Killed on the Rocks Read online

  “So whatever happened happened between three and seven, when Aunt Agnes decided she wanted to see how deep the snow was.”

  “Exactly. And for that, I have no alibi. I’ll be surprised if anybody does.” It occurred to me that Carol Coretti might be sorry she hadn’t taken Aranda Dost up on her offer.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “that brings us to means. This is the wild card, because I don’t know what the hell the means were. I mean, the blood patch makes it pretty obvious he’s been torn open. Okay, that could be accomplished any number of ways. But by what means does somebody get a good forty yards from a house without leaving a track! You figure that one out, and you’ve gone a good way toward naming the killer.”

  Ralph’s face lit up. “Maybe he walked!”

  I shook my head, but there was no stopping him.

  “Why not?” he demanded. “Snow isn’t wet cement. Maybe he was cut in the house, staggered outside, and collapsed. Then the wind covered up the blood trail and filled in the tracks.”

  “Ralph.” I noticed I was calling him Ralph again instead of Deputy Ingersoll. What the hell. “Ralph,” I said. “You’re a deputy sheriff. You’ve seen your share of accidents?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In the wintertime?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve seen blood on snow.”

  “More than I like to remember.”

  “Then you know it doesn’t work that way. As far as the snow is concerned, blood is no different from hot salt water. It melts down a good long way. Then when it cools off, it congeals. No wind is going to return that, and a trail of footprints, to a smooth, undisturbed surface of snow.”

  Ralph nodded sadly. The death of one’s first hypothesis is never easy to take.

  “Besides,” I went on, “there was no wind last night. Even forgetting about any possible blood. I stepped into the snow while we were outside, and my tracks are still there, unchanged. And,” I added, “there’s no blood in the house.”

  “So we’re back to an impossibility again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So the first thing we do is go get that body.”

  “You keep saying ‘we.’ It might come back to haunt you. I haven’t told you everything yet.” I recounted my meeting with Barry Dost in detail.

  Ralph shrugged it off. “Barry’s always been a little weird, to hear Uncle Fred tell it. I still say the first thing we do is get the body.”

  “All right,” I told him. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. No. The first thing we do is call the sheriff and let him know what’s going on around here. Then we take pictures of the body in situ to prove there really are no tracks there.”

  “Then we get the body.”

  “No, then we have the breakfast you told your aunt to make.”

  “Breakfast? Why?”

  “Because after we get the body and haul it back to the house, I don’t think we’re going to feel much like eating.”

  9

  Hold it! I think you’re going to like this picture!

  —Robert Cummings, “The Bob Cummings Show” (CBS)

  IT WAS A GOOD agenda. We followed it without a hitch right through to item one.

  “The phone’s dead,” Ralph said. He jiggled the breaker button the way we’ve all learned to do it from the movies, even though that particular ploy hasn’t worked since the inception of automatic dialing.

  “Try a number in the house. Try the kitchen. Your aunt should pick up.”

  He tried. “Uh-uh.”

  I didn’t like that. It wasn’t unusual for phone service to go out in the wake of a blizzard. The intercom’s going, though, made it seem a lot more likely that someone had been up to mischief.

  So all of a sudden, we had a new agenda. I outlined it for Ralph, and he said it sounded like a good idea to him.

  We went downstairs and joined the multitude at breakfast. Murder (or whatever) had broken down artificial social barriers. Fred Norman was sitting at the head of the table, in the place occupied by Gabby Dost the night before. Calvin Gowe was filling in for Barry. Aunt Agnes kept bustling back and forth to the kitchen. Uncle Fred pointed to a place that had been saved for Ralph. I sat where I’d sat the night before, and got busy filling my plate. While I did, I looked around at my companions.

  They were a quiet bunch, appropriate enough with a death in the house. The only words exchanged were requests to pass the milk or the maple syrup or whatever. Everyone seemed to be eating heartily enough, except for Agnes Norman (who never sat down), Aranda Dost, and Ralph, who, I suspected, was too nervous about his First Case to want to eat.

  Roxanne Schick kept giving me questioning looks, but I shook her off. It was show time, and Ralph had the first line.

  “I think I have a much better idea of what this gathering was all about,” he said. “I’ll want to talk to everyone individually, the way I talked to Cobb, here.”

  Everybody looked at Cobb, there. I tried not to seem guilty. I was too busy storing away bacon and pancakes and home-fried potatoes. I’d passed up the eggs. I don’t like eggs.

  Their eyes went back to Ralph. This was it.

  “Has anyone tried to make a phone call this morning?” he asked. He was a little ominous, but not too bad.

  Haskell Freed held up a hand while he swallowed a mouthful of egg. “Yes,” he said. “I did. I tried to call the president of the Network when I went up to get dressed. I thought he should know about this.”

  “What did he say, Haskell?”

  “I didn’t get through. I supposed the lines were down.”

  Ralph said, “Well, they must have come back for a while. I was in the middle of talking to the sheriff when the line went out again.”

  I took a quick look around the table. Did anyone know he was lying? Aside from a small belch and an “excuse me” from Jack Bromhead, there was no discernible reaction at all. That meant that either Barry Dost was the one who’d screwed up the phones (I wondered again where he was now) or that it’s a waste of time trying to find a guilty person by his facial reactions (which I already knew, but can never stop trying) or that the phone’s being dead this morning was in fact an accident, and the intercom’s being out was some technical side effect I knew nothing about.

  I was beginning to think Ralph had come to the wrong person for help.

  “We got some things accomplished before we were cut off, though,” Ralph went on. “I’m in charge of the case here until they can get an investigator through.”

  “Any idea how long that’s likely to be?” Bats Blefary asked. His tone was casual, but he sure wanted to know.

  Ralph shook his head. “No idea.”

  “The storm is gone,” Wilberforce said. His voice wasn’t exactly a whine. “You’d think they could lower someone in by helicopter.”

  “Tricky winds up the side of a mountain,” I said. “They’d probably save that for a last resort.”

  “That’s right,” Ralph said with an élan that almost made me believe he’d been speaking to the sheriff. “Besides, the county’s only got one helicopter, and they’re using that for emergency rescue work. They’ve asked the air force at Plattsburgh to help out with that. We’re sheltered here, and safe. We’ve got plenty of food, and a great cook.” He smiled at his aunt. “We’re going to be pretty far down their list.”

  “Their list!” Aranda Dost exploded. “My husband is lying out dead in the snow! I don’t care about anybody’s list!” She got up and trounced out of the room.

  Jack Bromhead mopped up some egg yolk with a piece of pancake. “I can see how she feels,” he said.

  “Me, too,” Ralph said. “I just don’t know what to do about it. I wanted to tell you people what’s going on.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. “Did the sheriff say anything else?”

  “Yeah. He named Mr. Cobb, here, a special deputy to help me investigate the case. So if he asks you any questions, answer them. It’s official. If you have any problem with that, I guess
you can talk to me.”

  That was it. That was the big lie we’d decided on. I was betting that at least one person knew that for the blatant falsehood it was, but what could he or she do about it?

  Ralph patted his mouth with a napkin, a move strictly for show since he hadn’t eaten anything, thanked his aunt for a delicious breakfast, and said, “All right, now for those pictures. The camera?”

  Jack Bromhead pulled it out from under his chair. “Been carrying it around all morning waiting for Cobb to take it from me.”

  I took it from him now. I checked the film. There was a new pack inside, ten shots. Bromhead assured me there’d be more available if we needed it. He then volunteered to take backup pictures with his own .35 mm. Nikon with the telephoto lens, and I told him that was a good idea.

  So we took pictures. Out the front door, from my window, from the window of the cable room. I had neglected to close that one after my encounter with Barry, so the room was freezing by the time we got there. Bromhead was limping noticeably by then, too, and grunting every few steps from the pain.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have thought about your ankle before we got started on this.”

  “I remembered it. Don’t worry about me. I want to do this. Gabby was my friend. I got my arm caught in an oil pump once, damn near tore it off. I worked the hole for three more days before I saw a doctor. For Gabby, I can lace my boot up tighter and keep going.” He took off his hat and scratched his head. “I wish you could bring him in out of the snow, though.”

  “That’s the next project,” I assured him. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  As we descended, I looked over the Polaroids. Unless you could photograph an hallucination, we still had the same impossible situation on our hands. There was the snow, a twig and a few bits of bark at the base of a pine, the corpse, and the blood. And nothing else.

  Downstairs, Ralph told his uncle to bring us to the tackle room.

  “Tackle room” was an understatement. What the place looked like was a branch warehouse of L. L. Bean. Fishing equipment filled one wall: rods and reels, creels, waders, and funny hats. The next wall was guns: rifles for everything from jackrabbit to elephant, and all kinds of hunting and target pistols. There were bows and arrows, even a Wrist Rocket slingshot and a can of ball bearings.

  “What was he expecting?” I asked. “Apaches?”

  Jack Bromhead smiled. “Gabby just didn’t like to see a guest ask for something he couldn’t provide.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. I was pointing to a broad leather strap with a chain and a metal clip on either end. It looked like a belt for a rhino.

  “It’s a phone lineman’s belt. Came in handy when we were stringing the cable over the mountain. Fastest way up a pine tree. You loop it around, fasten it, lean back, dig in the cleats on your shoes, throw it up a couple of feet, and go on from there.”

  “Thought so,” I said. “Where’s the winter stuff?”

  He pointed. Ralph had already picked out some insulated suits, ski gloves, and snowshoes for us. He pointed to something standing up in the corner. “We’ll take that, too.”

  It was a toboggan. Good idea. All the things we’d done before going out after the body had been necessary, or at least wise, but I might not have been so assiduous about thinking about them if I hadn’t been fighting with a picture of carrying the body to the house slung over my back.

  There was nothing else to do, now, so we got togged out and went.

  10

  ... And we’re gonna go and get it!

  —Andy Griffith, “Salvage” (ABC)

  WE DIDN’T HEAD STRAIGHT for the body—we walked in a wide arc. I wanted that snow to remain unbroken as long as possible. That was assuming I didn’t fall into the damned stuff.

  I had never used snowshoes before, and my success on this trip showed a decided lack of natural talent. I had to concentrate on every step. Don’t cross the snowshoes. If you do cross the snowshoes, try to remember to lift the one on top first. After a while, by experimenting and watching Ralph, who was hopping along like a white rabbit, I determined that the best way to do it was to walk bowlegged with my toes pointing out, leaving a track like the stitches on a baseball.

  Just about the time I got going good, my right snowshoe kicked something hard just below the surface of the snow. I knelt (another circus stunt), brushed away a few inches of snow, and saw a point of black stone. It was one of the pointed rocks that had marked the road leading up to the house. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the curve of the road. If I remembered correctly ...

  Ralph, pulling the toboggan, had reached the body. He stood well clear of it, and of the bloodstain, waiting for me, The Expert, to arrive.

  Which I did in about another two minutes. I took the Polaroid from one of the parka’s copious pockets and took some pictures. I put them back in the pocket to develop. Then I reached across the body and handed the camera to Ralph, so he could get a few shots from that angle. He put the camera in his pocket, and we looked at each other.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I want to check out a few things.” Ralph looked grateful.

  I knelt again, less clumsily this time, and felt around under the body. It was just as I had figured. The body was hung up on the points of the stegosaurus plates that made up the low rock wall.

  I told Ralph what I’d discovered.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well, we knew he must have hit something.”

  I took my hand out from under. Something sticky glistened on the blue leather of my borrowed glove. I rubbed my hand rapidly in the snow and looked at what I’d left behind. It would be a long time before I ate strawberry jam again.

  I was suddenly aware of the cold. My breath-clouds seemed to form ice particles that scoured my face, and the wind cut through the arctic survival gear the way it would have a cotton T-shirt. I wanted to tighten my hood, but I didn’t want to bring my hands near my face. I shuddered.

  I’d seen death before, and murder, but I’d never been so close to the nuts-and-bolts household details of the job. There had always been cops around to search the body, medical examiners to explain how the death had occurred. All I’d had to do was look, click my tongue, and think about it.

  To hell with it, I told myself. Fighting the problem wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I took a deep, cold breath.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s turn him over.”

  Ralph walked up, reached across the body to my side, grabbed two handfuls of the ridiculously flimsy jacket the body was wearing and pulled. I got my hands underneath and lifted. It was as easy as moving a piece of wood. I didn’t know if it was rigor mortis or the cold, but this was one body that truly lived up to the name “stiff.”

  The last doubts that this was G. B. Dost were removed as soon as I saw the face. It wore a startled expression, with eyes and mouth both open. Snow clung to his eyebrows. The skin of his face was as white as the snow it had been nestling in.

  There was a horrible gash in his abdomen, from about the navel to the sternum. The jacket, a zip-up, spring-weight flannel kind of thing, had kept his insides in place when we’d turned him over, for which I would be eternally grateful to it. There was a huge purple dent in his forehead.

  “Let’s get him on the toboggan.”

  We reached under an arm and a leg each and lifted him on. While Ralph covered the body with a sheet and strapped it to the sled, I looked at the depression in the snow.

  “If it makes you feel any better, he was dead when he hit the rocks,” I said. It sure made me feel better. The idea of being alive to feel myself being gutted like a fish with a knife of dull stone was more than I wanted to imagine.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Two things. The big one, not enough blood. You saw the hole in him. If his heart had been beating when that happened, we wouldn’t have been able to get within ten feet of him without stepping in it.

  “There’s enough blood for my taste,” Ralph said.
/>   “No disagreement there. The other thing is the print of his head.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s all snow, no ice. If he’d lain here breathing at all, the warmth of his breath would have melted some snow. It would have refrozen smooth. It didn’t happen.”

  “Okay. I guess that shot to the head must have been what did it. Fine. Now let’s just get him inside.”

  That’s what I wanted to do. Even knowing what was ahead once we got him there, I wanted nothing better than to grab that tow rope and toboggan G. B. Dost back to his fabulous Rocky Point retreat.

  “In a minute,” I said. “This is a crime scene. What do you do at a crime scene? You look for clues.”

  “Come on,” Ralph said. “There’s a body and there’s virgin snow. Where could there possibly be a clue?”

  “In the blood,” I said. There was a depression about the size of a punch bowl, directly below where Dost’s wound had been. There was a puddle of half-frozen strawberry jam in it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ralph said.

  “My sentiments exactly. Now you know why I wanted you to eat breakfast. Throwing up is never a pleasant experience, but it tends to go easier on you if you have something to throw.”

  “Just shut up about it, okay?”

  “You don’t have to look. My gloves are already screwed up.”

  Ralph took me at my word and turned his back. I plunged my already-gory hand into the puddle. Of course, I told myself, the real way to do this would be barehanded, so you can feel for things. I told myself to go to hell.

  It was like a stunt on some hellish version of “Double Dare.” I kept it up fifteen seconds longer than I would have ever believed I could stand it, having found, I thought, nothing.

  When I pulled my hand loose, something was stuck to the glove, dangling from between the ring finger and pinky. It looked like a curled red worm, but as the congealing redness dripped away, I could see it was a piece of heavy fishing line. It might have been eight or nine inches long stretched out.

  “You brought envelopes, didn’t you?” I said.