Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen

Blackout Richard Deming

One should make a confession of murder properly. As is the case at all social functions, suitable attire is most important. When admitting to first-degree murder, a dark, conservative business suit — in keeping with premeditation — is beyond reproach. Shun the hand-painted tie, the light-colored sock, and the electrified bow tie.

The man came into the homicide squadroom about nine a.m. He was about forty-five, well-dressed and freshly shaven. His suit had been so recently pressed, it looked as though he hadn’t even sat down in it since it left the ironing board. His whole appearance was neat, except that his necktie was slightly off-center and his hair was sloppily combed.

He gave the impression that he had been busily trying to sober up after an all-night binge by having a cold shower and a lot of black coffee. He’d also made himself presentable. The sobering-up process had, obviously, not been completely successful.

I said, “Yes, sir?”

Leaning his hands on the edge of the table where I was sitting, he carefully looked me up and down. “You a policeman?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Sergeant Sod Harris.”

“You’re not wearing a policeman’s suit,” he said owlishly.

“In the detective bureau we don’t wear policemen’s suits,” I said. “Believe me, I’m a policeman.”

He let go of the table edge, straightened up and swayed slightly. “All right. If you’re a policeman, lock me up.”

I looked him over thoughtfully. Sam Wiggens, who was checking a case in one of the filing cabinets, put the folder back, and came over to stand alongside of me.

I said, “You done something to be locked up?”

The man gave his head an impatient shake. “Just want to be looted up.”

“Why?”

“You need a reason?”

Sam Wiggens said, “There has to be a charge, mister. We’re not running a boarding house.”

The man turned his gaze to Sam. It took him time to focus his eyes. “Is drunk good enough?” he inquired.

Sam looked him up and down. “Might be.”

“Well, you ever see anybody drunker?”

Sam looked at me and I looked at him. Turning back to the drunk, I asked, “How’d you happen to come here?”

“What?”

“To this office. Know where you are?”

He considered this before saying brightly, “Sign on the door said Homicide.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You wanted to turn in drunk, why didn’t you just go to the Central District desk downstairs?”

This presented him with a problem. He had to consider some more before saying, “Just came in the first door I saw.”

“On the third floor?” Sam inquired. “You didn’t notice any doors on the way up?”

The drunk looked from Sam to me and back again. He couldn’t seem to think of any answer.

I said, “Want to tell us your name, mister?”

He shook his head. “I don’t see that that’s necessary. Look, gentlemen, I came in here voluntarily. I wasn’t arrested and dragged in. There’s no reason to treat me like a criminal.”

Sam said, “Nobody’s treating you like a criminal. We just want to know who you are.”

“Mind if I sit down and explain things?” he said.

“Go ahead,” I told him.

The man carefully seated himself across from me, fumbled out a package of cigarettes and gave me an inquiring look. I pushed an ash tray toward him and held a lighted match to his cigarette.

“Thanks,” he said, inhaling.

He offered the pack to us, and we both shook our heads.

“About this explanation—” I prodded.

“Well, first you must understand that I have a rather prominent social position.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wouldn’t want it in the papers that I’d been booked as a common drunk. Even though I am a common drunk.”

Sam said, “You going to get to the point, mister?”

“I’m getting there. You see I’m an alcoholic.”

“No!” I said.

“Fact. A periodic. Sometimes I go for months without a drink. Doesn’t bother me a bit. Go to cocktail parties, watch everybody else slugging it down, don’t have the least desire to touch it myself. Then, for no reason, I decide to try a single sip. And bingo.”

Neither Sam nor I said anything.

“Don’t know why I do it,” he went on. “Same thing always happens.”

“What’s that?” I inquired.

“I get drunk and stay that way for days.”

Sam asked, “How long’s it been this time?”

“Three and a half days,” he said promptly. Someone must have told him, because he couldn’t have been keeping track of time. “After eighteen months without a drink.”

I said, “You still haven’t said why you came here.”

“Well, sir, I decided the only way to stop was to get myself locked up. No way I could get hold of it in jail, you see.”

I grunted and Sam said, “You always sober up this way?”

“Sir?”

“Ever turned yourself in before?”

He shook his head. “First time I’ve tried it.”

“What made you decide this time?”

He shrugged. “Just seemed like a good idea.”

I said, “Want to tell us your name now?”

He shook his head again. “I explained why I can’t do that.”

After looking him over for a moment, I said, “Mind emptying your pockets?”

Agreeably, he began removing items from his pockets and laying them on the table. There was a handkerchief, a pack of cigarettes, a book of matches, a key ring with some door keys on it, some change and a money clip containing a few bills.

I said, “No wallet?”

He smiled. “I anticipated this. I left all identification at home.”

Sam and I exchanged glances. Sam asked, “You ever been arrested?”

“No, sir,” he said with an emphatic headshake.

Picking up the key ring, I handed it to Sam. “Take this up to the lab, Sam, and run them all through the key machine.”

The man straightened in his chair. “What’s the key machine?” he asked suspiciously.

“A machine that identifies locks,” I told him. “We’ll have your home address in fifteen minutes.”

He looked at me uncertainly. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“You know it now. Go ahead, Sam.”

Sam was moving toward the door when the man said, “Wait a minute.”

Sam halted to look at him. We both waited.

The man said, “I wouldn’t want my wife to know about this.”

We continued to wait.

“All right,” he said with an air of resignation. “My name’s George Cooper.”

I asked, “Where do you live?”

He gave me an address on Lindell Boulevard. While I was writing it down, Sam tossed the key ring back on the table and returned to his previous spot.

I said, “Now let’s get back to the important question. Why’d you come to Homicide?”

“I told you,” Cooper said. “It was the first door I saw.”

The phone rang and Sam answered it. “Homicide. Wiggens.”

After listening a moment, he said, “Yeah, he made it. Thanks for checking.”

He hung up, glanced at Cooper, then at me. “Information desk downstairs,” he said. “Just checking up.”

“On what?” I asked.

“Fellow asked where to find Homicide. They wondered if he ever got there. They thought he might have been too drunk to find his way.”

We both looked at George Cooper, who tapped ashes from his cigarette in an elaborate pretense that he didn’t know what Sam was talking about.

I said to Sam, “See if he has a record.”

Sam went over to pick up the phone. I gazed at George Cooper steadily while Sam was giving his name and description to Records. Avoiding my eyes, the man butted his cigarette.

While waiting for Records to phone back, we continued to question Cooper, but he still refused to say why he had turned himself into Homicide instead of downstairs. When Records finally phoned back that there was no package on the man, we gave up. We decided to take him down to Central District and book him.

Rising, I said, “Okay, Cooper. Let’s go.”

“Where?” he inquired.

“Downstairs. You wanted jail, didn’t you?”

Getting to his feet, Cooper began putting his possessions back in his pockets. “Well, finally,” he said. “It’s certainly hard to get arrested around here.” Then he paused with his key ring in his hands. “It’s all right to take my things back, isn’t it?”

“For now,” Sam said. “They’ll check them for you downstairs.”

Cooper returned the rest of the items to his pockets. He emitted a relieved sigh.

“Now I won’t have to worry any more,” he said.

“About what?” I asked.

“Getting in trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“You know,” he said vaguely. “I forget things when I black out. Later people tell me I’ve done things I shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Oh, different things. Get belligerent, maybe. Start a fight.”

“You have a fight somewhere?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I was just giving an example.”

I said, “You turned in here to keep from getting in a fight?”

He pursed his lips. “Well, you might say that.”

“With who?”

“A friend of mine,” he said reluctantly.

“He got a name?”

“Henry Marks,” he said even more reluctantly. “My next-door neighbor.”

Sam asked, “You have some trouble with this Marks?”

“Not trouble,” Cooper said with a shake of his head. “He’s been hanging around my wife, is all. I just told him to stay away.”

Sam looked at me. “That name ring a bell, Sod?”

I shook my head. “Not to me.”

Sam puzzled over it for a moment then walked over to the bulletin board. After glancing it over, he nodded with satisfaction.

“Thought I’d seen it,” he announced. “On the M.P. bulletin. Henry Marks has been missing since last Friday.”

We both stared at George Cooper, who suddenly looked uncomfortable.

“You better sit back down again, Mr. Cooper,” I said. “We’ve got a lot more talking to do.”

It took us another half hour to get about half a story out of Cooper. At first he insisted he knew nothing of Henry Marks’s whereabouts. But eventually he began to change his story. He admitted having a fight with Henry Marks when he discovered him in his home. But he insisted that it hadn’t been much of a fight and that the missing man was all right when he left Cooper’s home immediately after the fight. He further insisted that the fight had taken place only the previous night. According to the M.P. report, at that time Marks had been missing three days.

I said, “Last night was Monday. You sure this fight didn’t take place Friday?”

“Of course I’m sure,” he said in a sullen voice.

“Maybe you had one of your blackouts,” Sam suggested. “Maybe you lost a couple of days.”

Cooper said, “Listen, it was last night. I was blacked out, but the fight sobered me up. When I saw what I’d done—”

He stopped abruptly and stared from one to the other of us, appalled at his slip of the tongue.

“Go on,” I said quietly.

“I mean — you see, I don’t remember the fight at all. Don’t remember coming home — anything about it. My wife had to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” I asked.

Cooper looked from me to Sam with a trapped expression on his face. He opened and closed his mouth twice before he finally got anything out.

“I may as well tell you,” he finally managed. “I meant to when I came in.”

“Go ahead,” I told him.

“I got cold feet. I meant to tell the whole thing when I came here. Then I got scared.”

Sam and I waited.

After a long pause, he said in a bare whisper, “I killed him.”

The man dropped his face in his hands. We sat watching him and after a moment he listlessly dropped his hands to his sides and sat in a dejected attitude, his head down.

“Want to tell us about it?” I inquired.

He told us then. Once he had brought himself to admit the crime, he answered everything we asked willingly, but without spirit. He said he had left his home in a mildly intoxicated condition about 8:00 p.m. the previous Friday. After a round of taverns and night clubs, he had checked into a hotel and continued drinking in his room. Saturday, Sunday and Monday were largely blank. Except for brief periods he recalled nothing until he was awakened on his front-room couch by his wife shaking him. Henry Marks lay on the floor dead, his skull crushed by a pair of fire tongs.

I said, “You remember nothing at all about the fight?”

“Just what Helen told me,” he said dully. “She saw it.”

“What’s her story?”

“I came staggering in, found Henry there and accused him of chasing Helen. One thing led to another, and finally he hit me.” He felt of his jaw. “Ought to remember that. Still hurts. But I don’t.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Helen says I fell near the fireplace. When I got up, I had the tongs in my hand. I swung them and George dropped.” His voice grew tired. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Not quite,” I said. “There’s still one small item you haven’t covered. What did you do with the body?”

“Oh, that,” he said almost with indifference. “I buried him in the back yard.” After a pause, he offered, “I’ll show you right where, if you’d like.”

We told him we’d like. Booking him on suspicion of homicide, we had him checked out in our custody. Before leaving headquarters, we called the lab and asked for a technician to meet us at Cooper’s home. We suggested he bring along a pair of strong-backed rookies with shovels. Then we drove out to Cooper’s home on Lindell Boulevard.

Cooper lived right across from Forest Park, in one of the richest sections in St. Louis. He, therefore, might very well have been as socially prominent as he had claimed. His home, a two-story affair of tan brick, was set fifty feet back from the street and had about a hundred feet between it and the houses either side.

Sam turned the car into the driveway and parked alongside the house. We all got out and walked around to the back. Leading us to the rear of the yard. Cooper dully nodded toward a freshly-spaded section of garden.

“Right there,” he said in a low voice.

Sam said, “It’s a neat job. Smoothed off nice and even. What’d you do with the extra dirt?”

“Dumped it out back in a ditch.”

“Haw’d you manage such a clean job, as drunk as you were?” Sam asked. “And how come the neighbors didn’t see you?”

“Helen helped me. And it was dark last night. We didn’t use a light except to check up on how it looked afterward.”

The back door opened and a slim, rather pretty woman of about forty came outside. She wore a concerned expression on her face and her eyes widened when she got close enough to see Cooper’s handcuffs.

“What is it?” she asked on a high note. “Are you men police officers?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Sod Harris of Homicide. This is Officer Sam Wiggens.”

“Homicide?” she said. “Why is my husband handcuffed? George, what is it?”

In a low voice Cooper said, “I told them about it.”

“About what?” She looked at me. “What’s he done?”

“We understood you knew, lady,” I said.

She looked frightenedly from me to Sam and then at her husband. “Knew what?”

“It’s no use, Helen,” Cooper said in a weary tone. “I told them everything.”

Her nervous gaze made another circuit of all three of us. She took a deep breath and said rapidly, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

I said, “Afraid it’s not that easy. Your husband says you helped him conceal the body.”

Glancing at Cooper, she nervously worked her hands together.

Sam said, “Makes you an accessory, lady.”

“You can’t blame me for not reporting it,” she said. “He’s my husband. A wife doesn’t have to testify against her own husband. Right?”

“Sure,” Sam said dryly. “But she doesn’t have to help him bury bodies either.”

Art Ward from the lab came around the corner of the house carrying a lab kit and a camera. He had two uniformed cops with him carrying shovels. Mrs. Cooper stared at the shovels as if she’d never seen one before.

“Hi, Sod, Sam,” Ward said. “What’s the scoop?” He gave Cooper and Mrs. Cooper a curious glance.

I pointed to the spaded area. “Right there, Art. Should be a body.” I turned to the woman. “Maybe we’d better go inside while they’re digging, Mrs. Cooper.”

She nodded and then led the way toward the house, with her husband following and Sam and me bringing up the rear. One of the policemen sank his shovel into the ground as we walked away.

She only took us as far as the kitchen. Offering us seats at the kitchen table, she said in a flustered voice, “You’ll have to excuse the house. The servants have been gone several days. I... I always let them have off when George...” She let her voice trail off.

Cooper said glumly, “She means she gives them a vacation when I fall off the wagon. She doesn’t want them to know how I am.”

I glanced around. The place looked clean enough to me.

I said, “Now, Mrs. Cooper, you want to tell us about last night?”

She was standing by the window over the sink, her attention divided between us and what was going on outside. “What is there to tell?” she asked. “George said he told you all about it.”

“We’d like your version,” I said. “Incidentally, we came inside so you wouldn’t have to watch what was going on out there. Don’t you think it would be better if you came away from the window?”

Flushing, she came over to the table and sank into a chair. “What do you want me to tell you, Sergeant? George came home drunk and found Mr. Marks here. They had a fight and George hit him with the fire tongs. That’s all there is to it.”

“How did Marks happen to be here?” I asked.

“He came to the door about fifteen minutes before George got home. He’d been drinking too, but I didn’t realize that until after I’d let him in. He... he tried to get fresh with me. I ordered him out of the house, but he wouldn’t go. Then George staggered in and the argument started. It would never have happened if George had been home where he belonged instead of out getting drunk. Drink was the cause of the whole thing. How many times I’ve warned my husband. George, haven’t I done everything possible to make you stop?”

“I guess,” Cooper said in a low voice.

There was a knock at the back door. Mrs. Cooper started to get up, but I waved her back to her seat and answered it myself. Art Ward was standing on the back porch. Stepping out, I closed the door behind me.

“It was there all right, Sod,” he said. “Got a bashed-in skull. He was only buried about a foot down.”

I walked back to the grave with him to look at the body. It had been lifted out alongside of the hole. It was still all covered with dirt.

“How long do you figure?” I asked Ward.

He shrugged. “No bloating. I’d guess under twenty-four hours. You’ll have to wait for the coroner’s physician to make a post mortem if you want it pinpointed.”

I said, “Our information is he died last night.”

“I’d figure about that,” he agreed. “In this weather it doesn’t take long for them to begin to swell. And he hasn’t started yet.”

I sent one of the uniformed policemen over next door to break the news to the victim’s wife and bring her over to identify the body. She was a mousy little woman of middle age and she went all to pieces when she saw what was left of her husband. She managed to identify him, but she was too upset right then to question. I sent her back home accompanied by the same officer who had brought her over. I told him to phone her family doctor to come over and see if he could quiet her down. Then I went back inside.

I took Art Ward back inside with me, having him bring his lab kit. Mrs. Cooper took us into the front room and pointed out the fire tongs, which still lay next to the fireplace with dried blood on them. I told Ward to check them for prints, then take them back to the lab.

There wasn’t much more we could do at the scene. Sam called City Hospital for an ambulance to take the body to the morgue, while I went next door to see how Mrs. Marks was doing. Her family doctor had arrived and had put her under a sedative. I left word with a servant for Mrs. Marks to drop down to headquarters the next day if she felt better, or to phone me if she wasn’t up to it.

We took both Mr. and Mrs. Cooper back downtown. Cooper had already been booked, so we just turned him over to Central District and had him put in a cell. Pending further investigation, we booked Mrs. Cooper on suspicion of being an accessory to homicide and held her overnight.

The next morning, Wednesday, Mrs. Marks’s maid phoned that her mistress was feeling better and would be down to see us about ten a.m., if that was suitable. I said it was fine.

A few minutes later Art Ward phoned from the lab.

“Fingerprints all over those fire tongs,” he said. “Mr. Cooper’s, Mrs. Cooper’s, some other people who will probably turn out to be servants. Everybody who ever fixed the fire last winter, I guess.”

“Any superimposed over the others, to show who handled them last?”

He snorted. “That’s for the movies. We’re not that brilliant.”

Mousy little Mrs. Marks came into the squadroom just as I hung up. She hadn’t met Sam yesterday because he had been inside with the Coopers. After introducing him, I asked the woman to have a seat.

“We’re sorry to impose on you so soon after your loss, Mrs. Marks,” I said. “But it has to be done.”

“It’s all right,” she said listlessly.

I said, “We’ll make this as short as possible. We know it’s painful for you.”

“I have plenty of time,” she said drearily. “Time is all I have left. But I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve spent most of my life waiting anyway.”

“How’s that?” I inquired.

“For him. If I had back all the hours I’ve waited up, wondering where he was...”

When her voice trailed off, I said, “Your husband?”

She nodded. “I never really blamed him for it. He was awfully handsome, you know. And I’m so plain. I suppose I was lucky to have Henry at all, even to share with other women.”

It seemed like a peculiar philosophy, but I wasn’t going to argue with her. I said, “There’s some question about the date of your husband’s disappearance, Mrs. Marks. It may help to backtrack his movements. Now the M.P. report says you first missed him about nine Friday evening.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t miss him until eight Saturday morning. Nine Friday evening was just the last I saw him.”

I said, “I don’t think I follow.”

“He went out about nine Friday night,” she explained. “I was upset when he didn’t come home, but not worried. About anything having happened to him, I mean. It wasn’t the first time he’d stayed out all night. I didn’t really begin to worry until about seven-thirty the next morning. By eight I knew something had happened.”

Sam asked, “How was that?”

“He always came home to shave and shower before going to work. He owned Marks’s Department Store, you know, and he never missed being there at opening time. He always said if the boss couldn’t get to work on time, he couldn’t expect the help to. He never came in later than seven-thirty unless it was a Sunday.”

I asked, “Any idea where he went when he left the house Friday evening?”

“I thought I had. But I decided I was wrong when I saw her go off shopping Saturday morning.”

“Who?” I inquired.

“Mrs. Cooper, next door. She always goes downtown shopping Saturday morning. Get’s all dressed up and leaves about eleven. When I saw her leave at her usual time, I figured I was wrong. She’d hardly have left him alone over there.”

Sam said, “You mean you thought your husband might have spent the night at the Cooper home?”

“Naturally,” she said. “Helen Cooper was his latest interest. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that.”

“Oh?” I said. “Including Mr. Cooper?”

“Well, maybe not him. But everybody else did. It was common gossip.”

I asked her to be a little more specific and she gave us the names of two neighbor friends whom she said would confirm what she had said about her husband and Helen Cooper. We also questioned her about her husband’s last movements, but she wasn’t very helpful on that point. She said she had watched him walk up the street in the direction of King’s Highway and go right past the Cooper home. If he had later doubled back, she hadn’t observed it.

We thanked her for her co-operation and let her go home.

“Let’s check with those neighbor women now,” I said to Sam Wiggens.

It was noon when we finished this chore. Both neighbors whose names Mrs. Marks had given us verified her contention. They said Marks had often been seen going into the Cooper home, when George Cooper wasn’t there.

We caught some lunch before driving back downtown. Instead of immediately returning to headquarters, we stopped by the morgue, which is just down the street from police headquarters.

Dr. Allan Swartz was the coroner’s physician who had performed the post mortem. We found him in his office.

“You want medical terms or lay terms?” he inquired.

“Keep it simple,” I said. “Sam didn’t have much education.”

Sam looked at me. “Sure,” he said. “Sod went all the way through grade school with honors.”

“He had his skull crushed by a blunt instrument,” Dr. Swartz told us. “That good enough?”

“Fine,” I said. “Were you able to fix a time of death?”

“You couldn’t even fix a date of death in a case like this. Unless you can tell me when he had stuffed peppers for dinner.”

“What do you mean?” I inquired.

“The body’s been under some kind of refrigeration. He could have been dead a week.”

Sam and I looked at each other. Sam said, “What’s the least amount of time he could have been dead?”

The doctor shrugged. “A few days. Last Friday night, Saturday morning, maybe.”

We thanked him and returned to headquarters. Stopping by Central District, we checked George and Helen Cooper out of their cells and took them upstairs for further questioning. Cooper was sober now and had an obvious hangover. It left him in a less co-operative mood than he had been in yesterday. When his wife took a seat, he refused one, preferring to stand and stare from me to Sam and back again with a truculent expression on his face.

“Well?” he asked. “Have you officers completed your investigation?”

“Just about,” I said. “Except for a few questions.”

“Just how thorough an investigation did you make?”

His tone caused me to examine him curiously. “What do you mean, Mr. Cooper?”

“I just wondered how you cops worked. When somebody confesses to a crime, do you let it go at that, or do you go out and do a little digging?”

“We do a little digging,” I assured him.

He opened his mouth to say something more, then winced and felt his head. “Wow! You got any aspirin?”

Sam said, “In my locker. Over here.”

He led Cooper across the room to his locker, then over to the water cooler for a glass of water to chase the aspirin.

I said to the woman, “Couple of things came up since we talked to you yesterday, Mrs. Cooper.”

“What things?”

“You forgot to mention how friendly you were with Henry Marks.”

Her face stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

“Seems to be common knowledge in the neighborhood that he—”

“Gossip!” she interrupted indignantly. “Is that the way you policemen work? Go around listening to gossip?”

“One way.”

“Well, it isn’t true. I bet I know who started that rumor.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“That little vixen, Viola Marks. She’s so jealous, she’d even slander her own husband to get even.”

“Even for what?” I asked.

“For being better looking than she is. She hates me for it.”

Sam and George Cooper came back from the water cooler. Cooper said, “If I ever take another drink, I’ll kick myself — hard.”

“Feel better?” Sam asked.

“Not yet. It takes a while.”

I said, “I was just telling your wife about some new developments, Mr. Cooper.”

Helen Cooper said loudly, “Don’t you dare repeat that slander!”

Cooper winced and gave his wife an irritated look. “Do you have to yell?” He turned to me. “What slander?”

“It’s hardly slander,” I said. “We’ve pretty well established that your wife was carrying on an affair with Henry Marks.”

Mrs. Cooper got an outraged expression on her face, but her husband’s reaction seemed to surprise her out of saying anything. Instead of showing either astonishment or indignation, he merely gave an interested nod.

“You knew?” I inquired.

“Oh, no,” he said. “Merely suspected. I’ve caught him in the house a time or two. Helen insisted he’s been passing at her and she’s been resisting him. She’s begged me not to make an issue of it because she didn’t want trouble with neighbors. She said she could handle him all right. I guess I’m a henpecked husband. I let her think I believed her, when I really didn’t at all.”

“George!” she said in a shocked voice. “How can you say that?”

He ignored her.

I said, “Another development was that Marks had been dead three days at the time you were supposed to have your fight.”

This managed to surprise him. “Three days?” he said without understanding. “How could that be?”

“Why don’t you ask your wife?”

He turned to stare at Helen Cooper, who raised her chin and refused to meet his gaze.

“He’d been lying there dead for three days?” he asked slowly.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

The woman screamed at me, “You’re lying!”

Cooper put his hands to his ears and walked halfway across the room to sink into a chair. His wife stared after him, then shifted her gaze back to me when he looked at her.

In a tense, but lower-toned voice she said, “Why do you think he had been dead three days?”

I said, “The coroner’s physician says so.”

“He made a mistake.”

“Hardly,” I said. “Marks’s body lay in your house all that time. Don’t try to make us believe you didn’t notice it.”

Nervously she worked her hands together, trying to think of a way out. “I just had the day wrong, is all. George killed him on Friday. In all the excitement, I just—”

Her voice trailed off, when we both unbelievingly shook our heads.

I said, “Why don’t you save time by telling us about it, lady?”

She looked hopelessly from one to the other of us. Finally she said in a whisper, “I didn’t mean to do it. Honest I didn’t.”

We waited.

“It was spur-of-the-moment. When he said—” Her voice failed.

“When he said what?” I prompted.

Drearily, all hope now gone, she said, “He told me he was going back to her.”

“His wife?” Sam asked.

“Yes. That plain little nothing. After all we’d been to each other, he said I was just an interlude. He said he loved her.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“I guess I went mad. The tongs were there and I picked them up. I — afterward I didn’t know what to do. I... I hid him in the closet the first night, until I could think of a way to get rid of him.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Then I was afraid — afraid there’d be an odor. So I put him in the bathtub. I went out and bought cracked ice. Brought it home a bag at a time. I poured it over him.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “Then an idea came to me — a way out. I knew George would come home eventually. Dead drunk. He wouldn’t know what was going on.”

I looked across at George Cooper. He was listening attentively, but he still didn’t seem very disturbed. I thought I detected a faint note of triumph in his expression.

“You knew all along that she did it,” I accused him.

He shook his head, winced again at the motion. “Only suspected. Sergeant, I didn’t know.”

“Then why’d you confess? Why didn’t you just tell us your suspicion?”

“You have to remember I was drunk at the time and not thinking too clearly. All I knew was if Helen lied to me about her and Marks, she could also lie about my having killed him. I don’t know how to investigate murders. I figured the police would, so if I got them involved, maybe the truth would come out. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d confessed that if my wife was innocent, I’d be in a real jam. But by then, of course, it was too late.”

“You were just thinking of yourself!” she screamed at him. “You just wanted to get rid of me!”

An agonized expression crossed his face. Clapping his hands to his ears, he stared at her.

“You’re beginning to get the idea,” he said.