I looked around for Jill and didn’t find her. I went to the counter, bought a cup of coffee, and carried it to an empty table. I sat down and lighted a cigarette while I waited for the coffee to cool. And for Jill to arrive.
At a table not far from mine a young man and a girl sat eating ice cream. The boy was the all-American type—crew cut, broad forehead, boat neck sweater, khaki trousers, an intelligent-but-unimaginative expression on his face. The girl was quietly pretty, with light brown hair and rosy-apple cheeks. There was something naggingly familiar about her, and yet I was certain we had never met.
Then I realized just what it was that was so naggingly familiar, and I looked away guiltily. She was familiar, certainly. I had seen her picture.
And in that picture she had not looked nearly so wholesome.
I tried the coffee. It was still too hot and I sat the cup back in its saucer and took another deeper drag on my cigarette. I looked at my watch. It was after three, and Jill was due any minute.
I wondered how Alan Marsten was. He’d taken a hell of a beating, a professional job of punishment quite professionally administered. But he was a game lad. Game enough to knock out a pair of men in order to escape from his jail cell. Game enough to go up against a heavyweight type like Hank Sutton. All of which made him very game indeed.
I hoped he’d be all right.
Now Alan was in a hospital, mending, and Sutton was in his own house, lying dead and growing cold and stiff. And I was waiting for a pretty girl to come and drink a cup of coffee with me, and wondering when in God’s name she’d arrive.
She arrived, ultimately. It was almost three-thirty when she walked in the door, her hair neatly combed, her expression alert. She was carrying a leather notebook under one arm and was wearing a loose gabardine coat over a heavy sweater and a pair of plaid slacks.
I saw her before she saw me. She stood up straight and surveyed the room with sharp eyes, looking everywhere but at me. Then finally she saw me and headed over to my table. She dropped herself heavily into the chair directly across from me and slammed her briefcase quite dramatically upon the table. Her cheeks were pink from the cold and her eyes were bright.
“Hi, Roy.”
“Hi.”
“I got your note,” she said. “You wanted to see me.”
“That’s right.”
“How come?”
“To talk.”
A heavy mock sigh. “That’s disappointing,” she said. “That’s disappointing as hell.”
“It is?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she whispered, “I thought maybe you wanted to make love to me. But all you want to do is talk. And that, kind sir, is disappointing.”
She stood up again. “Not that I’m unwilling to talk,” she said. “But first my system demands coffee. Wait here, Roy. I’ll be back as soon as I convince the idiot behind the counter to sell me a mug of mud.”
I watched her walk to the counter, her full hips swaying ever so slightly under the coat. I tried my coffee again, and this time it was drinkable. Jill came back, her coffee cooled and polluted by cream and sugar. She sat down again and asked me for a cigarette. I gave her one. As she leaned forward to take the light I held for her I could smell the perfume of her hair. I looked at her, and I remembered the night before, and another night not too long before that.
She said: “Hello, you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hey! Did you hear about Alan?
“What about him?”
“He broke out of jail,” she said. “Isn’t that just one for the books?”
“I heard.”
“One for the books,” she repeated. “I don’t know exactly what happened—I heard it fourth or fifth or maybe tenth-hand. But he hit his own lawyer and slugged a cop and stole a car and ran out of town.”
I told her that was substantially what had happened. Her eyes narrowed.
“Then that cinches it,” she said. “Sort of kills your theory, too.”
“My theory?”
“That he was innocent. He wouldn’t bust out of jail if he was innocent, would he?”
I didn’t answer.
“He must have killed Gwen,” she said. “It probably broke him up when Barb killed herself—I guess he was more deeply involved with her than anybody realized. And he knew Barb and Gwen never got along very well. So that probably set him off. Made him want to get revenge, if you see what I mean. As if Gwen had anything to do with what happened to Barb.”
I nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s kind of nutty,” she said. “But he’s kind of a nut. He always has been—you know, a little weird. Something like Barb’s death could set him off and make him go nuts all the way.”
I picked up my cup of coffee and drained it, then set down the empty cup in the saucer. I looked up at the clock on the wall, looked over at the lunch counter. I was very tired now, tired of murders, tired of violence, tired of the college of Radbourne and the town of Cliff’s End and the whole bloody state of New Hampshire. I wanted to go someplace far more civilized and get disgustingly drunk.
I said: “Marsten has been found.”
She stared. “You’re kidding!”
“I’m serious.”
“But . . . oh, that’s impossible! Roy, you let me babble on and on about him and he’s already been found. You’re terrible, did you know that? But tell me about it, Roy. Where was he? Who found him? What happened?”
I drew a breath. “I stopped by the police station on the way over here,” I told her. “They couldn’t tell me too much. They’d just received a phone call a moment or two ago from the state troopers. They found Marsten in a town a few miles north of here. They didn’t tell me which town, but I don’t suppose it matters.”
I watched her face very carefully. “He seems to have gone berserk,” I went on. “They found a man there whom Marsten had murdered. Then the boy put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out. Murder followed by suicide.”
She tried to keep the relief from showing in her face. She was a rather accomplished actress but she was not quite good enough. Her mouth frowned but her eyes could not help dancing happily.
She said: “What on earth—”
“Some neighbors called the police,” I said. “When they heard the gunshots. It seems that Marsten broke into this man’s home in order to use his place to hide out. Evidently the man resisted in one way or the other and our boy didn’t like that. Alan had a gun—God alone knows where he found it—and he shot the man.
“Then I suppose he suddenly realized just what he had done. He’d killed Gwen Davison and had murdered an innocent man, and the two acts were too much for him. So he killed himself, and that’s the end of it.”
Now the relief was obvious. She was one happy little girl now. She drank more coffee, finishing her cup, and flicked ashes into it from her cigarette.
“Then I was right,” she said.
“Evidently.”
“Well,” she said. “That clears up your job, doesn’t it? You can tell Barb’s folks she committed suicide, but don’t tell them about the pictures—it would only make them feel bad. And Gwen’s murder is all solved now.” She smiled. “And I’m off Hank Sutton’s blackmail hook, thanks to you. You did me quite a favor last night, Roy. Quite a favor.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Poor Barb,” Jill Lincoln said. “Poor kid—if she had just kept a good grip on herself everything would have been all right. I tried to tell her just to hang on, to keep paying off Sutton until we found a way to stop him once and for all. But she was a pretty mixed-up kid, Roy. And that was enough to push her over the edge.”
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?”
She nodded sadly. “Poor Barb,” she said again. “And poor Gwen, getting killed almost by accident. And poor Alan and that poor man who got in his way. It must have been terrible for Alan, Roy. That one horrible moment when the curtain lifted and he
realized what he had done. And then killing himself.”
She lowered her eyes and studied the table-top. I reached across the table and covered her hand with my own.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Some private place. Any suggestions?”
She though it over. “I guess my room’s okay.”
“In your dormitory?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Am I allowed in there?”
“During the day you are. Let’s go.”
We got up from our chairs and walked out of the coffee shop. She tucked her leather notebook under one arm and buttoned up her gabardine coat. As we left the building she took my arm.
“Where’s your car, Roy?”
“I left it downtown. We can walk to your dorm, can’t we? It’s not far.”
We walked to her dormitory. I’d left Sutton’s Lincoln parked a short way down the block, but her dormitory was in the other direction and we did not pass the big car. I was glad of that. It was an uncommon sort of car, and I suspect she might have recognized it.
We went into her building, climbed stairs to her floor, walked down the hall and into her room. Her roommate was not in. Jill tossed her notebook onto a bed, then turned to close the door of the room.
“Now watch this part closely,” she said.
I watched closely. She rummaged around on the top of her dresser until she managed to locate a hair pin. Then she returned to the door and did something with the hair pin. She turned to me triumphantly and beamed.
“See?”
I didn’t see.
“Come here,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
I came and she pointed. I looked while she explained. “I drilled a little hole through the gizmo that keeps the door shut,” she said, “and when you stick a pin in, it locks the door. You aren’t allowed to padlock the doors or anything, but this works perfectly. Now nobody can get in, not while the pin is in place. It’s perfect.”
I told her it was amazing to what lengths college students would go to secure privacy. I told her the mechanism she had devised was ingenious. Then she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. It was the typical Jill Lincoln kiss, the sort that tickles one’s tonsils.
“Privacy,” she said. “You Tarzan. Me Jane. That—” pointing “—bed.”
I managed to smile.
“Oh, damn it,” she said.
“Damn what?”
“Just it. You’ll be going back to New York now, won’t you? I mean, the case is all bottled up or bundled up or whatever it is a detective does with cases. You won’t be able to stay here and dally with me much more.”
“That’s true.”
“Am I fun to dally with, Roy?”
“Great fun.”
She grinned. “You don’t dally so badly yourself, kind sir. Maybe I can get down to New York every so often. Maybe we can do a little more dallying.”
“Maybe.”
She stepped forward again, ready to be kissed, and even now I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her, hold her, make lovely love to her. The personal magnetism of the girl was extraordinary. Even now, knowing what I knew, with all the puzzle fragments securely locked in place and the whole ugly picture revealed, the girl managed to be charming and exciting.
But I stepped back. Her eyes studied mine and, perhaps, saw something there. She waited for me to say something.
“You’re very pretty, Jill.”
“Why, thank you—”
“You’re very pretty,” I repeated. “Have your lawyer get a great preponderance of men upon the jury, dear. That way you won’t hang. You’ll go to prison for a very long time, but you won’t hang.”
She stared at me. She had grown very secure now, and was perfectly happy about everything, and my words were coming out of left field.
“Because you killed Gwen.”
Her jaw fell.
“That’s right,” I said. “You killed her. Alan Marsten let Barb borrow his knife. She must have given it to you. And you killed Gwen with it.”
“Is this supposed to be a joke, Roy? Because it’s not very funny.”
“It’s no joke.”
“You really think I—”
“Yes. I really think you killed her.”
She stood stock still for a moment, nodding her head slowly to herself. Then she turned around, walked to the bed. Sat down on it. She picked up her leather notebook and toyed with the zipper, her eyes on me.
She said: “You’re out of your mind, you know.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Then pull up a chair,” she said, her voice acid. “Sit down and tell me all about it. This ought to be interesting. Did I have any particular reason for killing Gwen?”
“Yes. She was fouling your blackmail operation and you were afraid you’d find yourself in trouble.”
Her eyes went as wide as tea-cups. “My blackmail . . . oh, you’re kidding.”
I pulled up a chair near the bed and sat down. “It was a very pretty set-up,” I said. “I have to grant you that. I guessed that someone was on the inside, that Sutton couldn’t have worked it out all by himself. You gave me a quick story about Sutton being a pick-up of Barb’s, told me the rest of you went along to the party for the lark. But that didn’t add up.
“An operation like this one needed preparation,” I went on. “Someone had to pick the right girls, had to have enough of their confidence to get them to the party in Fort McNair. The girls had to have money, for one thing. No one would be fool enough to blackmail the average college girl for anything more than her maidenhead. The average college girl gets a few dollars a week and no more. But the girls in your little group were good subjects for blackmail, weren’t they?”
She did not answer. She was still playing with the zipper on the notebook, running it back and forth, avoiding my eyes with her own eyes.
I went on. “At first I thought Gwen was the inside girl. It seemed logical enough at the time—she resented Barbara Taft’s wealth, and when I found the photographs in her closet I thought she was in on the operation. That notion had me wandering around in circles. I couldn’t get anywhere with it.
“It was much more logical to figure it the way it actually happened, Jill. One of the girls being blackmailed wasn’t really being blackmailed at all. She was on the inside, setting things up and taking her cut of the profits. And she was always above suspicion as far as the blackmail victims were concerned. They thought she was in the same boat they were in. They never realized she had set them up for Hank Sutton.”
“And I’m the girl?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why me?”
“Several reasons,” I told her. “First of all, you were the pauper of the group. Barb certainly wouldn’t have been a blackmailer, not with the funds at her disposal. I thought of that possibility, as a matter of fact, but it didn’t make much sense. Dean MacIlhenny told me this afternoon that you don’t have much money at all, Jill. You act rich and you dress expensively, but your father hasn’t much money. It had to come from somewhere.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And you were the girl Sutton used to run his errands; you admitted that much on your own. You came to New York to set me off the trail. You collected the blackmail money for him. You knew where his house was and had been there often enough to have the layout committed to memory. My God, you even knew where he stashed the negatives! He wouldn’t tell you that if you were on his hook—it wouldn’t do him any good. But as his partner, you had a certain right to know.”
She was gnawing at her lower lip. I could see her trying to figure out a way into the clear. She hadn’t been able to find one yet.
“Let me tell you what happened, Jill. You arranged things and they were working splendidly. Then Barbara Taft disappeared and you started to worry. I came to Cliff’s End look
ing for her and you worried a little bit more, enough to tell Sutton all about it. He wasn’t even around campus; he never would have known I was investigating. But you were here and you found out.”
“Then what happened, Roy?”
“Then you followed me back to New York,” I said. “You had Sutton phone friends of his in New York and arrange for a pair of parties. His friends chased us in the cab so that you could pump me for information. Then they let us get away and I stashed you in an apartment in the Village.”
“Where we made love.”
I ignored that. “You left early in the morning,” I went on. “You caught the first train back to Radbourne and left me to get my head knocked in by more of Sutton’s friends. You told me the other day that you came back here when Gwen was killed. That was a lie, Jill. You came back right away, figuring I was confused enough for the time being. Then you killed Gwen.”
“Why would I kill her?” She was smiling now but the smile didn’t quite bring itself off. “I was trying to throw you off the trail, remember? Why do something to increase your suspicion and bring you up here again?”
“Because you couldn’t help it.”
“Why not?”
“Because Gwen found Barb’s set of photographs,” I told her. “She recognized your picture and called you up.”
“So I killed her because she was going to blackmail me? Don’t talk like a moron, Roy. I was a blackmailer myself, remember? And I didn’t have any money, so she couldn’t blackmail me, of course. So that knocks your theory—”
“She wasn’t blackmailing you.”
“No?”
“She wasn’t a blackmailer,” I went on. “She was the sort of girl who believed in playing everything by the book. She came across the photographs, had enough sense to realize that somebody was being blackmailed with them, and decided to go to the authorities. But first she wanted to find out what she could about it. She called you over, told you what she was going to do, and probably asked you if you would go to the police with her.”
You Could Call It Murder Page 13