The Corpse Next Door: A Detective Sergeant Randall Mystery. John Farris
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Gulliver waved the cigar. “Rumors. They don’t mean anything.” He slid his roller chair a little closer to the desk. “You know better, Bill. I work better than that. I never bruise anybody. There are other ways.”
I knew. There are several ways to jar a man loose from his senses. Gulliver has big hands. The heels of his palms are thick. He uses them against the temples of a suspect and never works up a sweat.
Gulliver smiled a little and picked up a letter. “Look here, Bill.”
I took the letter offered and glanced at it. It was from the mayor, commending Chief Gulliver on his expeditious work in capturing Jimmy Herne and obtaining a confession of the murder of Smithell, “one of our outstanding local citizens.” I figured the mayor’s secretary was on vacation and nobody was around to read the papers to him. The Highway Patrol, not Cheyney police, had captured Jimmy in the railroad yards of a small town seventy miles north of Cheyney.
I read as much as I could stand and surrendered the letter. Gulliver was pleased so I had to get out the needle.
“You’re proud of this one, aren’t you?”
Maybe I sounded sullen. Gulliver frowned.
“Sure I am.” He looked at his stiff left wrist, which lay on the desk top, the two frozen fingers of his hand curled. A souvenir of his days as a rookie cop in St. Louis, which had finished him with the St. Louis police. Every now and then, when he feels a compulsion to hate something, he looks at the wrist. He hates himself for it, for because of it he is not whole and strong as he thinks he needs to be. But most of all he hates those who did it to him, the two kids who must have been like Jimmy Herne, but more vicious.
“I admit there wasn’t much to it, just a matter of pounding away until the kid came around. The evidence was conclusive, fingerprints all over the jewelry box, Smithell’s wallet empty. Jimmy’s past record, and the fact that he ran away.”
He looked up sharply, as if wondering why the hell he was explaining.
“I guess you’d better notify the Francis girl,” he said. “Tell her Jimmy’s dead.”
“Okay.”
Gulliver put a thumb against his teeth. He was thinking about something. “I thought I was going to have to coax you. You generally gripe like hell when you have to visit bereaved relatives.” A little smile touched his face. “I guess it’s that girl. You seem to have gotten to know her pretty well in the last four days.” He stretched and the chair creaked. He put one arm over the back of the chair, so his upper arm flattened out.
Gulliver has arms broad as horse’s thighs. I’ve seen tough cons get sweaty just looking at him.
“You even helped her find a lawyer,” he said, a smooth empty expression on his face.
I could feel it coming then, like you can feel the pressure of a hard storm behind piled dark clouds.
“I just suggested someone she might get to help Jimmy. She didn’t have much money. I didn’t want her to waste it on somebody who wouldn’t be any good for the kid.” I wished I hadn’t spoken. I didn’t have to explain anything to him.
He brought the cigar out of an ash-tray and traced his lower lip with the wet end of it. Unexpectedly, he smiled. He has a smile like a baby when he wants to use it.
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything, Bill. It’s okay with me.” His eyes said he was remembering. “That Stella Francis . . . now there’s a nice little piece. Yes, yes.”
“She isn’t a piece, Gulliver.”
He clamped down on the end of the cigar. There was no more smoothness in his face. “I think she is. I think she’s a cheap little piece. I think she’s a cheap little lay like every other twist from that side of the river and don’t you by God call me Gulliver again without putting Chief in front of it!”
“Yes—sir.”
He was silent for a while, looking at me without anger, almost morosely. If you know something of Gulliver, you know his moods, as shifting and unexpected and treacherous as the sand bars that come and go in the big river.
He picked up a pencil, pinched the eraser and rubbed at a spot on one fingernail, waiting for me to tell him I was ready to be good.
When I didn’t, he said, “I want you to make a tour of Foundry Road about twelve-thirty or one tonight. Investigate every parked car, get names and addresses. Three or four dozen. We’ve been getting complaints from parents about all the kids necking out there. Throw a scare into ’em.”
I put my teeth together, cutting off an angry protest. What a crock. “All right.”
“Get out of here now, Bill,” he said wearily. “Go tell the Francis girl her cousin killed himself because he had a guilty conscience.” He looked at me bleakly for a second longer, then took the letter from the mayor and stroked it with his good hand and started reading it again, but he didn’t seem to be getting any pleasure from the words.
THE RIDGE IS A SPINE OF LAND NORTH OF THE BIG RIVER, usually above high-water level, and stretching across the rich lowlands almost to the rise of bluffs and shaggy domes of hills. This is an area of decay, largely abandoned by the old settlers who depended on river trade for their living when the unpredictable river made a new bed farther south. The Ridge was left to the lap of flood water, to fade and grow bleak in the sun. I knew the people who lived there and worked in the mills and small factories. I knew the kids like Jimmy Herne, who were unable to resist the relentless pressure of despair.
I parked in front of the crippled old rooming-house on Davis Street and went upstairs to Stella Francis’ room.
Her door stood open. She was inside, near the windows, ironing a dress. The sun was low in the west now, but the old house had soaked up heat all day and the small breeze pushing at the net curtains had little effect on the laden air.
Stella was wearing only a slip, wet under the arms, and the edges of her dusty blonde hair were damp against her forehead. There was a radio on in the room, turned low.
She glanced over one shoulder. “Bill? Come in. Be through with this in a minute.”
On a small table with the radio stood a pitcher of ice water. I ducked under a wire stretched across the small room from which Stella’s clothes hung and lifted the pitcher. The radio was now saying, “And just half an hour ago this afternoon, at the county jail . . .” and I spilled some of the water in my haste to find another station.
I reached over Stella’s shoulder with the misty pitcher. She upended the iron and took the pitcher in both hands, child-fashion, drank, then brushed the hair back from her forehead. Her hair is coarse, but not stiff and dry, cut at the base of her neck, the edges uneven and curled up slightly. In front the blonde hair is like a great mane that can either sweep over her forehead or be brushed back in a wave.
She put down the water pitcher with a sound of appreciation and looked up at me, her green eyes bright and clear, smiling. She seemed so young that it was strange to remember what the rest of her was like, beneath the slip.
I touched her wet shoulder lightly and took a bath towel from a nearby chair. “A bit damp, lady.” I toweled off the perspiration, then dabbed at her forehead. I kissed her on the tip of her nose.
Her mouth opened slightly and I kissed her again, seeing the look of sleepy pleasure in those green eyes, the subtle touch of woman-wisdom, at odds with her youthful appearance. Her skin is surprisingly youthful and good though not unmarked. It seemed, as I kissed her, that I had known her for so long—much longer than four days—known the quick one-sided smile, the somber shadows of knowledge that crept into her eyes at times, the fine firm body. I felt that I had never really known myself until I had met her.
“Very good,” she said, pleased, when we parted. She made a face at the ironing board. “I hate to iron. Sit down and take a load off those cop’s feet, Bill. Excuse the slip. It’s so hot in this room.”