Blow Hot, Blow Cold

6

When the doors to the offices adjoining the central room of the police station were open, as they currently were in the heat, any sound in the central room was shared by all, even by those who might have preferred to mind their own business.

When the telephone rang and the day desk man answered, Lieutenant Augustus Masters, hung up in his personal glorified sweat-bath, found himself automatically cocking an ear. Long experience in evaluating the nuances of the desk man’s voice told the lieutenant that something of unusual gravity was being reported — a deduction immediately verified when the desk man buzzed the chief and asked him to take the call. Whereupon Masters also heard the chief’s voice from the chief’s office on the other side of the central room. At that distance eavesdropping called for concentration, and with a little extra effort Masters could have made sense of it; but he did not bother.

He did not bother because he knew that if the matter was of any importance at all he would hear about it from the chief practically at once. The chief of police, being full of years and approaching honorable senility, was a cripple in any police matter requiring mental competence, and Masters was his favorite crutch.

Now and then Lieutenant Masters thought with wistfulness of succeeding to the office of chief himself. But it looked as if the old man, unrestricted by a compulsory retirement law, would live forever. Anyhow, Masters admitted to himself, he couldn’t possibly get the appointment. He had an unfortunate handicap — he looked like a clown. People always reacted to him as if he were about to take a pratfall or run face on into a custard pie.

Aware that the chief had stopped talking, Masters began to count to himself, spacing the numbers at one-second intervals. It used to take nine seconds, but the chief was slowing down with great rapidity; it took about fourteen these days. He had reached the count of twelve when the chief came in and sank into the other chair. Masters almost whistled. This must be a blockbuster.

One look at that seamed and lobster-colored face and Masters knew that the phone call had involved something not merely significant but catastrophic. The chief was plainly in a panic. It was a crying shame, Masters thought, that the local miscreants did not declare a moratorium on crime and leave the old man in peace until the morticians could decently get their hands on him.

“What is it,” said Lieutenant Masters, “a murder?”

The old man’s brow, which was as cracked as the sunbaked bed of a long-dry arroyo, suddenly became as blank as the top of his head.

“How did you know?” he exclaimed.

“I’m psychic,” Masters sighed. “Who is it?”

The chief swabbed his face with an old-fashioned blue bandanna. “A woman named Connor, Mrs. Lila Connor. Lives out in Shady Acres. Her husband is Larry Connor, the accountant. He’s missing and it looks like he killed her.” For a moment the old man looked almost happy. “Seems pretty open and shut, Gus. Just a matter of getting a few details and making the arrest.”

“After we find Connor, you mean.”

“Naturally. They’re pretty prominent among the younger married set, Gus, so it’ll probably be played for all it’s worth in the newspaper.”

“Well, this town doesn’t often get a murder to play with. You want me to look into it?”

“It’s the kind of thing you handle like a master, Gus. Anyway, it’s open and shut.”

“Thanks,” Masters said dryly.

“You’ll need to talk to the neighbors out there, but go easy on them. We don’t want any complaints. The guy who called in was Dr. Jack Richmond — you know, John R. Richmond? Citizens like that can give us a hard time if we get them sore.”

“I never get anyone sore, Chief, you know that. Lovable Gus, that’s me.”

“All right, all right, you better get on out there. I’ll get hold of the coroner. Here’s the address.”

Masters took it and left. He was only slightly bitter; his laughter, churning his insides, was only moderately derisive. He drove over to Shady Acres in less than ten minutes, and in less than five thereafter he had found the house. Oddly, there was no sign of anyone.

He went around to the back, beginning to hear voices.

There were six people gathered on a flagstone terrace. They immediately stopped talking and studied the final steps of his approach with critical intentness. Masters was sure they were noting his resemblance to the late W. C. Fields and giving him demerits as a police officer accordingly. This did not disturb him. He had learned from experience that it gave him an advantage.

“I’m Masters,” he said. “Lieutenant of police. Who’s Dr. Richmond?”

“Here,” Jack said.

“I understand you reported a murder.”

“That’s right. Mrs. Connor has been stabbed to death. She’s upstairs in the bedroom. I mean her body is.”

“Did you discover the body?”

“Yes.”

“I was with him,” Nancy said. “I’m Nancy Howell.”

“So was I,” David said. “I’m David Howell.”

“Why?” Masters demanded.

“Because Jack didn’t want to go,” Nancy said. “As a matter of fact, neither did my husband. It was only when I threatened to go alone that they agreed to go with me.”

“That’s not what I mean, Mrs. Howell. Why did anybody go? Is it the usual thing around here to walk into other people’s houses and look into their bedrooms?” The old technique, thought Masters; get ’em sore and they open up.

But beyond a few flushed faces, he evoked no reaction. They were apparently still too shocked by the murder. “Lila and Larry had a fight last night at the party,” the pretty little thing named Nancy Howell said, “and then Larry left home afterward, and all morning and afternoon today Lila didn’t show up, so naturally I was worried.”

“So you came over here and barged into Mrs. Connor’s bedroom.”

“Not at all. It was nothing so simple. First I came over with a pitcher of gin-and-tonic, but I only stepped inside the back door, and the air-conditioner was off. I couldn’t see any reason why it should be, and I began to wonder. That’s when I decided to go down to Larry’s office to see if he was there, but I couldn’t get any answer.”

“What made you think he might be at his office on a Sunday morning?”

“Because he’d said he was going there. Last night, I mean, when I saw him leaving in his car. He sometimes slept in his office when he and Lila had a quarrel.”

“I see,” Masters said.

He didn’t, not clearly; but he had at least an unorganized impression of what had taken place, which he would try to organize after examining the body and the bedroom. In good time he would return to these neighbors gathered on the Connor terrace, the most promising of whom seemed to be the pretty scatterbrained young woman with the runaway tongue.

“Suppose you show me the body, Doctor,” he said, turning to Jack Richmond.

“I’ll go along if you want me to,” Nancy said.

“I won’t,” David said, “unless you insist.”

“One person is enough,” Masters said. “Doctor?”

At the door to the murder room Jack Richmond stepped aside. Masters took three steps into the room and stopped. On the floor lay the woman, and sticking out of her left breast was the handle of the weapon that had killed her. She must have been a stunner, Masters thought.

“Has anything been touched in here, Doctor?”

“No. Nancy fainted when she saw the body, and David had to carry her back down to the terrace. I went immediately to the phone in the downstairs hall and called the police.”

“You did just right.”

Masters knelt beside the body and tested the flesh with his fingertips. The weapon, he noted, was not a knife but a metal letter-opener. The woman had obviously been dead for a long time. He almost asked the doctor for his opinion, but caution stopped him. Better to wait for the coroner’s physician’s report. Masters got to his feet and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief. He made a brief tour of the room.

“It’s funny,” he said.

“That depends on your sense of humor,” Jack Richmond said from the doorway.

“Queer, I mean.”

“What is?”

“This room. It’s so neat. If she and her husband had a fight that ended in a killing, you’d think there’d be signs of a struggle.”

“Not necessarily, Lieutenant. Larry was a strange sort in some respects. I rather imagine, when he was finally driven to it, that he went about it quietly. He probably just got the letter-opener and used it before Lila realized what he was up to.”

“You seem awfully sure he’s guilty, Doctor.”

“It’s certainly indicated, isn’t it? He’s run away, and who else could have done it?”

Masters grunted. “What makes you think the weapon is a letter-opener?”

“Because, from the looks of the handle, that’s what it is.”

“That’s right, it is. You have good eyes, Doctor. I wonder why the air-conditioning was turned off. Any ideas about that?”

“Yes. By the time they got home last night the weather had turned much cooler. I imagine they meant to open some windows in their room here. Fresh air beats air-conditioning any time. My wife and I did the same thing.”

“But no windows are open.”

“They just didn’t get around to opening them. Probably started to fight right off.”

“That’s good thinking, Doctor. Well, there’s nothing more to be done here until the coroner and my fingerprint man get here. Let’s get back to the people on the terrace.”

Out in the hall Masters halted abruptly to stare at the wall beside the bedroom door, as if he had suddenly come upon a most astonishing thing.

“Is this the thermostat?”

“I think so. Yes, it is.”

He reached up and with index finger slowly turned the dial which regulated the temperature. After a moment, through the air ducts, came a faint click of mechanism and whir of fan.

“It works,” Masters said.

“Of course it works. What did you expect?”

“I thought something might have gone wrong with it. But it’s working.” He turned the dial back to where it had been, and the faint sounds stopped. “The thermostat must have been deliberately set so the air-conditioner wouldn’t come on.”

“Of course. Last night so was mine. They intended to open windows.”

“Very logical explanation, too, Doctor. Well, we may as well go down.”

On the Connor terrace Jack Richmond performed proper introductions, and Masters filed each away in his head with identifying tags. Stanley Walters was a jellyfish; he probably had a high susceptibility to pressure, malign or benign, and would cling and yield. His formidable wife, Mae Walters, had a low tolerance level; her influence on Stanley, with its system of restraints, gave their union little chance of permanence. David Howell was a likable guy with an open, scoured-looking face, but this was a good disguise for a man who might be quite otherwise. Nancy Howell, already tagged as a scatterbrain, nevertheless possessed an innocent sort of curiosity that, coupled with acumen, made her useful as well as a nuisance; a charmer, she was already a threat to Masters’s objectivity. Vera Richmond, handsome and hefty in the hips, impressed him as a woman who accepted things as they were; she probably preferred being amused to being shaken up; her tolerance level must be as high as Mae Walters’s was low. As for her husband, the doctor, he was simply too handsome to suit Masters, whose personal ugliness made him allergic to handsome men. In his experience such men were trouble-prone.

“I believe you said there was a party here last night,” Masters said.

“Not here,” Dr. Richmond said. “At my house, next door. On our back terrace, to be exact. Just a few neighbors in for a barbecue.”

“Which ones?”

“Those present here, plus Larry and Lila Connor.”

“Did anything happen at the party that might explain what happened later?”

“Certainly nothing to make any of us think Larry would go home and do Lila in. No one would have been surprised to see them split up, but murder’s another matter.”

“So it is. You seem to have a reservation, though, Dr. Richmond. Please level with me — it may save us all a lot of time and trouble. Did the Connors have a fight at the party?”

“No. There was a delicate moment right at the beginning, but it didn’t develop into anything.”

“What was it, Doctor?”

Jack Richmond fumbled. Mae Walters promptly picked up the ball.

“What Jack means,” Mae said, “is that Lila made a pass at my husband Stanley. She was perfectly shameless. She made a pass at Stanley every time he came close to her.”

Conceding the maximum to Stanley Walters, and making allowance to women in general for their unpredictability in glandular affairs, Masters still found this charge incredible. He suspected that Stanley had merely been a jellyfish means of goading Mae Walters.

“Is that so?” Masters said mildly. “In front of seven other people, including her own husband, Mrs. Walters?”

“Lila was shameless, I tell you. She had the morals of an alley cat. I’m surprised Larry didn’t kill her long ago.”

“Please, Mae.” Stanley spoke impulsively, certainly against his better judgment. “It’s all right for you to make a fool of me, because I guess I am, but you needn’t make Lila out to be worse than she was. It was just her way, that’s all. It didn’t mean a thing.”

“Yes, darling,” said Vera Richmond, “you mustn’t exaggerate. You know perfectly well that all Lila did was to give Stanley a meaningless kiss. As a matter of fact, Lieutenant, it started us all off kissing one another immediately; and I must say, Mae, you seemed to enjoy it as much as the rest of us.”

Mae Walters glared.

“Did anything else happen I ought to know about?” asked Masters.

“Nothing at all, Lieutenant,” Vera said. “It was just a little backyard cookout. We didn’t ask any gangsters.”

“Apparently,” Masters said, “you asked a murderer.”

“Larry?” Vera frowned. “It may turn out that Larry killed Lila, but I for one refuse to think of him as a murderer.”

This was such an arbitrary, if not downright preposterous, point of view that Masters was momentarily silenced. Nancy jumped into the breach with a certain air of reluctant necessity, as if she were doing an unpleasant duty.

“It isn’t quite true that nothing else happened,” Nancy said. “I mean, almost anything might turn out to be important in a situation like this, mightn’t it?”

“It’s a question, Nancy, of whether it’s more important to talk about it or to keep quiet,” Vera Richmond said.

“I’d prefer that Mrs. Howell talk about it,” Masters said. “Yes? Go on.”

“I was just thinking about what Larry told me on the bench,” Nancy said. “Don’t you remember, Jack?”

“I remember,” said Jack. “I was hoping you didn’t.”

“Well, it was pretty grim when you and Lila came creeping up behind us and overheard part of what Larry said.”

“We didn’t creep. We walked.”

“What I would like to know,” Masters said, “is what was said.”

“To tell the truth,’” Nancy said, “Larry was a little high on beer, and so was I. I didn’t want to listen, but he insisted on talking, and there I was on the bench, trapped. What he said was that Lila was a psychopathic liar. He said she had lied when he married her — that he was actually her fourth husband instead of her second, which was what she had led him to believe. Her first and third husbands, he said, had divorced her. The second had committed suicide. She almost ruined him in Kansas City, where they lived before moving here, by her deliberate extravagance. That’s why they moved here. Larry thought they could start over, but she was only doing here what she had done there.”

“How much of this did Mrs. Connor hear?” Masters asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Most of it,” Jack Richmond said.

“What was her reaction?”

“That’s the odd part of it,” Nancy said. “She didn’t create a scene or even seem mad. Neither did Larry. They were both quiet and rather deadly, as if they’d finally come to the end of something.”

“As,” said Masters, “they had.”

He turned away abruptly, tired of them all. But he turned back immediately, rubbing his hands on his thighs, and sat down on a redwood bench beside a table.

“I’ll need to know, just for the record,” he said, “what each of you did last night after leaving the party.”

“As for me,” said David Howell promptly, “that’s no problem. I went directly to bed and to sleep.”

“So did Stanley and I,” Mae Walters said. “Isn’t that right, Stanley?”

“Well, no,” said Stanley. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?” Mae demanded.

“He means,” Masters said, “that he didn’t go to bed directly. Mr. Walters, what did you do?”

“As a matter of fact,” Stanley said, “I did go to bed immediately, but I couldn’t sleep. So I got up and went down to the backyard to smoke a cigaret. Nancy can verify this, because she saw me there.”

“That’s true,” Nancy said. “I was dying for a cigaret, and I saw Stanley’s glowing in the dark and thought he might have an extra one. I went over to the alley and called to him, and he gave me the cigaret, and we stood there talking and smoking for a few minutes. That was after I’d seen Larry leaving in his car.”

“Are you brazenly confessing that you and Stanley were alone in the alley in the middle of the night?” Mae Walters cried.

“Yes, Mae,” Nancy said. “I suppose I’d better confess everything. I said we only smoked and talked, but... wow-ee! It was love among the garbage cans, that’s what it was. I’m sorry, David, but Stanley simply swept me off my feet.”

“That’s all right,” David said. “Everyone is entitled to a little adultery now and then.”

“Oh, now, that’s too much!” Stanley protested. “You know perfectly well, David, that nothing like that happened at all. Honestly, Mae.”

“Didn’t it?” said Mae. “I’ll have to think about it for a while.”

“Please let’s stop horsing around,” Masters said. “Mrs. Howell, what time was it when you saw Larry Connor leaving his house?”

“I can’t say exactly, but it must have been around midnight. We came home from the party about eleven, and David and I discussed a number of things, and then David went to sleep and I went outside. I sat on the front steps for a while, and after that walked down as far as the Connors’ drive. It was then that the garage door opened suddenly and Larry backed out in his car.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he sound upset?”

“He only sounded sad. He said what a nice night it was, with the stars and all, and that he was going downtown to sleep in his office. He said he hoped I’d remember what he’d told me at the party about him and Lila, because he wanted me to know the truth.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“And I believe you said you drove down to his office this afternoon to try to find him?”

“That’s right. David and Jack had gone off to play golf, and I had nothing to do. So I went to Larry’s office. The front and back doors were both locked, and I got no answer to my knocks. As I told you, however, his car was parked in the little space off the alley. I assumed that he had walked off some place close. Now, I admit, Lieutenant, I doubt it.”

“So do I. It’s queer about the car, though. If he was running, why didn’t he take it?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps you can find out.”

Masters turned to Jack Richmond. “Now you, Doctor. Did you go to bed immediately?”

“No such luck,” Jack said. “I was called out on a maternity case. A little past one A.M., it was. It turned out the patient’s labor was prolonged, and I spent a couple of hours at the hospital waiting until I could deliver her. When I got home again I flopped into bed. I’m afraid I noticed nothing here to excite my curiosity, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“It is. Thanks.”

The coroner came around the corner of the house, followed by two policemen, one in plainclothes, the other in uniform. Masters went to intercept them. Then he returned to the terrace. The officials went into the house.

“That’s all for now,” Masters said. “You folks have had a rough time. You’d better go on home.”

He turned away at once and followed the coroner and the two police officers, presenting a rear view that would have instilled neither confidence in the innocent nor alarm in the guilty.