“Right here,” McGraw said, at his elbow.
DiPolo still shouted. “All he could say was — ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ Then it sounded like he dropped the phone.”
McGraw pointed, said, “Okay, Lulu. Call a doctor. Call an ambulance. Get ’em started and tell ’em to wait at the Pike and Hake for further instructions.” He wheeled about, almost smashing into Kin; he said, “Get going. Out Hake. Watch those old loops.”
“And see can you get the lead out of your pants,” DiPolo snapped.
Kin gave him a sad look. He said softly to McGraw, “Right, Mac,” and put on his stetson and stretched his long legs, soft and fast, across the central room. His stomach was held in — tight, rigid — and the pounding of his heart reached to his eardrums.
“Ten minutes should do it,” McGraw shouted after him.
DiPolo yelled, “If he can get the lead out!”
But it was almost twenty-five minutes. It was 12:50 when Kin picked up the radio-phone in his patrol car and said, “At last. And dead. Gunshot. Can’t tell the mileage, because I’ve been up and down, in and out of those old loops. About five miles from the Pike. I’ll stick a flare where this loop takes off from the new stretch of Hake. Tell the ambulance and doctor and anybody else about the flare, will you?”
But first he protected the scene of the killing; placed flares in the center of the old blacktop loop, twenty feet in each direction from Boagard’s patrol car. Then he drove an eighth of a mile and placed one at the juncture of the old and new roads. He returned to the scene and moved about swiftly, surely, with chalk and measuring tape, a clip-board under his arm, a small manila envelope tucked up under his hat. He measured and wrote on the clip-board and picked up things and put them in the envelope.
A patrol car from Drum, which had been marking time at the Pike and Hake, came sirening into the loop ahead of the village ambulance and slammed to a stop five feet from one of the flares. A trooper named Phelps jumped out with a big press camera, and the volunteer fireman who had driven the ambulance stepped down and was almost clipped by another Drum patrol car. The car slewed rear-end into the ditch. Decker, who had driven Phelps up, pulled open the door and saluted.
Stutz got out of that one on the off side and stood gazing glumly at it as the driver, a trooper named Priddy, came out of the bushes on the other side. “And a whole year out of the academy, too,” Stutz said morosely. He wore a hurry-up, out-of-bed-and-dressed-in-five-minutes get-up — whatever he’d grabbed at first, and all of it pulled on over his pajamas. Torn white ducks with soiled knees, a brown turtleneck sweater, and a black chesterfield topcoat, open and flapping in the wind. On his completely bald head he wore an old navy watch cap, and he smoked a short-stemmed pipe.
“Doc get here?”
Kin said, “Not yet. No need now.” He walked beside Stutz to Boagard’s car while Priddy tagged along noting down the time — 12:57 — and writing other memoranda in shorthand on his clipboard sheet. The dead trooper was at the steering wheel, lying against it, one hand caught between the wheel and shift lever, the other hanging toward the floor. Stutz, placed a hand on the dead man’s shoulder; he neither pressed nor patted nor stroked. He left his hand there for a long minute, while brown leaves sailed round him. Then he took his hand away and turned around.
“What’d you find, Kinsland?” he said.
Priddy leaned in. “Sir, should I take down what he says in my shorthand notes?”
“You take yourself down the road to that flare and make sure the doctor turns in here. And stay there. We’ll want the medical examiner too. In fact, that’s an idea, right now. Radio the barracks to get him started, or we’ll be here all night.” He turned back to Kin. “Yes?”
Kin stood with his clip-board tipped toward the headlights’ glare, his head tipped too. “I’ve chalked on the road there — the two x’s — where I believed Boagard stood when he talked with the driver. The chalked oblong would be the relative position of the driver’s car. Between the line marking the driver’s side of the car and the x’s marking where Boagard stood, you see two small chalked circles. One is where I found a whole cigarette — the brand Boagard smoked — only singed a bit at the front end and hardly damp at all at the other end. That smaller circle marks a wooden match burned a quarter way. Boagard used a cigarette lighter. The two items are in this envelope.”
“Any ideas?”
“Not much. Neither car was on the muddy shoulder at any time. The position of Boagard’s car, and the place where he stood, seem to indicate that he saw the other driver swing into the loop. But instead of following him in, Boagard must have raced up the main road and swung into the loop at the other end. The drunk had to stop then or they’d have crashed head-on. You can see that the patrol car’s facing back toward the Pike. The other car must have backed out to Hake and then gone on.”
“Anything else?”
Kin hesitated. “Only a guess.” He didn’t want to say too much: there was always the chance, if he showed too much interest, advanced too many theories, that he might be assigned to the investigation. But Stutz’s glum eyes were steady on him between blinking eyelids; and Kin said, “It looks as if Boagard might have been shot when the driver held out the wooden match to give him a light. If Boagard took time for a cigarette, it seems he must have known the driver and thought he could talk him into parking and driving to the barracks in the patrol car. I never knew Boagard well, but I don’t think he’d have fooled around with a strange drunk.”
Stutz kept blinking at him for another moment. Then he said, “Nice thinking.” He turned and said, “Phelps! Pictures — all angles of Boagard. Then all directions from the car. Don’t forget some angle shots of the chalked oblong — refraction from the flash might pick up some tire prints. Um, who’s this?” he said as a taxi drove up.
Dr. Ackerman looked out and bellowed, “Out of gas again, right in my own garage. And Gus here never answers his taxi phone after midnight till it rings for five minutes.”
Stutz said to Kin, “Mark the time — one-five.” He pointed his knobby chin toward Ackerman and said, “The dead’s man over there.” Then he pointed his chin toward the patrol car.
But Ackerman was knocked a little off balance by the backswing of the door he’d flung open. He teetered, fumbling with two pairs of glasses; put the wrong pair on, took them off, and put on the other pair. Then he gangled headlong to the patrol car, reaching his hand out in front. He spent only a minute, then backed out of the car and straightened, a raw-boned old man with his hat on the side of a white bush of hair.
“You know what I know,” Ackerman said, wiping his eyes. “No need of going into details — you wouldn’t understand them anyhow. And there’ll be a P.M., besides. I’ll give the medical examiner a ring soon as I—”
“We’ve notified him,” Stutz said, and watched Ackerman gangle back to the taxi, fumbling again with his glasses and hitting the taxi sideways. “Y’ know,” he bellowed all around, then laughing, “just because my name makes me the first doctor you come to in the book, you don’t have to feel you got to go by the alphabet.” He was on his way the next minute, flapping his big bony hand out the window.
“Well,” Stutz said glumly, “he dodders and flaps but finally gets on the job. One of the others won’t come out after midnight without putting up an argument, and the other one takes his time dressing but at least he’s pleasant and efficient when he does get on the job.”