Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  He did not hear her answer, as he turned away and started to sit down on the bright Navaho blanket that covered the studio couch, the pattern shifting geometrically in front of his eyes; then he saw the smiling picture watching him from the desk and he straightened up very quickly, and walked out of the room. There seemed to be a glare of light in the hallway, shot through with darting black specks, and he felt quite cold, but there was perspiration on his forehead. He stood there, feeling the ache in his head. I must have hit it harder than the doctors gave me credit for, he thought, lifting his hand clumsily to feel the adhesive tape that still covered the bruise. Then Chris was beside him, steadying him and leading him to a chair in the living room.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “I’ll get you a drink.”

  “To hell with the drink,” he said. Sitting with his head far back, he watched the room become clear; it was like watching the wind disperse a mist on the river. “Tell me,” he said.

  “They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital,” Chris said. “You’re not well, Hugh.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m gorgeous. Sit down and stop stalling and tell me about it.”

  She sat down on the arm of his chair, looking at the fireplace across the room.

  “How much do you know, Hugh?”

  “I know what’s in the picture,” he said impatiently. She would insist that he knew something. “I know that she had three thousand in the bank right after she got to Baltimore, and a gold cigarette case with her initials on it… What was her real name?”

  “Gordon. Jane Gordon.”

  The strange name seemed to wipe out a year of his life. Janice Gray had never really existed. This, he realized, was quite true.

  “I know,” he said, “that about three weeks ago, after having cleaned out her savings account this spring, she rejuvenated it with the juicy sum of five thousand bucks.”

  He saw Chris start and look down at him, and felt a savage satisfaction at having told her something, for a change. Yet in some peculiar way her reaction brought her a little closer to him. They were both, at least, people to whom five thousand dollars was a great deal of money. He could see that the fear was back in Chris’s eyes. She took the little book that he produced from his shirt pocket, but for a moment she was not looking at it, but at him.

  “Listen,” he said angrily, “have I got a wart on my nose, or what?”

  She looked away and laughed. “No, of course not, why?”

  Then she was studying the bank book. “Five thousand,” she said quickly. “That’s an awful lot of money, Hugh. Where could she…?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He moved his tongue around his lips, forcing himself to go on: “This man… this man that Janice used to live with…”

  “His name was Karl Lewis. He owned the Grotto.”

  “And how did you know she was…?”

  “It was in the papers,” Chris said. “After the mur—” She sat quite still. He had the impression that she had stopped breathing.

  “Take it easy,” he murmured. “Take it easy, Chris.”

  He got up and went to the sideboard. His hands, making the drinks, were quite steady. He went into the kitchen for ice and came back, and Chris was standing by the chair, watching him. He found himself wishing she would stop watching him so carefully.

  He put a glass in her hand. “You’d got as far as a murder,” he said. “Who did she kill? This Karl Lewis?”

  “Oh, no,” Chris said quickly. “Jan didn’t kill anybody. It was Lewis who…” She glanced down and discovered the drink in her hand and tasted it. A drop of water, condensed on the cold glass, dropped on her skirt, and she rubbed at it with her fingers. “We were interested, naturally, because we’d been there the week before,” she said in a low, even voice. “This man was killed behind the place, in the alley. Early in the morning. He was some kind of a crook or racketeer, in the black market, I think. Some columnist got hold of the fact that Karl Lewis had been questioned about the murder. He had produced an alibi.” She hesitated and turned the glass in her hands. “The alibi was Jane Gordon, Hugh.”

  “Did they say she had been living with him?”

  “It was… apparently it was one of those things that everybody in Hollywood knew about. I’m sorry…”

  He said bitterly, “I suppose your mother recognized her, too?” Everybody had known about his wife but him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She never said, and I never asked because I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Jan asked you to keep quiet about it?”

  Chris nodded. “She said… she said that you would kill her if you learned about it.”

  “The number of people who would kill Janice,” he said dryly, “or whom Janice would kill, if such and such happened…”

  Then he stopped, because Janice had been killed, and it was not really funny. Nothing was really funny any longer, and Chris was looking at him strangely. She put her glass aside and bent over to fasten up the buttons of her skirt, preparatory to leaving. He watched her fasten them and smooth the buttoned skirt over her hips and look up at him. There was a small stiff pause.

  Chris asked quietly, “Are you sure you didn’t know all this, Hugh?”

  He had a sensation of danger. “I didn’t know,” he said carefully. “Why do you keep asking, Chris?”

  The answer was at the back of his mind, but he would not let himself believe it. It went with the way she had acted and the way she had looked at him, as if she was afraid of him; and with the questions she had asked; but he did not want to believe it. Even after she had said it, he could not quite make himself believe it.

  “Are you… sure you didn’t kill her, Hugh?”

  Then her voice, up to now quite steady, became breathless and frightened. “She said you would kill her if you found out! And you called it murder, Hugh! Nobody else! You!”

  She moved backward away from him to the door, and stood in the doorway, waiting for him to reach her. When he moved his hands a little, perhaps merely to prevent her from fleeing, perhaps to shake sense into her, she shrank away from him. Then she stood quite still, but it was obvious that she was afraid of him. He stood with his hands at his sides, watching her fear.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he said. It seemed ridiculous to have to say it.

  “No,” Chris whispered. “I… I know… something just made me…”

  She whirled blindly, fleeing from him and from what she was thinking about him, and scratched her bare sunburned leg on the rough bark by the door, and stopped abruptly, bending over to rub the injury. Then, straightening up, she glanced at him still standing there. She walked across the porch, pushed the screen door aside, and walked out into the sunlight, but she was running again before she had gone out of sight around the corner of the house.

  He knew that she was quite sure he had killed Janice. He knew suddenly that she had suspected it ever since he had told her that Janice had been murdered; and everything he had said today had confirmed her suspicions. They’ll remember that you didn’t get along too well, the black-haired man had warned him. They’ll remember that the last anybody saw you together you were both pretty mad at each other. You had to hand it to Mr. Holt. Whatever else he was, he was a pretty smart man.

  VIII

  A spotlight was shining on the girl in the black satin gown as she sang. He could see her singing but he could not hear her. He tried to reach her, and the people in the audience held him back and shouted at him to sit down. He struggled forward through thickets of grasping hands, but the girl, still singing voicelessly, receded faster than he could follow, toward a door where a man was waiting for her, holding an object that cast a long cross-shaped shadow. He tried to call out to the girl, to warn her, but he could not think of the name of the thing the man was holding. Then the door closed.

  He was kneeling beside her on the dead leaves, and her white dress was torn and dirty, and she was dead.

&n
bsp; “Are you sure you didn’t kill her, Hugh?” a girl’s voice asked him.

  He said no, he didn’t kill her; and then suddenly he knew that he was not sure.

  He woke up.

  It was not quite dark in the room. Moonlight through the window shone on the gun and the pictures on the desk. He remembered waiting a long time after Chris was gone; then coming in here to lie down because his head ached. It still ached. He looked at the luminous electric clock on the desk; it read after nine. He got up and took the gun in his hands and sat down on the rumpled Navaho blanket covering the studio couch, holding the gun tightly while his heart gradually stopped pounding, but he did not stop being frightened.

  He rubbed his fingers over the rough checkered walnut of the revolver butt. The war was still not so far away but that he could get a sense of reassurance from the feel of the weapon; you were never quite alone as long as you had a gun.

  He remembered once, when she had driven to Baltimore, waiting late at night for her to come back. Suddenly he found himself listening expectantly for the telephone to ring to tell him that she had had an accident. He remembered the sick sense of horror with which he realized that he had been thinking calmly, almost hopefully, of what his life would be like if she were dead… He remembered the evening she had thrown the ashtray at him; and as he braced himself to strike her he had seen the fireplace behind her, the andirons, the fender, and the hard smooth bricks of the hearth. He had seized her instead of striking her, not because he loved her and was afraid she might be hurt, but because, even through his anger, he had suddenly realized that should she fall and hurt herself he would never be quite sure that he had not deliberately struck hard enough to make it happen. For an instant he had known that he had wanted it to happen.

  “But I didn’t,” he whispered. “And I never would have.” But he had wanted it. Not to kill her, but simply to be rid of her.

  He got up, turned on the light on the desk, and looked at the smiling studio photograph; and he knew that for days he had been hiding from himself the fact that he was glad she was gone. Chris had seen through the act the very first time they were together after the accident. She must have thought he was deliberately trying to conceal his relief; she must have wondered why he should feel the need for pretending to be broken-hearted; she had not realized that he was deceiving himself much better than he was deceiving her. Seeing him pretending to a grief much greater than he had any reason for feeling, she must have begun to wonder a little, remembering how things had actually been between him and Janice. And then, after she had commented on his behavior, he had volunteered a fairly implausible story of murder by an unknown truck-driver, as if to forestall any suspicions that might have risen in her mind…

  He stared at the smiling lovely face in the picture; and even then his sense of guilt tried to tell him that he could not stand to look at it; he had loved her so much; but he knew it was not true. He missed her, of course, as you would miss anybody you had got used to living with; but he had wanted to be rid of her and now, although he would have preferred to have it happen some other way, he was relieved that she was gone. It gave him a nasty sense of disloyalty to admit it at last, but he knew that it was the truth.

  But it did not mean that he had killed her, he told himself. After all, he knew perfectly well what had happened. He had seen it all. He closed his eyes and saw it again, Janice in the glare of the headlight and the man in the shadow, then coming forward as she turned away to return to the car… He could see every detail of it. He could almost see the man’s face. He could see too much of it. He had thought about it so long that his mind had filled in the gaps and he no longer knew what was true and what he had made up to complete the picture… It had been night when it happened but the picture showed everything, the hillside and the road as he had seen them later, when the snub-nosed girl in the yellow dress drove him out there. He could even see an election poster on a tree at the roadside, although it should not have been visible from below.

  He could see it all, but he could not remember when he had wrenched himself free and cut the gash in his leg that had required nine stitches to close. He could not be sure that the face of the man was not his own face. He could not be sure that it was not he, Hugh Phillips, at whom Janice was screaming hysterically… Perhaps the truck-driver had come down with his wrench and had seen them both lying there apparently dead, and had fled. Perhaps Janice, reviving, had got to the car and helped him out and, both half drunk and dazed with shock, they had quarreled… then his mind had rejected what had happened, telling him that he had never left the car until she was dead, seizing on the truck-driver as a scapegoat…

  If the wrench had killed her you would have thought the police surgeon would have noticed the wound. But Mr. Holt had said a rock. Phillips shivered suddenly, recalling all the black-haired man had said. It seemed to him, as he thought of the strange conversation again, that the man from the sheriff’s office had been covertly threatening him, warning him that he, Mr. Holt, knew what had happened; that there was no evidence that would stand up in court but that Mr. Holt wanted Hugh Phillips to know that he had not got away with it and that sooner or later Mr. Holt expected him to confess… I don’t like murder any more than you do, Mr. Holt had said. You’d rather she’d just died in an accident, wouldn’t you? Mr. Holt had known. Mr. Holt had warned him. Murder is something you never get away from, once it has touched you… Everything the black-haired man had said fell into place and made sense when you looked at it like that. Mr. Holt had simply not realized that he had not known what had happened, that his mind had automatically protected him from the knowledge that he was a murderer. Mr. Holt had thought that he was consciously lying.

  He found himself outside the house, walking slowly through the moonlight; then his feet were on the stairs and he could see the boats and the dock below him. He had to get away from the house that he had shared with her. There was a fresh sailing breeze on the bay; he could hear it in the trees on the bluff, but the pier was sheltered inside the mouth of the river. The bay had a pale brilliance in the moonlight.

  He found that he was still holding the gun. He put it down on the boards of the dock, but realized that somebody might see it there. Chris might come back and see the gun there and the boat gone and think, knowing what she did, that he had exchanged one method of suicide for another. He picked up the revolver and turned it, moved by a slow curiosity, until he could look into the round muzzle. The moonlight showed him the lands and grooves of the rifling, and the high target sight, and the gray lead noses of the bullets in the chambers of the cylinder. He grimaced and turned the weapon away from him. He was only, he knew, showing himself how lousy he felt as, under other conditions, he might have thrown a book across the room to show himself how mad he was. He did not, he discovered, feel nearly lousy enough to kill himself.

  He tucked the weapon inside his belt, under his jacket, threw off the mooring lines, jumped aboard, and pushed off, letting the boat drift gently out toward the center of the river while he raised the sails. There was only a little water in the bilge and he tried to realize that it was only yesterday that Chris had come down the bluff while he was bailing. It seemed much longer. He sat on the deck by the tiller and lit a cigarette and nursed the boat toward the open water of the bay on the erratic breaths of wind that dipped over the bluff. The high banks made it a hell of a place to take a sailboat out of.

  Then the sails filled solidly and he was easing himself out to weather and she was sailing. Looking back, he could see a light at the Hartshornes’ up the river; it seemed to stare after him even when he was clear of the land and the mouth of the river had faded into the blackness of the shore. He wondered if Chris had gone there or if she had walked all the way home. He thought she would have walked home. She would not, he thought, have wanted to see anybody after what had happened. He put the boat about for the long tack down the bay and after a while the bulk of Sand Point cut off everything behind him.

  T
he Brandons’ was dark; the Carrs’ also: they had not been out that summer and the people who had rented the place had left. There were scattered lights farther down the shore. There was a light at the Wellses’. He found himself tempted to let the boat bear off toward it. If he could talk to somebody… But Chris could not reassure him. She believed he had done it.

  He put about again, heading out into the bright moonlight toward the Eastern Shore, several miles away. The wind was strong enough now that he had to ease the little boat through the puffs, balancing her with the weight of his body, in the dark with the spray coming over, the boat pitching and plunging against the steep bay chop. The lights became smaller astern and he was alone in the moonlight. There was nothing else on the bay. He could drown out here and nobody would know it until his body came ashore. A sharp gust drove the edge of the deck under water. He eased the main sheet so that the mainsail spilled its wind, and the boat rose again, driving into the short sharp waves that sent luminous explosions of spray across the forward deck.

  “Listen, bud,” he said to himself aloud. “Listen, bud, a little Freud goes a long way.”

  The spray and the wind had cleared the sodden hopelessness from his mind. After all, he told himself, the fact that Chris suspected him did not prove anything except that he had acted like a damn fool. And what Mr. Holt thought was not proof, either; and he did not know what Mr. Holt thought. If Mr. Holt had known anything definite, Hugh Phillips would be in jail. And it was unpleasant to have to admit that he was relieved that Janice was dead; it made him feel like a particularly repulsive type of hypocrite, when he thought of the theatrical agonies he had put himself through to show himself how much he had loved her; but merely being fed up with a person did not mean that you had killed them…

  He shivered a little and looked around him in the moonlit darkness with the sudden realization that he did not have any idea where he was; then Cresset Point light blazed out to windward. Its bearing showed him he was too damn far out for a man just out of the hospital. He tacked and let the boat fall off until she was racing along with the wind just forward of the beam. No more spray struck him. He found that he was cold and rather wet and that nevertheless the thought of getting back to Sand Point gave him no pleasure. There might be a fire in the big fireplace at the Wellses’; there would be somebody to talk to; but Chris thought him a murderer.