A Kiss Before Dying

by Ira Levin

  The knowledge that Miss Koch’s original interpretation of Dorothy’s behaviour was erroneous will I hope, rid you of any feelings of self-recrimination that may remain.

  Your loving,

  Father

  PS. Please excuse my indecipherable handwriting. thought this letter too personal to dictate to Miss Richardson.

  Letter from Ellen Kingship to Bud Corliss:

  12 March 1951

  8.35 a.m.

  Dear Bud,

  Here I sit in the club car with a Coke (at this hour – ugh!) and a pen and paper, trying to keep my writing hand steady against the motion of the train and trying to give a ‘lucid if not brilliant’ explanation – as Prof Mulholland would say – of why I am making this trip to Blue River.

  I’m sorry about tonight’s basketball game, but I’m sure Connie or Jane will be glad to go in my place, and you can think of me between the halves.

  Now first of all, this trip is not impulsive! I thought about it all last night. You’d think I was running off to Cairo, Egypt! Second of all, I will not be missing work, because you are going to take complete notes in each class, and anyway I doubt if I’ll be gone more than a week. And besides, since when do they flunk seniors for overcuts? Third of all, I won’t be wasting my time, because I’ll never know until I’ve tried, and until I try I’ll never have a moment’s peace.

  Now that the objections are out of the way, let me explain why I am going. I’ll fill in a little background first.

  From the letter I received from my father Saturday morning, you know that Dorothy originally wanted to come to Caldwell and I opposed her for her own good, or so I convinced myself at the time. Since her death I’ve wondered whether it wasn’t pure selfishness on my part. My life at home had been restrained both by my father’s strictness and Dorothy’s dependence on me, although I didn’t realize it at the time. So when I got to Caldwell I really let go. During my first three years I was the rah-rah girl; beer parties, hanging around with the Big Wheels, etc. You wouldn’t recognize me. So, as I say, I’m not sure whether I prevented Dorothy from coming in order to encourage her independence or to avoid losing mine, Caldwell being the everybody-knows-what-everybody-else-is-doing-type place that it is.

  My father’s analysis (probably second-hand via Marion) of my reaction to Dorothy’s death is absolutely right. I didn’t want to admit it was suicide because that meant that I was partly responsible. I thought I had other reasons for doubt besides emotional ones however. The note she sent me, for instance. It was her handwriting – I can’t deny that – but it didn’t sound like her. It sounded kind of stilted, and she addressed me as ‘Darling’, when before it had always been ‘Dear Ellen’ or ‘Dearest Ellen’. mentioned that to the police, but they said that naturally she was under a strain when she wrote the note and couldn’t be expected to sound her usual self, which I had to admit seemed logical. The fact that she carried her birth certificate with her also bothered me, but they explained that away too. A suicide will often take pains to make sure he is immediately identified, they said. The fact that other things which she always carried in her wallet (Stoddard registration card, etc) would have been sufficient identification didn’t seem to make any impression on them. And when I told them that she just wasn’t the suicidal type, they didn’t even bother to answer me. They swept away every point I raised.

  So there I was. Of course I finally had to accept the fact that Dorothy committed suicide – and that I was partly to blame. Annabelle Koch’s story was only the clincher. The motive for Dorothy’s suicide made me even more responsible, for rational girls today do not kill themselves if they become pregnant – not, I thought, unless they have been brought up to depend on someone else and then that someone else suddenly isn’t there.

  But Dorothy’s pregnancy meant that another person had deserted her too – the man. If I knew anything about Dorothy it was that she did not treat sex lightly. She wasn’t the kind for quick flings. The fact that she was pregnant meant that there was one man whom she had loved and had intended to marry some day.

  Now early in the December before her death, Dorothy had written me about a man she had met in her English class. She had been going out with him for quite some time, and this was the Real Thing. She said she would give me all the details over Christmas vacation. But we had an argument during Christmas, and after that she wouldn’t even give me the right time. And when we returned to school our letters were almost like business letters. So I never even learned his name. All I knew about him was what she had mentioned in that letter; that he had been in her English class in the fall, and that he was handsome and somewhat like Len Vernon – he is the husband of a cousin of ours – which meant that Dorothy’s man was tall, blond, and blue-eyed.

  I told my father about this man, urging him to find out who he was and punish him somehow. He refused, saying that it would be impossible to prove he was the one who had got Dorothy into trouble, and futile even if we could prove it. She had punished herself for her sins; it was a closed case as far as he was concerned.

  That’s how things stood until Saturday, when I received my father’s letter with the one from Annabelle Koch enclosed. Which brings us to my big scene.

  The letters did not have the effect my father had hoped for – not at first – because, as I said, Annabelle Koch’s story was far from the sole cause of my melancholy. But then I began to wonder: if Dorothy’s belt was in perfect condition, why had she lied about it and taken An-nabelle’s instead? Why couldn’t Dorothy wear her own belt? My father was content to let it pass, saying she had ‘some peculiar reason of her own’, but I wanted to know what that reason was, because there were three other seemingly inconsequential things which Dorothy did on the day of her death that puzzled me then and that still puzzled me. Here they are:

  1. At 10.15 that morning she bought an inexpensive pair of white cloth gloves in a shop across the street from her dormitory. (The owner reported it to the police after seeing her picture in the papers.) First she asked for a pair of stockings, but because of a rush of business for the Spring Dance scheduled for the following night, they were out of her size. She then asked for gloves, and bought a pair for $1.50. She was wearing them when she died, yet in the bureau in her room was a beautiful pair of hand-made white cloth gloves, perfectly spotless, that Marion had given her the previous Christmas. Why didn’t she wear those?

  2. Dorothy was a careful dresser. She was wearing her green suit when she died. With it she wore an inexpensive white silk blouse whose floppy out-of-style bow was all wrong for the lines of the suit. Yet in her closet was a white silk blouse, also perfectly spotless, which had been specially made to go with the suit. Why didn’t she wear that blouse?

  3. Dorothy was wearing dark green, with brown and white accessories. Yet the handkerchief in her purse was bright turquoise, as wrong as could be for the outfit she wore. In her room were at least a dozen handkerchiefs that would have matched her outfit perfectly. Why didn’t she take one of those?

  At the time of her death I mentioned these points to the police. They dismissed them as quickly as they had dismissed the others I brought up. She was distracted. It was ridiculous to expect her to dress with her ordinary care. I pointed out that the glove incident was the reverse of carelessness; she had gone out of her way to get them. If there was conscious preparation behind one incident, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that all three had some kind of purpose; their comeback was, ‘You can’t figure a suicide.’

  Annabelle Koch’s letter added a fourth incident which followed the pattern of the other three. Her own belt was perfectly all right, but Dorothy wore Annabelle’s instead. In each case she rejected an appropriate item for one that was less appropriate. Why?

  I batted that problem around in my head all day Saturday, and Saturday night too. Don’t ask me what I expected to prove. I felt that there had to be some kind of meaning to it all, and I wanted to find out as much as I could about Dorothy’s state of mind at the
time. Like poking a bad tooth with your tongue, I guess.

  I’d have to write reams to tell you all the mental steps I went through, searching for some relationship among the four rejected items. Price, where they came from, and a thousand other thoughts, but nothing made sense. The same thing happened when I tried to get common characteristics in the wrong things she had actually worn. I even took sheets of paper and headed them Glove, Handkerchief, Blouse and Belt, and put down everything I knew about each, looking for a meaning. Apparently, there just wasn’t a meaning. Size, age, ownership, cost, colour, quality, place of purchase – none of the significant characteristics appeared on all four lists. I tore up the papers and went to bed. You can’t figure a suicide.

  It came to me about an hour later, so startlingly that I shot up straight in bed, suddenly cold. The out-of-style blouse, the gloves she’d bought that morning, Annabelle Koch’s belt, the turquoise handkerchief – Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

  It might – I keep telling myself – be a coincidence. But in my heart I don’t believe that.

  Dorothy went to the Municipal Building, not because it is the tallest building in Blue River, but because a Municipal Building is where you go when you want to get married. She wore something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue – poor romantic Dorothy – and she carried her birth certificate with her to prove she was over eighteen. And you don’t make a trip like that alone. Dorothy can only have gone with one person – the man who made her pregnant, the man she’d been going with for a long time, the man she loved – the handsome blue-eyed blond of her fall English class. He got her up to the roof somehow. I’m almost certain that’s the way it was.

  The note? All it said was ‘I hope you will forgive me for the unhappiness I will cause. There is nothing else that I can do.’ Where is there mention of suicide? She was referring to the marriage! She knew Father would disapprove of a hasty step like that, but there was nothing else she could do because she was pregnant. The police were right when they said the stilted tone was the result of strain, only it was the strain of an eloping bride, not of a person contemplating suicide.

  ‘Something old, something new’ was enough to set me going, but it would never be enough to make the police re-classify a suicide with note as an unsolved murder, especially when they would be prejudiced against me – the crank who pestered them last year. You know that’s true. So I’m going to find this man and do some very cautious Sherlocking. As soon as I turn up anything that supports my suspicions, anything strong enough to interest the police, I promise to go straight to them. I’ve seen too many movies where the heroine accuses the murderer in his sound-proof penthouse and he says ‘Yes, I did it, but you’ll never live to tell the tale.’ So don’t worry about me, and don’t get impatient, and don’t write my father as he would probably explode. Maybe it is ‘crazy and impulsive’ to rush into it this way, but how can I sit and wait when I know what has to be done and there is no one else to do it?

  Perfect timing. We’re just entering Blue River now. I can see the Municipal Building from the window.

  I’ll wind this letter up later in the day, when I’ll be able to tell you where I’m staying and what progress, if any, I’ve made. Even though Stoddard is ten times as big as Caldwell, I have a pretty good idea of how to begin. Wish me luck …

  TWO

  Dean Welch was plump, with round grey eyes like buttons pressed into the shiny pink clay of his face. He favoured suits of clergy-black flannel, single-breasted so as to expose his Phi Beta Kappa key. His office was dim and chapel-like, with dark wood and draperies and, in its centre, a broad field of meticulously accoutred desktop.

  After releasing the button on the inter-office speaker, the Dean rose and faced the door, his customary moist-lipped smile replaced by an expression of solemnity suitable for greeting a girl whose sister had taken her own life while nominally under his care. The ponderous notes of the noon-day carillon floated into chamber, muffled by distance and draperies. The door opened and Ellen Kingship entered.

  By the time she had closed the door and approached his desk, the Dean of Students had measured and evaluated her with the complacent certainty of one who has dealt with younger people for many years. She was neat; he liked that. And quite pretty. Red-brown hair in thick bangs, brown eyes, a smile whose restraint acknowledged the unfortunate past. Determined looking. Probably not brilliant, but a plodder – second quarter of her class. Her coat and dress were shades of dark blue, a pleasant contrast to the usual student polychrome. She seemed a bit nervous, but then, weren’t they all?

  ‘Miss Kingship,’ he murmured with a nod, indicating the visitor’s chair. They sat. The Dean folded his pink hands. ‘Your father is well, I hope.’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ Her voice was low-pitched and breathy.

  The Dean said, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting him – last year.’ There was a moment of silence. ‘If there’s anything I can do for you—’

  She shifted in the stiff-backed chair. ‘We – my father and I – are trying to locate a certain man, a student here.’ The Dean’s eyebrows lifted in polite curiosity. ‘He lent my sister a fairly large sum of money a few weeks before her death. She wrote me about it. I happened to come across her cheque-book last week and it reminded me of the incident. There’s nothing in the cheque-book to indicate that she ever repaid the debt, and we thought he might have felt awkward about claiming it.’

  The Dean nodded.

  ‘The only trouble,’ Ellen said, ‘is that I don’t recall his name. But I do remember Dorothy mentioning that he was in her English class during the fall semester, and that he was blond. We thought perhaps you could help us locate him. It was a fairly large sum of money—’ She took a deep breath.

  ‘I see,’ said the Dean. He pressed his hands together as though comparing their size. His lips smiled at Ellen. ‘Can do,’ he snapped with military briskness. He held the pose for an instant, then jabbed one of the buttons on the inter-office speaker. ‘Miss Platt,’ he snapped, and released the button.

  He brought his chair into more perfect alignment with the desk, as if he were preparing for a long campaign.

  The door opened and a pale efficient-looking woman stepped into the room. The Dean nodded at her and then leaned back in his chair and stared at the wall beyond Ellen’s head, mapping his strategy. Several moments passed before he spoke. ‘Get the programme card of Kingship, Dorothy, fall semester, nineteen-forty-nine. See which English section she was in and get the enrolment list for that section. Bring me the folders of all the male students whose names appear on the list.’ He looked at the secretary. ‘Got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He made her repeat the instructions.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. She went out. ‘On the double,’ he said to the closed door. He turned back to Ellen and smiled complacently. She returned the smile.

  By degrees the air of military efficiency faded, giving way to one of avuncular solicitude. The Dean leaned forward, his fingers softly clustered on the desk. ‘Surely you haven’t come to Blue River solely for this purpose,’ he said.

  ‘I’m visiting friends.’

  ‘Ahh.’

  Ellen opened her handbag. ‘May I smoke?’

  ‘By all means.’ He pushed a crystal ashtray to her side of the desk. ‘I smoke myself,’ he admitted graciously. Ellen offered him a cigarette, but he demurred. She lit hers with a match drawn from a white folder on which Ellen Kingship was printed in copper letters.

  The Dean regarded the match-book thoughtfully. ‘Your conscientiousness in financial matters is admirable,’ he said, smiling. ‘If only everyone we dealt with were similarly conscientious.’ He examined a bronze letter-opener. ‘We are at present beginning the construction of a new gymnasium and fieldhouse. Several people who pledged contributions have failed to live up to their words.’

  Ellen shook her head sympathetically.

  ‘Perhaps y
our father would be interested in making a contribution,’ the Dean speculated. ‘A memorial to your sister—’

  ‘I’ll be glad to mention it to him.’

  ‘Would you? I would certainly appreciate that.’ He replaced the letter-opener. ‘Such contributions are tax-deductible,’ he added.

  A few minutes later the secretary entered with a stack of manilla folders in her arm. She set them before the Dean. ‘English fifty-one,’ she said, ‘section six. Seventeen male students.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the Dean. As the secretary left he straightened his chair and rubbed his hands, the military man once more. He opened the top folder and leafed through its contents until he came to an application form. There was a photograph pasted in the corner of it. ‘Dark hair,’ he said, and put the folder on his left.

  When he had gone through all of them, there were two uneven piles. ‘Twelve with dark hair and five with light,’ the Dean said.

  Ellen leaned forward. ‘Dorothy once told me he was handsome—’

  The Dean drew the pile of five folders to the centre of his desk blotter and opened the first one. ‘George Speiser,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I doubt if you’d call Mr Speiser handsome.’

  He lifted out the application form and turned it towards Ellen. The face in the photograph was a chinless, gimlet-eyed teenager. She shook her head.

  The second man was an emaciated young man with thick eye-glasses.

  The third was fifty-three years old and his hair was white, not blond.

  Ellen’s hands were damp on her purse.