Archer explained what had happened to the owner of the service station.
Larry said, “He knocked him out first, then went to work on me.”
“Figures. But now, this. How did you know he lived in that flat?”
“I saw him come out of the door one day. Just by accident. I was passing, I don’t think he even noticed me. The thing I caught at the time—I just kept going—it wasn’t the address he’d given Mr. Warren, the home address where the repair bills had to be sent, things like that”
“You saw him coming out,” Archer said. “How did you know he wasn’t just a visitor?”
“He looked in the mailbox by the door. That’s why he didn’t see me.”
Archer could imagine it plainly, the young man passing in the street, the other man pausing to betray himself by the single, revealing gesture.
Larry said, “Can you tell me what happened to my girl?”
Archer hesitated and then said, “You’d better talk to her folks.”
“Her old man’s going to kill me if I come near him. The only one I can talk to is her uncle, and he’s in your jail.”
Archer nodded. “We’ll go back to headquarters and I’ll let you see him. I’ve got some things to do there, too.”
On the way to headquarters, seeing the check points set up, Larry said: “You must think Freitag’s still in there.”
“He could be.”
Archer’s own words returned to him sourly: he could be swimming the bay, or stealing a boat, or seeing a show. . . .
Somehow, though, in the end they’d get him.
They might never be able to prove that he’d had a hand in the deaths of Charles Carrol, Barbara Martin, and Edie Tomlinson, provided he chose now to deny it. But, at least he could be salted away for a while for what he had tried to do to Larry Lebracht.
While Larry went in to talk to Uncle Florian, Archer put in a call for a doctor. He had no intention of losing this prize witness.
Lottie stood in the dark yard and looked up at the towering old house. Many of the new places tried to give an impression of space, ranchiness, and cultivated distances to their squeezed-in properties, but this builder had been realistic. Land was precious, so build high, even if the footing was sand. The lower floor was dark, on the second floor a single window showed a light, but in the attic apartment all lights seemed to be burning. It had almost a festive look.
Lottie went up the outside staircase, her hand on the splintery rail, her thoughts filled with the questions she meant to ask Curt.
She rapped at the door. She heard some sound within, some kind of singing, hastily stilled. There was a hesitant silence; she sensed some unwillingness about answering her knock. Then the lock turned and Curt’s mother looked out, the light behind her. Lottie was surprised at the woman’s vivid, flushed appearance. Her lustrous brown hair falling loose, her glowing eyes, made her seem almost another person from the withdrawn dayworker to whom Lottie was accustomed.
“Mrs. Appleby, is Curt here?”
Her figure filled the doorway, blocking Lottie’s view. “He’s in his room.” She made it sound as if he were, in some way, unavailable.
“I’d like to talk to him. It’s very important.”
“He’s not . . .” The woman brushed at a lock of hair. “Oh, I expect he might be in bed by now.”
Lottie sensed the thought as if Mrs. Appleby had spoken: Get lost. But a stubborn persistence kept her on the porch.
“It’s very important,” she said again, and waited.
Curt’s mother narrowed the opening and for a moment Lottie thought she meant to close the door in her face. “Well, can’t you ask me?”
“No. I have to talk to Curt.”
The look of flushed excitement was fading, her manner was growing mean. “This is kind of peculiar, isn’t it? You coming here and wanting to see my son, and he’s just a kid? Compared to you? Doesn’t it seem funny?”
A sick knot rose in Lottie’s throat but she refused to move. “This has to do with my sister’s death. Curt knew Edie before she died. I’d like to ask him a single question.”
A touch of uneasy surprise showed in the woman’s expression. For an instant her hand on the door slackened and it moved inward, and Lottie caught a flash of movement inside the room and heard a rustle as of papers being shuffled together. Apparently Curt’s mother realized that Lottie had seen something; she hastily jerked the door to a narrow crack and peered through it with one eye. “How long will that take you, that single question?” she asked.
“Only a moment. Can’t you send Curt out here?”
Curt’s mother turned her head; her face disappeared from Lottie’s view. Lottie sensed that a voiceless conversation went on between her and some other person. She was asking if Curt should be sent out; and receiving an answer from someone Lottie couldn’t see.
“Just let him come and stand where you are now,” Lottie begged.
“No, but . . .” Lottie’s quick ear caught a step inside, as Curt’s mother looked out at her again. “If it’s just for a minute or so, you can see him in his room. This way.”
It was such a crazy switch, after her ugly insinuations, that Lottie was astonished. The door swung open. Across the room a man’s back was disappearing into the shadowy doorway of what must be the kitchen. He had a sheaf of paper under his arm. In the next moment, Curt’s mother had stepped into her line of vision. “Over here.”
She shepherded Lottie to the door and opened it and all but shoved Lottie through. A light burned in the ceiling; Lottie saw the cot, the shabby chest of drawers, an open closet. Curt was in the window embrasure across the room, busy there with something. He jerked himself back into the room and jumped to his feet, stood facing Lottie and his mother.
His mother was in a hurry now. “Here’s Miss Tomlinson, she’s got a question to ask you.” She went out of the room and shut the door.
They stood looking at each other. Curt’s face was smooth and expressionless, a mask. Lottie brushed at her blown hair; she was boiling with awkward embarrassment; the stunned grief, the feeling she had to know the ugly truth no matter what, almost forgotten.
Curt licked his lips. “Hello.”
She sensed his wariness, as if her being here was a part of something else, something he was already prepared to cope with.
“Curt, it’s about . . . Edie. Something has come up about her death. About . . . perhaps it wasn’t just an accident.”
No flicker of interest, no start of surprise, nothing. He was ready for this, too; ready for questions about Edie. From her, or from someone.
“The police are starting an inquiry into some accidental deaths. Edie’s, and others’. And I’ve remembered something. I think I need your help.”
He was resisting her. He had been prepared to resist, to evade, from the instant she had been half shoved inside this room by his mother. As clearly as if he had said so, she sensed his intention to thwart her.
“I don’t know anything,” he replied in a monotone.
“This . . . this isn’t something I can talk about easily. It’s very personal, very private. It concerns a mark on Edie’s body, something I noticed one day when she had showered after she’d been at the beach. A scratch. Some marks like——” Her voice dried up, she choked over the words and felt the trembling seize her throat. How could she go on when she was being ripped apart by shame, and when he didn’t even seem to be listening?
“She had scratched herself, or someone or something had scratched her, in a place that . . . that would ordinarily be covered by her swim suit.”
There. They were said at last. The ugly, dirty words.
Well, at least now he was looking at her, actually staring into her eyes. “She tore the suit,” he said.
Lottie heard what he had said, couldn’t quite believe it. “What?”
“She tore the backside of her suit. We were gathering shells, and she sat down on some driftwood, and there was a nail in it. When she got up a
gain, she ripped her pants. There was a lady on the beach, having a picnic with a bunch of kids, and we borrowed a pin from her. I tried to pin the pants and I scratched Edie. So the lady did it.”
Lottie, listening, felt her soul gathered up on a vast clean wind.
“I guess Edie didn’t tell you. She could have sewed it up.”
Of course she had. Edie hadn’t wanted a scolding for her carelessness.
Lottie walked stiff-legged to the end of the cot and sat down. The relief was so great that she was dizzy with it.
The tears came and she let them run down her face; and inwardly she found that scuffed, dirty bundle in a cobwebby corner of her mind, lifted it and dusted it off and found Edie’s memory as bright and shining as ever.
His hand rested on her arm; his urgent words gradually penetrated her thoughts.
“We’ve got to get out of here. Don’t you know who that is in the other room?”
She lifted her swimming eyes. Suddenly she did know; she placed that vanishing back in the kitchen doorway; and at once her mouth was dry with fear.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ARCHER STOOD in his office, behind his desk, all the lights lit, and studied the section of coastal map spread on the wall. The long hook of the peninsula jutted from the coast and dropped south, a narrowing arm that shut in the bay with its islands. A spider’s web of streets marked every inch of bayside land. Archer cupped his hands and laid them on the map, a section of the peninsula. “He’s in there. I know it”
Matthews nodded.
“He has a house on the upper bay, not too far from the Carrols. He rented it for the winter. To a middle-aged couple from Kansas. He took the small apartment, he told friends, to do some writing. Perhaps something autobiographical.” He remembered Lottie’s summation of the man who might have killed her sister: He is secretive. Sly. He likes to feel that he moves mysteriously.
“When we get him,” Archer went on, “we charge him with the attack on Larry Lebracht. That sticks. We found the people who passed Larry in Freitag’s car, so it’s just not Larry’s word against his. Then, there is the owner of the service station. He’s in bad shape now, according to the doctors, but will probably pull through. He ought to identify Freitag without any trouble, by the time we go to trial.”
“Before we start worrying about a trial——”
“Yes, I know. Counting your chickens and all such.” Archer turned to face Matthews who sat on the corner of the desk. “I’m going back to that neighbor. One item I didn’t check out. A woman neighbor saw a juvenile sneaking into Freitag’s place. I didn’t connect it at the time——”
“The second letter,” Matthews said.
“I’ve got to talk to that woman again.”
He got the same description the second time, with one thing added: the neighbor thought the boy lived somewhere around close. She was sure she’d seen him going by before, on the way to the beach. Archer put two men on it, plus his own time; and shortly had the name of every school-age kid in the district. Finding some of them was another thing; it was not yet curfew and they were visiting friends, or seeing the show, or at parties, or God knew where.
Archer was warming up now, though. When they got that kid they’d have another piece of the puzzle, they’d find out why the kid had done what he’d done—a gag? for kicks?—and they just might get a lead, incidentally, on where Freitag was keeping still right now.
Working in a hurry, not realizing that the house was divided into flats, Archer had passed up the darkened three-story dwelling, had asked his questions of a neighbor next door. The description he got of Curt made his eyes gleam behind their lenses. Upstairs—there was an attic apartment. And at that moment Archer’s mind, working with the oiled efficiency of a thinking-machine, recalled the fleeting impression, the scrap of next-to-nothing, the two winking and shining orbs like a pair of eyes that had glimmered down at him in the dying sunlight.
If the kid he wanted was up there and if that kid owned a pair of binoculars, a hell of a lot of this thing would fall into place.
Archer got his men, put one in the alleyway and one at the foot of the stairs, just in case the kid decided to run. Then he went softly up the stairs to the top landing, an open perch that made him feel nearer the night and the stars, and there he waited for a moment and listened.
Lights shone at the windows, but there wasn’t a sound from inside.
Archer lifted his knuckles and rapped.
He thought that he heard a sound like a sigh, then, just inside.
He knocked again.
The doorknob twitched with a metallic rattle and then the door crept inward. A woman stood in the opening, the light behind her. She was a woman of ordinary height, slender, with lustrous brown hair falling loose. Archer thought she was the most horrible sight he’d seen in a month of Sundays. Someone had worked on her with a knife.
From a gashed, trembling face she whispered, “Go after him. Kill him. He caught them trying to get out of the window in the other room and he”—eyes blinked, a dreadfully slow closing and opening, in the bleeding mask—“he’ll drown them in the bay. God forgive me. I thought he was a good man.”
Archer signaled his men below with a sweep of his arm, then ran in past the woman and gave the place a hasty shakedown. She was alone here. There was a lot of blood near the door—where, Archer thought, she must have tried to keep Freitag from taking her son away. He found the phone, called headquarters for a doctor, gave orders for a general alarm all along the waterfront. “Get boats out. Get anybody who can help, but warn them. He’s a maniac and he’s armed.” And even as he said it, Archer was struck by the murderous change of pattern. Freitag had killed the Carrol kid, the Martin girl, Lottie’s little sister—provided he had killed them—in bloodless ways. He’d murdered little Charles Carrol with a whistle to his pup, the Martin girl by keeping her from a doctor, Lottie’s sister in the bay. And now he was beating and cutting. Chopping down the owner of the service station, trying to brain Larry Lebracht, knifing Curt’s mother, all in a bath of gore. And suddenly, standing at the phone, Archer felt a premonitory uneasiness. It was as if——
She had laid a hand on his sleeve. Blood had run down her arm in veinlike streaks, as if the blood were seeking to follow its inward patterns. Beside her mouth, a cut welled, and she kept licking the sticky moisture off her lips. Archer couldn’t look at her.
“Find my son,” she said. “He tried to save me. He tried to keep Mr. Freitag from cutting me, and he got cut himself. He tried to protect me because I’m his mother, and all I ever did for him was to”—she made a strangling, coughing noise—“to torment him about religion. If I can see him again, if you will bring him back, I promise——” She stopped again to cough; and now Archer looked at her closely in fear and saw the wound that wasn’t bleeding, the one in her throat just above the collar bone.
He picked her up bodily and carried her to the couch.
It was dark here. The water made little sucking and slapping sounds under the rim of the float. The cruiser was a dim white bulk, motionless, heavy in the water; much heavier than the tipping float on which they walked.
“Get in there,” Freitag said. “You’ll find chairs in this little afterdeck. Sit down and keep quiet.” His voice was breathy and tired; it had an uneven edge as if below conscious thought something sawed on him. “If either of you yell, I’ll slit both your throats.”
Curt had his injured arm clutched close, trying to stanch the bleeding. Lottie had to help him up the little ladder to the deck, guide him to a chair. “How do you feel?” she whispered.
“Shut up,” Freitag said below her.
“I’ll be all right,” Curt said in a monotone.
“I told you to shut up.”
“You’re going to kill us anyway,” Curt said. He sounded adult, resigned; even old.
Lottie sat down in one of the canvas chairs. She tried to control the shaking exhaustion, the rasp of fear in her thoughts. “Mr. Freitag, w
hat have you got to lose by letting us go? You’re not cooped up in that apartment any longer, you’re not forced to make a stand. You can run your boat up the bay and get off on a beach there and walk away and never be seen again.”
“Shut up.” Freitag stood with his feet braced apart, looking at the lights on shore. “I’ve got to put up the canvas,” he said, as if to himself.
“Curt needs a doctor. You don’t want him to bleed to death,” she argued.
“I’m going to have to cut your throat after all,” he said.
“Yes, I guess you are.”
Freitag paused, jerking his head around to stare towards her. She could see his face, floating there in the dark; couldn’t read the expression on it. “You’d like that.”
“I’ve wanted to die for a long time.”
“And now? You still want to die? Facing it, as it were?”
She hesitated, then said with an air of frankness, “I don’t know.”
“You blamed yourself for Edie’s death,” he probed.
“For a long while. No, not for her death. For her life. For what I hadn’t let her have. For the fun I had denied her.”
“And you think”—he still stood brace-legged, as if the boat might suddenly move under him—“you think that fun is the fitting object of such a young life as your sister’s.”
“I was much too serious with her, and too strict.”
He made a small, cackling sound. “Death gives us perspective, Miss Tomlinson. We see what lacks. We see the unfinished, the lopsided structure. The sinners must regret their sins and I have no doubt that the righteous detest their obsession with righteousness. Life should be a sampling. A fact I have not known until tonight. You see, I too am developing a perspective. Too late. Even as in death.”
The Watcher Page 17
