Back | Next
Contents


Warped Clue




Diana sat on the narrow cot with her pretty head in her hands and sobbed. Dave Welch watched her, his back against the bars of the cell door.

“Di,” he said, “I’m going up to Tod’s cabin this afternoon to look around. Can you think of anything I should watch for?”

She sat still for a moment, trembling. Dave knelt beside her, and took her by the shoulders. She looked up, her eyes dark and shiny with tears.

“I’ve told you all I know,” she said. “It was a hot night and I felt like going for a drive. My car stalled on the hill. The temperature gauge was way up, and the car wouldn’t start again. I went for help, but the gas station at the foot of the hill was closed for the night. When I got back to the car, it was pouring, and the police were there. They took me to the cabin, and I identified Tod’s body. That’s all I know.”

“You had no idea Tod was going with your sister?” Dave asked her.

Diana looked down. “I didn’t even know Jean knew him. At least they can’t accuse her. She was at a square dance miles away.”

Dave nodded and signaled the jailer. There was a rattle of keys, and Dave stepped out into the corridor. Diana looked up at him.

“If I had known,” she said, “maybe I would have killed Tod. But I didn’t.”

A half hour later, Dave Welch swung his car up the hill road, rounded a curve, and went up a steep grade till he saw a spot where several cars had parked, crushing down the sparse weeds by the edge of the road. He pulled over, yanked on the brake, and glanced at the heat indicator. The engine was hot. Di’s story, so far, was perfectly reasonable. He put the car keys in his pocket and got out.

By the roadside, the white pines grew thick and close. The forest floor was a mat of fallen needles. The air was hot and faintly moist. Dave ducked the stiffly-branching lower limbs of the pines, which were just high enough so he could pass between them for several hundred feet. He stepped out into a brightly sunlit clearing.

A big cabin with a stone chimney, unscreened porch, and a shingled roof charred black on one side, was perched on the summit of the slope. A gravel driveway ran downhill from the left, and curved around in front of the dwelling. To reach the cabin by car, it was necessary to drive far up the hill, turn right onto a winding road, then come down this gravel driveway.

Dave was sure that Di could never have gone so far on foot, and reached her car by the time the police found her there. But the distance through the woods was only a few hundred feet, and from the woods to the cabin the open stretch she would have had to cross was no wider. The police argued that Diana had gone through the woods, killed Tod Holmes, and returned through the woods to a place below her car, where they had seen her on the road. Except for the accident of a neighbor hearing a still-unexplained shot and phoning the police, Diana would, the police argued, have gotten away unnoticed.

Dave Welch shook his head. The best way to disprove this was to show that Diana had not gone through the woods at all. But there were no witnesses, and Dave had just seen that the woods were not impassible.

He looked down at the cabin. Sunlight glittered on its roof and a black police car was parked on the roadway directly in front of it. Dave walked across the field above the cabin, then down the drive with the sun hot on his back and the gravel crunching underfoot.

At the front of the cabin was a narrow stone terrace. A tall hard-eyed policeman walked across the terrace to stand watching as Dave approached.

The policeman gave a short laugh. “I know you,” he said. “You’re going with that girl. Your picture was in her handbag.” He mopped his forehead, and pulled a rumpled cigarette pack from his pocket. “You can’t go in.” He rapped the pack, then frowned. It was empty.

Dave took out a package of Camels and extended it toward him. “I don’t want to go in. I just came up to check the distances.”

The policeman helped himself to a cigarette and nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “Why did you go across the field above the cabin?”

“So I could walk in on the gravel, and you’d hear me coming.”

“I thought you were snooping.” He looked at Dave curiously a moment, then said, “Have a seat. I have to watch this place till the D. A. is sure he’s got everything he wants. I can’t let you go inside, but maybe I can show you what you’re up against. You figure the girl didn’t do it?”

“I’m sure she didn’t.”

The policeman shook his head. “It’s open and shut. The body was right up on the porch there. Head smashed in with a medium-size rock from the wall by the porch steps. Nothing was stolen. There was eighty dollars in his wallet when we found him. What was the motive? Somebody just plain didn’t like him.”

“Tod Holmes had a lot of enemies.”

“Sure. He was a ladies’ man. There must have been a dozen husbands and boy friends who’d have been happy to swing that rock. But look at this place. There’s only one road out of here. The neighbors didn’t see any car go by. On the other hand, there was your girl, parked maybe two hundred yards away. Now, by good luck our first car happened to be coming down the hill when the station got the call about the shot. The car was near the side road, so they turned in, and saw the cabin roof on fire. They got here in time to find the body on the porch, and put in a call for a fire truck and some help. I came up in the second car. We came uphill just as the storm broke, and saw your girl walking through the pouring rain to her car.”

Dave Welch said, “She’d just gone down to the garage. But it was closed, so she came back up here.”

The policeman smiled. “I halfway believed it that night. Sure, the woods looked too close to walk through. And we knew she couldn’t have gone by the road in time. But the next day we checked, and we could walk through those woods almost as if they weren’t there. That meant she could have done it. Then we found out how fond she is of her kid sister. We found out the murdered man had so many girl friends, and ditched them so fast, that his friends compared them to paper plates—‘Tod’s disposable women.’ He was almost old enough to be the father of your girl’s sister. And yet, he’d been seen taking her out lately. We figure your Diana didn’t want her sister to start life as one of ‘Tod’s disposable women.’ She came up here to tell him so. He laughed at her. Then things got rough.”

“She didn’t know he was going with her sister.”

“That’s what she’d say,” the policeman said.

Dave sat back in the gathering heat of the day. Finally he said, “What about that shot?”

“His own gun. We found it in the shrubs by the porch. Either he grabbed it to protect himself, or she picked it up, and in the struggle one of them knocked it out of the other’s hand.”

Dave thought of Diana, her eyes large and dark, pleading with him to believe her. He did believe, but who else would?

Time stretched out, and he knew he had to find something that no one else had thought of. But what?

The policeman mopped his perspiring forehead, and moved his chair back into the dwindling shadow of the cabin. “Better get her to plead guilty. The thing is open and shut.”

Dave Welch shook his head and got up. He glanced around at the cabin with its partly-burned, warped shingle roof. He blinked. The shingles, now in the full glare of the sun, appeared more warped than earlier. He glanced around at the pine woods; the dead lower branches seemed to make a barrier around the clearing. He shrugged impatiently, and looked at the policeman.

“Isn’t there anyone you’d think might have done it—if you weren’t so sure about Diana?”

The policeman looked at him thoughtfully. “She was here. She had the motive. Just don’t try to warp the facts, and you’ll see how it had to be.”

Dave stared at him. He looked at the warped shingles on the roof, then out at the thick pine woods. He whirled suddenly, and started up the drive with the sun blazing down in his face. Behind him, the policeman shouted, but Dave scarcely heard him.

He crossed the field to the woods, walked in, and a stiff dry branch poked him in the face. He ducked and another branch caught his sleeve. He pulled loose, and a branch jabbed him in the side. He backed up, tried again, and managed to work his way further in, slowly and carefully.

Behind him he heard the snap of a dead limb, and glanced back over his shoulder.

The policeman was right behind him, frowning.

Dave felt his heart beat fast. “This isn’t an open-and-shut case,” he said. “It’s an open-and-shut woods.”

“I don’t get it. I’ve walked through and it was no trouble. You came through here yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t as easy as for you—after the storm.”

“The storm. Wait a minute. It started to rain after the murder. Before, the weather was dry as dust. When the white pines were wet, it was easy to walk through. Now the sun’s dried things out, it’s hard. Why?”

Dave Welch glanced down at the cabin. “What warps shingles? The underneath part stays damp while the upper part dries out and shrinks in the sun. With these white pines, the rain strikes the dead branches, and drains along the bottom as if you took the straw out of a soda and held it level. The liquid runs along the lower edge.”

The policeman nodded slowly. “The bottom of the dead pine branch gets wetter than the top, expands, and the whole business warps up out of the way.” He shook his head. “It was dry before that storm. That means the woods were like they are now, or worse. The girl couldn’t have got through in time to do it.”

“I told you she was innocent.”

“It’s a good thing you believed her. Come on.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Put in a call. The fellow who called up about that shot is renting the summer place by the end of this drive. After he called up, he took his usual sleeping pills and turned in. When he gave his statement the next day, he said he’d heard the shot while walking his dog in the woods back of his place. Those woods are a continuation of these. They’re the only woods like this around here, and apparently were planted when this was one big farm. My guess is, he’d never been out in them before and made that story up the next morning.”

“You think he did it?”

“Well, it’s guesswork, but we know his story isn’t true, and we know Tod’s reputation. Suppose he went down there and had a fight with Tod Holmes. Afterward, he could have set fire to the tinder-dry shingles, called the police to create a look of innocence, and gone to bed sure no one could get here before the cabin burned down.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

They were walking down the drive, the gravel crunching underfoot, and the sun blazing down from above. As they approached the patrol car, the policeman took out his handkerchief. “A hot day,” he said.

Dave Welch nodded. “It’ll be another warm night.”

For the first time since Diana had been arrested, Dave smiled.

Tonight he thought they might go for a drive.









Back | Next
Framed