The Corpse Next Door Read online

  He nodded gloomily, seemed to think about it a moment. He swung around to face me with a quizzical smile.

  “I don’t remember a whole lot about last night. You looked after that girl—?”

  “I took her home. She wasn’t hurt. She was no girl, either.”

  “Ummmhumm,” he said, as if it wasn’t important. Maybe it wasn’t. “She could have been sixteen, for all I could tell. Those lights in the place. No lights, actually. Ought to pass a law about places like that. Too easy to pick up. Too easy to get picked up. I don’t know. She just didn’t seem bothered when I puked under the table. That impressed me. I wasn’t drunk. Just some bad beer. Hell of an evening.”

  The words rambled out with no particular thought or inflection behind them, as if his mind was rewinding after the session with Campion. He irritated me slightly, but at the same time I felt in touch with him emphatically, as if I could know his moods and desires without understanding them. Nathan had a magnetic quality, all right. A politician.

  “You keep diversified company,” I said. “You hop from a tavern broad to the ex-governor of the state in a matter of hours and the only change I can see in you is a clean shirt.”

  He smiled as if I had hurt him. “I don’t intend to do it. I know what I should do and what I shouldn’t. But up comes this thing and carries me off and the part of me that knows better can’t help me.”

  “Your kind of mistake is the kind you can make too often.”

  He accepted that. He sat on the edge of his desk and watched the fingers of his right hand curl and uncurl. “I’m beautiful this morning,” he said with faint irony. “I’m really beautiful this morning.” He looked at me again. “Am I going to have any court trouble because of that creature last night?”

  “No.”

  “You reading me off with a warning?”

  “I don’t know what else to do with you.”

  “Yeah.” He studied his hands. “I won’t do it again,” he said. They were just so many words.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said. “Take care of your sister.”

  I went out and shut the door behind me.

  I WAS AT MY CLUTTERED DESK IN POLICE HEADQUARTERS about midnight when Phil Naar poked his head in the door.

  “You still hanging around?” I said. Phil was working the 3-11 that week.

  He came inside. He was wearing a coffee-colored shirt, sticking wet to him in places. He rested his stocky body in a chair near the window and gave me a tired grin.

  “We had a cutting down in the Mill Bottom,” he said. “Two kids were arguing over what to play on the juke box, for Christ’s sake.” He patted his face and neck with his handkerchief. “I been over to St. Kit’s with it.”

  “How did you get that?” I said, noticing the bandage on his left hand.

  “A little trouble getting one of the kids into the squad car. The one that was still standing when we got there. He bit me. Smith had to unload his billy on the boy before we could handle him. Kids!”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked at the folder and pictures on my desk. “What have you got there? Jimmy Herne?”

  I nodded. “I was adding the newspaper clippings about his suicide. Should I send out for coffee?”

  “I can’t drink coffee in the summer. I must have told you that before.”

  “Must have. It’s just my age. I can’t remember what people tell me any more. Old ladies help me across the street.”

  “Send that to Jerry. He could use it.”

  Jerry was Phil’s boy. He had a local television program out in Hollywood and played bit parts in movies.

  “On second thought,” Phil said, “I’ll tell him myself when I get out there.” He looked at a calendar on one wall. “My God, eight more months. Only eight more months and then forty-four dollars and seventy-six cents a week for the rest of my life. All that, and social security, too.”

  He reached out and unlaced his shoes, let them drop on the floor. His feet were on the radiator, which hasn’t worked for years. I don’t mean to sound like we’re hard up. The roof doesn’t leak, unless somebody spits on it.

  “I heard something real interesting,” I said. “According to Miller Starkey, Jimmy Herne was telling the truth about where he got the thirty dollars.”

  Phil picked at something stuck between a couple of his teeth. “You planning to let Gulliver know?” he said, trying to sound disinterested.

  “I already did.”

  He put his feet on the floor. “What did he say?”

  I grinned. “He said I spoiled his evening.”

  Phil spoke morosely. “The way you keep sticking your head in that lion’s mouth fascinates me. Either you got more guts than good sense or else you’re trying to prove something to yourself.”

  I quit smiling. “Like what?”

  “Aw,” Phil grumbled, “how would I know? You’re the college boy.” He didn’t look at me.

  “The college boy,” I repeated. “Maybe that bothers you. Maybe you think you should be giving the orders around here.”

  “Cut it out,” Phil said sharply. “I’m not the executive type. I’m just the kind of guy who spends his life taking orders and doing the best he can. I know that. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  We stared at each other for a while, not hostilely, but grimly. I broke it up. “Sorry, Phil. I’ve been touchy lately for some reason.”

  He turned a little and stared out of the window. I tucked the papers on my desk into Jimmy’s folder. The photos remained spread out on my blotter. I looked at them again. I had taken them myself and they showed good detail. Three of the pictures were of Leland Smithell lying on the rug in his living room. He was wearing an undershirt and trousers, his bare feet were in slippers. The candy dish, of hammered copper with a wooden handle, lay on the floor nearby. It had been used to kill Smithell. The back of his head was badly crushed. He had been hit at least twice, and the autopsy surgeon reported that the back of his skull had collapsed, shoving pieces of bone into the brain.

  The first blow possibly had only stunned him, and he had stumbled against an end table near the sofa, upsetting the heavy metal table lamp, which could be seen on the floor in the pictures.

  Along with several diagrams of the first floor of the house, I put the pictures back in the folder. Impulsively, I took out my report of the investigation and Jimmy’s confession, reread them both.

  Smithell had lived in Cheyney about three years. No one knew where he was from, and apparently he had no living relatives. A check of his few papers turned up no letters from anywhere but Cheyney. He wasn’t wealthy but had enough money to invest in the expansion program of Nordin Kaylor, and eventually became Kaylor’s partner. He lived in a new ranch-type house just down the street from the Fishers in the best section of town, apparently lived quietly. He entertained occasionally, belonged to Wood Hills Country Club and was socially acceptable. He seemed about fifty years old. His only charity had been a homely kid named Jimmy Herne, whom he had heard about from a friend connected with the state prison system. He had wanted someone to look after his house for him, and Jimmy eventually got the job. Somebody, besides Stella Francis, had been hoping Jimmy would straighten out. But Jimmy murdered Smithell, probably without meaning to, for a couple of rings and other pieces of men’s jewelry. And, apparently, thirty dollars. He had never had a chance to get away with it and he had finally ended his unattractive life personally, after confessing. There was nothing more.

  Nothing more, except that I couldn’t quite think of Jimmy as just another folder filled with reports and fingerprint cards and arrest sheets. Maybe that was Stella’s fault, for trying to make me see the hard ugly life when nobody gives a damn. So that I had to think about a frightened kid walking away from the reformatory, telling himself, grimly, that he was through with it, that he’d die before he went back.

  Then staying with Stella a while, before the job with Smithell came along.

  Washing dishes, cutting gras
s, catering to and supervising routine for an aging bachelor.

  For ten months. And then . . .

  A mistimed try for quick money, and running.

  And being brought back, and knowing there wasn’t a chance, because nobody would listen to him.

  Phil was still looking out of the window, and I wondered if he was remembering, as I was . . .

  The kid lay beside the wooden chair in the basement, the chair that was bolted to the floor. Gulliver lifted his head with a hand under the chin.

  “I . . . didn’t . . . do . . . it . . .”

  Gulliver looked at Phil Naar, who had come in quietly while it was going on. I watched both of them.

  “Clean him up, Phil, and take him over to the jail” Gulliver went to the door and left without looking again at Jimmy Herne.

  Phil wet his handkerchief at a sink on the wall. He helped Jimmy to a sitting position. Jimmy’s head hung, as if he didn’t have strength to lift it. Blood was bright on Jimmy’s lower lip. Phil wiped at it with the handkerchief.

  “You must have bit your lip,” he said.

  He helped Jimmy to his feet. The kid stood uncertainly for a moment, finding strength. He held his head gently with his hands.

  “I guess I don’t need to put the cuffs on you just to walk over to the jail, do I?” Phil said.

  Jimmy turned and kicked him. It seemed to take all he had because he sat down then, in the chair.

  “What . . . did you do that for?” Phil said, his eyes full of hurt. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  Jimmy sobbed. “You goddam cop!”

  “You got a cigarette, Bill?”

  “Oh? Sure.” I tossed him my pack and he lit one.

  “Thanks. Well, I guess I ought to go on home. No reason to stick around. No reason for you to stick around, either.”

  “No.” I put the remaining papers in the folder, secured it. “What do you think, Phil? I mean about Jimmy and the thirty dollars.”

  Phil sighed, and began putting on his shoes. “There had to be some truth in him somewhere. I guess that was it.”

  “Suppose that wasn’t all the truth.”

  He gave me a frayed stare. “What do you want to say, Bill?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Phil stood up and took out his handkerchief, patted his chin. “Eight more months,” he said, to himself. “Just eight more months. I don’t want to do anything but stay out of his way for that long. I don’t even want him to know I’m around, for eight more months.”

  His face was drawn. There was a sour tension in the hot little room, and I knew he could taste it. He sighed. “Well, there’s always the chance we were wrong about . . .”

  “Suppose we don’t talk about it,” I said. “Suppose we forget all about it because we can’t do anything about it anyway, now.”

  Phil took his hat off, combed his slack white hair with his fingers and put the hat back on.

  “If you find a way to forget it,” he said irritably, “let me know. I’d like to get some sleep too.”

  4

  THREE NIGHTS later I was going into my office when the desk officer looked my way and said, “Can you come here a minute, Sergeant?”

  I went behind the railing. He thumbed down the button on the radio mike and said, “Will you give me that again, Russ? Sergeant Randall’s standing by.”

  Russ was in one of our three cars. “We just drove past the Smithell house, Sergeant,” he said over the loudspeaker. “Isn’t the place supposed to be locked up?”

  “It is locked up,” I said. “Why?”

  “We saw a light. Just for a second, at one of the front windows. Like a flashlight somebody was being careful with.”

  “No mistake?”

  “Now, Bill . . .” he sounded pained.

  “Okay. Who’s with you? Concannon?”

  “Sure.”

  “If somebody’s inside, I don’t want you all barging in on him. Just make sure he stays inside until I get there. Understand?”

  “I get it,” he said briskly. “I’ll take the front and Con will watch the back door.”

  “Don’t go waving that gun of yours around,” I said. “It may just be a real estate man showing the house to a prospective buyer. Or something.”

  “Sure,” Russ said, with a wink in his voice.

  I went into the office and took my gun and belt holster from the desk. If you like fast hard-hitting hand guns, you’d like mine. It’s a Smith and Wesson .45 revolver, with the barrel cut down to four inches and a ramp sight mounted for more maneuverability on the hip. The front of the trigger guard is cut out, the butt rounded off and the hammer filed down, all for a faster draw. Not that I usually need my gun that fast. But you only have to be slow once to be dead.

  I took the front door key of the Smithell house from the bulletin board and went downstairs to my car.

  Four minutes later I parked across the street from the darkened Smithell house. The squad car was parked in a driveway down the street, partially hidden behind a hedge.

  Russ stepped out of the shadows between two trees near the porch as I approached. “Nobody’s come this way,” he said cheerfully, his voice low.

  “Any more lights?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  I tried the front door, found it locked. I unlocked it quietly, swung the door open. It was black as the pitch of hell inside. Light sprayed on the floor as I thumbed the button on my flash. I moved the light around, covering the foyer, living room and dining room from where I stood. Russ breathed heavily at my shoulder.

  “Well,” he said, scratching his belly comfortably. “I guess we—Jesus!”

  We both took a step backward at the sound of the scream from within the house, wincing at the withering terror reflected in it, and the sound seemed to crawl right up my back like something alive.

  “What-in-the-hell . . .” Russ began. A second scream cut him off.

  With the flash moving the darkness out of the way ahead of me, I ran through the dining room toward the kitchen and the cellar stairs. The house was silent now except for the memory of the last shocking scream and the heavy sounds of Russ as he followed me.

  I went down the stairs into the basement without bothering to turn on the lights. When I hit the basement floor I let the beam of light travel along the walls and Russ did the same with his flashlight. We found what we were looking for at the same time.

  The girl in the doorway of the utility room turned a little as both flashlights concentrated on her. The edges of her blonde hair looked white against the darkness beyond the door. I didn’t realize who I was looking at for a moment. She was wearing a green dress without sleeves, trimmed in white, with large white buttons. She had a flashlight, too, a small one, and in that caught moment that did not seem to be a part of time at all the flashlight slipped from her hand and hit the tiled floor, the glass shattering.

  She moved then, almost drunkenly, one arm coming up to cover her eyes from the glare. Her mouth was open in an ugly way and her eyes were gone, brother, ’way gone. She took a couple of weaving steps and pitched forward but I knew it was going to happen and was there to catch her.

  As I eased Stella to the floor there came a pounding at the basement door that led outside and Concannon was yelling something I couldn’t catch. Russ yelled back at him and went clumping up the stairs to turn the lights on. Russ came back down swearing to himself, and hustled over to let Concannon in. The two of them looked in bewilderment at the girl on the floor.

  I inclined my head toward the doorway from which Stella had come. “One of you take a look in there.”

  Russ went in with his gun and was about five seconds. He came back stabbing at his holster with the big revolver, a sick sheepish look on his face.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess we know what she was screaming about. Have a look, Bill.”

  I went in there. Behind me, Russ was saying, “You know, I think I had too much garlic in the spaghetti to
night. I’m afraid I’m going to be . . .” He made a rush for outdoors and was, on the grass.

  I didn’t blame him. Against one wall of the utility room was a trunk, the lid up. I looked inside. The man who looked back hadn’t seen anybody lately. Not quite some time. And he didn’t smell that way because he needed a bath.

  I marched outside and leaned on the doorway. With some surprise I found my right hand had a death grip on the cut-down .45. I didn’t remember drawing. I replaced the revolver and got myself a cigarette. My hand was shaking and I didn’t give a damn who knew it.

  “Somebody dead in there?” Concannon said. He’s an ex-marine about five feet eight inches tall and at least that wide. He’s put together as strongly as suspension cable, too.

  “I’ll say.” I tilted my hat back and looked at Stella, lying on the floor. This part of the basement was a sort of party room, with paneled walls and a patterned tile floor. There was a lot of crazy metal furniture, too, and a small bar. Part of one wall was glass and there was a stone-paved patio outside, along with a hillside rock garden, barbecue pit and a gradually sloping lawn to the garage, the roof of which could be seen just inside the illumination provided by a couple of powerful floodlights mounted upstairs. These had been turned on by the same switch that worked the basement lights.

  “How about getting some water for the lady?” I said. “Or would you rather go look at the body?”

  “Not especially.”

  “The kitchen’s upstairs to the right.”

  I went outside and told Russ to get my camera equipment out of the rear of my car and report in. I returned to the storage room and secured the lid before the air could go to work on him. There was no question as to how he had got it. About three-quarters of an inch of pointed steel poked through him just below the heart and his white shirt had turned rusty over a large area.

  Concannon returned with some water and a couple of ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel. I turned my attentions to Stella. I kneeled on the floor and propped her against me, let ice water trickle over her face. Even though she was still out her face retained a look of strain, as if she hadn’t been able to escape the sight of it even in unconsciousness.