Death Trap (7 page)

“Why not?”

“She didn’t take the things from her locker at school. I guess I better explain that. After she started doing bad things, my father wouldn’t give her any allowance. I get an allowance and I have to buy my clothes and personal things out of it. He wouldn’t let my mother buy her anything pretty. But I guess she made boys buy her presents. She had wonderful sweaters and skirts and things in her locker. She’d always get to school early enough so she could pick an outfit out of her locker and go change in the girls’ room. Then after school she would change back into her other clothes. She couldn’t wear any of those things home. Once she brought a dress home and when she put it on my father asked her where it came from and she wouldn’t tell him, so he ripped it and called her a whore.”

“Did she tell you who bought her the things?”

“No. I guess they were from the Sheridan boys. They have more money. She kept jewelry and perfume and lipstick in her locker. Afterward the school opened the locker and sent all those things home. I knew she probably hadn’t run away, because I knew that when she closed her locker on Friday all those things were in there. I was with her. I had to ask her something. I forget what it was. If she was going to run away, she would have packed up those pretty things and maybe left them off with a girl friend. After school closes on Friday you can’t get back into the lockers until Monday.”

“What happened to the clothing?”

“My father gave it all away. My mother thought I could use some of the sweaters, but I couldn’t have worn them.”

“Who got the stuff?”

“My mother thought we could save it for the church rummage sale; but my father took it all, the pretty things and the things she wore at home, and drove over to Warrentown and gave it to the Salvation Army.”

“How did she manage when she had a date and wanted to dress up?”

“She kept other clothes over at a girl friend’s house. Ginny Garson. She’s—just like Jane Ann was. Ginny was her best friend. I’ve seen Ginny wearing some of her things, so I guess she just kept them. They were about the same size, but Ginny is dark.”

“She didn’t go over there and change that night she was killed?”

“No. She thought she had a date and then she didn’t and I guess she was mad about it. There wasn’t any need to dress up. She was going up the hill to see another friend of hers. Not a very good friend. Ann Sibley. She’s the daughter of one of the professors at the college. Ginny had a date that night.”

“You didn’t tell the police that you were pretty certain she hadn’t run away.”

“No. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. They were hunting all over anyway. I guess if they’d found the money first instead of later they—” She gasped and put her hand over her mouth.

“What money?”

“I can’t tell you. I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

I had to argue, plead and browbeat her, and tell her how important it could be to Alister before she consented to tell me about it. “My father found it. It was a long time later. It was while the trial was on. You see if the police had found it when they searched her room they would have known she hadn’t run away. My father was like a crazy man when he found it. It was by accident. The house is small. He was going to change her room into an office where he could work on the books and charge accounts from the market. The trial was terrible for all of us. When it was recessed over a week end we came back and we all tried to keep busy. There were so many reporters calling we had to have the phone disconnected. And the Chief sent Barney Quillan over to keep people away from the house. That week end my father decided he would carry her bureau up to the attic to make way for the desk he was going to put in her room. He thought it would be easier to carry if he took the drawers out first. That was the way he found it. It was in one of those heavy reddish envelopes that was thumbtacked to the back of the drawer, so you had to take the drawer out to get to it.”

“Was there much?”

“He talked so loud to my mother I couldn’t help hearing. He made me go to my room but I didn’t shut the door all the way. It was eight hundred and something. Eight hundred and twenty, I think. He called it whore-money, and the wages of sin. He carried on for a long time. It hurt him very badly. I don’t know what ever happened to it. I guess he used it in the business. Or maybe he used it on the funeral bill. He made me promise that I would never tell anyone. He said it was a disgrace.”

“Don’t you think he should have told the police? Maybe they would have started looking for someone else.”

“Oh, no! Everybody knew Alister did it.”

And again I had run into the blank wall. I sighed and said, “Where do you think the money came from?”

“I guess the boys gave it to her. I guess she asked them for it and they would give it to her before she’d let them—do anything. Like they gave her the sweaters and things.”

We had talked a long time. She had to leave. She was becoming very nervous about the time and she kept glancing across the square toward the Paulson Market. It was obscured by trees but she kept looking in that direction. I asked her how I could contact her again if I had more questions. She was reluctant at first, then told me that if I really
had
to talk to her, I could park near the school. She would see my car and meet me here at this same bench a half hour later, or another bench close by if somebody was using this one. I wasn’t to talk to her or even look at her when I parked near the school. She said that if her father ever found out she was talking like this, and particularly if he should find out she had talked about the money, he would whip her. He would be angry. She was frightened of being whipped. One time he had whipped Jane Ann too hard. It had done something to her back. She had to wear a sort of corset thing for six weeks. The doctor had been very angry at her father. Dr. Farbon. He had been their family doctor for years, but he said the wrong things, and so her father had changed over to Dr. Higel, the new man.

She hurried away into the threat of dusk, and when she was far away, she looked back hastily and furtively. Her constricted walk was a sad thing to watch. Poor scared lamb in a wolf-infested world. Panicky virgin, running headlong from herself.

I walked across the green to the Inn and, using the phone booth in the rear of the entrance hall, I called John Tennant in Warrentown. I caught him just as he was leaving for a cocktail party. I told him about the money, about how I had found out about it, and I asked him if it was sufficient new evidence on which he could base a request for an appeal.

First he made some comments about Richard Paulson. He used not a single profane word, but he traced the probable ancestry and probable demise of Mr. Paulson with both fervor and emphasis. Then he said, “Hugh, it’s interesting. It’s provocative. It’s a new fact. But it isn’t enough. Paulson will deny it. He’ll make the daughter say she was lying. I may try to use it as a last forlorn hope if I have to. But there should be more. I suddenly have a lot more respect for your amateur talents. My boy didn’t dig that morsel up. How about I send you somebody down to help out?”

“Let me find out first if I need somebody. I’ve got a starting point now. And a new contact to make. One of Jane Ann’s girl friends. Her best friend.”

“Good hunting, Hugh.”

I drove to the motel. Vicky was still depressed. But as I told her what I had learned, I saw the rebirth of hope in her eyes. I wondered if I should have told her. Perhaps it would have been more kind to keep it to myself. It lifted her up a little bit, only to give her further to fall. She was almost gay at dinner. Then I told her I had work to do, and I went back to Dalton.

THE GARSON HOME was the nearest thing to being on the wrong side of the tracks that the town of Dalton could provide. It was on the Warrentown-Dalton road, about ten blocks from the Paulson home. Successive widenings of the highway had placed it too close to the road. There was a small woodworking mill on one side of it, a bar and grill on the other. Directly across the road was a new-looking farm implement dealership, with show-room night lights gleaming on flanked tractors, and intricate accessories.

I had been told the Garson home was directly across from the implement place. I parked on the wide apron in front of the implement place, and waited for a hole in the traffic so that I could walk across.

There was a narrow porch across the front of the house. The yard was bare. Oncoming headlights illuminated a tire swing hanging from a tree close to the corner of the porch. As I had walked across the road I had heard low male voices on the dark porch, and the clink of bottle neck on glass.

I walked up the first two steps and paused when a man asked, with the faked belligerence of someone who has had too many bill collectors come, “Something you want?”

I could make them out dimly. Two sitting on a couch, one slouched against the porch railing, facing them. The three faces were turned toward me.

“I’m trying to locate Ginny Garson. Is this where she lives?”

“She lives here, but she’s out some place. She’s my kid. What do you want to see her about? School trouble?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s about the Landy case.”

“You the law?”

“No, I—I want to get a story.”

“You come too late, buster. They got her story. Took pictures, too. Made her get her swimming suit on and for one of them they took her across the road and the fellow had her making out like she was driving one of them tractors over there. It’s going to come out right after they burn that Landy son of a bitch.
Cora!”

He called so loudly it startled me. A woman came to the door. She stood inside the screen. The light was behind her. It shone through her thin dress. She had massive hips and thighs, a long neck, scrawny shoulders. She spoke in a tired whining tone. “I can God damn well hear you, Jerry, without you yell like a crazy man.”

“Shut up,” he said amiably, “and tell me what is the name of that story that magazine is putting out about Ginny next month.”

“That story it’s called ‘He Killed My Best Girl Friend’ and it comes out in a magazine called
True Emotion
that’s one of my favorites.”

“The thing I remember about it, they wanted to give Ginny twenty-five bucks for a release thing, but I dickered ’em up to fifty bucks.”

“And you give her ten and me ten and you lost the whole thirty down to Bristol’s in the pitch game on Saturday night.”

“Shut up, Cora. This fellow here, he’s another one of those magazine fellows. How much you giving out for a release? Ginny, I bet you she could tell you some stuff she didn’t tell those others.”

I had gotten into a trap without meaning to, and it seemed easier to let it slide. “This is just speculation, Mr. Garson. I don’t work for a magazine. I’d do it and then try to sell it and give her part of the money if I do.”

“How much?”

“Maybe there isn’t any story left. I’d have to talk to her.”

“Where is she, Cora?”

“I don’t know how the hell you think I can keep track. I got five littler than her and this all the time washing and cleaning up and cooking and you never lift a hand to—”

“Knock it off before I come in there and kick your teeth in, woman.”

She turned away from the door abruptly, indignantly. One of the other men spoke for the first time. He had a low, slow voice with a Deep South tinge. “I see the Quarto kid pick her up about seven in that chopped Ford of his. They was a mess of them in the car. They hang around that Big Time Burger Drive-in about five mile east on this here road. It’s on the left. You can’t miss it. The Ford, it’s yellow and it’s chopped and it’s got a fish tail and chrome blower pipes. But just ask any of the kids out there. They all go out there. My boy, he’s out there I betcha, if he hasn’t got hisself killed off driving out there at a hundred and ten miles an hour. His driving like to drive the old lady nuts. You just ask out there. You can’t miss it.”

“And before you do any story,” Mr. Garson said blusteringly, “you’re going to put down in writing all notarized just what she gets paid if you sell it.”

I thanked them and turned to leave.

“Hey!” the third man said. “Hold it!” I turned back. “I was wondering why you sounded familiar and then you turned and the light hit your face. Your name ain’t Mac-Reedy is it? By God, I’m sure it is. You was an engineer on that road job three years ago. And I was working for the paymaster. I’d know you any place. And hey now! Jerry, this joker is MacReedy and I remember now he was running around with the Landy bitch.”

The atmosphere changed quickly. I was annoyed at myself for trying to take the easiest way out. The odds were good that at least one of the men on that porch had worked on the road job. Labor remembers the bosses.

“And now you write stories,” Garson said softly.

“Well, I just—”

He got up, tucked his thumbs in his belt and came rolling toward me with all the trite stylized belligerence of the barroom hero. His friend got up from the couch. The southerner pushed himself free of the railing and drifted along with them.

“What do you want to talk to my little girl about, MacReedy?”

“I told you I wanted her story on the Landy case. You brought up the magazine angle.”

“And you let me keep thinking I was right, wise guy. What are you after?”

“The truth, Mr. Garson. Your daughter may know something that will help.”

“Help your girl friend’s brother? Help that sex fiend killer? You ought to be run the hell out of town.”

He was moving closer, gaining courage from his friends. A bluff couldn’t hurt anything. “We’ve already got enough new information so that Tennant is reopening the case, Garson.”

“Nuts!”

“I’m telling you the tru—”

I barely saw the sucker punch coming. I ducked it in time. I backed down the steps and into the yard. They came down the steps and the two friends drifted out onto the flank. I turned and moved quickly, crossed the road and started to get into my car. I knew the trouble he could cause if I hurt anybody on his property. One of them had come after me, running in deadly silence. He yanked me around by the arm, swinging at the same instant. It was the southerner. The blow hit me high on the cheek bone, driving me back against the wagon and lighting up the night sky for an instant. He trusted that punch too much. He tried it again. I slapped his arm down and to the side and heard his quick suck of breath as his hand hit the frame of the wagon between the windows. I pushed him away to gain room, and hit him in the pit of the stomach. He doubled over and I slapped the side of his head as hard as I could. It made a noise like a pistol shot and knocked him down. The thin intensity of his yell came from the bursting pain of a ruptured eardrum.

The other two moved in on me, one from each side. I took a fist on the throat and felt as though I might strangle. Garson’s co-ordination was poor, his belly swollen with ten thousand beers. I put arm, shoulder, back and hip into one right hook that couldn’t have traveled over ten inches. It made a sound like tossing a shovel load of wet concrete into a wooden bin. He went back four steps and sat down heavily, making gagging noises and holding his belly. There was no more to do. I could have, and should have, stopped right there. But my throat ached and my left cheek bone felt like flame. I felt as swollen with anger as the hump of one of the black bulls of Miura. As the third man tried to run, I kicked his feet out from under him. He went down and scrambled up, turning, his face in silhouette against the car headlights. I caught him with one clean blow, an overhand right against the jaw shelf that sprung his mouth open and emptied his eyes and felt as though it drove my knuckles up into my wrist. I had sense enough to catch him as he toppled forward, or he would have smashed his face against the asphalt.

I got into my car. The southerner was stirring. Garson had labored up onto one knee.

“Stay away from my kid,” he gasped. “You stay away from her.”

I started the motor and drove away. I fingered my cheek bone. It was puffing, but it wasn’t split. Each time I swallowed, my throat rasped with pain, but it seemed to be diminishing.

The Big Time Burger was ten minutes away. A white building set in a large lot. Spotlights were focused on a huge replica of a hamburger “all the way” that revolved slowly on a pedestal on the roof with the poisonous yellow of mustard, a sick red of tomato. The big lot was more than half full, the carhops busy. They wore tight, red, shiny, bullfighter pants, short white coats with gilt buttons, pert black hats with patent leather bills. There was a racked mike beside each parking space to use to place your order. Until the button was pressed on the mike it served as a speaker, rocking and rolling in a tin voice.

The girl who brought my beer was not at her best in skin-tight pants. She hooked the tray on the window, reached for my dollar.

“You know the Quarto boy?”

“Quarto?”

“He runs a yellow cut-down Ford with a fish-tail rear.”

“Oh, those damn kids. They don’t come to my station no more. They’re over on the other side. Three hours of trouble and then a dime tip. Angie ought to run ’em off the place for good, but he’s got no guts. One night some of them were busting bottles and Angie went out and they showed him a switch blade and he went and hid in the kitchen for an hour. They don’t scare me. I just said, ‘Kids, you eat at my station and keep stiffing me with them dime tips and maybe I can think up something real fancy to do to your food before you ever even get a look at it.’”

“I suppose the Paulson girl used to come here.”

“Sure. She came a lot of times with that bunch that’s over there now, and then a lot of times with college guys, Those college guys are fine. They want to look big so they tip as big as they can afford. Jane Ann Paulson, she was an okay kid. Never no trouble with her. And you know something? Lots of times that Landy came here. Once he parked right where you are right now, right in that beat-up Ford, and he had the other Paulson girl with him, the old maidy-acting one. I served them myself plenty of times. Always she didn’t want nothing on her burger. Just plain. Her sister used to like them all the way. That was the car he used when he killed Jane Ann. He killed her because he wasn’t getting any from the sister. It drove him off his head. The sister is a teaser. I think any girl does that is lower than dirt. I always say if you let a guy get all hot you got a kind of obligation to play along, don’t you figure it that way?”

“Thanks a lot. When I’m ready for another beer—”

“Don’t bother with the squawk box, mister. Just blink your lights and I’ll bring the refill.” She made change and I gave her a quarter extra and she thanked me and went away.

I got out and walked around to the other side of the building. There were about a dozen cars of noisy kids there. The noise had apparently driven the other trade away from their area. Their closely parked cars formed an island. Constant carhopping was going on. One young girl was doing a clumsily suggestive dance to the strains of rock and roll. She was barefooted and she danced on the roof of a sedan. A group of four boys clapped hands in time to the music. The rest of them were ignoring the girl.

I picked out the Quarto car and walked over to it. The top was down. There seemed to be ten kids in it.

“Ginny Garson here?”

“The man wants Garson.” “Where’s short, dark, and repulsive?” “Hey, Rook! Where’d your beast go? There’s a suntan job wants a hack at the young stuff.” “Hey, she’s over with Smith, playing pooty-tat.” “Mister Suntan, you see the showboat? The gray Cord with what Smith says is nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer. Three over. Go look in the back seat. But knock first.” “Knock and roll, Mister S.T.” “Ole Smith’ll come up with the hinkups if you interrupt his stuff. She’s on loan-out from Rook. Hey, Rook?” “That merchandise is guaranteed. Never wears out. Don’t you people ever finish a brew? I need a frail with a pail.” I realized they were all half drunk. Long, golden girl-legs hung out in the chill October night. A half seen hand cupped a breast. They were half drunk and playful in the way that half grown lions can be playful. Rub them just a little bit the wrong way and they would have to find out if you had any chicken glands. They would cheerfully and efficiently cut you a little, or open the side of your face with a sharpened edge of a belt buckle. Or crush your groin with mail-order air force boots. While their women squealed because it was exciting. They were capable of forming a line-up on one of their own girls, or, with the callousness of the hen yard, pecking a weakened contemporary to death. They were revolt. They sheared off power poles and were found thirty feet from a tanned right arm with a homemade tattoo on the biceps. They died in flaming skids. There was nothing chicken about them. They had been informed about the world. They saw in the papers that everybody grabbed all they could. And there were slander-sheet magazines to tell them the inside dope on how their crooner heroes bounced from bed to bed. They knew the draft would catch them, that both parents and teachers had given up any last weak hope of discipline. Work was for the cubes—the quintessence of a square. The women were easy. There were always angles. They had it made.

And I could see how Nancy felt apart from this main stream, these social and emotional folkways of her contemporaries. Jane Ann had been a part of the group. Maybe she had been forced into it.

The Cord gleamed in the night. It was parked heading away from the lights, so the back seat was in darkness. I rapped on the roof of the car and asked for Ginny Garson. There was a slow stirring, a grunt of annoyance. The boy called Smith got out. He had a grotesque Mohican haircut, cold narrow Slavic eyes. He wore khakis and a maroon sweater with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder. His arms were long and heavily muscled, and he held his arms tensed and a little out from his body so the muscles would show.