The Black Hearts Murder (19 page)

He made Laurel a stiffish bourbon and soda and for himself a gin and tonic, going easy on the gin. One of the advantages of gin was that, being colorless, it did not betray its relative weakness in his drinks when he mixed them himself.

She had finished pressing his trousers and was draping them over a hanger when he brought the drinks into the living room. He set hers on a coffee table near where she was ironing.

“I don't think they'll shrink,” Laurel said, taking a sip of her bourbon and then going to work vigorously on his jacket. “Now suppose you tell me what kind of wringer you fell into tonight.”

He sprawled on her couch in the pink blanket and recounted his evening's adventure. When he reached the place in his narrative at which the gunman had fired at him as he dived into the quarry pool, she stopped ironing abruptly.

“You mean you're
wounded
? I thought that rip I mended—”

“Just a crease.” He slipped the blanket off his right shoulder to show the two-inch welt; it looked like a burn. “I helped myself to your first-aid kit.”

She went over to inspect it, then suddenly stooped to touch her lips to it. “Mama kiss the hurty place and make it well.”

“I bit my lip, too,” McCall said, and reached.

She dodged and retreated, laughing. “Later—maybe. Right now I'm busy ironing.”

McCall finished his story.

She stared at him. “What's it all about, Mike? It doesn't seem to make any sense.”

“I have a suspicion. I'll have to do some checking tomorrow before I express it. Because, if I'm wrong, I'd be wide open for a defamation-of-character suit.”

Laurel tossed her auburn hair. “Meaning you think I'd go blabbing something you told me in confidence?”

“Meaning I don't want you thinking I'm an idiot,” McCall retorted, “which you'd certainly think if my suspicion turned out to be wrong. It's that kind of suspicion.”

“Now I am curious!”

“You wouldn't be human if you weren't.”

“I wouldn't be a woman, you mean.”

“And that would be a calamity. You know, with your pink robe and my pink blanket, we look like Hers and His?”

“Not
yet
, Mr. McCall,” Laurel said firmly. “You just stay on that couch.”

She finished ironing his jacket, hung it on the hanger over his trousers, and carried hanger and necktie into her bedroom. She returned wearing a pair of multicolored bunny-sized scuffs on her bare feet.

“Going somewhere?” McCall asked in an interested voice. He had ducked into the kitchen to empty his glass while she was in the bedroom.

“I have to run downstairs to the utility room. The wash cycle ought to be finished.”

“I'll go down.”

“Like that? You'd lose me my lease if any of my neighbors saw you. You can put up the ironing board, if you'd like. It goes alongside the fridge.”

He was back on the couch when she returned with his shoes. She took them into her bedroom, announcing as she went by that his laundry was now in the dryer.

When she returned, barefoot again, she picked up her drink and unceremoniously sat down on his lap.

“You know, it's a few minutes to midnight and I have to get up at seven o'clock? So I don't think anybody will steal your clothes if we leave them in the dryer all night. Why, Mr. McCall, whatever are you doing?”

“Just replying to your kind invitation,” McCall said.

Laurel slid her arms around his neck. “Would you care to elaborate?”

“Let's elaborate in the other room.”

In the morning Laurel told him where to find a razor, and he shaved and dressed while she was fixing breakfast. Afterward she drove him to his hotel before doubling back to city hall.

“Do you do return engagements?” she asked, at the marquee. “Or are you a one-night-stander?”

Beth McKenna had asked him the same essential question. Did he have telltale psychological odor, or was it a built-in radar linking all females?

He decided to be cryptic. That way lay discretion. “Am I invited back?”

She was equal to his ploy. “Are you kidding?”

“That doesn't answer me,” McCall said, not without respect.

“Neither did your answer.”

They both laughed.

“I'll be back,” he said.

“I'll be waiting at the phone.”

“You won't have to wait long.”

There was remembrance of things recently past in her green eyes. “I didn't think I would.”

When Laurel was gone, McCall decided to check the hotel's parking lot. He was not greatly surprised to find his Ford rental parked on the lot with the keys in it. There had been a good chance that the gunman had left his own car either on the lot or somewhere nearby before getting into the Ford to lie in wait, and if so he would have to come back for it. If McCall had not found the rented car on the hotel lot, he would have expected to find it abandoned in the vicinity.

The tire chains and coil of piano wire were not in the Ford. A few smudges of rust from the chains had rubbed off on the floor matting.

McCall drove to police headquarters. He ran into Lieutenant Cox and Sergeant Fenner in the lobby, on their way out.

“You fellows in a rush?”

“We have to go break the news to a burglary victim that it was her own sonny boy lifted her jewel box,” the lieutenant said in his sad nasal tone. “It can keep a while if you've got something more interesting for us.”

“I got taken for a ride last night by Gerald Horton's killer, and I damn near got myself killed, too. Is that interesting enough?”

The two detectives stared at him. Sergeant Fenner muttered, “That's a cliffhanger for openers, all right. How about filling us in?”

When McCall had finished, the two detectives were silent. Finally Lieutenant Cox said, “Just because you've been nosy? The guy must be a kook. Or do you figure it some other way, Mr. McCall?”

“I'm not figuring anything till I've got more to figure on. Do you boys have any of the letters at headquarters here that Harlan James mailed to the Banbury radio and TV stations?”

“All of 'em. Plus all the taped speeches he sent with them. Confiscated them as evidence.”

McCall turned to the sergeant. “Yesterday you mentioned a gun application by Harlan James that's on file. I assume he had to sign that?”

The sergeant nodded.

“You have a handwriting expert in your crime lab, of course?”

“Estes Clayton, one of the best,” Lieutenant Cox said. “What are you getting at?”

“Let's have Clayton compare the signature on Harlan's gun application with the ones on his letters.”

The two detectives looked at each other. Sergeant Fenner said, “That sounds like a more interesting thing to do, Lieutenant, than breaking the bad news to that society broad.”

“You're very bright, you know that, Hank?” the lieutenant said. “All right, Mr. McCall, let's try it.”

TWENTY-TWO

The gun registration files were housed in central district. Fenner fished out the application showing Harlan James's signature, and they all went up to the detective bureau squadroom to compare it with the letters.

McCall was disappointed when the application was placed beside one of the letters. The signatures appeared to be in the same handwriting.

“Don't let it throw you,” the lieutenant said. “It takes an expert to tell even a poor forgery.”

They took the comparison material up to the fourth floor crime laboratory. Estes Clayton turned out to be a professorial type, with square-shaped glasses and a bald head that made him look like Benjamin Franklin.

It took him two minutes with a magnifying glass to reach a conclusion.

“Crude forgeries.”

“Crude?” McCall said. “I couldn't even tell they
were
forgeries.”

“The signatures on all these letters are identical,” the expert said. “No one ever writes his signature exactly alike twice. These have been traced from the same sample, probably an authentic signature.” He added, “Not from the one on this gun application, though.”

Cox and Fenner looked at McCall. “Okay,” the lieutenant said. “Are we agreed on what this means?”

“I should think it was obvious,” McCall said. “Where do we get hold of grappling equipment?”

“The fire department.”

“The killer said the pool's a hundred feet deep. Can they go that deep?”

“Probably a fairy tale, Mr. McCall. My bet is it'll turn out to be less than fifty. You're convinced that's where James is hiding out?”

“My bet is I was supposed to keep him company.”

Lieutenant Cox said sadly, “Can I use your phone, Estes? I have to call the fire chief.”

Before leaving the fourth floor, McCall stuck his head into 401 to say hello to Beth McKenna. Unhappily, two nervous policemen were waiting to see Chief Condon, so there was no opportunity for conversation in depth.

Beth commented that she had rather expected to hear from him the night before.

“I was busy on the Horton murder,” McCall said. Well, it was half true.

“Oh?” she said.

She waited.

McCall felt the thrill of caution that experience develops in bachelors of veteran standing. The cocked head, the whole attitude of that lovely body, reminded him of a hunter on the trail of prey, ready to get in the killing shot. The horrible part of it was that he was rather enjoying the sensation of being pursued.

“I'm not sure what my situation will be tonight, Beth. Things are coming to a head, and fast. If I should be free, are you available?”

“Oh, yes,” Beth breathed. “I'm really amazed at myself. I seem to have no shame at all.”

McCall glanced over at the two policemen, but they were too immersed in their own troubles with the chief, present and future, to pay any attention to office badinage.

He backed off hastily; that breathy delivery of Beth's held all the lethal promise of gasoline fumes in a match factory.

“I'll try to phone you before you leave for the day. That's five?”

“Yes.”

“I should know how things are by then.”

“I'll keep my fingers crossed,” she crooned.

When he rejoined Cox and Fenner in the hall, he tried to recall just how his conversation with Laurel had gone when she had dropped him at the hotel. He remembered promising to phone her, but had he stipulated tonight?

If he had, he was in deep trouble.

McCall led the way to the abandoned quarry in the rented car. Cox and Fenner rode with him. Behind them came the red car of the fire chief, and behind that the truck with the grappling equipment. At the scene it took some time for the dragging crew to set up. It was nearly noon before the operation settled down to business.

It turned out that Sergeant Fenner's estimate of the depth of the pool was good. The crew reported touching bottom at forty-five feet.

On the first drag, they hauled up debris ranging from a truck tire to a beer case; no bodies. The second try seemed fated to produce equally unsatisfactory results; McCall was beginning to doubt himself when the grappling hooks tangled with something heavy. The fire chief frantically signaled the man running the winch on the truck to put it in gear, and the object was slowly pulled to the surface.

It was the body of a man, and it was wrapped in tire chains. A black man.

The chains had been lashed in place by piano wire.

“There but for the grace,” McCall said, looking down with distaste; they had deposited the body on shore. “This tire chain and wire deal seems to be the joker's standard operating procedure. Is this Harlan James, Lieutenant?”

“Nobody else,” Lieutenant Cox said.

“He's awfully well preserved. I didn't think the water was that cold when I took my enforced swim.”

“It must be a lot colder on the bottom,” the sergeant remarked. “Where the pool's spring-fed.”

They stared at the black man's corpse without pleasure.

“Somebody's been playing awfully funny games,” Lieutenant Cox muttered. “The forged signatures on those letters I can savvy, but how'd they manage those taped speeches? They sounded like James's voice to me.”

“They were,” McCall said. “Only they were taped some time ago. James's orations were never very different. He had pretty much of a one-truck mind—kept pounding on the same themes, using the same language. Somebody taped his spiels at the Black Hearts rallies and patched together fifteen-minute segments of them onto fresh tapes for delivery to the radio and TV stations.”

“Rawlings,” the lieutenant said. “It has to be LeRoy Rawlings—he was the one who delivered that first letter and tape to BOKO. That means if he didn't personally kill James, at least he had to know James was dead.” McCall said nothing. “You don't buy it, Mr. McCall?”

“You certainly have sufficient grounds to pick Rawlings up for questioning. But I'd like to check out another angle before I settle for Rawlings.”

“What angle?”

“One that could blow the whistle on this town. But I don't want to start tossing accusations around until I can prove them.”

Sergeant Fenner scowled at his superior. “I told you, Lieutenant. This guy doesn't trust us.”

“It's a matter of principle,” McCall said, “not trust. You two will be the second to know when I'm sure.”

“The second? Who's first?”

“Maggie Kirkpatrick of the
Post-Telegram
. I promised her an exclusive. You have to hang around here, or can we head back to town?”

“Eager beaver, ain't he?” Sergeant Fenner said tartly.

“Shut up, Hank,” Lieutenant Cox said. “We have to wait for the sheriff's crew, Mr. McCall. We're in the county's jurisdiction—this is outside the Banbury limits. Hank, go use Chief Menoski's two-way radio and get some sheriff's deputies over here.”