charms.
She said, “Chief, there’s a Mr. Hammer from New York to see you. He’s a detective working-oh… Certainly, I’ll send him right in.”
The fact that I was important enough to rate immediate entry to the sheriff’s inner sanctum thawed out the policewoman just a little. She gave me a nice smile as she knocked on the wood-and-glass door just off the bullpen.
“Come in!” a male voice called.
She nodded and said, “Eleven.”
“What?”
“I take an early lunch. Eleven.”
She winked, went off, and I was thinking, Well, I’ll be damned, and strolled on in.
The sheriff wore a business suit with a dark-blue tie, not a uniform, and might have been a banker. He had a rugged, broad-shouldered look that had probably served him well as a political candidate, though his blond hair was thin and ineffectively combed over. Better stick to local elections.
He half-rose and extended his hand. I took it and his grip was firm. His smile was as business-like as his suit as he gestured to the visitor’s chair opposite his big mahogany desk.
They had some money to spend in Suffolk County, thanks to the tourist trade-this office was richly wood paneled with wooden filing cabinets, and my brogans were resting on carpet, not wood or tile. There was a big fancy county seal on the wall behind the chief, as well as some framed diplomas and photos, several of them color shots of him grinning with buddies in the Pacific. Navy guys in a tropical clime.
“I’ve heard of you, of course, Mr. Hammer. We do get the city papers all the way out here in the sticks.”
“I wouldn’t call Wilcox the sticks, Sheriff Jackson. You’ve got a handsome little town here. Population’s around, what? Twenty-five thousand?”
“Just twenty, but it swells to fifty during the season. Your notoriety in a number of cases isn’t the only reason I had no trouble recognizing your name, Mr. Hammer. Just this morning, in the press, you were mentioned in relation to the Sharron Wesley murder in Sidon.”
“Yeah, I’m looking into that.”
“In cooperation with the police department there?”
“What police department?”
His smile was immediate. “If I remember right, from one particular profile the News did of you and your colorful career, you served in the Pacific, too.”
“I did.”
“I’m glad that’s behind us.”
“Yeah. Listen, I was just talking to my friend Dave Miles out at his plant-”
“Terrific guy, Dave. How the hell is he?”
“Well, he’s fine as long as he doesn’t try to run a marathon. He pointed out some similarities between the murders of Doris Wilson and Sharron Wesley.”
He frowned. With his high forehead, that was a lot of frown. “Boy, I’ve read about the Wesley thing in the papers, but I can’t say I see any connection.”
“I didn’t say connection. I said similarity. The victims were both strangled, the bodies were unclothed, and the crime scenes were staged. As if for effect. Also, one body was on the beach and another in a park off the beach.”
“Well, not the same beach.”
“Not the same stretch of it, no. My understanding is you haven’t turned anything up on the Wilson case.”
He shook his head glumly. “Very little.”
“The similarities are there. I agree they are inexact, but Dave seems to think it may be the same killer as whoever tortured and killed those girls in that barn outside town, a few months ago.”
“That isn’t our case. That took place within Wilcox city limits.” He reached for the phone. “I can arrange for you to talk to Chief Chasen, if you like…”
“No. Not just yet, anyway. I have to say, I’m not convinced these murders are connected myself. It’s even possible someone killed Sharron Wesley and tried to make it look vaguely similar to this other killing, to muddy the waters.”
“That kind of thing has happened.”
“But I want to be up on this case. Two strangulations, two naked female corpses, there’s enough there that I want to carry any information available into my inquiry into the Wesley killing.”
He had started nodding halfway through that. “I’m afraid we have very little.”
“What do you have? Maybe if I could see the file-”
“There’s really not enough to bother getting it out. Doris’ car was found outside a roadhouse where she’d been seen dancing.”
“Was she there with a date?”
“No. Not even a girl friend. Some of her gang from work hung out there, and it was typical of that crowd to show up alone or in pairs or even in groups. She was a little tipsy-the autopsy showed a fairly high alcohol content in her bloodstream-and left about eleven, by herself.”
“This is that roadhouse between here and Sidon?”
“Right. The Hideaway. We questioned everybody there, from Doris’ co-worker friends to every waitress and both bartenders. Even the darn cooks, we talked to, and they never stuck their heads out of the kitchen.”
“Somebody grabbed her in that parking lot.”
“That is our theory. But we checked it. I even borrowed some lab boys from New York to go over that parking lot, and you know what they came up with? Gravel.”
“Anything else in that file?”
“Nothing pertinent.”
“Okay.” I rose and shook his hand again. I nodded toward the framed photos. “That’s the Philippines, right?”
“Uh, yeah.” He gave me an embarrassed grin. “We were on this island, handling supply lines. The Japs were hiding in these caves in the hills, and it got a little hairy. You know, they’d come out at night, looking for food. Grenade went off and I took some shrapnel. And you know, there were these native girls, but you could catch eight kinds of clap if you weren’t careful. Where were you?”
“In a fox hole,” I said, standing at his door. “Call Chief Chasen and tell him I’m stopping by, would you?”
Chief Chasen’s office was spare, but then so was the chief, a lanky Ichabod Crane kind of guy in a blue uniform. He was about forty and had an Adam’s apple that bobbed as he spoke and fought with his words for your attention.
“You know, there might be a tie-up at that,” he said, his voice a mellow baritone that might attract the ladies if he wasn’t otherwise a scarecrow. Of course, it had worked for Sinatra.
I said, “With the Wesley killing, you mean?”
“Yeah. Let me make a call.” He got on his phone and asked for “the paper evidence from the March 27 killing.”
Then he returned his attention to me. “The night of their murders, those two girls were seen in a bar in Sidon.”
“Sidon, huh? They were of drinking age?”
“Yeah, they were college girls from the city, but they were both twenty-one. Anyway, they took a booth at this bar. They weren’t with anybody, they were just laughing and talking. We questioned several local guys who went over and talked to them, just flirting, not getting anywhere. The girls said they were meeting some fellas somewhere, and that’s as much as we got.”
“Okay. So how did they wind up in that barn back in Wilcox?”
“Their car was found just outside Sidon. They’d had a flat. We had a witness come forward who was driving by when the two girls were getting into a fancy car.”
“What kind of fancy car?”
