The Oxford Book of American Det (96 page)

“Doubts!” he had screamed at her. “I have no more doubt about his guilt than the devil waiting for him at the gates of hell!”

She had thought a long time about that. Slowly then the realisation had come to her that Ed Fox suffered when such a man died because, in the pursuit and capture of him, Ed identified himself with the criminal. And fast upon that realisation the thought had taken hold of her that never in their marriage had she been that close to him.

Nancy opened her hand and saw the marks of her nails in the palm.

She looked at her nails. They needed polish. A beauty operator, Mary Philips. If Nancy had been in the habit of having her hair done by a professional, she might possibly have known Mrs. Philips. The shop was in the neighbourhood where she and Ed had lived, where Ed still lived...

She caught up her purse and brief case and forced her thoughts onto a recipe for which she had no appetite. Ed was not troubled that way in his work....

“Damn it, Fox, give them something! They’re riding my back like a cartload of monkeys.” This was the old man’s complaint on the third day after Mary Philips’s murder. Reporters were coming into Rockland from all over the country. The mayor had turned over the facilities of his own office to them.

So Captain Fox sat down and composed a description of a man who might have been the slayer. He did it aware of his cynicism.

The state police laboratory had been unable to bring out any really pertinent physical evidence in any of the cases. The murderer was a wily one—a maniac or a genius...

except in the instance of Elsie Troy. Fox could not help but dwell on that random start to so successful a career.

The detective stood over the stenographer while she typed the description—twenty copies on the electric machine. He then dictated a few lines calculated to counteract the description, to placate the rising hysteria of all the lonely women in Rockland. So many lonely women, whether or not they lived alone... Did Nancy feel alarmed, he wondered? If she did, she had not called on him for reassurance. But then she would not. There was that streak of stubborn pride in her that made her run like a wounded animal from the hand most willing to help.

“Forty-eight complaints have already been investigated, twenty-one suspects questioned...” Give them statistics, Fox thought. Nowadays they mean more to people than words. Maybe figures didn’t lie, but they made a convincing camouflage for the truth.

He handed out the release over the chief of police’s name, and found himself free once more to do the proper work of a detective, something unrelated to public relations.

Suspect Number 22 had been waiting for over an hour in the Sun Room.

It gave Fox a degree of satisfaction to know that he was there—‘Deacon’ Alvin Rugg.

Rugg with two g’s. G as in God, he thought. The young man was a religious fanatic—

either a fanatic or a charlatan, possibly both, in Fox’s mind. And he was The Fox’s own special catch, having been flushed out in the policeman’s persistent search for something the three women might have had in common besides the shedding of their husbands. All three—Elsie Troy, Jane Mullins, and Mary Philips—were interested in a revivalist sect called ‘Church of the Morning.’

On his way to the Sun Room, Fox changed his mind about tackling the suspect there.

Why not treat him as if he were only a witness?—the better to disarm him. He had no police record, young Mr. Rugg, except for a violation of the peace ordinance in a nearby town: the complaint had been filed against his father and himself—their zeal had simply begat too large a crowd.

Fox had the young man brought to the office, and there he offered him the most comfortable chair in the room. Rugg chose a straight one instead. Fox thought he might prove rugged, Rugg.

The lithe youth wore his hair crested around his head a little like a brushed-up halo, for it was almost the colour of gold. His eyes were large, blue, and vacuous, though no doubt some would call them deep.

‘Church of the Morning,’ Fox started, trying without much success to keep the cynicism from his voice. “When did you join up?”

“I was called at birth,” Alvin replied with a rotish piety.

He was older than he looked, Fox realised, and a sure phoney. “How old are you, Rugg?”

“Twenty.”

“Let’s see your draft registration. This is no newspaper interview.”

“Thirty-two,” Rugg amended, wistful as a woman.

“What do you do for a living?”

“Odd jobs. I’m a handyman when I’m not doing the Lord’s work.”

“How do you get these... these odd jobs?”

“My father recommends me.”

“That would be the Reverend Rugg?”

The young man nodded—there was scarcely the shadow of a beard on his face. Fox was trying to calculate how the women to whom his father recommended him would feel about Alvin of the halo. Fox himself would have had more feeling for a goldfish, but then he was not a lonely woman. He must look up some of them, those still among the living. Fox had gone to the revival tent the night before—he and one-tenth the population of Rockland, almost 12,000 people. It did not seem so extraordinary then that all three victims had chanced to catch the fervour of the Church of the Morning.

“I suppose you talk religion with your employers?”

“That is why I am for hire, Captain.”

The arrogance of an angel on its way to hell, Fox thought. “Who was your mother?” he snapped, on the chance that this was the young man’s point of vulnerability.

“A Magdalen,” Rugg said. “I have never asked further. My father is a holy man.” Fox muttered a vulgarity beneath his breath. He was a believer in orthodoxy, himself.

Revivalists were not for him, especially one like Reverend Rugg whom he had heard last night speak of this boy, this golden lad, as sent to him like a pure spirit, a reward—

this golden lad... of thirty-two.

“The reason I asked you to come in, Alvin,” Fox said, forcing amiability upon himself, and quite as though he had not sent two officers to pick Rugg up, “I thought you might be able to help us on these murders. You’ve heard about them?”

“I... I had thought of coming in myself,” Rugg said.

“When did that thought occur to you?”

“Well, two or three weeks ago at least—the first time, I mean. You see, I worked for that Mrs. Troy—cleaned her windows, things like that. Her husband was a bitter, vengeful man. He doesn’t have the spiritual consolation his wife had.” A nice distinction of the present and past tenses, Fox thought. But what Troy did have was an unbreakable alibi: five witnesses to his continuous presence at a poker table on the night Elsie Troy was slain.

“She told you that about him?” Fox prompted cheerfully.

“Well, not exactly. She wanted to make a donation to the church but she couldn’t. He had their bank account tied up... she said.”

The hesitation before the last two words was marked by Fox. Either the Ruggs had investigated Elsie Troy’s finances, he thought, or Alvin was covering up an intimacy he feared the detective suspected, or had evidence of.

“But Mrs. Troy ran a nursery school,” Fox said blandly. “I don’t suppose she took the little ones in out of charity, do you?”

“Her husband had put up the money for the school. He insisted his investment should be paid back to him first.”

“I wouldn’t call that unreasonable, would you, Alvin? A trifle un-chivalrous, perhaps, but not unreasonable?”

A vivid dislike came into the boy’s, the man’s, eyes. He had suddenly made an enemy of him, Fox thought with grim satisfaction. He would soon provoke the unguarded word. “Didn’t you and Mrs. Troy talk about anything besides money?”

“We talked about faith,” Rugg said, and then clamped his lips tight.

“Did you also do chores for Mrs. Mullins?”

“No. But she offered once to get me a messenger’s job at the advertising company where she worked. Said I could do a lot of good there.”

“I’ll bet,” Fox said. “And how about Mary Philips? What was she going to do for you?” He resisted the temptation to refer to the beauty shop.

“Nothing. She was a very nice woman.”

That, Fox thought, was a revelatory answer. It had peace of soul in it. The captain then proceeded to turn the heat on ‘Deacon’ Rugg, and before half an hour was over he got from the golden boy the admission that both Elsie Troy and Jane Mullins had made amatory advances. Seeking more than religion, the self-widowed starvelings! They kicked out husbands and then welcomed any quack in trousers. Lady breadwinners!

Fox could feel the explosion of his own anger; it spiced his powers of inquisition.

Alvin Rugg was then given such mental punishment as might have made a less vulnerable sinner threaten suit against the city. But while ‘The Deacon’ lacked airtight alibis for the nights of the 29th of April, the 16th of May, and June 2nd, he had been seen about his father’s tent by many people, and he maintained his innocence through sweat and tears, finally sobbing his protestations on his knees.

The extent of The Fox’s mercy was to leave Rugg alone to compose himself and find his own way to the street.

“Until tomorrow then, this is Nancy Fox going ‘The Woman’s Way.’” Nancy gathered her papers so as not to make a sound the microphone could pick up.

The newscaster took over. The next instant Nancy was listening with all the concentration of her being.

“...a man about forty, quick of movement, near six feet tall, a hundred and sixty pounds, extremely agile; he probably dresses conservatively and speaks softly. One of his victims is thought to have been describing him when she told a friend, ‘You never know when he is going to smile or when he isn’t—he changes moods so quickly...’” Nancy pressed her lips together and leaned far away from the table. Her breathing was loud enough to carry into the mike. That was her own husband the newscaster was describing—Ed Fox himself right down to the unpredictable smile! Actually, it could be any of a dozen men, she tried to tell herself. Of course. Any of a hundred! What nonsense to put such a description over the air!

She had regained her composure by the time the reporter had finished his newscast.

Then she had coffee with him, as she often did. But what a fantastic experience!

Fantasy—that was the only word for it. The description had been part of a release from the office of the chief of police, which meant it had Ed’s own approval.

“But now I’m going to tell you what it sounded like to me,” the newsman said. “Like somebody—maybe on the inside—deliberately muddying up the tracks. I tell you somebody down there knows more than we’re getting in these handouts.”

“What a strange idea!” Nancy cried, and gave a deprecating laugh as hollow as the clink of her dime on the counter.

She spent the next couple of hours in the municipal library, trying to learn something about water rights. A bill on the water supply was before the city council. Two years of research would have been more adequate to the subject, she discovered. Once more she had dived into something only to crack her head in the shallows of her own ignorance.

Then she drove out to the county fairgrounds to judge the cake contest of the Grange women. She fled the conversational suggestion that the murderer might be scouting there. Some women squealed with a sort of ecstatic terror.

A feeling of deepening urgency pursued her from one chore to the next: there was something she ought to do, something she must return to and attend to. And yet the specific identity of this duty did not reveal itself. Sometimes she seemed on the brink of comprehension... but she escaped. Oh, yes, that much of herself she knew: she was fleeing it, not it fleeing her.

With that admission she cornered herself beyond flight. There was a question hanging in the dark reaches of her mind, unasked now even as it was five years ago. Since the night Mort Simmons died in the electric chair, it clung like monstrous fungi at the end of every cavern through which she fled. And by leaving her husband’s house she had not escaped it.

Ask it now, she demanded—ask it now!

She drove off the pavement and braked the car to a shrieking halt. “All right!” she cried aloud. “I ask it before God—is Ed Fox capable of...” But she could not finish the sentence. She bent her head over the wheel and sobbed, “Eddie, oh, Eddie dear, forgive me...”

Without food, without rest, she drove herself until the day was spent, and with it most of her energy. Only her nerves remained taut. She returned just before dark to the apartment she had subleased from a friend. It was in no way her home: she had changed nothing in it, not even the leaf on the calendar. And so the place gave her no message when she entered—neither warning nor welcome.

She left the hall door ajar while she groped her way to the table where the lamp stood, and at the moment of switching on the light she sensed that someone had followed her into the apartment. Before she could fully see him, he caught her into his arms.

“Don’t, please don’t!” she cried. Her struggling but made him tighten his grip.

“For God’s sake, Nancy, it’s me!”

“I know!” she said, and leaped away as Ed gave up his grasp of her. She could taste the retch of fear. She whirled and looked at him as if she were measuring the distance between them.

“You knew?” he said incredulously. “You knew that it was me and yet you acted like that?”

She could only stare at him and nod in giddy acknowledgment of the truth.

His hands fell limp to his sides. “My God,” he murmured.

A world of revelation opened to her in that mute gesture, in the simple dropping of his hands.

Neither of them moved. She felt the ache that comes with unshed tears gathering in her throat as the bitter taste of fear now ran out. It was a long moment until the tears were loosed and welled into her eyes, a moment in which they measured each other in the other’s understanding—or in the other’s misunderstanding.

“I thought I might surprise an old love—if I surprised you,” he said flatly. “And then when I realised you were afraid, it seemed so crazy—so inconsiderate a thing to do, with a maniac abroad.” He stood, self-pilloried and miserable—immobile, lest one move of his start up the fear in her again.