Murder Most Foul Page 5
The attorney stacked the loose cigarettes. “I’ll tell you the truth, Andy, I’m damned if I can see why you didn’t bring him in last night.” He patted the folder closest to him. It chanced to be the coroner’s report. “You’ve done a fine job all the way. It’s tight, neat.”
“Maybe that’s why I didn’t bring him in,” Willets said.
Harris cocked his head and smiled his inquisitiveness. At forty-five he was still boyish, and had the manner of always seeming to want to understand fully the other man’s point of view. He would listen to it, weigh it, and change his tactics—but not his mind.
“Because,” the sheriff said, “I haven’t really gone outside their houses to look for a motive.”
The attorney drummed his fingers on the file. “Tell me the God’s truth, Andy, don’t you think it’s here?”
“Not all of it,” the sheriff said doggedly.
“But the heart of it?”
“The heart of it’s there,” he admitted.
“‘All of it’ to you means a confession. Some policemen might have got it. I don’t blame you for that.”
“Thanks,” Willets said dryly. “I take it, Mr. Harris, you feel the case is strong against him?”
“I don’t predict the outcome,” the attorney said, his patience strained. “I prosecute and I take the verdict in good grace. I believe the state has a strong case, yes.” He shrugged off his irritation. “Much hinges, I think, on whether Canby could feel secure from interruption while he did the job, and afterward while he cleaned up.”
Willets nodded.
Harris fingered through the folder and brought out a paper. “Here. The girl hid in the pantry when he told her to leave. She went upstairs to bed when her father told her to. Now I say that if she came downstairs again, all Canby had to do was to tell her to go up again. She's the amenable type. Not bright, not stupid, just willing and obedient.”
That from his documentation, Willets thought. If ever Harris had seen the girl, it was by accident. “Then you think she was an accessory?” Certainly most people did now, having seen or heard of her conduct at the funeral.
The attorney pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t pursue that right now. You haven’t turned up anything to prove it. But he could feel secure about being able to send her upstairs again before she saw anything. That’s what was important: that he could feel safe, secure. That’s how I’d use it. Put that together with the Lyons woman’s testimony and his own daughter’s. No jury will take his word that he was home with his grandson between ten and eleven.
“Did he strip naked to do the job?” said Willets. “His clothes went through the lab.”
“Old work clothes.” The attorney looked him in the eyes. “There’s been cleaner jobs than this before, and I’ll prove it. I don’t expect to go in with the perfect case. There’s no such thing.”
“Then all I have to do,” Willets said, “is get the warrant and bring him in.”
“That’s all. The rest is up to me.” The sheriff had reached the door when Harris called after him. “Andy…I’m not the s.o.b. you seem to think I am. It’s all in here.” He indicated the file. “You’ll see it yourself when you get to where you can have some perspective.”
Harris might very well be right, the sheriff thought as he walked through the county court building. He had to accept it. Either Harris was right, and he had done his job as sheriff to the best of his ability and without prejudice, making the facts stand out from sentiments…or he had to accept something that logic would not sanction: Sue Thompson as the murderer of her own father. That this amenable girl, as Harris called her, who, by the very imperturbability of her disposition, had managed a life for herself in the house of her father—that she, soft and slovenly, could do a neat and terrible job of murder, he could not believe. But even granting that she could have done it, could someone as emotionally untried as she withstand the strain of guilt? He doubted it. Such a strain would crack her, he thought, much as an overripe plum bursts while yet hanging on the tree.
But the motive, Canby’s motive: it’s there and it’s not there, he thought. It was the thing which so far had restrained him from making the arrest—that, and his own stubborn refusal to be pressured by the followers of Mary Lyons.
The sheriff sat for some time at his desk, and then he telephoned Matt Thompson’s friend, Alvin Rhodes. The appointment made, he drove out to see the former superintendent of the state hospital for the insane.
Rhodes, as affable as Thompson had been dour, told of Matt Thompson’s visiting him the previous Wednesday, the day before his death. “We were not friends, Willets,” the older man said, “although his visit implies that we were. He was seeking advice on his daughter’s infatuation with a man three times her age.”
As Thompson grew more sullen with the years, the sheriff thought, Rhodes mellowed into affability upon retirement. Such advice is not sought of someone uncongenial to the seeker. “And did you advise him, Mr. Rhodes?”
“I advised him to do nothing about it. I recounted my experience with men of Canby’s age who were similarly afflicted. The closer they came to consummation, shall we say, the more they feared it. That’s why the May and December affairs are rare indeed. I advised him to keep close watch on the girl, to forestall an elopement, and leave the rest to nature. In truth, Willets, although I did not say it to him, I felt that if they were determined, he could not prevent it.”
“He cared so little for the girl,” Willets said, “I wonder why he interfered at all. Why not let her go and good riddance?”
Rhodes drew his white brows together while he phrased the words carefully. “Because as long as he kept her in the house, he could atone for having begot her, and in those terms for having caused his wife’s death.” Willets shook his head. Rhodes added then: “I told him frankly that if anyone in the family should be examined, it was he and not the girl.”
Willets felt the shock like a blow. “The girl?”
Rhodes nodded. “That’s why he came to me, to explore the possibility of confining her—temporarily. In his distorted mind, he calculated the stigma of such proceedings to be sufficient to discourage Canby.”
And the threat of such proceedings, Willets thought, was sufficient to drive Canby to murder—as such threats against his own person were not. “I should think,” he said preparing to depart, “you might have taken steps against Matt Thompson yourself.”
Rhodes rose with him. “I intended to,” he said coldly. “If you consult the state’s attorney, you will discover that I made an appointment with him for 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon. By then Thompson was dead. I shall give evidence when I am called upon.”
The sheriff returned to the courthouse and swore out the warrant before the county judge. At peace with his conscience at last, he drove again to the Murray house. Betty Murray was staring out boldly at the watchers who had reconvened—as boldly as they were again staring in at her. He ordered his deputies to clear the street. John Murray opened the door when the sheriff reached the steps.
“Better take Betty upstairs,” Willets said to her husband. He could see the others in the living room. Sue and Phil Canby sitting at either ends of the couch, their hands touching as he came.
“The old man?” John whispered. Willets nodded and Murray called to his wife. Betty looked at him over her shoulder but did not move from the window.
“You, too, Miss Thompson,” Willets said quietly. “You both better go upstairs with John.”
Betty lifted her chin. “I shall stay,” she said. “This is my father’s house and I’ll stay.”
Nor did Sue Thompson make any move to rise. Willets strode across to Canby. “Get up,” he said. “I’m arresting you, Phil Canby, for the willful murder of Matt Thompson.”
“I don’t believe it,” Betty said from behind them, her voice high, tremulous. “If God’s own angel stood here now and said it, I still wouldn’t believe it.”
“Betty, Betty,” her husband soothed.
“I don’t know,” Willets said. No one did, he thought, for she looked completely bemused.
“You’re taking him away?” she said as Canby rose.
Willets nodded.
“It won’t be for long,” John Murray said in hollow comfort.
“Don’t lie to her,” Canby said. “If they can arrest me for something I didn’t do, they can hang me for it.” He turned to Willets. “If you’re taking me, do it now.”
Willets started to the door with him. Betty looked to her husband. He shook his head. She whirled around then on Sue Thompson. “Don’t you understand? They’re taking him to jail. Because of you. Sue Thompson!”
Canby stiffened at the door. “You leave her alone, Betty.”
“I won’t leave her alone, and I won’t leave Sheriff Willets alone. What’s the matter with everyone? My father’s not a murderer.” Again she turned on Sue. “He’s not! He’s a good man. You’ve got to say it, too.”
“Betty, leave her alone,” her father repeated.
“Then get her out of here,” John Murray said, his own fury rising with his helplessness. “She sits like a bloody cat and you don’t know what’s going on in her mind…”
The sheriff cut him off. “That’s enough, John. It’s no good.” He looked at the girl. Her face was puckered up almost like an infant’s about to cry. “You can go over home now, Miss Thompson.”
She did not answer. Instead she seemed convulsed with the effort to cry, although there was no sound to her apparent agony. Little choking noises came then. She made no move to cover her face and, as Willets watched, the face purpled in its distortion.
Sue’s body quivered and her face crinkled up still more, like a baby’s face in a spasm of pain or rage.
Then the sound of crying came—a high, gurgling noise—and it carried with the very timber and rasp of an infant’s.
Willets felt Phil Canby clutch his arm and he felt terror icing its way up his own spine; he heard a sick, fainting moan from Betty Murray between the girl’s spasms, but he could not take his eyes from the sight. Nor could he move to help her.
Sue hammered her clenched fists on her knees helplessly. Then she tried to get up, rocking from side to side. Finally she rolled over on the couch and pushed herself up as a very small child must. Her first steps were like a toddle when she turned and tried to balance herself. Then, catching up an ashstand, she ran at Willets with it, the infantile screams tearing from her throat.
In time, it would be told that Sue Thompson reverted to the infancy she coveted at least once before her attack on Willets, rising from sleep as a child on the night of her father’s quarrel with Canby, ripping off her night clothes when she could not manage the buttons, and in a rage with her father—when, perhaps, he berated her for something a child’s mind cannot comprehend—attacking him with a child’s fury and an adult’s frenzied strength…using the weapon at hand, Phil Canby’s wrench.
Sheriff Willets could document most of it when the sad horror had been made manifest before him: the crying Mrs. Lyons heard, even the cleaning up after murder, for he had watched Canby’s grandson clean off the tray of his high chair. And he could believe she had then gone upstairs to fall asleep again and waken in the morning as Sue Thompson, the happy betrothed of Phil Canby.
The Day of the Bullet
Stanley Ellin
I believe that in each lifetime there is one day of destiny. It may be a day chosen by the Fates who sit clucking and crooning over a spinning wheel, or, perhaps, by the gods whose mill grinds slow, but grinds exceedingly fine. It may be a day of sunshine or rain, of heat or cold. It is probably a day which none of us is aware of at the time, or can even recall through hindsight.
But for every one of us there is that day. And when it leads to a bad end it’s better not to look back and search it out. What you discover may hurt, and it’s a futile hurt because nothing can be done about it any longer. Nothing at all.
I realize that there is a certain illogic in believing this, something almost mystical. Certainly it would win the ready disfavor of those modern exorcists and dabblers with crystal balls, those psychologists and sociologists and case workers who—using their own peculiar language to express it—believe that there may be a way of controlling the fantastic conjunction of time, place, and event that we must all meet at some invisible crossroads on the Day. But they are wrong. Like the rest of us they can only be wise after the event.
In this case—and the word “case” is particularly fitting here—the event was the murder of a man I had not seen for thirty-five years. Not since a summer day in 1923, or, to be even more exact, the evening of a summer day in 1923 when as boys we faced each other on a street in Brooklyn, and then went our ways, never to meet again.
We were only twelve years old then, he and I, but I remember the date because the next day my family moved to Manhattan, an earthshaking event in itself. And with dreadful clarity I remember the scene when we parted, and the last thing said there. I understand it now, and know it was that boy’s Day. The Day of the Bullet it might be called—although the bullet itself was not to be fired until 35 years later.
I learned about the murder from the front page of the newspaper my wife was reading at the breakfast table. She held the paper upright and partly folded, but the fold could not conceal from me the unappetizing picture on the front page, the photograph of a man slumped behind the wheel of his car, head clotted with blood, eyes staring and mouth gaping in the throes of violent and horrifying death.
The picture meant nothing to me, any more than did its shouting headline—RACKETS BOSS SHOT TO DEATH. All I thought, in fact, was that there were pleasanter objects to stare at over one’s coffee and toast.
Then my eye fell on the caption below the picture, and I almost dropped my cup of coffee. The body of lgnace Kovac, said the caption, Brooklyn rackets boss who last night—
I took the paper from my wife’s hand while she looked at me in astonishment, and studied the picture closely. There was no question about it. I had not seen lgnace Kovac since we were kids together, but I could not mistake him, even in the guise of this dead and bloody hulk. And the most terrible part of it, perhaps, was that next to him, resting against the seat of the car, was a bag of golf clubs. Those golf clubs were all my memory needed to work on.
I was called back to the present by my wife’s voice. “Well,” she said with good-natured annoyance, “considering I was right in the middle of Walter Winchell—”
I returned the paper to her. “I’m sorry. I got a jolt when I saw that picture. I used to know him.”
Her eyes lit up with the interest of one who—even secondhand—finds herself in the presence of the notorious. “You did? When?”
“Oh, when the folks still lived in Brooklyn. We were kids together. He was my best friend.”
My wife was an inveterate tease. “Isn’t that something. I never knew you hung around with juvenile delinquents when you were a kid.”
“He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent. Matter of fact—”
“If you aren’t the serious one.” She smiled at me in kindly dismissal and went back to Winchell, who clearly offered fresher and more exciting tidings than mine. “Anyhow,” she said, “I wouldn’t let it bother me too much, dear. That was a long time ago.”
It was a long time ago. You could play ball in the middle of the street then; few automobiles were to be seen in the far reaches of Brooklyn in 1923. And Bath Beach, where I lived, was one of the farthest reaches. It fronted on Gravesend Bay, with Coney Island to the east a few minutes away by trolley car, and Dyker Heights and its golf course to the west a few minutes away by foot. Each was an entity separated from Bath Beach by a wasteland of weed-grown lots which building contractors had not yet discovered.
So, as I said, you could play ball in the streets without fear of t
raffic. Or you could watch the gas-lighter turning up the street lamps at dusk. Or you could wait around the firehouse on Eighteenth Avenue until, if you were lucky enough, an alarm would send the three big horses there slewing the pump-engine out into the street in a spray of sparks from iron-shod wheels. Or, miracle of miracles, you could stand gaping up at the sky to follow the flight of a biplane proudly racketing along overhead.
Those were the things I did that summer, along with Iggy Kovac, who was my best friend, and who lived in the house next door. It was a two-story frame house painted in some sedate color, just as mine was. Most of the houses in Bath Beach were like that, each with a small garden in front and yard in back. The only example of ostentatious architecture on our block was the house on the corner owned by Mr. Rose, a newcomer to the neighborhood. It was huge and stuccoed, almost a mansion, surrounded by an enormous lawn, and with a stuccoed two-car garage at the end of its driveway.
That driveway held a fascination for Iggy and me. On it, now and then, would be parked Mr. Rose’s automobile, a gray Packard, and it was the car that drew us like a magnet. It was not only beautiful to look at from the distance, but close up it loomed over us like a locomotive, giving off an aura of thunderous power even as it stood there quietly. And it had two running-boards, one mounted over the other to make the climb into the tonneau easier. No one else around had anything like that on his car. In fact, no one we knew had a car anywhere near as wonderful as that Packard.
So we would sneak down the driveway when it was parked there, hoping for a chance to mount those running-boards without being caught. We never managed to do it. It seemed that an endless vigil was being kept over that car, either by Mr. Rose himself or by someone who lived in the rooms over the garage. As soon as we were no more than a few yards down the driveway a window would open in the house or the garage, and a hoarse voice would bellow threats at us. Then we would turn tail and race down the driveway and out of sight.