“Do the best you can.”
She nodded. “But he wouldn’t call. Not with the police looking for him.”
“He might, Miss Sherman,” the chief said. “Judging from what we’ve found out about him, he very well might.”
CHAPTER VIII
Friday, 1:10-1:40 P.M.
It was early afternoon when Fellows got back to Stockford. Detective Sergeant Wilks was eating lunch at the chief’s desk in the little office behind the main room, munching a sandwich and washing it down with coffee from a thermos when the chief came in.
“You get coffee on my papers,” Fellows said, “and I’ll skin you.”
“Papers? You mean the crossword puzzle and the movie schedule and the circulars?”
“I’ve got your pay reports in there too.” Fellows went to the chest-high windows that looked out onto the green from the ground level of the basement. The room was small with a rolltop desk and swivel chair, a wooden table, three glass-faced cabinets, and a straight chair crowded in its confines. The walls were a neutral tan and decorated with a large collection of nude calendar girls in color, the accumulation of choice selections over the years. Fellows turned from the window, glanced at the gathering of bare bosoms and flirtatious smiles overlooking the desk, and said, “Have you been eating all day, or did you get anything else done?”
“You’re sounding like a man without a lunch,” Wilks said, chewing. “That picture of John Campbell came in from Erie this morning. I showed it to Watly. It’s not the same man.”
“What about the suitcases?”
“We had a locksmith in. He opened them up for us. Nothing but odd items and women’s clothes. No identification or laundry marks, and the clothes are off-the-rack things you buy in any department store. I’ve got the inventory list here on your desk, but it’s probably lost under two feet of papers by now. Oh yes. We found a blouse with a missing button that fits the one you turned up in that back room bureau. Unger’s got the suitcases out front under the desk if you want to see for yourself.” Wilks swung Fellows’s chair around. “Want one of my sandwiches?”
“Naw. I’m on a diet. I’m trying to give up lunch. I’ll take some of your coffee, though.”
“You would.” Wilks drained his from the thermos cap and refilled it, handing it to the chief. “There’s milk and sugar in it.”
“I didn’t eat breakfast, so that’ll make it all right.”
“Says you.” Wilks watched Fellows sip it. He said, “Nope. No luck in most places. In twenty-four hours all we’ve found out is the identity of the victim.”
“Says you,” the chief retorted, hooking a leg over the edge of the table. “We don’t even have that. We don’t know who either of them are.”
“You mean the address was a phoney?”
“Not a phoney. The girl was alive.” Fellows went on to detail his interview with Jean Sherman.
Wilks whistled when he finished. “What kind of a guy is he? Are you meaning to say he killed a girl, then hopped a train for New York for the weekend and then brings another girl back to the house for the night and makes love to her in one room while the corpse is lying in the other?”
“If he killed the girl before he went to New York, that’s the way it has to be.”
“And how do you account for Jean Sherman being a ‘J.S.’? What does he do, go through the train asking every young girl he sees what her initials are?”
“Why would he care what they are? He wouldn’t be trying to set the girl up for anything.”
“You mean the similarity was just a freak coincidence, huh?”
“Coincidence, but not a freak, Sid. J.S. are probably the commonest initials there are. He took the paper Jean wrote her address on with him, remember? He didn’t leave it out for bait.”
“If her story is true, that is.”
“If it’s true. Of course the alternative is something like him leaving J.S. in the house to go to New York and finding her still there when he gets back with a new lady friend. There’s a fight and the victim gets it either from him or from the new girl, or from them both.”
“That stinks too. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sure it stinks. Doesn’t life?”
Wilks said thoughtfully, “I guess no matter how you tell it, though, the initials don’t matter. So it’s coincidence. But what about the Sherman girl? You think she’s involved more than she says?”
“I think she’s telling the truth, but that’s only my opinion. At any rate, I stopped off at headquarters in Bridgeport and got their help. They’re standing by for a call from the girl at any time and they’re also putting a watch on her house just in case Campbell decides to come see her.”
Wilks snorted. “Come and see her? That’s a laugh.”
“He’s got her address.”
“And he’s got his name in the papers too. You don’t think he’s going to walk into that trap?”
“It’s not in the papers much. It made headlines around here, and it got an item on the front page in Bridgeport and New Haven, but this isn’t the kind of story they follow up on—not unless the body turns out to be somebody important. Jean Sherman never even saw it in the paper.”
“I still say he’d never try it. He’s not going to take that chance.”
Fellows said, “But we aren’t going to pass up that chance either. We need Bridgeport’s help in finding out about the girl. It’s part of the whole thing, checking her out and seeing if her alibi stands up.”
“You mean if she went to New York as she says?”
The chief nodded. “And what she was doing the rest of this month. Let’s face it, this bluebeard technique is a little too fiendish to sound real. She might know Campbell better than she lets on— and that’s another reason for keeping her under surveillance.” He finished the coffee and returned the thermos cap.
