She had worked her feet into her damp shoes while she spoke. She opened the car door and was gone, running through the rain, up onto the front porch of the old yellow house. She gave a shy wave and went inside.
I forgot everything else she said and remembered only that she had said she liked me too much already. It was the first chink in cool armor. I suspected that she had said it impulsively and would be sorry later. Tina was not one to plot, to connive a chance to say a thing like that.
I went home and thought about her, about long quick legs and the tilt of her smile, about eyes that held gravity and shyness.
Chapter 6
My local sonorous evening commentator said in part, at ten o’clock that evening, “Chief of Police Judson Sutton told your reporter earlier this evening that he expects an early solution to the brutal murder of Mary Olan. Rain and darkness prevented as thorough a search of the area where the body was found as was desired. The roped off and guarded area will be searched again in the morning in the hope that some clue can be found that will point to the identity of the murderer.”
I hoped they would not look in any holes in rotten birch trees.
“Earlier today Nels Yeagger, handyman at the Pryor estate at Smith Lake was brought down to the city for questioning. He was picked up by two of the men assigned to Captain Kruslov, who is handling the case personally. At the time of this broadcast Yeagger has not yet been released, and it is assumed that he is still being interrogated.
“The coroner’s office, after an examination of the body, has established the time of death as some time between two A.M. and five A.M. Sunday morning. Death was caused by a thin band of fabric that was tightened around the throat. There is no indication that the fabric was knotted. Coroner Walther stated that the object used could have been a belt used as a slip noose. The actual throat injury was slight, and it is believed that strangulation took place slowly. The absence of any marks of conflict on the body seem to indicate that the girl was unconscious at the time she was killed. She had not been criminally attacked. The body was taken to the place where it was found in a car, and the tire marks were carefully obliterated where the car passed over soft bare ground. An extremely valuable wristwatch had not been removed from the body, and police have eliminated robbery as a motive, despite the fact that the dead girl’s purse has not yet been found. At the dinner party before her death she was carrying a small black envelope purse with a gold clasp. She...”
My phone rang and I turned the radio down. It was Hilver. “Mr. Sewell, the captain wants you should come down and leave off fingerprints. I was supposed to tell you today out at Pryor’s but he sent me off and I forgot about it.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
There isn’t any answer to that. I agreed, put my tie and jacket back on and went on down to police headquarters. It is a grimy old red stone building, full of the varied stinks of a hundred years of crime and punishment. A sergeant behind a wicket told me where to go. A bored man wrote down my name, age, height, weight, marital status, employment, and place of birth. He rolled my fingers on an ink pad and then on a printed card. When he was through he gave me one paper towel and sent me over to a chipped sink in the corner of the room.
“Can I go now?”
“Sit down over there,” he said. I sat. He left the room. I sat and sat. There was an electric clock on the wall. Every two minutes it clacked loudly, jumped forward two minutes and caught up with Time. A garage girl on a wall calendar had snared her skimpy skirt crawling through a barbed wire fence. Some jokester had given her a complete set of hirsute adornment. I kept yawning so hard I shuddered. I got sick of looking at the wooden floor, one high table, one low table, four chairs, the tan institutional plaster wall. Sometimes people would walk down the hall, by the open door. That, at least, was mildly entertaining. A sniffling girl went by once, a short fat matron prodding her in the back with a bitter knuckle. Another time a man started whooping and yelling and roaring. He stopped in the middle of a roar, stopped very, very abruptly. A young cop went by trying to sing.
At eleven-thirty Kruslov came in. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie untied, the two ends hanging down in discouraged fashion. He stared at me, obviously puzzled. He turned on his heel and left. I called after him but he didn’t answer.
Ten minutes later he came back with a sheet of paper in his hand, studying it. He sat on the low table. “Sewell. Let’s see what we got. Clear print of first and second finger of left hand on rear of side mirror, smudged print of left thumb on face of mirror. Section of print of right thumb, clear, on horn ring.” He put the paper aside and stared at me.
“I told you I drove the car,” I said angrily. “I adjusted the side mirror. I guess I blew the horn once. Now you’ve proved I’ve driven the car.”
He yawned and stuck a fist against his mouth. “Relax. Relax. You shouldn’t have been told to stay around.”
“Can I go now?”
“Gus says you’re a working fool. He says you spend more time on his back than off it.”
“Gus and I get along.”
“He said that too. He hasn’t missed a day, except vacations, since they opened that plant. Twenty years around machines, the last six at that place.”
“He’s a good man.”
He yawned again. “I should have gone into that racket. I figured this would give me retirement. Now Gus gets retirement too, maybe better than I do. What’s there left to make a man go on the cops?”
“Has Yeagger confessed?”
“No. We’re letting him go. It took a long time to check, but it checked out finally. We had to contact half the people in the hills. He quit work Saturday at six. He spent from eight to midnight in a beer joint. Then he and another guy picked up two girls who came into the beer joint. They had a car and a bottle. They went to a hunting camp up near Grey Lake and stayed right there until noon Sunday. This Yeagger had tied on such a load he was pretty shaggy about the details. But we got it all checked out. He wouldn’t say anything for a while, until we convinced him he was in bad trouble. He didn’t want to talk because there is going to be some trouble with the husband of one of the two girls they picked up. You know something funny? He says this and I believe him. It’s the first time in his whole life he ever did anything like that. How about that?”
“Rough.”
“He loses his job because the Olan girl went out with him. He gets in a big jam. It’s a real mess for that boy. He got drunk on account of the Olan girl.”
“Is that what he says?”
“I believe that, too. You know, that little girl was a bad actor. The more I dig, the more I find out. She went up there before her uncle opened the place at the lake just to make trouble for Yeagger. She took him back to the place. She had a key. She took him in there and taught him most of the facts of life in one big lesson. Getting that out of him was like pulling teeth. She went up a few more times, got him all mixed up and involved, and then dropped him like he was dirt.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“You know, he hates you, Sewell. He thinks you took her away from him. He thinks you were getting what he was missing.”
“I wasn’t. But it wasn’t for lack of trying, Captain.”