“We talked to your friend Boardman last night,” I said. “You told me you were lifelong friends, and you referred to him once as Willie. That might not sound like much to you, Steward, but little things like that go a long way in this business. Especially when we found out that only a very few people are permitted to call Mr. Boardman by that name. You’re one of them. In fact, you’re the only one in New York just now who has that privilege.”
“This is ridiculous,” Steward said. “Why, my lawyers will—”
“Let’s hope you have good ones,” I said. “You’ll need them. I was about to say that the man who asked for Mr. Boardman and his wife at the party last night — he used the name Willie, too. It made me think of you, Mr. Steward. And once I started thinking about you I began to see how Leslie Ogden’s story might not be so fantastic after all.”
Steward started to get to his feet, but I put out an arm and pushed him gently back into his seat. “You told me that Doris and Leslie had words on the phone yesterday evening, just before she left to baby-sit for the Boardman’s. But that never happened. We’ve talked with Les’s boss, and he tells us that Les used the phone only once during the entire day, and that was when he talked to you, late that evening. The boss is certain of it because he and Les weren’t out of each other’s sight at any time from noon till Les got your call and left. They were so busy they even had food sent in. Les made no phone calls at all, and his boss will swear to it.”
Steward sat perfectly still, his thin body rigid, staring straight ahead of him with eyes that had suddenly grown moist.
“We know what you did,” I said, “but we don’t know why. We know you’d heard Doris talk about Les enough times to know where he worked and when he worked late, and we know you were aware the Boardmans were going to that party. With your wife away for the night, you had a good setup. After you got over there you simply made your telephone calls and went to work.”
Steward turned sick eyes toward me. “You rotten louse,” he whispered.
“Why? Because my partner and I didn’t let you get away with choking a girl to death and trying to frame her boy friend for it?”
“But you don’t understand! She had it coming! Oh, God, you don’t know how much she had it coming. She was going to ruin me. She would have killed my wife. She deserved to die, I tell you!”
“Why?”
“Because she was going to swear she was pregnant and that I got her that way. Did you hear that? She was going to my wife and to my boss.” He paused for breath. “God, I had to kill her. I had to.”
I glanced at Walt and nodded, and he started the car and pulled it out into the morning traffic.
“It was her fault,” Steward said. “The way she acted when my wife wasn’t around... God, you just don’t know what it was like. She’d come over in a real thin dress with nothing under it and show herself off to me. She drove me crazy. I... I couldn’t help myself. Nobody could.”
“It wasn’t necessary to kill her, Steward.”
“But it was, I tell you! She wouldn’t go to a doctor. Not until she got the money. That’s what she wanted. She’d found my bank book and she knew I had four thousand dollars saved up and she wanted every penny of it. And she meant business, too. She wouldn’t have hesitated a second to do exactly what she said she’d do, and she wouldn’t take anything less than the whole four thousand. She hated it here and she wanted to go back to California. She...” He broke off.
Steward said nothing more until Walt started to park the car in front of the station house. Then he looked at me with eyes that were too full of fear to focus properly, and touched my arm.
“What’ll happen to me now?” he asked.
But I knew he didn’t really expect an answer. He already knew the answer. Nothing else could have filled his eyes so full of fear.
Scarecrow
by David Alexander
Nobody liked old Jeff Purdy, so there were no broken hearts when Purdy’s Scarecrow killed him.
Andy Tevis, the rural mail carrier, tooled his jeepster at an angle to the curb directly in front of a No Parking sign outside the county courthouse in Clayville. He was a small, aging man, but he seemed made of taut wire and saddleleather as he leaped from the ancient vehicle with the agility of a self-important squirrel. It was the first Saturday of the month, court day, and there was a big crowd in town from the nearby farming areas. The loafers in front of the court-house, most of them wearing overalls and mackinaws, regarded Andy curiously as he pushed his way through, and a few called after him, “Hey, Andy! What’s the matter? You got a letter from the President?”
Tevis did not bother to answer them. He hurried to a basement entrance of the courthouse with the urgent concentration that always marks the bearer of disastrous tidings. He entered the mildewed, neo-Classis building that dated to pre-Civil War days and made his way down a narrow basement corridor that was dimly lighted by fly-specked, low-watt bulbs. He found a heavy door with the legend “Sheriff’s Office” inscribed on it and pushed it open.
Inside, Sheriff Charley Estes and his deputy, Coates Williams, were bent over cards and pegboards playing cribbage. Andy called out loudly, “Charley, old Jeff Purdy’s dead!”
Estes, a lean, weathered man, totted his score carefully before he spoke. Then he said, “You mean Martha finally killed the ornery old boy, Andy?”
“I didn’t say that,” Andy answered. “All I said was he’s dead. Been dead five-six days, maybe a week now. The Scarecrow don’t keep much track of time, I guess.”
“He must be plumb ripe by now,” Coates Williams commented. “There ain’t no embalmers out near Rocky Farm that I’ve heard of.”
“The Scarecrow says he got drunk and fell off’n the big cliff into Winding River,” Andy said. “He must of floated all the way to the Mississippi by now, I guess, the way that river runs when the spring thaws come.”
“Don’t call Martha ‘Scarecrow,’ ” the sheriff said to Tevis.
“That’s what her own husband called her!” the little man flared. “And she looks like a raggedy scarecrow, if you want to know it. Something on a broomstick, that’s what she is. I guess you ain’t seen her in recent times. I have.”
“I knew her all right when she was young,” the sheriff replied. “She was Martha Parsons then and there wasn’t a prettier girl in Jarrod County. I walked out with her myself when I was a young buck. She’s not more than pushing forty-five right now, today. Old Jeff must of been pushing sixty-five, at least. It was a plain cruel shame the way her old man married her off to that ornery drunk, twenty-five years ago, at least, it was. She’s been out there on that God-forsaken farm ever since, never seeing anybody and never coming into town. If she’s a scarecrow now, Jeff Purdy made her one.”
Andy Tevis said, “I guess we never would have known old Jeff was dead, even, if the Scarecrow — Martha, I mean — didn’t order one of them Burpee flower seed catalogues every living year. It was the only mail they ever got out there. I guess even the government didn’t know they was alive because they never even got no income tax forms. I don’t know what the hell she wanted with them catalogues. You couldn’t grow flowers on that rocky land. You couldn’t grow nothing but weeds and pigs and poke salad.”
“How’d you find out?” Coates asked.
“Because the catalogue come and I had to drive up that old road to Rocky Farm that nobody’s used since Dan’l Boone shot the b’ar. Damn near broke my axle. When I got there I just reached out and stuck the catalogue in the mailbox. Damn place gives me the creeps. No smoke from the chimney. No light in the window. House ain’t had a coat of paint or even whitewash since Sherman come a-burning through these parts. Damn place leans in the wind like the town drunk on Saturday nights. Dismal, that’s what it is.”