Ричард Деминг - Hit and Run

“Everything go all right?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said. “I even caught a fish on the way in.”

“Oh? Do you like fishing?”

“Under ordinary circumstances,” Calhoun said. “It’s my favorite sport.”

“Then why didn’t you stay out awhile?” she asked seriously. “I wouldn’t have minded waiting.”

The question crystallized an opinion Calhoun had been forming. Beneath her beautiful exterior, Helena was almost psychotically callous. He remembered the casual way she had taken ice for their drinks from the tub containing the corpse of her husband. And now she was suggesting that Calhoun might enjoy a little fishing immediately after dumping the same corpse in Lake Erie.

He didn’t try to explain it to her. He just said, “I wasn’t particularly in the mood for fishing tonight.”

Back at the tourist court, they had one more job. Calhoun set Helena to work scrubbing out the tub that had been her husband’s bier for five days.

Then he informed her there wasn’t any reason, now that her cabin was corpseless, that she couldn’t sleep in her own bed that night. She gave him a mildly surprised look, but she made no objection.

He didn’t think it necessary to explain that musing on her homicidal tendencies had given him the feeling that it might not be too safe to go to sleep in the same room with her.

Calhoun locked his cabin door that night.

His last thoughts before going to sleep concerned what Helena’s feelings would be when she stepped into the tub for a shower the next morning. He stopped speculating because he knew it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest.

At twenty-eight Vance Kriegler suffered the frustrating experience of realizing he had chosen the wrong career. For five years he had worked in the Crime Lab of the Cleveland Police Department. Although he enjoyed his work, what he really wanted to be was a detective. His type of crime investigation involved peering through a microscope at bits of thread, ash, or dirt, weighing bullets taken from corpses, and other such purely laboratory routines. He never personally saw or talked to a victim or suspect of a crime, never questioned a witness, and in some cases never even knew the details surrounding the bits of evidence he was asked to work on.

He would have loved to go out in the field — as a Homicide officer, for instance — and try his hand at deduction at the scene of a crime. He was too good a lab technician, however. Also, you don’t start out as a detective on a major-city police force. You first attend a Police Academy, if you can pass entrance requirements, then work in uniform at such humdrum jobs as walking a beat or directing traffic for a considerable time — possibly years — before you can expect to move into a glamorous job such as homicide investigation. And Vance Kriegler was a civilian employee of the Crime Lab. He would have to start from scratch.

As this would involve not only the scrapping of a scientific education but a considerable drop in income, he settled for dreaming about what a brilliant criminal investigator he could have made if he hadn’t decided to major in physics and chemistry in college. He even had the physical appearance of a detective, he often told himself. Tall and lanky, with a narrow face, long nose, and bulging forehead, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the illustrations of Sherlock Holmes in the early Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books.

There was one advantage to Kriegler’s job that he was thankful for and that he wouldn’t have as a detective. He worked regular hours instead of sometimes being on the day shift, sometimes the night trick, and always being on call. Some people in the Crime Lab — those who went to the scenes of crimes to gather and preserve evidence — worked odd hours. But Vance Kriegler was strictly a lab worker, and there is rarely any rush to get a decision on a piece of evidence, once the police have the evidence in hand. If the police pick up a suspect at three in the morning and want a bit of cloth found clutched in the murder victim’s hand matched to a tear in the suspect’s clothing, they don’t rout a lab worker out of bed. They simply jail the suspect and wait till the lab opens in the morning.

Kriegler always had Sunday off. It was the only day he didn’t envy the detectives on the force. Because his second love was fishing. He spent every Sunday that weather permitted out in a boat on Lake Erie.

The morning after Calhoun dumped the body of Lawrence Powers into Lake Erie, Vance Kriegler arrived at the boat livery at seven A.M. He backed as close to the dock as he could get, lifted his five horsepower motor from the car trunk and laid it on the dock.

The old man who ran the boat livery came from his cottage and walked down to the dock.

“Morning, Sherlock,” the old man greeted him with a grin.

“Morning, Jonas,” Kriegler said.

He didn’t resent the nickname the old man had given him. He was rather proud of it, as a matter of fact. On one or two occasions when the fishing was particularly good, old Jonas had hired a boy to tend the livery and had gone out fishing with Kriegler. He had exhibited keen interest in the crime-lab technician’s work, and flattered by the interest, Kriegler had exaggerated his role as criminologist. The old man was under the impression that Kriegler went out on criminal cases, examined evidence at the scenes of crimes and deduced the meaning of the evidence on the spot. He always asked Kriegler’s opinion on any criminal case in the news, and if the lab technician had any inside dope, he usually spoke of the case as though he were personally in charge. If he knew nothing about it except what he had read in the papers, he simply said someone else had the case.

If Vance Kriegler had studied psychology instead of physics and chemistry, he would have recognized that he was addicted to what psychologists call “ego-building lies.”

Jonas said, “Just take your regular boat.” He looked out over the water. “Don’t look like much of a day. Still too calm for walleyes to start hitting.” The old man never lied about fishing conditions to his favored customers.

Kriegler dropped down into a twelve-foot Lyman tied to the dock, one of the livery’s better boats, which were reserved for regular patrons. Jonas handed down the motor, and Kriegler started to clamp it onto the transom.

“Had a regular mystery here last night,” the old man said. “Right down your alley. Tried the kind of deductin’ you do, but never could work it out. Guess I don’t have the same knack.”

“What was that?” Kriegler asked.

“Well, it really started Friday night,” Jonas said. “Feller and his wife drove up in a Buick convertible with New York plates. Feller wanted a boat for last night. Asked if I thought the yellows would be biting.”

“Yellows?”

“Yellow pike, he meant. What they call walleyes up around Buffalo. I’ve had fishermen from there before. I said, ‘You must be from up Buffalo way,’ and right quick he denied it. Said he was from Detroit. But I’ve had Detroit fishermen, and they call walleyes walleyes. Then next night when he come, some fellers was just bringing in a string of crappies. He called ’em calicoes. That’s what the fishermen I’ve had from up around Buffalo always called ’em. Calico bass.”

“Hmm,” Kriegler said, interested. “Think he actually was from Buffalo?”

“Somewhere near there, I’ll bet. I’ve had fishermen from all over, and never heard no one but fellers from that section call a walleye a yellow. Then too, he had New York plates on his car. But that ain’t all. When he showed up last night, he was dressed like no fisherman you ever saw. Had on a fishing jacket, a brand-new one, but otherwise he was dressed to kill. Wore a dress shirt without a tie, pants to some suit with a crease like a knifeblade, and shoes shined so bright you could see yourself in ’em. All his gear was brand spanking new, too. And cheap, like he’d just bought it for the occasion. Besides that, he didn’t do no fishing. What he was doing out on that lake for near two hours, I don’t know. But it weren’t fishing.”