Death Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  “Nancy?”

  She was nearly by me. She stopped and turned sharply, frowning, head tilted slightly, then pretty face becoming bland and cool as she realized she did not know me.

  “What do you want?” Her voice was pitched too high and it was slightly nasal.

  “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  The three of them stood there speculating, staring at me. “What about?”

  “Is this yours?” I held the picture so she could see it.

  “Where did you get that?” Indignation, tempered by the slight coyness of a young girl talking of her own photograph.

  “I want to talk to you alone for a minute.”

  She spoke to her friends. “Wait up for me.” They moved slowly down the block, looking back. Nancy came hesitantly toward me and stopped a cautious distance away.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “It was his.”

  “I know. There were only two. I’ve got the other one.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk to newspaper people.”

  “I’m not one of those.”

  “Then what do you want? Who are you?”

  “I’m a friend of Vicky’s.”

  Her face changed and she backed away. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Wait a minute. You don’t want to talk to any friend of hers—or his?”

  She backed further, lips compressed, shaking her head.

  “You’re going to run now, aren’t you, Nancy? You’ll run because you’re afraid you’ll find out he didn’t do it.”

  That stopped her retreat. She looked dazed for a moment and then curiously indignant. “Everybody knows he did it!”

  “Three of us know he didn’t. Vicky, Mr. Tennant and myself. Four when you count Al.”

  She moved back toward me, not knowing she was doing so. “That’s crazy. How could anybody know? He did it. Everybody knows he did it.”

  I took a chance. “Nancy, for a long time you knew he didn’t do it. What changed you?”

  “I was being silly when I thought that. My father explained—”

  “Don’t kid me, Nancy. This is a small town. You don’t want to be unpopular. You don’t want to be different. You want to believe just what everybody else believes. So it was too expensive for you to be loyal.”

  “It wasn’t that way!”

  “This is a good picture, Nancy. The photographer made you look very honest and very brave. So I made a mistake. I’m wasting my time. You’re a good-looking kid but you’re another gutless wonder. There’s no point in asking you for any help. You’re too concerned about what people might think.”

  I flipped the picture at her. It scaled through the air, struck her shoulder, fell to the sidewalk. She snatched it up. Her face was red. Her eyes were narrow and angry. I watched her walk away. It was a calculated risk. The young want desperately to conform, yet at the same time each one wants to feel unique and unswayed by public opinion. I counted twelve briskly indignant steps and thought I had lost. Then I saw the hesitation, saw her turn and look back at me. I looked away, snapped my cigarette into the road and opened the door of the wagon.

  She came back slowly, stopped her usual wary distance away.

  “What kind of help?”

  “Don’t waste my time, Nancy. Run off and play. Go sew up some doll clothes. This is business for grownups.”

  She stamped her foot. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Something you haven’t got the courage to do. Something very minor. Just meet me and talk to me with frankness and honesty and answer every question I care to ask you.”

  “But why?”

  “We’ve got a very ridiculous idea, Nancy. We’d like to find out who really killed your sister.”

  “That’s crazy talk! Al did it. It’s all over now.”

  I looked directly at her and I waited until a woman carrying a shopping bag walked by us. “I’ll tell you something not very many people know, Nancy. When a person is electrocuted, there’s a problem of timing. Once when a notorious kidnaper was executed, they made a mistake.”

  “What are you—”

  “Shut up and listen. They pulled the switch when his lungs were full of air. When that happens and the current hits, it makes a sound you can hear for four city blocks, a sound you can’t ever forget. So they watch the chest and pull the switch at the end of an exhalation. When they do that to Alister a week from today, then it will be over, Nancy. And until they do that it isn’t over.”

  Her eyes closed and she swayed, her face chalky. I moved toward her and caught her arm. She opened her eyes and moistened her lips and swallowed with an effort. She did not try to move away from me.

  “There’s—nothing I can tell you that will help.”

  “You can’t know that. But if you can make yourself believe that, it will be a lot easier for you.” I released her arm. “You can still run along with your friends. After next Monday you can start wondering if by talking to me you might have changed things. And you can wonder about that for all the rest of your life.”

  “I—can’t talk to you now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to go right home. I’ll be a little late now. Mother gets frantic if I don’t go right home. She’s been that way ever since—it happened.”

  “But you can get out again?”

  “Yes. But I have to be back by five-thirty.”

  “Can I pick you up somewhere?”

  “No. No, I couldn’t go anywhere in your car with you. I couldn’t have anybody seeing me in a car with somebody.”

  “Where do you usually go?” I asked.

  “Most of the time to Dockerty’s Drugstore where all the kids go. Maybe I could talk to you in the park there, on one of the benches in the square.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  She acted nervous and furtive. She started to turn away and turned back. “I don’t care what people think, but my father—”

  “You act scared of him.”

  “He’s different than he was before.”

  “Will this make you feel better? Nobody has to know what we’re talking about.”

  She looked relieved. She walked away, schoolbooks cradled in her arm, with only one quick, nervous, backward glance.

  The bench I selected was not on one of the main cross paths. I sat and watched an enthusiastic and inept game of touch football. One small boy insisted on making his tackles legitimately until he caught a knee on his nose. The dismal sounds he made were audible after he was out of sight.

  I saw her when she was a hundred yards away. She crossed the street, walking primly. She had changed to jeans and a red cotton flannel shirt. Her blond hair was tied into a high pony tail with blue ribbon. She walked more slowly, looking around until she spotted me, and then came toward me. Her walk seemed very self-conscious, very body-conscious, as though she was making a deliberate effort to suppress any movement that could call attention to breasts or hips. It was not a natural walk for a girl so pretty, so nicely built. It was a denial of the natural and unself-conscious pride she should have had.

  As I had seen when I had talked to her near the school, she was not the girl of the picture. That special look of clarity was gone, as was the impression of imminent maturity. The murder had made growing up too expensive for her, and perhaps for reasons of self-preservation, she had slid back into the formlessness of adolescence, back into the random jungles.

  She gave me a nervous nod and sat on the far end of the bench, as far from me as she could get, her face averted.

  “I decided not to come,” she said.

  “Then why did you?”

  She ignored the question. “I don’t know who you are or anything. Maybe you’re going to write a story about this. I don’t see why I should talk to you. My father had to get the police to get men away from our house.”

  “I told you I’m a friend of Vicky’s.”

  “Anybody
could say that.”

  I took out my wallet, found the right card and handed it to her. It had my picture and thumbprint and physical description. The text, in both Spanish and English, said I was employed on the airfield project.

  She studied it and handed it back. “What does it mean? That says in Spain.”

  “I’m on a vacation.”

  “You’re awful tan.”

  “Nancy, I don’t blame you for being suspicious. I’m in the construction game. I was on a road job near here. I met Vicky then. I didn’t know she was in this trouble until I got back to Chicago. Then I came here. Maybe you’re almost old enough to understand this. In one sense I’m almost glad of this trouble, because it gave me a good excuse to come back here and see her again.”

  She gave me a rare look of directness. “Do you love her?”

  “Yes. And when I left before, I thought I’d never see her again. I gave her a bad time.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re that one!”

  “Then you know about it.”

  “Not much about it. Just some things Al said. You made her unhappy. He said you took the life out of her.”

  “I’ve been sorry ever since, Nancy. Now I’m trying to help her.”

  She had me placed, and she seemed more at ease. “I don’t see how anybody can change it now, Mr. MacReedy.”

  “I don’t see how either. But I’m not closing my mind the way you are.”

  “I came here, didn’t I? I’m willing to talk to you.”

  “It’s good to see you mad instead of scared.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Then we’ll talk. We’ll talk like friends, Nancy. Maybe if you can act like a grownup we can be friends. You’re eighteen years old. You aren’t a child. I want us to talk together like a man and a woman. And I want us both to make one major assumption before we start. Let’s assume Al is innocent.”

  “But—”

  “It’s the attitude a court of law is supposed to have. I think if we start that way, we may get farther. Forget that this town considers him some sort of a monster. You don’t have to think that way because they do. Now—can you pretend?”

  “I know the meaning of the word assumption,” she said haughtily.

  “Then we can start?”

  She nodded nervously, and looked down at her hands. She seemed to relax a little, but not as much as I would have expected of a girl of eighteen. There was an odd wariness about her.

  “You were in love with Alister.”

  “I—I thought I was.”

  “Your father explained to you how you really weren’t.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And he told you you are too young to know what real love is.”

  “Y-Yes.”

  “But you don’t really think he’s right, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Stop fencing, Nancy. What did you think of Alister?”

  “He’s—strange. He’s not like other boys. He doesn’t have any kind of line or anything. I—I met him in our back yard. He was watching a bird. He sort of wandered over, following it when it went from tree to tree. He was shy. He’s very smart. It could scare you, the things he knows and how quick he learns things, but he wouldn’t scare you the other way.”

  “What other way?”

  “I mean he—he was different. Usually we had a good time. Only sometimes he’d get angry. I guess I’m not too bright. Not with his kind of brains. He needed somebody.”

  “Don’t you think he still does?”

  “But—”

  “Nancy. Listen to me. Listen carefully. Can you really imagine him murdering Jane Ann?”

  “My father says you can’t ever tell—”

  “A book by its cover. The hell with your father.” She jumped as though I had slapped her. “I want to know what you think. What Nancy Paulson thinks. Do you think he had something twisted inside him that would let him do a terrible thing like that?”

  “Well—Jane Ann was always teasing him.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, in little ways. You know. Making him blush and get all confused. She was like that. She liked to do that to shy boys. Leaning up against them. Saying things that were almost dirty but not quite, and then laughing in a sort of wise way.”

  “So he could kill her because she teased him.”

  “Well, I kept thinking that maybe she sort of led him on. You know. And he got thinking about her. And then he was mad at me and he saw her walking and he picked her up and— Well, my father says that some men go out of their heads when they—”

  “Did Alister ever kiss you?”

  She looked at me and looked away, and her blush was really Victorian. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “Lots of times. But that was all.”

  “Did he act like he was going to go out of his head?”

  “No. He wasn’t like that. And he was polite. He didn’t get—funny or anything.”

  “You’re a better looking girl than your sister was. You’re a more exciting looking woman.”

  “Don’t— Please don’t say things like that.”

  “Most girls like to hear that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t. If you talk like that I’m going home.”

  “I’m not making any pass at you. I’m trying to figure you out. If kissing you didn’t make Alister lose control, is it likely to think he’d lose control kissing your sister?”

  “She was different.”

  “How do you feel about her? I mean what did you think about the way she acted with boys?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, though I knew she understood me.

  “I don’t know what you kids call it. When I was in high school we’d call her a girl that went all the way.”

  “Don’t talk dirty like that.”

  “Look, Nancy. I am not talking dirty. Somebody killed your sister. We’re pretending it wasn’t Alister. And we know it wasn’t some person just passing through. The blood on the car and the buried knife and purse rule that out. What did you think about the way she acted, the things she did?”

  Nancy lowered her head. I had to move closer to hear her. “I thought it was awful. It made me ashamed, all the time. It made the boys worse because they thought I was the same way. I never was. I never will be. I don’t want to do nasty tilings. Al didn’t either. We talked about her. He said it wasn’t really the way she was. He said it was a protest. She was so nice when she was little. We had so much fun. Then it all changed. I guess I’m terrible. Now everybody pretends they can’t remember the way she was with boys. And it’s like a weight off me. I can’t feel as bad about her as I ought to feel. She was my sister. I don’t want to be glad she’s dead. But she was going to keep right on doing terrible things. My father beat her. It didn’t change anything. He’d beat her so hard it would scare mother and me. But she’d go out a window. She’d sneak out. It didn’t matter to her. She’d cry when he hurt her and afterward she’d laugh. Nothing mattered. She’d talk dirty to me until I was so ashamed I’d cry, and then she’d laugh at me. In school I knew everybody was looking at me when I walked down the hall, and I was ashamed.”

  “When did she start being like that?”

  “It was in the summer. Let me try to remember when. She would have been seventeen this last summer. So it was five summers ago. When she was twelve. At the lake. Morgan’s Lake. We’ve always gone there. The Mackins own half of it. They live just down the street from us—on the corner of Oak and Venture. There’s a boathouse and a sort of upstairs to it. You get up there by a ladder. My father and Mr. Mackin keep gear up there. My father went up there after something and Jane Ann and a boy were up there.” She lowered her head and flushed. “They had taken their swim suits off. Even when she was twelve Jane Ann was—you know. Big.” And she half indicated what she meant by the fragment of a gesture toward her own breasts. “The boy was from across the lake. His name was Danny something. She said they were playing doct
or. My father whipped the boy so bad there was a lot of trouble about it, but everybody knew he was right to do it. He whipped Jane Ann too. And made her stay inside the camp for a whole month. She cried a lot at first and then she got mean. I think that was when she started to change.”

  “And after a while your father couldn’t do anything with her.”

  “That’s right. They talked—my mother and father—about sending her to one of those schools. Mr. Score, the Chief of Police, said they should after that time she stayed at that fraternity house, but my father said it would have been a disgrace to the family.”

  “There was a boy you went with when you were up there at the lake, wasn’t there?”

  She turned her head quickly and looked directly at me. It was a look of alarm. “Robby. Robby Howard. They said I was too young to have a boy friend. I was sixteen. He was nice. He was like—”

  “Like Alister?”

  “I was going to say that. Yes. Like Alister, I guess. Shy, and he didn’t try to get funny or anything. And he was drowned. It took a whole day to find him. They tried to make me look away but I saw him on the dock before they covered him up. He was black, his skin.” She shuddered visibly.

  “How did he drown?”

  “They thought it was a cramp. He was a wonderful swimmer. Nobody saw him and they didn’t know where it happened and that’s why it took so long to find him. It is a little lake. I used to have to sneak away to see him. It made me feel guilty and funny. Like I was being like Jane Ann.”

  “You were serious about him?”

  “I thought all of the world had ended. We had a crazy idea. We talked about it. About running away. He was seventeen. He knew all about radios. He had built a lot of them. He looked older than seventeen, we thought. He could get a job in a repair shop. He found out you can get married in Georgia when you’re sixteen without anybody’s permission. They didn’t want me to see him, and we thought it was the only thing we could do.”

  “Had you thought of marrying Alister?”