Pity Him Afterwards

And Arnie Kapow hadn’t helped matters any, asking him at the breakfast table if he expected the madman to try to escape. Answer yes, and he would confirm the madman’s belief that all escape routes were closed, and it would be best to stick around and see if the fingerprint was a threat or not. Answer no, and make the bluff obvious to everyone in the county. So he had tried answering yes and no simultaneously, but he had little hope that that would work.

Still, there remained the chance — slim though it might be — that the killer would try to escape. Sondgard had to work within that possibility, and so he had to see to it that all avenues of escape were blocked, while at the same time he wanted it to appear that one or more exits were not blocked.

He was going to have trouble. To begin with, he didn’t have enough men. Including himself, the Cartier Isle Police Department boasted a full complement of four men. One of them, Larry Temple, was dead on his feet, and would have to be relieved and taken home before he fell over, and that left three. Even if all other police business — that is, traffic control and general alertness — were ignored, he still had only three men, including himself. And the house, like most houses, had four sides. Right off the bat, he was one man shy.

In addition, he himself had other things to do, and couldn’t cut his movements by giving himself guard duty. So that further reduced his forces to two.

There was, of course, always Captain Garrett. Captain Garrett had so many men he didn’t know them all by name. Captain Garrett could cordon the house, bring up searchlights and megaphones, grill the suspects, search for clues—

No. There were too many reasons not to call in Captain Garrett at this point, and not the least of them was that Sondgard would be embarrassed to describe his little attempt at bluff to Captain Garrett until after he knew whether it was going to work or not. Once the killer was captured, Sondgard would be able to tell Captain Garrett the whole story, but not yet. His mistakes and blunders and hesitations would have lost their bite then, when the killer was safely behind bars. Right now they loomed too large; Sondgard wanted no professional on the scene to disparage him.

He told himself he should rise above personal feelings, that he should act out of logic rather than out of emotion, but he just couldn’t do it. The argument that this was a case for a humanist rather than a detective had grown pretty threadbare by now; Sondgard was supported now only by a grim tenacity, a determination not to be made an utter fool of.

So he was dependent upon himself, and the forces under his command, which consisted of an ex-Marine who preferred his uniform to his job, a twenty-year-old college student long overdue for sleep, and a man who hadn’t thought about anything but boats for the last twenty years.

And, of course, a houseful of interested participants, fourteen of whom were surely his willing allies, with only one adversary against the whole crowd of them.

He would do what he could with what he had. Some other day, he could think it all out and find out what he should have done.

He spoke first to Loueen Campbell, who had her own car, that white Continental convertible parked out in front of the theater. He asked her if she would do him the favor of driving Larry Temple home, since neither Sondgard nor Mike Tompkins could spare the time to do it.

“I’ll be glad to,” she said, and smiled her rather hard and brassy smile. “If you’ll do me a little favor back.”

“If I can.”

“Let me stay in town awhile and do some shopping.” The smile grew satiric. “Until shortly after three o’clock, say?”

Sondgard smiled back, though he had to force himself a little. “Fine,” he said. “Your time is your own.”

“Bless you, Eric.”

Loueen left, taking with her a Larry Temple now more asleep than awake, and Sondgard next phoned the office and talked to Joyce. “Can you get hold of Dave?”

“I told him what you said before, about staying off his boat and near a phone. He promised to stay right there at home.”

“Fine. Call him and tell him to come on out here, but not to wear the uniform. He should park in front of the theater, and wait. Sooner or later I’ll see him there and come out and talk to him.”

“All right. Will do.”

But Sondgard’s mind was still working, editing and correcting his plans even as he implemented them. “No, wait,” he said. “I won’t come out. He’s to park in front of the theater, where he can see both the front and the right side of the house. He’s just to sit there, and watch the house. If anyone leaves the house, I’ll go out on the front porch with him, with whoever’s leaving. If anyone goes out of the house without me escorting him as far as the porch, Dave should honk his horn three times, and keep the guy from getting away. And he should be careful because it may be somebody who’s already killed twice.”

“All right, I’ve got it. How are you doing, Eric?”

“Miserably.”