Death Trap (5 page)

I waited. Twice guards walked through the anteroom and into the inner office, giving me quick incurious glances. I wondered if I could smoke. I saw gray butts flattened against the dusty floor and I smoked two cigarettes. I had just finished the second one when she was brought back. There is a sisterhood of grief, of anguish, in which all women go apart from you and you cannot reach them. There is an habitual posture which makes you think of war drawings, of widows and refugees, of exile. She sat on the bench, shoulders hunched high, head lowered, handkerchief held to her eyes with both hands, body trembling. Despite the gay clothes she had worn, perhaps in an effort to cheer Alister, she could have been in rags, a peasant cloth over her head, knotted under her chin, bare brown feet dusty from roads that had been too long.

“Come along,” the elderly guard said to me.

Bird cage was a good word. There were no windows in the room. Fluorescence was white glare. Three of the walls of his cage were heavy woven wire, the fourth a bare wall painted an unpleasant glossy green. Two guards played cards at a small table against a wall twenty feet from the cage. I was permitted to approach to a point six feet from the cage. The elderly guard stood beside me. Alister stood inside the cage, gray fingers hooked into the wire, head lowered. He looked thirty years old.

“Al!” I said sharply. He gave the impression that you had to awaken him. His head lifted slowly. He looked at me. They were Vicky’s blue eyes. I had not remembered that. They were dulled. Recognition came slowly, lighting the eyes to a point of intensity and immediacy and then fading back to dullness.

“I want to help,” I said. “I need some leads.” I realized I was speaking the way one speaks to the sick, the deaf or the wounded. The elderly guard said, “She talked at him the whole time. He didn’t answer. They get this way. Punchy like. The brainy ones do.”

One of the guards at the table said, “And this kid has a real big brain on him.”

“Shut up, George,” the elderly one said gently.

“He’s sick,” I said. “He’s mentally ill. You can’t go ahead and—”

“The court says he’s sane, mister. He’s just gone back inside himself. He’s inside there, thinking.”

“With that big brain,” the guard at the table said.

“For God’s sake, George.”

“Al!” I said again. He didn’t lift his head.

“A week from tomorrow he’ll be over his troubles,” the guard said.

“You better take me back,” I said.

As we left I looked back. He still stood there, like the prey of a shrike impaled on a barb.

She had stopped crying. Her face was pale and empty. We were taken to the gate and they let us out. We got into the car and I drove into the middle of the shabby city and turned south. When we were on the open road she said, “Immature.”

“What?”

“I was, Hugh. Turning it into some kind of a movie plot. In comes the hero. The vital clue is found. The innocent boy is released. He walks out into the sunlight, and the birds are singing. But it isn’t that way. It’s all too late. They’ve killed him already.”

“He could come back. It would take time.”

“But you see,” she said patiently, “neither you nor I have any real hope of doing anything. We try to cheer each other up. There are only so many hours and minutes and seconds left. Then they’ll kill him and now maybe that’s best. Maybe that’s the only thing left to do with him now.”

“Vicky!”

“And when they do, Hugh, it’s the end of him, and it’s the end of anything we could have had. I won’t wish on you what I will become.”

“Is that self-pity?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

We stopped at a place but she couldn’t eat. I took her back to the motel. She didn’t want me to stay with her. Her eyes looked almost as empty as his.

I went back to the Inn. There had to be some starting place. I looked at my watch. I saw the sweep second hand moving around and around. Each revolution took that much off his life. And off mine and off Vicky’s.

MONDAY THE SEVENTEENTH was bright again and warm, the air flavored with the nostalgia of Indian summer. I had found the road where the kids parked, where the body had been found five days after the murder. I had driven up College Street hill and past the campus and past the faculty houses beyond the campus and past the small farms, five miles along the asphalt county road. Then the road dipped and turned west, to follow the ambling line of Three Sisters Creek. Two hundred yards from the turn there was a dirt road that led toward the creek some two hundred feet away. I drove into the dirt road. By the time I had gone thirty feet I was out of sight of the county road. When I turned off the motor I was in stillness. There were bird sounds, and wind through dry leaves, and the muttering of the creek.

I got out of the car. Beer cans rusted among fallen leaves. Shards of broken glass glinted in the sun. It was not hard to imagine what it would be like at night. A trace of dash lights on chrome. Dim pulse of the bass on the radio, gargle of liquor from the nearly empty bottle, the rough deep voice of a boy trying to talk like a man, a girl’s thin, empty and expected protests, and then the quickening oven-breathing, sleazy rustlings of nylon, and then, for the bolder ones, the hastily spread blanket and hip-thump against the wounding earth while girl eyes glaze at a sky of swarming stars. A cheap thirty-second taste of eternity.

I wandered toward the creek and after a time I heard voices. I found them, three boys in the twelve-year bracket, sloshing and yelping in a black pool under high rock shadow, bright bikes discarded in sunlight.

They were brashly self-conscious about skipping school, and delighted to show me the exact place where the body had been found, along with descriptions too lurid to be possible. Their knowing language about the ways of the law was directly from any third-rate television script. One of them spotted a used flash bulb in the aspen patch and snatched it up.

“My dad says they ought to burn everybody that attacks girls even when they don’t kill ’em.”

“My
dad says the chair is too easy for Landy.”

“I’ll betcha if they could have got him away from the cops they would have fixed him good.”

Soon they became bored with me and went back to the pool. I walked to the car. I had read the account in the back issues of the Warrentown paper, the reconstruction of the crime. The girl had been killed at the spot where the body was found, some seventy feet from the tire tracks. From the way twigs had been broken, she had tried to run. The killer had caught her. It made the gruesome chase more real to see the place. But I could learn nothing new there. Nothing factual. From the results of Tennant’s investigation, it was evident that Jane Ann was no stranger to this particular parking area, nor would she have been reluctant to come here. She would not have panicked and run from any normal advance. Some instinct had warned her, or perhaps the sight of the knife.

I found the Paulson address in the telephone book—88 Oak Road. I had remembered seeing that street sign somewhere near Maple Street, and found it quickly. It was the first cross street after you passed Mrs. Hemsold’s house on Maple, going away from the square. The houses were smaller than the houses on Maple. They were frame houses and they were well maintained and looked comfortable. Eighty-eight was a brown house with yellow trim, two story and unpleasantly square. There were two red maples in the front yard, and a box hedge along the sidewalk. It looked to be exactly what it was, the home of the owner of a successful market, with mortgage that had dwindled methodically through the years. It had a look of immunity to the sort of disaster it had suffered. There should still be two daughters in the house to sprawl in front of television, to quarrel over clothes, to spend inane hours at the phone.

Before I had looked at the house I had stopped in at the market to take a look at Richard Paulson. I had taken my time over a small purchase. I had guessed that he was the man behind the meat counter and it was confirmed when I heard a customer call him by name.

He was a tall man with a long face and high color in his cheeks. His no-color hair was carefully and intricately combed so that it lay across the baldness of his head. His shoulders were narrow, his hands large and red. He was surprisingly thick in the middle, considering the gauntness of his cheeks. He wore his white apron with dignity, and as he worked his hands were deft. His eyes and his mouth were too small, and his nose was fleshy. He looked to be a coldly methodical man, and when he talked to customers his affability seemed forced and insincere. Watching him I thought I could understand a little more easily the reasons for Jane Ann’s rebellion. He would be too harsh and too logical. And I wondered if Nancy’s conformity was the result of a broken spirit. I could hear rigid moral platitudes coming from that coin slot mouth. It was odd to hear customers call him Dick. An equal number called him Mr. Paulson.

As I drove by the house I could see, in the geometric placement of the red maples, in the rigid clipping of the box hedge, in the unhappy squareness of the house itself, reflections of his personality.

It was a reasonable premise that Nancy would walk home from the high school. And the route she would take was obvious. I parked a block from the school. When the kids started coming out, I got out of the car and leaned against it. All the young girls looked alarmingly alike. Several times I was on the verge of speaking when I saw that I was mistaken. I glanced at the picture again to refresh my mind.

Finally I saw her and I was certain. She was with two other girls. They were talking animatedly and, like the others who had passed, they gave me sidelong glances as they came abreast and the other two changed their walks in subtle ways, making an instinctive offer of young bodies, a subconscious response to maleness that is as old as the race.

“Nancy?”

She was nearly by me. She stopped and turned sharply, frowning, head tilted slightly, then pretty face becoming bland and cool as she realized she did not know me.

“What do you want?” Her voice was pitched too high and it was slightly nasal.

“I want to talk to you for a minute.”

The three of them stood there speculating, staring at me. “What about?”

“Is this yours?” I held the picture so she could see it.

“Where did you get that?” Indignation, tempered by the slight coyness of a young girl talking of her own photograph.

“I want to talk to you alone for a minute.”

She spoke to her friends. “Wait up for me.” They moved slowly down the block, looking back. Nancy came hesitantly toward me and stopped a cautious distance away.

“Where did you get that?”

“It was his.”

“I know. There were only two. I’ve got the other one.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“I’m not allowed to talk to newspaper people.”

“I’m not one of those.”

“Then what do you want? Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Vicky’s.”

Her face changed and she backed away. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Wait a minute. You don’t want to talk to any friend of hers—or his?”

She backed further, lips compressed, shaking her head.

“You’re going to run now, aren’t you, Nancy? You’ll run because you’re afraid you’ll find out he didn’t do it.”

That stopped her retreat. She looked dazed for a moment and then curiously indignant.
“Everybody
knows he did it!”

“Three of us know he didn’t. Vicky, Mr. Tennant and myself. Four when you count Al.”

She moved back toward me, not knowing she was doing so. “That’s crazy. How could anybody
know?
He did it. Everybody knows he did it.”

I took a chance. “Nancy, for a long time you
knew
he didn’t do it. What changed you?”

“I was being silly when I thought that. My father explained—”

“Don’t kid me, Nancy. This is a small town. You don’t want to be unpopular. You don’t want to be different. You want to believe just what everybody else believes. So it was too expensive for you to be loyal.”

“It
wasn’t
that way!”

“This is a good picture, Nancy. The photographer made you look very honest and very brave. So I made a mistake. I’m wasting my time. You’re a good-looking kid but you’re another gutless wonder. There’s no point in asking you for any help. You’re too concerned about what people might think.”

I flipped the picture at her. It scaled through the air, struck her shoulder, fell to the sidewalk. She snatched it up. Her face was red. Her eyes were narrow and angry. I watched her walk away. It was a calculated risk. The young want desperately to conform, yet at the same time. each one wants to feel unique and unswayed by public opinion. I counted twelve briskly indignant steps and thought I had lost. Then I saw the hesitation, saw her turn and look back at me. I looked away, snapped my cigarette into the road and opened the door of the wagon.

She came back slowly, stopped her usual wary distance away.

“What kind of help?”

“Don’t waste my time, Nancy. Run off and play. Go sew up some doll clothes. This is business for grownups.”

She stamped her foot. “What do you want me to do?”

“Something you haven’t got the courage to do. Something very minor. Just meet me and talk to me with frankness and honesty and answer every question I care to ask you.”

“But why?”

“We’ve got a very ridiculous idea, Nancy. We’d like to find out who really killed your sister.”

“That’s crazy talk! Al did it. It’s all over now.”

I looked directly at her and I waited until a woman carrying a shopping bag walked by us. “I’ll tell you something not very many people know, Nancy. When a person is electrocuted, there’s a problem of timing. Once when a notorious kidnaper was executed, they made a mistake.”

“What are you—”

“Shut up and listen. They pulled the switch when his lungs were full of air. When that happens and the current hits, it makes a sound you can hear for four city blocks, a sound you can’t ever forget. So they watch the chest and pull the switch at the end of an exhalation. When they do that to Alister a week from today, then it will be over, Nancy. And until they do that it isn’t over.”

Her eyes closed and she swayed, her face chalky. I moved toward her and caught her arm. She opened her eyes and moistened her lips and swallowed with an effort. She did not try to move away from me.

“There’s—nothing I can tell you that will help.”

“You can’t know that. But if you can make yourself believe that, it will be a lot easier for you.” I released her arm. “You can still run along with your friends. After next Monday you can start wondering if by talking to me you might have changed things. And you can wonder about that for all the rest of your life.”

“I—can’t talk to you now.”

“Why not?”

“I have to go right home. I’ll be a little late now. Mother gets frantic if I don’t go right home. She’s been that way ever since—it happened.”

“But you can get out again?”

“Yes. But I have to be back by five-thirty.”

“Can I pick you up somewhere?”

“No. No, I couldn’t go anywhere in your car with you. I couldn’t have anybody seeing me in a car with somebody.”

“Where do you usually go?” I asked.

“Most of the time to Dockerty’s Drugstore where all the kids go. Maybe I could talk to you in the park there, on one of the benches in the square.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

She acted nervous and furtive. She started to turn away and turned back. “I don’t care what people think, but my father—”

“You act scared of him.”

“He’s different than he was before.”

“Will this make you feel better? Nobody has to know what we’re talking about.”

She looked relieved. She walked away, schoolbooks cradled in her arm, with only one quick, nervous, backward glance.

The bench I selected was not on one of the main cross paths. I sat and watched an enthusiastic and inept game of touch football. One small boy insisted on making his tackles legitimately until he caught a knee on his nose. The dismal sounds he made were audible after he was out of sight.

I saw her when she was a hundred yards away. She crossed the street, walking primly. She had changed to jeans and a red cotton flannel shirt. Her blond hair was tied into a high pony tail with blue ribbon. She walked more slowly, looking around until she spotted me, and then came toward me. Her walk seemed very self-conscious, very body-conscious, as though she was making a deliberate effort to suppress any movement that could call attention to breasts or hips. It was not a natural walk for a girl so pretty, so nicely built. It was a denial of the natural and unself-conscious pride she should have had.

As I had seen when I had talked to her near the school, she was not the girl of the picture. That special look of clarity was gone, as was the impression of imminent maturity. The murder had made growing up too expensive for her, and perhaps for reasons of self-preservation, she had slid back into the formlessness of adolescence, back into the random jungles.

She gave me a nervous nod and sat on the far end of the bench, as far from me as she could get, her face averted.

“I decided not to come,” she said.

“Then why did you?”

She ignored the question. “I don’t know who you are or anything. Maybe you’re going to write a story about this. I don’t see why I should talk to you. My father had to get the police to get men away from our house.”

“I told you I’m a friend of Vicky’s.”

“Anybody could say that.”

I took out my wallet, found the right card and handed it to her. It had my picture and thumbprint and physical description. The text, in both Spanish and English, said I was employed on the airfield project.

She studied it and handed it back. “What does it mean? That says in Spain.”

“I’m on a vacation.”

“You’re awful tan.”

“Nancy, I don’t blame you for being suspicious. I’m in the construction game. I was on a road job near here. I met Vicky then. I didn’t know she was in this trouble until I got back to Chicago. Then I came here. Maybe you’re almost old enough to understand this. In one sense I’m almost glad of this trouble, because it gave me a good excuse to come back here and see her again.”