Ellery Queen's Double Dozen, page 15
I hated to see him go. But it satisfied me. He went inside and packed his old suitcase. Then I volunteered to drive him out to the highway. I could have offered him money for a bus ticket, but I knew he wouldn’t take it.
We were silent in the car. There wasn’t much to say, I guess. It had been a good time, having that boy staying with me, and now it was over and I was still a tough cop in a small town.
I stopped the car at a good place for hitchhiking and got out of the car when he got out. He hefted his suitcase in one hand.
“Goodbye, Mr. John,” he said.
“Goodbye, son,” I said. “Keep your nose clean now. You might not be so lucky next time.”
I don’t know why. Maybe he just couldn’t hold it in any longer. Maybe he couldn’t bear me not knowing what I’d done. Maybe he wanted to show me how soft I’d gone inside.
“You’re right,” he said. His face did not change at all—it stayed open and friendly and handsome as all hell; the face of a nice kid that even a tough old cop like me couldn’t help but like. “It would be hard to find another cop as stupid as you are.”
It was like a blow in the face.
I shocked back an involuntary step, the way a man does when he’s hit by a bullet.
“You killed her,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “I knocked off the old lady.” I took a step toward him. “You. . .”
“What are you going to do about it?” he said. “Take me back and tell them you made a little mistake, that you beat a confession out of the wrong man and now that man has killed himself? You’re hooked, copper. You’re hooked good and solid. You can’t ever tell anybody what you did.”
He was dead-right. I could never tell them how wrong I’d been. Besides, Peanuts was dead now. Dead and gone. With his signed confession that I guess any man, dim-witted and addled with whiskey or not, would have signed to stop what I was doing to him.
But my boy Billy forgot one thing. I’m tough enough for the job. For any job that comes along. He forgot that one thing.
I shot him right between the eyes. And I watched him kick and fall.
FLETCHER FLORA
Mrs. Dearly’s Special Day
Mrs. Dearly got a special joy out of living—everything contributed to her heightened sense of excitement and exhilaration and sheer sensuous delight.
After what had been done last night, it was mostly a day of waiting for something to happen. Waiting, however, can be a great excitement. If one possesses the quality of character to sustain composure, the excitement all inside and growing, waiting can be the most exhilarating experience imaginable.
The day began consciously for Mrs. Dearly at exactly nine o’clock, when she wakened. She had left her windows open and the drapes drawn back before going to bed, and her room was now, at nine o’clock in the morning, full of warm and golden light. It was clearly going to be one of those andante days expiring through minutes and hours to slumberous summer sounds.
Mrs. Dearly loved that kind of day, so softly sensuous and replete with drowsy dreams, and she was aware of this one instantly in her flesh and bones. She yawned and stretched, lifting golden arms into the golden light. Looking down the length of her body, its senses astir in a sheer mist of blue nylon, she felt a kind of innocent narcissistic delight. Holding herself in child-like affection, quite uncorrupted by vanity, she was truly grateful for being what she was—so perfectly made for love and lovely things; but her gratitude was unformed and undirected, and she hadn’t the faintest notion to whom it was owed, or how it might be acknowledged.
She lay in bed for perhaps another half hour, absorbing and transforming all the subtle manifestations of the day, and then she stretched again and got up and shed the blue mist on the way to the bathroom. It lay on the floor like something conjured out of her dreams, a giant handful of the bubble bath foam in which she soaked until ten. Returning then to the bedroom, she began to remove the bright enamel from her fingernails, and when this was accomplished she began, with equally meticulous attention, to put on another coat of enamel.
Inasmuch as the new coat was the same color and shade as the old, the effect, when she was finished, was identical with the one it replaced; but in the meanwhile she had measured the heightening of her anticipation and excitement by the precise performance of a small task that occupied her pleasantly and brought her so much closer to where the day was taking her.
It was almost noon when she was finally dressed in a tan sleeveless dress, tan stockings and shoes, and a tiny hat of deeper shade. She inspected herself in her full-length mirror with the same child-like innocence and delight with which she had looked at herself earlier in the blue mist, turning slowly now for the effect from all sides; and then, carrying her purse and a pair of white gloves, she went downstairs prepared to leave the house, going out the back way to a terrace where she expected her husband to be—and there he was, sure enough, reclining in a blue and yellow sling chair.
Mrs. Dearly crossed the terrace and kissed him lightly over one eye, patting his head at the same time with a display of that kind of affection one generally bestows on small boys and dogs.
“Good morning, dear,” she said.
“Morning? In case you don’t realize it, it’s noon.”
The words alone, unqualified by inflection, had a carping connotation; but his voice was, in fact, amused and indulgent as if it were understood and agreed that she should be immune to the imposition and demands of time, and that it would, really, be rather absurd if she were otherwise.
“Oh, I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Honestly I have.”
“You’re dressed for the street,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I have some shopping to do downtown. Do you mind?”
“Not in the least. But don’t you want some lunch before you go? I suppose it’s too late for breakfast.”
“I hardly ever eat breakfast, as you know, and I’ll have lunch downtown. What will you do?”
“There’s plenty to do in the flower beds, and I’m going to mow the grass.”
“I knew it. I was looking out at the lawn last evening, and I said to myself that the grass was getting high. Cal will mow the grass tomorrow, I said.”
“You were right. That’s exactly what Cal is going to do.”
“You shouldn’t work so hard at it, dear. Why don’t you hire a gardener to do such things?”
“Because I wouldn’t get any pleasure out of having a gardener do it. I enjoy doing the yard work—you know that perfectly well. All week I look forward to the weekend when I can get my green thumb into the ground. Things grow for me, and the grass somehow looks better when I mow it. I’m a frustrated horticulturist, I guess.”
This was true. He had made several millions in real estate speculations, but he took more pride in his grass, his roses, his flowering and evergreen shrubs. He even had the rough look of a man who lived close to the earth. Now, on the wide terrace be hind his costly house, he was wearing a coarse blue shirt tucked into worn jeans, and his shoes were the shoes of a working man, not of a dilettante gardener—thick-soled, hard-toed shoes laced up around his ankles.
Mrs. Dearly, although willing to concede something to his more numerous years—which were twenty more than her own still felt that the addiction of a rich man to rough pursuits, like digging in the ground and mowing grass, should adhere to more fashionable lines. There was no reason, for example, why Cal couldn’t work just as well in a colorful sports shirt and in presentable trousers and shoes as in the crude outfit he was now wearing. Moreover, to put it candidly, he stank. When she had bent over to kiss him and pat his head, the odor of perspiration had been strong. She could not see that it was made less offensive by being the result of earthy labor.
“Well, you must be careful of the heat,” she said. “You may have a stroke or something if you’re not careful.”
“I’ll be careful, thank you. An old fellow like me has to be, you know.”
“Nonsense. You’re a perennial boy. Will you look after yourself properly while I’m gone? Have a good lunch, I mean, and don’t stay too long in the sun without resting.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m strong as a bull.”
Bending to kiss him again, she thought that he not only was as strong as one, he also smelled like one.
“Goodbye, dear,” she said. “I may be just a little late.”
“Shall I back your car out for you?”
“Don’t bother, thanks. I don’t in the least mind doing it my self.”
As a matter of fact, she preferred it. His handling of her beautiful little Jaguar was, she felt, a kind of physical violation only a little less disturbing than that imposed infrequently on herself. Having now evaded the former—as she did, whenever possible, the latter—she drove the ten or twelve miles downtown in a considerably shorter time than obedience to the speed limits would have permitted.
She loved driving fast, could not resist the sense and excitement of high speeds, and it was fortunate that she also drove expertly, with a casual mastery to which the Jaguar submitted as if it were somehow an extension of its driver. Sometimes she really felt this, especially on the highway, that she and the powerful little car were organically joined, and that it experienced in its tempered-steel body the same thrill she experienced in her soft and yielding body. This was nonsense, of course, a private fantasy, but it amused her. . .
Downtown, she parked in the Municipal Garage two levels underground and walked through a brightly lighted tunnel to an elevator that carried her up into the lobby of a hotel across the street. She was hungry by then, so she had lunch by herself in the hotel, and after eating like a bird she went to several department stores in the area where she bought a great many things, mostly personal and wearable, all of which she left in the stores for delivery. This took quite a while, lunch and shopping requiring about three hours; but the time passed agreeably and almost before she knew it, it was 3:30—which was the time she was sup posed to meet Douglas.
She returned to the hotel where she had lunched, going this time to the cocktail lounge instead of the restaurant, and it was cool and seductive there, in an artificial dusk suspended mistily between light and darkness. She paused just inside the door while her eyes adjusted to the shadows, listening to the soft serenade of recorded strings and feeling her happiness and quiet excitement stir and swell inside her with an effect of almost painful pleasure; and all the while she was looking around for Douglas, and there he was, as she had hoped and expected, at a small table in a corner.
There was such a sudden sharp intensification of her pleasurable pain that she almost whimpered, and she thought at the same time, with incongruous detachment, that it was odd that he should have the capacity to make her feel that way, for he was not an exceptional young man at all. He was, in fact, rather dull at times, and incited her at once to exasperation and tenderness. Seeing her approach, he started to rise, but she slipped so quickly into the chair across from him that he was no more than half up when she was entirely down. He resumed his seat after remaining a moment half risen, as if he were fighting an impulse to leave at once, and she took one of his hands and held it lightly on the table.
“Darling,” she said, “have you been waiting long?”
“No. Just a few minutes.”
“Have you had a drink?”
“Not yet. I was waiting for you.”
“That was nice of you. You are always so nice. What shall we have? Martinis?”
“I suppose so. We always do, don’t we?”
He gave the order to a girl who was waiting for it, and after the Martinis had been mixed and brought, Mrs. Dearly looked at him fondly—and wondered why she was here looking at him at all. His face in repose, boyishly handsome beneath a falling lock of dark hair that seemed contrived, was like a cheap air-brush portrait by an inferior artist in which all other features were subordinated to a sulky mouth. Douglas was, in fact, an inferior artist himself, an instructor in an art school, and she had met him almost six months ago when she had gone to the school to learn to paint in water colors, for which, as she quickly learned, she had no talent whatever. This knowledge—and Douglas—were all she had acquired from the effort.
Sipping her Martini and speaking over the thin edge of glass, she said, “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Nothing much. Nothing of consequence.”
“Are you working on something remarkable?”
“I’m not working on anything at all. It’s impossible.”
“Darling, are you still feeling guilty about Cal? If only you could understand what a waste your guilty conscience is. You have done him no harm, and neither have I, and we have done each other a great deal of good.”
“I doubt that Cal would think so.”
“Oh, nonsense. Cal doesn’t think about it one way or another. While you are sitting here making yourself miserable, he is at home this instant as happy as can be, digging in the Hower gardens and mowing the grass.”
“You make everything sound so simple and acceptable.”
“Because it is. You must learn to accept things as they are and without complicating them in your mind.”
“Well, it’s not so easy to accept your going on indefinitely as Cal’s wife.”
“You must be patient, darling. Something will work out for us eventually—perhaps sooner than you think. In the meanwhile, let’s have another Martini before I go.”
“Why must you go so soon?”
“Something to do at home—but it’s really too tiresome to talk about.”
Her second Martini, which was consumed slowly to the sound of strings, proved a considerable challenge to her resolution to go home; but she went, nevertheless, about 4:30. The traffic was heavy on the streets, crippling the Jaguar, which could not get free to run until the last few miles—so that it was five when she pulled into the driveway behind a car which sat there, blocking the way to the garage.
Mrs. Dearly, mildly annoyed by the trespasser, got out of the Jaguar and walked around the house to the rear; but there was no sign of Cal or anyone else. She went into the house through the kitchen, and there in the hall which ran forward from the kitchen to the front entrance was a short man in a dark blue suit, a stranger with an odd little potbelly like a melon held in position by his belt; and this man had obviously come out of the living room to meet her, as if he had become, by some strange trickery in her absence, the master of the house and she the stranger.
“Mrs. Dearly?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”
“My name is Dickson. Police.”
“Police? What on earth are you doing here? Where is my husband?”
“You had better talk with Lieutenant Hardy about that. He’s waiting for you in the living room.”
He half turned and gestured toward a doorway, still with that curious implication of inviting her to be his guest. She walked past him into the living room, where another man was standing in the middle of the room with his back to a bank of windows bright with the late afternoon sun. He was even shorter than the man who had called himself Dickson—a thin, consumptive-looking man of indeterminate age in a wilted seersucker suit. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Dearly,” he said. His voice was as wilted as his suit, and perfectly supplemented by a languid, hesitant gesture of his right hand, its middle and index fingers stained by the smoke of countless cigarettes. “I’m Lieutenant Hardy. Sorry to intrude.”
The apology was hollow, a mere concession to form. For a moment Mrs. Dearly had a terrifying feeling of helplessness, of being swept into a play of forces she could not control, and at whatever cost she was compelled to assert herself in a way that would restore her position and assurance.
“Your car is blocking the drive,” she said. “Please be good enough to move it.”
“Certainly.” His right hand moved again, seeming to gather in Dickson. “Go move the car, Dickson, and drive Mrs. Dearly’s back to the garage.”
“The key is in the ignition,” Mrs. Dearly said. “Have you ever driven a Jaguar?”
“I’ll figure it out,” Dickson said.
He went out, and Mrs. Dearly turned back to Hardy. “Perhaps now, Lieutenant, you’ll explain why you are here. And I would like to see my husband, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. He isn’t here.”
“Where is he? Has something happened to him? Tell me at once.”
“I had hoped to break it to you a little more gently, but I see that I can’t. The fact is, your husband is dead.”
“Dead? Did you say—dead?”
She moved to a chair and sat down with an effect of excessive care, as if moving and sitting had become all of a sudden a precarious business. She sat erect in the chair, her back unsupported, her eyes staring past Hardy through a bright pane of glass behind him into the side yard beyond the drive.
She was oddly sensitive in that moment to the details of sight and sound, and she noticed that the yard had been partly mowed, the power mower standing at rest on the clean line dividing the clipped and shaggy grass. She heard the rich roar, quickly reduced, of the Jaguar in the drive.
“Are you all right?” Hardy said. “Yes, thank you. I’m quite all right.”
“Would you like me to tell you about it?”
“I think you had better.”
“Well, there isn’t much to tell, when you come right down to it. Our only witness is your neighbor on the west, Mr. Winslow, and he didn’t really see anything much. He was upstairs in a room on the second floor of his house this afternoon about two or two thirty, he couldn’t be exact, and he looked out the window and saw your husband reclining in one of those canvas sling chairs on your rear terrace. He said your husband had been mowing the grass, and Winslow assumed, naturally, that he had merely taken a break to rest and cool off, which was probably true. It’s been a pretty hot day, as you know.
