McCall drove out of Tisquanto, taking the macadam road. The mere thought of the clearing in the woods near the shack made the place on his groin itch.
He missed the dirt-road turnoff the first time and had to backtrack. Evil mood... uptight... he wondered what young Starret had meant.
He found the turnoff this time. It entered at a grassy knoll, then the road curled away in the woods. He was near the river, he knew. Not too far from where Starret had found Laura Thornton.
The clearing was deserted. McCall killed his engine and got out. Through the trees, some hundred yards away, he saw the log building. It had a railed porch.
He started toward it and stopped, looking down. He had stepped on his necktie. He picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket.
Half-grown fir trees flanked the shack. Then he saw a car, a bright blue fender-dented Corvair. It was parked at the side of the building. So Starret had been right.
McCall sprinted for the cover of the nearest fir tree. No sign of life from the shack. It looked like an abandoned lodge in need of repair; the roof was tacky and the porch sagged. A perfect hideaway for hell-raising college kids.
He made another quick dash to a tree nearer the porch, decided to chance it, leaped lightly over the rail and across the worn boards, and crouched at a window.
He heard muttering inside and risked a look.
It was young Sullivan in there, right enough. He was crouched in a chair staring into space, talking rapidly to some invisible audience. McCall could net make out what the student was saying. Not that it mattered; it was probably transcendental nonsense. The boy was high on some drug; turned on with a vengeance.
McCall kicked the door open and leaped inside.
Young Sullivan did not even look around.
“Sullivan,” McCall said.
It was nonsense, all right, a babble of incomprehensible impressions, a reaching out to a world beyond reality. The babble held steady.
McCall went over to him and shook him. “Sullivan!”
The stream of words dried up. The boy turned bloodshot eyes McCall’s way and blinked.
“It’s the upstate fuzz,” he said in a pleased way, but very slowly, as if a sensible statement required laborious thought.
McCall dragged a chair over and sat close; their knees touched. “Are you with it, Sully? Enough to understand plain English?”
Then he saw what the young man had been playing with under cover of the tabletop.
“Oh, yes,” Dennis Sullivan said, and he brought forth the pistol, aimed it at McCall’s head, and pulled the trigger.
19
The hammer clicked emptily. It had happened too unexpectedly for McCall to react; he would pay for it, he knew, much later, in his nightmares.
It was an old Beretta Cougar .380, known in the handbooks as “the official arm of the Italian Army and Navy.” This one was extra-fancy, a chromed job with a pearl stock. God knew how old it was. But it looked oiled and ready for business. The question was if it was loaded. The Beretta Cougar, McCall knew, held eight cartridges when fully loaded, seven in the magazine and one in the chamber. Sullivan might well have inserted a loaded magazine and forgotten to put the extra cartridge in the chamber. McCall decided that he did not care to play Russian roulette with a speed freak at the controls.
He found that unconsciously he had eased off a bit, getting his legs well under him and his feet raised at the heels, weight balanced forward.
“That’s a pretty dangerous thing to be playing with, Sully,” McCall said, smiling. “Have you checked to see if there are any cartridges in the magazine?”
“Why don’t I pull the trigger again and find out, Mr. McC?” the student asked, grinning back.
“No, thanks,” McCall said. “I don’t think either of us would enjoy the experience. Let’s dispense with the firearm, shall we? What do you say, Sully? Put it away?”
“Not till I find out what you want, ol’ fuzzy-wuzzy-buzzy. How’d you know where I was?”
“I ran into somebody who said he thought you might be out here at the shack,” McCall said. “So I took a chance and drove out here. I’d like to talk to you.”
“We had our talk.”
“Not one like this, Sully. In this one we’ll have to get down to the nitty-gritty. Come on, tuck the pistol away and let’s go at it like civilized people.”
Young Sullivan blinked at him. He was evidently slipping into another phase of drug reaction.
“So talk.” He dropped the automatic to the table.
McCall studiously avoided it.
“It was Inferno did you in, Sully,” McCall said. “Remember?”
“Inferno,” young Sullivan repeated owlishly.
“That painting? All in shades of red? An abstract that looks like flames licking the roof of a cave?”
“Inferno,” Sullivan said, nodding. “Did me in? How d’ye mean?”
“I first saw that painting in your room, Sully,” McCall said gently. “It was one of a group borrowed from the fine arts department that you had leaning against your desk. For some reason — was it because you liked it? — you held onto it for a few days before you returned it. Or maybe you were too high on speed to make a very smart criminal.”
Sully’s mouth was open. He seemed fascinated. “Yeah?” he said.
“Because it was Laura who originally borrowed Inferno from the fine arts department. I know that for a fact because when it became overdue Miss Smith sent a letter to Laura asking for its return. And my information was that when Laura was last seen — you told me that yourself, Sully — she was carrying a painting to return to the department. Obviously, Inferno. Days later I find Inferno in your room. So you lied, Sully, about having dropped Laura off with the painting at the liberal arts building. You didn’t drop her off at all. You took her somewhere and held her prisoner — maybe here, for all I know — and beat the living hell out of her. Why?”
Sully’s mouth was still open. “Why?” he repeated. “Why?”
“Chinky-chink shows, as the kids used to say in Chicago. Inferno, Sully. Very appropriate. What you should have done with that painting was not return it at all, ever. You should have destroyed it. Then I’d never have known that you were Laura Thornton’s beater-upper. You must have been very high, Sully, very high indeed, to try to beat her to death. In fact, I’m sure that’s what you thought when you left her down at the river — that she was dead. You’re a bungler, Sully, and you know what you’ve got to thank for it. Drugs, probably the same stuff you’re on right now.”
Young Sullivan’s breathing became shallower and more rapid.
“The question is why you set out to beat Laura Thornton to death,” McCall said. “The answer ties in to Dean Gunther’s death.
“A series of threatening letters was sent to Floyd Gunther, hinting that he had engaged in hanky-panky with some coed. A number of them were signed ‘Thomas Taylor.’ One of them was signed ‘Lady G.’ Why were those aliases chosen by the two blackmailers? Well, what does ‘Lady G’ suggest? Lady Godiva, for one. And ‘Thomas Taylor’? Well, if Lady Godiva was a principal in the case, Peeping Tom — Thomas — was certainly another. And what was Thomas’s trade in the legend? He was a tailor! So ‘Thomas Taylor.’
“It’s wonderful how the human mind traps itself, Sully,” McCall said to the boy. “Lady Godiva — nudity. Peeping Tom — the man who looked on secretly. Translate it into terms of the blackmail letters and Floyd Gunther’s predicament, and what do we have? A college dean caught fornicating with a coed, and somebody secretly watching in order to be able to blackmail later. Now blackmail in a fornication case has no teeth without evidence. What is the most damning kind of evidence you can have in a fornication case? Photographic. So that’s what Peeping Tom — the secret watcher, the coed’s confederate — was doing: he was snapping pictures of the event! And who do we know in this setup is a photographic bug? Why, young Dennis Sullivan.