by Q. Patrick
Jerry was gazing back at Robert Hudnutt, his face above the turtle neck of the sweater white as stone, his eyes reflecting some of the horror of that terrible story. Very huskily he said:
“I can see how it was for you—how hard it must have been.”
“Thank you.” A faint warmth kindled for a moment in Robert’s spent eyes. “You know the rest. I drove home. I went to bed.
My wife was asleep. She knew nothing of all this—nothing at all. I did intend to tell Miss Parrish next morning, and to ask her advice. But, when she jumped to the conclusion I had gone out in my own car—when she made it so easy for me to tell one little lie in exchange for an alibi—I let myself be lulled into a false sense of security. There was only the car to think of then. I suggested to my wife that it should be done over. I had the vague idea someone might have seen it, so I had it painted a different color. I’m afraid that was another of the criminally stupid things I did.”
He paused a moment and when he spoke again his voice was firmer, more resolute. “There is one thing that I want you all to know. I should most certainly have come forward if there had been the least question of an innocent person being accused. I want you also to know that I never gave Grace Hough any cause to think I was interested in her in any way except as a promising student. I never wrote any letters to her, and—” he gave a slight shrug—“you must believe me when I say I have not the slightest idea who killed Norma Sayler.”
I had been completely carried away from that long shadowy room back into those terrible hours in Robert’s past. Now that he had stopped speaking the spell was broken.
I realized suddenly that Robert’s harrowing confession had not really solved the mystery of Grace Hough. It made her death a senseless accident broken away from the real pattern. It did not explain who wrote Grace those innumerable special delivery letters; who it was that she hoped to meet at the theater. Above all, it did not explain the identity of that mysterious person whom Grace had gone to meet at the quarry later that night, and it shed no ray of light on the grim puzzle of Norma’s death.
Robert’s voice broke in again. “Well, Lieutenant, I’m ready.”
“Wait a minute, Robert.” Penelope had sprung up from her chair and was walking briskly across the room to the telephone. We all watched her purposeful movements as she lifted the receiver and asked for a New York number. While she was waiting, she looked at Trant, her eyes steady and controlled. “Chief Jordan will, of course, want statements from us at the courthouse?” Trant nodded.
“In that case,” said Penelope quietly, “I should prefer my husband to have a lawyer present. There’s no objection, I suppose?”
“Of course you may get a lawyer, Mrs. Hudnutt,” replied Trant softly. “But before you call him, I’d like you to hear something—something which may make you change your mind.”
Penelope’s eyes were suddenly curious. For a moment she fingered the receiver uncertainly, then in a clipped, businesslike voice, she canceled the call.
“Dr. Hudnutt has been very frank with us,” said Trant, “although he might have let us know all this earlier. Of his own free will he has admitted that he had a strong motive to desire Grace’s death. He has admitted that he struck her with his car and disposed of her body. As a police officer I cannot officially approve either his action or his subsequent silence. But, as a man, I can only say I might have acted myself in a similar manner under those particular circumstances.”
Trant was watching each one of us in turn now as if it were particularly important that we should appreciate what he was about to say. “In spite of those admissions, Dr. Hudnutt has denied several other things. He has denied writing those letters to Grace Hough; he has denied killing Norma Sayler, who was murdered for what the last of those special delivery letters told her; he denies that he was the person with whom Grace had an appointment at the quarry; he has denied that her death was anything but a tragic accident.”
He paused. “But we know that someone did write Grace special delivery letters; we know that she was intending to meet someone at the quarry; we know there is still a person involved in this case who plays a vitally important role and who is not Robert Hudnutt.”
Trant was looking at Penelope again. “This is the point I want to bring to your attention, Mrs. Hudnutt,” he said very deliberately. “Surely the most essential part of your husband’s story is the fact that he was switching on his windshield wiper at the time when he felt that sudden jolt. He did not see Grace Hough until he got out of his car and found her lying there dead.”
I couldn’t really grasp what he meant, but I saw a sudden quickening of hope on Penelope’s drawn face. She turned to her husband. “Robert, don’t you see what he’s suggesting? You never saw Grace fall in front of your car. Perhaps she was already dead when you struck her. Perhaps someone had murdered her and arranged it so that she was lying there on the bend, someone who knew you would be driving along that road, who set a deliberate trap to make you believe you killed her. Perhaps it was some ghastly, premeditated plan.” Her eyes, bright and eager, met Trant’s. “Isn’t that what you mean?”
Lieutenant Trant was watching her with a slow smile on his lips. “I mean, Mrs. Hudnutt that I have been put in a rather extraordinary position. For days I have been doing my utmost to force your husband into admitting to murder. Now—”
His gaze moved to Robert who was leaning back, limp and pale against the soft fabric of his chair.
“I have the unusual and very pleasant task, Dr. Hudnutt, of assuring you that you were not responsible for Grace Hough’s death.”
XXIII
It was then, at the most dramatic of the evening’s many dramatic moments, that Chief Jordan arrived. He came into the room, followed by two plainclothes men, looking exhausted and utterly dejected. His kindly eyes moved from one to the other of us and finally settled on the Lieutenant. Trant got up. It seemed incredible that he could leave us knowing so much and yet so very little, while we were still stunned by his announcement that Robert had not been responsible for Grace’s death.
But he did. Quietly he told Jordan that several of us had statements to make at the courthouse. And we were all trooping out into the spring darkness again—seven people in our smartest evening clothes going to the police station at one o’clock in the morning.
There wasn’t enough room in the two police cars for all of us. Steve’s car was parked outside Broome. Steve and I walked to it over the moonlit lawns and drove to the courthouse together.
A short time later we were all in the drab waiting room at the courthouse, sitting around on bare benches, silent and uneasy, waiting to be summoned in turn into Chief Jordan’s office.
Steve was called in first. I found a place on the bench next to Jerry. After about five minutes Steve came out again and a plainclothes man beckoned to me.
In the office Chief Jordan was sitting behind the desk with a male stenographer at his side. It was all brief and formal. While the man took notes I gave a bald account of the reappearance of my galyak coat, my own movements at the dance and the actual discovery in the pool.
Steve and Jerry were sitting together when I returned to the waiting room. The shock of what had happened that night seemed to have broken the barrier between them. They were talking together in low voices, looking just the way they used to be when they were the two closest friends at Wentworth.
And then Jerry was called into the office. I wanted to wait for him but Penelope told me to drive back with Steve and go to Elaine. She gave me the key to her house, and I was with Steve again in his car.
Neither of us spoke as we drove through the deserted main street of Wentworth. We reached the college garage and Steve headed through the open doors, past the solitary old night watchman and up the ramp to the third floor where all the college cars were kept.
It was eerie up there. The place was completely dark except for the fanwise beam from Steve’s headlights. Ahead I could make out the little closed-in repair s
hop. The sliding doors were open and I saw the back of a low-slung tan sports coupe inside. Dean Appel’s car was in the process of getting its summer coat of paint.
Steve turned into his own parking space and the lights showed the maroon sedan immediately next to it. It gave me a strange, desolate feeling to see Norma Sayler’s car standing there, forlorn and empty, where it had always stood.
I was moving to step out of the car when Steve gripped my hand. “Don’t go, Lee.” A shadow of the old sardonic smile was in his eyes. “I know you don’t give a damn what or why I’ve been doing the past couple of days. But I’ve got to tell you.” He paused. “You’ve been thinking I fled from justice, haven’t you? I’m afraid the truth is much less romantic. I’ve just been home, talking to Dad. Trant’s heard all about it. He’s an amazing guy. He seemed to know everything before I told him.”
There was a musty, lifeless smell about that garage. “I don’t have to be convinced of Trant’s smartness,” I said hollowly.
“But you’ve got to be convinced I’m not the lying son of a something you think I am,” said Steve urgently. “I’ve kept a few things back from you, about the red slicker, for example. But everything else I told you there in the garden was true. I told you I got into a jam at the Amber Club; I told you I’d been dumb enough to confide in Grace once; I told you she threatened to tell the world if I didn’t drop her at the quarry. All that’s true.”
“And you’re going to tell me what Grace had against you? And why you left the Amber Club, Steve?” I said, still not particularly caring.
“It all seems so dam sophomoric now.” He pressed a little closer. “You remember that torch singer at the Amber Club, the girl who came right over and sang at me? It was as simple as that. In my old unregenerate days I’d had an affair with her. I’d used a phony, name on account of Dad’s position and she didn’t know I was a Governor’s son until Elaine got tight and gave her that crazy line about me. Then she started to get the idea there were some fancy pickings in it for her. She was the person that called me. I went to her dressing room and she had her campaign all worked out. There were some dumb letters I’d written. She said she’d go in for a breach of promise suit if I didn’t come across with the dough. I was scared as hell, simply because I didn’t have any dough to come across with and Elaine had given her the idea I was a millionaire playboy. I spent most of the night arguing, pleading with her to give me back the letters. I was hellish late getting back to Wentworth because I had to drive her home first. She left her slicker in my car.”
There was something pathetic about that story, coming now of all times. Steve’s face was close to mine, flushed, awkward. I’d always thought of him as one of those super-sophisticates who knew exactly how to handle his women. This new picture of him as a blundering kid in the toils of a cheap golddigger somehow made him far more human—and more attractive.
“You poor darling,” I said. “And that’s what Grace found out?”
“Sure. Remember how I told you I’d confided in her in the old days when we all used to pal around together? It was about that Amber Club girl. She was singing somewhere else then. I hadn’t seen her for months until the night of the party. When Grace made me pick her up at the service station, she saw that red slicker in my car. Grace was dam smart about things like that. She cottoned on to it—from the coat. That was her lever. She knew Dad was in the running for G. O. P. presidential nominee. She knew any sort of family scandal would cut his chances in half.”
“And she also threatened to tell the girl you’re in love with?”
“Yes.” Steve looked down at his brown knuckles. “She also threatened that. You see now why I didn’t tell you any more than I did. I was a fool. I should have had the nerve to spill it all to you. But I was so damn scared for Dad. If the police ever traced that red slicker to me, I knew the whole story would get out in the press. That’s why I held back. That’s why I couldn’t even tell you where I’d put your fur coat. And that’s why I scrammed so dramatically after you called me from the theater and told me Trant had gotten onto the slicker. There seemed only one thing to do then; and that was to give Dad the dope first and give him a chance to fix it. He was swell about it. His lawyer took it up with Sylvia and somehow scared the pants off her. My juvenilia are home in the family safe; the Carteris political future is unsullied by scandal—and I got out of it far more easily than I deserved.”
I was going to say something reassuring when, suddenly, he gripped my arm and said in a gruff kind of voice: “Let’s get out of this place.”
We walked down the ramp in silence, our footsteps echoing against the cold cement. There was no light to guide us except the dim illumination from the main garage downstairs. Steve called a quiet goodnight to the old colored man in the office and we headed up the short road which led to the north gate of the college.
I said: “There’s one thing you haven’t told me, Steve. Why did you put my coat in the back of Norma’s car?”
“Grace told me to. When she switched coats, she said she didn’t want to lug the fur coat all the way back to Pigot. She asked me to take it to you, to thank you and to tell you how sorry she was she’d torn the lining or something. I pointed out I could hardly break into Pigot at that time of night. So she said to leave it in Norma’s car and you could get it in the morning. I put it in the luggage place because I thought it would be safer.”
“I see,” I said, thinking how all the things that had seemed so fantastic in the career of my galyak fur coat had actually been so mundane.
Steve slipped his arm through mine and we moved past the iron gates into the campus. Ahead of us Pigot loomed against the pale night sky, shrouded in respectable darkness.
When we had almost reached the porch, Steve paused, putting his hands on my arms, looking down at me.
“You know everything now, Lee. You know what a shoddy fool I made of myself and how I’ve come out of it intact when I should have been held up to public derision—the smart little sucker who was taken for a ride by the first cheap floosey that took the trouble. I’ve learned a heavy moral lesson, I suppose. But the only thing that really matters has been shot to hell-and-gone. I used to be a hundred to one shot with my girl. Now, when she hears about this, I’ll be right off the board.”
There was something so forlorn in his voice that I took his hand and squeezed it. “Darling, you’re not so hot on feminine psychology. Girls love men with tarnished pasts and repentant consciences. Up and tell her all. She’ll be thrilled.”
“You really mean that?”
“Of course. There’s only one thing that makes a girl mad and that’s being left out of what’s going on. Even I’m a bit mad about that, Steve. Why didn’t you tell me about the wicked, wicked torch singer from the beginning? Was it because you didn’t trust me?”
“Didn’t trust you!” He gave a short, odd laugh. “Your masculine psychology needs brushing up, too. Haven’t you guessed that I’d rather have you think I’m a murderer than just that sort of a fool. You see, you’ve always been two people to me, Lee. You’re the swellest person in Wentworth and my very best friend, but—” he broke off, adding quietly—“you also happen to be the girl I’m crazy about.”
I stared at him. I was too completely surprised to be able to think. Steve, who to me had always been the Governor’s son with a past, present and future strewn with the least correct hat-check girls or the most correct debutantes, Steve who had always seemed too gay and irresponsible to care about anyone—Steve in love with me!
He had taken both my hands now and was drawing me toward him. “I don’t want you to say anything,” he whispered. “I know you’ve always been crazy about Jerry and I don’t blame you. He’s far more of a person than I am. It’s been tough loving you so terribly and going on eating three meals a day. But I’m getting along nicely now.”
He was looking down at me, a slim, tall shadow in his immaculate evening clothes. From the faint starlight I could see the wry smile on
his lips.
“I’ve got enough sense to see I’m the one with the breaks. Jerry, Elaine, the Hudnutts, Marcia, they’ve all had something horrible come into their lives, something it’s going to be damn hard to forget. All I have to forget is you. And that shouldn’t be so difficult for a self-respecting young senior to whom Life is stretching out welcoming hands—as Prexy says at the end of term.”
He bent suddenly and kissed me. His lips were warm, uncertain on mine—so very different from the quiet irony in his voice.
Very slowly he drew away.
“If ever you need a sucker already there on the hook, Lee, just reel in and you’ll find me. Goodnight.”
And he was gone, slipping away across the shadowy lawns toward Broome.
XXIV
That feeling of surprise and incredulity stayed with me as I started up the dark stairs of Pigot to my top-floor room. I was very tired, far too tired to feel sleepy any more. The long skirt of my gown trailed against the wooden flats of the stairs and it was a conscious effort to drag it after me.
And I thought of all the things that had changed since I had put on that dress for the dance. Much more, in a sense, had happened to me in those few hours than had ever happened in my life before. The intoxicating thrill of being in Jerry’s arms, of feeling his lips on mine, knowing he needed me; then the shattering contrast of our discovery in the pool; Norma murdered and the blinding forward rush of events which had caught up Robert Hudnutt and then miraculously seemed to have freed him again.
