Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, October 1960

The Captive Corpse by M. C. Lynch

It was a gruesome way to hide a corpse and keep the Sheriff guessing. But what was worse — the guessing didn’t go nearly far enough.

I really feel bad about that girl from the newspaper. Fresh from college, she was — all eager and hopeful. Talking about getting my “story” like I was some kind of oracle. Waiting, with her pencils all sharpened nice and neat, for me to say something she could write down.

Seeing as I’d retired from being the sheriff after forty-five years, she’d explained without giving me a chance to get a word in edgewise, she was going to do what she called a “feature article” about me.

I knew what she wanted. I was supposed to tell her a lot of hair-raising yarns about my experiences. Most of ’em had been just plain dull. Routine stuff. I told her that, and it didn’t take long for her face to stop looking so bright.

“But surely there was one case that stands out in your mind,” she said. “Something special, out of the ordinary.”

Well, there was one like that. But I didn’t feel like telling her about it. When I look back on those forty-five years, the thing that sticks in my memory is the time we broke into the house next door to try to take the dead body of Charlie Wilson away from his wife. And even after all this time, remembering it gives me — well, a funny feeling.

When it happened, the Wilsons were new people in town. And when I say “New,” I don’t mean living in these parts a long time but not born here, the way folks are still considered outsiders if their families don’t go way back. The Wilsons were real new. Practically foreigners, from the local point of view.

There were a good many of them in those days. It was during the last war. The Government had taken over the old mill down by the river to make G.I. underwear, and there was more work than the folks in town could handle. So a lot of strangers came here to live.

The house next door to us had been vacant a long time before the Wilson couple rented it. It was an old place with some furniture in it. Millie, my wife, saw them move in and all they had with them, she said, were a couple of suitcases. Millie’s house-proud, and right away she started feeling sorry for Mrs. Wilson

Truth is, it was a funny set-up — at least it seemed that way to us. Mrs. Wilson got a job in the mill, and worked long hours. She kept her house neat, too. Millie, who manages to get a line on everybody no matter who they are, went calling right off the bat. She said Mrs. Wilson was a good housekeeper, and she ought to know. She’s an expert on things like that, and practically everything else that isn’t strictly a man’s concern.

You’d wonder how Pauline Wilson could do so much, since she was so little and looked as if a good strong wind would blow her away. Her husband didn’t do anything at all. I don’t just mean that he had no job and let his wife support him. You never saw him around the yard raking leaves or hauling out the rubbish or doing any household chores.

It was Pauline who did those things, even after a hard day’s work. The winter they were here, we had a couple of bad snowstorms. Pauline was the one that shoveled the walk. Charlie, as far as we could figure out, didn’t do anything but lie around the house all day and all night.

Like I said, Millie pitied Mrs. Wilson. And she’d gotten mighty het up about that lazy slob of a husband. A few times she went over to ask Pauline to go to the women’s club meetings they’re always having at church. She got refused every time. Mrs. Wilson said it was out of the question.

“When I get home at night,” she said. “I like to spend the evening with my husband. He’s in poor health, you know.”

Millie figured the excuse was just a cover-up for the man’s being good for nothing. There are women like that. They’ll work their fingers to the bone and be glad to do it for some big lazy lummox. That’s what Millie claims anyway. And like I said, she’s an expert.

After she got snubbed a few times, Millie said she wasn’t going to try to be friendly any more. But she didn’t really mean it. She’d made a big batch of her peanut butter cookies one Saturday morning and she couldn’t keep from going over and offering some of ’em to Pauline.

That’s Millie. All talk, but kind-hearted underneath. Saturday, her day off, there was that little woman still working like a slave. Millie couldn’t stand it. She had to go over.

Millie didn’t get in, though. Other times, Mrs. Wilson would come to the door at least, and sometimes she’d invite Millie into the hall. But not this time. Millie knocked and knocked at the front door, and then went around to the back. It was a cold day and she was standing there shivering. But she wouldn’t give up. She can be as stubborn as all get-out, and she could see the Wilsons’ old car in the garage and knew they hadn’t gone anywhere.

After five minutes or more, she saw Pauline Wilson’s face peek out of the kitchen window. She held up the plate with the napkin over it to show what she wanted. But Pauline just looked at her. With no expression on her face, Millie said. Just looked and shook her head. She kept shaking it and shaking it and when she started to let the curtain drop, Millie yelled, “Mrs. Wilson! What’s the matter?”

“He’s dead. Charlie’s dead.” Her voice was so low Millie had to read her lips to find out what she was saying. “Charlie died last night.”

Now more than ever, Millie wanted to get in there. She knew Pauline needed help. A woman alone like that, losing the one she loved better than anything else in the world, a stranger in town and all. But no matter how much she pounded on the doors, front and back, and yelled at the top of her lungs, Pauline didn’t come back to the window.

Millie called me up after a while.

“There’s something terrible scary about it.” I could hear the shiver in her voice. “Think of it — her locked up in there with a dead man. She said he died during the night and that’s a long time ago now. She must be in a state of shock. And she might do something desperate — try to kill herself, I mean.”

I told her to calm down. I said death affects people in strange ways sometimes. Maybe, I said, she just wanted to be alone with him for a while. To mourn in private.

“She’ll snap out of it pretty soon,” I told her. “It’s just that it’s been a shock, like you said.”

But when I went home for lunch, it was still like that. Millie was standing in front of the Wilsons’ house with a few of her women friends. They were taking turns calling out to Pauline. But her house looked locked up tight and they weren’t getting any answer to their yelling.

When Millie saw me, she rushed over and grabbed my arm. “You got to do something, Sim!” she cried. “We can’t leave her alone in there with a dead body.”

The trouble was, I didn’t know just what to do. Nothing like that had ever come up before. I figured if we broke into the house, it would terrify Pauline and might be just enough to set her over the edge, the way she’d been acting. It was a touchy business, and it had me stumped.

“Give her another little while,” I said to the women. “By the time night comes, she’ll probably snap out of it.”

Night came and there was no sign of life anywhere in the house, except for. a light that began to show in the second floor window, where they must have had their bedroom. But it was just a faint light, and I figured she was using candles.

We stood out there on their front lawn looking up, and I never felt so helpless. There were quite a few of us now. The word had spread around town that Pauline Wilson had locked herself up with her dead husband, and by dark there must have been fifty or sixty people, hanging around the lawn and the sidewalk in front of the house. Cars were parked along the street, too.

I tried to keep ’em cleared off, but they kept driving by slowly with faces peering out, and drivers craning their necks to look up at that bedroom window.

It was a very cold night. You could see people’s breath — like white smoke it was — and hear feet stamping on the ground and hands being beat together. Everybody was orderly — excited but quiet. Voices were held down to whispers. The faces, turned up to that flickering light in the second floor, were sober.

Like Millie had said, it was scary. Pauline moved across in front of the window once, and we saw her shadow looking bigger than a giant’s. There was a hissing sound as people pulled in their breaths.

Everybody was looking to me to do something, but I couldn’t decide what to do. There must have been a law about keeping a corpse in a house like that, but I’d never run across it. Still, I had to take some action.

“In the morning,” I said at last when somebody asked me when I was going to break in and get Charlie Wilson’s body. “If she don’t come out by then, I’ll Bust down the door.”

It was after midnight before I managed to talk all of them into going home.

The first thing Millie did when she got out of bed the following morning was run to the window and look out at the house next door. She said she was going to try to call Pauline on the telephone. She did her best, but the operator rang and rang and there was no answer.

We went to church. Millie’s one of the pillars. We met Mr. Morse, the minister, on the way in, and Millie grabbed him and began to talk about our neighbor who had spent twenty-four hours alone with her husband’s corpse. He’d already heard about it, Mr. Morse assured her. And although Mrs. Wilson wasn’t a member of his church and hadn’t let him in when he’d gone to call on her a few weeks ago, he’d lead the congregation in special prayers for her.

“That isn’t enough.” Millie was a bundle of nerves, close to tears. “I want you to come with us, just as soon as church is over. Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

That day, nobody in the congregation paid much attention to the services, except for the part where Mr. Morse led the prayers for “the poor bereaved soul who cannot accept the will of God.”

And right after the final prayer, everybody made a beeline to the Wilsons’ house.

Millie told me afterward that Mr. Morse didn’t get anywhere at all when he tired to get Pauline to let him in. After a while he had to give up. I wasn’t there. I heard about what went on that day second-hand because I was busy somewhere else. Bad luck often comes in triplicate, the town had to come up with a crime wave right then. Bill, one of my deputies, came looking for me after church services and told me the news.

A gas station down at the village had been broken into during the night. And that wasn’t all. There were a couple of stores that kept open late on Saturday nights, because business was good until midnight with the mill running overtime and a lot of spending going on.

When the news spread around town about the gas station burglary, the men who owned the stores — Jake Allen and Horace Orr — rushed to check the money they’d left in their safes over the week-end. In both cases, the safes had been cracked open and cleaned out.

Like I said, I was busy that Sunday, mostly listening to Jake and Horace squawking about the inefficiency of the town’s law officers. I called the State Police for help with fingerprinting and such. But it was a bad Sunday with a big traffic accident out on the Turnpike and some inmates at the prison trying to pull a riot. So nobody got around to covering everything that day.

When I finally got home, I found that nothing had changed in the situation next door. Night was coming on again, which would mean that Pauline Wilson had been keeping her vigil for almost forty-eight hours.

The crowd in front of the house was bigger than ever. All day people had come and gone, Millie told me — almost like it was some sort of tourist attraction. There were even some curiosity-seekers from neighboring towns and a couple of guys from a newspaper, one of ’em with a camera. He made some crack about getting a ladder and taking a picture through the Wilsons’ bedroom window. But I wasn’t allowing that, and I threatened to have him thrown in the jug if he tried it.

I was getting madder by the minute. Those burglaries down in the village had burned me up and I didn’t like the way some of the people in the crowd were beginning to act, the women clucking their teeth at me and pointing me out like I was some sort of a blundering freak.

It was tough getting rid of them all that night. It was black as pitch and colder than a polar bear’s ears out there on the lawn. But nobody wanted to go home.

Finally, I got up on the front porch and made a kind of speech. I shouted good and loud, so they could hear me way out on the sidewalk. I hoped my voice would carry inside the house, too, and that Pauline would get what I was saying.

“All of this crowding and staring isn’t helping anything,” I yelled. “We’re Mrs. Wilson’s friends. It’s our neighborly duty to have some consideration for her. I’m not going to bother her tonight. But in the morning, I’ll take some action.”

There was a little murmur that went through the crowd and then everybody became quiet.

“What I’m going to do,” I went on, loud as I could make my voice, “is get an order from the Board of Health and draw up a warrant to break in. Now I want you all to go home and stay there. There’s no call for you to come back here again.”

I might just as well have saved my breath. They did go home, finally. But most of them were back in the morning, even before me and Millie were out of bed. I couldn’t spend any time on Pauline Wilson that morning, either. Already calls were coming in from all over town.

What had happened was that there had been a big rash of burglaries during the night, private homes this time. It wasn’t only the big houses that were broken into — Jasper Crane’s and a couple of others with expensive things in them to tempt a thief. A lot of ordinary people had been hit, too. With all the prosperity in town, some folks kept fairly large sums of money at home, not being used to banks and being careful on principle.

So I was rushing around all morning. The fingerprint boys from the State Police showed up. I was talking to the women whose houses had been broken into; the men were at work and I’ve never run into a woman yet who couldn’t use ten words where a man could say it in one.

All in all, it was afternoon before I got to running down Chet Stewart, the Board of Health officer, over at the county seat.

Chet came back to town with me. When we got to the Wilsons’, even before I got my feet out of the car, Millie rushed up to me. She was all excited, but that wasn’t anything surprising. She’d been like somebody sitting on hot nails since Saturday morning.

“Not now,” I told her, “Chet and me have got a job to do.”

Bill, my deputy, was there, too. He pushed through the crowd and elbowed Millie aside. Him I had to listen to. He’d been working on the burglaries all day and, as a matter of fact, he did have something important to tell me. He’d gone into an old abandoned shack up in the hills and found what he called some “evidence.”

“Somebody’s been sleeping up there lately. Even left a blanket behind,” Bill said. “There was one of them kerosene heaters and it looked like it had been used recently. And there were some scraps of food, not even stale. Couldn’t make out any footprints because the ground is frozen hard. But the brush around the shack was broken down, like a car might have driven up to it.”

“One thing at a time,” I growled at him. “When I get through here I’ll take a run up there with you. Right now, I got something to do here.”

It was a job I didn’t care for. You can’t tell what some folks will do when they’re crazy with grief. But it was my duty and it had to be gotten over with. So I gave Chet the nod and we went up the front steps.

The crowd became very quiet all of a sudden. People moved a little closer on the lawn, watching us but not saying anything. When we reached the door, I made one last attempt to persuade Pauline to come and let us in. I yelled that we were going to bust in and that she might as well open up. There was no answer.

I said to Chet, “Well, I guess we have to do it.”

We stood close together, and heaved our shoulders against the door at the same time. The wood held but the second time we tried it we heard something splinter around the lock. With the third try, the door gave way and we almost fell into the hall.

The place was all dark and gloomy, as if the curtains had been pulled down in all the rooms. Chet took out his cigarette lighter and found a switch on the wall. We went upstairs, Chet a step or two behind me. Except for our feet sounding on the bare wood, the place was dead still. That’s what it seemed like — a house of the dead.

When we got to the second floor, Chet was still in back of me. I turned to the front of the house and stopped at the door there. I said softly, “Mrs. Wilson!”

Still no answer. I waited a couple of minutes and then went in.

The room was empty. Not a soul in it. And nothing much in the way of furniture except a scabby old bed and a couple of wooden chairs and a table by the window. On the table I found the stubs of two candles in empty whisky bottles.

It began to dawn on me then. I went to the closet and saw that there was nothing in it. Everything that had belonged to the Wilsons had been taken away.

After a while, we gave up looking around and went back outside. Millie grabbed me right off. What she’d been trying to tell me was that she’d looked in the garage that morning and seen that the Wilsons’ car wasn’t there.

We never did catch Pauline Wilson and her husband. They’d had a good head start on us. Some time during the night before, she must have gone and picked him up at the shack and off they went with the loot he’d stolen from the stores and the houses he’d broken into.

Oh, we made it easy for them all right! Falling for her story about him being dead in there. Hanging around in front of the house while he was pulling off those burglaries. And me letting her know when we were going to bust in, giving her a good warning in advance.

Now you can see why I didn’t say anything about that case to the girl from the newspaper.