Death Trap (12 page)

The house was small, quite new, pleasant. He introduced me to Mrs. Sibley. She was a tall woman, almost too tall for him, with dark hair, lovely hollows in her cheeks, a look and air of gravity and composure that did not match a look of bright mischief in her eyes. In all, a most attractive woman.

“Mr. MacReedy is a friend of Vicky Landy,” he said. “We have been talking about Alister. And soon, I imagine, he will want me to talk about Jane Ann Paulson. So, my dear, if you could join us on what we grandly call the patio, bearing three chill brews?”

She brought the beer out on a tray. The terrace was protected from the wind. It was almost hot there.

Sibley sipped his beer, set it down, put his fingertips together and frowned. “I make these assumptions, Mr. MacReedy. You are trying to help Miss Landy. The most help you could give her would be to discover, somehow, that her brother is innocent. I’m afraid that goal is unattainable. You have evidently been conducting your own investigation. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“In the course of which, you have learned, perhaps, many unsavory things about Jane Ann. And it puzzles you that she should have been a rather frequent visitor at the home of a college professor.”

“That’s right,” I said, feeling uncomfortable at his intuitive accuracy.

“Lame ducks,” Mrs. Sibley said.

“Precisely. That is a family expression, Mr. MacReedy. This family collects lame ducks. The emotionally halt and the emotionally blind. It is an affliction. We have learned to live with it.”

“But this time there was more at stake,” she said.

“This time the risk seemed not worth taking,” Sibley said.

“Ann, our daughter,” said Mrs. Sibley, “is emotionally quite mature for her age. She is honest and she is frank with us. I’m being objective. Otherwise we would not have taken that risk. As a member, so help me, of the P.T.A. in the village, I knew of Jane Ann’s wildness and her reputation.”

“Ann, I think, understood it before we did,” Mr. Sibley said. “I guess you could call it a controlled schizophrenia. This is the home Jane Ann wished she had. We are the parents she wished she had. In some obscure way maybe she felt that had the coin fallen the other way, she could have been Ann. I am quite certain, and I know Ann wouldn’t lie to me, that whenever Jane Ann came here, she was utterly different, not at all the way she was at school or with her friends. There was no contact between Ann and Jane Ann’s friends, nor between Jane Ann and Ann’s other friends. It was a curious relationship. Ann has told me that Jane Ann never talked of boys when they were together. It seemed necessary for her to be able to come here, and to have a normal uncomplicated relationship with another girl her age, uncomplicated by the tensions arising from the loose moral structure of her own group.”

“When we feel we have anything to give to another human being, we like to give it,” Mrs. Sibley said. “She seemed to gain something from coming here. We accepted her. She sensed that acceptance, and she needed it. We decided that there was no danger that she would try to corrupt Ann to her pattern. Had she tried that she would have destroyed this—this refuge.”

“The fact she was headed here the night she was killed gave us some very unhappy publicity,” Sibley said.

“And it was a very shocking thing for Ann,” Mrs. Sibley said. “But I’m afraid that’s rather a selfish viewpoint.”

I knew that there was no lead here, not of the kind I had half hoped for. These people had far too much dignity and honesty, and the aura of love between them was apparent. I felt ashamed of my wild guess.

“Did you ever notice that Jane Ann always seemed to have money?”

“Yes. She bought Ann a wrist watch. A very good make and quite expensive. We would not let Ann accept it. Ann told us later that Jane Ann had given it to Ginny Garson. We had quite a job explaining to Ann just why she couldn’t accept it,” Mrs. Sibley said wryly.

“Do you think Ann would have any idea where the money came from?”

“If it came from where I think it may have come from, I hope Ann doesn’t know,” Mr. Sibley said.

“I have information which makes me believe that it came from one source, from one man. I think I’d like to know who he is.”

Sibley looked at me and the corners of his mouth turned down in a savage little inverted smile. “And you thought it might be me?”

I felt my face grow hot. Mrs. Sibley giggled and then said, “Sorry, my dear. The vision was just too much for me.”

“Let’s not embarrass Mr. MacReedy. Seriously, I can see how it might be most interesting to find out who that man might be. I can’t see any harm in asking Ann. Can you, dear?”

“I don’t believe she’ll know, but we could ask her. She got home five minutes before you did. They let the high school out today. I guess everybody was too upset or something. They called a teachers’ meeting as an excuse.”

She went and called her daughter. Ann came out onto the patio. She was not a pretty girl. She was blond, she did not have quite enough chin, and she was rather pallid; but her look was very direct, and her smile was warm.

“We’ve been talking about Jane Ann,” Mr. Sibley said. “My dear, you remember we talked about Jane Ann being constantly in funds. Do you know where she got the money?”

“I—I don’t really know.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“She wouldn’t tell me. I asked her, but she wouldn’t tell me. One day, it was a Saturday I remember, we went to the movies in the afternoon. We got out about four-thirty. We were hungry when we got out. We looked, but we only had about fourteen cents between us. Jane Ann said that didn’t matter, she could get more. We went to the drugstore and she told me to wait right there in a booth for her. She was gone about five minutes. When she came back she had ten dollars. She showed it to me. I asked her who gave it to her and she said an old friend, but she made a kind of a face when she said it.”

“Which way did she turn when she left the drugstore?”

“Right. I’m pretty sure.”

“And she was gone five minutes?”

“It couldn’t have been any more than that, maybe a little less.”

“Did she have a bike?”

“No. We were walking.”

“Do you think anybody could have given her a ride?”

“I wouldn’t think so, Mr. MacReedy.”

“Was there any other time when she got money like that?”

“N-No, but there was a time when she didn’t. That sounds funny. It was another time we were in the drugstore. I think it was over a year ago. Last summer, I think. School wasn’t on. There was a lipstick she wanted. She told me to wait. She came back and she was mad. She didn’t have the money for it. She wasn’t gone long at all. Maybe two or three minutes.”

There was no other information. I thanked the Sibleys. They asked me to stay for lunch, but I refused. At the front door he told me he thought I was on a hopeless mission, but if I thought he could be of any further help, he’d be glad to talk to me again.

I drove down to the center of the village and parked on the square. I walked to the drugstore. It was on the west side of the square, four doors from the corner where College Street came into the square. I walked to the right, to the south. There were stores on either side of College Street, and others on the south side of the square. I estimated that I could walk to about fifteen places of business within two minutes. I felt almost certain she had gone to one of those places. It would be the easiest way in the world for her to get money. Suppose it were a candy store. She could go in and buy a dime’s worth of candy. The amount of the purchase in itself could be a simple code. The proprietor, when he put the dime in the register, could put a ten-dollar bill in the sack with the candy. How he must have hated to see her come in, her face young and bland, her eyes greedy. He must have known that his only hope was to eliminate her. It would have taken a great deal of careful planning, of waiting, and of waiting for precisely the right chance.

Someone who could follow the movements of the Landy boy!

I stopped there in the sunlight, and conviction was so strong as to be an almost physical tug at the edge of my mind. I felt that if I moved carefully, and thought clearly, I could establish a connection. The proprietor of one of these shops would have had to be in a position where he could observe the habit patterns of Alister Landy. And he would have had to know that Alister and Nancy Paulson had quarreled. Otherwise Nancy would have provided an alibi for Alister.

Furthermore, he would have had to be close enough to some source of information to know that Alister was in the habit of taking night drives by himself, stopping nowhere. And he would have had to know that Alister sometimes parked with Nancy in the obscure road by Three Sisters Creek.

The odds were that only one man who owned a business in this area could have been close enough to the girls, to the family, to the Landys, to learn all he would have to know in order to frame Alister Landy, and in that way get rid of the girl who was sucking him dry.

I walked again, slowly, and I looked at the store names. I stopped in front of a store. Mackin Hardware. And I remembered. Nancy had told me her family and the Mackins shared a camp at Morgan’s Lake. Alister had been in Mackin’s store before the murder. The knife had come from the store. Nancy had said the Mackins lived near them, at the corner of Oak and Venture.

A bell fastened to the back of the door tinkled as I walked in.

MACKIN HARDWARE WAS REASONABLY MODERN, light, airy, and could have been very attractive. Gift items, such as electric clocks, toasters, bar equipment, charcoal grills, glassware, were in the front. Kitchen gadgets, pots and pans, knives and lighting fixtures were in the next segment. The rear of the store, in front of the glass-walled office, was taken up with tools, nails, paints, tubing, screening, plumbing and electrical parts.

Had the store been clean, the goods neatly racked, the floor swept, the slow-moving items dusted, it could have been attractive. But there was about it the subtle flavor of impending failure. There was a dusty smell, an air of negligence and slovenliness.

A woman came out of the back of the store and walked toward me. When she was quite distant, I thought she was an old woman. She moved with the careful fragility of age, and her heels scuffed the inlaid linoleum floor. When she came close I was shocked to see that she was not at all old. Perhaps not far into her thirties. It was difficult to tell. Her arms and throat were painfully thin, and you sensed at once that the watermelon bulge at her middle was not a pregnancy, but more likely a growth that was inevitably devouring her. Blond colorless hair was pulled tightly back. Her face was so shrunken that the pattern of the skull showed clearly. Her color was greenish paste, her gray eyes dulled. She pushed a wisp of hair back from her forehead with the back of her hand, and her voice seemed to come from a remote uncaring distance as she said, “Yes?”

“Do you have any—brass screws? Wood screws.”

“Over here.” I followed her. Her dress bagged on her wasted body. She indicated a shelf with a listless gesture of her hand. “What size?”

“Inch. Inch and a quarter.”

She took down a small box. “Seventy cents. They run high.”

I gave her a dollar and she shuffled toward the cash register in the middle of the store. I followed her. She put the box in a bag and rang up the sale. The drawer came open but she didn’t reach in for my change. I looked at her. Her eyes squeezed shut. The arm of the hand that held my dollar was pressed against her middle.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Her eyes opened slowly. She looked at me with what I imagine was supposed to be an apologetic smile. “Just a twinge. It comes every once in a while.” She put the dollar in the drawer, gave me thirty cents and the paper bag.

“Maybe you ought to take some time off,” I said.

“I only work when Billy can’t make it. I’m Mrs. Mackin. Part-time help is so hard to get. But I don’t mind. It’s this or sitting home. He’s over to Warrentown today, to the bank.”

“You have a nice store here.”

She looked around, as though really seeing it for the first time. “I should do some sweeping. We don’t get the trade we used to. They go over to the shopping center, a lot of them. You know how it goes. The trade drops off and then you don’t order like you should and you don’t have what the customers want and they go to the other places. Billy is seeing about a loan. I shouldn’t talk about his business, I guess. But—you said it was a nice store. We own the building. We did a good trade in the old store. But that was before the shopping center. I ought to sweep the place up some.” Again she closed her eyes tightly and I saw the cords of her throat jump into prominence.

“You should sit down, Mrs. Mackin. You’re not well.”

“This is a pretty good day,” she said. “I felt pretty good the whole summer through. I sure dread the winter a-coming, though. It seems like spring never comes once the winter starts. The doctor, he’s been giving me injections, ever since my operation. I’m coming along fine now. By next spring I’ll be like I used to be, he says. Dr. Don Higel, his name is. He’s kind of new here, but everybody says he’s real good. Anything else you need, you come back.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Mackin.”

“You new in town?”

“Just visiting.”

I was glad to get out. In addition to the smell of dust and hardware, there was a scent of illness in the close air, serious illness.

Quillan stopped me with a heavy hand on my shoulder just as I was opening my car door.

I moved clear of his hand and said, “What now?”

“Nothing special. Nothing special at all.” He looked uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “No hard feelings,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged the massive shoulders, “I got a little excited. You know how it is. The Chief keeps pushing on me. I get a little worked up. No hard feelings.”

“What’s going on?”

His grin was heavy and unconvincing. He rubbed his jaw. “You got a good right hand. I guess you hurt me more’n I did you, huh?”

“Is this an apology?”