Laura gave Molly a meaningful look.
It was a complete essay, that look.
We swam, we loafed in the sun — three couples on a late Saturday afternoon. To any onlooker we were young and carefree and casual. Uncomplicated. I lay with Till sprinkling sand on the back of my arm and thought about us.
One vulnerable little girl heading for heartbreak, one icy maiden as ambitious as her grasping boy-friend, one young cynic complicated by a streak of ruthlessness, one lovely girl who had been persuaded the night before that this was not the time to die — and one pretender, a young man who had thought it possible to come to this place and solve a pretty problem without becoming emotionally involved, and who was slowly finding it impossible.
The police station of Sandson and the fire department shared the same building. It looked vaguely like a Moorish castle.
The man they steered me to was a Lieutenant Cord. He was an unlikely six foot six with a stoop that brought him to six three. He had a corded throat, heavy wrists, and a slack liver-spotted face.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Arlin?”
“I’m at the university, Lieutenant. I’ve been doing some work in psychology. One of the case histories assigned to me is the case of Tod Sherman, who was killed during March this year.”
I made it pretty breezy. He leaned back in his chair and for the first time I noticed a very alert intelligence hiding behind his sleepy gray-green eyes.
“Let me get you straight. I remember Sherman. How does it hook up with psychology when a lad had a bad accident like that?”
I took a deep breath. I had to make it better than I thought. “You know, of course, about accident-prone people and how they contribute the lion’s share of motor vehicle accidents and accidents in the home. The study of such people is a legitimate part of modern psychology. I have reason to believe that Sherman was an accident-prone. Actually it is the death wish operating on a subconscious level, or else the result of a childish desire for attention.”
“What do you want from me?”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, a summary of what happened. I’ve talked to the other members of the fraternity who were there at the time. Their reports are confusing.”
He looked at the wall clock. “I guess it won’t take too much time. We got the call on a Sunday afternoon. They don’t operate the dining room at that house on Sunday’s and nearly everybody was out. A boy named Flynn, the one who hung himself three months later, was the one who heard the shot and traced it to Sherman’s room. Flynn was in the lounge at the time, and it took him, he said, maybe ten minutes to find out who and what it was.
“One other lad, a sophomore named Armand, was in the house at the time. He was asleep and the shot didn’t awaken him. Flynn was smart. He phoned the campus infirmary and then us. He didn’t touch the body. He checked the time. We got there as the ambulance did. The doctor pronounced him dead. We were both there a little less than twenty minutes after the shot according to Flynn’s watch. Sherman had been sitting at his desk by the window. There was an oily rag and a bottle of gun oil on top of the desk. The gun was a .45 Army Colt.
“The slug had caught him under the chin and gone up through the roof of his mouth, exploding out of the top of his head to lodge in the ceiling. He had fallen to his left between the chair and the window. The gun was under his desk. The ejected cartridge case was on the window sill. A full clip was on the desk blotter beside the oil bottle. It was the standard mistake. Ejecting the case and forgetting the one in the chamber.
“As I see it, he was holding it pointing up toward him, and he pulled the slide down so he could look through the barrel. His hand was oily and the slide got away from him. When it snapped up, it fired the shell in the chamber.”
“Were you complety satisfied with the verdict of accidental death, Lieutenant?”
He smiled humorlessly. “Now what kind of a fool question is that, Arlin? If it wasn’t accident it would screw up this psychology report, wouldn’t it?”
I tried again. “Did you investigate to see if anyone said he was depressed?”
“Sure. Lots of guys are cagey enough to do a hell of a good job of faking an accident when they want to knock themselves off. But in that case there is an insurance angle, usually, and the guy himself is older. No, this Sherman was apparently a pretty popular guy in the house. He wasn’t depressed. He’d busted up with his girl, but he had a new one pretty well lined up. He had enough dough, a good job after graduation, and his health.”
“You’ve been very kind, Lieutenant.” I stood up.
“Any time,” he said.
I went to the door. As I turned the knob he said, “Just a minute.” I looked back at him. He smiled. “Do me a favor, Arlin. Come around some time and tell me what the hell it was you really wanted.”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“See you around, Arlin.”
I went out and sat in the car. There was a coldness at the nape of my neck. Up until the talk with Cord, I had been willing to go along with the theory of a chain of accidents. I had tried to be thorough for the sake of the pay I was getting. Mr. Flynn had just been a man pathetically anxious to prove his son was not a suicide. Tilly had been a girl who had not been able to understand how Ted Flynn’s mind may have been unstable, along with his undeniable brilliance.
But now everything had a new flavor. It was something that Cord had said, and yet, going over his words again and again, I could not pick it out.
I knew, sitting there in the sun, as well as I knew my own name that the odds were in favor of someone else’s finger pulling that trigger. I was sweating and yet I felt cold.
For the first time I realized that my operations were a bit transparent. If someone had killed Sherman — and I didn’t know why I was so sure they had — then that someone might still be in the house. If so, he was watching me. It would be natural for him to watch me. I was a stranger. I was an unknown factor.
I sensed a quiet and devious intelligence at work. A mind that could plan carefully and then move boldly.
I drove away. My hands were too tight on the wheel and my foot was shaky on the gas pedal.
Chapter Five
Accidentally — On Purpose
I cut the History class. Tilly cut her class at the same hour and we drove down Route 19 through Clearwater to Largo and then turned left to Indian Rocks Beach. I found a place where we could park in the shade and watch the placid gulf. On the way I had told her of the talk with Cord.
She look my hand, looked into my eyes and said, “For the first time it’s real to you, isn’t it, Joe?”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“It’s been real to me all along. You know how when people go with each other, they talk about everything under the sun. Once Ted and Step were arguing about suicide. It was after Sherman had died. Step couldn’t see that it was wrong — but Ted told us that the only time he could see the remotest justification was when a person was painfully and incurably ill — that the world is too wide and wonderful a place to leave before the time you have is up. He wasn’t just talking, Joe.”
“I think I would have liked him, Till.”
“You would have. I know it. When they told me he’d hung himself, I found out later that I’d screamed that he didn’t do it, that someone had done it to him. I’m still just as certain of that as I was during the first moments. He was incapable of it. They were holding the last meeting of the year, the election of officers for the next year it was. They waited and waited and then they went looking for him.
“Brad cried like a baby. They cut him down and then he was shipped north for the funeral. I couldn’t go to that. I couldn’t even go to the memorial service for him in the chapel at school. I was too sick. They had me in the infirmary. When I got out I went north and took that job.”