Hue and Cry

by Thomas B. Dewey

  “You going to the dance?” Elsie said.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not going to any dance.”

  Then I wasn’t edgy any more about her asking if I was going to Bridgeville. They had a dance in Bridgeville every Saturday night in the Lions’ Hall. A lot of people from Preston went to it every week. I’d forgotten about it. Mostly the fellows went stag and the girls went alone or in packs, and they’d get together at the dance.

  I was keeping my mind on the car and the road, not saying anything. Elsie sat over by the door, holding on to the handle. She was a pretty kid, a senior in high school, a nice girl.

  After a minute she said, “You seem to be in an awful hurry. Where are you going?”

  “I’m trying to catch the City bus,” I said.

  “Who’s on the bus?”

  “Singer Batts is on it.”

  Elsie looked out the window.

  “Wasn’t it awful about Miss Mason?” she said.

  “Yeah. Did you like Miss Mason?”

  She looked at me. Then she said, as if she really wanted me to believe it, “Sure I did.”

  “Was she a good teacher?”

  “She was a swell teacher.”

  I was making sixty-eight now and we were bouncing around a lot. We had to talk pretty loud to make ourselves heard. I rounded a bend in the road and felt better. Far ahead I could see the tail lights of the bus.

  “You used to run around with her on double dates, didn’t you?” I asked Elsie.

  “Once in a while.”

  “With Don Eastman?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I don’t go with Don Eastman anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just because,” she said.

  I pushed the gas clear down. The tail lights of the bus were closer now.

  “What was it about Miss Mason that some people didn’t like?” I said. “I mean—besides the fact that she smoked and drank and ran around a lot.”

  There was a long pause this time. Then Elsie said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do,” I said. And when she didn’t answer, I asked, “Seen Don Eastman today?”

  “You ask too many questions,” Elsie said.

  It was at that point I caught up with the bus. I quit talking, sat on the horn, and started around. The driver wouldn’t move over. The road wasn’t any too wide and I needed all the room I could get. I blinked my lights. He moved over a little. It was just barely enough and there were deep ditches on both sides. But I had to get around him. I blew hell out of my horn, kept flashing my lights, and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  “Be careful, Joe!” Elsie said, grabbing the door handle.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “It’s almost over.”

  A car was coming toward us and I couldn’t tell how far away he was, but it was too late to go back. I just hung on and prayed. I went too far to the left, hit the gravel shoulder, and we swayed. Elsie hollered and closed her eyes. Then I cut in front of the bus and straightened up to let the oncoming car pass. It wasn’t wasting any time either.

  “My goodness!” Elsie said. “Are you trying to commit suicide?”

  Ahead were the lights of Bridgeville, faint in the early evening.

  “What about it?” I said to Elsie. “What do you know about Miss Mason that you’re not telling?”

  “Please, Joe,” Elsie said. “No more questions.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I said. “Eastman?”

  “No!” Elsie said. “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “You’re afraid of something,” I said.

  We passed the town limits of Bridgeville and I slowed down a little.

  “Maybe I am, Joe,” Elsie said. “But I can’t tell you about it. I can’t tell anybody.”

  “Not even Singer Batts?”

  “No,” Elsie said. “I would trust Singer Batts more than anybody else I know. But I couldn’t tell this even to him.”

  “Look,” I said. “When somebody commits murder, the law has to find him and take care of him. If you know something about a murder and you don’t tell it, you’re disobeying the law. If we got no law, we got no safety. Think it over, Elsie.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I pulled up in front of McCarthy’s drugstore, where the bus stopped in Bridgeville. I took the car keys out and handed them to Elsie.

  “If there’s enough gas in the tank,” I said, “you can drive this thing home for me after the dance. But go by the back road and leave the car on a side street. The cops will be looking for it.”

  “All right, Joe,” she said. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Just think over what I told you.”

  She walked away. I climbed out of the car just as the bus drew up and honked. The guy who ran the drugstore came out and waved his hands, showing there weren’t any passengers. I knocked on the door of the bus and the driver opened it up. I climbed in. The driver looked me over.

  “You the guy damn near run me off the road?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why didn’t you give me room?”

  “I ought to turn you in,” he said. “You’re wild. I got responsibilities. I got passengers.”

  “Not many, you haven’t,” I said.

  I looked back in the bus. He had one passenger. Singer Batts.

  I went back and sat down beside Singer.

  He hadn’t seen me get on. When I sat down he looked at me.

  “Hello, Joe,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The driver shifted gears and we started off.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I have a couple of minor reports to make,” I said to Singer as we rolled out of Bridgeville.

  “Good,” Singer said.

  “First, about Tommy Rowe. I had a little talk with him just before you and Weaver came in with Pfeffer.” I told him what Tommy had said. He winced when I came to the lie I told Tommy about opening the envelope. But he didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t tell whether what Tommy said was interesting to him.

  Then I told him about picking up Elsie Schaffner and what she said. That seemed to make a better impression on him than what I told him about Tommy Rowe. When I got through, he said:

  “I couldn’t do anything without you, Joe. As an observer you are absolutely first-rate. A sort of high-fidelity reporter, you might say. The report of your inspection of the murder room and the events of the morning was amazing. Do you ever miss anything?”

  “I miss plenty,” I said. “Right now I miss the point of everything that’s happened. I have no idea who killed Marian Mason, or how it was done. The evidence makes no sense to me.”

  “You’ve been too busy to think about it,” Singer said. “You’re a man of action. I am so lazy physically that I have plenty of time to interpret the meaning of your actions and observations.”

  “How about letting me in on it?” I said. “I’d like to know what you think.”

  “Well, since we have the bus to ourselves and a little time, maybe we ought to review the case. The first thing we have to do is to reconstruct the scene of the crime. We have to know how it happened before we can determine who did it.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “Just to sharpen up our memories, Joe, we’ll go over the details of the scene of the murder. What did you find when you went up to Miss Mason’s room?”

  “I found Miss Mason dead at eleven-forty-five this morning,” I said. “She was lying on her bed in her birthday suit with a knife in her chest.”

  “Those are big facts, Joe. How about the other considerations? What else did you find?”

  “In the room,” I said, “I found a box of cookies, a nightgown, some slippers, a dressing gown—”

  “And?”

  “And some footprints on the window sill.”

  “Yes. And what else?”

  “What else? That not enough?”

  “Not quite. Perhaps I should
put it this way: What did you not find?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “You did not find two glasses, one of which had at one time contained poison.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. I did not find two glasses, one of which had contained poison.”

  “What else can you say about your observations?”

  “The footprints,” I said, “were a woman’s, which means that some dame was in the room at some time. Whether that dame was the one who killed the schoolteacher I guess we don’t know yet. Also, it was only one foot, the right one, once going out and once coming in.”

  “Let’s not attribute too much importance to that single footprint,” Singer said. “I am sure you must often have hopped in and out of windows in such a way as to leave only a single foot’s print on the sill. But the fact that they were a woman’s footprints is very interesting.”

  “So whose were they?”

  “They were Miss Mason’s footprints.”

  “Miss Mason’s!”

  “Is that too simple for you, Joe? I’m sorry I can’t introduce a strange lady in black. But I am forced to believe they were her own footprints. Maybe I’m stubborn. Maybe I stick to it because it fits my theory.”

  I looked at Singer. “So she climbed out on the fire escape, naked as a baby, in her little bare feet, where everybody in town could see her—”

  “No, Joe. You are still attaching too much significance to aspects of the case which are not really important. You must try to detach the unusual facts of a person’s daily life from those that are normal.”

  “Suppose you detach them for me,” I said. “I guess I’m stupid.”

  “Not stupid, Joe. Just a little impatient. I will try to tell you what I mean. It was not unusual for Miss Mason to be found naked on her own bed. If it had been in some other place, such as the middle of Oak Street, it would not have been usual. But in her own room it was not too startling. You admit that?”

  “I guess so. Of course, most people pull the shades down.”

  “Ah!” Singer said. “You are beginning to see. It was somewhat unusual to find the shade up. That is a fact which should be separated from the more or less normal aspects of the case. What does it suggest to you?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “The shade went up after she was killed. Then who did it?”

  “Exactly. Also, she was stabbed with a knife after she was dead.”

  “All right. If she could be stabbed after she died, somebody could have put the shade up after she died. Go on with the rest of it. What are the other strange features?”

  “Very well. It was not unusual, as I have pointed out, to find only one footprint on the window sill. But it would have been unusual to find she had gone out on the fire escape without any clothes on. We rule that out. We assume she had something on when she went out.”

  “Now look,” I said. “First you say it’s unusual and then you say it isn’t. You say look for the unusual things and separate them from the usual ones. Okay. So it would be unusual for her to go out on the fire escape naked, so she put something on. But it would be pretty unusual for her to go out with something on and no shoes, wouldn’t it? Those footprints were of bare feet.”

  “Yes, Joe. We now come to a somewhat more advanced line of reasoning. I admit it would be unusual for most people to go without shoes or something on the feet. Here we have to fill in some details from what we have observed of Miss Mason’s particular character. These are over and above traits normal to people in general.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Now we have got character.”

  “That’s right. You found when you examined Miss Mason’s room that she was an extremely fastidious person. Everything was neat and in its proper place. Her clothing was spotless. In short, so far as her personal appearance was concerned she was impeccable.”

  “So.”

  “Even though it was obviously her bedtime and she apparently had no thought of visitors and was preparing to go to bed, everything in her room was absolutely neat. She was fastidious to a point of mania. Besides, her shoes were not in evidence anywhere in the room. She had already put them away for the night. The fact that she went out on the fire escape at all at that hour of the night was unusual, since there is no particularly lovely view from the Preston Hotel. So she must have gone out suddenly, unexpectedly, as the result of some sort of emergency, or in response to a summons of one kind or another. Therefore it is reasonable, as I see it, to assume that while she would naturally put on something before venturing outside, she would not necessarily put on shoes. Not if she were in a hurry.”

  “But there were her slippers,” I said. “What about them?”

  “The slippers are very important, Joe. There were two pairs. One dainty, feminine pair and one utility pair, as you might say. She wouldn’t have worn the dainty ones out on a dirty old fire escape. She would have preferred soiling her feet—which she could wash easily—to soiling the slippers.”

  “What about the other pair?”

  “No. Not those either. Those were bath slippers—all right for shuffling about, but not good for hopping in and out of windows.”

  “All right,” I said. “You have convinced me. Now tell me what happened in that room. I believe it all right, but I can’t figure it out.”

  “Very well. From the known facts and on the basis of more or less logical assumptions, let us try to determine what happened to Miss Mason last night.”

  “In the order of their appearance,” I said, “so I can follow it.”

  “In the order of their appearance. First, we know she had a visitor, in the person of Tommy Rowe, at about eleven o’clock. We know that when Tommy went up to her room he was carrying a package that contained liquor and ice and perhaps a couple of tumblers.”

  “She might have had the glasses herself.”

  Singer nodded. “We won’t quarrel over that. In any case, Tommy went up to see her and they had something to drink. So we have accounted for the two glasses. We have established the opportunity for poisoning.”

  “So Tommy poisoned her?”

  “Don’t be impatient, Joe. We are faced with the fact that Tommy didn’t stay long. We have it from two sources.”

  “That could be a lot of baloney,” I said. “Naturally, Mr. Rowe would try to protect Tommy.”

  “Yes,” Singer admitted, “but we are assuming right now that it’s true. Tommy and Miss Mason would have had time for two rather quick drinks. They had one, and then Tommy poured another. He drank his faster than she, doubtless because they quarreled and he was angry.”

  “You think they quarreled?”

  “That is the only reason I can think of right now for his staying so short a time.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Tommy left with the liquor and ice—”

  “Because Miss Mason wouldn’t have it sitting around. Her fastidious nature—” I said.

  “You are learning,” Singer said. “That would have been about eleven-twenty. Miss Mason then undressed, preparatory to taking a bath. She hung her things away and put on her dressing gown. It was eleven-thirty. At this point she was interrupted. She was interrupted from outside, from the fire escape, perhaps by someone tapping on her window shade. She went to see who it was. It turned out to be someone she knew, maybe someone she expected to see. She was asked to come outside. She agreed to go and either took her slippers off—if she had put them on—or left them off, and stepped out onto the fire escape. She left the shade down so that the light from the room would not reveal her on the fire escape. She was gone only about five minutes. Then she came back into her room and went ahead with her toilet.

  “She put on her bath slippers and went to the bath, which is just beyond the stairway opposite Room 5, without finishing her drink. She planned to finish it when she came back. It took her about fifteen minutes to bathe.”

  “At least,” I said.

  “At eleven-fifty she was back in her room. Before she turned back
her bed or made other preparations for retiring she finished her drink. By this time the drink was poisoned. It was now twelve o’clock. She finished her drink, set her glass down beside Tommy’s empty one, and took off her dressing gown.”

  “Sounds like a strip tease,” I said.

  Singer looked hurt.

  “Sorry, go ahead,” I said.

  “She laid the dressing gown down and took off her slippers. She reached for her nightgown. And it was then that the poison hit her. She groped for the footboard of the bed and supported herself around the end of it. She worked her way around to the edge of the bed and fell on it. She rolled over onto her back, but she was so far gone by then that she could not even get her legs straightened out before she died.”

  Singer stopped. We were in that stretch of country between Preston and the City which was made up mostly of truck farms. It was dark outside and the driver was making good time. We were rolling along the highway at a sixty-mile clip, swaying from side to side. Singer’s story had been pretty convincing. I was seeing it all just as it had probably happened. It was impressive. It scared me a little.

  “It’s a good idea,” I said. “But why? Who did it? Why, after she was dead, did somebody sneak in and stick a knife in her? And who called her outside?”

  Singer didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally he said: “Those are good questions, Joe. I can’t answer them. That is why we are going to the City. That is what we are trying to find out.”

  “And what about Curly Evans?” I asked. “He wasn’t poisoned and he wasn’t stabbed. Can we figure on a connection between his murder and Marian Mason’s?”

  “No, we can’t now,” Singer said. “But we can assume it. It is not an irresponsible assumption. Curly lived in the back room of the same corridor that led to Miss Mason’s room. That would put him close enough for it. Not that I think he did it. Even if he had done it, I doubt very much that he would have used poison. Curly was a more direct character than that. Also, when we asked Bill Fogarty for information we were referred to Curly—which means that he knew something about the situation involving Miss Mason. What that situation was we don’t know yet.”

  “It must have been quite a situation,” I said. “It killed her.”