ashamed of his feeling and its expression of petty vandalism.
With Sergeant Bobo Fuller at his side, although a half step to the rear, he descended from the green on a gentle slope and moved rapidly across clipped grass toward a place where the ground dipped suddenly to form a rather steep bank. Sergeant Fuller, whose name was really something besides Bobo that almost everyone had forgotten, did not lag the half step because he found it impossible to stay abreast. Neither did he lag as a pretty deference to rank. Sergeant Fuller did not give a damn about rank, to tell the truth. He didn't give a damn about Lieutenant Marcus either, and that was why he maintained the half step interval. He considered Marcus a self- made snob who read books and put on airs, and the interval was subtle evidence of a dislike of which the sergeant was rather proud and the lieutenant was vaguely aware.
Going over the lip of the bank, Marcus dug in his heels again, this time with the perfectly valid purpose of retarding his descent. At the bottom he was on level ground that again tilted, after a bit, into a gentle slope. Fifty yards ahead was a small lake glittering in the morning sunlight. Between Marcus and the lake, somewhat nearer to him and almost in the shade of a distinguished and gnarled oak, was a group composed of four men and a boy. The boy was holding, in one hand, a fishing rod with a spinning reel attached; in the other, a small green tackle box. Two of the four men were uniformed policemen who had been dispatched from police headquarters to maintain the status quo for Marcus, who had not been on hand at the time, and a third was, as it turned out, a caretaker who had walked into a diversion on his way to work across the course. The fourth man was lying on his face on the grass, his head pointed in the direction of the bank behind Marcus, and Fuller, and he was, Marcus had been assured, dead. That was, in fact, why Marcus and Fuller were there. They were there because the man on the grass was dead in a manner and place considered suspicious by public authorities hired to consider such things, which included Marcus, who also secretly considered the whole development something of an imposition.
Speaking to the pair of policemen, with the air of abstraction that had contributed to his reputation for snobbishness, he knelt beside the body to make an examination that he felt certain would yield nothing of any particular significance. This pessimistic approach was natural to him, and he was always surprised when things turned out better than he had hoped or expected. Well, the man was dead, of course. He had been shot, Apparently in the heart, by what appeared to have been a small caliber gun. From the condition of the body, he judged that the shooting had occurred not many hours earlier, for rigor mortis was not advanced. These things were always hedged about by qualifications, however, and it was doubtful that the so-called estimate of the coroner, who was presumably on the way, would be much closer to the truth than Marcus's guess. Sometime between was the way Marcus expressed it somewhat bitterly to himself. Between midnight, say, and dawn.
Still with the irrational feeling of being imposed upon, Marcus made other observations and guesses. Age, thirty to thirty-five. Height, about five-eleven. Weight, give or take ten pounds on either side of one-seventy. Hair, light brown and crew cut. Eyes, open and blind and blue. White shirt, blood stained. Narrow tie, striped with two shades of brown, and summer worsted trousers, also brown. Brown socks, brown shoes. Lying on the grass, about five paces away, a jacket to match the pants. In the right side pocket of the pants, coins amounting to the sum of one dollar and twenty-three cents. Also a tiny gold pen knife. In the left hip pocket, buttoned in, a wallet. In the wallet, besides eighteen dollars in bills, several identifying items, including a driver's license and a membership card in Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Well, Marcus thought, they won't have to pay off on this one. According to both the license and the membership card, the dead man was someone named Alexander Gray. With all items officially appropriated and in his own jacket pocket, Marcus walked over to the brown jacket on the grass and found nothing in it. Nothing at all.
'Who found the body?' he asked of whoever wanted to answer.
'The kid found him,' one of the policemen said.
Marcus turned to the boy, about twelve from the looks of him, who still held the rod and reel and tackle box as if he feared that they, too, might be appropriated. Marcus had no such intention, of course, but he wished he could borrow them and spend the day using them instead of doing what he had to do. Marcus liked kids, but he seldom showed it. It was his misfortune that he seldom showed anything, and much of the little he did show was a kind of characteristic distortion of what he actually thought and felt.
'What's your name, sonny?' he said.
'William Peyton Hausler,' the boy said.
It was obvious that he was stating his name fully in an attempt to secure a status, however limited by his minority, that would establish his innocence and insure the respectful treatment to which he was entitled.
'You live around here?'
'On the street over there, the other side of the golf course.' He gestured with the hand holding the rod and reel to indicate the direction.
'Looks like you're going fishing.'
'Yes, sir. In the lake.'
'You fish here often?'
'Pretty often. The manager of the club said it was all right.'
'It doesn't look like much of a lake. Any fish in it?'
'It's stocked. Crappie and bass, mostly. Club members fish in it. I'm not a member — my dad isn't — but the manager said it was all right for me to fish.'
'What time was it when you found the body?'
'I don't know exactly. It hadn't been light long. About six-thirty, I guess. I wanted to get to the lake early because the fish bite better then.'
'That's what I hear. Early morning and late evening. What'd you do when you found the body?'
'Nothing much. I walked up close to it, and I spoke a couple of times to see if there'd be any answer, but there wasn't, and I was pretty scared because I could tell something was wrong, and just then Mr. Tompkins came along.'
'You touch anything at all?'
'No, sir. Not a thing.'
'Who's Mr. Tompkins?'
'This is him. He's one of the caretakers.'
'Okay. Thanks, sonny. You better go and see if you can still catch some fish.'
The boy went on down the gentle slope to the little lake, and Marcus turned to Tompkins, who was a leathery-looking man who appeared to be in his sixties. He was dressed in faded twill pants and a blue work shirt of heavy material like the ones that Marcus had worn with roomy bib overalls as a kid.
'Is that right?' Marcus said. 'What the kid told me?'
'I guess so. Far as I know. When I got here, he was just standing and staring at the body. He looked scared.'
'No wonder. Kids don't find a body every day. What'd you do?'
'I looked at the body, not touching it, and I could see a little blood where it had seeped out in the grass. I told the kid to stay and watch things while I hustled up to the Club House to call the police.'
'The Club House open that early in the morning?'
'No. There's a phone booth on the back terrace. I happened to have a dime.'
'Lucky you did. I usually don't. After you called the police, did you come back here and wait?'
'That's right. Just came back and waited with the kid and didn't bother anything.'
'Good. You did just right. I don't suppose you know this guy?'
'The dead man, you mean? I never saw him before.'
'All right. You might as well go on to work.' Marcus turned away to a uniform. 'You go up to the Club House and bring the manager down here. You can tell him what's happened if he's curious.'
The caretaker and the policeman went off in different directions, one toward the Club House and the other, presumably, toward whatever building sheltered the equipment for taking care, and Marcus began to prowl slowly the area around the body. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, just anything he could find, and he found nothing. No significant marks in the clipped grass growing from hard earth. No small item conveniently dropped that might later point to a place or person. Not even, he thought bitterly, a lousy cigarette butt.
The brown jacket bothered him. Why the hell had the dead man taken it off? Before he was dead, of course. And why had he left it lying on the ground five yards or so from where he had walked to be killed? Unless he had
