Mom Among the Liars

by James Yaffe

  “All right, all right,” McBride said, letting out his breath, looking very tired. “I was with Laurel, we went to Denny’s, we talked for an hour. She had a hamburger and I had an order of french fries. You go there and talk to the waitress, maybe she’ll remember us.”

  “Was this the only time she sneaked out to be with you?” Ann asked the question in the softest, kindliest way she could.

  McBride shook his head. “We did it plenty of times before. Whenever she had to stay late at school. What’s wrong with that, for Christ sake? I love that kid—and she loves me, believe it or not! She couldn’t see me out in the open, because she didn’t want to hurt her mother. And I damn well wasn’t going to expose her to one of her mother’s scenes. Believe me, that bitch knows how to stage a scene.”

  Then, suddenly, McBride’s voice sounded different from how I had ever heard it sound before. He was actually pleading with us. “Look, this doesn’t have to come out, does it? If that bitch ever finds out, Laurel’s life won’t be worth living.…”

  His voice trailed off. He lowered his head.

  Ann said quietly, “This conference is strictly off the record. I see no reason why anything we say here should go any further.”

  After that we were all silent for a while.

  Then Grantley cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but we seem to be right back where we started from. Since Marvin couldn’t have committed the murder, there’s nobody left but—”

  “Goddamn right!” McBride raised his head, and his eyes glittered. His little lapse into humanity was over, on his face was the usual cocky belligerence. “Ann sweetie, you know what you just accomplished? You cleared me, and you made your client look guiltier than ever! Thanks a lot!”

  * * *

  Ann waited patiently until McBride’s laughter had died down. Then, quietly and cheerfully, she said. “Actually you’re wrong about that, Marvin. What I’ve accomplished is to scrub away one layer of lies. One more coating that’s been preventing us from seeing the truth underneath.”

  “The truth underneath,” McBride said, “is that this bum busted into that whore’s bedroom, she caught him while he was trying to rip off her jewelry, and he killed her.’

  “I’m glad you mentioned her jewelry,” Ann said. “That brings me to the next layer of lies. We’ll scrape it away now, and then, with a little luck, we will be able to see the truth.”

  She turned to Harry Stubbins. “Don’t you think you should tell us about that ring?”

  “I told you.” Stubbins seemed to shrink back from her, though she hadn’t moved from her seat behind the table. “Somebody gave it to me. Put it in my hat. Some kind charitable soul who wants to see me in the gas chamber.”

  Ann gave a sigh, then she launched into the chain of reasoning that Mom had tried out on Roger and me the night before.…

  “The funniest thing about this ring,” Mom said, “isn’t that the Stubbins fellow had it in his pocket. The funniest thing is that he didn’t get rid of it two minutes after he noticed somebody put it in his hat.”

  “I suppose he was planning to sell it or pawn it or something.”

  “You’re right, ordinarily this is what he does with the things people give him. But this wasn’t ordinarily. How come he wasn’t scared out of his pants he should find it in his hat in the first place?”

  “I guess I don’t follow that, Mom.”

  “Look at it from his point of view already. He falls asleep in this woman’s bedroom, he wakes up and somebody killed her, and the police arrest him for the murder. And what happens a couple days later? He looks into his hat after a hard day on the streets begging, and in there he finds this gold ring with the green stone in it, which somebody stole from the dead woman and which he saw her wearing the night she got killed. We know he saw her wearing it because the first conversation you ever had with him he described this ring to you, along with the rest of her jewelry. And now, all of a sudden, this same ring shows up in his hat.

  “He’s an old drunk, yes, but he isn’t exactly a dope. You’re telling me he didn’t right away recognize this ring and ask himself some questions: ‘What’s it doing in my hat? Who put it there? Why did they put it there?’ And could he ask himself these questions without he should come up with the obvious answers? ‘It’s no coincidence this ring got into my hat. The murderer stole this ring from Edna Pulaski, and the murderer put this ring in my hat—not by accident but on purpose. Because this murderer wants the police to find this ring on me. Maybe he’s even tipping them off they can find it on me, because he’s trying to make it look like I killed the woman. Maybe they’re looking for me right this minute.’

  “Where I’m driving, Davey, as soon as this Stubbins sees the ring and figures out somebody is using it to put him in a frame-up, how come he don’t throw it away? Into the garbage, into the sewer, anyplace at all as long as it couldn’t be connected with him? How come, knowing this murderer is planting such a big piece evidence against him, he carries this ring around with him all day long and into the nighttime?”

  “He’s an old drunk. He gets befuddled, he forgets about things. What does the reason matter? He did carry it around with him, he didn’t throw it away, that’s a fact!”

  “Who’s disagreeing with you? He carried it around with him—which to me means he wasn’t afraid the police got a tipoff they should search him, he didn’t worry this was a frame-up against him. And why wouldn’t he have this worry? Because he knew the murderer didn’t put the ring in his hat, nobody put it there. In other words, he stole the ring from Edna Pulaski himself.”

  “Wait a minute, Mom, have you come around to believing Stubbins did actually kill her?”

  “Positively not. A killer he isn’t. But a goniff he is. You know what’s a goniff?”

  “A thief, isn’t it?”

  “Good, good. You didn’t forget everything yet from the language of your ancestors. He’s a thief, and also a little bit of a liar. Not such a big liar as some of the other people in this case, but definitely a little one. He gets knocked out in Edna Pulaski’s apartment, he wakes up from the old mother’s screams, she goes running away to call the police, and he looks around to see how the land is laying. And he asks himself is there anything valuable he can take with him so this whole visit shouldn’t be a total loss? What he sees is this big green ring on her hand. Why not take it, maybe he can pawn it for a few dollars later on, and after all she don’t have any more use for it.

  “Didn’t you wonder, Davey, how come the police were in time to catch him? Like this Captain Delaney told you, it was five minutes from the phone call to when the squad car got to Edna Pulaski’s house. Add on to that maybe another two three minutes while the old lady ran down the stairs and yelled in the street until somebody came along that would telephone the police for her. So what was Stubbins doing in these seven, eight minutes? He knows absolutely for sure the police are coming along soon, he certainly don’t want he should be found on the scene, so what’s he plotzing around for? Why isn’t he running out of there a lot sooner?

  “The answer is, he’s trying to take that ring off the dead woman’s finger—which isn’t so easy to do if the ring’s been there a long time. It takes him a lot longer than he expects, by the time he’s got the ring in his hands the police sirens are making noises in the street. So he throws the ring out of the kitchen window, he’ll come back for it later, then he goes down the stairs and out the front door and into a policeman’s arms. And the next day, when he’s out on bail, he comes back to the alley under Edna Pulaski’s kitchen window, he crawls around looking through the dirt, and lucky for him the ring is still there.

  “So ask him about this. He don’t exactly sound like a tower from strength. Act like you know for sure what he did, and I’m predicting he’ll fall in like a soufflé when somebody slams the kitchen door. He’ll tell you everything.…”

  And he did, of course. Ann had hardly finished her reconstruction when Stubbins started blubbering. And then
, when you could make out words in between the blubbers, they confirmed everything Mom had deduced.

  “I’m not a thief,” he kept saying, giving little flounces that, I suppose, were meant to be gestures of dignity and pride. “I’ve hardly ever stolen anything from anybody in my life. Only out of the most pressing need—”

  On he went for a while, the rest of us not quite wanting to look at him. Finally he was out of words, and the blubbering subsided into soft, almost inaudible sobs.

  And McBride said, “Okay, so what? He could’ve killed her that night and still stole her ring in the morning. Nothing about this means he couldn’t be the killer.”

  “Except the part,” Ann said, “that tells us who the killer really is.”

  * * *

  She milked the resulting silence for all it was worth. I ought to bring Mom and Ann together some day; there’s a large streak of ham in both of them. Then Ann went on just like Mom had done last night.…

  “So do you see already how useful this is,” Mom said, “clearing away the layers of lies? Once we know this—that Harry Stubbins stole the ring from Edna Pulaski’s finger before he ran out of her apartment—this tells us who killed her.”

  Mom looked back and forth from Roger to me, but our faces were blank.

  “You’re not thinking so sharp tonight,” she said. “I didn’t make the coffee strong enough. So I’ll tell it to you in simple words—since Stubbins stole the ring before the police got there, it’s easy now to understand why it wasn’t with Edna’s things when they got returned to her mother from the morgue. It couldn’t be with those things because it was never with them in the first place, it wasn’t one of the items the police took away along with her body. So—if this is a fact—tell me please how Grantley, your assistant district attorney, could say he saw this ring on her finger at nine in the morning, just before the people from the morgue took her body away…?”

  “How about it, Leland?” Ann said, turning her gentlest smile in his direction. “Got any explanation for that?”

  NINETEEN

  “I’ll be fucked!” said McBride. And practically for the first time since we entered that room, he stopped looking at Ann. He turned his gaze to Grantley now, he didn’t seem to be able to get enough of looking at him.

  After a moment Grantley made a little huffing sound, half bewilderment and half irritation. “Excuse me, Ann, is this supposed to be a joke? I’m afraid I don’t think it’s either funny or in very good taste.”

  “It’s no joke, Leland. And this has gone way out of Miss Manners’s jurisdiction.”

  Grantley got to his feet, snapping his papers into a briefcase. “I’ll leave you now. If you need me, you’ll find me at home.”

  “Sit down,” Ann said, before Grantley could move from behind the table. “The policemen outside the door have orders to stop anybody from leaving this room.”

  “I happen to be the assistant district attorney—”

  “Their orders apply to you especially.”

  “Who gave such orders? You have absolutely no authority—”

  “They come from Captain of Homicide Patrick Delaney,” I said. “He’s acting head of the police department while the chief is off hunting this weekend. I spoke to Pat on the phone this afternoon, and he’s happy to take the responsibility.”

  Grantley’s face was suddenly very white. He dropped into his chair.

  Ann went on talking, addressing herself to all of us. “Once you’re willing to take a serious look at the possibility that Leland Grantley is behind these murders, it’s amazing how many fuzzy details suddenly click into focus.”

  Then Ann ran down the list, just as Mom had done for Roger and me the night before. Ann’s language was probably more elegant, but the logic and the observation were strictly Mom’s.…

  “One—” Mom raised a finger; she liked to use her fingers to keep track of the points she was making. “We’ll begin with this slip he made about the ring. This Grantley did see the ring on Edna Pulaski’s finger, but it isn’t possible he could see it there on the morning she died, while he was looking over the body, because by this time the ring was gone. He saw it on her finger eight hours or so earlier, when he went to the room and killed her. He mixed up the two times in his head, he got a little careless—a natural mistake, since he’s been spending a lot of time with her the last six months, and she made a habit of wearing this ring, he was used to seeing it on her finger, he didn’t notice when it wasn’t there.

  “Two—” Another finger in the air. “How could this Grantley meet such a woman like Edna Pulaski in the first place? A stuffy fellow like him that never lets himself relax? We know the answer already, he met her the same way and at the same time that McBride met her. The police made a raid on her massage parlor six months ago, they brought her in for questioning, and McBride eventually questioned her—but first, like he told you himself, ‘she was questioned by some of my lower-echelon people.’ Which people from the lower echelon? (What’s an echelon, incidentally?) Who else but the assistant district attorney?

  “This is when he met her, and she gave him little signals, like she did to McBride, that she’d be happy if he followed up on the acquaintance. He called her, like McBride did, and pretty soon he was in bed with her once a week—one of the nights when McBride wasn’t.”

  “So Grantley and McBride were having affairs with her at the same time?” I asked. “Did they know about each other?”

  “A woman don’t go out of her way to tell one man he’s in competition with another man. You ask my opinion, Grantley never found out about McBride and McBride never found out about Grantley. When you finally tell them both about it, you should keep your eyes open how they react, their faces will be very interesting.

  “Here’s another piece evidence Grantley was having an affair with Edna Pulaski. Call it my three.” Another finger stabbed the air. “When you talked to Doris Dryden, she told you a story how McBride got mixed up when he cross-examined a witness, he thought he was cross-examining a completely different person in a completely different case. All right, it’s possible this didn’t even happen, it’s possible Doris Dryden made it up. Only when Ann Swenson mentioned it to Grantley, he gave a reaction that showed it did happen. So we have to ask, don’t we, how did Doris Dryden find out about it?

  “Like she told you, only two people in the courtroom realized what was going on—McBride and Grantley. This is one story, you can bet money on it, that McBride wasn’t talking about to his girlfriend—it made him look too foolish—so Grantley was the one that opened his mouth. Who did he open it to? The same spy that was giving Doris Dryden her information from McBride, isn’t it obvious? Edna Pulaski—is it so surprising?—was doing to Grantley the same as she was doing to McBride. The information she got from him in bed she was selling to the political opposition.

  “Which brings me to my four.” Yet another finger in the air. “Grantley got nervous about this affair finally. It was getting closer to the election, reporters and TV people and the opposite candidate, Doris Dryden, are sticking their noses around for information that could make McBride look bad. His assistant district attorney having hanky-panky with a prostitute, this is something that could maybe be embarrassing.

  “In other words, McBride told you the truth when he said his affair with Edna Pulaski was going along fine, with neither of them trying to break it up. Grantley was the one that told her he wanted to break up. Grantley was the one she was talking about when she told Harry Stubbins what schmucks men are, how she was going to get even with the man that was betraying her, how she threatened him she was going to give the whole story to the newspapers.

  “This shouldn’t be any big surprise, if we give a little thinking to the psychology of these two men. McBride is the type somebody threatens to expose his hanky-panky, he laughs and says, ‘Go ahead, expose!’ Between him and the voters is a love affair, or anyway he thinks so. They’ll love him even more, he thinks, on account of he turns out to have a
human weakness.

  “This Grantley, on the other hand, he’s got a completely different psychology. From what you told me about him, he never did this type thing before. He’s got no experience with hanky-panky. He’s got no confidence he can be a success at it. From the beginning, if you ask me, he’s expecting the whole thing will explode in his face some day. So anyway, once she tells him she’ll expose him, he don’t think he can stand the publicity. It could be the end of his career, the end of his marriage—and without his high-society wife, maybe he can’t afford to live in the same style he’s used to.

  “Also he isn’t the type—like McBride is, for instance—that can sit patiently and wait to see what’ll happen, telling himself that whatever it is he’ll figure out some fancy story to wriggle himself out of it. She makes her threat to him on Saturday morning, maybe, and for Grantley it’s necessary he should right away do something. And the only thing he can think of is he has to get rid of the Pulaski woman, before she has a chance to tell anybody what’s going on between them.

  “So right after the dinner, he goes down to the Pulaski woman’s house, he gets there around twenty-five minutes after eleven. He sees from her window that the light is on, he’s got a key to the downstairs door, so he goes inside and climbs the stairs. Very quiet—because he don’t know she’s given her girls the night off. He gives a knock, and walks into her room. Maybe he’s got no plans to kill her—in his head is only a vague idea—but then he sees something that makes up his mind for him.

  “Sitting in a chair next to her bed is this old bum, this Harry Stubbins. He’s looking like he’s drunk, he’s fast asleep, Grantley is positive this bum never got a look at his face. It’s like a gift from God on high, no? The perfect person to blame for Edna’s murder. What’s this type person called? A fall guy. So to put a long story in a nutshell, he pulls off his necktie and he strangles her with it.

  “And then—I’m up to five, no?—” Mom brought her thumb into the story. “—it comes to him that everybody knows the type neckties he wears. Plain, dark, one color, like he’s always on his way to a funeral. They see this type tie around the dead woman’s neck, he thinks, they’ll know right away who killed her. So he unwraps the tie from around her neck, and he takes it away with him. But you shouldn’t bother to look for it, he already threw it away somewhere.