“Si!”
A Word from Willie
by Charles Peterson
“Weedy Willy” was not going to be missed. But it was up to the police to run down his killer from a crazy clue.
Wilfred Weede, better known as “Weedy Willy” to police and acquaintances, was not a particularly attractive specimen in life. In death he was even less so, for whoever had engineered Willy’s departure had attempted a wholesale rearrangement of his ferret-like features prior to dispatching him with a kitchen knife.
The knife lay some inches from Willy’s outstretched right hand, near the overturned kitchen table. The kitchen itself was a mess — even the wall phone had been tom away and lay in a corner amid shards of chinaware, indicating that Willy had not gone gentle into that good night, but had scattered blood about with a lavish abandon in his going.
He had, however, retailed enough to write one word on the light grey asphalt tile with a finger.
“ ‘KWXOTE’?” said Dan Herndon in puzzled tone. He was the younger of the two Homicide Division detectives on hand, a tall, solidly-constructed, carefully dressed man in his thirties, with coppery hair which he wore longer than regulations, strictly interpreted, would allow. “What the hell kind of a dying message is that?”
“The kind you write when you have a knife in your gut, very little time, and no stationery handy,” replied Carey McKay. McKay, fortyish but still whippet-lean and a couple of inches taller than Herndon, had deep-etched lines from cheek to jaw in an angular face, out of which peered eyes of a startling ice-blue.
“I suppose he was trying to give us a line on his killer?”
“A guy doesn’t go to that kind of trouble to leave a note for the milkman.” McKay directed the police photographer on a couple of angle shots, then he and Herndon picked their way out of the shambles and walked toward the front of the house. Already registered was the fact that the bloodstains were thoroughly dry, indicating Willy had been dead for many hours. In passing, McKay cocked an eyebrow at the fingerprint crew, one of whom replied with a shake of his head.
“Somebody either wore gloves or wiped the place afterwards,” the man reported. “Haven’t found anything but him so far.” He jerked a thumb toward the corpse in the kitchen.
McKay and Herndon proceeded to the room that Weedy Willy would probably have called his library — a small corner room perhaps twelve feet square, with a couple of windows. It was crowded with a reclining lounge, end tables, a color television set, and a small kneehole desk with a princess phone on it. Floor to ceiling bookshelves covered one entire wall.
From the lounge, a small dark-haired girl looked up at them with frightened brown eyes and the appealing vulnerability of a kitten caught in a thunderstorm.
McKay made a show of consulting his notebook. “You are Miss Nicky Preston,” he said, without preamble. “Would you mind telling us how you happened to find the body?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“Just once more, please.”
The girl sighed. “I had some — business to talk over with wi... with Mr. Weede. I got here at about nine-thirty and rang the front doorbell but no one answered, so I walked around and rang the bell at the back door. Then I noticed the door hadn’t latched. I pushed it open and called inside.
“Then I saw... I saw—” She swallowed and shuddered, fighting for control. “The next thing I knew, I was running toward the street, and just then a patrol car happened by and the officer stopped and asked what was wrong. And — that’s all there is. How long are you going to keep me here?”
McKay ignored the question. “What was your business with Willy?”
Nicky Preston’s lips shut in a tight line. “I can’t tell you that. It — was a personal matter.”
“Personal enough to kill for?” asked Herndon.
She turned stricken eyes on him. “Yes! Yes! But I didn’t — he was dead when I got here, I tell you!”
McKay regarded her thoughtfully and allowed the silence to deepen as he scrutinized the room. There were a couple of crossword puzzle books on the end table, together with a canister full of lead pencils. One entire shelf of the bookcase was devoted to dictionaries and puzzle books, including collections of the Double Crostic variety.
A slim book titled Scrabble Word List jutted out from the others, and McKay picked it out to page through it curiously. It was a selection of unusual words arranged in groups of three to seven letters and someone — doubtless Willy himself — had written additional words on the book’s blank end pages.
“Miss Preston,” he said at last, “we know a good deal about our friend in the other room, including the fact that he served time for blackmail. He was released seven or eight years ago and has supported himself more than adequately since without any visible employment. The inference is that he was doing business at the same old stand. So I’ll ask you, Miss Preston, was Willy blackmailing you?”
It was not her emphatic “No!” that surprised McKay so much as the fact that the answer sounded absolutely genuine. He was still considering it when sounds of controversy came from the hallway and a policeman appeared with a volubly angry young man in hand.
“This one,” the officer explained, “was giving Harrison a hard time. Said he had to see whoever was in charge here. Harrison said to bring him in to you.”
“But the young man ignored McKay. Staring in consternation at the girl,” he cried, “Nicky, you little idiot! What are you doing here?”
“Oh, Jim!” The girl threw herself into his arms and burst into sobs. The young man glowered over her shoulder at McKay, dark eyes smoldering, dark hair falling over his brow. McKay put him in his late twenties, noting the big, capable hands and broad shoulders — and the truculence that probably masked a real sense of fear.
“And who’re you?” The detective finally asked.
“My name’s Sanders — Jim Sanders.” He released the girl long enough to toss McKay a wallet with driver’s license and company identification card. “I’m a chemist with Northridge Laboratories here in town. What have you been doing to Nicky?”
“Just trying to find out why she was calling on Weedy Willy.”
“I can tell you that,” Sanders said, ignoring an exclamation of protest from the girl. “It’s no use, honey. I told you not to come — that they’d find out sooner or later. It’s because she wanted to try to buy Willy off. She knew he was into me — though she doesn’t know why, thank God — and, well, we want to get married and knew we couldn’t swing it with his blood-sucking and his threats hanging over us, and... oh, hell!”
Dan Herndon, who had followed the policeman out of the room in response to the latter’s gesture, now returned, bearing a slip of paper. “This isn’t your first visit here, is it, Sanders?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Herndon tapped the paper. “Willy has neighbors who seem very much interested in his doings. One of them gave us the license numbers of three cars that stopped here for short periods last night. The third is the one you just drove up in and parked below.”
Anders gave Nicky Preston a despairing look. “I was here about eleven-thirty,” he admitted in a low voice. “I’d called Willy earlier.”
“When?”
“About ten-fifteen. Said I had to talk to him. He never liked to see his ‘clients’ face to face — always talked to ’em by phone unless he couldn’t get out of it — but I refused to be put off and he finally agreed. I pulled up here at exactly eleven-thirty by my car radio. I remember there was another car pulling away ahead of me, going pretty fast, and I wondered if someone else had been calling on him. Well, I rang the bell but no one answered, so I went in.”