The Galloping Corpses

Chapter II The Uninvited Corpse

A taste of blood in his mouth. Teeth aching hideously. The top of his skull seemed to be alternately expanding and contracting. He had trouble focusing his eyes. It was the same nauseating sensation he’d experienced that time eight years ago, when his jumper had fallen at the hedge in the steeplechase.

Slowly, at the expense of dizzying pain, he pulled himself up off the floor of the car. His shoulders had been wedged between the back of the driver’s seat and the front of the rear seat. His knees were doubled up, protecting his midsection. It must have been the only thing that had prevented his attackers from inflicting permanent injury.

Except for a light pickup truck and a station wagon with Stirrup & Saddle lettered on its door, the parking space was empty. He looked at his wrist-watch. That first smashing blow from the pipe had cracked the crystal, mashed in the works. The clock on the dash said ten past two.

He cursed himself for a stupe — letting himself be suckered into a trap like that. Yet if they'd only meant to wreck him within an inch of his life — to frighten him from Saratoga — how would they have dared use the waitress as a come-on girl?

Perhaps she would claim Keene had offered to drive her home after she’d finished working, then made a pass at her in his car — whereupon some club attendant had come to the rescue, beaten up her molester. If that kind of a story got into the papers, it wouldn’t do Keene, or his chance of doing his job, any good whatever.

He got out of the car. The knee screamed at him. He gulped the cool night air to keep from being sick.

The Stirrup & Saddle was dark, upstairs and down. The neon sign was out. He tried to remember what car had been parked next to his. It didn't seem possible that anyone could have come as close to the Buick as the driver of the adjoining sedan must have, without noticing something was wrong. Still, he had been jammed down on the floor boards, pretty well hidden.

He slid in behind his own wheel. The rear-view mirror showed him a face masked with a smear of dried blood, puffy lips, a dilly of a shiner over his right eye. At that, he felt worse than he looked.

He found the flask in the glove compartment, soaked his handkerchief in bourbon, swabbed the blood off. The liquor stung his mouth. But he decided it might make his insides feel a little less shaky, and so he gave the flask a couple of good belts.

He rolled the Buick out onto the concrete, headed north toward Union. It took all his powers of concentration to handle the car, but jumbled questions kept doing nipups in his brain: Who had spotted him so swiftly? Why had somebody decided to discourage him before his investigation had even got under way? What was all that byplay up in the casino between Towbee and Clay Larmin's girl?

A red eye blinked in his rear-view mirror. He became aware of a siren. A cop! He slowed to twenty-five.

The motorcycle pulled alongside, waved him over. He braked to a stop. The state trooper came up to the window.

“Where’s your tail-lights, Mac?”

“They out?” Keen’s lips felt swollen up like a pair of frankfurters.

The trooper bent forward, sniffing. “Not so far from out yourself, are you?”

Keene opened the door, got out stiffly. From the whisky on his breath and the thickness of his speech, it wasn’t surprising the officer thought Keene might have had more than he could handle.

“Couple of slugs too many, back at the Stirrup and Saddle.” He touched his mouth “But from a fist. Not a bottle. I’m oke.”

“Yeah?” The trooper peered at him, narrowly. “Let's see your license.”

Keene fished out his wallet, held it open.

“Goin' far tonight?”

“Hotel. In town. Staying there.”

“Better get those tail-lights fixed before you drive any more.”

Keene stalked back into the glare of the motorcycle's headlight, banged one tail-light with the heel of his hand.

“Sure.” Something red and shiny glinted on the white cement. As he stared at it, another drop fell from the rim of the trunk compartment. He put his shoe over it, quickly, as the trooper came around beside him. “First I knew of it.”

The trooper stood spraddle-legged, fists on hips, head cocked on one side as if listening for something. “You wouldn’t of been in a smackup, Mister — uh — Madden?”

“Only with that poke in the puss.” Keene pounded at the tail-light as if to jar apart a shorted connection, kept it up until the headlights of an approaching car were in the trooper’s eyes. “But it’s nothing a cold shower won’t cure. I’ll take it easy, to the hotel.”

He took his time about getting back to the driver’s seat. He started the Buick just as the oncoming car rushed past. He could see the trooper still standing there, eyeing him, as he gained speed, swung into Union Avenue. He lost the Cyclops headlight at the turn, waited for it to reappear as he circled Congress Park. It didn’t.

When he reached Broadway he swung right. His hotel was off to the left. He wasn’t familiar with the streets of Saratoga Springs, but the farther he got from the center of town, for a while, the better it suited him.

He drove for five minutes, found a dark side road, cut in, parked and switched off his lights. When he opened the trunk compartment, he was pretty sure what he’d find, even before he put his flashlight on it.

The waitress was lying face down, with her head on a spare tube, her knees curled up at her side, as if she’d just crawled in there to take a nap. She was wearing a white skirit and a dark red sweater instead of the jockey costume.

The back of her head looked like something that had just oozed out of a meat chopper.

He made silent apology. I had you wrong, babe. For them to cross you off the list, you must have really known something.

The strap of her handbag was clenched tight in her fingers. The murderer hadn’t bothered to remove it when he’d tossed her body in the trunk compartment.

Keene went through the bag while he tried to figure his next move.

It was a nice, tight frameup. After he’d been knocked senseless, somebody had fished the luggage compartment key out of his pants, unlocked the rear, put the dead girl in there and locked it up again. The wiring to the tail-lights must have been queered at the same time — with the expectation of having the cops stop him.

Unwittingly, Keene had put himself in an even worse predicament by swigging that whiskey, and informing a state trooper that there’d been “a little fracas” at the Stirrup & Saddle. Nothing to make a fuss about! Oh, no!

What he ought to do now was dear enough. He ought to drive straight to the Saratoga police station, report a corpse in the back of his car, and say he didn’t know who’d put it there. Then they'd check up. Nobody at the night spot would know anything, except that Keene had been seen chumming up to the waitress. The trooper would testify Keene had been drinking. There’d be plenty of evidence of a struggle in the back seat.

They’d have to hold him for the Grand Jury. They’d release him on bail, on his record and character references. But his chances of finding out who’d beaten him up and killed the girl, would be gone. Even if the grand jurors failed to indict him, his usefulness as an investigator would be slightly less than nothing.

Put it the other way, he told himself, grimly. If you don’t report the girl’s murder, and if anything happens later to tie you in with her death, then where’ll you be?

The best he could expect would be a guilty plea on “accessory after the fact.” Supposing he were lucky enough to draw a suspended sentence — still, the Protective Bureau couldn’t afford to keep a convicted man on its payroll...

The handbag contained the usual clutter: A purse with enough money to nullify any suggestion of murder for robbery, compact, lipstick, mirror, comb, matches, bobby pins, pencils, cigarettes, keys. In the zipper compartment at the side two envelopes addressed to Miss Lola Gretsch, 917 Lake Avenue and a couple of snapshots.

The envelopes contained one electric light bill, and one circular from a Saratoga store advertising an August fur sale. The snapshots were of a small, white frame cottage behind a picket fence. One showed the little waitress sitting on the doorstep looking demurely pretty in a polka-dot dress. The other had been taken in the winter. Snow was on the ground, with frosting on the eaves and on the long hood of a shiny Cadillac in the foreground.

He put the keys and photographs in his pocket, returned the rest of the stuff to the handbag. Then he used his flashlight until he found where the tail-light wiring had been cut. He made a temporary splice.

Coming out Broadway, he’d passed a Lake Avenue sign. He couldn’t tell which way the numbers ran, or in how crowded a section 917 might be. When he got to the corner, he turned left, followed the numbers out a mile and a half. The houses became smaller, farther apart.

The darkened cottage he recognized from the snapshot was a good hundred yards from its closest neighbor. There was a big hip-roofed house diagonally across the road. No lights showed there, either.

He drove past without slowing, kept on for another mile before swinging around, coming back again. Nobody had tailed him. The nearest street light was at least a quarter of a mile from the cottage. The elm-arched avenue cut down that faint illumination almost to zero. There were no cars parked within sight. He drove fifty feet past the picket fence, pulled over to the side, cut his lights and sat motionless in the gloom for the length of one cigarette, watching the cottage behind him.

One car sped past, heading for Schuylerville. He could see its headlights half a mile before it reached him. When it had gone, he took off his shoes, pulled on his driving gloves and went around back.

He opened the rear, picked up the body gently and then shut the trunk compartment.

Locating a gap in a hedge of lilacs, that almost sickened him with their sweetness, he stepped gingerly over a flower bed and swore softly as his stocking-feet found thorns from a rosebush. It was cloudy. Behind the cottage it was black as the bottom of a well. He didn’t dare use his flashlight until he had to. He laid the corpse down beside a clump of hydrangeas.

There was no back porch — just a tiny stoop with three steps. He told himself that if there was anyone in the cottage they’d hear the pounding of his heart, before he knocked. His knuckles on the paneling sounded terrifyingly loud. At least, if there was anybody inside they’d be likely to challenge him before taking a pot shot at him.

But nothing happened.

He used the keys. The second one did it. The door squeaked when it opened, but the kitchen was silent and inky black. His palm over the lens of the flashlight let enough illumination leak out to show him past a refrigerator, a gas stove and a table — to a door. Sufficient light filtered in through curtained windows at the front of the cottage to show he was in the living room. Crossing to a door that evidently led into the front hall, he heard a board creak. He froze.

After a minute of holding his breath, hearing nothing except the hammering of his own pulse, he decided the creaking had been caused by the shifting of his weight on the floor. He listened at the door of the room on the opposite side of the hall. There was absolute quiet. It turned out to be a bedroom. With a double bed, neatly made up, empty.

There was a queer odor, something unpleasant. He couldn’t give it a name, but it reminded him of New Guinea where he’d spent those dreary months at the remount station. Or maybe it was the darkness and being keyed way up to there, that recalled the bad days to him.

He went out to the hydrangeas, brought the body in and put it on the rug beside the bed. The glimmer of light escaping from the lens in his palm reflected from a bureau mirror, glinted on a silver frame.

He moved past the dead girl, let a trickle of light fall on the photograph in the frame.

The prominent, bulging eyes of Clay Larmin stared arrogantly at him in the semi-darkness.

Down in the corner of the photograph was a scrawl: To Lola, with memories — Clay.

Keene whistled softly. Had it been that way? The only son and heir to the Larmin millions and the Larmin racing traditions — and a waitress in a none-too-respectable hot spot? That suggested a lot of possibilities — none pleasant...

He was still mulling over its possible significance as he picked his way back across the hall to the living room, out to the kitchen. The kitchen door was closed!

He knew he’d left it open. He’d had his hands too full, when he came in with the body, to do anything else. He hadn’t heard the door close, either — so the night wind couldn’t have slammed it. There wasn’t enough breeze to rustle a leaf, anyway.

That creaking! There’d been somebody in there with? him then — somebody who’d be able to identify him. Unless, of course, it had been the murderer himself.

There was also the chance the closed door was a decoy.

The unseen doorshutter might still be in there.

Keene felt his way along the wall in total darkness as he went back, let himself out the front door. He was cautious when he opened that, too. But he saw no one, heard nothing. The car was where he’d left it.

He took off his gloves, put on his shoes, drove back to the hotel.