“There were obvious dangers, of course. The thing I worried most about was that she’d come out of the fugue. She wouldn’t remember anything since the murder, because the fugue period is entirely forgotten after recovery, but the murder was before the fugue, and she’d remember it as the last thing that happened to her, and if I wasn’t around to help her then, she’d be done for. God knows what she’d do. So I’ve been keeping watch over her the best I can, and everything’s been all right, except now you’ve come along and made like a God-damn detective, and I’ve got to kill you, and now’s the time for it.”
That was Darcy’s cue. He got out of the front seat and opened the door to the back seat on my side, and I was supposed to get out quietly into the road to save the cushions, but I didn’t want to do it. What I wanted to do was live, and in the growing sense of revelation and gathering ends, I thought I could see a faint chance.
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, “and if you go ahead and finish making it, it won’t be your first, but it may very well be your last and worst.”
Darcy stood erect by the open door and waited patiently and politely. Silas Lawler made an abrupt gesture with his gun and then became utterly still and silent for the longest several seconds there have ever been. Finally he sighed, and the tension went out of him.
“All right,” he said. “Another minute or two. What mistake?”
“Assuming that Constance Markley killed Regis Lawler,” I said.
“She was in the room with him. He was dead.”
“Conceded. But you said you checked her purse and saw seven hundred dollars. Did you see a gun?”
“No. No gun.”
“Was it in the room? Anywhere in the apartment?”
“No.”
“You think maybe she shot him with her finger?”
“I’ve wondered about that. You explain it.”
“I already have. She didn’t shoot him.”
“You’re just guessing.”
“Maybe so. But I’ve got better reasons for my guess than you’ve got for yours. You think she went off the deep end and killed him because he was getting tired of her. Is that it?”
“She’d had troubles. Things had piled up. Regis was more than a lover. He was a kind of salvation.”
“I’ll tell you something I’ve learned. The night Regis died, Constance Markley’s maid helped her dress. According to this maid, she was eager. She wasn’t angry or depressed or particularly disturbed in any way. She was only eager to see her lover. Does that sound like a woman betrayed and ready to kill? It sounds to me more like a woman who was still ignorant of whatever defections her lover was committing.”
“Say she was ignorant. She learned after she got there.”
“Sure. And shot him with her finger.”
Again, for the time it took to draw and release a long breath, Silas Lawler was silent. At the open door, Darcy shifted his weight with a grating of gravel.
“You got anything else to say?” Lawler said.
“Only what you’re already thinking,” I said. “Constance Markley didn’t kill Regis. Neither did you. But someone did. Pretend for a minute that it was you. You murdered a man, and the night of the murder the man’s mistress vanishes. No one knows where she went. No one knows why. In your mind these two things, the murder and the disappearance, are inevitably associated. It’s too big a coincidence. There must be a connection. But what is it? Does she know something that may be placing you in jeopardy every second of your life? Or every second of hers? You must learn this at any cost, and you must learn it before anyone else. You may pretend indifference, but in your mind are the constant uncertainty, the constant fear. They’re there for two long years. Then a garden variety private detective stumbles onto something. Maybe. He makes a trip to a town named Amity where the vanished mistress once lived with the same woman who has hired the detective to find her. Several people, in one way or another, learn of this trip. Including you, the murderer. What do these people do? They stay at home and mind their own business. Except you, the murderer. You don’t stay home and mind your own business, because your business is in Amity.”
That was all I had. It wasn’t much, but it was all, and I had a strong conviction that it was true. Silas Lawler was still, and so was Darcy. In the stillness, like a living and measurable organism, was a growing sense of compelling urgency. I could hear it at last in Lawler’s voice when he spoke again.
“Darcy,” he said, “let’s go back.”
Darcy got under the wheel, and we turned and went. We went as fast as the Caddy’s horses could run on the road and highway and streets they had to follow. On Canterbury Street, in front of the small frame house in which Constance Markley lived, Silas Lawler and I got out on the parking and looked up across the lawn to the house, and the light was still on the blind behind the window, and everything was quiet. Then, after a terrible interval in which urgency was slowly becoming farce, there was a shadow on the blind that was not a woman’s, a scream in the house that was.
The scream was not loud, not long, and there was no shadow and no sound by the time Lawler and I reached the porch. I was faster than he, running on longer legs, and he was a step behind me when I threw open the door to see Constance Markley hanging by the neck from the hands of her husband.
Interrupted in murder, he turned his face toward us in the precise instant that Lawler fired, and in another instant he was dead.
Constance Markley began to scream again.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
I had a notion that the screams were two years old.
CHAPTER 9.
I took a week to get things cleared up. I stayed in Amity that week, and then I went home, and the day after I went home, I went up to the apartment of Faith Salem. I made a point of going when the sun was on the terrace. Maria let me in, and I crossed the acres of pile and tile and went out where Faith was. She was lying on her back on the bright soft pad with one forearm across her eyes to shade them from the light. She didn’t move the arm when I came out.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hand,” she said.
“Good afternoon,” I said.
“Excuse me for not getting up. Will you please sit down?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Thanks.”
I sat down in a wicker chair. It was very warm on the terrace in the sun, but the warmth was pleasant, and after a while I began to feel it in my bones. Faith Salem’s lean brown body remained motionless, except for the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breasts in breathing, and I suspected that her eyes were closed under her arm.
“So it was Graham after all,” she said.
“That’s what you suspected, wasn’t it?”
“In a way. I had a feeling, but it was a feeling that he had done something to Constance. I can’t understand why he killed this man.”
“Not because of the affair. He didn’t care about that.”
“Why, then?”
“Regis Lawler tried to blackmail him. It went back to something that happened several years ago. Graham Markley and Constance were driving back from the country. They’d been on a party, and Graham was drunk. He hit a woman on the highway and killed her and kept right on driving. It was a nasty business. Constance isn’t a strong person, nor even a very pleasant person, and she agreed with Graham that it was better to keep quiet about the incident. It’s easy for some people to rationalize that kind of attitude. Then, in due time, after the death of her child, she met Regis Lawler, and she wanted to do with Regis just what everyone actually assumed she had done. She wanted to run away from everything—her marriage, her guilt, everything associated with her child’s death, all the unhappiness that people like her seem doomed to accumulate.
“Apparently Regis let her believe that he might be willing t
o go along with this, but he had no money. Silas Lawler told me that Regis stole seventy-five grand from a wall safe at the restaurant, but it wasn’t so. It was only a lie Silas used to make their running away plausible. What really happened was that Constance told Regis about the woman’s death on the highway, and Regis tried the blackmail, although he actually had no intention, it seems, of going anywhere at all with Constance. The blackmail didn’t work. Graham Markley wasn’t the kind of weak character to submit. He went to Lawler’s apartment and killed him. When Constance went there later the same night and found his body, she knew immediately what had surely happened. Her own burden of guilt was too heavy to bear in addition to everything else, and so she escaped it by becoming someone else to whom none of this had ever happened. It was something that could only have happened under certain conditions to a certain kind of person. She became the one woman she had known that she completely admired and envied, and she went back to the place where she had, for a while, been happier than she had ever been before or since. She became you, and she went back to Amity. With a break or two and a couple of hunches, I got the idea that she might be there, and I went there to see if I could find her, and Graham Markley learned from you where I was going. He was terribly afraid of what Constance might know to tell if she was found, and it was imperative, as he saw it, to get rid of her for good and all. And so he followed me and found her and tried to kill her, but it didn’t turn out that way.”
“I’m sorry I told him,” she said. “It was a mistake.”
“Not for me,” I said. “It made me a smart guy instead of a corpse.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important.”
The sun in the sky was nearing the tooled ridge of stone. I wished for a drink, but nobody brought one. Faith Salem’s breasts rose and fell, rose and fell. Her long brown legs stirred slightly in the sun.
“Did Constance tell all this?” she said.
“The part about the murder. Not the rest.”
“How strange it is. How strange simply to forget everything and become someone else.”
“Strange enough, but not incredible. It’s happened before. People have gone half around the world and lived undetected in new identities tor years.”
“Is she all right now?”
“She remembers who she is and everything that happened until she found the body of Regis Lawler in his apartment. She doesn’t remember anything that happened in the time of the fugue. That’s a long way from all right, I guess, but it’s as good as she can hope for.”
“Why become me? Why me of all people?”
There was honest wonderment in her voice. Looking at her, the lean brown length of her, I could have told her why, but I didn’t. I had a feeling that it was time to be going, and I stood up.
“I think I’d better leave now,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
“Of course. I’ll be here as long as the rent’s paid. That’s about three months.”
“Are you going to look at me before I leave?”
“No. I don’t think so. Do you mind letting yourself out?”
“I don’t mind.”
“Good-by, then, Mr. Hand. I wish you had a lot of money. It’s a shame you’re so poor.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. “It’s a crying shame.”
She never moved or looked at me, and I went away. The next day I sent her a bill, and two days after that I got a check. I saw her twice again, but not to speak to. Once she was coming out of a shop alone, and once she was going into a theater on the arm of a man. I learned later that she married a very rich brewer and went to live in Milwaukee.
THE WITNESS WAS A LADY
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1960.
It was a Thursday morning when Corey McDown called me. I hadn’t heard from Corey for a long time. Not directly. After he got to be a cop, we sort of drifted apart and lost contact with each other. I’m not exactly allergic to cops, you understand, but it usually turns out that we’re incompatible.
Corey was a bright guy, and he’d moved up fast in the force. He was pretty young for a lieutenant in Homicide.
“Hello, Mark,” he said. “Corey McDown here. Did I get you out of bed?”
“I don’t have to get out of bed to answer the phone,” I said. “How are you, Corey?”
“I’ve been worse,” he said, “and I’ve been better. I wonder if you’d do me a favor.”
“Do I owe you a favor?”
“Do this one for me, and I’ll owe you one.”
“You think I may need it?”
“You may, Mark. You never know.”
“True. There have been times before. What’s on your mind, Corey?”
“I hate long telephone conversations. Ask me over.”
“Sure, Corey. Come on over.”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
He hung up, and so did I. It must be a big favor he wanted, I thought, to make him so accommodating. I had an uneasy feeling that it was related to something that I didn’t want to think about, and I wished I could quit. I got out of bed and shaved and showered and dressed, which used up the thirty minutes. I had just finished when the door buzzer sounded, and I went out across the living room to the door and opened it.
“Right on time,” I said. “Come on in.”
He came in and tossed his hat into one chair and sat down in another. His hair was cut short, a thick brown stubble, and he looked trim and hard. Right now, leaning back and smiling, relaxed.
“You’ve got a nice place, Mark. You live well.”
“Heels always live well. It’s expected of them.”
“You’re not a heel, Mark. You’re just a reasonably good guy with kinks.”
“Thanks.” I walked over to a table and lifted a glass. “You want some breakfast?”
“Out of a bottle?”
“Is there another place to get it?”
“I had mine out of a skillet. You go ahead.”
I poured a double shot of bourbon and swallowed it fast. Then I went back and threw his hat on the floor and took its place. The double helped me feel as relaxed as he looked.
“Go on,” I said. “Convince me.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m trying to think of the best approach.”
“The best is the simplest. You want a favor. Tell me what it is.”
“Let me ask you a question first. You seen Nora lately?”
“No. It’s been forever. Why?”
“I thought you might have looked her up when Jack Kirby was murdered.”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s strange. Old friends and all, I mean. The least an old friend can do when an old friend’s boy friend is killed is to offer sympathy and condolences and all that.”
“My personal opinion is that congratulations were in order. I didn’t think it would be in good taste to offer them.”
He looked across at me, shaking his burr head and grinning. The grin got vocal and became a loud laugh.
“You see, Mark? All you’ve got are a few kinks. A real twenty-four carat heel like Jack Kirby offends your sensibilities.”
“Go to hell.”
“Sure, sure. Anything to oblige. What I’m leading up to is, this favor isn’t really for me at all. Oh, incidentally it is, maybe, but mostly it’s a favor for Nora.”
“You sound like a man about to be devious, Corey.”
“Not me, Mark. Whatever I may be that makes me different from you, I’m not devious. I haven’t got the brains for it.”
“O.K. Tell me the favor for Nora that’s one for you incidentally.”
“I’
ll tell you, but let’s get the circumstances in focus. Did you read the news stories about Jack Kirby’s murder?”
“Once over, lightly.”
“In that case, you’ll remember what the evidence indicated. He had an appointment with someone in his apartment. At least someone came to see him there, and this someone, whoever it was, killed him. Cracked his skull with a heavy cut-glass decanter, to be exact. This was all in the news stories, and it’s all true. What wasn’t in the stories, because we put the lid on it, is that someone pretty definitely knew who it was in the apartment with Kirby that night. That someone is Nora.”
“How do you know?”
“Never mind how. We know.”
“That won’t do, Corey. You can’t expect to clam up on the guy you’re asking for a favor.”
“All right. I’ll tell you this much. The day of Kirby’s murder, Nora told a friend that she was going to Kirby’s apartment that night, but she couldn’t go until late because Kirby was expecting someone earlier that she didn’t want to meet. This friend is a woman whose testimony can be relied on. We’re convinced of that.”
“Didn’t Nora mention the name of Kirby’s expected guest?”
“No. No name. Just that it was someone she didn’t want to meet there.”
“Did you ask Nora?”
Corey looked down at his hands in his lap. He folded and unfolded the blunt fingers. On his face for a few seconds there was a sour expression as he recalled an experience that he hadn’t liked and couldn’t forget.
“We hauled her in and asked her over and over for a long while. She wouldn’t say. She denied ever having told her friend that she knew.”
“I wonder why. You’d think she’d want to help.”
“Come off it, Mark. You know why as well as I do. Jack Kirby was a guy who associated with dangerous characters. One of these characters killed him, and he wouldn’t think twice about killing a material witness. Either to keep her from talking or in revenge if she did. If he couldn’t do it personally, he’d have it done for him. Today or tomorrow or next year. Nora’s been associating with some dangerous characters herself, including Kirby. She knows how they operate, Mark. She won’t talk because she’s afraid.”
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 22
