questioning along with whoever else you want. And give me about an hour before you turn them loose.”
“All right,” Gentry said grudgingly. “We’ll be right over.”
Shayne took Madame Swoboda back to the others in the seance room and waited for the police. The medium seemed to have lost all her fire. She slumped into her chair at the head of the table and sat staring dully ahead.
As soon as Gentry arrived with two policemen, Shayne left with Lucy. He headed the car toward the northwest outskirts of the city where the twin houses of Milfords and Thains stood in the scraggly field.
The night was foggy and moonless and the damp air had a desolate feel. Its heaviness separated people, set up a barrier between them, isolated each individual in a gray world of fog. Shayne extended his right arm and drew Lucy across the seat until her shoulder rested against his chest. That was a little better. The night lost some of its feeling of desolation.
The trenches were deep in the redhead’s lean face. He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, tossed the dead match out the window and said, “I’m taking you along, angel, because I’ve got a feeling I can use your woman’s eye.” He paused, asking after a moment, “Lucy, did you notice anything strange about that tape recording tonight?”
She stirred under his sheltering arm. “Of course. It was darned strange. Who’d murder a child? Jimsey wasn’t heir to a fortune or anything.”
“That isn’t what I mean. He was only twelve when he died. At that age children, especially boys, are quite attached to their mothers. Yet, instead of saying ‘Mother and Daddy’ as he did the night before, he called only for ‘Daddy’ tonight.”
“That is strange.”
“Now the point is,” Shayne removed his arm from her shoulder, ran one hand quickly through his wiry hair, then put it back around her, “Madame Swoboda made the previous recordings and she did the natural thing-had Jimsey call for both parents. But whoever made tonight’s tape either knew that Jimsey was not attached to his mother, or knew nothing about Jimsey or twelve-year-old boys in general. What’s your choice?”
“That Jimsey wasn’t attached to Mabel. She’s not exactly the mother type-and whoever made the tape knew it.”
“That’s what I think.” Shayne stared bleakly into the saffron glow the car lights made in the fog.
“There are so many loose ends,” Lucy murmured. “How does D. L. come into it, for instance? Is it possible he sent someone to kill Clarissa so that her husband would get her insurance and be able to pay his debt?”
“It’s possible. But voodoo dolls and seances seem too roundabout for a gangster. De Luca’s men don’t spend time trying to scare people to death. We’d do better to concentrate on the others who had a motive for killing Clarissa.”
“You mean her husband? And Percy and Mabel Thain?”
“Yes.”
“It’s hard for me to see why it would have been any of them, Michael.”
“It’s coming clearer,” Shayne said. He turned in at the Milford driveway, stopped the car and helped Lucy out. Together they walked around to the back. The kitchen door was open as Clarissa had said it always was. Shayne switched on a light. A few unwashed dishes lay in the sink, a pot of cold coffee stood on the stove. Nothing here told anything.
They walked through the small dining el into the living room. A tape recorder stood on the table. When Shayne connected it, the rhythmic beat of piano boogie sounded. He switched it off and moved across the room to look at two miniatures hanging on the wall; one of Clarissa as a young girl, the other, undoubtedly of her sister, Mabel, as ugly then as she was now.
They covered the rest of the house quickly. The two bedrooms were small, each contained a double bed and two dressers, and revealed nothing of interest. Shayne went down the basement steps, leaving Lucy alone in the living room, but there was nothing to tell him anything there either.
Turning off the lights and closing the kitchen door, they went out to the car, drove down the Milford driveway, still shrouded in fog, and up the next drive to the Thain house.
The kitchen here was identical, but neater. The pots and pans sparkled; the stove and icebox were spotless.
“This is curious, Michael.” Lucy had opened one of the cupboards. “The dishes seem new. There’s a complete set-eight of everything. All the same.”
“What’s curious about it, angel?”
“There aren’t even any odd glasses,” she said. “Everyone I know uses a few jelly glasses to eke out.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“If Jimsey was twelve,” Lucy said, “we can assume that Mabel and Percy Thain have been married at least thirteen years. By that time the average housewife has broken up several sets of dishes. But she always hangs on to a few of them, just in case. It looks here as if Mabel must have thrown everything out lately and bought all new stuff.”
Remembering the austere woman with the pinched, unhappy mouth and bony finger, Shayne said, “Maybe she’s just careful and never breaks anything. She looks it.”
In the living room the unimaginative furniture looked new and unused too. Under the shiny desk stood a wastebasket with a few torn letters and some crumpled paper in it. Dumping its contents on the immaculate floor, Shayne sifted through it. Lucy turned at his low whistle. “What is it, Michael?”
Shayne’s blunt fingers held out a piece of torn cellophane. “Wrappings from a tape that would fit the recording machine we saw at Milfords’.”
“What of it? Mabel and Clarissa must have seen a lot of each other.”
“It’s only a supposition. But if you think back you’ll remember that Percy Thain was the only one who spoke during the seance. He seemed to know when the pauses were due. And the tape answered him pretty accurately.”
Lucy nodded, her eyes quickening with excitement. “You think he made the tape and switched it for the one on Madame Swoboda’s machine, and put the timer on the fuse box to turn off the lights?”
“It’s possible.”
“So he tried to kill Clarissa because he thought Clarissa ran over his son-”
“I wonder.” Shayne lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. “You asked earlier what motive there’d be for deliberately killing a child. Why should Clarissa have wanted to?”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was an accident.”
Shayne scowled. “Percy might have suspected that Clarissa ran over Jimsey, but he wasn’t sure. That’s obviously the reason he made the tape-in the hope of forcing her to admit it.” The scowl eased, but the redhead’s gaunt face remained sober.
When he had left these houses last night, Shayne had sensed that no one except possibly Dan Milford actually believed in the seances. Certainly, if Percy Thain had prepared the tape used tonight with the supposed voice of Jimsey on it, he knew that the seances were faked. Why, then, had he and Mabel attended them every night since Jimsey’s death?
The answer came almost at once. Percy Thain thought Clarissa believed in the seances. The voodoo doll was the opening gun; then the tape and the timer set on the fuse box to cut the lights. Thain had counted on pyramiding fear to force a confession from Clarissa. It was the kind of unrewarding plan a man mad with grief might conceive of.
If, indeed, it had been Thain who left Clarissa the voodoo doll and who had made tonight’s recording. It could have been Clarissa’s husband, Dan. It could have been her sister, Mabel Thain. It even could have been Clarissa herself, though the motivation for that was obscure.
Shayne snubbed out his cigarette in a spotlessly clean dish and said abruptly, “Come on, Lucy. Let’s finish going through the house before they come home.”
In the first bedroom a picture of Mabel stood on the man’s dresser, a picture of Percy on the vanity. The second was a boy’s room, brown corduroy bedspread on the single bed, a school banner on the wall, a desk with a student’s lamp over it, a baseball bat standing in the corner. But it was all too clean and neat. It was silent and sad. Even under Mabel’s compulsively precise housekeeping, some aura of the live boy would have emerged, but none was here now. The room, like the boy, was dead.
