Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

"I used to be."

"And you're working private now?"

"With Reliable," I said, and showed him a card. "But this matter doesn't involve them, and I don't have a client. I'm here because I think the Sturdevant killing might tie in with an old case of mine."

"How old?"

"Twelve years old."

"From when you were a police officer."

"That's right. I arrested a man with a history of violence toward women. He took a couple shots at me with a.25, so that was the major charge against him, and he wound up pleading to a reduced count of attempted aggravated assault. The judge gave him less time than I thought he deserved, but he got into trouble in prison and didn't get out until four months ago."

"I gather you figure it's a shame he got out at all."

"The warden at Dannemora says he killed two inmates for sure and was the odds-on suspect in three or four other homicides."

"Then why is he walking around?" He answered his own question. "Although there's a difference between knowing a man did something and being able to prove it, and I guess that goes double inside a state penitentiary." He shook his head, drank some coffee. "But how does he hook up with Phil Sturdevant and his wife? They weren't the kind of people who lived in the same world as him."

"Mrs. Sturdevant lived in New York at the time. That was before her marriage, and she'd been on the receiving end of some of Motley's violence."

"That's his name? Motley?"

"James Leo Motley. Mrs. Sturdevant — her name was Miss Cooperman at the time — dictated a statement accusing Motley of assault and extortion, and after sentencing he swore he'd get even with her."

"That's pretty thin. That was what, twelve years ago?"

"About that."

"And all she did was give the police a statement?"

"Another woman did the same thing, and he made the same threat. Yesterday she got this in the mail." I handed him the clipping. Actually it was the copy I'd received, but I couldn't see that it made any difference.

"Oh, sure," he said. "This ran in the Evening-Register ."

"It came all by itself in an envelope with no return address. And it was postmarked New York."

"Postmarked New York. Not back-stamped by the New York office, but marked to indicate it had been mailed there."

"That's right."

He took his time digesting this. "Well, I see why you thought it was worth getting on a plane," he said, "but I still don't see how your Mr. Motley could have been responsible for what happened in Walnut Hills the other night. Unless he was sending out hypnotic radio broadcasts and Phil Sturdevant was picking them up on the fillings in his teeth."

"It's that open-and-shut?"

"It sure as hell looks to be. You want to have a look at the murder scene?"

"Could I do that?"

"I don't see why not. We've got a key to the house somewhere. Let me get it and I'll take you over there and walk you through it."

The Sturdevant house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development consisting of expensive houses on lots of a half-acre or more. It was a one-story structure with a pitched roof and a fieldstone-and-redwood exterior. The property was nicely landscaped with evergreens, and there was a stand of birch trees near the property line.

Havlicek parked in the driveway and opened the front door with his key. We walked through an entrance hall into a large living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling. A fireplace ran the length of the far wall. It looked to be built of the same stone used for the house's exterior.

A gray broadloom carpet had been laid wall-to-wall in the living room, and there were some oriental area rugs laid here and there on top of it. One of these stretched in front of the fireplace. A chalk outline of a human being had been traced on the rug, with part of the legs extending onto the broadloom.

"That's where we found him," Havlicek said. "Way we reconstruct it, he hung up the phone and came over to the fireplace. You see the gun rack. He kept a deer rifle and a.22 there, along with the twelve-gauge he used to kill himself. Of course we took both rifles along for safekeeping, in addition to the twelve-gauge. He would have been standing right there, and he'd have put the shotgun barrel in his mouth and triggered the weapon, and you can see the mess it made, blood and bone fragments and all. That's been cleaned up some, just for purposes of sanitation, but there's photographs on file if you need to see them."

"And that's where he fell. He landed face up?"

"That's right. The gun was lying alongside him, about where you'd expect to find it. Place has a charnel-house stink to it, doesn't it? Come on, I'll show you where we found the others."

The children had been murdered in their beds. They'd each had a room of their own, and in each room I got to look at blood-soaked bedding and another chalk outline, one smaller than the next. The same kitchen knife had been used on all three children and their mother, and it had been found in the bathroom off the master bedroom. In the bedroom itself they'd found the corpse of Connie Sturdevant. Bloody bedclothing indicated she'd been killed in bed, but the chalk outline was on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"We figure he killed her on the bed," Havlicek said, "and then threw her down on the floor. She was wearing a nightgown, so she'd evidently gone to sleep, or at least to bed."

"How was Sturdevant dressed?"

"Pajamas."

"Slippers on his feet?"

"Barefoot, I think. We can look at the photos. Why?"

"Just trying to get the picture. What phone did he use to call you people?"

"I don't know. There's extensions all over the house, and whatever one he used he hung it up afterward."

"Did you find bloody fingerprints on any of the phones?"

"No."

"He have blood on his hands?"

"Sturdevant? He had blood all over him, for God's sake. He blew the better part of his head all over his living room. You tend to lose a fair amount of blood that way."

"I know. Was all of it his?"

"What are you getting at? Oh, wait a minute, I can see where you're heading. You're saying he'd have had their blood on him."

"They seem to have done a lot of bleeding. You'd think he'd have got some of it on him."

"There was blood in the bathroom sink, where he must have washed his hands. As to whether he got blood on himself that he couldn't wash off, on his pajamas, say, well, I don't know. I don't even know if you could tell their blood apart. They could all have the same type, for all I know."

"There are other tests these days."

He nodded. "DNA matchups and that sort of thing. I know about that, of course, but an all-out forensic workup didn't appear indicated. I guess I see your point. If the only blood on him was his own, how did he manage to kill them without getting his hands dirty? Except he did get 'em dirty, we found where he tried washing up."

"Then there would have to be foreign bloodstains on his person."

"Foreign meaning not his. Why? Oh, because we know he had blood on him to wash off, and you never get all of it. So if there's none of their blood on his hands or his clothing, and if we do find traces of their blood in the bathroom sink, then somebody else killed them." He frowned and thought about it. "If there had been a single false note at the crime scene," he said. "If we had had the slightest reason to suspect this was anything other than what it looked to be, why, we might have taken a longer look at the physical evidence. But for God's sake, man, he called us up and told us what he'd done. We sent a car out and found him dead. When you've got a confession and the killer dead by his own hand, it tends to put a damper on further inquiry."

"I understand that," I said.

"And I haven't seen anything here today to change my mind. You saw the padlock on the front door. We put that on after, on account of we had to force the door when we got here. He had it locked with the chain on, the way you'll do when you're settled in for the night."