A Bullet for Cinderella Page 12

  “You don’t need anybody else,” Caswell said. “I’ve told you all you’ve got to know, haven’t I?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Caswell. You can go along if you want to.”

  “I’ll stay and see what happens, thank you.”

  Captain Marion studied the papers in front of him and then muttered to himself for a while. At last he looked up. “It’s not up to me to make any decision. That’ll be up to the inquest. But I think we can figure that George was pretty beat down. Lost his wife. Lost his brother. Lost most of his business. Drinking heavy. It certainly looks to me that if any man had reasons for suicide, George did. Steve, you look uneasy. What’s on your mind?”

  “Captain, I don’t think it’s that easy. I’ve seen some suicides. I’ve read up on them. A towel was used as a crude silencer. I’ve never heard of that being used. A suicide doesn’t care about the noise. He wants people to come running. He wants it to be dramatic. The towel-wrapped muzzle of the gun was in his mouth when it went off. The gun was new. A three-oh-three bolt-action rifle, right out of stock, with the tag still wired to the trigger guard. There were nice clean prints on the side of the action. Too clean. They were George’s, of course. There were no prints on the inside doorknob. It wasn’t wiped, but it had been smeared. That could have been accidental or purposeful. Many suicides are naked. More than half. That fits. Buttons had been ripped off his shirt. Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe somebody undressed him in a hurry. There was a bottle on the floor, under the bed. Half full of liquor. George left very clear prints on that. I’m interested in the stiff-legged man.”

  “What do you mean, Steve?”

  “I think somebody met George after he left Stump’s. I talked to Stump. George was nearly helpless. He carried a key to the store. I think somebody went to the store with him and took a rifle out of stock. I think he slid it down his pant leg. That gave him a stiff-legged walk. He took George up to his room. He fed him more liquor. When he passed out he undressed him, sat him on the edge of the bed, wrapped the muzzle, opened his mouth, put it between his teeth, and pulled the trigger. He put prints on the gun and bottle, smeared the knob, and left.”

  “Steve, dammit, you always make things harder.”

  “Strange things are going on. I got a report from the county sheriff’s office today. A man named Grassman left his stuff in a cabin and didn’t come back for it. That was last Sunday. He’d been staying there a couple of weeks. Milton Grassman from Chicago. The county police found stuff in the cabin to indicate he worked for a Chicago firm of investigators, and was down here on that Fulton thing. He stayed twenty miles north of town, on the Redding road. Yesterday a car was towed in. Over-time parking. A routine deal. Blue sedan, late model, Illinois plates. Just before I came here I found out the registration on the steering post is to this Grassman. All right now. Grassman has disappeared, leaving his clothes and his car. George Warden dies all of a sudden. Grassman was down here looking into the disappearance of a Mr. Fulton who took off with George Warden’s wife. It ties up, somehow. I want to know how. If we can tie it up, we can find out for sure if it was suicide or murder. I vote for murder. It was a bold way to do it, and a dangerous way to do it. The man who did it took chances. But I think he did it. Was it Grassman? Was it that man over there who claims to be writing a book? Who was it? And why was it done?”

  Marion sighed heavily. “Steve, I could never get it through my head why you take off so ugly on those men who came down to poke around. That poor Fulton woman, if she wants to spend her money, why don’t you let her? It’s no skin off us.”

  “I don’t want my judgment or the result of any investigation of mine questioned. We’re the law and order here. I don’t want amateur competition.”

  “Sometimes those fellas can help, Steve.”

  “I have yet to see the day.”

  “What did those Chicago people say? Did you get in touch?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you phone them, Steve. Or teletype Chicago and let them handle it with the agency. Those fellows may want to send somebody else down.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?” demanded Prine, losing control.

  “Why, to look for Grassman!” Marion said mildly. “Missing, isn’t he?”

  I managed to walk out beside Ruth. She was cool, almost to the point of complete indifference. “Ruth, I want to be able to explain some time.”

  “I don’t think it’s worth bothering about, really.”

  The day had begun to clear and we stood in frail sunlight.

  “I don’t know why I should worry so much about your good opinion,” I said, trying to strike a light note.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t even think about it. I’m usually frank with people. Too frank, as you will remember. I expect others to be the same. I usually expect too much. I’m usually disappointed. I’m getting used to it.”

  I found myself becoming annoyed at her attitude. “It would be nice for you to get used to it. It would make it easier to be the only perfect person—surrounded by all the rest of us.”

  “What do you think you—”

  “I think you sounded pretty stuffy. That’s all. You make a lot of virtuous noise. And you condemn me without knowing the score.”

  “You don’t seem exactly eager to tell me the score.”

  We stood glaring at each other. It suddenly tickled her sense of the ridiculous. I saw her struggle to keep from smiling. Just then a man came up to us. He was young, with a thin face and heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Hello, Allan,” Ruth said. “Allan, this is Tal Howard, Allan Peary.”

  We shook hands and he said, “Ruthie, I just heard they’re going to appoint me to straighten out George’s estate. What there is left of it. Do you happen to know what happened to the household effects when he sold to Syler?”

  “He sold everything, Allan.”

  Allan Peary shook his head. “I don’t know where the money went. I’ve been in touch with the bank. There’s only three accounts open. The lumberyard and the store and his personal account. And damn little money in any of them. You’re about the only one of his old friends who saw much of him, Ruth. Where did it all go? He liquidated an awful lot of stuff in the past year. What the hell was he doing? Playing the market? Gambling? Women? Drugs?”

  “He was drinking it up, I guess.”

  “Oh, sure,” Allan said. “I know what Syler paid for the house. I know what he got when he sold the lease on Delaware Street. I know what he got for the cement trucks. If he didn’t touch anything but Napoleon brandy at twenty-five bucks a bottle, he’d have to drink a thousand bucks a week worth to go through that money.”

  “Maybe it’s in some other account, Allan.”

  “I doubt it.” He looked at me uneasily and said, “I don’t want to talk out of school, but he had a big tab at Stump’s. He was behind on the room at the hotel. And I heard last week that Sid Forrester had a sixty-day exclusive listing on the lumberyard and had an interested customer lined up. That was the only thing George had left that was making any money.”

  “Maybe when you go over his accounts you can find what he wrote checks for, Allan.”

  “That isn’t going to work, either. He wrote checks for cash and cashed them at the bank. Amounts ranging from five hundred to two thousand.”

  Ruth frowned. “He didn’t seem worried about money.”

  “I’ve tried to talk to him a few times. He didn’t seem worried about anything. He didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. He almost seemed to be enjoying some big joke—on himself.”

  And right at that moment something became very clear to me. Something I should have seen before. I wondered why I had been so dense. Once you made the proper assumption, a lot of things fell into their proper place.

  • TEN •

  I realized they were still talking, but I was no longer listening to what they said. Then I realized that Ruth had spoken to me.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I
have to be running along.”

  “Wait a minute. Please. Can we talk for a minute? You too, Mr. Peary.” I saw that she was holding her shoulders as if she were chilled. The sun had gone under again and a raw April wind was blowing. “We could sit in my car a minute. I want to—make a guess as to what George was doing with the money.”

  They looked at me oddly. Peary shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  We crossed the street and got into my car, Ruth in the middle.

  “It’s just a guess. You know that Rose Fulton has never been satisfied with her husband’s disappearance. Prine investigated and he’s satisfied. George was out of town when Eloise ran off with Fulton. A neighbor saw Eloise carry a bag out to the car. Now suppose that Eloise wasn’t running away permanently. Imagine that she was just going to stay the night with Fulton. She didn’t want to stay at the house in case George should come home. And there were the neighbors to consider. She wouldn’t want to go to a motel or hotel in the area. She was too well known. So she planned to go up to the lake with Fulton. She took just the things she’d need for overnight. Was it the time of year when there wouldn’t be people up at the lake?”

  “It was this time of year,” Ruth said.

  “Now suppose George came home and found she wasn’t home. He started hunting for her. And went to the lake. Or imagine that for some reason, driving back from his trip out of town, he stopped at the lake and found them there together. What would he have done?”

  “I see where this is heading,” Ruth said. “It gives me a strange feeling. George loved Eloise and trusted her. I guess he was the only one who couldn’t see what she was. If George walked in on the two of them, I think he would have gone temporarily insane. I think he would have killed them. He used to be a powerful man, Tal.”

  “So he killed them up there at the lake. He got rid of the bodies. He could have wired weights to the bodies and sunk them in the lake, but I’m more inclined to think he buried them. Maybe he buried them on his own land there. He was lucky in that she had been seen at the Inn with Fulton and she was seen leaving with Fulton. He had no way to know it would work out so well. He killed them in anger, and buried the bodies in panic. For a long time he was safe. He tried to go on as though nothing had happened. He played the part of the abandoned husband. And then somebody found the bodies. They didn’t report it to the police. They went to George.”

  Peary said eagerly, “And put the bite on him. They demanded money and kept demanding money. He had to start selling things. When nearly everything was gone, he killed himself. He couldn’t face exposure and trial and conviction. So we have to look for somebody who has gotten rich all of a sudden.”

  “Or somebody smart enough to just put it away and not attract attention by spending it,” I said.

  “He seemed so strange sometimes,” Ruth said softly. “He said queer things I didn’t understand. He was like—one of those bad movies where people laugh at the wrong places.”

  “It would be quite a thing to have on your mind,” Peary said. “The more I think about it, the more logical it seems, Mr. Howard. I think you’ve hit it right on the head. The next step is to prove it. And that means looking for the bodies. I—I’d like to hear what Mrs. Fulton has to say, though. She’s been annoying Prine by sending people here. I’d like to know why she’s so convinced that she’s willing to spend money.”

  “We could phone her,” I said. “If you could get her address.”

  He got out of the car. “I think I can get it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  We placed the call from Peary’s office. Peary talked to her from the inner office. Ruth and I listened on the extension, her ear close to mine.

  The woman had a harsh voice. “How do you come into this?”

  “I don’t, really. Mr. George Warden committed suicide last night. It gives us a lead to what might have happened to your husband.”

  “He was killed and he was killed down there. Maybe that woman did it. I don’t know. Now I hear that man Grassman is missing. I talked to him before he went down there. When are you people going to wake up down there? What kind of a place is that, anyhow?”

  “What makes you think your husband is dead?”

  “Henry was no damn good. He’d chase anything in a skirt. I knew it. That was the way he was. He’d always come crawling back. He even liked crawling, I think. This business with that Warden woman was more of the same. It wouldn’t last any two years. He had fourteen hundred dollars in his personal checking account. That’s all tied up. He’s never drawn on it. He owed payments on the car. The finance company has never been able to find the car. We’ve got two kids in high school. I’ll say this for him, he loved the kids. He couldn’t go two years without seeing them. Not Henry. Personally, believe me, I’m convinced I’ll never see him again and I don’t care. But he had a couple of big insurance policies. I insisted on that to protect me and the kids. What protection have I got? The companies won’t pay off. It has to be six years from the time he dropped off the face of the earth. Four more years I have to get along. What about college for the kids? I tell you, you people better wake up down there and find out what happened to Henry.”

  There was more, but she merely repeated herself. The conversation ended. I hung up and looked at Ruth. Her smile was wan and she shivered a little.

  “That was pretty convincing, Tal,” she said.

  “Very.”

  Peary came into the outer office. He looked thoughtful. “Suppose I was the blackmailer. I find the bodies. I came across them by accident. Or maybe I was smart enough to look for them. Okay. What do I do? I make damn well certain that nobody else finds them and spoils the game. I want to do a better job of hiding them than George did. But I don’t want to completely dispose of the bodies. I want them where they can be a threat. I want them where they can be dug up.”

  Ruth said, “That man Grassman. We saw him out at the lake, Tal and I did. And now he’s disappeared. That could mean that he found the bodies.”

  “And found the blackmailer, too,” Peary said.

  I found myself remembering the odd conversation with George. When he had said he couldn’t give me a job. And had offered me a gun out of stock. He had known I had come from Fitz. He had thought I was a friend of Fitz, cutting myself in on the take. It was obvious that Fitz was the blackmailer. I remembered the expensive look of the suit he was wearing when I had seen him at the Inn. He had come to Hillston with the idea of finding the money Timmy had hidden. He had stayed in the cabin out at the lake. He made a point of telling me that the money wasn’t hidden out at the lake. He had looked there. And found something profitable and horrible.

  But what was most convincing was Fitz telling me that he was certain Eloise hadn’t taken the money with her. He must have appreciated his own joke. Eloise had never meant to leave permanently. She would have been a fool to leave as long as there was a chance of Timmy coming back. She knew about the money. Yet Timmy had been shrewd enough not to trust her with information about the hiding place.

  I thought of that first conversation that must have taken place between Fitz and George after Fitz found the bodies.

  “What should we do?” Ruth asked. “Should we talk to Captain Marion?”

  At four-thirty that gray Wednesday I stood on the lake shore with Ruth and Allan Peary, Sergeant Brubaker and Lieutenant Prine. We were in front of the place that had belonged to George Warden before he had sold it. The narrow dock had been hauled out onto the shore for the winter and hadn’t been replaced. The wind had died and the lake was like a gray steel plate. Voices had an odd resonance in the stillness. Captain Marion came out of the cabin with a husky young patrolman. The patrolman had changed to swimming trunks. He wore an aqualung with the face mask shoved up onto his forehead. He walked gingerly on the rough path in his bare feet. He looked serious, self-important, and chilled.

  Captain Marion said, “Try to stay on this line right here. The water looks kind of murky. How’s the light?”


  The patrolman clicked the watertight flashlight on. “It looks bright enough.”

  Prine said in a low voice so Captain Marion couldn’t overhear, “This is nonsense.”

  No one answered him. Brubaker moved away from us. I glanced down at Ruth’s face. Her lips were compressed. She watched the patrolman wade out into the water. It shelved off abruptly. He thrashed and caught his balance, the water up to his chest. He adjusted the face mask, bit down on the mouthpiece. He glanced toward us, then moved forward and was gone, leaving a swirl of turbulence on the surface. The ripples spread out, died away.

  Prine lit a cigarette, threw the match aside with a quick, impatient gesture. He had looked tall when I had seen him behind his desk. Standing beside me he was not tall at all. His trunk was very long, but his legs were short and heavy.

  The long minutes passed. We made idle talk, but we kept our voices low. The pines on far hills looked black.

  The man came abruptly to the surface about forty feet off shore. He swam to the shore and waded out of the water, dripping. He pushed the face mask up onto his forehead. He was shivering.

  “Man, it’s cold down there,” he said.

  We moved toward him. “Well?” Marion demanded.

  “Here, sir.” He handed Marion something. We looked at it as it lay on Marion’s hand. It was the dash lighter out of an automobile, corroded and stained. “I came right up from where it is. It’s in about fifty feet of water, half on its side. Gray Studebaker. Illinois plates. The number is CT5851. Empty. Rock bottom. It’s on a pretty steep slope. I think it can be hauled out all right.”

  “That number checks out,” Prine said in a reluctant voice. “Damn it, how can you figure a thing like that?”

  “Steve,” Marion said, “I guess maybe we goofed on this one. I guess maybe that Rose Fulton was right.”

  Ruth had gone back to town with Peary in his car. She had seemed subdued, thoughtful. As Peary had credited me with making the guess that led to the discovery of the car, I was in Marion’s good graces. I had not told them the second installment of the guess—no longer a guess, actually—that Fitzmartin was the blackmailer.