Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  It made him feel curiously happy, in a guilty sort of way, to watch Chris come along the dock toward him; but there was a small, uncomfortable pause when she reached him. She steadied him as, jumping to the dock, he let his weight come on the injured leg.

  “Ouch,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t fall in,” she said.

  They studied each other warily, as if they had not seen each other for a long time. He noticed that her light hair, as always in summer, had turned blonde in streaks from the sun. It seemed a funny thing to be noticing in August, when he had been seeing her around almost continuously for two months. Her skin had a golden color from the sun, very different from Janice’s dusky tan; and she wore no make-up except lipstick.

  She said, “Mother thought you might want to come over for dinner.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.” He turned away to make the sailboat fast. “You didn’t come to see me in the hospital,” he said lightly, but without looking at her. “All I got was a mess of ghoulish sympathy from Jack and Vivian.”

  She hesitated. “I couldn’t, Hugh,” she said soberly. “You know what I mean.”

  He knew that she was thinking of what Janice had said to her that night.

  “I know,” he said. “I was just kidding.”

  “Are you all right now?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Healthy as a pup.”

  She looked at him for a moment; and they were both, he knew, trying to find some natural way of bringing Janice into the conversation, so that they could dispose of her casually; then Chris turned away.

  They climbed slowly to the top of the bluff. Below them the dock and the boats and the river were in sunshine; and beyond the mouth of the river, the bay was bright and clear to the low dark line of the Eastern Shore, but at the top of the bluff the trees cast a heavy shadow. He glanced at the house and it seemed to stare back at him, silently accusing, because he was going off with Christine Wells. He got into the convertible beside her.

  She always drove a convertible, usually with the top down; and always with a slightly apologetic air, as if afraid that someone might think she was being flashy or ostentatious. He could feel her silence as she turned the car around and headed down the drive toward the sunshine beyond the trees.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked at last.

  “I think I’ll stick it out here till the fall term,” he said. “Then maybe I’ll move in with the folks. I don’t know.”

  “Jack and Vivian seemed to think you’d move in right away.” Her voice was a little surprised that he would want to stay on.

  He said, “I’ve got to get used to the idea, Chris.”

  “Did you love her very much?”

  He glanced at her quickly, startled and shocked that she would ask such a question. “That’s a hell of a thing to ask,” he said. “I married her, didn’t I? Right now… right now I feel like a man who’s lost his leg; it may not have been the best damn leg in the world, but it was his leg and he misses it like hell. Does that answer your question?”

  He did not hear her reply. It was occurring to him coldly that he did not really know Christine Wells any longer. He did not know with whom she had been going, or, except sketchily, what she had been doing, or what kind of person she had turned out to be. They had never really become reacquainted with each other after the war. Since his marriage to Janice he had seen her around, and talked to her, and danced with her at various people’s houses; and there had never, even at the first, been any particular constraint between them; but neither had there, of course, been any particular intimacy, no matter what Janice had claimed that night. They had simply acted like two people who had known each other for years.

  He had never allowed himself to dwell on what Chris’s feelings might have been the afternoon he called her long distance to tell her he was marrying Janice. When you did something quite unforgivable, it was better simply not to think about it.

  When he returned from the Pacific she had been working in New York. They had decided, sensibly, that since he was going to be very busy at the University, she might as well continue working until the fall, particularly since the people had been very nice to her and were now asking her, as a favor, to stay on two months longer. They had waited so long, they had agreed, that it would be a little silly to start rushing things now. In the fall they could get married the way people should get married… He remembered her remote voice in the telephone, saying It’s all right, Hugh. It was nice of you to call me. I’m glad you called. Good luck…

  “There’s Mother,” Chris said.

  He looked up with a guilty start to see Mrs. Wells come to the door to greet them as they drove up. He glanced quickly at the girl beside him, but he could not tell if she, too, had been remembering what had happened a year ago.

  Sand Point looked dark and deserted when they returned. He heard the frogs croaking in the ravine below the house, and the fireflies were out. Honey, come quick, Janice had shouted, it’s Fourth of July out here. She had never seen fireflies before, and he had caught half a dozen in a mason jar so that she could watch them flashing.

  “Thanks a lot,” he said, opening the car door. “I was getting pretty tired of my own cooking.”

  Christ waited behind the wheel while he climbed out. “If you need anything in town…”

  “I’ll let you know. Thanks.” He glanced at her. Nothing was the way it had been, nor would it ever be that way again, but he asked, “Do you want to come in for a moment, Chris?”

  She hesitated. “All right, but I’d better be getting home soon.” She smiled. “I have a date.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Frank. Frank Hartshorne.”

  There was nothing wrong with Frank Hartshorne, whose folks owned the big white house up the river. Frank was all right and there was nothing to be annoyed about. He had no right to be annoyed. But he was realizing that he had counted, vaguely, on Christine Wells from the minute he first realized that Janice was dead; never allowing the thought to come to the surface of his mind, because it would have seemed disloyal, but feeling it there, solid and reassuring: when everything was settled and smoothed away, Chris would be there. It was a particularly arrogant masculine idea to have had, he realized. Chris owed him no consideration at all. It was very generous of her to have thought of having him over for dinner. When you came right down to it, all Chris owed him was a kick in the face.

  Her white shorts and shirt made a sharp pattern in front of him as they came into the living room. He turned on the light.

  “Drink?”

  “Just a Coke,” she said.

  “With rum in it?”

  She shook her head. He splashed a jigger of rum into a glass from the sideboard, left the second glass plain, and finished the job in the kitchen. When he returned, she was reclining in a deep chair with her long tanned legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Not as nice as hers.”

  “You’ve got the tact of a hippopotamus today,” he said irritably.

  She looked up at him, smiling a little, and took the glass from his hand. “I’m a very tactful girl,” she said calmly. “But when two people have been throwing things at each other for almost a year and then one dies and the other goes into a heartbreak routine that would panic Broadway, I find it a little silly, Hugh.”

  He stood watching her face, too surprised to speak. She was still smiling at him, but he saw that there were fine lines of strain around her eyes, as if she were smiling into a bright light.

  “She told me all about it, you see. If I’d asked, she’d probably have shown me the bruises.”

  He turned away and walked carefully to the chair by the radio and sat down. There was no doubt in his mind as to the incident to which she was referring; but he could not quite accept the fact that Janice had told anybody, particularly Chris.

  “She heaved an ashtray at me,” he said. “So I turned h
er over and warmed her bottom.”

  He had asked Janice politely to turn the radio down a little, and she had turned it up instead, so he came out of the study and jerked the plug from the wall and she slapped him and he slapped her back and she threw an ashtray at him. It went through the big front window. He grabbed her and she struck at him with her nails. She was screaming at him. He had never been so angry in his life. They had been building up to it for weeks.

  “But you can see,” Chris said stiffly, “that it makes this bereaved husband act just a wee bit ridiculous.” The smile on her face looked as if she had forgotten it there.

  “She did have a habit of swinging at me occasionally,” he admitted. “It didn’t mean anything. After a while I just started swinging back.”

  When he had let her go, Janice had sat up in the middle of the floor, her dress twisted and her dark hair wild and the room a shambles about her. He had stood over her, feeling of the scratches on his face; and suddenly they had both burst out laughing; and he had picked her up and carried her out of the room. He could remember the way her arms had come around his neck, and the way she had kissed him, still laughing a little, as he kicked the door shut behind them.

  But Chris thought that if you hit a person you must hate them. Chris had probably never even kicked a waste-paper basket across the room in a temper: she would have thought it showed a dreadful lack of self-control.

  “I didn’t know she went around boasting about it,” he said slowly.

  Chris smiled. “She told me a great many things about you, Hugh. I think she was lonely out here. And of course I’m not really stupid enough not to know why she picked me to confide in: after all, she knew we’d been engaged once.”

  He said carefully, “You didn’t like her very much, did you, Chris?”

  “I didn’t dislike her,” Chris said stiffly. “She was fun to talk to. But I don’t suppose you can ever get very fond of a girl who’s taken a man away from you, can you?” She smiled again, and he knew that she was trying to keep up an illusion that they were talking frankly and good-naturedly about something that did not really concern either of them. She put her glass on the arm of her chair, looking at him across the room. “I guess I’m really prejudiced by what she said that night, Hugh, and it isn’t really fair, but… Not about you and me, because that was just silly, but… No girl likes to be told that she is ‘untouched and untouchable,’” she murmured, turning pink and looking away.

  “She was a little tight,” Hugh Phillips said.

  “I know,” Chris said. Her smile faltered and died as she looked at him again. “I guess I’d better go, Hugh,” she said helplessly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me…”

  “She was murdered, Chris,” he said.

  He remembered that before the war he had occasionally wondered guiltily what Chris would do if one evening, instead of just kissing her nicely, he mauled her around a bit: the idea had seemed somehow indecent, like thinking of making a pass at your own sister. But there were times when you wanted to startle Chris, or shock her, just to see what would happen.

  Suddenly it was intolerable that they should have been sitting calmly in the living room that had been Janice’s, taking Janice apart in a kind of spiritual post-mortem: intolerable, and disloyal and cruel. He got sharply to his feet.

  “She was murdered,” he said. “A man beat her head in with a wrench, and I lay with my leg in a crack, watching. He hit her twice, just to make sure, and went up to the road and drove away. Even if she did slap my face occasionally, I don’t think she had that coming to her …”

  “Don’t, Hugh!”

  He looked at Chris and finished his drink and turned away from her to the sideboard. Then Chris was beside him, holding his wrist.

  “I’ll drink as much as I damn well please,” he said, pulling free. “If you want to be helpful, get a Coke out of the refrigerator. You know where it is.”

  She went and came back with the bottle and he emptied it into the glass on top of the rum. He found himself grinning wryly.

  “Damn if I’m not putting on an act,” he said. Chris did not smile, but watched him. She never tanned so deeply that you could not see the color change in her face; and he could see that she was quite pale. He tried to make her smile: “I’m an unstable personality. You shouldn’t have anything to do with me… Oh, for Pete’s sake!” he exploded. “She was! I’m not trying to kid you. Don’t you go telling me what I saw.”

  “I don’t understand,” Chris whispered. “Why didn’t you tell…”

  “I let them talk me out of it,” he said. “Some local politician didn’t want to be bothered. I let him talk me out of it. He almost had me believing it was a hallucination. Most persuasive sort of chap, in a Gestapo sort of way. He threatened me with everything from manslaughter to first-degree murder, besides telling me it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “But,” Chris said, “there was an inquest, wasn’t there, Hugh?”

  He looked at her and realized that she did not believe him. He could see that she did not know what to believe, and that it frightened her. He remembered suddenly what the black-haired man had said about murder. Nobody wants to have anything to do with murder, Mr. Holt had said, and apparently he was right.

  “Skip it,” he said. “Just skip the whole thing.”

  He turned and walked to the fireplace and stood looking down at it. The last time they had had a fire was some six weeks ago, but the half-burned logs still lay untidily on the andirons. Some lipstick-stained cigarette butts lay among the ashes where Janice had thrown them carelessly some time when there had been no ashtray handy. You tried to remember things the way you would have liked them to be but there was always something or somebody to remind you of the way they had actually been. He heard Chris come up behind him.

  “It wouldn’t have done any good,” he said without turning around. “Don’t you see, Chris, it wouldn’t have done any good, because if they didn’t want to find the evidence, they just wouldn’t find it. You can’t buck a setup like that. I ought to know. I’m supposed to have a degree in sociology. And there would have been a big mess in the papers about her…” He turned and saw Chris’s eyes watching him steadily enough, but there was fear in them.

  “But why, Hugh, why?”

  “He just got rattled. He’d left his truck there in the way, don’t you see, and she was yelling at him…”

  “I mean…” Chris licked her lips. “… why didn’t the man want you to…?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I know it sounds screwy… All right,” he said. “You don’t believe me.” She did not say anything. Presently he went on, “The guy said he thought I’d been seeing things. He said I’d had a bad crack on the head and didn’t really know what had happened.”

  Her face seemed to light up with intense relief. He saw everything become clear to her. He had been delirious and the nice man had calmed him down. There really had been no murder. It was just something he had dreamed; and she of course was not asking herself why he should have dreamed it.

  “Don’t say it, Chris,” Hugh Phillips said. “I don’t want to hear you say it.”

  She was a very nice girl, Christine Wells, and she did not want to hurt anybody, and she was very sorry for him.

  “If it did happen they’ll find out all about it sooner or later, won’t they?” she said reassuringly.

  “Sure,” he said. “Goodnight, Chris.”

  He stood on the porch watching the fireflies long after the tail-lights of the convertible had turned onto the main road. He walked slowly to the front of the porch and he did not want Christine Wells. He wanted to hear the radio and the husky voice singing snatches of song a little more loudly than was necessary; not really meaning to irritate him, but just reminding him that he had a wife, like a kid being just a little naughty to get attention.

  He was glad he had refrained from telling Chris about the picture; although that was the reason he had asked her in, to show her the pict
ure, and ask her if Janice had ever said anything that might explain it.

  VI

  In the morning when he woke he saw the gun lying on the lamp table beside the bed. In the evening it had seemed quite logical to get it up from the top shelf of the locker in the cellar where his father stored the guns and fishing tackle, because if there were really anything to the idea he had had in the hospital when he said he could identify Janice’s murderer, then a gun might be a good thing to have around. But now in the morning, with sunlight in the room, the idea seemed far-fetched and ridiculous. Having the gun there looked as if he were afraid of the dark or of being alone in the house. He slipped the long-barreled .38 target revolver into a desk drawer to get it out of sight.

  Jack and Vivian Cunningham arrived while he was making breakfast. They brought a large cardboard carton of groceries and said that if he needed anything else just to let them know. Hardly had they left when the Desters, in town, called to say that they were coming out to see the Brandons, and could they bring anything. It seemed that everybody had suddenly remembered that the Phillips boy (Dr. Phillips’s son, you remember, his wife was killed in that dreadful accident last week) was out at Sand Point alone without a car.

  Old Mr. Hartshorne was driving up to Baltimore, and it would be no trouble at all to stop by the Phillipses’ apartment if there was anything to be taken up, or did Hugh want to go himself? Mrs. Wells dropped by on her way to do her weekly shopping. Mr. French at the store in Rio Vista called that he was making a delivery to the Williamses up the road and could easily stop by on the way. He had some fine pork chops, Mr. French said. Mr. Saunders, the mailman, brought the mail clear up to the house, with last night’s paper that had been in the box.