We All Killed Grandma

by Fredric Brown

  There in the warm night, standing outside the kitchen door, a little chill went down my back when I thought of the implications of the idea.

  What was I afraid of?

  I went back inside, through the dark kitchen and into the lighted hallway. Arch was just coming out of Grandma’s office, reaching back behind him to flick the light switch.

  CHAPTER 10

  I SAID, “Arch, are you sleepy, or can I keep you up for a while?”

  He frowned. “I’m not sleepy; I’d probably read an hour or so anyway. But listen, if you just want to rehash the details of that burglary all over again I can’t say I’m crazy about the idea.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” I said. “We’ll talk about me. The murder will come into it, sure, because I’ve got an obsession about it and I’m trying to find out what it is. There’s something—like as not something my subconscious mind remembers but won’t let my conscious mind know about—that keeps me from taking that burglary at face value. In spite, I’ll admit, of all indications and all logic.”

  Arch grunted. “Okay then. Let’s go in the living room. That’s the most comfortable place.”

  I followed him into the living room and we got comfortable. He said, “Listen, Rod, before you start there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about and let me get that off my mind before I forget to bring it up tonight. Why don’t you move in here until the house is sold?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Except—well, I don’t particularly want to, if that’s a good enough reason, I’d rather have a place of my own. And why do you want me to move in here?”

  “It would save us both money. You’d be sharing the household expenses and Mrs. Trent’s salary. But you wouldn’t be paying any rent and you’d get by a lot cheaper than you’re managing now. And it’s silly for one person to be living in a house this size and having to have a full-time housekeeper for the place.”

  “Why don’t you rent it and take a room of your own somewhere? You’ll have to do that eventually anyway if the house is sold.”

  “Well—outside of Mrs. Trent’s salary I wouldn’t save anything. I don’t have to pay rent here, any more than you would. Besides, I talked it over with Hennig and he says you couldn’t rent a place this size without giving a lease and that would make it harder to sell so he advised against it. I could save money by letting Mrs. Trent go and shutting up most of the house, just living here in a room or two, getting my own meals. But I couldn’t keep up the whole house and yard by myself and it’d get dirty and run down and that’d scare off buyers too. I’ve figured all the angles and your coming here is the best bet. And you’d have a room of your own, just as you have now, and it wouldn’t cost you anything at all. You’d be paying half of the household expenses but that’d cost you less than it does to eat all your meals out as you’re doing now.”

  It probably would save me money, but I wasn’t going to do it. I just didn’t want to live in this big barn of a place. And Arch didn’t really want me to except to save him money.

  I said, “No, Arch, to save money or not I just don’t want to live here. But I’ll make a counter suggestion that’ll do you as much good. You’ve got a good point that Mrs. Trent’s keeping on working here keeps up the value of the property and that it’ll sell easier if it’s kept on its toes. So why shouldn’t Mrs. Trent’s salary be paid out of the estate until the house is sold? You can convince Hennig of that if you tell him it’s all right by me. And that way, indirectly and in the long run, I’ll be paying half her salary anyway.”

  His face lost the frown it had been hiding behind. “You really mean that, Rod? That’s swell of you. I’ll phone Hennig tomorrow.” He looked thoughtful again. “And since room and board are part of her salary that would mean the estate would stand half the grocery bill because she eats as much as I do.”

  I laughed. “Don’t stretch it, Arch, any farther than that. Or you’ll get yourself such a soft soap here that you’ll try to discourage buyers to make it last.”

  He looked hurt. “I wouldn’t do that, Rod.” But something in his expression told me I’d given him an idea. Anyway, he made a generous gesture in return. “Want a bottle of cold beer while we talk, Rod? There are two in the refrigerator.”

  The drinks I’d had were wearing off and it sounded like a good idea. I said, “Sure, I’ll get them. Got my hands dirty crouching down in those bushes outside and I want to wash anyway.”

  He followed me out into the hall. “I’ll open them while you wash.”

  In the kitchen I managed to look over his shoulder when he opened the refrigerator. There were at least six bottles of beer on the top shelf. I grinned to myself. Arch had said there were two bottles so he wouldn’t have to offer me a second. It was true what they said about Archer; he didn’t value money any higher than he valued his life’s blood.

  With the bottles he opened and glasses we went back to the living room. We sat down again.

  I said, “Arch, do you think I’m psychopathic? Wait—let me change that question; I don’t care what you think I may be now. I want to know what I was before I remember myself.”

  “No, Rod. Definitely not. Of course you had some screwy ideas, but—”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as hating fishing and hunting. And your goofy politics. Being so—so soft. Letting people take advantage of you rather than hurt their feelings, things like that.”

  The politics was news to me; I didn’t know that I had—or had had—any opinions on politics. But it’s such a wide open subject that any opinions I might have held would have to be pretty screwy indeed to worry me. And the other things he’d mentioned worried me even less; if it’s psychopathic not to enjoy inflicting pain, then I’ll settle for being psychopathic.

  “There’s one thing, though—” Arch hesitated.

  “Go on. What?”

  “You used to worry a little, one time or another, that you might go insane.”

  I sat up straight and looked at him. “I did? Why, for God’s sake, if I didn’t act that way?”

  “Because—oh, hell, I guess nobody’s mentioned this to you or you wouldn’t be asking. Your mother—our mutual father’s second wife—died in an insane asylum. I don’t think you remember—remembered her at all. She was taken away when you were not much over a year old; she died a few months later.”

  “You’d have been about six then.”

  He nodded. “I remember her a little, as my stepmother, Dad had bad luck with wives. I don’t remember my mother, either; she died when I was about six months old. She and Dad had been married four years; I was born in the third year of their marriage. He remarried—your mother—about two years after mine died. I’d have been two and a half years old then. That made her my stepmother from then until I was six, so I remember her all right.

  “And her mother, Grandma Tuttle, came to live with us just after you were born. I guess—I don’t remember exact details and I wasn’t old enough to understand them then—because your mother was beginning to slip mentally and help was needed. After she died I guess Dad never even thought of marrying again; Grandma Tuttle stayed on to run the house and to raise us.”

  “Do you know any details of my mother’s insanity?”

  “Well—there must have been catatonic phases. I remember, when I was almost six, asking her questions sometimes and she’d be sitting there just staring into space and wouldn’t even hear me. And I remember them taking her away, and I remember learning afterwards—from over-hearing grown-ups’ conversations—that she’d tried to kill herself twice. I don’t know how the first time, but the second time was with a pair of scissors—and it was then that they took her away to the asylum. A private one, I think. What the actual cause of her death six months later was, I don’t know. What I’ve just told you is everything I remember about it.”

  I thought a moment.

  “Arch,” I asked him. “Did I know that when I married Robin?”

  “That’s
a funny thing; you didn’t. We’d never talked about it, but somehow I’d always just assumed that you knew. And then sometime a year or two ago—I don’t remember just when—we were talking and the subject of your mother came up somehow and I found out you hadn’t known how she died, and I told you.”

  “Arch, do you know if Robin wanted children? Did I ever talk to you about it?”

  “No, you didn’t. I don’t know.”

  I thought I knew, now. For the first time I began to see something serious that could have come between Robin and me. The reason for our divorce, the reason Robin wouldn’t tell me, made sense that way. Once I’d learned that I had even the possibility of an inherited—and transmittible—tendency toward insanity, of whatever kind, my having children would be out of the question. If children had been important to Robin—

  And now I wanted to get away, to be alone so I could think things out.

  I downed the last of my beer and stood up. I said, “Thanks, Arch. Thanks a lot. I think that clears up at least one thing for me. And I won’t heckle you any more tonight.”

  He stood up too and walked toward the front door with me. He said, “Don’t let it worry you. I think you take—and that you took when I told you before—that news much too seriously. If you read up on modern psychiatry you’ll find less and less belief in the inheritability of insanity. Except, of course, feeble-mindedness as in the Jukes family, and that isn’t involved here.”

  “Less and less belief,” I said, “but not certainty.”

  “There isn’t any such thing as certainty, I guess, when it comes to the human mind. By the way, how’s the Lincoln running? You used to be crazy about it; are you still? Or again?”

  “No complaints,” I said. That reminded me of the moment when I’d stood looking at the garage in back, almost remembering something. “Arch, did you drive to and from Chicago on your trip there?”

  He shook his head. “Went by train; figured it’d be cheaper in the long run that way than if I drove. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Well, if you’re back to the murder and wondering about my alibi, it happens to be solid. The police phoned me at one o’clock in the morning—Mrs. Trent knew what hotel I planned to stay at—and I was in my room. Even by plane, counting time to and from airports, it takes three or four hours from here to there. Besides I spent the evening in Chicago, up to almost midnight, with an editor of an outfit there that publishes one-act plays. Seeing him was the main reason I made the trip. I had a few other errands there.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” I said. “I took Walter’s word that you were in the clear.”

  “So why don’t you take his word that you are too? And that it was a plain, garden variety burglary?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Well, quit guessing you do, and just do. You’re getting an obsession about that murder and there’s no reason for it. Straighten up and fly right.”

  “I guess that’s good advice, Arch. Well—so long.”

  I went out and got into the Lincoln and drove home. Slowly. I didn’t want to drive home. It was only one o’clock and the bars would be open another hour yet. I wanted to go out and hang one on. Although what I’d drunk earlier was dying in me now it was still there for a foundation and a few more drinks would make me drunk. But that wasn’t the answer.

  Maybe there wasn’t any answer, I thought, except time. Maybe in time I’d even get over wanting Robin.

  Maybe someday I’d be able to love someone else, to get married again if I could find someone whom I could love who didn’t want children. Maybe Vangy. Vangy didn’t seem like even an incipiently maternal type.

  I went to bed and lay there alone and very damned aware that I was alone. The clock ticked. The window curtain rustled as a breeze blew it. At long intervals a car went by on the street and once I heard the distant banshee wail of a squad car’s siren.

  And after a while I gave up; I got up and turned on the light to read a while. There was no deadline for me for tomorrow so no reason why I had to try to force myself to sleep.

  There weren’t any books around; I made a mental note to have my bookcase and books sent around from the warehouse to which they’d gone when Robin and I were breaking up. And I’d read the magazines on my end table that stood by the comfortable chair. But I remembered that there’d been some old magazines in a suitcase in the closet; I’d come across them a few days ago when it had occurred to me to take a casual inventory of what possessions I might have around the apartment that I hadn’t discovered or used yet.

  I opened the closet door and slid the suitcase, which was lying flat on the floor, out into the light and opened it. There were ten or twelve magazines lying in two piles in the bottom of it. Mostly women’s magazines—Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, McCalls—so I’d probably bought them to study the advertising techniques or maybe because they contained ads I’d done myself and wanted clippings of. But I’d find some readable fiction in some of them.

  I carried the first pile of them over to the top of the other pile and then lifted them all at once. But I didn’t get up from the kneeling position I was in. I put the pile of magazines down on the floor carefully and looked, without believing, at what had been under them on the bottom of the suitcase.

  It was a black automatic pistol.

  I didn’t touch it.

  After a while I got up off my knees and went to the telephone. I called the homicide department and asked for Walter Smith. He was out but expected back shortly; I left word to have him call me. I didn’t want another detective, one I’d have to do a lot of explaining to.

  I sat down in the overstuffed chair and waited for the phone to ring. I didn’t try to read; I knew I wouldn’t be able to make sense out of a single sentence.

  After several years the phone rang. It was Walter. I said, “Will you come around right away?”

  I could hear him sigh. “Rod, can’t it wait? We’re awfully busy tonight. And you’ve probably worked yourself into a tizzy over nothing.”

  I said, “This is important. It’s something new. If you want, I’ll come down there.”

  “All right, if it’s that important I’ll run around for a few minutes. Got to finish one report first but I’ll be there in half an hour or so.”

  I said, “Thanks, Walter.”

  I sat down to wait another several years and then decided I might as well get dressed. I’d probably be going down to headquarters with Walter, anyway. He’d have to have a ballistics expert check it to see if it was Grandma’s gun, the one that had killed her. He’d want me with him until he knew that.

  Anyway, dressing would give me something to do to make the time go faster.

  I dressed. I killed some more time by plugging in my electric razor and shaving.

  Then I turned on the bright overhead lights and went over to look at the gun again, this time as closely as I could without touching it. I’m far from being an expert on guns, but I knew it was an automatic and thought it was a thirty-two caliber one. It wasn’t big enough to be a forty-five, anyway. The lettering on the grip said it was a Colt, but that didn’t mean anything to me because I didn’t know what make Grandma’s gun had been.

  I sat down again to wait for Walter.

  If the gun in that suitcase was Grandma’s it didn’t prove that I’d killed her, of course. But it would prove definitely and beyond a doubt that her murder had not been at the hands of an ordinary burglar performing an ordinary burglary. If the murder gun was now in my apartment it meant either that I was the killer or that the killer had planted the gun here to make me or the police think I’d killed her. An ordinary burglar would have had no conceivable reason to take the risk of bringing the gun here.

  But if I had killed her, it eliminated one of the two times when I might have done it. If I were the killer then the medical examiner must have been wrong by about an hour one way or the other, since he set the time at eleven thirty and Walter Smith had seen me downtow
n within minutes of that time. But if I’d killed her around midnight, then I couldn’t possibly have had time to come home, leave the gun, and get back there to make the phone call a few minutes after midnight.

  I could, just barely, have killed her at eleven, gone home and left the gun and got downtown by the time Walter saw me there.

  But had I? No matter how crazy I might have been my thoughts must have followed some pattern. What method in madness could have made me, after killing her, go home to leave the gun, go downtown where I was seen by Walter, then go back to the scene of the crime and telephone the police to report it?

  Suddenly and for the first time in eight days I began to see how ridiculous it had been for me to consider myself, even possibly, a murderer. Not that I’d ever really believed that I had; it was just that, until now, I hadn’t been able to discount the possibility, no matter how thoroughly other people were convinced that I could not have done it.

  But strangely it didn’t make me feel any better, any happier, to feel that way about it.

  I looked at my watch for what may have been the hundredth time. It was twenty-five after three. A little better than an hour since I’d called Walter; a little better than half an hour since he’d called me back.

  Then I heard footsteps along the corridor outside and went to open the door.

  CHAPTER 11

  HE came in casually, saying, “Hi, Rod. What’s on your mind?” But he was past me before I could answer and was standing there looking down at the open suitcase with the pile of magazines beside it and the pistol lying in it. He said, “Oh, Lord. You came across that and thought you’d found the murder weapon! Wish you’d told me over the phone; I could have saved a trip here.”

  He dropped into a chair. I stood staring at him. “What do you mean, Walter?”

  “That gun’s yours. Used to be mine; I sold it to you.”