“It’s worth bearing in mind, I guess. If you’re going down that way, you might drop in on Mrs. Stone and take a look at the little tyke. He’s only about four months old, though, so I wouldn’t count on his resembling anybody.”
The young deputy came back with a hot carton in a paper bag. Mungan poured black coffee for the three of us. In response to unspoken signals, the young deputy carried his into the back room and closed the door. Mungan said over his paper cup: “What I meant a minute ago, I meant the two killings weren’t connected the way you thought, by way of Campion. This isn’t official thinking, so I’m asking you to keep it confidential, but there’s some doubt in certain quarters that Campion killed Dolly.”
“What quarters are you talking about?”
“These quarters,” he said with a glance at the closed door. “Me personally. So did Ralph Simpson have his doubts. We talked about it. He knew that he was a suspect himself, but he insisted that Campion didn’t do it. Simpson was the kind of fellow who sometimes talked without knowing what he was talking about. But now that he’s dead, I give his opinion more weight.”
I sipped my coffee and kept still while Mungan went on in his deliberate way: “Understand me, Lew, I’m not saying Bruce Campion didn’t kill his wife. When a woman gets herself murdered, nine times out of ten it’s the man in her life, her boy friend or her husband or her ex. We all know that. All I’m saying, and I probably shouldn’t be saying it, we don’t have firm evidence that Campion did it.”
“Then why was he indicted?”
“He has his own stupidity to thank for that. He panicked and ran, and naturally it looked like consciousness of guilt to the powers that be. But we didn’t have the evidence to convict him, or maybe even arraign him. After we held him twenty-four hours, I recommended his release without charges. The crazy son-of-a-gun took off that same night. The Grand Jury was sitting, and the D. A. rushed the case in to them and got an indictment. They never would have indicted if Campion hadn’t run.” Mungan added with careful honesty: “This is just my opinion, my unofficial opinion.”
“What’s Royal’s unofficial opinion?”
“The Captain keeps his opinion to himself. He’s bucking for Sheriff, and you don’t get to be Sheriff by fighting the powers that be.”
“And I suppose the D. A. is bucking for Governor or something.”
“Something. Watch him make a circus out of this.”
“You don’t like circuses?”
“I like the kind with elephants.”
He finished his coffee, crumpled the cup in his fist, and tossed it into the wastebasket. I did the same. It was a trivial action, but it seemed to me to mark a turning point in the case.
“Exactly what evidence do you have against Campion?”
Mungan made a face, as if he had swallowed and regurgitated a bitter pill. “It boils down to suspicion, and his lack of an alibi, and his runout. In addition to which, there’s the purely negative evidence: there was no sign that the place had been broken into, or that Dolly had tried to get away from the killer. She was lying there on the floor in her nightgown, real peaceful like, with one of her own silk stockings knotted around her neck.”
“In her bedroom?”
“The place has no bedroom. I’ll show you a picture of the layout.”
He went to his files in the back room and returned with several photographs in his hands. One was a close-up of a full-breasted young blonde woman whose face had been savagely caricatured by the internal pressure of her own blood. The stocking around her neck was almost hidden in her flesh.
In the other pictures, her place on the floor had been taken by a chalk outline of her figure. They showed from various angles a roughly finished interior containing an unmade bed, a battered-looking child’s crib, a kitchen table and some chairs, a gas plate and a heater, a palette and some paints on a bench by the single large window. This window, actually the glazed door opening of the converted garage, had a triangular hole in a lower corner. Unframed canvases hung on the plasterboard walls, like other broken windows revealing a weirdly devastated outside world.
“How did the window get broken, Pat?”
“Ralph Simpson said that it had been broken for weeks. Campion just never got around to fixing it. He was too high and mighty, too busy throwing paint at the wall to see that the wife and child got proper care.”
“You don’t like him much.”
“I think he’s a bum. I also think he’s got a fair shake coming to him.”
Mungan tossed the pictures onto his desk. He took a button out of the pocket of his blouse and rolled it meditatively between his thumb and forefinger. It was a large brown button covered with woven leather, and it had a few brown threads attached to it. I’d seen a button like it in the last few days, I couldn’t remember where.
“Apparently the baby slept in the same room.”
“There’s only the one room. They lived like shanty Irish,” he said in the disapproving tone of a lace-curtain Irishman.
“What happened to the child on the night of the murder?”
“I was going to bring that up. It’s one of the queer things about the case, and one reason we suspected Campion from the start. Somebody, presumably the killer, took the baby out of his crib and stashed him in a car that was parked by the next house down the road. The woman who lives there, a Negro woman name of Johnson, woke up before dawn and heard the baby crying in her car. She knew whose baby it was – her and Dolly were good neighbors – so naturally she took it over to the Campions’. That’s how Dolly’s body was discovered.”
“Where was Campion that night, do you know?”
“He said he was gone all night, drinking until the bars closed, and then driving, all over hell and gone. It’s the kind of story you can’t prove or disprove. He couldn’t or wouldn’t name the bars, or the places he drove afterward. He said along toward dawn he went to sleep in his car in a cul-de-sac off Skyline. That wouldn’t be inconsistent with him doing the murder. Anyway, we picked him up around nine o’clock in the morning, when he drove back to his place. There’s no doubt he had been drinking. I could smell it on him.”
“What time was his wife killed?”
“Between three and four A.M. The Deputy Coroner was out there by eight, and he said she couldn’t have been dead longer than four or five hours. He went by body temp, and stomach contents, and the two factors checked each other out.”
“How did he know when she’d eaten last?”
“Campion said they ate together at six the previous night. He brought in a couple of hamburgers – some diet for a nursing mother – and the carhop at the drive-in confirmed the time. Apparently he and Dolly had an argument over the food, so he took what money there was in the house and went and got himself plastered.”
“What was the argument about?”
“Things in general, he said. They hadn’t been getting along too well for months.”
“He told you this?”
“Yeah. You’d think he was trying to make himself look bad.”
“Did he say anything about another woman?”
“No. What’s on your mind, Lew?”
“I think we can prove he was lying about what he did on the night of May the fifth. Have you talked to Royal this morning?”
“He phoned to tell me he had Campion. He wants me to go over to Redwood City and take a hand in the questioning.”
“Has Campion admitted anything yet?”
“He’s not talking at all. Royal’s getting kind of frustrated.”
“Did he say anything to you about the Travelers Motel in Saline City?”
“Not a word.” Mungan gave me a questioning look.
“According to their night clerk, Nelson Karp, Campion spent the night of May fifth there with a woman. Or part of the night. They registered as Mr. and Mrs. Burke Damis, which is one of the aliases Campion has been using. The Saline City police lifted the registration card last night after Campion was seen there. He seems to have been trying to set up an alibi.”