Murder with a Past

13

David Tully cooled off very suddenly — his urge to grab Smith by the neck and shake sense into him died at birth. He had caught a certain look in Sandra Jean’s eye, a look of calculation. She was the problem, not Smith. It was dawning on her that the lieutenant’s skepticism gave her a possible out even now.

Tully said very quietly to the girl, “If you have any idea of putting on an act for Julian’s benefit and finally ‘admitting’ that you and I hatched up a cock-and-bull story to save Ruth — forget it, Sandra. This is something that can be proved by having Dalrymple and the maid identify you.”

“Sit down, Dave,” Julian Smith said.

“Sure.”

Tully sat down, his stare pinning Sandra Jean to the wall. He could almost see the computer inside her pretty head whirring and clicking to produce the decision.

It was made. Sandra Jean looked bewildered and hurt. “I don’t know why you’d say a thing like that, Davey. I’m telling the truth, Lieutenant. I was the one. And, as Dave says, all you have to do to prove it is take me up to the Lodge for a positive identification.”

“All right,” Smith said. “Let’s take it from there. Why did you use your sister’s name?”

Sandra Jean said coolly, “Dave has a theory that it’s because I’ve always hated her. It’s nothing as Freudian as that. I was eighteen, I thought I was being terribly sophisticated, and since I never expected the story to get out I thought using Ruth’s name was a good joke. Now, of course, I see what a bad joke it was.”

“So when Cox came to town to blackmail Ruth, it was you he really meant?”

“Obviously. He asked me to come over to his room at the Hobby Motel—”

“The night he was shot?”

“Yes. I went.”

“Alone? Or with your sister?”

“As far as I know, Ruth didn’t know a thing about it. I went alone, yes.”

“With the gun?”

“Yes. I took it from Dave’s house. I knew it was there. I’ve always come and gone in the place as if it were my own home.”

“Miss Ainsworth, do you realize the implications of what you’re saying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” she said. “You’re inferring.”

He blinked at her, sat forward. “Cox tried to blackmail you, and you used the gun?”

“I did not use the gun. Anyway, he took it from me and wouldn’t give it back.”

Smith knuckled his jaw. “You did intend to use the gun, however?”

Sandra Jean said calmly, “If I’d intended to shoot Cox, I’d hardly have carried a gun traceable to a member of my family. And I’d certainly have picked a better scene for my crime than a wide-open motel on a busy night. I’d have chosen a safer time, place and weapon, Lieutenant, believe me. I took Dave’s gun simply to scare Cox.”

The detective’s face told nothing. “And did you scare Cox?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. He took a crazy chance and jumped me. He didn’t know I couldn’t have pulled the trigger even if I’d wanted to. Anyway, he wouldn’t give it back to me.”

“Then your story is that you didn’t shoot Cox.”

“It’s not a story, Lieutenant. It’s a fact.”

Smith drummed on his desk. “Tell me, Miss Ainsworth,” he said suddenly. “What was Cox asking of you?”

“Nothing.”

“Come again?”

“Nothing then.” Sandra Jean lowered her head again, modestly. “He knew Andrew Gordon and I were — are... well, in love. He was setting me up for a richer haul — after I became Mrs. Gordon.” She looked up with a show of anxiety. “I do hope this is all — I mean, confidential, Lieutenant.”

“Confidential!” Julian Smith sprang to his feet. “What is this, Dave? Doesn’t this girl understand the position she’s in? Confidential, she says! Miss Ainsworth, don’t you realize that, simply on the strength of what you’ve already confessed, I have grounds for holding you?”

She smiled.

Smith abruptly sat down again. “There’s something cross-eyed about this,” he complained. Tully had never seen him so upset. He was beginning to feel queasy himself. She had something up her sleeve, but what? I should have known, he thought. She came along too damn meekly!

“You could hold me, perhaps,” Sandra Jean said, “but it wouldn’t be for long. Cranny Cox was alive when I left him.”

“There’s only your word for that,” Smith snapped.

“Not at all. I can prove it. Or... yes, Lieutenant,” she said in the sweetest of voices, “I think I’ll let you prove it for me.”

“Prove that Cox was alive when you left him?”

“Mm-hm.” The girl tugged at her skirt. “Oh, dear, I seem to have ripped my hem somewhere... You see, Lieutenant, although I went to the Hobby in a cab, I had the man let me out blocks and blocks from the motel and walked the rest of the way. But when I left, I took a taxi right outside the motel. Cranny took me out to the road and actually hailed it for me — handed me into it, in fact, like the gentleman he wasn’t. I was all dressed up and I looked like a lady, if I do say so myself. Taxis don’t pick up many ladies outside the Hobby, so I’m sure the cabbie will remember me — and Cranny Cox being so gallant and, of course, alive. In fact, I can even give you a description of the taxi man. He was white-haired, about fifty-five years old...”

Tully scarcely heard her rattle on, as Julian Smith scribbled furious notes. The cold-blooded little bitch, he thought. She hadn’t said a word to him about that!

“Of course,” the detective was saying frostily, “even if this checks out, Miss Ainsworth—”

“Oh, it will check out all right, Lieutenant,” she smiled.

“—it could mean that you made a deliberate attempt to establish your departure at a time when Cox was seen alive, only to slip back to the motel later and do the shooting. In other words, a phony alibi.”

“I suppose it could mean that,” Sandra Jean murmured, “only ‘could mean’ doesn’t carry much weight as evidence, Lieutenant, does it? Anyway, my alibi’s a lot better than that. If you’ll find that taxi driver, I’m sure he’ll tell you where he took me, and when. He drove me to an all-night party I’d been invited to in the Heights. People named Bangsworth. And there must have been a dozen people there I knew who’ll account for every minute of my time. So, you see, Lieutenant, I simply couldn’t have shot Cranny Cox.”

Tully could only sit there, numb.

Julian Smith sat there, too. He said slowly, “A few minutes ago, Miss Ainsworth, you told me that Cox asked you to visit him at the motel the night he was shot. Just how did he ask you?”

Sandra Jean’s brow wrinkled ever so little. “I don’t think I understand, Lieutenant.”

“I mean, did he write you? Did he phone you?”

“He phoned me.”

“Where?”

“At the Cabbotts’, where I’ve been staying.”

Smith leaned forward. “But you said he thought your name was Ruth. How could he have looked for Ruth in a place where you’re known as Sandra Jean?”

“Oh, that,” Sandra Jean said. “Didn’t I explain that? Between the time Cranny came to town and the time he phoned me, he did some snooping. That’s how he found out my real name and where I was staying, he said.”

The unutterable trull. She hadn’t told him that, either.

Tully shut his eyes. Andy Gordon had placed Cox’s call to the Tully home, when the blackmailer had asked for Ruth, as having come two days before his murder. So at that time Cox must still have been ignorant of Sandra Jean’s real name. In those two days, then, Cox had done his homework. But if by the time of his phone call to the Cabbott house he had known that “Ruth” was really Sandra Jean, why had he...?

Tully heard scraping chairs. He opened his eyes. Smith and Sandra Jean were on their feet.

“But where are you taking me, Lieutenant?” Sandra Jean was saying, not entirely without alarm.

“On a tour of the cab companies,” the detective said, “to make an honest woman of you. Dave, this won’t take too long. Though you don’t have to wait if you have something else to do.”

Tully shook his head. Julian Smith opened his office door and stood aside, and Sandra Jean swept by in rather a hurry, Tully thought, noting that she was careful not to look at him. He could wait. There were only three or four cab companies in town; it wouldn’t take long.

It didn’t. Barely an hour later Julian Smith marched back into the office. He was alone.

“Where’s Sandra Jean?” Tully got to his feet.

Smith homed in on his desk. “She gave me a message for you. ‘Tell my darling brother-in-law he needn’t wait for me. I’ll hop a cab — I have things to do in a rush.’ The last I saw, she was streaking for a phone booth. That’s quite a sister-in-law you have.”

“So her story is true,” Tully said slowly.

The detective shrugged and sat down. “The alibi checks. I found the hack the first cab company I hit. He identified her, all right, and corroborated her statement that Cox put her into the cab that night. His trip-sheet in the office checks out for time, too. He described Cox to a T. For the record I had him hustled over to the funeral parlor for a look at the body, and I just had a call that he made a positive identification.

“And he did take the girl right from the Hobby to the Bangsworths’ at the Heights, as she claims. I phoned Mrs. Bangsworth and she gives the girl a clean bill. I also phoned three of the people at the party who Sandra Jean said could testify that she hadn’t left the house after she got there, and they so testify — the party didn’t break up until five A.M., long past the time of the shooting. One of my men is running down the whole list the girl’s given me, but that’s just going through the motions. There’s no question that Cox was alive when she left him at the motel, and she’s alibied for every minute after that. She’s absolutely in the clear, Dave. Didn’t you know that when you brought her in here?”

Tully said, “No,” and had to clear his throat. The detective looked at him curiously. “Where does this leave Ruth?”

“You tell me.”

“Well, for one thing, Julian, at least now you know it wasn’t Ruth who took my gun to the motel.”

“There’s still that business of the name.”

“Name?”

“The name Maudie Blake said she overheard Cox use that night in addressing his visitor — or one of them. According to Sandra Jean, Cox knew well in advance of the visit or visits that her name was really Sandra Jean. So if that night he called some woman Ruth...”

Tully bit his lip. He had foolishly hoped that detail would somehow be lost in the shuffle. “That’s assuming Sandra told the truth about what went on in the room, Julian.”

“Her alibi story checks to the letter. We have to assume the rest of her story is true, too.”

“But that means you think my wife came to Cox’s room after Sandra left! How do you know she hadn’t come and gone — assuming she was there at all — before Sandra even got there?”

Julian Smith said, “We have the Blake woman’s sworn statement as to the time she heard the name Ruth mentioned by Cox in direct address. That time was well past the time we know Miss Ainsworth left. I’m sorry, Dave,”

So the Blake woman had lied to him about not remembering the time, too! Tully was striding up and down the office like a prisoner in a cell. “That sworn statement of Maudie Blake’s. She’s dead, Julian. It seems to me that if it came to a trial—”

“The admissibility of evidence is a matter for the judge and the lawyers, Dave. I can only do my part of the job.”

“You’ve had your case blown right out of your hands!” Tully cried. “Why do you keep persecuting my wife?”

“Because of that name,” the lieutenant said doggedly. “Because she’s run away. And it’s not persecution, Dave; you know better than that. In the light of those two facts I’ve got to keep after her. You know that, too.”

“But you don’t even have a motive any more! Not with Sandra’s admission that she was the one who spent those three days at the Lodge with Cox.”

“I don’t have a motive I can prove yet, Dave, that’s true.” Julian Smith shook his head in distaste. “You make me say it. Ruth did go to Cox’s motel. That makes it pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that she knew him. Well, Cox’s relationships with women were strictly one thing. So I’ve got to work on the premise that not only your sister-in-law but your wife, too, was one of his ex-affairs—”

“No!” Tully’s face was purple. “No!” His fist came down with a crash on the Homicide man’s desk. “No, no, no!” His fist kept smashing at the desk impotently.

Smith said nothing more, letting him rage.

After a while, Tully stopped. A choked sound came out of his convulsed throat, and he turned on his heel and strode out of Smith’s office.

David Tully paused on the front steps of the municipal building to gulp the fresher air in mouthfuls and work himself back to some semblance of self-control.

He couldn’t blame Julian Smith. Julian wasn’t emotionally involved with Ruth. He had liked her (although now that he thought of it, Tully recalled that Ruth had always seemed to have reservations about Julian. Was it because she was concealing something unsavory about her past, and a policeman made her uncomfortable?). But he had to be a policeman first and a social being second. Julian had no choice.

His rage, Tully knew, had been directed not toward the Homicide man but to himself. He thought he had made peace with his love and faith; now he found himself doubting all over again.

As he stood there inhaling and exhaling, watching and not seeing the traffic go by, he found a thought pushing itself into the forefront of his consciousness. He tried to push it back; it would not stay pushed back.

If... if Ruth had had an affair with Cox, surely he knew all along that she was Ruth and that Sandra Jean was Sandra Jean? But the evidence seemed to indicate that Cox didn’t become aware of Sandra’s masquerade until a day or so before his death. Then the if was wrong. Cox didn’t know Ruth. He hadn’t known Ruth!.. Unless...

Unless he had originally known Ruth under some other name entirely.

It was possible.

If Ruth could be pictured as having somehow got herself to accept Cox’s love-making in some remote and hardly imaginable past, she could also be pictured — being Ruth after all — as having done so under a false name. It was more than possible. If and possible and false... Tully rested his forehead against the cool stone of the municipal building as his thoughts shattered into pieces that went flying off in all directions.

He started at a touch on his arm.

“Mr. Tully, you feeling all right?” It was a policeman in uniform, without a hat.

“Yes. Sure, Officer. I’m just going.” Tully straightened up.

“I came out looking for you. The lieutenant said you’d just left. There’s a phone call for you.”

“Here?” Who could that be? “Where, Officer?”

“I’ll show you.”

He followed the policeman back into the building. There was a table behind the desk sergeant’s wicket.

“You can take it here, Mr. Tully. I’ll switch you in.” The uniformed man sat down at the police switchboard. He said, “Just a minute, ma’am,” and plugged in.

Tully thought, Ma’am?

He picked up the phone on the table. “This is David Tully. Who—?”

“Dave! Norma Hurst.” It came into his ear all breathy, as if she had been running.

Tully became alert. “Norma? Something wrong?”

“I’m not sure. Mercedes Cabbott called. Ollie was out... She wanted Ollie... It was really you she wanted. She called trying to locate you.” Her sentences tumbled out. Was she having one of her spells again?

“Yes, Norma?” He forced himself to sound untroubled.

“I called all over trying to find you. Then I thought of Police Headquarters. Have they any news of Ruth yet?”

“Not yet, Norma.”

“They’re listening to us, of course. Aren’t they, Dave? I know they are. Can you come over here?”

“Well—”

“Wait, I think I heard Ollie’s car. I’ll tell him you’re coming over.”

“Norma...”

But she had hung up.

Ollie answered the door. The bald lawyer looked tired and preoccupied.

“Oh, Dave, come in. Norma says she caught you at Police Headquarters.”

Tully nodded. He stepped into the Hursts’ living room and said, “What’s all this about Mercedes trying to locate me? What does she want?”

“She wouldn’t say. Just said for me to find you and bring you to her place.”

“Ollieeeee?” Norma’s thin voice cut through the house. “Is that Dave?”

She burst into the living room with the power of a tornado-driven straw. Tully was shocked by her appearance. She wore a wrinkled dress. Her lank hair was uncombed. Her features seemed to have been honed to cutting edges overnight. Her eyes...

This was a bad one.

Tully kept himself from staring at her. And at Ollie. At times like this, Ollie went through his own brand of hell.

Norma’s nails dug into Tully’s hand. “Dave, you must hurry. You must find her quickly.”

“Yes, Norma. We’ll find her. Now stop worrying.”

Ollie slipped his arm about Norma’s thin shoulders. “You know we’ll do our best, hon. Haven’t I told you?”

She collapsed against her husband suddenly. “Mercedes will help you, Dave. She loves Ruth like a daughter. That’s why she called. I’m sure that’s why.”

“Maybe it would be better if Ollie stays here with you.”

“No, no, I’m fine. I’ll be just fine. That’s a promise. Ollie has to go with you, help however he can.”

From behind his wife’s head Ollie nodded slightly.

“Maybe you’re right at that, Norma,” Tully said.

Outside, Oliver Hurst mumbled, “It’s not good, Dave. I had to humor her. Maybe it’ll calm her down. I don’t dare cross her when she gets like this. Whose car’ll we take?”

“Mine,” Tully said. Ollie looked out on his feet.

They got into the Imperial and Tully headed it toward the hills.

“I don’t know,” Ollie said after a while, shaking his head. “For a while there this hassle about Ruth seemed to shake Norma back to her old self. Now... She’s worse than she’s been in months.”

“Why don’t you try taking her up to the old place, Ollie? The change may do her good.”

The “old place” was a Hurstism for an ancient log house some ten miles from town, deep in the foothills that had come down to Norma from her paternal great-grandfather. He had been an early settler, clearing the land, hewing the logs, digging a root-cellar and building the house with his own hands. It had been kept in a good state of preservation, and the Hursts had used it frequently as a weekend woodland retreat in happier days.

But Ollie Hurst shook his head. “It’s the one place she mustn’t go. Isolation is what she wants, a hole to crawl into. The psychiatrists told me to keep her strictly away from there. They want her to be with people.”

“That makes sense, I guess.”

“She was after me just this morning to take her up there. Reaction from a dream — a nightmare — she had during the night. Must have been a corker; it took me over an hour to quiet her down.”

“Nightmare about what, Ollie?”

“It seems she and Ruth were on a roller coaster. The thing kept going faster and faster. Suddenly a little girl — with no face — was in the middle of the track ahead of them on a tricycle. The roller coaster smashed into her, and the little girl wasn’t there any more. Then the coaster shot off the end of the track, tumbling through space, which was full of billions of stars. But it was also pitch-dark. Norma was all alone in just black nothing except stars. Ruth had vanished, too.”

And that’s a fact, David Tully thought.