Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 2, February 1964

The Bent Frame by Duane Yarnell

We continue to be amused by the plight of the fellow “so unlucky that he runs into accidents which started out to happen to somebody else”. Unfortunately, most accidents, unlike miracles, are not deemed propitious.

The sergeant from the traffic squad was a dour and brooding man named Farha. He took Joe Kerrigan upstairs and told him to wait in the little room outside the chief’s office.

“When do I see my wife?” Joe asked worriedly.

“You’ll have to wait,” Farha said.

A uniformed officer came out of the chief’s office, and left the door ajar. Joe caught a brief glimpse of Toni sitting nervously on the edge of a wooden chair beyond the chief’s, desk. Toni looked small and scared, and her dark eyes held terror as she recognized Joe.

“I didn’t do it, Joe!” Toni’s strained voice was a stricken cry.

Farha swore softly, slammed the door.

Joe Kerrigan was a tall, bronzed young man of twenty-three, and while nobody could accuse him of being a mouse, he was, like many law-abiding men, slightly in awe of the police. But the memory of Toni’s frightened face brought on a sudden outburst.

“What’re you trying to pull, Farha?” Joe shouted. “You walk in on me when I’m working late at the office. You tell me my wife’s in a little trouble. You act like it’s no worse than a traffic ticket — then I see her face—”

“Okay,” Farha conceded. “So I held out on you. The kind of news I had for you is the kind no cop likes to break.” Farha studied Joe from behind bristly brows, and after a moment he added, “You were listening to a newscast when I walked in on you tonight.”

Joe remembered. He always listened to the ten o’clock news, even when his boss, Sam Gruber, kept him working late.

Tonight, at twenty after eight, a six-year-old boy had been struck by a car. A witness had failed to get the license number, but had described the hit-and-run car as a light colored Jetflite Eight. Joe remembered that detail because he and Toni owned a brand new Jetflite Eight.

“A sliver of glass from one of the headlights punctured the boy’s throat,” Farha said grimly. “The boy just died.”

Joe Kerrigan began to tremble. He sensed what Farha was trying to tell him, yet his brain refused to accept it.

“Your wife’s a knockout,” Farha mused. “She could put arsenic in your soup and a jury might free her. But no jury will free a dame who leaves a kid dying on the street.”

Joe felt numb. Toni might accidentally hit a child, but she’d never flee the accident scene. Joe stared uneasily at Farha’s uncompromising face.

“Sergeant, you guys have made an awful mistake.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Farha said wearily.

They went downstairs to the big vault of a room that was the police garage. Two young technicians were working near the front of Joe’s pale blue Jetflite Eight. Their undershirts clung to them in the lingering, late-summer heat.

The twin headlights on the right front side were held in place by a chrome frame. The frame was. slightly bent and the outer lens was broken. Most of the glass had fallen out, although part of the lens had remained in the frame.

One of the technicians nodded at Farha. “We’ve checked it out, Sergeant. This is the car.”

“Can you prove it in court?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Farha took a thin, knife-shaped sliver of glass from a towel-draped tray and, as he held it up, Joe Kerrigan felt a deepening sickness. The lethal looking sliver was tinged with a dark stain.

“The surgeons took this, from the dead boy’s throat,” Farha said. There was more anger than triumph in his voice. “Watch closely, Kerrigan.”

Farha eased the bloodstained sliver into the chrome frame where it fitted perfectly against the piece of lens that had remained in place.

There was, a great roaring in Joe Kerrigan’s ears, a deep and frightening emptiness in his chest? “It was my car that hit the boy,” he finally admitted. “But that doesn’t mean that Toni was driving.”

Farha shook his head pityingly. “Let’s go back upstairs,” he said.

They returned in silence to the little room outside the chief’s office. Farha made Joe wait while he went inside. The walls were soundproof, but now and then Joe heard the muted rumble of voices raised in anger. Now and then he heard the ragged edge of a frightened sob.

As Joe Kerrigan waited, his fear grew. The heat wilted his, sports shirt until it hung like a limp rag across his lank shoulders. Fear and worry congealed the bronzed planes of his young face until he could have passed for a man of fifty.

It was twenty after eleven when the door opened again. The chief stalked out first, then two uniformed cops, then Farha. The sergeant stared hard at Joe.

“See if you can talk some sense into her,” he said bitterly. “She’s got nothing to gain by holding out.”

Joe went into the office, closed the door.

Toni was a small, slender girl and as she stared at him her great smoky eyes held an expression of raw terror. He pulled her gently to him, but she shivered in his arms and her body was cold and without response.

“It’s going to be all right, baby,” he said.

“Oh, Joe, Joe,” she sobbed. “I didn’t do it.” She lifted a frightened face and he watched tears gather heavily at the tips of long curved lashes, then spill down washed-out cheeks.

“Tell me about it, baby,” he said.

She said brokenly, “I didn’t hit that little boy!”

“I know you didn’t, Toni. But someone did. Someone who was driving our car at exactly twenty past eight tonight.”

She said, a little wildly, “But I was driving, Joe. I left the house at eight tonight and I was parking beside that little store where I buy magazines when I heard sirens over on Elm Street.”

Joe groaned. Toni admitted being behind the wheel at the time of the accident. She admitted being at a little store which was less than a mile from the accident scene. He hated himself for thinking it, but when Toni wanted a magazine, she always used the Elm Street shortcut. If she’d hit that little boy tonight, she’d have had just enough time to reach the store by the time the police cars converged on the accident scene.

“Toni,” he said tautly, “did you drive up Elm tonight?”

Her eyes turned dull. “The police claim I did. But tonight I drove to the little store by way of Ryan Boulevard.”

“But you’ve never gone that way before—” his voice broke. He couldn’t go on, not with Toni staring at him that way, her eyes wounded and hurt.

“You don’t believe me, either.”

“But our car did it, Toni. Look, maybe you didn’t feel the bump—”

“I don’t care what anyone says,” she cried. “I was driving our car at eight-twenty tonight and I wasn’t near Elm Street.” Her young mouth began to tremble, and the rest came in a broken sob. “I’d bought my magazine and I was on my way home when the police stopped me at a roadblock. They were looking for a new Jetflite Eight with a broken headlight. I don’t know how our headlight got broken.”

He stared at this lovely girl who was his wife and he found himself remembering something she’d once told him...

He’d met Toni on a blind date shortly after he’d gone to work for Sam Gruber’s firm of consulting engineers. For both of them, love had come quickly. Yet, happy as he was those days, something about Toni puzzled him. Whenever he’d mention her past, she’d turn the question aside. Finally, convinced that she must be hiding something, he’d demanded an explanation.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears and her slim shoulders sagged. “I thought I could lie my way to the kind of life I’ve always wanted, Joe. But I’m getting too tired to go on lying.”

The story she’d told of her past was far from pretty. She’d been born in the slums and she’d lived in a thrice-broken home. An older brother had been killed in the wreckage of a stolen car, A half-sister had married a hoodlum. Finally, at sixteen, she’d dropped out of school, no longer able to face her schoolmates. She’d lied about her age to enter a beauty contest, and with the prizes, which she’d pawned, she’d gained enough to take the business course that had qualified her for a secretarial job. Because of her past, she’d lied whenever it had seemed prudent.

When he’d heard her story through, he looked deeply into her eyes and he told himself that he’d trust this girl with his life. A week later, they were married. And until this night, the marriage had seemed the kind that could happen to a man maybe once in a thousand years.

Now, though, as he stared woodenly at Toni, he found himself remembering that she’d once been willing to lie about anything if it meant getting away from something disagreeable. And he wondered if it could be happening again.

“You still don’t believe me,” she said in a dead voice.

He was trying to frame an answer when Sam Gruber rushed into the office. Gruber was a big, ruddy man who’d started as, a cat-skinner thirty years ago. Gruber had parlayed an intuitive understanding of engineering and considerable brashness into a firm of consulting engineers second to none in the entire state.

One look at Gruber’s pale, brooding eyes and Joe knew that his boss had already heard all there was to hear. Sam Gruber was a wheel in this town and he had a grapevine all his own.

“I came as soon as I could, Joe,” Gruber said.

“Thanks, Sam.”

“I’ve already talked to Franklin Allis.”

Joe nodded. Franklin Allis headed the law firm that handled Sam Gruber’s myriad affairs. In the legal profession, Allis had a reputation for never being wrong about anything.

“Allis is worried,” Gruber fumed. “This can get pretty messy. You see the angle, Joe?”

Again, Joe Kerrigan nodded.

Gruber’s firm of consulting engineers was intricately involved with the city administration. The opposition party, hoping to get back into office, would grasp at any kind of scandal, no matter how indirect in an effort to embarrass the administration.

“If I didn’t need you to see that pipeline project through,” Gruber muttered, “I’d fire you and the devil with it—” He paused, then turned to Toni, his expression still grim. “Look, doll, you want to save Joe’s job, don’t you?”

Toni said, “Y-yes. Of course.”

“Then we’ll have to play it cute. I know a doctor who’s in a crack and he needs a favor. I’ll get him to say he’s been treating you for blackouts. Now get this, doll. Tonight, you visited him and he gave you a pill or something — we’ll work out the details after I’ve bailed you out and we’ve talked to Allis. You could have killed this kid, but you don’t remember it, see? You were having a blackout at the time.”

Joe felt revulsion as he weighed the plan. He waited bleakly for Toni to agree. A story of this kind, skillfully told, might make a jury forget she’d left a small boy dying on a dark street.

He sensed, somehow, that she’d take this way out. She’d done it before, hadn’t she? When she’d found it prudent, she’d often lied rather than face the bitterness of truth.

But when he glanced at Toni, she was shrinking away from Sam Gruber and her eyes were dark, vacant discs. She bit her lip, buried her face in trembling hands.

“I... I can’t do it,” she whispered. “Not even for Joe.”

Something began to swell inside Joe Kerrigan’s chest. He forgot the offer Sam Gruber had made, forgot everything but this young wife of his who’d refused to voice the one lie that might save her skin. Gently, tenderly, he touched Toni’s cheek.

“Baby,” he said in a voice filled with wonder, “I almost blew it back there.”

Toni watched him uncertainly. “You... you mean you believe me, Joe?”

He nodded, a lump in his throat. Everything was against his believing her. Toni’s past, her improbable story about her movements tonight, the sliver of glass Farha had shown him. Yet in one shining moment, Toni had washed away the last of his lingering doubts. He didn’t know how the little boy had died, but one thing was certain; Toni hadn’t killed him.

He turned to Sam Gruber. A young engineer could use a man like Gruber in his corner. A job with Gruber meant prestige, and with it, a split-level home, a Jetflite Eight, and many other things. But as he glimpsed the glow in Toni’s eyes, he knew there were finer rewards than the things Gruber could give him.

Joe said, “We’ll play it her way, Sam.”

The big man’s pale eyes narrowed, then his anger gave way to pity. Sam Gruber shook his head, sighed, then turned away. His mouth was working silently, as if he were already planning the speech he’d make to the press about how he’d had to fire this man whose wife had brought such discredit to his firm’s proud name. Gruber had a gambler’s instinct for turning a liability into an asset.

When they were alone again, Joe held Toni close in his arms. After a moment, he said, “Let’s go over it, Toni. Somewhere along the line, the cops have overlooked something important.”

Her red mouth softened in gratitude. “I left the house at eight, Joe. I remember because I’d just watched a quiz show.”

He tried to hide his disappointment. “You must be wrong about the time, baby. I think someone must have stolen the car, hit that boy, panicked, then returned it without you knowing...”

“No, Joe,” she broke in. “I’m certain of the time. You weren’t coming home until late and I was restless. I left the house at eight, drove along Ryan Boulevard for awhile, then decided to buy a magazine to have something to read.”

“And as you parked beside the little store, you heard the sirens over on Elm Street? Maybe there were two accidents over there. That could explain how you were wrong about the time.”

Toni shook her head. “No, Joe. The police say not. And they’ve checked with the owner of the store. He heard the sirens, too. They’ve pretty well pinpointed the time. They say I had just enough time to... to kill the little boy, then stop at the store.”

Again Joe Kerrigan tried to hide his disappointment. “Then what, baby?”

She said, “I was the last customer in the store. Mr. Kettrick was getting ready to close up. We talked for about five minutes, then I left. As I came outside, I met a woman who was looking for a lost kitten. She was a redhead, around twenty-five, and from the white evening dress she wore, I suppose she was getting ready for a dance. She asked me if I’d seen her missing kitten. I hadn’t, but she described it to me anyway, and then she practically broke down in tears as she told me how her daughter was going to miss it. We must have talked for five or six minutes, then I went around to the side of the store and got into the car. A few minutes later, the police stopped me and brought me in with them.”

Joe was baffled, but he couldn’t let Toni know it. He was trying to think of something reassuring to say when Sergeant Farha came in, sparing him the effort.

“She ready to talk, Kerrigan?”

“She’s already told you the truth,” Joe said.

Farha said, coldly, “We’ve got her six ways from Sunday, and we’ve done some fast checking. She’s got a sister married to Georgie Andrews, a two-bit punk with a record as long as your arm. We can probably dig up more. Put her on the stand and the D.A. will rip her to shreds. A confession and a guilty plea could stop all that.”

Joe watched horror come into Toni’s dusky eyes, and for a moment he misread it. Then she said in a voice heavy with anguish, “Joe, it doesn’t matter what they do to me. You’re the one who’ll have to suffer. Why don’t you leave me, Joe?”

“Then what?” he asked raggedly.

“Then I’ll fight this thing alone,” she said. “But you won’t have to get hurt.”

He felt suddenly warm again. He squeezed Toni’s waist, then turned to Farha. “I’m ready to put up bond,” he began. “I...”

“Bond?” Farha shouted. “Listen, in this state, we can hold a suspect for twenty hours before we file. In this case, it’ll be a pleasure. Don’t even mention bond to me for another seventeen hours.”

Joe looked down at Toni. Another seventeen hours of merciless hammering and she might be shoved beyond the breaking point. His only chance was to clear her, to get her out of here. Somehow, he made himself smile.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he said. “I’ll have you out of here in no time.” Fleetingly, he watched hope flare in her eyes, and he turned quickly away, sorry that he’d aroused a hope he might be unable to deliver.

Farha followed Joe outside, and when Joe asked for the release of his car, Farha shook his head.

Joe shrugged, “I can always rent a car.”

Farha watched him closely. “A word of warning. If you want to believe your wife, it’s none of my business. But don’t start acting like a cop—”

“It’s about time someone around here started acting like one,” Joe growled.

When he saw Farha’s angering face, he knew he’d made no friends tonight. But something had happened to Joe Kerrigan in the brief hours since Farha had first brought him here. Joe’s respect for the law was still undiminished, but he’d definitely lost his awe of cops.

He walked two blocks, rented a late-model car. It was midnight as he drove away, and it was ten past midnight when he parked in front of the little store where Toni bought her magazines.

The store was dark and the street, filled with second-rate rooming houses, was silent and empty. Joe stood for a moment before the store. The single front window was so clogged with crepe paper displays that it was impossible to see inside. As he stood there, he decided that Toni must have stood in almost that same spot while she listened to the redhead discuss her lost kitten.

Then he walked around the building to the narrow side street where Toni had parked the car. He struck a match and moved along the gutter until something glittered under the glare. He bent and picked up a small piece of glass arid he knew, with a kind of sickness in him, that it was a part of the broken lens that had fallen from the bent frame when Toni had parked there earlier tonight.

For a fleeting moment, his faith in Toni wavered, then he felt ashamed for having doubted. A man had to believe in something, and if not in his wife, then what was left?

As he returned to the store, he realized that something was bothering him. At the time Toni had told him about the redhead who’d lost a kitten, the story had sounded logical. But was it- sensible for a woman to spend five or six minutes discussing a lost kitten with a stranger who had already said she hadn’t seen it? Would a woman waste time that might better be spent searching?

He walked two blocks in each direction from the store. Wherever he saw a light burning, he stopped to ask two questions: First, had anyone heard a woman calling a kitten? Second, did anyone know an attractive redhead who lived in this neighborhood? The answer to both questions was always negative.

Returning to his rented car, he sat behind the wheel and stared broodingly into the darkness. The redhead had lied to Toni tonight. But why? People didn’t go out of their way to lie unless there was a good reason. Joe Kerrigan tried to find meaning in the redhead’s lie, but if meaning was there, it escaped him.

An attractive redhead, Toni had said, dressed for a dance.

Joe Kerrigan drove the rented car over to Ryan Boulevard, two blocks distant. That section of the city was dotted with night clubs, the most obvious place for Joe to begin his search.

He talked to scores of bartenders and waiters, to doormen and parking attendants. But the answers they gave him were always the same. None had seen the woman Joe described.

By a quarter to two, he knew the clubs would soon be closing. There were still half a dozen or so to be visited, and he’d never make them all. It was with a feeling of futility that he parked beside the next club, a small, neon-lighted place called The Boulevard Grotto.

He nodded at the doorman, stepped wearily inside.

A woman in a white evening dress sat at a rear table. She was young, somewhere in her mid-twenties, and she wore her coppery hair in closely cropped ringlets. She had a dazzling figure and while she could have been the one Toni had described, he realized there might be a dozen white-gowned redheads doing the town tonight.

Her escort was a man in his thirties, a tall, swarthy man impeccably dressed, and, somehow, vaguely familiar. Joe hesitated, then quickly crossed the room.

Both of them looked up curiously as he pulled out a chair and sat down. Joe ignored the man, turned to the redhead.

“Did you find your kitten?” he asked softly.

Her lovely forehead showed a slight frown, and there was bewilderment in the shape of her lush red mouth. Yet, fleetingly, he was certain that he saw a hint of uneasiness in her wide green eyes before she hid it behind throaty laughter.

“You’ve got the wrong person,” she said.

The swarthy man, too, looked faintly amused, although there was a wariness about him that Joe found hard to explain.

“I’m talking about the kitten you lost outside the store off Ryan Boulevard. You told my wife about it tonight.”

The redhead started to answer, but the man stopped her.

“I’ll handle this, Frieda,” he said. He leaned across the table. Joe felt a little shiver as he realized where he’d seen this man’s face before. He’d seen these same cold eyes staring from a newspaper photo less than two weeks ago. The man was Marty Duncan, an underworld character often arrested but never convicted. A few days back, police had reluctantly released him after two witnesses had mysteriously disappeared.

Joe Kerrigan gazed into this man’s cold eyes and he felt a little flicker of fear. Then he thought of Toni and of a promise he’d made that had to be kept.

“Blow, friend,” Marty Duncan said with his deceptive softness.

“Not until I know why the redhead lied to my wife.”

Joe’s voice had risen and people were beginning to stare. A big man in a dress, suit came silently across the room and he frowned down at Joe from an imposing height.

“This guy, bothering you, Marty?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

A hand dug into Joe’s shoulder. He tried to slap it away, but his wrist was suddenly locked painfully behind him and he was being propelled toward the back door.

Joe Kerrigan landed on hands and knees in the crushed shell parking lot behind the building. He picked himself up slowly, angrily. He dusted himself off, started back inside, then prudently changed his mind. He’d see Marty Duncan again, but next time there’d be no bouncer around.

He walked along the line of cars, wondering which belonged to Marty Duncan. He passed a pale green Jetflite Eight, then stopped dead still, breath rattling in his throat.

The right front headlight was in place, but just below it, the chrome grille was slightly dented from some kind of hard blow. Something flicked through Joe’s mind. He moved excitedly around the car, opened the front door. His fingers shook a little as he searched the unlocked glove compartment. He found a pair of pliers, a screwdriver kit, a packet of matches and a pair of sun glasses. Then he looked up and Marty Duncan was sliding into the seat beside him, bumping him with his hip, threatening him with a small and deadly palm-sized gun.

“So you finally got it,” Marty Duncan said.

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I finally did.”

And it was suddenly all too clear.

Tonight, this thug and his redheaded girl friend had been speeding up Elm Street when their car had struck a little boy. Marty Duncan had stopped long enough to see that his headlight lens had been broken and he’d known the cops would soon be looking for such a car.

But Marty Duncan had seen a way out. If only he could locate another Jetflite Eight, he could switch his damaged lens and chrome frame for an undamaged set. The switch required the removal of only four small screws and would take but a few minutes.

Near Ryan Boulevard, he’d spotted Toni’s car parked beside the small store. And while Marty Duncan had made the quick exchange on the dark side street, the redhead had delayed Toni by telling a story about a supposedly lost kitten. The misdirection had been perfect.

Now, the redhead, Frieda, slid in under the wheel from the other side. Joe Kerrigan, caught between them, covered by the gun held in Marty Duncan’s lap, felt sickness rise up inside him.

Frieda drove slowly along the side of the night club. A taxi had parked under the canvas entryway and the driver leaned against a supporting post as he waited for his fare to come out.

The cab was just to the left of the Jetflite Eight. Joe Kerrigan knew in his soul that once they reached Ryan Boulevard, he’d be on his way to oblivion. He took a quick, shaky breath, then suddenly reached across the wheel and jerked it hard left.

The Jetflite Eight smashed into the cab. Metal crunched as the left fender came hard against the tire. The Jetflite ground to an abrupt halt. Frieda screamed and Marty Duncan swore.

Joe turned swiftly, chopped a hard left hand into Marty Duncan’s face. The gun fell to the floor. Joe put a quick headlock around Marty Duncan. An angry cab driver jerked open the right hand door and Joe and Marty fell out, the headlock still unbroken.

“You’ve got a radio in the cab,” Joe panted. “Get the cops quick. I’ve got a guy they want...”

Joe Kerrigan still held the head-lock when the cops drove up, moments later.

At the station, the technicians from the traffic squad lab found Marty Duncan’s fingerprints inside the bent chrome headlight frame on Joe’s new Jetflite Eight. Then Frieda talked and it was all but over. Marty Duncan was jailed and a happy Toni was released.

Sergeant Farha drove them home and, as he pulled into the drive, he said sheepishly, “I really blew this one, kids. Sorry if I gave you a hard time.”

“Forget it,” Joe said. It surprised him that he really meant it.

“I’ll have the headlights switched again,” Farha said. “You’ll have your car in the morning.”

They waved goodbye to Farha, then walked up the drive, pale moonlight spreading a soft quicksilver halo around them.