But now it seemed so simple. When Bruce Case’s first murder attempt failed, he had made another the next night. It was Bruce who had planted the rope and cut the screen. And the meat cleaver hadn’t been picked out at random as a convenient weapon because he thought he heard a prowler in the house. He had chosen it because it would leave a wound similar to one inflicted by the cat burglar’s axe. He had meant to kill Betty and let the cat burglar take the blame.
His theory clarified a motive, too. If you discounted the jealousy motive the prosecution hoped to establish against Betty, there wasn’t a reason in the world for her to kill her husband. But there would have been a vast advantage for Bruce if Betty died. A divorce would have left him with nothing but his mediocre law-practice income; her death would have left him a wealthy widower. And she had just delivered an ultimatum that he would either arrange a quiet divorce or she would arrange it herself and drag his mistress into court as corespondent.
Then another thought struck him. Betty, knowing of the first murder attempt, must have realized the instant she turned on the light and saw that she had shot Bruce instead of the cat burglar that this had been a second attempt. He could understand her remaining silent before her arrest, for she probably thought that if it could be passed off as an accident it would be better for Bud not ever to know his father was a would-be murderer. But once she was charged with murder herself, why on earth hadn’t she spoken?
Another odd thing was that Bruce had still been sleeping in the study after his first attempt. It hardly seemed conceivable that Betty would have allowed him to remain in the house after he had attempted to kill her.
He decided he had better have a conference with Betty to get loose ends tied up before going to either the district attorney or the chief of police. And that meant waiting until visiting hours at the County Jail the next morning.
There was time, he thought. Her case wasn’t scheduled to come up before the grand jury until Friday, and the next day was only Tuesday.
Meantime he thought he might as well turn up all the evidence he could to support the premise that Bruce, not Betty, had planned murder. And there just might be something in Bruce’s love letters to Gail Thomas to support the premise.
He decided to accept her invitation to drop by that evening.
Promptly at eight o’clock that night he parked in front of the laundry at 126 Howard Street. Climbing the stairs, he rapped on the door of Gail Thomas’ flat. This time there was no delay. It opened instantly.
He was a little startled by the girl’s garb. She wore a tight red skirt which came to an inch above her knees, white sandals with straps running between the first and second toes, and a white, off-the-shoulder blouse whose elastic top formed a horizontal line across her spectacular bosom, no more than an inch above the nipples.
“You’re right on time,” she said, smiling at him. “Come on in.”
As he moved past her he caught a whiff of Intimate perfume and simultaneously realized she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. She moved aside only slightly to let him pass, at the same time turning sideways so that he had to squeeze by within an inch of the protruding part of her anatomy. He would have been less than human if he hadn’t glanced down. Her bosom pushed out the elastic top of the blouse so far that he could see down the cleft between her breasts dear to her navel. There was nothing at all beneath the blouse.
He felt a touch of alarm. Her provocative garb seemed the sort of thing a woman would wear when expecting a male caller only if she expected the evening to develop into something cozy. And he had no intention of complicating his already tangled love life.
Even if he had, Gail Thomas would have been his last choice. Not because she didn’t attract him, for under other circumstances he would have been delighted to cuddle with such a delectable blonde. But he shuddered to think what Betty’s reaction would be if she ever suspected he had succumbed to the same woman who had stolen her husband. He suspected that, this time, she might be inclined to commit murder in earnest.
He was a little reassured to see that the sofa-bed was still made up as a sofa. He moved to a chair but didn’t sit, because after closing the door, the blonde merely moved to the center of the room and smiled at him again. Her overabundent breasts jiggled up and down engagingly when she moved.
“What do you drink?” she asked.
“Nothing, thanks. I really only came to get a look at those letters.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “I thought maybe you’d stay awhile. I have the whole evening free.”
He hoped fervently she hadn’t done something like breaking another date for him, for it was his intention to get out of there as soon as he could, within the bounds of common courtesy and after seeing the letters.
It hadn’t even occurred to him that when she asked if they couldn’t be friends, she had meant other than platonic friendship. It probably should have, for while he wasn’t conceited enough to think every woman he met was prepared to throw herself at him, this wasn’t the first time a new female acquaintance had shown rather eager interest. He wasn’t wealthy, but his family was well-to-do and he was single. He was cynically aware that locally he was regarded as an eligible bachelor who would be a prize catch. Gail Thomas was fresh out of a lover, and being the sort of woman who needed a man to tell her what to do, she naturally wouldn’t overlook the first eligible male who hove into view.
He probably was the first, too, he thought. She had been squired around by out-of-town reporters and photographers for a week and a half now, but probably every one of them had a wife back home.
Because essentially he was a kindly man, he didn’t want to rebuff her bluntly after all her preparations. He said, “After we go through the letters, I’ll have some beer, if you have any.”
“Oh, my,” she said, distressed. “I thought you’d be the type who drank Scotch or bourbon. I have practically everything but beer.”
She looked so upset, he felt sorry for her. Apparently she had especially stocked up for him.
He said, “I like Scotch. But first can I see the letters?”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll fix a drink while you’re looking at them. Why are you so interested in them, anyway? Are you going to write about them in your paper?”
Her tone suggested that she wouldn’t mind. Some out-of-town newsman had missed a mighty chance for a scoop, he thought. Probably she would have agreeably handed the whole stack to the first reporter who asked her for them, if it had occurred to anyone to inquire of her if Bruce Case had ever written her any love letters. Syndicated and published a few at a time, they could have titillated the reading public from coast to coast for a week.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m not interested in them as much as a reporter as I am as an amateur detective. I just like to see everything that has any bearing on the case.”
She looked puzzled, but she didn’t press it. Going over to the writing desk, she pulled open the drawer containing the letters. He sat down.
She carried the stack of envelopes over to the sofa-bed, sat down and laid it on the low cocktail table in front of the sofa. Untying the string, she looked over at him.
“Come over here and we’ll go through them together.”
There was nothing he could do but comply. Rising, he walked over and sat about two feet away from her. She leaned forward to pick up the top envelope, the movement causing the top of her blouse to fall forward so that he glimpsed one rosebud nipple, oddly tiny in the center of its vast white mound.
“They’re all in order,” she said, handing him the envelope. “This is the first one, written about three months after we met. He didn’t write real often, because I had phones both at home and at the beauty shop where I worked, so usually he called if he just wanted me to know he was coming in. He only dropped me a line about once a mouth.”
“I see,” Marshall said, pulling the sheet from the envelope.
She continued to lean forward, her elbows on her knees, a
nd he was conscious of that rosebud in the corner of his vision. Then, to his relief, she not only sat up, but got up as he started to read.
“I’ll fix us a couple of drinks while you’re looking at that,” she said. “We can sip as we go through them.”
“Fine,” he said, finally able to concentrate on the letter.
“On the rocks will be okay.”
She moved on into the kitchen.
Chapter XXII
Like the letter Gail had shown him on Sunday, this one was typed. From its text no one could have told who it was from, who it was to, or where either lived. It was short, merely expressing a few corny sentiments about how much the writer missed the addressee, then mentioning that he would meet her at the usual place on Wednesday night. The letter was addressed to “Honey,” and was signed, “Love from me.” Even the signature was typed.
Gail returned with two old-fashioned glasses, each containing two ice cubes and loaded to the brim with Scotch. She sat down two feet closer to him than before, which placed her thigh right against his.
Glancing at the glasses, he wondered if the woman hoped to get him drunk — or get both of them drunk, since hers was equally full. There must have been four ounces of Scotch in each.
Lifting her glass, she said, “Cheers.”
He raised his, clinked it against hers and took a bare sip. She took a good-sized gulp. When she leaned forward to set down her glass, her left breast pressed into his arm.
“You hardly drank any at all,” she said reproachfully, examining the level of his glass.
“I like to sip my Scotch,” he said.
“Is that the way you’re supposed to drink it? I really don’t know much about drinking. Bruce drank vodka, and I can’t stand the stuff. I got drunk on it the night we met and haven’t been able to face it since. Mostly I just drank ginger ale with him.”
“Let’s look at the rest of the letters,” he suggested.
She insisted on handing him each one individually, since it gave her an excuse to lean forward each time. And each one she urged him to take another sip of his drink. By the time they were halfway through the stack, she had managed to badger him into emptying his glass.
Hers was empty, too, by then. She rose to fix two more.
The early letters merely expressed vague sentiments somewhat short of protestations of love. They were full of such phrases as “I miss you,” and “I want you,” but they carefully avoided the word “love.” That started to appear after about the sixth letter, and thereafter there were constant assurances of his love. In the tenth there was the expressed wish that he were single so that he could proudly show her off to all his friends. The twelfth was the one she had previously shown him, reporting that his wife refused to discuss divorce.
Marshall could almost visualize the gradual pressure Gail Thomas must have exerted to bring about the increasingly passionate avowals. She struck him as the sort of woman who, even though she regarded men as superior creatures and would willingly bow to the will of her man of the moment, would, at the same time, want to envelop him. He imagined her starting, early in the romance, by insisting that if Bruce didn’t love her, they had better part. Not yet ready for that, Marshall supposed he had fallen into the trap and had admitted his love in order to keep her as a bed partner for a while longer. The next step would have been for her to decide to end the affair because “there was no future in it.” Eventually her panting lover, making one small concenssion after another each time she decided to end the affair, had gotten himself into the position of having promised to divorce his wife and marry her.
Marshall knew the route, because he had once been subjected to this sort of inexorable campaign when he was a senior in college, the year after Betty had left him. He hadn’t had a wife to get rid of, but otherwise the process had been much the same as he imagined Bruce Case had gone through with Gail. One day he had awakened to the realization that the girl he had been chasing solely for the use of her soft white body seemed to consider them engaged. When he tried to back away, she pinned him down with exact quotes of the things he had whispered in her ear under threat of the withdrawal of her favors. He had finally gotten out of it by being blunter than he had ever been before or since.
Bruce hadn’t seemed to mind the envelopment, though. Maybe, in his case, he had actually been in love.
When the blonde returned with fresh drinks of the same caliber as before, she sat so close to him their bodies pressed together all the way from knee to shoulder.
Immediately she insisted on his sampling the new drink. They clinked glasses again, and when she set her glass down, the elastic top of her blouse slipped a little. When she straightened, both rosebud nipples were peeping out above it.
She seemed totally unconscious of the exposed, but he suspected she had stretched the elastic a bit while in the kitchen in order to cause just this effect. He also noted that her short skirt had hiked up halfway to her hips.
He ignored both views to concentrate on the letter.
The second half of the stack was full of vows of undying love and promises of eventual marriage, as soon as the writer could get rid of his burdensome wife. There was nothing, however, to suggest any murderous intent until he got to the last letter. He found it so interesting, he unconsciously lifted his glass and drained it as he read.
From the corner of his vision he was conscious of the blonde’s pleased expression at his sudden bibulousness. She immediately downed her own drink to keep up.
The letter read:
My darling:
I’ve learned that Dell’s Beauty Shop here has a vacancy for a girl, and if you catch the bus here Friday, I’m sure you can get the job. The flat I told you about is still vacant, so you should be able to complete all arrangements the same day. I’d see to it myself, in your name, but in a town this size there would be bound to be talk, so I think I’d better stay out of it altogether. I can hardly wait until you’re so close we can be together for at least a short time every night.
It’s not going to be much longer now, so please stop being impatient. I promise I’ll be in a position to marry within six months. And then it won’t be sneaking into furnished flats any more. I’ll be carrying you over the threshold of our own home at Rexford Bay.
Love forever,
Your man
The letter convinced Marshall of two things: Bruce Case’s murder attempts on Betty hadn’t stemmed merely from spur-of-the-moment desperation to hang onto his luxurious life; and he actually had been enough in love with Gail Thomas to marry her. Perhaps Betty’s insistence on an immediate divorce had brought things to a head, but he had planned to kill her even before he moved his mistress to Runyon City.
The evidence was right here in black and white. For there was no way in the world Bruce could have ever carried a new bride over the threshold of the old Runyon place if he had planned merely to divorce Betty. It could have been his if he were a widower and had inherited it.
Turning toward the blonde, he started to say, “Do you mind if I take this letter — ?” and stopped abruptly.
She must have deliberately pulled the wide top of her off-the-shoulder blouse down even more, for its sides were halfway down to her elbows. Her large breasts, totally bared, bulged toward him, thrusting their pink tips within kissing distance. Her knees had fallen apart and her skirt had worked up clear to her hips. She smiled at him blearily, obviously drunker than a kitten full of catnip.
He couldn’t decide whether to be amused or exasperated. Though he happened to be a sparing drinker, he had an enormous tolerance for alcohol, and the eight ounces of Scotch he had consumed had merely put a warm glow in his stomach. But apparently Gail Thomas’ capacity was as low as his was high.
No wonder she had gotten drunk the first time she was with Bruce Case, he thought. She looked on the verge of passing out from two drinks.
“You should have stuck to ginger ale,” he said. “You shouldn’t try to get other people drunk until you le
arn how to drink yourself. Did you ever drink Scotch before?”
She moved her head slowly from side to side, continuing to smile at him. She seemed to have difficulty keeping her face in focus.
Rising from the sofa, he took both her hands and pulled her to her feet. Staggering against him, she threw her arms about his neck, pressing her naked bosom against his chest.
Disengaging himself, he gently forced her over to the wall and leaned her against it. “Stay right there,” he commanded.
“Okay,” she said cheerily.
He drew the cocktail table out of the way and examined the sofa-bed. It was the type where you merely pulled the seat forward, the back flattened out level with the seat, and you had a double bed. As he made it into a bed, she regarded the operation with alcoholic interest.
“Where do you keep your sheets and blankets?” he asked.
“Unnerneath.”
He assumed she meant underneath the bed. Investigating, he discovered that the front of the sofa opened downward to disclose a space behind it, but it was empty and had no bottom. After contemplating it, he came to the conclusion that you had to remove the bedclothes before making the contraption into a bed. He pushed it back to its sofa position, looked again and was pleased to learn he was right. Beneath the seat was a storage chamber running the width of the sofa.
He drew out folded sheets, two pillows and a blanket, pulled the contrivance out into a bed again and efficiently made it up.
When he straightened from this endeavor and glanced over his shoulder to where he had left the girl, there was nothing there but a skirt and blouse lying on the floor. Swinging the other way, he found her swaying on her feet in the center of the room, stark naked except for her toeless sandals.
She lifted one foot to remove a sandal, lost her balance and started to topple on her face. He made a dash and caught her beneath the arms, just in time to prevent her crashing to the floor. Heaving her erect, he led her over to the bed and made her sit.
This Game of Murder Page 14