And suddenly Davidson began crying. His face twisted into a grimace, and the tears began flowing, and he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with this, I swear. Please, I didn’t have anything to do with it. Please, I’m married, my wife’s in the city expecting a baby, I need this job, I didn’t even look at those girls, I swear to God, what do you want me to do? Please, please.”
The room was silent except for his sobbing.
“I swear to God,” he said softly. “I swear to God. I’m a heavy sleeper. I’m very tired at night. I swear. Please. I didn’t do it. I only knew them to say hello. I didn’t hear anything. Please. Believe me. Please. I have to keep this job. It’s the only thing I know, skiing. I can’t get involved in this. Please.”
He lowered his head, trying to hide the tears that streamed down his face, his shoulders heaving, the deep sobs starting deep inside him and reverberating through his entire body.
“Please,” he said.
For the first time since the whole thing had started. Watt turned to Hawes and asked his advice.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I’m a heavy sleeper, too,” Hawes said. “You could blow up the building, and I wouldn’t hear it.”
13
On Sunday morning, the church bells rang out over the valley.
They started in the town of Rawson, and they rang sharp and clear on the mountain air, drifting over the snow and down the valley. He went to the window and pulled up the shade, and listened to the sound of the bells, and remembered his own youth and the Reverend Jeremiah Hawes who had been his father, and the sound of Sunday church bells, and the rolling, sonorous voice of his father delivering the sermon. There had always been logic in his father’s sermons. Hawes had not come away from his childhood background with any abiding religious fervor — but he had come away with a great respect for logic. “To be believed,” his father had told him, “it must be reasonable. And to be reasonable, it must be logical. You could do worse than remembering that, Cotton.”
There did not seem to be much logic in the killing of Helga Nilson and Maria Fiers, unless there was logic in wanton brutality. He tried to piece together the facts as he looked out over the peaceful valley and listened to the steady tolling of the bells. Behind him, Blanche was curled in sleep, gently breathing, her arms wrapped around the pillow. He did not want to wake her yet, not after what she’d been through last night. So far as he was concerned, the weekend was over; he could not ski with pleasure anymore, not this weekend. He wanted nothing more than to get away from Rawson Mountain, no, that wasn’t quite true. He wanted to find the killer. That was what he wanted more than anything else. Not because he was being paid for the job, not because he wanted to prove to Theodore Watt that maybe big-city detectives did have a little something on the ball — but only because the double murders filled him with a sense of outrage. He could still remember the animal strength of the man who’d attacked him on the mountain, and the thought of that power directed against two helpless young girls angered Hawes beyond all reason.
Why? he asked himself.
Where is the logic?
There was none. No logic in the choice of the victims, and no logic in the choice of the scene. Why would anyone have chosen to kill Helga in broad daylight, on a chair suspended anywhere from six to thirty feet above the ground, using a ski pole as a weapon? A ski pole sharpened to a deadly point, Hawes reminded himself, don’t forget that. This thing didn’t just happen, this was no spur-of-the-moment impulse, this was planned and premeditated, a pure and simple Murder One. Somebody had been in that ski shop the night before the first murder, using a file and then a grinding wheel, sharpening that damn pole, making certain its end could penetrate a heavy ski parka, and a ski sweater, and a heart.
Then there must have been logic to the choice of locale, Hawes thought. Whoever killed Helga had at least planned far enough ahead to have prepared a weapon the night before. And admitting the existence of a plan, then logic could be presupposed, and it could further be assumed that killing her on the chair lift was a part of the plan — perhaps a very necessary part of it.
Yes, that’s logic, he thought— except that it’s illogical.
Behind him, Blanche stirred. He turned to look at her briefly, remembering the horror on her face last night, contrasting it now with her features relaxed in sleep. She had told the story to Watt three times, had told him again and again how she’d found the dead girl.
Maria Fiers, twenty-one years old, brunette, a native of Montpelier, Vermont. She had begun skiing when she was six years old, had won the woman’s slalom four times running, had been an instructor since she was seventeen. She skated, too, and had been on her high school swimming team, an all-around athlete, a nice girl with a gentle manner and a pleasant smile — dead.
Why?
She lived in the room next door to Helga’s, had known Helga for close to a year. She had been nowhere near the chair lift on the day Helga was killed. In fact, she had been teaching a beginner’s class near the T-Bar, a good distance from the chair lift. She could not have seen Helga’s murder, nor Helga’s murderer.
But someone had killed her nonetheless.
And if there were a plan, and if there were supposed logic to the plan, and if killing Helga on a chair halfway up the mountain was part of that logic, then the death of Maria Fiers was also a part of it.
But how?
The hell with it, Hawes thought. I can’t think straight any more. I want to crack this so badly that I can’t think straight, and that makes me worse than useless. So the thing to do is to get out of here, wake Blanche and tell her to dress and pack, and then pay my bill and get out, back to the city, back to the 87th where death comes more frequently perhaps, and just as brutally — but not as a surprise. I’ll leave this to Theodore Watt, the sheriff who wants to make his own mistakes. I’ll leave it to him and his nimble-fingered deputies, and maybe they’ll bust it wide open, or maybe they won’t, but it’s too much for me, I can’t think straight any more.
He went to the bed and woke Blanche, and then he walked over to the main building, anxious to pay his bill and get on his way. Someone was at the piano, practicing scales. Hawes walked past the piano and the fireplace and around the corner to Wollender’s office. He knocked on the door, and waited. There was a slight hesitation on the other side of the door, and then Wollender said, “Yes, come in,” and Hawes turned the knob.
Everything looked exactly the way it had looked when Hawes checked in on Friday night, an eternity ago. Wollender was sitting behind his desk, a man in his late twenties with dark hair and dark brows pulled low over deep brown eyes. He was wearing a white shirt open at the throaty a bold reindeer-imprinted sweater over it. The plaster cast was still on his right leg, the leg stretched out stiffly in front of him, the foot resting on a low ottoman. Everything looked exactly the same.
“I want to pay my bill,” Hawes said. “We’re checking out.”
He stood just inside the door, some fifteen feet from the desk. Wollender’s crutches leaned against the wall near the door. There was a smile on Wollender’s face as he said, “Certainly,” and then opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out his register and carefully made out a bill. Hawes walked to the desk, added the bill, and then wrote a check. As he waved it in the air to dry the ink, he said, “What were you doing in my room yesterday, Mr. Wollender?”