I lighted a cigarette. I blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling and sighed.
“And you got panicky, Jill. You had the knife with you and you used it. Or you told her not to do anything until you had a chance to talk with her at length, then returned that night and knifed her with Alan Marsten’s knife. That sounds more likely, come to think of it.
“You see, Alan couldn’t have slipped in and out of a girl’s dormitory at that hour without attracting attention. He couldn’t have gotten close enough to kill her without her screaming. But you could, Jill. And you did. She was expecting you and she was hardly afraid of you. You killed her and left her there and walked out with no one giving you a second glance.”
“Roy—”
“Hold on,” I said. “And sit still, dear. You’re getting a little nervous just about now, aren’t you? Let’s not make any sudden moves. I want you to listen to this all the way through.”
She stopped fidgeting and looked at me levelly. Even now it was more than a bit difficult for me to believe that everything I was saying was true. She looked like a sweet and demure college girl.
Not like a blackmailer.
Or a murderess.
“Then I came along again,” I said. “You hated like hell to let me know who you were, but you couldn’t help yourself. For two reasons—I would probably find out anyway if I poked around long enough. And more important, you needed a little help. As long as Sutton had those photographs, you were in trouble. He could work the blackmail game and it could backfire, with you getting hurt. Or he could start blackmailing you, as far as that went.
“But with Sutton out of the picture one way or another, he couldn’t do much of anything. So you sent me after him to get the pictures, figuring that one of three things could happen. He could kill me, in which case at least I was out of your hair. Or I could kill him, in which case everything was every bit as perfect. Even better.
“Or I could get the pictures—which is what happened, of course. That helped. There was still more.”
She looked at me. “Oh, tell me,” she said, the sarcasm a bitter edge to her words. “Tell me everything, dear Roy. Don’t make me guess.”
I said: “I dropped you at your dorm last night. Then I went home to sleep and you came outside again. Do you want me to tell you where you went?”
“Of course.”
“You went to the police station. Oh, you didn’t go inside, because that would have been senseless. You went around the rear and banged on Alan’s window. You awoke him and fed him a story, a long story about how a man named Hank Sutton had been responsible for Barbara’s death in one way or the other. I don’t know what you said—maybe that he was blackmailing her and she killed herself, maybe that he actually murdered her. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever it was, it was enough to set him off like a bomb. He broke jail and went after Sutton.”
“Why did I do that?”
“Because you thought it could only help you. If Sutton killed Alan, then Alan would be forever tagged with Gwen’s murder. Everyone would reason that an innocent boy wouldn’t escape from a jail cell.
“And if Alan killed Sutton, that was just as good as far as you were concerned. Alan would hang, certainly, and Sutton would be out of the way.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well,” she said. “Well, they’re both dead, aren’t they? So it worked out perfectly. And with them both dead you’ll have a hard time convincing anybody that there’s any truth in this little fantasy of yours, won’t you?”
I just smiled.
“Well? Won’t you?”
I said: “Alan Marsten might help me out.”
“But he’s dead!” Her eyes were wide again. “God damn it, you said he was dead!”
“So I lied,” I said. “You can sue me.”
She lowered her eyes again and we sat there in silence. She unzipped the leather notebook all the way a little at a time, her fingers nervous.
I told her what had happened, how Bill Piersall and I had managed to get to Sutton’s house, how I had shot Sutton dead, how Alan was already at the hospital recovering.
“Then I’ll tell the police about you,” I said. “And if they don’t believe me, he can help out with an appropriate word here and there. And then do you know what will happen?”
“What?”
“Then you’ll go to jail,” I said. “And you’ll stand trial for murder. You’ll be found guilty. But I don’t think you’ll hang, not with enough men on the jury. You’ll wind up in prison for life. With good behavior you’ll be out in twenty or thirty years or so.”
“Roy—”
“What?”
She decided not to answer. I wondered why she kept fooling around with the leather notebook. She was dipping one hand into it when I caught on.
I dove for her. By the time I got to her there was a gun in her hand but she just was not fast enough. I hit the gun with one hand and her jaw with the other. The gun flew against a wall and went off aimlessly, a bullet plowing into the ceiling. Plaster showered down on us.
I stood up shakily. She sat up even more shakily, rubbing her jaw where I had hit her with one hand. The game was up now and she recognized the fact. Her eyes held a beaten look. She was giving up.
And then all Hades was breaking loose. The gunshot attracted a certain amount of attention, with half the female population of Radbourne banging on our door and wondering what was wrong. And the door, of course, was locked. Her hair pin held it securely in place.
I walked over to pick up the gun. I kept it trained on her and back to the door, pulling out and discarding the hair pin. I opened the door and turned to the first girl I saw.
Then Jill was yelling. “He tried to rape me! Call the police; he tried to rape me!”
The girl looked at me.
“Call the police,” I told her. “By all means. I want than to arrest Jill for murder.”
“Murder?”
“Gwen Davison’s murder. Hurry, will you!”
The girl looked at me, at Jill, at me again. Jill went on shouting something foolish about rape while I ignored her manfully. The girl nodded to me, then went off to find a policeman.
I walked toward Jill again. Her eyes were dull now. She’d made one last-ditch attempt, a final round of desperation, and it had not worked.
“You didn’t have a chance,” I said
“No?”
“No. Nobody could rape you, Jill.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’d never resist,” I said.
Then I sat down in the chair again and kept the gun pointed at her while we waited for the police to come.
Thirteen
IT ENDED at the Tafts’, at dinner.
Dinner was sandwiches and beer this time, and none of us were very hungry. Jill Lincoln was in jail in New Hampshire, charged with the murder of Gwen Davison. Alan Marsten was in a hospital recuperating. Hank Sutton was in a morgue, decomposing. Barbara Taft was dead and buried.
During dinner I did the talking and Edgar and Marianne listened in silence. Painful silence. I said the things I had to say and they listened, because they had to listen, certainly not because they wanted to.
Edgar Taft stood up, finally.
“Then she really did kill herself, Roy.”
“I’m afraid she did,” I said.
“It doesn’t play any other way, does it?”
“No.”
He nodded heavily. “You’ll excuse me,” he said. “I’d like to be alone for a few moments.”
Marianne and I sat there awkwardly while he left the room and went to his study. She looked at me and I looked back at her. I waited.
“I’m sorry you had to tell him,” she said.
“That it was suicide?”
“The rest of it, Roy. Those . . . those pictures. That filth. All of it.”
“It would come out in Jill’s trial anyway.”
“I know. But it seems so—”
&
nbsp; She let the sentence trail off unfinished. I took a cigarette from my pack, lighted it, offered her one. She shook her head I and I blew out the match and dropped it into an ashtray.
“You didn’t want me to tell him about the pictures,” I said. “Is that it?”
“It’s just that—”
“But you knew about them all along,” I said, interrupting her. “Didn’t you, Marianne?”
Her hands shook. “You knew,” she said. “You knew—”
“Yes,” I said. “I knew. I knew that you knew, if that’s what you mean. There was a reason for Barbara coming to New York to commit suicide, Marianne. Because that’s not why she came here. She came to see her mother.”
She had closed her eyes. Her face was very pale.
“Blackmail bothered her,” I continued. “She didn’t like being bleeded even if she could afford the money. She didn’t like letting some filthy crook hold a filthy picture over her head like a sword. They say you cannot blackmail a truly brave person, Marianne. I suspect there’s quite a good deal of truth in that statement. And I suspect that Barbara was a very brave girl.”
“Brave but foolish, Roy.”
“Maybe.” I sighed. “She was brave enough to want to call a blackmailer’s bluff. She was confused as hell—she left school, dropped out of sight for awhile, then came home. She came to you, Marianne. Didn’t she.”
She said: “Yes.” The word was barely audible. It was more a breath than a word.
“She wanted support,” I went on. “She told you about the pictures and the blackmail. She told you she was going to tell the man to go to hell, then tell the police what he was doing. She knew there was going to be publicity, and that it would be the worst kind—she would be asked to leave school, perhaps, and there would be nasty rumors.”
“It would have been bad for her, Roy. A reputation around her neck for life. It—”
“So you told her to go on paying. You probably were harsh with her, although that hardly matters. What mattered to Barbara was that her mother wouldn’t back her up, that her mother seemed to be more interested in appearances than in reality. That ruined her, Marianne. Her own mother wouldn’t support her. Her own mother let her down.”
“I never thought she would kill herself, Roy.”
“I know that.”
“I never thought ... I was horrible with her, Roy. But it seemed more sensible to pay the money than to risk the publicity. I didn’t take anything else into consideration. I—”
She broke off. We sat there, awkward again. I finished my cigarette.
“That’s why you didn’t want me to work too hard on the case,” I said. “That’s why you told me on the phone to drop it as quickly as I could. You thought I might turn up the pictures, and you didn’t want that.”
“It would have hurt Edgar.”
“It’s hurting him now,” I said. “But Barbara’s death hurt him a great deal more.”
She said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Marianne.”
“Roy—”
I looked at her.
“You won’t. . . tell Edgar, will you?”
Appearances were everything. She still lived in a little world of What Other People Think, and reality was not rearing its ugly head, not if she could help it. She was poised and polished as a figurine. And as substantial.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
The train transported me to Grand Central Station. I walked to the Commodore, reclaimed my key from the clerk, picked up bills and messages. I took an elevator to my room and put the bills and messages into a drawer without looking at them.
I took off my coat, my jacket, my tie. I could hear Christmas carols coming from somewhere. I wished they would stop. Christmas was coming any day now and I didn’t care.
I picked up the telephone, called Room Service. I asked the answering voice to send up some scotch. I told him to forget about the ice and the soda, and to make it a fifth, not a pint.
I sat down to wait for the liquor. The Christmas carols were still going on and I tried not to listen to them. It was the wrong night for them.
A New Afterword by the Author
The second book to be published under my own name was Coward’s Kiss, which its publishers had the great wit to retitle Death Pulls a Doublecross. In the afterword to that book’s e-edition, I explain how the book grew out of an assignment to write a tie-in novel based on Markham, a television series starring Ray Milland, who I must say was cut out for better things.
Well, so was I—and so, as it turned out, was Coward’s Kiss. My agent and I felt the book I wrote deserved to be more than a tie-in novel, and an editor at Gold Medal Books agreed. We changed the characters’ names and that was that.
Except I still had a book to write. Belmont Books had arranged to pay me a thousand dollars to write that tie-in for them, and I had in fact already received half the advance, so what was I going to do? Stiff them? That wouldn’t be nice. Pay them back? That wouldn’t be sane.
Obviously, all I could do was write the book. And I couldn’t let the fact that I’d already written it once stand in my way.
I don’t recall much about the experience of writing Markham—which is what I called the manuscript at the time, and what Belmont called it, along with a subtitle: The Case of the Pornographic Photos. It seems to me I must have started work on it as soon as I finished Coward’s Kiss, but I first may have taken a week or so to write my monthly volume for Bill Hamling at Nightstand Books.
I was living at 110 West 69th Street at the time. I had gotten married in March of 1960, and by the end of the year we had a child on the way and moved to larger quarters uptown. So I wrote about Roy Markham sometime in the summer or fall of 1960, and we moved to 444 Central Park West in December; in March my daughter Amy was born. Some months after that, Markham was published, subtitle and all, and the first I knew of it was when I got a phone call late one night from a writer friend of mine named Randall P. Garrett.
Now Randy lived substantially less than a mile from us, around 110th Street and Broadway, and when he wasn’t home working he was around the corner in a neighborhood saloon. But that night he called me from Boston. I don’t know what got him to Boston. (Well, duh, a train, but why’d he go there? That was never explained.) What Randy had called to tell me, quite out of the blue, was that he had picked up a copy of Markham, and that he’d read it in one sitting and thought it was just plain wonderful.
I don’t think Randy had ever called me before, and I doubt he’d ever read anything of mine before, either. I recounted the incident to my friend Don Westlake, who guessed that sooner or later Randy would hit me up for a small loan and was laying the groundwork in the meantime. Never happened. While Randy and I crossed paths a few more times before he disappeared into the Pacific time zone, he never phoned again, never said anything about Markham or anything else I’d written, and never tried to borrow so much as subway fare.
He was a very interesting fellow, Randy Garrett. Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day. Everyone knew where to find Randy on the first Tuesday in November. He’d be in the cocktail lounge of the United Nations, the only place of public accommodation within the five boroughs where liquor could be legally sold.
What Randy mostly wrote when I knew him was science fiction. He went on to make a reputation as a writer of alternate history and is best known for the Lord Darcy novels, in which a Plantagenet dynasty survives into the twentieth century and magic is scientifically established. I haven’t read the Lord Darcy books but understand they’re rich in puns and wordplay, and I don’t find that hard to believe, because I never met anyone as gifted at rhyming or “punnery” as Randy.
He was, during our acquaintance, a High Church Anglican, and met regularly for spiritual counseling with a canon of the church. Sometimes he told the canon jokes, and once wondered if perhaps a joke he’d just
told was too risqué for the clergyman’s ears. “Oh, your jokes are all right,” the man said. “Besides, I can always us them as fodder for my sermons.”
“It’s a wise canon that knows his own fodder,” Randy replied immediately.
Now how the hell did he do that? The more you think about it, the more remarkable the joke becomes.
Randy, an accomplished versifier, took as a personal challenge the fact that true rhymes don’t exist for the words orange or silver, and he furnished a pair of quatrains to remedy the situation:
Oh, I ate a poisoned orange
And I know I’ll soon be dead
For I keep on seeing more ang-
elic forms around my bed.
Or:
“Though my hair has turned to silver,”
Said George Washington with pride,
“Everybody knows I’m still ver-
acity personified.”
Genius, I say. Sheer genius. And to think that a man capable of such wordsmanship called me up to tell me he liked my book!
He was, I feel I must add, the only person ever to say anything nice about Markham.
Now this makes it sound as though the book is terrible, or as though people thought it was terrible. And it may be and they may have, but nobody ever told me so. As far as I know, Randy Garrett’s the only person who ever read it.
Belmont published it quietly, but then that’s the only way they ever published anything. The TV show to which it was tied proved a frail bond indeed, canceled after a single season and off the airways before the book was on the stands.
It must have been twenty years later when Lou Kannenstine, who’d resuscitated the four Chip Harrison books as two double volumes, cast about looking for other works of mine to reprint under his Foul Play Press imprint. One that I suggested was Markham, and we agreed that the title would have to go and could take its lame subtitle along with it. But what, he wondered, would I want to title it?
“Hmmm,” I said, or words to that effect. I hadn’t read the book since I’d written it. “Well, let me think, Lou. You could call it, uh—”
“Just a minute, I didn’t catch all of that. Let me write it down. ’You Could Call It—’”
You Could Call It Murder Page 14