Black Sheep, White Lamb Read online

  “No. I just got the day man down to check it—you know, just to be sure.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I see what you mean. If Moss got his money, that means he saw the rest of it in there, too, didn’t he?”

  “One more if,” Bassett said, trying to conceal his impatience. Kearns wanted it both ways—on Moss—if he didn’t get his money he was suspect, and if he did get it, he was suspect. It was not that Kearns was malicious: He was simply at the moment groping his way along the blind alley of prejudice without even knowing he was in its neighborhood. But by the same token, Bassett cautioned himself, the fact that Moss was a Negro was no grounds for presumption of innocence. “Does he drive to work?” Bassett was thinking of the availability of a weapon, a pipe or possibly a wrench.

  “Don’t know for sure. I think he rides with somebody.”

  “Then he’d have had to walk home tonight?”

  “Can’t really say,” Kearns said.

  “We’d better check him out tonight—just to be on the safe side,” Bassett said.

  “Better let me do it,” Kearns said. “Those people are kind of touchy with strangers.”

  Bassett called the county coroner at Toby’s funeral home, who had by then had time for at least a superficial examination of the wound. He would say no more than that the weapon was pipe-like—except of smaller bore than the standard plumbing equipment.

  “The back end of a wrench, maybe?” Bassett suggested.

  “Could be …” The examiner thought about it. “No … more round. Like the barrel of a pistol—a big one. Damn it, I’m not qualified to say exactly.”

  “I understand,” Bassett said. “Let’s lift a piece of the scalp when you’re through and have the lab boys give it the works. Was he bald?”

  “No, a fine head of sandy hair.”

  “Good,” Bassett said. Sometimes things clung to hair—dust, powder, anything sticky. And hair, especially soaked with blood, was likely also to cling.

  Bassett went outdoors. It was almost two o’clock. The smell of smoke was on the wind. They were having quite a fire up the hill. He watched Kearns drive off, presumably on his way to have his talk with Moss. He remembered then that his own car was parked at the top of a good steep hill. There was just so much a man could do in one night. A late half-moon hung like a Christmas bauble alongside the plant smokestack.

  Bassett walked a few steps from the office door and looked back. Through the two windows he could see the technicians finishing up. It would have been a simple matter for his assailant to have observed MacAndrews at his desk from outdoors, to have ascertained that he was alone. That he had been struck on the back of the head suggested that he had been taken by surprise. But what motive—the safe unopened? He then set himself to conjecturing the path of approach. There was but one door to the office shed although it was attached to the main building. If his assailant had come from the plant he would have come out the main door, some fifty feet away, and walked directly along the building, past the south wall of the shed, no doubt pausing to observe MacAndrews at his desk. To have approached the office from the street, he would have had to come along the drive from the parking lot or the railroad track adjacent to it. One lone boxcar sat on the tracks. To the north a Cyclone fence bordered the Graham grounds, also to the west. The northern and eastern walls of the plant were on the river. The gates to the parking lot and the railroad track lay open. He supposed that when or if the plant was shut down for an extensive time the gates were kept closed. There was no indication that that had happened for some time: The salt-river dampness had corroded the hinges.

  Bassett turned back toward the plant, this time walking along the tracks, the beam of his flashlight running before him. A puzzling thing: the rails shone brightly in the moonlight for some distance. Abruptly then they were rusted, and some thirty feet beyond the rusted section sat the solitary boxcar. Bassett went on toward the car. A remarkable accumulation of beer cans lay along the track bed, some of them of recent deposit, more already settled under the long grass. The glisten of frost shone over everything. Before he reached the boxcar, Bassett speculated on its use: It was a perfect setup for gambling. There were no foot tracks in the frost, except his own, and they would vanish within an hour, he suspected, but trailing his light along the ground at the side of the car, he picked up something curious in its beam: a nylon stocking. Bassett took his time about disturbing it. He would not say it had lain there long, not as long as the beer cans and empty cigaret packages. It was damp to his touch, but not wet, and he suspected that if it had been there for any length of time it would have settled, like the other debris, under the grass. He laid his own handkerchief on the ground and gingerly lifted the stocking into it and put it in his pocket. He proceeded then to satisfy his earlier curiosity. The boxcar was not locked, the door rolled easily, quietly. It had been greased far more recently than had the car wheels. The car was empty, the floor strewn with straw. Odd. There was a curious smell, too, one vaguely associated with his own youth—from the straw perhaps, a visit to the farm. Bassett hoisted himself into the car, and gently raked the straw with his foot. His flashlight picked up stains beneath the fresh straw—old blood stains if he was not mistaken. The walls of the car were hung with lanterns.

  As Bassett closed the boxcar door, he heard the low groan of the fire siren and the sound of the truck’s motor. The fire would be out, the engines returning to the stationhouse. He went back briefly to the plant office, giving the technicians the stocking to take to the laboratory and instructions on lifting specimens from the boxcar. He himself headed toward the firehouse.

  The station doors were open, only one truck having returned. A dozen or so men were cleaning equipment, others working on the truck. A man behind a small bar at the rear of the station was drawing beer.

  “All right,” somebody shouted. “We worked our asses off, didn’t we? We couldn’t save it, so to hell with it.”

  They were a gloomy bunch of men at the moment, Bassett thought, wildly jealous of their reputation as the best volunteer fire company in the state. A plaque over the bar testified to their excellence. He would himself be a long time forgetting the magnificent abandon with which they had fought. The times were short on this kind of heroism.

  Bassett went to the one man there he recognized, the ambulance attendant, who was standing at the bar. The man nodded to him and said to the one drawing beer, “Give my friend here a beer, Tony. He needs it.”

  Bassett was grateful to be called friend. He said, “Do they know yet that MacAndrews was murdered?”

  “Naw. You could tell ’em their own mother was murdered and it wouldn’t make any impression right now.”

  When a number of men had come to the bar, every one of them giving Bassett what he might almost have called the evil eye—it was not a time for welcoming strangers here either—the ambulance man said, “This here’s the county detective—that’s what you are, ain’t you?”

  Bassett nodded. “Ray Bassett,” he said.

  A couple of men muttered some sort of greeting and went on to their beer.

  The ambulance man, a young fellow with a flare for the dramatic, said then, “Old MacAndrews was bumped off, it turns out. No natural causes.”

  It was a long moment before the news seemed to take on any significance for the men present. Bassett would have liked to know which of them was Martin Scully, if he was among them, before the announcement. But in a community like Hillside, he wanted to be careful of the moment at which he singled a man out for his attention.

  “Bumped off?” Tony, the acting bartender, said. “You mean murdered?” He was looking at the detective.

  “I’m afraid so,” Bassett said.

  Somebody down the bar gave a short laugh. “Ain’t that like old Kearns? A heart attack. Holy Jeez.”

  “It could’ve looked like it,” the ambulance man said, having shared the assumption with the police chief at the time. “And Der Tag didn’t say any different.”

&nb
sp; Bassett was not going to criticize Kearns in his own town. “Were any of you fellows on the night shift at the plant?”

  “I was,” Tony said.

  Another man raised a finger without looking up.

  “Me and Angie,” Tony added.

  Bassett kept trying to eliminate without asking the direct question. “Do you all work at the plant?”

  “Not me,” somebody said. “I work in my father’s grocery.”

  “And Daley,” Tony said, nodding at the tall, stringy kid at the end of the bar who looked as though he should have been home in bed. “All he does is go hunting when the boatyard closes up. Some life!”

  Phil Daley wet his lips. “Cut it out, Tony.”

  Bassett had eliminated five of eleven men. There had to be a quicker way of finding out what he wanted to know. Then he remembered something Kearns had told him about Scully. “I don’t suppose there’s any way of getting into the drugstore at this hour of the night, is there?”

  Tony stretched his neck. “Where’s Scully? He just come down, didn’t he?” He called out, “Hey, Scully!”

  The blond young man came around from the far side of the truck. He was a good-looking boy, Bassett thought, and as he drew closer, not quite as young as he looked in the distance. There were lines already in his face, strong lines; he was by no means a callow youth. He spoke to Bassett, obviously having heard everything said at the bar. “I have a key to the building, but not to the store. I live up over it, that’s all.”

  “All I wanted was aspirin,” Bassett said lamely.

  “Hell,” Tony said with a sweep of his hand toward a shelf at the back of the bar, “I got Alka-Seltzer, Bromo-Seltzer, Ex-Lax, and Anacin right here.”

  Bassett said, “I’ll have one of each, please.”

  The men laughed then. They were all young, they had to be to sprint with every fire, to work all day, and turn out night or day whenever the alarm sounded. They would not brood long over their inability to save the house that night; they would talk about it, argue about what went wrong, and drill to see that the same mistakes did not happen again. Bassett had had his good moment with them. He did not want to push for camaraderie. He wouldn’t get it anyway.

  One of the boys sidled along the bar until he was standing next to Bassett. “How come you’re in on it?” he asked, gesturing with his glass. “We got our own police, ain’t we?”

  This was more like the reception Bassett had expected. “Well, I guess you could say it’s like the fire company from Anders Cove turning out to give you a hand tonight. I just rolled in to see if Kearns could use some help.”

  Scully asked him, “You didn’t want me for anything, did you?”

  “Not particularly,” Bassett said so that the others might also hear it.

  “Then I’m going home. I’ve had it.”

  “So have I,” Bassett said, and to those at the bar, “Thanks for the beer … and all the other jazz.” He indicated the row of medications Tony had set before him. It seemed to be the right word. He had picked it up from his son.

  He discovered, reaching the street, that Scully was waiting for him. “MacAndrews was murdered,” he said, as though needing private confirmation before believing it. “What for?”

  “That would be pretty valuable information right now,” Bassett said. “He wasn’t the most popular man in town, was he?”

  A gust of wind whirled round their legs, sweeping the debris of the street against their ankles. Instinctively they withdrew into the entryway of the darkened store. Its bleak window displayed an assortment of hunting equipment: knives, rifles, boots … and two stuffed pheasants.

  “He wasn’t the most unpopular either,” Scully said.

  “He was unpopular with somebody tonight.” Bassett thought about his car at the top of a long climb. This was no place for interrogation. Besides, he wanted to see a witness’s face talking to him. “I’d like to talk to you, Scully, but not here.”

  “Want to come up to my place?”

  “That would be better,” Bassett said. It could not be much worse.

  As they bent their head against a sudden shifting wind and strode into it, Kearns drove up to the police station across the street. Bassett got directions from Scully on where he lived, and stopped to see Kearns.

  He slipped into the police car before Kearns got out of it. “Mind driving me up for my car?”

  “Moss’d be in the clear, I think,” Kearns said on the way. “Damn fool foreman didn’t tell me he had an infected hand. That’s what’s wrong with him, running poison through his system. Had the doctor with him, ten o’clock for near an hour. He couldn’t swat flies with that hand.”

  “Did he stop for his pay?”

  “No. He was damn near delirious. High fever, and he walked all the way. Why wouldn’t he stop at the station? Somebody there would have run him home.”

  Bassett did not say anything. The rest of the way Kearns brooded over the man from Moontown who had failed to ask for help when he needed it. “It isn’t right, you know,” he said finally, “the way those people look on the police. They need a lot of educating in more ways than one.”

  Bassett didn’t answer. They drew up alongside his car. There was no sign of fire in the ruin down the street. Only occasional puffs of smoke. Two men still patrolled the area. Bassett chose his next words with care although they sounded casual: “I’ll check in with you in the morning, shall I, Chief?”

  “That’d be fine,” Kearns said. “Think I ought to put on some more men? I got two part-time boys on the job now.”

  “Let’s wait and see if we need them,” Bassett said. The depressing vision ran through his mind of their possibly putting the killer on police duty—at twelve dollars per day.

  The question Bassett asked himself climbing the dusty stairs to Scully’s rooms was what kept young people in a town like Hillside. Their parents, he could understand. First generation American, their roots were here—family, their friends, their gardens, and the only jobs most of them had ever held; church and village hall, firehouse and tavern, politics and palaver, trapping crabs off the pier in summer, TV in the winter and a little gambling all year round. It wasn’t a bad life—as long as the factory kept running. In fact, take out the television and put in a little medieval pageantry, and you could fade twentieth century America into an ancient village on the Mediterranean, where men carved sandstone perhaps, or quarried marble … except for one thing: beauty. In all the times he had driven through the town, he had seen but one monument, that to the war dead, and it resembled nothing so much as a giant machine-cut tombstone. Youth, he had always thought, craved beauty. What did the youth of Hillside crave?

  He tapped on Scully’s door, half-hoping to be admitted to an apartment that would give the lie to his somber view of the town. He was surprised with his first glimpse of the place, but not in the way he had hoped. The living-bedroom was whisper clean, but as bare of ornamentation as a laundromat. Not a picture, not a lamp except one hung low from the ceiling over the large table Scully obviously used as a desk. Whatever Scully was, the detective thought, he was not given to the pursuit of creature comforts. The chairs were straight-backed, without cushions. The floor was painted black. But once in the room, Bassett changed his mind. Along the wall, from door to window, was one large bookcase, loaded. It was large enough to cover almost one whole wall. And large enough, Bassett knew, to cover quite a fair-sized prejudice in himself. It would take some mighty vivid proof to convince him that a book-man was capable of brutal murder. And yet … there was a neatness to MacAndrews’ killing, such neatness that Kearns had not suspected for a moment that any violence had occurred. Bassett frowned, thinking of it—and from weariness. He was well into doing a second day’s work in one. The apartment was damp and cold, the heat in the building long since turned down for the night.

  “I got some coffee I can warm up,” Scully said. “Okay?”

  “That would be fine.” Bassett took the moment the younger man was
in the other room to estimate his interests: law and labor books mostly, some school textbooks kept over from his days of formal education … high school books, Bassett would guess. There was an odd sort of contrast in jackets and typeface that suggested their owner had made his own leap from the course of general studies to some pretty advanced tomes in industrial law.

  He went to the window where he could look down on the main street of Hillside. A hardware store stood opposite, the village hall next to it, with the single white light burning over the door to the police station. To the south of the hardware store was an empty building—or rather, a store converted to living quarters, for the window front was curtained. And next to that was the Crazy Cat, whatever that was. The sign, its lettering purposely askew, swayed in the wind, the face of a cat, its definition just perceptible from where he stood, had been painted between the words “Crazy” and “Cat.” And, Bassett thought wryly, he had supposed Hillside without benefit of art. Behind the street of one- and two-story buildings, the Graham plant brooded like a quiescent volcano, dribbling thin smoke into the wind from its single stack.

  “What’s the Crazy Cat?” he asked when Scully returned with two mugs of steaming coffee.

  “That’s where the kids hang out … when they’re not in the phone booth.” He nodded by way of emphasis and Bassett looked back to see the booth where it stood in the shadow of the building. “In summer you can’t hear yourself think for the jukebox,” Scully added.

  Bassett sipped the coffee. It was strong, bitter, and hot, what he needed. “You don’t work on the night shift?”

  “I go on it next week,” Scully said. “We change over every two weeks.”

  “What happens when there’s a fire and you’re at work?” He was remembering the timeclock at the plant.

  Scully shrugged. “There’s enough men off work generally. A second alarm and some of us clock out for it, depending on what we’re working on.”

  “What do you do at the plant?”

  “I run a machine that folds boxes,” Scully said with a touch of cold pride.