Horrible Imaginings

by Fritz Leiber

  “No, that must have been while I dozed.”

  “Did you hear the door to the dining room open or close? It’s just outside your bedroom.”

  “I don’t believe so. No, I didn’t. It must have been standing open.”

  “Do you sleep with your bedroom door open or closed?”

  “Ope—” Miss Graves frowned. “That’s strange. I thought I left it open, but it was closed when the scream woke me up.”

  The Lieutenant looked at her sharply. “Then are you quite sure it was Mr. Groener you heard coming back from the kitchen?”

  “Certainly. I couldn’t be mistaken. He always made a lot of noise, even in slippers.”

  The Lieutenant grunted. “And when did you finally get up?”

  “When Mr. Groener came rushing into the hall and knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s door and told her to call the police.”

  The Lieutenant stood up. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to ask you,” he said quietly. “Are you Mr. Groener’s mistress—or were you once?”

  “No, never,” she said. “Oh, Mr. Groener was an attractive man, but she spoiled him for everyone.”

  “But now that she’s no longer here...” The Lieutenant left that question hanging in the air and so did Mrs. Graves, though it seemed to start something working in her that almost had the look of hope. “That’s all then,” he told her. “Thank you. Ask Cohan to send in Mrs. Labelle.”

  When they were alone, Detective Zocky said, “Hey, I’ll bet you got the same idea as me. There was no trigger for this suicide. But what if Groener had been having his coffee in Miss Grave’s bedroom, and his old lady knew it or slipped out and caught them. That’d make a wow of a trigger.”

  “I take it Miss Graves is a dike no longer,” the Lieutenant said. “Ambidextrous at least.”

  “Hell, that was just descriptive. I’d say Groener and this dame are practically the same type.”

  “Yes, they’re both tall, good-looking people with gray hair,” the Lieutenant observed drily. “Bound to start making violent love to each other every chance they get.”

  “Well, what the hell, it was a perfect set-up for them,” Zocky persisted. “The wife passed out and Mrs. Labelle the tolerant type, no doubt. I know this Groener puts on the pious reformed-alky act, but most ex-boozers his age do that. Why, my father-in-law—” He stopped talking as the dining room door opened and high heels clicked in the hall.

  Mrs. Labelle was quite as sylph-bodied as Miss Graves but she dressed it in thinner silk—crimson. Under the coiled and gleaming blonde hair her face looked much younger. Its expression was teen-age, in fact, avid and pert. But there were more tiny wrinkles around the corners of her eyes and mouth than there had been around those of Miss Graves.

  “Do I sit there?” she asked, pointing at the brightly lit chair under the bridge lamp before the Lieutenant could. She took it, tucking her feet under her and carefully drawing down her skirt after giving him a flash of high leg.

  “This is quite an event for me,” Mrs. Labelle announced. “I’ve always been fascinated by police work. You must find out so many strange things about how people behave in funny situations.”

  “Right now I’m just looking for a few everyday facts,” the Lieutenant said. “How did the Groeners happen to be staying here?”

  “They’d lost their apartment without warning. I always feel very sympathetic toward them, because Mr. Labelle is an alcoholic too. We’re getting divorced. He lives at a hotel. Perhaps you can tell me what makes alcoholics tick, officer. They’re beyond me. I always told Mrs. Groener that if she’d just control her drinking—not stop altogether and get gloomy like her husband—but just take enough to feel bright and happy and relaxed—”

  “Miss Graves now,” the Lieutenant interrupted. “How did she happen to be here?”

  “I invited her. I thought the Groeners ought to have all their old friends around them.”

  “And perhaps you were interested in seeing how people behave in funny situations,” the Lieutenant said. “For instance, Mrs. Groener thinking her husband’s mistress was sleeping in the same apartment.”

  Mrs. Labelle giggled. “Oh that,” she said scornfully. “Mr. Groener chased every pretty woman in a lazy secret sort of way, but if he’d ever caught one he’d have scurried right back to his wife. I think she kept throwing it up to him just to keep him in line. I’m quite a psychologist—”

  “Okay,” the Lieutenant said. “Now about tonight. Did you hear the Groeners quarreling after you went to bed?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that. Mrs. Groener just let off steam for awhile as any woman will. I listened. It didn’t make much sense in her case. But it was interesting.”

  “And when they quieted down you went to sleep?”

  “Oh my no!” Mrs. Labelle gave a little wriggle and flirted her coiled blonde hair. “I had too many exciting things to think about.”

  “Good! I want you to tell me exactly what you heard in the way of footsteps and other noises. It’s important you get them in the right order. Mrs. Groener quieted down. Suppose you start from there.”

  Mrs. Labelle leaned forward, hugging her elbows, and briefly closed her eyes in happy concentration. “First a long time passed. It must have been an hour or more because I’d almost run out of things to think about and was wondering if I shouldn’t take a sleeping pill. Mrs. Groener’s windchimes were beginning to get on my nerves, though I’d hardly heard them at first. Then I heard Mr. Groener go clumping down the hall.

  “I called to him, because I had some hints to give him about how to handle Mrs. Groener. But my door was closed and he didn’t hear me. Then I heard his footsteps stop for a moment and a door close. A moment later I heard him going on to the kitchen.”

  “Are you sure about that?” the Lieutenant asked “Mightn’t he have been going into Miss Grave’s bedroom? Think hard, please, before you answer.”

  Mrs. Labelle laughed. “Not a chance in the world. He’s scared of her. You know why? Because she’s actually been in love with him her whole life and too stuck-up to do anything about it. That’s why she never married. He wouldn’t have gone into her bedroom even if she’d begged him to. Anyhow, I know he must have gone on to the kitchen, because right away I heard him banging around out there making coffee. Men! After awhile it got quiet and then Mrs. Groener screamed.”

  Mrs. Labelle shivered and momentarily closed her eyes. “It was a pretty dreadful scream, even for her, and just a little later there was a thud, as if she’d fallen out of bed. Only it wasn’t quite the same. If my window hadn’t been closed, I’d have probably heard the difference better and been the one to discover her. Just suppose I’d looked out and seen her perching on the sill ten feet away! That would have been a psychological challenge! As it was, I almost did get up though I knew her tricks. But when I waited, half-expecting to hear something else, there wasn’t a sound. Except the windchimes, of course.”

  “Think carefully, Mrs. Labelle,” the Lieutenant said. “Wasn’t there some other sound then? Didn’t Miss Graves get up? Or didn’t Mr. Groener at least start back from the kitchen or make some kind of noise?”

  “No, officer, it was all quiet as death—oh, I didn’t mean to say that, but it was. Mr. Groener stayed in the kitchen a long time—long enough for two or three cups of coffee, I’d say. I thought about a sleeping pill again and finally I took one and about then Mr. Groener came clumping back. I might have called to him, but I’d just taken the pill. Right after that he came charging out of the bedroom and pounded on my door and told me Mrs. Groener had jumped and to call the police. That’s all.” Mrs. Labelle buried her head in her arms and let out a large sigh.

  “Thank you,” the Lieutenant said. “Just a couple more questions now. Miss Graves said Mrs. Groener had tried suicide before. Do you know anything about that?”

  Mrs. Labelle laughed. “That was a false alarm. A few months ago he found her almost passed out with an empty bottle of sleeping pills beside her. He started
to force warm water down her and he’d just got the waste basket for her to throw up in when he noticed the sleeping pills scattered at the bottom of it. She just wanted to make him think she’d swallowed them. People are funny, aren’t they? What’s the other question?”

  “Miss Graves said that yesterday she saw Mrs. Groener drinking—in your sunroom, she said—with her left wrist tied to the arm of her chair with her scarf. Know anything about that?”

  “No, it sounds pointless. The sunroom’s that alcove behind you, officer, with the big windows. Wait a minute—I do remember seeing Mrs. Groener do that years ago. It was Oklahoma. It was sold out. We were sitting in the second balcony, and she had her scarf wrapped around her wrist and the arm of her seat. I thought she’d done it without thinking.”

  “Huh!” The Lieutenant stood up and started to pace. He noticed Mrs. Labelle. “That’ll be all,” he told her. “When you go back to the dining room would you ask Mr. Groener if I could see him again?”

  “I certainly will,” Mrs. Labelle said, popping up with another flash of leg. She smiled and rippled her eyelids. “You gentlemen have given me some fascinating sidelights on life.”

  “You’re certainly welcome,” Zocky assured her, gazing after her appreciatively as she click-clicked down the hall. Then he said to the Lieutenant, “Well, that kills my theory of a suicide trigger. I guess Groener really is the pious type who’d never get out of line.”

  “Yeah,” the Lieutenant agreed abstractedly, still pacing. “Yeah, Zocky, I’m afraid he is, though ‘pious’ may not be just the right word. Scared of stepping over the line comes closer.”

  “But this Labelle’s a real odd cookie—reminds me of that holdup girl last month. She thinks everything’s funny.”’

  “You got a point there, Zocky.”

  “A real bright-eyes too, despite her barbiturates and booze.”

  “Some it takes that way, Zocky.”

  “Of course she’s real attractive for her age, but that’s not here or there.”

  “Maybe not, Zocky.”

  “You know what? When you talked to her about Groener’s supposed mistress I think she thought you meant her.”

  “Okay, okay, Zocky!”

  When Groener arrived, looking more tired than ever, the Lieutenant stopped pacing and said, “Tell me, did your wife have many phobias? Especially agoraphobia, claustrophobia, acrophobia? Those are—”

  “I know,” Groener said, settling himself. “Fear of open spaces, dread of being shut in, fear of heights. She had quite a few irrational fears, but not those particularly. Oh, perhaps a touch of claustrophobia—”

  “All right,” the Lieutenant said, cutting him short. “Mr. Groener, from what I’ve heard tonight your wife didn’t commit suicide.”

  Groener nodded. “I’m glad you understand alcoholics aren’t responsible for the things they do in black-out.”

  Horrible Imaginings

  “She was murdered,” the Lieutenant finished.

  Groener frowned at him incredulously.

  “I’ll give you a quick run-down on what really happened tonight, as I see it, and you can tell me what you think,” the Lieutenant said.

  He started to pace again as if he were too wound-up not to. “You went for your coffee. Mrs. Labelle called to you through her door as you passed. You didn’t want any of her child psychology—or anything else from her either. But it told you she was wide awake and listening to everything. Then you came to Miss Graves’s bedroom and the door was open and you saw her sleeping quietly, her silver fleece of hair falling across the pillow.”

  Groener shook his head and moved his spread-fingered left hand sideways. But the Lieutenant continued, “It struck you how you’d wasted decades of your life caring for and being faithful to a woman who was never going to get well or any more attractive. You thought of what a wonderful life you could have had if you’d taken another direction. But that direction was closed to you now—you’d been spoiled for it. You’d built up inhibitions within yourself that wouldn’t let you overturn the applecart. If you’d tried to, you’d have suffered agonies of guilt and remorse. It would have killed all enjoyment. So you closed Miss Graves’s door, because you couldn’t bear to watch her.”

  “Wait a minute—” Groener protested.

  “Shut up,” the Lieutenant told him dispassionately. “As you closed the door you felt a terrific spasm of rage at the injustice of it. All of that rage was directed against your wife. You’d had feelings like that before, but never had a situation brought them so tormentingly home to you. For one thing you’d just been treated like a worm by the woman you were tied to in front of the woman you desired with a consuming physical passion. It was tearing you apart. You’d come to the end of your rope of hope. Five years had fully demonstrated that your wife would never stop drinking or mentally intimidating you.

  “You thought of all the opportunities of happiness and pleasure you’d passed up without benefit to her, or yourself—or anybody. You suddenly saw how you could do it now without much risk to yourself, and how afterwards perhaps everything would be different for you. You could still take the other direction. What you had in mind was bad, but your wife had been asking for it. You knew you could no longer ever get free without it. It was a partly irrational but compulsive psychological barrier that nothing but your wife’s death could topple. The thought of what you were going to do filled you like black fire, so there was no room in your mind for anything else.”

  “Really, Lieutenant, this—”

  “Shut up. Your plan hung on knowing Mrs. Labelle was awake—that and knowing that she and Miss Graves were both on to your wife’s screaming trick, if that should come up. You started making coffee—and even more noise than you usually do—and then you took off your slippers and you walked back to the bedroom without making a sound. Or if you did make a few slight, creaking-floorboard sounds, you figured the wind-chimes would cover them up.

  “Yes, Mr. Groener, you’re a man who normally makes a lot of noise walking, so your wife wouldn’t accuse you of sneaking around. So much noise, in fact, that it’s become a joke among your friends. But when you want to, or even just when your mind’s on something else, you walk very quietly. You did it earlier this evening right in front of me when you went in the bedroom. You disappeared that time without a sound.

  “You found your wife asleep, still passed out from the drinks. You carefully moved back what light furniture and stuff there was between the bed and the wide-open window. You wanted a clear pathway and it didn’t occur to you that a drunk going from the bed to the window under her own power would have bumped and probably knocked over a half dozen things.”

  The Lieutenant’s voice hardened. “You grabbed your wife—she got out one scream—and you picked her up—she weighed next to nothing—and you pitched her out the window. Then you stood there listening a minute. This was the hump, you thought. But nobody called or got up or did anything. So for a final artistic touch you put your wife’s bedtime drink and one of her burnt-out lipstick-stained cigarettes on the windowsill. You’ve got to watch out for artistic touches, Groener, because they’re generally wrong. Then you glided back to the kitchen, finished the coffee act, and came back noisy.”

  The Lieutenant quit pacing and paused, but Groener just stared at him—incredulously, almost stupifiedly, but still steady as a rock. Zocky shot an apprehensive look at his superior.

  “The important thing you overlooked,” the Lieutenant went on relentlessly, “was that I’d find out your wife was an acrophobe, and that her dread of heights was so great, sober or drunk, that she’d tie her arm to her chair when she was merely sitting near a big window or up on a theater balcony. To suggest that such a person would commit suicide by jumping is utterly implausible. To imply that she’d preface it by sitting or leaning on the window ledge having a last drink and smoke is absolutely unbelievable.”

  The Lieutenant paused and narrowed his eyes before adding, “Moreover, Mr. Groener, quie
tly as you walked back to the bedroom, did you really suppose you accomplished that so silently that Mrs. Labelle’s sharp ears wouldn’t catch the sound of your footsteps?”

  Groener roused himself with an obvious effort. “I... I... This is all quite absurd, Lieutenant. Mrs. Labelle...” He made the usual gesture with his left hand. “You can’t really believe that.”

  He looked at his left hand. So did the detectives. It was shaking and as he continued to stare it began to shake more violently. The tendons stood out whitely as he stiffened it, but the shaking didn’t stop.

  Groener’s tight-pressed lips lengthened in a grin but the corners of his mouth wouldn’t turn up. “This is embarrassing,” he said. “Must be embarrassing to you too. First time I’ve had the shakes in five years.”

  But the shaking only became convulsive.

  “All right,” he said, closing his eyes, “I did it.”

  The shaking stopped.

  After awhile he went on gently, “Just about as you’ve described it. I was insane to think I could ever get away with it. I suppose your doctor noticed that her neck had been broken before she fell. He probably deduced it from the tear in her scalp where I’d jerked her head back by the hair.”

  “No,” the Lieutenant said, “but he will now. Zocky, would you get Cohan? Tell the ladies Mr. Groener’s coming with us to make a statement at the station. Tell them he doesn’t want to speak to either of them now. I imagine that’s the way you want it, Groener?” The other nodded.

  After Zocky went off, Groener said, “Would you tell me one thing?”

  “I’ll try to.”

  “How did you know her hair looked like a silver fleece?”

  The Lieutenant flushed. “Oh that—please excuse it. I was just blasting away at you. The words came.”

  Zocky returned with the third detective. They opened the front door and started down the stairs. The Lieutenant told Cohan to go first with Groener.

  Zocky said to the Lieutenant in a gruff whisper, “Hey, I gave you a right steer on that walking loud on purpose business, didn’t I?”