Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  “Yes,” said Ned Saxon, and finished his work and, before she could fall, supported and half-carried her to the little belt of trees which Richard Morley was always promising to thin out. There was a long half-rotted beam there, and the remains of an outdoor fireplace. Ned Saxon dropped the unresisting body behind the crumbling stone structure— Jennifer Morley would not have thought his breathing quiet now; he was taking great panting lungfuls of air—and sped back to the telephone. Thanks to the perilous ditch road he was back in the supermarket twenty-five minutes after he had left it, saying to Iris, “I got the eggs. Extra-large, they were all out of the jumbo.”

  Richard Morley did not attend the weekly sales meeting because it was his turn to sit in an open house from six until nine. Even if the evening had not been rainy this was an almost certain waste of time—the house was overpriced and suffered badly from what the real estate manuals called, rather grandly, functional obsolescence—but it belonged to a friend of the firm’s president and living sacrifices had been made to it all week.

  As the property was in the Heights there was no point in going home first. Richard Morley called Jennifer at five-thirty and departed for his lonely vigil. The rain was coming down in earnest now; nobody in his right mind would be shopping for houses, not even the usual assortment of time-killers who liked to peer into other people’s domiciles when there was nothing of interest on television.

  The house was furnished solely by a straight kitchen chair and an old paperback which Richard pounced on hungrily and dropped with disgust when he found that the last chapter had fallen out. He might have been the last survivor of some great disaster: on one side the darkened identical mate to this place was also for sale; on the other side was a weedy corner lot ornamented with beer cans and fragments of glass. Presumably the other residents of this deteriorating street drove forth occasionally, but they were not doing so tonight.

  Normally this whole situation would have reduced Richard to savage gloom, but now he sat down quite mildly on the kitchen chair, glanced at his watch, and gave himself up to pleasant thoughts about the irony of Mrs. Mincer.

  Mrs. Mincer and Jennifer were old foes, dating from a time when Mrs. Mincer’s brass band of guinea hens had invaded the Morley property and been attacked with zest and appetite by Jennifer’s German pointer puppy. Mrs. Mincer, an elderly and razor-tongued widow, had not unnaturally called up in a trembling rage; Jennifer had retorted with some justice that those strident and witless birds were a public nuisance. So she might think, said Mrs. Mincer triumphantly, but according to the law fowl-killing dogs were required to be confined. “Very well, then, and I’ll get a restraining order for your horrible guinea hens,” Jennifer had answered furiously, but she knew when she was beaten. Rather than chain the puppy, or have him shot or poisoned by Mrs. Mincer, who was thoroughly capable of it, she had sorrowfully found him another home.

  Since then the two women had been implacable enemies, and it was Mrs. Mincer’s acid voice which had called Richard at his office to say, “In your own interest, I think you should know that your wife has been visiting that man at the Judd house, that bachelor or widower or whatever he calls himself. At least, her car was there last night.” Click.

  In the scene which was thus precipitated—Richard had gone home to lunch, because he did not want Jennifer unarmed against Mrs. Mincer’s venom, and his own difficult nature tore at him—they had arrived at almost their old accord. Jennifer had said she had brought duplicate keys to Eve Quinn—“She said something to Iris the other day about wanting them, and she’s an awfully nice girl, don’t you think?” and added casually, “It’ll disappoint Mrs. Mincer but it turns out that I do know Henry Conlon, from years ago in Colorado. I had no idea that he was still in this part of the country until—he read the newspapers, of course, and he sent a note . . .”

  The note that had driven her into that white stillness, and which he had never been shown? For the moment Richard did not ask; he was too relieved that for the first time in a week Jennifer was looking at him as someone other than a stranger to whom she must force herself to be polite. And with that new beginning, anything else could be straightened out. Anything . . .

  Arthur Pulliam had, very unusually for him, gone to a movie.

  He was so preoccupied with the terrible problem of Rosalinda that he saw only strange disoriented images on the screen: a man in a raincoat, the spinning wheels of a train, a woman in what appeared to be black lipstick dropping a sinister capsule into the drink of her companion, who had obligingly turned his back.

  Rosalinda had been far from good-humored at lunch, but what worried Arthur even more was the frequency with which she had dropped her black lashes. She—or that stepfather of hers—had worked out some ferocious demand, and she was simply testing him, like a woman poking a fork inquisitively into a roasting chicken. She was obviously not ready to spring her ultimatum, because when Arthur had begun stiffly, “I’m sure you can see that this is hardly the time—” she had interrupted him in her most catlike tone. “Of course I can see. I’m not stupid.”

  “Then why . . . ?”

  There as a brief interruption as a child began to shriek and was carried out bodily. “I missed you,” said Rosalinda then, reverting to blandness and giving Arthur a ravishing look from her eye corners. “Naturally.”

  Six months ago, even three months ago this coquetry would have enchanted him. Now it seemed to turn the lunch he had scarcely begun into a jumble of broken glass nestled intimately in his stomach. If only he dared announce firmly that any further meeting between them was out of the question—but he did not, and when they parted it was with the understanding that he would call Rosalinda soon.

  At any rate Arthur was safe for the moment in this flickering anonymous dark; he could not be telephoned or confronted by anyone. Even the massed and rapt attention around him—the woman on the screen was now dragging her comatose victim to an open elevator shaft—was somehow comforting, simply because no one was staring at or speculating about him; nobody was whispering, “It wouldn’t be the first time a man hired someone to get rid of his wife . . .”

  Eve Quinn listened to the rain with active pleasure. Ambrose was asleep, the kitchen was tidied, the little house, thanks to Ned Saxon’s planing of the bathroom window, impregnable to this enjoyably wild night. She had had her shower and barely begun an engrossing book. It was one of those rare intervals of perfect tranquility and anticipation, not to be thrown away by going early and mundanely to bed. She was even thinking that in some strange way she would miss Ambrose when the knock came at the door.

  It wasn’t late, just nine-thirty, and Eve was cautious but not frightened. Her robe was an almost monkishly austere white wool, not a frilly just-out-of-bed creation, and when she went to the door, secure on its bolt and chain, she asked crisply through the crack, “Who is it?”

  “Henry Conlon . . . I apologize for coming so late,” he said, entering, “but I was on my way home and it occurred to me that I ought to—that you should have some kind of explanation.”

  Eve flushed; she felt as though she were standing in her kitchen again, looking out, spotlit. She was saved from having to answer by the ringing of the telephone.

  It was Richard Morley. After the first terse question Eve wheeled unthinkingly to gaze at Henry Conlon, and in some way it was as though his pleasant spiky-eyelashed face were enormously familiar instead of seen here only twice. She said into the telephone, “No, she isn’t . . .Yes, she did, but she didn’t leave a— Yes, I did, around six, but your wife had to answer the door, and when she came back she hung up. I suppose she was in a hurry and took it for granted that Yd hung up . .

  She replaced the receiver, and said shakenly to Henry Conlon, who after her first wordless turning to him had made no pretense of not listening, “that was Richard Morley, and his wife seems to be missing. Her car is there, but apparently she had no dinner and there’s no note or anything . . . he’s calling the Sheriff now.”


  Missing: it was odd how a single word could seem to sweep aside adobe and glass and fabric and introduce the rainy black night almost physically into the room. Conlon’s face had gone frowningly tight and—Eve was to cling to this—disbelieving. Whatever he had been going to say before the telephone rang had obviously been wiped from his mind. “I’ll go over and see if I can help,” he said.

  Help meant search, of course. Eve felt cold even before he opened the door. “I’ll be up for a while. Will you let me know if you find out anything?”

  In spite of the dripping obscurity, and the tendency of tree branches to throw suggestively shaped shadows just outside the patiently moving lights, it was not a very long wait.

  11

  “SHE must have walked out of the house voluntarily,” said Henry Conlon, wearily and for perhaps the fifth time, “or you’d have heard.”

  Eve gazed at him through a woolliness of shock and pure physical and nervous fatigue. Although she had not glanced at the clock lately she knew it must be after midnight. They sat in her living room, talking in low voices so as not to wake Ambrose and absorbing the new fact of Jennifer Morley’s death by strangulation very possibly, almost certainly, when she had been in the middle of talking to Eve on the telephone. The crisp voice saying, in a ghastly turn of speech, “I’ll get rid of whoever it is.”

  As Eve would not have left Ambrose alone in the house at even an innocuous and sunny hour of the day, a deputy had come to take her statement that she had held an interrupted conversation with Mrs. Morley at somewhere between six and six-thirty, that the dead woman’s last audible words had been “Really? Are you sure?” and that there had been no further sound of any kind before the receiver was replaced.

  Jennifter had obviously expected to be outside only momentarily as her body, when they found it behind the stone fireplace, was clad only in blouse and skirt. Still clenched in her right hand was a piece of stiff wire which, for all its exposure to rain, was sent off to the laboratory; it was possible that she had marked her killer.

  The deputy wanted to know if Mrs. Morley had sounded in any way frightened or alarmed by her visitor, or if on the other hand she had seemed to be addressing a friend, and Eve discovered for the first time how difficult it was to assess such a thing when you were armed by hindsight. The very importance of her answer, and the resulting tendency to strain for nuances, was a heavy stress to place on four unremarkable words.

  “She sounded impatient, if anything,” Eve said with care, “but then it’s always a nuisance to have someone knock at the door when you’re on the phone. Of course, I wasn’t really paying that much attention at the time.”

  “No, you wouldn’t be. Did you have some special reason for calling Mrs. Morley, Miss Quinn?”

  “No, I was returning her call—I’d been out earlier in the day but as I was home from two on I don’t think it could have been anything very pressing,” said Eve steadily.

  Henry Conlon, who had been silent and alert on the other end of the couch, saw the deputy out and returned to the living room doorway. “I don’t like to sound openhanded with your liquor, but I think we could both use a drink,” and was soon making efficient sounds in the kitchen.

  The question of why in Jennifer Morley’s death was almost as baffling as the question of who. You thought of the husband right away—but according to Conlon, Richard Morley had seemed stricken almost to the point of physical collapse. Nothing in the house had been touched. Someone had come to kill, done it, and gone away satisfied.

  Eve had never met Molly Pulliam, but on the basis of an admittedly slight acquaintance Jennifer had seemed an unlikely target for murder. Probably only newborn babies had no enemies to any degree at all—Eve thought of the casual malice directed at her in the form of the newspaper clipping that announced Bill Cox’s engagement—still, enemies who killed?

  As though it had accomplished its night’s work, the wind had died; there was only a reminiscent plop of rain here and there, mockingly peaceful. Ambrose gave an occasional dim snore. Conlon gave Eve a peculiarly measuring look, came to some inner conclusion, and said, “You’ve known Nina Earl for quite a while, haven’t you?”

  “If two years is quite a while, yes.” As the import of this question was borne in on her, Eve felt a trace of wry amusement at the thought of their both, and separately, having used Nina as a character witness. It was, in its way, quite a tribute to her.

  “I knew Jennifer very well, years ago in Colorado,” Conlon said abruptly. “Her sister Molly was younger, and for some reason I hardly knew her at all—I certainly never connected her with a Mrs. Pulliam. I’d been living in New York for years before I came back out here, and I’d lost touch with the family completely. Then Jennifer called me up a few nights ago to find out if I was the same Henry Conlon. She’d just had a very unpleasant anonymous letter, touching on something that happened a long time ago, and she wanted to rule out the possibility that the writer could have had anything to do with what happened to her sister.”

  “Wanted to rule out . . . ?” repeated Eve incredulously.

  “Yes, because it didn’t seem possible for a lot of reasons, and to go to the police with the letter would only have stirred up a lot of unnecessary mud. She wanted me to make some inquiries because she had never told her husband about this matter and it would have been— awkward. Jennifer didn’t say as much, but I gather that Morley is a very”—he seemed to search before he went on—“single-minded man, by which I don’t mean jealous in the ordinary sense. Although, all things considered,” said Henry Conlon, meeting Eve’s eyes levelly and speaking with a certain dry calm, “I think I am probably one of the safest men Jiving as far as anyone’s wife is concerned.”

  Because, of course, his own wife . . . Much to Eve’s relief, Ambrose could be heard in an excited and rising mumble, Nothing of this night’s frightful happening could have penetrated to him, but she went swiftly into his little room, turned him on his side, said softly, “There’s your hat.”

  Ambrose was not really awake, because when she nudged the straw folds gently into his hand he responded, “There’s my hat,” and succumbed again. Thoroughly roused, he would have wanted a drink of water or a trip to the bathroom or something to eat. Nevertheless, Eve waited for his gentle tidelike snoring to recommence before she returned to the living room and Henry Conlon, who asked, “Did I wake him?”

  “No, he often does that.” In her brief interval away Eve had had time to think, and she said with conscious politeness, “I gather, then, that Mrs. Morley thought I might be the anonymous letter-writer, because I was about the right age or would be if I had an older sister? That was why you wanted to look at my typewriter?”

  “Jennifer was hardly at her most clearheaded,” said Conlon in mild reproof. “All these years had gone by without a worry about—what she was worried about. Then you turn up in this particular house, which is listed with her husband’s firm; you even have the same woman in to help.”

  “Yes, I see. Well, there’s no great mystery about that,” said Eve with the terrible pleasantness that only underlines anger. “Mrs. Morley herself suggested Mrs. Saxon to me, and as for the house, I was completely unfamiliar with the Valley so I consulted our good and mutual friend Nina—who would, I suppose, have known about this place?”

  (Nina Earl with her vast lack of surprise that Henry Conlon had turned out to be Eve’s landlord, her carefully off-hand endorsement of him. She would take care of Nina later.)

  Henry Conlon, who had clearly arrived at the same conclusion, took out his embarrassment in a long astonished glance at his watch before he got to his feet. The living room froze briefly around Eve like a stopped film, but she managed to say, “I hope you convinced Mrs. Morley that I didn’t write to her, and that I’ve never been near the Lockwood School.”

  The room froze deeper. Henry Conlon said out of a great and crystal silence, “Yes, I did. Thank you for the drink. Good night.”

  Where fatigue, had been, there
was now a furious restlessness. Nonsense, thought Eve, and began turning out lights. She looked in at Ambrose again, half-hoping he would raise one of his unseasonable commotions, but Ambrose would not help her; his lashes were peacefully down, his wide mouth, that was capable of such disarming and sharklike smiles, open to facilitate snoring.

  Eve used her new toothbrush, took two aspirins and went to bed. It was the kind of night she liked best for sleeping: cold enough for blankets, musical with the aftermath of the rain. Burned against her eyelids almost until an ambitious rooster came to life was the photographically clear image of Henry Conlon’s left wrist, extended as he looked at his watch, and the end of a fresh scratch there.

  The morning newspaper said in a black banner “Sister of Valley Victim Slain.” There was a lead paragraph in heavy type, and the usual head-and-shoulders presentation, in a vital and confident pose, of someone freshly dead. In stores and offices and trailer courts there was a deep hum of shock and anger, even though Jennifer Morley had not been as widely known or uncritically liked as Molly Pulliam—and under the hum ran a clear little current of relief.

  The murder of Molly Pulliam had been a matter of personal terror for and posed a threat to them all—what other door would this madman force, what other lone woman select for his prey?—but this was something else again. The violence was not random after all, but directed at the two sisters by some sort of reason, or something which a warped mind had construed as reason. .

  Nevertheless, it was entirely possible that the killer came and went among friends of the dead women—smiling, handing or accepting drinks—and delicately, self-protectively, the people who had been so shocked and angered began to disavow this dangerous pair. The very women who had gathered over their midmorning coffee to vie with each other as to their closeness to Molly now said consideredly, “Of course, I didn’t know either of them really well . .

  “Jennifer was always rather a lone wolf, wasn’t she? I mean, she kept herself to herself pretty much . .