by Jack Lynch
“This doesn’t say what time the body was found.”
Sergeant Findley nodded. “It was the deputy’s first homicide find. They aren’t all that common around here. The dispatcher’s log showed the call was received at five thirty-eight p.m. Dorenbusch was on the scene ten or fifteen minutes later. It was nearly dusk before the rest of us got out there. Want to see some photos of what we found?”
“Sure.”
He handed across several black-and-white, eight-by-ten glossy prints. Several were taken of the victim and the bedroom where the body was found. The victim was lying facedown on the bed, the head turned slightly to the right, showing a portion of a long, narrow face in repose. The blows to the back of the head were apparent. He didn’t have his pants on, but a long shirttail modestly covered most of his rump. Another photo showed the top of a bedroom bureau where somebody had put the things a man normally carries in his trouser pockets: a wallet, small change, a set of keys, handkerchief and a pocket comb.
Another photo showed the inside of some other dwelling, with a rough wooden floor, a box filled with miscellaneous gear in one corner and an irregular chalk outline on the floor. I held the photo up to Findley.
“That’s the boathouse out back,” he told me. “There should be another photo there of the suspected murder weapon.”
It was next in the pile, a close-up photo of a twelve- or fourteen-inch adjustable monkey wrench.
“We found it in the box of junk shown in the photo before that. Somebody had tried to clean it off with some solvent, but the lab in Sacramento was able to lift blood stains and minute tissue matter from the spiral gear. And the wrench head matched the skull indentation.”
“How long had he been dead before the phone call?”
“Not long. Couple of hours. Maybe three, according to the autopsy report. He’d eaten since morning. Drank some whiskey after he’d eaten.”
I went through the photographs again, stopping at the one with the toolbox. And the chalked, oblong patch. I turned it around and pointed at the chalk mark.
Findley nodded with a bleak smile. “And that’s where we think he died, out there in the boathouse.” He stared quietly at me for a moment, as if the import of that should lead me to some other leapfrogging conclusion. I didn’t have any.
“Maybe you’d like to take a run out there,” he said, getting out of his chair and giving the desk full of reports a nudge. “This place is beginning to depress me.”
FOUR
We drove out to the lake in a patrol car. On the way, the sergeant told me a little bit about the victim, John Donald (J. D.) Cornell. He’d been an unmarried man in his forties who lived at the lake year-round. His father had been a rancher in south Texas. The old man died when Cornell was in his twenties. He’d run the ranch another ten years or so then sold it and moved to Lake Appleton. Nobody knew just why he’d sold the ranch, but the sergeant said there had been some speculation which he’d tell me about later. At Lake Appleton, Cornell seemed comfortably well off and kept pretty much to himself.
“Some weekends in the summer,” Findley told me, “he would drive on up to Reno. Or during the winter, to various ski resorts in the Tahoe area. Sometimes, after these trips, he would return home with one or more gentlemen houseguests, who would spend anywhere from a day or two to several weeks here at the lake with him.” He rolled down the car window and spat elaborately out onto the pavement.
“Those seemed to be his friends, transients, mostly. I don’t think people living in Claireborn ever warmed up to the man. He was strange, in some ways, with unusual opinions.”
“What sort of opinions?”
“You can see for yourself when we get to his place.”
Lake Appleton was two miles northwest of town. A narrow road made a big loop around its perimeter, connecting comfortably spaced homes and cabins either on the lake itself or set back in shaded groves. The lake was a couple of miles long and between a half and three-quarters of a mile wide. The Cornell home was on the southwestern portion of the lake, nearly a mile up its side.
The sergeant turned off the main road into a wide, asphalt drive that wound through a stand of pine and fir trees to an airy structure of redwood and glass set back a hundred feet from the lake. Findley pulled into a carport alongside the house and we got out.
Scrub jays chattered noisily in the trees overhead. We didn’t go to the house right away. Instead, Findley led me down across a patchy lawn that sloped to the lake. We climbed a wooden ramp to a small boathouse. A cardboard notice had been posted on the boathouse door by the coroner’s office, proclaiming it to be a sealed dwelling and forbidding trespass. The sergeant had a key to the padlock securing the door. We went in and he turned on a single, overhead lightbulb.
There was nothing fancy about the place. It had a U-shaped wooden berth about a foot above the lake level that nestled a fifteen-foot runabout with an outboard motor. Narrow shelves lined one wall of the structure holding a variety of tools and cans of paint and polish and coils of rope, all of it giving off a vaguely nautical smell. The chalk outline was on the floor at the closed end of the U, and the box of miscellaneous gear was in a nearby corner.
Findley went over to the chalk tracing. “We found some evidence here, on the floor. Minute smears of blood. And there were scrapings taken from beneath the fingernails of the body up in the house. The recovered matter came from out here also.”
I grunted and walked down one of the legs of the U to study the hinged wooden doors that opened out onto the lake.
“Were these doors closed when you people got here?”
“They were closed and the sliding bolt that secured them had been wiped clean.”
I looked back at him.
“We found a lot of things wiped clean,” he told me. “Here and in the house, places where you’d expect to find finger and palm prints. At least those of the man who lived there. It seemed somebody had tidied up.”
We went back up to the main house. The front door had another of the coroner’s warning placards on it. Findley let us in and gave me a tour of the place. We went through a sterile living room and dining room. A hallway off the dining room led to the bathroom and a bedroom where the body had been found. The bed was stripped down to the mattress. The bedding probably was down in the lab at Sacramento or back in the sheriff’s offices. The room had a queer feel to it, like it hadn’t been lived in for a couple of years. A narrow beam of sunlight slanted into the room through the windows. It made a little stage for dust motes.
In the rear of the house there was a kitchen on the left, and on the right, looking out over the lake, was a den where Cornell apparently had spent most of his time. It was a big room with black leather furniture, a television set and stereo, and a multi-band radio that looked as if it could pull in signals from Hong Kong. But the expensive toys took a backseat to the way the walls were adorned. A huge, red Nazi ceremonial banner, with the familiar black swastika in a circle of white in the center of it, was draped across the wall opposite the windows. On the other walls were old German propaganda posters, framed photographs of the Führer, Hermann Göring, Paul Joseph Goebbels and dozens of other dignitaries from that era whom I either didn’t recognize or couldn’t remember. One photograph in particular caught my attention. It showed a grinning Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, standing at the gate of a sprawling compound of barracks. It looked like the entrance to one of the eastern European camps where several million men, women and children had been put to death just half a man’s lifetime ago. It wasn’t the view of the camp that gave me pause. I’d read about those places. What bothered me was the grin on the face of the man who stood just outside the gate.
Sergeant Findley waited quietly to one side while I took in the rest of the room. Here and there, on bookcases or end tables, were old German coal scuttle helmets, SS officer caps and armbands and unit patches from those bloody years. They looked authentic. Resting atop a low bookcase along one wall were scale models of German ai
rcraft. Atop the television set was a model of the German battleship Tirpitz. When I’d seen enough of it I turned back to the sergeant.
“You said he was a man of unusual opinions.”
Findley nodded. “He claimed to be a disciple. Said Hitler was the greatest thing that happened to Western civilization in the last five hundred years. Said the U.S. should have beat hell out of Japan then joined Hitler to purge the world of Bolshevism. And I believe he meant it.”
“You said he was in his forties.”
“That’s right. Couldn’t have been more than a baby when all that ended. Then again, maybe this was a smokescreen,” he added, glancing around at the walls. “He might have had all this for other reasons. This is the sort of stuff that would fascinate impressionable teenagers. Boys.”
“You’re almost telling me something.”
“Almost. I don’t really know what might have gone on in this house. I told you about the transient men he’d bring in. We never had any complaints of molestation reported by local families, but there have been kids who found all this stuff interesting. Cornell would invite them out, let them fondle his trinkets, march around outside wearing the helmets. He had a weapons collection too. A couple of German Lugers, some other things. He used to take the kids out on target-firing sessions. One time he organized what he called a German-American Youth Brigade. It all seemed tame enough, playing with this junk. Learning a couple of old marching songs. Still and all…”
He waggled a hand from side to side. “You never know where all that sort of thing can lead. And one time, at least, it led to some pretty hard feelings between Cornell and the Bancetti boy.”
I sat on the arm of a sofa, waiting for Findley to continue. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind.
“It was a couple of years ago. Cornell never talked about it to anyone I know of, and Buddy never talks about much of anything to anybody. But the boy had been with a group that was hanging around out here from time to time, then suddenly there was a rift between them. Bancetti tried to avoid Cornell, but whenever they would run into each other in town or wherever, J. D. would taunt him. Called him chicken, unmanly, things like that. Anyway, after the killing, it was enough to make the district attorney’s office feel they had a motive for murder, on Buddy’s behalf.”
“Sounds a little thin.”
Findley shrugged. “Come on back to the bedroom again for a minute.”
I followed him down the hallway and into the room where they’d found Cornell’s body.
“I didn’t tell you about all the evidence we recovered,” he continued. “And I held back a couple of photos as well. I wanted you to see the den first, and hear some of the background, so you could get a feel of how some assistant prosecutor might look at things. The bed was pulled away from the wall at kind of an odd angle.”
He tugged on the foot of the bed, moving it out a foot or two. “Underneath this lower corner of the bed,” he continued, “we found Buddy Bancetti’s wallet. And up on the bed itself, tangled among the sheet and blanket that were pulled down beneath the body, we found a pair of undershorts. They were of the same size and brand as others we found at the Bancetti place. And they had semen stains on them. I don’t know if you’re up on recent advances the laboratory people have made in identifying the chemical components of blood samples, or any other body fluid, including semen.”
“I’ve read some about it. Studies that originated in England, and work done down in the Bay Area, over in Berkeley.”
“That’s right. Well, we gave the undershorts we found here to a lab that does that sort of work. Their findings were that there was at least an eighty percent chance the stains were made by Buddy Bancetti. That, along with where the shorts were found, the wallet, the antagonism between Cornell and the boy, with the very real possibility of some sort of sexual activity between them in the past…”
He left it hanging and shoved the bed back into place. We wandered back into the Nazified den overlooking the lake. The room offered a nice view. The house was up high enough to see nearly to the end of the lake. A small sailboat was bobbing just off a little island half a mile away. Then I looked back at the boathouse and remembered something.
“I still say it doesn’t hang together,” I told Findley.
“Maybe I agree,” said the sergeant. “Tell me why not.”
“If the Bancetti boy did it, I could understand about the wallet. When I was on The Chronicle I helped work a story involving a young man who used to live in the Bay Area. He came to be suspected of killing a dozen or more young women throughout the West. One of his victims was a girl he’d picked up in Las Vegas and drove up into a remote desert area just across the line into Utah. The girl’s body was found in a shallow grave some months later. They found the killer’s wallet beneath her body. So I can see how a person could be so rattled after that sort of violence that their wallet could fall out of their pants and they wouldn’t miss it right away. But from the way you people found the body and the undershorts, it would seem to suggest the killing occurred during some great act of passion. Yet you say the man was probably killed down in the boathouse, a long way away from the wallet and the shorts and where any passion might have taken place. Then there had to be all that cleaning of the murder weapon, wiping off surfaces, hauling the body back up to the house and wiping off more surfaces. It seems to me any man or boy that deliberate in his actions following the killing wouldn’t forget to tug on his underpants when he looked around and decided it was time to go home. What does Buddy say about it all?”
“Now that, Bragg, is the really frustrating part of things. Buddy Bancetti says nothing. He tells us he didn’t kill Cornell. Says he didn’t see Cornell on the day the man was killed. But he has no alibi. He’s told us a couple of different stories. First he said he was just hanging around the house watching TV. But after we found somebody who’d gone by his place that afternoon and told us nobody was home, Buddy suddenly remembered he’d gone out for a tramp in the hills. I don’t believe either story.”
“What does he say about the wallet?”
“That he lost it somewhere. Doesn’t know where.”
“And the undershorts?”
“He doesn’t admit they’re his, but he acts like they are. When the subject comes up he looks away and practices blushing. In other words, he doesn’t tell us anything believable to help himself out of the crack he’s in.”
I looked out the window again. “I assume you’ve talked to any neighbors who might have been around here that afternoon.”
“Sure. But there wasn’t anybody out here that day close enough to have seen or heard much of anything. Maybe a gunshot, if one had been fired. Most of these places are still closed up.”
We’d both about had enough of the Cornell home. Findley locked up and we headed back toward town. On the way I asked the sergeant flat out if he thought Buddy Bancetti had killed Cornell. He thought for a moment before answering.
“The evidence says yes,” he told me. “The past history of the boy and Cornell says possibly. The nature of the boy himself, though, argues strongly against it. I think the odds are about the same as the weight of the evidence linking Buddy to the undershorts. I think there’s about an eighty percent chance he didn’t do it. Of course, I also happen to think the world is a little better place without J. D. Cornell in it.”
“Because of the Nazi business?”
“Because of the Nazi business, and the gentlemen-visitors business and the fooling-around-with-youngsters business. But more than that, even, because Cornell was a man who in years past had taken lives himself, and he wasn’t in any uniform when he did it.”
FIVE
Some youngsters, on their way to adulthood, go through a vicious little stage of experimentation on lesser forms of life. The end result usually is to watch the lesser form of life die. Hopefully, society straightens out this kink and guilds the young savage with a veneer of civilization by the time he’s grown up. But sometimes this
doesn’t happen, and J. D. Cornell had been an example of such failure.
God knows what he did with lesser forms of life as a kid, but what he had taken to doing as an adult was to plant himself atop a ridge with a rifle and wait for illegal Mexican immigrants from across the border to try to cross his land as a shortcut to where they could meet up with labor contractors.
