Брендан Дюбуа - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2006

The revolver Dad had halfway drawn was useless against that particular move. Even Mom’s deadeye marksmanship, now that she could pull out her target pistol, was useless too; the angle made it impossible for her to shoot away the gun and not kill Jason.

“Jason, no!” I heard Cathy cry. “Please! I’m sorry!”

Cathy’s presence must have been what threw Jason off. He knew Dad was coming eventually because Mom had told him so; he was expecting Kirsten; Liz was a familiar friend, the one who’d hidden him out secretly through his last finals, I found out later.

But when he saw his cousin there, crying and crying out, he was up against an eventuality he hadn’t considered and wasn’t prepared for. So all at once there were tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice. “I’ve... you just stay back, Cath. I’ve already done this to one person.”

“But the person was already cold and dead,” Dad responded. “For days. And you’re not.”

Mom and Dad exchanged a quick, communicative look and Dad nodded. “Berkham’s. Right.”

None of the rest of us understood, except possibly Cathy, but no explanation came because things started happening too fast.

“Oh, Jason! Why don’t you stop whining and grow up!” Kirsten said in a whiny tone from behind Dad’s shoulder.

Jason tried to answer her, speaking through Dad: “You don’t need to hide, Kirsten. Honestly. This was never for you. I just wanted you to pay attention! I wanted someone to pay attention! So now... you’re all paying attention!”

“Don’t!”

“No!”

Liz and Cathy seemed to shout together before Cathy stepped much nearer and Jason ordered, “Stay Back, Cath! I mean it!”

“Shoot me, then, Jason, if you have to, but don’t shoot anyone — that’s best! Nothing’s that bad if you didn’t—”

“Get away, I said! And — and everyone, all of you, move! Over by Mrs. Carr! Do you understand! All of you!”

So then came a mass shuffling toward Mom, with more cries and protests, followed by Jason circling around toward the still open apartment door with the weird pistol held up to his head. “Mr. and Mrs. Carr?” he said finally. “I’m sorry for all the trouble. I really am. Liz? You’re a good friend. Cathy — Cathy, I love you. Honestly.” A long pause. “You’re the last, I guess, Kirsten. And you can go straight to hell for all I care now.”

Only as he stood there making farewell speeches with his back to the open door, I slipped up behind him from outside in the hall — I was the backstop, remember — and sort of slapped the gun away from his head. It flew off and bounced around without firing, and I had Jason’s arms pinned before he could even respond.

And so that’s pretty much how Steve Carr turned out not to be an entire flop in his first real detective case — brawn far more than brain.

Dad has fudged quite a few cases over the years to keep what Mom calls “the innocent guilty” from facing authority, but mostly when no serious harm was done. In this affair, the car fire alone was serious enough, not just mischief, and so we four, Dad, Mom, Cathy Lindner, and I, escorted Jason to the Appleton police station, where he turned himself in, basically in a state of shock but looking relieved. Cathy promised to post bail as soon as it could be managed, and seeing the two of them say good-bye in front of a bunch of strangers made me decide I didn’t know enough about the ins and outs of human feelings.

After that we had dinner in a good but noisy restaurant, then the folks and Cathy checked into a motel with me tagging along, and finally, at about nine that night, we all got together for the full explanation which, as usual, only Dad knew.

“The crucial point, Steve,” he began, addressing me because I was being a little querulous about the delay, “was the point we didn’t know. Jason all of a sudden called up Cathy at work on Monday morning and announced that he was coming back up here to hunt for a job. All right, fine. But why? He and Cathy were—”

“We weren’t really speaking,” she said. “I was mad at him and he was mad at me, and we both felt guilty about... various things. It was mostly my fault, though, because I never gave him a chance. I was so hard on him, I’m ashamed. I wanted him to hurt a little, the way I had, before we made friends again.”

“Yes,” said Mom. “Except that, in his state of crisis he took it as absolute rejection.”

“Anyway,” I grumbled, “somehow he hatched a crazy plot. So what is this mysterious point I still don’t know?”

“It’s why he was fired summarily on Sunday night from his job at Berkham Truck Rentals. He wasn’t scheduled to work Friday or Saturday — or Sunday either — but he was called in unexpectedly that last morning. It wasn’t to do his usual work, which was cleaning vehicles overnight.”

Mom took over then: “It was a holiday weekend, you see, and there had also been that horrible storm. So not many trucks were under lease, but breakdowns among those on the road were doubtless far more numerous statistically and probably more difficult to confront with an understaffed holiday crew. That much was evident.”

“And so,” Dad picked up, “our guess was that Jason had been called to go out as a helper on some kind of emergency roadside service. Since I knew that the motto of the company was ‘We Specialize,’ I was expecting something a little different when I drove over there this morning, but I honestly didn’t see anything that gave me a clue. Lots of vehicles geared to specific use, sure, but nothing that connected to the problem.

“When I asked about Jason, though, the manager on duty practically shouted me out of the place. I yelled back that by not opening up he might just be allowing a crime to be committed, and he said that if one did happen he wasn’t responsible — and only if it did would he talk to the police. A real nice fellow, and logical too.”

“So you came up here still not knowing why Jason was axed.”

“The official explanation was ‘carelessness,’ but consider the time sequence. He and Cathy had argued and weren’t speaking all Friday and Saturday; he was called in for emergency work Sunday morning and got back to the Lindner house in the middle of the night. At ten or so on Monday morning he rented the stud gun, putting up two hundred dollars in cash; an hour later he called Cathy to say he was heading up here. Late Thursday and again Friday morning he tried to call Cathy collect, meaning he was out of money and desperate to talk. Friday afternoon he posted the announcement about the car fire—”

“And consider also, Steve,” Mom interrupted, “the rather forlorn, self-pitying humor of the wording. When you asked this afternoon which was worse, suicide or murder, we all were thinking — or I was — that murder was the greater worry at least, but in fact the young man I spent a silent hour with later was being consumed by despair, not guilt.”

At that statement she gave me one of her patented penetrating looks, and a shift occurred in my mental perspective. “You don’t mean to say he robbed a grave, do you? And brought the corpse with him to Appleton?”

Dad said, “Close enough. When I went in to see the police, the autopsy had just been completed, and it found that the body in the car had been dead for at least eight days and frozen solid for part of that time, meaning, for one thing, that Jason hadn’t murdered him, and the nail in the forehead was simply more window dressing à la Harnisch. The true cause of death was heart failure, and even though it was charred on the outside, the corpse had the physical characteristics of a man in poor health around seventy years old.”

Mom said, “No doubt, your father immediately placed a call to Berkham Truck Rentals and, with the backing of the Appleton police, forced the true story out of the recalcitrant shift manager. But as yet he hasn’t divulged that truth even to his wife.”