Death Trap (2 page)

Because she was so unlike any girl I had ever known, I was not at ease with her. I moved cautiously. There was a challenge in the quality of her mind, and to meet it I did not drink heavily when we went out together. I felt no need to, and suspected that had I done so she would have shown not contempt but boredom.

We argued about her brother, about this feeling of dedication she seemed to have. She said that he was a responsibility emotionally, yet his mind was worth any dedication. I met him. He was a misfit. He was petty, arrogant, supercilious, querulous and painfully shy. Alister was a very handsome boy. He irritated me. He was condescending to his sister, contemptuous of the school, the instructors, the other students. He could be morose, humorless and stubborn as a mule. He seemed to invite physical attack.

And yet—some of the things he said, the views he held—

Look at it this way. In my terms. Triangulation is the simplest process in civil engineering. Line up point A from points B and C and soon you know a hell of a lot more about the location of point A. Now assume that point A is, instead of a physical point, an idea. By inheritance and training and quality of mind, you are forever condemned to regard idea A from point B. You can see it in only one way. And then along comes an Alister Landy who can stand at point C and look at the same idea. It is only genius which is capable of the unique viewpoint. And the observations of genius give us our chance of seeing old ideas in new depth. This can stretch your mind, and it is a frightening thing.

Afterwards I talked to Vicky about him. “Now you do see what I mean, Hugh.”

“I think so. But he’s a monster. Forgive me for saying that.”

“I want you to be frank. But you’re wrong. You see all the defenses. They irritate me, but not as much as they do you, because I can see underneath. I can see the frightened boy. He’s almost alone in the world. He’s never been able to gain social acceptance or approval. When he was little he fought hard for that approval, playing games that bored him, fighting other little boys even though he thought it was childish. But he always said the wrong thing and they set him apart and finally he decided to stay apart from them—and from all of us. He wants so desperately to be loved that he goes at it in all the wrong ways. I sensed he wanted your approval. He’s a rebel, a barbarian. Already he is thoroughly disliked by the student body and most of the faculty.”

“But can’t they see that he’s really got something special?”

She smiled slowly and the smile turned into a grin, wrinkling an ivory nose, “Now who is defending him?”

She was what I had.

It didn’t take long to ruin it.

Not when my basic and instinctive reaction to the female was to attempt to rack up a score, add a pelt to the trophy shelf. I sensed it wouldn’t be easy. So I went at it very carefully. And without conscience. Why should I have felt any twinge of conscience? She was of age. She was willing to go out with me. So she was taking her own chances. Plenty of others had taken their chances too, and, to the gratification of my male ego, most of them had lost the game. I didn’t want to have to classify Vicky as one of the ones who got away. So I moved very carefully.

There are rules. Some people don’t follow them. When you don’t follow the rules, you can’t rack up a legitimate score. You’ve cheated. The rules say that you cannot promise marriage, hint at an engagement, or even use the word love.

When I first kissed her I anticipated a tepid response, a response which would be another implied obstacle in the way. But from way back, from the groves and hillsides and yellow sun of her mother’s people, came a response that was sudden and vivid and alive, like the tart-sweet taste of a good red wine. Her arms were tight and then convulsively tight, and her mouth was something soft and broken. Then she flung herself aside, moving away from me. The moon slanted down through the car window on her side, shining into her lap where her lean hands kept twisting and knotting, pulling at each other. I heard the deepness of her breathing, saw the flower-heaviness of her head, her half-closed long-lashed eyes. I knew that it would be easy then, and I was pleased and excited.

Why not? I was a construction bum. There were girls in every land. This was more special than most, but that merely made her a more desirable target. She was of age. She took her chances. And nobody had said anything about love.

I spoiled it. I worked entrapment. I moved cautiously. I betrayed her with her own deep sensuality, and at the end I closed my ears to her protests, to her fright, to her pleading. My answer was not in her voice, but in the physical indications of a passion she could not quell without my help. I did not help her.

It ended three weeks after the first kiss. It ended at midnight in a shabby room in a shabby motel on the far side of Warrentown. I lay in the darkness and smoked a cigarette. She was crying almost soundlessly beside me. I felt uneasy and uncomfortable. It was not the way it should have been.

“Why are you crying?”

She did not answer me. After what seemed a long time she stopped crying. I felt the bed move as she got up. I heard the rustle of her clothing.

“Now what are you doing?”

She turned on the light. She was dressed. I squinted into the light and pulled a corner of the sheet across myself. She looked down at me, and there were shadows under her blue eyes.

She looked down at me for a long time and then tried to smile and said, “I love you.”

It was on the edge of my tongue to say the same to her, but that was not in the rule book. I guess I smiled uneasily.

“Will we be married?” she asked. It was a question so Victorian that I tried to laugh.

“Is it funny?”

“Vicky, honey, you don’t understand the kind of business I’m in. Hell, next month I could be sent to Spanish Morocco.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

Her eyes made me feel guilty. You cover guilt with spurious anger. “No,” I said. “We won’t be married: Does that answer your question, darling?”

Her face was very still. She folded her arms, hugging her breasts as though she were cold. “I hope you’re very proud,” she said softly. “Maybe you keep a diary. Be sure to list my every reaction before you forget.”

“Wait a minute, honey.”

“Could you please get dressed? I’ll wait in the car.”

She had nothing to say on the way back. I do not mean that she made evasive answers. She would not open her mouth. After I got back to my place I could not get to sleep. I felt uncomfortable, and did not know why. After all, I had scored. Mission accomplished. She would get over being haughty. I told myself that I felt uneasy because she had been a virgin. I had not expected that and had, in fact, come very close to ending it when I found out. But in the dark room, in the dark bed, next to warmth and shivering eagerness tempered by fright, that brand of will power is an unusual commodity indeed.

She would come around, I told myself. I would have to apologize, get a chance to talk to her. It would be all right.

But I never heard another word from her lips, except when she would answer the phone. As soon as she recognized my voice there would be a soft decisive click and a dead line. I waited for her. I walked with her. I tried to talk to her. She walked with a lithe, even stride, never glancing at me or speaking. I could have been an invisible, inaudible man. She became visibly thinner and more pale. I wrote to her. There was no answer. I was certain she did not open the letters. I was still trying when I was transferred to the Spanish airfield job. And by then I knew what I had lost, what I had spoiled. Realization was a long time in coming; and when it came in all its intensity, I knew that the world seldom saw as great a fool as I. She had magic, integrity, passion and a rare loveliness. And I had gone at her the way you go at one of those coin machines where you try to pick up the prize with a toy crane. I could have had the whole machine, with all the prizes and all the candy. But I had settled for gilt and glass.

Other girls became tasteless. The gusto had gone out of the game. One breast was too like another; hips could move in identical cadence.

Time did not seem to soften the sense of loss. Had I come back from Spain sooner, I would have tried to see her. But I knew it would be the same; so I stayed away, forgoing my chances of quick trips back to the States until the sense of loss was dulled, until there were days and weeks when I could forget her entirely. Yet on the sour mornings, or during the nights I could not sleep—

And this morning there was no need for depression. I forced Vicky out of my mind by thinking about Scotty, wondering about what he could provide. In Guaymas I would rent a cruiser after I learned the waters. Maybe about twenty-six foot, with good bunks, a decent galley. Anchor for the night. Go over the side in first light, down into the gray warm water.

Then I went down to breakfast and found the clipping and went back up to the room. It was Alister Landy, her brother. I had met him; yet I could not say if it was possible or impossible for him to commit rape and murder.

It was all over now. The kid would be electrocuted. He would be nineteen now, or perhaps twenty. She would be twenty-six. And in five months I would be thirty. Perhaps she has married. She would not care to see me. There is too much on her mind. There is nothing I can do. Drive on down and see Scotty. Ignore it. Forget her. Don’t go near her. It will just make the pain sharp again and there is nothing in all the world you can do to mend what you spoiled.

I KEPT CHECKING THE MAP as I drove south. And I knew when I came to the crossroads. I could turn east at that junction, toward Dalton. Or continue south. I arrived at the crossroads at three o’clock on the thirteenth of October, on Thursday afternoon. There was a big truck stop. I pulled in and parked. I sat at the counter and had coffee. I could see the phone booth in the back. I kept turning and looking at it.

Finally I stood up slowly, wearily. I went to the cashier and got change. I shut myself into the booth and dialed long distance. She gave me the college. A woman answered. I put the coins in the box.

“I’d like to speak to Miss Landy, please. Miss Victoria Landy.”

The woman hesitated and said, “She is no longer employed here.”

“Would you know where I can reach her?”

She asked me to hold the line. She came back on and gave me a phone number in the village. I thanked her and got the operator and gave her the number and made the call person-to-person. I had about a half minute wait.

“I’m sorry, but that number has been disconnected.”

I thanked her and went back to the counter and had more coffee. I thought of her pride, and her gentleness, and the way she would lift her blue eyes to mine as the slow smile came. I paid for the coffee and picked up some cigarettes and walked slowly out to the wagon. I got in and sat for a long time before I started it up and headed east, driving too fast.

It was late when I drove into Warrentown. I passed the motel where it had ended. A lighted sign said,
Under New Management.
I stayed at a newer place down the road. After I checked in, I drove into town. Warrentown is a small city of about thirty thousand. I found a bar. I could be thirty-five miles from Vicky. Or if she had gone up to stay near the prison, she could be a hundred miles away. I knew I would find her tomorrow. It made me feel empty in the middle. And lost.

The bar was crowded. It was a neighborhood place. I found room at the curve of the bar. They stare at you in a neighborhood place and try to figure you out. It makes a short hush in the conversation and then they go on as before. A husband and wife team near me were having a deadly almost inaudible quarrel. She was drunk, her face loose, her eyes glittering, her fist opening and closing in a puddle of beer. They left soon, her face mirroring the pain of his hard hand on her arm. It gave me room to expand a little. I looked around without being too obvious about it, and picked my pigeon. He was a little guy, about fifty, well-dressed, with quick shrewd eyes. When I had a chance I moved next to him.

When he glanced at me I said, “Is this the town where they had the trial of the Landy kid?”

“Just passing through?”

“Stopping in a motel down the road.”

“This is where we held the circus, friend. And where were you? I thought every literate person in this great nation knew the fame of Warrentown. And most of the illiterates.”

“I was in Spain. I only heard about it the other day. Construction work.”

“I’ve got a son-in-law in that game, friend. Right now he’s in Panama.”

I didn’t want the conversation to get away from me. “I guess people got pretty excited about the Landy case.”

The man nodded. “He damn near didn’t come to trial. They got their timing right for once and sent a guard detachment in here. I guess you read about that.”

“I don’t know anything at all about it. I don’t know who he killed or where he killed her or anything about it.”

“He was a weird boy, mister. I guess I can use his name in the past tense without being too inaccurate. Too many brains. Like that Loeb and Leopold team years ago. I guess he figured that the laws of decency that apply to you and me didn’t apply to him. He was going to college over there in Dalton. Sheridan College. He was in his last year. He was running around with an eighteen-year-old girl named Nancy Paulson. She had a kid sister named Jane Ann Paulson, age sixteen. It just so happens that I know Dick Paulson, the father. Now I’m not the sort of guy to claim we were bosom buddies. But I did meet him a couple of times when I was over in Dalton on business. Dick owns a market over there. Good meats. He gets a high-class trade. This Landy boy had the use of a car. It was his sister’s car. She was working for the college at that time. You understand, this all happened way back in April, six months ago.

“Anyway, all of a sudden Jane Ann Paulson is missing. She’d been in some kind of Christmas pageant so there was a real good picture of her. Pretty little kid. It really stirred up the area. They had everybody and his brother out hunting for her, and cops from all over, and everybody trying to get in on the act. She turned up missing on a Friday night, I think it was. She had a girl friend in her class in high school, daughter of one of the professors lived up on the hill. The last anybody saw of Jane Ann, she was walking up the hill. But she never got there. Some farm kid found the body the following Wednesday afternoon in an aspen patch near Three Sisters Creek. She was naked and dead, raped and cut up some.

“Then the fun really started. The college boys park with their dates on a side road near where the body was found. Feeling ran pretty high in Dalton. There wasn’t a college boy who would have dared go down into the village alone. A smart state cop took over. He figured that the kid had to have been taken out there by car. It was five miles beyond the college, and over six miles from the village. He impounded every car that college kids had the use of. While the other police were rounding up known sex deviates, the state cop had lab tests run on a hundred and twelve automobiles. It took time. But they came up with the right car. It was the Ford that belonged to Landy’s sister. Blood had been scrubbed off the upholstery, but they took the fabric off and they got enough from the underside to run off the type. It matched the kid’s blood.

“That cop, Frank Leader his name is, was too smart to jump quick. He wanted to sew it up good; and he did. The Landy boy lived with his sister in a small apartment in an old house in the village. Leader found cleaning fluid there that he could tell—or the lab could tell—had been used on the car seat. And he found the rag and the lab was able to show it was human blood on the rag, even though they couldn’t type it. They’d vacuumed the car out and got female hair and did comparisons and found two of the hairs were from the dead girl’s head. Leader wanted the knife and he wanted to find the pocketbook the girl had been carrying. They really tore up that place. Found the pocketbook and the knife buried in a flower bed in the yard. It was a new knife, a paring knife. Leader traced it to a hardware store in Dalton. He was able to prove Landy had been in the store a few days before the murder. Nobody sold him a knife, but they were on open display.”

“Did he confess?” I asked.

“No. With all they had stacked up against him, he might just as well have. The ground was soft at that lover’s lane place. A smart speed cop kept people off the parking places until he could get help. They took molds of the tire tracks and matched one up with the Ford.”

“What was the defense?”

“The old yelp—you know—it’s all circumstantial. Landy had no alibi for the time. April the sixth, I think it was. Anyway, it was a Friday. His sister had a date. She’d come over here by bus in the middle of the afternoon to do some shopping and the guy she was dating met her over here for dinner. She didn’t take the car because it was in the repair garage. Landy got it out of the garage at five. The service manager said the kid acted funny. He drove back to the apartment. The prosecution proved the car was there at five-fifteen and gone by five-thirty. He was in the habit of going and taking rides all by himself. His sister testified to that. He was a funny-acting kid. No friends. He said he got back to the house about nine. His sister said he was asleep when she got back. He didn’t have a date with Nancy Paulson because they’d had some sort of a scrap that week.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, I’ve got to be rolling, fellow. You should have seen this town when the trial was going on. All the wire services and television and hundreds of newspaper guys and cranks from all over. That little town and the college won’t recover for a long time.”

He paid his bar check and as he started to leave, I said, “Is the sister still around?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know.”

I drove over to Dalton the next morning. It was a beautiful fall morning. The leaves of the big trees in the square were changing. The town had changed very little. The Dalton National Bank had had a face-lifting. Some of the stores had new plastic fronts. A Friday, the fourteenth of October. The same pre-school kids were fumbling around with the same soggy football in the park. Two young housewives walked diagonally across the park, talking as they pushed the carriages, groceries piled in beside the kids. There was a new traffic light where College Street came out onto the square. The red bus to Warrentown was waiting in the same place as before.

I parked, locked the wagon, and walked slowly in the sunlight and I
knew
she was in the town. I knew she was close. And I wanted to turn and run. I was ashamed of what I was—or what I had been.

I was wondering who to ask when I thought of a very simple solution. The phone had been disconnected but it was probably still listed. And it was. Landy, Victoria, 28 Maple. I knew Maple ran into the square at the north. I walked. Number twenty-eight was a block and a half down Maple, on the left. It was a big, elderly frame house painted an ugly reddish brown. There was a shallow porch around two sides, an ornate cupola, stained glass windows on either side of the front door, a waist-high iron fence.

An old lady was raking leaves in the yard. She wore a blue and white print dress and a man’s green cardigan sweater much too big for her. When I turned in at the walk she stopped raking and watched me as I walked up to her. She had hard little eyes and a mean little mouth.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a Miss Landy.”

“Around at the side, but she won’t talk to any newspaper or magazine people. Don’t cut across my lawn. You go on out to the sidewalk and back in that other gate over there. She’s packing and she’ll be gone by Monday and let me tell you there won’t be anybody in this neighborhood or this whole town that won’t be glad to see the last of anybody around here with the name Landy. I wanted to get her out of my house before, but Jud Cowan told me so long as she paid her rent I didn’t have any way of getting rid of her. It seems like a very strange law, to me that says a decent woman has to put up with having the sister of a murderer living in her very own house and not be able to do anything about it.”

The shrill whining voice followed me until I was around the corner of the house and out of sight. Though the front yard was narrow, the grounds behind the house seemed extensive. A small conservatory bulged from the flank of the house. It was an architectural afterthought, with narrow windows and an ugly roof. The path led to two stone steps, a screen door. As I walked to the steps, feeling more tremulously uncertain than ever before in my life, I could see movement through the glass. I stood and looked through the screen. Morning light through all the windows illuminated the room.

Vicky was there. There were open cartons on the floor. She was emptying bookshelves. She wore gray slacks, a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her dark hair was tied back. Her waist looked very narrow, her arms thin. She seemed to move with a stubborn weariness as she knelt and put the books neatly in the open carton. There was a smudge of dust on her cheek, other dust marks on the front of the white shirt. Her face was of an ivory pallor, lightly touched by the sun of the summer just past. Her facial bones seemed sharp against her skin.

She must have seen me, a tall shadow, out of the corner of her eye. She looked up quickly, half-flinching as she did so, in the manner of a small animal beaten too often. That reflex pinched my heart. She recognized me and she came very slowly to her feet, her eyes going wide. I tried to say her name but my mouth was too dry. The wide blue eyes closed and she put her hand to her throat. She tottered and I pushed the screen door open and went in and caught her, my hands on her shoulders, the bones under the flesh narrow and fine under my hands.

She opened her eyes again and there was the dazed, unfocused look of someone drugged. She said my name, said, “Hugh,” so softly that it was less an audible sound than a touch of warm exhalation against my throat. She let herself come forward, lean against me. I put my arm around her. The edge of my jaw touched the dark crown of her head.

“What have they done to you, Vicky?” I asked softly. “What in the world have they done to you?”

And as I looked across her shoulder, as I looked down through one of the windows, I found myself staring into the narrow venomous face of the old lady. She stood out there with the rake, looking in at us with spite and satisfaction.

Vicky stirred in my arms and pulled herself away. I released her. Her face was cool again, and apart from me.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been entirely well. I feel faint quite often. I’m sorry.” She moved away from me, putting half-packed cartons between us.

“I just heard about it, Vicky, just the other day. I was out of the country. I didn’t know about it.”

“I thought everybody in the world knew about it.”

“You know that if I had known, I would have come sooner.” And I tasted the shape of the lie on my mouth. I had nearly gone by. I had nearly gone on south because of fear and shame.

“Why?” The question was cool and blunt.

I made a helpless gesture with my hands. It wasn’t something you could explain in one minute or one hour. “I want to help you.”

“There’s no way I can be helped.” She went over to a narrow padded bench by the windows and sat down, took cigarettes from the shirt pocket, lighted one. There was a heavy wooden packing case already nailed up near the bench. I sat on it. I felt heavy and awkward and stupid, with hands too big and rough and brown, with feet too heavy. I looked at the floor, and then at the narrow and delicate shape of her ankles, at sandals which could not conceal the high patrician arch of her foot. I looked at her face until she looked away. There were sallow patches under her eyes, fine brackets around the contradictory mouth.