“He said he had to dress. But suppose he was already dressed and on his way out, because of another telephone call he’d received a few minutes before?”
I turned. “By God—!”
“And unless time was a factor—that is, to him—why would he even mention it? It’s not in character. Clement has a brilliant and incisive mind, the type that seldom wastes time on trivia.”
“But, still— Ten minutes? It’s not enough.”
She went on. “There would have been little or no traffic at that time of night. We’ll clock it, under the same conditions, and see. That’s one of the things I picked you up for.”
“But wait a minute,” I broke in, as the absurdity of it began to dawn on me. “This is George Clement we’re talking about, the ex-mayor, the leading citizen; he’s so proper and law-abiding he’s a little stuffy sometimes. Also, he’s a friend of mine—and of hers—we played bridge together an average of once a week.”
“Yes, I know,” she said calmly.
“And, listen—I don’t think anybody on earth could have walked away from the horror in that bedroom and then, in less than three or four minutes at the outside, into another room where there were people, without its showing on his face. Something would have twitched, or there’d have been no color—except green. Hell, he even called me Hotspur, because I was blowing my stack all over the place. Could anybody face the husband of the woman he’d just beaten to death with an andiron—?”
“He could have,” she said. “Remember, I worked for him for almost a year, and women study men a lot more than men are ever aware of. George Clement has the most perfect—I’d say absolute—control of his features of anybody I’ve ever seen. I don’t say he has that much control over his emotions—in fact, I know he hasn’t— but nothing inside shows through when he doesn’t want it to. It’s like pulling a blind. I’ve watched him in court when he was in trouble with a hostile witness and an unfriendly judge, and one time I hit him—”
“You what?’
She grinned. “All right, so I’ve been known to give way to a hot-headed impulse myself.”
“But—but— what did you hit him for?”
“Well, it was a little ridiculous, actually, but at the moment that seemed the simplest way to get his hand out of my bra.”
“You can’t mean—not George?”
“I assure you, George has hands.”
I goggled at her. “Well, I’ll be damned; the sanctimonious old bastard. So that’s the reason you quit?”
“Yes. Not then, but later. He apologized for it, and I thought we understood each other, but all he did was change his approach. I finally got tired of knocking down passes, oblique or otherwise, and resigned. Naturally, I didn’t say anything about it when you asked, and wouldn’t now except that it has a bearing on this matter. In fact, I would say it was quite relevant. But we were talking about his ability to control his expression. Most men under the circumstances would have been angry and blustered it out, or looked sheepish, or tried to laugh their way out of it, or shown some expression. All he did was pull that blind in back of his face. Imagine, the red splotch on the side of it still showing, where I’d hit him, and he was as calm and poised as if he’d merely offered me a cigarette. ‘My apologies, Mrs. Ryan.’ He must have been raging inside—at me, and at himself for getting into a ridiculous position—but he went right on dictating without missing a comma.”
I was still having trouble assimilating it. “That changes the picture considerably. George could be the man we’re looking for.”
“Of course. Now, there’s one other item. Are you sure that Frances Kinnan came here from Florida?”
“Yes. There’s no doubt of it. Regardless of the fact that Crosby couldn’t pick up her trail down there, she came here from Miami. Her car had Dade County license plates, and she paid the first month’s rent on the store with a check on a Miami bank. She was lying about all the rest of it, but she’d been there, and she’d been using the name Frances Kinnan. She had to, because that was the name on the pink slip of the car. I sold it for her when we were married, and bought her that Mercedes.”
“You don’t recall the date on the slip? I mean, when she bought the car?”
“No. I didn’t even look at it. But why?”
“As I recall, she arrived here in January, 1959. Is that right?”
“Yes. It was two years ago this week.”
“Well, George had just come back from a Florida fishing trip, less than three weeks before.”
“What? Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. I’ve been thinking back very carefully, to make certain of it. I started work for him in November, 1958, and it was less than a month afterward. There were continuations on a couple of cases he had pending, and he got away for about a week, sometime after the middle of December. He came back just a few days before Christmas. And he was down there alone.”
9
“By God, I think you’ve got it!” I said. “So that was what those fishing trips were for? He always went alone; Fleurelle didn’t care for fishing—or for Florida, either.”
“Yes, I know,” she said simply. “I’ve been briefed on what Fleurelle didn’t like.”
“So you had the frigid wife bit thrown at you too?”
She nodded. “But it’s not important now. The thing that is, however, is the fact he could have met Frances Kinnan that trip—” She broke off, making a little grimace of distaste. “I don’t like this sort of thing.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “But it can’t be helped. So he met her, only this time he brought the girl home with him. And cooked up that dress shop deal to cover it. He knew about the living quarters in back of the store, and knew the place was vacant—it had been for a couple of months, in fact—” I stopped, realizing we still didn’t know the answer. “What is it?” she asked.
“We’re as far in left field as ever. There’s no motive for murder in any of this. Take a look. Suppose Roberts did find out something about her—I mean, who she was—and she was paying him to keep it hushed up; it was still nothing to George. By that time she was married to me. She’d have been in a jam, and my face might have been a little red if it suddenly developed the police were looking for my wife because she’d absconded with the assets of some bank in Groundloop, Arizona, but they couldn’t pin anything on George, even if the details of this dress shop setup ever came out. He’s too shrewd a lawyer to get tagged with a charge of harboring a fugitive—he’d probably thought that all out in advance. He’d simply say he had no idea she was a fugitive, and even if she said otherwise, it’d only be her word against his. Admittedly, the scandal wouldn’t have helped his position much here in town, but anybody with George’s mind and legal training wouldn’t have much trouble weighing the risks of first-degree murder against a minor thing like that and coming up with the safe answer, even if he had no scruples against murder aside from the risk. Let Roberts talk, and be damned to him. And, finally, it’s doubtful Roberts even knew there was any connection between her and George. As far as Fleurelle is concerned, she might have divorced him if it all came out, but from my viewpoint that’d hardly qualify as a total disaster.”
“I know,” she said. “There has to be more to it than we’ve discovered.”
“Also, I still don’t think George could have killed her. There simply wasn’t enough time between my calling him and his showing up in the Sheriff’s office.”
“That we can check,” she said. “And we will in just a minute. But right now, let’s look at that Junior Delevan possibility again. I still have a feeling he fits into it somewhere; you can call it feminine intuition if you want, but there’s something very significant in that bitterness of Doris Bentley’s toward Frances. At first, I thought it might be because she believed you’d killed Roberts and of course blamed Frances for the fact. She probably still thinks you killed him, but I don’t think that’s what’s bothering her. She didn’t care that much about him. They dated a few
times, but from what I can find out, that’s about all it amounted to. So we have to go back further. She was pretty crazy about Junior, from all accounts.
“I’ve been asking a few questions here and there, trying not to be too obvious about it, and I’ve learned just about all that was ever known or ever found out about what happened to Junior that night. And it’s not very much. Scanlon questioned Doris about him, along with a lot of other people, but she swears she never saw him at all. She had a date with him, but he stood her up.”
Something nebulous brushed against the perimeter of my mind. I tried to close in on it, but it got away. I must have grunted, because she stopped. “What?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to remember something. Go on.”
“She could have been lying about not seeing him,” she went on, “but apparently Scanlon was satisfied she was telling the truth. It seems she even called Junior’s house, when he failed to show up for the date when the dress shop closed at nine P.M., trying to find out if his mother knew where he was. She—that is, Mrs. Delevan—verified this. She said Doris called there twice. There’s not much more to tell. They do know where Junior was until around eleven-thirty. He was with two other boys— Kenny Dowling and Chuck McKinstry—just riding around drinking beer. Dowling was old enough to buy it, so he was picking it up by the six-pack, and they were drinking it in the car. They told Scanlon he got out of the car on Clebourne, near Fuller’s, around eleven-thirty, saying he had important business to take care of and couldn’t spend the whole night with peasants. They thought he meant a girl, since he always swaggered a bit over his conquests, but he wouldn’t tell them her name. They swear that was the last they ever saw of him. Scanlon had them in his office for six hours—he had Dowling where the hair was short, anyway, for giving beer to minors— and when they came out they were pretty sick-looking boys, but they stuck to their story and said they had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do after he left them. Apparently that was the last time he was ever seen alive; he must have been killed in the next half hour. Somewhere.”
“Well, our only chance is that Doris knows something about it she hasn’t told. Shall we go?”
“Right. But first we time that route.”
I got in the back again, crouched down between the seats, with a pencil flashlight she took from her purse. She drove back into the edge of town, turned left, ran two or three blocks, turned right, and stopped. “We’re parked on Stuart,” she called softly over her shoulder. Stuart was the next cross street east of Clement’s big house on Clebourne. “Headed toward Clebourne, a half block from the corner. Starting from here would about equal the time it’d take him to back his car out of the garage. Ready?”
I cupped the little light in my hand and focused it on the watch. When the sweep second hand came around to the even minute, I said, “Take it away.”
She pulled away from the curb, and turned right at the corner. A car passed, headed in the opposite direction. I kept down. She turned again, left this time. We were on Montrose. She didn’t appear to be driving fast at all. After a moment, she turned right, and then right again. “I’m going around behind,” she said quietly. “I doubt he would have parked in your driveway.” Probably not, I thought. There were two houses across the street from ours, and he could have been seen. “I’ll park at that vacant lot directly behind your house.” We eased to the curb and stopped. “Mark.”
I flashed the pencil light on the watch, and couldn’t believe it at first. “One minute, twelve seconds,” I whispered. “It doesn’t seem possible.”
“I didn’t go above 30 miles an hour at any time. All right, here we go for the second leg.”
I checked the time as we pulled away. There was very little sound of traffic, even when we turned into Clebourne. In a moment we turned again, went on a short distance, and stopped. “Mark,” she said. “We’re parked right in front of the courthouse.”
I flicked the light on the watch. “One minute and thirty-two seconds. That makes a total of—” I added it quickly. “A total of two minutes forty-four seconds.”
“I thought so,” she whispered. “You see, he had better than seven minutes. It wouldn’t have taken him over two at the most to walk around to the front of your house and then back to the car. He had all the time he needed.”
Then—if it were George—there’d been no argument, nothing. He must have gone there simply for the purpose of killing her, for cold-blooded, premeditated murder. She’d called him, let him in the house when he rang, and then—the first instant her back was turned —he grabbed up the andiron and brought it down on her head. Why? I shook my head wearily, wondering if anybody would ever know. We started up again.
I could see the blinking amber light at the intersection as we crossed Clebourne. She turned left into Taylor. Westbury was in the east end of town, just beyond the edge of the business district. In a moment we stopped. “Nobody in sight,” she whispered.
I sat up. We were at the curb in the middle of the block, in shadow under some trees. All the houses were dark, and there were cars parked ahead and behind us. Up at the next corner, at the street light, was the apartment house. We could see the entrance from here. I checked my watch. It was five minutes of three. “She may be already home,” I said.
“Yes, but we don’t know where Mulholland is. He might have gone in with her. If they don’t show up in half an hour, I’ll drive back to the apartment and ring his number to see if I get an answer.”
We smoked a cigarette. Fifteen minutes went by in silence as we watched the shadowy, deserted street and the empty pool of light at the corner. The night seemed to have been going on forever, and I wondered where I’d be when it ended. In jail? Or dead? They’d take no chances; if I made a stupid move they’d shoot me.
Doris had had a date with Junior, but he hadn’t shown up. Something in that had rung a bell in my mind, very faintly, but I hadn’t been able to isolate what it was. She’d tried to get hold of him; she’d called his house— called it twice, in fact. Was she merely incensed because he’d stood her up, or was it something else, something she had to tell him? Just then, a car turned into Taylor two blocks behind us, its headlights flashing briefly in the rear-view mirror.
“Duck,” I whispered. We lay down on the seats.
The car came on and went past us. We sat up again. It wasn’t a police car, but it was slowing. It went on across the intersection ahead and pulled to the curb before the apartment house entrance. A man got out from the driver’s side and went around and opened the other door, a big man, bareheaded. I felt excitement run along my nerves, and began to tense up. It was Mulholland. He helped Doris out, and they crossed the sidewalk to the doorway. I watched nervously to see if he were going to follow her in. He didn’t. For a moment the two figures blended as they kissed, and then she went inside and he came back to the car. He drove on down Taylor and turned left at the next corner.
“Give him five minutes, to be sure he doesn’t come back,” she said softly. “And, remember—try not to scare her too much. If she panics, she’ll scream. I’ll drop you off right in front, and then go on and park in the next block.”
“No,” I whispered. “If anybody sees me under that light, I don’t want him to see me getting out of your car. I’ll leave you right here, and then you go on home.”
She refused to listen to this last. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “But if there’s any uproar, get out fast, because I won’t come back to the car. You’ve done too much for me now, and I don’t intend to get you in trouble.”
I waited another two or three minutes while my nerves tied themselves in knots. The street remained silent and deserted. I’d better go now, before I got too scared to go at all. I eased the door open and slipped out. “Good luck,” she whispered.
I came out from under the shadow of the trees at the intersection and felt a million eyes on me as I crossed Westbury under the street light. I hurried into the doorway. The door w
as locked. I pressed several buttons at random, and waited, feeling the muscles in my back grow taut. The door buzzed. I yanked it open, slipped inside, and hurried up the carpeted steps to the second floor.
The corridor was deserted. Apartment 2C was the second door on the left. I pressed the buzzer, and put one hand on the knob. For a moment nothing happened. It occurred to me that if they had safety chains on the doors I was sunk. Then I heard her moving. “Who’s there?” she asked. I mumbled something indistinguishable and trusted to curiosity. The knob turned.
Her breath sucked in as I came in on her, but before the scream could cut loose I clamped a hand over her mouth. She fought, her eyes wide with terror as she recognized me. I shoved the door shut with my foot, and backed her across the room toward an armchair near the old-style pull-down bed. A small, rose-shaded lamp was burning on the table beside it. So far we hadn’t made any noise, but I wasn’t sure how long my luck would last; it was a very small room, too cluttered with furniture for much romping. I pushed her down in the chair with my hand still over her mouth, pinching her nostrils to shut off her breath.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I snapped. “Keep quiet, and I’ll let you go.” She quit fighting. I turned her loose, but stood over her ready to grab her again. My hand I’d had over her face was greasy with cold cream. She wore nothing but bra and pants and a sheer nylon robe or peignoir deal that had got wrapped around her waist in the struggle. She squirmed in the chair and tugged at it, trying to get some random bit of it down over her legs. The blonde hair was aswirl across her face, and the normally rather sullen brown eyes were crawling with fear as she looked up at me. “Wh-what are you going to do?”
“Nothing except ask you a few questions,” I said. “But this time I want some answers, or I’ll break you in two. You got me into this mess, and now you’re going to get me out. Who was the man coming to Frances’ apartment there in the shop when you were working for her?”
The long Saturday night Page 10
