Tales for a Stormy Night (19 page)

“Poor fool—he deserves it.” Shanley shook with silent laughter.

Sommers took a mouthful of his drink. He was afraid to drink it, and afraid not to, so precarious was his position. He did not know what the joke was about, but he was sure he would not like it. This was the house of a despoiler. Shanley would defend the devil no more cynically than he would the innocent. And he was a leech; he seemed to suck at the very substance of a man’s soul while bantering him with words.

“Now you didn’t come to see me about the Rossi affair, Sommers, did you?” the lawyer said blandly. He turned to his wife. “Why don’t you take the shaker, Betty, and go along upstairs now?”

Mrs. Shanley got up while she spoke. “Where I come from, the gentleman waits for the lady to retire. The trouble with you, Jack…”

“I’m not a gentleman,” Shanley finished her sentence.

“No need to go, Mrs. Shanley.” Sommers got clumsily to his feet. “On my account, at least. It was only about—Kelley that I came to see you.” He hoped fervently that this sudden lie would serve to get him out of here. And poor Kelley would scarcely feel another kick. “If this murder goes unsolved, I think we should abolish the Point True police force and consolidate with the township.”

“You think so?” Shanley sat where he was for a moment, smiling, scrutinizing his visitor. Then he got up and without another word strode across to the adjoining room, a library or study.

Mrs. Shanley lingered, a little look of apprehension on her face. When the lawyer returned, she said, “Now, Jack, it’s just coincidence.”

“Go upstairs,” he said. And to Sommers, “Here’s something you may want to sign, if that’s the way you feel.”

Sommers glanced at the petition thrust into his hands. It outlined the same idea he had just proposed. “Yes,” he said. “I shall certainly want to sign it.” He could feel the pulse throbbing at his right temple.

“I drew this up after the last meeting of the Village Board,” Shanley said, “two weeks ago.”

“You can see how far out of touch I am then. I thought I’d come up with a new idea.” He supposed now he must have overheard talk on the bus which his subconscious dredged up when he needed an excuse to get away. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“Good night, Mr. Sommers,” Shanley’s wife said from the stairway. “I hope you’ll come again and bring your charming daughter. I adore teenaged girls. And I’m sure Jack does, don’t you, honey?”

Shanley did not answer. He stood smiling, aloof and tolerant, until she was out of sight. Then he said, imitating his wife’s drawl: “Teenaged girls
can
be very enticing.”

Sommers went, almost blindly to the door. He suspected now that Shanley was deliberately provoking him. Or was it all his imagination, the nightmare inside a nightmare? Shanley might only be mocking his own wife.

“Sommers,” Shanley said when they were both outdoors. “It’s not necessary that you like your lawyer, you know. You just have to hold his advocacy in some regard.”

“I’ll remember that,” Sommers murmured.

“And something else—I don’t like being played for a sucker, but I won’t ever turn down a Point True man who comes to me for counsel.”

Chief Phil Kelley knew most of the things being said about him in the village. He knew how shaky his job was, and he also knew he had five kids to support, the oldest one in high school, the youngest—and last, please God—in rompers.

He knew the parallel the villagers were drawing between Rossi’s murder and the druggist’s, and he knew that some of the loudest talkers were aware that the comparison was neither fair nor accurate. But who ever worried about being fair to a policeman? In the case of the druggist, somebody in the police service had deliberately messed up the clues, somebody who had hated the druggist’s guts; Kelley knew it, he even knew who the deputy was, but he had no proof. And in the end he could not even fire the deputy: the Village Board had turned down his recommendation on the basis of insufficient grounds.

In the Rossi case, his deputies were not plowing under any possible clues. The little black money satchel had turned up in an abandoned well-drilling. It was not unreasonable to hope the weapon might also turn up in an old well. That meant a difficult search: the abandoned diggings were not all dry.

One of the favorite jokes about Kelley—and he knew this one, too—was on the way he had of sitting in the patrol car outside Rossi’s Tavern and clocking speeders on the Upper Road. How else was a cop to make a living in Point True, they grinned. But the fact of the situation was that too many kids from the township high school used Rossi’s as a rendezvous, and Kelley felt that the presence of the patrol car there would turn some of the youngsters away.

Now and then, too, he was in the habit of walking into the place—to get a cup of coffee, or more often, to call his wife. Thus, without making an issue of it, he watched for licensing violations. And it was in this unostentatious fashion that he had learned of Rossi and his clientele, a knowledge that he hoped fervently would serve him now. He knew, for example, that Rossi was fond, far too fond, of young girls—though never could a complaint be got against him.

But that evening, when it was reported to him by a deputy that Tom Sommers had just paid a visit to the lawyer, Shanley, Kelley thought about Ellen Sommers. He had never seen her at the tavern. But that did not prove anything.

Kelley went into his dining room after getting the report. It seemed a shame to disturb so perfect a picture: four of his children doing homework at once. He asked his daughter to come into the kitchen for a minute.

“Do you know if Ellen Sommers has a boy friend?”

“No, I don’t,” she said—in a way Kelley understood to mean she did know but wasn’t telling.

“I don’t think her father would know it if she had one,” the policeman said, “him being as strict a man as he is.”

“He isn’t as fierce as he looks,” his daughter said. “That’s just his way. I think he’s handsome.”

“Mr. Sommers?” Kelley said, no longer understanding.

The girl said, “Now, don’t be jealous, daddy!”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Go back to your homework.”

He was putting on his coat, however, when she came out to the hall. “Daddy, I’ll tell you, only you mustn’t say where you heard it. Ellen’s just mad about Ted Green. It’s awful really, because Ted makes fun of her. I mean, about how she was brought up, so strict, and she won’t drink or anything. But Ellen’s so mad in love, she doesn’t care what he says.”

“Thanks. I won’t say anything. Good night, my dear.” Kelley kissed her forehead. “Tell mother not to wait up for me.”

Ted Green was a regular customer at Rossi’s Tavern.

Sommers, coming down into the village after his nerve-wracking half hour at the Shanley house, wanted more than anything else to see his daughter. It was after nine o’clock, so he called at the Rapps’ and asked Ellen if she would like to walk home with him.

They walked block after block in painful silence. Ellen, he noticed, stayed carefully apart from him.

“I wish to God your mother were alive now,” he blurted out finally, as helpless as a child himself.

“I wish I was dead,” the girl said, the morning’s pretense of high spirits vanishing.

“Why?”

Ellen did not answer.

“Something like your experience happens to most people, Ellen, at one time or other. It’s the sad truth about human beings. And you know he’s dead, don’t you?”

“It isn’t him. It’s you. I don’t want to talk about it even.”

“But I do, Ellen. Whatever it is you’re accusing me of, I must know what it is.”

“I wish I hadn’t told you what happened! Oh, how I wish I hadn’t.” The child began to cry. She was a wraith of a girl, all the more a child for crowding a womanhood she did not understand. “You made me feel so filthy.”

“Child dearest, I meant just the opposite, whatever I may have said. I was talking about Rossi…”

“Stop talking about him, papa! He’s dead and I don’t care. I’m not even glad. Only I don’t want to talk about him—not ever!”

After a few long seconds Sommers said quietly, “Do you want to talk about Ted Green?”

“Oh, no—no!” she said, even more in agony.

“What did I say, Ellen? What did I do? I tried to tell you that all men were not like him—not like Rossi.”

“I know that’s what you said. And you proved it! You said you hadn’t seen a woman since my mother.”

“Is that what it is—my saying that?”

The girl didn’t answer. She averted her face and began to weep softly. Sometimes her feet stumbled, but she caught herself and still stayed apart from him.

Yes, Sommers thought, he could remember saying that: so righteous, so wrongly righteous, and after she had brought the whole agonizing story to him, even confessing her humiliation in waiting for a boy…He cleared his throat. “I wish I could explain something that happened to me last night after you had gone to bed. I wanted to kill him…”

“He doesn’t matter, papa.”

“I know that, I believe it, too.” He wanted desperately now to communicate the good thing that had happened to him. But he knew even while he spoke that the telling of it was merely a diversion. Nevertheless he plunged ahead. “Let me try to tell you this, Ellen. I won’t go into where or how, and I don’t believe in ghosts, but there was an instant last night when I felt your mother as close to me as she ever was alive.”

In the light of an approaching car he glimpsed the girl’s face. What he was trying to say was not getting through to her at all. “Ellen!”

When she looked at him he forced himself, flatly, simply, to tell a very personal truth—a truth which related to her agony, not to his mystical experience. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to see another woman. Sometimes I’ve wanted to very much.”

Her tears welled abundantly, along with little choking sobs. He had touched the very core of her misery. “Oh, papa, isn’t it awful, what happens inside us?”

He dared then to take her hand in his and squeeze it gently. Her response was quick and fierce, a clutch of his hand and then the freeing of it. She was too diffident for anything demonstrative.

“It isn’t awful at all,” he said. “Sometimes it’s wonderful. What is awful is not being able to understand it or talk about it.”

Chief Kelley did not conceal his car. But he parked it around the corner from the Sommers’ house, not wanting to call the neighbors’ attention to it. Then he waited on the porch. It was such a clear night he could see the lights across the river doubled by their reflection in the water. He spoke as soon as father and daughter turned in the gate.

Sommers hesitated, then came on. “Good evening, Kelley. Ellen, I think it would be better if you go up to your room.”

“I’d like to talk to Ellen too, Mr. Sommers.”

He came as quickly to the point as he could, accepting only the hospitality of a chair in the living room. “I want to ask you, Ellen, when was the last time you were in Rossi’s Tavern?”

It was an unfair approach, but both father and daughter responded.

“I was only…”

“Ellen does not patronize taverns,” Sommers said over the girl’s words.

Kelley was not turned aside. “My daughter isn’t allowed to either, Mr. Sommers, but I got the feeling that if there was somebody in one she wanted very much to be with, she might just make an exception to the rules I lay down. Ellen, speak for yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When?”

“Yesterday evening. Only the person I wanted to see wasn’t there.”

“Who was there?”

The girl’s voice was very low, and her face flushed. Sommers sat, pale and tense, working his hands.

“Just Mr. Rossi, sir—at first. I asked him if he’d seen this person I was looking for, and he said no, but that I could wait. He expected him.”

“You may as well tell me the whole story,” Kelley said.

“The man got her in a corner and made advances to her,” Sommers interrupted. The veins were standing out on his forehead.

“Nothing else happened, Mr. Kelley,” Ellen said. “I tried to run away but he’d locked the door. You see, he’d got me to go into the back room to wait so that I wouldn’t actually be in the tavern. And then—I don’t quite know how it happened. But Mrs. Rossi came in through the rear door. She had a key, I think. But I just ran. She was shouting at him in Italian. But I ran all the way down through the woods home.”

“And told your father?”

She nodded.

“I don’t suppose there’s much point now in asking why you didn’t come to me about it, Mr. Sommers?”

“If you can’t keep youngsters like Green out of places like that, what could I expect? This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.”

“I know it’s not, but I need a signed complaint before I can do anything.” The policeman paused, thinking about it. “Can you tell me another time something like this happened?”

“No, but I’d suggest you talk to Shanley on the hill about it.”

“I just might,” Kelley said. There was no one he cared less to talk to. Shanley had the arrogance of Satan. “Is that what you went to see him about?”

“No—it was on a private matter.”

“I see.” Kelley turned to Ellen who was making pellets in her lap out of damp kleenex. “Who else did you talk to besides your father?”

“Nobody. I swear it, Mr. Kelley.”

“Didn’t Ted Green want to know why you didn’t meet him?”

The girl spoke almost in a whisper. “He didn’t know I was going to be there, Mr. Kelley. It wasn’t actually a date, you see.”

“Isn’t that enough, Kelley?” Sommers demanded.

“From Ellen? I think so, Mr. Sommers, and I guess if it’s all right with you, the two of us could do our talking down in the village.”

He purposely avoided mentioning the stationhouse, and Sommers threw him a grateful look. Outdoors, the policeman said, “Just what did you do about it, Sommers?”

“Nothing in the end. But I’m not sure I can prove it.”

The policeman opened the car door. “Do you have such little confidence in the Point True police that you feel you’ve got to prove your innocence?”

“I don’t have much confidence, that’s the truth,” Sommers admitted. He seemed to be examining his hands by the light of the dashboard. “And maybe I’m a little ashamed of my innocence.”