Death Trap Page 3

  When he glanced at me I said, “Is this the town where they had the trial of the Landy kid?”

  “Just passing through?”

  “Stopping in a motel down the road.”

  “This is where we held the circus, friend. And where were you? I thought every literate person in this great nation knew the fame of Warrentown. And most of the illiterates.”

  “I was in Spain. I only heard about it the other day. Construction work.”

  “I’ve got a son-in-law in that game, friend. Right now he’s in Panama.”

  I didn’t want the conversation to get away from me. “I guess people got pretty excited about the Landy case.”

  The man nodded. “He damn near didn’t come to trial. They got their timing right for once and sent a guard detachment in here. I guess you read about that.”

  “I don’t know anything at all about it. I don’t know who he killed or where he killed her or anything about it.”

  “He was a weird boy, mister. I guess I can use his name in the past tense without being too inaccurate. Too many brains. Like that Loeb and Leopold team years ago. I guess he figured that the laws of decency that apply to you and me didn’t apply to him. He was going to college over there in Dalton. Sheridan College. He was in his last year. He was running around with an eighteen-year-old girl named Nancy Paulson. She had a kid sister named Jane Ann Paulson, age sixteen. It just so happens that I know Dick Paulson, the father. Now I’m not the sort of guy to claim we were bosom buddies. But I did meet him a couple of times when I was over in Dalton on business. Dick owns a market over there. Good meats. He gets a high-class trade. This Landy boy had the use of a car. It was his sister’s car. She was working for the college at that time. You understand, this all happened way back in April, six months ago.

  “Anyway, all of a sudden Jane Ann Paulson is missing. She’d been in some kind of Christmas pageant so there was a real good picture of her. Pretty little kid. It really stirred up the area. They had everybody and his brother out hunting for her, and cops from all over, and everybody trying to get in on the act. She turned up missing on a Friday night, I think it was. She had a girl friend in her class in high school, daughter of one of the professors lived up on the hill. The last anybody saw of Jane Ann, she was walking up the hill. But she never got there. Some farm kid found the body the following Wednesday afternoon in an aspen patch near Three Sisters Creek. She was naked and dead, raped and cut up some.

  “Then the fun really started. The college boys park with their dates on a side road near where the body was found. Feeling ran pretty high in Dalton. There wasn’t a college boy who would have dared go down into the village alone. A smart state cop took over. He figured that the kid had to have been taken out there by car. It was five miles beyond the college, and over six miles from the village. He impounded every car that college kids had the use of. While the other police were rounding up known sex deviates, the state cop had lab tests run on a hundred and twelve automobiles. It took time. But they came up with the right car. It was the Ford that belonged to Landy’s sister. Blood had been scrubbed off the upholstery, but they took the fabric off and they got enough from the underside to run off the type. It matched the kid’s blood.

  “That cop, Frank Leader his name is, was too smart to jump quick. He wanted to sew it up good; and he did. The Landy boy lived with his sister in a small apartment in an old house in the village. Leader found cleaning fluid there that he could tell—or the lab could tell—had been used on the car seat. And he found the rag and the lab was able to show it was human blood on the rag, even though they couldn’t type it. They’d vacuumed the car out and got female hair and did comparisons and found two of the hairs were from the dead girl’s head. Leader wanted the knife and he wanted to find the pocketbook the girl had been carrying. They really tore up that place. Found the pocketbook and the knife buried in a flower bed in the yard. It was a new knife, a paring knife. Leader traced it to a hardware store in Dalton. He was able to prove Landy had been in the store a few days before the murder. Nobody sold him a knife, but they were on open display.”

  “Did he confess?” I asked.

  “No. With all they had stacked up against him, he might just as well have. The ground was soft at that lover’s lane place. A smart speed cop kept people off the parking places until he could get help. They took molds of the tire tracks and matched one up with the Ford.”

  “What was the defense?”

  “The old yelp—you know—it’s all circumstantial. Landy had no alibi for the time. April the sixth, I think it was. Anyway, it was a Friday. His sister had a date. She’d come over here by bus in the middle of the afternoon to do some shopping and the guy she was dating met her over here for dinner. She didn’t take the car because it was in the repair garage. Landy got it out of the garage at five. The service manager said the kid acted funny. He drove back to the apartment. The prosecution proved the car was there at five-fifteen and gone by five-thirty. He was in the habit of going and taking rides all by himself. His sister testified to that. He was a funny-acting kid. No friends. He said he got back to the house about nine. His sister said he was asleep when she got back. He didn’t have a date with Nancy Paulson because they’d had some sort of a scrap that week.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, I’ve got to be rolling, fellow. You should have seen this town when the trial was going on. All the wire services and television and hundreds of newspaper guys and cranks from all over. That little town and the college won’t recover for a long time.”

  He paid his bar check and as he started to leave, I said, “Is the sister still around?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t know.”

  I drove over to Dalton the next morning. It was a beautiful fall morning. The leaves of the big trees in the square were changing. The town had changed very little. The Dalton National Bank had had a face-lifting. Some of the stores had new plastic fronts. A Friday, the fourteenth of October. The same pre-school kids were fumbling around with the same soggy football in the park. Two young housewives walked diagonally across the park, talking as they pushed the carriages, groceries piled in beside the kids. There was a new traffic light where College Street came out onto the square. The red bus to Warrentown was waiting in the same place as before.

  I parked, locked the wagon, and walked slowly in the sunlight and I knew she was in the town. I knew she was close. And I wanted to turn and run. I was ashamed of what I was—or what I had been.

  I was wondering who to ask when I thought of a very simple solution. The phone had been disconnected but it was probably still listed. And it was. Landy, Victoria, 28 Maple. I knew Maple ran into the square at the north. I walked. Number twenty-eight was a block and a half down Maple, on the left. It was a big, elderly frame house painted an ugly reddish brown. There was a shallow porch around two sides, an ornate cupola, stained glass windows on either side of the front door, a waist-high iron fence.

  An old lady was raking leaves in the yard. She wore a blue and white print dress and a man’s green cardigan sweater much too big for her. When I turned in at the walk she stopped raking and watched me as I walked up to her. She had hard little eyes and a mean little mouth.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for a Miss Landy.”

  “Around at the side, but she won’t talk to any newspaper or magazine people. Don’t cut across my lawn. You go on out to the sidewalk and back in that other gate over there. She’s packing and she’ll be gone by Monday and let me tell you there won’t be anybody in this neighborhood or this whole town that won’t be glad to see the last of anybody around here with the name Landy. I wanted to get her out of my house before, but Jud Cowan told me so long as she paid her rent I didn’t have any way of getting rid of her. It seems like a very strange law to me that says a decent woman has to put up with having the sister of a murderer living in her very own house and not be able to do anything about it.”

  The shrill whining voice followed me until I was around th
e corner of the house and out of sight. Though the front yard was narrow, the grounds behind the house seemed extensive. A small conservatory bulged from the flank of the house. It was an architectural afterthought, with narrow windows and an ugly roof. The path led to two stone steps, a screen door. As I walked to the steps, feeling more tremulously uncertain than ever before in my life, I could see movement through the glass. I stood and looked through the screen. Morning light through all the windows illuminated the room.

  Vicky was there. There were open cartons on the floor. She was emptying bookshelves. She wore gray slacks, a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her dark hair was tied back. Her waist looked very narrow, her arms thin. She seemed to move with a stubborn weariness as she knelt and put the books neatly in the open carton. There was a smudge of dust on her cheek, other dust marks on the front of the white shirt. Her face was of an ivory pallor, lightly touched by the sun of the summer just past. Her facial bones seemed sharp against her skin.

  She must have seen me, a tall shadow, out of the corner of her eye. She looked up quickly, half-flinching as she did so, in the manner of a small animal beaten too often. That reflex pinched my heart. She recognized me and she came very slowly to her feet, her eyes going wide. I tried to say her name but my mouth was too dry. The wide blue eyes closed and she put her hand to her throat. She tottered and I pushed the screen door open and went in and caught her, my hands on her shoulders, the bones under the flesh narrow and fine under my hands.

  She opened her eyes again and there was the dazed, unfocused look of someone drugged. She said my name, said, “Hugh,” so softly that it was less an audible sound than a touch of warm exhalation against my throat. She let herself come forward, lean against me. I put my arm around her. The edge of my jaw touched the dark crown of her head.

  “What have they done to you, Vicky?” I asked softly. “What in the world have they done to you?”

  And as I looked across her shoulder, as I looked down through one of the windows, I found myself staring into the narrow venomous face of the old lady. She stood out there with the rake, looking in at us with spite and satisfaction.

  Vicky stirred in my arms and pulled herself away. I released her. Her face was cool again, and apart from me.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been entirely well. I feel faint quite often. I’m sorry.” She moved away from me, putting half-packed cartons between us.

  “I just heard about it, Vicky, just the other day. I was out of the country. I didn’t know about it.”

  “I thought everybody in the world knew about it.”

  “You know that if I had known, I would have come sooner.” And I tasted the shape of the lie on my mouth. I had nearly gone by. I had nearly gone on south because of fear and shame.

  “Why?” The question was cool and blunt.

  I made a helpless gesture with my hands. It wasn’t something you could explain in one minute or one hour. “I want to help you.”

  “There’s no way I can be helped.” She went over to a narrow padded bench by the windows and sat down, took cigarettes from the shirt pocket, lighted one. There was a heavy wooden packing case already nailed up near the bench. I sat on it. I felt heavy and awkward and stupid, with hands too big and rough and brown, with feet too heavy. I looked at the floor, and then at the narrow and delicate shape of her ankles, at sandals which could not conceal the high patrician arch of her foot. I looked at her face until she looked away. There were sallow patches under her eyes, fine brackets around the contradictory mouth.

  “I want to try to help.”

  Her voice became hard. “I do not want that kind of help. I don’t care to be helped because, strange as it may seem to me, your conscience might hurt a little. It must hurt, or you wouldn’t have come here. The whole thing seems odd to me.”

  “All right. Get out all the little whips. So it wasn’t like that when I walked in here. It wasn’t like that at all. Your face was different. Your voice was soft. It was all right to have me hold you.”

  She flushed and lifted her chin. “Don’t get stupid ideas from that kind of weakness, Hugh. I’m vulnerable right now.”

  I hit my fist on the packing case. “Skip all that. Forget all that. Maybe it’s conscience. It probably is. Is that such a bad thing? I want to help you. What are you going to do? Where are you going?”

  “I—I thought I’d go up and be near him until—” She twisted her face away, then covered her face with her hands. Then came the small, lost, stifled sound of tears. I sat there awkwardly until I could stand it no longer and then I went over and sat beside her and tried to touch her on the shoulder, turn her into my arms. She moved violently away from me. Then she got up quickly, hiding her face, and left the room, going into the other part of the apartment. I stood up, knowing I could not leave. I looked around. They had apparently used the conservatory as a living-room. Out the back windows I could see two cars parked in the rear of the house, a high old Dodge, and a Chevy coupé about five years old. I heard water running. I waited for a time and then began to pack the rest of the books.

  It must have been ten minutes later that she spoke, standing behind me. “Please don’t do that. Please go, Hugh. I mean it.”

  I had been trying to think of some way to tell her. I stood up and turned and said, “I’ll go. But please let me do one thing.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a very simple thing. It won’t cost you anything. I want you to sit over there beside me and I want to be able to hold your hand and I want to talk to you for maybe ten minutes. You don’t have to say anything.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Vicky. I’m begging you. I’m asking you very humbly. Please.”

  “All right.”

  She sat primly. She extended her hand to me with as much warmth as though she were reaching it out to touch nastiness. I took it in both of mine. It was cool, dry and utterly flaccid. And I did not know how to start.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’ve been in Spain. I’ve worked with those people. I like them. They’ve got pride. They’ve got self-respect. And a kind of passionate honesty. There was this boy, Felipe. A village boy. We taught him to drive a truck. After we started paving we put him on one of the big mixers. He was bright and quick. He took a lot of pride in how fast he could work the controls, drop the scoop and so on. When he came to work with us, he came with his best friend, Raoul. Raoul wasn’t too bright. He wasn’t good around equipment. He was tough and strong and willing, but he didn’t fit into the machine age.

  “Listen to what happened. There are guards, metal guards, where the big scoop comes down. So nobody can walk under the scoop from the side, by accident. But somebody could walk in from the front. So we have a mirror rigged. The operator is supposed to glance in the mirror before dropping the scoop. It comes down fast and hard. It weighs maybe a ton and a half. But on the job the mirror gets coated with dust, and the operator ignores it.

  “Felipe was running the mixer, full of pride. Raoul walked under from the front. Felipe dropped the scoop on him. He lived for two days and then died. Felipe was with him every minute of the two days and with him when he died. The next day I caught Felipe just in time. He’d wound wire around his arm as a crude tourniquet. He had an ax from stores. He was about to take his right hand off at the wrist. The right hand was the one on the control that drops the scoop. It was an infantile reaction. It was a stupid thing to try to do. It was remorse. And grief. I stopped him.”

  Her hand stirred in mine. I could not look at her face. “I don’t understand.”

  “I couldn’t cut my heart out, Vicky. I couldn’t go backward in time and mend things. I know there are things you can never mend. I’ll just tell you this. I’ve been ashamed. For three years. I’m not the person I was then. I’ve thought of you for three years. Sometimes I’ve been able to forget you for as long as two weeks. But you always came back, and everything is just as vivid.”

  “I hope—I hope your
three years have been hell.”

  Startled, I looked into her face. Tears stood on dark lashes and the blue eyes were hot and angry.

  “But, Vicky, I—”

  She snatched her hand away and jumped up, the look of weariness gone. “My three years have been hell. How many times do you think I told myself you were cruel, sly and unimaginative? That you just played a part to help you get what you wanted? That you were not worth pain, or a second thought? That you were a part of growing up, my growing up? Now you come back. I want the courage to spit on you. I—I—don’t want to love you any more. I’m so dirty awful tired of loving you, Hugh.”

  She sagged and half fell forward into my arms, her face contorted with pain. It was a curious experience to hold her like that. She was like a transformer taking too heavy a load. She was taut, trembling so intensely it seemed more like a hum than a physical reaction. I sensed that she was on the edge of breakdown, that the world had been too much for her. I held her for a long time. Her breathing slowed and deepened. I turned her until I could see her face. It was slack, lips parted. Emotional exhaustion had pushed her over the edge and she had fallen into a deep sleep. She was limp and boneless as a doll. I left her there and walked back into the other rooms. I found her bedroom. I turned the bed down, then went back to her. I took off her sandals, then carried her in, put her in the bed, covered her lightly, and closed the door gently as I left the bedroom.

  I went back out and picked up one of the sandals and studied it, and tapped it against the palm of my hand. Love makes a curious transformation in physical objects. Another woman’s sandals, scuffed as these were, with worn straps, with buckle marks on the straps, would have been meaningless. But these were hers and these were dear. There could be nothing about her that was not endearing. A smudge on her cheek, a blemish on her skin, a broken bra strap, lipstick on the edge of a cup—all the things that, had they referred to someone else, would have been nothing. Love creates its own symbolism, and touches the meanest things with magic.