Murder Most Foul Read online

  It’s possible to disperse them, the sheriff thought, just as a swarm of flies might be waved from carrion; but they would as quickly collect again, unless it were possible to go out and say to them: “It’s all a mistake. Matt Thompson fell and hit his head. His daughter, Sue, got hysterical when she found him… Idle conjecture. Even had he been able to say that to the crowd they would not have dispersed. They would not have believed it. Too many among them were now convinced that they had been expecting something like this to happen.

  There was one person in their midst responsible in large measure for this consensus, a lifetime neighbor of both families, Mrs. Mary Lyons, and she was prepared also to give evidence that Phil Canby was not at home with his grandson the night before, at the hour he swore he was at home and asleep.

  Sheriff Willets went outdoors, collected Mrs. Lyons and led her across the yard between the Thompson house and the house where Phil Canby lived with his daughter and son-in-law, and up her own back steps. From the flounce of her skirts and the clack of her heels he could tell she didn’t want to come. She smiled when she looked up at him, a quick smile in which her eyes had no part.

  “I hope this won’t take long, Andy,” she said when he deliberately sat down, forcing her hospitality. “I should give the poor girl a hand.”

  “In what way, Mrs. Lyons?”

  “With the house,” she said, as though there would be nothing unusual in her helping Sue Thompson with the house. “It must be a terrible mess.”

  “You’ve lots of time,” he said. “There’s nobody going to be in that house for quite a time except the police.”

  Mrs. Lyons made a noise in her throat, a sort of moan, to indicate how pained she was at what had happened across her back yard.

  “You were saying over there,” Willets went on, “that you knew something terrible was going to happen.”

  “Something terrible did happen, even before this,” she said. “Phil Canby taking after that girl. Sue Thompson’s younger than his own daughter.”

  “Just what do you mean, taking after her?”

  “I saw him kiss her,” she said. Then, as though it had hurt her to say it in the first place, she forced herself to be explicit. “A week ago last night I saw Phil Canby take Sue in his arms and kiss her. He’s over sixty, Andy.”

  “He’s fifty-nine,” the sheriff said, wondering immediately what difference a year or two made, and why he felt it necessary to defend the man in the presence of this woman. It was not that he was defending Canby, he realised; he was defending himself against the influence of a prejudiced witness. “And he gave it out the next day that he was going to marry her, and she gave it out that she was going to marry him. At least, that’s the way I heard it.”

  “Oh, you heard it right,” Mrs. Lyons said airily, folding her hands in her lap.

  If it had been of her doing, I should not have heard it right, the sheriff thought. But Phil Canby had passed the age in life, and had lived too much of that life across the hedge from Mary Lyons, to be either precipitated into something or forestalled from it by her opinions. Had he looked up on the night he proposed to Sue Thompson and seen her staring in the window at them, likely the most he would have done would be to pull the windowshade in her face.

  “Would you like your daughter to marry a man of fifty-nine, Andy?”

  “My daughter’s only fifteen,” the sheriff said, knowing the answer to be stupid as soon as he had made it. He was no match for her, and what he feared was that he would be no match for the town, with her sentiments carrying through it as they now were carrying through the crowd across the way. They would want Phil Canby punished for courting a young girl, whatever Canby’s involvement in her father’s murder. “How old is Sue Thompson, Mrs. Lyons?”

  “Nineteen, she must be. Her mother died giving birth to her the year after I lost Jimmie.”

  “I remember about Jimmie,” the sheriff said with relief. Remembering that Mary Lyons had lost a boy of four made her more tolerable. He wondered now how close she had got to Matt Thompson when his wife died. Nobody had been close to him from then on that Willets could remember. He had been as sour a man as ever gave the devil credence.

  A gardener by trade, Thompson had worked for the town of Pottersville, tending its landscape. A lot of people said that whatever tenderness he had went into the care of his flowers. One thing was agreed upon by all of them, it didn’t go into the care of his daughter. As he thought about it, now, Willets caught a forlorn picture from memory: Sue as a child of five or six trotting to church at her father’s side, stopping when he stopped, going on when he went on, catching at his coattails when she needed balance but never at his hand, because it was not offered to her. Would no one but himself remember these things now? Willets wondered.

  “How long has it been since you were in the Thompson house, Mrs. Lyons?”

  Her eyes narrowed while she weighed his purpose in asking it. “I haven’t been in the house in fifteen years,” she said finally.

  He believed her. It accounted in part for her eagerness to get into it now. “She isn’t much of a housekeeper, Sue,” he said, to whet her curiosity further and to satisfy his own on what she knew of her neighbors. “Or maybe that’s the way Matt Thompson wanted it.”

  She leaned forward. “What way?”

  “It has a funny dead look about it,” he said. “It’s not dirty, but it just looks like nothing has been put in or taken out in fifteen years.”

  “He never got over his wife’s death,” Mrs. Lyons said, “and he never looked at another woman.”

  Her kind has no higher praise for any man, he thought. “Who took care of Sue when she was a baby?”

  “Her father.”

  “And when he was working?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “From what I’ve heard,” he lied, for he had not yet had the opportunity to inquire elsewhere, “you were very good to them, and so was Phil Canby’s wife in those days.”

  “Mrs. Canby was already ailing then,” she snapped. “I was good to both families, if I say it myself.”

  “And if you don’t,” the sheriff murmured, “nobody else will.”

  “What?”

  “People have a way of being ungrateful,” he explained.

  “Indeed they do.”

  “You know, Mrs. Lyons, thinking about it now, I wonder why Matt Thompson didn’t offer Sue for adoption.”

  “You might say he did it to me once.” A bit of color tinged her bleached face after the quick, proud answer. She had probably been at the Thompson house night and day then with solicitudes and soups, when Matt was home and when he wasn’t home.

  Assuming Thompson to have been sarcastic with her—and he had had a reputation for sarcasm even that far back—the sheriff said: “Would you have taken the child? You must’ve been lonesome…after Jimmie.”

  For once she was candid with him, and soft as he had not known her to be since her youth. “I’d have thought a good deal about it. I had a feeling there was something wrong with her. She was like a little old maid, all to herself. She’s been like that all her life—even in school, they say.”

  “It makes you understand why she was willing to marry Phil Canby,” the sheriff said quietly. “Don’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t blame her,” Mrs. Lyons said. “This is one case where I don’t blame the woman.”

  Willets sighed. Nothing would shake her belief that there was something immoral in Phil Canby’s having proposed marriage to a girl younger than his own daughter.

  “Last night,” he said, “your husband was away from home?”

  “He was at the Elks’ meeting. I was over at my sister’s, and then I came home about 10:30. I looked at the clock. I always do. It takes me longer to walk home than it used to.”

  “And that was when you heard the baby crying?”

  “It was crying when I came up the back steps.”

  Phil Canby had been babysitting with his grandson while his daughter,
Betty, and his son-in-law, John Murray, were at the movies. It was his custom to stay with young Philip every Thursday night, and sometimes oftener, because he lived with them; but on Thursdays Betty and her husband usually went to the movies.

  “And you’re sure it was the Murray baby?”

  “Who else’s would it be over that way? I couldn’t hear the Brady child from here. They’re five houses down.”

  The sheriff nodded. Phil Canby swore that he was in bed and asleep by that time, and he swore that the baby had not cried. He was a light sleeper, in the habit of waking up if little Philip so much as whimpered. The neighbors to the south of the Murray house had not heard the crying, nor for that matter the radio in the Murray house, which Canby said he had turned on at 10 o’clock for the news. But they had been watching television steadily until 11:30. By that time, the Murrays had come home and found Phil and the baby Philip each asleep in his own bed.

  But to the north of the Murrays; in the corner house where Sue Thompson claimed she was asleep upstairs, her father, Matt, had been bludgeoned to death some time between 10 o’clock and midnight.

  “And you didn’t hear anything else?” the sheriff asked.

  “No, but I didn’t listen. I thought maybe the baby was sick, and I was on the point of going down. Then I remembered it was Thursday night and Mr. Canby would be sitting with him. He wouldn’t take the time of day from me.”

  Not now he wouldn’t, the sheriff thought. “Have you any idea how long the baby was crying, Mrs. Lyons?”

  “I was getting into bed when he stopped. That was fifteen minutes later, maybe. I never heard him like that before, rasping like for breath. I don’t know how long the poor thing was crying before I got home.”

  If Phil Canby had murdered Matt Thompson and then reached home by a quarter to 11, he would have had time to quiet baby Philip and to make at least a pretense of sleep himself before his family came home. Betty Murray admitted that her father was in the habit of feigning sleep a good deal these days, his waking presence was so much of an embarrassment to all of them. Scarcely relevant except as a practiced art.

  Willets took his leave of Mrs. Lyons. What seems too relevant to be true, he thought, striding over the hedge which separated her yard from the Thompson’s, is that Phil Canby admitted quarrelling with Thompson at 9 o’clock that night, and in the Thompson kitchen.

  After the first exchange of violent words between the two households, when Phil Canby and Sue Thompson made known their intentions of marriage, an uneasy, watchful quiet had fallen between them. Sue Thompson had not been out of the house except with her father, and then to Sunday prayer meeting. Matt Thompson had started his vacation the morning his daughter told him. Vacation or retirement: he had put the hasty choice up to the town supervisor.

  Thompson then had gone across to Betty Murray. He had never been in Betty’s house before, not once during her mother's long illness or at her funeral; and if he had spoken to Betty as a child, she could not remember it. But that morning he spoke to her as a woman, and in such a manner and with such words that she had screamed at him. When John Murray came home from the office that night and heard of it, he swore that he would kill Matt Thompson if ever again he loosed his foul tongue in Betty’s presence.

  But Matt Thompson had gone into his house and pulled down all the shades on the Murray side, and Phil Canby had gone about the trade he had pursued in Pottersville since boyhood. He was a plumber, and busier that week for all the talk about him in the town. All this the sheriff got in bits and pieces, mostly from Betty Murray. When Thursday night had come around again, she told him, she felt that she wanted to get out of the house. Also, she had begun to feel that if they all ignored the matter, the substance of it might die away.

  So she and John had gone to the movies, leaving her father to sit with the baby. About 8:30, Sue Thompson had come into the yard and called to Phil. He went out to her. She had asked him to come over and fix the drain to the kitchen sink. Her father was sleeping, she told him, but he had said it would be all right to ask him. Canby had gone back into the house for his tools and then had followed her into the Thompson house, carrying a large plumber’s wrench in his hand. When Phil Canby had told this to the sheriff that morning—as frankly, openly, as he spoke of the quarrel between himself and Thompson, a quarrel so violent that Sue hid in the pantry through it—Willets got the uncanny feeling that he had heard it all before, and that he might expect at the end of the recitation as candid and calm a confession of murder.

  But Canby had not confessed to the murder. He had taken alarm, he said, when Matt Thompson swore by his dead wife to have him apprehended by the State and examined as a mental case. He knew the man to do it, Thompson had said, and Canby knew the man of whom he spoke: Alvin Rhodes, the retired head of the Slate hospital for the insane. Thompson had landscaped Rhodes’s place on his own time when Rhodes retired, borrowing a few shrubs from the Pottersville nursery to do it. This the sheriff knew. And he could understand the extent of Canby’s alarm when Canby told about the confinement of a friend on the certification of his children, and on no more grounds apparent to Canby than that the man had become cantankerous, and jealous of the house which he had built himself and in which he now lived with his daughter. He had paid for it over thirty years, having had to add another mortgage during his wife’s invalidism. Unlike his friend, he did not feel a stranger in it. The baby had even been named after him, but he was well aware of the tax his wooing of Sue Thompson put upon his daughter and her husband.

  All this the sheriff could understand very well. The difficulty was to reconcile it with the facts of the crime. For example, when Canby left the Thompson house, he took with him all his tools save the large wrench with which Thompson was murdered. Why leave it then—or later—except that to have taken it from beside the murdered man and to have had it in his possession (or without it when its ownership was known) was to leave no doubt at all as to the murderer? All Canby would say was that he had forgotten it.

  Willets went to the back door of Canby’s house. He knocked, and Betty Murray called out to him to come in. Little Philip was in his high chair, resisting the apple sauce his mother was trying to spoon into him. The sheriff stood a moment watching the child, marveling at the normalcy which persists through any crisis when there is a baby about. Every blob of sauce spilled on the tray Philip tried to shove to the floor. What he couldn’t get off the tray with his hands he went after with his tongue.

  The sheriff grinned. “That’s one way to get it into him.”

  “He’s at that age now,” his mother said, cleaning up the floor. She looked at Willets. “But I’m very grateful for him, especially now.”

  The sheriff nodded. “I know,” he said. “Where’s your father?”

  “Up in his room.”

  “And the Thompson girl?”

  “In the living room, Sheriff. You’re not going to take them…”

  “Not yet,” he said, saving her the pain of finishing the sentence. He started for the inside door and paused. “I think Mrs. Lyons would be willing to have her there for a bit.”

  “I’ll bet she would,” Betty said. “I had to close the front windows, with people gazing in to see her. Some of them, and they weren’t strangers either, kept asking…where her boyfriend was.”

  “It won’t be long,” Willets said; and then because he had not quite meant that, he added: “It won’t be this way for long.”

  “Then let her stay. I think she feels better here, poor thing, just knowing Papa’s in the house.” She got up then and came to him. She was a pretty girl and, like her father’s, her eyes seemed dark when they were troubled. “Mr. Willets, I was talking to Papa a while ago. He was trying to tell me about…him and Sue. He told her when he asked her to marry him that he was going to be as much a father to her…as a husband.” Betty colored a bit. “As a lover,” she corrected. “That’s what he really said.”

  “And did he tell you what she had to say to that?”<
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  “She said that’s what she wanted because she’d never had either one.”

  The sheriff nodded at the obvious truth in that.

  “I thought I’d tell you,” Betty went on, “because I know what everybody says about Papa and her. They think he’s peculiar. Almost like what I told you Matt Thompson said. And he’s not. All the time mother was sick, until she died, he took care of her himself. He even sent me away to school. Most men would have said that was my job, and maybe it was, but I was terribly glad to go. Then when mother died, and I got married, it must have seemed as though…something ended for him. And fifty-nine isn't really very old.”

  “Not very,” Willets said, being so much closer to it than she was.

  “I’m beginning to understand what happened to him,” Betty said. “I wish I’d thought about it sooner. There might have been something…somebody else.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “That’s a man’s own problem till he’s dead.”

  “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “That’s what really would have been indecent.”

  The sheriff nodded.

  “I wish it was possible to separate the two things,” Betty said as he was leaving, “him and Sue—and Mr. Thompson’s murder. I wish to God it was.”

  “So do I,” the sheriff said, thinking again of the pressures that would be put upon him because it was not possible to separate them, not only by the townspeople but by the slate’s attorney, who would find it so much more favorable to prosecute a murderer in a climate of moral indignation.

  On the stairway, with its clear view of the living room, he paused to watch Sue Thompson for a moment, unobserved. She was sitting with a piece of crochet work in her lap at which she stitched with scarcely a glance. Whatever her feelings, the sheriff thought, she’s not grieving. She had the attitude of waiting. All her life she had probably waited—but for what? Her father’s death? A dream lover? A rescuer? Surely her girlish dreams had not conjured up Phil Canby in that role. The strange part of it was that it seemed unlikely to the sheriff she had dreamed of rescue at all. However she felt about her father, she did not fear him. Had she been afraid of him, she could not have announced to him that she intended to marry Phil Canby. And because she was not afraid of him, Willets decided, it is difficult to imagine that she might have killed him. She was a soft, plump girl, docile-eyed, and no match for her father physically. Yet she was the one alternate to Phil Canby in the deed, and he was the only one who knew her well enough to say if she was capable of it.