“They have a baby sitter over there who takes care of him when Mr. and Mrs. Jennings go out, and I’ve noticed that when the baby sitter is there Robert has a real gun to play with.”
“A real gun?” Mason asked.
“An automatic,” Jonathan Gales supplemented. “Looks like a Colt Woodsman model. I think it’s a .22 caliber.”
“He only has that when the baby sitter is there?” Mason asked.
“Well, now, that’s the only time I’ve seen him with it,” Mrs. Gales said, “but if you ask me, a seven-year-old boy has got no business playing around with a real pistol... personally, I think it’s bad enough when they start pulling these imitation six-shooters out of holsters, pointing them at people and saying, ‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’ Good heavens! When I was a girl, if my brother had even pointed a cap pistol at anybody, my dad would have warmed him up good and proper.
“Nowadays, boys go around with these toy pistols and think nothing of pointing them at somebody and saying, ‘Boom! You’re dead!’ You can see what it’s doing. Pick up the paper almost any day and you see where some child ten, twelve or fifteen years old killed off a parent because he was mad at not being allowed to go to a movie. I don’t know what the world’s coming to when—”
“Do you know who this baby sitter is?” Paul Drake interposed.
“No, I don’t. They have a couple of them. This one I’m talking about has only been working there about six weeks. The Jennings aren’t much for being neighborly, and... Well, this is a peculiar neighborhood. People seem to live pretty much to themselves.
“Time was when people used to swap a little gossip and borrow things back and forth, but now there’s a car in the garage and whenever they have a minute they get up and scoot off someplace. Then when they’re home they’re watching television or something. Seems like times are changing right under our eyes.”
“This baby sitter,” Mason prompted, “an older or a younger woman?”
“The one who lets him have the gun is an older woman — oh, I’d say somewhere in the forties.” She laughed. “Of course, that’s not old at all, you understand. It’s just that she’s older than the other one, and, of course, older than some of the baby sitters they have these days; girls going to high school who come and sit with kids for an evening. I don’t know what would happen if there was any sort of an emergency. I don’t know what one of those girls could do.”
“Well, as far as that’s concerned, what could a woman of forty-five do?” Jonathan Gales commented. “Suppose some man walked in, and—”
“We have to hurry along,” Drake interrupted, his voice apologetic. “I would like to have Mr. Mason hear your story just the way you told it to me. We’ll have time only for highlights. You’ve seen the child playing with this automatic?”
Mrs. Gales nodded emphatically.
“How about you?” Drake asked, turning to Jonathan Gales.
“I’ve seen him two or three times,” Jonathan Gales said. “The very first time I saw it, I said to Martha, ‘It looks to me like that kid’s got a real gun over there,’ and Martha said, ‘No, it can’t be. That’s just some kind of a wooden gun. They’re making imitations these days that look so much like the real thing they scare a body to death.’
“Well, I took a good, long second look at it and I said, ‘Martha, I’m betting that’s a real gun,’ and sure enough, it was.”
“Did you ever have it in your hands?” Mason asked.
“No, but I did think enough about it to get my binoculars and take a look at it — Martha and I do a little bird watching out in the backyard and we’ve got a mighty good pair of binoculars, coated lenses and all. They’re sharp as a tack.”
“All right,” Drake said, hurrying things along. “The child at times plays with a real gun. You’ve noticed that only when this one baby sitter was there.”
They both nodded.
“Now, about the bloodstains,” Drake said.
“Well, that’s the thing I can’t understand,” Gales said. “This morning Barton Jennings was up before daylight. He went someplace. Then, later on, he had a hose and he was out there washing off the sidewalk and pretending he was watering the lawn. It wasn’t five-thirty.
“Now, of course, that’s not unusually early for people that are accustomed to getting up early, but over there in the Jennings house they like to sleep late — you take on a Saturday or a Sunday when they aren’t going anywhere they’ll stay in bed until nine-ten o’clock in the morning. You’ll see Robert up playing around by himself out there in the patio.”
“Not that we’re the nosy kind,” Martha Gales interposed, “but we do our bird watching, a lot of it, in the morning. That’s when birds are moving around and both Jonathan and I are early risers. There’s a hedge between the properties, but you can see through it if someone is moving around. If anybody over there is sitting still-like, it isn’t easy to see him. But if a body’s moving around over in the patio in the Jennings’ house you can see sort of a shadowy outline through the leaves in the hedge.”
“Jennings was watering the lawn?” Mason prompted.
“Well, it wasn’t so much watering the lawn,” Gales said, “as hosing it off. He was pretending to water the lawn but he was holding the hose almost straight down and walking it along the lawn, using too much force to just be watering the grass. He was putting the full stream of water along a narrow strip — oh, maybe two or three feet wide — walking right along with it. Then he came to the sidewalk and he hosed off the sidewalk and in a couple of places I saw him put the nozzle right down within eighteen inches of the cement, just like he was trying to wash something away.
“Well, I didn’t think too much of it until I went out to get my paper. The delivery boy had tossed the paper and usually he tosses it right up on the porch. This morning it didn’t seem to be on the porch and I went out looking for it and I found it in the gutter. Evidently it had slipped out of the delivery boy’s hand. It looks like there had been blood in that water that ran down the gutter.”
“You have the paper?” Drake asked.
Gales handed the newspaper to Mason. “Now, it was rolled up this way,” he explained, rolling up the front page, “and then there was a rubber elastic band around it. You can see the water had quite a reddish tinge to it.”
“But what makes you think it’s blood?” Mason asked.
“I’m coming to that,” Gales said. “When I went out looking for the paper, Jennings was just finishing up watering along the sidewalk. I said to him, ‘Good morning’ and told him it looked like it was going to be a nice day, just sort of neighborly-like, and he seemed right startled to see me out there. And, before he thought, he said sharply, ‘What are you looking for?’ Well, I told him I was looking for my newspaper; that it wasn’t on the porch or on the front lawn and sometimes when the boy threw it out of the car it would hit against the side of the car door and drop down in the gutter. So then I looked down in the gutter and said, ‘Here it is; right here in the gutter.’
“I picked it up and Jennings said, ‘Gosh, I hope I didn’t get it wet. I was watering the lawn.’ Well, I looked at it and saw it was wet all right, but I said, ‘Oh, well, it’ll dry right out. It isn’t very wet; just the corner. You’re up early this morning, aren’t you?’
“Well, he said he’d had to take Robert and the dog out someplace to meet with some other boys that were going out on a camping trip, and then I saw his eyes rest on the paper I was holding. Something in the expression of his eyes caused me to look down, and I could see there was this reddish stain on the paper. Well, I didn’t say a word, but I brought the paper in and dried it out, and Martha and I had our cup of coffee. We both like a cup of coffee first thing in the morning and then we read the newspaper. Sometimes we don’t actually get around to breakfast for an hour or two. We sit out in the yard and watch birds and maybe sip coffee, and—”