A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Clever and Quick CHRISTIANNA BRAND

You had to keep up appearances; so the apartment was very showy, everything phony right down to the massive brass fender in front of the electric fire. But keeping up appearances was one thing and keeping up the payments was another; and with the theater as it was these days, both of them had been “resting” for a long, long time. So the fact was that they really ought to let Trudi go.

Trudi was the au pair girl and for different reasons neither one wanted her to go.

They were having a row about it now, standing in front of the fireplace. They had a row on an average of once an hour these days — nag, nag, bloody nag. Colette was driving Raymond out of his mind. And now this thing about Trudi. If he secretly (somehow) made up Trudi’s pay? He suggested, “Try offering her a bit less for the work.”

“You try offering her a bit less — for the pleasure,” said Colette. It touched him as ever on the raw. “Are you suggesting—?”

“Raymond, that girl thinks of nothing but money and you know it.”

Yes, he knew it, and with the knowledge his heart grew chill. If a time came when he could no longer give Trudi presents — He was mad about her — a little sharp-eyed, shrew-faced mittel-European — and yet here he was, caught, crazy for her, helpless in the grip of her greedy little claws. He, Raymond Gray, who all his life had been, on stage and off, irresistible to women, now caught in the toils of a woman himself. If I were slipping a bit, he said to himself, if my profile were going, if my hair and my teeth weren’t so perfect as once they were — but he was wearing marvelously well. Why, even that drooling old monster in the opposite apartment—

She was not a monster, though she was a big woman and, having once been something of an athlete, now found all the fine muscle running to flabby white fat. But drooling? She was disgusting, she thought, out of her mind — a fat, ugly, aging widow, sitting here drooling over a has-been matinee idol not much more than half my age.

But, as he was caught and helpless, so was she — caught and helpless, sitting there like a silly schoolgirl, yearning only to pop out to her balcony and see if, through his window, she could catch a glimpse of him. From her room she could not see into his; the apartments were not in fact opposite each other but across a corner, at the same level.

But she dared not venture forth. The plane trees in the street just below were in full pollination and if she so much as poked out her nose, her allergy would blow up sky high. And even just passing in the corridor, going up and down the elevator, he mustn’t see her with streaming red eyes and nose.

She spent a good deal of time in the corridors and the elevator.

“Oh, Raymond,” she would cry, “fancy running into you again!”

She had long ago scraped up an acquaintance and it was Raymond, Colette, and Rosa between them now. They were not unwilling — her place was rich in champagne cocktails and dry martinis, with lots of caviar on little triangles of toast. She was loaded.

Colette said so now “Can’t you wangle something out of the old bitch over there? She’s loaded, and if you’d so much as kiss her hand she’d chop it off and give it to you, diamond rings and all.”

Her hand was like a frog’s back, all speckled with the greeny-brown patches of aging skin. “All the same, I’ll tell you something,”

he said. “If you were out of the way, damn nagging so-and-so that you are, she’d make me a ruddy millionaire, I swear she would.”

“Yes and where would your precious Trudi be then? Because,”

said Colette nastily, “I don’t think dear Rosa would put up with very much of that little load of fancy tripe.”

“Don’t you call Trudi names!” he shouted.

“I’ll call her what she is. I’m entitled to that much, surely?”

She had a vile mind, a vile mind and a foul mouth to express what was in it. It flashed across him in a moment of hazy light, red-streaked, that once he had loved her — never dreaming that behind the façade lay this creature of venom and dirt, never dreaming that one day he would stand here with upraised hand, would lunge forward and strike out at her, would have it in his mind to silence her forever.

But his hand did not touch her. She stepped back and away from him, tripped over the rug on the polished floor before the fireplace, fell heavily, almost violently throwing herself back and out of his reach. A brief shriek, arms flailing, a sickening scrunch as the base of her skull hit the rounded knob of the heavy brass fender. And suddenly — stillness.

He knew she was dead.

Trudi stood in the doorway, then moved forward to him slowly.

She said, “Is all right. I saw. You did not touch her.” And she fumbled for the English word. “Was — accident?” She came close beside him, staring down. “But she is dead,” she said.

She was dead. He had not touched her, it had been an accident.

But she was dead — and he was free.

It took him a little while to accept that Trudi was not going to tie up her life with an out-of-work, has-been actor, free or not free. “But, darrleeng, you know that your money is all gone, soon I must anyway leave. Mrs. Gray she has told me so.” And since Mrs. Gray was lying there dead on the floor and could not contradict, she impro-vised a hurried tally of the debts already owing to her. “And this I must have, Raymond, soon I go home if I have no more a job here.”

To be free — to be free to marry her and now to lose her! He pleaded, “Don’t you love me at all?”

“But of course! Only how can we marry, darrleeng, if you have no money to live? So this money I must have, to go home.”

“You can’t go yet, anyway. You’ll have to stand by me about — her.” He had almost forgotten the poor dead thing lying there, ungainly, at their feet. “You’ll have to give evidence for me.”

She shrugged. “Of course. Was accident. But then I go home.”

“Leaving me here like this? Trudi, I have no wife now, no money—”

The little shrug again, so endearing to his infatuated heart, half comic, half rueful; the wag of the pretty little head toward the window across the corner. “As to wife, as to money — over there, plenty both.”

He said quickly, “Then I should be rich. So you and I—?”

But she said, as a few minutes earlier Colette had said, “I don’t think Mrs. Rosa Fox puts up with nonsense. I think she suddenly pulls the moneybags — tight.”

Did the idea come to him all in a flash as it seemed at the time? — or was there an interval while he thought? — while he stood over his wife’s dead body and carefully, deliberately, thought it all through to the end? All he knew afterward was that suddenly he had Trudi by the arm, was talking to her urgently, pulling her to kneel down beside as, very delicately, he scraped from the round brass knob of the fender a fleck of the blood so rapidly congealing there, smearing it over the round brass knob of the poker, the knob identical in size, covering the smears with his own hand. And finally he threw the poker back into the fireplace.

“Now, Trudi, slip out, don’t let anyone see you. Buy something somewhere. Come back right away and this time let the porter see you.”

He did not look back, as he scrambled to his feet, at the still sprawled body — he had not even that moment to spend on the past.

The future was now ahead of him. Only, he prayed, as he furtively slid out into the corridor, let Rosa be in! And let her be alone!

She was in and alone. She was always in and alone these days, flopped in an armchair, dreaming like an adolescent girl of her hopeless, her helpless, love. “A woman of my age,” she thought,

“sitting here mooning over another woman’s husband.” But she’d been quite a gal in her day and widowed a long, long time. Now she said, “Raymond — how lovely!” And at once, “But what’s the matter, my dear? Are you ill?”

“Rosa,” he said, “You must help me!” And he fell on his knees before her, grabbing at her skirt with shuddering hands — really, with all that talent it was quite extraordinary that he couldn’t get more work! He threw a hoarse quaver into his voice. “I’ve killed her,” he said.

She stepped back and away from him. “Killed her?”

“Colette. I’ve killed her. She went on and on. She said horrible things about — about you, Rosa. She thinks you — she always said that you — Rosa, I know you’ve liked me—”

“I love you,” she said simply; but she took a deep, deep breath while the future spread out before her — as earlier his own had opened out to him. His wife was dead and he was free.

He pretended amazement at her answer — amazement and gratit-ude; but he was too clever to claim immediately a return of her feeling. He came at last to the point. “Then, even more, Rosa, may I dare to ask you what I was going to. I am throwing myself on your mercy, just praying that out of friendship you will help me. And now, if you really mean that you—”

And he went with her to the sofa and sat there gripping her hands and poured it all out to her. “She was being so vile. She had — well, she’s dead, but Colette had a filthy mind, Rosa. She’d been going on like this for weeks and suddenly I couldn’t stand it any more. I saw red. I–I picked up the poker. I didn’t mean to harm her — honestly, I swear it — just to frighten her. But when I came to myself again—” And he prayed, “Oh, my God, please try to understand!”

“You did this because she was saying foul things about me?”

“You’ve always been so nice to us, Rosa; it just made me sick, her talking like that, sneering and jeering.” And he poured it all out again, living through the scene, only substituting her name for Trudi’s. Her big plain face went first white, then scarlet, then white again. She held tightly to his hand. “What do you want me to do?”

“Rosa, I thought very quickly — I do think quickly when I’m in a spot. It seems awful now, her lying there dead and me just thinking of myself, trying to fight my way out of it. But that’s what I did. And then I knelt down and — well, there are two brass knobs on the fender exactly like the one on the poker and I–I moved her head so that it looked as though she’d hit it against one of the fender knobs, and then I cleaned all the — the blood and stuff off the poker—”

She was a clever woman — quick and clever. The body might have slowed down, the body that once had been so strong and under control, but the mind was still clever and quick. “An accident,” she said.

“Yes, but — people knew we were always quarreling. Trudi must have known it, of course. They could say I’d pushed her, given-her a shove.” He gave her a sick look that was not too difficult to assume.

“At the least — manslaughter,” he said.

Clever and quick. “You want me to say that I saw what happened?

That you didn’t hit her?”

“My God,” he said, “you’re marvelous! Yes. You could say you saw it all through the window, saw me standing there talking to her, say frankly that we seemed to be arguing, make it look as though you’re not too much on my side, just a casual neighbor. And then — there’s a rug there, you know it, very silky and slippery — you skidded on it once yourself, remember? Perfectly possible for her to have taken a backward step, slipped and fallen backward; and of course that would be all you’d know — you can’t see down to the floor of our room, even from your balcony.”

“But I’d have to say I was out on the balcony. I can’t see your window from in here.”

He had thought that out too. “Your balcony’s only overlooked by two flats, and all those people will have been out; I know them.

No one could say that you weren’t there.”

“All right,” she said.

“You’ll do it for me?”

“Of course. But what about that girl, that little trollop, whatever her name is — the au pair?”

He could hardly keep the stiffness from his voice but he controled himself. “Out shopping, thank God!” And thank God, also, that Rosa couldn’t in fact have been on the balcony, looking in, seeing Trudi there in the room with him. He knew all about the allergy, and one glance at her face confirmed it — Rosa hadn’t been out.

“Well, go back now. You must call a doctor quick. And say nothing about me. Just tell your story, don’t seem even to think of bringing me into it. They’ll be round here soon enough, asking if I saw anything. Now, time’s passing, you really must go.”

He started for the door but suddenly he paused. “Rosa!” He had assumed a look of shame but over the shame a flush of exultancy.

“Rosa, it’s awful to have even thought of it, but suddenly it’s come to me. A trial for murder! You know how things are in the theatrical business, you know how things have been with me lately. But if I were suddenly in the news! Accused of murder — standing there at the Old Bailey, headlines in all the papers, a cause célèbre! And then — the dramatic intervention, the witness who’d seen it all, the last-minute evidence.” He stood before her, half shame-faced, half pleading. “Rosa?”

“Why didn’t I give evidence before? They’d never even have charged you if I’d spoken at once.”

“Well, that’s the point. I must get myself arrested and tried. You’d have to say you hadn’t realized, you didn’t want to get mixed up in it. But then of course the moment you heard I was accused—”

“Even so you wouldn’t get further than the first hearing, whatever it’s called. No publicity in that.”

“You couldn’t — just be abroad for a little while, out of touch?”

She opened her mouth to say that none of it mattered, he’d never need to work again. But she held her peace. He was an actor, actors needed to work, they had to express themselves. “Leave it all to me.

I’ll handle it,” she said.

The earlier headlines were not too bad though hardly sensational and then came the long dull period before the trial opened. However, at last — the day. Himself in the dock, very pale, very handsome. The police in the witness box. “Accused stated—” A flipped-over page in a notebook. “Accused stated, ‘Oh, my God, this is awful, I must have hit out at her, I must have had a blackout, she was nag nag nag at me the whole bloody time because I wasn’t getting work, but I never meant to harm her, I swear I did not.’”

And the forensic evidence. “On the head of the poker I found a small smear of blood.” The smear had been consistent with the blood of the dead woman, with having come there at the time of her death.

Tests showed that the accused had handled the poker after the blood came there. Yes, consistent with his having attempted to remove marks of blood with the palm of his hand, missing the one small smear. The blade of the poker appeared to have been wiped — it showed no fingerprints.

In reply to defense counsel: yes, it was true that the blade of a poker would not be much handled in the ordinary way and the wiping might well have been simply the previous routine cleaning.

The doctor testified that the woman had been dead between half an hour and an hour when he saw her.

Trudi in the box for the defense: shrewd and cool. Had arrived back from the shoppings to find Mr. Gray on his knees beside the body; had had almost to lift him to his feet. Yes, he might very well have touched the poker with his hand, made bloody by his examination of the wound; his arms were all over the place as she hauled him up. She had tried to get him calm; wanted to call a doctor but did not know the number of him, and Mr. Gray seemed so dazed she could get no sense from him. And anyway, what was the hurry, said Trudi with one of her shrugs. Anybody could see that Madame was dead.

And so at last to Rosa Fox. She had with extraordinary dedication deliberately shed all aids to such doubtful charms as she possessed — stripped off the jewelry, dressed herself drably, sacrificed the cosmetics which ordinarily, to some extent at least, disguised the ravages of her age. Not for one moment could anyone suspect that here stood a woman with whom the prisoner could ever have had the slightest rapport.

Into the agreed routine. The casual acquaintance, the occasional drink together. The question of the police directly after the — accident.

Agreed she had previously insisted she had seen nothing. She had been unwell, under great private tensions, wanted only to get abroad to a health spa where she had been ever since. She hadn’t wished to become involved. Never dreamed, of course, that there could possibly be any charge against Mr. Gray, knowing as she did with absolute certainly that the thing had been entirely an accident. Because in fact she had actually seen it happen.

“From my balcony you can look straight into their room. I glanced over and saw them standing there. They seemed to be having an argument. He said something angry, she jerked away from him as though he had raised his hand against her—”

“Mrs. Fox, had he anything in his hand?”

“In his hand? Oh, the poker you mean? No, nothing, no poker or anything. And anyway, he never raised his hand.”

“He never raised his hand? You can swear to that?”

The Judge from the Bench said solemnly, “Mr. Tree, she is swearing to that. She is swearing to everything she says. She is under oath.”

“Well, I could see it all quite clearly and I certainly can swear — well, I mean I am absolutely sure he never raised his hand at all. He said something. She stepped back and then she seemed to trip and topple over backwards. I thought to myself. “Oh, she’s skidded on that rug of theirs!” I know that rug — very treacherous it is on the parquet floor. I nearly slipped on it once myself.

Well, and then I went back into my room and thought no more about it.”

“It didn’t occur to you that she might have injured herself?”

“I thought she might have banged her head or something but of course no more than that. As I say, I’d slipped there myself and been none the worse for it.” And she made a little face and admitted that if the lady had collected a couple of bruises it would have been no more than she deserved. “I think she nagged him. But of course I didn’t know them well.”

Headlines, yes. But not much really and often not even on the center pages, let alone the front page. But there was a big picture of him planned for Sunday, with an interview — celebrating, a glass of champagne raised to the neighbor whose testimony had confirmed his innocence. Not perhaps in the best of taste, the picture taken right there in front of the fireplace where his wife had died. But it wasn’t a best-of-taste newspaper and one settled for what one could get.

And the reporters withdrew; and at last they were alone in his apartment.

She held out her hands to him. “Well, Raymond?”

She looked about a hundred years old standing there before him, the sagging face devoid of its makeup, the ugly dull dress, the droopy hairdo, the mottled hands without their customary diamond flash.

She revolted him.

“Well, Rosa, you did a beautiful job.”

She did not hear the chill in his voice, or did not believe it. She said softly, “And one day soon — shall I collect my reward?”

“Reward?” he said.

“After all, my darling, I have perjured myself for you.”

“Yes, so you have, haven’t you?” he said.

Now the unpowdered skin took on a strange ashen color, and her eyes grew frightened and sick. “Raymond, what do you mean?”

“I mean that you perjured yourself, as you say; and you know, perhaps, what happens to perjurers?”

A clever woman, quick and clever. But still she insisted, “I don’t understand.”

“I need money, Rosa,” he said.

“Money? But if we were married—”

He moved aside so that she looked over his shoulder and into the mirror above the fireplace.

He said, “You? And I? Married?”

She looked long, long at her pitiful reflection. She said at last, “Is this blackmail?”

“Wasn’t it blackmail when you thought that by saving me from prison you could force me to marry you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think perhaps it was.” And she thought to herself that now she was beaten at her own game. “If you give me away,” she said, “you’ll have to admit you murdered her.”

“In fact I didn’t murder her. I can say it happened almost exactly as you said in court.”

“Very well then,” she said swiftly, “I can change my story. Who can prove that I didn’t see you murder her?”

“I can prove that you didn’t see it. You couldn’t have been out on your balcony. The plane trees were pollinating and anyone will confirm to the police what happens if you so much as open a window when the pollen’s flying about. But when they first saw you, you showed no traces of any allergic reaction. I know, because I’d just seen you myself.

“Besides, they couldn’t touch me. I’ve been ‘put in peril,’ as they say— autre fois acquit is the legal name for it. Once acquitted I can’t be tried again for the same crime. I could shout from the housetops that I’d killed her and still be safe.”

“And live with that reputation?”

“Well, of course I wouldn’t say I’d been guilty — which anyway, as I keep telling you, I wasn’t. I’d still claim it had been an accident.

But you would be in the soup.”

“I see.” She pondered it long and carefully, still staring, but unseeingly now, at her sad reflection in the glass. “You thought all this out from the very first, didn’t you? In detail, from the very first?”

“Quite a nice little bit of opportunism,” he suggested, proud of it.

“All that about the publicity? The blood deliberately smeared on the poker? Yes, I see. You had to give them something, you had to get yourself accused and charged, you had to be tried and acquitted before it was safe to accuse me. Two purposes to my perjury: first to supply the evidence that would set you free and second to make me vulnerable to blackmail.” She said almost curiously, almost as though she were humbled for him rather than for herself, “Did you never even like me?”

“I didn’t mind you,” he said indifferently. “But as for marrying you — I think I’m a trifle more particular than that.” And he picked up her handbag, helped himself to the thick wad of banknotes there, stuffed them loosely into his wallet, tucked the wallet away. “Just a very, very small beginning, my dear,” he said.

“I won’t even ask how much you’re demanding. You’ll be back again and again and again of course, won’t you? But by way of a start—?”

“Make it ten thousand,” he said. “You can get that much quickly.”

He smiled at her with cruel and ugly triumph. “And I need it quickly — for my honeymoon,” he said.

Clever and quick. Clever not even to have to ask the name, to have summed it all up in one bright intuitive flash. And quick. The poker with its round brass knob lay there on the fender. She snatched it up — and struck.

Trudi burst open the door, darted forward from her listening post, slowed, then came smoothly the rest of the way and knelt beside him. For what seemed a long, long time they both stared down as only a few short months ago Raymond Gray himself had looked down at the dead body of his wife. It was his turn now.

Rosa’s fat white arms retained something, it seemed, of their once splendid muscle; long-ago anatomical training had suggested the most susceptible spot. The heavy ball of the poker had smashed to a cobweb of fractures Raymond’s delicate temple bone.

Trudi moved. With a small sick grimace she shifted Raymond’s head a little way, so that the wound lay crushed against the round brass knob of the fender.

“That rug!” she said, getting up to her feet again. “Always so dangerous! Fancy, a second time, just the same like the poor wife!”

She grinned with brutal complacence into the heavy white face with its look of dead despair. “So lucky that this time I was present, to see that it all was again just a terrible accident.”

Raymond’s jacket had fallen open. She stooped and with fastidious fingers picked out the wad of notes and stuffed them into her apron pocket.

“Just a verry, verrry small beginning,” she quoted and took the poker out of Rosa’s inert hand. “Go back to your flat, Madame.

Collapse upon your bed. I see to everything, then I make telephone to the doctor.” The Trudi shrug. “This time I know the number of him.”

Rosa went back to her own apartment. She did not, however, collapse upon her bed.

“Police?” she said, holding the telephone receiver in a steady hand.

She gave Raymond Gray’s address. “You’d better get over there quick. I’ve just seen from my balcony the au pair girl going for him with a poker. And this time — no question of an accident.”

She listened with a satisfied smile to a sharp voice cracking out orders. The voice returned to her. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that — I can’t see to the floor of the room. The girl disappeared from sight for a bit and when she got up she was stuffing money into her apron pocket. You’ll find it, I daresay, hidden somewhere in her room. An affair going on, you know, even before the poor wife died; and now I suppose he was refusing to marry her.”