We All Killed Grandma

by Fredric Brown

  Why hadn’t I thought to ask Vangy—while the asking was good; it was too late now—whether I’d seemed sober when I’d come for her at seven, and how much drinking I’d done while I was with her? If I knew that I’d know for sure, maybe, that I’d spent that hour and a quarter or so getting drunk.

  Well, it would be still better if I could find the tavern somewhere between here and downtown where I’d spent that time. Then I’d really know my movements on Monday evening, from seven to twelve.

  And what better time than now, the same time of evening, the same bartenders on duty, to do my canvassing?

  I started driving slowly toward town, going east one block to Center Street and straight north into town on Center. That was the only logical route for me to have taken, in a taxi or afoot, and it had been at Fourth and Center that Walter had seen me, and I’d been walking north on Center. I came to my first tavern within two blocks and parked the Linc in front of it.

  I had one drink and talked to the bartender. He’d been on duty a week ago yesterday at this time, yes, but he didn’t remember me. Not from that evening or any other. And yes, he had a pretty good memory for faces; if I’d spent an hour or more there only eight days ago he’d probably remember mine.

  At Fourth and Center I’d tried seven taverns and had drawn seven blanks. Only one of them was even open to question; the bartender there was a new one, only two days on the job, and the former one had quit.

  Fourth and Center and I hadn’t accomplished anything except the imbibing of seven drinks. And—well, getting my mind somewhat off Vangy. I felt less in need of a cold shower.

  I parked the Linc again and went into the restaurant in front of which Walter Smith said he’d seen me that night. It was eleven o’clock. Maybe, if Walter dropped in here often on his way to police headquarters to start the midnight shift, he’d be here now or drop in shortly. And I wanted some coffee anyway to counteract the drinks I’d had. I felt them some, not too much.

  I had two cups of coffee and Walter hadn’t come in so I figured he probably wasn’t coming tonight; it was eleven-thirty now, the time he’d been leaving the restaurant last Monday.

  I went out and got in the car again. I wondered if Robin would be home and still awake; then I realized I must be a bit drunker than I thought, even to think of trying to see Robin tonight, and this late.

  I wondered how long it would have taken me in a taxi, if I’d taken a taxi immediately after having seen Walter here, to get to Grandma’s, 1044 Chisolm. I looked at my watch and started driving, trying to go about the same speed a taxi would have.

  Thirteen minutes. Which proved nothing, because I didn’t know how long it would have taken me, after leaving Walter, to find myself a cab. And what was I trying to prove anyway?

  The house next door, Henderson’s house, was dark. So was the downstairs of Grandma’s, but there was a light, behind a drawn blind, in the front room upstairs, Arch’s room. I used my key to let myself in because the doorbell might have waked Mrs. Trent, switched on the hall light and went upstairs. I could hear the clicking of Arch’s typewriter.

  The door of his room was open and I could see him sitting in front of the typewriter. He heard me and turned.

  I said, “Hi, Arch. If I’m interrupting genius at work—”

  “Come on in. Just writing some letters, and I was about to quit anyway. Anything special on your mind?”

  I sat down on the bed. “Nothing special. Saw your light was on and thought I’d stop and talk a minute if you weren’t busy. I’m trying to get last Monday night straightened out. I know now where I was up to ten o’clock.”

  He looked interested. “You mean you remember? That things are starting to come back to you?”

  “No, not yet,” I told him. “In fact, not a glimmer. But I found who I was with up to ten o’clock. A girl I had a date with.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “I don’t know. Her name is Vangy Wayne. Do you know her?”

  “Met her a long time ago. You were dating her before you got married. A cute little blonde. So she’s trying to get her hooks into you, thinking you’re rich.”

  “Rich? Twenty thousand bucks isn’t rich, these days.”

  “Did you tell her it was only that? Don’t forget the wild guesses in the newspaper stories as to how big her estate would be.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I thought of it for a moment now and decided against it. For one thing, when I’d had my date with Vangy eight days ago, Grandma had still been alive. And tonight, if Vangy’s motives had been mercenary she wouldn’t have ordered me out because of what I’d said; she’d have let me stay despite it, hoping that sexual intimacy between us would have got me emotionally involved, and that could damned easily have happened.

  “No, Arch,” I told him. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  He grunted. “You think all women are plaster saints.”

  Not Vangy, I thought wryly. Saint or bitch, she wasn’t plaster. My hands had touched her body and they knew better.

  But that wasn’t Arch’s business, and it wasn’t what I wanted to talk about anyway. I asked him, “Arch, why did Grandma keep a gun?”

  “Why does anybody keep a gun? In case of burglars.”

  “And when a burglar eventually came, a lot of good it did. If he hadn’t found that gun first and had it in his hand, probably, when she walked in, she might still be alive.”

  Arch shrugged. “Sure. I’d pointed out to her that a gun in her desk drawer wasn’t going to do her any good. A burglar wouldn’t come in while she was in the room sitting at her desk. And if it was a holdup man instead of a burglar, he’d come in with his own gun ready and have the drop on her. So what good would a gun in her desk do? But women always have to be illogical about something or other and she picked that—among other things. Said it made her feel safer to have a gun around.”

  “But why one with a hair trigger, of all things?”

  “She got a revolver first and the action was pretty stiff; she found she couldn’t pull the trigger at all without using both hands. She wasn’t very strong physically. So she took it back and traded it for an automatic and had a gunsmith fix it to have a very light trigger pull—not quite a hair trigger, but almost one. Safe enough, since it had a safety catch. She kept it loaded and cocked but with the safety catch on. If she wanted to fire it all she had to do was snick off the safety and the weight of her finger on the trigger would be enough.” He grinned. “I found that out the hard way, just after she bought it.”

  I said, “Walter Smith told me you shot it accidentally. How’d you happen to be messing with it?”

  “Just curiosity, looking at it one afternoon while she was upstairs taking a nap. I knew it had a light trigger pull so that isn’t what fooled me. I pulled the common boner of taking out the slide with the cartridges in it and thinking I’d unloaded the gun, forgetting or not realizing that there was a cartridge in the chamber. Then I pulled the trigger, on purpose to see how near to a hair trigger it was and—bang.”

  “Served you right for messing. But about that light trigger pull—mightn’t it mean that the killing was accidental? That the killer pointed the gun at her when she walked in but didn’t necessarily intend to shoot?”

  “Then why would he have fired twice? I’d say the trigger pull accounted for the first shot going wild—he had his finger on the trigger when he snicked off the safety catch and he was just bringing up the gun to aim; that’s why the first shot missed her by six feet, which would be pretty bad shooting when you’re aiming at somebody only about twelve feet away from you. But the second shot was pretty good shooting. In the forehead. And even with a hair trigger you can fire a gun once accidentally, but not twice in a row.”

  Arch put the cover on his typewriter and stood up. He said, “Think I’ll go down to the kitchen and make myself a sandwich. Want one?”

  “I’m not hungry. But I’ll go downstairs with you. I want to take another look at that room.”

>   “Okay, but why?”

  “I don’t know why. I just want to.”

  He looked at me and shook his head, but didn’t say anything more. I followed him downstairs and turned off at the short passage that led to the room that had been Grandma’s office while he went on out into the kitchen.

  I went in and switched on the light. I stepped back when I realized that I was standing right where Grandma’s body had lain.

  I thought, I can reconstruct what happened. To me, that is. I came in the front door, for whatever reason. I walked back along the hallway, at the turn-off to the little passage back there I’d have glanced this way—even if I hadn’t been intending to come this way to see Grandma about something. And I’d have seen that the door was open and Grandma’s body lying just inside the room. I’d have gone quickly to her and bent over her—probably my first thought that she’d had a heart attack. Then I’d have seen the bullet hole in her forehead; I’d have known it was murder.

  That would have been, must have been, the shock that had caused my amnesia, although my mind had kept functioning for at least a minute longer; I’d gone to the phone—and I’d have had to step across her body to do that. I’d picked up the phone and asked for the police. I must have said, “I want to report a murder.” The telephone must have asked, “Your name, please,” or “Who it this?”

  And then my mind had gone blank. I’d been unable to remember my name, or who I was talking to or why.

  And from that point on I didn’t have to reconstruct; I remembered. The awful wait until the police got there, the wait in a strange room with a strange murdered woman. Not remembering anything, my own name or what had happened. Wondering whether I’d killed her or not. The whole rest of the night had been bad but that first ten minutes or so, while I’d been alone, before the first police car got there, had been the worst of it.

  I’d been too scared, too confused, even to think of looking in my pockets for a wallet and in the wallet for identification. The first squad car men had suggested that, and then a few minutes later Walter Smith was there and confirmed the identification because he happened to know me. And Mrs. Trent—they’d found and awakened her when they searched the house—had given them the name of Dr. Eggleston as the family doctor and they’d called him. And Henderson, I’d learned, had been waiting on the sidelines ready to get a writ of habeas corpus if one had been needed. It hadn’t.

  But those first ten minutes had been a nightmare.

  I walked over to the desk and stood looking down at the phone I’d had in my hand in my first remembered moment. It made me think of what I’d told Arch was my reason for not wanting to leave town: “The place to find a thing is where you lost it.” I’d meant my memory, of course.

  And it was at this very spot that I’d lost it, with that phone in my hand.

  On sudden impulse I picked up the phone and held it to my ear. After a minute an operator said, “Number, please,” and I said “Sorry,” and put the phone down.

  Behind me Arch’s voice said, with casual curiosity, “What was the idea of that?”

  I turned and he was standing in the doorway with a sandwich in his hand. The hallway was carpeted and I hadn’t heard him coming.

  “I was going to make a call and then suddenly realized how late it is. Arch, where did the wild shot go?”

  He took a step to his left and pointed and I saw a hole in the plaster where the bullet had been dug out. It was a good four feet from the doorway, only about three feet up from the floor, maybe even a little less that that.

  I asked, “What makes everybody sure both shots were fired at the same time?”

  Arch looked at me so curiously that I explained. “What makes me think of that is the fact that Henderson thought he heard only one shot at eleven-thirty.”

  “Henderson’s full of prune juice, Rod. He heard those shots at pretty much of a distance, remember. The room he was in is on the other side of his house. And one of the two shots probably coincided with some other noise—either in his house or outside—so he heard only one of them.”

  He came over and sat down on the corner of the desk to munch his sandwich. “Why would it make sense for the two shots to have been fired at different times? You think there were two burglars in one evening, or what?”

  “I wish I had less trouble believing in one.”

  He looked at me disgustedly.

  I said, “All right, so I’m crazy. But humor me. Outside of the fact that it fits the most probable reconstruction of the crime, is there any proof those two shots were fired at the same time?”

  He grunted; he’d just taken a bite of the sandwich. When he could talk around it, he said, “How could there be proof, if nobody heard both of them? But there’s proof they were both fired that evening. The empty cartridges, the shells.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I got a pitying look this time. “You sure know a lot about guns. An automatic ejects the empty cartridge after each shot; they don’t stay in the gun as they do in a revolver. So when they searched they found the two empties from the two shots.”

  “Where? I didn’t notice them.”

  “On the floor somewhere; I didn’t ask them the exact spot. And you wouldn’t have noticed them unless they were right in the open somewhere unless you were looking for them. Anyway, they were on the floor somewhere when the police gave the room a once-over after they got here. They weren’t there—either of them—that afternoon because the Trent does her sweeping in here in the afternoon and if one had already been there she’d have swept it up. Now listen, Rod, be reasonable. You say both shots being fired at the same time fits the most probable reconstruction. Give me any reconstruction that fits their being fired at different times.”

  I had to admit that I couldn’t.

  I remembered something else I’d wanted to try. And now would be the time. I said, “Arch I’m going outside a minute. I want to see what this room looks like from out there, through the window, at night and with the light on.”

  Arch just grunted around a bite of his sandwich.

  I went out through the kitchen door and stood outside until my eyes had accustomed themselves to the moonlight and I could see clearly. There’d been about this much moonlight, I remembered, eight nights ago.

  Then I walked around the corner of the house and along the driveway. The second window was the lighted one. I looked around for the clump of bushes among which Walter had told me they’d found the ground scuffed as though someone had hidden there, watching and waiting for Grandma to leave the room.

  The ground was dry and hard, as it had been then. I walked across to the bushes and tried them for size. There was an open area in the middle in which it was easy to crouch down and watch the window. And after dark, even in moonlight brighter than this, it would be almost impossible for a hider there to be seen from the street or the alley or from the windows of either house.

  I could see Arch from the waist up, still sitting on the desk, just then wiping his hands on a handkerchief after finishing the sandwich. If someone had been sitting at the desk I could have seen his head.

  And past Arch I could see the only doorway of the room, Yes, the setup and the angles were right to make it a perfect lookout post. I got up and walked over to the window. The crushed stone of the driveway was noisy under my feet and I saw Arch look toward the window. He called out, “That you, Rod?” and I said, “Yes. Just a minute and I’ll come back in.”

  The bottom ledge of the window was about four feet from the ground, maybe four and a half. Easy to climb through once the screen had been cut and pushed inward. And the screen had been cut all right, a neat job of cutting on three sides, close against the frame, so it hung like a flap from the top of the frame. The cutting had been done with a sharp knife and from the outside; the way the ends of the wire were bent showed that.

  And Walter Smith had been right about another thing; from here one could see the mirror on the wall near the door—the mirror that had be
en hung there to cover up the bullet hole in the plaster made by Arch’s accidental shot when he’d monkeyed with the gun ten years ago. In the mirror, by moving my head to one side of the window, I could see the safe in the corner. It was closed now but it had been left standing open the night of the murder while Grandma had gone for her glass of milk. And if he’d known the setup, the killer could have made sure that the safe did stand open before he cut the screen or entered the room.

  Everything as Walter had told me. Not that I’d doubted him; I’d just wanted to see it for myself.

  Well, I’d seen it.

  I went toward the kitchen door and I stopped as I went around the corner of the house and found myself looking at the garage—and, for just a second, thinking I was on the verge of remembering something. Something connected with the garage.

  Or was it just my imagination? I stood there a minute and the memory or the shadow of a memory faded and went away instead of getting stronger. But it was the first time even that much had happened. Would it happen again, and more strongly? I had a feeling that if there was ever a break, however tiny, in that blank wall the whole wall would crumble and I’d remember everything.

  But did I really want to remember? My conscious mind did—but wasn’t it at least probable that my subconscious mind had good reason to have blanked out my memory? Else why my compulsion against psychiatric treatment? I couldn’t have forced myself to go to a psychiatrist.