Death Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  I do not think I had ever felt so good in my life.

  I continued the packing, being very quiet. I did all I could see to do. By mid afternoon I was ravenous. I heard her call my name, faintly, tentatively. I went quickly to her. She sat on the bed.

  “This is—so silly. It’s like I dreamed things. But I feel all soft and weak. As if I couldn’t stand up.”

  “You’ve been going on nerve too long. Don’t try to get up.”

  She smiled and I went to her. “Is it true?” she asked.

  I nodded solemnly. “All true. I love you. That’s all I had to say three years ago.”

  “That’s all you had to say, Hugh.”

  “And I was too stupid to say it. It was against the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a game I gave up. I got too old for the game.”

  I kissed her, and the second time I kissed her, her lips were salt. I made her stay there. I went out and made some purchases and drove the car back and fixed food for her.

  After we had eaten, I said, “Now you’ll let me help you.”

  She studied me for a long time. “There’s only one way you can help me. I don’t want to say this to you, but I have to. Maybe I am too emotionally involved with Al. Maybe we were too close, closer than a brother and sister should be. I want—everything for us, Hugh. But I’m not going to be any good. I can feel that. When they—kill him, part of me is going to die and never be any good to you. If he lived, I think I could in time transfer that part to you. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think I do, Vicky.”

  “I’m very earnest about this. Maybe the part that will die will be—how to be gay. How to laugh. You see—” She touched my hand. “—if this is a true thing now between us, Hugh, and you help me, it will be helping us.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “No matter what I feel or what you feel, I won’t inflict on you the woman I will be after they—do that to him. And I mean that, with all my heart. Nothing can change my mind.”

  And I knew nothing could.

  “So how do I help, Vicky? What do I do?”

  Her thin fingers tightened on my wrist and her eyes were direct and fierce and blue. “He didn’t do it, Hugh. He didn’t do it.”

  “But—”

  “I know. I know the way it all sounds. I know the terrible sound of it. He didn’t do it. And there’s nothing I can do to prove he didn’t. Maybe you can. I don’t know. But you see— It’s our only chance, the only chance we’ll ever have. I won’t go away, Hugh. I’ll stay here, so I can help you. And—we won’t have much time.”

  “How much?”

  She whispered and she looked like a ghost. “Ten days, Hugh. They’ve set the date again. Ten days. They’ll do it on Monday, on the twenty-fourth. In the morning.”

  Chapter Three

  I took a room that night at the MacClelland Inn. The last thing she said to me as I left her was that she felt as though she had begun to live again. No matter how I tried to caution her, she could not stem the rising tide of her own optimism. It was a bigger responsibility than I cared to have. I knew that if I could do nothing, and I expected to be able to do nothing, the blow of his execution would be greater than if I had never come to see her. I could not endorse her faith in his innocence. I knew that whenever such a crime occurs, those close to the criminal find it impossible to believe that such a thing could be done by someone they have known and loved.

  And I knew my own limitations. I was no experienced investigator. I did not know this town well, or these people. And Alister had certainly inspired no trust or affection in me. Also I anticipated that there would be a lot of feeling against anyone who tried to help him. On the other side of the ledger, I had hired and fired and managed a lot of human beings. You learn how to improve your snap judgment. You learn how you have to lean on this one and tease that one. I knew that I wasn’t in any sense what could be called a timid man. And I had some money—at least enough to finance my own investigation.

  I had stayed at the MacClelland Inn before for a day or two while locating a room when I had first come to the Dalton area. It was a big place and it had once been a private home. It was right on the square, a white frame place with good plantings and a comfortable colonial look about it. The furniture in the lounge was authentic antique. The rooms were large, comfortable and furnished in taste. I had eaten there many times, particularly when the brass had been in town. At that time I had gotten friendly with the owner, Charles Staubs, and his wife, Mary. I didn’t know if they would remember me. He was a graduate of a good school of hotel management, a hard-working guy with sense enough to conceal the wry and somewhat cynical side of his nature from the cash customers who wouldn’t appreciate it.

  Mary came out to the small desk in the hallway when I rang the bell on the desk. She was a dark-haired comfortable woman. She had done the decorating, and I had suspected, three years ago, that it was Mary who kept a firm dark eye on the finances.

  She glanced at me curiously. I asked for a room and she said they could give me one. I signed the register card. She looked at it and said, “Of course! How stupid! In this business I’m supposed to remember faces, aren’t I? Are you building us another superhighway, Hugh?”

  “Just passing through.”

  “I hope you’ve eaten. The dining-room just closed ten minutes ago.”

  “I’ve eaten. Charlie around?”

  “He’s in the office making out some kind of a report. State unemployment or something.”

  “If he isn’t too tied up, I’ll buy him a drink down in the Brig in about ten minutes.”

  “I think he’ll be glad to break away.”

  I went up to the room and unpacked my stuff with the efficiency of a great deal of practice. My possessions are down to a severe minimum. Apart from clothing—and not too much of that—I have a thin black folder of photographs of jobs I have worked on, crews I have worked with, and a few photographs from way back. Then there are some personal papers: birth certificate, Navy discharge, diploma. And there is the revolver, a Smith and Wesson .38 in a spring clip belt holster worn shiny from wearing it on the jobs where you had to wear it, on those jobs where the junglies would come out and snatch a can of gas on the dead run.

  I went on down to the basement, to the Brig. When I had been in town before it had been a favorite hangout of the kids from Sheridan College. The Staubs had acquired somewhere the crude iron door from an early American cell and incorporated it into the décor. The walls were hung with antique manacles, whips, goads and other implements of lusty pioneer punishment. There were two sets of authentic stocks. The décor was macabre, but it seemed to appeal to the college trade. Six college kids sat at one of the big trestle tables drinking beer and talking in low tones. There were two others at one of the smaller tables. I had expected to see a lot more business on a Friday night. I had a drink at the bar and in a few minutes Charlie came up beside me. We shook hands. He acted genuinely glad to see me. We took our drinks over to a far corner.

  “Where’s all your business, Charlie?”

  He shrugged. “It’ll come back, I hope. I guess you can say the village is being sort of boycotted by the kids up on the hill. Can’t blame them too much. You know, in the old days there used to be a lot of trouble between the town and the college. It had all died out. Then we had the murder. Before they caught up with the Landy kid, things were rough around here. Town toughs beat up some of the hill kids, and vice versa. The college fathers declared the village off limits. Before that happened some of my more stupid fellow merchants were giving the college kids the business. Now when they get a night out, they go over to Warrentown. But they’re beginning to drift back. It’s hard to preserve a united front through the summer vacation. But don’t think this town is going to forget quick.” He shook his head sadly. Charlie is a balding man, thickening around the middle, with the bland wise eyes of the professional host.

 
“Everybody is pretty certain the Landy kid did it?”

  He gave me a shocked look. “My God! Certain? There isn’t a single shred of doubt.”

  “His sister doesn’t think he did it.”

  He tilted his head to one side and looked at me quizzically. “Now I remember. I should have remembered that, Hugh. You and Vicky. And stars in her eyes. You know, I guessed wrong on that one. I never thought it would blow up. You both used to look so sold on each other.”

  “Maybe it’s starting up again.”

  “It would be good for her. You ought to get her out of this town. People go out of their way to give her a bad time. There’s no sense to it, but they do it. The way they act, you’d think she handed him the knife and made the suggestion. There’s even dirty talk about them sharing the apartment. A boy and his sister. Imagine! Get her out of town if you can. Where have you been working?”

  “Spain, ever since I left here. To get back to Vicky, I understand the college fired her.”

  “Fast. They never stick their neck out up there on the hill. An aristocracy of fear. That’s what they’ve got up there. A lot of tired little feuds and jealousies and cliques. They were delighted when Frank Leader put together the airtight case against Landy. It took the heat off the school. So they helped jump on the kid. You know, big thoughtful opinions about how the kid was emotionally unstable, brilliant but erratic.”

  “Charlie, I think this must be about the fifth time I’ve ever had a chance to sit around and talk to you, but I have the feeling we know each other pretty well.”

  “An ominous approach, friend.”

  “I can ask you this. I’ve promised Vicky that I would dig around a little and see if I can find something that will take Alister off the hook.”

  “Why didn’t you make some other promises too? Like gnawing down all the elms in the square with your own little teeth.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  Charlie turned his glass slowly between thumb and forefinger. “I’ll make a classic understatement, Hugh. I’ll say that it was an unpopular crime around these parts. Jane Ann was a pretty kid. This is a town that goes for kids. We’ve got good schools, good recreation programs. There isn’t much juvenile delinquency. But there are some bad apples. The kids at Sheridan are, for the most part, good kids. I’ll tell you how we all feel. We feel as if we had a monster among us. We didn’t know it. Now we know it can happen, and did happen, and, following the logical pattern, can happen again. There can be other monsters. Dalton isn’t immune any more. We don’t look at each other the same way we used to. But get this. We do feel a little comfortable that at least we got the monster isolated and out of the way. Anybody who goes around with any idea of trying to prove he didn’t do it is going to be very unpopular. Because that implies that we’ve still got a monster running around loose. Until Frank Leader proved Landy did it, you never saw a town locked up like this one was.”

  “Suppose I have to try?”

  “Then be just as discreet as you can be.”

  “Can you think of any starting place?”

  “If I could think of one, the defense could have thought of one. That defense lawyer was good. John Tennant. I hear it hasn’t done him much good to have taken the case. Maybe you could talk to him. It might give you some kind of a lead.”

  I picked Vicky up at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The old woman glowered at us from a front window of the house. Vicky looked better. She said she had slept deeply for the first time in months. We had breakfast at a roadside place ten miles out of Dalton on the Warrentown road. It was one of a chain operation, comfortable, clean, efficient and characterless. I had not yet made a complete adjustment to having been away for two and a half years. It seemed to me that standardization had been accelerated, perhaps by television. There was less difference between the new cars, between the women, between all conversations. All seemed predigested and tasteless. I knew that in this place we could get ham and eggs that would not differ one milligram in weight or one half degree in serving heat from the same dish in the same chain a thousand miles away. It was all predictable, all designed to eliminate risk. I looked across the small table at her. She was not a part of this standardization. Her mind did not work in the flat, trite, acceptable ways. In our own way we were both aliens, nonconforming, bored with all the reassurances of a cooky-cut world.

  And, with an animal egocentricity, I knew that we were looked at, speculated about. The dark and lovely girl who looked as though she were recovering from some illness. And that deeply tanned man, gray eyes pale in his face. See them talk so intently. See her bend forward, with earnest mouth and look of pleading.

  “The first lawyer was from Dalton. His name is Cowan. When he found out what evidence there was, he backed out. He said it was too small a town. He named some people in Warrentown who might take it. I asked him the name of the best man. He said the best was John Tennant but he didn’t think Tennant would touch it. I drove over and talked to Mr. Tennant. I called him that then. I call him John now. He became a friend. He said he would have to talk to Alister first. They had put Alister in the County Jail in Warrentown. He went down and talked to him for a long time. And then he said he would take it. I won’t tell you any more. I want you to talk to him.”

  “Should we make an appointment?”

  “Perhaps we should. I’ll call from here.”

  She didn’t have change so I gave her some. I waited at the table over a fresh cup of coffee, watched her walk away from me toward the booth. She wore a gray sweater with an intricate stitch, a gray flannel skirt, very short. Her dark hair was not lustrous as I remembered it, gleaming with health. It was dulled and lifeless. But in her walk, despite the ten pounds she had lost, there was the same unconscious, unplanned provocation.

  As I settled back to wait, I overheard a snatch of conversation from two booths away, a heavy voice. “… her all right. It never got in the papers. And they didn’t have to bring it up at the trial. But you figure it out. They were living there in the apartment together. I got the cold dope. It wasn’t normal, Ed. It wasn’t normal at all.” The voice was oily, insinuating.

  “Who’s the guy with her?”

  “They locked up the other one. She’s got to have somebody. She’s that type. She’s the one got the kid so heated up he went out and …”

  I turned all the way around. The conversation stopped. The man was in his fifties, with a loose gray face, small avid eyes. His companion, with his back to me, was thin and redheaded and going bald. The man licked his lips and looked away. The thin one turned around and stared at me.

  I was about to turn back. I had myself under control. Everything was fine. But the redhead had to say, “Something on your mind?”

  “Not a thing. Want a suggestion?”

  Grayface was emboldened by his friend’s antagonism. “Not from you, friend.”

  “I thought you boys might go get a good dry-cleaning job. On the inside. A nice mental detergent maybe.”

  The waitress hovered, obviously nervous. Redhead was the one with the guts. Or maybe he thought all scenes of violence were limited to Saturday night taverns. He got up and came to my table. He leaned a freckled hand on the table. He had a wide loose mouth, a rasping voice, a florid necktie without tie clip.

  “You need a lesson in manners,” he said. “And maybe you need better taste in girl friends. That floozy you’re with—”

  His tone was loud. All the clink and rustle of the sounds of eating had ceased. I do not know how he planned to finish the sentence. I pushed his left hand off the table with my left hand. Simultaneously I grabbed the dangling gaudy necktie with my right hand and yanked down as hard as I could. He came down hard. His teeth clicked as his chin hit the formica table top. His eyes rolled vaguely and he sat gently on the restaurant floor. I put money on top of the check, got up and stepped across his legs. I turned and looked at Grayface. He stayed put, reaching nervously and absently for his coffee, looking everywhere but a
t me or his friend. The manager had appeared from somewhere. I went to the phone booth. Vicky smiled at me and hung up and came out of the booth. She saw the manager helping redhead to his feet.

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  A mile down the road she said, “It was about me, wasn’t it? I mean that’s what started it.”

  “Yes. Things they said.”

  “Don’t let it bother you, Hugh. They say things loud so I can hear. I don’t let myself listen. It’s filth. I know why it started. Silly reasons. Al and I were close. You know that. I guess I was the only person in the world he could be halfway normal with, affectionate with. Sometimes, when we walked, we would hold hands. It was brother-sister, and a sort of reassurance to him. Nothing else. I kissed him once in public. He had won a prize. It embarrassed him terribly. None of that would have mattered. But afterward they remembered it, and twisted it. Maybe you wonder why we moved to the apartment. He said that one year in the dormitory was all he could stand. He was never young the way the other students were young. The noise kept him from working as hard as he wanted to work. And also it was expensive, maintaining two places. And I guess—after you left—I didn’t want to be alone.”

  “Please don’t think you have to explain.”

  “But don’t let them bother you. Try not to hear them.”

  “Okay. What about Tennant?”

  “He wants us to come out to his house. I was there several times before.”