Markham: The Case of the Pornographic Photos

Nine

The road was a ribbon of moonlight and the red MG was a lunar rocket. And, while that particular imagery might have worried Alfred Noyes, it didn’t bother me in the least. I had other far weightier considerations on my mind.

“Bear right,” Jill was saying. “Then take the next left turn past the stoplight.”

I nodded and went on driving. It was late — well after midnight, and I’d been up since four in the morning. It was almost late enough for me to behave like a bloody fool, and I was doing just that. We were on our way to the house where Hank Sutton lived. We were going to steal some dirty pictures from him.

The wisdom of this move was still lost on me, as it had been when Jill first suggested it. She’d had a properly difficult time selling the notion to me. But she was evidently a good saleswoman. We were headed for Sutton’s house, ready to do or die, hearts set on securing the photographs once and for all.

It wasn’t completely aimless, as I saw it. Jill herself was about as hard to figure out as a four-year-old’s riddle, as transparent as a broken window. She wanted the photos back because she was tired of being blackmailed, tired of taking orders from New Hampshire’s version of Al Capone. Her childish chatter about getting hold of the photographs in order to clear the air was a lot of bloody nonsense designed to make me think she was taking her stance on the side of the angels.

Still in all, she happened to be right — if for the wrong reasons. The damned pictures cropped up no matter which way I turned around. In a sense they were the focal point of the entire case. As long as this Sutton individual had then in his possession, he would be tossing body blocks at me every step of the way.

But if we had them he might be out of the picture altogether. Perhaps that was too much to hope for, but at the least he would be subdued, with one major weapon taken away from him. It was vaguely analogous to nuclear disarmament; he might still start a war, but he couldn’t do nearly so much damage.

And we were on our way.

“Turn right,” she said. “Uh-huh. Now keep going straight ahead for three or four blocks. You’re in Fort McNair now. Isn’t it an exciting town?”

“Not particularly,” I told her. It wasn’t — very few tiny towns are especially exciting after midnight. This one was no exception, with its tree-shaded lanes and green-shuttered houses. It might be a fine place to live, but I’d hate to visit there.

“You’re now almost out of Fort McNair, Roy.”

“That was quick.”

“Wasn’t it? There’s his house, on the other side of that open field. See it?”

I nodded.

“Open fields on every side. He likes peace and quiet. It should make everything easier for us, don’t you think?”

I nodded again. I had slowed the car down and we were coasting in now. I pulled to a stop in front of the field she had mentioned and looked beyond it to Sutton’s house. All the lights were out. There was a car in the driveway, a late-model Lincoln.

“He’s home,” she said. “That’s his car, the only one he’s got. So he’s home.”

“Asleep?”

“He must be. Or in bed, anyway. He might have a girl with him, Roy.”

“Not with the lights out,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t take pictures in the dark.”

That made her blush a little. She turned off the blush, took out a cigarette and let me light it for her. “The front door’s probably locked,” she said. “How good are you with locks?”

“Fairly good.”

“You’re a talented guy, Roy. Okay, you go in the front door. The stairs are straight ahead, one flight of stairs up to the second floor. His bedroom’s right at the landing.”

“Bedroom?”

“That’s where he keeps the pictures. He has them in this metal lockbox that he keeps under the bed. You can just take the whole box. You don’t have to open it.”

She was an amazing girl. I took another long look at the house and the car, then a shorter look at Jill. She was waiting for me to say something.

“That’s all I have to do,” I said. “Merely pick the lock, head up the stairs, sneak into the bedroom where he’s either sleeping or making love to someone, crawl under the bed, grab the lockbox, and leave.”

“Uh-huh.”

I said: “You must be out of your mind.”

“Can you think of a better way?”

I thought of a great many superior methods, such as turning the car around on the instant and driving directly back to Cliff’s End. I suggested a few methods of this nature and she frowned at me. She looked extremely unhappy.

“You can do it,” she said. “I told you he’s all alone. Or he has a girl there, but she won’t be any trouble. He’s probably alone. He’ll be asleep and you’ll be awake. Why should you have a hard time with him?”

I asked her where she would be during all this fun and games. “I’ll wait here for you,” she said. “In the car. If anybody comes or anything I’ll hit the horn and warn you. And when you come out of the house I’ll scoot up in front with the car so you can just hop in. I know how to drive this buggy. Barb used to let me take it for a spin. I’m a good driver.”

I told her that was reassuring. I got out of the car, leaving the keys with Jill. She slid easily behind the wheel and grinned at me. I went around to the trunk, opened it. There was a tool kit there, and in the tool kit I managed to locate a tire-iron. It seemed ideal for slamming Hank Sutton over the head, so I dropped it into a pocket and went around to Jill’s window.

“Up the stairs and into the bedroom,” she said. “The bedroom door’s on the right of the landing. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“My hero,” she said, only partially sarcastic. “My hero in baggy tweeds. Give me a kiss at parting.”

I gave her a kiss at parting and she turned it into Penelope saying so-long to Ulysses. Her arms wound themselves around me neck and her tongue leaped halfway down my throat. When she let go of me there were stars in her eyes.

“Be careful,” she said. “Be careful, Roy.”

I was careful.

Very carefully I walked up the path to the house. I made my way up a trio of wooden steps that only creaked slightly. There was a door bell at the side of the door frame, and there was a knocker on the door itself, and I repressed a psychotic urge to ring bell and bang knocker and shout Halloo! at the top of my lungs.

I did not do this. Instead I fished in my pocket for my knife, a clever instrument made in Germany and equipped to perform every task from removing the hairs in one’s nose to dissecting laboratory animals. It wouldn’t cut a damned thing — the cutting blade wouldn’t hold an edge to save itself. But it was excellent for opening locked doors.

The glass-paned storm door had a hook which dropped into an eye attachment screwed into the door-jamb. I slid the long cutting blade of the knife between the door and the jamb to lift the hook. This took care of the storm door.

The real door was heavy oak. It had two locks — a pin-tumbler type of spring lock and a supplementary bolt turned manually. I used the screwdriver blade of the knife to ease back the bolt, then sprang the spring lock with the cutting blade. I turned a brass knob and eased the door open slowly and gently. It opened without making a sound.

I looked into the darkness and listened carefully. The old house was silent as the grave and dark as a blackout in a Welsh coal mine. I stepped inside and drew the door shut behind me. A clock was ticking in one of the other rooms. I stood and listened to it, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

They did this a bit at a time. Gradually I became aware of the fact that the darkened interior of the house was not entirely black, that there were shapes and shades and shadows. A staircase loomed in front of me. I approached it, counted fourteen steps, and wondered how much the stairs would creak when I walked up them. Jill hadn’t mentioned that point.

But they barely creaked at all. I walked up them like a man who had been riding horseback for several days without a pause, keeping my feet on the outward edges of the steps and being careful never to step in the middle of a plank. I stood without moving at the top of the stairs and wished for a cigarette, a long drink of scotch, and a seat in the parlor car of a fast train bound for New York. I dipped a hand into my pocket and drew forth the tire-iron. I hefted it in my hand. It was heavy.

I held onto the tire-iron with one hand, reached for the doorknob with the other. I turned it and heard the beginnings of metallic protest. It whined like a mosquito zeroing in for the kill. I took a deep breath and threw the door open. It made enough noise to wake the dead, and Hank Sutton was not even dead. He was very much alive.

He came out of sleep in a hurry. I saw the shadowy outline of his big body moving in the equally big bed. He swung both legs over the side of the bed and started to his feet.

“Who the hell—”

The room was completely dark, the shades all drawn. I moved from the doorway to one wall and pressed my back against it. He didn’t know who I was or where I was and he couldn’t see a thing. He hadn’t moved.

“Okay,” he snapped. “You’re here, whoever you are. Why not turn on a light if we’re gonna play games?”

I didn’t answer. I heard the sound of a drawer opening, saw his hand move around by the tiny night table at the side of the bed. The hand came out of the drawer holding something that could only be a gun.

“To hell with you,” he said. “You start talking fast or I blow a hole in your damned head.”

But he was pointing the gun away from me, at the doorway. I took a deep breath and hoped he didn’t hear me sucking air into my lungs. He had the gun and I had a tire-iron, and a gun can be a far more effective weapon than a tire-iron.

But I knew where he was. Which was even more of an advantage. I didn’t have all the time in the world. At any moment his eyes would become aware of the fact that he was awake again, at which time he would be able to see. And once he could see, the fact that he couldn’t hear me wouldn’t make a world of difference. He would shoot a hole in my head just as he had promised.

“Come on, damn it! Who in—”

I rushed him.

I ran straight at him at top speed, with the tire-iron going up and coming down. The gun went off, rocking the room and filling it with the subtle stench of burning gunpowder. But the gun went off in the direction he had been aiming it, and that was not the direction I was coming from.

Then the tire-iron was curving down in a lovely arc, smashing all hell out of his wrist. The gun clattered from his hand and bounced around on the floor. I caromed into him while he roared like a gelded camel and held onto his wrist with his other hand. I bounced away from him — every action having an equal and opposite reaction — and wound up on the floor. Somewhere in the course of it all the tire-iron managed to lose itself.

“Son of a bitch,” he howled. “What are you trying to do — kill me? You son of a bitch—”

I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was trying to knock him colder than his pair of thugs had done for me in New York. I got to my feet and went for him. This time he saw me coming and threw a right at me.

It was a mistake. The punch landed but it hurt him more than it hurt me. He swung at me before he remembered what had happened to his wrist, and when his hand ran into my chest he howled again and fell backwards.

It was my turn. I hit him in the stomach with all my weight in back of the punch and he doubled up neatly. I crossed a right to his jaw and he straightened out again. He went back against a wall, then lowered his head and charged me as a wounded bull charges a matador.

He ran into a knee and fell flat on his face.

He wasn’t moving. I picked up his head once or twice and banged it against the floor purely for sport. Then I went back to the doorway and rubbed one hand around the wall until my fingers found the lightswitch. I turned on lights and blinked — my eyes had grown completely accustomed to the darkness by then. I found a now-crumpled pack of cigarettes in my pocket, extracted a now-crumpled cigarette, and lighted it.

Hank Sutton was a big man. He had more hair on his chest than he had on his head. His nose must have been broken once and set poorly, and his wrist had been broken just recently by my tire-iron. He was stretched out on the floor and sleeping like a baby. I didn’t even have to be careful not to wake him.

I looked under the bed and spotted the strong box. It was an ordinary gray steel affair about a foot long, six inches deep and four inches high. I reached under the bed and dragged it out. It had three circular tumblers with numbers on them from one to ten which constituted a sort of combination lock that wouldn’t really keep a determined individual out of the box. I could have opened it in a moment or two but I didn’t want to waste the time.

So I left him there. I picked up my tire-iron, tucked his .38 into the waistband of my trousers and his strongbox under one arm, and went down the flight of stairs in a hurry. This time I didn’t bother stepping carefully, and this time each board that I hit squealed like a frightened mouse.

It was lovely — I had gone in there, smashed his wrist with a tire-iron, stolen a box of dirty pictures and taken his gun in the bargain. And the bloody fool didn’t even know who I was! He hadn’t so much as seen my face or heard my voice.

He was going to be unhappy. He was going to wake up with a quietly magnificent headache, with his blackmail material out the window and his gun along with it. I knew about the headache — his friends had given me one of my own in New York, and he had it coming. But the finest part of all was he wouldn’t know who on earth had done it all to him.

Which was cute.

I got downstairs, tossed the front door open and went out through it. I saw the MG still parked in front of the field, and as I headed down the walk I heard her start the motor and head toward me. She slowed down long enough for me to get into my seat, then put the accelerator on the floor.

“Hey! Take it easy, girl.”

She looked at me. “He’ll be after us, Roy. He’ll want to get that box back. He’ll—”

“He’s sleeping like a corpse.”

“You didn’t wake him?”

“I awakened him. Then I put him to sleep again.”

“You... you killed him? Roy—”

The conversation was rapidly getting inane. So I told her to shut up for a moment, and then I told her what had happened, and then all at once the car was parked at the curb and the motor was off and she was in my arms, hugging me fiercely and telling me how wonderful I was.

It got involved.

Finally I said: “Hurry up and drive, Jill. It’s late and we both have to get to bed”

“To bed? Why?”

“Because there’s not enough room in an MG.” I kissed her nose, her eyelids. “And you and I need a great deal of room.”

“I know,” she said softly. “I remember.”

“Then start driving.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “You’re wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“About there’s no room in an MG. There’s plenty of room. You never knew Barb Taft very well, did you?”

“Not very well.”

She grinned. “Barb would never have owned a car if there wasn’t enough room. See?”

I saw.

“Besides,” she went on, “if I started driving now it would break the mood, and this is much too nice a mood to break. Don’t you think so?”

“It’s a fine mood.”

“Uh-huh. And besides, I don’t want to wait. All the way back to Cliff’s End, for God’s sake. And then trying to sneak into your moldy old room. I don’t want to wait.”

Her mouth nuzzled against my throat. Her body pressed hard against mine and her voice was a whisper of warmth.

“We can stay right here,” she said. “And we can have a very enjoyable evening. I think.”

And, as it turned out, she was correct.