by Tedd Thomey
“Bastard!” Alma screamed. “Heinie bastard!”
Again she raised the weight. And before it descended, Norman’s eyes recognized her and were blurred with anguish and bewilderment at what his wife was doing to him.
“Jesus!” he said. “My God, Alma! Alma—”
The sash weight struck with such force that Ward, whose face was inches from Norman’s, could feel the contact of metal against bone. Tight around Norman’s throat, his fingers felt Norman’s neck muscles bulge and contract with reaction to each blow. It was unbelieveable that she could do it so many times—raise the huge weight again and again and bring it down with such crushing force.
It went on and on—a black dream of agony.
Ward did not know how much rime passed before he found himself standing beside the bed, shoulders slumped, staring at the figure tangled in the sheet, smelling something sharply sweet that hurt his nostrils.
Norman was no longer moving. Ward felt Alma’s presence beside him, heard her breathing rapidly, panting like an animal in heat.
He stared at the figure on the bed, saw that Norman was lying on his stomach, his hands tied behind his back with a towel. The face, dark with blood, was partially turned and he saw the cotton waste stuffed into both nostrils and realised what he smellcd was the sweet chloroform that had been poured upon the cotton.
He stared at Alma and saw that the front of her negligee was streaked with blood from the shoulders to below her knees. He stared at himself and saw that his shirt and tie were spattered with dark red. His hands felt wet and he discovered that the cheap cloth gloves were soaked with blood.
“Oh, my God!” he said.
“Help me!” Alma cried. “Help me tie him up!”
But he could not help her. He watched her go to the closet, find one of Norman’s neckties and knot it around Norman’s unmoving ankles.
He felt very weak and sick. Stumbling into the bathroom, he threw up into the toilet and then leaned against the wall, moaning and clutching his stomach with both hands.
The bathroom door opened and Alma came in. In the bright light from the overhead bulb, her eyes were glazed and dull-looking.
“Look at that.” She pointed weakly to his shirt. “Look at all that blood.”
She gazed at herself, discovered the red stains on her negligee.
“Oh, mv God!” she wailed. “What are we going to do? Look at me! Look at your shirt!”
He could not reply. He leaned against the wall near the toilet, shaking his head, trying to think but completely muddled.
“Take it off!” Alma said. “I’ll get you one of his.”
Following her back to the bedroom, he removed his necktie and shirt and dropped them on the floor. She took a blue shirt from a bureau drawer and he put it on, his trembling fingers moving awkwardly on the buttons, his shoulders feeling small and puny in the folds of the shirt which was many sizes too large. Numbly he watched her shed the negligee, place it on top of his shirt and then don a horrible blood-red Chinese robe with a dragon coiling across the front.
For many minutes they scrubbed their hands in the washbowl.
And then they went downstairs.
They did not speak.
A milk wagon rolled by on the wet street outside, its metal wheels splashing through a puddle, the horse’s hoofs making a crisp clop-clop sound on the paving. Ward wanted to lean back against the sofa but he could not. He sat up stiffly, his mind sobering, gradually allowing itself to dwell on what had happened upstairs. He could not shield his mind from the facts. It knew clearly now, horribly and thoroughly, what had happened upstairs. A quotation of his mother’s began to uncoil from a cove deep within his brain, finally coming into full awareness. It was not the familiar quotation: Thou Shalt Not Kill. It was another, one he hadn’t thought about for years: Ye shall keep the Sabbath; every one that profaneth it shall surely be put to death. And this day was now the Sabbath. This dark, black day was the Sabbath and the terrible thing upstairs had occurred on the Sabbath.
He spoke it aloud. “Ye shall keep the Sabbath.”
“What?” Alma turned and looked at him, her jaws working slowly on the chewing gum. “What did you say?”
He repeated it.
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “Shut up and think about what we have to do.”
For another two minutes, they were silent.
“We’ve got to go back up there,” she said. “We’ve got to make it look like burglary. Did you bring that newspaper, the Italian one?”
He nodded.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ve got to come with me.”
He followed her up the stairs. At the doorway to the bedroom they paused, staring fearfully at the heavy-shouldered form tangled in the sheet and blankets.
“My God,” said Alma suddenly. “What if he’s not dead?”
Ward said nothing. He began to shiver.
“He’s got to be,” she said. “This has got to go through or I’m ruined.”
CHAPTER 11
After Bud left, Alma forced herself to wait for a full half-hour. She lay on the bed in her mother’s room, legs tied with two of Norman’s neckties, her hands bound behind her back with strips of cheesecloth. Another strip of the cheesecloth, tasting very much like straw, was fastened across her mouth and knotted at her neck.
Silently, her tongue making the cloth damp, she cursed Bud for being so helpless, for not drawing the knots tighter.
It was the longest half hour of her life, but she had to give him enough time to catch his bus. She owed him that much, even though he’d done such a miserable job. The bedroom was cold from the rain which continued outside and she shivered and trembled and tried to fix accurately in her mind what she would say and do when the time came.
Finally there was enough ugly gray morning light in the room for her to read the small alarm clock on the shelf beside the bed.
Seven-thirty. It was time.
As she lowered herself to the floor rind wriggled toward the hallway, she did not have to feign excitement. Her whole body quivered with anticipation and she thumped her feet excitedly against the throw rug in the hall, welcoming the noise she made because it meant the strain and suspense would soon be over.
She began to shout.
“Help, help!” Her words were muffled by the cheesecloth. “Eileen, help me!”
Waking her daughter was more difficult than she expected. Tired from the long party of the night before, the little girl did not stir until Alma wriggled to the door of her bedroom and struck the wooden panel again and again with her bound feet.
The door opened a crack and Eileen’s blue eyes peered out, half-asleep. Instantly, they widened.
“Mama!” she cried.
“Burglars!” Alma screamed through the cheesecloth. “Help me, Eileen!”
After that, the events went off more or less as expected. Terrified, weeping almost hysterically, Eileen slipped the cloth gag from her mother’s mouth. Then she did as Alma commanded her—running to their neighbors next door, the Ernstbruners.
Within a few minutes the Chrysler house was transformed from gray Sunday morning silence into bedlam. Wearing a bathrobe and heavy, unlaced boots, Mr. Ernst-bruner, who was an exceedingly fat meat-market owner, shook the whole staircase as he hurried, puffing, to give Alma assistance. His wife remained downstairs, supposedly to comfort Eileen, who was still weeping uncontrollably. But Mrs. Ernstbruner, shrilling questions to her husband in German, demanding to know what had happened, was a comfort to no one.
“A burglar!” gasped Alma as Mr. Ernstbruner untied her legs and hands. “Help Norman! I think something terrible has happened to him!”
She remained seated on the hall floor as Mr. Ernstbruner hurried to the master bedroom.
One glance through the doorway was sufficient for Mr. Ernstbruner. In near panic, he bolted back down the hall, his fat cheeks pale and shaking, wanting to know where the telephone was so he could notify the police.
“An
d call a doctor!” moaned Alma. “There’s a terrible pain in my head!”
The doctor arrived first, a pleasant young man who lived in the neighborhood and who smelled nicely of medicines and chemicals. He spent less than a minute in the master bedroom. When he came out into the hall, shaking his head in that somber way doctors use when the news is bad, Alma was so relieved she had little difficulty loosing her emotions and carrying on like a bereft wife.
When the police came, the young doctor was still ministering to her, giving her pills to quiet her nerves and applying a cloth dipped in cold water to her forehead.
The two officers were also young. They were tall and very good-looking in their blue uniforms. They were very sympathetic and suggested that Alma rest downstairs on the sofa while they completed their investigation in the bedroom.
When they came down to the living room afterward, Alma couldn’t help noticing their appreciative glances. The Chinese robe did fit her very well, the thin cloth being sufficiently tight across the bosom, and her bare legs were attractively displayed against the soft pillows.
She repeated her story for the officers, keeping it simple so the facts wouldn’t be contradictory or confusing. Averting her eyes, she kept her voice low and husky.
“I—I don’t really know what it was that woke me,” she said. “A noise, some kind of a noise. I thought it might be Eileen. I thought she might be sick from something she ate at the party. So I got up and started down the hall. And—” she touched her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes. “And then I saw this shadow. That’s all I saw of him—a shadow, and it was awful—” She shuddered. “He hit me. He dragged rne into Mother’s room and threw me on the bed. He hit me again and I must have passed out because I don’t remember anymore. Nothing. I just can’t—”
Pressing her face against the sofa’s cushioned back, she wept for part of a minute. She did not overdo it. She wept quietly, like Carole Lombard did in that movie with Edmund Lowe, and was rewarded with comments of sympathy from the young officers as well as Mr. and Mrs. Ernstbruner.
“It must have been the same man I saw!” declared Mrs. Ernstbruner shrilly. “I saw him last Monday night, hanging around in the alley. He was a big man, wasn’t he, Mrs. Chrysler, big and tall and slouchy-looking?”
Alma nodded. “I rfiink so. I didn’t get too good a look at him. I think he might have been an Italian.”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Chrysler,” said one of the young officers. “It certainly looks like the work of the same burglar we’ve had reports on before.”
Continuing to weep quietly, brushing at the tears with her fingertips, Alma found it easy to conceal the warm glow of triumph within her. It hadn’t been nearly as simple as she’d imagined it would be. But with the police convinced, the worst of it was definitely over. She leaned back against the cushions, crossed her legs and modestly smoothed the hem of her robe down across her knee. None of her movements were missed by the eyes of the young officers and she knew exactly what they would say to one another when they got outside. Some dish, ain’t she? And did you get a good look at them gams? Man, oh, man!
The two officers closed their notebooks and went to the front door.
But they did not leave.
Instead they admitted several more officers in uniforms and a number who were, she supposed, plainclothes men. She was quite certain they would finish their work and leave shortly, but instead she heard the sound of more automobiles arriving outside and soon half a dozen more men came in and began moving through the house.
Rising from the sofa, she excused herself politely as she passed in front of Mrs. Ernstbruner and went to the window.
She was astonished at the amount of activity outside. Over a dozen police cars were parked in the street and it looked like the whole neighborhood—gangs of children, plus men and women in church finery and Sunday sport togs—thronged the sidewalk in front of the house. A vast number of police uniforms milled about, trampling Norman’s prized Warner rosebushes and crushing the bed of green daffodil shoots. She felt a small dart of panic that so many officers had been called out for what was obviously a simple case of burglary, but she was certain there would be no difficulty so long as she kept her facts in order.
By ten o’clock there were as many officers inside as outside and she had repeated her story nearly a dozen times. A surprising number of newspaper reporters and photographers were present, asking endless questions, taking endless pictures.
Two doctors from the Police Department examined her head, asked kind, sympathie questions and then consulted with the young neighborhood doctor who still hadn’t departed.
“Now, Mrs. Chrysler, shall we go over it once more?” asked the dumpy, badly-dressed man who had been introduced as Mr. Tomiskey, from the D. A.’s office. She noticed that the other officers regarded him quite highly despite his shabby appearance.
She repeated the facts, keeping them in the same order as before.
“We must have a better description of the man,” said Tomiskey. “Can’t you describe his nose or his hair?”
She shook her head. “No, sir, I’m sorry. He was rough-looking, that’s all I know. He might have been an Italian.”
“With a mustache?”
“Yes, I think he had a mustache.”
She decided she definitely didn’t like Tomiskey’s eyes. He was an older man, fifty-five or sixty at least, and his caramel-brown eyes were never at rest. He was gentle, however, and extremely courteous.
“Shall we go upstairs, Mrs. Chrysler?” he asked. “I’d like you to show us exactly how you were tied up and how you managed to crawl down the hall.
She did exactly as requested, complied with every request, answered every question and controlled her temper even though she saw that Tomiskey was altering his inquiries slightly, trying to force her to change her replies.
After that they took her into her mother’s bedroom and let her sit in the rocking chair near the bed. They brought her coffee, granted her wish for a stick of clove chewing gum, but they did not permit her to leave the bedroom except for a brief trip to the bathroom. They let her mother visit her for a few minutes, but it was a terrible scene, with Mrs. Jansson carrying on hysterically, embracing her, giving her no help whatsoever.
The questioning went on and on, throughout the morning and into the afternoon, and she found it increasingly difficult to understand why it was taking so long and why so many officers, almost dozens of them, were prowling the house. From the tone of Tomiskey’s questions, she knew she was in serious, even critical, trouble, but she did not allow herself to be frightened into changing her story. Several times Tomiskey stepped out into the hall and she heard his low-voiced conversation with some of the other officers.
After one of his trips into the hall, Tomiskey returned with another officer whom he introduced as Detective Yost.
“We found a strange object in the cellar,” said Tomiskey. “It was in a toolbox and covered with ashes.’ He paused. “A sash weight. Do you have any idea how it got there?”
“No, I don’t.” She kept her voice cool and unemotional.
“It’s spotted with dried blood,” added Detective Yost. “How do you account for that?”,
“I don’t know anything about it,” she said calmly, but she felt a tremendous pressure in the room as though something were closing in on her.”
“You claim the burglar knocked you unconscious,” said Tomiskey, “but none of the doctors found a scratch on you. Isn’t that rather strange?”
“It doesn’t look at all like burglary,” said Detective Yost.
“Why not?” Alma realized her voice was snappish, but she definitely didn’t like the detective’s attitude or his manner.
“We see lots of burglaries.” Detective Yost shrugged. “They are not done this way. The doors were not forceä. Your husband was attacked in a number of different ways, when one would have been quite enough. And I can’t for the life of me understand why that pistol was left on
the bed beside him.”
“What was so strange about that?” From the glance that passed between the two officers she knew she shouldn’t have asked the question, but now that she was committed she glared at them boldly, and demanded that they answer.
“It’s quite simple.” Detective Yost shrugged once more. “The gun has your husband’s fingerprints on it, making it look like he tried to defend himelf with it. But, believe me, Mrs. Chrysler, no burglar would leave a weapon lying beside his victim, running the risk of the victim coming to and picking it up. Entirely too risky.”
Suddenly she felt nauseous and weak, and she decided she hated these two men more than anyone in her life. Almost as much as she hated Norman. She tried to sit back in the rocking chair, tried to look calm, but there was so much perspiration on her palms she found it difficult to grasp the arm rests.
“Here’s something else that puzzles me.” Opening his handkerchief, Detective Yost displayed a jeweled stickpin. “How do you account for this being found on the floor of the bedroom, Mrs. Chrysler?”
“It’s my husband’s,” she said.
“Oh?” “The detective looked doubtful. “But the initial is W.”
She hesitated only long enough to take a deep breath. And then it was wonderful the way her mind came agilely to her rescue, supplying a perfect answer.
“That’s the initial of Winnie,” she replied. “She was Norman’s fiancée, but she died. He wore it in her memory.”
“I see,” said Detective Yost, but he did not appear to be convinced.
“And here’s something else that turned up,” said Tomiskey. “We found this address book in one of the bureau drawers. Is this your handwriting, Mrs. Chrysler?”
She glanced at the small book. “Yes.”
“And these names,” he continued. “Who are all these men? Ralph Shrank, Scotty McNallv, Robert Crenshaw, James Van Der Most, Ward Green, George Cline and all the rest. Who are they?”
“Acquaintances of mine.”