The Deep End

by Fredric Brown

  But after the kiss she said, “Sam–” And I said, “Yes, darling?”

  “I don’t think you’d better come around – or even phone–tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well–if for no other reason, I need sleep. At least one good long night’s sleep. I want to get to bed by nine o’clock–and to sleep. I’m a working girl. Sam.”

  “All right,” I said. “Eliminate the ‘if for no other reason’ and it’s a deal.”

  “Fine. I do need sleep, Sam. I guess that’s why I’m irritable. I guess there isn’t any other reason.”

  I kissed her again and this time she kissed back as though she meant it.

  2

  I went back to the salt mines. I hadn’t mined any salt the other time I’d been there but then I’d taken time to look only at the file folders on the four fatal accidents at the high school. This time I wanted to do some random and miscellaneous browsing through as many of the other files as I could cover in a day.

  But first I wanted to eliminate a possibility. Before I went to the file cabinets I stopped by the desk of the male clerk to whom I’d talked day before yesterday.

  “Heard there was an accident in the jungles last night. Have you had a report on it yet?”

  “The jungles? Oh, you mean the freight yards. No, there wasn’t any last night.”

  “Sure you’d have the report by now?”

  “Oh, yes. It would have been on my desk this morning. There were reports on four accidents last night, one of them a fatality, but they were all auto accidents.”

  “I thought they weren’t handled in this department.”

  “They aren’t. Traffic department, upstairs, handles them. But we get a duplicate of the preliminary report on any accident that involves car damage or bodily injury. Chief Steiner likes to look them all over, just in case.”

  I said, “I don’t get it. In case of what?”

  “In case one of them might correlate with something else we’re working on. Say there’s a robbery somewhere at two o’clock in the morning, two men involved. And it turns out there was a traffic accident, two men in a speeding car, several miles away and twenty minutes later. Might or might not be the same two men, but it’d be worth checking. It takes only a minute or two a day for him to give the traffic accident reports a quick look and once in a while it pays off. Ever hear of Tony Colletti?”

  “Sure, the bank robber. He was caught here a few years ago.”

  “Because the Chief read accident reports. We’d had a tip that Colletti was in this neck of the woods and one morning there was a report on a minor accident involving a guy named Anthony Cole. Antonio Coletti–Anthony Cole. And an out-of-state license and driver’s license. Where’d you hear there was an accident in the freight yards last night?”

  “Just an overheard conversation in a tavern,” I said. “I must have heard wrong about when it happened. But I’d like to check through past accidents that may have happened there. Do you have a cross index to them, by any chance, or will I just have to come across them in the files?”

  “If they’re accidents involving moving vehicles–which includes freight engines or freight cars if they’re moving at the time–you’ll find them upstairs in traffic. It’s a funny technicality maybe but we’ve got to draw the line between traffic and non-traffic accidents somewhere and that’s the line.”

  “You mean if a hobo falls off a stationary boxcar it’s a non-traffic accident, but if he falls off one while it’s moving–even being shunted around a freight yard, it’s a traffic accident?”

  “Sounds screwy but that’s the way it is. Of course most railroad accidents are outside freight yards and really are traffic accidents.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Think before I start on these files I’ll mosey upstairs and see if they have a separate file on freight-yard accidents. I’ve got a hunch I’ll find some I can use. Will I have to get permission from somebody to look at the files up there?”

  “Don’t see why. The Chief said to let you look through the accident files and those are accident files too. But ask them to phone down and check with me–my name’s Springer–if they give you any trouble.”

  They didn’t give me any trouble.

  Better yet, railroad accidents were filed separately and there weren’t too many of them so it wasn’t too difficult to run through and pick out those which had happened in the freight yards. In five years–which was as far back as I checked–there’d been twelve fatal accidents there.

  And seven of the twelve I could easily eliminate. There’d been witnesses to them or else they were accidents of such a kind that they couldn’t possibly have been deliberately engineered. Another one– a hobo who had died as a result of having both his legs cut off by the wheels of a freight car–I eliminated after I’d read it through to the end and had discovered he’d lived for two days and had regained consciousness. If he’d been pushed, he’d have mentioned it.

  But there were four others, all within two years. And any or all–or none–of them could have been what I was looking for.

  A hobo had fallen between the cars of a moving train just heading out of the yards and gathering speed. Another had died the same way except that the fall had been between two of a string of cars that were being shunted from one side track to another. In both cases the bodies had been found an hour or two later, badly mangled, but it was possible to reconstruct what had happened by checking car movements and blood on car wheels.

  A brakeman, or what was left of him, had been found on the tracks after an entire string of freight cars and the engine pushing it had passed over him. He’d just gone off duty and was on his way back to the office to punch out. Presumably he’d tried to cut across the tracks in front of them and had been run down. But they hadn’t been going fast; he must have stumbled and fallen in front of them. Or he could have been pushed or knocked down in front of them.

  The fourth accident was to a hobo again. This time there was a witness, in a way, the engineer of the engine that had run over him. He’d been looking out his window and just as the front of the engine, which was going forward and not pushing or pulling any cars, had come level with the end of a string of stationary empties the hobo had run or jumped from behind them right in front of the engine; almost as though he’d done it deliberately, the engineer had said.

  Or as though someone standing behind him at the end of the string of stationary cars had given him a sudden push?

  All four of those accidents had happened after dark, one as early as eight o’clock in the evening, one as late as two in the morning.

  Any one of them could have been an accident. All four of them could have been accidents. So could all of the deaths at the high school, the death at the amusement park. So, I felt sure now, could other deaths in other places.

  Where else had Obie hunted?

  3

  I went back downstairs to the non-traffic accident files.

  Working backwards chronologically I started going through them. A quick glance at each was enough for most of them. If there were no witnesses I looked to see how the accident happened and if there were witnesses I looked for one name among them. Not expecting to find that name, really, but on the off chance that once Obie might have made a kill and not been able to get away fast enough to keep from being corralled as a witness, probably the only witness. I was looking for a case in which, say, a man had fallen to his death from the roof of a building and maybe other witnesses had seen him land but only one had seen him fall–a boy who’d been on the roof with him, a boy named Henry or Obie Westphal, who’d seen the victim walk to the edge to look down and then lose his balance.

  By noon I’d looked at hundreds of files and had gone back almost three years and hadn’t found anything. After a while I’d quit looking to see how accidents had happened unless there were names of witnesses to them. There
were too many that had happened to people who were alone or presumed to be alone and which could have resulted from a sudden strategic push if someone had been there to give it and then run. I wasn’t going to let myself get psychopathic about this thing–unless I already was–and start suspecting Obie in every apparently accidental death that could conceivably have been a kill instead. He couldn’t have killed all of them.

  Chief Steiner’s secretary wasn’t at his desk when I went out to eat lunch but he was there when I came back.

  “Finding any good cases for your article?” he asked me.

  “A few,” I said. “But it’s tough going; most accidents are pretty routine. I’ll have to dig back more years than I thought to find enough screwy ones.”

  “Uh-huh. Say, an uncle of mine died in a screwy type of accident once. Maybe you can use it. Fell and killed himself because of termites in his wooden leg.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not. He’d used a wooden leg for several years after an amputation, then got a new aluminum one, put the old one out in a shed. Couple of years later something went wrong with the new leg and he went out and got the old one to use till he could get the new one fixed. Put it on and it broke under him half an hour later and pitched him down a flight of stairs. Termites had eaten most of the inside of it away.”

  “That I’ll have to use.”

  “Better look it up and be sure I’m right on the details. You’ll find it in the drawer for–let’s see, it was around twelve or thirteen years ago. Nineteen forty-one or nineteen forty. His name was Andrew Wilson; look it up in the yearly alphabetical list for one of those two years, the list at the front of the drawer.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks a lot.”

  I went back to the files and spent a couple of hours going back another couple of years. No luck.

  It had been a wasted day thus far except for what I’d found in the traffic accident files upstairs, those four accidents within two years at the freight yards. All of them, in the light of what I knew and suspected, looking pretty fishy to me. Of course I’d probably not have given them a second thought if it hadn’t been that Obie had gone there the evening I’d followed him.

  Still, nothing to get my teeth into. No proof of Obie’s connection with any supposedly accidental death except that of Jimmy Chojnacki, and there the only direct proof was the presence of Obie’s wallet in Jimmy’s pocket when he died. And the lunch counter man’s story that placed Obie at his stand just before the accident and gone at the time the accident happened.

  I’d hate to try to convince anyone else on evidence like that.

  I started away from the files and then turned back. I’d better carry out my pretext by looking up the report on the death of the secretary’s uncle; he might ask me something about it when I passed his desk on the way out.

  I pulled open the 1939 drawer and took out the alphabetical list. Half a dozen W’s on it, but no Wilson. But it was in the alphabetical list in the 1940 drawer; Andrew Wilson, and the date. I looked up the report and read it; the secretary hadn’t been kidding me. Termites in a wooden leg. Maybe, I thought, I really should write that article on screwy accidents. Andrew Wilson would make a damned good lead for it.

  I started out again, got almost to the door, and stopped as though I’d walked into something solid. Hadn’t one of those names under W in the first drawer I’d looked in, the 1939 drawer, been Westphal?

  Well, what if it had, I asked myself. My God, in 1939 Obie would have been four years old. And besides, those alphabetical lists for each year were lists of the names of victims of fatal accidents, not witnesses or others involved. It must be just a coincidence. Westphal is not too uncommon a name.

  I went back to the drawer and looked at the list again.

  Westphal, Elizabeth, April 16.

  I fumbled a little finding the file; I went past it in the chronological sequence and had to go back. Then I had it in my hand, a thin manila file folder with only three sheets of paper in it. I flipped it open and glanced at the top sheet, a copy of the death certificate signed by Dr. Lawrence J. Wygand. I knew him.

  Elizabeth Westphal, age 5 yrs., daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Armin Westphal, 314 S. Rampart St. …

  I closed the folder and the file drawer; I took the folder over to the window and sat down on the sill. I stared at the folder, almost afraid to open it.

  This, I thought, might be the key I was looking for. But could it? In 1939 Obie would have been four years old.

  But he hadn’t been an only child. Grace Smith had been wrong about that. He’d had a sister a year older than himself.

  She had died–accidentally.

  I took a deep breath and opened the folder.

  The death certificate was a Photostat of the original. Cause of death; severing of spinal cord between the first and second lumbar vertebrae. Other indications; severe contusions and lacerations of back, left forearm and right calf. Time of death; approximately 3:10 p.m. Time of physician’s examination: 3:15 p.m.

  The next two pages consisted of a typed report of a routine investigation of the accident, signed by a Lieutenant John Carpenter.

  The five-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother–called Henry in the report–had been playing in the back yard of the Westphal house on Rampart Street and had both climbed into a tree near the back fence. They had never been told not to climb it for it was a tree they could not ordinarily have got into; its lowest branches were well out of reach and the trunk too big around for them to climb. But Mr. Westphal had been pruning the tree and had left a stepladder leaning against the trunk. By means of the stepladder it had been easy for the children to climb into the tree and both Mr. and Mrs. Westphal were inside the house and were unaware that the children had done so.

  Mr. Westphal had been upstairs and had happened to look out a back window to see what the children were doing and had seen them in the tree. Just as he was about to throw open the window to call to them to be careful and stay where they were until he could come to help them safely down, Elizabeth fell out of the tree. She landed on her back across the fence and from there on into the alley behind the yard. She had screamed while she was falling.

  Mr. Westphal had rushed down the stairs. Mrs. Westphal was in the living room, running the vacuum cleaner; the sound of it had kept her from hearing the scream from the back yard. Mr. Westphal had yelled at her to phone Dr. Wygand to rush around fast. He had run on out into the alley and found Elizabeth unconscious, probably already dead. He had carried her into the house and put her on a sofa. He and Mrs. Westphal were still trying to find a heartbeat or a sign of life when the doctor arrived and pronounced her dead. Neither of the Westphals had looked at a clock nor had Dr. Wygand when he received the emergency call but the time of the accident was established within a minute or so because the doctor had looked at his watch when he made the death pronouncement. It was then 3:15 p. m. Dr. Wygand also lived on Rampart Street, less than a block away, and it had taken him only two or three minutes to get there; allowing a minute for the phone call and another minute or two after his arrival before he had glanced at his watch, the accident had happened about five minutes before. The doctor had stated that, in all probability, death had been instantaneous.

  The fence across which the girl had fallen was a board fence five feet high; the limb of the tree from which she had fallen was about twenty feet from the ground, about fifteen feet from the top of the fence.

  The boy, Henry, had said that his sister had climbed the tree first and he had followed her. He had been astraddle of the limb just behind her; she had tried to hold onto the limb with her legs only and had reached both hands above her head to try to catch the limb above but had lost her balance in doing so. He had tried to grab at her and had managed to touch her but not to hold on.

  He had got down from the tree safely and under his own power while Mr. Westphal had
been coming down the stairs and running to Elizabeth in the alley.

  Mr. Westphal had been unable to verify his son’s story of exact details of how the girl had fallen. He had seen the children through a partial screen of branches and leaves so he had not had a clear view of what had happened. But the boy had seemed quite intelligent for his age and there was no reason to doubt his version of how his sister had happened to fall, the lieutenant who wrote the report stated. He added, gratuitously, that it was probably well the boy had not succeeded in grabbing his sister; otherwise they would both have fallen.

  That was all.

  I put back the folder and closed the file drawer.

  I left, and luckily the secretary wasn’t at his desk when I passed it, so I didn’t have to stop and talk about termites to him.

  There’s a bar almost directly across the street from police headquarters and I headed there and ordered myself a beer; I wanted a chance to think.

  I had something, but I didn’t know what I had. Can a four-year-old boy commit murder?

  Or could it be that Obie hadn’t pushed his sister but their father had thought he had? Suddenly a new possibility occurred to me: What if Armin Westphal, and not Obie, was psychotic? What if Obie had never killed anyone but Armin Westphal had the delusion that his son was a killer, a delusion that dated from the death of his daughter? Wouldn’t that account for his paying for the funeral of Johnny Chojnacki? If Westphal was psychotic–

  4

  Suddenly I wanted to know all I could learn about Armin Westphal. Maybe Doc Wygand could tell me something. I went to the phone booth at the back of the tavern and phoned him.

  “Sam Evans, Doc,” I said, “Going to be home about half an hour from now and free to talk awhile?”

  He chuckled. “Free and getting bored. Come on out, Sam. Don’t know if you knew, but I retired three months ago. Almost beginning to wish I hadn’t.”

  “Be right out,” I said.

  I finished my beer on my way past the bar, then I went out and got in the Buick and drove to Rampart Street. The telephone directory had told me he still lived in the same place. He’d been a close friend of my parents and I’d liked him a lot too, although I hadn’t seen him often since their deaths.