"And almost all these yards are fenced, which blocks the view of the alley," Robin remarked, "and of the Buckleys' back yard." The Buckleys' yard was one of the few unfenced ones. The ones on either side had five-foot privacy fences. We stopped at the very back of the yard by the garbage cans, with a clear view of the back door of the house. The yard was planted with the camellias and roses that Mrs. Buckley had loved. In their garbage can—what an eerie thought—was probably a tissue she'd blotted her lipstick with, grounds from the coffee they'd drunk on their last morning, detritus of lives that no longer existed.
Yes, their garbage was surely still there ... everyone on Parson Road had garbage pickup on Monday. They'd been killed on Wednesday. I shuddered. "Let's go," I said. My mood had changed. I wasn't Delilah Detective anymore. Robin turned slowly. "So what would you do?" he said. "If you didn't want to be observed, you'd have parked your car—where? Where we came into the alley?" "No. That's a narrow street, and someone might remember having to pull out and around to get past your car."
"What about at the north end of the alley?"
"No. There's a service station right across the street there, it's real busy." "So," said Robin, striding ahead purposefully, "we go back this way, the way we came. If you had an ax, where would you put it?" "Oh, Robin," I said nervously. "Let's just go." We were leaving the alley as unobserved as we had entered, as far as I could tell, and I was glad of it. "I," continued Robin, "would drop it in one of these garbage cans waiting to be emptied."
That was why Robin was a very good mystery writer. "I'm sure the police have searched them," I said firmly. "I am not going to stand here and go through everyone's garbage. Then someone really would call the police." Or would they? Apparently no one had spotted us so far. We'd reached the end of the alley, at the spot we'd entered. "If you wouldn't park here, you might just cross the street and go through the next alley," he said thoughtfully. "Park even farther away, be even less likely to be seen and connected."
So we slipped across the narrow street into the next alley. This one had been widened a little when some apartments had been built. Their parking was in the back, and in the construction process a drainage ditch had been put in the alley to keep the parking lots clear. There were culverts to provide entrances and exits to the lots. I thought, I would put the ax in one of the culverts. And I wondered if the police had searched this block. This alley too was silent and lifeless, and I began to have the unsettling feeling that maybe Robin and I were the only people left in Lawrenceton. The sun came out briefly and Robin took my hand, so I tried hard to feel better. But when he crouched to retie his shoe, I began looking in the ditches. Certainly the culvert right by us hadn't been disturbed. The water oak leaves that half-blocked the opening were almost smoothly aligned, pointing in the same direction, by the heavy rain of the night before last. But the next one down... someone had been in that ditch, no doubt about it. The leaves had been shoved up around the opening so forcefully that the mud underneath had been uncovered. Perhaps the police had searched, but of course none of them were as short as I was, so they weren't at an angle to see a little gleam from inside the culvert, a gleam sparked by the unexpected and short-lived sunshine. And their arms weren't as long as Robin's, so they couldn't have reached in and pulled out... "My briefcase?" Robin said in shock and amazement. "What's it doing here?" His fingers pried the gold-tone locks.
"Don't open it!" I shrieked, as Robin opened it, and out fell a bloodstained hatchet, to land with a thud on the packed leaves in the ditch.
Chapter 14
While Robin stood guard over the horrible thing in the alley, I knocked on the door of one of the apartments. I could hear a baby screaming inside, so I knew someone was awake.
The exhausted young woman who answered the door was still in her nightgown. She was trusting enough to open the door to a stranger, and tired enough to accept my need to use her telephone incuriously. The baby screamed while I looked up the number of the police station, and kept it up while I dialled and talked to the desk officer, who had some trouble understanding what I was trying to tell him. When I hung up and thanked the young woman, the baby was still crying, though it had ebbed to a whimper.
"Poor baby," I said tentatively.
"It's colic," she explained. "The doctor says the worst should be over soon." Aside from occasionally babysitting my half-brother Phillip when he was small, I knew nothing about babies. So I was glad to hear that the child had a specific complaint. By the time I thanked her and she shut the door behind me, I could hear the child starting to cry again.
I trudged back to the alley where Robin was sitting glumly, his back propped against the fence on the side opposite the apartments. "Me and my great ideas," I said bitterly, plopping down beside him.
He let that pass in a gentlemanly manner.
"Cover it up," I suggested. "I can't stand it."
"How, without getting fingerprints on it? More fingerprints, that is." We solved that problem as a mist began to dampen my hair against my cheeks. I found a stick and Robin stuck it under the edge of the briefcase, lifting it and dragging it over the hatchet with its dreadful stains. We settled back against the fence, able now to hear the sirens approaching. I felt oddly calm. "I wonder if I'll ever get my briefcase back," Robin said. "Someone came in our parking lot and reached in my car, and took my briefcase, so he could use it for hiding a murder weapon. I'd been thinking, Roe, when this case is all over, if it ever is, that I might try my hand at nonfiction. I'm here, I'm involved through knowing some of the people. I even met the Buckleys the very night before they were killed. I was there when you and your mother opened the chocolates. Now I'm here finding a murder weapon in my briefcase, and I'm telling you, I don't like this much anymore. I don't think I even want the damn briefcase as a memento, now that I think of it." But after sitting for a moment in silence, he murmured, "Wait till I tell my agent." The surface of his glasses began to be speckled with tiny drops of moisture. I took my own off and wiped them with a Kleenex. "I've got to admire your lack of fear, Robin," I said.
"Lack of fear?"
"You think they're not going to want to ask you a few questions?" I said pointedly.
He had only seconds to absorb this and look dismayed before an unmarked car pulled in the alley, with a patrol car right behind it. For some reason, we stood up.
And God bless me, who should emerge from the unmarked car but my friend Lynn Liggett, and she was mad as a wet hen.
"You're everywhere!" she said to me. "I know you didn't do these murders, but I swear every time I turn around you're right in front of me!" She shook her head, as if trying to shake me out of it. Then words seemed to fail her. Her glance fell on the overturned open briefcase, with the handle of the hatchet protruding slightly from underneath.
"Who covered it up?" she said next. After we told her, and she lifted the briefcase from the bloody hatchet with the same stick, all her attention was on the murder weapon.