by Lionel White
The execution of Charles Merriweather took place in /#4
Sing Sing prison exactly a year and two months from the day when Jake Harbor had been shot. Ann Merriweather was in Nevada; she had gone ahead and obtained a legal separation. V irginia Grant was in Woman’s Prison where she was serving out a three-year sentence after her conviction for being an accessory.
Charles refused to see me the day before he died. He went to his death silent and alone.
It is nine-thirty now and I am sitting in my office with the door locked, writing the final notes on the Merriweather File. It is late spring, a little more than a year from the night when Charles Merriweather paid with his life for the crime of which he was found guilty by a jury of his peers.
This has been the most ghastly, most horrible day of my life.
This afternoon, just as I was about to clean up my desk and leave for the day, I had a surprise visitor. A man I had not seen in months. Lieutenant Clifford Giddeon.
He came into my office, his hand outstretched.
“Just stopping by, Howard,” he said. “Thought I’d drop in for a minute’s chat. If you are busy I won’t—”
“I’m never busy, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’m pleased to see you. Any time. Glad you stopped by.”
For several minutes we chatted idly. He asked about the boys and was pleasantly surprised when I told him that they were not going to be sailing this summer but would be away at camp where they had jobs as counselors.
Miss Taylor knocked and came in to find out whether she could go home.
I wished her a good night and she left.
It was after the door clicked behind her that the Lieutenant suddenly sighed and looked up at me.
“Howard,” he said. “I’ve just come back from Bedford Hills, up in Westchester.”
I looked at him curiously.
“Bedford Hills?”
“Yes. You see I was up there visiting. At the Woman’s State Reformatory to be exact.”
I couldn’t imagine, for the life of me, what he was getting at, but it was obvious that there was something on his mind.
“Yes-”
“I went up to see Ginny Grant,” he said, speaking very slowly. “You remember the Grant girl, don’t you, Howard?”
I looked at him sharply then; this visit was no accident.
“Yes, Lieutenant, I remember her. I remember her very well.”
He nodded and took out a pipe which he held in his hand, but didn’t light.
“She has been very ill,” he said at last. “As a matter of fact, three weeks ago they made a biopsy on her and discovered a tumor in her left lung. Operated on her a week ago. It was cancer. They removed the lung and gave her one chance in fifty of pulling out of it.
“She didn’t find that chance. A couple of days ago she was put in an oxygen tent, and she knew that she was going to die. She asked to see me.”
“She asked to see you?”
“That’s right. Sent down word that she wanted to see me. And so I went up there. Drove up this morning. I spent almost an hour with her. It was very difficult "for her to talk, but she managed to do so.”
I felt a terrible sense of sadness suddenly as I remembered how attractive and alive she had been.
But almost at once Lieutenant Giddeon brought me back to the present.
“Do you recall, Howard,” he asked, “that evening I met you at International Airport? I was just starting my vacation.”
“I remember.”
“Well, as I recall, I told you that, officially, I had been taken off the Merriweather Case. But I believe I also told you that the case, so far as I was concerned, was not closed.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Well, the case is now closed. Oh,” he said, as he saw the look of surprise on my face, “Oh, I know. To all intents and purposes it was closed when Charles Merriweather was electrocuted that night in the death chamber at Sing Sing. But it was never completely closed for me. No case ever is until I have the answer. But now I have it.”
I felt a peculiar tightening around my heart. I know that I must have paled and I know’ that my hand trembled as I reached for the package of cigarettes on my desk.
I struggled for breath and said, very slowly, “Are you ^7
telling me, Lieutenant,” I asked, “are you telling me that Charles Merriweather went to the chair an innocent man?”
He shook his head.
“No—no I am not telling you that. But I can tell you this. Charles Merriweather did not kill Jake Harbor.”
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean? He wasn’t innocent, but he didn’t kill Harbor?”
“That’s right,” he said, “he didn’t shoot Harbor. Nor did he put Harbor’s body in the trunk of his car.”
I just stared at him, wordlessly.
“Remember the story of the threat against Mrs. Merri-weather’s life?”
I nodded, dumbly.
“I told you that I believed the story. Well, today, Ginny Grant verified it for me.”
“But, Lieutenant,” I interrupted. “About Harbor. You say that Merriweather didn’t kill him. Then who did? Who did murder him? ”
“I’m getting to that,” Lieutenant Giddeon said. “This afternoon, there were only two persons in this world who knew who murdered him. One of them died only two hours ago in the Bedford Hills Reformatory. The other one—well the other one is the killer and the killer is absolutely safe because there isn’t a single soul alive who can prove anything. But let me get back. Get back to the time someone broke into the Merriweather home and turned on the gas—”
“But what can that have to do with the murder of Jake-”
“It has everything to do with it,” the lieutenant said. “Just let me continue. You see, Ginny Grant admitted to me this afternoon that it was she who had entered the Merriweather home that night. That Charles Merriweather himself had paid her two thousand dollars to do so. That she broke the window in the door, entered the house and turned on the gas jets.
“It was almost a foolproof murder plan. You see, Charles himself had already broken and turned off the pilot light so that there wouldn’t be a premature explosion. The whole scheme was to allow the gas to escape from the kitchen and into the bedroom. And then, when Mrs. Merriweather’s body was discovered, there would be no suspicion. After all, she had attempted suicide by gas once before and there was a record of it. It was Charles, himself, of course, who had poisoned the dachshund which they owned. He knew that the dog would set up an alarm.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Merriweather paid Ginny Grant to murder his own wife?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“That is exactly what I am saying. Ginny Grant admitted as much this afternoon.”
“But Jake Harbor,” I said. “What about him? How does he enter into—”
“Ginny Grant muffed the job—through no fault of her own. Mrs. Merriweather was lucky enough to wake up in time and smell gas.
“And then she came to you. Came to you and told you about it because she had to tell someone. Do you remember that she made you promise not to tell her husband? That under no conditions were you to tell him or the police? ”
“I remember.”
“She made you promise because she suspected that it was Charles who was trying to kill her. And she didn’t want him to know that she had been alerted. She knew it would happen again, an attempt on her life, and she was prepared for it, but she didn’t want Charles to know that she was.”
“Lieutenant,” I said, “are you actually trying to make me believe that Ann knew Charles was trying to kill her? That she-”
“She knew all right. And she was ready. Ready the next time when Charles went to Jake Harbor and hired him to commit the murder. Oh, it was to be very simple. Charles told Harbor he would pay him well for the job and he gave him an advance of three thousand dollars. He told him his wife would be home alone and that he would see to it that she had tak
en sleeping pills so that she would be unconscious when he entered the house. He told Harbor where the key was, under the door mat. The plan was for Harbor to choke her to death and afterward make it look like a robbery. As soon as he left the house, he was to call Charles at the tavern in Huntington and tell him the job was done. In the meantime, Ginny Grant waited outside of the house to pick up Harbor when he was through.”
“It’s impossible,” I said. “Utterly impossible. I don’t believe—”
“Listen to me,” the lieutenant said. “It isn’t impossible. It’s what happened. Except for one thing. Ann Merriweather was prepared. When Charles insisted she take the Nembutal that Sunday night, she knew and she was prepared. She pretended to take the pills, but palmed them instead. And then she went in and got Charles’s gun out of the gun case. She was there waiting when Harbor arrived.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Ann Merriweather shot and killed Jake Harbor?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. She was there waiting when Harbor sneaked into the house. She probably was sitting in the dark in the playroom. Ginny remembers seeing the light go on a few minutes after Harbor entered. She, Mrs. Merriweather, probably held him at gun-point. She undoubtedly attempted to pump him and make him confess that Charles had paid him to kill her. Harbor undoubtedly stalled for time.
“We know that he was killed somewhere around three o’clock or after. God only knows how long they sat in that room. I only know this—when Harbor failed to come out after almost an hour, Ginny became panicky and went to the bar where she had agreed to meet Charles in case anything went wrong. The two of them stayed there, not knowing what was going on and afraid to make a move until they heard from Jake. But Jake never showed up.
“No one, of course, will ever know what did happen. But sometime during the early hours of that morning, Ann Merriweather put a bullet into Jake Harbor and killed him. Perhaps Jake attempted to get away, perhaps he attacked her in an unguarded moment and she shot and killed him in self-defense. No one will ever know. Except that she did kill him and then she dragged the body into the garage and stuffed it into the trunk of her husband’s car.
“Ginny and Charles were together in the tavern and then they went to Ginny’s house. Charles was telling the truth about that. He stayed there until after six and then, still not knowing what to expect, he went home.
“He found his wife apparently unharmed and sleeping. No one knows just what must have crossed his mind. He probably thought Jake had chickened out on the job. In any case, he got in his car and started out on his usual routine sales trip. It was only by the sheerest luck that the body was discovered when it was. Of course it was Ann herself who took the trunk key from his car key ring and hid it in his watch pocket. She didn’t want him opening that trunk by accident, perhaps to put in a bag or something, until he was well away from home.
Again the lieutenant hesitated while he searched for a match.
“One thing Ann Merriweather did tell the truth about,” he said. “The attack on her the night you and she returned to the house to see about the dog. It was Ginny Grant who was in the house late that night. She had entered with a key that Charles had given her sometime when plans were first made against Ann. When Ginny learned that Charles had been arrested, she suspected what had actually happened and guessed that Ann had used a gun of Charles’s. Ginny went to the house in hopes of
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THE MERRIWEATHER FILE
finding the gun before the police could. Of course by the time she got there, we already had the gun.
“She was there, ready to start searching, when you and Ann Merriweather arrived. The reason the dog didn’t bother her was because it was she who had given the dog to Charles Merriweather in the first place; the dog was an old friend.”
By this time I was almost beyond talking.
“But why would Charles have wanted to murder his wife in the first place?” I asked.
“Why does anyone want to commit murder? We know that he was crazy about children and that he had disliked his first wife, maybe even killed her, because she was unable to have any.
“He and Ann had a child, but the child was killed in an ! accident—an accident he always blamed on her. Later she suffered a miscarriage and as a result was no longer able j to bear a child. At the same time, she was a Catholic and didn’t believe in divorce. It left Charles in the ironic position of being married to a woman who was unable to give him a child and at the same time being married to a woman who would never give him his freedom to marry someone else so that he might become a father. And he
was half in love with the Grant girl.
“In any event, you can see why Charles was never able to offer a defense, aside from his alibi. He had tried to kill his wife and failed. She had killed the man he had hired to murder her, but Charles could not admit that he had hired him for the job. He knew that his wife knew he had hired Harbor and he was afraid to trust her to help
him. She let him go to the chair, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. She had killed Harbor in self-defense. But in letting her husband go to the electric chair for that murder, she did, to all intents and purposes, deliberately murder him.”
Lieutenant Giddeon got up and stretched and looked at his wrist watch.
“Say,” he said, “it’s well after six. I’m really sorry I’ve kept you so late. But I thought you would like to know. How about stopping off somewhere and having dinner with me? ”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “No, I’m afraid not. You see,” I went on, without thinking, “you see I was supposed to meet my wife and I’m afraid I’ve already missed—”
“Oh, I am sorry,” Lieutenant Giddeon said. “I shouldn’t have kept you. By the way, did you say your wife? I thought that—”
“I was married again three months ago,” I said. “Ann Merriweather and I—we were married three months ago.”
