Killing Time

Twenty-Five

It was a hell of a long quarter-mile back to the house. I had plenty of time to think, and plenty of uncomfortable notions to think about.

Jordan Reed hadn’t been worried. I had promised him that I was on my way to the CCG with enough information to turn City Hall upside down and shake it like shaking dirty socks out of a laundry bag, and he hadn’t been worried. I’d seen two possibilities for that — he’d made a deal with the CCG or he’d managed to make a deal higher up and pull the reformers’ sting — but not until right now did I see the third possibility.

That I’d never get back to town.

But there was the maid breaking into Reed’s office, and the funny look the gardener had given me. This might be something else entirely.

I had three men with me in the car. Bill was unarmed, and he was a noncombatant anyway. Art and Ben were armed, but whose side were they on? I’d let them flank me all afternoon, and what the hell did I know about them, or what the hell did I know about what Jack Wycza was planning?

I was an idiot.

I’d just about come to that decision when we reached the house again, and I braked to a stop. Two of the police cars passed me, parking just ahead, and the third stopped against my rear bumper.

I sat tense, both hands still holding the wheel, high up, where I wouldn’t have far to move to get inside my coat. I looked straight out the windshield and said, “Stay in the car. Let them make all the first moves.”

Nobody answered me.

Up ahead, car doors were opening and spilling out Winston’s finest. I heard the chatter of a police radio, and wanted to switch on my own radio and listen in on the calls, but it seemed somehow like a bad time to do it.

Ed Jason came strolling back toward me, paused by the fender, looked in through the windshield at me, and suddenly grinned. “Take it easy, Tim,” he said. “We’re not saying you did it. You’re just all maybe witnesses, that’s all.”

“Did what?” I asked him.

“Killed her,” he said.

“Killed who?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet. You fellas just sit tight in the car. Harcum’ll be along pretty soon.” And he moseyed — there’s just no other word for Ed Jason’s walk — off toward the house.

Beside me, Art said, “Here.”

I looked at him, and he was offering me a fresh-lit cigarette. I grinned, spastically, letting all the tension out, and took the cigarette from him. I said, “Thanks.”

Bill Casale, in the back seat, said, “What’s going on?”

“You’ve got me, Billy boy,” I told him. I felt very good, very expansive. “It doesn’t concern us,” I said, “that’s all that matters to me.”

Art said, “Shall we get our stories straight?”

“What stories?” I asked him. “We don’t know anything. Did you guys see any woman getting killed?”

Art said, “No.” Bill said, “I didn’t see anybody except that old man, when you were on the porch.” Ben didn’t say anything. Ben never said anything.

“Well, then,” I said.

“What were we all doing here?” Art asked me.

“The truth,” I said. He raised an eyebrow, but he let it go at that.

We sat around, watching, and after a while I figured it out that the main area of interest was around on the other side of the house. The chain of events seemed clear, up to a point. The gardener had been over on that side of the house, had seen the dead woman, had rushed into the house and informed the maid, and she had come charging in to tell Reed just as I was leaving. Reed had quick called the law, while I was chatting with Alisan and standing around on the front porch, and by the time I’d driven out to the highway, the law had arrived.

It was clear, as I say, up to a point. Then it got muddy. For instance, who was this dead woman? Not Alisan, obviously, since I’d just talked with her. And not the maid either. And I didn’t know of any other women who lived in this house.

And, just incidentally, who had killed her? And why had it happened on the Reed estate?

I stewed on those questions for maybe half an hour, and finally Harcum arrived. He conferred with Ed Jason for a while, up on the front porch, and then Ed moseyed on over and said to me, “Harcum wants a chat.”

“All of us?”

“He just mentioned you.”

So the others waited, and I went up on the porch to talk to Harcum. Ed Jason headed back around the corner of the house like a cowboy going to the corral.

The porch was what you might call crowded. Harcum was there, and so was Jordan Reed, and so was Marvin Reed, and so was Alisan Reed. Marvin looked baffled, Harcum angry, Jordan angrier, and Alisan angriest.

Harcum said, when I was halfway through the screen door onto the porch, “Any of your bunch see her at all?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t. I asked the others, and they didn’t either.”

“From the spot where she was killed,” said Jordan Reed tightly, “she walked in from the highway, took the dirt-path short cut through the trees. You wouldn’t have seen her from the front of the house at all.”

“We’re trying to find out if anybody saw who she left the hotel with,” said Harcum.

“Isn’t that obvious?” asked Jordan Reed bitterly. “She left alone, probably took a cab, and walked in from the highway because she didn’t want anyone else to see her.” He flashed a bitter glance at his son. “I suppose she’d been here before,” he said. “When I was away on business.”

“Never!” cried Marvin. He still looked baffled, but now he looked a bit scared as well.

“I suppose,” said Jordan, “neither of you expected me back from Albany so early.”

“I didn’t even know she was in town!” cried Marvin hopelessly. “I haven’t seen her for years!”

“You wanted to know why I didn’t give you a grandson,” said Alisan, her voice harsh and vicious. “Now you know why. I don’t have to hide it any more.”

“Alisan!” cried Marvin, like a drowning man calling for a life preserver he doesn’t really expect to get.

“I knew Sherri used to know Marv—” started Harcum, and I inadvertently interrupted him, blurting, “Sherri!” He glanced over at me, somber and frowning. “Yes, Sherri,” he said.

Oh ho, I thought. Oh ho de ho ho. The dead woman was Sherri, who used to know Marvin Reed, and who had come to town with Harcum — I could see why Harcum was so gloomy. It isn’t pleasant to realize you were just a railroad ticket. Sherri had come to town to see Marvin again, and if I’d figured Sherri right she spelled Marvin with a capital $.

Had she seen him?

The cluck in question was saying, “Dad, I haven’t seen her for years, I swear it, not for years.”

Jordan looked at his son the way he’d look at a New Dealer, and said, “You’re scum.” And then he looked away again. Never had a son been disinherited so briefly or so completely.

Harcum caught that message, too, and took courage from it. To Marvin, he said, “It looks like you’re the prime suspect, boy. And the only suspect.”

“But I didn’t see her!” Marvin wailed. “I swear it, I swear it, I never even saw her!”

“What was the weapon?” I asked.

Harcum pointed at the whitewashed porch table. There was something on it, wrapped in a white handkerchief. I went over to inspect. Harcum was so used to me nosing around he didn’t make a murmur.

It was a bone-handled hunting knife, balanced, with a thick blade six inches long. Sheldon’s, the big department store downtown, sold that particular model by the carload lot. Winston is a big hunting town, and this was one of the most popular hunting knives.

“What about prints?” I asked.

Harcum snorted. “On that handle?”

He was right, come to think of it. A rough, grainy surface like the handle of that knife wouldn’t produce a print in a million years.

Harcum was saying, “You want to tell us about it, Marv? She came up here to talk to you. She wanted money, I guess. You couldn’t afford what she wanted, and you were afraid your father would see her. So you killed her, and you were going to get rid of the body but the gardener came along first, scaring you off. Is that the way it happened?”

Marvin just stared at Harcum, shaking his head slightly, and then he turned to his father, who was glaring out over the wooded slope at the town. “Dad,” he said. “Dad, please.”

Jordan didn’t move.

“Dad, please,” said Marvin, “I didn’t do it. I haven’t seen her for years, I— Dad, listen to me! I’d do anything for you, you know that. I haven’t see her for years.”

He stopped, his hands working jerkily in his lap. He looked pleadingly at me, at Harcum, even at Alisan. “Anything,” he said. “I didn’t do it.”

It was uncomfortable as hell, for everybody concerned, and we were all grateful for the interruption when the silence following Marvin’s plea was broken by the screen door opening.

It was Art, looking in with polite apology, saying, “You okay, Mr. Smith?”

“I’m peachy,” I told him.

He took that at face value, and said, to the group in general, “Is it all right if I use the phone?”

Jordan turned away from glaring at the town to glare at Art, a who-the-hell-are-you glare, and then he shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” Art came in the rest of the way and said to me, in a somewhat lower voice, “Got to check in with Jack again.”

He went on into the house, and Harcum cleared his throat portentously. “It seems like a pretty clear case to me, Marv,” he said. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

Before Marvin could answer, I got to my feet and said to Harcum, “Can I talk to you for a second?”

He frowned at me. “What the hell is it, Tim?”

“Just take a second,” I said.

Grumbling, he followed me along the porch and around the corner, out of sight and hearing of the family group back there. I said, “Let me do you a favor, Harcum. Jordan just might reconsider. You better take it easy with Marvin.”

“It’s an open-and-shut case, Tim,” he said.

I shook my head. “It’s an obvious case,” I told him. “But it isn’t open-and-shut. You don’t have any witnesses, you’ll never trace that knife back to Marvin in a million years, and you don’t know for sure that she even got to Marvin.”

“I got a good circumstantial case—” he started.

“You don’t have any case at all,” I told him. “A good defense lawyer will run your case right out of court. And if Jordan reconsiders, Marvin will have a good defense lawyer.”

“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” he demanded.

“Take it easy,” I advised him, “and let your detectives handle this. That’s what the city pays them for. You’ve already made one stupid arrest—”

“You mean Lascow? I’ve got a case against him, by God.”

“And the hell you do, too.”

“I’ve got a case!” he insisted.

“I’d sure like to see it,” I said.

“You’ll see it,” he said darkly. “You might like to know what Lascow’s job is in the National Guard.”

I blinked. I knew Ron was a lieutenant in the Guard — it kept him from active duty — but I didn’t see what the hell that had to do with the price of beans. “I give up,” I said. “What is his job with the National Guard?”

“He’s in charge of a bomb demolition squad,” he said. “They taught him all about taking bombs apart. And putting them back together again.”

I stared at him. “Is that all you’ve got?”

“Not by a long shot.” He pushed past me, the conversation finished for now, and went back to the Reeds, where he started telling Marvin how he shouldn’t leave town or anything, that although he wasn’t under arrest he would probably be wanted for questioning and he should keep himself available and—

I broke in, saying, “You want me to stick around here any more?”

He looked at me, thrown off the track. “Hell, no,” he said, and went back to Marvin, trying to remember where he’d left off.

“Keep yourself available,” I prompted, collected my dirty look, and went back to the car.

Art hadn’t returned yet, so I sat there and answered Bill’s questions for a while. Then Art came strolling toward the car, frowning, his usual sardonic smile missing from his face. He slid into the front seat beside me and said, “There’ve been some changes, Mr. Smith.”

“Such as?”

“Jack says for me and Ben to come on back in.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It looks like the arrangement between you and him is all finished.” Meaning that our own private arrangement was still alive.

“He wants you right away?”

“Right away,” he said.

I wondered if this move had anything to do with Reed’s earlier smugness. I had the feeling in the small of my back that it did.

“Just in case he changes his mind again,” said Art casually, “where do we get in touch with you?”

I wasn’t sure myself. I still didn’t have a working phone at home, and I’d be pretty much on the move from now on. I finally decided on Cathy’s place, figuring she could take a message if I wasn’t there.

He took down the address and number and said, “Mind dropping us off in town?”

“Not at all.”

This time, we got to the highway with no interference, and I went a couple blocks out of the way to drop Art and Ben off in front of the People’s Candy Store. Bill switched to the front seat, and we drove on down toward the center of town.