A Ticket to the Boneyard

"Can they keep you there beyond the maximum sentence? Isn't that a violation of due process?"

"Not if you're a very bad boy. That sort of thing happens now and then. You can go to prison for ninety days and still be inside forty years later."

"God," she said. "I guess prison didn't rehabilitate him."

"It doesn't look that way."

"He got out in July. So that's plenty of time to find out where Connie went to and, and-"

"I guess it's time enough."

"And time to clip the story out of the paper and send it to me. And time to wait around while the fear builds. He gets off on fear, you know."

"It could still be a coincidence."

"How?"

"The way we said last night. A friend of hers knew you were her friend and wanted you to know what had happened."

"And didn't send a note? Or put on a return address?"

"Sometimes people don't want to get involved."

"And the New York postmark?"

I'd doped that out, too, lying on the couch and looking at Long Island City 's skyline. "Maybe she didn't have your address. Maybe she put the clipping in an envelope and mailed the whole thing to someone she knew in New York, asking him or her to look up your address and send it on."

"That's pretty farfetched, isn't it?"

It had seemed plausible while I was stretched out watching dawn break. Now it did look like a stretch.

And it seemed even less likely an hour later, when I got back to my hotel. There weren't any messages in my box, but while I was checking I collected the letters I'd left behind the previous night. There was some junk mail, and a credit-card bill, and there was an envelope with no return address and my name and address block-printed in ballpoint.

It was the same story clipped from the same paper. No note with it, nothing scribbled in the margins. Something made me read it all the way through, word for word. The way you'll watch a sad old movie, hoping this time it'll have a happy ending.

United had a nonstop out of La Guardia at 1:45 that was due into Cleveland at 2:59. I put a clean shirt and a change of socks and underwear in a briefcase along with a book I was trying to read and took a cab to the airport. I was early, but after I'd had a bite in the cafeteria and read the Times through and called Elaine I didn't have long to wait.

We were on time getting off and five minutes early at Cleveland-Hopkins International. Hertz had the car I'd reserved, a Ford Tempo, and the clerk gave me an area map with my route to Massillon marked out for me with a yellow highlighter. I followed her directions and made the drive in a little over an hour.

On the way, it occurred to me that it was just as well driving was one of those things you didn't forget how to do, because I'd done precious little of it in recent years. Unless there was a time I was forgetting, it had been over a year since I'd been behind a steering wheel. Last October Jan Keane and I had rented a car and driven to the Amish country around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a long weekend of turning leaves and folksy inns and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It started off well but we'd been having our problems and I suppose the weekend was an attempt to cure them, and that's a lot of weight for five days in the country to carry. Too much weight, as it turned out, because we were sullen and sour with each other by the time we got back to the city. We both knew it was over, and not just the weekend. In that sense you could say the trip accomplished what it was supposed to, though not what we wanted it to.

Police Headquarters in Massillon is housed in a modern building downtown on Tremont Avenue. I left the Tempo in a lot down the street and asked the desk officer for a Lieutenant Havlicek, who turned out to be a big man with close-cropped light brown hair and some extra weight in the gut and jowls. He wore a brown suit and a tie with brown and gold stripes, and he had a wedding ring on the appropriate finger and a Masonic ring on the other hand.

He had his own office, with pictures of his wife and children on his desk and framed testimonials from civic groups on one wall. He asked how I took my coffee, and he fetched it himself.

He said, "I was juggling three things when you called this morning, so let me see if I got it straight. You're with the NYPD?"

"I used to be."

"And you're working private now?"

"With Reliable," I said, and showed him a card. "But this matter doesn't involve them, and I don't have a client. I'm here because I think the Sturdevant killing might tie in with an old case of mine."

"How old?"

"Twelve years old."

"From when you were a police officer."

"That's right. I arrested a man with a history of violence toward women. He took a couple shots at me with a.25, so that was the major charge against him, and he wound up pleading to a reduced count of attempted aggravated assault. The judge gave him less time than I thought he deserved, but he got into trouble in prison and didn't get out until four months ago."

"I gather you figure it's a shame he got out at all."

"The warden at Dannemora says he killed two inmates for sure and was the odds-on suspect in three or four other homicides."

"Then why is he walking around?" He answered his own question. "Although there's a difference between knowing a man did something and being able to prove it, and I guess that goes double inside a state penitentiary." He shook his head, drank some coffee. "But how does he hook up with Phil Sturdevant and his wife? They weren't the kind of people who lived in the same world as him."

"Mrs. Sturdevant lived in New York at the time. That was before her marriage, and she'd been on the receiving end of some of Motley's violence."

"That's his name? Motley?"

"James Leo Motley. Mrs. Sturdevant- her name was Miss Cooperman at the time- dictated a statement accusing Motley of assault and extortion, and after sentencing he swore he'd get even with her."

"That's pretty thin. That was what, twelve years ago?"

"About that."

"And all she did was give the police a statement?"

"Another woman did the same thing, and he made the same threat. Yesterday she got this in the mail." I handed him the clipping. Actually it was the copy I'd received, but I couldn't see that it made any difference.

"Oh, sure," he said. "This ran in the Evening-Register."

"It came all by itself in an envelope with no return address. And it was postmarked New York."

"Postmarked New York. Not back-stamped by the New York office, but marked to indicate it had been mailed there."

"That's right."

He took his time digesting this. "Well, I see why you thought it was worth getting on a plane," he said, "but I still don't see how your Mr. Motley could have been responsible for what happened in Walnut Hills the other night. Unless he was sending out hypnotic radio broadcasts and Phil Sturdevant was picking them up on the fillings in his teeth."

"It's that open-and-shut?"

"It sure as hell looks to be. You want to have a look at the murder scene?"

"Could I do that?"

"I don't see why not. We've got a key to the house somewhere. Let me get it and I'll take you over there and walk you through it."

The Sturdevant house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development consisting of expensive houses on lots of a half-acre or more. It was a one-story structure with a pitched roof and a fieldstone-and-redwood exterior. The property was nicely landscaped with evergreens, and there was a stand of birch trees near the property line.

Havlicek parked in the driveway and opened the front door with his key. We walked through an entrance hall into a large living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling. A fireplace ran the length of the far wall. It looked to be built of the same stone used for the house's exterior.

A gray broadloom carpet had been laid wall-to-wall in the living room, and there were some oriental area rugs laid here and there on top of it. One of these stretched in front of the fireplace. A chalk outline of a human being had been traced on the rug, with part of the legs extending onto the broadloom.

"That's where we found him," Havlicek said. "Way we reconstruct it, he hung up the phone and came over to the fireplace. You see the gun rack. He kept a deer rifle and a.22 there, along with the twelve-gauge he used to kill himself. Of course we took both rifles along for safekeeping, in addition to the twelve-gauge. He would have been standing right there, and he'd have put the shotgun barrel in his mouth and triggered the weapon, and you can see the mess it made, blood and bone fragments and all. That's been cleaned up some, just for purposes of sanitation, but there's photographs on file if you need to see them."

"And that's where he fell. He landed face up?"

"That's right. The gun was lying alongside him, about where you'd expect to find it. Place has a charnel-house stink to it, doesn't it? Come on, I'll show you where we found the others."

The children had been murdered in their beds. They'd each had a room of their own, and in each room I got to look at blood-soaked bedding and another chalk outline, one smaller than the next. The same kitchen knife had been used on all three children and their mother, and it had been found in the bathroom off the master bedroom. In the bedroom itself they'd found the corpse of Connie Sturdevant. Bloody bedclothing indicated she'd been killed in bed, but the chalk outline was on the floor at the foot of the bed.

"We figure he killed her on the bed," Havlicek said, "and then threw her down on the floor. She was wearing a nightgown, so she'd evidently gone to sleep, or at least to bed."

"How was Sturdevant dressed?"

"Pajamas."

"Slippers on his feet?"

"Barefoot, I think. We can look at the photos. Why?"

"Just trying to get the picture. What phone did he use to call you people?"

"I don't know. There's extensions all over the house, and whatever one he used he hung it up afterward."

"Did you find bloody fingerprints on any of the phones?"

"No."

"He have blood on his hands?"

"Sturdevant? He had blood all over him, for God's sake. He blew the better part of his head all over his living room. You tend to lose a fair amount of blood that way."

"I know. Was all of it his?"

"What are you getting at? Oh, wait a minute, I can see where you're heading. You're saying he'd have had their blood on him."

"They seem to have done a lot of bleeding. You'd think he'd have got some of it on him."

"There was blood in the bathroom sink, where he must have washed his hands. As to whether he got blood on himself that he couldn't wash off, on his pajamas, say, well, I don't know. I don't even know if you could tell their blood apart. They could all have the same type, for all I know."

"There are other tests these days."

He nodded. "DNA matchups and that sort of thing. I know about that, of course, but an all-out forensic workup didn't appear indicated. I guess I see your point. If the only blood on him was his own, how did he manage to kill them without getting his hands dirty? Except he did get 'em dirty, we found where he tried washing up."