Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos

Ten

I dropped her off at her dormitory despite her protests. She wanted to come with me, wanted to be on hand when I opened Sutton’s strongbox, but I wouldn’t listen to her. I explained that it was too damned late as it was, that I wanted to open the box in the privacy of my own room, and that sneaking her up Mrs. Lipton’s stairs once in an evening was quite enough. She argued a bit and pouted a bit and finally accepted the state of affairs. She kissed me goodbye almost passionately enough to change my mind, then scampered off to her dormitory.

I drove back to Mrs. Lipton’s, parked the car outside and carried the strongbox up to my room. It was the middle of the night, almost the middle of the morning, and soon false dawn would be painting boredom upon the face of the sky. I was exhausted and the bed beckoned.

So did the strongbox. I sat down on the edge of the bed with it and looked it over thoughtfully. The combination lock was a simple affair — three dials of numbers running from zero to nine, with a consequent nine hundred ninety-nine possibilities, the same as the odds in the policy slip racket.

I started spinning the dials aimlessly, trying to hit the right combination, then gave that up as fundamentally insane. Instead I took Hank Sutton’s gun, hefted it by the barrel, and slammed the butt against the box.

It made a hellish noise. I sat still for a moment and felt guilty. I wondered how many boarders I had managed to awaken. Then I decided that one might as well wake them all and slammed the strongbox again with the gun.

This time it opened. I put the gun away in a drawer and opened the box. Its contents were no phenomenal surprise. First of all there were twelve negatives — two each of the six poses. I guessed that he was getting ready to pull the old gambit of selling the negatives for a high price, then resume the blackmail dodge. There were prints, too. Eighteen of them, three sets in all. All of them equally glossy, equally detailed, and equally pornographic.

I didn’t waste time looking at them. I put them back in the box, adding the set I’d found in Gwen Davison’s closet. Tomorrow I would have something to burn in a convenient field; for the time being only sleep interested me.

The strongbox — and the gun as well — went into a dresser drawer. While putting them away I came across what little remained of my bottle of scotch, and this could not have worked out more neatly if I had planned it. I finished the bottle and put myself, at very long last, to bed.

I was awake suddenly. It was noon and I was still tired but I’d had the magnificent luck to wake up tired or not. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around for cigarettes. There didn’t seem to be any.

It was that sort of day. There are days when one bounces out of bed filled with life and easy of spirit. There are other days when one wakes up coated with a fine layer of foul sweat, and on those days that sweat seems to have seeped into one’s brain. And it was that sort of day. My brain felt sweaty.

I shook my head to clear it, then shuffled down the hall to the community bathroom. Someone was in it. I went back to my room and shifted uncomfortably until someone got out, then took his or her place. The shower was either too hot or too cold all the while I was under it, the spray either too hard or too soft. I struggled with the controls only for a small while. On days like that, you cannot fight with fate. You do not stand a solitary chance of success.

The towel provided might have blotted a small puddle of ink. It wouldn’t do for a full-sized human being. I did as much as I could with it, then trundled back to my room and waited for the water to evaporate. I had a strong urge to roll around in the rug but managed to control myself.

One of those days.

I got dressed and dragged myself out of the house. The cold spell had broken, which should have been a pleasant turn, but it was the wrong day to expect pleasant turns. Rain had come with the warm air, rain that mingled with the fallen snow and made slush out of it. In New York you learn to accept slush as part of the winter wonderland environment. In New Hampshire you expect a little better in the way of weather.

I squished through the slush to the MG and wondered if it would refuse to start. But the gods smiled and the engine turned over. I drove over to the main street of town and parked the car.

The drugstore didn’t have any of my brand of cigarettes left. I should have expected as much. I settled for a pack of something else, then went next door and smoked a cigarette while a waitress brought me orange juice and toast and coffee. There was nothing wrong with the orange juice, but the toast was burnt and the girl put cream in the coffee.

Which was par for the course.

I ate the toast without complaining, had her trade the cup of dishwater for a cup of black coffee, and smoked my way through the day’s second cigarette. Then I sat there for a few moments wondering what was going to happen next. Something, no doubt. Something abominable.

So I left the lunch counter and went to the police station. And it happened.

I asked the old policeman if I could talk to Alan Marsten, He stared at me. “You mean you ain’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“About the kid,” he said. “About what he did, the Marsten kid.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said mildly.

“No?”

“I was sleeping,” I said patiently. “I just awoke.”

“Ayeh,” he said. “Sleeping till noon, eh? You private police have the right deal, by God. Sleeping till noon!”

We had the right deal, by God. I wondered if they would throw me in jail for hitting the old fool in his fat stomach. I decided they probably would.

“The Marsten boy,” I reminded him.

“Escaped.”

“What!”

He smiled with relish. “Escaped, I said. Run off, took to the woods, disappeared.”

“When? How? What—”

“Hang on,” he said. “One at a time. First the when part. Happened about three hours ago, just after I come on duty. Then the how — that lawyer of his came in to see him. I opened the door and the kid gave me a hit over the head that was enough to put me out on the floor. When I came to he was gone. They say he ran out, jumped in a car that some damn fool left the keys in. And off he went like a bat out of hell.”

I must have had a magnificently foolish expression on my face because he was smiling patronizingly at me. “The lawyer,” I managed to say. “What about the lawyer?”

“Kid hit him. Hit him same as he hit me, with one of the legs he busted off that little chair in his cell. The lawyer was still out cold by the time I got up.”

There was probably little enough that was even mildly humorous about it, but it came at the right time, on top of no cigarettes and burnt toast and coffee with cream in it, on top of an occupied shower and a feeling of ill-being and everything else that went along with it. The mental picture of that fine Philadelphia lawyer tapped on the head with a chair leg was too much for me.

I laughed. I howled like a hyena, clutching my belly with one hand and pawing the air with the other. I roared and whooped hysterically while the excuse for a policeman watched me as if I had lost my mind. Maybe I had.

The laughter stopped almost as suddenly as it had started. I straightened up and tried to get my dignity back. “No one knows where he was headed?”

“Nope.”

“Or why he ran off?”

“Hell,” he said. “Guess that’s easy enough. He figgered he better run away before we hang him. He’s guilty as hell and he wants to save his neck.”

I didn’t believe it. The more the situation developed, the more little puzzle-pieces started to come into view, the less likely it seemed for Alan Marsten to have killed Gwen Davison. After what I’d learned in the past day he was bloody well coming into the clear. I was all ready to suggest releasing the boy, when the little fool decided to set himself free.

“We’ll get him,” the cop assured me. “You know what they say — he can run but he can’t hide. Dumbest thing a man could do, running away like a rabbit the way he did. That way not a soul in the world’s going to believe he didn’t cut that girl to pieces.”

He dropped me a sly wink. “More’n that, I don’t figger his lawyer’s going to love him. Not going to work too hard to get him off. The boy really let him have it with that chair leg, let me tell you. By God, that fancy talker had a lump on his head the size of a turkey egg!”

He had a lump on his own head. It was more the size of a duck egg, as it happened, but I decided against mentioning it to him. He probably already knew.

Instead I thanked him, for nothing in particular, and left him there. I went out into the slush again and used the butt of one cigarette to get a fresh one started.

On the way to where the MG was parked I ran into Bill Piersall, the younger and somewhat more competent Cliff’s End police officer. He told me what the other one either hadn’t known or hadn’t thought worth mentioning. The car Alan Marsten picked was a dark blue Pontiac, three years old, with New Hampshire plates. The state troopers already had word of the jailbreak plus descriptions of boy and car, and they were in the process of throwing a roadblock around the area.

Which, according to Piersall, was not a difficult procedure. “Just a few roads out of here,” he explained. “They can seal ’em all off in no time at all. That boy’s caught in a net, Mr. Markham. He can’t get far.”

“What if he stays in town?”

He looked at me blankly. “Why’d he do that? He’s a dead duck if he stays around. Why, he just about admitted his guilt by taking off like that. He stays around and he doesn’t have the chance of a fish in the desert.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “But he might be safer trying to hide out Especially with the roads sealed.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll check,” he assured me. “We’ll give the town a good going-over, see if we can’t turn him out. But I think he’ll be off and running, Mr. Markham. I think they’ll pick him up on Route Seventeen heading south, as a matter of fact. He’s running scared, you see. Might be safer for him, trying to hide, but he won’t stop to think on that. He busted out of that cell because he was scared and he’ll run for the same reason.”

He was on his way to the station house. I let him go and got into the red MG, fitted the key into the ignition and started the motor running. Piersall’s analysis was intelligent enough, I thought, but it was probably wrong.

If I was right, Alan hadn’t killed Gwen Davison. And, in that case, he wasn’t running away out of fear. He was running in an attempt to accomplish something, to find somebody, to perform one task or another. And if that were so, he wouldn’t be leaving Cliff’s End. He’d either go straight for whomever it was he wanted to see, or he’d hide out and wait for things to clear up.

That was the way it appeared to me. Which, taking into consideration the way the day had gone thus far, indicated that Piersall was probably right. Alan was a killer on the run and they’d pick him up at the roadblock on Route 17.

It was that kind of a day. But it has to be a hellishly bad day before I’ll stop playing out my own hunches. And things weren’t quite that bad yet.

Not quite.

I drove back to my home away from home first of all. Those photographs were still around, and as long as they remained in existence they were a potential weapon for anybody who had his hands on them. As far as that went, I didn’t know whether or not Mrs. Lipton made it a practice of going through her guest’s drawers simply out of curiosity. I didn’t want her to get an eyeful.

I parked the car and went into the large tourist home. Mrs. Lipton met me with a smile and asked me if I would be staying another night. I smiled back at her, told her I probably would, and paid her for another evening. She held the smile while she pocketed the bills, then stepped out of my way and let me go up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I went into my room and closed the door after me.

The strongbox was in the drawer and the pictures and negatives were in the strongbox. I carried the box to the lavatory, locked myself in, and tore each of the eighteen photos into tiny and innocuous shreds. I did the same for one strip of six negatives, but I changed my mind and folded the other strip, putting it into my wallet. There was always the chance that the photos might come in handy at a later date. Even if they didn’t, I could always make prints and sell them to high school children if the going got rough.

I flushed the shredded prints and negatives down the bowl, unlocked the door and left the bathroom for whoever might want it. I put the broken strongbox back in my drawer because there wasn’t much else to do with it, tucked the gun back into the waistband of my trousers. God knew what use I might have for it, but it could conceivably come in handy.

Back in the MG again, I sat for a moment feeling like a yo-yo top on a string, bouncing back and forth all over the town of Cliff’s End and accomplishing nothing at all. Thoughts like that can only depress one. I got the car going again and drove off.

Jill wasn’t in her dormitory. A hallmate told me she had classes from one to three that afternoon, then usually dropped over to the college coffee shop for a bite to eat. I left a note on her desk to the effect that I would meet her at the coffee shop after three on the chance that she returned directly to her room. I looked at my watch — it was one-thirty, which gave me an hour and a half to kill before I could see her. I looked for a way to kill it.

Helen MacIlhenny was one way. I found the dean in her office, evidently not too busy to see me. I sat down in a chair and looked across her desk at the woman. She asked me if I was getting anywhere and I told her the truth.

“A few dozen things are happening,” I said. “But no pattern’s developed yet. Maybe I’ve accomplished nothing. It’s hard to say.”

“Are you piling up clues?”

I smiled sadly. “It doesn’t work that way in real life,” I said. “Only in the comic books. You pick up a piece here and a piece there and you never know which are clues and which are trivia. Then the final piece drops into place and everything works itself out. It’s fun when it’s over, but a headache while it’s going on.” I turned the sad smile into a grin. “A headache some of the time, anyway.”

“Meaning now, I suppose?”

“Meaning now.”

She nodded. “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Markham? Anything I can tell you?”

“Maybe. Is there anything on the order of a curfew for the students here? A bed check or something of the sort?”

“Freshmen have to be in their dormitories by midnight, two o’clock on weekends. It’s strictly enforced.”

“And the older girls?”

“No curfew,” she said. “We have a rather liberal philosophy of education at Radbourne, Mr. Markham. We believe that you have to give a student responsibility in order to teach him to handle it. A bed check or curfew would be rather inconsistent with that way of thinking.”

“It would. Is attendance required at classes?”

“Only the first and last class of each session. If a student is going to acquire knowledge, he or she will do so out of motivation, not compulsion. Class attendance is not required. Some students learn the material as well on their own. And, to be painfully frank, some of our lecturers aren’t worth getting up at eight in the morning to listen to. As the students are well enough aware, Mr. Markham.”

I nodded. “Then it would be possible for a student to leave campus for a day or two without anyone realizing it.”

“Oh,” she said. “You mean Barbara—”

“Not specifically.”

“Oh,” she said again. “Yes, I would be inclined to say that it’s possible enough, Mr. Markham. A student could go away and return without it coming to my attention, or to the attention of anyone in authority. Of course, a prolonged absence would not go unrecognized. Barbara’s case is a case in point. Some students worried about her and called the matter to my attention.”

She thought for a moment. “And a prolonged absence would not be disregarded,” she went on. “There’s no hard and fast rule against it, you understand. But it would be discouraged.”

I didn’t say anything. I was not thinking about Barbara Taft at the moment. As a matter of fact, I was clearing up Jill Lincoln’s trip to New York, among other things. I looked at Helen MacIlhenny. She had a thoughtful expression on her face.

“Mr. Markham,” she said, “I have the feeling that you know something which I don’t know.”

“That’s not likely, is it?”

Her sharp eyes twinkled. “Oh, I’m afraid it’s highly likely. You ought to tell me. I’m supposed to have my finger on the pulse of Radbourne, so to speak. The dean must know all that goes on around this little campus.”

“So must the detective,” I said.

“Then you don’t have anything to tell me? I’ve a feeling something has been going on behind my back, something serious. And that it’s linked with the murder.”

I admitted that it was possible. “When I have something,” I said, “I’ll let you know about it.”

“Will you?”

“Of course.”

“I wonder if you will, Mr. Markham.”

There was a pregnant pause. It was my turn to ask her something so I picked up my cue.

“What do you know about a girl named Jill Lincoln?”

“Jill Lincoln? Why?”

I tried to be nonchalant. “Someone mentioned her as a close friend of Barbara’s,” I said. “I may be having a talk with her soon to find out if she knows anything. I like to know something about a person before a conference.”

“Is that all?”

“Certainly.”

She looked quizzically at me. “Oh, well,” she said. “I suspect you’ll tell me what you want to and when you want to, and I suspect that’s your privilege. What do you want to know about her?”

“Whatever you feel is pertinent”

“I see. Well, there’s not much to say, I’m afraid. I’ve never had much contact with the girl, Mr. Markham. She’s a reasonably competent student and she’s never been in any serious trouble, the sort that has to be brought to a dean’s attention.”

“From a wealthy family?”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Barbara seems to have had friends from the upper circle, so to speak.”

Helen MacIlhenny frowned at me. “Radbourne’s liberalism is a social affair as well, Mr. Markham. There’s remarkably little grouping along dollar lines. As a matter of fact, Jill’s family is not too well off at all, hardly in a class with Barbara’s. Her father owns two or three dry-goods stores, as I understand it. He’s no candidate for the poorhouse, not by any stretch of the imagination. Devoutly middle-class — that might be a good way to put it No, Jill doesn’t come from wealthy parents.”

On the way to the police station I stopped in the drugstore, took up temporary residence in the telephone booth and put through a call to the Taft home in Bedford Hills. Edgar Taft wasn’t in but Marianne was.

She took the call.

“Roy,” she said, “I was hoping you would call. Now, while Edgar was out”

“Something happen?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing’s happened, not really. But I wanted to tell you that... that you don’t have to waste any more time up in Cliff’s End. You can come back to New York now any time you feel like it.”

“Really? Is that Edgar’s idea?”

She hesitated. “Not... exactly. Roy. I appreciate what you’ve done. He was very upset emotionally by Barb’s death; you know that. You’ve been a settling influence. Otherwise he would have sat around feeling that nothing was being done, and he’s a man who cannot live with that feeling.”

She stopped, probably for breath. I waited for her to get back on the track.

“But now I think he has accepted the fact that Barb committed suicide, Roy. I’ve... I’ve tried to help him reach that conclusion. His attitude has been a common one. He thinks of suicide as a cowardly act, the act of a worthless person. But I’ve been making him... I should say helping him... to realize that Barb was a very sick girl, an extremely disturbed girl. And that can make a difference. He sees that now.”

I let her wait for an answer until I had a fresh cigarette going. Then I said: “So now he’s cooled off and I’m supposed to drop everything. Is that the idea?”

“More or less.”

“I see. Marianne—”

“You could come to New York, Roy. Come up to our place this evening, talk to Edgar, tell him you’ve been working like a dog and nothing’s turned up to indicate anything but suicide. Then tell him that as far as the reason for her depression goes, it seems as though it’ll be impossible to determine it for sure. Tell him it was just one of those unfortunate things, that—”

“Marianne.”

She stopped.

“I can write my own dialogue, Marianne. I don’t need a script, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m afraid I’ll be in Cliff’s End another day or so at the least. Not solely because of your daughter’s death. I’m involved in another matter as well.”

“In Cliff’s End?”

“That’s right.”

A significant pause. “I see, Roy. Well, all right. I just thought that the sooner he could be reassured once and for all that Barbara wasn’t murdered. Well, you’ll be back soon enough, I suppose.”

“I suppose so.”

“Yes,” she said. “Roy, I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done so far. It means a great deal both to Edgar and to myself.”

I didn’t answer.

“When Edgar comes home, should I give him any message? Or I could call his office if it’s anything important. He doesn’t like it when I disturb him during office hours—”

“I thought he was retired.”

A slight laugh. “Oh, you know Edgar. He’d lose his mind without an office. Roy, is there anything you want me to tell him? Any message?”

“No,” I said. “There’s no message.”

I put the phone on the hook and wondered why something bothered me. I should have felt relaxed enough. I did not.

Alan Marsten. I had to get to the police station and find out what, if anything, had happened. Piersall had his theory, that the boy would be caught at a roadblock, and if it were true he had probably been caught already.

If not, I wanted to find him.

Because if Piersall was wrong and I was right, then Alan Marsten was on his way somewhere, looking for somebody, ready to do something. Somebody might get hurt — either Alan or the person he was looking for.

Who would he be after? Why had he run — like a rabbit or like a lion, depending upon your point of view — and what in the name of the Lord was he planning?

Good questions.

Then I thought of an answer...