Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 31, No. 4. Whole No. 173, April 1958

Frederick Nebel No Kid Stuff

A restrained but vigorous study of a State Trooper who for months had been overcautious. Some of his coworkers thought he had lost his guts. But Kinsland wasn’t yellow...

The bulky trooper was soft on his feet for a man of his size. He was all the way across the bedroom, setting down his square strongbox, when Kinsland stirred on the cot against the opposite wall and kicked off the covers. Kicked hard, for Katherine Eaves was on his mind again.

“Uh?” Boagard said. “Wake you?”

“Uh-uh.” Kin sat up. “Been awake on and off all night. How was yours out there on the Pike?” Kin was twenty-nine — six years a trooper.

“So-so. Okay.” Boagard had put on his pajamas in the locker room. He rolled up the window shade, his broad face calm and remote in the windy sunlight. “A vag. Two drunk drivers. Changed a tire — some woman.” He got into bed, unlocked the strongbox, and took out some pamphlets; and the next minute he was even more remote, absorbed in his reading, settled in solid, indestructible repose.

“Day off,” Kin said, watching the wind skim brown November leaves across the parking lot. “I’m on duty tonight. Downstairs — not on patrol.” He was always a little apprehensive these days about the night tour. But downstairs, on call, was better than the night patrol. It was six months, almost to the date, since his good friend had been killed. Boagard had been sent in from a post two hundred miles east to replace Harry Eaves. Harry-had been young — a rookie, really — and he’d been lots of fun. Boagard was no fun. He was a fifteen-year man, giving out little, asking nothing; dedicated with quiet resolve to anything he set out to do; a competent police officer, strict and businesslike. Kin started to say what a wonderful day it looked out; but weather, fair or foul, never brightened or depressed Boagard.

Kin put on his bathrobe and went down two flights of stairs to the basement locker room. He showered and shaved, watching the clock, and took civilian clothes from his green metal locker. Katherine was on his mind most of the time; but after last night, more than ever. And now — the way her aunt had come out with it about Harry — Kin felt heartsick and lonely and a little desperate. For Katherine.

He skipped breakfast in the barracks dining room. Outside, the rollicking wind stirred his spirits; he swung his arms to ease the tension that always seemed to burn between his shoulder blades. He dropped his arms at sight of Stutz, the new commanding officer of the Drum Ridge barracks. “Morning, sir. Nice morning, after all the rain.”

“Nice country,” Stutz said, taking his prebreakfast walk up and down the parking lot. It was only his third month at Drum; he had been transferred from Post D in a tough industrial area three hundred miles south. “You’re up early for a man on the long post duty tonight.”

“I’ll catch some sleep this afternoon.” Kin slowed down. “Yes, sir?”

Stutz had started to say something. But he pivoted and scowled off on his brisk walk — a small man, one-half inch above the minimum height required; his body thin, supple at fifty. His small thin face seemed made up of a series of hard knobs — cheekbones, nose, the chin hardest and most prominent of all. His uniform was all spit-and-polish this morning, the flat-brimmed gray stetson tilted sharply over one ear. His eyelids blinked a lot, but the blinking in no way affected the glum, dead-level way he could peer at you. “Enjoy yourself, trooper,” he grinned, on the lap back past Kin, and was off again, admiring the windy view of meadows and rolling hills. And the State Police flag cracking.

Kin drove down the hill to the village center, ate breakfast in a lunchroom and by eight thirty was parked in front of a shingled house eight blocks from the center, high on Church Street. In a little while Katherine came out, stood beside the car, and gazed down the street in wistful abstraction. “I wish you wouldn’t, Kin.” But she shrugged, anyhow, and got in beside him, giving him a morning-bright, friendly, altogether unsatisfactory smile. The kind she gave to patients, strange or familiar, as she greeted them in Dr. Wilmott’s waiting room.

Kin said, “I’m sorry I blew my top at your aunt last night.”

“I can’t blame you. She — shouldn’t have said that. But she couldn’t help it — help herself. After all, Harry was her only son.”

“She made me feel like a criminal when she said that if it wasn’t for me he’d still be alive!”

She touched his arm lightly. “Kin, I am sorry — dreadfully sorry.”

He almost started the engine then, but didn’t; his hands were locked on the steering wheel, the knuckles white. “You say so. You say so, Katherine. But you, too — ever since it happened — you’re shying away from me, ducking me; excuses and excuses. And even last night, the first time I’ve seen you in three weeks, you said nothing... nothing... when Aunt Grace let me have it.”

Katherine’s look was away from him, pensive. “I understand, I guess, something of what she feels. Besides, she’s been like a mother to me; and Harry was almost like a brother.” She touched her light brown hair absently and there was a small indecisive quiver at one corner of her mouth. But then she sat up straight. She shuddered. “When that awful news came over the radio last May—”

Her Aunt Grace had let him have that, too, last night — how Katherine had fainted after one rigid, terror-stricken moment and a wild scream that still haunted the brown-shingled house like a ghost.

Kin said now with great earnestness, “But things like that don’t happen to experienced men. Harry was young, green, and you know yourself how reckless he was. Katherine, honest, I’m careful, cautious — why, nowadays, knowing how you feel, I’m the most cautious character—”

“Kin,” she said, stopping him with the directness of her tone, “I couldn’t take that kind of news again — or even anything like it. Kin, I’ve had it. I couldn’t even take the chance. But please believe me, I don’t blame you for helping Harry to make the grade at the police academy, even though Aunt Grace never wanted him to be a trooper. And as for the other thing—” She flushed a little, shook her head. “I... I don’t even think Aunt Grace meant to say that.” Then she brisked up all at once and glanced at her watch. “You understand, I’m sure, Kin. I’m sure you do. Everything. Me — and how I feel — anyhow. And you were sweet to pick me up this morning.”

“I’m sweet,” Kin said, starting the engine. “I understand,” he said, taking off like a rocket. The speeding car churned up waves of brown leaves which the heavy rains had threshed from the trees. He slid the car into Dr. Wilmott’s driveway on South Main and said, “I understand nothing.”

She was out of breath from the mad ride, and trembling. She got out and said, “Please, Kin, don’t — don’t do anything reckless. For my sake, please.”

“Why for your sake, please?”

She turned and ran, hop-skipping up the driveway, and after a minute Kin drove off. Slowly this time, coming back into focus again, back under the check-rein of care and caution he’d held on himself these past months.

He stopped at the cemetery and smoked a cigarette, all the way down, beside Harry Eaves’s grave. The remembered hysteria in Harry’s mother’s voice last night made a pulse beat in Kin’s throat.

That night back in May, at the last minute, late, Harry had substituted for Kin on the night patrol. And Harry’d been shot to death.

By seven, after supper in the barracks dining room, Kin was in uniform. The November wind all day had dried out the leaves and now they were rattling and scuffing against the windows like blown twigs. He moved restlessly from window to window: the trees out there, oaks, and maples, reeled and tossed in the moonlight and high up shredded clouds sailed fast, far off, over the Witch Hills. Behind him the police teletype clicked intermittently; DiPolo, the civilian dispatcher, talked lazily from time to time on the police radio with some patrol car or the district command post at Plummerston. McGraw, the night sergeant, spoke at odd intervals on the telephone.

“Checkers, Kin?” McGraw said at eleven thirty.

Kin cleared his throat. “Little headache, Mac.” And went to the washroom at the back of the central room to take an aspirin. And then he was at the windows again, restive under the pall of inactivity yet vaguely apprehensive — tonight like any other he was on duty — that despite all his care and caution something, some night, would happen to him. He peered toward town, where Katherine was at a church supper.

“Kin,” McGraw said at midnight, yawning, “how’s to liven up a dull night by making us all a pot of coffee?”

Kin jumped at that. “Right, Mac.” And he moved swiftly enough on long, lithe legs across the central room to the kitchen wing.

“He’s sure changed,” DiPolo said, making a complete turn on his swivel chair. “He gives me the creeps. Loosening his belt one minute, tightening it the next. Off in corners. Hesitating before he comes around corners.”

McGraw said, “All right, all right,” and scrubbed his red hair energetically with thick fingers.

“So all right, all right,” DiPolo said, spinning the chair round again; he had dark, knowing eyes and a sly, teasing smile. “You like the kid, huh? Troopers always stick together, huh?”

McGraw opened a desk drawer for no reason whatsoever, then slammed it shut and beetled round the room, everywhere and nowhere.

“Could be,” DiPolo said, “he lost his guts when—”

McGraw said, “Button up your loose mouth, Lulu. Belt out the midnight summary on the teletype to Headquarters and Plummerston. You just take care of your end, that’s all.” McGraw tramped over to the washroom.

DiPolo’s soft whistling was somewhere between drollery and insolence. He drummed the keyboard with offhand efficiency. Kept on drumming, no let up, when a radio report started coming in. He glanced at the big electric clock above his head; he nodded, typed one-handed, wrote with the other hand on his sheet. The time he put down was 12:09.

“Boagard,” he said when McGraw returned. “On the Turnpike trying to overhaul some throttle-happy drunk. Guy’s weaving all over the place.”

McGraw said, “Tell Boag not to knock his brains out on that. We can always get the drunk by his license number.”

“You know the law, Mac, on drunk driving. Park the car, lock it, and bring the drunk to the barracks. Book him, toss him in the clink overnight — his operator’s license automatically suspended till trial. You know Boag and you know the law. No guy laughs off eighty an hour with Boag — drunk or sober. Besides, can’t read the license — mud on it.”

Kin came in just then with cups and a pot of coffee on a tray. He’d heard the last part and asked what was up with Boagard; and when McGraw told him he fiddled with the knot of his tie and then made his belt a notch tighter. “He ought to be careful out there, Mac, even if he does overhaul the car.” He poured the coffee, slopping some.

DiPolo said, “Boagard’s a man for the book, all right. All he was trying to do in the first place was a favor — Chapter Twenty-one, Courtesy and Assistance to Motorists. He was cruising west on the Pike when he saw this car up ahead start off from the muddy shoulder. Then his headlights spotted something on the shoulder, he stopped, picked up a fedora and took off after the guy, to give it back and now—” He broke off, listening to the loudspeaker, nodding; he said, “Okay, Boag, I’ll do that. Good luck.” And then to McGraw: “You heard. The Hake Mountain road now, so it won’t be long.” He marked down the time — 12:14 — and chuckled. “Up hill, down dale, and either Boag will nail him or the guy’ll fly off one of those hairpin curves. Don’t bother him, you heard, with the radio; he’s got all he can do to handle the wheel.”

Kin said, “Hake’s a bad road. Where they’ve straightened out some of those hairpins they left the old loops and a desperate man could scoot in there, brake sharp, sideways, then turn out his lights and jump. Hitting in there hard, a trooper would plow into it—”

“This is just some knuckle-head drunk, kid,” DiPolo said. “Get the ants out of your pants and pass some coffee.”

But at 12:20 McGraw said, “Get hold of Boag, Lulu. Never mind — I don’t care what he said.” But Boagard made no answer and that caused McGraw to get up and make a circle of the room. At 12:25 he told DiPolo to try again, and peered across the room, uncertain, where Kin stood by a window tugging this way and that at his belt.

“Nope,” DiPolo said. And then he was half out of his chair and his coffee cup crashed on the floor. “Boagard? Boag — is that you, fella? Boag!” He was writing the time down — 12:27 — and then he was all the way up on his feet, still writing; but he shouted: “Mac!”

“Right here,” McGraw said, at his elbow.

DiPolo still shouted. “All he could say was — ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Then it sounded like he dropped the phone.”

McGraw pointed, said, “Okay, Lulu. Call a doctor. Call an ambulance. Get ’em started and tell ’em to wait at the Pike and Hake for further instructions.” He wheeled about, almost smashing into Kin; he said, “Get going. Out Hake. Watch those old loops.”

“And see can you get the lead out of your pants,” DiPolo snapped.

Kin gave him a sad look. He said softly to McGraw, “Right, Mac,” and put on his stetson and stretched his long legs, soft and fast, across the central room. His stomach was held in — tight, rigid — and the pounding of his heart reached to his eardrums.

“Ten minutes should do it,” McGraw shouted after him.

DiPolo yelled, “If he can get the lead out!”

But it was almost twenty-five minutes. It was 12:50 when Kin picked up the radio-phone in his patrol car and said, “At last. And dead. Gunshot. Can’t tell the mileage, because I’ve been up and down, in and out of those old loops. About five miles from the Pike. I’ll stick a flare where this loop takes off from the new stretch of Hake. Tell the ambulance and doctor and anybody else about the flare, will you?”

But first he protected the scene of the killing; placed flares in the center of the old blacktop loop, twenty feet in each direction from Boagard’s patrol car. Then he drove an eighth of a mile and placed one at the juncture of the old and new roads. He returned to the scene and moved about swiftly, surely, with chalk and measuring tape, a clip-board under his arm, a small manila envelope tucked up under his hat. He measured and wrote on the clip-board and picked up things and put them in the envelope.

A patrol car from Drum, which had been marking time at the Pike and Hake, came sirening into the loop ahead of the village ambulance and slammed to a stop five feet from one of the flares. A trooper named Phelps jumped out with a big press camera, and the volunteer fireman who had driven the ambulance stepped down and was almost clipped by another Drum patrol car. The car slewed rear-end into the ditch. Decker, who had driven Phelps up, pulled open the door and saluted.

Stutz got out of that one on the off side and stood gazing glumly at it as the driver, a trooper named Priddy, came out of the bushes on the other side. “And a whole year out of the academy, too,” Stutz said morosely. He wore a hurry-up, out-of-bed-and-dressed-in-five-minutes get-up — whatever he’d grabbed at first, and all of it pulled on over his pajamas. Torn white ducks with soiled knees, a brown turtleneck sweater, and a black chesterfield topcoat, open and flapping in the wind. On his completely bald head he wore an old navy watch cap, and he smoked a short-stemmed pipe.

“Doc get here?”

Kin said, “Not yet. No need now.” He walked beside Stutz to Boagard’s car while Priddy tagged along noting down the time — 12:57 — and writing other memoranda in shorthand on his clipboard sheet. The dead trooper was at the steering wheel, lying against it, one hand caught between the wheel and shift lever, the other hanging toward the floor. Stutz, placed a hand on the dead man’s shoulder; he neither pressed nor patted nor stroked. He left his hand there for a long minute, while brown leaves sailed round him. Then he took his hand away and turned around.

“What’d you find, Kinsland?” he said.

Priddy leaned in. “Sir, should I take down what he says in my shorthand notes?”

“You take yourself down the road to that flare and make sure the doctor turns in here. And stay there. We’ll want the medical examiner too. In fact, that’s an idea, right now. Radio the barracks to get him started, or we’ll be here all night.” He turned back to Kin. “Yes?”

Kin stood with his clip-board tipped toward the headlights’ glare, his head tipped too. “I’ve chalked on the road there — the two x’s — where I believed Boagard stood when he talked with the driver. The chalked oblong would be the relative position of the driver’s car. Between the line marking the driver’s side of the car and the x’s marking where Boagard stood, you see two small chalked circles. One is where I found a whole cigarette — the brand Boagard smoked — only singed a bit at the front end and hardly damp at all at the other end. That smaller circle marks a wooden match burned a quarter way. Boagard used a cigarette lighter. The two items are in this envelope.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not much. Neither car was on the muddy shoulder at any time. The position of Boagard’s car, and the place where he stood, seem to indicate that he saw the other driver swing into the loop. But instead of following him in, Boagard must have raced up the main road and swung into the loop at the other end. The drunk had to stop then or they’d have crashed head-on. You can see that the patrol car’s facing back toward the Pike. The other car must have backed out to Hake and then gone on.”

“Anything else?”

Kin hesitated. “Only a guess.” He didn’t want to say too much: there was always the chance, if he showed too much interest, advanced too many theories, that he might be assigned to the investigation. But Stutz’s glum eyes were steady on him between blinking eyelids; and Kin said, “It looks as if Boagard might have been shot when the driver held out the wooden match to give him a light. If Boagard took time for a cigarette, it seems he must have known the driver and thought he could talk him into parking and driving to the barracks in the patrol car. I never knew Boagard well, but I don’t think he’d have fooled around with a strange drunk.”

Stutz kept blinking at him for another moment. Then he said, “Nice thinking.” He turned and said, “Phelps! Pictures — all angles of Boagard. Then all directions from the car. Don’t forget some angle shots of the chalked oblong — refraction from the flash might pick up some tire prints. Um, who’s this?” he said as a taxi drove up.

Dr. Ackerman looked out and bellowed, “Out of gas again, right in my own garage. And Gus here never answers his taxi phone after midnight till it rings for five minutes.”

Stutz said to Kin, “Mark the time — one-five.” He pointed his knobby chin toward Ackerman and said, “The dead’s man over there.” Then he pointed his chin toward the patrol car.

But Ackerman was knocked a little off balance by the backswing of the door he’d flung open. He teetered, fumbling with two pairs of glasses; put the wrong pair on, took them off, and put on the other pair. Then he gangled headlong to the patrol car, reaching his hand out in front. He spent only a minute, then backed out of the car and straightened, a raw-boned old man with his hat on the side of a white bush of hair.

“You know what I know,” Ackerman said, wiping his eyes. “No need of going into details — you wouldn’t understand them anyhow. And there’ll be a P.M., besides. I’ll give the medical examiner a ring soon as I—”

“We’ve notified him,” Stutz said, and watched Ackerman gangle back to the taxi, fumbling again with his glasses and hitting the taxi sideways. “Y’ know,” he bellowed all around, then laughing, “just because my name makes me the first doctor you come to in the book, you don’t have to feel you got to go by the alphabet.” He was on his way the next minute, flapping his big bony hand out the window.

“Well,” Stutz said glumly, “he dodders and flaps but finally gets on the job. One of the others won’t come out after midnight without putting up an argument, and the other one takes his time dressing but at least he’s pleasant and efficient when he does get on the job.”

That one was Lincoln Wilmott, physician and, also, medical examiner for the township of Drum Ridge. He arrived — Stutz showed his wrist watch to Kin, who wrote down 1:26 — in a run-of-the-mill two-door sedan. “Well, well, what have we here?” He was a husky man in robust middle age, bright and buoyant, popular after five years in town. “Has Dr. Ackerman been here?”

Priddy had come up with him from the junction, and now said, “With bells on, Dr. Wilmott. He must be in his seventies. You’d think he’d call it quits.”

Wilmott looked at him, up and down. “Dr. Ackerman’s seventy-nine. He hangs on, I suppose, because that’s his whole life and always has been.” He turned to Stutz. “It would be easier for me if you moved the body into the ambulance.”

In ten minutes he was through, said he would make his report to the coroner; and he left with a pleasant nod.

Stutz looked around morosely, saying, “I guess that about wraps it up here for the time being. One of you boys will have to finish out Boagard’s Pike patrol. Who?”

Kin hung in the background pretending interest in the notes on his clip-board. Stutz skimmed a glance toward him, paid no attention to Phelps’s offer, nor to Priddy’s desire to type up his shorthand notes. He gave a noisy blast through his pipe.

“You, Priddy,” he said. And to Kin: “I’ll ride back with you, Kinsland. You, Decker,” he said to the trooper who had come up with Phelps, “take back poor Boagard’s buggy.”

The brown leaves sailed and spiraled in the headlights’ glare on the drive down the Hake Mountain road; they snapped and clattered against the car’s underparts. Stutz was screwed up in the corner with his watch cap almost down to his eyebrows.

He said, “Kinsland, I’ve only been at Drum for about three months, and maybe I catch on slow. Anyhow, I don’t get you.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Kin was wary. He cleared his throat. “Haven’t I been doing my work right?”

“By the book, yes. But when I first came here I went over the dossier on all the troopers. There’s a lot in yours about initiative, alertness, competence, quick to take a calculated risk — stuff like that. On the ball. In their pitching extra innings.” His pipe made a loud noise. “If you’ve got a beef against me, let’s have it. And don’t bother dressing it up with ‘sir’ this and ‘sir’ that. Dish it out.”

Kin laughed outright, spontaneously. “What? For Pete’s sake, sir!” And he dropped his guard. “If it was anything as simple as that—” He got his guard up again, quick. And because he didn’t know how to explain himself, he lied. “Maybe for a while there — before you came — I was too much of an eager beaver. Too much of that stuff and you’re in the other troopers’ hair. You know?”

Stutz looked at his pipe and then spoke as if he hadn’t been listening. “Could be,” he said in a casual way, “you’re losing your guts. Happens. Some get ’em back, some don’t. Some don’t try. They just stick it out — polite, respectful, sticking to the book. And comes pension time, they get the same as any other man. It’s a living.”

The taste in Kin’s mouth was bitter, acrid. The lump that rose in his throat was soft and mushy and sickening. He hit the throttle, swung off Hake, and streaked up the Turnpike. He eased up only a little bit for the Drum Ridge exit and was on the throttle again, hard. He snaked the car viciously up the barracks driveway and slammed down the brakes in front of the square granite building.

Stutz yawned a little and rubbed his eyes. He got out of the car, said, “Kid stuff,” and went inside.

They were all there in the central room when Kin slipped in a few minutes later. Troopers were all over the place — not a single man in bed upstairs. Reporters and news photographers had come in from the nearest city and were milling around along with a radio man lugging a tape recorder. McGraw looked beat-up by this time; so did DiPolo. Pots of black coffee, cups, plates of sandwiches were set up on a card table. Kin stood around on the edge of it all, listening.

Why, he kept asking himself, didn’t anyone mention the reasonable similarity between the deaths of Boagard and Harry Eaves? He kept on listening, looking, but no one mentioned it. Why not? Or had he been too close to Harry’s death, remembered too much or imagined too much? But on the night of May 10, late, a filling-station man on the Hillsboro road saw a police car flash past in pursuit of a speeder. Half an hour later, and only five miles from the filling station, the driver of a milk-tanker found Harry sprawled on the road twenty feet from his patrol car. Dead.

Harry had been shot clean through the heart and had died instantly. Had he been careless in not radioing to Drum that he was in pursuit of a stolen car? Or had he known the driver and, like Boagard, overhauled him and tried to reason with him? The consensus at the barracks was that Harry in his haste and inexperience, and not wishing to drive one-handed while using the radio-phone, had risked running down a known stolen car before first reporting in by radio. Well, Kin told himself, if that was the consensus—

“Hey, Kin. On the phone over here,” McGraw yelled. He pointed to one of three on his desk. “That one. Katherine Eaves.”

Kin picked it up. “Katherine?”

“Katherine! Yes, Katherine!” Her voice was high, strident, as if in wild outrage or anger. “And only inexperienced troopers get killed-killed!”

He ducked his ear away from the phone, baffled and tongue-tied. And the next instant he realized she had hung up. He stared stupidly at McGraw, who managed a wry, haggard grin, touching his own ear as if the stridency on the phone had reached him too. Kin looked ill. He turned and stared at DiPolo, who looked back at him with a kind of exhausted irony.

“Couldn’t the Old Man even trust you to finish up the night patrol for poor old Boag? How’d you live with yourself, buster?”

Kin gave him a sad look, with no bewilderment in it. He said, “Say that again, Lulu. Tomorrow, sometime, when you know what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying it right now!” DiPolo shouted. “Yellow! Yellow!”

Kin looked around — at McGraw, at half a dozen other troopers; at Stutz in his corner office, who looked back, blinking, through the open door. “Warm in here — getting warm,” Kin said. He looked again at McGraw, at his heavy red face, the beetling eyes, the massive hunched shoulders. “You think I’m yellow, Mac?” he said softly.

“Don’t ask me,” McGraw said. “You were told by somebody else.”

“By a little guy, Mac. Five-feet-seven, about one-forty. You want to say it, Mac? If you do, let’s go outside and you say it.”

Stutz came out of his office, jangling keys on a ring. “Cut out this kid stuff. Kinsland, Boagard’s keys. Go down and clean out his locker and bring the stuff to my office.”

When Kin returned to the central room ten minutes later everybody looked washed out and the high crackling tension had passed. He carried an armful of clothing and the square strongbox to the corner office and they found the key to the box and opened it. Stutz called in McGraw to witness and itemize the contents. Two bankbooks, a sheaf of receipts, a Bible, a stack of old photographs, sixteen dollars in bills, a dozen pamphlets and a book, a bundle of letters — pink or blue paper — and a newspaper clipping of his wife’s death five years ago. The quiet, tough, strict man’s little hoard of things he must have considered too personal to leave lying about. The men around the desk read the clipping, shook their heads; and they leafed the pamphlets and only McGraw and Stutz shook their heads.

Kin didn’t shake his head. He felt a slow crawling along his spine and his whole body stiffened as if to stop it. The pamphlets and the book reminded him of something — something Katherine had once told him, amused about it, laughing and forgetting it the next minute. As he had. “Sir,” Kin said.

Stutz blinked at him.

“The man we want,” Kin said, “might be right in town here.”

Stutz said, “That’s interesting. Who?”

“A friend, maybe. If it is, I’d like to see him, alone. If it is, there won’t be any trouble.”

Stutz looked at McGraw. “I’d be breaking every rule in the book if I let him do it his way — wouldn’t I, Mac?”

“Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

Stutz’s pipe gurgled. “Go ahead, Kinsland,” he said. “I’ve been out on a lot of limbs in my time.” He blinked after Kin as the trooper left the office. He said to McGraw, “Good sergeants try to cover up for their troopers, Mac. Maybe one of them’ll have to cover up for the commanding officer.”

“I tell you this, sir. I sure escaped the beating of my life a little while ago. And you know what? I don’t think it was anything DiPolo said that burned him. I think it was his girl — on the phone. She damned near took his ear off!”

“A little here, a little there — it all adds up, piles on. You think she hit him with something? Good. Maybe I’d better call her back and congratulate her. If I can stay awake long enough.”

Kin walked along the side of the darkened house to the front porch and pressed the white button beneath the sign lettered Night Bell. He heard, after a minute, the thump and scuff of footfalls, the clatter of something knocked down — wood against wood. A light shone through milky glass panels on each side of the door. The porch light went on and the door was flung open.

Kin said, “Doc.”

“No! Again?” Ackerman bellowed, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Oh... you, Kin. Didn’t quite make out the face, but the uniform— My phone not working?”

“Can I come in, Doc?”

“Can you come in! Sure, sure. You hurt, boy?” He gangled off into the frowzy living room, sideswiping an old bamboo whatnot that shook, rattling the bric-a-brac on its shelves. He got the room lights on, saying, “Come on, right here, boy, and let’s have a look.”

“I’m not hurt, Doc,” Kin said. “You sit down, will you, please? I’d like us to have a little chat.”

Ackerman reared back, glaring, “Chat! What in the blasted time of night is this for a chat? I’ve been up half the night and I’ve got to get up at six—”

“It’s tough, Doc,” Kin nodded. “And you want to hang on. You don’t want to let go. You’d do anything so you could hang on.”

Ackerman bellowed, “You’re right tootin’ I would. All hours, bad eyes, shaky knees, but” — he thumped his chest — “I got it in here, boy — here in the heart, where it counts. For me and for the people that call me up all hours because they need me — not any doctor — me! — and not because I’m the best doctor in the world. I’m not, damn it, by a long shot. But I got it — in here — right in here—” He broke off, reared back again. “You sick, boy? Hurt?” Then he bellowed, “No? Then get out!”

The hoarse bellowing, the wild glaring eyes, made Kin cautious — but cat-cautious, cool and ready for anything, ready to move toward it. Not cautious the way he’d been for months — cutting corners and dodging and ducking and twisting away like a ballet dancer. Away from what? From the fear of losing Katherine and of not wanting to hurt her, worry her, by taking risks. But Boagard — poor Boag — had taken all that right out of his hands. Boagard, an experienced trooper, had been trapped and murdered just like the rookie Harry Eaves. And Katherine had hit him hard with her strident anger, hurling him right out of her life.

“You gonna get?” Ackerman blared, picking up a poker from the fireplace.

Kin’s hand slid along past his belt buckle, stopped short of his revolver. He said, “Did Harry Eaves ever stop you on the highway for something or other and then let you go?” He’d handle it without a gun.

Ackerman looked at the poker, confused. “Harry Eaves? Oh... him.” He slammed the poker down and shouted, “Of course he did. Once, out there on — I can’t remember where — but I was looping all over the road—” He stopped, put his head down, and squinted at Kin. His voice came out thin, between pursed lips: “What’re you getting at, boy?”

“Were you drunk, Doc?” Kin said, “and all over the road?”

Ackerman grabbed the poker.

“Don’t try it, Doc,” Kin said. “There’s at least five gallons of gas in your car in the garage. Why did you use a taxi?”

Ackerman roared, “Of course there is, trooper! I’d never get Gus out in his taxi again this late, so I had him siphon some from his car into mine — case I was called out quick again, emergency.” He slammed the poker down on the floor. “And I was slewing around all over that road because of my glasses. I can’t stand bifocals — and besides, I need three pairs. One for close up, one for where you are, one for driving. And I never can get out with the right ones, or all three.” Then he looked disgusted. “Do what you want — go or stay — but I’m going back to bed.” He shook a long, bony finger from the doorway. “And I haven’t touched a drop of liquor in twenty-five years, since the day they carried me home on a shutter from a clambake.” He glared. “You drunk, boy?” And he went on upstairs, scuffing and growling.

Kin left. He stood on the sidewalk, tapping his belt — more alert now than ever, his body feeling as if it were strung out like a wire, taut and strong. He drove the patrol car south on Main and parked in front of the white house opposite St. Andrew’s Church. There were lights on upstairs. He remained in the car, watching a dim figure move out of the darkness in front of the high hedge.

“Kin!”

“Katherine?”

Then she was in the car, hugging his arm with both of hers. He could feel her shaking, but he watched the lights upstairs. She was saying, “I turned on the radio when I got home from the church supper after midnight — and I couldn’t go to bed. I knew you’d be out there, somewhere. I... I phoned to see if you were all right, safe; and then when you were — I don’t know why” — she held on to his arm — “I just... just blew my top at you. The way Aunt Grace did to me, years ago, when I got lost in the woods and she hunted hours for me and when she found me—”

“Yes, Katherine,” he said. She was there, clinging to his arm, and that was enough. And he was watching the upstairs windows: at one of them, for a moment, Dr. Wilmott’s face appeared. Then one of the lights went out and Kin said, “What are you doing here, Katherine?”

“Stutz phoned me fifteen minutes ago to congratulate me. He didn’t say why. He just said you were out on the town, on a secret mission, trailing a big bad wolf. Then somebody there laughed and Stutz said, ‘Kid stuff,’ and hung up. It sounded silly until I remembered—” She sat back. “Kin, what are you doing here?”

He said, “I’m a cop asking questions, Katherine. You must have come here for a reason. Why?”

“I... I was afraid for you, with the things, little things, itching me since the radio news first started coming in about a drunken driver.”

“But why here?” Kin said.

She held her face in her hands. “I keep trying not to believe it, but it keeps after me now — knowing about Boagard and what he said in Dr. Wilmott’s office the day he came in for his physical. Weren’t we kidding around about that a little a couple of months ago?”

“I was trying to remember it. Then something in Boag’s strongbox brought it back to me, and tied in. And I went to Doc Ackerman’s, remembering a long way back how my folks said he used to hit the bottle.” He shook his head. “But it’s not Doc Ackerman. You,” he said, “must think it’s Wilmott. Why? An hour or so after Boagard’s death Wilmott was out there at the scene, all bounce and efficiency.”

She was trembling, bewildered and uncertain. “People almost always accept a doctor when he moves into town and starts practicing. They don’t stop and ask themselves — I didn’t, did you? — why a doctor should come from far away, at the age of forty-five, and start a new practice in a strange place. You don’t ask if he had to leave the place he came from.”

“You’ve seen Wilmott drunk?”

“No, never. But he’s always chewing chlorophyll tablets. But mainly the oxygen tank in the office. I use it mostly for metabolism tests and penicillin sprays; but it can sober you up fast too. We use too much!”

Another light went off upstairs. Kin stirred and said, “I’ll have to go in and ask a few questions.”

Katherine held him by the arm again, hard. “Kin, please! Maybe we’re both wrong but — but he likes to hunt and he has all kinds of guns — rifles — pistols. And Kin—” Her small, choked laugh was a little hysterical. “Kin, that awful night last spring. The first radio report was wrong — the one I heard. Somebody at the barracks didn’t mark it down when you had to rush to the hospital about your dad and because of that Harry took over for you. The relief dispatcher who came on that night assumed it was you out there in that car — not Harry. I... I fainted because I thought it was you—”

He gave her a light pat. “You run now, hon. Everything’ll be okay. I’ll give you a ring after.”

She got out and stood for a minute with the door open, her face still and pensive but with a fond smile moving along her lips. She said, “No, don’t ring, Kin. I’ll learn to worry and worry — and wait. I’ve worried all along, all summer and fall. I always will. But you’ll come home and I’ll see you — and all the worry in the world will be worth that. If you want to, come for breakfast.”

“I’ll be there, hon,” he said, stepping out the other side.

“Kin,” she said, turning a dozen feet away, “what did Stutz mean by kid stuff?”

Kin said, “Run along now, honey, beat it.” And when she was out of sight he looked up at the house, where only one window showed a dim light and a face flashing past. Kin got back into the car and radioed the barracks. Stutz was at the other end.

“Mac’s taking forty winks,” Stutz said, “and Lulu’s sick to his stomach. Some ball here tonight. What’s with you?”

“I think the man we want is Dr. Wilmott. I’m parked in front of his house. He’s upstairs pacing back and forth.”

“Why Wilmott?”

“I think the reason Wilmott stopped on the Turnpike was to smear mud on his license plate so it couldn’t be read. The wind blew his hat off, he saw headlights way up the Pike and didn’t want to be seen staggering around after his hat. At Boagard’s last physical he was overheard to say that he had no use for M.D.’s but he had to conform to the regulations. The news clipping in the strongbox said his wife died five years ago in the operating room. Maybe he blamed the surgeon, right or wrong — and probably Boagard was wrong. And those pamphlets on healing by faith — Boagard was always reading those. I don’t think Boag was gasping for a doctor. I think he was trying to tell us a doctor’s name.”

Stutz said, “Maybe you’ve got something. Going in after him?”

“Anything you say, sir.”

“I say that if a doctor killed a cop in order not to have himself exposed as an irresponsible drunk driver, he’ll kill another before he’ll be taken in. I say stay right where you are until we get there. That’s an order. No kid stuff.”

“Right. No kid stuff.”

In three minutes a car with a red blinker on top swung into Main past St. Andrew’s Church. Another was right behind it. Then a third. Kin turned on his own blinker as the cars converged. One stopped in the street. One drifted slowly up the driveway and around back. One parked in the driveway.

Upstairs, the last light went out.

There was an explosion inside the house.

“Um,” Stutz said, sucking on his pipe.