The Copper Frame

Chapter 1

Lieutenant Ted Saxon was surprised when a radio call came into headquarters from Car One. Car One was the police chief’s car, and it was taking his father and two other police officers to a county law-enforcement officers’ meeting at Rigby. By 8 P.M., when they call came in, it should have been nearly there, beyond the twenty-mile range of its broadcast band.

Nevertheless, the message was quite clear. The voice from the speaker said, “Car One to Control. Can you read me, Control?”

Lifting the microphone from its bracket on the radio panel, Saxon said, “Control to Car One. I read you fine. What’s up?”

The voice said, “This is Sam Lennox. That you, Ted?”

“Yes.”

“We’re on Route Sixty, five miles out of Rigby. The chief and Lieutenant Burns have both been shot by a suspect we stopped. I’m rushing them to Rigby Memorial Hospital. Description of suspects’s car: new Chevrolet two-door sedan, gray with blue top, New York License IUL-053. No description of suspect because it’s dark and he started firing before the chief and Burns got close to him, then took off. Last seen thirty seconds ago heading south on Route Sixty toward Rigby. I fired after the car and believe I hit it a couple of times, but I didn’t give chase because I can’t leave the wounded men.”

Ted Saxon had been too busy jotting down the pertinent data to think of anything else while Lennox was speaking. But now it registered on him that his father and one of his closest friends had been shot.

He said huskily, “I’ll get it right out, Sam. How bad are they hit?”

The patrolman’s voice came over the radio with an edge of bitterness. “Vic’s only nicked, but your dad’s hit bad. I’ll phone you from the hospital. Car One to Control, over and out.”

“Control to Car One, roger,” Saxon said mechanically.

He phoned the Rigby police first, to have a road block set up. Then he contacted the sheriff’s office and the state police by radio. As the Iroquois radio communication system was linked to both, he was able to relay the information to them simultaneously.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

Ted Saxon was a younger image of his father, with the same wide shoulders and hipless frame, the same wide-mouthed face sprinkled with freckles and the same sandy red hair. The only difference was that usually there was a smile on the younger man’s face, whereas Chief Andy Saxon seldom indulged in any expression at all.

Peering outside, the lieutenant saw that the night was pitch black and the air was filled with tiny flakes of falling snow. By the thermometer bracketed just outside the door and angled so that it could be read from indoors, he saw that it was twenty above zero.

Christmas weather, he thought. In ten more days it would be Christmas. A box of cigars for his dad was already wrapped and hidden at the back of his closet. He wondered if the old man would ever get to smoke them.

Sam Lennox phoned at eight-thirty. “I’m calling from Rigby Memorial, Ted,” the patrolman said heavily. “I’m sorry, but your dad was D.O.A.”

For a few moments Saxon couldn’t speak. It was too hard to adjust to the thought of his indestructible father being dead. At sixty-two Chief Andy Saxon still had been sturdy as an oak and twice as tough. For thirty years he had run the Iroquois Police Department with an iron hand, fair and impartial, but as demanding of perfection as a Marine drill sergeant.

Eventually Saxon managed to ask, “How’s Vic?”

“Just a bullet singe on the right biceps. They patched him up with a Band-Aid. We’re starting back now. I’ll give you the details when we get there.”

Saxon hung up and sat staring into space. He had been closer to his father than most Iroquoisans were aware from their reserved relationship in public. Though Andy Saxon’s public image was that of a remote, unapproachable man, his son knew the hidden side of his character that made him capable of both warmth and compassion. Vaguely, Ted could recall a house always filled with laughter before his mother died, when he was ten. And though the laughter stopped the night his father stonily returned to the house half an hour before the visiting period at the hospital ended, the house remained, if not as gay, at least one of warmth and security.

A single parent, striving to fill the roles of both father and mother, often develops a closer relationship with a child than two parents possibly could, and this had been the case between Andy and his boy Ted.

Sam Lennox and Vic Burns got back from Rigby at nine-thirty. They came in stamping the snow from their galoshes and brushing flakes from their overcoats, both making a to-do of it in an obvious effort to out-wait each other in approaching the desk.

Finally Lennox conceded defeat and moved his thin, lanky frame forward. His eyes briefly touched Saxon’s before shifting to gaze past his left shoulder.

“Sorry, Ted,” he murmured. “Twenty, twenty-five years ago it would never have happened, but I guess I’m getting old.”

Despite his grief, Saxon felt a twinge of sympathy for the veteran patrolman. After twenty-eight years on the force, Sam Lennox was not, by a country mile, quite the police officer he had once been. The gradually increasing redness of the veins in his cheeks and nose suggested the reason. Long ago a younger man with Sam Lennox’s drinking habits would have been bounced from the force by Andy Saxon. But disciplinarian that he was, even the hard-bitten chief couldn’t bring himself to rob a veteran of so many years of his pension. For the past two years Lennox had been relegated to the relative sinecure of the chief’s driver.

Saxon said, “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault, Sam. The old man was still fast as a whip, so if he was caught flat-footed, it must have happened too suddenly for anyone to save him.”

“It did,” Vic Burns said, coming over to the desk. “The chief and I had just stepped from the car when the guy started banging away. The chief was down and I had a numb arm before I could reach for my gun.”

Lieutenant Vic Burns was a stocky, open-faced man of about Saxon’s age: thirty. A former member of the Buffalo Police Department, he and Ted had met at the F.B.I. school in Washington three years before, where they had taken an instant liking to each other. It was Ted Saxon who had talked him into transferring to the Iroquois force.

“Just how’d it happen?” Saxon asked.

“It must have been a setup,” Burns said. “The guy must have been some old con with a grudge against the chief. It was in the paper that your father planned to attend the county law-enforcement officers’ meeting, so anyone could have known he’d be on Route Sixty about that time. Sam says he followed us clear from the out-skirts of Iroquois.”

Saxon glanced at Lennox, who said, “I could see his lights in the rear-view mirror. I didn’t think anything of it until afterward, because the way the roads and the weather were, nobody was passing anybody else.”

“That’s why we stopped him,” Burns said. “All of a sudden he cut around us, nearly putting us in the ditch, and gunned off at about sixty. With road conditions what they were and visibility cut by falling snow, that was about thirty too fast for safety. The chief told Sam to give him the siren. I guess that’s what the guy wanted, because he pulled right over. When Sam parked behind him and the chief and I got out, the shooting started. Then he took off again.”

Sam Lennox said, “I tumbled out and emptied my gun at his taillights. I think I hit him a couple of times, but it didn’t slow him down.”

“Neither of you got any glimpse of the man’s face?”

“My headlights were on the back of his car,” Lennox said. “But he had on a hat with the brim turned down. It all happened too fast. He just leaned out the driver’s window and started shooting, then took off. All I know is it was a man.”

“Sure he was alone?”

“Unless someone was crouched on the floor,” Burns said. “There was only one head showing.”

At that moment a radio call came from the state police. The wanted car had been found, abandoned on a side road off Route Sixty only a mile from the murder scene, with three bullet holes in its trunk. The dispatcher added that a report had been received from the Buffalo police that the car had been stolen in Buffalo earlier that day.

When the state-police dispatcher signed off, Saxon said heavily, “I guess it was a setup, all right. He must have had a getaway car planted in that side road.”

“Or an accomplice waiting for him in one,” Burns suggested.

Belatedly Saxon remembered that Vic Burns had been wounded, too. Glancing at him, he saw a singed area on the upper right sleeve of his overcoat. There was a tiny hole in the center of the area and another a couple of inches behind it where the bullet had come out. The exit hole was ringed with dried blood.

In a tone of apology Saxon said, “I haven’t even asked how you are, Vic.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Burns said. “It’s only a nick about an eighth of an inch deep.”

“How do you know it wasn’t you the gunman was after?” Saxon asked. “You got shot, too.”

Burns said, “We thought of that. But the item in the paper didn’t mention me. I decided to go at the last minute.”

Sam Lennox said diffidently, “Want me to take over the rest of your trick, Ted? You probably don’t feel much like sitting here all alone.”

Saxon shook his head. “Thanks, but I’d hang around anyway to hear what reports come in. I’ll be all right. What about Dad’s body?”

Burns said, “We phoned the coroner. He’s having the autopsy performed at Rigby Memorial instead of shipping the body back here. You’ll have to contact whatever funeral director you want to pick it up when the coroner’s through with it.”

“Okay. I’ll call Alstrom in the morning,” Saxon said. “Thanks for stopping in, fellows.”