time, he said, “You’re going to need a search warrant to get in my place.”
Round-faced Hank Gent smiled at him. “Oh, we’ve got one of those,” he said cheerfully, and produced it.
If you liked Hit and Run check out:
Fall Girl
CHAPTER I
THE TALL man signed the registration card with a flourish, then examined the signature, “James Horton,” with satisfaction. It was a pleasant experience to be using his own name in a strange town.
The girl behind the hotel desk picked up the card, entered the room number 414, and glanced up at him with what started out to be an impersonal smile. As often happened when women took their first thorough look at him, the smile didn’t remain impersonal. It broadened into a surprised grin of real welcome.
James Horton was used to this reaction, though he had never quite understood it. While he had a pleasant enough face, he wasn’t at all handsome in the conventional meaning of the word. For one thing his broad, wide-nosed face was splashed with freckles. For another his coarse, sandy hair was so resistant to comb-and-brush discipline, he had given up the battle and wore it in a quarter-inch crew cut. For a third, his ears stuck out. But he was six feet three with unnaturally wide shoulders and a slim waist, and that alone was enough to make most women look twice.
Hit and Run Page 14
