“Yes, once. When they were about sixteen.”
“They were twins. They look a lot alike?”
“In a way, yes,” he said. “They weren’t identical twins, though, if that’s what you mean. Pauline took after the Major, and Paulette looked more like her mother. Pauline’s no slouch as a looker, but Paulette was a lulu. Regular movie star for looks.”
I said, “I see.”
Merlini, catching the inflection I couldn’t keep out of my voice, gave me a quick curious glance. I tried to keep a poker face. I had just discovered that I was pregnant — with a theory. But I wasn’t going to give yet. I wanted time to think about it. I was asking myself if Pauline might not have been lying when she said that sister Paulette was dead. Suppose sister was alive and kicking. She’d have one nice simple Grade A motive for eliminating both the Major and Pauline — the inheritance. And Pauline could know it — but, in spite of the attempt on herself, have some reason to cover up. If I could prove that assumption, the next step was as obvious — Sister Paulette was the Headless Lady.
Then Merlini, blast the man, grinned widely. “Ross Harte, I’ll bet you a ten-gallon cowboy hat that I can read your mind right now.”
He turned to Mac, and his abrupt change of subject from Paulette to Headless Lady made me glad I hadn’t taken the bet and sore as a boil because my theory wasn’t exclusive.
“I’m afraid this is going to hurt a bit, Mac,” he said. “But I’ll bet you another hat that the Headless Lady is dead, and it’s high time we did something about it.”
Mac nearly had apoplexy. “You aren’t going to tell me she was — was—” The word nearly got him down. “—murdered too!” he finally finished.
“I don’t think she left that trailer willingly,” Merlini answered. “Ross here has lately been theorizing high, wide, and handsome to the effect that whoever the Headless Lady is, she committed the murder and took it on the lam. That hypothesis completely disregards the fact of the arrow on the pole. The arrow quite obviously indicates that she was deliberately sidetracked — misled into thinking she was following the proper route to Norwalk.”
I didn’t have a good objection ready for that. “Why was the arrow covered with the poster?” I asked.
“So that the other circus people who came along afterward wouldn’t all come traipsing down the side road and interrupt whatever was going on. Someone cut in ahead of the Headless Lady, placed the arrow, and after she had made the turn, covered it with the poster and streaked out after her. Then he stopped her, and the rest is pure guesswork. Of the clues at the trailer, the really ominous one is the missing rug.”
“Missing rug?” Mac asked, bewildered.
“Yes. My hunch is that it was carried away because its presence would have contradicted the theory that she had simply ducked out.”
“How?” Mac asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Suppose,” Merlini said, “that it had blood on it.”
“No, dammit!” Mac exploded. “This is too much! You see murder in everything. That’s the flimsiest—”
Mac’s expostulations ran suddenly aground. He stopped dead, his mouth still open. Then suddenly he emitted blue flames, swearing like — well, like an old circus man.
Two state troopers in their spruce gray uniforms, Stetson hats, Sam Brown belts, and shiny boots were coming toward us across the back yard with purposeful determined strides. Somehow they didn’t look as if they merely wanted passes; they acted as if they were on a job — a serious one. With them there was a round-eyed excited boy of about twelve and a middle-aged nervous man whose appearance was that of a farmer. Another man, Stuart Towne, followed interestedly in their wake.
The trooper with the captain’s stripes, a bronzed, square-jawed individual with a direct no-nonsense air about him, addressed Mac.
“We’re looking for a man named Wiley. They said he’d be back here.”
“Wiley?” Mac asked innocently. “Wiley. Oh yes, saw him an hour or so ago over by the cookhouse. That way. Tall man with a squint.”
“Mac,” Merlini objected, “for Pete’s sake! That won’t—”
The boy who accompanied the troopers was pointing at Merlini and myself and saying, “That’s them! The ones I saw in the trailer after we heard the shot!”
Chapter Thirteen
Clown Alley
“The marines have landed,” Merlini said wryly. “And with the usual fanfare. Mac, where can we hold a conference?”
Mac knew when he was licked. His scowl was black, but he gave in like a good loser. “Major’s trailer,” he said helplessly. “Come on.”
On the way Merlini asked, “The shot. What time did that happen?”
“No you don’t.” The trooper shook his head. “Your story first.”
At the trailer Merlini made a few introductions, and we discovered that the trooper was Captain Schafer, of the New York State Police. His companion was Trooper Palmer.
Rapidly Merlini gave them the works. His swift summary was concise, stripped of irrelevant detail and yet complete in all the essential points. Mac listened wearily as Merlini paraded one suspicious circumstance after another, pyramiding the little evidence we actually had, but cementing it with enough deduction to make it hold together remarkably well. Well enough so that Captain Schafer’s eyes were popping before Merlini was half finished. The Captain interrupted just once, to send Palmer on the run for the nearest phone and reinforcements.
Merlini held back only one thing, the mysterious clown; evidently with the intention of saving that piece of investigation for himself. He soft-pedaled the objections Mac and Pauline had raised at nearly every turn and offered the lack of concrete evidence as an excuse for not informing the authorities sooner. The Captain wasn’t greatly impressed.
When Merlini had described our discovery of the trailer that morning, told where it was now, and handed over the garage ticket, Schafer let us hear the boy’s story. Buddy and his father were brought in to repeat it. At seven that morning the boy had been doing his chores on the farm which lay behind the hill out of sight of the road. He had heard what he thought was a shot and, since it was not hunting season, had wondered about it. His father, less romantically inclined, had reckoned it was a car backfiring and made the boy finish his work. But as soon as he was free he had set out, a Buck Rogers disintegrator pistol in hand, to investigate. He had found the trailer, occupied a strategic position in the woods on the hillside above, and was holding a council of war with himself when Merlini and I arrived. We discovered now that all the time we were there we had been covered by Buck Rogers’ deadly weapon of the future and in constant danger of instant annihilation. The kid was completely disgusted with himself for his error of the dislodged stone and his subsequent hasty flight, though I’m sure that if I had been faced with a couple of charging interplanetary outlaws I’d have done the same.
“They looked like murderers,” he said, finishing.
His father had again expressed his skepticism, but the boy was persistent. Captain Schafer, recently married to the boy’s sister Ann, ran Buck Rogers a close second in Buddy’s esteem; and finally, behind his father’s back, he had phoned the barracks with his story. The Captain had agreed that it was odd enough to investigate, had checked on the license number the boy had given him, and discovered that the owner of the vehicle was the Mighty Hannum Circus Corporation. The Captain hadn’t, however, expected to scare up anything quite like this. He was by now nearly as excited as Buddy, though he did a fair job of hiding it.