Meet Me at the Morgue (2 page)

“What was Fred Miner after, or wouldn’t he tell you, either?”

“He wanted to see Alex. I told him Alex was away, and he seemed rather worried and disappointed.”

“Did he say why?”

“He mumbled something obscure about wanting to go through channels, and do the right thing for everybody.”

“I think there’s something up his sleeve,” I said. “I met him on the sidewalk just now, and he acted pretty evasive. I couldn’t get him to open up.”

“You won’t be mad if I tell you something, Howie? I think he’s afraid of you.”

“Of me?”

“Quite a few people are. When you put on that grim righteous look. I was scared myself for the first six months or so.”

“I don’t see why.”

“You have a terrible lot of power over these people.”

“I don’t misuse it if I can help it.” The conversation was beginning to irritate me.

“I know you don’t. I wonder if Fred Miner knows it, though. With his Navy experience, he must be aware of what official power can do to him if he makes the slightest slip. After all, he doesn’t know you the way he does Alex. I told him you’d be in soon, but he wouldn’t wait. Probably he came in to ask Alex’s advice about some private problem.”

“He didn’t say anything about going away?”

“Not a word. I’m sure you don’t have to be concerned about him. Alex told me he’s adjusting wonderfully.” Ann’s blue eyes darkened with feeling. “Personally I think he’s a sturdy character. If I killed a man with my car, I swear I’d never be able to drive again.”

“You call it driving, what you do?”

“I’m serious. You mustn’t make fun of me.”

“You mustn’t waste all your fine emotion on a hit-run driver and a married man to boot.”

She colored slightly. “Don’t be ridiculous. My feelings about our clients are quite impersonal. Anyway, he isn’t a hit-run driver, morally speaking. Alex says he didn’t know he’d run over anyone, so it wasn’t his fault.”

“When they’ve been drinking, it’s always their fault. You can pin that in your hat. It’s an axiom.”

Her eyes widened. “Had he been drinking? Alex didn’t tell me that.”

“Alex doesn’t talk about his cases any more than he has to. It’s a good rule to follow.”

She said with a flash of impudence: “You’re very moral-lecturey this morning.” But her curiosity overcame her pique. “How do you know Fred Miner was drinking that night?”

“I read the police report. They gave him an intoximeter test when they arrested him. He was heavily loaded, over two hundred milligrams.”

“Poor man. I didn’t realize he was that way. Perhaps we should run a Rorschach on him. Alcoholics always have deep-seated emotional problems—”

“He isn’t alcoholic. He simply got drunk, as a lot of people do, and killed a man. Don’t waste your sympathy on him, because he’s been lucky. His wife stayed with him. His boss stood by him. If it wasn’t for that, and his war record, Miner would be in jail.”

“Well, I’m glad he isn’t.” She added irrationally: “Even if you’re not.”

She lowered her head and fired a machine-gun burst on the typewriter. Our conversations often ended like that. I liked to think that it was the ancient conflict between heart and head, with me representing head.

The courthouse clock had already struck nine, and I felt its delayed, guilty echo. Closing the door of the inner office rather sharply, I took off my jacket for work and spent the next two hours on the Dictaphone. I was doing a report on a prosperous matron who had been arrested for stealing several dresses from local shops. The dresses were invariably size nine. The lady was size eighteen, and had no children.

Between the paragraphs, my mind kept turning to Fred
Miner. Though I wouldn’t admit it to Ann, I felt a certain satisfaction in his case. Three months ago, in early February, it hadn’t looked too promising.

According to the sheriff’s office and the city police, Fred had got himself violently drunk on a Saturday night, had taken one of his employer’s cars without permission, had run a man down in the road near Johnson’s country house, and then driven on into town without stopping. The city police caught him steering in long sweeping arcs along the ocean boulevard, and booked him for drunken driving. The sheriff’s men didn’t find the body in the road until later that night, and then they were unable to identify the victim.

But one of the fog lamps was smashed on the Lincoln that Fred had been driving. Fragments of yellow glass from the fog lamp were scattered at the scene of the accident. One long shard of glass was found imbedded in the dead man’s eye cavity.

The courthouse crowd predicted that Fred would be found guilty on a felony charge and sentenced to two to five years in state prison. Then Abel Johnson came back from his winter house in the desert. He found bail for Fred and put his personal lawyer on the case. The lawyer, a man named Seifel, pleaded him guilty to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter and applied for probation.

I assigned Alex Linebarge to do the report on Miner. Alex spent nearly a month going over his record with a fine-tooth comb. He came up with the conclusion that Fred Miner was a solid citizen who had made one grave mistake but wasn’t very likely to make another. Fred was sentenced to one year in the county jail, suspended; he was fined three hundred dollars and put on five years’ probation.

On the whole he had been lucky, as I said. His life had been salvaged, and my department had a stake in it. He’d
fallen, been caught before he hit the bottom, and hoisted back to the moral tightrope that everyone has to walk every day.

But a man on probation walks his own high wire without a net. If he falls twice, he falls hard, into prison.

CHAPTER
2
:
      
A burst of voices from the outer
office broke into my thoughts. I switched off the Dictaphone. One of the voices was Ann’s. She seemed to be trying to quiet another voice, which rose and fell in surges of emotion. One of her juvenile clients, I thought, having a tantrum or a crying spell.

When I thought that it had lasted long enough, I opened the pebbled glass door. A woman who was far from juvenile was slumped in the interview chair beside Ann’s desk. Under a cheap, print house-dress, her body was long and angular. Ann was bent over her with one hand on her gaunt shoulder.

I recognized her when she lifted her face in the light. She seemed to have aged ten years in the three months since I had seen her. There were strands of gray like steel shavings caught in her straight brown hair. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth was distraught.

“What’s the trouble, Mrs. Miner?”

“Terrible trouble.” With difficulty, she controlled the trembling of her lips. “It came down on me out of a blue sky.”

I looked at Ann.

“I don’t quite know what she means,” she said. “It’s something about a kidnapping. Mrs. Miner is afraid her husband is involved in some way.”

“No!” the woman cried. “It isn’t true. Fred couldn’t do a thing like that. He couldn’t, I ought to know. We’ve been married for ten years, and Fred is the kindest man. He loves that boy.”

I crossed the room and stood over her. “Has the Johnson boy been kidnapped?”

She raised her wet black lashes. “Yes, and they’re accusing Fred. They claim he stole the boy and ran away with him. But it’s a lie.” Her voice broke in a storm of grief.

“Mrs. Miner says there’s a plot against him.” Ann leaned towards me and added in a whisper: “Do you think she’s having delusions of persecution?”

“Nonsense,” I said, more loudly than I intended.

Mrs. Miner jerked herself upright, dislodging Ann’s hand from her shoulder. “Don’t you believe me? It’s the truth I’m telling you. Jamie’s been stolen away, and Fred’s been framed to take the blame for it.” Under the thin flesh, her high cheekbones stood out as if grief had washed them bare.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I can’t believe you or disbelieve you until I’ve heard what happened. Bring her a drink of water, will you, Miss Devon?”

“Of course.” Ann filled a paper cup at the earthenware cooler and brought it to Mrs. Miner. “There you are, dear.”

With a shaking hand, she raised the cup to her pale unpainted lips. Some of the water spilled down the front of her dress. She gulped the rest of it and crushed the cup in her fist. Her knuckles were red and cracked from housework.

“Now tell Mr. Cross what you told me,” Ann prompted her.

“I’ll try.” She made an effort to be calm. Above the square-cut collar of her dress, the cords in her neck bulged taut like thin ropes. “You saw my husband this morning? He said he was coming here to talk to Mr. Linebarge.”

“He was here. Mr. Linebarge wasn’t, but I talked to him.”

“Did he look to you like he was planning a crime? Did he? Is that the way he looked?”

I felt a repetition of the qualms I had had that morning, talking to Fred. “Perhaps I’d better ask the questions, Mrs. Miner. You say your husband’s been accused of kidnapping Jamie Johnson. Who accused him?”

“Mr. Johnson.”

“On what grounds?”

“No grounds at all. It’s a plot.” The stiff movement of her jaws gave her speech an oddly ventriloquial effect.

“You’ve said that. Can’t you tell me anything more definite? I take it they’re both gone.”

“Both of them, vanished like smoke.” One of her hands flipped up in an involuntary gesture. She returned it, clenched, to her lap. “It doesn’t mean my Fred is guilty. It means the opposite. It means foul play.”

“Nobody knows where they are?”

“Somebody knows. I don’t, but somebody knows. Whoever it is behind all this, they know.” Her mouth was tight and hissing. Her eyes glared like brown glass.

“Who do you have in mind?”

“A conspiracy,” she said, “that’s what it is.”

Ann and I looked at each other. I was half inclined to agree with her that Mrs. Miner had been unbalanced by the shock of events.

“He’s got a big black mark against him,” she was saying, “and
they
know that. It’s a criminal conspiracy to put the blame on him, for stealing the child.”

“Has Jamie really been kidnapped?”

“I’m telling the truth,” she said fiercely. “What do you think?”

“I think you may be exaggerating a little.” I looked at my wrist-watch. “It’s twenty to twelve now. I saw the boy
with Fred less than three hours ago. There was no trouble then.”

She leaned towards me, her thin face avid for any kind of hope. “I knew it. Fred loved the boy like his own son. I knew there couldn’t be trouble between them, only Mr. Johnson won’t take my word for it. He’s blaming Fred. They’re all down on him now, even Mr. Johnson. He said he made a terrible mistake when he saved Fred from going to prison.”

Ann said in surprise: “Does Mr. Johnson think his son has been kidnapped?”

“He knows it.”

“How can he know it?” I said. “The boy’s only been gone since nine o’clock. Fred told me he had orders to take him for a drive.”

“I don’t know about that.” The authority of special information had restored some of her self-control. “All I know is, I saw the ransom letter with my own eyes. It came in the mail this morning. I took it up to the main house myself. I was there when Mr. Johnson opened it.”

Ann and I looked at each other in silence. The first stroke of the three-quarter-hour fell from the courthouse tower like a bomb of sound, a giant exclamation-mark at the end of the woman’s statement. Between the first stroke and the third the situation changed palpably. Even the familiar room altered in appearance.

I echoed stupidly: “A ransom letter?”

“Yes. It came in the mail this morning.”

“Did it mention Fred?”

“Of course it didn’t. He’s got nothing to do with this, can’t you believe me? It gave instructions like for paying the money. It wasn’t even signed.”

“How much, Mrs. Miner?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

Ann whistled. Fifty thousand dollars would pay her salary for nearly twenty years, and mine for nearly ten.

“He called the police, I hope.”

“No. He didn’t. He was afraid to. The letter said if he did they’d kill the boy.”

“Where’s Johnson now?”

“He came into town to raise the money. I haven’t seen him since he left the house. He was in an awful rush. The letter only gave him till eleven o’clock.”

“You mean the money’s been paid already?”

“I guess so. He was going to pay it all right. He dotes on that boy.” She added defensively: “No more than Fred, though.”

“I know that. Tell me this. Have you any idea where Fred is?”

“I only wish I had. He didn’t tell me, except about Mr. Linebarge. He said he was coming here, and that’s all.”

“Did he say why?”

“Not him. He kept things to himself.”

“Do you know if he took the boy without permission?”

“That’s what Mrs. Johnson says. Fred never did it before. Fred always tried to do the right thing.”

Ann said: “Is Mrs. Johnson out there alone?”

“As far as I know she is. She’s taking it calm enough, or I wouldn’t have left her. When they started making these accusations, I had to come in and see—”

I interrupted her: “We’d better go out there. Do you have a car, Mrs. Miner?”

“We had. Fred had to sell it to pay his fine. I rode in on the bus.”

“I’ll drive you out.”

“Shouldn’t we call the Federal Bureau?” Ann said.

“Not without talking to Johnson first. It’s his boy.”

CHAPTER
3
:
      
I knew Abel Johnson slightly. He
had come into the office in February to discuss the Miner case, and Alex had introduced us. Johnson was an expansive middle-aged man who was supposed to have made a moderate fortune in San Diego real estate during the war. A year or so after the war ended he retired to Pacific Point and bought a country house a few miles out of town. There he settled down with his wife and baby son.

The courthouse gossips said that he had been seriously ill and had married his nurse. I had never met Mrs. Johnson. Johnson himself was regarded as a leading citizen. He was a heavy contributor to local charities and a member of the retired executives’ club. If his son had really been kidnapped, there was going to be a great deal of strong public feeling.