I pushed the door shut and stood for a couple of seconds looking out at the empty slough. Then I went down along the path to the pier. Tied up on the lee side was a fourteen-foot skiff with an outboard engine tilted up at the rear and a tarpaulin roped over most of its length. I took a couple of steps out on the pier, to where I could look both upstream and downstream along the slough. There wasn’t anything to see in either direction, or across the channel at the opposite bank.
The wind gusted and made the skiff bob in the choppy water, bang against the side of the pier. I could feel my cheeks and ears getting numb. It could be Meeker had a second skiff and had gone fishing in one of the other sloughs; he was a fisherman, judging from the gear I’d seen inside the studio. But it was a damned cold day-too cold and too rough for the fishing to be good at any hour, much less the middle of the afternoon.
And why would he leave the studio door unlocked?
When I stepped off the pier the shed caught my eye. It was about twelve feet square, made out of weathered gray boards, with an asymmetrical roof covered in tarpaper. There was a window on this side too, facing the channel. On impulse I headed over that way through the marshy grass. At the door I stopped and reached out to try the knob. Locked.
I started to turn away-and stopped again, for no reason except that a length of fishing twine lay curled in the grass like a scrawny snake. A hollow jumpy feeling started up in my stomach; then the back of my scalp began to crawl, and not from the wind or the cold. Ah no, I thought, not again, not another one. But that kind of feeling had come over me too many times before. It had got so I could almost feel the psychic after-tremors of violence, the presence of death, when I got near enough to them.
I put my teeth together and moved around to the window on the side nearest the house. The glass was streaked with dirt; I had to lower my face close to it to get a clear look inside. The interior was shadowed and cobwebby, but enough daylight penetrated through the windows to make the shapes within discernible.
Ozzie Meeker was lying crumpled on the wooden floor near the door, next to an overturned stepladder and a double-bitted ax. There was blood and gray matter on him and on the blades of the ax: the back of his head had been split open.
Bile kicked up into my throat; I turned away and took three or four deep breaths. When my stomach settled down again I had another look through the glass-not at the body this time but at the door. There was a key in the old-fashioned latch, one of those big, round-headed ones; I could see it plainly. I caught hold of the window sash and tried to force it upward. It wouldn’t budge. I hurried around to the other side, made the same effort with that window, and got the same nonresults. Both windows were either stuck fast or locked from inside like the door. And as far as I could tell, there was no other way in or out of the shed.
Another damned sealed-room killing.
SIXTEEN
I called the county sheriff’s office from Meeker’s studio, using my handkerchief to hold the phone receiver and not touching anything else. A guy with a voice like a file on metal took my name and Meeker’s address, told me to stay where I was, somebody would be out within twenty minutes, and clicked off before I could offer an acknowledgment. He sounded pretty excited; they probably didn’t get many homicide cases up here, and this one would be the highlight of his week. Some highlight.
I debated ringing up Eberhardt and filling him in on this latest turn of events, but that would have been premature. Maybe Meeker’s death would get Dancer off the hook and maybe it wouldn’t; it was too soon to tell. If Meeker had committed suicide, and if there was a note somewhere saying he’d done it because he had been responsible for Frank Colodny’s death, then that would tie everything off in a nice little bundle. The problem with that was, Meeker hadn’t com mitted suicide. Suicides don’t lock themselves inside sheds and split their heads open with double-bitted axes. No, it was either an accident- which was more convenient coincidence than I cared to swallow-or it was murder. And if it was murder, it would either uncomplicate things or complicate them even more; it all depended on the mitigating circumstances and on what sort of evidence the local authorities came up with.
Or that I could come up with myself, I thought.
Here I was, alone in the studio with nothing to occupy my time until the county sheriff’s men arrived. I could go outside and wait for them, but it was pretty cold outside. I was not supposed to touch anything in here, but I didn’t have to touch anything-not with my hands, anyway. There was nothing to stop me from sniffing around like an old bloodhound, was there? Nothing to stop me from looking! I went over to the screen door and looked out to make sure the rear yard was still empty. Then I turned to look at the disarray of things in the studio. And it struck me that the mess in there might not have been made by Meeker-that maybe the place had been searched. It had that kind of look, the more you studied it. Nothing overt, like slashed upholstery or upended furniture, but a messiness that went beyond sloppy. About the only things that weren’t slung around helter-skelter were the pulp magazines stacked along one wall.
But if it had been searched, why? What did Meeker have that somebody wanted?
The pulps didn’t tell me anything; they were all late forties issues, except for a couple of coverless Wests from the thirties, and all Westerns. The artist’s supplies and fishing equipment didn’t tell me anything either. I gave my attention to the scattered papers. Most of them were leaves from various-sized sketch pads, containing partially finished drawings of one kind or another, and letter carbons dating back several years. All of the face-up correspondence related to Meeker’s commercial artwork. None of it was addressed to anyone I knew or mentioned the names of any of the Pulpeteers.
Spread out over one of the tables were two maps, one half open and the other open all the way. The half-open one was a city map of San Francisco and on it was a circled X, made with a black felt-tip pen, at the approximate location of the Hotel Continental downtown. The open map was a comprehensive of the state of Arizona. That one had a circled X on it too, some distance southeast of Tucson, in Cochise County. I bent over for a closer look. The area beneath the X showed blank-no town, no road or railway or body of water-which meant that it was open land of some kind: desert, maybe, or foothills. The nearest town was a place called Wickstaff, and that was at least ten miles from the X.
Why would Meeker have marked a piece of barren land on a map of Arizona? Well, there was one answer: Frank Colodny, according to testimony, owned a ghost town in Arizona called Col’ odnyville. So maybe the land wasn’t barren after all; ghost towns were seldom included on even the most comprehensive of state maps.
I started to straighten up from the table, and as I did that I noticed another mark on the map, down in the lower right-hand margin, half-hidden by a crease in the paper. What it was, I saw when I got one eye down close to it, was a pair of names written in a small crabbed hand, one above the other and both circled, like the names of lovers inside a heart. The bottom name was also underlined several times and had a string of question marks after it.
The upper name was Frank Colodny.
And the lower one, with all the question marks, was Cybil Wade.
The county sheriff’s men showed up in just about twenty minutes, as advertised. I was outside by then, sitting in my car with the engine running and the heater up full blast to take the chill out of my bones. The first car contained a pair of patrol deputies, and the second, on the tail of the first, contained a deputy sheriff named Jeronczyk, who was the acting officer in charge until the arrival of the sheriff’s investigators from Rio Vista.