Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 18, No. 5, May 1973

The Wrong Time to Die by James Michael Ullman

Happily, the word that carries the most weight is sometimes that of the one who carries the most weight.

Ben was about to take his first bite of supper when the implications of the radio newscast emanating from the little diner’s kitchen seared into his brain.

“...body was discovered about an hour ago. Maxine Treadway, the internationally known novelist, was bludgeoned to death in a small lakeside cottage here by an unknown assailant. Police Chief Howard Cream said an expert pathologist is on the way here and an autopsy will be performed tonight. It has also been learned that the police are seeking a prime suspect, a young man seen leaving Miss Treadway’s cottage this morning. Miss Treadway, currently writer-in-residence at nearby State College, had rented the cottage for the summer. At City Hall, Mayor Hoke expressed confidence that the crime would be cleared up quickly. Stay tuned for more details. And now...”

As the announcer began reading a commercial, Ben, a thin, slight young man wearing jeans and a denim jacket, put his fork down and rose.

Lounging behind the counter, the waitress gazed at him curiously and asked, “Anything wrong?”

“I just remembered,” Ben replied, walking as casually as he could toward the door, “I left a cigarette burning in my room. I’d better make sure it’s out, or that old hotel will go up in smoke.”

Outside, he took a few steps toward his hotel, veered into an alley and broke into a trot. It was nearly dark, a good break, probably the last he could count on. If he could reach the outskirts of this resort city and get into the pine forest that fanned for miles in all directions, he might evade capture for a day or so at least.

He needed help first. At the next street he stepped into a phone booth. Fighting a growing feeling of panic, he spread his pocket change on the shelf. Did he have enough for a call to Milwaukee? Just barely.

He gave the number he remembered so well, dropped coins into the slot and the phone began ringing. Five, six, seven times. Hell, where was she?

A woman’s deep voice said: “Ex-Con Rehab Center. Ernestine Barr.”

“Miss Barr? It’s Ben Phelan.”

“Wonderful. We were just talking about—”

“Look, I can’t explain now, but I’m in big trouble. The police here think I did something, but I swear I didn’t. You’ve got to come up here. Without you, I’ll do anything to keep them from bringing me in. You understand?”

There was a pause. “I think so,” Ernestine said slowly.

“You’ll read about what happened here in the papers. How soon can you make it?”

“Not until tomorrow afternoon. It’s a long drive, and I have to rent a car and make office arrangements in the morning. But are you sure—”

“Yes,” he told her. “I need you. There’s a county park east of town. Drive past the entrance and turn left at the fire lane. I’ll be in there someplace.”

Ben hung up, slipped out of the booth and began hiking toward the forest.

In Milwaukee, Ernestine Barr gazed angrily at the dead phone. An immense woman, she was over six feet tall and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, with rotund, fiftyish features that told a story of hard work and hard times.

What, she wondered, was she getting into now? Why should she care what happened to Ben Phelan? Hadn’t she done enough, helping him get his parole and then finding him a succession of jobs, culminating with the landscaping company in that north woods resort city?

Something about Ben had touched her, all right. An orphan reared in a succession of foster homes, he’d become an accomplished burglar by the time he was sent to prison at 20. She’d first seen him there, where she’d gone to visit another convict. Seen him, and been impressed by his apparent desire to go straight and earn an honest living so he could teach himself to be a writer.

Of course, she had to admit that what got to her most was his remarkable resemblance to her only child, the boy killed in a faraway war...

She slammed the phone down, then said aloud, “The little rat’s probably lying. But I’ve got to do it.”

Ben watched from behind a tree as a late-model sedan bounded down a wooded lane and coughed to a stop. It was nearly four in the afternoon of the following day.

Cautiously, he stepped out into the open. Ernestine was waiting for him, her great bulk hunched behind the wheel and her eyes appraising him with strict distrust.

“I brought food,” she said, nodding to the back seat. “You’d better eat before we start talking business.”

Eagerly, he wolfed a sandwich and drank a can of beer. When he was through, she studied him intently and asked: “All right, why’d you kill that woman?”

“I told you, it wasn’t me.”

“Then what were you doing there?”

He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets and began pacing. “Giving her background for a prison novel.”

Someone, he went on, had told her about him. She’d come to the landscaping firm one day and offered to criticize his stories if he’d tell her about life in prison. It had seemed like a big break, having a famous writer criticize his work, but after a while it dawned on him that she was just using him. She spent hardly any time reading his stories, but most of her time getting him to describe what it was like being a convict.

“But she was attractive, wasn’t she?”

“I suppose so. What are you getting at?”

“The state’s case may be built on the theory that you made advances, and she resisted.”

The notion shocked Ben. “A woman that age? But I wouldn’t—”

“Nobody knows,” Ernestine said coldly, “what you would or wouldn’t. Tell me what happened when you saw her yesterday morning.”

“Well, as usual, she started asking questions, but she had something else on her mind. She didn’t even hear my answers. Finally she told me to leave.”

“Any boats or swimmers nearby?”

“No. A storm was coming. It’s why I got the day off.”

“Could anyone have been hiding inside the house while you were there? Someone who came out later and killed her?”

“In that little place? I don’t see how, not without her knowing. And if she was hiding someone, why’d she let me hang around so long? She could have told me to go right off.”

“A good point,” Ernestine replied, “and all the more reason you should have turned yourself in as soon as you heard about the murder. The longer you stay in hiding, the worse it looks for you.”

“I know,” Ben admitted. “And I promise, I’ll let you turn me in. But not now and not here. I’ve heard stories about what goes on in this jail. The mayor and the police chief are real rough on anyone they think gives the town a bad name. If it comes to that, I’ll surrender someplace else and be brought here under guard, with you and the newspaper guys watching everything that happens.”

“What do you mean, If it comes to that’?” she demanded.

“I think I know who killed her.”

Ernestine’s brows arched in surprise.

“Well, not his name or what he looks like,” Ben went on hastily, “but she was seeing a man on a regular basis. He left signs. For instance, he smoked a pipe. Sometimes I’d smell stale smoke or see ashes. If she had a lover it was none of my business, so I didn’t say anything. And once I saw a man’s black raincoat, with a red-plaid lining, hanging in a closet. It had rained the day before, and I guess he forgot the coat.”

Ben searched his memory further.

“And there was something else. When I was walking to see her one day, a guy in a little purple sports car barreled out of her driveway in a big hurry, like he was real sore. That day, she didn’t even talk to me. They must have just had a big argument. So this guy smokes a pipe, has a raincoat with a red lining and drives—”

“What guy?” Angrily, Ernestine pounded a fist on the dashboard. “Ben, so far you haven’t shown me how there could be any other guy. For your information, Dr. Von Wythe, one of the state’s most highly regarded pathologists, said Maxine Treadway died between nine-thirty and eleven. A road crew was in front of her place all that time. Except for you, nobody could have gotten on or off the property.”

“I don’t care what anyone says,” Ben responded stubbornly. “Somehow, the guy did get into the cottage without being seen. I don’t know how he managed it, but if we knew who he was, maybe we could figure it out.” He paused. “Anyhow, before I give up, I want to try to learn his name, so the police will have something to work on.”

“How’ll you do that?”

“By reading Maxine’s journals. She told me she’d kept journals of all the important things that ever happened to her — names, dates, places, everything, even the personal stuff. She said she didn’t have time to make entries every day, but she brought them up to date every month or so. One day, she planned to edit them down into an autobiography.”

“Where are these journals?”

“In her studio at State College, where she was writer-in-residence. I was there once. It’s on a quiet side street and I think I could break in easily.”

“You,” Ernestine wondered incredulously, “are now asking me to help you commit a burglary?”

“Oh, no, no,” he assured her, “I’ll do that alone. I’ve already made you take too many chances, and you’d be in an awful jam if we were picked up together. We’ll wait here until dark. Then I’ll take you to town, let you off and drive to the campus. It’s only about sixty miles. I should be there in an hour. If the police pick you up, just say you tried to talk me into surrendering and I stole your car. If they catch me, that’s what I’ll say too.”

“Uh-huh. But why not just tell the police about the journals and let them learn the man’s name?”

“They might not believe me. Even if they did, by the time they got around to looking, someone else might have them. Her ex-husband, maybe. There must be a lot about him in those journals he wouldn’t want anyone to know. Or maybe even the guy who really killed her.”

“It’s true,” Ernestine mused, “that Mayfield is here. According to the last newscast, he and his party arrived on a chartered jet and went to some fancy motel, the Ajax. But suppose you don’t find her journals? Or this man’s name isn’t in them?”

“No matter what I find, at ten o’clock I’ll phone the all-night drugstore, say its an emergency and ask the clerk to page ‘Mrs. Robinson.’ That’ll be you. We’ll arrange for me to pick you up and then work out the details of the surrender. If I don’t call, it means the police got me.”

Ernestine thought it over. Then she shook her head. “No,” she announced emphatically. “I won’t have anything to do with it. There are absolutely, positively, no conceivable circumstances under which you could talk me into going along with such a crazy scheme...” but several hours later, she stood moodily alongside a road at the resort town’s outskirts and watched the taillights of her rented car receding into the dusk.

Wearily, she began hiking toward town until, a mile or so to her right, she observed a giant electric sign jutting into the sky: AJAX MOTOR INN.

That’s where Warren Mayfield was staying. If anyone could shed some insight into Maxine Treadway’s character, either confirming or denying the possibility of Ben’s story being true, it would be Maxine’s ex-husband...

Warily, Ben circled the house. It seemed unoccupied and unguarded, so he decided to risk everything with a direct approach. He darted up the back steps, picked the lock to the back door and slipped inside.

No alarms sounded. Fine, his gambit had worked. Swinging the flashlight beam around, he moved from the kitchen to the dining room and then to a study. If the journals were still here, that’s where they’d probably be.

They were, piled in cardboard cartons — stacks of loose-leaf notebooks with double-spaced, rough-typed pages.

Squinting under the light of his torch, Ben flipped through the books. These were highly personal reminiscences all right, but they were old incidents, lurid recollections of past years.

Finding the current book took time, but ultimately he unearthed it and began to read.

Behind him, a floorboard creaked. Before he could turn around, something heavy came down on his skull with blinding force.

He came to in the trunk of a moving car, gagged and bound tightly. His head throbbed. How long he’d been unconscious, he didn’t know. He tried to roll over, but couldn’t. This was a small car; probably a purple sports car.

It was all too unreal. The knot of fear in his stomach got bigger and bigger. What the hell was going on?

The car slowed, turned, proceeded at modest speed, turned again and stopped. Then it moved a few more yards. There was a clank as an automatic garage door fell back into place. The driver cut the engine. Footsteps echoed on concrete, and the trunk’s door swung open.

Peering down at Ben was a trim, mid-thirtyish man in a modish business suit. His eyes were shielded by tinted glasses and his hair had been coiffured by a professional. Ben had never seen the man even once before in his life.

“Nice of you,” the man said, “to break into Maxine’s studio for me. I’d been hanging around since dark, trying to figure how to do it. And nice of you to find her latest journal, the one where she had so many things to say about me.”

He hauled Ben from the trunk and dropped him to the floor. Apparently, the garage adjoined a house.

“Maxine told me about you,” the man went on. “Understand, I don’t want to kill you, but I have no choice. Fortunes of war, plus the question of which of us can contribute the most in our life spans — and I’m afraid you’re already a loser.”

Pensively, he folded his arms.

“I’ll admit,” he continued, “from your point of view this isn’t fair. It’s never the right time to die, is it? But it isn’t easy for me, either. I didn’t have to make a conscious decision about Maxine, I just killed her in a rage. Picked up the figurine and bashed her head in. I’d told her I’d found a woman nearer my own age, with the right kind of family, someone who’d help my career. But Maxine wouldn’t let me go through with it. She said she’d wreck the marriage before it could begin, and I couldn’t allow that.”

His eyes strayed to the car.

“Of course. I’ll just put you to sleep. Carbon monoxide. You won’t feel any pain and I’ll dispose of your body at leisure. There’s a deep lake not far from here. Wrapped in a weighted canvas bag, your body will never be found.”

Quickly and silently, he tied Ben into a heavy chair, positioned him near the car’s exhaust and kicked the engine into life. Before stepping into the house and closing the door, he said: “Too bad, kid. I wish it could be some other way, but it can’t.”

The engine kept running. Ben began to cough and found himself getting sleepier and sleepier. This was it, then? He’d die without even knowing who killed him, or what this was all about...

“Ben? Are you all right, Ben?”

He opened his eyes. He was outside, lying on his back. Looming over him was Ernestine Barr, and behind her were half a dozen other faces, most of them under policemen’s caps.

“He’s confessed,” she continued, lifting Ben to a sitting position and loosening his bonds. “After we found you in his garage, he had to.”

“But how—”

“Deduction. Once I decided you really were innocent, all came clear. Improbable as it seemed, there was only one solution. So I kept screaming it to the police, and when they finally checked and found that our man really did smoke a pipe, own a red-lined raincoat and drive a purple sports car, we came straight here.”

“But I still don’t understand. Who is the man? And how did he get into Maxine’s cottage without being seen?”

“He wasn’t seen,” Ernestine said, “because there was nobody to see him. The road crew had already gone home. And much later that day, he deliberately misstated the time of death by several hours to give himself an alibi. Maxine’s secret lover, whose office at the state medical school is a block from her studio, was Dr. Jurgen Von Wythe, the man who performed the autopsy.”