Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “It’s my car. If I want to wreck it, I’ll wreck it.”

  “All right,” he said. “But let me out first.”

  She began to sing again. She was always singing. It was enough to drive a man crazy when he was trying to study; other times it could be rather pleasant, when she went up to the radio and sang along with the music, to him, in that personal kind of way she had… It was not exactly what one expected from marriage, but it was pleasant. But there were times when the singing and the radio made him want to kill her.

  She stopped singing and put the gas pedal to the floorboards as the inside of the car filled with light from behind; then a three-tone horn waved them aside and a big car passed them as if they were standing still. Janice spoke a sharp ugly word; she hated to be passed. They could see the twin tail-lights of the big car taking the curves ahead of them, and occasional headlights whipped past on the way to Washington, but at that time of night the traffic was sparse.

  “I mean,” Janice said, “it’s either gin or some lousy blend that nobody ever heard of, and then they come over to our place and swill Old Grand-dad like it was Coca-Cola.”

  The draft from the hood ventilator had blown her skirt back into her lap, and Hugh Phillips had had enough to drink, himself, that he found this interesting, even if it was his wife.

  “It’s not like during the war when you couldn’t get the stuff,” she said. She glanced at him and smiled a little, and brushed the skirt negligently into place. “Well, I’m glad you still like my legs, at least,” she murmured.

  Then they hit the curve down to Littlefish Creek, and there was a moving van with a flat tire parked on the road; and a car was just passing it, coming up from below. There wasn’t enough space left to take a motorcycle through.

  “Did your wife always drive when you rode together?” the black-haired man asked. Hugh Phillips watched him idly and thought that he should have been wearing a bright plaid shirt and hobnail boots and singing a song in French-Canadian dialect against a technicolor background. Instead he wore a very fine gabardine suit and had a notebook on his knee.

  “Usually,” Phillips said. “You see, it was her car.”

  The black-haired man glanced up from the notebook.

  “I mean,” Phillips said, “she had it before we were married. That made it her car.”

  Everything was quite clear of the parts he could remember, but he could not remember all of it. But he could see himself lying down against the side of the wrecked car with the windshield six inches in front of his face and the steering wheel above him; and above that the open door gaping to the sky. There were stars in the sky and he could see the top of a tree. The radio was still playing. He wanted to turn it off. One headlight at least was still burning, showing him, through the splashed windshield, the upward slope to the road with the trees and bushes shattered by their decent.

  The car rocked a little and he heard her sobbing outside as she tried to climb up what had been the bottom and was now the side, to reach him, and he could not make himself speak to her. He could only say over and over to himself, “Dear God, please God, don’t let the damn thing start to roll again. Don’t let it turn over again…”

  The hospital room was clean and bright with daylight and a Maryland state policeman stood by the door.

  “You didn’t think it was dangerous to let her drive in her condition?” the black-haired man asked.

  “She wasn’t drunk,” Hugh Phillips said. “She’d just had enough to make her stubborn. I didn’t think it was important enough to argue about. She’d always got us home all right before.”

  They were just talking about a girl named Janice that both of them knew.

  “You’d had a fight, hadn’t you?” the black-haired man asked.

  “Not exactly. She objected to my talking to a girl at the party.”

  “Did you continue the fight on the way home?”

  Hugh Phillips shook his head.

  “Did you have any more to drink while you were driving?”

  Hugh Phillips shook his head.

  “Did you stop anywhere along the road?”

  Hugh Phillips shook his head. He was working on the parts that were missing.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asked.

  “Don’t you remember? You told Sergeant Case when he arrived…”

  The state policeman moved a little. Apparently he was Sergeant Case.

  When she came into the light her hair had come down and her left arm was scraped and bleeding from the naked shoulder to the elbow, and her left thigh from the bared smudged girdle to the knee; the white dress almost completely ripped away on that side. She had lost her white pumps and she was covered with motor oil. She swayed a little from shock and hurt and gave the man hell for parking his truck on the pavement beyond a blind curve. He thought that no man had a right to see his wife like that, and he had better get out there and put a coat on her.

  “Tell me how it happened,” the black-haired man said.

  “Who are you?”

  “Holt. From the sheriff’s office.”

  Hugh Phillips said, “We came around the curve at fifty something, and the truck was parked there…”

  “Heading down?”

  Phillips nodded. “… and a car coming up was just passing it. There wasn’t any place else to go, so we went over. Where am I?”

  “You’re in the Emergency Hospital in Annapolis.”

  For a while he had not been anywhere. Being in Annapolis put him back into the world again, so to speak, and he knew what things would look like when he got outside. There would be old brick houses, and midshipmen from the Naval Academy on the streets in the late afternoon, and he could drop into the Tap Room at Carvel Hall for a drink, but he would have to do it alone.

  He remembered the state policeman asking questions while the doctor patched him up in the light of a flashlight. Then some men came along with a stretcher and loaded him on top of it and the doctor stuck a hypodermic in his arm. When he woke up it was daylight and they had cleaned him up and put him into a hospital nightgown. He tried his arms and legs and they worked. He could see and hear. He was in fine condition. Another doctor came in to tell him so. He was a very lucky man, the doctor said. In spite of the fine condition he was in he hurt all over.

  The black-haired man asked a question.

  “Yes, I’m quite sure she was driving,” Hugh Phillips said. The missing parts were flooding back and he did not like them. He wanted to get them out and done with—referred for action to the proper authorities, as you said during the war when you wanted to pass the buck. It did not seem to him that it made any difference who was driving.

  “Have you got the truck-driver yet?” he asked, and the voice that came out, remembering, suddenly belonged to somebody else. It was raw and savage, and startled him, because he did not feel like that about it at all. He just wanted to know if they had got him yet.

  “No, we’re looking for him.” Mr. Holt closed his notebook and ran his hand over his smooth black hair. They pushed something with rubber tires down the hall outside, talking. The black-haired man glanced at Sergeant Case and said reluctantly, “There was something about a cross, wasn’t there? You told Sergeant Case…”

  “Yes,” Hugh Phillips said. It was very clear now. “A black cross. He hit her with it. Then he kneeled beside her and hit her again. With the cross. Then he went back up to the truck and drove away.” He could see that they did not believe a word of it.

  II

  In the afternoon Sergeant Case brought a girl in to see him. She came in sideways and stood against the wall by the door, a little round-shouldered and awkward with embarrassment and uneasiness. She wore a gray flannel suit and a pink shirtwaist that tied in a bow under her chin. The state policeman said that her name was Shirley Carlson and that she had been driving the other car. Shirley Carlson said she was dreadfully sorry about the whole thing. Hugh Phillips said it was not her fault at all, and that made her feel a little
less uncomfortable, but not much. She went out of the room with the state policeman. Presently Mr. Holt came in.

  Mr. Holt came across the room and sat down on the bed lighting a cigarette, holding out the package as an after-thought. He had a powerful catlike body and his face had the impersonal handsomeness of a wood carving and the color of old mahogany. When he moved, the fine gabardine suit he was wearing seemed thin and fragile to contain the energy inside it.

  “She backs you up that your wife was driving,” Mr. Holt said. “You’re pretty lucky, kid.”

  Hugh Phillips said, “Yes. Jan is dead, the car’s smashed and I’ve got nine stitches in my leg. Everything is breaking right for me. Some days you can’t lose.” He refused the cigarettes.

  “That was a nasty gash you had,” Mr. Holt said. “For a while I wondered why there wasn’t any more blood in the car.”

  “I must have got it when I started pulling myself out of there,” Phillips said.

  The black-haired man nodded. “I figured that out after a while. You must have been pretty much in love with her to want to get to her that badly. If you’d waited…”

  “I couldn’t just lie there looking at her.”

  “How long had you been married?”

  “A year this fall.” He took a cigarette after all, and the smoke hurt his bruised lip. “She was working in the office at Johns Hopkins when I came back from the service. I had her do some typing for me. She was a lousy typist.”

  “You’re a professor at Hopkins?”

  “Thanks,” Phillips said. “Instructor. Sociology.”

  “I wouldn’t have picked her as the wife of a college teacher,” the black-haired man said idly.

  “Well, I did,” Phillips said stiffly. After a moment he went on, “I guess she’d never felt free to spend money on herself before. She told me she had supported her parents until they died and I guess she had just got into the habit of living on hardly anything. She had quite a bit saved up. I couldn’t say anything when she started to spend it. I didn’t want to. Things were pretty dull for her, anyway. I hadn’t taught much before, and they gave me a heavy schedule so I didn’t have time for much except studying. I didn’t really mind as long as she was having fun, although I’ll admit that some of the things she bought looked a little startling on campus.” He smiled. “On the other hand, a man gets kind of a kick out of suddenly discovering that his wife is a knockout, I mean, in the office she was a nice-looking kid with good legs, but her figure could have been anything in the clothes she used to wear… Of course, I looked her over on the beach before I decided to marry her,” he added, grinning quickly, and then he stopped grinning, annoyed with himself for telling a stranger things about his private life that were none of the man’s business.

  “Did she often drink as much as last night?” the blackhaired man asked.

  “She hadn’t had much,” Phillips said defensively. Then he gave in. “Well, she did drink more than I liked to, at least lately. Just the last few weeks. She hated it down here and said it bored her to death… We were put out of our apartment in Baltimore,” he explained in answer to the black-haired man’s look. “The folks gave us the summer place on the bay until we could find something else.”

  “Is there any relative of hers you want to notify?”

  He shook his head. “She had some people on the West Coast, but I never met them and as far as I know she never wrote to them. I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with them.”

  “What do you want to do about the funeral?”

  “My mother’s coming down from Baltimore,” Phillips said wearily. “Talk to her, will you? I don’t know much about funerals.”

  While he had been talking about her it had seemed for a moment as if Janice were alive again, and losing that feeling left an emptiness inside him.

  The black-haired man got up and walked to the window. Phillips watched him without interest. He did not dislike the man because the man would not believe him, but he wished he could be alone and not have to talk about it; and his leg and head both hurt.

  “I know what you’re thinking, kid,” Mr. Holt said without looking around. “You think your wife was murdered and we’re not doing a thing about it. You’re wrong. We’ll catch the man and if we don’t like his story…” He turned slowly, sitting down on the sill. “Look at it from my point of view, Phillips. The state police call me because a car has gone off the road and a man says his wife was murdered. With a cross, mind you. A black cross!”

  Hugh had been thinking, and he knew all about it. “Would it help any if I called it a socket wrench?” he asked.

  Mr. Holt looked up quickly.

  “He was fixing a tire,” Phillips said. “He was changing a tire and he had one of these big four-way wrenches to take the nuts off. When he ran down there he carried it with him. He probably didn’t even realize he had it …”

  “Are you sure or are you guessing?”

  “What else would a man like that be using that looked like a cross?”

  The black-haired man nodded. “All right. You’re probably right, kid,” he said slowly. “But where does that get us? You still called it a cross when they found you. That shows your condition.” He got up and came to the bedside table to crush out his cigarette. Then he stood over the bed, smiling a little. “I want to tell you the way I had it figured out first,” he said wryly, “so that you can see I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong. I saw a car that had gone off the road and a girl who could have smashed her head on a rock when she was thrown clear; and I asked myself, now why would the kid want to call it murder? Then I checked with the folks you had been visiting…”

  “That must have been interesting,” Phillips murmured.

  “… and I started to thinking about a young married couple quarreling,” the black-haired man went on. “He starts to get behind the wheel and she beats him to it. They drive off practically tearing up the road. The people in the house can smell rubber burning clear back from the gate. The young man doesn’t go for this so he makes his wife change places with him… All right, but it could have happened. He was mad, they were both mad. They were at least a little tight; I couldn’t get anybody to admit you were pie-eyed, but you’d both had a couple and then another couple… Well, they keep on fighting and presently the husband starts trying to scare the wife by crazy driving…”

  Hugh Phillips laughed abruptly.

  “It could have happened,” the black-haired man said calmly. “I’ve seen it happen. And then you go off the road and when you wake up she’s dead and your conscience tells you that you as good as killed her. You feel like a murderer and you’ve had a crack on the head and the thing that pops into your mind is that you’re going to be blamed for it if you can’t pin it on somebody else. You see the truck-driver with his socket wrench. He beats it because he thinks that you’re both dead and he’ll be blamed for leaving his truck like that. You stagger up to the road and tell everybody the truck-driver killed your wife with a black cross. Just to make it fancy.”

  The big man laughed pleasantly. “It was a nice pipe-dream,” he said. “The Carlson girl knocks it on the head. Your wife was driving. But I just wanted to show you that I’ve had some reason for the silly questions I’ve been asking.”

  It seemed to Hugh Phillips that this was largely irrelevant. He could not feel concerned over the possibility that he might have been suspected of concealing manslaughter in what appeared to be a remarkably stupid manner.

  “She was wearing a white dress,” he said. “There wasn’t much left of it but she had got it pretty well covered with motor oil and grease. If she…” He swallowed. “If she died instantly, how did she get back to the car to get her dress so dirty?”

  “There was oil all down the hillside, kid,” the blackhaired man said gently. “Your oil line must have gone the minute you started to roll. And besides…” He hesitated. “Oil and blood look pretty much alike at night,” he said.

  “On her hands, too,” Philli
ps said absently. He looked up. “I know what I saw, Mr. Holt. I’m just trying to find something to convince you. She had it all over her hands. How would she get that, just being thrown clear? I’m trying to show that she must have been alive afterward. Wasn’t there… Didn’t you find her footprints?”

  Mr. Holt said, “She’d lost her shoes, remember, and when I got there a dozen people had been tramping up and down the slope. Not much chance of finding tracks of a girl in her stocking feet. Sorry. And there wasn’t much oil on her hands.”

  “I know. I wiped them off. With my handkerchief.”

  “You didn’t happen to wipe your own hands with the same handkerchief, did you, kid? Before…?”

  Hugh Phillips sighed. It was no use at all and he let himself sink back to the pillow. “I guess I did. When I touched her… I’d got it all over me, climbing out. I wiped my hands and then hers and… and fixed her up a bit and put my coat over her. I guess I was crying. I don’t remember. I left her there with the light on because it seemed better than leaving her in the dark. Did I get all the way up to the road?”

  The black-haired man nodded. “You walked right out in front of a car. Scared the man to death; he had to go up on the cutbank to miss you.”

  “Bleating about a black cross,” Hugh Phillips said bitterly. “That’s what gets you, isn’t it? The black cross.”

  Mr. Holt nodded again. “It shows you weren’t exactly in your right mind, doesn’t it, kid? The way we figure it now, you heard the truck-driver trying to get into the car. Your first thought was your wife, naturally, and you wanted her to be all right so badly that you jumped to the conclusion it was she. You weren’t thinking very clearly, but you got it fixed in your mind that she was alive; and then you looked around and saw her lying there and this man was kneeling beside her holding this wrench that he had forgotten about. You assumed hazily that he had killed her.” He spread his hands. “Why should he kill her, Phillips? Give one good reason! It doesn’t make sense.”

  The story sounded so plausible that he found himself wondering if it had not really happened that way, and when he answered, his reasoning seemed far-fetched and improbable.