Murder in the Wings

18

Trueblood Medical Supplies was housed in a small brick building a few hundred yards from a railroad siding. In the rain and fog, the green and red rail yard lights were bright as beacons. A lone switch engine lurched by. As we walked toward the building, the engineer tugged twice on the air horn.

A light shone through a grimy window. I peered in past the metal mesh. A naked overhead bulb lit long, tall rows of supplies on deep wooden shelves. The place appeared clean and orderly and prosperous. I rattled the door knob. I hadn’t really expected it to be open. “Let’s try the front,” I said.

We walked around the corner to where a big glass window read TRUEBLOOD MEDICAL SUPPLIES. From there I could see a small, tidy front office with three gray metal desks from the sixties, a fake red flower in a slender glass vase on each. I tried the front door. Zip. Zero. Nada.

“You still haven’t told me—” she started to say.

“—what we’re doing here exactly,” I finished for her.

“Exactly, smart-ass.”

“Well, in prison Lockhart worked in the infirmary. Out of prison he lived at a halfway house, where he had nothing whatsoever to do with medicine. But he had a card from a medical supply house in his wallet.”

“Boy, that is weird.”

“Now all we have to do is raise somebody and ask him a few questions.”

“There isn’t anybody in there.”

“There should be.”

“At this time of night?”

I nodded toward the back. We stood under an overhang. In the moonlight the rain drops looked fat and silver. “You didn’t notice the little decal on the door back there?” I said.

“What little decal?”

“It’s from the Thornton Security Agency. A bull’s-eye.”

“Uh-huh. I didn’t notice it.”

“Well, that supposedly means that Thornton keeps a man on the premises every night.”

“So there’s somebody in there?”

“Yeah, and apparently he’s asleep because I sure rattled the hell out of the back door.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “Are you hungry?”

“God, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Meaning you are.”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“You know what I’m thinking about?”

“Before you tell me what you’re thinking about, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about my waistline and about how my agent gets on my ass every time he sees me these days. Donna, I’ve really got to cool it with the food.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s sensible.”

We stood under the overhang some more and watched the fat silver raindrops and our chilled silver breath.

“So why don’t you tell me what you were thinking about?” I said.

“It’d probably be better if I didn’t.”

“Hell, there ain’t any calories in mental pictures.”

“I was thinking about Denny’s.” Junk food is her specialty.

“Yeah, what about Denny’s?”

“Well, you know that breakfast they serve, with a cheese omelet and hash browns on the side with one of those little containers of Kraft’s grape jelly?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I was thinking about. My relatives down South always serve food like that. You’re going down there in June with me, right?”

“Right.” I liked the South, and I’d heard so much about her relatives that I wanted to meet them. But right now I wanted to go to Denny’s and have the food she’d just described.

I was just about to take her hand and lead her around back, whether to the door again or to Denny’s I wasn’t sure, when the door behind us opened and a chunky woman with a butch haircut and a big Magnum said, “This ain’t no place for hanky-panky. This is private property.”

“Bertha,” I said.

She squinted at us with steely blue eyes. In her blue Thornton Security uniform she could easily have been a guy, and when I’d worked with her there had been occasional speculation that she actually was, or had been before the miracle of surgery. She was wide and squat and a good woman in a gruff way.

“Dwyer?”

“Yeah.”

“Dwyer, you dipshit, what’re you doing out here?”

“Trying to get inside.”

“You’d think a former cop would know that B and E is against the law.” With a quick practiced glance, she assessed the tall and casually beautiful Donna Harris. “How did you ever talk her into spending time with you?”

“I’m still wondering myself.”

She tilted her head toward the inside. “You up for some coffee?”

“Sounds great,” Donna said.

Apparently I now had an official spokesperson.

Bertha Lamb led us down a corridor to a tiny lunchroom with a Formica table and a microwave that didn’t look big enough to hold a donut. On top of the cabin-style refrigerator sat a Mr. Coffee with a full pot. Bertha poured coffee into “personalized” mugs and handed us each one. I drank from Mona’s cup, hoping Mona didn’t have gum disease or something. Bertha raised her cup with a heavy competent hand, almost in a toast, and said, “Were you the asshole who was rattling the back door?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, I’ve had a spell of stomach trouble, so I was incapacitated for a while.” She nodded to a door that showed the brush strokes of a bad green paint job. The sign read LADIES. “Puts you in a hell of a bind, let me tell you. You can’t move but some fool is rattling anyway.” She smiled at Donna. “What do you see in this hot dog, anyway?”

“Not much, now that you mention it,” Donna said sweetly.

“Now I want you to tell me about this place,” I said.

“Trueblood?”

I nodded.

“Started working here last week. The plumbing’s bad, their subscription to Time ran out a couple months back so they’ve just got old issues, they’ve got a Scanray security system that isn’t worth diddly-squat, and one of the secretaries keeps a jumbo package of Switzer’s licorice on her desk. Unfortunately, Thornton makes us take a polygraph test every month, so if I so much as took a bite of the stuff, I’d be out of a job.”

“You think the place is strictly legal?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, have you noticed anything funny going on? Late-night deliveries, anything like that?”

“You on a case?”

“Sort of.”

“I wish Thornton would let me moonlight like that. Hell, I get tired of being a baby-sitter for alarm systems. I wish I could work on an actual case.”

“So have you noticed anything?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Damn.”

“Sorry, Dwyer.”

Donna said, “Do you know anything about the owners?”

I looked over at her, impressed. I should have thought of that myself.

“You a detective, too?”

“No, I’m an editor.”

“An editor?”

“Yes, of an advertising magazine.”

“Oh, I see.” But obviously she didn’t. She put a fat finger to her sulky lower lip. “The owners. Hmmm. Nope. I don’t remember anything except for a plaque in one of the offices. Shows a bunch of guys a long time ago cutting the ribbon to open this place up. That mayor — Dandridge — was in the picture, the one who went to prison? He was the one cutting the ribbon.”

“Mind if we go see the photo?”

She shrugged. “Hell, no. Come on.”

We followed her. As we walked, I asked her about Lockhart: she didn’t know anything about him. She moved like a rowboat in rough water. Her thighs were so short her Magnum almost touched her knees. We went back to the front office. All of us looked at the desk with the big black slab of Switzer’s licorice on it. “You’d think the bitch would at least have decency enough to keep it in her desk,” Bertha said.

We went through a dark door. Bertha flipped on the lights. A mahogany desk the size of a ping-pong table lay before us. It was covered with photos of a blond middle-American family. All the kids would grow up to be George Bush. There were two miniature flags on the desk, one U.S.A., one state. The rest of the desk was so bare it looked like a prop. Bertha pointed to a faded photograph behind the desk, reverently framed in silver. “There.”

We went over and looked at the six men. Each wore a suit of the sort that Edmund O’Brien wore in D.O.A. (one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite movies). At the right edge of the photo you could see a black 1948 Buick, fat and formidable. I scanned the men, their faces. At the fourth one I stopped.

“God,” Donna said. “Look.” She was ahead of me.

“Somebody you know or something?” Bertha asked.

I grabbed Donna’s hand. “Maybe,” I said, and started to turn toward the door.

“Hey, Dwyer, you going to clam up on me, you bastard?”

“Bertha, look, if I told you what was going on, you’d be liable to tell Thornton all about it, right?”

She shrugged unhappily, knowing I was right. “I guess. Yeah.”

“So I’m going to do you a favor and not tell you anything at all.”

“Gee, thanks, Dwyer.” She looked and sounded as if she was going to cry. I felt bad. I liked her.

“But we’ll have you over to dinner once we get all this resolved,” Donna said.

Bertha brightened. “Say, you’re one hell of a nice lady, you know that?”

“Nice to see you, Bertha,” I said. And we were gone.

“It was him, I know it was him,” I said.

“In the photograph, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean Dr. Kern?”

“Yeah. He had a mustache and a lot more hair and he had on that strange double-breasted suit, but it was him.”

“You’re right, Dwyer,” Donna said. “It was definitely him.”

“But what’s he got to do with Trueblood Medical Supplies?”

“Right. And why did Lockhart have the medical supply’s card in his pocket?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You sure you’re not sure?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, maybe you know or think you know but are keeping it to yourself.”

“No. One thing they teach you on the force is to form as few opinions in advance as possible.”

She didn’t say anything for a time. Just watched the windshield, the way headlights and then muddy water splashed across it.

“You really don’t have any ideas, Dwyer?”

“Not yet. Sorry.”

“Damn.” Then she curled up, fetus-like, next to the door.

The sanitarium was on a hill. It was brick, big and friendly even in the gloom. It might have been the campus of a small liberal arts college. Definitely not the sort of place that mad scientists hung out. Our headlights swept the right wing; on the third floor the windows were barred. For a moment that struck me as ominous, but I thought it through. Some mental illnesses inspired violence. Barred windows, in such cases, made sense. To the right of the front door in front of neatly trimmed hedges was a white sign with gold embossing that said HAVENHILL. We pulled up in front of it and got out. Next to us was another car that looked familiar. “Boy,” Donna said, “this really is starting to come together.”

“Yes,” I said, “maybe it is.”

The car was a silver XKE. It belonged to Evelyn Ash-ton’s father. It was the same one we’d seen her and Keech in.

We went up to the double doors and knocked, safe from the rain beneath a wide porch roof. There were enough lights on for the Cubs to play at night.

The girl who opened the door was nineteen at most, but she was one of those fair earnest blondes who at that age are already on their way to being matrons. She wore jeans and a turtleneck sweater underneath a blue smock. I hadn’t seen eyeglasses like hers since the fifties. An English teacher I hadn’t liked much owned a pair just like them. The woman’s favorite novel had been Giants in the Earth, the only novel I know that makes Silas Marner read like Judith Krantz.

“Yes?” the girl with the glasses said. She sounded only a bit nervous about visitors coming this late.

“We’d like to speak with Dr. Kern.”

“I’m afraid he’s busy right now,” she said. A smidgen of chocolate malt in the right hand tuck of her stern but erotic mouth spoiled her seriousness somewhat.

“It’s very important,” Donna said. “It could be life and death.”

“Oh,” the girl said. Surprisingly, she didn’t move or even say anything — just that little neutral “Oh.” She stood before us, chocolate smidgen and all, thinking it over. “Then I suppose I’d better get him, hadn’t I?”

“If you would, please,” Donna said.

“Come in then.”

While the girl went down a white hail long enough to approximate a near-death experience, we stood dripping in the vestibule. Donna took my hand. Her skin was hard from the cold. She looked around, then shoved it in my pocket. “Sorry. It’s the only way I can get my hand warm.” When she finished with the left, she inserted the right. At least she was careful about the exact placement of her hand. She didn’t lead me on.

Dr. Kern wore an English hunting jacket and an open white shirt. His mussed hair spoiled the effect of casual control he wanted his clothes to give. So did his frenzied glance. He looked as if he’d just finished helping deliver triplets.

“I really don’t have time to see you,” he said, obviously annoyed at our presence.

The girl smiled, pleased that he disliked us as much as she did.

I took the TRUEBLOOD MEDICAL SUPPLY business card from my pocket and showed it to him. “We found this tonight on the body of an ex-convict named Lockhart. I believe you know him.”

All he said was, “Marsha, why don’t you go back to making your rounds?”

“Really, Doctor?” She was tremendously disappointed.

“Really, Marsha.”

She went back down the white tunnel. Maybe at the end of it she’d find beings more to her liking than we’d been.

Kern said, “I was going to call you — or somebody.”

“Me?”

He glanced around, as if somebody might be eavesdropping. “My life has started to come unraveled and I don’t have any control over it at all.”

“If you wanted to talk to me, why did you look so aggravated when you saw us a minute ago?”

He ran a shaky hand through his hair, then waved the hand toward another part of the sanitarium. “Evelyn and her friend Keech are here. They’ve been telling me things—” He shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not reacting well to pressure tonight. When I saw you, I thought maybe you were here to help Evelyn. I’m not thinking clearly.”

“Help Evelyn. What does that mean?”

“She’s accused me of trying to talk her mother into confessing.”

“To what?”

He brushed a hand on his jacket and said, “Why don’t we go into the small study? Evelyn and Keech are in the larger one down the hall.”

“All right.”

We followed him. In the study were a fireplace and enough books to start a small-town library. He poured us brandy from a cut-glass decanter. For some reason, my first taste of it made me sneeze. Donna made a production out of pantomiming a big “God bless you.” She considered it terrible luck to miss a “God bless you” in these circumstances.

When he was seated in a leather chair, Dr. Kern said, “Evelyn thinks I want her mother to go to the police and confess.”

“Confess to what?”

“To Michael Reeves’s murder.”

“Do you think she’s guilty?”

He studied his brandy, then raised his head. “I think it’s a possibility.”

“So do we,” Donna said. She explained how Reeves’s neighbor had told us about seeing Sylvia Ashton there not long before the murder.

“My God,” Kern said.

I leaned forward in my chair. “Now I want to know about your relationship with Lockhart.”

He smiled unhappily. “Until Evelyn brought him up half an hour ago, I didn’t even know I had such a relationship. I thought she’d just come out here because it’s her birthday today. She usually drives out. I’m her godfather. But Lockhart — I’d never heard of him till today.”

“I don’t follow you.”

He got up and poured himself more brandy. We declined his offer of another round. He sat down and said, “In high school, Evelyn worked at the medical supply house I own half of.”

“Trueblood.”

“Yes.”

“I’m surprised a girl as wealthy as Evelyn would work there.”

“That was David’s point. He’s always been of two minds about the money he married into. On the one hand he likes it, on the other he feels that it inspires many false values. He wanted his daughter to know ‘the real world,’ as he always calls it. So he asked if she could work at the medical supply house, and of course I said yes. She was a very good worker. She came back three different summers during her college years. All the employees liked her a great deal. That’s why it was so easy for her and Lockhart to find somebody to help her.”

“With what?”

He studied his brandy. “What I’m going to tell you may prejudice your thinking. It puts Evelyn in a bad light, I’m afraid.”

“There’s a man in jail tonight who’s in terrible shape, Doctor. Right now, he’s who I’m thinking about.”

He finished his brandy. “I assume by now you know about the ‘truth’ games Michael Reeves liked to play?”

“Yes.”

“They were very characteristic of a certain kind of psychosis, the sort you find in many powerful people in our society. Presidents who want the FBI to spy on private citizens, corporate heads who sic detectives on their employees so they can know what their people do in off hours, members of Congress who are always pushing for loyalty tests of various kinds. Michael Reeves was a lot like that — but he went further.”

“How so?”

“Were you aware that some of the ex-convicts in his acting class used mescaline?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he went even further than that. He convinced Evelyn to help him obtain Sodium Pentothal — what people call ‘truth serum’ — which is one of the things Trueblood happens to stock. Because Evelyn knew everybody there, she didn’t have any trouble finding an employee who needed money and bribing him into giving her Pentothal. This went on for some time. Evelyn got scared, so Lockhart started paying the man off himself, getting the Pentothal, and bringing it back to his good friend Reeves.”

“Where does Keech fit into all this?”

“Keech, for all his crusty surface, even for all his psychotic tendencies, is actually in search of a reasonable life. He’s been in love with Evelyn for quite some time. Of course, he had to pretend otherwise in order to save his ego — he knew of her affair with Reeves. But yesterday he went to her and told her how he feels.”

I thought of what the director of the halfway house had said about Keech. Keech’s supposed affection for Evelyn could be a clever ploy to cover up his own complicity in the murder. “Do you believe him?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“I’m just considering all the possibilities.”

“Well, when I tell you about the Sodium Pentothal, you’ll see even more possibilities,” he said.

“Reeves used it on his acting class?”

“Yes. At first, anyway. When they were under the influence of the mescaline and supposedly pushing toward the ‘truth’ he wanted them to find, it was no problem for Lockhart to inject them with it.”

“He’d been an orderly in the prison infirmary.”

“Exactly.”

I was beginning to see the inevitable direction of what he was saying. “But he didn’t stop with his acting class, did he?”

“No. Eventually he got around to everybody. Keech, Evelyn, even Sylvia Ashton.”

“Sylvia?”

“My God,” Donna said.

Dr. Kern’s face flushed. “The bastard. If I had known what he was doing to her, I might have killed him myself. Her grip on reality is tentative enough as it is — but to play with Sodium Pentothal —” I believed his threat. He seemed young and strong suddenly. “Under the influence of the drug, he had no difficulty finding things out about people. Evelyn and Keech, both of whom were very much in his grasp at the time, took the drug willingly, as part of their ‘search for truth,’ as part of learning all about ‘real acting.’ You can ask Reverend Jim Jones about how all that works.”

“How about Sylvia Ashton?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t take it willingly. She took it because she knew that Reeves had started to blackmail Evelyn.”

“How did you know that?”

He looked surprised that I didn’t know. “Why, Evelyn herself told me. After she realized what sort of person Reeves was, and what he was doing to her, she came to me in a real panic.”

Now Lockhart’s position in all this was coming clear, too. As Reeves’s closest cohort, Lockhart knew that Reeves had very profitable blackmail material stashed someplace. That’s why Lockhart had asked Stan if he could look in Reeves’s office, and why Lockhart had come to the acting class the night of his death — to search for the blackmail material.

“What about Keech? Why was he with Evelyn the other day?”

“I encouraged Evelyn to see him. Keech is in love with her, much as neither of them is willing to admit it. At this point in her life, that’s a very good thing.” He frowned. “Plus, they have one other thing in common — Reeves was blackmailing Keech, too.”

“What did he have on Evelyn?”

He cleared his throat. “Evelyn told Reeves all about a hit-and-run accident she’d had as a teenager — this was under the influence of the Sodium Pentothal, of course. The man she hit wasn’t killed, but he was injured badly. It’s just the sort of story Evelyn’s grandmother would pay a lot of money to keep out of the papers. Reeves knew she’d be willing to pay.” He shrugged. “As for Keech, he revealed that he’d been involved with a seventeen-year-old girl shortly after getting out of prison. Technically, that’s not against the law in this state, but it could help an unsympathetic parole officer send you back to prison. So he had to start paying Reeves whatever he could, too.”

“God, Reeves was really into power,” Donna said.

“Reeves knew Sylvia pretty well — knew that she was weak,” Kerns said. “He may even have seduced her. There are times when Sylvia feels very lonely — sometimes even when she’s surrounded by people she loves — and then she’s very vulnerable to seduction. Much more so than most women.”

“You’re making a very strong case against her,” I said.

He nodded glumly. “I know.”

“If I was a police detective, I would call her in for questioning — at the very least. Especially if I knew about the incident with the knife when she was in her early twenties.”

“You really have been looking into this.”

I watched his face. “Do you think she killed him?”

“I’ll repeat what I said before.”

“Which is what?”

“That I think it’s a possibility.”

“There’s at least one other possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“The way David Ashton has been so careful to cover for his wife.”

“You think David Ashton did it?”

“That’s another possibility. But I think there’s an even better one,” I told him.

“You’ve lost me.”

“What if he knew that it was his daughter and not his wife who killed Reeves? By being so protective of his wife, he makes her appear all the guiltier. He might be thinking that Sylvia could get off with an insanity plea. But Evelyn — well, she’s mentally sound, and she is his daughter.”

Something tightened his eyes, and he looked for a moment as if he were going to tell me something terrible. But all he said was, “As you say, there are a lot of possibilities.”

I studied him. Something I’d said had troubled him. But what? He stood up. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to Evelyn. She needs calming down.”

Donna frowned at me. She must have noticed Dr. Kern’s sudden strange attitude, too.

He held out a hand and we shook. He contrived a smile. “Now I know why people pay to see psychiatrists. Just by talking this through, I feel better.” But he sure didn’t look better or sound better.

Marsha appeared as if by magic and showed us to the door. She hadn’t wiped the chocolate smidgen off her mouth. I’d expected more from a girl like her.