Murder with a Past

4

At one time she must have been pink and firm and cheaply pretty, a sexpot joyously ready for a tumble. But the years had caught up with her. Her overblown breasts had grown soft and lifeless, her heavy hips supported a thickening middle, and she was getting jowly. She was wearing a flowered wrapper and curlers in her straw-bleached hair, and there was a patina of cold cream on her fat cheeks when she answered Tully’s knock on the motel-room door.

She looked at him impudently. “Yes? What is it?”

“Are you Miss Maudie Blake?”

She nodded.

“My name is David Tully. I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“What about?” She was taking automatic inventory, noting the cut of his clothes, the beige Imperial he had parked nearby. If his surname meant anything to her, he could not detect it.

“May I come in?” Tully asked.

“You a cop?”

“No, Miss Blake.”

“A girl never knows,” she said, poking at her hair. “You don’t look like one. What is this, a sales pitch?”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m the husband of the woman named Ruth.”

Her eyes closed to slits.

“I know you’ve made a statement to the police. You don’t have to talk to me, Miss Blake. But I’d appreciate it if you would.”

He could see her weighing the possibilities, ready for instant retreat or advance. There was an animal cunning about her. He felt his pulse begin to accelerate. His instinct had been right.

“I guess I got a minute, Mr. Tully. Come in.”

She stood aside and he entered the motel room. The air was clogged with heavy perfume and powder. The place was close and hot, like an incubator, and it was cluttered with magazines, newspapers and odds and ends of apparel.

The Blake woman shut the door, waddled to the messy dressing table, picked up a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She did not ask him to sit down, or sit down herself. He waited.

“Mr. Tully,” she said suddenly. “You ought to know I can’t change my story now.”

Tully said to himself, Easy, boy, easy. You’ve got a bite on your line. “You think that’s why I came here?”

She made a vague gesture with her dimpled hands. “Why else? I figured this Ruth babe for a chippie. Now that I see the kind of husband she’s got, I get a different picture. Class. A bored dame with everything, including round heels.” She clucked, shaking her synthetic locks. “It’s too bad. How do broads like that hook guys like you?” The fat blonde cocked her head at him. “Just for laughs, how much were you going to offer me?”

“Miss Blake,” Tully began, “I don’t think you understand—”

“Only thing is, it’s too late.” She sighed. “You should have beat the cops here. I’m stuck with what I told them.”

“And what you told them was the absolute truth?”

“Sure it was.” She looked at him steadily. Too steadily?

“Did you actually see the woman?”

“No. I didn’t even know he had a woman in there till I heard her say something. These walls are like tissue paper. After that I listened, just for kicks.”

“You heard him call her by name, I understand.” He had to hold on to himself with all his strength.

“I sure did.”

“How many times?”

“Oh, once or twice.”

“Then isn’t it possible you made a mistake?”

Her wrapper rustled as she undulated toward him. She came close enough for her various odors to sicken him.

“You’re really gone on this wife of yours, ain’t you, Mr. Tully? I wish I could say I’m not sure, but how could I make a mistake? He said her name loud and clear.”

Tully managed to back off without offending her. Why did I have to come here? he thought.

“You want a drink, Mr. Tully?” the woman asked sympathetically. “You look like you could use one.”

“No, thanks.”

She shook her head. “What a dope, playing around when she has a husband like you. Have they found her yet?”

“No. I mean I don’t know. I don’t suppose so.”

“Maybe she can explain things when they do.”

And maybe she can’t. “What time did you hear them in there?” Already it was becoming easier to couple them verbally.

Maudie Blake shrugged, everything jiggling. “Earlier part of the evening. I wasn’t watching the time.”

“Is there anyone else who might have heard them?”

“I guess not. His room’s on the end of the row. No room on the other side.”

“And you were able to hear him call the woman by name,” Tully said. “How is it you didn’t hear the shot?”

“I went out before that, I guess — before she let Cranny have it.”

He turned to go, his shoulders at a defeated slope. But then he stopped and turned slowly around.

“Cranny,” Tully said. “You just called him Cranny. You knew him!” He was all over her in an instant, digging his big fingers deep into her floppy arms, glaring down at her. “In fact, you know a hell of a lot more about this than you’ve let on! Suppose you start telling the truth—”

“Whoa, buster,” the woman said. She had gone a little pale around the edges of the cold cream, but her voice was cool and unperturbed. “I could have you up for assault. Calm down, Mr. Tully. You can bruise me any time you want, but not with that look in your eye. Take your hands off me.”

“All right!” He almost flung her from him in his frustration. “Then you explain why you called him Cranny.”

“I must have heard one of the cops call him that.” She actually came close to him again and patted his cheek. “I know, she really gave you the knee. You’ll get over it. You in the phone book?”

“What?” Tully said, trying to shake his head clear.

“I said you in the phone book.”

“Of course. Why?”

“I thought you might have an unlisted number — you look well-heeled enough.”

“Why did you ask?”

“Oh, so I could get in touch. In case I thought of something... No, I can’t right now,” she added hastily, seeing his expression. “But you know how it is. Sometimes a person remembers... later.”

Tully said tiredly, “Maybe Lieutenant Smith could jog your memory right now, Miss Blake.”

“I doubt it,” Maudie Blake said, smiling. “I’d just have to tell him the same thing over and over. But I like you, Mr. Tully. And I’m going to set my mind to work real hard to see if I can think of anything else.”

Tully stood beside the Imperial immobilized between despair and hope. Some of the Blake woman’s statements had had a horribly truthful ring. And yet... He kept shaking his head.

After a while he trudged across the parking strip to the office of the motel. Behind the desk was the dried-up old cutthroat who had given him Maudie Blake’s room number. The old man was reading the evening Call.

“What’s it this time?” he grunted, not looking up.

“Sorry to bother you again,” Tully said. “But I’d like to know when Miss Blake checked in.”

“You would, would you?”

“Yes.” Tully began to feel the rumble of anger again. A little more of this and I’ll blow like a volcano, he thought.

“Can’t give out information ’bout our guests.”

“A dollar bought me her room number.” Tully fished in his wallet and flung two dollar bills on the desk. “When did she check in?”

The old man lowered his newspaper, looked around cautiously, and clawed the two bills out of sight. “Look, mister,” he said in a low voice, “this place has been crawlin’ with cops. They told me to keep my trap shut. I’ll do it this one more time, but that’s it.” He scuttled over to a card file and went through it fast. “The tenth. That would be four days ago. Now beat it, mister, will you?”

“Thanks,” Tully said grimly.

He went out. There was a ferment of exultancy in him now. Maudie Blake had checked in four days ago. The same day as Cox! Surely...? He thought of the Witch in Macbeth. “By the pricking of my thumbs...” Was it likely that Julian Smith, with all his experience, hadn’t seen a possible connection between the Blake woman and the dead man?

The exultancy drained out of him.

Tully plodded over to his car, carefully not looking at the end room of the row. One look on his arrival had been plenty. It was too easy to imagine Ruth stealing up to it, glancing around, knocking surreptitiously...

He drove home in a torment of doubt.

How could a man live in love with a woman and not know her? Was Ruth capable of putting on an act that had fooled not only him, but his friends as well? Including a shrewd observer like Ollie Hurst?

It’s ridiculous and unreasonable, Tully kept telling himself. The actress didn’t live who could carry off such a role for so long.

Ruth had travelled widely. She had finished her education abroad and had a rather cosmopolitan outlook. So she was not particularly interested in the petty social cliques of a small town. She had been quite frank — with him — about her views on living there. But she hadn’t minded the smallness so long as she lived there with him, and nobody but him was aware of her attitude. She joined into the life of his set happily, if on her own terms. Practically everyone was crazy about her.

You couldn’t paint that sort of honesty into a picture of an adulterous killer.

Or could you?

His doubts were less insistent as he got out of the Imperial in his driveway. The house was still dark. He made a quick, futile search anyway. Then, because he could no longer resist, he began telephoning friends. He explained that he had returned from the capital sooner than he had expected. Was Ruth there?

He received invitations to golf, a dinner, a bridge session, but no clue to his wife’s whereabouts. If any of them had heard of the Crandall Cox murder, none had yet connected Ruth with it.

Between calls to others, he kept trying Mercedes Cabbott’s number. It continued busy. As he was about to try it for the fourth time, someone rang the doorbell.

Ruth?

But it was only Mercedes Cabbott’s son, Andrew Gordon.

Andy wore his usual sulky look. His breath was rich with liquor.

“I was just trying to get your mother, Andy—”

The son of Mercedes Cabbott’s second marriage brushed by Tully. He was a dark, lean, sullenly good-looking boy who might have been handsome if his features had had any strength. Tully suddenly realized that Andrew Gordon had a habit of pouting, uncomfortably like Sandra Jean Ainsworth. Too bad his character wasn’t as muscular as his body.

“Is Ruth at your place, by any chance?” There was no point in challenging Andy’s rudeness. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of special privilege.

“Nah,” Andy said. “Where’s Sandra Jean?”

“I don’t know.”

“She said she was stopping by here to kill a loose evening.”

“She did. Then she left to look for you.”

“Damn,” Andy said. “Well, it looks as if neither of us is having any luck with the Ainsworth sisters tonight. Got a drink handy?”

“You know where it is.”

But Tully noticed that Andy went heavy on the water and light on the Scotch. He always acted tighter than he was.

Andy clutched the drink and threw his leg over the arm of a chair.

“I had a real brawl with the old lady,” Andy said. “I was supposed to squire her around this evening, but then we got into it. It’s that damned George’s fault. Can’t Mercedes see he married her for the loot?”

Tully knew the petulant statement to be false. George Cabbott, Mercedes’s third husband, was a little younger than she, but he had plenty of money of his own. George was a husky, no-nonsense fellow who didn’t care a hoot what people thought of him. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, public opinion, or anything else. He and Mercedes were genuinely attached to each other, a fact nobody but Tully and a few other perceptive people believed.

“One of these days,” Andy promised, “I’m going to push George’s nose through the back of his neck.”

It might be a pretty good brawl at that, Tully thought. Physically Andrew was gristle, bone and cat-gut. George was a hundred and eighty pounds of rock-crusher.

“I could handle the old lady and marry Sandra Jean,” Andy continued to mutter, “if George would keep his nose to himself. He’s got my respected mother so worked up against Sandra Jean the old lady’ll use any excuse to break us up.”

Such as a sister hunted for murder? Tully wondered, and then winced at the absurdity of it.

Andy held his glass up to the light, squinting. To hide the misery? Tully felt sorry for him at that. The boy had had it pretty rough.

In her globe-trotting, gadabout career Mercedes had picked up a string of husbands. By two of these she had borne children. Her daughter Kathleen’s father had been a man named Lavery. Andrew was the offspring of Lavery’s successor, a mining tycoon named Gordon. Andy had been a small boy when his half-sister, already a young woman, died in a boating accident. This had been fifteen years ago.

In her daughter’s grave Mercedes had buried her maternal common sense. She had never worn an apron in her life, but the strings by which she tied her son to her had been no less hampering. She had protected Andy from everything, including his opportunity to become a man.

“Maybe Sandra Jean ran into Ruth,” Andy said. “They’ll probably come home together.”

“I don’t think so,” Tully said. “I don’t think there’s any point in waiting, Andy.”

Andy’s lip twitched. “Is that a gentle hint to leave?”

“No,” Tully said. “Though if you’re going to get argumentative, it might be a good idea.”

“Everybody, but everybody!” Andy exploded. He looked as if he wanted to throw the glass. “Like a stinking conspiracy. Send Andrew home so mama can tuck him into his itty-bitty bedikins! I’m getting so damned fed up—”

“Look, kid,” Tully said, “I’ve got too much on my own mind tonight to listen to your bellyaching.”

“You? What kind of trouble could the noble Dave Tully be in?”

“Skip it.”

“First you insult me, then you tell me to skip it! You trying to make me out a nothing?”

“You do a pretty good job of that yourself, Andy.”

“You’d better apologize for that,” the boy said excitedly. “I’m not going to stand for that—”

“All right, I apologize,” Tully said wearily. “Now will you start acting your age?”

“You stop talking to me as if I were still wearing diapers!”

“Well, aren’t you? Andy, I’ve asked you to lay off me tonight. Ruth is in the worst kind of trouble. Some man has been killed in the Hobby Motel and, unbelievable as it is, the police think she killed him. They’re looking for her now.”

Andrew Gordon’s skin underwent a remarkable series of color changes, from its normal sun-brown through a number of gradations of mud-tan to a final, dirty yellow. There it remained. The boy stared up at Tully as if he had received a fatal wound. Slowly he got to his feet.

“Ruth? Wanted for murder?”

“I told you it was unbelievable.”

Mercedes Cabbott’s son moistened his lips. “She wouldn’t do that to me and Sandra Jean — she couldn’t—”

“What?” Tully said, bewildered.

“I always thought that angel-puss of Ruth’s was too good to be true,” the boy mumbled. “I tagged her for a cheap lay long ago. But to kill the guy and drag Sandra Jean into the papers just when... Sure as hell, this is going to blow it with the old lady—”

Andy staggered backward across half the room, landing with a jarring impact against the wall, his hand to the cheek on which Tully’s heavy fist had landed.

“Say anything like that about Ruth again and I’ll tear that filthy tongue of yours out by the roots.”

Tully stood rigid, fighting the steel band tightening about his chest. He kept watching the boy murderously, licking his torn knuckles.

Andy Gordon lurched away from the wall. There was a wild look in his eyes, a sort of crazed happiness.

Tully set himself for a brawl.

It failed to come. Instead, the boy grinned. “So I’m wrong about Ruth, huh? Man, you’re as blind as they make ’em.”

“I wasn’t kidding, Andy. You’d better get out of here now.”

“You’d rather not hear it, huh?”

In spite of himself, Tully growled, “Hear what?”

“While you were away upstate, she had a man calling her here. And he wasn’t anybody in our crowd, either.”

“You’re lying,” Tully said. “Or making something out of nothing.”

“Am I?” Andy Gordon laughed. “Let me ask you one question. I know the answer because I heard the newscast, but I don’t know if you did. What was the name of the guy they found shot in the Hobby?”

“Crandall Cox.”

“So you do know. Good enough! Now you listen to me, big man, because I’m going to give it to you good, where it’s going to hurt the most.” The young voice crackled with hate. “I was out for a drive with Sandra Jean a couple days ago when she said, ‘Let’s drop in on my sister and cheer the poor darlin’ up.’ So we dropped in. Your poor darlin’ wasn’t home. We helped ourselves to some of your liquor, and just then the phone rang. Sandra Jean told me to answer it, so I did. It was a man with a funny kind of voice — flat and sneery and like he talked out of the side of his mouth. A voice I never heard. He asked for Ruth — he didn’t say Mrs. Tully, Dave-boy, he used her first name. I said she wasn’t here and asked if he wanted to leave a message. He said, ‘I sure do,’ and the way he said it — well, ‘drooly’ would be the only word to describe it. And then he said, ‘Tell Ruth that Cranny called,’ and he hung up. Crandall Cox — Cranny; get it, Mr. Tully? Do you get it?”

Tully rubbed his eyes. He had an overwhelming wish to lie down and go to sleep and sleep on and on and on.

“Did you tell Sandra about the call?” Tully said.

“Why, sure,” Andy Gordon said gayly. “No secrets between us. But don’t worry, Dave, it’s all in the family. We won’t tell anybody... Say, you throw a pretty good punch, do you know?”

And, still grinning, the boy left.