As we drove back toward the tourist court I said, “We may as well start back tonight. We can have the car back in your garage by tomorrow morning.”
Helena didn’t say anything at the moment. She waited until we were back in my cabin and I had mixed a couple of drinks.
Then she said, “There’s one other little job we have to do before we go back to St. Louis, Barney.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Drink your drink first, then I’ll show you.”
“Show me?” I asked, puzzled. “Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Drink your drink,” she repeated.
She sounded as though she meant I might need it. I looked at her dubiously for a minute, then drained my glass.
“All right,” I said. “I drank my drink. Now show me.”
Setting down her own drink unfinished, she took my hand and led me to the door. Still holding my hand, she led me to her own cabin door, unlocked it and drew me inside. Then she released her grip on me and locked the door behind us.
“It’s in the bathroom,” she said.
Now completely puzzled, I followed her. In the bathroom the shower curtains were drawn around the bathtub and a glittering new icepick lay on the edge of the washbowl. Without comment Helena drew the shower curtains wide.
Three damp burlap bags were spread over something bulky in the bathtub.
For a few moments I simply stared at the bags, the hair at the base of my neck prickling in anticipation of shock. Then I pushed Helena aside and lifted one of the pieces of burlap.
Underneath, cozily packed in what must have been more than a hundred pounds of cracked ice, was the naked body of a man. He lay on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest and his back to me. The back of his head was oddly flattened and was matted with dried blood.
Letting the burlap fall back into place, I staggered out of the room and collapsed in a chair in the bedroom. Helena followed as far as the bathroom door, then stood watching me with curiously bright eyes as I stared at her in stupefaction.
Finally I managed to whisper, “Who is it?”
“Lawrence,” she said without emotion. “My husband.”
I closed my eyes and tried to make some sense out of the nightmarish discovery that Lawrence Powers, who was supposed to be at a banker’s convention in New York City, was actually lying dead in an improvised icebox not a dozen feet away. Surprisingly it did make sense. Like the tumblers of a lock falling into place, various oddities in Helena’s behavior which had been vaguely puzzling me ever since we started the trip began to develop meaning.
Opening my eyes, I said in a dazed voice, “He was in the trunk all the way from St. Louis, wasn’t he? That’s why the key wouldn’t work. You substituted some other key so I couldn’t open the trunk, then put the right one back on the ring after you got his body out of the trunk and into your cabin.”
“It was the key to the trunk of Lawrence’s Packard you tried in the lock that first time,” she said calmly. “I had the Buick trunk key in my purse.”
“And that’s why you insisted on this particular tourist court,” I went on. “You wanted one with car ports, so you could get him out of the trunk and into your cabin without being seen. You dragged him in through the car port door while I was taking a shower.”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t very heavy. A hundred and forty. I weigh one twenty-five myself.”
Leaning forward, I put my head in my hands and mumbled, “Tell me the rest of it.”
Without a trace of emotion in her voice she said, “While you were arranging for the Buick to be fixed I located an ice house only two miles from here. I thought of ice because I knew he’d begin to smell after a few days if he wasn’t preserved. I had the man put four twenty-five pound pieces of ice in the trunk of the Dodge. He also sold me an icepick. Then I came back here and carried the pieces in one at a time. I left the plug out of the bathtub so the melted ice would run away, and I’ve been adding fifty pounds a day. I got it while you were still in bed and thought I was out after coffee.” She paused, then added, “The burlap bags were in our garage at home. I put them on the floor of the trunk in case he bled any.”
I thought of something. “Good God!” I said. “All you borrowed from the motel proprietor was an empty pitcher. The ice for our drinks has been coming out of that bathtub!”
When her lip corners quirked upward in the suggestion of a smile, I got to my feet, reeled into the bathroom and threw up.
When I returned to the bedroom Helena had seated herself on the bed and was serenely smoking a cigarette.
“Tell me how it happened,” I suggested dully.
“He was going to call the police,” she said. “It was all because he insisted on getting everywhere early. His plane didn’t leave until six, and I planned to start driving him to the airport at five. But he was all packed and ready to go before four. I intended taking the station wagon, figuring I’d make some excuse if he asked why I wasn’t driving the Buick. But Lawrence tried to be helpful. Without my knowing what he intended doing, he went out to the garage at four o’clock and backed the convertible out for me.”
She paused to crush out her cigarette and light another. “When I heard the car start up, I rushed out back to stop him. I did get him to drive it back in the garage, but it was too late. He’d already noticed the damage. And he guessed at once what had caused it. He used to read every inch of both papers, so he knew the police were looking for a green Buick. He didn’t even ask me. He just looked at me in a horrified way and said, ‘Helena, you killed that old man.’ ”
She blew twin streams of smoke from her nostrils, creating a curious mental impression on me. With her immobile face and motionless body, the smoke issuing from her nostrils made her look like a carved oriental idol.
Tonelessly she went on, “There wasn’t any reasoning with him, Barney. He was the most self-righteous man who ever lived. It didn’t mean a thing to him that I might go to jail for months or years if I was discovered. I actually pleaded with him, but he was determined to phone the police. We have five phone extensions and one of them is in the garage. He marched over to it like an avenging angel and was dialing O when I picked up a wrench and hit him over the back of the head.”
I said huskily, “Why’d you wait until now to mention all this? Why not before we started for Chicago?”
“Because I wanted to make sure you’d help me get rid of the body,” she said serenely. “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to dispose of it myself. And you might have backed out of the whole deal if you’d known about Lawrence.”
“What makes you think I won’t anyway?” I asked. “I’m not an accessory to this yet. Suppose I just walk out?”
Helena yawned slightly. “Then I suppose I’d be caught. But I doubt that the police would believe you knew nothing about it. I’d tell them it was you who killed Lawrence, of course. And even if they didn’t believe me, they’d certainly never accept your story that you had nothing at all to do with it. Particularly after the motel proprietor identified you as the man who’d been with me.”
She was right, I knew. No cop would ever believe I’d transported a body three hundred miles without knowing it, or that the woman I was traveling with had kept it on ice in her bathtub for three days without my knowledge. I had to save Helena in order to save myself.
If it was possible to save either of us.
I didn’t waste any time upbraiding her. In the first place it wouldn’t have accomplished anything, and in the second place I didn’t think it would bother her in the least.
“Let’s go over to my cabin where I can think,” I said wearily.
I spent the next twenty minutes thinking, pacing up and down and chain smoking while Helena calmly watched me and sipped a highball. I had one straight shot myself. I would have preferred a highball, but I refused to use any more of Helena’s ice.