This Game of Murder

by Deming, Richard

  Marshall said, “It doesn’t get dark until about nine this time of year.”

  “Just as we reached those big bushes between our house and the Pierces', I said, ‘Hey, look what somebody’s doing.’ We both stopped and Mom looked where I pointed. You couldn’t see who it was behind the screen, but you could see the knife sticking out and cutting across the top. Mom pulled me behind one of the bushes and we watched. The knife went all around the four sides, then Dad leaned out the window and dropped the cut-out piece to the ground behind the bushes next to the house.”

  When the boy stopped, Marshall said, “Keep going, Bud. You aren’t finished.”

  “Oh. I thought you just wanted to know about us seeing him cut the screen. Mom held my arm and told me to be quiet. Dad closed the window from inside, and a couple of minutes later we heard the back door open and close. Mom pulled me along behind the bushes until you could see the place in the wall where you go down to the beach. Dad was just going down the steps. We moved closer to the wall until we could see over it. Dad was walking along the beach behind the Pierce house and the Derring house. He kept going to where the road comes down to the water. past the country-club grounds and cut across that. I guess he was walking over to the clubhouse. Across country like that instead of taking the streets it’s only about three blocks.”

  There was the sound of feet tripping lightly down the stairs. Marshall said quickly, “I guess that’s enough, Bud.”

  Betty entered the room with a smile on her face. With her strawberry-blond hair drawn into an upsweep, she was beautiful in a white, form-fitting dress. Marshall rose from his chair.

  “Hello, Kirk,” she said. “Time for your bath, Bud. When you’re in your pajamas, give a yell and I’ll come kiss you good night.”

  “Okay,” Bud said, getting up from the sofa. “Good night, Mr. Marshall.”

  “ ‘Night, Bud.”

  When the boy had gone upstairs, Betty came over, placed her hands on Marshall’s shoulders and offered her lips for a kiss. He touched them very gently with his own.

  “Your passion overwhelms me,” she said, cocking an eyebrow at him. “After all this time I thought I’d have to fight you off.”

  He smiled a trifle weakly. “Maybe I’m tireder from the trip than I thought.”

  “Would a drink perk you up?”

  “All right,” he agreed, more to get her out of the room for a minute so that he could think than because he was thirsty.

  She moved on through the dining room toward the kitchen. Marshall sank heavily back into his chair.

  What Bud had told him changed the whole picture of what had happened that night. Betty had known what Bruce planned. That explained her puzzling transfer of Bud back to his own bedroom, when she had been having him sleep in her room ever since the attack on Mrs. Ferris. She had never for a moment thought it was the cat burglar opening her bedroom door. She had known it was Bruce, and had been calmly waiting for him in the dark with a gun in her hand.

  It still wasn’t murder. He knew no jury in the country would convict her, even if the whole truth came out, for it was patently a case of self-defense. But her cold-blooded handling of the situation appalled him. Any normal woman would simply have asked for police protection.

  He understood what her thoughts must have been. By then she had realized that her father’s drowning had been no accident and that she was marked as the killer’s next victim. She must have hated Bruce to the core of her soul.

  Perhaps there was some moral justification in what she had done. But he knew beyond any doubt that he didn’t want a woman who took such matters into her own hands.

  All at once he felt a sense of relief. The shackles which had kept him bound to a memory for so many years dissolved.

  There was no point in letting her know he was aware of her cold-blooded act, he decided. The burden of her own guilt was enough for her to bear. For he was sure she felt the burden. Now he understood her strange insistence on being tried. Guilt must have been the deciding factor in her decision to stand trial instead of telling the partial truth. Concern over her son’s future had been only part of it. She must have felt the need to stand trial because she knew in her heart that she had deliberately killed her husband, even though the killing could be legally justified.

  Betty came back into the room with a tray containing a highball, a bottle of beer and an empty glass. She set it on the coffee table before the sofa.

  “Come on over here,” she invited.

  Moving over to the sofa next to her, he poured beer, waited for the foam to settle and liften his glass. He might as well get it over with fast and clean, he thought.

  “I can’t think of any appropriate toast,” he said. “Unless you want to make it to friendship. This’ll probably be our last drink together in such cozy surroundings.”

  She looked at him strangely. “What do you mean?”

  “Lydia and I are getting married.”

  Momentarily her face registered shock, but she recovered immediately and assumed a bright smile. Her eyes failed to join her lips in the smile. They suddenly grew opaque and expressionless.

  “Congratulations,” she said, touching her glass to his. “When?”

  “We haven’t set a date. I suppose she’ll want enough time to get in a few bridal showers. Probably in the fall.”

  “Im sure you’ll be very happy.” She drained half her drink, a few moments later drained the other half.

  He left fifteen minutes later. As she walked him to the door, Bud called from the top of the stairs, “Mom! I’m ready.”

  “The voice of the master of the house,” she said, offering her hand in a formal handclasp. “Good luck, Kirk.”

  “The same to you,” he said.

  The door closed gently behind him and he heard the bolt click home.

  He was still only nine-fifteen when he parked in front of Lydia’s apartment house. There was light in her front windows.

  She answered the door in her quilted housecoat and with a towel wrapped about her head.

  “I just stepped out of the shower,” she said, smiling at him. “Come on in.”

  As she closed and locked the door behind him, he said abruptly, “How’d you like to get married?”

  Her eyes widened. “To you?”

  He burst out laughing. “I’m not running a marriage brokerage.”

  “I guess it was a silly question,” she said. “I just wasn’t sure I heard right. Do you mind repeating what you said?”

  Taking her by the shoulders, he drew her against him. “Will you marry me? I love you. Would you prefer it on my knees?”

  “I accept,” she said, throwing her arms about his neck. Never mind your knees. When?”

  “I think the bride is supposed to fix the wedding date. That’s up to you.”

  “Labor Day,” she said. “Then you’ll be able to remember our anniversary. But let’s start the honeymoon right now.”

  Obligingly he scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom.

  THE END

  If you liked This Game of Murder check out:

  Body for Sale

  1

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN RAINE CITY, I DIDN’T GO STRAIGHT to the office. I stopped by Tony Vincinti’s Bar and Grill first. When you know you’re going to be fired anyway, what’s the point in being careful not to breathe liquor in the boss’s face?

  At two in the afternoon the place was deserted except for fat Tony. He flashed me his white-toothed Sicilian grin and ran a rag over the already spotless section of the bar in front of me.

  “You’ve been gone a while, amico,” he said.

  “Just three weeks,” I said. I pulled my order book from my pocket and started to flip pages. “Seven fifty, five, three fifty and two. I netted four orders for good old Schyler Tools, Tony. Eighteen-hundred-dollars’ worth of business.”

  Tony’s grin widened. “That sounds good, Tom.”

  “It sounds lousy,” I told him. “The co
mmission is ten per cent. It works out to sixty dollars a week.”

  The tavern proprietor’s grin disappeared. “Well, you get expenses too, don’t you?” he said philosophically.

  “Yeah. Which cuts Schyler’s profit on my last three weeks’ work to nothing. Make me a double Gibson.”

  Tony looked worried. “You reported in yet, amico?”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  His dark face flushed. “I thought we was compari.”

  His flush made me a little ashamed of myself. “We are,” I said. “No, I haven’t reported in yet. Make me a double Gibson.”

  “You come in here once before with that look on your face,” Tony said. “In uniform that time. Remember what happened?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had six double Gibsons and got knocked off the force for being drunk on duty. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I served them, didn’t I? I always felt bad about that.”

  “Rest easy,” I said. “I make my own jams. I’m a slob.”

  “You’re my compare,” he protested. “You can’t talk that way about a friend of mine.”

  I gave him a patient grin. “You going to build me a double Gibson, or do I have to go to some clean bar?”

  He pretended he was offended. Slapping ice into a mixing glass, he poured quite a bit of gin before adding a mere dash of vermouth.

  “This time it doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Drunk or sober, I get canned the minute I turn in this order book.”

  He stirred the mixture. “Why? You been working, ain’t you? You even been on the wagon since you started with Schyler.”

  “I’ve been working my head off, Tony. That’s what makes it a boot in the pants. I never blamed anybody for my own mistakes, did I?”

  Pouring the drink into a five-ounce stemmed glass, he dropped in a pearl onion and set it before me. I gave him a five-dollar bill. He rang up a dollar twenty and set the change on the bar.

  “I never heard you cry about anything,” he said.

  I took a sip of the drink. “Up to now I never had anything to cry about. I never held it against the lieutenant who caught me drunk on duty. Hell, he was just doing his job. It wasn’t his fault I let a dame throw me for a loop. And I never blamed anybody but myself for the other two jobs I lost.”

  Tony said, “That private-eye job wasn’t so much anyway, was it?”

  “That’s beside the point. Know why I got canned?”

  He shook his head.

  “I got caught trying to shake down a client.”

  Tony looked embarrassed.

  “Know why I lost my hack-driving job?”

  He shook his head again.

  “An inspector caught me gimmicking my meter. I told you I was a slob.” I drained my glass and shoved it toward him. “Same way.”

  Tony said, “Don’t a lot of them do that? You was just unlucky to get caught.”

  “I was an angle-shooter,” I said. “Up to six months ago I’d been an angle-shooter all my life. I woke up when I suddenly realized all it ever got me was trouble. So in six months on the road for Schyler Tools I haven’t even padded my expense account. And I’ve worked night and day. Only I can’t seem to sell tools.” I pointed to my empty glass. “I said the same way.”

  A little reluctantly he started to mix another drink. “That ought to count for something, Tom. Why don’t you check in and talk to the boss instead of going off half-cocked?”

  I let out a bitter chuckle. “I plan to talk to the boss. I’m primed to tell him good.”

  “You will be primed if you keep downing this priming fluid,” Tony muttered. He set the second drink before me and rang up another dollar twenty. “Ain’t it kind of childish to tell off the boss when you get canned?”

  “Not this boss,” I said. “You know who the president of Schyler Tools is?”

  Tony shook his head.

  “George Mathews. He’s president because he married old Lyman Schyler’s daughter just after the old man died. She inherited controlling interest. Without her vote Mathews couldn’t get a job as a stock boy. He spends about three hours a day at the office. The rest of the time he’s golfing, boating and discreetly chasing females. Discreetly, because his wife would kick him out on his can if she ever caught him. That’s the kind of incompetent that’s going to fire me.”

  Tony frowned. “That’s not just sour grapes? How’s the place keep going with a guy like that in charge?”

  “He’s only nominally in charge. The real brains of the company is the force of assistants Lyman Schyler built up before he died. It goes on functioning just as automatically under a figurehead boss as it did under the old man. This isn’t just sour grapes. My opinion of George Mathews is the same one held throughout the plant.”

  “He’s nobody you can reason with then, huh?”

  “He wouldn’t know what I was talking about. He’ll just can me and then rush off to play golf. At least I’m going to have the pleasure of telling him he doesn’t know his head from a cobblestone.”

  I finished my second drink and Tony mixed a third without my ordering it. “On me this time,” he said.

  I had one more after that. I was pretty well primed by the time I reached the office. Not drunk, just courageous enough to spit in a tiger’s eye.

  The little blond who served as George Mathews’ receptionist gave me a nice smile and trilled, “Good afternoon, Mr. Cavanaugh.”

  The smile turned to a look of alarm when, without even answering, I pushed through the swinging gate and headed for Mathews’ private office.

  “You can’t go in there!” she squealed, rushing after me. “Mr. Mathews is in conference.”

  I stepped inside and shut the door just before she got to it. She must have been afraid to violate her boss’s privacy further because she didn’t try to follow me. A quick glance about the office showed me that no one was there. This made me feel a little foolish until I remembered the small siesta room connecting to the office. The door to it was closed.

  Quietly I crossed over to it. It was unlocked too. I pushed the door open and went in.

  This room was a mere cubbyhole, no more than ten by seven feet square. There was a bar across one end with four stools before it and the door to Mathews’ private washroom alongside. The only other furnishings were two leather-upholstered chairs and a leather-covered sofa, plus a couple of ash stands.

  A couple of people, stark naked, were horizontal on the sofa.

  My unannounced entrance brought on a flurry of activity. With a flash of white legs a shapely brunette bounced up from the sofa, swept a dress and a couple of pieces of lingerie from one of the chairs and darted into the washroom so rapidly I didn’t even glimpse her face.

  But I didn’t have to. I recognized the small pink birthmark on the left cheek of her round little bottom. George Mathews wasn’t the only man at Schyler Tools who was intimately acquainted with file clerk Gertie Drake. But he probably did have the distinction of being the first to get intimately acquainted on company time.

  Mathews’ look of consternation changed to a threatening frown when he saw who had interrupted his conference. But he delayed saying anything until he had grabbed his own clothing from the other chair and jerked it on as fast as he could. He didn’t sacrifice thoroughness to speed, though. He knotted his tie in the mirror behind the bar and even carefully adjusted his tie clip.

  Then he asked in a cold voice, “What do you mean bursting in here unannounced?”

  I had intended blistering his ears with my personal opinion of him, but the situation changed my mind. Giving him a chummy smile, I took one of the chairs and lit a cigarette. Mathews glared at me.

  “I don’t seem to be much good on the road,” I said. “I think I’d like district sales manager better.”

  Striding toward me, he looked down at me with clenched fists. I wasn’t very impressed. At thirty-two George Mathews was lean and hard and well muscled, but at thirty I was leaner and harder and better muscled. A
nd I outweighed his one seventy-five by twenty pounds.

  “Of all the unmitigated — ” Mathews started to say.

  “Would you rather have me discuss the promotion with Mrs. Mathews?” I interrupted.

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. After staring at me wordlessly for a few moments, he managed in a slightly high voice, “Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  I gave him a pleasant nod.

  He stared a while more, unclenched his fists and rubbed the back of his neck. His gaze strayed to the closed washroom door.

  “I’ll make as good a district sales manager as you do a company president,” I said reasonably.

  Looking back at me, he sniffed. “You’ve been drinking.”

  “A little,” I admitted. “We all have our minor indulgences.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “You’re an adulterer,” I countered amiably.

  His fists clenched again, then unclenched. Instead of staying angry, he decided to make me a fellow conspirator.

  Summoning a rueful smile, he said, “What the hell, Tom. We don’t have to insult each other. You’d get a little sore if I barged in on you at a time like this. And don’t tell me you’ve never had a time like this.”

  “I won’t. But I’m single.”

  He dismissed this hair-splitting with an airy wave. “According to Kinsey, fifty per cent of all married men cheat a little.”

  “How many of them have wives who could pitch them out in the street without a nickel?”

  He flushed. “You want to be nasty about this?”

  “No,” I said. “I just want to be district sales manager.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said testily. “There’s no opening.”

  “Ed Harmony retires in two weeks.”

  “You know very well Harry Graves is scheduled for that spot. Moving you over his head would create an office scandal.”