Wild horses couldn’t have dragged Bliss away. He was numbed beyond feeling now, anyway. The whole scene had been one that could never again be forgotten by a man who had once lived through it.
“Not with that” he protested, as he saw the crouching Stillman flick open the large blade of a penknife.
“It’s the only thing I can use! Go out and get us some water, see if we can soften this stuff up a little, dissolve it.”
When Bliss came back with a pail of it, Stillman was working away cautiously at one end of the mound, shaving a little with the knife blade, probing and testing with his fingers. He desisted suddenly, flashed the constable a mutely eloquent look, shifted up to the opposite end. Bliss, staring with glazed eyes, saw a stubby bluish-black wedge peering through where he had been working—the tip of a woman’s shoe.
“Upside down at that,” grunted Cochrane, trying not to let Bliss overhear him. The latter’s teeth were chattering with nervous shock.
“I told you to get out of here!” Stillman flared for the third and last time. “Your face is driving me crazy!” With as little effect as before.
Fine wires seemed to hold some of it together, even after he had pared it with the knife blade. He wet the palms of his hands in the pail of water, kneaded and crumbled it between them in those places. What had seemed like stiff wires were strands of human hair.
“That’s enough,” he said finally in a sick voice. “There’s someone there; that’s all I wanted to be sure of. I don’t know how to go about the rest of it, much; an expert’ll have to attend to that.”
“Them devils,” growled Cochrane deep in his throat.
Bliss suddenly toppled down between them, so abruptly they both thought he had fainted for a minute. “Stillman!” he said in a low throbbing voice. He was almost leaning across the thing. “These wisps of hair— Look! They show through dark, bluish-black! She was blond! Like an angel. It’s somebody else!”
Stillman nodded, held his forehead dazedly. “Sure, it must be. I don’t have to go by that; d’you know what should have told me from the beginning? Your wife’s only been missing since Tuesday night, three days ago. The condition of the mortar shows plainly that this job’s been up for weeks past. Why, the paint on the outside of the wall would have hardly been dry yet, let alone the fill in back of it. Apart from that, it would have been humanly impossible to put up such a job single-handed in three days. We both lost our heads; it shows you it doesn’t pay to get excited.
“It’s the mother, that’s who it is. There’s your answer for the discrepancy in the handwriting on the two notes, the snapshot, and that business about the nickname that puzzled you. Come on, stand up and lean on me, we’re going to find out where he keeps his liquor. You need a drink if a man ever did!”
They found some in a cupboard out in the kitchen, sat down for a minute. Bliss looked as if he’d been pulled through a knothole. The constable had gone out on wobbly legs to get a breath of fresh air.
Bliss put the bottle down and started to look alive again.
“I think I’ll have a gulp myself,” Stillman said. “I’m not a drinking man, but that was one of the nastiest jobs in there just now I’ve ever been called on to participate in.”
The constable rejoined them, his face still slightly greenish. He had a drink, too.
“How many of them were there when they first moved in here?” Stillman asked him.
“Only two. Only him and his wife, from first to last.”
“Then you never saw her; they hid her from sight, that’s all.”
“They’ve been kind of standoffish; no one’s ever been inside the place until tonight.”
“It’s her, all right, the real mother,” Bliss said, as soon as he’d gotten his mental equilibrium back. “I don’t have to see the face; I know I’m right. No, no more. I’m O.K. now, and I want to be able to think clearly. Don’t you touch any more of it, either, Still. That’s who it must be. Don’t you see how the whole thing hangs together? Smiles did show up here Tuesday night, or rather in the early hours of Wednesday morning; I’m surer than ever of it now. You asked me, back at my house, for a motive that would overshadow that possible insurance one of mine. Well, here it is; this is it. She was the last one they expected to see, so soon after her own marriage to me. She walked in here and found an impostor in the place of her own mother, a stranger impersonating her. They had to shut her up quick, keep her from raising an alarm. There’s your motive as far as Smiles is concerned.”
“And it’s a wow,” concurred Stillman heartily. “The thing is, what’ve they done with her, where is she? We’re no better off than before. She’s not around here; we’ve cased the place from cellar to attic. Unless there’s another of those trick walls that we’ve missed spotting.”
“You’re forgetting that what you said about the first one still goes. There hasn’t been time enough to rig up anything that elaborate.”
“I shouldn’t have taken that drink,” confessed Stillman.
“I’m convinced she was here, though, as late as Thursday night, and still alive in the place. Another of those tantalizing things just came back to me. There was a knock on one of the water pipes somewhere; I couldn’t tell if it was upstairs or down. I bet she was tied up someplace, the whole time I was sitting here.”
“Did you hear one or more than one?”
“Just one. The woman got right up and went out, I noticed, giving an excuse about getting a fresh handkerchief. They probably had her doped, or under some sedative.”
“That’s then, but now?”
“There’s a lot of earth around outside, acres of it, miles of it,” Cochrane put in morbidly.
“No, now wait a minute,” Stillman interjected. “Let’s get this straight. If their object was just to make her disappear, clean vanish, as in the mother’s case, that would be one thing. Then I’m afraid we might find her lying somewhere around in that earth you speak of. But you’re forgetting that her clothes turned up in your own furnace at home, Bliss—showing they didn’t want her to disappear; they wanted to pin her death definitely on you.”
“Why?”
“Self-preservation, pure and simple. With a straight disappearance, the investigation would have never been closed. In the end it might have been directed up this way, resulted in unearthing the first murder, just as we did tonight. Pinning it on you would have not only obviated that risk, but eliminated you as well—cleaned the slate for them. A second murder to safeguard the first, a legal execution to clinch the second. But—to pin it successfully on you, that body has to show up down around where you are, and not up here at all. The clothes were a forerunner of it.”
“But would they risk taking her back to my place, knowing it was likely to be watched by you fellows, once they had denounced me to you themselves? That would be like sticking their own heads in a noose. They might know it would be kept under surveillance.”
“No, it wouldn’t have been. You see, your accidental switch to that hitchhike from the bus resulted in two things going wrong. We not only went out to your house to look for you when you didn’t show up at the terminal, but, by going out there, we found the clothes in the furnace sooner than they wanted us to. I don’t believe they were meant to be found until—the body was also in position.”
“Then why make two trips, instead of just one? Why not take poor Smiles at the same time they took her clothes?”
“He had to make a fast trip in, the first time, to beat that bus. They may have felt it was too risky to take her along then. He also had to familiarize himself with your premises, find some way of getting in, find out if the whole thing was feasible or not before going ahead with it. They felt their call to us—it wasn’t an accusation at all, by the way, but simply a request that we investigate—would get you out of the way, clear the coast for them. They expected you to be held and questioned for twenty-four, forty-eight hours, straight. They thought they’d given themselves a wide enough margin of safety. But your fai
lure to take the bus telescoped it.”
Bliss rose abruptly. “Do you think she’s—yet?” He couldn’t bring himself to mention the word.
“It stands to reason that they’d be foolish to do it until the last possible moment. That would increase the risk of transporting her a hundredfold. And they’d be crazy to do it anywhere else but on the exact spot where they intend her to be found eventually. Otherwise, it would be too easy for us to reconstruct the fact that she was killed somewhere else and taken there afterward.”
“Then the chances are she was still alive when they left here with her! There may still be time even now; she may still be alive! What are we sitting here like this for?”
They both bolted out together, but Bliss made for the front door, Stillman headed for the phone in the hall.
“What’re you doing that for?”
“Phone in an alarm to city headquarters. How else can we hope to save her? Have them throw a cordon around your house—”
Bliss pulled the instrument out of his hands. “Don’t! You’ll only be killing her quicker that way! If we frighten them off, we’ll never save her. They’ll lose their heads, kill her anywhere and drop her off just to get rid of her. This way, at least we know it’ll be in or somewhere around my house.”
“But, man, do you realize the head start they’ve had?”
“We only missed them by five or ten minutes. Remember that coffeepot on the stove?”
“Even so, even with a State police escort, I doubt if we can get in under a couple of hours.”
“And I say that we’ve got to take the chance! You noticed their tire treads before. He has a walloping bad patch, and he’s never going to make that bad stretch on the road with it. I saw his car last night when it raced past, and he had no spares up. There’s no gas station for miles around there. All that will cut down their head start.”
“You’re willing to gamble your wife’s life against a flat tire?”
“There isn’t anything else I can do. I’m convinced if you send an alarm ahead and have a dragnet thrown around my house, they’ll scent it and simply shy away from there and go off someplace else with her where we won’t be able to get to her in time, because we won’t know where it is. Come on, we could be miles away already, for the time we’ve wasted talking.”
“All right,” snapped the detective, “we’ll play it your way! Is this car of yours any good?” he asked Cochrane, hopping in.
“Fastest thing in these parts,” said the constable grimly, slithering under the wheel.
“Well, you know what you’ve got to do with it: cut down their head start to nothing flat, less than nothing; you’ve got to get us there five minutes to the good.”
“Just get down low in your seats and hang onto your back teeth,” promised Cochrane. “What we just turned up in there happened in my jurisdiction, don’t forget—and the law of the land gives this road to us tonight!”
It was an incredible ride; incredible for the fact that they stayed right side up on the surface of the road at all. The speedometer needle clung to stratospheric heights throughout. The scenery was just a blurred hiss on both sides of them. The wind pressure stung the pupils of their eyes to the point where they could barely hold them open. The constable, luckily, used glasses for reading and had happened to have them about him when they started. He put them on simply in order to make sure of staying on the road at all.
They had to take the bad stretch at a slower speed in sheer self-defense, in order not to have the same thing happen to them that they were counting on having happened to the Alden car. An intact tire could possibly get over it unharmed, but one that was already defective was almost sure to go out.
“Wouldn’t you think he’d have remembered about this from passing over it last night, and taken precautions?” Stillman yelled above the wind at Bliss.
“He took a chance on it just like we’re doing now. Slow up a minute at the first gas station after here, see if he got away with it or not.” He knew that if he had, that meant they might just as well turn back then and there; Smiles was as good as dead already.
It didn’t appear for another twenty minutes even at the clip they had resumed once the bad stretch was past. With a flat, or until a tow car was sent out after anyone, it would have taken an hour or more to make it.
“Had a flat to fix, coming from our way, tonight?” Stillman yelled out at the attendant.
“And how!” the man yelled back, jogging over to them. “That was no flat! He wobbled up here with ribbons around his wheel. Rim all flattened, too, from riding so long on it.”
“He?” echoed Stillman. “Wasn’t there two women or anyway one, with him?”
“No, just a fellow alone.”
“She probably waited for him up the road out of sight with Smiles,” Bliss suggested in an undertone, “to avoid being seen; then he picked them up again when the job was finished. Or if Smiles was able to walk, maybe they detoured around it on foot and rejoined the car farther down.”
“Heavy-set man with a bull neck, and little eyes, and scraggly red hair?” the constable asked the station operator.
“Yeah.”
“That’s him. How long ago did he pull out of here?”
“Not more than an hour ago, I’d say.”
“See? We’ve already cut their head start plenty,” Bliss rejoiced.
“There’s still too damn much of it to suit me,” was the detective’s answer.
“One of you take the wheel for the next lap,” Cochrane said. “The strain is telling on me. Better put these on for goggles.” He handed Stillman his reading-glasses.
The filling-station and its circular glow of light whisked out behind them and they were on the tear once more. They picked up a State police motorcycle escort automatically within the next twenty minutes, by their mere speed in itself; simply tapered off long enough to show their badges and make their shouts of explanation heard. This was all to the good; it cleared their way through such towns and restricted-speed belts as lay in their path. Just to give an idea of their pace, there were times, on the straightaway, when their escort had difficulty in keeping up with them. And even so, they weren’t making good enough time to satisfy Bliss. He alternated between fits of optimism, when he sat crouched forward on the edge of the seat, fists clenched, gritting: “We’ll swing it; we’ll get there in time; I know it!” and fits of despair, when he slumped back on his shoulder blades and groaned, “We’ll never make it! I’m a fool; I should have let you phone in ahead like you wanted to! Can’t you make this thing move at all?”
“Look at that speedometer,” the man at the wheel suggested curtly. “There’s nowhere else for the needle to go but off the dial altogether! Take it easy, Bliss. They can’t possibly tear along at this clip; we’re official, remember. Another thing, once they get there, they’ll do a lot of cagey reconnoitering first. That’ll eat up more of their head start. And finally, even after they get at it, they’ll take it slow, make all their preparations first, to make it look right. Don’t forget, they think they’ve got all night; they don’t know we’re on their trail.”
“And it’s still going to be an awful close shave,” insisted Bliss through tightly clenched teeth.
Their State police escort signed off at the city limits with a wave of the arm, a hairpin turn, and left them on their own. They had to taper down necessarily now, even though traffic was light at this night hour. Bliss showed Stillman the shortcut over, which would bring them up to his house from the rear. A block and a half away Stillman choked off their engine, coasted to a stealthy stop under the overshadowing trees, and the long grueling race against time was over—without their knowing as yet whether it had been successful or not.
“Now follow me,” Bliss murmured, hopping down. “I hope we didn’t bring the car in too close; sounds carry so at an hour like this.”
“They won’t be expecting us.” One of Stillman’s legs gave under him from his long motionless stint at the wheel; h
e had to hobble along slapping at it until he could get the circulation back into it. Cochrane brought up at the rear.
When they cleared the back of the house next door to Bliss’s and could look through the canal of separation to the street out in front, Bliss touched his companions on the arm, pointed meaningly. The blurred outline of a car was visible, parked there under the same leafy trees where Stillman himself had hidden when he was waiting for Bliss. They couldn’t make out its interior.
“Someone in it,” Cochrane said, breathing hard. “I think it’s a woman, too. I can see the white curve of a bare arm on the wheel.”
“You take that car, we’ll take the house; he must be in there with her long ago at this stage of the game,” Stillman muttered. “Can you come up on it quietly enough so she won’t have time to sound the horn or signal him in any way?”
“I’ll see to it I do!” was the purposeful answer. Cochrane turned back like a wraith, left the two of them alone.
They couldn’t go near the front of the house because of the lookout, and there was no time to wait for Cochrane to incapacitate her. “Flatten out and do like I do,” Bliss whispered. “She’s probably watching the street out there more than this lot behind the house.” He crouched, with his chin nearly down to his knees, darted across the intervening space to the concealment provided by the back of his own house.
“We can get in through the kitchen window,” Bliss instructed, when Stillman had made the switch-over after him. “The latch never worked right. Give me a folder of matches, and make a footrest with your hands.”
When he was up with one foot on the outside of the sill, his companion supporting the other, Bliss tore off and discarded the sandpaper and matches adhering to it, used the cardboard remainder as a sort of impromptu jimmy, slipping it down into the seam between the two window halves, and pushing the fastening back out of the way with it. A moment later he had the lower pane up and was inside the room, stretching down his hands to Stillman to help him up after him.
They both stood perfectly still there for a minute in the gloom, listening for all they were worth. Not a sound reached them, not a chink of light showed. Bliss felt a cold knife of doubt stab at his heart.
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 15
