Legion Read Free Page B

missing. It had been severed. The detective felt a chill.
    He replaced the canvas and slowly heaved himself to his feet. Then he stood looking down with a sad resolve. I will find your murderer, Thomas Kintry, he thought.
    Even if it were God.
    “All right, Stedman, take a walk,” he said. “Take the body and get out of my sight. You stink of formaldehyde and death.”
    Stedman moved to get the ambulance team.
    “No, no, wait a minute,” Kinderman called to him.
    Stedman turned. The detective moved toward him and spoke to bun softly. “Wait until his mother is gone.”
    Stedman nodded.
    The dredge had docked. A police sergeant wearing a fleece–lined black leather jacket jumped lightly to the dock and came over. He was carrying something wrapped in cloth and was about to speak when Kinderman stopped him. “Wait a minute, hold it; not now; just a minute.”
    The sergeant followed Kinderman’s gaze. Atkins was talking to the nurse and Mrs. Kintry. Mrs. Kintry nodded and the women stood up. Kinderman had to look away as for a moment the mother stared over at the canvas. At her boy. He waited a while and then asked, “Are they gone?”
    “Yes, they’re getting in the car,” said Stedman.
    “Yes, Sergeant,” said Kinderman, “let’s see it.”
    The sergeant silently undid the brown cloth wrapping and disclosed what appeared to be a kitchen meat–pounding mallet; he was careful not to touch it with his hands.
    Kinderman stared and then said, “My wife has a thing like that. For the schnitzel. Only smaller.”
    “It’s a type used in restaurants,” Stedman observed. “Or in large institutional kitchens. I saw them in the Army.”
    Kinderman looked up at him. “This could do it?” he asked.
    Stedman nodded.
    “Give it to Delyra,” Kinderman instructed the sergeant. “I’m going inside to see the old lady.”
    The boathouse interior was warm. Logs burned and crackled in a massive fireplace faced with large gray rounded stones, and mounted in the walls there were crew racing shells.
    “Could you tell us your name, please, ma’am?”
    She was sitting on a torn yellow Naugahyde sofa in front of the fireplace, a policewoman close beside her. Kinderman stood before them, wheezing, his hat held in front of him clutched by the brim. The old woman didn’t seem to see or hear him, and her vacant stare seemed fixed on something inward. The detective’s eyes crinkled up in puzzlement. He sat down in a chair that faced her and gently put his hat on some old magazines that lay torn and coverless and neglected on a small wooden table in between; the hat covered up an ad for whiskey.
    “Could you tell us your name, dear?”
    There was no response. Kinderman’s eyes threw a silent question to the policewoman, who immediately nodded and told him quietly, “She’s been doing that continually, except for when we gave her some food. And when I was brushing her hair,” she added. Kinderman’s stare returned to the woman. She was making curious, rhythmic motions with her hands and arms. Then his eye fell on something he had missed before, something small and pink near his hat on the table. He picked it up and read the small print:’ ‘Great Falls, Virginia.” The n was missing from Virginia.
    “I couldn’t find the other one,” the policewoman said, “so when I brushed her hair I left it off.”
    “She was wearing this?”
    “Yes.”
    The detective felt a thrill of discovery and bafflement. The old woman was conceivably a witness to the crime. But what had she been doing on the dock at that hour? And in this cold? What had she been doing for that matter up above by the C & O Canal where they had found her? It occurred to Kinderman immediately that this sickly old creature was senile and perhaps had been walking a dog. A dog? Yes, maybe he ran off and she couldn’t find him. That would account for the way she was crying. A more terrible suspicion then occurred to him: the woman might have witnessed the murder