One Hour to Kill

by George Harmon Coxe

  He tried not to dwell on what Fay had said about him and Ann, at the same time admitting that she must know some of the truth. The resentment did not come from this but from the fact that he had again done exactly as Fay wanted him to do. He remembered now that she had said something about having plans or things to do. Apparently it had been important that she get back to the bungalow around a certain time. She had wanted him out of the way, and he had gone, and this was just another illustration of how she had always been able to manipulate him according to her needs.

  The more he considered the situation, the more it seemed important that he get back to the bungalow and try to find out what was going on. It was his place, wasn’t it? He paid the rent and it was time he kept the earlier promise to himself that from now on he was going to be tough. Not physically but simply to assert the rights that were his. He had told Ann he would do something constructive, so what was he waiting for?

  Aware, even as he asked himself the question, that he was wasting time, he finished his drink. Then, before he could ton away, the barman put a fresh glass in front of him and poured soda onto the brandy and ice.

  Wallace scowled at it and then at the man.

  “What’s this?”

  “From Mr. Lee Fong,” the barman said and nodded behind Wallace.

  When he turned he saw Sam Lee Fong sitting with his family at a table on the far side of the room. He knew Lee Fong as a prosperous merchant and restaurant owner, and of the three children who sat with Lee Fong and his wife he recognized the twelve-year-old daughter because he had once made a sketch of her. Now Lee Fong lifted one hand in a casual salute and Wallace made a small bow of acknowledgment and raised the glass in reply.

  He finished the drink as soon as he politely could. He waved again to Lee Fong. He said good night to the barman and went out to his car. This time he knew where he was going and he took a direct route at somewhat more than the legal speed limit. When he came to the turn which led to the bungalow he had to stop and let a car pass that was coming from the opposite direction. He took that moment to glance at his watch and see that he had been gone from the house less than an hour; then he was idling slowly down the narrow lane.

  His headlights picked out the shack behind the bungalow and he smiled absently when he saw the tightly closed shutters; for it was important to the islanders that the interior and its occupants be shielded against what the more superstitious natives called the “night spirits.” He swung the sedan into the lean-to and switched off the lights and engine. He was aware that the lights were still on in the bungalow but he had started for the corner of the porch before he noticed the sedan parked off to the right under a breadfruit tree which overshadowed an open, sandy area.

  A waning moon had placed itself above the horizon to highlight the dark waters of the gulf and the top of the sea-grape hedge but it also served to make the surrounding shadows even blacker, so that he had to walk almost to the sedan before he actually saw its outline.

  He did not know then, or later, just why he was interested in identifying that car. The answer that came to him was clear enough. Fay had wanted him out of the house because she had a date of one kind or another. Whoever owned the car was at the moment inside, and all he had to do was continue round the porch and up the steps and then he’d have his answer.

  That was what he told himself but it did not stop him. There was no feeling of apprehension or danger as he approached the side of the car. There was no room for anything beyond the simple impulse that prompted him to satisfy his curiosity. He could tell by then that the sedan was either dark blue or black and as he started for the rear end to get a look at the license it happened.

  What warning there was lasted for less than a second. Instinct or intuition or whatever it is that is supposed to alert a man to impending danger was on a momentary holiday because all he heard was a whisper of sound on the sand behind him; then, from out of the darkness, someone stepped close while a huge hand clamped tightly across his mouth and nose, jerking him erect and holding him motionless. There was no chance to resist or cry out, and his reaction in that instant was a feeling of amazement rather than alarm.

  He only knew that the man behind him was tall and powerfully built, that a heavy ring of some sort on the third or little finger of that left hand was bruising his lips. There was that much time to think and then something clubbed him behind the right ear. After that, the pressure on his mouth had gone and he knew he was falling.

  He did not remember hitting the ground. There was blackness all about him when the attack came and that blackness was still there as he found himself on hands and knees with his eyes open. He felt the sandy soil beneath his hands and shook his head to clear it. Still not trying to rise, he turned slowly and, as he became aware that the car had gone, he heard the distant sound of an accelerating motor.

  He saw it as he came unsteadily to his feet, far down the lane, its taillight winking redly as it turned right into the highway and was gone. By then his head had cleared and he took a hurried step toward the lean-to before common sense told him that no matter how quick he was there would be no chance of catching the speeding car.

  There was nothing but a dull ache inside his head now but he could feel a swelling in his lip, and when his fingertips explored the area behind his ear he found plenty of soreness but no pronounced swelling. It seemed then that he had been hit with a fist, and properly. By some boy friend of Fay’s?

  The unspoken question brought new and disturbing possibilities that burrowed swiftly into his consciousness and made him wheel toward the house. His stride lengthened automatically as he moved in front of the porch, and now an odd sense of uncertainty and foreboding began to build inside him as the questions multiplied.

  Why should the owner of that car take such desperate measures to get away unseen? Fay knew who it was, she must know; Fay could tell him and—

  He went swiftly up the steps and across the porch, the thought scaring him now as another alternative came to him. He tried to evade it by denying its presence, and as he stepped into the lighted room he saw that everything was as he had left it. The furniture seemed in place and the rack of unframed paintings, the easel, the paint case were in their accustomed corner.

  “Fay!”

  The word came out with unexpected loudness in the quiet room and the pressure of his doubts and mounting uncertainty made him call again.

  “Fay!” he said, his voice ragged.

  Then he was moving, legs stretching as he stepped into the hall, seeing the open door of the bath at the end and then turning the knob to Fay’s bedroom. The familiar, perfumed odor greeted him but the light was on here too and he felt an instants reassurance when he noticed that the room seemed in order. The bed, what he could see of it from that angle, was not mussed but to be sure he pushed the door all the way open and it was then that he saw the limp and crumpled figure in the wicker chair.

  Dave Wallace was not aware of what he did or what he thought in those next interminable seconds. The shock and incredulity of his reaction held him immobile for what seemed like a long time when there was neither pulse beat nor breath in his body. The still airless warmth of the room evaporated slowly into a queer physical chill and now a frightening emptiness expanded where his stomach had been. For he seemed to know instinctively that his wife was dead. He did not have to move closer to see the livid distortion of her face and neck and the ugly way the painted lips had been drawn back against the teeth.

  Somehow he was aware of all this before his mind began to work and now he forced himself to move his stiffened muscles. Two deliberate steps brought him to her side and he saw that the heavy silver necklace that he had never asked about was still imbedded in the side and front of her neck, part of it almost hidden in the soft discolored flesh.

  He took one limp soft hand and found it as warm as his own. He looked at his watch and saw that it was just 10:17. He had one other thought before his brain tried to cope with his own predicamen
t and that was that Fay had not been killed in the chair. The position of the body, with the outstretched legs, the shoes that lay to one side, the dangling arms and cocked head, suggested that someone had put her there deliberately.

  He got that far in his hypothesis before he backed from the room and found other more pressing matters demanding his attention. The first of these, now that he had overcome his initial shock and could contain the lingering sickness inside him, was simple:

  Fay was dead. She had obviously been murdered and the first duty of any law-abiding citizen was to notify the police and set the official machinery in motion without delay. Because the step was so logical, he had already started for the telephone in the living room before additional elements came tardily to the top of his mind and set in motion a whole new mental image that was both terrifying and disheartening.

  For he had read enough crime stories, both factual and fictional, to know that when a wife was murdered the husband was the prime suspect. He also knew that more often than not the husband was guilty. Now, considering his own position, he saw that all available evidence pointed directly to him.

  For in addition to an ingrown acquisitiveness, Fay was both inquisitive and, when drinking, garrulous. Just as she had given him odd bits of information and gossip from time to time, he knew that she had told others about the present state of their marriage. The Carvers, for one, knew that that marriage was on the rocks; Oliver and Ernestina must have overheard quarrels from time to time, some of them bitter.

  The fact that he was in love with another woman and wanted to get rid of his wife would almost certainly be discovered by the police before long. If Fay knew about the affair, and from what she had said earlier she certainly had some information about it, then it should prove no great problem to the authorities. This in itself would be a satisfactory motive.

  There was one final bit of evidence that would support a hypothetical case, and as he held out his hand and turned it over he knew he could not deny it. The three scratches that Fay had put there had already started to scab over and he realized it would be a simple matter for the police to prove that the skin from those scratches was still under his wife’s fingernails.

  Taken together, such arguments might have been enough to convince him that his only chance was to do what he could before the fact of murder became known to the police. But there was still another black mark against him that could never be explained under the circumstances. For once arrested, it would be routine for the authorities to check with the New York City police. He had no record, as such, but a complaint had been filed for an offense that was all too similar to the tragedy that had happened tonight.

  Once before he had resorted to violence and taken his wife by the throat. That night he had let go in time, but if that fact became known while he was under suspicion, who would believe he was innocent?

  He made up his mind then. For it was no longer a question of the rightness or the wrongness of the plan now taking shape in his brain. He had no choice but to cover up and make the most of the time he had left.

  5

  The basic steps in the procedure Dave Wallaces mind proposed as he stood there on the threshold of the living room were three in number, and he stated them in ascending order of importance.

  First, he would make thorough inspection of his wife’s effects to see if there was anything at all that might give him some clue as to who had killed her.

  Second, he would stop by the Carvers' long enough to establish the impression that he did not know his wife was dead so that, when questioned, they could testify to his apparent innocence.

  Third, he would drive to the Joslyn cottage on Manzanilla Bay and tell Ann and her uncle exactly what had happened. This seemed the most important step of all because he had no doubt that he would be arrested and he wanted them to know the truth; he had to prepare them for possible investigations and he would need Joslyn’s help in getting the proper legal counsel and advice.

  Now, having reached his decision, he went back to Fay’s bedroom and looked carefully about, his glance flicking from the chair to the bed, to the bureau with its mirror, the bedside table, the curtained recess which was all the closet there was.

  He wondered first about the shoes. Somehow he did not believe Fay had put them there. But who had, and why?

  When there was no answer to this he looked at the bureau and found the top in its normal untidy condition. Since it had to double as a vanity, the native mahogany was cluttered with creams and ointments, astringents, perfume, toilet water, and tissues. When he found nothing to interest him he opened one of the two cupboards that flanked the top two narrow drawers because it was here that Fay usually put her straw handbag.

  It was here now and he lifted the top. He took out the red wallet and put it aside. He pawed through the rest of the tilings, finding a pack of filtered cigarettes, nearly empty, a silver lighter, lipstick, compact, mascara, tissues; near the bottom were nail scissors, a comb, a silver pill box, a nail file, three keys on a ring, and a folding checkbook.

  This and the wallet were the only things that interested him and now, remembering finally that there were such things as fingerprints, he took out his handkerchief before he unfolded the checkbook to examine the stubs. They did not tell him much except that she had a balance of seven hundred West Indian dollars. The initial deposit was for twelve hundred and something. Five deposits for one hundred dollars had been made since that time, the last ten days ago. The last check had been written three days earlier in the amount of sixty dollars and the scrawled word on the stub looked like cash.

  Still using the handkerchief, he opened the wallet and glanced first into the bill compartment. What he saw when he slid out the new bills he had noticed when Fay paid the check at the Tavern gave him something of a shock. For what he found were not two-dollar bills, as he had supposed then, but hundreds. There were five of these plus a ten-dollar note and a five.

  “Now where the hell,” he said aloud, not knowing that he did so, “would she get five hundred bucks?”

  Even as he spoke he saw that there was something else in the compartment. On closer inspection he found that it was a check for one hundred dollars, made out to her, signed by Joseph Anderson, and dated two days earlier. Somehow the discovery did not surprise him greatly but he began to wonder about the five earlier deposits for a hundred dollars he had noticed in the checkbook. He was not inclined to believe this was coincidence. He knew Fay’s salary at the gift shop was but a few dollars a week, but when he saw there was no way of proving his assumption that Anderson was her patron he put it from his mind and began to inspect the smaller pockets of the wallet.

  Here he found a drivers license, some old sales slips, a social-security card, two credit cards, and finally a business card that set up a new and disconcerting sense of anxiety in his mind. For this was a cheaply printed card which said: Leon Doucette—Private Investigations. In the lower righthand corner was a telephone number and opposite it was a Bay Street address in Bridgetown, Barbados.

  It took him a while to do more than stare at the card. The mere sight of it flipped his mind off on many tangents, and it was not until he could concentrate that he thought to pick up the checkbook and go back over the stubs. What he finally found served only to confirm his mounting suspicion. For the stub was there, undated but with the notation of seventy-five dollars and the word Doucette scrawled beneath it.

  Still not understanding why his wife should want a detective from Barbados or what she expected to learn, he slipped the card into his pocket. The fact that Fay had hired the man at all was enough for now and, unwilling and a little afraid to waste more time on idle speculation, he turned at once to the recessed closet, his mind telling him that if Doucette had worked for Fay, for whatever reason, he might have made a written report.

  Other times when he had been in the room the protective curtain which made the closet had been drawn. It was pushed back now but he did not wonder about it as he moved clos
er to consider the two pieces of luggage on the floor, an oversized wardrobe case and hatbox. Fay had referred to this as her safe, which meant that she kept her valuables locked here when she was away from the house. The key would be one of those in the straw bag, but as he bent low Wallace saw that the two catches were snapped back. There were marks, too, on the lock. He did not know how or when they had been made; the important thing was that the bag was now unlocked.

  The odor of her special perfume seemed even stronger here as he opened the hatbox and it did not take him long to realize that there was no report. The soft leather jewel box seemed to contain its regular quota of pieces that Fay had collected. There was a passport, travel folders, and a return airline ticket from Port-of-Spain to Idlewild. That was all, and when he had replaced the case and wiped off his fingerprints he pulled the cord overhead to turn off the ceiling light and left the room. Everything was exactly as he had found it except for Leon Doucettes business card, which was now in his pocket; for while he was quite aware that the police might eventually find Doucette, he was damned if he would leave a card which was the same thing as a road map and an invitation to call.

  He did not waste much time in the living room. He saw that someone had cleaned up the table on the porch and put away the bottles and glasses. There was an ash tray on the buffet near the dining-room table with a couple of cigarette butts, and he noticed Fay’s brocaded spectacle case, although there were no glasses in it now. There was another ash tray on the table at the other end of the room but there was nothing that showed any signs of a struggle and now he went across the porch and down the steps as he considered the second part of his program.

  He went down the path to the water’s edge and stood a moment while he made the necessary mental adjustments for the part he was about to play. On the left a high thick hedge blocked off the neighboring house and extended to a seawall. This not only shut out the view when one was on the porch but it prevented any access from that direction except by water since the bottom of the wall was never exposed, even at low tide. Here, in front of the bungalow, there was no wall, the present owner apparently feeling that it was not worthwhile; it was the same way with the lot on the right.