Free A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block

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