Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  Eileen said, “Well, that’s been cleared up, hasn’t it? When my mother was hurt, I imagined it was my own fault because I’d halfway wanted something bad to happen to her.”

  “And you were afraid your parents would find out that you’d caused the accident?”

  “I didn’t cause it! It was only a wish—”

  “Like all feelings, it was mixed up with others.”

  “All right, we know that now! I was jealous of my mother. I wouldn’t admit to myself that I did really love my father, even when he was so cross with me. All right. So I was jealous of—” She paused.

  “Yes?”

  “Neil,” she said. “Neil Pollard. He’s like my father in so many ways. Of course I was jealous when I knew Neil was sleeping with Beverly Bond. It was like my parents all over again.”

  Gray started to say, “Neil? But you must have known it was your father who—” Then he caught himself. He wouldn’t speak now. Let her go on. He said, “Beverly Bond was like your mother?”

  Eileen looked at him, frowning. Gray got a cigarette out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Then, remembering, he offered her the pack. She took one thoughtfully. He lit it for her.

  Exhaling smoke, she said, “Not really. But I thought—I felt…” She took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it before her oddly, palm upward, the lighted end toward her mouth.

  Gray said softly, “What are you thinking now?”

  Staring at the glowing coal, she said, “I don’t…I was afraid you’d see.”

  “See what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “Frightened,” Eileen said in a faraway voice. She reversed the cigarette and laid it down on the edge of the ashtray, still looking at it as if she had never seen a cigarette before. “Frightened. But—that’s funny. Glad, too. I guess I wanted you to notice—but notice what?”

  Gray said, “What would I do if I did notice?”

  Eileen stared at him. Tension suddenly drew her face bleak.

  “Kill me!”

  Gray kept his expression calm, but it took great control to do it A strong sense of expectation had begun to gather in him.

  “Why would I kill you?” he asked softly.

  She shut her eyes. “Because you’d know. You’d know what I did. It was my fault. I did kill—”

  Gray’s voice was a whisper. “Who?”

  The words burst out in a tearing sob. “Mama—mama!”

  Then, for a moment tight control took over. Eileen set her jaw, looked up at Gray and then managed a smile. She shook her head. Gray felt a surge of disappointment It had been so close.

  Eileen took up the cigarette again. And again she held it between her fingers, palm up, looking down in bewilderment.

  Suddenly Gray made an intuitive leap of the mind. He knew what that holding of a cylinder made him think of. He risked a good deal when he spoke.

  “Is that a thermometer?” he asked quietly.

  Eileen’s horrified eyes flashed to his. Abruptly her control crumbled. She threw the cigarette to the floor with a gesture of panic. She spread her hand flat above her stomach with a strange gesture she had used once before.

  “No,” she gasped. “I don’t remember. Nobody ever—ever knew…”

  She paused, fighting to regain control. Gray’s calm voice was soothing and reassuring.

  “How does it feel?” he asked.

  She shuddered violently. “Warm—hot. It’s—a hot-water bottle. Nobody knows. I’m holding the thermometer against it. But she—she mustn’t see. The nurse. She’s coming in…The thermometer, I’ve put it in my mouth. She’s taking it…”

  “Yes?”

  “She thinks I’ve got a fever. She’s going to call Papa. He went to a party with Mama and left me alone. But he always stays with me when I’m sick. Now…”

  “Now?”

  “Nurse says Papa’s coming back. She called him. He’ll be home soon. Then I’ll tell him about the thermometer. It’ll be a big joke, getting him away from Mama, and he’ll read me a story, and—and—oh, Mama, Mama!”

  The anguished cry burst out of Eileen. She doubled up, hands to her face, while tearing, agonized sobs shook her from head to foot.

  Gray watched silently, filled with a confusion of deep sympathy and a sense of strong triumph as well. Triumph for Eileen, really, because he felt that what might be the core of Eileen’s conflicts had finally been reached. Perhaps this was the seed, the secret guilt and terror that had driven her so hard since that crucial night fifteen years ago.

  So he waited until she lifted her tear-stained face at last.

  “I—I never knew,” she said incredulously. “I never remembered. I’d forgotten.”

  “Yes,” was all Gray could say, for it was up to her now. All he could do was wait and listen and show that she could feel safe in trusting him.

  Eileen said shakily, “It was the night of the accident. They drove home as fast as they could when the nurse telephoned them. They had the accident then. It killed—crippled my mother. And I’d caused it. No one ever knew. My—my dreams started after that. And all the rest of—of being afraid, and hating…I couldn’t tell anybody. I guess I couldn’t even let myself remember. Because if I did—he’d kill me. I remember thinking that. I wanted him to love me, and he couldn’t have, really—not if he’d known…I guess I used to try to make him mad, after that. Just to see how far I could go…I wonder if that’s why I’ve got in so much trouble?”

  “Why was that?”

  “So he’d punish me…and then forgive me? I wonder…When he was angry at me, I’d feel better for a while, but then it would all start to build up again. I’d start worrying and then I’d go out and get in more trouble, and—the same old thing. And it never worked, it never worked at all!”

  Gray said, “It couldn’t work, could it?” He watched her intently. “This punishment you’ve been wanting—is that why you confessed to the murder of Beverly Bond?”

  Eileen went rigid in her chair. She turned a face of hate to Gray.

  “I confessed because I did it!” she cried. “You’ve got to believe me! You’ve got to!”

  Gray said, “All right, Eileen. It’s all right.”

  What was she covering up? It had to be something. This anger was defensive. He was sure of it.

  He leaned back and stretched his legs comfortably.

  “All right,” he said again. “If you say you did, you did. It’s almost time to stop now anyhow.” He saw the tension go slowly out of her face.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Maybe it’s minor. What’s all this about an earring, Eileen?”

  Again he got that swift, flashing glance of hers, this time with a look of painful bewilderment in it. She touched her ear.

  “It was there,” she said. The quick hatred had vanished again. At least, she was still listening and responding. “I saw it there. On the floor in front of her.” She looked at Gray with an anxious little frown. “I wish I—” She stopped herself.

  “What do you wish, Eileen?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Gray tried again. “You saw it on the floor in front of Beverly’s body. How did it get there? Who dropped it?”

  Eileen shook her head, eyes shut. She could have said, “I did.” What was stopping her from this obvious confession? Gray waited. She was still silent, eyes closed, a frown of bewilderment and anxiety on her face.

  “You were wearing both earrings when you left home?” Gray asked, not sure where the questions would lead now, but sure there was something here that needed digging into.

  She put her hands to her ears again, both hands, and opened her eyes to look searchingly at Gray.

  “I—I’m not sure. I’ve thought and thought about it. Yes, of course I was. I must have been. Yes, I had them both.” It was too emphatic. She wasn’t sure. Then how…?

  Gray said, “Let’s follow you through that evening for
a minute. You left your room and went downstairs. Then what?”

  “I’d called a taxi. I wanted to drink that night and I thought I wouldn’t try to drive.” Gray felt a moment of quick satisfaction. In this, at least, she’d changed for the better in the past six months.

  “Then what?” he said.

  “I paid off the taxi at the Silver Slipper. I went in and sat down with Jim and Mary Donnelly. We had a drink—” She went through the now-familiar routine of that evening. Gray listened, not sure what he was looking for. Was it possible that Beverly Bond herself had picked up the earring after the quarrel? Was that the question he wanted an answer to?

  He asked it. Eileen’s face cleared amazingly.

  “Of course!” she said in a happy voice. “That’s it! Why didn’t I think of it!”

  “You couldn’t have dropped it yourself?” Gray asked, very softly.

  She looked at him. For a moment their eyes met in silence.

  “Of course I could have,” Eileen said in a quiet voice.

  Gray nodded. He thought he had his answer.

  “What happened to Beverly Bond after your quarrel?” he said. “Did she have a chance to return the earring, if you really dropped it there?”

  Eileen thought it over. “Neil went and talked to her,” she said. “When I came back to the table, he was just walking her to the door, making sure she left.” She shut her eyes, remembering. “It was about that time his business message came. I started to take it for him, but he got back just in time and said he had to leave for the airport soon. So we had another drink and then Neil went out.” She shook her head. “Nothing there, is there?”

  Gray said, “I don’t know yet. Maybe there is.” He looked at Eileen. “After that,” he said, “you went up to her apartment and knocked on the door.”

  “You know what happened,” Eileen said sullenly.

  “I know you knocked. About the rest—Eileen, do you still feel you have to be punished?”

  She was silent so long he wondered if she would speak at all.

  “No,” she said slowly, at last. “It’s not the same now. I think I see I wanted my father to punish me for the thing I never admitted. So I could deserve his love again. I—I do love him. It’s strange. I thought I hated him and there wasn’t any room for anything else. But—She closed her eyes again and swallowed painfully. “Oh, I wish it could be different. But it can’t. I killed Beverly Bond.”

  Gray said, “Eileen?”

  She answered “Yes” without looking at him.

  “Eileen, look here. Now. I want to ask you a question.”

  She met his eyes almost fearfully. “What is it?”

  Gray said distinctly, “Why are you so sure it was your father who killed her?”

  Eileen sat motionless. Her eyes never swerved from his. All the color drained slowly out of her face, leaving it bleak and gray. The bones looked stark under the suddenly taut skin. She would look like this twenty years from now.

  Gray let his breath out in a long sigh. It had been an intuitive leap, a guess based on only partial evidence, and a wild chance to take—but he was right. One look at her shocked face told him that. Whether she could be brought to admit it was another question.

  She was staring at him now, shaking her head, her eyes never leaving his. Her pallor was like death.

  “No,” she said in a small, hoarse voice Gray had never heard before. “No, no, no!”

  14

  “She thinks her father did it,” Gray said into the telephone.

  At the other end of the line, Daley Quine’s voice said something too explosive to come through clearly. Gray waited for the reaction to cool a little.

  “Okay, but that’s what she thinks,” he said presently. “She won’t admit it. She probably never will. And I haven’t got legal evidence. But all the same—”

  Daley Quine said, “Wait a minute, God damn it. Herrick’s the guy who’s paying me! Is this just your private opinion, or—”

  “It isn’t even that. But it is Eileen’s. That’s why she won’t talk. She’s scared to death she’ll give herself away. She’s made up her mind she’d rather go to the gas chamber than accuse her father.”

  “What do you figure happened?” Quine asked skeptically. “Think she saw him do it?”

  “She was there,” Gray reminded him. “I’ve been thinking about it. If you go by actual evidence, what witnesses heard and saw, you can build up quite a case for Eileen. She was seen pounding on the door. She was heard calling, ‘I know who’s in there with you!’ Maybe she never set foot inside the apartment. All she knows about the murder is what she could have seen through the door when they broke it open.”

  Quine said discontentedly, “All right, then. Nobody else saw Herrick killing the Bond girl. Why should Eileen—”

  “Suppose you’re the killer,” Gray said. “Beverly Bond’s dead and you’re searching the apartment for—whatever it was you want. You think you’ve got all night to find it in. But then Eileen starts pounding on the door, making so much commotion you panic.”

  “So you set the place on fire?” Quine suggested derisively.

  “Well, somebody did. I admit that’s a hard one to figure. But it wasn’t done by someone who just touched a match to the curtains. It was carefully set and tended until it got a good hold in half a dozen places. Maybe the killer wanted to destroy what he was hunting and hadn’t time to go on searching. Either because of Eileen, or maybe because he had to be somewhere else by a given time. For an alibi, maybe.

  “But picture him now, with the kitchen and back door blocked by fire, and Eileen hammering on the front door. Where would he go?”

  “Out the window?” Quine suggested. “There’s a fire escape—”

  “And the police found traces in the soot that somebody had been on it lately. Remember the layout? The fire escape passes not only the living room windows, but the window of the outer hall where Eileen was standing. Quine, I think she saw the killer go by that window.”

  Quine was silent for a moment

  “Then how did the earring get there?” he asked.

  “The killer dropped it. The way it looks to me, Eileen thinks her father picked it up where she left it on her dresser at home. She thinks he dropped it by the body. She’s trying to convince herself Beverly Bond was the one who picked it up in the night club after their scuffle, but she knows it couldn’t have happened that way.”

  “You’re a mind reader?” Quine asked in an acid voice.

  “I was watching Eileen’s face while I asked her questions. Knowing the layout of the apartment helps, too. Remember, the earring was found on the carpet right at Beverly’s feet. There must have been a lot of scuffling and trampling over that area of carpet during the stabbing and the search afterward. There was only one time when the earring could have been dropped in that spot without getting kicked out of the way later, or stepped on. After the stabbing, after the search, just as the killer was on his way out.” Gray paused. “My guess is the earring was a deliberate plant.”

  Quine said incredulously, “She thinks her own father framed her and left her to take the rap? From all I hear, Eileen hates her father’s guts. You trying to tell me she’d sit still for a deal like that?”

  “She’s feeling pretty desperate by now. No doubt about that. But Eileen doesn’t hate her father, Quine. Or at least—well, nothing’s that simple in human relationships. If all she felt for him was hate, do you think she’d ever have got herself engaged to Neil Pollard? A man so much like her father that—”

  Gray’s voice broke off abruptly.

  “That what?” Quine prodded him after a long pause.

  In a strained voice Gray went on, “I was going to say that you could almost mistake one for the other if you saw them at a distance.”

  “Well, why not say it?” Quine’s voice was impatient.

  “I was thinking of the fire escape,” Gray said slowly.

  “The fire escape? What’s that got to do w
ith the—” Quine paused suddenly, too. “My God,” he added.

  “It could have been Neil Pollard,” Gray said, almost as if he were arguing with himself. “It was her father she expected to see. That must be what she meant when she called out, ‘I know who’s in there with you!’ But if she got just a glimpse of a man going by the window and the man looked as much like her father as Neil Pollard does—”

  “She knows about her father and Beverly Bond?” Quine asked.

  “I think so. From things she’s said, slips of the tongue, I’m pretty sure of it. I haven’t asked her yet. We were talking about—more important things—today. But that could be why she named Pollard at random when she had to think up a motive for herself. She couldn’t name her father as Beverly’s lover without giving away the secret she’s trying to keep dark. But she had to name somebody. And Pollard was in her mind at least unconsciously, because of what she saw at the window.”

  “How about that earring?” Quine asked. “Could Pollard—”

  “I wonder,” Gray said. “This would explain a lot of things. Such as why the girl’s own father seems to be letting her take the rap for him. And why the killer was in a hurry. Pollard had to get to the airport. Herrick could have taken his time. And—”

  “Hold on, damn it,” Quine said. “I asked you about the earring.”

  “The earring?” Gray pulled his mind back with an effort. He thought about it. “Yes, he could have picked it up, couldn’t he? Wait a minute. Let me think this over.”

  There was a brief pause. Then Gray said with decision, “I want to talk to Pollard again. I want to take him through the things that happened that night once more. And this time I’ll be looking for something different.”

  “Well, take it easy if you do,” Quine said. “If you’re right, there’s somebody in this mess isn’t playing parlor games.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Gray said. “I’ll call you later about it.”

  “I hope so,” Quine said forebodingly.