This Game of Murder

by Deming, Richard

  “Is this safe enough for you?” she asked.

  He glanced around. In addition to a desk, bookcases and a couple of overstuffed chairs, there was a day bed against one wall. This room, he remembered, was where Bruce Case had been sleeping after being ousted from his wife’s bed.

  “I suppose it’s safer than the woods beyond the ninth hole,” he said grudgingly. “I give in.”

  “What an avid lover you are,” she said. “Don’t do me any favors.”

  Grinning at her, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. After a time she pulled free, switched on the desk lamp and turned off the overhead light. This still left the room well-lighted, but at least it subdued the glare. She gave him an inquiring look.

  “Leave it on,” he said. “I like to see what I’m doing.”

  Kicking off her shoes, she turned her back to him. “Unzip, please.”

  He pulled the zipper down to her waist. With her back still to him, she slipped out of the arms, loosened a side zipper and stepped out of the dress. She tossed it onto a chair.

  He took off his shirt and tossed it onto the other chair. As she laid her slip on top of her dress, he threw his undershirt on top of his sport shirt. Then he reached out to unsnap her brassiere. She stood quietly as he fumbled with the clasp, finally got it undone and let the garment slide down her arms. Tossing it onto the chair, she leaned back against him.

  His arms went around her from the rear and he cupped both plump breasts, gently rolling the nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. He could feel them swell and harden beneath his touch. Her body began to squirm against his.

  After a time she pulled away, turned to face him and pulled off her panties. This left her clad in nothing but a thin garter belt and stockings.

  He managed to complete stripping while she was removing the stockings and garter belt. When he reached for her, she took his hands, threw herself prone on the day bed and drew him down alongside. Her arms went about his neck and she pressed her naked body tightly against his.

  “Do it just like in the woods,” she whispered against his lips. “I don’t care if you never stop, but I want you to start right now …”

  It must have been twenty minutes before he released her. When he rose to his feet, she lay motionless with her arms and legs sprawled and her breasts heaving with exhaustion. She stared up at him, totally spent.

  “I should be able to sleep now,” she finally managed to say. “I don’t even feel like moving from here to go upstairs.”

  After a time she did rouse herself enough to get up. By then he was fully dressed. The only garment she put back on was her dress, bundling up the rest of her clothing and carrying it and her shoes to the foot of the stairs, where she left them until she was ready to go upstairs.

  At the door she put her arms about his neck to kiss him good-night.

  “Why did I ever let you go?” she said. “I think I’m falling in love with you all over again.”

  “I’ve never been completely out of love with you,” he told her.

  During the drive home he decided he was going to have to resolve things one way or the other before long. He couldn’t continue to alternate between two women. Besides being unfair to both of them, he was beginning to feel constitutionally incapable of keeping up the pace.

  The next morning Sylvia arrived home at eight a.m. in time to cook breakfast for her husband and son. George Reed, Betty’s uncle by marriage, drove her home.

  The banker was an affable, gray-haired man of fifty-five with a double chin and a substantial paunch. He said that he and his wife had started to drive from Rochester, which was less than a hundred miles away, at six that morning and had just arrived. He refused an offer of breakfast.

  “My wife’s making breakfast at Betty’s for all of us,” he said. “I promised I’d be right back. Thanks a lot for staying with Betty last night, Mrs. Marshall.”

  “I was glad to,” Sylvia said. “Anything else she needs, just tell her to call me.”

  When Reed had left, she said, “Isn’t he a nice man?”

  “Seems to be,” her husband said. “But you would think Jack the Ripper was nice. I’ll have just one egg this morning.”

  After checking into the city room long enough to read his mail, Marshall drove over to police headquarters in the basement of the City Hall. He found Chief Meister in his office.

  “Anything new?” he asked, taking a seat in front of the chief’s desk.

  “A little,” Meister said. “I just phoned the paper to ask if you’d like to run out to see Mrs. Case with me, but you’d already left. You’re an old friend of hers, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve known her all my life.”

  “I thought it might be best to take along somebody who knew her well when I ask to look around the place.”

  “Why? What’s up?”

  “Farroway sent over his lab report this morning. Incidentally, one set of prints he lifted from the window were left there by the dead man. Mrs. Case left the other one.”

  “That’s too bad,” Marshall said. “I’d hoped the cat burglar had finally left a clue.”

  “Seems the cat burglar may not have been there at all,” Meister said slowly. “Farroway’s report says the screen was cut from the inside.”

  “What!”

  “There isn’t any doubt about it, Kirk. He put it under a microscope. The individual wires are bent outward where they’re cut. That’s why I need another talk with Mrs. Case. Want to come along?”

  “I certainly do,” Marshall assured him.

  Before they left, the chief took the two-foot length of rope from his desk drawer, coiled it and put it in his pocket. Marshall didn’t ask him why he was taking it along, because he knew. The chief obviously hoped to find the coil it came from somewhere about the old Runyon place.

  They drove out in Marshall’s car. En route Marshall kept turning over in his mind the bombshell Meister had dropped. The more he thought about it, the sicker he got. He kept remembering Betty’s controlled emotions immediately after the shooting, and also her climb to the roof. He wondered if she would ever have mentioned being on the roof if he and his mother hadn’t unexpectedly arrived while she was up there. Was it possible that instead of looking for evidence, as she had claimed, she had been in the act of planting some?

  He recalled that Patrolman Graves had said the fragment of rope was tied to the air-vent pipe by a fisherman’s knot. This was an odd knot to use on half-inch rope, as primarily it was used to tie flies to a nylon leader. Of course there was no reason it wouldn’t hold as effectively with rope as it would with a delicate leader, but it seemed to indicate that the person who tied the rope to the air vent knew something of fishing. And Betty was as accomplished an angler as her husband had been. In their youth Marshall had many times seen Betty tie a fisherman’s knot. As a matter of fact, he had taught it to her.

  Then, after working himself up over the evidence of her guilt, he angrily began to berate himself for having so little faith in her. Of course she couldn’t have deliberately murdered her husband, he told himself. Not only was she incapable of such a crime, it would have been ridiculous fo her to commit it when divorce was so easy these days. Inasmuch as she had all the money in the family anyway, there would be no financial advantage. Even the house was hers. All she would have had to do to get rid of him was to put him out of the house and fly to Reno for six weeks.

  He began to feel a little better.

  Chapter VIII

  George Reed answered the door to their ring. Marshall introduced the chief, they were invited in, and found Betty and Audrey Reed in the big front room. Betty’s last surviving blood relative was a slim, still-shapely woman in her early fifties with smartly styled gray hair and the chronic assurance of the typical club woman. Both she and Betty wore conservative street dresses suitable for women in mourning.

  Reed introduced his wife to the chief, then said, “You remember Kirk Marshall, don’t you, dear?”

&nb
sp; “Of course,” she said, giving Marshall a smile of cultivated charm. “It’s been a lot of years, though, hasn’t it, Kirk? You were just a boy last time we met. It was lovely of your mother to take over here until we arrived.”

  “She enjoyed it,” Marshall assured her.

  Barney Meister had waited patiently for the social amenities to be gotten over. Now he said, “A little something has come up, Mrs. Case. Mind if we look around the place a bit?”

  Betty looked surprised. “You’ve already gone through every room in the house.”

  “I mean outside.”

  “The grounds? Why certainly. Look anywhere you please.”

  Meister and Marshall excused themselves and went back outside. George Reed trailed along to see what they were up to.

  The driveway which curved past the front of the house made a loop past the wide door of a three-car garage set at right angles to the house. The door was counterbalanced to swing upward and fold against the ceiling when it was opened. The chief heaved it up.

  All three stalls were occupied. In one was the station wagon Bruce Case used to drive, in the second was Betty’s little sports car, and in the third was Bruce’s fourteen-foot fiberglas boat on a trailer. The boat was powered by an outboard motor.

  The chief walked into the garage and peered into the boat. Both the anchor line and the mooring rope were the same type of half-inch hemp which had been tied to the roof air-vent pipe. Neither had been recently cut, however, and were much darker in color from countless immersions in lake water than the fragment found on the roof.

  At the rear of the garage were some narrow shelves containing tools and various kinds of hardware. One shelf was devoted to fishing equipment, and lying in its center was the remains of an unused coil of half-inch hemp.

  Pulling the two-foot segment from his pocket, the chief matched its cut end to the cut end of the coil. Standing next to him, Marshall could see even without the aid of any magnification that the ends matched. He felt a queasiness form in his stomach.

  George Reed was standing on the chief’s opposite side. He said, “You got a match there. What’s it mean?”

  “This was tied to the roof vent the night your brother-in-law was shot,” Meister said, indicating the two-foot length.

  The banker mulled this over. “You mean this so-called cat burglar stole the rope he used right here from the garage?”

  The burly chief shook his head. “Since the coil’s still here, this two-foot section must have been cut off in the garage, but not by the cat burglar. Why would he take only a two-foot length of rope when it must be fifteen feet from the air vent to the second-floor hall window?”

  It took several moments for Reed to digest this. When he finally had, he frowned. “Are you implying there was no burglar here that night, but somebody arranged things to make it seem there had been?”

  “Implying, no,” the chief said. “I’m saying it right out.”

  He strode out of the garage and mounted the porch steps with Marshall right behind him. The plump banker scurried to keep up.

  With a policeman’s caution about entering private premises without invitation, the chief didn’t barge right in, even though his previous invitation presumably would have covered the situation. He paused in front of the door until Reed got there and courteously waited for the banker to open it and precede him inside.

  As they all entered the front room together, the flustered banker said, “I think the chief is going to make some kind of accusation, Betty. Don’t say anything at all.”

  Both his wife and Betty looked at him in astonishment. Audrey said, “Whatever are you talking about, dear?”

  Barney Meister cleared his throat. “Mrs. Case, we’ve uncovered evidence that the items indicating the presence of the cat burglar the other night were deliberately planted. I’ll have to ask you to come downtown with me.”

  Betty merely stared at him.

  George Reed said loudly, “Wait a minute, Chief. How do you explain the cut screen?”

  “That only makes the case stronger, Mr. Reed. Microscopic examination showed it was cut from the inside.”

  The banker’s mouth opened and closed several times like that of a fish kissing the side of a bowl. Eventually he abandoned whatever it was he had intended to say and turned toward Betty.

  “What’s the name of that fellow who was Bruce’s law partner?” he asked.

  “You mean Henry Quillan?”

  “That’s it. You remember Bruce’s office number?”

  “Of course. Miller 4-3200.”

  “Miller 4-3200,” Reed repeated, fixing the number in his mind. “I’ll have Quillan down at headquarters before you get there. Meantime, don’t say a word.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Betty said. “Chief Meister, are you accusing me of murder?”

  “I’m arresting you on suspicion of homicide, Mrs. Case. Your uncle is right that you don’t have to say anything without legal counsel, but you do have to come along with me.”

  Audrey Reed said, “You must be mad, Chief. My niece is no murderess.” She turned to her husband. “Never mind Henry Quillan, George. Get on the phone to our own lawyer in Rochester and ask him to arrange for the best criminal lawyer in the state.”

  Rising to her feet, Betty said with a strained smile, “If you don’t mind, I prefer Henry Quillan. Will I need to pack a bag, Chief?”

  Marshall said huskily, “If they hold you, I’ll bring you what you need. Where’s Bud?”

  “Over at a neighbor boy’s. He’ll be all right. Aunt Audrey and Uncle George will be here. I’m quite ready to go.”

  Picking up her handbag from an end table, she moved toward the front door. Marshall reached it first to hold it open for her. He let the chief go out immediately after her. As he pulled the door closed from outside, he could hear the sound of George Reed dialing the phone.

  Outdoors, Chief Meister had Marshall wait in the car with Betty while he returned to the garage for the coil of rope.

  Tossing it in the back seat of the car, he said laconically, “Evidence.”

  As Henry Quillan’s law office was only half a block from police headquarters, the lawyer was already there when Meister, Marshall and Betty arrived. He was a tall, bony man of about fifty with a gaunt, Lincolnesque face and a rather dignified manner. He listened quietly to the chief’s explanation of Betty’s arrest.

  “Any objection to my speaking to my client in private before you book her?” he asked.

  A felony suspect had no legal right to confer with anyone without a police officer being present before even being booked, but the Runyon City police force inclined to be informal about such matters.

  “All right with me,” the chief said with a shrug. “You can use my office.”

  “May Kirk sit in with us?” Betty asked the lawyer.

  He also shrugged. “If you want it that way.”

  Inside the office Henry Quillan seated his bony frame on a corner of the desk and waved Betty and Marshall to chairs.

  When they were seated, he said, “Now — first I have to know how you want to plead to this charge, Betty. Innocent or guilty?”

  Marshall said indignantly, “She’s innocent, of course.”

  Quillan gave him a brief glance. “Suppose we let her answer.”

  “Innocent, Henry,” she said in a steady voice.

  “All right. Now — that rope hasn’t yet been examined by the state police crime lab, and it may well turn out that the cuts don’t match after all. You can’t accurately judge a thing like that with the naked eye. But I know Harold Farroway’s work, and if he says that screen was cut from the inside, it was and he’ll be able to prove it in court. Do you have any theory as to how and why it was cut from inside?”

  Betty gave her head a bewildered shake.

  Marshall said, “Maybe the cat burglar got in some other way and only used the second-floor hall window as an escape route.”

  Betty smiled at him. “I appreciate your faith, Kir
k, but he could have unlocked it from inside. All you have to do is release a hook and swing it outward.”

  Quillan said, “Frankly, it looks bad for you, Betty. And it’s going to look worse if Farroway establishes the fact that the rope fragment actually did come from the coil in the garage. We’d be better off with no evidence that the cat burglar attempted to break in that night. Just your word that you heard noises on the roof probably would be enough to establish reasonable doubt. But a jury is going to accept this apparently rigged evidence as an indication that you tried to cover up deliberate murder.”

  “Don’t you want to defend me?” she asked quietly.

  “Don’t turn temperamental,” he said with a touch of impatience. “As a lawyer I have to accept your word that you’re innocent. As a friend, I believe you are. But I have to convince a jury of it. I have no intention of sparing your feelings by avoiding unpleasant questions, because I’m going to have to furnish a jury with the answers. We have to find some reasonable explanation for that rope and screen.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “But I’m afraid I have no reasonable explanation. I did hear someone on the roof that night. I did hear a rasping noise from the direction of the hall window. I was convinced it was the cat burglar who eased open my bedroom door. What more can I say?”

  “There’s the matter of motive,” Marshall put in. “How’s the state going to establish one? If she wanted to get rid of Bruce it would have been much simpler to divorce him.”

  Quillan pursed his lips. “You have a point there. What was the financial setup between you and Bruce, Betty?”

  “I’m afraid I controlled the purse strings. Bruce had his income from the law firm, of course, but he spent it pretty much as he pleased. The house and Dad and Mother’s estates were in my name. You might say I supported the family and Bruce’s income was his personal pocket money.”