Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  He went down and kicked among the leaves, some still oilstained. Everything looked different in daylight; and it was difficult to remember how far it had seemed to the road after he had left her lying there that night. He wandered back among the trees and found a white high-heeled pump among the dead stuff on the hillside. The suede was matted with dried rain and the side on which it had been lying was dark and caked with earth. The discovery did not mean anything. It was not a clue. It only showed what degree of thoroughness he could expect of the black-haired man’s investigations. The shoe could have been flung there when she was thrown clear or kicked there later. It only showed that he was a fool to come here because nothing he could find after this time would mean anything, except a socket wrench, and he had seen the truck-driver take that with him.

  Sand Point, Janice had said, after she had been there long enough to get tired of it, was out at the end of nowhere, and why any person would deliberately choose to live in a place where you had to go a quarter of a mile to the mailbox and five miles to the nearest store, and then you didn’t have anything except the store and gasoline pump and a sign saying Rio Vista; why any civilized human being would deliberately exile himself or herself to a forgotten corner of the woods like that, she couldn’t understand. Even if the view was good, she couldn’t understand it. Views were all right, but they were like movie stars: you liked them to look at, but to live with? Nix.

  “You can let me out at the mailbox,” Phillips said.

  “Don’t be silly,” the girl said. “You can’t walk that road with your leg, and I’ve got to turn the car around, anyway.”

  It had been different when they first came there, and as they drove up he remembered the way she had looked, seeing it for the first time through the trees. Why, it’s a log cabin, she had said a little uncertainly; and then she had seen the wide expanse of the bay glittering beyond with early morning sunshine. She jumped out when they stopped and ran to the edge of the bluff, heedless of the fact that the grass had not been cut that year and was wet with dew. Baby, it’s gorgeous! she cried, and whirled to kiss him. That was before she snagged her last pair of nylons where the bark was flaking off the logs by the front door, and found a mouse in the bathtub, and decided that views and fresh air could come too high…

  “It’s a lovely place, Mr. Phillips,” the girl said as she stopped the car in the circle off the garage, also built of logs.

  “My folks like it,” he said. She glanced at him, and he laughed. “I mean, it seems a little far-fetched to leave the bark on the logs and then do the inside in knotty pine with hardwood floors… Do you want to see it?” Suddenly he found himself unable to walk into the place alone.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You must be tired and Dad will be wondering where I’ve got to with the car.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Thanks an awful lot for the lift…”

  He tried to make his voice sound right but he could feel the house waiting behind him, empty.

  The girl smiled quickly. “All right,” she said, “just for a minute.”

  When she left she said she was living with her father at the Brown place on Polling Creek; you turned left at the filling station and it was the last house on the road, and they would love to have him drop around some time. He watched the car drive away. Then he went back into the house to get something to eat. There was a small gold wristwatch lying on top of the refrigerator where Janice had placed it for safety before doing the dishes after lunch that day. He closed the refrigerator door very carefully and went back into the room he had been using as a study and lay down on the studio couch. Janice’s picture looked at him smilingly from its frame on his desk. He lay there telling himself that he was not going to get up and put it out of sight, but he did.

  IV

  Shaving, he had explained to Janice, was something a man liked to do the same way every time. He preferred, he had said, to keep the brush on the right-hand side of the medicine cabinet and the bowl on the left-hand side. If she insisted, he would keep the bowl to the right and the brush to the left. He did not, however, he had informed her, take kindly to the idea of finding them now one way and now the other. But what earthly difference can it make, baby? she had protested. It isn’t as if you used them up there. You always have to take them down, anyway, don’t you?

  He opened the window beside him and looked out. Outside, the early morning sun was gradually taking the dampness out of the air and shortening the shadows under the trees. The bay was quite calm, what he could see of it, and a little smoky with mist. He felt a great deal better than he had the day before. He had slept all afternoon, grabbed a bottle of beer and a sandwich, and slept all night, dreamlessly; a fact that rather disturbed him. It seemed a little disloyal to be able to sleep like that.

  He looked at the brush in his hand. In spite of what she had said, she had never put it back wrong since the day he mentioned it; she would remember something like that when you least expected her to. But it had been wrong this morning. He lathered his chin and began to shave. The coffee began to bubble in the Silex in the kitchen and he ran out to rescue it. Standing there in his pajama trousers with the razor in his hand he took careful stock of the kitchen, and the bread-knife was in the knife-rack where it should have belonged and didn’t; and the extra paring knife they kept in the rack in the bread-knife slot, because it was sharp, was in the open table drawer where they usually kept the bread-knife. And yet, a hundred and twenty dollar gold watch lay untouched on top of the refrigerator, as if to give the lie to the idea that somebody had been through the house.

  He went back to the bathroom and finished shaving. When he reached for a pair of slacks in the closet, they were hanging on a wooden hanger, while his good sports coat hung on a metal wire article. He always kept the coat on the wooden hanger to keep the shoulders from breaking down. He dressed and went into the kitchen and fried himself a pair of eggs sunnyside up while the toast was making. He thought the salt and pepper shakers above the stove were reversed, but he could not be sure. He was reasonably certain that the allspice had been at the right end of the shelf. He remembered the torn label. The allspice was now in the middle.

  He ate hungrily and had a cigarette before doing the dishes.

  It was, of course, possible that his mother had decided to clean house while he was in the hospital. She had come here for his clothes, and she had tidied the bedroom, which Janice had left, as usual, in a mess, after dressing for the party. His mother could have decided to do a job on the whole house, but it was not likely. It was even possible that Jack and Vivian Cunningham had had a brainwave: Poor Hugh in the hospital, we’d better see that everything’s shipshape before he gets home. One or two items might have been explained by the Brandons from up the shore coming by while he was gone to make sure nothing was running or burning or being rained on; or the Hartshornes from the other side; or Chris Wells might have dropped in. In fact, when you thought of the number of people who quite innocently could have entered Sand Point while he was away, the place took on the aspects of Grand Central Station.

  But the chances of any of these people embarking on a program so ambitious as to result in this wholesale juggling of small and relatively inaccessible items was, he had to admit, very slight. Every time he reached for something it was somewhere else. The dish towel had fallen behind the sink, the scouring powder was hidden behind the soap flakes, and he could not find the steel wool to clean up the frying pan. Somebody had been through the house, leaving an expensive watch on the refrigerator, refusing to soil their hands with a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of silver flatware, and even turning up their nose at thirty dollars in cash that he had left tucked under an ashtray on the dresser in his study.

  Nothing in the house was as Janice had left it, and it was as if the unknown, by moving everything just a little, had drawn a veil over the part of the life that she had shared.

  “But why?” he asked aloud. “What the hell would they want?”

&
nbsp; He dried his hands on the dish towel, took the cigarette from his mouth and extinguished it under the tap, threw it in the garbage can, and walked slowly out of the kitchen to the door of the bedroom; then he stopped, for a moment unable to make himself go inside… He would go inside and say that breakfast would be ready in a few minutes and she would sit up drowsily in the big bed, not quite awake, having fallen asleep again after he left the room. He would throw her bathing suit at her and pull on his trunks, and they would run out of the house and down the steep steps to the dock and dive in. If it was very early and nobody around they sometimes neglected the bathing suits. Then they would dry themselves and go to breakfast in their bathrobes…

  He shivered a little and opened the door, and the bed was, of course, smooth and empty under the yellow chenille spread. He went to the dresser and found her gold cigarette case untouched among the loose jewelry carelessly heaped in the top drawer. It was of no use to check through the jewelry because he had only a vague notion of what should be there. It was all new, anyway. The cigarette case she had owned when he first met her. He turned it over in his hands. It was engraved with the initials J.G., for Janice Gray. He had always been quite sure that a man had given it to her because it was so much more expensive than anything else she had brought with her.

  He opened it and found three cigarettes. On the inside edge, in fine engraving, was the name of the maker: Huntsman, Los Angeles. She had never told him if his hypothesis were correct; sometimes when he kidded her about it she would seem to admit it, other times she would get angry, but usually she would merely laugh. If you really want me to, she had said once, I’ll throw it away, making as if to pitch it through the car window. He had seized her wrist and she had laughed at him. Well, make up your mind, baby. I don’t want to keep it if it makes you unhappy.

  He found himself wishing the unknown had taken the case with him, but it was still there, in his hands, unwanted: like the white slipper he had found on the hillside it was not a clue. It did not mean anything. It was merely something she had owned for a while and did not need any more.

  He put the case gently down on the dresser and turned and walked out of the room. Suddenly it was more important to get her belongings packed up, ready to be taken away, so that the house would, at least, be free of the things she had worn, played in, slept in, abused, and treasured, than it was to discover what, if anything, the unknown had wanted. But when he had the trunk and the two suitcases up from the cellar, and an armful of her dresses off the hangers, he found that he could not go through with it. Even with Janice dead, you could not throw her dresses in a heap in the corner of a trunk. They would have to be packed as she would have packed them, and he could not stand to do it; he would have to ask his mother to do it.

  He dropped the load on the bed, smoothing it a little so it would not look too untidy, and turned to the dresser drawers. These were untidy already, and he could make himself take the things out by the double handful; and when he reached the bottom drawer a small roll of paper fell to the floor and disappeared under the bed.

  He stood for a moment looking after it uncertainly, his hands buried in the silk of the peach-colored slip in which it had been wrapped. Then he let the bright cloth fall back into the drawer and kneeled beside the bed. The paper was stiff to his fingers and he knew what it was before he had it in sight: a photograph rolled into a cylinder and tied with a string. He found himself trembling a little as he straightened up; and, before slipping off the string, he pushed the dresses aside and sat down on the bed. Then he rolled the string off the end of the cylinder and spread the picture out flat on his knee and sat looking at it.

  In the picture she was singing. She wore an evening gown of black satin and her dark hair was loose about her white shoulders. From somewhere outside the picture a spotlight struck highlights from her hair and lips, and from the shining black dress; and there was an orchestra behind her. She had her hands a little outstretched in a gesture of renunciation, and she was singing her heart out to an invisible audience, and he could hear the song quite plainly. It had love in it, and heartbreak, and promise; and every man listening would know that the promise was for him.

  He looked at the picture very carefully, but there was no doubt at all that the girl was Janice.

  When he let it go, the picture coiled itself shut like a spring and rolled off his knee to the floor. He looked at it but made no effort to reach it. He could still hear her singing and it was unbearable that she was dead…

  After a little he got up and blew his nose and hung all the dresses back in the closet and closed the suitcases and the drawers on their jumbled contents. Then he took the photograph with him out into the living room, closing the door behind him. He could feel a steady throbbing in his head and he went into the bathroom and took three aspirin tablets, with water, and made himself a drink, and returned to the living room.

  Once, a few weeks ago, when they were dancing to the phonograph at the Hartshornes’ next door, Janice slipped out of his arms as they passed the instrument and leaned over it, listening, her toe beating time to the music. She was just a little drunk. Then she began to sing as if there were nobody in the room but the two of them. Everybody there, Chris Wells and Frank Hartshorne, the Cunninghams, and some people from up the shore, gradually stopped dancing to listen. When Janice became aware of them all watching her she hesitated, laughed, and finished the lyrics in a wild burlesque. Then, while they were clapping, she curtseyed and ran out on the porch. When he reached her, she was crying. Take me home, baby, I’m tight, she gasped, burying her face in his shoulder.

  He let the picture roll itself up at last. The stamp on the back read: Paul Linz, Hollywood. There seemed to be no reason to doubt its authenticity, or the authenticity of the photograph. At some time Janice had sung with a band, probably on the West Coast. Yet he had found her inexpertly pounding a typewriter at Johns Hopkins University, on the other side of the continent. Even if she had failed to make good in the long run it did not explain why she should want to keep the episode a secret; and she had kept it a secret deliberately. He had commented on her singing often enough, so that it would have been simple and easy for her to show him the picture and tell him about it, but the most she had ever said was that she had had a few lessons when she was a kid.

  There were three things about the picture that were significant, he reflected as, rising, he went into the study and put it away with the other picture he had of her: Janice had kept it, therefore it had been important to her; she had never told him about it, therefore it represented a part of her life of which she had been ashamed or afraid; and, finally, the unknown had not wanted it. Therefore it was not the reason why the house had been searched.

  But perhaps it was. He dismissed the idea that a man who would examine the medicine chest and the knife-rack in the kitchen would miss an eight-by-ten photograph simply because it was wrapped in a peach-colored silk slip; but if the man’s name were Holt… If the blackhaired man from the sheriff’s office had searched the house to discover why Hugh Phillips should want to claim that his wife had been murdered, he would not have wanted to remove anything. It would have been simple enough for him to have the picture copied and returned in plenty of time. He would not want anything to be missing when Hugh Phillips came back, because it was unlikely that he had bothered to provide himself with a warrant.

  The black-haired man had searched the house. Janice had sung in a band and suffered some experience painful enough to make her want to leave that life behind forever. The truck-driver had killed Janice in a fit of panic. It was all very pretty and it did not make sense. There was no relation between the items except that they all revolved about the life of one girl, who was dead. One would prefer the world to be a little more logical, but perhaps it wasn’t.

  V

  In the afternoon he went down to the pier and found that, as he had expected, the sailboat was badly in need of bailing after a week’s neglect. Three seasons of disuse while h
e was away had not done it any good, and in spite of the work he had done on it that spring it still leaked. It was seventeen feet long, sloop rigged, and the name Starlight was stenciled in gold on the mahogany transom.

  The boat had not been used very much that summer. Janice had not thought much of sailing; she had not liked the boat’s tendency to deviate from the horizontal as the wind increased, and she had taken a dim view of getting her fanny wet. Sailing, she had said, was like horseback riding; as a sport it was all right for those who liked it, but as a means of transportation it stank.

  He did not like to remember the ways in which they had disagreed; it seemed, now that she was dead, like a form of betrayal. He stood looking down at the two rowboats, also partially full of water. They did not matter, but if the sailboat filled beyond a certain point the weight of the tall mast capsized it and righting it again was a mess. He was sitting on the green canvas deck, bailing left-handed to keep the water away from his bandaged leg, when Christine Wells’s convertible drove up beside the garage on the bluff above him.

  He stopped bailing and watched Chris come down the long flight of wooden stairs. She was wearing a white tennis suit, and the pleated shorts flared a little with each downward step she took. Even at a distance she looked freshly laundered and clean and sunburned; a moderately tall, athletic girl with long light hair, tied back at the nape of her neck with a pink ribbon, so that it looked a little old fashioned.

  With her complexion, she doesn’t need to be beautiful, Janice had said the first time she saw Chris. Another time he had been a little surprised to find the two of them chatting pleasantly in the living room at Sand Point. Oh, I think she’s nice, Janice had said later, with one of her murderous little pauses, in a bovine sort of way. He had pointed out, vaguely nettled, that Chris could probably have worn any of Janice’s dresses. Surprisingly, Janice had refused to lose her temper. Yes, and wouldn’t she look like a damn fool, Janice had said, smiling. I wasn’t talking about her figure, stupid.