Top Suspense Page 3

  "Hello, Chief Hodgkinson," she said, cheerfully. "How are you today?"

  "Why, I'm just fine," he said.

  "I'm doing better...thanks," the blue-eyed teenager said, answering a question Hodgkinson hadn't asked. "The reason I'm here is, I wanted to ask about the car."

  "The car?"

  "My parents' car. I know it was left here in the lot, and I thought maybe I could drive it back up to Flintridge...I've been staying up there, since...the tragedy."

  "Excuse me," I said, getting out, and I flashed the chief a look that I hoped he would understand as meaning he should stall the girl.

  "Well," the chief was saying, "I'm not sure. I think perhaps we need to talk to the District Attorney, and make sure the vehicle isn't going to be impounded for..."

  And I was gone, heading for the parking lot.

  Wherever Louise went, so surely too went Bud - particularly since another driver would be needed to transport the family sedan back to the Flintridge estate.

  Among the cars in the gravelled lot were my own rental job, several police cars, Bud's Pontiac convertible, and a midnight blue '47 Caddy that I just knew had to have been Walter Overell's.

  This opinion was formed, in part, by the fact that Bud Gollum - in a red sportshirt and denim slacks - was trying to get into the car. I approached casually - the boy had something in his left hand, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't a weapon.

  Then I saw: a roll of electrical tape, and spool of wire. What the hell was he up to?

  Then it came to me: while little Louise was keeping the chief busy, Bud was attempting to plant the tape and wire...which would no doubt match up with what had been used on the makeshift time bomb...in Overell's car. When the chief turned the vehicle over to Louise, the "evidence" would be discovered.

  But the Caddy was locked, and apparently Louise hadn't been able to provide a key, because Bud was grunting in frustration as he tried every door.

  I just stood there, hands on my hips, rocking on my heels on the gravel. "Is that your plan, Bud? To try to make this look like suicide-murder, planned by ol' Walter?"

  Bud whirled, the eyes wild in the boyish face. "What...who...?"

  "It won't play, kid. The dynamite didn't do its job - the fractured skulls turned up in the autopsy. You're about two seconds away from being arrested."

  That was when he hurled the tape and the wire at me, and took off running, toward his parked convertible. I batted the stuff away, and ran after him, throwing a tackle that took us both roughly down onto the gravel.

  "Shit!" I said, getting up off him, rubbing my scraped forearm.

  Bud scrambled up, and threw a punch, which I ducked.

  Then I creamed him with a right hand that damn near broke his jaw - I don't remember ever enjoying throwing a punch more, though my hand hurt like hell afterward. He dropped prayerfully to his knees, not passing out, but whimpering like a little kid.

  "Maybe you aren't smart enough for pre-med, at that," I told him.

  Ambling up with two uniformed officers, the chief - who had already taken Louise into custody - personally snapped the cuffs on Bud Gollum, who was crying like a little girl - unlike Louise, whose stone face worked up a sneery pout, as she was helped into the backseat of a squad car.

  All in all, Bud was pretty much a disappointment as a Boy Scout.

  # #

  The case was huge in the California press, the first really big crime story since the Black Dahlia. A grand jury convicted the young lovers, and the state attorney general himself took charge of the prosecution.

  My wife was delighted when we spent several weeks having a real summer's vacation, at the expense of the state of California, thanks to me being a major witness for the prosecution.

  I didn't stay for the whole trial, which ran well into October, spiced up by steamy love letters that Louise and Bud exchanged, which were intercepted and fed to the newspapers and even submitted to the jury, after Bud's "filth" (as the late Mrs. Overell would have put it) had been edited out.

  The letters fell short of any confession, and the star-crossed couple presented themselves well in court, Louise coming off as intelligent, mature and self-composed, and Bud seeming boyishly innocent, a big, strangely likable puppy dog.

  The trial took many dramatic twists and turns, including a trip to the charred hulk of the Mary E. in drydock, with Louise and Bud solemnly touring the wreckage in the company of watchful jurors.

  Not unexpectedly, toward the end of the trial, the respective lawyers of each defendant began trying to place the blame on the other guy, ultimately requesting separate trials, which the judge denied.

  After my wife and I had enjoyed our court-paid summer vacation, I kept up with the trial via the press and reports from Fred Rubinski. All along we had both agreed we had never seen such overwhelming, unquestionably incriminating evidence in a murder case - or such a lame defense, namely that Walter Overell had committed suicide, taking his wife along with him.

  Confronted by the testimony of handwriting experts, Bud had even admitted buying the dynamite, claiming he had done so at Walter Overell's request! Medical testimony established that the Overells had died of fractured skulls, and a receipt turned up showing that Bud had bought the alarm clock used in the makeshift time bomb - a clock Bud had given Louise as a gift. Blood on Bud's effects was shown to match that of the late Overells.

  And on, and on....I had never seen a case more open and shut.

  "Are you sitting down?" Fred's voice said over the phone.

  "Yeah," I said, and I was, in my office in the Loop.

  "After deliberating for two days, the six men and six women of the jury found Bud and Louise not guilty."

  I almost fell out of my chair. "What the hell?"

  "The poor kids were 'victims of circumstance,' so says the jury - you know, like the Three Stooges? According to the jury, the Overells died due to 'the accident of suicidal tampering with dynamite by Walter Overell.'"

  "You're shitting me...."

  "Not at all. Those two fresh-faced kids got off scott free."

  I was stunned - flabbergasted. "How could a jury face such incontestable evidence and let obvious killers go free?"

  "I don't know," Fred said. "It's a fluke - I can't imagine it ever happening again...not even in California."

  # #

  The trial took its toll on the lucky pair, however - perhaps because their attorneys had tried to pit Bud and Louise against each other, the girl literally turned her back on the Boy Scout, after the verdict was read, scorning his puppy-dog gaze.

  "I'm giving him back his ring," she told the swarming press.

  As far as anybody knows, Louise Overell and Bud Gollum never saw each other again.

  Nine months after her release, Louise married one of her jailers - I wondered if he'd been the guy who passed the love letters along to the prosecution. The marriage didn't last long, though the couple did have a son. Most of Louise's half million inheritance went to pay for her defense.

  Bud flunked out of pre-med, headed east, married a motordome rider with a travelling show. That marriage didn't last long, either, and eventually Bud got national press again when he was nabbed in Georgia driving a stolen car. He did two years in a federal pen, then worked for a radio station in the South, finally dropping out of public view.

  Louise wound up in Las Vegas, married to a Bonanza Air Lines radio operator. Enjoying custody of her son, she had a comfortable home and the security of a marriage, but remained troubled. She drank heavily and was found dead by her husband in their home on August 24, 1965.

  The circumstances of her death were odd - she was naked in bed, with two empty quart-sized bottles of vodka resting near her head. A loaded, cocked .22 rifle was at her feet - unfired. And her nude body was covered with bruises, as if she'd been beaten to death.

  Her husband explained this by saying, "She was always falling down." And the Deputy Coroner termed her cause of death as acute alcoholism.

  I gu
ess if Walter Overell dynamited himself to death, anything is possible.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: Fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case and uses the real names of the involved parties, with the exception of my fictional detective, Nate Heller and his partner Fred Rubinski (the latter a fictionalization of real-life private eye, Barney Ruditsky). I would like to acknowledge my research associate, George Hagenauer, as well as the following works: The California Crime Book (1971), Robert Colby; For the Life of Me (1954), Jim Richardson; "Reporters" (1991), Will Fowler; and the Federal Writers' Project California guide.

  Bill Crider's Death's Brother was originally published in New Mystery #2 in 1992. It an example of Crider's noir side, which can be seen in his novels published under the name "Jack MacLane" and in his private-eye novels featuring Truman Smith.

  DEATH'S BROTHER

  by Bill Crider

  "O soft embalmer of the still midnight,

  Shutting with careful fingers and benign,

  Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,

  Enshaded in forgetfulness divine: . . . "

  Jon Cline closed the leatherbound book on Keats' poem to Sleep and thought about the words. He especially liked the part about the "soft embalmer of the still midnight," with its suggestions of the undertaker's parlor and cool marble slabs, but he also liked the "careful fingers and benign."

  He looked at his own fingers, wondering how benign they were, put the book on the end table by his leather-upholstered recliner, and took the glass of Wild Turkey that was sitting there. Sipping the smooth, fiery liquid, he thought about the time he had first heard about Sleep, Death's brother.

  It had been in high school, in an English class where the teacher was discussing Greek mythology. Even then Cline had been interested in literature, and he remembered most of what the teacher had said, though of course he had read the story again later on.

  It seems there were two of the gods that most of the others didn't like at all. The two who proved to be so unpopular were the sons of Night—Death and his brother, Sleep. The other gods had so little regard for those two that they wouldn't even let them reside up on Mount Olympus, where all the rest of the immortals were living and having a high old time of it. Sleep had to live in a cave quite some distance away and was hardly even mentioned in any myths at all.

  The gods apparently didn't even like to think about him, not until they needed him, anyway.

  The story Cline remembered best about Sleep concerned a man who had to die for some reason or another. Cline couldn't quite remember why. The man was the helmsman on one of the ships of Aeneas, and the gods sent Sleep to do him in. Sleep pulled all the tricks he knew, but the man—Palinurus was his name, Cline suddenly recalled—was too devoted to his duty; he just wouldn't let go of the helm and fall into the sea.

  Sleep must have learned a few things from his brother, though, because he finally just pushed Palinurus over the side.

  The man slipped into the sea, still clinging to the helm. In fact, he took it right along with him, but Sleep got the job done, all right.

  Cline had always admired him for that.

  # #

  The old man's room stank. It smelled like someone had puked in there, and Cline would have bet the toilet in the little adjoining bathroom hadn't been cleaned in a month.

  There was a lamp on the nightstand next to the old man's bed, but it just had about a twenty-watt bulb in it. It mostly made a lot of shadows and gave the room a kind of yellow glow.

  That was good enough for Cline, though. He could see just fine.

  There was a big chair over in one corner with what looked like about a week's laundry in it, sheets, pajamas, stuff like that. Maybe some of the stink was coming from there.

  There was a tv set sitting on top of a chest of drawers, but Cline doubted if the old man had watched it in a long time. He didn't look to be in much of a condition to watch anything, what Cline could see of him.

  What Cline could see of him in the dim light was just his head, which was sticking out from under the dingy sheets of the bed he was lying in. It looked like one of those heads Cline used to see as a kid in the old movies when they unwrapped The Mummy, or when Dracula had been in the sun about a minute too long, dried and shriveled and covered with lines like a road map.

  The rest of him probably wasn't in much better shape. Cline could see sort of an outline of him under the sheet and lightweight thermal blanket that covered him. Hell, he probably looked worse than The Mummy. Out from under those covers, the old guy would probably make The Mummy look like he'd just gotten back from a visit to a health spa.

  The covers hardly moved with the old man's shallow breathing. A clear bubble of spit formed in his mouth as Cline watched him.

  The man had been like that for months, more than a year. He should have died long ago, but for some reason he kept clinging to a life that had nothing of dignity left in it.

  There was dirt in the corners of the smelly room where he lay. He had to wear diapers and be changed like a baby. He was unable to identify his own daughter when she appeared in the room.

  He needed someone to push him over the side.

  That was Cline's job. He hadn't taken it on voluntarily, not exactly, but he hadn't run from it, either.

  # #

  "I don't know what I'm going to do, Jon," Dana Randall

  had said to him. "I need the money so much, and I'll never get it as long as he's alive."

  They had been sitting in deck chairs, looking out beyond the pool and the tennis courts at the woods that bordered the Randall estate. The sun dappled the wooden redwood deck, and the leaves of a huge pecan tree speckled it with shadows.

  "Surely there's enough to run the estate," Cline said, sneaking a look at Dana's long, tanned legs. They were just about the best legs Cline had ever seen. Movie actresses like the ones in the 1950s, the ones who were always going and having what they referred to as their "gams" insured for a million dollars, would have killed for legs like that.

  Dana raised a languid hand and let it drop. "There's enough for that, of course. But not for anything else."

  "Anything else" in Dana's terms covered all the things that really mattered to her—cars, parties, clothes, jewelry—the necessities of life.

  "He can't last forever," Cline said. He'd known Dana for almost a year, ever since she had signed up for his class in Romantic poetry at the university as a way to ease her boredom and kill a little time while she waited to come into her inheritance.

  Cline had soon found himself doing more than was required of him as a professor to help her do both of those things. He spent extra time to tutor her in his office and then at her home. Before long, she was tutoring him. In the bedroom.

  It was the kind of tutoring Cline had often longed for. He was single and lonely. And while he had heard stories of other professors who got involved with nubile young women, it had certainly never happened to him. That it finally had seemed like a minor miracle.

  Dana tossed her long black hair and looked at Cline. "There was something you said in class one time, something Byron said when he was hoping for an inheritance."

  Cline remembered. "It had to do with the fact that old women never die."

  "That's right. They just hang on to life forever. Just like my father. He'll never die, Jon. He'll hang on for ten more years just to spite me, so I'll be too old to enjoy the money. It isn't fair."

  Cline figured that Dana would be around thirty-six in ten years. He was a ten years past that already.

  Dana turned in her chair and looked at Cline with intense blue eyes, the eyes that were so startling with her dark hair and tanned skin.

  "You could help me," she said. "I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you will."

  # #

  The old man stirred slightly in the bed. Not much. He didn't seem capable of much.

  Cline walked over and looked down at him. He wondered what it would be
like to be so near to dying, and he thought about a sentence from Keats: "Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death."

  Maybe the old man wanted to die and just couldn't say so. Cline was pretty sure he would in that situation. Well, there was no use in putting it off any longer. It was time to help the old man to cease upon the midnight with no pain.

  Cline took one of the flimsy pillows from the bed and prepared to press it to the old man's face.

  Dana had assured him that it would be all right. "People die in places like that all the time. And I can guarantee you there won't be an autopsy. I won't allow it."

  That was one reason she had put him in the Happy Hills Nursing Home. The old man's money would have bought him much better, but with more care and watchfulness on the part of the staff, it would have been harder to do him in. Dana admitted to Cline that she'd planned it that way from the beginning.

  Cline leaned down and the lamp threw a long shadow across the old man's bed, darkening his face.

  Cline brought the pillow down.

  The old man's eyes popped open. He stared wildly at Cline, at the descending pillow. He might have had difficulty recognizing Dana, but he had not trouble at all recognizing what was about to happen to him. He struggled with the covers and managed to get one spidery hand out, raising it as if to protect his face.

  Cline hesitated, stopping the pillow's descent. He didn't know what to do. Dana had told him that her father wasn't aware of anything, didn't even know who she was.

  The old man's hand reached up and his scrawny fingers tangled in the pillow case as he tired to force it away from him. He had almost no strength at all.

  Cline moved the pillow and leaned down. He could smell the old man's breath, foul and hot.

  "Wha . . . ?" the old man said. "Wh . . . why?"

  Cline looked behind him, though the voice was lower than a whisper. The door was securely closed. Cline looked back at the man on the bed.