Murder Most Foul

by Robert Bloch

  The sheriff went on and knocked at Canby’s door. “I’ve got to talk to you some more, Phil.”

  Canby was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I’ve told you all I know,” he said without moving.

  The sheriff sat down on the rocker by the open window. The radio, which Canby claimed to have been listening to at 10 o’clock the night before, was on a table closer to the window; and across the way, no more than fifteen yards, the neighbors had not heard it.

  “Mrs. Lyons says that little Philip was crying at 10:30 last night, Phil.”

  “Mrs. Lyons is a liar,” Canby said, still without rising. His thin gray hair was plastered to his head with sweat, and yet he lay on his back where no breeze could reach him. A pulse began to throb at his temple. The skin over it was tight and pale; it reminded Willets of a frog’s throat.

  “Betty admits you didn’t change the baby. That isn’t like you, Phil, neglecting him.”

  “He was sleeping. I didn’t want him to wake up. I had to think of my plans.”

  “What plans?”

  “My marriage plans.”

  “What were they?”

  Finally Canby rose and swung his slippered feet over the side of the bed. He looked at Willets. “We’re going to be married in Beachwood.” It was a village a few miles away. “I’ve got a house picked out on the highway, and I’ll open a shop in the front of it.”

  It’s fantastic, Willets thought, both Canby and the girl behave as though they are not in any way suspected of Matt Thompson’s death—as though nothing in the past should interfere with the future. This angered Willets as nothing save Mrs. Lyons’s judgement had. “You’re in trouble, Phil, and you’re going to hang higher than your fancy plans if you don’t get out of it. The whole damn town’s against you.”

  “I know that,” Canby said. “That’s why I’m not afraid.”

  The sheriff looked at him.

  “If I didn’t know what everybody was saying,” Canby went on, “I wouldn’t of run off home last night when Matt Thompson said he was going to get me certified.”

  “Phil,” the sheriff said with great deliberateness, “the state’s attorney will maintain that’s why you didn’t run home, why you weren’t in this house to hear the baby crying, why you weren’t home in time to change him, why you can’t admit Mrs. Lyons heard Philip crying! Because, he’ll say, you were over in the Thompson kitchen, doing murder and cleaning up after murder.”

  Canby was shaking his head. “That baby don’t cry. He don’t ever cry with me around.”

  The sheriff got up and walked the length of the room and back, noting that Phil Canby was careful in his things, their arrangement, their repair. He was a tidy man. “You’re still planning to marry her, then?” he said when he reached Canby.

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t I?”

  The sheriff leaned down until he was face to face with the man. “Phil, who do you think killed her father?”

  Canby drew back from him, his eyes darkening. “I don’t know,” he said, “and I guess I never rightly cared…till now.”

  Willets returned to the rocker and took a pipe from his shirt pocket. He didn’t light it; he merely held it in his hand as though he might light it if they could talk together. “When did you fall in love with Sue Thompson?”

  Canby smoothed the crumpled spread. “Sounds funny, saying that about somebody my age, don’t it?” Willets didn’t answer and Canby went on: “I don’t know. Whatever it was, it happened last spring. She used to stop by ever since she was a little girl, when I was out working in the yard, and watch me. Never said much. Just watched. Then when little Philip came, she used to like to see him. Sometimes I’d invite her in. If I was alone, she’d come. Kind of shy of Betty, and whenever John’d speak to her she’d blush. John don’t have a good opinion of her. He’s like all the young fellows nowadays. They look at a girl’s ankles, how she dances, what clothes she puts on. It’s pure luck if they get a decent wife, what they look for in a girl…”

  “You and Sue,” the sheriff prompted when Canby paused.

  “Well, I was holding Philip one night and she was watching. He was puckering up to cry, so I rocked him to and fro, and he just went off to sleep in my arms. I remember her saying, ‘I wish I could do that,’ so I offered her the baby. She was kind of scared of it.” The man sank back on his elbows and squinted a bit, remembering. “It struck me then all of a sudden how doggone rotten a life Matt Thompson had given her as a kid.”

  “How, rotten?” the sheriff said.

  “Nothing. No affection, no love at all. He bought her what she needed, but that was all. She was in high school before she knew people was different, what it was like to…to hold hands even.”

  “I wonder what got into him,” Willets said. “Most men, losing a wife like he did, would put everything into the kid till they got another woman.”

  “He didn’t want another woman. He liked his hurt till it got to mean more to him than anything else.”

  The sheriff shook his head. It might be so, although he could not understand it. “Go on about you and Sue.”

  Canby took a moment to bring himself back to the contemplation of it. He sat up so that he could illustrate with his hands, the strong, calloused, black-nailed hands. “I put Philip into his cradle, and she was standing there, and I just sort of put out my arms to her like she was maybe a little girl which’d lost something or was hurt, and she came to me.” He paused, moistened his lips, and then plunged on. “While I was holding her... Oh, hell, what was it happened then?”

  He sprang up from the bed and walked, his hands behind his back. “I thought that was all over for me. I hadn’t felt nothing like it, not for years.” He turned and looked down at Willets. “I was young again, that’s all, and she wasn’t a little girl. I was ashamed at first, and then I thought—what am I ashamed of? Being a man? I waited all summer, thinking maybe it’d go away. But it didn’t. It just got inside me, deeper and quieter, so’s I wasn’t afraid of it, and I wasn’t ashamed. And when I asked her and she was willing to marry me, I explained to her that it couldn’t be for long because I’m fifty-nine, but she didn’t care.” He opened his hands as if to show they were empty. “That’s how it was, Andy. That’s how. I can’t explain it any more than that.”

  “That’s how it was,” the sheriff repeated, getting up, “but look how it is right now.”

  Willets went downstairs to Sue Thompson where she still sat, crochet work in hand, a bit back from the window yet with the people outside within her view.

  “Know any of those folks, Miss Thompson?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think I do.”

  He could believe that, although some of them had lived in the neighborhood all her lifetime. He sat down opposite her so that the light would be in her face. “Last night. Miss Thompson, why did you tell Mr. Canby your father said it would be all right to ask him to fix the drain?”

  “Because I wanted him to come over. It was the only excuse I could think of.”

  “Your father didn’t say it would be all right?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you expect trouble between them?”

  “I didn’t think my father would wake up.”

  “I see,” the sheriff said. A pair, the two of them, he thought, unless their guilt was black as night: one as naïve as the other. The marks of Canby’s wrench were on the drainpipe where he had actually commenced to work. “When did you and Mr. Canby expect to be married?”

  “Soon. Whenever he said.”

  “Were you making plans?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling then. “I’ve been doing a lot of work.” She held up the crocheting by way of illustration.

  “Didn’t you expect your father to interfere—in fact, to prevent it?”

  “No,” she said.

  The sheriff rested his chin upon his hand and looked at her. “Miss Thompson, I’m the sheriff of this county. Your father was murdered last night, and I�
�m going to find out why, and who murdered him. You’d better tell me the truth.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Mr. Willets. I know who you are.”

  “And you didn’t expect your father to interfere with your marriage?”

  “He never interfered with anything I did,” she said.

  “Did you know he told Betty Murray that he would chain you up rather than see you marry her father?”

  “I didn’t know that. He never said it to me.”

  “Just what did he say when you told him?”

  “He laughed. I think he said something like: ‘Well, doesn’t that beat everything.’”

  The sheriff sat up. “He was treating you like a halfwit. You’re an intelligent girl. Didn’t you resent it?”

  “Of course,” she said, as though surprised that he should ask. “That’s one reason why I’m so fond of Phil…Mr. Canby.”

  “You resented it,” Willets repeated, “and yet you did nothing?”

  “I was waiting,” she said.

  “For what? For him to die? To be murdered?”

  “No,” she said, “just waiting.”

  “Have you always got everything you wanted by waiting, Miss Thompson?”

  She thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I think I have… Or else I didn’t want it anymore.”

  Passive resistance, that’s what it amounted to, the sheriff thought. If nations could be worn down by it. Matt Thompson was not invulnerable. But his murder was not passive resistance. “Last night you hid in the pantry during the quarrel?”

  “Yes. Phil told me to go away, so I hid in there.”

  “Did you hear what they were saying?”

  “Not much. I put my fingers in my ears.”

  “What did you hear exactly?”

  She looked at him and then away. “I heard my father say, ‘insane asylum.’ That’s when I put my fingers to my ears.”

  “Why?”

  “I was there once with him when I was a little girl.”

  “Can you tell me about it?” the sheriff said.

  “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “There was a man working for him in the garden. I liked him, I remember. He would tickle me and laugh just wonderful. When I told my father that I liked him, he took me inside to see the other people. Some of them screamed at us and I was frightened.”

  “I see,” the sheriff said, seeing something of Matt Thompson and his use of the afflicted to alarm the timid. “Last night, when did you come out of the pantry?”

  “When my father told me to. He said it was all over and I could go up to bed.”

  “And you did? No words with him about the quarrel?”

  “I went upstairs and went to bed, like I told you this morning.”

  “And you went to sleep right away because you felt so badly,” he said, repeating her earlier account of it. He could see how sleep must have been her salvation many times. She had slept soundly through the night, by her account, and had wakened only to the persistent knocking of Phil Canby—who, when he was about to start his day’s work, had remembered, so he said, the plumber’s wrench. Going downstairs to answer Canby’s knocking, she had discovered her father’s body.

  The sheriff took his hat. “You can have the funeral tomorrow, Miss Thompson,” he said. “I’d arrange it quickly if I were you, and see to it there’s a notice of it in the paper.”

  He went out the front door and across the yard, ignoring the questions pelted at him from the crowd. The technician in charge of the state crew was waiting. “I don’t have much for you, Willets. Whoever did the job scrubbed up that kitchen afterwards. But good.”

  “Canby’s clothes?”

  “Nothing from that job on them. We’ll run some more tests to be dead sure if you want us to.”

  “I want you to. What about here?”

  “Not even a spot to test. I put them back in her room, night clothes and day clothes.”

  The sheriff thought for a moment. “What was the kitchen cleaned up with?”

  “A bundle of rags. Left in the sink. They came out of a bag hanging beside the stove.”

  “Handy,” the sheriff said, and went upstairs.

  After the male sparsity and drabness in the rest of the house—and that was how Willets thought of it, as though a woman’s hand had not touched it in years—Sue’s room screamed with color. Her whole life in the house was in this one room. There were crochet work and needlework of multi- and clashing colors, laces and linens, stacked piece on piece. She had fashioned herself a fancy lampshade that almost dripped with lace. At some time not too long before, she had tried her hand at painting, too. It was crude, primitive, and might very well be art for all he knew, but in his reckoning it was in contrast to the exact work of her needle.

  In a small rocker, left over from her childhood—perhaps even from her mother’s childhood, by its shape and age—sat two dolls, faded and matted and one with an eye that would never close again. The dust of years was ground into them, and he wondered if they had been sitting there while she grew into womanhood, or if upon her recent courtship—if Phil Canby’s attentions could be called that—she, a timid girl, and likely aware of her own ignorance, had taken them out to help her bridge the thoughts of marriage.

  The bed was still unmade, Sue’s pajamas lying on it. Not a button on the tops, he noticed, and the cloth torn out. The technician had put them back where he had found them. Her dress lay with its sleeves over the back of the chair, just as she had flung it on retiring. She had, no doubt, put on a fresh dress to go out to the fence and call Phil Canby. There was scarcely a crease in it.

  The sheriff trod upon her slippers, a button, a comb. The rug, as he looked at it, was dappled with colored thread from her sewing. Not the best of housekeepers, Sue Thompson, he thought, going downstairs and locking up the house; but small wonder, keeping house only for herself and in one room.

  George Harris, the slate’s attorney, was in the sheriff’s office when he returned to the county building. He didn’t want to seem too eager, Willets thought, since obviously the sheriff had not yet made an arrest. He spoke of the murder as a tragedy and not a case, and thus no doubt he had spoken of it with everyone in town. “I’ve had a lot of calls, Andy,” he said, “a lot of calls.”

  The sheriff grunted. “Did you answer them?”

  Harris ignored the flippancy. “Not enough evidence yet, eh?”

  “I’m going to put it all together now,” Willets said. “When I get it in a package, I’ll show it to you. Maybe in the morning.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Harris said. He started for the door and then turned back. “Andy, I’m not trying to tell you how to run your office, but if I were you, I’d call the local radio station and give them a nice handout on it—something good for the nerves.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, something to the effect that any suspect in the matter is under police surveillance.”

  He's right, of course, Willets thought. The very mention of such surveillance could temper would-be vigilantes. He called the radio station, and then worked through most of the night. His last tour of duty took him past the two darkened houses where his deputies kept sullen vigil.

  Fifty or so people attended the funeral service, and as many more were outside the chapel. Among them were faces he had seen about the town most of his life. With the murder, they seemed to have become disembodied from the people who clerked, drove delivery trucks, or kept house. They watched him with the eyes of ghouls, to see how long it would take him to devour his prey.

  The minister spoke more kindly of Matt Thompson than his life deserved, but the clergyman had the whole orbit of righteousness, frugality, and justice to explore and, under the circumstances and in the presence of those attending, the word “love” to avoid.

  Phil Canby stood beside the girl as tall as he could, with the hard stoop of his trade upon his back. His head was high, his face grim. Sue wept, as did the other women, one prompted by another’s tears.<
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  Behind Canby stood his daughter and his son-in-law, John Murray—who, when the sheriff spoke to him at the chapel door, said he had taken the day off to “see this thing finished.” It would be nice, Willets thought, if it could be finished by John Murray’s taking the day off.

  When the final words were said, people shuffled about uneasily. It was customary to take a last look at the deceased, but Matt Thompson’s coffin remained unopened.

  Then his daughter leaned forward and fumbled at a floral wreath. Everyone watched. She caught one flower in her hand and pulled it from the rest, nearly upsetting the piece. She opened her hand and looked at the bloom. Willets glanced at Mrs. Lyons, who was on tiptoe watching the girl. She too was moved to tears by that. Then the girl looked up at the man beside her. If she did not smile, there was the promise of it in her round, blithe face.

  She offered him the flower. Phil Canby took it, but his face went as grey as the tie he wore. Mrs. Lyons let escape a hissing sound, as sure a condemnation as any words she might have cried aloud, and a murmur of wrathful shock went through the congregation. Willets stepped quickly to Canby’s side and stayed beside him until they returned to the Murray house, outside which he then doubled the guard.

  He went directly to the state attorney’s office, for George Harris had had the report on his investigation since 9 o’clock that morning.

  “Everything go off all right?” Harris offered Willets a cigarette, shaking four or five out on the desk from the package. He’s feeling expansive, the sheriff thought.

  “Fine,” he said, refusing the cigarette.