Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

  “How long had you been driving?”

  “I don’t know. I just drove.”

  Practice stifled his impatience. “Val, it’s absolutely necessary for you to remember where you stopped. Yesterday afternoon, about one o’clock, a small boy was murdered in the old prison near the Borden school.”

  “I know about that,” Val said tightly.

  “You worked at the school and you’d been there several months. You had plenty of time to get acquainted with the boys, with Chris Guthrie, the Governor’s son. Did you know Chris Guthrie?”

  “I knew him.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “A couple of times. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “What about?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Did you ever mention the prison to him?”

  Val- seemed to have grown smaller and more remote as he sat on the edge of the cot, staring down at the floor.

  “Look,” he said, “I took that crummy job because I couldn’t get anything else. No other reason. So what if his—what if this kid went to school there? I didn’t know that. When I found out who he was, I—can you blame me for being curious? For—I spent a lot of time, just—watching him. You’ll find that out; the regular janitor caught me at it. Then I—I tried to figure out ways to approach the kid. Once I gave him an old baseball and once a piece of cake. I never talked to him when we were alone; there were always other boys around. I didn’t have anything against the kid. He was—you know, he wasn’t a jerk like a lot of them are. He sounded okay to me. I wasn’t—jealous of him or anything like that.”

  “Weren’t you, Val?”

  “No!”

  “Did you tease him about the prison?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dare him to explore it or something like that?”

  Val’s hands clenched tighter.

  “He’ll remember, Val. You might as well tell me.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  Practice sighed almost inaudibly.

  “So it was stupid and childish. That doesn’t make me out a murderer.”

  “I don’t know what it makes you out, Val. There was an attempt on Chris Guthrie’s life three years ago. Only a couple of weeks later you committed yourself to the state hospital. You’re the illegitimate son of the Governor of this state. You’ve admitted sending him a threatening letter. You destroyed one of the Governor’s dogs and demolished his bedroom in a fit of passion. It’s reasonable that the feelings you had for Guthrie could easily be extended to his—legitimate—son. By your own admissions you made several efforts to get close to Chris Guthrie and plant the notion of a rather dangerous escapade in his mind. Yesterday, Chris and his friend sneaked away from school at the lunch hour and went to the prison. They were followed by someone who either knew they would be leaving or happened to see them as they left. In the prison they were surprised by this person and ran for their lives. Hugh McAdams was caught, trussed up in a sack, and nearly cut to ribbons by a long knife or a sword. Chris escaped by hiding in a well. I don’t know if he got a good look at the killer; the light is poor inside the prison. One thing he’ll remember: it was your idea to go there. The District Attorney will make sure he remembers. There’s no real evidence yet that you killed either Fletcher Childs or Hugh McAdams, but the circumstantial evidence is impressive. As far as I know, nothing but your unsupported word stands for your defense. You have no evidence that Fletch Childs received a visitor in the middle of the night at the reservoir. You have no way to prove you were a hundred miles away from Osage Bluff at the time Hugh McAdams was murdered. Oh, you bought a tank of gasoline, hut you don’t know where.”

  “I’ll remember where!”

  “Do that. And then prove you didn’t turn around and drive back to Osage Bluff in time to murder that boy. It’s a lousy story, Val. You ought to be able to see that.”

  “If you don’t like my story, then make up one to suit yourself, but let me alone!”

  Practice didn’t reply. He had hoped to jar Val’s memory by pointing out to him the need to document every minute of his time for the past twenty-four hours. For someone like Val, a habitual lone wolf, it would have been a difficult task under the most ordinary circumstances. Now he was charged with two deaths, and his inability to provide any sort of adequate account looked only like the desperate evasions of guilt, which, perhaps, was the only answer.

  Practice wasn’t sure now how he felt about Val St. George. The boy was all but unapproachable. He was bitter and hostile. And yet, in the few moments when his desire to be helped had overcome his innate suspicions, the story he had told sounded like the truth. Practice could believe in the Val St. George who had been forced to kill one of the German shepherds, and had been sickened and angered by his own violence. But the image of Val St. George deliberately murdering a man and a small boy wasn’t nearly as persuasive. Logically he could be guilty of both murders. Practice glanced again at Val, who was trembling now on the bunk. He saw a thin, vulnerable youth who had spent the better part of three years living on dreams, stalking the shadow of his father with self-confessed heroic intent.

  Practice wondered if it weren’t time for John Guthrie to meet his other son. Perhaps if Guthrie talked to Val ... But the shock might be more than Val could survive just now.

  Troubled and uncertain, Practice rose.

  “I’m going now, Val. Is there anything at all I can do for you? Would you like some cigarettes?”

  Val shook his head. Practice hesitated, thinking that he had something to say.

  “She’s written me off, then?” Val whispered. “She thinks I killed her brother and she’s written me off.”

  “What else is Lucy going to believe?”

  “Tell her I didn’t do it. Tell her I didn’t kill anybody, and that’s the truth. I don’t care who else believes it. But tell her ...”

  He didn’t seem able to say more. Practice studied the boy’s bent head, then walked to the door and let himself out.

  Mike Liles was waiting in the hall.

  “Has he loosened up any?” Liles asked.

  Practice pulled out his pouch of tobacco and began to make a cigarette.

  “He told me his story. I don’t think any of it can be proven, Mike. But I don’t think he’ll change it, either. There’s something about that boy I could admire, under other circumstances. If his life had been a little less thankless he might have ...”

  Liles yawned and deposited the coffee container he had been drinking from in a nearby wastebasket.

  “We’ll see if he sticks to his story.”

  “Mike? Couldn’t you let him sleep for a couple of hours? He’s worn down to the bone.”

  Liles shrugged. “Then this is the best time for me to work on him. Christ, Jim, the kid has killed twice. Didn’t you get a good look at that McAdams boy?”

  “I saw all I wanted to see,” Practice said grimly.

  Liles gave him a long look. “I think you want to believe St. George is innocent.”

  “I’d like to believe it.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “I don’t know what to think right now. I’m as exhausted as he is.”

  Liles shook his head in resignation and walked toward the door of the interrogation room. Another man, in plain clothes, followed, and the door was unlocked by a turnkey. Practice turned away and started wearily down the hall. The sun had just risen and light was flooding through the windows on the east side of the hall.

  “Jim!” Liles called; and Practice, aroused by the urgency in his voice, turned and ran back to the detention room.

  The other officers were laying the body of Val St. George on the bunk. The boy’s head rolled loosely, and there was an expression of shock in his sightless eyes.

  “What happened?”

  Liles pointed to the foot of the bunk. “He must have got down on his hands and knees on the bed and stuck his head between the mattress and the pipe frame. A real tight fit, and not
much give in the mattress. Then he threw his feet over the end of the bed. All his weight was on his neck and he was falling free, so his neck snapped. Just as effective as if he’d put his head in a noose. He was dead when we came in.”

  Practice stared at the body of Val St. George, unable to believe for a few moments that he had killed himself. And then he remembered what Val had said to him as he was leaving, the urgency in his voice: Tell her I didn’t kill anybody, and that’s the truth.

  So Val had already made up his mind what he was going to do, but Practice didn’t feel any better about it. Somehow, he should have been able to help the boy, and he had failed.

  “I suppose that’s as good as a confession,” Liles said, nodding toward the bunk. “Jim, I’ll want a complete statement from you.”

  “All right. Can I stop by later in the day? I’m not up to it right now.”

  “Sure, go get some sleep.”

  “What’s going to happen to him, Mike?”

  “The usual. County morgue until somebody claims the body. But who’d want him?”

  “I think I know who—a man named Skandy. I’ll get in touch with him myself. Mike, what if Val was telling the truth? What if he didn’t kill Fletch or Hugh McAdams?” Liles took the unlighted cigar out of his mouth and wiped a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. He tilted his head to one side and looked calmly at Practice. “Figure it all out. Nobody else could have killed them.”

  • 18 •

  The first light of day and the songs of birds in the pale spring trees outside the window awakened Steppie.

  She woke with a violent thrashing of limbs, and then lay still, her eyes wide and frightened, focused on the ceiling, the fragments of a nightmare dissolving in her mind. When she again felt capable of movement, she turned her head slowly to one side.

  The Major wasn’t in bed with her.

  Steppie wondered what had happened to him. Of course, the nights he spent with her, he rarely slept, perhaps he didn’t even sleep when he was in his own bed. Usually he lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest, not changing his position for hours. If she was lucky enough to drift into a fretful doze when he was with her, when she awoke he would still be in the same position, his eyes open and yellow, his breathing so shallow that she could not hear him at all.

  Part of the nightmare she had just escaped came back to her, and she swallowed. The tip of her tongue was raw from cigarettes and she had a bad headache. Probably she had passed out along about dark yesterday. She had been drinking too much; but what else could she do in this place? He wouldn’t let her go home.

  He needed her, he said.

  For what?

  He came and went quietly, and sometimes she heard the sound of his car, and sometimes she didn’t. She might be sitting in the library with a book, and suddenly she would look up and he’d be sitting opposite her, as if he had suddenly materialized; the experience was frightening enough to make her heart stop beating for a long second.

  No one as old as the Major could be so quiet, but somehow he was ageless, weightless, noiseless.

  Inhuman.

  It would amuse her friends—and her enemies—to know that Major Kinsaker never tried to make love to her. Sometimes he uncovered one of her breasts as they lay together in the night, and put his hard dry lips against her nipple, but he never did anything else. Maybe he couldn’t. She had been tempted to find out.

  But they wouldn’t be amused if she told them why he didn’t make love to her.

  Steppie sat up in bed, choking on the dryness of her throat. Damn it, she wanted to get out! She had been here for three straight days and was slowly losing her mind.

  She got up from the bed, steadied herself with an effort, looked at the sun on the windows. Her eyes watered. She knew that she looked dreadful, and she resented her unseen face that morning.

  Thirty-seven, thirty-seven, thirty-seven years old.

  Her robe wasn’t where it should have been, and Steppie didn’t trouble to look for it. She put on a pair of slippers and tried to push her hair off her forehead with one hand.

  The connecting door between the two bedrooms was open, and Steppie went carefully as far as the doorway of the Major’s room, leaned against the jamb, and looked inside. The room was cheerful with morning sun. The Major wasn’t there, and his bed was untouched.

  She stared at the telescope for several moments.

  Would he be in his room at the usual time later this morning, sitting in front of his telescope, looking down at ... ?

  Steppie stifled her thoughts impatiently. She didn’t care why he should be so interested in the square brick school building below.

  She shook her head and her eyes rested for a moment on the portrait of Molly Kinsaker.

  For an instant she thought she would be sick. Quickly she closed the door and went downstairs in her nightgown. All the draperies were drawn in the lower part of the house and she barely saw herself flickering over the surface of the mirror at the foot of the stairs.

  First she looked into the kitchen, thinking that he might be having his breakfast. But there were no dishes on the kitchen table.

  Then she heard a persistent, unidentifiable sound: slap-tick.

  The basement door was ajar. Steppie opened it wider and looked down the stairs. She saw a vague, ghostly light in the room below, and knew immediately what it meant.

  She would not, she could not, make herself go down into that room again.

  For several minutes she remained motionless, listening, her head pounding, but no other sound came to her and the light didn’t change.

  If he were showing those pictures again, she thought, the light would flicker as the ghastly images followed one another across the movie screen.

  Slowly she descended into the basement, and on the last step she reached up to pull the cord of the ceiling light.

  The sixteen-millimeter projector was set up on a table facing the portable silver-gray screen. A rectangle of light was fixed in its center. The ticking sound came from the end of a reel of film whirling on the side of the projector. The movie had ended, but still the Major sat in a wooden chair behind the table, eyes on the screen, shoulders hunched, hands gripping lightly the long gleaming sword in his lap.

  Steppie knew as soon as she saw the sword what her nightmare had been; it wasn’t just wild fantasy, melting from her mind in the moments of awakening; it was the truth, only the truth, which her conscious mind could never fully accept.

  Before Steppie could stop herself, a sound that was partly a sob and partly a scream came from her throat, and she fell back against the wall, staring at the Major.

  He didn’t move or turn. His eyes remained, without blinking, on the screen.

  “It’s all right,” he said in comforting tones. “Everything’s fine, Molly. You go on back to bed.”

  • 19 •

  The suicide of Val St. George had almost been welcome news to John Guthrie.

  Practice surveyed him over the rim of the coffee cup he was holding. The Governor looked rested, decisive, well groomed. He and Mike Liles had been in a huddle most of the morning straightening out details of the double murder, so that it was unlikely that any hint of scandal would be laid at Guthrie’s doorstep.

  Now it was up to Practice to see that the boy’s funeral would be swift and discreet. He had already made one telephone call to Gene Ogden and received a pledge of cooperation. He understood Guthrie’s relief that a dangerous situation had been resolved, with no harm coming to him or to his family, but he didn’t understand why he was feeling resentful toward the man.

  They were sitting in the offices of Guthrie’s law firm, which he had seldom visited since his election.

  “I got in touch with Lucy this morning,” Guthrie said. “Someone from this office and an executive of the bank will see to all the arrangements for Fletch’s funeral. Lucy said she was capable of handling the details herself. Maybe so, but I made her realize there was no reason for her to suffer thro
ugh all that. I couldn’t talk her out of resigning as Chris’s governess, though.”

  Practice put his cup aside and noticed with displeasure that his hands were trembling after a not very restful sleep.

  “How is Chris?”

  “In a bad temper.” Guthrie smiled, a fond smile that was unfamiliar to Practice. “He threw a spoon at me when I told him Lucy couldn’t come today. The doctor’s going to keep him in bed a couple of days until the cold is cleared up. You know, I never realized how much the boy takes after my side of the family: restless, moody, but bright as hell.”

  Practice let him go on in a similar vein, somewhat astonished that Guthrie seemed just to have discovered the fact that he had a son. That at least was one piece of good news in an otherwise dismal day.

  “... so I promised him a trip as soon as he gets out of the hospital. I thought we might go up to Greenbard County tomorrow afternoon and get in some fishing before the weekend at A.B. Sharp’s.”

  “Where are you going to stay?”

  “My great-uncle has a farm not far down the road from the Major’s place. Doesn’t use it much anymore, except as a private hunting and fishing preserve. Come to think of it, Chris has never been fishing; it ought to be an adventure for him.” Guthrie became thoughtful and leaned forward, clasping his hands on top of the desk. “You know, Jim, he doesn’t remember much of what happened to him day before yesterday.”

  “What does he remember?”

  “One of Liles’s men saw him early this morning, with the doctor, and asked a few questions. He didn’t probe too deeply, there was no need and it might have upset Chris pretty badly. Anyway, Chris was talkative enough. They were inside the prison before they knew St. George was following them; he got within a few feet of them and then ...”

  “Wait a minute,” Practice interrupted. “Did he identify St. George by name?”

  “How could he?” Guthrie said with a hint of annoyance. “He didn’t know St. George. Oh, he’d seen him around school, sure. But we know who it was.”

  “How did Chris describe the man who was following them?” Practice asked patiently.