Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  Helen Rodney had followed along a few steps behind them, but when Warfer led Libby to the stairs to the second floor she said, “I think I’d better be going. If you get frightened of anything during the night, Frederick, just give me a call.”

  When she’d gone, Libby remarked, “I feel as if I’m coming between you two.”

  “No. Helen’s just an old friend. A friend of my wife’s, really. She’s been trying to take care of me ever since Betty left.”

  “Your wife?”

  He nodded, leading her into the master bedroom and indicating a framed color photograph on a bedside table. “Betty and I were married for twenty-one years. And then she just left.”

  “I’m sorry.” The woman was smiling at the camera, but the picture was overexposed and she was squinting slightly into the sun. Her eyes were a stunning blue. The photo had obviously been blown up from a much smaller candid shot. “She’s very attractive.”

  “She was.”

  When he added no more, she said, “Tell me about this intruder. What time does he usually arrive?”

  “Shortly after I retire. Sometimes I’m still awake when the alarm goes off.

  See—” he showed her the mechanism “—it buzzes next to the bed, too.”

  “Midnight? One o’clock?”

  “It varies. Closer to one, usually, but that may be because I go to bed late. The police have come and searched every inch of the house, but they’ve found no one. The intruder is invisible by night and non-existent by day. But I have a terrible feeling he’s getting closer to me every time.”

  “We’ll see what happens tonight,” Libby said.

  Warfer showed her the guest room and she brought her bag up and unpacked what she needed. The .38-caliber snub nosed revolver went under her pillow.

  Warfer rapped at her door a few minutes after one, waking her. “The alarm just went off!” he told her anxiously

  Libby, who slept fully clothed when on a job, grabbed her gun from under the pillow and ran down the stairs ahead of him. Her left hand hit the living-room light switch as she went into a crouch in the doorway. “Hands up!” she shouted. “I have a gun!”

  The room was empty, and so was the dining room. The entire first floor was empty.

  “You can see for yourself that the doors and windows haven’t been tampered with,” Warfer said after they had both checked them “It’s just like the other times.”

  “Maybe you’ve got mice.”

  “Mice four feet tall? That’s the height of these alarm beams that were broken.”

  A flashing red light suddenly lit up the wall opposite the front windows. “That’ll be the police,” Libby said. “I’ll go out and talk to them.”

  There was a single officer in the squad car a slim young man whose name tag read David Oakes. He was new since Libby’s days on the force and she introduced herself.

  “I know,” the officer said wearily. “The alarm went off again and no one was here.” His deep-set brown eyes took in the scene.

  “Well, I was here this time, but I didn’t set it off.”

  Oakes sighed and recorded the time on his call sheet. “They’re talking about fining people with defective alarm systems. It wastes one hell of a lot of our time.”

  “He claims it’s not defective. He’s an inventor and he’s checked all the wiring.”

  Frederick Warfer joined them. “I’m sorry, Officer. I had hoped that hiring Miss Knowles might solve the problem.”

  “Give me a chance,” Libby countered. “It’s only my first night.”

  A light went on in the house across the street and she saw Helen Rodney appear in the doorway. “Are you all right, Frederick?” she called.

  “I’m fine, Helen,” he called back. “Just another false alarm.” She wrapped her robe more tightly around her, waved, and went back inside.

  “You’d better disconnect the alarm for tonight,” Oakes suggested after taking a quick walk around the house, shining his flashlight at the windows and trying the doors.

  “All right,” Warfer told him. “I’ll disconnect the call-in alarm that flashes at the police station, but I’ll leave on the house alarm.”

  Somehow she didn’t think their unseen visitor would be back that night and she was right. They spent the rest of the time till dawn in undisturbed slumber.

  Since the bodyguard assignment was only for nighttime, Libby left Warfer’s house and drove to her office in the morning as usual. She was going through the mail, dictating some replies to her secretary, when Sergeant O’Bannion phoned. “How’d it go last night, Libby?”

  “The alarm went off but there was no one in the house. The same as before.”

  “I dug out the complaint file and checked on this guy Warfer. He’s had a string of false alarms lately.”

  “I know. That’s why he hired me.”

  “But there’s more. Somebody flagged his file with a cross-index to Missing Persons.”

  “How come?”

  “He had a wife named Monica Warfer.”

  “He told me she walked out on him.” But he’d called her Betty.

  “Maybe it’s true. It was eleven years ago and she just disappeared one day. He said she went downtown to shop and never came back. We never found a trace of her. Some of the smart guys in the Bureau thought maybe he buried her in the back yard, but there was never any evidence of it.”

  “How old would she have been at the time?” Libby asked him. Warfer had told her Betty left him just two years ago.

  “Somewhat younger than her husband. Only thirty-five. A good age for running off, I suppose.”

  “Any relatives?”

  “A brother who still lives in town. Ralph Forrest. Want his address?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  After lunch she tracked down Ralph Forrest at work. He was a used-car salesman at a lot near downtown. When she told him what she wanted, his manner turned into something resembling annoyance. “Monica’s gone,” he said. “She’s been gone for eleven years. Why are you bothering me now?”

  “You must have heard from her during that time—a postcard or something.” He shook his head. “We weren’t very close toward the end.”

  “The end of what?”

  “I mean before she went away. I’d be the last one she’d write to.”

  “Who’d be the first one?”

  “Her husband, I suppose.”

  “Are you friendly with Frederick Warfer?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice. He came raving to me a few times after she left, but I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “You think she ran away from him?”

  “You met Warfer? What do you think? Me, I always thought she was crazy to marry him in the first place. Anything might have happened.”

  “He believes someone has been breaking into his house, trying to harm him.”

  “Who’d bother?”

  “You don’t think your sister could be back in the city, do you?”

  The very idea seemed to startle him. He thought about it, but only for a moment. “No, she’s not back. She’s never coming back.”

  “Would you happen to have a picture of your sister?”

  “I might have an old snapshot in my desk. Let me see.”

  Libby followed him into an office at the center of the lot. He rummaged through the drawers of a cluttered desk before coming up with a photograph of a solemn woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes. It wasn’t the same woman as the one in the photograph by Frederick Warfer’s bed.

  “Was your sister ever called Betty?”

  “Betty? No—her name was Monica.” He seemed about to say more, but Libby was in a hurry now. “May I keep this picture for a bit?”

  “Take it,” he told her tiredly. “I don’t need it.”

  Libby arrived promptly at eight o’clock to begin another night of guard duty This time Warfer was alone and there was no sign of his neighbor from across the street.

  “I’m going to sleep down h
ere in the living room tonight,” she told him.

  His eyes widened a bit but he said nothing to dissuade her. Once more she searched the ground floor of the house and made certain the doors and windows were locked. It was a warm night, but she didn’t want to risk opening a window. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?” she asked.

  “It’s bad for your health,” he said with conviction. “I leave the windows open upstairs. Do you want to change your mind and—”

  Libby shook her head. “I’m more likely to hear someone trying to break in if I’m down here,” she told him.

  After he went up to bed, Libby read a little, then, before she turned out the lights, she switched on the alarm system so that a small red light would go on in the house but no signal would be transmitted to the police. It just might be that the arrival of the squad car was scaring away the invisible intruder.

  Taking care to keep below the four-foot height of the electronic beams that criss-crossed the first floor, she settled down with a blanket, a flashlight and her revolver close at hand on the coffee table. She could hear Warfer moving around upstairs for a time and then there was silence. It was about midnight.

  For the next half hour, nothing happened.

  Remembering how quickly the alarm had sounded the previous night. Libby began to grow uneasy. She kept glancing at the alarm switch in the hallway but no red light glowed. Then she remembered they hadn’t retired until twelve-thirty last night and it had been a good half hour after that before the alarm had sounded.

  She must have dozed momentarily. She awoke with a start, certain she’d felt something brush the air near her head. It was just before one by the glowing digits of her watch. She glanced toward the hallway and froze. The alarm light was showing red!

  She rolled over on her back and quickly reached for the flashlight on the table. Holding it in her left hand, she picked up the revolver with her right. Then she felt it again, the feather-light rush of air. She snapped on the flashlight.

  It was a bat, swooping and soaring about the room as if seeking an exit. Libby jumped to her feet and hit the light switch. Turning back, she saw the bat fly into the fieldstone fireplace and disappear.

  The fireplace! Of course! It had gotten in there somehow a week ago and was unable to find its way back up the chimney! Every night, after the lights were turned out, it flew around the ground floor of the house seeking its freedom, then retreated up the chimney again when the lights went back on. It was as simple as that.

  Libby was grinning as she ran up the stairs to break the good news to Frederick Warfer. The light was on in his room, as she knew it would be once the alarm light had shown. “It’s all over,” she announced, knocking at his half closed door, “I found our intruder.”

  The silence that greeted her was so ominous, she pushed the door open cautiously. Frederick Warfer was slumped against the bed by the window. His throat had been cut and he was dead.

  Libby had to steady herself against a chair as she looked down at the bloody sight. Then the wave of nausea passed and she looked around the room to make certain the killer wasn’t hiding there. She checked the closet and under the bed. The window was open, but it was a good fifteen-foot drop to the ground.

  The red alarm light on Warfer’s bedside panel was still on. It reminded her of the police and she went to the phone to call them. In almost no time, she heard a squad car pull up.

  There were two cars, actually, and Officer Oakes emerged from one. “We figured we’d hear from you tonight,” he said.

  “Mr. Warfer’s been murdered,” she told him. “He’s upstairs, in his bedroom.”

  “What?”

  “Someone cut his throat.”

  The young policeman ran up the stairs ahead of her with the two officers from the second car behind him. “So the intruder finally got to him,” Oakes said after checking out the body for signs of life.

  “No, the intruder who set off the alarm was a bat.”

  “Then who—?” He stared at her.

  “I don’t know. I was downstairs. He was alone up here.”

  There were other cars pulling up outside and she was thankful to see Sergeant O’Bannion climbing the stairs, followed by some other detectives. “What happened?” he asked.

  She told him about the bat and about finding Warfer dead. “He was my client,” she heard herself saying. “And now he’s dead.”

  “We lose clients all the time, Libby. Every time a taxpayer is mugged or killed, it’s a client we’ve failed.”

  “This is a first for me.”

  “Any ideas about it?” he asked as the lab technicians set about their business.

  She glanced at the photograph of Warfer’s wife. “Not right now.”

  “It looks as if the killer either came up the stairs or through the window.

  Go home and get some rest, Libby. We’ll handle it from here.”

  “Don’t you want a statement from me?”

  “Come down to the office in the morning.”

  Still she felt she had to remain until they took the body away. Frederick Warfer had paid her for the week and she hadn’t earned it. Maybe she wouldn’t really earn it if she found his killer, either, but it was the least she could try to do now.

  On the way out to her car later, she saw Helen Rodney watching from behind her picture window across the street.

  Libby stopped by the office in the morning before going to police headquarters. She wanted to look through the mail and tell her secretary what had happened, but instead she found a familiar-looking middle-aged woman waiting in the reception room.

  “This is Mrs. Coxe,” Janice said from behind her desk. “She’d like to talk with you.”

  Libby glanced at her watch. It wasn’t yet ten and she had a few minutes. If only she could remember where she’d seen the woman before. “Come in, Mrs. Coxe. I have to go out again in ten minutes, but perhaps I can help you.”

  “I heard on the morning news that Frederick Warfer was killed last night while you were guarding him.”

  Then it clicked. ““The photo in his bedroom! You’re Betty Warfer!” The woman smiled slightly. “Not anymore,” she said, taking the seat opposite Libby’s desk. “That was over two years ago. In fact, I’m not really sure I ever was Mrs. Warfer legally. That’s why I wanted to see you before I went to the police.”

  Libby took out the photograph of Monica Forrest. “I think you can help me clear something up. Frederick Warfer told me he’d been married to you for twenty-one years when you left him two years ago. But eleven years ago he had a wife whose maiden name was Monica Forrest—this woman—who disappeared and was never seen again.”

  Betty Coxe nodded. “I can explain it in one word—bigamy. Frederick had two wives at the same time.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “He and I lived in the house on Maple Shade Drive. He had another house well out in the suburbs where he lived with Monica. His consultant’s business involved a great deal of travel—or so I was always led to believe. He kept up this double life for twenty years or more. I suspect he might have had a child by her. It was never clear which of us he married first, so I don’t even know if my marriage was legal. My divorce was, though.”

  “How did you find out about his other marriage?”

  “One day eleven years ago I wanted to use one of his credit cards for some shopping. We needed some yard equipment—a pruning hook for the trees and some shovels to dig up the rose garden and put in some new things. In his wallet I found a credit card in his name but with a different address out in Shady Heights I asked him about it and he went to pieces. He confessed to a double life and begged me to forgive him. He promised he’d get rid of this other woman, Monica, and be faithful to me. A short time later he told me she’d run off, disappeared. He even filed a missing-persons report with the police but she never turned up.”

  “What happened to this child you mentioned?”

  “Fred never admitted the boy was his. He sa
id it happened about the same time we were married and she used her pregnancy to trap him into marrying her, too. After she disappeared, her brother raised him. I had believed everything Fred said, but about two years ago the brother, Ralph Forrest, came to see me. He told me for the first time that the police suspected Fred of murdering Monica. But they hadn’t known about his double life and they never found her body. I was horrified.”

  “Why did her brother come to you at that late date?”

  “He’d only just found out about me himself. He was clinging to the hope that Monica was still alive and might have contacted Fred. When I couldn’t help him, he told me the police theory. Once he put it into words, I realized it might be true. That’s when I decided to leave Fred. I got a divorce and have since remarried.”

  “You say you’re going to the police now. For what reason?”

  “To tell them what I know. If Monica’s brother really suspected Fred of causing her death, he might have had a motive for killing him.”

  She hesitated. “I just wondered—”

  “What?” Libby asked.

  “Well, Fred was never one to be without a woman. I wanted to make certain there wasn’t another one around who might have had a reason to kill him. I don’t want to get the police after Ralph Forrest without cause.”

  “There was no other woman that I know of,” Libby answered. Then she remembered Helen Rodney across the street.

  Sergeant O’Bannion listened to Betty Coxe’s story and when she had gone he called Libby into his office. “What do you think about this, Libby?”

  “I’m not on the force anymore,” she reminded him. “I don’t have to think anything about it.”

  “Come on, Libby. Give me a break.”

  “All right—have you questioned the woman who lives across the street? Her name is Helen Rodney. She was at Frederick Warfer’s house when I arrived two nights ago. He said she’d been trying to take care of him since Betty left him—”

  “Rodney.” He shuffled through the reports on his desk. “Sure—young Oakes talked to her last night. I’ll read you his report: ‘Arrived at Warfer home at one A.M. in response to burglar alarm. All seemed, quiet outside the house but noted a neighbor, Helen Rodney, crossing her front yard at number 34. The Rodney woman reported she’d been walking her dog and thought she saw a light in the Warfer garage. Before I could investigate further, patrol car arrived in response to telephone call reporting dead man at Warfer home.’”