Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “Miss Wells? Miss Wells, this is Dr. Carlson’s nurse.” Her voice was precise and faintly accented with refinement. “Yes, Dr. Lewis Carlson. I am speaking from a cottage on Polling Creek, the last house on the road. You know where it is? It is called the Brown cottage, I think… Yes, that is correct.”

  You could almost hear the starch on her uniform rustle as she looked up, facing the tall man over the telephone, defying him to snatch it away from her as he clearly wanted to.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right. Yes…” Her voice became severe. “Miss Wells, if you’d allow me to go on… We have a young man here. His boat capsized on the bay and the doctor was called… Phillips. Yes, he is alive…”

  She waited, listening. Then she glanced up at the man standing over her, and a queer little half-triumphant smile came to her face and vanished.

  “I see, Miss Wells,” she murmured at last. “Yes, there was a question… You say his wife was killed in an accident and he… Yes, of course we noticed the bandage on his head. No, the doctor has not yet notified the police. Under the circumstances… I realize that, Miss Wells. As I was about to say, under the circumstances perhaps the doctor would be willing… Perhaps if you came out here, Miss Wells. He is asking for you. You’re very welcome.”

  She hung up very gently and leaned against the wall, looking up at Karl Lewis. Her small face was suddenly drawn and tired, so that the color put into her face by the drinks she had taken looked unhealthy. When she spoke her voice was her own.

  “She thinks he tried to commit suicide. She doesn’t want us to call the police.”

  The tall man started to speak, but the girl suddenly swung herself away from him and walked quickly across the room to the liquor cabinet, a little unsteadily, the full black skirt bunching about her knees.

  “He was telling the truth, Karl,” she said thinly. “She does think he killed his wife. So now where are you?”

  Karl Lewis said harshly, “She was kidding you. And if she thinks he killed his wife, why…?”

  “She’s in love with him, you damn fool,” the girl said without turning. “Some people don’t seem to give a damn who a man kills… Where the hell are the cigarettes? I haven’t smoked for three weeks, playing your sissy daughter, and I’m going nuts…” She tossed off a drink and shuddered.

  “I don’t want you too drunk to drive.”

  “I’m never too drunk to drive,” the girl said, whirling. “Give me some cigarettes, damn you…”

  The tall man threw them to her. She picked them off the floor. Karl Lewis said, “You aren’t taking a screen test, Kitten, so drop the Bette Davis.”

  The girl said in a low, intense voice, “She wasn’t kidding me. They don’t kid that good, darling. And he was telling the truth all along. He just came around for a shoulder to cry on… And what are you going to do now? She’s coming. I couldn’t have stopped her, she’d have got suspicious. And you wanted to have him call her with that fairy tale about some note that doesn’t exist!”

  “But he came here,” the tall man said. “I don’t like that kind of coincidence.”

  “Coincidence?” The girl’s laugh rose to a high musical note and seemed to ring through the room even after she had stopped laughing. The tall man whirled on Phillips, who had pulled himself up to the davenport.

  “You don’t move!” he said. “I don’t want any trouble from you!”

  “Coincidence!” the girl cried. “You brought him here. I brought him here. If we’d just pulled out after she was dead instead of hanging around to make sure… But no, you had me go and be nice to him, to find out what he knew. And his girl thought he was a murderer, so he came here because I was such a nice girl—I can be a damn nice girl, you know, when I try—and he wanted somebody to talk to. Just like he said. And if you hadn’t tried to be so bright we’d be back in Hollywood…”

  “With a gun?” the tall man said. “Would he have brought a gun?”

  “Maybe something scared him. Maybe he was using it for a paddle. He brought it. And he was embarrassed as hell about it. You saw him… Anyway, she thought he’d tried to commit suicide, and that means she thinks he’s a murderer, so there goes your pipe-dream about any letter that woman left with her. If she’d seen any letter she’d know he wasn’t a murderer, wouldn’t she? So now what are you going to do with the two of them? Kill them, too?”

  “Shut up,” Karl Lewis said. “Shut up, Kitten.” But she did not shut up, she kept right on talking.

  It was, Hugh Phillips thought, like being in a cage with two bickering wild animals that had forgotten him for the moment; then the tires of a car scattered the gravel of the drive and put an end to it.

  The car rushed to a halt outside. Chris’s footsteps were running toward the porch before the door had time to slam shut behind her. Phillips heard them on the steps. Then there was a pause, and he could visualize her touching her hair, or smoothing her dress, or simply drawing a long breath that she had not had time for since the telephone rang, so that she would not betray herself too completely to the people in the house. She knocked twice on the screen.

  He got up and walked slowly across the room toward the door.

  He felt, but did not turn to see, the tall man’s gun rise and steady behind him; he heard Shirley Carlson’s breath catch in an audible gasp. There was in his mind the vague thought that if the gun went off, Chris might have time to turn and flee, but the two men waiting outside would probably catch her.

  Suddenly he found himself facing the bitter realization that he had been uselessly brave and very stupid. If he had called her, telling her what Karl Lewis had wanted him to say, she might have thought he was crazy, but she would have guessed that he was in serious trouble, and she would probably have called the police. The girl had known. Shirley Carlson had realized that he had been telling the truth throughout, that Chris knew nothing, and that he must not be allowed to call her.

  The gun did not go off. He heard Karl Lewis follow him across the room. He stopped at the door and felt the revolver touch him in the back. He looked up and saw Chris watching him through the screen door.

  He knew that he did not look like a man who had been rescued from drowning. His clothes were dry, and he did not think there was blood on his face, or any mark that would be visible in the dim light on the porch. He was not obviously ill, nor did he seem to be receiving medical attention. Her eyes studied him carefully and something went out of them, sympathy perhaps, and bewilderment and a trace of fear took its place. She glanced at the two people behind him and pulled the door open and stepped up to the porch.

  “Hello, Hugh,” she said carefully.

  “Hi, Chris.”

  She was still dressed in the white playsuit with the skirt that buttoned on to make a sports dress of it; it was crushed and wrinkled and her hair was not smooth. She was no longer wearing the black velvet band. He had not seen Chris look sloppy since they were kids. Her face was painfully clean and she had no lipstick on.

  He knew as if he had been there that she had not been to bed, although it was past two in the morning. He knew that she had been lying on the bed, fully dressed, perhaps still crying a little, perhaps with all the tears out of her, staring at the ceiling; or perhaps she had been asleep at last, surprised to find herself so, when the telephone rang. She had taken the message and washed her face hastily and come here without stopping to change her dress or even put on lipstick.

  He felt no sense of elation at knowing that what she believed about him had touched her so deeply; he could only feel a piercing sense of guilt at seeing her like that, rumpled and untidy and tired; because it was all part of the thing he had brought into their lives when, searching for a nameless excitement, he had married Janice. He felt the presence of the man with the china-blue eyes behind him, and the gentle touch of the gun in his back. He remembered that it was his own gun, and that it had a very long barrel.

  “You’d better come in, Chris,” he said.

  Spea
king, he swung his arm backward with a helpless desperation that was not courage but simply a refusal to stay alive and take the responsibility for what was going to happen to her at the hands of Janice’s murderer.

  He felt the barrel of the revolver against his wrist and the blast from the cylinder scorched him and he was not dead. He was pushing and kicking, shoving death back into the cottage, and closing the door on it; and he had not been able to get his hands on the gun but neither had the tall man been able to turn the unwieldy weapon against him. The gun crashed again inside. The bullet removed two panes of glass and the wood between them. He was running across the porch, seeing Chris’s face wide-eyed and unbelieving, staring at him. He pushed her; she stumbled on the steps and went to her knees at the bottom; two men were coming up the bank from the drive at a run.

  He heard the voice of the snub-nosed girl inside: “You damn fool, what do you think you’re doing with that cannon? They can hear you clear to Baltimore!”

  And the voice of the blue-eyed man, more clearly, as if the door had been opened. “Don’t shoot, grab them. Head them off from the cars.”

  Chris was running across the unkempt lawn toward the bluff and he was following her. There were no more shots behind them. He had no hope that the shots that had already been fired would bring help; this was out in the country and some farmer was always letting off at crows or stray dogs: two shots meant nothing to anybody. They were only enough that the tall man would have to be conservative from now on; he could not afford to draw attention with a fusillade, now that people in the neighborhood might have been partially awakened. Chris saw the stairs and veered toward them and plunged down the long flight, her thin skirt ballooning about her knees. The slight wind caught at her hair and dress as she reached the dock. Phillips heard the heavy shoes of the men behind them on the stairs.

  Then they were in the boat and he was paddling desperately with the single paddle while Chris, forward, hauled up the mainsail, and he heard himself laughing.

  Chris said breathlessly, “Watch it, Hugh. Stop it! Take in on the mainsheet.”

  He glanced back. One of the men had reached the end of the dock and was aiming a gun at them, but the experimental way in which he held the weapon told that he did not intend to fire. But there was a strange fascination in watching a man debating with himself whether he should try to kill you or not. Then the gun dropped and the man turned back and joined the second man at the outboard runabout chained to the dock.

  Chris pleaded, “Hugh…!”

  He watched her rise to clear the jib as he sheeted in the mainsail and felt it fill. He steered and watched her get the jib up and turn, hampered by her skirt, to climb over the centerboard trunk; she snatched at the hem of her skirt with both hands and two buttons yielded with immense reluctance; sobbing a little, breathlessly, she gave it up, rammed the centerboard down, and dove for the trailing jibsheet, whipped into lazy snakelike patterns by the flapping sail.

  “Watch it, Hugh,” she gasped. “Please watch it. You’re luffing.”

  He wanted to tell her not to work so hard. Behind them the men, seeing how funny it was, had stopped hurrying. One was walking deliberately along the shore toward the sandbar. He could wade out there and force them to stand well over to the far bank to avoid him. He did not have to walk fast. Even strolling along, watching them, he was already well ahead of them. Phillips thought he was grinning.

  Karl Lewis was climbing back up the stairs to get the key for the runabout. The girl was nowhere in sight.

  The sailboat heeled gently and gracefully and little ripples played along the planking and it was all very silly and futile. In a wind like this they would do two knots to windward; out on the bay, running free, they might do four or five; the runabout could probably do thirty.

  Chris, lying flat on the weather deck to offer as little resistance to the wind as possible, turned her head sharply.

  “Hugh, you’re sailing very badly. There isn’t any wind ahead. Let’s come about.”

  He remembered how, before the war, she had often crewed for him in races; and thought that he must really be horsing it up when Chris Wells could bring herself to tell him how to sail his own boat.

  “All right,” he said docilely, “ready about. Hard alee.”

  The little boat swung noiselessly. There was an infuriating leisureliness about it, as if they had all the time in the world. As if internal combustion engines had never been invented and death were a million miles away. The boat swung, the sails shivered a little and settled over on the new tack, the lines creaked and hardened, and they could hear again the little tinkling sounds of their progress through the dark, barely ruffled water. Directly ahead they could see the opening to the bay between the high shores, and the man waiting in ankle deep water at the edge of the reeds.

  “Anyway,” Phillips said dryly, “Anyway, there isn’t any moonlight. Not that I can see how it helps.”

  Chris whispered, “Hugh, what is it? Who are they? Are they policemen?”

  For a moment he could not speak, he could only look at her in amazement. Her face was a dim oval in the darkness, turned toward him over her shoulder. Even in the darkness he could see the sun-bleached streaks in the rumpled hair.

  “I forgot,” he said harshly. “No, they’re not policemen, Chris. He’s the man who killed Jan. Karl Lewis.”

  He thought she became pale, but he could not be sure. Then she turned her face abruptly away from him with a little gasp.

  The boat slipped softly through the water toward the spit where the man was waiting. As it approached, he walked gingerly out until he was standing knee deep twenty yards from shore. They were heading directly for him, and the wind, slanting into the mouth of Polling Creek, would not let them point up farther toward the south bank to avoid him. The man began to wade to meet them, but the sandbar dropped off abruptly, wetting him to the waist, and he scrambled back to higher ground. He was a big man and he was holding in his hand, not a gun, but a short club, like a policeman’s billy. Apparently Karl Lewis had decided to capture them alive. Later they would presumably be found drowned, washed up along the shore somewhere with the overturned sailboat.

  Behind them the tall man had come down to the pier again. They heard the distant rattle of a chain, removed and thrown to the weathered boards.

  “Ready about,” Phillips whispered. “Hard alee.”

  They swung through an angle of ninety degrees and headed across the creek on the port tack, sailing parallel to the sandbar. Several boat-lengths to the left the big man splashed noisily abreast of them, saying nothing, keeping between them and the bay. He seemed gradually to diminish in size. When the water reached his chest he stopped, watched them sail on toward the darkness under the south bank, swore, and surged back toward shore. Phillips waited until he had covered half the distance; then came about again.

  The man looked back, seemed about to return to intercept them as they sailed across the shallows toward open water, shook his head disgustedly, and plunged ashore. They could hear his shoes making sucking sounds in the muck among the reeds. He was running to catch the others before they shoved off. An outboard motor coughed twice and was silent. Chris giggled.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny—” She stopped and took the shrill note out of her voice. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they couldn’t start it?”

  Outboard motors never started. You cranked them all around the bay and the river and they never started. It was an old joke. It was no good. The motor spluttered again, ran for a moment and was silent, but the joke was still no good.

  Phillips crouched to look back under the sail, but the reeds had slipped astern of them to hide the dock. The boat was lifting and pitching, heeling to the fresh bay breeze. He caught his breath sharply as they were sailing now, the sail hid them from shore. Back on the dock, the tall man, looking over the reeds to seaward, would be seeing nothing but a dim leaning sickle of sail standing out into the darkness.

  Phillips wound the end of t
he mainsheet around the tiller and made it fast, adjusting it carefully. Then he sat quite still, watching the boat sail herself with the helm lashed half a point to starboard. He moved his tongue over his lips and looked at Chris. Her eyes widened a little with understanding, and she nodded. The boat lurched a little and she was gone. He saw her head rise astern. He had a momentary impulse to keep sailing, drawing the others away from her while she swam ashore; but he knew she would not stand for it and the boat would do the job for the two of them. He made a last minor adjustment of the tiller lashing and dropped over the side.

  The water closed over him, not as cold as he had expected. He felt a moment of complete panic as his shoes and clothes seemed to drag him endlessly down through the murky water; he stroked once and felt the surface and opened his eyes and breathed. The boat was sailing rapidly away from him, leaving a slight phosphorescence in its wake. Lacking the weight of two people on deck, it was heeling quite sharply and, as Phillips watched, it nosed up into the wind, hesitated, fell off again, and sailed on. Already he could not read the name on the transom.

  Chris’s head broke water beside him. “Are you all right, darling? I can…”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They had reached the shallows when the runabout came out. They crouched in the water and watched it roar past after the small unguided sail holding out into the bay; the runabout planing, flinging aside a curling bow wave and dragging a plume of roiled water astern. The sound of the motor was a shrill racketing whine. The wake hissed through the reeds toward them and washed over them, gritty with sand and covered with a scum of the small dead stuff that piled up against a lee shore. They scrambled into the reeds and crouched in the mud, listening to the sound of the motor.

  “There were only two,” Chris whispered. “Where’s the third?”

  There had been only two men in the boat, and neither had seemed to have gray hair, although it had been hard to tell in the darkness.