Tales for a Stormy Night (14 page)

The old man grunted and thrust his bent shoulders as far back as they would go—in subconscious imitation of The Fox’s military bearing. On the way to the “Sun Room”—so called because of the brilliance of its lighting—where Thomas Coyne was waiting, the chief paused and asked, “Is it safe to say for sure now that Elsie Troy was the first victim? That we don’t have a transient killer with Rockland just one stop on his itinerary?”

There had been several indications of such a possibility.

“I think we may assume that Elsie Troy was the beginning,” Fox said. “I think now that her murder was a random business, unpremeditated. She was killed at night—in her bedroom, with the lights on and the window shades up. She was fully dressed, unmolested. It wasn’t a setup for murder. It was pure luck that someone didn’t see it happening.

“But having walked out of Elsie Troy’s house a free man, her assailant got a new sense of power—a thrill he’d never had in his life. And then there began in him what amounted to a craving for murder. How he chooses victims, I don’t know. That’s why I called attention to the…the state of suspension in the marriages of the victims.” Fox shrugged. “At least, that’s my reconstruction of the pattern.”

“You make it sound like you were there,” the old man said.

“Yes,” Fox said, “I suppose I do.” He watched the old man bull his neck and plow down the hall ahead of him, contemplating the bit of sadism in himself—in, he suspected, all policemen. It was their devil, as was avarice the plague of merchants, conceit the foe of actors, complacency the doctor’s demon, pride the clergyman’s. He believed firmly that man’s worst enemy was within himself. His own, Fox thought grimly, had cost him a wife, and beyond that, God Almighty knew what else. There were times since Nancy’s going when he felt the very structure of his being tremble. There was no joy without her, only the sometimes bitter pleasure of enduring pain.

Coyne sat in the bright light, as Fox had expected, with the serenity of a religious mendicant. His anus folded, he could wait out eternity by his manner. It was unnatural behavior for any man under police inquisition. Fox was himself very casual. “Well, Tom, it’s about time for us to start all over again. You know the chief?”

Coyne made a gesture of recognition. The chief merely glared down at him, his face a wrinkled mask of distaste.

“April twenty-ninth,” Fox led. “That was the night you decided finally that you had time to fix Mrs. Troy’s back steps.”

“Afternoon,” Coyne corrected. “I was home at night.”

“What do you call the dividing line between afternoon and night?”

“Dark—at night it gets dark…sir.”

“And you want it understood that you were home
before
dark?”

“I was home before dark,” Coyne said calmly.

There had never been reference in the newspaper to the hour of Elsie Troy’s death, partly because the medical examiner could put it no closer than between seven and nine. The month being April, darkness fell by seven.

“Suppose you tell the chief just what happened while you were there.”

“Nothing happened. I went there on my way home from work. I fixed the steps. Then I called in to her that the job was done. She came out and said, ‘That’s fine, Tom. I’ll pay you next week.’ I never did get paid, but I guess that don’t matter now.”

Told by melancholy rote, Fox thought, having heard even the philosophic ending before. But then, most people repeated themselves under normal circumstances, especially about grievances they never expected to be righted.

“What I can’t understand, Tom, is why you decided to fix the steps that day, and not, say, the week before?”

Coyne shrugged. “I just had the time then, I guess.”

“She hadn’t called you?”

“No, sir,” he said with emphasis.

“You say that as though she would not have called you under any circumstances.”

Coyne merely shrugged again.

“As a matter of fact, it was the husband—when they were still together—who asked you to repair the steps, wasn’t it, Tom?”

“I guess it was.”

“And you happened to remember it on the day she was about to be murdered.”

“I didn’t plan it that way,” Coyne said, the words insolent, but his manner still serene. He tilted his chair back.

“It’s a funny thing, Chief,” Fox said. “Here’s a man commissioned to do a job on a friend’s house. He doesn’t get around to it until the home has broken up. If it was me, I’d have forgotten all about the job under those circumstances—never done it at all.”

“So would I,” the chief said, “unless I was looking for an excuse to go there.”

“Exactly,” Fox said, still in a casual voice.

“It wouldn’t be on account of you they broke up, would it, Coyne?” the chief suggested.

Coyne seemed to suppress a laugh. It was the first time his effort at control showed. “No, sir.”

“Don’t you like women?” the chief snapped.

“I’m living with one now,” Coyne said.

“Mrs. Tuttle?” said Fox, naming Coyne’s landlady.

“What’s wrong with that? She’s a widow.”

Fox did not say what was wrong with it. But Mr. Thomas Coyne was not going to have it both ways: he had alibied himself with Mrs. Turtle for the hours of all three murders. A paramour was not the most believable of witnesses. But then, from what Fox had seen of Mrs. Tuttle, he would not have called her the most believable of paramours, either.

With deliberate ease Fox then led Coyne through an account of his activities on the nights of the two subsequent murders. By the suspect’s telling they brought Coyne nowhere near the scenes.

Finally Fox exchanged glances with the old man. He had had more than enough of Coyne by now and very little confidence that the carpenter had been worth bringing in again. “You can go now, Tom,” Fox said, “but don’t leave town.” He nodded at the uniformed policeman by the door. And then, after a pause, “By the way, Tom, when was the last time you went swimming?”

“Oh, two or three weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“Baker’s Beach,” Coyne said, naming the public park.

Fox nodded, held the door for the chief, and then closed it behind them.

“That guy should go on the radio,” the old man said. “He knows all the answers.”

“Seems like it,” Fox said.

The second victim, Jane Mullins, had been strangled on the beach. But if Tom Coyne, as he said, had gone swimming two or three weeks ago, that would account for the sand found in Coyne’s room.

Sand and a stack of newspapers—the only clues to Thomas Coyne’s interests…and a clue also to the personality of his landlady; Mrs. Tuttle was a very careless housekeeper to leave sand and old newspapers lying around for weeks. She might be as careless with time—even with the truth.

Three strangulations—all of women who lived alone—within a month. It was enough to set the whole of a city the size of Rockland—population 110,000—on edge. As the
Gazette
editorialized: “When murder can match statistics with traffic deaths, it is time to investigate the investigators.”

Knowing Ed Fox so well, Nancy wondered if he had not planted that line with the
Gazette
; it had The Fox’s bite. It would be like him, if he was not getting all the cooperation he wanted from his superiors.

She looked at the clock and poured herself another cup of coffee. She was due at the radio station at eleven. Her broadcast time was noon: “The Woman’s Way.”

How cynical she had become about him, and through him about so many things. As much as anything, that cynicism had enabled her to make the break: the realization that she was turning into a bitter woman with a slant on the world that made her see first the propensity for evil in a man, and only incidentally his struggle against it. This philosophy might make Ed a good policeman, but it made her a poor educator. And she considered herself an educator despite his belittlement of her work. A radio commentator was responsible to her audience to teach them a little truth. Why just a little? Ed had always said to that.

She wondered if Ed thought about her at all these days, when she could scarcely think of anything except him. It was as though she bore his heelmark on her soul. A cruel image—oh, she had them. For a month she had lived apart from him, yet the morbid trauma of their life together still hung about her. If she could not banish the memories, she must find psychiatric help. That would greatly amuse Ed—one more useless occupation by his reckoning. Worse than useless, the enemy of justice: his hardest catch could escape the punishment that fit his crime by a psychiatrist’s testimony.

Nancy folded the morning paper and rinsed her coffee cup.

Strange, the occupations of the three victims: Mary Philips had operated a beauty parlor, Elsie Troy had run a nursery school. She could hear Ed lecture on that: why have children if you pushed them out of the house in rompers? And poor Jane Mullins had written advertising copy—to Ed, perhaps the most useless nonsense of all. Well, that would give Ed something in common with the murderer—contempt for his victims. Ed always liked to have a little sympathy for the murderer: it made him easier to find. And no man ever suffered such anguish of soul as did Ed Fox at the hour of his man’s execution.

There, surely, was the worst moment in all her five years of marriage to him: the night Mort Simmons was executed. Simmons had shot a man and Ed had made the arrest and got the confession. Nancy had known her husband was suffering, and she had ventured to console him with some not very original remarks about his having only done his duty, and that doubts were perfectly natural at such an hour.

“Doubts!” he had screamed at her. “I have no more doubt about his guilt than the devil waiting for him at the gates of hell!”

She had thought a long time about that. Slowly then the realization had come to her that Ed Fox suffered when such a man died because, in the pursuit and capture of him, Ed identified himself with the criminal. And fast upon that realization the thought had taken hold of her that never in their marriage had she been that close to him.

Nancy opened her hand and saw the marks of her nails in the palm. She looked at her nails. They needed polish. A beauty operator, Mary Philips. If Nancy had been in the habit of having her hair done by a professional, she might possibly have known Mrs. Philips. The shop was in the neighborhood where she and Ed had lived, where Ed still lived….

She caught up her purse and briefcase and forced her thoughts onto a recipe for which she had no appetite. Ed was not troubled that way in his work….

“Damn it, Fox, give them something! They’re riding my back like a cartload of monkeys.” This was the old man’s complaint on the third day after Mary Philips’s murder. Reporters were coming into Rockland from all over the country. The mayor had turned over the facilities of his own office to them.

So Captain Fox sat down and composed a description of a man who might have been the slayer. He did it aware of his cynicism.

The state police laboratory had been unable to bring out any really pertinent physical evidence in any of the cases. The murderer was a wily one—a maniac or a genius…except in the instance of Elsie Troy. Fox could not help but dwell on that random start to so successful a career.

The detective stood over the stenographer while she typed the description—twenty copies on the electric machine. He then dictated a few lines calculated to counteract the description, to placate the rising hysteria of all the lonely women in Rockland. So many lonely women, whether or not they lived alone…Did Nancy feel alarmed? he wondered. If she did, she had not called on him for reassurance. But then she would not. There was that streak of stubborn pride in her that made her run like a wounded animal from the hand most willing to help.

“Forty-eight complaints have already been investigated, twenty-one suspects questioned…” Give them statistics, Fox thought. Nowadays they mean more to people than words. Maybe figures didn’t lie, but they made a convincing camouflage for the truth.

He handed out the release over the chief of police’s name, and found himself free once more to do the proper work of a detective, something unrelated to public relations. Suspect Number 22 had been waiting for over an hour in the Sun Room.

It gave Fox a degree of satisfaction to know that he was there—“Deacon” Alvin Rugg. Rugg with two g’s. G as in God, he thought. The young man was a religious fanatic—either a fanatic or a charlatan, possibly both, in Fox’s mind. And he was The Fox’s own special catch, having been flushed out in the policeman’s persistent search for something the three women might have had in common besides the shedding of their husbands. All three—Elsie Troy, Jane Mullins, and Mary Philips—were interested in a revivalist sect called “Church of the Morning.”

On his way to the Sun Room, Fox changed his mind about tackling the suspect there. Why not treat him as if he were only a witness?—the better to disarm him. He had no police record, young Mr. Rugg, except for a violation of the peace ordinance in a nearby town: the complaint had been filed against his father and himself—their zeal had simply begat too large a crowd.

Fox had the young man brought to the office, and there he offered him the most comfortable chair in the room. Rugg chose a straight one instead. Fox thought he might prove rugged, Rugg.

The lithe youth wore his hair crested around his head a little like a brushed-up halo, for it was almost the color of gold. His eyes were large, blue, and vacuous, though no doubt some would call them deep.

“Church of the Morning,” Fox started, trying without much success to keep the cynicism from his voice. “When did you join up?”

“I was called at birth,” Alvin replied with a rotish piety.

He was older than he looked, Fox realized, and a sure phony. “How old are you, Rugg?”

“Twenty.”

“Let’s see your draft registration. This is no newspaper interview.”

“Thirty-two,” Rugg amended, wistful as a woman.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Odd jobs. I’m a handyman when I’m not doing the Lord’s work.”

“How do you get these…these odd jobs?”

“My father recommends me.”

“That would be the Reverend Rugg?”