Cry for the Strangers (21 page)

Chip got into his car, slammed the door, and rolled the window down. He stack his hand out the open window.

“Well, good luck. Frankly, I don’t think you’re ever going to make a nickel on your gallery, but I hope I’m wrong. I think you made a big mistake in choosing Clark’s Harbor to try something like this.”

“Well, we didn’t really have much choice in the matter,” Glen said, taking Chip’s hand and shaking it firmly. “Sorry I gave you such a rough time.”

“If it’s the worst time we ever have we’re both in good shape,” Chip replied. Then he started the engine and a moment later pulled onto the highway, made a neat U-turn, and headed for town. Glen watched until he’d disappeared, then went back into the gallery.

As he continued staining the display case he’d been working on, he thought over the conversation with Connor and decided that maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he
was
paranoid and the town wasn’t really out to get him. But then Miriam Shelling’s words came back to him, ringing in his ears.

“They’re going to get you! Just like they got Pete.… They’ll get you too!”

14

The folder on the deaths of Pete and Miriam Shelling lay open on the desk in front of him, but Harney Whalen wasn’t reading. By now he knew the contents of the folder—could repeat them verbatim, if necessary. Still, none of it made sense. Despite Miriam’s insistence to the contrary, Whalen was still sure Pete’s death had been an accident. But Miriam Shelling’s was something else.

Somebody strangled her
.

The words crawled up from the depths of Whalen’s mind, tormenting his sense of order. Suicide fit for Miriam Shelling; murder didn’t. Even so, those three words kept coming to him.
Somebody strangled her
. But Whalen could find no reasonable motive for someone to want to kill Miriam Shelling. So he went back once more, as he had periodically over the last several days, to considering unreasonable motives. And, as always, the name Glen Palmer popped into his head.

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch, annoyed that Chip Connor had not yet come in this morning. He was about to phone him when Chip suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“You keep banking hours?” Harney growled.

“Sorry,” Chip said quickly. Something was eating at Whalen this morning. “Talking to Palmer took longer than I expected.”

Whalen’s brows rose skeptically. “I thought you were going to take care of that yesterday.”

“I tried,” Chip explained. “But the gallery was closed, and when I drove out to the Palmers’ nobody was home.” Chip excused himself for the small lie: after all, there was a good possibility the Palmers hadn’t been home the previous afternoon. Whalen seemed satisfied. He looked at Chip expectantly.

“You want to tell me what you found out?”

“Not much of anything. His wife wanted to go to the funeral, so they went. That’s all there was to it.”

Whalen stared at Chip. “How long did you talk to him?”

“An hour, maybe a little longer,” Chip said uncomfortably.

“And all you found out was that his wife wanted to go to the funeral, so they went?” Whalen’s voice dripped sarcasm and Chip winced.

“I found out some other things, too, but they don’t have anything to do with the funeral.” He decided to try to shift the conversation a little. “Frankly, Harn, I don’t see what’s so important about that funeral. Why are you so concerned about who was there?”

“Because I don’t think Miriam Shelling committed suicide,” Whalen said flatly. Chip gaped at him, and Whalen grinned, pleased that he had disturbed his deputy’s normal calm.

“I don’t understand—” Chip began, then fell silent as Whalen made an impatient gesture.

“There’s nothing to understand,” the chief snapped. “It’s nothing but a hunch. But over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to my hunches, and right now my hunch tells me that there’s more to Miriam Shelling’s death than a simple suicide.”

“And you think Glen Palmer had something to do with it?”

Whalen leaned back in his chair and swiveled it around to gaze out the window as he talked. “When you live in a town all your life you get so you know the people. You know what they’ll do and what they won’t do. As far as I know, nobody in town would kill Miriam Shelling. So it has to be a stranger. Palmer’s a stranger.”

Chip felt baffled: it didn’t make sense—none of it made sense. As if he had heard Chip’s unspoken thought, Whalen began explaining:

“He was the last person to talk to her. She was saying strange things. Probably acting crazy, like she was when she came in here the day before, and she scared him. Hell, maybe she even attacked him. How the hell do I know? But it happened on his property, and he was the last person to talk to her, and I can’t see that anybody else in town would do something like that.”

“But that certainly doesn’t mean Glen Palmer did it,” Chip protested. “It doesn’t even mean that
anybody
did it!” Now he spoke his earlier thought out loud. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, and if you’ll notice, I haven’t charged him with anything, have I? I didn’t say it makes sense, Chip. Hell, I didn’t even say he did it. All I said is
that if Miriam was murdered, a stranger did it. Palmer’s a stranger, and he could have done it.”

“So what are you going to do?” Chip asked, confused by Whalen’s logic, but curious.

“Same thing you’re going to do. Keep my ears open, my mouth shut, and my eye on Glen Palmer.”

“I don’t know,” Chip said, shaking his head doubtfully. “I just don’t think Palmer could have done it. He just doesn’t seem to me like the type who would do a thing like that.”

“But you don’t
know,”
Whalen replied. “And until we do know I think Palmer’s a damned good suspect.”

Chip wanted to protest that there was no need for any suspect at all, but Whalen was too caught up in his “hunch” to be dissuaded now. So instead of protesting he tried to defend Glen Palmer.

“I think we ought to be a little bit careful of him,” Chip said reluctantly.

“Careful? What do you mean?”

“He’s pretty upset right now. In fact, he almost refused to answer my questions. Claimed I didn’t have any right to ask them.”

Harney Whalen’s face paled and his hands twitched slightly. “Did he now?” he growled. “And what did you have to say to that?”

“I told him I didn’t have any right to question him but that I thought he ought to cooperate with me. With us,” he corrected himself. Then his face twisted into a wry grimace. “That’s when he suggested maybe the town could cooperate with him. His gallery hasn’t been going very well.”

“Nobody ever thought it would. He’s mad because nobody’s buying his junk?”

“No,” Chip said mildly. “He just thinks that everybody in town’s been trying to make it difficult for him. Thinks people are holding up on deliveries and delivering bad goods—that sort of thing.”

“Tough,” Whalen replied. “Everything takes time out here, and everybody gets damaged goods now and then. What makes him think he’s special?”

“He doesn’t think he’s special,” Chip said. He could feel his patience wearing thin and wondered why Harn was so hostile toward Palmer. “Anyway, he’s almost got the place finished. In fact, he’s displaying some of his stuff outside the building this morning. You ought to go take a look. Some of it isn’t half-bad. In fact, there’s a picture of the old Baron place that I bet you’d like.”

But Harney Whalen was no longer listening. He was glaring at Chip. “Did I say something wrong?” Chip asked.

“He’s displaying his merchandise outside?” Whalen said.

“Yeah,” Chip replied, wondering what could be wrong. “He’s got maybe fifteen or twenty canvases lined up against the building so you can see them as you drive by.”

“And you didn’t cite him?” Whalen demanded.

“Cite him?” Chip was totally baffled now. “For what, for Christ’s sake?”

“Peddling,” Whalen snapped. “We have an ordinance here against peddling without a license. If he’s displaying stuff outside he’s peddling.”

“Oh, come on,” Chip said. “That’s ridiculous. Even if there is such an ordinance, when did we ever enforce it?”

“That’s not the point,” Whalen said stubbornly.

“Well, it seems to me that if you’re going to enforce it against Glen Palmer, you’d better be ready to enforce it against anybody in town who violates it, because I’ll bet Palmer will start watching.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet he just would at that,” Whalen agreed. Then a slow smile came over his face. “So I won’t cite him. But I’ll get those pictures off the highway, just the same.”

Chip frowned and stared suspiciously at the chief. “What are you going to do?”

“Come along and find out.”

Something inside Chip told him that whatever Whalen was planning, it wasn’t something he wanted any part of. He shook his head. “No thanks. I’ll hang around here.”

“Suit yourself,” Whalen said. “But if you change your mind, drive on up to the highway in about ten minutes. Just pull off the road and wait.” He put on his hat, glanced at himself in the mirror on the inside of the door, and left. A moment later Chip saw him leave the building and get into the police car.

Chip picked up the file on Whalen’s desk, glanced at it, then closed it and put it in the file cabinet, locking the drawer after he slid it shut. He wandered around the office for several minutes, looking for something to do.

“Ah, shit,” he muttered to himself finally. He put his own hat on, closed the office door behind him, and went to his car. A few seconds later he was on his way up Harbor Road. When he got to the intersection with the highway, he pulled off the road, parked where he
would have a good view of the Palmers’ gallery, and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. In the distance behind him, Chip heard the faint wailing of the siren on Harn Whalen’s car. As it grew louder he began to think that Whalen must be pursuing a speeder. The car would be coming into sight any minute.

But no speeding car appeared. Instead, the wail only increased, and suddenly Chip saw the police car roar around the bend, lights flashing, siren screaming. As the car charged into the stretch of straight roadway, it seemed to accelerate, and Chip tore his eyes away from it to look ahead, almost expecting to see Whalen’s prey disappear around the next curve. But all he saw was Glen Palmer coming out of the gallery, a puzzled look on his face.

Chip realized then what was about to happen. He leaned on his own horn, hoping to warn Glen, but it was too late. Whalen, in the speeding black-and-white, roared by him, and the sound of Chip’s horn was drowned in the shriek of the siren. Then, just as he was about to pass the gallery, Whalen swerved to the right, slightly off the pavement.

Glen Palmer jumped back before he realized that the car had not been aimed at him. Indeed, he wasn’t even sure that it had been aimed at all, the swerve had been so slight and so quick. But the right tires of the police car hit a long, narrow puddle, and the muddy water cascaded over Glen, soaking him to the skin. Almost before he realized what had happened he thought of the pictures.

They lay in the mud, most of them knocked over by the force of the cascading water. Without even looking
at them, Glen was sure they were ruined. He stared at them, rooted to the spot, seeing weeks of work destroyed in an instant.

He was still standing there when Chip Connor raced by him and began grabbing the paintings, snatching them out of the mud, taking them inside the gallery, then coming back for more.

“Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t just stand there,” Chip cried. “Help me get these things inside.”

*    *    *

Harney Whalen glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the last of the cascading water pour over the pictures, then put his eyes back on the road. He moved his foot from the accelerator to the brake, slowing the speeding squad car enough to keep it on the road as he went into the curve that would cut the gallery off from his view. He left the siren on for a moment, enjoying the wailing sound that poured from the roof of the car, then reached up to snap it off: Palmer had gotten the message. Not, Whalen reflected, that he really cared—if he hadn’t, Whalen could always repeat the performance.

Close to Sod Beach, he decided to stop and have a look at the Baron house. He turned the police car into the nearly invisible lane that cut through the woods toward the beach and parked it when he could drive no farther.

From outside the house looked no different than it had ever looked, and Whalen didn’t bother to inspect the porch that ran almost all the way around it. Instead he let himself in through the kitchen door, closing the door behind him.

He made a mental note to hire a couple of the local
kids to clean the place up. It wouldn’t cost much to have the rotting garbage removed and the dishes washed and put away. If the sink wasn’t scoured, the ancient wood stove not cleaned, and the floor still badly stained, it wouldn’t matter—nobody was living there, and Whalen had no intention of having anybody live there.

A faint memory stirred at the back of his mind. Something about the Randalls. They had wanted to rent the place but he had refused.

Again the faint stirring. Whalen shook his head, trying to catch the elusive memory, then dismissed it. He
had
refused to rent the house to them. He was sure of it.

He wandered through the lower floor and picked up a stray sweater that lay haphazardly on one of the worn-looking chairs. Then he saw a fire neatly laid in the fireplace and felt vaguely annoyed. Before he could define his annoyance a chill suddenly came over him and he impulsively lit the fire. The chill stayed with him. He pulled one of the old chairs close to the hearth and sat in it, huddling his bulk far back in the chair. As the fire blazed into life and began to spread its warmth through the room, a light rain began to fall, streaking the windows of the old house and blurring the view of the ocean.

Harney Whalen sat alone, watching the flames and listening to the rain. He could feel a storm building.

Glen Palmer stood up, tossed the muddy rag into a corner, and surveyed the painting carefully.