“And,” Fellows added, “the woman wouldn’t be his wife. A wife would object to using an assumed name. Probably one or both of them were married to someone else too.”
“Why married, necessarily?”
“Same reason. Assumed name.”
“And he probably meant to kill her all along. It’s a nice love-nest setup and he could sell it to her for that, but it’s even better for a murder. She’s been dead quite a spell already and nobody would still suspect anything if he hadn’t stolen the leases.”
“That’s the one thing I wonder about,” Fellows said. “Cutting up the body was obviously for purposes of disposal. Why did he steal the lease before he finished getting rid of it?” He added slowly, “Cold feet?”
“Cold house.”
“Or a weak stomach?” Fellows turned the comer onto Highland Road and pulled up behind a lone car parked in front of the house.
“Whose is that?” Wilks wondered.
They found the answer up on the lawn where patrolman Manny was keeping the house under surveillance. With him was a young man in his early thirties, wearing a brown coat and hat with a press card in the band. The man held out a hand as the chief came up and said, “I’m Hilders of the Bridgeport Courier. I’ve been assigned to the case.”
Fellows said, “That’s a coincidence. I’ve been assigned to it too.”
“You going inside now?”
“That’s right. The sergeant and me—only.”
“Give a guy a break.”
“If we find anything, we’ll let you know, Mr. Hilders. But I wouldn’t suggest waiting out here in the cold. I’ll be making my statements at headquarters.”
“And if you don’t mind, Chief, I’ll be making my investigation on my own.”
“O.K. You find something, you can let us know.” He said to the patrolman, “Any trouble out here?”
“No, sir. Just one car of sight-seers about an hour ago. I didn’t let them get out.”
“All right. Your relief will be out any minute.” Fellows went on to the stoop with Wilks and fitted the key Restlin had turned over to him into the lock. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the reporter, snapped on the lights in the frigid and forbidding living room, and went through the rest of the house, turning on lights in all the rooms. He ended in the kitchen where he turned slowly around. “Pretty bare,” he said. “Our friend was kind of careful about clues.”
“He was,” Wilks said. “No papers in the wastebaskets, no writing, no fingerprints, no nothing that I could see.”
“Except a hair on the pillow in one bedroom and a button in a dresser drawer. We’ll have to see if that button fits any of the clothes in those suitcases there.”
“You want to break them open, Fred?”
Fellows looked down at the suitcases and shook his head. “Kind of nice merchandise to bust. We’ll let a locksmith do it in the morning.”
They started an examination of the house then. Fellows went to the rear bedroom and looked in at the stripped mattress. Two of the three windows still had their shades down. “This is the larger bedroom,” he said. “Two-view exposure and three windows. The other bedroom has two windows and one view. The button was in the drawer here, but the hair was in the other bedroom. They obviously slept there, but if the button fits any of the woman’s clothes, she must have had them here. Now why would they sleep in the worse room?”
“If he’s married and went back to his wife at night, one room could be for love and the other for sleeping.”
“Now, Sid, do you think that makes sense?”
“It makes as much sense as the question. What’s the answer got to do with finding Campbell?”
“If we can find the answers to enough questions, we’ll turn him up.”
“That’s not the kind of question I’d ask.”
Fellows turned. “All right, Sid, what questions have you got?”
“I’d ask why was the bed stripped? Why are the shades down? And I’d answer by saying that if the house was completely furnished, including linen, and the sheets aren’t in the place, he did something with them.”
“You didn’t find the sheets?”
“They aren’t here, Fred. What linen there is is on a shelf in the kitchen closet and they’re clean. My guess is she was probably killed here or hidden here and he got rid of the sheets to hide the fact he had a body rotting on them for a week.”
“O.K., I’ll go along. Next question?”
“What did he do with the missing parts of the body? The only shovel in the house is a snow shovel. There’re no signs of digging on the property and the ground’s like a rock anyway. There’s no new-laid concrete in the cellar. That, plus the burned saw and knife means to me he burned those parts.”
Fellows laughed. “I guess that’s a fair deduction all right.”
“Those are the kind of questions that lead us somewhere, Fred. What difference does it make where they slept?”
“I don’t know, Sid. I just ask them to satisfy myself, I guess. For instance, I’d kind of like to know where he burned the head, arms, and legs.”
“The furnace, of course. And maybe the fireplace. We’ll know when the lab analyzes the ashes.”
“But if the fireplace, why, Sid? You try it there and you’ll smell up the neighborhood.”
“Which may be why the guy got panicked and didn’t finish the job.”
Fellows clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re quite a detective, Sid. I’d promote you except that’d put me out of a job and I’m not aiming to retire for quite a spell.”
“What you mean is you get the same answers.”
“I’ve got to go along with you. My only problem is the whys.”
“The girl was pregnant. I can answer that one.”
Fellows edged past him in the tiny hall and looked into the bathroom. “You’re making an assumption there, Sid. The doc hasn’t said that yet.”
“Why else were some of her organs removed other than to hide the fact?”
The
