“They write out sales slips?”
“I don’t know, Chief. I didn’t ask them about that. I only asked if they could tell me when it was sold—if they had any record. They said they didn’t.”
Fellows picked up his phone and called them. They didn’t make out sales slips, they told him. Everything was cash over the counter.
“How much would a knife and saw like that come to?” the chief asked.
“The knife is two and a quarter and that particular saw sells for two seventy-five. Five dollars even. That’s not counting the sales tax.”
“How about checking through your files for purchases of exactly five dollars for us? We might be able to pinpoint it that way.”
“We don’t have any files, Chief.”
Fellows made a face. “Come on, now. Your cash register totals up your purchases, doesn’t it? It turns out slips, doesn’t it?”
The manager laughed. “We don’t have a cash register. We have a cash drawer. We start in the morning with twenty dollars in change in the drawer and at the end of the day we add up what we’ve got and subtract twenty to get our daily intake. I can tell you the total amount of money we took in on any given day, but I couldn’t tell you any individual purchases.”
Fellows hung up. He said sadly, “You wait all day for a break and when you get it, it doesn’t do you a damned bit of good.” The next report, however, promised more. Patrolman Harris called in from Peck’s grocery store on Williams Street. “Chief, this place delivered an order to Campbell on Friday the thirteenth. The boy isn’t in right now. He’s out delivering, but he’ll be back in a little while.” To Fellows it was a chance to escape from his office. He said, “You hold him there. I’m coming out,” and hung up the phone.
Peck’s was a small, dingy store occupying the first floor of a frame house that, in other respects, resembled the rest of the frame houses that lined both sides of the street. It was a private operation unconnected with the chains and catered to the neighborhood because of its convenience and because it made deliveries. Mr. Peck, a short, fat, bald-headed man with glasses and an apron soiled with the day’s doings, was waiting on a woman customer who kept eyeing patrolman Harris when Fellows opened the glass-paned front door and came in.
“My boy ain’t back yet,” Mr. Peck said, putting the woman’s groceries into a brown paper bag. “You gotta wait.”
Fellows waited. He opened a bag of potato chips and fed Harris and himself from it until the woman left. Then he laid a half a dollar on the counter and waited for his change. “You say the name was Campbell? The Campbell who lived at 2 Highland Road?”
“That’s the one. Yup.”
“How many deliveries did you make to them?”
“Just that one.”
“Mr. Campbell ever shop here?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You know all your customers?”
“Most of ’em.”
“This one would be about six feet tall, middle thirties, wearing a tan or a dark coat, slender build. He’d do his shopping after five o’clock.”
“Can’t remember anybody like that.”
A blue and battered panel truck turned from the street and rattled into the drive alongside the house to the back. There was a banging of the truck’s loose rear doors and a youth came in the back way wearing an apron, blue jeans, and a quilted cloth jacket. He was lugging a wooden crate of empty bottles and a couple of cardboard cartons in red, raw hands.
There was a room out back behind the store proper. Its floor was rough and unswept and cartons, opened and sealed, were stacked against the walls. The chief and Harris were waiting for him there and Fellows said, “We’re police officers. What’s your name, son?”
“Who, me? Andy, sir. Andy Palekowski.” He was short and thin with a shock of tousled dark hair and a small wizened face. He dumped the crates and rubbed his red hands.
“Mr. Peck tells me you delivered groceries to a party named Campbell two weeks ago today. You remember anything about it?”
His eyes widened. “Geez. That’s the dame that got killed, ain’t it? I was telling Mr. Peck I almost got to see her.”
“You remember the delivery?”
He nodded eagerly. “Sure I remember it. I gave the stuff to the guy who killed her. He paid me. He touched my hands. He touched them with the hands he killed her with.”
Fellows smiled wanly. “I hope you washed them, son.”
“Yeah. Huh? Are you kidding me?”
The chief put a foot on one of the nearby cartons. “No, I’m not kidding you. What we want you to do is tell us everything you can remember. You can remember that far back all right?”
“Sure, why not? It’s the only delivery I ever made there. I had to go way out to do it. So when I turned the corner, this guy Campbell, he’d just pulled his car in the drive. I’d have gone around to the back like I usually do, but he was blocking the drive and I pulled up in front. So I’m getting my stuff out and he’s getting out of the car and he sees I’m going to make a delivery, so he comes over and says something like, This for Campbell?’ or something like that and I tell him, ‘Yeah,’ so he says he’ll take them and how much is it? Well, I tell him it’s—I forget what— but whatever it is, he takes out his wallet and pays me and he gives me the exact change and a tip and the last I see of him, he’s carrying the box into the house.”
“What’d the man look like? Remember?”
“Sure. I remember pretty good. Kind of a happy-go-lucky type. Kinda tall and dark and smiling. I don’t know the color of his eyes, but he was well built. He was in shirt sleeves, dark
