Roy Carroll - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 4, April, 1953

I was about ten yards from their car when I saw Harry Owen get out of the driver’s side, walk around the car to the other door, open it and start to drag something out. I edged a little closer. What he was dragging out, I saw, was Vera. He was dragging her out by the legs and her skirt got hiked way up and the starlight gleamed on the whiteness of her thighs. Then Owen went around to the trunk compartment of the car and got out a spade. He held the spade under his arm while he dragged Vera’s corpse into the woods. I followed him and saw the clearing where he was going to bury her, and then I got out of there, fast. I drove home.

All that night I was so excited I could hardly sleep, hardly wait for tomorrow. I knew it would be better that way. Be more of a shock to him. When nothing had happened by morning, he’d pretty well figure he was safe. I waited most of the next day, too, until the middle of the afternoon. Then I took some mail into Harry Owen in his private office.

“Hi, Harry,” I said. “How’s Vera?”

He took it nice. He just looked up quietly and said: “Vera? Oh, you mean that little brunette you used to go with?”

The one I used to go with. I had to admire this guy, the way he’d got control of himself, even though he did look terrible. I said: “Yeah, that one.”

“She doesn’t work here any more,” he said, fussing with papers on his desk, not looking up. “I got a call this morning, said she was resigning, had another job.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yes, Van. She was a nice girl. Too bad you two had a falling out. I’m busy, Van. Anything special on your mind?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Vera. I’m wondering how she made that call this morning. Any phone booths up in those lonely Westchester woods? You know, where she’s tucked in for the long sleep?”

He jerked almost out of his skin. His head went back so hard his neck snapped. I’ve never seen such a scared, sick look in anybody’s eyes. His face looked like crumpled parchment. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me.

“She didn’t quit any job, did she, Harry?” I said. “She just took a one way ride along a dirt road, off the Hutchinson River Parkway, with a guy who had her in some trouble.”

“Van,” he said. His voice sounded like a frightened child’s. He tried to say something else but all he could do was keep saying my name over and over.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “I won’t be greedy. But I think it’s about time I got promoted, got a big raise, don’t you, Harry?”

He said: “Go away, Van, for a few minutes. Leave me alone. Let me think.”

“There’s nothing to think about. I’ve been here long enough to get promoted, get more pay. Nobody will think anything. Not like what they would think if they knew about that grave up there in Westchester. I could take the cops there easy. I know just where it is.”

“Wait a minute, Van,” he said. Some of the color was coming back to his face. He loosened his collar. His eyes narrowed a little. “You’re forgetting a few things. Vera and I were very — uh — circumspect. Nobody knows about our relationship. Not anybody at all. There’s nothing to tie her in with me. I went back to her place, last night, and got rid of all her stuff, left a note written on her typewriter, explaining to the landlord that she’d gotten a better job in L. A. That angle’s well covered. Van, the way it’s set up, you’d be the one the police would jump on. Everybody in the office knew you were going with her, then had a fight when she got in trouble. It will just look like she let it go for a month, then really went after you. You got panicky — and took that way out. That’s the way the police would figure it. So, you see, you’ve got no real hold on me.”

I stared at him, unbelievingly. That turned my guts over for a moment. But not for long. I laughed. “Nice try,” I told him. “But police work is super-scientific these days. When they go over your car, they’ll find proof that Vera was in it, last night. They’ll go over that car with vacuum cleaners, with a fine tooth comb. There’ll be plenty of evidence that you’re the killer and you’ll never in a million years get rid of it. The shoes you wore, the shovel.” I grinned at him. “A nice attempt to pass the buck, Harry, but it won’t work. Let’s talk about that raise some more.”

I got to be Supervisor of the mailing department that day. With a big raise. And from then on I began living it up. I got a better apartment, a lot of clothes. My boss was a real good guy. Whenever I ran short I could always borrow a hundred from him. He wasn’t in any sweat about me paying it back, either. Especially since I didn’t overdo it. Poor Harry Owen wasn’t enjoying life so much, though. He began to drink a lot. Even in the office, during the day, you could smell it on him. It started some talk but not much. So maybe business was bad or something and he was worried.

Once, I got curious, and asked him: “Why did you do it the hard way? Why didn’t you marry the kid? She wasn’t so bad.”

He told me, then, that he was already married, although separated, and that his wife was against divorce. I borrowed an extra fifty from him, on that.

During that next month, I began to take it easy on the job, too. When I felt like taking an afternoon off or something, I did it. If I felt like sitting around, reading for awhile, I did it. Who was going to say anything? Harry Owen? It griped a lot of people in the office. They got jealous. I didn’t care. The hell with them! One wise guy even said:

“Who does this guy Van think he is, a privileged character or something? I never saw a guy get away with so much. He must know where the body’s buried or something.”

The funny part was, he wasn’t kidding. He just didn’t realize it, that’s all.

This went on for a month. Then one morning, in front of the whole office, when I came in an hour late, Harry Owen told me: “Van, you come in late one more morning, take another afternoon off, or sluff on the job any more, and you’re through. You’re fired.”

I looked at him as though he’d said something in Arabic. “What?” I said. “Are you kidding?”

He’d aged badly in the last month but right now his jaw was set firmly. His eyes looked sunken way into his head and bloodshot from drinking so much, but they held mine steadily enough. “Try it and find out,” he said.

There was only one thing to figure. The guy’d gone crazy. He couldn’t do that to me. For this, for humiliating me like that, I was really going to rub his nose in some dirt. Now he was really going to pay. I’d get ten grand out of him, or else. From now on I’d bleed him dry. But it was late afternoon before I got into his office to see him. By then he was pretty drunk. A kind of controlled drunk, so that he could still talk all right, and sit fairly straight in his chair. But he was loaded, no question, in spite of that.

He didn’t even give me a chance. “Whatever you’re going to say, skip it,” he told me right off. “The honeymoon is over, Van. You have no more hold on me.”

I got so mad I felt as though I was swelling, like a puff adder. My collar got too tight. “I haven’t, huh?” I said.

“No, Van.” He showed his teeth in a ghastly grin. “I moved it. It isn’t where you saw me put it, any more. I put it where nobody’ll ever find it. Never. So now what can you prove?”

It took me a moment to get it through my head. I said: “I can still go to the cops.”

“Sure,” he said. “And they’ll go up there and find nothing, and slap you around for bothering them.”

“Wait a minute. You couldn’t have moved her. She’s been there a month. She’d have been a mess.”