Death Trap (11 page)

“You can’t tell, these days. This is a terrible thing.”

“But it gives me a breathing space. Score will need my evidence. He won’t be riding me. All of a sudden I’m not as important on this other deal. In a way it’s a break, but I’d just as soon not have had it this way. Not at her expense.”

The drinks began to ease the aches and the tensions.

“What next?” Charlie asked.

“I’ll go along with Ginny’s guess. Jane Ann was blackmailing somebody. He is a man of a certain position in the community. Probably a wife and kids. At least a wife. He got out of line with her. She had some sort of proof. I would think she would have kept it with the money, if it was some sort of letter, but evidently she didn’t. So I have to look for a man who hasn’t been doing as well financially as he should have been doing. I don’t think Jane Ann would have been stupid enough to be too greedy, but I’ll bet she made the bite hurt. He had to be somebody she could contact easily and without anybody getting suspicious. He didn’t mail the money to her. She had to make her demands known to him.”

“And you think this man killed her?”

“I don’t know. I have to find out. And it’s the only lead. Now I’m too tired to think, and I’m half drunk. Can you think of a man who would match that description?”

“I’ll think about it. I’ll make a list. How about one of her teachers?”

“Could be. Could very well be. She could snatch his job right out from under him. Or it could be one of the professors up on the hill. She was headed up there the night she was killed, wasn’t she? To see some girl friend?”

“That’s right. Ann Sibley. Daughter of Dr. Wayne Sibley.”

“Did she see that girl often?”

“I’ve got that impression.”

I yawned and stretched until my shoulders creaked. I went woodenly up to bed. I tried to stay awake to think things through, but sleep came like a deep blue comber, the kind you can ride. Ginny’s battered face floated through my dreams. In one dream it was Vicky who died there on the couch, before scribbling my name on the pad Score held for her. That one woke me up, sweaty and shaking.

I got down to breakfast at five minutes of ten, just under the wire. Charlie brought in a cup of coffee and sat down with me.

“They got the Smith kid. It was all on the eight o’clock news out of Warrentown. The state cops spotted him thirty miles north of here. They couldn’t catch him. They radioed ahead. Another car blocked the road. He tried to take the ditch and flipped. It threw him clear. It banged him up pretty bad. He was still unconscious at the time of the broadcast. There was blood on his boots that they matched to the girl’s blood.”

“Is he going to live?”

“They think so. The Garson girl died of a brain hemorrhage. Everybody is going around shaking their heads and clucking. I’ll bet they might just as well close the high school for all the work those kids’ll do there today. It was the same way after Jane Ann’s body was found, but this seems almost a little gaudier, if possible. There’s talk of a Citizens’ Council to take up the teen-age problem.”

“Did I make the news?”

“They didn’t say anything about that note. The way he ran for it is as good as a confession. I guess they think he’ll confess when he regains consciousness. The newspaper people are over here from Warrentown already. Dalton is getting itself quite a reputation.”

“Did you make up that list?”

“I tried. I can’t. Hell, you know how small town businessmen are. Everybody talks poor mouth. That keeps them from getting hit too hard by the charities. They come out with big cars and when you admire the cars, they moan about the payments. How do you feel this morning?”

“Better than I should.”

“You going to do anything about Quillan?”

“There’s nothing I can prove.”

“If I can get six or seven men together, will you tell them just what Quillan did and how Score asked him to do it?”

“If you think it will do any good.”

“It may and it may not. I know the fellows I want to round up. I usually stay out of town politics. But I’m fed up with Score and Quillan.”

After breakfast I drove to the motel. Vicky was out in the back garden in a sun suit. She wore dark glasses. She put her book down as I walked out. She seemed in fair spirits.

I told her everything that had happened. She asked questions and she looked so distressed when I started to tell her about Quillan that I made it sound as if I had gotten off a good deal easier than I had.

“I despise that man. I never told you what he did to Al. He had him there nearly a whole afternoon before he was taken over to Warrentown. Al didn’t even want to tell me about it. I was there when he told John Tennant about it, when the question of the confession came up. Quillan made him sit in a chair. Quillan wrapped a Coke bottle in a towel. And he kept hitting Al over the head with it. Not hard, but continually. Each blow jarred his head. He said he got so he couldn’t think or hear or see. And he knew the only way to stop it was to say yes. He didn’t give any details of the crime. He didn’t know any. He just kept saying yes while Quillan was asking the questions with all the details in them. Then they wrote it all out and Alister signed it. He had blinding headaches for three days, so bad that he couldn’t sleep. And Quillan questioned me, too. He put his hands on me. Here. I told Lieutenant Leader and he made him stay away from me. They didn’t try to use the confession. John Tennant said it would have been better for our side if they had because Quillan had made some errors in his reconstruction of the crime, and John Tennant could have proved they were impossible and invalidated the confession that way.”

“Don’t get so upset, honey.”

“I get upset every time I think about him.”

“Did you know Ginny Garson?”

“Just by sight. I’d seen her with Jane Ann. Al knows her better. Quite a few times he drove Jane Ann and Ginny over to the movies, as a favor. John Tennant pointed out that those trips could account for her hair being found in the car. But it didn’t seem to help. They all seemed to have their minds all made up. They didn’t seem to listen to John, no matter what he said.”

“Can you think of any married man Jane Ann could have been blackmailing?”

“No. I’ve been wondering about that ever since you told me about the money. That’s the way she would have had to get it.”

“There’s one boy who may be able to help. They call him Rook. I want to talk to him. And I want to talk to a professor named Sibley. I imagine you know him.”

“Oh, I do. He’s very nice. Dr. Wayne Sibley. He was very nice to me. He told me he had objected to my being released, but he hadn’t been able to do anything about it.”

I looked at her intently. “Is everything all right?”

Her mouth changed shape. “There’s so little time, so very little time left.”

“I’m doing all I can.”

“I think you’re doing a great deal, Hugh. I—I hope it’s going to be enough.”

“Ginny’s testimony, if I could have persuaded her to give it, might have given us another stay of execution. It might have. There’s no guarantee.”

She took her dark glasses off, massaged tired eyes with thumb and forefinger. “This all seems like a strange dream, Hugh. None of it has seemed real. It couldn’t have happened to us.”

She looked small, forlorn and weary and my heart went out to her. Her hand reached out and tightened on my wrist and those so blue eyes looked directly into mine, almost blazing with intensity. “Don’t let it happen to him, Hugh. Promise me you won’t let it happen to him.”

“I—”

“That was stupid of me. And unfair. You can’t make a promise like that.”

As I drove back to Dalton, the task she had set me seemed too impossible. Trained men had been over the ground. I had had a little bit of luck. The odds were that it was the last I would have. And that wasn’t enough.

Professor Wayne Sibley had an eleven o’clock class. I waited on the second floor corridor of Delsey Hall outside the door of room 209. At five minutes of noon the classroom door opened and the students began coming out of that room and other rooms on the floor. A few of them gave me abrupt incurious glances. They seemed very young. Younger in some strange way than the kids in their chopped cars, the kids with their shrill girls at the drive-in.

Sibley came to the door and stood there chatting with two of the students while I waited over at the side. He was a stocky man with kinky gray hair, an outdoor complexion, tweedy clothes, a trained resonant voice. He talked amiably with the students, and they laughed at what he said. When they drifted off, he turned to me.

“Are you waiting to see me? I’m Wayne Sibley.”

“Hugh MacReedy, Dr. Sibley. I’m a friend of Vicky Landy.”

He studied me and I had the feeling he was making a decision about me. “I see. And you want to talk to me?”

“With your permission.”

“Come along then. I have some papers to leave off at the administration building, and then we’ll walk to my house. This is one of those blessed days without a one o’clock class.”

“I—I certainly appreciate—”

“Don’t look so startled, Mr. MacReedy. I’m willing to talk without putting up an argument.”

“It isn’t like the others I’ve tried to talk to, sir.”

“I can imagine that. You stuck your jaw out when you proclaimed yourself a friend of Miss Landy. I also consider myself a friend of hers. But I have been a moral and social coward. And it has been on my conscience. As a friend I should have tried to help her. She is an exceptional young woman. I pride myself—or used to pride myself—on being a man of honor and integrity and courage. But this time the chips were down and I thought too long about the comfortable nest I’ve made for myself here, and I thought too long about what other people would think of me if I made a display of my friendship for her.” He looked directly at me. “In other words, I have sickened myself, Mr. MacReedy. So I will talk to you without argument. And I hope you can think of something I can do to help her. Something rather difficult. Something that will make me so unpopular with my associates that it will serve as a form of self-punishment.” He turned quickly away and I followed him.

As we cut across the campus I said, “Did you have Alister Landy in any of your classes?”

“For two years.”

“What was your opinion of him, Dr. Sibley?”

“I prefer Mr. Sibley, Mr. MacReedy. I believe the title should be reserved for the more scientific degrees. I am an associate professor of English. I am also a victim of one of the more prevalent diseases of this age—parlor psychoanalysis. Alister Landy was one of the most intelligent students I have ever had. I could not like the boy. I was forced to respect him. His—intellectual arrogance was displeasing to me, even though I felt it justified. If you will forgive me for a moment, what proof have I that you are a friend of Miss Landy and not a journalist of some kind?”

“I—I guess the easiest way would be to phone Charlie Staubs at the Inn.”

“My wife tells me incessantly that I am the world’s most gullible man. I’ll prove that by taking you at face value. Just a moment while I drop these off. I’ll be right out.”

He was out in far too short a time to have made a phone call.

“Can I drive you home?”

“I’d rather walk, thank you. It isn’t far.” I noticed that the students we met greeted him with what seemed to be a genuine fondness. “To get back to Alister, I believe I understood him. His parents died at the wrong time in his development. The experimental school he attended paid far too little attention to intellectual discipline. His sister, out of a sense of emotional duty, overprotected him. Too much of his thinking was intuitive. He would leap from peak to peak, unwilling to make the unexciting effort of plodding through the valleys in between. When I attempted to criticize his pattern of thought, I could not reach him. Brilliance, standing alone, is not enough. No one is too good for work. Things came far too easily to him. His memory was almost photographic. Isn’t it odd how easy it is to speak of the boy in the past tense? Rather dreadful, I think.”

“You think he committed the crime?”

“I’ve thought about it a great deal. I believe he did. The brilliant and erratic minds are so often not solidly anchored in reality, in the knowledge of the implacability of cause and effect. There is, of course, no such thing as an entirely normal man. It is trite to point out the correlation between brilliance and madness. And, after horror, the mind can provide its own anesthesia. I feel he was capable of doing that deed, doing it in such a dazed way that he committed innumerable errors, and wiping it out of his memory afterward. I would rather imagine that sort of mind is overly responsive to sex fantasy, to lurid imaginings. He turned fantasy into reality. The business of his emotional responsibility is something else again. He was declared sane. I cannot be that certain.”

He walked with an even stride, staring at the walk ten feet ahead, frowning from time to time.

“You heard what happened last night.”

“In the town. Yes. A horrible thing. But what can they expect?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

He shrugged. “It seems to me to be the result of a curious trend. A reversal of values. Basic decency is corny. Sex is used to sell refrigerators. Violence has become admirable. A boy is supposed to toughen himself, seek out the angles, display no emotion, disguise intelligence, avoid any stain of individuality. Public schools have become temporary stockades with such overcrowding that only the most devoted of teachers still try to stimulate intelligence and imagination. The welfare state guarantees that nobody will starve, no matter how badly they goof. And at the end you get your social security. So, from womb to tomb, you just let yourself sink into the warm selfish bath of conformity, of sex without emotional responsibility, of violence without punishment. Does this sound like a speech? I’m afraid it is. I’ve said it so many times I hardly need to pay attention any more.”

“It’s a black picture, Mr. Sibley.”

“Not as black as I paint it, thank God. There’s a new breed coming along. A batch of stern, almost painfully moral children, who have, through some miracle, become a bit sickened by their slightly elder contemporaries. The pendulum always swings.” He turned in at a walk. “Here we are. Come on in, Mr. MacReedy.”