False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (5 page)

“It’s a long time to wait to see my name in print.”

“March
Sensational
goes to the printer at Christmas. It hits the stands in January. When can I expect another piece from you? The body on the beach sounds promising.”

“The cops are spinning their wheels. It’ll be a while.”

“You shouldn’t have trouble finding good cases in South Jersey.”

“I’m not with the
Press
any longer.”

“You didn’t quit when the check arrived?” Pelfrey said. “Let me give you some advice: Don’t put money down on a new house just yet. There will be times when you curse the killers for not working hard enough for you.”

“I’ll go easy on them, I promise.”

It bothered him that Pelfrey didn’t want to know why he’d left the
Press
. Was
Real Detective
so hungry for copy that they accepted stories from anyone, no questions asked?

“Read all the papers in your neck of the woods, and clip the promising murders,” Pelfrey said. “The Palmer case is one of the best first stories I’ve published. You have a future with us, if you want it.”

“I’ll start looking.”

When he was a
Press
man, he’d barely glanced at the suburban dailies, didn’t think of them as serious competition, if he thought of them at all. Coming back from the corner with a stack of them under his arm, he felt ashamed, the way he would bringing home dirty books.

They were lousy papers. He hated to consider that he might end up working on one. The coverage was terrible. Reporters stinted on the news in favor of garden parties, and bridge club meetings, and the churches. The only mention of murder was a squib in the
Margate Light
, a couple of graphs from the United Press on the investigation in Little Egg Harbor that was going nowhere.

It wasn’t just killers that he faulted for not doing their job.
Potential victims were not making themselves easy prey. The cops had been struck blind. Poisonings were misdiagnosed as tummy aches, cases going begging because corpses remained undiscovered under freshly poured patios. Bumblers were preventing him from making a living.

He filled a thermos and drove south, stopping for the papers in every town. At Cape May he turned back along Delaware Bay. He steered clear of the police stations and newsrooms where he had no contacts. His interest in bloody murder would mark him as a suspicious character to the cops. Enterprising reporters would hear him out, then pitch Pelfrey themselves. If he learned of a good story, he’d introduce himself. In the meantime it was enough to find out what was going on.

At Dennisville he went into Cumberland County. The isolated farm country was an unlikely setting for skillful homicide. In the sticks husbands bludgeoned cheating wives and were stabbed in their sleep by them. Jealous boyfriends gunned down love rivals on the high school playing field. Straight razors mediated craps games in the migrant camps. Killers lacked the ingenuity that
Real Detective
demanded.

A wife-killing outside Vineland seemed promising. But with an arrest barely two days after the body was found, it failed Pelfrey’s criterion for a
Real Detective
case. Jordan wanted Pelfrey to love his stories, to put them on the cover with his name in 96-point type.
Real Detective
was the springboard to... he didn’t know what. But he wouldn’t spring far as just another contributor. He took a pass.

In May’s Landing a third grade teacher was charged with sprinkling arsenic in her husband’s lunchpail. Jordan studied pictures of a bottle blonde in handcuffs and a torpedo bra. Not his type. But he’d make the readers fall in love with her, and break their hearts. He’d make Pelfrey love her, too. Love him.

The trial could go on for weeks before ending in a hung jury or acquittal. He’d sat in enough dreary courtrooms when he
was collecting a check from the
Press
to know he didn’t want to be in one on his own time. If there was a conviction, he’d write the story from clips. It was cheating—but Pelfrey hadn’t said it wasn’t kosher. He didn’t anticipate a moral crisis.

Every hour he wasn’t at the typewriter was an hour that he wasn’t making a buck. He hurried back to Vineland. At the circulation department of the
Times
he bought the back issues for the last couple of weeks. The wife-killing violated Pelfrey’s three-day rule between the murder and arrest. The pacing was sloppy, but Jordan gave the husband an A-minus for inventiveness, a solid B for the elements of high melodrama. Together they would craft a memorable story.

He called Pelfrey without reversing the charges. “I’ve got one for you,” he said.

“Convince me.”

“I’m in the boondocks,” he said. “Manumuskin. The suspect’s the undertaker here, Elmer Lambert—38, ex-B-17 pilot, POW, double Purple Heart winner. The victim’s his better half.”

“Why’d he do it?”

“I couldn’t tell you. The cops are playing it close to the vest.”

“Find out, and call me back.”

“The story’s not about why,” Jordan said.

“They’re all about why.”

“This one’s about how,” Jordan said. “The Lamberts lived on Main Street next to the funeral parlor. When he wasn’t embalming a client or burying him, Lambert liked to sit in the living room with the papers. Never drew the shades. People on the street would see a sober man in a dark suit content in his own home, and know God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. Never gave anybody a smile. But if they dropped dead they knew he’d take good care of them.”

“How’d he kill her?”

“Used a .38 he found in a client’s pocket.”

“Undertaker’s generally a cold fish,” Pelfrey said. “I’d be shocked, the wife’s anything to look at.”

“Just listen,” Jordan said. “Lambert told her they were getting stale, and how did a weekend at the shore sound? It must’ve sounded good because one morning her body came in with the tide at Ocean Grove. Lambert wasn’t seen there with her, but I don’t have to tell you he was the automatic suspect. He told the cops he hated the shore, had never been within a hundred miles of Ocean Grove, that his wife had wanted to get away a few days on her own, and while she was being shot he was home with the papers. He had plenty of witnesses to back him up. Twenty or a couple dozen passersby on Main saw him on his couch the same time Mrs. Lambert was in Ocean Grove. Too many alibi witnesses to argue with. Lambert was officially a non-suspect.”

Pelfrey said, “So?”

“Thirty-six hours later the cops got a tip he’d killed somebody else.”

“The wife’s boyfriend?” Pelfrey said. “Lambert’s? The story can use one.”

“There’s no boyfriend,” Jordan said, “for which I apologize. Lambert had been seen outside the cemetery with a man’s body slung over his shoulder. He was pleasant when the cops came to see him again, said they’d made a natural mistake. He hadn’t murdered anyone this time either, just brought a corpse to the graveyard to bury it. The cops asked if he carried all his customers on his shoulder. Wouldn’t it be easier to drive them in his hearse? Lambert stopped being pleasant, and said he wanted a lawyer.

“A fresh grave had been dug in the cemetery. The D.A. got a court order to open it.”

“And?” Pelfrey said. “Who’d they find? Judge Crater? Amelia Earhart?”

“A mahogany casket,” Jordan said, “belonging to the woman who was buried there. Stretched out on the lid was a clothes dummy in a black suit with a moustache and a wig parted on the right like Lambert. Lambert had dressed the dummy in old clothes, and painted his face on it the way he restored stiffs who went through a windshield. The same dummy he left on the couch before taking his wife to Ocean Grove. What do you think?”

Pelfrey said, “That was awful clever of him.”

“You know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction.”

“It’s bunk,” Pelfrey said. “If truth were strange, I’d go to Hollywood and get rich selling story ideas to the studios. Truth is bland, forgettable, and often ridiculous. It’s the work of amateurs with spare imagination. That’s why scriptwriters make the money they do. A story like the one you told me almost never reaches my desk. How much did you make up?”

“I have the clips in front of me,” Jordan said. “Every fact is documented.”

Pelfrey said, “Pictures?”

“I’ll make some calls,” Jordan said. “Let me tell you what else I’m looking at. A young schoolteacher in May’s Landing poisoned her husband. She’s been married before, and both previous husbands died under suspicious circum—”

“Nice-looking woman?” Pelfrey said.

He stopped for sliders, ate them reading through the Lambert clips for ideas. The case didn’t require ideas beyond a good opening sentence. After that he’d get out of the way.

He got home at ten, and went straight to the typewriter. At three, when he pushed back his chair, he had to force himself not to drive the story to New York. He wanted to be there when Pelfrey apologized for doubting him. What he didn’t want was
Pelfrey expecting door-to-door service for every case. He put the manuscript in an envelope, and went to bed.

He couldn’t sleep. He turned on the lights, and had a look at the May’s Landing clips. The hook was staring him in the face—the pretty teacher’s hard-working husband wracked with stomach pains as doctors struggled to diagnose the mystery ailment. Other angles might be more effective, but he wasn’t going to knock himself out trying to find one. Clever plotting was not the mark of a
Real Detective
staffer. Fast typing was.

After the principal characters took the stage, he didn’t know where the story was going. Investigators hadn’t revealed how they’d gotten on to the wife, or what she had told them. The detective work would remain under wraps until the witnesses gave evidence from the stand. If the testimony wasn’t credible, where the story was going was into the garbage.

Jordan chain-smoked as he filled around the holes in his case. More than sleep he needed to write. In Princeton, John O’Hara, his literary hero, was up every night at the typewriter. O’Hara produced underrated art, and Adam Jordan was churning out copy for the pulps that no serious reader would see. He liked to think that what he was doing could also be called writing. That was where the similarities ended.

He quit beating himself up, and concentrated on his story. By six he’d gone as far as the facts would take him. A couple of hours of sleep were under his belt when he left for the post office. He came back with the papers, determined to make slow work of them. With nothing left to write he had a long day to kill.

Van Pelt was reporting that the state police had identified the Little Egg Harbor strangling victim. Twenty-two-year-old Susannah Chase, originally from Manalapan, had been a waitress at a Brigantine restaurant, the Rusty Scupper. There were typical quotes from family members devastated by news of her
death. Not much else. Accompanying the short piece were photos of a gorgeous girl in a waitress’ outfit, high school cheerleader’s uniform, and looking serious but no less attractive in cap and gown.

Susannah Chase’s name had not come to the attention of the police without other facts. That was not the way investigations progressed. The cops were sitting on information, and van Pelt was too lazy or inept to pry it loose. Jordan looked out at a gray sky promising sleet. Before the roads turned treacherous he’d find out what else the troopers had learned.

The Absecon barracks looked like nothing so much as the suburban home of an unusually patriotic family. It was somewhat larger than other houses in the area, red brick at street level and aluminum siding on the upper floor. The stars and stripes and New Jersey flag flew above a grassy triangle edged in gravel. On a petrified log a brass plaque was inscribed with the names of town residents who had fought in every military conflict since the Battle of Trenton. Jordan ran his fingers down a shiny roster from the Second World War, lingering at the asterisks awarded to those who had died in combat.

No one asked what his business was. Everyone knew him. Outside the basement lockup he had the run of the building. Security wasn’t tight because there was no call for it. It was a theory of Jordan’s that troopers who screwed up in sensitive postings were stashed out of the way in Absecon where nothing happened and it was impossible to resuscitate their careers.

He went along the corridor nodding to officers who didn’t deliberately avoid him. From time to time the brass barred him from the station. Threats of legal action, and editorials he scripted himself, had forced a reversal of the bans. The heaviest burden that democracy put upon the state police was having a reporter look over their shoulder. Adam Jordan in particular.

Day was in the communications room, watching the
teletype. When the clattering stopped he tore off the paper, and saw Jordan looking in.

“What’s new, Lieutenant?”

“We talked to the papers yesterday.”

Jordan remained in the doorway. All he’d meant was hello, and Day had taken it the wrong way. How did you misinterpret hello? “I was busy with something else.”

“Watch your rear. The other fellow from the
Press
has the right stuff.”

“No hard questions?”

“Good questions,” Day said. “He’s after your job.”

“I have one or two he forgot to ask. Where did you get Miss Chase’s name?”

“It’s
Mrs.
Chase.”

Jordan made a note. “Where—?”

“You’ll have everything when we’re ready to give it out.”

“I can’t hang a story on changing Miss to Mrs.”

Day held the printout between his hands as though it were a royal proclamation, and then he looked up. “You’ve done it with less.”

From anyone else it would have prompted a smile.

“My next stop’s the Rusty Scupper,” Jordan said. “My readers are entitled to the stuff you’re holding back. If it comes as an exclusive, they’ll get the idea you’re not trying.”

“Does
everyone
tell you what an SOB you are?”

“I thought we were friends, Lieutenant. Did I spell your name wrong?”

“I can’t stop you from going.” Day went to his office with Jordan on his heels.