One Hour to Kill

by George Harmon Coxe

  Once on Eastern Main Road he watched the speedometer climb, and with Bartaria and San Juan behind him there was only an occasional car or truck to pass. It was flat country here, an area of mixed agriculture and truck farms, most of which were the province of the East Indians who, unlike the Negro, preferred to work the soil. Now and then his headlights picked out the plain, high-standing houses near the roadside and he could see the drab, bare yards and the tall bamboo poles, most of which were decorated with pennant-shaped prayer flags in various colors, a religious custom that had been brought in by the original immigrants and passed on to succeeding generations.

  He kept his speed at an even fifty-five when he could, seeing the bright pouri blossoms along the roadside from time to time and ticking off the villages as he came to them—Tunapuna, Tacarigua, Arouca. As he was going through Arima, a black-uniformed police constable wheeling a bicycle stepped into the street, but if he gave a signal Wallace did not see it, nor did he slow down. After that there were fewer towns, and with Sangre Grande behind him, he had less than ten miles to go. When, a few minutes later, he had his first glimpse of the Atlantic, he slowed down and presently he found the entrance he wanted.

  The cottage Sidney Joslyn had rented for the winter had no garage, and Wallace coasted up behind the Vauxhall which stood at the end of the driveway. He cut his lights and motor as he stopped, but as he stepped to the ground his eyes were not yet adjusted to the darkness so that he had to feel his way past the other car. He stumbled a bit as he picked his way forward and when he put his hand on the hood to steady himself he found some remaining warmth in the radiator, a fact which suggested that someone had been out not too long before and therefore might still be up.

  Coming round to the front of the white-painted cottage, he could see on his left the vague outline of the headland that formed the north end of the Bay. On the right the shoreline stretched straight to the south and he could make out the white lines of the breakers that curled in to flatten on the clean sandy beach.

  He could tell now that there was some light in the living room, and it was Sidney Joslyn who came to answer his knock. He had a flashlight in one hand, and apparently he had already started to retire because he was clad in slacks and an undershirt. His long, thin face held a look of surprise and the eyes behind the old-fashioned metal-rimmed spectacles squinted into the thick shadows of the porch.

  “David?” he said in slow astonishment.

  “I was hoping I could catch you before you went to bed.”

  “I couldn't imagine who could be knocking at this hour.”

  “I'm sorry,” Wallace said. “I had to see you—and Ann.”

  “Come in, come in.” Joslyn stepped out of the way. “Ann’s in bed, but she hasn’t been there long. I don’t imagine she’s asleep.”

  He stepped to the hallway and raised his voice: “Ann? A friend of yours is here.”

  The reply came quickly. “I heard him. I’ll be right out.”

  Joslyn said nothing more, nor did he look at Wallace until the girl came out of the hall, pajamas showing under the thin yellow robe. The thick chestnut hair had a somewhat tousled look now and when Wallace saw her hazel eyes widen with incipient alarm he made no attempt to go near her.

  “You’d better sit down, Ann,” he said, and waited until she found a chair. “Fay’s dead.”

  “Dead?” they said in unison, the rising inflection of their voices much the same. “How?” Joslyn said. “What happened?”

  “She was murdered,” Wallace said, and as they watched in wide-eyed incredulity he went on quickly to tell them what had happened, concentrating on his phrases, wanting to be explicit and convincing.

  Ann’s face was white and stiff when he finished, her lips parted, her slender body still. Joslyn sat down heavily and reached for a filtered denicotinized cigarette, which was all he was allowed to smoke. He waited until he had a light before he spoke.

  “You haven’t been to the police, son?”

  “How could I?”

  “But”—Ann swallowed and her voice was hushed—“why, David? You didn’t do it.”

  “Are you sure you did the right thing?” Joslyn said.

  “Not any more,” Wallace said and knew that this was true. He took the business card with Leon Doucette’s name on it and showed it to Joslyn. He took it over and let Ann look at it. He told them where he had found it and mentioned the notation he had seen on the check stub. “Fay must have hired him. She must have known about us. She might even have known that I stayed here those two weekends when I told her I was in Barbados.”

  He digressed to tell them about Shirley Goddard’s visit and what she had said. “If Shirley could know about you,” he added, “I imagine the police will find out before long. They’ll find out how it was with Fay and me, and about our arguments, and how she acted when she was drunk. It’s a classic situation, isn’t it, a man wanting to get rid of his wife so he can marry another woman?”

  He displayed the scratches on the back of his hand. “They can prove Fay scratched me. They re going to say we had a fight and I lost my head and strangled her.”

  “But it’s not true,” Ann said, her voice tight and small.

  “It’s all true,” he said, “except the part about my killing her.”

  When no one could find an answer to the statement, Wallace found his mind slipping back to the first time he had met Ann. It had happened quite by accident. There are no good beaches around Port-of-Spain and what swimming there is is usually done by small boys of various colors who do not care about nice beaches. The closest is across the northern mountains to Maracas Bay. Wallace had been there but he had not yet seen the Atlantic side of the island and on this day he drove over to have a look.

  He had done his sketching and was on his way back when a tire went flat on the sedan he had rented. When he opened the rear deck and discovered there was no spare he started out to look for a telephone. He had found one here and as he came up to the cottage he saw a distinguished-looking older man and a girl with a stenographer’s notebook on her knee. They were sitting in the yard, and after he explained his problem they asked what kind of a car he had. When it developed that theirs was the same make as his they insisted that he use the spare.

  He could remember the way she had looked as though it had happened yesterday. She was dressed in shorts and a halter then and her skin was smooth and beautifully tanned. She did not have Fay’s obvious prettiness and his over-all impression at the time, possibly because Joslyn was present and he didn’t want to stare, was simply that she was young and friendly, with a pleasantly unaffected manner and a quiet charm all her own.

  He brought the tire back the following afternoon and they asked him to stay to tea, and it was then that he noticed how beautiful her eyes were. They were hazel and long-lashed, and he studied them as an artist in their high-cheekboned setting. Before long it occurred to him that they reflected somehow an inner radiance that was both genuine and warmly contagious.

  He found himself thinking about it that night. His mind kept wandering when he was working. Two days later he found an excuse to go back and this time he knew what was happening to him. Until then there had been no idea of marriage in his mind but for the first time in years he felt-relaxed and happily at ease. In the end he told her how he felt. He told her about Fay, all of it.

  With Sidney Joslyn, he had been lucky because the older man seemed to like him from the very beginning. He must have known what was happening but he made no objections then or later. A tall, slender man with a slight stoop and thinning gray hair, he had never married and his chief concern seemed to be his niece’s happiness. As a younger man he had worked as a geologist here and in the Guianas and in Venezuela. He had a comfortable income because he had helped develop some magnetic logging device which was used in calculating underground formations in potential oil fields. In later years he had been an associate professor at a New England college. He had a lung condition which might eventually p
rove fatal, which was why he wanted to get away from the cold weather while he was writing a book. Now Joslyn cleared his throat and said:

  “You think they’ll arrest you and not look any further?”

  “I don’t know what else to think.”

  “The body will be discovered in the morning. You’ll say you know nothing whatsoever about it?”

  “The Carvers can say I was looking for Fay. Shirley Goddard glanced into the bedroom and didn’t see her and that should help. If they do an autopsy, and I understand they always do down here, they can only guess at the time of death.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s an advantage, David,” Joslyn said doubtfully.

  “How do you mean?”

  “How long were you away from the house?”

  “Not more than an hour. Less, if anything.”

  “If you had called the police at once they might have been able to establish that she was killed during that hour.”

  “Oh,” Wallace said in sudden discouragement as he understood what the older man meant. “You mean, I would have had a better alibi.”

  “If David made a mistake,” Ann said in his defense, “it can’t be helped now.” She looked at Wallace. “Haven’t you any idea whose car that was or who hit you?”

  “None.”

  Wallace was still looking at the private detective’s card and other things occurred to him that served to magnify his depression. He remembered how he’d taken a Saturday morning flight to Barbados nearly two months ago, carrying several of his paintings with him in the hope that he could display them at one or two of the Bridgetown hotels. Lorraine Carver was also on that flight and she had, in fact, helped him get started by giving him an introduction to the manager of the Sandy Hill Hotel.

  Two weeks later he went back with other canvases to replace those which had sold. Again he rode with Lorraine and it was then that he got the idea about seeing Ann. The short intervals that he was able to spend with her on occasional afternoons when he was supposed to be sketching were no longer enough, so the next time he went to Barbados on a Saturday morning he took care of his business hurriedly and caught the afternoon plane back. Ann met him at the airport and drove directly to the cottage and then Monday morning took him to the airport at the proper time.

  That he was able to get away with these clandestine weekends was due to the fact that Fay had always been a late riser. The idea of his riding home in one of the airport limousines was fine with her because it meant she wouldn’t have to get up and meet him. She had seemed completely indifferent as to what happened in Barbados, just as he was indifferent as to what she was doing when he was away. It had all gone along so nicely that he never once worried about being caught; only now, when she was dead, did he understand that she had suspected him and done something about it.

  Joslyn had not objected to such arrangements, once he knew how Ann felt. If he questioned the wisdom of their meetings, he kept his objections to himself. He was, however, concerned about the delay in getting a divorce. Once he had gone so far as to offer Wallace an advance that could be used to make a new settlement with Fay, but Wallace had politely rejected the offer even though Joslyn explained that Ann’s happiness was the only thing that mattered to him. . . .

  “I’m sorry,” he said, aware that Joslyn had asked a question.

  “I said, what’s done is done. The point now is—what can we do to help?”

  “I don’t know that you can do anything” Wallace said. “The reason I came down here was to tell you what had happened. You were bound to find out about it and I didn’t want you to read it in the paper. I wanted to be sure you understood. Also,” he said, not looking at the girl, “so long as there’s a chance that the police might not find out about us I think Ann should stay as far away from me as possible. You too,” he added.

  Joslyn nodded, worry showing in the thin face. “I think you’re right about Ann. With me it’s different.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a friend of yours. I have a right to help.” He hesitated and said: “I once offered to advance you some money—”

  “And maybe I should have accepted,” Wallace said woodenly.

  “That’s not what I meant. But that money is still available. If they do arrest you I’ll notify the American consul. If they will allow you bail I can supply it. I just want you to know that whatever happens you’ll have the best criminal lawyer that can be had.”

  The sincerity of those words and the look in the older man’s eyes moved Wallace strangely. When he found that there was nothing more he could say he stood up and moved toward Ann, who rose to meet him.

  “Maybe I’m crossing too many bridges,” he said in an effort to sound hopeful. “There’s an awful lot about Fay I didn't know. Maybe the police can come up with something.”

  “Of course they will, David.”

  She lifted her arms so that he could put his hands round her waist. She smiled up at him but he could see the anguish deep down in the hazel eyes and could understand the effort the smile cost her. He put his arms at the small of her back, feeling the warmth of her, the smooth, firm flesh beneath his fingers. Because he could not meet her gaze, he looked at her mouth and then kissed her gently before he stepped back.

  He turned and shook hands with Sidney Joslyn. He said he would telephone just as soon as he could in the morning; then he opened the door and went out without looking back. . . .

  It was getting on toward two o'clock when Wallace returned to the bungalow and locked the door behind him. He took a minute to glance once more about the familiar room, a feeling of weariness and despair settling heavily upon him. For he was confronted now with a decision that he had heretofore been able to ignore.

  He had to leave Fay where she was. He had to go to bed and try to sleep, and wait for morning; he had to pretend nothing had happened and put the burden of the ugly discovery on Ernestina. He found the idea heartless and somehow inhuman, and the only thing he could do to ease his conscience was to keep telling himself that nothing could matter to Fay now, that the only thing he could do for her and for himself was to find out who killed her.

  He made one more aimless tour of the room. He glanced at the spectacle case and the ash tray with the two cigarette butts he had seen before. He came back to the other table where he had sat with Shirley Goddard. The glass ash tray that stood there was well filled and now, not looking for anything in particular, he saw one stub that was different from the others.

  He had noticed that Shirley’s cigarette had brown filters like Fay’s. This one, near the bottom and no more than half smoked, had a white filter. The moment he picked it up he recognized the brand and for another second he stared at it, his thoughts bewildered. Then a new tension began to wind up inside him and somewhere in his chest a nerve tightened sharply.

  For he had seen a similar cigarette not too long ago. He knew exactly when, and now he wanted to believe that this could be coincidence. Other people smoked this brand. The fact that it was not a common one meant nothing at all. This is what he told himself even as he accepted the fact that Sidney Joslyn smoked such cigarettes. What made the knowledge worse was the remembered warmth of the radiator in Joslyn’s car when he, Wallace, touched it. Someone had used that car not too long before he arrived at the cottage and—

  He tried to reject the hypothesis. He told himself the idea was fantastic but reason was not to be denied and he thought now of the man who had jumped him while he tried to examine the unidentified car.

  The scene that took place under the breadfruit tree was still vivid in his mind. The man who had grabbed him from behind was tall; so was Sidney Joslyn. He had worn some sort of ring on his left hand—Wallace touched his lip and found it tender but not swollen—and he could recall no such ring on Joslyn’s hand. He was convinced that the other man had been powerfully built and the slender, slightly stooped Joslyn certainly did not fit this description. Yet, even as he accepted such facts, his thoughts moved on and he knew ther
e was another factor that had to be considered.

  He could never believe Joslyn had come here to kill Fay even though he knew that the man did not have too many years to live and might be ready to take the risk. He also knew that, under the proper provocation, one would not need premeditation to kill Fay.

  There were scars on the walls of their New York apartment where she had thrown things when alcohol had loosened the violence of her temper. At such times there seemed, somehow, to be a streak of meanness in her that was difficult to control and he remembered the things she had done to him and the times when he had stood with his hands anchored in his pockets lest he reach out and take her by the throat.

  He did not believe that premeditation was a factor in his wife’s death but he also understood that such thinking served only to magnify his doubts. He was ready to admit that Sidney Joslyn may have been here, but as he turned off the lights and started for the back bedroom he told himself that there would be some explanation that would stand up and absolve Joslyn from any complicity in the murder.

  8

  It was Dave Wallace’s custom to have breakfast at eight o’clock on weekday mornings. He was usually awake when Ernestina knocked on the door at seven forty-five, but this morning was an exception. He came out of a confused and dream-filled sleep with a start, and it took him a few seconds to answer her call. When the events of the previous night came flooding back to haunt him he swore bitterly, grabbed his robe, and tried to close off his mind.

  As he shaved and showered, he concentrated on the job ahead, and uppermost in his thoughts was the determination to do everything exactly as before so that the established routine could be maintained this morning. Later, as he came into the front room on schedule, he saw Ernestina sitting down to examine the heel of one bare foot. When he moved close he could see the blood that she had squeezed from a small cut.