“One thing I don’t see,” I said, “and that’s how, from outside, he could have known she’d leave the safe open when she left the room. And the safe’s against the outer wall; he couldn’t see it from outside. And it seems to me unlikely she’d have it standing open all evening every evening.”
“You can see it, though; there’s a mirror. You have to step close to the window, but you can see the safe in that mirror—the one on the wall near the door. He couldn’t see it from where he crouched in the bushes waiting, but the minute he saw her leave the room—and he could see the doorway all right from where he hid—all he had to do was step to the window and look through it into the mirror to see if the safe was standing open.”
“And if it hadn’t been?”
“How would I know? Maybe he’d wait till another night; maybe he’d watched her several times before, waiting for the safe to be open at the time she went for her glass of hot milk. Or maybe he figured to do the job anyway, whether the safe was open or not. He could have taken advantage of her leaving the room to get inside; he could have waited by the inner door for her to come back, have slugged or overcome her and tied her up and then taken his time about getting into the safe, one way or another. Maybe by making her give him the combination under threat of killing her. Or if he really knew his business as a burglar, he wouldn’t have had to do that; a good man could have got that safe open in fifteen minutes, and he’d have had as much time as he needed.”
“But he killed her. Why didn’t he just slug her? You say that’s what he would have done if she’d left the safe closed. Walter, I think she knew him. And that’s why I don’t believe it was a burglar.”
He frowned. “This is all guesswork, but I’ll reconstruct it for you—the way I see it. It goes fairly well whether he cased the job or not. He sees Mrs. Tuttle leave the room, goes in as soon as he can cut the screen. He goes first to the desk and looks quickly in the drawers—”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I’ll have to tell you one little thing we kept out of the papers. The gun she was shot with was her own gun; she kept it in the top drawer of her desk. A thirty-two automatic. We kept that fact out of the paper just on the off-chance that if the burglar didn’t know we knew the gun was missing he might keep it—or even try to sell it. Just an off-chance, but nothing to lose.
“But back to the reconstruction—he goes through the desk first, at least the top drawer of it, and snags onto the gun. Then he goes to the safe and is taking the money out of it when Mrs. Tuttle returns. She sees him and he shoots, first shot wild and second into her forehead.”
He held up a hand. “Now don’t ask me why he didn’t just step across the room and kayo her instead. It doesn’t mean she knew him. It just means she’d had a good look at him and could identify him. For that reason he decides he has to kill her, and shoots.”
“But why, especially if he was wearing gloves, would he have taken the gun away with him? Why not just drop it, once he’d used it for killing?”
“Probably panicky, a gun makes a hell of a lot of noise inside a room. Likely he pictured the whole neighborhood waked up and a beat cop running toward the house. He’d want to keep that gun till he was clear of the neighborhood in case he had to use it again. But if he’s smart, damn it, he got rid of the gun as soon as he was in the clear.”
My glass was empty; I saw that Smith was sipping at his slowly, only an inch or so gone. I made myself another drink. And did some thinking.
I said, “You seem awfully sure about it being Grandma’s gun she was shot with. Any reason for being sure, except that it was the right caliber and you didn’t find it?”
“We’re sure. We had a bullet fired from it for comparison. Fired ten years ago, but that doesn’t matter; it had probably never been fired since and the lands and grooves in the barrel hadn’t changed.”
I took a swallow of my drink. “How the devil did you find a bullet fired from it ten years ago?”
“It was still in the wall, behind the mirror.” He grinned. “Your brother fired it, accidentally. One day shortly after Mrs. Tuttle bought the gun to keep in her desk, Arch was fooling with it and it went off. It had almost a hair trigger, he told me; he was just barely touching the trigger when it fired. The bullet went into the wall. He said Mrs. Tuttle bawled the hell out of him but never went to the expense of having the plaster patched. She just hung a mirror over it. Anyway, we dug out the old bullet and it matched the two that were fired Monday night. So we’re not guessing about what gun was used.”
Arch hadn’t told me about that, but then again I hadn’t asked him.
Smith said, “So that’s that. And what’s wrong with it as a reconstruction of the crime?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Not a thing, except that I don’t believe it.”
He put down his glass, still half full, and turned around to face me squarely. He said, “Rod, you’re crazy. You’ve been seeing too many mysteries on television or in the movies or something. In real life, the simple explanation is the right one. And most murders are done by professional criminals, not amateurs leaving a string of false clues. Or—wait a minute, do you know anything about this that I don’t know? Or have you remembered anything?”
“I haven’t remembered anything. And no, I don’t know anything about it except what you’ve told me.” There was, of course, the expression on Robin’s face last night, but I wasn’t going to bring Robin into this. And besides, I hadn’t believed it was a simple burglary with murder incidental even before last night.
“Then what are you going on?”
“A feeling, I guess. A hunch. Only it might be more in this case because it might be something I know or remember in my subconscious mind and that my conscious mind has forgotten as part of the amnesia.”
“Then why don’t you go to a psychiatrist, like Arch has been wanting you to?”
“I don’t know, Walter. All I know is that I won’t, I can’t. And I don’t think it’s because I might find out that I did the murder myself. I think if I knew I’d done a psychopathic killing, I’d want to give myself up. I don’t know why it is. Call it an unreasoning phobia against psychiatric treatment, call it anything. Maybe just plain damn stubbornness.”
“All right, it’s your business whether you want treatment for your amnesia or not. Nobody can force it on you as long as you’re sane otherwise. But about the murder. I hate to see you working yourself into a tizzy—and you are—over nothing. Listen. We’ve checked every other angle, every other possibility, forty ways for Sunday. Mrs. Tuttle’s accounts and papers are in perfect order and have been checked by accountants. The only man who was in any possible position to be robbing her is Hennig, and he wasn’t. And he’s got lots more money than she had, anyway. It’s true she didn’t have many friends, but she didn’t have any serious enemies either that we’ve been able to find. She was a pretty shrewd dealer and implacable in getting anything she had coming, so a lot of people disliked her—but none to the point of murder.
“So who does that leave? You and Arch are the only ones who benefited by her death. Arch was in Chicago—and don’t think we didn’t check that thoroughly. But—well, let’s grant that he could have hired an assassin to kill her, and to make it look like a burglary, at a time when he was out of town.”
“I’d never even thought of that. But he wouldn’t; Arch is no killer.”
“There are better arguments than that why he wouldn’t have. One, he’d be placing himself in the hired killer’s hands, susceptible to blackmail all the rest of his life. Regardless of Arch’s morals, he’s too smart a boy for that. Second, he wasn’t under any pressure for money; he knew he was going to get that inheritance soon anyway. Did he—or anybody—happen to tell you about Mrs. Tuttle’s heart condition?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“That she didn’t have very long to live anyway. Her heart was bad and getting worse. Doc Eggleston, your family doctor, told me she might have died of cor
onary thrombosis any minute—or maybe lived a year or two but not likely much longer than that. With his inheritance coming that soon, Arch wouldn’t have put his head in a noose by committing murder. Neither would you, for that matter, if you nurse any wild idea you might have killed your grandmother for money. You knew about her heart condition too. Probably why nobody thought to mention it to you, and it couldn’t have been a factor in her being murdered, any way that you look at it.”
“I never thought that I—”
“Wait, we’re finishing with Arch first. There’s still one possibility; he might have had adequate motive for killing her—or hiring her killed—if for any reason she was turning against him, if he had cause to think she might disinherit him. Let’s face it that Arch loves money, even if he hates to work for it. But luckily we happen to know that Arch wasn’t in the doghouse; he was still the apple of Grandma’s eye. She was in Hennig’s office the very day of the murder, on minor and irrelevant business, and they chatted a while and Hennig says she mentioned—he forgets in what connection—that she was increasing Arch’s allowance. Probably just on account of rising prices, but it shows he was still in her good graces or she wouldn’t have done that, prices or no. And she still had strong faith in him as a writer. God knows why.”
“Maybe she read his plays and liked them.”
“Whatever the cause, Arch was her one weakness. We can rule out Arch. Along with everybody else, including you. Which gets us back to the burglar, which is where we belong. Maybe you don’t realize one thing, incidentally; there really are burglars, you know. And sometimes when surprised in the act of burglary, they really do kill people. Come down to headquarters sometime and I’ll show you records of cases right in this very city and within recent years.”
I said, “That takes care of Arch. And plenty well, although it never even occurred to me to suspect him. Now take care of me as well, if you can. Wait a minute, I’ll admit I had no sane or logical motive and from what I know of myself wouldn’t have killed anybody even if I had a sane and logical motive. But I was drunk. For all I know maybe I was suddenly off my rocker. The fact that I went into shock and amnesia because I found a body doesn’t make me look too mentally stable. Anyway, ignore my apparent absence of motive and stick to the facts. Have you been able to find out where I was or what I was doing before you saw me downtown around eleven-thirty?”
“No, and I don’t give much of a damn what you were doing because I did see you there and then—and spoke to you—and I’m convinced Mrs. Tuttle died at just about that time.”
“That’s one thing I want to ask you. I’ve never studied forensic medicine—or at least I don’t think I have—but I have the impression that no medical examiner is going to be sure within half an hour of how long a body has been dead. So why couldn’t Grandma have been killed at eleven o’clock or at twelve o’clock—and in either case I could have had opportunity.”
He sighed patiently. “All right, the M. E. could have been off half an hour, but it’s pretty unlikely he’d be that far off since he saw her as soon as he did and estimated an hour. That’d be a 50 percent variation, but I’d buy it except for the other facts. Henderson’s hearing one of the shots—and it’s not too strange he didn’t hear both; a passing car might have been gunning its engine or something just at the time of one of them. Or, more likely, he did hear both, but the first one didn’t penetrate his awareness; the second one did. Things like that happen; I’ve come across them. But even more important than that is the regularity of Mrs. Tuttle’s habits. You could set your watch by her, and eleven-thirty was her time for that glass of warm milk and she was coming back through the door with it when she died. And the autopsy showed, incidentally, that she’d taken a sip of milk—one sip—just about one minute before she died. Probably in the kitchen, sampling it to see if it was the right temperature. And—I don’t know how the reporters missed this but they didn’t mention it in the news stories so I don’t know whether you know it or not, but her wrist watch broke when she fell and the hands are at eleven-thirty-three.”
He finished the last of his drink and put down the glass. He said, “All right, you’re thinking that watches can be set to any given time after they’ve stopped. And that women’s wrist watches are notoriously inaccurate. But damn it, Rod, don’t look at any one of those points; look at all of them added together. Mrs. Tuttle died within minutes of half past eleven, and if you killed her then I must be your accomplice to give you the alibi I do give you. I’m sure what time it was when I saw you and you couldn’t have got there more than a few minutes sooner than you did and—oh, hell, just because you can’t remember what did happen quit reaching for impossibilities so you can assume the worst thing you can think of. You didn’t kill her; you couldn’t have.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s forget it, and thanks. One more drink?”
“Well—I’m not on duty for two and a half hours yet and I don’t feel that first one. Guess I can stand one more.”
I made one for each of us. Definitely I was beginning to feel the drinks I’d had, and probably that was to the good. I hadn’t thought about Robin for minutes, and I hadn’t been wondering where she was and what she was doing.
And I thought I’d be able to sleep when Walter Smith left.
All right, I was thinking, then I hadn’t killed Grandma. Walter had probably put his finger on part of it when he’d said that just because I couldn’t remember what really had happened, I was trying to convince myself of the worst. Just because I had amnesia, from an obvious cause, that didn’t have to mean I was psychopathic.
And then I told myself—but there’s something. If there wasn’t something that I’d known before my amnesia and which my subconscious mind didn’t want me to know, why was I morbidly afraid of psychoanalysis in general, hypnotism in particular?
I knew something I didn’t want to know. Amnesia was my defense against myself. And if I broke it down, if I remembered—
Glass in hand, I went to the window and stood staring down into the lighted street. Behind me, Walter said, “What’s eating you, Rod?”
“I wish I knew,” I told him.
“Well, if it will help you straighten yourself out, I sure hope we get that burglar—and send him to the chair.”
I said, “I suppose I hope you get him—he may kill again if you don’t. But I don’t wish him the chair. I’d settle for a sentence.”
“Why, in God’s name? Unless you don’t believe in capital punishment at all.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe in any form of violent death or inflicting unnecessary pain.”
He grinned. “Rod, I’d forgotten that about you. You were the boy who wouldn’t go hunting or fishing because you didn’t like to hurt or kill animals. Say—do you follow through on that? Maybe I didn’t think to ask you back then, but why aren’t you a vegetarian if you don’t like animals killed? Or are you one by now?”
“No, I’m not a vegetarian. I accept that we’re carnivorous and that animals have to die so we can eat. But I don’t believe we have to enjoy killing. I’ll admit we have to kill other creatures in order to survive. Even if we were all vegetarians, we’d have to do that to keep the animal—not to mention the insect—populations down. We’d be crowded off the earth and out of our own homes if we didn’t kill.” I found myself pacing up and down the room, empty glass in my hand. I said, “What I object to in hunting—or even fishing—is that men take pleasure in killing, make a sport of it. If a man hunts or fishes to eat, to survive, all right. We all had to do that once, back when we were living in caves and trees. A man got a kick out of killing then because making a kill meant food for him. And because he was still a savage anyway.
“Don’t give me the line that modern man hunts for food. He doesn’t, not people like us anyway. One hunter out of a thousand gets enough game to pay for the time he spends, not to mention what he’s paid for equipment to hunt with. It’s because the human race has a hangover from s
avagery—a hangover in red.”
“But damn it, Rod, hunting serves a purpose. You yourself admit animal populations have to be kept down so we can survive. If deer, for instance, weren’t checked, they’d ruin every bit of woodland by overbrowsing it, and then starve to death and die anyway. Some of them have to be killed each year.”
“Sure, but it doesn’t have to be done for pleasure. It could be done—and more easily and effectively—by a few professional hunters hired by the state. Men who were real marksmen and could kill an animal painlessly with one shot. Maybe even some painless poison could be used. My point is that killing, even necessary killing, is an unpleasant duty. Like—well, like garbage collecting. That’s got to be done too, but it’s done by men who do it for a living and not for pleasure. If you ran into a man who spent his vacation collecting garbage for the fun of it you’d think he was perverted, and you’d be right. But he wouldn’t be a tenth as perverted as a man who goes out and spends his vacation killing animals—and too damn often not doing a good job of it and letting them get away wounded to suffer and die horribly—for enjoyment.”
Walter put down his glass and stood up.
“Got to go,” he said. “Got to eat before I report in. How’s about having something to eat with me?”
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t want to eat.” I hadn’t eaten since noon, but I wasn’t hungry.
“Okay. Be seeing you. And I’ll let you know if we make any progress—even if you’re too soft-hearted to want the killer fried.”
At the door he turned back. “Thanks for the lecture,” he said. “And damn your hide for it. I’m on vacation week after next and have a hunting trip planned. I’m still going, but maybe I’ll enjoy it a little less than I did last year. So long.”
“So long,” I said. “And thanks a lot for coming up.”
When he’d left I made myself another drink and then sat trying to read because I didn’t want to think, but the type was hard to focus on and I gave up after a while when I realized that I’d just read a whole page without getting any sense out of it at all.
We All Killed Grandma Page 9