Death Trap Read online

  “If you could hear what I’m thinking, you wouldn’t say so.”

  The old woman came out and complained about a burn on the counter top in the kitchen. Vicky informed her that the burn had been there when she had moved in. We went to the two cars. I looked back. The old woman was staring at us, implacable as weather, rigid as death.

  “Now where?” Vicky asked.

  “Out of town for you, I think. I know Charlie Staubs would take you at the MacClelland if I asked, but I don’t want to put him on the spot, and I don’t think it would be good for you. The stuff you’ll need is in your car. I’ll put all this other stuff into storage in Warrentown as soon as I get a chance. You follow me and I’ll find a place for you.”

  I checked from time to time in the rear view mirror. She followed along. I remembered an area about fifteen miles north of Dalton where, at the conjunction of a superhighway and a main state road, a tourist area had been started three years before.

  It had grown up a great deal. There were big glossy motels, restaurants, service areas. I picked what seemed to be the newest and the glossiest and she followed me into the lot.

  “Here?” she said. “It isn’t what I—”

  “Hush! Look, you have a nice new name. Virginia Lewis. That’ll fit the initials on your suitcase. I’m your fiancé.”

  I got her settled in. I watched the desk clerk carefully. There was no flicker of extra interest. I arranged for a room for a week. It was in the end of a wing far back from the road. The room was large, clean, impersonal, handsome. The rear door opened out onto a back garden. The bath with its pebbled glass shower stall looked as efficient as a comptometer. The towels were fluffy, the rugs deep. I suspected that it was more than she had wanted to pay, but she wouldn’t let me help. I hoped she wasn’t aware of all the reasons why I had insisted on this sort of place, and on the change of name. When the time of execution drew close, the ghouls would gather again. Victoria Landy waits in hopeless tears as the hour draws closer. Sister of executed murderer hysterically proclaims his innocence on day of execution. As an extra precaution I made certain that her car was parked so the plates couldn’t be read from the highway. They were shiny new plates. I guessed that she had traded in the Ford the moment the state was through with it.

  And also I wanted her to be in just such a cool, impersonal place when he was killed. This room had no rough edges, no place where memories could cling.

  After she was unpacked there was still some warmth in the October afternoon, so we went out to the back garden and sat on white lawn chairs near a high cedar hedge.

  She said slowly, “I think this was exactly right, Hugh. I feel a little apart from myself. Virginia Lewis doesn’t have any problems. She’s brand new. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if, as a sort of extra service, they had a brain surgeon here, and a nice refrigerated bank of clean unused brains. Then they could take this tired one out and put a new one in and make the stitches neat, and when I came out of the anesthetic they could say, ‘Now you are Virginia Lewis and you are a gay person and there is a long warm life ahead of you.’ ”

  “So Virginia would be all girly and giggly and I couldn’t love her.”

  “You have to have a somber woman?”

  “Not somber. But with a few shadows here and there.”

  “Mrs. Hemsold would just adore Virginia Lewis.”

  “Speaking of Mrs. Hemsold, I saw an antidote just up the street. The sign said package store.”

  “Superb suggestion, Mr. MacReedy.”

  I left her there and walked to the liquor store. I bought gin and vermouth there, and one lemon in a grocery store, and two very lean and deadly and handsome cocktail glasses in a gift shop. Back in the room the ice tinkled in the pitcher. The cold cocktail was pale in the glasses. The drops of lemon oil floated on the surface. I carried the drinks out. In a toast without words, the rims of the glasses made a bright tick as they touched.

  “It is an antidote,” she said a few moments later.

  “Proposition. Be Virginia Lewis tonight. There’s nothing we can do. Tomorrow you can be Vicky again.”

  She agreed quite solemnly. We drank until it was too cool to stay outside. We went in and split what was left in the pitcher. I talked and talked. The look of the Spanish landscape. The poverty of the people. The international set near Malaga. The self-importance of the Army Engineers.

  Then she put a short coat on and we walked up the road in the night. Cars rushed by us as we walked on the shoulder. The restaurant was good, and the steaks were good. We walked back and I said good night to her at her doorway. She had unlocked the door. She took me by the wrist, her fingers cold, and tugged me toward her, through the open door into the dark room. We kissed hard and hungrily, and then she leaned against me for a little time and cried with hardly any sound at all. I knew how easy it would be. I knew how much I wanted her. But the old debt was large and it had to be paid, and trust can wither in morning light. I told her good night and drove back to Dalton and had a nightcap and went to bed.

  State Prison is on the eastern boundary of the small industrial city of Mercer. It is in an area of freight yards, sidings, truck terminals, small chemical plants. The air has a smoky, acrid stench. The prison is big and the high concrete walls enclose a big area. It is a maximum security prison and the guard posts atop the walls are closely spaced. Directly across from the main gate is a cinder parking lot. The day was gray, but even the brightest of sunlight would have done little to change the look of gloom.

  Vicky had been very silent on the ninety-mile drive. We arrived on time. I parked and walked across the road to the main gate. From the parking lot I had seen guards on catwalks leaning on the railing, looking into the compound. As we reached the gate I heard the deep roar of an excited crowd. For a few moments I could not identify the familiar sound. Then came a cadence that identified it to me. Hold that line! Hold that line! It was familiar, yet not familiar, because here was no intermingling of female voices. This was deeper, hoarser, angrier—more of an animal sound.

  I talked through a small square cut into metal to the gate guards. They checked identity by phone to the office of the Guard Captain and then let us both inside the outer gate. We had to walk in turn through a narrow gate which I suspected was some sort of metal-detection device. We waited there until a guard came to get us. When he arrived they opened the inner gate with a pneumatic hiss. It was controlled from above, perhaps from the guard tower over the main gate.

  The man who got us was elderly, slow-moving. His uniform was tight across the shoulders and shiny with age. Inside the compound the yelling was louder.

  “Where is the game?” I asked.

  “The field is over behind D Block,” he said. “It ain’t regulation so we got our own ground rules.”

  He took us to the Guard Captain’s office. I saw men sitting in the afternoon sun, their backs against cell block walls, other men working at a big oval flower bed, taking out bulbs and putting them in flat wooden boxes. A railroad siding came into the prison through a large closed gate off to our right.

  The anteroom of the Captain’s office had the bored, weary smell of any police station in the world. There were two girlie calendars and some dusty framed pictures of groups of officials.

  The elderly man said to a young clerk at a corner desk, “All cleared for a Landy visitor?”

  “Just took the call. It’s okay.”

  The old man turned to me. “You wait here, mister. It’s just one at a time.” She gave me a quick frightened smile and they left. I was left alone on a hard bench, hearing the hesitant clack of the clerk’s typewriter, and the distant roar of crowd excitement.

  “You get to see him when she’s through,” the clerk said. “It’s all fixed. But it’s special. Usually only relatives.”

  I nodded. He typed some more. Then he stopped and said, “I hear the kid is taking it good so far. Lots of times they take it good right up to maybe an hour, two hours before the deal. Then they go
nuts. They moved him yesterday into one of the bird cages.”

  “Bird cages?”

  “Over there they keep you in a cell, see? If you got the lawyers working for you, maybe you are in the cell a year. Then you run out of appeals. So they leave you there until maybe a week, ten days before you’re due. Then they move you to a bird cage where you got eyes on you night and day. The cages are on the top floor, see? Once since I been here all four were full. Now he’s the only one up there.”

  I waited. Twice guards walked through the anteroom and into the inner office, giving me quick incurious glances. I wondered if I could smoke. I saw gray butts flattened against the dusty floor and I smoked two cigarettes. I had just finished the second one when she was brought back. There is a sisterhood of grief, of anguish, in which all women go apart from you and you cannot reach them. There is an habitual posture which makes you think of war drawings, of widows and refugees, of exile. She sat on the bench, shoulders hunched high, head lowered, handkerchief held to her eyes with both hands, body trembling. Despite the gay clothes she had worn, perhaps in an effort to cheer Alister, she could have been in rags, a peasant cloth over her head, knotted under her chin, bare brown feet dusty from roads that had been too long.

  “Come along,” the elderly guard said to me.

  Bird cage was a good word. There were no windows in the room. Fluorescence was white glare. Three of the walls of his cage were heavy woven wire, the fourth a bare wall painted an unpleasant glossy green. Two guards played cards at a small table against a wall twenty feet from the cage. I was permitted to approach to a point six feet from the cage. The elderly guard stood beside me. Alister stood inside the cage, gray fingers hooked into the wire, head lowered. He looked thirty years old.

  “Al!” I said sharply. He gave the impression that you had to awaken him. His head lifted slowly. He looked at me. They were Vicky’s blue eyes. I had not remembered that. They were dulled. Recognition came slowly, lighting the eyes to a point of intensity and immediacy and then fading back to dullness.

  “I want to help,” I said. “I need some leads.” I realized I was speaking the way one speaks to the sick, the deaf or the wounded. The elderly guard said, “She talked at him the whole time. He didn’t answer. They get this way. Punchy like. The brainy ones do.”

  One of the guards at the table said, “And this kid has a real big brain on him.”

  “Shut up, George,” the elderly one said gently.

  “He’s sick,” I said. “He’s mentally ill. You can’t go ahead and—”

  “The court says he’s sane, mister. He’s just gone back inside himself. He’s inside there, thinking.”

  “With that big brain,” the guard at the table said.

  “For God’s sake, George.”

  “Al!” I said again. He didn’t lift his head.

  “A week from tomorrow he’ll be over his troubles,” the guard said.

  “You better take me back,” I said.

  As we left I looked back. He still stood there, like the prey of a shrike impaled on a barb.

  She had stopped crying. Her face was pale and empty. We were taken to the gate and they let us out. We got into the car and I drove into the middle of the shabby city and turned south. When we were on the open road she said, “Immature.”

  “What?”

  “I was, Hugh. Turning it into some kind of a movie plot. In comes the hero. The vital clue is found. The innocent boy is released. He walks out into the sunlight, and the birds are singing. But it isn’t that way. It’s all too late. They’ve killed him already.”

  “He could come back. It would take time.”

  “But you see,” she said patiently, “neither you nor I have any real hope of doing anything. We try to cheer each other up. There are only so many hours and minutes and seconds left. Then they’ll kill him and now maybe that’s best. Maybe that’s the only thing left to do with him now.”

  “Vicky!”

  “And when they do, Hugh, it’s the end of him, and it’s the end of anything we could have had. I won’t wish on you what I will become.”

  “Is that self-pity?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  We stopped at a place but she couldn’t eat. I took her back to the motel. She didn’t want me to stay with her. Her eyes looked almost as empty as his.

  I went back to the Inn. There had to be some starting place. I looked at my watch. I saw the sweep second hand moving around and around. Each revolution took that much off his life. And off mine and off Vicky’s.

  Chapter Five

  Monday the seventeenth was bright again and warm, the air flavored with the nostalgia of Indian summer. I had found the road where the kids parked, where the body had been found five days after the murder. I had driven up College Street hill and past the campus and past the faculty houses beyond the campus and past the small farms, five miles along the asphalt county road. Then the road dipped and turned west, to follow the ambling line of Three Sisters Creek. Two hundred yards from the turn there was a dirt road that led toward the creek some two hundred feet away. I drove into the dirt road. By the time I had gone thirty feet I was out of sight of the county road. When I turned off the motor I was in stillness. There were bird sounds, and wind through dry leaves, and the muttering of the creek.

  I got out of the car. Beer cans rusted among fallen leaves. Shards of broken glass glinted in the sun. It was not hard to imagine what it would be like at night. A trace of dash lights on chrome. Dim pulse of the bass on the radio, gargle of liquor from the nearly empty bottle, the rough deep voice of a boy trying to talk like a man, a girl’s thin, empty and expected protests, and then the quickening oven-breathing, sleazy rustlings of nylon, and then, for the bolder ones, the hastily spread blanket and hip-thump against the wounding earth while girl eyes glaze at a sky of swarming stars. A cheap thirty-second taste of eternity.

  I wandered toward the creek and after a time I heard voices. I found them, three boys in the twelve-year bracket, sloshing and yelping in a black pool under high rock shadow, bright bikes discarded in sunlight.

  They were brashly self-conscious about skipping school, and delighted to show me the exact place where the body had been found, along with descriptions too lurid to be possible. Their knowing language about the ways of the law was directly from any third-rate television script. One of them spotted a used flash bulb in the aspen patch and snatched it up.

  “My dad says they ought to burn everybody that attacks girls even when they don’t kill ’em.”

  “My dad says the chair is too easy for Landy.”

  “I’ll betcha if they could have got him away from the cops they would have fixed him good.”

  Soon they became bored with me and went back to the pool. I walked to the car. I had read the account in the back issues of the Warrentown paper, the reconstruction of the crime. The girl had been killed at the spot where the body was found, some seventy feet from the tire tracks. From the way twigs had been broken, she had tried to run. The killer had caught her. It made the gruesome chase more real to see the place. But I could learn nothing new there. Nothing factual. From the results of Tennant’s investigation, it was evident that Jane Ann was no stranger to this particular parking area, nor would she have been reluctant to come here. She would not have panicked and run from any normal advance. Some instinct had warned her, or perhaps the sight of the knife.

  I found the Paulson address in the telephone book—88 Oak Road. I had remembered seeing that street sign somewhere near Maple Street, and found it quickly. It was the first cross street after you passed Mrs. Hemsold’s house on Maple, going away from the square. The houses were smaller than the houses on Maple. They were frame houses and they were well maintained and looked comfortable. Eighty-eight was a brown house with yellow trim, two story and unpleasantly square. There were two red maples in the front yard, and a box hedge along the sidewalk. It looked to be exactly what it was, the home of the owner of a successful market,
with mortgage that had dwindled methodically through the years. It had a look of immunity to the sort of disaster it had suffered. There should still be two daughters in the house to sprawl in front of television, to quarrel over clothes, to spend inane hours at the phone.

  Before I had looked at the house I had stopped in at the market to take a look at Richard Paulson. I had taken my time over a small purchase. I had guessed that he was the man behind the meat counter and it was confirmed when I heard a customer call him by name.

  He was a tall man with a long face and high color in his cheeks. His no-color hair was carefully and intricately combed so that it lay across the baldness of his head. His shoulders were narrow, his hands large and red. He was surprisingly thick in the middle, considering the gauntness of his cheeks. He wore his white apron with dignity, and as he worked his hands were deft. His eyes and his mouth were too small, and his nose was fleshy. He looked to be a coldly methodical man, and when he talked to customers his affability seemed forced and insincere. Watching him I thought I could understand a little more easily the reasons for Jane Ann’s rebellion. He would be too harsh and too logical. And I wondered if Nancy’s conformity was the result of a broken spirit. I could hear rigid moral platitudes coming from that coin slot mouth. It was odd to hear customers call him Dick. An equal number called him Mr. Paulson.

  As I drove by the house I could see, in the geometric placement of the red maples, in the rigid clipping of the box hedge, in the unhappy squareness of the house itself, reflections of his personality.

  It was a reasonable premise that Nancy would walk home from the high school. And the route she would take was obvious. I parked a block from the school. When the kids started coming out, I got out of the car and leaned against it. All the young girls looked alarmingly alike. Several times I was on the verge of speaking when I saw that I was mistaken. I glanced at the picture again to refresh my mind.

  Finally I saw her and I was certain. She was with two other girls. They were talking animatedly and, like the others who had passed, they gave me sidelong glances as they came abreast and the other two changed their walks in subtle ways, making an instinctive offer of young bodies, a subconscious response to maleness that is as old as the race.