"Heartstone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Margolin Phillip)

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Three days after Richie Walters died, winter began with a vengeance. Temperatures dropped near zero. People started staying indoors and snow and wind made the price of firewood soar. And through it all the searchers went out daily hunting for Elaine Murray.

The fact of Miss Murray’s disappearance and the police search was revealed in the Monday morning papers. The Marine, Navy and Coast Guard Reserve volunteered 125 men and the Boy Scouts rounded up forty more. During the first few days of the search the weather was still mild and the area around the meadow was cluttered with thrill seekers.

The story dominated the headlines in the Portsmouth Herald and several of the eastern papers picked up on the “Lover’s Lane” murder and the hunt for the missing girl. The investigation turned up no new clues and the only real lead, the glasses, was kept from the public.

On December 28, 1960, the search for Elaine Murray was officially called off. Then 1960 became 1961. A new President of the United States was sworn in and more current events took hold of the public imagination and the Murray-Walters case drifted farther back in the pages of the Herald until it disappeared.

Roy Shindler’s six foot five inch body slumped in his favorite armchair. A book lay face down in his lap and he stared hypnotically at the cold, sleeting rain that beat against the living room window of his small, one-bedroom apartment. The apartment was tidy, yet cluttered. Shindler tried to maintain order, but often failed through lack of interest.

The detective was a resident of the city. He had been born there and he had been raised in its poorer parts. His father had been a shoemaker at a time when nobody seemed able to afford repairs. His mother worked as a sales clerk in a department store. She was always tired. His father was always silent. His childhood, the life of his family, had been a canvas of grays, except for one spot of shining white. Abe.

Abe had been a shooting star, always on the ascendancy. A person to be looked up to. He transcended their drab apartment, the monotony of life behind a sales counter or in the backroom of a shoe repair shop where people never came. On Saturdays, the family could watch from the stands at the high school as Abe floated downfield, avoiding outstretched arms, to stand in the end zone, ball held high above his head as the crowd screamed its adulation. In heated gymnasiums in the midst of winter, the family would join the crowd, Roy’s father more strident than any other, as it cheered on Abe, who could score a basket with the grace of a ballet dancer. He was the best in sports and a top scholar. But most of all he had been a warm, caring human being. After Abe died, everyone talked about him the way they were eulogizing Richie Walters now.

Roy had always done well in school and, for all his lack of grace, he had been good at sports, but his father never noticed. He saw only Abe. Had Abe been someone other than the person he was Roy might have hated and resented him. But Abe was Abe and Roy worshipped his older brother.

In the first year of college, on scholarship at an eastern university that would groom him for the medical profession, he had excelled. He had come home for intersession, at great personal expense to Roy’s father, to tell in person the tales that they had read in the sports section of the Herald. He had died in the snow returning home from an evening with his old high school friends. The detective who told them was sorry. He had been a fan, but then who hadn’t been. The detective said that the motive was robbery. The person who murdered Abe was never caught.

When Abe died, the family died. Roy tried night school. He wanted an education, and his grades were good at first, but he wore down. He had to work all day because his father could no longer manage. He had to do the cooking and the housework. The oppressive atmosphere of the small apartment drained his resources. He found himself sleeping in class, unable to complete his assignments. He was too tired to study in the late evening, the only time he could call his own, when his father and mother were asleep and he could finally be alone in the solitude of his room.

He was never quite certain why he had turned to police work. At first, when he was new to the tensions and danger of the job, he thought about his choice a lot. Perhaps, subconsciously, he felt that he would someday find the person who had murdered his brother. Perhaps he had joined because the job was night work and presented a justification for sleeping away the daytime when his parents roamed the apartment like lost souls, sitting silently for hours at a time, rising slowly and without reason to wander to another chair by another dust-coated window.

His father had died during his second year on the force and his mother had passed away two months later. It had been a relief to Roy. He had moved out of their apartment into another apartment just as small and just as barren.

Before they died, Roy had imagined that their passing would somehow liberate him, but it had only left a void. The patterns of a quarter of a century are difficult to change. He had re-registered at the night branch of the state university. There even had been a girl. She had been quiet and bookish. Their dates had been a series of long pauses punctuated by discussions intentionally abstract and intellectual, as if both were afraid to communicate anything resembling a true feeling. They had lived together for a short time, but the barriers had never fallen and they had parted friends for whom a closer relationship had not worked out.

Roy’s fellow officers found him strange. Intensely emotional about abstract ideas, yet cold as ice in life-and-death situations. It was as if Abe’s death had killed all personal joy for him, leaving only the hard shell of his intellectualism to shield him from life’s realities. The Walters boy reminded him of Abe in so many ways that the investigation operated like a scalpel that was peeling through the layers of his own personal wounds and baring the grief that he had believed to be long buried.

An hour ago, Shindler had tried to read, but his mind wandered and he had given up the attempt. It was the case. Several times he had even dreamed about it. He could not stop thinking about what had happened to that boy.

“You can’t let a case get to you, Roy,” Harvey had said. “If you become personally involved, you don’t do your job.”

“Intellectually, I know you’re right, but I can’t help it. It’s the things I’m learning about him. I’ve talked to dozens of people and not one has had a bad word to say. It’s not just because he’s dead, either. You can tell.

“And you know what hurts most?” he said. “I was at the house again, yesterday. His mother was beginning to handle it. Mr. Walters said she was back on her feet. They even went out to dinner. Then they got yesterday’s mail. He was accepted at Harvard. Harvard. Jesus. That kid could have been a doctor, a scientist. Anything.”

The phone rang and Roy sighed and walked into the kitchen.

“Roy?”

It was Harvey Marcus.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“I just got a call from a Dr. Norman Trembler, an optometrist in Glendale. He read the bulletin on the glasses and he thinks he’s found the person with the prescription.”

“Did you get the name and address?” Shindler asked. He could feel Marcus’s excitement. There was a certain electricity generated whenever good, solid police work paid off.

“I’ve got it. We went over everything on the phone. He sold a pair of glasses just like the ones we found to an Esther Freemont, 2219 North 82nd Street.”

The Freemont house had seen better days. The small front lawn was overgrown with weeds and no one seemed to care about cutting the grass that was left. The wood had a gray, weatherbeaten appearance. It had not been painted in some time.

Marcus and Shindler stepped over some broken toys and walked up the creaking front stairs to the porch. There were soiled curtains on the front window and over the small glass window in the upper half of the front door. A tricycle lay on its side on the porch. Marcus could hear a TV blaring inside. A baby was crying and someone was yelling. There was no doorbell so Marcus knocked loudly on the door frame.

There was someone shuffling toward the door. The curtain over the front door glass raised and a bloated face peered out. Marcus flashed his badge and the door opened warily.

The woman standing in the doorway was well over two hundred pounds. The weight was collected in rolls of fat over large thighs and sagging breasts. She wore a soiled gray dress that covered her like a tent. An apron hung over the dress. Her eyes were bloodshot and held no sign of cheer. Marcus suspected that she had been drinking. A cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth and medium-length graying hair straggled across her forehead.

The inside of the house was a reflection of the personality of the owner, Marcus decided. A heavy, unpleasant smell hung in the air. The rooms were dark and untidy. How could humans live this way? He was always asking questions like that and never finding the answers.

“Mrs. Freemont?”

“I was. It’s Taylor now.”

“Are you Esther Freemont’s mother?”

“What’s she done now?” she said with bored disgust. Without waiting for an answer, she turned her head and yelled angrily into the interior of the house.

“Esther, you get out here.”

A voice answered unintelligibly over the roar of applause on a TV game show.

“Turn that goddamn thing down and get out here,” Mrs. Taylor yelled.

The sound level did not diminish, but a young girl came around the corner of the living room. When she saw the two men in suits, she stopped, then continued toward them at a slower pace.

Shindler watched her walk across the room, the way a hunter watches his prey. Esther was tall for a girl. Shindler judged her to be about sixteen years old. She was wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt that covered large, swaying breasts. Shindler realized that she was braless and the excitement generated by the police investigation blended subconsciously with an undercurrent of sexual desire.

Esther’s skin was smooth and dark. Her long, dark hair was as dirty and unkempt as her mother’s. Involuntarily, Shindler began to think of her in sexual terms.

“These men want to see you. They’re police. What have you done now?”

Esther’s large brown eyes moved from her mother to the detectives without answering. She appeared to be nervous, but no more than any other person confronted by the law.

“We have no reason to believe that your daughter has done anything wrong, Mrs. Taylor. This is just part of an investigation we’re conducting. We just want to ask your daughter a few questions.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Taylor said. Marcus thought she sounded disappointed.

“Is there someplace we could talk?” Shindler asked.

Mrs. Taylor looked around the cluttered living room. The couch was covered with unwashed laundry and the nearest chair was occupied by a cat. Mrs. Taylor headed toward the back of the house. They followed her into the kitchen. A portable TV was resting on the sink. A baby in a high chair stopped screaming when they entered.

Chairs were arranged on each side of a yellow formica-topped table. Marcus and Shindler motioned Esther into one and took two of the others. Mrs. Taylor hovered over her daughter.

“Could we?” Shindler asked, motioning toward the TV…Mrs. Taylor looked confused for a moment, then leaned over and turned the sound off. The picture remained on.

“Esther, this is Detective Marcus and I am Detective Shindler. We are investigating the murder of Richie Walters and the disappearance of Elaine Murray, who were students at Stuyvesant.”

Marcus was watching her. There was no trace of fear. If anything, she seemed relieved when they said that the investigation was not about her.

“Is…is she dead?”

“Pardon?”

“Elaine. You said disappeared. Is she dead?”

“We don’t know, Esther. We have men out searching, but we still haven’t found her.”

“Gee, that’s sad. I knew Richie from school. I didn’t know him real well. He was in different classes. But…you know, being from the same school and all, it’s like he was a friend. I cried when I read about it in the papers.”

“Do you know Elaine Murray?”

“Well, not to talk to, but I knew her. She was…is real pretty. I hope she’s okay.”

“We do too, Esther. Can you remember where you were on the Friday night that Richie was killed?”

Esther looked nervously at her mother, then back to the detectives.

“Why do you want to know where I was?”

“This is just routine, Esther. We have to check up on everyone,” Marcus said.

“You don’t think she had anything to do with that killing?” Mrs. Taylor asked incredulously.

“You ain’t going to take me to detention?”

Esther was panicky. She started to stand. Marcus laughed. It was a made-up laugh that Shindler had heard before. Esther looked confused.

“No one is going to detention and no one thinks you killed anybody. Now just relax and tell me where you were so I can fill out my report. Okay?”

To Shindler, Esther looked like a trapped animal. Her eyes shifted from face to face and her hands were slowly washing one another.

“You tell them where you were,” Mrs. Taylor said, suddenly angry. “I just remembered where she was.”

Esther hung her head and bit her lip.

“She was drunk, that’s where she was. She come home late and puked all over the bathroom.”

No one can look more dejected than an embarrassed adolescent girl, Shindler thought. Esther looked as if she wanted to crawl inside herself.

“How did you get drunk?” Marcus asked.

“You promise I won’t go to juvenile detention?”

Marcus smiled his best fatherly interrogation smile.

“Don’t worry about detention, Esther. We are only interested in Richie Walters’s murder. Look, I used to drink more than a wee bit myself when I was your age. So, why don’t you tell us what happened.”

“Well, to tell the truth,” Esther said sheepishly, “I can’t remember it all. I was pretty drunk and it’s kind of hazy.”

“Tell us what you can remember.”

“Roger, he’s my boyfriend, and me and Bobby and Billy Coolidge went to Hamburger Heaven. Then, we went to a party. It was after the party that we got drunk.” She stopped and looked pleadingly at Marcus. “Do I have to tell? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

“Answer their questions,” Mrs. Taylor barked. “I told you I didn’t want you hanging around with that Hessey. He’s no good, like the rest of those hoodlums.”

“How did you get drunk, Esther? Don’t worry about getting anyone in trouble. We won’t tell anyone what happened,” Marcus said.

“It was Billy. He swiped some wine while the grocer wasn’t looking at one of these all-night places. He took a few bottles. We drank it in the car. That’s where it gets fuzzy. I guess I don’t drink so well and I must have had too much, because I really don’t remember after the wine. Except I remember we drank it in the car and I think we went cruising downtown after that.”

Shindler reached in his pocket.

“Do you wear glasses?”

Esther did not answer for a moment. She ran her tongue across her lips.

“Talk up. Yeah, she has glasses to read,” Mrs. Taylor said.

“Do you have your glasses, Esther?”

Esther did not say anything. She stared at the table.

“Esther, where are those glasses?” Mrs. Taylor asked menacingly. “Goddamn it, if you lost those glasses again, you ain’t getting new ones.”

“I’m sorry, Ma,” Esther blurted out. “They were stolen. It was three months ago. I was afraid to tell you.”

“Who stole them?” Mrs. Taylor demanded.

“I don’t know. I swear. I was afraid you would get mad, so I didn’t tell and I thought maybe they would turn up.”

“What was the exact day your glasses were stolen, Esther?” Shindler interrupted.

“It wasn’t just the glasses. It was some other stuff from my purse. And I can’t remember the exact day. I just know it was in early November.”

“Are these your glasses?” Shindler asked, placing an envelope on the table. Esther picked up the envelope and took out the glasses.

“They look like them, but I can’t tell until I put them on.”

“Go ahead.”

Esther fit them on her nose. She picked up a True Confession from the sink and scanned a page.

“These are mine. Can I have them back?”

“I’m afraid not right now. They’re evidence.”

“Evidence for what?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

“Did you also lose a lighter and a comb, Esther?”

“Yes,” she answered hesitantly.

“Where did you find those?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

“The comb, the lighter and the glasses were found near the scene of the Walters murder. It is possible that the person who stole your daughter’s glasses was involved in the murder.”

“So she can’t get them back?”

“Not for a while.”

“Well, that’s fine. And how am I supposed to get her new ones?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

“Damn it, Esther, this is your fault. You’re always losing things. Well, this time you don’t get new glasses till you pay for them.”

They left the house with Esther in tears. Shindler watched her intently: slumped in her chair, head buried in her slim brown arms, shoulders raked with sobs. He felt an icy contempt for her and something else he would not allow himself to name.

“She knows something,” Shindler said.

“That girl?” Marcus asked incredulously. “She doesn’t know a thing.”

“I can feel it, Harvey.”

“You want to feel it. Christ, Roy, she was more worried about being taken to juvenile detention for being under age and drinking then she was about being involved in a murder investigation.”

“I don’t buy the coincidence. Her stolen glasses just happen to turn up at the scene.”

“Now wait a minute. The glasses were found near, not at, the scene, down the hill and quite some way from where the car was located.”

“Right where someone who was running from the scene in a panic might drop it.”

Marcus shook his head.

“I’m afraid I’m not with you on this one, Roy. If you want to follow up on Esther Freemont, you do it on your own.”

The radio crackled and Shindler lifted the mike and gave their call letters. The radio dispatcher told them that they had found Elaine Murray.

They had been looking in the wrong places. The girl had never been in Portsmouth. There was an offshoot of the main highway that led to the coast. It was not heavily traveled, especially this time of year. Walter Haas and his wife, Susan, had been headed for their folks’ house in Sandy Cove when their car got a flat. Walter had pulled onto a shoulder and had gone out into a torrential downpour to change the tire. The ground was muddy and slippery and he had lost his balance, sending the jack handle over the embankment. He could see the body when he looked over the side. It looked to Shindler as if it had been tossed over the edge of the grassy downslope from the road like a sack of wheat.

The rain was making it difficult for everyone. There was no possibility of finding any tracks. The roadway would leave none and the shoulder was a miniature swamp.

Shindler half slid, half scrambled down the embankment. A small group of officers were beating the tall grass for evidence. Marcus had gone over to a large man dressed in a rain slicker and wide-brimmed hat. Shindler looked down at the body. Someone had had the decency to cover it with a blanket. He raised the corner and looked.

He almost retched. The head was almost denuded of tissue and the scalp had practically rotted away. He moved his eyes away from the face. She was wearing tan toreador slacks, but the zipper was undone, as if someone had put them on her. Her only other piece of clothing was a white blouse. It was unbuttoned and the left side had flapped over, revealing her left breast.

Shindler was churning inside. He could feel the adrenaline conquering the initial effects of the nausea. Then he saw her feet and he started to shake. He did not know why the fact that she was barefoot should affect him so. What could it matter? She was dead. But then the whole thing was illogical. How could two young people such as these be struck down at the beginning of their lives.

Shindler covered Elaine Murray and walked up the hill with the rain stinging him. He stood by his car and breathed deeply until he was in control. Then he joined Marcus.

“Roy, this is Larry Tenneck, Meridian County Sheriff’s Office.”

They shook hands.

“It’s a pity, ain’t it?” Tenneck said. “A young girl like that.”

“Any idea how long she’s been down there?”

“Not a one. This stretch of road isn’t heavily traveled in the winter. I don’t think she was killed here. Course with the rain and all you couldn’t really tell, but I figure she was just left here, because whoever killed her figured she wouldn’t be found for a while.”

“You’re probably right,” Marcus agreed. “The autopsy should tell us a few things.”

“Speaking of autopsies, can we move her now? I told the boys to leave her till you got here, but I think it would be better to have her taken out of the rain.”

“Of course. You took pictures?”

Tenneck nodded and signaled to two men who were smoking in the front seat of an ambulance that was parked alongside the road. One man nodded and flicked a cigarette out of the ambulance window. Tenneck shook his head.

“I wish they wouldn’t do that. We have enough trouble as it is with littering. You boys’ll want to see the clothes, I guess.”

“Clothes?” Shindler asked.

“Oh, yeah. We found the rest of her clothes. Deputy found them over in that grass about a hundred yards from the body. I guess they dumped her, then threw the rest of her stuff over the side.”

Tenneck reached into the back seat of his car and pulled out a plastic sack. Harvey opened the rear door and sat inside. Shindler sat next to him and Tenneck leaned in through the window, oblivious to the rain. There was a red and black ski sweater, a torn brassiere and a pair of panties in the bag. The panties were torn in several places and Roy realized that they had actually been torn in two at one point near the right hip.

“We better have Beauchamp check for signs of rape,” Marcus said in a low, hard voice.

“That’s the first thing I thought of when I seen them,” Tenneck said. For the first time since they had talked with him, Shindler noticed that he had lost his country calm.

“You do me a favor, will ya. You get these boys and get them good.”

Dr. Francis R. Beauchamp, like Roy Shindler, was a man of odd proportions. There, however, the similarities ceased. Where Shindler was tall and thin, with a small head and bulbous nose and overlong arms connected to oversize hands, Beauchamp was short and squat and possessed of a large melon-sized head that overbalanced his entire body, giving the impression that a quick, downward nod would pitch him forward. His tiny hands were heavily veined and his imperfect eyesight was aided by tortoiseshell glasses that perched on a thin, delicately shaped nose.

Shindler and Marcus were seated in the waiting room of the Heavenly Rest Funeral Parlor in Perryville, Meridian County’s county seat. Shindler had smoked all the cigarettes in his pack and was debating with himself the pros and cons of braving the elements in search of pie and coffee when the door opened and Beauchamp flopped onto a couch upholstered in a peach-colored material upon which fluttered flocks of smiling cherubim.

“Strangulation,” he said. He looked tired. They had called him from the Sheriff’s office and made him drive out in the night. “Probably done with the cord that was found stuffed into the waistband of her slacks.”

“How long has she been dead?”

Beauchamp pursed his lips.

“I’ll say four to six weeks.”

“The body didn’t look that bad, except for the head,” Marcus said.

“It’s the weather. Gets cold out here. Cold retards the deterioration. Say, can I get a cup of coffee and some food? I’m really beat.”

He looked tired, Shindler thought. We’re all tired.

“On me. Grab your coat and I’ll stake you at the first hamburger joint we find.”

“Last of the big spenders. You bastards owe me more than hamburger for this job.”

“Was there anything else?” Shindler asked. They all knew what he meant.

“Yes. Poor thing.”

Beauchamp sighed and removed his glasses. He closed his eyes and rubbed the eyelids with his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger.

“There were hemorrhages on the front and back surfaces of the uterus. In my opinion they could have been caused by a blow to the lower abdomen or by vigorous intercourse. If it was intercourse, she would have had to have been unusually active.

“I also found morphologically identifiable sperm in the vagina.”

“What is that? Morphologically identifiable.”

“It means that I could tell it was sperm. It was dead, but it was there.”

“And what does all that mean?” Shindler wanted to know.

“It means that I think that more than one man had her shortly before she died and it means that I think they had her over and over again. Then they killed her. That’s an unscientific opinion, so don’t hold me to it. But, then, I’m not feeling too scientific tonight. Dr. Harold Murray is a good friend of mine and I have been thinking of how lucky I am that I don’t have to be the one who tells him what happened to his daughter.”