Fellows said, “I’m still waiting for your explanation.”
“I was out making calls, see? So I decide I’ll hit that area. I never touched it before and it looked ripe. So the first house I stop at is this number two, comer house. I park in front and get out my demonstrator and lug it up to the stoop. Well, this woman opens the door. She’s a nice-looking woman, not beautiful, but good-looking and well built. I don’t want you to get the idea, Chief, that I make passes at everyone who opens a door, but a man gets so he can tell when he meets a woman if she’d be interested in a pass. I’m telling you, she was interested. I don’t know that I blame her, living out in the sticks alone like that. You tell me she was married. Well, I didn’t honestly know that when I met her. In fact, I thought she wasn’t married on account of she wasn’t wearing any ring. So when she acted friendly-like, really glad to see me, you can’t blame me for figuring, O.K., anything she wants, I’ll take her up on. This girl, I want to tell you, wasn’t any kid. She knew her way around as well as I did. We spoke the same language right from the start and it was obvious what we were talking about wasn’t going to be vacuum cleaners.
“Well, she gets out a bottle and I take off my coat and tie and get ready to make myself at home. Now what I mean about her knowing the score is she brings in the liquor and she looks out the window and she says I should move the car. She thinks it would look bad for some salesman’s car to be sitting out front of the house for an hour or more. If I put it in the drive, it’ll look more like I belong there. She says, especially, there’s a nosey dame across the way who’d be sure to notice the car and start drawing conclusions. So I move the car into the drive and just when I’m getting out, up comes this grocery truck and a guy gets out with a box full of food. I can’t see any point in him bringing it in the house and maybe wondering who I am and what it’s all about, her and me there alone. You see, I don’t know what’s what about the place. All I know is the girl’s name is Joan—Joan Campbell, she calls herself. I don’t know what she’s doing there or anything else —meaning whether she’s married or lives with her family, or lives there alone, or what, so I don’t want to do anything that’s going to look out of the way. I pay for the groceries myself, so the kid won’t be coming in and I send him on his way and go back inside. She paid me back for them as soon as I came in. I wasn’t even buying her anything.
“So anyway, I was there until nearly five o’clock, I guess. Then it’s time for me to go and I lug the demonstrator back to the car and take off. O.K. You’re wondering why I wasn’t making any more calls in that area. Well, do you think I’d call on someone else and then have the neighbors know I’m selling vacuum cleaners? Me, spending an hour and a half with that Joan Campbell? I got a little more respect for women than that. And besides, it was quitting time anyway and besides that, well, who the hell wants to go sell vacuum cleaners after that visit? I’m asking you.” He paused and looked around. “Now that’s my story and it’s the truth.”
Fellows sat very still for a good many seconds. He wanted to punch holes in the tale, but he didn’t quite know how. The trouble was, it could actually have happened that way. It was a perfectly plausible explanation and there wasn’t one loose thread he could seize on. A woman who’d live with a man under an assumed name would be quite capable of an adventure like that, so the Burchard story even took her character into consideration. Finally he said, “You made no attempt to see her again?”
“I starred her name. That was just in case I was in the neighborhood and felt in the mood, but I don’t often go back to places.”
“And when did you learn she was dead?”
“When you told me tonight, Chief. I swear, that’s the first I heard of it.”
“It’s been in the papers.”
“I don’t read the papers much. I might have seen it, but I wouldn’t have connected it. Honest I wouldn’t.”
“One of those photographs in your collection a picture of her?”
“Hell no. Those are just pictures I picked up over the years, from high school and the war on. I guess the latest one is five years old.”
Wilks asked a few questions then, but his were no more pointed than the chief’s. The story was believable and, against their will, they found themselves believing it. One thing, of course, remained. They would show him to Raymond Watly in the morning.
There was one other thing, and Fellows did it that evening after Burchard was returned to his cell. He copied all the Townsend addresses from Burchard’s record notebook. It would help break down his story if they found the murder victim had lived at one of them.
“At least,” Wilks said as they departed from headquarters late that night, “we can guess the ‘J’ in her initials stands for ‘Joan.’ ”
CHAPTER XVII
Tuesday, March 3
Tuesday was mild and almost warm with a bright sun eating up the snow. When Raymond Watly pulled into the yard behind the town hall at quarter after nine, the streets were slushy and the gutters runny. He came down the concrete steps wearing rubbers and
