We All Killed Grandma

by Fredric Brown

  I said, “Glad to know you again, Andy. How are things going for you?”

  “Not bad. Office of my own and building a fair law practice. The old man’s footsteps and all that.”

  “And I believe your father said you were married?”

  “Oh, yes. Long time. Got a son four and a half. You still with that advertising agency? I mean—are you going back to work for them?”

  “In a few days.”

  “Uh—nothing new on the burglary, is there?”

  I told him that there wasn’t, not that I knew of. A few questions of mine convinced me that he and I hadn’t been close recently; we’d last seen one another several months previously and then just a casual meeting like this one. And we hadn’t known one another well since boyhood; he’d never even met Robin, although he’d known I was married.

  But there was still one thing I could pump him about, and that was Grandma; his father had told me Andy had handled all or most of her work and then she and he had had a tiff over something and she’d gone back to Andy’s father.

  He pumped easily.

  “She was a hellion, Rod,” he said. “I don’t see how anybody got along with her. You didn’t, incidentally. You moved out as soon as you got back from college and got your first job.”

  “Arch seemed to get along with her all right. And your father.”

  “Arch would get along with anybody, anywhere, anytime, if he didn’t have to work. Sure, as long as he lived for free and got an allowance, he’d put up with anything. Funny, you’re her grandson and he isn’t, but he’s the one that takes after her—when it comes to attitude toward money. Arch will do anything for a buck—anything except work. And once he’s got it he hangs onto it. Have you seen him grab a check for a lunch or drinks or anything?”

  “Well—not in the last week,” I admitted. I’d noticed that about Arch already.

  “But about Dad. I never did understand why he liked her. Nil nisi bonum and all of that but she was one tough female, Rod. I don’t guess she was so tight with Arch, but when it came to business dealings she pinched her pennies so hard you couldn’t read the dates on them. And fussy! The reason she fired me was because I typed a date wrong on an option. A typographical error and one that didn’t even matter or cost her anything. You’d have thought I forged a check on her bank account.”

  “Did she suspect you of changing the date deliberately?”

  He shrugged. “Probably. She was psychopathically suspicious. Anyway, after that she divvied up her work between Dad and Hennig. Hennig handling the money and Dad doing the dirty work, the paper work. God knows why he bothered with it. Well, back to the salt mines.”

  The waitress brought us separate checks but I grabbed both of them. I grinned at Andy when he protested. “After what you said about Arch, I can’t let you think it runs in the family, can I?”

  “Okay, if you’ve got to a prove a point that doesn’t need proving, I won’t fight you for it. Thanks.”

  I drove home to 407 Cuyahoga and took the brief case up to my room, got comfortable and started to study its contents. They were just ads like any ads; if I’d written the copy for these I could do as well again, maybe better. Some of them were even a bit on the corny side and made me wonder why Gary Cabot Carver paid me two hundred a week. The Lee Hosiery file was more interesting than the others, but not because of the copy I’d written for it. Because of the contents of the stockings in the illustrations.

  I got to thinking about Robin. I wanted to see her again, and it was too soon even to try.

  It was hot in my room. I took my necktie off and wandered over to the window. The sun had burned away the clouds that had hidden it before noon and the bright outdoors looked more cheerful than the inside of my room.

  Too nice a day to study ads that didn’t seem to need studying anyway.

  I put my tie back on, and my suit coat, and I went downstairs. I got in the Linc and drove and after a while I found myself turning into the block Robin’s apartment was in.

  That was silly, pointless.

  I drove on, past the next corner, and parked there. I sat half turned and stared through the back window at the doorway I’d entered—how many thousand times?

  I parked there, and I sat there, and I wondered why. Robin, in all probability, wouldn’t even be home. She’d said she was going to start looking for a job today. But possibly she’d changed her mind about that. Or had job-hunted in the morning and was home by now, two o’clock.

  Why had Robin been afraid of me last night?

  The sun was beating down on top of the car. Why didn’t I have sense enough to drive away, to cool the car and myself by the motion and act of driving? Why was I sitting there anyway?

  I sat there.

  A shiny new little car, a Nash Rambler, drove past me and parked in front of the door of the apartment building. A girl got out and went into the building. Not Robin.

  I sat there.

  A few minutes later the girl came back out and Robin was with her. She wore a cool-looking white linen dress and carried a small musette bag. She and the girl got into the Rambler and took off.

  I gunned the Linc up to the corner and made a fast U-turn that would have got me pinched if a cop had been around, but no cop was around. The Rambler was two blocks away by then, but I lessened the distance a bit and then hung on. The Rambler was lemon yellow and easy to follow, even when we turned onto the Boulevard and into traffic. I kept a discreet distance, half a block or more behind it and most of the time kept at least one car between us. When we turned onto Lake Drive I suddenly realized where we were going. Or where they were going. The musette bag Robin had carried must contain a swim suit and towel and they were driving to the beach for a swim.

  I thought, if only I had my swim trunks in the car I could pass them easily and get there first, be on the beach when they reached it so they wouldn’t realize that I had started out by following them. But Robin knew the Lincoln; she might recognize it and me when I passed them. And besides I didn’t have my trunks in the car.

  I saw the Rambler turn in at the drive to the beach, but the car that was between us didn’t turn in, so I didn’t want to drive in right behind them; I kept on going a mile or so and then turned around and came back. I saw where the Rambler was parked and put the Linc down at the other end of the lot; then I strolled over to the long boardwalk, which is elevated a few feet above the beach.

  I strolled along the boardwalk and back again. I bought a coke and drank it and turned down three shoeshine boys in succession and then gave up and let the fourth one shine my shoes.

  Then I went back to the railing of the boardwalk and looked over, down on the crowded beach and this time I saw them. They’d spread a blanket and Robin was lying on it, on her back, her eyes shielded from the sun by glasses so dark they must have been almost opaque. The other girl sat on a corner of the blanket rubbing sun tan oil on her arms and shoulders.

  The blanket was red, bright red, and Robin’s two-piece suit, what there was of it—I believe it was what they call a Bikini suit—was bright yellow. A beautiful color combination but I didn’t look at it long. I was looking at Robin instead, at her long, slim but rounded legs, at the swell of her breasts under the bra, at the lovely olive tint of her skin between the bra and the trunks.

  And after a while, I don’t know how long, I got the hell away from there and found myself back at the Linc and then driving it away from there, driving fast. Along the shore road, away from town, toward nowhere. A siren behind me told me that I was going too fast and the state patrolman in the car confirmed the fact and gave me a ticket to prove it.

  I turned around at the next turnable-around-in place and drove back to town, this time so slowly that I was probably more of a road hazard than when I’d been speeding.

  The lemon-yellow Rambler was still parked in the lot by the beach, but I kept going. I stopped and bought a bottle of whisky and took it home with me.

  Home was a room like a hotbox,
although it was late afternoon now, almost five o’clock. I made myself a long cold drink with whisky and water and ice cubes. I took my coat and tie and shoes off and made myself physically comfortable. I opened all the windows wide and made a mental note to get myself an electric fan for the room.

  I sat and sipped at the cold drink and the shadows lengthened outside and the room got cooler and physically I felt all right.

  Mentally I felt like hell.

  I knew now that I’d lost something that was terribly important to me—and I didn’t know why I’d lost it, or any way of finding out. Or any way of getting it back.

  And the future, ahead of me, looked as blank as my forgotten past.

  Arch had been right; he couldn’t guess how utterly right he had been. I should never have looked up Robin. I should not have gone to the apartment to see her; I should not have taken her to dinner last night; I should not have followed her to the beach this afternoon. I shouldn’t see her again, ever.

  At least not until and unless I knew what had prompted that sudden expression of fear in her face last night, knew why she had divorced me, knew what had gone wrong between us.

  And did Robin think, despite her protest to the contrary, that I had killed Grandma Tuttle? If so, in God’s name why did she think so? Had I, at any time in our marriage, been suspect of being insane, of having homicidal tendencies?

  I wanted to beat my head against the wall so I could remember.

  I wanted to know whether I was a psychopathic murderer or not.

  The police thought I wasn’t. But how could they be sure? Henderson thought he had heard a shot at eleven-thirty, and at eleven-thirty I was alibied. But he could have been wrong; he admitted he’d thought the shot might have been a backfire. And he’d heard only one, whereas two shots had been fired in the room. And the medical examiner, seeing the body at half past twelve, had said she’d been dead about an hour, and since that fitted Henderson’s story the police obviously accepted it as being exact. But could a medical examiner be sure that a body had been an exact hour dead? As against half an hour? As against, for that matter, an hour and a half—then a psychopathic killer returning to the scene of his crime for whatever mad reason, suddenly becoming sane again and getting amnesia from the shock of realization of what he’d done? Perhaps—as he would have done if sane—phoning the police to give himself up and forgetting, during the call, who he was and what had happened?

  The cut screen, the money—only a couple of hundred dollars, it had been estimated—missing from the safe, the absence of the murder gun—yes, but if I’d been crazy enough to kill in the first place, might I not have, with a madman’s cunning, planned those things? Particularly if the murder had been done an hour and a half before the medical examination and, when Lieutenant Walter Smith had seen me, I had been returning to the scene of the crime…

  I made myself another drink. My fourth or fifth. Outside, it was getting dark.

  I wanted to talk to somebody. I wanted to talk to Robin, but that was out of the question. Pete Radik? I could tell things to Pete, get his opinions; they’d probably be good for me. But they’d be only opinions, and biased by his liking for me. Arch? No, not Arch.

  Suddenly I knew who I wanted to talk to—and listen to. Walter Smith, the homicide detective who was on the inside of the case if anyone was. I hadn’t talked to him since the night of the murder, and then he’d asked all the questions, or most of them.

  I got the phone book and there were nine Walter Smiths in it—two of them plain and seven with middle initials. I tried the plain ones first and got the right one on the second try.

  I said, “I wonder if you could spare a bit of time before you report in for work at midnight, Lieutenant. There are some things I want to ask you.”

  “Lay off the Lieutenant, Rod. You called me Walter. Sure, I’ll drop around. Let’s see, it’s eight o’clock. I’ll be there by nine. Okay?”

  I told him it was okay.

  I made myself another drink and the whisky was getting low. I didn’t know whether Walter Smith would drink with me or not, just before going on duty, but I wanted to have plenty on hand in case. I went down and got another bottle.

  It was a warm muggy night, with flashes of heat lightning in the distance. An unusually warm night for May? even late May. If this was a fair sample, it was going to be a hell of a summer.

  I didn’t like it outside, in the hot, flashing night. I was glad to get back to my room and finish the cool drink I’d made.

  The hands of my watch crawled to nine o’clock and then past it, and at five minutes after there was a knock on the door.

  CHAPTER 7

  HE WAS slightly under medium height and on the chubby side. He didn’t look like a detective, but good detectives aren’t supposed to. And I hoped that he was a good detective because he didn’t think I was a killer. Or did he? Could he be giving me rope to hang myself? No, hardly that or he’d have hung around more; I wouldn’t have had to call him.

  “Drink?” I asked him.

  “Well—one. No more.” He looked at me closely. “You’ve been hitting the stuff pretty hard yourself, haven’t you, Rod?”

  “Guess I have. Feeling low.” I made us two drinks. Handed him his.

  “All right,” he said, “what’s on your mind?”

  “Maybe you can straighten me out on some things, Walter. Let’s start at the beginning. How well did I know you? Where did we meet? That sort of stuff.”

  “Friends, but not close friends. We met—let’s see—about six years ago. You were just back from college. You had your first job, in the circulation department of the Chronicle, and you’d just moved away from Grandma Tuttle’s and had taken a room of your own—in a rooming house my mother ran. I was about the same age as you—a year older, I think—and still a rookie on the police force. My room was next to yours and we got to be friends, used to play cards some, once in a while went out on double dates together, even shot a bit of pool and bowled once in a while.

  “You stayed there a year or so and then moved away—up in the world, I guess—you were making more money and took a bachelor apartment instead of just a furnished room. We kept on seeing each other for a while, and then it got less and less frequent. Lately it’s been only when we happened to run into one another accidentally. Last time I saw you—before Monday night—was a month or so ago, on the street. We talked a few minutes and you suggested we drop in somewhere for a drink or a cup of coffee, but I didn’t have time.”

  “Did you know Robin?”

  “Met her one night, that’s all. I came into a restaurant—Ricci’s—to eat and you and Robin were at a table and had just ordered. You introduced us and asked me to sit at your table and I did. That’s the only time I ever saw her. Nice-looking girl. I’m married too, by the way, and you met my wife once under fairly similar circumstances, only it was my night off and a tavern instead of a restaurant. I’ve been married four years, got a kid two and a half. Well, I guess that gives you the picture of how well we knew one another. Pretty well for a year or so and then—well, you know how things like that happen, people drift apart.” He grinned reminiscently. “You used to be nuts about cars, back then. Had a hot rod, a Model A that you spent most of your money on and loved like a brother.”

  “Guess I’ve still got a touch of it,” I said. “Picked up a ticket today for speeding.”

  “Want me to fix it for you?”

  I shook my head. “Let me pay the fine and teach myself a lesson.”

  He laughed. “Knew you were going to say that. I’ve offered three or four times to fix tickets for you, and you always insisted on taking your medicine. Well, what did you want to talk about?”

  “About the murder. Anything new on it?”

  He shook his head gloomily. “And this isn’t for publication, but I doubt if we ever will. We’ve picked up every known burglar in town and questioned the hell out of them, and haven’t got any reason to suspect one more than another, except that we c
ould eliminate a few who had pretty solid alibis. Must have been an out-of-towner, or somebody new to the game we don’t know yet. And if we do ever pick him up, how the hell would we prove a case against him?”

  “Ballistics?” I asked: “I mean if he kept the gun he shot her with—”

  “We can hardly hope he’d be that stupid, but of course it’s an outside chance. And outside of that, what could we get on him? There were securities in the safe—some of them negotiable—but presumably he took only the cash, and it wasn’t marked. And he either wore gloves or was damn careful in wiping out his prints. We’re pretty sure it was gloves. We lifted every print in or around the room and they’re mostly Mrs. Tuttle’s, some of Mrs. Trent’s, a few that are Arch’s. And yours on the outside doorknob and the telephone. Not even any footprints outside; the ground was too hard. We found scuff marks in a clump of bushes about ten feet from the window, but no clear prints. He must have hid there, watching the window, until he saw her leave the room, then he upped with his knife and cut the screen and went in.”

  “Don’t you think that shows he knew her habits?”

  “Possibly, not necessarily. If he’d cased the job, it wouldn’t have been too hard for him to find out. And a lot of people knew Mrs. Tuttle’s working habits—she was something of a local celebrity, Rod, as an elderly, eccentric woman in business. She’s been written up in news stories, feature articles, in both the daily papers here. She must have liked it, thought publicity was good for business, because she was always willing to talk to a reporter or a feature writer. Matter of fact, that gives me an idea.”

  “What?”

  “Got to ask Mrs. Trent if any reporters called on Mrs. Tuttle recently. If the burglar did case the job—if it wasn’t a random prowl—that’d have been the simplest way for him to find out things. He could have pretended to be a reporter—and probably have been invited right into the room he wanted to case and could have asked her all the questions he wanted. And if Mrs. Trent let him in, she might be able to give us a description. That’d help.”