“Miss Wennersehn? I’ll transfer you to… oh, excuse me, sir. She is still up at our Jacksonville office. Shall I see if I can find out when she’ll be returning?” I thanked her and told her not to bother. I went back to the motel to see if there were any messages. Stanger was waiting for me.
16
SOMETHING HAD changed Stanger, tautened him, given him nervous mannerisms I had not noticed before. We went to 109. He moved restlessly about. I phoned for sandwiches and coffee.
When I asked him what was wrong, he told me to let him think. He paused at the big window and stood with Ms hands locked behind him, teetering from heel to toe, looking out at people playing in the pool.
“I could maybe go with one of those security outfits,” he said. “Gate guard. Watchman work.”
“You get busted?”
“Not yet. But maybe that’s what they’ll want to do.”
“Why?”
“That Mrs. Boughmer was off on some kind of garden club tour. I finally got the daughter to let me in. Went into my act. Want to warn you you’re in serious trouble. Withholding information about a capital crime. Maybe I can help you if you level with me now. And so on and so on. Until she split open.”
“What was her problem?”
He turned and walked over and sat heavily in the armchair. “She was bellering and squeaking and sobbing. Spraying spit. Words all jammed together she was trying to say them so fast. Grabbing at my hands. Begging. Confessing. Jesus!”
“Confessing what?”
“That poor dun ugly girl was in love with Doc Sherman. Not so much romance and poetry. Passion. Hot pants. You saw her. Any man ever going to lay a hand on her? So there was something she was doing, God only knows what. Last to leave. Lock the doors. Leave the office lights on. Go into the dark treatment room. Do something in there. She wouldn’t say what. Something, according to her, that was nasty and evil. Went on for years, I guess. Some kind of release. No idea what Broon was after or how he got in. She was working on the files after Sherman had died, a few days later. She was in the treatment room and the lights suddenly went on and Broon is in the doorway watching her. Told her to put her clothes back on and he’d talk to her in the office. Apparently, McGee, he convinced that poor sick sad homely woman that there was some law, crime against nature, jail her as a degenerate or some damned thing. Told her that if she ever tried to tell anybody Sherman didn’t kill himself, he’d have her picked up and taken in right away. He took some kind of `evidence’ away with him. How the hell was I supposed to know she was so close to the edge? All of a sudden she went rigid as a board, bit right through her lip, started whooping and snapping around, eyes out of sight. Followed the ambulance in. Some kind of breakdown. Left a neighbor woman on the lookout for , Mrs. Boughmer. Probably Dave Broon slipped the lock on the rear door that night and came easing in.”
“That won’t be anything to bust you for, Al.”
“It isn’t that. It’s what comes next. Maybe.”
“Which is?”
“Dave Broon. I’ve come right up to it with him. Too many years, too many things. No way to nail him according to the rules I’m supposed to follow. We’re supposed to be on the same ball club. He gives the whole thing a bad smell. Maybe there’s a time when you don’t go by the book. Look, I’ve got to have somebody with me. The things I’m thinking scare me. I’ve got to have somebody stop me if I can’t stop myself.”
“Maybe you’d better think it over.”
“Meaning you don’t want any part of it.”
“If you want me with you, okay. But just for the hell of it, before we see him, can you get a decent check on where he was the night Sherman died, and where he was the afternoon Penny Woertz died?”