Blow Hot, Blow Cold

15

Masters was not happy. He had slept poorly for three nights; his temper was short, his tolerance level low. He was even, in a rational sort of way, hearing voices when he was alone, or rather, a voice. He heard it over and over, the voice of Jack Richmond. He was hearing it now, as he sat brooding at his desk.

“I was in that private room napping every second of the unaccounted-for time,” the voice of Jack Richmond said, “and I challenge you to prove otherwise.”

Each time he heard the unvoiced words, they sounded more like the bluster of a guilty man. They did not sound at all, in Masters’s judgment, like the despair of innocence. They seemed the vain utterance of a man who was getting away with something. Masters did indeed feel challenged.

The hell of it was — the blazing, frustrating hell of it was — that the doctor was perfectly right in one respect. He had gone into an empty hospital room before Larry Connor’s murder, and he had been found there over an hour later, and there was no way of proving that he had not remained there the whole time. For three days Masters had tried in vain to dig up a witness who had seen Dr. Richmond during the crucial period. He had apparently not been seen approaching the Connor office, or leaving it, or returning and leaving Sunday morning for the legerdemain with the air-conditioner. It was bad luck. The streets of the town early on a Sunday morning would have been virtually deserted. As, apparently, they had been.

Masters was still at his desk, brooding, when his chief dropped in and claimed a chair.

“How’s it going, Gus?”

“It’s not,” Masters said. “It’s gone. Gone, I mean, as far as it’s going.”

“You decided to drop it? You think, after all, it was murder and suicide by Connor?”

The chief’s voice betrayed the wish behind the thought, and Masters’s recognition of it increased his irritation.

“Hell, no. It wasn’t murder and suicide by Connor, and I haven’t decided to drop it. Damn it all, you can’t just drop a murder case.”

“Don’t get upset, Gus,” said the chief, with the sympathy of a man who has slid home safely and can afford to relax. “Any plans?”

“To slit my throat, maybe. I know what happened, and I know who’s guilty. And I can’t do a damn thing about it!”

“Who’s guilty?” repeated the chief, astounded. “Who, who?”

“Dr. Jack Richmond, that’s who. I’ll give odds on it.” Masters added, “Though there don’t seem to be any takers.”

“If you know he’s guilty—”

“There’s a big difference between knowing something and proving it. There’s no proof.”

“You’d better be sure,” said the chief excitedly. “We can’t afford a mistake that big.”

Masters grunted.

“I’ve got a suggestion, Gus. You listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Dump what you’ve got on the county attorney’s desk. Let him decide if it’s anything he wants to take into court.”

“The county attorney,” Masters said wearily, “is just a few years out of law school, and his trial experience doesn’t include first-degree murder. You expect that pup to take a chance on getting his brains knocked out? He wouldn’t even try.”

“Damn it, Gus, you fish or cut bait. You can’t spend the rest of your life on this thing!”

“Look, Chief, let me keep up the pressure on this guy. He may break or something. If I could only dream up a way to trick him into exposing himself!”

“On your head be it,” said the chief oracularly. He heaved himself to his feet, creaking in various places. “Because you can lose it, Masters, if you do anything foolish.”

He left; and Masters, abandoned in his own unpleasant company, reflected on the ominous change in his chief’s form of address from “Gus” to “Masters.” There was nothing very subtle about the warning that accompanied it. But then the chief had not retained his office for sixteen years by the exercise of subtlety. Wham! was his motto.

So now, the lieutenant thought, my job is on the line, too.

But Augustus Masters was a stubborn man. As he saw it, he had no choices. Back to the wars.

He decided to try to cleanse his mind of all bias and preconception and go over the case from as virgin a viewpoint as he could muster. Forget Dr. Jack Richmond and all the fancy deductions about the air-conditioning. Forget everything but the facts, and even reexamine those for hidden flaws or rivulets that trickled off in unguessed directions.

The logical place to start, he thought, was Larry Connor’s office. He had kept it locked; it was as the investigation had left it. Doggedly Masters reached for his hat and walked over to the business block and entered the alley running behind it.

He let himself in by way of the alley door and stood for a moment in the hot storeroom behind Connor’s office. The air was stale and stifling, and he automatically jerked his collar open and loosened his tie. The air-conditioner in the window beside him was silent, and he found himself listening in the silence. He was aware of a vague and irrational uneasiness. This was ridiculous, of course, and he started to laugh; but then he was listening hard, crouched a little. There was a sound, an odd sound scarcely more audible than heavy breathing; and after a moment he realized that someone, somewhere on the premises, was crying.

Masters moved his bulk with remarkable swiftness. He was across the storeroom and in the central office in a flash. But no one was there. The outer office, then... He had almost reached it when the muffled crying stopped, as if from sheer exhaustion. He yanked the door open; and there, in the drape-drawn, dusty anteroom, at her useless desk, sat Ruth Benton, arms on the desk and head on her arms. She raised her head on hearing him; her face was swollen and red and a muddle of ruined make-up. She seemed not in the least startled — as if, somehow, she had been expecting him. It was Masters who was startled; he had forgotten that she had a key to Connor’s office.

“Miss Benton,” he said softly. “What are you doing here?”

Larry Connor’s secretary either did not know or did not care what her face revealed. “I came to get some of my things,” she said in a dreary way. “I didn’t think I’d mind. But when I got here and saw the dust, the... decay, and realized...” Ruth Benton shrugged. “It got me. I broke down and cried like a baby. Just like a woman. Eh, Lieutenant?”

“Sometimes I wish I could break down and cry like a baby myself,” said Masters. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Oh, I’m over it now,” the girl said. “I suppose I’m trespassing. I’m sorry if I’ve broken a rule or something. I won’t come back again.”

“Just leave your key, Miss Benton.”

“I’ve already put it in the drawer here. Do you want to check what I’m taking? They’re all personal possessions.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Masters, nevertheless looking over the litter of compacts, hairpins, tissues, ball-point pens and such things that the girl had spread on the desk. She began putting them into her purse. “You must have thought a lot of Larry Connor.”

“More than he thought of me, I’m afraid,” she said.

“How do you figure that, Miss Benton?”

“He killed himself, didn’t he?”

“Do you have much trouble accepting the idea that he killed his wife?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Please,” said Masters, and she looked up at him, faintly frowning. “Suppose I told you that he didn’t?”

“Didn’t what?”

“Kill his wife.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders drooped again. “You mean because of the letter-opener? He could have taken it home the day before or something. I couldn’t swear that he didn’t.”

“How long had it been on his desk?”

“Years. It was here when I came to work for him.”

“And suddenly he took it home? Anyway, we have reason to believe someone was with him in this office the night Larry Connor died.”

“Why are you telling me this? Do you think it was me?”

“Was it?”

“No,” Ruth Benton said. “I wish it had been. He might still be alive.”

“Do you have any notion of who it was?”

“Not the slightest.”

Masters looked around. “Have you been in the inner office since you came?”

“No. I don’t believe I could bear going in there.”

Masters let her out and relocked the street door. He put out the anteroom light and went into Larry Connor’s office.

He looked for a moment at the sofa. Then he trudged into the lavatory, where he went through the medicine cabinet again. It yielded nothing; he returned to the office.

He sat down behind Larry Connor’s desk and dug in.

Nothing came to him, absolutely nothing. He thought and thought, and his thoughts ranged over territory that was merely familiar and barren. He began to curse the choking heat.

And suddenly he was aware that he had been staring at the telephone on Larry Connor’s desk. The telephone. The telephone!

He had completely ignored the telephone.

He began to think in terms of telephone. It led him back over a sinuous course. After he had thought the whole thing through, he put his thoughts together in orderly fashion.

Larry Connor had left home that night, after a quarrel with his wife, at midnight or a little after — Nancy Howell had not recalled the exact time. No matter; more important was the time Larry had arrived at his office.

If he had driven there directly from his home, not more than ten minutes or so should have elapsed. But suppose he had not come directly? A man with Connor’s troubles and in Connor’s frame of mind might well have made for a bar. Masters had dropped the stop-in-at-a-bar theory because no bartender in any of the fringe joints that violated the closing-hour ordinance had testified to having seen him. Understandable.

So understandable, in fact, that their testimony was worthless. Of course the barkeepers would have denied seeing the man who was now dead and the center of a small-town sensation! Why get involved and upset the fine balance by which such outside-the-law joints remained in business?

Assume, then, that Larry Connor had stopped in at some joint to get loaded. And some of them, particularly the ones in which the pimps and prostitutes hung out, were pretty low; a drunk could get himself into a peck of trouble. Knockout drops were far from unknown. A big bill could buy some — if not from the bar, then from some unsavory character sitting at it. If a man were desperate enough...

It led, astonishingly, back to the idea that maybe Larry Connor had committed suicide after all. (Forget the Lila kill, Masters told himself sternly; for now forget it. And the air-conditioning. Stick to Connor in that office.)

Say that Larry Connor decided to take his own life, and bought some chloral hydrate for that purpose, simply because he had reached the point where death was preferable to going on living. He had come back here to this hot room, clutching the chloral hydrate, and he had mixed his lethal Mickey Finn, and he had swallowed it and lain down on the sofa there to wait for unconsciousness and death.

Now: Larry versus Lila and the Lila kill. He had not killed her. That was certain, from the wrong-hand prints on the murder weapon. Somebody else had used that weapon, putting Larry’s prints on it... somebody who could not have done so unless Larry was already dead. That placed Lila’s killer in this office, with Larry dead or lapsing into death — someone who had come here after Larry voluntarily swallowed the overdose of chloral hydrate. The killer had to have been here in order to get possession of Connor’s letter-knife, in order to press Connor’s prints on it and tag him for a murder he never dreamed of committing.

Larry had been a dead patsy.

But if the murderer of Lila had not been responsible also for Larry’s death, at least in the sense of having planned it, how the devil had he known that Larry was dying, or dead, in the office? And with Larry dying or dead, how had the unknown gained entrance to the office? True, there was that key to the street door, not Larry Connor’s own... the key just deposited in the outer-office desk drawer by...

Ruth Benton.

Masters considered Ruth Benton.

Larry’s secretary had been in love with her boss. What would she have done if she had discovered his body in the office that night, obviously self-destroyed, driven to suicide by his vicious wife? Would Ruth, in grief and rage, have gone hunting for Lila Connor’s scalp? In her overwrought state, would she have been capable of the elaborate deceptions Lila’s killer engaged in? And aside from all that... a “chance” visit to the office after midnight Saturday night was uncomfortably coincidental, although coincidence could never be ruled out. Still, Masters recoiled from it. There was too much in this tricky case that showed design. No, he could not buy accidental discovery of the suicide. But suppose... suppose the visit had not been by accident. Suppose... suppose Larry Connor had called her.

The telephone.

The telephone might be the key to all the mysteries!

A man takes a drug that will kill him — takes it deliberately — and lies down to die. How many would-be suicides, sure that they want death, experience an abrupt change of heart at the approach of the grim reality? It was an everyday occurrence — police files and hospital records were full of such cases.

Suppose, after swallowing the drug and feeling its first effects, Larry Connor had become frantically certain that he did not want to die after all?

Suppose he had telephoned for help?

Masters sat hunched over Larry Connor’s desk, exulting. He had the feeling. It was like swimming after a long layoff, lungs heaving, arms like lead weights, and then, without warning... second wind, breaths easy, no weight, streaking for the nearing shore like a fish. He had the feeling.

The drug has been taken. Larry Connor lies on the sofa waiting to die. As he waits, death becomes dreadful. He begins to feel terror. In spite of everything, he wants to live. And to live he needs help, desperately, quickly, for the drug is already taking effect.

He is groggy now, his thoughts tumbling, his mind clogged. Here is the telephone at hand... can he make it? He struggles off the sofa, manages to get to the desk, unhook the phone. He will call... whom? Perhaps he knows; perhaps he tries. But he cannot remember the number, or he is not coordinating — his forefinger like a swollen thumb on the dial. What would he do?

Call Operator. Surely he could manage one swing of the dial.

Operator answers. He asks her to dial... whom? Ruth Benton? Dying, needing help, would he have summoned Ruth Benton?

No. A man dying of an overdose of a drug he has himself taken would grasp at only one savior.

A doctor.

His doctor?

Masters sat back. He did not have to answer the question. It could be answered by the operator at the telephone exchange. She would remember the call, to whom it had been placed.

She would. Masters was sure she would. He no more questioned his certainty than he questioned the whole train of thought that had led him to it.

This was right. This was it.