Read an Excerpt
The Detective
By Roderick Thorp OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1966 Roderick Thorp
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8094-4
CHAPTER 1
"... And now, recapping today's headlines," the news broadcaster continued, "the search in Port Smith for little Mary Shoftel goes on. Grim spokesmen for the Port Smith Police Department this morning released the information that since last Friday evening, more than five hundred men have been diverted from other duties to hunt for the seven-year-old girl. No evidence of kidnap or ransom notes has been revealed. The little girl, who had been playing in front of her home in the Westlake district of Port Smith on Thursday afternoon when she disappeared, requires daily medication for the treatment of a rare form of anemia. In an interview with WTOU's Bill Phillips, health officials here in Manitou stated that the lack of the medication would weaken little Mary, but in no way would it prove fatal. The search goes on.
"In a related story, the Port Smith police this morning announced the arrest of twenty-two-year-old Donald L. Harrow, Jr., in connection with a series of obscene and threatening telephone calls received at the Shoftel home yesterday. Young Harrow is being held on charges of obscenity, disturbing the peace, and obstructing justice. Other charges are forthcoming. It was reported that Mrs. Edna Shoftel, mother of little Mary, has been under heavy sedation since yesterday afternoon, when the crank telephone calls began."
The announcer paused. "Now, at nine thirty-four A.M., WTOU and WTOU-FM bring you the official United States Weather Bureau forecast for Manitou, Cuyahauga County, Upton County, and vicinity. Cloudy today with possible snow flurries late this afternoon, temperature in the low thirties, dropping to the twenties tonight, five to ten degrees colder in the mountain areas. Tomorrow, Tuesday, November sixteenth, cloudy and seasonably cold again with possible snow. Present humidity, sixty-eight percent; barometer thirty point two inches and steady; wind out of the west at eight miles an hour; and the temperature now, at the observatory atop the Manitou Life Insurance Building in downtown Manitou, thirty- one degrees ..."
Joseph Leland, in his shirt sleeves, turned the radio off. Puffing on his cigarette, he hurried with the buttons of his cuffs. He had awakened with his mind racing. Usually he had time to stop over coffee and get things aligned, but not this morning: as of this moment he had been awake seventeen minutes. He hoped that he could get the taste of toothpaste out of his mouth with cigarettes while he rode downtown. He hated the taste of toothpaste, and for some reason it always made him feel that he was wearing the clothing he had slept in. He puffed again. Now he shivered; somebody stepping on his grave. It was the shock of getting going. The reaction of his body reminded him of a dog shaking water off his back, and he grinned as he returned to the bedroom for a tie.
The newsman's words followed him through the apartment. Leland had turned on the radio for the weather and the international news; he had forgotten the Shoftel case. He did not want to hear about it, for he knew that Mary Shoftel was dead. The responses of the Port Smith Police Department after the failure to find her quickly, the number of men working on the case, the cooperation with the press, and the lack of an announcement of a kidnap, all pointed to a rape and murder. On the face of it there was some piece of evidence, perhaps the report of a neighborhood man suddenly moving from his boarding house, that gave the P.S.P.D. a direction in which to go. The men who were in on the search were looking for the girl's body. They knew it. The only thing they had going for them was that most child-rapist- murderers had no taste for the act once it was done. They cleaned up after themselves the way cats scratched at their droppings.
The newspapers and radio and television stations had turned the case into the circus it had become—"hoping against hope" was a phrase Leland had heard. Leland usually read three or four newspapers a day in the attempt to find out what was really happening, but he had passed them over on Saturday and yesterday. He knew that in a case like this what was really happening, if anybody knew it, was unprintable in newspapers. On Friday night, without a picture to run, one of the Port Smith papers had gone with a front-page editorial sketch of the weeping parents, captioned "Why?" Leland wondered why. The newspapers knew the truth almost as well as the police. Before the end of the week the father would be escorted through the corridors of the police headquarters basement to view the freshly decomposing body of his daughter. Leland had seen enough doctored victims of crimes of violence—one would have been enough. They were stripped and bathed down with alcohol, the wounds cleaned and tucked together for the official photographs. After death, before it sank back into the skull, the human eye had a strange shine. The oldest corpse Leland had seen in that basement, a man over seventy, had looked like a child surprised. Having been kicked to death had been only part of it. Death itself seemed to have put the expression on his face. They all looked young and surprised, those whom death had overtaken quickly. Mr. Shoftel would see his own child, and Leland, who had always had the role he had been playing to hide behind, could not eagerly wish Mr. Shoftel a long life. Every man had his nightmares, and it was not hard to imagine Mr. Shoftel's. Setting his jacket on his shoulders before the mirror. Leland could not conceive any experience for Mr. Shoftel that would not be clouded by the memory of a dead daughter. Mr. Shoftel would have something to remember after he saw her body, and if he read the newspapers, he was being set up for it nicely. Leland started to fill his pockets.
Leland was thirty-six, five feet ten, and weighed one hundred and forty pounds. His hair was dark brown, thick and cut short. He did not part it. His skin was fair and had a faint translucent quality, so that he had to work hard to look closely shaved. His lips were dark, the kind that seemed moist when they were not. His brown eyes were his most attractive feature—and most expressive, too, for he had had to practice drawing other people into talking, which required staying silent and conveying impressions, true or deliberately misleading, with the eyes. There was a scar, the result of an automobile accident, in his left brow, and there was another, from a different kind of accident, along the side of his jaw. Both scars were small, thin, and white; most people did not take much notice of them. It was only in recent years that Leland had begun to pay attention to his appearance—until two years ago he had parted his hair on the side and allowed it to grow as long as the barber would allow—and the impression that he made now was as crisp and conservative but at the same time as energetic as that of a young congressman still learning his job. But not quite: there were the scars which, if they blended in, nevertheless had their effect; and the eyes, which perhaps had had to mislead too much and looked tired. The young-congressman presentation was created in fact by habits that Leland regarded as bad: his suits ran to sober browns and grays—all of them two-buttoned, medium lapeled—today's was a brown worsted—and he used bow ties. He had more than thirty of them. He liked them; they were easier for him to tie and more comfortable to live with than four-in-hands. Today's tie was dark brown with dot-sized white doodads resembling blighted cloves. It had been a gift in celebration of nothing, and he liked it.
He came out of the bedroom with his topcoat over his arm and a five-dollar bill in his hand. The money was for the cleaning woman, Mrs. Walsh, who was due in the afternoon. This was the last thing he had to attend to before he could leave. Out of simple habit of living alone, Leland took a last look around.
The telephone rang. He knew who it was. "Relax, I'm on my way," was his response into the receiver. The crisp impression that his appearance made was ruined when he spoke. His speech was city speech, roughly enunciated and slurred. His own thought was that it was no worse than the twang they spoke up here.
"This is important," his secretary, Florence Cline, said. "You could have been asleep. I think you'd better hurry."
"Where are you? At my desk?" She called him from there when she thought there was trouble.
"Yes. There are some people outside, there's something you have to handle, and the phone will start to ring as soon as people have their second coffee."
"Why?"
"Your picture is in the Port Smith Herald-Press. They've started a series on famous old crimes, I guess because of Mary Shoftel, and they have the Leikman case today. Your picture is on the bottom of page one, over the caption 'War Hero Cop Who Tracked Down Leikman's Killer ...'"
"Say no more." The Shoftel case was more than the depraved circus he had thought; it had moved into ritual. The Herald-Press had run a similar series during the Leikman case. Now one of the papers had to start a fund. There had been none six and a half years ago, because nobody had cared about Leikman or his family, but a fund really was standard. When one of these things happened the public waited and looked for a place to send its money. This added to its sense of participation. Leland asked, "Who are the people in the office?"
"Schwartzwald, for one," she said. "He's seeing Mr. Petrakis now."
"Swell. Keep your voice down." Leland and his partner, Mike Petrakis, had adjoining offices, separated by a plasterboard wall. "What does Schwartzwald want? I told him on Friday that I'd call him."
"He likes it here, I think."
"All right, who else?"
"Mrs. Colin MacIver."
"Don't know her. What kind of a looking woman is she?"
"Early twenties, small, brunette, cute, and pregnant."
"No kidding? Okay."
"With her is a Mr. Miller. Fred, he said. He's—"
"I know him," Leland said. "Heavy guy around fifty."
"That's him. Mr. Petrakis doesn't know who he is. He gave him that polite look as he came out to greet Mr. Schwartzwald."
Greet Mr. Schwartzwald. Mike still had a lot to learn about handling people. Leland said, "Mike wouldn't know Miller. He's an agent for Manitou down in Port Smith"—in the proper contexts, the name of the town was sufficient to identify the insurance company—"and he's another pest, like Schwartzwald. The last thing we need is him drumming up trade. I haven't seen him in years. Does he still have that tweed overcoat?"
"Brown, with raglan sleeves," Florence said. "He kept his hat on when he sat down—"
"He's bald."
"I sort of knew that," she said.
"Okay, what is it that I have to handle?"
"Hugh Thoms called. He thinks he was spotted last night on the custody case. It was late and the woman seemed to be on her way home. She turned around and went by him and looked him straight in the eye. He'll explain it to you."
Leland did not like that. The case was a lawyer's referral and a man was trying to get his child away from his ex-wife because she had a boyfriend. The lawyer would not have a case to take to court, but that did not devalue this work. Being spotted would; it would devalue Leland. There was a very good chance that Hugh Thoms was wrong because he was an extremely cautious man, but they could not risk it. It was something to handle, as Florence had said "Did you tell Mike?"
"I haven't been able to."
"If he wants to get going on it, tell him that I said to see if he can't pull someone out of Bonney's who knows how to tail, and we'll put Hugh in the store for the duration."
"Hugh was very upset," she said.
"He would be. When you're sixty-eight we'll let you get upset, too."
"Yes, sir." Her tone indicated that she was not bothering to listen, which was all right. Leland was still not awake. A directive on how to treat Hugh Thoms was something she did not have to hear. Leland knew that she liked Hugh in her own way, even if Hugh made it clear that he did not understand the faith Leland had in her, a girl who had just turned twenty.
"Was there anything else?" he asked.
"No, sir."
"I'll be down in ten minutes."
It was enough of a goodbye, and they hung up.
His apartment was in a new building in the Clifford Heights section, looking down on the center of commercial Manitou. On a bluff over the river, to the right in his picture window, was a cluster of old mills and factories, some a hundred years old, and in their center, rising like the tomb of an Aztec king, was the square, buttressed, fourteen-story home office of the Manitou Life Insurance Company. In spite of a population nearing three hundred and fifty thousand, Manitou was still a company town, and that was the company. Twelve thousand people worked there, and many others depended wholly or in part on the business it made. When Leland had come here six years ago to take the job the company had offered, he had not known what to make of the location in the heart of the industrial district. But it had been no mistake; Manitou, the town, which had suffered terribly in the depression, was prospering in the postwar boom, and planned to rebuild from there, on the spot on which it had been founded. In six or seven years a score of apartments and commercial buildings, the home office among them, would rise from a grassy plain and command a view thirty miles down a river that surely was one of the most beautiful in the world.
When he could, Leland still went down to the executives' dining room under the rooftop observatory. The paintings there showed that the vista had hardly changed in the three centuries since the fur traders had come up the 170 miles from Port Smith. Leland had a business here now, and many deep attachments, but he still saw himself as a guest and, when he was near that view, a stranger. Deer were still being taken within sight of downtown, nothing so remarkable. But Leland had spent his first thirty years in Port Smith; he had never shot at an animal in his life. When he saw the river, it made him aware of how far he had come. This was his home now, but he knew that he would never feel completely comfortable. He was not unhappy, and it was not an unhappy feeling; he knew, too, that this was the most fruitful and rewarding period of his life. It was just that he would not say that he was going to be here in ten years; he refused to decide. Ten years from now he probably would still be here, but it would be because ten years of living one-day-to- the-next had passed, nothing more.
He took the five-dollar bill to the side table on which he left money for Mrs. Walsh. There, folded on a candy dish in the way a servant delivered mail, was a note from Karen. Leland knew her neat, small writing better than he knew his own. He brought the note into the light.
Midnight
Dear Joe,
Sorry. I should rouse you to say good night properly, but you're flat on your back, not to be moved. You're smoking too much. I can hear it in your breathing.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Superintendent and then lunch at twelve-thirty with a hysterical woman—I'm not the one who should talk, I know—who wants to take some books out of our curriculum, and then in the afternoon I go down to the Teachers' College to speak on "The Emotionally Unstable Adolescent." Don't laugh.
At night is the presentation to the School Board, which is why I have to see the Superintendent in the morning, to get our stories straight. I'll be home to cook dinner for Steffie and then back no later than ten-thirty. Can we get together? Any way you want. If you want to come over for dinner, let me know. You probably won't catch me at the office, but leave the message. I just want to see you, but I really hope you can be there later.
I had a lovely time this evening. The things we don't discuss make the others much more difficult to express. They go unsaid for too long. I had a lovely time. I mean it.
I'm looking forward to going to Montreal for the weekend. Maybe I'll get a book from the library so we'll all Know what to look for when we get there.
I love you, Karen
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Detective by Roderick Thorp. Copyright © 1966 Roderick Thorp. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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