by Unknown
McGavock had the impression at the time that he was being decoyed away from something, that the naturalist had been interrupted in something he wished to conceal.
It was pretty obvious that his client had been lying to him like a trooper ever since they had joined forces. According to Jarrell’s story he hadn’t left the back porch for sixteen hours, except to phone Memphis. The cubeb cigarettes and the half-eaten chocolate bar were evidence to the contrary. One doesn’t keep a reserve of such tedium-breaking luxuries on one’s back porch to be conveniently handy for just such an emergency. There had been other funny stuff, too. The naturalist’s report had been as full of holes as a second-hand snood. He’d said he’d been awakened by a dragging sound outside his window—yet the corpse by the arbor was a good thirty yards from the house.
McGavock reconstructed it this way: Jarrell had probably seen the killer drag the body into his yard. Maybe he had recognized him, maybe not. In any event, the naturalist was reluctant to discuss it. It didn’t look good.
The detective scowled. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to plow through a client to get at the criminal.
uther McGavock swung open the squeaky gate, made a quick, cautious survey of the shrubbery. The white moon high overhead, now harsh and bright, struck the frothy lilac hedge to shimmering silver, laid ragged shadows of black velvet on the close-clipped lawn. It was indescribably beautiful—unearthly. McGavock thought, It’s no wonder the big-headed naturalist is half cuckoo. I’ve never seen a place like this. It’s actually narcotic. A human couldn’t live in this dream world and retain his sense of values. It’s a place for vampires and ghouls, creatures who flourish from the grave.
Lester Hodges had been taken to the funeral home, the mulch had been restacked in the stable lot. Only a few wisps of scattered straw by the arbor testified to the gruesome tragedy.
He inspected the rat in its cage on the porch. Its ruby eyes glared at the hooded flashlight in the detective’s hand. “If you could talk,” McGavock said thoughtfully, “we’d get this thing over in three minutes. You’re the kingpin in this bloody mess.” He fumbled about, discovered the key behind a flowerpot and entered Malcom Jarrell’s kitchen.
He worked through the kitchen, the dining-room, the bedrooms. It took him twenty minutes to discover it: the hiding place in Malcom Jarrell’s study. The detective lifted a Spanish tile in the hearth. Beneath it, in a narrow, boxlike space, lay a bulky brown envelope.
McGavock picked up a small hooked throw-rug from the floor, draped it over a student lamp on the desk, flicked on the light and examined his find.
The envelope contained a thick bundle of clippings, letters and papers held together by a rubber band. It contained something else, too—a little fuzzy, gray ball of hair about as big as a small marble. The detective’s first unpleasant reaction was that he was looking at a wad of human hair, the hair of Lester Hodges.
But this hair was too fine, too dry.
Rat hair? Hardly likely. The fibers were much too long.
McGavock grinned. He realized what he held in his fingers, knew that this was evidence to hang a killer.
He wondered if Jarrell fully realized its significance. Probably yes. It all fitted in now. His call that evening on his client. Jarrell here in this cozy study, interrupted in his analysis of the furry object. It explained the Bebe binoculars and Jarrell’s sidetracking him around the house.
McGavock slipped off the rubber band, fanned out the papers on the desktop and started through them systematically.
The first item was a yellowed newspaper clipping with a block headline. From the Bartonville Clarion, dated August 7, 1909:
NORTHERN GUEST VANISHES AT FERN SPRINGS
Devil’s Elbow Claims
Wealthy Manufacturer
A prosperously dressed individual giving his name as T. James Cortwright had, according to the article, registered at the Fern Springs resort on the night of the sixth. In a brief talk with Calhoun Bradley, the clerk, he had declared that he was from Cleveland, Ohio, and had inquired courteously if any of his fellow townsmen were, by chance, among the resort’s guests. With regret Mr. Bradley informed him that the resort was patronized in the main by local gentry and expressed mild astonishment that even Mr. Cortwright had himself heard of its existence in such an out-of-the-way corner of the coun-try. This remark had somehow angered the Clevelander. He had opened a wallet, paid for a month in advance, and had retired to his room.
Mr. Bradley had attempted to mollify him by informing him that the resort’s season was at its height and that later in the evening there was to be a lawn party. Mr. Cortwright had made some unsociable remark and had left the desk.
The next morning a mountain man, snaking logs, had discovered the gentleman’s hat and wallet a quarter of a mile from the hotel buildings. They lay at the edge of a patch of treacherous quicksand known as Devil’s Elbow.
An examination of Mr. Cortwright’s room showed that his bed had not been slept in. The management was attempting to inform Mr. Cortwright’s family.
McGavock said to himself: “So Bradley was clerk. And the season was in full swing. Ten to one, Jarrell was there—and Maldron, and Bennett.”
The next clipping, dated a week later, said:
CORTWRIGHT DEATH SUICIDE
Absconder Succumbs to Remorse
Here, the tale took a fantastic twist. Communication with the Cleveland police disclosed the stunning fact that T. James Cortwright was none other than Thompson J. Wainwright, a badly wanted absconding broker who had looted his firm of seventy thousand dollars in cold cash.
It seemed obvious to the Cleveland police and to the Bartonville Clarion that Wainwright had selected Fern Springs as a hideout and suddenly, for some unfathomable reason, had an uprising of conscience which induced him to take his life. What had become of the booty, no one could find out. The conclusion was that he must have spent it.
McGavock shook his head. Such goings-on!
How could a stranger, in the night, locate a patch of quicksand he couldn’t possibly have known to exist? Why hadn’t he taken his hat in with him? And just what kind of a conscience was it that Mr. Cortwright-Wainwright possessed? One that drove him to suicide yet refused to return his plunder to his victims. Horsefeathers!
There were three letters, each bearing a recent postmark and mailed a week apart. Each was addressed to Lester Hodges and each contained a blank sheet of paper clipped with a wire paper clip.
Bennett had said that Lester Hodges was unable to read. Someone had used the envelopes to send him money. Bills. And small bills probably—Lester Hodges changing a large banknote in Bartonville would have caused a sensation.
McGavock bundled the stuff back up, snapped on the rubber band and replaced things as he had found them—under the Spanish tile.
The light in the window of Hal Maldron’s law office had been extinguished. The window-rapping attorney, like his fellow citizens, was home in bed—fighting mosquitoes in his old-fashioned nightgown, trying to get some sleep. McGavock palmed the brass knob and got out his key ring with its assortment of keys. The third one did it. He slipped in, left the door ajar behind him.
He knew just what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.
A wire basket on the lawyer’s desk containing signed but unmailed correspondence gave the detective a specimen of Maldron’s signature. It was bold, fancy, with loops and flourishes. The sort of signature a pompous man assumes cannot be forged.
The detective placed his hat over his flashlight, rummaged for a piece of scrap paper. He dipped the attorney’s steel pen in the inkwell, got a generous nibful of gummy ink and wrote:
The bones of Thompson J. Wainright are at Fern Springs. Seek and ye shall find!
Hal Maldron
McGavock wrote in large letters, lines wide-spaced. He filled his pen twice during the short inscription. The signature was a marvelous replica.
Quickly, McGavock slid the worn desk blotter out of its corne
r brackets. The underside, as he suspected, was new, unused. He blotted the message on the blotter’s reverse—with the care of a master engraver.
The detective crumpled the paper, stuffed it in his hip pocket, refitted the blotter in the brackets in its original position—so that his handiwork was concealed.
Again on the street, the office door locked behind him, he gave a short, mirthless laugh. The entire operation had taken less than two minutes. He couldn’t help thinking of Atherton Browne, wondering what the old man would say. It had been a busy evening with a rather heavy routine: three breaking and enterings, one assault and battery, one forgery.
It had been a busy evening and a profitable one, too.
McGavock had found out why Hodges had been murdered, had a good idea who the killer was. He understood now the double irony in the anonymous warning he had received: Let the dead alone. There was more than one corpse involved in this case. He was confronting a veteran, a two-time killer.
From the tunnel-black alley behind the Bradley House, he could see the white towel hanging from his open window. He caught the shed’s low eave, drew himself up onto the tin roof.
His room was just as he had left it. The tobacco tin behind the crayon enlargement, the wire key lock on the doorknob. McGavock undressed, donned a violent purple suit of cossack-style pajamas, and was asleep by the time he hit the sheet.
CHAPTER THREE
THE HAMMER
he detective was just finishing a pungent, savory breakfast of chicken pie and eggs in the bare matting-floored hotel dining-room when Calhoun-not-Calvin Bradley materialized at his table. The puffy proprietor dragged out a chair and sat down. “You may be the owner of this flea-trap,” McGavock said darkly into his coffee. “But the law books will tell you that I have a tenant’s lease on this table. Scram!”
Bradley said artificially: “Did you have a sound night’s sleep?”
“I did. In spite of that broken-down bed—”
“It’s that bed,” Bradley said smugly, “that I wanted to speak to you about. When you check out of here, you will notice an added debit of $6.80 on your bill. That is for mutilating my best bed—clipping the spring, suh, and twisting it through the key! I’m shocked—”
McGavock asked bleakly: “How do you know?”
“I saw it, suh. With my own eyes.” The hotel man rolled his eyeballs reprovingly. “Shortly after you left the desk last night—to hibernate—I was under the impression that I heard you call me. I knocked on your door. No response. I rattled the panel. All was quiet. I became frantic. I’ve had guests with heart seizures. I raced around to the alley. With the aid of a ladder I reached your room from the outside. You were gone. I must say I was grieved to observe that you had—”
“Go ’way!” McGavock ordered. “You’re constricting my digestive juices.”
Bradley settled himself comfortably. “You’re a deep one, full of dodges. It seemed a bit eccentric at the moment but this morning I think I understand. Toujours l’amour.” He squeezed a lewd wink from the corner of his eyelid. “Someone was telling me that they happened to notice you on the old swamp road with Laurel Bennett last night.” He left the sentence up in the air, on a note of inquiry.
“You’d better take a reef in that limber tongue of yours,” McGavock said quietly. “Or it will bring on an Act of God. You don’t kid me a bit—I’ve been pumped by experts. You, and the whole population, know all about me by now. Who I am and what I’m here for. When the cat gets out of the bag in a village like this one—it divides and scatters. I met Mrs. Bennett by appointment—that was business. I went out along the swamp road and manhandled your friend Chunky—that was pleasure. I’m a detective and I’m here to find out who killed Lester Hodges.”
Bradley tittered. “Who do you favor?”
“I favor you.”
The hotel proprietor asked mockingly: “How do you make that out?”
McGavock folded his napkin in a neat cornucopia, got up. “The man that killed Wainwright killed Hodges. Lester Hodges’ murder was bred in the homicide of that absconder back at Fern Springs thirty years ago.”
Bradley said innocently: “Wainwright? I never heard of him.” He went through a grotesque facial contortion, pretended to remember. “Oh. You mean the man that fell into the quicksand? I recall what you’re speaking of now. A tragic incident. I was clerk at the time. I’d almost forgotten. Wainwright wasn’t murdered.” He lowered his voice confidentially. “The affair was very strange. I’ve thought about it a great deal. What became of the money? No one has ever answered that. Would you like to hear my personal hypothesis?”
“I would, indeed.”
“It’s this,” Bradley announced brightly. “Wainwright didn’t commit suicide. He just used Fern Springs as a blind to throw pursuers off his tracks. He signed up at the resort, paid weeks in advance, learned about Devil’s Elbow—probably from the servants. That gave him an idea. He sneaked out of the back of the building, placed his hat and wallet on the edge of quicksands and left the neighborhood that very night. You see, he had a small cowhide satchel with him. It disappeared when he did. That proves my point. He hightailed and took his seventy thousand with him. Right today he’s doubtless a pillar of society in some place like Johannesburg or Rio.”
There was logic in the hotel man’s statement—and McGavock had to admit it. “If that’s your story,” he rasped, “stick with it. It strikes me you’re mighty clear on the details—considering it happened three decades ago.”
Bradley simpered. “That’s my story. And will remain my story—until a better one comes along.”
Laurel Bennett, herself, was standing in the sunny foyer of the lobby waiting for McGavock. She was wearing jodhpurs and a baggy pearl-colored brushed wool sweater. A short, braided quirt was tucked into her armpit. The bright morning light was harsh, unkind to her. There were tiny crow’s-feet at her temples, her lips were drawn, fagged. “I thought you’d never get up,” she said. “I’ve been watching for you from across the street. Let’s go somewhere and talk, someplace where we’ll be alone. I’ll meet you at the cemetery in ten minutes.”
McGavock was ugly. “We’ll do nothing of the kind. No clandestine conferences for me! If you have anything to unload, let’s have it here and now.”
“But this is too public—”
He prepared to brush past her. “O.K.”
She clutched him desperately by the sleeve. “It’s about the hammer! You have to listen. I’ve found the hammer!”
“I’ve lost no hammer.”
“Don’t taunt me. You know what I’m talking about. Gil came home with your compass last night and told us why you had given it to him. This morning, before anyone was up, I took it out in the toolhouse and found the hammer. It was in a big wooden chest with the rest of the tools. Its head was magnetized. It pulled the compass needle. I tried it out; it picked up nails.”
McGavock said gravely: “Don’t tell me you disposed of it!”
She raised her eyebrows innocently. “How did you know? That’s exactly what I did. I took it out in the country and threw it in the river. I’ll never tell anyone where. Wild horses couldn’t drag it from me.”
“It couldn’t have been Gil’s hammer?”
“Oh, no. It was a new one—I’d never seen it before.” She smiled deprecatingly. “It was in Gil’s tool chest but that doesn’t prove anything, does it?”
McGavock guffawed. “Sister, you’re a thing of beauty and a joy forever. You’re more fun than a stampede at the circus. I wish I wasn’t so busy; I’d like to give you more of my time. Cal Bradley tells me the town is pairing us off together, gossiping about our little trip to Chunky’s last night. Answer me this: wasn’t it you, yourself, that put out the story?”
Rage swept into her eyes.
“I think I’ll leave,” McGavock said hastily. “You’re getting set to touch off a string of oaths.” He left her standing there—frustrated and furious.
alcom Jarrell was seated
on the side steps of the Bennett mansion in smoking jacket and carpet slippers. He had his four-lensed spectacles hooked on the bridge of his nose. He was feeding brown sugar to a procession of big, black ants. He’d bend down, watch for a second, and then scribble a note on a jumbled sheaf of papers. Hunched with his stubbled chin between his scrawny kneecaps, he reminded McGavock of some shabby sea monster.
“You’d better turn around,” he said placidly as McGavock came into his vision. “And go straight back to town. The sheriff just phoned. He’s mad enough to top the high cotton. He’s waiting for you at Lawyer Maldron’s.” The naturalist smiled. “If I wasn’t so occupied here, I’d trot along. It’d be amusing to hear you bluster. You’re going to have to do a bit of explaining—”
“It’s you, my erudite friend of fur and feathers, it’s you, suh, who have a bit of explaining to do.” The detective bore down on him. “I want to know about that rat of yours. I want to know all about it.”
“His name is Bertram,” the naturalist said owlishly. “He’s deficient in vitamins A, C and D—”
McGavock spat, “And don’t take me for a sleigh ride. I’m talking about his hind leg. Just above the ankle, there’s a raw place in the fur—a band of flesh where the skin’s been rubbed off. What caused that?”
Jarrell nodded sagely. “I’m treating him for it. Bertram was caught in a trap. The mark of the trap’s jaws—”
McGavock said happily: “Boy, you really think on your feet! That’s a snappy answer. Now let’s see what you have to say to this. As a matter of fact, there’s no raw place on his leg at all! I know. I checked.”
Malcom Jarrell’s composure cracked. His florid cheeks went gravel-gray, sucked in, his eyes darted wildly—past McGavock’s shoulder, past his hip, evading the detective’s steady gaze.
The naturalist licked his lips. “I owe you an apology,” he croaked. “I certainly misjudged you. I should have known that Atherton wouldn’t send me a fool, that you must be smarter than you acted. Grant me this request: don’t question me. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
