Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  “I’ve barely met Arthur Pulliam—he’s not terribly friendly, do you think?—but I was at a party a few weeks ago when someone said something to Richard Morley that he disagreed with, and you won’t believe this but he walked right out of the room, leaving poor Maude Fellowes with a whole handful of drinks. Naturally I couldn’t feel sorrier for him, they were a really devoted couple if I ever saw one, but it does show temper, doesn’t it? Not that he could possibly . . . I’m not suggesting for a minute . .

  This dainty knifing was only a reflection of the official attitude. At the time of Molly Pulliam’s murder, the Sheriff’s office had automatically verified her husband’s presence in a Denver motel. They had also put a few perfunctory questions to Richard Morley—perfunctory because, even apart from an apparent lack of motive his air of horror in that sauerkraut-smelling house, and frantic concern for his wife’s reaction, had seemed unarguably genuine.

  Moreover, the Valley was not the city with its element of unknowns who had drifted in yesterday and might drift out tomorrow. Here, most of the residents were taggable either by sight or by reputation, and both the Pulliams and the Morleys were alien to such a brutal crime on both heads. If there had been rumors of dalliance anywhere, or a financial straitening with insurance involved . . . but neither circumstance obtained.

  And Silverio Baca had turned up, with his wrathful mutters about his former employers, his record of theft, his drinking bout. He had fitted in as neatly as the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but someone had turned the puzzle upside down. Grimly the Sheriff’s officers began to restudy Arthur Pulliam and Richard Morley, and the past of the women who had begun life as Jennifer and Molly Vane.

  12

  THERE was one coincidental factor that the Sheriff wanted tidied out of the way, one common denominator to note down as having been examined and dismissed. Accordingly, early the next morning, a deputy made his way to the tiny apartment where the Saxons lived.

  Although a scant ten-minute drive would have taken him to either the Pulliam or the Morley house, this was a sharply different world. A year ago, even cloaked in deep tree shadows, the street had shown the marks of poverty; now, with the blighted Chinese elms cut to stumps, the sunlight stared cruelly down on small cement-block structures stained with reddish dust around the bases, exposed gas meters, defeated lawns gone back to hard weed-sprouting earth. Children had played with and abandoned a few old inner tubes, and against one crumbling pale green wall was a black dog so thin that he might have been a mural.

  The deputy knew Mrs. Saxon slightly. He was also familiar, in a different and tolerant way, with Ned Saxon, who had called in indignantly on various occasions to report a Peeping Tom, a sheared-off mailbox, strange small-hours trafficking across the street. There did seem to be a bewildering number of people at the address in question, and the mailbox had undeniably been wrecked, along with several others on the block, but under the circumstances the deputy could not place much faith in the Peeping Tom.

  It was Saxon who opened the door now, with an expression that startled the deputy until he caught sight of Mrs. Saxon; she was obviously in a very shaken state and her husband did not want her further upset.

  “Come in,” said Saxon, standing aside. He was holding the newspaper, and he shook his head at it. “I don’t suppose there’s any new lead in this terrible business?”

  “Not yet.” Invited, the deputy lowered his large frame into a chair which gave an alarming twang. He kept his gaze firmly riveted on Mrs. Saxon in order not to look about him, because he often found himself in surroundings of extreme financial depression but they seldom embarrassed him to such an extent. Perhaps it was because these people were so proud, and so far from young.

  He said gently to Mrs. Saxon, who was gazing at him like a child who has been savagely punished for no reason within its comprehension, “We’re trying to find out all we can about Mrs. Morley’s activities yesterday, Ma’am. I understand that you were at Miss Quinn’s when she telephoned there—would you remember what time that was?”

  The tiny frozen turn of Ned Saxon’s orange head was arrested so swiftly that it went unnoticed.

  “About one o’clock,” said Iris Saxon a little unsteadily. “I told her that Miss Quinn had taken the little boy out to lunch, and we chatted for a few minutes and she said something about having errands to do and that she’d call back later. But she didn’t, while I was there.”

  “And you got home at about—?” This was the real point the deputy had come to establish, even though it was an almost purely academic one: all other considerations aside, it seemed laughable to the point of tragedy that these hard-pressed people would have wiped out any source of income.

  “It must have been well after six,” said Ned Saxon, with a consulting glance at his wife, who nodded, “because we did our week’s shopping and if you’ve ever been in the Maxi-Mart on double-stamp day you know what it’s like. Tell you what, though—the manager would probably know what time we left there because when we were at the checkout stand it seemed to me that a package of noodles looked funny, powdery, and he gave me kind of a hard time about it and kept looking at his watch. You’ve got be very careful about the freshness of packaged foods in those big markets because sometimes,” he explained severely, “the boys who restock the shelves don’t do it properly.”

  This was evidently a hobbyhorse of Saxon’s, along with Peeping Toms and hypothetical drug traffic, and the deputy—who was now listening to something about an earlier purchase of eggs at the Double A Egg Ranch— began to be afflicted by a monumental boredom. Hastily, before he could be lectured about the hazards inherent in buying eggs, he left. A routine check would have to be made, but this angle, never of much interest to the Sheriff’s office, had been taken care of . . .

  The deputy’s car cruised away, its departure attended by gaping children and a few inquisitive women. Ned Saxon closed the door and said softly and fixedly to Iris, “You never told me that Jennifer had called yesterday.”

  “Why should I?” asked Iris, her eyes beginning to fill. “It wasn’t important, and with—with what happened it went completely out of my head.”

  Like his departure from the Maxi-Mart, supposedly for eggs—but he had not been able to chance leaving that out of his account to the deputy. He had actually bought the eggs forty-five minutes earlier than the time stated, but it had been darker then usual because of the rain, and in any case the clock in the sales office of the Double A Egg Ranch stood permanently at twenty minutes after eight.

  “There,” said Ned tenderly to his now weeping wife. “There, Iris. They’ll catch the man, because it stands to reason that women like that—”

  Iris’s bent head lifted unbelievingly, almost angrily.

  “—young, attractive, might have made enemies without knowing it,” continued Ned in a smooth flow. “The newspaper said they came originally from Colorado. You wait and see, it’ll be somebody from there.”

  “But that won’t bring them back,” Iris said in a drowned voice.

  “No,” agreed Ned, gazing tranquilly over her shoulder. “Nothing can do that.”

  “There was a letter,” repeated Richard Morley exhaustedly, “which upset my wife very much. It came on Saturday, and that’s all I can tell you about it.”

  To this particular deputy, who ruled his family w ith an iron hand, it was almost inconceivable that a wife should withhold mail from her husband, even more so that the husband should not have demanded the letter on the instant. He said skeptically, “And you think that this letter may have had a bearing on your wife’s murder.”

  “I think it came as a direct result of her sister’s murder, and the two have to be tied up, don’t they?”

  Richard had not slept for well over twenty-four hours, and all his taut aggressiveness had drained away. He was docile under this questioning, even though the deputy had the kind of personality which would normally have touched off his low flash-point, and he seemed completely unaware tha
t he was being viewed as a possible double murderer even when he was examined once again as to his activities the evening before.

  “So nobody showed up at this empty house you were sitting in. Somebody must have seen your car there—it was visible from the street?”

  “Yes, but if you’ve checked up on the place you’ll know that there’s another empty house on one side and a vacant lot on the other, and the store that sells wigs across the street. It was closed. Besides which,” said Richard with a first faint anger, “it was raining cats and dogs, if you’ll recall, and I imagine that no one was out who didn’t have to be.”

  “You seem to have bad luck with your business in the evenings. Let’s see, on the night Mrs. Pulliam was killed some people broke an appointment to look at a house with you, didn’t they?”

  Verification of that other appointment, at this late date, had proved impossible; the people concerned were from a small town in the southern part of the state, and even if they could have been contacted in their apparently leisurely tour it would have proved nothing. Morley could have seized the unexpected opportunity to go to the Pulliam house where he knew his sister-in-law to be alone.

  But even this did not seem to penetrate. “Officer,” said Richard Morley wearily, and began a dissertation, singularly contained, for him, on the state of this particular business in Albuquerque. The few men who were not real estate brokers had wives who were, he said, and women in this field had as many scruples as piranhas when it came to pirating other people’s customers. As for the other aspect, there was the tale, which no one could be sure was apocryphal, of the would-be buyer who had thoughtlessly spent his down payment in a cigarette machine.

  In the middle of this indictment Morley’s attention had begun to stray; he was trying to make up his mind about something. The deputy had seen the signs before—the tightly locked fingers, the focused stare that saw nothing but some abstract weighing of a possible good against a possible evil. He waited prudently, and Morley said slowly, “I don’t think it will help, but the only thing out of the ordinary in the past few days—apart from the letter—was that my wife had discovered that an old friend of hers was living here in Albuquerque. Not far away, in fact.”

  This was more like it, thought the deputy, concealing a flash of elation; this was the first crack in the happy unimpeachability of these two households—because there could be no doubt, from the other man’s tone, as to the sex of the old friend.

  “His name is Henry Conlon,” said Morley, “and you can reach him . . .”

  Unlike his brother-in-law, Arthur Pulliam was openly shocked and shaken when asked to account for his whereabouts at the presumed time of Jennifer Morley’s death. He said in a horrified voice, “You can’t possibly think that / had anything to do with this terrible business? Good God, she was my wife’s sister!” Another thought struck him then. “I can’t believe that Richard means to insinuate, just because Jennifer spent a good part of the day before yesterday here, helping me with the disposition of my wife’s personal belongings, that there’s any reason whatever to—”

  He floundered here, and not because he had lost the thread of his sentence. It was clear that this was the first investigating officers had heard of Jennifer’s lengthy and solitary presence in the Pulliam house, and that they were extremely interested.

  They had done the routine photographing and fingerprinting at the time, but because of the apparent nature of the crime and the fact that that short and terrible chase had stopped well short of the bedroom, they had paid little attention to that area beyond having Arthur Pulliam verify that his wife’s jewelry and his own valuables were intact. Certainly it had occurred to no one to dredge through the closets and bureau drawers and the pretty little desk which Arthur now indicated to the deputy.

  But Jennifer Morley had done just that, and been strangled two days later. The two facts might be totally unconnected; on the other hand, they might have the tightest possible link.

  Attention went back, temporarily, to Arthur Pulliam and his movie, and it was at this point that the deputy’s curiosity began to stir. It was not so much that the other man could not remember the name of the movie and was not even sure of the theater—“It’s somewhere on Central”—as his obvious perturbation. He took off his sparkling glasses and polished them as vigorously as if they had just emerged from the bottom of a mud puddle, and although explanation of his own motives was clearly something that did not come easily to him, he embarked on a long string of propitiatory phrases.

  His own recent loss . . . tried to bury himself in his work and had perhaps been overdoing it . . . sometimes a movie, even a bad one, was the best way to relax . . .

  Which might be true, except that it hadn’t worked very well for Arthur Pulliam, thought the deputy. Had he had a female companion with him, to whom he didn’t care to admit? That would be interesting even if not criminal, and some of these solid, board-meeting types were the very ones . . . but he looked again at the neat respectable face and thought, No.

  Some overriding worry on his mind, then which had driven him to a movie he could scarcely remember this soon afterward? Or simply grief and strain, as he said? Certainly Pulliam was unbreakably alibied for his own wife’s murder, unless—

  In any sizable city there were areas in which desperate men could be bought for any purpose. It seemed farfetched, as there was no apparent reason why Pulliam should have wanted his wife dead, but unless and until something turned up in Colorado the two husbands were the only line to pursue.

  As in the case of Molly Pulliam, there was next to no physical evidence to go one. Gravel did not take tire prints, even if the killer had come by car; again, if it had been he who replaced the receiver after Jennifer Morley had laid it down to go out to her death, Richard Morley had used the telephone, and the whole area of the desk on which it stood, to call friends in search of his missing wife before notifying the authorities. An understandable procedure, but not helpful.

  Neither man bore any fresh cuts or scratches, but in view of the preliminary lab report it now appeared that Jennifer Morley had missed her assailant. Still, the interviews had not been barren. Richard Morley was disturbed about his wife’s “old friend,” and Arthur Pulliam had been flustered.

  Easy enough to look into Conlon; the deputy made a dubious note in his report as to the advisability of, maybe, having a closer look at Pulliam’s extracurricular activities. Through the services of an uncle of his by marriage, who had worked at the Heatherwood Construction Company for years, this was to have mildly surprising results.

  13

  EVE woke that morning with the sense of disaster that had followed her into sleep and colored her fragmentary dreams. She was not yet conscious enough to remember the cause, and when she first opened her eyes she thought it was something to do with the bewildering change that had come over her bedroom in the night.

  Where there should have been shafting sun, there was a strange greenish twilight, and the window across from the bed was an unfamiliar mass of leafy darkness. Eve had been so deeply and exhaustedly asleep that she had to prop herself up, blinking, before she realized that at some point a huge cottonwood branch had come down and was pressed against the panes. And if she had not heard that—

  Was that smoke on the air?

  Fortunately, even without smoke, there was seldom any doubt as to Ambrose’s whereabouts; when he was busy at some totally silent activity it was in a hivelike way, constituting a cone of its own in contrast to the innocent silence of chairs and tables. At the moment he was absorbedly burning slices of bread in Eve’s horizontal toaster—this was still a novelty to him—and there was a neat black pile beside him.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” said Eve, limp and inadequate in her relief. “It’s a terrible waste of bread for one thing,” she added a little more briskly.

  “For the birds,” suggested Ambrose sweetly. “Birds don’t like burned bread.” To Eve, fully awake for not quite a whole minute, it seem
ed incredible that Ambrose could have been so active so early, but he had. The refrigerator door hung open a few listless inches, a carton of milk was leaking on the floor, there was a knife buried up to the very tip of its handle in the peanut-butter jar.

  First things first: Eve disconnected the toaster over Ambrose’s angry protest, put coffee water on, went back to her bedroom for the robe she hadn’t bothered with in her precipitous dash. The bowered effect lent by the leaning branch had a kind of eerie charm, but she supposed she would have to—

  Memory came back then, of the reason for the late evening, her exhausted sleep, her sense of catastrophe upon waking. Somewhere in this glittery morning Jennifer Morley’s body was being dealt with; equally, a murderer with strong hands was still sleeping, or having breakfast, or going briskly off to work. Unless—

  Eve brought her clock-radio into the kitchen and listened to it with a screening ear while she opened the windows and tried to wave out the layered blue smoke from the toaster, mopped up the spilled milk, rescued the peanut-buttery knife. She surprised Ambrose, on her entrance, backing out of the broom closet in a flushed and disconcerted way and clutching a crumple of sheeting to his chest.

  It had come, Eve realized, from the box where she kept rags for cleaning; she had to conceal them from Iris Saxon, who out of her own desperate need for thrift would have sewed or patched them indefatigably together. A memory flickered through her head and was gone. Ambrose held out the cloth and said in a tone of simple command, “Wash it.”

  Eve broke two eggs into a bowl and beat them with a fork. “It’s already clean, Ambrose. It’s a torn pillow-slip that got into the laundry yesterday.”

  “I wash it,” said Ambrose, and he sounded so fiercely anxious that although she could already look ahead to the resultant mess Eve said, “All right, but hurry up, I’m starting your scrambled eggs.”