My Son, the Murderer

by Patrick Quentin

  She looked at me incredulously. Did even Jean then feel my mission was hopeless? “How?” she said. “How?”

  I said: “First you can tell me what really happened. Last night on the phone you said Ronnie locked you in your room right after I left. That wasn’t true, was it? I talked to Bill. He told me everything. You were there in the living-room when he came back with the gun.”

  Her face was suddenly blank. “Bill told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But”—she hesitated—“but you didn’t tell the police?”

  “Bill did. He told them everything—the whole truth.”

  Her hand was still on my arm. She swayed towards me so that her whole weight was resting against me. Her cheeks were suddenly like chalk. I thought she was going to faint.

  She said: “Then—then he confessed?”

  Anxiety stirred in me like a snake uncoiling from hibernation.

  “What do you mean. ‘He confessed’?”

  “You said he told them everything.”

  “He did. He told them how he came here with the gun, how you made him put it down, how Ronnie threw him out.”

  “Oh,” she said. She drew away from me, standing straight again. “Oh, I see.”

  I said: “That is how it happened, isn’t it?”

  She nodded vaguely. “Of course that’s the way it happened. On the phone I didn’t tell you I was there. I thought—I thought it would be better for Bill if I didn’t say it, so they would never know he had come with the gun.”

  “But they’d have known it anyway with the gun lying there and Peter and Iris knowing Bill had stolen it.”

  “Yes,” she said, almost meekly. “Yes. I see that now.”

  “So you’d better tell me everything that happened.”

  “After you left? When Ronnie was standing there by the chimney-piece?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. Her hair fell half over her forehead, like Bill’s. She didn’t push it back. She said: “After you left, he just stood there. Ronnie. He didn’t say anything. He just stood like a statue. And Johnson came in. He must have heard the crash when Ronnie broke the figurine. He had a dustpan and brush. No one said anything. He just knelt down by Ronnie’s feet and swept up the pieces of china. Then he started to go away and Ronnie barked out at him like a sergeant-major: ‘Johnson, take the evening off’. And Johnson said: ‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir’. And left.”

  That got Johnson off the premises. “Yes,” I said. “And then?”

  She looked up at me, tossing back her hair. “I was angry. You know that. I’d never been so angry in my life. Before that, I’d always felt guilty. I thought what I felt about Bill was terrible, wicked. I tried to stop it. I tried everything to stop him too. But then, yesterday, when I saw Ronnie like that, when I heard what he said to you, I didn’t feel guilty any more. It was as if my eyes were open, as if I’d been blind ever since he came to Shropshire, when I thought he was so good, so wonderful, so kind with us all, so brilliant, such a godsend to Father. Suddenly I saw him the way he was, ready to destroy you, his best friend who hadn’t done anything in the world but try to help him, just because his pride was hurt, just because he’d been made to feel a fool. If it had only been Bill and me, I could have understood. But you! And I thought: So he is a monster. Bill’s right. He’s arrogant, malicious—a monster. And we stood there, not even looking at each other, and the silence was terrible. And I tried to change myself. I tried to think: He can’t really be as bad as that. He didn’t really mean he was going to destroy Mr. Duluth. He only said it because he was angry. And—and then …”

  She broke off, and added fiercely: “He did mean it. He meant every word he said. Suddenly he strode away from the chimney-piece to the phone and he rang his lawyer.”

  “Arthur Freedland?”

  “Yes. Mr. Freedland wasn’t there, but whoever answered the phone must have expected him soon, because Ronnie said in a voice like poison: ‘Tell him to come here the minute he gets back. Tell him it’s of the utmost importance. Tell him I am going to dissolve Sheldon and Duluth and change my will.’ ”

  I thought of Arthur’s wife or Arthur’s mother-in-law on the other end of the phone. I thought of the flurry of gossip when Arthur got back from Baltimore and was smothered in the news. No wonder Arthur was so uneasy with me last night. No wonder his response to my cry for help had been so glacial.

  And, in spite of the young, merciless prejudice in Jean’s narration, I could see the scene so well. Of course Ronnie had called Arthur. Of course he’d still been far too hurt and savage to have lost his hatred for me. Not, of course, that he would have gone through with his plan. Next morning, or the morning after, he’d have come to me, hiding his shame behind flippancy, grinning sheepishly.

  “I say, old boy, kind of went off the deep-end, didn’t I?”

  But I didn’t expect Jean to realize that. How could a bewildered, love-sick nineteen-year-old understand so complex, so subtle, so contradictory a character as Ronnie’s?

  Her voice called back my attention.

  “He left that message on the phone and he swung round to me. That was the first time since you’d left that he even looked at me. He was smiling, and his face was horrible. He said: ‘I hope you’re satisfied. Any minute now will witness the total extinction of the Duluth family. That’s quite an achievement for a nineteen-year-old girl only three weeks out of the chicken-run, isn’t it.’ And I looked at him, hating him, and I said: ‘You can’t do that to Mr. Duluth. What has he done to you?’ And he said: ‘Jake’s given birth to Bill. That’s crime enough, isn’t it?’ And that’s when I knew it was the end, that nothing, nothing could ever make me bear to be in the same room with him again. And I saw then that it was all right to love Bill after all. It wasn’t wicked. It was wonderful. It was the healthy thing in me that would save me. And I said to myself: I’m leaving. Right this very minute. And I left him and I ran upstairs and I started to pack. I wasn’t worried about Mummy. I knew, when I explained, she would understand. And I didn’t care about Daddy and Phyllis anyway. I pulled out drawers. I started to pack. I was happy as I didn’t think it possible to be. I was thinking: Any minute now I’ll be with Bill.”

  She glanced up at me again, so young, so sure of her ethical ground. “And then, about twenty minutes later, Ronnie came up. He was there, standing in the doorway, watching me. And he said: ‘What are you doing?’ And I said: ‘Packing. I’m leaving. I’m going to Bill.’ I—I can’t tell you the way he was. He was worse even than he had been before. He screamed, he shouted, he called me every filthy name. He said, if it cost him every cent he had, I would never see Bill again as long as I lived. He’d have me deported, he’d have the whole lot of us deported. He … Oh, he went on and on for minutes, shouting at me like a madman. And then—then the doorbell rang.”

  She broke off. My pity for Ronnie was mingled now with shame for him and bewilderment. I had never, perhaps unfairly, thought of him as in love with Jean—in love as one normally imagines love to be. It was, I suppose, the Haddad figurine remark which had made me feel Jean was more of a precious possession to him than a human being. Had I been wrong? Didn’t this extended exhibition of childish spite hint that Ronnie had been wounded more deeply than in his pride? Had he really fallen in love with Jean? Had he, then, for the first time in fifty-odd years, been faced with a real sense of loss?

  She was saying: “When the bell rang, he laughed. He grabbed my arm. He started pulling me down the stairs. He said: ‘This is Arthur. You must be there. It wouldn’t do at all, would it, for me to change my will without the presence of my loving wife?’ He took me down to the living-room. He said: ‘Stay here’,- and he went to open the door. And that’s when he came up with Bill and Bill had the gun …”

  From then on she told the story exactly as Bill had told it. When she saw the gun, she had been so frightened for Bill that she thought of nothing but the gun. And she had kept calling to
him to put it down. Bill had seemed dazed, as if he didn’t know what he was doing, but finally he put down the gun and Ronnie jumped on him. Bill had crumpled. He had made no attempt to defend himself. Jean, in fear and humiliation, had ran out of the room and upstairs.

  “I’d meant to tell Bill that I was going with him. I meant to shout it out to him. But the gun stopped me and then the way he—he let Ronnie hit him and hit him.” She put her hand up to cover her face. “I ran upstairs. I just stood there by my suitcase. I didn’t do anything. And I heard Ronnie cursing and dragging Bill down the stairs and I—I heard the front door slam shut. And then Ronnie was up in my room again. He was grinning. There was a broad grin on his face like a cat’s. And he said: ‘So much for your knight and his large white charger. I’m afraid Sir William isn’t on form today, is he, old girl? Well, since you seem so fond of this room, you may as well stay here for a while.’ And he waved at me, a horrible, jaunty wave and he went out and slammed the door and turned the key. That was when he locked me in.”

  For the first time, hope was sprouting in me. “So you heard him drag Bill down the stairs. You heard the front door slam shut?”

  “Yes.”

  Then she was a witness after all. I felt light-headed. This was too simple, too good to be true. I took her arm.

  “Jean, tell all this to Barnes. It proves it. It proves Bill left over an hour before the murder. It’s his alibi.”

  I was astonished that she hadn’t realized it before, and even more astonished now that her lips tightened into the grim line of fear which I knew so well.

  “No,” she said.

  “But …”

  Passionately, she said: “He’s so clever, Lieutenant Barnes. If I tell him that much, he’ll trick me. He’ll make me tell him the rest.”

  “The rest?”

  She was looking directly at me. The straight attention of her eyes sent a tingle of apprehension up my spine.

  She said: “Haven’t you guessed?”

  “Guessed?”

  “Bill came back,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “I was locked in that room, but it’s at the top of the stairs. The sound comes up. You can hear everything in the hall. I just sat on the bed, waiting, wondering what to do. And then— it was just at nine—I heard someone let themselves in. I heard the key turn in the lock, I heard the door open and close. I heard the—the person going up the stairs to the living-room.”

  “Person,” I said. “Only person. You didn’t see. You didn’t hear his voice.”

  “No, I didn’t hear his voice. But it was someone with a key.”

  “Angie.”

  “Angie was with Gwendolyn Sneighley all evening.”

  “Your father or Phyllis or your mother.”

  “They don’t have keys. It was all arranged when we first arrived. Mother arranged it so they wouldn’t be dropping in on us. None of them has keys.”

  She was talking with icy deliberation, almost as if she wanted to convince me of her own nightmare delusion.

  I almost shouted at her: “But, for God’s sake, Bill didn’t have a key.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, he did. Don’t you remember? I left my handbag at Fire Island. The key was in it. When I came back with you, you had to let me in. Bill brought my bag back to me yesterday.” She turned bleakly to the bed, picked up a navy blue handbag and gave it to me. “See for yourself. The key isn’t there.”

  I started to search in the handbag. Jean went on:

  “After I heard the person come, I thought immediately: It’s Bill. He’s come back. This time he’s going to kill Ronnie. And I remembered the handbag. I went to it. I searched it. The key wasn’t there—and then I knew. I knew I should beat on the door and shout and shout to tell him to stop. But suddenly I felt dizzy and faint. I wanted to be sick. I—I went into the bathroom. I was terribly sick. I thought I was going to die. I just stayed there in the bathroom—and then I heard the shots. That’s all I heard. From the bathroom, you can’t hear anyone on the stairs or going out or anything. I was there—and I heard the shots. And—that was when I called you.”

  The key wasn’t in the handbag. I had searched it twice. I stood there, looking at her, fighting against despair.

  I said: “But you don’t know it was Bill.”

  “Of course it was Bill.” There it was again, the Juliet look, the look of young, transported love that accepts inevitably the tragic ending. “He loves me. He knew what a monster Ronnie was. He’d come to try to save me with the gun. I’d made him put the gun down. Ronnie had thrown him out. But he wouldn’t have left it there. Of course he wouldn’t. After he’d gone, he remembered the key.”

  For one terrible moment, a picture came of Bill picking himself up out of the gutter where Ronnie had thrown him, brushing down his pants. I was so humiliated. … I saw him standing outside the house, looking back, racked with love and fury and shame, remembering what he had said to Johnson. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll kill him. I saw him walking blindly away. Then I saw him suddenly stop, feel in his pocket and find the key. I saw him turning back toward 58th Street. …

  An image came of Angie. Don’t raise your hopes too high. Think all the time. Maybe he did it. And in a flash of morbid insight, I thought: Do I really think he’s innocent or is it only my stubbornness, my cowardice, my great fear of facing the fact that a son of mine, like a wife of mine …?

  I crushed the thought as if I were stamping on a bug. I mustn’t think that way. If I did, all would be lost.

  Jean was clutching my arm. “Mr. Duluth, don’t you see? You’ve got to face it. We’ve both got to face it. That’s the only way, or we’ll go mad. Bill killed him. And it’s all my fault. It’s …” She started to sob. “Oh, God, why did I marry Ronnie and come here? Why did I …?”

  I put my arm round her. I said: “Bill didn’t do it. If someone let themselves in with a key, it wasn’t Bill. If it wasn’t Angie, it was your father or Phyllis or your mother.” My arm tightened round her. “Listen, Jean. Ronnie said he’d have your whole family deported, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. I told you.”

  “And he meant it. At least, he thought he meant it at the time. After he locked you in, he was waiting for Arthur Freedland. He was still hurt, furious, malicious, and there was no one to vent his spite on. So he called them here upstairs. He talked to one of them, to your father or Phyllis or your mother. He talked to them the way he talked to me and you. He said: ‘Go ahead. Pack your bags. Your little gilded hour is over. Tomorrow you all get sent back to squalor and Shropshire.’ Jean, that’s what he did. He called them. He taunted them. They believed him because they didn’t understand Ronnie. And they couldn’t face it. They couldn’t face losing all they had so miraculously won. So one of them …”

  It all seemed vivid to me, as real as if I had actually witnessed it. And, in the upheaval of horror, it no longer meant anything that I should be accusing Jean’s family of murder in front of her face.

  “Don’t you see, Jean? That’s what happened. Of course Ronnie would have called them and …”

  She broke in: “But Daddy was alone. Phyllis and Mummy were out shopping all afternoon. They didn’t come back.”

  “Then it was your father.”

  “But later, when Ronnie was killed, he was at the theater with Mummy and Phyllis. They were all at the theater. It started at eight-forty. And the—the shots were at nine-twenty.” She looked up at me hopelessly. “Don’t you think I haven’t thought of that? And don’t you realize I should turn against them—even them—if it could save Bill? But it wouldn’t save Bill, because they didn’t do it. They couldn’t have done it. It couldn’t have been anyone but Bill.”

  The strength of her conviction was dreadful. It seemed to curl around me like an octopus, squeezing out of me the little strength of purpose that remained. Don’t raise your hopes too high. Angie was now a fury, hounding me to despair. I struggled against her insidious influence and
won. Somehow it must have happened the way I suggested. It was Basil Lacey. And I would prove it. Somehow I would defeat Barnes, Angie, Jean, all the other blind jumpers at conclusions.

  Jean was saying: “If we told the police the truth! If we told them everything that happened, made them see what a monster Ronnie was, how terrible it was for Bill, how—how I was really to blame! Mr. Duluth, wouldn’t they see? Wouldn’t they somehow take me instead, wouldn’t they …?”

  She too was talking from despair. Even she, I knew, didn’t take those pitiful histrionics seriously. Although she would have done it. I was sure of that. If it had been possible, she would have sacrificed herself for Bill. I never doubted her love. But she had turned, like Angie, from an ally into an enemy.

  She said: “Mr. Duluth, Lieutenant Barnes will be here soon. He’s bound to come soon. What shall I do?”

  “Don’t tell him.”

  “Not anything?”

  “Tell him the first part, tell him you were in the living-room when Bill came with the gun, tell him you heard Ronnie throw him out and slam the door behind him. And, yes—tell him you heard someone let themselves in at nine with a key. But that’s all. Don’t tell him about Bill and your key.”

  She was more frightened of Barnes than I was. I could tell from the flicker of her eyelids.

  “If I can,” she said.

  “You’ve got to. If you tell about your key, it’s the end for Bill.”

  I saw then that she was defeated. She had a lot of courage, but it had been worn out like Bill’s. I thought, with terror, of the moment when Barnes would begin his quiet, merciless interrogation. That was all there was now between Bill and certain disaster—the frail extent of Jean’s courage and cunning.

  I repeated urgently: “You do see, don’t you? You do see how important it is for Barnes not to know about your key?”

  “Yes.” she said. “Yes. I understand.” Then suddenly she added: “Can I see him?”

  “Bill?”

  “If I could see him. If I could just let him know …”

  I said: “You’re the motive. Don’t you understand? It’s in all the papers already. Bill murdered Ronnie for love of you. That’s what they say. If you went to the jail …”