"RICHARD_M_ELLIS_-_THE_DARK_WELL" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellis Richard M)

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YOU HAD TO SEE IT t0 feel the full dramatic impact
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THE DARK WELL



By Richard M. Ellis


Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Volume 15, No. 11 (November 1970).
"Woman like Blanche Ames, endin' up like this," muttered Dr. Johnson as he examined the body. "Enough to make you sick."

The doctor got no argument from Sheriff Ed Carson or myself. Mrs. Ames, a dumpy, middle-aged widow, had been stabbed repeatedly and left in a crumpled heap on her bedroom floor, at the end of a trail of blood and torn clothing that led halfway through the house she had shared with her younger brother.

"Nice guy, our killer," I said.

"Yeah," said Sheriff Carson with a sigh that ruffled the ragged lower fringe of his pepper-and-salt mustache. "Well, Doc?"

Dr. Johnson wheezed to his feet. "She was knocked out, I'm glad to say, sometime before she was killed by a knife-thrust that severed the carotid artery, here, in her neck. The rest of the wounds are more or less superficial aimless slashin' around with the knife."

"Was she raped?" I asked.

"Not far as I can tell here, Lon," said the doctor.

"Mebbe her brother come home 'fore the killer got to that," Carson said, "and dealin' with the brother made the killer lose interest in anythin' but gettin' out and away."

Mrs. Ames' brother, Lloyd Parmeter, was in the livingroom at the front of the house. He'd been shot through the heart. He was found lying just inside the front door, his door key still clutched in his hand.

I asked now, "When did it happen, Doc?"

"Near as I can make it, sometime between, say, seven and midnight last night. Closer to seven, mebbe. And both Mrs. Ames and Parmeter died at about the same time."

The doctor tramped out to summon his ambulance crew to haul the bodies over to the hospital morgue for autopsy.

Carson and I stayed a moment longer in the bedroom. It was a pleasant room, the furniture massive and highly polished, bathed now in autumn morning sunlight flooding in the windows in the far wall; pleasant, except for the silent figure that lay on the blood-spattered gray carpet.

When found, the dead woman's naked body was covered by a patchwork quilt that the killer had evidently taken from the bed. The knife he'd used wiped clean he'd left atop a chest of drawers beside the door leading to the hallway. One of Carson's deputies had taken the knife away to test for fingerprints.

Now the lanky, rawboned sheriff stirred. "Let's see if the boys have turned up anything else. Then mebbe go next door and talk again to those two women that found this mess."

From the bedroom we moved along a corridor toward the front part of the house, staying close to the wall to avoid splotches of blood on the corridor's polished wooden flooring. We passed open doors that gave us quick views of a bathroom, a linen closet, and a couple of other bedrooms, the largest that of Lloyd Parmeter. Only he and his sister, Blanche Ames, had lived here.

It was a few minutes after ten o'clock when we emerged into the livingroom. The sheriff, his two deputies, and myself Lon Gates, Pokochobee County Attorney had been at the house not quite half an hour.

Deputy Buck Mullins was standing near the front door, huge fists on his hips, his square inch of forehead wrinkled in ponderous thought as he stared down at the dead man. He said, "Looks like he didn't have no warnin' at all. Just opened the door, stepped inside and bam, he was dead."