My Son, the Murderer

by Patrick Quentin

  “Yes, during the first act I was sitting in the aisle seat, and, sitting next to me with the empty seat between her and your friend was—Lady Phyllis. You see, Lieutenant, the member of our party who was missing during the first act was my wife.” His left hand, with its tapering fingers, went up to stroke the goatee. “During the long course of our married life, my wife has invariably and courageously confronted all the domestic crises that have arisen. It is one of the many virtues in her which I have learned to cherish. It was, as you may know, my wife who, single-handed, brought Mr. Sheldon into our lives at a very dark period for us. Last night, it was my wife who offered to cope with the situation. My wife was convinced that she would be able to mollify Mr. Sheldon. She offered to return immediately to plead with him and I consented to her going, for she seemed to me, as she had always seemed to me, the obvious and inevitable—champion.”

  His hand was still on Norah’s shoulder. He smiled down at her with benignity—the godhead rewarding the faithful servant.

  “So now, Lieutenant, I am sure you understand why I have been reticent with you. In the light of what happened at Mr. Sheldon’s last night, it would have been cruel to my wife to tell you the truth. Cruel—and, of course, quite unnecessary, because the little episode had a far less villainous end than the one suggested by Mr. Duluth.”

  Basil Lacey’s eyes bestowed their blue patronage on Peter and then on me.

  “I am, of course, the first to sympathize with the position of these gentlemen. They are, quite naturally, keenly anxious to save young Duluth from the consequences of his terrible deed. But”—he shrugged—“kindly as I feel toward them, they can hardly expect me to distort the truth merely to assuage their anxiety. My wife did go to Mr. Sheldon’s—yes. And afterwards she did return to the theater in time for the interval and thus gave herself, quite accidentally, an alibi with Miss Staines. But she did not kill Mr. Sheldon. As soon as she rejoined us, as soon as she was able, she let us know what had happened. And there are, of course, no grounds whatsoever for doubting her. When she arrived at Mr. Sheldon’s, she found Mr. Sheldon dead.”

  As I looked at him, I felt tense as the spring of a set mousetrap. When Angie had said that, I had believed her. There had been every reason, emotional and factual, to support her claim. But Basil Lacey … ! How could he stand there, so smug, so securely certain that the game was already won? How …? He had paused for a moment, but his hand, lifted almost as if in benison, still commanded silence.

  “And now,” he said, “I feel it my duty to tell you something which, I fear, will once and for all establish the guilt of Bill Duluth. When my wife found Mr. Sheldon dead, she noticed something in his clenched fist. She bent down to examine it. It was a button—a button with fragments of grey and white check tweed attached to it. The only time I ever saw Bill Duluth, he was wearing a coat of that description. I am sure, Lieutenant, that, when you arrested him, you noticed such a button missing from the jacket.”

  He paused, glancing at Barnes, generously permitting him to interrupt if he so wanted. When Barnes said nothing, he went on:

  “That this button was, apparently, no longer in Mr. Sheldon’s hand when you found him, proves only one thing. It proves that the Messrs. Duluth, in their obsessed attempt to shield young Bill, removed the button before they summoned you to the scene.”

  He was smiling at me; he was smiling at Peter. The understanding one whose faculty for forgiveness was infinite!

  “I am sorry, gentlemen, I am terribly sorry. But, when my wife’s security is at stake, there are, with me, no other loyalties.”

  I could hardly believe it. It was impossible that even Basil Lacey, with his grotesque powers of self-deception, could fail to see the holes in what he seemed to think was a densely meshed net. I was raring to get at him. But Iris and Peter were on the warpath, too. And instantly Peter challenged:

  “Why didn’t your wife call the police?”

  Simultaneously, Iris said: “If Mr. Sheldon was dead, how did she get in? Did she have a key?”

  It was Iris to whom Basil Lacey chose to reply. With that same, now fatuous complacency, he said:

  “No, Mrs. Duluth, I do not believe my wife had a key. As I remember, she told me that she found the front door open.”

  “Open!” echoed Iris. “Why in heaven’s name should the front door have been open?”

  “That, Mrs. Duluth, with or without invoking heaven, I am not in a position to say.”

  “So,” cut in Peter, “she arrived there after Mr. Sheldon was dead?”

  “Yes, Mr. Duluth.”

  “And she left the theater before the play began?”

  “Just before.”

  “At eight-forty then. She left the theater at eight-forty. Mr. Sheldon wasn’t killed until nine-twenty. The theater is at 54th and Sixth Avenue. If she went by taxi, or even if she walked, it couldn’t have taken her more than twenty minutes to get to Ronnie’s. According to you, she took over forty minutes. Why? How is that possible? What was she doing?”

  It was a tribute to Basil Lacey’s strength of personality that none of us even thought to look at Norah Lacey herself. She was quite submerged in the background of her husband—like Phyllis, like Jean, a mere appendage.

  Basil Lacey took up Peter’s challenge with the familiar serenity.

  “No one claimed, Mr. Duluth, that my wife went directly to Mr. Sheldon’s. Isn’t it obvious that she was faced with a difficult interview? Isn’t it obvious that she needed time to think, to arrange the arguments she would have to employ?”

  “Is that what she was doing for forty minutes?” asked Peter. “Loitering in the streets? Arranging her arguments?”

  “Precisely, Mr. Duluth.”

  My time had come then. With a wonderful glow of satisfaction, I said to Basil Lacey: “So she arrived at Ronnie’s after nine-twenty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since she was back at the theater for the interval at nine-forty-five, she must have arrived at Ronnie’s around nine-twenty-five?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And she could only have stayed a few minutes? That’s all the time she had, wasn’t it?”

  “Only a few minutes.”

  I got up. For the first time I felt able to look at Lieutenant Barnes straight in the eyes because, at last, I was the one with the trump card.

  I said: “I can prove that Mrs. Lacey wasn’t at Ronnie’s at nine-twenty-five. At nine-twenty-five Miss Sheldon returned there. She’s kept it from you, but I know she’s more than ready now to make a full statement. There’s no doubt she was there because she repeated word for word a phone conversation that took place between Jean and me at nine-twenty-five. So, if Miss Sheldon was there at nine-twenty-five, Mrs. Lacey was not there at nine-twenty-five. And if Mrs. Lacey was not there at nine-twenty-five, she was there before Ronnie was killed…”

  “Nonsense,” Basil Lacey’s voice boomed over mine. “This is a ruse, Lieutenant. This is just another of their futile attempts to shift responsibility. My wife arrived after the murder. It was Bill Duluth who killed Mr. Sheldon. The button …”

  Peter broke in there: “Oh, yes, Mr. Lacey, the button.”

  His voice was calm, but the calm was a little exaggerated. It always sounded that way when he was making a great effort to control excitement.

  “It’s true that there was a button missing from Bill’s jacket. Whether that button was ever in Ronnie’s hand, I don’t know. Certainly neither I nor my wife nor Jake removed it. But, if it was at one time in Ronnie’s hand, I think I know why it was there. The murderer found it—on the stairs or in the living-room, wherever Ronnie had struggled earlier with Bill. And, when he found it, he deliberately planted it in Ronnie’s hand after death as a false clue in the hopes that it, like the gun, would convince the police of Bill’s guilt.”

  His eyes, fixed on Basil Lacey’s face, were as unrevealing as Barnes’s.

  “I think the time’s come to let you know that I’ve been able to
discover something else, Mr. Lacey. After I’d talked to Hollywood, I took Bill’s picture and checked with the picture houses in the general area of Ronnie’s house. On Third Avenue I found a box-office clerk who identified him immediately. Last night he bought a ticket from her at five past nine. The girl remembers him clearly because she told him the feature had just started and he—as she described it—didn’t seem to listen. He seemed in a daze. So”—he gave a slight shrug— “Bill has an alibi after all. There is no possibility in the world that he could have killed Ronnie. And since Bill isn’t guilty, and since your wife couldn’t have arrived at the time you claim …”

  I wasn’t listening any more. With my awakening joy, my feeling of release, the sensation of unreality had come back. Peter couldn’t have said that! It wasn’t possible that, after so many hours of anguish and despair, Bill could have been saved by the banal, the routine, the completely anticlimactic medium of a cinema box-office clerk.

  But there was so much then to absorb my attention. There wasn’t only Bill; there wasn’t only the surge of my own joy; there was Barnes, very quiet, still uncommitted; there was Norah Lacey huddled forward on the chair arm; and there was Basil Lacey.

  And, even now, it was Basil Lacey, with his flair for stage center, who dominated the scene. For a few moments, he had flinched under Peter’s words as if each syllable had been a little whip, stinging his face. But now that mood was over and a new mood had taken its place. It was, of course, a godlike mood.

  With great dignity, he turned to Barnes. “Are we to suppose, Lieutenant, that Mr. Duluth is speaking the truth?”

  Barnes was looking at him as he had so often looked at me, with that steady absence of hostility which was far more ominous than any open accusation.

  “This is the first time I have heard of the alibi, Mr. Lacey. But I’ve known Peter Duluth for some time and I have a great respect for him. I, for one, would accept any statement he made.”

  There, astonishingly, was Barnes’s endorsement. Even Basil Lacey could not ignore it.

  “Then—then Bill Duluth is innocent?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Then …”

  Very slowly Basil Lacey turned and looked down at his wife. His hand no longer was anywhere near her. The fingers were fluttering above the chair arm, as if they feared contagion. And his face registered—pity, yes, because Basil Lacey was a “merciful” man, but it also registered shock and appalled understanding. It was the look of The Master Betrayed.

  “Norah! ” he said in a tone of gentle reproof. “Norah, you poor unfortunate woman! Why did you lie to me? Why didn’t you tell me that you had killed Mr. Sheldon?”

  24

  Basil Lacey’s voice stopped. In the silence and stillness that followed, it was as if we were a film and a single frame had stuck in the projector. We were all of us looking at Norah Lacey. She sat there on the arm of the chair, huddled forward, her arms clasped round her as if she were out in a bitter wind. I hardly recognized her. She had withered like a dying plant.

  It was Jean who came alive first. She ran to Norah’s side, dropped down on the floor by the chair and took one of her mother’s hands. That hand, suddenly revealed, worn and roughened from years of drudgery, seemed then a symbol of her whole life. So now, at last, I knew. Ronnie’s murder had just been the egg-money over again; another attempt to achieve for Basil Lacey what Basil Lacey demanded; Norah’s last, terribly consistent service as a wife.

  Later I should be able to absorb the fact that the woman whom I’d thought of as “comfort” and “home” was in fact as awe-inspiring a monster as her husband. But I couldn’t take it in then. I was too full of Barnes, too full of my anger against Basil Lacey.

  Peter had moved. I hadn’t been conscious of it. But now he was by a table near the window. He had picked something up and was glancing at it. Slowly, while the rest of us remained frozen in that arbitrary pattern, he crossed the room to Norah and held the thing out to her. I saw then that it was a theater program.

  “Mrs. Lacey, would you please open this at the cast of characters? It’s the program of Town Meeting.”

  Norah looked up at him and then at the program. She didn’t seem to have heard what he said.

  “Please, Mrs. Lacey, open it at the cast of characters.”

  Jean took the program, opened it and put it in her mother’s hand.

  Peter stood over them both. “The characters are listed in the order of appearance. Please read out the first name, Mrs. Lacey.”

  Norah was looking at the program. She didn’t say anything.

  Jean said: “Mummy, dear, do what he says. Read the first name.”

  “Borden,” said Norah.

  “All right. Tell me about Borden, Mrs. Lacey.”

  Norah’s hand holding the program, started to shake. It was horrible to look at her. Her eyes flashed to her husband. They were the eyes of a prisoner under torture.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Tell me, Mrs. Lacey. Tell me about Borden.”

  Norah looked down at the program. Slowly her face changed. Deep, bitter lines formed round her mouth and she sat there as if she were paralyzed by some overwhelming inner struggle. Then, at last, she said :

  “All right. Borden was the postman. He came in with a letter. He—he was thirsty. The woman gave him some—what was it? Iced tea. And he’d brought some grass clippings from the lawn in on his shoes and he was embarrassed about them. He said: ‘Messy, that’s what I am. My old woman’s always getting on at me for …’ I don’t know. He said something like that. And that was all. He only came in that once.”

  Barnes had moved to Peter’s side and was watching Norah too.

  Peter said: “Read the third name on the list, Mrs. Lacey.”

  Norah’s hand, holding the program, was still shaking. “Isobel Stratton. She was the principal woman’s friend, the woman from next door. She came in for some baking powder.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “A blue apron. And there was a pattern of red mice all over it … because she looked down at it and said: ‘What’ll they think of next? Marion gave it me for Christmas, so I have to wear it. But each time I put it on I feel like screaming. I …’” She stopped and dropped the program. Her hands went up to her face.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.”

  Impassively Peter bent and picked up the program. He moved with it across the room to Phyllis Brent. He held it out to her.

  “Perhaps you’d be good enough to read the fourth name.” Phyllis Brent scowled at him. “Haven’t got my glasses. Can’t read a line without them.”

  “Well,” said Peter, “get them then.”

  Phyllis glared at Barnes. “Does one have to be pestered by this man?”

  “I’d get your glasses, Lady Phyllis,” said Barnes. Grudgingly Phyllis stumped over to a table and came back with her lorgnette. She put it up to her nose and took the program.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  “The fourth name, Lady Phyllis,” said Peter.

  “Marion Stratton.”

  “All right, Lady Phyllis. Tell us about Marion Stratton.” Phyllis Brent shrugged. “God, I don’t know. Do you imagine I was paying any attention to that trash? There were other far more important things on my mind.”

  “But who is Marion? I don’t think anyone could ignore Marion.”

  “Why …”

  “What age was she? A little girl or a grown-up?”

  “She was the daughter of the woman Norah talked about.”

  “That’s right. She was Mrs. Stratton’s little daughter. And she came in howling her eyes out because some other kid had stolen her hoop. Surely you remember that? The noise she made was enough to deafen an army.”

  “I remember the howling, but as for what was going on, as for what the dreary child said …”

  “That’s enough.” Peter’s voice sliced into the sentence. “I know that in England Marion is exclusively a wom
an’s name, but that isn’t true in the States. Marion was not a little girl, Lady Phyllis, Marion was the son of the woman next door, a man of about twenty-two. Needless to say, there was no howling, even though you remember it so clearly. Marion was a man.”

  “Then the little girl was …”

  “There was no little girl in the first act, Lady Phyllis.” Peter leaned forward and tugged the program from her. “So the picture’s changed again, hasn’t it? Mrs. Lacey seems to know everything about the first act. You seem to know nothing.” He swung round to Barnes. Phyllis Brent still kept the lorgnette up to her nose. She, like Peter, had turned to Barnes. I looked at him, too. Although he had been deliberately effacing himself, leaving the field to Peter, some quality in him still seemed to dominate the room. When he spoke, his face, with the unrevealing grey eyes, was as impassive as ever.

  “You suggest, Mr. Duluth, that it was Lady Phyllis and not Mrs. Lacey who left the theater during the first act?”

  “Indeed I suggest it,” said Peter.

  Barnes looked down at his hand and then up again quickly. “That’s a point I happen to be able to confirm. My men, of course, have been investigating those theater tickets, too. They haven’t caught up with the Hollywood director, yet, but I’ve had them check all the New York ticket-brokers. A broker in the Piccadilly Hotel has a record of the two seats immediately behind the Laceys. He sold them to a couple who are old customers of his, a Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick of Union City, New Jersey. One of my men went out to interview the Fenwicks. They confirm Mr. Duluth’s claim that one seat was empty during the first act. They also confirm Mr. Lacey’s claim that he was sitting on the aisle seat with a woman next to him. My man didn’t have a photograph of Lady Phyllis or Mrs. Lacey and I was going to wait for a positive identification before I mentioned all this, but I don’t think the identification will be strictly necessary now, because the Fenwicks remember that during the first act the woman who was with Mr. Lacey lit a cigarette lighter and consulted the program. They are both positive that she did not put on glasses.”

  He turned to Phyllis. “And you, Lady Phyllis, have admitted that you can’t read a line without your lorgnette. I think that clinches it, doesn’t it? Mr. Duluth’s point has been proved.” So Barnes had known of Phyllis’s absence of alibi even before we came to the apartment, while he was still pressing me about Bill! And now it was he, of all people, who had used it to strike the final blow for our side. I didn’t even begin to understand him, but that didn’t matter.