Find a Victim (23 page)

“It’s not as complicated as you’re trying to make out.”

“Maybe not, when we know the answers. We don’t know them yet.”

“I thought you regarded Church as the answer.”

“Church puzzles me,” I said. “I think he puzzles you, if you’d admit it. You wouldn’t be defending him unless you had a reason.”

“I’m not defending him. He doesn’t need defense.”

“Aren’t you a little suspicious of him yourself? You saw his reaction to Anne Meyer’s death.”

“She’s his sister-in-law, after all. And he’s an emotional man.”

“A passionate man, would you say?”

“Just what are you getting at?”

“She was more than his sister-in-law. They were lovers. Weren’t they?”

He drew his fingers wearily across his forehead. “I’ve heard they were having an affair. But that doesn’t prove anything. In fact, it makes it even less likely that he had anything to do with her death.”

“It doesn’t rule out passional crime. He may have shot her out of jealousy.”

“You saw the grief on his face.”

“I saw it. Murderers feel grief like anyone else.”

“Who could he be jealous of?”

“I can think of several people. Aquista is one. He was an old follower of hers, and he was up at the lake Saturday night. It could account for what happened to Aquista. And Kerrigan’s hold over Church, and Kerrigan’s death.”

“Church didn’t kill Kerrigan, you know that.”

“He may have had it done for him. There are plenty of ready guns under his orders.”

Westmore said: “No,” in a voice as sharp and high as a cry of pain. “I can’t believe Brand would harm a living soul.”

“Ask him. If he’s an honest cop, or has any vestiges of honesty left, he’ll tell you the truth. You might even be doing him a favor. He’s carrying hell around with him now. Give him a chance to let it out before it burns him down.”

“You’re very sure of his guilt,” Westmore said softly. “I’m not.”

But he seemed to be deeply divided against himself. The artificial light reflected from the pale green hospital walls lent his face a ghostly pallor.

The light in the corridor altered suddenly. I turned to face the doctor who had failed to save Aquista. He had quietly opened the door of the emergency room.

“You can take him now, Mr. Westmore. The leaks are caulked, at any rate. You want to query him in here?”

“No. Send him out.” Westmore sounded angry with the world.

Bozey came through the doorway. Between the bandages that swathed his head, his one visible eye swung wildly to the exit. The guard behind him put his hand on his holster. Bozey caught the movement and slumped into resignation.

Westmore led the procession to the morgue, and I brought up the rear.

CHAPTER
29
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Treloar wheeled the bodies out
of their glass-doored compartments, one by one, and uncovered their faces. Aquista’s was pale and gaunt, Kerrigan’s fleshy and imperturbable. Anne Meyer was already old in death.

“Handsome cadavers,” the doctor said. “Their organs were in beautiful shape, every one of them. It’s a pity they had to die.” He gave Bozey a mildly chiding look.

“What you bring me in here for?”

Westmore answered him. “To assist your memory. What’s your name and age?”

Leonard Bozey. Age twenty-one. No address. No occupation. No hope.

“When did you last see this man, Donald Kerrigan?”

“Thursday night. About midnight, I guess it was.”

“You guess?”

“I know. It wasn’t any later.”

“Where did you see him? At his motor court?”

“No. At a drive-in near there. I don’t remember the name.”

“The Steakburger,” I said. “I witnessed the meeting.”

“We’ll hear from you later.” Westmore turned back to Bozey: “What occurred at that meeting?”

“I don’t have to answer. It’s self-incineration.”

Westmore smiled grimly. “Did a package of money change hands?”

“I guess so.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went away.”

“What were you running away from?”

“Nothing. I just went for a drive. I like night driving.”

“Before you went for your joy-ride, did you take a .38-caliber revolver and shoot Kerrigan through the head with it?”

“I did not.”

“Where is your gun?”

“I got no gun. It’s against the law to carry one.”

“And you never do anything against the law?”

“Not if I can help it. Sometimes I can’t help it.”

Westmore breathed deeply. “What about the truck you stole? What about the bank you robbed in Portland? Couldn’t you help doing those things?”

“I never been to Portland. You mean Portland, Maine?”

“I mean Portland, Oregon.”

“Is there a Portland in Oregon?”

Westmore leaned forward. In the flat bright light his profile was sharp-edged and thin, like something cut from sheet metal. “You’re talking pretty flip for an ex-con with the blood of three citizens on his hands.”

“I didn’t kill any of them.”

“Didn’t you? Take a good look at them, Leonard, refresh your recollection.” Westmore said to the guard: “Move him up closer.”

The guard pushed Bozey forward to the head of Aquista’s stretcher. The closed Latin face seemed to be haunted by its lifelong yearnings, persisting into death.

“I never saw him before.”

“How could you shoot a man and steal his truck without seeing him?”

“I didn’t shoot him. He wasn’t in the truck, and I didn’t exactly
steal
it. It was sitting here on the open highway, see. People oughtn’t to leave their trucks sitting around in the open with the engine running.”

“I see. This was one of those things you couldn’t help. Was shooting Aquista another? Was that another one of the things you couldn’t help?”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“You didn’t take your revolver and point it at this man’s heart and pull the trigger and inflict a fatal wound on him?”

“I don’t even own a revolver.”

The interrogation went on for an hour. It reminded me of a fight between a young club fighter and an educated southpaw. Gradually Bozey was being worn down under the padded blows of words. After a while he had nothing left but a stubborn mulish terror. His voice was a croak, and the bandages that masked his face were stained with a reddish sweat.

I sweated with him, trying to guess the life behind his record. I had lifted cars myself when I was a kid, shared joy-rides and brawls with the lost gangs in the endless stucco maze of Los Angeles. My life had been like Bozey’s up to a point. Then a whisky-smelling plain-clothes man caught me stealing a battery from the back room of a Sears Roebuck store in Long Beach. He stood me up against the wall and told me what it meant and where it led. He didn’t turn me in.

I hated him for years, and never stole again.

But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls. It felt as cold as death
around the heart, and after a while the heart would die and there would be no more hope, just the fury in the head and the fear in the bowels. Bozey. But for the grace of an alcoholic detective sergeant, me.

There was another reason for my sense of identification with Bozey. Westmore was using him as my whipping boy, trying to force his answers to prove me wrong, and not succeeding. Not quite.

CHAPTER
30
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I was grateful for the interruption
when it came. Captain Danelaw opened the door and called Westmore out. The room was perfectly quiet for a moment after he left, the four living as still as the three dead. Then I said:

“You’re in a box, Leonard. If you don’t talk now, you may not have another chance. You’ll be sniffing cyanide before you can turn around.”

“They can’t frame an innocent man.”

“But you’re not innocent. You took the truck and we know it. That makes you accessory to the driver’s murder, even if you didn’t shoot him yourself. Your only out is to turn state’s evidence.”

He thought about it. “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth. How did it happen?”

He wagged his head in melodramatic despair. “You wouldn’t believe me anyway. What’s the use of telling you what I saw?”

“Try me.”

“You’ll call me a liar. I waited for the truck out on the highway. Kerrigan said it would be along around six o’clock. It went past me on schedule, in a breeze, rolling along about sixty. It stopped a half a mile or so down the road, and I followed along on foot as fast as I could.”

“What stopped it?”

“There was a car there. A green Chevvy sedan. The Chevvy drove away, and that’s all I saw.”

“You saw it drive away from the truck?”

“Yeah. I was still a piece up the highway.”

“Was Aquista in it? This man?”

“Yeah. He was sitting in the front seat. I guess it was him.”

“Was he driving the Chevvy?”

“No. There was somebody else with him.”

“Who was it, Bozey?”

“You won’t believe me,” he said. “I know it don’t make sense.”

“Say it anyway.”

He lifted his arm and pointed to the stretcher where Anne Meyer lay. “Her. I think it was her.”

“You saw that woman drive Aquista away from the truck on Thursday afternoon?”

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

Treloar shook his head from side to side in sad tolerance. “You’ll have to do better than that, boy. This woman has been dead for a week.”

“You saw her body Monday night,” I said.

Bozey began to talk in a high, rapid voice: “What’s the use? You don’t believe me when I tell you the truth. You’re all a bunch of creeps.” He raised his handcuffed arms and shook them at us. “You’re all in cahoots with the sheriff, tryin’ to railroad me and cover up for yourselves. Go ahead and gas me. I’m not afraid to die. I’m sick of breathing the same air you bastards breathe.”

The guard struck him across the face with the back of his hand. “Knock off now, guy. You’re getting loud.”

I pushed between them. “What’s that about the sheriff?”

“He was there in the pass when I broke out with the
truck. He sat there in his God-damn Mercury and let on he didn’t see me—didn’t even turn his head when I went by. He was setting me up for the murder rap. I can see it now.”

“There won’t be any murder rap if you’re leveling.”

“Won’t there? He’s got you all on a string.”

“Not me. And I’ve cut down bigger ones.”

“Who did they fall on? People like me?”

It was a hard question.

Danelaw opened the door and looked in. “What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble. Is Westmore out there?”

“He left.”

“Left?”

“That’s right. He’s got some official business.”

I stepped out into the corridor. “This is a hell of a time for Westmore to leave.”

“He has a hell of a reason. Meyer’s waiting for him at the courthouse.” He hooked his thumbs in his belt and looked complacent. “I just arrested Meyer.”

“On what charge?”

“Murder. I went over to Meyer’s house last night and got his permission to look around. I let on I was searching for traces of his daughter. He made no objection, probably didn’t know what could be done with old bullets. There were plenty of old bullets in that shooting-gallery of his down in the basement. I dug some out of the boards where he pins the targets.

“Most of them were too beat up to be any use to me. A few were in pretty good shape, though—good enough for the comparison microscope. It took me until now to sort them out and make my case, but I made it. Some of the slugs in Meyer’s basement were fired from a .38 revolver. And the ones that were good enough to compare
came from the same revolver as the murder slugs. That includes the one that killed Anne Meyer.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can prove it in court. Wait until you see my blown-up microphotos. I can prove it even if we never find the gun. You see, Meyer has a .38 revolver registered under his name. I asked him for it when I arrested him. He told me a cock-and-bull story, claimed he didn’t have it any more.”

“What was his story?”

“He said he lent it to his daughter last fall and never got it back. Of course he’s lying.”

“I thought so yesterday. Now I’m not so certain.”

“Sure he’s lying. He has to lie. He’s got no alibi for any of the shootings. He was by himself all day Sunday, when Annie got it, and he had plenty of chance to drive up to the lake. On Thursday afternoon, he claims his other daughter for an alibi. But she was right there in his house from five o’clock on, and he didn’t get home until after seven. He admits that himself, he claims he went for a drive when he left the yard. The same for the Kerrigan shooting. No alibi.”

“No motive, either.”

“He had a motive. Aquista and Kerrigan both went with Annie at one time or another.” His thin nose wrinkled, as if it detected an odor worse than iodoform. “And Meyer had some kind of an insane crush on his own daughter.”

“It’s a pretty story,” I said. “Did you tell it to the sheriff?”

For the first time Danelaw seemed uneasy. “I haven’t seen him. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to put him in the position of arresting his own father-in-law. I went over his head for once and laid it out for Westmore.”

“And Westmore bought it?”

“Sure he did. Don’t you?”

“I’ll take an option on it. But I want to do a little more shopping around. Meyer drives a Lincoln, doesn’t he?”

“That’s right. He has another car, too, an old Chevvy he uses for transportation.”

“A green Chevvy sedan?”

“Yeah. I’m going to work on those cars next shot out of the box. One of them must have been seen around the time and place of one of the shootings.”

“I can save you some trouble there. Talk to the prisoner inside. Ask him about the car Aquista drove away in on Thursday.”

Danelaw turned to the door. I went the other way.

CHAPTER
31
:
Hilda Church opened the front
door and looked out shyly. In her quilted cotton housedress she might have been any pretty suburban chatelaine interrupted at her morning work. But there was a tight glazed look around her eyes and mouth. Her eyes were translucent and strange, a clear pale green like deep ocean water.