“Look. He was arrested. On the theft charge. He lied, hastily and not too well. He lied again. He was caught. He couldn’t lie his way out of the predicament, which he instinctively tried to do. So he hesitantly tried the truth. And it was so fantastic that nobody believed it. Then he was arrested for murder, and it was the mixture as before. One, two, three lies—then the truth. And nobody believed it. That was the message I got from Dr. Milton Heber’s little dissertation. Deep down inside I believed it from the start, but my superficial critical faculty kept rejecting it.
“And finally I conned Wes into abandoning the incredible truth and seizing on a credible lie. Thank God I saw the light in time—if it is in time.”
“I just don’t get it,” she said.
“Someone is framing Wes. Someone who knows him. Someone who is clever. Someone who knew that he would try to be credible rather than truthful, and that someone therefore dished him up a helping of truth that no one would believe. Until now, that someone has held all the cards.”
“But what can we do?” June said.
“I have a tape recording,” he said. “It was made by Wes under sedation. It is the full story of his alibi. Dr. Heber said it was full of inconsistencies which damned it. Then Wes, bless him, admitted that it was all a lie, to fool Heber—and I believed him. But Wes was clever enough to point out that Dr. Heber’s alleged inconsistencies are not inconsistencies at all. Now, believe it or not, I have never listened to that tape, because it seemed worthless. So as soon as you drink up your dinner, I’m going home to do it. June, through this awful week, I have seen the prison bars opening up to admit you—and me. I couldn’t summon up enough nerve to tell you. I’ve been paralyzed, but now I’m in action again.”
***
“Tell me about the girl. How did you come to meet her?” Dr. Heber’s voice said from the tape machine.
Sidney Grant, clutching a brandy, lay back on the sofa and listened.
“Well, I met her downtown,” Wes’s voice said. “In this place where I used to always eat. I didn’t like eating with the agency guys. I went to this place where I didn’t know anybody and read a book, and this girl came and sat at my table. I edged over and kept on reading, but I could feel her staring at me. She said I must think she was rude, staring like that, but she couldn’t help it because I was the spitting image of a boy she used to know. I said no kidding, and she said no kidding, when she first saw me she nearly rushed over and kissed me. Wouldn’t that have embarrassed me in public, she said. I just glared at her cold and hard and thought how kooky can you get? She said sorry, I ought to know better and she smiled and looked hurt. I said forget it—I just like my privacy at lunch. She said, oh, pardon me for breathing, now I’ll crawl away. I said heck, I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant I like reading. She said ‘Oh, you’re just like him in every way. You value your dignity and privacy. You like to read. You can be cold and cruel to people that like you. I’ll bet you’d do just like he done, if the same thing happened.’ I tell her I’m not cold and cruel, but a person has to protect themselves, and I ask her what happened and what this boy did. She says she can’t really tell me, a perfect stranger, but it was just that this boy ran out on her when they’d been going steady, and she humbled her pride and groveled in the dirt to try to explain, but he wouldn’t look at her again. And she said she knew I would be the same way. No matter how much a girl loved me, if she made one little mistake that would be it. Proud men won’t forgive a girl, she said. Well, part of me knew her line wouldn’t be good enough to make Ann Landers or a confession mag, but by this time I’m kind of looking at how she’s made, which is pretty good and all female, and my critical faculty isn’t so hot. I said it would depend on what mistake a girl made. I said I could always forgive spelling mistakes and she says, ‘Oh yes, I knew it, you can laugh at other people as if they hadn’t got no hearts, because you haven’t got one yourself. It wasn’t a spelling mistake I made.’ I said what was it. She said it was the worst mistake a girl can make. She said she was going steady with this boy Ross, and then her girl friend told her she saw Ross at Wasaga Beach with this blonde that was married, and he was there all the weekend. And she was so jealous, she wanted to make him jealous, so she went on a party with this other boy, a real wolf type and a regular octopus with eight hands, and Ross is there but he just looks contemptuous. Well, she felt so bad, she let this boy give her too much to drink, and he also slipped her some tranquilizers, with the result she went right off the deep end, and of course this wolf type bragged about it all around town, and Ross just walked right out on her and went away and joined the navy. And she cried and wrote and begged for forgiveness, but he wouldn’t answer her letters.”
“The swine,” Sidney said, sitting up and pulling at his brandy.
“Anyway by this time I’m getting kind of interested,” Wes’s voice continued. “Like she was pushed over close and talking very quiet into my ear and almost crying. And her thigh was touching mine and when she leaned over I could sort of see, well, she was really stacked, and she had this perfume. So my voice was a bit shaky and I said, ‘So what? A girl is liable to make that mistake. Why should a guy be so tough on her?’ She said what was so awful, she had always said no to Ross, and now she wanted him that way, but he was gone forever, but when she saw me she thought for a minute I was him, and… well, anyway I was getting ideas, and I said maybe I could take Ross’s place. And she said there, men, they’re all the same. They only want a girl for one thing, and I was like all the rest. She said no girl would mind that, if only she could feel that there was anything more, like a little tenderness and love, and I said well, how about a date, and we could see how she felt about me. I said she’d find I wasn’t like these guys and all that stuff. And anyway the upshot was she said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind anything if you’ll only be kind!’ Holy cow, I make a date. She says don’t say anything to anyone, but keep every evening clear. It might be Friday, Saturday or Sunday, but she would phone me for sure and tell me where to meet her.
“She said she had to be careful because she made an even worse mistake. After this party, and after Ross walked out, she found she was in trouble, and she had to marry this wolf type, and he was mean as hell to her and kicked her around, but like all these wolf types he was jealous as anything about her. I said what about the kid, and she said she lost it, she had a miscarriage after she got married. She got my phone number at the office and said to stay downtown for dinner Friday, because probably Friday she would call me, and she squeezed my hand under the table. So anyway I fell for this line.”
“Okay, Wes, okay,” Sidney said. “I understand perfectly.”
The tape droned on, and Wes recounted how he had waited, all of a tremble, for his big date. Most nice girls didn’t want any part of him, as an ex-jailbird, and the girls at the office all went with account executives or clients. Then on Friday she called and said, “Tonight is our night, dearest,” and told him to meet her at the Ladies’ Beverage Room entrance of a hotel on Jarvis Street. She told him to meet her at the rear entrance, the one coming in off the parking lot.
Sidney sat up at the term “parking lot.” Parking lots had already loomed large in the case.
Wes met the girl at the doorway. He had parked his car in the lot, which was unattended—a car which his grandmother had bought for him when he came home from jail. But the girl was in terror. She said they couldn’t go in—some friends of her husband’s were in there—they would have to go somewhere else. She told him to leave his car and come in hers. She couldn’t leave it there. Her car was parked on the side street, and they got into it. It was a Ford or something like that. She drove away, but didn’t say where they were going.
“I was sort of fooling with her in the car,” the voice went on. “She said how could she drive if I did that, but she didn’t get mad. I kept looking at her and I didn’t have a clue where we were going, turning every which way, and first thing I knew we were in a lane, and she turned into this
garage with an overhead door and turned the lights out. She jumped out and pulled the overhead door down; then I caught her and she said, ‘Not here, honey boy.’ We walked through a little yard, all dark, and went in the back door of this old apartment house and up the wooden stairs, and then we were in the kitchen of this apartment. She said, ‘See, honey boy, my husband is away, out of town, and the night is ours.’ I grabbed her, but she said she wanted a drink. I said I would have rye, and she wanted a rum and Coke. She looked in the fridge and said damn it, no Cokes. She said would I call the drugstore and order a couple of cartons of Cokes and a carton of Matinee cigarettes. I was cursing. She said the phone was in the hall, but leave the kitchen door open and there’d be enough light. The hall bulb was gone. She said call the drugstore, the number is Walnut 9-0962. I called and the number was busy. I tried it again and still busy. I called out the line is busy and she said oh, skip it, she’d found some Cokes in the ironing cupboard and she still had a full package of cigarettes. I went out and she had the drinks all poured and I started to fool around and she said not here…”
The drowsy voice went on, recounting how the lady, whose only name was Gail, led him to a bedroom with a Renoir above the bed, and how certain events took place which fully occupied Wes’s attention for several minutes. And then Wes, wearing only his shorts, wandered out of the room and through the apartment, carrying his still unfinished drink, and how the girl called to him to come back, and eventually pursued him, and he asked her about the abstract painting in the living room and the Modigliani in the dining room, and she said her husband was an awful square and his mother and his aunts gave him all these things because his father was dead so his mother gave him his father’s books and all.
Then they went to the kitchen and had another drink, by which time Wes wanted to see the Renoir again. So they returned to the Renoir, and once again were very happy and preoccupied, and she told him not to touch anything, because her husband would notice if anything were out of place, and he walked around and looked at the books and records, and then the phone rang. The girl answered and listened a minute, and she appeared to be terrified.
A girl friend had phoned to say that she had seen Gail’s husband drinking downtown. He hadn’t gone out of town. He might be trying to trap her. She told Wes to get dressed as quickly as he could, and they both dressed and rushed out, through the dark yard and into the car. The girl pulled up the overhead door, then told Wes to lie down with his head in her lap, in case any neighbor might see them leaving the lane, and he lay there as she drove away, and it was so comfortable that he fell asleep, and when he woke up they were back in the side street beside the hotel, and she shook him and said quick, get out. She said, “Honey boy, I know God intended you and I for lovers,” and promised to call him again. And there he was on the pavement feeling woolly and drowsy, and the girl had gone.
“And Dr. Milton Heber is a plain damn fool,” Sidney said aloud when the tape had finished.
Sidney had become drowsy during the recital, but now he was wide awake.
***
As Wes had said, suppose the girl were acting as a decoy—why should she fit in with the décor of the apartment? Viewed in that light, the whole thing became credible.
Sidney played the tape again, speeding it up at times and skipping portions, but making careful notes of all the bits of description—paintings, books, records, furniture, china and glass.
But the point which struck him with the greatest force on the second run was the telephone call to the drugstore. If Wes were lying, why would he include such inconsequence? Was it his attempt to hint that he had put his fingerprints on the telephone during the evening —fingerprints that were to be transplanted to another telephone by magic?
If he were telling the strict truth, on the other hand, the thing was of the greatest significance. Under those circumstances, the girl was an actress, acting out a scenario prepared by that obscene impresario Howard Gadwell. No detail would have been overlooked. Would she really have run out of Cokes? If so, would she really have asked Wes to phone for some?
If the idea was to cut Wes off from the world, would she let him call a real drugstore? Suppose the call got through, and he said “Send up some Cokes”? Then the drugstore would have asked for the address. If they failed to get it, they might remember the call. It would be a complete breach of security.
That being the case, the call must have been part of the scenario, and its only possible use was to get Wes’s fingerprints on a telephone. So she told him to call the drugstore—she called out the number to him. Did she just pick a number at random? That might have been dangerous. The person answering might have said “Peachtree Restaurant.” Some slight conversation might have followed—which might have been remembered later. It wasn’t the sort of detail the conspirators overlooked. No, Sidney reasoned, it must have been a prearranged number. Possibly the apartment of some member of the conspiracy, maybe the home of a friend, who had been asked to leave the telephone off as a gag, in order to ensure that Wes got a busy signal.
Sidney Grant was pacing back and forth in his attic room, but suddenly stopped and stood still. Something had exploded in his brain.
Under sedation, Wes Beattie might have dredged up the actual number from his unconscious mind. He had rattled it off very glibly, without thinking. If it were an actual number, it could lead to a member of the gang or an accomplice or to somebody who had been asked—last September—to leave the phone off for an hour.
It was a thin chance.
Sidney looked up Gadwell’s number, but it was definitely not the one. And Gadwell lived in one of the ultramodern apartment houses on stilts, up on Avenue Road. It certainly could not have been the decoy apartment.
Sidney turned back the tape and listened, checking the drugstore number that the girl had given to Wes. Walnut 9-0962. He walked slowly to the telephone and dialed it. A woman’s voice answered after several rings.
“Hello?”
“Hello, can you send me a cab right away?” Sidney said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. You must have the wrong number. This is a private residence,” the voice said. It was a cultured voice.
Sidney hung up. Not a drugstore.
He called a friend at police headquarters, where, in spite of his practice, he had many friends.
He gave the number, Walnut 9-0962, and asked his friend to find out from the telephone company whose number it was. The police would find out faster than he could.
The answer came back in five minutes. The number belonged to Dr. E. Neil Whitney, at an address in Moore Park.
It was nearly eleven o’clock, and Sidney was tired. It was hardly the time to make social calls, but time was precious.
Sidney called a taxi, and drove to Moore Park.
Dr. E. Neil Whitney lived in an old-fashioned apartment house like many others in the area. Sidney sat in the cab and studied it until the driver said, “That’s ninety cents, Mac.” Sidney was feeling in his pocket when he saw some people emerging from the building, and then he bent his head over and hid behind the front seat.
“Don’t get sick in this cab, Mac,” the driver warned.
“No danger,” Sidney said. “I just want to stay here until those people go.”
The people were Ralph Paget and his wife Marcia, the same Ralph Paget who had been so cooperative as a witness the day before.
They stepped into a parked Jag and drove off.
It was a link that Sidney Grant had been looking for, provided it was the Whitney apartment that they had been visiting.
Sidney paid the cab and walked into the lobby. He found the Whitney bell and pressed it.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Mr. Grant. A lawyer. May I see Dr. Whitney for a minute?”
“At this hour?” the voice said.
“I apologize for the hour. I won’t stay a minute,” Sidney said.
There was a dubious silence, but then the buzzer sounded, and Si
dney quickly opened the inner door.
As he rode up on the slow automatic elevator, he racked his brain for an opening to the conversation. He couldn’t just say, “Did Ralph Paget ask you to leave your telephone off the hook last September?”
Mrs. Whitney was framed in the doorway of her apartment as he approached it.
“Are you Mr. Sidney Grant?” she said. “My husband says you were probably looking for Ralph Paget. The Pagets just left, not five minutes ago.”
Which settled one question.
“No. You are Mrs. Whitney? I wanted to talk to you and Dr. Whitney about the Wes Beattie case.”
“Such a frightful thing!” Mrs. Whitney said. “My heart bleeds for Ralph and Marcia and the poor old lady. Do come in.”
She led him through a dark, narrow passage which opened into a large living room, where the bridge table was still set up with cards and score sheets spread over it, and Dr. Whitney was just sitting down with a fresh drink, which he had evidently poured while his wife was occupied.
“Not another one, darling?” she said. “This is Mr. Sidney Grant. My husband. We’ve been talking about you quite a lot this evening. Were your ears burning?”
“Here, sit down, Mr. Grant, and let me buy you a drink,” the doctor said. “What can we do to help the great defense?”
Sidney sat down, facing a white-on-white abstract painting that hung above the sofa, and agreed that he could use a Scotch and water.
“Paget is very worried about the course you’re taking,” the doctor said. “But he tells me you really dragged poor old Hale over the coals.”
Sidney watched Dr. Whitney go into the dining room, where he saw, hanging above an Italian inlaid chest, a portrait of a lady with a long neck. He stood up and walked to the archway leading to the dining room and saw some bright blue and gold ikon paintings on the opposite wall. At first he merely had the feeling of entering a vaguely familiar house, but as he swung about and checked the positions of various objects, his head began to swim.
The Weird World of Wes Beattie Page 17