Needful Things (61 page)

Lester stood on the top porch step for a long time, reading this message from his fiancée over and over and over again. The prayer-meeting? Was that it? Did she think he'd gone over to the prayer-meeting in Lake Auburn to meet some floozy? In his distress, it was the only idea that made any sense to him at all.

He went inside and called Sally's house. He let the phone ring two dozen times, but no one answered.

Sally knew he would call, and so she had asked Irene Lutjens if she could spend the night at Irene's place. Irene, all but bursting with curiosity, said yes, sure, of course. Sally was so distressed about
something
that she hardly looked pretty at all. Irene could hardly believe it, but it was true.

For her own part, Sally had no intention of telling Irene or anyone else what had happened. It was too awful, too shameful. She would carry it with her to the grave. So she refused to answer Irene's questions for over half an hour. Then the whole story came pouring out of her in a hot flood of tears. Irene held her and listened, her eyes growing big and round.

“That's all right,” Irene crooned, rocking Sally in her arms. “That's all right, Sally—Jesus loves you, even if that son of a bitch doesn't. So do I. So does Reverend Rose. And you certainly gave the musclebound creep something to remember you by, didn't you?”

Sally nodded, sniffling, and the other girl stroked her
hair and made soothing sounds. Irene could hardly wait until tomorrow, when she could start calling her other girlfriends. They wouldn't
believe
it! Irene felt sorry for Sally, she really did, but she was also sort of glad this had happened. Sally was so
pretty,
and Sally was so darned
holy.
It was sort of nice to see her crash and burn, just this once.

And Lester's the best-looking guy in church. If he and Sally really
do
break up, I wonder if he might not ask me out? He looks at me sometimes like he's wondering what kind of underwear I've got on, so I guess it's not impossible . . .

“I feel so horrible!” Sally wept. “So
d-d-dirty!”

“Of
course
you do,” Irene said, continuing to rock her and stroke her hair. “You don't still have the letter and that picture, do you?”

“I b-b-burned them!” Sally cried loudly against Irene's damp bosom, and then a fresh storm of grief and loss carried her away.

“Of course you did,” Irene murmured. “It's just what you
should
have done.” Still, she thought, you could have waited until I had at least one look, you wimpy thing.

Sally spent the night in Irene's guest-room, but she hardly slept at all. Her weeping passed eventually, and she spent most of that night staring dry-eyed into the dark, gripped by those dark and bitterly satisfying fantasies of revenge which only a jilted and previously complacent lover can fully entertain.

Mr. Gaunt's first “by appointment only” customer arrived promptly at eight o'clock on Tuesday morning. This was Lucille Dunham, one of the waitresses at Nan's Luncheonette. Lucille had been struck by a deep, hopeless aching at the sight of the black pearls in one of the display cases of Needful Things. She knew she could never hope to buy such an expensive item, never in a million years. Not on the salary that skinflint Nan Roberts paid her. All the same, when Mr. Gaunt suggested that they talk about it without half the town leaning over their shoulders (so to speak), Lucille had leaped at the offer the way a hungry fish might leap at a sparkling lure.

She left Needful Things at eight-twenty, an expression of dazed, dreaming happiness on her face. She had purchased the black pearls for the unbelievable price of thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents. She had also promised to play a little prank, perfectly harmless, on that stuffed-shirt Baptist minister William Rose. That wouldn't be work, as far as Lucille was concerned; it would be pure pleasure. The Bible-quoting stinker had never once left her a tip, not even so much as one thin dime. Lucille (a good Methodist who didn't in the slightest mind shaking her tail to a hot boogie beat on Saturday night) had heard of storing up your reward in heaven; she wondered if Rev. Rose had heard that it was more blessed to give than to receive.

Well, she would pay him back a little . . . and it was really quite harmless. Mr. Gaunt had told her so.

That gentleman watched her go with a pleasant smile on his face. He had an extremely busy day planned,
extremely
busy, with appointments every half hour or so and lots of telephone calls to make. The carnival was well established: one major attraction had been tested successfully; the time to start up all the rides at once was now near at hand. As always when he reached this point, whether in Lebanon, Ankara, the western provinces of Canada, or right here in Hicksville, U.S.A., he felt there were just not enough hours in the day. Yet one bent every effort toward one's goal, for busy hands were happy hands, and to strive was in itself noble, and . . .

. . . and if his old eyes did not deceive him, the day's second customer, Yvette Gendron, was hurrying up the sidewalk toward the canopy right now.

“Busy, busy, busy day,” Mr. Gaunt murmured, and fixed a large, welcoming smile on his face.

Alan Pangborn arrived at his own office at eight-thirty, and there was already a message slip taped to the side of his phone. Henry Payton of the State Police had called at seven-forty-five. He wanted Alan to return the call ASAP. Alan settled into his chair, placed the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, and hit the button which auto-dialed the Oxford Barracks. From the top drawer of his desk he took four silver dollars.

“Hello, Alan,” Henry said. “I'm afraid I've got some bad news about your double murder.”

“Oh, so all at once it's
my
double murder,” Alan said. He closed his fist around the four cartwheels, squeezed, and opened his hand again. Now there were three. He leaned back in his chair and cocked his feet up on his desk. “It really must be bad news.”

“You don't sound surprised.”

“Nope.” He squeezed his fist shut again and used his pinky finger to “force” the lowest silver dollar in the stack. This was an operation of some delicacy . . . but Alan was more than equal to the challenge. The silver dollar slipped
from his fist and tumbled down his sleeve. There was a quiet
chink!
sound as it struck the first one, a sound that would be covered by the magician's patter in an actual performance. Alan opened his hand again, and now there were only two cartwheels.

“Maybe you wouldn't mind telling me why not,” Henry said. He sounded slightly testy.

“Well, I've spent most of the last two days thinking about it,” Alan said. Even this was an understatement. From the moment on Sunday afternoon when he had first seen that Nettie Cobb was one of the two women lying dead at the foot of the stop-sign, he had thought of little else. He even dreamed about it, and the feeling that all the numbers added up short had become a nagging certainty. This made Henry's call not an annoyance but a relief, and saved Alan the trouble of calling him.

He squeezed the two silver dollars in his hand.

Chink.

Opened his hand. Now there was one.

“What bothers you?” Henry asked.

“Everything,” Alan said flatly. “Starting with the fact that it happened at all. I suppose the thing that itches the worst is the way the time-table of the crime works . . . or
doesn't
work. I keep trying to see Nettie Cobb finding her dog dead and then sitting down to write all those notes. And do you know what? I keep not being able to do it. And every time I can't do it, I wonder how much of this stupid goddam business I'm not seeing.”

Alan squeezed his fist viciously shut, opened it, and then there were none.

“Uh-huh. So maybe my bad news is your good news. Someone else was involved, Alan. We don't know who killed the Cobb woman's dog, but we can be almost positive that it wasn't Wilma Jerzyck.”

Alan's feet came off the desk in a hurry. The cartwheels slid out of his sleeve and hit the top of his desk in a little silver runnel. One of them came down on edge and rolled for the side of the desk. Alan's hand flicked out, spooky-quick, and snatched it back before it could get away. “I think you better tell me what you got, Henry.”

“Uh-huh. Let's start with the dog. The body was turned over to John Palin, a D.V.M. in South Portland.
He is to animals what Henry Ryan is to people. He says that because the corkscrew penetrated the dog's heart and it died almost instantly, he can give us a fairly restricted time of death.”

“That's
a nice change,” Alan said. He was thinking of the Agatha Christie novels which Annie had read by the dozen. In those, it seemed there was always some doddering village doctor who was more than willing to set the time of death as between 4:30 p.m. and quarter past five. After almost twenty years as a law-enforcement officer, Alan knew a more realistic response to the time-of-death question was “Sometime last week. Maybe.”

“It is, isn't it? Anyway, this Dr. Palin says the dog died between ten o'clock and noon. Peter Jerzyck says that when he came into the master bedroom to get ready for church—
at a little past ten
—his wife was in the shower.”

“Yes, we knew it was tight,” Alan said. He was a little disappointed. “But this guy Palin must allow for a margin of error, unless he's God. Fifteen minutes is all it takes to make Wilma look good for it.”

“Yeah? How good does she look to you, Alan?”

He considered the question, then said heavily: “To tell you the truth, old buddy, she doesn't look that good. She never did.” Alan forced himself to add: “Just the same, we'd look pretty silly keeping this case open on the basis of some dog-doctor's report and a gap of—what?—fifteen minutes?”

“Okay, let's talk about the note on the corkscrew. You remember the note?”

“ ‘Nobody slings mud at my clean sheets. I told you I'd get you.' ”

“The very one. The handwriting expert in Augusta is still mooning over it, but Peter Jerzyck provided us with a sample of his wife's handwriting, and I've got Xerox copies of both the note and the sample on the desk in front of me. They don't match. No
way
do they match.”

“The hell you say!”

“The hell I don't. I thought you were the guy who wasn't surprised.”

“I knew something was wrong, but it's been those rocks with the notes on them that I haven't been able to get out of my mind. The time sequence is screwy, and that's
made me uncomfortable, yeah, but on the whole I guess I was willing to sit still for it. Mostly because it seems like such a Wilma Jerzyck thing to do. You're sure she didn't disguise her handwriting?” He didn't believe it—the idea of travelling incognito had never been Wilma Jerzyck's style—but it was a possibility that had to be covered.

“Me? I'm positive. But I'm not the expert, and what I think won't stand up in court. That's why the note's in graphanalysis.”

“When will the handwriting guy file his report?”

“Who knows? Meantime, take my word for it, Alan—they're apples and oranges. Nothing alike.”

“Well, if Wilma didn't do it, someone sure wanted Nettie to
believe
she did. Who? And why?
Why,
for God's sake?”

“I dunno, scout—it's your town. In the meantime, I have two more things for you.”

“Shoot.” Alan put the silver dollars back into his drawer, then made a tall, skinny man in a top-hat walk across the wall. On the return trip, the top-hat became a cane.

“Whoever killed the dog left a set of bloody finger-prints on the inner knob of Nettie's front door—that's big number one.”

“Hot damn!”

“Warm damn at the best, I'm afraid. They're blurry. The perp probably left them grasping the doorknob to go out.”

“No good at all?”

“We've got some fragments that
might
be useful, although there isn't much chance that they'd stand up in court. I've sent them to FBI Print-Magic in Virginia. They're doing some pretty amazing reconstructive work on partials these days. They're slower than cold molasses—it'll probably be a week or even ten days before I hear back—but in the meantime, I compared the partials with the Jerzyck woman's prints, which were delivered to me by the ever-thoughtful Medical Examiner's office last evening.”

“No match?”

“Well, it's like the handwriting, Alan—it's comparing
partials to totals, and if I testified in court on something like that, the defense would chew me a new asshole. But since we're sitting at the bullshit table, so to speak, no—they're nothing alike. There's the question of size, for one thing. Wilma Jerzyck had small hands. The partials came from someone with big hands. Even when you allow for the blurring, they are damned big hands.”

“A man's prints?”

“I'm sure of it. But again, it'd never stand up in court.”

“Who gives a fuck?” On the wall, a shadow lighthouse suddenly appeared, then turned into a pyramid. The pyramid opened like a flower and became a goose flying through the sunshine. Alan tried to see the face of the man—not Wilma Jerzyck but some
man
—who had gone into Nettie's house after Nettie had left on Sunday morning. The man who had killed Nettie's Raider with a corkscrew and then framed Wilma for it. He looked for a face and saw nothing but shadows. “Henry, who would even
want
to do something like this, if it wasn't Wilma?”

“I don't know. But I think we might have a witness to the rock-throwing incident.”